Something You Should Know - AI: Blessing or Curse? & What Our Noisy World Does to You

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

Can drinking tea make you happy – or do happy people just like to drink tea? There is definitely a connection between tea and mental health, and this episode begins with an explanation. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25657295/ Artificial Intelligence is either the next big thing that will transform our lives or the worst thing ever that will curse humanity. So, what is the truth? Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Rivlan has taken a hard look at AI and joins me to discuss the good and the bad and reveals how AI will affect us all. Gary has been writing about technology since the mid-1990s, he is author of 9 books and his latest is called AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence (https://amzn.to/4dXcfIl). You have likely noticed that the world is pretty noisy. The big concern is that noise has a big impact on our health. It’s not just hearing loss that is the problem. Noise is connected to heart disease, premature death and other health issues that we all need to be aware of. Here to explain how noise affects you and what we can all do about it is Chris Berdik. He is a journalist who has investigated the dangers of noise in our world and he is the author of a book called Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World - and How We Can Take It Back (https://amzn.to/45cyYhe). There is something that women can do with their voice that can make them seem more attractive to men. What’s interesting is that if men try to do it, it has the opposite effect. Listen as I explain what that is. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140411153320.htm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No Frills delivers. Get groceries delivered to your door from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC Optimum Points on your first five orders. Shop now at NoFrills.ca. Today on Something You Should Know, the powerful effects from a simple cup of tea. Then, the growing use of AI in almost everything has many people scared of the consequences. I think we're scared of the wrong things. When it comes to AI, I'm worried about stuff

that can happen right now, the use of AI in warfare, the use of AI for surveillance, the use of AI to manipulate people. Also something interesting women can do with their voice that men simply cannot. And noise. We all know unwanted noise can be irritating and aggravating, but... There's a bigger systemic issue out there that from offices, hospitals, schools, restaurants, our world is increasingly noisy

and it's causing harms to our health, wellbeing, and to the planet. All this today on Something You Should Know. What does it take to lead like a superhero? Well, find out on the Superhero Leadership Podcast hosted by Marvel's former CEO and legendary turnaround expert, Peter Cunio. Each week, Peter is joined by top performers

from business, media, and beyond, leaders who have mastered the art of impact, resilience, and vision. Together, they explore Peter's 32 leadership essentials, revealing what it really takes to rise, inspire, and lead with purpose. If you want to level up your leadership, this is your blueprint. Search for Superhero Leadership, available wherever you get your podcasts. to be happier people? Well, why would that be? Let's find out. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. So tea drinkers are happy people, but does that mean tea makes people

happy or is it that happy people tend to like tea? Research out of China seems to indicate that tea makes people happy or at least protects them from depression. In 11 studies of over 22,000 people, the results reveal that regular tea drinking predicts a 31% decrease in depression risk, and the more tea people drink, the less their risk of depression. It also seems to be true for both regular and green tea drinkers. The researcher's conclusion is that consumption of tea may act as an independent protective factor for depression. Given that tea is widely consumed, has few documented adverse effects, and is relatively inexpensive, its potential in treating and preventing depression

inexpensive, its potential in treating and preventing depression should be recognized. And that is something you should know. It's hard to get through the day without hearing about, or interacting with, AI. And depending on who you hear it from, AI is either the next great thing to change the world or the biggest threat to everything we hold dear. In the meantime, big companies are pouring huge amounts of money into AI in an attempt to cash in on the technology. So how does all of this, and will all of this,

affect you and me now and in the future? Here to discuss this is Gary Rivlin. He is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who has been writing about technology since the mid-90s. He's the author of nine books and his latest is called AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence. Hey Gary, welcome to Something You Should Know. That's great to be on. Thanks. So in just a snapshot, what's your take on AI?

Is it gonna change the world? Is it what is it? It's not gonna change the world your world Tomorrow or next year, but if you take the long perspective if you look 10 or 15 years in the future I really do think it's gonna change everything just like the internet in the mid 1990s didn't change things overnight. But now, two decades plus later, it's infiltrated everything, the same with mobile, which dates back to the mid 2000s. It took a while, but it really has changed the world. And I really think AI is going to do that.

