Something You Should Know - How to Sync with Your Circadian Rhythms & A Fascinating History of Cars
Episode Date: October 3, 2024“You should drink at least 8 glasses of water per day!” Well, wait a second. That advice is about 80 years old and frankly doesn’t really “hold water.” This episode begins by explaining how ...much water you really should drink and how some people might actually be drinking too much. https://www.tuftsmedicine.org/about-us/news/medical-myths-drink-8-glasses-water-each-day Every cell in your body apparently has a little clock built into it. These clocks know when you should sleep, when you should get up, when you do your best work and more. The whole system is called you circadian rhythms and you are about to take an interesting journey into how they work so that you can understand your personal circadian rhythms and how to optimize them. Here to explain it is Lynne Peeples. She is science journalist and former staff reporter at The Huffington Post. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, Scientific American, Nature and other publications. Lynne is also author of the book, The Inner Clock: Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms (https://amzn.to/3XJWcWx) Do you know who built the first internal combustion engine-powered car? And when? Have you ever wondered why American cars look so different (and bigger) than most European cars? Whatever happened to the station wagon? Here to explore these questions and explain some of the amazing history of the automobile is Witold Rybczynski. He is an architect and emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He has written 21 books with his latest being The Driving Machine: A Design History of the Car (https://amzn.to/3BlWCuN). Can dogs or cats be vegetarian or even vegan? It is a growing trend but is it the right thing to do as a pet owner? This episode begins with some thoughts on this. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-04-07/can-your-pet-become-vegan/10969616 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.). New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. INDEED: Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/SOMETHING. Terms and conditions apply. SHOPIFY: Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! DELL: Dell Technologies and Intel are creating technology that loves ideas, expanding your business and evolving your passions! We push what technology can do, so great ideas can happen. Bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Today on Something You Should Know,
some people may be drinking too much water.
Then your internal clock.
It tells you when you should sleep, when you should get up,
when you perform your best at work, at play,
even athletically. On average, athletic performance peaks in the late afternoon or early evening.
That's when we found most world records have been broken. First, like a swimming event,
sprint, late afternoon. For a lot of sports, that is the prime time. Also, can dogs and cats be
vegetarian? And the fascinating history of the car, and why American cars are so different than European
cars.
European cars tended to be designed by engineers.
They were taught to be rational, they were solving problems.
Whereas American cars, Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler were essentially mechanics trained
in the school of hard knocks.
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.
Hi. Welcome to a new episode of Something You Should Know.
I'll bet throughout your life you have been reminded several times to make sure you drink enough water.
Everyone's probably heard the recommendation that you should drink eight glasses of water a day.
So where did that recommendation come from?
Well, it apparently came from the U.S. Food and Nutrition Board back in the 1940s.
But that is outdated and a bit of a myth, because water isn't the only thing that
hydrates you. Other fluids count as well. Soup, tea, coffee, even gelatin. But more importantly,
a majority of your water intake should come from food products, especially high-water content foods
like vegetables and fruit. So just to be clear, everyone is different,
but the eight glasses of fluid per day is not a bad target,
taking into account all sources of fluid.
But eight glasses of water plus all your other sources of fluid
could actually be too much.
According to a kidney specialist,
it's the kidney's job to filter out toxins,
and too much water can actually
decrease their efficiency. And that is something you should know.
There is a term that I know you've heard before and have some understanding of, and that term is
circadian rhythm. It's your individual biological schedule, I guess you could say.
It has a lot to do with when you sleep or when you should sleep and when you get up.
But there is a lot more to it than that.
And it's a good idea to get a better understanding of what your circadian rhythm is,
how it works, and how to use it to your best advantage.
Joining me to discuss this is Lynn Peoples.
She is a science journalist, former staff reporter at the Huffington Post, and her work
has appeared in The Guardian, Scientific American, Nature, and other publications.
She is author of a book called The Inner Clock, Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms.
