Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice

Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know, the interesting ways some food products got their names. Then, inventions that dramatically changed how we see the world.

Speaker 1 Television, eyeglasses, the smartphone, even mirrors.

Speaker 2 And that, being able to see their own reflection, gave people the idea that they could see themselves as others saw them. Got them thinking about, well, who am I? I am actually a different person.

Speaker 2 I'm not just part of the group.

Speaker 1 Also, you've probably been told to stand up straight and suck in your gut, which turns out to be bad advice. And why do we have so much trouble with big decisions about love and money?

Speaker 3 The conventional wisdom is that love and money decisions are intertwined, that you make love decisions with your heart and money decisions with your head, and that's just not right.

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Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you ever been in your kitchen and looked in the cupboards or in the refrigerator and looked at some of the food and wondered, why is it called that?

Speaker 1 Where did that name come from? Well, here are the origins of some popular,

Speaker 1 somewhat random, but some popular foods that may be in your kitchen. First of all, Philadelphia cream cheese.
It didn't really come from Philadelphia. It started in New York.

Speaker 1 It was called Philadelphia cream cheese because that city was associated with high quality food products. Gatorade, as you might imagine, does not contain any alligator in it.

Speaker 1 It was a kidney specialist from the University of Florida who helped develop it for the school's football team, the Florida Gators. So they named the drink Gatorade.

Speaker 1 The product name SPAM was chosen for the canned meat from a contest. There is no official explanation for its meaning, but most people assume SPAM stands for spiced ham.

Speaker 1 The frisbee, the flying disc frisbee, comes to you courtesy of the Frisbee Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut.

Speaker 1 The empty pie tins were perfect for throwing like a frisbee, and since it was the Frisbee Pie Company, they became known as Frisbees.

Speaker 1 The first plastic version was called the Pluto Platter Flying Saucer. Whamo bought the rights and stamped frisbee on it instead.
Marshmallows started out as medicine.

Speaker 1 In the 1800s, juice from the roots of the marshmallow plant were extracted and cooked with egg whites and sugar. It was whipped up and given to children to soothe sore throats.

Speaker 1 And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 Now I love it when I see a topic to discuss here that I didn't actually know was a topic to discuss. And that's what you're about to hear.

Speaker 1 We're going to discuss the history of what we see and how we see it. Because how we see ourselves and how we see the world has changed.

Speaker 1 And what's caused those changes are certain inventions, certain technologies that alter our vision. I mean, imagine the first mirror.

Speaker 1 When people could actually see themselves clearly the way other people do, that had to change a lot. It's pretty remarkable.
Or the telescope, television, the smartphone.

Speaker 1 All these things have altered our our view of ourselves and the world in some way. Here to explain all this is Susan Denham Wade.
She's author of a book called A History of Seeing in 11 Inventions.

Speaker 1 Hey, Susan, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 2 It's great to be here, Mike.

Speaker 1 So explain first how you came up with this idea and formed it into a topic for discussion.

Speaker 2 Well, the inspiration for the book was the 2014 internet meme that became known as hashtag the dress

Speaker 2 this was a photograph of a dress that was bought for a wedding that found its way onto the internet and the dress was striped

Speaker 2 and the reason it went so viral and was actually one of the first global memes was because when people looked at the image online they couldn't agree whether the stripes of the dress were white and gold or blue and black.

Speaker 2 This went all around Twitter with various celebrities weighing in on their opinions. It was discussed on newscasts.

Speaker 2 And this really intrigued me and got me to wondering, wow, if people in the same time and place can look at the same thing and see something different, did people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago see their worlds differently?

Speaker 2 And that was the question I set out to answer. And that was the beginning of the journey.

Speaker 1 And so where did that journey take you? What did you find from looking at all this?

Speaker 2 Well, I found that indeed people have seen their worlds differently

Speaker 2 over time

Speaker 2 and that there have been a variety of technologies that mankind has either harnessed or discovered or invented that have really changed the world as we saw it.

