The Science of Evil & How the Bicycle Changed Our Lives - SYSK Choice

This episode dives into the scientific understanding of "evil" and the profound impact of the bicycle on society.

1. Evil can be more accurately understood through the science of empathy, not as a mystical force.
2. The bicycle has been a revolutionary tool for social change, especially in promoting women's independence.
3. Psychological and social factors significantly affect an individual's capacity for empathy.
4. Bicycles played a critical role in the development of personal and societal mobility, predating and influencing the automobile.
5. The episode highlights how both topics, evil and bicycles, offer insights into human behavior and societal evolution.

1: Understanding Evil

Simon Baron-Cohen discusses how deficiencies in empathy rather than an inherent evil govern actions perceived as cruel. He explains the scientific basis for empathy and its impact on human behavior. Simon Baron-Cohen: "I think the concept of evil doesn't really help us to answer that question."

2: The History and Impact of the Bicycle

Jody Rosen narrates the transformative impact of bicycles on society, detailing its inception and societal implications, especially for women’s rights. Jody Rosen: "The bicycle had done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in history."

3: The Psychological and Social Roots of Cruelty

Further exploring the concept of empathy, Baron-Cohen discusses how early life experiences shape empathy levels and, consequently, behaviors labeled as evil. Simon Baron-Cohen: "Empathy is something that scientists have been able to study in terms of the brain, in terms of the mind."

1. Cultivate empathy through active listening and engagement with diverse perspectives.
2. Use cycling as a low-impact exercise to improve physical health and reduce environmental impact.
3. Educate others about the importance of understanding psychological factors in addressing social issues.
4. Promote cycling in urban planning to enhance community connectivity and health.
5. Encourage discussions about the scientific understanding of human behaviors traditionally labeled as "evil" to foster a more empathetic society.

Why do they call it PLASTIC surgery? It seems like a weird word to use. What’s even weirder is that the term goes back a couple of centuries, even before we had plastic as we know it today. This episode begins with an explanation and once you hear it, it’ll all make sense. Source: Lindsey Fitzharris author of The Face Maker (https://amzn.to/3x3IP69).

What does the word “evil” mean when you hear it? What is evil? Is it some sinister force in the universe? Is it even possible to explain what it is? What makes someone do cruel and evil things? Perhaps evil isn’t something itself but the result of something else. Listen to my conversation with Simon Baron Cohen, a professor of developmental psychopathology at the University of Cambridge and author of four books including The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty (https://amzn.to/3tf4ffC).

Most people in the world know how to ride a bike. It is the most popular means of transportation on earth. And it makes you wonder how that happened so fast. The modern bicycle was invented not all that long ago – yet there are now twice as many bicycles as cars in existence. You are about to discover that the history of the bicycle is more interesting than you ever knew. Listen as I discuss this with Jody Rosen, a writer for The New York Times magazine and author of the book Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle (https://amzn.to/3NuAoaU).

If you live in or visit a place that has fireflies (or lightning bugs), you know they are fascinating to watch. However, the population of fireflies is diminishing. Listen as I explain why this is happening. http://www.firefly.org/how-you-can-help.html

People

Simon Baron-Cohen, Jody Rosen

Companies

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Books

"The Science of Evil" by Simon Baron-Cohen, "Two Wheels Good" by Jody Rosen

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Simon Baron-Cohen, Jody Rosen

Content Warnings:

None

Mike Carruthers
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Today on something you should know. Why is it called plastic surgery? Where does the plastic come in then? Is evil a real thing? Can people truly be evil evil?

Or is evil something else? I don't think evil is a helpful concept. I argue that empathy is actually a more useful concept than evil to understand both cruelty and kindness. Also, fireflies are disappearing all over the world. I'll explain why then.

The amazing story of the bicycle. It's had a significant impact all over the world. The bicycle is the most widely used vehicle on Earth. The rough estimate is that there are 2 billion bicycles on the planet. There are 1 billion cars.

