Diet is bad
We're going to be talking about the history of the fork
and why the fork became ubiquitous in western dining culture and not so much elsewhere, but first, the incredibly unsatisfying body of scientific literature on diet soda. I am a former Diet Coke drinker, a two or three a day Diet Coke drinker for many years. I was that. I actually like Diet.
Coke. I prefer it to the taste of regular Coke, or other sugared sodas. I'm also overweight, but I didn't drink Diet Coke because I was overweight. I drank it because I actually prefer the flavor of it. I find it a pleasurable experience to consume Diet Coke in particular, not Diet Pepsi, Diet Coke. Yeah, I'm one of those people at a restaurant who's like, "Can I have a Diet Coke, and is Diet Pepsi? Okay, no, it's not. It's not okay. It's it is never okay." Bill: Friends don't let friends drink Diet Pepsi.
Anyway, I was drinking a lot of Diet Coke, and I would get emails from friends who were attempting to do some sort of an intervention with me, because they would read these scary articles about studies that linked diet soda consumption to things like heart disease and type two diabetes and obesity.
Alright, I have mixed news and I have some clearly bad news, unambiguously bad news, and I guess what you'd call ambiguously good news. For the unambiguously bad news is that the brown fizzy drink I hold in my hand now is Diet Pepsi. If given a choice, I will always take Diet Pepsi over Diet Coke. And being that I live in the south which is the land of Co-Cola as it is often called here, I rarely get the choice. But when I do, I choose Diet Pepsi not DC. And my wife can barely stand to look at me when I do it.
She's so ashamed. I don't know what it is with people originally from the southern United States such as my wife, but their loyalty to this multinational corporation with annual revenues around $40 billion is really something to behold, all because the company is based in Atlanta I guess. Adam: And they have a prominent skyscraper downtown with their company logo prominently displayed a loft. I don't understand why there was a cult of Co-Cola worshiping that skyscraper with its sign on top, but you do you. The bad news bill is that Ragusea prefers Diet Pepsi. The mixed news is that nobody knows for sure if diet soda is good or bad for you. There is a ton of research, and it's all conflicting and contradicting. The weight of evidence suggests diet soda is probably fine.
That is not my assessment. No one should care about my assessment. I am not a nutritional epidemiologist.
I'm just a nerd who eats and
Reads a lot often at the same time.
And what I can read quite plainly is that the Mayo Clinic and the Harvard School of Public Health, two sources of trusted health science advice for the general public, they say that diet soda is probably fine, or at least they say that the study is documenting some correlation between diet soda and negative health outcomes.
Those studies are not super reliable. Why aren't they reliable? Well, because they are basically all observational studies, and observational studies are particularly prone to confounding factors in a situation like this, where you have a product that people are generally consuming because their diet is already unhealthy. Adam: They're drinking diet soda, because they know they're consuming too many calories, particularly simple carbs and such people are naturally going to have poor health outcomes, but not because they are drinking diet soda.
It's because all of the other factors that lead them to drink the diet soda in the first place are factors that are conducive to poor health. Everybody who gets chemotherapy also has cancer, but that doesn't mean chemotherapy is giving them cancer. For those who have not considered this, let us consider the distinction between observational and experimental studies. Observational studies are where you look at data collected on people who are out there in the world, living their lives with free will. Adam: You as the scientist, you do absolutely nothing to influence or affect their behavior. You don't ask them to switch from regular Coke to. Diet Coke for a year. You don't do none of that.
You just look at data sets, and you crunch the numbers on people's health and what they consume. Observational research has exploded in recent years, thanks to revolutions in big data. As freaking annoying as it is to fill out a million forms every time you go to the doctor and you have to answer a million questions from the intake nurse, every box that nurse checks or doesn't check on their little form on their computer, every one of those boxes is adding to a giant pile of invaluable data that we are growing about the health of everyone in the developed world.
Adam: Increasingly, observational research involves no data collection at all on the part of the scientist. They just dip into the well of big data. They haul up the bucket, and they parse its contents. Personally, I think this is a great thing. Yes, governments and insurance companies and employers and advertising agencies and such, they can use big data for all kinds of nefarious purposes.
But in general, I think it's better to know what's going on than to not know what's going on. I will take enlightenment over ignorance every time. Most times, big data is a net good, IMHO. That's observational research. Experimental research is when you actually do something to affect the behavior of the people, or the other entities that you are studying. Adam: That's where you actually recruit a group, a cohort of human test subjects and you perform some kind of trial on them. You have half of them switch from regular Coke to Diet Coke, and then you track their health outcomes over some period of time. The advantage of experimental studies is you can control things.
The disadvantages, you will be limited to a much smaller scale. Observational studies where they draw from the big data well, those will often cover tens of thousands of test subjects, because you're not putting any of those people out of their way. You don't have to pay them anything. You don't have to try to make sure that they're actually drinking Diet Coke like they said they would. You're just observing what they do naturally.
