Something You Should Know - The Psychology of Self-Deception & How Weather Really Works

Episode Date: March 16, 2020

If you have an iPhone, you have likely struggled moving the cursor around in a text message or email. However, there is a very simple way to easily maneuver the cursor to exactly where you want it to go - that many iPhone users don't know. This episode begins with an explanation of exactly how to do that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMevwmsbrTk You are deceiving yourself about yourself. Everyone does it. We rationalize and excuse our behavior and tell ourselves things to make us feel good. Clinical psychologist Dr. Cortney Warren is an expert on self-deception and she offers some valuable insight on how we deceive ourselves, why we do it and the harm it causes. She also has some strategies to help you to stop doing it that I know you will find helpful. Cortney did a TED Talk on the topic which you can see here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpEeSa6zBTE Her website is https://choosehonesty.com/ You may think that while you sleep not much is going on – but in fact there is a lot going on. Yes your body is resting but it is doing so much more. Listen and find out all the things that happen to you while you sleep. http://www.womansday.com/health-fitness/conditions-diseases/what-happens-during-sleep#slide-9 So much of what you do is determined by the weather. And there are a lot of fascinating things about weather that you probably don’t know – but you are about to. Listen as I talk about the weather with meteorologist Simon King, a very popular weather presenter for the BBC in England and he is author of the book What Does Rain Smell Like (https://amzn.to/2xjnD0M) This Week's Sponsors -Indeed.com Post your job today at www.Indeed.com/something and get a free sponsored job upgrade on your first posting.  -Theragun. Try it risk free for 30 days and get a free charging stand (a $79 value) when you go to www.Theragun.com/something Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Today on Something You Should Know, many iPhone users struggle to move the cursor around in a text or email. So I'll tell you how, and it's really simple. Then, self-deception. We all do it. We all lie to ourselves. But why? When you acknowledge unpleasant realities about yourself or people that you love, it hurts.

And so lying is actually something we learn from an early age and we do so to protect ourselves from realities that are too painful for us to acknowledge. Also, did you know getting enough sleep can make you taller? Plus, fascinating facts about the weather, like raindrops. They're not the shape you think they are. And everyone's familiar with that teardrop shape that they think is a raindrop. They're actually raindrops and not that shape. They are actually thin pancake shapes. So they're squashed. All this today on Something You Should Know.

Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like Something You Should Know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices,

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The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hey, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, it's amazing how you can pretty much ask Google, or I guess any other search engine, but I tend to use Google, anything. I mean, but you have to think to ask, right? Like if you want to learn how to, you know, teach your dog to play fetch,

well, you type that in and Google will tell you. But one thing I never thought to ask that has always bothered me was how to move, and this is for iPhone users, but how to move the cursor. Like if you're writing a text to somebody and you need to go back, it's hard to move the cursor to a specific point. And I just figured it's just hard to do. You got to kind of tap it. And then I saw this video in my Facebook feed of how to move the cursor.

And one of the things they did was they asked a lot of people, do you know how to do this? And most people didn't know, so I'm assuming most people don't know that if you want to move the cursor in a text on your iPhone, you just hold the space bar down and then just slide your finger left, right, up, or down, and the cursor will move wherever you want. To me, it was like a revelation. I'd never seen that before. And so now I'm telling you, if you need to move the cursor on your iPhone in a text,

you just hold the space bar down and just move it. And that is something you should know. We humans have this amazing ability to deceive ourselves in all sorts of ways. We can justify and rationalize and blame other people for things that happen in our life, but we're not so good at looking inward and seeing what our role is in the events of our lives. This self-deception that we all engage in comes at a pretty steep price. According to Dr. Courtney Warren, she's a board-certified clinical psychologist and speaker who did a really interesting TED Talk on the psychology of self-deception.

