Stuff You Should Know - Short Stuff: Time Zones

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

Time zones are a pain. Let's get rid of them! Can we? Sure! Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. Well, the short stuff I should say. Let me just start over.

Hey, and welcome to the short stuff. Nice work. Thanks. You think we'll edit that first part out? Nope. OK. I'm Josh. There's Chuck, the contrarian, always saying nope.

And there's Jerry over there who just kind of keeps quiet because she knows that's how we like it. And like I said, this is short stuff. Let's go. That's right. And we're talking about time zones, and the sort of weirdness of time zones in this modern age. It is very weird.

And they're kind of new, and it makes sense that they're kind of new, because before, it was really difficult to move from place to place in any sort of quick manner. Sure. So it didn't really matter what time it was in some town 100 miles away from you. Right.

Nobody cared. Yeah. Like there was no way of knowing really what time it was. And by the time you walked over there to ask, it was so much later than it had been when you left, it really, the whole thing just didn't matter. But once we started to invent ways of locomoting more quickly, the world got a lot smaller.

And I really don't like that term for some reason. I just feel like I need to confess this. The world got smaller. The world shrank. I don't know why it really bothers me. OK. OK. Well, because you're a flat earther.

Right. Well, you can make a flat circle smaller. And by the way, I am absolutely not a flat earther. Of course, not everyone does. What's funny is that you have to specify that in this day and age, you know? That's true. So as the world got smaller, then suddenly it

did kind of matter what time it was in the town 100 miles away because you might have a connecting train you had to pick up there. And you needed to make sure that that train was coordinating with the train that you were getting there on so that you could reach there by some designated time. And that didn't always happen at first. No.

I mean, it was a real problem. People were late for trains or were missing their trains. There were circumstances where trains would be close to colliding to one another because of the schedules and the times. Yeah. It was a real problem. If everyone isn't agreed on what time it is and you have an

interconnected train system, that can be extraordinarily problematic. Yeah. I mean, and this was happening in Europe. In the US, it was a real mess because we had local time zones. And I don't mean regional. I mean, like every city in the US. So we had 300 time zones in the United States.

And then eventually they said, all right, this is unwieldy. Let's whittle it down to 100 time zones. Right. And the reason why there were so many is because up to this point, everybody basically set their watch or their sundial or what have you to noon. When the sun was directly overhead, everybody knew it was

noon in your town. But that doesn't mean it's noon somewhere else. It means it's noon in your town. And so everybody, every town basically had their own time zone, right? So when they whittled it down to 100, that was a vast improvement. But it still wasn't quite where they needed it to be because

there were still a lot of problems with it. And so a scientist, his last name was Fleming. He was Scottish. And his first name was Sir Sanford. Well, the sir wasn't his first name. That was an honorific. But the Sanford was his first name. Yes, not the Sanford.

Sir Sanford and Sun Fleming. Right. And he missed a train in 1876 as the legend goes because of the timetable and this screwy time zone thing. And he said, I'm through. Got mad. And he said, you know what? I'm going to do.

I'm going to divide the world into 24 time zones, which makes sense. Spaced at one degree intervals all across the planet. And everyone said, groundskeeper Willie, that's brilliant. Yeah, you just made short stuff special officially because it was a rare Chuck Scottish accent. I know. It's the rarest.

Yeah, it is the rarest. So that's pretty smart. 24 time zones makes a lot of sense. That's how it is today, you would think. That's not the case. As a matter of fact, I believe there's 39 time zones around the world. Is that right?

Yeah, that's what I saw. 39 time zones, not 24. And to make the madness even more complete, some of these time zones are offset not by a single hour like it should be. Some people offset their time zones by 30 minutes or 45 minutes, which is just like just drop out of the world, basically, if you do that.

So it's what they call an S-word show these days. But even that was still an improvement from that 100 or 300 something in the US. And in the United States, we've had four time zones. Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific for, I guess, since the 19th century. Actually, as a matter of fact, exactly in the 19th century. On November 18, 1883, those were officially instituted, not

by the country necessarily itself, but by the railroad companies, who all agreed finally on a uniform time, where it was at any given point in the country. That's right. And they actually, when all the railroads set time on this one specific day, they all changed to noon when it reached noon standard time in their time zone, which meant that each of those places had a noon twice in one day.

So it's very famously called the day of two noons. Amazing. I think so too. You want to take a break? Let's do it. OK. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude,

bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it. And now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars,

friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist?

So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy.

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or more wieldy? More wieldy. Is that a thing? That's what I'm casting my lot. Can something be wieldy? I guess if it can be unwieldy, surely it can be wieldy, too. All right, so things are getting better. And then we went off and invented planes.

