Something You Should Know - The Benefits of Doing Nothing (or At Least Less) & When Math Goes Terribly Wrong

Episode Date: April 30, 2020

Have you ever had a headache that seemingly came on for no apparent reason? This episode begins with an interesting and unusual list of reasons why headaches happen and you likely haven’t heard of many of them before. https://www.webmd.com/migraines-headaches/common-headaches-17/mild-moderate/slideshow-headache-triggers Are humans meant to work long hours? Could it be that working less could actually make us more productive and happier? That’s the case made journalist Celeste Headlee author of the book, Do Nothing: How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving (https://amzn.to/3cKMOJ8). Celeste reveals the benefits of working less including more profit for business and better health for workers and offers examples of famous, productive people who worked a pretty short day. Ever wonder why people look back so fondly on the past, yet we often fear and worry about the future? There is something called “hindsight bias” and I’ll explain what it is and why we often long for the good old days. (Source: Dan Gardner, author of the book Risk (https://amzn.to/2S6MpIW) 90% of all spread sheets in the world likely contain at least 1 error. And that is just one of the many ways math screws things up in our world according to Matt Parker. Matt is a math teacher, YouTuber and author of the book Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World (https://amzn.to/2S8kdFF). Matt joins me to explain some fascinating truths about math, why it is so important in our lives today and how it often goes wrong. You can find him here on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDn3y3MGcBc This Week's Sponsors -AirMedCare Network.Go to www.AirMedCareNetwork.com/something and get up to a $50 gift card when you use the promo code: something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving and arts and crafts for creative thinking, Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world. Because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug. The play is pretend. The skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. Today on Something You Should Know,

ever get a headache for no apparent reason? I'll tell you a likely reason why. Then, are we working too much? Well, not lately, but when we do work, should we work less? I mean, on average, a human being has about four hours of focused work in them a day. Charles Darwin worked four hours a day. Charles Dickens worked about four hours a day. There's a long,

long history, and we can track the working hours of some of the most productive people in all of history. Also, why do people look back so fondly at the past while we worry about the future? And when math goes wrong, and math goes wrong a lot. There's a group called the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group. And they currently estimate that over 90% of all spreadsheets contain one or more mistakes. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know. 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, 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. Something you should know.

Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know Today, which seems a lot like yesterday, and the day before that, and the day before that. But we have a brand new episode for you, so hopefully this will brighten your day, and we start today with headaches. Have you ever had a headache that just seemed to come out of nowhere? There was no reason for it.

But there is a reason you may not realize. Here are some common but not widely known causes for headaches. First of all, tight ponytails. Hats, braids, and hair bands can all cause headaches. Undoing them will lead to fast relief. Your boss. If being around him or her raises your stress level, that can result in a headache. Poor posture. Slouching at work or at home all day can make your head hurt. Cheese. A migraine trigger for many people is aged cheese, including blue cheese, cheddar cheese,

parmesan, and Swiss. Cold cuts. Processed meats have two strikes against them. They often contain tyramine and food additives such as nitrites, which may trigger headaches in some people. Skipping meals can make your head hurt. As can coffee. Too much can cause headaches, and then if you try to quit drinking coffee cold turkey, that can have the same effect. And that is something the same effect. And that is something you should know.

As many of us have found out over the last several weeks, staying home and doing nothing is hard. It's not what we're used to doing. In fact, we have a very productivity-driven society. Look at all the books and articles and podcasts and videos that tell you how to be more productive and more effective. Well, journalist Celeste Headley decided to take a look at all this. Are we really programmed to get more done faster? Maybe by doing less, we actually do more. Celeste is the author of the book, Do Nothing, How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving.

And she's looked at the research regarding how much work people do, how much people used to do, and where's that point where you stop being productive. Hi, Celeste. Thanks for having me. So why in the world would we want to think about doing nothing or doing less? Why? Human beings, I mean, our species, lived a certain way for 300,000 years and change, right? And say two or 300 years ago, we changed almost every aspect of our work and our home life. And it wasn't always for the better.