Jody Rosen
So it is a bicycle planet that we live on because in so many places, that's the primary means of travel. All this today on something you should know. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently, I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes.

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Mike Carruthers
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. And in just a moment, we're going to tackle a topic, a big topic that is in the news and something I'm sure everyone has thought about. And that is the topic of evil. Welcome to something you should know.

We're going to start today with something I've always wondered about. Why is it called plastic surgery? Because most of the time I dont think theres a whole lot of plastic involved. So why is it called plastic surgery? According to medical historian Lindsay Fitzharris, who wrote a book called the Facemaker.

The term plastic surgery was first used in 1798 by a french surgeon. And at that time, the word plastic didnt mean what it does today. A synthetic substance that you make credit cards out of. Plastic simply meant something you could mold, like skin or soft tissue. Today, under the umbrella of plastic surgery is reconstructive surgery, which is the attempt to put something back the way it was, and cosmetic surgery, which is more about trying to improve over the way it was.

And that is something you should know.

The word evil comes up a lot. People talk about all the evil in the world, and there does seem to be a lot of it. And you have to wonder at times, what is it that makes people do such horrible things? When I think of evil, I think of Adolf Hitler, war crime, school shootings, murder. But what is the force behind those things?

What causes people to act with such hate or indifference? Is evil an actual force, a thing? Do people simply have evil in their heart? Or might there be another way to explain evil? Simon Baron Cohen studies evil as a scientist.

He's a professor of developmental psychopathology and director of the autism research center at the University of Cambridge. He's the author of more than 600 scientific articles and four books, including the Science of Evil on empathy and the origins of cruelty. Hey, Simon, welcome to something you should know. Hi. Thanks for inviting me.

Sure. So how do you look at evil? What is it? Well, we use the word evil in the english language all the time, but I'm a scientist, and I'm trying to understand the question of why do people sometimes act with cruelty, and the flip side, act with kindness. And I think the concept of evil doesn't really help us to answer that question.

Simon Baron Cohen
I mean, it's just, you know, it's a word that, you know, in a way that the word evil means this person did something bad, but it doesn't help us understand why that person acted in a bad way. I argue that empathy is actually a more useful concept than evil to understand both cruelty and kindness. Empathy is something that scientists have been able to study in terms of the brain, in terms of the mind, and in terms of why people lose their empathy under certain conditions. And the main argument is that when people act with cruelty, it's because their empathy is in some way impaired, affected. And when they act with kindness, it's because they are using their empathy.

Mike Carruthers
Okay, and so what is empathy? How do you define that? So empathy is a kind of very broad concept, but there's at least two parts to it. So psychologists talk about cognitive empathy, which is the ability to put yourself into somebody else's shoes to imagine what they might be thinking or feeling. And then there's another component called affective empathy, which is the emotional response we have to somebody else's thoughts and feelings.

Simon Baron Cohen
So the first kind of empathy, the cognitive part, is sort of recognizing what someone is thinking or feeling, maybe from their facial expression, from what they say, from their body language, or just the context. But the second part is responding. It's kind of how you feel in your guts if you see somebody else in pain. So basically, you're saying that when people do something that we would consider cruel or evil, it's because they lack empathy. Cruelty is best explained by a reduction in affective empathy.

And the best case to think about are psychopaths or people who have antisocial personality disorder, because they can do the first part of empathy pretty well, and sometimes even to a very high level, so they know what their victims are thinking and feeling. That's how they're able to manipulate them, deceive them, find their vulnerability. But they don't seem to have the normal levels of affective empathy in the sense that they don't care about their victims. So that's how they're able to hurt other people. And these are just two parts of a process of empathy.

