AI: Blessing or Curse? & What Our Noisy World Does to You

Can drinking tea make you happy – or do happy people just like to drink tea? There is definitely a connection between tea and mental health, and this episode begins with an explanation. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25657295/ Artificial Intelligence is either the next big thing that will transform our lives or the worst thing ever that will curse humanity. So, what is the truth? Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Gary Rivlan has taken a hard look at AI and joins me to discuss the good and the bad and reveals how AI will affect us all. Gary has been writing about technology since the mid-1990s, he is author of 9 books and his latest is called AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence (https://amzn.to/4dXcfIl). You have likely noticed that the world is pretty noisy. The big concern is that noise has a big impact on our health. It’s not just hearing loss that is the problem. Noise is connected to heart disease, premature death and other health issues that we all need to be aware of. Here to explain how noise affects you and what we can all do about it is Chris Berdik. He is a journalist who has investigated the dangers of noise in our world and he is the author of a book called Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World - and How We Can Take It Back (https://amzn.to/45cyYhe). There is something that women can do with their voice that can make them seem more attractive to men. What’s interesting is that if men try to do it, it has the opposite effect. Listen as I explain what that is. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140411153320.htm PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! MINT MOBILE: Get your summer savings and shop premium wireless plans at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://MintMobile.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ! FACTOR: Factor meals arrive fresh and ready to eat, perfect for your summer lifestyle! Get 50% off at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://FactorMeals.com/something50off⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ROCKET MONEY: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://RocketMoney.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ QUINCE: Stick to the staples that last, with elevated essentials from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! DELL: Introducing the new Dell AI PC . It’s not just an AI computer, it’s a computer built for AI to help do your busywork for you! Get a new Dell AI PC at⁠⁠ https://Dell.com/ai-pc⁠⁠ 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones. Like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then, sometimes you make great ones. Like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options, so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 0:33Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know, the powerful effects from a simple cup of tea. Then, the growing use of AI in almost everything has many people scared of the consequences.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  I think we're scared of the wrong things. When it comes to AI, I'm worried about stuff that can happen right now. The use of AI in warfare. The use of AI for surveillance. The use of AI to manipulate people.

• 1:01Mike Carruthers?

  Also, something interesting women can do with their voice that men simply cannot. And noise. We all know unwanted noise can be irritating and aggravating, but...

• 1:13Speaker 03

  There's a bigger systemic issue out there. That from offices, hospitals, schools, restaurants, you know, our world is increasingly noisy and it's causing harms to our health, well-being, and to the planet.

• 1:25Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

  Now, here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in shop cash. But not to one person. A thousand people will each win $1,000 in shop cash. And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So, in... Instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for,

• 2:16Mike Carruthers?

  and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing. But with a thousand chances to win $1,000, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win. That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:56Speaker 04

  Something You Should Know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life today. Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

• 3:09Mike Carruthers?

  I don't know if you knew this or not, but tea drinkers tend to be happier people. Well, why would that be? Let's find out. Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know. So, tea drinkers are happy people. But does that mean tea makes people happy? Or is it that happy people tend to like tea? Research out of China seems to indicate that tea makes people happy, or at least protects them from depression. In 11 studies of over 22,000 people, the results reveal that regular tea drinking predicts a 31% decrease in depression risk. And the more tea people drink, the less their risk of depression.

• 3:54Mike Carruthers?

  It also seems to be true for both regular and green tea drinkers. The researcher's conclusion is that consumption of tea may act as an independent protective factor for depression. Given that tea is widely consumed, has few documented adverse effects, and is relatively inexpensive, its potential in treating and preventing depression should be recognized. And that is something you should know.

• 4:24Mike Carruthers?

  It's hard to get through the day without hearing about or interacting with AI. And depending on who you hear it from, AI is either the next great thing to change the world or the biggest threat to everything we hold dear. In the meantime, big companies are pouring huge amounts of money into AI in an attempt to cash in on the technology. So how does all of this and will all of this affect you and me now and in the future? Here to discuss this is Gary Rivlin. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter who has been writing about technology since the mid 90s.

• 5:04Mike Carruthers?

  He's the author of nine books and his latest is called AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence. Hey Gary, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:16Speaker 02

  It's great to be on, thanks.

• 5:19Mike Carruthers?

  So in just a snapshot, what's your take on AI? Is it gonna change the world? What is it?