Experimental studies are much, much more
Involved on the data collection side.
You got to recruit people, check in
With them at regular intervals, potentially pay them.
Experimental studies often involve just a handful of people, a dozen, two dozen people.
A clinical trial for a pharmaceutical drug will generally involve hundreds, or a few thousand people. And those are the super high stakes experiments with tons of government oversight and bi, big money behind them. And that's only a thousand people in a phase three trial, which is the phase right before a drug is approved for general use in the United. States. The smaller the group of test subjects is the more prone it is to random variation. Adam: Back when I was a journalism professor at Mercer University in Macon, Georgia, a class of mine did a semester long investigative project on pedestrian fatalities, people who are out walking on the streets and they get hit by a car and they die. Macon has a particularly bad problem with those, because of the built environment and socioeconomic factors, et cetera. Anyway, we filed an open records request, and we got five years worth of pedestrian fatality data from the state of Georgia.
And when we got it into a spreadsheet, we found that the county in Georgia with the highest rate of pedestrian death over those five years was not our county Macon-Bibb County as we expected it to be based on prior public comments made by government officials. Adam: Our county was up there, but the county with the worst rate of pedestrian death was one of those South Georgia counties that basically no one has ever heard of. People in my social media circle will often share these memes, where they have a map of Georgia. And in the area Northeast of Atlanta, they've got it labeled Migos, because the hip hop group that reintroduced the triplet to contemporary rap technique Migos is from Lawrenceville, Northeast of Atlanta. Adam: They label that whole area of the state in Migos. And the meme map will label Northwest to Georgia as carpet because of the enormous concentration of the flooring manufacturing industry, and those otherwise impoverished Appalachian mountains and valleys that send the likes of Marjorie Taylor. Green to represent them in the United States Congress. And then the meme map will describe some part of Southern Georgia as pine trees, or place you drive through on the way to.
Disney World or something. The county with the highest pedestrian death rates according to the five years worth of data that we obtained was one of those pine tree regions of South Georgia. Adam: I'm not going to name the county, just because I don't want to bring dishonor upon their house. If you want to know who it was, do your own public records request. Let's call it Pine Tree County, Pine Tree County, not the real name. My students looked at our class Google Sheets and they said, "Man, what is going on in Pine Tree County? Why are people there getting mowed over with cars left and right?" And I said, "Well, don't just look at the rate, look at the count." The rate is how many people per hundred thousand residents got hit by a car and died.
Public health and safety data is generally given in the form of X incidents per hundred thousand people, even if there aren't a hundred thousand people in the population being described, which is why X is often less than one. Adam: The rate of pedestrian death in Pine Tree County was twice that of our rate in Bibb County where Macon Georgia is.
There is a Macon county Georgia, but that is a totally different place. Macon is in Bibb County, which recently renamed itself to Macon-Bibb County when the city and county governments consolidated. It is understandably confusing, but this is to say, everybody please stop DMing me stupid articles about things happening in Macon County Georgia. Macon County is almost two hours away from where I used to live in Macon-Bibb County. Also, there's a Macon County in Alabama, and the article you sent me is from Macon County Alabama which I've never even seen. Adam: Anyway, the rate of pedestrian death in Pine Tree County, not it's real name was off the charts. I said, Y'all, don't just look at the rates, look at the count. The count is the number of actual incidents, not incidents per a hundred thousand people, but the number of actual incidents that happened.
And the count of pedestrian deaths in Pine Tree County for this 5-year study period was two, two pedestrian fatalities in five years.
The reason the rate was so high
Was that 15 total people live in pine tree county.
When the group you are studying is tiny, there are likely to be crazy findings due to just rando variation. Billy got drunk and had a real bad night. Adam: And now Pine Tree County has the highest rate of pedestrian fatalities in Georgia because. Billy mowed over two of the county's 15 residents. More than 15 people live in the county in question, but it's still a real small place. Anyway, experimental studies.
Experimental studies have their advantages, but they have their drawbacks. The first being that they're almost always very small, and small studies are prone to rando variation. Uncle Billy just having a real bad night. It's easier to do experimental studies on non-human animals like lab rats. You don't have to pay lab rats. You don't have to let them go home where they can drink regular Coke, instead of Diet Coke, even though they're supposed to only be drinking Diet Coke for your study. Adam: Plus with a lab rat, you can inject Diet Coke straight into their brains or whatever, and just see what happens. The scariest studies you will find people circulating about food ingredients are generally animal studies, where they pumped huge amounts of something into lab rats.
