The Science Behind Your Intuition & How Things Get Made

A lot of people drink coffee in the morning to kickstart the day. Interestingly, how you drink it (when, how many cups, length of time between cups, etc.) influences the kick that you get. This episode begins by explaining the best way to consume your morning brew for maximum benefit. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a15327/coffee-most-caffeine/ I’m sure you’ve had a gut feeling about something. You didn’t have to think about it – you just knew! That is your intuition at work. But what is it? Is intuition just a knee jerk reaction to something or is it something more – perhaps some deep inner wisdom? Is it reliable? Should you trust it? Joining me to talk about that is Elizabeth Greenwood. She is a writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, and GQ, and she is author of a book called Everyday Intuition: What Psychology, Science, and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice (https://amzn.to/3H0TN4U). It is astonishing to contemplate all the things around you that have been manufactured. Everything you can see that is not a plant, an animal or dirt – someone manufactured it. That means a person designed it, got the materials, assembled it, packaged it up and shipped it. How does that happen? What is the process that keeps it all going? Here to discuss this is Tim Minnshall. He is an engineering academic who works at the University of Cambridge, and he is author of the book, How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing (https://amzn.to/43bsRHf). Why do cars break down? Surprisingly, they mostly break down for just one of a few reasons – which are often preventable. Listen as I reveal what those reasons are and how to prevent them from happening. https://roadsidesurvival.com/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! CARAWAY: Get 10% off your next purchase, at ⁠https://Carawayhome.com/SYSK⁠ or use code SYSK at checkout. Caraway. Non-Toxic cookware made modern. MINT MOBILE: Ditch overpriced wireless and get 3 months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for 15 bucks a month at ⁠https://MintMobile.com/something⁠ ! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at ⁠⁠⁠https://FactorMeals.com/something50off⁠⁠⁠ TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to ⁠⁠⁠https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to ⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:27Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know. If you drink coffee to get going in the morning, there's some science to it you need to know. Then, your intuition, that gut feeling. What is it, and how does it work? For instance...

• 1:42Speaker 01

  You go on a date with someone who's great on paper. You know, they have the job, you have similar interests. But then, when you meet, there's something that just doesn't connect. And that's intuition, right? That kind of data that will not show up on paper.

• 1:58Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why your car is most likely to break down, and how to prevent it. And how things get made. And a lot of things get made.

• 2:08Speaker 02

  Every single thing you can see, unless it's a plant, a rock, another person, or some other animal, has been manufactured. Once you start to think about it, it's almost overwhelming. Every single thing has a manufacturing story behind it.

• 2:22Mike Carruthers?

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• 4:22Mike Carruthers?

  If you're one of those people who needs coffee to get your day started, it turns out there's a little bit of science to it. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. For many of us, the morning just can't start without that first cup of coffee. And then, the second cup of coffee. But if you want to get the perfect amount of kick to start your day, there is a bit of an art to it, according to Esquire Magazine. "You should wait 15 minutes after waking up to drink your first cup of coffee," they say. "Given your body's desire to get more sleep," what's known as sleep inertia, "it's natural to wake up tired, but this usually wears off in about 15 minutes."

• 5:08Mike Carruthers?

  If you've already had your first cup of coffee by then, it can lead to you consuming more caffeine than you ultimately need. You should take an hour and a half, at least an hour and a half, break between cups of coffee. Many people drink a cup, don't feel anything, so they drink another cup, and then they start to feel it. But that's not because the second cup is kicking in, that's the first cup of coffee. Caffeine takes about half an hour or so to reach its maximum effectiveness. So that kick you're actually feeling is coming from the first cup. After another 30 minutes, the second cup kicks in, and now, you've got a lot of caffeine in you. And try not to drink too much coffee.

• 5:52Mike Carruthers?

  200mg of caffeine is what you'll find in most 12-ounce cups of coffee, and this amount will bring most people to their peak performance levels for about two hours, at which point the caffeine begins to slowly leave your system. Anything more than 200mg in a two-hour timeframe can result in diminishing returns. And that is something you should know.

• 6:21Mike Carruthers?