Hey, Courtney, welcome. Hi, it's so nice to be here. So you say we're all masters of self-deception. So explain what it is you mean by that and why you think it's so. One thing that became really clear to me in my own personal life, in watching my family dynamics, and in working with patients, was that people really got stuck a lot. And they got stuck in large part because they were not able to acknowledge the truth to themselves about who they really were and how they were contributing to dysfunction

in their life. And so I became interested in this idea of self-deception and honesty really by observing how people behave. And that, in essence, my best way of helping people evolve was by getting them to look in the mirror. And until they could look in the mirror, they really weren't going to change. Why do you suppose that is? Why is it so hard to look in the mirror, to look inward? It must serve some purpose. Very, very self-serving for all of us, because when you acknowledge unpleasant realities about yourself or people that you love, it hurts. It's painful. It's uncomfortable. And so, from a developmental perspective, lying is actually something we

learned from an early age. And we do so in many ways to protect ourselves from realities that are too painful for us to acknowledge. And so it does serve a very, very important function. The problem is that it also comes with great cost over time if you aren't able to make choices based in reality. So give me an example, just a real simple example of this in real life. One thing that I see a lot in couples and in individuals who are dating is that they'll have an emotional reaction to their partner. And the first thing they want to do is point the finger at their partner and tell me what's wrong with their partner. They'll say, Dr. Warren, he did this to me. She did this to me. He's like this. She is like this.

And what happens in those situations, me as the therapist, is that I want you to pause. And instead of telling me what's wrong with the other person, I want you to turn the mirror on yourself and say, what is it that my interpretation of this situation is contributing to the dynamic that's unhealthy here? And one thing that happens, for example, in that situation, it would be called projection, where I'm taking something that's uncomfortable in me and I'm putting it on someone else, instead of saying, what I'm really contributing here is an inability to see you as separate from me, or an inability to communicate what I actually need based on who I am, as opposed to really blaming you for my emotional experience, which is actually completely in me and may have nothing to do with you.

Maybe you're triggering something in me that has nothing to do with this situation at all. For example, let's say that you grew up in a household that had a lot of fighting. And so when your partner is angry with you, your immediate response is to withdraw and to hide. And instead of saying, you know what, I am really uncomfortable because you are bringing up emotion in me that I don't want to acknowledge, you point the finger externally. And so one of the first things that I will do with people when I am working with them to understand themselves better is to start looking at what your emotional reactions say about you

as opposed to telling me what your emotional reactions say about the outside world. Okay, and so how else are we humans deceiving ourselves and caught up in this whole self-deception thing? Give me some of the psychological tools that we use to protect ourselves from unpleasant truths include things like denial. It is not true. I am not that way. I'm not jealous. I'm not pathologically uncomfortable with my own value. Yet, if I look at our behavior, oftentimes we're acting in ways that indicates we're very jealous, like checking other people's emails or following people home from work to see if they are where they're supposed to be. Projection is taking an undesirable aspect of ourselves and ascribing it to someone else, saying, you're like that, but not me.

You will take it out through something called displacement, where you'll take emotional experiences that are really hard for you. And instead of acknowledging them in the context that they're occurring, you will take them out on objects or situations or people that have less power. So this would be the idea of you're really mad, you come home and you kick your dog, as opposed to saying why you're actually angry about something. Rationalization, explaining a reason that we are undesirably a version of ourselves. I didn't take responsibility for this because of this,

thereby trying to make myself feel better about it. I didn't turn my homework in on time because I ran out of time and it really wasn't a priority. So I'm going to try to make myself feel better by giving you a rational explanation for why I am the way that I am, as opposed to changing the way that I am. So cognitively, we have myriad ways that we try to distort or manipulate reality to make ourselves feel better. We also engage in lots of behaviors to try to make ourselves feel better. So, okay, I'm just going to have another drink because I really don't want to think about this anymore. Or I am going to travel a lot or work extra hours so that I don't have to come home and confront whatever the unpleasant reality is. It seems as if this is just how people are.

