The Science of Recognizing Faces & The Rules to Clearer Thinking-SYSK Choice

How food tastes has surprisingly little to do with the food itself. The lighting in the room, the weight of your fork, and even the color of your plate can all change how much you enjoy a meal — without you realizing it. This episode begins with how easily your senses can be influenced. https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/12/31/370397449/food-psychology-how-to-trick-your-palate-into-a-tastier-meal# When you recognize someone, it usually happens instantly — but what exactly are you recognizing? How much of a face do you need to see? Why are some people incredibly good at recognizing faces while others struggle or are completely face blind? And how does facial recognition software compare to the human brain? Sharrona Pearl joins me to explore why face recognition varies so dramatically between people. She is associate professor of medical ethics and history at Drexel University and author of Do I Know You?: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition (https://amzn.to/3TWc0VX). We like to believe we think clearly and rationally — but much of the time our brains are running on autopilot. That’s when bad decisions, faulty reasoning, and unnecessary mistakes creep in. Shane Parrish explains how to slow down your thinking, avoid mental traps, and make better decisions in everyday moments. Shane is an entrepreneur whose work is used by Fortune 500 companies and professional sports teams, host of The Knowledge Project podcast, and author of Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results (https://amzn.to/3Hl0FHj). And finally, some people insist they can drink coffee right before bed and sleep just fine. Is that really possible — or are they fooling themselves? We wrap up with what sleep science actually says about caffeine and nighttime rest. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/shift-worker-alert-curb-t_b_386058 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 0:32Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, how the environment where you eat can affect the way your food tastes. Then, the science of how we recognize faces. Some of us are really good at it, and some are totally face-blind.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  Somebody who's profoundly face-blind sends their kid to daycare in the morning in one outfit, and their kid, as kids do, needs a change of clothing. That parent might not be able to recognize their kid at pickup.

• 0:58Mike Carruthers?

  Also, is it true some people can drink coffee right before bed and be completely unaffected by it? And how to set rules to think more clearly and accomplish what's important?

• 1:10Speaker 03

  How can we create automatic rules? I work out every day. I have no meetings till 12:00. I invest in an index fund every month to come up with them. Just ask yourself, what would the person who accomplishes what I want to accomplish, what would their life look like, and how do I set rules around this?

• 1:26Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know. Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping, especially with the holidays coming? Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in Shop Cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in Shop Cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place.

• 2:09Mike Carruthers?

  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 a thousand dollars, 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. 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?

  Hi there, and welcome to Something You Should Know. Since we all eat food, I've always been interested in all the things that affect how we enjoy our food. And there's a guy named Charles Spence. He's an experimental psychologist at Oxford University. He has spent his career studying how environment affects the way we experience food. So for example, the weight and color of the utensils you use can affect how sweet or salty a food tastes. And people tend to enjoy the same dish more if it has a longer and more descriptive name. He also found that people who like strong coffee

• 3:52Mike Carruthers?

  tend to drink more of it under bright lights, whereas people who prefer weak coffee tend to drink more of it under dim light. And the shape and color of the dinnerware can affect the taste of the food as well. In general, round white plates tend to enhance sweet flavors in food, whereas black angular plates tend to bring out more savory flavors. And serving food on a red plate tends to reduce the amount that people eat. And that is something you should know.

• 4:28Mike Carruthers?

  Here's a topic that you don't hear discussed very often. It's the topic of how we recognize faces. But think about it, when you recognize someone, it's because of their face, right? I mean, you don't look at someone's hands and go, "Oh, it's Bob." No, it's always the face. Some of us are pretty good with faces. Some people are really good with faces. They'll often say, "I never forget a face." And still others are face-blind. They can't tell anyone, even family members, who they are by looking at their face. And of course, now we have something called face recognition software. How does that work and how does it fit into this conversation?

• 5:11Mike Carruthers?

  Well, here to discuss this unusual and fascinating topic is Sharona Pearl. She's an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and History at Drexel University. She's written a couple of books about faces. Her latest is called "Do I Know You: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition." Hi, Sharona, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:32Speaker 02

  Thanks so much, Mike. It's really exciting to be talking to you.

• 5:36Mike Carruthers?

  So I have to say, it seems like an unusual career choice to study faces and how we recognize faces. How did you, how did you get into this?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  I didn't intend to become a scholar of the face, per se, because like you say, it's one of those things that's ubiquitous, but isn't really a category. And the things that we study and the things that we know tend to be categories. But I just got really, really interested in the stakes for the face as the most basic unit of how we understand our own humanity and build relationships. And also as a site where we actually impose a lot of assumptions, biases, and then naturalize them and say, "Actually, it's not me, it's the face."

• 6:25Mike Carruthers?

  So there are people who seemingly can remember faces really well. "Oh, yeah, that's Bob. I met him six years ago in Tallahassee." And, and, and they just, they see a face once and they remember it. Then there are people, and I would consider myself in this category. I'm OK with faces. I sort of remember faces pretty well, but you know, maybe I saw them on TV. Maybe I met them, I'm not really sure. Is the, is the ability to remember a face... A skill?

