How Light Seriously Impacts Your Health & What If You Had a Different Profession?
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A bloodbath tonight in the rural town of Chinook. Everyone here is hiding a secret. Four more victims found scattered. Some worse than others. I came as fast as I could. I'm Deputy Ruth Vogel. And soon, my quiet life will never be the same. Realm presents a 30 Ninjas production, Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.

Today on Something You Should Know, a fascinating difference between how men and women shop. Then, a top expert reveals how artificial light is damaging our health.

Women who've never seen electric light very rarely get breast cancer. Women who are in Sub-Sahara Africa where electricity has not arrived yet, very low rates of breast cancer. Women who are blind from an early age also very rarely get breast cancer. Also, when was the last time you washed your credit cards? And have you ever wondered what other jobs would be like to do? Like a high school principal or a comedian or a Secret Service agent?

If a candidate's going to go to some diner in New Hampshire, it's the Secret Service that's going to talk to local police to get the candidate from the airport. How do we talk to the diner owner to make sure we have safe passages in and out? All this today on Something You Should Know.

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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. Hi, here we go. Three times a week, every week, it's another episode of Something You Should Know.

First up today, retailers use all kinds of tactics to get you to buy and spend more money, including the use of color, specifically when the price is in color. A study published in the Journal of Retailing found that when men see prices marked in red, they assume they're about to get a bargain, even if that wasn't true.

What researchers did was they pooled men and women and gave them consumer catalogs to look through. One group had a version with red prices and the other with black prices. Red prices were more likely to fool men into thinking they were saving money, while women were more likely to read the fine print and actually pay attention to the number, not the color of the price.

Interestingly, a follow-up study found that men weren't as colorblind when it came to bargain shopping for something they really wanted. In other words, the more engaged they were in the item they intended to purchase, the more closely they read the fine print. And that is something you should know. Music

You're about to hear something that's probably going to sound a little weird, but it's coming from a renowned doctor who knows more about the topic of how light affects you than anyone else you're likely ever going to meet. He's going to tell you that the light you see, the light you're exposed to from light bulbs and computer screens, from everywhere, that light is as important to your health as the food you eat, the water you drink, and the air you breathe.

Dr. Martin Moore Ede is a medical doctor, former professor at Harvard Medical School, and is one of the leading experts on circadian rhythms and biological clocks. Dr. Moore Ede holds multiple patents related to light and circadian rhythms, and he is author of a best-selling book on this subject called The Light Doctor, Using Light to Boost Health, Improve Sleep, and Live Longer.

Hey Martin, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hello there Mike, good to be with you. So go ahead and say it, how important light is to our health?

Light and the light you see and it comes in through your eyes is important for your health as the food you eat, the water you drink and the air you breathe. Most people don't realize that but life is actually a huge terminate of how well you're going to be, your health, your lifespan. How can that possibly be? Explain that to me.

Well, the key thing that we tend to forget in today's world is that we, for the first 10,000 generations of human beings, were out and about in bright daylight, sunlight during the day and slept in the dark at night. And since the invention of electric light and particularly more recently with the LED lights we have today, we live in this indoor world 90% of the time

with much dimmer light, far, far dimmer light, 100,000 times dimmer than sunlight. And during the evening and nighttime hours, we're not in the dark, we're in, again, this twilight level. So, we're in constant twilight. And even asleep, 50% of the population, 40-50% of the population actually sleeps with some lights on in the bedroom. So, this is 24-7. We're just living in electric light

And as a result, that causes huge disruptions to how our body works. It causes increased risk of obesity, diabetes, heart disease, and certain types of cancer like breast cancer and prostate cancer. And this is not new science. This is now for the last 20 years, there's a huge amount of scientific evidence

showing exactly this problem. And a lot of it's got to do with the blue content, the amount of blue in that light, the blue wavelengths. Whether you've got to see them during the day, which is healthy, and whether you see them at night, which is unhealthy, is a huge part of the problem.

Can you, because I'm sure you could talk about this for 45 minutes and get very technical and medical and all that, but can you make the connection for me how light in your room is going to give you breast cancer? What's the mechanism for that?