So in that sense, I think it's under hype, but it's over hype because these startups, these large big tech companies have put a lot of money into this, they've raised a lot of money, and so they're over promising, right? They have to justify all those millions, if not hundreds of millions, if not in some cases, billions of dollars they put in, so personal agents are gonna change your life tomorrow.

They're not, but 10 years from now, I think they will. So you talk about these big tech giants battling over AI, because where's the money? That's one of the things I don't understand is, it seems to be pretty much available for free to anybody who wants to use it I can go to chat GPT and and do all kinds of things. It doesn't cost me a dime. So where's the money? Where's the big dollars in AI? Well, you've you've identified a problem for those large companies and small that are putting a lot of money into this

Venture capitalists are investing a lot of money in startups. Last year, they invested around $150 billion or so in AI startups. And the large companies, Google, Microsoft, Meta, others, they're investing tens of billions of dollars in this. But the problem is it's not really making much money. Let's use OpenAI, they're the ones that in a way started all of this, started all of us talking about AI. They released Chat Cheap PT at the end of 2022.

You know, they actually brought in like $3.5 billion in revenue last year, which is a lot of money for a small company. But it cost them like nine billion, 10 billion dollars to train the models, run the models, to do everything. So they are losing money. They do, they make money, some people take the premium version, so anything you're using

for free is sort of the next best alternative. But if you want the cutting edge stuff and you want unlimited use, you could pay $20 a month. And more than that, you have businesses licensing their AI. So you go to Expedia and there's an AI bot there. That's OpenAI. Apple has cut a deal with OpenAI to use their chat bot there. So, you know, there is money, but

that's part of the problem with AI. It was part of the problem with the internet in the mid-1990s. You know, you give it away for free. People don't expect to pay for it. So it's going to be a long time before we're seeing profits by either big companies or startups in the AI area. So the three billion dollars that it has made is just subscriptions? A lot of it is subscriptions and you know there's a lot of people who do want a subscription. I subscribe to one, it's not ChatGBT, it's called Claude because I use it a lot. I use it for editing, I use it for research assistant. If you use it a lot, they're not going to let you use it a lot. I use it for editing, I use it for research assistant. If you use it a lot, they're not gonna let you use it for free. They put a limit on it.

And then you have businesses out there licensing, and you could use the example of Instacart. You go and like, hey, these are the ingredients I have. Create a recipe for me, or the opposite. I wanna cook this recipe, put together a shopping list for me. So you're seeing other companies experiment with using AI, and they're paying those that create these chatbots

to use their service. So you just brought up something that I've always wondered about. So there's the free version, and there's the premium version. What's the difference? Is it just time that you can access it? Or do you get better results? the what am I paying for? You're right. It's both. So with the subscription you get a lot more time on device, you know

There's a limit how much you can use the free if you You want to return to it five ten times during a day? They're not gonna let you do that unless you pay. But there's also the cutting edge version. So the latest greatest version of the chatbot that an OpenAI puts out or the arrivals put out, you're not going to be using that one when you use it for free, you're using the previous model. And the truth is, I use both. I use some free versions of chatbots. I've used paid versions. It's hard to tell the difference.

To me, the difference really is how much time you get to use it each day. When all these venture capitalists are putting all this money into it, it would seem that if you're a venture capitalist, before you hand over your check, you wanna have some idea like, what's the path to money? What's the path to profit here?

But it sounds like no one's really sure where the money is. The venture capital game is a weird one. It's really a hits business. For every 10 investments they make, three or four go out of business, three or four do okay. But it's those one or two that give you the return on your investment. So you know, the, the, the ghouls that you could make a hundred X, a thousand X, uh,

your money, one of the main character in the book, Reid Hoffman, he invested $37,500 as an angel investor, the opening round in Facebook. And when it went public, it was worth $400 million. It's a hits game. It's the astronomical hits, the ones we've all heard of, that really the venture capitalists is shooting for. So you said you use AI. What do you use it for?