Speaker 2 But not only that, Each of these visual technologies has coincided with a really major inflection point in human history.

Speaker 2 So one of the big conclusions that I came to was that the world seen differently becomes a different world.

Speaker 1 So when you say, as you just said a few minutes ago, that in earlier times people saw their world differently, what does that mean?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 2 if you take, for example, the invention of mirrors, the very first known mirrors were discovered in a proto-town, one of the very earliest settled communities, which is in Anatoly, which is now part of Turkey.

Speaker 2 And this was a settlement of about up to 8,000 people, which existed between about 8,000 and 5,500 years ago.

Speaker 2 And archaeologists exploring this site came upon these mirrors at a time when the society fundamentally changed as far as they could tell.

Speaker 2 Up until the point that we're talking about, the society, the archaeologists described it as fiercely egalitarian.

Speaker 2 There were no signs of different status. Food and other implements were shared.
People's homes were more or less the same size.

Speaker 2 And then around the layer of the site where these mirrors were discovered, archaeologists noted a shift in the psychology of this community to identify a much greater sense of individualism and the emergence of a sense of self, which I think is completely mind-blowing that we don't know what came first, the sense of self, and then that generated a desire to find mirrors, or whether someone had created these mirrors and that being able to see their own reflection gave people a self-realization, the idea that they could see themselves as others saw them.

Speaker 2 And that got them thinking about, well, who am I? Am I? I am actually a different person. I'm not just part of the group.
I'm an individual.

Speaker 2 And in later history, with the development of psychology, for example, in the 19th century,

Speaker 2 well actually going right back to the Romans, the mirror has become symbolic as a tool for exploring the self.

Speaker 2 But it's incredibly interesting to me that going right back through human history, it appears that mirrorless societies tend to be highly egalitarian without much of a sense of individuality.

Speaker 2 And it's only that, but the appearance of mirrors tends to coincide with that individuality. So this is an example from a long time ago of how a change in

Speaker 2 visual technology and seeing something different caused a fundamental shift in mindset.

Speaker 1 So if the invention of the mirror was so transformative and people could see themselves as individuals rather than just part of the group, I mean, imagine what photography must have done because a mirror, a look in the mirror is a fleeting thing, but photography lasts forever.

Speaker 2 All the excitement about photography when it was first announced, this amazing technology that could capture an image permanently, was all about how it was going to represent the great landscapes of the world and the great monuments of antiquity and the works of art.

Speaker 2 And none of the inventors or promoters of early photography mentioned the idea of portraiture. But as soon as photography was announced, people set up portraiture studios.

Speaker 2 And this was the absolute killer app for photography. All very well to see the great sights of the world and the great works of art, but what people really wanted to see was themselves and each other.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 photography studios set up all around Europe and around the USA.

Speaker 2 and people for the price of a day's wages could get an image of themselves to keep forever. And the market for it was huge.

Speaker 2 Something like 90% of photographs taken in the first 50 years of photography were portraits.

Speaker 1 When you see early photography, early portraits, no one's smiling. No one seems to be particularly happy at all.

Speaker 2 Well, in the earliest photographs, the earliest process was called a daguerreotype.

Speaker 2 They took about 10 to 15 minutes for the exposure to happen. So people had to stand very, very still in that time.

Speaker 2 So the photographic studios developed all kinds of

Speaker 2 props to help people stay still.

Speaker 2 So if you see people standing up, often you'll see them, there's a pedestal that they've got an arm resting on, or they're sitting on a chair with a slightly unnaturally raised arms.

Speaker 2 And all of these were devices to help people stand really still for that time so that the image could take on the film used at the time.

Speaker 2 And so I guess it's pretty hard to hold a smile for that length of time. So they were probably advised just to keep it fairly serious.

Speaker 1 Another one of these inventions you talk about is the telescope, which not only changed the way we see the world,

Speaker 1 but the universe.

