Why We All Think We’re Right

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:13

And we are back Monday. Or is it the sixth today? Just after the fourth, yeah, the fourth of July, two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this country. Robert Watson and myself, two nobody to know nothing. What is going on, Robert?

SPEAKER_00 0:29

It's a beautiful day, and I thought we would talk about sleep.

SPEAKER_01 0:34

What's that? I'm just kidding.

SPEAKER_00 0:39

So I bring it up because it's the idea of science, right? To know and data and how we uh create the ideas about what is a norm. And the idea that science is to know, but as you have realized through your life, what you think you knew at 20, again, scientifically, and what you know at 40 changes. And so I was reading a study from New York Times about sleep, and it basically said, you know, you've heard eight hours of sleep, but the data that's a little more sketchier than you think. Because in essence, what they come down to now, now, at this moment in time, is about 6.5 hours of sleep that is consistent and repeated over and over again. In other words, we go to bed at 10 o'clock, we wake up at 4.30. You know, that we can't keep the same schedule and get our body on the same nightly schedule in about six and a half hours. And so what they talk about is what they call data clusters, meaning there is no right answer. They're looking at all the data, and they say that they're, like, for example, mortality tables, that if you sleep 9 to 11 hours, you have a much higher risk of mortality, meaning dying. And if you get down into the seven to six hour range, there seems to be kind of a sweet spot. But what they're really saying is it's about six and a half hours of every night consistently, you go to bed at six, wake up at 4:30. So the data is, you know, they're still doing the analysis even after all these years. And what they end up doing was called a meta-analysis, which is an analysis of the analysis to be able to come to some kind of aggregate solution. So I say that because most of the things in our world, in our environment, are not physical, like we can see gravity, we can measure it, it's repeatable, we can do it time after time after time, and we'll get the same results. Once we do that, then it becomes predictive, right? Because it's so consistent that it becomes predictive. But most of the things, the supermajority of the things in our life are in fact not measurable, repeatable, and therefore predictable. So you end up with things like this meta-analysis, which is the you know, kind of the best we can have at the time. So a lot of the arguments, a lot of the things that people fight over, are in fact not science, but where we are currently in the science. Meaning, in other words, to make a ridiculous point, at one point we thought the world was flat, right? We now know the world is round. The reality is that we're only as good as the current state of science.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

Most people know the world is round.

SPEAKER_00 3:40

I know that.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

I'm not saying most people too. Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:47

So it's just it's really kind of a cool way to look at the world and realize that I remember in the 1980s they were trying to suggest that hamburgers cause cancer. Well, of course, that was kind of ridiculous. It they were how they got the data, how they did it, I don't know. But it's kind of a ridiculous finding. They've also found, you know, that there is uh we call them spurious correlations, things that are correlated, that we think they're correlated because the data looks like they're correlated, but they have nothing to do with each other, but it just so happens the way that's the data's aligned. So my point is a lot of the things we fight about are going to change anyhow. Because again, as the science gets better and we look at things better, like you talked about this morning, you spent a lot of time online and you were saying, oops, let me scratch that. I spent a lot of time with ChatGPT.

