Are You Revealing Too Much or Not Enough? & How We Absorb Technology

Summary

Podcast Summary: Something You Should Know
Episode: Are You Revealing Too Much or Not Enough? & How We Absorb Technology
Host: Mike Carruthers
Guests: Leslie John (Harvard Business School), Vanessa Chang (Leonardo/Author)
Release Date: March 12, 2026

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Episode Overview

This episode explores two seemingly separate but deeply interconnected topics:

1. The social and psychological science of sharing personal information—are we withholding more than we think, and is oversharing always as risky as it feels?
2. The history of human adaptation to technology—how our bodies, minds, and habits shape and are shaped by inventions from writing to smartphones.

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Segment 1: Mindset and Aging (00:34–02:40)

Main Insight:

• Your outlook on aging directly influences your health and lifespan.

Key Points:

• A landmark Yale study shows people with a positive view of aging live, on average, 7.5 years longer than those with a negative outlook—regardless of their actual health or circumstances.
• “If you expect decline, you unconsciously live into it. If you expect growth, you behave differently and your body follows.” —Mike Carruthers (02:00)
• Mindset affects memory, mobility, recovery, and risk of illness.

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Segment 2: The (Under)Rated Power of Oversharing, with Leslie John

(02:40–26:23)

Introduction: The Social Risk of Sharing

Mike introduces Leslie John, Harvard Business School professor and author.

• Leslie argues the problem isn't just "TMI—Too Much Information," but also "TLI—Too Little Information."
• “The line between TMI and the bigger danger, in my opinion, TLI... you can go further towards TMI than you think you can in all kinds of contexts.” —Leslie John (00:48, 08:46)

Leslie John’s Research on Disclosure

Revealing is a Skill (05:47)

• We're not born open or closed; revealing is a learnable skill.
• Openness builds trust—by taking a social risk, you signal faith in the other person.

Key Study: Managers' Self-Disclosure (08:46–11:45)

• Managers who admitted common vulnerabilities (like nerves when public speaking) were more trusted and liked than those who avoided sharing any weakness.
• “The line is further than you think... Not saying anything vulnerable was where people trusted [the manager] the least.” —Leslie John (08:46)

What We Regret: Not What We Did, But What We Didn’t Do (11:58–14:49)

• Long-term, 76% of regrets are about things not done—including not sharing feelings.
• “Silence is not neutral. Silence charges interest.” —Leslie John (24:17)
• Bronnie Ware’s palliative care research: 4 of the top 5 end-of-life regrets are about inaction; #3 is not expressing feelings.

Feelings vs. Gossip (18:44–21:40)

• Sharing about others (gossip) erodes trust; sharing your own feelings deeply builds it.
• “Massively we under-share our feelings. But gossip ...that is an overshare. It erodes trust.” —Leslie John (19:10)

Disclosure Hangovers: Are We Really Judged? (11:45, 17:09–18:44)

• The anxiety after sharing (“disclosure hangover”) is mostly imagined—others are usually flattered and feel closer to you.
• “While you're over there with a disclosure hangover, they're like, 'Oh wow, that person was so brave. I'm so flattered.'” —Leslie John (17:58)

Long-Term Relationships & the Danger of Assumption (22:04–24:10)

• In established relationships, we mistakenly believe we know everything, stop sharing, and risk growing apart.
• “Our confidence that we know everything about them outpaces our actual knowledge of them. That’s where the trouble begins.” —Leslie John (22:04)

Takeaway Advice (24:10–25:52)

• Ask: What is the price of not opening up?
• The “mind reading expectation” (expecting others to know what you need without telling them) damages connection.
• “Of course people can’t read each other’s minds...I need to share more.” —Leslie John (24:17)

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Segment 3: How We Absorb Technology, with Vanessa Chang

(27:24–48:03)

The Long Relationship Between Humans and Technology

Technology is Not New—But Our Reactions Are Timeless (27:24–29:42)

• Every generation faces “unprecedented” change, but adapting to new tools—from writing to AI—is centuries-old.
• “There’s always frustrations. Zoom, video chat—the future that’s arrived and how mundane it is.” —Vanessa Chang (29:17)

Technology Shapes and Disciplines Our Bodies (29:49–33:02)

• Writing: learned through discipline; extends the mind beyond death.
• “Your body is trained... so you can participate. And because of that, you can have these really profound individual moments of expression.” —Vanessa Chang (31:56)

How Inventions Transform the Human Experience

• Recording the Voice (33:18–36:19): The shift from voices dying with the speaker to voices living on through recordings changes our relationship to identity and privacy. Vocal deep fakes and AI-generated voices both empower and threaten authenticity.
• “When the sound becomes an object, suddenly we can play with it in lots of different ways.” —Vanessa Chang (33:19)

