Weird, But True Stories of Famous People & What We Can Learn From Top Sports Competitors - SYSK Choice

Summary

Podcast Summary: "Weird, But True Stories of Famous People & What We Can Learn From Top Sports Competitors - SYSK Choice"

Release Date: July 12, 2025

Introduction

In this captivating episode of Something You Should Know, host Mike Carruthers delves into a fascinating blend of peculiar anecdotes about renowned personalities and insightful discussions on the lessons top athletes can impart for personal and professional growth. Featuring special guests Dan Schreiber and Sally Jenkins, the episode promises a blend of intriguing stories and practical wisdom.

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1. The Dangers of Sending Checks in the Mail

Mike Carruthers kicks off the episode by addressing a modern pitfall: mailing checks. He explains how traditional advice has flipped, highlighting the risks associated with check theft and the rise of electronic payments. Carruthers cites a report from the U.S. Postal Inspection Service noting over 300,000 mail theft complaints in 2021, more than double the previous year.

"Putting a check in the mail is a risky proposition... criminals are stealing them through check washing, where they alter the payee’s name and amount." — Mike Carruthers [01:35]

2. Weird Stories About Famous People

The episode transitions into a series of bizarre yet true stories about famous figures, blending history with the uncanny.

• Ringo Starr's Exorcism Experience

  Dan Schreiber shares an astonishing tale about The Beatles' drummer, Ringo Starr. Ringo's grandmother, known as the "Voodoo Queen of Liverpool," subjected him to multiple exorcisms to eliminate what she believed was the devil residing within him due to his left-handedness. This unusual upbringing influenced Ringo's drumming style, inadvertently creating The Beatles' unique beat.

  "When he started learning to play the drums, he was a right-handed drummer... this little extra time that it takes him to do that creates this micro lag. That means that The Beatles had this just unique beat that was really hard to replicate." — Dan Schreiber [14:31]

• Ronald Reagan's Self-Saving Assassination Attempt

  Another extraordinary story involves President Ronald Reagan and Secret Service agent Jerry Parr. During an assassination attempt in 1981, Parr's quick thinking not only saved Reagan's life but also inspired Parr to join the Secret Service after witnessing his role in the event.

  "Ronald Reagan basically saved his own life by inspiring Jerry Parr to become a Secret Service agent, who then saved him." — Dan Schreiber [20:10]

• Nobel Laureates with Strange Beliefs

  Schreiber discusses the "nobility disease," where Nobel laureates sometimes develop unorthodox beliefs post-award. He highlights Wolfgang Pauli, who, despite being a scientific eagle eye, was accused of causing equipment malfunctions—a phenomenon known as the "Pauli effect."

  "There was one time when students tried to prank him with a chandelier drop, but the device broke instead — an example of the Pauli effect in action." — Dan Schreiber [12:14]

• Backmasking in The Beatles' "Free As a Bird"

  The episode explores the eerie instance of backmasking in The Beatles' track "Free As a Bird." Schreiber reveals that reversed audio unintentionally spelled out John Lennon's name, suggesting a mysterious presence during the song's production.

  "When you listen to the backward words of John Lennon, which should absolutely be nothing but mumbles, you can hear him say the words 'Made by John Lennon.' It’s impossible." — Dan Schreiber [28:41]

• The First Mission to Find the Titanic with a Psychically Trained Monkey

  Schreiber recounts the peculiar plan of billionaire Jack Grimm, who nearly led a scientific expedition to locate the Titanic using a monkey trained to point to its location psychically. Thankfully, Grimm was dissuaded at the last moment, preventing an unconventional search strategy.

  "The scientists said, 'Are you nuts? We're not going on an expedition led by a monkey pointing at a map.'" — Dan Schreiber [28:56]

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3. Insights from Dan Schreiber

Dan Schreiber, author of "Theory of Everything A Voyage into the World of Weird," brings a wealth of strange and intriguing stories to the conversation. His background in blending information with comedy equips him to present these tales engagingly.

Key Stories Highlighted:

• Dodgers' Russian Scientist for Positive Thoughts

  The Los Angeles Dodgers reportedly employed a Russian scientist to beam positive thoughts to players from 3,000 miles away, aiming to boost performance by 10-15%. While the scientific efficacy was limited, the initiative coincided with the team's improved performance during those years.

• Premier League Team's Monks Blessing the Grounds

  In the UK, a Thai billionaire owner hired monks to bless the soccer field before home matches. These monks conducted prayers and rituals, which team members believe contributed to the team's unexpected surge to the top of the Premier League.

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4. Lessons from Top Sports Competitors with Sally Jenkins

Sally Jenkins, a distinguished columnist and sports writer for The Washington Post, shares profound insights on what elite athletes can teach us about handling pressure, practice, and failure in our own lives.

Key Topics Discussed:

• Performance Under Pressure

  Jenkins emphasizes that athletes are highly susceptible to pressure, often more than the general public realizes. However, the best athletes manage to perform consistently by mitigating stress, allowing their ordinary abilities to shine through rather than peaking unrealistically under pressure.

  "The best ones are able to learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary, everyday performance is what's coming forward." — Sally Jenkins [02:13]

• Deliberate Practice vs. Repetition

  Contrasting casual practice with "deliberate practice," Jenkins explains that targeted, purposeful practice focusing on specific weaknesses leads to true improvement. She cites Peyton Manning's methodical approach to overcoming his early career interceptions by stabilizing his feet with sandbag drills.

  "Really good practice is what's called deliberate practice, which is you diagnose a weakness and then you specifically work on measurable improvement at that weakness." — Sally Jenkins [45:48]

• Resilience and Handling Failure

  Athletes develop resilience through repeated exposure to failure and learning to focus on self-improvement rather than external factors. Jenkins shares the Kansas City Chiefs' "four inches better" mantra as an example of fostering a resilient and improvement-focused team culture.

