Something You Should Know - Strange Stories About Amazing People & Extraordinary Lessons from Great Athletes

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why you shouldn't send checks in the mail anymore. Then, weird stories about amazing people like Ronald Reagan, Nobel Prize winners, even Ringo from the Beatles. His grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him because she believed that the devil was inside of him because he was left-handed and she needed him to not be left-handed anymore. That's what gave the Beatles their beat and that's all down to the voodoo queen of Liverpool who gave exorcisms to expel the devil. Also, what you didn't know about Trader Joe's and what we can learn from top performing athletes, like performing well under pressure. Athletes are far more vulnerable to

Starting point is 00:01:11 pressure than we realize. What the best ones are able to do is learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary everyday performance is what's coming forward. It's not rising to the moment. It's simply not deteriorating under the pressure. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches.

Starting point is 00:01:55 Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome i don't know if you remember this or not it wasn't all that long ago but i remember that a lot of people were afraid of online banking, didn't want to pay for things online,

Starting point is 00:02:27 because what if their information got stolen? What if someone got a hold of your credit card number? The whole idea of online transactions seemed very risky. It was much better to just put a check in the mail rather than pay online. Well, that advice has now been flipped on its head. Today, putting a check in the mail is than pay online. Well, that advice has now been flipped on its head. Today, putting a check in the mail is a risky proposition, and postal authorities and banks are suggesting you stop putting checks in the mail because bad guys are stealing them. The U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, which was more than double the prior year.

Starting point is 00:03:07 And how are they stealing the mail? Well, mail carriers are actually being robbed, mailboxes are being broken into, and the criminals are targeting envelopes that look like they have checks in them. And then what they do is something called check washing, where a criminal steals a check, then proceeds to change the payee's name and the check amount. And it gets even more sophisticated than that. But the point is that today, a lot of businesses are accepting only electronic payments, and that may be for the best. If you do have to mail a check, the advice is to at least use a secure mail drop,

Starting point is 00:03:45 such as inside the post office, but not a mailbox. And that is something you should know. There are a lot of weird things in the world. I guess you know that. And some of them are really fascinating, mind-boggling, hard to imagine. And many of them you may not know about or have heard of. But you're about to. So settle in here and listen to Dan Schreiber.

Starting point is 00:04:12 Dan is an author and podcaster. He hosts a podcast called No Such Thing as a Fish. His latest book is called The Theory of Everything Else, A Voyage into the World of Weird. Hey, Dan, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hey, thanks for having me, Mike. So before we learn a little more about you and why you're into weird things, I want to jump into one good weird thing here, and this one is about the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team.

Starting point is 00:04:39 And I live in Southern California, and I bet even a lot of diehard Dodger fans haven't heard this before. So likely neither have many other people. So tell that tell that story. Yeah, this is an amazing story, which we only really kind of found out about because the owners of the Dodgers went through a very messy divorce. And as part of the papers showing the financial side of what was going on with the Dodgers were brought into court, it got revealed this thing, which is that for five years from 2010, the Dodgers baseball team was basically paying a Russian scientist to beam positive thoughts at the

Starting point is 00:05:16 players during matches from 3,000 miles away to improve their game. But he couldn't improve it by a huge amount. He could only promise a sort of increase of about 10 to 15% in extra abilities of the players on the team. But he was on the payroll and he just used to sit there in his flat somewhere in America because he emigrated to America, just watching the TV and just focusing really hard. And he was on the, yeah, there was a salary. The Dodgers did start kind of getting better when this was happening. But in the UK, there's one of the most extraordinary stories that ever happened where a team was at the bottom of the Premier League table and the chances of them winning was something like 15,000 to one if you were placing any bets on them.

Starting point is 00:05:58 And they managed to win the top spot of the Premier League that year. And it was largely down to obviously an amazing team. But in the background, the owner, who was a Thai billionaire, he had hired a bunch of monks to come in. And every match, or at least every home match that they could manage, they would come in and bless the grounds. They would be hitting all the players on the legs with these sort of prayer sticks that had ointment on them. They were out while the game was going on. They were sitting in a specially made room that had all sorts of proper religious iconography inside.

