Selects: Noise Pollution: Arrrgh!

Summary

STUFF YOU SHOULD KNOW — "Selects: Noise Pollution: Arrrgh!" Original Air Date: September 6, 2025 Hosts: Josh Clark & Chuck Bryant

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Episode Overview

This deep-dive episode explores the overlooked but significant issue of noise pollution—what it is, how it's measured, its surprisingly harmful impacts on humans and wildlife, and why even minor reductions can bring big health benefits. With their trademark blend of wit, curiosity, and offbeat tangents, Josh and Chuck break down the science, share landmark studies, kvetch about leaf blowers, and advocate for collective action—while acknowledging that laws haven’t kept up with research.

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Main Themes & Purpose

• Definition and Nature of Noise Pollution: Outlines what noise pollution is, how it’s different from other sounds, and the subjective nature of “unwanted sound.”
• Health and Societal Impacts: Goes beyond hearing loss to explore systemic effects, from heart disease to learning delays in children.
• Noise Pollution’s Impact on the Environment: Unpacks what noise does to animals, especially marine life and migratory birds.
• (Lack of) Policy Responses: Discusses how regulations initially started strong in the 1970s (U.S.) but later faltered, and why meaningful change is hard.
• Everyday Relevance: The episode is peppered with relatable, funny examples—leaf blowers, loud concerts, city life—making a compelling case for why this hidden pollutant matters to everyone.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Getting Old & Noise Intolerance (02:25–07:20)

• Josh and Chuck open with anecdotes on math mistakes and joke about turning into grumpy old men complaining about noise.
• Generational Differences: Discuss how children seem to take noise for granted while adults become more sensitive.
  • “Unless it’s something that really bothers them, it’s just part of life.” – Chuck (05:03)
• Hypothesis: As you age, you learn that it doesn’t have to be this way—and you start to resent it.

2. Decibels: The Basics (07:33–10:00)

• Decibel Origins:
  • Decibel (dB) = 1/10 of a bel (named after Alexander Graham Bell).
  • "A decibel … is the lowest, the smallest difference that humans can detect." — Josh (08:05)
  • Loudness is logarithmic, not linear—100 dB is not twice as loud as 50 dB.
    • “An airplane is 100,000 times louder than a normal conversation if it reaches 120 decibels.” – Josh (10:34)
• Volume Reference Points:
  • Conversation: 60 dB.
  • Cars: 70–90 dB.
  • Pain threshold: ~120–140 dB.

3. What Is “Noise” Anyway? (12:43–14:24)

• Noise is Subjective, but with Limits:
  • Technically defined as “unwanted sound,” but what’s unwanted varies.
  • Example: Rock concert vs. space shuttle launch—context matters (15:28).
• Human-Caused Distinction:
  • Researchers generally define noise as human-caused—nature sounds like waterfalls or waves are not counted (14:41).

4. Types of Noise Pollution (16:33–18:40)

• Industrial: Continuous, unvarying hums and machinery noise.
• Intermittent: Trains, planes, sirens, revving leaf blowers—“one of the worst sounds for us.”
  • "They just rev in this arrhythmic pattern that your brain… is just giving its all to try to find a pattern in." – Josh (17:37)
• Community: Lawn mowers, music, fireworks, general “people” noise.

5. Health Impacts – Beyond Hearing Loss (22:48–31:44)

• Hearing Damage: Traditional loss vs. “hidden hearing loss” (damaged neurons, not detectable by hearing tests).

• Fight-or-Flight Trigger:

  • Noise triggers the same stress pathways as, e.g., facing a bear. Adrenaline, cortisol spike.
    • “Your amygdala...is gonna send that same distress signal to the hypothalamus.” – Chuck (24:46)

• Chronic Health Consequences:

  • Linked to heart disease, diabetes, obesity, high blood pressure, cognitive delays in children, and even low birth weights.
  • Key Study: 10 dB increase in aircraft noise = 28% rise in anxiety medication, 25% higher depression (29:13).

• Sleep Disruption:

  • Even if you “get used to it,” noise disrupts sleep, impacts the endothelium (blood vessel lining), raising risk of heart attacks and more.

  “After one night of being exposed while you're sleeping to something like train sounds, your endothelium starts suffering.” – Josh (30:56)

6. Landmark Studies: Children & Surroundings (33:00–36:47)

• 1970s New York Studies:
  • Kids in noisy classrooms (near subway) were 11 months behind in reading compared to their quieter peers; the gap closed after acoustic dampening was added.
  • Bridges Apartments (Manhattan): Persistent traffic noise led to lower academic performance.
• WHO Reports:
  • 2011: At least 1 million healthy years of life lost annually in Europe to noise.
  • 2018: Raised to 1.8 million.
  • Recent research: 3% of night-time sudden cardiac deaths could be from nighttime aircraft noise.

7. Wildlife Impacts (42:02–47:25)

• Whales & Shipping:
  • Stress hormone levels in right whales in Bay of Fundy dropped when shipping stopped post-9/11.
  • “Shipping is probably humans’ noisiest marine endeavor that we do all the time.” – Josh (42:53)
• The Phantom Road Study (2012):
  • Road traffic noise played in the wild led 25%+ of the birds to leave; those who remained lost weight needed for migration.
• Marine Life:
  • Noise from seismic air guns, sonar, and ships disrupts marine mammals, possibly causing strandings.
    • “It just drives them out of the water, which sounds bonkers…” – Josh (46:26)

8. Policy and Regulation: Why We’re Stuck (47:25–52:42)

• Early US regulation (1970s): Several federal acts, OSHA standards, Office of Noise Abatement and Control (ONAC).
• But: 1980s deregulation (Reagan era) removed federal authority, left noise control to states and cities—most did little.
  • “...the Office of Noise and Abatement Control on paper still exists, but Congress said, you know, let’s just not fund them anymore.” – Chuck (48:06)
• Local noise ordinances focus on “nuisance” issues (parties, lawn crews).
• Federal preemption: Air and rail traffic, etc., can’t be regulated by local authority—even when communities suffer.

9. Mitigation & Solutions (52:42–56:45)

• Barriers & Landscaping: Planting trees/shrubs near roads or railways can reduce noise.

• Building Design: Use of acoustic insulation and soundproofing.

• Tech Fixes:

  • Shipping: Redesign engines/propellers, buffer ship engines from hulls for quieter operation.
    • “Maersk...spent $100 million bucks to do just 11 of its ships...They have 740 ships. They've done 11.” – Chuck (54:52)
  • Wind Farms: Adding perforated pipes to muffle underwater pile driving noise.

