Pod Insights Something You Should Know What Nature Reveals About Living Longer & Why Smart People Believe Irrational Things-SYSK Choice About this episode If you’re stocking up on Halloween candy, do you know which treats kids actually want the most? This episode opens with a list of the top 10 most popular Halloween candies — and it may not be what you expect. https://www.cincinnati.com/story/entertainment/2023/10/03/blow-pops-win-title-ohio-favorite-halloween-candy/71041875007/
Some animals live unimaginably long lives — an oyster that’s over 500 years old, creatures that seem to never age at all. What if unlocking their secrets could help us extend human lifespans? Research into nature’s most resilient species is already pointing the way. Joining me is Steven Austad, Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and author of Methuselah’s Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us about Living Longer, Healthier Lives (https://amzn.to/3Q5Zj8L). He reveals what the natural world is teaching us about living not just longer, but better.
Why do some people come to believe things that simply aren’t true? From flat-earth theories to dangerous conspiracy thinking, misbelief is everywhere — and it can have serious consequences. Dan Ariely, professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, knows this topic intimately. He’s the author of Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things (https://amzn.to/3ZNNOpB), and he shares both the science and his personal story of being the target of misbelief. This conversation might change how you view false beliefs — and those who hold them.
And finally today, tossing out your empty prescription bottles might seem harmless — but it could expose you to risks you never considered. In the closing segment, I’ll explain why and what you should do instead. https://www.newjerseyshredding.com/2021/09/27/the-basics-of-shredding-pill-bottles/
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:23 Mike Carruthers? Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need the right hire fast? Then this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Today on Something You Should Know, the top 10 Halloween candies this year. Then what science is learning from animals to help humans live longer, because some animals live a very long time. What's the longest?
1:59 Speaker 01 It's a clam called the ocean cohog. They live at least 507 years, because we know of one that lived that long. It was born in 1499 and died in 2006.
2:13 Mike Carruthers? Also, why you shouldn't throw away your empty prescription bottles. And the terrible consequences of disbelief, believing things that just aren't true. My guest, Dan Ariely, is a victim of it.
2:25 Speaker 02 Because people were very much convinced that I conspired to bring about Covid. And that was the reason for me to join Bill Gates and the Illuminati in trying to kill as many healthy people as possible.
2:38 Mike Carruthers? All this today on Something You Should Know.
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4:09 Speaker 03 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.
4:22 Mike Carruthers? Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. One list that doesn't change much year to year is the list of the most popular Halloween candies. Now, it does vary from region to region and state to state, well, and person to person for that matter. But CandyStore.com has compiled a list of the top 10 Halloween candies in the US according to their data that they put together over the last 16 years. At number 10 is Snickers, which surprises me a little bit because it's my number one, or maybe number two. So, number 10 is Snickers, number nine is Hershey's Mini Bars, number eight, Candy Corn.
5:07 Mike Carruthers? Never been a big fan of Candy Corn, but it is one of the only candies that you see only at Halloween. Number seven is Hershey's Kisses, Starburst comes in at number six, Sour Patch Kids at number five. The fourth most popular Halloween candy is Skittles. At number three, Hot Tamales. Number two is M&M's. And the number one Halloween candy, can you guess? Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Hard to argue with that one. And that is something you should know.
5:46 Mike Carruthers? Human beings live to be somewhere around 80 years old, on average. And that's a lot longer than it used to be. And of course, you occasionally hear of people living well over 100. But that's pretty rare. Clearly, age, or aging, is a killer. Still, there are other species that live a lot longer than we do. So what if we could learn from, or even extract from, those animals, whatever the magic is, to keep us alive a lot longer? Or what if we could somehow use the, whatever it is, that, say, keeps birds healthy? Because birds tend to stay healthy right up until when they die.
6:30 Mike Carruthers? And they don't get those long, slow illnesses that often painfully kill people.
6:36 Mike Carruthers? It may sound a little science fictiony, but there's actually some serious research going on to see if we can live longer the way other species do. And it starts by understanding what it is and how it is that these animals live for decades longer, and sometimes literally centuries longer than we do. Right in the middle of this research is Stephen Ostad. Stephen is a distinguished professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and author of a couple of books. His latest is Methuselah Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives. Hi Stephen, welcome to Something You Should Know.
7:17 Speaker 01 Thanks, it's nice to be here.
7:19 Mike Carruthers? So this idea, this whole notion of looking at other animals that live longer, and somehow tying it to human longevity and improving human longevity, how does this all work? How does this research, explain all this?
