Something You Should Know - Why You Have Trouble Sleeping & How to Fix It & How to Get the World’s Attention

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

80% of infectious disease are spread by touch. This is why it is so important to wash your hands. Still, most people don’t wash their hands correctly. Listen to discover the right way to wash your hands and which spots on your hand that are not getting clean enough. http://www.hardydiagnostics.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/Hand-Washing.pdf You have to sleep – and you probably have to sleep more than you do. That’s the message from neurologist Dr. Guy Leschziner. Guy heads up The Sleep Disorders Centre in London which is one of the largest sleep services in Europe and he is author of the book, The Nocturnal Brain: Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep (https://amzn.to/2lSckr0). Listen as he explains why so many of us struggle with sleeping well and sleeping enough and what everyone can do to get better sleep.  If you work in a job you don’t like, you really should quit. Listen as I explain the very real negative consequences of staying at a job that you hate and that stresses you out. https://news.osu.edu/news/2016/08/22/lousy-jobs/ Whether you have a business, an idea or the next big thing – the hardest thing is to get the world to pay attention to you. There is so much competition for people’s attention and yet some companies and people manage to do it well. Ben Parr is the former editor-at-large for Mashable, managing partner of DominateFund, a strategic venture capital firm, a former columnist CNET and author of the book Captivology: The Science of Capturing People’s Attention (http://amzn.to/2euC4Sd). Listen as Ben explains what successful companies and people do to capture attention and how you can too. This Week’s Sponsors -Calming Comfort. To get 15% off the displayed price go to www.CalmingComfortBlanket.com and use the promos code: something. -SimpliSafe. Get free shipping and a money back guarantee go to www.SimpliSafe.com/something -Noom. To start your trial go to www.Noom.com/something  -Babbel. Lean a new language. Try it for free at www.Babbel.com  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, do you honestly wash your hands as well as you should? I'll explain why it's so important. Then, if you're not sleeping the right amount, you could be asking for trouble. I think on a population basis, we know that sleeping very little or sleeping a lot is associated with a range of negative health consequences,

including mortality, the most negative health consequence. Also, if you don't like your job, there's a really good reason to quit and how to get people to pay attention to your ideas in a very crowded and noisy world. You know, in 1986, there was a study that estimated that we were exposed to about 40, 45 newspapers worth of information daily. By 2006, that number jumped to 176. And today, it's probably over 1,000. And when you put all that together, you have a real issue when it comes to capturing the

attention of others. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives and one I've started listening to

called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. 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 to Something You Should Know. We're heading into cooler weather, and cooler weather typically means cold and flu season. So I want to start today by talking about washing your hands, because 80% of all infectious diseases are spread by touch. The Center for Disease Control recommends that you wash your hands for at least 15 seconds. However, studies show that the reduction of skin bacteria

is nearly 10 times greater if you wash your hands with soap for 30 seconds rather than 15 seconds. Now, 95% of the population says they wash their hands after using a public toilet. However, when 8,000 people were monitored across five large cities in the U.S., they found that the actual number was more like 67%. When people wash their hands, the most commonly missed areas are fingertips and fingernails.

And here's something else important to consider. Hot or warm water is no more effective than cold water when you wash your hands. It may feel better, but it doesn't help you clean your hands any better. And you should ask your doctor to wash his or her hands as well. A recent poll of pediatric ICU physicians showed that they claimed their rate of washing their hands in between patients was 73%, but when followed and observed, the hand-washing rate was found to be less than 10%. And that is something you should know. There is not a person alive, I suspect, who hasn't at some point in their life struggled with sleep.

You can't fall asleep. You can't stay asleep. You sleep, but you're still tired all the time. You sleep too much or you sleep too little. Sleep can be a real problem for virtually everyone. And here with the latest research, techniques, and advice on the subject is Dr. Guy Leschziner. He is a neurologist in London where he leads the Sleep Disorder Center, which is one of the largest sleep services in Europe. He's also author of the book The Nocturnal Brain, Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep. Hi, Guy. Thanks for joining me from London.