• Regulatory Action: Strengthen muffler and leaf-blower regulations, enforce noise level limits.

• Ecosystem Strategy: Noise mitigation is “low-hanging fruit” to help stabilize marine life while tackling larger problems like climate change.

  “There’s some really easy stuff we can do, like even rerouting shipping lanes is one thing we can do. And...it will actually stabilize marine ecosystems and marine life so that it will buy us a little time while we're figuring out much trickier stuff like ocean acidification." – Josh (55:56)

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Decibels:
  • "I never thought of the fact that a decibel was a tenth of a bell, which is named, and it's got deci right there...a bell is named after Alexander Graham Bell." – Chuck (07:33)
• On Leaf Blowers:
  • “Again, [the leaf blower] is the worst thing that anyone's ever invented.” – Josh (17:37)
• On Personal Vulnerability:
  • “Even if your sleep isn’t disturbed… the noise is still affecting you while you’re sleeping because again, your ear never turns off.” – Josh (29:48)
• On Public Policy:
  • “We had the start, Chuck. We started out like we were going to almost immediately. When we realized how bad noise pollution was in the 70s, we started to do something about it. And the federal government passed...huge acts.” – Josh (47:09)
• On Collective Solutions:
  • “The noise pollution we’re contributing to marine ecosystems in particular is just such low hanging fruit that there’s no reason we shouldn’t do this.” – Josh (55:56)

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Memorable Tangents

• Math with Kids: Chuck’s daughter asks him simple math questions as she falls asleep, prompting a reflection on learning and how our brains change with age (03:16).
• Wild Stallions/Bill & Ted: The misspelled episode doc “NOIZE POLLUSHUN” sounds like a metal band, “a good name for a made-up band in a movie” (04:16).
• Brown Noise: A lively discussion on using white, brown, and “chrome” noise to help sleep, with jokes about bodily functions and the band Ween (27:04–28:12).
• Pandemic Birdsong: Anecdotes from Spring 2020 when city traffic stopped and birds took over the soundscape (44:12).

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:25 — Hosts joke about getting old and noise intolerance.
• 07:33 — How decibels work and what they measure.
• 12:43 — Defining “noise” as unwanted/human-made sound.
• 16:33 — Industrial, intermittent, and community noise categories.
• 22:48 — Health impacts of chronic and acute noise exposure.
• 29:13 — Landmark studies: medication use, depression rates, physiological stress, sleep disruption.
• 33:00 — 1970s New York noise studies: academic impacts on children.
• 36:47 — WHO global burden estimates (DALYs lost).
• 42:02 — Wildlife: whales, “phantom road,” adverse marine impacts.
• 47:25 — Policy, regulatory rollback, and why local authorities can’t fix everything.
• 52:42 — Practical, technical, and regulatory solutions.
• 55:56 — Low-hanging fruit: shifting shipping lanes, greening, noise abatement benefits all.

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Final Thoughts

Chuck and Josh frame noise pollution as a legitimate public health and ecological threat, and a form of pollution just as real as trash or chemicals. Despite its invisibility (or perhaps because of it), it rarely gets the attention or regulation it deserves—even as another million or more healthy years are lost annually.

If you take away one thing: Major reductions in noise pollution—at home, in cities, and at sea—are easily achievable, would protect human health, and would give ecosystems a crucial breather. But this “low-hanging fruit” will require both awareness and action.

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Stuff You Should Know turns a topic most people tune out into something everyone will want to rethink—and maybe start wearing earplugs at Dinosaur Jr. shows.

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For more resources and information:

• World Health Organization: Environmental Noise Guidelines
• CDC: Noise-Induced Hearing Loss
• Recent studies on urban noise and sleep quality
• See also SYSK episodes on jackhammers, marine biology, animal navigation

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(Summary by [Podcast Summarizer AI], using host tone and direct quotes for accuracy and engagement.)

Transcript

[Chuck Bryant]

This is an iHeart podcast.

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Hi friends, it's Josh. For this week's Select, I've chosen our October 2021 episode on noise pollution, which is actually an overlooked hazard to our health and it's even been shown to cause death in some cases. Plus, it guest stars the worst thing in the world, the gas powered leaf blower, and we get to the bottom of why they're so terrible. Plus there's plenty more amazing action packed stuff. So kick back and enjoy this episode on Noise pollution.

[Chuck Bryant]

Welcome to Stuff youf Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

[Josh Clark]

Hey and welcome to the PODC. I'm Josh Clark and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant, and there's Jerry over there. And this is stuff you should know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can I tell people what just happened?

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

After what going on 14 years coming up?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I guess in April Jerry hit record.

[Chuck Bryant]

And he went, hey, everybody. Oh, wait.

[Josh Clark]

I've been having a lot of trouble with my brain lately. I think I'm just.

[Chuck Bryant]

Hey, I think you're doing great.

[Josh Clark]

I don't know if I told you. Thank you. I think you're doing great too. I don't know if I told you, but I had trouble remembering how to what six plus seven added together too. Did I tell you that the other day?

[Chuck Bryant]

That sounds familiar.

[Josh Clark]

That really bothered me, man. Yeah, that's like my favorite number. And it's like I just couldn't do it.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was putting my daughter to bed the other night and as she was going to sleep, literally falling asleep, daddy, what's four plus four? It's eight. What's six plus two? That's also eight.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

She's learning math. And you know that first stuff you learn is literally just that simple addition. And it's just funny to think about, like, wow, that's what's on her mind right now.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. But also she's learning acceptance too. Just unquestioning.

[Chuck Bryant]

Can I tell people how you spelled this document that you sent my way for this noise pollution episode?

[Josh Clark]

Sure. Boy, you're just laying it all out there, aren't you?

[Chuck Bryant]

It was fun because it looked like a heavy metal band. It was N O I Z E P O. I think it was P O L L U S H U N. Yeah. And looking at it on paper, I was like, oh, man, that's a good bad band.

[Josh Clark]

It is. Like, that's a, that's a good name for a made up band in a movie.

[Chuck Bryant]

Like Wild Stallions.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

Bill and Ted.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Although that's tough to compete with. You know, it is. I also think we should, we should give a little COA here. I think it's 100% impossible for you and I not to turn into old men complaining about like loud music and loud mufflers and stuff in this episode. So it's going to happen. I think everybody who knows us and saw the title of this one knew it was going to happen, but let's just put it on the table now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, and it's also funny you mentioned this because I did mention noise pollution. I introduced that concept to my daughter the other day and said, you know, she was like, well, what's that? And I said, well, it's as bad as trash on the road, but it's noise that's doing it and you should be aware of it. And she was like, oh, okay. And I guess it never occurred to me that like, loud Noises for kids, unless it's something that really bothers them, is just part of life.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. It definitely seems to become more bothersome the older you get.