I call it the empathy circuit in the brain, which can be affected by both genetic factors, other aspects of biology, like hormones, but also, most importantly, social factors. If I lack empathy, or something's not going right in my head with empathy, so that I'm not able to put myself in your shoes doesn't necessarily mean I'm going to be cruel to you, though. No, you're absolutely right. I think what empathy does is it puts the brakes on our behavior. So we might be angry, we might feel that we've been badly treated, and we might have a very strong desire for revenge, for example.

But empathy is, you know, it stops us from hurting others by making us think, well, how would the other person feel? And so it's kind of. It intervenes between our feelings of often driven by anger and acting on that anger. It would seem to me that there are other things at work here, too. Like, I may not be cruel to you because I have.

Mike Carruthers
It's not my character to be cruel, or I can see, I can reasonably and logically see there's no benefit to being cruel and being evil. So I choose not to, even though I might feel like getting revenge. But I'm smart enough to know there's no point to it. Yeah. So you're absolutely right that other processes are also at play, including using reason or logic.

Simon Baron Cohen
You might take a very calculating approach to how you treat other people and simply think, what are the benefits? What are the potential losses or risks? And just act in your own best interest. Even without using empathy, you might just use logic. But in everyday interactions often, empathy is also playing a very major role, and it happens at lightning speed.

We see somebody else, we see a person falling over in the street. It doesn't necessarily benefit us to rush over and help them if we're doing this cost benefit analysis in a very logical way. But nevertheless, we rush over because we recognize that the person is maybe distressed or in pain, and we want to do something to alleviate their distress. So it's a very rapid response in the brain, and maybe after the event, you might rationalize it, why did I do that? But at the time, in the heat of the moment, it's your empathy that's driving you to respond.

Mike Carruthers
I have always thought, and I think most people think, that evil is something else entirely, that evil is almost some sort of strange black magic feeling of wanting to do harm and getting some thrill out of it. It's not that you don't have empathy for the other person. You actually enjoy being evil. I mean, the first part of your comment that it's a kind of black magic experience is it just shows that the word evil has come from, if you like, more of a religious or a spiritual context rather than a scientific one. We think of the devil as an evil character, or the evil is some kind of force which is in some sense supernatural.

Simon Baron Cohen
But if we're trying to take a scientific approach to understanding cruelty, reference to these, what you call black magic isn't really going to help us. I don't think your second point is about whether some people might actually derive pleasure from hurting others. And that is something that's real. We were talking earlier about psychopaths or people with antisocial personality disorder. The version of that that you see in teenagers is something called conduct disorder.

So, you know, delinquents, you know, teenagers who, for example, might get involved in antisocial behavior, you know, hurting others or hurting other people's property. But, you know, some. Some of the research using MRI scanning has shown that the reward pathways in the brain, which is activated when we enjoy something, those pathways are also activated in these kids, in delinquent kids, when they see somebody else in pain. And that is, I mean, it's a shocking thing that a person could feel pleasure at somebody else's pain. But we do have to recognize that's a real phenomenon and try to understand where it's come from.

But I think any kind of analysis of that behavior would say that empathy is absent in that situation. You know, you're seeing somebody else in pain and you're getting pleasure from it suggests that you're not really empathizing. But why would one person get pleasure out of evil and cruelty and another person not? What is the difference? If we take the example of people who have been abused or neglected in their childhood and where as young kids they felt very powerless, they've been the victims.

As they get older and they get into the teens and even into adulthood, there's a kind of phenomenon that is widely discussed about how the victim turns into the victimizer. The kid who was abused turns into the abuser as an adult. And you get these cycles of abuse across generation. Sometimes getting some pleasure out of seeing someone else suffer may simply be because as a child you had no control in the situation. But as a grown up teenager or adult, you finally get some control.

You're now the one who's in control, even if it is at somebody else's expense. We're talking about evil and what it is and what it isn't. Simon Baron Cohen is my guest. He's author of the book the Science of Evil. If you ask any manager, I bet you they can tell you some hiring horror story.

