Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Important New About Infectious Diseases & Looking at Life without Sight

Episode Date: December 21, 2019

Do you really have a year to send a wedding gift? That turns out to be one of several etiquette myths we’ll explore as I begin today’s episode. http://www.goodhousekeeping.com/family/etiquette/etiquette-mistakes We’ve all heard the stories of terrible, deadly disease outbreaks in other countries that take a devastating toll on the people who live there. Unfortunately, with modern air travel, those diseases could be in the jungles of some Third World country one day and on the streets of New York the next. You really need to hear Michael Osterholm. He is founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of the book, Deadliest Enemy (http://amzn.to/2mJxiTh). What he says about infectious diseases is both encouraging and scary – and is definitely something worth knowing. Then, you’ll meet Isaac Lidsky. He was a regular on the TV series “Saved By the Bell.” But he also became a very successful attorney – and along the way lost his sight to a rare disease. He is author of the book Eyes Wide Open (http://amzn.to/2mJwdev) and he shares his unique philosophy on life – and explains why losing his sight was a turning point in his life. You know it is not safe to talk on the phone while driving – but something interesting happens when you drive while. OTHER people in the car are talking on the phone. It is more dangerous than you could have imagined. http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2010/05/half-heard-phone-conversations-reduce-performance This Week’s Sponsors -Les Mills On Demand. Try the fitness app FREE for 21 days by going to www.TryLesMills.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, do you really have a year to send a wedding gift? We'll look at some misconceptions about manners and etiquette. Plus, there are some serious infectious diseases all around the world that you need to be concerned

about. Why? Last year, about 1.5 billion people crossed the international border just for tourism purposes. So anywhere there's an infection in the world today could mean tomorrow it could be anywhere else in the world. And you know that talking on the phone while driving isn't safe, but what about driving while other people in the car are talking on the phone? And you're going to meet Isaac Lidsky. He starred on the TV show Saved by the Bell when he was 13. He became a lawyer, argued in front of the Supreme Court, and along the way went gradually blind. That experience actually turned out to be among the greatest of my life and one of the things I'm most thankful for in my life in an odd way.

All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

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There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 Carruthers. Hello, come on in. We have many fascinating things to discuss today.

Starting right at the top here with talking about manners. Manners still matter to people, not just your grandmother. They matter to everyone that you deal with. And there are a few common etiquette rules that you may unintentionally be breaking. So let me run down a few. RSVP to every invitation. It helps the host plan better and it shows that you're thoughtful. And if you've ever hosted a party and sent out invitations and asked people to RSVP, you probably have had that experience where so many people just don't. They just don't reply.

And it's really, frankly, rude. When an invitation says no gifts, don't bring a gift. You'll embarrass the other guests who obey the request. And it's easy enough if you want to give a gift, just do it privately, but not publicly at an event where the request was no gifts. Don't ask people to come to a restaurant to celebrate your husband's birthday or your wife's birthday or your birthday and expect them to pay for their own food. If the party was at your house, you wouldn't ask people to pay,

so you shouldn't ask them to pay at a restaurant either. You're the host, you should pay the bill, and if you can't afford it, invite fewer friends or do it at home. Don't talk about children in their presence as if they aren't there. Instead of saying, you know, to the parent, how old is he or how old is she? Ask the child directly. It's more respectful, and the child will most likely be happy to tell you.

And here's what I think people have a misconception about. Don't wait to send a wedding gift until after the wedding. This notion that you have a year to send a wedding gift is just not true. A wedding gift is to help celebrate the event, not the one-year anniversary of the event. So wedding gifts should be sent or brought at the time of the wedding. And that is something you should know. One of the greatest threats to the world's population is infectious diseases. They kill millions of people.

And while we like to think that perhaps we're a little better protected here in the United States than in other parts of the world, it's important to remember that today, anyone with an infectious disease can hop on a plane and go anywhere else in the world and start the disease there. And it's a real serious problem with much to be done. Here to talk about it is Michael Osterholm. Michael is the founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, and he's author of a new book called Deadliest Enemy, Our War Against Killer Germs. Welcome,

Michael. And so paint the picture for me here. Why do we all need to be concerned with infectious diseases? Ever since our very first days in the caves, humans have been confronted by the top 10 causes of death. In those early days, infectious diseases were often among most of those causes of death. People lived very short lives, 20, 30 years of age in many cases. Remember, even by 1900, life expectancy after 80,000 generations from the caves only got to 48 years. A lot of that was because of early infectious disease deaths.