[Chuck Bryant]

Absolutely.

[Josh Clark]

I think. I don't know why, but I'm going to hypothesize that it's because you grow to learn that it doesn't have to be that way and you come to really resent the things and the people who are making it.

[Chuck Bryant]

So. Yeah. And I think that's why people. One reason people retire to the country or something like that, if they've lived in the city their whole life, just a little more tranquil, perhaps even bucolic lifestyle, quieter. And there's a lot of science behind it. It's not just like, oh, I don't want to hear those noises. As you will see throughout this episode, it's bad for your health.

[Josh Clark]

Hey, speaking of retirement, have you seen that documentary on the villages?

[Chuck Bryant]

I have.

[Josh Clark]

It is bonkers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I saw it, actually, when I had Covid. I went on a documentary binge. And that was one of them, man.

[Josh Clark]

It was like, one of the most disturbing documentaries I've ever seen. And I've seen, like, Dear Zachary. And somehow it was, like, up there with it.

[Chuck Bryant]

It was good, man. I mean, I don't want to give you anything, but the one guy that was the sort of the van guy. Disco Stoop.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

That was. It's kind of funny at first, but then that got really sad, too. Yes, a lot of layers.

[Josh Clark]

All of it was incredibly sad.

[Chuck Bryant]

Highly recommended.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Just bizarre, man. And then I was watching the credits and I saw Darren Aronofsky was an executive producer. I'm like, okay, here we go now. Things suddenly clicked a little more.

[Chuck Bryant]

I thought a great idea for a movie would be a setting like that. You couldn't call it that because it's sure, proprietary, but the towns. Yeah, a setting just like that where they wake up one day and there's been a murder. And then, like, you know, Kyle McLoughlin. It's kind of a Twin Peaks y thing. You know, the stranger from a strange land comes in to investigate a murder in a very unlikely place and all the sort of weirdos there. I think that would be a cool movie.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Or TV show.

[Josh Clark]

Sure. Well, I mean, that is Twin Peaks, basically.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. But you could. If you said it in a retirement community in Florida, people wouldn't recognize that.

[Josh Clark]

You could just walk away dusting your hands off, like, job well done.

[Chuck Bryant]

There's plenty of things that have done that. It's not just Twin Peaks, sure.

[Josh Clark]

I know. Just nobody did it better than Twin Peaks, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

Agreed. All right, so noise pollution, I think the fact of the podcast, to me came right up front in that I never thought of the fact that a decibel was a tenth of a bull or a bell, which is named, and it's got deci right there.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I know. I never thought of it either. Because you never hear of any other variation. It's like 1 decibel, 10 decibels, 100 decibels, you know, and apparently a bowl or a bell, B E, L is named after Alexander Graham Bell, too.

[Chuck Bryant]

Didn't know that either.

[Josh Clark]

And the reason why we. Why a decibel is used, which is 1/10 of a bell, is because a decibel, a 1/10 of a bell difference in sound, is the lowest, the smallest difference that humans can detect.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

So we trade in decibels here on.

[Chuck Bryant]

The human level, and we trade in an algorithm when we talk decibels because it's one of those weird things where it's not like 100 decibels isn't twice as loud as 50 decibels. It's spit into an equation that's actually 100,000 times as loud.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So like 10 decibels, the difference between 10 decibels and 20 decibels is. 20 decibels is 10 times louder. The difference between 10 decibels and 30 decibels. 30 decibels is 100 times louder.

[Chuck Bryant]

It's logarithmic and 0 DBs, as we'll call them. That is the threshold of human hearing, period. And 140 decibels is about where you can start to experience literal physical pain from a sound.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I saw between 120 and 140.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, it ranges like. I mean, I've been to some loud concerts in small venues.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Dinosaur junior at Variety Theater was it for me.

[Chuck Bryant]

I was just about to say Dinosaur junior They're one of the legendary loud bands.

[Josh Clark]

It was insane.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is super loud. But it's not. Like, I don't remember feeling pain, but I do remember feeling discomfort at a couple of these where I was like, geez, this is like, I like my music loud, but this is a little much, dude.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Like, I don't wear earplugs. I wore earplugs in that, and I was like, I'm saving myself right now. It was so loud. And I meant to say Variety Playhouse, not Variety Theater.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, because we played there before. We don't want to disrespect.

[Josh Clark]

No, I Know, you know, the variety of places.

[Chuck Bryant]

But all of this to say God bless Jay Mascus.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, no, it was great, but it was really loud.

[Chuck Bryant]

What about this conversation that we're having? What is that?

[Josh Clark]

Well, it depends. A normal conversation, something around 60 decibels. And I saw that. That's people standing about a meter apart, speaking without raising their voices. That's 60 decibels right there for reference.

[Chuck Bryant]

What about a car?

[Josh Clark]

Cars are about 10 times louder to 10 hundred to 1000 times louder than normal conversation, depending on the car or the truck, between 70 and 90 decibels.

[Chuck Bryant]

What about an airplane or a siren?

[Josh Clark]

So you would think, okay, a normal conversation is 60 decibels. Airplane being 120 decibels is twice as loud. No, my friend, it's 100,000 times louder. An airplane is 100,000 times louder than a normal conversation if it reaches 120 decibels.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right. If you've ever been on a tarmac, like a live tarmac, and heard a plane kind of landing or taking off, you that's some loud stuff.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that's why they wear those cans on their ears.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, they. And they definitely should, because we're starting to realize that there's all sorts of hearing loss besides the traditional ones that you can pick up on a regular hearing test. There's something called hidden hearing loss that we're just starting to get our eyes or mind around, where the structure of your hearing apparatus in your ear, the little cilia that's almost like a Venus flytrap trigger hair, but for sound instead, like, those things can be intact, but the neurons that form the chain between your ear and your brain can be permanently damaged, so that the sound that gets to your brain is garbled or partially missing. And that's a huge thing. And that can happen at much lower intensity than we understood before. And speaking of intensity, I think we should say real quick a decibel. To us humans, we basically talk in decibels as, like, a measure of volume, because that's what it appears to like us, like, an increase in decibels is an increase in the volume of the sound. But really, what a decibel is measuring is the intensity of the disturbance of the air that something has made. So if you're really close to that disturbance, it's going to be a very intense exposure to your ear. If you're further away, it's going to be a much less intense exposure because it kind of dissipates over distances. But to you, it's just registering as A difference in volume, where really it's a difference in the intensity of the wave that's being produced that's traveling through the air.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And this is all sound.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's not noise. Noise is different. Noise is what we're talking about mainly. And noise is classified as unwanted sound.

