← Something You Should Know
Something You Should Know
Your Hormones Control More Than You Think & How Big Mistakes Shape You
00:51:18
How hormones affect your body and mind, how to recover from major mistakes, and coffee’s surprising benefit.
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- [00:01]
Mike Carruthers
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- [01:15]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Because I think it's getting a really bad rep. You know, cortisol is a wonder hormone. You know, if any of your listeners got out of bed this morning, well, that was because of cortisol. Because you had this wonderful boost of cortisol half an hour before you woke up.
- [01:28]
Mike Carruthers
Also a very big benefit to drinking lots of coffee. And the former CEO of Sony Pictures on how to handle your biggest mistakes. And he made a big one.
- [01:40]
Michael Linton
What you're referring to is a movie called the Interview about two hapless journalists played by Seth Rogen and James Franco who go off to North Korea to assassinate Kim Jong Un. I jumped up and said let's make the movie and and disaster ensued.
- [01:55]
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- [03:19]
Michael Linton
something you should KNOW Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today.
- [03:28]
Mike Carruthers
Something you should Know with Mike Carruthers have you noticed how people love to give advice? Trouble is, people hate getting it, and it's the perfect topic to begin this episode of SOMETHING YOU should Know. Research shows that unsolicited advice often backfires because of something psychologists call reactance, our natural resistance to feeling controlled or told what to do. The moment someone pushes advice on us, part of the brain starts defending our independence and freedom of choice, which is why people often resist advice about eating, drinking, parenting, money, politics, and just about everything else. What actually does change behavior? Research on observational learning and social influence suggests that people are far more likely to copy what they see others doing rather than follow direct instructions. When someone quietly models a behavior, exercising regularly, staying calm, in conflict, putting down their phone at dinner, others are surprisingly likely to imitate it, especially when the results look positive. In other words, if you really want to influence people, stop lecturing them and start demonstrating. And that is something you should know. People throw around the word hormones all the time. We blame hormones for mood swings, stress, weight gain, low energy, poor sleep, aging, even attraction. But if you were to stop people and ask them to explain what hormones are and how they work, they'd probably struggle. Are hormones chemicals signals messengers? And how can something so invisible have so much control over how we think, sleep, eat, age and function every day? It turns out that hormones are part of an extraordinary communication system inside your body. Hormones help determine when you wake up, when you feel hungry, how stressed you are, how your body handles sugar, why puberty happens, what menopause is, and even how your body responds to fear and love. In fact, scientists believe there may still be hormones in your body that we haven't yet discovered. So what exactly are these powerful signals? How do they work? And what happens when when the system goes wrong? Here to explain it all is Dr. Saira Hamid. She is an endocrinologist in the UK and author of the book Signals the Hidden Power and Secret Language of hormones. Hi Dr. Hamid, welcome to Something youg Should Know.
- [06:18]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Hi Mike, It's a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me.
- [06:22]
Mike Carruthers
So I must admit that I don't know a lot about hormones, and I think most people don't really know a lot about hormones. And the reason for that Is that they're not really easy to understand. They're a little elusive. So can you, in a very simple way, explain what hormones are and what they do?
- [06:43]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Hormones are the chemical signals in your body. You can think of them as being like your body's text messages. Your body consists of 30 trillion cells, and those cells need to be in communication with one another so that they're all doing the right thing at the right time. So it's your hormones that mean that you are not just a being an organism of 30 trillion cells. You are an interconnected human being. You can think of hormones being like signals that come out of a radio transmitter. The radio transmitter are the glands in your body, like the adrenal glands or the thyroid gland or the pituitary gland. And these gland transmitters are sending out their hormone signals to distant parts of the body. The hormones travel in the bloodstream and they go from the gland to the target cell, and they contain an instruction, and the target cell must then carry out that instruction. And these hormones are affecting every moment of your day as well as the milestones in life. So they are pretty important.
- [07:52]
Mike Carruthers
How many different kinds of hormones are there? Do we know clinically?
- [07:57]
Dr. Saira Hamid
So as an endocrinologist that's a doctor who specializes in hormones, there are about 15, 20 that we would see fairly commonly. And we would see them because somebody either has too much of that hormone that's causing problems or too little. And again, that can cause other problems. Sometimes the body can become resistant to the hormone. What does that mean? That means a bit like if you're getting. If a radio program is being broadcast, but you, the listener, you tune out, you're just not listening. You're not understanding or listening into the information. So there can be a variety of issues. Clinically, we see these issues in our clinics. And, yeah, about sort of 15 to 20 are probably clinically relevant, but there's a whole lot more out there. And what's so exciting in the field is that more and more are being discovered.
