Something You Should Know - Weird, But True Stories of Famous People & What We Can Learn From Top Sports Competitors - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: July 12, 2025

Not all that long ago, people felt paying bills by sending a check in the mail was the best way to do it. Today, it seems like a bad idea. In fact, banks and the post office are recommending against it. Listen as I reveal why. https://www.businessinsider.com/post-office-check-fraud-mailing-be-careful-usps-scam-2023-6 There are a lot of weird but true stories out there. And this episode offers you several of them!. For instance, how one U.S. President prevented his own assassination and how Beatles’ drummer Ringo Starr’s unique drumming style is due to exorcisms. And, how the Los Angeles Dodgers paid someone to cosmically beam positive messages to players during games from 3000 miles away. And there’s more... These stories all come from my guest Dan Schreiber. Dan hosts a podcast called There is No Such Thing As a Fish (https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/no-such-thing-as-a-fish/id840986946) and he is author of the book The Theory of Everything Else: A Voyage Into the World of the Weird (https://amzn.to/43eruph) How the very best athletes perform at their peak can teach us all something about life and how to do our best at what we do. Here to explain this is Sally Jenkins who has been a columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post for over twenty years. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 and in 2021 was named the winner of the Associated Press Red Smith Award for Outstanding Contributions to Sports Journalism. She is the author of 12 books including The Right Call: What Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life (https://amzn.to/44wtc6y). If you have been to Trader Joe’s, I’m sure you have noticed that the people who work there wear different colored Hawaiian shirts. Perhaps you have wondered what the different kind of Hawaiian shirts mean or why they are so friendly and why they keep ringing that bell? Listen as we peak behind the curtain at Trader Joe’s. https://www.businessinsider.com/trader-joes-slang-terms-only-employees-know-2023-7?utm PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠ QUINCE: Stick to the staples that last, with elevated essentials from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Hers is transforming women’s healthcare by providing access to affordable weight loss treatment plans, delivered straight to your door, if prescribed. Start your initial free online visit today at ⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠ DELL: The Black Friday in July event from Dell Technologies is here. Upgrade for a limited-time only at ⁠https://Dell.com/deals⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Try them all while you can. For a limited time in participating McDonald's Canada the international menu heist try them all while you can for a limited time in participating McDonald's in Canada Today on something you should know why you shouldn't send checks in the mail anymore Then weird stories about amazing people like Ronald Reagan Nobel winners, even Ringo from the Beatles. His grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him because she believed that the devil was inside of him because he was left-handed and she needed him to not be left-handed anymore. That's what gave the Beatles their beat and that's all down to the Voodoo Queen of Liverpool who gave exorcisms to expel the devil. Also what you didn't know about Trader Joe's and what we can learn from top performing athletes like performing well under pressure.

Athletes are far more vulnerable to pressure than we realize. What the best ones are able to do is learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary everyday performance is what's coming forward. It's not rising to the moment, it's simply not deteriorating under the pressure. All this today on Something You Should Know. What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue? A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door. A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even

leaving the kiddie pool. Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered. Download the Instacart app and enjoy zero dollar delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart, groceries that over deliver. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. I don't know if you remember this or not. It wasn't all that long ago, but I remember that a lot of people were afraid of online banking, didn't want to pay for things online because what if their information got stolen?

What if someone got a hold of your credit card number? The whole idea of online transactions seemed very risky. It was much better to just put a check in the mail rather than pay online. Well that advice has now been flipped on its head. Today, putting a check in the mail is a risky proposition, and postal authorities and banks are suggesting you stop putting checks in the mail because bad guys are stealing them.

The U.S. Postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, which was more than double the prior year. And how are they stealing the mail? Well, mail carriers are actually being robbed, mail boxes are being broken into, and the criminals are targeting envelopes that look like they have checks in them. And then what they do is something called checkwashing, where a criminal steals a check, then proceeds to change the payee's name and the check amount. And it gets even more sophisticated than that. But the point is that today, a lot of businesses are accepting

only electronic payments, and that may be for the best. If you do have to mail a check, the advice is to at least use a secure mail drop such as inside the post office, but not a mailbox. And that is something you should know. There are a lot of weird things in the world. I guess you know that. And some of them are really fascinating, mind-boggling, hard to imagine. And many of them you may not know about or have heard of.