So right now, what we have is an unnatural and frankly, anti-human, at this point, relatively toxic obsession with overwork and productivity. So it's not even so much that I'm telling people to try something new. I'm saying let's return to the habits that are good for our species and good for human beings and undo some of the changes we made during the Industrial Revolution. Which, and what happened then? The vast majority of people before the Industrial Revolution, the vast majority lived in rural areas, almost a huge number of them, at least in European countries and in the Mediterranean, owned at least a small plot of land. A large number, much more than today, were small business owners of some kind and owned their own tools. And so not only did all of that change in sort of

terms of disempowering the vast majority of the populace when the Industrial Revolution came along, but also in just the seismic shift of when time became money. Because before the Industrial Revolution, time did not equal your pay. How much time it took you was not relevant. What was relevant was whether you finished the task or not. Did you bring in the harvest? Did you finish the making the wheel? Did you tat the lace? That's what mattered was the pay for the task.

But when everyone started going into a factory setting of some kind, you never stopped. The task was never over. You never finished the wheel because you just kept making wheels all day long. And so the currency was not the task. It was your time. But the rules of the game have changed and they may not be good and you may not like it, but that's the way things are now, that we are very much productivity driven. So to do what you're suggesting, to go back to the way things were, would be difficult. Oh, I absolutely think it would be very difficult, but it's absolutely doable. It just what we're doing right now makes no sense. It's not logical in terms of productivity. We're less productive with the way that we're doing things right now. We are less creative, we're less innovative problem

solvers, and we're wasting a lot of time and money. So think about this for just a moment. Imagine an accountant in 1972, right? And working his 40 hours a week. Now, today, that accountant could have the same number of clients doing the same exact job, but finish his job in a fraction of the time, maybe a third, if we're being generous, of the time it took him in 1972. So why is he still sitting there 40 hours a week? Well, he's still sitting there because we falsely believe that if he works those extra hours, that means bigger profits. So number one, in this particular system, that's not true for that accountant. When you do see increases in profits from productivity, they almost entirely go to the C-suite and they have not gone to any of the workers for the most part. But even for that C-suite, human beings become less productive when they overwork.

That has been proven not even just in recent years. That's been proven for hundreds of years over and over and over again. So why are we not learning from that? I have no idea. It makes absolutely no logical sense to have people working overworking. I mean, not only is it less productive, not only does it cut into your profits, not only does it increase the amount of errors that you make, which of course cuts into your productivity but overwork actually um uh solidifies gender differences for example they have traced gender inequality even to our system of overwork some of the most intractable intractable problems that we have could be solved if we stopped

working long hours if we if we ended this myth that long hours meant more productivity and more money in the long run. So wait, so let's slow down here a second, because you're making some pretty big sweeping statements without a lot of evidence. I haven't asked you for the evidence, but basically you're saying that we were somehow better off before the Industrial Revolution than we are now. To which I would ask, well, by what means? I mean, life expectancy is higher.

Our overall health is better. Fewer people are in poverty. And just the math of your example that you just said, if you're an independent accountant, and because of productivity and technology, you can do three tax returns for your clients in the time that it used to take you to do one. How does that not make you more profitable? And you said, well, when there are more profits, it goes to the C-suite executives, again, according to who, but even if that's true, that's a different argument. That doesn't have to do with a person's potential productivity. And the idea of going back to the good old days before the Industrial Revolution doesn't

sound particularly appealing to me, and I suspect a lot of other people. So where is the line, do you think, between working and working too much and who's to say? Well, who's to say? I mean, to a certain extent, it's slightly individual. For example, I mean, on average, a human being has about four hours of focused work in them a day. And that's, again, that's not new. Charles Darwin worked four hours a day. Charles Dickens worked for about four hours a day. There's a long, long history and we can track the working hours of

some of the most productive people in all of history. But you yourself can sit down and do these tests, which is sit down, don't multitask, focus on one thing at a time and stop working when you become too distracted, when you start noticing yourself making mistakes. Most of us just keep working and keep our heads down and we don't even notice when we've made mistakes. And we have this idea that just doing more and more and more is helping us get ahead when it's just not. Well, but if you go into your boss tomorrow and say, you know what, I'm going to work four hours a day from now on. You won't have a job, and you'll never get one anywhere else. Oh, no, I don't agree with that. You may not, that may be a problem at your current job,

but I don't believe it means you're not going to get a job anywhere else. I think people are beginning to read the writing on the wall and see that we have gotten to the place where overwork is actually costing companies money. And a lot of times that's the drawing line. When you look at the amount of time spent in turnover, in sick days, in lost productivity in and of itself, it doesn't even make financial sense to keep doing it. So will that possibly harm your promotion chances at that job? Maybe.

