Something You Should Know - The New Science of Sleeping, Breathing and Drinking & Where Did Dinosaurs Go?

Episode Date: December 2, 2024

Have you ever heard of the word – shadenfreude. It’s when you are amused by or laugh at someone else’s failure or misfortune. We’ve all done it, and this episode begins by explaining why we do it and what it says about you. https://www.livescience.com/17398-schadenfreude-affirmation.html Why in the world would you need someone else to tell you how to sleep, breathe and hydrate yourself? You are about to find out when you listen to my discussion with Dr. Michael Breus. He is regarded as one of the top sleep experts around and he has done some extraordinary research into how making small improvements in these three simple things – sleeping, drinking and breathing – will do wonders for your health. It is simple yet powerful advice. Michael Breus is a double-boarded clinical psychologist and clinical sleep specialist and author of several books. His latest is called Sleep Drink Breathe: Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health (https://amzn.to/3ATqDCc). Here is the link to take the Chrono Quiz Michael discusses: https://sleepdoctor.com/sleep-quizzes/chronotype-quiz/ There is a real fascination with dinosaurs in our culture. These huge creatures roamed and dominated our planet and then one day – disappeared. What are dinosaurs? How big did they get? Why did they die off? What I find so amazing is that we are still discovering new species of dinosaurs millions of years later – 46 so far this year! Hear to explain and discuss this is Armin Schmitt. He is a vertebrate paleontologist and research assistant at the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University and author of the book The Lost World of the Dinosaurs: Uncovering the Secrets of the Prehistoric Age (https://amzn.to/40Tz3UQ). While we have made great strides in our awareness of the dangers of drunk driving, you don’t hear much “drowsy driving.” This is when people drive when they are so sleepy they fall asleep at the wheel. It happens more than you think. Listen as I explain the magnitude of the problem and what you can do. https://www.nsc.org/road/safety-topics/fatigued-driver PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! INDEED:  Get a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to get your jobs more visibility at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING  Support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.  Terms & conditions apply. AURA: Save on the perfect gift by visiting https://AuraFrames.com to get $35-off Aura’s best-selling Carver Mat frames by using promo code SOMETHING at checkout! SHOPIFY:  Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at https://Shopify.com/sysk . Go to SHOPIFY.com/sysk to grow your business – no matter what stage you’re in! MINT MOBILE: Cut your wireless bill to $15 a month at https://MintMobile.com/something! $45 upfront payment required (equivalent to $15/mo.).  New customers on first 3 month plan only. Additional taxes, fees, & restrictions apply. HERS: Hers is changing women's healthcare by providing access to GLP-1 weekly injections with the same active ingredient as Ozempic and Wegovy, as well as oral medication kits. Start your free online visit today at https://forhers.com/sysk DELL: Dell Technologies’ Cyber Monday event is live and if you've been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year! Shop now at https://Dell.com/deals Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Missouri. From November 25th to December 2nd, get 25% off everything on orders over $150 in Missouri's biggest sale ever. From bold hoops to minimalist stacks, Missouri has something for everyone. Missouri makes handcrafted fine jewelry for every day made with responsibly sourced materials,

so you can look and feel good about gifting and wearing them. Shop your wishlist 25% off at majurie.com today. Today on Something You Should Know, have you ever laughed at someone else's misfortune? Most likely you have, and I'll tell you why. Then, things you never knew about breathing, sleeping, and hydration. When you wake up in the morning, sleep in and of itself is a dehydrated event. You lose almost a full liter of water just from the humidity in your breath every single

night. And so when you wake up, clearly you're dehydrated. Also, the problem of drowsy driving. And the problem is huge. And the fascinating world of dinosaurs and their fossils, there is so much we're still learning. We find fossils today more than ever. Even this year is a very important year for fossils because we have already described

46 new species of dinosaurs only this year. All this today on Something You Should Know. This episode is brought to you by Missouri. From November 25th to December 2nd, get 25% off everything on orders over $150 in Missouri's biggest sale ever. From bold hoops to minimalist stacks, Missouri has something for everyone.

Missouri makes handcrafted fine jewelry for every day made with responsibly sourced materials. So you can look and feel good about gifting and wearing them. Shop your wishlist 25% off at majori.com today. 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. Glad you're here. And I want to start with something today

that's a little weird. And here's the question. Have you ever laughed or felt the urge to laugh at someone's misfortune when they trip or fall down or make a fool of themselves. While it seems like that would be a cruel thing to do, it's actually a perfectly normal reaction. It's a phenomenon known as Schadenfreude. That's a German compound word meaning damage and joy.

Research from Princeton University found that from time to time most of us feel a sudden mix of emotions at the misfortune of others. It's a reaction triggered by a sudden boost of self-esteem or victory at someone else's expense. So doesn't that make you a bit evil if you giggle at someone else's blunder or fall or failure? Not necessarily. Blame Schadenfreude. That simultaneous feeling of superiority and concern can manifest itself in the form of seemingly inappropriate laughter. And that is something you should know.

