Something You Should Know - Why Voice Computing (Alexa) is a Game Changer & The Fascinating World of Liquids

Episode Date: December 12, 2019

When your hands and feet are cold, you feel you cold. Why is that? And what can you do to warm them up quickly? This episode begins with some interesting help that will keep you warm this winter. http://www.rd.com/health/wellness/keep-cold-feet-hands-warm/ You may not realize it but communicating with a computer with just your voice is a really big deal. It is a game changer according to Bradley Metrock, CEO of Score Publishing who produces events that revolve around voice computing. Bradley is the host of the podcast This Week in Voice and author of the book More than Just Weather and Music: 200 Ways to Use Alexa (https://amzn.to/2PbTAPe). Listen as he explains how smart speakers work, how some are different than others and what it all means to you. If you are going on a job interview, what is the worst color to wear? I’ll explain what hiring managers say about the worst and best clothes to wear if you want to make a good impression. https://www.businessinsider.com/best-and-worst-colors-to-wear-to-job-interview-2013-11 You have probably never thought much about the topic of liquids but liquids are vital to our survival and the survival of every species on earth. British scientist Mark Miodownik, author of the book Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances that Flow Through Our Lives (https://amzn.to/2RMwSyL) joins me to discuss the fascinating world of liquids. For one thing, liquids are hard to define yet one liquid (water) covers 70% of the earth's surface. Interestingly, liquids are so important to our survival yet there is very little liquid in the universe. Listen to hear this fascinating discussion. This Week’s Sponsors -Beauty Counter. Check out great holiday specials before they are gone. Go to www.BeautyCounter.com  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, when the weather gets cold, your feet and hands feel especially cold. How to fix that, plus smart speakers. Which is better, Apple HomePod, Amazon Alexa, or Google Assistant?

Google Assistant is known to be smarter. It's better at answering questions than Alexa is. If you ask me the questions more likely to answer it and answer it correctly. Siri is behind. And so any Apple speaker you buy will be behind as well. That's the practical difference between the three. Also, if you're going on a job interview, what color should you definitely not wear? And liquids, you're surrounded by them. You can't live without them. But what is the definition of a liquid? Yeah, you'd have thought there'd be a good answer to that, wouldn't you? And that's one of the fascinating things about liquids. There isn't actually a very good definition of what a liquid is. We know what a solid is, and we know what a gas is. Well, liquids are somewhere

between the two states of matter. All this today on Something You Should Know. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared.

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

Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts something you should know fascinating intel the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today something you should know with mike carothers hi welcome to something you should know it's beginning to look and feel a lot like Christmas around here. And now I just need to get my Christmas shopping done. But one of the things that happens around Christmas time is things get colder. And when the weather gets colder, you'll notice that your hands and feet get cold. Do you know why that is?

It's because your body prioritizes keeping your vital organs, like your heart and your lungs, warm. And that reduces the blood flow to your extremities, so your hands and feet feel colder. But when your hands and feet feel colder, then you feel cold. So what can you do? Well, here's some advice. First, sleep with socks.

It can make a big difference on a chilly night, because when your feet are warm, you feel warm. And when your feet are cold, you feel cold. Get real gloves. Skip the dollar store gloves or the fancy ones that are more for show.

Get the kind of gloves that are lined with fleece. It'll keep your hands warm, and that'll keep you warm. And go high-tech. Portable hand warmer packs or heated shoe insoles that you can buy online or in sporting goods stores really can make a difference. And exercise.

If your blood is flowing, it will make you feel warmer. And that is something you should know. There is an old episode of the original Star Trek where, if I recall correctly, Captain Kirk and Spock and the other members of the landing party travel back in time to the 20th century, and Mr. Scott, Scotty, comes face to face with a 20th century computer and tries to talk to it. He says, computer, do this or that. And it's funny because, of course, the computer didn't do anything. You

couldn't talk to computers in the 20th century. Fast forward 50 years and now you can talk to computers. If you have Alexa, if you have a smart speaker in your home, you can do what Scotty tried to do and talk to a computer and get it to do something. And this is actually a big deal. Bradley Metrock is CEO of Score Publishing and he produces events that revolve around voice computing. He's the host of a podcast called This Week in Voice, and he's author of a book called More Than Just Weather and Music, 200 Ways to Use Alexa. Hey, Bradley, welcome to Something You Should Know. Mike, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure. So the idea of talking to a computer and getting it to do something rather than typing on the keyboard to get it to do something, that seems like a pretty