  "The separator between the people... is resilience, and they've acquired it." — Sally Jenkins [50:54]

• Physical Conditioning and Executive Function

  Drawing parallels between physical fitness and mental performance, Jenkins discusses how physical conditioning can enhance executive functions like decision-making and judgment. She references studies showing that intense mental activities, such as chess, can burn significant calories, underscoring the physical aspect of mental stress.

  "Decision fatigue is huge, but that's related to physical fatigue." — Sally Jenkins [36:20]

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Conclusion

This episode of Something You Should Know masterfully intertwines bizarre historical anecdotes with actionable insights from the world of sports. Listeners are treated to an exploration of how unconventional stories from famous personalities can illuminate strategies for personal development and resilience. Whether it's the quirky origins of The Beatles' rhythm or the disciplined practices of top athletes, the episode underscores the value of unique perspectives in enhancing one's life.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• "Putting a check in the mail is a risky proposition... criminals are stealing them through check washing, where they alter the payee’s name and amount." — Mike Carruthers [01:35]

• "When you listen to the backward words of John Lennon... it can hear him say 'Made by John Lennon.' It’s impossible." — Dan Schreiber [28:41]

• "The best ones are able to learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary, everyday performance is what's coming forward." — Sally Jenkins [02:13]

• "Really good practice is what's called deliberate practice, which is you diagnose a weakness and then you specifically work on measurable improvement at that weakness." — Sally Jenkins [45:48]

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About the Guests:

• Dan Schreiber: Author of "Theory of Everything A Voyage into the World of Weird" and host of the podcast "No Such Thing as a Fish." Schreiber specializes in uncovering and narrating obscure and fascinating stories from various domains.

• Sally Jenkins: A seasoned columnist and feature writer for The Washington Post with over two decades of experience. She's a Pulitzer Prize finalist and the author of twelve books, including "The Right What Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life."

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Tune In and Learn More

For listeners eager to delve deeper into these stories and gain actionable insights, subscribing to the Something You Should Know podcast is highly recommended. Additionally, exploring Dan Schreiber's work and Sally Jenkins' writings can provide further enrichment on the topics discussed.

Transcript

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[Mike Carruthers]

Today on something you should know, why you shouldn't send checks in the mail anymore. Then weird stories about amazing people like Ronald Reagan, Nobel prize winners, even Ringo from the Beatles.

[Dan Schreiber]

His grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him because she believed that the devil was inside of him because he was left handed and she needed him to not be left handed anymore. That's what gave the Beatles their beat. And that's all down to the voodoo queen of Liverpool who gave exorcisms to expel the devil.

[Mike Carruthers]

Also, what you didn't know about Trader Joe's and what we can learn from top performing athletes like performing well under pressure.

[Sally Jenkins]

Athletes are far more vulnerable to pressure than we realize. What the best ones are able to do is learn to mitigate stress to the point that they're ordinary. Everyday performance is what's coming forward. It's not rising to the moment, it's simply not deteriorating under the pressure.

[Mike Carruthers]

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[Dan Schreiber]

Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life today.

[Mike Carruthers]

Something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome. I don't know if you remember this or not. It wasn't all that long ago, but I remember that a lot of people were afraid of online banking, didn't want to pay for things online because what if their information got stolen? What if someone got a hold of your credit card number? The whole idea of online transactions seemed very risky. It was much better to just put a check in the mail rather than pay online. Well, that advice has now been flipped on its head today. Putting a check in the mail is a risky proposition, and postal authorities and banks are suggesting you stop putting checks in the mail because bad guys are stealing them. The U.S. postal Inspection Service reported roughly 300,000 complaints of mail theft in 2021, which was more than double the prior year. And how are they stealing the mail? Well, mail carriers are actually being robbed, mailboxes are being broken into, and the criminals are targeting envelopes that look like they have checks in them. And then what they do is something called check washing, where a criminal steals a check, then proceeds to change the payee's name and the check amount. And it gets even more sophisticated than that. But the point is that today a lot of businesses are accepting only electronic payments and that may be for the best. If you do have to mail a check, the advice is to at least use a secure mail drop, such as inside the post office, but not a mailbox. And that is something you should know. There are a lot of weird things in the world. I guess you know that. And some of them are really fascinating, mind boggling, hard to imagine, and many of them you may not know about or have heard of, but you're about to. So settle in here and listen to Dan Schreiber. Dan is an author and podcaster. He hosts a podcast called no Such Thing as a Fish. His latest book is called the Theory of Everything A Voyage into the World of Weird. Hey dad, and welcome to Something youg Should Know.

[Dan Schreiber]

Hey, thanks for having me, Mike.

[Mike Carruthers]

So before we learn a little more about you and why you're into weird things, I want to jump into one good weird thing here. And this one is about the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team and I live in Southern California and I bet even a lot of die hard Dodger fans haven't heard this before, so likely neither have many other people. So tell that, tell that story.

[Dan Schreiber]

Yeah, this is amazing story which we only really kind of found out about because the owners of the Dodgers went through a very messy divorce. And as part of the papers showing the financial side of what was going on with the Dodgers were brought into court, it got revealed this thing which is that for five years from 2010, the Dodgers baseball team was basically paying a Russian scientist to beam positive thoughts at the players during matches from 3,000 miles away to improve their game and but he couldn't improve it by a huge amount. He could only promise a sort of increase of about 10 to 15% in extra abilities of the players on the team. But he was on the payroll and he just used to sit there in his flat somewhere in America because he immigrated to America just watching the TV and just focusing really hard and he was on the yeah, there was a salary. The Dodgers did start kind of getting better when this was happening. But in the UK there's one of the most extraordinary stories that ever happened where a team was at the bottom of the Premier League table and the chances of them winning was something like 15,000 to 1 if you were placing any bets on them. And they managed to win the top spot of the Premier League that year. And it was largely down to obviously an amazing team. But in the background the owner who is a Thai billionaire, he had hired a bunch of monks to come in. And every match, or at least every home match that they could manage, they would come in and bless the grounds. They would be hitting all the players on the legs with these sor of prayer sticks that had ointment on them. They were out while the game was going on. They were sitting in a specially made room that had all sorts of proper religious iconography inside. And they sat and they. And they hummed and prayed and, and chanted the whole match through. And so, you know, a lot of people said, well, it was the monks that helped Leicester win the football season that year. So it's not, it's not just the Dodgers, there's all sorts of different teams that are doing this.

