Something You Should Know - The Car’s History and Future & Inside Your Unconscious Mind – SYSK Choice

Episode Date: November 16, 2024

“Sit up straight!” You’ve probably heard it since you were very young, and it turns out to be good advice. Your posture can affect your physical and mental health in ways you may not realize. This episode begins by revealing the importance of posture and how to instantly improve it. https://bit.ly/3NT6aQ5 The automobile has changed our world in so many ways. If it weren’t for the car we wouldn’t have roads, bridges, and tunnels and all the hotels and motels we stay at. So many things simply would not exist if it weren’t for the car. The car is also responsible for a lot of problems. Still, the story of how the car came to be and the people who built them is fascinating. Here to discuss it all is Bryan Appleyard author of the book The Car: The Rise and Fall of The Machine That Made The Modern World (https://amzn.to/3hfm0bp) Your unconscious mind is responsible for who you are – your personality and character lives in your unconscious mind. The way you experience the world, your mood, what you like or dislike all comes from your unconscious. It's a big deal. Joining me to explain how the unconscious mind works is psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Lieberman professor and vice chair for clinical affairs in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University and author of the book Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind (https://amzn.to/3ConESP) If you plan to get a flu shot, there is something you should do first. And it might take you a few days to do it. Listen as I explain. https://www.ajc.com/life/why-you-shouldnt-be-sleep-deprived-before-getting-a-flu-shot/ZZNNHFDYLJCYTOPPZBJBRMFSBE/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED:  Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING  Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.  Terms & conditions apply. SHOPIFY:  Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.).  New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: Dell Technologies’ Early Holiday Savings event is live and if you’ve been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Tech enthusiasts love this sale because it’s all the newest hits plus all the greatest hits all on sale at once. Shop Now at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Red One. We're coming at you. Is the movie event of the holiday season. Santa Claus has been kidnapped. You're gonna help us find him. You can't trust this guy. He's on the list. He's a naughty lister.

Naughty lister? Dwayne Johnson. We got snowmen! Chris Evans. I might just go back to the car. Let's save Christmas. I'm not gonna say that. Say it.

All right. Let's save Christmas. There it is. Only in theaters November 15th. Today on Something You Should Know, the problem of slouching and why you have to sit up straight. Then how the car changed our world and the stories of the people who built them. Like Henry Ford. Why was he so successful?

There was something about the man. He was perfectly placed. He came from a farming family. He hated horses, which was quite crucial actually. And he took great pride in ridding the world of the need for horses. Also, before you get a flu shot, there's something you need to do first. And what goes on in your unconscious mind? The good things and the not so good. In other words, the unconscious mind might be the uncontrollable mind. Within every single human being in the world, there are horrible drives and urges. But if we deny them, if we push them away and we don't accept them, paradoxically,

that makes us more likely to act on them. All this today on Something You Should Know. So I first came to Edward Jones with a great deal of trepidation. When I first met with my advisor and I really was feeling vulnerable about what I would have to share, I was of course pleasantly surprised to find that there was absolutely no judgment and a lot of support. And when it was time to get serious, he really took my hand and helped me to do that. Edward Jones. We do money differently.

Visit edwardjones.ca slash different. 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, and here we go with another episode of Something You Should Know. And we start with a quick question. How's your posture right this second? Slouching, bad posture, can affect your flexibility and it can lead to increased strain on your

joints. But bad posture has a lot of other negative side effects you may not know. For example, it can make you look fatter, it can reduce your circulation, it can actually cause more stress in your body and even deepen depression. It can reduce your circulation. It can actually cause more stress in your body and even deepen depression. It can also affect your career. People who slouch at work are often seen in a negative light. So for all those reasons, you really need to sit up and stand up straight. And some common advice to do that is to imagine there is a headlight right in the middle of your chest. And you just want to make sure you keep that headlight shining forward.