But by the same token, doing it is shortening your life. And working what they call excessive hours, which is over 50 hours a week, actually only on average gives you a 6% bump in pay. So why are you doing it? The statistics show that if you're the type of person who takes your vacation time more than 11 days, if you're lucky enough to have paid vacation, you are more likely to see a raise in pay and a promotion. Those who take fewer than 11 days are less likely to see those things. So frankly, the evidence is just not on the side of overwork. The evidence may not be, but the reality is, you know, working eight hours a day has for a long, long time been the norm. And so to say we should cut that in half

would turn the world on its head. Yeah, absolutely. It certainly would. And you don't have to start. Frankly, if people only worked eight hours a day and they weren't answering work emails when quitting time came around and they weren't answering calls or texts from their bosses or doing any of that stuff after 5 p.m., whatever their quitting time is, or on the weekends,

that would be a great start. But frankly, we don't have to start by cutting it in half. There are plenty, there's plenty of case studies showing that even cutting your work day to four days a week doesn't impact your productivity. For example, Salgorinska Hospital, which is one of the largest hospital systems in Europe, and they had an orthopedic unit, which was just completely overwhelmed. Obviously, healthcare is one of those industries which sort of lives and dies on excessive work hours. would think that would be a case in which you absolutely could not shorten the hours of these medical professionals. This particular orthopedic unit, the wait time to get in for a surgery was months long. They just were not, they weren't handling the amount of workload they had. So they participated in a study, they got a large grant in order to fund bringing on more people, and they cut everybody's – nobody had a shift longer than six hours a day, which I'm sure you understand is unheard of in that industry. person because productivity went up so much during that time that the wait time to get an operation done, to get surgery done in that unit, went down to weeks. Productivity went up.

So would it turn the world on its head? I guess, but it has to be done. It has to be done. Well, it has to be done, but it's the business owners that would have to do it. You can't go decide you're going to work six hours a day when you've been hired to work eight. Yeah, but I'm a business owner, and I let all of my employees work until they finish their tasks, and I don't actually care how many hours they spend. I don't even know. I don't keep track of their hours. If it takes them two and a half hours to get their work done, that's great. They still get

their salary. Don't you think though, that if it was as clear cut and black and white as you're portraying it to be, that business owners would be doing this? Because why would they deliberately make people work longer to be less productive and do crappy work if in fact what you're saying is true? What would be the motivation to say, well, in light of all this evidence, let's keep doing it the wrong way? So number one, it's not usually that clear cut for businesses. And there's a few other answers to that question. For example, you can't reward what you can't measure. One of the easiest things to measure in terms of employee performance is how long their butt is at that desk,

or whether they're answering your email, how long it takes them to answer your email. So we have this completely wrongheaded idea that that's what you reward financially. But we've also known since, what, the 1960s that financial rewards aren't the best way to motivate creativity, insight, or innovation. So why do we keep doing that? People do what they think is right in their gut level. And it is very hard to change people's beliefs. It is very hard. And I'm sure you know that. Human beings are the only species that suffer from confirmation bias, meaning that we believe something, someone shows us evidence that it's wrong, and it makes us

believe it harder. So it is very difficult to change people's minds on that. But we have gotten to the point where people are having such disastrous impacts on their health, that you are seeing corporations sit up and take notice. You're seeing corporations actually begin to fund studies into burnout. We're discussing and imagining a world where maybe we didn't work so hard and so many hours, and what would happen if we did? My guest is Celeste Headley. She's author of the book, Do Nothing, How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving.

