Something You Should Know - Why Being a Specialist is Overrated & The Extreme Creatures that Roam Our Planet

Episode Date: June 3, 2019

Automobile traffic, like the weather, is hard to predict. The slightest thing can cause a traffic jam and sometimes it seems that traffic jams just happen for no apparent reason. I begin this episode by exploring one oddity of traffic – where the solution usually makes the problem worse. (Edward Humes author of the book Door to Door). To be a success you have to get really good at one thing as soon as possible. In other words, you have to specialize. While that concept seems to make sense, it turns out to be flawed, according to journalist David Epstein, author of the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Listen as he explains why being a generalist is a better path to success despite popular opinion to the contrary. Spanking as a form of punishment is a lot less common than it used to be but there are still many parents around the world who still believe that when you spare the rod, you spoil the child. Listen as I explain why a lot of those parents will live to regret it. (30 Lessons for Living by Karl Pillemer) Our world is crawling with “extreme” creatures. By that I mean the largest, fastest, smallest, strongest and smartest. There is a lot we can learn from these animals and organisms. For example, the largest mammal could help us end cancer. The fastest bird is teaching engineers about flight. Matthew LaPlante, a professor of journalism at Utah State University is author of the book Superlative: The Biology of Extremes. He joins me to reveal the fascinating reasons why these creatures became so extreme in their own right and why they are so fascinating.   This Week's Sponsors -LinkedIn. To get $50 off your first job post, go to www.LinkedIn.com/podcast -Capterra. To find the best software solutions for your business for free, go to www.Capterra.com/something -Stroke of Genius Podcast. Subscribe to Stroke of Genius on Apple Podcasts, at www.ipoef.org, or your favorite podcast platform -Fab Fit Fun To get $10 off your first Fab Fit Fun box go to www.FabFitFun.com and use promo code: 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, the strange way automobile traffic works to cause more congestion and traffic jams. Then, we live in an age of specialization, but is specializing the best way to get ahead? We all know the Tiger Woods story of early specialization. He's on TV golfing at two years old, whereas Roger Federer, who did a little bit of everything

and delayed specialization and became the best tennis player in the world, we never hear that story, but that actually turns out to be the research-backed approach. Plus, some advice for parents who still spank their children. And the fascinating world of extreme creatures. The oldest, the fastest, the smartest, and the largest. The largest animal organism ever to live, the blue whale, this is larger than any dinosaur we know of, exists right now in this point of time in our history in which we're here too. All this today on Something You Should Know.

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

a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

I don't know about you, but I love to drive. I've always loved to drive, and I've always been fascinated by traffic. How traffic seems to have a mind of its own. How cars can slow down for no apparent reason and cause a traffic jam, and just as quickly, cars speed back up and the traffic jam is gone. It's as if traffic is its own living organism. And one of the most interesting examples of this is when traffic is consistently bad, what often happens is the powers that be say, well, let's add new lanes.

If we add more lanes, that will ease traffic congestion. And it never works. And it never works for a fascinating reason, which can be summed up in the phrase, if you build it, they will come. In other words, when you add more lanes, more drivers show up to use it. And one famous example happened a few years ago and was called Carmageddon. In order to add more lanes, the 405 freeway in Los Angeles was closed for an entire weekend to tear down bridges and make way for new lanes. And being one of the

busiest freeways in the world, people feared the worst. Gridlock, road rage, who knows what else would happen. Even hospitals staffed up their ERs, fearing what might happen. And yet nothing happened. In fact, traffic in the area was better than usual because people stayed away. So the construction continued, the 405 freeway reopened with all these new lanes, and guess what? It now takes longer to travel that stretch of highway that was widened

because more cars have shown up to use it. It is the nature of traffic. And that is something you should know. So I think it's the opinion of most people that we live in an age of specialization. That success comes as a result of being really good at something rather than being pretty good at a lot of things. But that theory may be flawed. There's a strong case to be made that specialization, especially early on in life, may be counterproductive. Journalist David Epstein has investigated this, and I think you will find