And that is something you should know. Imagine for a moment what your life would be like if we didn't have cars. I mean, really, the automobile has changed the world in good ways and some not so good ways. But more than any other technology it has revolutionized life for pretty much all of us. There are many people who love to drive, me included, and yet the days of getting behind the wheel and hitting the open road, those days may become a thing of the past in the not too far distant future. How the car came to be, how it evolved and where it's headed is a wonderful story with

some interesting characters and it is one that Brian Appleyard has painstakingly put together for his book, The Car, The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World. Hi, Brian, thanks for being here. Hi, Mike, it's good to talk to you. So yes, most people would probably agree that the car has transformed the world. But people have said that about other technologies

in the past, the light bulb, the computer, they've revolutionized the world, but what's different about the car? Well, yeah, they say it about things like the horse, the stirrup on the horse and things like that quite commonly. But what they miss out from what the car did was the absolute physical change brought to the world. It created roads, it created created motels it created interstates created it the physical world has been changed by the car. I don't want to dwell too much in the in the distant past but do we have a sense of what the first car was where it was and who made it. Who made it? Well, there's some dispute about this, but an official story has emerged

that the first one was built in 1885 by Karl Benz, who was an engineering genius, but he wasn't a public relations genius. And what made him a public relations genius was his wife, Bertha Ringer, or Bertha Benz. And she borrowed his car and drove 66 miles south in Germany with her children, which was astonishing. No other vehicle had done more than a mile or two

at the time. Now that made it sort of the official narrative, but there are lots of close to actual cars at that time. Is the car, in terms of its impact on culture, is it mostly or originally kind of an American thing and then it spread throughout the world? I mean, Carl Benz obviously wasn't here, but there's something about cars in America

that seem to go together somehow. Absolutely they do, but not at the beginning they didn't. The car was developed in Germany and France mainly in the late 19th century. It wasn't really American at all. The Americans probably needed it more than anybody because it's a very big country and it had the most appalling roads in the world at the time.

There was a lot of talking and praying about what was the best propulsion method for the car in America. Was it steam, electric or gas as you would call it? And it really took hold. First of all, it was the Oldsmobile, which is a nice little car. It didn't really take off as well as it should have done, but it did catch people's eye. It was called the Curved Dash Oldsmobile. This is because a dashboard in those days

did not mean what we mean now. It meant the wood, piece of wood, in front of a carriage to stop the muck kicked up by the horses in front hitting the passengers. So he made a car with a dashboard that was curved rather than flat, that's all. So it's its least interesting feature really, but it became known as the curved dash Oldsmobile. And a song, a famous song was written about it, My Merry Oldsmobile.

But the real change came in 1908 when Henry Ford launched his Model T. After that point, America took over the world car business. Why is it that the car business is in America, seemingly in the beginning anyway, and for many decades centered in Detroit for General Motors? Why? Well, it's an interesting question. It may be just because it had to be somewhere, but what happened was the engineers and people like Ford went to that city. It was a kind of a city ready for industrialization. And the key thing was that Ford started building his Model T in a tiny warehouse in Detroit,

and then built two huge industrial complexes, the biggest in the world had ever seen. And that meant it was going to be Detroit, and General Motors came out later and so on, and it was all in Detroit. It's just, it's a kind of a crucial place. And so Henry Ford shows up and changes everything. What's so special about him? Was he a special guy or was he just a guy at the right place at the right time? Or he just had a brilliant idea?

But what is it that came together to make Henry Ford this icon? He was perfectly placed. He came from a farming family. He hated horses, which was quite crucial, actually. And he took great pride in ridding the world of the need for horses. He took to engineering on his own, off his own bat. He didn't really have an education in engineering. He just suddenly saw this little machine that was

used to drive farming machinery and he became obsessed with it, how it worked, what it did, and he started building it himself. And then gradually people became aware that people are actually making cars out of this machine. He did it. But then there was something about the man that was unbelievably concentrated. So for example, when he actually started working, he built several cars that were quite successful. He became known as a big carmaker. But at some point he realized that something was missing from the car.

What he realized was that the car had to be for everybody. He wanted to make a cheap, reliable, easily serviceable car. And he concentrated all his mind on this. He did it in a special room in Detroit. The most important thing was possibly his use of vanadium steel, which is a special kind of steel

that had been discovered in Britain, I think, first, but then he found it. You can make very light cars out of this stuff. And he believed in lightness, like some people believe in God. You know, it's just lightness in automobiles to him was the most important thing. And it cracked it. It coped with the bad American roads by making this wonderfully ingenious suspension system that meant probably a good condition Model T would be better at going over bad roads now than a modern SUV. It had a special system for holding the engine in place so that the twisting of the suspension didn't damage the engine. It was a beautiful little thing. And it started out quite cheap, and then it got cheaper still.

