Something You Should Know - The 4 Stages of Mastering Any Big Change & The Latest In The War On Cancer

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why the safest way to drive is the way a race car driver drives. Then, there's a lot of change going on in the world, and that can be scary but also an opportunity you can't debate a change that's happening in your life you can't say well well maybe this shouldn't happen because if it's happening it's happening so the the thing that you can do is try to identify where it's going and what value you can

Starting point is 00:00:56 derive from it that's your competitive advantage is trying to get there before other people do also the amazing benefit of taking three deep breaths. And the fight against cancer. It's a tough battle, but there is progress. For example, in the USA, the five-year survival rates for breast cancer have gone up from 75% to about 90%. And for prostate cancer, they've gone up to very nearly 100% now. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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Starting point is 00:01:51 Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you ever been given the advice, or maybe you've given the advice to someone else to breathe deeply. Well, it turns out that that simple act of taking three deep breaths can do wonders for you. Why? Well, deep breathing

Starting point is 00:02:34 is the quickest way to experience the body's relaxation response. Under stress, we breathe very shallowly. It's part of the fight-or-flight response. Without being aware of it, we're actually acting as if it's a life-and-death emergency and we flood our system with stress hormones. When we breathe slowly and deeply, on purpose, we signal our body and our mind that it is okay to calm down. We bring greater oxygen to our brain and our body, and it slows our heart rate.

Starting point is 00:03:08 Our muscles relax, at least a little. And it helps create patience, the ability to face our challenges with persistence, calmness, and acceptance. Go ahead, try it. Try it right now and notice how you feel. Take three deep, slow breaths. There. Feel better? And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:03:34 You have to deal with change all the time. Because, well, because things change. No news there. In the last several years, though, it seems that a lot has changed. And ultimately, one could argue, it's how we deal with and manage change as it comes at us that determines how successful we are. This is something Jason Pfeiffer has taken a serious look at. Jason is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. He's a startup advisor and host of the podcast Build for Tomorrow. He's also author of the book Build for Tomorrow. Hey Jason, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me, I appreciate it.

Starting point is 00:04:17 So when you look at all the change in front of us here, what is it that you find so interesting about it and makes change worth studying and paying attention to? The really interesting thing for me as a guy who watches how change happens, this is a thing that I've been studying for years through Entrepreneur as I have access to the world's greatest entrepreneurs and also the podcast as I study history. But when the pandemic happened, I realized that we were in the middle of happened i realized that we were in the middle of a very interesting we were in the middle of a lot of things but one of them was a very interesting experiment because you got to watch everybody go through the same change at the same time and then

Starting point is 00:04:57 watch how they deviated and who did things differently and how did it impact what happened to their businesses or their lives. And that's when I came to this theory about change, which is that it happens in four phases because I was watching everybody do it. Number one is panic, then adaptation, then new normal, and then wouldn't go back. This moment where people say, I have something so new and valuable that I wouldn't want to go back to a time before I had it. I saw people get there very quickly in the pandemic. I mean, almost immediately people pivoted,

Starting point is 00:05:27 they reinvented themselves. And others, of course, it took a very long time. And I wanted to know what it was that was enabling people to move through these four phases so efficiently, because I really do believe that on the other end of this process for everybody, there is a wouldn't go back moment waiting. But the question is, do you have enough faith in it that you can move quickly towards it?

Starting point is 00:05:49 Well, I want to revisit those stages you just mentioned, but that first one, panic, I think everyone has felt that, some more than others, because some people seem to go with the flow better when change happens and others, well, they panic. We want to talk about panic. I think that the greatest challenge that we have is that people equate change with loss. So something new happens in their lives and they immediately say, well, this thing that I was comfortable with, that I was familiar with, I no longer have access to that and that feels like loss to me and then because of course we want to know what's coming next we extrapolate

