Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Importance of Skepticism & Sucking at Anything Can be Good

Episode Date: September 4, 2021

Here’s a question for you if you wear a watch. Have you washed it recently? I bet not. So, this episode begins with just how gross and disgusting the surface of your watch and watchband are and why they need a bath right now – today! http://www.ladbible.com/news/uk-watches-three-times-dirtier-than-toilet-seats-study-finds-20190623 There are some people believe vaccines cause autism – science says no. Some people believe in ghosts and UFOs – science says no. But just because science can’t explain it – does that mean it isn’t true? Steven Novella is a skeptic who believes that we should probably all be a bit more skeptical of things, events and phenomenon that can’t be explained. Steven joins me to reveal why this is so important. Steven is the author of the book The Skeptics Guide to the Universe (https://amzn.to/2Ycr16d) . He is also host of the podcast of the same name which you can find on your favorite podcast platform or here: https://www.theskepticsguide.org/podcasts Did you know that if you like yogurt, you’ll like it even better if you eat from a certain type of spoon. If you like cheese it will most likely taste better to you if eat it off a particular type of utensil. Listen to find out which spoon and which utensil and why this happens to be true. https://abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/2013/06/27/yogurt-tastes-different-depending-on-the-spoon/ Do you suck at something? Maybe it’s playing an instrument or skiing or cooking. You probably didn’t start out wanting to suck at it – but here we are. You do it and you suck at it. Well, it turns out that may be a good thing. Writer Karen Rinaldi author of the book It’s Great to Suck at Something (https://amzn.to/2Lj05xY) explains why it is perfectly fine to NOT do some things well. She has been a surfer for 18 years and by her own admission – sucks at it. But she still does it, she still loves it and says there are actual benefits to doing things not for the achievement or the trophy but just to do it. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! We really enjoy The Jordan Harbinger Show and we think you will as well! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen to podcasts.  T-Mobile for Business the leader in 5G, #1 in customer satisfaction, and a partner who includes benefits like 5G in every plan. Visit https://T-Mobile.com/business JUSTWORKS makes it easier for you to start, run and grow a business. Find out how by going to https://justworks.com For more information on fire safety products, safety tips and educational activities you can do at home with your family visit https://firstalert.com/firepreventionmonth   https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Visit https://www.remymartin.com/en-us/ to learn more about their exceptional spirits! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, why you should probably clean your watch and do it sooner rather than later. Then, do you tend to believe things that can't be proven, like near-death experiences or UFOs? Or are you a skeptic like this guy? It's pretty clear that the more intensely you investigate individual UFO sightings or encounters, the more of them you explain. So the residue of unexplained encounters approaches zero.

Plus, if you eat yogurt, there's a certain kind of spoon you should use, and why it's good to do something you enjoy, even if you suck at it. I think the culture is telling us that it's not okay to suck at something, that be the best or go home, and BS. When you learn to suck at something where the stakes are low, you forgive yourself a lot quicker, and you rebound a lot quicker for the things that matter. 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. 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, 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. 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. Hi, welcome. You know, one of the first things I did this morning that I never do is I cleaned my watch and my watch band because according to a new study, watches are on average three times dirtier than toilet seats. And this was research conducted by Tick Watches. They swabbed 10 different kinds of watches to test for bacteria, yeast, and mold.

Fitness watches were the dirtiest, you know, the kind of watch that tracks your steps and such. They were up to eight times dirtier than a toilet seat, and leather watches were the least germy. The recommendation is that you clean your watch at least once a month, and that might involve soaking the band or maybe having it professionally cleaned, and if it's not waterproof, you have to be careful, but it's probably worthwhile to find a way to get it clean. Because I usually wear my watch to bed and then I realize that I often have my hands and wrists near my face when I sleep. And my watch is often coming in contact with my pillow when I sleep. And the pillow is where I put my face.

