Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: How to Decode Greatness to Achieve Success & The World’s Most Valuable Insect

Episode Date: June 10, 2023

There are a lot of good reasons to be more optimistic. Interestingly, it also seems simply pretending to be an optimist has many of the same benefits. This episode starts with a discussion on how real or pretend optimism can be good for everyone and why even the most hardened pessimist might want to try looking at the bright side of life. Source: Michael Mercer, PhD author of Spontaneous Optimism (https://amzn.to/3vo7oc9). To be successful typically requires skill, practice and hard work. However, one often overlooked strategy to being successful is - reverse engineering. In other words, by taking apart and analyzing what others have done to be successful, you can find a better path for yourself, according to psychologist Ron Friedman. Ron is author of the book Decoding Greatness: How the Best in the World Reverse Engineer Success (https://amzn.to/2REVhc7). Listen as he reveals how some of the top people in their field use this technique to achieve greatness and how you can too. Few of us are fans of houseflies. I'm sure you don't like them buzzing around your head or landing on your food or ruining your outdoor picnic. As pesky as they are though, we couldn’t survive with flies. There are about 20 million flies on the planet for every human and they actually do some very beneficial things for us, according to biologist Jonathan Balcombe author of the book SUPER FLY: The Unexpected Lives of the World’s Most Successful Insects (https://amzn.to/3bVgqp3). Listen as he takes you on a tour into what it is like to be a fly and all the gross yet beneficial things flies do.  Growing up I am sure you were told to go play outside. We have all heard that it is good to be outdoors. How good is it? Listen as I explain the very concrete benefits of being outside in nature for all of us – and especially for kids and teens. https://positivepsychology.com/positive-effects-of-nature/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! The Dell Technologies’ Summer Sale Event is on, with limited-quantity deals on top tech! It’s the perfect season to power your passions during Dell’s Summer Sale Event. Save today by calling 877-ASK-DELL. Discover Credit Cards do something pretty awesome. At the end of your first year, they automatically double all the cash back you’ve earned! See terms and check it out for yourself at https://Discover.com/match We really like The Jordan Harbinger Show! Check out https://jordanharbinger.com/start OR search for it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you listen!  Let’s find “us” again by putting our phones down for five.  Five days, five hours, even five minutes. Join U.S. Cellular in the Phones Down For Five challenge! Find out more at https://USCellular.com/findus Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The search for truth never ends. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story. Connect with friends, explore the roaring 20s, and enjoy thrilling activities and challenges while supporting environmental causes. After seven years, the adventure continues with our immersive travels feature. Explore distant cultures and engage in exciting experiences. There's always something new to discover. Are you ready?

Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, why being an optimist is good and faking being an optimist is almost as good. Then, reverse engineering. It's a seldom discussed pathway to success and greatness. It's how we got the personal computer and laptops and even the iPhone. What's less well known is that reverse engineering also explains how writers like Stephen King

and Malcolm Gladwell learned their craft. Also, the benefits of getting outside are tremendous for everyone, particularly kids. And as annoying as house flies are, we couldn't live without them. They're incredibly valuable. If we want to measure a fly's value in terms of human benefits, they certainly do benefit us in huge ways. Probably the most prominent of those things is that they're pollinators. And it's estimated that the value of insects as pollinators is over half a trillion dollars a year. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello there. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Has anybody ever asked you if you're an optimist or a pessimist? I've been asked that before, and I find it kind of an interesting question, because at least for me, the answer is, it really depends. Some days when things are going well, I feel very optimistic,

and then there are those days where just nothing goes right, and I have to admit, I feel pessimistic. But certainly, being an optimist has its rewards. Optimistic people have better mental and physical health, and when they do get sick, they tend to recover faster than pessimistic people. They also earn more money, have more friends, and are generally happier. Although your level of optimism is somewhat built into your personality, it turns out that if you act like an optimist, you will become more

optimistic. So straighten up your posture. Optimistic people tend to have good posture, and they walk with bigger steps. Act happy. Use a cheerful tone of voice, even if it feels funny. Use optimistic language. Instead of saying things like, I'm going to make changes, say, I'm going to make some improvements. According to Michael Mercer, author of the book Spontaneous Optimism, research has proven that doing what optimistic people do will make you more optimistic. And that is something know. How do you become great at something? Are the people who are at the top of their game really special? Do they possess some inherent ability that makes them so good? Or can we all be great at something if we practice enough? What is the path to greatness, and is it open to everyone? Award-winning social psychologist Ron Friedman, author of the book Decoding Greatness, has researched what makes

