December 28, 2023 • 51 mins
It’s all fun and games to think about how backwards and misguided some things people did in the past were until you realize we’ll be “the past” one day. What do we do now that will seem primitive then and how will they be better in the future?
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with
access to an airport or a car rental place that
can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the
end of January. We'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and
San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right to. Our new live show for twenty twenty
four is Seattle, Washington January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater,
then Portland at our Homeway from Home at Revolution Hall
in the twenty fifth, and then winding it all up
at Sketchfest on the twenty six at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information,
if you want tickets, you can go to a couple
of places. You can go to our link tree at
Linktree slash sysk, and you can go to our home
on the web, Stuff youshould Know dot com. Click on
the tour button and it'll take you to all of
the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets
and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know, the last edition of the two to the
to the Deuce Tray.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Oh, is this our final of the year?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
It is. It's the last one of twenty twenty three, Chuck.
We recorded all of the episodes that we're ever going
to record in the year twenty twenty three. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah? And hey, you know, since you brought that up,
can I say something?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Spotify, who carries our show, as do all platforms, they
have this really cool thing they send out called the
wrap Wrap I guess is in year end wrap up
kind of thing, and they they sent us as a
show our own statistical analysis, but then they send individual
users their own and we just had a lot of
(01:53):
great listeners sending us in their rap statistics like hey,
I'm in the top one percent of stuff you should
know listenership, And it was just really neat to see
all that stuff coming in, So thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
It really is. It's amazing and everybody's so proud of it.
It's so great to see. So no matter what percentage
you're in, if you are proud enough to send an
email or post it, kudos to you, because we're proud
of you right back. I do think, though, Chuck, that
we probably should shout out the person who wrote in
with the far and away the largest number of listening
(02:27):
minutes according to Spotify.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, who's that?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
That is Aravin Cancerla, who is in the top point
zero five percent of listeners and based on the eighty
thousand plus eighty six, seven hundred and seventy two minutes,
I don't see how there could be anybody else in that,
you know, in the remaining what point zero's five percent left?
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah. I did a little back of the envelope math
and that that's something somewhere between twenty five and thirty
hours of stuff you should know a week.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, that just it's a lot.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Doesn't seem possible. So I have suspicions that this person
might have just played it on a loop so they could,
you know, and then just went out shopping or whatever.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I don't know. I think Aravin strikes me as a
pretty straightforward person. So grats to Airvind and also seriously,
thank you to everybody who listens to us so much
that you get statistics at the end of the year
that make you proud. I mean, that's amazing, guys. Thank
you very much.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, thanks to Spotify. That's a cool service that they
or I don't know if is that a service, whatevers
cool thing they do.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
It's a service, it's a public service.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
We were downloaded in one hundred and sixty three countries.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Oh, I didn't know there were that many countries.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Which is we looked it up. It was actually something
like one hundred and ninety. So like that's most of
the countries.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, I would say that's the vast majority of them.
And by the way, everybody I knew that there were
more countries than that.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I was joking and quickly I saw that. I don't
know if you went through that yet, Josh, but we
our third biggest country of growth was Mexico. Oh, no way,
And I'm gaming. I'm gaming. I'm aiming for a show
in Mexico City. I'd like to do that. We just
don't know if like people would come. So, you know,
(04:17):
if we can get like a thousand people in a
room in Mexico City, I think that might be a
fun thing to do.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah, especially if it's a room with seats.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, so we should get at least five hundred emails
saying at least two people will come and then that
means we might go all right, So anyway, should we
get on with barbaric practices?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, let's because I find this endlessly fascinating. Olivia helped
us with this, and basically what we're doing here is
reversing what we already kind of like to do smugly,
which is look back fifty one hundred, two hundred years
and be like, look at how backwards and antiquated those
people were back then, Like even in as recent is
(05:00):
the nineties. I remember in the mid nineties, I was
I smoked on an airplane on the way to Amsterdam. Yeah,
and like there was it was just like the last
three rows were smoking. But it's not like it was
sectioned off. There wasn't even a curtain. It's just like
this is the smoking section, even though the entire plane's
being covered in your cigarette smoke. This was the nineties, man.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, the first time I flew to Europe there was
smoking in like that was it would have been ninety six.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, I mean imagine that today. I mean you would
literally go to federal prison if you tried to light
a cigarette on an airplane today.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
You know, Yeah, I mean it's about the fire, but sure, yeah,
a few decades before that there was jello salad where
it was all the rage and like the weirdest jello salad.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
If you've never just kind of taken a stroll down
memory lane and looked up like pictures of jello molds
from the fifties to the seventies, yeah, treat yourself and
go do that. But make sure you have not had
lunch yet, because you're gonna want to gag when you
see a lot of them. That's another fun thing to
judge people for being stupid with cello because I don't
know if we said it yet. We're going to do
the opposite. We're going to look forward and try to
(06:11):
figure out what our descendants are going to ridicule us
or look down at us about, right, what will we
seem primitive or barbaric or ridiculous about?
Speaker 2 (06:22):
That's right? But what we have before us are seven.
I think a little more serious things than jello molds
and spanking kids is on up there. However, it really
depends on who you ask, because about half of Americans
still think and this is a quote, and this from
(06:44):
a survey a couple of years ago from the American
Family Survey quote, it is sometimes necessary to discipline a
child with a good, hard spanking, and half.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Of those respondents said almost under their breath feels so right.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, I mean, big change from you know, back in
the day. They have another stat from sixty eight when
ninety four percent of parents said, yeah, hit your kids,
it's awesome.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
You drop. That's a big drop.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
But things are really changing because a third of the
respondents between eighteen and twenty nine agree with spanking, compared
to fifty percent of the overall survey. So it's something
that's going out of fashion for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, it seems to be following a larger trend of
moving away from social acceptance of violence in any form,
and it's being supported by studies that find like, yeah,
it's actually good if you don't spank your kids, because
not only has there never been a study that shows
it improves children's behavior, study after study keeps suggesting it
(07:50):
does the opposite. It actually maladjusts children. I mean, I
can't imagine what a well adjusted person I would be
if I hadn't been spanked that handful of times when
I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, you know, I was. We're always trying to poke
around to find, you know, the other opinion on something,
just to take a look at it, and you know
there are people who don't agree. I saw this one
professor from the Oklahoma State Robert Larzelli. I can't even
read my handwriting now, but he said that the studies
(08:21):
that are out there are flawed for a couple of reasons. One,
he says, these studies that say that if you spank
kids more, there that leads to them actually acting out more.
He's saying, no, kids, it's the kids that are acting
out more that are it's a chicken in the egg thing. Yes,
I've seen the ones getting spanked more.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
I've seen that, and I think I found in a
Scientific American article there was at least one group that
managed to control for that and basically have shown like, no,
it's it's it actually does have this effect on kids.
The problem that what'd you say, Lara Zelli?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I think so if my writing is any indicator.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
That what Larazzelli's saying is that these studies don't they
don't start following kids and from like birth to twenty
five or thirty and then see you know where you spanked,
where you're not spanked it's all just like they might.
They might peek in on a kid who's in at
the spanking age and look at their behavior. Then you
(09:24):
just can't parse it apart. So there's not really good
quality studies. But I saw it put like this. Even
if there are no studies that conclusively show spanking is
bad for kids or produces malajusted behavior in kids, there
are plenty of studies that seem to suggest that. There
(09:47):
aren't any studies that seem to suggest otherwise that it's
it's actually good, it's actually it's effective to spank your kids.
And so the argument that I've seen is like, why
why do it? Then?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, I saw a First of all, I'm a parent.
I can't in a million years imagine hitting Ruby for
any reason that's nice. It makes me want to cry
just thinking about that. It's terrible for our family. But
I did find a study from twenty eighteen that I
found in from NPR. They didn't do the study, but
(10:23):
they were, you know, did a thing on it.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
I'm sure they were hot and heavy.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Oh of course it was what they claim. And it
seems like probably one of the most robust studies at
least that looks at countries that have banned spanking, because
I think something like sixty two countries have banned spanking
starting with Sweden in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Did you even know there were that many countries?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
But they followed four or they used four hundred thousand
children from kids from eighty eight countries, so that's pretty good.
Fifty eight countries have the bands in thirty don't. I'm
not sure which one it is. But what they found
when what they were tracking was incidences of kids fighting,
like you know, getting in fights at school, right and
in the countries that have banned spanking, there was a
(11:16):
school fighting reduction by sixty nine percent in boys in girls,
which is I mean, that is pretty substantial. I was
curious about the United States because you know, we both
grew up, like my dad was my elementary school principal,
and they were he spanked me and other kids. It's
ridiculous to think about, but apparently in seventy seven the
(11:39):
Supreme Court of the United States gave the power to
the states. These days, ninety percent of schools don't use
corporal punishment, but it is still legal in seventeen states.
There are restrictions in place in a lot of those
like maybe your parents have to sign a thing. I said, sure,
hit my kid. But seventeen percent of states you can
(12:02):
still do this, with Mississippi leading the way in the
most spankings. And the other thing I found out that
we should point out is that black males are twice
as likely to be spanked than anyone. And get this,
sixteen point five percent of kids that are corporately punished
(12:24):
in schools in America today are disabled. My god, usually
it's an intellectual disability. Wow. Is that so not disturbing?
