Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Art of Breathing & An Easy Way to Smarter Decisions

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Starting point is 00:00:18 That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, how to effectively stop robocalls for free. Then the amazing benefits of breathing the right way. And most of us breathe all wrong. For instance, vast majority of people are breathing too much and you think, well, how can breathing too much be a problem? I'm getting

Starting point is 00:00:52 more oxygen into my body. The opposite is happening. We're actually inhibiting circulation throughout our body. Also, if you have old VHS tapes, I'll tell you what to do with them and do it soon. Plus, how to make better decisions and understanding the difference between a good decision and a bad one. One of the very tough things is what is a bad decision. It's routinely mistaken to be that you got a bad outcome. You could have made what was a great investment in a stock and it dropped. That doesn't mean you made a poor decision. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Starting point is 00:02:23 robocalls. I haven't met anyone who said, oh yeah, I love those when I get those calls. And even if you are on the do not call list, you still probably get robocalls. In fact, well over 20% of all phone calls in the U.S. are robocalls. It is a real problem. Robocalls are often used by scammers, and complaints about them have been pouring in to the Federal Trade Commission. So a few years ago, the Federal Trade Commission had a contest for whoever could come up with the technology to block robocalls. And software engineer Aaron Foss won the prize with his program Nomo Robo.

Starting point is 00:03:06 I interviewed him back some time ago about this, and I use it. It is terrific, and it is absolutely free for landlines. I think there's a small fee for mobile phones. I don't get that many robocalls on my cell phone, but I was getting a lot of robocalls on my landline, and I don't get that many robo calls on my cell phone, but I was getting a lot of robo calls on my landline, and I don't get them anymore. The Federal Trade Commission awarded Aaron the $50,000 prize, and Nomo Robo has been endorsed by many large news organizations,

Starting point is 00:03:39 and according to their website, they have, since it started, they have stopped over 1,600,000,000 robocalls. To sign up, just go to nomorobo.com and follow the directions. And that is something you should know. Okay, now stick with me here because you might think, they're going to talk about breathing? How exciting can that be? Well, I'm telling you, it is actually really exciting.

Starting point is 00:04:18 Think about it. You breathe all the time. So what if you're doing it wrong? Because you probably are. And what could breathing better do for you're doing it wrong? Because you probably are. And what could breathing better do for you? And it turns out, a lot. James Nestor is a journalist who investigated how we breathe, and what he discovered is really fascinating. James is author of a book called Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. Hi James, welcome. Thanks so much for having me.

Starting point is 00:04:46 So what's the premise here? Why did you investigate breathing? I mean, what's to investigate? What is the problem? So a freediver told me this years and years ago. Freedivers are these people who have trained themselves to take a single breath of air and dive down 300, 400 feet. No tanks, no anything, no fins, and come back to the surface. So she told me, she said, there are as many ways to breathe as there are foods to eat. And just as we eat different foods to be able to allow our bodies to do different things, we can use breathing in the same way. We can use it to straighten scoliotic spines. That's true.

Starting point is 00:05:24 We can use it to help heal the symptoms of autoimmune problems. That's true. Asthma, snoring, sleep apnea, on and on and on. It all sounded like pseudoscience to me, but I was intrigued enough to spend a few years in labs talking to leaders in the field to find out what she told me. So much of it was actually true. Well, what about just plain old every day here I am sitting

Starting point is 00:05:45 here talking to you and I'm breathing while we're talking kind of breathing. So for instance, the vast majority of people are breathing too much, at least at some time during the day, or for some people for about 25% of the population all the time. And you think, well, how can breathing too much be a problem? I'm getting more oxygen into my body. The opposite is happening. When we breathe too much, we're actually inhibiting circulation throughout our body. This is such a contrarian concept. It took me months of digging into the science to understand it, but that is absolutely true. Okay. So what is proper breathing? I mean, demonstrate or explain how do we breathe better?

Starting point is 00:06:28 So the best way to breathe that anyone can practice right now is to take in a breath, about five to six seconds, slowly through the nose and exhale that same amount of time. When we do this, we increase our circulation. We greatly decrease the burden on the heart by sucking in all that blood into our thoracic cavity when we inhale and letting that blood go out through the rest of our body when we exhale. And we allow the systems in our body to enter a state of coherence where everything works at peak efficiency. And that's where you want to be. So I realize this isn't very realistic for people to walk around and try to breathe six, five times a minute. But if you can do that at least part of the time, your body can become better acclimated to breathe this way unconsciously the rest of the time. And that's really the key.