But you're about to. So settle in here and listen to Dan Schreiber. Dan is an author and podcaster. He hosts a podcast called No Such Thing As A Fish. His latest book is called The Theory of Everything Else, A Voyage Into The World of Weird. Hey, Dan, welcome to something you should know. Hey, thanks for having me Mike. So before we learn a

little more about you and why you're into weird things, I want to jump into one good weird thing here and this one is about the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team and I live in Southern California and I bet even a lot of die hard Dodger fans haven't heard this before. So likely neither have many other people. So tell that story. Yeah, this is an amazing story, which we only really kind of found out about because the owners of the Dodgers went through a very messy divorce. And as part of the papers showing the financial side of what was going on with the Dodgers were brought into court, it got revealed this thing, which is that for five years from 2010,

the Dodgers baseball team was basically paying a Russian scientist to beam positive thoughts at the players during matches from 3,000 miles away to improve their game. But he couldn't improve it by a huge amount. He could only promise a sort of increase of 10% to 15% in extra abilities of the players on the team. But he was on the payroll and he just used to sit there in his flat somewhere in America because he emigrated to America just watching the TV and just focusing really hard. There was a salary. The Dodgers did start getting better when this was happening, but in the UK, there's one of the most extraordinary stories that ever happened where a team was at the bottom of the Premier League table and the chances of them winning

was something like 15,000 to one if you were placing any bets on them. And they managed to win the top spot of the Premier League that year. It was largely down to, obviously, an amazing team. But in the background, the owner, who was a Thai billionaire, he had hired a bunch of monks to come in. Every match, or at least every home match that they could manage, they would come in and bless the grounds. They would be hitting all the players on the legs with these prayer sticks that had ointment on them. While the game was going on, they were sitting in a specially made room that had all sorts of proper religious iconography inside. They sat and they hummed and prayed and chanted the whole

match through. A lot of people said, well, it was the monks that helped Lester win the football season that year. So it's not, it's not just the Dodgers. There's all sorts of different teams that are doing this. Great. So let me now ask you like how you got into this, why you know so much about weird things. Well, in the UK, I've been working for the last two decades or so for various different companies that is largely about information and comedy being smashed together and finding the interesting stuff

in every single possible thing that you look into. So there is a show in the UK called QI, which as a 19 year old, I joined straight out of high school without any qualifications. And so my whole training since then, I don't know, 19 has just been reading books with an eye to spot something that's out of the ordinary that you might not know about what is quite a well-known subject and then try and convert it into a way that comedians can play with it. And then so I've been doing that my whole career in various different ways, hosting a podcast and that's the core bit of it.

Interesting thing with funny jokes around it. So I'm sure everybody has heard PCR. PCR was the test, or is the test, for COVID that became very familiar to us a couple of years ago. And there's a weird story about the guy who came up with that. So go ahead and tell that story. When I was putting together the book, it was just at the sort of tail end of the

first big batch of the pandemic lockdowns in the UK. And what surprised me was, is that this word that suddenly became a household word, which was PCR, I'd never heard of PCR prior to the pandemic. PCR, as you might know, is an extraordinary moment in chemistry that kind of changed the way that almost everything is looked at now. So from forensics and police work all the way through to archaeology, and then, of course, coming up with the use of the PCR test to help us curb the coronavirus, COVID-19, and allow for millions of lives to be saved, most likely, as a result of it.

So I was thinking, well, how come I don't know when this came about? And I looked into it, and I discovered that it was a single person who invented PCR. There's a guy called Carey Mullis, a Californian guy, who was working out there and one night had the idea for PCR. I thought, why is he not a household name? This guy's literally just saved the planet with this thing almost, or at least help us

until the vaccine came in. And then I realized why, because he was a very odd cookie. And there was lots of bizarre things about him. The most striking one was that one night when he was out at his cabin, which was out somewhere in California, he was walking to the toilet one night. And as he was walking to the toilet, he was confronted with a English speaking glowing raccoon, who then abducted him most likely into a spaceship is his opinion. And that struck me as very interesting that someone who was able to save the world also spent the vast majority of the rest of his life trying to prove that a glowing raccoon abducted him.

And that happened the exact same year that he invented PCR. Well, and also you you mentioned other like Nobel laureates who, you know, clearly are brilliant, but but pretty weird in other ways. pretty weird in other ways. Yeah, well, there's this thing that you must have heard of, I guess, but I certainly and of which is nobelitis, the Nobel disease. And it's this thing which is the idea that once you win the Nobel Prize, the power of it and the adoration is so great that you suddenly think, well, I must be a genius about everything. And you start spouting opinions about stuff that you have absolutely no background in,

but everyone believes you because you're a Nobel Prize winner. There's people like Wolfgang Pauli, who was seen as one of the, the, the eagle eyes of science. You know, he would, he would not let anything get by yet. He was pretty convinced that there was something involving telekinesis and telepathy going on with him because everywhere he went, things broke. And it wasn't just him that was noticing that there was a whole group of scientists who genuinely thought if Powley is around, this stuff is going to break. And in some cases, a few scientists actually banned him from entering the laboratories where they were working because they were working on something important. I thought they can't have Powley come in and mess it up with his presence. And it was known as the Pauli effect. And people wrote down many examples of where this happened. There was one time when a bunch of students tried to