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, of course it's disturbing. That's horrible. That's one of
the most horrible statistics you've ever spouted out. And I
should say, also just want to verify for the listeners
in any of those sixty two countries where spanking is banned,
you're talking about like public spanking, like in school in
seventeen states. In schools, you're allowed to do that.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Right, Yes, a teacher or a principal and they say
it's you know. And this is one of the other
problems that that professor had is that those studies, he says,
lump everyone in together as in, like the parents who
do it as the very last resort after several other
attempts at discipline or parents are just like, oh, you
(13:15):
screwed up, you know, let's hit you or whatever. And
apparently most, you know, almost all the schools, it is
a last resort, as in they've tried other things, but
you know, it's just I don't know, I got to
try not to judge people, but don't hit your kids.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Well, I was gonna say, it's it's legal in seventeen
states for schools to spank kids. It's legal in all
fifty states for a parent to spank kids. That's there's
not really anything coming down the horizon that makes it
seem like that's ever going to be banned. But it
does seem generationally like we're moving away from spanking pretty rapidly.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, my spankings as a kid, we're very infrequent and
very organized, as in it was never done in the
heat of anger, like just getting slapped or something. It
was like, all right, go to the bathroom and spend
ten minutes, you know, upset and card and then I
got spanked with a bolo paddle. You know, the little
(14:15):
bolo paddle games.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
I know, the bolo tie.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
No, the bolo paddle where you a little light plywood
paddle with a ball hard. Yeah, sure, that's that was
the spanking device.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
In mind, those things are made of like balsa wood.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, it wasn't you bad. It's stung.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
But you know, how about all of your spankings that
had grown.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Up that's usually involves leather.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Okay, you you want to move on to the next one.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Yeah, let's let's move on to chemotherapy.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Okay. So chemotherapy is one of these things where, if
you start kind of putting it down today, what you're
talking about is our current modern medical miracle that since
the nineties has reduced the cancer death rate by twenty
five percent. Yeah, it's it's a really big deal that
we have chemotherapy now, it's saved a lot of lives.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, this is not poopoo in chemotherapy.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
No, it's not the reason why we can probably guess
that our descendants down the line are going to look
at chemotherapy is fairly primitive and barbaric is because it's
so indiscriminate in how it harms the body. It harms
the whole body in order to kill the cancer cells. Right,
(15:30):
and we're moving it seems like much more toward far,
far more specific and tailored medicine, and so all of
the side effects, in the horribleness that come with chemotherapy,
even though it does save lives, will be going away
in future decades.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
It looks like, yeah, and it seems like and we're
going to talk about a few ways that things are
becoming more specific, but that seems to be the way
it's all trying to go is instead of just like
killing all the cells, let's see if they can just
specifically target cancer cells and then eventually, you know, get
down to you know, the human specific targeting of things,
(16:08):
which would be amazing obviously, yeah, you know, patient specific, right.
But one of the first ones is antibody drug conjugates,
and this is a type of chemotherapy, but it combines chemotherapy,
like the drugs used in chemotherapy, with monoclonal antibodies, which
are you know, lab just like antibodies that we have
(16:29):
in our body, except they're created in a lab.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Right, And so what happens is we inject these drugs,
these antibody drug conjugates into a patient with cancer, and
those antibodies are designed to go seek out that tumor
the specific kind of tumor that that patient has, Yeah,
and attached to that tumor, that cancer sell and it
(16:52):
delivers that payload of chemo drugs to it, says here
you go, here's a nice little present, and then turns
around and runs, and then in the background, the cell
explodes and the antibody like ends up on its chest
but lives to fight another day.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah, exactly. That's if we're headed in that direction. That's fantastic. Yeah.
Vaccines is another one, the mr NA vaccines that we
detailed back when those came out for COVID. Two of
the most successful versions of those vaccines were originally brought
about to begin with as tumor vaccines, and the idea
(17:29):
is to use sort of that same technology to just
specifically target tumors themselves. So it's not like a vaccine
to prevent a disease. It's a shot that will essentially
specifically shrink a tumor.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, just like the mRNA vaccines for COVID train the
body to look for and respond to COVID viruses, saying like, hey,
if you see anything with this little horn on it,
the spike, go after it. They're doing the same thing
with tumors, right, So that's boosting the immune response. It's
also training immune response. So technically it does qualify as
a vaccine. And because like we talked about in the
(18:05):
COVID vaccine episode, this mRNA technology is just so you
can just it's just like ready to wear vaccines basically.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Apparently, yeah, apparently they they have reached a turning point
and in the next five years a lot of cancer
researchers are saying We're going to see a lot more
cancer vaccines coming down the pike.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Amazing. And then what I talked about earlier, like making
like targeting cancer cell specifically is like a great direction
to go, but really getting into personalized cancer care will
be the next step beyond that, Like, hey, I'm going
to identify exactly what kind of tumor that you have
(18:50):
in your body and not just maybe this kind of
tumor and you know, treat like get to patient specific
levels of treatment. And you know, I know we poo
pooed AI in certain respects, but this is a place
where AI can really probably do a lot of good.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, I think we should just clarify or position on
it if I can speak for both of us. Sure,
as long as AI is not taking over the world
or damaging humanity in some terrible way. I'm all for
all the great ways that can help things, and this
is a really sterling example of that.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, it gave us a new Beatles song.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Yeah, I would say that's right in the middle for me.
But the I think what you were talking about was
taking a sample of the specific tumor that a specific
person has, analyzing its genetic makeup, and then looking at
that genetic makeup thanks to AI spitting out all of
the information that we need from analyzing that huge genome,
(19:51):
saying oh, this is an achilles heel, this is another weakness,
this is another way we can attack it, and then
tailoring the treatment for that specific tumor like that tumor,
Like you said, now that kind of tumor that tumor
is getting at tech. It's so specific you could name
the tumor, name the tumor Melvin. Melvin is toast when
you're using precision or personal cancer treatments.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, you know, this kind of stuff could even be possible. Now,
it's just really really expensive to target a specific tumor
for a specific human And so the idea is hopefully
with the help of AI, they can just reduce a
lot of the you know, the cost basically for doing that,
So it becomes instead of something that's not even you know,
(20:35):
not even something worth pursuing or able to be pursued
because of finances, something' is like, oh yeah, just step
right up and we'll spit out your treatment.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah. And as more more does the cost come down,
more people use it, which means more people using it
allows for greater chance of new breakthrough. So yeah, hopefully
we're going to have cancer licked in the future. I
saw somebody suggest that it'll end up being kind of
like a chronic disease akin to diabetes in the.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Future, just something you can live fairly healthily with.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, you can manage and there'll be plenty of drugs
to keep you going amazing. You want to take a break, Yeah, okay,
well then let's do that.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
All right. Next up on the list of things that
people may one day look back and say, why did
you do it that way? Dummies of the twenty first
century is organ transplants. We have a pretty great episode
on organ transplants somewhere in our back catalog. It feels
like a long time ago. It was a little while,
but what we're basically talking about, and again, organ transplants awesome.
(22:00):
It's amazing how far they've come in the past, you know,
since they've been doing them. But rejection rates are still
an issue, up to ten to fifteen percent for kidneys
for instance. And then also the fact that you know,
transporting organs, getting them to the people in time can
still be an issue. Seventeen Americans die every day waiting
(22:22):
on organs. And it's also inequitable in that, you know,
generally people that have are the most funded, get the
most organs for transplant. But there's a better way forward, right.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, I just want to say one I found a
stat that I found rather shocking. One in five donated
kidneys goes unused. It goes to waste, even though people
die waiting for kidneys. That's just how kluge the whole
setup is right now. Yeah, So, yeah, they're trying to
fix the process and the system and the organization in
charge of that in the United States, But like further
(22:58):
down the pike on a longer timeline, the goal is organagenesis,
which is what it sounds like. It's creating entirely new
organs from cells from scratch. It's like watch this grow.
You remember those little dinosaur sponges that you added water
to and they just grew, grew, grew. It's kind of
(23:19):
like that, but with fully functioning organs.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah. How far are we away from someone trying to
grow a human out in a lab?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I'm sure somebody's probably trying it already, but I don't
know how long it'll be till they're successful.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
I mean, we had Dolly the sheep, that Dolly was
a clone, right.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yes, And I don't know if everybody's read our book,
and if you haven't, I'll just go ahead and share
with you a little fact from it. Yeah, passage of
dramatic reading. Apparently Dolly was named Dolly because she was
grown from a mammary cell. So it was a nineties
haha joke about Dolly Park.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah. I think we might have said that in the
Delli parton episode.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Didn't make or did If we did, I'll have to
go back and listen. If so, we'll edit this part out.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
No, no, no, the beers repeating, I think.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Okay, So, yes, we're a little ways off, because not
only Chuck, are we not capable of growing human from cells.
We're not capable of growing kidneys or hearts, but we
are somewhere. We've grown and successfully transplanted windpipes, bladders fairly
like simple organs and structures. But I mean simple as
(24:33):
like a relative term, because we're talking about something that
was grown from that person's own cells into the very
piece of equipment that they needed and then put in
them and it worked.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, which is remarkable. I know that they can do
this with, at least right now, the epidermis. So if
you're a burn victim, you can get your own stem
cells and you can get some new epidermis of about
to say, just skin, but they're working on growing like
the entire thickness of the skin. They're not there yet,
but they can now grow epidermis from your own stem
(25:09):
cells in a lab and they transfer it to something
called fibrine, which is a protein that really kind of
helps your blood clot when you get a cut or something,
and then they put it on your body and it
just it goes and then you're done.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah, that's it makes that sound.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
It takes you know, obviously it's a process. I was
just kidding around, But right now they can't like grow
skin that grows hair or sebaceous glands and stuff like that.