Speaker 2 Usually credited to Galileo, but in fact, the first telescope to be brought forward publicly was from a Dutch spectacle maker whose name was Lipperhey.

Speaker 2 But he tried to patent his telescope, but he was refused because the patent office decided it was too easy to copy.

Speaker 2 And unfortunately for him, the patent office was right because people started making telescopes all around Europe.

Speaker 2 Galileo was this very talented mathematician and craftsman, and he spent, he got the idea of the telephone, heard about the idea of the telescope and made his own very

Speaker 2 much, much more powerful than the original telescopes that were made.

Speaker 2 And he trained his telescope on the night sky and saw things that amazed, truly amazed the world and changed forever really how people saw their world. What he saw was

Speaker 2 around the planet of Jupiter, three small

Speaker 2 smaller stars. The planets were called the wandering stars.
They were all considered to be stars,

Speaker 2 but it had long been observed that the planets move through the night sky in a different way than the other,

Speaker 2 what were called the fixed stars. But he saw that there was this smaller group of stars that followed Jupiter across the sky throughout from night after night.

Speaker 2 And this was a radical thought because up until then, the received view of

Speaker 2 how the universe worked was with the Earth was at the center

Speaker 2 and the sun, the moon and all the other planets,

Speaker 2 the stars rather, the wandering stars and the fixed stars rotated around the earth.

Speaker 2 But there had been some theorizing in the previous 50 years,

Speaker 2 most famously by Copernicus, that this might not be the right way to view the universe, that in fact the Sun might be the center of the universe and the planets revolved around it.

Speaker 2 But this was a heresy because there were various passages in the Bible that suggested that the Earth was the center

Speaker 2 and so on.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 2 Galileo's discovery showed that because these the mini stars followed Jupiter around, he concluded that they were moons of Jupiter. And that demonstrated that

Speaker 2 the Earth wasn't necessarily the center of the universe. This was radically controversial at the time.
And indeed, Galileo eventually was hauled up in front of the Inquisition more than once.

Speaker 2 And he spent his final years under house arrest. So it didn't have a happy ending for him.
But it did kick off

Speaker 2 a whole new way of viewing. nature.

Speaker 1 We're talking about some important inventions that have really altered the way that you and I see the world. And my guest is Susan Denham Wade, author of A History of Seeing in 11 Inventions.

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Speaker 1 So, Susan, in your list of inventions is eyeglasses. I mean, there is an invention that literally changed the way people viewed the world, people with vision problems.
So, talk about that.

Speaker 2 The very first eyeglasses were convex glasses, which is the ones that correct for long sight. They were most useful for people who were reaching middle age.

Speaker 2 So, just as today, we reach our 40s or 50s, and we find it more difficult to see close up. And convex glass lenses can help us, convex spectacles can refocus our eyes to improve that sort of vision.

Speaker 2 So if you were born very short-sighted around the time that the first spectacles were invented, around 1278 in Italy, I'm afraid they wouldn't have been much help to you.

Speaker 2 about glasses and the time at the time they were first invented was that they extended the useful life of so many of the artists, artisans and scholars of that time because they allowed them to keep working beyond a time when ordinarily their failing eyesight would have forced them to stop.

Speaker 2 And I don't think it's a coincidence that the invention of spectacles, as I say, towards the end of the 1200s happened just on the cusp of what became the Renaissance, the amazing and in Italy, the amazing flowering of art, scholarship, architecture that happened in the next couple of hundred years.

Speaker 2 It wasn't until around 1450 that concave spectacles, which correct for short sight, were invented.

Speaker 2 But obviously that, again, would have been a massive revelation for people who were born short-sighted. Although there were many, many fewer short-sighted people then than there are now.

Speaker 2 There's been a massive increase in short-sightedness, in particular over the last 70 years, since the invention of television, in fact.

Speaker 2 And the explanation for that is not that television itself damages our eyes, but ever since televisions came into our lives, children in particular have spent more time inside

Speaker 2 and that does damage our eyes.