The mechanism is we have at the back of our eyes receptors that are light detectors and particularly are blue light detectors. And the light we see is made up of all the colors of the rainbow. We normally don't see it. We view it as white light or yellowish white light, but it's got all those colors in there. And it depends on how much of those colors you actually coming in. So what happens is if you've got blue in the light you're seeing,

It hits these receptors. That in turn triggers a message to the biological clock, the master clock in the brain that controls our sleep and hormones and everything else. And one of the key things it does, it switches off

In other words, there's a hormone in our body that's released at night which is the darkness signal that our body uses. It's called melatonin, comes from the pineal gland. And that normally rises as soon as it's dark outside, reaches a peak about two o'clock in the morning and it's back to normal by morning time. So the challenge is that when you have that light,

during the middle of the night, you are suppressing this signal and melatonin is critical, one of the critical parts of this. Melatonin suppresses cancer cells. So if you take away the melatonin or suppress the melatonin, cancers grow at double or triple the faster rates. But if you don't have melatonin, you're gonna have much more cancer and it's also linked to more risk of heart disease and diabetes and so forth.

because people have too little melatonin that is part of nature's restoration and recovery of the body while we are asleep in the dark at night. You said a few moments ago that this is not new. So why don't we know about it? I mean, I think people have heard that the blue light on your computer screen or your phone or your iPad or whatever, that that's a problem if you're using it at night.

But not in the way you're talking about it, not in the alarming way you're talking about it, that it could lead to cancer. And why aren't, why don't we hear this? Well, unfortunately, as one of my colleagues said, scientists speak only to each other. So there's a large number of scientists. In fact, there've been over the last 20 years, 30,000 scientists from all over the world who've been working on this problem and published a

scientific papers in the peer-reviewed literature. In other words, really substantial science. And that whole group of scientists understands this totally.

The frustration is the regular people think light is light. Hey, you know, we take it for granted to flick a light switch on the wall. You know, how can that be a problem? And it's really been the problem of, number one, recognizing this, and there have been major bodies like the World Health Organization, like the National Institutes of Health have come out with major

decision. American Medical Association reports on the effects of light at night and the unhealthy problems it causes, but the general population of people just is unaware.

Well, we're doing our best to fight the good fight for you. And that's why we're here, Mike, just to bring this to your audience's attention. So explain this whole circadian rhythm thing, because again, I think people hear about it, that we have this biological clock and that light affects it, but I don't think I know it enough to have an intelligent conversation. So help me out.

We're designed to be up and awake and about during the daytime hours and asleep in our beds at night or in our caves in the old days. And that is facilitated or works through having a master clock in the brain.

That master clock is not the only clock in the body. We actually have clocks in every cells of the body that govern the up and down pattern of all the various functions of the body. So for example, we've talked about melatonin, which peaks around two o'clock in the morning and comes down. Another hormone that's driven by these clocks is cortisol, which peaks just before dawn. That's getting you ready for the day ahead. It's getting the various processes in the body ready so you're...

operational for daytime duty. And then there are other hormones like growth hormone, which surges just after you fall asleep. So, the whole patterns in the body, your body temperature goes up and down, we tend to sleep at night, those are called circadian rhythms. And they're not just pattern responses to the environment, they're actually driven internally. Now, why is that? Well, it turns out that these are predictive mechanisms. In other words,

They're actually getting our body prepared for a night worth of sleep. And some of the hormones, some of the proteins it takes to synthesize some of the processes in the body take hours to be ready. So having an internal clock gets the process started before dawn so you're ready for daytime and before the evening hours so that you're ready for nighttime.

Do we know why it is that blue light seems to be the problem, seems to be the trigger here? Why not red light or yellow light? Why is it blue that's the problem?

Well, life began deep in the oceans millions of years ago. And would you believe that sunlight, when it falls on the oceans, all the other colors of the rainbow, in other words, regular sunlight contains violet, blue, green, yellow, orange, red, all those other colors disappear except for one color, and that's a sky blue color that penetrates all the way into the ocean depths.

So, when life began, daytime was blue, it was actually the sky blue color, and nighttime was no blue. And that is something we've preserved all the way through. So, it turns out the blue content, and LEDs are rich in blue that we use today, the blue content is the thing that is telling our bodies whether it's night or day.

And we have special receptors in the eye that are tuned, precisely tuned to detecting a sky blue light. So this is something that is fundamental. And all these rhythms of the body, when they're running in sync with mother nature, and when they're running internally in sync with ourselves, we're in perfect health.

But if you get that out of whack, if you get it, you know, we all know about jet lag, but basically you have a, we live in a constant state of chronic jet lag in the modern world because we live in this twilight level of light, getting inappropriate amounts of blue at night, not getting enough blue during the day. Now we can fix all this.