• 5:26Speaker 02

  It's not gonna change the world, your world, tomorrow or next year. But if you take the long perspective, if you look 10 or 15 years in the future, I really do think it's gonna change everything, just like the internet in the mid 1990s didn't change things overnight. But now, you know, two decades plus later, it's infiltrated everything, the same with mobile, which dates back to the mid 2000s. It took a while, but it really has changed the world and I really think AI is gonna do that. So in that sense, I think it's underhyped, but it's overhyped because these startups, these large big tech companies have put a lot of money into this, they've raised a lot of money, and so they're overpromising, right?

• 6:09Speaker 02

  They have to justify all those millions, if not hundreds of millions, if not in some cases, billions of dollars they put in. So personal agents are gonna change your life tomorrow. They're not, but you know, 10 years from now, I think they will.

• 6:24Mike Carruthers?

  So you talk about, you know, these big tech giants battling over AI. Because where's the money? That's one of the things I don't understand is it seems to be pretty much available for free to anybody who wants to use it. I can go to ChatGPT and do all kinds of things. It doesn't cost me a dime. So where's the money? Where's the big dollars in AI?

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Well, you've identified a problem for those large companies and small that are putting a lot of money into this. Venture capitalists are investing a lot of money in startups. Last year, they invested around $150 billion or so in AI startups. And the large companies, you know, Google, Microsoft, Meta, others, they're investing tens of billions of dollars in this. But the problem is it's not really making much money. Let's use OpenAI. They're the ones that in a way started all of this, started all of us talking about AI. They released ChatGPT at the end of 2022. You know, they actually brought in like three and a half billion dollars in revenue

• 7:34Speaker 02

  last year, which is a lot of money for a small, a small company. But it cost them like nine billion, $10 billion to train the models, run the models, to do everything. So they are losing money. They do, they make money. Some people take the premium version. So anything you're using for free is sort of the next best alternative. But if you want the cutting edge stuff and you want unlimited use, you could pay $20 a month. And more than that, you have businesses licensing their AI. So you go to Expedia and there's an AI bot there that's OpenAI. Apple has cut a deal with OpenAI to use their chatbot there.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  So, you know, there is money, but that's part of the problem with AI. It was part of the problem with the internet in the mid 1990s. You know, you give it away for free. People don't expect to pay for it. So it's going to be a long time before we're seeing profits by either big companies or startups in the AI area.

• 8:37Mike Carruthers?

  So the $3 billion that it has made is just subscriptions?

• 8:43Speaker 02

  A lot of it is subscriptions and you know, there's a lot of people who do want a subscription. I subscribe to one. It's not ChatGPT. It's called Claude because I use it a lot. I use it for editing. I use it for research assistance. If you use it a lot, they're not going to let you use it for free. They put a limit on it. And then you have businesses out there licensing it. You could use the example of Instacart. You go and like, hey, these are the ingredients I have. Create a recipe for me or the opposite. I want to cook this recipe, put together a shopping list for me. So you're seeing other companies experiment with using AI and they're paying those that create these chatbots to use their service.

• 9:24Mike Carruthers?

  So you just brought up something that I've always wondered about. Like, so there's the free version and there's the premium version. What's the difference? Is it just time that you can access it? Or do you get better results? Or what's the, what am I paying for?

• 9:41Speaker 02

  You're right. It's both. So with a subscription, you get a lot more time on device. You know, there's a limit how much you can use the free. If you want to return to it five, 10 times during a day, they're not going to let you do that unless you pay. But there's also the cutting edge version. So the latest, greatest version of the chatbot that an OpenAI puts out or their rivals put out, you're not going to be using that one. When you use it for free, you're using the previous model. And you know, the truth is, I use both. I use some free versions of chatbots. I've used paid versions.

• 10:24Speaker 02

  It's hard to tell the difference. To me, the difference really is how much time you get to use it each day.

• 10:31Mike Carruthers?

  When all these venture capitalists are putting all this money into it, it would seem that if you're a venture capitalist, before you hand over your check, you want to have some idea like, what's the path to money? What's the path to profit here? But it sounds like no one's really sure where the money is.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  The venture capital game is a weird one. It's really a hits business. You know, for every 10 investments they make, three or four go out of business, three or four do okay. But it's those one or two that give you the return on your investment. So, you know, the ghouls that you could make 100x, 1,000x your money. One of the main characters in the book, Reid Hoffman, you know, he invested $37,500 as an angel investor, the opening round in Facebook. And when it went public, it was worth $400 million. It's a hits game. It's the astronomical hits, the ones we've all heard of, that really the venture capitalist is shooting for.

