How to Read People & The Most Extreme Things on Earth – SYSK Choice

Summary

Podcast Summary: "How to Read People & The Most Extreme Things on Earth – SYSK Choice"

Podcast: Something You Should Know
Host: Mike Carruthers
Episode Date: August 1, 2026

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Overview

This episode of Something You Should Know with host Mike Carruthers is divided into two main segments:

1. An insightful conversation with social psychologist Peter Collett about “tells” and how to read people’s body language in everyday life, not just at the poker table.
2. A fascinating tour of “extremes” in our world, such as the brightest, biggest, loudest, and stickiest things, with science writer David Darling.

Both discussions are packed with practical advice, eye-opening studies, and memorable examples—making this episode a must-listen for anyone interested in human behavior and the wonders of our extraordinary planet.

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Segment 1: How to Read People—The Science of "Tells"

[00:32–24:37]

Key Discussion Points & Insights

• Do People Look Like Their Names?

  • Research shows adults can often match names to faces at rates better than chance, because as people age, they may subconsciously shape their appearance to fit cultural expectations of their names.
    • “If your name is Susie, over time, you start to look like a Susie.” (Mike Carruthers, 01:31)

• What is a “Tell” in Everyday Life?

  • “Tells”—small gestures or behaviors—reveal inner feelings or intent not just in poker, but in all walks of life, from love to business.
  • Keeping one’s own behaviors hidden (a “poker face”) and decoding others’ behaviors are universal social tools.
  • Quote:

    “Keeping a poker face on the one hand and interpreting other people’s behaviors… they are not peculiar to poker. They are general. They apply to almost every walk of life.”
    (Peter Collett, 04:10)

• Peter Collett’s Own Tells

  • The “eye wipe”: Dragging a finger under the eye signals sadness, often before conscious awareness.
    • Quote:

      “If I place my index finger underneath my eye and drag it away from my nose towards my ear… it’s all to do with sadness.”
      (Peter Collett, 06:52)

  • Touching the face when speaking to someone perceived as powerful often signals deference.
    • Quote:

      “By touching my face when talking to important people… I am aware of their position vis a vis me.”
      (Peter Collett, 08:00)

• Common Myths About Liars

  • Contrary to popular belief, liars often maintain more eye contact and fidget less, trying to avoid appearing suspicious.
    • Quote:

      “When somebody is lying… they overreact by looking at you more. Some liars become almost frozen.”
      (Peter Collett, 09:03)

  • Most people think they’re good at spotting lies, but research shows we’re no better than chance.
    • Quote:

      “People are about as good as throwing a dice when it comes to detecting other people’s lies.”
      (Peter Collett, 10:57)

• Romantic Tells

  • Gaze patterns are key in flirtation; often, a slightly prolonged look signals interest, particularly from women.
    • Quote:

      “Women indicate interest by providing what I call an approach tell—a slightly prolonged look, possibly with eyes slightly widened, lips parted… but it’s infinitesimally long.”
      (Peter Collett, 12:18)

  • In heterosexual encounters, “women call the shots.”
    • Quote:

      “Men think they do, but in this regard… they’re completely mistaken.”
      (Peter Collett, 13:03)

Memorable Moments & Tips

• The “Fake Shock” Reaction

  • People often perform exaggerated shock gestures to align with the storyteller or social expectations, especially with children.
    • Quote:

      “They want you to know... that shock... it is a kind of kindness.”
      (Peter Collett, 15:00–16:38)

• Reading Feet and Orientation

  • Direction of feet is revealing: If someone’s toes point at you, they're engaged; if not, their attention or desire lies elsewhere—or maybe at the exit!
    • Quote:

      “If you extend the lines out from their toes, you should be enclosed within those two lines.”
      (Peter Collett, 17:40 / 18:42)

    • Memorable story: Peter predicted which dog would win at a dog show by watching the judge’s foot.

• Folding Arms: Habit vs. Message

  • Sometimes folding arms is just comfort, but it can also be a barrier signal. The unconscious way most people cross their arms can illustrate the power of habit.
    • Quote:

      “We do things habitually, unthinkingly, and without any conscious awareness… It doesn’t mean others aren’t aware of what we’re doing.”
      (Peter Collett, 21:02 / 21:28)

• Handshake Dynamics

  • Handshakes are supposed to express equality, but “giving the upper hand” (presenting your hand palm down) subtly asserts dominance.
    • Quote:

      “I would have gained the upper hand, both figuratively and literally.”
      (Peter Collett, 22:38)

Actionable Tips

• Observe the direction of others’ feet in conversations.
• Notice subtle gestures in your own body language—are you touching your face, folding arms, or avoiding certain gazes?
• In handshakes, strive for equality, not dominance.
• Be mindful of the interplay between gut feeling and observable behavior when reading others.
• Don’t rely on fidgeting or lack of eye contact to spot liars.