  How many times have you heard the advice to go with your gut? Use your intuition? What is your intuition telling you? Well, that's putting a lot of responsibility on your intuition. But what exactly is intuition? It's not a thing. There's not a spot in your brain where your intuition lives. And if you type in a search engine "the case against intuition", you will see a lot of people have concerns about the reliability of what is called intuition. The dictionary definition of intuition is "the ability to understand something immediately without the need for conscious reasoning", you know, that gut feeling. But critics say intuition can be used to justify pre-existing beliefs

• 7:06Mike Carruthers?

  rather than arrive at objective truths. Some say it can be just a justification to come to a quick decision rather than taking the time to deliberate and think something through. And the fact is, intuition can be wrong. It can be right, but it can be wrong. So how valuable is it? Let's dive a little deeper into intuition with someone who has studied it, Elizabeth Greenwood. She's a writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, and GQ. She is author of a book called Everyday Intuition: What Psychology, Science, and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice.

• 7:50Mike Carruthers?

  Hi, Elizabeth. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 7:53Speaker 01

  Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.

• 7:56Mike Carruthers?

  So let me start by saying that I use my intuition. I get gut feelings, but I'm also suspicious of them. I worry sometimes that intuition might also just be a knee-jerk reaction or a shortcut to a decision that really should take more thought, just by saying, "Well, it was a gut feeling." And I get it. I get that we all have gut reactions to things. And I think of it more as your collective wisdom telling you something more than anything else.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Well, Mike, I hear you. I don't think you're alone in that feeling toward intuition of what even are we talking about when we talk about intuition? Is it just this out there woo-woo thing? So I hear you there for sure. I spent several years interviewing experts of all stripes, ranging from neuroscientists to gastroenterologists, to data scientists, to people on, you know, more the other end of the spectrum, intuitive practitioners such as Reiki healers, et cetera. It goes on and on. But I think that the most useful definition I came across comes from neuroscience.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  And that is that intuition is pattern recognition that happens incredibly quickly. And it's based on prior experience. And it shows up in biofeedback in your body. And this is an adaptive trait, and we all have it. So what does that mean? It means you walk into a room and you get some kind of vibe from that room. Maybe you feel comfortable, at ease, and your body kind of exhales, sighs a little breath of relief. Or you walk into that room and your throat constricts and you feel uncomfortable. Maybe you don't even notice your throat constricting, but there's something happening in your body

• 9:57Speaker 01

  giving you a signal based on prior experience. So it's as simple as that. It's pattern recognition that happens incredibly quickly.

• 10:07Mike Carruthers?

  The idea of intuition, though, most people have, is not what you just said. It's some sort of mystical, magical, you know, women's intuition, or, you know, my intuition told me to do this thing and the car didn't hit me. It's more magical than that.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  That's right. And intuition can feel magical. And that's because intuition is knowledge that is not always linear. It's not always, I can't say how I got from A to B. And that can make you doubt it. That can make it feel mystical. Because intuition is really this very complex ensemble of neurological functions, such as memory activation.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  All of these things working in tandem to come up with getting quote, "an intuition, a gut feeling." It's also a very embodied experience, and that's why we hear it called "a gut feeling." So sometimes an intuition will come to you in a physically embodied way. And, you know, in our culture, we've really separated the brain from the body. So when we get something that feels like our body knowing something, we do have a tendency to distrust that, or lump it in as something that is irrational. When really, we store so much of our memories and emotions in our bodies. So it's not that this is irrational,

• 11:37Speaker 01

  it's just another form of rationality. And it's always based on past experiences. This isn't based on nothing. Sometimes an intuition can come out of the blue and feel almost mystical, but it's always based on prior experience. Intuition in that way is everything that's ever happened to you.

• 11:59Mike Carruthers?

  So why not just call it collective wisdom? Why give it a name like intuition, which adds that magical thing to it?

• 12:08Speaker 01

  You'd have to ask neuroscience and linguists that question. I can't really answer that. But I will say that there are neuroscientists and people working in the sciences that do study intuition. They don't have a different name for it. This is just what we've called it. And I totally hear you that this is, does feel like something that is a collective wisdom. But I think intuition also is very personal for people. It's knowing without knowing why. And the ways in which people know can be very different from person to person. Some people are more verbal, some people are more somatic, embodied.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  But it is that knowing without knowing why, and being able to trace point A to point B. But this is a highly adaptive trait. This is something that evolutionary psychologists look at. And I think at its most essential, it is a kind of protective instinct of toward or away. When you place

• 13:13Speaker 01

  A paramesium in a Petri dish and put sugar in it. The paramesium will swim toward the sugar. It will swim away from an electric shock. And that, in its most essential, is a form of intuition.