• 11:35Mike Carruthers?

  So you said you use AI. What do you use it for?

• 11:40Speaker 02

  You know, I started using AI at the end of 2022, and I found it extraordinary for a variety of reasons. As a journalist, as a writer, I use it as my research assistant. It's a terrific editor. You know, if you're in a job where you're writing reports, you use that. It could create an illustration. You could try it 100 different ways. The illustrator is not going to be frustrated because it's a bot. No, I'm actually convinced that AI is going to be pretty essential.

• 12:10Mike Carruthers?

  And what about all this talk about, you know, it's going to take everybody's job? That we won't need people because we have AI?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  That is a worry. I think it's going to happen more slowly over time than people are thinking, which theoretically will give policymakers and others time to react. But, you know, autonomous vehicles. I was just in San Francisco a few weeks back, and there's these robo taxis everywhere. And they're driving around the city very safely. I don't think we're very far off from driverless cars. You know, it could be two years, four years, whatever, when they're ubiquitous, maybe 10 years. But 8 to 10 million people in this country make their They're living as a driver, long haul truckers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, local delivery.

• 13:01Speaker 02

  And a lot of those jobs are going to be eliminated. Customer service, there's millions of people, tens of millions of people around the world who make their living in customer service. Well, these chatbots are being used already in customer service centers to just, you know, I want to change my password, you know, basic stuff and like, oh, I can't handle this. So I'll give it off to a human. They're really having success with that. So that's another job category. I don't think it's going to eliminate all the jobs, but you know, you've got a team of 20 people working on marketing in a large company. Well, the entry level positions like do the preliminary research, you know, give me some rudimentary drawings, redraw this, redraw that.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  You know, you could suddenly a team of 20 could be a team of 10, team of five and do the same thing. So I think you're going to see large reductions in a lot of categories. And the shock to people, to me and, you know, others who have been studying this for a long time is it came for knowledge workers. It came for white collar workers before blue collar. Everyone thought it was going to be robots on the factory floor, which eventually it will happen, I'm convinced. But right now it's the computer programmers, it's the content creators, you know, paralegals, those kind of positions that are the most threatened by AI where it is today.

• 14:25Mike Carruthers?

  It seems like the companies who are in AI are big companies and you have to be a big company to get a seat at the table, that it's going to be hard to come from nowhere and be a real player in AI. If you don't have just gazillions of dollars.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  It really is the stuff of big tech. I mean, Microsoft has $100 billion in cash laying around. And the same with Google, the same with Meta. They have tens and tens and billions of dollars. It is, I fear, going to be the stuff of big tech, of big tech. You know, I fear that the next Google is Google, that the next Meta is Meta in the area of AI.

• 15:06Mike Carruthers?

  And is that a good thing or a bad thing, or it just is a thing?

• 15:11Speaker 02

  I personally think that's a bad thing. I'd say the same companies that have messed up tech in the last decade or two, the same companies we do not trust are going to be in charge of AI. And like, AI is a powerful thing. I mean, you know, eventually we're going to lose our apex status as the smartest entity on the planet. We're talking about personal agents, AI agents that are like a rich person's personal assistant. They'll make reservations for you. They know what you like, those kinds of things. Like, well, we're asking these AI models to be trusted with our information. Are we going to give our information over these things?

• 15:53Speaker 02

  So I do fear that if it's the same group of big tech companies that are dominating AI, there's going to be a trust issue on behalf of the consumers. And the mistrust I have, having written about these companies for decades, I don't quite trust them to put our best interest first. I mean, when I first started writing about this, trust and safety was a major concern for all of these companies. And that's fallen by the wayside as it's gotten more competitive and across the board. I mean, from OpenAI to Google, safety issues, I feel, have taken a backseat to making profits. And for something like AI, I think that's a real problem.

• 16:35Mike Carruthers?

  We're talking about the business of AI. And my guest is Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Gary Rivlin, author of the book AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence.

• 16:50Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers. Not available in all states.

• 17:19Speaker 05

  As wish lists grow, you know where to go. Head to Ulta Beauty. We have gifts they'll love from brands like Tato One and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. Shop beauty faves to give or keep from Shark Beauty, Sol de Janeiro and more. Not sure what they want? You can't go wrong with Balmain, Clinique or Redken. And don't forget to put yourself on the list. Book a salon moment or add a little more sparkle to your season. Shop holiday in store or at Ulta.com. Ulta Beauty.

