Something You Should Know
The Car’s History and Future & Inside Your Unconscious Mind – SYSK Choice
Sat, 16 Nov 2024
“Sit up straight!” You’ve probably heard it since you were very young, and it turns out to be good advice. Your posture can affect your physical and mental health in ways you may not realize. This episode begins by revealing the importance of posture and how to instantly improve it. https://bit.ly/3NT6aQ5 The automobile has changed our world in so many ways. If it weren’t for the car we wouldn’t have roads, bridges, and tunnels and all the hotels and motels we stay at. So many things simply would not exist if it weren’t for the car. The car is also responsible for a lot of problems. Still, the story of how the car came to be and the people who built them is fascinating. Here to discuss it all is Bryan Appleyard author of the book The Car: The Rise and Fall of The Machine That Made The Modern World (https://amzn.to/3hfm0bp) Your unconscious mind is responsible for who you are – your personality and character lives in your unconscious mind. The way you experience the world, your mood, what you like or dislike all comes from your unconscious. It's a big deal. Joining me to explain how the unconscious mind works is psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Lieberman professor and vice chair for clinical affairs in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at George Washington University and author of the book Spellbound: Modern Science, Ancient Magic, and the Hidden Potential of the Unconscious Mind (https://amzn.to/3ConESP) If you plan to get a flu shot, there is something you should do first. And it might take you a few days to do it. Listen as I explain. https://www.ajc.com/life/why-you-shouldnt-be-sleep-deprived-before-getting-a-flu-shot/ZZNNHFDYLJCYTOPPZBJBRMFSBE/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms & conditions apply. SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. 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 DELL: Dell Technologies’ Early Holiday Savings event is live and if you’ve been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Tech enthusiasts love this sale because it’s all the newest hits plus all the greatest hits all on sale at once. Shop Now at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why is good posture important?
Today on Something You Should Know, the problem of slouching and why you have to sit up straight. Then, how the car changed our world and the stories of the people who built them. Like Henry Ford, why was he so successful?
There was something about the man. He was perfectly placed. He came from a farming family. He hated horses, which was quite crucial actually. And he took great pride in ridding the world of the need for horses.
Chapter 2: How did the car change our world?
Also, before you get a flu shot, there's something you need to do first. And what goes on in your unconscious mind? The good things and the not so good.
Another word for the unconscious mind might be the uncontrollable mind. In every single human being in the world, there are horrible drives and urges. But if we deny them, if we push them away and we don't accept them, paradoxically, that makes us more likely to act on them. All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Hi, and here we go with another episode of Something You Should Know. And we start with a quick question. How's your posture right this second?
Slouching, bad posture, can affect your flexibility and it can lead to increased strain on your joints. But bad posture has a lot of other negative side effects you may not know. For example, it can make you look fatter. It can reduce your circulation. It can actually cause more stress in your body and even deepen depression. It can also affect your career.
People who slouch at work are often seen in a negative light. So for all those reasons, you really need to sit up and stand up straight. And some common advice to do that is to imagine there is a headlight right in the middle of your chest. And you just want to make sure you keep that headlight shining forward. And that is something you should know.
Imagine for a moment what your life would be like if we didn't have cars. I mean, really, the automobile has changed the world in good ways and some not so good ways. But more than any other technology, it has revolutionized life for pretty much all of us. There are many people who love to drive, me included.
And yet the days of getting behind the wheel and hitting the open road, those days may become a thing of the past in the not-too-far-distant future. How the car came to be, how it evolved, and where it's headed is a wonderful story with some interesting characters. And it is one that Brian Appleyard has painstakingly put together for his book,
The car, the rise and fall of the machine that made the modern world. Hi, Brian. Thanks for being here. Hi, Mike. It's good to talk to you. So, yes, most people would probably agree that the car has transformed the world. But people have said that about other technologies in the past. The light bulb, the computer, they've revolutionized the world. But what's different about the car?
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Chapter 3: Who were the key figures in automotive history?
No other vehicle. had done more than a mile or two at the time. Now that made it sort of the official narrative, but there are lots of close to actual cars at that time.
Is the car, in terms of its impact on culture, is it mostly or originally kind of an American thing and then it spread throughout the world? I mean, Carl Benz obviously wasn't here, but there's something about cars in America that seemed to go together somehow.
Absolutely they do, but not at the beginning they didn't. The car was developed in Germany and France mainly in the late 19th century. It wasn't really American at all. The Americans probably needed it more than anybody because it's a very big country and it had the most appalling roads in the world at the time. There was a lot of...
about what was the best propulsion method for the car in America. Was it steam, electric, or gas, as you would call it? And it really took hold. First of all, it was the Oldsmobile, which is a nice little car. It didn't really take off as well as it should have done. But it did catch people's eye. It was called the curved dash Oldsmobile.
This is because a dashboard in those days did not mean what we mean now. It meant the wood, piece of wood in front of a carriage to stop the muck kicked up by the horses in front hitting the passengers. So he made a car with a...
dashboard that was curved rather than flat that's all so it's its least interesting feature really but that it became known as the curve dash old boltonville and so a song with a famous song was written about it my merry oldsmobile But the real change came in 1908 when Henry Ford launched his Model T. After that point, America took over the world car business.
