What AI Is Really Good At & That Feeling You Get When You Don’t Fit In

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Today on something you should know, what makes someone attractive? The answer will surprise you. Then the very latest on AI. What's new? What it's good at? And which AI tool is best for you? The one that is best for you often is the one that you are already devoting the most time to. And that's because of context. These AI's become a lot more useful when they just know more about you, what it is you want to do, what your preferences are. Also, should you leave your computer on all the time or not? And certain interactions with people who are different than us can feel tense. That feeling is called churn. Churn is my term for the tension that we can all feel in diverse settings. Classrooms, workplaces, you know what to say and what not to say and how to behave. All this today on something you should know. I am excited to tell you about the world's number one expanding garden hose and their brand new product, the Pocket Hose Ballistic. 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That's "SYSK" to 64,000 for your two free gifts with purchase. Text "SYSK" to 64,000. Message and data rates may apply. 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 my carothers. Have you ever wondered what makes someone attractive? It may have less to do with beauty and more to do with your brain. And I'll explain what that means as we begin this episode of something you should know. Hi, I'm Mike Herbothers and thanks for being here. So research shows that we tend to prefer faces and find them attractive if they're easy to process what scientists call processing fluency. That usually means faces that are more average, more symmetrical and less visually complicated. We see that as attractive. Why? Because your brain likes things it can understand quickly. When something is easy to process, it actually feels better and we interpret that feeling as attractive. And this doesn't just apply to people. It's why simple logos like the Nike swoosh or Coca-Cola's script are also very effective. They're easy for your brain to recognize and remember, so you like them more. So when you find someone attractive at first glance, it may not be because they're objectively more beautiful. It may be more about how hard your brain has to work when you look at them. And that is something you should know. AI is everywhere. You hear about it constantly. We've addressed various aspects of AI on this podcast about how it's going to change work and creativity and everyday life. But how many people actually use AI in a meaningful way? Beyond the headlines and the hype, what is AI really good at? And where does it fall short? And if you want to use it, how do you use it without wasting time or getting misled? Because for most people, the challenge is an access to AI. It's understanding how to use it effectively. My guest has been thinking about exactly that. Christopher Mims is a columnist for the Wall Street Journal who covers technology and he's developed what he calls 24 laws of AI, practical guidelines to help people make better use of it. He's author of a book called How to AI, cut through the hype, master the basics, transform your work. Hey Christopher, welcome to something you should know. Hi Mike, thank you for having me. So if you were to take a snapshot of AI usage today, where are we? How many people use it? How many people are afraid of it? What do they use it for? What's the status quo right now? Roughly more than half of people are using it regularly and work and in there just regular day to day life, but an equal proportion are concerned that it's going to be worse for humanity on balance than it's going to be a boom. And the people who are using it, what are they using it for people are still mostly using AI as an answer engine. So I think this is one reason chat GPT is, you know, the Kleenex for the Xerox of the field right you say AI. That's first thing people think of obviously Google has made it available by default in their search results. So people are mostly treating it as an oracle, a source of truth. But you also see a lot of folks kind of poking at it as a reasoning engine. So they'll say, you know, what do you think of X is this image of fake image, for example, is this image in AI generated image. And you know, or increasingly they will say, here's my tax return, you know, where are some areas I could save money or I want an alternative to QuickBooks help me generate a spreadsheet right to run my life for my finances. And people use it to say, look at my finances and tell me what you think. You know, my concern is always when I use it, it's always very encouraging always tells me how smart I am. And it also seems very confident in its answers. And we also hear that it can also make up things. It can lie. It can hallucinate and it will do that confidently. So I don't know how accurate it really is. Absolutely. I mean, my favorite day to day reminder of this when I was writing my book, I used software called otter to automatically transcribe all of the interviews that I did. There's lots of AI transcription software at all works, approximately the same at this point. And it's very funny and a little bit strange to read the transcript of an interview you've just conducted. And in the AI generated summary of the AI generated transcript, see a very confident and obviously wrong statement. And it's really interesting how sometimes you can even kind of guess how it arrived at that incorrect conclusion, you know, it's close to what was actually in the transcripts. But anybody who works, you know, with AI regularly, whether they're using it to generate code or populate spreadsheets or giving answers, knows that it's just interacticable. These so called hallucinations that it has. And I understand from talking to people and I've read that the whole hallucination and lying thing with AI is getting better, right? That the technology is improving and it lies less than it used to. That's true. But we have to keep in mind that it used to be hallucinating constantly. So if you go from a hallucinating 20% of the time to 5% of the time, that is a significant