The Smartphone as an Extension of Self (37:51–43:01)

• Devices are designed for the body—PalmPilot, Walkman, MP3 player all “primed” us for constant phone use.
• “The designer...actually walked around with this piece of wood...to see if it would fit into his life.” —Vanessa Chang (38:08)
• Staggering stat: “The estimate was 2,600 [phone touches] a day for the average user...Power users, over 5,000.” —Vanessa Chang (41:08)

Technology, Privacy, and Changing Behaviors (43:01–47:35)

• Private, individual music (Walkman) was not always the goal: features for shared listening or conversation were quickly abandoned in favor of privacy.
• “Those [intercom and dual-headphone] features quickly fell away. So that movement towards privacy ultimately won.” —Vanessa Chang (45:48)

Historical Context: Building Habits and 'Needs' (41:28–43:01)

• The current urge to always “pull my phone out” is the product of decades of prior habits and inventions.
• “All of the behaviors we have...are absolutely primed by technologies in the past.” —Vanessa Chang (43:01)

Notable Quote

• “Your confidence that you know what your partner is thinking and feeling...outpaces your actual knowledge. If we’re more confident than we should be, then we stop asking, we stop sharing, and then we start to grow apart.” —Leslie John (22:04)

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Segment 4: Interesting Fact (48:09–49:22)

New Clothes Aren’t Clean Clothes

• New retail garments can carry bacteria, fungi, and especially chemical residues from manufacturing—so always wash before wearing.
• “The risk of serious illness is low, but new doesn’t necessarily mean clean. So before you wear it, wash it.” —Mike Carruthers (48:09)

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Timestamps for Highlighted Segments

• 00:48 — Leslie John on TMI vs. TLI
• 08:46 — Disclosure study: Where’s the line?
• 11:58 — Regret and not sharing
• 14:49 — Saying “I love you” is reciprocated 80% of the time
• 17:58 — Disclosure hangovers are mostly self-created
• 19:10 — Gossip as trust erosion
• 22:04 — Long-term relationship risk is under-sharing
• 24:17 — "Silence is not neutral. Silence charges interest."
• 29:17 — Tech frustrations and “mundane” marvels
• 31:56 — Writing as bodily training
• 33:19 — Voice recordings, deepfakes, and identity
• 38:08 — How the PalmPilot was ergonomically designed
• 41:08 — 2,600 phone touches/day for the average person
• 45:48 — Walkman’s privacy evolution

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Closing Thoughts

This conversation reframes two fundamental questions:

• In relationships, why does fear of saying too much overshadow the cost of saying too little?
• With technology, how much of our supposedly “unprecedented” present is built on slow, bodily adaptation and invisible habit formation?

Both guests illuminate that what seems like a modern predicament—be it speaking up or putting down the phone—has deep roots in how humans connect, trust, and create meaning.

Transcript

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[Micah Carruthers]

Today on something you should know what you think about getting older can impact just how much older you get. Then the problem of oversharing revealing too much it may not be the problem you think it is.

[Leslie John]

The line between TMI too much information and the bigger danger. In my opinion, TLI too little information. That line you can go further towards TMI than you think you can in all kinds of contexts.

[Micah Carruthers]

Also, new clothes are not necessarily clean clothes. And the interesting way humans slowly adapt to new technology, then we can't live without it.

[Vanessa Chang]

There was a study some years ago that tried to trace how many times someone touched their phone in the day. The estimate was 2,600 times just for the average user.

[Micah Carruthers]

What?

[Vanessa Chang]

And power users? Over 5,000.

[Micah Carruthers]

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[Leslie John]

Hi. Thanks for having me.

[Micah Carruthers]

So you're a professor at Harvard Business School, and this topic about oversharing seems maybe a little outside the scope of that. So I'm curious what your interest is in this topic.

[Leslie John]

Yeah, my interest in this is that I have realized the benefits of opening up even just a little bit more in your personal and professional lives. I've actually come to believe that we're not born as open people or closed people. Rather, revealing is a skill that we can develop. And it's not about being open all the time or closed all the time. It's about knowing when to open up to Whom and how much and why.

[Micah Carruthers]

Yeah, well, that seems to be the magic that a lot of people probably do get right and a lot of us get it wrong and regret it later.

[Leslie John]

Yeah, yeah, that's true. But the thing is, with the regret aspect. Yes. I mean, I, as a card carrying over sharer in many respects, I have felt many disclosure hangovers. Right. It's the day after you've told one too many embarrassing stories or said one too many sensitive things at a party and you're cringing, you're like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. You live with this sting, this cringe. That definitely sucks. But the thing is, it's much shorter lived than we think it is. And what it's often replaced with is something much more meaningful. So some of my worst overshares, like sharing my most embarrassing moment to a group of senior colleagues, I definitely had a disclosure hangover the next day, but those senior colleagues actually ended up being some of my closest mentors. And I don't think it was in spite of the sharing. It was in part because of it.

