Seth Godin on Creating Your Best Strategy & How Beer Changed the World

Today, on Something You Should Know, we all like the number two pencil, but how come no one uses a number one pencil? Then, Seth Godin reveals why you need a strategy for your life. Strategy is not tactics.
Strategy is not a plan. Those things are based on a mindset that says, if I do this, I'll get that.
Strategy is our philosophy of becoming. It's seeing how the world actually is and then showing up to make it better.
Also why you should be careful about opening up new credit card accounts around the holidays and how beer has changed the world and just how delicate beer is. At its absolute best straight from the brewery and from the moment it leaves it's only getting worse.
You know 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer so we need to treat beer like it's almost a fresh food. All this today on Something You Should Know.
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Fascinating intel. The world's top experts.
And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
Hi. I'm holding in my hand a pencil.
And it has little Christmas trees on it. Because it's a holiday pencil.
And the background of the pencil is white. Which makes it somewhat of a rare pencil.
Because as it turns out, 75% of all pencils are yellow.

Why is that? Well, during the 1800s, the best graphite came from China.

Yellow is the color they associate with royalty and respect.

A pencil-painted yellow became known as the best pencil you could buy.

And that's why today there are still so many yellow pencils.

The most popular pencil is the number two pencil, but there is also number 1, 3, 4, and 5. There's a trade-off between the hardness and the darkness in pencils, and the number 2 is the best compromise for most purposes.
The number 1 pencil is darker, but people find it smudges too easily and has to be sharpened too often. One average pencil can write 45,000 words or draw a line 35 miles long.
The lead, of course, is not lead. It is graphite.
The wood is cedar. And pencils have been mass-produced in Europe since 1622.
The first U.S. pencils were made in 1812.
And that is something you should know. You probably have goals and plans, but do you have a strategy? Those three words, goals, plans, and strategy, and maybe tactics, those words get used a lot, somewhat interchangeably, but they are all very different, and strategy is probably the most misunderstood.
Strategy is not a list of steps to take. Strategy requires strategic thinking and is much more long-term.
Perhaps there is no one better to discuss strategy and strategic thinking than Seth Godin. Seth

is author of 21 international best-selling books such as Unleashing the Idea Virus,

Permission Marketing, and Purple Cow. He's given five TED Talks.
He is the former vice

president of direct marketing at Yahoo and the founder of the pioneering online startup Yo-Yo Dine. His latest book is called This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans.
Hey Seth, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thank you, Mike.
What a pleasure. So we're talking about strategy and it's a word that, you know, people throw around a lot, but focus it in the way you're talking about it.

What are you talking about when you mean strategy?

Strategy is not tactics and strategy is not a plan.

Those things are important, but those things are based on a mindset that says, if I do this, I'll get that.

Strategy is our philosophy of becoming. It's where

we want to go and how we hope to get there. It's seeing how the world actually is and then showing up to make it better.
And how is that not a plan? Well, a plan comes with a guarantee. So a plan could be, I need to lose 25 pounds.