Speaker 2 One report suggests that for every additional hour spent outside your chance of developing myopia, that's short-sightedness, reduces by 2%

Speaker 2 and that's because even on the Dallas Day natural daylight is about 10 times as bright as artificial light and our eyes need daylight for their health and especially children as their eyes are growing and

Speaker 1 Well, I would think that television is one of the big game changers in your list of inventions because it not only changed how we see the world, it really brought the world into our homes, good and bad.

Speaker 1 We could see things we could never see before.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. Absolutely.
I mean, television you know, created the consumer society as we sat watching, happily watching TV shows through the 50s,

Speaker 2 funded by advertisers who showed us all the lovely products we could buy, and we obediently went out to buy them, whereas previous generations did without those things.

Speaker 2 Now, I'm not saying that a lot of those products haven't made our lives easier and better, but they have convinced us that we need a lot of stuff that somehow we managed to live without

Speaker 2 before we saw it all advertised on television. And politics drastically changed by television.

Speaker 2 You'll remember, remember, well, probably not yourself, but you'll know the story

Speaker 2 of the television debate between Nixon and Kennedy

Speaker 2 just

Speaker 2 before the election, the presidential election, between those two.

Speaker 2 Those who listened to it on radio named Nixon the winner of the debate, but those who watched it on television saw Nixon looking a little sweaty. He'd been ill.
He had a dark shadow

Speaker 2 under his makeup, of his beard coming through.

Speaker 2 Kennedy, who was a much more sickly person on the whole, had spent the morning sitting in the sun, had a crisp white shirt, and exuded relaxed good health.

Speaker 2 And those who watched the debate on television, and it was the most watched program ever, I think something like 60 million people watched it,

Speaker 2 declared Kennedy the winner and sure enough he won that election.

Speaker 1 And, you know, more recent times have seen telegenic candidates become president once again and then there is the smartphone which not only has changed the way we see the world in many ways it is the world that we see because we spend so much time looking at it we spend hours and hours a day checking our phones.

Speaker 2 Many, many people have their phone by their bed. It's the last thing they look at before they go to bed.
It's the first thing they look at when they wake up in the morning.

Speaker 2 It's become the dominant feature of our lives, really. Increasingly, with all the apps available,

Speaker 2 pretty much every aspect of our lives can be channeled through this little screen in our hand. It's not just a phone.
In fact, the phone is one of the least used.

Speaker 2 features of a smartphone. It's our encyclopedia.
It's our car key. It's our bank.
It's our email.

Speaker 2 It's our encyclopedia, it's our entertainment device.

Speaker 2 It's pretty much everything that it's our window onto the world.

Speaker 2 And what that's meaning, it seems to me, is that we're using our other senses less and less. So we are,

Speaker 2 I'm sure we're all guilty of sending a text to someone, even if they're in the next room, rather than putting our head around the corner and having a conversation, or texting a friend or one of our family members just to say hi and have a little catch-up just because it's kind of quicker and easier rather than speaking to them on the phone

Speaker 2 and this is actually not great for our mental and eventually leading on from that physical health because we really need to hear each other.

Speaker 2 There was a research study done at Wisconsin University that put a group of young girls, school children, ages I think seven to twelve in a stressful situation where they were asked to give a presentation to some strangers.

Speaker 2 And after that, and they had them wired up to measure the level of cortisol, the stress hormone in their bodies.

Speaker 2 And after they'd been put in this situation, a quarter of the girls were allowed to go and be with their mothers and talk to them face to face.

Speaker 2 A second quarter was allowed to speak to their mothers on the phone. The third quarter was allowed to

Speaker 2 text with their mothers. and the fourth group had to go and sit quietly alone.

Speaker 2 And what the researchers found was that the girls who spoke to their mothers on the telephone calmed down as much as the girls who were with their mothers and talking to their mothers face to face.

Speaker 2 Whereas the girls who just texted their mothers calmed down as little as the girls who just sat quietly alone.

