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Why do kids get the whole summer off from school?
Then, most of us think stress is bad, something to get rid of.
Well, maybe not.
The issue is all in our heads.
And I'm not saying that to be Pollyanna-ish or say, you know, stress is really good for you.
But in fact, it's not necessarily bad for you.
The research around just thinking about stress differently is tremendous.
Also, what you may not know about bananas, that monkeys do.
And the movies.
You have access to thousands of movies, yet somehow watching movies isn't what it used to be.
You used to make more of kind of an intentional choice.
You know you had to sit down and watch that movie on cable or go to the video store and pick something and make a choice or buy a ticket.
And now it's just sort of scroll scroll, scroll until you find something that looks decent from an algorithm.
And you go, OK, I'll watch that.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
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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.
Come September, pretty much all kids are back in school.
But it does make you wonder, how come they got the whole summer off in the first place?
It's a good question and the one we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know.
Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers.
Welcome.
And you know, it's commonly believed that school kids started taking summers off in the 19th century so they'd have time to work on the farm.
And as nice as that story sounds, it's not true.
If they did take time off to work on the farm, they would get time off in the spring and fall, when the crops are planted and harvested, not during the summer, when they're still growing.
Before the Civil War, kids did not get summers off.
But as people moved to urban areas and cities got denser, they got hotter.
All that brick and concrete create the urban heat island effect in the summer.
So city dwellers would head to the cooler countryside.
Back then, school attendance was not mandatory, so classrooms were being left half-empty each summer.
At the same time, labor unions were taking hold and an eight-hour work week meant adults were getting more time off for themselves, so taking vacations away from home became more popular.
Advocates also started arguing that the brain was like a muscle and needed a break.
On top of all of that, there was no air conditioning and schools were miserably hot in the summer.
So by the beginning of the 20th century schools started giving kids more time off during the summer.
And here we are.
And that is something you should know.
One big goal for a lot of people is to reduce stress.
Life is so stressful.
I'm so stressed.
This stress is killing me.
These are phrases you hear often because stress is a big topic.
People feel stressed and they think it is doing them harm.
And that's a problem.
But I would like you to listen to an entirely different and more optimistic take on stress that is backed by actual research.
In fact, just hearing this conversation could make you less stressed about your stress.
You'll understand what I mean in just a bit.
Meet my guest, Dr. Rebecca Heiss.
She is a physiologist, writer and researcher, and she's author of a book called Springboard Transform Stress to Work for You.
Hi, Rebecca.
Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me, Mike.
So there is a whole industry wrapped around the idea that you need to reduce your stress or get rid of your stress.
Your stress is killing you and it needs to go away.
I gotta say I think it's probably the worst strategy that we can adopt, because the only people with no stress are dead people.
And I don't think that should be our goal, right?
The idea of getting rid of stress is really flawed because stress is part of life.
So, instead of trying to get rid of it, I think the challenge should be to use it differently, to recognize it's just our body preparing ourselves to perform.
Yeah, but my experience is that when I'm stressed, that is the worst time to prepare for anything, because I'm stressed.
Yeah, and yet your body is actually giving you and delivering to you the exact things that it needs in that moment.
So, when you feel stress, what's happening in your body is your body is producing all of these hormones and neurotransmitters that are actually preparing you to rise to the occasion.
So while our brain is saying, oh my gosh, I'm stressed, this is really negative.
In fact, we have control over that.
We can change the label on it and say, instead of man, this is really awful and I'm anxious, and this is scary, we can say oh, I'm excited.
This is my body preparing me to actually rise to the occasion.
Because you think about Olympic athletes.
They're breaking world records when the pressure and the stress is at its absolute peak.
And that's when we all can do the same thing.
We may not be breaking Olympic records, but we can still perform at our very best, even under high levels of pressure.
Here's my thinking about this is that.
I wonder how stressed people really are.
In other words, it's very cool to say how stressed you are, because that means you're a very busy person and all that.
But I wonder if people are really stressed or... This is just life.
I mean there's no.
The bar has been lowered to what stress actually is, so that we can say we're stressed.
Absolutely.
Life is kind of one giant trauma, right?
It is a whole bunch of series of stressors.
And that is what our body is built for.
So this isn't a bug.