Starting point is 00:07:19 And so walk me through that again. So I breathe in for six seconds. Five to six seconds. Do not stress about, Oh my God, I was a half a second off. That's not the point. So breathe in through my nose. You know what? Put your hand over your heart when you're doing this. Okay. We'll try a little exercise here. I'm not a breathing therapist, but I picked up a few tricks along the way. So breathe in to a count of about one, two, three, four, five, and out one, two, three, four, five. When you breathe in, you're going to feel your heart rate slightly increase. When you breathe out, you're going to feel your heart rate slightly decrease. So breathing in is a sympathetic response. It stimulates us.

Starting point is 00:08:05 Breathing out is a relaxation, parasympathetic response. So it relaxes us. So this is how the body stays balanced. And if ever you want to become more relaxed, you extend those exhales. If you want a little pump of energy, you extend those inhales. So these are the dials that we have to take control of how our heart is beating and how so many of our other organs are functioning just by the ways in which we inhale and exhale. And just to be clear, we're exhaling and inhaling through the nose? Always through the nose. Yes.

Starting point is 00:08:40 I know a lot of people are going to say, I can't breathe through my nose. I have allergies. I have other problems. You got to find a way of breathing through your nose. And that's really the number one thing here. If a sink is clogged in your house, you find a way of cleaning it out as soon as possible. The nose has to be considered the same thing. Why?

Starting point is 00:08:56 What's so special? I mean, I can breathe through my mouth. So why do I, I have another sink that I can breathe through. Why do I need to clean the drain out of my nose? Your mouth is a secondary device in which you can breathe if something wrong happens to your nose. We've developed two channels for a reason. It increases our chances of survival. But breathing through the nose is going to filter air.

Starting point is 00:09:24 It is going to heat air. It is going to heat air. It is going to humidify air. It's going to condition that air. So when it enters our lungs, it enters at our body's temperature and that air can be processed so much more efficiently that way. So we're going to increase our oxygenation with each breath about 20%, but just breathing through our nose. We're also going to be increasing our nitric oxide, which is this wondrous molecule, which is now being used to treat people with severe problems due to COVID. But we produce our own nitric oxide in our nasal cavities. So just by breathing through the nose, you can lower your blood pressure, you can increase your respiratory health. And you can help expand your lungs and lung capacity.

Starting point is 00:10:07 What else are we doing wrong when we breathe? Different situations, different times of the day. What else are we messing up that we could fix? So if you go to a gym, chances are you're going to see a lot of people on treadmills just huffing and puffing, breathing as hard as they can through their mouths, believing that they're getting more oxygen, they're getting more CO2 out of their bodies, that this is a more efficient way of breathing. But it is not. So breathing this much, just as I mentioned before, is actually going to decrease the circulation. And you can see this for yourself by sitting down in a chair and huffing and puffing

Starting point is 00:10:45 for about a minute and you're going to feel some tingling in your fingers and some tingling in your toes and maybe you'll feel lightheaded. That's because you're getting less circulation to those areas. So it turns out that this happens not only when we're at a gym or exercising, but asthmatics, people who suffer from anxiety, people who suffer from depression, other fear-based disorders, traditionally inhale and exhale far too much. They're breathing far too much. And if they're able to slow down their breathing and get their blood gases in a better balance, so many of these symptoms have been showed to either decrease slightly or decrease on a massive level. And this is what psychiatrists and other scientists have shown. When you're exercising, you commonly hear the phrase,

Starting point is 00:11:34 I'm out of breath. And what you do to compensate for being out of breath is to breathe more. For sure. And so I'm not saying that, you know, go out and jog and try to not breathe as long as possible. I'm saying that we need to condition our bodies to breathe along with our metabolic needs, which is almost always breathing less, at least in our culture. I know this because I spent days and days in a Stanford study in which my nose was blocked for 10 days and I could only breathe through my mouth. And then I repeated that test in which I tried to only breathe through my