Speaker 2 And although researchers,

Speaker 2 serious researchers, are very

Speaker 2 wary about jumping to too many conclusions from what they find, the title of the research was Why We Still Need to Hear Each Other.

Speaker 2 And if you think about it, Verbal and oral communication has been our primary form of communication for tens of thousands of years.

Speaker 2 Language is one of the things that made us human.

Speaker 2 We are hardwired to learn to speak. No child needs to be taught to speak.
They just pick it up naturally. It's part of our, it's in our DNA.
Whereas everyone has to be taught to read and write.

Speaker 2 It's not an innate human skill. It's a learnt, learnt ability.

Speaker 1 Well, as I said at the start, this is a topic that I didn't really know was a topic.

Speaker 1 You actually really created the topic by putting these 11 inventions together and looking at the world through them. And it's been a lot of fun.
Susan Denham Wade has been my guest.

Speaker 1 The name of the book is A History of Seeing in 11 Inventions. and you'll find a link to that book in the show notes.
Thanks for being here, Susan. This was fun.

Speaker 2 Well, thank you very much, Mike.

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Speaker 1 When it comes to major decisions in your life, there are a couple of categories that are huge. They are love and money.

Speaker 1 And as you may have noticed in your own life, we tend to struggle with those decisions and end up regretting some of them. So why is that? Why do we mess up some of the biggest decisions in our lives?

Speaker 1 And how can we make better love and money decisions? Well, here to discuss that is Myra Strober.

Speaker 1 She is a labor economist and professor at Stanford University and author of a book called Money and Love, an intelligent roadmap for life's biggest decisions. Hi, Myra.

Speaker 1 Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Thank you, Mike.

Speaker 1 So I would imagine that everyone listening can think back to a decision regarding love or money or both that they regret.

Speaker 1 So why do you suppose that is? I mean, why do we mess up what seems to be such an important decision?

Speaker 3 I think there are two reasons. One is that

Speaker 3 people don't make these decisions in a systematic way.

Speaker 3 That's the first reason. And the second reason is that people tend to see money and love decisions as separate.

Speaker 3 So money decisions concern money and love decisions concern love and never the twain shall meet. But in fact,

Speaker 3 most life's decisions, especially the big ones, are both love and money decisions.

Speaker 1 But it seems to me it's not only the decision you make, because you could make what appears to be the right decision

Speaker 1 but things don't always go according to plan things don't go the way you think they're going to go life has a way of serving up curveballs that

Speaker 1 if things had gone the way you thought that decision would have been great but but it didn't go that way so but how would you have known

Speaker 3 you certainly can't predict the future but You can

Speaker 3 ask yourself when you make your decision, what are the likely consequences of this decision? What are the likely things that are going to happen?

Speaker 3 So, for example, if you're considering moving to another city for a job and you have a family, you know, you might think this is a money decision. The money is so much better in this new job.

Speaker 3 But in fact, it's a love decision too, because your family is involved. And if, you know, six months down the line, your daughter is depressed because she can't adjust to her new school.

Speaker 3 Had you thought in advance, what are the likely consequences for my daughter of this decision, you might have predicted that she would have a difficult time.

Speaker 3 You might have taken some steps to ease that transition.

Speaker 3 And the situation might be a little bit better had you anticipated the consequences.

Speaker 1 Well, see, that's a good example of what I mean, that your daughter might have trouble adapting to her new school. She might thrive in the new school.

Speaker 1 There's no way to know until it happens, and it only happens after the decision, and then you have to deal with the consequences. But you can't have predicted that.
I mean,

Speaker 1 it's kind of a crapshoot.

Speaker 3 No, I don't really think it's quite a crapshoot. Of course, you can't know everything.

Speaker 3 For instance, you can't know that

Speaker 3 the girl next next door to where you moved is going to make life difficult for her.

Speaker 3 You couldn't know that. But you know your daughter.
You know if she adjusts easily to new circumstances or not. You could have a conversation.