So my plan is with a guarantee. So a plan could be, I need to lose 25 pounds.
So my plan is stop eating dessert, run three miles a day. If I do that for X amount of time, I will lose 25 pounds.
We like plans because they come with a prize at the end. But a strategy is about dealing with an unknown future.
So you don't have a plan for getting into a famous college, but you might have a strategy for doing it that is based on some assertions and some understanding of the game you're playing and how you're going to be able to win that game. Well, it seems, well, my experience anyway, but I think for many, plan, strategies are great, but life has a way of doling out its own strategy or disrupting yours, if nothing else, that you can have the best of intentions and the best ideas and the best ways to get there, but life will always throw you a curveball.
Exactly. And that's the big insight here.
The big insight is you don't get to decide. The system existed before you got there, and the system is going to be there when you leave.
Instead, what we say when we build a strategy is there are certain things that are more consistent than others. I want those things to be at my back.
So let me give you an example of an elegant strategy that changed the world. When potatoes were brought to Europe in the 1600s, they weren't viewed with respect, partly because of colonialism and racism, partly because they were new and people were afraid of things that were new.
So potatoes were banned in France. And the question this entrepreneur faced was, how am I going to get potatoes to be adopted by people who don't want them? And the tactics that he came up with were brilliant based on a simple strategy.
So what he did was he took some land near Versailles, the castle, a few acres, and he planted it with potatoes. And then he put armed guards all around the farm during the day.
But at night, he sent them home. So at night, hungry peasants who figured there must be something valuable there on the farm stole the potatoes, discovered that they were delicious, probably with some butter, and Europe changed.
The key to this is that tactic might not have worked, but the strategy of betting on the fact that people want what they can't have, that's an interesting strategy that's likely to get you where you're going. Well, that's pretty clever, but don't you think that's kind of manipulative? Like you're tricking people into believing something.
Well, what's manipulation, Mike? Manipulation is when you use marketing to get someone to do something that if after the fact they did it, they'd regret it, that's manipulation. So when a drug dealer stands outside of a school and gives out free samples and people get addicted, they've manipulated people.
On the other hand, when the coach of the high school football team gives an inspirational speech and the kids on the team go out and play better, they're not manipulated. That's what they signed up for.
And so there's a fine line when we show up to contribute, to make a difference, right? That if we go ahead and rescue somebody who's drowning, they might thank us for it later, but in the moment, they're fighting us because in the moment, they're drowning. You have written in your book some things that I think are really interesting, but I would like to get you to tie this into what you just said about what strategy is.
And one is the story about where's the meter? How is that a strategy? So this brilliant natural experiment occurred, and it involved a housing development in Amsterdam or somewhere in the Netherlands.

And what happened was there was a bunch of houses. They were all identical pretty much, except some of them had the electric meter in the basement and some of them had the electric meter in the vestibule.
So you had to look at it when you walked in. And what they found is that people who had the electric meter right in front of them used one third less electricity than people who didn't have the meter in front of them.
And when we hear that story, it seems sort of obvious. We could imagine that could happen to us, but we are intentionally putting meters all around us.
Do you know how many people follow you on Instagram? Do you know to the penny how much money you have in your checking account? Those are meters. Those are things that are right in front of us.
But if they're keeping you from doing the work you want to do, from focusing on what you want to focus on, then you're measuring the wrong thing. So we know, for example, that the people who do the best in the stock market only pay attention to what's happening every three months or year, not every five minutes.
So if you're busy getting updates about how your stock portfolio is doing, if you have one, every few minutes, you're going to panic. And in fact, there's some very successful investment funds that don't permit their analysts to even keep track on that kind of scale because they know it's going to cause them to make bad decisions.
You say that the hard work of developing a more resilient strategy begins with letting go of assumptions and goals, which seems like, well, why would you want to let go of those? When we have assumptions, what we're saying is we've already made statements about how the world is and the systems that are around us. But it's entirely possible that we are mistaken about that.

So back to the idea of college. If I talk to a typical high school student and say, who gets into Yale or who gets into Princeton, they'll tell me the smartest kids or the kids who kissed up the most.
But if I look, for example, at Harvard University, 50% of the people who get in, get in because of a recommendation of a sports coach. That if I take a hard look at what the system actually rewards, it might not be the thing you think it does.
So part of what we have to do to bring change to a system is to see the system, to see where the leverage points are. And the goal that we had when we got there might not match the change we actually seek to make.
That's a hard way to think. I mean, it's not a normal, natural way to think.
It's the other way of you make assumptions, you have goals, you make assumptions on how you get there, and then you go. Well, that's exactly what the system wants you to do.
The system is good at sticking around. The system invents culture.
So simple example, all the 12, 15, 20 years we spend in school, they never once, never once ask you a question they don't know the answer to. And then we graduate, and that's all that's required if you want to actually have a great life and succeed, is to answer questions no one knows the answer to, but no one trained you how to do that.
Why? Because it's much easier to be a teacher or to run a school if everything is already in the notebook, if everything is a given, if it's a multiple choice test. And we can see in all these corners of our lives where systems have created a reality that doesn't actually match what works best for our lives.
I'm speaking with Seth Godin. He is author of the book, This is Strategy, Make Better Plans.
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And I'll put that promo code in the show notes. So Seth, as I listen to you, I think, you know, perhaps you see the world differently than most.
In fact, you, Seth Godin, have a reputation as being this out-of-the-box thinker. And so what might be obvious to you might not be so obvious to me or somebody else.
I'm not some special talent. I just decided to focus on this, to focus a lot of my life on seeing systems that would help me explain why things might be the way they are.
If you see something in the world and you're not sure why it is that way, it's worth asking a few questions to get deeper into, well, who benefits from it? What's the history that made it this way? Because that history might not be relevant anymore, but the thing is still the way it used to be. Well, sometimes it seems that although you can ask the question, it doesn't mean you know the answer.
And you may come up with a false answer that leads you down another wrong path. This is interesting, Mike.