You know, I started using AI at the end of 2022. And I found it extraordinary for a variety of reasons. As a journalist, as a writer, I use it as my research assistant. It's a terrific editor. If you're in a job where you're writing reports, you use that. It could create an illustration. You could try it a hundred different ways. The illustrator is not going to be frustrated because it's a bot. No, I'm actually convinced that AI is going to be pretty essential. And what about all this talk about, you know, it's going to take everybody's job,

that we won't need people because we have AI? You know, it's going to take everybody's job that we won't need people because we have AI That is a worry. I think it's gonna happen more slowly over time than people are thinking which Theoretically will give policymakers and others time to react with you know Autonomous vehicle vehicles. I was just in San Francisco a few weeks back and there's these robo taxis Everywhere and they're driving around the city very safely I don't think we're very far off from driverless cars

You know it could be two years four years whatever when they're ubiquitous maybe ten years But eight to ten million people in this country make their living as a driver long haul truckers in this country make their living as a driver, long haul truckers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, local delivery, and a lot of those jobs are gonna be eliminated. Customer service, there's millions of people, tens of millions of people around the world who make their living in customer service.

Well, these chat bots are being used already in customer service centers to just, I wanna change my password, you know, basic stuff and like, oh, I can't handle this, so I'll give it off to a human. They're really having success with that. So that's another job category. I don't think it's going to eliminate all the jobs, but you know, you've got a team of 20 people working on marketing in a large company. Well, the entry level positions like do the preliminary research, give me some rudimentary drawings, redraw this, redraw that.

You could suddenly a team of 20 could be a team of 10, team of five and do the same thing. So I think you're going to see large reductions in a lot of categories and this shock to people to me and you know others who have been studying this for a long time is it came for knowledge workers, it came for white collar workers before blue collar, everyone thought it was gonna be robots on the factory floor which eventually you know will happen I'm convinced but right now it's the computer programmers, it's the content creators, you know, paralegals, those kind of positions that are the most threatened by AI where it is today.

It seems like the companies who are in AI are big companies and you have to be a big company to get a seat at the table. That it's gonna be hard to come from nowhere and be a real player in AI if you don't have just gazillions of dollars. It really is the stuff of big tech. I mean, Microsoft has $100 billion in cash laying around, the same with Google, the same with Meta. They have tens and tens and billions of dollars.

It is, I fear, going to be the stuff of big tech. I fear that the next Google is Google, that the next meta is meta in the area of AI. And is that a good thing or a bad thing, or it just is a thing? I personally think that's a bad thing. I'd say the same companies that have messed up tech in the last decade or two, the same companies we do not trust, are going to be in charge of AI. And AI is

a powerful thing. Eventually, we're going to lose our APEC status as the smartest entity on the planet. We're talking about personal agents, AI agents that are like a rich person's personal assistant. They'll make reservations for you. They know what you like, those kinds of things. Like, well, we're asking these AI models to be trusted with our information. Are we going to give our information over these things? So I do fear that if it's the same group of big tech companies that are dominating AI,

there's going to be a trust issue on behalf of the consumers and the mistrust I have having written about these companies for decades. I don't quite trust them to put our best interests first. I mean, when I first started writing about this trust and safety was a major concern for all of these companies. And that's fallen by the wayside as it's gotten more competitive and across the board. I mean, from OpenAI to Google, safety issues, I feel, have taken a backseat to making profits. And for something like AI, I think that's a real problem.

We're talking about the business of AI. And my guest is Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Gary Rivlin, author of the book AI Valley, Microsoft Google and the trillion dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence. The Chevrolet employee pricing event is on now. Get a big cash purchase discount of up to $11,300 on the 2025 Chevrolet Silverado LDZR2 and Silverado HDZR2.

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So, Gary, you use AI as an assistant and, you know, people use it, as you pointed out, for recipes or, you know, or help me write my paper, or come up with a better title for this, or what, you know, those kinds of things. What else, what in 10 years is AI gonna be doing that is so spectacular beyond recipes and assisting you, and that kind of thing? The term artificial intelligence dates back to the 1950s.

