Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Willpower Works

Episode Date: December 30, 2017

You use it every day to overcome your lower self (which wants you to eat cake until your vision blurs) in pursuit of the goals of your higher self (which wants you to not develop Type-II diabetes). Yet it was only in the 1990s that researchers began to understand what makes our willpower and how it behaves. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, welcome to Stuff You Should Know Selects. This is Chuck here, this week it's my pick, and I'm gonna go with How Willpower Works from February 7th, 2013. And frankly, I'm picking this one

because I need to listen to this one again because I have no willpower. There's something I need to work on. So I'm gonna check it out again. I encourage you to do the same. It's a, it's a pretty neat episode. So here we go with How Willpower Works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark and sitting across from me putting on his Love Your Mama lip balm. What, what's the flavor? That is almond, actually, it's yummy. Look at that plug right out of the gate. This is Charles W. Chuck Bright. Hello.

Those are nice lips you got there, man, wow. They're now moistified. Like moist baloney. Yep, woohoo. Well, the two of us get together as we are right now and you have yourself Stuff You Should Know, the podcast. Nope, this is the podcast. It ain't going nowhere.

It ain't gonna change. Don't worry, folks. Yeah. Same as it ever was. If you love the TV show, we thank you. If you don't like it, hang out with us here online. Yeah. Not to be confused with our online presence,

our website, our new website, the home of Chuck and Josh, StuffYouShouldKnow.com. This is pretty cool. I don't mind saying words about this because we got a new website and it's like, it's awesome. It's got video and blogs and photos and all sorts of cool stuff. It's us, it's our house on the web.

It's really cool. I mean, StuffYouShouldKnow.com, it's our website. Mine below me. Five years of the making. Yeah. So, and then not to be confused with our Twitter handle, S-Y-S-K podcast. Not to be confused with our Facebook page

at Facebook.com slash StuffYouShouldKnow. Boy, you're front loading this one. Yep. All right, all that's out of the way, right? So, Chuck, you're doing good. You feeling well? I'm not feeling great, but you know. Yeah.

You ready to be done? No, I'm ready to talk about Willpower though because it is a topic that I struggle with. As do most people, I think. Like you struggle with the topic or you struggle with Willpower? I think everybody struggles with Willpower. Oh yeah, well, as a matter of fact,

I think you're absolutely right. There is a very famous guy named Plato, famous Greek philosopher. Plato. Plato. Yeah. Plato. Yes, not Plato.

Right, and Plato decided, well suggested, that the entire human experience, the sum of human existence could be basically nailed down with just this. You have a higher self and a lower self. Yeah. And your purpose for living is to overcome the usually more powerful urges of the lower self

in order to fulfill the goals of the higher self. I am down with that 100%. It makes uttering complete sense. I don't know about the reason for living, but the struggle, man's struggle, or at least. Okay, yeah, yeah. Like that's, if you're born, you're going to face that. Yeah.

But you're gonna face it in varying degrees because as we found, Willpower, which is what you use to get over your lower urges and pursue your higher goals, it comes in differing amounts for differing people, different people. Yeah, and Robert Lam wrote the original article from House of Works.

Yeah. And he points out that we're at odds with our own nature as we have evolved here on the planet because we craved sugary sweet things because sugar gave us lots of energy back in the day. And back in the day, they didn't have little debbie cakes within hands reach at all times. So we're sort of at odds with ourselves.

And he points out sexually as well. We evolved to spread the seed and procreate as much as possible to ensure the survival of the species. And nowadays, you can't really do that stuff. Or if you do, you're a flanderer or a jerk or you're spreading disease. Right, you're a public health nuisance. Yeah, so we're at odds with ourselves

with our very existence. Yeah, and not only internally, but you make the point as a society as well. I mean, society and evolution tussles. So you can make the case that society represents our higher self and our basic instincts that we've evolved to are our lower selves. So that's what's going on and it's willpower,

willpower that will get us over the bumps that come along in life inevitably. Yeah, and I think most people relate willpower to things like eating or going to the gym or indulging in sexual proclivities and things like that. But I think it's broader than that in general. I think it's the will to, like Plato said, to strive to, I guess, do the right thing.

Yeah, by yourself, by others, by society at large. Right, and I guess also how often you come up against that, how often you have to exercise willpower because you just hit it on the head. Willpower is the act of making a decision. You're deciding to do something or not to do something. How often you do that, it does depend on how you define the world around you.

