How to Change What’s Not Working & Why Time Seems to Speed Up and Slow Down

Speaker 1 Today, on something you should know: how to improve your chances of not getting sick on an airplane flight. Then, why organizations resist change and how they discourage new ideas.

Speaker 2 When you're told, No, that can't work, we can't try that, no, somebody else tried that, it doesn't work, it's not your business, stay out of it.

Speaker 2 When you're told that, you know, a hundred times in a row, it's like you just kind of slowly build up these calluses.

Speaker 1 Also what to do with your face so you look good in every photo and your perception of time, why it sometimes seems to fly by and other times seems to move so slow.

Speaker 3 Time perception is related to information processing. So the more information you process, the slower time goes.

Speaker 3 And that's why new environments and new experiences usually make time pass more slowly because you're absorbing more information.

Speaker 1 All this today on something you should know.

Speaker 1 it's time for black friday dell technology's biggest sale of the year that's right you'll find huge savings on select dell pcs like the dell 16 plus with intel core ultra processors and with built-in advanced ai features it's the pc that helps you do more faster from smarter multitasking to extended battery life these pcs get the busy work done so you can focus on what matters most to you.

Speaker 1 Plus, earn Dell rewards and enjoy many other benefits like free shipping, expert support, price match guarantee, and flexible financing options.

Speaker 1 They also have the biggest deals on accessories that pair perfectly with your Dell PC, improving the way you work, play, and connect.

Speaker 1 Whether you just started holiday shopping or you're just finishing up, These PCs and accessories make perfect gifts for everyone on your list. Shop now at dell.com slash deals and don't miss out.

Speaker 1 That's dell.com slash deals.

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, welcome. Happy New Year.
This is our first episode of 2025, and it's a pleasure to have have you here. We're going to start today talking about travel, air travel to be specific.

Speaker 1 And people who travel by air often worry about getting sick on the airplane. It does seem to happen a lot.
And I think most people believe that it's because of the air in the plane.

Speaker 1 But actually, it's probably not. The air on airplanes is really clean.

Speaker 1 Thanks to HEPA filters and the efficient way that air circulates on commercial aircraft, the air that you breathe in flight is much cleaner than the air that you would find in restaurants, bars, stores, or even in your own home.

Speaker 1 It is much more likely the surfaces you touch. That's where germs can live and linger.
So washing your hands and using wipes to wipe down the surfaces is probably a really good idea.

Speaker 1 But here's some other advice that you may not have heard before. Rethink how you board the aircraft.

Speaker 1 When passengers board by zones, when they call out your zone and then everybody from that zone gets in line and gets on the plane, that's when people tend to be closest to one another.

Speaker 1 This makes them much more likely to spread sickness. Researchers who looked at this said you're better off boarding the plane last.

Speaker 1 Wait till everybody else is on and then come on board and find your seat, or at least standing back from the long line of people waiting to board so you're not all bunched together with possibly sick people.

Speaker 1 And that is something you should know.

Speaker 1 We all have a tendency to get stuck in our ways. We do things because,

Speaker 1 well, that's how we do things.

Speaker 1 A lot of times it's probably fine, but for the big things we do and the things organizations do because that's how they do things, Well, that can be a real problem and a problem you can become blind to.

Speaker 1 Here to explain this and why it is so problematic and what you can do to address this is Dan Heath.

Speaker 1 He is a speaker and writer who's written some very important and well-received books over the last several years. His latest is called Reset, How to Change What's Not Working.

Speaker 1 Hey Dan, good to have you back. Welcome.

Speaker 2 Hey, great to be back, Mike.

Speaker 1 So can you start with an example, a story that you can tell that illustrates what you're talking about, about this idea of doing things because that's how we do things that doesn't work?

Speaker 2 There's a story that I love about a

Speaker 2 receiving area at a hospital, a Northwestern Memorial Hospital. And so this is the group whose job it is to take incoming packages and get them delivered to their appropriate places in the hospital.

Speaker 2 And for a long time, their average delivery time from receipt of package to ultimate delivery was three days.

Speaker 2 So, you know, UPS or FedEx would deliver the package across the country in a day or two, and then to get from the receiving area to like the third floor of the same hospital might take another three days.

Speaker 2 And I love situations like that because let's be clear, the people working in this department, they were not lazy, they were not stupid, they were just stuck inside a system that had kind of hardened and become entrenched.

Speaker 2 And maybe my favorite quote in the book captures this. It comes from a healthcare expert expert named Paul Bataldon, who says that every system is perfectly designed to get the results it gets.

Speaker 2 And I think that's the story of situations like that receiving area, where every day you come to work, as long as you can remember, it's taken you three days to get packages delivered.

Speaker 2 And you come eventually to kind of shrug your shoulders and say, well, maybe that's the way things work.

Speaker 2 And so it's situations like that that I'm hoping to help people get out of.

Speaker 1 Well, what's interesting about situations like that to me is

Speaker 1 that because they're just situations like that, they aren't necessarily problems to fix. That's just the way things are done.

Speaker 1 And so you can't fix something if you don't identify it as something that needs fixing.

Speaker 2 That is exactly it. Yes.
It's like you come to just almost accept the way things are as, well, this is just the way nature operates, right? It's because that's all you've ever seen.

Speaker 2 I mean, every day you come to work, you work a hard eight-hour day, you go home and next day it's the same thing.

Speaker 2 And so what often happens is, and in this case, this is what happened, an outsider came in who had a background in lean manufacturing.

Speaker 2 And so he comes in and he immediately realizes, you know, a half dozen things that they could fix to get way better performance.

Speaker 2 But he's also savvy enough and wise enough to realize it's not enough for him to want to change. He's got to plant the seed with this crew.

Speaker 2 And so he starts by canvassing them to figure out, hey, I'm here to help us all do better work to make your life easier, to make it smoother. If I can do that, will you help me?