• 17:47Mike Carruthers?

  So Gary, you use AI as an assistant and you know, people use it, as you pointed out, for recipes or you know, or help me write my paper or come up with a better title for this or what, you know, those kinds of things. What else? What in 10 years is AI going to be doing that is so spectacular beyond recipes and assisting you and that kind of thing?

• 18:13Speaker 02

  The term artificial intelligence dates back to the 1950s. So AI, at least experimenting with AI has been around for a long time. You know, in the 2000s, Google was using AI to help with its searches. If you use Google Translate, that's been around since around 2015. That's AI translating your words from English to Italian or French or whatever. You know, that's, that's AI. What, what happened in the last couple of years is we've been using generative AI. This idea that it could create something original. Example, I love that somebody at the start of 2023, playing around with ChatGPT.

• 18:58Speaker 02

  Explain Marx's economic theory in the form of a Taylor Swift song. And it didn't go search that out. It just created, just based on its knowledge of Taylor Swift and its knowledge of Karl Marx. And the answer was really, really clever. So these bots kind of know a lot about everything in a way that no human could know it. And so what, what can I imagine AI being used as? It's an expert in more or less everything. So instead of doing a Google search and spending hours trying to find something, you can talk to the AI bot that knows everything about. Physics or history or whatever your whatever your topic is.

• 19:43Speaker 02

  You could use AI in the future, I'm imagining, as a companion. I mean, we have a loneliness epidemic in our country. AI now, these generative AI programs can speak. You can speak to it, you know, like, just like you could with an Alexa. And I think a lot of people, I think a lot more people than we'd like to imagine, are gonna come home from work and just don't have anyone to talk to. They're gonna chat with their AI bot. You know, there's a lot of startups out there trying to do AI therapists, essentially. We can't anticipate all the changes that are gonna happen. Like, when the smartphone came around, did everyone think like, oh,

• 20:25Speaker 02

  I'm gonna call a car from my smartphone and, you know, we're gonna have Uber. And so a lot of this is just kind of guesswork. But my research and what a lot of smart people paying attention to AI say is there's gonna be plentiful uses way beyond just give me a good recipe based on these ingredients.

• 20:47Mike Carruthers?

  Yeah, although that's not a bad use. I mean, that's pretty good.

• 20:50Speaker 02

  I used it yesterday. I actually, you know, it's like, I have fresh tuna avocado. Inspired me and came up with five different recipes. And my spouse gave me the best compliment, like, wow, this is restaurant quality. So, you know, hats off to you, ChatGPT.

• 21:07Mike Carruthers?

  You said you use Claude as your AI tool. Tell me about Claude.

• 21:12Speaker 02

  Claude is, it's kind of the tech world's favorite. If you're out in San Francisco or in the Silicon Valley, you know, people are likely using Claude. It was created by a group that left OpenAI. They didn't trust that OpenAI had our best interest at heart. So they created a rival. It's just the best for writing, the best for editing. I mean, I'd be honest about it. I routinely take the words I write and said, give this a read, Claude. Give me some feedback. Or I, Claude, I'm struggling with this transition. I'm struggling with. This paragraph, write it three or four different ways. And it's never like I cut and paste it. It's it's flat, it's not quite right. But it comes up with really good idea. Oh, that's the right word.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  Oh, that's the way I should be rewriting this. So, you know, I I just find a really valuable tool so much that I pay 20 bucks a month for. And the other one I love too, again, another bot that's the large language model. One of these things that you could talk with that is really popular in Silicon Valley is perplexity. And what I like about that is it footnotes everything. You know, one big problem, one major problem with these chatbots is they hallucinate. It's just a fancy way of saying they make stuff up and they make mistakes. So as a journalist, I like going to a perplexity because I could click the footnote and say, oh, OK, that was an actual quote from a CNBC article. Because they'll just make stuff out of whole cloth.

• 22:39Speaker 02

  There's, you know, examples that you would find funny if they weren't potentially so tragic. There's a, you know, a law professor that they made up a whole, one of the bots made up a whole sexual harassment case against this guy. And, you know, it took place at a conference that never existed. And, you know, you you don't know where that's going to happen. Even you don't even know why it's happening. Even the people who are creating these models talk about the black box problem. They can't quite explain it says what it says. And so, you know, that's that's one of the things they really need to figure out. It's it's a real limit to to to these bots.

• 23:18Mike Carruthers?