• 6:58Speaker 02

  So it's not really a skill in the sense of something that you can get better at or train yourself in. As you gestured toward, there are some people who absolutely cannot do this at all. They have something called prosopagnosia or face blindness. And they are absolutely unable to look at a face and then when they see that face again, understand that it is the same person. And asking them to work on that, to try a little harder is akin to asking somebody who's colorblind to really focus and then maybe you'll be able to see the color. So in that sense, it's not really a skill. But having said that, for most people, most of us are mostly good at recognizing faces

• 7:43Speaker 02

  in the sense that if we see someone and then we see them again, we have the idea that they are related to that specific person. Now, we can be better or worse at it. And for most of us, how good we are at it in any given situation has a lot to do with the kind of interaction we had with that person. So if it's your mother, your lover, your brother, you see them a lot, they mean something to you, you're going to be able to recognize them more readily. But I love that you mentioned, Mike, somebody that I saw on TV because they're also people we have these parasocial relationships with. They don't know us, but we know them. So if we've had a meaningful encounter with them, we might also have a better ability to recognize them.

• 8:25Speaker 02

  But people on the extremes of this face recognition spectrum, people who are completely faceblind, all the way up to people who are what we call super recognizers, and it does sound like something that the Marvel or DC Universe came up with, but it's actually a neurological condition. Those folks have the ability to recognize faces independent of their relationship or interaction with that person. Now, you might hear about super recognizers and hear that they never forget a face. I think that's not strictly accurate. I think it's more reasonable to say that their ability to recall a face is unrelated to the relationship or encounter that they've had.

• 9:10Speaker 02

  And that's basically true of faceblind people as well, except for faceblind people, their ability to recall those faces is zero. And for super recognizers, it is extremely high.

• 9:21Mike Carruthers?

  So wait, so, so somebody who is a super-recognizer is somebody who's seen someone before and then can recall them upon seeing them again very well, correct?

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Correct, correct. So, they're really good at high school reunions because not only can they recognize folks, but they can actually age them over time. They are basically the walking internet movie database. So they can recognize minor characters and extras and say, "Oh hey, that was vampire number two in Buffy the Vampire Slayer." Now, interestingly, those folks don't necessarily have a great memory, per se, right? And they might not recall names, but for situational understanding of where that face appeared, their recall is pretty impressive.

• 10:09Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's something you, you sometimes hear those two things thrown together is, "I'm not good with names and faces," but those are two very different things, right?

• 10:18Speaker 02

  That's absolutely the case. And mostly because names do tend to be a function of memory, whereas faces are actually a different neurological process and a really complicated one that's connected in some ways to recall and memory, but actually has a lot to do with how we build images in our mind. And some folks just don't have the ability to do that for faces. But having said that, face-blind people have developed, tend to have developed, a whole host of really impressive adaptations, like voice recognition and gait recognition. They tend to have really good awareness and attunement to things like

• 10:59Speaker 02

  hairstyles and clothing and general ways that people manifest in the world. But if a face-blind parent, someone who's profoundly face-blind, and remember, it's a spectrum, so the bottom 1% to 2% of the population, I shouldn't say bottom, 1% to 2% of the population on the extreme end of face-blindness are going to have much less ability than those on the bottom 5%, 10%, and so on and so forth. But if somebody who's profoundly face-blind sends their kid to daycare in the morning in one outfit and their kid, as kids do, needs a change of clothing... That parent might not be able to recognize their kid at pickup.

• 11:38Mike Carruthers?

  No.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Yes. And in fact, one of the most well-known face-blind people, Oliver Sacks, who made a career out of tracking the unusual and the odd and the kind of quirky things that can happen to our brains, who himself didn't realize that he was face-blind until later middle age, as he described it, talks about sometimes waving to somebody and realizing it's himself or seeing what he thought was his own reflection and starting to groom his beard, only to see someone looking at him oddly because it was not, in fact, him.

• 12:21Mike Carruthers?

  That's very weird.

• 12:23Speaker 02

  Very weird.

• 12:23Mike Carruthers?

  So I get what you said, that it's a spectrum, but just to get a sense of this, like, what percentage of the population would you say are really good at recognizing faces? And what percentage of the population suffer from some form of face-blindness?

• 12:41Speaker 02

  Scientists believe that about 1 to 2% of the population is profoundly face-blind. That's 1 in 50 people, so quite a lot. And then by the logic of that spectrum, 1 to 2% of the population would be super-recognizers. Having said that, there are a couple of caveats. First of all, the kinds of super-recognizers who are being deployed, and they absolutely are, and we can talk about this, in criminal justice and police forces to make sense of face-recognition technology, are not the top 1 to 2%, they're probably the top 1 to 2% of the top 1 to 2%. The people who can really, really have this fantastical ability are really quite quite a discreet number.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  And also, there's a lot of ways to seem like you're bad at face-recognition. So it could be that you're face-blind and you have prosopagnosia, but it could be that you have trouble understanding emotions and communication, and that makes it hard for you to make sense of faces, right? So people with autism sometimes might...