Yeah, like are these things, you know, are you surrounded by temptations that you have to ward off all the time and you're paying attention to it and they're always closing in. If you like that, then you're going to exercise your willpower a lot. If you don't see the world as temptation,

you give in to them all the time, you're not going to. If you look at the world as something that you can handle, you're probably not gonna have to exercise your willpower too much then either. But it's all, those are three different ways of living and they all are, I guess, described by willpower and how you use it. Yeah, that's a good point.

Robert makes a point that is backed up somewhat by science, or actually completely by science. Yeah. And he puts it in terms of the video game, which makes sense, that if you were a video game and you have a willpower meter, that that willpower meter is replenished and depleted on a daily, probably hourly basis.

And the more you use your willpower and say, you know what, I'm not gonna have that little Debbie cake, your little willpower meter goes down and it depletes itself, so you're not gonna have as much willpower maybe for the next decision. Right. It's really interesting. Yeah, that's pretty new.

Our understanding of willpower like that is very new. The first guy to really kind of put it out like that was Freud. And he basically said, we have this thing called willpower, we have an ego, that's what the Freudians associate with willpower is the ego. And your ego is this finite thing, it has a finite energy reserve, it uses energy and therefore it can be sapped.

And then Freud fell out of fashion and everybody just kind of stopped looking at willpower that way. And it wasn't until 1996 when Florida State University psychologist named Roy Baumeister. The Balmer. He figured out through this test using chocolate and radishes, I believe,

that if you are staving off temptation using willpower, you actually do terribly on like another test of willpower. Yeah, they used persistence tests, basically puzzles that you have to just keep at it and keep at it. It's not something you could complete immediately. And offered some people chocolate chip cookies and other chocolate treats of their liking and offered other people radishes instead,

which is not a fair fight. No, I mean, he really stacked the deck. Like maybe a shaved radish and a salad or something. But if all you're looking at is a plate of radish, then yeah, I would take the cookie. So what he found out though was the people who ate the radishes had more trouble completing the test, I guess, because I guess the idea is they're using up

all their willpower to not eat the cookie so they don't have time for the test, the persistence. And there was also another kind of follow-up study a few years after that by the University of Iowa professor with the greatest name of all of the faculty there, Baba Shiv, and Dr. Shiv had basically tested willpower by saying this group's going to remember a two digit number and this group's gonna remember a seven digit number

and then we're gonna test their willpower by tempting them with chocolate cake. And Dr. Shiv found that there was the people who were using their working memory, their cognitive capacity to remember the seven digit number had a harder time resisting. So it basically proves that we use our working memory to resist temptation and I guess it's something like

reminding yourself at the forefront of your mind not to do something until the temptation pass, who knows? Yeah, maybe I had that cookie yesterday so man, I can't eat it today. Or we use our working memory to remind ourselves of our long-term goals in the face of a short-term reward. Well, that's one of the big keys, I think. And that's something Robert hits on,

which is I want that cookie now and I know bikini season's coming up and you've seen me in a bikini, Josh, it's not pretty. I will never get that out of my memory, working memory or otherwise. Yellow polka dot bikini. But that's sort of what we're at odds with is the short-term, I think humans as a group

tend to enjoy the short-term pleasures and if you truly learn to conquer that in lieu of long-term gain, that's when you're like, you're winning, as Charlie Sheen would say. Right, exactly. Although Charlie Sheen's not exactly one who's known to exercise the willpower. No.

That was a really odd person to tap for that. Well, I think that's the opposite. He thought winning was the short-term gain. Yeah, I guess. Yeah. And that is so dated. Yeah, it really is. People are like, when do you guys record this?

But it's been, I think, today might be the very day where you could get away with it. Okay. So it was perfect, by the way. So from all these tests, like when Baumeister put his 1996 study, ego depletion, colon, is the act of self a limited resource, it just basically kicked off the slew

of follow-up studies from Dr. Shiv and others. And one of the things that they found was that you can kind of watch people exercise willpower on the old wonder machine. Oh, yeah? Yeah, using MRIs. They put people in and had them think about, I guess, a sweet or a health food.

Oh, right. And decide between them. Is it Caltech? Yeah. And they found that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex lights up when you're making that decision, when you're considering it, which made sense. They, I think they kind of expected that.

Yeah. But they were also surprised to find that the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is located a little further back. Sure. That lit up as well. And they think that that has to do with- Well, that lit up for the people

who made the good decision only. Thank you. Right. And they think that that's maybe part of your, that's part of the working memory where you're like, no, I can't eat that because- Yes. That's tapping into that higher self goal pursuit.

That's the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Right. You did a nice job there, by the way. Thanks. I'm gonna be back. Okay. Okay, bye. Bye.

Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye. Bye.