And that's kind of gross. So now I wash my watch. And that is something you should know. The word skeptic is interesting. Sometimes being skeptical is a good thing. Like when you get that email from the Nigerian prince who wants to give you several million dollars, it's probably good to be skeptical.

But other times, people are said to be too skeptical. You have no faith. You're not trusting. You're so skeptical. But generally speaking, skepticism is probably a good thing. And there are people who self-identify as skeptics

and proud of it. One of them is Steve Novella. Steve is the host of the podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, which he's been doing for a very long time. And he's the author of a book with the same name, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Hi, Steven. Thanks for coming on. Hi, thanks for having me. So what is a skeptic? What's your definition? Yeah, how I define it, or how I would say the modern skeptical movement defines it is a skeptic is someone who admires science as a method for knowing what's real and what's not real. So we promote both science and philosophy and critical thinking and logic

in order to discern what's likely to be true and what's probably not true. Which sounds perfectly reasonable. Why wouldn't you believe things that science can prove are true and not believe things that can't be proven to be true. But a lot of people argue with you as a skeptic and don't believe you as a skeptic. We tell ourselves stories, right? So a lot of what we think is very narrative. And when facts and reality bump up against our self-serving narratives, we become progressively less rational. Everyone is guilty of this, obviously, to some degree. The goal of being a skeptic is to learn how to be more critical, more logical. So let's talk about some specific examples. And I know vaccines is one of those

things where there are people who believe that vaccines are good and people who believe that vaccines cause autism and I'm not sure what else, but that they're not so good. So as a skeptic, what do you say? There's a strong, strong consensus that vaccines are the safest and most effective public health intervention that humanity has ever devised. And yet, ever since there have been vaccines, there have been, you know, people who are paranoid about vaccines, who don't like the

idea of, you know, injecting things into their bodies or that of their kids. There is a, you know, a kind of whole conspiracy subculture around being anti-vaccine. The same is true, and I think probably the other biggest issue in terms of the disconnect between science and public opinion is genetically modified food. In fact, that's the issue where there's the biggest disconnect. Again, the scientific community is pretty solid in that there's nothing particularly risky about the techniques that are used for genetic modification for crops. And the ones that are on the market are among the most tested foods that we have. And we have now 20 years plus of evidence showing that they're perfectly safe.

A very solid scientific consensus, but people, for ideological reasons or just because it's easy to be scared, to be made afraid because of misinformation. It's a lot harder to reassure people by correcting that misinformation. And so because there's been essentially a political movement demonizing genetically modified foods, they've put a lot of misinformation out there into the public. And part of what we do as skeptics is try to correct that. Well, actually, here's the published studies.

Here's the facts and evidence. This claim is demonstrably wrong. That claim is demonstrably wrong. So if you want to listen to the evidence, here it is. I think the problem people have with what you just said is it well a couple of things first of all science says a lot of things here are the studies here's what the science says and a couple years later they go oh whoops science was wrong now here's what the new science says so why should I believe your science now when a couple

years from now there may be something else that comes along and says, well, that was wrong. Now believe us. Now believe us. And the other thing is I think people like stories. They like to hear human stories, not just scientific data. And when somebody knows a guy or knows a guy who knew a guy where something happened to him and look what happened and it flies in the

face of the science that you're talking about, that kind of anecdotal evidence people take to heart. There's many reasons why anecdotes or just stories are inherently unreliable. We tend to cherry pick them, right? We tend to interpret and remember the ones that support what we already believe or what we want to believe. They're not systematic. You know, we'll tend to dismiss or ignore or not even notice the negative evidence or the disconfirming evidence. And we can't control for all the possible variables that could be affecting it. We don't know if it was a coincidence that whatever it is you're pointing to happened. Whereas scientific evidence is controlled and objective and reproducible, et cetera. So that's