• 13:27Mike Carruthers?

  Can you test for it? Can you and I take a test, the same test, and see which of us has more or better intuition?

• 13:34Speaker 01

  Well, there are several metrics that scientists use to study intuition. And the most famous among them is called the Iowa Gambling Task. And this was developed in the 1990s by the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio. So the Iowa Gambling Task is this. There are two decks of cards. One deck pays winnings when you select from that deck. And the other deck, and the other set of cards deduct winnings. And this is, they, you really mix it up and make it in this very complicated system where there is a system, but it's really hard to figure out.

• 14:15Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, scientists are monitoring the participants' biofeedback. And what they notice is that people running the experiment, they are recording signals from participants' bodies that measure when people are considering the bad choices, the cards that deduct winnings, versus the good choices. And what they find is that people are often completely unaware of those signals, but in the end, they learn to make the good choices based on this low-level biofeedback. And they really can't tell you why. They'll just say, oh, well, this card seemed like the right card to choose. They might feel a sense of kind of being repelled by the quote-unquote "bad" cards.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  So the people who are more interoceptive, more aware of these very subtle bodily cues, they are drawn to the profitable decks and they stay away from the low-paying decks. So that's just one example of a test that people run to measure intuition.

• 15:18Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's really interesting because there's something to that, that you're somehow intuitively going from one deck and not the other deck. But people will often say, since we're in kind of the card game gambling mode here, you know, I went with red because my intuition told me to.

• 15:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe, but...

• 15:40Mike Carruthers?

  Gambling, just random gambling like that doesn't seem intuitive. It seems like luck.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  I think that's right. And I think that what studies have shown also is that this is really comes from Daniel Kahneman's research in Thinking Fast and Slow, but it dates back to even Benjamin Franklin writing about this phenomenon in his autobiography, is that we like to tell ourselves this story that we are rational beings and we've made decisions based on all the data and evaluating things with a cool head. But more often than not, we make decisions intuitively. We make decisions based on something that is emotional or that we can't even put words to, and then we will go back and post hoc reasons for why that makes sense rationally. So I think it cuts both ways.

• 16:35Mike Carruthers?

  Right, there is that let's go back and rationalize or figure it out. But, but people will go, they'll say, you know, I, I went to that liquor store to buy the Lotto ticket and that's why I won. Well, a lot of other people went to that other liquor store because their intuition told them to and they lost. That's the way people do that go back and rationalize thing that, that, you know, the reason I, I won the Lotto is because my intuition told me to go to that store. But, but you don't hear the other people saying, yeah, my intuition told me to go to the other store and I didn't win a thing.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I hear you, and I think that that is a great example of memory bias of the way in which we will prioritize a story that we like, that really kind of rhymes with our worldview. What I really emphasize for people who do want to become more intuitive or become even just more familiar with the way intuition shows up for them, is becoming a little bit systematic about it. The neuroscientists I interviewed say that intuition is pattern recognition based on expertise, based on having expertise in a certain domain.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  So what I really advocate for is people becoming experts in themselves. So if you have an intuition to, say, go to that liquor store or to, you know, walk on the left side of the street that day versus the right side of the street, I think that you should notice that and you should notice how that intuition shows up for you. When you feel an urge or pull, one way or another, does that come to you as a sentence in your mind? Is it a feeling in your body? And how is that different than, say, something else? Like anxiety, or fear, or just plain old habits

• 18:37Speaker 01

  that we are all accustomed to? So I really recommend people clocking when they have an intuition. I keep a note on my phone of these sorts of things. You know, whatever kind of inclination I'm having that day, how I knew it, and how it panned out. Because then you do actually have some hard data to pull from rather than our very fallible memories and storytelling that we all do.

• 19:03Mike Carruthers?

  We're discussing intuition with my guest, Elizabeth Greenwood. She's author of the book, "Every Day Intuition: What Psychology, Science, and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice." This episode is sponsored by Vinted. You know, I remember interviewing an organizing expert who offered this really clever trick for figuring out which clothes you should get rid of. You go to your closet and you look at the clothes hanging there. And chances are, the ones toward the middle are the clothes you wear most often. But the clothes pushed way over to the left or the right, some of those you probably haven't worn in years. And yet there they hang, taking up space. But here's the thing.