On the podcast, HeyDude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show HeyDude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use HeyDude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to HeyDude the 90s called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'll be there for you. And so will my husband, Michael, and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

If so, tell everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye-bye-bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So the Balmer also went on to say that he compares the willpower, your own willpower, to a muscle, or something like a muscle, and you can deplete it. Like he said, if you overwork your muscles, you're just going to deplete your muscles and be worn out at the end of the day.

Or you can exercise that muscle in a healthy way and make it stronger in the long term. Right. Do you do this? After reading this, I started to realize that I actually kind of exercise willpower all the time. I think you especially do. So like for example, I have a mail key that I used to go get the mail, right? We keep it in our car.

And I had to go to the car and get the mail key and then go get the mail and it was cold out yesterday. And then on the way back, I could have just taken the mail key inside with me and taken it back to the car the next time I went to the car. Again, it was very cold. But instead, I walked up a flight of stairs, put the mail key into the car, and then went back home. So you made that decision and you struggled with it even in a minor way?

Yes. I did it specifically because there was no reason whatsoever for me to do that. Rationally, and as far as common sense went, there was no purpose to it. But by doing it, I basically just exercised my willpower. It was something I didn't really want to do, but it wasn't a big deal. But I could, like doing that accumulates. Yeah, I think you and I are really different in that way. I see you as someone who actively works that muscle a lot on a daily basis, and I don't

enough and not that I just have no willpower, but I don't give decisions like that enough consideration. Does that make sense? Completely, yeah. I was like, yeah, I'll just go upstairs and throw the key on the coffee table. Which a sane person kind of has that thought, I think, that puts you in the sane camp. But that doesn't ensure that I'm making good decisions for my life, you know? No.

But I mean, I don't think you're making bad ones, but it's good to self-reflect, you know? Yeah. I do kind of, it's kind of fun, you know? It's like a game. Yeah. Yeah. I want, you know, it's like, how Ramrod Street can I stay in, you know?

Right. That's what I'm building toward. So another thing Robert points out from the science side of things is, as far as giving into the short term, in favor of the long term, is glucose plays a big part in that. And I think they found that a quick shot of sugar, I don't think a whole lot, can sometimes stave off or build up that willpower reserve in the short term. Yeah. Yeah, it's like, you were talking about how we have like a willpower bar, and every time

we resist temptation, it's depleted a little more and more. They found that a shot of glucose replenishes that willpower bar. So is that in lieu of like, hey, boy, I really want that cupcake, but let me have the juice box instead? That's the irony of it, is giving into that cupcake may help you exercise your willpower with other stuff further on. Ah, interesting. Isn't that weird?

Okay. But yeah, I mean, if you had something healthier, that would be the better choice. But the point is, is like, any kind of shot of glucose has been shown to re-up your willpower. And this was very much poo-pooed at first, this idea. I think Bowmeister, there's this really great article by John Tierney in New York Times Magazine. It's from the August before last. It's called, Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue? Our buddy Chad loves this.

Oh yeah. He proselytized this article. Remember? Oh yeah, yeah. Okay. This is the one. Okay. So I strongly recommend everybody go read it.

It's a good one. But in it, it talks about Bowmeister, like thinking that, you know, glucose has something to do with this. And it was poo-pooed at first because everybody knows the brain uses the same amount of energy pretty much all day long. So it didn't make any sense. Like if you're ego depleted and you're suffering from some sort of willpower fatigue, but your brain's still using the same amount of energy, those two don't jibe.

Again with the MRI, what they found was somebody suffering from ego depletion, from willpower fatigue who took a shot of glucose or whatever, their brains lit up in areas that had to do with exercising willpower. So while your brain was using the same amount of energy, it was using them in different places when your willpower was fatigued and that glucose basically was like spinach to Popeye for that part of your brain that's charged with exercising willpower. Interesting. Isn't it?

Yeah. I'm so happy to be with you at all times. I'm on so much sugar right now. Yeah. Also, in that same article, they talk about this kind of landmark study of an Israeli parole board and they found that if you were a parolee and you came to them after it had been a while since a break or lunch or breakfast, your chances of being paroled dropped by like 50% or 60%.

So if the parole board had not had breakfast? Yes. Or no, if you came to them right after things got started after breakfast or after lunch, your chances of being paroled were like 50% to 60% greater than people who came to them for identical crimes like a couple hours later. I'm sure that makes the criminals of the world feel pretty great. Yeah, exactly. It's so arbitrary.

What they found is it's not laziness, it's not like physical fatigue where you can tell you're tired, what our brains do is they employ the strategy where you become risk averse, like you don't want to make a decision. So you say, you know what, I'm just going to put this off. You're going to go back to jail. I'm not going to grant your parole because that's risky behavior to let you back out in the world and I've made too many decisions today. But you're not thinking this.