[Micah Carruthers]

Because why? What happened? Why do you think that was effective in connecting you better?

[Leslie John]

That's a great question. The fundamental thing is trust. So when you open up and share something a little edgy, a little sensitive, a sensitive thought or a feeling, you're like relinquishing control to the universe. You're saying to the person implicitly, I trust you to not use this against me, to not make a fool out of me. You're literally showing you're modeling because you're taking a risk. So you're showing that you're trusting. You trust the person, and when you do that, it causes them to trust you more. And that is the foundation of all human relationships. Right. Trust. Trust is social currency. And you can't just say, hey, I'm trustworthy. You have to show it by doing something inherently risky. And opening up is something that is inherently risky. It for sure has dangers, but the upside, we often don't anticipate.

[Micah Carruthers]

Yeah, well, the, the, I guess the question then is like, well, where's the, where's the line between enough sharing and too much sharing? I mean, how do you know where that is?

[Leslie John]

Yeah, that's the million, million dollar question. I can't tell you. It's here exactly at this spot all the time. That's not realistic because it depends on so much. But what I can tell you is the line between TMI too much information and the bigger danger. In my opinion, TLI too little Information, that line, you can go further towards TMI than you think you can in all kinds of contexts. So for example, we had a series of studies where we had people watch a video of a manager and they watched the manager introduce themselves. And we asked the people in the study, how much do you trust, like the manager, how much you want to work for them and is this person competent? And what we did was we just varied how much the manager self disclosed how vulnerable they got in this intro. So the key thing was in one of the versions they basically didn't say anything vulnerable. In another version they said, sometimes I get nervous public speaking, right? So that's sharing something vulnerable, sharing a weakness, which is a manager ordinarily wouldn't do. So that's one version. Another version is a little bit further where they said, I sometimes get nervous public speaking, sometimes my hands get sweaty. Okay, so just another level. And then the final level was all of that plus piled on and sometimes I have full blown panic attacks. And what we wanted to see there is your question, where is the line? Well, the line is further than you think. So people, the first, the version where the person, the manager didn't say anything vulnerable. That was actually one of the versions where people trusted the manager the least. Again because they're not opening up, they're not taking any social risk. But then the two middle ones where they said sometimes nervous public speaking, and then even further, my hands get sweaty, they still trusted the person, wanted to work for them even more so than when they said nothing. When it kind of started to backfire in that you kind of started to think, is this person competent? Was that extreme version where full blown panic attacks, okay, so that's TMI there. But saying as a manager you're sometimes nervous about public speaking and even going so far as to say, and sometimes I feel my palms get a little sweaty, like showing a little bit more of the physiological symptoms. It actually caused people to trust them more and be more willing to work for them relative to when they weren't vulnerable at all. And it didn't make the people think the manager was incompetent at all. Rather they're more relatable. I say this to say that, you know, we've done many, many experiments and all in love, romance, in all kinds of different contexts, personal, professional, and the line is a little bit further than where you think it is.

[Micah Carruthers]

When you describe the experiences you've had where you had that hangover the next day, isn't that telling you something? Is that a false alarm or Is it really? Maybe you did.

[Leslie John]

So it could be. Oversharing is alive and well. TMI is definitely a problem still. But what I would encourage people to do is I wouldn't take your cue from the immediate aftermath necessarily, that it was a mistake. You gotta kind of look at the long game. And one way to describe this is just to tell you about how what people tend to regret in life in interactions and what they don't regret. So it turns out that it's something like 76% of the types of regrets that people have are regrets over things they did not do, like, including sharing. Right, not sharing. So you're much more likely to regret over time. In the long run, you're more likely to regret the things that you did not do over the things that you did. Now, in the immediate aftermath, we often regret the things we did more than the things we didn't do. But over the course of time, this pattern reverses such that we end up regretting the things that we didn't do. And that's where undersharing is so problematic, because it's. It's a life of missed opportunities, Right? When we don't share, we miss connections. We have colleagues that don't quite trust us, we have relationships that don't spark. The other thing I would say on regret that I found when I was researching this book that really, really shaped my thinking on this was how there's a palliative care nurse by the name of Bronnie Ware, and she's obviously spent a lot of time with people in their final days, and she wrote a book on the top five things that people regret most in life when they're dying. Four out of five of those regrets are things that they did not do. And number three, the number three most common regret is literally, I wish I had shared my feelings more. So that's real food for thought.

[Micah Carruthers]

Yeah, that's really food for thought. And it seems so true if you even. You don't have to wait until you're almost dead to figure it out either. If you stop and think about it, one of the things you regret right now are probably things you did not do or did not say rather than things you did.

