Something You Should Know - The Truth About Becoming Wealthy & The Hidden Damage of Our Digital Life

Starting point is 00:00:01 Today, on something you should know, the surprising importance of that three-digit security code on your credit card. Then the truths and myths of financial advice, stocks, crypto, real estate. Yeah, there's three myths about real estate that you can find it over and over again. It always goes up. Investing in it is passive. And this is how the really wealthy did it. No, it doesn't. No, it isn't. And no, they didn't. Also, revenge.

Starting point is 00:00:30 Getting Even. Does it really feel as good as you think it will? And you've heard that sitting is the new smoking, and that may not be far off. So it's estimated that the average American sits around 187 days a year, which is kind of crazy, more than half the year, and that the average 19-year-old now moves about the same amount as the average 60-year-old. All this today on something you should know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen.

Starting point is 00:01:18 If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longest shortest time.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. You know that three or four-digit security code on the back of your credit card? I bet you've wondered how much protection against fraud can that provide? Well, the answer is quite a bit. You see, that security code is designed to be. used in what the payment world calls a card not present transaction, like buying something online or buying it over the phone. And here's what makes the code so important. Unlike your credit card account number, that security code is not stored on the magnetic stripe or in the chip. And merchants are not allowed to store that code after the transaction. So even if hackers steal your card

Starting point is 00:02:29 data in, say, a breach. They usually don't get the security code, which makes it harder to use that card online. Now, it's not full-proof. Modern fraud now uses things like fishing and social engineering to get you to give up that number. But that tiny little number is still one of the simplest ways to prove you actually have the card in your possession. So you may think it doesn't do much, but it's working harder than you think. And that is something you should know.

Starting point is 00:03:03 You've probably heard most of the standard financial advice. Buy a house, invest for the long term, diversify your portfolio, put your money in index funds, and most of us assume those rules have always been true and always will be. But history tells a much messier story. There were long periods when stocks performed terribly or didn't move much. at all. Times when owning a home was a bad investment. Times when spending money made a lot more sense than saving it. So how much of what we believe about building wealth today is timeless wisdom, and how much of it is just a product of the moment we happen to be living in? My guest says if you

Starting point is 00:03:51 really want to understand money and build wealth, you have to look at how people have tried and often failed to get rich throughout history. Joseph Moore is an historian, an investor, an author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, amongst other places, and he's author of a book called How to Get Rich in American History, 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. Hey, Joseph, welcome to something you should know. Well, thank you so much for having me. So why look back at 300 years of financial?

Starting point is 00:04:26 advice. What was it that pushed you to do this? This just became kind of a personal desire, a personal obsession to kind of pursue this to the end. Like what were Americans always told to do with their money? And why do we always believe it? And as it turns out, a lot of what worked was always changing. We think that, you know, the past is stable and we're what's moving, but actually what always worked was always changing. And we have to adapt with it. And that was, that was not what I expected to find. Well, there is this. standard advice that we hear today about investing for the long term and diversifying. And there isn't a lot of pushback against today's standard advice because a lot of the people who are

Starting point is 00:05:10 touting that advice, people like Warren Buffett, and I mean, these people have made a ton of money. So how do you not listen to them when they've made so much money? Yeah, well, I mean, the fun thing about the really rich is that they rarely got rich the way they tell everyone to get rich. You know, what's the standard advice, right? You know, for 40 years, put, you know, 10% of your income into stocks. Okay. Run that scenario every year from the American Revolution to yesterday. And it fails in just under half of the experiences.

Starting point is 00:05:45 So as it turns out, like, invest in stocks for the long term has only started working fairly. recently. So this is actually, they say it's old advice. It's actually very new advice because it used to not work. That doesn't mean it can't work going forward. But the way most wealthy people got wealthy was by doing something different than that. Most of them took very strategic, highly leveraged, risky, not gambles, but they took risk on one or two or three big payouts. And as it turns out, that's where most of their wealth comes from. In this idea, one of the things you hear a lot is diversification, right? Diversification is how you get rich. No, diversification is for staying rich. So don't mistake what the rich have with what the rich did to have it. What most of the wealthy did,