So AI, at least experimenting with AI, has been around for a long time. You know, in the 2000s, Google was using AI to help with its searches. If you use Google Translate, that's been around since around 2015. That's AI translating your words from English to Italian or French or whatever. You know, that's AI. What happened in the last couple of years is we've been

using generative AI, this idea that it could create something original. An example I love, it's somebody at the start of 2023 playing around with Chachi BT explain Marx's economic theory in the form of a Taylor Swift song and it didn't go search that out it just created just based on its knowledge of Taylor Swift and its knowledge of Karl Marx and the answer was really really clever. So these bots kind of know a lot about everything in a way that no human could know it. And so what can I imagine AI being used as? It's an expert in more or less everything.

So instead of doing a Google search and spending hours trying to find something, you can talk to the AI bot that knows everything about physics or history or whatever your topic is. You can use AI in the future, I'm imagining, as a companion. I mean, we have a loneliness epidemic in our country. AI now, these generative AI programs can speak, you can speak to it, you know, like just like you could within Alexa. And I think a lot of people, I think

a lot more people than we'd like to imagine, are going to come home from work and just don't have anyone to talk to, they're going to chat with their AI bot, you know, there's a lot of startups out there trying to do AI therapists, essentially. We can't anticipate all the changes that are going to happen. Like when the smartphone came around, everyone think like, oh, I'm going to call a car from my smartphone and, you know, we're going to have Uber. And so a lot of this is just kind of guesswork. But my research and what a lot of smart people paying attention

to AI say is there's going to be plentiful uses way beyond just give me a good recipe based on these ingredients. Yeah. Although that's not a bad use. I mean, that's pretty good. I used it yesterday. I actually, you know, it was like I have fresh tuna and avocado inspire me and came up with five different recipes and my spouse gave me the best compliment. Like, wow, this is restaurant

quality. So, you know, hats off to you, Chachi P.T. You said you use Claude as your AI tool. Tell me about Claude. Claude is, it's kind of the tech world's favorite. If you're out in San Francisco or in the Silicon Valley, you know, people are likely using Claude. It was created by a group that left OpenAI. They didn't trust that OpenAI had our best interests at heart, so they created a rival. It's just the best for writing, the best for editing.

I mean, I'd be honest about it, I routinely take the words I write and say, give this a read, Claude, give me some feedback, or I, I'm Claude, I'm struggling with this transition, I'm struggling with this paragraph, write it three or four different ways. And it's never like I cut and paste it, it's flat, it's not quite right. But it comes up with really good idea, oh, that's the right word, oh, that's the way I should be rewriting this. So I just find it a really valuable tool so much that I pay 20 bucks a month for it. The other one I love too, again, another bot that's the large language model, one of these things that you could talk with that is really popular in Silicon Valley is perplexity.

What I like about that is it footnotes everything. You know, one big problem, one major problem with these chatbots is they hallucinate. It's just a fancy way of saying they make stuff up and they make mistakes. So as a journalist, I like going to a perplexity because I could click the footnote and say, oh, okay, that was an actual quote from a CNBC article

because they'll just make stuff out of whole cloth. There's examples that you would find funny if they weren't potentially so tragic. There's a law professor that they made up a whole, one of the bots made up a whole sexual harassment case against this guy. And it took place at a conference that never existed. And you don't know where that's gonna happen.

You don't even know why it's happening. Even the people who are creating these models talk about the black box problem. They can't quite explain it says what it says. And so that's one of the things they really need to figure out. It's a real limit to these bots. What from your view, what's a big misconception people have about AI?

I think we're scared of the wrong things. When it comes to AI, I think people have this Hollywood notion that it's going to be laser eyed robots that are going to subjugate humanity. And that's just the stuff of movies. That's just the stuff of science fiction. I'm worried about stuff that can happen right now, the use of AI in warfare, the use of AI for surveillance, the use of AI to manipulate people.