But if you're a burn victim and you can get
you know, your own epidermis to replace you know, your
scarred skin on your body, then that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
It's kind of akin to laying sod, but with skin,
you know. Sure, So right now, I think the state
of the art with organ and genesis that extra oh
trips me up and I like to add syllables. So
that's a real tricky one is growing organs in other animals,
(26:13):
And as we'll see, hopefully we're going to be moving
away from that because to take that organ from the
animal and transplant it into a human, you kill that
animal in the process, right Like you don't. You can't
take a pig's heart and be like, good luck with
the rest of your life, because it doesn't have a
rest of its life. It's missing its heart. And from
a lot of the trends that I've seen, it seems
(26:35):
like a fairly safe bet that we're moving in a
direction where animal welfare is going to become more and
more and more important to where how we treat animals
will be maybe the most critical thing that people will
of the future will look back at us on you.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Know, yeah, which that's coming up in a more robust
way in a second. But to finish this up, there's
also three D bioprinting, which is pretty amazing. I remember
telling the story one time. I've known two people in
my life who were born without an external ear, and
(27:15):
the process back then was they formed a sort of
a skeleton of the shape of an ear, and if
I'm not I'm not sure what it was made of,
I think cartilage. But if I'm not mistaken, that then
was there was like a skin bubble around it, and
then they would suck the air out of that skin
(27:37):
bubble very quickly to onto that cartilage to form you
know what looked close enough to an external ear. And
I say external like you know, the ear parts or.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Yeah, I know it's talking about.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
And I've known two people in my life that had
that done and they, you know, back in the day,
it was not like it is now. I think the
three D bioprinting of ears is much much further along
and they look much better than they used to. And
that's kind of the point, right, But they're thinking that,
you know, maybe one day we can three D bioprint
a liver.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, pretty amazing, and that'll kind of come up well
in the next section two. So I say we move
on to the next section because it does kind of
tie into what we were talking about.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Just now, that's right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
So getting meat from animals is probably something that will
really be looked down upon in the future because we
already have techniques that will that make it so we
don't really need live animals to create meat to eat meat,
and yet we're still eating meat. And that's despite and
(28:43):
I'm very much guilty of this too, that's despite knowing
how horrific and terrible factory farming is for the animals themselves,
for the environment. People just really love meat and it's
tough to give up. So rather than forcing people to
give up, there's other alternatives that people are working on
to replace. We're going to need to do that too, because, apparently, Chuck,
(29:04):
the growing demand for meat is going to be totally
unsustainable in the next couple decades.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I mean, there are statistics like the UN will
throw out that say we're going to by the year
twenty fifty, the meat demand means we're going to have
to produce fifty to one hundred percent more meat than
we do now. But there's also other people saying, like, Hey,
this whole notion of you know, wealthier countries eat meat
because they can afford it and countries that are more
(29:32):
developing eat agriculturally largely or vegetarian because they're forced to,
isn't really the case any or at least moving forward,
it looks like because what they found is the emerging
trend is that people are eating less meat once they
get enough of wealth to afford it for a bunch
of reasons, and one of which is what you're talking about,
is there's just a forever changing way that humans look
(29:56):
at animals and animal welfare for one. And also you
red meat in the fact that it's terrible for your
body is another one.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And terrible for the environment livestock raising that includes transportation,
tractor emissions, but also methane from the cow shooting ducks
all the time that it counts for fourteen and a
half percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. So it has
like this triple impact, triple negative impact on the animal's welfare,
the human body, and the health of the earth. And
(30:28):
for those reasons, it does seem like people in wealthier
countries are starting to move away from meat, and so
I think the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development they
released an Agricultural Outlook within the last couple of years
and they predicted that around twenty seventy five, the whole
world will start moving away from meat and that eventually
(30:50):
we're just going to stop eating what's called carcass meat
very appropriately altogether.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, can I tell you something really quick about a
Instagram all today. Yeah, it has to do with the
cows and the methane. Actually, our colleague, our old friend,
Tamika at work posted this, yeah, and it was a
video of a guy that was showed how they treat
bloat in cows. Have you seen this? No, when a
cow gets bloated with gas, they stick a needle into
(31:22):
the cow's stomach, releasing methane and they light that thing
so they can see a flame to judge like how
much gas is still in there. Oh wow, So there
was a video of a cow with a with a
blowtorch coming out of its side.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Essentially wow, what was the cow's expression?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Like, Well, all I saw was the cow, but the
guy who was hosting the video his expression was horrified
because he was like, you know, can you believe that
this is where we are in the world.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Yeah, I totally can believe that. That doesn't surprise me at all,
to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
And they're trying to help the cow, but it's you know,
the cows. The reason cow's there is because of factory partment.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Right. Tamiko, by the way, has one of the better
non celebrity Instagram feeds you can find.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah to me, because this is great. It's good stuff.
But what you were saying about moving away from what'd
you call it, carcass meat? Yeah, there are two main
ways that that's happening right now, and that is obviously
what they call novel vegan meat replacements, you know, fake meat,
impossible stuff, beyond stuff, and then lab grown meat, which
(32:31):
did we do a whole episode on lab grown meat?
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah? We did a while back.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
I thought so we should.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Update it like we did the recycling episode, you know,
like so much stuff has changed since total I'm sure, well,
we'll update it eventually. But lab grow meat or cultured
meat is exactly what it sounds like. You use a bioreactor,
sometimes a three D like bioprinter using animal cells to
recreate meat, and they I think the there's a consulting
(32:57):
group called at Kearney, they predict that by twenty forty,
which is not that long off everybody, the sixty percent
of global meat consumption will be from cultured or non
vegan meat replacements. Yeah, like that's significant. That's a huge change.
Like there may be countries that are developing now that
won't even eat carcass meat when they become wealthy because
(33:21):
the replacements will have become so great there'll be no
reason to eat meat.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah. You know, if you ask the CEOs of beyond
it impossible, they're going to say, then fifteen years there
will be no more eating of meat. Yeah, that's a
little ambitious, and I think that, you know, maybe they're
trying to drive up the stock price, so that's probably
not going to be the case, but that that at
Kearney group prediction, like, that's that seems quite possible.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I buy that, especially if there's a couple of challenges
that are overcome by then, which is you know, that's
seventeenth sorry, sixteen years now away, and that's plenty of
time to overcome some relative speed bumps. One is replicating no,
I think they have flavor kind of locked, at least
as far as cultured meat goes.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah, texture textures.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
The problem, because you don't want to eat like a
little a little scobie of beef that tastes just like
beef but looks like a scobi from a kombucha batch.
No one wants to eat that. And yet Japanese researchers
recently showed I think according to freethink, this great website
(34:34):
I found in twenty twenty one, they recreated a Wagoo
steak which has got some of the most complex marbling
of fat mixed in with the meat that you could
possibly ever come across, and they faithfully recreated one. I'm
sure it cost them a million and a half dollars
to make that one steak, but there was a proof
(34:54):
of concept that it can be done. The other big
challenge is right now, when you're making that Wagou steak
from cellular culture, you actually need to take it from
an unborn calf as you slaughter the mom. I don't
think the mom has to be slaughtered. I think they
just take it while they're slaughtering the mom. Yeah, and
(35:14):
that's what they used to grow meat. Right now, and
a lot of people are like, no, still, I'm not
okay with that. It's still an animal suffers somehow, some way.
And so there's a company called Meetable, a Dutch company
that said, we got this, we got our way around this.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, they made us sausage in July twenty twenty two
that was lab grown sausage, lab grown pork. But it
was it did not use I don't think we said.
What it's called fetal bovine serum. Is that blood drawn
from the cow's fetus, and that's what you said, it's
typically used, but they didn't use that at all. It
(35:52):
was you know, there was no animal involved.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, they used cells from like a live animal that
was unharmed by it.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Well yeah, yeah, that's what I meant. No, no animal
involved is in their death?
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Was not involved, right right, exactly? Yeah, the animal couldn't
have cared less either way. From what I understand they did.
They were in the process of having they were being degassed,
so they had bigger fish to fry than somebody scraping
a few cells off their hind quarters.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You know, it's like I got a blowtorch coming out
of my exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Uh, okay, I say we move on. Oh but first, Chuck,
let's take a break, because it's it's that kind of time.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Okay, we're back, Charles. We're talking about what people in
the future are going to think of us based on
the stuff we do today that may seem primitive, and
one of them might not seem well, it could seem primitive,
it'll seem quaint. Probably is driving a car yourself, Yeah,
or maybe even owning your own car, because the predictions
(37:11):
for the future are that car hailing apps will become
so ubiquitous that you're gonna need your own car less
and less and less. This is a prediction from Karas
Swisser Swisher the New York Times tech colonists. Sorry Kara,
that in not too many years, owning your own car
is going to become obsolete. And then eventually the next step.
(37:34):
This is me adding to that prediction, those cars that
pick you up when you use a ride hailing app
will not have a driver in them. You will just
get in the back and go.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah. I mean, self driving cars has been in the
news a lot over the past you know, decade or so.
I remember being in San Francisco, a couple of years
ago and seeing a car with a crazy contraption on top,
and I was like, what in the world is that?
And is that a Google Maps or a Google Earth
like thing taking pictures.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
That car's wearing braces.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Then I looked inside. It's like no, no, no, there's
no human in that car. And it kind of startled me.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
But just showing witchcraft, right.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I did. I threw a Molotov cocktail out of it
all to care of that problem. But there was a company,
I think there were you know, there's more than one
company that's trying this stuff out, but there's a company
called Cruise, which just recently in October of this year. Well,
I guess last year now of twenty twenty three, the
California state government said you can't do this, you can't
(38:40):
practice this anymore, no more driverless practicing out of you
because well, for a lot of reasons building up to
what was called the incident, but minor incidents involved things
like blocking ambulances, stopping in the middle of an intersection,
rearinding a bus, running red light, stuff like that. But
(39:02):
the big incident was when a pedestrian finally was bound
to happen, was hit in downtown San Francisco when she
was hit by another car driven by a real human,
knocked into the other lane, and then the Cruise car
apparently braked but then rolled over her anyway, pulled her forward,
(39:22):
and then stopped on top of her.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Just stopped. It was like, Okay, I'm fine, I don't
know what to do. I'm just gonna freeze right here
on top of this pedestrian. So yeah, Cruise is far
and away the only company from having problems with their
tech that they're working on. They're just the most recent
poster child of the problems with self driving cars.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah she didn't die, by the way, No, thank.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
You for saying that.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
The point of this is, though, is that despite these setbacks,
we exist in the time of setbacks. In a couple
of decades, will exist in the time where were beyond
those setbacks and we have driverless cars. These setbacks don't
mean we're never going to have driverless cars. In fact,
even people who are super skeptical of them right now
still admit we're probably going to have them at some
(40:09):
point in the future. It's just a question of when.
