The Skincare Hoax & How Measurement Shaped Our World - SYSK Choice
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Today on Something You Should Know, just because you're messy doesn't mean there's anything wrong with you. Then, skin care. What works? What doesn't? And can a skin cream really get rid of wrinkles? In over 30 years of testing products, and I don't care whether they're anti-aging creams, anti-wrinkle creams, eye creams, night creams, day creams, neck creams, I have never seen any one of these products get rid of a wrinkle.

Also, one reliable way to spot a liar when they're telling a story. In measurements, inches, feet, kilograms, pounds, you'll hear the fascinating history of where they came from. Like, do you know why a meter is as long as it is?

It was originally 1/10 millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. The motivation for that, they wanted a unit that was going to be defined by something unchanging and something that was accessible to everyone. All this today on Something You Should Know. Dell Technologies' Black Friday event is live and if you've been waiting for an AI-ready PC, this is their biggest sale of the year.

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Just visit dell.com slash deals. Whether you're treating yourself or thinking of others, these Black Friday prices were worth the wait, but it's only for a limited time. Shop now at dell.com slash deals. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

Hey there, welcome to Something You Should Know. It's conventional wisdom that messy people should probably be a little neater. That's the accepted standard. You seldom hear calls for neat people to mess things up a little bit. But according to David H. Freeman, who wrote a book called A Perfect Mess...

Being neat isn't necessarily better than being sloppy. It's just different. In fact, research shows that neat people tend to be more judgmental. They not only want their lives to be neat, they want sloppy people's lives to be neat. But sloppy people don't demand that neat people get sloppier. Neat people spend a big portion of their day working on their neatness when they could be spending time on the tasks of the day.

Neat people like to categorize everything, but life isn't always easy to categorize. Life can be unorganized and ambiguous. Neatness and messiness are personality traits, and they're very hard to change. The fact is, messy people will always tend to be messy. Trying to get them to be neater causes tension and frustration and is typically a waste of time. And that is something you should know. ♪

Skin care sure seems to be big business. You walk into any store that sells skin care products and there's zillions of them. Some are cheap, some are expensive, and they all promise to do something. Moisturize, reduce wrinkles, prevent damage, tighten skin. What's the real deal here? How powerful and effective are these products? Are they worth the money you spend on them? Do any of them live up to the hype?

The person to answer these questions and reveal the truth about skincare products is dermatologist Dr. Fain Fry. She has been independently testing consumer skincare products and has a very good understanding of how they work. She's also author of a book called The Skincare Hoax. Hi, Dr. Fry. Thanks for coming on. Thank you for having me.

So there is certainly a lot of marketing, aggressive marketing of skincare products, so much so you would think that by now, I mean, nobody should have a wrinkle. We should all have beautifully moisturized, sun damage-free skin. But that's not the case. So is a lot of the marketing and the promises made about these skincare products true or is it hypey or what's your take?

Yes, some of the marketing is misleading, but do know the skincare industry is a fantastic industry. It does manufacture wonderful products that are truly good for your skin health.

So that's the good news. The bad news is it's a blind item. Most ingredients are not known by the consumer. So it's a blind item because consumers don't understand the ingredient listing. They don't have the chemistry background to do so.

And the other point is marketing is powerful. It reinforces a definition of beauty that's unrealistic and unobtainable. So the consumer feels bad about themselves. So somebody's got to advocate for the consumer. And that was my goal. Here's the problem that I see. I mean, you walk into a store and there's...

how many different moisturizers. And I wouldn't know, other than price and maybe what it says on the label, I wouldn't know the difference between any of them or what they do or what they don't do or are they all the same? I don't know. And I don't think most people know. Right. Like I said, the most important information on a skincare product is the ingredient listing.

But again, because consumers don't understand the ingredient listing, they base their product selection on the front display panel. And that front display panel has what the product is and the amount as far as fluid ounces that's required. But after that, you have a lot of marketing real estate. In addition, how do people pick products? Right, Mike, they ask their friends, they look at a magazine ad, or they listen to the media.

And so where do you find are the big points of confusion? For example, what? Well, first of all, you have to understand these products are cosmetics.