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• 22:21Mike Carruthers?

  So Elizabeth, the term "women's intuition," everyone's heard that. But do women have some sort of special intuition that men don't have? Is women's intuition a thing?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  It's such a great question, and it's a question that I was really interested in pursuing because I became interested in this question, this topic, this question of intuition when I became a mother myself. And I felt I had this stream of kind of non-cognitive knowledge really kicking on in my body in this meaningful way. So I did want to find out about women's intuition. And here's what the research shows. There is a seminal study from the 1980s where they paired mixed groups of people, men and women. They assigned one person to be the boss and another person to be the subordinate.

• 23:20Speaker 01

  And what they found is that the people who were in the position of power did not have to have any awareness, or empathy, or intuition around their subordinate. The subordinate, however, had a heightened awareness about the boss, about what was going on with them, about what they were saying, thinking, feeling. So what that study has shown is that "women's intuition" is really more about positionality and about people who are marginalized and have to have more of an awareness of the dominant

• 24:04Speaker 01

  group do tend to notice and exhibit more intuition toward that group than people who do not have to have that awareness.

• 24:15Mike Carruthers?

  You said a moment ago that intuition and anxiety, two different things, can feel the same. And I'm not sure I understand that. So can you explain that a little more?

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Let me give you an example. A friend had a 40th birthday party a few years back and the party was just this amazing girls' trip. We were going to fly to Milan, take the red eye, and then rent a car and drive up to the mountains to wine country to go to this wine festival. This is so dreamy. However, prior to this trip, I was having horrible nightmares about the car, you know, careening off the road, about doom and disaster. And I was feeling really some very, very

• 25:08Speaker 01

  aroused, very high level fear around this trip. Now, if I had not been thinking very deeply about intuition, it would have been really easy for me to say, "My intuition says don't go on this trip. I'm just having a really bad gut feeling that something bad is going to happen on this trip." But what I did was I stopped and took a deep breath and tried to really examine what this fear was. Well, the fact of the matter is, I was anxious because I was going with people I didn't know very well. I was anxious because I was in a car accident years ago, and I've always felt pretty uneasy about car travel, especially, you know, in a new country after

• 25:51Speaker 01

  getting off a red eye in coach, etc. So I think that we all, all of us do, will have responses to things that can feel very fast, very complete, and that looks like intuition. But if you are willing to dig a little deeper and dig into your personal history and think about what chords those feelings might also be touching, you can find that that actually could have something to do with past trauma, with past experience, that isn't exactly intuition. It might be something else.

• 26:27Mike Carruthers?

  But it would seem that those things would be a piece of the puzzle of intuition, that your past experiences shape your intuition to some extent, that you've had that experience of being in that car accident, of not being comfortable around strangers, that that's a piece of it.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  That's absolutely a piece of it, no doubt. Like I said, intuition is everything that's ever happened to you, in a way. But if you want to become more wise and use intuition really as a more kind of sharp and refined tool, rather than just a blunt instrument, you have to start kind of pulling back the layers a little bit. So, you know, if every time my heart starts racing when I get into a car and I call that intuition, that's not exactly intuition that is based on past experience, but that's more anxiety than intuition.

• 27:24Mike Carruthers?

  One of the, one of the things that I guess people struggle with, when you talk about intuition, the question becomes, do you or don't you trust it? If you can't trust it, what good is it? And if you do trust it and it's wrong, what good is it?

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Well, I think we could also say that about rational decision making. I mean, I think that there are a lot of times when we, you know, follow the Excel spreadsheet and it still leads us to an outcome that we don't want. Again, I think this really all leads back to expertise, to becoming experts in ourselves, to monitoring those decisions that we make and how we're making them. You know, I think that dating is a great realm for this. What kind of impression did you have about this potential partner initially? And did that pan out? Or not pan out?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  I think that there are so many different realms of exploration for us to do this. And I think that intuition, again, it is synonymous with self-knowledge. So this is just kind of another way in to get to know yourself.

• 28:40Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's certainly true. The dating is probably a really good, because what else do you have to go on? You go on a first date with somebody, there's not enough data there to decide really whether there should be a second. Well, there might be enough data to decide there should not be a second date, but there may not be enough data to really suggest that we should move this forward, other than gut feeling. Just, well, yeah.