I mean, these are the things people do to cope with life. Not all of them. I don't kick my dog. But the kinds of things you're talking about are the things that people do to cope. We all do them. I'm sure you do some of them. All of us do it. And I think for most of us, we have times in our life where we get these aha moments where you have an experience and you think, oh my gosh, in retrospect, I completely see that I was doing this for a reason that I could not see at the time. So one of the things that I talked about in the TED talk that I gave was that I was raised in a very academic environment. My

parents are both professors. And so I grew up thinking, I really have to be a professor because that's kind of the only option for me. And so I got my doctorate and I got a tenure track job and I got tenure. And then guess what happened? I was confronted with myself in a completely new way. I had my first child and I was confronted with this reality of, okay, I always believed that I needed to be a professor because I thought that's what made me valuable. And now I'm looking at this little person in my life and I'm going to work every day and I leave her right after she wakes up and I get home right before she goes to bed. Oh my gosh, is this what I really want to do with my life? And as I started asking myself those questions,

I was confronted with a barrage of self-deception around why I pursued academia and what it meant for my identity and why it mattered so much. And the beautiful thing about trying to engage in self-honesty is that the more honest you are with yourself, the more power you have to make different choices. And that is the journey of life. And in doing so, it required that I confront all kinds of insecurities that I had about what my value would be based on moving forward. It required taking risks around finances, around time, around how I was going to create a

new career, which I really didn't know what would look like. And yet, that was the best choice I could make, because I knew in my gut and in my head that if I had stayed in academia, I would be doing it for the wrong reasons. Doesn't it also seem possible that you could have made this other choice and looked at that and gone, well, this wasn't right either. I chose this for all the wrong reasons. Sure. There is actually no security in any choice. There's no security. But the best way to make a choice, I would argue very strongly, is for you to try to look inside and figure out who you are and why you're making the choices you are and make those choices based on the most accurate information that you have at the time

so that if you decide it was the wrong choice in the future, you will not have regret over the choice that you chose, over the choice that you made, because you made it with as much information as you could possibly have had at the time. The biggest regrets people have in their life that I see that lead them to a great deal of pain and psychological strife are the choices they knew they should have made or the risks they knew they should have taken but weren't willing to. Those are the regrets that will eat you alive

because there's no way for you to go back in time and change your choices. And if you were not willing to change when you knew better, when you knew it was time for you to evolve in a different way, to change your career path, to change your relationship dynamics, to perhaps get married or get divorced or create a new dynamic with your children, but you didn't, that comes with a great deal of psychological pain because you knew better and something kept you from doing it anyway. We're talking about self-deception and the price we pay for deceiving ourselves.

My guest is Dr. Courtney Warren. She is a board-certified clinical psychologist. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride.

We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives.

So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars.

Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Courtney, making the kinds of decisions that you're talking about doesn't happen in a vacuum. When you make a decision like you're talking about, that affects in a vacuum. When you make a decision like you're talking about, that affects a lot of other things in your life. And so it may be

impossible to make that decision or making it may screw things up so badly that you're just better off staying where you are. Well, it's easier to leave it the way it is. People don't like change because it's unknown and it's scary and there's no guarantee and I can't give you any security that the newness is going to work. So change is incredibly hard. In fact, some people that I work with are absolutely miserable and they still won't change. And that's a really hard thing to watch. But what I will tell you is that the biggest predictor of therapeutic change is misery. You change.

We all change. People change when they're so uncomfortable with their present life that they cannot afford to stay the same. If you know that you are in a job or in a relationship that is not fulfilling to you because you're afraid that the unknown is potentially scary, you're just going to stay in a pretty mediocre place and you will probably stay stuck there, even if you're miserable for a long time,

unless the universe gives you kind of a kick in the butt and says, you know what? I hope you look at this because I'd like you to do something differently because you will feel better because you can create the life that you want to live. That's a very existential psychology idea that you are who you choose to be. People in this world experience all kinds of hardships, miserable experiences.

I treat people who have lived through horrendous life experiences and the reality is i am not going to let you live there because it doesn't serve you well that doesn't mean that what happened to you is okay it doesn't mean that life is easy what it means is you're going to encounter hardships in your life, and you're going to encounter moments where you really have to get honest with yourself about who you are and how you got here. And in the face of those hardships, you still are responsible for the choices that you make. So let's try to make choices that lead you to have the least regret and the most fulfillment possible for you.