prank him by rigging up a chandelier to drop to the ground as soon as he walked into the room so they could say, no, look at the Pauli effect. But when he entered the room, the device that was actually going to drop the chandelier broke. And so it didn't drop. Hence of like a Pauli effect in action that the prank failed. Like even Linus Pauling, I mean, who seemed so like mainstream vitamin C, but he, he believes some weird stuff. Yeah. He was a guy who his, his weird one was eugenics, right?

And he believed in eugenics so much that he thought, I believe he actually recommended that people who had a lower IQ or any kind of genetic defects should be given a physical mark on their head so that people knew not to procreate with them. That's very bizarre, these scientists. It's hard to imagine anyone listening who doesn't know who the Beatles are, but this story about Ringo, the drummer, Ringo, I've never heard. I always thought I knew quite a bit about the Beatles and their music and everything else, but I hadn't heard this, so tell that story. Ringo, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame a few years ago, and there were multiple amazing drummers that were up on the screen talking about what an incredible drummer he is.

And there's always been this joke that he wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But the fact is, is that Ringo is up there as one of the greatest drummers ever, particularly specifically, I guess, for pop music and rock music. What they would always say is that Dave Grohl would say this kind of thing, you'd be in a studio, if someone's playing too tight, like it's just not quite got a sort of vibe of live music, he would say, give me more Ringo, give us more Ringo. And what more Ringo is, is play a little sloppier, play just slightly out of time. And that was a style that Ringo developed because when he was a kid, his grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him because she believed that the devil was inside of him because he was left-handed and she needed him to not be left-handed anymore. So multiple exorcisms performed on him. She was known as the Voodoo

Queen of Liverpool, but she spent her time, whatever those exorcisms were, getting Ringo from being a left-handed person to a right-handed person. When he started learning to play the drums, he was a right-handed drummer and he had a right-handed kit. But then after he left and moved out from his grandmother's house, slowly he started favoring the left hand again, but he didn't change the right-handed kit because his feet were familiar with it, it just made sense to him. But what it means is that when Ringo has to get to all of the drums that are on the right of him and do those fills, instead of his hand going up and around, leading with the right, which is super easy, he has to go underneath and lead with the left. And that little extra time that it takes him to do that creates this micro lag that means that

the Beatles had this just unique beat that was really hard to replicate. So that's what gave the Beatles their beat. And that's all down to the Voodoo Queen of Liverpool who gave exorcisms to expel the devil. So it's just a weird tiny little nugget about rock history that again rarely gets mentioned. So I can't wait for you to share the story about the US president who stopped his own assassination. I'm speaking with Dan Schreiber. He's author of the book, who stopped his own assassination. I'm speaking with Dan Schreiber. He's author of the book, The Theory of Everything Else. This episode is brought to you by Adidas. When the frustration grows and the doubts

start to creep in, we all need someone who has our back. To tell us we'll be okay, to remind us of our ability to believe, because their belief in us transfers to self-belief and reminds us of all that we're capable of. belief in us transfers to self-belief and reminds us of all that we're capable of. We all need someone to make us believe. Hashtag, you got this. 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. 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 longestshortesttime.com. So Dan, of all of your stories, I think I like, the one I like the best is the one of the United States president

who stopped his own assassination. That was Ronald Reagan. Do you know the story about Ronald Reagan and Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent? So, okay, so 1981, Ronald Reagan is coming out of one of the Washington DC hotels and there's an assassin waiting outside for him. And he takes a couple of shots at Reagan. But fortunately, the quick thinking secret servicemen get in the way.

I think one of them takes a bullet, sadly, and Jerry Parr grabs Ronald Reagan and quickly bundles him into the back of a limousine. And they quickly drive away and they check the president to see if there's any injuries. And he's clearly bruised his, his ribs from being thrown into the limousine. But outside of that, they can't see that a bullet's gone in. There's certainly no blood coming out. So they go, okay, let's get back to the White House. As they're driving back to the White House, a tiny bit of blood comes out of Ronald Reagan's mouth.