[Mike Carruthers]

Great. So let me now ask you how you got into this, why you know so much about weird things.

[Dan Schreiber]

Well, in the uk, I've been working for the last two decades or so for various different companies that is largely about information and comedy being smashed together and finding the interesting stuff in every single possible thing that you look into. So there is a show in the UK called QI, which as a 19 year old, I joined straight out of high school without any qualifications. And so my whole training since then, I don't know, 19, has just been reading books with an eye to spot something that's out of the ordinary, that you might not know about, what is quite a well known subject, and then try and convert it into a way that comedians can play with it. And then. So I've been doing that my whole career in various different ways, hosting a podcast and that's the core bit of it. Interesting thing with funny jokes around it.

[Mike Carruthers]

So I'm sure everybody has heard pcr. PCR was the test, or is the test for Covid, that became very familiar to us a couple of years ago. And there's a weird story about the guy who came up with that. So go ahead and tell that story.

[Dan Schreiber]

When I was putting together the book, it was just at the sort of tail end of the first big batch of the pandemic lockdowns in the uk.

[Mike Carruthers]

And.

[Dan Schreiber]

And what surprised me was is that this word that suddenly became a household word, which was pcr. I'd never heard of PCR prior to the pandemic. Pcr, as you might know, is an extraordinary moment in chemistry that kind of changed the way that almost everything is looked at now. So from forensics and police work all the way through to archaeology, and then of course coming up with the use of the PCR test to help us curb the Coronavirus COVID 19, and allow for millions of lives to be saved, likely as a result of it. So I was thinking, well, how come I don't know when this came about? And I looked into it and I discovered that it was a single person who invented pcr. There's a guy called Carrie Mullis, Californian guy who was working out there and one night had the idea for pcr. Why is he. Why is he not a household name? This guy's literally just saved the planet with this thing almost, you know, or at least help us to, until the vaccine came in and. And then I realized why. Because he was a very odd cookie and there was lots of bizarre things about him. The most striking one was that one night when he was out at his cabin, which was out somewhere in California, he was walking to the toilet one night, and as he was walking to the toilet, he was confronted with a English speaking glowing raccoon who then abducted him, most likely into a spaceship is his opinion. And that struck me as very interesting that someone who was able to save the world also spent the vast majority of the rest of his life trying to prove that a glowing raccoon abducted him. And that happened the exact same year that he invented pcr.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, and also you mentioned other Nobel laureates who clearly are brilliant but pretty weird in other ways.

[Dan Schreiber]

Yeah, well, there's this thing that you must have heard of, I guess, but I certainly hadn't of, which is nobilitis, the Nobel disease. And it's this thing which is the idea that once you win the Nobel Prize, the power of it and the adoration is so great that you suddenly think, well, I must be a genius about everything. And you start spouting opinions about stuff that you have absolutely no background in, but everyone believes you because you're a Nobel Prize winner. There's people like Wolfgang Pauli, who was seen as one of the eagle eyes of science. You know, he would not let anything get by. Yet he was pretty convinced that there was something involving telekinesis and telepathy going on with him because everywhere he went, things broke. And it wasn't just him that was noticing that. There was a whole group of scientists who genuinely thought, if Pauli is around, this stuff is going to break. And in some cases, a few scientists actually banned him from entering the laboratories where they were working because they were working on something important. They thought, they can't have Pauli come in and mess it up with his presence. And it was known as the Pauli effect. And people wrote down many examples of where this happened. There was one time when a bunch of students tried to prank him by rigging up a chandelier to drop to the ground as soon as he walked into the room so they could say no, look at the Pauli effect. But when he entered the room, the device that was actually going to drop the chandelier broke. And so it didn't drop, hence of like a Pauli effect in action that the prank failed.

[Mike Carruthers]

Like even Linus Pauling, I mean, who seemed so like mainstream vitamin C. But he believed some weird stuff.

[Dan Schreiber]

Yeah, he was a guy who. His weird one was eugenics. Right. And he believed in eugenics so much that he thought. I believe he actually recommended that people who had a lower IQ or any kind of genetic defects should be given a physical mark on their head so that people knew not to procreate with them. It was very bizarre. These scientists.

[Mike Carruthers]

It's hard to imagine anyone listening who doesn't know who the Beatles are. But this story about Ringo the drummer Ringo I've never heard. And I always thought I knew quite a bit about the Beatles and their music and everything else, but I hadn't heard this. So tell that story, Ringo.

[Dan Schreiber]

If you. He was inducted into the hall of Fame a few years ago and there was multiple amazing drummers that were up on the screen talking about what an incredible drummer he is. And there's always been this joke that he wasn't even the best drummer in the Beatles. But the fact is, is that Ringo is up there as one of the greatest drummers ever. Particularly specifically, I guess, for pop music and rock music. What they would always say is that Dave Grohl would say this kind of thing. You know, you'd be in a studio if someone's playing too tight, like it's just not quite got a sort of vibe of live music. He would say, give me more Ringo, give us more Ringo. And what more Ringo is, is play a little sloppier, play just slightly out of time. And that was a style that Ringo developed because when he was a kid, his grandmother performed multiple exorcisms on him because she believed that the devil was inside of him because he was left handed and she needed him to not be left handed anymore. So multiple exorcisms performed on him. She was known as the Voodoo Queen of Liverpool, but she spent her time, whatever those exorcisms were, getting Ringo from going being a left handed person to a right handed person. And so when he started learning to play the drums, he was a right handed drummer and he had a right handed kit. But then after he left and moved out from his grandmother's house, slowly he started favoring the left hand again. But he didn't change the right handed kit because his feet were familiar with it. It just made sense to him. But what it means is that when Ringo has to get to all of the drums that are on the right of him and do those fills, instead of his hand going up and around, leading with the right, which is super easy, he has to go underneath and lead with the left. And that little extra time that it takes him to do that creates this micro lag. That means that the Beatles had this just unique beat that was really hard to replicate. And so that's what gave the Beatles their beat. And that's all down to the voodoo queen of Liverpool who gave exorcisms to expel the devil. So it's just a weird, tiny little nugget about rock history that again rarely gets mentioned.