improvement, but has it improved so much that it opens up, you know, applications where you can trust the AI completely. Definitely not. Is there a difference between the two of you? between the different chatbot things, like chatch, ept, and Claude. And there is this sense that they're kind of all the same, but you also see ads that this one's better for, this application and this one's better for writing and this one's better for whatever. And do we have any really good guide for that? I can tell people on any given day, which AI they should be using for which application, the problem is two months from now, I might have to give them different advice. So they are all in an arms race with each other to match each other in terms of features and capabilities. So as of April, 2026, if you want to write code, you're gonna use OpenAI or you're gonna use Claude. If you just want to get questions answered, Gemini's great because it taps into Google's entire search database, although of course, chatch ept also taps into that database, but in a way that Google doesn't like but can't stop because chatch ept and others are paying companies to scrape Google's search index. Don't use co-work for most things. I mean, that Microsoft's kind of having a challenging time right now. Co-work just doesn't, it's not competitive with those other options. If you want to use a chatbot that's pretty good with Excel, you would go with Claude, although Gemini and chatch ept are catching up. So it really depends, but the bottom line is that if you play with them or you read around on the internet a little bit, you'll quickly determine which one is right for you and often the one that is best for you is the one that you are already devoting the most time to and that's because of context. So whatever their abilities, these AI's become a lot more useful when they just know more about you, what it is you want to do, what your preferences are, what your writing style is, what you're working on these days. - Yeah, well, that seems like a big issue because I use chatch ept for a lot of things and there might be a better one, but chatch ept knows so much about me that seems like starting over would not be beneficial. - Yeah, with chatbots, my advice is the same. As when people ask me, should I switch to a new desktop computer OS or phone operating system or something? I just say no, the switching costs are always so much greater than whatever you're gonna gain. It's really a love the one year with type of situation. People who are really invested in chatch ept but using it for years, they should stick with chatch ept. If you're relatively new to this, but you use Gmail and Google Calendar and Google Docs, then Google's personal intelligence and a $7 a month Gemini subscription is gonna do wonders for you. If you are already really bought in on perplexity, for example, I know somebody who surprised me recently by saying, I love their chatbot, that's the one I use all the time. Should he switch no? Because that's where he's invested all of this time and energy and it knows so much about him. So we are really entering this age of personalization with AI, where that matters more than anything in terms of what they can do for us. So generally speaking, what is, at this particular moment in time, what is AI good for and what is it not good for? Generally speaking, AI can be great at basic tasks like helping you edit a document, generate a presentation, bouncing ideas around, that's what these generative AI's, these chatbots that we use are great at. There's of course a vast universe of what I call classic AI, all the AI that came before the chat, GPT moment, when it broke onto the scene in November of what was that, 2022 now? But those tend to be the kind of things that get used by scientists or meta or Google. These are the classic machine learning and deep learning systems that are populating our social media algorithms and giving us directions in our mapping app of choice. So we're using that kind of AI all the time, right? So AI is really great at helping us find things that we might wanna consume or getting a start destination, but that kind of AI is invisible. And so when people ask, what is AI good at, I tend to interpret that as what is modern generative AI good at? And one reason that question's a little bit tricky is its abilities are expanding every day. Partly that's because the models are getting, quote unquote smarter, but in no small part, it's because these JAPATs are becoming a default interface for existing software. So if you ask a cloud, for example, to do something for you that involves or requires a calculation a couple of years ago, it would have confidently answered using its large language model, its language-based brain. And it would have been wrong. Today, it will write some code, which will actually do the math, and it will give you an answer that is much more likely to be correct. So these JAPATs are becoming more capable in part because they are getting better at using existing software on the internet, writing their own little programs to answer our questions. That's sort of thing. They're becoming tool users, right? Just like us. As good as AI is, it's not good at everything. And I wanna ask you what you think AI is not good at in just a moment. - Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex, ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at logashortesttime.com. - So Christopher, as amazing as AI is for what it does well, what does it not do so well? What is it bad at? Well, there was a brief vogue where people would show off an axe for someplace like that. Using something like Chat GBT's mobile app, and they would show it a picture, you know, they would say, yeah, here is a valve in this pipe in my house that broke. How do I fix it? And sometimes they were really surprised by its ability to, not just reason with language, but to see, to look at an image of something and identify its contents or suggest ways to solve a problem. You know, I mean, Google has had an image recognition feature in its Google app that will help you identify plants or anything for years. But the truth is, when you really kind of poke into the guts of it and you start to try