Mike Carruthers
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Exclusions apply. See ebaymotors.com. so, Simon, you don't see evil as a thing. When people do evil things, it's because of a lack of something. It isn't something.

It's a lack of something else. It's a lack of empathy. I don't think evil is a helpful concept. I know that the title of the book, the Science of Evil, might lead the reader to expect that they're going to discover what is evil. But actually I'm reframing it to saying, let's look at the related concept of empathy.

Simon Baron Cohen
Because empathy is much more straightforward to analyze, to research from a scientific perspective, and maybe also to intervene if we want to intervene so that that that abused child doesn't grow up to abuse others. There's a very clear point of where we can intervene, and that is in the development of empathy, cultivating that child's empathy. What about cultivating empathy later in life? Is that possible.

When we have somebody in prison who's done terrible things, and there are programs like restorative justice, where we bring the criminal into contact with the victim or their family? In part, that's maybe because we're trying to offer the opportunity to cultivate empathy even later in life. Because prison is not just about punishment. It's also often about rehabilitation, about allowing the individual to change?

Mike Carruthers
Well, what's normal? Is there a normal? Is normal being empathetic and the lack of empathy is abnormal, or people are just different or what? That's a great question. So we developed a questionnaire called the empathy quotient, the EQ.

Simon Baron Cohen
And what we found was it asks you all kinds of questions about how easily you can empathize with another person, how easily you can tune into somebody else's thoughts and feelings and respond appropriately. And what we found was that the scores are actually distributed in the population along a bell curve. A lot of your listeners will be familiar with the bell curve. It's kind of the normal distribution in statistics. So most of us just have average levels of empathy, but there are people who are above average, less of them, and then there are people who are below average.

So when we talk about what is normal, basically there are different degrees of empathy, and most of us are just in the average range. So you and I might not have great empathy, but we have enough to be able to kind of live in a community where we're not hurting other people on a day to day basis. We're considerate towards our neighbors, towards our friends and colleagues and family. And it's empathy that's constantly reminding us to think about the impact of our actions, our words on others. Somehow, though, there are things that, like truly horrific events, mass shootings, Adolf Hitler, it just seemed like there's more to it than just a lack of empathy, that there is something else.

Mike Carruthers
It isn't a lack of something. It's a force that is evil. We have to go back one step, because right at the beginning of this conversation, my point was that the word evil is not helpful. Hitler is often brought up as an example of someone who did extreme things, and no one's arguing that that's the case. He killed 6 million jewish people.

Simon Baron Cohen
He also killed people with learning disabilities. He killed gay people. To understand his attitudes and his behavior, this is the argument we would need to look at him as an individual. What led to the loss of empathy? Because if he had empathy, he wouldn't have legalized all of those things.

And we know that with Hitler, as soon as he came to power, he passed a whole bunch of laws that legalized, initially, euthanasia, but then the concentration camps. Well, you said a couple times that you don't think the word evil is useful. But I think it is useful because it helps put a label on certain types of behavior, and it helps to differentiate between good. You know, there's good and there's evil. So we get a better understanding of right and wrong, good and evil, which is why the word I think exists and people use it.

I think they like the word because it's a short word, just four letters, which kind of allows people to express how upset they are at what somebody has done. So to say, he must be evil. That's why he did it. But if you analyze the sentence, that's why he did it. There isn't really an explanation there.

It's kind of referring to something. Again, you called it black magic. Some people would call it mysterious, something indefinable. I think it's fine to try and have a word which says that the behavior was extreme in terms of how bad it was. But to understand it, we need some explanatory factors.

And the science is now getting to this point where we can point to social factors like early deprivation and abuse, but we can also point to biological factors, which include genetics and prenatal hormones, all kind of combining to influence how much empathy a person has. I don't see anything similar going on in terms of trying to really understand this concept of evil. In fact, I find the concept of evil unhelpful. Well, I get what you're saying about that. From a scientific point of view, that it isn't helpful to talk about evil because it is this mystical thing.

