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Today on Something You Should Know, people can be left-handed, but what about a dog or a cat or an octopus?
Then the science of productivity that gets things done. And it starts with planning your day. The real reason for that is because it's a dress rehearsal for your brain. It eliminates resistance. So there's all kinds of studies that if you write down, work out 8 to 9 a.m., you're way more likely to actually work out.
Also, how food looks before you eat it affects how it tastes when you eat it. And the fascinating world of skyscrapers. Seems like they're getting taller and taller. First of all, when you're just looking at the world's tallest building, there's only been 12 record breakers since 1890. So they don't really occur with the kind of frequency that we may see them occurring. All this today on Something You Should Know.
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$45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. 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. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. You know, I am left-handed.
And all things being equal, I would probably prefer not to be just because we live in a right-handed world, but it is what it is. And about 10% of the human population is left-handed. But is handedness, or limb preference as it's called, is that a thing in other species?
Well, only recently did we start to think so. In 2013, a study compared different forms of limb preference, such as which paw a cat prefers or which foot a bird prefers, and they looked at 119 different animal species, from toads and lizards to birds and apes, and they found that 51% of the species they investigated clearly preferred one limb over another.
Cats are more likely to be left-handed than humans are. While 10% of humans are left-handed, in one study they found 46% of cats were. And dogs are also far more likely to be left-pawed than humans are to be left-handed. And what about the octopus? An octopus has eight arms. And in one study, the octopuses showed a clear preference for one arm over all the others when reaching for something.
And that is something you should know. If I were to ask you to define productivity, you would probably say that it's about getting things done. Being productive is about accomplishing tasks. Yeah, maybe. But you're about to hear some really interesting, different, intriguing, and actionable ideas about productivity that will have you thinking about it in a whole new way.
Laura Mae Martin is the Executive Productivity Advisor in the office of the CEO at Google. She coaches Google's top executives on the best ways to manage their time and energy, and she sends out a weekly productivity newsletter that reaches tens of thousands of Google employees.
She's author of a book called Uptime, A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Well-Being. And I think you're really going to enjoy listening to what she has to say. Hi, Laura. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, thanks for having me. You bet. So most of us have a sense of productivity. Where do you think our image, our idea of productivity comes from?
I think a lot of it's cultural. So we've definitely fallen into the idea that busy is productive or busy is important. You know, a lot of it is how much can we churn out? How much can we be back to back crazy fire drills? You know, how does that feed into our definition of being important and
you know, that's where a lot of it gets lost. Is that really productive? Are we really, if we're doing a lot of things, are we really doing the right things? And so I think that that's certainly a piece of it is more is not better all of the time. But do you think if we asked people just randomly asked 10 people, when's your best time? Most people already know that or they would be surprised to hear the results.
I think most people would have what you have, which is a general sense. If I'm a night owl, I know that I'm kind of groggy in the morning and I don't want to wake up at 8 a.m. and start doing work. I know if I'm a morning person, that's when I'm most energized. So people have a general idea of when some of their natural productivity rhythms happen, but you can get more and more specific. I worked with one executive and she said, you know, mid-morning tends to be my time
When I really feel the most productive and I said around what time we kind of kept track of it for two weeks. We noticed that 10 to 1 p.m. seemed to be when she felt her best almost every day. She was always stopping to eat lunch at noon just because that's when everyone stops to eat lunch. And she realized that every day she was wasting one of her top productivity hours eating.