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Segment 2: The Most Extreme Things on Earth

[25:42–44:39]

Key Extremes and Surprising Facts

• Brightest Man-Made Light

  • The Luxor Sky Beam in Las Vegas is so powerful it attracts wildlife for miles around and can be seen tens of miles away by air travelers.
    • Quote:

      “It’s so bright that it attracts all the wildlife from miles around… you can see it from tens of miles away.”
      (David Darling, 26:21)

• Brightest Stars

  • Every star visible to the naked eye is actually brighter than our sun; some are millions of times brighter.
    • (David Darling, 27:27)

• The Stickiest Substance

  • Nature’s “stickiness” is often from microscopic hairs (like those on a fly’s feet), not glue. In the lab, glues have been developed so strong they can lift trucks.
    • (David Darling, 28:07)

• The Slowest Experiment: Pitch Drop

  • Continuously running since 1927 in Australia, the “pitch drop experiment” demonstrates the viscosity of tar—only nine drops have fallen in a century, and no one has ever seen one fall live.
    • Quote:

      “Since then… there’s been nine drips from this thing. You could watch it on the Internet… but nobody’s actually seen this thing happen.”
      (David Darling, 29:44–31:32)

• Supercomputers Then and Now

  • The iPhone 13 is 3,000 times faster and has vastly more storage than the $7 million Cray 1 supercomputer from 1980.
    • Quote:

      “The iPhone 13 is 3,000 times faster than a Cray One supercomputer…”
      (David Darling, 31:49)

• Human Acceleration Extremes

  • In 1954, John Stapp endured a rocket sled acceleration that took him from 632 mph to zero in one second (equivalent to hitting a wall at 120 mph), surviving a force of 12 Gs (far more than astronauts).
    • (David Darling, 33:48–36:39)

• Loudest and Quietest Sounds

  • Loudest human-made sound: The “Thunderscreech” propeller plane (200 decibels).
  • Natural loudest: Krakatoa’s 1883 eruption (estimated 310 decibels, heard 3,000 miles away).
  • Quietest: Anechoic chambers—so silent, you can hear your own heartbeat and even muscles creaking.
    • Quote:

      “People can’t tolerate [anechoic chambers] for very long because… you start to hallucinate after awhile and go crazy.”
      (David Darling, 38:26)

• Largest Structures in the Universe

  • Galaxies, clusters, superclusters, and finally, the observable universe itself—about 90 billion lightyears across.
    • (David Darling, 40:04–41:29)

• Longest Reverberation

  • A disused sugar beet silo in Cooper, Scotland has reverberation over 30 seconds; concerts are occasionally held there for this unique sound effect.
    • (David Darling, 41:35)

• Most Poisonous Substances

  • Botulinum toxin tops the list—microscopic doses are lethal. In nature, the poison arrow frog and improperly prepared puffer fish are deadly.
    • (David Darling, 42:50–44:19)

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Notable Quotes/Exchanges (with Timestamps)

• On Tells and Control:

  “A lot of our actions are completely unconscious… but that doesn’t mean for a moment that other people aren’t aware of what we’re doing.”
  – Peter Collett (21:02)

• On Flirtation:

  “Sex is always a matter of female choice.”
  – Peter Collett (12:18)

• On the Brightest Light:

  “The brightest light on Earth is actually in Las Vegas… it attracts all the wildlife from miles around.”
  – David Darling (26:21)

• On the Pitch Drop:

  “If you’re patient… you could watch this thing and maybe see the next drop fall. But nobody’s actually seen this thing happen.”
  – David Darling (29:44)

• On Silence:

  “You start to hallucinate after a while and go crazy because it’s a very, very, very, very unsettling experience.”
  – David Darling (38:26)

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Bonus: Science of Rituals and Taste

[44:48–45:39]

• Singing Happy Birthday or Saying Grace
  • Rituals before eating (like singing or praying) heighten intrinsic interest, making food taste better.
    • (Mike Carruthers, 44:48)

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Timestamps for Main Segments

• Body Language & Tells: 00:32–24:37
• Extreme Things on Earth: 25:42–44:39
• Science of Rituals & Taste: 44:48–45:39

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Final Thoughts

This episode merges the subtle art of reading people with the jaw-dropping extremes of the natural and human-made world, delivering both life skills (how to gauge real-time intent and emotion) and curiosity-sparking facts. If you want to get better at interpreting others’ signals or just enjoy amazing trivia about our universe, this is an episode you’ll want to revisit—and share.

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Listen, learn, and experiment: next time you shake hands, enter a silent space, or glance at a stranger's feet, you might just discover something new—about the world, or yourself.

Transcript

[Mike Carruthers]

Today on something you should know. Ever meet someone named Suzy and she kind of looks like a Suzy? Why is that then? A person's gestures or movements can tell you a lot about them if you know how to read them. Like their feet.

[Peter Collett]

The direction in which people's feet are pointing is also highly informative. If you're chatting to somebody new, it's always a good idea to look at their feet. Ideally, if you extend the lines out from their toes, you should be enclosed within those two lines.

[Mike Carruthers]

Also, why saying grace can make a meal taste better and extremes in our world. The loudest, the stickiest, the biggest and the brightest.