Hi Lynn, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me.
So let's start by defining what your circadian rhythm is because, as I said, I think people
think of it as it has to do with your sleep and your schedule, but dive in a little deeper.
So your body is filled with trillions of little clocks. Basically, every
cell in your body has a clock and these clocks are working together. They're coordinating to
help prime your body to do the right things at the right time. So that is essentially creating
a rhythm to the systems of your body to sleep and wake, to digest food, to prime the immune system,
to fend off invaders. It's doing all these things more at certain times of day. So it's creating
a rhythm. That's essentially how we evolved in sync with the sun. So as the sun rises and sets, that's helping set that rhythm to our body.
And yet you can have people living in the same house, the same place on earth where the sun
comes up and goes down at the same time. And those people will have different schedules
from each other. Yes, there is diversity to our clocks. So the term circadian, circa means about or around.
So none of our clocks tick at exactly 24 hours a day,
which is why they are always seeking cues from the environment,
particularly light and dark, to help try to keep tabs
and keep in sync with the actual 24-hour day of Earth. And we each are born with
slightly different clocks. So some of us take a little longer than 24 hours a day, some a little
less. And so there's this diversity. And we commonly think about early birds and night owls.
There's everywhere in between. It's just like kind of the length of our feet, which we try to peg into shoe sizes.
But it's a continuous distribution, you could say, of circadian rhythms, which we call also chronotypes, if you hear that term.
And so this idea of, you know, morning people or night owls or whatever, are those set in your clock or are those adjustable?
Can we adjust our own clocks?
To some extent.
So circadian rhythms, our biology, our genes program how our clocks are ticking.
Yet our behavior and our exposure to the environment can help kind of pull those closer basically to the 24-hour day. So we can,
we exacerbate our differences essentially in how we live. If we're, you know, up late in front of
a blue screen, watching Netflix, sleeping in, missing the morning sun, these things can all
exacerbate our genetic differences. So when we do things like staying up later than we should
or spending a lot of time in front of blue screens at night,
which mess up our sleep and all that,
so we're messing up our circadian rhythms,
but is it temporary or are we actually doing harm by doing this
or is it just something you fix later and everything is fine?
Potentially we are doing harm. So we can think of this as jet lag. Our clocks want to stay in
sync with each other and with the sun. If you imagine traveling internationally, you're jumping
across time zones, that is going to throw your clocks out of whack. But we are doing the same
thing to ourselves every day,
depending on our lifestyle. So if you are getting up with an alarm clock in the mornings for school
or work and then sleeping in on weekends, that is essentially jet lagging your body.
If you're staying up late with a lot of light and not getting that light during the day,
that is probably the most important thing.
If you're not doing that, you're again, throwing your clocks out of the rhythm that they want to
tick to. If you do that over the long term, this is what scientists are finding in their studies
now is that that could set you up for greater risks of metabolic disease like diabetes,
to raise your risk of being obese.
They're finding links now with dementia, Alzheimer's, cancer.
These things are all potentially tied to just chronically throwing your clocks out of whack.
But it does seem like we adjust pretty well.
And what I mean by that is that if I take a plane from here to London and I get there and the time is very different and my schedule is all messed up, in a day or two, I adjust.
I adjust to London time instead of where I am in California.
It does seem like humans adjust pretty well.
Now you can adjust.
Our bodies are flexible enough. Our
clocks do have that malleability. So once you've, yeah, you've arrived, let's say you travel to
London, you get to London after a few days, your body is now going to sync to where the sun is in
the London sky. So it's, it's adjusting to that, that place in the world with its association to
the sun. So it just, yeah. So you're going to have a few days of
being miserable, but then you adapt. Problem is in today's society, you know, staying in one place,
it's not getting that regular sinking signal from the sun, from when you eat,
these other variables that can throw your clocks out of whack. I mean, these are like, as you said,
I mean, with jet lag, we can kind of correct that. Your body naturally corrects that if you do the
right things. We can also not set ourselves up for being in this predicament if we just follow
some basic circadian hygiene where we are. And what is that hygiene?