Eating lunch so she just shifted her lunch to more like 12:45 one each day and that added five hours of Really deep focus time that she was engaged for the week What do you find not just personally but in working with other people and talking with people? What are the big time sucks? What are the things that eat up all your time so that you get to the end of the day and think geez? I really didn't really get anything done. I
There'd be a few of them. I always give this example. Let's say you are a morning person. You've decided 9 to 11 or what I call your power hours. You set aside that time to work on something. So that's the time management piece. I think time management is a buzzword. We all want more time, need more time. But that time you just set aside. Now it's 9.05 and you want to wrap up a couple emails. So then it gets to be 9.15 and then you see a tab open that you want to look
quickly somewhere and now it's around 9:30 you say okay I'm just gonna get started on this but as you're opening it you see something else someone stops by your desk you know etc etc now it's 10:15 you barely have time to get started and you know now you've blown through this two-hour block so a lot of times the time can be there but what really sucks our time is one distraction so so many notifications so many devices you know I see people on their laptop still looking at their phone
You know, if you are working at the office, you're having people stop by all the time. If you have your tab open for chat and email, you're seeing that. So certainly those things can pull away the time that we've set aside to be intentional. I think email being probably the biggest culprit, people, you know, all kinds of studies of people check their email more.
more than 25 times a day, first thing in the morning when they wake up, last thing before they go to bed. So that's using so much of our time and our brain space. And then lastly, meetings. I think meetings can really explode in a bad way. They can be necessary and helpful, but
So many people I work with tell me I'm in meetings I don't need to be in or this could have been shorter or I've always sat in this meeting, but I don't think I really need to be part of it. And so those are the biggest three culprits, I would say distractions, email and recurring meetings specifically. Yeah.
What about where you work? Because now people, you know, a lot of the work is done at home. Maybe they go into the office now and again. When you're home, you've got different, you know, you could do it at the kitchen table or you could, and then at work, I mean, things have changed where instead of having a desk, there's now tables and you just take a spot and
I've never been much of a fan of that, but it does seem the environment that you're in is going to impact what you do.
There's actually a theory called state dependency. Well, it's not a theory. There's lots of studies on it. So it's basically that your brain is taking in all the information about where you're working and how you're working, the sights, the smells, the sounds, and associating it with how you work. So for example, they had some scuba divers in one study go underwater and half stayed on land and they learned a bunch of strings of numbers, things they needed to memorize and
And then they switched half the group. So half of the underwater went to land, et cetera. And they were asked to recall what they learned. And the recall rate of those who were in the same location as when they learned the material was statistically significant higher because they were in the same location as when they were thinking about it last. And so what you can do with that for yourself is say, maybe I am working from home and that's my only option. But statistically,
Some things I do at my desk. So I call these hotspots. I have a spot where I send all my emails to my clients at my desk. But when I need to make a few phone calls, I go down to my porch.
Or, you know, I go to a coffee shop when I have to do reviews for my team and I get out of the house and I'm always sitting at this coffee shop smelling coffee, thinking about performance reviews. And so I'm using these different spots to train my brain to think about those activities in those spots and make it easier to slip into work. And that could be in the office, too. I always sit in this chair in the corner of my office or I sit outside when I'm doing this or whatever flexibility you have.
Yeah, that sounds right. I think most people have a spot, a place where they know they can go and think and do their best work if they need to. And I think, you know, you hear those stories of an author saying, I wrote my entire book
in the same seat, you know, because I are at the same place, the same coffee shop, because it allowed me to really start thinking about the characters immediately. And that's because the last time the author was thinking about the characters, they were also hearing coffee house chatter and smelling coffee. And so it gives your brain those cues. And that's why so many of us had a hard time transitioning to work from home during the pandemic, because we had all these cues for our brain to get ready for work, whether it was our commute,
you know, the walk into the office, the favorite coffee mug on our desk at work. And now all of a sudden we were expected to do that in a place where we had never thought about work before. And so it's just about understanding what's going on there and then using it to your advantage. So a lot of the time management gurus will tell you, you know, you need to plan your day and your week and your month and you need to have it all scheduled out. And, you know, you've got to stick to your plan and
I'm sure you've heard all this before. What's your take on all of that? I think the most important plan that you make is for the following day. So I'm not too big on long-term goals and what am I doing in six months to a year. I mean, you can always be thinking about those things long-term, but the more important thing
plan is how am I spending the hours of tomorrow? And the real reason for that is because it's a dress rehearsal for your brain. It eliminates resistance. So there's all kinds of studies that if you write down somewhere, work out eight to 9am, you're way more likely to actually work out than if you kind of think of it, I'm going to work out sometime tomorrow. You know, you wake up and what should I do now? You know, so having that little bit of
thought to say, okay, what do I have going on? What do I need to accomplish tomorrow? What can I realistically do during these times? So when 10 a.m. rolls around, I'm not thinking, what should I do? Check my email, et cetera, et cetera. No, I told myself in this dress rehearsal that I was going to work on this new training I need to build. And so 10 a.m. hits, I'm way more likely to do it. So if someone was going to make a
an actual plan, I would say that's really the one that I would prioritize first. Night before, how do I plan to spend the hours of tomorrow? And it doesn't have to be every five minutes. You could say from one to three, I plan on doing these things. But you really want to get a handle on how am I going to spend that day. And what often happens, and I think what discourages people
Is that it never goes that way. It never goes completely that way. Because things always come up, something happens, you got to go here, your kid's sick, you got to go pick him up at school. And then it's like, well, what's the point of planning when life throws a curveball?