Starting point is 00:12:12 nose and we compared data sets and it was transformative just breathing through the nose. And along the way, I was exercising with a pulse oximeter on my finger that showed me my O2 sets in my blood. And I was shocked to find that by breathing extremely slowly, even though I felt extremely out of breath, I had plenty of oxygen in my blood, 97%. What I'm responding to is an increase of carbon dioxide. That's what triggers the need to breathe. And by having a better balance of CO2 and O2, we're going to be able to metabolize oxygen so much better. And that's the key. CO2 gets this really bad rap because it's causing climate change and acidity in the oceans and all that's true. But our bodies can benefit from having a proper balance of CO2 and O2.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And that usually means for most people, like having more CO2 in your body. And you get that by breathing less. You get that by breathing less because if I'm breathing right now, I'm off gassing tons more CO2, right? And if I were to calculate how much CO2 I had in my exhaled breath, it'd probably be down to four and a half, four percent. But by breathing slowly, you're allowing that air to exhale more slowly. So you're able to balance that CO2 and O2 in your lungs.

Starting point is 00:13:42 And that's what we really want because it's CO2 that has a massive vasodilation properties throughout our bodies. It increases circulation. So it makes me wonder why like when people are sick, you know, the medics come, the first thing they do is strap an oxygen mask on the face to get more oxygen in? These are for sick people. These people do not have the proper gas exchange in their lungs, so they need oxygen. For a healthy person who has blood sats of about 92 to 93 percent up to 99 or 100 percent, you don't need more oxygen. What you need is a proper balance of co2 and oxygen which is why if at an airport or if you're walking down the street and you see an

Starting point is 00:14:30 oxygen bar and they're selling this is you can get more oxygen into your body and increase your health it is complete BS what you're doing is you may be increasing your oxygenation of your blood one or two percent but that oxygen has nowhere to go unless you have a proper balance of CO2. And this is something almost everybody gets wrong. And we've known this for over a hundred years, but it's still not widely known or acknowledged. What about when you're sleeping though, when you're not aware of how you're breathing, you're just breathing to stay alive because you're off in dreamland. So it seems like that would be difficult to control. Well, of course, because most breathing is unconscious. But if you think about breathing and how poorly we're breathing during our sleep

Starting point is 00:15:17 now, 50% of the population snores. About a quarter of the population is suffering from asphyxia every night from sleep apnea. We're choking on ourselves so severely that our blood O2 is going down, you know, into the 80s. That is completely bad news. So that has to be fixed. CPAPs help. They pump air into your lungs and allow you to exhale. Those help. But what I've found is even though we can't control the rate at which we're breathing, we can control the pathway. And I worked with a Stanford therapist who found that using a teeny piece of tape and putting that tape on your lips, I'm not talking about a fat strip of duct tape across your mouth, a teeny piece of tape just to train your mouth

Starting point is 00:16:06 shut at night can have a very powerful effect with snoring and i've had several people who have done this and found that they no longer snore and i found this in in the stanford study as well when i had forced mouth breathing i immediately started snoring and i immediately had sleep apnea the day I started breathing through my nose and Taping my mouth that teeny piece of tape snoring disappeared sleep apnea disappeared. So you're saying to tape your mouth shut Well, why just use a teeny piece of tape then why not just tape your mouth shut? Because it's gonna make people extremely paranoid To the the idea that their entire mouth is shut and if if they suddenly panic they can't rip it off and that's where don't go on youtube and look this

Starting point is 00:16:52 stuff up because there's a bunch of bozos who are using seven pieces of tape to tape their entire jaw shut all you need is this teeny piece of tape so at any time in the night that you get paranoid or you freak out you can just by by will by opening your lips a little bit that tape comes off so you want a very light tape i know this seems totally crazy until like i talked to dr mark verheny who studied this stuff for decades and has seen correlations direct correlations between ADHD and mouth breathing, especially at night. And he has had a lot of success helping patients to tape their mouths at night and to improve their symptoms. When you did it, or whatever the research says, how long do you have to tape it before you train yourself so you don't have to tape it. This is not fun, people, especially at the beginning, which is why I think a lot of people are going to be turned off to it. But after I heard this from a Stanford therapist, she was a

Starting point is 00:17:55 mouth breather, mouth breathed at night, snored, all of the above, had been doing it for decades. She was slated for surgery, said, oh, I'm going to try to do this another way. And she found that the more we use the nose, the more easily it's going to be to breathe through the nose. It responds just like any other muscle. So it took her about a week to get used to it. And it took me about a week as well. And it's not fun. You wake up, you're like, you know, you feel like you're some hostage in some awful foreign country. But I found just like anything else, you get used to it after a while. And, you know, it's been a year and a half since I used it and I use it every night.

