Something You Should Know - Why Your Sense of Smell is So Amazing & Where Did the Internet Come From?

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, what you may not know about Christmas trees. Then some fascinating things about your ability to smell. Most people say it is the one sense they would give up if they had to give up one. It's one thing for it to be an armchair exercise, which one would I give up? But people who actually do lose their sense of smell essentially lose all pleasure in eating and drinking. And that's such a fundamental aspect of human life. Also, what's the best cure for hiccups?

Starting point is 00:01:04 And the internet. How did it get here? Who owns it? And what is it? We have to remember the internet is an actual physical thing, especially when we use words like the cloud. It feels like this magical genie that just brings us stuff we want. But it's actually, it's just a bunch of wires and servers and loads of people own those. All this today on Something You Should Know. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global

Starting point is 00:01:41 markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. and practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi. Welcome to Something You Should Know. I would imagine that by now, as this episode is being released, there is a Christmas tree in your house or outside

Starting point is 00:02:27 your house or somewhere nearby. And I find some of the facts and figures about Christmas trees to be so fascinating. And here are several of them in no particular other than random order. The use of evergreen trees to celebrate the winter season actually occurred before the birth of Christ. There are 100,000 people employed in the Christmas tree industry. Michigan ranks third amongst all the states in the production of real Christmas trees, but actually grows a larger variety than any other state. They grow 13 varieties of Christmas trees in Michigan. Real Christmas trees are involved in less than one-tenth of one percent of residential fires, and only when ignited by some external

Starting point is 00:03:19 ignition source. In the first week, a Christmas tree in your home will consume as much as a quart of water per day. 93% of real Christmas tree consumers recycle their trees in community recycling programs or in their gardens or backyards. I bet you didn't know that an acre of Christmas trees provides for the daily oxygen requirements of 18 people. Growing Christmas trees provides a habitat for wildlife. Well, until it's time to put it up in your living room. Christmas trees remove dust and pollen from the air. And, you know, you should never burn your Christmas tree in the fireplace because that can contribute to creosote buildup in your chimney.

Starting point is 00:04:06 And finally, Teddy Roosevelt banned Christmas trees from the White House for environmental reasons. Didn't know that. And that is something you should know. Have you ever noticed that when you smell certain scents or odors, it can instantly take you back to a place and time in your past? Perhaps you've heard that the loss of smell is one of the effects and symptoms of the coronavirus. And have you ever wondered why some scents you like and others you find repulsive?

Starting point is 00:04:40 Why is that? Your sense of smell is really important, yet most of us don't really understand a lot about it. One person who has looked deep into this topic is Harold McGee. Several years ago, Harold wrote a book called On Food and Cooking that has since become one of the real definitive books on food science. He's now turned his attention to smell science, and I think you'll find this discussion really fascinating. His new book is called Nosedive, a field guide to the world's smells, and it has already become a big bestseller. Hey, Harold, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks, Mike. Great to be with you.

Starting point is 00:05:21 So something I've always wondered is, are there smells, certain ocean, things like that. We're a little less delighted with the smells of the decay of things in the natural world, things that are rotting, things that are spoiling. And then, of course, aspects of our own lives, which involve those kinds of smells. But I would imagine that a lot of smells, whether we like them or don't like them, is a learned or association thing. Because I've heard that babies don't know that the smell of poop is objectionable. That's why they play with it. Exactly.

Starting point is 00:06:21 But they learn that that's an objectionable smell. And then we all feel that. That's right. And this has been studied in some detail. And it turns out that even in the womb, a baby gets exposed born with certain aspects of the world of smells and flavors. And then it's how we're brought up, the culture we're brought up in, the family we're brought up in, our personal experiences that help define what it is we like and don't like. So having studied this topic, what are the things about smell that you find particularly fascinating or that you had no idea about when you first dove into it? Well, this one is a very personal kind of thing. I started out being very interested in the science and especially in astronomy. So I went to college thinking that I was going to become a professional astronomer. That didn't happen. I ended up adding a G and became interested in gastronomy rather than astronomy. But it occurred to me to ask when I began to delve