7:33 Speaker 01 Well, our fundamental biology is very similar between animals and humans. And in fact, some people study aging in single-celled animals even. But the thing is that we're quite successful at aging. So life itself is a damaging process, and gradually it kills organisms. But some animals are very good at resisting that damage, and some are not so good. Humans happen to be quite good. We're the longest-lived of any of the terrestrial mammals. But there are animals that combat the destructive processes of aging better than we do. And I think that we can learn something from their biology that could turn into, let's
8:17 Speaker 01 say pharmaceuticals, that address some of our key vulnerabilities inside our bodies.
8:23 Mike Carruthers? Well, I've often wondered, you hear about animals like turtles, you know, tortoises that live, you know, I don't know, they live forever. And you wonder, well, you know, we hear that our body parts, our organs and things wear out at a certain point. Why don't theirs wear out too? What's the difference?
8:45 Speaker 01 Well, turtles are an interesting case because one of the reasons that they probably wear out more slowly is that they live much more slowly than we do. They have a heart rate that's seven or eight beats a minute, you know, a tenth of ours. And pretty much everything they do is in slow motion. They even, of course, move in slow motion, as everyone knows. And it turns out that a major contributor to what goes on with our aging is the damage due to our metabolism. And they have a very slow metabolism. So even though they're long-lived, and they live somewhere between 150 and 200 years, we're certain about that range, but we're not certain about the specifics of that. If you calculate,
9:30 Speaker 01 let's say, how many times their heart beats in a lifetime, it's actually only about a third of the number of heartbeats that we get in a lifetime.
9:40 Mike Carruthers? So it's interesting that part of their longevity is because they're slow and that they don't move a lot. And yet, we're told, and our experience is that for humans to live a long time, you need to move, that movement is essential to good health and longevity.
9:59 Speaker 01 That's exactly right. And, you know, for the turtles, whether they're moving or not, it's kind of hard to tell the difference. It doesn't change that much. Charles Darwin, when he first discovered these giant tortoises on the Galapagos Island, actually walked along them and timed how fast that they walked. And, you know, a turtle that's going top speed can cover about four miles in a 24-hour time period. Now, that wouldn't be much for us. But surprisingly enough, this link between metabolism and longevity is so strong, if you look across animal species, that one of the early aging researchers even wrote
10:40 Speaker 01 an article called "Why Lazy People Live the Longest," making the case that really exercise is bad for you. Now, we know now that he was very, very wrong, but he lived and died, by his words, he died at 62 of a massive heart attack. And one of the reasons that we think that activity is good for us is that, you know, our muscles are very, very important to our health. Our muscles are even important to our brain health, as we're learning now. So metabolism plays a role in how long we live and how healthily we live, but it's not the whole story. Exercise is clearly one of the miracle drugs for staying healthy longer.
11:25 Mike Carruthers? So what is the longest living animal on Earth? Either on average, or the longest living animal that we actually know lived?
11:34 Speaker 01 The longest living animal that we would perceive as an animal, I actually have spent some time studying. It's a clam called the ocean cohog, and they live at least 507 years. And I can say at least 507 years because we know of one that lived that long, and it was killed by a scientist, actually, by a researcher, who had no idea how long lived it was when it killed. We found that out later.
12:05 Mike Carruthers? He must have felt terrible.
12:08 Speaker 01 Well, it was actually a daughter, and his daughter was helping him with the research, and he was just collecting all these clams, and he was interested in the shells, because he was using the shells to try to understand ancient climates. And his daughter was just scooping the insides out of these shells and throwing it over the side of the boat. So that's what happened to what we call Ming the mollusk.
12:32 Mike Carruthers? Oh, man. Whoops.
12:35 Speaker 01 And I'm sure he was horrified when he discovered this, because we don't even know what sex it was. So, could have been a male, could have been a female. We do know, though, that it was born in 1499 and died in 2006, when this young girl scooped it out of its shell.
12:54 Mike Carruthers? How could you possibly know that a clam was born in 1499?
12:59 Speaker 01 Because they have growth rings in their shells that if you know what you're doing, you can section this, you have to section this shell, you have to polish it, you have to etch it, but if you do all this and then you study it very carefully under a microscope, you can count the growth rings. So that's how we know precisely how long ago it was it was born.
13:23 Mike Carruthers? That's incredible. And I would imagine that a clam too, like the tortoise, lives a very slow existence.