Thanks very much for having me on. So I must tell you that I love the subject of sleep. We've talked about it a couple of times on this podcast. And one of the things that I love about it is that, you know, it obviously affects everyone. Everyone has different experiences with sleep. Everyone has a different experiences with sleep. Everyone has a different relationship with sleep. And what is your relationship with sleep? Well, I've always been fascinated with sleep. Really, even as a schoolboy, I was fascinated

with neuroscience and read the books of Oliver Sacks. And it was really reading those stories that got me fascinated by the world of neurology and as a as an undergraduate although historically in the UK and and pretty much everywhere in the world sleep has been very very poorly taught it's been largely ignored but as an undergraduate when I was at Oxford I was asked to go away away and write a thesis on why we dream. And what occurred to me at that point was, first of all, how little we knew about sleep and the fact that despite us doing this for eight hours a day, we have no real understanding of why we do what we do. It was a really fascinating area that subsequently has taken me into all sorts of areas of medicine because we now understand that sleep and sleep medicine has links with every aspect of human physiology and human medicine.

It is so interesting that sleep is such a dominant part of our lives. We spend a lot of time doing it, and when we don't do it well, it screws up the other time when we're not doing it. And yet, as you say, it's kind of almost a nuisance. Like, well, you have to do that, and you have to sleep, and yeah, I guess it's important. But nobody really spends a lot of time thinking a whole lot about it. But it's so critical.

Well, it's staggering, really, if you think about it. If somebody were to ask you, well, why do we eat or why do we drink? And you turned around to them and said, well, you know, I don't know. It would be laughable. Yet this fundamental aspect of our lives is absolutely crucial to every aspect of our being, we really understand incredibly poorly. So why do we sleep? What happens when we sleep? What does it do for us beyond the obvious, you know, then we're not so tired the next day? But what is going on there? I think the answer is that there's no one function of sleep, that sleep has a multitude of functions. So we know that it is primarily controlled by the brain and many of its functions

are for regulation of brain function, of normal brain functioning. So that sleep is part of the housekeeping that is required to maintain our brain which is a the most metabolically active organ in our bodies in in fighting shape we know that sleep has important functions in terms of making connections between different cells within our brain, sometimes actually pruning those connections. But it's also involved in, for example, flushing out toxins or metabolites, substances that have built up over the course of the day out of our brains and back into the rest of our systems. But it goes well beyond the brain in that we now understand that sleep is absolutely vital for regulation of cardiovascular function, for kidney function, for healing and restoration of various aspects of our

bodies, regulation of our immune system, and so on. So an absolute array of functions. When we talk about quality of sleep, not all sleep is the same and that that you could sleep eight hours and maybe feel really rested and somebody else could sleep the same eight hours and and not feel so rested yes yes that's absolutely right i i think that some of that is related to the fact that sleep is not a single state so we often think of sleep and wake as being binary states so either you're awake or either you're asleep but actually what we know is that sleep consists of multiple different stages so we at its most basic level we divide sleep up into into REM sleep or rapid eye movement sleep where the brain appears to be very active when we monitor the activity of the brain using electrodes on the scalp.

Actually, it looks rather similar to wake on that basis. And then non-REM sleep, which is where the brain sleep that we most associate with restorative sleep or sleep that makes you feel better when you wake up, there are different stages of sleep. our night has gone, sometimes bears relatively little relationship to the objective measurement of sleep that we can record when you come in for a sleep test in a sleep laboratory. What about people's sleep requirement? You hear people say, I can get by on a couple hours of sleep. I'm one of those people that if I don't get a good night's sleep, I feel the effects. It's I suffer the next day. And some people seem to skip by on very little. What's the science say? Well, I think on a population basis, we know that sleeping very little or sleeping a lot is associated with a range of negative health consequences, including mortality, the most

negative health consequence. So people who sleep a very short period, you know, usually less than about six hours, certainly have an increased risk of mortality compared to those who sleep seven or eight hours. But it's important to understand that that is on a population basis and that for each individual, what is seen as a normal sleep requirement is perhaps slightly different. And that's a function of the quality of your sleep. So whether or not you've got anything else going on with your sleep, like, for example, sleep apnea, this breathing condition that disrupts the quality of your sleep because your airway is constantly collapsing but it's also a function