what he found to be really interesting. David is author of the book Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Hi, David. Thank you for having me. So I would think, as most people, I think, would think, that being a specialist is a good thing. As a specialist, you're an expert. And as an expert, you can command more money, and you're looked upon with more prestige. And so people are pushed towards, or gravitate towards, specializationization. And in fact, as people are being pushed to specialize more and more in a knowledge economy, there are unique

benefits to people who are more broad and that those are accelerating, not declining, as people are being pushed to be more and more specialized. So why is that? Why do you think the perception is so different than the reality? I think it's for two main reasons. One, because according to some of the research I cite in range, specialization did make more sense when our work world wasn't how it is now, where it involved a lot of transfer of knowledge and the merging of domains and interdisciplinary knowledge. And so, for example, some of the patent research, if you look at technological innovation, prior to about 1990, the biggest contributions were indeed made by specialists, people who were very deep in a particular area of technology and drilled down into that area.

But with the explosion of the knowledge economy, where specialized information became disseminated so thoroughly and quickly, it started shifting. And now it's very much in favor of technological inventors who spread their work across a large number of different technology classes, as determined by the U.S. Patent Office. And what they usually end up doing is creating something new, not by finding knowledge new to the world, but by taking things from different domains and simply combining them in ways that experts can't see. And so one of the guys I profiled who did that is a guy named Gunpei Yokoi, who did not score well on electronics exams and so had to settle for a low-tier job as a machine maintenance worker at a playing card company in Kyoto and realized that so much

information was available that he could combine technologies in a way that specialists wasn't within their view. And in doing that, he turned that company, Nintendo, into a toy and game company and combined old technologies to create the Game Boy, the best-selling video game console of the 20th century. And that turned out to be a model for most of the innovators today. As information is more widely available, the opportunities accrue to people who combine knowledge

as opposed to just drilling down into an area. You know, I think our well-meaning mindset is still stuck in a time when that was the right thing to do, and I also think it has to do with the drama of some of the stories of early specialization. We all know the Tiger Woods story of early specialization. He's on TV golfing at two years old, whereas Roger Federer, who did a little bit of everything and delayed specialization long after his peers and became the best tennis player in the world, we never hear that story,

but that actually turns out to be the research-backed approach. And so I think it has to do with sort of an old mindset and also with the drama of some of these stories of specialization. Yeah, well, but since you brought up the sports example, I think there's a sense, I mean, you know, Michael Jordan, a great basketball player, he tried to play baseball, he sucked at it. And that he specialized in basketball, that was his thing. And to try to broaden that out was a mistake.

I would disagree with that. He hit.220 in the minors, and I think if you pulled a random person off the street, they would hit zero in the minors. And so for someone who had not played baseball in like 20 years and jumped right into professional baseball, I actually think he did quite well. But it's not about him trying to play baseball in later life. It's about how he developed originally, which was as a multi-sport athlete before focusing on basketball. So everyone specializes to one degree or another at some point or other. But it's really a question

of how you get there. And if you have this, the pattern that science shows ubiquitously for athletes is they have a sampling period where they play a variety of sports. They gain a breadth of general skills that serve as the foundation for later, more specific skills. They learn about their interests and abilities and systematically delay specialization until later than their peers who plateau at lower levels. They do specialize eventually, but by the time they get there, they have this much broader range of skills and experience. So I think it's not about trying to be a generalist. It's about when you follow what we know about optimal development, there's some zigging and zagging involved that gets you where you're going

with a much broader range of skills. And what does that zigging and zagging look like? One of the research projects I profile is at Harvard, and it was a study to figure out how people maximize what's called their match quality, which is the term economists use for the degree of fit between an individual's interests and their abilities and the work that they do. And it turns out to be incredibly important for your motivation, your performance, and your apparent work ethic.

So when you get people in good match quality, it will seem all of a sudden like they're a really hard worker, even if they didn't before. And the common trait of people who maximize their match quality is basically short-term planning, where they don't look around and say, here's someone younger than me who has more than me. They say, here's who I am right now. Here are my skills and interests. Here are the opportunities right in front of me, I'm going to try this one I think it'll change me in this way maybe a year from now I'll change because I will have learned

something about myself or about the world and they do that sort of zigzagging and reflecting until they kind of triangulate a good match for themselves and so this project, this research project became named the Dark Horse Project because all of these subjects would come in and say don't tell people to do what I did. Like I did the wrong thing. I didn't specialize.