Well, we really made major inroads in public health activities from the 1900s to the 1970s and 80s. That includes the establishment of safe water systems in many parts of the world, sewage systems. We brought about the world of vaccines and eliminating the childhood immunized disease issues. We also were able to bring about antibiotics and use them in ways that eliminated deaths that were occurring from common infections. But then things really began to change over the last 20 years. World population exploded. Today, we have 7.6 billion people on the face of the earth. One of every people who has ever lived is here now. And much of that growth has occurred in the urbanized

areas of the developing world, the megacities of Asia. And with that has come very dire living conditions, the squalor conditions of some of the worst slums ever in history. And on top of that, you now add in the global trade and travel where we've eliminated oceans, mountain ranges, valleys, political borders as any way of stopping infectious diseases from moving. And so we've actually created really new problems that we've never seen before. And none the least, right here in the United States, we're concerned today about the ever-creeping problem with Zika virus infection in mosquitoes. That mosquito, the Aedes aegypti mosquito, came over to the Americas in the first slave ships, established itself,

but was almost eliminated out of the Americas by the 1970s. Today, because of the expanding world of garbage and plastic garbage in particular, these mosquitoes have breeding sites in all of these countries on unprecedented levels. And we now see more Aedes aegypti than we've ever seen since any of the mosquitoes first arrived in our shores. That creates huge challenges for us. And so, in a sense, we really live in a new era of infectious diseases and infectious disease potential. And that's really what this book is about. Deadliest Enemies is about why is it different today? And importantly, it's also about what we can do about it. Today we're dealing with the issue of influenza and the concern we

have for another pandemic, a new strain of virus emerging out of birds getting into humans causing human infection and changing genetically enough so that humans can transmit it to other humans, a disease which may have as high as 20 or 30 percent case fatality rate. The last really severe pandemic we had with influenza in 1918, at a time when the world was one-third of the population as today, killed upwards of 200 million people. And today, the same thing would happen with modern medicine,

because the way the virus killed isn't really amenable to the kinds of treatments we have today. Why do infectious diseases like this crop up? I mean, is there, or maybe it's irrelevant, but you wonder, why do we have them? You know, it's not irrelevant at all because it's part of what we need to keep in mind in terms of where to look for the next problem. I mean, we don't look for the next hurricane to develop in Colorado. We look for it to develop somewhere across the Atlantis that enters the Caribbean. And so we want to know where these things come from so that we can anticipate them.

And frankly, the human and animal interface is a huge, huge issue, meaning today the contact with animals, particularly domesticated farm animals, which is at all-time high population levels, issue, meaning today the contact with animals, particularly domesticated farm animals, which is at all-time high population levels, oftentimes that's where some of these infectious agents come from. That's what we call a zoonosis or transmitted agent between humans and animals both ways. And so this is a real concern. Some of it is just human, meaning that take vaccine preventatives like measles, polio, things like this we worry about. Those are ones where humans only are the source for the virus or for the

bacteria, but because we are able to travel so much and we have so much contact with others, last year about 1.5 billion people, that's with a B, crossed international border just for tourism purposes, just being tourists. And so we take these viruses and bacteria and parasites around the world now with us, and it so changes it. So anywhere there's an infection in the world today could mean tomorrow it could be anywhere else in the world. That's a big challenge for us. Is there a formula when a virus like the ones you've just mentioned are identified to find,

is there a formula and a timeline to fix the problem, or is everything brand new and we have to rewrite the whole plan to fight this? Actually, there really is a very similar blueprint for many of these. And so what we do is we apply that same standard, and it matters how the virus is spread, for example, and how you prevent it. If it's a respiratory transmitted virus or bacteria where you just have to breathe the air that I'm breathing in the same room, in the same shopping center, in the same airplane,

that's very different than one that is only from body fluid contact like we see with Ebola. We're different than one where you only from body fluid contact like we see with ebola we're different than one where you have sexual transmission like hiv so we tailor these to each of those kind of disease categories and then we look at what is most likely to cause the most severe problems which are the ones that are most likely to kill most people you and i may not like the common cold but we don't have very many people to die from that. So that takes on a very different level of importance than, say, something like a pandemic of influenza, which could kill hundreds of millions of people. And what can we do about that?