Well, it does seem very human that it takes some big catastrophe. I mean, even on simple things, you know, people stop smoking when they hear they've got cancer. Then it's easy. There's always those choices that we could make that are easy not to make until some big disaster happens. And then they're a lot easier to make. True. Because when the disaster happens, again, you can't afford to stay the same, right? Because either your health is going to suffer in an obvious way, or your emotional health is going to suffer in an obvious way. And I would still argue that on a daily basis, living the most conscious life you can is the best way to create the most fulfilling life for you.

But so what does that mean, though? I mean, people hear that. It sounds very psychological. Live the most conscious way. So how would I, if I were to do that tomorrow, how would that look differently than when I didn't do it today? What does that mean on a very practical level? To begin with, it means that your intention is to be as self-aware as possible. So the first step in this would be for you to enter into each day saying, I want to be an objective observer of myself today so that I can see in the most honest way possible, the most honest way that I'm capable of seeing myself and the way that I exist in the

world. I want to know what I'm thinking, how I'm feeling, where I'm reactive. I want to explore who I am in this daily life. And as I become more and more self-aware, I now want to make choices based on the information that I learn. And as I learn, I'm going to make choices that leave me with the most fulfilling life I can create for myself. I'm not willing to sleepwalk through life. I want to be a conscious human being means I am not just going to go through the motions. I am going to deliberately try to understand myself and those around me and my world. As I go through this life, I'm going to observe and notice.

And as I learn, I am going to change. And I am going to do that every day of my life. And it is not easy. It's incredibly hard. But it is the only way for you to develop empowerment. And what do you do, though? Because when I hear you say that, it sounds as if we're we're moving towards perfection, which no one will ever get to. And so what happens at those times when you don't do that? You give in to temptation. You indulge your dark side.

You do something that isn't what you're talking about. It's the antithesis of that. And then you think, screw it. Yep. We're all going to go there at some point. This is the stereotypical, I'm 90 days sober and I walked by the bar today and I couldn't stop myself from going in because I had an argument with my spouse and I'm going to give you 100 rationalizations as to why it was okay for me to have a drink today

and I'm angry at the world and I had a horrible childhood and I was abused and so I'm going to drink or I'm going to binge eat or I'm going to yell at my kid or I'm going to justify a non-ideal version of myself. What I would say is pause. If you're having a moment where you see that you are not being your best self, whatever that looks like for you, I want you to pause and I want you to sit with whatever emotion you're having and say, what do I need to learn about myself in this moment so that in the future I reduce the likelihood that I'm here again?

That's about as good as it's going to get. We're never going to be perfect. And in fact, I wouldn't even say that we're going to get. We're never going to be perfect. And in fact, I wouldn't even say that we're going to ever be completely honest with ourselves. I will argue very strongly, though, that the goal is for you to be as honest with yourself as possible. It is not to judge yourself. It is not to be self-critical or demeaning or in any way pejorative. It is to be an observer. And so when you have a moment where you really slip up and you know it because you know that you're not being your best self, you're going to pause.

You're going to work on forgiving yourself, and you're going to start over. And you're going to say, okay, I just learned something about myself. So the next time I'm in a situation where I see that pothole in the road, and I know I'm about to step in it, hopefully before I actually put my foot in it, I can pause and say, oh, I see that. I see the bar. I see the pothole. I see me wanting to scream at you and call you names. I'm going to pause and I'm going to pause, and I'm going to walk away, and I'm going to sit with myself, and I'm going to choose how I want to respond that leads me feeling good about who I am. Well, it's not easy being human, is it?

And it's interesting, all these little quirks of human behavior that really get in the way, and it's good to pull the covers off and take a look at them the way you just did to get a better sense of how we deceive ourselves and what we can do to stop doing it. My guest has been Dr. Courtney Warren. She is a board-certified clinical psychologist and speaker, and she did a really interesting TED Talk on the psychology of self-deception, and there is a link to that TED Talk in the show notes.