And in our country, in 1938, we passed a law that said if you're a manufacturer and you intend to make a product and sell it, if that intention of that product is to really change the structure or the function of any organ, but in this case, we're talking about the skin. If your intent as the manufacturer is to change the structure or function, by law, it's a drug.

And if it's a drug, it has to go through the FDA and it has to get pre-market approval. It has to prove safety and it has to prove efficacy. If the intent of your product, Mike, is to just beautify, like lipstick, just to make somebody look better or adorn, you don't have to get pre-market approval. But again, the intent of that product is not really to change anything.

the structure or function of the skin. So that's why when you preface this by, you know, you know this all can't be true. It can't be true because these are cosmetics we're talking about, not drugs. So with something like moisturizers, because I don't buy a lot of skincare products, but you know, I use a moisturizer. I know that there are moisturizers that are pretty cheap and some that are, you know, hundreds and hundreds of dollars.

And it just seems so confusing, like why would you pay that much? I mean, all it's doing is moisturizing. So what's the real truth here? So the truth is this. There's no correlation between what you pay for a moisturizer and how well it works.

And I know this because I test these products in my office. I have a machine, it's called a corneometer and it actually measures skin hydration. So you'll put a product on the skin for a week, we'll test the water content before you start using the product and a week later and I can tell you whether the product works. That's first and foremost. So we know what works and we know there's no correlation between what you pay and how well that product works.

I recommend people buying products from reputable national and nationally known brands. They have the resources to make the best products. They have the resources for using ingredients. They do testing as much as testing is done. And these products are available. So that's why I recommend that. I'm not sure I could give you a list of four or five ingredients that would be ideal for someone to pick based on the ingredient listing.

It would be much like picking a cake. How do you pick a good cake? Well, some of it is taste, but the best cakes, it depends on the combination of ingredients and the quality of ingredients and of course your personal preference. So it's not so easy as to just say, oh, look for these four ingredients and that's how you pick.

But if you're going to moisturize your skin, there must be some ingredients that you really need, like something with water in it or something. Well, if you want to go over the basic recipe for a good moisturizer, I'm happy to do that. A basic good moisturizer is water-based, and there are ingredients in it called humectants. These are ingredients that hold on to water.

Ingredients like glycerin, like hyaluronic acid, which is a great humectant. It doesn't penetrate into the skin when you see that marketing like, oh, this is in your skin, so put hyaluronic acid, it'll decrease your wrinkle. Well, not really. It really just sits on the skin and holds water. A great moisturizer will have occlusives in it, which are ingredients that prevent water from evaporating out of the skin. The most effective one being petrolatum.

you'll see that on the back of an ingredient listing often. Again, and then you have ingredients that hold these water and oil combinations together. Water and oil don't mix much like your salad dressing and so you have to have emulsifiers that hold these products together. You'll have some preservatives because all these water-based products will turn rancid with mold and bacteria within two weeks if they don't have a preservative. Many times we add fragrance.

But a good moisturizer is one that helps you prevent water loss from your skin. And there's a lot of good ones on the market. But how do you know which one? I mean, there are some really expensive moisturizers. You would think to justify the price that there must be something in it.

No, like I said, there's no correlation but what you pay per price for a pound. You'll get a great product for $12 for 16 ounces and you'll see other women are paying $500 an ounce. That's a shot glass. That's $8,000 a pound. Mike, can you think of any perishable that you'd even consider spending $8,000 a pound on? Can these products, are there products that can actually reduce or remove wrinkles?

Well, I guess that depends on what you call reduce or improve wrinkles. If it's a temporary hydration, so if you have a raisin and you pump water into it, you get a grape temporarily. I'll ask you, is that anti-wrinkle?

- It's anti-raisin. - Okay, it's a temporary improvement. So if you have dry skin and that means there's low water content and you put on a product that prevents water from evaporating and the water is in water content of the skin goes up and the skin looks optimal, it's temporary, right? 'Cause that product is gonna wear off and water's gonna evaporate again. You can have an improvement in the appearance of the skin. In over 30 years of testing products, cosmetic moisturizers,

And I don't care whether they're anti-aging creams, anti-wrinkle creams, eye creams, night creams, day creams, neck creams. They're all cosmetics. They're all moisturizers in my opinion. I have never seen any one of these products get rid of a wrinkle. When a skincare product uses the term anti-aging, that this product is an anti-aging whatever, cream, what does that mean?