• 13:50Speaker 02

  Also seem like they have face blindness. And so it has kind of a long tail on that spectrum. But in fact, they don't, although there is, you know, face blindness is a little overrepresented amongst the autistic community, but there are other ways to seem like you're not great at recognizing faces. And folks who have excellent memories or pay a lot of attention when they're interacting with others may seem like they're more super recognizers, but they're not. They're relying on a different set of skills.

• 14:20Mike Carruthers?

  We are talking about face recognition and how some of us can recognize faces really well and some of us can't do it at all. And most of us are somewhere in the middle. My guest is Sharona Pearl. She's author of a book called Do I Know You? From Face Blindness to Super Recognition.

• 14:39Speaker 05

  Purchase new carpet from The Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's Collection, Traffic Master, or Life Proof with Pet Proof Technology and see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid October 15 through November 1, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com/license numbers.

• 15:09Speaker 06

  The best part of waking up? A full cup of Folgers coffee and music on full blast.

• 15:35Speaker 06

  Shop Folgers Instant Coffee and more at your nearest retailer.

• 15:39Mike Carruthers?

  So Sharona, people who are face blind, are they always face blind? You know how a baby can recognize its mother's face very, very quickly? Do people start out okay and then something happens? Or it's from birth?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  So that's a really astute question because we were talking earlier about this question of tacit knowledge and things that we do without even know that we're doing it. It took a really, really long time for people who think about the brain and think about faces to understand that face recognition was even a thing or a category. Because there was no kind of crisis, there was no moment where people could do a thing and couldn't. So folks who just were face blind felt like they were stupid or not trying hard or everybody else had a superpower that they didn't. But they didn't have framing or language for it. So the first forms of face blindness that were categorized as such in 1947, although

• 16:36Speaker 02

  there's a longer history in certain ways, were people who had what's called acquired prosopagnosia. So that means that they could recognize faces and then something happened. A traumatic brain injury, a fever, a fall, and then they couldn't anymore. And that was the way that it became entered into the record as a category. And even though 1 to 2% of the population is probably born with what they call developmental prosopagnosia, it took something like 20 to 30 years after that initial acquired case was established for folks to even find people who were born with it because it's so hard to name or label.

• 17:21Speaker 02

  But yes, it does seem to be the case that some people are born completely face blind.

• 17:26Mike Carruthers?

  I would imagine that must be terrifying for, well, I guess you don't have anything to compare it to, but, but you know how a baby sees its mother's face and just, you know, relaxes, just, you know, smiles because, you know, there's comfort there. If you can't recognize your mother as an infant. God, I can't, that would just be horrible. But, but if you have nothing to compare it to, maybe it's not, I don't know.

• 17:52Speaker 02

  Well, probably infants can also recognize their mother's smell and voice and other kinds of cues. So, they might not be living in that condition of terror or

• 18:04Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, right.

• 18:04Speaker 02

  overwhelmingness or sense of loss until later. But absolutely, that's the case. And well, I'm interested in the way that extremeness itself is something that people have in common. So, trying to think about what faceblind people and super-recognizers themselves have in common by virtue of being on extreme ends of this kind of unusual spectrum. There's no doubt that the challenges of being faceblind are much more significant from all kinds of perspectives, including social and navigational and safety.

• 18:42Speaker 02

  But, one of the nice things about this now becoming a category is that people have some language to describe themselves. And I think that's really important. I recognize the stigma attached to labeling, but at the same time, being able to say, "It's not that I'm rude. I genuinely can't recognize you." Can be an enormous relief from that fear you're talking about.

• 19:07Mike Carruthers?

  So here's an observation that I've made is that it would seem to me, from my experience, that if I meet someone one-on-one, I'm more apt to remember their face than if I meet them in a group. Especially if it's a group of similar people. They kind of all melt together, I think, in terms of my ability to later recognize them. Because it's just a group of guys or a group of ladies and they're not individuals so much, and so their faces aren't as recognizable.

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think some of that is, again, about the relationships and the interaction that you're having. So their face kind of imprints a little more meaningfully on you because you've had this encounter with them. But I really like the point that you raised, that often people do tend to look pretty similar. Obviously, that's not exclusively the case. But even for those of us who aren't face blind, it might be really challenging to be able to distinguish between four Hollywood actors who all have the same haircut and teeth and veneers and kind of nose and so on and so forth. And it's not accidental. I mean, there is this enormous pressure for people to look similar

• 20:23Speaker 02

  to one another, right? So I think that when you're in a group of people who do tend to look pretty similar, that can be harder.

• 20:33Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, I remember, I just saw not that long ago, a video, and they were talking with Brad Pitt, Mark Wahlberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Matt Damon. And they were talking about how they get recognized as the other, often. And they all kind of, there is something about them that's very, they're roughly the same age, they probably roughly the same height, and they're all pretty good looking guys. But they get, you would think a big superstar like that, you would know exactly who that is, and not think it's another superstar.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Well, there's a cultural thing to think about there, is the fact that they all became superstars a function of them all kind of looking similar, right? Is it, they might, on some level, occupy a similar kind of genre of look. An interesting piece there, though, is that Brad Pitt is actually face blind.