Speaker 3 You should have a conversation with your daughter about this move, unless she's under the age of five.

Speaker 3 And ask her, what is this going to be like for you? Are you looking forward to it? Are you concerned about it? What What are you concerned about?

Speaker 3 And then you could take steps to try to mitigate the effects of this for her.

Speaker 1 So I guess maybe what my point was is that it is human nature to think about the road not taken.

Speaker 1 And so you'll always wonder what if, when faced with a choice like what you're talking about, should I move there? Should I take that job? Should I marry that person?

Speaker 1 Or that person. You're always going to wonder, no matter what you choose and how great a decision what if you had done something different

Speaker 3 well I think that may be true but we have a very flexible five-step framework for making these decisions and

Speaker 3 what the hope is

Speaker 3 is that after you've taken these five steps

Speaker 3 you have convinced yourself that this is the best decision that you can make given whatever circumstances you're facing. So, you know, you might be taking a walk in the beautiful woods and think about

Speaker 3 what might have happened, you know, had your parents been born millionaires.

Speaker 3 But you need to deal with reality and you need to convince yourself, and I think our framework helps you do that, that this is the best decision that you could make given what you knew at the time.

Speaker 1 So, what are those five steps?

Speaker 3 Well, the first one is clarify. Clarify for yourself what it is that you want, what's important to you.
And what's important to you, not to your parents or your spouse or

Speaker 3 somebody else in your life.

Speaker 3 Try to figure out what you really care about.

Speaker 3 And then the second step is communication.

Speaker 3 Then you need to communicate that to whoever else is in your life making these decisions with you.

Speaker 3 And, you know, as you communicate and you listen to the other person's hopes and dreams, you may revise your own. You may start thinking about some issues that you hadn't thought about before.

Speaker 3 So first clarify and then communicate.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 you need to consider a broad range of choices. So let's go back to the moving decision.
You've been offered a job in another city. Your family agrees that you need more money.

Speaker 3 It's a good career step for you. And you have already clarified that your career is important to you.
But what are the other possible choices?

Speaker 3 Have you looked around in the same city where you are at other possible jobs? Or did this this new job possibility come out of the blue and it seems so attractive and you're going to take it?

Speaker 3 So unless you convince yourself that in order to get what it is you're looking for, you must move,

Speaker 3 you may well be sorry later on because you didn't do

Speaker 3 the kind of

Speaker 3 seeking that would give you a broader range of choices. The fourth step is check in.
So it's the five C's framework. These all start with C's.

Speaker 3 Clarify, communicate, consider a broad range of choices, and now check in. So you want to check in with family and friends and other people

Speaker 3 whom you admire and ask them, have they faced these kinds of decisions? What did they do? How did it turn out for them?

Speaker 3 Share your thought process with them. I'm doing this because

Speaker 3 I want more money. I'm doing this because I think my career will be furthered by this.

Speaker 3 Ask them about family

Speaker 3 ramifications of decisions that they may have made.

Speaker 3 And the last step is what I talked about before, explore the likely consequences. And you need to explore the consequences both short-term and long-term.

Speaker 3 So let's go back to the daughter who is not happy in the new environment.

Speaker 3 Maybe she's not happy, you know, six months after you move, but maybe she's in a school that's far better than the one that she left. And three years from now,

Speaker 3 she'll realize that this was a really good move because her school life and her education is far better than it would have been.

Speaker 3 So, you know, there are short-term consequences and longer-term consequences.

Speaker 3 Well, your five-step process, it certainly makes sense.

Speaker 1 It sounds good. But how do you know it works? I mean, is there research?

Speaker 1 How do you know that doing those five steps are better than any other five steps that somebody would come up with?

Speaker 3 I taught a course at the Stanford Business School and also in

Speaker 3 the undergraduate part of the university

Speaker 3 for more than 40 years on the topic of work and family. And so over that time, I've had thousands of students who write back to me and say,

Speaker 3 I mean, not all thousands write back, but many of them write back and say,

Speaker 3 you know, thinking about these issues when I was in your course has really helped me down the line. I feel that I have better decisions.
I feel that this helps me when I have a big decision to make.