Mike Carruthers
But from a living your life point of view, it does seem helpful because I think people need to make sense of the world somehow, and that's what religion does, and that there is evil and that that is something to avoid and something to keep away. And that may be not scientific, but it does serve a purpose. Yeah, but, you know, I think if you, if you look at the words and try and analyze, you know, is it helping you? Is it a helpful word for us to have? In some ways, I find that the word closes down any questioning, you know, to say, well, the person did that because they're evil.

Simon Baron Cohen
It's as if that's the end of the story. Whereas the approach that I'm suggesting, where we look at what are the determining factors that influence how much empathy a person has. Empathy is a kind of normative process, as we've said, and some people have more of it than others, but what is it that determines how much empathy you have? And what are the factors that can interrupt your empathy? And one, for example, that we haven't talked about is stress and when you're feeling under threat.

So if we take a conflict, like the Israel Palestine conflict, where we've had two communities living for almost 100 years, both feeling threatened by the other, when you feel under threat, if you feel your country is going to be bombed, for example, it's very difficult to have empathy for the other community. Instead, you're living in a state of fear the whole time. And the hormones, the stress hormones related to fear, such as cortisol, can be at a very high level, which are kind of blocking the empathy process. And it's only when you're in the position of, if you like, security, that you have the luxury to think, I wonder what the other person is thinking or feeling, and I wonder if I can help. And the same would be true at an individual level, not at a community level, but at an individual level, if you've been, I don't know, repeatedly assaulted, it's very difficult to have empathy for the people who you fear may assault you again.

Mike Carruthers
Well, I think people will always use the word evil because it describes something that people readily identify as the opposite of good. It's evil, it's bad. But as I listen to you talk and the more I think about this, I think you're right that you can't really put your finger on evil, that it isn't a thing. There is no magical force. There has to be something else that explains it.

And this has been an interesting discussion exploring that explanation. I've been speaking with Simon Baron Cohen. He is a professor of developmental psychopathology and director of the Autism Research center at the University of Cambridge. He's the author of several books, including the Science of Evil on Empathy and the origins of Cruelty. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Thank you, Simon. Appreciate the conversation. Great. I enjoyed it. Thanks again, Mike.

Simon Baron Cohen
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Mike Carruthers
I'm willing to bet that you know how to ride a bicycle for many of us. For me, certainly as a kid, my bike was my ticket to freedom. I could go places on my own, meet up with people, do stuff and think about it all over the world every day, people ride bikes for fun, to get to work, to run errands. I mean, the bicycle has become a very important player worldwide. So how did that happen?

I mean, there are twice as many bikes as there are cars in the world. What is it that makes the bicycle so special? Well, someone who knows a lot about this is Jody Rosen. He is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and author of the book two wheels. Good the history and mystery of the bicycle.

Hi, Jody. Welcome. Hi, Mike. Great to be here. So when did the bicycle first show up?

What was the first bike? You know, there were many, many attempts over the centuries, even the millennia, to create something like a bicycle. But it was only strangely, in the second decade of the 19th century, in 1817, that a german minor nobleman named Carl von Dreis invented the first bicycle, or really proto bicycle, because it was a vehicle that had two wheels lined up in a straight line bicycle does it? It definitely is recognizably a bicycle, but it doesn't. It didn't have pedals or a chain drive.

Jody Rosen
He called it. Karl von Dreis called it a laufmaschine, that's the german word, which translates roughly to running machine, because it was a vehicle you propelled. You kind of straddled it and moved your feet along the ground, pushed it along, like the balance bikes, the push bikes that you see children riding these days to learn how to bounce their bodies on the bike. So at what point did we get something that is more like the modern bicycle? It was only in the mid 1880s that we got what was then called the safety bike.