of your genes in that we know that there are a number of genes that influence our sleep requirements so for example i have a few families that i've seen in whom everybody in that family sleeps a very short duration and doesn't seem to have any negative effects of sleeping, say, four or five hours a night. But it's also important to understand that some people are resistant to the effects of sleep deprivation in terms of how sleepy they feel, but not necessarily resistant to the effects of sleep deprivation in terms of, for example, their cognitive function, how easy they find to perform particular tasks, or how good their memory is, for example. So just because you don't necessarily feel sleepy when you're sleep deprived doesn't mean that you don't have any consequences of

that sleep disruption per se. Can you, quote, make in other words you have trouble sleeping and so you add extra hours on the weekend and and it all evens out? Well the evidence suggests that if you sustain a significant sleep debt which is how we term it that if you're losing quite a lot of sleep during the week then actually it's quite difficult to make that up by lying in at the weekend. And that some of those cognitive effects of being sleep deprived during the week persist on a Monday morning. So the answer to that is, if you really are burning the candle at both ends, then actually catching up at the weekend is very difficult. In terms of, and I've heard the expression, you ends, then actually catching up at the weekend is very difficult.

In terms of, and I've heard the expression, you know, sleep hygiene, that how we create our sleep environment, what we, the rituals we go through, those kinds of things can have a real impact on our sleep. Yeah, sleep hygiene is a horrible term. It really conjures up images of, you know, sleeping in a dirty bed. Essentially, what we mean by sleep hygiene, as you say, is those behaviors that are conducive to a good night's sleep. And some of those are really obvious, you know, like not drinking several cups of coffee before you go to bed, not smoking immediately before you go to bed or consuming other nicotine containing substances sleeping in a quiet environment some of them are becoming increasingly well known like avoiding bright light in the evening so there is some evidence to suggest that what we do by exposing ourselves to bright light in the evenings is suppress our natural

secretion of melatonin so melatonin is this substance that an area of the brain called the pineal gland puts out that that is the chemical signal to the brain and indeed the rest of the body that it's time to go to sleep so by exposing yourself to bright light in the evenings what you may actually be doing is having a negative effect both on sleep quality, but also making it more difficult for you to get off to sleep in the first instance. When people have trouble sleeping, are there a million different reasons depending on the person or is there typically a reason or two why? We know that one of the major causes of difficulty sleeping, insomnia, is actually a condition called psychophysiological insomnia, where psychological factors largely surrounding your association, your conscious and unconscious association with being in the bed and drifting off to sleep are replaced by negative

associations so rather than associating bed with being a comfortable sleeping environment where you feel cozy and you feel the warmth of and the security of knowing that you're going to drift off to sleep it's replaced by that stress that agitation that anxiety that you're actually not going to drift off to sleep and that you're going to lie there awake for prolonged periods of time so rather than the bed being an inviting place of comfort it often gets that that psychological association is replaced by a feeling that your bed is an instrument of torture that it's the place where you go to where you will have difficulties dropping off to sleep and will stay awake for a prolonged period

of time. And for many people, it's addressing those psychological factors that is actually the solution to actually treating their insomnia. For other people, however, there are many biological factors that result in poor sleep, be that medication that you're prescribed for something else be it a range of sleep disorders like obstructive sleep apnea or a condition called restless leg syndrome so there are many different reasons but we know that by far the commonest is insomnia which affects about one in three adults at some point every year and about one in ten adults on a regular long-term basis. So sometimes I'll have trouble sleeping because, you know, something exciting happened or is about to happen or, you know, anticipating tomorrow and is that just, is that insomnia or is that just something exciting is happening?

Well, that's just normal. That's a normal response to what's going on in your life. I think that one of the things that's underappreciated is that the range of normal when it comes to sleep is actually quite large. And just because you have a few nights where you don't sleep particularly well, that doesn't constitute insomnia. It doesn't constitute an ailment. It is part of normal life. I'm speaking today with Dr. Guy Leschziner. He is a neurologist in London, and the name of his book is The Nocturnal Brain, Nightmares, Neuroscience and the Secret World of Sleep. Hi, this is Rob Benedict.

And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride.

We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll, of course, have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left-field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show.