[David Darling]

The brightest light on earth is actually in Las Vegas and it shoots up in the sky from one of the resorts there. In fact, it's so bright that it attracts all the wildlife from miles around. Bats and the insects and that type of thing.

[Mike Carruthers]

All this today on something you should know.

[Peter Collett]

I'm Arch Manning. I'm Madison Skinner.

[Eva Jovic]

I'm Eva Jovic.

[Peter Collett]

I'm Decoria Moore.

[Mike Carruthers]

Wanna train like a Red Bull athlete?

[Eva Jovic]

Tell us your fitness goals this summer to enter the Red Bull Athlete Challenge. You'll get to try each of our workouts for a chance to win an ultimate Red Bull experience.

[David Darling]

Think you have what it takes?

[Commercial Announcer]

Something you should know. Fascinating intel, the world's top experts and practical advice you can use in your life today.

[Mike Carruthers]

Something you should know with Mike Carruthers.

[Eva Jovic]

Hey.

[Mike Carruthers]

Hi. Welcome to Something you should know. So here's a question for you. Have you ever met someone and thought, you know, they kind of look like their name, you know, like he kind of looks like a Ken or she looks like a Jennifer or he looks like a Jeff. Well, there might be something to this. According to a study published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, both children and adults can tell the names of adults by looking at pictures of them at a rate better than mere chance. But they could not tell the names of children by looking at pictures of them at a rate better than chance. So how can this be? Well, according to researchers who conducted this, as people mature, they may alter their appearance over time to conform to cultural expectations associated with their name without even knowing they're doing it. In other words, if your name is Susie, over time you start to look like a Susie. As further evidence of this, when they used artificial intelligence to age photos of children to make them look like adults, people were not able to tell their names. The study gets a bit complicated and there's a link to it in the show notes if you want to read More. But it does seem that people tend to look like their names over time, and that is something you should know. You know what a tell is, right? You hear about tells in poker. People have these little behaviors and movements like how they hold their cards or how they look at their cards or how they place their bets. If you know how to read them, you can tell if the other player is bluffing or if he or she has a good or bad hand. But tells work in everyday life as well. There are common tells that, if you know how to read them, can give you insight into what other people are really thinking. That's according to my guest, Peter Collette. Peter is a social psychologist who has taught at Oxford University and is widely acknowledged to be a world expert on communication. He has been called a grand master of the secret code of fleeting gestures, signs, and expressions that give us all away. He's author of a book called how to Tell what people are Thinking from the bedroom to the boardroom. Hi, Peter. Welcome to something you should know.

[Peter Collett]

Thank you very much.

[Mike Carruthers]

So until I saw your book, I mean, I'd never associated tells with anything other than playing cards that I thought that's kind of what it was all about. But you say it applies in everyday life, too.

[Peter Collett]

I do. I've requisitioned the term tell, and I've used it throughout, and I think it's very informative and illustrative and ill. It's illuminating because as you probably know and a lot of your listeners will know, in order to play the game of poker with some effectiveness, it's absolutely crucial that you do two things. One, you make sure that other people don't know what the hell you're thinking or intend to do next. And at the same time, you also try to read what kind of cards they might be holding on the basis of their behavior, what they say and. And do. Now, those two elements, in other words, keeping a poker face on the one hand and interpreting other people's behaviors, they are not peculiar to poker. They are general. They are applied to almost every walk of life, you know, from our love lives to our association with our friends and with our business partners and so on. In other words, I think it's fair to say that the notion of tell applies right across the board.

[Mike Carruthers]

So explain how that works. I mean, how do tells work in everyday life? In your everyday life, if you were

[Peter Collett]

to say to me, ah, Peter, confess. What are your personal tales? What are your personal giveaways? I. I would have to say to you, there are two things that give Me away. I've noticed. Now, this is not to say for a moment that I'm in a position to control these, by the way, but I am in a position to recognize when I've done them. Now, the one is what I call the eye wipe. In other words, if you place your index finger underneath your eye and drag it away from your nose towards your ear, that's the. That's the gesture I call the eye wipe. And it's pretty common. I mean, Prince Charles did it right in the middle of his wedding ceremony with Diana. And I think that was a very important tell because it showed in that context that he was a troubled man. Now, just coming to me, if I may, my eye wipe. I seem to, as it were, share that particular signature tell with him. Other people have it, too, but it's something that he has and that I also do fairly commonly. So I'm able to gauge. In other words, I'm able to, as it were, read my own behavior. Not only my own behavior, but I can read the behavior of others simply on the basis of this very tiny little gesture.

[Mike Carruthers]

And what does that tell? What does that eye wipe tell. Tell about you?

[Peter Collett]

What it obviously tells me is that I'm experiencing something sad. Now, on occasions, I. I'll know that I'll be watching a movie which distresses me, and I find myself doing the eye wipe. But the more interesting ver version of that is when I don't even know that I'm sad, and I find myself doing the eye wipe. And then reflecting upon that, I suddenly realize that something has crossed my mind which has saddened me. It is all to do with sadness.

[Mike Carruthers]

Do you have other tells that you know about?