  What, from your view, what's a big misconception people have about AI?

• 23:23Speaker 02

  I think we're scared of the wrong things. When it comes to AI, I think people have this Hollywood notion that it's going to be laser eyed robots. They're going to subjugate humanity. And, you know, that's just the stuff of movies. That's just the stuff of science fiction. I'm worried about stuff that can happen right now. The use of AI in warfare, the use of AI for surveillance, the use of AI to manipulate people. AI is trained on our text, and so it just reflects the same biases.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  That are baked in to what we as humans have created. And so if we invest too much power in AI to make decisions around employment, about sentencing when someone's convicted of a crime, that really scares me. And I think the final one that really scares me is autonomous AI. This stuff is powerful. This stuff, I play with it all the time, seems like magic. But you know, it's like there's this expression that AI is a stochastic parrot. It doesn't understand a word of what it's saying. It doesn't have common sense. And so something tragic can happen if we invest too much responsibility into an AI.

• 24:41Speaker 02

  I think for the foreseeable future, if not for the rest of time, we need humans in the loop. It's a great tool. It's a great co-pilot, but we can't entrust it with anything of significance.

• 24:52Mike Carruthers?

  Well, this is a topic that affects everyone and will affect everyone even more in the future and something we all need to keep our eye on. I've been speaking with Gary Rivlin. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter and author of the book, AI Valley: Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence. There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Gary, thanks for being here.

• 25:18Speaker 02

  Thanks, Mike. It was great.

• 25:20Speaker 00

  Life is all about making decisions. Sometimes you make questionable ones, like buying a new TV that's too big for the wall because the electronics store employee was a little too good at their job. Then sometimes you make great ones, like protecting your home and auto with Progressive. You get customized coverage options so you can be sure you have the right coverage. Get your quote today at progressive.com. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, not available in all states.

• 25:50Speaker 05

  As wish lists grow, you know where to go. Head to Ulta Beauty. We have gifts they'll love from brands like Tato One and Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez. Shop beauty faves to give or keep from Shark Beauty, Sol de Janeiro, and more. Not sure what they want? You can't go wrong with Balmain, Clinique, or Redken. And don't forget to put yourself on the list. Book a salon moment or add a little more sparkle to your season. Shop holiday in store or at Ulta.com. Ulta Beauty.

• 26:21Mike Carruthers?

  When you think about noise, you most likely think of it as a distraction, a temporary interruption, the jackhammer outside, or the helicopter overhead, or that loud motorcycle that goes by. It's a distraction, and then it's gone. But actually, noise is bigger than that. In many places, noise is more than a distraction. And being exposed to noise, even when you think you're used to it, or it doesn't bother you, can actually be harmful to your physical and mental health in ways you may not have considered. Chris Burdick is a journalist who has investigated the effects and dangers of noise in our world. And he is author of a book called,

• 27:05Mike Carruthers?

  "Clamor: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back." Hi, Chris. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Thanks for having me, Mike.

• 27:14Mike Carruthers?

  So everyone deals with noise, and in the moment, it can be very aggravating. But if you ask people, I suspect most people would say that noise is not really high on their list of life's worries or concerns.

• 27:28Speaker 03

  Well, I think people, as you say, they do care a lot in the moment when they're trying to work on a deadline and their office mates are chattering about the weekend. They care a lot about noise when it's 3:00 a.m. and the alarm on a car alarm goes off down the street, or when they're visiting a loved one in the hospital and that person hasn't been able to sleep because of all the alarms going off. They care quite a bit in those moments, but when the noise isn't in their ear, they don't think about it. There's other priorities. And what I'm trying to say is, there's a bigger systemic issue out there that from offices to hospitals, schools, restaurants, you know, our world is increasingly noisy and it's causing harms

• 28:12Speaker 03

  to our health, well-being, and to the planet.

• 28:15Mike Carruthers?

  So what are these harms, I guess, first of all, like that would help me care more if I really had an understanding that the harms were above and beyond the momentary annoyance?

• 28:25Speaker 03

  Sure. Well, you know, starting with hearing loss, the World Health Organization estimates that by 2050, about 2.5 billion people will have measurable hearing loss, 700 million of them will need hearing assistance. They also say that right now, about 100 million young people, excuse me, more than that, 1 billion young people are at risk of noise-induced hearing loss because of how loud they're listening to things on their personal devices. And beyond hearing loss, the European Environment Agency, they say that noise is implicated in about 40,000 to 50,000 new cases of heart disease and maybe 11,000 to 12,000 premature

• 29:07Speaker 03

  deaths across the continent every year. CDC implicates noise in about 100 million, excuse me, harming the health of about 100 million Americans every year. And the American Public Health Association says that the noise harms from hearing loss, cardiovascular and other impacts and work productivity impacts cost the American economy hundreds of billions of dollars a year.