- [08:45]
Mike Carruthers
So we don't really know all the hormones there are.
- [08:48]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Exactly. So we could never believe in the here and now that we are at the peak of our knowledge in this area. There will be more hormones discovered, and as they're discovered, we will understand more and more about how we as human beings work. So it's an exciting time.
- [09:07]
Mike Carruthers
So you've explained how hormones are in our body, and they're signals going to different parts of our body. But people also take hormones, right? There's hormone replacement therapy, for example, where people are putting hormones from outside into their body. Where did those hormones come from?
- [09:27]
Dr. Saira Hamid
We need to understand what is the structure, what is the molecular structure of that hormone. Once that has been elucidated, you can chemically synthesize a medicinal mimic, and that medicinal mimic can be identical to the naturally occurring hormone, or you can make tweaks to the molecular structure so that the medicinal version does something extra. So if we look at the example of glp, one very famous hormone now because of drugs like Mounjaro, WeGovy, etc. The naturally released hormone released by the gut after eating lasts in the system minutes. Whereas if you inject these medicinal versions, they will last in the system for a week because of those changes to the molecular structure. That's what we're doing when we replace a hormone. And as I say, it can be like, for like, or, or we can have changed it in some way to benefit the patient.
- [10:34]
Mike Carruthers
But they're artificially created. They're not getting it from an animal or a person or a cadaver. These are artificially created.
- [10:43]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Exactly right. So in the history of endocrinology, the first hormone replacement, exactly as you say, came from animal glands. So the first insulin came from dog pancreases. And then once there was proof of concept, for decades, insulin was extracted from pig and cow pancreases, and that is what patients were injecting. The issue with the insulin example is that there was an unpredictable potency. And so if you gave an animal derived insulin, there was a high risk of hypoglycemia, because the dose you took yesterday, that could have been fine, but then you injected the same volume the next day and you overshot. The blood sugar went too low. And as molecular biology improved, as pharmaceutical manufacturing improved, it became possible to make synthetic versions. Not only did that lead to much greater predictability in terms of how the hormone would be in the body, but it also meant that we could produce these hormones in far larger quantities. Because if you're relying on animal derived hormones to get enough hormone to serve a population, you're talking about a huge supply of animals that you would require to do that.
- [12:08]
Mike Carruthers
So generally, we've got these hormones in our body and they're doing what they do, and things seem to be fine. Where do things go wrong?
- [12:18]
Dr. Saira Hamid
The paradigm in endocrinology is as follows. You can have too much of a hormone, so the gland just starts overproducing. That signal bombards the target cell with the instruction, and the person will develop symptoms. So in endocrinology, that's case study one, you've got too much.
- [12:39]
Mike Carruthers
And what's an example of that?
- [12:42]
Dr. Saira Hamid
An example would be what we call thyrotoxicosis, otherwise known as Graves disease. This is an autoimmune illness of the thyroid gland. So the body launches an autoimmune strike on the thyroid gland, and the thyroid gland responds by churning out unregulated quantities of thyroid hormone. Thyroid is the metabolism hormone. So having tons of thyroid in the system means your metabolic rate revs up, you can lose a great deal of weight. One of the byproducts of metabolism is heat generation. So you become completely heat intolerant. It might be December and you're wearing a T shirt. You can become very agitated, very anxious, your heart rate speeds up a wealth of symptoms, and people feel very, very unwell. That's one of the more dramatic presentations in endocrinology. And the second part of that is we always say if there's too much hormone, the treatment is you suppress it. And we have ways of doing that. Situation two is a gland fails for some reason, so it stops producing the hormone it should produce or can't produce it in sufficient quantities for that hormone to carry the message to the target cells efficiently. If we stick with the thyroid, the opposite scenario to the one I just described is hypothyroidism or an underactive thyroid, sometimes called Hashimoto's. The thyroid loses its ability to produce thyroid hormone, and then we see the opposite symptoms to the ones we just went into. Metabolism slows down, you put on weight, you're feeling very, very cold. You can feel very tired, very, very depressed, very unmotivated to do anything. And the second part of that paradigm is we say if there's too little hormone, you give it back. So too much hormone, you suppress it. Too little hormone, you give it back.