Speaker 3 I think about the class. And in fact, my co-author, Abby Davison, was a student in that class.
And the man who took the class with her is now her husband. So

Speaker 3 they have used used this framework, you know, for their entire marriage and now they have two young children. And,

Speaker 3 you know, the anecdotal evidence is that people feel helped by this framework and this way of deciding.

Speaker 1 When people make decisions on their own and don't use your process, where is it you think people tend to go wrong?

Speaker 3 Well, I think they haven't really gone through steps one and two. They have not clarified for themselves what it is they want.

Speaker 3 Most of us are stuck for life

Speaker 3 with

Speaker 3 our parents' voices in our heads. And our parents,

Speaker 3 for the most part, not all parents, but our parents pretty much told us what they want for us.

Speaker 3 And somewhere along the line of reaching an adult, we need to put our parents' voices in the background, develop our own voices, and make decisions based on our own voices.

Speaker 3 But I think lots of people still

Speaker 3 are not making decisions that are going to benefit them

Speaker 3 as much as might be the case.

Speaker 3 And the second place that goes wrong is in communication. So a lot of these decisions are fraught because

Speaker 3 couples are in different places in their lives lives and they haven't taken the time to come together and figure out what it is they can both agree upon. And I think a lot of these fraught decisions

Speaker 3 come

Speaker 3 when couples have other issues underlying this particular decision.

Speaker 1 Well, what you said about really taking the time to figure out what it is you want, not what somebody else wants, that's a step I think a lot of people skip because there are so many other influences and there's so many assumptions people make about what they want that they don't really stop and go, hey, wait a minute, let's really stop here.

Speaker 1 What is it I want?

Speaker 3 Right. And so think about somebody deciding to apply to medical school.
Their whole life

Speaker 3 Up to that point, their parents have said, you know, this would be a good career for you. Their Their older brother is already in that career, and so they talk to their older brother.

Speaker 3 And their older brother says, you know, this is just a wonderful career. I just love

Speaker 3 medicine. I love being a doctor.
Well, the next step is to talk to some other people who don't like being a doctor or who thought they might and decided otherwise.

Speaker 3 You know, if you stack the deck toward a certain decision,

Speaker 3 you don't really have enough input to figure out if this is the right decision for you.

Speaker 1 Well, and you know, we've talked about it on this podcast before. I think people do tend to fall into that confirmation bias trap where they just look for things that confirm what

Speaker 1 their gut is telling them.

Speaker 3 Yes, I think that's right. And that's why, you know, you may need help figuring out what you need.
But yes, confirmation bias could be a real problem.

Speaker 3 You do want to talk to some people who have a different perspective and see what you think about that.

Speaker 1 But it would also seem that as you make these decisions, it's not just a snapshot in time.

Speaker 1 There's got to be course correction because the decision, you know, you decided to take this new job, but then the guy that hired you left and now you've got a new...

Speaker 1 So there's always things that happen. It isn't frozen in time that I made this decision and now we go forward the way I decided.

Speaker 3 True enough. I mean, you know, there's an old Yiddish saying that

Speaker 3 man plans and God laughs

Speaker 3 because planning only gets you so far. There are things that happen that nobody anticipated.

Speaker 3 Nonetheless, if you don't plan,

Speaker 3 you know, you're certainly not going to get what you want. So yes, you have to have course corrections.
And you and your spouse need or your partner need good communication.

Speaker 3 So when this new curveball comes onto the field, you have somebody to talk to about it. And, you know, okay, what are we going to do next?

Speaker 3 And it's we, even though it's a job decision, it involves love.

Speaker 3 It involves your family. And,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 they need to be supportive of you and they need to know what they want.

Speaker 1 I can just think back in my own life of some decisions I've made that I didn't really, I kind of like already had it in my head what the decision was going to be without really going through any process of, it just felt right.