I bounced around before I found my thing. And that turns out to be the norm, not the exception. So it starts to make sense when you see research like LinkedIn, which just released research on a half million members and found that the best predictor of who would go on to become an executive was the number of different job functions an individual had worked across within an industry. That kind of goes against the intuition to pick and stick, but it turns out to be the norm, not the exception. And so this has even been incorporated into the military, where they now have a program they call talent-based branching, because they were having trouble retaining their most highest potential officers, where instead of saying, here's your

career track, go up or out, they pair these officers with a coach. They say, here's a whole bunch of career tracks, dabble in them. The coach will help you reflect on your own strengths and weaknesses. And we'll delay picking because we know that it's more important to invest time and experimentation to get the best match. So there are places that are systematizing what this research says we should do, but it's still not intuitive. It's still not even intuitive to me, and I wrote the book. Well, you know, it's interesting, just using myself as an example. I got interested in radio when I was 13 years old,

and I've never worked in anything else. Well, podcasting is different than radio, but it's basically the same kind of business. And when I tell people that, I often hear, oh, you're so lucky because I just bounced around and did things. But what you're saying is maybe they were lucky and maybe I made a mistake. If you found a good match for yourself early, there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Like I would never tell someone, force someone to diversify any more than I would want to force someone to specialize. But typically, if someone is to maximize their match quality, they have to do some experimentation. You found an interest early like Tiger Woods did, and that's great.

I would also say that in some ways, the lifeblood of what you do, whether it's on radio or in some other medium, is your broad curiosity. So you may be focused in a medium. And again, like I am in writing, I was trained to be a scientist in my past career, but I was still writing just like I am now. I'm guessing, and you tell me if I'm wrong, that it's your sort of wide-ranging curiosity is probably what appeals to a lot of people and makes you good at what you do. Well, perhaps, because, you know, when I went to college, my parents used to give me a hard

time because I was always taking classes, you know, chemistry for the non-chemistry major and, you know, all kinds of classes that were much more general in nature to see what it was all about rather than just taking classes in what I was doing. Yeah, and that's one of the interesting, you mentioned like chemistry for non-chemistry majors, one of the traits that predicts people who have like the best judgment about the world, basically the best at predicting political and economic trends and things like that, is what psychologists call science curiosity, not

science knowledge, science curiosity. And they study this in really unique ways where, you know, they'll give people what look like consumer research surveys and will somehow smuggle in some scientific information and then they track how those people follow up on that information. And even if it's information they don't necessarily agree with, the more science-curious people will keep delving into it. And the less science-curious people will actually forego a chance to be paid just not to read it if it goes against what they already think. And so my guess is that if you were doing that of your own accord, like a lot of people get to college, and what they like about it is they never have to think about chemistry ever again.

And so the fact that you weren't majoring in that and still took it, my guess is you would fit in with those people who are highly science curious or you would not have done something like that. Journalist David Epstein is my guest. He's author of the book Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. Triumph in a Specialized World. about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. People who listen to Something You Should Know

are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics,

creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person

Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So David, what's the prescription here? I mean, you know, there are a lot of people who often feel bad as they're going through college that they don't know what they want to be when they grow up, but maybe that's okay. Maybe you just haven't found it yet. But at some point, you've got to pull the switch. You've got to do something. You can't keep looking.

And I think I know people who have stayed in college a long time, perhaps longer than most, because they couldn't figure out what they wanted to do. You do have to do something eventually, obviously. We all specialize to one degree or another. There is research in range pertinent to this. So an economist who was interested in this specialization timing in higher education looked at, across different countries, at when students decide to specialize, either late in high school or early in college or late in college.

And his question was, who wins the trade-off, the early or late specializers? And the early specializers do, in fact, jump out to an income lead because they learn more specific skills for whatever domain they're going into. And so they start earning more money upon graduation. But by six years out, the later specializers who have experimented a little, know a little bit more about their options and their skills, and have identified better matches, catch up with them and pass them. Meanwhile, the early specializers start quitting those careers in much higher numbers. When they're made to choose earlier, it works for some of them, but many more of them end up picking a wrong fit.

