Something You Should Know - Is Processed Food Really That Bad? & Why We Love to Drive

Episode Date: July 20, 2020

Is there a way to drink without getting drunk or feeling the effects of alcohol? Kinda. This episode begins with the story of how a professional beer taster drinks a lot of beer and stays pretty sober. And it is a pretty simple trick. http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/how-to/a26328/how-not-to-get-drunk/ You have probably heard the advice that you shouldn’t eat foods that have a long ingredient list or have ingredients your grandmother wouldn’t recognize – but is that really good advice? Is a food with a lot of added ingredients less healthy than an all-natural food? Listen to my guest George Zaidan. He is an MIT trained chemist who created National Geographic’s web series Ingredients: The Stuff Inside Your Stuff and he is author of the book Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put in Us and on Us (https://amzn.to/2Zykgij) . He explains what these ingredients are in processed food, why they are there and just how dangerous or healthy they are. Did you know a lot of salmon is dyed pink? Otherwise it would be gray. Did you know that bananas are actually berries, but strawberries are not berries? These are just a few of the fascinating food facts you will learn by listening to today’s episode. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/17/food-facts_n_4788746.html There are a lot of people who really enjoy driving. I am one of them. So the idea of driver-less cars has little appeal to me and – as it turns out – to most Americans. There is something very special about taking the wheel and heading down the open road. Joining me to discuss driving and why we love it so is Matthew B. Crawford author of the book Why We Drive. (https://amzn.to/3fDXcUR). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations.

You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Today on Something You Should Know, how can you drink alcohol and not get drunk? There is a way that seems to work. Then, people say processed food is bad, and if it has ingredients your grandma wouldn't use, you shouldn't eat it. First of all, your grandma probably ate a lot of stuff that may have been easy to pronounce,

which I think is another part of that advice, but not great for you, like, you know, spam or pound cake or snickertoodles. So, I'm not really sure why people think idolizing grandma's diet is a good idea. Then, fascinating food facts, like strawberries aren't really berries, but bananas are. And an explanation into why we love to drive our cars. And we do love it. It's interesting, when you ask people what their ideal commute is, the answer is not zero. It's about 20 minutes in each direction,

because people seem to savor that time. All this today on Something You Should Know. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman

who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back. And in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker.

Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Another day and another episode of Something You Should Know. And thanks for listening. We start today with some advice on how to drink without getting drunk. Now, some people drink to get drunk, so this doesn't apply to them. But Jim Koch, chairman of the Boston Beer Company, spends a lot of time with a beer in his hand. And he revealed a secret that he learned, how to drink alcohol without getting wasted. In an article at Esquire.com, he explained the secret he learned from a friend who has a Ph.D. in biochemistry.

And the secret is yeast. Plain, old, active, dry yeast you buy in those little packets at the grocery store. You see, dry yeast has an enzyme in it called ADH, which is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. That's the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in the liver. If you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking some of it down before it gets into your bloodstream and thus into your brain. Just before he starts drinking, Koch takes one teaspoon of yeast mixed with yogurt for each drink he plans to consume. While it does not eliminate the effects of alcohol, it can minimize them. The author of the

article did some tests and found that it did help mitigate some, but not all, of that feeling of being drunk. And that is something you should know. I know you've heard this advice that when you buy a food product at the store, it's a good idea to look at the ingredient label. And the general wisdom is that the fewer ingredients, the better. And if there are a lot of hard-to-pronounce ingredients, well, that's a bad sign. So how accurate is that advice? And why are all those ingredients in some food products?

And what are they in there for? Here to discuss this is George Zayden. He is an MIT-trained chemist who created National Geographic's web series, Ingredients, The Stuff Inside Your Stuff. He co-wrote and directed MIT's web series, Science Out Loud, and he is the author of the book, Ingredients, The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us. Hi, George. Welcome. Mike, thanks for having me.