SPEAKER_01 4:35

Yeah. Well, and it's pretty crazy. I mean, we're having I'm having issues with my computer. I need to buy a new one, but it's like it's the one that I want is gonna cost me a thousand dollars, and I don't have a thousand dollars. So I was talking to it, you know, I have this iMac that's from 2019, and it started asking me all these questions about we'll try this, look at this, show me that, send me pictures, show me this, show me that. And like it literally broke it down for me. Like, here's what's going on, you know, and I can possibly go through it, fix it, get it to last, you know, another couple years. But it's it's funny because you and I have had this conversation before, you know, with this podcast, with computers, with all this stuff, like I switched to a Mac in 2019 because I had bought a Windows, you know, PC, and it only lasts me like a year and a half because every time you update it, it gets worse and worse. Well, what's going on is these computers are holding a little bit of crap from the last up from the previous version, and so now you have 10 versions on your computer that are still there and it doesn't delete the nine, the other nine, but you only re- need the one operating system, so it slows it down. And so that's pretty much where it was coming from. So, but yeah, I mean, time is is of the essence, and when you sit there and you look at it, and I was thinking last night, it's like put the download in there, and you're talking about sleep, and I'm like, Well, I'm going to bed. This thing's gonna take four hours to back up. I need the backup because if something goes wrong, I gotta go be able to go back to it. But um, it just was kind of funny because then you wake up this morning, I'm like, am I gonna mess with it now? I know that I have this, you know. Like this morning I was thinking, well, I have this, which I'm like, this, if I miss this, it's okay over the other scenario that I have because I have an interview tomorrow. But if it doesn't work for the interview tomorrow, do I really want to mess with that? Because I got a person coming over here. You and I can do not that you're not important, but you and I do this every week, and I have this one, this one guest that you know is gonna come in. So it's kind of crazy. But yeah, I sleep is something that with and even with the studies in general, right? Like, like you said, it's even with sleep, with uh vaping, you know, everyone's like, oh, vaping's way more safe, or the nicotine patch is way more safe because it doesn't have all the stuff a cigarette has in it. Well, they don't know that yet, right? Because everyone just started taking straight nicotine instead of instead of smoking it, you know, and getting all the ash and the tar and all that crap they put in the cigarette. But that's where we're going. So we don't even we don't even know what these studies say. We don't know, like you said, someone's in hamburgers are gonna kill you. Well, now it's like red meat's not bad. So it's like, how many times are we gonna change all this stuff and make it fit the narrative of the person who's trying to sell it to you, right?

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Right. And so um I've been married before, so my ex-wife mother had taken a drug to keep her pregnancy that they later found out made the child sterile. Right. Okay, not not a hundred percent, mind you, but high incidence of sterility. Yeah. And it, you know, kind of one of those paradoxes, right? But the fact was is that you don't really know how drugs are going to affect people until you get number one, 20 or 30 years with the study and then intergenerational because you don't know if there's some because people don't realize that viruses are transmitted between generations in the DNA. So we don't know exactly how they're going to go. So, for example, you could look in my DNA and see if my ancestors were exposed to the black plague or whatever. You could see it in the DNA. The the point being is we don't know a lot of things until we get a lot of what we call longitudinal data. And so that's just not something you can do a lot of times, as one professor did to me. There's not a lot of funding for that. And if you have a career in research, you do something for 30 years, that's your career. So you're you're making a decision that's gonna be uh you're making a decision in your 30s when you get your PhD that you want to do a 30-year study. That's it. That's that that's gonna be a big piece of your life as a as a researcher. And so that there's not a lot of desire to do that, but that's the data we really need as a culture and a civil. These are the data we really need. And plus, it was like we were doing political science data, and we were trying to say that the culture in the 1960s, the culture in the 1970s, the culture's 80s, 90s, 2000s were the same politically, and you're like, dude, I'm not sure that that's gonna get you anywhere. Like media, saying that the media culture is the same when I grew up and there were three network TVs and you know, half a dozen newspapers, and you're gonna try to say that media environment's the same as this media environment.

SPEAKER_01 9:48

Right.

SPEAKER_00 9:49

Yeah, really sometimes hard to compare apples to oranges.

SPEAKER_01 9:53

I was just sitting there thinking as you were talking about it. I'm like, man, I'm glad I'm not that person, and I'm glad that there's people that are willing to do that because that 30-year study is something that I just I I mean, you think about it, 30 years is a long time. I mean, I if I go back 30 years, I was 15. That study would have had to start when I was 15 years old. That's a big chunk of life to be studying something to find out what's going on, and there's people who are doing this all the time. I bet there's a ton of people who don't make it through that study and have to pass on their work to someone else to have them finish it. But we don't know any long-term effect, long-term effects of anything, you know. And that was that was one of the things, and yes, I'm gonna say the word, I'm gonna say COVID, because that's where we went with this vaccination for COVID. It was like they expect you when you don't have data, like we'll talk about like polio or the the the flu's not so much a difference because it's different every single year. There's some other virus, but like um, polio was a big one, measles was a big one, uh, tetanus is a big one. There's no data on like how that affects you when they first gave it, but they studied it for years and years and years before they said, Hey, this is viable, this is gonna work. But we take this other vaccination and we're like, oh, ah, we've been working on this one for about three months. We knew this was coming, so here's the vaccination takes it. Nothing, we'll figure out what would happen. And what do we do? We get like 30 years of data in one year, right? And we we have information on what it's doing, yet people some people still take the stupid thing and it and it's killing people, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:25