[Peter Collett]

The other little giveaway that I have is a tendency, for example, to touch my face when I'm talking to people whom I regard as being more powerful or important than me. Now, this is a fairly common tell. It's not, as it were, a signature tell, which is peculiar to very few people. Lots of people do it. And the reason they do it is. Well, there's a variety of reasons why they do it. But it's something that I do, and I've noticed myself doing it. And I now make a special point of trying to avoid doing it.

[Mike Carruthers]

Why?

[Peter Collett]

Because I think that even if they're not consciously acknowledging what I'm doing, other people, important people, as it were, may be able to read the fact that I'm deferring to them, that I'm aware of their position vis a vis me.

[Mike Carruthers]

Really? So you're Saying that, like if you touch your face when you're talking to someone in a superior position, like your boss or something, that you are sending a signal that you're acknowledging that you're in an inferior position. And so you don't do that, or you try not to do that because that's one of your tells. And do you think you can use these tells to tell if someone is lying to you?

[Peter Collett]

Well, let me put the question to you. How can you tell if somebody's lying from their body language?

[Mike Carruthers]

I don't think I could articulate it, but I sometimes think I can spot it, but I don't know what it is I'm spotting.

[Peter Collett]

Okay, what about patterns of gaze?

[Mike Carruthers]

Yeah, I know. You mean like where they look? Yeah, yeah.

[Peter Collett]

How much they look at you?

[Mike Carruthers]

Yeah, I will. I would assume the less they look at me, the more likely they are lying.

[Peter Collett]

You share that opinion with the majority of people that if people don't look at you, there's a higher probability that they're lying. The other conclusion that people draw is that if somebody is fidgeting, can't sit still, then they're probably lying too. Both of these turn out to be incorrect for very good reasons. When somebody is lying to you, they unconsciously or consciously know that there's this assumption around about gaze patterns. If I don't look at this person, he or she's going to think I'm lying. So what they do is they overreact by looking at you more. When it comes to fidgeting, the reason why people fidget less, in fact, some liars become almost frozen in their demeanor. The reason for that is they are doing their utmost to ensure that they don't give you any information about their inner state at all. So those are the two ways in which people draw the wrong conclusions about the signals associated with lying. The interesting remark you've made about, well, I get a gut feeling about it now. There's actually an interesting study where they contrasted people trying to detect if others had told them the truth or lied to them on the basis of either gut feelings or analysis of the other person's behavior. And what they found is that when people are directed to actually look at the tells, they are much more accurate than when they go on the basis of their gut feelings. There's a whole lot of interesting things about lying, not least the fact that if you ask people how good they are detecting liars, most people consider themselves to be above average, but the majority of people are no better than chance. In other words, people are about as good as throwing a dice when it comes to detecting other people's lies.

[Mike Carruthers]

What about using tells in romance? And specifically, like when you see somebody across the room or something, are there tells that that give you an indication that that person is interested or not? And I've heard that, you know, men are particularly bad at this.

[Peter Collett]

First of all, men get it wrong, by and large. But your initial question, how can you tell if somebody's got an interest in you? Has a lot to do with gaze patterns. And one of the things that happens in a romantic encounter when two people are, as it were, moving towards each other, one of the ways in which women are not men, one of the ways in which women indicate their interest in men is by providing what I call an approach tell. In other words, it's permission to make the next move. And as Darwin said, sex is always a matter of female choice.

[Mike Carruthers]

So what's the tell?

[Peter Collett]

The tell is a slightly prolonged look, possibly with the eyes slightly widened, possibly over the shoulder, which is a very sexy way of doing it, possibly with the lips slightly parted, but it's infinitesimally long, longer than one of those mistaken glances one gets when somebody catches your eye and then they break off. But we're pretty sensitive to that. And that, as you've indicated, is often an indication. It's often a clue to the fact that the person has some residual preparatory interest in taking things further.

[Mike Carruthers]

And it goes both ways that that slightly elongated gaze, men to women and women to men.

[Peter Collett]

Yes, but with the proviso that when it comes to heterosexual interactions and courtship and flirtation, it's the women that call the shots. Men think they do, but they in this regard, as so many others, they're completely mistaken.

[Mike Carruthers]

We're talking about tells, little body language, things people do, what they are and how to read them. And my guest is Peter Collette. He is author of the book how to Tell what People Are Thinking from the Bedroom to the Boardroom Right now

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[Mike Carruthers]

So, Peter, can you run down a couple of common tells and what they mean? And one that I see frequently, I guess, is, you know, when people say something, it's not really shocking, but you react as if it is. You know, you put your hand to your neck or your chest and you open your eyes and, oh, my gosh, you know, this kind of fake shock. You see that a lot.