And it seems like we're a little further behind than
we may have thought a few years ago.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah, and you know one thing that if it's not,
I think the road there may not be as abrupt
because we already see in newer cars a lot of
like things like lane assistance, Like your car will correct
itself and steer itself back if it sees that it's
driving off the road, like if you're drowsy or you're
(40:39):
on your phone, which you should never be, so you
see like lane assistants and stuff like that. You know,
if your speed like really really changes a lot. A
lot of times cars these days will send you an
alert that says, like, you know, are you okay? Maybe
you should pull over, stuff like that. So that's sort
of like these are the intermediary steps that will lead
(41:00):
to full automation, and they've already come a long way,
but apparently, again with the help of AI, they could
go a lot further.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Yeah, eventually the cars is going to start talking to
itself and you'll feel so left out you just don't
even get in the driver's seat anymore. But the whole
point of removing humans from cars is to remove humans
from the equation of driving, not for our convenience necessarily,
but for our safety because we're our own worst enemies
when it comes to driving. You found a stat that recently,
(41:30):
it was it like twenty twenty twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Do you know it's twenty twenty one, But just over
the last few years, in general, it's been about thirty
to thirty three percent.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Of fatalities involved at least one of the drivers being drunk.
I couldn't find any statistics that also include drugs, but
just being drunk alone, thirty percent of people who die
in the United States die because one of the people
involved in that crash was drunk. That is unacceptable, but
(42:00):
it's humans. People do that. It's a terrible decision. People
think that that's not going to happen to them, and
it does, and it accounts for thousands and thousands and
thousands of deaths every year. Yeah, driverless cars don't drink.
They have other problems right now, But as we work
them out, those problems will become a part of the past,
and drunk driving accidents will become a part of the
(42:22):
past as well, which will be great for everybody.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, I mean, ninety four percent of any accident in
the United States involves some kind of human error. So
you know what I'm curious about is what the acceptable
percentage of driverless car error, because it seems like it
seems like human car error is just endlessly forgivable, to
the point where, you know, like every car these days
(42:48):
you shouldn't be able to start unless you can blow
into a breathalyzer like that technology is there.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, we're harder on computers than we are in ourselves,
is what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Huh, well exactly, So, like what if all of a sudden,
driverless cars they prove, like you know, they can reduce
total accidents by ninety percent, there would still be people saying, like,
in those ten percent of cases where someone died, it
was some AI computer or whatever.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
So it's just I don't know, just find it really
interesting that we still allow people to get into a
car after they've been drinking and drive, even though the
technology exists to stop that from happening.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Well, yeah, I think that it's a cognitive bias of ours.
We tend to focus on the more sensational, and the
more sensational. Is a car being driven by a computer
killing somebody than a drunk dude killing somebody in his car. Yeah,
So yeah, there's just removing people from the equation should
increase safety. It should also probably increase or decrease pollution
(43:48):
as a result. There's somebody who came up with the
eye popping statistic that thirty percent of the traffic in
metropolitan areas is people circling the block looking for a
place to park. If you don't own a car and
you're not driving your own car, that goes away. So
thirty percent of traffic goes away instantaneously with that, Yeah,
(44:09):
I mean that you have me right there. Yeah, yeah,
So driverless cars almost certainly coming down the pike, as
long as AI doesn't take over the world, of course,
I think we should caveat this entire episode with that
all of this is going to happen if AI doesn't
take over the world.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Okay, that's right, And we're going to finish up with
a couple of shorter ones that I think you're just
pretty awesome and interesting. One is the fact that sort
of the current thinking is that we we tend to
tie like progress as a nation, definitely in the United States,
(44:45):
but in most places around the world, to how like
robust and economy is. It's like always tied to finances
on what kind of progress we're making, and there are
people that think like sort of like with the way
we're starting to look at animals, like, you know, one
day that's not going to be the most important factor
for humans, and things like the health of the earth
(45:09):
and human beings health and well being both physically and
mentally is the you should equate that with the success
of a nation, And one day they're going to look
back and say, you remember when we all that we
cared about was the fact that the stock market was flesh.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Yeah, because we GDP just tells you whether an economy
is growing or shrinking, right, That's basically all it tells you,
And it leaves out a lot of stuff, like you said,
human well being, things like whether people are dying of
deaths of despair or whether they're generally happy, how many
(45:46):
resources are being depleted. Is anybody working on an alternative
that all of the stuff that creates that growing economy
just is totally ignored? Yeah, And I think that's what
that economist Kate Rayworth was saying, is like it's it's madness,
Like it's so ridiculous to just completely not count all
this stuff that really really counts in favor of just
(46:09):
this one metric, which is growth or shrinkage. And not
only is that probably going to be thought of as
ridiculous in the future. People younger people today, who are
becoming adults or who have recently become adults, they already
tend to think this way as a group. So it's
a pretty sure indicator that we're going to leave GDP
(46:31):
or growth behind as an indicator of the health of
an economy and start thinking more about the other stuff,
the more important stuff. And who knows what can result
from that, like what great cascading knock on effects that
that will have.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah, you found this Princeton University bioethicist named Peter Singer
who talked about the fact that the circle of concern
as humankind and advances is expanding, And that's just a
wonderful thought. And you know, you see it in everything
from the fact that you know, we've laughed before it
like the mad Men episode where people used to just
(47:10):
willingly throw litter on the ground, to you know, we
look back at that as barbaric generally. And that's just
one small example. So as as humans are evolving down
the line, that circle of concern is expanding and people
are caring about more and more things that they didn't
care about before, and that's that's great.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah. And Peter Singer, by the way, is very famous
ethicists as far as animal rights are concerned in animal welfare.
So yeah, his whole thing is like, we're gonna stop
focusing on conspicuous consumption and rather you'll be more considered
like a great person, not from your wealth, but from
your charity and your charitable giving, which would be great.
(47:52):
And then that circle of concern kind of leads us
to our last one too, because the most recent inclusion
into the circle of conc is the environment, the earth,
the health of the earth, and that this one is
just a sure give me, there is no way that
we're not going to be looked down upon for this
(48:12):
by our descendants. So that is burning fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, I mean in five hundred years, who knows, maybe sooner.
It seems like people will definitely look back and say,
I can't believe that we used to burn fossil fuels
like we did. And for a lot of reasons, not
just the you know the process of removing fossil fuels
and all that goes into that, or even the climate
(48:38):
and the ozone, which are all huge concerns obviously, but
just things like pollution and air quality and the fact
that you know that kills people and that costs so
much money in healthcare. I think there was a study
from the University of Wisconsin in Madison that said if
we stopped burning fossil fuels all together, it would have
(49:00):
about fifty thousand premature deaths per year because of air
quality alone, and about six hundred billion dollars annually and
the US alone and healthcare costs.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yeah, And I think even more than looking at us
as like dumb dumbs for ignoring that we're going to
be looked at, is kind of reviled because of the
future will have delivered our descendants because of the climate
change we just allowed to happen.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
I saw who estimate that two hundred and fifty thousand
additional deaths per year are expected to come each year
between twenty thirty and twenty fifty because of climate change
from things like heat stress, malnutrition, insect born diseases. That
an additional quarter of a million people are going to
(49:46):
die every year because of climate change starting six years
from now. That's nuts. So I can only imagine what
the people of you know, twenty one hundred are going
to think of us. Hopefully they'll have everything under control
by then, but they're probably going to be pretty ticked
off that they had to go to the trouble.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah. I mean, you can see this coming because it
already happens now once again by seeing younger generations already
looking at previous generations as barbaric and how we treat
the earth.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
For sure, I saw an RHS financial estimate or prediction
that the oil market will collapse this decade that we're
just based on trends, current trends now and the way
people think now that probably we won't be using oil
nearly as much in the next ten twenty years.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Very interesting.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, the future is interesting, Chuck, And it is the future.
As a matter of fact. It's almost twenty twenty four,
and I just want to say happy new year to everybody.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Huh, that's right, Happy new year everyone. We thank you
once again for your support. We say it all the time.
If there was no U, that would be no US.
We are always grateful that we are allowed to do
this job because you listen.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
Yeah, thank you, and happy new year to everyone. Happy
birthday to you me Andy Birthday, Thanks Chuck, and we'll
see you guys next year. And if you want to
get in touch with this in the interim, in this
very short time left in twenty twenty three, you can
do it via email almost instantaneously. Wrap it up, spank
it on the bottom, put a sash onto this says
twenty twenty four, and send it off to Stuff podcast
(51:22):
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, everybody out there in the Pacific Northwest or with
access to an airport or a car rental place that
can get you to the Pacific Northwest specifically at the
end of January. We'll see you in Seattle, Portland, and
San Francisco.
Speaker 2 (00:14):
That's right to. Our new live show for twenty twenty
four is Seattle, Washington January twenty fourth at the Paramount Theater,
then Portland at our Homeway from Home at Revolution Hall
in the twenty fifth, and then winding it all up
at Sketchfest on the twenty six at the Sydney Goldstein Theater.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Very nice. If you want tickets, if you want information,
if you want tickets, you can go to a couple
of places. You can go to our link tree at
Linktree slash sysk, and you can go to our home
on the web, Stuff youshould Know dot com. Click on
the tour button and it'll take you to all of
the beautiful places you can go to buy your tickets
and we'll see you guys in January.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (01:01):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's
Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is stuff you
should know, the last edition of the two to the
to the Deuce Tray.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
Oh, is this our final of the year?
Speaker 1 (01:16):
It is. It's the last one of twenty twenty three, Chuck.
We recorded all of the episodes that we're ever going
to record in the year twenty twenty three. Isn't that amazing?
Speaker 2 (01:25):
Yeah? And hey, you know, since you brought that up,
can I say something?
Speaker 1 (01:29):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (01:30):
Spotify, who carries our show, as do all platforms, they
have this really cool thing they send out called the
wrap Wrap I guess is in year end wrap up
kind of thing, and they they sent us as a
show our own statistical analysis, but then they send individual
users their own and we just had a lot of
(01:53):
great listeners sending us in their rap statistics like hey,
I'm in the top one percent of stuff you should
know listenership, And it was just really neat to see
all that stuff coming in, So thank you.
Speaker 1 (02:05):
It really is. It's amazing and everybody's so proud of it.
It's so great to see. So no matter what percentage
you're in, if you are proud enough to send an
email or post it, kudos to you, because we're proud
of you right back. I do think, though, Chuck, that
we probably should shout out the person who wrote in
with the far and away the largest number of listening
(02:27):
minutes according to Spotify.
Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, who's that?
Speaker 1 (02:30):
That is Aravin Cancerla, who is in the top point
zero five percent of listeners and based on the eighty
thousand plus eighty six, seven hundred and seventy two minutes,
I don't see how there could be anybody else in that,
you know, in the remaining what point zero's five percent left?
Speaker 2 (02:55):
Yeah. I did a little back of the envelope math
and that that's something somewhere between twenty five and thirty
hours of stuff you should know a week.
Speaker 1 (03:03):
Yeah, that just it's a lot.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Doesn't seem possible. So I have suspicions that this person
might have just played it on a loop so they could,
you know, and then just went out shopping or whatever.
Speaker 1 (03:14):
I don't know. I think Aravin strikes me as a
pretty straightforward person. So grats to Airvind and also seriously,
thank you to everybody who listens to us so much
that you get statistics at the end of the year
that make you proud. I mean, that's amazing, guys. Thank
you very much.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Yeah, thanks to Spotify. That's a cool service that they
or I don't know if is that a service, whatevers
cool thing they do.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
It's a service, it's a public service.
Speaker 2 (03:39):
We were downloaded in one hundred and sixty three countries.
Speaker 1 (03:43):
Oh, I didn't know there were that many countries.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Which is we looked it up. It was actually something
like one hundred and ninety. So like that's most of
the countries.
Speaker 1 (03:50):
Yeah, I would say that's the vast majority of them.
And by the way, everybody I knew that there were
more countries than that.
Speaker 2 (03:56):
I was joking and quickly I saw that. I don't
know if you went through that yet, Josh, but we
our third biggest country of growth was Mexico. Oh, no way,
And I'm gaming. I'm gaming. I'm aiming for a show
in Mexico City. I'd like to do that. We just
don't know if like people would come. So, you know,
(04:17):
if we can get like a thousand people in a
room in Mexico City, I think that might be a
fun thing to do.
Speaker 1 (04:22):
Yeah, especially if it's a room with seats.
Speaker 2 (04:25):
Yeah, so we should get at least five hundred emails
saying at least two people will come and then that
means we might go all right, So anyway, should we
get on with barbaric practices?
Speaker 1 (04:38):
Yeah, let's because I find this endlessly fascinating. Olivia helped
us with this, and basically what we're doing here is
reversing what we already kind of like to do smugly,
which is look back fifty one hundred, two hundred years
and be like, look at how backwards and antiquated those
people were back then, Like even in as recent is
(05:00):
the nineties. I remember in the mid nineties, I was
I smoked on an airplane on the way to Amsterdam. Yeah,
and like there was it was just like the last
three rows were smoking. But it's not like it was
sectioned off. There wasn't even a curtain. It's just like
this is the smoking section, even though the entire plane's
being covered in your cigarette smoke. This was the nineties, man.
Speaker 2 (05:22):
Yeah, the first time I flew to Europe there was
smoking in like that was it would have been ninety six.
Speaker 1 (05:29):
Yeah, I mean imagine that today. I mean you would
literally go to federal prison if you tried to light
a cigarette on an airplane today.
Speaker 3 (05:38):
You know, Yeah, I mean it's about the fire, but sure, yeah,
a few decades before that there was jello salad where
it was all the rage and like the weirdest jello salad.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
If you've never just kind of taken a stroll down
memory lane and looked up like pictures of jello molds
from the fifties to the seventies, yeah, treat yourself and
go do that. But make sure you have not had
lunch yet, because you're gonna want to gag when you
see a lot of them. That's another fun thing to
judge people for being stupid with cello because I don't
know if we said it yet. We're going to do
the opposite. We're going to look forward and try to
(06:11):
figure out what our descendants are going to ridicule us
or look down at us about, right, what will we
seem primitive or barbaric or ridiculous about?
Speaker 2 (06:22):
That's right? But what we have before us are seven.
I think a little more serious things than jello molds
and spanking kids is on up there. However, it really
depends on who you ask, because about half of Americans
still think and this is a quote, and this from
(06:44):
a survey a couple of years ago from the American
Family Survey quote, it is sometimes necessary to discipline a
child with a good, hard spanking, and half.
Speaker 1 (06:55):
Of those respondents said almost under their breath feels so right.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Yeah, I mean, big change from you know, back in
the day. They have another stat from sixty eight when
ninety four percent of parents said, yeah, hit your kids,
it's awesome.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
You drop. That's a big drop.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
But things are really changing because a third of the
respondents between eighteen and twenty nine agree with spanking, compared
to fifty percent of the overall survey. So it's something
that's going out of fashion for sure.
Speaker 1 (07:27):
Yeah, it seems to be following a larger trend of
moving away from social acceptance of violence in any form,
and it's being supported by studies that find like, yeah,
it's actually good if you don't spank your kids, because
not only has there never been a study that shows
it improves children's behavior, study after study keeps suggesting it
(07:50):
does the opposite. It actually maladjusts children. I mean, I
can't imagine what a well adjusted person I would be
if I hadn't been spanked that handful of times when
I was a kid.
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Yeah, you know, I was. We're always trying to poke
around to find, you know, the other opinion on something,
just to take a look at it, and you know
there are people who don't agree. I saw this one
professor from the Oklahoma State Robert Larzelli. I can't even
read my handwriting now, but he said that the studies
(08:21):
that are out there are flawed for a couple of reasons. One,
he says, these studies that say that if you spank
kids more, there that leads to them actually acting out more.
He's saying, no, kids, it's the kids that are acting
out more that are it's a chicken in the egg thing. Yes,
I've seen the ones getting spanked more.
Speaker 1 (08:39):
I've seen that, and I think I found in a
Scientific American article there was at least one group that
managed to control for that and basically have shown like, no,
it's it's it actually does have this effect on kids.
The problem that what'd you say, Lara Zelli?
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I think so if my writing is any indicator.
Speaker 1 (09:03):
That what Larazzelli's saying is that these studies don't they
don't start following kids and from like birth to twenty
five or thirty and then see you know where you spanked,
where you're not spanked it's all just like they might.
They might peek in on a kid who's in at
the spanking age and look at their behavior. Then you
(09:24):
just can't parse it apart. So there's not really good
quality studies. But I saw it put like this. Even
if there are no studies that conclusively show spanking is
bad for kids or produces malajusted behavior in kids, there
are plenty of studies that seem to suggest that. There
(09:47):
aren't any studies that seem to suggest otherwise that it's
it's actually good, it's actually it's effective to spank your kids.
And so the argument that I've seen is like, why
why do it? Then?
Speaker 2 (10:00):
Yeah, I saw a First of all, I'm a parent.
I can't in a million years imagine hitting Ruby for
any reason that's nice. It makes me want to cry
just thinking about that. It's terrible for our family. But
I did find a study from twenty eighteen that I
found in from NPR. They didn't do the study, but
(10:23):
they were, you know, did a thing on it.
Speaker 1 (10:25):
I'm sure they were hot and heavy.
Speaker 2 (10:27):
Oh of course it was what they claim. And it
seems like probably one of the most robust studies at
least that looks at countries that have banned spanking, because
I think something like sixty two countries have banned spanking
starting with Sweden in nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 1 (10:47):
Did you even know there were that many countries?
Speaker 2 (10:51):
But they followed four or they used four hundred thousand
children from kids from eighty eight countries, so that's pretty good.
Fifty eight countries have the bands in thirty don't. I'm
not sure which one it is. But what they found
when what they were tracking was incidences of kids fighting,
like you know, getting in fights at school, right and
in the countries that have banned spanking, there was a
(11:16):
school fighting reduction by sixty nine percent in boys in girls,
which is I mean, that is pretty substantial. I was
curious about the United States because you know, we both
grew up, like my dad was my elementary school principal,
and they were he spanked me and other kids. It's
ridiculous to think about, but apparently in seventy seven the
(11:39):
Supreme Court of the United States gave the power to
the states. These days, ninety percent of schools don't use
corporal punishment, but it is still legal in seventeen states.
There are restrictions in place in a lot of those
like maybe your parents have to sign a thing. I said, sure,
hit my kid. But seventeen percent of states you can
(12:02):
still do this, with Mississippi leading the way in the
most spankings. And the other thing I found out that
we should point out is that black males are twice
as likely to be spanked than anyone. And get this,
sixteen point five percent of kids that are corporately punished
(12:24):
in schools in America today are disabled. My god, usually
it's an intellectual disability. Wow. Is that so not disturbing?
Speaker 1 (12:35):
Yeah, of course it's disturbing. That's horrible. That's one of
the most horrible statistics you've ever spouted out. And I
should say, also just want to verify for the listeners
in any of those sixty two countries where spanking is banned,
you're talking about like public spanking, like in school in
seventeen states. In schools, you're allowed to do that.
Speaker 2 (12:55):
Right, Yes, a teacher or a principal and they say
it's you know. And this is one of the other
problems that that professor had is that those studies, he says,
lump everyone in together as in, like the parents who
do it as the very last resort after several other
attempts at discipline or parents are just like, oh, you
(13:15):
screwed up, you know, let's hit you or whatever. And
apparently most, you know, almost all the schools, it is
a last resort, as in they've tried other things, but
you know, it's just I don't know, I got to
try not to judge people, but don't hit your kids.
Speaker 1 (13:32):
Well, I was gonna say, it's it's legal in seventeen
states for schools to spank kids. It's legal in all
fifty states for a parent to spank kids. That's there's
not really anything coming down the horizon that makes it
seem like that's ever going to be banned. But it
does seem generationally like we're moving away from spanking pretty rapidly.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
Yeah, my spankings as a kid, we're very infrequent and
very organized, as in it was never done in the
heat of anger, like just getting slapped or something. It
was like, all right, go to the bathroom and spend
ten minutes, you know, upset and card and then I
got spanked with a bolo paddle. You know, the little
(14:15):
bolo paddle games.
Speaker 1 (14:16):
I know, the bolo tie.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
No, the bolo paddle where you a little light plywood
paddle with a ball hard. Yeah, sure, that's that was
the spanking device.