• 29:28Mike Carruthers?

  Okay, wait a minute. How in the world can noise be implicated in thousands of cases of heart disease and death?

• 29:38Speaker 03

  So the main way it does that is through chronic stress. And so if you think about hearing, when you sleep, your eyes close, but your ears stay open. And the reason they do is because they have to be alert evolutionary, evolutionarily, they are alert to threats. And they have a hair-trigger connection to your fight-or-flight reaction. And part of that fight-or-flight reaction is an inflammatory response. And this is very good in the short term. If you actually are under threat and there's a likelihood you might be injured by the saber-toothed tiger or whatever might be hiding in the woods, you want to have

• 30:19Speaker 03

  the white blood cells and other responses to a potential injury to help start healing and to fight off infection. But the problem with with with stress from noise or any stress is when it becomes chronic because all of those white blood cells, all the inflammatory response can end up, you know, hardening and and clogging up your arteries. So that is a kind of a direct route connecting noise, stress to cardiovascular health problems.

• 30:49Mike Carruthers?

  So what is noise? Noise is in the ear of the beholder, right? I mean, your noise could be my music.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  I like to say that noise is subjective but not arbitrary. Your noise could be my music, but even my music, if I play it in my ears at about 100 decibels, it's going to hurt my inner ear, my cochlea is going to sustain damage, no matter what I think of the sound. But more than that, I think our reactions to sounds are, you know, they're governed by our our likes, our dislikes, our cultural backgrounds, our mood at any given point. But there's also a foundation of shared human responses to sound that are are also at play here. We have the lightning fast connection that I mentioned before to

• 31:39Speaker 03

  our fight or flight. We all have a limitation in in our attentional resources, how many signals we can handle at any given point. You know, these studies of sound interrupting sleep, they will pipe in different decibel levels of transportation noise, like highways sounds or overflights or trains. And they will see how many times people have a disturbed disturbance in their sleep, not necessarily that they'll bolt upright, but the sort of the heart rhythms that are at rest when you sleep, the blood pressure that it lowers when you sleep, they will have temporarily spikes, you know, so there's a normal pattern in that when you are sleeping. But if you have a certain amount of noise piped into

• 32:23Speaker 03

  into your sleeping quarters, like they do in these sleep studies, those will increase and they will track, well, what decibel level does this really make a difference across all of our subjects? That doesn't mean every subject will react the same way, but you can see among the data set where the trouble starts and it's typically around 45 decibels. So, you know, that is based on a shared human reaction to sound.

• 32:50Mike Carruthers?

  So there are people who live near airports or by train tracks or where there's a constant, there's constant noise, but sporadic noise. The train goes by, the plane takes off. And those people will often tell you, I'm used to it. I'm, I'm used to it. Are they used to it?

• 33:10Speaker 03

  Well, the science would suggest that even if they say they're used to it, it's still disturbing their sleep. A lot of these, the guy that studies this is Matthias Bazner. He's at the University of Pennsylvania Medical School. And he studies something called awakenings, which is essentially a very brief change in our physiology while we sleep. It doesn't mean that we are actually consciously awake, but it is disrupting the restoration that takes place in our, in our brains and in our heart, our cardiovascular system. And he says, you know, these things happen without our being aware of it. So that when you wake up, you think, oh, I slept fine, but it actually has impacted your physiology.

• 33:55Mike Carruthers?

  And so how much impact? In other words, I could think I slept really well last night, but at two in the morning, a siren went by and disturbed my sleep. Am I ruined for the day? Or we can handle that. It's, it's worse than that. Like, how much is too much?

• 34:12Speaker 03

  Right. I, I don't know is the answer to how much is too much. I know from, the epidemiology usually looks at sort of a very wide swath of geography and sort of, they have a, a model of how much airplane noise this zip code or this neighborhood is being exposed to. And then they look at the cardiovascular health from hospital reports that are also geocoded to that place. And so what they'll find typically is that when the overall

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Decibel exposure at night goes up about 10 decibels. That you will have something in around 8% increase in the risk of cardiovascular disease. So it's that sort of finding. It's not sort of on any given night. What one siren will do to you. They just don't have the the science on that yet.