[Peter Collett]

It's very. It's quite a youthful gesture, actually, this shock horror as you've described it. You know, hands up, eyebrows raised, eyes opened, jaw dropped. You know, there will be occasions when it's a genuine reaction to something that you've said or you've seen somebody else say. But equally, there will be times when it's a synthetic gesture designed to communicate something to you, and one that doesn't really reflect the potency of. Of the signal itself. In other words, people aren't really that shocked. It's just that they want you to know that that shock, in order to, as it were, realign themselves with you. Now, if they think, for example, that you want to tell them something that's horrifying, unexpected or whatever, and in the process of doing so, they react that way, it's a kind of kindness on their behalf. It's not as though they're doing it necessarily to draw attention to themselves. They're doing that because they are thinking to themselves, not acknowledging their own thought processes, by the way. They're thinking to themselves, oh, my goodness, this is a story about something surprising. I better look surprised.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, I think I've done that plenty of times. You do.

[Peter Collett]

We all do all the time.

[Mike Carruthers]

You do it with children a lot, too, because you want them to. You want them to see your reaction to what they said, so they get what your reaction is. And that's a great way to do it, is to demonstrate it as well as say it.

[Peter Collett]

Yeah, well, it is a kind of gestural conversation, isn't it? Something that operates in parallel with what we're saying. And that, if I think, is probably fair, it's. It's probably fair to say that that's true of almost everything we do when we're engaged in a face to Face conversation with somebody. You know, the two, the two lines of. Of interaction. There's not only what we're saying and how we're saying it, but at the same time there's all the stuff to do with. Tells, you know, our comportment, our orientation towards the other person, how far or close we are to them, how we rearrange our limbs, what we do with our hands and face and the whole panoply, you know, everything is going on. Now. What's interesting, of course, is that people are reading that stuff, but that's not to say that they could necessarily articulate it.

[Mike Carruthers]

What about people's feet? I've heard that you can tell that it's a tell that you can tell something about the person you're talking to if you look down at their feet.

[Peter Collett]

Yeah. The direction in which people's feet are pointing is also highly informative. Some years ago I was watching Crufts, the great dog competition, which has been televised, and I turned to my wife and said, you see the judge there? This was now in the final judgment and the judge was going to decide which of the. The. The dogs who had won their divisions was going to be top dog. And I turned to her and I said, you see the poodle on the right there? That's the one he's going to choose. And she fittingly said, well, what the hell do you know about dogs? And I said, no, no, it's not about the dogs. Watch the judge's foot. His right foot is pointing right at. And lo and behold, moments later, that was the dog he selected. As, as best in show.

[Mike Carruthers]

Is it fair to say that if you're talking to someone and their feet are pointing in a direction that isn't you, that that says something and if they are pointing at you, that also says something?

[Peter Collett]

Yes. If you're chatting to somebody new, if, for example, you are concerned about whether or not they find you attractive, want to continue the conversation or whatever, it's always a good idea to look at their feet. Ideally, if you extend the lines out from their toes, you should be enclosed within those two lines. On occasion, what you'll find is that the foot is pointing at somebody else. And if you watch their eyes closely, you might find them steal a glance at that person, in other words, suggesting that they probably would prefer to be chatting to the person at whom their foot is pointing. Equally, if the foot is pointing at the exit the door, that likewise might provide clues to an intention to escape this little engagement that you've got with him at presently so there are these

[Mike Carruthers]

body language things that people do, you know, like folding your arms. Right. And so the, and the conventional wisdom is that you're putting up a barrier, that you're closing up that you, that that says something. And maybe it does, but couldn't it also be you're just folding your arms and has nothing to do with anything else?

[Peter Collett]

Yeah, yeah. No, I think you're right there, by the way. I mean, there are occasions when these actions are innocent, but there also times when by crossing your arms, you are actually establishing a barrier signal against any intrusion by somebody else nearby. Folding arms in itself is a very interesting gesture, by the way. I mean, why don't you do so.

[Mike Carruthers]

Okay, I'm folding my arms.

[Peter Collett]

All right, you're doing it.

[Mike Carruthers]

Yes.

[Peter Collett]

Looking down at your arms, you'll see that either your right or your left arm is on top, as it were. Now, which is it in your case?

[Mike Carruthers]

Right, my right arm is on top.

[Peter Collett]

Okay. Just like me. Now, in other words, did you know that to be the case? Absolutely not. You never knew that you were a right over left person. Now switch it so that the left is over the right. It's a struggle. It requires quite a lot of thinking.

[Mike Carruthers]

It really does.

[Peter Collett]

Have you got yourself in complete knots at this stage?

[Mike Carruthers]

No, no.

[Peter Collett]

I've asked you to do that for two reasons. One, to illustrate the fact that a lot of our actions are completely unconscious. And they are also a whole range of things we do where we are so ingrained in our habits that we can't actually do something that's quite different.

[Mike Carruthers]

So do most people go right over left or is it 50, 50 or what?

[Peter Collett]

I think it's fairly even. But the point I wanted to make really was that, you know, the power of habit is all encompassing and we do things habitually, unthinkingly, and without any conscious awareness of what we're doing. This doesn't mean for a moment that other people aren't aware of what we're doing, even if they don't even know that they've spotted what we're doing. Because a lot of our actions can, as it were, creep in under their radar and impact on them. So we have to be on our guard, as it were, against giving people information about our inner world simply because they're quite capable of picking up our behavior and reaching a conclusion about what kind of people we are, what kinds of thoughts and preferences we have, possibly even what we're likely to do next purely on the basis of our non verbal behavior.