Yes. So I point to three key things to do. And the first is contrast. So I keep talking about getting bright light during the day and darkness at night. So just trying to increase that contrast. Tell your body it's day, tell your body it's night. And that is any light. So you want bright light during the day, dim light at night. Blue wavelengths in particular have been found to kind of wake up the circadian system and
tell it it is daytime.
So you want more of that during the day, less of that at night.
The other thing is to constrict.
So that's really trying to keep the calories you take into your body to daylight hours
or just really constrict the hours during the day that you eat. Because that's how we evolved, right? Our ancestors weren't going out for a midnight snack.
They weren't going down to the 24-hour diner or raiding the fridge. So cutting off in particular
the time you stop eating during the day. If you can get that at least three hours before you go to bed, that's ideal.
And then finally, consistency.
So trying to go to bed, get up, eat, exercise at the same times every day, that keeps your body knowing what time it is.
So what you said about bright light in the day, dim light at night, I get that.
But what does that look like really?
Like how much bright light?
How dim is the dim light? What does it you do differently now that you know all this?
The main take home I got was to get outside first thing in the morning. As soon as I can after getting up, I will get outside for 15, 20 minutes. Maybe that's a walk to get my morning coffee. And that light first thing
in the morning helps to recalibrate your clocks, helps to sync them back up with the sun, however
they may have drifted. So that is kind of the number one thing. So light during the day,
throughout the day is important. Morning, the most important. And then also, the more light you get during the day,
the less vulnerable your clocks are to that light at night from throwing your circadian system out
of whack. So it's kind of a twofold win there. But yeah, regardless, you're better off cutting
the lights, especially that blue wavelength light at night. And that includes the screens that we've all been warned about.
We're talking about your body clock, your circadian rhythms.
And my guest is science journalist Lynn Peoples, author of the book,
The Inner Clock, Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you and have a nice life.
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So Lynn, I think people have gotten the message anyway about the blue light from computer screens, phones, iPads, that kind of thing.
But what about just the light in the house at night?
What about that?
Overhead light is probably the worst.
I mean, there's blasting new LED lights that the standards they initially rolled out when we kind of shifted over to LEDs are a little richer in blue wavelengths than the
old incandescents. So we really need to be aware of those. So cutting, cutting those at night.
I, one of the other tips I gleaned from scientists is in addition to just, yeah,
cutting the lights out, your eyes naturally adapt pretty well to the dark. I mean, that's also,
thank you, evolution. We have these rods and
cones that help us to kind of recalibrate, right? And so you don't need that much light to see.
And I have put in an array of electric candles around my apartment, which my friends laugh at
me, but I think it's really cozy and nice and it provides plenty of light for me to see. So it's another thing I've implemented.
So if the general rule is be up when the sun is up and go to bed when the sun goes down,
then what about people who claim to be night owls, who like to be up all night,
who would prefer to work the shift that they're up all night and then they sleep during the day?
Is that a thing?
Are they different biologically or is that just a lifestyle choice?
It is a thing.
Not to say that for some people it might not be a lifestyle thing because again, our chronotype
is biology.
It's also behavior and environment.
But for some people, their genes really do program them to optimally
function by being up at night and sleeping during the day. And there's a lot of experts,
advocates I spoke with that are really pushing for more appreciation, recognition of this,
for chronotype diversity, that workplaces accommodate these people. It's a win-win. That's
going to help the employee's health. It's going to help the employer's bottom line because you're
going to get the most productivity out of an employee. You know what I wonder is if people
who are night owls, who like to work all night and sleep during the day. Do they gravitate towards that somewhere in their lifetime,
or was there a time where they worked that shift, and so they were up all night, and then they
thought, oh, you know, this feels better, this works better? It's really interesting. I came
across several folks in my research who, on both ends, so night owls and early birds, but the night
owls I found that have really,
you know, they struggled during their lives with trying to conform to society's time schedule,
but then ultimately have found careers and lifestyles that really suit them better.