Anti-aging, as I say, is the most brilliant marketing term in existence. We haven't discovered a single ingredient or a single product that can reverse the aging process. Now remember, these are cosmetics, which by law are not intended to actually change the structure or function of skin to begin with. In fact, they're not allowed to.

That is correct. And they're limited by what ingredients they can use. As cosmetics, there are limits to the actual ingredients they can use in their formulations. So this is something the consumer has to be aware of. What is the... it would seem to me that the biggest enemy of your skin is the sun. Is that a fair assessment? That's an excellent assessment. The sun, ultraviolet rays of the sun,

cause more skin damage, yes, skin cancer too, but if anyone would compare unexposed skin to exposed skin, you will see a very large difference in the tone, in the texture, certainly once you're past the age of 40, 45 years of age. So it would seem that the way you prevent getting skin damage from the sun is to stay out of the sun.

You know, sun avoidance is number one, meaning avoid midday sun.

Number two cover up as much as you can if you have minimal exposed skin You don't need to apply as much sunscreen I love sunscreen and I apply it every single day and I think everybody should apply it every single day But some people are concerned about putting more chemicals on their skin So my answer is put it on as little bit as you can of surface area as you can by staying covered up You don't need to apply sunscreen under under clothes under you know skin that's covered and

So sunscreen is by far, if you want to use the word anti-aging, the most effective anti-aging product on the market. But do keep in mind, sunscreen is regulated in this country as a drug because it does prevent disease and it claims to do so. So sunscreen is a great choice and I believe everybody should be using it every single day of the year.

We're talking about how to take care of your skin and how to save money in the process. My guest is dermatologist Dr. Fain Fry, and the name of her book is The Skin Care Hoax. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.

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Upgrade your business and get the same checkout we use for Realm merch with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash realm, all lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash realm to upgrade your selling today. shopify.com slash realm. So Dr. Fry, is sunscreen sunscreen or are there different grades of sunscreen or is it all the same?

Again, as a drug, sunscreen is sunscreen, but to get the actual SPF on the label, it requires that the user applies enough of it. And I think the biggest problem is most people put it on so thin and they don't get the SPF on the label, which is why I get the next question is always, do I really need more than 30 SPF or 15 SPF? And the answer would be yes, because most people don't put on enough. So if you don't put on enough, you're not going to get what's on the label.

Are there any ingredients that are in any of these creams like retinol or anything that does have some sort of like magical pixie dust or is it all just is it all just nothing? These are cosmetics. Remember they can't intend to change your skin. Now all ingredients in my opinion in all these cosmetics they fall into one of three categories.

So these ingredients are either functional ingredients, for example, those humectants and occlusives I told you about, the ingredients that actually create a good moisturizer. These ingredients are also aesthetic. Nobody would be happy if they poured out a cream and it went into your hand like water. So there are ingredients that add thickness and color, and we'll call those aesthetic ingredients.

And then there are ingredients that I call marketing tool ingredients. Now remember, this is a cosmetic that's not really intended to change anything, but they do make claims like anti-aging. So if you're a manufacturer, you have to add a minuscule amount of some ingredient that has to be, if I was to take chromatography and make sure that there's actually this ingredient in there, they have to have enough that it could be identifiable if it's tested. They add this little marketing tool ingredient,

And that satisfies the claim on the front panel, which as I told you is a lot of marketing. Now, does it, you asked a question, does it have any benefit whatsoever? I've never seen any permanent benefit. And again, which is consistent with the fact this is a cosmetic. What is retinol? Retinol is a vitamin A derivative. The parent compound is tretinoin, which is the prescription.