Why is it that the car business is in America, seemingly in the beginning anyway, and for many decades centered in Detroit for General Motors? Why? Why?
Well, it's an interesting question. And it may be just because it had to be somewhere. But what happened was the engineers and people at Ford went to that city. It was a kind of a city ready for industrialization. And the key thing was that Ford started building his Model T in a tiny warehouse in Detroit and then built two huge industrial complexes, the biggest the world had ever seen.
And that meant it was going to be Detroit. And General Motors came out later and so on. And it was all in Detroit. It's just a kind of crucial place.
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Chapter 4: How did Henry Ford revolutionize the car industry?
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So Brian, Henry Ford is Ford. His name is on every car that he makes. Who's behind General Motors?
well there were two people both utterly different the the big one the big name was alfred sloan and sloan and ford were the two opposites in the in the car business and sloan was so boring to meet i mean he was catastrophically boring i mean it still is because if you look at wikipedia he's got about third the length of ford's
entry people can't find anything interesting to say about him this was because he was concealed himself from the world he he had something to hide i don't know what it was but he certainly wanted to hide himself uh paralyzingly boring when if you can look up youtube videos of him and he talks as if you know like an undertaker on a bad day um but he had perversely
His idea, he wasn't boring in his idea, which was the way to sell cars was to market them. Ford sort of did market cars, but he did it on the assumption that if you told your customer about the Model T, they would buy it. You know, if you build it, they will come. And he was right for a long time. But after 1920...
the end of the 20s, he stopped producing the Model T and never came up with anything to compete with it. And as a result, General Motors became the big competitor for Ford. And it did so by marketing. He got in, Sloan got in, Harley Earl, who built most extravagant cars imaginable, the opposite of Ford's puritanical small cars, light, small, everything. The opposite.
He just built massive, heavy cars that we all, by the time they got into the 50s, we all recognized them, the great Cadillacs and so on. Absurd cars with gigantic wings at the back, which made no sense sort of in engineering terms. But they would, because people, as Ford also introduced planned obsolescence so that, you know, he would build a new car model every year.
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Chapter 5: What role did marketing play in the success of General Motors?
One of the key flaws was that if you have men doing one thing at a time, Occasionally they'll do it wrong and it would go to the end of the line and you'd have to take the car and put it all right. So all these Ford type production systems had a sort of room beyond the production line where they were putting cars right. He saw this as catastrophic and stupid.
And he designed that out by saying any worker working on the line who saw a mistake or a fault could stop the entire line. Which sounds like craziness, because you'd think that has reduced production. But of course it didn't, because you had to work out why exactly it had stopped, what had gone wrong, get it right, so it would never go right and wrong again.
Whereas the Fordian system was reproducing the same errors, but just fixing them at the end. That's a huge change. Combined with this other change, which was that Ford just got his stuff delivered or manufactured it himself at River Rouge, and just chucked it into the bins where the workers were working. But Ono said, no, no, we're not paying for all that stock.
We're just going to make sure that the things arrive just in time. So he created the just-in-time production system. Now, it took a while for it to work. The problem was that Americans were resistant to non-Detroit cars or non-American cars generally.
And the only car that was making any inroads was the German Volkswagen Beetle, and it was being bought by young people who regarded it as deviant, eccentric, wicked, you know, because they bought this car. But it was a groovy car. When it really got going, everybody wanted one. And that was a sign, a warning that Detroit should have noticed, but it didn't, or it decided to ignore it.
And along came the Japanese. First of all, they started to invade the market in the 50s and 60s and make serious inroads thereafter. And this appealed to young people because young people were increasingly anti-corporate in those days. So they thought, we'll stick it to the man in Detroit and buy a Japanese car. And again, the Detroit didn't believe it at first.
They couldn't believe this was happening. But these were good cars, you know, and they weren't spectacular cars. They were just good. They worked. They lasted.
You know, it's interesting. Not that long ago, my son and I were at a shopping mall and we were walking through the parking lot and he said, let's count the American cars. And there were hardly any. One out of 10, one out of 15, everything else was Japanese, German, Korean, but there weren't that many Fords and Chevrolets.
They made a big mistake, Ford and General Motors. They thought, you see, if you built a big car, you could then persuade the customers to buy it, and then you could put on all these extras, so the car comes out a lot more expensive.
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Chapter 6: How did Japanese cars impact the American automotive market?
Now, when they analyzed a way of doing a small car, they decided it wasn't worth it because they'd have to make sort of 10 or 20 small cars to make the profit they did on one heavily loaded Chevrolet. And so they made the mistake of thinking a small car simply wasn't possible for them. But people did want small cars. They're easy to drive around towns. They don't consume as much gas.
Increasingly, they showed it by buying them.
One of the reasons, in my view anyway, one of the reasons for the success of the car has always been that sense of you get behind the wheel and drive. You go where you want to go. You go as fast or slow as you want to go. You've got a gas-powered engine you can rev if you want to rev it. And now things are changing. We're going electric.