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So, Guy, are there things that people either don't know that if they did know would help them sleep better, or perhaps some things people think they know that by not knowing the truth, are helping them sleep worse. You know, people don't appreciate that caffeine hangs around for a very long time, particularly if you consume a lot of it. People, especially nowadays, are very used to using gadgets, you know, their cell phones or laptops in bed. And that's not very conducive,ive firstly because of the issue of light exposure but secondly also that's quite a mentally stimulating activity but there are you know

one of one of the issues is that there are a range of sleep disorders that are very poorly known about not just by the general population but also by physicians and in many cases we often see individuals who clearly have had a problem with a sleep disorder for many years that has gone unrecognized. So it's knowing about these sleep disorders, recognizing them as sleep disorders, that is really the first step to getting appropriate treatment. When people are diagnosed with a true sleep disorder, it's not just that they're having some trouble sleeping now and again, but they have something really wrong. Are these sleep disorders generally based in biology or psychology or what? Both really, because the psychological and the physical interact quite

a lot. There are some sleep disorders that are clearly purely biological. Things like obstructive sleep apnea, which is, you know, people who are snoring and collapsing their airway in the middle of the night. Things like restless leg syndrome, which is physical. Things like narcolepsy, which is a very pure neurological disorder that results in damage to a very small part of the brain. But for some individuals, there are sleep disorders that have inputs from both. So for example, people who sleepwalk, we know that actually the basis of sleepwalking is purely biological. It's as a result of different parts of the brain being asleep whilst other parts of the brain are awake. But obviously, those events can be influenced by daytime stress,

sleep deprivation, poor sleep hygiene. So this is a good example of an interaction of the psychological and the behavioral and the environmental and the physical. What about dreaming? Why do we dream? Is it just the brain's got to do something while you're sleeping, so it does that and it plays little movies? Or is there more to it or what? Well, I think I mentioned at the start of this interview that one of the essays that I was sent off to write was, why do we dream? And I'm not sure that we have any better inkling now than when I was writing that essay over 25 years ago. I think we know that dreaming probably has more than one function and it probably has different functions at different stages of our

lives. So there are lots of theories but none have been definitively proven. One of the theories is that dreaming is absolutely crucial to the development of consciousness in early life, so what differentiates us from other animals. But it also appears that dreaming is of significant importance in terms of memory, in terms of emotional processing, in terms of learning something about our environment. And one of the popular theories about dreaming is that actually it creates a

virtual environment in which we can tweak our model of the world around us so that we're integrating the sum of all our past experiences to tweak what we understand about the world around us. What do you think? I mean, people have theorized that, you know, dreaming predicts the future, that dreaming helps you solve problems that you can't solve while you're awake. What's your sense? I think to argue that it predicts the future

is very difficult from a scientific rationalist perspective. But certainly there is some evidence that REM is linked to creativity. So REM sleep being the stage of sleep that we most associate with dreaming. You know, there are many, many examples of people who have dreamt particular songs or particular works of literature. You know, I think it was Paulccartney and yesterday is often um uh is often used as an example of that he said that uh he he that came to him in a dream so so you know clearly there is uh potentially something in the fact that rem is about creating links between

different parts of the brain which facilitates creativity this idea idea that, you know, if you dream about this, it must mean that, that's a pretty weak connection. I think that has largely fallen away as a popular idea in the world of neuroscience. I've read and heard it said that one of the ways, if you're having trouble sleeping, one of the ways to improve your sleep is to go to bed at the same time every night and get up at the same time every morning, seven days a week, do it regularly, and that that consistency will help improve pretty much anybody's sleep. Yes? Yes, the brain is a creature of habit. And, you know, sleep is a learned habit habit and as such can be unlearned i think the exception

to that is that occasionally i see people who have become so obsessed by their sleep that they actually if they don't meet that rigid schedule they become very very stressed and then don't sleep at all as a result so so there is a line to be trodden, balancing your habits, but making sure that it doesn't become an obsession. and I set the alarm for 5 o'clock in the morning, I'll wake up about two minutes before 5 just before the alarm gets off. I don't know how I do that. How do, what is that? It is important to stress that we all within our brains have a clock. We have a circadian rhythm. There's a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus

that regulates our circadian rhythms throughout our bodies. It's also important to understand that sleep, as I said, is not a continuous state. So people are constantly having brief awakenings or having very, very light sleep. And so it's quite possible that there are some circuits within the brain that maintain a degree of awareness or a degree of consciousness in fact that's what we think is happening during lucid dreaming which is when people have an awareness of the fact that they're in a dream and can actually sometimes exert conscious control over their dream these are networks that are responsible for consciousness