Most of the interactions I have with people,

I'm not seeing that that is the problem.

I'm seeing the problem is people aren't asking the question.

So I wrote a book about school,

and there's only one question in the book,

which is, what is school for? And if I talk to teachers or to parents or to administrators, school boards, they can't answer the question because they're not asking the question. We're going to spend a trillion dollars and we can't even ask the question, why? What is school for? And if you answer that question, you might not come up with the answer I come up with, but at least you'll be ahead of people who aren't even bothering to ask it.
A great point. What is school for? In the Seth Godin head, what is school for? Two things.
It's to teach kids to solve interesting problems and to teach them how to lead. and we don't do either one of those things in almost any school setting except for a few minutes a day.
What do you mean that games are in every strategy? A game is any situation where there are multiple players and boundaries and outcomes. And that's, you get pulled over by a cop and you don't want to get a traffic ticket.
That is a game. It's a game when you run for local city council.
It's a game if your birthday's coming up and there's seven people trying to decide where to go for dinner. These are all games.
And the reason they're worth calling them games, one, because we understand game theory. We've learned a lot about how games actually work.
And two, because if you make a move that doesn't work, you realize you're not a bad person. You just made a move that didn't work.
And that's how you get good at chess, but it's also how you get good at life because you don't take it personally when a move doesn't work.

You just make a better move next time. So talk about Airbnb because their story, you say, is a great strategy story.
Explain how that is. Okay.
So here's the deal. When you pick your audience, you pick your future.
so here we are on this extraordinary podcast, and yet nobody, not one person who listens to it, speaks only Greek. Because the podcast isn't in Greek, it's in English.
You picked that first thing about your listeners. But there's lots of other things you picked about your listeners that help you decide if it's a good show or not.
And so if someone's writing for the sports page of the local newspaper, they probably shouldn't be covering the city council election that took place in Botswana last week because that's not who their audience is. So Airbnb, they think, oh, we've got this great idea.
We're going to create a place where people who have an extra

room, a spare living room, can trade it, sell it to somebody who's traveling. That's too many people.

It's too many people because until you get everybody, you're going to have nobody. No one's

going to be listing and no one's going to be looking for listings because it's too amorphous.

It's too unclear who it's for.

And Airbnb almost went out of business.

Interesting trivia, the way they stayed in business during an election, a bunch of elections

ago, is they made boxes of cereal named after John McCain and Barack Obama and sold them

as collectibles to make enough money to stay in business.

So they're about to fold.

And then they said, oh, you know what we need? We need to pick the right audience. Well, there's a conference that takes place in Austin, Texas every year, the South by Southwest Tech Conference.
And the people who go are really nerdy and they don't have a lot of money and they use the internet a lot. And the other thing about that conference is there aren't enough hotel rooms.
They decided to focus all of their energy, this part's the plan, all of their energy on that week in that town. By that focus, they got enough listings, those listings got them enough users, and then all of those users bragged about how cool it was.
So the overall strategy was pick the right audience, focus on them obsessively, make it as small as you possibly can. The tactic they picked, the plan was an example of that, but they could have picked 40 different ones that would have worked just as well.
Can you explain the idea of it barely works, I think is the phrase you use, where you talk about things don't have to be perfect to launch? Well, think about the telephone. At the beginning, there was no one to call.
It took more than a decade for a million people to have a telephone. It was really expensive.
You had to crank this thing up. The connections weren't very good.
It barely worked. In fact, when the telephone came out, Thomas Edison took Alexander Graham Bell aside and he said, this idea that you should say ahoy when you answer the phone is stupid.
They invented the word hello as a way to answer the telephone because people didn't even know how to answer the phone. So you had this stumbling technology that barely worked.