We're looking at self-driving cars where you don't really drive it anymore. A computer does. And a lot of people don't like that. They find that very disconcerting.
To me too. I think the era of the car as we know it is coming to an end. I think this process will accelerate and we won't be seeing internal combustion cars. I don't know whether they'll be electric cars replacing the hydrogen, but one or the other. And we're also seeing increasing computer intervention in the driving conditions. We already have that. I mean, it's very interesting.
If you look at a car, it's becoming more like an iPhone. An iPhone works because it doesn't work unless you're connected to something. And it's becoming like that with cars. I mean, Tesla now doesn't even have to ask you about changing the software. It just drops it in from the cloud. Now, so far, the attempt to make them self-driving is stalled.
They're not really getting very far with it at the moment. And it's much more complicated than they realized. And it's risky because people get killed. But I have no doubt that the kind of money that has been put in this will produce something very different to what we now know. And that will happen quite quickly.
And also, if you look at the way both Apple and Google, about the same time, started work on a self-driving car, Now, there's a reason for that. They're the richest companies in the world. They're all in Silicon Valley. It's not in Detroit. It's not in the old world. It's in the new world. So basically, these vast tech companies stuffed full of money want to move into this area.
And it's not just the cars. They'll change cities. They'll put in cloud control of cars and cities as a whole.
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Chapter 7: What is the future of the automobile?
There are people, though, who seem to have a pretty good handle on what they do. You know, they don't ruin their careers. They don't get in trouble. They don't get arrested. They don't drink too much. They have a sense of control over their lives, and they don't give in to whatever this unconscious mind is that you're talking about.
And I think plenty of those people aren't trying deliberately to grab the reins there. They just... don't give in.
As a psychiatrist, I do a lot of work with people who engage in self-destructive behaviors. And they're immediate instinct is, well, I just need more willpower. I need to just say no, or as you put, I need to not give in. We find that that generally doesn't work. Willpower is like a muscle in that it fatigues very, very easily.
So for example, if you're on a diet and you say no to a chocolate chip cookie, that's going to make it much harder to say no to the angel food cake that you're faced with later. So I would take issue with that, that there are people who just don't give in.
And I would say that the people who don't have difficulties with unconscious contents disrupting their lives probably fall into one of two categories. One is that some people just don't have very strong unconscious drives. Their passions are relatively weak, and as a result, they're very easy to go against them if that's not what they want to do.
That's not a great situation to be in because these unconscious drives that can destroy our life are also the things that give us motivation and energy and the passion that we need to achieve very difficult goals. The other category they may fall into are people who have suffered a great deal, people who have had very, very difficult lives.
And one of the sad facts of life, of human nature, is that it does seem to be hardship which moves us down the path of developing this good working relationship with our unconscious mind. So I don't think this is anything that comes easily. I think it's something that has to be earned.
And so given that, then what should people be doing to do what you're talking about? How do you actively, proactively, consciously do this or does it just happen?
I think that the first step is, if you wanna make friends with someone, the first thing you wanna do is get to know them better. You ask them, where are you from? Where did you grow up? What are your hobbies? The first step here is getting to know your unconscious mind better. And you do that by becoming simply a better observer of what's going on in your head.
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Chapter 8: What makes Honda a notable player in the automotive industry?
indulging myself now against the pain of maybe looking at myself on the scale tomorrow morning and unfortunately the the current pleasure usually wins out well the way we've been talking it seems like the unconscious mind is nothing but trouble but it must also be positive there must be some good to the unconscious mind so talk about that
Well, you know, the unconscious mind has about half a million times the processing power of the conscious mind. Just to give you an example of how powerful it is, when you simply walk down the street, your unconscious mind is coordinating literally millions of individual muscle fibers in order to maintain your balance, your tone and your forward locomotion. It has enormous processing power.
There have been a number of famous people in history who have talked about being struck by inspiration. They've been struggling with a difficult problem that their rational mind was absolutely unable to solve. And then all of a sudden, boom, out of the blue, the answer comes ready-made right into their mind and it completely solves the problem.
That's one of the amazing things the unconscious mind can do. And I think we've all had the experience, whether we're writing a presentation, writing a report, maybe doing something creative, when ideas just pop into our mind that solves problems our conscious mind was not able to figure out.
It happened to me many times where I would hit a problem where I just couldn't figure out how to explain something. And then invariably it would happen when I was drifting off to sleep at night, the solution would hit me and it was far better than anything else I could come up with myself.
But that seems so uncontrollable. That just happens when it happens and you can't have any influence on that.
I think that that is largely true. But I don't think the unconscious mind is ungenerous. I think it gives us more than we realize and we need to cultivate the habit of paying attention.
And so when the dust all settles, what's the message here? What is it you want people to really get? What's the guts of what you're saying here?
What I want them to get is that forging a good relationship with the unconscious mind may be the single most important task in life. Think about the time when you said to yourself, I've never felt more alive. That's what we live for. We live for those moments when we feel most fully alive. It's not about prestige. It's not about money. It's not about pleasure.
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