Starting point is 00:07:41 into smells, if we had been present from the beginning of the universe, from the beginning of the Big Bang, when would we as human beings with a human nose be able to detect smells that we would be familiar with on Earth today? And it turned out, I mean, my expectation was, you know, the smells of Earth, we had to have the Earth first. But it turns out that a lot of the smells that we experience in everyday life are actually out there in outer space, formed without planets, simply by virtue of the behavior of the elements, carbon and hydrogen and oxygen just kind of naturally come together to form things that we recognize as the smells of, for example, vinegar and even fruits. There are molecules out there called esters, which are very typical of and help define the smells of fruits. So the smells that we enjoy on Earth, many of them are kind of primordial creations. They're made on Earth by earthly things, but they're also made

Starting point is 00:08:54 kind of on their own up in space. Does space smell? Can you smell in space? The problem with smelling in space is that you need air to carry the smells into you and to survive, of course. But if you kind of imagined yourself as an avatar that can fly through space and head for the dust clouds that we often see when we see dramatic photographs of the galaxy, there are dark patches. That's where these molecules form. And if we could fly into those and inhale and survive, that's where we would smell these primordial smells. One of the things about smell that I have always found so fascinating is certain smells, and I'm sure this applies to everyone, you smell them and it immediately takes you back in time to a place. It brings up a memory.

Starting point is 00:09:51 It's amazing how powerful that is. That's right. You can think of our brains very crudely as being information processing circuits. And those processing circuits depend on the databases that they've accumulated. So our experiences give our brains and our beings in general data for the brain to then interpret what's happening in this moment. And it depends entirely on our individual databases, how our particular brains interpret what it is that we're experiencing. If we have pleasant associations with a particular smell, like cilantro, for example, then we'll enjoy our food sprinkled with cilantro.

Starting point is 00:10:39 But if we have either no experience of it before or unpleasant experiences, then we're not going to enjoy it the same way. Are smells, are odors and scents, are they categorizable in the sense that, you know, with taste, they're salty and sweet? And are smells categorized in a similar way? They aren't, partly because they're so various. You know, we have maybe a dozen or so tastes. Scientists debate about that these days. But we have the potential to classify them, and this has

Starting point is 00:11:26 been true for centuries now, by the things we associate them with. So the classification systems are things like there are floral smells, and there are earthy smells, and there are animal smells, and spoiling smells, and ocean smells. But each of those categories has hundreds of different molecules that could be described in that way. How do humans rank in terms of our ability to smell in the sense that dogs supposedly have a really good sense of smell, sharks supposedly can smell blood in the water from a mile away? So where are we? Are we pretty good

Starting point is 00:12:07 at smelling what's really out there? Or does the world smell a lot different and a lot more, and we just don't detect it? For a long time, it's been thought that human beings have an inferior sense of smell, especially compared to our pets. You know, dogs can detect all kinds of things when they're tracking someone through the woods and that kind of thing. It turns out that dogs are very good at particular tasks like tracking through the woods. Because their nose is down on the ground and that's the world, the sensory world in which they develop and for which they evolved. Our noses are up in the air and we use them for very different purposes. And so it's true that dogs are very sensitive and animals in general can be very sensitive to particular things that we're not so sensitive to.

Starting point is 00:13:01 But on the other hand, if you asked a dog or any other animal to distinguish between two different vineyards of wine in Burgundy or Bordeaux, they wouldn't be so good at that either. So if we're interested enough in a particular set of smells, we're actually very good at discriminating them and detecting them. When we smell something, in order to smell something, doesn't some of the thing that we're smelling have to enter our nose? I mean, that's what an odor is, is it's a little bit of it, is it not? That's right. That's the really cool thing about smell compared to the other senses. You know, vision and hearing depend on very indirect evidence

Starting point is 00:13:46 of what's out there, light waves and pressure waves in the air. But in the case of smell, we're actually detecting little bits of the things that are around us. So they emit small molecules that are light enough that they can fly through the air and be breathed in by us when we inhale. And then we detect them with our olfactory receptors up in the nose. And in that instant of detection, what's happening is that the receptor and the molecule, the volatile molecule, actually become fused. So for a moment, that little bit of the thing around us has become a little part of us in the process of sensing it.

Starting point is 00:14:29 Well, and depending on what you're smelling, that could be really gross to think about, that that's becoming part of you. Yeah, it is a startling thing to realize. And, you know, so it makes perfect sense that if you're walking down the street and you smell something that's not very nice, you hold your breath. It's not just that you don't like that sensation, but I think there is this kind of instinctive sense that I'm taking this molecule into me and it's disgusting and I don't want anything disgusting in me. So I'm going to reject it. I'm going to keep it out. I'm speaking with Harold McGee.