[Josh Clark]

Sounds simple enough.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That can vary depending on who you are. Obviously, you know, the sound of your significant other's voice after 40 years may be noise to you asking for some tea. The sound of a Harley Davidson motorcycle being revved up in front of your house might be noise. Or those blowers that. That you used to hate and now you love and use.

[Josh Clark]

I still don't love it. And I went battery powered. But it's still. Even while I'm using it, I'm like, I'm a terrible person.

[Chuck Bryant]

But you get it done quickly, probably. Right.

[Josh Clark]

So quick. So quick. I'm like mincing and prancing, just getting it done.

[Chuck Bryant]

And there's a lot of kinds of different noise. Sometimes, like, let's say you work in a machine shop or something and you use a machine. Like, the sound the machine makes is like, it's not necessary, but it's a byproduct. It's a result of that machine working correctly. It's not like, well, let's just make this thing loud. It's like, well, I'm sorry, a jackhammer is going to be loud because that's just the way it goes. You can reference our jackhammer episode. It was fantastic. It was so good. So that sound isn't necessarily noise, but the intensity and repetition of that sound makes. It becomes noise.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, yeah. It's an unwanted intensity. Or it can just the sound existing itself. Like you're saying, like a leaf blower, just an unwanted existence of sound. So either way, the operative thing is it's unwanted sound. That's the key, right.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this is another cool fact of the episode, I think, is that they think that as late as through the 1940s and into 1950, natural sounds were still the dominant sounds that you heard. And then things really changed.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because there's a big qualifier that a lot of researchers make that and not everybody does, but that noise is by definition human caused.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right.

[Josh Clark]

Like either we're yelling or whatever, or one of the machines that we've created is making noise. But that you wouldn't say, like, the sound of that waterfall is noise. Like, we don't think of, like, natural sounds typically as noise. It's just sounds. And as we'll See, it's probably because we have been living, like our species has been living around those sounds and has definitively excluded them as threatening so that they don't produce, like, an irritation in us. They just are sound almost regardless of how intense they are.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And again, that irritation is subjective because that rock concert that I enjoy, someone else might call that noise, that space shuttle launch that is super loud, might be noise to some people, but to others it's the same sound, but they don't think of it as noise because they're excited and exhilarated in the moment to see and hear that thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So, you know, the other night, the Inspiration4 crew came back on the Dragon capsule. Did you watch that?

[Chuck Bryant]

No. Did you see it live?

[Josh Clark]

We didn't see it because they splashed down in the Atlantic, but we heard the sonic boom it made when it came back into the atmosphere over Florida. It was astounding.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's awesome.

[Josh Clark]

Did you see that, Doc?

[Chuck Bryant]

Sonic boom. No, I didn't.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, it's really good. It starts out like, oh, God, this is not good. This is like a terrible corporate ad. And then it really starts to find its feet. It's. It's crazy how it evolves over, like, just the first couple episodes.

[Chuck Bryant]

I got to see it.

[Josh Clark]

It's good. It's definitely worth seeing.

[Chuck Bryant]

What other kinds of noise you got industrial noise, which that's classified as kind of from the beginning of the process all the way to the end of any kind of industrial process. And that's basically called continuous noise from raw materials all the way to the end disposal of whatever byproducts can usually cause a lot of racket.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So like a generator humming or something like that. There's not a lot of variation in intensity. It's basically this hum or steam being released or even like a rhythmic. Like something being, like, hammered. No, not hammered. That's a different. That's called the impulsive noise, but just something that doesn't really vary. It's just kind of a monotonous sound that's kind of a subcategory called continuous sound. And it just so happens that most industrial processes are continuous in nature.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Whereas a train going by your house or a plane flying or a car going by or a siren is intermittent.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And then also you could probably say, like, if you held the trigger down on a backpack leaf blower, which, again, is the worst thing that anyone's ever invented, but if you held it down, that would be a continuous sound for the whole time it was going. But no one does that ever. They just rev in this arrhythmic pattern that your brain is just, just giving its all to try to find a pattern in. And so you get worn out and irritated so quickly because of those things because they don't follow rhyme or reason. And in conjunction with that, it's an intermittent sound which is from what I can tell, one of the worst sounds for us.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. And then you've also got community noise, which is just people noise. I think the leaf blowers are thrown into that lawnmowers. You know, if you got a festival in your neighborhood or fireworks on the 4th of July or people playing their music in their cars or their houses, this is all just sort of people generated community sound.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. So those are basically the three categories that I saw. Industrial trafficking, community.

[Chuck Bryant]

Should we take a break?

[Josh Clark]

I think we should.

[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we'll be right back. I gotta go quiet down that racket outside and I'll be right back.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Josh Clark]

Okay, do you finish shaking your fist at those teenagers on your lawn?

[Chuck Bryant]

I'm lucky, because we don't have loud. We don't have one neighbor on one side, and our neighbor beside us is pretty quiet. But I do live near, and I've talked about it before, a pretty main road, and you kind of get used to it. But I also yearn, you know, to be a few blocks in. But, you know, you can't pick up your house and move it. So what are you gonna do? You get used to it.

[Josh Clark]

You can, but it's really expensive.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, no, that is true. You can move a house sometimes.

[Josh Clark]

Didn't we do an episode on that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Once, how to Move a House?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I think.

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know if we did one just on that. It may have been like historic districts or something. I don't know.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

And by the way, that episode we couldn't think of the other day was Crumple zones.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, boy. So we did do a whole episode on crumple zones.

[Chuck Bryant]

We did.

[Josh Clark]

Boy, we were scraping the bottom of the barrel there. But I remember that being an interesting episode, though.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, it was totally interesting.

[Josh Clark]

Well, that's the stuff you should know weigh, isn't it, Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

It is indeed. Should we talk about hearing damage?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So like I was saying, there's that kind of new type of hearing damage that we're wrapping our minds around that is like the death of the neurons that are supposed to transmit the electrical impulse to the brain. And so we don't hear very well. Our communication is garbled, and yet you can pass a traditional hearing test no problem. But other research is really starting to unfold, like, less predictable ways that noise and noise pollution actually affects our health. And it's like our entire system is negatively affected by noise and noise exposure.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is. And it Basically, at the beginning of the whole process is triggering the same exact thing that triggers your fight or flight response. Like you're gonna have the same reaction to. If you hear a siren go by, the same thing is happening as far as your brain knows. Then what happens if a bear walks up to you and roars?

