Steve Casner
Appearances
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
What I always do is say I'm holding a knife and I just imagine that the knife goes a little farther than I intended it to, or a little wider than I intended it to. So you can almost imagine a cone uh of of possible travel for the knife and then i think what's in that cone and is it anything important that i don't want to get stabbed or sliced or slashed and you know it's just really amazing i'll
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
find myself, I'll catch myself like trying to open a package by pulling the knife towards me, you know, almost towards my chest. And I'll think, do I really want a knife in my chest? I mean, it's probably not going to slip, but what if it did? So wouldn't it be better to move the knife away from me so that if it did slip, it would just go into the air?
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And I do that with chopping vegetables or using screwdrivers. Hammering a nail is a classic one. Do you really want your other thumb to be right beside where you're aiming the head of the hammer? I mean, is there another way?
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yeah, almost always. And it's often just as simple as... You know, rearranging yourself so that the tool just goes somewhere that, you know, it isn't going to hurt you. And, you know, the classic example is when you're chopping vegetables to curl your fingers, you know, get your fingertips out of the path of travel, possible path of travel, right?
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
That's interesting. You know, a lot of people say just the opposite that, you know, the dull knife is more dangerous. But, you know, I think anytime something changes, you got to realize that your old routine, that that routine that runs on autopilot for you might might not serve you so well in this situation. So, yeah, a newly sharpened knife. Yeah, I'd be careful of that myself.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yeah, I mean, we certainly do see that. It's sort of this U-shaped curve. People who are really good slippers and fallers are children. They have no experience and no sense of what's dangerous. And that's why we have to follow them around and helicopter over them to prevent things that are worse than those boo-boos and scrapes. But then, you know, comes later in life. And here is the other thing.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
big example of something in the world that changed and caught us by surprise that we're not willing to sit down and think about so i go back to 1930 i just did this the other day how what what percentage of the population was age 75 and older in 1930 And it was 2%, 2% of all living human beings were 75 or older. So, you know, that's kind of rare, one in 50.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
I mean, you could walk around, go about your day and never actually see one, one meaning a person over 75. But now you fast forward today, it's almost seven and a half percent. So we've almost quadrupled the number of persons over 75. But all of a sudden, we have this widespread need to be aware of what it's like to be 75 or older. And aging is something that's getting us.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And you got to understand, you know, none of us have had any practice being 75 before our 75th birthday. And If there aren't that many of them around, we don't get to learn from others. So this is something we really got to prepare ourselves for because it's different.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Could I just back up and say something? You said something really important there about the world getting safer and safer. And it really did. But it seemed to hit a turning point sometime around 1995 or 2000. I call it the hockey stick graph. So it's really fun. You go back to 1900 and you see. You know, the world is a very dangerous place.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And but the numbers year after year just keep going down and down and down and down like the you know, the the long handle of the hockey stick. And then we get to 1995 or 2000 and then it starts going back up again. So we're seeing a subtle rise in in everything. across the board.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And, you know, which just reinforces my point that we got to put a little more thought into this, that it's a little harder to get through the day in one piece. It's not a lot harder. You know, we don't need to study. We just need to stop and think just a little bit more than we used to.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
No. Again, that's my point, the hockey stick graph. It did go way down, and then it started going up again. Look at the past couple of years. We've seen just unprecedented increases in the number of car crash fatalities, pedestrian fatalities, cyclist fatalities. It went up again, and it almost leaves you incredulous. We've put every safety feature, safety strap, we've bubble-wrapped
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
everything in sight. How does it go up again? Well, we've introduced things like phones that can be used while you're driving and other subtle things. Maybe people are more stressed out. They're maybe more likely to drive aggressively than they used to be. There's just a lot of subtle things, which brings me back to my point. We just got to think a little bit more about this.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Am I more stressed out? Am I distracted? What's going on with me? Spend 15 seconds, 30 seconds thinking about this, and you might make a difference in your life.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Hey, thanks, Mike. This has really been a great opportunity and a great chance to let people know about something really important to all of us.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
it's getting a little bit harder to be safe. Over the past few years, say 15, 20 years, the rate of unintentional injuries has just crept upward and upward. And this is after decades of improvement. In the old days, driving a car, walking down the street were much scarier things. And we've made so many improvements.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
But lately, maybe in the past 20 years or so, 15, 20 years, the numbers started reversing. And it got worse.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
What happened? Things that we deal with in everyday life are becoming more complicated and more complex in ways that we're not really noticing upon first glance.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
One of my favorite examples is the phone. Now we all have smartphones, and we're walking around and driving around looking at these phones. That invention sort of... introduced a very big difference that we didn't necessarily see coming. So you think back in the old days, the phone was attached to the wall and you could do other things while you talked on your phone that was attached to the wall.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