This is a feature.
The trouble I think comes in and that humans are weird, right?
We're the only animal that creates our own stress.
So, you know, a lion, we'll think of lions for a second because they're great hunters.
I think everybody would argue that they're pretty good hunters, but they fail 80 of the time that they hunt.
And what they do immediately afterwards is they lay down and they take a nap, right?
They don't get in their heads and say, oh my gosh, I'm such a lousy hunter.
I can't believe I missed that gazelle.
You know, they're not creating more problems. problems from this response.
And yet that's exactly what humans do.
We get into our heads about all of the ways that, even trying to get rid of stress.
So, like our research has shown, that people stress out even more trying to get rid of stress, because what happens is they try and meditate or they try and do some yoga and they're still stressed and they're like, oh my gosh, I'm a failure.
I can't even get rid of stress.
And we create more stress as a result.
So it's a really negative cycle.
I have witnessed, and I'm probably guilty of it too, is something goes on in your life that you have now determined is stressful.
So now the problem isn't even the problem anymore.
Now the problem is the stress.
And it's going to suck you down into this whirlpool that there's no way out.
And we have worse outcomes as a result of trying to get rid of it to begin with.
So, instead of trying to be rid of the stress, I think we need to have a whole mind shift, a little mindset shift in the way we treat it and recognize listen, this is part of life.
It's not going anywhere.
And our response to it, instead of treating it like it's this life and death situation, which is how our body typically responds.
It's like getting chased by a tiger every time we have an email ping.
Instead of treating it like life and death, we can say, okay, invite that tiger in for a cup of tea.
Sit it down.
Have a little chat with it.
We can begin to get curious with our stress and say, wow, I wonder why this means so much to me.
Because really, that's what stress is about.
It's a barometer for how much we care about something.
Yeah, well, we'll take an example, all right?
You go in for a job interview and it's very stressful.
You know why it's stressful because a lot is on the line here.
There's no reason to have a real long discussion with yourself about why do you think this is important.
You know why it's important.
The problem is, how do you handle that stress that can sometimes flub you up in that interview, make you say something stupid or you freeze up.
That becomes the issue.
And it turns out that the issue is all in our heads.
And I'm not saying that to be Pollyanna-ish or say, you know, stress is really good for you.
But in fact, it's not necessarily bad for you.
And that shift, the research around just thinking about stress differently is tremendous.
So there was a Harvard business professor.
Harvard School research project where they looked at people.
Can you start that again?
I would love to.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Yes, there was research that came out of Harvard Business School looking at two groups that they use.
Gosh, man, now I'm just going to flub this next left and right.
I'm under stress, Mike.
I'm under stress.
What did we do?
You're under stress.
What did we do?
So there was this research that came out of Harvard Business School, where they looked at people under high pressure situations.
One of the situations they set up was having people give an impromptu speech.
And they recorded it and then observers would watch it and rate the speeches.
And before the speech, they'd had one group say, I'm excited.
And the other group tried to calm down, which is the advice we typically give ourselves, right?
Try to calm down.
The results were really spectacular.
The group that simply engaged with the stress said I'm excited.
This means I'm excited. actually were rated as being more competent, more confident.
They had higher scores all around on their performance, whereas those that tried to calm down had the exact opposite.
So trying to calm down, trying to get rid of the stress doesn't work.
And the difference is not trying to get rid of the stress, but trying to use that state of excitement in a different way.
So a moment ago you flubbed your answer to a question and I asked you again and you flubbed it again.
So I assume there was some stress there that you were starting to get pretty stressed by the fact that you weren't answering it the way you wanted to.
But what I noticed you did was you didn't go down very far into that drain where you start beating yourself up.
Oh my God, this is going to, you laughed it off and you came back and nailed it.
I mean, I think again, this is just an example of when we get stressed and we create more stress by thinking about it.
You know, I sat there for a second.
I was like, oh, my gosh, Rebecca, you're a professional speaker and you can't get this sentence out.
This is so embarrassing.
And I was like, wait a second.
I'm hearing myself say that.
Stop.
This is not a tiger.
This is not a life and death situation.
Pause.
Recognize that you're excited about this because this is meaningful and you want to communicate clearly and do it again.
And that's where we ended up, Mike.