[Josh Clark]

Right, yeah. So our hearing is always on and it's always on the lookout for a potential threat. And one of the ways that a potential threat can give itself away is by making a sound. It was like I was saying earlier, like, we've been around waterfalls and the sound of waves in our evolutionary history for so long that basically it seems like when you're born, you come equipped with this. Don't worry about that sound, actually, you can be soothed by it. It's not something that should stimulate your fight or flight response. But we've lived around industrial machinery and the sound of a text message or a leaf blower, the stupid leaf blowers, for such a little amount of our evolutionary history that our minds are not at all attuned to those things, or we haven't kind of adopted this idea that a leaf blower is non threatening. And so it stimulates the fight or flight response in us when we hear it.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. So you're gonna hear that sound. Your amygdala, which we've talked about plenty, contributes to emotional processing, is gonna send that same distress signal to the hypothalamus again. That gets. If you are in a fight or flight response, which is why you probably want to run screaming if you hear too many sirens or hear too many leaf blowers, and then that's going to signal your adrenal glands to get your adrenaline going. And I believe cortisol gets going as well. Yes, it's like literally mimicking fight or flight.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And so they figured out that people who are continuously, chronically exposed to sound like, say, people who live really close to an airport or really close to the subway tracks, or people who work in a really noisy factory, they have all sorts of crazy, random health problems. Like their kids sometimes have low birth weight, Obviously they can develop tinnitus, heart disease, obesity, diabetes. Their children who are exposed to chronic noise can have cognitive impairments, high blood pressure, like all sorts of crazy stuff. And so you think, well, okay, that's terrible. Anybody who has to live near noise or work near noise, like, we should do something about that. But it's even worse than that. Like, noise pollution is even more insidious than that because you don't have to be chronically exposed to it. You don't have to live in a place where you're like, this is an objectively noisy place that I live or work in to still suffer from the effects of noise pollution.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I mean, it can affect you when you're asleep because, like you said, your ears are always on. It's not like you go to sleep and the ears say, well, I'm gonna take a nice break. That would be a fantastic evolutionary adaptation, actually. Well, actually, it would be terrible.

[Josh Clark]

It would. These days. It wouldn't be these days.

[Chuck Bryant]

It would be great.

[Josh Clark]

The mountain lion, sabertooth tiger days.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. It'd be nice if there was a switch and you could kind of control that.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, it'd be so nice. I think the switch is the white noise wave machine is that switch.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Which I've gotten addicted to, such that I have to travel with them now everywhere I go.

[Josh Clark]

I've heard that. Yeah. Basically, once you start, you can't go back.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. I like it, though. I do. Brown noise is my drug of choice.

[Josh Clark]

It sounds so gross, though.

[Chuck Bryant]

Brown. Hey, I make a brown noise every morning. You know what I mean?

[Josh Clark]

Wow. I was not expecting Dangerfield to make an appearance.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, that's what you meant, right? Poop or no?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, I mean, I guess anytime I hear brown, I think it's poop. You know, you think of that or.

[Chuck Bryant]

You think of Ween.

[Josh Clark]

The band, do they have a brown song or album?

[Chuck Bryant]

They talk about the brown thing, the brown sound. And brown is just sort of their color and how they used to talk about sound. And I've heard other groups talk about brown sounds.

[Josh Clark]

So what does brown sound sound like?

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, brown noise, you know, if white noise is brown noises.

[Josh Clark]

Okay.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's the best way I can describe it. Yeah, it's sort of a lower end. And if you actually play it through a speaker, like if you put it on your phone and play it through a little Bluetooth, you can get some good bass, and it really works wonders for me.

[Josh Clark]

I should try brown noise or even white noise. I've been using Chrome noise, where it's like. And it's really not helping me sleep at all.

[Chuck Bryant]

You're like, I have the sound of a early Internet connection being made on a constant. Did they ever name that? They should have named that. It'd be great to.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. I don't know.

[Chuck Bryant]

Just call it whatever it was.

[Josh Clark]

They called it the tickety widget.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Interrupted sleep, though. That's the big problem. Or one of the big problems, because your ears are always on if you have uninterrupted sleep or poor sleep overall, you're gonna be tired, obviously.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

Your creativity, your memory can get impaired, your creativity is going to be low, you're going to have impaired judgment, your psychomotor skills might be impacted, you might have more headaches. They've done studies. If you live near airports and stuff like that or next to a rail yard, you're going to have more headaches, you might take more sleeping pills. As a result, you might be more prone to minor accidents and you are going to be more prone to seek psychiatric treatment in your life. Studies have shown this.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, there's a study of people living near European airports. They found a 10 decibel increase in aircraft noise was associated with a 28% increase in anxiety medication. And that people were also likelier to have like 25% more likely to have symptoms of depression. So again, all this is just from like having not good sleep, which is bad enough, but apparently, Chuck, it even gets worse. Because even, even if your sleep isn't disturbed, where you're waking up and not getting sleep because of noise.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Like, you get used to it sort.

[Josh Clark]

Of the noise is still affecting you while you're sleeping because again, your ear never turns off. It's always on the listen out for some sort of threat creeping up on you. And so if you're exposed to noise while you're sleeping, it still has that stress effect on you. And what they figured out is that one of the problems of just being chronically stressed through something like noise, and I think stress in general, is that it affects, I think it's called the endothelium, which is the lining of your blood vessels, and they respond to chemicals that tell them to constrict, to relax, and they get constricted when they get stressed. When they're exposed to stress, like cortisol or something like that comes along and says constrict. And when they do that, you get high blood pressure, you can end up with heart disease, you can end up suffering from heart attacks. And what's insane is they figured out that after one night of being exposed while you're sleeping to something like train sounds, your endothelium starts suffering. Like it doesn't function as well after just one night of that.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. Like, isn't the idea that you can have no other sort of poor health markers and it can actually be brought on because of this noise? Right.

[Josh Clark]

Yes. While you're sleeping, you're still getting sleep, but it's still happening to you while you're sleeping. And not only like high blood pressure or like a heart attack or something like that coming down the road, but also like diabetes, obesity. There's a lot of things that we're figuring out are tied to the lining of the blood vessels and whether they're healthy or not. It's a huge predictor of a whole range of diseases. And when you hear noise, your stressors trigger your endothelium to constrict. And that is a really bad thing.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is here in the United States. We kind of started studying this stuff in earnest in the 70s. That was when pollution was a big deal just all around in the United States. And we started to say things like, hey, maybe you shouldn't just have a family picnic and then just pick up your blanket and dump all the trash on the ground like they did on that episode of Mad Men and on.