It's a great question. And I think your life, your day will never go according to plan, but it won't even go 10% to plan if there is no plan. So there is a benefit, you know, even if it's never going 100%, there still is a benefit of saying, well, my morning went well, and then my afternoon was bad.
But the real benefit of it is realizing what didn't go to plan is just as powerful as what did. So, for example, you know, I did have a plan of how I wanted to spend my last month at work before I went on maternity leave. I had everything scheduled out, what I wanted to do, you know, what I was going to do, what days, whatever.
Then my son was born a month early because not even the best planners plan when babies come. So, of course, you know, the thought is, what was the point of making that plan? Well, after my maternity leave, it was really nice to pick up that piece of paper and say, okay,
okay, here's everything I didn't do. Here's everything that I missed, you know, everything I had planned to do. That's a great starting point to say, okay, how do I pick up the pieces from the plan not going as expected? So if I hadn't taken the time to write that out, I wouldn't have that data to go back to. So even when things go awry, it's still helpful to go back to that structure and say, what did I not do? And how can I go from there?
Our topic is productivity, and my guest is Laura Mae Martin, Executive Productivity Advisor in the office of the CEO at Google, and author of the book Uptime, A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Well-Being. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth
that ours is not a loving God, and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine, wherever podcasts are available. So Laura, there's something that happens, I think, to everyone. It certainly happens to me, and that is you have something to do. It's probably pretty important, but you just don't want to do it. And you put it off, and you put it off, and then there's often a price to pay for putting it off.
And you have this strategy that I really like that's called, it's called being your own assistant. And explain how that works because it's great. Let's say there's been something that you've been meaning to do and you just can't bring yourself to do it. You can ask yourself, what would an assistant do to set me up for this task? And then do that instead of doing the full task. And what that does is our brains, they love a prepared environment where
So that's why we like charcuterie boards versus just a bunch of packages of cheese laying out. It's the presentation. It's the invitation. And so, you know, for example, I wasn't making these muffins that I've been wanting to make with some bananas. Bananas just kept getting riper and riper, just kept not doing it. So I thought if I had an assistant, what would I ask them to do? Maybe just set out all the ingredients.
set out the pan. So before I went to bed, I did all of that, set it all out on the counter, the mixing bowls, everything went to bed. But when I came down, my morning self said, wow, everything's set out for me. You know, measuring spoons, everything's already out. I'll go ahead and do it. So for some reason, splitting up that preparing of the task and the doing of the task is
makes a big difference for our brain. So there's some ways to, quote, push through when we do have to do things, you know, even if they carry over and carry over. I love that. That's a great idea. Because how can you not bake that bread now? I mean, okay. Exactly.
It seems like such a waste that you did all that work to prepare and then you just say, ah, screw it. Right. It removes the resistance by saying, oh, someone set all of this out for me even though it was me. And, you know, I was going to do that anyway if I baked them. But something about splitting it up tricks your brain into that delightful prepared environment. What's another one? You said you had a couple of those tips. What's one more? Because that's just out of the park perfect.