13:30 Speaker 01 That is true. But clams, most people don't realize this, but clams have a beating heart. And this clam's heart beats about as fast as the tortoise's heart. But what that means is that there's somewhere out there, there's hearts that have been beating over for over 500 years, which I find pretty remarkable. In fact, I used to have cardiology residents come by my lab and I'd say, here, hold this clam here. I said, you're holding an older heart than you will ever hold in your lifetime again.
14:01 Mike Carruthers? So I know birds, or some birds, like the parrot family of birds, that live a long time, right? And birds are a long-lived animal.
14:10 Speaker 01 I mean, I have a parrot that may be the longest-lived parrot of its species, if I can believe, and this is always a problem with these longevity records, is that there tends to be exaggeration, particularly in the lack of knowledge. But if I could believe the people who gave me this parrot some 40 years ago, this parrot's now 73 years old.
14:36 Speaker 01 But there are really good records of parrots living into their 80s and less good records of them living longer than that. The longest-lived bird in the wild, these are all pets, but the longest-lived bird in the wild that we know of is actually an albatross that's at least 72 years old and just had a baby last year.
14:59 Speaker 01 The other thing that makes it remarkable, and this is one of the things that makes birds remarkable, is they seem to maintain their physical fitness right up to the very end. I mean, albatrosses have to fly thousands of miles to feed their chicks when they're raising them. And to be able to do that when they're in their 70s, it's really quite remarkable. And even veterinarians say about pet birds, they're fine, they're fine, they're fine, they're dead. Which is kind of like what we'd like humans to do. Of course, we'd like that to happen as late as possible. But if we could stay healthy right up till the end of our lives, that's kind of a goal of the kind of research that I do.
15:43 Mike Carruthers? We're talking about how many other animals live a long, long time, and what can we learn from that to help humans live a long, long time. My guest is Stephen Ostad. He is a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and his book is Methuselah Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives.
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17:24 Mike Carruthers? So Stephen, as fascinating as this is about how other animals live a long, long time, how does this intersect with human longevity?
17:33 Speaker 01 We're working very actively on this, and we haven't got anything that's quite ready for humans yet, but we've, just recently, there was a paper where they took a gene out of a very long-lived animal called a naked mole rat. And naked mole rat is roughly the size of a mouse, and a mouse will live two or three years, and a naked mole rat will live up to 40 years. And so they took a gene that they thought was responsible for some of this naked mole rat's longevity, and they put it into the mouse genome, and the mouse lived a bit longer and stayed healthy substantially longer. So this is, this is the first example of taking a gene from a long-lived animal, putting
18:17 Speaker 01 it in a short-lived animal, and keeping it healthy longer. And I think that's probably the first of a slew of these kinds of things that we're going to come up with. Now, we're not going to take the genes from long-lived animals and put them into people, probably. People are not going to go for that, and, but we might put it into some parts of people. We might take a gene, for instance, that, that, that keeps proteins from clumping in your brain, and we might inject it into your brain in a virus, and that might keep people from getting Alzheimer's disease, which is caused by clumps of protein in the brain.
18:54 Mike Carruthers? Well, that'd be pretty cool.
18:57 Speaker 01 Yeah, it's one of the things that we discovered about the really long-lived clams is they seem to have something in their bodies that keeps proteins from clumping together. And it would be very nice to know, even the protein that causes Alzheimer's disease, this A beta protein, it prevents it from clumping. So if we can figure out what that is, that's a good example of how we might use knowledge that we get from long-lived animals to keep people healthy longer.
19:23 Mike Carruthers? But generally, when you look at animals in the wild that live a long time, do they eventually start to suffer the same things that people who live a long time, you know, aches and pains and arthritis and things like that, does that happen?
19:38 Speaker 01 Yeah, the things that degrade the quality of later life. Yeah, you can see that. And I mean, I've spent, unlike most of the researchers in this field that came up through medical laboratories, I came through field biology. And I have spent years and years watching animals of various ages in the wild. And yes, you can see them with cataracts, you can see them with arthritis, you can see them with many of the same maladies that they get. They don't tend to live very long once they get those maladies, because if your vision is compromised and you're living in the wild, it's something, something bad is going to happen to you quickly.
20:19 Mike Carruthers? You have this, you tell the story of the, was it the vampire bat? And I think you used the phrase that it constantly teetering on the edge of starvation. Explain that and why that's part of this conversation.