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 Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. 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. So Celeste, as I listen to you make your case, it does seem that there's a large portion of people who this idea could never apply to. First of all, you've got people who want to work more. People either like their work

or they depend on the overtime. They depend on working those hours in order to put food on the table. Secondly, you've got shift workers. You've got people who can't, as you put it, do their work and then go home. They have to clock in at 8

and clock out at 5. They have to be there due to the nature of their work. And you've also got a lot of hourly workers who, if you do what you're talking about and cut their workday back to those prime four hours you were talking about when they would be most productive, you just cut their pay in half. So I'm going to leave the middle out, the shift workers, because that's, again, a different structural problem. You're talking about like a security guard, for example, which again, that's for the most part, they're idle while they're working, if you know what I'm saying. No, no, no, no, no, no. I disagree with that. No, I'm talking about grocery clerks who are there all day long because they work hours that start at eight and end at six? So this is, okay, so this is what I want to address are those the first one and the

third category. So part of the reason that they're in this situation where you depend on overtime is partly because employers since the 19th century have designed a system in which they want people to have to work very, very long hours. Going back to the very early days of the industrial revolution, employers realized that the more hours worked meant higher productivity, which meant bigger sales, which meant more profits. That's not necessarily true anymore. Like part of the reason that luxury goods over the past 30 to 40 years have become so cheap is because if you keep making them, if you get all this productivity, and instead of using that productivity to give people shorter

work hours, you use it to try to produce even more and therefore increase your growth all the time, then yeah, you're going to end up with a surplus of goods. So what do you do with it? Do you give your workers more time off? No, you cut the prices and then you're able to sell to a larger number of people. It's frankly part of the reason that it's driving our global warming problem because we are overusing resources because of this belief in constant, constant growth. But the system is designed to force people to have to work long hours and to rely on overtime pay, overtime pay, specifically because there is the belief that if you can, the goal is to get your employees to work

as many hours as possible. That belief is wrongheaded. And there's actually a growing economic movement that has evidence and believes the same thing. I truly believe that will change over time and painfully, and maybe not universally, but that I think will change. Think for a moment about what you lose when you go from full-time to part-time, right? So technically, you're only cutting your hours in half, if even that. Many part-time workers are just people who aren't working the 37 hours a week. But when you go to part-time hours, you lose everything, at least in the United States. You lose everything. You lose your sick pay. You lose your unemployment insurance. You lose your health insurance. You lose your sick pay you lose your unemployment insurance you lose your your health

insurance you lose your retirement you lose everything and the reason it is designed that way is because of this idea that uh we need to construct the system to try to make it uh necessary for workers to spend as many hours on the job as necessary. That's why we're in the situation that we're in. And again, it's wrongheaded. Wrongheaded says who? I mean, it seems like you're making policy statements or even political statements and painting employers as being these evil people who are exploiting all workers. But if somebody loves their work, if somebody wants to work,

then who are you to say, no, no, no, that's wrongheaded? I mean, I don't get that. And it also seems that technology has really kind of gotten in the way of what you're proposing because people are now more connected to their work than ever before, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They can do work almost anywhere in many cases. So it seems to be moving away from what you're proposing. Yes, that's what makes it urgent.

But that's not going to change. I mean, that's just not going to... Yeah, it is. Sure it is. Well, where's the proof of that? How is it going to change? It changes one business at a time. Frankly, there already is a huge amount of growing concern among corporations about, like I said, about burnout, about overwork, about work-life balance. Why? Because they are seeing the impact on their own bottom lines. And they're seeing the impact on turnover, especially. People are constantly moving on to a new job

to try and find something better than what they're in. And turnover is incredibly expensive. So yeah, it will absolutely change. You know how it will change? It will change because there's going to be people who say, I'm not answering my cell phone after such and such a time. And that's already beginning. It sounds like you haven't gotten one of those messages yet, but people will put vacation responders on their phone. It's already changing in Europe. You see it in many countries right now, where there's even companies who shut down their email system completely at closing time. So if you're a customer and you send in an email, you will get a response saying, hey, we're closed. You'll get a response. It's not even, I mean, it's automated, but it's not even automated. Can I help you? It's just an automated, we'll get back to you tomorrow because all of our employees are off for the night. So yeah,

it will change. Well, I haven't heard of that. But you also have the problem, and I know there's a lot of people that, regardless of the company policy, get very anxious if they don't check their email every 10 minutes. And so they go home, and they're still checking their work email, and you can't policy that away. No, but you can. I mean, that's exactly what those European companies have done. You can't access your email during that time. But that's partly because of the addiction we have to our electronic devices. I mean, the email inbox was just one of the many apps and software that was designed to make us dopamine addicted. And look, the dopamine is not called the addiction hormone for nothing. It is very addictive

