Something You Should Know
Why Accidents Happen & Where to Find Courage When You Need It
Thu, 27 Mar 2025
Wisdom comes with age. That’s a common belief – but is it necessarily true? Can you acquire wisdom when you are young? This episode begins by looking at the science of wisdom, where it comes from and when it shows up. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8493820/ Doesn’t it seem like the world is safer? Cars are safer, equipment is safer, people wear helmets, warning signs are everywhere. So it makes sense to believe that we are safer today than ever before but that’s not true according to my guest. Steve Casner is a research psychologist and NASA scientist. He is author of the book, Careful: A User's Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds (https://amzn.to/4j74GjN). Listen as he explains how and why accidents have been getting worse lately. While you have surely done things in your life that required courage, you can probably recall other times when you wished you had the courage to do something differently – to speak up, to make a move, to do something! But you didn’t. How can you be courageous when you need to be? Listen to my guest, Jenny Wood. She is a former Google executive, speaker, and airplane pilot. Her writing has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Inc., and Forbes. Jenny is author of the book Wild Courage: Go After What You Want and Get It (https://amzn.to/4iNpYCJ). Yes or no questions can be very telling when you want to figure out if someone is telling the truth. Actually, it’s not the question so much as how people answer it that can raise some red flags. Listen as I explain how to use yes or no questions to get a better sense of someone’s truthfulness. https://www.inc.com/jack-schafer/an-fbi-agent-on-how-to-detect-deception.html PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at https://FactorMeals.com/something50off QUINCE: Indulge in affordable luxury! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING 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! SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: Where does wisdom come from and when do you acquire it?
It is often said that we live in a fast-paced world, but there is one thing that you cannot speed up, and that is wisdom. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. In middle age, something happens to your brain. According to imaging science, the mature brain is not inferior to a younger brain, it is just wired differently.
As a result, it's capable of triggering a new form of intelligence that we're just not capable of when we're younger. In fact, when a mature brain is challenged, it begins to produce a type of intelligence that for thousands of years we have called wisdom. In other words, the brain is wired in middle age to start to produce wisdom and continues to do so in old age.
And no matter how smart you are, that wisdom will not come to you when you're younger. It just cannot. Put simply, as people age, they become wiser. Of course, it doesn't apply to everyone. Oscar Wilde once said, With age comes wisdom, but sometimes age comes alone. And that is something you should know. Doesn't it seem like our world is safer than it used to be? Cars are built safer.
Playground equipment is safer. Bikers and skiers wear helmets when they didn't used to. Your stepladder has multiple warnings all over it. Safety seems to be a big concern. Still, accidents happen. And there is this perception, at least, that some people are more accident-prone than others. So what does the research say about our safety-conscious world? Are we safer than ever before?
When accidents happen, why do they happen? The answers might surprise you. Joining me is Steve Kasner. He is a research psychologist who studies the accident-prone mind. He is a NASA scientist who also flies jets and helicopters and rides motorcycles and skateboards. And he is still around. He's author of a book called Careful, A User's Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds. Hi, Steve.
Welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks. Glad to be here. So are we safer than ever before? Because it seems like we're safer than ever before.
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.
But lately, maybe in the past 20 years or so, 15, 20 years, the numbers started reversing. And it got worse.
Why?
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Chapter 2: Are we truly safer today than in the past?
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.
Things like what?
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.
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.
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.
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.
And are the statistics backing that up, that there's a lot of phone-related, or maybe somebody gets hit by a car, you don't say, well, it's because they were watching their phone.
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.
which is a really awful scenario.
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Chapter 3: Why do accidents continue to increase despite technological advances?
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.
Is it true that a lot of accidents and injuries that happen to people happen in the home?
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.
And where in the house are they happening?
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.
Why is that? Why are ladders, I mean, obviously you're climbing up into the sky, yes, but there's also 400 warning stickers on every ladder that gives you a sense that there may be some danger here and to pay attention to what you're doing.
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.
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.
We're talking about accidents and safety, and my guest is Steve Kasner. He is a NASA scientist and author of the book, Careful, A User's Guide to Our Injury-Prone Minds.
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Chapter 4: How does smartphone usage contribute to accidents?
So Steve, what about this idea that there are just some people who are injury prone, that accidents are just more likely to happen to them?
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
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.
But there's a general sense, I think, that men are more risk takers and therefore more likely to be hurt in accidents. And they use more power tools perhaps or whatever. But do the statistics hold true for that?
Yeah, it's two to one odds. It's going to be a man, a male being wheeled into the emergency room.
And so what do you do differently or what do you recommend people do differently? What are the big things to be really careful of that maybe people don't think about?