Starting point is 00:15:08 He's author of the best-selling book Nosedive, a field guide to the world's smells. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful, as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert, as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. This is an ad for better help. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind.

Starting point is 00:15:53 Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual. That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. So Harold, it's my anecdotal experience, and I'd like to hear what the science is, that women have a better sense of smell generally than men. It's been studied, and the results, as far as I'm aware, are still inconclusive.

Starting point is 00:16:30 So what is true is that a woman's sense of smell varies with her biological state. So it turns out that when a woman is having her period, she is more sensitive to smells. When a woman is pregnant, she is more sensitive to smells. When a woman is pregnant, she is more sensitive to smells. But as far as a kind of overall matchup of men versus women, I think the jury is still out. And what about over time? It seems that, I mean, I know for myself, as I've gotten older, I don't think my sense of smell is as strong as it once was. I still smell things fine, but I just get a sense that it isn't quite what it used to be. Yeah, it does turn out that our senses of taste and smell

Starting point is 00:17:13 are most acute, most sensitive in childhood and early adolescence. And then they slowly decline. I mean, not too much for the first few decades, but then as we age, they do decline. What's been found, though, is that even though that does seem to be a kind of inevitable biological truth, it can be mitigated to a great extent simply by exercising our senses of taste and smell. So paying attention, going around and smelling the flowers in our garden and noticing the differences and just making use of those

Starting point is 00:17:53 senses keeps them going. Really? That's interesting. Because I don't think people would figure that that would be true. You know, when your eyesight goes, looking at more things doesn't make it better that's true uh and that's one more advantage of uh of smell over vision and hearing you know the there is this cliche to stop and smell the roses which means you know generally speaking enjoy the sensory aspects of the world that are around you at least every once in a while stop. But the Japanese have a wonderful term that comes out of a ceremony that they have that's related to the tea ceremony. In the tea ceremony, you pay a lot of attention to the making of a cup of tea and then the enjoyment of it. There's also an incense ceremony, and you do the same thing with little

Starting point is 00:18:47 pieces of incense wood. And the Japanese term for that activity translated into English means listening to smells. So it's the difference between hearing a sound and actually listening to it. It does seem to be the case that in the case of smell and taste, listening to those senses, that is to say paying attention to them rather than just kind of going with them, means that they become stronger, more capable, and we can get more pleasure out of them. I would imagine if you ask people, if you had to give up one of your senses, smell would be right at the top, that that would be one thing you could, if you had to live without one, that would be the one I would probably pick. You know, it's one thing for it to be an

Starting point is 00:19:38 armchair exercise, which one would I give up? But people who actually do lose their sense of smell essentially lose all pleasure in eating and drinking and that's such a fundamental aspect of human life you know it's it would be tough to lose smell as well I have had I have the ability I imagine other people do too, it happens at random times, but I will have memory smells where I can smell something, but it isn't there. It's a smell that I remember from my past, but it feels real, even though I know it isn't there. Yeah. And that's something that some people report and most people don't. So it's, again, something that is very much under investigation, and it's not really clear what's going on. A lot of people will say that they simply can try to imagine a a smell and they can't. They can remember the image of the

Starting point is 00:20:48 thing that they're smelling, but they can't really duplicate in their minds the smell. They can't kind of relive that. Other people report that they can. And it reminds me a little bit of how some people are synesthetic. A sound is associated with a color for them. I think it's just an indication, again, of the individualities of our different brains and the way they work. That's interesting. Well, I can't think of a smell, I can't pick one and smell it. It just, they just pop into my head or my nose or wherever they're popping into from the past. And, you know, they stay for a while and leave. I have no control over it.

Starting point is 00:21:33 But when I smell it or when I think I smell it, it seems very real even though I know it's not. Well, actually, that's a slightly different version of what I find fascinating about smell in general, which is that we tend to pay attention to them when they surprise us. Usually, we sit down to a meal, we look at it, we've ordered it, or we've made it, and we kind of know what to expect. And so our brains are kind of on autopilot. It's when something pops out of that experience that we're not expecting that we really pay attention. What about this whole idea of aromatherapy and the healing powers of smells? I mean, when I think of, when I smell the smell of cut grass, I swear my stress levels go down. I just, I just feel better. There's something about that smell.