for a top performer, and he says it isn't necessarily what you might think. Hey Ron, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. So by definition, greatness is reserved for a select few, because if we were all great, well, then we'd all be average. So whenever there's a discussion of top performers in anything, sports or business or whatever, it's always, you know, Michael Jordan, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs. And, you know, somehow those people don't seem that ordinary. They seem to be very special. And while people may find it interesting to hear about them and to talk about them, I don't think that most of us think we can actually get there.

If I were to put my finger on the thing that motivated me to write this book, that would be it, is this misperception that we have that greatness is for others. And it comes from the stories we've been told about success. There are two basic stories that most of us have heard throughout our lives. The first story is that greatness comes from talent. It's this idea that we're all born with certain innate strengths and that the key to achieving greatness is finding a field that allows those strengths to shine, whatever those strengths are for you. The second story is that greatness comes from practice. And according to this perspective, getting to the top requires the right practice regimen and an appetite for doing lots of hard work. But in doing the research, what I found is that there's a third story

and it's one that's not often told, yet it's the path that an astonishing number of top performers, everyone from writers and artists to inventors and entrepreneurs used for generations. And it involves mastering a skill that few people have heard of. And that skill is called reverse engineering.

And it works how? Reverse engineering simply means studying the best in a field and then working backward to figure out how they did it. In Silicon Valley, it's well known. There's a long history of coders who have deconstructed winning products to learn how they're made. It's how we got the personal computer and laptops and even the iPhone. What's less well-known is that reverse engineering also explains how writers like Stephen King and Malcolm Gladwell learned their craft and how painters like Claude Monet became a groundbreaking artist and how Judd Apatow became one of the most successful comedy minds of our generation. studying the best works in a field and then working backwards to figure out how they were created turns out to be a lot more common than anyone realized. So you mean that if I were to go ask any of the people you just mentioned, how'd you do that? They would say, well, I looked at the best and I reverse engineered what they did. And then I did that. It's not clear to me that they

would identify the term reverse engineering, but it is without a doubt the component of reverse engineering that has enabled them to perform at the level that they have. And I'll give you some clear examples. In the case of Stephen King, he utilized a process called copywork. And what that means is, in his case, he would take comic books and he would recreate them word for word for memory when he was a kid. And that enabled him to pick up on some of the hidden patterns that are embedded in some of the more successful stories. In the case of Gladwell, Gladwell has said that he would look at William Buckley.

William F. Buckley, that was his favorite writer growing up. And if you looked at his early work, he describes it himself as insanely derivative because all he was doing was looking for patterns and trying to model off them. And I think that so many of us actually do this implicitly. No one's ever taught us to go and copy someone else's work or to look for hidden patterns. But invariably, that is one of the key steps to figuring out what works in your field and then adapting some of those formulas to create new works. That's the key. When you say copying other people, there's something about copying that doesn't, you know, we're told don't copy. You know, you come up with your own way of doing things. You come up with your own idea. You don't copy somebody else's. Yes.

And just to be clear, I am not suggesting that copying is the path to greatness. What I am suggesting is that the process of copying can teach you some of the tricks of the trade that you can then apply in new ways by evolving some of those proven formulas. And one of the interesting things that I discovered while doing the research is that copying actually makes us more creative, not less. And here's why. It's because the process of copying someone else's work opens our eyes up to decisions that we might have otherwise overlooked. And that experience of considering options that we might have otherwise overlooked. And that experience of considering

options that we normally would ignore makes us more creative in subsequent work. And so there's research out of the University of Tokyo that had amateur artists copy the work of an established painter and compared a different group that didn't go through that experience and was just told to create original work. And what they found was that the process of copying the work of an established artist actually made their subsequent paintings more creative. And it wasn't by mimicking the style of the artist they copied. It was being original in completely new ways. And I think, Mike, the key takeaway here is that the last thing that you want to do when you're searching for novel ideas is to be stuck in your own head. Creativity comes from blending