• 21:32Mike Carruthers?

  Profoundly face blind?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Profoundly face blind. As an interesting anecdote,

• 21:39Speaker 02

  People who are face blind tend to have significantly more diverse groups of friends and also tend in their romantic relationships to be attracted to people who are not conventionally attractive, partly because if you have a friend group, and like you're saying, it can be really confusing even for non-face blind people to know who is who, you might want to have a diverse group to make it easier to distinguish who is who. And one of the adaptations that face-blind folks have is that if there's something unusual about how someone looks, that can make it easier for them to remember. So while this doesn't hold true in giant swaths of the aggregate,

• 22:20Speaker 02

  I think there's something to be learned from face-blind people about the kinds of judgments that we make of others.

• 22:28Mike Carruthers?

  It is seemingly politically incorrect to say that, say, a group of people from a different race tend to look similar, tend to look alike. But experience, people will tell you that that does sometimes seem to be true. What do you say?

• 22:48Speaker 02

  Psychologists would agree with you. There's something called the other race effect, or the cross-race effect, the CRE, and it's not just racism with an acronym. There is an idea that faces that we have less exposure to are going to be harder to distinguish. So that actually works for folks who are not of the race that they have a lot of exposure to, as well as folks who are of that race. And as it happens, because of the global dominance of whiteness on television and in other ways, we tend to find it a lot easier to recognize white folks. But it is a demonstrated phenomenon.

• 23:28Mike Carruthers?

  So when I get up in the morning and turn my phone on, the phone recognizes my face and opens up. How does it do that?

• 23:38Speaker 02

  Essentially, your phone has a form of face recognition technology embedded in it. And what it's doing... Is turning your face into a series of data points and measurements that it's comparing to a stored image of your face that it already has, that it has already converted into those data points. So if those data points match, i.e. the various distances between points on your face match, then it's decided that it's you. That is the easiest case by far, and by far the most successful version of facial recognition technology in the sense of having very few false positives, right? Deciding that people are a match who aren't.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  Because it's already got the image of you that you took in ideal conditions, matching it up to a captured image of you in ideal conditions. What we see with cameras, with embedded facial recognition technology, either private or public, are images that people captured not deliberately often and matched up against images that were not specifically necessarily taken for that purpose, often scraped from social media in ways that can represent a pretty serious incursion upon our privacy. And that has historically led to all kinds of false positives. People incorrectly being identified as a match for, say, somebody who has an arrest warrant.

• 25:04Mike Carruthers?

  Something interesting. You said that facial recognition software basically uses data points on your face and compares it to an image that it has stored. But is that how we do it? Are we using data points on a person's face? Because when I look at a person and look at their face, I just look at their face and I see the whole face. And then I wonder, well, how much of the face do you have to see in order to recognize it?

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And scientists are kind of split on this question. Early face recognition researchers suspected that people who are at the extreme ends of these spectrums tended to focus on a particular feature, a nose, a mouth, ears, as opposed to doing what you're referencing, which is holistic processing, looking at the face as a whole. And you can see why, from a super recognition standpoint, that makes sense. If you only see an ear or a nose or an eye, and you can still recognize that person, it's because you are actually taking in Discrete points of information as opposed to making sense of the face as a whole.

• 26:14Speaker 02

  Now, it's unclear whether or not that's actually as robust as we thought. Maybe some super recognizers are also processing the face as a whole, but I'll say this. For me and for a lot of people, it actually becomes really important to see the whole face. I don't know about you, but I certainly had more difficulty recognizing people when they were wearing masks that covered their nose and their mouth. The other thing that emerged is that when people took their masks off, if you only met someone with a mask on, they looked really different because our faces were filling in information. We were making mouths for them. That didn't necessarily line up with how they looked at all.

• 26:54Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is a topic I have never discussed before, and it's fascinating to hear you explain it, especially the fact that you're one of the top people in this field. I've been speaking with Sharona Pearl. She's an Associate Professor of Medical Ethics and History at Drexel University, and the name of her book is Do I Know You: From Face Blindness to Super Recognition. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Thanks, Sharona. Really well done.

• 27:21Speaker 02

  That's a huge compliment from you. Thank you so much.

• 27:25Speaker 00

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want online only at homedepot.com.

• 27:56Speaker 07

  Parenting unlocks some pretty impressive skills like carrying grocery bags, a soccer ball, and a sleepy kid all at once. Good thing the newly designed Chrysler Pacifica has a few tricks of its own: hands-free power sliding doors and liftgate, rear seat entertainment, and still-and-go seating and storage that adapts faster than your family's weekend plans. Visit Chrysler.com to learn more. Chrysler is a registered trademark of FCAUS LLC.

• 28:28Mike Carruthers?