So the advice that I think many of us have heard that, you know, if you're looking at a food product to buy and there's ingredients in there that your grandmother didn't use or that you can't pronounce, that you shouldn't buy it. Are you in agreement with that? So I know a lot of people who swear by that advice, and I don't. First of all, your grandma probably ate a lot of stuff that may have been easy to pronounce, which I think was another part of that advice, but not great for you, like, you know, spam or pound cake or snickerdoodles. And your life expectancy is probably higher than your

grandmother's was. So I'm not really sure why people think idolizing grandma's diet is a good idea. I'd listen to her wisdom, sure, but I would not try and copy her diet. Yeah, I get that. But I'm not so sure that I idolize my grandmother's diet so much as I have a concern, and I think a lot of people have a concern, for the way food is seemingly over-engineered. I mean, things are artificially colored in colors that you don't find anywhere in nature. There are ingredients in the ingredient list of big, long words I've never seen before. I don't know how to pronounce them. I don't know what they are. So why am I eating them? Yeah, that's a great question. I think it helps to know a little bit about the different types of ingredients, of additives. There are things like

vitamins and minerals, which are added to try and prevent nutritional deficiency diseases. Classic example there is iodine is added to almost all salt to try and prevent nutritional deficiency diseases. Classic example there is iodine is added to almost all salt to try and prevent goiter. There are flavorings, you know, which are added obviously to make food taste better. And that's a whole other, you know, debate we can have. There are lots of different types of texture modifying additives. So for example, most peanut butter you buy will contain emulsifiers to prevent the peanut solids from separating out from the peanut oil. And then, of course, there are preservatives, which if you didn't have those, your food would go bad a lot faster. So, you know, those are just a few of the categories.

And if you're interested in seeing the entire long list, you can find that the FDA has a list. But the question is, you know, why is all this stuff in there? Does it need to be in there? We all want foods that are healthy, delicious, convenient, and cheap. But it's really hard, if not impossible, to have all of those things at once. If you want peanut butter that doesn't separate, you can either buy the all-natural stuff and put it in the fridge, which I personally think makes it taste not as good, Or you can buy a peanut butter with an emulsifier in it. It is a trade-off. You know, the other part of the trade-off is if you want

everything to be all natural, be prepared to spend a lot more on your groceries and spend a lot more time preparing food. It really is a trade-off. The whole idea of added ingredients gets a bad rap because there is this just idea that the fewer ingredients the better and i guess it's because like when you when you eat an apple the only ingredient is apple and that's a very you know natural easy to understand concept and so when you have some something else apple sauce and there's 18 added ingredients, people are suspect of that. Yes, that comes part and parcel with the other piece of this, which is if the ingredient is really hard to pronounce, it must be bad for you. You know, I have issues with that too.

My main issue with the pronouncing thing is like, you know, one chemical can have 40 different names and they can range from really easy to pronounce to impossible to pronounce. So if I tell you that a food contains 1-alpha-D-glucopyranosyl-2-beta-D-fructofuranoside, you'd think I was trying to poison you. But that is just sugar. That's another name for sugar. The name of the chemical doesn't tell you anything about whether it's good or bad for you. It tells you how the FDA regulates ingredient labels. And your other point of, you know, the more ingredients it has, the worse it must be for you, that's, I think that's a side effect of the wellness industry basically brainwashing us

or trying to believe that chemicals are somehow bad for you or that just because something is a chemical, it must therefore be bad for you. So the more chemicals you have, the worse a food is. And that couldn't be further from the truth. An apple, for example, seems really simple, but it has hundreds, if not thousands of chemicals in there. It's made of living cells with proteins and genomes and small molecules and, you know, polysaccharides, all kinds of things that are hard to pronounce, but, you know, no one would ever argue, oh, an apple has a thousand chemicals, so therefore it must be bad for you. So here's the concern I think people have that seems pretty obvious, that the amount of processed food being manufactured and eaten is on the rise.