Vaccines. In this case, we need new and better vaccines. We can stop it. We can take it off the table. We just haven't. And that's what the book lays out is really that plan based on those prioritizations. And it's very clear. There's no beam me up Scotty machine technology here. We're not waiting for some magic to come about. We just have to apply what we have today and what we know we can do

and make sure that we do it before the problem happens instead of waiting until afterwards. Once you identify a virus and can isolate it, can you fairly rapidly develop a vaccine for it? We can, and we should in many cases, depending on which the disease is. That's the problem, though, is today we don't have the basic private sector government combination to do that. Take, for example, the three major companies that have really come forward to work on Ebola vaccine so that we could take Ebola off the table as a disease problem in Africa. Each have invested hundreds of millions of dollars of their own money into this. And the only sized pot we have at the end of the rainbow for them is about, you know, a $5 million purchase by one organization to stockpile some of the vaccine.

Well, you know, you don't have to be a brilliant business person to understand that the return on investment isn't real good there. Imagine today if we ran the defense industry, the Pentagon, by saying, you know, we want a brand-new aircraft carrier. We want you to go build it. We want to have all the bells and whistles you can find. And when you get done, bring it back to us, and we'll decide if we're going to buy it or not. And if we decide to, we'll tell you how much we're going to pay for it. Who would be in that industry? Nobody. And that's, we basically do that with vaccines today. So what we need, and we lay this out in the book, is really a new model for how do we work on this. These are

strategically needed products. If they don't get made, we all suffer. So this can't be looked at as just a pharmaceutical industry opportunity. It's not. We need them. And government needs to be a part of that because it's only government that can really pull together these kinds of things. And in a day and age when people don't like big government, they don't want it, there's nobody else who's going to do it. Well, there's so much to talk about here, and I want to get to talking about, you know, the infectious diseases that more readily affect us here in the U.S. as well,

like the flu and all that. My guest is Michael Osterholm. His book is Deadliest Enemy, Our War Against Killer Germs. 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, 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 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. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

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 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.

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Michael, when you create a vaccine for an Ebola, for example, is it good forever, unlike the flu, where the flu changes every year, so the vaccine has to change? Well, see, now you've raised several very other important questions here. Let me just start with the flu first. We shouldn't have to live with a vaccine you have to get vaccinated every year with. That's 1940s technology. And one of the things that we lay out in the book clearly is the fact that there is enough evidence today that we can come up with a whole new generation of flu vaccines. We just haven't done it yet because of the cost. But think about this. Each year,

we have spent about a billion dollars worldwide on research for new HIV vaccines, which is really very important. I wouldn't take a penny away from it. Last year, we only spent $35 million as a global public health community researching new flu vaccines, ones that could be given once a decade and cover a whole variety of different strains of the virus. Imagine how that would change the whole risk pattern for, for example, a pandemic or for just seasonal flu. So the same is true with Ebola. We need vaccines that we can cover the multiple strains. There are different strains of Ebola vaccine. There's Marburg virus, a similar virus that can also be a very real challenge for us. Imagine having a vaccine that had a cocktail of these different strains

and could provide protection for 10, 20, or maybe 30 years. That's the kind of research we need. That's the kind of thing we have to pay for. If we don't, we'll continue to be responding to these crises after they happen, which I can tell you is going to be much, much more costly than investing up front and trying to prevent these things from ever happening. But is this a problem for government and business and public health people like you, or is this something that everybody plays a role in? Everybody plays a role in this because it's only through the public's demand for this

kind of support and action is things going to happen. That's exactly why the center that I lead at the University of Minnesota, the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy, or CIDRAP, C-I-D-R-A-P, this was really born out of the challenges that we saw where we have lots of good science coming forward in the public health world, but none of it was getting translated into policy. So you might have a bunch of public health scientists talking to each other, but did it make any difference? And at the same time, we see a lot of policy that gets developed both in the public and private sector that has a relative absence of good science to it. And that can actually be actually damaging as opposed to

helpful. And so what we need to do is marry the two, kind of like chocolate and peanut butter running into each other in the hallway. What we need basically is to blend that, and that's what our center does. And so what we try to do is take the best science, the current information that we know and anticipate the future, and we try to say, okay, what kind of policies do we need to make this problem go away or never happen? And how can we do that cost-effectively? How can we do that so that we bring the best technology to bear?