ideas, not isolation, which is why this process of studying other people's work in an analytical way and looking for hidden patterns is so powerful. Still, you can look for patterns in other people's work and blend ideas and all the things you're talking about. But if you don't have the talent and you're not willing to put in the timecelling. Same is true for practice. If you have the right practice regimen, you're going to do much better. But there's a glaring problem with the notion that it takes 10,000 hours to succeed at any particular field, or that just practice generally is enough to get you there. And that glaring problem is that you can't practice an idea you've never considered. The best ideas don't emerge from hours of isolated practice. They're waiting to be found inside the work of masters, which is what reverse engineering allows you to do. Just because you can identify patterns in other people's work

doesn't mean you can do it, though. I mean, I could spend years analyzing and reverse engineering Michael Jordan's ability to play basketball. It's unlikely I will ever have the ability to play basketball like him. In the case of Michael Jordan, that's a physical sport. And without question, we're all going to have particular physical limitations. The limitation to that thinking is that reverse engineering, although it might not make you Michael Jordan, identifying what he's doing differently will likely improve your performance on the basketball court and enable you to guard against other players more effectively. And so if we make it a black and white discussion of either I'm going to

become Michael Jordan or this doesn't work, then most strategies are not going to work because Michael Jordan is such a singular talent. What we should be looking at is what's the quickest way to improve – what's the quickest way to improving our skills? And there's no question that reverse engineering can help us improve our skills in ways that go beyond simply simple practice. By how much? You know, there's no real, I can't point to a particular number, because it depends on your inborn ability. It depends on how you're going about reverse engineering, how well you're applying it. There are so many factors there that make it difficult to pinpoint, to give a definitive answer. I guess what I mean is the implication is that if you reverse engineer greatness, you too can be great. And my question is, can you be great? Or can you

just maybe be better than you might otherwise have been? That's such a great question, Mike. I don't know whether I can say definitively that you can be great. you don't have 10,000 hours or the ability to just practice, practice, practice for a decade of time, then this offers an alternative option to not just improving your skills, but allowing you to strive for some of the things that perhaps you've given up on. How do you do it? How do you reverse engineer someone else's success? And how do you know what you're looking at is actually the reason that they got there? There are a wide variety of techniques for reverse engineering, and all of them involve looking for clues that reveal how an object was created.

So it ultimately depends on what field you're looking to reverse engineer work in. So in the world of writing, nonfiction authors will often go to the bibliography at the end of a work to identify the sources that went into creating it. In the world of cooking, chefs will often order food to go, where they can place certain sauces on a white plate and parse out the ingredients. Sometimes they'll use a microscope. Photographers will scan images for clues like the length of shadows that reveal the time of day and the location of a light source. The critical thing ultimately is to not just enjoy an object passively, but to continuously think, how was this constructed? What can I learn from this? And how does this apply to a project I'm working on?

We're talking about peak performance and how to use reverse engineering to achieve it. And my guest is social psychologist Ron Friedman, author of the book Decoding Greatness. 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. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat.

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to figure out what someone did to get to the top, typically you would look at their talent and their abilities. But sometimes it isn't just talent and ability that propels you to the top. And so here's an example. Okay, so let's say you want to be a great singer and a really successful singer. And you could focus on how other great singers sing, but I've talked to enough people in the music business that'll tell you that there's a lot of people

who can sing really well. You need to know how to play the game of being a success in the music business. And yeah, singing's important, but there's a lot more to it than that. So if you're spending all your time perfecting your pitch and how you breathe and the way you pronounce words, you're missing the boat. I love that example because in Decoding Greatness, I talk about some of the formulas that musicians use to be successful. And one of those formulas is standing out from other musicians and also evolving their approach over time. Some of the greats like, for example, David Bowie and Beyonce, what you'll find is that

every year or so, they will evolve their image. And that's a pattern too. And they're doing it because they realize that if they continue to put out the same product album after album, they're going to fade. And this is often what you see with many musical acts is that they fade over time because they continue to bring out the same types of songs, the same look and feel. And that's an element that contributes to their success as musicians that you may not pick up on unless you attempt to reverse engineer what they're really doing. So when you reverse engineer, what are you doing? Are you sitting down with a piece of paper and going, okay, well, so let's see here. He did this and he did this.