I mean, the store is full of processed food products. Every corner has one or two or three or four fast food places. There's a lot of processed food being consumed. And in addition, we have an obesity problem, a growing obesity problem in this country. People are getting heavier and I don't think it's going out on a limb to say these two things are probably connected. Yeah. So that's another great question. You know, trying to work out what caused and what is

continuing to cause the obesity epidemic that we are all living through is really difficult. Ultra-processed foods could very well be responsible. It could be that by over-engineering these foods, we've made them addictive so people eat more of them and then they become obese. I talked to many scientists who totally buy that theory. I think it sounds very plausible. I also talked to a few scientists who had different ideas. They said, look, it may not just be one thing that's doing that. One person said that he thought the obesity epidemic could be explained partially by the decrease in smoking rates. Now, how might that have a role? Cigarettes are an appetite suppressant. So, you know, if you if a large number of people stop smoking, they're going to start eating more food. Another scientist I talked to thought that architecture might play a role.

He said that, you know, the the way kitchen the way homes are designed these days, kitchens are the hub of the home. And if you spend a lot of time near a kitchen, you know, that's going to make you want to eat more food. So my belief here is that the obesity epidemic has many different causes. One major one may very well be ultra-processed food, but there's not going to be one silver bullet to ending it. One of the processes of processed food seems to be everything has added sugar. It's hard to find foods that you wouldn't necessarily even think would have sugar, have sugar. It's hard to find food that eats foods that you wouldn't necessarily even think would have sugar, have sugar. There's a lot of added sugar in an awful lot of foods and people have demonized sugar, whether right or wrong, that that is a real culprit.

That is one theory. I find it a little slightly hard to believe that one chemical is the only responsible party for an entire epidemic across large parts of one country. I think it's more likely that there are multiple causes at play. It's funny, the other part of that is sugar is completely natural. It's sort of funny to me that some of the same people who are saying sugar is the devil are also some of the people who are saying only eat natural things. That's conflicting advice. Yeah. But for example, if you make, I don't know, crackers at home, there probably isn't much sugar added to it. But if you look at crack, a package of crackers you buy at the store, there's sugar in it. Well, why is there sugar in crackers? Aren't sweet. So why is there sugar in it. Well, why is there sugar in crackers aren't sweet. So why is there sugar in it? I'm not sure exactly. I, my suspicion is that if you, if there is added sugar in something,

it will, it will cue you to eat more of it, or it will cue you to take that next bite. There was a study that came out, uh, one or two years ago that was done at NIH and it was a randomized controlled trial, which is the gold standard of these kinds of studies. And basically what they did was they took two groups of people and fed one group a diet high in ultra-processed foods and fed another group a diet low in ultra-processed food. Now, this was not looking at sugar specifically. This was looking broadly at a diet that was more processed versus a diet that was less processed. And they found that the people who were given the ultra-processed diet did eat more. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't double, but it was a measurable amount more that, you know, over time does lend weight to the theory that ultra-processed foods could be partially

responsible for the obesity epidemic. So yeah, I mean, I buy that sugar might play a role. I'm just not sure it's the only thing playing a role. We're talking about the foods you eat and the ingredients in those foods, what they are, what they do, and what they don't do. My guest is George Zaden. He is an MIT-trained chemist, and he is author of the book Ingredients, the strange chemistry of what we put in us and on us. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children.

The Heresies of Rudolf Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson, discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, George, it sounds like you're saying, you know, there's a lot of factors here and we can't really figure out or find the silver bullet. So don't worry about it. Is that what you're saying? Broadly, I would say, yeah, worry a little bit less. But it also depends on who I'm talking to. So I'm talking really to the person who is worried a lot about food and spends a good chunk of time on the internet researching individual ingredients.