Starting point is 00:22:28 It doesn't mean it's really benefiting my health, but is there any research into that? There is, and there are a set of smells that do, not universally, but very often result in a calming effect on the people who are being studied. So cut grass is one. Lavender is another. Citrus aromas tend to kind of perk people up rather than relax them. So it seems to be a mixture of, you know, the nature of the smell itself and the associations it brings up. And again, this is something that is, you know, brains and smells are both really complicated

Starting point is 00:23:12 compared to, you know, photons and vision. So this is still all being worked out. But there does seem to be something to the idea that mood can be affected by aromas. We've talked about on this podcast before, we've talked about the relationship between your sense of smell and your sense of taste, and that smell is a big part of taste. But how big a part of taste? I mean, if I have a hamburger in my hand and I take a bite, but I have no sense of smell, am I really not going to taste anything? No, the sense of smell is really critical to knowing what it is you've got in your mouth. So you can do an experiment, like take an apple and a potato, which have, when they're raw,

Starting point is 00:23:59 fairly similar textures. And, you know, pinch your nose and take a bite of each and see if you can tell the difference. And sitting down at a meal, just stop for a moment breathing through your nose, because that's how we get the smells from our mouth into our nose, so that we can enjoy that aspect of flavor. If you just hold your breath and breathe out through your mouth, you get no flavor whatsoever. You get sweetness and sourness and saltiness, that and the texture of the food. But the actual identity of what it is that you're eating just disappears completely. Well, from our discussion, I have renewed respect for my sense of smell.

Starting point is 00:24:45 Although I guess if I had to give up one of my senses, I would still, I guess I would still give up my sense of smell. Harold McGee's been my guest. His book is called Nosedive, A Field Guide to the World's Smells. And there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Harold. Likewise. Thank you so much, Mike. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine and snacks

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Starting point is 00:26:12 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. You likely use the Internet every day, many, many times every day. The Internet is an important part of all of our lives.

Starting point is 00:26:57 And you've probably heard some vague stories about how the Internet got started and how it grew. But there is a lot to the story you probably haven't heard that I think you're going to find very interesting. And here to discuss what the Internet is, how it grew, and who runs the show is James Ball. James is the global editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. He's former special projects editor at The Guardian, and he is author of the book, The Tangled Web We Weave, Inside the Shadow System That Shapes the Internet. Hey, James, welcome. Hey, lovely to be here. So make your case for me here. What is it you want people to understand about the internet that we don't? Because we don't think

Starting point is 00:27:41 about the internet so much. We just use it, kind of like we don't think about the telephone system much. We just use it. What's your point here? I think there's two things I'd like people to know. I think the first is that we have to remember the internet is an actual physical thing. I think, especially when we use words like the cloud, it feels like this magical sort of almost you know genie that just brings us stuff we want you can get food to your door you can get any information you want and most importantly you can stream podcasts but it's actually it's just a bunch of wires and servers and loads of people own those and loads of people own the companies that own

Starting point is 00:28:21 those and so you know number one is hey it's this big physical thing that's got a ton of protocols and rules and things governing it and then number two is why i think you should know number one and that's that when you look at who owns the computers and who owns the data and how the money behind the internet works, it stops looking like this wild transformational thing. Yeah, there might be a few new billionaires and a few new CEOs at the top table, but actually, weirdly, this supposedly revolutionary technology that was going to upend society

Starting point is 00:29:01 has pretty much kept the same people in charge and often made them richer and more powerful. And so working out how to untangle those two things and looking into that thesis helps us think about, you know, if we do want to change things, if we do want to question things, where can we start? Where do those levers exist? So why do we need to untangle it? I mean, if these are the people who created it, and they risked what they risked in order to get where they are, don't they deserve to be where they are? I think there's definitely a case that can be made for that. What I would suggest is a lot of the people who built the internet aren't the people who got rich doing it. The internet was this US government project when

Starting point is 00:29:46 it started out. The US kind of had its own reasons for doing it. And they wanted for various reasons to test networking between computers, which was still the size of a room at the time. And they wanted to test this on some pretty low stakes computers. They didn't want to test this on military systems first or any of that. We had a cold war going on. And so they basically decided to hook up four universities, network their computers and see how that went. And so the people who actually worked out a whole bunch of the early rules for how what is now the internet works were basically just grad students. They were just trying to work out a little cross-university project. And in about the sort of early 90s, just as quite a lot of people were on it, you know,