I mean, what's the process specifically? It depends on the particular field. But one of the things that often plays a role is something I call zooming out. Zooming out essentially means elevating yourself to a higher level and evaluating what is really happening without staring at the details. It's the difference between standing up close to a canvas and seeing the brush strokes and taking a few steps back and witnessing the totality of what is on the canvas. And an example of this in writing is a process called reverse outlining.

So everyone has heard of outlining. It's what we do in middle school and in high school where we plan a paper in advance by listing the major points we intend to address in the various sections of our paper. Reverse outlining entails working backwards and outlining the major points we intend to address in the various sections of our paper. Reverse outlining entails working backwards and outlining the major points contained within a completed piece. So it's a simple process, but it empowers you to uncover hidden structures within the work of authors other than yourself. So I can tell you I've taught writing on the graduate level and on the undergraduate level. And one of the things that you teach people is to reverse outline because once they reverse outline, they can't help but see that certain paragraphs aren't contributing

anything. But you can also do this with the works of published authors to identify what it is that's happening over the trajectory of a essay or of a book. Now, reverse outlining goes beyond writing. Marketers can use it to reverse outline memorable advertisements. Consultants can use it to reverse outline successful proposals. Podcasters can use it to outline a program structure. And when you do that, you're able to pick up on things that you might otherwise miss that can help contribute to your evolving the formula in a new way. And what about the idea that, which I think is kind of inbred in how we approach success is, you know, yeah, that's good.

That worked for him. But that's not going to work for you. You have to come up with your own way of doing things because his way isn't going to be your way. I'm glad you brought that up because the truth is someone else's formula, if you just simply try to reproduce it, the chances of you being able to pull it off in a way that feels authentic to you are low. And I give an example where I actually reverse engineer a TED Talk. It's actually one of the most popular TED Talks of all time by Ken Robinson. And I look to see what he is doing within that talk and try to show people how they can reverse engineer other TED Talks to identify what the formula is and also evolve it in

a way that feels authentic to them. And one of the things that you discover when you analyze Ken Robinson's TED Talk is that he actually relies on very few facts. Although he's an education expert, he actually just conveys one fact throughout the entire talk. Now, he's able to do that because he's an education expert. He actually relies on anecdotes and storytelling to become persuasive to his audience. But if you're not an education expert, you might feel like you actually do need some facts to present a persuasive talk. Or another thing that Ken Robinson does is that he relies on

a lot of jokes. What if you're not funny? What if that's not your personality? And so what I try to tell people is that you don't need to just simply identify a single formula. Often the best outcomes can come about when you reverse engineer four or five or six examples that really resonate with you and pick out the elements that feel like they would work best in your particular circumstance. And so it's not about finding a single formula and then utilizing it for yourself, but rather being inquisitive about what it is that's working and how might I apply this to what I'm working on. So I certainly see the value of finding someone else who is successful and

deconstructing, reverse engineering their success. But I guess what I'm wondering is, how do I know that when I identify, well, the reason they were successful is they did it this way. How do I know that that's really the reason that they were successful? They might have been successful because they were pretty good and they knew the right person or they were at the right place at the right time. How do I know what I think is the reason for success is actually the reason for success and then build my success on top of that? I don't think that what we're trying to do here is reverse engineer one particular person's career path. What we're trying to identify are what makes a particular work within a given field so impactful. And I think that is a crucial difference because we're not trying, for example, to recreate my – if I want to write a great book, I might say to myself, wow, that Malcolm Gladwell, he's really successful.