Speaker 2 And the first thing he asks them is, what's getting in your way? What are your complaints? What are the stones in your shoes, so to speak?

Speaker 2 And they start flagging these very mundane things like, you know, they push the packages around on carts.

Speaker 2 And some of the carts have those kind of janky, gummed up wheels like you get in the supermarket sometimes.

Speaker 2 And so this new guy says instantly, okay, new carts, new wheels, whatever it takes, that shouldn't be a source of friction in our work. What's next?

Speaker 2 And so that becomes a theme as well is if we're trying to get unstuck, motivation is the fuel for that change.

Speaker 2 And so this outsider, Paul Suet, that came into the receiving area, he was very, very attentive to motivation as the force that would help him achieve a higher level of performance.

Speaker 1 But isn't it hard to identify in your own life what you're stuck on? Because, again, it's just

Speaker 1 what we do. It's how I do what I do.

Speaker 1 I haven't really thought about changing the way I do it.

Speaker 2 It is hard. And that's why it doesn't happen naturally, why these

Speaker 2 equilibria, if you will, kind of set in and we adapt to them.

Speaker 2 So one of the principles that

Speaker 2 I offer is the notion of finding leverage points, which is to say in situations where we're stuck, there's a lot of variables, there's a lot of factors involved, we can't change them all.

Speaker 2 We've got to find a place to push where a little bit of effort yields a disproportionate return. And so the next logical question is, okay, well, how do you find these magical leverage points?

Speaker 2 And that's what I devote many different principles to helping people explore. And one of those, just to give you a flavor, is the idea of studying bright spots.

Speaker 2 So this is a story actually from a therapist. There's a branch of therapy called solutions-focused therapy that is obsessed with bright spots.

Speaker 2 And one of my favorite examples has to do with this kid, Bobby, who was a ninth grader, always in trouble at school. always getting sent to the principal for discipline, comes in.

Speaker 2 One day there's a new counselor just started, and he is a practitioner of this branch of therapy. The counselor immediately asked Bobby, Bobby, when do you not get in trouble as much at school?

Speaker 2 I mean, think about the beauty of that question. Like, it's so natural to just kind of wallow in the problems and what's not working.

Speaker 2 The counselor's immediately looking for where are the bright spots? When is Bobby not getting in trouble? And so Bobby says, well, I don't get in trouble as much as Mrs. Smith's class.

Speaker 2 The counselor starts peppering him. Okay, well, what's different about Mrs.
Smith's class? What does she do that's different? What does it feel different?

Speaker 2 And eventually identifies these three very specific things that Mrs. Smith does, one of which is to greet him at the door with a smile.

Speaker 2 Usually Bobby's other teachers tended to kind of, you know, slink the other way when they saw the kid coming, not Mrs. Smith.

Speaker 2 And she always checked to make sure he understood the instructions before assignments and these other very practical things that the counselor then takes to Bobby's other teachers and says, hey, I know you've had some struggles with Bobby.

Speaker 2 Will you try these things? Will you try greeting him at the door? Will you try making sure he understands the instructions every time?

Speaker 2 And basically, Bobby goes from getting in trouble in about four or five out of six classes a day down to about one or two out of six a day. And to me,

Speaker 2 that's a kind of magic. To take a situation where this kid had a really, really problematic home life in and out of foster care, you can't change that.
You can't affect that.

Speaker 2 You can't go back in time and give him a more caring family. But what you can do is look for what's succeeding in spite of that.
And that's the notion of bright spots.

Speaker 1 I just love that. It's such a different way of looking at a problem by looking at the other side and looking at the solutions rather than

Speaker 1 what works rather than what doesn't. And not harping on what's wrong and why are you doing this?

Speaker 1 But find the way to make it work.

Speaker 2 Completely agree. And I think what happens, especially in the world of organizations, is

Speaker 2 our attention is just captured by the problems. You know, a lot of leaders just kind of careen from one emergency to the next and they're constantly putting out fires.

Speaker 2 And so when something good happens, it's not that people are oblivious. You know, we all know when things are working and we all know that the happy times and the best customers and so forth.

Speaker 2 But the trick is we don't study what's working. We just acknowledge it.
We celebrate it.

Speaker 2 We're relieved that something's working because it gives us more time to work on the things that aren't working.

Speaker 2 And I think the twist that I'm adding is, hey, let's take that same discipline that we used to figure out, hey, that broke. Why did it break? And how can we keep it from happening again?

Speaker 2 Let's flip that around and say, why did that work?

Speaker 2 So we can understand how to do it more.

Speaker 1 One of the ingredients that seems to be necessary in the kind of thing you're talking about and in the examples you've given is it needs like fresh eyes.

Speaker 1 Like somebody somebody has to come in and say, well, wait a minute,

Speaker 1 why are you doing this?

Speaker 1 You need a new perspective, I guess, is what I mean.

Speaker 2 I got the best email from a reader who

Speaker 2 was saying that

Speaker 2 years ago, she had worked in a government office, and one of her priorities as a leader was to canvass people on the front line to get their ideas and their inspirations.

Speaker 2 And she said, you know, this one woman had been working in the printing department for a long time.

Speaker 2 And she said, well, I've got an easy idea for you. We need to start buying paper in bulk.
And for whatever reason, you know, back to the notion of systems that just kind of set in and get sclerotic.

Speaker 2 They'd just been buying paper on a project basis. Like when they had something brewing, they'd go buy some paper, they'd do it.

Speaker 2 But she said, you know, we go through a ton of paper. And if we just kind of anticipated what we would need and buy it in bulk, it would be vastly cheaper.
And so the boss immediately runs with this.

Speaker 2 They start buying paper in bulk. They save tens of thousands of dollars, no joke.
And imagine what that does for morale. You know, number one, to be listened to.