to trick it, today's large language models, even the ones that are called vision language models, which means they have the ability to parse images as well. They're so bad at seeing that they kind of border on being blind. Like there's basic test you can hold up two pens or something and it's not that hard to trick it into saying, oh, I see three or I see one or I see no pens. That's something these models are pretty terrible at. Another thing that they're bad at is anything that is outside of their training data. In other words, a human being, we have in our head, you know, a model of the world. And we don't really know how we construct this model, but it's separate from our language faculty. We do know that from modern neuroscience and brain studies. So we are able to learn in one context based on very limited data and apply that in many other contexts. But today's AIs, if you show them something that is just completely outside of anything they've ever seen, they just break because they're just statistical prediction machines. Or if you show them something that they rarely see, they break. But you said that you give it something that it doesn't know when it breaks. But my sense has, and my experience has been, if you ask AIs something, it never says, I don't know, it always comes up with an even a nonsensical question will get an answer. That's true. They are to their credit, I think Google especially, is getting a little better at having their AIs answer in the negative, if you ask. But generally, the way that AIs work. fundamentally they're just going to kind of go with whatever you feed them. And they certainly have no ability to evaluate the truth or falsity of a statement the way a human would. Where do you think it's headed? In other words, with so much technology, you know, you can look back and say, God, I can't believe it was so archaic back then. What are we going to be saying? And I know it's not fair to ask you to predict the future. But what are in 10 years, 20 years, are we going to look back at today and go, oh my God, can you imagine how archaic, chat, GPT and all these, you know, large language model things were? Well, I think in 10 years we're going to have many more examples of AI being given too much latitude and too little supervision and doing things that are disastrous. And so we're going to look back and say, wow, I can't believe we have trusted such primitive systems to, you know, automatically target and engage certain types of enemies on a battlefield and look where that got us. For example, I also think that potentially in the next 10 years there could be a breakthrough that is on the same level as what happened when chat, GPT broke onto the scene. And that's going to require a new kind of fundamental underlying system for that artificial intelligence, the one that underlies chat, GPT and all large language models and many other things besides, it's called a transformer architecture. That's the real secret of modern generative AI is that at Google, somebody invented a thing called a transformer architecture, Google didn't know what to do with it. Open AI figured it out. Or as to history, we could have another breakthrough, another new fundamental kind of architecture that will get us to the next level of, you know, reasoning in AI's perhaps they'll start to be able to reason abstractly perhaps they'll be able to learn from just a single example. That would be a huge breakthrough right now. If you want to train in AI, of course, you got to have thousands of examples of something. And that's very inefficient. But humans are amazing. You can show a human something once. You can show an octopus something once. And they'll repeat it. Imagine if AI could do that. You know, I wanted to ask you because when I use chat, GPT, I don't use the voice thing I type. And the reason I type is because I think you have to be a little more thoughtful when you type. But I also worry too about whether it would really understand what I was saying and what about that? What about chat at GPT and the others in their ability to understand voice and to talk back? The voice recognition is outstanding. And the voice synthesis is really good. Almost uncanny. So something that I've written about is these incredible leaps and bounds we've made in both understanding and in production of speech by computers. For some folks are leading us to a world where they barely type anymore. I mean, you go into certain startups and at every desk, there's a goose neck microphone, people are wearing headphones. They're whispering into those microphones, props for their coding agents rather than typing out code. It's pretty remarkable. I guess my concern about having a conversation with AI where I'm just talking off the cuff is if I say something that maybe I didn't mean to say or it hears something and we end up going down a rabbit hole that we that I never intended to. But if I type it out, I'm a little more thoughtful and careful. Well, the thing about having a conversation with an AI which makes up for the fact that you're just speaking off the cuff is that it can be iterative. So when I'm typing, if I'm typing a specification for an AI that's going to create a program for me, I'm sitting there doing all the mental labor myself. I've got the blank page in front of me, the most daunting thing in the world. When I'm conversing with an AI, I can be like, "Hey, I got this rough idea. Help me think it through." And of course, you're going to go back and forth. Now, the difference is the AI is going to influence your thinking. You have to be okay with that. Okay. So you're a tech columnist for the Wall Street Journal and you know a lot more about this than I do than most people do, I think. What's one thing you really think people need to get about AI today? Here's the most concrete, most practical advice I can give anyone about AI today. If you're not paying for AI, you are not experiencing AI as it exists today. The free versions keep getting better. But when you start to pay for, it doesn't matter, Claude, ChetGPT, Gemini, you are tapping into their best models. You are always logged in. So you are building the database that the AI has about you. It's memory of what you're up