20:33 Speaker 01 Yeah, so vampire bats exclusively live on blood. And blood, they don't have the ability to store a lot of energy as fat. Blood is pretty much all protein. So they're on a protein-only diet, and their bodies does not store energy very well. So they're always a couple of days away from starving. And that's why they have this unique system where they actually share blood. So in these colonies that they live in, if one individual has not been successful at finding anything, anything to bite and drink its blood in a day or so, they'll actually share blood.
21:17 Speaker 01 The ones that are successful will share it with the ones that are unsuccessful. Now-- They're pretty unique in that their their window to starvation is so short. But one of the things that we know from a lot of other animals is if you reduce the amount that they want to eat, you give them less than they prefer to eat, actually increases their health quite substantially.
21:41 Mike Carruthers? So what's another example of an animal that lives a ridiculously long time and what we learn from that?
21:47 Speaker 01 Sure, one of the animals that I'm most fascinated by, well, a group of animals are the bats. And in particular, there's one species of bat called Brant's bat, which is very similar. It's an old world bat, it lives in Europe and Asia, but it's very similar to bats that we have here. And it weighs about as much as a quarter and a nickel put together. So it's very, very tiny. They live up to 40 years in the wild. And if you think of all the dangers of something that small, faces, dangers of predators, dangers of diseases, because they live in dense colonies.
22:28 Speaker 01 And you know, that's why they, you know, that's why they have so many viruses that sometimes spread to humans. But the remarkable thing about them is not just that they live so long, but the fact that they maintain their health so long. So for instance, bats that eat insects hear their prey. They don't see their prey. They yell and they listen for the echo, and that's how they track down their prey. And they yell in these very high pitched screams, basically. Well, one of the first things to go in in humans is our high frequency hearing. So these bats live decade after decade and maintain their high frequency hearing. Otherwise, they wouldn't survive.
23:13 Speaker 01 The other thing is if we If we are forced to undergo bedrest for a period of time, say we had some surgery or something else, our muscles shrink and after really just a couple of weeks, people have a tough time even getting out of bed and walking around. Well, bats can hibernate for six or eight or nine months and wake up and fly off. Now, how do they do that? How do they maintain their hearing? The other thing is they have this incredible memory for space and geography. One of the first things to go and are is our spatial memory, as they call it. These bats will fly 50 to 100 miles a night in the dark and then they'll
23:57 Speaker 01 go back and they'll find the cave that they were living in and they'll find their pup that might be there among a million other bats in that cave. And if we could, if we could transfer any of these capabilities to humans, it would be quite remarkable.
24:13 Mike Carruthers? Is there a creature that people probably have not heard of that really just is off the charts on longevity and health and all that that you've studied that we just, we haven't, we don't know anything about?
24:25 Speaker 01 Yeah, well, it's interesting. So, some animals you'd never think of are pretty amazing. There's a very small animal called a hydra that lives in freshwater and basically it looks like a little tube with a bunch of tentacles around its top and that's, that's its mouth. So far as we can tell, that animal does not age at all, at least in the laboratory, it doesn't age. That is as long as anybody has had the patience to follow them. They don't die, their, their death rate doesn't increase the older they get and their reproductive rate doesn't decrease. Now, this is no doubt not true in the wild because they live in a very seasonal environment, but at least in the laboratory, we know they don't age.
25:10 Speaker 01 So we might learn something critical about aging for them. The other group of animals that's pretty interesting in this regard are the mole rats. I mentioned the naked mole rat before, and that lives underground in colonies. They virtually never come above ground. They live on the equator in East Africa, and about the only thing you ever see of them is them kicking dirt out of their underground tunnels. So you'll see these little things that look like volcanoes, little bounds of dirt with dirt coming out of it. That's as close as you come. And like I say, in the laboratory, at least, they live 10 times as long as a mouse, which is the same size, so they live up to about 40 years.
25:53 Speaker 01 Now, the interesting thing is there's a number of other rodents that live their entire lives underground, and those also tend to be long-lived. And we're not really sure why that is. I think it may have to do with their ability to exist on very low levels of oxygen and very high levels of carbon dioxide, because if you're in a tunnel that doesn't have good ventilation and you're breathing a lot, you're going to reduce the oxygen that's in the atmosphere there, and you're also going to be increasing the carbon dioxide. And there really is this remarkable relationship between animals that can get by on very little
26:36 Speaker 01 oxygen, but yet live a long time.
26:40 Mike Carruthers? Whales live a long time, right? They live like, what, hundreds of years?