• 29:07Speaker 01

  Well, that's exactly right. And there are so many times I think that, you know, we have, it's possible you go on a date with someone who's great on paper. You know, they have the job, the career that you like, you have similar interests, you live in the same part of town, but then when you meet, there's something that just doesn't connect. And that's intuition, right? I mean, and that's really kind of, I think, more valuable in a way is what that, that certain chemistry, that ineffable feeling is. So you can call that intuition, you can call it chemistry, but it is, you know, that kind of data that will not show up on paper, that won't show up on the dating profile, that is important to listen to.

• 29:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, think about it. Intuition is something everybody has experienced. I can't imagine anybody not having that gut feeling about something at some point in their life. Yet it's really hard to know what to do with it, or not do with it, or is it real? And I really enjoyed talking to you about it, because it's clarified a lot of things for me. I've been speaking with Elizabeth Greenwood. The name of her book is Everyday Intuition: What Psychology, Science, and Psychics Can Teach Us About Finding and Trusting Our Inner Voice. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Elizabeth, it's been a pleasure. Thanks for being here.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Thanks, Mike. Take care.

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• 34:02Mike Carruthers?

  And when you start to think about all the things that are man-made, that are manufactured, it's really staggering and something worth discussing. And the perfect person to discuss it is Tim Minchell. He is an engineering academic who works at the University of Cambridge. He also delivers outreach programs to raise awareness of manufacturing among primary and secondary schoolchildren, and he is author of a book called "How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing." Hey, Tim, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me here. I love that we're talking about this because, as you say, we are literally surrounded

• 34:44Mike Carruthers?

  every day by manufactured items, things that somebody created and made somewhere, somehow. And yet, it's also very invisible. Like, we don't think about all the things we have that somebody actually sat down and planned and designed and made, and yet, the things that we manufacture in our world make our world.

• 35:09Speaker 02

  It's so true, and this sounds like a silly thing to say, but just doing that little exercise of just pausing, looking around where you are now, and every single thing you can see, unless it's a plant, a rock, another person, or some other animal, has been manufactured. And it sounds so obvious and so almost trite to say it, but it's really true. And once you start to think about it, it's almost overwhelming that every single thing, unless it's a plant, a rock, another human, or some other animal, has been made in a factory. Someone, somewhere, had to design that thing, to choose the materials from which it would

• 35:50Speaker 02

  be made, to get those materials, to assemble them into components or subsystems, and then assemble them into a bigger thing, and then get it shipped to where it's needed, and then get it delivered to where it's actually going to be used. All of that, for every single object. And I'm sitting here at my desk, and, you know, everything, everything, the desk itself, the carpet on which it sits, the chair, the pen, the computer, the microphone I'm talking into now, every single thing has a manufacturing story behind it. But as you say, most of this is just invisible. We don't see it, we don't notice it, we just take it for granted.

• 36:24Mike Carruthers?

  Well, I think one reason that manufacturing things is somewhat invisible here in the US and perhaps in Europe as well is that we don't see it. I mean, so much of the manufacturing has left and gone to Asia and India, and that we don't see it, so we don't think about the process of manufacturing and all the things that go into it.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  That's right, and I think even for very, very simple things. So I like to use this example of toilet paper, right? That's a fairly mundane and simple product, but taking just a UK example, if I may. So the sheet of toilet paper doesn't seem very advanced or complex. Yet to make it requires trees grown up in Scandinavia and trees grown in South America. Because the the properties of those different trees means that you have different properties of the wood pulp. And so to make something as simple as a roll of toilet paper requires vast forests to be grown and it takes decades for them to grow.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  You chop down those trees, you use most of it for construction and all sorts of other good things. Some of it is used and made into wood pulp and that wood pulp is then used for all sorts of different things, one of which is toilet paper. And so what's kind of worrying about this whole manufacturing system is that even for something as simple as a sheet of toilet paper, it has a journey that typically has encompassed thousands of miles. Huge amount of resource has been used to develop and to make and to deliver that to you. Huge amounts of energy, huge amounts of water, huge amounts of stuff needed to happen to make that work. And it's incredibly wasteful. Now, we like our large variety of products. I mean, I'm a massive hypocrite.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  I love the fact that any of us can go into any mall or any market, any supermarket, any mini-market and just look at the variety of products that are there. It's absolutely brilliant. But as you say, because so many of these products just appear on shelves, we don't really appreciate the journey that they've gone through.