Speaker 2 Number two, to see that your suggestion was put into practice and to see it pay off.

Speaker 2 Like not only was that a win for the organization, but it was also just a huge psychological win for the people involved.

Speaker 1 My guest is Dan Heath. He's author of a book called Reset: How to Change What's Not Working.

Speaker 1 I've learned from experience that hiring isn't easy, even when you know exactly who you're looking for.

Speaker 1 Running a business doesn't automatically make you good at hiring people. It's a skill and it takes time, sometimes too much time.
That's why I like Indeed.

Speaker 1 It makes the whole process faster and easier and the results are better. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need.

Speaker 1 Instead of struggling to get your job post noticed, Indeed Sponsored Jobs helps you stand out. Your listing jumps right to the top of the page for the people you actually want to reach.

Speaker 1 And that saves you days, maybe weeks of waiting. And the numbers back it up.
According to Indeed Data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed get 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.

Speaker 1 What I like most is there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts. You only pay for results.
And while I've been talking, 23 hires were made on Indeed worldwide. It's that fast.

Speaker 1 There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.

Speaker 1 And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash something.

Speaker 1 Just go to Indeed.com slash something right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on on this podcast. Indeed.com slash something.

Speaker 1 Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need.

Speaker 1 With the weather getting colder and the holidays upon us, I just want my wardrobe to be easy. Things that look sharp, feel great, and last season after season, which is exactly what I get from Quince.

Speaker 1 I reach for my Quince cashmere sweaters constantly. They're 100% Mongolian cashmere, and somehow they're just 50 bucks.
Soft, warm, and the kind of everyday luxury that doesn't feel overdone.

Speaker 1 And their denim is another favorite, great fit, easy to wear, and it holds up beautifully. And if you're looking for a holiday gift to give without the big price tag guilt, Quince is perfect for that.

Speaker 1 Those cashmere sweaters I just mentioned, they make great gifts. And their wool coats, you got to check them out.
They're stylish and durable, and their quality is top of the line.

Speaker 1 It's amazing how many people have found Quince and love it. What I love is how Quince works directly with ethical factories and top artisans cutting out the middlemen.

Speaker 1 So you get premium quality at half the cost of other high-end brands. It's luxury without the markup, which means you can give something nice this season or keep it for yourself.

Speaker 1 Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to quince.com/slash SYSK for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns.
Now available in Canada too.

Speaker 1 That's quince.com slash sysk. Free shipping and 365 day returns.
Quince.com slash SYSK.

Speaker 1 So Dan, you assume that people go into any job wanting to do their best, wanting things to go well. I mean,

Speaker 1 there's some optimism there.

Speaker 1 And yet, we've all come across that worker, that often the government worker, who is so couldn't care less, so doesn't have any interest in what you want.

Speaker 1 That's not the way we do it here. And you wonder what happens? Like,

Speaker 1 what happens to people that they get stuck in the way you're talking about and they just don't care?

Speaker 2 I think it's like a slow realization of powerlessness and

Speaker 2 which yields a slow accretion of indifference. It's like I think that every human being coming into a new job means well, has ideas, notices things they would do differently.

Speaker 2 But when you're told, no, that can't work. We can't try that.
No, somebody else tried that. It doesn't work.
It's not your business. Stay out of it.

Speaker 2 When you're told that, you know, a hundred times in a row, it's like you just kind of slowly build up these calluses. calluses.

Speaker 2 And eventually you shrug your shoulders and you say, you know, well, that's just

Speaker 2 this is my degree of freedom. It's tiny, but if I want to keep this job, I'll stay within that degree of freedom.

Speaker 2 And so a lot of times, like in situations like that, you need that outside catalyst, you know? And so it may be that some of these situations have just not yet found the right catalyst.

Speaker 1 And how does that usually happen? Is it just some new fresh eyes on a problem?

Speaker 2 I think that's right. I think that's right.
Like the receiving area story where it was taking them three days to deliver within the hospital.

Speaker 2 I think what happened there is, you know, the muckety mucks in the hospital had gotten enough complaints with people that were frustrated.

Speaker 2 Hey, we can't get our medicines and our gloves on time and that they brought in a new person.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 that was the spark.

Speaker 2 I don't think it always takes that. I mean, that would be kind of depressing if, you know, a new boss was the answer, but

Speaker 2 I think there often does need to be a new catalyst.

Speaker 1 You know, listening to that story about it taking three days for things once they arrive in the hospital to get to where they're going seems so unbelievable to me that nobody would have said, hey, wait a minute,

Speaker 1 that you would just accept that because it doesn't take three days to walk from the receiving area to any other place in the hospital. Why can't somebody,

Speaker 1 why couldn't a lot of people say, hey, here's a problem, let's fix that, rather than go, you know, just

Speaker 1 it takes what it takes and that's three days.

Speaker 2 Well, here's something that's interesting about that story,

Speaker 2 which is, I think a lot of the things that they had done unwittingly were motivated by good goals. Like, I'll give you an example.

Speaker 2 They had a lot of batch processes baked into the way they handled things. And, you know, batch processes are great sometimes.

Speaker 2 Like we, nobody puts one spoon at a time in the dishwasher and then runs it and puts in a fork. I mean, we, we load it up, right? It's a batch or the same thing with laundry.

Speaker 2 And so batch processes can work wonders for efficiency. And so that was the thinking behind some of the things they had done.

Speaker 2 Like, for instance, when FedEx and UPS would pull up, lay some packages down, and then they would kind of wait until there was a pile of packages before they did the first level of processing.

Speaker 2 Maybe it was zapping the packages into the inventory system or whatever. And then maybe they'd let a second pile build up before they did the next thing.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's stickering the boxes with their destination in the hospital.