Speaker 1 (14:25):
In mind, those things are made of like balsa wood.
Speaker 2 (14:28):
Yeah, it wasn't you bad. It's stung.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
But you know, how about all of your spankings that
had grown.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
Up that's usually involves leather.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Okay, you you want to move on to the next one.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Yeah, let's let's move on to chemotherapy.
Speaker 1 (14:43):
Okay. So chemotherapy is one of these things where, if
you start kind of putting it down today, what you're
talking about is our current modern medical miracle that since
the nineties has reduced the cancer death rate by twenty
five percent. Yeah, it's it's a really big deal that
we have chemotherapy now, it's saved a lot of lives.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
Yeah, this is not poopoo in chemotherapy.
Speaker 1 (15:07):
No, it's not the reason why we can probably guess
that our descendants down the line are going to look
at chemotherapy is fairly primitive and barbaric is because it's
so indiscriminate in how it harms the body. It harms
the whole body in order to kill the cancer cells. Right,
(15:30):
and we're moving it seems like much more toward far,
far more specific and tailored medicine, and so all of
the side effects, in the horribleness that come with chemotherapy,
even though it does save lives, will be going away
in future decades.
Speaker 2 (15:45):
It looks like, yeah, and it seems like and we're
going to talk about a few ways that things are
becoming more specific, but that seems to be the way
it's all trying to go is instead of just like
killing all the cells, let's see if they can just
specifically target cancer cells and then eventually, you know, get
down to you know, the human specific targeting of things,
(16:08):
which would be amazing obviously, yeah, you know, patient specific, right.
But one of the first ones is antibody drug conjugates,
and this is a type of chemotherapy, but it combines chemotherapy,
like the drugs used in chemotherapy, with monoclonal antibodies, which
are you know, lab just like antibodies that we have
(16:29):
in our body, except they're created in a lab.
Speaker 1 (16:31):
Right, And so what happens is we inject these drugs,
these antibody drug conjugates into a patient with cancer, and
those antibodies are designed to go seek out that tumor
the specific kind of tumor that that patient has, Yeah,
and attached to that tumor, that cancer sell and it
(16:52):
delivers that payload of chemo drugs to it, says here
you go, here's a nice little present, and then turns
around and runs, and then in the background, the cell
explodes and the antibody like ends up on its chest
but lives to fight another day.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
Yeah, exactly. That's if we're headed in that direction. That's fantastic. Yeah.
Vaccines is another one, the mr NA vaccines that we
detailed back when those came out for COVID. Two of
the most successful versions of those vaccines were originally brought
about to begin with as tumor vaccines, and the idea
(17:29):
is to use sort of that same technology to just
specifically target tumors themselves. So it's not like a vaccine
to prevent a disease. It's a shot that will essentially
specifically shrink a tumor.
Speaker 1 (17:43):
Yeah, just like the mRNA vaccines for COVID train the
body to look for and respond to COVID viruses, saying like, hey,
if you see anything with this little horn on it,
the spike, go after it. They're doing the same thing
with tumors, right, So that's boosting the immune response. It's
also training immune response. So technically it does qualify as
a vaccine. And because like we talked about in the
(18:05):
COVID vaccine episode, this mRNA technology is just so you
can just it's just like ready to wear vaccines basically.
Speaker 2 (18:15):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
Apparently, yeah, apparently they they have reached a turning point
and in the next five years a lot of cancer
researchers are saying We're going to see a lot more
cancer vaccines coming down the pike.
Speaker 2 (18:30):
Amazing. And then what I talked about earlier, like making
like targeting cancer cell specifically is like a great direction
to go, but really getting into personalized cancer care will
be the next step beyond that, Like, hey, I'm going
to identify exactly what kind of tumor that you have
(18:50):
in your body and not just maybe this kind of
tumor and you know, treat like get to patient specific
levels of treatment. And you know, I know we poo
pooed AI in certain respects, but this is a place
where AI can really probably do a lot of good.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, I think we should just clarify or position on
it if I can speak for both of us. Sure,
as long as AI is not taking over the world
or damaging humanity in some terrible way. I'm all for
all the great ways that can help things, and this
is a really sterling example of that.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
Yeah, it gave us a new Beatles song.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
Yeah, I would say that's right in the middle for me.
But the I think what you were talking about was
taking a sample of the specific tumor that a specific
person has, analyzing its genetic makeup, and then looking at
that genetic makeup thanks to AI spitting out all of
the information that we need from analyzing that huge genome,
(19:51):
saying oh, this is an achilles heel, this is another weakness,
this is another way we can attack it, and then
tailoring the treatment for that specific tumor like that tumor,
Like you said, now that kind of tumor that tumor
is getting at tech. It's so specific you could name
the tumor, name the tumor Melvin. Melvin is toast when
you're using precision or personal cancer treatments.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Yeah, you know, this kind of stuff could even be possible. Now,
it's just really really expensive to target a specific tumor
for a specific human And so the idea is hopefully
with the help of AI, they can just reduce a
lot of the you know, the cost basically for doing that,
So it becomes instead of something that's not even you know,
(20:35):
not even something worth pursuing or able to be pursued
because of finances, something' is like, oh yeah, just step
right up and we'll spit out your treatment.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
Yeah. And as more more does the cost come down,
more people use it, which means more people using it
allows for greater chance of new breakthrough. So yeah, hopefully
we're going to have cancer licked in the future. I
saw somebody suggest that it'll end up being kind of
like a chronic disease akin to diabetes in the.
Speaker 2 (21:03):
Future, just something you can live fairly healthily with.
Speaker 1 (21:07):
Yeah, you can manage and there'll be plenty of drugs
to keep you going amazing. You want to take a break, Yeah, okay,
well then let's do that.
Speaker 2 (21:36):
All right. Next up on the list of things that
people may one day look back and say, why did
you do it that way? Dummies of the twenty first
century is organ transplants. We have a pretty great episode
on organ transplants somewhere in our back catalog. It feels
like a long time ago. It was a little while,
but what we're basically talking about, and again, organ transplants awesome.
(22:00):
It's amazing how far they've come in the past, you know,
since they've been doing them. But rejection rates are still
an issue, up to ten to fifteen percent for kidneys
for instance. And then also the fact that you know,
transporting organs, getting them to the people in time can
still be an issue. Seventeen Americans die every day waiting
(22:22):
on organs. And it's also inequitable in that, you know,
generally people that have are the most funded, get the
most organs for transplant. But there's a better way forward, right.
Speaker 1 (22:35):
Yeah, I just want to say one I found a
stat that I found rather shocking. One in five donated
kidneys goes unused. It goes to waste, even though people
die waiting for kidneys. That's just how kluge the whole
setup is right now. Yeah, So, yeah, they're trying to
fix the process and the system and the organization in
charge of that in the United States, But like further
(22:58):
down the pike on a longer timeline, the goal is organagenesis,
which is what it sounds like. It's creating entirely new
organs from cells from scratch. It's like watch this grow.
You remember those little dinosaur sponges that you added water
to and they just grew, grew, grew. It's kind of
(23:19):
like that, but with fully functioning organs.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Yeah. How far are we away from someone trying to
grow a human out in a lab?
Speaker 1 (23:30):
I'm sure somebody's probably trying it already, but I don't
know how long it'll be till they're successful.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
I mean, we had Dolly the sheep, that Dolly was
a clone, right.
Speaker 1 (23:39):
Yes, And I don't know if everybody's read our book,
and if you haven't, I'll just go ahead and share
with you a little fact from it. Yeah, passage of
dramatic reading. Apparently Dolly was named Dolly because she was
grown from a mammary cell. So it was a nineties
haha joke about Dolly Park.
Speaker 2 (24:00):
Yeah. I think we might have said that in the
Delli parton episode.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
Didn't make or did If we did, I'll have to
go back and listen. If so, we'll edit this part out.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
No, no, no, the beers repeating, I think.
Speaker 1 (24:10):
Okay, So, yes, we're a little ways off, because not
only Chuck, are we not capable of growing human from cells.
We're not capable of growing kidneys or hearts, but we
are somewhere. We've grown and successfully transplanted windpipes, bladders fairly
like simple organs and structures. But I mean simple as
(24:33):
like a relative term, because we're talking about something that
was grown from that person's own cells into the very
piece of equipment that they needed and then put in
them and it worked.
Speaker 2 (24:45):
Yeah, which is remarkable. I know that they can do
this with, at least right now, the epidermis. So if
you're a burn victim, you can get your own stem
cells and you can get some new epidermis of about
to say, just skin, but they're working on growing like
the entire thickness of the skin. They're not there yet,
but they can now grow epidermis from your own stem
(25:09):
cells in a lab and they transfer it to something
called fibrine, which is a protein that really kind of
helps your blood clot when you get a cut or something,
and then they put it on your body and it
just it goes and then you're done.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
Yeah, that's it makes that sound.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
It takes you know, obviously it's a process. I was
just kidding around, But right now they can't like grow
skin that grows hair or sebaceous glands and stuff like that.
But if you're a burn victim and you can get
you know, your own epidermis to replace you know, your
scarred skin on your body, then that's pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (25:49):
It's kind of akin to laying sod, but with skin,
you know. Sure, So right now, I think the state
of the art with organ and genesis that extra oh
trips me up and I like to add syllables. So
that's a real tricky one is growing organs in other animals,
(26:13):
And as we'll see, hopefully we're going to be moving
away from that because to take that organ from the
animal and transplant it into a human, you kill that
animal in the process, right Like you don't. You can't
take a pig's heart and be like, good luck with
the rest of your life, because it doesn't have a
rest of its life. It's missing its heart. And from
a lot of the trends that I've seen, it seems
(26:35):
like a fairly safe bet that we're moving in a
direction where animal welfare is going to become more and
more and more important to where how we treat animals
will be maybe the most critical thing that people will
of the future will look back at us on you.