It is very well tested in a petri dish. It definitely has an impact on gene rearrangements. It has an effect. But when it's put on the skin, the ability for retinol to actually penetrate 20 layers of dead tissue, which is what the top 20 layers of your skin are, the barrier,

through another 60 layers of top layer of skin, below a basement membrane, into a second layer of skin called the dermis where the wrinkles and the real aging changes occur, not likely gonna happen. - Sounds like it would be impossible to happen.

Some people feel that it helps it makes them feel better I have never looked at anyone like if you ever walk down the street and you run into somebody you haven't seen in a long time and You look at them and they say you say wow, you know, Suzy you look fantastic And she says well that's because I'm using this magic retinol cream. It just doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen It's a cosmetic which is not intended to make any permanent change in anyone's skin. I

What about soap for your skin? Is there a big difference between one soap and another? Well, soap by definition is a combination of animal fat and it's a salt of animal fat and lye. It's got a high pH. That's what soap is. The original ivory soap was a soap and it's very effective at cleaning, but it's also very drying for the skin because the pH is so high.

So companies have created some really nice lower pH, 5, 6, what we call synthetic detergent bars, Sindet bars, if you will. Dove Beauty Bar is an example. It cleanses adequately, but it's not as drying. So people use the word soap and cleanser interchangeably, but when it gets down to science, a true soap is very different and much harsher than some of the beauty bars and liquid cleansers that are on the market.

It's interesting that many people treat the skin on their face differently than the rest of their body, that the face gets special facial cleansers and facial this and that, and then you use something else for the rest of your body. Is that a good practice? Is there some reason for doing that?

Well, it's preference. I personally use one cleanser for my whole body. Again, there's market share. They want you to buy a product for your face and a product for your body and a product for your eyes and a separate product for your neck. They would love you to buy an anti-aging product, probably a toner, a serum, an astringent, a primer, an essence. Again, market share. It's a business. If you're a manufacturer of a skincare company, your goal is to sell.

And most of these products are redundant. As far as the cleanser, a mild cleanser with a synthetic detergent is all you need for your whole body. You don't need a separate facial product and a separate body product. What about shampoo? Because there's a big price difference from the cheapest to the most expensive. And I've always had this sense that it probably doesn't make too much difference.

Shampoo is fascinating. If you know anybody who's older than 75 years of age, if you ask them, if you have a grandparent, ask them what shampoo they used when they were 10, 15 years of age. And I can almost guarantee you what they're going to say. They're going to say, I don't remember.

And the reason they don't remember is because shampoo wasn't even a thing. It wasn't a part of a common household item before the late 50s, early 60s when Prel and Breck hit the market and Johnson & Johnson's baby shampoo. So before that, most people used a bar of soap or they would use Castile soap. These were harsh soaps that left a ring around the bathtub and shower. And of course, shampoo was born. It was a much more aesthetic product.

product to leave the hair both clean and manageable. But again, there's no correlation between what you pay for a shampoo and its effectiveness.

And just like moisturizers, those three ingredients, you don't want to pour out a bottle of shampoo that looks like water. You'd be miserable. So we have the surfactant or the ingredient that takes the dirt away. And then we have ingredients that make it thicker and sparkly and fragrance. It smells nice because ultimately that's how most people pick their product. They actually flip open the cap and smell it, make sure it smells good. And then we have those marketing tool ingredients as well.

But a lot of shampoos make claims like, you know, thickens your hair, maximum volume. It seems that shampoo really only has one task, and that's to clean your hair. That is correct. Shampoo is designed to clean. Conditioners are designed to leave the hair manageable. It's very difficult to create a product that can do both.

Because if your product is trying to strip things off the skin as the shampoo does, it's very difficult then to leave the hair manageable with a coating of something that leaves it pleasing to the consumer. Which is why in my opinion those two-in-one products don't work very well. If you wanted to buy a shampoo that's gonna clean your hair, I would suggest a separate conditioner to help keep it manageable. And these are all cultural pleasures. You don't need any of these really.