Starting point is 00:06:34 And they sat and they hummed and prayed and chanted the whole match through. And so, you know, a lot of people said, well, it was the monks that helped Leicester win the football season that year. So it's not just the Dodgers. There's all sorts of different teams that are doing this. Great. So let me now ask you how you got into this, why you know so much about weird things. Well, in the UK, I've been working for the last two decades or so for various different companies that is largely about information and comedy being smashed together and finding the interesting

Starting point is 00:07:11 stuff in every single possible thing that you look into. So there is a show in the UK called QI, which as a 19-year-old, I joined straight out of high school without any qualifications. And so my whole training since then, I don't know, 19 has just been reading books with an eye to spot something that's out of the ordinary that you might not know about what is quite a well-known subject and then try and convert it into a way that comedians can play with it. And then, so I've been doing that my whole career in various different ways, hosting a podcast. And that's the core bit of it. Interesting

Starting point is 00:07:45 thing with funny jokes around it. So I'm sure everybody has heard PCR. PCR was the test or is the test for COVID that became very familiar to us a couple of years ago. And there's a weird story about the guy who came up with that. So go ahead and tell that story. When I was putting together the book, it was just at the sort of tail end of the first big batch of the pandemic lockdowns in the UK. And what surprised me was, is that this word that suddenly became a household word, which was PCR. I'd never heard of PCR prior to the pandemic. PCR, as you might know,

Starting point is 00:08:26 is an extraordinary moment in chemistry that kind of changed the way that almost everything is looked at now. So from forensics and police work all the way through to archaeology, and then of course, coming up with the use of the PCR test to help us curb the coronavirus, COVID-19, and allow for millions of lives to be saved, most likely, as a result of it. So I was thinking, well, how come I don't know when this came about? And I looked into it, and I discovered that it was a single person who invented PCR. It was a guy called Cary Mullis, a Californian guy who was working out there, and one night

Starting point is 00:09:02 had the idea for PCR. I thought, why is he not a household name? This guy's literally just saved the planet with this thing almost, or at least help us until the vaccine came in. And then I realized why, because he was a very odd cookie. And there was lots of bizarre things about him. The most striking one was that one night when he was out at his cabin, which was out somewhere in California, he was walking to the toilet one night.

Starting point is 00:09:29 And as he was walking to the toilet, he was confronted with an English-speaking glowing raccoon who then abducted him, most likely into a spaceship, is his opinion. And that struck me as very interesting that someone who was able to save the world also spent the vast majority of the rest of his life trying to prove that a glowing raccoon abducted him. And that happened the exact same year that he invented PCR. Well, and also you mentioned other like Nobel laureates who, you know, clearly are brilliant, but pretty weird in other ways. Yeah, well, there's this thing that you must have heard of, I guess, or I certainly have, which is nobilitis, the Nobel disease. And it's this thing which is the idea that once you win the Nobel Prize, the power of it and the adoration is so great that you suddenly think, well, I must be a genius about

Starting point is 00:10:19 everything and you start spouting opinions about stuff that you have absolutely no background in but everyone believes you because you're a Nobel Prize winner. There's people like Wolfgang Pauli, who was seen as one of the eagle eyes of science. He would not let anything get by, yet he was pretty convinced that there was something involving telekinesis and telepathy going on with him because everywhere he went, things broke. It wasn't just him that was noticing that. There was a whole group of scientists who genuinely thought if Pauli is

Starting point is 00:10:49 around, this stuff is going to break. And in some cases, a few scientists actually banned him from entering the laboratories where they were working because they were working on something important. They thought they can't have Pauli come in and mess it up with his presence. And it was known as the Pauli effect. And people wrote down many examples of where this happened. There was one time when a bunch of students tried to prank him by rigging up a chandelier to drop to the ground as soon as he walked into the room so they could say, no, look at the Pauli effect. But when he entered the room, the device that was actually going to drop the chandelier broke and so it didn't drop. Hence, a Pauli

Starting point is 00:11:23 effect in action, the prank failed. Like even Linus Pauling, who seemed so mainstream, vitamin C, but he believed some weird stuff. Yeah, he was a guy who... His weird one was eugenics, right? And he believed in eugenics so much that he thought... I believe he actually recommended that people who had a lower IQ or any kind of genetic defects should be given a physical mark on their head so that people knew not to procreate with them. It's very bizarre, these scientists. It's hard to imagine anyone listening who doesn't know who the Beatles are, but this story about Ringo, the drummer, Ringo, I've never heard. And I always thought I knew quite a bit about the Beatles and their music and everything else, and there was multiple amazing drummers that were up on the screen talking about what an incredible drummer he is.