- [14:47]
Mike Carruthers
I want to ask you, I'm really curious if most people go through life and never have a concern about their hormones, or are we sooner or later going to have a problem or what?
- [14:59]
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- [16:23]
Mike Carruthers
We're talking about your hormones and how they work with Dr. Saira Hamid. She's an endocrinologist and author of the book Signals the Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones. So doctor, I want to get a sense of how often people have hormone problems. Like if you randomly picked 100 people off the street and lined them up, I wouldn't recommend this but and check their hormones, are most of those people going to have problems with their hormones when you check them? Are most of those people not going to have a concern whatsoever about their hormones or what?
- [17:02]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Oh, such a good question. And there are various nuances to my answer. The first thing to say is if you had asked me that question a generation ago. So if you had asked me that question pre1970, I would have said, yeah, most people are okay, that endocrine hormone illness is not that common. Most people could go through life not really thinking about hormones or indeed ever having to even know what an endocrinologist is. So time, the timeframe we're talking about is important. And the reason I say that is is that today such a huge number of people have a condition called insulin resistance that unfortunately it's no longer possible to say that most of us are living with good hormone health. Insulin resistance means that the body becomes resistant to the hormone insulin. It can no longer hear insulin's message. And in terms of your metabolic health, this is a disaster. I'll give you one example of insulin resistance. Insulin we often think of as being the blood sugar hormone. So you eat something, the blood sugar goes up, your pancreas detects the blood sugar rise and will release the hormone insulin. Insulin clears that sugar from the blood, the Blood sugar returns to normal. So that is physiology, that is when it's working perfectly, when the body becomes resistant to insulin's message. Insulin cannot clear sugar from the blood effectively, so it will release insulin in higher and higher quantities. That is, the hormone is now shouting at the target cells just to try to get its job done. And for a period of time, that can work. So the blood sugar can be cleared from the blood. But after a while, the resistance becomes so strong that no matter how strongly the insulin message is transmitted, not enough sugar can be cleared from the blood. The blood sugar rises. You are diagnosed with pre diabetes or type 2 diabetes. That is just one facet of insulin resistance. Insulin resistance is massively common in the us, massively common in the uk where I practice. So the time period that we're talking about is important.
- [19:27]
Mike Carruthers
Why is that? What happened?
- [19:29]
Dr. Saira Hamid
What happened was this. So genetics didn't change. Genetics can't change in 50 years on a population basis. We had such massive societal changes in the food that we eat and the lifestyle that we lead, so that it's. The world is now set up to make you insulin resistant, not to make your insulin signaling work better. So you now have to go really out of your way to eat a diet that does not promote insulin resistance. You have to go out of your way to be active because you, you can literally be still all day. You can have a phone and a thumb and everything can come to you. You can have a WI FI connection and you can work and go to meetings and do your shopping and anything else you need to do to get on with life. So our human biology, our physiology didn't change. Right. But the environment massively changed and public health hasn't kept up.
- [20:31]
Mike Carruthers
You were going to say something and I interrupted you with a question.
- [20:34]
Dr. Saira Hamid
The second thing I was going to say is that 50% of the population from midlife onwards will have a hormone condition, and that is menopause. So if you look at women from, you know, mid-40s onwards, they will have, I would say I'm going to call it a change in their hormones. I'm not necessarily going to call it a disorder, because some women go through perimenopause and menopause and they're fine.
- [21:00]
Mike Carruthers
So except for those two things, the insulin and menopause. The other, I don't hear a lot about all the other hormones very often. So are we pretty much. Okay. And those are the two big problems?
- [21:17]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Yeah, so those are the two problems, I think, that the public would come across or which, you know, are happening. At a very high prevalence. But as we spoke about at the start of our conversation, there are many other hormones buzzing away every day inside you, doing their thing. You're not even aware of them. And they can cause problems like the thyroid issues that we spoke about. But for most people, most people will go through life and they won't think about their hormones. Their hormones will do their thing in the background. The hormones will guide them through all of life's major milestones and they will glide you through every day. From getting you up in the morning, that's cortisol, to feeling hungry, that's the stomach hormone ghrelin, to feeling full GLP1 as we spoke about, and other gut hormones and so on. But you won't notice it. It just feels like life. When your hormones work well, life feels normal.
- [22:10]
Mike Carruthers
Do hormones react to. You mentioned diet and insulin being the prime example. But what about the other hormones? Are they reacting to our lifestyle things or they do what they do regardless of more or less what we do?