Starting point is 00:06:31 based on the information we think we have so if we're saying well i'm losing something then obviously the next thing that's going to happen is that because i've lost this i'm going to lose that other thing and then i'm going to lose that other thing and i'm going to lose another thing and you start to feel panic because you start to feel like you are really, the foundation beneath you is crumbling. But of course, that's not what happens. What actually happens is that change, it does lead to loss. It can certainly lead to loss, but it also drives gain. It creates gain. And so while I'm not suggesting that we ignore loss or diminish its importance, I think what we really need to do is focus on the gain, because that is the only thing that we can actually work with. You can't debate a change

Starting point is 00:07:11 that's happening in your life. You can't say, well, maybe this shouldn't happen, because if it's happening, it's happening. So the thing that you can do is try to identify where it's going and what value you can derive from it, and then try to move towards that. That's your competitive advantage, is trying to get there before other people do. But it's hard to see the gain in anything if you're panicking. If you're in panic mode, that's not a good mode to be in when it's time to face change and make decisions. What I would recommend is that to start right now, whether you're going through a moment of change or not, you need to identify what I like to call the thing that does not change in times of change. Because I think we often identify too much with the output of our work. We identify too much with the output of our work. We identify too much with the things that we do.

Starting point is 00:08:07 So that could be a particular role that we hold at a job, or it could be a thing that we make or sell or whatever. This isn't just for entrepreneurs. This is for anybody. You identify with the thing that you do, naturally so. But the problem is that when change comes along and it impacts that thing that you do, because what you do is easily changeable, it just is. It's like a flag flapping in the breeze, right? Just like the next day, the breeze could flow in a different direction and it's going to alter the way in which you interact, it's your entire identity. I remember when I was a newspaper reporter, it was my first job out of college, and then I realized I didn't want to be a newspaper reporter anymore because I just didn't love the work, I didn't love the hours. One of the things that kept me in a job that I was unhappy at for far too long was that I was a newspaper reporter.

Starting point is 00:09:00 It was my identity. I was afraid of losing that identity, even though I didn't really want to do the job anymore. So how do we fix this? Well, what I found is that entrepreneurs in particular are really, really good at identifying something about them that does not change in times of change. You could try to boil it down to a single sentence. Strip away everything that you think you identify with. Strip away your tasks and your skills, the things that you would say you do if somebody asks what you do at a party. And instead, get down to something that you can define in a single sentence, as short as possible, in which every single word is not easily changed, in which every single word is something that lots of different things can revolve around. It's very abstract,

Starting point is 00:09:51 so let me tell you for myself. I used to think of myself as a newspaper reporter. Then I thought of myself as a magazine editor. Now I say this to my... I wouldn't say it to other people because it would sound weird and obnoxious, but this is what I tell myself. I say, I tell stories in my own voice. Two important components there. I tell stories, so not newspapers, not magazines, not books, not podcasts, in my own voice. And so now I'm setting the terms for how I want to work. And I find that by having that, every time that there's a change, or every time that I'm trying to consider something, consider whether I would pursue something new, I go back to, does this fulfill that core mission? And whenever I lose something, I mean, if we got off the call today and Entrepreneur Magazine has fired me, I sort of hope not, but it wouldn't impact my

Starting point is 00:10:36 ability to tell stories in my own voice. This is the thing about us that does not change in times of change. And if we identify it, then we know that we have something that is valuable, that carries forward even in uncertain times. It gives us something to hold onto. It gives us a point of direction to move towards. And that by itself is just so orienting that I think that it can give us, it can help us see what it looks like to move out of that panic. Well, but what you just said, like if Entrepreneur Magazine fired you tomorrow, well, you could still tell stories in your own voice, but not as successfully as you could as the editor of Entrepreneur Magazine. And so, yeah, you still have that thing, but you also need to be successful and make money and pay the bills. Well, sure. But I actually would push back against that because it depends on what your definition of success is, right? We make a mistake when we allow other people to define

Starting point is 00:11:35 success for ourselves. So it's true that you say that if I lost the job at Entrepreneur, that I wouldn't be able to very easily reach as many people as I do right now. But here's another way of looking at it. I would now have the opportunity to build stronger relationships with a smaller audience, which could in fact be a lot more valuable. I can reach millions of people with Entreprene entrepreneur, but I'll tell you something, that doesn't actually help me very much