Moved to the modern day.

When Facebook started, it was on one college campus for lonely guys who couldn't get a date.

And all it was about was looking at other people on this campus and figuring out who

would go out with you.

It barely worked. Big problems demand small solutions.
It doesn't matter if you're trying to lose weight or get a job. Whatever you do isn't going to be perfect for a long time.
And yet people's sense, or my sense is, you know, if you're going to launch something, if you're going to do something, you do it right or you don't do it at all. This is a great point.
And it comes to the confusion about the word quality and the idea of perfectionism. People also don't understand what quality means.
Quality doesn't mean luxury. Quality doesn't mean expensive.
Quality just means it meets spec. You decided what the spec is.
And once you meet the spec, you ship it. If it needed to be better, you should make a better spec.
Perfectionism is an enemy because it's a way of hiding. Perfect is unobtainable.
With that said, what we have to do is say, well, what is the spec that we need to launch this with that we can be proud of? When Toyota started making quality cars in the late 60s, early 70s, it took a while. But by 1980, a Toyota Corolla was a better quality car than a Rolls-Royce, not because it was fancier, but because it met its specification better.
It reliably did what it said it was going to do. And so we need a strategy to help us decide what the spec should be.
But then once we have the spec, we should define that as what good enough is. So we're seeking the minimum viable product for the smallest useful audience.
Not shipping junk, shipping something with utility, but just enough utility to make it worth eagerly trying. You can't name not a single idea, scientific advancement product of any kind that launched as good as it's ever going to be.
Not one. Not the Mac, not the iPhone, not Nike sneakers.
Not one. Talk about feedback loops.
What are they and why are they important to this discussion? Yeah, this is another good one because people think feedback means criticism. I'm just going to give you some feedback.
We should have a word for that, but that's not what feedback is. There's two kinds of feedback, positive and negative.
They sort of mean the opposite of what you think. So negative feedback is the thermostat in your house.
So when it gets warm out and your house gets too warm, the thermostat kicks in the air conditioning. When it gets too cold in the winter, the thermostat

kicks in the heat. The purpose of negative feedback is to keep things stable.
Positive

feedback is what happens if you go to a wedding and the amateur DJ holds the microphone too close

to the speaker and you hear that horrible screeching sound. That's what happens when

something gets amplified and amplified and amplified and goes out of control. So the feedback loop

Thank you. screeching sound.
That's what happens when something gets amplified and amplified and amplified and goes out of control. So the feedback loop we have in our climate right now is a positive feedback loop because as the ice caps melt, they release methane.
Methane makes climate change worse and more ice caps melt. It's not a good thing.
But in lots of areas of our lives, we have negative feedback that keep systems the way they are. So if there's a culture at your company of meetings, that meetings are a certain way, they always last a certain amount of time, certain people get to speak, other people don't, it sticks around, not because that's a good way to have a meeting, but because the negative feedback loop keeps it in place.
Because if you try to change it too fast, the boss is going to come down on you and make it back to what it was. Not because the boss likes it the old way, but because the boss's job is to protect the old way.
So if we want to change a negative feedback loop, we have to do it incrementally, often apart from the crowd. And we have to change the way that the feedback is applied so that it doesn't extinguish our good ideas too early.
Well, I always enjoy talking to you. You're one of the people who we talk about sometimes about, I feel smarter having talked to you because you make me think in a way that I don't normally think and I think that's true for a lot of people which is why your books sell so well and you're so popular.
I've been speaking with Seth Godin, author of 21 best-selling books. He has five TED Talks you can go watch and the name of his latest book is called This Is Strategy, Make Better Plans and there's a link to that book in the show notes.
Always great to have you on. Thanks, Seth.
All right. We'll see you.
Hello, I am Kristen Russo. And I am Jenny Owen Youngs.
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I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History. And every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it.
Sometimes we reexamine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahas, sharing the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook.
If you can hear my cat purring, she is often on the podcast as well. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts.
Go to any party, bar, sporting event, backyard barbecue, you will usually find people drinking beer. It's a popular drink.
So popular, it has its own aisle at the grocery store. There are many types of beers, many brands of beers.
And of course, it's not only popular in the U.S., but beer is popular all over the world. People like their beer.
So what's the big deal here? Why is beer so popular? What are all these different kinds and colors of beer? Well, meet my guest, Johnny Garrett. He is an award-winning author, journalist, filmmaker, and podcaster who is best known as the co-founder of the Craft Beer Channel, a YouTube channel with over 140,000 subscribers and 10 million views.
He is author of the book, The Meaning of Beer, One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint. Hey, Johnny, welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thank you very much for having me. So do we know who first said, hey, taste this.
This is great. This is beer.
I'm really liking this. Do we know when that was? It's a great question.
And to be honest, no, we don't. What we know is the oldest record we have of that happening, which is about 13,000 years ago in a cave called Rakhophat Cave near Nazareth in Israelrael where we found evidence of the natufian people who were a sort of a semi-sedentary uh semi-nomadic kind of tribe who we know they were brewing with uh barley and wheat in divots that they created purpose-built in the cave and we know this through sort of of digging right down and looking at these divots very carefully under microscopes and working out the processes and the ingredients.
But we're fairly certain, given how, I guess, complicated the process was, how technologically advanced it was, that it must have been happening earlier. We're too far down the chain to think that this was the first example of brewing.
They must have learned it earlier it sort of we're too far down the chain to think