• 38:32Mike Carruthers?

  So I want you to tell the story about something that people really never give much thought to at all, but is actually a big player in this story of manufacturing that you're telling. And that is the shipping container, that thing you see on the back of trucks and on railway cars. That thing has like changed the world and people don't know the story.

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And one of the key cost issues, of course, is transport. And so one of the greatest innovations of our time is the wonderful invention of the shipping container. It's just a standard sized metal box, but the genius.

• 39:12Speaker 02

  Of Malcolm McLean and his sea land company, his shipping company in the States, coming up with the idea of a standard, a standardized dimension of box that could go on to the railroad, go on the back of trucks, could go on to ships, and you could just switch between them was absolute genius. And the story of how he developed that shipping container, and when he had the first ships running, I think, down the eastern US seaboard, the cost per ton, per mile, dropped unbelievably, like 90% lower cost by doing it in shipping containers. And as soon as you have that, then the fact that a factory is very, very

• 39:53Speaker 02

  far away from you doesn't matter anymore, because the cost of shipping is so low, it's almost a tie, it's a tiny percentage of the overall cost of the customer. So you're right, by people far away being able to manufacture things cheaply makes it very attractive. But it only works if the transport costs to and from that country are cheap as well.

• 40:13Mike Carruthers?

  So just how old is the shipping container? And, and what was used before it?

• 40:18Speaker 02

  So before the shipping container, you did what's called break bulk. You literally had very, very skilled longshoremen and dock workers who would be tasked with saying, here are all the things that need to go on a ship, and we're going to have to load this ship in the optimal way. So imagine the, the shape of a ship. It's got curves in it and all sorts of things. So loading a ship with lots of products is actually very, very skillful. Because you get it wrong, the ship becomes unbalanced and will, you know, bad things will happen in the ocean. So loading a ship was a highly skilled job that required lots and lots of dock workers to bring things onto the ship and stow them where they were needed. So it was what's called break bulk. Lots of things in small units being just one by one brought onto the ship. The shipping container just, just

• 41:03Speaker 02

  completely removed the need for that. And so by just making this very elegantly simple leap of faith by saying, rather than lots of little products, each being taken onto a ship one by one, or in little bundles, or on trolleys, or on small hoists, put everything into a big box and just lift the big box onto a ship. So this, I believe, goes back to the 1950s when it was started. But as you can imagine, this put had a very dark side to it as well because it put a huge number of people out of jobs. So this idea of innovation and advanced technologies and new technologies that make life better, that reduce costs is absolutely great. But very often, there's a negative side to it as well.

• 41:48Speaker 02

  And so the communities that had built up around the docks employing thousands of workers, often generations upon generations of workers. I mean, if you look at the Port of Los Angeles or anywhere in the world, there's relatively few people working there now.

• 42:04Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I don't think I've ever heard the story of the shipping container. I mean, I've noticed that, you know, it's pretty cool that the same container can be put on a railroad car or the back of a truck, but I didn't know it was as revolutionary as you're describing it.

• 42:20Speaker 02

  It's quite incredible that just the standardization of a metal box transformed everything about our modern economy.

• 42:29Mike Carruthers?

  What gets mind boggling to me is like, take a car, for example, and we talk about manufacturing a car. But in large part, manufacturing a car is really taking little components or big components that have themselves been designed and manufactured by somebody, brought together in a factory, and then assembled and then put into a car to make the car. And that is part of manufacturing, right? The assembly.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Absolutely. To me, the manufacturing is the whole process of making the thing, of moving it to where it's needed, and even the process of consumption because by us buying a thing and us having that thing serviced or supported or repaired is also part of this whole manufacturing journey, in my view. And so that great point you make there about a car. So a typical petrol car, gasoline powered car, has around 30,000 components. And those will be sourced from factories all around the world. And we're certainly seeing that at the moment. It's becoming much more visible, the consequences of having things made in lots of different countries. And then all those parts that are made in these different factories, all coming together

• 43:44Speaker 02

  to one central place to be assembled, is absolutely extraordinary how well that works, how efficiently that all works, if you can move things across borders reasonably smoothly. It's interesting as well that a car... With its thirty thousand components, which strikes me as quite a lot. But then if you look at things like an airliner, which is up into the millions of components. And some of the older planes, like a seven four seven, I think, has about six million components. Modern planes have slightly fewer than that, but it's still millions of individual components. Every single one has to be perfectly manufactured, delivered at the right time, the right cost, at the right quality,

• 44:26Speaker 02

  to exactly where it's needed, to be assembled into some subsystem, to be assembled into some bigger system, to be assembled into the final product, be it a iPhone, or a car, or a plane. It's just mind boggling that it works at all.