how we know if something is actually true. But psychologically, we're very compelled by stories. We are a storytelling species. And that's just the way we're, you know, that's human psychology. That's the way we're hardwired. And so it's very hard to ignore that. If somebody says, oh, you know, I tried that medicine, it made me deathly ill. It's hard to ignore that piece of evidence, even though it's completely anecdotal. It may have been a coincidence, may have had nothing to do with the medication, or maybe it's just a one in a million, you know, side effect. There's no substitute for objective data. And so again, you have to, you know, deliberately step back from even your own experience, you have to recognize that even my own anecdotal experience isn't definitive, it's quirky. It's, you know, it could be a coincidence. It's biased. And so I'm not going to listen to that over scientific evidence. If it contradicts the scientific evidence, then chances are I'm wrong. And it's just hard to say. It goes a bit of reading on this. And the sense I get is what it comes down to is, and this is perhaps oversimplifying, but if you can't prove it, if you can't prove something

scientifically, then you can't claim it's true. And I, well, you can claim it's true, but it doesn't mean it's true. It's just, it's just your story because there's no science behind it. And I think one of the areas where this gets very tricky is religion because you can't prove God scientifically, but people aren't going to go, well, I guess there's no God. Yeah, I mean, this is where we get into epistemology, the branch of philosophy that deals with how we know what we know. And so people have different philosophical approaches to what to believe in.

And of course, skeptics take that approach. It's like, well, you could really only know something that, you know, is a question on which you can bring logic and evidence to bear. But then the other side, people say, yeah, but like, I know I love my mother and you can't prove that. That's just something that I feel. It's subjective and that's real. My love for my mother is real. It's like, okay, but if that's your claim that you have this subjective feeling that you love your mother, then fine. I have no problem with that. But don't extrapolate from that to objective empirical knowledge about the world.

So that's where people fall down philosophically, is they use examples dealing with subjective feelings and then impose that upon objective empirical claims about the world. And when you go to faith, it gets a little bit more complicated because people say, well, I believe in God based upon faith. To which, you know, skeptics will say, good for you. That's fine. I have no problem with what you choose to believe as your personal faith. But don't confuse your personal faith with knowledge, your personal faith.

That's where, again, people, they kind of want to have it both ways. When you say, well, you can't prove to me that God exists. They say, I don't have to because I believe him in God on faith or whatever. I believe in whatever my religious beliefs are on faith. So it insulates it from from evidence or refutation, even logic. They'll play the well, it's a mystery card. Right. If there's an internal contradiction. But they still want that support, right?

They still will say, but there's evidence for God. There's evidence for it. So they try to have it both ways. And that's where we say, now, wait a minute. You can't have it both ways. Either evidence is relevant or it's not relevant. You have to relegate it to faith, which, again, we believe in separation of church and state, personal freedom. You could believe whatever you want to believe. I don't care.

But you cannot claim it as objective knowledge because then you're in the realm of science. You either have to be in the arena of science or not. But again, science can't explain, doesn't explain everything and doesn't always explain everything correctly the first time. There was a time when science said the world is flat. Science said the Earth is the center of the universe. Science was wrong. That's correct. And that's why we don't say necessarily that things that we can't know about are wrong.

We just say they're unknown. Or if you make a claim that science cannot be brought to bear for whatever reason, you know, there's a phrase we say that it's not even wrong. You know, being wrong is actually, you have to be in the arena of science and even to be wrong. Being wrong in a way is a virtue. It means you have proposed a falsifiable hypothesis. The fact that it was falsified doesn't make it any less scientific. But if you say something that is squirrely or is sort of insulated from evidence or is not logically consistent, it may not even have the benefit of being wrong. But in that case, we don't say it's wrong. We say, well, you just proposed something that's unknowable, and that's different.

And again, you could believe whatever you want, but that's outside the realm of science. Now, it may be inherently unknowable, like we'll never know about it because it's not something we could ever really, almost by definition investigate. Or it may be something that we can't know now because we simply don't have the technology or the background knowledge. And so we just sort of put that on hold. It's like, well, that's not something that we can currently test. As soon as somebody figures out a way to test it, though, then it fully enters the arena of science. And so there are lots of things like that now. Like, for example, although this is a little bit controversial, but like some people think we can't really disprove string theory.