that this was the first example of brewing they must have learned it earlier and it was when again well about 11 000 bce so and so is beer beer like is is the beer that they made 11 000 years ago if i took a sip of it i'd go yeah that's beer or would i say well no that's not what i think of as beer?

I think in the Western world,

you'd absolutely not recognize it.

Beer has come an incredible distance since that first brew that we know of. But there are still lots of, I guess the word would probably be like indigenous style still made in certain parts of Africa, certain parts of South America, where the technology hasn't been introduced.
And so the methods are still very, very traditional. So what makes beer beer? Like in order to call this beer, it must have what? It must be a fermented cereal based alcoholic drink.
So it must use something like barley or wheat or phonio, or which is sort of a new grain that we're getting very excited about now because of its sustainability properties, or even things like sorghum, spelt. All of these grains would have been used in different parts of the world and indeed exported and imported to different parts of the world because of the unique flavors and characteristics that they had.
Today, people drink beer. Well, I mean, today people drink alcohol because they want to get buzzed i mean has that always been the the purpose of beer has beer served any other purpose other than being an alcoholic beverage that people use to get buzzed and socialize and whatever well when it was first invented as far as we know in 11 000 bc and probably for the next 10 000 years it had a dual purpose or even a three-pronged purpose so the first one the most important one was actually that it was full of nutrition it was full of calories and it was a relatively safe thing to consume you didn't always have access to clean water our ancestors so we somehow knew that beer was much less likely to poison us and the reason behind that is that alcohol is an antiseptic so it kills many of the bacterias and viruses that might make us ill from drinking water that we didn't really know the source of so it became very important for nutrition and as a safe source of liquid and as a result of those two things it then became a form of worship we've seen it in the ancient Egyptians, we've seen it in the ancient Sumerians, and countless different civilizations all over the world were using beer as part of funeral traditions, part of worshipping of gods.
You know, we don't necessarily associate beer with the ancient Egyptians, but actually it was a daily inevitability in their lives in terms of, you know, the people that built the pyramids were paid in beer, in cloth, and in bread. Those were the three things that you needed to survive in ancient Egypt as a worker.
And so it was inevitable to them, but equally it's painted onto their sarcophagi, it's carved into the stones as a gift to God because it was a life-giving drink. And that's only really faded in the last, you know, maybe thousand years, but really in the last 200 with sort of the industrial and technical revolutions and of course the spread of safe drinking water throughout the Western world.
And so what is it that makes, you know, some beers very expensive, some beers very cheap, some beers dark, some beers light? I mean, is it just subjectively we're going to do it this way or is there some rhyme or reason to it or can you untangle that or it just is what it is? I mean, it's a super complicated question and would really vary depending on where you are. And I would say in the UK where we're very sensitive to how much our beer costs because it's so important to us, but equally, we have some of the highest taxation on alcohol in the world.

The strength of the drink can make a big difference because that's what the duty is levied against in many countries.