[Josh Clark]

Anchorman, when they're all eating McDonald's and they just throw it on the ground in the park.

[Chuck Bryant]

I saw a guy throw a fully full McDonald's thing out the window the other day and smashed on the sidewalk.

[Josh Clark]

Oh, my God.

[Chuck Bryant]

And I was just like, who does that still?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. The problem is we're at a place in our country's history where if you confront people like that, there's a chance you're gonna get shot for confronting someone like that. I don't confront, but that's like, that is the kind of behavior you should, under normal circumstances, non shooting circumstances, feel perfectly fine. Confronting somebody about and being like, what is wr? Like, we're so far beyond that. Like, everyone knows you shouldn't do that. It's just. Oh, it drives me insane.

[Chuck Bryant]

Oh, I got into a good fight with him in my brain.

[Josh Clark]

Yes, I know. Like what? Like, where's the solution? Where's the answer?

[Chuck Bryant]

I don't know, man. I think the Zen path is you go pick up that McDonald's cup and throw it away totally. And say a prayer for that person. Good luck. So, yeah, New York is where they started studying this stuff in the 70s because it was kind of wrapped up, like I said, folded into larger pollution studies. They're like, well, we might as well talk about noise pollution. New York is the place to do it. And there were a couple of Studies in the 1970s about subway noise that really sort of gave. Put the whole thing on some terra firma. As far as the health effects and learning effects. In the case of kids at PS98 in Manhattan, it was very close to the train tracks there. The subway. Train tracks.

[Josh Clark]

Like real close.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, like 220ft away. And they found, and this is pretty startling, they found that the kids that were closest to the train tracks were 11 months behind their classmates that were on the other side of the school.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, like not in another school, just on the other side of the school.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, almost a full. Well, I mean that is basically a full school year.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

Cause you know, with summers off and stuff, that's an academic year. Plus that they were behind and they installed acoustic tiles in the classroom and some dampening devices and they did a follow up study and the gap had closed basically. So I mean there's proof right there, like your kids are not learning as well if they're near that subway noise.

[Josh Clark]

There's another kind of landmark study in the seventies in New York that established the concept of noise pollution at a place called the Bridges Apartment High rise or a cluster of them in Manhattan that I believe 95 maybe drives under or really, really close. And the traffic noise is so bad that even as high up as the 8th floor, the traffic sound is about the level of a vacuum cleaner. And like just sitting in your apartment, you have to raise your voice to be heard, which I mean just the stress of that I can't imagine. Like that's an inhabitable, uninhabitable place. I believe people are still living there as well. But this study found that children living there were far behind at reading comprehension, at listening comprehension, and just weren't learning as quickly as other kids their age who did not live in the Bridges. So those two studies together from New York kind of established this idea. Like, okay, there's a real problem with noise pollution. And then it just went away for many, many years until about 2011 when the WHO, there was a bunch of other studies, a lot of the other ones that we've referenced so far came out around 2010, 2011, 2013. I'm not sure what exactly kicked it off, but there was a big spate of them. But then the WHO released a really big report. Not the who, the band, the World Health Organization.

[Chuck Bryant]

They're another loud band actually.

[Josh Clark]

And yeah, they felt terribly guilty about causing hearing loss in their fans. So they launched this study of basically all of Western Europe. They looked at, I think something like 500 different studies and did a meta analysis of them to calculate what's called the Disability Adjusted Life years or dailies that were lost in Europe every year to noise pollution.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And the idea of a daily is they basically say it's like the healthy years of your life that end up being lost to this human made noise that you're living with.

[Josh Clark]

Right.

[Chuck Bryant]

And it's kind of a sort of an esoteric way to think about it, but once you wrap your head around it, it makes a little bit more sense. But they found that at least 1 million healthy years of life are lost every single year, only just in Europe, due to noise pollution. A million healthy years of people's lives annually.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And that means because of all of the disease burden that noise pollution produces in humans, that's how much of our healthy lifespan is shaved off every year collectively, or how much Europe's is. And they did a follow UP study in 2018, Chuck, and found that actually, no, we got it wrong. It's 1.8 million dailies are lost in Western Europe alone each year. So they definitely established through these couple of who studies, like, no, noise pollution is still a thing and we should probably do something about it. And there was another study that was released this past year that said, yes, dailies are significant, but we may have found a link that shows that noise pollution can actually straight up kill you under some circumstances. Potentially.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And this one was, this was pretty startling because they looked at heart. Well, not necessarily heart attack, but nighttime deaths. No, I guess it was heart attacks.

[Josh Clark]

Yes.

[Chuck Bryant]

But if you die overnight, die in your sleep, quote unquote from heart attacks and the link to commercial aircraft flying over your house. And I guess they had a way to sort of cancel out all the other factors and they got down to the nitty gritty that 3% of all nighttime deaths from heart attacks can be attributed to the sound of aircraft flying overhead while you're sleeping.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. That is just like that was it. That was the last stress response that your body could handle. And you had a heart attack and died from that sound. They said like, okay, we found a definite correlation. But if there is causation here, then we can chalk up about 3% of those. That's astounding.

[Chuck Bryant]

It is astounding. We're going to take a break. That's the human grossness. And we'll talk about the awful things that we're doing to our animal friends and nature right after this.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, how about awakening your senses with a Hendrix cucumber, lemonade? Or just a simple cocktail that's really perfect for any occasion?

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[Chuck Bryant]

All right, we talked about a lot of studies that basically all added up to noise pollution. Very bad for human beings, like literally bad for their health. And I know we've talked about a few of these before over the years, especially when it comes to whales. But all manner of Mother Nature are impacted by this noise. They did a study in the early 2000s about stress hormones for what kind of whales were they?

[Josh Clark]

Right whales?

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, right whales in the Bay of Fundy. And they saw, and this is remarkable, they saw a really weird, unexplained decline in the stress hormone concentrations that went away and then came back up again. And they eventually Realized it was a halt in the shipping in the Bay after 911 happened.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. Because shipping is probably humans noisiest marine endeavor that we do all the time, constantly. And the idea of a break in that having being connected to a huge decline in stress hormones in whale poop, that's, that's significant. But it was an accidental discovery and I think it led other people to start studying stuff like that, like the effects of noise on wildlife. And there was this, I think University of Idaho, Idaho. I'm sorry, if it's Idaho State, please don't be mad.