It's a theory about the ultimate nature of the universe. And theoretical physicists are still struggling to find a way to really definitively test whether these ideas are correct or not. And so it's only sort of a quasi theory for now. But, yeah, it's one of those philosophical things where you have to be careful not to confuse something which is currently unknown with something that with being wrong. And careful scientists will will police their own language when they say they won't necessarily like that doesn't exist. They'll say there's no evidence that that exists, or there's no reason to conclude that it exists. That's that's different than concluding it doesn't exist. We're talking about being skeptical, and who better to talk about skepticism than Stephen Novella. He is author of the book, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe.

He's also the host of the podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a co-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 Lightning, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. During her journey, Isla meets new friends, including King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the

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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, Stephen, there are cases, though, of supernatural, unexplainable things where there is some evidence. It may not be scientific evidence, but there seems to be an inclination to believe, for example, the near-death experience. So many people who have it come back and report the same thing, and they don't know each other, and yet they had the same experience. You have to start to think, well, maybe there's something there, because how else do you explain it? Yeah, so that's a complicated question, and you're not really giving an accurate summary of the evidence. And this is something that I have read very deeply into and I've written about. So

in terms of near-death experiences, so first of all, people don't really tell the same story. If you look at all surveys of multiple accounts of NDEs have lots of different versions. It's really not the same story over and over again. And the most important factor in determining the details of the near-death experience that people report is their culture. People basically tell a story that's consistent with their cultural and religious beliefs. So it's not as if you have Buddhists in one part of the world and Muslims or Christians in another part of the world telling strangely the same story. That's not what's happening. They are telling stories that are consistent with their belief system.

So it's pretty much what you would predict from an experience that is being culturally interpreted. Of course, having said that, it's not as if there isn't something happening. There absolutely is something happening. These people are having an experience. I don't think every one of them is lying. That's not what neuroscientists say. The question is, what is the nature of the experience that they're having? And I think the evidence supports, strongly supports, that it's a neurological experience. For example, most of the details that are fairly reproducible, like seeing light and things like that, you can provoke that in people by pilots who are in training and will be put in the centrifuge until they pass out. You put them under Gs until they don't get enough blood flow to their brain and they pass out. They report the same thing. They're not dead or even near death. They're just passing out.

There are certain drugs which can reliably reproduce certain features, like the sense of floating above your body, for example. That's a known neurological phenomenon that could be fairly reliably induced. So when you look at all the evidence objectively, it's pretty clear that what people are reporting is a neurological phenomenon related to different parts of the brain shutting down under stress and that there isn't anything that people report. So, again, a good scientist would say, well, how do we distinguish different hypotheses? How do we distinguish a neurological experience from a spiritual experience? Well, is there anything that people report that cannot be explained as a neurological experience? And the short answer to that is no. There aren't any documented cases where there are features, again, there's anecdotes, there's story, but not documented, not anything that is provable, where people report things where you cannot explain it as a neurological experience.

So we don't need to hypothesize that this is a spiritual phenomenon in order to explain it. And then Occam's razor cuts in, right? You're sort of not justified to introduce a new element to explain something if you don't have to. And we don't have to introduce that element. But wait, you've said that the near-death experience could be a neurological experience and that you can induce these symptoms in people neurologically. Okay, but that doesn't make it the true answer. It's just an alternative answer. It's another explanation. And just because you put science in front of it doesn't push the spiritual explanation necessarily out of the way. It doesn't make you more right. It's just another possible explanation. You can invent an infinite number of hypotheses to explain any observation, and they're all equally

compatible with the evidence. But the one that's preferred is the one that introduces the fewest new assumptions, right? Like I liked, one of my favorite examples is, I could say when you turn on the light switch in your room, that is summoning a light fairy, which then goes to your lamp and then lights your lamp. And I could weave a story around the light fairy that is consistent with all of the observations and all of the evidence in any experiment that you can hope to conduct.