to continue to refresh your email inbox or your Twitter feed or your Facebook feed or whatever it may be. It is. So to a certain extent, there may be policies we have to put in place like shutting down email. One of the questions in the material that just jumped out at me that like, this is where the conversation ought to be, is this question that you ask of, why do we measure our time in terms of efficiency instead of meaning? And when you stop and think about that question, it's profound. It's, well, of course, why do we? Because I think we equate the one with the other, you worked really, really hard for however long it took you to bring in the harvest. And then you partied and had harvest festivals for weeks because that task had meaning, right? The bringing in the harvest was a tentpole of your life. It was how you kept track of time in a way. And you didn't measure it by the calendar, you measured it by when the crops were ready to come in. And it changed every year. So that was what partly gave your life meaning, was the changing of the seasons, the tasks that you accomplished. But that all changed when we all went inside, when we all moved into cities, when we stopped doing landowning, and when we started deciding that everyone was, well, the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, everyone is going to work, what, you know, 16, 18 hours a day. Everything changed. And again, it feels like this is the way it has been forever.

But really, in the 300,000 years history of our species or so, these past 250 are a blink. They're just a blip on the radar. Well, I'm not sure I'm a convert to your way of thinking, but it's an interesting exercise to think about what would happen if we didn't put so much emphasis on work. If we did work less, what would we do instead? Where would we find our meaning? So I appreciate the conversation. Celeste Headley has been my guest, and the name of her book is

Do Nothing, How to Break Away from Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Celeste. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. Stay well. 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 listener 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. Even if it wasn't your favorite subject in school, you have to admit that math is pretty interesting, and it is very much a part of all aspects of your life. And I think we like to think of math as being very reliable. 2 plus 2 is 4. There is no doubt, there is no debate. Math is rock-solid. But not always. As fascinating and objective as math appears to be, sometimes math goes terribly wrong. And here to explain how that happens is Matt Parker. Matt has taught math. He's written about math for several major publications. He is a YouTuber, a performer, and author of the book, Humble Pie, When Math Goes Wrong in

the Real World. Hey, Matt. Absolute pleasure to be here. So I think for many of us, math is, it's that thing, that subject that we learned in school, and it's something that we leave at school. Exactly. And a lot of people have this memory of math being that thing at school where there was a right answer and there was a wrong answer. And so much about mathematics, on one hand, is kind of play, I guess. So a lot of math is just messing around with puzzles and concepts and patterns. And you try things and it doesn't work and you get it wrong.

And mathematics, I think a lot of people appreciate this, is very difficult. And the people who are really into math aren't the people who don't make mistakes. They're not the people who find it easy. They're the people who enjoy the fact that it's difficult. And so I want to try and get across that math is not just about always getting the right answer. It's about giving it a go. Although, on the other hand, math is obviously very important in things like engineering, medicine, finance, situations where you do want to get

the right answer. So I didn't want to downplay how important it is to get the math right in some situations, but I also want to focus on how you can have fun with it. Well, I think that comes as a relief to a lot of people like me who thought that A, math was difficult and consequently I didn't like it. You're saying that a lot of people who are good at math, it isn't that they find it easy, they find it difficult, but they like that it's difficult.

They like the challenge of it. I think kind of the dirty secret of mathematics is that everyone finds it difficult because the human brain is not good at doing math naturally. So when you're born, your brain can do a little bit of number so you can understand how big and small quantities are, but your brain's not very good at kind of doing arithmetic with it. And you can do a little bit of geometry. So humans, we can kind of almost read a map out of the box, like with our factory settings. We get a bit of geometry and spatial

awareness, but we're not good at then doing much kind of deductive reasoning from there. And so the process of math education is teaching your brain new ways to think. So you're doing things with your brain beyond the original kind of intuitive settings. And some people enjoy that sensation of being lost and not getting it. And then suddenly one day it snaps into focus. But for other people, just that frustration can be a massive turnoff. Do you think that math aptitude is something you're born with? It's an innate ability and you either have it or you don't? Or is it something anybody can get really good at?

