Your Hormones Control More Than You Think & How Big Mistakes Shape You

People love giving advice—but most of the time, it doesn’t actually change anyone’s behavior. In fact, there’s a much more effective way to influence people that works far better than telling them what they should do. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4675534/ Hormones influence nearly every aspect of your life, yet most people only have a vague understanding of what they actually do. These powerful chemical signals affect mood, stress, sleep, energy, appetite, weight, sex drive, and much more. And when hormones fall out of balance, the effects can ripple throughout the entire body. Dr. Saira Hameed, endocrinologist and author of Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones (https://amzn.to/4eO37IB), explains how hormones work, why they matter so much, and what happens when this intricate signaling system goes wrong. Everyone makes mistakes—but some mistakes hit differently. A bad decision involving work, relationships, money, or reputation can feel overwhelming and difficult to move past. Michael Lynton understands this firsthand. As former CEO of Sony Entertainment, he approved a film that unexpectedly triggered an international crisis involving North Korea, cyberattacks, leaked emails, and worldwide controversy. In our conversation, he explains what he learned from that experience, why major mistakes can shake your identity so deeply, and how people can recover, grow, and even find meaning after things go terribly wrong. He is co-author of From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You (https://amzn.to/4toBGZj). Coffee may be doing more for your health than simply waking you up. Large-scale research suggests it appears to protect one important organ in the body—and interestingly, the protective effect may increase the more coffee you drink. https://www.coffeeandhealth.org/health/liver-function/overview PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 AQUA TRU: Take the guesswork out of pure, great-tasting water. Head to ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://AquaTru.com⁠⁠⁠⁠ now and get 20% off your purifier using promo code SYSK. AquaTru even comes with a 30-day best-tasting water guarantee or your money back. RULA: This Mental Health Awareness Month, don’t just think about your mental health - actually take the step to take care of it. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Refresh your everyday with luxury you will actual use! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! DELL: With the Dell Pro laptop powered by Intel Core Ultra with vPro, no matter how many interruptions you have, your laptop won’t be one of them. With battery that’s optimized for the way you work, and built-in intelligence that quiets distractions the moment you’re trying to focus, your tech won’t slow you down. Find out more at ⁠https://Dell.com/Dell-Pro⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:31Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know: Why giving people advice is rarely worth the effort. Then, a top doctor explains the mystery of how your hormones work and why the hormone cortisol is not your enemy.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Because I think it's getting a really bad rap. You know, cortisol is a wonder hormone. If any of your listeners got out of bed this morning, well, that was because of cortisol. Because you had this wonderful boost of cortisol half an hour before you woke up.

• 0:59Mike Carruthers?

  Also, a very big benefit to drinking lots of coffee. And the former CEO of Sony Pictures on how to handle your biggest mistakes. And he made a big one.

• 1:11Speaker 03

  What you're referring to is a movie called "The Interview", about two hapless journalists, played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who go off to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong-un. I jumped up and said, "Let's make the movie", and disaster ensued.

• 1:26Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

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• 2:00Mike Carruthers?

  And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So, instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing, but with a thousand chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.

• 2:44Mike Carruthers?

  That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:09Mike Carruthers?

  Have you noticed how people love to give advice? Trouble is, people hate getting it. And it's the perfect topic to begin this episode of Something You Should Know. Research shows that unsolicited advice often backfires because of something psychologists call reactance. Our natural resistance to feeling controlled or told what to do. The moment someone pushes advice on us, part of the brain starts defending our independence and freedom of choice. Which is why people often resist advice about eating, drinking, parenting, money, politics, and just about everything else. What actually does change behavior? Example.

• 3:54Mike Carruthers?

  Research on observational learning and social influence suggests that people are far more likely to copy what they see others doing, rather than follow direct instructions. When someone quietly models a behavior, exercising regularly, staying calm in conflict, putting down their phone at dinner, others are surprisingly likely to imitate it, especially when the results look positive. In other words, if you really want to influence people, stop lecturing them and start demonstrating. And that is something you should know.

• 4:32Mike Carruthers?

  People throw around the word hormones all the time. We blame hormones for mood swings, stress, weight gain, low energy, poor sleep, aging, even attraction. But if you were to stop people and ask them to explain what hormones are and how they work, they'd probably struggle. Are hormones chemicals, signals, messengers? And how can something so invisible have so much control over how we think, sleep, eat, age, and function every day? It turns out that hormones are part of an extraordinary communication system inside your body.

• 5:12Mike Carruthers?

  Hormones help determine when you wake up, when you feel hungry, how stressed you are, how your body handles sugar, why puberty happens, what menopause is, and even how your body responds to fear and love. In fact, scientists believe there may still be hormones in your body that we haven't yet discovered. So what exactly are these powerful signals? How do they work? And what happens when the system goes wrong? Here to explain it all is Dr. Syrah Hamid. She is an endocrinologist in the UK and author of the book Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones. Hi, Dr. Hamid, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Hi, Mike. It's a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.

• 5:59Mike Carruthers?

  So I must admit that I don't know a lot about hormones. And I think most people don't really know a lot about hormones. And the reason for that is that they're not really easy to understand. They're a little elusive. So can you, in a very simple way, explain what hormones are and what they do?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  Hormones are the chemical signals in your body. You can think of them as being like your body's text messages. Your body consists of thirty trillion cells. And those cells need to be in communication with one another so that they're all doing the right thing at the right time. So it's your hormones that mean that you are not just a being, an organism of thirty trillion cells, you are an interconnected human being. You can think of hormones being like signals that come out of a radio transmitter. The radio transmitter are the glands in your body, like the adrenal glands, or the thyroid gland, or the pituitary gland.

• 7:03Speaker 02

  And these gland transmitters are sending out their hormone signals to distant parts of the body. The hormones travel in the bloodstream and they go from the gland to the target cell and they contain an instruction. And the target cell must then carry out that instruction. And these hormones are affecting every moment of your day, as well as the milestones in life. So they are pretty important.

• 7:29Mike Carruthers?

  How many different kinds of hormones are there? Do we know?

• 7:33Speaker 02

  Clinically, so as an endocrinologist, that's a doctor who specializes in hormones, there are about, you know, fifteen, twenty that we would see fairly commonly. And we would see them because somebody either has too much of that hormone that's causing problems, or too little. And again, that can cause other problems. Sometimes the body can become resistant to the hormone. What does that mean? That means a bit like if you're getting, if a radio program is being broadcast, but you, the listener, you tune out. You're just not listening. You're not understanding or listening into the information. So there can be a variety of issues. Clinically, we see these, uh, these issues in our, in our clinics. And yeah, about, about sort of fifteen to twenty are probably clinically relevant, but there's a whole lot more out there.

• 8:17Speaker 02

  And what's so exciting in the field is that more and more are being discovered.

• 8:21Mike Carruthers?

  So we don't really know all the hormones there are.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  Exactly. So we could never believe in the here and now that we are at the peak of our knowledge in this area. Uh, there will be more hormones discovered. And as they're discovered, we will understand more and more about how we as human beings work. So it's an exciting time.

• 8:43Mike Carruthers?

  So you've explained how hormones are in our body and they're signals going to different parts of our body. But people also take hormones, right? There's hormone replacement therapy, for example, where people are putting hormones from outside into their body. Where did those hormones come from?

• 9:04Speaker 02

  We need to understand what is the structure? What is the molecular structure of that hormone? Once that has been elucidated, you can chemically synthesize a medicinal mimic. And that medicinal mimic can be identical to the naturally occurring hormone. Or you can make tweaks to the molecular structure so that the medicinal version does something extra. So if we look at the example of GLP-1, very famous hormone now because of drugs like Munjaro, Wegovy, et cetera. The naturally released hormone released by the gut after eating lasts in the system minutes.

• 9:47Speaker 02

  Whereas if you inject these medicinal versions, they will last in the system for a week because of those changes to the molecular structure. So that's what we're doing when we replace a hormone. Um, and as I say, it can be like for like, or we can have changed it in some way to benefit the patient.

• 10:11Mike Carruthers?

  But they're artificially created. They're not getting it from an animal or a person or a cadaver. These are artificially created.

• 10:20Speaker 02

  Exactly right. So his, in the history of endocrinology, the first hormone replacement, exactly as you say, came from animal glands. So the first insulin uh came from, from dog pancreases. And then once there was proof, proof of concept, for decades, um insulin was extracted from pig and cow pancreases. And that is what patients were injecting. The issue with the insulin example is that there was an unpredictable potency. And so if you gave an animal derived insulin, there was a high risk of hypoglycemia because the dose you took yesterday, that could have been fine. But then you injected the same

• 11:03Speaker 02

  volume the next day and you overshot and the blood sugar went too low. And uh as molecular biology improved, as pharmaceutical um manufacturing improved, it became possible to make synthetic versions. Not only did that lead to much greater predictability in terms of how the hormone would be in the body, but it also meant that we could produce these hormones in far larger quantities. Because if you're relying on, on, on animal derived hormones to get enough hormone to serve a population, you're talking about a huge supply of animals that you would require to do that.

• 11:44Mike Carruthers?

  So generally, we've got these hormones in our body and they're doing what they do and things seem to be fine. Where do things go wrong?

• 11:55Speaker 02

  The paradigm in endocrinology is, is as follows. You can have too much of a hormone. So the gland just starts overproducing that signal, bombards the target cell with the instruction and the person will develop symptoms. So in endocrinology, that's, that's case study one, you've got too much.

• 12:16Mike Carruthers?

  And what's an example of that?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  So an example would be what we call thyrotoxicosis, otherwise known as Graves' disease. This is an autoimmune illness of the thyroid gland. So the body launches an autoimmune strike on the thyroid gland. And the thyroid gland responds by churning out unregulated quantities of thyroid hormone. Thyroid is the metabolism hormone. So having tons of thyroid in the system means your metabolic rate revs up. You can lose a great deal of weight. One of the byproducts of metabolism is heat generation. So you become completely heat intolerant. It might be December and you're wearing a T-shirt.

• 13:00Speaker 02

  You can become very agitated, very anxious. Your heart rate speeds up, a wealth of symptoms. And people feel very, very unwell. That's one of the more dramatic presentations in endocrinology. And the second part of that is we always say if there's too much hormone, the treatment is you suppress it. And we have ways of doing that. Situation two is a gland fails for some reason. So it stops producing the hormone it should produce or can't produce it in sufficient quantities for that hormone to carry the message to the target cells efficiently.

• 13:40Speaker 02

  So if we stick with the thyroid, the opposite scenario to the one I just described is hypothyroidism or an underactive thyroid, sometimes called Hashimoto's. And the thyroid loses its ability to produce thyroid hormone. And then we see the opposite symptoms to the ones we just went into. Metabolism slows down. You put on weight. You're feeling very, very cold. You can feel very tired, very depressed, very unmotivated to do anything. And the second, the second part of that paradigm is we say if there's too little hormone, you give it back. So too much hormone, you suppress it. Too little hormone, you give it back.

• 14:23Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I want to ask you, I'm really, I'm really curious if most people go through life and never have a concern about their hormones? Or are we sooner or later going to have a problem or what?

• 14:37Speaker 05

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• 15:06Speaker 06

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• 15:36Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about your hormones and how they work with Dr. Syrah Hamid. She's an endocrinologist and author of the book Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones. So, doctor, I want to get a sense of how often people have hormone problems. Like, if you randomly picked 100 people off the street and lined them up, not, I wouldn't recommend this, but, and checked their hormones, are most of those people going to have problems with their hormones when you check them? Are most of those people not going to have a concern whatsoever about their hormones? Or what?

• 16:16Speaker 02

  Oh, such a good question. And there are various nuances to my answer. The first thing to say is if you had asked me that question a generation ago, so if you had asked me that question pre-1970, I would have said, yeah, most people are okay. That endocrine hormone illness is not that common. Most people could go through life not really thinking about hormones, or indeed ever having to even know what an endocrinologist is. Uh so we're so so time, the timeframe we're talking about is important. And the reason I say

• 16:54Speaker 02

  that is that today such a huge number of people have a condition called insulin resistance that unfortunately it's no longer possible to say that most of us are living with good hormone health. Insulin resistance means that the body becomes resistant to the hormone insulin. It can no longer hear insulin's message. And in terms of your metabolic health, this is a disaster. I'll give you one example of insulin resistance. Insulin, we often think of as being the blood sugar hormone. So you eat something, the blood sugar goes up, your pancreas detects the blood

• 17:35Speaker 02

  sugar rise and will release the hormone insulin. Insulin clears that sugar from the blood, the blood sugar returns to normal. So that is physiology, that is when it's working perfectly. When the body becomes resistant to insulin's message, insulin cannot clear sugar from the blood effectively. So it will release uh insulin in higher and higher quantities, i.e. the hormone is now shouting at the target cells just to try to get its job done. And for a period of time, that can work, so the blood sugar can be cleared from the blood. But after a while, the resistance becomes so strong that no matter how strongly the insulin

• 18:19Speaker 02

  message is transmitted, not enough sugar can be cleared from the blood, the blood sugar rises, you are diagnosed with prediabetes or type 2 diabetes. That is just one facet of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is massively common in the US, massively common in the UK where I practise. So the time period that we're talking about is important.

• 18:40Mike Carruthers?

  Why is that? What what happened?

• 18:42Speaker 02

  What happened was this, that so genetics didn't change, genetics can't change in fifty years. On a population basis, we had such massive societal changes in the food that we eat and the lifestyle that we lead, so that it's, the world is now set up to make you insulin resistant, not to make your insulin signalling work better. So you now have to go really out of your way to eat a diet that does not promote insulin resistance. You have to go out of your way to be active because you you can literally be still all day. You can have a phone and a thumb and everything can come to you. You can have a wifi

• 19:25Speaker 02

  connection and you can work and go to meetings and do your shopping and anything else you you you need to do to get on with life. So our human biology, our physiology didn't change, right? Um, but but the the environment massively changed and public health hasn't kept up.

• 19:43Mike Carruthers?

  You were gonna say something and I interrupted you with a question.

• 19:47Speaker 02

  The second thing I was gonna say is that fifty percent of the population from midlife onwards will have a hormone condition and that is menopause. So if you look at women from, you know, mid forties onwards, they will have, I would say, I'm gonna call it a change in their hormones. I'm not necessarily gonna call it a disorder because some women go through perimenopause and menopause and and they're fine.

• 20:13Mike Carruthers?

  So except for those two things, the insulin and menopause, of the other, see, I don't hear a lot about all the other hormones very often. So it is, are we pretty much okay? And those are the two big problems?

• 20:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, so those are the two problems I think that the public would come across or which or which, you know, happening at a very high prevalence. But as we spoke about at the start of our conversation, there are many other hormones buzzing away every day inside you, doing their thing, you're not even aware of them. And they can cause problems like the thyroid issues that we spoke about, but for for most people, most people will go through life and and they won't think about their hormones. Their hormones will do their thing in the background. The hormones will guide them through all of life's major milestones and they will, you know, glide you through every day from getting you up in the morning, that's cortisol, to feeling hungry, that's the stomach hormone ghrelin, to feeling full, GLP-1, as we spoke

• 21:15Speaker 02

  about, and other gut hormones and so on. But you won't notice it. It just feels like life. When your hormones work well, life feels normal.

• 21:23Mike Carruthers?

  Do hormones react to, you, you mentioned diet and insulin being the, the prime example, but what about the other hormones? Are they reacting to like our lifestyle things, or they do what they do regardless of more or less what we do?

• 21:40Speaker 02

  A really key message I'd love your listeners to, to, to take away from our conversation today is that we don't control our hormones, our hormones control us. But exactly as you've pointed out with the insulin example, we can sort of live considerably alongside them. So another hormone that's having a bit of a moment right now is cortisol. And cortisol, people are very interested in because it's, it's developed, it's got the moniker, uh, the stress hormone. And that's right in the sense that physiologically, if we are under stress of some sort, get a very bad flu, for example, you break your leg, you're undergoing surgery, your adrenal glands will release this hormone cortisol.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  But we will also release cortisol in sort of life's day to day skirmishes. Like, you know, having a big presentation to do at work or checking your bank balance and it's not as robust as you'd like it to be, or having an argument with someone. You, you might release a bit of cortisol to sort of bolster you through that moment in time. And there's a bit of a online movement and it's very big on social media that cortisol is somehow an enemy and it needs to be suppressed. We've got to get the cortisol down. There's this idea that when cortisol is up for too long, it can make us unwell. Now, to clarify, Mike, there is a pathological condition where the body overproduces cortisol,

• 23:08Speaker 02

  condition called Cushing's, and a patient can be very, very unwell. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about day to day life and can you sort of produce enough, slightly too much cortisol that, that it's affecting your health because you're stressed all the time? And the answer is possibly, but what I want to say is this, that there is no supplement or tonic or elixir you can take to to reduce your cortisol level. And actually, what you need to do is look at the root cause, which is the stress. And how do you manage the stress? And very old fashioned, I suppose, approach, but there's a reason why this sort of age old wisdom goes down the generations.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  It's things like getting an early night, keeping the body moving, spending time with family and friends, people you love, you and do it in real life. Don't do it through a screen or digital communication. These things will reduce your stress levels potentially. I don't want to rose tint things for your listeners and say that this is the the magic solution. It depends what what the stress is. But the idea that cortisol is a baddie is wrong. And I'll tell you why, because when you don't have enough cortisol in a condition called Addison's disease, you are very, very sick. So you need cortisol, you need it to run at the appropriate level, and most of us, that's the case.

• 24:30Mike Carruthers?

  But your body produces and releases cortisol because cortisol does what? What is the benefit of it?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  So the reason the body releases cortisol in the first place to deal with stress is that it will have certain effects that in the moment will will will help. It will raise the blood pressure, some rise in the blood sugar, make you very alert, very hypervigilant. Now, all of this revolution was brilliant because if a if a saber tooth tiger was circling the camp, you want all these things to happen so that you're ready to run away. Okay. But today, we're not talking about that scenario.

• 25:14Mike Carruthers?

  But I do hear a lot of people, a lot of people that are come on this show, talk about the the problem of increased cortisol and that that the stress is causing too much cortisol.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  I would say that, you know, I want to be on team cortisol, Mike, because I think it's getting a really bad rap. You know, cortisol is a wonder hormone. You know, if if any of your listeners got out of bed this morning, well, that was because of cortisol. Because you had this wonderful boost of cortisol half an hour before you woke up. That's part of your natural circadian rhythm. And that gave you a massive energy boost. Blood pressure went up a bit, blood sugar went up a bit, brain alert. And suddenly you're like, I can get out of bed, I'm ready. If you think about it this way, sometimes you can go to bed the night before, and everything just seems too much. I can't answer that email. I can't deal with that load of laundry. I'm I'm absolutely done. And yes, there are many benefits to sleep. But one of them is this massive cortisol boost you get

• 26:11Speaker 02

  in the early hours of the morning. And suddenly you're like, whoa, right? You're like a clockwork toy that's suddenly been wound up again. So I am pro cortisol. And I think, you know, all of these, this hacks and hype of, you know, I've got to get it down, I've got to get it down. I think if we just live well and manage stress as best we can within the confines of being normal human beings living in the real world, cortisol will take care of itself.

• 26:38Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's good news. There's one less thing to worry so much about, huh?

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Totally, I agree with you.

• 26:44Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it is strange how mysterious hormones are. I mean, and nobody really, I don't think most people really understand how they work. So I appreciate you clarifying the mystery. I've been speaking with endocrinologist Dr. Sarah Hamid. She is author of the book Signals: The Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Doctor, thank you for being here.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Thank you so much, Mike. It has been a real pleasure speaking to you.

• 27:45Speaker 06

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• 28:18Mike Carruthers?

  We all make mistakes. How many times have you heard that? You simply cannot get very far in life without making mistakes. Sometimes, very big mistakes. And a big mistake can leave you feeling alone, regretful, and devastated. I imagine everyone listening, if you think about it, has made a mistake that has been hard to come back from. Mistakes can linger in our mind for a long time, sap our confidence, and get in the way of future success. So what exactly is a mistake? How is a mistake different from failure? And how can you get better at moving past it? Well, Michael Lynton knows a thing or two about mistakes.

• 29:01Mike Carruthers?

  He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment. And he approved the production of a movie that truly became a huge and very public mistake that caused an international crisis involving the North Korean government, cyber attacks, threats, and worldwide headlines. It is truly quite a story with an important lesson for everyone about making and overcoming mistakes. Today, Michael Lynton serves on the board of the Rand Corporation and the Smithsonian, and he's co-author of a book called "From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You." Hi, Michael, welcome.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.

• 29:43Mike Carruthers?

  So first, explain, and I know you've really studied this now, explain what a mistake is and how it's different from failure.

• 29:52Speaker 03

  Failures are when people, in our description of it, when people come together to make a calculated decision with analysis that has ambition. And for whatever reason, it doesn't work. In the case of mistakes, typically what happens is it's an individual. They make a decision in the moment. The decision is charged by emotion and it doesn't work. And that mistake leads to regret. And specifically, in addition to all of that, we didn't want to talk about humble bragging, which is oftentimes how failures are dealt with in books where they say, oh, this kind of thing, you know, didn't work out, but lo and behold, over in the corner,

• 30:36Speaker 03

  there was a pot of gold we didn't realize was there. No, these mistakes had no happy outcomes. And when we also looked into the field and tried to find literature on it, we discovered there was very little, if any.

• 30:48Mike Carruthers?

  You know, as soon as you said that, I imagine everyone listening could think of an experience, a mistake that they've made that fits that description that was very, very tough.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  I would add one other thing, Mike, which is that very few people actually have the opportunity to have failures outside perhaps of their own marriage because, you know, it does require a big decision and not everybody has that opportunity. Everybody makes mistakes and everybody makes mistakes almost every day.

• 31:19Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, but but there is this idea that, you know, you learn from your mistakes, that mistakes are okay because as long as you learn from them.

• 31:26Speaker 03

  The unfortunate part of it is, is that oftentimes, myself included, people try and avoid looking at those mistakes after you've made them. And there, if you avoid that process, then you're not going to learn from them by definition.

• 31:42Mike Carruthers?

  Or maybe rationalize those mistakes. Try to explain them away, oh, well, we didn't see that this thing and who, how could we have known? And, and, but it wasn't really my fault.

• 31:54Speaker 03

  Exactly, and I think when you say my fault, I think actually in my looking at it, one of the reasons I think why people are so reluctant to talk about their mistakes is it's really down to you, it's really your responsibility for having made the mistake. Failure, you can blame on a number of different people who might have, might or might not have been involved, but a mistake, it's just on you.

• 32:16Mike Carruthers?

  So tell the story of your big mistake about the movie that you approved when you were at Sony, you approved the production of a movie that caused so many problems, big, big problems.

• 32:29Speaker 03

  I had been at Sony Pictures at the time for a little more than a decade, and we had a very good process in place for agreeing, for greenlighting movies. We typically got them to a point where we knew who all the actors were, we knew the budget, and then we brought a people, a group of people together in a room, people from marketing, finance, public policy, et cetera, and then we would come to a decision, along the lines of what I said earlier about things that have ambition. Sometimes it worked, most of the times it worked, meaning the pictures delivered, sometimes it didn't. In this particular case, and what you're referring to is a movie called The Interview, the movie is about two hapless journalists, played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who go off to North Korea under the

• 33:14Speaker 03

  auspices of the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong-un. And we, when we agreed to make this movie before we could get it out, the North Korean government, through a variety of circumstances, informed us that they did not want us to put this movie out and ultimately hacked our systems. But specifically what happened, why it was a mistake, was everybody at the studio who was involved at the time, on the creative side of the business and the marketing and finance, really wanted to make the movie. It had already been sort of through the, through various hands, and it was really down to me. We were in a competitive situation because

• 33:55Speaker 03

  Universal had a relationship with Seth Rogen, who was going to direct the movie and, and was in it. And he knew that if we didn't, and we knew that if we didn't want to make the movie, they would. So it all came down to a day, or a day and a half. I asked if we could do a read-through, which means that you bring the actors together, and you typically do it with a comedy to see whether the jokes actually play in a room. And that's exactly what happened. We had all the actors there, all the creative executives involved were there. Everybody, as I walked into the room, I was actually the only suit in the room. Everybody else was dressed casually, jeans, t-shirts, and the eyes were on me because

• 34:37Speaker 03

  I said earlier, everybody wanted to make this movie. We went through the read-through. It was really funny. Everybody was laughing, myself included. And normally, what I would have done at the end of a meeting like that was I would have said, okay, fine, we'll assemble this afternoon in another room and go through that process I described earlier. Instead, I jumped up and said, let's do it. Let's make the movie. And disaster ensued. So that's the mistake.

• 35:05Mike Carruthers?

  When the North Korean government contacted you through channels that they use, however they do that, was it a request or a threat?

• 35:13Speaker 03

  It was a threat.

• 35:14Mike Carruthers?

  If you release this movie, we will do something horrible.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Well, the threat started in a subtle way. We weren't even sure where it was coming from because we didn't have, the US didn't have established relationships with North Korea at the time, relations with North Korea. And that started in June before the movie came out. And then over time, when we didn't back down, they amplified the threat, particularly once they started hacking our systems.

• 35:43Mike Carruthers?

  So the movie was released, but well, I don't, explain, explain what happened.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  We continued to put out trailers. We continued to say that we were going to release the movie in the fourth quarter of that year, in the Christmas period. What wound up happening was they hacked our systems and they started exposing not just emails from the studio, which were salacious and involved a lot of celebrities, but also actually movies that we had not yet released, like The Karate Kid, which was a full-blown movie that was just put out. Scripts like The New James Bond, which was confidential and had been released. And with each release of these, the threats got bigger and bigger, to the point where they finally started threatening the movie theaters. ...themselves to say that if they put the movie into those theaters,

• 36:33Speaker 03

  they would physically attack the theaters. The theaters backed down, the big chains. And what wound up happening is, we wound up scrambling around to try and figure out how we could get the movie released. We wound up doing that through a bunch of independent movie theaters, not the big chains, as well as by releasing it online through our own downloading service, as well as Google Play, who participated with us. No one else was willing to do that.

• 36:59Mike Carruthers?

  But at what point did you say, "This is a mistake"?

• 37:01Speaker 03

  Well, there was a moment in time where the heat was coming on the studio very hard because of all of those leaked emails. And in particular, Amy Pascal, who was running the actual film studio at the time. And I was invited to come to New York to speak on Fareed Zakaria's show and explain what was going on in a brief segment. And I chose to do that because I thought, this'll take some of the heat off. People would really properly understand what Amy and others at the studio were going through. When I get to New York and get to the studio in the green room, Fareed Zakaria said, "The

• 37:43Speaker 03

  US government just announced that they had figured out that the North Koreans was responsible for this attack." And Fareed wanted to hear, because President Obama was gonna come out and make a statement, what he was gonna say. A journalist asked two questions. The first was, "What are you gonna do about the North Koreans?", and the second was, "What do you think about what Sony had been doing?". I think the president at the time didn't have an answer to the first, so he chose to answer the second, which he was critical of us, because he didn't properly understand why we hadn't released the movie yet. We couldn't get it in theaters, as I mentioned earlier. So Fareed then turned to me and said, "With that, if you're gonna come on, you need to spend the full hour", which is what I wound up doing, explaining exactly what had happened.

• 38:28Speaker 03

  This is the long way around of saying, two weeks later, I got a phone call from the president, very gracious of him, to say that he himself had been mistaken, and he apologized for accusing us of self censorship. But then he said to me, don't you think it was a mistake to make a movie about a hostile leader of a foreign nation where you kill him? And that was the moment where the penny dropped. And I said, you know what? Yeah, that was a mistake.

• 38:58Mike Carruthers?

  So that was the moment you confirmed to yourself, yeah, this is a mistake. And so then what did you do? What is the process of dealing with that mistake?

• 39:08Speaker 03

  The first part of the process is to understand something called a schema. A schema is really a way of seeing the world, and it really provides a very useful purpose to our lives, where we, it's sort of a prism, and it provides us with a shorthand on how to react to things.

• 39:28Speaker 03

  A simple schema, by way of example, is, we all know how to walk into an elevator. Typically, when there's a bunch of people walking to an elevator, people go into one corner, another corner, a third and a fourth, before you fill in the middle. And that, that's just a way that prevents, you know, a mess getting into an elevator. But we develop all sorts of schemas, and those schemas can be very useful if used in the right way, and not so useful in the wrong way. My schema, the specific schema that resulted after exploration in the mistake, was, early in my life, I'd been moved by my family to the Netherlands, where I didn't speak the language. We came from the United States. I was a very lonely

• 40:08Speaker 03

  kid for a couple of years. And I developed this need to be part of the cool gang, which obviously I was never going to be a part of, and a real sense of FOMO. And that sort of traveled with me throughout my life, and really came to the fore in that room, where after 10 years of being the guy in the suit who was responsible for saying no, I got tired of it, and in that moment, determined that I wanted to be part of that group, and in a moment of weakness, said, yeah. Let's do this. And so one of the things I learned was you need to understand what your schemas are. You need to understand whether they serve a purpose in that moment.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Or whether you're in the right context to be using that schema or you are not. So that's one thing I very much learned. There are a bunch of others which we can go through.

• 41:00Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I'm gonna, it's curious that you said, you know, you wanted to be one of the cool kids, but you know, being in the top echelons of Sony, kind of gives you cool kid status, I would think.

• 41:15Speaker 03

  It does to a degree, but you'd be surprised sort of the way that the hierarchy and the structure works out in Hollywood. Yes, it's true that studio executives occupy a certain space in that hierarchy. But you're never really part of the inner inner circle, the way you would be if you were a creative executive or somebody much closer to the talent. So it's a nuance, but it's there.

• 41:43Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, yeah. And so you said there are other things you learned that we could go through, like what?

• 41:49Speaker 03

  Well, there's something that's called the Cheetah Pause. We all know the rule that, or maybe we don't, that if you're angry and you write a letter, or these days you write an email in anger in the moment, you're supposed to like take a pause, put the letter or the email to one side, wait a day and see whether you really want to send it the next day. Well, that's probably advisable in general to do, to make decisions in the heat of the moment when you're all charged up emotionally. That's not particularly if the decision has consequence, which this one did. That's also a problem. And that's a lesson that I learned.

• 42:28Speaker 03

  Another is we divided, we realized that all mistakes are sort of divided up into a three act structure. There is the events that happen before the mistake that lead you to a place that makes the mistake. Those are sort of things like the schema, there's the mistake itself. And then there's the things that you sort of carry with you after. To the mistake principally a sense of shame. And that burden lived with me for a very long time. I was, you know, I would walk into rooms and think everybody was looking at me years after the whole event occurred, which is a whole other thing called the spotlight effect, where you think you have this thing sort of emblazoned on your forehead when in truth, nobody even remembers the incident.

• 43:12Speaker 03

  But that third act, that shame, that not dealing with the mistake, trying to understand how you feel about it, how you did it, that is in and of itself is a mistake. And by talking this through with Josh Steiner, my writing partner in this, and we also recruited a very, very able, a wonderful woman from Johns Hopkins, Alison Papadakis, who's a professor of psychology there. It was extremely helpful to work through all of that stuff. And, you know, get out of that place where I felt shame about what I'd done.

• 43:48Mike Carruthers?

  What do you feel now about what you have done?

• 43:51Speaker 03

  I don't feel shame. I don't feel regret. I feel like I have some resolution around it. Part of it, to be honest, is, which is a whole other part of the technique, which is sort of like flooding, you know, there's this thing in psychology where when you fear something, spiders or flying, they flood you with whatever it is. So in the case of spiders, they put a lot of spiders around you. Or if you're afraid of flying, they make you fly a lot. By talking about this mistake over and over and over again, it's sort of succeeded in doing that same thing for me.

• 44:27Mike Carruthers?

  So you're shining a light on this in part to tell your story, but, but also what is it you want people to take from this? And put in their own life, like what are, what's the message for this?

• 44:39Speaker 03

  The biggest message is, quite honestly, and I know it's a little bit of an overused word, but it's permission to actually, and the courage to look at one's mistakes, and a little bit of a guide as to how one should look at them. And hopefully, people who read the book or listen to this podcast will gain some purchase on how to do that. That's really the point of the whole thing, frankly. And if we can get, and I've seen already some positive indication that it's having, that it's having a good result, that's really the reason we did this.

• 45:18Mike Carruthers?

  In your career, though, there have been other mistakes, I'm sure, probably other pictures that you greenlit that didn't do well. Why not talk about those two? I mean, is this one just particularly because it was your fault?

• 45:33Speaker 03

  You know, you gotta find a mistake that comes down to a moment, which this did, and that you're personally responsible for, which this did. I think the magnitude of it helped to sort of illustrate the point, and that doesn't hurt either. And the fact that I just carried the shame around with me, I really did want to deal with this particular mistake, you know? There aren't that many things that I felt as strongly about, or carried with me the way that I carried this mistake, so I wanted to deal with that.

• 46:07Mike Carruthers?

  I see. Well, I get that. I mean, that certainly was very public, and your face was on it, wasn't it?

• 46:14Speaker 03

  For sure, yes. And even, you know, the idea of talking about it the way I'm talking about it with you, or putting it into the book, or the excerpts in the newspapers, that in and of itself was, you know, a little bit scary to do, but I'm glad I've done it now.

• 46:29Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, but the way you talk about it now is, it seems like you're a step or two removed from it, that you can talk about it objectively and not get all worked up about it, like you've made peace with it.

• 46:38Speaker 03

  Exactly. And I definitely would not have been able to do that a few years ago. Not a chance.

• 46:44Mike Carruthers?

  But do you ever get through a day and not think about the interview?

• 46:49Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Now I do. And you're right, you know, closer to the time, and it's been almost a decade now, it was in my head every day. But that hasn't been the case now for a long time, and even less so since I started doing this.

• 47:04Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I have to ask you, because I certainly have read about North Korea enough to know that they've, you know, they're known for doing some pretty horrible things. Why poke that bear? Why not? Well, yeah, why poke that bear?

• 47:20Speaker 03

  At the time, the North Koreans were less sort of in the news and less understood than they are today. At the time, they were sort of a bunch of people in funny hats that we didn't really see as a threat. Now we see them very differently.

• 47:34Mike Carruthers?

  Did they threaten you? Did they threaten the actors? Was it a real significant threat that you felt, we need to get security here, or what?

• 47:45Speaker 03

  No, I, well, it's interesting you ask. So in the summer before we released the movie and after the first communication or their sort of effort to say that they were unhappy with the movie, I did reach out to somebody at the State Department and the Rand Corporation to try and understand the capabilities of the North Koreans. And in both cases, they told me not to worry, that they were more bark than bite. I think they were basing most of their analysis on Kim Jong-il, who had died a few years before. So nobody was really familiar with his son, Kim Jong-un, who it turns out is a lot more aggressive. But even knowing that, they didn't describe the cyber capabilities of North Korea,

• 48:30Speaker 03

  which it turns out are considerable. They still were very, the FBI in particular, who was terrific throughout the process, were adamant that they didn't have physical capabilities here in the United States. So I wasn't personally, yes, they did threaten, but I was not personally worried. I wasn't worried for the employees of Sony. I was not worried for the physical safety of the actors.

• 48:54Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it's quite a story, and I admire that you are willing to shine a big light on your big mistake, so that people can perhaps learn to deal with their own mistakes better. I've been talking with Michael Lynton. He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment, and currently on the boards of the Rand Corporation and the Smithsonian. He's co-author of a book called "From Mistakes to Meaning: Owning Your Past So It Doesn't Own You," and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Michael, thanks for spending time.

• 49:24Speaker 03

  Thank you very much, Mike.

• 49:29Mike Carruthers?

  I'm sure you've heard that coffee can wake you up, sharpen your focus, maybe even improve your mood. But one of the most surprising things coffee appears to do is protect your liver. And researchers say the effect is so strong that some doctors now routinely ask liver patients about their coffee habits. Multiple large studies continue to show that regular coffee drinkers have a significantly lower risk of liver disease, liver scarring, fatty liver disease, and even liver cancer. What's fascinating is that coffee seems to interfere with inflammation and the formation

• 50:09Mike Carruthers?

  of scar tissue in the liver, almost like a protective shield against years of wear and tear. And the benefit doesn't seem to require huge amounts. Research suggests even one to two cups of coffee a day can help, while protection appears to increase around three or four cups a day. Even decaf has shown to have some benefit, which means coffee's protective powers aren't just because of the caffeine. Scientists are still sorting out exactly which compounds in coffee are responsible, but coffee may be one of the few pleasures in life that your liver actually appreciates. And that is something you should know.

• 50:51Mike Carruthers?

  Now, there is no doubt you know somebody who drinks coffee who would love to hear that story. Or maybe the great story from Michael Lynton about the movie "The Interview." If you would just refer your friends to this episode, it helps grow our audience, and I think your friends would appreciate it. I'm Michael Rathers. Thank you for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 51:14Speaker 06

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