Everybody who just heard that explanation has been in that position where you start talking to yourself.
Oh, my God, this is horrible.
I'm going to die.
And the more you do that, the harder it is to come out of it, because you're sinking deeper and deeper and deeper.
That's it.
And your stress response is working against you then rather than for you.
And it really is as simple as saying, okay, I'm excited about this.
Let's get curious about why this means something to me.
And then shifting that energy to serve you rather than have it hold you back.
Well, but that's you know.
Almost like saying the way to be a millionaire is to get a million dollars.
How do you do that in the moment when you've never been able to do it before?
So it seems like that is the tricky part.
It is a little tricky, but our body does actually help us with this, because our brain is looking to our body to understand what is happening.
So I want you to think about a situation where you should be scared.
You should be defensive.
Like a tiger is actually coming at you.
What's going to happen to your body?
Well, you're going to clench down.
You're going to sort of cross your arms.
You're going to furrow your brow.
Your muscles are going to be very tense, right?
And your brain then reads this response and says, oh, adrenaline is surging and my body is tense.
This is an emergency.
Whereas what just happened now when I flubbed my answer, I could feel my body get into that space.
And so instead, what I did was I took a moment, I unclenched my fist, I put a smile on my face and I opened my shoulders up, as if I was confident and excited.
And then I try it again.
And what this does?
Is it actually signals to the brain?
It's called somatic feedback, where our brain is looking to our body to understand what's happening.
So all of these chemicals are being released into our body And our brain goes, what's going on here?
How do I read this emotion?
Is it a good thing?
Is it a bad thing?
And if our body is open and relaxed and curious, then our brain goes huh okay, we must be excited here rather than anxious or scared.
We're talking about stress with my guest, Dr. Rebecca Heiss.
She's author of the book Springboard Transforms Stress to Work for You.
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So Rebecca, one might argue that you know the example that we're using, where you flubbed your answer a few minutes ago.
It's a pretty small in the scheme of things, in the scheme of your life.
This will not be one of your big.
As I look back on my life, one of the most stressful moments was in this interview.
It isn't.
But life has different levels of situations where sometimes stress is really really severe and seems like the degree of stress has something to do with how you respond.
Yeah.
I mean, yes.
And to that Mike, I would argue that if people look at their stressors in the moment, everything feels really big in the moment.
Everything feels like it's life and death because we have a singular stress response and it responds to, you know, flubbing an answer on a podcast, the exact same way as it does as it does to blowing an interview for the job that you really need in order to pay the rent.
And I'm not here trying to be Pollyanna-ish and saying we have to feel good about all of these stressors.
So this is maybe the major difference here is that there are massive stressors.
Those are things that are causing the stress. in our bodies.
But the stress response itself, that's something that's neither good nor bad.
It's just energy that our body is getting.
And we get that energy from flubbing an answer on a podcast and horrible diagnoses that are going to affect us for years.
But when we recognize that neither of those is an actual life and death situation and what I mean by that is in the next three minutes, we're not dead, because that's what our stress response is built for.
It's built for three minutes of screaming terror through the savanna getting chased by some lion, tiger or bear, oh my.
It's not built for these long-term, lots of little interruptions throughout the day.
And so, when we recognize that it's not an actual tiger, we can begin to utilize that energy differently.
And I'm not saying that this is simple or easy or that our brain accepts that this is just all good.
What I am saying is that that stressor can cause a response that we can utilize in a new way.
When I think about times that I have been stressed, it's because I care about the outcome.
You know that job interview, or you want to buy a house and it looks like the deal's not going to go through.
It's big things sometimes. that you really care about.
And you can't not care about something you care about.
So how do you deal with that when you're trying to do what you're talking about?
Yeah, I think you actually just nailed it.
So our research, we looked at meaning, stress, and purpose.
And it turns out to have a meaningful, purposeful life, you also must have a lot of stress.
So stress was one of the most high correlates to a meaningful, purposeful life.
Past stressful events, current state of stress, even future worry and anxiety are highly correlated to a meaningful, purposeful life.
So one of the questions that I asked in my follow-up research was to think of a project or an accomplishment that you're most proud of and then go back in time to when you were in the middle of that project.
And figure out, you know, how stressed were you on a scale of zero to 100?