- [22:27]
Dr. Saira Hamid
A really key message I'd love your listeners to take away from our conversation today is that we don't control our hormones, our hormones control us. But exactly as you've pointed out with the insulin example, we can live considerately alongside them. Another hormone that's having a bit of a moment right now is cortisol. And cortisol people are very interested in because it's got the moniker, the stress hormone. And that's right in the sense that physiologically, if we are under stress of some sort, get a very bad flu, for example, you break your leg, you're undergoing surgery, your adrenal glands will release this hormone cortisol. But we will also release cortisol in sort of life's day to day skirmishes, like, you know, having a big presentation to do at work or checking your bank balance and it's not as robust as you'd like it to be, or having an argument with someone, you might release a bit of cortisol to sort of bolster you through that moment in time. And there's a bit of an online movement and it's very big on social media, that cortisol is somehow an enemy and it needs to be suppressed. We've got to get the cortisol down. There's this idea that when cortisol is up for too long, it can make us unwell. Now to clarify, Mike, there is a pathological condition where the body over produces cortisol condition called Cushing's and a patient can be very, very unwell. That's not what we're talking about here. We're talking about day to day life. And can you sort of produce enough, slightly too much cortisol that it's affecting your health because you're stressed all the time. And the answer is possibly. But what I want to say is this, that there is no supplement or tonic or elixir you can take to reduce your cortisol level. And actually what you need to do is look at the root cause, which is the stress. And how do you manage the stress? And very old fashioned, I suppose, approach. But there's a reason why this sort of age old wisdom goes down the generations. It's things like getting an early night, keeping the body moving, spending time with family and friends, people you love. And do it in real life, don't do it through a screen or digital communication. These things will reduce your stress levels potentially. I don't want to rose tint things for your listeners and say that this is the magic solution. It depends what the stress is. But the idea that cortisol is a baddie is wrong. And I'll tell you why. Because when you don't have enough cortisol in a condition called Addison's disease, you are very, very sick. So you need cortisol, you need it to run at the appropriate level. In most of us that's the case.
- [25:17]
Mike Carruthers
But your body produces and releases cortisol because cortisol does what? What is the benefit of it?
- [25:25]
Dr. Saira Hamid
So the reason the body releases cortisol in the first place to deal with stress is that it will have certain effects that in the moment will help. It will raise the blood pressure, some rise in the blood sugar, make you very alert, very hypervigilant. Now all of this through evolution was brilliant because if a saber toothed tiger was circling the camp, you want all those things to happen so that you're ready to run away. Okay, but today we're not talking about that scenario.
- [26:01]
Mike Carruthers
But I do hear a lot of people, a lot of people that come on this show talk about the problem of increased cortisol and that the stress is causing too much cortisol.
- [26:12]
Dr. Saira Hamid
I would say that I want to be on team Cortisol, Mike, because I think it's getting a really bad rep is a wonder hormone. You know, if, if any of your listeners got out of bed this morning. Well, that was because of cortisol, because you had this wonderful boost of cortisol half an hour before you woke up. That's part of your natural circadian rhythm. And that gave you a massive Energy boost. Blood pressure went up a bit, blood sugar went up a bit, brain alert, and suddenly you're like, I can get out of bed, I'm ready. If you think about it this way, sometimes you can go to bed the night before and everything just seems too much. I can't answer that email. I can't deal with that load of laundry. I'm absolutely done. And yes, there are many benefits to sleep, but one of them is this massive cortisol boost you get in the early hours of the morning. And suddenly you're like, whoa, right, you're like a clockwork toy that's suddenly been wound up again. So I am pro cortisol and I think all of these hacks and hype of I've got to get it down, I've got to get it down. I think if we just live well and manage stress as best we can within the confines of being normal human beings living in the real world, cortisol will take care of itself.
- [27:25]
Mike Carruthers
Well, that's good news. There's one less thing to worry so much about, huh?
- [27:29]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Totally. I agree with you.
- [27:31]
Mike Carruthers
Well, it is strange how mysterious hormones are. I mean, nobody really. I don't think most people really understand how they work. So I appreciate you clarifying the mystery. I've been speaking with endocrinologist Dr. Saira Hamid. She is author of the book Signals the Hidden Power and Secret Language of Hormones. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Doctor, thank you for being here.
- [27:57]
Dr. Saira Hamid
Thank you so much, Mike. It has been a real pleasure speaking to you.