They just say parole denied and you have no idea why. It just makes sense to you at the time. But if you had had some glucose, that same instance, you may be like, well, yeah, I think you're ready to come back out in society. That reminds me of the Ben Rush that we talked about before. Of course. I remember this from when I was a teenager. You know the lyric, oh man, what song is it?

If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice. Free will. Oh yeah, that's from that song, of course. I think on the original album jacket, it says, if you choose not to decide, you cannot have made a choice. Is that right? Yeah. My brother and I used to laugh that I think Neil Pert actually wrote a lot of the lyrics

back then. Yeah. That Getty Lee just like, you know, etched it out with a pencil. But it's the complete opposite meaning. So it's interesting that at some point Rush, I guess had maybe a band argument or something. I'm glad Getty Lee won. Yeah. You have made a choice.

No, you cannot have made a choice. Right. Just shut up and play drums. Your voice is weird. I remember hearing that the first time I was like, oh man. Oh yeah. It blew me away. Yeah.

Yeah, Free Will. I can't believe I didn't remember the name of it. Yeah, you're like, I can't think of the name of this song, but it's about Free Will. Yeah. Was it Red Barchetta? All right. Let's see. What else we got?

Oh, I didn't really fully get the Stanford psychologist, Walton and Dweck. And that is Dweck. It sounds like I'm saying direct wrong. I didn't fully get that, that they said that people who have willpower fatigue tend to slack off when they felt their resolve wavering, but then people who felt their resolve was limitless pressed on. I don't get the point there. It seems like a no-brainer.

Yeah. I think it is. You may just be looking too deeply. It's like what I was talking about earlier at the beginning where depending on how you see the world. Like, do you see the world as like you have willpower so you can overcome any temptation. You're going to last longer on tests of willpower than somebody who is like, I'm feeling kind of weak today.

Gotcha. And then you're just going to give in. Okay. So it is pretty simple. Yeah. All right. I thought it was a dummy. Not only is it simple, I managed to make it more complex and talk about it at length.

They do know that people generally there is some genetic component involved, like if your parents are super self-disciplined, then you are more likely to turn out that way. I found that to be true from friends of mine whose parents were like super self-disciplined and their kids kind of turned out that way too. Yeah, but I wonder, and Robert makes a point in the article, like, is it genetic or epigenetic? Yeah. I don't know. Probably both.

Yeah, I would think so. That would be my guess. We just chose not to decide. We could not have made a choice. And then the old marshmallow experiment, the Stanford, not the prison experiment, but the marshmallow experiment from the 1960s, a very famous one where they placed these, tortured these kids basically by placing a marshmallow in front of them and saying, if you hold off on eating that marshmallow in 15 minutes, you will have two.

And of course, not many of the kids could hold out. But they found that the ones who did hold out for the second marshmallow went on in life to greater successes, at least if you count SAT scores as a measure of success, 210 points higher than the ones who chowed down on the marshmallow. And the ones who ate the marshmallow later on had struggles with relationships and stress and attention. Yeah. So I wonder if that has anything to do with like, you know, OCD.

I wonder as well. I wonder how much of our modern problems are really just crises of willpower. Yeah. I wonder. Yeah. There was a follow-up to that 60s experiment, there's been a bunch, but there was one at the University of Rochester that was carried out last year that found we are more willing to exercise willpower if we think that what we're holding out for is actually going to

happen. Yeah. You know? Yeah. And they did that by, this is hilarious. It's funny. Studies with kids are always, they're so cruel and funny. Uh-huh.

I mean, not the really truly cruel ones, but like any psychological study that has to do with kids, almost invariably has some cruel aspect to it. Yeah. And this one was no exception. Basically they said, here's the control group, here's the experimental group, and the control group, we want to give you some extra art supplies, let us go get them. And they came back with some extra art supplies. The experimental group, they said, hey, we're going to get you some more art supplies, we'll

be right back. And they came back, they're like, we don't have any more art supplies. We know you were really excited, but sorry, you're going to have to make do with that old red pen. And then they tested them with the Marshmallow experiment and found that the ones who had gotten the art supplies, the promise hadn't been broken, they held out longer than the ones who had been lied to. Yeah, they're like, screw that, you're not bringing me to Marshmallows, I mean this Marshmallow

right now. Exactly. I'm going to kick you in the shin afterward too. I'll show you. Yeah. Yeah, that's not cruel on the level. That one, the one kid, remember that we talked about that was tested on, like, kept in a closet?