26:46 Speaker 01 That's a very interesting story, because the bowhead whale, which is the one that lives over 200 years, lives in the Arctic. And unlike cold-blooded animals, whose metabolic rate is really determined by the temperature that they're in, mammals, like whales, have to maintain a high body temperature. You know, we have a body temperature of 98.6, and whales have a body temperature that's roughly the same. Well, they've got to do that in the face of the fact that they're living in water that's only a couple of degrees above freezing. And one way to do that is to make your metabolism faster, not slower. So these whales are really interesting because they're living that fast.
27:29 Speaker 01 I mean, they have a metabolism that's that fast, but despite that, they're living quite a long time. And they're also extremely resistant to cancer. And here's another thing, just a thought experiment about the world, so about cancer susceptibility. So virtually every animal that we know of gets cancer, although some of them get it very rarely and some of it get it quite commonly. But if you think of the fact that any cell in your body has the potential to have out of control growth and then potentially kill you, well, then animals with a lot of cells should be very susceptible to cancer because there's more chances for any single cell
28:13 Speaker 01 to undergo this kind of transformation. But yet, animals like elephants and animals like whales that have thousands, you know, hundreds of thousands of times the number of cells that mice do, or birds do, or humans do, somehow can survive for decade after decade or century after century without getting cancer. And that's, again, that's something we'd like very much to be able to understand and find some way to mimic with pharmaceuticals, or with diets, or somehow.
28:50 Mike Carruthers? Well, it seems so amazing that there's like these secrets of longevity locked into these animals, and wouldn't it be great if we could unlock those secrets and apply them to humans? I mean, that's so exciting. I've been speaking with Stephen Ostad. He is a professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, the author of several books, and his latest book is called Methuselah Zoo: What Nature Can Teach Us About Living Longer, Healthier Lives. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Stephen. This was really, really interesting.
29:26 Speaker 01 Thanks, Mike. It's been a lot of fun talking to you. I've enjoyed it, and I hope we can do it again sometime.
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30:51 Mike Carruthers? So, this is a segment, a discussion about misbelief, which you'll understand better in just a moment, but essentially, misbelief is believing something that is not true, or generally accepted to be not true. And we are about to have this discussion about misbelief with Dan Ariely, who was, and maybe still is, the subject of misbelief. It's kind of a weird and interesting story that's about to unfold here. So, meet Dan Ariely. He's been here before, and Dan is a well-regarded professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He's co-founder of several companies and author of several bestselling books.
31:33 Mike Carruthers? His latest is titled, "Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things." Hi, Dan. Thanks for coming back on. Wonderful to be back. So, let's start with an example. Give me an example of misbelief.
31:50 Speaker 02 Think about the question of diets. People have all kinds of beliefs in diets and some of them are actually harmful. People have all kinds of beliefs about cancer treatment. People have beliefs about end of life. Almost, almost everything we have beliefs on and many of those are wrong. I'm not saying that your beliefs specifically are misbeliefs, but I'm saying that if you think about something incredibly basic like educating our kids, the reality is that we have very strong beliefs about what is the best way to raise our kids, but we haven't really tested those. We haven't looked really at the data. And many people do things that are actually not in the best interest of their kids.
32:35 Mike Carruthers? According to who?
32:37 Speaker 02 According to science.
32:39 Mike Carruthers? But many times, science is proven to be wrong.
32:42 Speaker 02 That's right, that's right.
32:44 Mike Carruthers? What's the difference between misbelief and being wrong?
32:50 Speaker 02 The idea is that if we have the consensus scientific notion pointing to one direction and then we have a few people who are holding a... They're not just wrong and they're not ignorant. They're not unaware of what the establishment is saying, but they're saying the establishment is wrong and we have it right. That in the current context is defined for me as a, as a misbelief.
33:19 Mike Carruthers? All right, I get that. I believe that. Yeah, that's, that certainly seems correct. That if, if in the face of a lot of evidence and convention and what most people believe, you believe something else, that's probably a misbelief.
33:33 Speaker 02 Yeah, and not, and not just in a way that you, you're unaware of it, because then it could be just a mistake, right? That it's, it's something that you believe in a strong, in a strong way.
33:44 Mike Carruthers? But there's another part to this you talk about, that misbelief is not just believing something that is proven to be not true. It's believing something that you think or that you know is right when there isn't any evidence at all, one way or the other. So give me an example of that.
34:04 Speaker 02 I have a notion, for example, of what's the the right way to give allowances to kids. But it's just my opinion. There's almost no research on this topic. And the few papers that there are are not that good. And I'm I'm realizing I'm basing it in a very lot of confidence, but very little actual data. So that, of course, opens the door for for misbeliefs.