Speaker 1 It just seemed right. This is an opportunity I can't pass up.

Speaker 1 I suspect that happens to a lot of people where they just say, wow, I've got to grab this right now and go and never do what you're talking about.

Speaker 3 Yes, that's what I have learned over the years is that people tend to do that.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it's rare that a decision this big has to be made certainly within 24 hours or maybe even within a week. And

Speaker 3 people need to take the time to go through our process, to check in with other people whom they admire and make sure they check in with people.

Speaker 3 who have a different perspective than theirs and take the time to make these decisions. You know, take the decision, who am I going to marry?

Speaker 3 Certainly you have to make that decision in part with your gut. I mean, you don't want to marry someone, never mind marry, but live with them, be a partner with them.

Speaker 3 It doesn't matter whether marriage is involved particularly or not. But, you know, is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with?

Speaker 3 Well, that is surely a biggie.

Speaker 3 And you want your gut to be involved, but you want your head to be involved too.

Speaker 3 And you want to think about the financial implications of this decision. And

Speaker 3 making that decision solely with your gut

Speaker 3 is not going to necessarily work out.

Speaker 1 Well, it's interesting. We make decisions all day long,

Speaker 1 big ones and little ones, and often don't think about the process of making the decision. We just make the decision

Speaker 1 there

Speaker 1 and then have to live with the consequences.

Speaker 3 You know Daniel Kahneman talks about system one thinking and system two thinking. System one you make the decision with your gut and you move on.

Speaker 3 System two is more like the framework we are proposing and you need to make these

Speaker 3 very big love-money decisions using system two thinking. And particularly, I think our framework is helpful.
The second thing is that love and money decisions are intertwined.

Speaker 3 You know, the conventional wisdom is that you make love decisions with your heart and money decisions with your head. And

Speaker 3 that's just not right.

Speaker 3 Even when you're deciding

Speaker 3 how to invest your portfolio, you might think that that is only a financial decision, but it isn't. Because the question now is, what do you want? What do you want this money to do for you?

Speaker 3 To whom do you want to leave the money if there's money left over at the end? And why? And what are their needs? So there are no purely financial decisions and no purely love decisions.

Speaker 1 They're all intertwined. Well, it is so easy,

Speaker 1 even with really big decisions, to go with your gut. You know, oh, this just feels right.

Speaker 1 And I enjoy hearing what you say about, you know, there's a system, there's a way to analyze this that isn't quite so romantic as going with your gut, but may yield a better decision.

Speaker 1 I've been talking to Myra Strober. She's a labor economist and professor at Stanford University.
The name of her book is Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions.

Speaker 1 And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Myra.
Enjoyed the conversation.

Speaker 3 Thanks, Mike.

Speaker 1 How many times have you been told to stand up straight and suck in your gut? Well, the stand-up straight part's probably fine.

Speaker 1 It's the sucking in your gut thing that could be a problem, even though some people do it all the time. When you suck in your stomach, it prevents you from breathing properly.

Speaker 1 That shallow breathing can actually lead to anxiety and poor balance and crummy posture. It can also lead to incontinence and a whole host of other problems.

Speaker 1 So, stand up straight, that's fine, but relax your stomach muscles. And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 If someone asks you what podcasts you listen to, I hope you'll remember to tell them about this one. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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Speaker 4 Oh, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.

Speaker 4 But the Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history.

Speaker 4 And on the Vulgar History podcast, we're going to be looking at the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal of the Regency era.

Speaker 4 Vulgar History is a women's history podcast, and our Regency Era series will be focusing on the most rebellious women of this time.

Speaker 4 That includes Jane Austen herself, who is maybe more radical than you might have thought.

Speaker 4 We'll also be talking about queer icons like Anne Lister, scientists like Mary Anning and Ada Lovelace, as well as other scandalous actresses, royal mistresses, rebellious princesses, and other lesser-known figures who made history happen in England in the Regency era.

Speaker 4 Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts.