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

The origins of the names for popular food products often make interesting stories. For instance, why are they called marshmallows? Why is Spam called Spam? What do gators have to do with Gatorade? This episode begins with the origin stories of some iconic foods. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tagged/health/at-home/odd-facts-7-iconic-products-164000529.html Some inventions have had profound effects on how humans see themselves and our place in the world. For example, the mirror, photography, television, and the smartphone have all significantly changed our perception of ourselves. Here to explain this and the significance of it all is Susan Denham Wade author of the book A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions (https://amzn.to/3vZdj9k) The most difficult decisions we most often make are about love and money. So how can we improve our ability to make these important decisions? Here with some great insight and advice is Myra Strober. She is a labor economist, Professor Emerita at Stanford University and author of the book Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions (https://amzn.to/3H34xNO) Your gym teacher probably told you to stand up straight and suck in your gut. It turns out half of that advice is good – the other half isn’t. Listen as I explain why. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/11/12/how-to-stop-holding-in-stomach/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: "Established in 2025". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! CURIOSITY WEEKLY: We love Curiosity Weekly, so be sure and listen wherever you get your podcasts! 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.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:28Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know: The interesting ways some food products got their names. Then, inventions that dramatically changed how we see the world. Television, eyeglasses, the smartphone, even mirrors.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  And that being able to see their own reflection gave people the idea that they could see themselves as others saw them, got them thinking about, well, who am I? I am actually a different person. I'm not just part of the group.

• 1:56Mike Carruthers?

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

• 2:09Speaker 02

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

• 2:22Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:27Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  Hi and welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you ever been in your kitchen and looked in the cupboards or in the refrigerator and looked at some of the food and wondered, "Why is it called that? Where did that name come from?" Well, here are the origins of some popular, somewhat random, but some popular foods that may be in your kitchen. First of all, Philadelphia cream cheese. It didn't really come from Philadelphia. It started in New York. It was called Philadelphia cream cheese because that city was associated with high-quality food products. Gatorade, as you might imagine, does not contain any alligator in it.

• 5:03Mike Carruthers?

  It was a kidney specialist from the University of Florida who helped develop it for the school's football team, the Florida Gators. So, they named the drink Gatorade. The product name SPAM was chosen for the canned meat from a contest. Now, there is no official explanation for its meaning, but most people assume SPAM stands for Spiced Ham. The Frisbee, the Flying Disc Frisbee, comes to you courtesy of the Frisbee Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The empty pie tins were perfect for throwing like a Frisbee. And since it was the Frisbee Pie Company, they became known as Frisbees.

• 5:45Mike Carruthers?

  The first plastic version was called the Pluto Platter Flying Saucer. Whammo bought the rights and stamped Frisbee on it instead. Marshmallows started out as medicine. In the 1800s, juice from the roots of the marshmallow plant were extracted and cooked with egg whites and sugar. It was whipped up and given to children to soothe sore throats. And that is something you should know.

• 6:15Mike Carruthers?

  No, I love it when I see a topic to discuss here that I didn't actually know was a topic to discuss. And that's what you're about to hear. We're going to discuss the history of what we see and how we see it. Because how we see ourselves and how we see the world has changed. And what's caused those changes are certain inventions, certain technologies that alter our vision. I mean, imagine the first mirror. When people could actually see themselves clearly the way other people do, that had to change a lot. It's pretty remarkable. Or the telescope, television, the smartphone. All these things have altered our view of ourselves and the world in some way.

• 7:00Mike Carruthers?

  Here to explain all this is Susan Denham Wade. She's author of a book called A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions. Hi Susan, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  It's great to be here, Mike.

• 7:13Mike Carruthers?

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

• 7:20Speaker 01

  Well, the inspiration for the book was the 2014 internet meme that became known as hashtag the dress. This was a photograph of a dress that was bought for a wedding that found its way onto the internet and the dress was striped. And the reason it went so viral and was actually one of the first global memes was because when people looked at the image online, they couldn't agree whether the stripes of the dress were white and gold or blue and black. This went all around Twitter with various celebrities weighing in on their opinions. It was discussed on newscasts.

• 7:59Speaker 01

  And this really intrigued me and got me to wondering, wow, if people in the same time and place can look at the same thing and see something different, did people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago see their worlds differently? And that was the question I set out to answer and that was the beginning of the journey.

• 8:24Mike Carruthers?

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

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Well, I I found that indeed, people have seen their their worlds differently uh over time, and that there've been a variety of of technologies that mankind has either harnessed, or discovered, or invented, that have really changed the world as we saw it. But not only that, each of these visual technologies have has coincided with a really major inflection point in human history. So, one of the big conclusions that I came to was that the world seen differently becomes a different world.

• 9:04Mike Carruthers?

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

• 9:14Speaker 01

  Well, if you take, for example, the invention of mirrors, the very first known mirrors were discovered in a proto-town, one of the very earliest settled communities, which is in Anatolia, which is now part of Turkey. And this was a settlement of about up to eight thousand people, which existed between about eight thousand and five and a half thousand years ago. And archaeologists exploring this site came upon these mirrors at a time when the society fundamentally changed, as far as they could tell. Up until the the point that we're talking about, the society, the the archaeologists described it as fiercely egalitarian. There was no, there were no signs of different status,

• 9:59Speaker 01

  food and other implements were shared, people's homes were more or less the same size. And then, around the layer of the of the site where these mirrors were discovered, archaeologists noted a a shift in the psychology of this community to to identify a much greater sense of individualism, and the emergence of a sense of self, which I think is completely mind-blowing, that we don't know what came first, the sense of self, and then that generated a desire to find mirrors, or whether someone had created these mirrors, and that being able to see their own reflection.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  Gave people a self-realization, the idea that they could see themselves as others saw them, and that got them thinking about, well, who am I? Am I, I am actually a different person, I'm not just part of the group, I'm an individual. And in later history, with the development of psychology, for example, in the 19th century, the start, well, actually going right back to the Romans, the mirror has become symbolic um as a a tool for exploring the self. But it's incredibly interesting to me that um going right back through human history, it appears that um mirrorless societies tend to be highly egalitarian without much of a sense of individuality.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  And it's only um that but the appearance of mirrors tends to coincide with that individuality. So this is an example from a long time ago um of how a change in technol- in visual technology and seeing something different caused a fundamental shift in mindset.

• 11:39Mike Carruthers?

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

• 11:58Speaker 01

  All the excitement about photography when it was first announced, this amazing technology that could capture an image permanently, was all about how it was going to represent the great landscapes of the world and the great monuments of antiquity and the works of art. And none of the inventors or promoters of early photography um mentioned the idea of portraiture. But as soon as photography was announced, people set up portraiture studios, and this was the absolute killer app for photography. Um all very well to see the great sights of the world and and the great works of art, but what people really wanted to see was themselves and each other.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And photograph studio, photography studios set up all around um Europe and around the USA, um and people for the price of a day's wages could get an image of themselves to keep forever. And the market for it was huge, something like um ninety percent of photographs taken in the first fifty years of photography were were portraits.

• 13:04Mike Carruthers?

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

• 13:14Speaker 01

  Well, in the earliest photographs, the earliest process was called a daguerreotype. They took about 10 to 15 minutes for the exposure to happen. So people had to stand very, very still in that time. So the photographic studios developed all kinds of props to help people stay still. So if you see people standing up, often you'll see them, there's a pedestal that they've got an arm resting on, or they're sitting on a chair with their slightly unnaturally raised arms. And all of these were devices to help people stand really still for that time,

• 13:54Speaker 01

  so that the image could take on the film used at the time. And so I guess it's pretty hard to hold a smile for that length of time. So they were probably advised just to keep it fairly serious.

• 14:09Mike Carruthers?

  Another one of these inventions you talk about is the telescope, and which not only changed the way we see the world, but the universe.

• 14:19Speaker 01

  Usually credited to Galileo, but in fact, the first telescope to be brought forward publicly was from a Dutch spectacle maker, whose name was Lippershey. But he tried to patent his telescope, but he was refused because the patent office decided it was too easy to copy. And unfortunately for him, the patent office was right because people started making telescopes all around Europe. And Galileo was this very talented mathematician and craftsman. And he spent, he got the idea of the telescope, heard about the idea of the telescope, and made his own very, much, much more powerful than the original telescopes that were made.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  And he trained his telescope on the night sky and saw things that amazed, truly amazed the world and changed forever, really, how people saw their world. What he saw was around the planet of Jupiter, three smaller stars.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  The planets were called the wandering stars. They were all considered to be stars. But but it had long been observed that the planets move through the night sky in a different way than the others, what were called the fixed stars. But he saw that there was this smaller group of stars that followed Jupiter across the sky throughout from night after night. And this was a radical thought because up until then, the received view of of how the universe worked was with the earth was at the centre and the sun, the moon and all the other planets, the the stars rather, the wandering stars

• 16:10Speaker 01

  and the fixed stars rotated around the earth. But there had been some theorising in the previous fifty years, most famously by Copernicus, that this might not be the right way to view the universe. Then, in fact, the sun might be the centre of the universe and the planets revolved around it. And but this was a heresy because there were various passages in the Bible that suggested that the earth was the centre and so on. But Galileo's discovery showed that because these the mini-stars followed Jupiter around, he concluded that they were moons of Jupiter.

• 16:55Speaker 01

  And that demonstrated that the earth wasn't necessarily the centre of the universe. This was radically controversial at the time. And indeed, Galileo eventually was hauled up in front of the Inquisition more than once. And he spent his final years in under house arrest. So it didn't have a happy ending for him. But it did kick off a a whole new way of viewing nature.

• 17:22Mike Carruthers?

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

• 17:37Mike Carruthers?

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• 18:20Mike Carruthers?

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• 19:46Mike Carruthers?

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• 20:31Mike Carruthers?

  With this incredible discount, that means you'll pay just 83 cents per night for the best sleep of your life. So seriously, think about it. I mean, how much would you pay for a truly great night of sleep? Beam is just 83 cents per night. So go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. So Susan, in your list of inventions is eyeglasses. I mean, there is an invention that literally changed the way people viewed the world, the people with vision problems. So, talk about that.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  The very first eyeglasses were convex glasses, which is the ones that correct for long sight. They were most useful for people who were reaching middle age. So just as today, we reach our 40s or 50s and we find it more difficult to see close up. And convex glass lenses can help us, convex spectacles can refocus our eyes to improve that sort of vision. So if you were born very short sighted, around the time that the first spectacles were invented, around 1278 in Italy, I'm afraid they wouldn't have been much help to you. But what was so important about glasses and the time they were first invented was

• 21:57Speaker 01

  that they extended the useful life of so many of the artists, artisans, and scholars of that time because they allowed them to keep working beyond a time when ordinarily their failing eyesight would have forced them to stop. Um. And I don't think it's a coincidence that the invention of spectacles, as I say, towards the end of the twelve hundreds, happened just on the cusp of what became the Renaissance, the amazing, and in Italy, the amazing flowering of art, scholarship, architecture, that that happened in the next couple of hundred years.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  It wasn't until around fourteen fifty that concave spectacles, which correct for short sight, were invented. But obviously, that, again, would have been a massive revelation for people who were born short sighted, although there were many, many fewer short sighted people then than there are now. There's been a massive increase in short sightedness, in particular over the last seventy years, since the invention of television, in fact. And the explanation for that is not that television itself damages our eyes, but ever

• 23:18Speaker 01

  since televisions came into our lives, children in particular have spent more time inside, and that does damage our eyes. One report suggests that for every additional hour spent outside, your chance of developing myopia, that's short sightedness, reduces by two percent. And that's because even on the darkest day, natural daylight is about ten times as bright as artificial light. And our eyes need daylight for their health, and especially children as their eyes are growing and developing.

• 23:57Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I would think that television is one of the big game changers in your list of inventions, because it not only changed how we see the world, it really brought the world into our homes, good and bad. We could see things we could never see before.

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, television, you know, created the consumer society as we sat watching, happily watching TV shows through the 50s, funded by advertisers, who showed us all the lovely products we could buy and we obediently went out to buy them, whereas previous generations, you know, did without those things. Now, I'm not saying that a lot of those products haven't made our lives easier and better, but they have convinced us that we need a lot of stuff that somehow we managed to live without before, before we saw it all advertised on television. And politics drastically changed by television. You'll, you'll remember, well, probably not yourself, but you'll, you'll know the story

• 25:00Speaker 01

  of the television debate between Nixon and Kennedy, just before, before the election, presidential election, between those two. Those who listened to it on radio named Nixon the winner of the debate, but those who watched it on television saw Nixon looking a little sweaty, he'd been ill, he had a dark shadow under his, under his makeup of his, of his beard coming through. Kennedy had, who was a much more sickly person on the whole, had spent the morning sitting in the sun, had a crisp white shirt and exuded relaxed

• 25:40Speaker 01

  good health. And those who watched the debate on television, and it was the most watched programme ever, I think something like 60 million people watched it, declared Kennedy the winner, and sure enough, he won that election. And, you know, more recent times have seen telegenic candidates become president once again.

• 26:04Mike Carruthers?

  And then there is the smartphone, which not only has changed the way we see the world, in many ways it is the world that we see because we spend so much time looking at it.

• 26:16Speaker 01

  We spend hours and hours a day checking our phones. Many, many people have their phone by their bed, it's the last thing they look at before they go to bed, it's the first thing they look at when they wake up in the morning. It's become the dominant. Feature of our lives, really, increasingly with all the apps available. Pretty much every aspect of our lives can be channeled through this little screen in our hand. It's not just a phone. In fact, the phone is one of the least used features of a smartphone. It's our encyclopedia, it's our car key, it's our bank, it's our email, it's our, it's our encyclopedia.

• 26:59Speaker 01

  It's our entertainment device. It's, it's pretty much everything that, it's our window onto the world. And what that's meaning, it seems to me, is that we're using our other senses less and less. So we are, I'm sure we're all guilty of sending a text to someone, even if they're in the next room, rather than putting our head around the corner and having a conversation. Or texting a friend or one of our family members, just to say hi and have a little catch up. Just because it's kind of quicker and easier rather than speaking to them on the phone.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And this is actually not great for our mental and, and eventually leading on from that, physical health. Because we really need to hear each other. There was a research study done, Wisconsin University, that put a group of, of young girls, schoolchildren, ages, I think, seven to twelve, in a stressful situation where they were asked to give a presentation to some strangers. And after that, and they had them wired up to measure the, the level of cortisol, the stress hormone, in their bodies. And after they'd been put in this situation, a quarter of the girls were allowed to go and be with their mothers and talk to them face to face. A second quarter was allowed to speak to their mothers on the phone.

• 28:22Speaker 01

  The third quarter was allowed to text with their mothers. And the fourth group had to go and sit quietly alone. And what the researchers found was that the girls who spoke to their mothers on the telephone calmed down as much as the girls who were with their mothers and talking to their mothers face to face. Whereas the girls who just texted their mothers calmed down as little as the girls who just sat quietly alone. And although researchers, serious researchers are very wary about jumping to too many conclusions from what they find, the title of the research was Why We Still Need to Hear Each Other.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  And if you think about it, verbal and oral communication has been our primary form of communication for tens of thousands of years. This is, you know, language is what, one of the things that made us human. We are, we are hardwired to learn to speak. No child needs to be taught to speak. They just pick it up naturally. It's part of our, it's in our DNA. Whereas everyone has to be taught to read and write. It's not an innate human skill. It's a learnt, learnt ability.

• 29:35Mike Carruthers?

  Well, as I said at the start, this is a topic that I didn't really know was a topic. You actually really created the topic by putting these 11 inventions together and looking at the world through them. And it's, it's been a lot of fun. Susan Denham-Wade has been my guest. The name of the book is A History of Seeing in 11 Inventions. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Susan. This was fun.

• 30:02Speaker 01

  Well, thank you very much, Mike.

• 30:04Mike Carruthers?

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• 33:16Mike Carruthers?

  When it comes to major decisions in your life, there are a couple of categories that are huge. They are love and money. And as you may have noticed in your own life, we tend to struggle with those decisions and end up regretting some of them. So why is that? Why do we mess up some of the biggest decisions in our lives? And how can we make better love and money decisions? Well, here to discuss that is Myra Strober. She is a labor economist and professor at Stanford University and author of a book called Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions. Hi, Myra. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 33:58Speaker 02

  Thank you, Mike.

• 33:59Mike Carruthers?

  So I would imagine that everyone listening can think back to a decision regarding love or money or both that they regret. So why do you suppose that is? I mean, why do we mess up what seems to be such an important decision?

• 34:17Speaker 02

  I think there are two reasons. One is that people don't make these decisions in a systematic way. That's the first reason. And the second reason is that people tend to see money and love decisions as separate. So money decisions concern money and love decisions concern love and never the twain shall meet. But in fact, most life's decisions, especially the big ones, are both love and money decisions.

• 34:53Mike Carruthers?

  But it seems to me it's not only the decision you make because you could make what appears to be the right decision. But things don't always go according to plan. Things don't go the way you think they're going to go. Life has a way of serving up curveballs that... If things had gone the way you thought, that decision would have been great. But but it didn't go that way. So but how would you have known?

• 35:20Speaker 02

  You certainly can't predict the future, but you can ask yourself when you make your decision, what are the likely consequences of this decision? What are the likely things that are going to happen? So, for example, if you're considering moving to another city for a job and you have a family, you know, you might think this is a money decision, that the money is so much better in this new job. But in fact, it's a love decision, too, because your family is involved. And if, you know, six months down the line, your daughter is depressed because she can't adjust to her new school.

• 36:04Speaker 02

  Had you thought in advance, what are the likely consequences for my daughter of this decision? You might have predicted that she would have a difficult time. You might have taken some steps to ease that transition. And the situation might be a little bit better had you anticipated the consequences.

• 36:27Mike Carruthers?

  Well, see, that that's a good example of what I mean, that your daughter might have trouble adapting to her new school. She might thrive in the new school. There's no way to know until it happens, and it only happens after the decision. And then you have to deal with the consequences, but you can't have predicted that. I mean, it's kind of a it's kind of a crap shoot.

• 36:51Speaker 02

  No, I don't really think it's quite a crap shoot. Of course, you can't know everything. For instance, you can't know that the the girl next door to where you moved is going to make life difficult for her. You could you couldn't know that. But you you know your daughter. You know if she adjusts easily to new circumstances or not. You could have a converse, you should have a conversation with your daughter about this move, unless she's, you know, under the age of five. And ask her, what is this going to be like for you? Are you looking forward to it? Are you concerned about it? What are you concerned about?

• 37:31Speaker 02

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

• 37:38Mike Carruthers?

  So I guess maybe what my point was is that it is human nature to think about the road not taken. And so you'll always wonder what if, when faced with a choice like what you're talking about. Should I move there? Should I take that job? Should I marry that person? Or that person? You're always gonna wonder, no matter what you choose and how great a decision, what if you had done something different?

• 38:04Speaker 02

  Well, I think that may be true, but we have a very flexible five-step framework for making these decisions. And what the hope is, is that after you've taken these five steps, you have convinced yourself that this is the best decision that you can make, given whatever circumstances you're facing. So, you know, you might be taking a walk in the beautiful woods and think about what might have happened, you know, had your parents been born millionaires, but you need to deal

• 38:44Speaker 02

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

• 38:54Mike Carruthers?

  So what are those five steps?

• 38:57Speaker 02

  Well, the first one is clarify. Clarify for yourself what it is that you want. What's important to you? And what's important to you, not to your parents, or your spouse, or somebody else in your life. Try to figure out what you really care about. And then the second step is communication. Then you need to communicate that to whoever else is in your life making these decisions with you. And, you know, as you communicate and you listen to the other person's hopes and dreams, you may revise your own.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  You may start thinking about some issues that you hadn't thought about before. So first clarify and then communicate.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  And then you need to consider a broad range of choices. So let's go back to the moving decision. You've been offered a job in another city. Your family agrees that you need more money. It's a good career step for you. And you have already clarified that your career is important to you. But what are the other possible choices? Have you looked around in the same city where you are at other possible jobs? Or did this this new job possibility come out of the blue? And it seems so attractive and you're going to take it? So unless you convince yourself that in order to get what it is you're looking for,

• 40:34Speaker 02

  you must move, you may well be sorry later on because you didn't do the kind of seeking that would give you a broader range of choices. The fourth step is check in. So it's the five Cs framework. These all start with Cs. Clarify, communicate, consider a broad range of choices, and now check in. So you want to check in with family and friends and other people whom you admire and and ask them, have they faced these kinds of decisions? What did they do? How did it turn out for them? Share your thought process with them.

• 41:16Speaker 02

  I'm doing this because I want more money. I'm doing this because I think my career will be furthered by this. Ask them about family ramifications of decisions that they may have made. And the last step is what I talked about before. Explore the likely consequences. And you need to explore the consequences, both short term and long term. So let's go back to the daughter who is not happy in the new environment. Maybe she's not happy, you know, six months after you move. But maybe she's in a school that's far better than the one that she left.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  And three years from now, she'll realize that this was a really good move because her school life and her education is far better than it would have been. So, you know, there are short term consequences and longer term consequences.

• 42:17Mike Carruthers?

  Well, your five-step process, it certainly makes sense. It sounds good. But how do you know it works? I mean, is there research? How do you know that doing those five steps are better than any other five steps that somebody would come up with?

• 42:34Speaker 02

  I taught a course at the Stanford Business School and also in the undergraduate part of the university for more than 40 years on the topic of work and family. And so, over that time, I've had thousands of students who write back to me and say, I mean, not all thousands write back, but many of them write back and say, you know, "Thinking about these issues when I was in your course has really helped me down the line. I feel that I have better decisions. I feel that this helps me. When I have a big decision to make, I think about the class."

• 43:17Speaker 02

  And in fact, my co-author, Abby Davison, was a student in that class. And the man who took the class with her is now her husband. So, they have used this framework, you know, for their entire marriage, and now they have two young children. And, you know, the anecdotal evidence is that people feel helped by this framework and this way of deciding.

• 43:44Mike Carruthers?

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

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Well, I think they haven't really gone through steps one and two. They have not clarified for themselves what it is they want. Most of us are stuck for life with, you know, our parents' voices in our heads. And our parents... For the most part, not all parents, but our parents pretty much told us what they want for us. And somewhere along the line of reaching an adult, we need to put our parents' voices in the background, develop our own voices, and make decisions based on our own voices.

• 44:36Speaker 02

  But I think lots of people still are not making decisions that are going to benefit them as much as might be the case.

• 44:48Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think that's

• 44:49Speaker 02

  And the second place they go wrong is in communication. So a lot of these decisions are fraught because couples are in different places in their lives, and they haven't taken the time to come together and figure out what it is they can both agree upon. And I think a lot of these fraught decisions come when couples have other issues underlying this particular decision.

• 45:19Mike Carruthers?

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

• 45:45Speaker 02

  Right. And so, think about somebody deciding to apply to medical school. Their whole life, up to that point, their parents have said, you know, this would be a good career for you. Their older brother is already in that career, and so they talk to their older brother, and their older brother says, you know, this is just a wonderful career. I just love medicine. I love being a doctor. Well, the next step is to talk to some other people who don't like being a doctor, or who thought they might and decided otherwise.

• 46:22Speaker 02

  You know, if you stack the deck toward a certain decision, you don't really have enough input to figure out if this is the right decision for you.

• 46:34Mike Carruthers?

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

• 46:48Speaker 02

  Yes, I think that's right. And that's why, you know, you may need help figuring out what you need. But yes, confirmation bias could be a real problem. You do want to talk to some people who have a different perspective and see what you think about that.