Well, it was when I got my uh pilot certificate, my uh flight instructor handed me the the the uh my little piece of paper and said, here you go. And I had like 60 hours of flight time. And I said, Is there any do you have any suggestions about how to get my experience level between 60 and 300 as fast as I possibly can, 300 hours? He said, Yeah, fly 300 hours. There is there's no substitute. One of the things you learn in your first three or four or five hundred hours is you learn that there is no substitute for experience. You just need to have that experience, you need to have those crises, you need to have all that stuff. It's part of the learning experience. Yes, they're teaching you basic flight, but you need to see all this other stuff. And so there's a weird little thing with the insurance companies that they have is um your highest premiums are between 100 and 200 hours. And somebody would think, well, that's kind of ridiculous. You would be much more dangerous at 60, right? And the answer is no. What happens is somewhere between 100 and 200 hours, you get comfortable that you've seen everything and you haven't. And the next thing that comes is the thing that surprises you. You get kind of lazy with your procedures, and so they they they warn you. And so what we saw is your insurance premiums really went down over 300, 350 hours. All of a sudden, your insurance premiums really dropped because now you had got over that bubble of I'm smart enough to be able to do this and I've seen enough things. And the reality is you haven't. Yeah. Um, but by the time you get to five or six hundred hours, you you've you've seen a few things, and you're, I'm not gonna say anybody's you know, never a little bit lazy, but the point is you're pretty sensitive to change and stuff by the time you get to five or six hundred hours.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

Yeah, well, I mean, I think it's just like you said, like there's all these perfect situations that can happen when you're driving, right? Oh my, you know, I grew up in a small town in Oregon where I drive on a slow street with, you know, three or four cars on the road at a time. You may not see any cars on that road at all. And then you go move into a city that has a high population, you're driving on the freeway all the time at a higher speed with more stuff around you, all that stuff. And you could spend your first 300 hours or in between those first 300 hours driving back and forth in a tiny town and not how to know how to deal with traffic, then get stuck in traffic and be in a totally different scenario.

SPEAKER_00 14:04

Oh, yeah. So the first time you drive in a foreign country, first time, I mean, all kinds of things. The the point I think we're both making is there's no substitute for experience.

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Right.

SPEAKER_00 14:15

And that's the way I think that's probably what people don't want to do is they want to say that there is a shortcut, and the fact of the matter, there isn't. And that's really what life is, is we we always talked about that in athletics, right? Yeah, there's not a shortcut. Put you got to put in the work. You gotta put in the work. Yep. Yeah. Same thing here.

SPEAKER_01 14:36

Yeah, and I mean, anything in life takes work. I mean, you look we're talking about like a study of sleep or a study of work, you know, like working out or whatever. Like, you're not gonna see the results that you want to see. If if I try to lose 20 pounds in a day, I'm not gonna see the results if I just don't eat for one day. That's that's all there is to it. Like, you have to do it. You have to see what works. You have to. I mean, I think you talk about your nutrition all the time where it's like I'm constantly changing, trying to see if this will help me, this will fix it, this will do this, this will do that. And that may mean trying a bunch of different supplements and finding out that one isn't good for your body, one is good for your body. You know, maybe that one your body has gotten immune to it or used to it or whatever, you get a up the dose. I mean, there's there's all kinds of scenarios where it's not one size fits all, and we don't have all the answers.

SPEAKER_00 15:24

No, and that that's very, very true in the supplement side and also in the workout side. So it's sometimes hard to change your regiment. For example, a regiment that's going to build muscle and you're trying to lose weight.

SPEAKER_01 15:39

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 15:39

Um, you have to be careful that your whatever your routine is, that your routine is geared toward weight loss, not muscle growth. Because what will happen is you will actually not go anywhere, and your body composition is shifting. So your routines are designed to do certain things, like I'm gonna build uh a chest or I'm gonna work on my waist. But be careful that the least useful measure oftentimes is weight.