Why don't I just try to figure out what he's doing and copying it? That probably is likely to not work for some of the reasons I mentioned, which is that audience expectations tend to evolve. And also because what Malcolm Gladwell did in the early 2000s was unique at the time and is no longer quite as unique. I'd like to get like one really solid example of somebody we might know that reverse engineered someone else's success and used it to be successful. And you say Barack Obama is a perfect example. So explain that. Well, long before he became president, Obama was a dreadful speaker and he got trounced in his first congressional race. And that's a little bit hard for people to believe. And the reason that he did not succeed

as a speaker is because he had been a law professor and was used to lecturing students. Voters didn't appreciate being lectured to, and they let him know at the ballot. And after that stinging loss, for a while, Obama actually considered leaving politics until he noticed the way that pastors delivered sermons at church. And he started applying that approach to his speeches. And so when he came back to politics, he started, he was now telling more stories. He was modulating his tone. He was using repetition to drive home points. And what Obama's story illustrates is that often the quickest path to success isn't finding your talent or practicing harder. It's about

plucking strategies that work in other fields and then importing them into your own. Well, it's interesting as I'm listening to you speak, I'm thinking that I, without knowing what I was doing, have done this several times in my life, in my career, and in my personal life. I've done what you're talking about, where I've kind of reverse engineered what people who are good at it do, and then tried to emulate them in my own way. So it's interesting to hear that it's a legitimate way to achieve success. Ron Friedman's been my guest. The name of his book is Decoding Greatness, and you'll find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for

being here, Ron. I enjoyed it. Thank you for your time. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit flyporter.com and actually enjoy economy. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world,

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In the spring and summer, when you go outside, it seems there are always flies waiting to bother you. They buzz around your head, they land on your food and on your drinks. They can be a constant annoyance. And when you take into account all the species of flies, which includes mosquitoes, which is something I didn't know until today, flies are your almost constant summertime companion and pest. So what are flies? Where do they come from?

Do they serve any useful purpose? And is there anywhere in the world that doesn't have flies? With the answer to these questions and more is biologist Jonathan Balcom. He's the author of a book called Superfly, The Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects. Hey Jonathan, welcome. Hi Mike, great to be here. So let's start with some facts. What is it we know about flies on the planet Earth? Flies are a major group in the most successful group of animals on Earth. Insects make up about 80% of all known species.

And flies make up about 160,000 of those and it's estimated there may be as five times as many on earth that are yet to be described by us so they're a massive group they're like the entrepreneurs of insects they're very nimble they're very clever they do a lot of amazing things how they interact with other species and their environments and so that's kind of why I wanted to talk about these these animals And so at any given moment, how many flies are there in the world? It's estimated there are 20 million flies, about 20 million flies for every human. So if you do the numbers, that puts them in the quadrillions. I think there's estimated to be quintillions of insects. That's one with about

18 zeros after it. So there's just huge numbers. And when we talk about flies, we talk about house flies, horse flies, dragonflies. Are they all flies? Yeah, it's confusing. No, some of those are. Horse flies are, deer flies, mosquitoes. There's lots of obscure ones, but dragonflies are not. That's another group. Beetles, of course, have wings. People know beetles aren't flies. Wasps and bees are not flies. They're hymenopterans. So there's quite a few groups of winged insects. A lot of them are flies, but not all of them. So when I think of a fly, I think of like the common house fly. That's the thing. And I remember of a fly, I think of like the common house fly. That's the thing. And I remember having a conversation, I think on this podcast with somebody about, you know,

what purpose could they possibly serve? Not just flies, but just insects in general. I mean, I mean, I'm sure they have their own purpose, which is to multiply and keep making more flies, but they seem to be more trouble than they're worth which is why we swat them and smack them and spray them and try to kill them yeah it's easy to forget how useful they are many people may not know at all hence the question but if we want to measure a flies value in terms of human benefits they certainly do benefit us in huge ways probably the most prominent of those things is that they're pollinators that they are ranked second only to the bees and wasps as pollinators and in alpine and northern

regions they are the champions of pollinators and it's estimated that the value of insects as pollinators to humans is about over half a trillion dollars a year the total commercial value of pollination of plants, crops that we eat. And flies are a huge part of that. They're also important, those waste disposers, they clean up dead rotting bodies. And poop, they clean up huge amounts of that. And sure, that's gross, but hey, we'd be living in a much less clean and pestilential, in a much more pestilential planet if we didn't have flies and the other really critical point here is that they're very

important members of food webs there as predators and parasites themselves they consume a lot of creatures but they are also consumed by many so if flies disappeared the food webs would collapse the planet would would essentially collapse into chaos and we wouldn't survive that event, probably. Wow. That's really surprising. It gives me new respect for flies, but they certainly are annoying. And when flies annoy people when they're buzzing around, I assume they're just looking for something to eat for the most part. That's right. They're out for food. Of course, in the case of a mosquito or a horsefly, the food they're after is that lovely liquor that we have coursing through our bodies, blood.