Thank you, Courtney. Thanks, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which

is for the listeners that didn't take our advice. Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our Lister Poll results from But Am I Wrong? And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts,

Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. 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. I've always been fascinated by how much the weather dominates our lives. So much of what we do or don't do, or what we wear, where we go, it's all dictated, at least in part, by the weather. And then there are also those catastrophic weather events we have no control over that can devastate people's lives. And really, there isn't much we can do to control the weather,

but we can try to understand it a little better. And here to help do that is Simon King. Simon is a meteorologist and very popular weather presenter for the BBC in England, and he is author of the book, What Does Rain Smell Like? Hey Simon, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks very much indeed, Mike. Thanks for having me. There's so much to weather. Let's start with what is it about weather, if there is one thing, what is it that really fascinates you?

What's the one thing that really like, man, this is amazing? I've been fascinated with the weather since I was, I don't know, 10, 11, 12 years old. It was the Great Storm of 1987. And if you're not familiar with it, it was a big, powerful storm that affected southern England. There's a very famous weather presenter at the time called Michael Fish. And on TV, he said, you may have heard there's a hurricane on the way. If you're listening, don't worry, there's not, but it will turn very windy overnight. And then the next morning, we had hurricane force winds, massive amount of destruction, something like

15 million trees were destroyed across southern England. So obviously his words the night before made it sound like he got it completely wrong because there were hurricane force winds. And a lot of people said, well, you had a hurricane, but you can't actually get hurricanes in the UK. So he was kind of factually correct, but it all went a bit wrong. So I remember that forecast so well. I remember being in my bedroom listening to the wind and this destruction going on outside, and that's what really got me fascinated with the weather.

So it's the power of the weather, I think, that really gets me the most. So what do you mean you can't have hurricanes in the UK? Why not? For a hurricane to form, you need to have a certain number of conditions. One of the big ones is sea surface temperature, where the sea surface temperature is going to be above 26 degrees Celsius. So in the mid-Atlantic and towards the United States, you know, the Gulf of Mexico, that's where you get those sea surface temperatures above that. Now, hurricanes can move across the North Atlantic and towards the UK, but what will happen is they tend to then decay because they go into cooler waters. So the waters around the UK are not above 26 degrees Celsius.

So you can have X hurricanes affecting the UK and not above 26 degrees Celsius. So you can have X hurricanes affecting the UK and you can have hurricane force winds where the wind speed will be above 74 miles an hour. But in essence, it will not itself be a hurricane. Oh, just because it doesn't fit the textbook definition of what a hurricane is, it still does all the damage. It just isn't cold. It's absolutely, yes. So I, like you, am fascinated by the weather and have always been. And it amazes me how much the weather controls our life. And we kind of just take it for granted that, you know, you have to check the weather. Are we going to need a sweater today? Are we going to not? Up to, like you had, a hurricane event that really affects your life. And is there any sense that we will ever be able to control any of this, or are we just

observers and victims of it? Well, that's really interesting, and that's weather modification, and that's something that's happened in the States before. Cloud seeding happens in the United States. It happens in the United Arab Emirates. In fact, it happens in overensation nuclei within the cloud. And that means that basically there's more little seeds for water droplets to form and make rain. In practice, it's very difficult to tell whether it works or not. So there's a lot of research that still goes into it. But there are places like the United Arab Emirates investing millions of dollars into this kind of technology to try and make it rain more. Since the title of your book is What Does Rain Smell Like, what does rain smell like? Yeah, well, everyone, I think, will know it. It's that wonderful smell, especially after a dry period. And then you get the first drops of rain and then there's this sweet smell that comes from the ground

and it's just i just absolutely love that smell i can smell it right now just talking about it and that is actually called petrichor so that's the that's the name of the smell of rain petrichor what's going on is that the water droplets are falling to earth and as they hit the surface if you think about a champagne glass and the bubbles coming up from the top of the champagne glass or if you've ever seen a slow motion video of a raindrop going into a pond you know it goes in it comes back out and it splashes back up you know so you've all these other water droplets that come back out up into the um up into the air so when a water droplet falls on the ground it disrupts all these molecules and bits of dirt and rock and the technical term is geosmin which is a kind of a molecule in soil

and rock and when that gets disrupted it's released into the air. And it's the combination of that and combination of tarmac smells such as petrol and diesel and all sorts of different things that go in there and it gets released up into the atmosphere and that's what we can smell. And so when it does rain and the water falls from the sky, why does it come down in drops over time as opposed to just come down like a big bucket full of water? All at once. Yeah.