Starting point is 00:06:34 and Buffett's a good example. Like how he actually got wealthy is by taking some highly strategic risks in the market that paid out in oversized ways, and he did that with leverage. His average leverages $1.7 of debt to every dollar of equity, which is not at all what he would tell you to do. And to be fair, you and I aren't Warren Buffett, right? So there's some logic to that. But the way people actually got wealthy in the past is not what most of the financial industry tells us to do today. One of the big things I've heard all my life is every wealthy person or almost every wealthy person today has quite a bit of money in real estate. That real estate is the way because they're not making any more. You hear all the cliches. And it always, it always,

Starting point is 00:07:20 goes up and what does the history tell us yeah there's three myths about real estate that you can find over and over again it always goes up investing in it is passive and this is how the really wealthy did it um no it doesn't no it isn't and no they didn't let's start with let's start with real estate always goes up there are there were investors in the 1700s who bought what all of what is today west Virginia. And they died with no profits. To this day, there are portions of what they bought that no human being has ever inhabited. Homes in most American cities, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, Houston, I could go on, cost the same adjusted for inflation in the 1990s as they had in the 1890s. And they're bigger, nicer, better insulated. So to a certainly say, they've gotten cheaper. The myth that real estate always goes

Starting point is 00:08:16 up is a product of two things. One, there are boom towns where it does go up. Chicago in certain period, San Francisco, in the gold rush, et cetera. But in our, not our entire lifetime, but if you're, unless you're about 70 years old, you've never really lived through a period where real estate didn't go up because starting in the 1990s, real estate everywhere started to go up. And then after 2008, when we undersupplied the market, it's gone up dramatically. But that's actually not historically normal. It's actually historically weird. But when you live in a historically weird time, you assume this is what it always did, which leads to the next thing. It's not passive. I've owned a lot of real estate. And one of the things you will learn, if you want to make real money in real estate,

Starting point is 00:09:00 you're going to be active, not passive. The passive returns on real estate range in American history. And we actually have the stats going all the way back for hundreds of years, all the way back to Europe in the 1500s. Like, academics have studied this extensively. The historic return on real estate is four, five, or six percent, depending on the era. So, like, if you want passive returns, then you can get passive returns. But if you want outsized returns, it's going to be active. You're going to make it more valuable. So that kind of circles around the question that people often, well, I don't if they struggle with it, but they think about it. Is it better to own or rent? Because when you own, you're a landowner, you're a homeowner, you're responsible for the taxes and the

Starting point is 00:09:48 upkeep and all of that. And is that a good investment? Because people say that's the, your biggest investment, that's your best investment. Is it? Well, this has been debated for centuries, by the way. Like, I can go back and find people arguing about rent versus buy, at least in the early to mid-20th century. And you can find kind of hints of a similar debate earlier than that. Renting is not throwing your money away. Renting gives you optionality, which people don't always think about. So if you are especially young and coming up in your career and you're getting really good at what you do, the best opportunity that may come your way may involve a trip to the other side of the country. And you're going to want to be able to say yes

Starting point is 00:10:31 to that. And so renting does give you the ability to up and leave when you need to. And also if your dog messes up the carpet, you know, you're only out the security deposit. But as an investment class, real estate can be very powerful for the average person. It's actually not great for building the biggest fortunes, but it's probably the strongest builder of mid-size and small fortunes in American history. There's this nostalgia that we have, and you see this a lot in political discourse. I'm not going to pick sides here. It's on both sides of we've turned the American home into an investment rather than to a home. Well, no, no, no. All American homes were investments for most of history. For one thing, most of those homes were farms. They were by definition income producing. So Americans saw

Starting point is 00:11:16 home ownership, land ownership as their ticket out of poverty and into what we would call the middle class. So I actually think it's a pretty good investment class, but I've actually told some young people, you may do better to rent your own home, but invest in someone else's. Because the real payouts for real estate are you're shorting the dollar. That's essentially what you're doing is saying, I'm going to buy an asset, and I'm going to bet that the U.S. dollar is going to lose two to three to four percent of its value every year,

Starting point is 00:11:47 and that asset is going to go up. Meanwhile, it's not only a short on the dollar, it's a leveraged short on the dollar, because you can buy it five, 10, 15 cents down for every dollar you're borrowing. And the great American mortgage, the 30-year amateurized mortgage, is probably the most amazing financial product

Starting point is 00:12:04 in the history of the country. country and it's a financial invention other countries envy in which they could get so americans are able to to borrow you know say if you put a 20 percent down payment you're borrowing 80 cents to your 20 cents and if the thing goes up then you're leveraged against the short of the dollar which i know we're getting kind of technical there but if i went to the stock market and said i'd like you to lend me that kind of money they call me crazy when you'd have to go to the chicago board of trade to get that kind of leverage. And even then, you'd have to already kind of be rich for them to let you borrow that kind of money to invest in. So as an investment, it could be powerful. It can build wealth over time.