It's quite addressable. And in fact, the blue can be seen as an environmental pollutant, but it's so much easier to address than PFAS chemicals, you know, those for chemicals or microplastics. That's a horrendous problem to clean those up. But light, my gosh, all you need to do is have light bulbs and light sources and screens that emit blue during the daytime but give you no blue at night and problem solved.

We're talking about light and how it affects your health. My guest is Dr. Martin Moore Eade, and he's author of the book The Light Doctor. A bloodbath tonight in the rural town of Chinook. Everyone here is hiding a secret. Four more victims found scattered. Some worse than others. I came as fast as I could. I'm Deputy Ruth Vogel. And soon, my quiet life will never be the same. Realm presents a 30 Ninjas production, Chinook.

Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Brennan Storr. I'm Paul Bestall. We're the Ghost Story Guys. And every two weeks, we explore first-person stories of encounters with the paranormal from all around the world. Then we have some fun reacting to those stories. We like to say our goal is to scare the hell out of you, then make you laugh.

Belief in the paranormal is not required. All you need is a love of great storytelling and curiosity about the world around you. Come find the Ghost Story Guys on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else fine podcasts live, or at ghoststoryguys.com.

So doctor, help me understand if my body is programmed for a night of sleep and a day of being awake and let's say I get a new job and it's overnights. So I'm up all night and I'm sleeping all day. Does the body adapt to that or does it create a problem or what?

Well, it's highly disruptive. And what happens is, for example, if I take you or any regular healthy people, and I give you, keep you up all night under these LED lights, blue rich LED lights we use today, there are 99 plus percent of lights in the stores these days are these, then in fact, I will make you diabetic or pre-diabetic by the end of that night.

And how do I know that? Well, we know that that blue light, number one, stimulates your appetite. You get ravenously hungry under that blue light, so you snack. In fact, people under blue rich light snack twice as many things during the night than people who are not. But when we measure a common measure of diabetes, just to give an example, is a diagnostic test is called the glucose tolerance test.

That's when you give someone a bottle of sugar water, it's usually in early in the morning after you've arrived at fasting, take this bottle of sugar water, they take blood samples every half hour and they can see the glucose level and the insulin level in the body rise and come down again. That's the normal response. But if you're diabetic, it rises further and then stays high. That's how we know someone's got diabetes.

So I can take perfectly healthy people under blue rich light and make them diabetic just in one night. So that just shows one, and this is only one of the many markers in the body and things in the body that we're basically screwing up by using blue rich light at night.

Now, what's fascinating, by the way, Mike, is it wasn't until we had electric lights, and particularly the fluorescents and LEDs of today, we really had this problem. Because our ancient ancestors used wood fires and candles, and they've got virtually no blue in them at all. So that wasn't a problem.

It was only after Edison invented the light bulb, and even that wasn't very much blue, maybe 4% blue. Now we've got lights which all of us are using, 15%, 20%, sometimes 25% blue, which are wreaking havoc on our bodies and our metabolism and our health. You had said at the beginning that we live a lot of our life in dim light, that our ancestors were out in bright light.

So, is the amount of light a problem? It must be or you wouldn't have said it. Absolutely. So, the one way of measuring light, the brightness of light is something called lux. And to give you an idea is a normal typical indoor room light during the day that we have and into the evening hours, we might have 300 lux or so of light typically. That's the amount of light coming, you know, that's falling on our eyes.

If we walked outside and it was dark, overcast day, we'd get 10,000 lux of light, not 300, 10,000. And on a sunny day, we'd get 50,000 or even 100,000 lux of light. That's the difference in brightness. It's thousandfold difference in brightness between what we're living in today versus what we used to live in.

Now, that's a problem. So the problem is the brightness of the light, the amount. So if you look at the percentage of blue times the total brightness of the light or the total amount of light, obviously, that's the dose you're getting. So it's a dosage problem. We get inadequate dosages of blue light because we don't

aren't outside. And the answer is, quite frankly, to go outside and do it in the morning hours. And I'll tell you why. But in the nighttime, we need to avoid that blue light

like the plague, because that will disrupt us and send the signal to the body that we are still in daytime and daylight, which is not what you want when you want melatonin to clean up your cancers and prevent your diabetes. And so why do you want to do that in the morning and not later in the day?