But also, yeah, houseflies zipping along your arm. I was visited by many houseflies researching my book. I actually quite like the tickle of them, but most people would rather they not be there. But yeah, they're looking for scraps, and they have this proboscis on their mouth, and they have this wonderful ability to use it as a sort of a squeegee mop, so they can release fluids through the mop, through the proboscis, to liquefy food on the surface, and then they can imbibe it. They can suck it up through the proboscis to liquefy food on the surface, and then they can imbibe it. They can suck it up through the proboscis. So, it's a very, very complex organ, a very useful organ for them to get by. In terms of, you know, pests and that sort of thing, it is worth mentioning.

The bad side of flies is that they parasitize us. They come for our blood. Some of them do. And they're also vectors of diseases such as, of course, malaria, Zika, yellow fever, fortunately not COVID. And they're crop pests, quote unquote pests, because of course that's how we categorize them. So in those ways, that's the bad side of flies. But, you know, they're just indispensable. And I just want to add that they're also very useful. We know more about genetics thanks to flies. The fruit fly is sort of the darling of genetics research. And they're also crime solvers. Their capacity to locate a dead body at great speed and with great accuracy has led to many murder convictions and also some exonerations. And the other thing I wanted to mention there in terms of the utility to us beyond being pollinators and waste disposers is that they are also used in medicine for wound healing.

They have properties that lend itself very well to healing intractable wounds such as diabetic ulcers and the like. So wait a minute. Let's go back to how they solve crimes. Explain that. I mean, you can't say, hey, Freddy the fly, go find this body like you might tell a dog. So how do they find bodies and you like, is so acute that they are very quick to recognize the presence of a dead body in the vicinity. So they will come along, and they will land on the carcass, and they will start their life history, which in that case is not so much food, although that's something they will use a carcass for, but mainly it's to lay eggs.

Those eggs hatch out on a particular schedule depending on the species and the weather conditions. The maggots feed on the carcass and if by looking at the carcass and the stage of development of the maggots, forensic entomologists, which is the specialists who specialize in this rather morbid field, they can determine to within hours the time of death of the victim. And that's a really critical piece of information, the amount of time that's elapsed since their death. And that's why evidence from insects has led many, many times to exonerations as well as convictions in murder cases.

Wait, wait though, it's not that the flies are finding the body and they're following the flies to locate them. It's not that. No, it's more a case of not knowing where the carcass is, and then when somebody's body is discovered in the woods, it could be days or weeks later, the development of the stages of development, the evidence either left by flies or still present by the flies, allows the researchers, the entomologists, to determine very closely how long ago it was that that body died. And that can be a very important piece of evidence in terms of knowing the whereabouts of a suspect or suspects in the case. I should add, Mike, though, that there is quite a lot of research ongoing and has been done in the past, including at the University of

Tennessee when I was a grad student there. There's a place called the Body Farm, which is a cordoned off area of many acres of woodland and other habitats. And the scientists actually place dead human bodies there. They obviously have to get special permission to do this. And then they get the baseline data on when and what kind of flies arrive. Of course, it's only specific to the particular geographical region. So this kind of research is going on around the world. When flies, maggots are baby flies, basically, right? Right, yes. And I don't know much about insects, but it seems that most animals don't lay their eggs on their food, but flies seem to do that. Yes, they typically lay their eggs on their food.

Why? Well, they feed, and then they give a head start for their young by laying eggs on the carcass or the poop or the whatever food source it is. And there are flies who eat more agreeable things such as nectar and such. But by laying the eggs there, you give a good head start to your young. So it's a food source for the young. That's correct, yeah. With the wound healing I mentioned, that's the same case. It's gross to think about, but these maggots, which are contained in a pouch, like a sort of like a tea bag, a mesh pouch, they're feeding on necrotic tissue, you know, tissue that's not