[Leslie John]

Yeah. And one of the things I think that is really, really tricky. One of the hardest reveals is sharing strong feelings, saying you love someone, saying you're into them. And so I did a study where I asked people, hey, when you said, when you were the first to say I love you, did the person reciprocate, or did you get jilted I didn't use the term jilted, but you know what I mean. I said, was it reciprocated or not? And guess what percent of the time it was reciprocated?

[Micah Carruthers]

85.

[Leslie John]

That is almost on the nose. It's about 80%. And I wouldn't have guessed that because me, catastrophic thinker, you know, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, it's so threatening if you get rejected, right? Being rejected by a romantic interest is like one of the most primally difficult kinds of rejection we can get. And so my prior going into this study was like, you know, maybe you get reciprocated 40% of the time. I don't know, maybe this is revealing something about my love life or Mrs. But that was so assuaging to me that 80% of the time when you know, when you feel like it's the right thing to do. And so the other thing to keep in mind is when you do get rejected. Yeah, that sucks. It stings in the short run, but at least you know, it saves you from endlessly cycling and wondering and staying with the wrong person. Right? So there's again, even when it, when it stings, the long term payoff seems actually quite good.

[Micah Carruthers]

We're talking about oversharing and undersharing and the pros and cons of both. And my guest is Leslie Johnson. She's a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. Marvel Television's Wonder man, an eight episode series now streaming on Disney. A superhero remake. Not exactly what we'd expect from an Oscar winning director.

[Leslie John]

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[Leslie John]

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[Micah Carruthers]

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[Micah Carruthers]

So, Leslie, I'm wondering, I don't know if you could study this. Maybe somebody has. But when you have one of those hangovers where you feel, oh my God, I said way too much. And often, you know, alcohol is involved when that happens.

[Vanessa Chang]

Truth

[Micah Carruthers]

do the other people that you told think you shared too much?

[Leslie John]

That's a great question. Say more about where you're coming from?

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, I just wonder, is it a false concern you think you shared too much? Oh, why did I say that? But are other people going home, going, gee, why did Bob say that? My sense is that people go home and worry about what they said. They don't really remember all that much about what you said anyway.

[Leslie John]

Completely. In fact, people are often happy that you shared to them. Right? It's because if we come back to trust, they feel flattered that you opened up to them. So while you're over there with a disclosure hangover, they're like, oh wow, that person was so brave. I'm so flattered. That means they trust me. I can't wait to spend more time with them and learn more about them and share what's on my mind with them. Maybe they'll be able to help me with some of the things I'm struggling with. Right. So that's kind of, that's the core of friendship. And yet it's sad that the day after we just kind of feel badly about ourselves when we oftentimes it's often misplaced, as you say.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, a lot of, well, pretty much all of what you've talked about is when you share things about yourself. A lot of people overshare things about other people that, and the conversation starts with, you know, I really shouldn't tell you this but. And maybe you really shouldn't, maybe you really shouldn't tell me that because you're saying something out of turn. It's not your place, this isn't your thing to say.

[Leslie John]

You've hit on something that is a common overshare. Right. There are certain categories of things people often ask me, like what do we tend to overshare and under share? Massively we under share our feelings. But gossip, saying negative things about someone, talking smack about people behind their back, that is an overshare. You're exactly right. And why is that oversharing? It's because it erodes trust, right? So the person that you confide in, well, confide is the wrong word. The person you fetch to and gossip to that you say negative things about someone else to. That'll give you maybe a short term hit of pleasure, right? Like it's, it's kind of fun sometimes and juicy to do this. But the long game is not so good because the person you, you say the thing to, they're going to wonder if you do this enough, they're going to wonder, hmm, what do, what do they say behind my back? What do they say about me? And that fundamentally erodes trust, setting aside the fact that it's an unkind thing to do, but you're exactly right.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, talk about the difference between sharing information and sharing feelings, because, you know, you can share either one, but sharing your feelings, I don't know.

[Leslie John]

A friend of mine was telling me about how they were in a PTA meeting. They're part of the parent teacher association and they have a pretty good group. You know, they're affable and they get along pretty well. But things weren't moving in this meeting and it was really frustrating and they weren't making progress. And my friend said, you know, I thought of you and I thought of the feelings about sharing feelings. And so I went out on a limb and I said, I am feeling really, really frustrated and disappointed that we're not making more progress. I don't think she said it as firmly as I just said it now. She said it a little bit more graciously, but she said, she told me then once I shared my feelings, it was a total game changer. People rallied behind it. People, other people said, oh, you know, I've been feeling frustrated too. I'm so glad you said that. And then it actually ended up being constructive. So, you know, when we say open up a bit more, share your feelings, you know, it sounds kind of cheesy like share your feelings, but like this is a really tangible thing that you can do that has, that can be a complete game changer in many social interactions.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, it seems to me when you stop and think about it, people worry about their own oversharing. Like maybe I said too much, but that's not how other people. I guess it depends on what it is you said, but generally I think we're more self critical than other people are critical about our oversharing.