How do we become mathematical? When babies are born, we come out not with a good sense of how numbers relate to each other in terms of size. But then through school, that becomes a lot more cemented. So if you get someone who's never been in formal education and you show them a scale of, let's say, one to nine, or you could do zero to 10, but zero comes with its own baggage. If you did one to nine and you see what someone who's never been in school puts in the middle. So what's the middle number between one and nine? We're taught that it's five, that's halfway up. But native, like our natural instinct actually is to put three right in the middle and we're looking at what you have to multiply to go up because one times three

is three and three times three is nine so we have this kind of we're born with a multiplication sense of of size and scale but through schooling we learn that actually it's addition you should have to add the same amount to go up the scale. And so we've almost completely forgotten the way our brains originally worked. And occasionally it will surface when we're dealing with very big numbers. But for the most part, we've taught our brain a whole new way to think about math. Let's get into the stories about where math went wrong, because I think they're really interesting.

So let's start with the one about Pepsi. Oh, the Pepsi one is one of my absolute favorites. This was a case from the mid-1990s and they were running a campaign where you could trade in Pepsi points. So you got these from buying Pepsi products and then you would get some kind of Pepsi stuff, Pepsi gear like hats, sunglasses, leather jackets, things that were, you know, branded with Pepsi. And when they ran the TV commercial for this, they showed all the usual things, the hats and everything else. And they thought it would be hilarious at the end of the commercial to have something just ridiculous. So they had a Harrier fighter jet. This is one of these jump jets which can land vertically.

And they put up on the screen that instead of being, you know, like tens of points to get the other things, you would have to get 7 million points to get the Harrier fighter jet. Although they just picked the number 7 million at random. And if you actually looked into it, so I did the research at the time, it cost the US military roughly 20 million US dollars per Harrier jet they were getting in the air. And you could buy extra Pepsi points. So you could, as long as you got enough from actual products, you could write a check for 10 cents per point. And so you could actually buy 7 million Pepsi points with just $700,000 and you're going to get yourself a $20 million jet. And I don't know what kind of like what resale value you're going to get on an ex- back a check, and they sent in their application. And they said, here's my $700,000 worth of points, one jet, please. And eventually it went to court. And so, because Pepsi said no, but, you know, the person had lawyered up. And so there was this big battle, and eventually it came down on the side of Pepsi.

So no one got a jet for Pepsi points. And during the course of this very expensive legal battle, they changed the commercial. So instead of being 7 million Pepsi points, they changed it to 700 million Pepsi points, which I find interesting because that's not more or less funny. The commercial would have worked either way. It's just when they were writing the ad, they didn't stop and think, is this big enough number? They just thought, oh, 7 million. That sounds huge. They didn't actually do the math and the working out. They didn't double check it. And it's amazing how often people would just take a guess and then not bother to do the math to check if their intuition was correct in the first place. Well, that's interesting because when we talk about large numbers, especially when we're

exaggerating, oh, you know, that'll cost you a billion dollars. We don't really mean it'll cost a billion dollars. We're just using that as an example, as a figure that it's out of reach. And we don't really differentiate much between million and billion and trillion. It's just, they're just all big numbers. So explain the difference. So the way I like to look at it is how long from now would that be if it was a million, a billion or a trillion seconds?

So passing of time is something that humans have a reasonably good grasp on. And so if you were to calculate one million seconds from right now, it's within two weeks. It's about 11 days away. And we can all imagine 11 or so days in the future. We go, okay, I've got a rough sense of how big that is. And then I ask people to try and guess how long would it be a billion seconds from now? People go, okay, well, a million seconds was under two weeks. So I don't know.

It turns out it's just over 30 years. So depending on when you're listening to this, a billion seconds from right now will probably be around the year 2052. And a trillion seconds from right now would be roughly in the year 33,709. And the fact that everyone's like, what? So it goes from 11 days to 30 years to over 30,000 years. And well, actually, yes. And that's because a trillion is a thousand times bigger than a billion. And a billion is a thousand times bigger than a million. But we always think the jump is about the same. No, it's a thousand times bigger than a billion. And a billion is a thousand times bigger than a million.

But we always think the jump is about the same. No, it's a thousand times bigger. As the saying goes, the difference between a trillion and a billion is about a trillion. Because if you've got a trillion and you subtract a billion, you've still got about a trillion left.