- [28:02]
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- [28:32]
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- [28:52]
Mike Carruthers
Done.
- [28:52]
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- [29:05]
Mike Carruthers
We all make mistakes. How many times have you heard that you simply cannot get very far in life without making mistakes. Sometimes very big mistakes. And a big mistake can leave you feeling alone, regretful and devastated. I imagine everyone listening, if you think about it, has made a mistake that has been hard to come back from. Mistakes can linger in our mind for a long time, SAP our confidence, and get in the way of future success. So what exactly is a mistake? How is a mistake different from failure? And how can you get better at moving past it? Well, Michael Linton knows a thing or two about mistakes. He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment, and he approved the production of a movie that truly became a huge and very public mistake that caused an international crisis involving the North Korean government, cyber attacks, threats, and worldwide headlines. It is truly quite a story with an important lesson for everyone about making and overcoming mistakes. Today, Michael Linton serves on the board of the Rand Corporation and the Smithsonian, and he's co author of a book called From Mistakes to Owning youg Past so It Doesn't Own youn. Hi, Michael. Welcome.
- [30:27]
Michael Linton
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me.
- [30:30]
Mike Carruthers
So first explain, and I know you've really studied this now explain what a mistake is and how it's different from failure.
- [30:39]
Michael Linton
Failures are when people, in our description of it, when people come together to make a calculated decision with analysis that has ambition and for whatever reason, it doesn't work. In the case of mistakes, typically what happens is it's an individual. They make a decision in the moment, the decision is charged by emotion and it doesn't work. And that mistake leads to regret. And specifically, in addition to all of that, we didn't want to talk about humble bragging, which is oftentimes how failures are dealt with in books where they say, oh, this kind of thing didn't work out. But lo and behold, over in the corner, there was a pot of gold we didn't realize was there. No, these mistakes had no happy outcomes. And when we also looked into the field and tried to find literature on it, we discovered there was very little, if any.
- [31:35]
Mike Carruthers
You know, as soon as you said that, I imagine everyone listening could think of an experience, a mistake that they've made that fits that description. That was very, very tough.
- [31:47]
Michael Linton
I would add one other thing, Mike, which is that very few people actually have the opportunity to have failures outside perhaps of their own marriage, because, you know, it does require a big decision. And not everybody has that opportunity. Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody makes mistakes almost every day.
- [32:06]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, but. But there is this idea that, you know, you learn from your mistakes, that mistakes are okay because as Long as you learn from them.
- [32:13]
Michael Linton
The unfortunate part of it is, is that oftentimes, myself included, people try and avoid looking at those mistakes after you've made them. And if you avoid that process, then you're not going to learn from them
- [32:27]
Mike Carruthers
by definition or maybe rationalize those mistakes, try to explain them away. Oh, well, we didn't see that this thing, and how could we have known? But it wasn't really my fault.
- [32:41]
Michael Linton
Exactly. And I think when you say my fault, I think actually in my looking at it, one of the reasons, I think, why people are so reluctant to talk about their mistakes is it's really down to you. It's really your responsibility for having made the mistake. Failure, you can blame on a number of different people who might have, might or might not have been involved. But a mistake, it's just on you.
- [33:03]
Mike Carruthers
So tell the story of your big mistake about the movie that you approved. When you were at Sony, you approved the production of a movie that caused so many problems. Big, big problems.
- [33:15]
Michael Linton
I had been at Sony Pictures at the time for a little more than a decade and we had a very good process in place for agreeing for green lighting movies. We typically got them to a point where we knew who all the actors were, we knew the budget, and then we brought people, a group of people together in a room, people from marketing, finance, public policy, etc. And then we would come to a decision along the lines of what I said earlier about things that have ambition. Sometimes it worked. Most of the times it worked, meaning the pictures delivered, sometimes it didn't. In this particular case, and what you're referring to is a movie called the Interview. The movie is about two hapless journalists, played by Seth Rogen and James Franco, who go off to North Korea under the auspices of the CIA to assassinate Kim Jong Un. And when we agreed to make this movie, before we could get it out, the North Korean government, through a variety of circumstances, informed us that they did not want us to put this movie out and ultimately hacked our systems. But specifically what happened, why it was a mistake, was everybody at the studio who was involved at the time on the creative side of the business and the marketing and finance really wanted to make the movie. It had already been sort of through the pro, through of various hands. And it was really down to me. We were in a competitive situation because Universal had a relationship with Seth Rogen, who was going to direct the movie and was in it. And he knew that if we didn't, and we knew that if we didn't want to make the Movie they would. So it all came down to a day or a day and a half. I asked if we could do a read through, which means that you bring the actors together and you typically do it with a comedy to see. See whether the jokes actually play in a room. And that's exactly what happened. We had all the actors there, all the creative executives involved were there, everybody. As I walked into the room, I was actually the only suit in the room. Everybody else was dressed, you know, casually, jeans, T shirts, and the eyes were on me because I said, I said earlier, everybody wanted to make this movie. We went through the read through. It was really funny. Everybody was laughing, myself included.