But the introduction of the observations and all of the evidence in any experiment that you can hope to conduct. But the introduction of the light fairy is a completely unnecessary new assumption. And therefore, there's absolutely no reason to accept that as the preferred theory. The theory without the light fairy explains everything, again, without introducing this new supernatural element. So it's exactly the same thing. The idea that, you know, that there is a spirit that we have, our consciousness is something more than the biological functioning of our brain, is not necessary to explain near-death experiences. And therefore, it is the introduction of a new unknown assumption, a new element for which there's no explicit reason.

Yes, you can make it compatible with all the evidence, but I could make up a hundred other supernatural or spiritual explanations that are also completely compatible with the evidence. I could tell you we're in the matrix and that that's what's happening.

And that would be completely consistent with all the evidence. I could tell you we're in the matrix and that that's what's happening. And that would be completely consistent with all the evidence. But unless you have some independent reason for the introduction of that new element, it's not scientific to introduce it. And just because it happens to be the culturally dominant view doesn't make it right

or doesn't make it reasonable either. So before we go, we certainly have to introduce the idea of UFOs, because this is one of the things that skeptics and non-skeptics argue about all the time because of supposedly Area 51 and people have been abducted. And it's always interested me that, you know, a UFO is just an unidentified flying object. It just means there's something in the sky that nobody knows what it is. It doesn't necessarily mean there are creatures aboard who are coming to colonize the Earth and take it over. It just means there's something in the sky and nobody knows what it is.

Exactly. And that's the exact same logical jump that people are making when they claim miracles or even near-death experiences, the exact same thing. You see a light in the sky that you don't know what it is. The answer is you don't know what it is.

That's as far as you can get. You can start to try to tease apart what it may or may not be. But yeah, leaping to an alien spacecraft is the argument from ignorance. And in the UFOs, because UFO lore now is about 70 years old, we have a lot of data that we could look at. And it's pretty clear that the more intensely you investigate individual UFO sightings or encounters, the more of them you explain. So the residue of unexplained encounters approaches zero.

Well, it's always fun to have these discussions and explore these things. And you truly are a skeptic. Stephen Novella has been my guest. He's the host of the podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. And he is also the author of the podcast, The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe, and he is also the author of a book called The Skeptic's Guide to the Universe. There are links to both the podcast and to his book in the show notes for this episode. Thank you, Stephen. It was a lot of fun. Thanks. 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?

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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. Why in the world would you want to do something you suck at? That's what I thought when I saw this book and this topic that we're about to discuss.

Because when I think of things that I have tried to do in my life, I'm the kind of person who wants to do something well, or at least good enough, or not at all. But then I thought, well, there are some things I've done that I really wasn't all that great at. I enjoy skiing, although I've never thought of myself as very good at it. And I played the drums in high school, and I was okay, but there were other drummers in other bands who were a lot better than I was, but I still

enjoyed it. I didn't start out not wanting to be great at it, but I was okay at not being great at it. So maybe there is something to this idea of doing something you suck at. Meet Karen Rinaldi. She's a writer and publisher who works for HarperCollins, and she's author of a book called It's Great to Suck at Something. Hi, Karen. Thank you for having me on, Mike. So this is interesting because I think most people believe, you know, if you're going to do something, you want to be good at it.

I don't deliberately start doing something hoping I suck at it. So explain what you mean by it's great to suck at it. I don't deliberately start doing something hoping I suck at it. So explain what you mean by it's great to suck at something. What I mean by it is that so much of what we do in our daily lives is driven by the goal, the reward, the success, the promotion if it's at work, or the winning all the time. And I feel like our goal-driven lives kind of lead us striving and we're exhausted by it. And what I found in my own crazy practice of surfing, and I'm very bad at it. I've been doing it for 18 years and I'm just not good. I can surf.