to. And you're able to start to connect it to other things on the internet. For example, if you activate personal intelligence in Google and you're paying for a pro subscription, when you're having a conversation with it and you're starting to ideate, it'll say, "Oh, is this related to this thing that you're working on that I know about?" Because I can see every single one of your Google docs. And frequently, my answer is yes. Thanks for reminding me. That is a whole other level of utility for AI. So you have to pay for AI to get the full value out of it. You don't have to pay a lot. $20 has been the standard. You can pay less. You go to Google, there's even a $7 or $8 subscription now, which will get you Gemini Pro. We've talked about AI several times. Yet we always come at it a little differently with different people who have a different perspective. I really appreciate yours. I've been talking with Christopher Mims. He's a columnist for the Wall Street Journal. And the name of his book is "How to AI? Cut through the height, master the basics, transform your work." There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. And Christopher, thank you so much for explaining it the way you did. I really enjoyed it. Yeah, Mike, this was a lot of fun. I appreciate your really thoughtful questions. Sometimes with these interviews, it can feel a little wrote, but I feel like the questions you asked challenged me in ways that I found really rewarding. Have you ever had an interaction with someone or a group of people and it just felt tense? Nothing obvious was said. No one was trying to start an argument. And yet something in the air made the conversation feel uncomfortable, guarded, even a little stressful. We usually assume that tension is personal or political, or that someone did something wrong. But what if that feeling is actually a psychological response? Something that happens automatically when people perceive identity differences between each other. My guest calls this feeling "churn" and he says it shows up in all kinds of everyday situations. At work, in the classroom, even in casual interactions. Often without anyone realizing what's happening. Claude Steele is a social psychologist in Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on how identity and perception shape human behavior. He's author of a book called "Churn," the tension that divides us and how to overcome it. I, Claude, welcome to something you should know. I'm Mike. That's a great pleasure to be here. So I must admit I'd never heard the term "churn" before. So explain a little more what "churn" is when where it shows up. Sure. "Churn" is my term for the tension that we can all feel in diverse settings. Classrooms, workplaces, boardrooms, etc. athletic teams. When they're diverse. And it's attention over what to say and what not to say and how to behave. And generally, how our particular identity will affect our experience in that setting and how, maybe even how fairly we will be treated in that setting. So that's what I mean by "churn." It's that tension. And I offer a new understanding of this tension. One that assumes it has less to do with prejudice and bias, which I think is the more typical way of thinking about this tension. And more to do with just the simple fact that our identities can have on our ability to trust each other. As you were just talking now and describing what "churn" is, I remember when I was in college, I took a class in. it was middle-eastern history. And when I walked into the classroom the first time, and subsequent times, I was the only non-middle-eastern person in that room. And I got this weird Feeling it was nothing obvious. It just felt like I don't really belong here Because I'm not like them and that feeling that's churn right? That's that's churn when you when you have that kind of feeling that's the what that term is referring to Well, and I'm glad you said that there's not necessarily any prejudice involved Because I didn't feel any prejudice. I just felt different like I didn't belong As part of their group and they were the majority of the group in the room But there was no judgment attached to that it was just a feeling of being different Exactly. I mean, I think we're so used to thinking about the term diversity in a context of of prejudices We have this sort of assumption that if we get limited prejudices and what would the problem be? But interestingly churn is something different than that. It's it's something that happens to both the prejudiced and unprejudiced alike It's just the attention you just Described I'm I'm not one of them and they're not one of me and and how's that gonna work out here in this situation and as a you know a society that is very diverse and probably getting more diverse This this can be a significant factor in in the important settings of our lives. I don't I don't mean you know sitting on a subway or something or on a bus but But you know in a classroom or in a workplace a doctor's office. I think on those real life important situations where you know we're pursuing our goals and and the like This churn can can be a factor that that can sometimes you know make us want to avoid situations and avoid conversations and it puts attention Between us. Well, it seems to me that in a lot of cases This problem will fix itself if you are with the same people for a while I have a I have an example of like extreme churn That happened to me when I was young when I was 12 years old my family moved from the United States to the UK and we lived in a small town in the middle of England Lemmington Spa and Went to the local school there and I walked into that school literally not knowing a soul It was the scariest thing I've ever done and I still think about it But it didn't take very long before I felt accepted as part of the group and The churn disappeared for the most part. I mean I still always felt a little different Because you know my accent or their accent is different than my accent But mostly I just felt part of the group eventually Yes If you if you have that opportunity in a setting, you know a classroom I teach a class over the course of a quarter You know what is that about quarter of a year and the students they