And so the tradeoff is much more often won by the later specializers when it comes to that timing of specialization in higher education. If you are a generalist and you're not really sure which direction you want to go or which direction to take next, my perception is that, especially younger people, it's not that they're trying lots of interesting things. They're waitressing and bartending and things that are just kind of paying the bills. But it's not like they're, oh, let's go try this specialization.

They're just doing jobs until something comes along. Yeah, I mean, I think you have to proactively set up experimentation. So Herminia Ibarra, who I talk about some of her research, she studies how people change careers and find careers that are better match quality for themselves. She doesn't say, like, just leap out of your career or anything like that. When she studies these people, what they usually do is they're doing something, and they start very proactively, not accidentally, setting up kind of experiments about things they might be interested in, whether that is joining a club, starting a hobby, talking to people on the fringes of their

network about some opportunities that they might not have known about. And they'll start dipping a toe in something and say, and then dip a toe in a little bit more and a little bit more. And until they might decide that something, you know, they should actually go into something, usually their friends start saying, no, no, just keep it as a hobby. You know, you want to stick with your staple job. But they make these transitions very slowly, usually while they have one stable thing going, and they start building up this interest and this sort of new identity one step at a time through these little personal experiments.

And so I think we should be oriented toward doing those personal experiments, not just waiting for something to come along because things don't just come along, I think we should be oriented toward doing those personal experiments not just not just waiting for something to come along because things don't just come along I think unless you're really lucky you have to be you have to be looking and exposing yourself to things in a proactive way. Even with all this research and everything isn't a lot of what people end up doing just luck serendipity I mean again my I became interested in radio because I walked into a radio station when I was 13 and was mesmerized by it. But if I hadn't, I'd probably be doing something else. And so it just seems like there's a lot of chance meetings and situations that push people in a particular way.

Totally. That doesn't mean it's the best way to do it. I mean, doing something... So again, when students specialize earlier, they are many times more likely to go into a work field that they were exposed to when they were very young because they don't really know what else is out there.

Their insight is constrained by their roster of previous experiences. And so we all need serendipity for whatever we're doing, right? Like Charles Darwin's dad was a doctor, and so Charles Darwin was going to be forced to be a doctor, but he hated it, and his father hated it. And fortunately, he convinced his father to let him take a gap year and go live on a boat, and that turned into about the most impactful post-college gap year in the history of the world. But he was going to do what his father did, even though they both hated it. And that's not a good reason to do it. But serendipity is involved in everything. But I think there are habits of mind and approaches we can take that make us more likely to get

lucky. Like I say, it takes luck to hit a home run, except Hank Aaron would get lucky 40 times a year for 20 straight years because he had a certain approach. And so I think if we adopt a certain approach and certain habits of mind, we make it more likely that we'll get lucky in good ways. I remember hearing somebody's career advice, and I remember it because it sort of applied to me as I alluded to before, that if you're older and you really can't figure out what to do, look back to when you were about 13 and what interested you. But then I heard someone else saying, nah, that's probably not really a very good way of doing it. What's your sense? That would not be my first instinct, because one of the psychology findings I sort of profile in range is called the end of history illusion.

And this is this finding that we all recognize we have changed a lot in the past when we look backward. But then when we're asked how much we think we're going to change in the future, we always underestimate it at every single time point in life. We underestimate how much we'll change in the future, even though we acknowledge we changed a lot in the past. And the most rapid time of personality change is between about the ages of 18 and 28. And the correlation between your personality traits from your teen years to about middle age is low to low-moderate. Basically, there are traces of the teenage you and the middle age you that are recognizable, but you are a very different person. And so I think it's much more fruitful to pay attention to yourself as you're developing and be running those experiments and taking time to reflect and try new things than to think back that far to when you were effectively a different person

by any psychological measure and certainly living in a different world. There are a lot of things, though, you can't try. I mean, you can't try to be a lawyer. You have to be a lawyer and then find out you hate it and then give it up. It's kind of the standard, right? Yeah, I mean, right. I mean, so you can't try to be a doctor. You have to be a doctor and then decide whether you like it or not.