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

And you also can get into these positions where you're retaining fluids for whatever reason, right? And you got to make sure that you're not because as my son said, he went changed his workout routine and went really heavy with some special operations guys. And the first thing he did was put on four pounds of fluid.

SPEAKER_01 16:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 16:30

And the reason was is he was doing a lot of retaining of lactic acid and stuff. So he immediately his weight shot up and he was like, geez, I forgot about that. I said, Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

Yeah, and that's I mean, you think about that. One of the supplements that I read about all the time and took when I was young was younger, and supposedly it's really good for you, but the dosage really is really dependent on creatin, right? Creatin is something that you eat and it's in red meat and it's natural, but if you get and you get enough of it, then you're fine. And it also helps you build muscle. That's why they're always saying, like, eat high protein. But what they really should say is eat red meat because that will help you with the recovery. Well, you take creatin at a at the dose that they ask you to take for working out, and your body retains fluid because the fluid saturates the muscles, which helps the muscles recruit re um. Gosh dang it, what's the word I'm looking for? It helps them recover faster, right? And so if you recover faster, you can lift more again and do it again. But with that, if you retain fluid, you retain weight and you gain weight. It's kind of weird, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:32

Yeah, and and and and that's the problem, is that the only way to do that is to have multiple metrics like measuring muscles, size, and all this kind of stuff. And remember that you got to do it over enough time to wear what? To where all those things kind of normalize out. Right. And it takes a minute, takes a minute to do. Um, but you learn that, you also learn your body too. Like creatine in my body is different than creatine in your body. Like my body doesn't need creatine to just go silly when I start introducing weights, I get big fast.

SPEAKER_01 18:09

Right. Yeah, not everybody does. Yeah, and everyone gets different places and different scenarios like that, too. Like my legs are the first place where I put on muscle and I have uh weird, like everyone's body's different. I think that I had this conversation with my daughter because she's everyone says this about me and everyone says that about me. And I'm like, okay, it's a it's an opinion of what someone thinks, right? So if someone thinks you're fat, they're gonna say you're fat, right? They look at you and they think you're fat. You may be real thin, but their idea of what fat is is completely different. And same thing with muscles. It's like that person's really muscular. But how many of those lumberjack guys have you seen with six-pack abs and just totally defined, right? But they can go out there and they can lift six, seven hundred pounds, no problem. Where you could be, you know, you could look jacked. You could because you have really low body fat, doesn't mean you you're strong. So it's it's kind of a weird deal, you know, what what I find attractive versus what you find attractive. All these things and all these decisions, and we sit here and we put all this weight on what people think about us, and it's like, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't, because your body's different than mine. You may be able to bench past 300 pounds, your arms may be a foot long, and it you only have to go this far and that far. Mine are three, four feet long. I mean, that would be kind of weird. They might be. I don't know, I haven't measured in a while. When you got long arms, you got a longer place to go. It takes a lot more muscle to get that same type of um distance because the geometry is completely different. So it's it's a weird deal.

SPEAKER_00 19:45

Yeah, and you know, one of the things that, you know, working out to my first tryout for the NFL, I was laughing because uh I was working out in the offseason with the defensive end that ended up being an all-pro. And he was 265 pounds, he was six foot six, and he was chiseled.

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 20:04

And he ran a 4640. So we're running up and down this hill, okay, that we had this little nice 45-degree angle hill that we used to go up and down. A bunch of us did, uh, a couple wide receivers in the NFL and stuff. So we were all working out and stuff like that. We got down the bottom of the hill and he said, uh, he said, uh, what's your 40 time? And I said, No, no. What's more important is what's your 40 time. He said, Well, I run a 4'6 40. I said, I run a 455.

unknown 20:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

And the point was, I ran a 4'6, but I promise you, when he chased me, I ran a 455. Right. Exactly. Because I was looking at him going, oh crap.