34:28 Mike Carruthers? If you don't have people who misbelieve, it seems like you would never make progress on anything. Because if somebody doesn't say the conventional wisdom is wrong, nothing ever changes.
34:42 Speaker 02 So so there's a there's a difference between being convinced that that it's wrong and a willingness to ask the question. So I think one of the nice things about science is that people are able to hold multiple hypotheses at the same time. Is to say, everybody's saying that X is correct. But nobody has really shown that that's correct, and maybe B is correct. And I don't have to be convinced that B is correct. I can just create an idea of how B might be correct, what would be the mechanism by which B would be correct, and then I would test it. But I don't think for progress, we need we necessarily need the conviction that everybody is wrong. We just need to have the open mindness.
35:28 Speaker 02 And and actually, this open mindness is incredibly important. Sometimes it's called intellectual humility. This ability to hold multiple hypotheses at the same time, not to be overly convinced in any one of them and basically saying, OK, I'm looking for evidence. And not only am I looking for evidence, I'm going to enjoy the process of looking for evidence until I can find out what is correct and what is wrong.
35:53 Mike Carruthers? This seems like a really interesting academic exercise, but it seems that in most things in life, this doesn't really matter.
36:01 Speaker 02 When you say this, you mean what? Misbeliefs?
36:04 Mike Carruthers? This whole idea of what's a misbelief versus what's a belief. It seems, I mean, there are, I'm sure, big, big things that this is important to. But if I spent my whole day trying to decide, is this a misbelief? Or is this the truth? Or about allowances or everything? It would be exhausting.
36:23 Speaker 02 Yes, that's, that's right. But, but other misbeliefs can have more dire consequences. For example, let's just take the question of health. Imagine that some people decide that they don't believe in conventional medicine, and they don't believe in cancer treatment, and therefore, they're going to go for alternative medications. I saw some institution not, not too long ago that, that basically takes people's urine and gives it back to them.
36:57 Speaker 02 These people end up, you know, first of all, it doesn't seem like it's working. They end up spending lots of money. There's a lot of wasted hope. And also, they eventually cost a lot of money to the healthcare system.
37:10 Mike Carruthers? We did an interview not long ago. We were talking about, you know, kind of great breakthrough moments in history. And one of the discussions that, that we had was talking about how there was a time when somebody, I don't remember the details, suggested that germs could be causing a lot of problems. Because up until that point, doctors, surgeons didn't clean things. They didn't wash their hands. They, and they, and when this person came out and said, no, these things are creating problems because it's causing infections. The, the conventional wisdom is you can't see it. It's not true. They poo-pooed it. They pushed, they ostracized this guy.
37:52 Mike Carruthers? Because convention was, if you can't see it, it's not a problem. And they, convention was dead wrong. And now, we don't believe that anymore.
38:03 Speaker 02 That's right. So, so there are two ways to think about your statement. One is to say that misbeliefs are not 100% bad. That there are occasions in which they are useful. Maybe even incredibly useful.
38:18 Speaker 02 And another way to think about it is that maybe this is not, was not a misbelief as I define it. But that really depends on, on the person. If the person in question, right, this was in England a long time ago. But if the, and I don't remember the name of the person who discovered that. But if that person basically said, I, I reject everybody's notion and I'm a hundred percent correct and, and that's it. That I would have called it misbelief and it would fall into the category of, yes, sometimes misbeliefs are, are correct. But if it falls into the category of that person saying, you know what? Everybody believes that. I'm not so sure that that's true.
39:01 Speaker 02 I have another alternative and let me see whether my alternative is a better explanation to reality. That for me would not be a misbelief. That would just mean that the person has what we call again, high intellectual humility. And they're basically open to the possibility that there are other alternatives. And that's always good. And instead of saying, I know it for sure. They say, let me look for data to support it. I mean, one of the things with misbeliefs is that people are not looking for that much data, that they are quite confident in what they have. And they're not even looking for, for a lot of evidence.
39:37 Mike Carruthers? So we've been talking about how misbeliefs happen. But talk about, talk about why they happen and the, and the purpose they serve. Because they must, they must serve a purpose.
39:50 Speaker 02 I also say that these misbeliefs that people have are actually a reasonable response to some real need. They don't just happen. The, the story is that people basically start with a stressful situation. And I don't mean the stress of being too much at work or having too much to do. It's the stress of feeling that I'm kind of hard done by. The, the world has done something bad to me. I don't understand the world. I don't understand why I'm not successful. I don't understand what, why I got sick, why I lost my job, something like that. And now I have a need for an explanation. And that need for an explanation is, is a need to fulfill something.