And that is something you should know. Three things you do every day. Sleep, drink, and breathe. You can't not do them. You have to do them. And maybe you could do them a little better, according to my guest, Dr. Michael Bruce. Michael's name has popped up on other episodes of Something You Should Know. He's been a guest, but even other guests have referenced him or quoted him. He's considered one of the top experts on sleep anywhere, and he is about to explain how small improvements in how you sleep, breathe, and hydrate yourself can have extraordinary results. Michael is a double board certified clinical psychologist and clinical sleep specialist.

He's the author of numerous bestselling books and his latest is called Sleep, Drink, Breathe, Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health. Hi Michael, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks for having me. I'm stoked to be here. So why, I'm thinking people are wondering, why would I need advice on be here. So why, I'm thinking people are wondering,

why would I need advice on how to sleep, breathe, and hydrate myself? Such a great question. So I get this all the time, like, Michael, we already do that. Next, here's the thing. When you think about the fundamentals, like what is the DNA of wellness?

What can you stack all that on if you're deciding to optimize your health or start a new health program or any of that? If you're not sleeping well, if you're not hydrated and you don't breathe appropriately, you're not gonna be able to accomplish any of those goals. So why not start with the basics and you kinda have to do them every single day.

So if I give you a couple of tips that you can just kind of smooth on into your routine and it doesn't take a lot of energy or effort. Why not? So let's start with drinking hydration. That should be easy I mean the advice that everyone's always heard is drink eight glasses of water a day and you're good to go Is that pretty good advice? It's not the worst advice that I've heard eight glasses of eight ounces of water puts you at 64 ounces, which is about three-quarters of the way you probably want to be there, depending upon your height and weight, things of that nature. I will tell you though that here's the thing that I think most people don't understand,

is it's not necessarily about amount, it's about quality and timing. So as an example, number one, what kind of water are you drinking? If you're drinking water straight out of your tap, I would tell you that there are websites where you can put your zip code in and you can learn exactly what is in the water coming out of your tap.

To be clear, there's a lot of things that go into that water to clean it in order for it to be usable again. So for me, personally, I only drink filtered water. Now, to be fair, you don't have to go buy some crazy double osmosis thing for your home. Although if you do, you're going to get much better water. I went out and I brought a Brita pitcher and take my tap water and I run it through there. So that way I know that I'm getting decent quality water. If you can, don't drink water in plastics. There's a lot of data that's coming out about these nanoplastics that appear to leach into the water, and then we drink them. And they've actually started to find nanoplastics in utero babies now. So we really want to keep that away, if at all possible.

And then there are actually types of water. So you can't just call yourself mineral water or spring water without having minerals in it or coming from a spring. And of course, those two sources of water are infinitely better than tap water that's not going to have a whole lot for you. Now, a lot of people like to ask me about things like what are called hydration multipliers or these powders that you can put into the water to maybe make it better water or make

it absorb better. Here's what I'll tell you is most of them are loaded with salt. And so for folks out there who've got high blood pressure or are salt sensitive, this might not be the best idea. Then another area that I found super duper interesting that I didn't really think about before because I was the same of what do I just drink eight glasses a day was sipping versus gulping makes a massive difference. So this took me a little while to comprehend. And so I had to think of an example. And the one that I thought of is sort of like this. So most people don't realize it, but when you wake up in the morning, sleep in and of itself is a dehydrated event. You lose almost a full liter of water just from the humidity in your breath every single night. And so when you wake up, we want you obviously drinking water and clearly you're dehydrated.

So what a lot of people will do is they'll go and then they'll drink 30 ounces right in the morning, right? Like right before a workout. This is not a great idea. Let me explain. So when you walk out in the morning to your kitchen and walk over to your sink, usually there's a dried up sponge that's lying there somewhere. You are that dried up sponge every single morning. If you took that dried up sponge and you stuck. If you took that dried up sponge and you stuck it under your faucet and you open up the faucet full blast as though you were gulping water, what happens to the sponge? The water hits it and it runs right off it. But if you actually had it at a slower rate, like sipping water, and you let it absorb

into the sponge, soon the sponge regenerates and now you have a useful tool. You are the sponge and so the better you can sip, the better it will absorb. Well, one of the other things that I have heard about hydration is, yes, you should drink water, but the other fluids and the foods with fluids count. Oh, absolutely. One of the big recommendations that we have

is making sure that each one of your meals has water-filled vegetables in it, right? And the good news is most vegetables got a lot of water in it, but having that decent size serving of it, you can actually count towards your water, absolutely. And also I wanna be clear, you can actually count coffee towards your water.