[Mike Carruthers]

So I can't wait for you to share the story about the US President who stopped his own assassination. I'm speaking with Dan Schreiber, he's author of the book the Theory of Everything Else. Have you ever had that experience? Well, everyone's had this experience. You buy some clothes online, they get delivered, you open it up and then there's that wave of disappointment. The quality's poor or it doesn't fit, or the fabric's not what you thought. It's such a letdown. Well, that has never happened. When I or my wife order clothes from Quince, Quince has the kind of stuff you'll actually wear on repeat, like breathable flow knit polos, crisp cotton shirts, and comfortable lightweight pants that somehow work for every occasion. And the best part, everything with Quints is half the cost of similar brands. You see, by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quintz gives you luxury clothes without the markups. Now, since I started buying clothes from Quint's, I really, I haven't bought clothes from anywhere else. And each time the clothes arrive, I. I'm always delighted and never disappointed. And you know something weird? When I tell people about how great Quince is and how I love buying clothes from them, I often hear back, oh, Quince. Yeah, I shop there. I love them. Stick to the staples that last with elevated essentials from quince. Go to quince.comsysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's quince.comsysk to get free shipping and 365 day returns quince.comsysk losing weight is a big topic now. You see a lot of dramatic pictures in the news of celebrities and others dropping a lot of weight with these new medications. And if you've looked into it yourself, you quickly get that sticker shock when you see the price. That's where hers comes in. Hers is transforming women's health care by giving you access to affordable weight loss treatment plans. Hers connects you with a medical provider who will work with you to determine the best treatment options for you. And then if prescribed, you get medication as part of a doctor developed weight loss program complete with ongoing care check ins, dosage and medication adjustments and 24,7 online support. No additional cost. Weight loss by hers is realistic, it's not restrictive and it's very affordable. Hers provides access to both oral medication kits and GLP1 injectable options with oral medication kits starting at just $69 a month with a 10 month plan when paid up front. Start your free online Visit [e-mail] something that's f o r h e r-s.com something for your personalized weight loss treatment options. Forhers.com something weight loss by hers is not available everywhere. Compounded products are not approved or reviewed for safety, effectiveness or quality by the fda. Prescription required. See website for full details, important safety information and restrictions. Actual price depends on product and plan purchased. So Dan, of all of your stories I think I like the one I like the best is the one of the United States President who stopped his own assassination.

[Dan Schreiber]

That was Ronald Reagan. Do you know the story about Ronald Reagan and Jerry Parr, the Secret Service agent? So, okay, so 1981, Ronald Reagan is coming out of one of the Washington D.C. hotels and there's an assassin waiting outside for him and he takes a couple of shots at Reagan. But fortunately the quick thinking Secret Servicemen get in the way. I think one of them takes a bullet sadly and Jerry Parr grabs Ronald Reagan and quickly bundles him into the back of a limousine and they quickly drive away and they check the President to see if there's any injuries and he's clearly bruised his ribs from being thrown into the limousine. But outside of that they can't see that a bullet's gone in. There's certainly no blood coming out. So they go, okay, let's get back to the White House. As they're driving back to the White House, a tiny bit of blood comes out of Ronald Reagan's mouth and Jerry Parr sees that and instantly knows that he must have been hit by a bullet. Somewhere, it just has to have happened. So he goes against all protocol, and he says, get him to a hospital now. We need to save his life. So they do that. They go to a random hospital, they bring the President in. They can't believe the President's there. The doctors manage to save his life, and they later say, you know, if he was five minutes later, we wouldn't have been able to save him. So that was. It was Jerry Parr's quick thinking that allowed for him to. To remain alive. And Jerry Parr, as a result, got all these amazing, you know, medals and all these honors as a result of being a hero. But for Jerry Parr, there was something more going on in that moment, which he later told Ronald Reagan, which was that when Jerry Parr was a kid, he was taken to the cinema to be. To. To see a movie with his dad. And they went to see a movie called Code of the Secret Service. And because of that movie, it's the only reason that he was there on that day, because he fell in love with the Secret Service. And then he thought, that's exactly what I want to do with my life. And his whole life led up to doing that, to looking after a President. The person who plays the role of the Secret Service agent in that movie was Ronald Reagan. So it's a full circle story. Ronald Reagan basically saved his own life. He inspired him to become a Secret Service agent, and then years later, he ends up saving his life as one. I just find that a really awesome story.

[Mike Carruthers]

So I thought this was weird. Maybe some people know about this, but I certainly didn't. And that has to do with the Savannah airport and Runway 10 at the Savannah Airport that has graves in it. So explain that.

[Dan Schreiber]

During one of the wars, they were needing to expand the size of the airfield and have more runways, but there was a graveyard that was attached to a farm and a family there that was sitting on the spot. And so they had to pay them to move it. And they said, we'll dig up every grave and we'll put them into a new cemetery and we'll make sure it's all done respectfully. But one thing that they couldn't do was agree on the four people who ran the place, the two owners, and then I think the cousin and a brother. And so they're still there. The graves of them are literally in the Runway. And as you're taxiing down the Runway, if you look out the window on one of those runways, you're going to see the two headstones that are laying Flat that you then go over on as you're flying off to wherever you're going. So other people have, you know, claimed that they're. They've seen ghosts and so on. And I interviewed a pilot who said she thinks that was a rumor that was made up as a joke by someone, but that, you know, you can ask for the haunted graveyard Runway if you're taxiing out as a pilot there.