big deal, a pretty fundamental shift in how we communicate with computers. Is it a big deal? Very much so. It's a permanent inflection point in technology. And, and I and many others who are listening to this show right now, we've lived through hype cycles of technology before. We've lived through, hey, here comes somebody telling us this is the next big thing, and then it's not the next big thing, and so it goes. The thing about voice that makes it different is that this is who we are. It's innately human. You know, when we're in the womb and shortly thereafter, all we have is our mother's voice. And then we develop an inner voice that guides us the rest of our life. So it always stood to reason that technology would arc toward being voice-driven,

voice-oriented, what we call voice-first. So I remember, I think it was just a couple of years ago, there was a lot of hype about smart speakers and Alexa and reports that smart speakers were flying off the shelves at this alarming rate, that everybody was getting a smart speaker because what a huge potential these things offered. And lots of people bought them. But it seemed to have died down. And for the most part, people aren't using it for anywhere near the potential it has. That most people use it to set a timer or ask Alexa the weather or what time is it.

It's all kind of died down. This is a known problem. it, it's all kind of died down. This is a known problem. Yeah, it's a known problem for Amazon. They've had a lot of success, and with some of the other companies as well, like Google and Apple and so on. Amazon specifically has had a lot of success in cultivating a developer ecosystem. There's over 100,000 apps, what they call Alexa skills for the platform that other people and companies have developed. They've been very successful in selling the

devices into homes. And if you think about it, you know, that's not a trivial feat. If you had had a company like a Facebook, a company with a whole lot less consumer trust, try to do the same thing, it would have failed. So they've been successful with that too. They have not been as successful in communicating and educating the end user on all of the different things that they can do with Alexa. And I do believe in time that will change, but for now, that's where we are. Yeah, well, and I remember even in the podcasting world and in the radio world, Alexa was touted as, you know, people basically don't have radios in their home anymore like they used to. We used to all have radios. Now we don't. And here was Alexa coming into the home, and radio stations saw this as a great way for people to bring radio back in the home,

but it hasn't really done anything. And same with podcasting. I mean, I know we get downloads off of, or we get listens off of Alexa, but not a great deal. Give it time. Get on both fronts. Podcasting will come, and radio will too. What you need to think about, and what the listeners hopefully will think about as well is the shift that will take place over the next 12 to 18 months. assistant series, some of these voice assistants that are mainstream voice assistants will make the shift and Alexa will do it first into being less reactive and more proactive. So as opposed

to you saying, Alexa, what's the weather Alexa, you know, what's, um, five times eight, um, in these sort of one-off exchanges that are reactive, Alexa will come to you and say something like, Mike, we know that you're going to be in the car for the next 50 minutes driving to a meeting. And we know that you listened to a couple of these podcasts. And this one in particular, we saw that you listened to the whole episode all the way through. You didn't skip anything. And so this podcaster's got a new episode out and it will fit in this time that you're going to be in the car. Would you like to cue it up and listen to it while you're in the car? All of that completely bypasses what most

people use as search today, but it also requires that content creators, whether you're a podcaster or a radio host, a video person on YouTube, whatever it is you're doing, be within these ecosystems and you're playing in these sandboxes. And that is the future, an AI-driven, algorithmic, machine-learning-oriented, proactive approach toward pushing content out to the user rather than waiting for them to find it. And there is a bit of a creep factor there that somehow this little box knows or thinks it knows what I want next. And I don't know that I want that box to know what I want next. Well, that's the million dollar, that's the trillion dollar question, I ought to say, because just like with any technology, there will be a privacy trade-off. And also,

as we're learning, there's a data security trade-off because these companies aren't as good as they ought to be at fortifying consumer data either. So there are risks and trade-offs that each person and family will have to make for themselves. But these companies that are leading the way with voice, they're going to do a themselves. But these companies that are leading the way with voice, they're going to do a pretty good job at making the case to the end user that it's worth considering from a utility standpoint, from a life improvement standpoint, that perhaps you ought to be willing to make that trade, and many will. What is the difference between the Google and the, on a practical level, I'm sure there's lots of technical differences.