Starting point is 00:12:09 because that's entrepreneur's audience and entrepreneur owns that audience. If I'm on entrepreneur's social media, which I am regularly, you know, a small number of those people are gonna go follow me on my own personal social media, but for the most part, I'm contributing to the relationship that they have with

Starting point is 00:12:22 at entrepreneur on Instagram or whatever the case is. And that's good because it helps me earn my salary, but it doesn't actually enable me to build something that is ownable for me in the future that could have more of a long term, you know, long tail. So what if I define success differently? What if I don't define success as reaching the largest number of people by any means necessary, but rather start thinking, what if I actually just focus on a slower growth where I'm building stronger bonds through my content and other means with an audience of people who are going to pay me directly? Now, that's a different game, but I could certainly define success in a different way. And I think the same is true for anybody. You know, you could, you could, I was, I was just talking with an old friend of mine who was saying that she's in medicine and she is really not, she's not happy. She wants to leave

Starting point is 00:13:14 her job, but she was telling me that the thing that's holding her there is, is salary and education, right? She got educated for this particular thing and she makes a lot of money. And so she feels like she's in these kinds of golden handcuffs. And that's true if you want to define success a certain way. But another way of defining success is that she has now earned the ability to go try to build her own thing. And maybe it won't make her as much money immediately, but it will be something that is a job in a life that she has crafted more herself and that she can wake up every day a little more excited about. And maybe she makes less money, but maybe she is happier. And maybe that's success.

Starting point is 00:13:54 We're talking about how you deal with change and how to find the opportunity when change happens. My guest is Jason Pfeiffer. He is editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine and author of the book, Build for Tomorrow. can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets.

Starting point is 00:14:53 So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. So Jason, it seems that there are a lot of people who have skills that really don't transfer to something else, or at least those people believe and find it hard to see what that transfer would be. Where could they take these skills and go do something else? I really believe that we don't quite fully understand the reason that we're successful. I mean, I hear this all the time from people who have had success in some place and now they're thinking about starting over. And one of their greatest worries is that they just won't be able to repeat the success that they already had because maybe it was good fortune or good luck or good timing or

Starting point is 00:15:47 they were good at this one thing. They only know this one thing. They've only been doing this thing for so long. And look, getting from there to where I'm about to tell you is, I'm not saying it's easy, but what I have often found is that when people make major shifts, then when they look back upon it, what they realize is that there was something that they knew how to do that was more fundamental than the way that they had understood their skillset. And that enabled them to make this change because something about themselves was transferable i mean i i you know i watch

Starting point is 00:16:26 people all the time leave media industry and you know i'm not talking about like powerful people with tons of money i'm talking about people who are making 50 grand at a magazine or something and um and and discover that oh actually their market value is is pretty substantial elsewhere because what they're really really good at is not writing a magazine because what they're really, really good at is not writing a magazine article. What they're really good at is processing information and making it useful. And once you start to realize that that's your power and it's deeper down, you liberate yourself to start thinking differently about who you are and what kind of value you can provide to others. When it comes time, though, to go find that opportunity, it seems like there's been a lot of change in that. Like, you know, there are a lot of people that aren't employees anymore,

Starting point is 00:17:14 so it isn't like you go apply for a job. Everything seems to have changed. Yeah, sure has. And that's great opportunity, isn't it? I mean, it's scary if you are only willing to engage in old systems. But think about this way. The craziest thing about a massive change is that incumbents fall. Ways of doing things that seemed unchangeable suddenly change. I mean, look at, for example, the kinds of conversations that we're having now about the future of work. They would blow the minds of anybody just alive in 2019. I mean, the number of conversations that I've had with people about the four-day workweek, could you believe the four-day workweek? Companies are shifting over to a four-day workweek.