going to heal and that may have harmful bacteria in it. These little maggots eat that. They consume that. They scour it out. And then the scouring of the rasping mouthparts help to clean the wound. They don't eat fresh, good tissue. They only go for the rotting necrotic tissue. So that's why they're so valuable at healing intractable wounds. So knowing what you know about flies, when you're sitting at a picnic and one lands on your hot dog, do you still eat the hot dog? It's a great question. It depends. I think I'd probably rub it off. I'd probably give it a little wipe just to be on the safe side. You know, flies and house flies are definitely contaminated often because of some of the types of unsavory items that they're

attracted to and they can mechanically transfer germs from one thing to another so yeah i think you know covering food is a good idea um and if if a fly lands on something then wiping it off is a good idea there was a study done actually and more people were grossed out by the presence of cockroaches on their food than flies uh but it's it's been suggested there's data that suggests that cockroaches are a little bit cleaner than flies that's interesting yeah yeah i mean people are because flies will come around your picnic and land on your food people you know wave their arms and get rid of them but they still go ahead and eat the food because to not if if we threw it all away, well, nobody would eat anything.

Yeah, some enterprising biologists at a border area where there was food kiosks outside, I think it was in Guatemala, they wanted to impress upon the food vendors that the flies do transfer bad things to our food. And what they did was they sprinkled white flour, I think it was, on the latrines nearby and then a few hours later little bits of white flour were showing up in the footprints of the flies who'd gone from the latrines to the food outlets. So that was one way of demonstrating and the vendors started covering up their food after that. Yeah. Is it possible to go anywhere in the world and there not be flies?

Well, I can tell you they're found on all seven continents, and I believe they're the only group of insects that can make that claim. So on that basis, perhaps not. Of course, in the depths of winter in the Antarctic, you're probably not, you're not going to have any mosquitoes buzzing around you, but, you know, stay until summer and you probably will. If a fly, I mean, how do flies get around? Like do flies like hide in suitcases and then when you get to your destination and open your suitcase, the fly pops out and off he goes? I mean, do they travel that way or do they just fly where they fly on their own or how do they get around? Yeah, most of their dispersal is of course just using their wings. But I've seen flies in large aircrafts on intercontinental flights.

And I think, you know, is that fly going to – well, you've got to figure occasionally some of those flies exit the plane on landing when the doors open. I can imagine it's maybe a bewildering experience for a fly to suddenly find themselves in Nairobi when they left New York nine hours earlier. So for sure, because of their omnipresence and their ability to move quickly, we have definitely helped disperse them. You mentioned suitcases, and I have to just add that flies are incredibly good at getting into tight spaces. Not so much the adults, but the larvae, the little maggots, the very small, there are small maggots that actually can crawl between the teeth of a suitcase zipper. That little bit of information is proved useful in, again, back into this forensic entomology

cases where murderers have hidden their victims in suitcases and the flies can get in there and access that. And again, they leave a trail of evidence as to when and where that victim was killed. Talk about how flies relate to each other. Do they mate for life? Do they mess around? Do they have girlfriends and boyfriends? How do they communicate with each other?

That kind of thing. thing yeah they sure do mess around flies have very colorful sex lives I like to say that fly sex comes in 50 shades of brown they have courtship songs they have wing fanning they have some quite complex courtship displays you get male-male competition where males will square off in fights. But do they live in communities? Where do they go at night? How long do they live? That kind of thing. Well, most of the lifespan of most insects is in the larval stage.

So there's a short egg period. It's the same with caterpillars turning into butterflies and moths. So the larvae need maybe a couple of weeks to mature. And then the adult period, well, actually the adult period of some flies can be months, but a lot of small ones, midges and such, it may be a day or less. So it really varies quite a bit, not surprisingly with such a diverse group of insects. So the housefly buzzing around my house that I then see on the windowsill a couple days later may have lived a good long life.

Some of them may have, indeed. I have to tell you, Mike, I rescue them out of my house. It just gives me a good feeling to liberate them. If I see them buzzing, bouncing against a window pane, as happens in the warmer months, it's fun to take them out and let them fly. Well, but that's hard to do. And I was going to ask you about, they're very hard to catch. They're very hard to hit. Because why? It's a way of escaping predators. Their great speed is probably because they have a history of being pests for other humans, primates, other animals with swatting tails. You know, when you look at cows in the field in the summer or horses, those tails are swatting constantly.