Starting point is 00:18:41 And I know that this sounds like quackery until you really dig into the science and the people who have studied this stuff and really seen some profound changes from it. I'm talking with James Nestor. He is a journalist and he's author of the book Breath, the new science of a lost art. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. 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.

Starting point is 00:19:32 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. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences,

Starting point is 00:20:04 career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, James, I remember several years ago there was a big campaign about those Breathe Right strips, and everybody was using them, and football players were using them. I still see them at the store. I don't hear much about them anymore.

Starting point is 00:20:45 What does the science say? Yeah, well, that's another problem. And there's this diagnostic test you can do. It's called the Coddles Maneuver. So if you take your fingers right now and you place them right on both sides of your nostrils and you stretch those nostrils out, if you can breathe better that way, there's a good chance that there's something wrong with your nostrils. Either they're too closed or they're too thin, so they collapse inward every time you take a breath in. So we know that those breathe right strips really, really work. And there are surgical interventions that will do this for you, so you don't need to use those strips. The point is to get air freely

Starting point is 00:21:25 into your body and out of it without any struggle. Snoring is not natural. It's not good for us. It causes neurological disorders. Some metabolic disorders have been associated with it. Sleep apnea is even worse. Choking on yourself and suffering that fear and stress every night is so bad for us. And it causes everything from autoimmune disease to heart conditions. So you have to find a way to be able to let your body naturally do what it's designed to do. That's to easily take breath in and easily get it out. On a practical day-to-day level of the count of six in, the count of six, I mean, you and I have been talking here for 20 minutes. You haven't done that once. Maybe you'll do it

Starting point is 00:22:14 when we're done. But I mean, how do you incorporate that into your day? So you incorporate it into your day because think of how much time your mouth is shut and you're stressing out and reading emails and doing other stuff. So I have timers which work for me to remind myself when I'm spending an hour and a half chugging through emails to breathe in a healthy way. And sometimes I put on a pulse oximeter just to watch my O2 levels. But again, the idea here isn't to become a neurotic about this. It's to condition your body to be able to breathe this way all the time automatically. And creating habits can take three weeks, four weeks, even five weeks. With breathing,

Starting point is 00:22:58 it may even take longer. But the benefits are so many once you get the stuff down. And I've seen people absolutely transform by adopting just simple, healthy breathing habits. And this has been confirmed in various studies. You started the conversation talking about this diver that goes down and then comes back up. Don't they breathe through their mouth? Don't divers mouth breathe? They have to, right? Sure. So if you think about it, we take 25,000 breaths a day. So even if we're taking 500 of those breaths or even a thousand of those breaths through our mouth, it's not going to make that much of a difference. So if you look at Steph Curry playing basketball, right before he dunks, he goes, takes this huge mouth breath. That one

Starting point is 00:23:52 breath at a 25,000 breaths is not going to be affecting him. So divers do the same thing. Right before they dive, they take a huge mouth breath. But if you see any of these people, and I hung out with hundreds of them at this competition, when they're walking around for almost 24 other hours of the day, they're nasally breathing. And this is something that they adamantly believe in because they know the benefits of it. So don't worry about laughing. Don't worry about talking on occasion, breathing through your mouth that way. The point is that your habits should circle around nasal breathing as often as possible. Doesn't it make you wonder why so many of us are not breathing correctly? I mean, almost everybody's not breathing correctly.

Starting point is 00:24:37 It seems that unless you train yourself to do it, the default is to do it incorrectly. Well, yeah, you know, for a long time, this was just considered a psychological problem, like a mental hangup. And that's what I thought it was when I was first writing this book until I met some biological anthropologist who showed me how drastically the human skull has changed, especially over the past 400 years. So for many of us, even if we want to breathe correctly, especially at night, we cannot because of this morphological change that has occurred. And it's affected the vast majority of people on the planet right now and certainly affected me.