Let me explain. So coffee is got the coffee in and of itself is a diuretic, but it doesn't really have that great of a diuretic properties until you get about three cups into you. So to be clear, and I am the sleep doctor, I'm telling you that if you want to have your coffee in the morning, one to two cups, you can actually count those cups towards your hydration. Now, as a quick tip in order for you to get the biggest bang out of your buck from caffeine, now I'm becoming the sleep doctor once again, is what you want to do is you want to drink your caffeine 90 minutes after you wake up.

You want to hydrate before you caffeinate because once again, your body is very dehydrated. And while the two cups of coffee do count towards water, you don't wanna mix it up with the caffeine right away. If you do wait 90 minutes, here's what ends up happening, is the adrenaline and cortisol that your brain needed to wake you up finally starts to slow down. And when you add caffeine,

you actually get a bigger bang for your buck just by waiting 90 minutes after you wake up. The only other thing about caffeine that I think is important to think through is when should you stop? And so caffeine becomes important from a hydration standpoint, because again, once you hit the third cup, that's when it starts pulling water out of your body.

So you want to be careful for that. But you also probably want to stop around 2 PM in the afternoon, because caffeine has a half life of between six and eight hours. And if you stop at two then half of the caffeine is out of your system by 10 and that means you've got a far greater likelihood of getting some sleep. So let's talk about breathing because you know I breathe I breathe all the time I seem to do it pretty well because I'm still alive I'm not dead. Well I don't think that's the right way to think about it, to be fair. Like, are you in great shape? If you, you know, don't exercise? No, of course not. Right? Same kind of concept here

is I do it, could I do it a little bit better? And is the juice worth the squeeze? I think that's actually the more important question is, okay, Michael, you've come up with all these cool ideas to maybe make my breathing better or make my hydration better. But is it really worth it? Like, am I OK, Michael, you've come up with all these cool ideas to maybe make my breathing better or make my hydration better, but is it really worth it? Am I going to get something out of this? So I think we will.

And breathing is actually kind of an interesting one. And to be fair, it was the one that I was the least familiar with, but actually they had the most experience with. Let me explain. So most sleep doctors work in pulmonary offices because pulmonary doctors or lung doctors usually own most of the sleep labs here in the United States. We end up dealing with patients that have got asthma, COPD, all kinds of breathing-related issues. Understanding

how the lungs function becomes very, very important. Also, sleep apnea is arguably the number one diagnosis in terms of sleep labs. So certainly something that I've had a lot of experience with. But thinking about breathing differently, not on the medical side, but thinking about it on the, hey, could I do it better side? And what good would that do me? Here's one of the techniques that I learned

that actually turns out to be incredibly helpful, not just for me, but for my patients with insomnia. It's called four, seven, eight breathing. So this is an interesting technique and it's exactly like what it sounds like. You breathe in for a count of four, you hold for a count of seven and you breathe out for a count of eight.

If you do this 10 to 12 times, your heart rate will drop to about 60 beats per minute. The reason this becomes so interesting and important is because 60 beats per minute is exactly the place where your body can enter into a state of unconsciousness. Anything higher and it cannot. So this technique of four, seven, eight breathing, I actually have taught many of my insomnia patients who wake up in the middle of the night. So you might have listeners out there who are saying,

hold on a second, what is he talking about? So I have a lot of patients who tell me that they wake up between one and three o'clock in the morning and they have a terrible time falling back to sleep. This is where breathing can actually come into play to help lower your heart rate, decrease your anxiety and get you back to bed. The four, seven, eight method works

because number one, you're counting during the whole process so you can't think of anything else and because of the way you're breathing, it's lowering your heart rate at the same time. This allows you to not think and just breathe and then the natural sleep process has a tendency to take over. And so that pattern is, just run me through it again, four?

Sure. Go ahead. Seven, eight, breathing. Actually, we can do it together. So if everybody listening, you would do it like this. Breathe in, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four, five, six, seven. Out, two, three, four, five, six, seven, out, two, three,

four, five, six, seven, eight. That's it, it's very simple. You count in your head and you go through it 10 to 12 times and you really get involved and you're counting and you're breathing and you get into it and you just stop thinking. And then the natural sleep process kicks in because your heart rate has gone lower and you're good.

My guest is Michael Bruce. He is a clinical psychologist, clinical sleep specialist and author of Sleep, Drink, Breathe, Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health. Breaking news coming in from Bet365, where everybiting overtime win, breakaway, pick six, three-point shot, underdog win, buzzer beater, shootout, walk off, and absolutely every play in between is amazing. From football to basketball and hockey to baseball, whatever the moment, it's never ordinary at Bet365. Must be 19 or older, Ontario only. Please play responsibly.

If you or someone you know has concerns about gambling, visit connectsontario.ca. The faster money and data move, the further your business can go to a seamless digital future for Canadians. Let's go faster forward together. In life, Interact. So Michael, let's talk about breathing during the day,

just regular breathing. It could probably use some attention, but it just seems so automatic. It does seem automatic. And here's the thing is, is it really helping you? So as an example, another thing that I noticed, and maybe you could tell me if this happens to you as well, when I'm really concentrating on something

like reading an email, I don't breathe. Like I sit there and I'm reading, reading, reading. And before I know it, if it's a long email, I'm like, and I have to breathe. So a lot of people, when they focus and concentrate during the day, they actually forget to breathe and that's an important factor.