• 47:04Mike Carruthers?

  But it would also seem that as you make these decisions, it's not just a snapshot in time. There's got to be course correction because the decision, you know, you decided to take this new job, but then the guy that hired you left and now you've got a new. So there's always things that happen. It isn't frozen in time that I made this decision and now we go forward the way I decided.

• 47:28Speaker 02

  True enough. I mean, you know, there's an old Yiddish saying that man plans and God laughs because planning only gets you so far. There are things that happen that nobody anticipated. Nonetheless, if you don't plan, you know, you're certainly not going to get what you want. So yes, you have to have course corrections and you and your spouse need or your partner need good communication. So when this new curve ball comes onto the field, you have somebody to talk to about it. And, you know, okay, what are we going to do next?

• 48:07Speaker 02

  And it's we, even though it's a job decision, it involves love. It involves your family and, you know, they need to be supportive of you and they need to know what they want.

• 48:23Mike Carruthers?

  I can just think back in my own life of some decisions I've made that I didn't really, I kind of like already had it in my head, what the decision was going to be without really going through any process of, it just felt right. It just seemed right. This is an opportunity I can't pass up. I suspect that happens to a lot of people where they just say, wow, I've got to grab this right now and go and never do what you're talking about.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  Yes, that's what I have learned over the years is that people tend to do that. And you know, it's rare that a decision this big has to be made, certainly within 24 hours or maybe even within a week. And people need to take the time to go through our process, to check in with other people whom they admire and make sure they check in with people who have a different perspective than theirs, and take the time to make these decisions. You know, take the decision, who am I going to marry?

• 49:36Speaker 02

  Certainly, you have to make that decision in part with your gut. I mean, you don't want to marry someone, never mind marry, but live with them, be a partner with them. It doesn't matter whether marriage is involved particularly or not. But, you know, is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with? Well, that is surely a biggie, and you want your gut to be involved, but you want your head to be involved too. And you want to think about the financial implications of this decision. And making that decision solely with your gut is not going to necessarily work out.

• 50:15Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it's interesting. We make decisions all day long, and big ones and little ones, and often don't think about the process of making the decision. We just make the decision and then have to live with the consequences.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  You know, Daniel Kahneman talks about system one thinking and system two thinking. System one, you make the decision with your gut and you move on. System two is more like the framework we are proposing. And you need to make these very big love money decisions using system two thinking. And particularly, I think our framework is helpful. The second thing is that love and money decisions are intertwined. You know, the conventional wisdom is that you make love decisions with your heart and money decisions with your head. And that's, that's just not right.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  Even when you're deciding, you know, how to invest your portfolio, you might think that that is only a financial decision, but it isn't. Because the question now is, what do you want? What do you want this money to do for you? To whom do you want to leave the money? If there's money left over at the end? And why? And what are their needs? So there are no purely financial decisions and no purely love decisions. They're all intertwined.

• 51:45Mike Carruthers?

  Well, it is so easy, even with, even with really big decisions, to go with your gut. You know, oh, this just feels right. And I enjoy hearing what you say about, you know, there's a system, there's a way to analyze this that isn't quite so romantic as going with your gut, but may yield a better decision. I've been talking to Myra Strober. She's a labor economist and professor at Stanford University. The name of her book is Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life's Biggest Decisions. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Myra. I enjoyed the conversation.

• 52:22Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike.

• 52:27Mike Carruthers?

  How many times have you been told to stand up straight and suck in your gut? Well, the stand up straight part's probably fine. It's the sucking in your gut thing that could be a problem, even though some people do it all the time. When you suck in your stomach, it prevents you from breathing properly. That shallow breathing can actually lead to anxiety and poor balance and crummy posture. It can also lead to incontinence and a whole host of other problems. So stand up straight, that's fine, but relax your stomach muscles. And that is something you should know. If someone asks you what podcasts you listen to, I hope you'll remember to tell them about this one. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You

• 53:12Mike Carruthers?

  Should Know.

• 53:14Speaker 03

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