And yeah, the lab rat got cancer because almost anything gives you cancer if you ingest enough of it. Plain water is toxic in sufficient quantities. Scientists are not being Gould by pumping rats full of enough aspertame to kill them. We need to know how much of anything is likely to be dangerous to us, so experimental rodent studies. Experimental rodent studies are incredibly valuable, but any scientist who works with that research will also tell you to take it with a grain of salt. Adam: Humans are not rats. There was a very famous study in the 1970s that linked saccharin sweet and low with bladder cancer in rats. And it got people real freaked out about artificial sweeteners, but then subsequent research found that it simply does not do the same thing in human bodies, just different mechanisms.
Rats are not humans, sweet and low is fine. Rats, you can keep in the lab before their entire lives. Humans, you can't. Large scale studies of many, many humans are mostly limited to observational data, where you're just combing through what people said to the intake nurse at the hospital or whatever. And there are many big observational studies that link diet soda consumption with elevated risk of type two diabetes, obesity, heart disease, but correlation is not causation. Adam: When scientists do awesome statistical magic to try to determine causation, diet soda is sometimes exonerated. Here's a giant 2011 study from Harvard School of Public Health. "The association between artificially sweetened beverages and type two diabetes was largely explained by health status, pre-enrollment weight change, dieting and body mass index.".
Another big study from several of the non-hard elite institutions in Boston, this is from 2016. "Regular sugar sweetened beverage intake, but not diet soda intake is associated with a greater increase in insulin resistance and a higher risk of developing pre-diabetes in a group of middle aged adults." Here's a quote that Dr. Vasanti Malik gave to the New York Times in 2019.
Malik is at Harvard School of Public Health.
Adam: "It could be that diet soda
Drinkers eat a lot of bacon, or perhaps it's because there are people who rationalize their unhealthy lifestyle by saying, 'well, now that i've had a diet soda, i can have those french fries.'" sounds familiar to me.
Hmm, love some Diet Pepsi. Any link that you've heard about between aspertame and cancer is bunk. Aspertame is the most common artificial sweetener used in diet sodas.
It is one of the most studied food additives in history, and every official body that has examined its safety finds no link, whatsoever between aspertame and cancer. Even the EU food safety regulator that is paranoid about absolutely everything, they're fine with aspertame. Adam: There are of course other things in diet soda and other health problems than cancer and metabolic syndrome. The dental hazard of diet soda is pretty well supported. Diet sodas are acidic, and those acids have been shown to erode tooth enamel. Speaking for myself, I'm conscious of the need to brush my teeth after I have sugar, but it slips my mind when I'm drinking an artificially sweetened drink, and it should not slip my mind. I should be brushing my teeth after I drink something like this. This stuff is bad for your teeth, brush your teeth.
Diet soda has caffeine, and there are numerous health implications with caffeine, both positive and negative. Adam: Though It should be said that Diet Coke has maybe a third of the caffeine of a typical cup of coffee, then again it's easy to imagine that people are likely to drink diet soda in much larger quantities than coffee. Maybe it all evens out, but I have no science to support that particular claim. The link between diet soda and dementia. There's a big study from the American Heart Association came out in 2017 followed 4000 people for 10 years, found a strong correlation between artificially sweetened beverages and risk of dementia and stroke later in life. That's freaky to me, but the authors themselves said this is just correlation, not causation. We have no idea what is causing what here. Adam: Also, we didn't distinguish between different types of artificial sweeteners.
Plus, that was one study and its finding has yet to be replicated by anyone in the published literature. You can never go off of one study. Finally, let us consider whether diet soda actually helps you lose body fat. It's well established that aspertame has no effect whatsoever on blood sugar. It is metabolized and eliminated from the body very efficiently, without really doing anything to you, but that's a different matter from whether people in actual real world practice are able to improve their body composition by drinking diet soda, instead of drinking other things. And here, we really just have a giant pile of contradicting studies. Adam: The observational studies tend to suffer from confounding variables. There are a few small scale experimental studies with pretty interesting results.
There's a 2015 randomized clinical trial looking at about 300 overweight people. The experimenters had all the people adhere to a weight loss program, and then half of them were also directed to consume 700 mills of water every day, and the other half were directed to consume 700 mills of diet soda every day. And after a year, the diet soda group lost significantly more weight than the water group. The authors of that study do not pretend to know why this happened. But as excited as that might be making you as a DC drinker Bill, I could show you tons of other studies that have the exact opposite finding. Adam: Exact opposite finding, you will find it in the literature. There is one intriguing possibility that you mentioned Bill in the second part of your question that I've not played yet.
So, let me play that for everybody
Else.