AI is trained on our text. And so it just reflects the same biases that are baked in to what we as humans have created. And so if we invest too much power in AI to make decisions around employment, about sentencing when someone's convicted of a crime, that really scares me. And I think the final one that really scares me is autonomous AI. This stuff is powerful. This stuff I play with it all the time seems like magic.

But it's like there's this expression that AI is a stochastic parrot. It doesn't understand a word of what it's saying. It doesn't have common sense. And so something tragic can happen if we invest too much responsibility into an AI. I think for the foreseeable future, if not for the rest of time, we need humans in the loop.

It's a great tool, it's a great co-pilot, but we can't entrust it with anything of significance. Well, this is a topic that affects everyone and will affect everyone even more in the future and something we all need to keep our eye on. I've been speaking with Gary Rivlin he is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter and author of the book AI Valley, Microsoft, Google and the trillion-dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence. There's a link

to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Gary, thanks for being here. Thanks Mike, it was great. Uh, excuse me. Why are you walking so close behind me? Well you're a tall guy. You throw a decent shadow when I'm walking in it to keep out of this bright sun. It hurts my eyes. Okay, well you know at Specsavers you can get two pairs of glasses from $149 and oh you'll like this, one can be a pair of prescription sunglasses.

Sounds great! Where's the nearest store? Mmm, not far, come on. Let's hurry then! To my count! One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one. And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer, and director. You might know me from The League, Veep, or my non-eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees, and acasity missteps.

We're talking Parasite the Home Alone. From Grease to the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unschooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the follow button. When you think about noise, you most likely think of it as a distraction,

a temporary interruption, the jackhammer outside or the helicopter helicopter overhead, or that loud motorcycle that goes by. It's a distraction, and then it's gone. But actually, noise is bigger than that. In many places, noise is more than a distraction. And being exposed to noise, even when you think you're used to it or it doesn't bother you, can actually be harmful to your physical and mental health

in ways you may not have considered. Chris Burdick is a journalist who has investigated the effects and dangers of noise in our world, and he is author of a book called Clammer, How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back. Hi Chris, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me, Mike. So everyone deals with noise

and in the moment it can be very aggravating. But if you ask people, I suspect most people would say that noise is not really high on their list of life's worries or concerns. Well, I think people, as you say, they do care a lot in the moment when they're trying to work on a deadline and their office mates are

chattering about the weekend. They care a lot about noise when it's 3 a.m. and the alarm on a car alarm goes off down the street or when they're visiting a loved one in the hospital and that person hasn't been able to sleep because of all the alarms going off. They care quite a bit in those moments, but when the noise isn't in their ear, they don't think about it. There's other priorities. And what I'm trying to say is there's a bigger systemic issue out there that from offices

to hospitals, schools, restaurants, our world is increasingly noisy and it's causing harms to our health, wellbeing and to the planet. So what are these harms, I guess, first of all, like that would help me care more if I really had an understanding that the harms were above and beyond the momentary annoyance. Sure, well, starting with the hearing loss, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2050, about 2.5 billion people

will have measurable hearing loss, 700 million of them will need hearing assistance. They also say that right now, about 100 million young people, excuse me, more than that, 1 billion young people are at risk of noise induced hearing loss because of how loud they're listening to things on their personal devices. And beyond hearing loss, the European Environment Agency, they say that noise is implicated in about 40,000 to 50,000 new cases of heart disease and maybe 11,000 to 12,000 premature deaths across the continent every year.

CDC implicates noise in about a hundred million, excuse me, in harming the health of about a hundred million Americans every year. And the American Public Health Association says that the noise harms from hearing loss, cardiovascular and other impacts and work productivity impacts costs the American economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

Okay, wait a minute. How in the world can noise be implicated in thousands of cases of heart disease and death? So the main way it does that is through chronic stress. And so if you think about hearing, when you sleep, your eyes close but your ears stay open and the reason they do is because they have to be alert. Evolutionarily, they are alert to threats, and they have a hair trigger connection to your fight or flight reaction.