- [35:33]
Dr. Saira Hamid
And.
- [35:33]
Michael Linton
And normally what I would have done at the end of a meeting like that was I would have said, okay, fine, we'll assemble this afternoon in another room and go through that process I described earlier. Instead, I jumped up and said, let's do it, let's make the movie. And disaster ensued. So that's the mistake.
- [35:52]
Mike Carruthers
When the North Korean government contacted you through channels that they use, however they do that, was it a request or a threat? If you release this movie, we will do something horrible?
- [36:04]
Michael Linton
Well, the threat started in a subtle way. We weren't even sure where it was coming from because we didn't have the. The US didn't have established relationships with North Korea at the time, relations with North Korea. And that started in June, before the movie came out. And then over time, when we didn't back down, they amplified the threat, particularly once they started hacking our systems.
- [36:29]
Mike Carruthers
So the movie was released. But. Well, I don't explain, explain what happened.
- [36:35]
Michael Linton
We continued to put out trailers. We continued to say that we were going to release the movie in the fourth quarter of that year, in the Christmas period. What wound up happening was they hacked our systems and they started exposing, not just emails from the studio, which were salacious and involved a lot of celebrities, but also actually movies that we had not yet released, like the Karate Kid, which was a full blown movie that was just put out scripts, like the new James Bond, which was confidential and had been released. And with each release of these, the threats got bigger and bigger to the point where they finally started threatening the movie theaters themselves to say that if they put the movie into those theaters, they would physically attack the theaters. The theaters backed down the big chains. And what wound up happening is we wound up scrambling around to try and figure out how we could get the movie released. We wound up doing that through a bunch of independent movie theaters, not the big chains, as well as by releasing it online through our own downloading service as well as Google Play who participated with us. No one else was willing to do that.
- [37:45]
Mike Carruthers
But at what point did you say this is a mistake?
- [37:49]
Michael Linton
Well, there was a moment in time where the heat was coming on the studio very hard because of all of those leaked emails and in particular Amy Pascal who was running the actual film studio at the time. And I was invited to come to New York to speak on Freed Zakaria show and explain what was going on in a brief segment. And I chose to do that because I thought this will take some of the heat off. People were would really properly understand what Amy and others at the studio were going through. When I get to New York and get to the studio in the green room, Fried Zakaria said the the US government just announced that they had figured out that the North Koreans was responsible for this attack. And Freed wanted to hear because. Because President Obama was going to come out and make a statement what he was going to say. A journal asked journalist asked two questions. The first was what are you going to do about the North Koreans? And the second was what do you think about what Sony had been doing? I think the president at the time didn't have an answer to the first, so he chose to answer the second which he was critical of us because he didn't properly understand why we hadn't released the movie yet. We couldn't get it in theaters as I mentioned earlier. So Freed then turned to me and said with that if you're going to come on you need to spend the full hour which is what I wound up doing, explaining exactly what had happened. This is the long way around of saying two weeks later I got a phone call from the President, very gracious of him to, to say that he had, he himself had been mistaken that and he apologized for, for accusing us of self censorship. But then he said to me, don't you think it was a mistake to make a movie about a hostile leader of a foreign nation where you kill him? And that was the moment where the penny dropped. And I said, you know what? Yeah, that was a mistake.
- [39:45]
Mike Carruthers
So that was the moment you confirmed to yourself yeah, this is a mistake. And so then what did you do? What is the process of dealing with that mistake?