Bill: And I have noticed just anecdotally that after I drink a Diet Coke, I will often experience hunger pangs, even though I should not really be hungry yet. Lunch wasn't that long ago that I should be experiencing hunger, and I don't experience that if I don't have a Diet Coke or if I drink seltzer instead, or something. And certainly if I have a Diet Coke in the afternoon, I almost always experience that when dinner time comes around, my feelings of hunger are much more intense around dinner time than they would be. And they come on very much faster all at once after a Diet Coke, than if I didn't have a Diet Coke or if I had seltzer or something else in the afternoon. Adam: Yeah, you are not the only person to notice this anecdotally Bill. I don't feel that response, but other people definitely say they do. Several studies indicate that low or no calorie sweetness provokes a hormonal response in the body that makes us hungry, even if we're not getting any actual calories. I'm quoting now from a 2010 literature review out of University of.
Southampton UK. This quote uses the term knockout mice. Knockout mice are genetically altered mice. The part of their genome has been knocked out in order to isolate variables in an experiment. Can't do that to a person. That's what that means. Okay, so this is a long. Buckle up, here we go.
Adam: "Recent studies using animal and human cell lines and knockout mice have shown that low-energy sweeteners can stimulate intestinal enteroendocrine cells to release glucagon-like peptide-1 and glucose-dependent insulinotropic peptide. These studies have given rise to major speculations that the ingestion of food and beverages containing low-energy sweeteners may act via these intestinal mechanisms to increase obesity and the metabolic syndrome due to a loss of equilibrium between taste receptor activation, nutrient assimilation and appetite.
However, data from numerous publications on the effects of low-energy sweeteners on appetite, insulin and glucose levels, food intake and body weight have shown that there is no consistent evidence that low-energy sweeteners increase appetite or subsequent food intake, cause insulin release or affect blood pressure in normal subjects.
Thus, the data from extensive in vivo studies in human subjects show that low-energy sweeteners do not have any of the adverse effects predicted by in vitro, in situ or knockout studies in animals." Remember that in vivo means in an actual living being, in vitro means in a test tube. In vivo human studies don't find much if any link between diet soda and increased hunger. Adam: There are several studies linking increased desire for sweet things with diet soda consumption. Maybe you are training yourself to desire sweet things by drinking the diet soda, but again, maybe your brain was already genetically predisposed to sweet things. That's why you drink diet soda.
All of this is complicated by the fact that the artificial sweetener industry has funded tons of this research. Yeah. My personal conclusion Bill is that I would guess diet soda is probably fine for most people, but I will not be surprised if it turns out that it's not fine. And there are other interests to consider, like whether or not drinking it brings you pleasure. For me, Diet Pepsi brings me joy. Adam: Like you, Bill, I prefer the taste to regular soda. And I like that I can drink a lot of it without spiking my insulin with a ton of sugar, which makes me feel really bad physically and emotionally in the short term. An hour later, I don't feel good after I drink a ton of sugar.
For me, in the absence of any conclusive scientific evidence telling me that diet soda is definitely bad for me, imma keep drinking it sometimes because it makes me happy.
Pretty much anything that you could drink
Other than plain water is going to have some health risks if you drink a ton of it.
If you don't like drinking water, I
Really think it's worth the time and effort it takes to acquire a taste for it, or to find a cheap and consistent source of good tasting water.
Adam: I drink a ton of water. If you can lean on water for all of your basic hydration needs, you can consume more fun beverages with the appropriate level of moderation, such as soda or wine. How about some sake? The traditional rice wine of Japan. This episode is sponsored by Tippsy, the largest online sake store in the United States. If you're a total connoisseur, Tippsy's got you.
They carry more than 400 labels you can choose from. If you're a sake noob like I am, Tippsy's gotcha too. Tippsy is here to make sake and sake culture accessible to newcomers like me. Every single product page on Tippsy's website translates all the jargon for you. For example, I have been drinking this silent snow bottle. It's from a Yamagata Prefecture Japan. Adam: Tippsy has a video online, where you can see the brewery and all these little handmade wooden trays they use to ferment the rice. Smaller trays are associated with higher quality, and Tippsy explains why.
Tippsy also recommends a serving temperature for each little bottle. Hot sake is very popular in the US, but most sake is served cold, just like white wine. It's great for the summer. If you join the Tippsy sake club, you can receive a curated box every three months. I've got mine right here. Each box comes with six little 10-ounce bottles. This means you can try lots of different things. You get Tippsy's guide for sake beginners and unlimited free shipping for regular orders.
Adam: Follow my link that's in the description, or it's also in the show notes if you're listening to this on a podcast app. Tippsysake.com/discount/adam. Tippsysake.com/discount/adam. Use code Adam for 10% off all products, and use code ADAM30 for $30 off your first sake box like the one, that I have. Code ADAM for 10% off everything, ADAM30 for 30 bucks off your box. Thank you Tippsy. Conrad: Hi Adam, I'm a 17-year-old Singaporean. My name is Conrad, got a question for you.