Well, Mike, here's a story. Because the light that's really critical to reset our circadian clocks and keep them in sync is the light that falls in the morning. We tend to drift later. You know, people on the weekends, they sleep in later, sleep late. That's because our clock tends to drift to later hours left to its own devices.

But if we get out in the mornings, we reset that. And in fact, the really beautiful evidence for this is take a psychiatric ward in a hospital, and it's been done several times now, have half the rooms facing on one side of the corridor facing south and east, so they're getting the morning sun. Take the other half of the rooms on the other side of the corridor facing north and west,

Bring in these patients with psychiatric disorders, major depressions, anxiety, PTSD,

admit them to the hospital, give them all exactly the same pharmaceutical treatments, therapy, same doctors. The ones in the sun-facing rooms, the morning sun-facing rooms, get out in half the time. In other words, their major depression is cured in half the time. Tells you something. You know, and basically, the other side of the occasion is that women who've never seen electric light very rarely get breast cancer.

So, we just talk about that for a moment. Who are these women? Who never sees electric white? Well, number one, women before electric white was invented historically, breast cancer was a very rare disease.

Women who are in Africa, sub-Sahara Africa, where electricity has not arrived yet, very low rates of breast cancer. Women, very interestingly, women who are blind from an early age also very rarely get breast cancer. The rates are five to six times higher in the electrified world of women getting breast cancer. And the same sort of story for prostate cancer in men. What's more...

People who are exposed to more daylight live longer and so massive study in Sweden, 29,000 Swedish women studied for 10-12 years. They were studying the effect of sunlight on

skin cancers or melanomas. That's what they're focused on. They weren't even thinking about this, right? They were just studying cancers, how many cancers would develop in the women who were out, spend a lot of time there outside, as opposed to people who spend their time indoors. What they found to be their surprise is the women who were spending more time outdoors lived years longer on average than the women who were spending most of their time indoors. And the effect was as large as smoking or not smoking. It's that scale of effect on lifespan.

So it's really two things. It's being exposed to more sunlight, daylight, and being exposed to less electric light. That's right. Less electric light in the evening hours, or at least electric light. You still use electric light. Make sure it's zero blue, free of blue. But unfortunately, what's on the shelves today is mostly rich in blue, which is the last thing you need.

So let's talk about that because of course when you buy a light bulb, an LED bulb or any light bulb and screw it in and turn it on, it doesn't look blue. You don't see blue. So what's the blue?

Absolutely, that's also really confusing. When we see a white light, actually it is an optical illusion. The light is never white. There's no white light coming out of a light bulb. It is actually a mixture of all the colours of the rainbow. And that light is merged in our brains, our perception of the back of our brain, in the occipital cortex of our brain,

Views puts that all together and interprets it as white light with the right mixture. But what's coming in our eyes is this mixture of different colors, and it matters the composition of that. What matters is those colors each have different effects. So the violet actually is excellent at killing bacteria and viruses and so forth.

The blue light, as we say, resets or resets or disrupts the circadian clocks depending on the time of day. Green light actually fixes pain, makes people relaxed and also reduces the level of pain. And red light actually heals. It heals skin, it grows hair and so forth. Some of these devices you may see the people on their heads that they're getting bald. So all those colors are naturally in sunlight. Getting outdoors gives you the full dose of all the natural colors and all the health-giving effects.

But we live indoors. 90% or more of our time is indoors, and we're just not getting the benefit of what Mother Nature gives us. And then we're making it worse by bringing this, you know, earth-shaking invention of electric light. I mean, what a huge invention it was when Thomas Edison did this. But it has a huge downside. And Edison's light wasn't bad. It was the old incandescent light bulbs and the halogens, rather little blue.

It's our modern technology because we want to be energy efficient. Unfortunately, that's the problem. It's a poorly designed technology in terms of human health. Well, I've seen those blue blocking light bulbs available and they are more expensive, aren't they? They are more expensive, but they're far less expensive than if you're going to get obese and you're going to get diabetic because you're using cheap products.