I got better, absolutely. But what I found is that I was experiencing this kind of incredible freedom in the fact that I didn't have to do it well, that nobody was paying me for it. If I made a wave, it was awesome, but it wasn't transactional. And I started to think about how I loved doing, the thing I loved doing the worst and I was least talented in was the thing that brought me the most joy. And I thought about this for like 10 years, it was a long, it was kind of a long slog through trying to understand it. And I realized that in the action of doing something that you're not good at, it's always new, you have to forgive yourself and and get rid of the selfic, that loud noise in your head,

that there's a certain freedom in not having to succeed, that you learn how to be resilient, that you learn how to improvise. And I felt like there was all this really good positive stuff hiding underneath the thing that we're told we're not allowed to do, which is we're not allowed to suck at something. And I thought, what happens if you turn it on its head and embrace it and love it instead? What then happens and what is the cascade effect in the rest of your life? Don't you think, though, that this is very individual, that there are a lot of people who would hear this and go, no, no, no, no. I mean, there's far too many things to try to do well. Why would I stick with something I suck at? Yeah, I think that's a lot of people. And I think the excuse is, oh, I don't do things. I would

never start something that I wouldn't be good at. I'm such a perfectionist. I mean, I hear that line or variations of that line all the time. And I think, well, think of all the things you're not trying and you're not experiencing in the communities you're not joining and the joy and the learning that you're not doing because of fear. It's basically fear, right? So fear of not being good at something. And I get it. Listen, clearly, whenever anyone writes a book, they're talking to themselves to a certain degree. But I feel like that's really the self critic being more important than potential joy or experience. So that perfectionist idea,

right? So none of us are perfect, we will never be perfect. There are perfect moments in people's lives when they hit flow, or they come up with a brilliant idea, you know, they're fleeting. But for the most part, I know, maybe not in your life, but I know in my life, there is nothing I do with perfection. And when you let go of that, and you go, okay, so what comes next after that, if I'm not going to be perfect? It's like, well, I might as well try. And then you don't know, you don't know if there's an unhidden talent that you haven't tapped. You don't know if there's a community that you will find incredible joy and love and connection with, you know, by entering it. There's so much you don't experience. So yes, I do think our instinct, I think the culture is telling us at every moment that it's not okay to suck at something, that be the best or go home. It's all

or nothing. I mean, you can just like tagline after tagline and it's BS. It really is. Most of us are flailing about in even in the things we're good at, right? So even the things you're good at, you're going to kind of mess up. When you learn to suck at something where the stakes are low, you forgive yourself a lot quicker and you rebound a lot quicker for the things that matter. I want to go back to something you said a moment ago and have you explain it a little more. Because you said that fear keeps us from doing things. But it seems like there are a lot of things I don't do not because I'm afraid of them. I either have no interest in them or I don't have time for them.

But not because I'm afraid of them. Well, then if it's something you're not interested in, then that's a non-starter. I, you know, the people ask me, what do you mean? How do you find this? And I think, well, if you can fantasize about something you've always wanted to do, let's just take, you know, and people will say, oh, singing, singing in public, dance. A lot of people are terrified to dance, but they want to dance, but they're afraid to dance because they're afraid they're going to look foolish. Oh, I've always wanted to play guitar. Oh, I've always wanted to play tennis, but X, Y, or Z. Oh, I've always wanted to surf, but it looks scary. It looks hard. I'll never get good at it. So the idea is not for what you're saying. And I agree with that. The stuff that you don't

care about, nah, that's not fear. That's just a lack of interest. But I think if you think really often people have something, you'll hear this line a lot. Oh, I've always wanted to, you know, dot, dot, dot. And my point is go to that go towards that whatever that thing you want to do and try it and then the second line is oh but i'll never be good at it and i say so that's where the fear is again though i mean i clearly this has been a good experience for you and you suck at surfing and you still enjoy it because there's something about sucking at it that that lights you up but how do you know this works for everybody how do you know this isn't just you because whenever i would this resistance that you're talking about

is something that i met up whenever i talked to somebody about this and i say hey what do you suck at they would kind of shift and get nervous and i I thought, well, I'm not going first. I'm not saying where I'm coming up with this idea and this philosophy, right? I had to come clean. So I thought I'm, so I wrote this essay for the New York times. It's great to suck at something. And it was about me surfing. And I posted a video of me surfing, which, you know, people in the lineup would know that I surfed not well or badly or like a kook, but you know, people heard the lineup would know that I surfed not well or badly or like a kook. But, you know, people heard that I surf and they thought it was really cool because they think surfing is cool. But when I surf, it's not cool.