And then the other thing that I've noticed during daytime breathing that a lot of people don't have a tendency to do is when I tell somebody to take in a deep breath, when they breathe in, if their shoulders rise, that means that they're actually not using their abdomen, they're using their thorax to breathe. And so what I try to teach them to do is to breathe wide, not up.

Now, what do I mean by that? When you breathe, you don't want your shoulders to rise. What you want is when you take a big deep breath, you want to feel your belly expand almost like it's a horizontal breath versus a bringing up your shoulders breath. And again, these are different things that you can do during the day. Now you're probably sitting here saying, well, Michael, when would I do that? Why would I do that? This seems kind of like information overload. How can we put off something like this together and I can actually have a cogent program so I can get on with it all.

So I created a three week program. All you do is you set five different alarms on your phone, one for right after you wake up, one for before lunch, one after lunch, one before dinner, and the other one after dinner. And then all I'm asking you to do during these five separate times is you do a little bit of breathing, you drink a little bit of water, and you might do a few things that have to do with sleep.

And after three weeks, I can almost guarantee that you will have significantly better quality sleep. So let's talk about sleep. And the common advice is you get roughly eight hours of sleep per night and you should be good to go, right? So what we're talking about there usually is length of time in terms of sleep and remember sleep is not just a quantity issue, it's really a quality issue. In fact, I could make the argument with a lot of science to back me up that you can actually sleep less if you have higher quality sleep.

And so a lot of people are like, okay, I'm always up for higher quality. What is an easy way for me to do that so that I can maintain my regular old schedule and still have some high quality sleep? And so one of the things that I'm known for and you've known me for is this idea of chronotypes, right? So these are genetic predisposed sleep schedules that we all have inside our bodies. Sometimes we're called early birds, sometimes we're called night owls.

I kind of rejiggered the system and changed the names. And so early birds are now lions, night owls are now wolves, and we actually know what time they should go to bed and what time they should wake up based on the science. And so one of the easiest things that people can do is just wake up at a consistent time based on their chronotype.

And it will honestly, within three weeks, magically make the quality of your sleep significantly better. And you figure out what type you are just based on what? So you go to chronoquiz.com and you take a quiz and you can learn from that. Or you can just kind of think through and I can give you some of the different chronotypes.

Why don't we just talk about them for folks and they can listen as opposed to having to go to a quiz. Sure. So many of you might know or think of yourself as an early bird, but what I'm talking about here is without an alarm on vacation, what time do you wake up? If you wake up at six o'clock in the morning without an alarm on vacation, there's no question about it.

Genetically speaking, you're an early bird or what I call a lion. You might also be the opposite, right? And so what if you're the type of person who hates to wake up in the mornings, can barely drag their butt out of bed before 730, oftentimes it's eight o'clock, but boy, come two o'clock in the afternoon, you've got a lot of energy and you're brimming to go and ready to hit the trails. Well, then you're probably more of a night owl or what I call a wolf. There are people in the middle, we call them bears, they make up almost 50, 50% of the population. But there's actually a fourth one and that's kind of what I'm known for. So to be honest, Mike, I haven't told you anything you don't already know, right?

There are people out there that are early birds, makes up about 10 to 15%. There are people out there that are night owls, again, makes up about 10 to 15%. And then there are people in the middle and that makes up 50%. What are we doing with the other 15 to 20% of people out there? Unfortunately, those are my insomniacs.

And when you look at them genetically, they actually have a kind of weird genetic sleep schedule so that it actually makes it very difficult for them to sleep. The good news is I've done all the research in the book. And if you do the chrono quiz online, I actually send you an email and tell you personally what are the different chronotypes

and what's your bedtime, what's your rise time, things like that. So living within that chronotypical timeframe actually turns out to be one of the easiest things that people can do just by waking up consistently seven days a week. What happens though if your chronotype doesn't match up to your work schedule? Yep. Happens all the time. Like shift workers, for example, right?

So what happens if you're a normal person or even an early bird and you got to work from 11 at night till seven in the morning? So number one, oftentimes I tell people if it's humanly possible, it would be great to talk to your boss. So what I've discovered over the course of time is when I sit and talk with people's employers, it's actually quite remarkable

because they can see the difference. They know who their employees are who are good at night and who are good in the morning. And oftentimes, if you talk with them intelligently, they'll start switching people's schedules around to match their chronotype. Now, let's be fair, I'm not so foolish as to think that every employer out there is gonna be so smart

and be able to do something like this. So I've given people reasonable times to wake up. So as an example, if you're a night owl, I'm asking you to get up at 7 30. I don't think that's completely unreasonable. Now, if you've got a job meet that says you have to be there at 6 30 in the morning, I'm going to actually tell you to sit back and think if that's really the right job for you, because you're going to be fighting this every single day.