[Mike Carruthers]

Can you pick two or three common tells and explain what they mean so that I might use that in my life.

[Peter Collett]

Well, the handshake is a very interesting one. In our society, a lot of greetings, a high proportion of them are conducted via the handshake. And it's designed as a kind of egalitarian exchange. We both, as it were, you and I, when we shake hands, we both do the same thing. So it's, it's an expression of our equality. In contrast to previous greetings, which involves a bowing or cursing, which were asymmetric, you know, where the subordinate, as it were, expressed their respect for the superior. And the handshake is designed to underline the fact that there's no difference between us. There are people, of course, who cannot resist the opportunity to use the handshake to gain an advantage over other people. So if, for example, I would shake hands with you and I were to twist my or I were to present my hand to you palm down, you would be forced to greet me with your hand palm up. I would in the process have gained the upper hand, both figuratively and literally. And even though you don't really recognize it, you would have felt slightly subordinated by the practice.

[Mike Carruthers]

What I find so interesting about this is how all these tells all these various body language things, these expressions, these gestures, we see people doing them all the time, we do them all the time. They're communicating something and somehow it doesn't register, but it really adds to the meaning. I've been speaking with Peter Collett. He is a social psychologist and author of the book how to Tell what People are Thinking from the Bedroom to the Boardroom. And if you'd like to read his book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. I appreciate your time. Thanks for coming on today, Peter.

[Peter Collett]

Thank you, Mike. It's been an absolute pleasure.

[Mike Carruthers]

So good, so good, so good.

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[Mike Carruthers]

The world is full of extremes. The brightest, the biggest, the loudest, the stickiest, lots of extremes. And they don't necessarily have anything to do with each other, except they are extreme. So someone has gathered many of these extremes together in one book and so that we can talk about them. David Darling is a science writer, astronomer, and author of about 50 books, including Kaboom. The Science of Extremes. Hi, David. Welcome to something you should know.

[Peter Collett]

Hi, Mike.

[David Darling]

It's nice to be here.

[Mike Carruthers]

So let's start with an extreme. What is the brightest thing on Earth?

[David Darling]

Well, the brightest light on Earth is actually in Las Vegas, and it shoots up in the sky from one of the resorts there. And it's tremendously bright. In fact, it's so bright that it attracts all the wildlife from miles around. And you can see it from a great distance away. In fact, if you're in a plane, you can see it from tens of miles away. And that's really the brightest artificial light on Earth, except going into a laboratory, for example. And it attracts all kinds of wildlife, bats and all the insects and that type of thing. And it's tremendously hot. You can imagine the amount of energy that's required to fire this thing up there. Beyond that, you would have to go beyond the Earth, really, and into space, where, of course, we end up with a lot of these records, because that's where the brightest, the biggest, the most distant things are.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, obviously, I think of the sun as being pretty bright, but as suns go, as stars go, is the sun bright?

[David Darling]

There are many, many stars out there. And all the stars that you can see in the night sky with the unaided eye are actually brighter than the sun. You see maybe a couple of thousand, three thousand stars. Every single one of those stars is brighter than the sun. Some of them are thousands of times brighter, tens of thousands of times brighter, and in the most extreme cases of the biggest, most energetic stars, actually millions of times brighter than the sun.

[Mike Carruthers]

The stickiest is in your list of things you looked at. So I can't wait to hear what's the stickiest.

[David Darling]

Well, of course, a lot of insects are sticky. You see flies, for example, climbing up the side of walls, and they just appear to be sticking there. They're not actually sticking there. There's no. There's no glue on the feet of flies or indeed any Other animals, what they have is tiny little hairs. Microscopy. You would have to look under a microscope to see them. And they use these tiny hairs to grip onto any roughness in the surface and it enables them to actually walk across the ceiling. It appears to be as if by magic. So that's a form of stickiness, if you like. And of course, the tongue of a chameleon that shoots out is also sticky as well. If you want to go beyond the stickiness in nature or apparent stickiness in nature, then you have to move on to chemicals that have been, you know, created in the laboratory. And there are some extraordinary, extraordinarily sticky glues. One of them, one of the strongest one, was used to support a truck. Just you. Just by using tiny little pads where the. The glue was connected to the wheels of the truck and lifted this thing, which was several tons, up in the air. It was quite remarkable, actually. When you see pictures of it, it just seems impossible.

[Mike Carruthers]

So you pick one. You pick one that you liked that you, when you came across in your research, you found particularly fascinating or that other people tell you is fascinating.