And most people are saying like 5,492.
Like we're stressed out of our gourds when it's something that's meaningful.
And you really nailed it there, Mike.
It is recognizing stress as a barometer for how much we care.
And rather than running away from what is ultimately going to bring us meaning and purpose, we need to run at the roar, run towards that stressor and recognize that we may not be able to control the outcome.
But we can take action within it toward the thing that is going to provide us the best possible outcome that we can control in the moment.
Well, you said a couple of things back in the beginning about how people will meditate or they'll try to calm down.
Yeah.
Well, what about that?
I mean, it seems like maybe not in the moment when you're stressed, but do you dismiss the idea of meditation and those kind of relaxing things?
Are they unnecessary?
Unnecessary?
No.
I don't want to be dismissive of those things.
It's not that meditation or yoga or getting a massage or any of those things are bad.
It's just they're not actually going to mitigate your stress.
And this comes from research in 2013 where we looked at 90 different workplace interventions.
Those included things like meditation, massage, coaching, good night's sleep, you name it.
And of those 90 workplace interventions, zero of them, with the exception of one, with the exception of one, zero of them actually made stress better.
In fact, a lot of them made it worse.
And that comes back to the thing that I was saying at the beginning.
When we try to calm down and we...
We can't, we physiologically can't.
We get in our heads and we're like, oh gosh, this isn't working for me.
I am just, I'm broken in some way.
The one intervention that actually does mitigate stress is surprising to most people.
It's service to others.
And I love this so much because, while we're all familiar with the number one stress hormone right cortisol, one of the other major stress hormones in the stress response is oxytocin.
And that's the cuddle hormone, the love hormone, the connectedness hormone.
It's the hormone of courage that forces us to reach out in times of stress, to connect with others and ask for help or offer help.
And it's really powerful to recognize that in stress, it can actually bring people closer together.
Wow, good answer.
That's a great answer.
Thanks.
Well, I've always thought that just because you calm down today, you meditate or go get a massage, doesn't mean that on Thursday, when things all go to hell, that that's going to have any effect on the stress in that moment.
It felt good on Tuesday, but this is Thursday and everything's hitting the fan.
Yeah, exactly.
And so training our stress response and recognizing how we treat stress, I think is a longer term solution.
But what about?
I'm sorry, but what about this idea that if you participate in those activities meditation, yoga that you bring down your resting heart rate, that you exercise?
Does this that that will help?
I mean, I think that's a theory.
People believe that doing these things preventatively will help in the moments when the stress hits.
Are you saying that that is not true?
I'm saying there's a lot of science that will support doing meditation, doing yoga increases the pause right.
Increases the break between the stressor hits and your response to it.
What I am also saying is that it's not going to prevent the stressor from coming into your life.
And you having a physiological response to it.
So yes, your resting heart rate may be lower if you meditate and do yoga.
But when that stressor hits, you should have a stress response.
It's not a bad thing to have a stress response.
And that's the thing that I really want to... to bring into people's minds.
I think stress needs a better PR agent because instead of us thinking oh, it's bad for me to have a response.
No, that's actually brilliant.
Your body is getting prepped to do the thing it needs to do in that moment in order to seek a solution to the problem.
What's something if we haven't talked about it already?
What is something that would really surprise me to know about stress?
Yeah, I think probably the most important thing is the study in 2013 that looked at 30000 Americans across eight years time.
And the questions that the researchers were interested in were do you believe that stress is harmful to your health?
And does that affect your health based on how much stress you have.
And so people that have very high levels of stress, who believed that stress was bad for their health.
They had the highest mortality rate of the entire study.
So 43% higher mortality rate than the rest of the study.
That's massive.
And this is bad news for most of us who have very high levels of stress and believe stress is bad for us.
But here's the good news.
The good news is, in the same study, people who had the same very high levels of stress, but simply believed that that stress response or that stress wasn't bad for them.
Maybe it was good.
Maybe it was just energy.
Just not bad for them.
They had the lowest mortality rate of the entire study.
Lower, in fact, than people who had very little stress in their life.
So over the course of the eight-year study, 182000 people died, not because they had very high levels of stress, but because they believed that that high level of stress was bad for them.
