Something You Should Know
Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Sat, 25 Jan 2025
The origins of the names for popular food products often make interesting stories. For instance, why are they called marshmallows? Why is Spam called Spam? What do gators have to do with Gatorade? This episode begins with the origin stories of some iconic foods. https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/tagged/health/at-home/odd-facts-7-iconic-products-164000529.html Some inventions have had profound effects on how humans see themselves and our place in the world. For example, the mirror, photography, television, and the smartphone have all significantly changed our perception of ourselves. Here to explain this and the significance of it all is Susan Denham Wade author of the book A History of Seeing in Eleven Inventions (https://amzn.to/3vZdj9k) The most difficult decisions we most often make are about love and money. So how can we improve our ability to make these important decisions? Here with some great insight and advice is Myra Strober. She is a labor economist, Professor Emerita at Stanford University and author of the book Money and Love: An Intelligent Roadmap for Life’s Biggest Decisions (https://amzn.to/3H34xNO) Your gym teacher probably told you to stand up straight and suck in your gut. It turns out half of that advice is good – the other half isn’t. Listen as I explain why. https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2021/11/12/how-to-stop-holding-in-stomach/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! SHOPIFY: "Established in 2025". Has a nice ring to it, doesn't it? Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business! HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING right now! CURIOSITY WEEKLY: We love Curiosity Weekly, so be sure and listen wherever you get your podcasts! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What interesting food name origins are discussed?
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Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi, and welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you ever been in your kitchen and looked in the cupboards or in the refrigerator and looked at some of the food and wondered, why is it called that? Where did that name come from? Well, here are the origins of some popular, somewhat random, but some popular foods that may be in your kitchen. First of all, Philadelphia cream cheese.
It didn't really come from Philadelphia. It started in New York. It was called Philadelphia cream cheese because that city was associated with high-quality food products. Gatorade, as you might imagine, does not contain any alligator in it. It was a kidney specialist from the University of Florida who helped develop it for the school's football team, the Florida Gators.
So they named the drink Gatorade. The product name Spam was chosen for the canned meat from a contest. There is no official explanation for its meaning, but most people assume Spam stands for spiced ham. The Frisbee, the flying disc Frisbee, comes to you courtesy of the Frisbee Pie Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The empty pie tins were perfect for throwing like a Frisbee.
And since it was the Frisbee Pie Company, they became known as Frisbees. The first plastic version was called the Pluto Platter Flying Saucer. Wham-O bought the rights and stamped Frisbee on it instead. Marshmallows started out as medicine. In the 1800s, juice from the roots of the marshmallow plant were extracted and cooked with egg whites and sugar.
It was whipped up and given to children to soothe sore throats. And that is something you should know. No, I love it when I see a topic to discuss here that I didn't actually know was a topic to discuss. And that's what you're about to hear. We're going to discuss the history of what we see and how we see it. Because how we see ourselves and how we see the world has changed.
And what's caused those changes are certain inventions, certain technologies that alter our vision. I mean, imagine the first mirror. When people could actually see themselves clearly the way other people do, that had to change a lot. It's pretty remarkable. Or the telescope, television, the smartphone. All these things have altered our view of ourselves and the world in some way.
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Chapter 2: How do inventions change our perception of the world?
All the excitement about photography when it was first announced, this amazing technology that could capture an image permanently, was all about how it was going to represent the great landscapes of the world and the great monuments of antiquity and the works of art. And none of the inventors or promoters of early photography mentioned the idea of portraiture.
But as soon as photography was announced, people set up portraiture studios. And this was the absolute killer app for photography. All very well to see the great sights of the world and the great works of art. But what people really wanted to see was themselves and each other. And photography studios set up all around Europe and around the USA.
And people for the price of a day's wages could get an image of themselves to keep forever. And the market for it was huge. Something like 90% of photographs taken in the first 50 years of photography were portraits.
When you see early photography, early portraits, no one's smiling. No one seems to be particularly happy. At all?
Well, in the earliest photographs, the earliest process was called a daguerreotype. They took about 10 to 15 minutes for the exposure to happen. So people had to stand very, very still in that time. So the photographic studios developed all kinds of algorithms props to help people stay still.
So if you see people standing up, often you'll see them, there's a pedestal that they've got an arm resting on, or they're sitting on a chair with a slightly unnaturally raised arms. And all of these were devices to help people stand really still for that time. so that the image could take on the film used at the time. And so I guess it's pretty hard to hold a smile for that length of time.
So they were probably advised just to keep it fairly serious.
Another one of these inventions you talk about is the telescope, which not only changed the way we see the world, but the universe.
usually credited to Galileo, but in fact, the first telescope to be brought forward publicly was from a Dutch spectacle maker whose name was Lipperhey. But he tried to patent his telescope, but he was refused because the patent office decided it was too easy to copy. And unfortunately for him, the patent office was right because people started making telescopes all around Europe.
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Chapter 3: What role do love and money decisions play in our lives?
So, you know, you might be taking a walk in the beautiful woods and think about what might have happened, you know, had your parents been born millionaires. But you need to deal with reality and you need to convince yourself, and I think our framework helps you do that, that this is the best decision that you could make given what you knew at the time.
So what are those five steps?
Well, the first one is clarify. Clarify for yourself what it is that you want, what's important to you, and what's important to you, not to your parents or your spouse or somebody else in your life. Try to figure out what you really care about. And then the second step is communication. Then you need to communicate that to whoever else is in your life making these decisions with you.
And as you communicate and you listen to the other person's hopes and dreams, you may revise your own. You may start thinking about some issues that you hadn't thought about before. So first clarify and then communicate. And then you need to consider a broad range of choices. So let's go back to the moving decision. You've been offered a job in another city.
Your family agrees that you need more money. It's a good career step for you. And you have already clarified that your career is important to you.
but what are the other possible choices have you looked around in the same city where you are at other possible jobs or did this this new job possibility come out of the blue and it seems so attractive and you're going to take it so unless you convince yourself that in order to get what it is you're looking for you must move um you may well be sorry later on because you didn't do uh the kind of
Seeking, that would give you a broader range of choices. The fourth step is check in. So it's the five C's framework. These all start with C's. Clarify, communicate, consider a broad range of choices, and now check in. So you want to check in with family and friends and other people whom you admire and ask them, have they faced these kinds of decisions? What did they do?
How did it turn out for them? Share your thought process with them. I'm doing this because I want more money. I'm doing this because I think my career will be furthered by this. Ask them about family ramifications of decisions that they may have made. And the last step is what I talked about before, explore the likely consequences.
And you need to explore the consequences both short-term and long-term. So let's go back to the daughter who is not happy in the new environment. Maybe she's not happy six months after you move, but maybe she's in a school that's far better than the one that she left. And three years from now, she'll realize that this was a really good move because her school life and her education
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