Speaker 2 And so the thinking was this is making us more efficient because when we get around to stickering the boxes, like we can go slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap, slap and do 20 of them at once.

Speaker 2 But what the new guy realizes is that, no, no, no, this is not a system where you need batch processes.

Speaker 2 Like he completely changes their mental model and says, I want you to imagine letting packages flow like a river.

Speaker 2 And so our job is to help packages flow from the delivery trucks through our system to their places in the hospital. Our job is to remove friction, to remove delays.

Speaker 2 And it's like once they put on those lenses, they were able to reimagine the way that they work.

Speaker 2 And they were able to realize not only would it be a lot better for the people in the hospital, it was also a lot better for them. It was actually less work to create the better system.

Speaker 2 Like, here's my favorite example of that.

Speaker 2 They had a red phone in the receiving area that they had to answer all the time with people from within the hospital complaining about their packages and asking for someone to check on them.

Speaker 2 And so, you know, they pick up the phone, they handle these complaints. They've got to go rushing around looking for the package.
And that's all wasted effort

Speaker 2 because the people in the hospital didn't want to have to call about their packages to check on them. And then, you know, to have to spend 10, 15 minutes fielding each one of these calls.

Speaker 2 When the packages start flowing and they start getting where they need to go on the right time schedule, those calls disappear. And all of a sudden, you don't have to do that work anymore.

Speaker 2 It's actually easier to stick with the better system.

Speaker 1 So, what's the advice here? And then it does seem like it's kind of a top-down problem. You need a new manager to fix this.
But what can people do to plug into this?

Speaker 2 The heart of what I'm saying boils down to a two-part framework. If you're trying to get unstuck, number one, find leverage points.

Speaker 2 So those are those, you know, places where a little bit goes a long way, like the batch processes in this receiving area.

Speaker 2 Like that was a place where if they cut that out, they could get big gains quick. And then the second part is about, okay,

Speaker 2 now that you found a place to aim in the leverage points, how can you muster resources to push in that new direction? And resources might be, you know,

Speaker 2 your time or your energy or your motivation or your systems. And the problem that most of us have is we don't have extra of any of those things.

Speaker 2 You know, you can't just walk to the office supply cabinet and pull down a satchel of cash or, you know, tap some idle employees to come off the bench. Like you're stuck with what you have.

Speaker 2 And so we have to be smart about how do we reconfigure those resources to push in a new way.

Speaker 1 I guess it starts, though. I mean, you have to start thinking about like, well, what's not working?

Speaker 1 So many of us, like we talked about before,

Speaker 1 are doing things because that's the way we do things and not realizing that maybe there's a better way.

Speaker 1 And I guess that motivation has to come because

Speaker 1 if the way we're doing it isn't really bothering you, even though it's not a very good way, but if it's not bothering you, then maybe there's nothing to fix. I mean,

Speaker 1 you've got to find the thing to fix first.

Speaker 2 Yeah, well said. I remember years ago, I talked to this

Speaker 2 kind of genius systems thinker named Steven Speer, and I was asking him about some of the changes that he'd seen. And he said that the change tends to start with an insufferable frustration.

Speaker 2 You know, when people just, you know, fed up and they're like, you know, we want this to be different. That's often the motivating factor.

Speaker 2 Now, that said,

Speaker 2 I think all of us can play a role in helping other people discover that insufferable frustration.

Speaker 2 You know, Imagine if you were in the receiving area and you took one of your colleagues to like another hospital in Chicago and showed them how theirs worked and it was clean and there weren't piles of boxes and they weren't answering frustrated calls and the packages were just zipping along.

Speaker 2 Like an experience like that has a way of creating an insufferable frustration. Like, why do we have, why is ours so much worse? Why do we have to live like this?

Speaker 2 And so I think we can help unite and rally our colleagues around a new direction.

Speaker 1 So in researching this subject, did you find, was there anything else that you found that was really striking that we should probably mention?

Speaker 2 One thing that

Speaker 2 really struck me, what I call considering the goal of the goal, I came across the story of a guy named Ryan Davidson. So he buys a new truck, a ram truck at a dealership.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, within hours of him driving off the lot, they're immediately pestering him to fill out a survey about the experience he had.

Speaker 2 And when I say pester, I mean at least five different people from the dealership hit him up in at least three different media, email, texting, calling, I mean, just hounding the guy.

Speaker 2 And not just for insight, they wanted like positive scores. I mean, they basically said as much.
We would really appreciate positive scores on these surveys.

Speaker 2 And so Davidson kind of reluctantly fills out this survey. Probably all of us have been through some form of this.

Speaker 2 And after he's been pestered and pestered and pestered and pestered for feedback, he fills it out, gives them the feedback, never hears from anyone again, except for his salesperson who texts him to complain about not being given all 10 out of 10s on the survey.

Speaker 2 And when you think about a charade like that,

Speaker 2 I think what's going on is at some point people thought, hey, we want to deliver a good experience for people who buy cars and trucks from us. Okay, so far, so good.
We need things to

Speaker 2 measure so that we know if we're getting better or worse. Okay, well, let's try a survey at the end.
That makes sense. Okay, so far, so good.

Speaker 2 But then sometimes these goals just take on a life of their own.

Speaker 2 So rather than using those surveys as a diagnostic of whether the experience is getting better, the survey becomes an end in itself, right?

Speaker 2 It's like they just want you to literally bubble in 10 out of 10, regardless of what your actual experience was, because if they get a 10 out of 10, they'll they'll get a bonus or something.

Speaker 2 And so that's why I think this prompt, if we can learn to consider what's the goal of the goal, I think that's a useful corrective.

Speaker 2 So in this situation, you know, the goal of the goal, in other words, why are we collecting the survey data?