Okay, so my favorite author, for example, is a woman named Susan Cain, who wrote a book called Quiet, and she was a lawyer, and that wasn't the best fit for her, so she started working on a book about the special contributions of introverts in a world where we mostly prize extroverts, and she started doing that on her side time, and that became like one of the biggest blockbuster nonfiction books of this generation. And so she was a lawyer, and she did have to try it out, but that didn't mean you couldn't get off that path. There's nothing wrong with setting a goal to being, and here I'm actually basically quoting one of the Dark Horse researchers, there's nothing wrong with setting a goal to be a doctor or lawyer, but if you do that before a period of discovery, then it's a dangerous goal, because then you're hoping for luck, that you're actually going to like that career and be good at it.

So when the dust all settles, what do we know? How do people who follow your advice of staying more general before they specialize, at the end of the day, how do they compare to the people who specialize early? The later specializers have much higher growth rates. So they get out, again, they get up behind in income. That part is true. But then their growth rates are so much faster because they have picked a better fit that they fly past their earlier specializing peers. And then they are much more likely to stay in related fields than the peers who specialized earlier,

who are much more likely to quit, probably because they picked a goal too early. And then in other fields, the biggest contributions are made by people who merge disparate domains. So in science, which we consider a highly specialized field, the most impactful work comes from people who make what people who study this call novel combinations of knowledge where they they put together knowledge from domains that never usually talk to each other to technological innovation again where it's people who spread their work across a large number of patent classes to comic book creation where the best creators are not those who have

done the most number of comics or have the most years, but have spread their work across the largest number of genres, to geopolitical and economic forecasting where people, members of the general public who have a wide variety of interests and have had a very diverse background experiences outpredict our U.S. intelligence analysts who have access to classified data simply because those people have such a narrow view, and people who have had more diverse background experiences and have more diverse interests get a better grip on the world. Right. Well, the prescription's pretty clear. If you don't know what you want to do, that's okay. And just hearing that kind of takes the pressure off, that that's okay. And just hearing that is kind of, kind of takes the pressure off,

that it's okay not to know and to go experiment and figure it out rather than wait for some divine intervention that says, you must be a doctor, you must be a lawyer. Exactly. That's, again, Hermione Ibarra, who does this groundbreaking study of people who find their best fit, says, we learn who we are in practice, not in theory, meaning we're not that good at introspecting what we're going to like and what we're going to be good at without actually trying some things. many cases with a broader array of skills that I think the work world is increasingly starting to reward, which is why you see things like that LinkedIn research that shows that people with the largest number of job functions are most likely to be the VPs and CEOs, but it takes some time to get there. Well, when you hear you tell it, it makes a lot of sense, but I do think

that most people think specialization is the way to go, and clearly there's another side to the story. David Epstein has been my guest. The book is called Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, David. My pleasure. Thanks for talking to me. Do you love Disney?

Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed,

but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa Demonts, for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? Each week, we deliver four fun-filled shows. In Don't Blame Me, we tackle our listeners' dilemmas with hilariously honest advice. Then we have But Am I Wrong?, which is for the listeners that didn't take our advice.

Plus, we share our hot takes on current events. Then tune in to see you next Tuesday for our listener poll results from But Am I Wrong. And finally, wrap up your week with Fisting Friday, where we catch up and talk all things pop culture. Listen to Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. You may not have thought about this before, but this is really interesting. In our world, there are what you would call biological extremes. These are creatures, living things that are the biggest, the smallest, the fastest, the smartest, the deadliest, the oldest. And when you look at these extreme creatures,

you discover some very fascinating things like how they got to be that way, why they got to be that way, and there are a lot of other things we can learn from these extremes. Matthew LaPlante is an associate professor of journalism at Utah State University, and he has researched this phenomenon and put it in a book called Superlative, The Biology of Extremes. Hi, Matthew. Hey, thanks. I appreciate the invitation. So why is it important to look at this and talk about this? Why are we discussing these extremes of nature?