And Jerry Parr sees that and instantly knows that he must have been hit by a bullet somewhere. It just has to have happened. So he goes against all protocol and he says, get him to a hospital now. We need to save his life. So they do that. They go to a random hospital, they bring the president in, they can't believe the president's there. The doctors manage to save his life. And they say, if he was five minutes later, we wouldn't have been able to save him. It was Jerry Parr's quick thinking that allowed for him to remain alive. Jerry Parr, as a result, got all these amazing medals and all these honours as a result of being a hero. But for Jerry Parr, there was something more going on in that moment, which he later told Ronald Reagan, which was that when Jerry Parr was a kid, he was taken to the cinema to see a movie with his dad.

And they went to see a movie called Code of the Secret Service. And because of that movie, it's the only reason that he was there on that day, because he fell in love with the Secret Service and he thought, that's exactly what I want to do with my life. And his whole life led up to doing that, to looking after a president. The person who plays the role of the Secret Service agent in that movie was Ronald Reagan. So it's a full circle story. Ronald Reagan basically saved his own life. He inspired him to become a Secret Service agent and then years later he ends up saving

his life as one. I just find that a really awesome story. So I thought this was weird. Maybe some people know about this, but I certainly didn't. And that has to do with the Savannah airport and runway 10 at the Savannah airport that has graves in it. So explain that. During one of the wars, they were needing to expand the size of the Arab field and have more runways. But there was a graveyard that was attached to a farm and a family there

that was sitting on the spot. And so they had to pay them to move it. And they said, we'll dig up every grave and we'll put them into a new cemetery and we'll make sure it's all done respectfully. But one thing that they couldn't do was agree on the four people who ran the place, the two owners and then I think the cousin and a brother. And so they're still there. The graves of them are literally in the runway. And as you're taxiing down the runway, if you look out the window on one of those runways, you're going to see the two headstones that are laying flat that you then go over on as you're flying off to wherever you're going. So other people have claimed that they've seen ghosts and so on. And I interviewed a pilot who said she thinks that was a rumor that was made up as a joke

by someone. But you can ask for the haunted graveyard runway if you're taxiing out as a pilot there. So you write in the book about a guy named John Lilly. John Lilly, he kind of became eventually part of the big psychedelic movement. He invented those tanks that you go into and you lay in and you float, floatation tanks. He's the inventor of that.

But his big project was trying to communicate with dolphins. And at one point, he was partly funded by NASA to teach dolphins to speak. This was his mission with the funding, to teach dolphins to speak English so fluently that they would be given a chair at the United Nations so that they could speak on behalf of all marine mammals. He set up this house, which was along the ocean. It was half flooded, and he would have the dining room so that the table was flooded up to the knee if you were sitting down in a chair, and so you would eat your dinner with the dolphins, but then they would have their room to sleep in,

you'd have your room to sleep in. And his work was so looked on as an interesting development of communication between human and animal that at the very founding meeting of SETI, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where Frank Drake was and Carl Sagan was and so on other amazing scientists, he was also there and gave the opening lecture on how we might be able to find aliens. Because if there was another intelligence that's evolved on our planet, they thought it's the dolphin. And so that's if we can communicate with that, we'll be able to communicate somehow with the

aliens. It might give us an insight. I just love that this guy who ultimately failed, and there was a huge, a lot of controversy again. A lot of these people eventually caught a lot of controversy in their lives. But the very, very first meeting of Seti was with a man who believed that he was going to create cars that dolphins could be driving themselves in the street. A topic that I remember years ago was kind of a hot topic. People were talking about it, about backmasking, about how, you know, when you play a record backwards, there's satanic messages in it. And you write about that and explain why you write about that. This is the story of how in 1994 the Beatles got back together to do two songs as a threesome.

John has passed away by 15 years or 14 years at this point. And they get a demo from Yoko Ono and it's called Free As A Bird. And The three of them for the anthology project, which is telling their life story, get together, and they re-record over John Lennon's demo with him singing this new track. When they're in the studio, Paul the entire time is saying, I feel like John is here. I can feel his energy and I feel like he's going to make himself known somehow. They're all thinking, that's not going to happen, Paul. They go on recording. He makes a few points at certain

times going, look, it's John. Everyone thinks it's not. They just do the whole song. At the end of the song, there's a bit on Free as a Bird that you can hear if you go on places like Spotify and listen to it, where they decided at the end of the song to do some backmasking onto the track. The Beatles were very famous for backmasking. It's the idea of taking a bit of vocal spoken word, flipping it backwards and laying it down onto a track so that you hear it backwards when a song's played normally. Fans of vinyl back then used to love going and playing songs backwards to see any hidden messages. So the Beatles were famous for that, were accused of demonic influence for doing it. And in 1994, they thought, let's do that again as a nice little nugget and little Easter egg for the fans. Let's