Starting point is 00:25:18 And what is this change in the skull? So she took, I'll use a little story here. She gave me a modern skull. She said, look at its teeth. And his teeth were very crooked, just like mine were as a kid. And then she showed me a skull that was 500 years old and it had perfectly straight teeth. Then she showed me a skull that was 5,000 years old, perfectly straight teeth, 15,000 years old, straight teeth, 50,000 years old, straight teeth on back. So right now humans are the only animals in the animal kingdom that have chronically crooked teeth. 90% of us have crooked teeth and we have crooked teeth because our mouths have grown so small. And when you have a mouth that's so small, what happens to get teeth to grow in

Starting point is 00:26:03 straight? You have to either extract them or they're gonna grow and crooked Well, what else is a problem with having a mouth too small? It's because your airway is too small as well So a smaller mouth means a smaller airway, which means it's harder to get breath in and out and this was a story I had no idea existed. I'd always Learned that evolution was this, you know, line forward of progress, survival of the fittest. That is not true.

Starting point is 00:26:29 Evolution means change. And right now, humans have changed for the worse in regards to breathing. I wonder why. The main reason is industrial food. And it doesn't have to do so much with vitamins and minerals as many people think, but it is chewing stress. If we don't chew a lot, those bones and those muscles in our face never quite grow right and our mouths grow too small. So this starts once you're in adulthood, you know, you're, you're pretty hosed. You're stuck with what you have. You can change it a bit and surgical interventions can definitely help, but this is especially important when you're an infant and when you're a kid to be

Starting point is 00:27:10 chewing a lot. And they've done tons of studies showing infants who were breastfed versus infants who were bottle fed. Breastfeeding requires a ton of stress and it pushes the mouth and the face outward. And those infants will have a significantly decreased chance of snoring and having other breathing problems because of that chewing stress early on. And you look at bottle feeding now, and most kids are bottle fed after six months. Infants just up until 300, 400 years ago were breastfed at least two years, sometimes much longer than that. Well, when you think about it, it's kind of interesting that everybody seems to have

Starting point is 00:27:47 some sort of breathing problem or they're stuffed up because of their allergies or they snore. This seems to be a pretty pervasive problem. So when I first heard this, it completely blew my mind because I had always understood that crooked teeth are genetic But then this anthropologist said well, how were your parents teeth? I was like, well, huh, they were a lot better than mine then look at pictures my grandparents Their teeth were better than mine as well. So When you think about it, it's crooked teeth right now and even on the National Institutes of Health website, they say the causes of crooked teeth are genetic or caused by some problems associated with tumors.

Starting point is 00:28:31 Food and chewing aren't mentioned anywhere. Even though we know there's a researcher named Dr. Robert Corcini who studied this stuff for 30 years, 250 publications on this stuff, pretty obsessive. And he found without a doubt, chewing is directly correlated to mouth size and to breathing health. So it's this hidden story that's been in front of us the whole time that only a few researchers have been looking at. So it's pretty thrilling to dig into that and understand why I've had so many problems and why so many other people have had similar problems. Well, we all breathe and it's so amazing how many of us have trouble breathing. And it's great to get some advice on how to do it right. James Nestor has been my guest. He's a journalist and author of the book Breath, The New Science of a Lost Art. There's a link to his book in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:29:26 Thanks for being here, James. Thanks so much, Mike. It's been a pleasure. 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 on science, tech, politics,

Starting point is 00:29:54 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.

Starting point is 00:30:22 Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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,

Starting point is 00:30:54 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. All day long, you make decisions and you just make them without giving a whole lot of thought to the process of how you make them. And in most cases, it probably doesn't matter much. But when it comes to those big decisions in life, how you make them can matter a lot. Ralph Keeney knows a lot about this. He's been studying and teaching decision-making at Duke University and the University of Southern California. And he is author of the book, Give Yourself a Nudge,

Starting point is 00:31:37 helping smart people make smarter personal and business decisions. He's here to discuss how we can all make better decisions as we travel through life. Hey, Ralph. Hello, it's a pleasure to be here. My guess is that people think they're pretty good at making decisions. You know, after all, the decisions I've made have got me this far in life, so I must do it okay. And I imagine most people think that, so they don't give a lot of thought to the process they go through to make those decisions. You're right. People don't think about their decision-making. And I think one of the reasons is we all learned it from a very early age and picked up habits over time. In fact, learned is the wrong word.