[Vanessa Chang]

Yeah.

[Leslie John]

And in fact, that's like basic cognitive behavioral therapy. Right. That the foundation of it, which is getting out of your head and realizing that people don't notice the things about you that you think they notice. Right. Like get out of your head. It's not all about you. We're inherently kind of self absorbed in a, in a way that, that, that hurts ourselves. Right. Because we think that people are constantly judging us and, and when in reality, oftentimes they don't notice and when they do with sharing, they're often happy and flattered that we share. There is one area though, I have to say that. So in this Vein of like, we often have a good feel for it when we're starting to date someone, when we're getting to know someone, this often comes really naturally to us, right? This kind of dance of reciprocity, this mutual gradually escalating self disclosure. Where our instincts can go awry is actually in long term relationships. Because one of the things that happens is long term, intimate, close relationships. The longer we're with someone, of course, the more we know about them. But the problem is that our confidence that we know everything about them outpaces our actual knowledge of them. So that's where the trouble begins, right? Because if we're more confident that we know what our partner is thinking and feeling, if we're confident that we know that when, like more confident than we should be, then we stop asking, we stop sharing and then we start to grow apart, right? And so you see, like a lot of long term relationships, it's, it's often not some catastrophic event, cheating or something that makes them break up. It's rather you wake up after 10 years and you realize, wait, I don't feel understood and known and I don't feel I know them. And the root cause of that is under sharing.

[Micah Carruthers]

So in the last moments here, what is it you want people to take from this? What's the advice?

[Leslie John]

I want people to ask themselves, what is the price I might be paying? What is the price I'm already paying for not opening up, for not saying the thing? Because silence is not neutral. Silence charges interest. The other thing that I wanted to say on the point about relationships growing apart is there is a personality trait. So one of your questions, you know, is there a. Do people, are people chronic oversharers or under sharers? There's a personality trait called mind reading expectations, which is as it sounds, it is the tendency to believe that your partner should just know how you feel, that they should be able to intuit your thoughts, you shouldn't have to say your needs, they should just know which. When I say that out loud, it sounds, as my grandmother would say, nutty noodle, right? Of course people can't read each other's minds, but the problem with this belief is that it's really insidious. And there's a scale, you know, psychologists, we love scales where you can measure this in yourself. And I did this myself, I measured my own. How high am I in mind reading expectations? And my, I'm very high in this trait. But it was liberating learning this about myself because as soon as I learned that, that my instinct is to like expect implicitly that my husband can intuit what I need all the time. Once I knew that I have this tendency. What does it mean? It means that I need to tell him I need to share more. I need to tell him what I need, tell him how I feel.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, when you listen to this discussion, it's kind of like it's taking a problem off the table that people, if they worry about oversharing, it's probably overblown. And maybe the bigger problem is under sharing and what we're missing by not sharing more. I've been talking to Leslie John. She is a professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and author of the book Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. And there's a link to her book in the show Notes this episode is

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[Micah Carruthers]

when we talk about technology today, it often sounds like we're living through something completely unprecedented. Computers, artificial intelligence, Driverless cars. Machines that seem to think and create, even imitate us. But our complicated relationship with technology didn't start with computers or smartphones. It began centuries ago with things as simple as cuckoo clocks. Eyeglasses, player pianos. All kinds of things that introduced new ways of maneuvering through the world. My guest Vanessa Chang argues that the story of humans and machines is not new. It's ongoing. And the panic, the optimism, the utopian promises, and the apocalyptic fears we see today are nothing new. Vanessa is director of programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences and Technology, and she is author of a book called the Body A Brief History of Humans and Machines From Cuckoo Clocks to chatgpt hi, Vanessa. Welcome to something you should know.

[Vanessa Chang]

Hi. Thank you for having me.

[Micah Carruthers]

Sure. Well, I was just thinking the other day I was talking to someone about, you know, there are people, plenty of people still alive today who can remember a time before television, let alone video and Netflix and all of that, but just basic television. Plenty of us remember a time before cell phones, let alone smartphones. And now so many of these technologies have become not only part of our lives, but integral. I mean, look, go walk down the street, everybody's got their face buried in a phone, and it's become part of who we are. And yet it wasn't that long ago when it was impossible to imagine.

[Vanessa Chang]

Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, I was talking to a colleague the other day when we were having technological issues, because even though there's a kind of magic to everything, you know, there's always frustrations. And I was just marveling at zoom and video chat, at the future that's arrived and how mundane it is. You know, you're right. And it's really transformative in how we conduct ourselves and how we move through the world and how we talk to each other.