Speaker 2 Surely it's not because we want our team to get better and better at hectoring customers into giving falsely inflated scores, right? That surely can't be the goal of the goal.

Speaker 2 The goal of the goal is to provide a better experience. And if that's what we care about, this whole charade

Speaker 2 of bugging people to give 10 out of 10s is just on the wrong path altogether.

Speaker 1 What a great example because everyone has had that.

Speaker 1 I'd really appreciate it if you would give me 10 out of 10.

Speaker 1 Well, how about if I just tell the truth?

Speaker 1 Right, right.

Speaker 2 Why are you asking me for feedback if you fundamentally do not care what the feedback is?

Speaker 1 Wouldn't it be better if I told your company how I really feel rather than give you 10 out of 10?

Speaker 2 Exactly right. There's a law called Goodhart's Law that says when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
And I love that because that's what happened in the survey story, right?

Speaker 2 It's like as soon as you start layering on carrots and sticks to get the 10 out of 10, when the measure becomes a target, it's no longer a good measure of anything.

Speaker 1 Well, what an interesting conversation about a topic that everybody has probably thought about to one degree or another, another, but nobody ever really talks about this.

Speaker 1 But it's really interesting when you think about why we do the things we do and why we don't do them better. I've been talking to Dan Heath.

Speaker 1 He is a speaker and writer who's written some great books over the years. His latest is called Reset, How to Change What's Not Working.
And there's a link to his book in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Great to have you back. Thanks, Dan.

Speaker 2 Thanks so much, Mike. Great to be with you.

Speaker 1 I want to tell you about a great new podcast I think you'll like. I'm loving it.
So, what happens when our passions become obsessions?

Speaker 1 Well, on David Green is obsessed, one of America's most familiar voices and longtime co-host of NPR's Morning Edition seeks out obsessives of all kinds while unpacking his own fixations.

Speaker 1 You'll hear David talk to comedian Tig Notaro about her complex passion for plant-based food. Actor David Arquette on his love of Bozo the Clown.
Paula Poundstone on her house full of cats.

Speaker 1 Celebrity chef and author Michael Simon discusses why he just can't quit the Cleveland Browns, even though they often make him miserable, and so much more.

Speaker 1 It's pop psychology disguised as conversations with the world's most fascinating people.

Speaker 1 You can listen to David Green is obsessed wherever you get podcasts.

Speaker 1 You know, my mornings used to be a scramble, coffee, breakfast, trying to remember what supplements to take. It was a lot to juggle.

Speaker 1 And now I start every day with a single scoop of AG1 and it's made my morning so much easier and better. In one mix, here's what I get.

Speaker 1 I get nutrients from real whole foods plus prebiotics, probiotics, and enzymes that support my digestion and gut health. After just a few weeks, I mean, I can tell it's working.

Speaker 1 My energy feels steady all day. I don't have to think about juggling five different pills or powders.
And what I love is that AG1 isn't just another supplement.

Speaker 1 It's a daily micro-habit that supports whole body health in one scoop. It's simple, it's consistent, and it fits easily into my routine.
One scoop, shake, drink, done.

Speaker 1 And I know I've done something good for myself before the day even starts. It's become a small ritual that sets the tone for the entire day.
AG1 helps me stay one scoop ahead.

Speaker 1 Head to drinkag1.com slash something to get a free welcome kit with an AG1 flavor sampler and a bottle of vitamin D3 plus K2 when you first subscribe. That's drinkag1.com slash something.

Speaker 1 Something we all experience is the passage of time. Time goes by.
It never stops. We measure it with a clock, we can tell how much time has gone by and what time it is now,

Speaker 1 but we can't really control time, we can't go back in time, we can't speed up time.

Speaker 1 Still, we've all had experiences where it seems like time flies by quickly or drags on so slowly, it's agonizing.

Speaker 1 In other words, even though time, according to the clock, goes by at the same rate, it doesn't always feel like that.

Speaker 1 So, is there something to this? That's what Steve Taylor's here to talk about.

Speaker 1 Steve is a senior lecturer and researcher in psychology at Leeds Beckett University in the UK, and he's author of the book, Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time.

Speaker 1 Hi, Steve. Welcome.
Good to have you on Something You Should Know.

Speaker 3 Hi, Mike. Great to be with you.

Speaker 1 So, tell me why you want to understand and research research this idea of time perception in the first place.

Speaker 3 The topic is what I call time expansion experiences. So these are moments when our normal sense of time slows down drastically.

Speaker 3 It's almost as if we open a kind of wormhole into a different experience of time.

Speaker 3 And these experiences often occur in accidents. And I had my own, my own car crashed about 10 years ago in which I had this type of experience.

Speaker 3 So that encouraged me to investigate them as a psychologist.

Speaker 1 And why is it important to talk about this and investigate this as a psychologist? Because

Speaker 1 why?

Speaker 3 When I had my own experience, well, maybe I'll tell you a bit about it. I was driving down the motorway, as we call them here in the UK, and it was quite a busy highway.

Speaker 3 And there was a truck on the inside lane that came out and crashed into my car. So our car started to spin round in the middle of the highway at maybe 60 miles an hour.

Speaker 3 But immediately, as soon as the truck hit us, everything went into slow motion.

Speaker 3 The cars behind us seemed to almost freeze and i felt as though i had so much time to try to analyze the situation to try to work out what to do to try to take some sort of preventative action and my perception became very clear and detailed everything looked very bright and intense and i felt this very strange sense of calmness you know i never expected to to feel so calm in a kind of life-threatening situation But

Speaker 3 in real time, this experience probably lasted just three or four seconds before we veered towards the left and crashed into a barrier at the side of the road.

Speaker 3 But in my mind, it was more like 30 seconds, maybe 40 seconds, even longer. So to me, as a psychologist, it kind of exemplified that time as a kind of construct.

