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

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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.

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.

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

All this today on something you should know.

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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.

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.

It also seems to be true for both regular and green tea drinkers.

The researchers' 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.

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.

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.

It's great to be on.

Thanks.

So in just a snapshot, what's your take on AI?

Is it going to change the world?

What is it?

It's not going to 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 going to 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 going to 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?

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 going to change your life tomorrow.

They're not.

But, you know, 10 years from now,

I think they will.

So you talk about 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 chat GPT 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?

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 $3.5 billion in revenue last year, which is a lot of money for

a small company.

But it cost them like $9 billion, $10 billion to train the models, run the models, to do everything.

So they are losing money.

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 chat bot there.

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.

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

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 assistant.

And 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.

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 am I paying for?

You're right.

It's both.

So with a subscription, you get a lot more time on the device.

There's a limit how much you can use the free.

If

you want to return to it five, ten 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 it's hard to tell the difference to me the difference really is how much time you get to use it each day 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

the venture capital game is a weird one it's 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 the Googles that you could make a hundred X a thousand X

your money.

One of the main characters in the book, Reid Hoffman,

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.

So you said you use AI.

What do you use it for?

You know, I started using AI at the end of 2022, and I found it extraordinary for for a variety of reasons.

As a journalist, as a writer, I use it as my research assistant.

It's a terrific editor.

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 central.

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.

Aaron Powell, 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 living as a driver, long-haul truckers, Uber drivers, taxi drivers, local delivery.

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'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.

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 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

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.

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.

It really is the stuff of big tech.

I mean, Microsoft has $100 billion in cash laying around.

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.

You know, I fear that the next Google is Google, that the next Meta is Meta in the area of AI.

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

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?

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 interests 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 Open AI to Google, safety issues, I feel, have taken a back seat to making profits.

And for something like AI, I think that's a real problem.

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.

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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?

The term artificial intelligence dates back to the 1950s.

So AI, at least experimenting with AI, has been around for a long time.

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 AI.

What happened

in the last couple of years is we've been using generative AI, this idea that it could create something original.

The example I love, somebody

at the start of 2023 playing around with ChatGPT,

explained Marx's economic theory in the form of a Taylor Swift song.

And it didn't go search that out, it just created it, 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 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 topic is.

You can 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 going to come home from work and just don't have anyone to to talk to.

They're going to 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 going to happen.

Like when the smartphone came around, did everyone think, like, oh, I'm going to call a car from my smartphone and we're going to 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 going to be plentiful uses way beyond just give me a good recipe based on these ingredients.

Yeah.

Although that's not a bad use.

I mean, that's pretty good.

I used it yesterday.

I actually did.

You know, it's like I have fresh tuna and avocado inspire 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.

You said you use Claude as your AI tool.

Tell me about Claude.

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 interests at heart, so they created a rival.

It's just the best for writing, the best for editing.

I mean,

be honest about it.

I routinely take the words I write and say, give this a read, Claude, give me some feedback.

Or I, I'm, 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 flat, it's not quite right, but it comes up with a really good idea.

Oh, that's the right word, oh, that's the way I should be rewriting this.

So, you know, I just find it a really valuable tool so much that I pay 20 bucks a month for it.

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 chat bots 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, okay, that was an actual quote from a CNBC article, because they'll just make stuff out of whole cloth.

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 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 one of the things they really need to figure out.

It's a real limit to these bots.

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

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 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 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.

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.

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.

Thanks, Mike.

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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 Clamor, How Noise Took Over the World and How We Can Take It Back.

Hi, Chris.

Welcome to something You Should Know.

Thanks for having me, Mike.

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.

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 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,

our world is increasingly increasingly noisy and it's causing harms to our health, well-being, and to the planet.

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.

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 to 50,000 new cases of heart disease and maybe 11 to 12,000 premature deaths across the continent every year.

CDC implicates noise in about 100 million, excuse me, in 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.

Okay, wait a minute.

How in the world can noise be implicated in thousands of cases of heart disease and death?

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 the

white blood cells and other responses to

a potential injury to help start healing and to fight off infection.

But the problem 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 hardening and clogging up your arteries.

So that is a kind of a direct route connecting noise, stress, to cardiovascular health problems.

So what is noise?

Noise is in the ear of the beholder, right?

I mean, your noise could be my music.

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 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 also at play here.

We have the lightning fast connection that I mentioned before to our fight or flight.

We all have a limitation in our attentional resources, how many signals we can handle at any given point.

These studies of sound interrupting sleep, they will pipe in different decibel levels of transportation noise, like highway 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 in those.

So there's a normal pattern in that when you are sleeping.

But if you have a certain amount of noise piped into your

sleeping quarters, like they do in these sleep studies, those will increase and they will track, well, at 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.

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 used to it.

Are they used to it?

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 Basner.

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 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.

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 worse worse than that.

Like how much is too much?

Right.

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

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 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 science on that yet.

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?

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.

What about

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 days, it'll like it'll equalize or can you come back from that?

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 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 not, it is irreversible.

And how much damage does it do in this sense?

And we're talking strictly about hearing loss here, but

because

when I was younger, people would say, oh, you kids, and you're rock and roll and you listen to it so loud, you're all going to 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 going to cause you to go deaf, right?

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 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 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 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, 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

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.

So let's talk about

solutions or preventative measures you can take for 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 sleep?

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 every creak of the house.

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.

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 stray conversation is not going to

reach them.

So it has that utility at the very least.

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.

Basically, what 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.

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 you could finally,

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 spotlight.

In the other ear, you could remember nothing.

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 was guided by their attention.

And so that attention really plays a huge part in what we consciously hear.

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?

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 a 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 sort of bungle into.

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?

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're 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.

And then they're going to test different nudges to see what works, what helps people to kind of take control of how loud loud they are listening to it.

I think that's the main thing, to kind of realize

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.

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, Clamor, 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.

Sure.

Thanks, Mike.

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 1 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.

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.

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