[Micah Carruthers]

But it's not just the current technology. I mean, technology and the body go way back, right? I mean, way back.

[Vanessa Chang]

Oh, yeah, absolutely. The most surprising history that I like to think about in setting some kind of historical precedent or moment for thinking about technology is really kind of one of those prosaic ones. Writing, it's something that so many of us do and that we're kind of trained to do. And I don't know about you, I was trained to do cursive in school. There's a lot that you need to. To. To do in your body to learn how to write, but I think it also has a lot of implications for how we think, you know, and writing has really been tremendous in extending our minds out into the world. It allows us to put our thoughts out on, you know, on print in ways that mean we can talk to people after we die. And, you know, it helps us think through things in ways that aren't always possible if you can't kind of see your thoughts reflected outside of your body. So, you know, for me, I think that's a really important way of thinking through some of the. The emerging technologies now, like AI, that look like they're really transformative and they look like they're going to really change the way we think, that, you know, this is part of a long history that, you know, how we. How we think, how we Write how we express, how we use our hands. All of that has been just ongoing dialogue, Right. With technologies for thousands and thousands of years.

[Micah Carruthers]

But what I find interesting is that a lot of technology doesn't just respond to a need. It creates a need or it further creates the need. You know, people got along just fine without cell phones, smartphones. You know, where the only phone was, the one on your kitchen wall. You know, life went on. People seemed to get along okay, but now everybody has a phone. And that technology created, like. Created its own demand. Like when, you know, when a caveman's drawing pictures on a cave wall with a stick. Well, that makes writing kind of hard, but you invent the pen and the paper, and now writing's pretty easy and so more popular.

[Vanessa Chang]

Yeah, I mean, there's a whole, I think, feedback loop between, you know, that moment of using a stick and, you know, and simply just a person with a stick or some kind of tool making some kind of mark on the world and the whole kind of infrastructure that gets built around it. I mean, the fact that you have a pen in your room to be able to write on a piece of paper, that so much comes together and kind of colludes to produce that moment. You know, it's that you go to school, that your teacher puts that pen in your hand, makes you, teaches you how to hold it, disciplines you so you're writing neatly in line so other people can understand what you're writing. And, of course, you need to know how to read. The term I often use is discipline. It sounds. It sounds a bit strict, I suppose, but it is a. It is a form of. Of discipline. Right. Like, you're trained. You know, your body's trained. It's trained by these systems and infrastructures so that you can participate in them. And because of that, you can have these really profound individual moments of expression, too.

[Micah Carruthers]

So take an example of the body and technology, either in history or current, just to give people a sense of what you're talking about, but to illustrate how powerful all of this is and worth talking about.

[Leslie John]

Yeah.

[Vanessa Chang]

Another interesting example is the example of the voice. Our voices are a really kind of primal object. They really communicate who we are, and they're really kind of fundamentally connected to our breath and to our bodies. They're really expressive of life. And in speaking before technology, voices disappear, you know, when people die. I mean, your voice actually in speech disappeared in the moment immediately after it was spoken. So when you have. When you have something like sound recording technology in the late 19th century, that emerges this is a moment when the voice becomes transformed into an object and it's separated from our bodies much in the way that writing could separate our thoughts from our bodies, too. And when that happens, suddenly the voice becomes something that can live on after you die. This becomes. When the sound becomes an object, suddenly we can play with it in lots of different ways. And that status that it has as a marker of human identity starts to become really troubled. And you don't see that. You don't think about that so much at the moment sound recording gets invented, but you see it now, and you see it when you think about things like music recording and copyright and the way people are struggling to contain something like VOC deepfakes, where voices can be reproduced in ways that are completely untethered from who we are.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, that's, you know, I hadn't thought of that. But that's really remarkable when you think about it, because somebody's voice has always been like a fingerprint. Like, you know their voice and they know your voice, and so, you know, you're talking to that person. But technology has made it such that you don't know that anymore.

[Vanessa Chang]

Yeah, absolutely. You don't know that. You know, hip hop artists in the 1970s started to kind of play with focal samples, starting to do really interesting things about it. And it did, you know, stir a lot of these anxieties about identity and not knowing where we are, but also kind of really interesting and cool music. And then when it comes to vocal deep fakes, you know, there's some people are using it to restore voices when they've lost them. Right. Val Kilmer, for example, lost his voice to. I think it was throat cancer. And he worked with an AI company to create a vocal clone that was trained on because, you know, he's got. He's got a huge archive as an actor, lots of material and voice data to work with, so he could kind of create a. A vocal clone for himself. And it wasn't like, connected to his body in the same way, but it sounded like him. It had his fingerprint because it was rooted in his voice. So there's a lot to be excited about, but so too a lot to be troubled by.