Speaker 2 (26:53):
Know, yeah, which that's coming up in a more robust
way in a second. But to finish this up, there's
also three D bioprinting, which is pretty amazing. I remember
telling the story one time. I've known two people in
my life who were born without an external ear, and
(27:15):
the process back then was they formed a sort of
a skeleton of the shape of an ear, and if
I'm not I'm not sure what it was made of,
I think cartilage. But if I'm not mistaken, that then
was there was like a skin bubble around it, and
then they would suck the air out of that skin
(27:37):
bubble very quickly to onto that cartilage to form you
know what looked close enough to an external ear. And
I say external like you know, the ear parts or.
Speaker 1 (27:49):
Yeah, I know it's talking about.
Speaker 2 (27:51):
And I've known two people in my life that had
that done and they, you know, back in the day,
it was not like it is now. I think the
three D bioprinting of ears is much much further along
and they look much better than they used to. And
that's kind of the point, right, But they're thinking that,
you know, maybe one day we can three D bioprint
a liver.
Speaker 1 (28:10):
Yeah, pretty amazing, and that'll kind of come up well
in the next section two. So I say we move
on to the next section because it does kind of
tie into what we were talking about.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
Just now, that's right, let's do it.
Speaker 1 (28:21):
So getting meat from animals is probably something that will
really be looked down upon in the future because we
already have techniques that will that make it so we
don't really need live animals to create meat to eat meat,
and yet we're still eating meat. And that's despite and
(28:43):
I'm very much guilty of this too, that's despite knowing
how horrific and terrible factory farming is for the animals themselves,
for the environment. People just really love meat and it's
tough to give up. So rather than forcing people to
give up, there's other alternatives that people are working on
to replace. We're going to need to do that too, because, apparently, Chuck,
(29:04):
the growing demand for meat is going to be totally
unsustainable in the next couple decades.
Speaker 2 (29:10):
Yeah, I mean, there are statistics like the UN will
throw out that say we're going to by the year
twenty fifty, the meat demand means we're going to have
to produce fifty to one hundred percent more meat than
we do now. But there's also other people saying, like, Hey,
this whole notion of you know, wealthier countries eat meat
because they can afford it and countries that are more
(29:32):
developing eat agriculturally largely or vegetarian because they're forced to,
isn't really the case any or at least moving forward,
it looks like because what they found is the emerging
trend is that people are eating less meat once they
get enough of wealth to afford it for a bunch
of reasons, and one of which is what you're talking about,
is there's just a forever changing way that humans look
(29:56):
at animals and animal welfare for one. And also you
red meat in the fact that it's terrible for your
body is another one.
Speaker 1 (30:04):
And terrible for the environment livestock raising that includes transportation,
tractor emissions, but also methane from the cow shooting ducks
all the time that it counts for fourteen and a
half percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. So it has
like this triple impact, triple negative impact on the animal's welfare,
the human body, and the health of the earth. And
(30:28):
for those reasons, it does seem like people in wealthier
countries are starting to move away from meat, and so
I think the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development they
released an Agricultural Outlook within the last couple of years
and they predicted that around twenty seventy five, the whole
world will start moving away from meat and that eventually
(30:50):
we're just going to stop eating what's called carcass meat
very appropriately altogether.
Speaker 2 (30:56):
Yeah, can I tell you something really quick about a
Instagram all today. Yeah, it has to do with the
cows and the methane. Actually, our colleague, our old friend,
Tamika at work posted this, yeah, and it was a
video of a guy that was showed how they treat
bloat in cows. Have you seen this? No, when a
cow gets bloated with gas, they stick a needle into
(31:22):
the cow's stomach, releasing methane and they light that thing
so they can see a flame to judge like how
much gas is still in there. Oh wow, So there
was a video of a cow with a with a
blowtorch coming out of its side.
Speaker 1 (31:38):
Essentially wow, what was the cow's expression?
Speaker 2 (31:41):
Like, Well, all I saw was the cow, but the
guy who was hosting the video his expression was horrified
because he was like, you know, can you believe that
this is where we are in the world.
Speaker 1 (31:52):
Yeah, I totally can believe that. That doesn't surprise me at all,
to tell you the truth.
Speaker 2 (31:56):
And they're trying to help the cow, but it's you know,
the cows. The reason cow's there is because of factory partment.
Speaker 1 (32:02):
Right. Tamiko, by the way, has one of the better
non celebrity Instagram feeds you can find.
Speaker 2 (32:08):
Yeah to me, because this is great. It's good stuff.
But what you were saying about moving away from what'd
you call it, carcass meat? Yeah, there are two main
ways that that's happening right now, and that is obviously
what they call novel vegan meat replacements, you know, fake meat,
impossible stuff, beyond stuff, and then lab grown meat, which
(32:31):
did we do a whole episode on lab grown meat?
Speaker 1 (32:32):
Yeah? We did a while back.
Speaker 2 (32:34):
I thought so we should.
Speaker 1 (32:35):
Update it like we did the recycling episode, you know,
like so much stuff has changed since total I'm sure, well,
we'll update it eventually. But lab grow meat or cultured
meat is exactly what it sounds like. You use a bioreactor,
sometimes a three D like bioprinter using animal cells to
recreate meat, and they I think the there's a consulting
(32:57):
group called at Kearney, they predict that by twenty forty,
which is not that long off everybody, the sixty percent
of global meat consumption will be from cultured or non
vegan meat replacements. Yeah, like that's significant. That's a huge change.
Like there may be countries that are developing now that
won't even eat carcass meat when they become wealthy because
(33:21):
the replacements will have become so great there'll be no
reason to eat meat.
Speaker 2 (33:26):
Yeah. You know, if you ask the CEOs of beyond
it impossible, they're going to say, then fifteen years there
will be no more eating of meat. Yeah, that's a
little ambitious, and I think that, you know, maybe they're
trying to drive up the stock price, so that's probably
not going to be the case, but that that at
Kearney group prediction, like, that's that seems quite possible.
Speaker 1 (33:50):
I buy that, especially if there's a couple of challenges
that are overcome by then, which is you know, that's
seventeenth sorry, sixteen years now away, and that's plenty of
time to overcome some relative speed bumps. One is replicating no,
I think they have flavor kind of locked, at least
as far as cultured meat goes.
Speaker 2 (34:10):
Yeah, texture textures.
Speaker 1 (34:13):
The problem, because you don't want to eat like a
little a little scobie of beef that tastes just like
beef but looks like a scobi from a kombucha batch.
No one wants to eat that. And yet Japanese researchers
recently showed I think according to freethink, this great website
(34:34):
I found in twenty twenty one, they recreated a Wagoo
steak which has got some of the most complex marbling
of fat mixed in with the meat that you could
possibly ever come across, and they faithfully recreated one. I'm
sure it cost them a million and a half dollars
to make that one steak, but there was a proof
(34:54):
of concept that it can be done. The other big
challenge is right now, when you're making that Wagou steak
from cellular culture, you actually need to take it from
an unborn calf as you slaughter the mom. I don't
think the mom has to be slaughtered. I think they
just take it while they're slaughtering the mom. Yeah, and
(35:14):
that's what they used to grow meat. Right now, and
a lot of people are like, no, still, I'm not
okay with that. It's still an animal suffers somehow, some way.
And so there's a company called Meetable, a Dutch company
that said, we got this, we got our way around this.
Speaker 2 (35:31):
Yeah, they made us sausage in July twenty twenty two
that was lab grown sausage, lab grown pork. But it
was it did not use I don't think we said.
What it's called fetal bovine serum. Is that blood drawn
from the cow's fetus, and that's what you said, it's
typically used, but they didn't use that at all. It
(35:52):
was you know, there was no animal involved.
Speaker 1 (35:56):
Yeah, they used cells from like a live animal that
was unharmed by it.
Speaker 2 (36:00):
Well yeah, yeah, that's what I meant. No, no animal
involved is in their death?
Speaker 1 (36:04):
Was not involved, right right, exactly? Yeah, the animal couldn't
have cared less either way. From what I understand they did.
They were in the process of having they were being degassed,
so they had bigger fish to fry than somebody scraping
a few cells off their hind quarters.
Speaker 2 (36:18):
You know, it's like I got a blowtorch coming out
of my exactly.
Speaker 1 (36:22):
Uh, okay, I say we move on. Oh but first, Chuck,
let's take a break, because it's it's that kind of time.
Speaker 2 (36:29):
Let's do it.
Speaker 1 (36:51):
Okay, we're back, Charles. We're talking about what people in
the future are going to think of us based on
the stuff we do today that may seem primitive, and
one of them might not seem well, it could seem primitive,
it'll seem quaint. Probably is driving a car yourself, Yeah,
or maybe even owning your own car, because the predictions
(37:11):
for the future are that car hailing apps will become
so ubiquitous that you're gonna need your own car less
and less and less. This is a prediction from Karas
Swisser Swisher the New York Times tech colonists. Sorry Kara,
that in not too many years, owning your own car
is going to become obsolete. And then eventually the next step.
(37:34):
This is me adding to that prediction, those cars that
pick you up when you use a ride hailing app
will not have a driver in them. You will just
get in the back and go.
Speaker 2 (37:44):
Yeah. I mean, self driving cars has been in the
news a lot over the past you know, decade or so.
I remember being in San Francisco, a couple of years
ago and seeing a car with a crazy contraption on top,
and I was like, what in the world is that?
And is that a Google Maps or a Google Earth
like thing taking pictures.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
That car's wearing braces.
Speaker 2 (38:07):
Then I looked inside. It's like no, no, no, there's
no human in that car. And it kind of startled me.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
But just showing witchcraft, right.
Speaker 2 (38:16):
I did. I threw a Molotov cocktail out of it
all to care of that problem. But there was a company,
I think there were you know, there's more than one
company that's trying this stuff out, but there's a company
called Cruise, which just recently in October of this year. Well,
I guess last year now of twenty twenty three, the
California state government said you can't do this, you can't
(38:40):
practice this anymore, no more driverless practicing out of you
because well, for a lot of reasons building up to
what was called the incident, but minor incidents involved things
like blocking ambulances, stopping in the middle of an intersection,
rearinding a bus, running red light, stuff like that. But
(39:02):
the big incident was when a pedestrian finally was bound
to happen, was hit in downtown San Francisco when she
was hit by another car driven by a real human,
knocked into the other lane, and then the Cruise car
apparently braked but then rolled over her anyway, pulled her forward,
(39:22):
and then stopped on top of her.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
Just stopped. It was like, Okay, I'm fine, I don't
know what to do. I'm just gonna freeze right here
on top of this pedestrian. So yeah, Cruise is far
and away the only company from having problems with their
tech that they're working on. They're just the most recent
poster child of the problems with self driving cars.