[Chuck Bryant]

I think it's Idaho.

[Josh Clark]

Okay. A study from 2012 where researchers set up like what they called a phantom road, which is basically, they affixed a line of loudspeakers to some trees out in the wilderness that stretched about a half a mile in length. And they just played road and traffic noise and not like city stuff, just like the kind of stuff that possibly a remote road through the wilderness would sound like because they recorded it in Glacier national park on a road there. And just from that, just from like this rural Glacier national park road noise, something like more than a quarter of all the birds in the area just left. They were like, we're moving. Yeah, we're going to Canada. That's what everybody in the United States says.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. You know, I think I definitely noticed and I heard other people talk about in like April of last year when things really slowed down commuter and traffic wise due to the pandemic. And I don't think it was just our imaginations, but there was a lot more bird activity going on. And I remember, I think I remember us even talking about it or maybe it was just quieter for us so we noticed them more or maybe a combination of both, but there was a difference. And when, you know, when shipping stops after 911 or when traffic stops, nature says, oh, the human a holes are gone, now we can start behaving normally again.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, like things are back to normal. And that's, I mean that's just on land. Also they found, the Idaho study found that the birds that stuck around lost a bunch of weight, which they would have needed to migrate. So maybe they couldn't leave even if they wanted to. But that was a land study. There's been other studies on. But it seems like we're doing a lot of damage to marine ecosystems as well. Like probably even more because sound waves travel in water a lot better than light. Which means that most of the animals that live in the water have really sensitive hearing. That's what they've evolved to use to communicate and listen out for. Right. So when we make noise, it's really problematic in marine ecosystems.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And we make a lot of noise. I mean, that shipping activity we talked about is super disruptive to anything underwater. When they search for mineral deposits on the sea floor or under the seafloor, they use these seismic air guns that are. You can hear those things like a fish can hear that thousands of miles away. Very disruptive. Sonar. I know we talked about sonar in an episode years ago and how that affected marine life. I can't remember what it was.

[Josh Clark]

Did we do an entire episode on the time they blew up the beached whale? Like, what to do with the beached whale?

[Chuck Bryant]

Maybe.

[Josh Clark]

I think we do.

[Chuck Bryant]

But they basically kind of say now like they think the reasons whales beach themselves is because of these noises. And sonar is a big culprit.

[Josh Clark]

Right. Like it just drives them out of the water, which sounds bonkers. But if you ever think about how humans sometimes jump from tall buildings rather than being burned by the intensity of a fire, I think it's virtually the same principle.

[Chuck Bryant]

Sure.

[Josh Clark]

So we are. We have become aware of just how much noise pollution affects not just us, but the environment as well. It is a form of pollution, and it seems like it started to accumulate in the last few years, but really, we've known for a good 50 years that noise pollution is really bad for everybody, and yet we've done almost nothing about it. But we had the start, Chuck. We started out like we were going to almost immediately. When we realized how bad noise pollution was in the 70s, we started to do something about it. And the federal government passed like three. And actually I saw a fourth one huge act that had to do with basically controlling noise pollution.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. Either controlling noise pollution for people in general or through osha, making sure people were working in safe conditions or at least had the ear cans and things they needed to work safely. And like you said, it was headed in the right direction. We knew it was bad and we were trying to stop it. And then the Reagan administration came along and said, nuts to that. That's federal regulation. Let's just leave it to the states. Because you ask any governor of any state and they'll tell you their citizens know to do the right thing and they'll do that right thing. And so we'll just leave it up to the states and let them. They volunteered to phase itself out. The Office of Noise and Abatement Control on paper still exists, but Congress said, you know, let's just not fund them anymore. And let's keep these laws on the books, but really not worry about it too much, because the states will take care of it. Right. Cause states always do the right thing.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And the states, of course, did absolutely nothing. And it's partially because they can't do a lot about it. A lot of noise is really best understood, studied, and regulated by the federal government. Like what? Like Georgia has a bunch of money reserved to study the effects of noise on humans. Like, no, that's totally a federal kind of thing to do. You know, and that's what some of those 70s acts set up. Like that Office of Noise Abatement and Control, or Noise Control and Abatement. Like, its purpose was to study that kind of stuff. That's not what states do. So the states have. Well, not the states, but usually more municipalities and counties have. They have taken steps to kind of mitigate sound pollution. Like, there's noise pollution. There's usually regulations on how early or late a landscaping crew can work within the city limits. Or some of them say, like, you can't boom your stereo, or you're not allowed to have that broken glass muffler on your Harley. There's some stuff like that. But then if you live kind of under a flight path, if your town wanted to say, you know what, you can't fly over our town and wake Everybody up between 12 at night and 7 in the morning. You can't fly an airplane over it. The airplanes would just be like, I didn't hear you. Sorry. I was listening to the feds who say you can't make laws like that. That.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And, you know, I get the feeling with municipalities, it is more like complaints from neighbors kind of noise or the lawn crews and construction. Like you were saying. Unless, like stuff with big teeth recently. Weird reason I won't get into, but I was looking up noise ordinances in Athens, Georgia, and they're kind of funny when you look at these noise ordinances. It's like. It literally said, like, you know, walking down the sidewalk, yelling at one another, talking about basically drunk kids.

[Josh Clark]

Sure.

[Chuck Bryant]

You know, like the French Quarter kind of thing. It said, you know, this includes hooting and hollering. And it was something about being able to hear you from like 300ft away or noise from your apartment. But, you know, it's like, good luck with that. Like, you can call the cops on someone maybe, but there's no teeth or. Or reg. Or what do you call it when you. Or enforcement, kind of. With a lot of this stuff, aside from singling out People when it happens in the moment and you may get a cop come by and say turn it down.

[Josh Clark]

But even if there's a will to do something, it depends on if it's like rail traffic or air traffic, like the federal, the federal government ties local, local towns and counties hands like they can't do anything about it. And there's, as a result, there's a lot of noise pollution that people can't do anything about. There's a, there's a town in Canada, I can't remember the name of it, but it's got a rail system that goes through it and it doesn't have alarms or the arms that come down. So trains have to honk their horns at least three times as they cross through this town and there's a bunch of different crossings and they calculated that train horns blare 1200 times a day in this little tiny town. And obviously everybody's going, going nuts. But they can't do anything about it because the federal government of Canada is in charge of regulating rail travel like every other developed or industrialized country.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. And even if it's something like OSHA and like you work in a loud factory and they're trying to regulate that, they say that a, they don't cover all industries, they should cover. And when they do, it's very inconsistently applied. And even when they do apply it inconsistently, they say that these limits aren't even low enough to protect all the workers anyway from hearing loss. It said OSHA regulations allow workers to be exposed to 95 decibels for four hours a day, five days a week for your entire 40 year career.