So here's something that I find that I have found throughout my life is that my type seems to change. Some days, when I was a teenager, I'd like to sleep late when now I tend to get up early. But a few years ago, I tended to be somewhere in the middle and consistently. So let's talk about that for a second. So number one, it definitely waxes and wanes over time. Now everybody actually goes through every chronotype. So if you think about it, when you're an itty bitty baby, you're a lion, you go to bed early, you wake up early. When you're a toddler or a middle schooler, you're a bear.

You go to bed at 7.30, you wake up at 7.30, kind of in bed and out of bed with the sun. When you hit adolescence, oh, I remember that time too. I wanted to stay up until two o'clock in the morning playing video games and sleep until 12 the next day. That's when you're a wolf. Then you hit about 18 to 20 years old and your chronotype seems to set for about 30 years.

Then you get older like me and you turn 55, 56, and your chronotype actually starts to go backwards. So as an example, if any of the listeners out there ask their parents, for example, hey, mom, dad, you want to meet for dinner. What time do you want to meet? More times than not, if you're talking to a 65 or 70-year-old, they're saying, hey, let's have dinner at 530.

Well, that's because their chronotype is going backwards. And their melatonin production and their temperature changes. This is all based on when your core body temperature rises and falls. So that's really where chronotypes come from. Now, one little caveat that I think is interesting is if people said to me, hey, Michael, I don't want to wake up based on my chronotype. I would turn to them and say, okay, do me the favor and then just wake up at the same time seven days a week. You're not gonna get all of the benefit of the higher quality sleep,

but you will get some of the benefit of the consistency of the wake up time. Lastly, snoring, not only for the snorer, but for the people who have to listen to it. Is it just a problem you have to live with or what? Absolutely not. I will tell you this, Mike, I've actually saved more marriages as a sleep doctor than I ever would have as a marital therapist

just by working on snoring. And I agree with you, it is a big issue. So let's go through it fairly quickly. Number one, drop some weight. I'm trying not to be offensive to people, and I'm not saying that everybody who's a snorer is heavy, but the data would suggest's a snorer is heavy, but the data would suggest that a 5% weight loss,

so in a 200 pound person, that's 10 pounds, should reduce the snoring decibel level by about 25 to 30 decibels. That's massive. So number one, it won't be as loud if you or your bed partner loses a little bit of weight. The second thing I tell people is you wanna decongest

for better rest. So the way I think about this is, Mike, have you ever been out in the garden and you're watering the plants and you stick your thumb over the hose and the water squirts out faster? You know what I'm talking about? Yeah.

So that is a situation where the opening of the hose, you've closed it partially and then the substance, which is water in this case, has to get out a smaller opening, and so it has to move faster to get out of that opening. Same holds true with your nose. So now your nose is that hose, and as you're breathing in, anything that makes your nose more narrow or blocks it is going to make the air move faster. When the air moves faster, it causes a vibration, causes a cadence, and causes a snore. So the only way to make snoring disappear is to open up the pipes. Anything that is making the pipes narrow or blocking them, we've got to move out of the way. And

congestion, especially in the sinuses, does an amazing job of that. So what ends up happening is your whole sinuses congest up, your mouth drops open, now you're actually breathing unfiltered air into your lungs and you're sucking your tongue to the back of your throat. All of that flappy tissue back there is now got all the air running through it since it's not actually coming through your nose and now you snore. So using something like a neti pod or something called a Navaj, which is a device that you can actually attach to your nose and it'll run salt water through your sinuses and out and get all that gunk out of there

can be extremely, extremely useful. It's not a bad idea to put an air filter in your bedroom. It is the room you're spending the most time in in your home and you want that air to be of high quality. Third thing that I tell people to do is create a pillow wall between you and your bed partner. So remember sound is a matter wave.

And so if you actually physically block it, it will bounce back to the snorer and then they will naturally turn away from you. And then the final thing is, I think I would be remiss if I didn't tell everybody that if you've got a snoring bed partner, it's probably not a bad idea to do a sleep study to make sure that they don't have something called sleep

apnea, which has terrible consequences if left untreated. And a lot of people out there who snore, unfortunately, have got sleep apnea. Well, this is great, because you think about sleeping, breathing, and hydrating. How simple could it be? But apparently, there's a lot more to it, and I appreciate you sharing this. Michael Bruce has been my guest. He is a double boarded clinical

psychologist, clinical sleep specialist, and author of the book, Sleep, Drink, Breathe, Simple Daily Habits for Profound Long-Term Health. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks so much, Michael. It's always great having you on. Thanks, Mike. It's always great having you on. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure wishing you sweet dreams. The Paramount Plus exclusive series, The Agency. The CIA sends us out to behave in a dangerous way.