Speaker 3 You know, it's something that we create with our minds. And there's nothing absolute or fixed about it.

Speaker 3 It varies according to our state of mind, according to our mood, according to our state of consciousness.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but if there was a video camera taping your car crash and we all watched it later, we would all agree that it took three seconds.

Speaker 1 It didn't take 30 or 40 seconds the way you perceived it while you were in it. It took three seconds.
Objectively, it just took three seconds.

Speaker 1 So those experiences, and also those experiences where time not only slows down, like in your accident, but it also speeds up. Like, you know, time flies when you're having fun.

Speaker 1 And, you know, but at the end of the day, eight hours is eight hours. And

Speaker 1 whatever happened during that eight hours, that's what happened.

Speaker 3 That's true. But, you know, you can actually experience more or less time in eight hours.
Eight hours is a very subjective experience. You can talk about this in terms of a whole lifespan.

Speaker 3 You know, I sometimes use the example of two twins. I think Einstein uses this example in relation to relativity and physics.
But in relation to psychological time, there could be two twins.

Speaker 3 Let's say one twin grows up to be a very conventional person and lives a very normal life, doing the same job for 40 years in the same area. And

Speaker 3 they live according to a routine and don't have many new experiences. But the other twin goes off traveling around the world doing lots of different jobs.

Speaker 3 And maybe they have a lot of time expansion experiences. Maybe they take psychedelics or engage in meditation to change their state of consciousness and therefore time expands.

Speaker 3 But when these, you know, if these two twins, if they, let's imagine that they died on the same day, on the same date, the second twin who went traveling around the world and had many new experiences and time expansion experiences they actually live for longer you know they actually experience a lot more time in their lives than the first person so and that applies to any period of time whether it's a day or a month or a whole lifetime It all seems very subjective.

Speaker 1 And at the end of the day, I mean, what do we do with this? I mean, it's interesting. And I think people have all experienced these time expansion kind of moments.
But

Speaker 1 so now what?

Speaker 3 Well, most human beings, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think most human beings feel oppressed by time. We feel that we don't have enough time.

Speaker 3 We feel that time is an enemy, that it's always running away from us and speeding up as we get older.

Speaker 3 But if we know that time is flexible, it's subjective, it's not a fixed, even a real phenomenon, then it changes our attitude towards time. You know, we no longer,

Speaker 3 we no longer have to be afraid of time or feel that time is our enemy because we have some degree of control over it and there's nothing really fundamentally real about it.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 what's the control? I mean,

Speaker 1 you could go get into lots of accidents to slow it down, but that might kill you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's not really advisable. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But how can you control it? Because I, like you just said, as you get older, time speeds up. It just

Speaker 1 does. I mean, a year

Speaker 1 when you're in your 60s is not a year when you're 14. It's just a different thing.
But can you fix that? Can you change it?

Speaker 3 To some degree, on the one hand, time perception is related to information processing. So the more information you process, the slower time goes.

Speaker 3 And that's why new environments and new experiences usually make time pass more slowly because you're absorbing more information because it's all unfamiliar. It's all novel and fresh to you.

Speaker 3 And that's normally why time

Speaker 3 seems to move more slowly, sorry, more quickly as we get older. Because as we get older, there are fewer new experiences.

Speaker 3 Our lives tend to become more repetitious and full of routine. But we don't necessarily have to allow that to happen.
You know, we can bring in new experience into our lives.

Speaker 3 If you keep changing your life in some way, and if you keep, say, exposing yourself to new environments by traveling, new information by being curious,

Speaker 3 You keep challenging yourself,

Speaker 3 you know, taking in new experiences and new information, then time doesn't necessarily go more quickly. So to a degree, it depends on what you do with your life.

Speaker 1 I want to understand because, you know, I get what you know, that people have a subjective sense of time and how it passes, but there's also,

Speaker 1 but we've also come up with a way to measure it. We can measure time passing with a clock.
And

Speaker 1 that doesn't change. I mean, a second is a second, and there's one, oh, there's another one, there's another one.
And at the end of the day,

Speaker 1 that much time has passed on my clock.

Speaker 3 That's true, but how you actually experience a second can be different. You know, a second to a person who's very bored is longer than it is to a person who's absorbed in an activity.

Speaker 3 A second to a person in an accident can be much, much longer than a second to a person who's sitting at home watching TV. So, you know, it's all about subjective perception.

Speaker 3 I mean, in time expansion experiences, people may only experience, say, five seconds of clock time, but in their mind, in their subjective experience, they actually go through maybe one minute of subjective time, and they're actually able to do things, which would only be possible in a minute of normal time.

Speaker 3 There are so many time expansion experiences from accidents and emergencies where people report being able to, you know, go through really complex series of thoughts and actions.

Speaker 3 which would be impossible if time had been running at a normal speed.

Speaker 3 And so so for example, I did a survey recently of 300 people who'd had time expansion experiences, not just in accidents, but also under the influence of psychedelics or in meditation or in sports, for example.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 almost, well, more than three quarters of people were sure that their time expansion experience allowed them to do things that would be impossible in a normal passage of time.

Speaker 3 So in that sense, time really does expand. It really does move more slowly to these people.

Speaker 1 well one of the things I've always found interesting is how the

Speaker 1 because in an accident

Speaker 1 in in a traffic accident time passes more slowly but you have you don't know it's coming and you know then it's over but you know that an hour in the dentist chair is a lot longer than an hour you know at an amusement park.

Speaker 1 It's it's a different

Speaker 1 because it's unpleasant. And why does unpleasant slow it down?

Speaker 3 There's a whole category of negative experiences in which time goes very slowly, whether it's boredom or whether it's a waiting situation or whether you're in pain or whether you're anticipating pain, when you're in some kind of discomfort, that almost always makes time pass very, very slowly.