do some backmasking. So they say to the engineer, is there any bit of John just talking randomly on any of these demos? And he says, yeah, yeah. and he finds this bit and it's a phrase that says turned out nice again. So I think that's great. And it's actually really nicely apt because at the end, there's ukulele playing. And one of the most famous people for ukulele in the UK was George Formby. And his phrase was turned out nice again, which it just so happens is what John is saying on that little audio extract. So it was perfect. So they flip it backwards, they put it on, and they play the song out. While they're mastering the song, one of the engineers says, did you guys just hear that? And he said, what? And he said, listen to that again,

the backwards mumblings of John Lennon. And this is what is impossible. When you play this song, I highly encourage everyone listening to do this as soon as you finish the show. When you listen to the backward words of John Lennon, which should absolutely be nothing but mumbles, you can hear him say the words made by John Lennon. He says his own name in the backward words of a thing that it's impossible. It's absolutely impossible. And Paul said, there you go. He's done it. He's come through. He's shown us that he's here. He's here on the song. I mean, it's really there when you listen to it. And it has to be impossible. I can't work out how the probability of that is possible. I've

said possible a lot, but yeah, it's weird. You talk about the first mission to find the Titanic. And lately, Titanic has been in the news because those people died. But the first mission to find Titanic was, well, you tell it. The very first ever scientific expedition to go and find the Titanic was led by a billionaire called Jack Grimm, but he had the top scientists and oceanographers on the boat to go and look for the Titanic.

And the hour before they set off, he almost ruined the entire thing because he said to the top scientists who were there, by the way, there's one more crew member that's joining us on this trip. And then he introduced them to the latest member of the crew, which was a monkey who had been trained to psychically point out where the Titanic was going to be on a map. And that's what they were going to follow to find the Titanic. And so they all said, are you nuts? We're not going on an expedition and ruining our reputations by being led by literally a monkey pointing at a map. It's either us or the monkey. And he picked the monkey. He was fortunately talked out of the monkey right at the last second and the scientist did go.

But if he had had his way, the first expedition would have been with just a monkey pointing at a map. What I find so weird about all these weird things that you talk about is a lot of them I think I should have known this like I should have heard this story before about Ringo or Ronald Reagan or so I'm really glad you found them and and we're able to share them. podcaster. His podcast is called No Such Thing As A Fish and I'll put a link to that podcast in the show notes. And his latest book is called The Theory of Everything Else, a Voyage into the World of the Weird. And there's a link to that book in the show notes as well. Thanks Dan, appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much, Mike. That was so much fun. This episode is brought to you by Dzone. For the first time ever, the 32 best soccer clubs It was so much fun. Watch every match for free on DAZN, starting on June 14th and running until July 13th.

Sign up now at dazon.com slash fifa. That's d-a-z-n dot com slash fifa. It won't take long to tell you Neutral's ingredients. Vodka, soda, natural flavors. So what should we talk about? No sugar added? Neutral. Refreshingly simple. When you look at great athletes who are at the top of their game in any sport, football, basketball, baseball, tennis, it can be a real pleasure to watch. But what you often don't think about is how they get there.

How did they become so great at what they do? And is there something to learn from them and use in our own lives to become better at what we choose to do? Well, the answer is a resounding yes, according to Sally Jenkins Sally has been a columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020 in 2021 She was named the winner of the Associated Press Red Smith Award for outstanding contributions to sports journalism. Sally is also the author of 12 books, her most recent being The Right Call, What Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life.

Hi Sally, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you for having me. So in our culture there's a lot of admiration for top athletes but what is it that you think athletes and sports can teach us about life, our own life? Athletes have a lot to teach us about performance under pressure and that we under study and under use them. Most of us who work from the neck up sitting at desks struggle to make the connection between what they do and what we do. Look, a Michael Phelps or a Peyton Manning have a lot to teach you about how to perform under pressure in your own life. So make that connection for me because it's not always easy to see how I can learn something from someone who's just a superstar at a

sport, how that impacts, how that could be used in my life. There's a truly deep intelligence going on in a great athlete who's performing under pressure, but the thing that people need to realize is that that deep intelligence is earned and it's learned. It's not natural born talent. We make the mistake so often of mistaking the ease that a great athlete performs with as something that's natural born in them. And it's really, it's truly not.

It's a method. It's a result of a great deal of dirty, tedious practice and real method and real discipline. And I think the more we learn to unpack what's in that performance, the more we can export some of the things that those people do into our own lives and our own endeavors. So let's unpack it, and let's talk about how that works.