LED lights, it's way cheaper and you're going to, because you're diabetic and obese, you're going to overweight, you're going to start taking a Zempik, one of these new wonder drugs, costing you $600 to $800 a month for most people. Hey, change a light bulb, you know, if you have to spend $25 or $30 on a light bulb as opposed to $3, it's a huge, huge benefit. Now, part of this is demand. We talked about demand.

as the demand goes, those prices will come way down again. Well, I have a sense that the more people hear about this and understand it, the more this is going to become really important. And you certainly make the case really well for what the problem is and really what the solution is. I've been speaking with Dr. Martin Moore Ede. He's an MD, former Harvard Medical School professor, and he's author of the book, The Light Doctor, Using Light to Boost Health, Improve Sleep, and Live Longer. Now,

There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, doctor. Appreciate you explaining this, laying it out the way you did. Thank you so much, Mike. Have you ever looked at someone who's working in their job and wondered, I wonder what it would be like to do that? You know, what would it be like to be an FBI agent or the guy who sells beer at a baseball game or, or a high school principal? I mean, that, that sounds like a really tough job.

or a marriage counselor? What would that be like? Well, Dan Heath, who has written some really interesting books and has been a guest here before, he has a new podcast called What's It Like To Be? in which he explores what various professions are really like by interviewing the people doing those jobs. Hey Dan, welcome back to Something You Should Know.

Thanks for having me back, Mike. So there are actually a lot of jobs that I've thought that very thing about. Like, what would it be like to do that job? Is it interesting? Is it boring? Is it just a job? And what I'd like to hear about, so I guess we'll start with this one, is a Secret Service agent. The Secret Service has been in the news quite a bit lately. So what is it like to be a Secret Service agent? Tell us about the agent you talked with.

This is a woman who served for 26 years. She served under both Bush Sr. and George W. Bush. And she said at one point somebody was trying to kind of commiserate with her by saying, oh, it must, you know, being a boring job, just kind of stand around.

And she said, for her, at least, it was quite the opposite, you know, that they're always, you know, monitoring threats and their communication with other services. And she said a fascinating thing, which was she said more than any other law enforcement agency, the Secret Service is like in constant communication with others, like

If right now we're talking in campaign season and if a candidate is going to go to some diner in New Hampshire, it's the Secret Service that's going to talk to. OK, how do we work with local police to get the candidate from the airport safely to the diner? How do we talk to the diner owner to make sure we have safe passages in and out? And where are the other exits? And is there higher ground where a bad guy could be lurking and.

And so I just found it fascinating. Yeah, well, but I also think you also see in the movies anyway, like when the candidate or the president is staying in a hotel, some Secret Service agent is standing out there all night long, just standing there. And that's, I don't think I could do that.

Well, it's funny you mentioned that because I was just thinking the Secret Service agent interview happened recently. Now, it occurred to me that there's this genre of jobs that requires this intense mental concentration. And I've seen it in several very different looking jobs. So for the reasons you said, it's the Secret Service agent, but it's also long haul truckers. You know, imagine staying focused on the road for 11 hours on a shift.

It's also ocean lifeguards. I talked to a guy who, you know, used to sit in the lifeguards chair for hours at a time. And there are these jobs that demand this sort of unnatural concentration, you know, where most of us would be daydreaming after 45 minutes. Like these professionals just have an intense ability to keep their mind on task.

You spoke with a stadium beer vendor, and there's a job you would think, well, you're doing an episode of a podcast. That's not going to be a very long episode because he's just selling beer at a baseball or football game. So what intrigued you about that, and what did you find that was so surprising?

I tell you what, I just thought it was going to be sort of quirky and fun. Oh, here's a guy who spent, you know, 35 years selling beer at mostly Baltimore sports games, primarily Orioles.

And then I talked to him and the conversation was so much richer than I had bargained for. I mean, he was telling me about number one, I didn't realize that beer vendors serve the same area of stands. So he actually got to know people in some cases, multiple generations of families that were in his stands. And, you know, there were probably a hundred people that he knew by name and they'd say, Hey Howard, you know, how you doing? And they'd keep in touch and they would send each other cards and,

he had alcoholic fans where, you know, he had to navigate their problem and he had, he had a set of principles, you know, I'm not going to sell somebody has a problem more than more than two beers. And, and I'll just, I'll take my lumps if, if they get mad at me. And he talked about,

how his relatives were always getting after him saying, Howard, you're squandering your life doing this. You can do more. And he said, no, I love what I do. And I love the people I serve. And I love having access to these incredible events. I mean, he met Muhammad Ali and he saw every game in the Cal Ripken streak, at least at home. He saw Beyonce play. He saw Super Bowls. And I just came away from that conversation thinking, man,

You know, there is so much more here if you're just willing to sit down with people and listen. What kind of money can he... Did he tell you how much money he made? He did. He said he got paid, you know, as you would expect on a per beer basis. But he said he could make, you know, a couple hundred bucks in a good shift. One of the things he said that stuck with me is...