But I kind of just went out front and I said, all right, I'm going to post this video. And what happened is that it went completely viral, right? People just started writing and saying, oh, my God, thank you for saying that. And no one was talking about surfing. Everybody was saying, you know, I'm 70 years old and I love ancient languages and I'm learning Latin and Greek and I'm really bad at it. Or I play golf and I'm, you know, and people just came forward with their stories. So really it's experiential. So I get stories every day via Facebook, emails, social media, phone calls of saying, I want to tell my story about it gives people permission to not be a master. But generally, you don't start out doing something.

You didn't start out surfing, thinking, well, I can't wait to really, I can't wait to suck at this. You probably started out doing it as most people start anything like this, thinking, I might really be good at this, right? You need a little bit of delusion to enter any new activity, right? Because you have to say, well, I might be good at this. But if you tell yourself over and over again, I can't enter it. I can't. I can't.

I won't. I can't. I'm afraid. I won't be good at it. I don't care. I'm not interested, right? So what happens is we build grooves in our brains, right? The way our brains work is that they are plastic. Neuroplasticity is a real thing, meaning we can learn new things. Our brains don't stop developing. We thought that they did until the recent advances in neuroscience basically tell us that, yeah, we can learn new things, but your brain is, you can shift your thinking on things, right? But

just as quickly as you can shift it for the positive, you can shift it for the negative. So our attachment to outcome and our fear of an outcome that is less than successful is something that we can build that groove. And I think it can paralyze us, right? About, you know, trying new things for fear that will be foolish, that we won't succeed. But in the same way that if we pivot and say, it's okay, if I'm not good at something, I'm going to go try this, you can actually make that a practice. And you become more open. And you kind of build new grooves for positivity, right? For not judging yourself, for letting go of that critic. I want to try to understand the benefit better. I know what you

said that, you know, you become more open to it. You build grooves to positivity, but is there something more concrete? I mean, it's good to suck at something. Why? Why is it good? What's the benefit? What's the payoff? Well, a lot of it is in kind of the practice of the soft sciences of kind of emotional development, psychology, and sort of getting yourself to a place where you can forgive yourself for not being perfect, right? So there are studies that show that people's attachment to perfectionism and the striving for perfection actually can go lead to mental instability,

depression, anxiety. And there are studies that show that people who embrace their imperfections are actually mentally healthier than those who feel like, oh, I can't do that because I'm such a perfectionist, right? So that would be one of the kind of studies about it. So I'm saying practice the art of imperfection to open yourself up to this self-forgiveness, this self-compassion. Do you think though that, I mean, you say you've been surfing for 18 years and you suck at it, but I don't know that I would do something for 18 years if I sucked at it, that people lose interest in something they're not very good at and they gravitate to things they are good at because it's more rewarding. Well, I mean, what's being good? What's your measure of good? Right? I mean,

I think that's part of the equation is that you mean make a living out of it and from it and have people look at you and go, Oh, you're an awesome basketball player. Or is it just making a basket every once in a while? Listen, you play basketball, you're going to make a shot, right? If you play guitar, and you you and a lot of playing guitar seems to be, there are a couple of things that people talk about that they suck at, and they come out about it. It's playing guitar, running, golf. These are things that people, a lot of people do, and they admit to, you don't have to be a rock and roll star to be able to pick up a guitar, play and sing. I mean, how good do you have to be? Right? And the idea is that you you

tell yourself that you have this fantasy, right, that the disconnect happens in this fantasy that I'm going to be a rock and roll star, as opposed to the reality based, how lovely to pick up a guitar and sing to my, you know, child or my loved one or alone in a room, whether my voice is good or not. But there's beauty in that imperfection, right? There's beauty in that effort. And I, again, am I, can I prove that? No, but there have been thousands and thousands of years of, of, of thinking on this that says that there is beauty in that effort and there is beauty in that imperfection. So getting good at it is really maybe where the, where, where the, it's falling apart for you in a sense that what is good?

