Stuff You Should KnowIt’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?
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.
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Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
Oh, is this our final of the year?
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?
Yeah? And hey, you know, since you brought that up, can I say something?
Sure?
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 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.
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 minutes according to Spotify.
Yeah, who's that?
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?
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.
Yeah, that just it's a lot.
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.
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.
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.
It's a service, it's a public service.
We were downloaded in one hundred and sixty three countries.
Oh, I didn't know there were that many countries.
Which is we looked it up. It was actually something like one hundred and ninety. So like that's most of the countries.
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.
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, if we can get like a thousand people in a room in Mexico City, I think that might be a fun thing to do.
Yeah, especially if it's a room with seats.
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?
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 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.
Yeah, the first time I flew to Europe there was smoking in like that was it would have been ninety six.
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.
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.
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 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?
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 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.
Of those respondents said almost under their breath feels so right.
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.
You drop. That's a big drop.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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?
I think so if my writing is any indicator.
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 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 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?
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 they were, you know, did a thing on it.
I'm sure they were hot and heavy.
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.
Did you even know there were that many countries?
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 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 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 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 in schools in America today are disabled. My god, usually it's an intellectual disability. Wow. Is that so not disturbing?
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.
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 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.
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.
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 bolo paddle games.
I know, the bolo tie.
No, the bolo paddle where you a little light plywood paddle with a ball hard. Yeah, sure, that's that was the spanking device.
In mind, those things are made of like balsa wood.
Yeah, it wasn't you bad. It's stung.
But you know, how about all of your spankings that had grown.
Up that's usually involves leather.
Okay, you you want to move on to the next one.
Yeah, let's let's move on to chemotherapy.
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.
Yeah, this is not poopoo in chemotherapy.
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, 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.
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, 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 in our body, except they're created in a lab.
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 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.
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 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.
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 COVID vaccine episode, this mRNA technology is just so you can just it's just like ready to wear vaccines basically.
Yeah.
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.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, it gave us a new Beatles song.
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, 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.
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, 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.
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.
Future, just something you can live fairly healthily with.
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.
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. 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 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.
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 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 like that, but with fully functioning organs.
Yeah. How far are we away from someone trying to grow a human out in a lab?
I'm sure somebody's probably trying it already, but I don't know how long it'll be till they're successful.
I mean, we had Dolly the sheep, that Dolly was a clone, right.
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.
Yeah. I think we might have said that in the Delli parton episode.
Didn't make or did If we did, I'll have to go back and listen. If so, we'll edit this part out.
No, no, no, the beers repeating, I think.
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 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.
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 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.
Yeah, that's it makes that sound.
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.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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.
Yeah, I know it's talking about.
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.
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.
Just now, that's right, let's do it.
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 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, the growing demand for meat is going to be totally unsustainable in the next couple decades.
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 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 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.
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 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 we're just going to stop eating what's called carcass meat very appropriately altogether.
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 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.
Essentially wow, what was the cow's expression?
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.
Yeah, I totally can believe that. That doesn't surprise me at all, to tell you the truth.
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.
Right. Tamiko, by the way, has one of the better non celebrity Instagram feeds you can find.
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 did we do a whole episode on lab grown meat?
Yeah? We did a while back.
I thought so we should.
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 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 the replacements will have become so great there'll be no reason to eat meat.
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.
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.
Yeah, texture textures.
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 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 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 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.
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 was you know, there was no animal involved.
Yeah, they used cells from like a live animal that was unharmed by it.
Well yeah, yeah, that's what I meant. No, no animal involved is in their death?
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.
You know, it's like I got a blowtorch coming out of my exactly.
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.
Let's do it.
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 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. 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.
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.
That car's wearing braces.
Then I looked inside. It's like no, no, no, there's no human in that car. And it kind of startled me.
But just showing witchcraft, right.
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 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 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, and then stopped on top of her.
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.
Yeah she didn't die, by the way, No, thank.
You for saying that.
Yeah.
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 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.
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 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 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.
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, it was it like twenty twenty twenty twenty one.
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.
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 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 past as well, which will be great for everybody.
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 you shouldn't be able to start unless you can blow into a breathalyzer like that technology is there.
Yeah, we're harder on computers than we are in ourselves, is what you're saying.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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 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, 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.
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, 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 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.
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 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 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 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.
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 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.
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. 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 by our descendants. So that is burning fossil fuels.
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 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 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.
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.
Yeah.
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 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.
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.
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.
Very interesting.
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.
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.
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 at iHeartRadio dot com.
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