Well, so if you think about a cloud, okay, so within this cloud that's floating up in the atmosphere, it's got millions, trillions of water droplets inside it it so the actual cloud itself is quite heavy it's the size of you know a typical cumulus cloud is the size of about 100 elephants now the reason why that's all staying up there is because you've got updrafts so wind from the surface is rising up through the atmosphere and it's it's kind of keeping that cloud buoyant in the sky now when you get water droplets bouncing and bashing together they they grow bigger and bigger and bigger and then once they get so big they start to defy these updrafts that are keeping them up in the cloud so they'll start to fall but the the rate at which all these different water droplets bash together and grow bigger is different within a cloud so all these water droplets will reach this certain size and this

certain weight at different times and that's why you've got rain rather than the whole of cloud coming down at the same time so it's all to do with the updrafts really is it true that rain typically starts as snow or some something frozen and then it thaws on its way down or not yeah absolutely so this is this is something that confuses quite a lot of people, is that you can cloud droplets start off as super-cooled water, which means that water is existing at a temperature of, say, minus 30, minus 40 degrees Celsius. You'd think in the real world, well, that would just freeze.

That would be ice, wouldn't it? But actually, it can sustain itself as liquid at that temperature if it's pure water and what i mean by that is if it hasn't got a bit of pollen a bit of dust soot a bit of sand something that would set off the ice nucleation. You're right, as it starts to fall out of the sky, then it will be either ice or snow. And then as it comes further down the atmosphere, obviously it goes into warmer layers, and then it will just melt into water.

What causes the wind to blow? Wow, that's a big question. And that kind of stems all the way back to the sun, and that's driving a lot of heat towards the earth. Now, the heat isn't evenly distributed across the earth, okay, because we are, you know, we're tilted. It means that the equator gets hotter than the poles. Now, we know that because we've got ice caps in the poles, and it's hot on the equator gets hotter than the poles now we know that because we've got ice caps in the in the poles and it's hot on the equator but it's that temperature difference that generates wind essentially so you've got the equator getting hotter

and what that tends to do is as you heat the ground you start to then get air rising out from the equator up into the atmosphere it cools and then because the Coriolis effect the air will start to then go towards the poles where it will then go back down to to the earth surface and then another cycle will happen another circle so those are the cells that's what we call the the hadley cell the feral cell and the polar cell and then it's within these that you can get the jet streams you know another big wind uh that forms high up in the atmosphere so the jet stream is blowing all around all the way around the earth and that creates our weather

pretty much. So anything that happens on the surface, if you've got a low-pressure system, that's been driven by this jet stream, which then in turn gives you wind at the surface. So it all comes from the sun, basically, and how it heats the Earth. Well, since it seems that we can't do much about the weather, the big question is how much better can we get at predicting the weather so that we can prepare for it? And how's the scorecard on that? To predict the weather, it takes a huge amount of computing power. The UK's met office has one of the the biggest supercomputers for weather modeling and that can do at the moment 15 quadrillion calculations every single second

which is just an incredible number to even think about. And that is calculating everything that's going on in the atmosphere. That's collating millions of weather observations from around the world every hour, chucking into the computer, doing all this math and physics and coming out with an answer. So the idea is, can you make bigger supercomputers and you can so for example the met office have just announced that they're investing millions of pounds to produce the the next generation supercomputer uh with the idea of being able to forecast the weather in much more detail so what happens in weather forecast models is that you split the Earth up into grid squares.