So one woman I spoke with, you know, just a few weeks before we first talked, she had just found a job where she works
as a veterinary pathologist and she does cases from, she was in the Midwest at the time. She
was doing cases from Australia. So she, yeah, she found a company that could hire her that she could
work through the night and she was so happy. Like her health got better, her migraines way lessened, and she was living in sync with her
inner clocks. And that was much better for her biology and her health and well-being.
And then the other end, I spoke with a guy who could not keep his eyes open after like 7 p.m.
He really struggled. And social life happens at that hour. So he'd be falling asleep
at movies, at concerts, at the dining table. And then, you know, getting up really early
and that like for him, he thought was a blessing because he got up early before anyone else.
So he was uninterrupted and had really productive hours. One interesting point here is that there is science that is on the
verge of producing potentially like a pill that you can take to change your clocks. So I proposed
to these people, what if there was a pill available to not have this issue where you
could be more in align with society, with your clocks? And both of them were like, eh, you know, at this point in their lives, they're doing okay.
Like they found the benefits of their unique clocks and they weren't necessarily ready to give that up.
So I'd like to go back to what you said earlier about the long-term effects of messing up your circadian rhythms
tend to be metabolic problems like diabetes and obesity,
which implies it has something to do with diet and maybe when you eat, not just when you sleep and when you're awake.
So why is that? Why is it resulting in metabolic problems?
That is primarily because our body is programmed to digest food and, you know,
do all that metabolism during the daytime. That's when our bodies are expecting food to come in. So
that is actually points to one of the tools that scientists are pointing to for night shift
workers. If they could try to actually still eat during daytime hours, you know, maybe right before
a shift or after a shift, that could potentially reduce some of the harm of that whiplash. But
there are studies pointing to links with cancer. I think stroke risk has been shown to go up.
The science is ongoing. Talk about the alarm clock, because there's an invention that, you know,
forces people to wake up. Maybe that's a good thing to help them get back on schedule.
But anybody who's woken up to an alarm clock knows how irritating it can be.
So is there science on this?
Is an alarm clock a good thing or a bad thing?
Yeah, a lot of scientists I spoke to is we really should throw away alarm clocks.
I mean, practically speaking, that's not going to happen for a lot of us, but we really should
be waking naturally.
We should be getting up when our eyes naturally open.
That means our inner clocks are happy.
We're in sync.
If we are waking up to an alarm clock, like most of us do, yeah, it's immediately a sign
that we're giving ourselves
jet lag. So I think they have a role. We all do need to get to work on time or to school on time,
but unfortunately, they've been an issue since they were invented. The first thing that comes
to mind is a high school student whose alarm clock may be going off at 6 a.m. and who naturally whose biology which is shifted later during adolescence really doesn't want to be
waking up till at least three hours later. But it would also seem that clocks would keep you
on schedule that yeah it might be tough to get up because the alarm clock went off but it'll help
you and your day might be lousy today but at least it'll reset you. And your day might be lousy today, but at least it'll reset you back
to where you should be. To a point. So I think what you might be getting at is if you wake up
at the same time every day, then that, you know, that's the consistency piece that we want for
keeping our clocks in sync. But that, that means that you're doing it seven days a week
and at the same time. And if, if you are one of those people that does that you're doing it seven days a week and at the same time.
And if you are one of those people that does that, maybe you've experienced that phenomenon
when your eyes just actually open before your alarm clock goes off.
That's a sign that if your eyes are opening before your alarm clock goes off, that your
rhythms are strong.
So I think if that's happening, great.