He kept pushing down the price. And amazingly, he made ever more money out of it. And he is often considered the father of the assembly line. Is that a fair assessment of him, or is that more myth than real? Yes and no. It came out of thought processes from others about how you best made people work more efficiently

and quicker, and other people had had these ideas. But what he did was simplify the process so that every workman on the line would do one job, you know, and he did do that all day. It made it very, very efficient. The problems were later to emerge from this, which is later story was that the Japanese made it better. But nobody had ever seen anything like this. It could produce millions of cars very easily. And they flooded out of the factory. There was such an extraordinary, they changed politics. Both Stalin and Hitler admired Henry Ford for what he did. In other words, both ends of the political spectrum. And they admired him

because to them, this seemed like a new world, a new way of organizing humanity. It was a new politics in a way. As I understand it, Henry Ford, genius though he may be in the car industry, wasn't a particularly bright guy, well-educated, worldly kind of fella. You're right? There was a sort of monstrous simplicity of the man. He was easily influenced. Towards the end of his life, he was thinking of handing over the company, not to his son, whom he didn't regard as that competent,

but to somebody called Harry Bennett, who's a low-life thug. He beat up people who protested against working conditions and things. He was a low-life thug. It was only because Clara, his wife, was so revolted by the idea that it stopped him. So Henry Ford was the man, the character, the myth behind the Ford. I want to ask you about General Motors and who was behind all that? I'm speaking with Brian Appleyard. He is author of the book, The Car, The Rise and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World. Finance podcasters love saying things like,

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Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling Problem, call 1-866-531-2600. Visit connexontario.ca. So, Brian, Henry Ford is Ford. His name is on every car that he makes. Who's behind General Motors? Well, there were two people, both utterly different. The big one, the big name was Alfred Sloan. And Sloan and Ford were the two opposites

in the car business. And Sloan was so boring to meet. I mean, he was catastrophically boring. I mean, he still is, because if you look up Wikipedia, he's got about third the length of Ford's entry. People can't find anything interesting to say about him. This was because he was concealed himself from the world. He had something to hide, I don't know what it was, but he certainly wanted to hide himself.

Paralyzingly boring when, you can look up YouTube videos of him and he talks as if, you know, like an undertaker on a bad day. But he had, perversely, his idea, he wasn't boring in his idea, which was the way to sell cars was to market them. Ford sort of did market cars, but he did it on the assumption that if you told your customer about the Model T, they would buy it. You know, if you build it, they will come. And he was right for a long time. And he was right for a long time. But after 1928, the end of the 20s, he stopped producing the Model T

and never came up with anything to compete with it. And as a result, General Motors became the big competitor for Ford. And it did so by marketing. He got in, Sloan got in, Harley Earl, who built most extravagant cars imaginable, the opposite of Ford's puritanical small cars, light, small, everything, the opposite.

He just built massive, heavy cars that we all, by the time they got into the 50s, we all recognized them with the great Cadillacs and so on. Absurd cars with gigantic wings at the back, which made no sense in engineering terms, but they would because people, as Ford also introduced planned obsolescence so that he would build a new car model every year,

a model of the same car every year, which had very little difference, but he would say you had to have the new car and if the people saw their neighbors had the new car, they then went out and bought one themselves. So he created a marketing system, which is kind of like the parallel of Ford's production system, but applied to marketing.