• 35:08Mike Carruthers?

  And just because it's come up a couple of times and it'll probably come up again. When you talk about decibels, because I don't think people are that fluent in decibels. What is 10 decibels? Like, how loud is that or 40 decibels?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  And so decibels are a measure of acoustic energy intensity. What we're talking right now is probably around 60 decibels. The usual kind of person to person conversation level is about that. And then if you go up into kind of the 75, 85 decibel range, you're talking about, you know, a vacuum cleaner or you 85 to 95, maybe a power tool like a saw or a drill. The danger starts to happen, you know, based on the research at around 85 decibels for hearing, that is, for disturbance in other ways, it can happen all along the decibel scale. So that is what decibels are in a nutshell.

• 36:06Mike Carruthers?

  What about, right, you go to your favorite rock concert and it's really, really loud and you come home and your ears are ringing? Can you recover from that or is the damage done? Or if you stay in a real quiet room for a couple of days, it'll like it it'll equalize or can you come back from that?

• 36:28Speaker 03

  The researchers I spoke to at Mass Eye and Ear, which is a big hospital here in Boston, that they do a lot of research on hearing. They say that when you are exposed to a big loud rock concert, for instance, or some loud event, you will have a temporary reaction in terms of the ringing in the ears or even a temporary hearing loss, which will bounce back. But there's also damage below just being able to kind of sense sound that happens inside the ear, deep inside the ear, that can damage the fine-grained connection that

• 37:10Speaker 03

  your brain needs to not just sense the sound, but to help make sense of it, to differentiate one person's voice from another, or to know where in a room a sound is coming from. These are very important for, for instance, having a conversation in a noisy place. This kind of damage happens rapidly, and it is irreversible.

• 37:37Mike Carruthers?

  And how much damage does it do in this sense? And we're talking strictly about hearing loss here, but because, you know, when I was younger, you know, people would say, "Oh, you kids in your rock and roll, and you listen to it so loud, you're all gonna go deaf." Well, there aren't, I don't see a lot of deaf people walking around going, "What? What? What did you say?" I mean, so people didn't go deaf, seemingly, from going to rock concerts, but maybe their hearing was damaged. So, like, what's the scale of that? I mean, loud noise isn't gonna cause you to go deaf, right?

• 38:15Speaker 03

  That's right. So what happens is, there's, the way that they test it is an audiogram. And what that does is, you'll remember the last time you had a hearing screening, where you put the headphones on and the beeps start. They're very quiet. They're, you know, they're just basically testing, can you sense sound at all these frequencies at a low-decibel level? And what will happen is, as you are exposed to more and more loud noise, and to a certain extent, as you age, they haven't figured out exactly what contributes how much of this damage, but you will start to lose the ability to detect those frequencies at the very low decibels. They'll have to crank it up. Once they start having to crank

• 38:59Speaker 03

  it up, then they start defining you as having some measure of hearing loss. Now, that's how they measure it, but how you experience it is different. If you think about how do they test for vision loss? If they tested vision loss the same way, they would just say, can you see anything at all on that next line down? They wouldn't ask you to read any letters or numbers. The hearing test is very rudimentary. It's just a, is there a stimulus or is there not? So the damage is not that you go deaf, but that you, first of all, will lose the ability at low frequencies to detect certain sounds. But more than that, you lose that kind of fine-grained

• 39:44Speaker 03

  connections, which are part of the inner ear, you know, inside the ear, that allow you to kind of pick out a voice among many in a conversation. You'll hear a lot of people say, you know, instead of just like, what, what, I'm stone cold deaf, but I can hear you, but I can't understand you.

• 40:03Mike Carruthers?

  So let's talk about solutions or preventative measures you can take for this. And the first thing I want to ask you about is a lot of people say, I can't sleep, it's too quiet. My wife is one of these people. So we have a white noise machine, which I'm not a big fan of. I would rather have total quiet. So what do we know about white noise in terms of sleep and not interrupting your, and not interrupting your sleep?

• 40:37Speaker 03

  Part of what makes a sound noise is that it's not just an unwanted sound, it's an unwanted signal. And so when you have a very quiet background, let's say you're out in the country. Everything is very quiet, but you can then suddenly hear some strange animal out in the woods or the, every creak of the house. You, you will be disturbed by that because you are hearing this signal that might otherwise be masked by the sort of constant dull whoosh of traffic going by.