SPEAKER_01 20:40

Yeah. And I'm he's not gonna beat me, right? You know, no, I think that that's one of the things that, you know, I it was funny because this weekend was the um, you know, is it obviously the fourth of July, and we have this parade, and it's pretty close to my house, maybe two miles away, um walking, right? And so my daughter, as much as I she annoys me sometimes, has got a lot of the same tendencies that I have, and it's kind of stubborn like me. And um it's just kind of interesting because I can't stand being in public, I can't stand being around a lot of people. Like, I I want to be, which is funny because we had this conversation. I was talking about she's like, How do you talk to people? I'm like, I meet four or five new people every day. I have five appointments today. I'm gonna meet five new people, I'm gonna talk to them, I'm gonna have a conversation with them and be able to do that one-on-one, but I can't stand being in a big crowd. And they have this parade going on, and it's just nuts, it's crazy, it's long. We've been sitting outside for you know almost an hour and it's sunny. And I look at my wife and she's like, You guys can walk home if you want, which was kind of ironic because we walked home, we were here for like five minutes, and then they pulled up and it the parade was over. It took them that long to load in the car and get there. And it took us about a half hour to walk home. So we would have been quicker just getting in the car, but we didn't want to. And we were talking about how you get better. At things and taking the time to do that, and everything became relative to the competition. And I told her, I said, My problem is I'm super competitive about everything that I do. So whatever I'm doing, I think of it in terms of competition. If I'm working and I'm selling, my goal is to be better, get a better sell this time than the last time, or find some way to make that sell better than what it was. And I was trying to tell her, like, if you can just figure this out because she's really big into art and she likes to draw, she's like, Well, I can't draw this and I can't draw that. And I said, Well, you have to try to draw something else. You have to expand what the way that you're thinking in order to do that. So you need to try and draw realism if all you're doing is drawing anime. The realism drawing will help you make your anime better because you know how this eye looks when it's supposed to be real and you're adjusting to what that is. Well, I don't really like drawing realism, and I'm just like, okay, well, if you want to get better, you have to do those things, and you have to compete with yourself that, hey, I like this this way, but I want it to be better next time. And if you could just bottle that, and I told her that, and she's 12, obviously. And I didn't think this way 20 years ago, but I do now because I've recognized the things that I do and how I do them. You're gonna be better if you can just recognize that and try to fix, not fix what you're doing, but make it better every single time, right? Because there's not really a problem with it, but if you want to be better at it, you're constantly honing that with everything that you do.

SPEAKER_00 23:40

Yeah, always work on your weaknesses. And so, you know, I told you how I began my running streak, I began my running streak by doing something I didn't didn't like at the front end of a day.

SPEAKER_01 23:51

Right.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

And so the idea for me is if I front load my day with enough stuff that I know that's constructive, right? If the back end of my day goes crazy, I don't care. Because I've done all this really positive things in the front end of my day, that my day is considered a success by nine o'clock in the morning. After that, I could coast, but a lot of times I'm I'm gonna go work on my weaknesses. One of the, you know, one of the things I don't particularly like is stairs, right? Yeah, so I added stairs to my running in the morning. So I've introduced stairs. Why? Number one, they're good for you, but number two, I don't like them. Yep. So if I'm gonna, you know, and so what's it doing? It's really beefing my quads. Because again, you know, 40 flights of stairs every morning just for fun.

SPEAKER_01 24:41

Yeah, you work on your weaknesses. You say it's just for fun, but it's not really just for fun. There's a there's an actual result you're looking for, right? And I think that that's what a lot of people get lost in is that look at this person, all they do is work out, but they don't understand that later on in life, and I'm not saying you're old, but you know, 20 years from now, how are you gonna feel, right? Are you gonna be the guy who is two-stepping it all the way to the door because you're afraid you're gonna fall? Are you gonna have the strength to continue to keep moving like you did when, you know, not when you were 60, you know, not when you were 40, not when you were 20, but way better than that other person next to you who is sedentary and just sat down in the chair because they were just getting old.