I surf and I don't surf well, but do I catch and ride waves? Do I ride the face of a wave and catch sections and kick out and paddle out for another one? Yes. Do I mostly miss them and get hammered and everything else? Yes, I do. So when people say, yes, but you do surf, I go, yes, I do surf, but I'm really not. The hours for the waves that I catch, a lot of people look at that and say, why do you do it? And I say, because the process of doing it, of being out there and trying, there's so much else

that I get from being in the ocean and being with my friends and being in the lineup and being active and trying and being humbled by the fact of how hard it is because things are hard, right? Things are really hard. Making that shot from, you know, I don't know, across the court is really hard to do, but when you do it, it feels really good. So you will get better. And this is definitely the tension that people go to. It's like, will I get better? And I'm like, yes, you'll get better, but you have to stick with it. Will you be a professional? Maybe not. Maybe, you don't know. Maybe there's something you're afraid to try that you might be naturally a genius at, who knows? Well, all of this is

really relative. How good is good? How sucky is suck? I mean, you say you suck at surfing, but if you and I went surfing together, by comparison, you're a champion and I would really suck. So it isn't, but it isn't so much about how good or how sucky you are. It's just being okay with wherever you are. I'm saying for where the stakes are low, it's good practice for really appreciating how hard things are, the effort that you make, the little increments of getting better. You know, there's all these studies about, you know, micro changes and how micro changes are actually the way to get to a big change, right? You have to do something over and over and over again and practice and fail

so that you can go forward. Don't you think a big part of not wanting to suck at something isn't so much whether or not you do it well, but what other people will think of you if you don't do it well. If you do suck at it, people will think bad things about you. And anybody that goes to a gym on a regular basis probably knows this, but when somebody comes into the gym for the first time and is maybe out of shape, people aren't judging them and mentally making fun of them. If they think anything at all, they're thinking, good for you for coming in,

but more likely they're thinking, I wonder what people think about me. So I think that's such a false barrier, worrying about what other people will think, because who cares what they think? And chances are they're not thinking anything. It was a great story that someone told me about being on a softball team. Eight years it took her, eight years to catch a fly ball. And she was healing herself from a difficult divorce and a difficult situation. And she joined this team and she was embraced. And she said when she finally caught a fly ball after eight years, both teams cheered. You know what I mean? Even the team, you know, the out that she caused, they both cheered. And I thought that is the beauty of sucking at something and being allowed to do that by the people around you and forgiving yourself for doing it.

There's a lot of beauty hiding underneath all of it. So go forth and suck at something. Karen Rinaldi has been my guest. She is a writer and publisher and author of a book called It's Great to Suck at Something. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Karen. Okay, okay, enjoy. Go suck at something. This is really interesting.

If you'd like your yogurt to taste even more creamy and delicious, eat it with a plastic spoon. A study experimented with the weight and shape of utensils and found that they can really influence the feel and taste of certain foods. Where yogurt was concerned, it seemed creamier, sweeter, and more dense when enjoyed from a lightweight plastic spoon. If you're eating cheese, you might want to try it from a knife. Cheese tasters rated samples as more aged, saltier, and more satisfying when they ate the cheese off a knife than when they ate it from a fork, a spoon, or a toothpick. And that is something you should know.

I'm sure there's someone you know that would appreciate this podcast, so please take a moment and share it. I'm Micah Ruthers. 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 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 V.B. 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, 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

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