But on the whole, if you're being startled awake by an alarm clock,
generally not a good sign. So having researched this information and understanding more about
circadian rhythms than most of us do, how do you use it, if at all, in your life other than,
you know, to go to sleep when the sun goes down and get up when you're supposed to? But
are there other things we can do with this
information? We could also harness our circadian rhythms to really optimize our days. So that's
one thing I gleaned myself is that, you know, there are certain times of day when I am just
way more productive, way more on alert, focused. And so paying attention to those for your personal
circadian clocks can be really helpful in kind of designing your days. And so paying attention to those for your personal circadian clocks can be really helpful in
kind of designing your days. And this is something I talked to chrono coaches about,
that's a thing, who are advising athletes and teams on how to best optimize their clocks to
increase their chances of winning because there's certain times of day when the team's probably
at their best.
There are chrono coaches?
Chrono coaches. Yes. Yes, indeed. I mean, the main takeaway there is on average, and again,
we all are different, but on average, our athletic performance peaks in the late afternoon
or early evening. That's when we found most world records have been broken.
Other studies have been done to find that for a lot of sports, that is the prime time.
So you think about a team traveling, say I have the Seattle Seahawks, my hometown football team is having a kickoff at 1 p.m. here in Seattle.
Let's say we had a team fly in from the East Coast to play us.
Their interclocks upon arrival would be at about 4 p.m.
They're playing, you know,
for the next two, three hours through their prime time. My home team is not yet at their prime time
on average, so we're at a disadvantage. So you think about those kind of things and the implications
and then the potential to manipulate your circadian rhythms with light and dark and other
things. There's, yeah, you can open a can of worms there about what, you know,
what a chrono coach might help a team with in addition to just getting better sleep
and overcoming jet lag faster and those factors.
That's really surprising to me that people, that world records are broken in the afternoon
only because I tend to do my best work in the morning.
When I get up, it seems like that's my prime time,
not late in the afternoon. Well, it's different for prime time, for cognitive functions,
for creativity, for speed, for strength. These things can vary across the day and also vary
for individuals based on your chronotype. But usually, you know, usually for like a swimming event, sprint, a lot of the main
kind of athletic competitions, they do find it's that late afternoon, early evening hours
for most athletes is the best. Well, this really has a lot of repercussions for everyone to pay
attention to their circadian rhythm, which as we discussed in the beginning, people tend to think of this as being something about sleep
and when you wake up,
but there's so much more to it than that.
Lynn Peoples has been my guest.
She's a science journalist,
and the name of her book is
The Inner Clock, Living in Sync with Our Circadian Rhythms.
And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.
This was very eye-opening, Lynn.
I appreciate you coming on. Oh, in the show notes. This was very eye-opening, Lynn. I appreciate you coming on.
Oh, thank you so much.
This was great.
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It's hard to imagine a day goes by when you don't interact with a car. You either drive a car,
or you're a passenger, or you're a pedestrian walking next to one. And I bet without much effort, you could probably see a car right now outside your window.
The automobile has become a dominant force in our lives,
and in people's lives around the world.
And it all happened very quickly, at least in historical terms.
How we became such a car-dominated culture is an interesting story,
and here to tell it is Vitold Rybczynski.
He is an architect and emeritus
professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania and author of 21 books. His latest
is called The Driving Machine, A Design History of the Car. Hi, Vito. Welcome to Something You
Should Know. Hi, Mike. So since we have to pick a starting point to start our conversation, let's start at the beginning.
And who invented, who created the first car?
As far as I know, it was Carl Benz.
Of course, he built the engine.
That was the real, the nub of the invention.
But he built a car in 1885, obviously in Germany. But at that time, weren't there a lot of people around the world working on something like a car at the same time as he was?
Probably, yes.
This is sort of like the Wright brothers.
Many people were trying to make gliders that could be propelled by a motor.