I really like you mentioned not stopping in the middle of something, but I actually prefer stopping in the middle of something because, again, it removes that that start of something. So if I'm writing an email and I have to go to another meeting or a lunch break, you would think that my brain should say, OK.
oh, I should just wrap up this email and then I'll start another email response when I get back from lunch. But my brain already knows what comes next. So for example, when I was writing the book, it's very tempting to say, I'm going to write, finish this chapter and then be done for the day. But I would say, no, I'm actually going to pull myself away right within a chapter when I know what comes next. Because then when I come back, I'll
I'll sit down and immediately go back into work mode without having to get over what's this chapter going to be about, you know, if I was starting new. So getting back into that flow right away because I know what's coming next so that I get back in and then, you know, immediately to the next chapter without feeling this big hump to start. But here's my problem with that, because that happens to me. For example, if I'm
editing a segment for the podcast and I stop in the middle because somebody needs something or I have to go do something. When I come back, it takes me a long time to get back into it. Like I've got to remember, well, what happened before this? What did they say before? Where was I? And that eats up a lot of time rather than just finish it and be done with it, put it to bed. And then when I get back, I could just move on to something new.
Yeah, I think that has happened to me before. And I think you can find a middle ground where I would usually say, I'm not going to finish writing the chapter, but I'm going to make sure the rest of it is outlined.
And so, you know, I'm not I'm not trying to get right back in the zone, but I gave myself some hints about what was going to come next. And so something that's like breadcrumbs, you can drop yourself, your future self to say, here's how to get right back into it. But again, each person is different. I think, you know, figuring out what that pattern is for you is going to be the most powerful. Another one is similar is is.
Swiss cheesing a task to get started on it. So if you let's say your task that keeps carrying over is run three miles every morning at 6am, you know, that feels so daunting for your brain, it's never going to happen. You just keep saying, I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it.
But you make it smaller and smaller until it's something that your brain says, oh, I can do that. So can I run one mile every morning at six? Still feels like a lot. Can I go on a walk? Still feels like I don't want to do that. Can I just set my alarm and put on running shoes every morning at six for a week?
So that immediately crosses that threshold where my brain thinks, yeah, I can do that. So now, you know, I've gotten it small enough where I'll wake up and I'll put on my shoes. Now, by the time I've woken up and found my shoes, I'll probably say, whatever, I'll go out for a walk.
And by the time I'm walking, I might even run. I might even run three miles. So you can do that even in the workplace saying I need to build this new training feels daunting. Can I just make the title slide that's small enough that my brain says, yeah, I can do that. And so just poking holes in those big, big things we keep carrying over to just say, what's the smallest possible thing I can do? Because that's usually the hardest is getting started.
That is such a true statement that I think everybody's had that experience. But for me, getting started is always the biggest hump. I mean, it's just always so hard. And then once you're in it was, well, what was that all about? That wasn't that hard. But the anticipation of starting something is what seems so daunting.
Right. And if it's smaller tasks, like for me, it's the emptying the dishwasher used to just be my nemesis. It was just something I dreaded. And, you know, I finally decided I'm just going to time myself to see how long does this actually take me? You know, it was something like four and a half minutes and that really shrunk it into something manageable for my brain. So now I just think, do I have four and a half minutes to do this? Sure. You know, it made it so that I was probably dreading it for more than four and a half minutes throughout the day.
So can you talk about, because we hear about AI and people should use AI. It'll help you do your work better. I don't, and every job is different, I understand. But I don't even know what that means to use AI. Actually, one of the things I like to tell people if you're getting started with AI, so let's say, you know, Gemini for Google. If I'm planning a birthday party and I'm not sure how to use AI, I can actually put that burden on AI and say, okay.