What are the differences from the consumer's point of view between the Apple smart speaker, the Google smart speaker, and the Amazon smart speaker? There's not a lot of differences from a smart speaker standpoint. The HomePod's gotten some praise for being a really good and rich audio experience for music, but this new Echo Studio is the same way. I mean, Google's got Google Home Max is the name of Google's version of that. So that playing field is leveled now. It's more important the differences in the voice assistant themselves, you know, the brains of the speaker. And that's where Alexa has a lot of partnerships it brings to the table.

You know, they just announced a few weeks ago that Spotify's free tier now works with Alexa. There's a gazillion things like that I could name where Amazon's been successful in bringing partnerships and making Alexa a more rich experience for the user. Google Assistant is known to be smarter. It's better at answering questions than Alexa is. And so you've got a richer experience from that standpoint. If you ask it a question, it's more likely to answer it correctly. Siri is behind, and Apple's known to be behind. You know, when Steve Jobs passed away,

he was the architect of the deal in which Apple purchased Siri when they acquired that business. And when he passed away, that vision was lost. Tim Cook didn't share that. He didn't quite know what to do with it as much. And so Siri's behind, and so any Apple speaker you buy will be behind as well. That's the practical difference between the three. I'm speaking with Bradley Metrock. He's CEO of Score Publishing.

We're talking about voice computing, and Bradley is author of the book More Than Just Weather and Music, 200 Ways to Use Alexa. 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,

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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. So Bradley, is a smart speaker just hardware? And what I mean by that is, if I have a smart speaker, an Alexa speaker that's three years old, does it matter? Or because it's just hardware that sends my message to some central place and that's very updated all the time and I'm just using it as a conduit to get

there? Or if my smart speaker is old, am I not having the experience that someone has with a new one? The former. So it's just a, it's a vessel. It's a. It's a container for the voice assistant, that AI that lives within. Now, that's changing a little bit. There's some nuance to it because there's some things that both Amazon and Google and some of these other companies are doing to have functionality provided for localized offline usage that maybe doesn't conform to that. But in general, smart speakers are constantly updated every day because these assistants, Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri and so on, are being updated every day. So, you know, the container doesn't matter as much.

The brains are everything. Before we dive into the stuff that Alexa does, has Google or has anybody said, when you ask Alexa a question, we don't record that. We don't listen to you. There's nobody that ever hears you do that. It's just between you and the machine. Is there any feeling of confidence about that? You know, that's a big sticking point for these companies, and it's something that made a lot of news this year, the revelations that human beings are listening for a QAQC sort of purpose, quality control.

I don't think we're close to having humans removed. I think what you've seen the companies do, eventually they will be removed because this will be a purely AI-driven process and computer-oriented where human listening will not be necessary anymore for quality control. The computers will be doing the quality control. But I think the step that the companies have made, this intermediate step of making it much easier to delete your recordings, you can say Alexa, and you have to activate it within the Alexa app,

but you can tell Alexa, Alexa, delete my recordings. And you can say delete everything you've ever recorded of me. And it will, Alexa, delete everything that's been said over the last 48 hours. Alexa, delete everything said in the calendar year 2019. Any of that, and it will do it. Google has similar functionality as well. So it's an intermediate step. It's not a complete answer to your question on whether it's recording or not. But for the moment, that's about as good as they're going to be able to do until they take that next step change in how they work operationally. Well, the fact that you can ask Alexa to delete your recordings means there are some,

and they exist. So that does answer the question that they record everything. And now let's talk about what Alexa can do, because in our house we we got over the past few years we've gotten a couple of smart speakers and it was all very cool in the beginning and all the things you can do and then it kind of became like oh what's the weather and and Alexa I'm baking cookies so Alexa set a timer for 12 minutes and it all kind of faded into the background. And then I looked at your book and I thought, wow, I mean, look at all the things Alexa can do. But I just I I don't think to think to ask Alexa these things. Nobody does. Even Amazon's employees don't.