So I think there's a couple of reasons. The first is just that superlative organisms, things that are the biggest or the fastest or the strongest or whatever, they're instantly relatable, they're instantly interesting. People love these things. And this is why the Guinness Book of World Records sells a bazillion copies every year and continues to do so. So the first thing is these things just make great ambassadors for science because people are already interested in them. Number two, these organisms for a really long time, because they are by definition outliers, have been largely ignored by scientists. We tend to study things in the middle of whatever category we're looking at. And so as scientists have begun in recent years to really focus in on these things,

we are learning so much about how they have managed to survive and the evolutionary tricks that they used to do so, and then learning a lot about how we can apply that to our own lives and our own technology and our own biomedical technologies. So let's start to talk about some of these things, and we might as well start with the biggest. What's the biggest and why is it so fascinating? Maybe a really great place to start is the African bush elephant. The bull African bush elephant is the largest animal to live on the surface of, because of the way we grow, because of the way all life forms grow through cellular division, it was at risk, at great risk of developing cancer. Because cancer materializes in large part because cells divide and cells divide and cells divide. And every time a cell divides, there is a potential for a mutation.

So really, I've been talking to these cancer researchers, and some of them are perplexed by the very nature of the elephant because it doesn't make a lot of sense. It shouldn't be allowed by the rules of cellular division and cancer and everything else as we know them to get that big. But it has. And so researchers have been diving into answering the question of how it has been able to do this. And one of the ways it does this is apparently through the use of a gene, of which it has many copies. We only have a few copies. It has many copies of this gene. The gene is called P53. It's a known cancer suppressor in humans, but in elephants, it fights cancer in a different way. It induces cells that have mutated in bad ways to kill themselves. And so researchers now, just actually up the street from my home at Utah, the University of Utah, are figuring out

ways to insert this synthetic gene into human cancer cells and cause them to kill themselves. So the elephant may be pointing us in the direction of how to stop not just one form of cancer, but all forms of cancer. And this elephant that is so big, and it is the largest, as you say, the largest thing walking the earth, was it always this big, or has it gotten bigger? No, the evolutionary history of the elephant is fascinating. It started looking like an elephant, like the elephant that we think of millions of years ago, but it got bigger and bigger and bigger. There is not an elephant in the evolutionary history, the modern elephant, that was bigger

than the elephant that we happen to share the planet with right now. Interestingly, the largest organism, the largest animal organism ever to live on our planet, the blue whale, this is larger than any dinosaur we know of, exists right now in this point in time, this really small little microscopic point of time in our history in which we're here too. So we're actually really fortunate, I think, to be around at this time, to come along at this time at the same time as the blue whale. And the reason for that is, or one of the many reasons for that is this principle called Cope's Rule, which suggests that over time, animals will get bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller in a single lineage, but the curve tends to be up over time. So things get bigger over time. And I make the argument in the book that it's not just size that follows Cope's rule. It's also speed. It's also intelligence. It's also strength. Over time,

animals evolve to fit these niches and become the most extreme thing ever in those niches. Okay, so the blue whale is the largest living creature, you know, animal with a brain kind of thing, but not the largest living thing. The biggest life form we know about, if we include plants as well, is an interconnected forest of aspen trees. These are interconnected at the roots, and it's one singular organism. It is here also in central Utah, and it is 100 acres big. The smallest living life forms that we know of, little microorganisms, single-cell microorganisms, are so small that they are

exceptionally hard to photograph, even with the really souped-up electron microscopes that we have at our disposal today. What we're learning for them, because they only use a very small number of genes to exist and they have very short genomes, is we're starting to use these very small organisms to understand what genes are actually absolutely necessary for life of any form to exist. We could talk about fastest. The fastest animal that we know of is the peregrine falcon. It dives so fast that it is falling at a rate of about a soccer field every second at its fastest speed, over 200 miles an hour. Aeronautical engineers are taking a second look

at Falcon feathers and the way that they arrange those feathers over their back to interrupt airflow to try to solve the problem of stall, which is a century-old problem of aviation engineering that still, unfortunately, causes airplanes to fall and to crash and to kill people. So wait, you said a falcon can accelerate towards the Earth at 200 miles an hour? Yeah, greater than 200 miles an hour. And the way that we learned this is fascinating because there was, like, people had this theory that falcons were really fast, but we couldn't prove it because by the time they're close enough to get, like, a radar fix on them, an amateur falconer, all one person in the state of Washington who decided that he was going to teach his pet falcon to skydive with him. And he put a little altimeter on the falcon's tail feathers and then taught the falcon to chase a lure after he jumps out of a plane with him.