[David Darling]

Well, yeah, I like the ones where humans are involved because you can kind of. I mean, there's a lot of things to do with outer space and, you know, laboratory experiments. There is actually an experiment, but it's a very simple one to explain. It's also the longest running experiment ever in the world. So now we're talking about slow records. And this thing is called the pitch drop experiment, and it's been running since 1927 in Australia, the University of Queensland. And this professor back in the day decided he wanted to see how fast pitch, or tar, if you like, would drip. So he filled this funnel with the tariff, you know, what you put down on roads, the sticky black stuff that hardly seems to move at all. And when you put this into the funnel, let it settle for a long time, in fact, for three years, and kept it under rigidly constant conditions because, of course, it's going to depend on temperature and things like that. And then let it drip out. When I say let it drip out. Since then, and we're talking about a century ago, there's been nine drips from this thing. So we're talking about slow record here. The last drip was in 2014, 10 years ago. They actually have a live webcam pointing at this thing. You can. You can see it on. On the Internet and you can watch it, you know, so if you're patient and you're interested, you could watch this thing and maybe see the Next drop fall. Because nobody ever seen a drop fall the last time it was captured on camera, but nobody's actually seen this thing happen. I like things like that, you know, they're just a little bit eccentric.

[Mike Carruthers]

What's the purpose of this?

[David Darling]

Well, very little. No, I think it was just a piece of eccentricity, actually, and it's certainly a talking point, but there's no real practical purpose to it at all.

[Mike Carruthers]

So you did an interesting comparison of computers. So tell that story.

[David Darling]

So I used to work for a company called Cray Research, which makes, made and makes supercomputers. And so now we're talking about 1980ish. And I worked for them when they produced their first computer, the Cray 1, which was the fastest computer in the world at the time. It sold for about $7 million. And I was interested in how fast the cray one was, would be compared with an iPhone, because we don't really think of iPhones as being computers, but that's what they are. They're supercomputers, in fact. So I compared the speed and the memory and the storage capacity of the Cray One with actually the iPhone 13. So it's not the latest model, but the iPhone 13 is 3,000 times faster than a Cray One supercomputer in its day. 3,000 times the storage, 750 times the RAM. And yet the Cray cost, well, say 8 million. That's about $38 million today. The iPhone maybe $1,000, 2,000 times less. Absolutely extraordinary. So that just shows how the records moved in the computing world. And really it's unfair because we're comparing the Cray supercomputer with the thing you carry around in your pocket. What you really have to compare it with is supercomputers today. And the fastest of those is the Frontier computer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which is an exo flop machine. In other words, it can conduct a million trillion operations a second. So there we're talking about record speed in computers, which obviously has a huge practical implication.

[Mike Carruthers]

Can you talk about extremes of acceleration, specifically human acceleration?

[David Darling]

Again, I'm going to take you back in time to 1895, a park in Brooklyn, where they had the first vertical loop roller coaster. It was called a flip flop railway. And it was quite a sensation. It had a vertical loop 25ft high, which is quite small. And that was one of the problems with it. It was small. And the biggest problem was that it was perfectly round. So you would have them coming in, you'd have the passengers coming in to this loop. They would then enter this vertical circle, loop around, and come out again. Now the problem is going from a straight direction into a circle. They were subjected to a tremendous G force, in fact, 12 GS, far more than an astronaut would experience going into space or reentering. And it unfortunately caused a lot of problems, spinal injuries, serious neck injuries, because they didn't really know how to make roller coasters properly at the time. And now, of course, we know more about the physics of it. You don't do vertical circles, you do teardrop shaped curves. So you come in on a gentler angle before you go into the circle. So that was something they had to learn through experience. Of course, when we started thinking about space flight, we needed to see whether the human body could withstand high G forces. So that's when you started putting astronauts and test subjects into centrifuges and, you know, seeing what the limits of human tolerance are. But to really go to the extreme of what humans are capable of withstanding in terms of acceleration, you have to look at the experiments of John Stapp, who was a surgeon who worked for the U.S. air Force. And he subjected himself to extraordinary situations on a rocket sled. And on December 10, 1954, he got on this rocket sled called Sonic Wind 1 and fired the rockets. And in five seconds time, he was traveling at 632 miles per hour. It's pretty faster than what an airliner will travel at cruising altitude. Not only that, but he then hit a water trough which broke him from 632 miles per hour to zero in just over one second, to the equivalent of hitting a brick wall at 120 miles an hour. And he did survive it.

[Mike Carruthers]

Let's talk about loudest and quietest records for those.

[David Darling]

Yes, loudest. One of the loudest things that humans had built was actually an aircraft. And not a jet aircraft, it was a propeller aircraft, a prop plane. It's called the Thunderscreech. Well, that was its nickname anyway. And it was tremendously loud. You could hear it 25 miles away when it was just, you know, running on the, on the ground with its propellers turning. And the reason for that is that propellers turned at supersonic speeds and they produced a sound of about 200 decibels, which is pretty close to what you would get from a rocket taking off. It was tremendously loud and it caused all kinds of problems. The ground engineers all suffering from nausea and this type of thing. But there are natural sounds which are even greater than that. And one of them, for example, would be the explosion of Krakatoa, the island of Krakatoa, in 1883, which is reckoned to have made a sound of 310 decibels and you could be heard 3,000 miles away. Now, I say 310 decibels. There's a physical limit to loudness.

[Peter Collett]

Actually.

[David Darling]

A sound of 194 decibels beyond that is not really sound as we know it. It's a series of supersonic pulses. So really at that point it stops being loudness, it turns into something else.