Don't say I told him that. But, you know, yeah, it's a big problem. It's the next step. And when I say problem, I mean it in terms of it's the next challenge. It's able to be overcome. And it's just going to take a little bit of realignment of how Amazon markets the platform and the ecosystem, the Alexa ecosystem. Because if you take a look at some of the stuff that Alexa can do, Amazon's bad at marketing even their own stuff. And I'll give you one example. Amazon on the Echo Show just came out with, and this was probably three or four months ago, so not too long ago, this incredible feature, Mike, called Alexa, what am I holding? And you can bring a product up to an Echo show with the front facing camera and say, Alexa, what am I holding?

And if it's a product that Amazon has for sale, it'll tell you this is a bag of M&M's, it's a can of beans, it's a gallon of milk, and it'll let you reorder it on the spot if you want to do that. If it's not a product that Amazon has, it'll look with the camera and attempt to figure out what you're holding. And, you know, that might sound a little gimmicky, but for people who are low vision, no vision, senior citizens using this technology, it's profound. It's by far alone a very good reason to purchase an Echo Show for people who are in one of those situations. And have you seen Amazon market that? No, you haven't. So much less all the third party stuff that people are creating. And it will change. Rest assured, that will change. But for this snapshot in time, that's their next frontier to solve.

Okay, so what are some of the coolest things that either you think are cool or the cool things that people tell you, gosh, I never knew that. That's really cool. What are they? So on the gaming frontier, there's a lot of cool games and entertainment. There was a big game that came out in the last few years called Skyrim, and it's a role-playing game. And Bethesda, the company that made it, turned that massive game that they spent hundreds of millions of dollars on, and they created this audio-only version of it that lives within Alexa. And they call it Skyrim Very Special Edition. And most people have no clue that that exists. On the healthcare side, Mayo Clinic has produced a phenomenal Alexa skill called Mayo Clinic First Aid. It gives a lot of great information.

There's something called My Pet Doc, where you can speak live to a veterinarian 24 hours a day through Alexa. We live in this information, so-called information age, and technology impacts our lives in different ways. But the reality is we live more depressed, isolated, and lonely lives than almost ever before. And there's two groups of people that are more depressed than anybody else, senior citizens and college freshmen. And there have already been some very phenomenal studies done that if you take smart speakers like Amazon Echo Dots or Google Home Minis or small ones, big ones, doesn't matter, and

you insert those into a senior living facility or a college dorm with freshmen, miraculous good outcomes start to take place. College freshmen and senior citizens feel more sense of belonging. Senior citizens adhere to their drug regimens better. They become more participatory in their communities. And senior citizens live longer. College freshmen drop out less, and they kill themselves less. It's incredible what these devices, and you talk about, you know, back earlier in the conversation, sort of the demise of the radio. This is a radio plus a whole lot of other stuff layered onto it. And when you, it just adds to this communal fabric in a way that's

real hard to describe, but can be measured. And it's just phenomenal. Well, that's incredible. But give me some just nuts and bolts, bread and butter kind of uses for Alexa that maybe people have never thought about. The number of people that use Alexa for smart home applications is far less than it ought to be. Alexa is very, very robust at handling smart home, anything you want to do with your smart home. Food ordering is a big one. So Starbucks reorder. Starbucks has spent a lot of money investing in the platform. And with the Starbucks Alexa skill, it will look back at your 10 most recent orders across your

five most recent locations. And you can just place that again and it'll be ready for you when you show up at the store. Domino's Pizza, very similar functionality. It'll take a look back at your previous orders going way back and you just tell it what you want to order and it makes it real simple. It's not a long, drawn out conversational experience. There's a lot of banking that is on Alexa and you might think, I don't want to talk about my bank out loud. We're going to get into where Alexa is built into glasses. We've already seen that in hearables and built into clothing and stuff. But, you know, there's Capital One has got a great Alexa skill that really does some innovative stuff. One of my favorites is called HP Printer, where you can interact with your printer, your HP printer through Alexa and do some things that would be common sense that

you could do. But you can also tell your printer, hey, HP printer, print me a coloring page, and it'll print out a Crayola coloring page. Print me a recipe for dinner tonight, and it will print you a recipe from Food Network or someone like that. There's all sorts of content it's got in there, too. It's just all sorts of really value-added stuff that can add value to your life that is in the book and that Alexa can do. Well, if you have a smart speaker in your house, and if you haven't used it in a while, or you haven't used it for much, it's worth checking

out Bradley's book called More Than Just Weather and Music, 200 Ways to Use Alexa. Bradley Metrock has been my guest. He is the CEO of Score Publishing. He is the host of the podcast This Week in Voice, and he's author of this book. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Bradley. Mike, this is great. 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,