Starting point is 00:12:43 But as a strategy for where you live, renting is often the better choice. There's also this idea that there are money isn't just dollars in sense. There's a psychological part to it as well. Because, for example, I get what you say about renting, but I hate renting. because you just, you know, you can get thrown out. You know, the landlord can raise your rent. If you own it, you control it. But there's that security of owning that nobody can come and, you know, throw you out or raise your rent or whatever. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:13:16 And I think a lot of this is also regional. We forget how big the United States is as a country, right? Like if you're, if you live most of your life in one metropolitan area and some of this can be can vary wildly. So for people in California, it's a very different experience since, say, Austin, Texas right now. Like it's, it's cheaper to rent in Austin, Texas than it's ever been because they just build and build and build and build there. And so there's a lot of people who bought who have seen the kind of price they paid go down. But the psychological benefit, if you're going to be in one place and you know you're staying, then that flips the math. Right. So if you're young and

Starting point is 00:13:52 upwardly mobile, keep the mobile part often. But if you're moving into middle age and you've decided like, This is the school district. This is the town. This is the community I want to be part of. Well, then that flips the moral math because you're trying to be part of something. You're trying to be part of the community. Again, like the 30-year amateurized mortgage is the single greatest financial invention in American history. Take advantage of it. And that's when you can find roots and put those down and have the psychological payout as well as the financial payout. So next I want to talk about stocks and bonds and get your historical take on that because it's become, you know, the go-to investment. So let's discuss that next. I'm speaking with Joseph Moore. He is author of the book, How to Get Rich in American History,

Starting point is 00:14:39 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't. So Joseph, if you go to any financial advisor in the United States and sit down and say, okay, I have my money and I want an investment plan, I want to know what to do with my money, I'm sure they're going to suggest that some of that money, if not much of that money be placed in stocks and bonds because you've got to be in the market. Is that a good investment? Well, show me the incentive and I'll show you the behavior, right? That's not original to me. I cannot remember who I'm quoting.

Starting point is 00:15:13 I'm definitely quoting someone. And the incentives on Wall Street are to get to you to invest in Wall Street because that's where all of the fees come from. So you would be hard pressed to go to a financial advisor and say, I'm thinking about putting 30% in Wall Street and stocks and index funds and 30, percent in real estate and 30 percent and something else and they will tell you that's not wise and to some extent the reason they'll tell you not what that's not wise is because that's not how they get paid but also the market itself is constantly changing you know you hear a lot of times this time is

Starting point is 00:15:44 different or this time is never different well this time is always different because the market is always different so the stocks that you buy today have nothing in common with the stocks your grandfather bought so when your grandfather bought a stock he was buying a share of future profits at today's prices. Because from the Washington administration until Michael Jackson's Thriller album, dividends were 92 or 96% of all the profits investors made. Prices didn't go up. In fact, the Dow Jones was lower when I was a boy than when my dad was a boy. So the idea of stocks going up in their price was unusual. You got dividends and you invested those. reinvested those dividends or you lived on them. Today, since then, price appreciation is well over

Starting point is 00:16:35 70% of all of the gains in the market and only one in five stocks even give a dividend. In fact, 96% of stocks don't beat treasury bills. So everything is in the price appreciation of the index and the most concentrated stocks. Well, that means you're not buying what your grandpa bought. You are buying a share of future buyers at today's prices. You are at a source. You are a source. assuming one day 20 and 30 years hence, someone else will want this at a higher price than I paid for it, which is not at all what your grandfather was betting on. So the market itself changes dramatically over time. And most of the people who get rewarded for investing your money either haven't thought about it or simply don't care because that's not their job. Their job is to get your money, move to the market and keep this river flowing downstream.

Starting point is 00:17:26 Now, I'm not saying it won't work. I'm just saying it's different. Well, but if you are investing for the future and what you're saying is the future will be different than the present, then what are you investing in? You have no idea what you're investing in. Yes, that's correct. And I think a little bit of humility goes a long way. You know, understanding that when people tell you, it has to go up because it always went up, it's only done that. So the stock market, this idea of stocks for the long run, which we hear all the time.