Starting point is 00:30:38 the internet was huge, maybe a million people were on it. Another researcher, this time working out of CERN in Switzerland, came up with the ideas for what became the World Wide Web. That was the real explosion, where you had something very simple, like the websites that we look at still now that dominate most of our internet use. Those aren't the people who got rich from the internet. The people who got rich from the internet are the ones who worked out how to make money from that underlying protocol. A lot of what went into making the technology, either we funded as taxpayers or as society,

Starting point is 00:31:16 or was kind of given away for science. So the questions on who makes the money aren't necessarily the same as who gives us the biggest benefit. And so these guys that are making the money, who are they? Generally, the obvious people who make money from the Internet are the tech founders. You know, it's not that hard to look at someone like Jeff Bezos or you've got Mark Zuckerberg, of course, Facebook boss. They're kind of the obvious people who make make the money. And they're often obvious hate figures people who make the money. And they're

Starting point is 00:31:45 often obvious hate figures, or at least very polarizing. I don't think they're the most interesting billionaires out of this. Although there's lots of questions about how the company's models work, whether they push to monopoly, whether Facebook can only make a profit of tens of billions of dollars every quarter because it's not facing the full costs of managing its content. We've got those questions, but is it necessarily the founders that are to blame for that? I would say the big invisible sort of engine behind a lot of the internet and the internet economy is venture capital.

Starting point is 00:32:26 And venture capital raises money from what are called institutional investors. Now, this is actually really people like you and me. This is our pension pots if we have them. It might be some of our savings accounts. We don't ever really think about how it's invested and we might not even have any say. But this will go into venture funds and they are trying to get really big returns from their investments to those people. And the venture model is usually that you are wanting to make loads of bets in the hope that one of them pays off really big. Venture capital doesn't want you to build a nice small or medium-sized business, make a bit of profit, reinvest that, get a bit bigger. It wants you to either get to the moon or die trying. And so that kind of means that any company that's backed by the VC money, it's got to try and get as big as possible. It's going to go

Starting point is 00:33:26 hell for leather. And so you tend to see companies following lots of models like Facebook's or like Google's or like Twitter. They will try and get first a million users, then tens of millions, then hundreds of millions, and obviously the biggest get billions now, and then work out how to make money from them later, which almost always turns out to be advertising. But that means we have this very weird online world where everyone is trying to be the next kind of multi-billion dollar company. Imagine a world where if you wanted to start a restaurant, you've worked as a chef, you know a little bit about how to run a business, you can do that as it stands. And if your restaurant works and you make a bit of money

Starting point is 00:34:16 from it, you employ a few people, you can stop at that. That's cool. That's fine. You might want to open a second site on the other side of town or in the next place over. You can do that. Almost no one who does that will want to be the next McDonald's. The internet model, this venture capital model says, if you're not trying to be McDonald's, you don't belong on the internet. And so we have everything rushing in this huge winner-take-all, get big or get bought model. And that means we end up with these huge companies that suddenly then become very, very hard to govern or to regulate. And it's usually the VCs behind them that are the ones that are taking the most money and taking the most return. The CEO is just the visible figurehead.

Starting point is 00:35:06 MARK BLYTH Your example of McDonald's kind of points to the fact that this isn't only tech companies. It's McDonald's. It's non-tech companies. That's kind of the venture capital game of throw a lot of money at a lot of places and hope that one of them really blows up. MARK BLYTH It absolutely is.

Starting point is 00:35:24 And I don't think any of us would think the world would work better if we just banned venture capital. That would probably be too far. We want some people, you know, we want there to be, most of us at least, want there to be a McDonald's. You know, sometimes you want nuggets, but sometimes you don't. and you want a mix of different business models and different types of investment so that you know say in your town your high street doesn't just have six shops on it that are the same six shops in every town on the internet we have this problem where stuff isn't far away from each other you know if you set up a restaurant in the real world, to stick with that example, to get some customers,

Starting point is 00:36:10 you've only got to be as good as other restaurants within about half a mile or so of your site. If you're setting up an online-only business, you're competing with every other online business, certainly in your country, but possibly in the world. And so you've got this tougher backdrop already. And then you've got this investment model that really sort of says, the only successful online businesses are the ones that get to this huge global scale. And so I don't think the problem is that the venture capital model has discovered