So, you know, the important thing to point out, and I think the thing that a lot of people worry about when they're getting expensive beer is that the beers that maybe we grew up drinking, the beers that are the best selling in the world, you know, the Budweiser's, the Coors, the Stella Artois, say in the UK, these are mass produced commercialized products. So they have huge economies of scale.
They have used the absolute pinnacle of human endeavor and technology to make these beers as quickly and as cheaply and as uniformly as possible. And that has resulted in beer becoming very cheap, but also I think its place in society, its place in the world being diminished as well, because it just sort of sits there next to the washing up liquid on your shopping list instead of being something that was celebrated the way that our ancestors did.
And so there are a lot of people that are very cynical about the craft beer movement, about the bringing back of traditional methods, of small batch brewing, of experimentation with different ingredients and different techniques, as sort of, you know, hipster fuel and this kind of stuff. But actually, I think that it's an incredibly important thing that's happened in the last 30 or 40 years.
And of course, that's going to come with additional costs because of the smaller batches that it's being made in because of the

increased ingredients. If you want to make a very strong beer, that takes significantly more malt

because you need more sugar to ferment to get that higher ABV. But then also you might need

more hops to balance it, or you might want more hops to get more aroma and flavor and to really

push the boundaries of what a beer can taste and smell like. Or you might, you know, a Budweiser's made in a week, 10 days, a really great artisanal lager like the way they've made in Germany for centuries would typically take at least six weeks in the Czech Republic.
They'll lager beers for three months, six months, 12 months. To look at your book, as I looked at your book, you attribute a lot of things to beer from, you know, pasteurization to railroads to, I mean, that it's more important than, in your mind, than what most people think.
So can you talk about some of that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I've made a career of writing about beer for about a decade now and i've constantly come up against either people online sort of saying come on man it's it's just beer or friends sort of worrying about me and worrying about my career and that's sort of what spurred me onto this journey and just sort of going well is it just beer is is the significance of beer purely you know a drink at the end of the day or at the end of the week or meeting up with friends? Or in my brain, something so fundamental to the daily life of most people in the world, there has to be more significance to it.
And so I started to think about all the possible ways that beer might have changed the world. And it started with the discovery in my previous book, A Year in in beer that the fridge was actually invented in a brewery in Bavaria like the first commercial compressed gas refrigeration unit was for a brewery so that they could chill their cellars and get fewer infections and be able to brew year round most importantly because it was too warm for the lager yeasts of Bavaria to brew in summer.
And it was literally outlawed by the government. So I started to think, what else could there be? And I started to discover all kinds of incredible things, such as the pH meter, the Keldahl test, which is what we use to test for protein in food.
So if you've ever read the back of a cereal packet with the protein listed, that would probably use the process that process that was invented actually in the first case for beer and then I started to go across some sort of the incredible industrial stuff and look at you know medicine and medical ties that the brewing industry had so we only discovered you know the full role of bacteria and infections in humans as a result of us trying to work out why beers and wines were turning sour. And that was the work of Pasteur and a couple of other incredible scientists in the mid-1800s.
And in fact, I managed to dig out a century-old biography of Louis Pasteur in which there's a letter that's sent by Joseph Lister, the surgeon who created the very notion of antiseptics and saved millions of lives as a result of basically saying to surgeons, wash your hands, please. That comes from him studying Etude Soulebier and Etude Soulevan, which were the two sort of huge pieces of research that Pasteur did in wine and beer.
So like many of the things, our journey to the moon, lots of people might say that was a huge waste of money, particularly given the way that the world is right now. But if you look at the technology we had to develop to get to the moon and the implications that has had, it's kind of the same with beer.
There's so there's very few, I think, industrial, commercial or indeed cultural developments that have happened in the last 200 years that haven't had beer either inspiring it or directly influencing it. And this book was trying to make that case.
And I'm sure there'll be critics out there that will say I've overplayed it in some ways, but beer literally and metaphorically has had an influence on our lives, whether we drink or not. But do you think that it's bigger than anything else? In other words, somebody could be similar to you and take on vodka and say, look at all these great things that we can associate with vodka.
And it would be just as compelling as beer. Or do you think beer just stands head and shoulders above every other alcoholic drink? I've had this argument many times online and I think my point always comes down to a couple of simple facts.