Starting point is 00:18:09 But when you think about it, you think, well, why the hell not? Why not? Because it's not like the five-day workweek was some... It wasn't written down. It wasn't the 11th commandment chiseled into stone. It's only about 100 years old, the very idea of a five-day workweek. So why not change it? What does it have for us?

Starting point is 00:18:26 And the same is true that you're describing for ways to connect and work with people. I have heard so many people who get jobs by connecting with others on social media, for example, because social media is a pretty amazing place where you don't have to wait for anybody's permission to show that you are smart and valuable. Get onto LinkedIn and just start sharing knowledge. Start engaging with other people. People will notice fast.

Starting point is 00:18:53 It's actually more democratized than it was before. I think that's a wonderful thing. So it's like instead of being really focused on the loss of old systems, I would instead say, well, you now have an opportunity to be a part of a new system, to help not only define a new system, but to find the value in that new system before others do. So instead of thinking, oh my gosh, I don't know what to do, rather, why don't we start to think, what do others need? What are others looking for? I have great talent. Who needs me? How can I go solve problems for

Starting point is 00:19:30 other people? When we start to think about it like that, it turns out actually the opportunity is everywhere. Well, that's a very different and forward way of thinking that isn't what most people do, I think, when they feel their career, their skills, or their livelihood is threatened, you know, people tend to lament and, you know, they'll mourn the death of, you know, what's gone before rather than look ahead and, I mean, how many people, you're in the publishing business and there's been a lot of disruption there. I mean, how many people in that business have lamented the death of the book business and the magazine business and the newspaper business? Oh, my God.

Starting point is 00:20:09 There's no money in it. Well, that doesn't get you very far. No, it gets you nowhere. I just don't know what the point of it is. People have those conversations all the time. And yeah, fine, sure, you could lament it all day but but like also consider that the thing that you're lamenting was not around forever this is not some disruption to the natural state of things right you know i i an example i like to use is is cds you know musicians were like up in arms when cds

Starting point is 00:20:42 disappeared but like are you kidding me like me? The very idea that music was captured on a disc and sold as a product is actually a very small amount of time. I mean, it was a very small amount of time. First of all, for most of human history, you couldn't even record music. The only way you could listen to music is if somebody was playing an instrument in front of you. Then recorded music came along. Thomas Edison invented the phonograph in 1877, got popularized in the 1890s. People were floored by it. Musicians hated it.

Starting point is 00:21:21 They opposed it. I mean, it was wild. They despised the thing because they saw it as replacing what they thought of as the natural and only music industry that was possible, which of course was live performances. And if you were a composer, you could also sell sheet music. And instead, what happened? Well, we moved into an era of radio and of records and then eventually tapes and CDs. And now we're in streaming and it'll go on and on and on. The point of this is you can't just think of a singular, very brief moment in time as the way that things have to be. It's just the way that you happen to be introduced to it., it's fine. It works for a little bit,

Starting point is 00:22:05 but it's not going to work forever. And so what would happen if instead you stopped thinking of your job as my job is to sell CDs. And instead you start to think of your job as I entertain, or I bring joy to people, or, you know, I, I create, uh, atmospheres, uh, you know, that matter or whatever. I don't know. You define it for yourself. But the point is that once you do that, you liberate yourself from the thing that's most changeable and you drill down into something that you actually can control and you think, okay, I entertain people, so let me go do... When you go try to do something else, there is that sense of, you know, I don't even really know what I'm doing. And what if this doesn't work? And you just fill yourself full of doubt, as everyone does when they try something new, that it's really hard to overcome that and dive in headfirst.

Starting point is 00:23:04 Sure. So here's something you can tell yourself. Ready? When you're starting to do something the very first time, very first time, just tell yourself this, I cannot wait to do this the second time. I cannot wait to do this the second time. Because I think we often, we expect that doing something must be, we must be good at it. We have to be good at it. If we're going to try something, we must be good at it. We have to be good at it.