Starting point is 00:32:25 We just picked up a bunch of habits, and that's what we do, so it's not something we ever thought about much. And yet those decisions we make are the things that shape our life, that determine which road in life we take. One of the things about decisions is it's the only purposeful way that you can influence anything in your life. Everything else just happens to you. So your decisions represent the power that you have to influence the quality of your life. And a metaphor that I use for that is the one you all

Starting point is 00:33:00 know is a person walking down a path and when they come to forks on that path, they can choose to go either way and that's a decision. And imagine if you were on your life path and you start walking and there are no forks. So you keep walking a little further and there are no forks. All you can do is continue on that path, and then all of a sudden, your path ends. That would be a phenomenally disappointing life, I think. You really want those decisions there, because again, that's the only way you can influence your life purposefully. And so do people, when they make decisions, typically follow a similar path, or when they do make decisions, or does everybody kind of do it their own way?

Starting point is 00:33:53 Well, everybody's a little bit distinctive, but I think the standard way that happens is people don't like decisions. If one loses their place of employment, one has a problem. What should I do about that? And if one gets sick, one has a problem. What should I do? And so those are problems and people don't want them. And the way people, we deal with them typically is the first stage is, well, I'd like to figure out how I can get rid

Starting point is 00:34:26 of this problem, and the sooner the better. So they start thinking about an alternative that might work, and they come up with one, and then they think, well, is that good enough? And if it's good enough, it likely gets implemented. There isn't the thinking that goes, is there a better alternative or another one? And plus, thinking of alternatives first is a backwards way to make decisions because it's reactive. The problem occurred. You have to address it. And it's backwards because you're choosing alternatives

Starting point is 00:35:02 before you really carefully understand all that you want to achieve. And how can you possibly create good alternatives if you don't know what you want those alternatives to achieve? Okay, well, I understand that. So basically you're saying that if, for example, you want to get a job, before you start choosing which company to go work for, you first have to figure out what it is you want from that job. Is it a higher salary? Is it a better position? And only when you know that, then do you make a decision about where to work. But today, I think especially, people hear the idea of go with your gut. Just follow your gut. Your gut will tell you what to

Starting point is 00:35:44 do. I imagine you probably don't think that's a really great idea, but that's what a lot of people do. Yes, they do. And that's a standard thing that's said. And I think it does mean some different things to different people. But for an important decision, I would rather get information that was relevant to it, create a set of good alternatives for it, and give some thought to the better one there, and basically educate myself. And then I might say, well, based on all my education and knowledge about this decision, it suggests that I choose alternative A. So if you have a decision to make, and you have all your objectives, and I guess you

Starting point is 00:36:33 prioritize them to some degree, you figure out which are the important ones and which aren't, I mean, this sounds a little exhausting. So I guess this is really just for big, big decisions. Isn't so exhausting if you learn some of these habits. I mean, there are kind of three key things that really nudge you to make better decisions. One, what do you hope to achieve by making the decision? Two, what are some good alternatives? And three, are there any better decisions that I could face? And I call those decision opportunities. And it's not difficult to learn how to do these, and they can become very natural. I could give a simple example that I think everyone would

Starting point is 00:37:20 understand of why identifying one objective would have avoided a very bad decision. It's short, but suppose somebody important is coming to your town or city and they work for the company you work for and they'd like to have dinner with you. So you arrange a dinner at a close place to where they're staying. You think that's important. It has excellent food and kind of a local flavor. So you choose a restaurant. They come, and you go there, and it's a terrible evening. And the reason was it was too noisy, and you wanted to talk to them, and they wanted to talk to you. Had you just thought about what would I like to achieve by having this dinner