No, they tested fear conditioning and extinction in the kid. It was Little Albert. Yeah, Little Albert. Where they like, they would put a bunny in his lap and then bang a bar of metal with a hammer and scare the bejesus out of him. That's right. And then they came to like fear rabbits, like bunnies. And there was a search form, right, and they eventually found him, they thought.

I think so. I don't remember. I wrote a blog post that, I'll have to republish it or whatever, because it's been a while. I don't remember. But yeah, they figured out who it was pretty much. So this isn't on that level? No, no, no. This is just Marshmallows.

Yes it is. So there was one other point I wanted to bring up that I thought was pretty interesting and horrible from that John Tierney article where with decision fatigue, with exercising willpower, disproportionately affects the poor, and they think that possibly now that poverty exists in a cycle because if you're a poor person, you have to exercise willpower. You have to make more decisions than somebody who has more resources, more money. Like say you're walking through the grocery store. I want the soap and this food.

If you're poor, you might have to say, I want both, but I have to just buy one. I don't have enough for both. So how much is it going to be? And their willpower, their resources of willpower of decision making become fatigued a lot faster because they have to exercise it a lot more and they don't have the resources to get themselves out of poverty. To indulge. Or to study or do more, they already have the deck stacked against them resource-wise,

but then you throw in this idea of willpower possibly that makes it even more difficult. Yeah. Boy, I never really thought about that. It's interesting. Yeah. It's pretty interesting stuff. It makes you feel for them even more. Yeah.

And it makes me feel bad when I say, do I want the peanut butter ganache cupcake or the chocolate? You know what? Just go ahead and give me both. Exactly. Well, you can buy both and then just take one to somebody who's struggling in the grocery store trying to figure out if they're going to buy soap or food. That's a good idea. Yeah.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? You'll leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing

on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you. Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Uh-huh. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life.

Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. You got anything else, man? No, this is a good one. Yeah.

I like willpower. It's fun. Go out and exercise it in little ways. It's fun. Or don't. Either that or strap a car battery to your inner thighs. It's just for fun. Okay, well, if you want to learn more about willpower and read this good article by Robert

Lamb, you can type in willpower in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it will bring it up. And I said search bar, so it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, Josh, quickly before we do that, we need to say a special thank you to a fan of ours who helped us out with our Wikipedia page. Oh, nice. Thank you. He's very cool in his name, and he's been mentioned on tech stuff, evidently, too.

Oh, wow, this guy's a star. We're not going to hold that against him. And this is how his name is spelled, A-N-T-R-I-K-S-H, Y-A-D-A-V. And he says, you pronounce it, untricksh. The T is soft, though, as in math. So untricksh, untrith? Yeah, there you go. He phonetically spelled it out.

He told me what it sounded like, and I still can't quite do it. So we just want to say thanks a lot for helping us with the Wikipedia page. Nice. And now, a Listener Mail that I'm going to call S-Y-S-K can help you get ladies. This is from Todd in Oklahoma City. Okay. Guys, and Jerry, I've come to the conclusion that I may owe you a big thank you. Your podcast has created the impression, whether fiction or reality, that I am somehow a guy

who knows about stuff with the ladies. My new girlfriend, in fact, mentions as one of my winning traits that I am often seeing interesting things. And this really interested me. So I asked her for some examples of things that I say, and it was notable that every example that she cited was something that I learned listening to your podcast at work. So it is quite possible, sirs, that you and your podcast made my baby fall in love with me.

Nice. I'd like to shake your hands. A single guy should listen to your podcast, because it may at least get you a second date. And that is Todd from Oklahoma City, who is banking on our knowledge to Woo Women. And I guess you got a girlfriend of it. Good going, Todd. Good for you. We're glad we could help, man.

We're married, dude. So we live vicariously through these emails. That's not true. Well, no, I think it's great. I'm happy for Todd. Yeah, I don't mean I live vicariously, I said, I wish it was... You like telling me all the details of your life, Todd. No, no.

I just mean, like, that's great. I'm glad someone out there is getting a date because of this. Yeah, I love helping people find love connections. Yeah. As a matter of fact, we should do a speed dating episode. I wrote an article on it once, and that's pretty neat. Yeah, my friend PJ, you met PJ. He just texted me yesterday and said, hey, this girl, he does a lot of online dating.

He said part of her profile is that she's like a huge fan of you guys. And I said, date her. Yeah. A lot on a date with her. Yeah. There you go. You're doing it all over the place, man. That's right.

Let's see. If we have affected your life positively, we want to hear about it. Not negatively, just positively. You can tweet to us at SYSK Podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuffyoushouldknow. You can send us an email to stuffpodcastatdiscovery.com, and you can always find us hanging out at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands

give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. Get a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.