- [39:55]
Michael Linton
The first part of the process is to understand something called a schema. A schema is really a way of seeing the world and it really provides a very useful purpose to our lives where we it's sort of a prism and it provides us with a shorthand on how to React to things. A simple schema by way of example is we all know how to walk into an elevator. Typically when there's a bunch of people walking to an elevator, elevator people go into one corner, another corner, a third and a fourth before you fill in the middle. And that's just a way that prevents a mess getting into an elevator. But we develop all sorts of schemas, and those schemas can be very useful if used in the right way and not so useful in the wrong way. My schema, the specific schema that resulted after exploration in the mistake, was early in my life. I'd been moved by my family to the Netherlands, where I didn't speak the language. We came from the United States. I was a very lonely kid for a couple of years, and I developed this need to be part of the cool gang, which obviously I was never going to be a part of, and a real sense of fomo. And that sort of traveled with me throughout my life and really came to the fore in that room where after 10 years of being the guy in the suit who was responsible for saying no, I got tired of it, and in that moment, determined that I wanted to be part of that group and in a moment of weakness, said, yeah, let's do this. And so one of the things I learned was you need to understand what your schemas are. You need to understand whether they serve a purpose in that moment or whether you're in. Whether you're in the right context to be using that schema or you are not. So that's one thing I very much learned. There are a bunch of others which we can go through.
- [41:47]
Mike Carruthers
Well, I'm going to. It's curious that you said, you know, you wanted to be one of the cool kids, but, you know, being in the top echelons of Sony kind of gives you cool kid status. I would think it does to a degree.
- [42:05]
Michael Linton
But you'd be surprised, sort of the way that the hierarchy and the structure works out in Hollywood. Yes, it's true that studio executives occupy a certain space in that hierarchy, but you're never really part of the inner, inner circle the way you would be if you were a creative executive or somebody much closer to the talent. So it's a nuance, but it's there.
- [42:30]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah. Yeah. And so you said there are other things you learned that we could go through. Like what?
- [42:36]
Michael Linton
Well, there's something that's called the cheetah pause. We all know the rule that. Or maybe we don't. That if you're angry and you Write a letter or these days you write an email and anger in the moment. You're supposed to like, take a, take a pause, put the letter or the email to one side, wait a day and see whether you really want to send it the next day. Well, that's probably advisable in general to do, to make decisions in the heat of the moment when you're all charged up emotionally. That's not particularly if the decision has consequence, which this one did, that's also a problem. And that's a lesson that I learned. Another is we divided. We realized that all mistakes are sort of divided up into a three act structure. There's the events that happen before the mistake that lead you to a place that makes the mistake. Those are sort of things like the schema, there's the mistake itself and then there's the things that you sort of carry with you after the mistake, principally a sense of shame. And that burden lived with me for a very long time. I was, you know, I would walk into rooms and think everybody was looking at me. Years after the whole event occurred, which is a whole other thing called the spotlight effect, where you think you have this thing sort of emblazoned on your forehead when in truth, nobody even remembers the incident. But that third act, that shame, that not dealing with the mistake, trying to understand how you feel about it, how you did it, that it's in and of itself is a mistake. And by talking this through with Josh Steiner, my writing partner in this, and we also recruited a very, very able, wonderful woman from Johns Hopkins, Alison Papadakis, who's a professor of psychology there, it was extremely helpful to work through all of that stuff and, you know, get out of that place where I felt shame about what I'd done.
- [44:34]
Mike Carruthers
What do you feel now about what you have done?
- [44:38]
Michael Linton
I don't feel shame, I don't feel regret. I feel like I have some resolution around it. Part of it, to be honest, is which is a whole other part of the technique which is sort of like flooding. You know, there's this thing in psychology where when you fear something, spiders or flying, they flood you with whatever it is. So in the case of spiders, they put a lot of spiders around you, or if you're afraid of flying, they make you fly a lot. By talking about this mistake over and over and over again, it sort of succeeded in doing that same thing for me.
- [45:14]
Mike Carruthers
So you're shining a light on this in part to tell your story, but also what is it you want people to take from this and put in Their own life. Like, what's the message for this?
- [45:26]
Michael Linton
The biggest message is, quite honestly, and I know it's a little bit of an overused word, but it's permission to actually, and the courage to look at one's mistakes and a little bit of a guide as to how one should look at them. And hopefully people who read the book or listen to this podcast will gain some purchase on how to do that. That's really the point of the whole thing, frankly. And if we can get, and I've seen already, some positive indication that it's having a good result, that's really the reason we did this.
- [46:05]
Mike Carruthers
In your career, though, there have been other mistakes, I'm sure. Probably other pictures that you greenlit that didn't do well. Why not talk about those two? I mean, is this one just particularly because it was your fault?