Where does cutlery or silverware as the Americans would say? How did we get to here with forks and spoons being the general western traditional one, and then we have the. Chinese oriented or at least my to my knowledge, the origins are of Chinese chopsticks and spoon? How did we get from in my mind the neanderthal eating stuff with hands? Adam: While it is no doubt true that early humans ate with their hands, rather than with tools, let us first establish Conrad that very advanced modern humans also eat with their hands, which you of course know, Conrad.
You don't need me to tell you that, but I just want to make that clear for everybody else. We're talking about India here, okay. A billion highly advanced people, with a very sophisticated and refined dining culture going back thousands of years, in which the traditional practice is to pick up the food with your fingers.
Even sloppy wet curries and crumbly rice,
You are expected in india to ball up some curry with some rice.
The sauce binds the rice grains together. Adam: You are not, repeat, not to let the food touch your palms on, only your fingertips.
Then you bring the food to your mouth with your hand in a supinated position, palm facing upward and use your thumb to push the food into your mouth. That's what they do in India, parts of India. Why did this practice evolve in Indian high society, while other similarly advanced civilizations adopted eating tools like forks and chopsticks? I have no idea that seems like a good thing to talk to an expert about for a video, and I think I will. Thanks for the tip Conrad, but certainly the practice seems consistent with other things about Indian culture that we know. Its sensuality, right? Adam: People who talk about this practice in India talk about how feeling the food with your fingers is inherently pleasurable. It's part of the experience. It's certainly the case that eating with your fingers makes it easier to consume curries that are filled with inedible whole spices as is traditional. Fingers are much better than chopsticks or forks at picking tiny slippery whole cloves and cardamom pods out of the curry, which is certainly a core ritual of eating Indian food.
Though I actually like to eat the whole cooked green cardamom pods, and I don't care if people think that makes me weird. Adam: Is the whole spices thing the reason why eating with the fingers evolved in India, or did the practice of eating food with the fingers allow for the whole spices thing to evolve, because they didn't bother people very much when they were eating with their fingers? Again, correlation is not causation, and it is often next to impossible to determine the chain of causality, probably because the chain zigzags back and forth.
One big benefit of eating with your fingers is you can feel how hot the food is before you burn your mouth. That's good. And traditional ayurvedic medicine speaks of health benefits of eating food with your fingers, and modern science may indeed support some of that. Adam: At least among people who are meeting certain minimal levels of hygiene, people whose hands are well washed before they eat. The microbiome on your generally clean hands might be good for the microbiome in your gut. I won't be surprised if someone sends me a study finding as much.
I am not an anthropologist, but let me pretend I am one for a second. I think that we can safely conclude that knives are universal food preparation implements, right? It is very difficult to eat many foods without first breaking them down with a sharp thing, some kind of knife. You don't necessarily need to use the knife at the table, but it's a perfectly logical extension to take the knife that you use to prepare the meal, and then use it to actually bring the food on its last mile from plate to mouth. Adam: Medieval Europe is definitely contemporaneous illustrations of knights eating their meat with their daggers. This could easily be an extension of martial culture. It's also easy to imagine another culture saying, "No, no, no, we use knives to kill each other. We use knives to slaughter the beast and break down its meat, and that is the very reason why we should leave the knife in the kitchen, and only pick up our food with these dainty little sticks that couldn't possibly be used to hurt anyone. Thus, these dainty little sticks will embody the refinement, the gentleness that distinguishes our elevated class from the riffraff." And then eventually the riffraff starts eating with sticks too, because they want to be regarded as high class even if they aren't.
Adam: That all sounds totally plausible to me which doesn't mean it's right. Actually, research on the evolution of chopsticks in East Asia suggests that they too were first used as cooking tools, not as eating tools. Chopsticks are ancient. Bronze chopsticks were found in an archaeological site in China dated to 1200 BCE, and those are the bronze ones that lasted until now. Imagine how much earlier they would have had wooden ones that could not have possibly lasted until now. It is a perfectly logical natural thing to pick up two sticks and use them to manipulate food as it cooks, because the food is too hot to touch and sticks are everywhere. Adam: Couldn't tell you why Chinese people ended up using the pair of sticks to eat, but I can say that the reason that you Conrad in Singapore, the reason you eat with two sticks is because Singapore is close to China.
Scholars have traced the origin of this
Practice to china, and the practice spread with chinese cultural dominance, or at least cultural influence over your entire part of the world there, conrad.
Spoons are pretty universal, simply because the
Only other way to bring watery soup to your mouth is to pick up the bowl and slurp.
And it's easy to imagine why some culture came to regard the bowl slurping as either annoying, or just disgusting and so spoons. Adam: Spoons are also extremely easy to fashion out of all manner of materials, where western culture, my culture is unusual is in our ubiquitous use of the fork. The fork is the oddball. Spoons are pretty universal. Knives are totally. Universal as cookware and pretty universal as tableware. Forks are not.