Starting point is 00:12:29 And there's always been this joke that he wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But the fact is, is that Ringo is up there as one of the greatest drummers ever, particularly, specifically, I guess, for pop music and rock music. What they would always say is that, and Dave Grohl would say this kind of thing, you know, you'd be in a studio. If someone's playing too tight, like it's just not quite got a sort of vibe of live music, he would say, give me more Ringo, give us more Ringo. And what more Ringo is, is play a little sloppier, play just slightly out of time. And that was a style that Ringo developed because when he was a kid, his grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him because she believed that the devil was inside of him because he was left-handed and she needed

Starting point is 00:13:10 him to not be left-handed anymore. So multiple exorcisms performed on him. She was known as the voodoo queen of Liverpool, but she spent her time, whatever those exorcisms were, getting Ringo from going being a left-handed person to a right-handed person. And so when he started learning to play the drums, he was a right-handed drummer and he had a right-handed kit. But then after he left and moved out from his grandmother's house, slowly he started favoring the left hand again, but he didn't change the right-handed kit because his feet were familiar with it. It just made sense to him. But what it means is that when Ringo has to get to all of the drums that are on the right of him and do those fills, instead of his hand going up and around, leading with the right, which is super easy, he has to go underneath and lead with the

Starting point is 00:13:55 left. And that little extra time that it takes him to do that creates this micro lag that means that the Beatles had this just unique beat that was really hard to replicate So that's what gave the Beatles their beat and that's all down to the voodoo queen of Liverpool who gave exorcisms to expel the devil So it's just a weird tiny little nugget about rock history that again rarely gets mentioned So I can't wait for you to share the story about the US president who stopped his own assassination I'm speaking with Dan Schreiber. He's author of the book, The Theory of Everything Else. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world.

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Starting point is 00:15:25 Securian Canada, insurance designed for life. So, Dan, of all of your stories, I think I like, the one I like the best is the one of the United States president who stopped his own assassination. That was Ronald Reagan. Do you know this story about Ronald Reagan and Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent? So okay, so 1981, Ronald Reagan is coming out of one of the Washington DC hotels and there's an assassin waiting outside for him. And he takes a couple of shots at Reagan. But fortunately, the quick thinking Secret Servicemen get in the way.

Starting point is 00:16:03 I think one of them takes a bullet, sadly, and Jerry Parr grabs Ronald Reagan and quickly bundles him into the back of a limousine. And they quickly drive away, and they check the President to see if there's any injuries. And he's clearly bruised his ribs from being thrown into the limousine. But outside of that, they can't see that a bullet's gone in. There's certainly no blood coming out. So they go, okay, let's get back to the White House. As they're driving back to the White House, a tiny bit of blood comes out of Ronald Reagan's mouth. And Jerry Parr sees that and instantly knows that he must have been hit by a bullet somewhere. It just has to have happened. So he goes against all protocol and he says,

Starting point is 00:16:40 get him to a hospital now. We need to save his life. So they do that. They go to a random hospital. They bring the president in. They can't believe the president's there. The doctors manage to save his life. And they later say, you know, if he was five minutes later, we wouldn't have been able to save him. So that was it was Jerry Parr's quick thinking that allowed for him to remain alive. And Jerry Parr, as a result, got all these amazing, and all these honours as a result of being a hero. But for Jerry Parr, there was something more going on in that moment, which he later told Ronald Reagan, which was that when Jerry Parr was a kid, he was taken to the cinema to see a movie with his dad.

Starting point is 00:17:20 And they went to see a movie called Code of the Secret Service. And because of that movie, it's the only reason that he was there on that day, because he fell in love with the Secret Service. And then he thought, that's exactly what I want to do with my life. And his whole life led up to doing that, to looking after a president. The person who plays the role of the Secret Service agent in that movie was Ronald Reagan. So it's a full circle story. Ronald Reagan basically saved his own life. He inspired him to become a Secret Service agent. And then years later, he ends up saving his life as one. It's I just find that a really awesome story. So I thought this was weird. Maybe some people know about this, but I certainly didn't. And that has to do with the Savannah Airport and Runway 10 at the Savannah Airport that has graves in it.