Safety bike or safety bicycle, which was so called because it wasn't as dangerous as these earlier bikes. And that's the modern bicycle, which has a chain drive that loops back to the rear wheel, has two wheels of equal size, and gives you a nice, smooth ride. So when I think of the early days of the bicycle, I think of those bicycles that had that really huge wheel in the front and the little thing in the back, and if you had to balance on it and if you fell, you'd probably kill yourself. So what was that all about? What was the deal with the big, huge front wheel?

Yeah, because it was a direct drive bike. There was no gearing system on the bike. So the reason you have a big front wheel is so that you can travel a further distance with each rotation. That is like, if you had a tiny wheel at the front, you'd have to push the pedal around, the pedals around many, many, many times to even, you know, go ten yards. When you're riding the high wheel with a big front wheel, one rotation of the wheel would shoot you along the ground a slightly longer distance.

When we got the safety bicycle, the modern bicycle, which had this chain drive that looped back to the rear wheel, that created a gearing effect so that you could, you know, go further distances and you could have wheels of equal size instead of that big front wheel. One thing I'll add about the big front wheel is it was extremely dangerous bike to ride. It was very hard to mount. You know, you had to sit very high on the bike. And people were prone to taking headers, as they called it back then, to flying over the front of the handlebars and knocking their heads on the ground.

So it was an important innovation to create a different model of bike that was safer to ride. What is it, do you think, about the bicycle that, I mean, I don't know if there's any statistics on this, but I don't know anybody that can't ride a bicycle. It's pretty universal. There's that expression. It's like learning to ride a bike.

Once you learn to ride a bike, your brain works in a way that you instantly assimilate the skill. It's actually pretty easy to learn to balance your body on the bike and turn the pedals and move along. It's a very well engineered machine, and it's a very democratizing machine. You know, it's. A bicycle can bear ten times its own weight.

So if you're a very big person, you can ride a bike. You can even ride a bike if you're a bear. Remember, in the. In the old circuses, they would have. They would have animals that rode bicycles as a kind of a stunt.

So there were. There were bears that rode bicycles. But. But it's also a machine that a child can operate, that, crucially, old people can operate. And the bicycle is the most widely used vehicle on earth.

The rough estimate is that there are 2 billion bicycles on the planet. There are 1 billion cars. So in many ways, even though our cities and our towns and our landscapes are dominated by infrastructure for cars, it is a bicycle planet that we live on because that's the way, in so many places, that's the way the primary means of travel. When the bicycle became something that people were aware of and people started to ride, was it a big deal at the time, or was it like, yeah, a couple of people riding it here, a couple people. And it just kind of grew slowly?

Mike Carruthers
Or was it, like, a big deal? It was a huge deal. The bicycle was hailed as the greatest invention of the 19th century. And if we think about the various other technologies that were developed in the. In the 19th century, that's saying something.

Jody Rosen
After all, this is the century that gave us this, the steam locomotive and, you know, the. The phonograph and the movie camera. But at the time, the bicycle was. Was. Was really viewed as a revolutionary device, and it was also viewed as, by many people as a threat, because it was changing the social order very rapidly.

Suddenly, all kinds of people who didn't have a means of travel, people who were both rich and poor, could get on a bike and zip around. There was a great hue and cry from many quarters about how the bicycle was ruining the morality, it was leading women astray, how people weren't attending church anymore because they were riding bicycles. Whole industries who were thought were going to go out of business, no one was going to patronize bars anymore, because, after all, they were too busy off riding the bicycle. And why did they want to go have a beer when they could just drink a soda pop and go riding through the countryside? So it was a huge deal, and it was thought at the time that the bicycle would kind of be with us and be the primary means of getting around for decades, centuries.

But, of course, very quickly after the invention of the bike, we have the rise of the automotive era, Ford's model T. And the kind of fate of the bicycle was transformed. But before the bicycle took a backseat to the automobile, what did it transform? How did it change the world? Well, one of the things it altered was, I can't overstate what a big deal it was that suddenly women had a means of getting around on their own, unchaperoned.