Starting point is 00:36:47 the internet and they're on there. I think it's that they seem to be the only show in town on the internet. Well, how would you do it differently? If you could wave a magic wand and do it differently, what would that be? I think you've got a few different sort of issues with it. I think we do have to work out what we want from the internet. I think a lot of us are a bit divided on that because we say we want one set of things and our actions show we want something completely different. We still say we care about privacy. We still say we worry about online abuse and about polarization. And yet we all use the same two or three social networks or search sites or YouTube or you name it that we all know contribute to them. So we're conflicted and we're often trying to kind of have our cake and eat it. But if we actually want an internet that lets big and small enterprises thrive,

Starting point is 00:37:50 that actually lets there be a wide range, say, of news sites, of music, of media, we have to kind of go back to that era where we thought, hey, the internet's going to save the long tail. You know, record shops, a physical one, can only sort of hold 2,000, 4,000 different titles. Online, it can have 40,000. There'll be way more range of music. The charts won't be so dominant anymore. I think part of it is trying to actually accept

Starting point is 00:38:21 other business models on the internet and try and actually push back against this idea that scale first, make money later. Part of doing that is a really tricky thing of saying we actually have to look at the profits of big tech. I always find it a bit weird when people kind of talk about properly moderating Facebook would cost billions. Yes, it would. It absolutely would cost billions. They make billions. And so if those excess profits are smaller, if tech is actually facing the societal costs of its actions, maybe that VC carrot won't look so tempting that it's the only show in town.

Starting point is 00:39:09 Well, it's interesting you mentioned in the beginning of this conversation that it often just comes down to ad dollars, that that's the real fuel for the internet, that the data is being sold to advertisers. It's all ad money that's really driving this, yes? It absolutely is. And I think that's quite a wild world because I spoke to basically the guy who has a good claim to have invented what are called programmatic ads, which are all those automatic ones

Starting point is 00:39:41 that follow you around the internet. The one relief is he is at least slightly sorry about it because I think most of them find it annoying. But it is particularly weird that three or four companies have become, you know, the top five publicly listed companies in the world are all tech companies. And at least three of them make almost all their money from advertising. And online ads aren't very good and they don't work very well. And so it's a

Starting point is 00:40:13 completely strange situation that they're making that much money off them. Yeah. Well, it's always interested me that programmatic advertising of you know you you buy something or you look especially if you buy like a new coat that you as soon as your transaction is over you get served ads for that coat well i already just bought it why are you sending me ads for this coat it's the most infuriating thing isn't it it's especially annoying if you buy something quite weird uh that like you're never going to need again you know i i got followed by my ikea sofa i think for about six months and you do start trying to imagine well you know is there some crazy person that just buys a new sofa every week rather than like ever wipe it or you know you're trying to figure it out and what's sort of the actual answer to it really is that we hear all this creepy stuff about being

Starting point is 00:41:13 tracked and it turns out usually really dumb stuff works much better in advertising than clever stuff and rather than be 100 sure whether you actually bought the item or not if you were just on the page enough people quit you know they were just browsing or thinking about a sofa and didn't finish it enough people quit and it's just worth re-advertising it to them for months right because that's better targeting than any other clever thing that they could do. You know, we hear all this stuff about adverts making psychological profiles of you or doing all sorts of clever things like that. And then you end up finding, you know, when you talk to the people in it, actually really, really dumb stuff tends to be how they follow you.

Starting point is 00:42:01 You know, I ended up, you know i i work as a journalist i mainly cover tech but i covered russian misinformation for quite for quite a few months so was doing stories on that and every single uh advert in my email inbox uh started turning to russian and eastern european brides which for me was a particularly fun bit of ad targeting because I'm gay. And so it was literally just apparently, if you talk about Russia in subject lines enough, the most obvious advert to serve you is that. And so these quite crude bits of targeting end up following you. And because no one really gets their head into the very weird world

Starting point is 00:42:44 of the kind of instant auction that happens every time you click the mouse, it lets the people in the middle, which is Facebook, Google, Amazon actually has a huge online advertising arm that most of us don't really know about. You know, it lets them make billions. It does make you wonder why advertisers don't say, you know, this really isn't working all that well and go put their money somewhere else. I'm kind of intrigued by this as well because it's a very, very strange world where there's been a few academic analyses of this and you can start seeing sort of times where advertisers will be spending,