Starting point is 00:38:08 and you thought of that one additional objective, I'd like to have a good conversation, there's no way you would have chosen that restaurant. So that isn't really sophisticated thinking or anything. It's just stopping and thinking for a moment. And that's a nudge that in this case would avoid it, a very poor decision. And it's not the biggest decision of life, but it was pretty relevant if this person was relevant. So I like that example. And although I can't think of a specific time in my life, I know I've had that feeling of picking the wrong restaurant for something like that. Oh, why didn't I think about the noise? Why didn't I? I think everybody's done that, and you're right, yeah. If you had thought about it ahead of time, you wouldn't have picked that

Starting point is 00:38:54 restaurant, but you didn't think to think about it. That's right, and it should be natural for something like that. You're going to spend maybe two and a half hours of your near-term life with somebody that's important that you'd like to know. And so to think maybe five minutes about it is not unreasonable. It can really enhance the quality of two and a slave to those types of ideas, but that's a decision I consider worthy of thought. Not anxiety and everything, but just a little bit of thought can make a big difference. One of the traps I think people fall into when they're making a decision, and I know I've done this too, where you're making a decision and you think you're going to go through the process of looking at alternatives and which is the better way to go, when really you've pretty much decided which is the better way to go. You're going through the motions of looking at alternatives, but I think in general you're looking for ways to justify the decision you've already made.

Starting point is 00:40:06 Yeah, I think there are many cases where that happens. One of the things that I say to many people is once you've created one alternative, especially when it's been a little difficult, then you've got one. So spend a little more time to create two or three more. And if you create three more, so you have four, probably the chance that first one is best is no more than half. And, again, that can be a big, big nudge to make a better decision. Because if you create a better alternative than those currently available, you're going to make a better decision based on that one insight. And then you get more skilled at doing that, and you challenge yourself to create alternatives. There's a bunch of different techniques to

Starting point is 00:40:55 stimulate your thought process that will help you create those alternatives. For example? What you do is you use each of your objectives for the decision to generate alternatives. The For example? of that, but outside the box is everywhere else, and there's no guidance for where to look for alternatives. So you're not very effective. Well, once you've laid out all your objectives for the decision, the only alternatives you care about are those that are going to contribute to that set of objectives. So those basically characterize the region where you should be thinking. I call that a much larger right-sized box, correct-sized box. And you can create alternatives to address one objective well, and then you kind of combine some of those and do thinking to meet two or three of the objectives.

Starting point is 00:42:05 And on important problems, there are more than a few. And so that's how you create the alternatives. And then once you've got a rich set of alternatives, it's pretty easy to get rid of the bad ones. It's easier to get rid of bad ones than it is to choose the best. Something that I heard many years ago that has always stuck with me about decisions is when you make a decision, and you know, I'm thinking, for example, you know, what color to paint the wall, or what kind of carpet to buy, or something along those lines, and it's not so much the decision as it is your commitment to the one you make, that you can't just keep fretting about,

Starting point is 00:42:51 oh, maybe we should have gotten gone with a little lighter color, and oh, I don't know, and that you make a decision, commit to it, and move on. Well, I think you're right. And your comment that it might not matter too much is, I think, the same concept I was saying. If you get rid of the poor alternatives, then the ones that remain are those where the differences don't matter too much. And that you think you didn't have the perfect wall coloring, whatever that is, probably very few

Starting point is 00:43:26 of us have the perfect wall covering color. But we have a pretty good one. And that's good enough for that decision because you don't want to spend all your life making decisions because life is kind of the enjoyment and the experience and the contributions you make because of the time you have and the position you're in because of the decisions you did make. You know what's interesting is that everyone can think of bad decisions they have made because you can't get very far in life without making some bad decisions. And yet, what you said at the beginning, people think they're better decision makers than 85% of the population. So there's kind of a disconnect there that if you're a bad decision maker, and you have made a lot of bad decisions that probably you could have done a better job at, why do you think you're so good at it? One of the very tough things is what is a bad

Starting point is 00:44:27 decision. And it's routinely mistaken to be that you got a bad outcome. You could have made what was a great investment in a stock. You checked everything you could. You checked with many people. It was a great thing to do. You bought the stock, and it dropped. That doesn't mean you made a poor decision because you used the best information. You maybe said before you made it, there's a 1% chance the stock drops, and if it drops, I will lose 20% of my funds. There's a 99% chance it will go up. And let's say you make 20%, again, the same amount. That would be a great decision. Most people would say, if that's really the way it was, I would take that decision.