So since you're the expert, give us a peek as to what products you use. Well, I have hundreds of products because I'm always testing them. But if I wasn't testing them, the one single product I would have on my vanity is sunscreen. And it could be a spray. You'd spray it into your hand and put it on your face and spray it on your body. It could be a lotion. It could be a stick. You can pick any form of broad spectrum SPF 30 or higher sunscreen you like.

but it should be used every single day, January through December, regardless of where you live. Because I'm a true believer you get a lot of ultraviolet light just incidentally walking to the drugstore, walking to your mailbox, etc. And that would be the one single product that I would recommend everybody have. Moisturizer, if you have dry skin. I live in the Northeast. It gets dry in the wintertime and oftentimes moisturizer helps.

Skin is optimal when the amount of water in the skin is optimal because it functions better. So a moisturizer if you need it is ideal. And the third product I'd keep on my vanity is petroleum jelly. I think it's the most versatile product on the market. It can be used for many things, runaway eyebrows, chafed skin, protection of the lips, dry elbows and knees. So those are the three products that I recommend my patients keep in their vanity.

One thing I really like is on your website, people can go and answer a few questions about the kinds of products they're looking for, and then you make recommendations based on your testing, and people can buy the product right there on your website.

through your Amazon link, but even the 4% that you make from Amazon, you donate to charity. So you truly have no skin in the game here other than to provide good information to people, and I think that's admirable. Dr. Fain Fry has been my guest. She is a dermatologist and author of the book,

The Skin Care Hoax. There is a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes and also her website, fryface.com, F-R-Y-F-A-C-E.com, if you want to check that out and look for products. And there's a link to that also in the show notes. Thanks, Doctor. Thank you for being here. Mike, it's been an absolute pleasure speaking with you today. Thank you for having me.

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We measure things. That's what humans do. We want to know how much, how far, how long, how heavy, how many. Measurement allows us to organize everything in our lives. I mean, imagine if there were no standards of measurement. Everything would be chaos.

The story of how and why we measure everything is a fascinating one. And joining me to tell it is James Vincent. He's a senior reporter for The Verge and author of a book called Beyond Measure, The Hidden History of Measurement from Cubits to Quantum Constants. Hi, James. Welcome. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So I was surprised to learn that even the standards of measurement change. And in fact, you covered...

what you would call, I guess, the redefinition of what a kilogram is back in 2018. So maybe this would be a good place to start because I would think a kilogram is a kilogram, like an inch is an inch and a pound is a pound. So why did the definition of a kilogram change? The big thing that they changed is that the kilogram used to be based on a physical standard.

So there was such a thing as the kilogram. It was created along with the meter during and the other units of the metric system during the French Revolution. And that eventually became what we is officially known as the System International or the SI, which has a lot of more units in it. But it's basically the metric system. And these units used to be based on physical standards. There was a kilogram. There was a meter. So everything, every unit in the world, every kilogram in the world was measured.

technically speaking, a copy of this physical kilogram. And it was a small little weight made of platinum iridium alloy, about the size of a hen's egg, very small because the metal is so dense because it's meant to be unchanging over time. And they kept it in a vault, underground vault near Paris in Versailles. And they had two of them over the centuries.

And then in sort of the middle of the 20th century, they discovered that the most recent one, which is known as the International Prototype Kilogram, was losing weight. It wasn't losing much weight. It was losing about 50 micrograms, which is about the weight of a single eyelash. But in the sort of the high precision world of scientific metrology, the science of measurement, it's pretty consequential.

So what they did is that they redefined the unit. So it's no longer based on a physical object, but it's based on universal constants, in this case, quantum constants. So these are sort of calculations or figures that we think are

unchanging throughout reality. So for example, the meter used to be based as the kilogram was on a physical standard. And eventually they found that this was too imprecise. So they moved it to this sort of definition based on the distance traveled by light. So it's essentially it's tied to the speed of light.

So this is sort of the big project of the System International, of the metric system, is that over the centuries, they started off as physical standards and they've all become these standards based on universal physical constants. And the idea is that by doing that, the units become unchanging. So they're based on the speed of light. They're based on the spin of atoms. They're based on things that we think are the same throughout the universe.

We have these different standards of measure. You know, we have an inch, but then we have a foot, which is 12 inches. Is there any sense of like where each of these individual measurements started?

Well, each unit tends to have its own origin story. And some of them are like the metric system. We can say exactly how that came about because there's modern records of it. For things like the cubit, well, we just know someone decided to base that on the length of their forearm. For the inch, for example...