[Mike Carruthers]

So you write in the book about a guy named John Lilly.

[Dan Schreiber]

John Lilly, he was a. He kind of became eventually part of the big psychedelic movement. He invented those tanks that you go into and you lay in and you float. Flotation tanks. He's the inventor of that. But his big project was trying to communicate with dolphins. And at one point, he was partly funded by NASA to teach dolphins to speak. And this was his mission, with the funding to teach dolphins to speak English so fluently that they would be given a chair at the United nations so that they could speak on behalf of all marine mammals. And he set up this house, which was along the ocean. It was half flooded. And he would have the dining room so that the table was flooded up to the knee if you were sitting down in a chair. And so you would eat your dinner with the dolphins, but then they would have their room to sleep in. You'd have your room to sleep in. And his work was so looked on as an interesting development of communication between human and animal that at the very founding meeting of seti, the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, where Frank Drake was and Carl Sagan was and so on, other amazing scientists, he was also there and gave the opening lecture on how we might be able to find aliens. Because if there was another intelligence that's evolved on our planet, they thought it's the dolphin. And so that's. If we can communicate with that, we'll be able to communicate somehow with the aliens. It might give us an insight. So I just thought. I just love that. This guy who ultimately failed. And there was a huge. A lot of controversy again. A lot of these people eventually caught a lot of controversy in their lives. But the very, very first meeting of SETI was with a man who believed that he was going to create cars, that dolphins could be driving themselves in the street.

[Mike Carruthers]

A topic that I remember years ago was kind of a hot topic. People were talking about it, about back masking, about how, you know, when you play a record backwards, there's satanic messages in it. And. And you write about that and explain why you write about that.

[Dan Schreiber]

This is the story of how in 1994, the Beatles got back together to do two songs as a threesome. John has passed away by 15 years, or 14 years at this point. And they get a demo from Yoko Ono and it's called Free As a Bird. And the three of them, for the Anthology project, which is telling their life story, get together and they re record over John Lennon's demo, with him singing this new track. And when they're in the studio, Paul the entire time is saying, I feel like John is here. I'm just. I just. I can feel his energy and I feel like he's going to make himself known somehow. And they're all thinking, that's not going to happen, Paul. And so they go on recording. He makes a few points at certain times going, look, it's John. And everyone thinks it's not. And so they just do the whole song. And at the end of the song, there's a bit on Free As a Bird that you can hear if you go on places like Spotify and listen to it, where they decided at the end of the song to do some back masking onto the track. And the Beatles were very famous for backmasking. It's the idea of taking a bit of vocal spoken word, flipping it backwards and laying it down onto a track so that you hear it backwards when it's played, when a song's played normally. And fans of vinyl back then used to love going and playing songs backwards to see any hidden messages. So the Beatles were famous for that, were accused of demonic influence for doing it. And in 1994 they thought, let's do that again as a nice little nugget and little Easter egg for the fans, let's do some backmasking. So they say to the engineer, is there any bit of John just talking randomly on any of these demos? And he says, yeah, yeah. And he finds this bit and it's a phrase that says turned out nice again. So I think that's great. And it's actually really nicely apt because at the end there's ukulele playing. And one of the most famous people for ukulele in the UK was George Formby. And his phrase was turned out nice again, which it just so happens is what John is saying on the. On that little audio extract. So it was perfect. So they flip it backwards, they put it on and they play the song out. While they're mastering the song, one of the engineers says, did you. Did you guys just hear that? And said what? He said, listen to that again, the backwards mumblings. Of John Lennon. And this is what is impossible. When you play this song. I highly encourage everyone listening to do this as soon as you've finished this show. When you listen to the backward words of John Lennon, which should absolutely be nothing but mumbles, you can hear him say the words made by John Lennon. He says his own name in the backward words of a thing that it's impossible, it's absolutely impossible. And Paul said, there you go. He's done it. He's come through. He's shown us that he's here, he's here on the song. I mean, it's really there when you listen to it. And, and it has to be impossible. I can't work out how. How the probability of that is. Is possible. I've said possible a lot. But yeah, it's. It's weird.

[Mike Carruthers]

You talk about the first mission to find the Titanic, and lately Titanic has been in the news because those people died. But the first mission to find Titanic was, well, you tell it.

[Dan Schreiber]

The very first ever scientific expedition to go and find the Titanic was led by a billionaire called Jack Grimm. But he had the top scientists and oceanographers on the boat to go and look for the Titanic. And the hour before they set off, he almost ruined the entire thing because he said to the top scientists who were there, by the way, there's one more crew member that's joining us on this trip. And then he introduced them to the latest member of the crew, which was a monkey who had been trained to psychically point out where the Titanic was going to be on a map. And that's what they were going to follow to find the Titanic. And so they all said, are you nuts? We're not going on an expedition and ruining our reputations by being led by literally a monkey pointing at a map. It's either us or the monkey. And he picked the monkey. He was fortunately talked out of the monkey right at the last second. And the scientist did go. But if he had had his way, the first expedition would have been with just a monkey pointing at a map.

[Mike Carruthers]

What I find so weird about all these weird things that you talk about is that a lot of them. I think I should have known this. Like, I should have heard this story before about Ringo or Ronald Reagan or. So I'm really glad you found them and were able to share them. I've been speaking with Dan Schreiber. He is an author and a podcaster. His podcast is called no Such Thing as a Fish. And I'll put a link to that podcast in the show Notes and his latest book is called the Theory of Everything Else A Voyage into the World of the Weird. And there's a link to that book in the show Notes as well. Thanks Dan. Appreciate you coming on.