And part of that fight or flight reaction is an inflammatory response. And this is very good in the short term. If you actually are under threat, and there's a likelihood you might be injured by the saber tooth tiger or whatever might be hiding in the woods, you want to have the white blood cells and other responses to a potential injury to help start healing and to fight off infection. But the problem with stress from noise or any stress is when it becomes chronic because all of those white blood cells, all the inflammatory response can end up hardening

and clogging up your arteries. So that is a kind of a direct route connecting noise stress to cardiovascular health problems. So what is noise? Noise is in the ear of the beholder, right? I mean your noise could be my music. I'd like to say that noise is subjective but not arbitrary. Your noise could be my music but even my music if I play it in my ears at about a hundred decibels it's gonna hurt my inner ear, my cochlea, it to sustain damage, no matter what I think of the sound. But more than that, I think our reactions to sounds are, you know, they're governed

by our likes, our dislikes, our cultural backgrounds, our mood at any given point, but there's also a foundation of shared human responses to sound that are also at play here. We have the lightning fast connection that I mentioned before to our fight or flight. We all have a limitation in our attentional resources, how many signals we can handle at any given point. These studies of sound interrupting sleep, they will pipe in different decibel levels of transportation noise like highway sounds or overflights or trains. And they will see how many times people have a disturbance in their sleep, not necessarily

that they'll bolt upright, but the sort of the heart rhythms that are at rest when you sleep, the blood pressure that it lowers when you sleep, they will have temporarily spikes in those. So there's a normal pattern in that when you are sleeping, but if you have a certain amount of noise piped into your sleeping quarters like they do in these sleep studies, those will increase and they will track, well, at what decibel level does this really make a difference across all of our subjects? That doesn't mean every subject will react the same way. But you can see among the data set where the trouble starts. And it's typically around 45 decibels.

So that is based on a shared human reaction to sound. So there are people who live near airports or by train tracks or where there's a constant, there's constant noise but sporadic noise. The train goes by, the plane takes off. And those people will often tell you, I'm used to it. I'm used to it. Are they used to it?

Well, the science would suggest that even if they say they're used to it. I'm used to it. Are they used to it? Well, the science would suggest that even if they say they're used to it, it's still disturbing their sleep. A lot of these, the guy that studies this is Matthias Basner. He's at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. And he studies something called awakenings, which is essentially a very brief change in our physiology while we sleep. It doesn't mean that we are

actually consciously awake, but it is disrupting the restoration that takes place in our in our brains and in our heart, our cardiovascular system. And he says, you know, these things happen without our being aware of it. So that when you wake up, you think, Oh, I slept fine, but it actually has impacted your physiology. And so how much impact, in other words, I could think I slept really well last night, but at two in the morning a siren went by and disturbed my sleep.

Am I ruined for the day or we can handle that? It's worse than that. Like how much is too much? Right. I don't know is than that. How much is too much? Right. I don't know is the answer to how much is too much. I know from the epidemiology usually looks at sort of a very wide swath of geography and sort of they have a model of how much airplane noise this zip code or this neighborhood is being exposed to. And then they look at the cardiovascular health from hospital reports that are also geocoded to that place. And so what they'll find typically is that when the

overall decibel exposure at night goes up about 10 decibels, that you will have something in around 8% increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease. So it's that sort of finding. It's not sort of on any given night what one siren will do to you. They just don't have the science on that yet. Dave And just because it's come up a couple of times and it'll probably come up again, when you talk about decibels, because I don't think people are that fluent in decibels, what is 10 decibels?

Like how loud is that or 40 decibels? And so decibels are a measure of acoustic energy intensity. What we're talking right now is probably around 60 decibels. The usual kind of person-to-person conversation level is about that. And then if you go up into kind of the 75-85 decibel range, you're talking about, you know, a vacuum cleaner or you 85-95 maybe a power tool like a saw or a drill. The danger starts to happen, you know, based on the research at around 85 decibels for hearing that is for disturbance in other ways, it can happen all

along the decibel scale. So that is what decibels are in a nutshell. What about, right, you go to your favorite rock concert and it's really, really loud and you come home and your ears are ringing. Can you recover from that or is the damage done or if you stay in a real quiet room for a couple days, it'll equalize or can you come back from that? The researchers I spoke to at Mass Eye and Ear, which is a big hospital here in Boston that they do a lot of research on hearing,