- [46:20]
Michael Linton
You know, you gotta find a mistake that comes down to a moment, which this did, and that you're personally responsible for, which this did. I think the magnitude of it helped to sort of illustrate the point, and that doesn't hurt either. And the fact that I just carried this shame around with me, I really did want to deal with this particular mistake. There aren't that many things that I felt as strongly about or carried with me the way that I carried this mistake. So I wanted to deal with that.
- [46:54]
Mike Carruthers
I see. Well, I get that. I mean, that was. Certainly was very public and your face was on it, wasn't it?
- [47:01]
Michael Linton
For sure. Yes. And even the idea of talking about it the way I'm talking about it with you or putting it into the book or the excerpts in the newspapers, that in and of itself was a little bit scary to do, but I'm glad I've done it now.
- [47:16]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, but the way you talk about it now is it seems like you're a step or two removed from it, that you can talk about it objectively and not get all worked up about it, like you've made peace with it.
- [47:26]
Michael Linton
Exactly. And I definitely would not have been able to do that a few years ago. Not a chance.
- [47:31]
Mike Carruthers
But do you. Do you ever get through a day and not think about the interview?
- [47:36]
Michael Linton
Absolutely. Now I do. And you're right, you know, closer to the time, and it's been almost a decade now, it was in my head every day. But that's. That hasn't been the case now for a long time, and even less so since I started doing this.
- [47:50]
Mike Carruthers
You know, I have to ask you, because I certainly have read about North Korea enough to know that they, you know, they're known for doing some pretty horrible things. Why poke that bear? Why not? Well, yeah, why poke that bear?
- [48:07]
Michael Linton
At the time, the North Koreans were less sort of in the news and less understood than they are today. At the time, they were sort of a bunch of people in funny hats that we didn't really see as a threat. Now we see them very differently.
- [48:22]
Mike Carruthers
Did they threaten you? Did they threaten the actors? Was it a real significant threat that you felt we need to get security here or what?
- [48:32]
Michael Linton
No, I. Well, it's interesting you ask. So in the summer before we released the movie and after the first communication or their sort of effort to say that they were unhappy with the movie, I did reach out to somebody at the State Department and the RAND Corporation to try and understand the capabilities of the North Koreans. And in both cases, they told me not to worry, that they were more bark than bite. I think they were basing most of their analysis on Kim Jong Il, who had died a few years before. So nobody was really familiar with his son, Kim Jong Un, who, it turns out is a lot more aggressive. But even knowing that they didn't describe the cyber capability as North Korea, which it turns out are considerable, they still were very. The FBI in particular, who was terrific throughout the process, were adamant that they didn't have physical capabilities here in the United States. So I wasn't personally. Yes, they did threaten, but I was not personally worried. I wasn't worried for the employees of Sony. I was not worried for the physical safety of the actors.
- [49:40]
Mike Carruthers
Well, it's quite a story, and I admire that you are willing to shine a big light on your big mistake so that people can perhaps learn to deal with their own mistakes better. I've been talking with Michael Linton. He is the former CEO of Sony Entertainment and currently on the boards of the Rand Corporation and the Smithsonian. He's co author of a book called From Mistakes to Owning youg Past, so It Doesn't Own youn. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Michael, thanks for spending time.
- [50:11]
Michael Linton
Thank you very much, Mike.
- [50:16]
Mike Carruthers
I'm sure you've heard that coffee can wake you up, sharpen your focus, maybe even improve your mood. But one of the most surprising things coffee appears to do is protect your liver. And researchers say the effect is so strong that some doctors now routinely ask liver patients about their coffee habits. Multiple large studies continue to show that regular coffee drinkers have a significantly lower risk of liver disease, liver scarring, fatty liver disease, and even liver cancer. What's fascinating is that coffee seems to interfere with inflammation and the formation of scar tissue in the liver, almost like a protective shield against years of wear and tear. And the benefit doesn't seem to require huge amounts. Research suggests even one to two cups of coffee a day can help, while protection appears to increase around three or four cups a day. Even decaf has shown to have some benefit. Which means coffee's protective powers aren't just because of the caffeine. Scientists are still sorting out exactly which compounds in coffee are responsible. But coffee may be one of the few pleasures in life that your liver actually appreciates. And that is something you should know. Now. There is no doubt you know somebody who drinks coffee who would love to hear that story, or maybe the great story from Michael Linton about the movie the Interview. If you would just refer your friends to this episode, it helps grow our audience and I think your friends would appreciate it. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thank you for listening today to something you should know.
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