[Dan Schreiber]

Thanks so much Mike. That was so much fun.

[Happy Mammoth Representative]

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[Mike Carruthers]

When you look at great athletes who are at the top of their game in any sport football, basketball, baseball, tennis, football, it can be a real pleasure to watch. But what you often don't think about is how'd they get there? How did they become so great at what they do? And is there something to learn from them and use in our own lives to become better at what we choose to do? Well, the answer is a resounding yes, according to Sally Jenkins. Sally has been a columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. She was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. In 2021, she was named the winner of the Associated Press Red Smith Award for outstanding contributions to sports journalism. Sally is also the author of 12 books, her most recent being the Right what Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life Hi Sally, welcome to Something youg Should Know.

[Sally Jenkins]

Thank you for having me.

[Mike Carruthers]

So in our culture, there's a lot of admiration for top athletes. But what is it that you think athletes and sports can teach us about life? Our own life?

[Sally Jenkins]

Athletes have a lot to teach us about performance under pressure and that we understudy and underuse them. Most of us who work from the neck up, sitting at desks, struggle to make the connection between what they do and what we do. Look, a Michael Phelps or a Peyton Manning have a lot to teach you about how to perform under pressure in your own life.

[Mike Carruthers]

So make that connection for me, because it's not always easy to see how I can learn something from someone who's just a superstar at a sport, how that impacts how that could be used. In my life, there's a truly deep.

[Sally Jenkins]

Intelligence going on in a great athlete who's performing under pressure. But the thing that people need to realize is that that deep intelligence is earned and it's learned. It's not natural born talent. We make the mistake so often of mistaking the ease that a great athlete performs with as something that's natural born in them. And it's really, it's truly not. It's a method. It's a result of a great deal of dirty, tedious practice and real method and real discipline. And I think the more we learn to unpack what's in that performance, the more we can export some of the things that those people do into our own lives and our own endeavors.

[Mike Carruthers]

So let's unpack it and let's talk about how that works. Because it's, I think, as you just said, we look at some athletes and we think it, you know, it's just a gift. It looks so simple and so easy to them that that has no application in my life. So what is it and how do you take that, what you see in sports, and apply it to life?

[Sally Jenkins]

Well, one of the things that you can take away from athletes is the value of, of physical conditioning when it comes to executive function and judgment. There's a mountain of neuroscience that shows that people who are sitting at desks are actually working really, really hard. Decisional fatigue is huge, but that's related to physical fatigue. A grandmaster chess player might burn 6,000 calories in a day of chess play. So now marry that to your own life and understand that when you're trying to make critical decisions, your body is actually having a lot to say about your judgment.

[Mike Carruthers]

So that surprises me that a chess player could burn 6,000 calories playing chess, because it doesn't seem like that's a very strenuous sport.

[Sally Jenkins]

It's fascinating, isn't it? So I'll give you a couple of examples. Magnus Carlsen, who's really the regnant chess player in the world these days. You know, they have Fitbits these days in chess. There's a game within a game of putting Fitbits and other sorts of, you know, physical tools onto chess players to see what's going in their body, what's going on in their body physiologically while they're thinking. And Magnus Carlsen, his heart rate can get up to 130 beats per minute when he's trying to make a decision at the chessboard under pressure. You know, a chess player named Mikhail Antipov, measured in one tournament, he lost 560 calories in two hours of hard thinking. So these are the types of things we're talking about. It's that the stresses on your body when you're doing some really, really hard thought and particularly stressful thought can be akin to running a marathon or some kind of really arduous physical undertaking. So this is my point that athletes have a lot to show us if we would look at them as something more than entertainment. You know, it's not an accident that NASA has begun to train astronauts very much like athletes. You know, they've adopted very, very athletic training for people who are going to be in critical situations in deep space.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what does that mean, though, for the average person to condition? Because you're not going to do what LeBron James does every day. That's just unrealistic.

[Sally Jenkins]

Sure. But you can hydrate better. You can get your rest. You can listen to a guy like Dana Cavalea, the longtime performance coach for the New York Yankees, who actually now has a side business, training executives and helping them understand what pressure is doing to your body and how to mitigate it. So pressure is not a state of mind. It has actual physical properties. And once you understand that, you can set out to sort of counter some of its effects on you that might be undermining your performance. You know, that's a starting space. It's just understanding what's happening in your body when you are under pressure and under stress.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, I'd like to explore that a little more because everybody's been in the position of being under pressure, under stress, deadline, think something's due, whatever. And it does feel like a state of mind that you're in that state of mind of being under pressure. So how do you counter that?

[Sally Jenkins]

So you feel it physically, Right? You can sometimes feel like there's an actual weight on you, your eyesight. You get tunnel vision. One thing that happens to you under stress is the fight or flight reaction kicks in, and your body is actually shunting blood from your small muscle groups to your large muscle groups. There was a great example in the French Open a couple of weeks ago when a great, hugely fit young player named Carlos Alcaraz actually went into cramping on the court just under the pressure of facing Novak Djokovic across the net, the number one player in the world. And Alcaraz wasn't cramping because he was tired. It was quite early in the match. He was cramping from nerves and stress and pressure. The guy who pioneered the best research into stress, a guy named Hans Selye, he used the word stress. He borrowed it from engineering to describe the stresses that happen to say, you know, like a bridge when a lot of cars have been driving over it. Stress is truly a physical manifestation in your body. And when you understand that the blood is rushing from small muscle groups to large muscle groups, it Starts to explain why you might be losing fine motor control as you are. Like, let's take an example, typing on deadline at the Super Bowl. To use a personal example, I'm here to tell you, like, my typing gets really, really bad under pressure because I'm losing blood in my fingers. That's literally the reason why.

[Mike Carruthers]

So you, you start to suck at the thing you really need to be good at and which really kind of ruins everything.