Forks are weird, probably because forks are harder to make than spoons and less essential than knives. Make no mistake, there are ancient forks in the archaeological record all over the world. In China, bone forks used in Shang Dynasty, right alongside those bronze chopsticks. Big forks were used in cooking by all kinds of ancient civilizations to grab hot food to pierce it into steady it. Adam: But from what I have read, from actual scientists and scholars on this topic, the personal table fork as it exists in contemporary western tradition, this has its likely origins in the. Eastern Roman Empire, Byzantium or potentially earlier in ancient Greece, but the byzantines would have picked it up from there. The practice which became very fashionable in Byzantium spread actually to Iran where forks were highly fashionable in Elite Persian Society for a time. Byzantines brought the table Fork to Italy around the 10th Century, major trade links between medieval Byzantine and Italian society.
And in Italy, forks became very fashionable and people liked them for eating pasta. Adam: Previously, Italians had used this wooden spike thingy for winding up long pasta shapes and bringing them to their mouths. A multi-timed fork was simply better of this. Did the fork allow Italian pasta culture to flourish, or did the fork flourish because Italian people ate pasta? Again, causality probably zigzags. Italy is really where the Byzantine Fork took hold in the west, and Italy became the center of western civilization and remained that through the Renaissance. French travelers to Italy, they brought the fork home with them. And in the 19th century, Paris became the capital of the western world, and everybody did whatever the French did, especially at the table. Adam: Again, the fork's adoption was probably slowed by the fact that it is simply harder to make than other tableware implements.
It's hard to get three or four slender little tines fabricated out of metal. That is tricky and thus, the fork absolutely had high class associations in the west. And given the global ascendancy of the west, I could imagine the other people in the world have adopted the fork just by virtue of its western associations. Lots of people in India using forks right now, instead of the fingers because colonialism. I aso think that forks are just intrinsically good. I just think forks make it real easy to grab food and bring it to your mouth, without getting any part of your body dirty. Adam: And you can use forks as spoons. A non-western person sent me an email once asking why I use my fork for scooping, as well as for spiking.
And the answer is because it can do both, it can do it all, as long as whatever you are scooping is thick enough to not drip down through between the gaps in the tines. As long as it's pretty thick, you can use a fork to scoop a liquid food to your mouth. There's simply no reason to put down the fork and pick up the spoon.
You really only need the spoon for
Soup and some such.
The solution to the soup problem had to wait until typically industrious Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries developed the spork, a spoon with little fork tines at the tip. Adam: A spork can do it all if only we will let it. If only the various cultures of the world will accept the spork, normalize sporks. Well, you might need different cutlery to eat politely in different parts of the world.
You generally only need one way to get on the internet, and that is Surfshark sponsor of this episode. Surfshark is the spork of virtual private networks. Say you are in a ball up the rice with your fingers country, but you want access to a piece of content that's only available in a fork and spoon country or vice versa. All you do is open up the Surfshark app on your computer or your phone and you route your traffic through one of Surfshark's secure servers in another country. They have them nearly everywhere. Adam: Takes two seconds and then boom. It'll be as though you are in a totally different country, watch whatever you want to watch. A virtual private network like Surfshark is also great for getting around government censorship and for general security.
You can use multi-hop to send your traffic through not one, but two totally different servers in different countries. You can turn on the kill switch, and that'll drop your internet connection if you lose your. VPN connection. VPNs are particularly great when you're traveling and using public Wi-Fi. Other people on that network could potentially snoop on you without a VPN connection, and a Surfstruck membership comes with tons of other internet security tools like antivirus, CleanWeb for blocking ads and trackers. Adam: You got Surfshark's own private search tool and lots of stuff. Right now, you can save 83% on. Surfshark and get an additional three months for free with my promo code at checkout.
That code is ADAMRAGUSEA, all one word. follow my link in the description or the show notes, use code ADAMRAGUSEA and save yourself 83%. Thank you Surfshark. Adam: Hi Adam, this is Adam from Knoxville, Tennessee. That sounds a little familiar. My wife has pointed out to me that I have what she calls my explaining voice, that is the voice I use when I explain things. It sounds a lot like this, and I've come to realize that I think I got my explaining voice from you, because you speak very clearly, and I want to also speak clear and be understood. My wife has also expressed to me that she hates my explaining voice.
It makes me sound unnatural. It's not how I actually talk. So, that begs the question does Lauren ever get annoyed or irked with the way that you speak, or the way that you explain things? Adam: But more importantly, how much thought do you put into the way you sound specifically your annunciations, or your intonation as you speak in your videos or in your podcast? You tell us a lot about your attempts to illuminate reverberations, but I'm really interested to hear what you think about the way that you sound.
I am going to play you something now.
I'm going to play you a clip
Of me, adam ragusea doing some of my very first radio reporting from wfiu in bloomington, indiana about 15 years ago.