  Thinking Clearly. It's something we like to think we do pretty well. Yet I bet there have been moments when you've looked back on an event or a decision and thought, what was I thinking? Clearly, you were thinking not very clearly. Seems like when we put our mind to it, we can think pretty well, but so much of the time, we're on autopilot. So how do we become better at clearer thinking to help make better decisions and do the right thing? Well, here with some insight and some advice on that is Shane Parrish. He is an entrepreneur whose insights are used by Fortune 500 companies and major sports teams. His work has appeared in nearly every major publication, including The New York Times,

• 29:13Mike Carruthers?

  The Wall Street Journal, and Forbes. He has a podcast called The Knowledge Project, and he's author of a book called Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. Hi Shane, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  Hi, thanks for having me.

• 29:29Mike Carruthers?

  As I mentioned, I like to think that I think pretty well, and I think most people like to think that they think well. Do we think well? Are people... Are we good thinkers?

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Well, we're pretty good when we know we're supposed to be thinking. I mean, we're generally okay in the moments when we know we're making a decision, when we are choosing, you know, what career or what person to marry. Other times, we're not so good, when situations tend to think for us. We have to get caught up in the moment. You can easily recall any example when you're angry. And you said something that you wish you could unsay, and you weren't thinking in that moment. And if I tapped you on the shoulder and I said, "Hey, do you want to pour water or gas on this situation?" You would be like, "Water." But that's not what we choose in those moments.

• 30:17Mike Carruthers?

  So emotions seem to get in the way much of the time.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Emotions is one of the defaults. So there's four defaults. There's the emotion default, there's the ego default, there's the social default and inertia default. And all of those things sort of conspire to create situations that think, situations or circumstances that do the thinking for us. And this is why positioning is so key to this because all of these things are going to come up. You're always going to be faced with these things. But how do you position yourself so that you're playing on easy mode instead of hard mode?

• 30:51Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, well, how do you do that? Because it seems very human to let those other things think for you. And that's kind of what human beings do. And to push those aside and be clear seems like a pretty tough thing to do.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Can I give you an example from my life?

• 31:08Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  Yeah. So one of my kids came home and he, you know, he's a teenager and he passed me his exam and he didn't do as well as he should have or hoped to do on that exam. And, you know, he shrugged his shoulders and he said, I did my best. Later on that evening, I approached him and I talked to him and I said, hey, what does it mean to do your best? Like, walk me through when you said I did my best. What do you mean? He's like, well, in the moment that I sat down to write the test, I read all the questions, checked all the points, allocated my time accordingly. And I'm like, oh, that's so interesting because you think about doing your best as from the moment the circumstances arrive at your doorstep to the moment you finish, whatever you sort of set out to do. That's how a lot of adults think about decision making too. And it's how we handle our emotion or ego or social or inertia.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  But let's rewind, let's go back 72 hours for the sake of argument. And did you study? Well, not really. Did you stay up late? Yes. Why did you stay up late? Well, I was cramming. Did you eat a healthy breakfast? No, I didn't eat a healthy breakfast. Well, why didn't you eat a healthy breakfast? Because I got up late. I was running at the door, so I just grabbed a bagel. So you crashed at the same time that your test was coming. Did you get in a fight with your brother? Yeah. Why'd you get in a fight with your brother? Because we were both trying to use the bathroom at the same time. Why did that happen? Because I got up late. So you chose to play on hard mode. The test was going to happen. The test might still kick your butt. That's a different story, but you chose to put that on hard mode based on your actions. And we do that a lot in life, right? If we don't get enough sleep, it's harder to handle the emotional variability

• 32:37Speaker 03

  that we have on a daily basis. If we get a lot of sleep, if we eat healthy, if we drink less, if we go for walks, if we connect with people. Well, these emotional variations that happen to all of us, well, they're a lot easier to overcome in those moments.

• 32:51Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's such a great example because who hasn't been in a similar situation to that? And it's like, we kind of make it hard for ourselves when we could have not, we could have made it a lot easier, but we seem to throw up these roadblocks for reasons, I guess, I don't really understand.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  Well, think about it, a lot of arguments or conflict in relationships happens after work at night. Why does it happen after work at night? One, you're spending time together, but that time is not your best time. You're tired, you're exhausted, you had a long day, you've got a million things on your mind, so you're not at your best, you're not bringing your best self to that. But you've also probably, did you eat a healthy lunch? Did you not? Did you work out that day? Did you not? These things contribute to how easily that situation gets resolved. And another aspect of positioning, if you will, is, just to bring it back to relationships, are you investing in that relationship on a regular basis? And if you are investing in that relationship, it's like watering the grass. And what do we know about watering the grass?

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Well, if I water the grass every day with my partner and I spend time with them and I connect with them and I cuddle with them and I love them and I try to be the best partner that I can be, well, every day I'm watering that grass. And so when we have one of these little, I don't want to call them disputes, but call them whatever you want, tiffs, then all of a sudden, it just dissipates really quickly. But if I'm not investing in that relationship, if I enter into that tiff, that disagreement, in a bad position, if we both enter it in a bad position, well, now all of a sudden, it starts to take on a lot more gravity, it becomes a lot more serious, and it doesn't dissipate. And so we can think of watering the grass. What happens when you water the grass and a spark falls on it? Well, nothing, it just goes out. But if you don't water the grass, the grass gets dry, and then what happens? Well, any little spark is going to set that on fire.