And that is so powerful to recognize how much the way we interpret our stress response affects our health outcomes.
Well, this was fun and a very different conversation than I thought it was going to be about stress.
And I like this conversation better than the one I thought it was going to be.
I've been talking with Dr. Rebecca Heiss.
She's author of the book Springboard Transform Stress to Work for You.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes.
Rebecca, thanks.
You're a very good interviewee.
I appreciate your time.
Oh, goodness.
Well, you're a great interviewer.
I listen to your podcast quite frequently.
In fact, it kept me awake last night on my drive from Charlotte, so I really appreciate it.
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You may not have thought about this much, but the way we watch movies has changed a lot over the last several years.
It used to be that to see a movie, you had to go to a theater or a drive-in.
Then television started showing movies so we could watch some movies there.
Then services like HBO showed up, and then videotape rentals of movies where, if you're old enough to remember, you'd head to the video store to see what you could rent.
Then DVDs got added to the mix, and there were Laserdiscs.
And now there are streaming services that tell you what movies they think you will like and then allow you to pick a movie and watch it instantly on your big screen TV.
The experience of watching movies has really changed, and that change has also changed the way movies are made and distributed.
Here to discuss all this is Jeff Rossio, who has researched this topic thoroughly and written a book about it called Lost in the Stream.
How algorithms redefine the way movies are made and watched.
Hey, Jeff, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Hey, Mike, thanks for having me.
Appreciate it.
Well, I just gave my brief history from my point of view of watching movies.
And you focus primarily on the more recent history because that's where things really have changed.
Over the last five years, I mean it has just the explosion of digital platforms and the streaming revolution, and every studio has their own streaming service.
That's all changed.
You don't need to go to the theaters anymore.
Movies come out on rental platforms within three or four weeks.
A lot of movies go right to streaming.
So it's really shifted and there are so many more options now that personally I feel almost overwhelmed compared to the options i used to have.
And you used to make more of kind of an intentional choice.
You know you had to sit down and and watch that movie on cable or go to the video store and pick something and make a choice or buy a ticket, and now it's just sort of scroll scroll, scroll until you find something that looks decent from an algorithm and you go okay, i'll watch that.
Well, the thought process in the mind of the movie watcher has changed in this way.
It used to be, if there was a movie on television like the ABC Sunday night movie, and it's Sunday night and you sit down and you watch the movie because it's on.
Now, there are so many choices and you can watch them whenever you want.
You don't know what to watch or when.
It's true.
You probably watched a lot of those movies start to finish because that's what you had.
Right.
And now, you could get half an hour in and say, forget it.
Sometimes people don't even give the movies a chance.
You flip to something else.
But I think there used to be that commitment and that kind of allowed people to really figure out what they liked and what they didn't like.
And you let a movie kind of tell its story because hey, i mean, how many movies have you watched?
For the first 30 minutes you're like i'm not sure.
Then by the end you're like, oh wow, like glad i stuck through it.
Yeah well, it does seem odd that not that many years ago your options were limited.
It's whatever movie you rented or whatever movie was on television or whatever HBO was showing.
Those were your options.
Now there are so many options.
You've got Netflix and Amazon Prime and all the other streaming services.
And yet, how many times have you thought, God, there's nothing on.
There's nothing to watch.
And there's millions of things to watch, but nothing strikes your fancy.
Yeah, no, it's true.
And it's a sort of I call it an illusion of choice, sometimes because there are so many choices, but at the same time it feels like whenever you go to look for a specific movie, it's not where you expect it to be or you can't find it.
And it's just a totally different ball game now, because you're truly missing.
You know i have some numbers in the book but like, even if you add up all the streaming platforms, all the major streamers, you get about 25 000 movies on those platforms.
It sounds like a lot, but there's Scarecrow Video in Seattle, who's the world's largest video store, that have 150000 movies on their shelf.
Streaming is really just this tiny portion of the total movie history.
You are truly missing out on 80 percent of movies out there.
I think that's the frustration people have, is There seems to be so much and, at the same time, there isn't.
It's a strange world to live in, to have that much choice without what you're looking for.
Well, something I'd like to get you to comment on is that when you have access to all these movies, thousands and thousands of movies on these streaming services, so you start to watch them, and you watch the big blockbusters first and you get through all of those, and then you start to go down the list and There are a lot of mediocre and frankly, lousy movies out there.