Starting point is 00:45:21 And the fact that you lost was just unlucky. You didn't control that. All decisions that you make have a chance for something to go wrong and pretty wrong. If you, in normal situations, decided to go to someone's wedding who you had known forever and you were driving 50 miles, you could be in a car crash. But that wouldn't mean it was a real poor decision to go to the wedding. Let's say you were driving carefully and it just happened. It was a freak accident. So that's one of the problems with people thinking, where have they made a very, very poor decision? Because it's the quality of the decision before you know all the consequences that is relevant to whether it was a poor decision or not. Well, that's interesting about bad decisions, because I think we do tie it to the outcome,

Starting point is 00:46:21 or we tie our bad decision to the road not taken. You know, the girl that got away, and gee, if we'd only married her, or, you know, something like, you never know what would have happened. It could have turned out to be horrible, but we have a tendency to make that, the thing we didn't do, look so much better because it never happened. Yes, I think that happens. And it's just this distinction between a good decision and a good outcome of the decision are different, but that's not well understood, and it's very natural to, when something bad happens, to say, oh, boy, I really messed that up and made a poor decision. But it might not have been a poor decision.

Starting point is 00:47:10 Any decision you make just about can have poor outcomes. You could go to a top school. You've got all the skills to be there, and something happened that it's just a disaster. Not a poor decision. It's unfortunate and that's the way decision making is. There's no guarantees on it. And also not choosing an alternative is of course making a decision too. Well, it's interesting when you think about it that the decisions you make are the things that steer your life, so it's important to pay attention to the process you use to make

Starting point is 00:47:52 them. Yes, and again, if you go back to the very key point, the only way to influence anything is by your decisions. That includes the decision to do nothing. Should suggest to people, I would like to make some of these decisions a little more carefully because that's the way I can improve my life. And it's not selfish, I should say. What you want to improve your life could be in your life is to contribute to others. And so improving your life is if you get in position where you're helping a lot of other people too it's whatever you define it as but it's not a selfish notion to want a high quality life well it's a really interesting and insightful way of looking at how we make decisions and i appreciate you sharing it with us ralph keene has been my guest. He's been studying and teaching decision-making for some time now

Starting point is 00:48:48 at Duke University, the University of Southern California, and he is author of the book Give Yourself a Nudge, Helping Smart People Make Smarter Personal and Business Decisions. And there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Somewhere in your house is most likely a box that contains old VHS videotapes. And someday, you've probably said, you'll get those transferred to some digital format. Well, someday will either be here soon or may have already passed. Every analog tape has a lifespan, and when it is over, it is over.

Starting point is 00:49:28 Magnetic recording tape, if properly taken care of, can last 20 plus years. And proper care includes not stacking them or storing them flat, but on their ends, and not exposing them to heat and handling them with care. But sooner

Starting point is 00:49:43 or later, they will no longer play. The tape will deteriorate into dust, and that will be the end. So the sooner you attempt to transfer those VHS tapes to digital, the better. You could put them on DVD, but even DVDs won't last forever. However, they will last a lot longer than VHS tapes. Estimates now are that a well-stored DVD will last 100 to 200 years. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you know somebody who would enjoy this podcast just as much as you. So take a moment and share it with a friend. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Starting point is 00:50:24 Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. And don't blame me. We dive deep into listeners' questions, offering advice that's funny, relatable, and real. Whether you're dealing with relationship drama or you just need a friend's perspective, we've got you. Then switch gears with But Am I Wrong?, which is for listeners who didn't take our advice and want to know if they are the villains in the situation. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events and present situations that we might even be wrong in our lives. Spoiler alert, we are actually quite literally never wrong. But wait, there's more. Check out See You Next Tuesday, where we reveal the juicy results from our listener polls from But Am I Wrong? And don't miss Fisting Friday, where we catch up, chat about pop culture, TV and movies. It's the perfect way

Starting point is 00:51:19 to kick off your weekend. So if you're looking for a podcast that feels like a chat with your besties, 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. 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,

Starting point is 00:51:50 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.

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Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Art of Breathing & An Easy Way to Smarter Decisions

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