[Mike Carruthers]

And quietest, I would think silence is silence.

[David Darling]

So the quietest places are really places that are made specifically to be quiet, which are called anechoic chambers. And these basically absorb all the sound that you can produce immediately. So you get no sound coming back to you whatsoever. And these places are actually very difficult to tolerate because we're so used to having even, you know, slight sounds in the background. It's not a natural situation to be in. And so people can't tolerate this for very long because you start to hear your own heartbeat, breathing and even sounds made that you never normally hear, but, you know, your own muscles creaking and things like this, and it becomes very, very disconcerting. And so they do have some of these anechoic chambers open to the public, but they limit how long people can spend them because, you know, you start to hallucinate after a while and go crazy because it's a very, very, very, very unsettling experience.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, where are these things and who made them and why?

[David Darling]

Well, they make them for doing all, for carrying out all sorts of experiments, for example, on hi fi equipment or there's all sorts of situations where you don't want any sound coming back at you. There is one at Bell Labs, for example. They're usually, usually at major, major laboratories. Quite a few in the us there's some in Europe as well. And they're just used for you, for carrying out scientific experiments.

[Mike Carruthers]

Let's talk about largest. What's the largest thing that we have?

[David Darling]

So locally, the sun is the largest thing. We can then move beyond the sun out into the galaxy and we find other stars, some of which are immensely bigger than the sun. They can be a hundreds times, thousands of times bigger than the sun. But then what's bigger than that? Well, the whole collection of stars that we live in, which is the galaxy, which is 100,000 light years across, that takes. Means that it takes light 100,000 years to get from one side to another. Is there anything bigger than the galaxy? Well, you get clusters of galaxies. We live in a cluster of galaxies called the Local group, which has 30 odd galaxies in it, and that is 10, 15 million light years across. Surely that's the biggest thing there is. But no, you can get clusters of clusters of galaxies which are called superclusters, and you can go beyond this to great walls of galaxies which can be billions of light years across. The largest structure in the Universe is about 10 billion light years across. Is there anything bigger than that? Well, beyond that you would have to go to the universe itself, which is about 90 billion light years across.

[Mike Carruthers]

You've got some weird extremes in here. And so talk about the one about reverberation.

[David Darling]

I live in Dundee on the east coast of Scotland, and about 15, 20 minutes drive away from here is a little town called Cooper. And in that town there is this silo. It's 200ft high. It's a concrete silo and it used to be used for storing sugar beet. It's disused now, so it's empty. And in fact, it's not really open to the public because it's quite dangerous. But they do occasionally open it up and for an interesting reason. This silo, when you make a sound in it, for example, clap your hands, the sound takes over 30 seconds to die away. In other words, it's a tremendously reverberant space. It's one of the longest reverberation times of any human made space. And they even hold concerts in there, very unusual concerts, I might add, because of course, as soon as you make a sound, that sound is going to carry on for a long time. So you have to come up with a composition that works in that sort of environment. So that's very interesting to me, this whole idea of reverberation. There are bigger reverberation spaces, but this one happens to be nearby, so I have a particular fascination for it.

[Mike Carruthers]

Talk about poisons. What's the most poisonous thing?

[David Darling]

Of course, in the past, poisons were used for getting rid of people you didn't like. There were obviously things like strychnine and, and arsenic and those sort of things you could actually pay people. This is going back into sort of late medieval Renaissance Europe to dispose of people you didn't want by. By getting, you know, some of these substances. But as time goes on, we found there are more and more poisonous things. I can think of, for example, the poison arrow frog. You can just touch a poison arrow frog and make the mistake of putting that into your mouth and that can be lethal. The puffer fish, for example, which is found off the coast of Japan and is considered a delicacy in Japan, but it has to be cooked properly because if it isn't, again, it's deadly. So chefs that serve puffer fish have to have three years of training before they'll be allowed to prepare a meal of this for, for the public. If you want to go to the most poisonous things of all, you're talking about bacterial toxins, botulin, and this sort of thing, which are so poisonous that they are, they're deadly in microscopic amounts. So the botulin toxin is actually the most poisonous substance we know and it takes a microscopic amount of it to, to, to kill a person.

[Mike Carruthers]

Well, this was kind of fun to take a bunch of relatively unrelated topics and put them under the umbrella of extremes so we could talk about them. And we've been talking about them with David Darling. He is a science writer, astronomer, and author of the book the Science of Extremes. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Thank you, David.

[David Darling]

Thanks very much, Mike for having me on your show. It's been great fun and thank you.

[Mike Carruthers]

How could singing Happy Birthday make birthday cake taste better? Well, according to research from the University of Minnesota, rituals like singing Happy Birthday trigger what psychologists call our intrinsic interest and that heightens our feel good senses, including taste and smell. This same intrinsic interest trick can also work with saying grace or a prayer before taking the first bite of a meal or or proposing a toast before savoring that first sip of something. And that is something you should know if you have on your to do list. Maybe a little extra space, a little extra time. You might want to write this down to tell two people two people about this podcast. Share the link and tell them to listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.

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