So people were working on on at the same time. He's also credited with
generally with when he developed the four-wheel version that was the first
production car he built about 2,000 of them or sold 2,000 of them over the next
several years and of course you know steam driven cars predated that car so
it's the first internal combustion engine car. You know what I wonder is when a technology like the automobile, people are developing it,
what is in the mind of the creator? Like, why are they developing it? Where do they think it,
what do they think it's going to do? Where do they think it's going? Could they possibly envision
what the car today is going to be like?
Like, what are they thinking?
I don't think that's the way it works when you're an inventor.
You're just trying, it's like the Wright brothers.
They didn't know what planes would be used for.
An inventor is really just trying to get off the ground in terms of get the thing moving.
It only has two seats on it. It doesn't carry anything yet. So you can't solve all the problems at the same time. And I think to a certain extent,
it was a novelty. Certainly the ones he would have sold first would have been sold to people
who, the kind of people that just want to be the first person on the block to own something.
I don't think people really understood yet how cars would be used. His wife, by the way,
Bertha Benz is a historic figure because she, as far as we know, is the first person to take a
long distance drive in a car. After Benz invented the car, he started producing it, but the sales were
not going very well. And she had actually helped him on working on the car. She wasn't a bystander.
Some people think that in another time, her names would have been on the patent as well as his.
So she, without telling him, took one of his cars, her two teenage sons,
and drove 60 miles to her home village. And halfway, of course, there were no service stations.
So halfway, she stopped at a drugstore and bought some basically cleanser, cleaner,
petroleum-based cleaner. And then she bought a whole bunch of bottles and,
you know, filled up her tank and continued. Well, I also wonder, like, how do they know
what to make them look like? What's the model for a car when there's never been a car?
Well, the first cars are collaborations with companies that are making carriages,
you know, horse-drawn carriages. So the very first cars use a lot of techniques and materials and shapes
from horse-drawn carriages.
But it doesn't take very long, maybe less than 5, 10 years,
they're starting to develop differently.
And part of it has to do with the speed.
The first cars that start to look like cars, they were called torpedo
bodies because the engine and the passenger compartment were all smoothly integrated.
Of course, eventually people start looking at things like aerodynamics, but certainly not at
the beginning. At the beginning, it's really just trying to figure out what this new machine should look like.
And it's not just a copy of a horse-drawn carriage.
It has its own aesthetic.
So who were the people pushing this whole idea of passenger cars for people?
Who are these people?
From what industry did they come?
What was their motivation for all of this?
All these early pioneers are also racing enthusiasts.
I mean, drivers.
People like Henry Ford.
Henry Ford had the land speed record for a number of years in a car that he built.
This was long before the Model T.
And Porsche, too, he was an enthusiastic race driver. And so,
they're not looking at it sort of theoretically. They're very much personally involved and
sort of aware of what the problems are and what needs to be done. And racing develops right away
because the companies who are making cars realize that this is a popular thing.
Race car audiences are still among the biggest of any sport in the world.
And they were right from the beginning.
They had these long distance races and everybody would line up on these roads and watch these cars zooming by. One of the things that I really like to understand about the design of automobiles is
like how they get to look the way they get to look. Does somebody sit in a room and go,
what if we put big fins on this thing? Or what if we put, you know, what if we made it look more
like a box than a car? How do these design things happen? Well, it depends on who's taking the decisions.
European cars tended to be designed by engineers.
And so they were taught to be rational.
They were solving problems.
And they didn't initially have anything like a stylist.
Whereas American cars, Henry Ford and Walter Chrysler were essentially mechanics.
They weren't trained in an engineering school.
They were sort of trained in the school of hard knocks.
They learned by doing on the shop floor.
What you have to remember with cars, and it was something that I learned writing the book,
was that it is a consumer product.
And in the end, it's the consumer who decides.
It isn't that somebody thinks up fins and puts them on the car.
If the consumers didn't like the fins, they would have disappeared.
I mean, the way the Edsel disappeared or the Henry J, there were all kinds of cars that people didn't like.