And it was just hugely successful, but it didn't produce great cars. Something happened, I believe it was in the 60s, when Japanese cars started showing up in the United States. And at that same time, it was a time when American cars seemed to be suffering from a lack of quality, that they weren't as reliable, they weren't as good as they could be,

and Japanese cars showed up to perhaps fill that gap. So what happened there? There was a brilliant, brilliant Japanese engineer called Taichi Ono. And he was working for Toyota, as it was called later, Toyota, because Westerners found it easier to pronounce. And he developed a new production system based upon Ford's production system,

Ford and General Motors production systems. But when he looked at the production system, he could see all these flaws. One of the key flaws was that if you have men doing one thing at a time, occasionally they'll do it wrong and it would go to the end of the line and you'd have to take the car and put it all right. So all these Ford type production systems

had a sort of room beyond the production line where they were putting cars right. He saw this as catastrophic and stupid. And he designed that out by saying, any worker working on the line who saw a mistake or a fault could stop the entire line, which sounds like craziness because you'd think that

it's reduced production. But of course it didn't because you had to work out why exactly it had stopped, what had gone wrong, get it right so it would never go right and wrong again. Whereas the Fordian system was reproducing the same errors but just fixing them at the end. That's a huge change. Combined with this other change which was that Ford just got his stuff delivered or manufactured it himself at River Rouge, and just chucked it into the bins where the workers were working. But Ono said, no, no, that's too, we're not paying for all that stock. We're just going to make sure that the things arrive just in time.

So he created the Just-in-Time Production System. Now, it took a while for it to work. The problem was that Americans were resistant to non-Detroit cars or non-American cars, generally. And the only car that was making any inroads was the German Volkswagen Beetle, and it was being bought by young people who regarded it as deviant, eccentric, wicked, you know, because they bought this car. But it was a gritty car.

By when it really got going, everybody wanted one. And that was a sign, a warning that Detroit should have noticed, but it didn't, or it decided to ignore it. And along came the Japanese. First of all, they started to invade the market in the 50s and 60s and make serious inroads thereafter. And this appealed to young people because they were, you know, the young people were increasingly anti-corporate in those days.

So they thought, we'll stick it to the man in Detroit and buy a Japanese car. And again, the Detroit didn't believe it at first. They couldn't believe this was happening. But these were good cars, you know, and they weren't spectacular cars. They were just good. They worked.

They lasted. You know, it's interesting. Not that long ago, my son and I were at a shopping mall and we were walking through the parking lot and he said, let's count the American cars. And there were hardly any. One out of 10, one out of 15, everything else was Japanese, German, Korean, but there weren't that many Fords and Chevrolets. They made a big mistake. Ford and General Motors, they thought, you see, if you built a big car,

you could then persuade the customers to buy it, then you could put on all these extras, so the car comes out a lot more expensive. Now, when they analyzed a way of doing a small car, they decided it wasn't worth it because they'd have to make sort of 10 or 20 small cars to make the profit they did on one heavily loaded Chevrolet. And so they made the mistake of thinking a small car simply wasn't possible for them. But people did want small cars. They're easy to drive around towns.

They don't consume as much gas. Increasingly, they showed it by buying them. One of the reasons, in my view anyway, one of the reasons for the success of the car has always been that sense of you get behind the wheel and drive. You go where you want to go. You go as fast or slow as you want to go. You've got a gas powered engine. You can rev if you want to rev it. And now things are changing. We're going electric. We're looking at self-driving cars where you don't really drive it anymore.

A computer does. And, and a lot of people don't like that. They find that very disconcerting. To me too. I think the era of the car, as as we know it is coming to an end. I think this process will accelerate and we won't be seeing internal combustion cars. I don't know whether there'll be electric cars replacing hydrogen, but one or the other. And we're also seeing increasing computer intervention in the driving conditions. We already have that. I mean, it's very interesting if you look at a car is becoming more like an iPhone.

An iPhone works because it doesn't work unless you're connected to something. And it's becoming like that with cars. I mean, Tesla now doesn't even have to ask you about changing the software. You know, it just drops it in from the cloud. Now, so far, the attempt to make themselves driving is stalled. They're not really getting very far with it at the moment, and it's much more complicated than they realized. And it's risky because people get killed. But I have no doubt that the kind of money that has been put in this will produce something very different to what we now know and that that will happen quite quickly. If you look at that and also if you look at the way both Apple and Google about the same

time started work on a self-driving car. Now there's a reason for that. They're the richest companies in the world. They're all in Silicon Valley. It's not in Detroit. It's not in the old world. It's in the new world. Basically, these vast tech companies stuffed full of money want to move into this area.