they say that when you are exposed to a big loud rock concert, for instance, or some loud event, you will have a temporary reaction in terms of the ringing in the ears or even a temporary hearing loss which will bounce back. But there's also damage below just being able to kind of sense sound that happens inside the ear, deep inside the ear, that can damage the fine grain connection that can damage the fine-grain connection that your brain needs to not just sense the sound, but to help make sense of it, to differentiate one person's voice from another or to know where in a room a sound is coming from. These are very important for, for instance, having a conversation in a noisy place, this kind of damage happens rapidly

and it is irreversible. And how much damage does it do in this sense? And we're talking strictly about hearing loss here, but because when I was younger, people would say, oh, you kids and you're rock and roll and you listen to it so loud, you're all going to go deaf. Well, there aren't, I don't see a lot of deaf people walking around going,

what, what, what did you say? I mean, so people didn't go deaf, seemingly from going to rock concerts, but maybe their hearing was damaged. So like, what's the scale of that? I mean, he, loud noise isn't going to cause you to go deaf, right? That's right. So what happens is there's the way that they test it is an audiogram and

What that does is you remember the last time you had a hearing screening where you put the headphones on and the beeps start Yeah, they're very quiet. They're basically testing, can you sense sound at all these frequencies at a low decibel level? And what will happen is, as you are exposed to more and more loud noise, and to a certain extent as you age, they haven't figured out exactly what contributes

how much of this damage, but you will start to lose the ability to detect those frequencies at the very low decibels. They'll have to crank it up. Once they start having to crank it up, then they start defining you as having some measure of hearing loss. Now, that's how they measure it, but how you experience it is different. If you think about how they test for vision loss, if they tested vision loss the same way, they would just say, can you see anything at all on that next line down that they wouldn't ask you to read any letters or numbers? The hearing test is very rudimentary.

It's just a, is there a stimulus or is there not? So the damage is not that you go deaf, but that you, first of all, will lose the ability at low frequencies to detect certain sounds. But more than that, you lose that kind of fine-grained connections, which are part of the inner ear, you know, inside the ear, that allow you to kind of the inner ear, inside the ear, that allow you to kind of pick out a voice among many in a conversation. You'll hear a lot of people say, instead of just like, what, what, I'm stone cold deaf. But I can hear you, but I can't understand you.

So let's talk about solutions or preventative measures you can take for this. And the first thing I want to ask you about is a lot of people say I Can't sleep. It's too quiet My wife is one of these people so we have a white noise machine, which I'm not a big fan of I would rather have total quiet, so what do we know about white noise in terms of sleep

and not interrupting your sleep? Part of what makes a sound noise is that it's not just an unwanted sound, it's an unwanted signal. And so when you have a very quiet background, let's say you're out in the country. Everything is very quiet, but you can then suddenly hear some strange animal out in the woods or every creek of the house.

You will be disturbed by that because you are hearing this signal that might otherwise be masked by the sort of constant dull whoosh of traffic going by. I don't know what the science says about white noise disturbing our sleep, but in terms of its ability to kind of lessen the signals coming to your ears, it does have a utility, you know, people use it in office settings all the time to try to set a floor where every straight conversation is not going to reach them. So it has that utility at the very least. Well, one of the interesting things I notice, even though I don't like the white noise machine,

when I wake up in the morning, I don't notice it until she turns it off. Like, I got used to it. It wasn't even something on my radar until it's turned off and I go, oh, yeah, that was on. But I didn't know, I didn't register that it was on because somehow it just became part of me.

Basically, what your mind is trying to do is figure out what it needs to pay attention to and what it doesn't. Once it has figured out that it doesn't need to pay attention to that, you won't hear it. There's a great study by a British engineer who had people try to differentiate two conversations played over headsets, one in each ear. And people had a hard time doing that. They would come up with a word or two from each one, they couldn't track it. And then he would separate them. One would be played in the left ear, one would be played in the right ear.