Starting point is 00:18:08 So explain that. During one of the wars, they were needing to expand the size of the airfield and have more runways. But there was a graveyard that was attached to a farm and a family there that was sitting on the spot. And so they had to pay them to move it. And they said, we'll dig up every grave and we'll put them into a new cemetery and we'll make sure it's all done respectfully. But one thing that they couldn't do was agree on the four people who ran the place, the two owners, and then I think the cousin and a brother. And so they're still there. The graves of them are literally in the runway. And as you're taxiing down the runway, if you look out the window on one the runway. And as you're taxiing down the runway,

Starting point is 00:18:45 if you look out the window on one of those runways, you're going to see the two headstones that are laying flat that you then go over on as you're flying off to wherever you're going. So other people have claimed that they've seen ghosts and so on. And I interviewed a pilot who said she thinks that was a rumor that was made up as a joke by someone. But you can ask for the haunted graveyard runway if you're taxiing out as a pilot there. So you write in the book about a guy named John Lilly. John Lilly. He kind of became eventually part of the big psychedelic movement. He invented those tanks that you go into and you lay in and you float, flotation tanks. He's the inventor of that.

Starting point is 00:19:28 But his big project was trying to communicate with dolphins. And at one point he was partly funded by NASA to teach dolphins to speak. And this was his mission with the funding, to teach dolphins to speak English so fluently that they would be given a chair at the United Nations so that they could speak on behalf of all marine mammals. He set up this house which was along the ocean. It was half flooded and he would have the dining room so that the table was flooded up to the knee if you were sitting down in a chair. So you would eat your dinner with the dolphins, but then they would have their room to sleep

Starting point is 00:20:03 in, you'd have your room to sleep in. And his work was so looked on as an interesting development of communication between human and animal that at the very founding meeting of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where Frank Drake was and Carl Sagan was and so on, other amazing scientists, he was also there and gave the opening lecture on how we might be able to find aliens. Because if there was another intelligence that's evolved on our planet, they thought it's the dolphin. And so if we can communicate with that, we'll be able to communicate somehow with the aliens. It might give us an insight. So I just love that this guy who ultimately failed, and there was a lot of controversy again a lot of these

Starting point is 00:20:45 people eventually caught a lot of controversy in their lives um but the very very first meeting of seti was with the man who uh believed that he was going to create cars that dolphins could be driving themselves in the street a topic that i remember years ago was kind of a hot topic people were talking about it, about back masking, about how, you know, when you play a record backwards, there's satanic messages in it. And you write about that and explain why you write about that. This is the story of how in 1994, the Beatles got back together to do two songs as a threesome. John has passed away by 15 years or 14 years at this point.

Starting point is 00:21:26 And they get a demo from Yoko Ono, and it's called Free as a Bird. And the three of them for the anthology project, which is telling their life story, get together and they re-record over John Lennon's demo with him singing this new track. And when they're in the studio, Paul the entire time is saying, I feel like John is here. I can feel his energy and I feel like he's going to make himself known somehow. And they're all thinking, that's not going to happen, Paul. And so, they go on recording. He makes a few points at certain times going, look, it's John. And everyone thinks it's not. And so, they just do the whole song. And at the end of the song, there's a bit on Free as a Bird that you can hear if you go on places like Spotify and listen to it, where they decided at the end of the song to do some backmasking onto the track.

Starting point is 00:22:12 And the Beatles were very famous for backmasking. It's the idea of taking a bit of vocal, spoken word, flipping it backwards and laying it down onto a track so that you hear it backwards when it's played, when a song's played normally. And fans of vinyl back then used to love going and playing songs backwards to see any hidden messages. So the Beatles were famous for that, were accused of demonic influence for doing it. And in 1994, they thought, let's do that again as a nice little nugget and little Easter egg for the fans. Let's do some back masking. So they say to the engineer, is there any bit of John just talking randomly on any of these demos? And he says, yeah, yeah. And he finds this bit and it's a phrase that says, turned out nice again. So I think that's great. And it's actually really nicely apt because at the end there's ukulele playing. And one of the most famous people for ukulele in the UK was

Starting point is 00:23:04 George Formby. And his phrase was turned out nice again, which it just so happens is what John is saying on that little audio extract. So it was perfect. So they flip it backwards, they put it on, and they play the song out. While they're mastering the song, one of the engineers says, did you guys just hear that? And he said, what? He said, listen to that again, the backwards mumblings of John Lennon. And this is what is impossible. When you play this song, I highly encourage everyone listening to do this as soon as you finish this show. When you listen to the backward words of John Lennon, which should absolutely be nothing but mumbles, you can hear him say the words made by John Lennon.

Starting point is 00:23:46 He says his own name in the backward words of a thing that it's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. And Paul said, there you go. He's done it. He's come through. He's shown us that he's here. He's here on the song. I mean, it's really there when you listen to it. And it has to be impossible. I can't work out how how the probability of that is is possible i've said possible a lot but yeah it's it's weird you talk about the the first mission to find the titanic and lately titanic has been in the news because those people died but the first mission to find Titanic was, well, you tell it. The very first ever scientific expedition to go and find the Titanic was led by a billionaire

Starting point is 00:24:33 called Jack Grimm. But he had the top scientists and oceanographers on the boat to go and look for the Titanic. And the hour before they set off, he almost ruined the entire thing because he said to the top scientists who were there, by the way, there's one more crew member that's joining us on this trip. And then he introduced them to the latest member of the crew, which was a monkey who had been trained to psychically point out where the Titanic was going to be on a map. And that's what they were going to follow to find the Titanic. And so they all said, are you nuts? We're not going on an expedition and ruining our reputations by being led by literally a monkey pointing at a map. It's either us or the monkey. And he picked the monkey. He was fortunately

Starting point is 00:25:17 talked out of the monkey right at the last second and the scientists did go. But if he had had his way, the first expedition would have been with just a monkey pointing at a map. What I find so weird about all these weird things that you talk about is a lot of them. I think I should have known this, like I should have heard this story before about Ringo or or Ronald Reagan. So I'm really glad you found them and were able to share them. I've been speaking with Dan Schreiber. He is an author and a podcaster. His podcast is called No Such Thing as a Fish, and I'll put a link to that podcast in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:25:55 And his latest book is called The Theory of Everything Else, A Voyage into the World of the Weird. And there's a link to that book in the show notes as well. Thanks, Dan. Appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much, Mike. That was so much fun. Porter Fairs include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

Starting point is 00:26:45 So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to, called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for.

Starting point is 00:27:36 Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. When you look at great athletes who are at the top of their game in any sport, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, it can be a real pleasure to watch. But what you often don't think about is how they get there. How did they become so great at what they do? And is there something to learn from them and use in our own lives to become better at what we choose to do? Well, the answer is a resounding yes, according to Sally Jenkins. Sally has been a columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years.

Starting point is 00:28:15 She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. In 2021, she was named the winner of the Associated Press Red Smith Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sports Journalism. Sally is also the author of 12 books, her most recent being The Right Call, What Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life. Hi, Sally. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So in our culture, there's a lot of admiration for top athletes. But what is it that you think athletes and sports can teach us about life, our own life? most of us who work from the neck up sitting at desks struggle to make the connection between what they do and what we do. Look, a Michael Phelps or a Peyton Manning have a lot to teach you about how to perform under pressure in your own life. So make that connection for me because

Starting point is 00:29:18 it's not always easy to see how I can learn something from someone who's just a superstar at a sport, how that impacts, how that could be used in my life. There's a truly deep intelligence going on in a great athlete who's performing under pressure. But the thing that people need to realize is that that deep intelligence is earned and it's learned. It's not natural born talent we make the mistakes so often of of mistaking the ease that a great athlete performs with as something that's natural born in them and it's really it's truly not it's it's a it's a method it's a result of a great deal of dirty tedious practice and real method and real discipline. And I think the more we learn to

Starting point is 00:30:05 unpack what's in that performance, the more we can export some of the things that those people do into our own lives and our own endeavors. So let's unpack it and let's talk about how that works because it's, I think, as you just said, we look at some athletes and we think it, you know, it's just a gift. It looks so simple and so easy to them that that has no application in my life. So what is it and how do you take that, what you see in sports and apply it to life? Well, one of the things that you can take away from athletes is the value of physical conditioning when it comes to executive function and judgment. There's a

Starting point is 00:30:46 mountain of neuroscience that shows that people who are sitting at desks are actually working really, really hard. Decisional fatigue is huge, but that's related to physical fatigue. A grandmaster chess player might burn 6,000 calories in a day of chess play. So now marry that to your own life and understand that when you're trying to make critical decisions, your body is actually having a lot to say about your judgment. So that surprises me that a chess player could burn 6,000 calories playing chess because it doesn't seem like that's a very strenuous sport. It's fascinating, isn't it? So I'll give you a couple of examples. Magnus Carlsen, who's really the regnant chess player in the world these days, you know, they have Fitbits

Starting point is 00:31:34 these days in chess. So there's a game within a game of putting Fitbits and other sorts of, you know, physical tools onto chess players to see what's going in their body, what's going on in their body physiologically while they're thinking. And Magnus Carlsen, his heart rate can get up to 130 beats per minute when he's trying to make a decision at the chessboard under pressure. You know, a chess player named Mikhail Antipov measured in one tournament, he lost 560 calories in two hours of hard thinking. So these are the types of things we're talking about. It's that the stresses on your body when you're doing some really, really hard thought and particularly stressful thought can be, you know, akin to

Starting point is 00:32:16 running a marathon or some kind of really arduous physical undertaking. So this is my point that athletes have a lot to show us if we would look at them as something more than entertainment. It's not an accident that NASA has begun to train astronauts very much like athletes. They've adopted very, very athletic training for people who are going to be in critical situations in deep space. So what does that mean, though, for the average person to condition? Because you're not going to do what LeBron James does every day. That's just unrealistic. for the New York Yankees, who actually now has a side business training executives and helping them understand what pressure is doing to your body and how to mitigate it. So pressure is not a state of mind. It has actual physical properties. And once you understand that, you can set out to sort of counter some of its effects on you that might be undermining your performance.

Starting point is 00:33:23 That's a starting space is just understanding what's happening in your body when you are under pressure and under stress. Well, I'd like to explore that a little more because everybody's been in the position of being under pressure, under stress, you know, deadline, things, something's due, whatever. And it does feel like a state of mind that you're, you're in that state of mind of being under pressure. So how do you counter that? So you feel it physically, right? It's it, you can sometimes feel like, you know, there's an actual weight on you, your eyesight, you get tunnel vision. One thing that happens to you under stress is the fight or flight reaction kicks in and your body is actually shunting blood from your

Starting point is 00:34:07 small muscle groups to your large muscle groups. There was a great example in the French Open a couple of weeks ago when a great, hugely fit young player named Carlos Alcaraz actually went into cramping on the court just under the pressure of facing Novak Djokovic across the net, the number one player in the world. And Alcaraz wasn't cramping because he was tired. It was quite early in the match. He was cramping from nerves and stress and pressure. The guy who pioneered the best research into stress, a guy named Hans Selye, he used the word stress. He borrowed it from engineering to describe the stresses that happen to say, you know, like a bridge when a lot of cars have been driving over it.

Starting point is 00:34:51 Stress is truly a physical manifestation in your body. And when you understand that the blood is rushing from small muscle groups to large muscle groups, it starts to explain why you might be losing fine motor control as you are like let's take an example typing on deadline at the super bowl uh to use a personal example i'm here to tell you like my typing gets really really bad under pressure because i'm losing blood in my fingers that's literally the reason why so you you start to suck at the thing you really need to be good at and which really kind of ruins everything i mean we we talk about choking a lot and you know you'll watch a great tennis player double fault and you're like how could that person double fault at this stage of the match when they're you know a top five ranked player how could a great golfer on the pga tour

Starting point is 00:35:42 miss a three foot putt, stress is the reason, and you and me are experiencing the very same things, is the truth. But not everybody chokes, and not even people who choke, choke all the time. So I wonder why. Well, people choke more than you think. Athletes are far more vulnerable to pressure than we realize. We tend to think of a LeBron James as someone who ordinarily just performs at a really, really high level under pressure. But the fact is, if you examine LeBron James's statistics in the clutch, what they call a clutch shooting in the NBA, I mean, even the greatest clutch shooter in the NBA, you have to understand, is missing well over 50% of his shots. It's not that athletes perform at a really, really, really high level under pressure.

Starting point is 00:36:34 What the best ones are able to do is learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary everyday performance is what's coming forward. They're just operating under their own standard. They're not, you know, achieving some otherworldly level. They are just being themselves in the moment. And that's the real key of dealing with stress. That's what real grace under pressure is. It's not rising to the moment. It's simply not deteriorating under the pressure. But haven't you ever been in your line of work, as you say, when you're typing at the end of the Super Bowl and you're typing sucks and you've got to fight that, but haven't there been other times where you've been under similar pressure and somehow you just flow and

Starting point is 00:37:20 somehow it just happens for you? Yes, and what athletes do is they examine the difference between those two circumstances with really, really fine diagnosis. And that is what I've learned to do from them more than anything else as a writer, is to understand that athletes aren't confused about the difference between their good performances and their bad performances. The rest of us can be. I can remember an editor asking me once, do you know the difference between that story you wrote