And then they just,
they wouldn't buy them.
And they usually last a couple of years and then they,
they have to be pulled from production.
So people are trying things,
but the market is always deciding.
Well,
it's interesting that like you say,
the marketplace decides whether cars stay or go, but it's interesting that, like you say, the marketplace decides whether cars stay or go.
But it does seem that sometimes a car will stick around for a while and then fall out of favor.
It isn't like a right away, oh, we don't like this.
It's like, we like this, but now we no longer like this.
That's true. The big difference is Europe versus America. Because in America,
the cars would last, a model would last maybe three or four years before it was changed.
Whereas in Europe, they couldn't afford to do that. The markets were too small. And so models
would last 10 or 20 or even 30 years. The Volkswagen lasts an awful long time. And so that is a difference.
But you're quite right. There are cars like station wagons, for instance. It's a type of car
which becomes very popular starting really in the 30s and 40s and 50s. And then there's a moment
where it actually disappears in America. You know,
you get the minivan replaces it, and then eventually the minivan disappears because
it's replaced by the SUV. On the other hand, there are countries like Germany and Scandinavia
and countries where station wagons remain very popular. That's why today, if you want a station
wagon, it's probably going to be an Audi or a Volkswagen or a Mercedes if you can afford it, because those are the
countries that still make them. We don't make them anymore. The market just didn't like them.
So there's a strong cultural sort of thread going through here because there's no sensible reason why station wagons shouldn't
appeal to Americans, but they don't. I mean, we somehow, the market, the public decided they
didn't like them anymore. They wanted to sit high up. Right, right. You wanted to sit high up. Yeah.
Well, my assumption has always been when I look at cars, European cars versus the cars here, which tend to be bigger.
And a lot of the driving force of that was the price of gasoline.
It's so much more expensive in Europe.
So cars are smaller.
And having a big car wasn't a thing.
So having fancy cars wasn't a thing as much as it is
here, and it was really the price of gas driving. Is that a fair statement? I think it's half true,
because, of course, the United States had petroleum. I mean, we had our own petroleum.
The Europeans didn't have any petroleum at that point.
And we're talking now, say, the 20s and 30s.
They had to import it.
So, yes, gas was more expensive. But there was another reason, which is when cars started getting popular, the state governments, city governments have to build roads and maintain roads.
And people demand paved roads.
And the question is, how are you going to pay for that? What's interesting is that Americans
and Europeans came to two different systems. The American system was to add a tax to gasoline,
and the idea is that if you drive more, you use more gasoline, so you pay more tax. In Europe, they did it
differently. They said a bigger car puts more wear and tear on the road, and so we're going to tax
people by the size of the engine. Every year, this is an annual tax. You're going to pay a tax based
on basically how big a car you have. And so European car makers
and engineers got very good at figuring out how to make the smallest possible engine, which means
the lightest possible car, which tends to be a much more sophisticated engineering machine than
an American car, because an American car can be as big as you like. And then you have the physical difference.
Our roads are very long and very straight.
Basically, until you hit the Rocky Mountains, it's flat.
So you don't need cars that are very maneuverable and good handling.
That's not the issue.
You need a comfortable car because you're going to be in it for long periods of time.
But you're driving straight, basically.
And whereas the Europeans had lots of hilly and mountains that they had to go through,
they had a lot of existing old roads which were curvy.
So handling was always much more important to European drivers.
Where did the whole notion of, you know, car culture come from,
this whole idea of, well, there's so much to that, I guess.
But, you know, we've got muscle cars and people are collecting cars.
And, like, the cars are becoming an art form rather than just a functional thing.
Oh, they were always an art form right from the beginning.
That was one of the things that I didn't write about these cars because I've never driven one and I've never even seen one.
But, you know, the great luxury cars, the Duesenbergs and the very fancy big cars, the cars that are
six feet tall when you stand next to them, they have huge wheels. They're in completely different
categories. So that was there from the beginning. And the only people like Hollywood stars could
afford them or tycoons, but there was a whole category of car. They were basically handmade.