Each one of these, million, billion, trillion, the one before it becomes vanishingly small. They're dwarfed by the next one up. And what's the next one up? Is there a next one up after trillion? Yeah, you go to quadrillion, and then you go to quintillion. And at some point, we stop giving them catchy names because they start getting more and more elaborate. So what we would do in mathematics is we would switch to just saying the number of zeros. So I want you to talk about spreadsheets because a lot of us deal with spreadsheets and it is one of the more interesting stories of where math goes really wrong. Because people use spreadsheets for way more than they were designed

to do. Because originally spreadsheets are used for very much like accounting and finance and adding numbers up and taking averages. But a lot of people start using them as a database or using them to store information in. And so there's a group called the European Spreadsheet Risks Interest Group. And they research mistakes in spreadsheets. And they currently estimate that over 90% of all spreadsheets contain one or more mistakes, which is just incredible. And of all the spreadsheets that have some kind of formula or calculation doing math within the spreadsheet, about 24%

of those spreadsheets have a mistake in one of the calculations. And you think, well, hang on, how on earth can they possibly know that? What they do is they wait until a large corpus, a large group of spreadsheets is accidentally released by a company into the public domain. Because if you ask a company, can we see your spreadsheets to look for mistakes, they're not going to let you. And so they, when Enron was going through, well, it was in the courts because of some unfortunate financial dodginess. As part of that, about half a million emails from within the company, internal communication, was made public as part of the evidence. And they went trawling through all those emails and found just over 15,000 spreadsheets, which were as attachments on the emails. And so they could then go through and analyze all those spreadsheets. And they found

that over 90% have some kind of a mistake in it, which is just terrifying. And what's going wrong? I mean, if that many spreadsheets contain errors, it makes you wonder what the value of a spreadsheet is, but what tends to go wrong? So some of them are quite boring, where they will either have pointed at the wrong cell. So in a spreadsheet, if you're doing some kind of calculation, you can say, add this cell to this cell and put the total over here. And occasionally they would just, either the data has been moved later or they clicked on the wrong one when they were doing it. And so, for example, in 2012, the state office of education in Utah miscalculated its budget by $25 million because they had a faulty reference.

So they were pointing at the wrong cell within the spreadsheet. And other times it's things like if you select a bunch of numbers to be summed, so you're going to add them all together, you might miss one off at either end. And there was a village in Wisconsin, I think, which they miscalculated what they could borrow through the local government by about 400,000 US dollars because when they were adding a range of cells, they just missed one off one end. And those for me are kind of the boring mistakes. That's just where people have clicked on the wrong cell or selected the wrong ones. I really like the interesting ones where it's something like autocorrect. So if you type something into Excel, which looks a bit like a date, so there's a gene called March 5. It has nothing to do with the month. That's just the shortened version of a much longer name. There's

another one called SEP15. Again, it's a much longer name, but it's normally abbreviated as SEP15. If you type that into Excel, it will remove what you typed and replace it with just a numerical date. And so some researchers in Melbourne, they thought they would download all publicly available genetic research and then look to see which bits of research used Excel files or any kind of spreadsheet of data. And then they would automatically comb through it looking for where the names of genomes had been replaced with a date. And they found over 35,000 publicly available spreadsheets, and they related to 3,597 separate bits of genetic research. And of those, 19.6%, so that's about one in five, had an autocorrect error because of the way the data was typed into Excel. And so I have no idea what the knock-on effects of that are.

But I imagine that, you know, your data being corrupted because Excel is trying to be too clever for its own good, that can't be good. Although, on the flip side, when this research came out, Microsoft, who make Excel, came out and said, look, Excel is fine for most normal uses. And if you're doing genetics research, you shouldn't be using Excel. However, I can guarantee you across all sorts of scientific mathematics and financial research, people are going to use spreadsheets and autocorrect is going to corrupt their data. Tell the story about how math went wrong in engineering in building that skyscraper. There was a skyscraper in South Korea. This was about the year 2011. And it was just shy of 40 stories tall. And there were some people in one of the upper floors, about the 37th floor. And one day, they felt the whole building start to shake,

which for any skyscraper, that's a bad sign. And they figured it was an earthquake. So they evacuated. And when they got outside, everyone was just looking at them like, what are you doing? They're like, there was an earthquake. Like, no. But the building was shaking.

And they had to investigate why the top of this building had suddenly started shaking. And it turns out there was an exercise class at about the 11th floor. And on that day, they decided to exercise to the song, I've Got the Power by Snap. I'm not sure if you're familiar with Snaps. I've Got the Power. I'm not going to try and sing it. People can look it up. But it turns out that the frequency, like the beat of I've got the power matched what we call a resonant frequency of the building. And that's a frequency where the building is particularly susceptible to being able to move. In this case, it was twisting. So it wasn't shaking side to side. The whole thing was twisting along its vertical axis.