It's not just the cars. They'll change cities. They'll put in cloud control of cars and cities as a whole. So, yeah, it's changing. they'll put in cloud control of cars and cities as a whole. So yeah, it's changing. I can see why people would say that's a good thing. And in a sense, I accept all their arguments. Cars have killed a lot of people. They kill about 1.3 million people a year.

They do cause problems for the environment and for health. I understand all that. I accept all that. But I don't think you should allow those negatives to overrule the great positives that the car brought to people. They brought freedom on a scale unimaginable before. Obviously there are a lot of interesting players in the history of the car business, but you shine a spotlight on Honda. And well, why is that? Honda is the name you know on your cars, but the man was just extraordinary. He was the only businessman, Japanese businessman, American businessman

thought they could get on with this because he was a bit of a party animal. And, um, you know, he didn't have that reserve that Japanese businessman seemed to have about them. Um, he was pretty wild. He went, he developed motorcycles, brilliant motorcycles, moved into cars, developed increasingly brilliant cars. He was, I think, probably the greatest of all the mainstream car makers as an engineer.

He made the most beautiful fast car and the Honda NSX, which everybody I know, the experts I know, Gordon Murray is one of the greatest fast car and the Honda NSX, which everybody I know, the experts I know, and Gordon Murray is one of the greatest fast car designers in the world. This changed his life when he drove this car, not because it was faster than anything else, because it just handled. Murray went on to build the most expensive car in the world, the McLaren, and he owed it all to Honda, because he just saw how Honda did it. He was a great engineer.

I just, I'm fascinated by it. Well, it's certainly an incredible story. And as you point out, not all of the story is good. The car, the automobile has done great things. It's also done some harmful things. But it has undeniably changed the landscape of the entire world. So it's interesting to hear about the people behind it. I've been speaking with Brian Appleyard. The name of his book is The Car, The Rise

and Fall of the Machine that Made the Modern World. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Hey, thanks, Brian, this was really interesting. Thanks, Mac, that's been a real pleasure and a great interview. Oh! Interrupting their playlist to talk about Defying Gravity, are we? That's right, Newton. With the Bronco and Bronco Sport, Gravity has met its match. Huh. Maybe that app will hit me a little harder than I thought. Yeah, you should get that checked out. With standard 4x4 capability, Broncos keep going up and up. Now get purchase financing from 0% APR

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Shop great deals on Amazon. You essentially have two minds, your conscious mind and your unconscious mind. And when you think about it, most of the things you do and the choices you make happen unconsciously. Your unconscious mind makes your life easier by just doing things that you have to do so you don't have to stop and think about doing them. But the unconscious mind doesn't always work in your favor.

And that's what we're going to talk about with psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Lieberman. He's the author of a book called Spellbound, Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind. Hi Daniel, welcome. Thanks so much for having me back. Absolutely. So, since the first sentence of your book is there's someone living in your head besides you, I guess we should start there. What do you mean by that?

You know, it's something that we don't often like to think about that we are not alone inside of our heads. But if you think about it, you're really not in all that much control in terms of what goes on inside your mind. You don't get to choose whether you have a good day or a bad day, what your emotions are, how much psychological energy you have. In fact, you don't even get to choose the things that you want, the things that you use your time and energy to pursue. These are all things that are chosen by the unconscious mind,

and getting to know that other person, that other inhabitant inside your head, can be very valuable. And so, when you say we don't, can't choose our emotions, we can't choose the things that you just outlined, why can't we? Why don't we? I think it's difficult to say why.

It's simply the way that evolution has formed our brain. Like all animals, the vast majority of it is unconscious. And another word for the unconscious mind might be the uncontrollable mind. It's only this tiny sliver of consciousness that we have control over, but that's the part of our brain that we identify with. And so as a result, we don't always give the unconscious mind the credit that it deserves. But so often we hear that, you know, we should be in control of our

emotions, that we should be in control of all of those things, that that's what a healthy person does and doesn't give in to these impulses and other things. And I think that that is so misguided, because in some ways that's saying, well, we should be able to fly. The truth of the matter is that we simply can't. And if we try to deceive ourselves, if we give ourselves more credit than we deserve in terms of what we're able to control, we become delusional about it and that's when we get into trouble. I think that we've all had experiences of being overwhelmed by our

emotions and saying things that we should not have said. We've all seen news stories about highly accomplished people completely destroying their career because they gave into an unimaginably stupid impulse. We've gotta stay humble. We've gotta realize that there are these forces inside of us and we have to learn how to come to terms with them.