Speaker 2 (39:43):
Yeah she didn't die, by the way, No, thank.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
You for saying that.
Speaker 2 (39:46):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
The point of this is, though, is that despite these setbacks,
we exist in the time of setbacks. In a couple
of decades, will exist in the time where were beyond
those setbacks and we have driverless cars. These setbacks don't
mean we're never going to have driverless cars. In fact,
even people who are super skeptical of them right now
still admit we're probably going to have them at some
(40:09):
point in the future. It's just a question of when.
And it seems like we're a little further behind than
we may have thought a few years ago.
Speaker 2 (40:18):
Yeah, and you know one thing that if it's not,
I think the road there may not be as abrupt
because we already see in newer cars a lot of
like things like lane assistance, Like your car will correct
itself and steer itself back if it sees that it's
driving off the road, like if you're drowsy or you're
(40:39):
on your phone, which you should never be, so you
see like lane assistants and stuff like that. You know,
if your speed like really really changes a lot. A
lot of times cars these days will send you an
alert that says, like, you know, are you okay? Maybe
you should pull over, stuff like that. So that's sort
of like these are the intermediary steps that will lead
(41:00):
to full automation, and they've already come a long way,
but apparently, again with the help of AI, they could
go a lot further.
Speaker 1 (41:07):
Yeah, eventually the cars is going to start talking to
itself and you'll feel so left out you just don't
even get in the driver's seat anymore. But the whole
point of removing humans from cars is to remove humans
from the equation of driving, not for our convenience necessarily,
but for our safety because we're our own worst enemies
when it comes to driving. You found a stat that recently,
(41:30):
it was it like twenty twenty twenty twenty one.
Speaker 2 (41:32):
Do you know it's twenty twenty one, But just over
the last few years, in general, it's been about thirty
to thirty three percent.
Speaker 1 (41:39):
Of fatalities involved at least one of the drivers being drunk.
I couldn't find any statistics that also include drugs, but
just being drunk alone, thirty percent of people who die
in the United States die because one of the people
involved in that crash was drunk. That is unacceptable, but
(42:00):
it's humans. People do that. It's a terrible decision. People
think that that's not going to happen to them, and
it does, and it accounts for thousands and thousands and
thousands of deaths every year. Yeah, driverless cars don't drink.
They have other problems right now, But as we work
them out, those problems will become a part of the past,
and drunk driving accidents will become a part of the
(42:22):
past as well, which will be great for everybody.
Speaker 2 (42:24):
Yeah, I mean, ninety four percent of any accident in
the United States involves some kind of human error. So
you know what I'm curious about is what the acceptable
percentage of driverless car error, because it seems like it
seems like human car error is just endlessly forgivable, to
the point where, you know, like every car these days
(42:48):
you shouldn't be able to start unless you can blow
into a breathalyzer like that technology is there.
Speaker 1 (42:54):
Yeah, we're harder on computers than we are in ourselves,
is what you're saying.
Speaker 2 (42:57):
Huh, well exactly, So, like what if all of a sudden,
driverless cars they prove, like you know, they can reduce
total accidents by ninety percent, there would still be people saying, like,
in those ten percent of cases where someone died, it
was some AI computer or whatever.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (43:13):
So it's just I don't know, just find it really
interesting that we still allow people to get into a
car after they've been drinking and drive, even though the
technology exists to stop that from happening.
Speaker 1 (43:24):
Well, yeah, I think that it's a cognitive bias of ours.
We tend to focus on the more sensational, and the
more sensational. Is a car being driven by a computer
killing somebody than a drunk dude killing somebody in his car. Yeah,
So yeah, there's just removing people from the equation should
increase safety. It should also probably increase or decrease pollution
(43:48):
as a result. There's somebody who came up with the
eye popping statistic that thirty percent of the traffic in
metropolitan areas is people circling the block looking for a
place to park. If you don't own a car and
you're not driving your own car, that goes away. So
thirty percent of traffic goes away instantaneously with that, Yeah,
(44:09):
I mean that you have me right there. Yeah, yeah,
So driverless cars almost certainly coming down the pike, as
long as AI doesn't take over the world, of course,
I think we should caveat this entire episode with that
all of this is going to happen if AI doesn't
take over the world.
Speaker 2 (44:25):
Okay, that's right, And we're going to finish up with
a couple of shorter ones that I think you're just
pretty awesome and interesting. One is the fact that sort
of the current thinking is that we we tend to
tie like progress as a nation, definitely in the United States,
(44:45):
but in most places around the world, to how like
robust and economy is. It's like always tied to finances
on what kind of progress we're making, and there are
people that think like sort of like with the way
we're starting to look at animals, like, you know, one
day that's not going to be the most important factor
for humans, and things like the health of the earth
(45:09):
and human beings health and well being both physically and
mentally is the you should equate that with the success
of a nation, And one day they're going to look
back and say, you remember when we all that we
cared about was the fact that the stock market was flesh.
Speaker 1 (45:25):
Yeah, because we GDP just tells you whether an economy
is growing or shrinking, right, That's basically all it tells you,
And it leaves out a lot of stuff, like you said,
human well being, things like whether people are dying of
deaths of despair or whether they're generally happy, how many
(45:46):
resources are being depleted. Is anybody working on an alternative
that all of the stuff that creates that growing economy
just is totally ignored? Yeah, And I think that's what
that economist Kate Rayworth was saying, is like it's it's madness,
Like it's so ridiculous to just completely not count all
this stuff that really really counts in favor of just
(46:09):
this one metric, which is growth or shrinkage. And not
only is that probably going to be thought of as
ridiculous in the future. People younger people today, who are
becoming adults or who have recently become adults, they already
tend to think this way as a group. So it's
a pretty sure indicator that we're going to leave GDP
(46:31):
or growth behind as an indicator of the health of
an economy and start thinking more about the other stuff,
the more important stuff. And who knows what can result
from that, like what great cascading knock on effects that
that will have.
Speaker 2 (46:49):
Yeah, you found this Princeton University bioethicist named Peter Singer
who talked about the fact that the circle of concern
as humankind and advances is expanding, And that's just a
wonderful thought. And you know, you see it in everything
from the fact that you know, we've laughed before it
like the mad Men episode where people used to just
(47:10):
willingly throw litter on the ground, to you know, we
look back at that as barbaric generally. And that's just
one small example. So as as humans are evolving down
the line, that circle of concern is expanding and people
are caring about more and more things that they didn't
care about before, and that's that's great.
Speaker 1 (47:31):
Yeah. And Peter Singer, by the way, is very famous
ethicists as far as animal rights are concerned in animal welfare.
So yeah, his whole thing is like, we're gonna stop
focusing on conspicuous consumption and rather you'll be more considered
like a great person, not from your wealth, but from
your charity and your charitable giving, which would be great.
(47:52):
And then that circle of concern kind of leads us
to our last one too, because the most recent inclusion
into the circle of conc is the environment, the earth,
the health of the earth, and that this one is
just a sure give me, there is no way that
we're not going to be looked down upon for this
(48:12):
by our descendants. So that is burning fossil fuels.
Speaker 2 (48:16):
Yeah, I mean in five hundred years, who knows, maybe sooner.
It seems like people will definitely look back and say,
I can't believe that we used to burn fossil fuels
like we did. And for a lot of reasons, not
just the you know the process of removing fossil fuels
and all that goes into that, or even the climate
(48:38):
and the ozone, which are all huge concerns obviously, but
just things like pollution and air quality and the fact
that you know that kills people and that costs so
much money in healthcare. I think there was a study
from the University of Wisconsin in Madison that said if
we stopped burning fossil fuels all together, it would have
(49:00):
about fifty thousand premature deaths per year because of air
quality alone, and about six hundred billion dollars annually and
the US alone and healthcare costs.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Yeah, And I think even more than looking at us
as like dumb dumbs for ignoring that we're going to
be looked at, is kind of reviled because of the
future will have delivered our descendants because of the climate
change we just allowed to happen.
Speaker 2 (49:24):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (49:24):
I saw who estimate that two hundred and fifty thousand
additional deaths per year are expected to come each year
between twenty thirty and twenty fifty because of climate change
from things like heat stress, malnutrition, insect born diseases. That
an additional quarter of a million people are going to
(49:46):
die every year because of climate change starting six years
from now. That's nuts. So I can only imagine what
the people of you know, twenty one hundred are going
to think of us. Hopefully they'll have everything under control
by then, but they're probably going to be pretty ticked
off that they had to go to the trouble.
Speaker 2 (50:03):
Yeah. I mean, you can see this coming because it
already happens now once again by seeing younger generations already
looking at previous generations as barbaric and how we treat
the earth.
Speaker 1 (50:14):
For sure, I saw an RHS financial estimate or prediction
that the oil market will collapse this decade that we're
just based on trends, current trends now and the way
people think now that probably we won't be using oil
nearly as much in the next ten twenty years.
Speaker 2 (50:33):
Very interesting.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
Yeah, the future is interesting, Chuck, And it is the future.
As a matter of fact. It's almost twenty twenty four,
and I just want to say happy new year to everybody.
Speaker 2 (50:43):
Huh, that's right, Happy new year everyone. We thank you
once again for your support. We say it all the time.
If there was no U, that would be no US.
We are always grateful that we are allowed to do
this job because you listen.
Speaker 1 (50:58):
Yeah, thank you, and happy new year to everyone. Happy
birthday to you me Andy Birthday, Thanks Chuck, and we'll
see you guys next year. And if you want to
get in touch with this in the interim, in this
very short time left in twenty twenty three, you can
do it via email almost instantaneously. Wrap it up, spank
it on the bottom, put a sash onto this says
twenty twenty four, and send it off to Stuff podcast
(51:22):
at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (51:26):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For
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