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.
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
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?
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Chapter 5: What are common household hazards leading to injuries?
And there usually is another way.
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?
the knife because sometimes it just doesn't dig in it slips to the side and that's where it gets us exactly or the other thing is you know what i i tend to cut myself in the kitchen more likely right after the knives get sharpened because i've i'm used to them not being that sharp and then all of a sudden they're slicing through things like my finger like never before
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.
So we hear a lot about, especially for older people, slips and falls, you know, in the bathroom or wherever. And is that really the domain of older people? Or it seems like anybody can slip and fall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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Chapter 6: Is there such a thing as being accident-prone?
And so it seems like wild courage is more of a personality trait than it is something you could learn to do.
Well, I deeply believe that wild courage can be learned. And I also believe that wild courage can come in small steps and little courage deposits that you make every day. So here's an example that might feel just on one end of the spectrum of wild courage, and then I'll kind of bring it back to how you can still apply this to your day-to-day. So it's 2011.
I'm riding the New York City subway home from work, and about 20 feet away from me stands this really good-looking guy, gorgeous blue eyes, thick, wavy brown hair. And I'm so taken by him, and I want to talk to him, but something holds me back. It's those same three fears I just mentioned. Fear of failure. What if he's married? Fear of uncertainty. What if he's a convicted felon?
Fear of judgment by others. What if 100 people watch me as I make a fool of myself on this packed train? So I sit there as the train passes stop after stop after stop. And frankly, Mike, as life passes me by. But I was still so excited about the prospect of this guy. And I was looking to get married at that time. So I was clearly keeping my eyes open.
And I said, OK, if he gets off at my stop, then I'm going to try to strike up a conversation with him. And if not, then that's the universe telling me it wasn't meant to be. Well, he gets off at the next stop, which is not my stop. And all of a sudden, this wave of wild courage washes over me and practically pushes me out of my subway seat. And I pry the doors open. I am not exaggerating.
I pry the doors open and I run off the train after him. I catch up with him. I tap him on the shoulder. I say, excuse me, I'm sorry to bother you. You're wearing gloves, so I can't tell if you're wearing a wedding ring. But in the event that you're not married, you were on my subway and I thought you were cute. Any chance I can give you my business card? And he calls the next day.
A week later, we go out. Three years later, we're getting married and we've now been married happily 11 years with two little hooligans ages seven and nine.
Well, it seems like you're making my point by telling that story because I can imagine a lot of women particularly, but people in general, listening to that story and thinking, I could never, ever do that. Walk up to a guy, a strange guy, and offer to give him my business card. I would never do it. That's not who I am.
Right. So, yeah, when I teach wild courage, I definitely, I use that as an example, right? That seems like a very extraordinary example, but there are so many ordinary moments as well where it can come into play.
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Chapter 7: Why are some individuals more prone to accidents than others?
Is it important to embrace that, or that's nice to know, but that's not part of this?
Oh, it's absolutely part of this. Oh, I'm so glad you're bringing this up because of the nine traits, that's the reckless trait. Reckless is the courage to take calculated risks and to err on the side of action. Because frankly, better to learn from your mistakes than waste time predicting the consequences of every decision, right? Think fast and fearless. And if you're on the fence, Do it.
Right. I regret and I so agree with you that we regret the moves we don't make more than the than the moves we do make that maybe resulted in a mistake or maybe a failure because a failure is just data. B, if you want to double your successes, quadruple your failures. C, if you want to have a successful career laterally. Look at the discography of any successful leader, right?
Don't just look at their greatest hits. They had a bunch of gaffes. They had a bunch of failures. They had a bunch of missteps. Look at their LinkedIn profile. Look at all the redirections, right? The career changes, the moves, the lateral moves, the industries, the international moves, right? All of those represent risks that they took, represent failures that happened.
It represents that they must have learned from those failures, which just become data, right? And, and for, for sure, I've regretted the moves. I didn't make far more than the moves I did.
When John and I got married, we said, okay, at some point we're going to, when our kids are young in elementary school, we're going to, we're going to take them and we're going to live abroad for a year and study abroad, not study abroad and work abroad, be expats for one or two years. Guess what? Life has passed us by.
It's our own subway train moving stop after stop after stop without us getting off the train and together as a family, um, moving to another country because it's easy to stay, because it's hard to rent your house, because the kids are in school and ingrained in their activities and their lives. But for sure, I regret that we didn't make that happen, even though we vowed to do so.
And I'm pretty confident that if we had moved to Paris or Singapore or Buenos Aires, we would have, sure, had some hard months getting adjusted, but we never would have regretted it. So I agree that even I fail to be reckless, right? And to... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
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