• 44:41Mike Carruthers?

  So you mentioned toilet paper, and I'd love to get some more examples from you, some actual things that get made that people would be surprised to realise what it takes.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Something as simple as sugar. And I love the story of making sugar, because sugar processing plants are quite energy intensive. You know, in one end, raw material, straight from field or wherever it may be. Out the other end, nice, clean packets of white or brown sugar. And in between those two points, so much energy, so much effort is put in to process that. And I love the fact that with a sugar plant near us here in the east of England, it's quite amazing, because they produce, they require so much energy, that they used to just burn off any excess they had, they just piped it away and they didn't even bother about it.

• 45:33Speaker 02

  Seeing nowadays how something as as energy intensive as the manufacturing of sugar is an exemplar of the future of manufacturing. And what I mean by that is, what they're trying to do is to make their factories circular. What I mean by that is, there's no waste. Everything related to the making of sugar, that in the past might have just been chucked away at the end as a, well, that's just a by-product, we don't need that, has now become something that is valuable either to the business itself or to another business. Here's a quick example. At the end of the process of making sugar, you often end up with some very low-grade types of sugar, sort of heading to the molasses end of things. And there's not that much you can do with it.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  But by building a bioethanol plant at the end of the sugar production line, they can actually produce biofuel. They can actually start making fuel from the residual, the waste products of making sugar. It's quite amazing. Another example they did was they were producing a lot of CO2, of carbon dioxide. And this was just being vented to the atmosphere, which is not good. So this sugar plant decided, they said, well, what else could we use CO2 for? And heat. And the answer is for ripening crops, things like tomatoes. So as a side business, they set up the production of glass houses specifically for ripening tomatoes

• 47:02Speaker 02

  and pumped all their excess heat and CO2 into those greenhouses, making a wonderful environment for ripening tomatoes. Interestingly, when they found out that the market for tomatoes was getting a bit challenging, they actually switched to the production of medicinal cannabis, which has proved to be a growing market in certain countries at the moment. So again, this idea that a simple thing like a packet of sugar, you're sitting there, you tear the top off, pour it into your coffee. I would never have given that a moment's thought. That, even the making of sugar, is an incredibly complex manufacturing story.

• 47:38Mike Carruthers?

  Another part of the manufacturing process that is really invisible, but is an important part of the process is whatever it is you're making, you're probably always looking to make it better, make it smaller, make it more efficient, make the process of making it more efficient. You're always trying to improve on your improvements.

• 48:00Speaker 02

  So this is going to be quite hard to make work on a podcast. But down by my feet is a 1980s cellphone. So this is one of the ones that was roughly the size of a car battery. And I use it as a doorstop now. Okay, so it's a very impressive piece of technology. At the time, this was space age technology. This was the coolest thing to have, a mobile phone, a phone you could walk around with that had no cables attached to it and you could make calls. Absolutely brilliant. So they spent a lot of time making the components for that better. They spent a lot of time improving the making of that giant mobile phone.

• 48:42Speaker 02

  But what they were also doing was making the phone better, smaller, cheaper, with more features in it. So I have littered around my spare room here, these old phones that go from car battery-sized giant phones, right down to the tiniest little Nokia phone, which is like a Mars bar that's been sliced down the middle. It's so thin and so small, right the way up to my nice shiny iPhone, which then got bigger again as more and more features are added in. So manufacturing is about continuous improvement, both of the product as well as making the making of the product better and better, this process of continuous improvement.

• 49:24Mike Carruthers?

  Something manufactured that everybody interacts with every day is clothing. Clothing is manufactured.