Starring Michael Fassbender and Richard Gere. Whatever it takes, make it impossible. The Agency, new series now streaming exclusively on Paramount Plus. This is an ad from BetterHelp. This holiday season, do something for a special person in your life. now streaming exclusively on Paramount+. from the comfort of your own home. Having someone to talk to is truly a gift, especially during the holidays. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more and save 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com.

Everyone, I think, has some interest in dinosaurs. You probably heard about them in school, maybe been to a museum where you saw a huge dinosaur skeleton. And then there are the movies like Jurassic Park that just fuel that curiosity about these creatures. There is just something about dinosaurs. Perhaps because one day they apparently roamed and ruled the planet and then they disappeared. So what are or were dinosaurs? What were they really like? Are the movies about them accurate? And what happened to them?

That's what Armin Schmidt is here to talk about. Armin has been fascinated by dinosaurs since he was five years old. Today he is a vertebrate paleontologist and research assistant at the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford University. He is also author of the book, The Lost World of Dinosaurs, Uncovering the Secrets of the Prehistoric Age. Hi, Armin, welcome to something you should know. Thank you for having me, Mike. So when dinosaurs were here, did they in fact rule the planet as they roamed around because they were so big and dominant? In fact, they did. But their beginnings were very humble.

They were very small. The first dinosaurs that we know from the fossil records that are about 230 to 235 million years old, they were tiny by comparison. They were about the size of a cat or maybe the size of a dog. And only later they became increasingly large. And at the very beginning, they were still competing against the crocodile ancestors and against synapsids, which are the mammal ancestors.

And only after a large mass extinction at the end of the Triassic period, about 200 million years ago, they out competed all the other species and then became the rulers. And by that, I mean they conquered all territory or terrestrial land. We find dinosaurs in the fossil record from all continents, even Antarctica or Australia. They have conquered regions that were inaccessible for other animals because they had a elevated metabolic rate so they were more active, they could run fast. And also most of them at the beginning were bipedal. And they carried their arms and legs under their body. So they had straight arms and straight legs, which made it easier

for them to run. And also the arms did not press against the lungs so they could breathe easily. While lizards, for example, they cannot run and breathe at the same time. So they have to hold their breath for a little while and then they run very fast, but then they have to catch their breath and only then they can continue to run. But dinosaurs like mammals today could run continuously. Do you know why though you say they started out maybe as the size of cats and then they got really big like why? Why did they get so big? So in nature it's always better to be bigger because then you're less likely to become the source for other animals' food. So and if you're big, then you're less likely to be hunted down, less likely to be killed, less likely to be eaten. And the dinosaurs had very special body shapes that enabled them to grow bigger than mammals today.

And so when you say they went from basically the size of a cat to this giant size, how giant? How big did they get? What's the... I know different species would be different sizes, but give me a ballpark idea. Yeah, so the largest of them all that were the long-necked dinosaurs, and they could grow up to 100 feet in length, maybe even larger. Just because we find one that is about 100 feet long doesn't mean that that was the biggest specimen of this particular species. Chances are there might have been some specimens

that were even larger and we just haven't found them yet. But we know for sure that some of the long neck dinosaurs could grow up to about a hundred feet long and maybe up to a hundred tons in body mass. So that is quite enormous. And the largest predators like Tyrannosaurus, for example, they could grow up to 45 feet in length and they could weigh as much as two elephants, African elephants. And what did they eat? Did they eat plants or did they eat other animals or what was the diet? The first dinosaurs, they started out as meat eaters and only later some of them became

herbivorous, so they started eating plant matter. And that is true for the sauropods. No sauropod ever ate anything else but plants, so they were all vegetarians. But the so-called theropods, to which tyrannosaurs and allosaurs belong, they were carnivorous, they were meat eaters. And one thing I think so many people wonder about is like, so for example, on the cover of your book,

there's that picture of that dinosaur there. How do you know from their bones that that's what the outside of them actually looked like? Yeah, so that is a very good question. And the short answer would be that in some cases, we do actually find tissue, we find skin impressions on rocks so we know that they had scales and some of the smaller theropods they actually

had feathers and later on they all become feathered like all the theropods, the meat eaters and some of the herbivores they had had so-called proto feathers. So they look like hair, but biologically they are more closely to feathers than hair. But like the long-necked dinosaurs, the very big dinosaurs, they had scales, and tyrannosaurs, they had scales, so they didn't have feathers. So we know that. And then in some cases we actually can reconstruct the color, but this is very limited to very few species. Were all dinosaurs related to other dinosaurs? Were they all from the same, you could trace them all back to the same start?