This is true because, so there's sort of a, there's pros and cons, right?
With streaming and with the way everything is, distribution is easier.
It's easier to make a movie now.
Cameras are cheaper.
You could shoot a movie with your iPhone.
They shot 28 years later on an iPhone.
You know what I mean?
Like Hollywood movies.
So it's easier to make a movie.
It's easier to get it distributed, put out on a platform.
But at the same time, yeah, it kind of floods the market and it becomes really hard to find the good, the diamond in the rough.
How do you find something that's actually worth watching and not just?
I don't want to call it streaming slop, but some people are like oh, that's just, that was made in two days, just to have something else for the service, because they are content machines.
That's what they are and they need constant content.
I think it's significant though that, even though there have been so many changes as we've already been talking about so many changes in the way people watch movies, people still go to the theater.
And they like to go to the theater.
They do.
I will say though, if you look at ticket sales by number, they are actually down quite a bit, which is sad.
Now people, there's still that dedicated audience that goes to theaters and the revenue looks okay, because the ticket prices keep going up every year.
But the amount of tickets being sold every year has been decreasing.
And it's one of the things I'm worried about is I want more people to go to theaters because I think there's the movie fan, there's the movie nerd like me who's always going to go to a theater to watch something.
But I think there's a lot of those casual viewers who would have gone to theaters 15 years ago, who now just are trained to know.
Oh, this is going to be on streaming in a month or two.
I'll watch it at home.
And you're missing out on that community experience, seeing it on a big screen, seeing it with an audience.
Well, and there are some movies that really lend themselves to a theater experience.
I mean the Mission Impossible movies, and Tom Cruise has always said he wants to make movies for theaters.
But you see that on an IMAX screen with that audio capability.
And even watching it at home on a big screen TV, it's very different.
It is a movie that in the theater is much more spectacular.
You can't match that, even as far as technology is coming.
Hey, I'm a home theater nerd, too.
I've got a 85-inch TV.
I've got 11 speakers, two subwoofers.
I invested in it because I want my movies to look great at home.
But you can't watch Mission Impossible or Top Gun Maverick, and then watch it at home and go oh yeah, that was just as good.
I mean even older movies I tried watching.
I remember the first time I tried watching 2001 A Space Odyssey at home.
And I was like, I couldn't get into it.
And then I went to a theater a few years back and saw a 70 millimeter screening of it.
And I was like, I get it.
Now I understand.
This was the experience.
So people are... missing that.
And I think it does take away a little bit from the art form.
So, knowing what you know, do you have advice for people like me who have that there's nothing on?
I've seen it all before.
The same stuff keeps coming up.
They keep offering me the same things I don't want.
Like is there a way around it?
There's a few things you can do.
You know i wrote in the book about getting more involved and you know, not not to say social media, because that's going to be full of algorithms, but tighter communities and places like um.
You know, i really like reddit for that kind of thing, where you can have these, these dialogues and these forums.
And it feels a little bit like old school internet before social media, but you have a real dialogue with people.
You can find those deeper cuts.
You kind of you get from a group mind rather than just one person.
You know an influencer like myself i mean, i do this in social media so i'm going to criticize myself but you shouldn't just watch me.
You know, watch everybody get recommendations from more people.
Go to the theaters, talk to people, talk to your friends about movies.
Like you have to bring back that, That conversation that used to happen at a video store, at a movie theater.
These conversations don't happen as often anymore and people don't even know.
You could have a best friend who has a movie you've never seen and you guys probably don't even talk about it because it's whatever's latest on streaming.
So that's a big piece of it.
It's just like bringing back the community aspect.
But I'm also a huge advocate for physical media.
And that's not just because, oh, it's better quality and all this stuff.
Sure.
I'm also a huge proponent of it because of the selection and because of the work that There are a lot of great independent we call them boutique labels out there who are reviving movies and remastering movies from the 50s 60s 70s 80s 90s, putting them out in beautiful new restored editions, really diving into deeper catalogs that you're not going to see on streaming.
And there are great films out there.
There's 100 years plus of movies out there.