If that's you, or if you've changed your diet five times in the last year because of news you've seen, then I would say, yes, go ahead and worry less about food. You can relax a little bit. On the other hand, if you are overweight or obese, or if you've got a medical condition of some kind, there I would say you're probably worrying the right amount or maybe you should worry a little bit more. Do you think that if a processed food is sold in the United States that whatever is in it is probably okay? I believe that we can all be fairly confident that unless something is contaminated or something has gone wrong somewhere in a production process, foods sold in the U.S. are not going to be immediately toxic or poisonous. Now, where things get tricky is when you start extending that time horizon. So, yeah, okay, those ingredients may not be poisonous immediately now, but are they going to raise your risk of a heart attack or cancer? That is a lot harder to figure out. You have to follow a large group of people over a long

period of time. You have to accurately record what they eat. You have to track what diseases they get. And so using these methods, scientists have estimated that eating 10% more ultra-processed food is associated with roughly a one-year shorter lifespan. And there's a lot of disagreement about that result. It's not ironclad. But I do think we have to be comfortable with the idea that we know less than we think we do about the longer-term health effects of most foods and ingredients. Then doesn't that circle back to and support the idea that if we don't know the long-term effects of all these ingredients and all these things we're eating, that we should eat a simpler diet and that that would be safer in the long run?

Or you could argue, you know, you could argue the opposite. If we don't really know, why don't you just eat whatever you want? There's a lot of factors that go into your decision about what to eat. Some of it is health effects like we've been talking about. Other parts of it are, what do I enjoy? I mean, the sort of more European or the more French way of eating is we don't worry about whether a food is particularly good or particularly bad. We just eat what we like, what makes us feel good, what we eat with company. And that I would argue is probably,

I hesitate to use the word healthier, but that's maybe a more sane way of looking at foods rather than worrying about, well, is this one particular ingredient bad for me because I can't pronounce it? Well, I think there is a suspicion that people who, the companies that make processed foods are up to something. I mean, why do we need to have caffeine in orange soda? I mean, oranges don't have caffeine. Why does the soda have to have caffeine? The suspicion is to hook people on it. And that there's just trouble afoot here, that manufacturers are manufacturing addicting foods, making us fatter, making us unhealthy, and that's the problem. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. I think that is a, that's a philosophy that actually France does share with us, because they are quite vigilant about certain things over there, especially how quote unquote natural a food is, or how natural it's perceived to be. I think part of the problem does come down to the food

industry there. I mean, they have made no bones about the fact that they have engineered foods to be delicious. I mean, on the one hand, why wouldn't you engineer, if you're trying to sell a food, you would want it to taste as good as possible. So why wouldn't you engineer it to be delicious? But on the other hand, you know, you can argue that they've gone too far, that things are too good, that we eat too much of them. And so that, uh, that, that suspicion is probably a natural reaction to, to the, the percept, to that perception. Well, you know, in every story, there has to be a bad guy. And so it's easy to point fingers at the food manufacturers and point at things like, you know, strawberries? Why do they have to crush up bugs? There's this suspicion that somebody's manipulating this.

Crushed up bugs are completely natural. I mean, that's the funny thing about it, right? It is that part of it is a perception issue. Natural bugs are not okay, but adding caffeine to cola, for example, is fine. The other thing I would say there is bad news tends to sell. And so if you have a headline that says, for example, you know, coffee raises your risk of a heart attack or whatever it may be, that is much more likely to get clicks and traction and media coverage than a headline that says, you know, coffee is probably fine. And there's maybe one group of people who should avoid it. But you know most of the time you're okay let's go back to crushed up bugs for a sec crushed up bugs are there to make strawberry flavor why isn't there just strawberries in it and it's fine if

you want to put natural crushed up bugs but say it's natural crushed up bug flavored whatever not artificially strawberry flavor and put in crushed up bugs. So I think there it's because I think the crushed up bugs are actually for color, if I remember correctly, not for flavor. But your point is well taken. It's like, why would you add artificial strawberry flavor instead of actual strawberries? And basically there, the answer is cost. I mean, it is way more expensive to, if you want to make strawberry ice cream, to make it out of freshly harvested, delicious, ripe strawberries than it is to take one or two of the chemicals in the strawberry flavor, isolate them and add them to