• 41:18Speaker 03

  I don't know what the science says about white noise disturbing our sleep, but in terms of its ability to kind of lessen the signals coming to your ears, it does have a utility, you know, people use it in office settings all the time to try to set a floor where every straight conversation is not going to to to reach them. So it has that utility at the very least.

• 41:49Mike Carruthers?

  Well, one of the interesting things I noticed, even though I don't like the white noise machine, when I wake up in the morning, I don't notice it until she turns it off. Like, I got used to it. It wasn't even something on my radar until it's turned off and I go, oh, yeah, that was on. But I didn't know, I didn't register that it was on because somehow it just became, you know, part of me.

• 42:14Speaker 03

  Basically, what your your mind is trying to do is figure out what it needs to pay attention to and what it doesn't. And once it has figured out that it doesn't need to pay attention to that, you won't hear it. There's a great study by a British engineer who had people try to differentiate two conversations played over headsets, one in each ear. And people had a hard time doing that. They would come up with a word or two from each one. They couldn't track it. And then he would separate them. One would be played in the left ear, one would be played in the right ear. And he would say, just listen to the one in your left ear. He would still play them both, but you would just listen to one ear. And people after a few tries could do it.

• 42:59Speaker 03

  But then he would say, well, tell me anything, any of the words, anything that was said in your right ear. So you had been focusing on the left ear conversation and and you could finally pick up by focusing on that, recite it perfectly. It would be a sentence or two. But because you had been paying attention to it, your focus is like a like a spotlight on in the other ear. You could remember nothing. You you could change the language in mid-sentence in the right ear and people wouldn't notice it. It was basically as if they hadn't heard it at all and it's it was guided by their attention. And so that attention really plays a huge part in in what we consciously hear.

• 43:40Mike Carruthers?

  Again, I know you're not a doctor, but is the general prescription to be aware of and try to eliminate noise in your life, is that a fair prescription?

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Yes, I think that's fair. I think in a broader sense, what we should do more of is pay attention to sound in a proactive way. We tend to pay attention to it when it's become a problem that we can then complain about. But as we are creating our spaces, the architects that work on creating the next office space or restaurant, to think about sound and how it's going to work in this space ahead of time is incredibly valuable. It can help us avoid noise that we would otherwise bungle into.

• 44:34Mike Carruthers?

  I know there's a lot of concern about headphones, listening to music or listening to anything on headphones because it's so close to your ear. And I think I read that Apple's doing research on that. Can you talk about that?

• 44:48Speaker 03

  The Apple hearing study is ongoing. This is a study that Apple decided to do because they know that people generally listen to music a bit too loud because it is right there next to their eardrum when you have the AirPods, for instance. And so they have a study now where they're trying to track how loud people are listening to their devices when they have a headphone or an earbud in. And they will send them small reminders to say, you know, you've been listening at 85 to 90 decibels. That's often considered to be a danger to hearing, just to let you know. They're not going to cut you off or anything.

• 45:32Speaker 03

  And then they're going to test different nudges to see what works, what helps people to kind of take control of how loud they are listening to it. I think that's the main thing, to kind of realize.

• 45:45Speaker 03

  That it matters when you have something that close to your ears. You have to be particularly sensitive to kind of how loud the volume is.

• 45:55Mike Carruthers?

  Well, when you think about it, you know, our hearing is always on. Sound is always coming in, whether we're actively listening to it or not. And it's important to know what the effects of all that sound is. I've been talking to Chris Burdick. He is a journalist and author of the book, "Clammer: How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back." There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. And Chris, thanks for coming on and talking about this.

• 46:22Speaker 03

  Sure. Thanks, Mike.

• 46:28Mike Carruthers?

  Here's something a woman can do that a man cannot. That is make her voice sexier. In a study at Albright College, researchers found that women were able to deliberately manipulate their voices while counting from one to 10 to sound more attractive. But when guys tried to do it, they actually sounded worse, not better. When a woman intentionally drops her voice to make it sound low and breathy, she's often perceived as more attractive, but not exactly for the reasons you might think. Men tend to prefer women with higher, more feminine voices, according to the study's author.

• 47:09Mike Carruthers?

  But when a woman lowers her voice to deliberately sound sexy, she's sending a signal of her interest in a potential mate. And that's a clue that men are able to pick up on. But it doesn't work the other way around. And that is something you should know. The producers here at Something You Should Know are Jeff Havison and Jennifer Brennan. The executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 47:40Speaker 00

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