Starting point is 00:23:27 If we're going to try something, we better be good at it. No, we don't. No, we don't. It's not possible. It's not possible to be good at something the first time you do it or the first many times that you do something. I mean, there's some great thinking about this. Ryan Reynolds, I interviewed him for the magazine a long time ago.

Starting point is 00:23:42 He said, in order to be good at something, you have to be willing to be bad. The point being that nobody is good at something to start. It's just the thing that is the difference maker is whether or not you can tolerate being bad for long enough to be good because most people can't tolerate that. Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, very famously talked to IC very famously because it's all over the internet. He went on this wonderful little tangent at one point on a television station about how when you're new at something, particularly in the creative arena, but it could be anywhere, that there is a large gap between your tastes and your abilities.

Starting point is 00:24:21 He would just say, you have good taste, right? If you wanna learn to play guitar, you probably have good taste in music, really. You've listened to great artists, you know what great sounds like, but your abilities are not there. There's a gap between your taste and your abilities. And that's hard to know because you can listen to great music

Starting point is 00:24:42 and then you can't produce great music. But the thing is that that's everybody. It's hard to know because you can listen to great music and then you can't produce great music. But the thing is that that's everybody. So really the thing that you need to do is not be great because that is not possible, but rather instead you need to be able to tolerate being bad. That is what is possible and that is ultimately what's going to separate you from everyone else. Well, what you said at the beginning I I think, is really true that so many of us, when faced with change, think of it as a loss.

Starting point is 00:25:12 Like the change will cost us something. And while it might, dwelling on that doesn't do much good. And so we need a new way to face change, to look at change and look for the opportunity. And I appreciate your viewpoint on this because it's very optimistic and I think gives people hope for the future. Jason Pfeiffer has been my guest. He is editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine. And the name of his book and the name of his podcast, Build for Tomorrow. And there's a link to the book and the podcast in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:25:46 Thanks, Jason. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times,

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Starting point is 00:27:10 Cancer seems to touch all of us one way or another sooner or later. More and more, we hear stories of victory in the fight against cancer, but are we really winning the war? Are we going to cure cancer, make it obsolete? A few years ago, we had Robin Hesketh on as a guest. Robin is one of the world's leading experts on cancer. He's a member of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge and has been working in the field of cancer biology for many years. He's published over 100 research papers and authored textbooks on the subject of cancer. His latest non-textbook book is called Understanding Cancer,

Starting point is 00:27:48 and he is back with the very latest update on how the fight against cancer is going. Hey, Robin, welcome. Welcome back. Hi, Mike. Thank you very much for inviting me. So we've been hearing for many, many years about the fight against cancer, and it does seem that there are some victories, but it also seems that a lot of people still get cancer. And what that means is that at the moment in the U.S., one in two men and one in three women will develop cancer in their lifetime. And the upshot of that will be about 1, 1700 deaths per day. It's the second most common cause of death after heart disease. And an implication of all of that, of course, is that it costs a lot

Starting point is 00:28:33 of money to look after cancer patients. In the USA, it costs over $21 billion a year. And to try and put that in context, it's about a 30th of the total defense budget. And that's not counting cancer research, which the National Cancer Institute estimates will be about $7 billion this year. And of course, none of that conveys the human cost, the emotional impact of cancer on families and friends is incalculable. And so what is cancer? I mean, I'm sure you could talk for hours about this, but just in a real brief way, how do you define what cancer is? It's a group of cells somewhere within an animal that are reproducing, that is, making more of themselves, either faster

Starting point is 00:29:26 than they should or in a place where they have no business to be or at the wrong time in terms of the life of the animal. So put another way, these cells have lost control of their capacity to divide and the result is that cells grow and divide to make more copies of themselves, paying no heed to normal controls. So that's a kind of unruly mass of cells, and that's what constitutes a tumor. And so when people get cancer, sometimes the cause of it seems clear, smoking being an obvious example. But there are other times when people get cancer for seemingly no reason at all. It just comes out of the blue. Why is this so hard to get a handle on? Well, you're absolutely right. And perhaps at the outset, make what I think is a very important

Starting point is 00:30:19 point that you've touched on. And that is that we can now estimate that at least 50 percent of cancers are what one might call self-inflicted that's to say it's things that we do to ourselves and the lifestyle that we adopt that directly leads to cancer and the extreme example of that would indeed be smoking but it is of course a bit more complicated than that and it's perhaps the other kind of like half of cancers that are the real worry where we don't have a very obvious cause but the point about cancers in general is that they can start in pretty well any organ and the reason for that is that the fundamental cause is the same for all cancers. It's this loss of control of the process of cell replication.