ice cream. So again, you know, you can have healthy, cheap, delicious, and convenient food. You can't have all four of those things. Occasionally, they're going to have to be trade-offs. Well, and I think that's really where it comes down to, isn't it? It's really trade-offs, because you can get naturally flavored just about anything, but it's going to cost you more. Organic is going to cost you more. It's just, if you're willing to pay for it, go have it. But if you want cheap strawberry ice cream, well, it's probably going to have some artificial flavors in it. Yeah, absolutely. There are a lot of people, though, who write books and go on TV and they wear white lab coats and they demonize a lot of foods that they say that you know you should eat an all-natural diet and and and explain

why all these horrible foods are going to kill you and and and they have science to back it up they publish a lot of either unsubstantiated stuff or they'll read a study and over interpret it um or uh not say things about the study that were counterintuitive or weaknesses of the study, they won't give you the full picture. You know, a lot of the stuff you read on blogs is basically blueberries are a miracle food or, you know, I don't know, kale is poison or things like that, extreme statements that aren't necessarily grounded in fact. Well, I've noticed that there is a lot of nutrition advice that is based on assumptions, based on philosophies,

that humans are naturally vegetarian. Oh no, they're not. No, humans are naturally carnivores. Well, they can't both be right, but they take one of those positions or some other position about what humans should or shouldn't eat and run with it based on the philosophy. Yeah, exactly. And much of that advice, if it is tested at all, it's tested in a way that really doesn't actually test what the person is claiming was tested. You know, if they say, listen, you should avoid every single processed food and never eat anything

unless it's completely all natural. Well, no one's ever done that experiment. We've done experiments where we've incrementally increased someone's processed food intake, but we have not had two groups of people and released one group into the forest to fend for themselves and fed the other group a diet entirely of Cheetos and Coke. That just doesn't happen like that. But reading these blogs, you'd think it does. Well, I like having these conversations about food and nutrition

because there is so much conflicting advice, and some of it is very extreme. But every single person has to figure out and sometimes struggle with what should they eat, what should they not eat. And it's good to get some solid information about it. My guest has been George Zayden. He is an MIT-trained chemist. He created the National Geographic web series, Ingredients, The Stuff Inside Your Stuff. And he is author of the book, Ingredients, strange chemistry of what we put in us and on us.

There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, George. Cool. Thank you very much, Mike. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney.

There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks.

And me, Melissa Demonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for

our Lister poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. I'm one of those people who likes to drive. I've always liked to drive. Not all the time. Certainly here in Southern California, traffic can make driving more like parking.

But like so many people, I find there's something very magical and freeing about driving down the open road. For many of us who like to drive, the idea of self-driving cars sounds terrible. How will that work? How can self-driving cars share the road with people driving cars? What about that sense of control you have when you're driving? I would imagine you have just the opposite sense in a self-driving car. Matthew Crawford is somebody who's given this a lot of thought.

He likes to drive. He's a mechanic, a philosopher, and he's author of a really interesting book called Why We Drive. And he's here to talk about it. Hey, Matthew, welcome. Hey, Mike. Thanks for having me. So why do we drive? You know, we drive to get from point A to point B, and we drive for fun, as you just mentioned. I also think that in driving, we're displaying some really impressive human capacities, not least a kind of capacity for cooperation on the road, and I take that to be an important element of political

culture, really. What do you mean, political culture? Explain that. The reason I kind of got interested in this topic was a news report about a Google self-driving car that came up on an intersection, and it was a four-way stop. The car came to a complete stop and waited for the other cars to do the same before going through. But of course, that's not what people do, right? They roll through. It's kind of improvisational. So the Google car just got paralyzed. It didn't know what to do.