• 34:36Speaker 03

  And we can think about relationships that way. Now, most people tackle that at the moment of, how do we have a better conversation in that moment? Like, how do you handle these moments better? But how can we avoid them in the first place? How can we prevent them from happening? How can we add friction to them so that we actually end up enabling ourselves to think clearly?

• 34:55Mike Carruthers?

  Well, isn't it interesting, and I know people, I'm sure you know people in relationships, where you can tell that there's friction in that relationship, yet they stay in it, and yet they don't do what you're saying. Well, what's driving that? If you know that by... Not watering the grass in this relationship, you know what that's gonna do. Why do you stay? Why do, why do people do it? Willingly do it when they know it's going to end poorly?

• 35:28Speaker 03

  Because all of the things that we know we should be doing, all the common sense, the obvious actions that we know are gonna result in success, we avoid them because they all require prepayment. They all require us to do something today, to expend effort, to expend money, to put in time in order to get paid in the future. And increasingly, we're unable to sort of make those trade offs in our head. You know, if I wanna invest in my relationship today, I'm not gonna see the payoff today, but we have to be smarter than that. We know the payoff's coming. We can foresee that that watering the grass is not only good for our soul on a daily basis, but it's really good for our relationship and it helps us stay connected to our partner.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  And it helps us handle the inevitable ups and downs that life is gonna throw at us. There's other ways, you know, we talk about positioning, but you know, another thing that we talk about, how do we handle these daily situations so that we can think clearly? A great example is social situations. So one of the four defaults is the social default. And, you know, I don't know about you, but I tend to say yes to people because I want them to like me. So they might request something from me. And if I'm talking to them, you know, it's really hard to say no to people. It's a lot easier to say no to people on email. It's a lot harder to say no to people in person. So I was at Daniel Kahneman's penthouse in New York, and this came up with me. And Daniel Kahneman is a Nobel laureate. He studied cognitive biases for 65 years.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  He is the godfather of cognitive biases. And he picked up the phone when we were having a conversation because he had to answer this call. And towards the end of the call, he said, you know, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And then he, he sort of like hung up. You know, he's like, I'll get back to you tomorrow. And I was like, whoa, pause. What did you just say there? And he said, well, my rule is I don't say yes on the phone. And I said, well, what do you mean? And he's like, well, I want people to like me. So I tend to say yes in situations that I don't want to. So I end up doing all these things that I don't really want to do. And so he's like, I created a rule. And he's like, I noticed that, you know, I don't argue with my own rule and nobody else argues with my rule. And so I just say, my rule is, and it's really important to use those words, my rule is.

• 37:41Speaker 03

  And that allows the other person to say, oh, okay. He's going to get back to me tomorrow perfectly. And so he's like, now I say yes to 10% of the things. I don't end up doing things that I don't want to do. And nobody's pushing back at me, making it awkward in these social moments. So that situation is a great example of a social default where the situation tends to think for you. For most of us, we say yes, we say yes to things we don't want to do. We say yes to things we don't have time to do. Why do we say yes? Cause we want other people to like us. Why do we want other people to like us? Because we're self preserving. Why are we self preserving? We need to fit in the tribe. We can't be on the outside of the tribe. This is 10,000 years of human evolution right here. And so I was like, what other rules do you have? This is the most powerful thing you've done. And he said, I don't have any.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  And I was like, oh gosh, like, how can we use this in, in practical everyday? Like, how can we create automatic rules that position us for success? And so, you know, another example of a rule is that I work out every day. I have no meetings till 12. I start drinking at nine. I invest in an index fund every month. And so you can come up with your own set of rules and to come up with them, just ask yourself, what would the person who accomplishes what I want to accomplish? What would their life look like? And how do I set rules around this? And so one of my friends who was trying to lose weight, you know, he is a salesperson. So he ends up eating out like 15 times a week. And he's like, it's crazy. So he said, you know, I was like, well, let's try this rule thing.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Cause he said dieting was really hard for him. And I was like, well, instead of dieting, let's just think about it as a rule, right? But let's just tackle the, the meals that you go out, you eat at a restaurant. Your rule is you always order the healthiest thing on the menu. And your rule is you only have one drink.

• 39:27Speaker 03

  And he's like, okay, he's like, I don't believe you. This is gonna work. Anyway, three months later, all of his health metrics are up, his weight's down, he feels happy, energetic, all from a simple rule. Nobody pushes back on his rule, and he doesn't push back on his rule. We've been brought up our whole lives to follow rules, but nobody's ever taught us how to create these rules and take advantage of them for ourselves.

• 39:50Mike Carruthers?