He said, I didn't make much money. Like, could I buy a brand new car? No. Could I get a big house? No. Could I take vacations in Europe? No. But I got enough to get by, and I kept my nose clean, and I enjoyed my work, and I brought something to other people, and they brought something to me. And, gosh, I never saw it coming that I was going to be moved by a conversation with a stadium beer vendor. So you talked to a guy who was the director of a summer camp company

And you found this really interesting. And I don't know anything about that job, but it doesn't sound like it's all that interesting, frankly. So dive into that one.

So one reason I found it surprising is this guy, he admitted to having a little bit of a chip on his shoulder because he says when he goes to, you know, dinner parties and stuff, people say, well, what's your real job? You know, when you're when you're not at your summer camp in June and July. And the reality is it's a full year round job. He spends most of the year. I mean, a good 10 months a year.

In an office in Philadelphia, there's five people and it's basically a recruiting job. I mean, he's got to fill slots for campers. That's more of a marketing role. And then the hardest part is finding counselors because he's got to hire 100 counselors to come spend three months on site. And these are mostly, you know, 20 and 21 year olds. And so you've got to do multiple rounds of interviews and then, you know, half of them are going to flake out on you. So for 10 months a year, it's just a very normal, you know, stare at your computer kind of job.

And then for two months a year, he says it's basically like he turns into the mayor of a small town. He's providing primary childcare for over 100 kids, and that means housing, and it means running a full-service kitchen that is doing four meals a day, including snacks. And it means he's running a health clinic, and they're 35 miles from the nearest hospital. And so

Everything from dealing with sewage problems to, you know, connecting tether balls to poles is part of his mandate as the mayor of this summer camp. His parents met at a summer camp. He met his wife at a summer camp.

He said over the lifespan of the camp, there have been 16 weddings that were spawned by camp counselors who fell in love. And so it was just such a cool episode to hear all the twists and turns and the emotional rollercoaster rides.

We talked about the Secret Service agent, but you also talked to an FBI special agent. And I'd be curious to hear about life as that, because that job is portrayed a lot in movies and in television and has been throughout, well, for forever. But I wonder if it's really like what it's really like.

I think the short answer is no, at least according to the guy we spoke to. Yeah. And in fact, it's uncannily similar to the summer camp director. You know, the thing about the camp director job is so weird as you spend 10 months doing this thing that's totally unlike the other two months. And it's exactly the same thing with the FBI special agent where he said,

But his day-to-day job, he had this memorable way of putting it. He said, it's like putting together a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, meaning assembling in a painstaking way every little piece of evidence that's going to put away some horrible gang member or other bad guy. And that takes years. And you've got to be patient. And you've got to file the paperwork and deal with the subpoenas and try to get access to people's phone records. And it's a computer job. It's patient.

But, you know, there's 10% of the job that's like you're on the street and you're kicking down someone's door. And that's the part that we see on TV. And so I just get a kick out of hearing these, I don't know what to call them. It's almost like they're phase shift jobs where the two things that are really special about your job look nothing alike, like with the FBI special agent and the cam director. Yeah.

Who did you speak to? What comedian did you speak to when you did that episode? Because I did stand-up comedy for a while, and I'd be curious... Did you really? Yeah, a long time ago. And one of the reasons that I didn't stick with it is because it's a miserable existence, basically. And I remember one comedian told me early on, he said...

anybody can be funny at 10 o'clock, but try being funny at one o'clock in the morning with, you know, a handful of drunks and it's, it's a tough life. He admits as much. So this is a guy named Chris Grace, who, who's a pretty successful comedian. I mean, I didn't want someone who's doing, you know, Netflix special, cause that's just a whole different, uh, different, uh, you know, world. I'm

I want someone who's kind of a working comedian. And he talks about, number one, to your point about how hard of an existence it is. He says at one point early in his career, he bombed so bad at an event that he just quit for like three or four years. It was just, he just thought this is not worth it. It's just too painful. And then he kind of grudgingly, you know, got back on the circuit and got better and better and better. And one of the things I enjoyed hearing about from him was,

the process of developing jokes and I think that somebody if any of our listeners are fascinated by stand-up comedy like I've always just wondered like what's the inside a process for that and he says he he just keeps notes in an app on his phone like anytime something strikes him just going through life he'll just kind of file away a note and then one of the things that stuck with me was he said part of testing jokes is

You've got to make sure that the audience is with you on the premise of a joke. So he gave, you know, what he admitted was kind of a vanilla example. He's like, if you're going to tell a joke about kids, you know, you want to kind of test out the premise. You know, when you have kids, you know, it's long hours. You may not get enough sleep.