Starting point is 00:17:55 Of course, Jeremy Siegel's famous book made this argument. there's actually an earlier version of that argument in the 19-teens. And as it turns out, academics went back and pieced all that together, and they found there were a lot of stocks that did not make it into that data set, some of which went to zero. And when you do the whole data set, what you find is that bonds beat stocks for most of the 1800s, and they were tied with stocks until World War II, which means that stocks for the long run is only as old as our world.

Starting point is 00:18:27 last two presidents. Now, that's not nothing, but I'm a historian. So in my line of work, that's a rounding error. So the idea that stocks always went up is actually a new idea. But we have been told it's a very old truth. It's not. It's entirely new. And so what does that mean for the average everyday person? Well, you're probably going to be okay for a while doing what everyone else is doing, but understand you're going to get what everyone else is getting. but don't presume or pretend that this is that because this has worked for the last six decades or so, that it's going to keep moving that way for the next six. Can you give me an example of one of these financial changes that affect us all to give them a sense of what you're talking about?

Starting point is 00:19:13 Here's an example of something that has changed in our own lifetimes and that is changing it right in front of us. And yet we act as if everything is staying the same. And that's the index fund revolution. If you go to any competent advisor, they're going to tell you a lot of what you need to do is put it into index funds. And by the way, that's fine. I buy index funds. But what index funds were supposed to be when they were invented in the 70s and 80s was a chance to buy the index itself for low cost. Because we forget in the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, no one could buy an index.

Starting point is 00:19:45 So if you look back at the index and use that to create your historical chart, you forget no one owned it. Because to own it, you would have to buy 100 shares of every company, the index, which was a million dollars back then. It's like 12 million today. No one owned the index unless they were already wildly wealthy. So now the everyday person could own the index. And it was supposed to be the ant on the back of an elephant. You're getting a free ride from this massive market that's doing all the hard work of price discovery. And all you get to do is just ride pretty much for free through that marketplace. It's a great idea. But the problem is it's no longer an end on the elephant. It's now an ant army that has swarmed the entire elephant and is biting it,

Starting point is 00:20:26 because it only has one order from the ant queen. Buy at what price. Any price, doesn't matter. Just keep buying. And the more these buy orders flood into the market from index funds, the more it's starting to cause the elephant to run uphill. And we know this. We have the quantification on this. We know that for every $1 coming in, three, four, even $5 at times of value is being pushed up the market valuation. And so the more we're all told to buy index funds, the more we're kind of charging the stock market up no matter what. If you look at all the craziness we've lived through,

Starting point is 00:21:02 the should have been crashes and corrections that suddenly bounce right back to where they were and go higher. And everyone wonders, why does it keep bouncing back? When is it going to correct? Well, the index fund revolution is part of the reason it's not correcting because we're all continuously pouring in buy orders, whether it goes down or not. And so that's the kind of change that happens in slow time right in front of you. And you have to recognize that it's there. For the time being,

Starting point is 00:21:29 you'll probably be fine buying index funds. But there's going to come a time when those buy orders go away and they start to reverse in the other direction. And that will be very interesting, fast time to live through. That's fascinating. I never would have ever thought of that. But as you lay it out like that, it makes perfect sense. If everybody's buying, index funds, everybody's buying. And so that's going to affect the price of all those stocks. Yes. I mean, that's what we're literally living through that right now. So it's like the only reason. I'm not trying to make it like the magic key that solves everything, but it is a part of the equation. And it is a, and it's becoming a bigger part of the equation every single month.

Starting point is 00:22:10 The investment that we hear about today so much that completely confuses people is crypto, Bitcoin. And I don't get it. I still don't understand it. Is it a thing or is it not a thing? Well, if I think you mean a bubble, it's perfectly valid as a bubble and people have made and lost money in bubbles before. But crypto is not the future. It is the past.

Starting point is 00:22:33 We have had self-issued currency in America before. At the dawn of the Civil War, there were roughly 10,000 self-issued currencies, not by the government, by people, by local banks, by businesses, which means the advice. you got about money in the 1800s was very different than advice you get today. Young people were told whatever you do with money, do not save it. Spend it as fast as you can. Now think about this. If you went to work and you got paid in Dogecoin and I went to work and I got paid in FarkC coin, which by the way is a real thing, the very first thing we're going to do with that paycheck is spend it as fast as possible because we know it could go up, but it could also go down. It could go to zero and it regularly went to zero then. When we look at the past,

Starting point is 00:23:17 we find people doing money very differently because they were basically using and living with what we have today in crypto, self-issued currencies with no government oversight or limited government oversight. And they didn't like it. And so when they finally got to the Greenback and the US dollar coming out of the Civil War,

Starting point is 00:23:34 people flocked to that dollar because they're like, I can save this thing. I can use this thing. I can trust it to not go to zero tomorrow. And that's what American financial advice flipped from spend as fast as you can to save as much as you can. And so I tell people, the one lesson from crypto

Starting point is 00:23:52 is that every self-issued currency in American history eventually always went to zero. So as a bubble, if you want to invest in a bubble and try to get it out before everyone else does, that's great. You do you do you. But the lesson of the past is pretty clear. This thing will eventually go to zero. So with your historical perspective

Starting point is 00:24:12 on the whole world of finance, give me some suggestions on what to do with my money. Number one, solve somebody else's problems. We think personal financial advice is always about you and your problems. Should you drink a latte? Should you buy crypto? That's about you and your problems. It will keep you from getting broke, but it won't help you get rich.

Starting point is 00:24:34 Like if you want to go ahead, you actually have to solve someone else's problems because that's where most of the real money is made. Secondly, is you do need to take some risks. I think we're probably in the least risky age in American history, and yet we're more risk-averse than we ever have been. Third, you need to move more, especially if you're younger. Most of the great opportunities in American history came from those who went or those who won, and you have to go where the opportunity is.

Starting point is 00:24:59 You live in the largest free market zone in the world. There is an opportunity for you somewhere. Merry well. That works in every era. And by the way, that's not just marrying into money. That's marrying into the kind of character that helps a family, build wealth over time, and then finally believe that you can, because optimism is wildly overrewarded in the American economy. Wow. Well, it feels like you've just taken us on a roller

Starting point is 00:25:23 coaster ride through American financial history, and it's really fascinating. I've been speaking with Joseph Moore. He's an historian, an investor, and author of the book, How to Get Rich in American History, 300 years of financial advice that worked and didn't, and there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Joseph, thanks for the ride. Thanks, Mike. Have a great day. We've all heard the warnings about sitting too much and spending too much time on screens. But let's be honest, most of us are doing exactly that. Hours at a desk, then hours on a couch, scrolling, streaming, checking one more thing. So how bad is it really? Because this isn't just about feeling a little stiff or tired.

Starting point is 00:26:13 Research is starting to show that this screen-heavy, sedentary way of living may be quietly affecting everything, your energy, your focus, your sleep, and even your long-term health. And here's the surprising part. Fixing it may not require a complete lifestyle overhaul. My guest says small changes, even just a few minutes at a time, can make a big difference. Manouche Zamoroti is an award-winning journalist and host of NPR's TED Radio Hour. She has spent years investigating how our digital lives are reshaping our bodies and brains, including a large-scale study she did with Columbia University. Her book is Body Electric, the hidden health costs of the digital age,

Starting point is 00:27:01 and new science to reclaim your well-being. Manus, welcome to something you should know. Mike, thank you so much for having me. So even though everybody's heard those warnings, that we're spending too much time in front of screens, that we're not moving enough, we're too sedentary, the warning is a little vague in the sense that I'm not sure what the consequences to all of that are

Starting point is 00:27:23 and how much is too much. And also, the bigger question is, with the way life is today, I don't know how you not do that. How do you not spend time in front of screens, which means you're sitting there watching, which makes you sedentary. I don't know how to not do that.

Starting point is 00:27:41 Yeah, I mean, we've heard the saying, like sitting is the new smoking for years now. And so we work out in the morning and maybe we have a standing desk. But I don't think we've realized that not only are we sitting more, we have built a world around screens, which means that in order to socialize, in order to do our work in order to relax, we are using screens, and that is leading us to sit even more.

Starting point is 00:28:10 So it's estimated that the average American sits around 187 days a year, which is kind of crazy, more than half the year, and that the average 19-year-old now moves about the same amount as the average 60-year-old. And we're seeing the costs. We're seeing that chronic health issues are on the rise. Many of those are preventable. Type 2 diabetes in young people has doubled over the last 20 years. But not only that, I think, you know, we hear everyone feels like crap, basically, Mike, to use a technical term. We're tired.

Starting point is 00:28:49 We're exhausted. We're overloaded. And I think that we've been paying a lot of attention to the mental health effects of all the screen time. but we haven't been really diving into the physical health impact of all this time sitting and looking at screens. Well, aren't those statistics so eye-opening? Because the fact that a 19-year-old moves as much as a 60-year-old either says 60-year-olds are moving a lot or 19-year-olds are moving much. And that's just, that's stunning because that's not what we were built. That's not what we were built to do.

Starting point is 00:29:26 No, that's exactly right. And that's not to shame 19-year-olds. I mean, I have one of them. And I see, like, he's in class. He's on his laptop. He's doing his homework. He's on his laptop. He's trying and stay in touch with friends.

Starting point is 00:29:39 He's on his phone. He wants to chill out. He's watching Netflix. Our worlds are built, and our schedules are built around these things. And so as a result, we've sort of crowded out some of the things that we really didn't have to think about, like, decades ago. Like, go outside, play, look into the distance. breathe more, spend time being bored, move your legs. Like it sounds absurd you need to think and move more,

Starting point is 00:30:04 but that's what happens when we create a world where we have so much that has to be done through a piece of glass. It's just so weird when you think about it. It's just so weird. It's weird, totally. But I sense people know this. Like I'm sure your son know.

Starting point is 00:30:27 this. I mean, this is what you talk about and write about. But as you say, the world is the way it is. So, so then what do we do about this? How do you stay connected and do the right thing by your friends and also move more than a 60-year-old? Yeah. And I think that was the question I had, because it really gets my goat when people are like, well, just get off your screens or like, just don't put your phone away and it's like, I have older parents, I have teenagers, I have a job, I want to exist in the world, and part of that is staying connected and it's not all bad, right? So how do we begin to not to sacrifice our health to our devices? And that was the big question I had. I was sick and tired of feeling sick and tired when I came across actually a study in 23 that sort of blew my socks off.

Starting point is 00:31:23 So I heard this study. It was by a physiologist at Columbia University Medical School. His name is Keith Diaz. And Keith's whole mission in life has been to figure out what is the minimum amount of movement that the human body needs so that all this sitting and staring at screens doesn't lead them to an early grave, essentially. And in his lab, he had come up with quite a simple and extraordinary formula. essentially five minutes of gentle movement for every half hour of sitting during prolonged periods made made a huge outsized difference. It reduced blood pressure, reduced blood sugar. It made people able to concentrate. It reduced their fatigue. And when I say gentle movement, I mean like,

Starting point is 00:32:11 Mike, we're not talking like burpees or sprints or anything like that, two miles per hour on a treadmill, a stroll. And so when I heard that, I mean, Keith has other amazing things. This one is shocking. If for people who are mostly sedentary, when they replaced half an hour of sitting with gentle movement, they reduced a risk of early death by 18%. So just kind of shocking. So when I heard this, I was like, oh my God, is it really? Is it that easy? Like you just got to get up and move every five minutes every half hour. And I reached out to Keith and he was like, yeah, come up and give it a shot. So I went up and I joined his lab experiment and I did it for myself. One day, I sat at a desk for eight hours working on my laptop while they measured my blood glucose. They measured my blood pressure,

Starting point is 00:33:04 my heart rate. I took regular surveys about my mood. And then the next day, I did the exact same thing, except I walked for five minutes, two miles per hour, on a treadmill that was in the corner of the room. And the results were shocking. My blood sugar was cut in half. My blood pressure dropped by five points. My fatigue was gone the second day. I was able to concentrate, and I was just more positive. And I had energy when I got home in the evening.

Starting point is 00:33:36 I didn't feel like slithering over to the couch to like look at my phone and watch Netflix, allegedly, at the same time. It was really amazing. Wow. Well, that seems doable, right? I mean, how hard was that? Well, that's what I thought. I was like, this seems easy. And Keith was like, but is it like, can people do this?

Starting point is 00:33:58 Can they interrupt their lives, like to take these five-minute breaks? Like, this is not acceptable, right? Like, how do we measure if somebody's working hard? Bums on seats, eyes on the screen, locked in, right? We are not used to people taking breaks. much less getting up and like moving around for no reason at all. So that became the big question that the two of us had. The science is there, but can people actually do it? So we combined forces. My team at NPR and his team at Columbia created a global clinical trial and we had 20,000 people

Starting point is 00:34:34 sign up to try to take movement breaks either every half hour, every hour, or every two hours. and report back, because we really wanted to measure not only the effects that they saw, but feasibility. What did they have to do to make it possible for them to move more? And so, yeah, so it was a massive public science investigation. It was pretty fascinating what ended up happening. What do you think, Mike? Just out of curiosity, are you like, I could totally do this?

Starting point is 00:35:05 Or are you like, hmm, actually, that would be hard? Here's my problem with doing it. And I think most people can relate to this if they do spend a lot of time on screens or doing projects in front of screens. That when you take a break, you disengage from what you're doing and you go do what you're going to do, it takes a long time to get back to where you were and you feel like you've wasted the time. Because it wasn't just the time of the break that you lost. It was the disengaging and re-agaging time that you lost that, that feels. feels like a loss.

Starting point is 00:35:42 I totally hear you because there's been so much research that says, you know, interruptions, when we switch tasks, it's really hard for us to regain focus. Absolutely. And that was one of my fears as well. So that's what I was curious to find out. Like, how did people deal with that? So, okay, so we had these 20,000 people sign up of the people who committed, who started taking movement breaks, 80% of them were able to stick with them for two

Starting point is 00:36:08 solid weeks. I mean, look, this is a self-reported study, right? And these were people who clearly were motivated to try. But still, we found there was a dose response relationship, meaning that the people who took the most breaks had the biggest effects. On average, there was a 25% reduction in fatigue. And to your point about not getting things done, we did not measure any productivity downfall. If anything, people's productivity actually rose slightly. So what we heard from people was that they would get back to their desks and they were able to focus again, that they didn't get that sort of foggy feeling in their head, that they were more positive, more job satisfaction, and actually they were more efficient in the end. So we also heard from people who

Starting point is 00:37:01 we weren't able, obviously, to measure the glucose and the blood pressure and all those things, but there were other people who worked with their doctors during this period. We heard from people who lost some weight. They lowered their blood pressure. They were able to manage their blood sugar. And generally, on the whole, people felt, A, it was doable. And 82% of them actually liked taking the breaks. They actually enjoyed them.

Starting point is 00:37:27 All right. So now I've got some questions. What's a break? What did they do during the break? So a break, as I said, is nothing. big. It can be a walk if that works for you. It could be a lap around the block with your dog. It could be collecting all the dishes in your house that people have left around and bringing them down to the dishwasher. It could be a dance party. It could be marching in place. I like my personal favorite

Starting point is 00:37:55 is the shuffling side to side during a Zoom call. If walking is not an option for people, you could, there have been studies that show just working your arms, pumping your arms, arm shoulder rolls, all of that counts as well. So it was kind of whatever, if you want to walk and talk on a phone call, that counts as a movement break. Well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, your favorite shuffling side to side on a Zoom call, how is taking a Zoom call a break? Well, we didn't stipulate.

Starting point is 00:38:27 We didn't say you had to get off your screen. We just said add movement to your life because we also wanted to see whether people did go off their screens or not. And what we did find, as you might suspect, Mike, is that people liked using it as screen breaks as well. But when they couldn't, they integrated movement into their lives, and that helped too. And the prescription is, how many breaks per, what's the prescription? So the prescription is, if you can, for long periods of sitting, get up and move for every five minutes for every half hour. But we saw benefits for people at every hour and every two hours.

Starting point is 00:39:11 And actually, it's been shown that even moving for one minute, an hour, will reduce your blood pressure, although that did not have the same effect for blood sugar. But the point is, I think, any movement is good movement. And we need to interrupt these long periods of sitting and being locked on screens for very basic, ancient biological reasons, which, I sort of dig into to try and understand what exactly is going in our body that leads us to feel, you know, wired and tired, and then eventually can lead to chronic health illnesses. And it's, it's kind of fascinating what these habits are doing to us because you think, well, I'll work out in the morning or I'll use my standing desk and that'll take care of it. And unfortunately, that is not the case. Well, what does that do? What, if you did this, compared people who took breaks every so often as

Starting point is 00:40:05 you're suggesting versus somebody who works all day and then goes to the gym for an hour and a half. Unfortunately, study after study has shown that even if you work out in the morning or you go for a long evening, if you sit for the majority of the day, the harms are not offset. That's not to say that you shouldn't work out. Obviously, it's good for bone health, muscle health, cardiovascular health, all those things. But it does not offset what happens in your body when you are sitting for hours and hours. And so, as I learned, you have to think of, like, when you sit, you're putting a kink in your body at your knees and at your waistline, right? And you need to think of that. Keith explained this to me, like a garden hose. You know how when you kink a

Starting point is 00:40:52 garden hose, things start to kind of get backed off, up, and the pressure builds. Well, same thing happens to us. Blood starts pooling in our legs, our muscles stop contracting, and leg muscles are key to clearing out glucose and fat and lowering blood pressure. And if they don't, over years, over months and years, that is when these chronic conditions start to creep in. Not to mention the fact that when you are sitting, you are bent over like a shrimp or a cashew, and that compresses your diaphragm. You start to take shallow breaths. And shallow breaths means that you get less oxygen into your bloodstream and going up to your brain. And when you don't have enough oxygen going to your brain,

Starting point is 00:41:37 that is when you start to feel tired and foggy and you lose your focus. And then this is where screens come into the picture, which I find fascinating is there's a relatively new field of research into a sense called interoception. So interoception is the body's way of signaling to you what it needs. And that can be subconscious, like, you know, you need to sweat to cool down, or it can be very conscious, which is, my eyes hurt.

Starting point is 00:42:10 Can you look into the distance? I need to move because I'm starting to have my back ache. And I think what we're finding is, and there's starting to be new studies looking into this, is that your body could be begging for a break, but what do you do? you're swiping, you're typing, you don't listen to what your body is telling you it needs. And no wonder we feel exhausted and anxious. We are not hearing the signs because we're hearing the notifications and the pings far more than we're hearing our biological needs. It all makes sense. It all makes perfect sense.

Starting point is 00:42:52 I sense that people go, yeah, I really should do that, but they don't. They just, because it's so easy not to. It's so easy because this requires very intentional effort. I think that's right. I think what we need is a cultural shift. But, you know, I am optimistic because we are seeing a conversation that as a tech journalist, we have not seen ever yet people calling on tech companies to do something about the content that's on their platforms. We have people constantly talking about.

Starting point is 00:43:26 how distress they are about the relationship they have with their phone. There is a, there is something needs to change, right? And I don't think it can be hugely drastic necessarily. But my hope is that something as simple and as you say, kind of not that surprising, like just do it. We actually know it makes a big difference and it's not that big a deal. It's free. It means like just go down your driveway and go get the mail and walk back and it's going to make a huge difference to how you feel and to your health. Like if we can just do one little tiny thing, wouldn't it be nice to be able to feel just a little bit better during these weird, weird times? Well, you've certainly laid out your case well here and it's up to people to see the urgency in what you're saying because it clearly

Starting point is 00:44:14 takes a toll by not taking those breaks. Manus Samarodi has been my guest. She is the host of NPR's TED Radio Hour, an author of the book Body Electric, The Hidden Health Costs of the Digital Age and New Science to Reclaim Your Well-Being. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Manus, thanks. Appreciate you being here. Have you ever noticed how getting revenge sounds satisfying right up until the moment you actually do it?

Starting point is 00:44:49 Psychologists have studied revenge for years, and one surprising finding is, is that revenge often makes people feel worse, not better. In one famous study, people who got the chance to punish someone who had wronged them kept thinking about the person afterwards more than people who never got revenge at all. Why? Because revenge doesn't always create closure. It can keep the offense mentally alive. Researchers say we tend to predict revenge will feel relieving or empowering. but once we act on it, many people end up replaying the event in their mind instead of moving past it, which means revenge may not end the conflict, it may actually keep the conflict going.

Starting point is 00:45:35 So the old saying about revenge being sweet, psychology suggests it may be more addictive than satisfying. And that is something you should know. So here's a thought, a request. Use your brilliant writing skills to write us a review on, on whatever platform you listen on, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, CastBox, wherever you can leave a review, leave us one, and we like that, and we read them too. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all.

Starting point is 00:46:19 birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent. parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, the longest shortest time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at

Starting point is 00:47:02 longest shortest time.com.

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