We know that that was a sort of common unit used throughout Europe and was usually taken to be the width of the thumb. And now that sounds like a short inch, but if you take the width of your thumb and you press it down flat on a surface and measure the exterior across the widest part of the knuckle, that will be an inch.

inch. And we had actually, it's a very interesting bit of law from King David of Scotland, which I think about the 13th century, where he says that if you want to define an inch, you need to take the thumbs of three men, one small, one medium and one large.

And then you take the measurements of all their thumbs and then you add them up and you divide it by three. And that gives you the average length of the thumb. So people were aware that there was variation within body parts and they tried to mitigate this in various ways. Some units have, you know, really, really ancient measurements.

origin stories. For example, the carrot as a unit of sort of gems, of precious gems, that actually comes from the carob seed, which is a seed of a tree which is sort of spread across Arabia and was used by Arabian traders in order to measure in their scales the weight of precious metals and gems. Because the

the seed was so consistent in size, it was the same each time it was created, that meant that it could be a useful marker. So yeah, some units we have stories for, some units it's not so clear, they change over time. Each unit is sort of like its own narrative history that often goes back thousands of years.

It seems like some of these measurements are based on other measurements. Like you mentioned that the meter has something to do with the speed of light. But first you'd have to know the speed of light to know what a meter is. So help me understand that.

Well, to measure the speed of light, this is the, so I mentioned earlier that the meter is, the length of the meter is defined using the speed of light. And it's the distance traveled by light over a certain time period. And you go, okay, well, how do you measure the time? And

And we measure the time because the second is based on the number of frequency changes of a certain atom, cesium-133. And it sort of flips back and forth between these two levels of frequency, essentially. It's like it's flipping. It's like it's turning around, essentially. And we count the number of rotations that it makes in order to define the second. So there is, you know, there is something sort of that can be counted at the end of all that.

In terms of how we measure the speed of light, though, it's an interesting one because there's always the chance that we're going to measure it with greater accuracy. And what we do have for the speed of light, we have an agreed upon speed that we think this is as accurate as we're ever going to get. But there could always be more decimal places further down the line. It

It seems that much of the world uses the metric system, but in the United States we still tend to use inches, feet, yards, pounds, quarts, gallons. We don't use a lot of the metric measurements and I wonder why.

The reason why the US never went metric, there's lots of explanations for it. One of the ones is that when the metric system was being defined, it was during the French Revolution, as I mentioned earlier. And the meter, which was the key unit of the metric system, was defined as one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. So that's the meridian line.

And you have to pick a specific meridian because the surface of the Earth is not a uniform shape. So that distance differs depending on whereabouts on the Earth you take it. The French, very understandably, decided to pick the Paris meridian. That is the meridian that runs through the center of Paris.

the Americans and the British both thought this was a little too localized. They thought that it meant that the metric system was inherently foreign.

And so that was something that made people reject it. You know, at the time that the metric system was being made, there was a lot of support for the metric system in America. A lot of people from Washington to Jefferson all said, you know, we're pro metric. We think it's a great system. It has all sorts of advantages. It's going to unite the world in this frictionless world of trade. We should get onto it. And yes,

you know, quite understandably as well, you guys, you had pretty important things to get on with at that period. You know, you were creating a country from scratch. So understandably, measurement was not necessarily the highest thing on the agenda. But it seems there have been other attempts. There were attempts, I think, in the 70s to move to the metric system in the US. And it seems we're just not that interested.

It becomes a really, really difficult thing to change a country's system of measurements because it is changing people's way of life in a way. There's lots of sort of fantastic discussions from this during the 19th century where it's sort of compared to changing people's language or going into their homes and moving things about in their house without their say so. You know, it's seen as very intrusive and it becomes a cultural issue as well.

The real reason, though, if we want to get down to the sort of pragmatist approach to this, the real reason that the US and the UK as well, to a degree, didn't immediately adopt the metric system is that these were two countries that were too powerful that they ever needed to.