I'm planning a birthday party. What are five things that you can do to help me with that? So then AI is going to come back and say, I can brainstorm themes. I can give you activities. I can give you vendors locally that you could use for the party. And so instead of putting the burden on you to think what to ask, you can ask AI what I should do, what I can ask you. And so when I tell people who are just starting to use AI,
I usually say just look at your to-do list and find one single thing that AI might be able to help with. If it's drafting a blog post, if it's starting an email, if it's researching something, if it's making sense of a graph, whatever you were going to do today, instead of trying to find something crazy for AI to do for you, just
Go into your day. How are you going to spend it? And then play around with what can I do to, you know, propel this forward or make this easier on me? So, you know, things like summarizing. Hey, this is a YouTube video. I don't have time to watch. Can you read the closed caption and give me the top three things that are here?
are here. I'm looking through my Gmail and I know there's four or five threads about this topic. Can you just summarize them all for me? So summarization, brainstorm, planning, those are usually the big buckets that you can start to think about how to use AI.
I think it intimidates a lot of people, the whole AI thing. And I'm sure that will diminish, but at least right now, I think people are like a little afraid of it. Don't you think? Well, you would know. I mean, you work at Google. Yeah, I think it kind of has that, I don't know, you know, just AI futuristic, you know, this. And I think when you just think of it as
a brainstorm partner, a conversation with a friend, you know, that makes it a little bit more approachable. If you were talking with a friend saying, what should I do for my birthday party? You know, that it's giving you ideas, it's researching. And, and so you can just think of it as a starting point, you know, but I, I agree with you. And that's why I think it's beneficial that it's now integrated into, you know, a lot of our products. So that's,
People are more comfortable with just using email. And now you go to write an email because that's something you already do all the time. And there's a little button that says, do you want me to help you write this email? So that's a little less intimidating because it's right there doing something that you do all the time versus having to go to this blank screen with a cursor. You know, having it built into some of those things you're doing anyway is really nice.
Well, these last 20 minutes I've learned a lot, and I think anybody listening who's been paying attention has come away with some really great ideas for being more productive and understanding how productivity works. Laura Mae Martin has been my guest. She is the Executive Productivity Advisor in the office of the CEO at Google, and her book is called Uptime, A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Well-Being.
If you'd like to read that book, there's a link to it at Amazon in the show notes. This has been really insightful. Thanks, Laura. Thanks, Mike, for having me. This has been great. Go to any big city, such as New York or Chicago, and look up. And what you'll see are skyscrapers, lots of skyscrapers, that seem to keep getting taller and taller.
Skyscrapers, when you think about it, are incredible feats of engineering and construction. And their story is a fascinating one. Here to tell it is Jason Barr. He is a professor of economics at Rutgers University, Newark. He's one of the world's foremost experts on the economics of skyscrapers. And he's author of a book called Cities in the Sky, the quest to build the world's tallest skyscrapers. Hi, Jason. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks, it's great to be here. So I was thinking about this this morning in preparation of our discussion, and it just occurred to me that the whole industry of building and running and managing skyscrapers all owes an awful lot to the elevator. Without the invention of the elevator, there would be no skyscrapers, right?
oh that's absolutely true actually if you look at historically uh before the elevator was common i mean the tallest buildings were only five stories and if you look at the rents in apartment buildings where there were no elevators the the highest rents were on like the second floor and by the time you got to the fifth floor the reds were just you know maybe 25 percent lower i mean just people didn't want to pay to walk up the stairs then all of a sudden
When the elevator comes around, just the idea of living on the top floors or working on the top floors was something that people really wanted to do. So the elevator was definitely the key. So as you just said, once there were elevators, once there was electricity, people wanted to work on higher floors and live on higher floors. Why? What is it about being high up that appeals to people?