40:35 Speaker 02 And, and what do I want? I want to understand the world. I want to find a villain.
40:42 Speaker 02 I could blame them, it would not be my fault. And I want an explanation that would make me feel in control, that I'm smart and I know more things and so on. So in the way that misbeliefs end up being shapen is into stories about why I'm not doing so well and why it's somebody else's fault, a villain. And the story has to give the person telling the story to themselves that they are actually knowledgeable and smart and know something that I'm.
41:16 Mike Carruthers? When you think, just think about all the conspiracy theories that people have, there's always a villain. It's the government, it's Russia, it's, you know, there's, we need a villain. We, it, it, it serves a purpose, doesn't it? To have a villain because then they're wrong and we're right.
41:36 Speaker 02 So my, my story with, with the misbeliever started with a video.
41:40 Mike Carruthers? Yeah, and this is what I wanted to get to because you, being a fairly high-profile guy, were the subject of a big misbelief that started with this video. So go ahead with the story.
41:53 Speaker 02 So there was one video that showed how, because of my injury, because I got badly burned, I started hating healthy people. And that was the reason for me to join Bill Gates and the Illuminati in trying to kill as many healthy people as possible. I don't know if you know these, some of those theories, but there's theories about the cabal of people who are trying to reduce the world's population.
42:19 Mike Carruthers? You were accused of trying to kill as many people as possible?
42:23 Speaker 02 As many healthy people as possible, presumably out of resentment to people who were not badly injured.
42:29 Mike Carruthers? Well, that, I mean, I can't really get my head around that, that people would actually believe that someone like you, that anybody would, would be out to kill as many healthy people as possible. It seems absurd.
42:44 Speaker 02 So, so, you know, I, I don't think it's, well, you know, I wish it didn't happen. It was very painful. I also got lots of death threats in the first few years of COVID.
42:53 Mike Carruthers? Why?
42:53 Speaker 02 But, you know, in the beginning.
42:54 Mike Carruthers? Why were you getting death threats?
42:57 Speaker 02 Because people were very much convinced. That I conspired to to bring about Covid. They thought that I was part of the Covid plot. I was part of the vaccination plot. So we can say, oh, you know, this is just a shame. And this is crazy. And this is sick and so on. But but for me, I want to understand that psychology. And I want to understand what were the causes that that got people to go down that that path? And then also, what can we do next time to hopefully fix it or reduce it or improve on it?
43:34 Mike Carruthers? Why do you think?
43:37 Mike Carruthers? I mean, this is so fascinating to me. Why? Because you were right in the eye of the storm. Why you? Why would people attach on you that you started Covid? And that you wanted to kill healthy people? Why you?
43:56 Speaker 02 So so I think that kind of two reasons, two main reasons. One is that I I did try to help lots of governments early in Covid. There were questions about giving fines or not giving fines. There were questions about reducing domestic violence, distant education. There were lots of lots of questions in the beginning about all kinds of things. And I and I try to help as much as I can. But but the second thing is, I don't know if you've seen how I look in the last few years.
44:29 Mike Carruthers? Yes.
44:30 Speaker 02 But but I have this very strange half a beard because of my injury. Right? I don't have hair on the right side of my face and I don't shave. So I have something that looks like it is. It is a half a beard. It's almost symmetrical. And and you know, there are lots of comments about devil, devilish look, not not in a good way. So I think the combination of looking strange, seeming odd, basically created that.
45:01 Speaker 02 And once it's created, I became a social currency. And people kind of made up more facts about me and more information and attacked me. By the way, one of the, there was, at some point, there was a post about me that described kind of my crimes against humanity. And the guy wondered whether I should get a life in prison or public hanging when they do the Nuremberg 2.0 trials for all the people who did crimes against humanity during, during Covid. And there were about a thousand comments to his post. And if you didn't read his post, you would just see love and support for this guy.
45:45 Speaker 02 People told him what a clever writer he is and how insightful and so on. And, and when you, if you just looked at the comments, you would think, oh, what a, what a kind, wonderful group of people. And, but of course, they were not. But they did give each other tremendous support, right? And they needed that support. Again, the psychological perspective here is to look at that behavior and to try and understand what is fulfilling. And, and those people were basically, you know, ostracized from society. I'm sure their friends and family didn't understand them anymore, probably wouldn't talk to them. And, and, and they found a great group of people
46:30 Speaker 02 who supported each other and helped each other. And that was incredibly important, some at my expense. But incredibly important for them to, to manage these complex times.