And he would say, just listen to the one in your left ear. He would still play them both, but you would just listen to one ear and people after a few tries could do it. But then he would say, well, tell me anything, any of the words, anything that was said in your right ear. So you had been focusing on the left ear conversation and you could finally, because by focusing on that, recite it perfectly. It would be a sentence or two. But because you had been paying attention to it, your focus is like a spotlight. In the other ear, you could remember nothing.

You could change the language in mid-sentence in the right ear and people wouldn't notice it. It was basically as if they hadn't heard it at all and it was guided by their attention. And so that attention really plays a huge part in what we consciously hear. Again, I know you're not a doctor, but is the general prescription to be aware of and try to eliminate noise in your life,

is that a fair prescription? Yes, I think that's fair. I think in a broader sense what we should do more of is is pay attention to sound in a proactive way. We tend to pay attention to it when it's become a problem that we can then complain about. But as we are creating our spaces, the architects that work on creating the next office space or a restaurant, to think about sound and how it's going to work in this space ahead of time is incredibly valuable.

It can help us avoid noise that we would otherwise sort of bungle into. I know there's a lot of concern about headphones, listening to music or listening to anything on headphones because it's so close to your ear. And I think I read that Apple's doing research on that. Can you talk about that? The Apple hearing study is ongoing.

This is a study that Apple decided to do because they know that people generally listen to music a bit too loud because it is right there next to their eardrum when you have the AirPods for instance. And so they have a study now where they're trying to track how loud people are listening to their devices when they have a headphone or an earbud in. And they will send them small reminders to say, you know, you've been listening at 85 to 90 decibels. That's often considered to be a danger to hearing, just to let you know, you know, they're not going to cut you off or anything. And then they're going to test different nudges to see what works, what helps people to kind of take control of how loud they are listening

to it. I think that's the main thing to kind of realize that it matters when you have something that close to your ears. you have to be particularly sensitive to kind of how loud the volume is. Well, when you think about it, our hearing is always on, sound is always coming in, whether we're actively listening to it or not. And it's important to know what the effects of all that sound is.

I've been talking to Chris Burdick, he is a journalist and author of the book, Clammer, How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes and Chris, thanks for coming on and talking about this. Sure, thanks Mike. Here's something a woman can do that a man cannot. That is, make her voice sexier. In a study at Albright College, researchers found that women were able to deliberately

manipulate their voices, while counting from 1 to 10, to sound more attractive. But when guys tried to do it, they actually sounded worse, not better. When a woman intentionally drops her voice to make it sound low and breathy, she's often perceived as more attractive, but not exactly for the reasons you might think. Men tend to prefer women with higher, more feminine voices, according to the study's author, but when a woman lowers her voice to deliberately sound sexy, she's sending a signal of her interest in a potential mate. And that's a clue that men are able to pick up on. But it doesn't work the

other way around. And that is something you should know. The producers here at Something You Should Know are Jeff Havison and Jennifer Brennan. the executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. You might think you know fairy tales and you might think they are cute and sweet and boring but the real grim fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark and they were often very grim. On Grim Grimmer Grimmest, we tell a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids.

Perfect for car rides or screen-free entertainment, Grim Grimmer Grimmest activates kids' imaginations and instigates fun conversations, because fairy tales speak to all of us at a very deep, primal level, and they raise interesting topics and questions that are worth chewing over together as a family. Every episode is rated Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmest,

so you, your kids, your whole family can choose what is the right level of grim for you. Though, if you're listening with Grandma, she's just gonna go for Grimmest. Trust me on this one. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest, and our new season available now. From the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and

back in time through the sapphic history that shaped them comes a brand new season of cruising beyond the bars. This is your host, Sarah Gabrielli, and I've spent the past year interviewing history-making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds of queer spaces, from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more. For 11 years, every night women slept illegally on the common. We would move down to the West Indies to form a lesbian nation. Meg Christen coined the phrase women's music, but she would have liked to say it was lesbian music.

And that's kind of the origins of the Convihugue collective. You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4.