are do you know pretty soon as you describe They get comfortable with each other because they've all said things now and they've all learned that in this particular class We're not gonna go into this hyper Judging of each other mode We're gonna we're gonna trust that people that people have good intentions and people are going to try to see the best in In the situation so as that atmosphere takes over Turn lowers and gets manageable and then the differences Between us become interesting and you know sources of enrichment lots of good things happen as this apprehension Receives and we begin to see the opportunity in diversity You know what I find interesting about this is the churn that you're talking about I wonder if in a lot of cases It's in your head, but it isn't real and here's an example if you're someone who's Never been to the gym you're out of shape But you've decided to start going and you go to a gym that's full of people who are Beautiful in shape people you're going to think I'm very different they're judging me and My sense is as somebody who goes to a gym pretty regularly People aren't thinking that at all. They're not judging you because you're out of shape They're probably more into what they look like than what you look like in the first place And if they think anything about you they're probably thinking good for you. I mean, that's great. I'm glad you're here. Welcome I don't think people judge the way we think they judge us that it's as I said it's in your head Yeah, that's a good example of churn. I think You know, it could be there a little there could be judgments that are being made by other people But they're they're really not important and probably more fundamentally the people that may make a passing judgment like that Really are as you say impress with your effort to to deal with the situation. They're they're happy. You're there They want to be supportive You know, I think you've got a good example of what I mean But in those cases in those higher stakes cases like it work if you're feeling like you don't belong there That that weird feeling that you get inside that you're being judged and maybe ostracized What are you supposed to do about it because people have their prejudices and they're going to make judgments about you and treat you differently That's them Nothing you could do about them. So what are you supposed to do? What I propose is a relatively new suggestion for what to do in that situation and that suggestion is to focus on Building trust in the situation in through your own behavior I'm trying to really get elemental here. Not you don't I'm not advocating that you Learned about every other culture and all of its details. I'm not advocating that you you learn how to get rid of all your prejudices and biases and so on I What I'm advocating is that you focus on on being a trustworthy person in that situation be responsive to people Listen to them Listen to them again try to try to help them function well in the setting So to support their functioning in the setting be have a bit of a service orientation if I might put it that way That that combination of things and a focus on that kind of things builds the trust that lowers the term Is that it is a lot simpler than maybe we've made it out to be can you give me an example of that? Yes I have a story about Miles Davis and Gil Evans who are two great jazz artists of the 20th century and Miles Davis is a cool hardened African-American trumpet player probably the best in the of that century If you want my opinion Gil Evans is From rural Canada a band leader white tall skinny guy He's he's kind of square. He's he's eating radishes out of a bound brown paper bag in these sophisticated jazz clubs in the in New York City but but they really became absolute best friends and that friendship was is rooted in the concrete Connection that they're both very open to their shared humanity Even though they're very different kinds of people and come from very different backgrounds with different orientations and have maybe even have different interests maybe even have conflicting interests Miles Davis is very concerned about his sort of propriety About the employment of African-American jazz musicians. It's time Gil Evans is not African-American and so but but they jump over those differences because They're not trying to move to each other that they're not prejudice or they're not distracted by those things They they really want to help each other in their goals and in their careers and that that attitude of listening closely to each other and trying to be responsive to each others needs establishes a profoundly close relationship between Between the two but I also think a lot of us Americans have relationships that go across Identity divides that one might think of as prohibitive but that we learn to Just connect very elementally to each other to listen to each other that formula focusing there on that kind of behavior Returning to emails being timely trying to it those things just wipe aside these Identity differences and the worries that make up churn those elemental Behaviors that connect us to each other like I like that guy guy guy here's who I am He's he hears what I'm concerned about and and he's trying to help me deal with it That is and it is more powerful, I think then we have recognized We have seen this challenge of the diverse society that we have this challenge of bridging differences as As more complicated is somehow we have to get past You know prejudices and biases and misunderstandings and you know mistrust takes complicates things and and gets us Down very difficult paths. I'm trying to reorient or refocus us on simpler things and so what would be some examples of things I could do to do that? I do think listening, the really trying to see what the other person is concerned about. That itself engenders trust in the other person. That person begins to trust you when you show that kind of interest in them. So if I'm a teacher with a student, if I'm a doctor with a patient, if I'm a lawyer with all these circumstances, I'm proposing this focus on simple things. Really listening, asking questions, I can give you an example of an experiment that I think that we did