So if you were looking at it from over the top, like a bird's eye view, you would see it twisting backwards and forwards, like a spring or something. And because the engineers had missed this one frequency in the building they were designing, because other ones they had engineered out, they missed this one, and an exercise class happened to hit it. During the investigation, they got people back to exercise, to snaps I've got the power, and they measured 10 times the normal movement at the top of the building which would absorb energy to stop the building from twisting at that frequency. And this is kind of how engineering developed. So now that's part of building codes. Now people know to look out for it. Future buildings are designed with that in mind.

But it was this whole new nuance of the math that no one saw coming. Thankfully, there was no damage. No one was injured. No one died. But it was terrifying for these people. But because of it, we learned something new about the math of building buildings. Briefly, tell the story of the airplane and how important it is to understand the units of measure that you're measuring. An aircraft, which in the 1980s was flying across Canada. It was going from

Montreal to Edmonton. And when they were fueling the aircraft, they carefully calculated the exact amount of fuel that a Boeing 767 would require to complete this flight. And once they calculated that amount, and they did it in kilograms because Canada had just switched to the metric system. And when you're fueling an aircraft, unlike a car where you'd put in like gallons where you're measuring volume, the problem is if you change the temperature of fuel, it changes its volume slightly. And so in aviation, they calculate the mass because that always stays the same. So they worked out the exact number of kilograms of fuel they would need. But then when they were fueling it, they used the wrong units. So they put in that many pounds of fuel and a pound, it's about half a kilogram. Now, separately, there were things going wrong with the fuel gauges and the instruments on the aircraft. And I'm also

fascinating by the logic behind how different things go wrong at the same time and how they all kind of fit together to form these disasters. But on this case, they didn't notice because the gauges weren't working that they'd put in half as much fuel as they thought they had because of a unit conversion error. And in the end, the plane ran out of fuel mid-flight, which must have been terrifying for everyone on board. But the pilot, before they became a commercial airline pilot, they used to be a glider pilot. So they were able to glide the aircraft about 40 miles to a disused runway in a very small village called Gimli in the middle of Canada. And with no power, they were able to glide a 767,

hit this runway, and it just, you know, like the landing gear gave way and it was just skidding down the runway. It was enough friction that it came to a halt before the far end of the runway with everyone fine. No one died. It was perfectly safe. It did scare the daylights out of the people who were camping at the other end of the runway. They were there for a weekend of go-karting and they had no idea what was happening because a gliding 767, that's pretty quiet. So all they heard was boom and this aircraft is just slamming into the runway and then sliding towards them. But it came to a halt. No one was injured. They fixed it. They got the aircraft back in the air. But what could have

been a massive disaster for hundreds of people on board, thankfully it wasn't, but it all came out because some people didn't double check their units when they were fueling an aircraft. And so I like to think that now, whenever a student in a math class is like, why do I have to learn about units? Teachers can go, well, previously someone didn't and an aircraft ran out of fuel. And you have no idea what jobs you're going to have in the future. So the mathematics is worth learning. Great. Well, now parents actually have real stories to tell their kids about how important math is when they say, I don't need to learn this.

I'm never going to use this. Well, you might one day and it might make a difference. Matt Parker has been my guest. He is a math teacher. He's written about math for several major publications. He's a performer. He has a YouTube channel, and he's author of the book, Humble Pie, When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World.

There's a link to his book and to his YouTube channel in the show notes. Thanks, Matt. All right, thanks so much. See ya. It appears to be human nature to have nostalgia for the past and a fear of the future, particularly now when the future seems so uncertain. Psychologists call it hindsight bias, and here's what it means. The defining feature of the future is uncertainty. The future is a blank canvas, and we can paint it any way we want. This could happen. That could happen.

Anything could happen. Uncertainty is inherently alarming to people. It's scary. The past is 100% certain. Whatever happened, happened. But life went on. And that is very comforting and reassuring and makes us long for those good old days. But what we're really longing for is the certainty of the past. There can be no surprises in the past. That is hindsight

bias. And that is something you should know. Thank you for your kind emails wishing me and my family well, and I wish the same to you. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening 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,

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