The US has this huge internal market. It had a huge manufacturing base. The UK had the same thing with the British Empire while it had the empire. And that meant that they had these huge markets that they could trade with them. And so they were just too powerful and too rich. But there have been other countries that have gone metric. I don't know how difficult or how much trouble it was, but it is doable.

The really interesting thing with when you look at the history of metric adoption is that it often happens right after a political revolution, which sounds sort of sounds like a silly comparison. But it happens in Russia, for example, after the Communist Revolution, they go metric. It happens in China with.

So communist revolution, again, they go metric. It happens in India when they free themselves from British imperial rule, they go metric. And it happens in South America a lot too, where you have new republics being created. One of the things they do is they adopt the metric system.

And my personal read on this is that it's only in these times of huge instability where the norms of the world, the norms of how we live our life are sort of thrown up in the air. They're thrown to hazard and we don't know where they're going to land. It's only in those moments that you can make such a monumental change. There does seem to be this underlying belief that the metric system...

Is better like that people convert to the metric system? I don't know if anyone has converted from the metric system that that's kind of the the gold standard of measuring systems and I wonder why yeah, I mean the metric system I would argue is one of Our species is sort of greatest Scientific accomplishments in a way. I mean, I mean

I know that perhaps sounds like I'm overstating it, but it's such a useful tool. And it has been so thoroughly adopted throughout the world. And the benefits of it have been amazing. Imagine if every country today in the 21st century still used its own system of units. And every time you went from one country to another, you had to find out what the new units were.

or every time you shared plans to build a car, or the latest scientific research, you had to convert for each country that you went to what their units were. I mean, imagine all the mistakes and the wasted time that would entail.

When the metric system was having a sort of a real surge in the 19th century, people compared it to the introduction of a single language for the world. There was this big internationalist movement where they thought if the world shared all these systems, that there would be less fighting, that there would be more international collaboration and harmony. And advocates used to say, first, we'll get the shared units of countries.

weight and measure, then we'll get a shared money system and then we'll get a shared language. And once we're all speaking the same language,

you know, there'll be peace on earth. And obviously, you know, it's a pretty rose-tinted view of the world. We have very good translation tools now that make it easy to translate from one language to another. I don't think it particularly stops wars, but there is something in there in that if you're all speaking the same language, whether that language is, you know, speech and grammar or whether it is weights and lengths, that that does help reduce friction. So I have quite an idealist view of the metric system. I guess you do.

So since the metric system is such a big part of the world here, again, you said a meter is determined by what? It's one what of the distance? So it was originally one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator.

The motivation for that is that they wanted a unit that was going to be defined by something unchanging and something that was accessible to everyone. So they thought if we measure the earth, that is sort of humanity's shared heritage, that anyone would then therefore be able to recreate this measurement by taking measurements of the earth again in the future. And so you said that there is a physical meter. You mean like there's a stick? Yeah.

There was, there was. Yeah. So they came up with this, they made this measurement. They took these measurements by traveling across Europe, the pair of astronomers, and they came up with this measurement, one ten millionth of the distance from the North Pole to the equator. And then they realized, okay, great, we've got this. But how is everyone else going to copy this? So they turned it into a physical meter standard.

And the first meter and the first kilogram, which are known as the meter and kilogram of the archives, were unveiled in 1799. And so for a while, every meter was a copy of that meter stick. And is that meter stick still around?

It is. I've seen it. I've seen it. It is in the National Archives in Paris, in the Hôtel de Subban, if my memory is correct. Yeah, it's still there. It's a beautiful thing. It's kept in this iron vault in the center of the archive. So we know the history or the backstory of the meter. What about the gram? Does it have a similar backstory? Who said, okay, this is our unit of measure?

So they decided when they were making the metric system that they wanted all the units to be interconnected. So once they had the meter, they then turned that into a cube, which is a decimeter on each side. That's a tenth of a meter. And then...

That would be the capacity measure, that cube. And then they filled that with water and then they made the weight of that water the kilogram. So that's where the kilogram comes from. And then you divide that into thousands to get your grams. But again, this is something that, OK, so that sounds like it's really easy to work out. You make the cube, you fill it with water, you weigh it, that's your kilogram.