And this is how we got a measurement of the fastest capable speed of the peregrine falcon. Let's talk about the oldest. What is the oldest thing, oldest living creature on the planet? There is no consensus on what the oldest organism is in the world. One of the theories is that it is this interconnected aspen clone that I mentioned earlier, which is nicknamed Pando. Some people believe it may be tens of thousands of years old. One popular guess is 80,000 years old. But because these trees grow individually, the stems grow individually only for about 100 to 120 years,

and then they die. But the root system stays. It continues and it perpetuates. So we can't just age these trees like we would any other tree, like a bristlecone pine, for instance, where if you just cut down the tree, you can count the rings. So the estimates vary, but it may be 80,000 years old. It may be even older than that. That's the oldest plant potentially that we know of. The oldest animal that we know of is a sea sponge that they dredged up from the bottom of the Sea of Japan. It's roughly 10,000 years old. and the really great thing about having access to organisms that are that old is that they aren't just organisms they're also measuring sticks this sea sponge because it grows on this silicon spicula it's like a sponge like a on top of almost what looks like a glass throwing spear, that throwing spear

adds a ring to itself every year. And it collects molecules from the bottom of the ocean that scientists have been able to use to measure sea temperatures going back for thousands of years. So we collect enough of these. What we can learn from them is how sea temperatures have fluctuated over these thousands of years. And also that allows us to understand better how sea temperatures and air temperatures on the terrestrial world and the rest of our atmosphere correlate over time. And that helps us understand climate change better. So what was the most of all of the things, if we haven't talked about it already, the most fascinating to you when you did this research?

I've got to say, I still remain enamored with the cheetah. Which I think if you ask most people, you say, like, what is the fastest animal in the world? They'll instantly tell you the cheetah. Now, fast is a funny thing, right? Because we can measure speed in very different ways. The cheetah doesn't fly, obviously, so it's not as fast as a peregrine falcon, but that's a little unfair comparison. But if you put a cheetah in a 100-meter foot race with any other terrestrial animal, the cheetah is going to win. So we call it the fastest animal in the world. And what fascinates me about this organism is that it really also, much like the elephant, it shouldn't really exist. Way back about 10,000 years ago,

there was a population bottleneck. A lot of animals, a lot of large animals all across the world began to die out. And the cheetah was really on the ropes and came down just to a few members of its species. Now, when you only have a few individual members of the species yet left, what ends up happening is that your genetic, your gene pool gets really shallow, mutations start taking over, and the things get wiped out. This is why we don't have woolly mammoths on our planet anymore. They existed on this little island called Wrangell Island in Canada until about 3,000 years ago, but there just weren't enough of them to develop a deep enough gene pool to survive, and they ended up repopulating themselves out of the existence.

Now, that should have happened to cheetahs, too, but it didn't. And as a result, even 10,000 years later, cheetahs rebounded during that time. Now, they're on the brink now because of us, quite frankly. But as a result of the fact that they had this real extreme population bottleneck, cheetahs, one cheetah to the next, are so genetically similar that they actually look like siblings, no matter how far spaced out, no matter where you collected them in Africa or Asia. But one of the things that that bottleneck locked in was the cheetah's speed. It's so much faster than anything that it chases that it doesn't was the cheetah speed. It's so much faster than anything that it chases that it doesn't have to work very hard. It doesn't have to expend a lot

of energy to catch prey. So it had this uber advantage. So the thing that maybe should have killed it also saved it as well. That's really amazing when you think about that. That's really interesting. So you say we're not the smartest, but I think that's a surprise to people because we're at the top of the food chain. We think we're pretty smart, but who's smarter than us? Oh, well, I mean, again, this depends on how you measure intelligence, but let's talk about ants. Let's say that I took you to a city park and I said, here's what I want you to do. I want you to walk across this park. It's, you know, three city blocks long.

I want you to walk across this park. And as you do, I want you to count your steps. I want you to know how many steps you took with your left foot. I want you to know how many steps you took with your right foot. I also want you to remember every turn you took. I want you to remember every smell you smelled. I want you to be able to remember every turn you took. I want you to remember every smell you smelled. I want you to be able to remember every sound you heard. I want you to be able to tell me every time you took a step over something or around something. And I want you to be able to retrace your steps.