[Sally Jenkins]

I mean, we, we talk about choking a lot. And you know, you'll watch a great tennis player double fault and you're like, how could that person double fault at this stage of the match when they're a top five ranked player? How could a great golfer on the PGA Tour miss a three foot putt? Well, stress is the reason, and you and me are experiencing the very same things is the truth.

[Mike Carruthers]

But not everybody chokes. And not even people who choke choke all the time. So I wonder why.

[Sally Jenkins]

Well, people choke more than you think. Athletes are far more vulnerable to pressure than we realize. We tend to think of a LeBron James as someone who, you know, ordinarily just performs at a really, really high level under pressure. But the fact is, if you examine LeBron James's statistics in the clutch, what they call clutch shooting in the NBA, I mean, even the greatest clutch shooter in the NBA, you have to understand, is missing well over 50% of his shots. It's not that athletes perform at a really, really, really high level under pressure. What the best ones are able to do is learn to mitigate stress to the point that their ordinary, everyday performance is what's coming forward. They're just operating under their own standard. They're not achieving some otherworldly level. They are just being themselves in the moment. And that's the real key of dealing with stress. That's what real grace under pressure is. It's not rising to the moment. It's simply not deteriorating under the pressure.

[Mike Carruthers]

But haven't you ever been in your line of work, as you say when you're typing at the end of the super bowl and your typing sucks and you've got to fight that, but haven't there been other times where you've been under similar pressure and somehow you just flow and somehow it just happens for you?

[Sally Jenkins]

Yes. And what athletes do is they examine the difference between those two circumstances with really, really frustrating fine diagnosis. And that is what I've learned to do from them more than anything else as a writer, is to understand that athletes aren't confused about the difference between their good performances and Their bad performances. The rest of us can be. You know, I can remember an editor asking me once, do you know the difference between that story you wrote that was really, really good, and. And this other story you wrote that wasn't so good? And I was a much younger writer, and the truth is that I did not understand the total difference between those two stories. And so one thing that athletes, great athletes, like a Peyton Manning has taught me to do just by covering him and interviewing him over the years, is to understand how to get more consistent and how to create the circumstances that allow the good performance to come through. So I'll give you just one example from my own life. I go into the super bowl much more prepared than I used to on the day that I know I'm going to have to write a thousand words in two hours or less. On deadline, when the game probably wasn't even decided until the final two minutes of the game late at night, I make sure I have a good 500 to 600 words of material ready at my left hand. Of material I've been preparing all week long, from listening to interviews, from reading statistics and understanding where the pressure points in the game are liable to be. Because it's a lot easier to write for 400 to 500 words under pressure than a thousand words under pressure, right? So if you have some material ready to go and you've really done your homework, your flow, that flow performance that you're talking about is much more likely to come forward. And the same thing is true if you haven't been eating junk food in the press box all afternoon, which is something else I used to do quite a lot of. So those are two pretty simple basic examples, but they make a world of difference in performance.

[Mike Carruthers]

Let's talk about practice, because you hear that practice is what makes success, that you gotta put in the time, the 10,000 hours, you've gotta practice, practice, practice. A lot of people practice and they still don't get to the top of their game. So what's the deal?

[Sally Jenkins]

You know, there's a lot of bad practice in the world, Mike. I mean, I think a lot of people don't understand what the right kind of practice is. There's a lot of purposeless activity, right? A lot of meaningless activity where people think that practice is just head banging. Really good practice is. Is what's called known as deliberate practice, which is you diagnose a weakness and then you specifically work on measurable improvement at that weakness. And I'll give you one example. Peyton Manning, who I love to to use just because he was a Hall of Famer and a Super bowl winner. And he's also very, very self aware with his explanations of how he was able to perform. Peyton Manning told me that, you know, as a younger quarterback, his, his record by his third year in the NFL was just 32 and 32. He was a 500 quarterback who led the league in interceptions. And one of his issues was his feet were not great under pressure. They had a tendency to jackhammer and he'd get very stutter steppy. He sat down with his coaches, Tony Dungy and his quarterbacks coach, Jim Caldwell, and they examined tape of every single interception he had thrown in his first three years in the league. Every single one. And then they looked at a different tape, what Peyton calls a more. A more hidden tape, which was tape of all of the passes that he threw that should have been intercepted, but he just got a little lucky. They diagnosed the commonalities in all of those poor throws and all of those circumstances. It turned out he was, he was nervous. His feet got very, very nervous when large defensive linemen were hurling themselves below his knees. So understandably, you know, that kind of pressure made his feet unstable. The drill that they designed, the coaches would take very, very heavy sandbags and throw them at Manning's feet in practice until he learned to set his feet and get more stable under pressure. And that cleaned up a lot of his errors. So that's an interesting example and a very hardcore example of using practice in the right way. A directed correction, not just head banging, going out and throwing a million balls. If Peyton Manning had gone out there and just thrown pass after pass after pass, he wasn't going to get any better at the thing that was really holding him back.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yeah, well, you see that. I mean, that's the difference. And maybe it's just a semantic thing, but that's the difference between practice. What I think of as practice, which is doing a lot of repetition. You say it's conditioning and what you just described, which is coaching. It takes like another person to come in and identify those flaws and help you figure out, which a lot of us don't. We don't have a coach. We have to figure it out ourselves.

[Sally Jenkins]

Correct. And Erik Erickson, the great sociologist, who is really the guy who was the basis for that sort of myth, about 10,000 hours of practice makes an expert. It drove Erickson a little crazy because while there's some truth to that, there's a difference between practice, which is what you and me do, when we say pick up the guitar. And we want to get pretty good at the guitar. We learn the guitar, we practice the guitar, and then we sort of plateau. There's a state at which we don't get a whole lot better. Or tennis, you know, mostly because when we take up tennis, we get to a place where we're pretty good, and then we run around our weak backhand for the rest of our lives. The really people who really, really excel at something, they use those 10,000 hours to find what they're. They're not very good at. They work far more on their weaknesses than their strengths. And that's a critical distinction. And that's what Erickson called deliberate practice. So there's a big difference between just learning scales at the piano and then working at something, you know, to understand where your, you know, literally your weakest finger is on. On your left hand at the piano and why you're having trouble mastering a certain measure of music.