And then planes could get places even quicker. And that just compresses the travel time even more. And then the internet is invented, and all of a sudden, it's pretty much like everyone's running on a 24-7 culture all over the world. And some people in recent years have looked up and said, why do we have time zones anyway? Why can't we just all agree to set our clocks on the same time,

take a little bit of getting used to, but you'll all be OK once you wrap your head around the fact that a number is just some random shape that you designate for where the sun is in the sky? Yeah, I mean, that's absolutely true. And it is arbitrary and totally artificial. But it's going to take a little while to not think like that if we follow these guys' advice, if you ask me.

Yeah, we're talking specifically about a man named Hanka. I'd say Hanky. Hanky? Yeah. I'd say Hanka. It depends on where he's from. If you wanted to be wrong, you can say Hanka. He's a Johns Hopkins University professor of physics.

And there's another guy named Richard Kahn-Henry. And what they propose is just a universal time, like I said, where everyone in the world agrees on one thing and that's to just set our clocks the same, which I am totally down for. It does make sense. Hanka and Henry definitely have a really good idea here, which is we all set our clocks to universal time

coordinated, UTC, which used to be called Greenwich Mean Time, which basically says the prime meridian that goes through Greenwich, England, is zero hours. It's also called Zulu Time, because z for zero in air trucker or planespeak is Zulu, z is Zulu. Got it? I think he means zed. Zed, depending on who you're talking to.

That's why they all just call it Zulu, because they couldn't agree on zero or zed, right? Right, but this is already happening, and the military has been doing this. Financial traders do this, because it's just clearly the better way to go. It is, because if it's, say, it's 9 o'clock and on the prime meridian, 9 o'clock AM,

then it would be 9 o'clock all over the world. The whole world is based on what time it is on the prime meridian. But here's the thing, and this is why it's hard to wrap your head around this kind of thing. That means then that rather than it being 9 o'clock eventually associated with the morning in your land, wherever you are, 9 AM might take on an entirely different

meaning, just a completely different meaning, because that 9 AM might be at what's 2 AM to you now. Yeah, you just got to give up those things, man. Give it up. Right, we would have to totally decouple. And it would be so difficult that I think Honka and Hinrai say that it would take about a generation for us to get used to it.

And basically, they're saying, those of us alive today have to die off, and then the younger generation have to be raised like this for it not to be weird to eat breakfast at 11.30 PM or something like that, depending on where you are. Yeah, and I think that's for a full, hey, it's a little weird for me to completely go away. I think inside a few years, everyone would just be like,

all right, whatever. I used to call this 9 AM, but now it's 12 PM. And again, I mean, I've gone off before about, I don't necessarily think it's arbitrary, but just the symbolic nature of a number is just something man has slapped on the sun or the moon. Time is an artificial human construct, for sure. And clocks, like keeping time, is even more artificial.

But there's some real upsides to this idea. It's all upside. So, well, I think the getting used to it part would be really weird, although it could be like such a distraction for the entire world that we might just forget about all this, the BS quagmire, a lot of us find ourselves in and just be like, this is cool, who knows?

But some of the upsides are that if you live on the western edge of a time zone, you got to keep up with the eastern edge, and you typically suffer from sleep deprivation chronically as a result of living on the western edge of the time zone, that would be gone. Yeah, I think solely for business purposes and travel purposes, the benefits are just

so outrageously strong that it just doesn't make any sense to do anything otherwise. So, can you explain something to me? Sure. How does it get rid of something like jet lag? If we're still traveling to some other part of the world and the sun is still up or it's not up, and it should be for our biological clocks,

how does having the time be the same help that? Do you understand that? No, I don't think it does at all. Oh, okay, well, that makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I think you would just, you would still be going to bed super early if you traveled to LA from the East Coast. It would just, whatever symbol on your watch

would be different. Yeah. But just booking travel, booking conference calls, like anything, it would be nice to have to be like, well, this is 10 o'clock your time and nine o'clock my time. It's just 10 o'clock. Right, it's just 10 o'clock means different things to different people.

Yes, exactly, you'd have to, there would be no more shootouts at high noon or, you know, we party till two in the morning, we party till seven at night. Right, exactly, all around the world. Depending on where you are. It would totally take some getting used to, but I just think it's like, why not explore this?

Well, because it would be a significant undertaking, but yeah, it could be kind of. Yeah, I guess it would be. To get the whole world to throw away all this stuff and just start over on UTC, it would take some, we can't even agree on the metric system for Pete's sake. That's a good point. But I agree with you, I think it's neat and interesting

and I think it could probably over time be very beneficial. Or the rest of the world would do it and the United States wouldn't. Right, right. Just kind of sort of what's going on. I mean, Europe's on a 24 hour clock, right? Yeah, I believe so and I know the military in the United States is, so it is kind of like metric.

Like we do kind of secretly do metric on the down low here or there. That's true. So, you got anything else? I got nothing else. Okay, well, if you want to know more about this, go find out about it yourself, because sure, stuff is done.

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