that are firing during our dreaming sleep. And they probably fire in different stages of sleep as well. So, you know, to think of the brain as being switched off during sleep is quite incorrect. There are a lot of electronic devices, sleep trackers that people wear to kind of track how much they sleep, how much they move around when they sleep how often they wake up that kind of thing what do you think about those sleep trackers the answer to that is is mixed the difficulty that I have with sleep trackers is that first of all they sometimes engender a degree of obsession ality about sleep but also people may be drawing very wrong

conclusions about the nature of their sleep in that we know that sleep trackers do have issues in terms of their accuracy they're good at telling us how long we spend in bed they're okay at telling us how much sleep we get but they're not very good at telling us what stages of sleep we're in and people often become quite obsessed about you know the fact that they're not getting as much deep sleep as they feel they should or that their sleep tracker shows that they're waking up multiple times a night and that can actually drive the insomnia and can make things worse and actually when you talk to people with significant insomnia they they will often say, you know, when I'm sitting on the sofa watching television or listening to music or reading a book, I will doze off.

And once I get into bed, I find it incredibly difficult. So it's when they're not thinking about the process of going to sleep, when they're not in bed thinking about sleep, that they're actually far more able to fall asleep. Well, this is really helpful because, as I said, so many people, pretty much everybody, at some point in their life has trouble with their sleep. And this is some excellent information that can really help everybody. Dr. Guy Leschzener has been my guest. He is a neurologist in London, and he is author of the book

The Nocturnal Brain, Nightmares, Neuroscience, and the Secret World of Sleep. You'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Thanks, doctor. Okay. Bye-bye. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong?

And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. All of us have an idea, a project, a cause, something we wish we could get the world to pay attention to.

But getting the world's attention, getting anyone's attention, is harder now than it's ever been. Yet some people are able to do it. So how do they do it? That's what we're about to find out from my next guest, who is Ben Parr. Ben is an award-winning journalist, author, entrepreneur, investor, keynote speaker, and an expert on growth and attention. He was editor-at-large for Mashable, columnist for CNET, and his book is called Captivology, the Science of Capturing People's Attention. Welcome, Ben, and let's start with why it's so hard to get people to pay attention. The science says that we're exposed to more information than ever. You know, in 1986, there was a study that estimated that we were exposed to about 40, 45 newspapers' worth of information daily.

By 2006, that number jumped to 176. And today, it's gotten even higher, probably over 1,000. And more than 90% of the world's information has been created in the last three years alone. And when you put all that together, you have a real issue when it comes to capturing the attention of others, because there's just so much information. It's both a good thing and a bad thing. Because if you've got information you want to get out there, you've got quite a battle on your hands, because so does everybody else. Absolutely. And there's so many great causes, passions, ideas, startups that deserve attention, but a lot of people don't know how to get their ideas to the forefront. So let's talk about that. I mean, some people seem to do it pretty well, and most of us don't. And so what's the difference? I think the biggest difference is that a lot of people just don't understand

how attention works or don't actively court it. And they're the ones, unfortunately, missing out because the ones who understand attention and the ones who actively quarter for their passions and their projects and ideas are the ones who capture attention the most. Difference between, you know, building a Facebook and building, you know, a social network nobody ever hears of or a charity that makes it to the mainstream or a charity that just doesn't go anywhere. So help me understand how attention works. So attention in my model in captivology is a three-stage process, and that's how people should think about it. In the first stage, immediate attention, it is our immediate reaction to certain sights, sounds, and colors. It's our immediate reaction

to a gunshot or a symbol or a color. But you move on from short attention to short-term focus. It's our focus maybe on a song or a show or a movie. And then you move to the final stage, and the most important stage, long attention, which is our long-term interest and our long-term fascination with something. It's the difference between listening to a Beyonce song and becoming a lifelong fan of Beyonce. It's the difference between looking at an Apple phone or looking at a commercial and becoming a lifelong customer of Apple. How does Beyonce or Apple get some people to become lifelong fans, whereas other

people just enjoy their music and move on? What are they doing to pull those people in, and why are some people resisting? What they do is they walk their audience through those three stages of attention. They do something to initially capture their attention, and then they walk them through, and then they build a deeper relationship. One of the triggers I talk about in the book is acknowledgement, which is that we pay attention to those who pay attention to us and provide us with validation or an identity. Part of the reason why Beyonce and artists like Taylor Swift or One Direction or that

have been so successful is because it's not just being a fan of them. It's an identity. You know, it's not just Beyonce. It's the Bayhive. It's not just Justin Bieber. It's Beliebers. It's creating a community that people want to be a part of. And that's among the most powerful things you can do.