That is right. All dinosaurs share the same common, less common ancestor. And are there animals today that come from that as well? All birds are also, so birds are basically a very special kind of dinosaur. And they're the only surviving dinosaurs after the end Cretaceous mass extinction event when the asteroid struck Earth. What about lizards and things that kind of look like dinosaurs that we see? Are they not related? Yes, surprisingly, like the ranids or lizards that look a lot like dinosaurs, or at least what we think

dinosaurs look like, they are actually not as closely related to dinosaurs as chicken or eagles or ravens or things like that. One thing I've always wondered about is how many were there? If you were alive, could you go days and days and never see a dinosaur? Are they everywhere or what? So they were very abundant because dinosaurs were egg-laying animals and they reproduced very rapidly so they could lay eggs two or maybe even three

times per year and they had clutch sizes of up to 30 eggs, maybe thousands of offspring, but the mortality rate of babies was extremely high as well because there were a lot of small raptors that were like hunting for for Baby dinosaurs you often see in the movies, you know dinosaurs fighting each other Did they fight each other or or did was it all just about survival and food and all of that? So actually that is also a very exciting story because we now have proved that Tyrannosaurus, for example, in fact did hunt animals such as Triceratops and we have scars on bones of Triceratops from Tyrannosaurus teeth. And we know that in the same region where we find Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops, there's also a duck-billed dinosaur

that's called Edmontosaurus, and that was also a very good food source for the meat-eating Tyrannosaurus. And we know from scratch marks, from bones, from long-necked dinosaurs, that actually those were hunted by Allosaurus, which is an old ancestor to Tyrannosaurus. But did they fight for territory?

Were they territorial like some animals are, or was it just, we, we can all get along here, but when I'm hungry, I might just eat you. Yeah. So we do have some proof that some dinosaurs, we, we cannot say this for sure for all the dinosaurs, but we know that some dinosaurs actually had interspecies fights about territories or mates and during like mating season, they were fighting each other like rams or or even elephants or giraffes, the male ones and whoever won the fight, they got to procreate with the female.

And we know that this happened with dinosaurs as well. This is probably a hard, hard thing to know, but was there any sense of like how smart they were, how bright they were, or were they very just, you know, instinct driven? Yeah, so what we can do is we can nowadays, we have modern technology, we can look at the inside of skulls of dinosaurs with CT or synchrotron scanning devices, and then

we can measure the cavity inside of the skull where once the brain was and we can actually locate different areas that were dedicated for for sense of smell, or, or sense of hearing, things like that. And so we can say that some dinosaurs were actually smarter than others. And we can say that some dinosaurs had a celebration coefficient, which means the size of the brain. Relative to the body mass that is comparable to two modern birds and maybe even even small mammals so they were pretty smart. Any sense of their ability to communicate with one another again that might be very hard to know. I cannot say this for sure, but some dinosaurs were able to vocalize. And we know a very good example, for example, is parasaurolophus, which is a herbivorous

dinosaur with a long crest on its back of its head. And these crests, they were hollow and they were connected to the nasal region. So they could actually create sounds like it, like blowing a horn or something like that. So they could vocalize and other dinosaurs probably did the same. So if you look at Jurassic Park, they sound like lions or wolves or things like that. But in reality, they probably made noises more closely to ostriches or crows or things like that, but in reality, they probably made noises more closely to ostriches or crows or things like that. There was never a time that humans and some ancestor of dinosaurs shared the earth, correct?

That is correct. So the last non-avian dinosaurs, all the dinosaurs that are not birds died out about 66 million years ago when this very large asteroid struck Earth close to the Yucatan Peninsula. And the first humanoid ancestors of humans, they showed up in the fossil record maybe 300,000 years ago. So there's a gap of 65 million years in between those two events. And so what happened? What brought the end of dinosaurs? Yeah, so 66 million years ago, there was an asteroid that struck Earth. And this asteroid was so massive that it created a huge earthquake. And it actually was so powerful and so large. It's about the

size of Manhattan and this big, huge rock from space crashed into Earth and it actually penetrated the crust. And it was so massive that it created tsunamis with a height of 3,000 feet and they traveled the entire globe. And there were wildfires that were incredibly hot like a pizza oven and they caused the rocks to melt in the vicinity of the impact and actually rain glass for a couple of hours and maybe even days. And then because of the debris, there was ash in the atmosphere and that caused the atmosphere to go dark. And then a lot of the plants died. And then there was a food shortage.

And also the temperatures dropped massively because there was no sunshine, no sunlight. And then in the following month or maybe in the following years, all the dinosaurs went extinct because they could not recover and they could not create enough offspring to compensate for this massive loss of life. So I would imagine a lot of other species went away as well. Yeah, so I think what would help the mammals, our ancestors to survive was that they were much more caring for their offspring and they put a lot more effort in protecting the offspring. And dinosaurs, because of their massive size and because they all laid eggs, they could not care for their young.