some years ago that illustrates what I'm talking about here. Sure, yeah, I love to hear it. We were interested in what would enable people across the racial divide to have an honest conversation about difficult topics. So we had white male Stanford students come into the lab one at a time and they were told they were going to have a conversation with two other students and on the table in front of them are photographs of the two students they're going to talk to. And for half of these participants, the two photographs were of two white guys. And for the other half, they were of two black guys. And then they find out that they're going to talk either about something easy to talk to anybody about, love and relationships in college. And or they're going to talk about something kind of challenging, racial profiling. So that's the setup. They're white guys, they're going to talk to either two black guys or two other white guys about either loving relationships or racial profiling. Then the experimenter says, I'm going to go down the hall and get your conversation partners. And while I'm going, would you arrange these three chairs for the conversation, would you just pull them together for the conversation? And that's kind of what we're interested in. Depending on the condition of the experiment that they're in, how do they arrange those chairs? And you wouldn't be surprised to learn that when they're going to talk to two white guys about either topic or to black guys about loving relationships, they put the three chairs very close together. But when they're going to talk to two black guys about racial profiling, there's attention in the room. There's churn going on. I don't want to say something here that would, you know, get me seen as racist or something. So they distance themselves in that condition. So how do you overcome that? That was really the central question of this work. And we tried a number of things. We tried some of the wisdoms that come out of diversity training. That didn't really work very well. Sometimes it even backfires. But eventually we found something very simple that worked. And that's kind of what launched our thinking in this direction. What worked, and by work, I mean, what enabled those white participants to move their chairs close together with two black conversation partners talking about racial profiling? What frame of mind reduced their churn enough to do that? And what it was was we simply said, look, you know, these are difficult conversations. Nobody really knows how to have them be perfectly smooth. So we, part of our societies, our history. So look, just just relax and view this as an opportunity to learn about somebody else's experiment, experience. And when you're in doubt, don't try to prove that you're not biased or prejudice. Don't do that at all. That could be a red flag. Just relax and ask questions. When in doubt ask questions. And with that instruction, with that mindset, so to speak, they moved in close for, they put their chairs close together to have a conversation with two black guys about racial profiling. That says a number of things. They really did want to have this conversation. They were interested. They just didn't know how. And the churn that they felt in this situation, what was, you know, made them initially just want to avoid the conversation to not really have it if they didn't have to. They would have left. But with a simple shift of mindset, one that said, look, just relax, listen, ask questions. Use it as a chance to just learn about somebody else in a situation like that. That reduced the churn, lowered it, enabled them to move in close for these conversations. Well, it's an interesting topic in the sense that it's, you know, you really simplified it. Like a lot easier than people get all twisted up in knots about this. And maybe we don't have to. You know that you're putting, you're putting my aspiration to good words there. I mean, I think that's, that is the aspiration that, you know, it's a lot easier than we think. Well, this is one of those things that I think everyone has experienced and thought about. Like, you know, what should I say? Did I say the right thing? I hope I didn't offend anybody. And nobody ever really talks about it. So it's good to get a perspective on it from someone who's really studied this. I've been talking with Claude Steele. He is a social psychologist at Stanford University and author of the book, Churn, the tension that divides us and how to overcome it. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Claude, I appreciate you being here. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you. As people started using personal computers, there's been this debate of should you shut the computer off completely for the night or when you're away for long periods of time or leave it on, maybe just put it in sleep mode. But with modern computers today, there's really not much debate. Sleep mode is designed to be safe and efficient. Your computer uses very little power and can wake up instantly. So for short breaks, sleep mode is usually the smarter move. But here's what most people don't realize. If you never shut down your computer or never restarted, performance can slowly degrade over time. Updates don't fully install. Memory doesn't fully reset. And small glitches can build up over time. That's why tech experts now recommend a simple rule. Sleep mode when you're stepping away. Or shut down your computer at least every few days. So it's not one or the other. It's knowing when to do which. You know, our most consistent source of new listeners is when people like you tell somebody or share an episode and talk up this podcast and get those other people to listen and then they become listeners. It is, well, it's word of mouth. It's very effective. And we appreciate it if you'd help spread the word. I'm Mike Herothers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from the Longest Shortest Time, an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm. And of course, the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase. It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods. The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longashortesttime.com.