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Then we have some fun reacting to those stories. We like to say our goal is to scare the hell out of you, then make you laugh. Belief in the paranormal is not required. All you need is a love of great storytelling and curiosity about the world around you. Come find the Ghost Story Guys on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and everywhere else fine podcasts live, or at ghoststoryguys.com. You are surrounded, well, sort of surrounded, by liquids.

Liquids are everywhere. 70% of the Earth's surface is covered in a liquid. Liquids fuel your car's engine. Liquids are the most likely thing the TSA will confiscate from you at the airport. Some liquids can be turned into solids. Some liquids can be turned into solids. Some solids can be turned into liquids. But you've probably never once stopped to consider all the liquids in your life and why they're so important. Well, that's about to change because with me is Mark Myodownik. He's a scientist and author of the book, Rules, the delightful and dangerous substances that flow through our lives. Hi Mark, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hello, nice to be on the program. So explain why we're talking about this. Why are liquids worth discussing? Why are they worth being a segment on Something You Should Know? Why are liquids interesting to you? I'm a material scientist by trade, so I spend my days in labs looking at different materials. And, of course, I go to conferences to talk about this work. And, of course, when you get to the airport, the things they're really worried about are the liquids. In fact, they're so worried about them, they kind of frisk you for them.

And so I thought, whoa whoa why is that so dangerous what is it about liquids that is so much more dangerous than solids let's say and uh so i started to think about that and then i realized of course that the whole journey across the atlantic is dominated by different liquids um the liquids that fuel the aircraft the liquids you drink to make you feel better about flying or just enjoy the flight and the liquids that fuel the aircraft, the liquids you drink to make you feel better about flying or just enjoy the flight, and the liquids you need, you vitally need to actually eat anything at all. You don't have saliva, you ain't eating. It just struck me as a brilliant topic. They're dangerous, but they're also wonderful. I mean, we wouldn't be without a beer. We wouldn't be without tea, coffee.

And so what makes a liquid a liquid? Yeah, you'd have thought there'd be a good answer to that, wouldn't you? I'd be able to just reel it off. And that's one of the fascinating things about liquids. There isn't actually a very good definition of what a liquid is. We know what a solid is. It's stuff that stays put. When you put it there, it stays there.

We know what a gas is because, you know, it's stuff that stays put when you put it there it stays there and we know what a gas is because you know it's it's atoms you breathe it in and out and they expand to fill the space but liquids well liquids are somewhere between the two states of matter and they have components of both there's the dynamicism of a gas for instance liquids they can get up to stuff on their own and you see this with rivers of course and and kind of the oceans are constantly moving about. It's not us that's moving them. If you spill something, off it goes somewhere else. It's not just gravity that creates the dynamics of liquid.

So liquids have a sort of lifelike quality, a dynamicism, but they're also somewhat like solids. I mean, if you jump out of an airplane, for instance, and hit the sea, it's going to behave like a solid. You're going to basically go splat. That's interesting, isn't it? That liquids sit between a gas and a solid. They have elements of both in terms of how they behave. And yet, they're very hard to kind of pin down. Well, and we think of liquids as, well, remember in school you learned that liquid water finds its own level and that basically it flows downhill, but you point out that sometimes liquids flow uphill. drinking liquids up from the ground. Plants do the same thing. So that's all to do with capillary action. There are these weird words that you know that are to do with liquids. Capillary is one of them. Surface tension is another one.

You know they're important, but how are they important? Why is it that some things can walk on water, for instance? Why can some insects do that and others don't? Why can't we do it? It would be great if we could. Why do some insects walk on water? The thing about liquids is that they have this thing called a surface tension. It's basically because the surface of the liquid is the same molecules that are in the liquid,

but they're not surrounded by liquid. They're surrounded by a little bit of liquid below them, but above them, there's a gas, usually. In the case of a pond, you've got this gas. And that means that those liquid molecules, they're not as happy as the ones that are in the liquid. And because of that, if you can kind of let some of them not interface the gas, they're quite pleased about this. And that's how surface tension works. So some insects have worked out that if they can create a surface that the liquid would rather be next to, then it will support their weight. And you see it in human-made technologies too. You can design surfaces that repel water.