[Micah Carruthers]

What are you troubled by? Just the fact that it could be fake?

[Vanessa Chang]

Well, it could be fake. I know that the sophistication of scammers is getting to the point with AI that it's really hard to distinguish when someone is calling you. And it used to just be they needed to be trickster enough to fool you. Now they could sound like someone, you know, or they could replicate your voice for kind of vocal IDs. There's that, too. And then there's also kind of questions when it comes to ownership and identity. You get people who, particularly vocal actors who may not have known that their voices were being used for a particular purpose. I read this fascinating story about the voice of Siri. Actually, she was a voice actress and was called into a studio years ago and asked to record, you know, a whole suite of different, different phrases and sounds. She never knew what she was doing. And then some time later, Siri came out and a family friend called her and was like, is this you? So suddenly her voice is out in the world and it's recognizable enough that her family members could. Could ask, is, you know, is this you? It sounds like you. But she didn't have control over it anymore. It's millions, you know, she or her voice is in dialogue and in service to millions and millions of people around the world.

[Micah Carruthers]

What about the phone? I mean, it has become so ubiquitous. It is just kind of taken over everybody's life. How did that happen? I mean, what is it about that device that makes it so I can't do without it?

[Vanessa Chang]

You know, there's the way it fits physically into our lives. You know, I often think about one of the preemptive technologies of the phone. The PalmPilot Palm Pilot was an early kind of personal organizer in the late 90s. My mother is a major early adopter, and she had a Palm Pilot. And the designer of the Palm Pilot, in trying to kind of figure out how it best kind of fit into people's lives, actually walked around with this piece of wood that was shaped the same kind of size and weight as the object and carry it around for a long time to see if it would fit into his life. You know, and then there's other kind of early technologies like the walkman and the mp3 player that start to bring moments of convenience and kind of like personal control over music into our lives that I think all of which come together to prime our bodies, whether it's our ears or our hands, for physically kind of carrying these convenient objects around. And then the other thing I think is really about. About corporate design, you know, when it comes to phones, we use them to connect in ways that. That are convenient but that allow us to consume things. You know, maybe it's your. Your calendar, but maybe it's. Maybe it's Amazon. Maybe you're. Maybe it's music. There's a lot that allows you access it kind of gives you freedom, freedom to do. And it's physically designed in a way that it can just kind of sit so neatly into your hand. And then it comes to that. There's this dialogue between a phone and your own kind of embodiment that. That really starts to cement that relationship. You know, there's a. There was a study some years ago that tried to trace how many times someone touched their phone in the day. And the estimate was 2,600 times a day just for the average user.

[Micah Carruthers]

What?

[Vanessa Chang]

And power. I know that's. And power users over 5,000. Just, just try and wrap your head around that. So there's this kind of.

[Micah Carruthers]

Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. What do you mean by touch your phone? Like if you dial a number that's seven touches.

[Vanessa Chang]

I not sure the answer to that, but I would consider, I personally would.

[Micah Carruthers]

That sounds like an awfully large number.

[Vanessa Chang]

But think about like, I don't know if you wear a watch. I no longer wear a watch. So I pick up the phone to take check the time. I pick up the phone to send messages, to listen to music, to send an email, to check on, you know, maybe buy something. I see people kind of nervously touching their phones. It used to be, I'm of the time kind of just as cigarettes kind of transitioned out of public spaces so much. But it used to be when people were waiting, they were kind of fiddling with something like a cigarette. Right. Now they just fiddle with their phones.

[Micah Carruthers]

Right? Yeah. That has always fascinated me, how it's become the go to thing to do when you have an idle moment. Well, I'm standing here waiting for something. Let me pull my phone out. Not let me talk to somebody or read a book, but it's always pull my phone out.

[Vanessa Chang]

Absolutely. I think it's increasingly difficult to just. Just be present and be okay with sitting in your body. And I think there are larger reasons for that around, like expectations of kind of productivity and the world that we live in and kind of the aesthetics of distraction. You know, you don't have to kind of sit in the nervousness, I guess, of life because I don't know about you, I actually think life, life isn't always comfortable. Right. There's a discomfort to a lot of life and particularly if you're moving through the world or waiting for someone or trying to kind of be on a train. It's not that pleasant, say sitting on a train in rush hour. But if you can be distracted by it or do something else, not have to. I don't know, make eye contact with someone else. Then it just lubricates that a little bit, makes that, that kind of life a bit less, you know, a bit less friction for.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, what you said a moment ago, I hadn't really thought about that. But the power and the popularity of the phone didn't just happen. There was. It makes you wonder, like, how well adopted would the phone have been if it just showed up and hadn't been Preceded by the PalmPilot, the Walkman, the ipod, that this kind of warmed us up to this all in one device, that we'd already been used to carrying something around. And now this is everything.