It's the same thing for great products. They build great communities. So how do you do that? How do you, is it a characteristic of the person? Is it salesmanship? I mean, what is it that you actually do to get that? It's provided validation and acknowledgement. And so the science, again, shows that we pay deep attention to those who provide us with validation. We don't want to pay attention to somebody who seems in it for just themselves. And so one example, one person I interviewed was Jonah Preddy, the founder of BuzzFeed. And what BuzzFeed does is if you read their articles and their article titles,

they're really about validating their audience. They have things like 54 things that Minnesotans are too humble to brag about. And what happens is that people who are of that identity, in this case Minnesotans, share it like a beacon. And the reason is because it validates an aspect of their identity. And that's a fundamental human need, but not a lot of companies really think about, how do I validate my audience? How do I acknowledge my audience? That's brilliant. And that's a great example of exactly that,

because who in Minnesota isn't going to share that with everybody? Exactly. And they do it, and BuzzFeed does it incredibly well. And sadly, a lot of brands don't. Why don't they? Is it just they don't get it? I think it's a combination of they don't get it and they just don't know. That's part of the reason why I wrote Captivology, because I feel like a lot of people don't know these, why certain people pay attention and don't understand, you know, why is it that certain communities and certain companies and certain people are more captivating? In this case, it really is about acknowledging others.

It's the same reason why Kickstarter and Indiegogo have done so well, because people get to participate, feel acknowledged, feel validated, are part of something greater than just themselves. Doesn't being first help, too, though? Being first absolutely does help, but being first doesn't always mean you win. One of the other triggers I discussed is the disruption trigger, which is a great tool for capturing attention. And the science, again, shows that we pay attention to the things that violate our expectations.

And that's because it's a threat assessment for us. We're trying to find out, you know, if we're sitting at a bar and suddenly a clown walks up to us and, like, hugs us, we're going to pay attention, because that's not normal, and we have to figure out, is this a good thing? Maybe it's a friend, or is this a bad thing? Maybe it's someone trying to mug us. But at least it got your attention. Yes, there is such a thing between positive and negative attention. You know, Patagonia, a couple years ago, they did a campaign called Don't Buy This Jacket, and that's a thing that a clothing brand shouldn't say. But when they went deeper, they did a campaign called Don't Buy This Jacket. And that's a thing that a clothing brand shouldn't say.

But when they went deeper, they talked about how they wanted to help you keep your jackets and your clothing as good as they could be and environmentally friendly and help you repair it. And you know what happened when they had that campaign? Their sales more than doubled over the next couple of years. Just because of that connection, that feeling that they're validating, they care about me, so I'll care about them. They disrupted people's expectations, and then they validated their audience. Well, what about that idea of reciprocity? Is that part of this?

Oh, absolutely. Enabling participation is a key element to attention. It's, again, part of that acknowledgement process. Again, what happens when you look at YouTube stars? They do a great job in the modern era of reaching out to their fans, directly interacting with them, of making them feel acknowledged and asking them for feedback and comments and advice. It's part of the reason why now lots of teenagers go wild for YouTube stars much more than they do for traditional celebrities.