Okay, well, actually, that's a great question. The human desire to go up is a bit complicated. So this desire to go taller and higher depends on whether you're a business or an individual living in an apartment. For people who live in apartments, absolutely, it's the views. There's no doubt about that as you get older.
up into the you know 30 40 stories in the air you just see these amazing views but i've actually done some research trying to tease out how much of the value of an apartment uh on higher floors is due to the views versus other things and it actually seems that from what i could gather a large part of the uh price for rent or you know condo apartment prices actually just comes from
people wanting to have a sense of status that they could say that they live on a higher floor. So in a way, one way to think about why people live on higher floors is because it boosts their self-esteem. It makes them feel better about living above their neighbors. Well, you know, that is weird because then that's just a decision. People decided living higher up is more prestigious, but there's no real intrinsic value in being higher up. In fact,
I mean, it seems like there's reasons not to live high up. For one thing, I mean, I've never lived in a high rise, but I've lived as high as the fourth floor,
And if the power goes out or the elevator is broken or the elevators are broken, that's a real pain in the neck. And then there's always that worry about fire. You know, like when you stay in a hotel, you shouldn't stay above whatever the floor is that the ladders can reach. That being high up, if there's a fire, is more dangerous.
Perhaps. I mean, today's technology with fire safety and all buildings have come equipped with a whole series of measures of fire safety components. So many of the tall buildings, they have water tanks every 20 or 30 floors, for example. So, you know, and sprinklers in the roof. So fire safety today is much, much vastly improved. And fires in tall buildings, while they do happen from time to time, are quite rare.
And living in a single family house in the suburbs, they have their problems with fire safety too. So I don't think today really fire safety is nearly the kind of concern that it might have been in the early part of the 20th century, let's say.
Every few years it seems there's plans are announced to build some new skyscraper that's taller than all the other skyscrapers. And then a few years later there's going to be a new skyscraper that's even taller than that one. Almost as if there's a competition. There's a race to build the tallest skyscraper. Is there a competition?
Well, that's certainly the perception. But again, I'm a numbers guy. So actually, I take the time to try to sort of crack this nut, as it were. And first of all, when you're just looking at the world's tallest building, there's only been 12 record breakers since 1890. So they don't really occur with the kind of frequency that we may see them occurring with.
So in the early days, especially in New York, all of the record breakers were corporate headquarters. And then over time, you had the Twin Towers. That was built by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey as a kind of a quote-unquote slum clearance type project. And then the Sears Tower that was built, which is today the Willis Tower, that was built as a corporate headquarters. And then in the 21st century,
cities in Asia build supertalls is much for advertising and tourism and just kind of to get that city on the map. So in my perspective, looking at it, sure, there's ego, right? So behind every tall building is a developer who says, I must have the tallest building. But fundamentally, when you sort of peel that kind of ego element away from it, you see there are underlying economic rationales to these buildings.
Today, those rationales tend to be more about tourism, having observatories on 120th floor. So I would say the ego part is a small part when you actually look at it. When you stand in New York City and just look up and you see all these buildings, I mean, just to build any one of them seems like an insurmountable task when you've got
You know, you've got surrounding buildings and people you have to protect and you've got all the permits you've probably got to pull and you've got to get water in there and electricity in there and you've got to make sure it doesn't fall down. And I mean, it just seemed like impossible.
Yeah, I could see that and I do appreciate the difficulty. But again, New York has been building tall buildings really since the 1870s. And so in a way, the city has been at it for 150 years. So even though there's increasing number of complexities with building regulations or you're digging your foundation, all of a sudden you find this subway tunnel that you didn't know existed.
There's this tremendously knowledgeable industry of engineers, architects, the developers themselves that have been building in New York for decades. And so there's this collective experience on how to build tall buildings. And each building in some sense, each new building in some sense, has stood on a
both literally and figuratively has stood on the shoulders or the roofs of the buildings that preceded them. Is there a sense, is there a formula, like if you're going to build a 100-story building, that basically it's going to take this much time, this many people, it's going to take, you know, do we know that or every building is so unique that there's no way to do that?
No, there are rules of thumb. I mean, a good developer has a time schedule and meets with the engineers. So the engineers can tell you, okay, so this is how much steel you need. This is how much concrete you need. These are how big your elevators are going to be. And so, again, working together, the developer works with a team of consultants, engineers. And so there's just a
a pretty well-known pattern. Of course, things come up. Again, just to come back to that example of, oh, here's a subway tunnel underneath our lot that we didn't know about. Or, you know, all of a sudden the market tanks and your financing dries up. So there's a lot of uncertainties. But again, this long history of building hundreds, hundreds, you know, there's over...