And that's the premise part where you're kind of looking out to the audience to see, do they recognize that phenomenon? Like, will, will they buy into that? Right, right. Because if the audience doesn't buy the premise, if they don't, if they're not on board with you with the premise, then,

then the joke will never work. And what I found that was so great about doing stand-up comedy is it's so pure in the sense that you're either funny or you're not, and you're out there all by yourself, and it either works or it doesn't. And when it works, when people laugh, I mean, it's the best feeling in the world. And when people don't laugh, it is the worst feeling in the world.

Well, that's one of the things Chris Gray shared with me is just how sort of naked you are as a performer. I mean, like you said, if you're funny, it's all the credit goes to you. And if you're not funny, there's only one person standing with a spotlight on them.

And you're just it. It's almost like the ultimate, you know, direct to one's nervous system job. Like if you're if if if it's working, it's really, really working and you feel it instantly. And if it's not, it's not. And actually, that reminds me.

of, uh, of an episode we did with the tennis coach and he made the same point about tennis. He said, what, what's, what's unusual about tennis is it is such a solo affair. You know, it's only recently that the tennis players have even been able to consult their coaches during a match, you know, for, for many, many, many years. I mean, you were just alone, right?

just alone out there in competition. And so that's why I think so many of us have memories of some of the classic matches like Nadal and Federer, and it would go three and a half hours. And then at the end, it's like whoever lost would just be crushed. I mean, you could just see it on their face, and they would often be in tears. I mean, it's just such an emotionally excruciating sport. And the tennis coach was talking about how

preparing for that emotional intensity is part of the work. You know, it's not just about, you know, holding the racket right or smashing forehands down the line. It's about how do you deal with failure? And I found that totally fascinating. So you talked to a couples therapist and here's a job that I would think would be so difficult because

Oh, God. Here comes another couple whining and complaining and blaming each other. It's all his fault or her fault. And if I had to do that all day, I, man, I think I, I couldn't do it.

I am right there with you. I mean, that was one of the things I wanted to ask about is just, you know, speaking of dealing with a lot of failure. I mean, imagine seeing people at their worst moments of their relationship and then seeing another one in the same situation and then another and then another. And that's your whole calendar. One of the funny things she told me was she I was asking her, you know, who are the worst clients? And she said, OK.

She'll have clients that will email her and talk about, well, we want to come see you. We're having some problems in our relationship. We've got a vacation coming up in eight weeks, and we'd really like to kind of hammer this out before we leave for vacation. Do you think we can wrap this up in six sessions in the next six weeks? It's like they want to scope it. Yeah.

We have a terrible problem on our marriage, but we want to make sure we can fit it into this exact window that we have available. Will you sign up for that? And she said those are the kinds of emails and clients that she really dreads. I always wonder, though, if people who go to marriage counseling wait until things are so bad that it's so much harder to fix it. And can you really fix it in one hour a week? I mean, I don't care how good the therapist is, but...

One hour a week compared to all the other time of the week doesn't seem like much. But here's one thing that fascinated me, which was she said, you know, given this disjunction between the amount of time I have with people and...

And how big the problem is. I have to look for little leverage points. And she said, one of those leverage points is when people get in these situations where, you know, they're seeing all the worst parts of their partner and, you know, everything that the other person does bugs them and annoys them. She said, I have to get them to reframe how they see each other.

And so she said one of her clients' favorite activities that she has them do is what she called sticky note affirmations. This really stuck with me. So the idea is like in the bathroom when you're brushing your teeth, you have a post-it notepad and a pen.

And as you brush, you're just jotting down some positive thing that you observed about your partner that day. So, you know, I really love the way you snuggled with Maya on the couch or or thanks for making my coffee this morning or, you know, that that new shirt you wore looked cute or just anything positive.