I cannot listen to this.
I'm not going to listen to it. I don't know what you're about to hear. Don't tell me about it. Just listen to the waveform that I'm about to drop into this premiere project purely by eye. I refuse to listen to it, but here it comes. This is me doing some of my first radio reporting about 15 years ago. Adam: "For eight years, starting in 1962, an 18-acre site west of Bloomington called Neal's landfill accepted industrial waste from what was then Westinghouse Electric Corporation. That waste included polychlorinated by phenols or PCBs, a class of compounds used by Westinghouse to insulate capacitors produced at a nearby plant." .
Adam: Yeah, that was bad, I assume. When you first start doing professional voice work of any kind, the advice everybody gives you is hey just be yourself, just relax, just talk natural. That's advice that we get all the time in many fields of endeavor, not just voice work, right? Pretty much any work. "Oh, you're an. Olympic figure skater. Well, just relax when you get out there on the ice, don't think about it.". This is terrible advice. This is advice that older, more established people give to younger people without considering their own privileged point of view.
When you've been figure skating for a long time, you have done all the hard thinking necessary to develop the neural pathways involved in executing a triple lutz or whatever. Adam: You could not just shut off your brain for that learning process. You had to think through every coordination of every muscle group necessary to pull off that jump. And now that you've forged those neural pathways, you can indeed relax the parts of your brain responsible for high level conscious thoughts. You can get out there and just do the jump, because you have built a brain that will pretty much do it for you. In fact, conscious thought might get in the way of what your more autonomic systems are doing to help you do that jump. At the very least, it's better to use your conscious thoughts for other things in that moment, like remembering to smile and connect with the audience and feel the music and all of that. Adam: A person who has never done anything like a triple lutz before cannot simply relax, and not think about it.
They have to think about it because they've never done it before. Likewise when you're trying to do voice work for the first time, you can't just relax and do what comes natural, unless you are one of these genetic freaks of nature, people with a preternatural ability to just do it without any intentional practice, or other skill cultivation. Such people exist and I am not one of them. When you are young and inexperienced, you can't just relax and be yourself because yourself isn't good enough yet. You have to work on yourself. I had to consciously develop skills, like singing through every syllable. Adam: In everyday speech, we often drop syllables from words and we do that even more when we're nervous. You have to think about pushing through every syllable of the word one at a time, getting them all out to the gate one at a time.
I had to work on emphasizing words that introduce concepts that are new to the audience, though not necessarily new to me.
When you've been reporting on the mayor
All day, the mayor is not a new concept to you.
When you get on the mic to do your newscast at the end of the day, you might say something like, "Today the mayor said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but the people listening have not been thinking about the mayor all day. They've been thinking about their own shit all day, not your shit. Adam: You need to emphasize the mayor. "Today, the MAYOR said blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.". That's a way of singing the sentence that is much more accessible to people who are just getting in on the ground floor of the thing that you are trying to explain to them. I had to work on that.
I had to work on compensating for the trail off. We very naturally in human speech, we get lower in volume and sometimes lower in pitch as we approach the end of a sentence, or a thought. This happens because greater volume and higher pitch require more physical energy to produce, and our energy flags as we get further and further away from the breath that we took to power the sentence in question. Adam: I take a breath. I've got maximum power here at the beginning of the sentence, and now I'm starting to run out of gas, literal gas. And I'm losing power, losing power, losing power and so the sentence ends somewhere down here. Trailing off is perfectly natural. We're used to hearing it and dealing with it in one-on-one personal conversation, but we have to be clearer than that when we talk to an audience in a big room, or through a microphone to people listening to our podcasts.
I like to think that you are listening to the Adam Regusea pod in an anechoic chamber with your eyes closed, giving it your full undivided attention, but I know you are not. Adam: You're probably driving on the highway, or mowing the lawn, or doing the dishes, or doing something with an inherent noise floor, some amount of near constant noise competing for your attention and perception. Maybe the high energy tops of my sentences are rising above your noise floor, but what about the low energy bottoms? Are the ends of my sentences slipping beneath the noise floor? Record yourself talking, and then go listen back in your car while driving down the highway. And you will be horrified by how many words are completely lost. When I was young, I did things like straining at the ends of sentences to equalize acoustical power across the whole sentence. Adam: And that fixed the problem, but it also sounded totally unnatural and silly, because that's not how humans actually talk. The next phase of my development involved finding ways to make my voice cut across the sentence, and also sound natural and not like alienating robot announcer voice. What do I do now? I get lower in pitch and volume at the ends of my sentences, because that's what normal humans do, but I compensate by emphasizing the upper frequency content of my voice in those low moments.