There's a lot that you probably like and just don't know about, because when you live in that sort of you know the bubble of just what streaming has and they're always going to be about what's the most popular, what's going to get the most view time.
And they're not going to challenge you with something different.
What has streaming done to the film business?
I mean, certainly it hasn't helped the theater business, but But it has brought a lot of movies that you know before streaming.
It would have been impossible to find most of these movies unless you spent hours and hours in a video store.
So it's bringing movies to people's lives, but what is it doing to the business of movies?
For the business side of it.
What it's kind of done is it's turned all of the movie studios into.
They've had to become tech companies essentially.
They need to now run a streaming platform.
You can't just be...
Paramount, you need to run Paramount Plus and you need to be selling software subscriptions.
You're now a software tech company as much as you are a movie studio.
And you need that to continue to be profitable and have that kind of infinite growth in order to please everybody and please the investors.
So what it ends up doing is you see a lot more content that just kind of gets cranked out, thrown on there.
You see stuff.
Just the theatrical experience has definitely been devalued.
The movie theaters you know they make their money on the second third, fourth week sales opening weekend studios take a big chunk.
Well now, by the third or fourth week, those movies are already on a streaming service or on a rental platform.
So movie theaters are hurting because they're not getting used to have movies in theaters for three, four months.
They're not getting that anymore.
They're getting two weeks and then people know it's coming out soon.
I'm not going to buy a ticket.
So the movie theaters hurt.
I think the studios are hurting, trying to find a way to make running a massive tech platform profitable.
And the ones who are doing it best are probably the tech companies like Netflix is a tech company.
They knew how to run the tech first, content second.
Apple TV, same thing.
Amazon Prime.
They're probably doing the best because they understand the technology and they are tech companies.
The ones who are struggling.
I think you see it with a little bit of Warner and Discovery and what they've been juggling around with HBO.
You see it with Paramount.
You even see it to a certain degree with Disney and Disney+.
They've kind of told filmmakers hey, we're not going to have the budgets we had a couple of years ago for you to make these big shows and movies.
This isn't the reality.
We can't keep this up.
So it's dramatically changed just the kinds of movies that can get made, because You need guarantees now.
There's not a lot of risks being taken.
They're literally running movie scripts.
I've had filmmakers tell me they're running stuff through algorithms and AI machines to say is this going to play well or not?
The human element's kind of been taken out and it's all run through these algorithms and the software side of the business.
Are DVDs still a thing?
Do people still buy them?
I always like having them, like the Christmas DVDs, like you can just pull them out and play them.
But it seems like nobody's really buying them much anymore.
It's definitely not ever going to get back to its peak like the 80s and the 90s, but there are still a lot of companies and even the major studios still cranking out.
You have DVD, you have Blu-ray, you have 4K UHD Blu-ray now for 4K TVs.
And there are a lot of people, it's more limited.
I compare it to like the vinyl record resurgence a few years back, where that was dead, that was at zero, and now all of a sudden people are buying vinyl.
There's always going to be this dedicated group of enthusiasts who want to own it, and there's always going to be someone out there, whether it's an independent label or someone that the studios contract to make these things.
I don't see them going anywhere, but I mean, you're right, the average person doesn't have them, just like they don't have CDs or cassette tapes or vinyl records, but I think that there's still a place for it.
It's still nearly a billion dollar industry in the US and a lot of recent releases that have come out have actually sold out and people are having a hard time finding them.
So There's been a little bit of excitement lately.
Interestingly enough, even with like Gen Z and the younger generations to kind of grew up in this world and never knew anything different of getting back to CDs DVDs, VHS tapes have made a huge resurgence.
Wait, VHS has made a research... I mean, that is the poorest quality video... It is.
...man has ever made.
It is, but if you... Yeah, I mean, VHS tapes are... very hot right now if you go on ebay um they do vhs tape swaps movie theaters are doing events with the local indie theaters it's become you know there's people making reproductions of modern movies on vhs tapes and even some of the studios you know 20th century studios put out Alien Romulus on a VHS tape as sort of a collector's piece, but it's playable and those sold out.
So there's been this kind of resurgence.
There's this nostalgia factor and clearly the quality is not there, but there are a lot of people who are, I guess, pushing back against it.
And you'll see.