Speaker 3 And I think that's because in these situations, we can't focus our attention. You know, we can't get absorbed in any kind of activity or entertainment.

Speaker 3 And therefore, we're in this kind of very open state of awareness in which our minds become very busy.

Speaker 3 Our minds start to worry, start to think about the future, start to envision lots of scenarios, start to think about the past. So our minds get very kind of agitated and very, very busy.

Speaker 3 So in other words, they get full of information, a massive amount of thoughts pass through our consciousness. And all of this information passing through our consciousness stretches time.

Speaker 3 So if you compare that to, let's say you're waiting.

Speaker 3 And you're waiting to go on holiday at the airport. So you're in a good frame of mind, looking forward to your holiday.
Maybe you're reading a book in the waiting lounge

Speaker 3 at the airport. And time can go quite quickly in that situation because you're in a state of absorption.
You're relaxed and you're focusing on a magazine or a book.

Speaker 3 Maybe you're talking to your partner.

Speaker 3 So when you're at the dentist or when you're waiting for

Speaker 3 a doctor's appointment, or maybe you've been waiting for a long time for a bus or a train and you're getting quite agitated, time passes very slowly because your mind gets very agitated and full of information.

Speaker 1 But I wonder why, for example, you can watch a two-hour movie and it flies by because it's a great movie. The next day you could watch a two-hour movie.

Speaker 1 You're just as absorbed in it, but it's taking forever. Like get to the point.

Speaker 1 You know, he's the bad guy. He gets him.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 it's the same experience more or less.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 the time that passes feels very different.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, it's actually to do with absorption again, because when you watch a really good movie, you forget about everything. You forget about, you know, your life.

Speaker 3 You even forget who you are because you're so absorbed in the film. Everything kind of drops away and you become completely absorbed in the story or the characters of the film.

Speaker 3 So that kind of intense absorption makes time pass really quickly.

Speaker 3 But if a film isn't very good, and if you don't believe the characters, if the story is not very enthralling, then you can't really get into absorption. And again, your mind gets a bit busy.

Speaker 3 You start to think about other things. You start to think, hmm, what shall I do tomorrow? Oh, what happened? Yes, you know, what happened at work today?

Speaker 3 So again, your mind gets full of information again, which stretches time. In a way, you can judge how good a film is by how quickly it seems to pass.

Speaker 1 Another experience that I have that I think most people, well, you tell me, but so if you take a car trip, you're going to go someplace you haven't been and it takes two hours to get there.

Speaker 1 And you, and, you know, it's that, oh God, are we there yet? Are we there yet?

Speaker 1 The trip back always seems to take less time.

Speaker 1 It takes the same amount of clock time, but the trip, the return trip always seems shorter than the going trip.

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's a very common experience. In my view, that's due to familiarity, because when you go to a place, when you travel to a place for the first time, the journey is fresh.

Speaker 3 You're looking at everything for the first time.

Speaker 3 But even when you come back, even if you're just traveling back a few hours later, it's already slightly familiar to you. You've done the journey before.
So

Speaker 3 you're processing less information the second time you do the journey.

Speaker 3 It's kind of interesting because I once did a survey at an airport where I interviewed people who had returned from their holidays.

Speaker 3 And people often said that the first week of the holiday went really slowly, but the second week went really quickly.

Speaker 3 And that's just because of familiarity, because after a week, the environment's already slightly familiar to you. You're already settling into a routine.

Speaker 3 And therefore, it makes time pass more quickly.

Speaker 1 Well, my theory has always been about that, about taking a trip and coming back, is that on the way back,

Speaker 1 because on the way there, you never know when you're going to get there because you don't really know where you're going and you don't know how long it's going to take.

Speaker 1 So it's a big open-ended question. On the way back,

Speaker 1 within an hour of your home things start to look so familiar you feel like you're almost home

Speaker 3 it's also to do with awareness of time you know when we're when we're aware of time and when we focus on the concept of time and we're thinking about when am i going to get when am i going to get there how long is this going to take that awareness of time actually makes time pass more slowly compared to when you forget about time then time seems to go quickly.

Speaker 1 You said something about

Speaker 1 people in sports and their perception of time. And I haven't heard that before.
So can you explain that?

Speaker 3 Well, I've collected hundreds of examples of time expansion experiences in my research.

Speaker 3 And I found that about 50% of them come from accidents and emergencies, but about 10% of them come from sports people.

Speaker 3 Some sports people report that in their highest moments, in their moments of peak performance, time seems to slow down and they seem to have more time to position themselves, to respond to their opponent's actions.

Speaker 3 And they often report that, you know, because time was moving so slowly, they were capable of astounding feats.

Speaker 3 And, you know, it was these seats which enabled them to win competitions or to break records.

Speaker 3 And my theory is that the, you know, the most elite sports people and the best athletes in the world have this ability to slow down time.

Speaker 3 And there are many reports from athletes, you know, speaking about this. Do you remember the baseball player, Ted Williams? He said that, you know,

Speaker 3 he felt that he had a slow down experience of time, which

Speaker 3 gave him more time to see the ball as it was hurtling towards him. He said that he could even see the seam on the ball.
He could see the stitches on the ball as it flew towards him.

Speaker 3 You know, Lionel Messi, the soccer player, he has the same ability.

Speaker 3 I think the reason why most people say he was or is the best soccer player in the world is because he has this amazing ability to slow down time.

Speaker 1 Something I heard, I don't know if you have ever looked into this, and I don't even know if it's true, but I like the fact that it might be true, is that one of the reasons that it is so difficult to swat a fly is that a fly's perception of time, that we are moving so slow that he can see us coming a mile away, that for him, we're not even close.

Speaker 1 And yet for us, we're trying to get him real fast. For him, that's forever.
And for us, it's an eighth of a second.