And that's what we talk about in Deadliest Enemies. We actually lay out in layman's terms just what needs to be done. It should be common sense, but we're not doing it. That's where the general public needs to demand of their elected officials. What are we going to do about this? Why are we going to not deal with this? Imagine, you know, if we had no response to a hurricane in this country that hit landfall and did major damage. Well, you know, first of all, the key thing is how do you prepare for it to begin with so it minimizes the damage, and then after it occurs, how do you respond? Well, we saw

that with Katrina. We know how the public responded. These are the same things that go on with infectious disease outbreaks and infectious disease challenges. So that's our goal, is to take these off the table by using the best science and policy combination. Well, it would seem that if somebody would invest in a vaccine that wipes out several strains of flu for decades or a decade, that that would be a real profit center. So why aren't we doing this? Why is there this big resistance to what seems, the way you describe it, so obvious? Well, first of all, because there's been a lack, I guess, of creative imagination in government. For many years, we unfortunately portrayed the flu vaccine as working a lot better than it is. And we made people think that it was just making more of it.

Now, remember, this is a vaccine that largely gets made in chicken eggs. It takes almost six months to make. So it's surely not an emergency response kind of vaccine. When a pandemic arises, as we've seen in everyone we've had in the modern era, the virus wiped through much of the population before the vaccine ever was available because it took that long to make it. And unlike, you know, something where you can just make more of it by doing it faster, there's no way to make this faster than it is. That's why we need a new vaccine. The public hasn't cried for out for a new vaccine because they didn't understand what the challenges were to begin with. And the industry, surely, that makes flu vaccine now, why would they want to disrupt their annual sales?

Why would we invest a billion dollars to find a new vaccine and also, by the same time, cannibalize our annual sales that we're now currently realizing with the current vaccine? So somebody else has to step in. We need a Manhattan-like project on flu vaccine that I believe and others around me who are experts in flu agree we could likely do. So this is where we have to break the logjam of what we've been doing works when it doesn't and the creative imagination to say, so what can work? And if you do the return on investment of that, as you just so well said, imagine what our world would be like if we could take pandemic flu off the table. And that's not an unrealistic goal.

So that's what we need. The same thing is true with antibiotic resistance. We need to limit how we use antibiotics today so that we don't lose all the ones we have and speed on the mutation changes that occur when these bacteria are exposed to it. In this case, bacteria that shouldn't be exposed because we're just overusing the antibiotics. We need new vaccines to target some of the diseases that are caused by these antibiotic-resistant infections. So rather than treat them, let's prevent them. And finally, we just need new antibiotics. But imagine if you're in the

pharmaceutical industry and we're saying, we want you to create a new drug, but we don't want anybody to use it unless they absolutely have to. And when they use it, we want them to use it as sparingly as possible. Now, how are you going to cost that out? You know, rather than when you have a drug like a lifestyle drug where you're going to have to take it every day for the rest of your life. And in that standpoint, you know, the profits are pretty well assured. So we just need a new model for how we do these things and how we invest in them from a government

standpoint, and not just to do it because it's altruistic, but because it's darn good business to make sure that we protect people's lives and the economy from these kinds of problems happening. Well, it's a really fascinating subject and one that really everyone needs to pay attention to. Michael Osterholm has been my guest. He is the founding director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota and author of the book Deadliest Enemy, Our War Against Killer Germs. Thank you, Michael. Thank you. You really asked great questions. I really appreciate it. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan,

the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong. Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Sometimes it takes something serious or traumatic to get you to see what's really important in life.

That's certainly the case for my next guest today. Isaac Lidsky was 13 years old when he was told that he had a disease that would slowly rob him of his sight, which it did. It was also around that time, when he was 13, that he got a job as one of the regulars on the TV show Saved by the Bell. Despite going blind, Isaac has had a fascinating life since his days on Saved by the Bell, and he's learned some things about life that his blindness has taught him that we can probably all benefit from hearing. He recently came out with a new book called Eyes Wide Open. Welcome to the program, Isaac. And tell me, what is your big message here?

What is it you want people to understand? I was blessed to see that in every moment, we get to choose how we want to live our lives and who we want to be. It's our ultimate power, and it's also our responsibility. But we are the masters of all reality, and that vision brought me immeasurable joy and fulfillment in my life, and I'm eager to share it with others. So now let's talk about your story, because it's quite a unique journey from where you were to where you are. So if you could briefly just run through the high points.

So I grew up acting in Miami. I did somewhere between 100 and 150 commercials growing up. Got some lucky breaks here and there and wound up landing the series regular role of Weasel Weisel on NBC's Saved by the Bell, the new class. When I was 13, around the same time, I was diagnosed with this blinding disease and felt the real pressure to kind of hurry and get as much crammed into my life, do as much as I could before the sort of the curtain fell. I wound up leaving Los Angeles to go to college a couple weeks after I turned 16. I graduated from Harvard at 19, started an internet advertising technology business with my brother-in-law, and when we finally raised some institutional money, I went back to Harvard for law school,

litigated appeals for the Justice Department for a few years, and realized, I should say, a dream of clerking for the U.S. Supreme Court for Justices O'Connor and Ginsburg. And in 2011, with some partners, I bought a struggling residential subcontractor, a residential construction subcontractor in Orlando, and I've spent the last five or six years really turning that company around and growing it and building it into something excellent with a phenomenal team of people. Remarkably, of all those diverse sort of experiences that I've been blessed to have, the experience of losing my sight slowly kind of from age 13-ish to 25 or so, that experience actually

turned out to be among the greatest of my life and really one of the things I'm most thankful for in my life in an odd way. Yeah. Why would you say that losing your sight was a great thing? So the way in which I lost my sight, it was, it was slowly, it was sort of slow over time, like I said, from, you know, from 13 to 25. Also, it wasn't like, you know, just progressively, you know, stronger, you know, prescription lenses or glasses, that kind of thing. You know, if you picture a Jumbotron screen in an arena that's got, you know, millions of bulbs, imagine you're watching my life as a movie on that screen, and the bulbs kind of start randomly breaking over time.

So you might not even notice at first, then it becomes annoying, then, you know, certain parts of the screen are sort of too obscured to make sense of. And in my daily sort of reality, objects would, you know, appear and morph and disappear. And I could see things only when someone sort of described them to me. Yes, I saw all these bizarre visual effects. It was challenging and terrifying to be sure. But at the same time, it sort of shattered for me in my mind this illusion of sight as something that is objective and external. It's something that's out there. We tend to experience sight as something that's sort of passive. You know, we say seeing is believing.

But in truth, you know, sight is this immersive experience that's really manufactured in our minds. It's a creation of our own making. It implicates our memories, opinions, emotions, our knowledge, and on and on and on. So for me, that was really, if you'll pardon the pun, this sort of eye-opening realization. I mean, I literally saw the awesome power of the mind to really shape our reality, shape the way we experience our lives. And do you think that you would have done all the things you did had this not happened?

You know, I don't know is the short answer. It's one of the things I talk about in the book. I think we kind of tend to misconstrue luck and sort of oversimplify. And who knows if you could sort of go back and change one thing in your life, who knows how it would turn out. But I will tell you, I think that this sort of vision I gained led to sort of a profound awareness in life, a profound, I embraced this notion that we can live with intention and with accountability. And I think that much of the sort of beauty and joy in my life is a direct result of this sort of peek behind the curtain that I gained by going blind. But that really is,

like I said earlier, I mean, it's not about blindness or disability, and it's not about me. It's about the human mind. It's about a power that we all have. So how do I, knowing what you know, and from that perspective, what is it that I'm missing perhaps, or what's the secret bullet here? There's so much of our lives that we experience as sort of things beyond our control that we're really manufacturing. So we tend to believe the sort of awful realities of our fears. We tend to believe our experience is truth, our misguided assumptions, our faulty logic. We will surrender to sort of self-limitations we impose upon ourselves without realizing we're doing it. We misperceive what strength looks like and what weakness looks like when we think about our own image of ourselves and that of others. We misperceive what true success means and what

value means. We unwittingly perpetuate our vulnerabilities and our insecurities and fail to listen to our hearts and listen to each other and sort of on and on and on. And I think a lot of it is, as I said, because it's not often easy to see, to admit, to recognize that these sort of experiences we have really are well within our control. It's well within our power to decide, you know, how we want to experience. So how do you do that? How do you, because everybody does what you just described, we fail to see these things, how do you then see them?