Starting point is 00:37:50 that was really, really good and this other story you wrote that wasn't so good? And I was a much younger writer, and the truth is that I did not understand the total difference between those two stories. And so one thing that athletes, great athletes like a Peyton Manning has taught me to do just by covering him and interviewing him over the years is to understand how to get more consistent and how to create the circumstances that allow the good performance to

Starting point is 00:38:16 come through. So I'll give you just one example from my own life. I go into the Super Bowl much more prepared than I used to. On the day that I know I'm going to have to write a thousand words in two hours or less on deadline, when the game probably wasn't even decided until the final two minutes of the game, you know, late at night, I make sure I have like a good 500 to 600 words of material ready at my left hand of material I've been preparing all week long from listening to interviews, from reading statistics and understanding where the pressure points in the game are liable to be, because it's a lot easier to write 400 to 500 words under pressure than a thousand words under pressure, right? So if you have some material ready to go

Starting point is 00:39:04 and you've really done your homework, your flow, that flow performance that you're talking about is much more likely to come forward. And the same thing is true if you haven't been eating junk food in the press box all afternoon, which is something else I used to do quite a lot of. So those are two pretty simple, basic examples,

Starting point is 00:39:22 but they make a world of difference in performance. Let's talk about practice, because you hear that, you know, practice is what makes success, that, you know, you've got to put in the time, the 10,000 hours, you've got to practice, practice, practice. A lot of people practice and they still don't get to the top of their game. So what's the deal? You know, there's a lot of bad practice in the world, Mike. I mean, I think a lot of people don't understand what the right kind of practice is. There's a lot of purposeless activity, right?

Starting point is 00:39:56 A lot of meaningless activity where people think that practice is just headbanging. Really good practice is what's known as deliberate practice, which is you diagnose a weakness and then you specifically work on measurable improvement at that weakness. And I'll give you one example, Peyton Manning, who I love to use just because he was a Hall of Famer and a Super Bowl winner. And he's also very, very self-aware with his explanations of how he was able to perform. Peyton Manning told me that, you know, as a younger quarterback, his record by his third year in the NFL was just 32 and 32. He was a 500 quarterback who led the league in interceptions. And one of his issues was his feet were not great under pressure. They had a tendency to jackhammer and he'd get very stutter-steppy. He sat down with his coaches, Tony Dungy and his quarterbacks coach, Jim Caldwell,

Starting point is 00:40:52 and they examined tape of every single interception he had thrown in his first three years in the league, every single one. And then they looked at a different tape, what Peyton calls a more hidden tape, which was tape of all of the passes that he threw that should have been intercepted, but he just got a little lucky. They diagnosed the commonalities in all of those poor throws and all of those circumstances. It turned out he was nervous. His feet got very, very nervous when large defensive linemen were hurling themselves below his knees. So understandably, that kind of pressure made his feet unstable. The drill that they designed, the coaches would take very, very heavy sandbags and throw them

Starting point is 00:41:35 at Manning's feet in practice until he learned to set his feet and get more stable under pressure. And that cleaned up a lot of his errors. So that's an interesting example and a very hardcore example of using practice in the right way, you know, a directed correction, not just headbanging, going out and throwing a million balls, you know. If Peyton Manning had gone out there and just thrown pass after pass after pass, he wasn't going to get any better at the thing that was really holding him back. Yeah, well, you see that. I mean, that's the difference. And maybe it's just a semantic thing, but that's the difference between practice. What I think of as practice, which is doing a lot of repetition, you say it's conditioning.

Starting point is 00:42:19 And what you just described, which is coaching, it takes like another person to come in and identify those flaws and help you figure out, which a lot of us don't. We don't have a coach. We have to figure it out ourselves. Correct. And Eric Erickson, the great sociologist who is really the guy who was the basis for that sort of myth about 10,000 hours of practice makes an expert. It drove Erickson a little crazy because while there's some truth to that, there's a difference between practice, which is what you and me do when we say pick up the guitar and we want to get pretty good at the guitar. We learn the guitar, we practice the guitar, and then we sort of plateau. There's a state at which we don't get a whole lot better.

Starting point is 00:43:02 Or tennis, you know, mostly because when we take up tennis we get to a place where we're pretty good and then we run around our weak backhand for the rest of our lives the really people who really really excel at something they use those 10 000 hours to find what they're they're not very good at they work far more on their weaknesses than their strengths. And that's a critical distinction. And that's what Erickson called deliberate practice. So there's a big difference between just learning scales at the piano and then working at something to understand where literally your weakest finger is on your left hand at the piano and why you're having trouble mastering a certain measure of music. But don't you think, though, that there are just some people, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, those kind of people, they just have something that other people don't have?