SPEAKER_00 25:22

Well, and you know, one of the things that I've noticed and it really, really uh difficult with aging is mobility, is you lose your stretch and all those kind of things. And so I'm having to go back, right? And and I didn't realize the decline, especially from like 55 to 65. I didn't realize the decline was so dramatic. And so now I'm going back and I'm having to learn to stretch again. Right. And this is why I with 45 years of martial arts, it's not like I don't know stretching, but it gets away from you. It's like the sedentary part of sitting down a lot really works adversely against your hips and lower back. And you're thinking, well, I'm sitting down, how hard can it be, how bad can it be? And the answer is pretty bad for mobility.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

Yeah, and it's pretty annoying because why do we look at like I think of stretching as I know how the importance of it, but it's one of those things where you sit there and go, Well, that's five minutes out of what I'm trying to do that I don't need to do. Because if I do that, then I've taken five minutes away from something else that I could be doing. And we don't put, I feel like most people don't put that importance on there, and I'm not telling no one does, right? But it's like I think about that, that's the last thing I want to do because I'm thinking, hey, I gotta go walk for an hour today. I need to go get that walk-in. So that hour is maximized because I had to fit it in somewhere. Now I gotta fit in another 10-15 minutes, maybe more of stretching to make that happen. But what is the first thing you do when you're sore or you get a cramp? You stretch because you're trying to get that that pain away. So maybe you should try some preventative maintenance, dumbass, is what I tell myself.

SPEAKER_00 27:05

Well, and yeah, and that's and that's kind of the way I feel about it too. And I I kind of come off the exactly the same response as you what did I do? Was I said I've got a certain amount of time, off I go. And one of the things in running is they suggest that you don't stretch, that you you you allow the run to warm you up, which is correct. Right. The problem is you need to stretch after the run, and then you need to stretch a couple hours later because guess what's happened to your muscles? I mean, again, this is all a process, and you had to learn this process kind of on the fly, and you had to learn it route aging. What you got away with in your 30s, you cannot get away with in your 60s.

SPEAKER_01 27:48

That's I was having a conversation with someone this weekend about that. I was like, I've recovered for a couple surgeries, and she was recovering from a surgery, and she says, Man, it's just like I'm so sore. And I said, Well, we gotta remember one thing. I recovered from my knee replacement that I had four years ago pretty damn good, but I was watching all these other people who had had one at the age of 60, 65, took them months to get back to where they were because you you don't use it, you lose it. That's all there is to it. So you gotta do the work, gotta put it in.

SPEAKER_00 28:21

And that is so difficult to uh approach because you don't even know what you're losing because you don't know what you're not using until you get to the point where you go, my hip is bothering me, and then you realize you've been sitting all this time and you've not been stretching, and you're like, oh crap. Yeah, now I've got and now I've got to okay, I've got to add that to my routine. And like you said, I've got an hour, now I have to have an hour and 15 minutes, there's no ifs, ands, or buts about it. And so you're all of a sudden your routine becomes pretty dang large, and that's just to cover the necessities.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Right. Yep, it's pretty funny. You ever want to you ever want to find out if you're uh if you're using what you're supposed to with your body, just go do something you haven't done in a while. Go crawl under a car and work on it, go put some flooring in, go, you know, do something that you haven't done in a while, and then you'll go, Oh, I'm sore. Why? Because I haven't done that.

SPEAKER_00 29:14

And I'm yep.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

It's pretty amazing. Oh yeah. Well, Robert, great conversation as usual. We will be back next week. Same time, same place. Robert, what do you got going on? Where can they find you?

SPEAKER_00 29:28

They can find me, Global Strategy Institute.substack.com.

SPEAKER_01 29:34

Check out Shaping Success, Treasure Valley with myself. New episode coming out Thursday. Just got that one edited up and ready to go. Got another awesome interview tomorrow with my friend Hayden Levitt. Call him my friend. He was one of my students. Robert, I think you'll probably want to tune into this one. He is a pilot and it's gonna be fun. He's he is, I think he's only, I don't even think he's 22. He I think he's 22 years old. Started flying when I was coaching him baseball, so it's gonna be a good, good interview. I want to talk to him about it. I knew he'd be interested in it. And you can catch Jay Finning and myself on One Drink Wednesday, every Wednesday, 7 o'clock Pacific Standard Time on IG Live. Make sure you go follow that out. Until next time, this is Wes Tankersley signing off for Robert Watson and two nobodies who know nothing.

SPEAKER_00 30:18

Have a great week, everyone. We'll see ya.