Starting point is 00:31:10 Cells making more of themselves in an uncontrolled sort of fashion. Now 90% of cancers are what are called carcinomas. And that simply means that they occur in epithelial tissue and epithelial cells are the most abundant cells in the body. They line pretty well all the sort of cavities and organs and internal passageways. And they also provide an outer coating for most of the organs as well. So that includes our skin and it includes also lungs, bowel, prostate, breast, and so on. And sometimes these cells are actually dividing quite rapidly anyway as part of their normal lifestyle. So if something goes wrong with the cell division control mechanism,

Starting point is 00:31:59 it's big trouble. Lately, I remember hearing something about how our gut, the bacteria in our gut, can cause cancer. Can you talk about that? We now know that, for example, bowel cancer arises at least in part because of the microorganisms that live in our gut. So we're actually made up of rather more microbial cells, mostly bacteria in fact, than what you might call our own cells. And the vast majority of our bacterial cells make their home in our gut, over 95% of them. And we now know that the balance between different types of bacteria in the gut

Starting point is 00:32:48 can affect whether cancer develops or not. And we also know that obesity is a major risk factor for bowel cancer. And that comes about because of changes in the balance of these bacterial species in our gut. And so one of the questions I think people often have is, and you talked about lung cancer a moment ago, that some people will smoke quite a bit and they don't get lung cancer, and other people will smoke the same amount and get lung cancer. Why? Why the difference? It's because the expression I quite often like to use to describe this sort of phenomenon is that from conception to death, we're engaged in a game of genetic roulette and what I mean by that is that most people nowadays thanks to the increasing exposure of science and cancer in the media now know that cancers arise because of damage to our

Starting point is 00:34:00 DNA and what that means is that our DNA picks up what are called mutations. These mutations occur randomly throughout life and that's the reason why cancers are predominantly diseases of old age. We need time to pick up the relevant hand of mutations to give us a particular cancer and of course we can give things a helping hand in that context by doing things like smoking. Of course, most people have got an uncle or a granddad or somebody who's smoked all his life and never shown any signs of lung cancer.

Starting point is 00:34:37 And yet, we know that if we could ban smoking across the world, we would make a significant impact on the incidence of cancers. We dropped them by at least 90% because at least 90% of lung cancers are caused by smoke inhalation. So how does our great-grandfather or whoever it is manage to escape? Well, he's lucky. In the game of genetic roulette, he's smoked, so he's weighted things against himself. And yet, somehow or other, against the odds, he's emerged without picking up the necessary mutations to give himself lung

Starting point is 00:35:21 cancer. So it's really a game of chance, genetic roulette. So we call cancer, cancer, but it does seem as if different kinds of cancer are very different from each other. You get skin cancer, you go to the dermatologist, they zap it and it's gone. You get pancreatic cancer and there's no more serious diagnosis, I suspect, than that. So why the difference? Why are some cancers so easily treated and others are so easily not? Yeah, that's pretty well right. Well, I think it's worth making the point here that progressive science generally, in fact, and especially in the context of cancer, is slow.