Using what you know, I mean, how could we get a little better insight into this stuff? It's about making the choice to be aware of every thought, every detail, every moment, and to be zealous in making the distinction between what you know and what you think you know, and in a recognition that, you know, look, we all confront awful circumstances in our lives, right? You know, always there are people who have done far more with far less and importantly have been a lot happier doing it. So it can't be about those circumstances out there, right? It's about how we choose to let those circumstances kind of manifest themselves in our lives. Well, what you just said about distinguishing between what we know and what we think we know,

I think that's pretty profound, because how many times do we think we know what's going on when, in fact, we have no idea what's going on? Yeah. And we're programmed, we're built, you know, we're designed, you know, the way the human brain sort of is organized and developed. So we're designed to predict, to infer, to assume, you know, we build up a vast database of experiences and we reason from those experiences. And often, you know, it works pretty well. So, I mean, I'll give you an example. You know, when I was diagnosed with my blinding disease when I was 13, I knew blindness was going to ruin my life. It's not something I thought about. I just, I knew it. I knew all sorts of awful things. It felt as real as sight feels, right, when you open your eyes. I realized that everything, you know, I thought I

knew about blindness was just an awful fiction born of my fears. And, you know, worse thought I knew about blindness was just an awful fiction, uh, born of my fears. And I, you know, worse, I hadn't done anything to learn about going blind or being blind. Um, I was choosing to, uh, to sort of buy into this reality of my fears. And, um, ultimately I chose to make a, you know, a very different, uh, decision. I chose to go in a different, a different way. And like I said, my life is better for it. Was it deliberate, or did it just kind of organically happen, or did you wake up one morning and say, you know what, I'm doing this all different now? No, it's absolutely deliberate, and it requires a lot of, for me at least,

it requires a lot of effort and attention and intention. I write in the book that eyes wide open for me is it's my daily aspiration. Some days I'm better at it than others. I slip into, you know, all the awful ways in which we, you know, we can be our own worst enemies in life. But I try very hard to catch myself to remain aware, to see through it. And it's conscious effort every day. Nothing, well, I don't want to say nothing, but in my experience, very, very few things in life that are worth doing are easy to do.

I would agree with that. Isaac Lidsky is my guest. What an amazing story. He starred on the TV series Saved by the Bell. He was diagnosed with a disease when he was 13, and at that point he knew that he would eventually go blind, which he did. He went on to become an attorney. He clerked in the Supreme Court, argued cases before the Supreme Court,

and he's had quite an interesting and amazing life. His book is Eyes Wide Open. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Isaac. Thank you. I really appreciate the support, Mike. Thanks. You certainly know by now that talking on your cell phone while you're driving is distracting, and in most places it's against the law, and everybody knows that. But it also turns out that if you're driving a car and a passenger is talking on a cell phone, that can also be very distracting. A study at Cornell showed that when you hear what they call half a log, that is only half of the conversation, it reduces your cognitive function.

You see, when someone else is in the car talking on the phone, it's impossible to tune it out, so your brain is frantically trying to make sense of what the conversation is about without being able to hear the other person. The researchers point out that when we overhear a conversation normally, we actively try to predict how it will go. And when you only hear one side of the conversation, well, then now your brain has to work even harder to do what is pretty much impossible, which is to predict where the conversation is going to go. So with less of your brain available to focus on driving, you're more at risk for an

accident. That's a good reason for everyone not to talk on the phone in the car. And that is something you should know. Merry Christmas, happy holidays, happy new year from me and everyone who works here on the podcast. I'm Mike Carruthers. 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 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. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla

who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.