You said that dinosaurs wandered the entire Earth. Is that because you have found fossils all over the Earth? Yeah, so we find fossils from dinosaurs all over the world. We actually found fossils of dinosaurs in Antarctica and in very remote places such as the Gobi Desert or even in the Sahara Desert in Africa, but we can only find dinosaur fossils in sediments and only in sediments from the Mesozoic age, that is like from 252 million years to 66 million years. We don't find any dinosaurs before that and we don't find any

dinosaurs after that except birds. And you said you find them in the Gobi Desert, but could you find them in my backyard maybe? That depends where you live. So if the backyard that you're describing is of Mesozoic age, so if the sediments in your backyard, the age of the sediments is between 66 and 252 or maybe 235 million years old, then there is a chance that you actually might find something. And we've, we, especially in North

America, we see a lot of regions, especially in the Midwest, they are actually on ground that is as old as the dinosaurs. But the hunt goes on, yes? That is very true. We find fossils today more than ever. Even this year is a very important year for fossils because we have already described 46 new species of dinosaurs only this year.

But how do you even know where to look? I mean, if you wake up tomorrow morning and say, you know, I think I'm gonna go look for some dinosaur fossils, where would you go? If I wanna look for dinosaur fossils, then I would in the North American continent, I would probably go to places such as South Dakota or Montana or Wyoming or Colorado or Utah.

These are very fossiliferous regions where we find dinosaurs. And now that you've found, as people have been looking for so long, and now that you've found them, other than just finding more, well, nevermind, you just answered the question a minute ago, you said you found 46 new species. So I guess that's why you keep looking.

So nowadays, you know, there was there was a couple, an odd couple, if I may say so, of two scientists, American scientists, and they were looking for dinosaur fossils in the 1870s when the Midwest was still the Wild West. And over time, they became rivals and they were actually fighting each other and they were trying to outcompete each other and they were trying to find more fossils than their rival.

But nowadays it's not about finding new fossils and new dinosaurs and creating new records. That is also nice. It's a side effect. But today we want to understand how did they live? How did they eat? How did they procreate? How did they survive certain catastrophes? And were they able to breathe actively? Did they have a metabolic rate that's comparable to birds today or more like crocodiles because dinosaurs are closely related to both birds and crocodiles. So we want to know are they more like crocodiles

or are they more like birds? And then we find dinosaurs with feathers and then we want to know, okay, so who is the first dinosaur to evolve feathers and and which group of dinosaurs evolve these feathers and are these feathers capable of powered flight like we have in most birds today or were they just for display for sexual display to to attract mates so so feathers have a lot of functions, and it's not only for flight. So you've been fascinated by dinosaurs since you were a kid, and you've studied them for a long time. Is there something that really, in particular,

you find so interesting that you're still researching? Because you clearly know an awful lot about them, but what is it that you're still stuck on that you really want to uncover? So for me, I always want to find a dinosaur fossil that will help us explain a certain aspect of the dinosaur anatomy or the dinosaur biology. We want to understand, for example, why the birds were able to survive this mass extinction event and all the others died out. There was actually a group of dinosaurs

that was very similar to the birds. And we call them the ananthronythines. And that means, in English, that translates to something like the opposite birds. So they were very much like birds. They could fly, they had feathers, they lived in trees, they laid eggs, and they were about the same size as modern birds, but they did not survive. And the ancestors of today's birds,

they were able to survive. And we cannot really understand why that is. And this is something that is really fascinating. And this is something that keeps me up at night. Well, it's fun to hear you share some of the things you know about dinosaurs. And I know so many people are fascinated with them, as evidenced by the movies and the books. And it's a topic that I think really captures people's imagination. And I find it interesting what you said about, We're still discovering a lot of things about dinosaurs. 46 new types of dinosaurs

discovered just this year. I mean that's really that's incredible. I've been speaking with Armin Schmidt. He is a vertebrate paleontologist and research assistant at the Department of Earth Sciences at Oxford and he is author of a book called The Lost World of the Dinosaurs, Uncovering the Secrets of the Prehistoric Age. And you will find a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Armin, thanks. It was a pleasure. Well, thank you very much, Mike, for having me. It was a pleasure showing up. Today, it seems that people are much more aware of the dangers of drinking and driving. But a lot of people underestimate the problem of drowsy driving.

But listen to this statistic, according to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety. Two out of every five drivers admit to having fallen asleep at the wheel at some point in their driving career. If you're tired, the monotony of driving can make falling asleep so easy. What's tricky about drowsy driving is it's hard to quantify. You know, after a crash, it's hard for the police to know if fatigue or someone falling asleep

was a factor in the crash. In fact, it's now estimated that 328,000 drowsy driving crashes occur every year, which is more than three times the police reported number, because so often the police just can't tell. One government agency says drowsy driving or fatigue-related crashes resulting in injury or death costs society a hundred and nine billion dollars a year not including property damage. One big mistake people make is beginning a long car trip after a full

day of work. Coffee and other tricks are just no substitute for quality sleep before a big road trip and that that is something you should know during the busy holiday season. I hope you'll find a moment or two to share this podcast with people, you know, help us grow our audience. It is a great way, in fact, probably the best way to support something you should know. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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