[Josh Clark]

That's insane.

[Chuck Bryant]

And that's like you're going to suffer from hearing loss if that's the case.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. That's like holding a leaf blower right next to you for four hours a day, five days a week for 40 years. Like of course you're going to lose your hearing. Like that's crazy.

[Chuck Bryant]

Well, and then factor in the other health effects that no one ever talks about that we mentioned in the whole first half of this thing. And you have an unhealthy population if you're stuck in one of those places.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So we can sit here and kvetch all day, which we would love to do. But there are solutions to this. But I want to point out one more time, all these solutions are zero thanks to the Reagan administration. Instead, there's some simple stuff you can do to help us humans. Like you can change aircraft routes, you can build barriers along roadways and railways. You can even green it up. Like, they found that if you use shrubbery and trees mixed together so that they basically produce a fence and you plant them close to the road or close to the railway rather than close to the place that you're trying to protect. They do pretty good at reducing the decibels of the sound, the noise pollution coming from the traffic. That's some easy stuff you can do. And then on the user end, on the individual's end, there's all sorts of like acoustic insulation and paneling you can add to your house to make your it a little more soundproof and quieter. What about those mufflers, Chuck?

[Chuck Bryant]

Car mufflers?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. So apparently the ones that make the sound are not good.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, I mean, they could change that. The EPA could get involved and say, you know what? You can't have those kind of mufflers anymore.

[Josh Clark]

Thank God if they did.

[Chuck Bryant]

As far as the shipping go, I know it's always like a Honda Civic or something that it's like tricked out like it's some kind of race car as far as the water goes and the shipping, stuff like that. Those big ships, they found that if they separate the ship's engine from the hull, they are quieter, much quieter. And they even found that there is, I think there's a 75% reduction in acoustic energy, 6 to 8 decibels, which is significant. And they also found that. That it is less fuel efficient. And if they like retrofitted or kind of changed the way they built these ships, I don't know if you can. Well, I guess you can retrofit some of them.

[Josh Clark]

Well, yeah, the propellers are what's making them less fuel efficient. So you can not easily. But you can take off the old propellers and put on new ones.

[Chuck Bryant]

Right. But it costs a lot of money up front, like they will save in the long run. And I think. Is it pronounced Maersk, the big shipping company?

[Josh Clark]

Yeah.

[Chuck Bryant]

They spent 100 million bucks to do just 11 of its ships. So that gives you the idea of how much it cost. There may be some efficiencies if they did more or something, but it's not cheap. And they have 740 ships. They've done 11.

[Josh Clark]

Well, I did see that it's actually a very small fraction of all of the ships involved in shipping that are responsible for the vast majority of the noise. So if you did just focus on the worst offenders, it would have a significant impact.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah.

[Josh Clark]

There's also a huge amount of noise, apparently underwater noise that comes from offshore wind farms. Because of the pile driver that is moved by up and down by the blades to help produce the electricity to move the turbine, right?

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right.

[Josh Clark]

And they found that if you just put a perforated pipe around the pile driver, the pile driver is going to produce bubbles and those bubbles will dissipate the noise. Almost all the noise, I think like 95% of the noise coming from those offshore wind farms. That's a really simple, easy solution.

[Chuck Bryant]

Just do it, people.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah. And there's one other thing that I hadn't thought about, but I saw a couple places and it really makes sense, is that the noise pollution we're contributing to marine ecosystems in particular is just such low hanging fruit that there's no reason we shouldn't do this. There's some really easy stuff we can do, like even rerouting shipping lanes is one thing we can do. And that by doing that, it will actually stabilize marine ecosystems and marine life so that it will buy us a little time while we're figuring out much trickier stuff like ocean acidification and things that are also threats to it. So it's like just removing noise pollution would really go a long way toward extending the, I guess, the health and vitality of the oceans while they're, you know, while we're combating climate change.

[Chuck Bryant]

I love it. Let's get all these things going. Our health is suffering.

[Josh Clark]

Let's start with the mufflers.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah. That's just annoyance and health.

[Josh Clark]

Yep. Well, since Chuck said that's just annoyance, of course, everybody, that means it's time for listener mail.

[Chuck Bryant]

This one's pretty short and sweet. I just love it when we get an answer about something. I think I might have known this at some point, but we talked about shrinking as humans.

[Josh Clark]

Mm.

[Chuck Bryant]

And this is from Steve in Roscoe, Illinois. He says, I've been a longtime listener. Never had a reason to reach out, but you hit my area of expertise. I'm a physical therapist, and while listening to the episode about crash testing, you ask, why do we shrink when we get older? What happens as we age, guys, is the intervertebral discs in our back lose hydration and as a result, we shrink. There are six discs in this cervical spine, 12 discs in the thoracic spine, and five discs in the lumbar. If each disc were to lose a minimum of 116 of an inch in height, that adds up pretty quickly and you can easily lose an inch plus in your lifetime.

[Josh Clark]

Wow.

[Chuck Bryant]

The other thing to consider as we age is our muscles and tissues get tighter. Pulls us into positions of poor posture.

[Josh Clark]

Sarcopenia.

[Chuck Bryant]

That's right. And this restricts our ability to stand up straight. You combine all these things together and all of a sudden Josh isn't going to hit his goal height of 6ft.

[Josh Clark]

I have to stand on my tippy toes now.

[Chuck Bryant]

Thanks for all the good work. I hope I didn't step on the toes of a future short stuff. I think we just did it. Steve. That's Steve Marima or Marima from Roscoe, Illinois.

[Josh Clark]

Thanks a lot Steve. That was a good email. We appreciate that big time. And if you haven't stumbled upon it yet, you should check out our episode on sarcopenia. It is old but it was interesting.

[Chuck Bryant]

Yeah, if you have any physical therapy needs in Illinois, give Steve a call. Sounds like a good guy.

[Josh Clark]

Yeah, head to beautiful Roscoe, Illinois.

[Chuck Bryant]

Come on.

[Josh Clark]

If you want to be like Steve from Roscoe and give us some more info that we were asking for. We love that kind of stuff. You can send it to us via email to stuff podcast at iHeartRadio.

[Chuck Bryant]

Stuff youf Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the.

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[Josh Clark]

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[Chuck Bryant]

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[Chuck Bryant]

By volume 2025 imported by William Gretton Sons Incorporated, New York, NY this is an I Heart podcast.