The first thing is that beer was the first alcoholic beverage produced by humans. We know that for a fact.
Wine was four or 5,000 years later. We didn't distill anything for seven or 8,000 years after that.
And things like cider were also discovered thousands of years later. So we know

that beer was the very first one. And we know that beer had a huge influence on why we settled,

where we settled, arable farming in its early days, the shape of pottery, our religions and

how they were constructed and how they were enacted. So beer had five, 6,000 years of

influence over humanity before any other form of alcohol was sort of manufactured by humans. The other thing I would say is that we are yet, anthropologists are yet to find a civilization, ancient or modern, that didn't brew beer.
And that's not the case, say, for vodka or for sake or these very regional forms of beautiful and influential alcohols within their spaces but beer is fundamental to every you know every human that's ever existed and ever will will know what beer is and will probably have consumed it at some point and so beer has you know sort of has the time and it has the the spread that no other alcohol does the only one where i'd entertain the idea that it might be as influential is wine. Pasteurization was an idea that Louis Pasteur first suggested to the wine industry before he did to beer.
And there's a couple of other instances there because wine is so central to Europe where a lot of these certainly 19th century discoveries were being made. Obviously, there's so many more happening around the world now.
But wine, you know, could come close, but it doesn't have that head start and it doesn't have that ubiquity. And what's the connection between beer and railways? There was a time after Prohibition where many of the breweries had to close due to the lack of business, the fact they weren't allowed to brew.
The surviving breweries, five of them became known as the shipping breweries. So these were breweries, Budweiser, Coors, Miller, Pabst.
And these were the breweries, they were called shipping breweries, because they were the quickest out of the gate to recognize that railroads were the best way to grow their business, to get their beers out there. And so they were helping, they were funding railway projects.
They were funding technologies such as ice-packed railway cars so their beer could stay cold on the way Budweiser invested in ice houses all over the country next to railroads where they could store their beer to keep it cold but also then sell the ice to local people so they had a huge impact on where the railways went why they went and when they were built and indeed invested in many of them because that's how they knew their breweries could grow quicker than say their competitors. So could you do me a favor and I'm not a big beer drinker.
I drink a couple of beers a year, go to a baseball game, I'll have a beer, but I'm not a big beer drinker. So I don't know a lot about it, but there is so much vocabulary in beer from, you know, there's beer and there's ale and there's lagers and there's pilsners in there.
And all these words that I have, I don't really know what they mean. Could you give me like a little vocabulary tour through beer? Yeah, I mean, when I first got into beer, I was in the same position and didn't understand a lot of these phrases and if i could have sort of craft beers time again i would say look everybody let's try and keep this a bit simpler but we didn't really have names for styles or families of beer until a great beer writer called michael jackson came along and he still venerated as sort of the original beer writer and he came came up with, you know, essentially he made sort of the animal kingdom, these taxonomies of beer by traveling the world and discovering all these styles that haven't been made.

So it all sort of comes from his work.

And really what we have at the top is beer.

Beer, as I said earlier, refers to anything that is is a fermented cereal-based alcoholic drink. Down from beer, you have ale and you have lager.
And lager is often seen as sort of the poor man's version of ale. But really, the only difference between those two things is the yeast strain that's being used.
And lagers, lager a slightly different breed of yeast like to ferment cold and ale yeasts like to ferment at room temperature and that's literally the only difference as a result of you know the laws of thermodynamics they ferments lagers ferment slower and produce fewer flavors which is why they're used in all these these clean crisp lagers but that's the only difference and then from that point onwards between ale and lager you break down into hundreds and hundreds of different styles of beer that all have their individual histories their individual stories and in particular until quite recently their own regionality so it used to be that you know particularly in places like Belgium and the UK and Germany and the Czech Republic these sort of of old world brewing nations, every town would have its own style, its own breweries, its own customs when it came to consuming beer. But obviously that's now blurred as we've started to learn more about other people's cultures, been able to brew with different yeast, different ingredients and export them around the world.
So I guess sort of the most famous styles would be the pilsner which was invented in 1842

in pilsen in the czech republic which is a beautiful like quite hoppy quite bitter full-bodied lager beer pilsner rakel being the most famous in the original and then you have the ipa which in the uk used to be a slightly funky really hoppy very bitter quite strong beer that got its name from being sent over to

India when the UK occupied that. But now the Americans have sort of co-opted that beer and

turned it into the American IPA, which I think most people will know, some will love, some will

hate. And those are sort of the two biggest styles in the world, IPA being sort of the flagship of

craft beer. Don't ask me what craft beer means, because that meaning is lost to the wind.