So within that grid, the computer would be able to predict what weather's going on inside that grid. Now, to get a higher resolution model, obviously you need to go smaller. So you want to have a hundred meter grid square but with that you need a lot more computing power so that's the idea so the idea is that you can get higher resolution models but also improving the maths and the physics and the science of meteorology to try

and predict for longer days so at the moment a five-day forecast is pretty much uh seen as the standard beyond five days you can get a good idea of trends perhaps if it's going to be wetter or windier than average or or warmer than average so when people ask me are we ever going to have a situation where a forecast is 100 accurate i think the answer has to be we're not really because the weather is so variable. And I just don't think we'll be in that situation. It will get a lot better than it is now, but I don't think it will ever be 100%.

And how historically has it gotten better? I mean, if we can't know exactly what's going to happen in the future, at least we could look back. How much better are we at predicting the weather today than 10 years ago, 50 years ago, or not at all? The idea is that we can do an extra day's forecast every decade. so a decade ago perhaps the the four-day forecast was as good as the five-day forecast is at the moment if we go back to the great storm of 1987 the famous storm that hit the the south of the uk back then the one-day weather forecast was as good as the four-day weather forecast is now. So that kind of gives you an indication of where we're going. So you'd expect in this next decade, we would definitely hope that our six-day weather forecast will be as good as our five-day weather forecast

is now. So that's kind of the projection going forward. Any other quick little thing that really fascinates you or that people tell you fascinates them about weather that people may not know? Okay, here's one. So if you go into your phone, you're typing out a message and you pick your emojis and you pick the raindrop emoji and everyone's familiar with that teardrop shape they think is a raindrop but actually raindrops are not that shape they are actually thin pancake shapes so they're squashed so that's one myth that i like to debunk to people yeah your emoji is wrong um Oh yes, you're never likely to find two snowflakes exactly the same. They all have six sides, but they will all have very different patterns. How would you know that unless you looked at every single snowflake?

There must be, in the history of the world, two snowflakes that were alike. You're probably right there probably would be but within if it was a snowy day if you were to kind of gather a load of snowflakes then you'd be very unlikely to find two that are exactly the same how could anybody ever check that when you go to look at a snowflake it melts well it's all theory based really isn't it because you know what i said earlier about how raindrops all fall at different speeds and at different times because they all form at different rates. So it's the same as snowflakes. So a snowflake will have one snowflake forming, will be forming under ever, ever so slightly different conditions than the one next to it,

whether it be the pressure or the humidity or the amount of water that's available to it. So they all grow at different rates under different circumstances. And that's why you're unlikely to find two snowflakes the same size or the same shape. Well, as I said at the start, weather is so interesting to me

because it is a big part of everyone's life and controls so much of how we live our life. So it's really fun to kind of get under the surface and understand why weather is the way it is. Simon King has been my guest. He is a meteorologist and weather presenter for the BBC in England, and he is author of the book, What Does Rain Smell Like? And you will find a link to that book in the show notes for this episode.

Thanks, Simon. Thank you very much indeed. Thanks. Nice to talk to you. You may think that when you're sleeping, you're just sleeping. But while you're sleeping, your body is doing all kinds of things you most likely don't know. First of all, you're losing weight. This is why it's a good idea to weigh yourself in the morning.

During the night, you perspire and breathe humid air while taking in no food, so you lose weight. The more you sleep, the more weight you lose. You get taller. The discs in your spine act as cushions between the bones and they get squished during the day. They then rehydrate and get bigger while you're in bed because the weight of your body is not pressing down on them. Your blood pressure and heart rate decrease. Blood pressure needs to dip at night so your cardiac muscle and circulatory system have time to relax and repair itself. Your muscles are temporarily paralyzed. It may sound scary, but that's actually what keeps you

from acting out your dreams. You may have a full body spasm. I think I've had that while I'm sleeping. 70% of people experience that, and science is not sure what it is or why it happens. And that is something you should know. And now that the program is over, feel free to take a few minutes and leave a review of what you just heard.

You can leave a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers

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