Starting point is 00:36:06 And particularly in terms of cancer treatment, it has been slow over actually centuries. But slow though it is, there have been successes. For example, in the USA, the five-year survival rates for all cancers from 1970 to 2013, I think is one measure, have gone up from 50% to just a little bit short of 70%. For breast cancer, over the same period of time, the five-year survival rates have gone up from 75% to about 90%. And for prostate cancer, they've gone up from just under 70% to, well, very nearly 100% now, perhaps we should say 99%. And the reason for that has been in part an improvement in surgical techniques, and also in the developments associated with radiotherapy so that it's now possible to treat cancers with radiotherapy in a much more focused

Starting point is 00:37:15 and directed manner than ever before but most of all these improvements have come about through developments in the field of chemotherapy. And chemotherapy simply means drugs that target cancer cells. For the ones that you mentioned that are the really big problems, pancreatic tumors, as you say, have a dismal prognosis that hasn't altered much. It's about an 11% five-year survival rate. Lung cancers have gone from about 12% to 18% over the period that we were talking about just now. And although there are drugs that have been developed that can be effective against these cancers, I think the problem is the majority of these cancers are not discovered until they're at a relatively late stage of development. So I know there are screening tests for certain cancers, and I know you talk about how

Starting point is 00:38:13 some of those screening tests, which are trying to detect cancer so you can treat it, but those screening tests themselves have some problems. So talk about one of them, and I know mammography is one of them. So talk about one of them. And I know mammography is one of them. So talk about that. So mammography is looking for breast cancers normally by x-rays. There have been several very big reviews about mammography and its usefulness. And let me just give you a kind of example to illustrate what the problem is here. Because on the face of it, you would think, well, it's got to be a good idea. But in one huge study, they discovered that for every 2,000 women invited for screening over a period of 10 years,

Starting point is 00:38:55 one of them will avoid dying of breast cancer, but 10 will be treated unnecessarily. And in addition to that, there will be false alarms for 200 women one-tenth of those subjected to mammographies that will be because their false alarms will subject the patient to prolonged stress and anxiety and the upshot of all of that is that the two big Swiss and Danish studies suggested that we should give up on screening until we have better biomarkers and needless to say that caused an international furor but it's tough to argue with their evidence the situation for the moment in the USA remains that

Starting point is 00:39:40 the preventative services task Force recommends that women who are between 50 and 74 years old and the average risk for breast cancer that is they don't have a big family history of breast cancer that they get a mammogram every two years or so but even that's a bit controversial I think the Mayo Clinic recommends mammograms beginning earlier and continuing annually. But all of that does serve to illustrate just how difficult the problem of screening is. So given what you know about cancer, if someone has a feeling something's wrong, that they might have a symptom of cancer, or they, I don't know, had a bad dream that they might have cancer? I

Starting point is 00:40:25 mean, do you think if people think there might be a problem, they should go get it checked out? If anyone suspects anything on the basis of either you're getting to the age where you begin to think about these things and you note that you have ancestors who were prone to prostate cancer go and see a physician ask him what the current state of play is in terms of tests for that cancer and just see what is available it may be that the answer's not much it may be that it's a bit complicated if it's pancreatic cancer it may be that the answer's not much. It may be that it's a bit complicated. If it's pancreatic cancer, it may be that you have to do something like have a CT scan to give you any chance of picking something up. And then you have to take the decision as to whether you want to do something about

Starting point is 00:41:18 that or not. And so the watchword is the earlier the better, and don't be backward about going to see a physician. This idea of curing cancer, I've heard that it's impossible because first of all, there are lots of different kinds of cancer and you treat them all differently. But you can't cure cancer. That's an unrealistic goal. Yes? Yes, I think it is. You can't cure cancer. That's an unrealistic goal, yes? Yes, I think it is. So the problem with cancer is that it arises because of the accumulation of mutations.