Do you think that that's somewhat generational, though? That would older people, if they did watch those YouTube stars, feel about them the same way as younger people do? Or is this just a younger people thing, or what? I think that it's another effect that I talk about in the book, which I call the framing trigger. And it's that we pay attention to the things that fall within our worldview, within our frame of reference. It's the reason, for example, why talking about global warming will have a completely different reaction between two people on opposite coasts of the

country. And it's the same thing. The new generation has grown up with YouTube and YouTube stars and this kind of connection. And so this is their level of celebrity. And it's the same thing. The new generation has grown up with YouTube and YouTube stars and this kind of connection. And so this is their level of celebrity. And it's not the same, at least for most adults, because they didn't grow up with YouTube. And they have a different frame of reference. And you could expect this frame of reference to change with each generation. So it sounds like these things are pretty deeply based in human nature. That, yeah, the players change and the technology changes,

but this really is human nature. Absolutely, and I think what the difference between now and maybe back then was, now we actually have the scientific knowledge to understand why these things happen and how they work psychologically, and we didn't have that even 20 years ago. And that's part of the reason why I went forth and wrote this book, because this knowledge, I think, is very useful and very powerful for lots of people. Can you give me an example or two of somebody who you've mentioned BuzzFeed, but somebody else or one or two other companies or people that do this really well?

David Copperfield. And David Copperfield has done a fantastic job of this. And the reason why is because he thinks very thoughtfully about every aspect of how his audience is going to react to his presentation. He's a master at the frame of reference. He thinks about how his audience is going to view or feel something and builds around that feeling and builds around getting them to participate and to feel like they're involved and feel just joy and magic without it being about himself and making it more about them. Another good example, Shigeru Miyamoto, who I interviewed, who's the creator of Super

Mario, and they did a fantastic job of creating not just a character who's iconic, Mario, but creating a game series that's lasted for several decades. So why do you suppose there are some brands, some companies, some people who don't jump on this bandwagon? If it is as clear as you paint the picture, it seems like everybody should be doing this. So is it just a matter of knowledge and people have to learn about this and then they'll catch on? I think more and more people will realize that you have to go to your audience and you have to validate them and you have to capture their attention in order to succeed.

And just a lot of people maybe are set in their ways and go by the old methods, and those methods don't work anymore in an era where we've completely changed how information works. And so the ones who are going to succeed, the ones who are succeeding now, are the ones who have adapted to the modern social media era, filled with information, and found ways to rise above the noise. I can imagine people listening to this and thinking, well, you know, this doesn't really apply to me because what he's talking about are big ideas, the next big thing, rather than the more mundane, you know, I just, I'm just selling what I sell. And there's a lot of other people who do the same thing. It's going to be hard to capture people's attention with an idea that's been around

a long time and that people are already familiar with. I disagree. idea that's been around a long time and that people are already familiar with. I disagree. I think that it's absolutely possible, even regardless of whether you're a salesman or a teacher or a businessman or a businesswoman or an entrepreneur. It's a little bit of going through those stages. It's about either building that relationship or using creative techniques to really make what you do interesting and what you're selling interesting. I can think of interesting plenty of ways. You could make something that maybe seems dull on the surface fascinating to lots of

people. It's just a matter of people putting the effort and trying and having the knowledge of how to capture attention. And to the people who do this well, did they stumble along the way? I mean, is this a science, or is this you kind of have to feel your way around? It's both, you know. You can be equipped with the knowledge of attention and the science of it, but then it's all about the execution after that and the trial and error.

You know, great companies, for example, are very metric-driven. They're looking at the statistics of which things resonate with their audience, which ones don't. And the ones who maybe make a mistake, they quickly apologize and they move on. And I even talk about the difference between, you know, a short scandal and a long scandal. In the end, it's just really, you just got to go out there and you just got to go try things. And you got to get to know your audience, especially. Well, in this increasingly noisy world where so many people are trying to get everyone's attention, this is really important. Ben Parr has been my guest. His book is Captivology, the Science of Capturing People's

Attention. And you will find a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, Ben. If you hate your job, you should probably leave as soon as possible. It turns out that job dissatisfaction has real consequences. In a study at Ohio State, people who reported greater levels of dissatisfaction with their jobs when they were in their 20s and 30s scored lower on measures of overall mental health by the time they hit their 40s compared to those who had been consistently happy with their work. While the study started analyzing guys when they were in their 20s, it's likely that older men dissatisfied with their jobs face similar effects as well. It turns out that being unhappy at work also takes a physical toll. Those people with low job satisfaction were more likely to suffer

from 13 different health complications, including frequent colds and sinus problems, than those who enjoyed their work. The good news is that if you leave a job you hate for one that is more satisfying, many of these problems just disappear. And that is something you should know. And now I will simply disappear after I ask you to please share this podcast with someone you know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. to something you religious group. Enter federal agent VB Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues

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