Because I think, as you just said, we look at some athletes and we think it's just a gift. It looks so simple and so easy to them that that has no application in my life. So what is it, and how do you take that, what you see in sports, and apply it to life? Well, one of the things that you can take away from athletes is the value of physical conditioning

when it comes to executive function and judgment. There's a mountain of neuroscience that shows that people who are sitting at desks are actually working really, really hard. Decisional fatigue is huge, but that's related to physical fatigue. A grand master chess player might burn 6,000 calories in a day of chess play. So now marry that to your own life and understand that when you're trying to make critical decisions, your body is actually having a lot to say about your judgment. So that surprises me that that a chest player could burn six thousand calories

playing chess because it doesn't seem like that's a very strenuous sport. It's fascinating, isn't it? So I'll give you a couple of examples. Magnus Carlsen, who's really the regnant chess player in the world these days, you know, they have Fitbits these days in chess. There's a game within a game of putting Fitbits and other sorts of, you know, physical tools onto chess players to see what's going in their body, what's's going in their body, what's going on in their body physiologically while they're thinking.

And Magnus Carlsen, his heart rate can get up to 130 beats per minute when he's trying to make a decision at the chessboard under pressure. You know, a chess player named Mikhail Antipov measured in one tournament, he lost 560 calories in two hours of hard thinking. So these are the types of things we're talking about. It's that the stresses on your body when you're doing some really, really hard thought and particularly stressful thought can be, you know, akin to

running a marathon or some kind of really arduous physical undertaking. So this is my point that athletes have a lot to show us if we would look at them as something more than entertainment. You know, it's not an accident that NASA has begun to train astronauts very much like athletes. You know, they've adopted very, very athletic training for people who are going to be in critical situations in deep space. So what does that mean, though though for the average person to condition? Because you're not going to do what LeBron James does every day.

That's just unrealistic. Sure. But you can hydrate better. You can get your rest. You can listen to a guy like Dana Cavalea, the longtime performance coach for the New York Yankees, who actually now has a side business training executives and helping them understand what pressure is doing to your body and how to mitigate it.

So pressure is not a state of mind. It has actual physical properties. And once you understand that, you can set out to sort of counter some of its effects on you that might be undermining your performance. That's a starting space. It's just understanding what's happening in your body when you are under pressure and under stress. Well, I'd like to explore that a little more because everybody's been in the position of being under pressure, under stress, deadline,

something's due, whatever. And it does feel like a state of mind that you're in that state of mind of being under pressure. So how do you counter that? So you feel it physically, right? It's, you can sometimes feel like, you know, there's an actual weight on you. Your eyesight, you get tunnel vision.

One thing that happens to you under stress is the fight or flight reaction kicks in, and your body is actually shunting blood from your small muscle groups to your large muscle groups. There was a great example in the French Open a couple of weeks ago when a great, hugely fit young player named Carlos Alcaraz actually went into cramping on the court just under the pressure

of facing Novak Djokovic across the net, the number one player in the world. And Alcaraz wasn't cramping because he was tired. It was quite early in the match. He was cramping from nerves and stress and pressure. The guy who pioneered the best research into stress, a guy named Hans Selye, he used the word stress. He borrowed it from engineering to describe the stresses

that happen to say, you know, like a bridge when a lot of cars have been driving over it. Stress is truly a physical manifestation in your body. And when you understand that the blood is rushing from small muscle groups to large muscle groups, it starts to explain why you might be losing fine motor control as you are, like, let's take an example,

typing on Deadline at the Super Bowl, to use a personal example. I'm here to tell you, like, my typing gets really, really bad under pressure because I'm losing blood in my fingers. That's literally the reason why. So you start to suck at the thing you really need to be good at, which really kind of ruins everything. We talk about choking a lot.

And you'll watch a great tennis player double fault. And you're like, how could that person double fault at this stage of the match when they're a top five ranked player? How could a great golfer on the PGA Tour miss a three-foot putt? Well, stress is the reason and you and me are experiencing the very same things is the truth. But not everybody chokes and not even people who choke choke all the time. So I wonder why?

Well, people choke more than you think. Athletes are far more vulnerable to pressure than we realize. We tend to think of a LeBron James as someone who ordinarily just performs at a really, really high level under pressure. But the fact is if you examine LeBron James's statistics in the clutch, what they call clutch shooting in the NBA, even the greatest clutch shooter in the NBA, you have to understand, is missing well over 50% of his shots. It's not that athletes perform at a really, really, really high level under pressure. What the best ones are able to do is learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary everyday performance is what's coming forward.

They're just operating under their own standard. They're not achieving some other worldly level. They are just being themselves in the moment. And that's the real key of dealing with stress. That's what real grace under pressure is. It's not rising to the moment. It's simply not deteriorating under the pressure. But haven't you ever been in your line of work,

as you say, when you're typing at the end of the Super Bowl and your typing sucks and you've got to fight that? But haven't there been other times where you've been under similar pressure and somehow you just flow and somehow it just happens for you? Yes, and what athletes do is they examine the difference between those two circumstances with really, really fine diagnosis.