There's over 500 buildings in New York City that are like 30 stories or taller. It seems like from start to finish, designing and building a skyscraper would take forever. What's the longest chunk of time taken up with? In a big city like New York, where you have, for example, a lot of small lots, that could take 10 years to assemble from these...
lot owners one larger lot. You have to buy them out, for example, or buy their development rights. So the land acquisition part is probably actually the longest part of the process because you have to deal with so many people. And if a small building owner is in the middle of your proposed
a lot, then you have this holdout problem where they could just wait and wait and keep jacking up the cost of buying them out. So the land assembly problem is a very expensive and time consuming one. But let's say you have a lot and you're ready to build. Well, it might take about a year to two years to do all the planning and to file all the paperwork.
And then with the skyscraper constructing maybe a very tall building, you might be able to get three stories in per week. So if everything goes smoothly, you could probably put the shovel in the ground and do the opening ceremonies maybe in five years if everything goes well. But if the bank somehow withdraws its funding promises or a major tenant pulls out,
then it's just going to delay things, maybe six, seven, ten years. It all depends on the market conditions. The people who build these buildings, do they usually have people lined up to move in before the building's built? Because that seems like, well, why would I commit to that?
That's right. Well, okay. Actually, it depends on the business cycle. So in a normal time, if you're going to build an office building, in the normal time, if you're going to build an office building, the banks and the funders want to see an anchor tenant, like a big corporation taking so many floors before they will release the money. With apartment buildings, I mean, especially in a city like New York, there might be some pre-leasing early on.
But if the market conditions are well, then these units could sell out rather rapidly. So what's going on now, would you guess? It would seem that construction of new buildings is probably less because, I mean, in fact, I was just reading this thing about, you know, St. Louis, that so many of the buildings are just empty, that people have moved out, that, you know, crime and COVID and everything else, people are working from home and that
that at least for office commercial space the demand is really dropped. In some cities like St. Louis, San Francisco work from home has just devastated the office sector. There are other cities where people
in Houston or even New York, even though the buildings tend to be emptier, they're still holding on. So what's happening is across the United States, there's a kind of a readjustment at work. The big cities, they're just sort of playing this waiting game. They're waiting for their big city-ness, as it were, to kick back in.
Then there's smaller cities which have a higher quality of life, lower cost of housing. People are moving to these cities for work from home opportunities. So they're doing okay. It's just some of the older industrial cities that had these office buildings, they just find them empty. And again, it
that potentially can contribute to this kind of downward spiral. So most planning officials across the United States, they're not quite sure what to do. It's this kind of deer in the headlights kind of situation because they had been so used to collecting real estate taxes and making sure that their office sectors were more or less functioning. Now that they're not, people are not quite sure what to do.
Well, it would also seem that this is going to put a damper on the construction part of this because why would you build new skyscrapers if you can't fill up the ones you already have and people keep leaving and you're going to have these buildings that are empty or half empty. You're not going to build new ones and what do you do with the ones you can't fill up? Right. So a lot of what has to happen is that these buildings have to be repurposed. Some of them can be converted to housing and quite frankly,
We have to come up with more creative uses for buildings. We have this notion in the United States that a building either has to be for offices or housing. But I think if we creatively think about buildings that are not just one or the other, they could be both offices, housing, or how about offices on the lower floor, a mall and restaurants and gyms from floor 10 to 20, and then apartments from floor 20.
you know 21 to 30. i don't think we need to be so afraid of mixed uses and we're still kind of shy in this country about mixed-use buildings if you go to asia buildings have all kinds of uses under the same roof so if you just group things by floor it will allow more opportunities to repurpose these buildings
But city officials, they have to be more proactive about encouraging this kind of stuff. I think everybody's just playing this waiting game. They really don't quite know what's going to happen, and they're just keeping their fingers crossed. Okay, maybe employment will bounce back somehow. Maybe we can get some of these people back to the offices. What's the tallest building in the world right now? It's the Burj Khalifa.