[Vanessa Chang]

This is the story that I really want to surface in, thinking about contemporary technologies and the kind of technological history that preceded them. All of the behaviors that we have and the interactions we have are absolutely primed by technologies in the past. You know, I think about something like Spotify and the algorithmic curator. If, you know, I. I have really mixed feelings about the Spotify curator and the kind of songs that are selected for me, because sometimes it is exactly what I want. And it's like, hey, this algorithm knows me. It's giving me more of what I want. And I link that to other kind of practices that prefigured something like that. Things like the mixtape, where people who did know you and who did love you would put together a mix of music as a gift, perhaps. And that was a form of kind of like technologically mediated social form that's now kind of been displaced by a computational curator that kind of knows you not in the same way, but it does know you, because it's got access to your data in a way that is really kind of unprecedented historically. But your habits of consumption around listening and listening to a playlist, a mixtape, for example, prepared people for that and kind of primed the technology for that. And that in turn was kind of primed by something like the Walkman, which before that was primed by music boxes and other forms of musical automation. Where it used to be, when we were listening to music, we had to be in the same room as someone. Maybe they were singing, maybe they were playing the drums. But all of these. This kind of history, you know, starts us at these quite primeval moments where we're kind of gathered together as bodies. Maybe we're listening to each other, talking to each other, speaking, writing. All of these things and technologies kind of allow us to divorce those functions from our bodies and eventually kind of lay the scaffolding for all of these

[Micah Carruthers]

tools today, as we wrap up here. What is an example or two of a technology that just from your perspective, has a very interesting story that people might not know or might not have considered considered.

[Vanessa Chang]

One story I love about the Walkman. So I, I got my first Walkman in the, in the late 80s, but it was kind of prototyped in the late 70s by, by Sony. And it descended from actually a tape player. Apparently a version kind of went up into space on one of the Apollo missions. But when they were prototyping the Walkman, the Sony boss, Akio Morita, took a prototype home to his walk wife. And he was. Didn't take it home to his wife, but he was testing it at home. And his wife did not like it. She did not like how it cut him off from her and that it kind of fostered to her this privacy divorce from this kind of social interaction that she wanted. So he added two elements to this, to the Walkman, right, that were trying to mitigate that sense of privacy. And this kind of has everything to do with what we've been talking about. So those two pieces were kind of like an intercom button. So if you were listening to a Walkman, someone maybe it's your mom, would come and press the button and that would turn on a mic on the outside of the Walkman and lower the music so that your mom could speak to you, say, hey, hey, listen to me, it's time for dinner. And could kind of cut through that private social world. And the other feature was the dual headphone jack so that you could list two people, could listen together, you know, fast forward, those quickly fell away. People were not interested in that. So that kind of movement towards privacy ultimately won with the Walkman and kind of gets us to that, you know, private world. We're all just scrolling through our phones and not reaching out to other people.

[Micah Carruthers]

Well, this is great because, you know, we use technology all the time and yet we so seldom stop and think about the story behind how humans and technology came to be and how we got so reliant on it. And this was fun to do. I've been talking with Vanessa Chang and the name of her book is the Body A Brief History of Humans and Machines from cuckoo clocks to ChatGPT. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Vanessa, thank you so much.

[Vanessa Chang]

Great. Thank you so much. Great to talk to you.

[Micah Carruthers]

You know that brand new shirt you just bought? Well, you may not be the first person to wear it before it reached you. It may have been tried on by multiple shoppers. Not to mention handled by factory workers, warehouse staff and store employees. Microbiologists say that retail clothing can carry bacteria, fungi and other microbes from all that that human contact. But those germs aren't even your biggest concern. New clothes are often treated with dyes and formaldehyde finishes and other chemicals to keep them wrinkle free and looking crisp. Dermatologists say those residues are a common cause of skin irritation, especially for sensitive skin. The risk of serious illness is low, but new doesn't necessarily mean clean. So before you wear it, wash it. And that is something you should know. Sharing this podcast with someone else is by far the best way to support this podcast and help keep it going. So please share this episode, or any other episode, or the whole what, 1300 episodes with someone you know. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[Roxanne or Chantel from All About TRH Podcast]

If Bravo drama, pop culture, chaos and honest takes are your love language, you'll want All About TRH Podcast in your feed. Hosted by Roxanne and Chantel, this show breaks down Real Housewives, reality tv, and the moments everyone's group chat is arguing about. Roxanne's been spilling Bravo tea since 2010, and yes, we've interviewed Housewives royalty like Countess Luann and Teresa Giudice, smart recaps, insider energy, and zero Fluff. Listen to all about Tear H podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. New episodes weekly.