• 49:33Speaker 02

  So the story of the manufacturing of clothing is an interesting one. It's produced wonderful things, low cost clothing we can, almost all of us can access. But it's also by making it into a disposable product, something we waste a lot of. And the whole idea of fast fashion has perhaps amplified that. But if you want to get and to be a really good buyer of clothing, it gets quite tricky because what do we mean by good? So the huge amount of water that's required to make a single pair of jeans is just eye-watering because there's the actual production of the cotton that needs a lot of water to make that grow because it's quite a tricky crop to grow. There's then all of the processing of the cotton requiring even more water.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  There's then the producing of the weaving and then the dyeing of the textile to make it in to give it that nice denim colour. There's then all the process of cutting and sewing to make the pair of jeans and we then put them back in to re-wash them again to give them a distressed look. So a simple thing like a pair of jeans has an extraordinary story of energy and water consumption behind it. So you might say, well, I'll just buy better genes. I'll only source naturally grown cotton. I'll only use, you know, the indigo dye that's been sourced from a, an appropriate source. But you and I, none of us, we don't really have the time to look at every single product in the store and go,

• 51:01Speaker 02

  can I work out whether these genes are actually the best ones for the planet? So we have to rely on other people. We have to trust our judgment. And one of the good things about the world of manufacturing at the moment is that most companies are actually really quite keen for us to know how a product has been made. Because they know sooner or later, if they're doing a bad thing, someone's going to find out about it. So the visibility we now have of the iPhone supply chain, of the Levi supply chain, of all of the supply chains of products is a really positive thing. It gives us a sense that we understand where these products have come from. Another example is electric vehicles and batteries.

• 51:45Speaker 02

  Just extraordinary where we, we, uh, many of us strongly believe that electric vehicles are absolutely the way forward. Not everyone agrees. Others can see there's a, there's a long future for petrol cars and maybe even hydrogen vehicles. But at the moment, there's a movement that says electric vehicles are good. But if you break down the supply chain of an electric vehicle and you go right the way back to saying not just how's the car built, how are the components made? But how are the batteries made? Where do the materials come from in that battery? It doesn't take you long to trace it all the way back to a small number of countries where they're mining things like cobalt.

• 52:25Speaker 02

  And we don't really always know how safe, how worker friendly those mines were. And there's some, some really quite bad stories about what happens in some of those very, very, very distant mines way, way down the supply chain. So I think this idea of trying to choose a product that is good for the planet and has been well made is very tricky. But now for this generation, for us now, we have the best possible chance of understanding what's going on and shedding a bit of light onto these complex supply chains. So that we can make, we can help companies, we can force companies to be better at how they manufacture things, to do it in a way that's less harmful for the planet.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  But also so we know we are buying a product that has been made ideally in the least harmful way possible.

• 53:12Mike Carruthers?

  Well, ever since I saw your book, I've become much more aware and see things everywhere and think, you know, how did that get here? Who made that? Where was it made? It's such an interesting way of looking at the world. I've been talking to Tim Minnshall from the University of Cambridge, and he is author of the book, How Things Are Made: A Journey Through the Hidden World of Manufacturing. There's a link to his book in the show notes, and Tim, thanks so much for coming.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  Mike, many thanks for that. Really appreciated it, and enjoy the rest of your day.

• 53:47Mike Carruthers?

  Having your car break down is the worst, and yet, most of the time, it is preventable. According to Walt Brinker, author of a book called Roadside Survival, the majority of times that cars break down is tire-related, usually a flat or a blowout, and that is usually because of under-inflated tires. Take care of your tires, and they will take care of you. Another big reason people break down is they run out of gas, also preventable. But still, it happens, and even if you go get a gallon of gas at a gas station to put into your empty tank, it often won't start. Why? Because you're pulled over to the shoulder. Your car is often not level.

• 54:32Mike Carruthers?

  It's leaning to the right, and the gas pools to the right side of the tank and can't get to where it needs to go. Walt says the solution is to rock the car while someone turns the key to try to start it. And still, another reason a car breaks down is it just stops working. And Walt finds that very often, it's just a case of the clamp on the battery terminal comes loose. So check that. It may be all you need to fix the problem. And that is something you should know. As a listener to this podcast, it would really help us if you would help spread the word about it. Tell a friend, use the share button on the app you're listening on, and help us get new listeners. It is greatly appreciated.

• 55:17Mike Carruthers?

  I'm Mike Carruthers. Thank you for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 55:23Speaker 04

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• 55:50Speaker 03

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