And I want you to be able to do that with your eyes closed. Humans can't do that. There's no way. We couldn't do that. We could walk from one side of the park to another. An ant can do all of that because they have individual centers of their brains that are devoted to doing things like counting their steps so that they know how many steps that they need to take to get back to where they came from. To remembering where the light shifted. To remembering where smells changed. So depending on how you think about intelligence, now when I think about something like that, I think, well, that's brilliant. That demonstrates incredible intelligence.

But we don't tend to think of intelligence like that because ants don't build computers and they don't read books, right? But it depends on how you think about intelligence. Dolphins can do things with their brains that will just knock you off your chair, right? Their emotional intelligence appears to be so much more refined than ours does. And we are coming to learn of the importance of emotional intelligence. We probably don't hold a candle to dolphins, whose limbic system spreads out across their entire brain

and is integrated in all of their thought processes. And so they make emotional decisions as much as they make rational decisions. Talk about the strongest. On the spine of the book, Superlative, there's a rhinoceros beetle. It can pull a load greater than 100 times its body weight. So that's one way to measure strength is just like how much weight can something carry. Another way to measure strength is how tough is something, right? How able is it to survive against really extreme conditions?

And for my money, again, this is subjective, but for my money, that's got to be the Tardigrid, which is a microscopic organism, also known as a water bear. I think it looks like the Sarlacc from Return of the Jedi, except for it's also really strangely also cute, but also ugly. It's like that space between cute and ugly. But these things, you can blast them with radiation. You can send them into outer space. You can freeze them.

You can boil them. You can step on them. You can try to crush them. And what they do in times of stress is that they reduce themselves into this little form that's about 3% of their total water weight, just a crust of themselves, basically. And they wait out a better day. And they can do this for decades. So they can sustain all of the trials and tribulations of the world. And they're so good at this that some scientists have estimated that even if all other life on Earth was wiped out, these things would survive up until the point that our sun supernovas and takes out the planet.

That's pretty impressive. It's really impressive. One more, one more. Let's talk about the deadliest. Deadliest, yeah. So, you know, like humans make a pretty good claim for the title of deadliest, certainly deadliest to the greatest number of species. We can put that trophy on our mantle. You know, but again, we think of deadliest in different ways. Most people, if you ask about deadliest, might think about a lion, right? And, you know, like, I don't want, I wouldn't want to find myself in a cage with a lion. But I've done quite a few expeditions, research expeditions, journalism expeditions

in Africa. And I will tell you, I'm far, far more afraid with another animal, another large animal in Africa, the hippo, which is actually the deadliest large animal in Africa to humans. And these things are incredibly big. They're incredibly powerful. They're a lot faster than they look. And they will break your back with a single bite. But they're not even close. Neither of these organisms are even close to the deadliest animal in Africa, which is the mosquito, because it spreads malaria.

Malaria, to humans at least, spreads malaria and malaria claims hundreds of thousands of human lives every year, even today, which which really should make it a public health priority for all of us. Well, it's not only interesting, but clearly there are lessons to be learned from all of these extreme biological creatures, and I appreciate you explaining all of this. Matthew LaPlante has been my guest. He is an associate professor of journalism at Utah State University, and the name of his book is Superlative, the Biology of Extremes, and there is a link to that book in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Matthew.

Hey, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. All right, Matthew, take care. Good luck with the book. All right, take care now. Bye. Bye. Although I'm sure it's a lot less common than it used to be, a lot of parents around the world still spank their kids. And if you do, here's a really good reason to stop. A survey of 1,200 people over the age of 65 asked them to look back at their life and identify their biggest regrets. The big one was that they

spent too much time worrying. But right up there near the top of the list was hitting their kids. And many of these adults are from the spare the rod, spoil the child era of child rearing. While people can still debate the good versus harm of spanking children, one thing seems likely. It will make you feel terrible for doing it. And that is something you should know. Subscribing to this podcast is always free, and it is the best way to make sure you never miss an episode. You can subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts. There's always a subscription button.

I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more

sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Redolph Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children.

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