Come to terms with them or learn to work with them, control them, adapt to them. What does it mean to live with them? Well, I think that all of those terms are good except control because again we're stepping away from this attitude of humility that I don't completely control everything that goes on inside of me. And so when I say come to terms with it, I think that it's almost as if we were making friends with this other person inside our mind, or I should say people,

because there's all kinds of agents in there, all pursuing their own goals. We come to terms with them, and perhaps we can even tame them the way a rider might tame a horse. If that's true, what are we talking about this for? If the guy who lets an impulse destroy his career because his unconscious mind made him do it basically,

then he's going to do it. So that's the end of that. Well, I think we can go back to the metaphor of the horse and its trainer. One mistake the trainer could make would be like thinking the horse is like a car and he just presses a button and the horse goes where he wants it to. Obviously, that's not going to happen. The other mistake he could make is saying that he has no influence over the horse at all and that the horse is simply going to go where it wants and he has no say in the matter.

Of course, that's not true either. He needs to take a sophisticated, skilled approach to forging this partnership. The same is true with the unconscious mind. We cannot control it directly, but we can learn strategies to develop a better relationship with it. And let me give you a very simple example. One of the very simple things the unconscious mind does is it controls the physiological balance within our body.

For example, our blood pressure. You can't consciously will your blood pressure to go down. But if you happen to have a pet dog in the house and you consciously will to go over and pet your dog, your unconscious will drop your blood pressure. So there are ways that we can learn how it works and we can use that knowledge to forge a better partnership. There are people though who seem to have a pretty good handle on what they do. You know, they don't ruin their careers, they don't get in trouble, they don't get arrested, they don't drink too much, they have a sense of control over their lives and they don't give in to whatever this unconscious mind is that you're talking about. And I think plenty of those people aren't trying deliberately to grab the reins there.

They just don't give in. As a psychiatrist, I do a lot of work with people who engage in self-destructive behaviors. And their immediate instinct is, well, I just need more willpower. I need to just say no, or as you put, I need to not give in. We find that that generally doesn't work. Willpower is like a muscle in that it fatigues very, very easily.

So for example, if you're on a diet and you say no to a chocolate chip cookie, that's going to make it much harder to say no to the angel food cake that you're faced with later. So I would take issue with that, that there are people who just don't give in. And I would say that the people who don't have difficulties with unconscious contents disrupting their lives probably fall into one of two categories. I would say that the people who don't have difficulties with unconscious contents disrupting their lives probably fall into one of two categories. One is that some people just don't have

very strong unconscious drives. Their passions are relatively weak, and as a result, they're very easy to go against them if that's not what they want to do. That's not a great situation to be in because these unconscious drives that can destroy our life are also the things that give us motivation and energy and the passion that we need to achieve very difficult goals. The other category they may fall into

are people who have suffered a great deal, people who have had very, very difficult lives. And one of the sad facts of life, of human nature, is that it does seem to be hardship which moves us down the path of developing this good working relationship with their unconscious mind. So I don't think this is anything that comes easily. I think it's something that has to be earned.

And so given that, then what should people be doing to do what you're talking about? How do you actively, proactively, consciously do this? Or does it just happen? I think that the first step is, you know, if you want to make friends with someone, the first thing you want to do is get to know them better. You ask them, where are you from?

Where did you grow up? What are your hobbies? The first step here is getting to know your unconscious mind better. And you do that by becoming simply a better observer of what's going on in your head. The technical term for it is the observing ego. If you're angry, you don't identify with the anger

and say, oh my gosh, I'm so angry. You take a step back and you say, hmm, my brain is generating anger. Let's see what that feels like. Let's think about why that is and see what I can do with it. You just try to notice more, when are you having a good day? When are you full of energy? Or when is the opposite occurring?