[Mike Carruthers]

But don't you think, though, that there are just some people, Michael Jordan, LeBron James, those kind of people, they just have something that other people don't have?

[Sally Jenkins]

No, I don't believe that. And I base this on 30 years of covering those people. I don't believe they have something extra than you or me. It's taken me a long time to get to this conclusion, but I truly don't. What they have is love of their craft. They have found something they truly, truly love to do, and they have gone all in with every piece of themselves. If. If you and me found the thing that we love to do with that level of enthusiasm, I com. I am 100% certain that we can achieve the same level of success in our own fields or our own endeavors. It's about going all in.

[Mike Carruthers]

So talk about failure, because that. That's a thing that stops a lot of people, and it certainly discourages a lot of people. And yet. But it's part of the game.

[Sally Jenkins]

It's the thing that stops most people. It's the thing that stops almost everybody. The separator between the people. I'm talking about a Peyton Manning who again, was just 32 and 32 his third year in the league. The thing that they have is resilience, and they've acquired it. That's an acquired trait. Resilience. We're not born with it. You develop it through failure. Very much like engineers sort of understand, and entrepreneurs understand that you have to stress things and break things in order to improve them and to arrive at better answers. The great big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, who I'VE interviewed quite a lot over the years, including for this project. Laird is really eloquent because he's an engineer and a builder and an entrepreneur as well as a the greatest big wave surfer who ever lived. And as a designer of of lots of different types of surfboards and instruments for traveling over water. Laird understands that your first couple of tries are going to be failures. You know, he's built a lot of things that broke in the water and that needed improvement. And he feels the same way about the human body and the human psyche in approaching big wave surfing. And and so athletes are good failures. They're gracious losers, the great ones. You never hear them bitch about the officiating. You never hear them talk about how they got screwed on the field or got a bad break. And those things do happen to them, but they don't focus on those aspects of the outcome. They focus on their own performance. And they're very, very resilient about unpacking the result, learning from it, and doing it a little bit better the next time. One of my favorite stories is the story of the Kansas City Chiefs who played probably the greatest football game NFL game I ever saw in person against the new New England Patriots and Tom Brady a few years ago. And they had the Patriots and Brady on the ropes in the final two minutes of the game when they intercepted Tom Brady and the interception was called back by an offsides penalty, a flag. A guy had lined up 4 inches offsides and Brady got the ball back, completed a pass, drove his team down the field to tie the game and send it into overtime. And the Patriots won the game in overtime to go on to the super bowl, the Kansas City Chiefs. And Andy Reid just absolutely refused to scapegoat the guy who had lined up offsides. And all Andy Reid said after the game was, listen, we all could have been four inches better. And for the next year, the chief's mantra was four inches better, four inches better. And the predictable thing happened. They won the super bowl the following year as a result of that attitude.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, you have such a unique perspective on the relationship between sports and what it can teach us about life. I really appreciate you sharing these stories. I've been talking with Sally Jenkins. She's a columnist and feature writer for the Washington Post for more than 20 years. The name of her book is the Right what Sport Teaches Us About Work and Life. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you, Sally.

[Sally Jenkins]

Thank you, Mike.

[Mike Carruthers]

You've probably shopped at a Trader Joe's before. After all, there are over 400 stores in 42 states. And while there, you may have noticed that the people who work there are particularly friendly and happy to help. That friendly nature of their employees is considered part of the secret of their success. Instead of calling their workers employees, they use nautical terms. Crew members are entry level workers, merchants are crew members who've received recognition for excellent customer service, mates are the assistant managers and captains are store leaders or managers promoted from within the company. You can tell different employees ranks by their shirts. Crew members wear single color T shirts with a flower on the back, Captains wear button shirts with Hawaiian prints. And you've likely heard a bell rung every once in a while in a Trader Joe's. And apparently those bells are just calls for help. One bell is to signal to open another register, two calls are for general support, such as replacing a damaged product at checkout, and three rings is a call for manager assistance. And that is something you should know. We're here cranking out three shows a week and we would love it if you would share what we do with friends of yours and help us grow our audience. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

[Dan Schreiber]

You might think you know fairy tales and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring, but the.

[Mike Carruthers]

Real Grimm fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark and they were often very grim. On Grim Grimmer Grimmest we tell a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids. Perfect for car rides or screen free entertainment.

[Dan Schreiber]

Grim Grimmer Grimmest activates kids imaginations and.

[Mike Carruthers]

Instigates fun conversations because fairy tales speak to all of us at a very deep primal level and they raise interesting.

[Dan Schreiber]

Topics and questions that are worth chewing.

[Mike Carruthers]

Over together as a family. Every episode is rated Grim, Grimmer or Grimmest. So you, your kids, your whole family can choose. What is the right level of grim for you? Though, if you're listening with Grandma, she's.

[Dan Schreiber]

Just gonna go for Grimmest. Trust me on this one. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest and our new season.

[Happy Mammoth Representative]

Available now from the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country. And back in time, through the sapphic history that shaped them, comes a brand new season of Cruising beyond the Bars. This is your host, Sarah Gabrielli and I've spent the past year interviewing history making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces. From bookstores to farms to line dancing.

[Sally Jenkins]

And much for 11 years, every night.

[Dan Schreiber]

Women slept illegally on the common.

[Sally Jenkins]

We would move down to the West Indies to form a lesbian nation. Meg Kristin coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked to say it was lesbian music. And that's kind of the origins of the Combaheever Collective.

[Happy Mammoth Representative]

You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday, starting February 4th.