I get brighter at the end of my sentences to compensate for the fact that I'm getting lower and quieter. I get brighter, emphasize the upper partials. Adam: Upper frequency content is likely to cut over. The typical noise floor is competing with my voice out there in the real world. I also lean into the mic at the ends of my sentences. This is something that you see really good singers doing. I think I first noticed this when I was a kid with Garth Brooks, the massively successful pop country western singer. Say what you will about Garth Brooks.
I'm not a fan, but the man is a stone cold professional, with an excellent voice and excellent mic technique. When he goes up into his belting range, he pulls the mic away from his mouth. And the higher the note he hits, the further he pulls the mic away.
You can see the notes he's singing
In the position of his arm.
Adam: It's like he's playing the theremin.
And when he needs to get lower and quieter, he brings the mic back in to compensate. Stone cold professional, Garth Brooks is. Compare that to today's idiot mic cuppers.
Glenn Fricker, who has a YouTube channel about heavy metal music production, Glenn is always going on righteous rants against metal singers, who cup the mic to their face all the time and it sounds like crap for many, many different reasons. Search Glenn mic cupping for a righteous rant about that. Anyway, these are just skills that I have tried to cultivate to make my voice work better for me in the context of the content that I create. Does it work every time? No. Do I do it right every time? No. Adam: Just because my execution isn't a hundred percent though, that doesn't mean that I'm not trying. It doesn't mean that I don't know what the problem is, and it doesn't mean I don't know ways of fixing it. It just means that I'm not sticking the landing every time.
This is one of the worst things that people do when they give feedback. You ever notice this. People are given feedback. They assume that if there is a problem, it is because you don't know that the problem exists, or you have no idea how to fix it. You may know damn well that the problem exists, and you may have some idea of how to fix it. But because life is hard and complicated, you still can't nail the triple lutz every time. No one can. Adam: I made a grievous error recently.
I squatted on the internet, never do that. I was doing a video that contained an ad for a product designed to help you improve your body composition. I showed footage of myself doing squats in my garage. And of course every time, the form Nazis show up in the comments. "Hey man, I'd be thinking more about your anterior pelvic tilt if I were you.". Well, what makes you think I'm not thinking about it dude? It's all I am thinking about. I know how to squat. The fact remains that 225 is a heavy squat for me, a 40-year-old dad not on performance enhancing drugs.
And I was not able to maintain perfect form on that rep. I was struggling just to get back up. Adam: When you see somebody doing something that you regard as imperfect, do not assume that they are ignorant of the problem, or its potential solutions, never assume that, never presume it. "Hey, you're actually not supposed to fall down at the end of a triple lutz. You're supposed to stay standing." Yeah, thanks bud, that is the essence of condescension. And to get back to your question Adam from Knoxville, yes, one hazard of speaking very clearly and deliberately for the purposes of explaining things is that you may sound condescending. And yes, it bothers my wife sometimes.
She bought some like pre-marinated carne asada
At the store the other day, extremely thin pieces of skirt steak.
Adam: She wanted to grill them on our gas grill. And I said, honey, "I don't think that grill gets hot enough for that." And she said, "But the meat is thin. Why would the grill need to be super hot?". And then I went into Adam YouTuber explaining man voice, and I said, "Well counter-intuitively, the thinner the meat is, the higher the heat. You need extremely high heat to brown the exterior before the very thin interior gets overcooked." And she did not appreciate my tone, understandably because a conversation between equals in an intimate relationship has totally different terms and conditions, when compared to a piece of instructional content like the videos that I make on the internet.
This is not what they signed up for, and there is a broader societal phenomenon, a bigger problem where men have historically presumed that they are superior to women in many respects. And that all women are eager to be instructed by us as to how to do certain things. This false belief on our part is exacerbated by the fact that women have historically been conditioned to feign ignorance so as to make the men feel around them feel good and important, so as to allow the men around them to assert their dominance by explaining things that women already know. Adam: They're conditioned to do that, or they have been historically. This cultural trope is known as mansplaining, but you already knew that. It was condescending for me to even say that, but you probably were not very bothered, because this is not a conversation between the two of us, Adam from Knoxville. This is a piece of informational content intended for a mass audience. Everybody listening has implicitly consented to be instructed by me.
Moreover that, you know what I'm saying right now is not intended solely for you. You know that other people are listening, other people who might not know all the things that you know. Maybe somebody much younger, or somebody from a very removed cultural point of view where mansplaining isn't really a trope. Adam: What a paradise that place must be. Anyway, you recognize that there's value in bringing along those people who aren't as read in as you are. You are not insulted when I mansplaining, because you know I'm not doing it for you. And maybe you actually really like content that promises to bring people in on the ground floor of a topic, even though you're already on the fifth floor. Maybe you like the feeling that you get knowing that any potential gaps you have in your knowledge will be filled if you just listen to this content that's designed for beginners, even though you're not a beginner.