And she said, there's kind of a double victory there. Number one, I mean, all of us like to be praised or complimented. So there's kind of like a little jolt of optimism that comes from seeing those little sticky notes left in the bathroom. But she said the more fundamental change is that knowing you're going to have to write those notes next time you brush your teeth, it kind of rewires the way you're perceiving your partner. It's like all of a sudden you're on the hunt for

for something good that you can write up next time you're in the bathroom. And that, it's almost like you're changing your glasses, you know, going from very skeptical lenses to more rose-tinted lenses. I loved the spirit of that. One I'd be curious to hear more about is the high school principal because the high school principal is...

portrayed in movies and tv shows is i think a mr strickland and back to the future kind of guy and and i've never really understood the job of a principal like does he really manage the teachers i don't think so but but but what parents go to him or her to complain about teachers and there's some discipline mixed into the so i don't what is a what does a principal do

You know, in the business world, we use the phrase a lot. It's tough to be in a position where you have a lot of accountability and little control. And I think that's basically the lot of the principle, a lot of accountability, little control. It was diagnostic that the day I recorded my interview with him, he had spent part of his morning as a substitute teacher in an algebra class.

So they couldn't find a substitute and who are they going to get? Well, let's plug in the principal. He said, I had time on my calendar, so I just did it. And, and that was the vibe I got from that interview is that a principal is, is ostensibly the boss, right?

you know, on the org chart. But in reality, he's a kind of utility player. He's doing whatever is needed in the moment. And sometimes that's filling in in the classroom. Sometimes it's, you know, going and trying to resolve an issue in the cafeteria. Sometimes it's sitting with a student in the hallway who's really, really struggling and almost being, you know, kind of a mentor or an impromptu therapist for their situations. And so it's just...

a job of startling diversity it seemed to me. You know what's interesting is I assume that people in that position come from the ranks of teachers and yet from what you just described it's nothing like being a teacher. You're getting promoted into a job that is nothing like you've done. Very very true. Yeah I think what is so striking about being a teacher is that to a large extent you create your own world.

I mean, you have your classroom with your students. I mean, yes, there's curriculum you have to follow, but you can kind of roll it your own way. And there's very little observation. I mean, you might be observed once or twice a year for some kind of review, but you're kind of autonomous versus a principal is almost always working through others and dealing with some kind of conflict.

And a lot of times it'll be multi-dimensional conflict. Like a parent will call and end up grousing at the principal about, well, Johnny got in trouble in biology class and it wasn't fair because of blah, blah, blah. And so then the principal has to go hunt down the biology teacher and kind of intervene in the conflict.

And so you're so right that you go from, if you go from teacher to principal, it's like you go from this one person world to a world of constant drama, constant working through others, constant, you know, multidimensional personalities. And, and that's a big leap. Well, I imagine everybody has thought at one time or another, you know, what, what would it be like to do that job? What it's, what is it like to be him or her, uh,

And so it's fun to take a peek behind the curtain and see what it is like. Dan Heath is who we've been talking to. Dan's written several really interesting books. And he now has a new podcast called What It's Like to Be, which is more stories, like we just heard, of what it's like to be in different professions. There's a link to his podcast in the show notes, or you can just look wherever you listen to podcasts and find the podcast What It's Like to Be. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for coming on.

Hey, thanks so much, Mike. I came across this article I have, and I can't tell where it's from, but it must be a reliable source or I wouldn't have kept it. And it's about some of the dirty surfaces we touch every day that you probably don't give much thought to. For example, your credit and debit cards. I mean, they get really, really dirty and they can be safely cleaned with a disinfectant wipe.

Just be sure that they're completely dry before you put them away. All your electronics, phones, tablets, they're all crawling with germs. You should check your owner's manual for the cleaning recommendations because disinfectant wipes can damage some touchscreens. The back of your rugs. This is one I think people miss all the time. When vacuuming, flip your throw rugs over and vacuum the underside.

Toilet roll holders. Every time you switch toilet rolls, give the holder a shot of disinfectant. And then there's the old salt and pepper shakers. They're often the filthiest thing on the table with the highest concentration of cold and flu viruses. So remember to clean those once in a while. And that is something you should know.

You heard a lot of really good information in this episode of Something You Should Know, particularly the interview about light. I find this fascinating. So please, I know there are people that you know that would love to hear that. So share this episode with someone you know. It helps us grow our audience and people like getting podcast recommendations. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

Talmor is my home. My family have worked the land for generations. My gran says the island does not belong to us, but we belong to the island. And we must be ready, for a great evil is coming. And death follows with it.

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