And this is the essence of waterproof jackets and trousers and all of that stuff. We spend quite a lot of our time having to combat the rain, for instance, and stop getting wet. This is all about controlling how liquids sit on surfaces. You started the conversation by talking about how when you go to the airport, they're very concerned about your liquids. No water, they're going to take your shampoo if it's more than, what is it, three ounces or whatever it is.

What is it that they're so worried about with liquids? The thing about it is that liquids have very little structure. The atoms in them, they're often connected to their neighbors. But apart from that, there isn't much structure. That's how they can flow. That's what's different from a solid but but that means that when you x-ray them or you interrogate them with these with these techniques that we've got used to for security like to detect something like a gun or a knife they're very good at finding those in luggage with these techniques

but if you're shooting that stuff at a liquid it's very little for it to get hold of it's the form of the liquid is not there they don't have a form, do they? They take the shape of any form, and that's another one of their sort of slightly sinister properties. So you can't look for a form. So what do you look for? Well, you'll look for a kind of chemical signature because you're looking for explosives mostly. They're looking for explosives or poisons or viruses, all these things that could be weapons. And it's very difficult in a short space of time with those kind of detectors to find those. And of course,

when you're trying to get thousands of passengers through an airport, you cannot afford basically to take samples of everyone's liquids, do a little chemical test, and then let them through onto the plane. The whole of the airport system would just grow into a halt so instead of saying that or instead of doing that they basically have these blanket bands because they basically don't know what's in your liquids so basically try and keep the liquid volume to the small amount you said that a liquid is hard to define but that you know a solid stays put it stays where it is and it looks the way it looks, whereas a liquid will take the shape of whatever it's in.

So does that mean that stuff like peanut butter and toothpaste are technically liquids? Because I don't think of them as liquids, but maybe they are. Well, basically peanut butter will make the shape of the container. So if you take the peanut butter out of that container the jar it'll just fall and puddle on the floor or the table and that's the hallmark of a liquid so toothpaste the same these things that kind of flow and you you might ask the question well how what's the time frame it has to flow obviously honey is very viscous but we'll agree that honey is a liquid, toothpaste is a liquid, peanut butter flows very slowly but it is also a liquid. But how about this,

the tar on the roads that we drive around on is also a liquid by that definition. We drink a lot of liquids, beverages, so those must be important liquids. Obviously, we've got the liquids that we drink every day, tea and coffee. And there's a big debate, especially coming from Britain, where I come from, which is the better drink. Worldwide, tea is a more popular drink, i.e. more people drink tea than coffee, although that ratio is changing. You know, could you ever define the the best most refreshing drink in the world could we actually have a is there a kind of quantitative measure of refreshingness tea you know has that sort of air of a kind of quiet drink a drink that isn't about you getting up and going and taking the day by the horns um so in a way starting the day drinking tea does seem a bit odd you know it's

a quite a subdued way to start the day whereas coffee you know fires you up with a big caffeine hit but it's also quite an astringent taste in the mouth and it and it has a flavor profile that's very kind of chocolatey and has these different you know flavor components that are kind of fiery so these drinks tea and coffee they sort of do different things for people but they are there's no doubt about it they're very sophisticated in terms of chemistry so they have thousands of flavor molecules and um that fascinates me because the drink that everyone thinks of as the king of drinks, let's say the most sophisticated drink in the world, isn't tea or coffee. It's wine.

Now, how did wine end up being the de facto most sophisticated drink in the world? It's not that wine has a more sophisticated chemical makeup, has more flavor molecules than tea or coffee. It's just that the people who make wine want you to think that this drink is the epitome in sophistication, in taste. If you can detect the difference between this wine from this region, then somehow that says something about you. You are a sophisticated person. You don't have to tell me whether you know maths or chemistry or poetry or Shakespeare. You are sophisticated because you know the difference in these drinks. And that's the kind of idea that's going on here. And there are lots of props that this industry uses to kind of get that across.