But when you look into the sort of very high precision measurements, you realize, okay, well, what type of water are you going to use? You know, because saltwater has a slightly different weight to freshwater. And where are you going to measure this? Because if you measure it at the top of a mountain, it's going to have a slightly different weight to if you measure it at the bottom, because the effect of gravity will be different on the mass. So again, they decided that rather than have this sort of definition of

They would instead create a physical standard and these were created at the same time and again copies were made and shared around the world. Was there, once these things were determined, like okay this is now the meter and this is now the kilogram, was there like a real campaign to sell people on it or people, or just kind of more organically became the standard?

In France, there was a huge campaign and they saw it, as I say, as this sort of political campaign that they were freeing people from the old system of measurement. And the big thing was that in France at the time,

units of measurement really divulged. They were different in different towns because the authority to define them was often kept by local aristocratic nobility, and they would make tweaks to it based on what they liked. And this meant that you could have a pint in one town that would be a litre,

or half a litre, whatever it was, and then you'd go 80 miles down the road to another town, and it would have a different definition. Obviously, this was incredibly confusing. It hurt trade. It made life difficult for people all across the country. So the metric system was really embraced to begin with. There was a campaign to educate people about it, but people were really keen on it. They wanted change. They wanted standardisation.

Unfortunately, this was happening during one of the most tumultuous periods in French history. And the French revolutionaries decided that they didn't just want to remake weights and measures. They wanted to remake other things. So, for example, they got rid of the old calendar and they created a French Republican calendar, which each month had 30 days in it. And instead of a seven-day week, you had a 10-day week. And there were three weeks in each month.

And then they even went so far as to decimalize time. So they got rid of the 24 hour clock and they introduced a 10 hour clock where each hour has 100 minutes in it and each minute has 100 seconds in it. So they were really very ambitious about changing the world and making it more rational. But of course, there was so much change that people got sick of it.

And when Napoleon took power in his coup, he got rid of most of the metric system because he thought it was just too much. He said it was tormenting the people with trivia. He thought they couldn't handle it. Why is a mile as long as it is? I mean, where does the mile come from?

So the mile was an ancient Roman unit of measurement that originally was milus passus, which meant a thousand paces. And, you know, that's it. That's it in the title, essentially, that they they had a unit which was a pace and they thought you measure out a thousand of them and it becomes a mile. Obviously, that's, you know, depending on your length of a stride, it's not really quite a mile. But what often happens in the history of measurement is that even if you

the value may fluctuate, sometimes the unit name stays the same because it's one that people are used to and it just gets standardized in different ways over time. - I would imagine that in the quest to standardize units of measurement that there have been some pretty unusual units of measurement that kind of defied standardizing. Can you talk about some of that? - So there is a Finnish unit of length that was known as the penin kuma

And that was the distance at which a dog's bark could be heard. And there's one used by the Sami people, which is the poroncusima, which is the distance a reindeer can walk before it needs to urinate. So these are units of length that you might think,

oh, well, how would you ever know that? How would you ever standardize that? And it is pretty tricky. But if you're, say, part of the Sami people and you're hanging out with the reindeer all the day and you're traveling with them, it probably would be a decent rule of thumb to be like, yep, we've gone three reindeer toilet breaks, so we must be just about there.

Well, given our need to measure things and given that we use measurements every day all the time, it's interesting to hear the story of how these units came to be and why we use the ones we use. I've been talking to James Vincent. The name of his book is Beyond Measure, and there's a link to it in the show notes for this episode. And I appreciate you being here, James. It was really interesting. ♪

The next time you hear a story that's hard to believe, pay attention to the order in which it is told. According to Pamela Meyer, a certified fraud examiner, liars tend to tell their story in chronological order, building up to the big finish. When we tell a true story for the first time, we tend to blurt out details that had a big impact on us, randomly, not necessarily in the order that they happened.

Liars are more likely to have it all planned out, skipping unnecessary details. Another giveaway to a phony or exaggerated experience is the end. Truth-tellers tend to include an epilogue describing how they feel or how they were affected. That's difficult for a liar to do, considering they didn't actually experience those emotions since it never really happened that way in the first place.

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