Thank you. And those are sort of the two biggest styles in the world, IPA being sort of the flagship of craft beer.
Don't ask me what craft beer means, because that meaning is lost to the wind, I think, at this point. Although I don't know much about beer.
Well, I do now. I know a lot more than I did 20 minutes ago.
But one thing I do know or that I've heard over and over again is that light is beer's enemy. Absolutely.
Yeah. So beer has a couple of enemies.
Light is absolutely one of them. Heat is the other one and oxygen is the final one.
So when it comes to brewing beer and when it comes to caring for the beers that you have, those are the three things you want to avoid. So light, UV light creates this process called light striking, which is essentially UV light breaking down some aroma compounds in the beer.
And it makes the beer smell and taste a little bit kind of weedy, a little bit skunky. It's sometimes called skunking, but just kind of musty.
And if you want to know what that tastes like, what I'd advise is getting a bottle of Corona, putting it in the window for an hour and then drinking it or crack it open and smell it and it will smell a little bit illicit. So that's why bottles are almost always in brown glass because that blocks the most amount of UV light that you can.
But in terms of protecting beers best, they're actually better off in the can. And there's a lot of cliches around cans not being as good for beer.
And that was definitely true 40, 50 years ago. But technology, you know, we line these with certain plastics that are entirely inert.
And now cans are absolutely the best preservative for beer because it blocks out the light. It also means they're quicker to chill down.
And as I said, heat is the enemy as well. That also breaks down aromatic compounds.
So you want to keep your beer cold. Don't sort of keep it in a cupboard and then put it in the fridge so it's cold when you want to consume it.
Always, always keep it in the fridge. Think of it as butter.
It should always, always be in the fridge. And then the final one is oxygen, which we can't do a lot about other than drinking quickly.
But breweries spend millions and millions of pounds on perfect canning and bottling lines to minimize how much oxygen ends up in the bottles and the cans. Because that's called staling of the beer.
And again, oxygen breaks down these delicious aroma and flavor compounds in the beer to make it no longer the beer that the brewer sort of had in their heads. Well, that's really interesting to know because I think most people would imagine that beer sealed in a can or sealed in a bottle you could store it forever in your cupboard and then just cool it off when you want to drink it but you're saying that that no that's bad idea absolutely beer beer is they called it liquid bread for thousands of years our ancestors and it is like that you know it it's not going to poison you if you drink out of date or you haven't cared for it because it's got alcohol in it it's it's a pretty safe uh safe form of liquid but it is at its absolute best straight from the brewery and from the moment it leaves it's only getting worse so that's why you know craft brewers they'll always be saying you know drink it fresh and why a lot of the cans will also say keep cold and store in a dark place because it really you know 30 seconds in the light is enough to taint a very hoppy beer so you'll even see at beer festivals and this is slightly ridiculous sort of beer geeks putting paper over their beers to try and protect it from the light that doesn't do much but that's sort of the extent that it can affect the flavor of beer so we need to treat beer evenced, you know, macro lagers, we need to treat it like it's almost a fresh food.
Well, I had no idea there was that much to know about beer. I mean, you certainly are the quintessential beer expert.
I appreciate you coming on. I've been speaking with Johnny Garrett.
He is an author, journalist, filmmaker, podcaster. He has the Craft Beer channel on YouTube, and he is author of a book called The Meaning of Beer, One Man's Search for Purpose in His Pint.
And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Again, thanks so much for being here, Johnny.
Thank you so much for having me, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure being on the show.
One very common marketing practice is for retail stores to get you to open a store charge account by giving you 10% off your first purchase. And if you're buying hundreds of dollars of holiday gifts or other merchandise, it might be a pretty good idea if you don't do it too often.
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And that is something you should know. It's always fun to read reviews that people leave about this podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen, you can typically leave a review.
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I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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