One of the props is the label on the wine wine another prop is the pulling of the cork and the sound of it another prop is the fact that there's a wine menu in a restaurant right there's not a tea menu i mean and sometimes there is a coffee list but it's quite restricted but there's a wine there might be 25 30 wines and what they're basically saying to you is this drink is so special. We've got a whole other booklet of stuff. I don't know if you looked at this, but one of the things that's interesting to me is somebody figured out sauces. Like if we put this on that, it'll make it taste even better. Ketchup, gravy, things like that. And they're all liquids for the most part. Somebody had to figure that out. In the mouth, you have taste buds, but it's not the solids.

It's not the solid food that's getting those flavors to those taste buds. It's the liquids. So if you don't have saliva, which is the main liquid that conveys the flavor, you just don't taste stuff. And the other thing that's really important to taste is your nose so when you eat stuff in your mouth it releases the aroma and the aroma goes up the back of your nose the back of your mouth into your nose and that gives you this very wide-ranging flavor profile but the other thing that liquids are doing in your mouth is they are and it doesn't sound very nice thing but it is really important is they stop your soft palate being lacerated by the food and again this is about lubrication so what those sources that you're talking about ketchup and mayonnaise and hot sauces what they're doing is that partly they're delivering flavor and these lovely tangy, you know, to your taste buds,

and partly they're lubricating the mouth. Talk about water, because without water we wouldn't be here. So water is probably our most important liquid. What about it is interesting? The first thing to say about water is that we believe it's it's it's something called a universal solvent so what does that mean a solvent things that dissolve other things are solvents so salt for instance dissolves in water and and that's great and oil oils will dissolve organic molecules um so that's that's why you cook with oil a lot of the time because a lot of the

flavor that's coming out is an organic molecule from the plant or the meat and it's going into the oil and then you taste it on your taste buds via the oil so oily foods are often very delicious foods but there are these two things the kind of carbon world and the kind of mineral world they tend to be very separate that you know, one side will dissolve one type and the other side will dissolve the other type. But water straddles the gap. Water will dissolve organic molecules, not oils, but it will dissolve carbon molecules. And we know this, things like sugar is dissolved in water and it's a carbohydrate, it's a carbon-based molecule. Well, one of the things I remember from science class is that, unlike most things that expand when you heat them and contract when you cool them,

water is just the opposite. When you freeze water, it expands. And so why is that? Why is it against the grain of everything else? Yeah, that's another one of those things um which is kind of counterintuitive but yet so vital to to a lot of the way life has evolved on the planet because if it was the other way around lakes would freeze from the bottom upwards and then essentially in the winter everything would die because the ice would just get to the top and there'd be nowhere for the

there'd be nowhere for the fish and the other organisms to survive the fact that you can have ice that that not only does it freeze at the top but it floats because it's less dense than the liquid phase means that that then insulates the rest of the water from being frozen and so allows the life to survive underneath it i mean that is just miraculous but um how does that work it's very unusual but yeah because liquid is a um you know the molecules in a liquid tend to be disordered and so that means there's there's some space between them where there's no order and that usually means they are less dense than the solid because the solid that comes out of it like gold liquid goes into a gold solid or iron goes into an iron solid the solid is comes out of it, like gold liquid, goes into a gold solid, or iron goes into an iron solid. The solid is always a much more organised form of the matter,

and therefore denser. So basically, iron solid sinks in its own liquid. But in the case of water, that doesn't happen. Ice floats. So how can it be that there's more space inside ice, molecularly-wise, than there is the liquid and It's it's to do with the way the crystal forms in ice and there are actually many different types of crystal phases in ice and that's partly I think to do with the fact that h2o that molecule is

has This very many different types of way of bonding to itself, which is how crystals form. So yeah, I mean, it is a very special molecule in so many ways. Oil is an interesting liquid in a lot of ways, I guess, but you talk about how oil helped to light the world back before electricity. Light is such an important thing, indoor light. And if you're living in a cave, or even if you're not living in a cave, if you're looking in a hut or some sort of brick, mud brick construction, for most of the time, the world's in darkness.