And that is what I've learned to do from them more than anything else as a writer, is to understand that athletes aren't confused about the difference between their good performances and their bad performances. The rest of us can be. I can remember an editor asking me once, do you know the difference between that story you wrote that was really, really good and this other story you wrote that wasn't so

good? I was a much younger writer and the truth is that I did not understand the total difference between those two stories. One thing that athletes, great athletes like a Peyton Manning has taught me to do just by covering him and interviewing him over the years is to understand how to get more consistent and how to create the circumstances that allow the good performance to come through. So I'll give you just one example from my own life. I go into the Super Bowl much more prepared than I used to. On the day that I know I'm going to have to write a thousand words in two hours

or less on deadline, when the game probably wasn't even decided until the final two minutes of the game, you know, late at night, I make sure I have like a good 500 to 600 words of material ready at my left hand, of material I've been preparing all week long from listening to interviews, from reading statistics and understanding where the pressure points in the game are liable to be, because it's a lot easier to write 400 to 500 words

under pressure than a thousand words under pressure, right? So if you have some material ready to go and you've really done your homework, your flow, that flow performance that you're talking about is much more likely to come forward. And the same thing is true if you haven't been eating junk food in the press box all afternoon,

which is something else I used to do quite a lot of. So those are two pretty simple, basic examples, but they make a world of difference in performance. Let's talk about practice, because you hear that practice is what makes success, that you've got to put in the time, the 10,000 hours. You've got to practice, practice, practice. A lot of people practice, and they still

don't get to the top of their game. So what's the deal? There's a lot of bad practice in the world, Mike. I mean, I think a lot of people don't understand what the right kind of practice is. There's a lot of purposeless activity, right? A lot of meaningless activity where people think that practice is just head banging. Really good practice is what's called known as deliberate practice, which is you diagnose a weakness and then you specifically work

on measurable improvement at that weakness. I'll give you one example, Peyton Manning, who I love to use just because he was a Hall of Famer and a Super Bowl winner, and he's also very, very self-aware with his explanations of how he was able to perform. Peyton Manning told me that as a younger quarterback, his record by his third year in the NFL was just 32 and 32. He was a 500 quarterback who led the league in interceptions. One of his issues was his feet were not great under pressure. They had a tendency to jackhammer and he'd get very stutter steppy. He sat down with his coaches, Tony Dungy

and his quarterback's coach, Jim Caldwell, and they examined tape of every single interception he had thrown in his first three years in the league, every single one. And then they looked at a different tape, what Peyton calls a more hidden tape, which was tape of all of the passes that he threw that should have been intercepted,

but he just got a little lucky. They diagnosed the commonalities in all of those poor throws and all of those circumstances. It turned out he was nervous. His feet got very, very nervous when large defensive linemen were hurling themselves below his knees. So understandably, you know, that kind of pressure made his feet unstable. The drill that they designed, the coaches would take very, very heavy sandbags and throw them at Manning's feet in practice until he learned to set his feet and get more stable under pressure.

And that cleaned up a lot of his errors. So that's an interesting example and a very hardcore example of using practice in the right way, you know, a directed correction, not just head banging, going out and throwing a million balls, you know. If Peyton Manning had gone out there and just thrown pass after pass after pass,

he wasn't going to get any better at the thing that was really holding him back. Yeah Well, you see that I mean that's the difference and maybe it's just a semantic thing, but that's the difference between Practice what I think of his practice which is doing a lot of repetition You could say it's conditioning and what you just described which is coaching it takes like another person to come in and identify those flaws and help you figure out, which a lot of us don't. We don't have a coach. We have to figure it out ourselves.

Correct. And Eric Erickson, the great sociologist who is really the guy who was the basis for that sort of myth about 10,000 hours of practice makes an expert. It drove Erickson a little crazy because while there's some truth to that, there's a difference between practice, which is what you and me do when we say pick up the guitar and we want to get pretty good at the guitar. We learn the guitar, we practice the guitar, and then we sort of plateau. There's a state at which we don't get a whole lot better. Or tennis, you know, mostly because when we take up tennis, we get to a place where we're

pretty good and then we run around our weak backhand for the rest of our lives. The really, people who really, really excel at something, they use those 10,000 hours to find what they're not very good at. They work far more on their weaknesses than their strengths. And that's a critical distinction and that's what Erickson called deliberate practice. So there's a big difference between just learning scales at the piano and then working at something, you know, to understand where your, you know, literally your weakest finger is on your left hand at the piano and why you're having trouble mastering a certain measure of music. you know, literally your weakest finger is on your left hand at the piano

and why you're having trouble mastering a certain measure of music. But don't you think though that there are just some people, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, those kind of people, they just have something that other people don't have? No, I don't believe that. And I base this on 30 years of covering those people. I don't believe they have something extra than you or me. It's taken me a long time to get to this conclusion, but I truly don't. What they have is love of their craft.