The second thing you do is you do what you can to meet the needs of the unconscious mind. I was just talking to a gentleman who was telling me about this work retreat they had. And originally they planned to rent out some hotel ballroom and simply have it with a bunch of folding chairs, et cetera. But at the last minute they decided that they were going to spend a little bit more money and they were going to go out to this nature preserve and have it among trees and sky and clouds. And it made a revolutionary difference in the quality of the meeting.

And it wasn't because they had any different presenters or because the topics were different, it was because it was an environment that was conducive to stimulating the best parts of the unconscious mind. So I think that just like a horse trainer is going to exercise his horse and feed his horse, we should pay attention to the needs of our unconscious mind and try to meet them whenever we can. It's interesting to think of your unconscious mind as having its own needs different than the ones you think you have. That it is, as you say, like someone else living in your head. That just, it doesn't feel right.

That seems weird to me. It does. And yet how often are we tormented by desires that we know are bad for us? Many of us have had the experience of having an incredibly strong attraction to someone that we know would be a terrible partner for us. And we wish we could just put them out of our head, but we absolutely can't.

Primitive desires like junk food often torment us. Or even more sophisticated things. For example, we may be very ambitious. We may want to get great prestige. We might want to have a huge bank account. While deep inside knowing that's not going to make us happy and it's going to distract our attention from the things that we find truly fulfilling. My sense is that when people think about those desires,

those desires that they have that could just screw things up or could go nowhere, you're right. They think that it's a matter of willpower, that they shouldn't have those desires. Or at least they wonder, where do they come from? I mean, why would someone desire something that could do them absolutely no good? It's unfortunately part of the human condition

for us to experience this split. We all know the saying, the spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. The human condition is this very strange combination of spirit and matter, of mind and body. The unconscious is much more associated with the body, with the flesh. We tend to associate ourselves with the mind and the spirit. But it's the fundamental reason why it's basically uncomfortable to be a human being.

And we often try to flee from this split, this division that's within ourselves. And one of the easiest ways to do it is to try to take out the unconscious mind, at least temporarily. That happens every night when we sink into sleep. Sometimes we get into a hot bath or we watch mindless videos

in order to turn off the unconscious mind. In extreme cases, we shut it down with intoxicating drugs. But it can be exhausting having this split to constantly be at war within ourselves. But unfortunately, that is the human condition. Well, it is good news to hear that because I think when people have those kinds of desires, those kinds of thoughts, they think

there's something wrong with them. But what you're saying is everybody has them. They're just not the same ones all the time. But everybody has these bizarre thoughts or desires that don't necessarily line up with who you think you are or should be. Yeah, that's a very important thing to keep in mind. Within every single human being in the world,

there are horrible drives and urges within them. And it's not a good idea to deny them. Obviously, we don't want to act on them. But if we deny them, if we push them away, and we don't accept them, paradoxically, that makes us more likely to act on them. Because then they're hidden in the darkness, and they can ambush us when we're not prepared, and sometimes take over and make us act out these terrible impulses. Well, when people have these impulses, some people do act on them and some people don't.

So why do some people act on them and some people don't? I think that there's two reasons for that. One reason is that, as I mentioned, you're more likely to act on them if you try to pretend they're not there. Unconscious drives can express themselves in one of two ways. One way is through behavior, and that's what animals do. That's instinct. But the other way an unconscious drive can be expressed is simply by experiencing it consciously.

So if I feel like I'm so angry with someone, I want to punch them in the face. I might say, oh my gosh, I'm not a violent person at all. Where did that come from? I'm going to forget about that as soon as I can, because it's very disturbing to think of myself as violent. Alternatively, I could allow myself to feel that urge, to feel that violence, and say, yeah, this is part of me,

but I have a choice. I don't have to act on it. So that's one way that we can avoid acting on these destructive urges. The other way is to build up our ego strength, to build up our willpower. Willpower is not such a great tool, but it's certainly a tool that we have and that we need to use. And there are ways that we can build it up and make it stronger. You know, something I've always found interesting, and I don't know what the explanation is or if there is one, but when you get one of those uncontrollable urges to say something or do

something, particularly if it's based in anger, and you're gonna, if you say it, you're gonna hurt somebody, or if you do it, you're gonna hurt somebody or if you do it you're gonna hurt somebody and It yet it's still it feels so right and you so want to do it in the moment And yet so often you so regret it later. You're so remorseful You can't take it back the damage is done how one thing that can feel so right in one moment and So wrong later and we can't see that in the moment we still want to say it or do it. The only mind that I have access to from the inside is my own.