And it's interesting, the Google engineer who was in charge said that what he had learned from the episode is that human beings need to be less idiotic. And of course, what he meant by that is they need to behave more like robots, be strict rule followers. But completely invisible to him was the kind of social intelligence on display, what was actually going on at that intersection. You know, so you have people make eye contact, maybe one person waves another through. There's almost a kind of body language of driving. But if you think the mind is basically an inferior version of a computer, then this is the conclusion you reach to, that human beings need to sort of get out of the way

to make room for the machines. You're right and we all cooperate on the road or most of us do and it does seem that we have this kind of unspoken cooperation you know at a four-way stop you go and then you go and but then people can screw it up because it's their turn and they don't go and they wave you but it's not your turn and then and then the whole rhythm gets thrown out because they've broken the rule yeah and i think the the impulse to automate things comes from taking those instances as you know the thing that is that irritates you and that you're trying to eliminate, you know, all that sort of slightly improvisational, some slightly chaotic stuff, which for the most part works. But if you have a dream of perfect order, then it's somehow offensive to you. is our ability to solve problems together without having to rely on some bureaucracy

or on some technology that does everything for us. You know what I find interesting is when I talk to young people, and I have two boys, one's 15, he'll be getting his license soon, that that desire to get your driver's license isn't what it used to be when I was 16. That day was like one of the best days of my life when I got my driver's license. And today it's not that. And maybe it's because, you know, there's Uber and there's Lyft and the talk of self-driving cars.

And that younger people today don't have that, whatever that feeling is of, I've got to get my license and i've i've got to get on the road yeah i think a lot of people our age have have similar stories to tell so it's an interesting question of what like why do younger people not have that and i guess i mean i can only speculate but um you know the we've we've had a push toward a different relationship to the material world that automation is part of. It's a shift in which the demands of skill and competence give way to a promise of safety and convenience. And maybe part of it also is if you spend a lot of your life in front of a screen in a sort of, you know, manufactured reality, say, you know, playing video games where you blow stuff up and you get blown up and you just hit reset, there's no real consequences to your actions. That's a world that doesn't really push back against you.

And the interesting thing about sort of actually driving a car is that you make mistakes and you learn sort of unambiguously that you have made a mistake. I mean, you can scare yourself. And I think there's an important kind of education of the character that happens when you submit yourself to that kind of humiliation from physical stuff. Well, and you know, I wonder too, when I hear you say that is, you know, driving, when I first started driving, it was very exciting. But I wonder if you play video games where you're driving and blowing things up and knocking people over, that real driving may not be so exciting because you don't get to you don't get to do that yeah it's kind of bland it's weird because it's both more bland and yet more demanding

in the sense that the you know the obviously the consequences are so enormous we're hurtling toward one another and these sheet metal containers of gasoline with just painted lines to separate us. So, is the magical age of driving that I remember, is it gone forever? I don't think so. I mean, the road is still there. The country is still there. And when you get off the interstate and you take some of the little county roads, it's amazing the difference. You know, the interstate, all those establishments are basically sprung up to service people who are just passing through. But when you get off onto the surface roads, there are actual communities and you see that places really differ. It's an amazingly diverse country once you get away from the homogenized arena of the interstate, you discover your country again when you get out on the road. It's a great thing to do. One of the things that fascinates me about driving is how people behave. And, you know, there's been surveys that say that, you know, 80% of people think they're better than average drivers, which is a statistical impossibility.