And it's in Dubai, and it's 828 meters, which is over 2,500 feet tall, and it's about 163 stories. Versus the Empire State Building is, what, it's 102 stories? Yeah.
It's 102 stories. Actually, technically, I think it's 85 stories because they count extra stories that are inside the mooring mast. The spire was originally built as a docking
port for airships. So that spire when it lights up and has this great Art Deco feel to it was actually originally intended to be for the docking of airships. And is there anything on the books that looks like something's going to come along anytime soon to top the one in Dubai? Yes. So in 2010, in Saudi Arabia, they announced what's called the Jeddah Tower in the city of Jeddah,
However, for several reasons, both economic and political, that tower had been put on hold. But if restarted and completed, that tower will be one kilometer tall, which is about 0.62 miles high, and that will be the new world's tallest building if it's ever completed. So the Burj Khalifa is 0.8 kilometers, and this one aims to be one kilometer tall.
So the people who finance and build these buildings and then lease them out, is it a lot of different people or is the industry controlled by a few? There are only a handful of developers that really know how to create a super tall building. In that sense, the construction side is probably limited to...
a much smaller group of people who know how to operate within the system and get financing and deal with the building regulations and get these things constructed. Typically, when a skyscraper gets built in a big city by the usual players, do they hold on to it? Or do these buildings get sold around back and forth?
So there's a huge turnover in these buildings. What the average rate of building sale is, it's hard to say, but it could be a developer could build something, hold on to it for five years and then sell it. A corporation could be in a super tall for 20 years and then realize its business is failing. So it sells its building. That's what happened with the Sears Tower. Sears completed the world's tallest building in 1974 because it believed it was going to eventually fill,
the Sears, which today is the Willis Tower, with its staff. But then by the 1980s, it made a whole series of bad business decisions. And then Walmart started taking over. And then Amazon and online shopping became a thing. And so today, Sears is just a kind of... Sears is just a memory of...
And Sears was probably the greatest retail chain in the United States in the 50s, 60s, 70s. So by the 1990s, Sears couldn't afford to keep itself in its own building and it sold it. Actually, I should say that, let me restate that. In Sears, as Sears' business was collapsing, it couldn't...
afford to keep its building and it lost it to its creditors. So it actually defaulted on the loan it had with the bank who held the mortgage.
Well, I remember the first time as a kid going to New York City and walking out of Grand Central Station and looking at the buildings. And, you know, you just have to walk a couple of blocks up to Fifth Avenue and you can turn and see the Empire State Building. And just being in awe of like, how do they do that? How do these things get built and how do they function? And it's great to hear what you have to say about them and puts it all in context.
Jason Barr has been my guest. He's a professor of economics at Rutgers University in Newark, one of the foremost experts on the economics of skyscrapers, and his book is called Cities in the Sky, The Quest to Build the World's Tallest Skyscrapers. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Jason. Very, very insightful. Thanks, Mike. Thank you.
Just how much you like the food you eat depends a lot on how much you expect to like the food you eat.
There was one fascinating study that used a very unusual food, smoked salmon ice cream. And as part of the experiment, scientists asked people to try the smoked salmon ice cream, which was basically bright pink ice cream. But before they gave the participants the food, they gave them different information. They told some it was a savory mousse,
They told other participants that it had this ambiguous name of Food 386. And the rest of the people received no information at all. People without prior information, who only had visual clues to go on, were probably expecting something like strawberry ice cream.
So, unsurprisingly, their expectations weren't met and they didn't like it at all. They said it was too salty. The other two groups, however, really liked the smoked salmon ice cream. Some said the seasoning was just right. So, it does seem that expectations are powerful and colors help set up those expectations.
And that is something you should know. And that's it. That's the end of this episode. But before you go, just a reminder to please share this episode. Use the share link on the platform that you're listening on, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever. And let someone else know about it, and so they'll give a listen and become a listener as well. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.
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