Speaker 3 That's true. I think that's a very true aphorism, because,

Speaker 3 you know, animals have a different metabolism, a different kind of consciousness to human beings. And I believe that they do experience time in a different way.

Speaker 3 Usually, the rule is that the smaller animal, the slower its sense of time is. So, you know, there are insects who may only live for a few days.
or maybe a few weeks in human time.

Speaker 3 But in terms of their metabolism or their consciousness, they actually experience what would be to human beings a whole lifespan.

Speaker 3 So it kind of illustrates my main point, which is that time is totally flexible and subjective. You know, the human experience of time is totally different to an insect's experience of time.

Speaker 3 But also, you know, the experience of time that human beings have in different situations or different states of consciousness can be completely different to other situations or states of consciousness.

Speaker 1 You talk about the phenomenon of your life flashing before you, like when you think you're going to die or something. And can you explain how that fits into this discussion?

Speaker 1 And first of all, is that really true? I mean, does that happen to a lot of people?

Speaker 3 It's not an uncommon experience.

Speaker 3 It usually happens when a person is close to death.

Speaker 3 For example, during a fall, maybe a mountaineer falls off the side of a mountain and in the few seconds that it takes before he hits the ground, then he has a life review.

Speaker 3 And that means that he or she experiences

Speaker 3 sometimes literally every experience of their life is experienced again in a matter of a few seconds, right from birth through their childhood, through their teenage years, right to the present moment.

Speaker 3 It all flashes before their eyes.

Speaker 3 And also when people actually are clinically dead for a short time in what's called a near-death experience, in those, again, usually that's just for a few seconds or maybe a few minutes.

Speaker 3 in that short period of time before they are revived or resuscitated they may have this life review so sometimes it is literally every experience of their life which flashes before their eyes.

Speaker 3 And it's not just a question of memory because people who have these experiences, they say that they actually relive these experiences, don't just remember them, they actually relive them.

Speaker 3 They recall them in very intense perceptual detail. They even notice things from the events which were not apparent at the time.
They sometimes see the events from different perspectives

Speaker 3 from what they experienced at the time. Sometimes occasionally they just see a number of salient or significant events from their lives.

Speaker 3 But, you know, it's completely paradoxical, kind of a complete mystery really, how a whole lifetime of experiences can be recalled or relived in a matter of a few seconds or maybe a few minutes at the most.

Speaker 1 That does seem impossible, doesn't it?

Speaker 3 It does seem impossible. Yeah, and there are some kind of neurological explanations

Speaker 3 to try to account for the life review, but they don't really make sense.

Speaker 3 If you look into them deeply, they're quite flawed i personally think the only way to make sense of these experiences is to think of time in a different way and so i like to think of time as a kind of spatial phenomenon and this kind of fits with einstein's theory of relativity it fits with some theories from quantum physics so the the basic idea is that time is not linear you know we experience time in a linear way as a kind of arrow that moves towards the future The past disappears when we enter the present and then we move towards the future.

Speaker 3 That's our our normal experience of time, like an arrow heading into the future. But I think in reality, at the kind of fundamental level, time is actually spatial.

Speaker 3 You know, it's all kind of laid out in a panorama. So then in some sense, the past still exists and the future

Speaker 3 already exists. So you can actually re-experience the past in certain states of consciousness because it's still there.

Speaker 3 And maybe in certain states of consciousness, you can, you know, you can glimpse into the future because it's already there.

Speaker 3 And as I say, it sounds completely counterintuitive, but it does fit with some theories from physics. And it's really the only way to make sense of a phenomenon like the life review.

Speaker 1 Well, I would imagine that really everybody has had these experiences where time either seems to have sped up or slowed down.

Speaker 1 And although we've all experienced it, we tend to write it off as just, well, you know, it's not real. You know, it's not, it's not, it's just something that happens in the human brain.

Speaker 1 But as you point out, it's a real thing that we can make time speed up or slow down. We do all the time.
Steve Taylor's been my guest.

Speaker 1 He's a senior lecturer and researcher in psychology at Leeds Beckett University.

Speaker 1 And the name of his book is Time Expansion Experiences: The Psychology of Time Perception and the Illusion of Linear Time. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
Great, Steve.

Speaker 1 Good to have you on. Thank you.

Speaker 3 Thanks a lot. All the best.

Speaker 1 It is staggering how many photographs are taken every day around the world. And there's a pretty good chance that you'll be in some of those photographs.

Speaker 1 So you might be interested in knowing there is one facial expression that you can make in a photograph that will make you look better. It's called the squinch.

Speaker 1 Squinching is a word that was coined by professional photographer Peter Hurley.

Speaker 1 He has a YouTube video that went viral about about this a while ago and I'll put a link to it in the show notes so you can see it because you kind of have to see this.

Speaker 1 But when you squinch, you're squinting your eyes just a little bit, narrowing the distance between the pupil and the lower eyelid. It creates a look of confidence.

Speaker 1 It eliminates that deer in the headlight look that you often get when you're in a picture. While squinching and squinting are similar, there's a big difference when it comes to photographs.

Speaker 1 A squinch is more subtle than a squint, and it won't give you that furrowed brow look. You just use your cheek muscles, not your forehead, in order to squinch.

Speaker 1 And to get a better understanding, you can watch the video. And again, the link is in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Something you should know is produced by Jennifer Brennan, Jeffrey Havison, executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Speaker 1 Next up is a little song from CarMax about selling a car your way. You wanna sell those wheels? You

Speaker 1 Wanna take a sec to think about it. Or like a month.
Wanna keep tabs on that instant offer. With OfferWatch.
Wanna have CarMax pick it up from your driveway.

Speaker 1 So, wanna drive? CarMax. Pickup not available everywhere.
Restrictions and fee may apply.

Speaker 4 Oh, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes 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.