They have found something they truly, truly love to do, and they have gone all in with every piece of themselves. If you and me found the thing that we love to do with that level of enthusiasm, I am 100% certain that we can achieve the same level of success in our own fields or our own endeavors. It's about going all in. So talk about failure because that's a thing that stops a lot of people and it certainly discourages a lot of people and yet it's part of the game. It's the thing that stops most people.

It's the thing that stops almost everybody. The separator between the people I'm talking about, you know, a Peyton Manning, who again was just 32 and 32, his third year in the league. The thing that they have is resilience and they've acquired it. That's an acquired trait, resilience. We're not born with it. You develop it through failure very much like engineers sort of understand and entrepreneurs understand that you have to stress things and break things in order to improve them and to arrive at

better answers. The great big wave surfer, Laird Hamilton, who I've interviewed quite a lot over the years, including for this project, Laird is really eloquent because he's an engineer and a builder and an entrepreneur, as well as the greatest big wave surfer who ever lived. As a designer of lots of different types of surfboards and instruments for traveling over water, Laird understands that your first couple of tries are going to be failures. You know, he's built a lot of things that broke in the water, and that needed improvement. And he

feels the same way about the human body and the human psyche in approaching big wave surfing. And so athletes are good failures. They're gracious losers. The great ones, you never hear them bitch about the officiating. You never hear them talk about how they got screwed on the field or got a bad break. Those things do happen to them, but they don't focus on those aspects of the outcome. They focus on their own performance.

And they're very, very resilient about unpacking the result, learning from it, and doing it a little bit better the next time. One of my favorite stories is the story of the Kansas City Chiefs, who played probably the greatest football game, NFL game I ever saw in person against the New England Patriots and Tom Brady a few years ago. And they had the Patriots and Brady on the ropes in the final two minutes of the game when they intercepted Tom Brady. And the interception was called back by an off-sides penalty, a flag.

A guy had lined up four inches off-. And Brady got the ball back, completed a pass, drove his team down the field to tie the game and send it into overtime. And the Patriots won the game in overtime to go on to the Super Bowl. The Kansas City Chiefs and Andy Reid just absolutely refused to scapegoat the guy who had lined up off sides and all Andy Reid said after the game was, listen, we all could have been four inches better. And for the next year, the chief's mantra was four inches better, four inches better. And the predictable thing happened. They won the Super Bowl the following year as a result of that attitude. Will you have such a unique perspective on the relationship between sports and what it

can teach us about life. I really appreciate you sharing these stories. I've been talking with Sally Jenkins. She's a columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. The name of her book is The Right Call, What Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you Sally. Thank you Mike. You've probably shopped at a Trader Joe's before. After all, there are over 400 stores in 42 states. And while there, you may have noticed that the people who

work there are particularly friendly and happy to help. That friendly nature of their employees is considered part of the secret of their success. Instead of calling their workers employees, they use nautical terms. Crew members are entry-level workers. Merchants are crew members who've received recognition for excellent customer service, mates are the assistant managers, and captains are store leaders or managers promoted from within the company.

You can tell different employees ranks by their shirts. Crew members wear single color t-shirts with a flower on the back. Captains wear button shirts with Hawaiian prints. And you've likely heard a bell rung every once in a while in a Trader Joe's. And apparently those bells are just calls for help. One bell is to signal to open another register. Two calls are for general support, such as replacing a damaged product at checkout.

And three rings is a call for manager assistance. And that is something you should know. We're here cranking out three shows a week and we would love it if you would share what we do with friends of yours and help us grow our audience. I'm Mike Herothers, 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. 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 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 longestshortesttime.com. You might think you know fairy tales,

and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring boring but the real grim fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark and they were often very grim. On Grim Grimmer Grimmest we tell a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids. Perfect for car rides or screen-free entertainment, Grim Grimmer Grimmest activates kids' imaginations and instigates fun conversations because fairy tales speak to all of us at a very deep, primal level, and they raise interesting topics and questions that are worth chewing over together as a family. Every episode is rated Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmest, so you, your kids, your whole family can choose what is the right level of Gr for you. Though if you're listening with grandma, she's just gonna go for grimist.

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