And yet, there's like two behaviors. There's like the individual way I drive, but then I'm also part of a group, which is why we all slow down for accidents and cause traffic jams. That there's that group driving, and then there's the individual driving. It's interesting because we're very alone in our cars. We're sealed off from other people in our private property. And yet the road is this shared space. So driving has this kind of hybrid quality to it that I think nicely mirrors kind of this big social picture where we have a hyper

individualism, especially in America, sort of every man for himself. But on the other hand, we have these hopes for social solidarity. And somehow the whole problem of a democratic society seems to be kind of in a microcosm in driving that's endlessly fascinating and there are always people when you're driving with a lot of cars around you there's always people who go too fast or go too slow but but that's not quite as big a problem at least for me as the the idiots who weave in and out of traffic and barely miss everybody and rev their engines and all that. And I've always wondered about those guys,

and I think they're usually guys, as to why. Because from the time I started driving and been in cars with other people and seen those people driving in other cars, I've never heard anyone go, oh my God, he is the coolest guy I've ever seen. Everybody thinks he's an idiot, but he doesn't think he's an, but how come he doesn't think he's an idiot when no one has ever reinforced like, oh my God, you're, rev it again, you're

just so cool. My God. Oh, you nearly cut again, you're just so cool. My God. Oh, you nearly cut that guy off. That is fabulous. Nobody ever says that. That's well put. I think the young male in particular is given to self-dramatization. And often his car is a means for kind of projecting out onto the world some image that he has of himself.

And, you know, that stuff is best confined to a racetrack, obviously. And in this book, I take these excursions into different grassroots motorsports and automotive subcultures where that instinct is given free reign. That sort of competitive, you know, a little bit macho and playful spirit. It's interesting, it's both a spirit of hostility combined with friendship, where you have people kind of trying to outdo one another in excellence. But those are guys on a racetrack who probably are pretty well trained in what they're doing, and they're not driving amongst the rest of us. I guess trying to impress themselves or other people.

I just found it interesting because there is no reinforcement for that behavior and yet it never ends. We feel weirdly empowered in our cards. There's a kind of solipsism where you feel you've got all this horsepower at your fingertips. And other people are almost an abstraction. And so you feel safe to live out this kind of, you know, everyone get out of my way. I'm the center of the universe. Well, it's a little early to predict, but how do you think the world will react to driverless cars? I mean, I have no interest in one because I like to drive. Well, you're in the majority in feeling that way. When they poll people, they still distrust the technology. Pew did a survey where they asked people about driving and it turns out about two-thirds of people enjoy it and one-third just regard it as a chore.

But it's become very clear that this push for driverless cars is very much a top-down project that has to be sold to people. It's not a response to consumer demand. But especially with driverless cars, there's this totalizing logic because they're really not going to be able to share the road gracefully with humans. Artificial intelligence and human intelligence are just too different. So it's kind of an all or nothing thing where driving your own car, if we go down this road is likely to become illegal so boil this down for me what's the what's the big message here i've got this hunch that you know doing things for ourselves is important a hunch that taking risks is inherently bound up with humanizing possibilities and, if you're trying to

sort of make everything idiot-proof for the sake of safety, there's a risk of human degradation that is subtle, but it's worth thinking about. And if you've ever seen that movie WALL-E, I think it presents a pretty nice picture of that. Have you seen that? Oh, maybe a long time ago. Yeah. Well, let me just refresh your memory and those of your listeners. So there's a scene where these grotesquely fat people are being ferried around in these driverless pods, slurping from their cup holders, gazing rapidly at their screens. And their faces beam with this opiate pleasure of being completely safe and content, and yet somehow

less than human. You can't watch that scene with feeling a certain revulsion. And I take that as a clue that there's something important at stake when we're rendered into passengers. And you could point to any number of other movies in which, for whatever reason, driverless cars play a prominent role. Somehow we have this intuition that being rendered into passengers is some kind of threshold that we don't want to cross. And maybe just finding your way through the world by the exercise of your own powers is a very basic animal kind of competence and freedom. Well, I've never been in a driverless car, but I remember the first time I got on the

air train at JFK Airport in New York, which is the train that goes around the airport and there is no driver. There's no one driving the train. It's a computer driving it, I assume. I just remember this very weird feeling of what you just described of here I am a passenger but there is no driver. We're all passengers. There's nobody here in control. It's just a weird feeling.