  So how do you do that? I can just imagine creating that rule and saying in a moment of weakness, "Well, it's just my rule. I mean, I could let it go this time."

• 40:04Speaker 03

  But that's not how we're brought up to think about rules, right? So you don't drive down the road every morning, look at the speed limit and wonder why it's set at, you know, 70 miles an hour, or 70 kilometers an hour, or whatever it's set at where you're located. You know it's a rule. Nobody has to remind you it's a rule. You just know it. You follow it. You learned it once, and that's all it took. And it's the same way with our head. Try it. You know, we have a 99.8% success rate. I think we've tried this on 10,000 people, and I think there's like 20 people who are like, "It didn't work for me." Like, it's insane.

• 40:39Mike Carruthers?

  That's a pretty good success rate, because as you were giving that example, yeah, I know the speed limit, but I break it sometimes. And not purposely, or not, you know, but sometimes rules are meant to be broken. So then I think, well, if I break it now, maybe I'll break it tomorrow. So I'll screw the whole rule.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  I mean, you can do that if you want. I mean, you know, there's obvious situations where your rules won't apply, right? There's a saying that the young man knows the rules and the old man knows the exceptions. And I think it's wise to keep that in mind. And it's not about being perfect with your rule. But for example, you know, my rule is I work out every day, and I've probably missed three in the past year. So I think, you know, never miss twice.

• 41:30Mike Carruthers?

  And so how do you build the, whatever that is, the stamina, the discipline to do this? And because it seems maybe daunting to some.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Well, that's interesting, right? So let's take working out every day. I used to work out three days a week and I found that when I was working out three days a week, that little voice inside my head, and maybe everybody has a different voice, but my voice was like, "Hey, you had a long day today. You didn't sleep well last night. You got a lot on your plate. Let's take today off. And you know what? We'll make up for it. We'll do extra tomorrow. We'll pay with interest." And then tomorrow would come around and I'd negotiate with myself all over again. And I was negotiating and the negotiation was causing me so much, I don't know, not even anxiety, but I wasn't doing the things that I wanted to do because I was like, "Why?" So I created this automatic rule. I'm gonna sweat every day. I don't, you know, go to the gym every day,

• 42:24Speaker 03

  but I sweat every day. And when I wake up, the conversation that I have with myself isn't, "Am I going to work out today?" It's, "What does my workout look like today?" And some days, that's 15 minutes. Some days, it's 90 minutes. And so I can change the duration or scope of what I'm doing, but I can't change the fact that I'm gonna be healthy and I'm gonna exercise, because that's the type of person that I want to be. The person that achieves the things that I want to achieve in life, that lives the type of life that I want to live, does those things. So I created an automatic rule around it. Now I do it every day. I don't argue with myself.

• 43:01Mike Carruthers?

  I mean, I get it and it sounds great, but and other people are listening to you right now going, "Yeah, I mean, this sounds pretty good." But, but how, you know, how many people will actually do it? Because one thing I think people are afraid of is if they fail, or if they, they miss a day, or they do something wrong, then it's like, "See what a failure I am," and then they just throw in the towel.

• 43:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's that little voice inside of our head. The most powerful story in the world is the one we tell ourselves. And I think, you know, we need to learn to talk to that voice in the moments when we're strong. And when are we strong? We're usually strong, you know, when we wake up in the morning. And you just, we tell ourselves, tell that little voice, "Not today. I can fail tomorrow, but you know, missing one workout doesn't make me a failure. You know, I'm not gonna miss again. I'm gonna go right now. I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna make time. I'm gonna make a priority for it. I'm gonna set it in my calendar, so I don't have to find the time to do it." There's a million different solutions for this, and I think we beat ourselves up about this, you know? And once that little voice takes hold, it paralyzes us. And I think that we can just change that. All you have to do is say, "Not today. I can fail tomorrow, but I'm not gonna fail today."

• 44:06Mike Carruthers?

  I have a sense that one of the reasons that people don't follow what you're talking about, or something along those lines, is that they self sabotage, like they don't believe they can, so they don't even bother. And that when they look at people like you, and people who do what you're talking about, you have, just listening to you, you clearly have a lot of self-confidence, you have a lot of self-control, you have something that I think a lot of people think they don't have, so what's the point? And I think it's really all in their head.

• 44:44Speaker 03

  I don't know if that's true, right? When I think about confidence, I think about confidence very differently than other people. I think about confidence as next step confidence, not all the way to the ultimate outcome confidence. Most people think the other way. And I'll give you an example. When I left the three-letter agency, and I decided that I was gonna pursue a different path, you know, my mom showed up at my house in tears, crying, begging me to keep my job, begging me not to do this, begging me not to throw away this amazing career that I had built over the course of 15 years. And towards the end of that conversation, she's like, what are you gonna do to make a living? And I said, I don't know. I have