Starting point is 00:43:28 you know, let's say $10 to put an advert next to some news content. You know, the kind of stuff that people working in the traditional media want to happen. Someone puts an advert, it's going to appear on the New York Times or on the Wall Street Journal. And in some cases, the actual site where the ad displays is getting less than 15% of that. And so in between the kind of money that the ad companies are spending and the money that the content providers are getting, huge margins are being taken. And so there's a lot of middlemen with a lot of interest in showing you either the online ads work or the classic argument that they work indirectly and they brand build and the advertising industry has kind of kept itself going and kept itself alive by convincing

Starting point is 00:44:21 clients for decade after decade that adverts have these incredible indirect effects. And somehow, despite the fact that we should have the best, most granular, most amazing data about online adverts, that sell seems to kind of work online too. So you've got very, very crude ad campaigns that companies are clearly wildly overpaying for that are sort of getting you these big kind of profits in the middle. And it's really in no one's interest in the industry to tell people, hey, actually, you might want to do this differently. If you're the creative agency, you don't want to call out the others. If you're the broker in the middle of it, you don't really want to. And so the main sort of role of a lot of the ad industry to me seems to be

Starting point is 00:45:17 trying to keep the people who want to sell the adverts as far away from the people who have advertising spaces as possible so that neither finds out what the other's paying or getting. So ad dollars keep going into internet advertising because of what you just described, but also because there isn't something better or there isn't something different because radio, newspapers, print magazines are all suffering from the fact that a lot of their ad dollars have gone to the internet and because that was the new

Starting point is 00:45:53 shiny object. But when the next new shiny object shows up, maybe some of those ad dollars in the internet will go to the new method of advertising, and that could create some real trouble. I think that's got to be pretty inevitable because the current system kind of sucks. You know, even Google, which is one of the biggest, you know, it is the big ad agency, now has an ad blocker by default in its browsers because it knows how much users hate most of them.

Starting point is 00:46:24 But generally, it's quite a broken system. It's quite irritating and it's quite risky for everyone involved. So it feels like you do need a new ad model. I think podcasts actually have been one of the more creative places on that, where they're trying to get something that sounds more authentic by ad breaks with the host in, that kind of thing. I think online ads feel particularly inauthentic and unuseful. And so the danger then though, is so much of the whole online model is based around this. It's a monoculture that if people start moving to this new, better thing, you could have a real domino effect.

Starting point is 00:47:06 Well, what I think is really important here is that the kind of problems that you're talking about are really below the radar for most of us, because most of us think of the internet as something relatively benign that has a lot of benefits, whether it's, you know, keeping in touch with your friends on social media or being able to check the weather or the sports scores or whatever it is that makes the Internet an important part of our life. But as you point out, it's becoming such an important part of our life that we need to keep our eye on what's going on and who's pushing the buttons and where the money is.

Starting point is 00:47:44 My guest has been James Ball. He is the global editor at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism. He's the former special projects editor at The Guardian, and he's author of the book, The Tangled Web We Weave, Inside the Shadow System that Shapes the Internet. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, James. Fantastic. Thank you very much.

Starting point is 00:48:11 According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the title for the longest lasting case of hiccups is held by an Iowa farmer who hiccuped for 60 years. Hiccups happen when your diaphragm goes a little haywire. What should you do if you get the hiccups? Well, no one cure seems to work for all people all the time. But here are a few things to try. Breathe into a paper bag is one old-fashioned cure. Doctors think that this calms the diaphragm down by increasing carbon dioxide in your blood. Drinking a large glass of water or holding your breath can sometimes help for the same reason as breathing into the paper bag.

Starting point is 00:48:53 Stimulate the roof of your mouth with your tongue or a cotton swab. Plug both ears with your fingers. In almost all cases, the surefire cure is to just wait five minutes. Except in rare cases, that's how long it takes for hiccups to stop all by themselves. And that is something you should know. And that's the podcast today. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top 10 lists? 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. The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show.

Starting point is 00:49:43 We are famous for rabbit holes disney themed games and fun facts you didn't know you needed i had danielle and megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions i asked danielle what insect song is typically higher pitched and hotter temperatures and lower pitched and cooler temperatures you got this no i didn't don't believe that about a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying.

Starting point is 00:50:11 I'm so sorry. You win that one. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown 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

Starting point is 00:50:37 that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The heresies of Redolf Bantwine. Wherever podcasts are available.

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