Starting point is 00:42:02 And what that sort of implies, if you think about it, is that it's actually a kind of shifting target. So these mutations are coming and sometimes even going all the time. So it's not like something that you might, for example, think of having a general cancer vaccine for. Vaccines work against diseases that are caused by a single event, an infection of some sort but they won't work on mutation driven cancers is there any general advice people can follow other than the usual you know live a healthy lifestyle don't smoke because smoking obviously

Starting point is 00:42:40 is a is a cause of lung cancer but because there are so many different cancers, is there some general anti-cancer advice that you can give? Taking smoking as the first example, smoking has been accepted, I think, in the Western world as being the major cause of lung cancer from, well, back in the 1950s when Richard Dole and Richard Peto produced a very famous paper but actually the association between smoking and lung cancer goes back further than that there was a very clever guy called Fritz Likind who worked in Germany in the 1930s and he spotted the link between smoking and cancer and

Starting point is 00:43:27 said don't do it and he also worked out that what we now call passive smoking it is a very significant threat in itself but the interesting point in the context of your question and smoking is that some years after their initial findings, Dahl and Peto did another study and they showed that although any smoking, even smoking one cigarette, but certainly smoking for a prolonged period of time and certainly smoking heavily for a prolonged period of time, does a huge amount of damage to your genome and in particular to the dna in your lungs they showed very convincingly that if you stopped smoking you stopped causing the damage and even to some extent cells would repair themselves. So this issue of what can we do

Starting point is 00:44:25 to prevent ourselves getting cancers comes back really to how we treat our own bodies. So smoking's one thing. Another thing that we can do is to limit the amount of red meat that we eat. Doesn't necessarily mean giving it up altogether, but there are very convincing studies showing an association between red meat consumption and bowel cancer in particular. So limit the

Starting point is 00:44:54 amount of red meat that you eat. We've touched already on obesity and excess consumption Excess consumption of sugar is a critical component in driving the obesity epidemic, which has now reached huge proportions across the developed world, and in particular in the USA. The estimate is that each US citizen, on average that is, consumes more than twice the World Health Organization recommendation for sugar consumption on a daily basis. And the advice always boils down to eat a sensible diet, exercise to a reasonable extent regularly, and generally look after your health. And if you do that, you will do as much as you can to minimize getting cancer.

Starting point is 00:45:48 Well, I'm well aware that cancer is not the cheeriest of subjects to talk about, but it's a topic that touches just about every, I don't know anybody who hasn't had a friend or family member get cancer. My mother died of cancer. She died very young from cancer. It's affected our family, certainly, and I think it affects everyone's family, and it's important to understand what's going on in the fight against cancer

Starting point is 00:46:15 and how it all works. Robin Heskath has been my guest. He is one of the world's leading experts on cancer. He's a member of the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge. And the name of his book is Understanding Cancer. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Robin. Thanks for coming on and explaining it all. Thanks very much, Mike. You've probably heard all the safe driving advice you could ever want to hear, but here's some you may not have heard, and that is drive like a race car driver. Not speed-wise. We're not talking about going as fast as a race car driver.

Starting point is 00:46:55 This is about the position of your seat. Edmunds.com test drivers are required to go to high-performance driving school each year, and they say that in order to get race car driver control, you should move your seat close enough to the steering wheel so that your wrists rest on top of the wheel with your arms outstretched while your back is up against the back of the seat. This reduces arm fatigue, and your arms will be positioned for last-minute evasive maneuvers. Here are a few more tips. Keep your hands at 9 and 3 o'clock on the wheel, not at 10 and 2,

Starting point is 00:47:34 and stay in the center lane. You have more escape routes from there. And that is something you should know. A simple thing you can do to show your support for this podcast is to share something you should know with someone you know and can do to show your support for this podcast is to share something you should know with someone you know and ask them to give it a listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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. The parks,

Starting point is 00:48:10 the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this.

Starting point is 00:48:34 No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one.

Starting point is 00:48:47 So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. 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,

Starting point is 00:49:18 and learns valuable life lessons with every quest, sword fight, and dragon ride. Positive and uplifting stories remind us all about the importance of kindness, friendship, honesty, and positivity. Join me and an all-star cast of actors, including Liam Neeson, Emily Blunt, Kristen Bell, Chris Hemsworth, among many others, in welcoming the Search for the Silver Lining podcast to the Go Kid Go network by listening today. Look for the Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - The 4 Stages of Mastering Any Big Change & The Latest In The War On Cancer

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