Starting point is 00:43:58 No, I don't believe that. And I base this on 30 years of covering those people. I don't believe they have something extra than you or me it's taken me a long time to get to this conclusion but I truly don't what they have is love of their craft they have found something they truly truly love to do and they have gone all in with every piece of themselves if if you and me found the thing that we love to do with that level of enthusiasm, I am 100% certain that we can achieve the same level of success in our own fields or

Starting point is 00:44:33 our own endeavors. It's about going all in. So talk about failure because that's a thing that stops a lot of people and it certainly discourages a lot of people and yet it's part of the it's part of the game it's the thing that stops most people it's the thing that stops almost everybody the the separator between the people i'm talking about you know a peyton manning who again was just 32 and 32 his third year in the league, the thing that they have is resilience and they've acquired it. That's an acquired trait, resilience. We're not born with it. You develop it through failure, very much like engineers sort of understand and entrepreneurs understand that you have to stress things and break things in order to improve them and to arrive at better answers.

Starting point is 00:45:26 The great big wave surfer, Laird Hamilton, who I've interviewed quite a lot over the years, including for this project. Laird is really eloquent because he's an engineer and a builder and an entrepreneur, as well as the greatest big wave surfer who ever lived. And as a designer of lots of different types of surfboards and instruments for traveling over water laird understands that your first couple of tries are going to be failures

Starting point is 00:45:53 you know he's built a lot of things that broke in the water and that needed improvement and he feels the same way about the human body and the human psyche in approaching big wave surfing. And so athletes are good failers. They're gracious losers. The great ones, you never hear them bitch about the officiating. You never hear them talk about how they got screwed on the field or got a bad break. And those things do happen to them, but they don't focus on those aspects of the outcome. They focus on their own performance. And they're very, very resilient about unpacking the result, learning from it, and doing it a little bit better the next time.

Starting point is 00:46:35 One of my favorite stories is the story of the Kansas City Chiefs, who played probably the greatest football game, NFL game I ever saw in person against the New England Patriots and Tom Brady a few years ago. And they had the Patriots and Brady on the ropes in the final two minutes of the game when they intercepted Tom Brady. And the interception was called back by an offsides penalty, a flag. A guy had lined up four inches off sides and Brady got the ball back, completed a pass, drove his team down the field to tie the game and send it into overtime. And the Patriots won the game in overtime to go on to the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs and Andy Reid just absolutely refused to scapegoat the guy who had lined up off sides. And all Andy Reid said after the game was,

Starting point is 00:47:25 listen, we all could have been four inches better. And for the next year, the Chiefs mantra was four inches better, four inches better. And the predictable thing happened. They won the Super Bowl the following year as a result of that attitude. Well, you have such a unique perspective on the relationship between sports and what it can teach us about life. I really appreciate you sharing these stories. I've been talking with Sally Jenkins. She's a columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post for more than 20 years. The name of her book is The Right Call, What Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life.

Starting point is 00:48:02 And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Sally. Thank you, Sally. Thank you, Mike. You've probably shopped at a Trader Joe's before. After all, there are over 400 stores in 42 states. And while there, you may have noticed that the people who work there are particularly friendly and happy to help. That friendly nature of their employees is considered part of the secret of their success. Instead of calling their workers employees, they use nautical terms. Crew members are entry-level workers.

Starting point is 00:48:38 Merchants are crew members who've received recognition for excellent customer service. Mates are the assistant managers, and captains are store leaders or managers promoted from within the company. You can tell different employees' ranks by their shirts. Crew members wear single-color t-shirts with a flower on the back. Captains wear button shirts with Hawaiian prints. And you've likely heard a bell rung every once in a while in a Trader Joe's, and apparently those bells are just calls for help.

Starting point is 00:49:11 One bell is to signal to open another register, two calls are for general support, such as replacing a damaged product at checkout, and three rings is a call for manager assistance. And that is something you should know. We're here cranking out three shows a week, and we would love it if you would share what we do with friends of yours and help us grow our audience. I'm Micah Ruthers.

Starting point is 00:49:34 Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel

Starting point is 00:49:55 isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent VB Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth.

Starting point is 00:50:22 Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course,

Starting point is 00:50:51 every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent

Starting point is 00:51:18 Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.

Something You Should Know - Strange Stories About Amazing People & Extraordinary Lessons from Great Athletes

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