They often had bodies that were custom made. It was like getting a suit made. You had it
made for you. You bought the chassis and the engine from Duesenberg, and then you went to a
shop that made you exactly the body you wanted that nobody else
had. So of course, if you were a Hollywood star, that was the sort of thing that you liked. I mean,
the idea of a personalized car. So that was there from the very beginning.
So as someone who has looked at the history of the automobile, what's your sense of the
electric car? Is that a big disruptive thing in the development of the automobile. What's your sense of the electric car? Is that a big disruptive
thing in the development of the automobile or is that going to change
everything or not? I mean I've never owned an electric car because my last car
was a Mercedes that was built, designed, I mean in 1984 it lasted me more than 20
years and that was my last car. So I don't speak from any personal experience.
The big difference to me is not so much that the car is electric,
although that has huge impact on some things like acceleration and top speed,
but that it is digital because the car becomes much more like a smartphone.
It can be upgraded remotely by the company, and you can add all sorts of features which are really not expensive additions, which they would have been if they were mechanical.
You can have cameras everywhere and sensors and all sorts of things.
So I think that's the big change is that the car has become very different.
It really is at the beginning of a very different sort of automobile than the automobiles that
I've owned in my life, which roughly span 50 years in terms of their design. So this is really the beginning of a new age of
cars, I think. It's not a car that appeals to me particularly. I don't like these cars that have
cameras that are beeping all the time and telling me to watch out and don't go too fast. There's
somebody on your right side and all this kind of, it just gets very nerve wracking. Plus, I really like having just three dials to look at.
Those TV screens get very complicated.
So, but I'm just, that's just me.
It's not, it's got nothing to do with, this is the future.
Whether it's electric or hybrid or hydrogen or something, I think that's, that probably
is going to change over the next decades.
But it's certainly the idea that things are operated digitally,
and that this is a very different sort of machine than it used to be.
Well, we touched on it earlier, how tastes in cars change,
how it used to be that everyone had a station wagon,
every family had a station wagon.
Now nobody has a station wagon, there's something else,
and people would never go back to station wagons, at least not in the foreseeable future.
But I find it really interesting when you look at the pictures of cars over the years,
how tastes change.
I've been talking to Vitold Rybczynski. He is an architect,
emeritus professor of urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. He's written 21 books, and his
latest is called The Driving Machine, A Design History of the Car. And there's a link to that
book in the show notes. Vitold, thank you so much for being a guest today. Well, thank you. I enjoyed our talk.
You ever wonder what vegetarians feed their pets? Well, hopefully they're feeding them regular,
old, non-vegan, packed full of meat, pet food. Forcing pets to go vegan has become a trend in this country particularly, but most vets will tell you it's really a bad idea.
While dogs theoretically can do okay as vegetarians, they cannot be vegans.
They will need special dietary attention from a vet, and they will also need other animal products like eggs and dairy, which a true vegan diet does not contain.
Cats, on the other hand, should not go vegan or vegetarian under any circumstances.
They are true carnivores and they require nutrients that a vegan diet cannot provide.
Forcing a cat to go vegan can be fatal.
And that is something you should know.
You know, most likely on the app that you are
listening to this podcast on, there is a share function, a button, something that you can share
the podcast. You can send this episode to someone else and let them hear it. And so I encourage you
to take advantage of that feature and please share this episode with someone or some people that you
know who you think would like it.
I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana
community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager,
but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced.
She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.
Enter federal agent V.B. Loro,
who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity.
The pair form an unlikely partnership
to catch the killer,
unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn
between her duty to the law,
her religious convictions,
and her very own family.
But something more sinister than murder is afoot,
and someone is watching Ruth.
Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan.
Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network.
At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce.
That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining,
a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.
Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.