• 45:27Speaker 03

  no idea. But I have the confidence that I'll get up tomorrow, and I'll get one step closer to it, and I'll figure it out. And that is what I call next step confidence. You don't need the confidence to get to the end, you need the confidence to take the next step. I use this with my kids as well. We went cliff jumping, you know, a few years ago. And it's this sort of like one-way door. You climb up this cliff, you can't climb down, like you literally have to jump in. And so I told my son, I was like, hey, if you go up there, it's 25 feet, like this is a big jump. If you go up, you have to jump, or I have to throw you in. Like you literally can't come down. It's too dangerous to climb back down. So he climbs up, you know, with all the bravado of, I think, a nine or 10

• 46:12Speaker 03

  year old at the time, and he gets to the top, and he's like, oh my God, like, I can't do this. And it's like, okay, well, let's talk about this, right? First, get control of your physiology. So let's like back away from the edge, and let's start breathing again. Get some oxygen to our brain and calm down. Now walk me through what you're thinking. What's that voice inside your head saying? Well, the voice is saying, I can't do it. I'm scared. I've never done this before. Okay, well, that's interesting, right? So let's think of all the moments where you've done something hard. And you know, if I can do this with a nine year old, you can do it with your life. We've all gone through moments where we didn't think we could do it, where we weren't prepared. And we came through it stronger. You can recall those moments for yourself.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  For him, it was like snowboarding and wakeboarding and all these sports that he had tried, that he'd never tried before. And you know, then I was like, okay, well, now, instead of looking down, instead of looking at the water, let's look about it. Let's change our vantage point, change how we're looking into this situation, and just take one step off the edge. That's all I had to do. And he didn't look down. He took one step off the edge and low and behold, you know, as soon as he hit the water, he's like back up climbing and now he's like running and trying to do flips up the edge. And so I think that that's what we can do with adults too. If you look at anybody in professional sports, marathoner, you know, when they start a marathon, they're not thinking about the end.

• 47:39Speaker 03

  You know, when things get hard and they start playing these little voices in their head and that little doubt creeps in, all they tell themselves is like, I just have to make it to that light. And then when they hit that light, they switch it. I gotta make it to that stop sign. And they keep that goal. They keep the distance between where they are and the goal they want to accomplish really small. And the bigger that gap is, the bigger the gap between where you are today and where you want to be. And if you focus on where you want to be and you don't focus on the first step, it's just going to cause that little voice of self doubt, that little paralysis. It's going to make it really, really, really challenging to take that first step.

• 48:20Speaker 03

  If on the other hand, you're like, okay, well, what's the first step that I can take towards this goal? I can do that. That's manageable. The gap between where I am and accomplishing that first step is pretty small. And so I call it next step confidence. Focus on the next step and have the belief in yourself that you'll figure it out as you go down the path. Everything changes anyway. Once you start to take action, it creates its own momentum. Action creates confidence. You're not going to get confidence without action.

• 48:50Mike Carruthers?

  When you think about it, this is a topic, what we've been discussing for the last 20 minutes. This is something that applies to everybody, but nobody ever talks about. And it's really good to just get it out on the table and look at it. And it helps you think more clearly and perhaps accomplish more in your life. I've been talking with Shane Parrish. The name of his book is Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments Into Extraordinary Results. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Shane. I really like this. Mike, it's been a pleasure. Thank you.

• 49:26Mike Carruthers?

  Most of us know somebody who says they can drink coffee right before bed without any negative effects. Maybe it's you. I've always thought I was one of those people. But according to Michael Bruce, who is author of The Sleep Doctor's Diet Plan, that's pretty much impossible. While you may think it's not interfering with your sleep, caffeine is a stimulant that has been proven to affect everyone. If you measure the brainwaves, you see an increase in mental activity, whether a person is asleep or awake. Dr. Bruce says people who have little or no difficulty falling asleep after a fresh cup of coffee are most likely sleep deprived in the first place,

• 50:10Mike Carruthers?

  or exhausted enough to override the effects. But that doesn't mean the caffeine isn't having an effect. And that is something you should know. You know, there's been a lot of research done and articles written about how it is that people discover podcasts, because there's millions of them. And one of the number one ways is from recommendations. People are more likely to listen to a podcast because a friend or colleague recommended it. Knowing that, it would really help us if you would recommend this podcast to someone you know and help us grow the audience. It is a great way to support the show. I'm Mike Herthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 50:54Speaker 05

  Purchase new carpet from The Home Depot and get it installed for free right now. Shop the stylish choices and simple pricing of carpet from Home Decorator's Collection, Traffic Master, or life-proof with pet-proof technology. And see for yourself why nobody beats our prices. Enjoy new carpet with free installation right now at The Home Depot. Offer valid October 15 through November 1, 2026. Exclusions apply. For licenses, see homedepot.com/license numbers.

• 51:24Speaker 08

  Now streaming on Paramount+. I'm Dexter Morgan. I've been killing killers for half my life. It gets to you. You're having a midlife crisis. I'm not ready for this. He's back. I'm older. I'm wiser. And sharper than ever. Things are gonna get messy. But if I can't believe in myself, I can't believe in anything. Dexter: Resurrection. New season now streaming on the Paramount+ Premium Plan.