You might have a fire for warmth, but that's a flickering light. So people really wanted and therefore found ways to get indoor light that wasn't just for heat. And the way to do this is another incredible property of liquids, which is that this capillary action it'll go uphill if you get oil and you put a little bit of fabric in it or string then the oil will travel up this string because its interaction with that string means that the surface tension pulls it up and when it gets to the top if you then light the top the oil being know, flammable will burn. You get this little flame, but it won't burn down and keep going down towards the pool of oil. It will actually just stay up there. And why is that?

Because the oil can only burn where it can find oxygen and oxygen. So it just has enough oxygen up there to burn, but it can't go further down. So you have this brilliant technique, which is a pool of oil. It goes up this little bit of fabric or string and you get a light and it's called the oil lamp. It's been around for thousands of years. So early ancestors of us all collected seeds and things like olive berries and crushed them for the oil and had indoor light, but also used it to cook. So this was an incredibly valuable substance. It's 101 survival for early civilizations is to harness oil, not just for cooking, but also for indoor light. And it turns out that early

civilizations paid their taxes through oil. And any place that had more than one oil lamp, you know, lots of indoor light during the night, people displayed well through the amount of indoor lighting. We're used to electricity now and it being mostly cheap, but that was not the case, emphatically not the case until quite recently. Another liquid that's probably worth talking about is ink. Ink in a pen.

We take it for granted that obviously the ink is flowing from some reservoir. Often you can see it, this little tube of ink, and off it goes onto the page. And it happens sort of so easily. You kind of don't give it a second thought. But actually, it's taken a thousand years to get a pen to do that. Turns out to be a really difficult thing because, and I'll just describe the problem. If you make the liquid ink too runny, then it basically just flows out of the nib of the pen and you just get a mess or you get it all over your hands. And this happens. I mean, most of the great books of the world, the literature of the world that we're familiar with were written by these pens that were basically leaking the whole time over there, over the authors. But if you go the other way, if you if you try and make the ink very viscous, so it doesn't flow very far and so it's not going to get everywhere on your hands or all over the page, then you have a real trouble getting it to flow.

So with a pen, you've got to get this ratio right. And the perfect ink, if you think about it, is something that only flows when it's going through the nib onto the page, at that moment where they contact. And after that, it becomes viscous again and stops flowing. So it's not going to go over the page or onto your hand. And equally, it's not going to run out of the pen and get everywhere. But how could you design an ink that only becomes runny at the moment you put it on the page?

Well, that is what the inventor of the ballpoint pen did. And I think that is such an incredible invention and it's about property of liquids we we sort of a strange one called it's a viscoelastic property sometimes liquids behave very viscously and sometimes they behave you know like they run very runny and and there's a whole set of liquids which behave in this way where they're non-newtonian so-called so under certain pressure they run and under when you take the pressure away from them they become like almost like a solid so it's not the pen it's the liquid in it that's so tricky yes and that's what you don't appreciate when you're kind of writing.

And actually, that's thousands of years of people fiddling with that system, trying to get the right liquid. Well, I must admit, I have never sat down and had a serious discussion with someone about liquids before like this. But that's what I like about my job. I get to talk to interesting people about interesting subjects like liquids, and this time it was Mark Myodownik. He's a scientist and author of the book, Liquid Rules, The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through

Our Lives. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Mark. Thanks for being here and talking liquids. Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure talking to you. I'm sure you know that the clothes you wear communicates a lot about who you are and how you see yourself. So when you're going on that all-important job interview, what color of clothes you wear can make or break your first impression. According to 2,099 hiring managers and human resource professionals who participated in a survey, blue and black are the best colors to wear on a job interview.

Orange is the worst. In fact, the study found that 25% of those people think that not only is orange the worst color to wear in a job interview, it's also most likely to be associated with a lack of professionalism. Conservative colors, such as black, blue, gray, and brown, seem to be the safest bet when meeting someone for the first time in a professional setting. The goal of any interview is to communicate what is unique about you and what you bring to the company and its culture. So a good rule of thumb is make sure people remember you more than they remember your clothes. And that is something you should know. So I'm on this mission to build up our subscriptions on Apple Podcasts. Well, really anywhere, but Apple Podcasts in particular. And, you know, subscribing is free. The episodes get delivered right to your phone or tablet. It's a great thing to do. So please subscribe to this podcast. 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. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network. At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series 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.