They're not swatting at marshmallows, they're swatting at flies. So I think flies' speed and guile is a product of their unpopularity among other animals. Oh, I remember hearing, and I don't remember from who, but it seems like they were a credible source, that flies experience time differently. That although we think we're swatting a fly really fast, the fly perceives us as moving very slow. And they have tons of time in fly time to get out of the way. I love that idea too. It gets at the question of, you know, what's the experience of a fly? And I want to just make a note here that flies have been shown in close, careful experiments to have an attention span. They do have some cognitive skills. So the question of whether they're alert or conscious does come to mind. And all the flies around my house that are outside, where do they go at night? Do they live in a community?

Do they just sit in a tree? Do they hang out with their girlfriend? Where are they? They're probably where the kind of places where birds go at night. You know, we see them in the day. They're all over the place. They're calling. They're flying everywhere.

And then at night, where are they? Of course, there's some birds that are active at night and there are some flies active at night. But most of them, as you say, they go to bed somewhere. Where are they? Of course, there's some birds that are active at night and there are some flies active at night. But most of them, as you say, they go to bed somewhere. Where are they? My guess is, and I have to say this is not an expert answer. I don't remember researching this. They probably just find nooks and perch quietly there. They do sleep. I can tell you that. Flies do sleep. And so they're probably doing what birds do. They find a quiet perch that's on an outer limb in a tree in the case of birds and perhaps under an eave or under a little bit of bark in the case of flies. And they hide there for the night and all going well, they'll be ready to resume their activities the next morning.

You mentioned at the beginning that there are thousands and thousands of species of flies and probably thousands of species that have yet to be discovered. But of all the species we know, is there any species that like really is particularly interesting or that you find fascinating? Let me just give a bizarre one. Bot flies. So I'll just mention a bit about them. Just something I thought was fascinating about their life history. Bot flies are quite large, bumbling flies. They don't have any mouth parts. They don't feed as adults. And they get their maggots inside our body and the maggots feed on us. It's kind of gross, but it's also pretty morbidly fascinating. How does the maggot enter our body? And how that happens is a really, I think, an interesting situation that involves a courier, involves the involvement of another fly. So what a bot fly does, a female who's ready to lay eggs, she perches and looks for a mosquito, hopefully a female mosquito because it's only females who bite us. And a

mosquito comes by, bot fly flies out, grabs the mosquito, temporarily holds the mosquito captive while she lays an egg on the mosquito and then lets the mosquito go, the egg hatches into a maggot which crawls to the mouth part, the proboscis of the mosquito, that biting mouth part. And then when the mosquito, if from the butterfly's perspective and the mosquito's perspective, if the mosquito is successful in finding someone to bite, and of course this needn't necessarily be a human, it could be a rhino or another mammal. Then the mosquito bites, the little maggot crawls down the proboscis, gets onto the host who's being bitten. Mosquito withdraws, flies away, and then the little maggot crawls through the hole left by the mosquito to start his or her little bit of several weeks of development and growing inside the host before

hatching out and dropping onto the ground and pupating and eventually becoming another adult butterfly. That's just disgusting. I understand. In fact, this whole conversation has been kind of gross, but interesting nonetheless. Jonathan Balcombe has been my guest. He's a biologist and author of the book Superfly, the Unexpected Lives of the World's Most Successful Insects. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Thanks, Jonathan. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure. Growing up, I imagine we all received some variation on the same advice that you need to get outside, play outdoors, be in nature, that it's good for you to be outdoors. So how good is it? Well, there have actually been studies regarding the effects of nature on kids and their development.

And it turns out Mother Nature does no best. Simply being outdoors and interacting with nature has shown to reduce stress, gets kids more focused, and even enhances a child's emotional and social development. One study in Environment and Behavior magazine said that the more natural the surroundings, even the more greenery around the home, the more significant the stress reduction.

Even teens benefited from being outdoors. They showed increased self-esteem, independence, initiative, and more interaction with nature. And that is something you should know. If you enjoyed this podcast, remember there are literally hundreds of other Something You Should Know episodes you can listen to. Most of them are evergreen. And I'm sure if you went back through the list of episodes, you would find something you enjoy. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this.

No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one.

So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown 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.

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