Even the old TV VCR combos that you know we all used to have yeah, selling on, selling on eBay now for a hundred, two hundred dollars I mean, there's used to be free on the side of the curb.
And Well, as you were talking, I just pulled.
I just went on Amazon and looked and there's a lot of VHS players for sale.
So you know, a lot of them are reconditioned players, but I mean, there doesn't seem to be any shortage.
If you wanted to get one and didn't have one anymore, you could get one pretty easy.
Yeah, and they do sell.
They sell a lot.
You'd be surprised.
A lot of them sell.
A lot of people are looking for them.
And there's, yeah, there's been this weird resurgence to that format and just getting back to it.
If you look it up online, they're everywhere.
So you would know the answer to this.
So you have a pretty fancy schmancy home theater system.
If you rent a movie on a fancy format like a disc format and watch it on your theater system, Is it going to look a lot different than if you streamed it on Netflix?
Depending on the movie, yes.
I would say there are a lot of older movies that.
So when you're streaming something, it's pretty heavily compressed because they need to send all that data over the internet to you, to your streaming device, to your TV.
And so there are.
You know, we can get really technical and there's bit rates and things of how the quality is, but it's typically like five to six times less quality than a disc, if not more.
And that's just because they have to compress files in order to get them to you.
Our internet infrastructure isn't there yet.
So you'll see it a lot.
There's a good example I always bring up is people who watched game of thrones on hbo and a couple of the last episodes in the final season got very, very dark and people complained they couldn't see what was happening.
Their tvs looked.
It looked like a mess you know there was.
It looked like it was blocky and looked like a VHS tape almost.
And that's because the streaming service couldn't handle what they were sending through.
I have the 4K disc.
If you put that same episode in, it's nearly perfect.
One real fundamental problem I've always had with home movies watching commercial movies at home is the audio.
Because if they leave the theater mix with the home version it often it's either too loud at points and then you turn it down, and then you can't hear the soft dialogue.
It works in a theater, because it works in the theater, but if it's just coming through a couple of speakers in your living room, it's hard to adjust And I'm surprised they haven't fixed that.
Yeah, that is.
The problem is that they're mixed for a theater and then when you get home you know if you have a sound bar or even if you're just watching through the TV speakers, everything kind of has to come through that one source, and so I'm sure like yeah, the music will get super loud, but you can't hear the dialogue, and And then the dialogue's too quiet.
You turn it up, and then your speakers get blown when the explosion happens.
It's very common.
So they've actually started.
There's been a bit of a debate in the home theater community because they've started to sort of mix things.
I've noticed they're mixing things differently for at-home viewing, and there are the people who invested all their money in their home theater to say well, now you're taking away from my experience, because I invested all this to have that and I get that.
But 99% of people don't have that.
And so that's why they're kind of, they're changing the mixes a little bit.
Well, I'm glad to hear.
It's a hot debate though, for sure.
And really the only way around it is yeah, you have to get more speakers if you're watching movies, or you're pretty much going to be stuck with that problem.
Just that's...
That's what a movie is, right?
You just can't get around it.
Well, this is fun to talk about because, you know, I like movies.
Everybody likes movies.
Clearly, you like movies.
And yet you know, I have never really stopped and talked about it like this and looked at the evolution of how we watch movies.
So I appreciate you sharing your insight.
I've been talking with Jeff Rossio and the name of his book is Lost in the Stream.
How Algorithms Redefine the Way Movies are Made and Watched.
And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.
And Jeff, I appreciate you coming on.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Bananas are an amazing fruit.
They're chock full of nutrients.
They're easy to peel and eat.
But you're probably peeling them all wrong.
If you watch a monkey, you'll see the way the monkey peels bananas is from the bottom up.
That way the white stringy stuff stays with the skin.
So start at the other end of the banana, the end of the banana, where the bananas are not connected together.
Pinch the end of the skin and they should split open and you just peel and enjoy.
And another tip for a better banana take them apart when you get them home from the store to slow down the ripening process.
They'll ripen faster when they're all connected.
And that is something you should know.
I appreciate you listening, and I appreciate all the support that we get from listeners.
And one great way to help support this show is to spread the word, tell people about it, share it and get them to listen.
It's easy to do with the share function on whatever player you're listening on right now.
I'm Mike Carruthers.
Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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