And so I can speak from my own experience. And there are moments where I feel that I don't have that ability to pull back. I know times when I've been in an absolute rage and I hate to admit it, but it's been actually pleasant to say hurtful things to people that I actually care deeply about because I was possessed by this rage. There are other times though when I do feel I do have a moment.

For example, I want to eat a piece of chocolate and there is a moment when I can say no. But in my mind, what I tend to do is I weigh the pleasure of indulging myself now against the pain of maybe looking at myself on the scale tomorrow morning, and unfortunately the current pleasure usually wins out. Well, the way we've been talking, it seems like the unconscious mind is nothing but trouble, but it must also be positive. There must be some good to the unconscious mind. So talk about that.

Well, you know, the unconscious mind has about half a million times the processing power of the conscious mind. Just to give you an example of how powerful it is, when you simply walk down the street, your unconscious mind is coordinating literally millions of individual muscle fibers in order to maintain your balance, your tone, and your forward locomotion. It has enormous processing power. There have been a number of famous people in history who have talked about being struck by inspiration.

They've been struggling with a difficult problem that their rational mind was absolutely unable to solve. And then all of a sudden, boom, out of the blue, the answer comes ready-made right into their mind and it completely solves the problem. That's one of the amazing things the unconscious mind can do. And I think we've all had the experience, whether we're writing a presentation, writing a report, maybe doing something creative, when ideas just pop into our mind that solves problems our conscious mind was not able to figure out.

It happened to me many times where I would hit a problem where I just couldn't figure out how to explain something. And then invariably it would happen when I was drifting off to sleep at night. The solution would hit me and it was far better than anything else I could come up with myself. But that seems so uncontrollable. That just happens when it happens and you can't have any influence on that. I think that that is largely true.

But I don't think the unconscious mind is ungenerous. I think it gives us more than we realize, and we need to cultivate the habit of paying attention. And so when the dust all settles, what's the message here? What is it you want people to really get? What's the guts of what you're saying here? What I want them to get is that

forging a good relationship with the unconscious mind may be the single most important task in life. Think about the time when you said to yourself, I've never felt more alive. That's what we live for. We live for those moments when we feel most fully alive. It's not about prestige. It's not about money. It's not about pleasure. It's about the feeling of being full of life. We often call those moments magic moments. That's what we want. They seem to come out of the blue by chance. It seems like we have no control over them. But in fact, there are agents underneath there.

There are agents creating those magic moments, those feelings of being fully alive. And by recognizing those agents, learning about who they are and establishing good relationships with them, we can deeply enrich our lives. Well, it does seem weird as you say that there's someone living in your head besides you and that all these impulses and thoughts and feelings are going on seemingly without you controlling it.

But it's good to get an understanding of it. So I appreciate you joining me for that. I've been speaking with Dr. Daniel Lieberman. He is a psychiatrist and author of the book, Spellbound, Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind. There's a link to his book in the show notes. I appreciate you coming back on, Daniel. I enjoy the conversation. Oh, thank you so much for having me back.

It was a pleasure. As we head into winter in flu season, it's probably a good idea for you to make an appointment to get your flu shot. But before you go in to get it, make sure you've gotten plenty of sleep. Researchers at the University of Chicago say that the flu shot can be up to 50% more effective if you're not sleep deprived. Taking a nap before or after your shot won't help much. You really need to be well rested for several nights prior to getting the vaccination to get the optimal protection. And that is something you should know. And if you enjoyed this episode, the best thing you can do to support this podcast is to share it,

tell someone you know about it, and let them give a listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. What if we could disagree in a way that encouraged empathy, even during an election year, with a new episode of Thread the Needle, a better way to disagree. I'm your host, Dona Shil Dugan.

I use my background in journalism and draw from my life experiences to explore topics that matter to fellow feminists like you. In this episode, activist and professor Loretta Ross charges us to try her calling-in technique. I'm always gonna hold people accountable for the harm that they do. The question is, am I gonna do it with anger

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