46:41 Mike Carruthers? So you were the villain?
46:44 Speaker 02 I was the villain, yeah, yeah.
46:46 Mike Carruthers? And does it?
46:46 Speaker 02 I was the villain.
46:47 Mike Carruthers? Can I ask you? I mean, I, I don't, I don't want to get too personal here, but what is that? When you, when you're in bed at night and you think about all that, what does that feel like? That there's like this hatred for you when you know in your heart that it's not deserved?
47:06 Speaker 02 Yeah, so, so, you know, when it started, I thought that I could just explain to them that they were wrong. I thought, okay, this must be a simple matter of misunderstanding. Let me just fix it. And I called some of them. I joined some online discussion group. I joined some podcasts with them. And I only, I only did my self-damage. I couldn't convince them of anything. They were not there to be convinced. They were not there after data. Going back to how we talked about misbelief. They were not there to find out the truth. They've decided what the truth was and nothing changed.
47:49 Speaker 02 So I, I spent a few weeks trying to persuade them and failed miserably. Maybe even a month. And during that time, during the day, I was, I was kind of okay. But then at night, I would have terrible nightmares. It's terrible to feel so hated.
48:10 Mike Carruthers? I know that, and I find this remarkable, that you actually spoke to some of these people who hate you, who want you dead, who attacked you. And I'd like to get your comment on what that was like. And also, if it changed their thinking about you, seeing you as a person as opposed to a monster. And I know, I know there were a couple of people, but that, but that one woman that you talked to, what was that experience like?
48:39 Speaker 02 As I was describing it, you know, it was the combination of the emotional state from being attacked plus the emotion of, of reminding myself about those very, very tough days on, on being on the ventilator. And I just started crying, just started crying uncontrollably. And that influenced her. I met her for beer at some point.
49:00 Mike Carruthers? What?
49:01 Speaker 02 But yeah, yeah, I met her for, you know, I, you know, as I told you, like my, my coping strategy is to try and understand. I did meet her for beer at some point, but she, she made sure that she was always... With her back towards the other people so nobody could take a picture of her meeting me, so her reputation would not be hurt.
49:22 Mike Carruthers? Just because you've mentioned it, can you just quickly in 30 seconds, explain, if you wish to, your burns, how you got them?
49:32 Speaker 02 So when I was in my late teens, I was next to a magnesium flare, one of these things that the military sends to the sky to light up a battlefield, and one of those things got burned, exploded next to me, and I was burning about 70% of my body, and I stayed for almost three years in hospital. And that, you know, life in hospital is very tough, and life with burns after it is very complex. It's certainly the biggest event of my life. It gives me perspective on everything else and lots of lessons, but very, very tough still, still very, very tough.
50:12 Mike Carruthers? Well, certainly a shame that you went through all you went through and being hated the way you were, but it certainly gives you this unique perspective from being right at the, as the target of it, to understand this whole idea of misbelief. I've been talking to Dan Ariely. He is a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University. He's the author of several bestselling books. The latest is called Misbelief: What Makes Rational People Believe Irrational Things. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Dan. Thank you. It's an honor to talk to you. Thanks.
50:50 Speaker 02 Thank you very much.
50:51 Mike Carruthers? You probably, when you're done with a prescription pill bottle, you probably just throw the bottle in the trash. What harm could that do? Well, it could put you at risk. You see, there's a lot of important information on the label, and it really needs to be removed before you toss out the bottle. Your name, prescription number, pharmacy, and doctor are all usually listed. That could give some unauthorized access to any number of people. Family members, friends, someone working in your house, to the person recycling or sifting through your trash. So what could they do with that sensitive information? Well, for starters,
51:34 Mike Carruthers? there's a chance they could use the pharmacy's automated refill line or find a drive-through pharmacy that doesn't require ID. Not only could they end up with your medication, you could have a big problem with your next refill. And that is something you should know. If you enjoyed this episode of Something You Should Know, I hope you'll spread the word and tell someone you know about it and suggest they give a listen. I'm Mike Herbrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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52:36 Mike Carruthers? Witness the beginning of the revolution.
52:39 Speaker 07 Hey Mitch, you've been trying to take down these games from the start.
52:42 Mike Carruthers? Film for IMAX.
52:43 Speaker 07 Make them remember you.
52:46 Mike Carruthers? The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Leaping, November 20th, rated PG-13.
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