Or there's something in control but you don't know what or where it is. It's not some entity that you can visualize. You can't address it in any way. So, yeah, there's a kind of spooky action at a distance quality that kind of goes against the grain of our, you know, we're animals with bodies and we like to see who we're dealing with. We like to see who's in control. And I imagine if I get in a driverless car and it starts to move, I'm going to have that very same feeling of what's going on. I have no, there's no point of reference. There's no way to know what's happening. And I think our readiness to accept that or not, it serves as a nice index of this subtle form of re-education that's taking place toward greater passivity and dependence, where we become more willing to be completely ignorant of the basic, you know, kind of infrastructure of material stuff that we depend on, like that's someone else's business. And that doesn't sit very well with the kind of mental engagement with your own world that makes you also responsible for your

world. You know what I wonder is if there were driverless cars and it was time to get one, like what are you shopping for? What are the features? Why would you get this one and not that one? I mean, it's just going to be all vanilla cars. Well, you can imagine a world in which you can hail one for free, you can ride it for free.

But of course, it's not really free because once you get in, you then have to decline, of course, it's not really free because once you get in, you then have to decline 10 different offers tailored to your unique lifestyle. In other words, the car becomes a device. absorbed into the logic of surveillance capitalism where the whole point is to gather data about you, your movements through the world and use that to sell you stuff and sort of create a proprietary science of managing your behavior. And that's, I think people are starting to wake up to the fact that that's the basic logic of the internet which is now slipping the bounds of the screen and coming out into

the real world with smart devices of all kinds. So in other words, the driverless car might or might not be better for you, but that's not the point to be better for you. It's to gather data about you. Well, there is something about driving that when you get in the car and you shut the door and it's just you and you decide where to point the car, how fast to go, when to go, there's something so, I don't know, gratifying and freeing about that, that the idea of losing that,

well, I don't like that at all. Yes, the absence of remote control, I guess. And how many spaces can you really say that about? I mean, your own home, hopefully, and your car. It's a place where you have a bit of private headspace. and it's interesting when you ask people how what their ideal commute is or would be the answer is not zero it's about 20 minutes in each direction because people seem to savor that time of kind of decompressing you know between work and home and and also just being out roaming without giving anyone an account of your whereabouts you know there's no committee involved it's just you know the accelerator wired directly to the

seat of your pants and you're right there's something just um really rejuvenating about that well what you said that people who commute don't want a zero commute they like to commute they like their drive. They like their solitude, whatever that is. There's something that feeds the soul, I think, about driving, and it's interesting to talk about. Matthew Clark has been my guest, and the name of his book is Why We Drive.

You'll find a link to it in the show notes. Thanks, Matthew. Yeah, this is fun. Thanks, Mike. And we close today with some fascinating facts about the foods you eat. Because there is a lot about food you probably don't know. For example, most of the salmon we eat is dyed pink. Wild salmon are pink in color because of these little crustaceans called krill that they eat. But farm salmon, which accounts for two-thirds of the salmon we eat,

are fed pellets to dye their flesh pink. Otherwise, they would be gray. An ear of corn will almost always have an even number of rows. What's in your peanut butter may shock you. According to the FDA, there may be up to an average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams of peanut butter and an average of one or more rodent hairs per 100 grams. Twinkies actually do have a shelf life. It's about 45 days. Honey does not have a shelf life.

It may crystallize and change color, but it will never go bad. Avocados, pumpkins, bananas, and watermelon are all actually berries. But strawberries are not berries. Almonds are part of the peach family. And the average American eats about one ton of food per year. And that is something you should know. I am here if you have any comments, questions, or ideas. You can always contact me by email.

And I always read them. It's Mike at SomethingYouShouldKnow.net. I'm Mike Kerr Brothers. 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 VB 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, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times,

we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice

in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, "'He's great, we love him, "'but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.