You could keep an eye on your spaghetti sauce. And if you were distracted and something bad happened, it wasn't going to be that terrible. And then a few years later, we had the longer cord on our phone. Then we could grab our phone and go in the other room. You'd run it under the door and you could sit in there and have some privacy. And that was fine too.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And then we had cordless phones, which allowed us to roam around our house with no cord running under the door. And that was fine. But when the smartphone came along, it just... eliminated everything about that, all the restrictions about that. We can now drive a car. We can walk. We can do anything. And we're in this new environment.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And people don't really understand that, wow, I can get in a whole lot more trouble with this particular invention than I could with all those previous inventions. And no one really, I mean, people know it on some level, but they don't stop to totally realize it.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yeah, I mean, if you go to the statistics, there is a noticeable growth in driver distraction crashes and fatalities. And even over the past few years, since my book came out, we've seen just a striking rise in the number of pedestrians and cyclists getting hit by cars. And sometimes it's the drivers that are distracted. Sometimes it's the pedestrian and the cyclist. And sometimes it's both.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
which is a really awful scenario.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
We saw a spike in the number of ladder falls following the introduction of the show Home Improvement, and it was a really noticeable increase. That show inspired people to be involved in more do-it-yourself home projects, and a lot of those involved ladders.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Well, yeah, that's a pretty cold way to look at it. Thank you. Yeah. You know, just the very idea of multitasking is something we have to reconsider, that maybe there's multitasking – 40, 50 years ago where we would talk on the phone and keep an eye on our spaghetti sauce, you know, that seems okay.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
But in the car and on the street, you know, it's a very different picture that, you know, people just aren't generally aware of how limited our ability to do that. I mean, there really is no multitasking. What we're really doing when we're doing two things at once is switching back and forth. And there's a subtle thing. People don't really realize how engrossed in their phone they can be.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
The classic example is you're waiting at a stoplight, and everybody's seen this, that the light turns green, but the person in front of you doesn't go anywhere because they're looking down at their phone.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yeah, I mean, that certainly is some of that. So much is technology-based, you know, so like the rear-view cameras we have in cars now. You know, there's another one. I'm always talking and writing about these. People think, hey, this is so great. I have a camera that shows me what's behind my car. I can just look into that camera before I go and...
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
and then go uh but we're actually not seeing them have the the effect that we all hope for that you know we would eliminate these sort of backup crashes that that we had because what you know people aren't realizing is that they're really there to supplement our looking around to see what might behind might be behind us there's no uh they're not the the only thing we can use we still have to turn around and look because they don't show everything
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
You know, where the accidents happen in many, many cases is someone comes running, often a child, comes running from the periphery, sometimes to say goodbye to the driver. They run around the back, hoping to make it to the other side and say, you know, bye. And, you know, that's not on the screen. Well, why wouldn't it be on the screen? Well, it only shows a limited... unlimited angle.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
So that child comes running out of nowhere. They're going to be one foot away. You're going to see it on the screen, but you're going to have what a half a second to react to that. So you need to be looking around and seeing the big picture. You know, it doesn't really help much to see what's happening right now.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
You need to know what's going to happen or might happen in a second or two or three seconds from now, or even 10 seconds from now.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yes. It turns out that about 50% of all injury accidents do happen inside the house, believe it or not. You'd think that if you want to stay safe, you could just never leave your house, and that would solve the problem. No, it would probably make the problem worse.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Literally every implement. people use in the home can become almost a weapon of destruction. You look at the number of injuries that happen using stoves and pots and pans. Knives are another really big one. And then of course, ladders. Ladders are a terrific way to get hurt.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
For one, it's sort of easy to imagine that it's not going to happen to you, that you have a really good sense of balance. You're going to be OK. Again, this is another example of the world just slightly changing and slightly becoming more complicated. But we saw a spike in the number of ladder falls following the introduction of the show Home Improvement.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
So, you know, and it was a really noticeable increase. So, you know, what we imagine happened there was that that show inspired people to be involved in more do it yourself home projects. And so they did. And a lot of those involved letters. So people pulled out their letters and started using them much more than, you know, they did before. And there it was.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yeah, that was a long-held notion that there are, you know, people walk around with a little black cloud over their head, the accident prone. And someone finally wrote a book about this and, you know, dug into all the research. You know, what they find is it's sort of a myth that really they're
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
And I'm sure there are individual exceptions, but generally speaking, there are not people who are, you know, an accident waiting to happen. It's sort of spread across all of us because, you know, these things just aren't obvious, like, you know, the effect of the phone. They just don't pop out to really anyone.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Yeah, it's two to one odds. It's going to be a man, a male being wheeled into the emergency room.
Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
One thing I like to do day to day is just pause for a second whenever I pick up something. anything that might do some harm or enter into any situation where I could be harmed. And you know, I have a great one about hand tools. Like I literally stopped cutting myself with kitchen implements. once I started doing this.