It changed the way women dressed. Before this period, women typically wore not only dresses, but in the proper victorian style. We're wearing these huge whalebone corsets, and those things were very hard to move in. And, of course, it was impossible to mount a bicycle while if you're wearing a giant corset. Well, so women took to wearing different types of clothing, including these kind of big pantaloons, which allowed them to ride the bike.

And this, this modern dress, what was called dress reform was a cornerstone of the feminist movement at that time. So the bicycle was definitely viewed as a transformative device and, as I say, a threat to the social order. Susan B. Anthony, the great feminist activist, said that the bicycle had done more for the emancipation of women than anything else in history. So I imagine that back in the day before, cars, bicycles were a great means of transportation for adults.

Mike Carruthers
But when the car came along, it would seem that, well, you know, why ride a bike when you can drive a car? And I know, certainly in the US especially, that bicycles were more something kids rode than adults, at least when I was growing up. So the bike was marginalized in various ways and kind of reframed as a toy. This was a deliberate strategy by the bicycle companies. They were like, let's market the bike as a plaything for children, and moreover, let's market it as kind of like a starter car.

Jody Rosen
So if you see the design of bikes, for instance, from the 1940s and fifties, bicycles in the US were built with these great big gas tank type things in the frames. The idea being that a child riding the bike was kind of in training to eventually be a motorist. And when they got older, they would discard the bike and take to the road in a. In a vehicle that had an internal combustion engine and ran on gasoline. This process didn't take place in the same way in Europe, and cities there were older, they had better design to accommodate bicycles.

And these cities in England and Europe had city cultures that were kind of perfect for bicycles, because you could live in a neighborhood where all the shops were right there. It was actually quick and convenient to get around, the way to get around and do your errands, even though bicycles. And automobiles are clearly very different, but they also seem related. You know, they share the road, they have wheels. How else are they related?

Mike Carruthers
Did anything from the bicycle end up in the car? Did bicycles help to develop the car? That kind of thing? Some of the parts that were first developed for bicycles, ball bearings, brake pads, became cornerstones of car manufacturing and things like dealer networks, assembly lines, planned obsolescence. Those were first developed by bicycle manufacturing moguls in the late 19th century, many of whom transitioned to the manufacturing of cars after the success of Ford's Model T.

Jody Rosen
So the relationship between cars and automobiles is very, very close indeed. In fact, the roads themselves in the United States, the fact that so much of the country got paved over in such a short period of time, is the result of the work of bicycle activists, something called the good roads movement. A huge and very consequential political crusade in the late 19th century, which was led initially by bicycle activists. So the relationship between bikes, motorcycles, cars, is actually more like the relationship of close cousins than it is like archenemies. If you know your history, I'm going.

Mike Carruthers
To guess that while Covid was bad for a lot of businesses, it probably was pretty good for the bicycle business. Yes, the pandemic, when we were all in lockdown and suddenly the streets were cleared of cars, was a big moment for bicycle revival. There were record numbers of bike sales in the United States, record numbers of new cyclists taking to the streets to use the bicycle, to commute to and from work because they were worried about social distancing, didn't want to be on public transportation. The bicycle suddenly had a different kind of appeal. So what I'd say is the biggest changes in the world that bicycles are making are quite possibly happening now and are still to come.

Jody Rosen
We may be entering a kind of a new golden age of the bicycle, and that's certainly what a lot of the urban planners and bicycle advocates think and are hoping for. Well, throughout its rather long history, the bicycle never has really fallen out of favor. I mean, people have been riding, either out of necessity or pleasure, been riding bicycles. And I've always thought it's because of a couple of things. One, that they're relatively simple, that, you know, a bike is a bike.

Mike Carruthers
The parts are. There aren't that many parts, and you can see them. They're all right there. It's not hard to figure them out if you really wanted to. And bikes are relatively inexpensive compared to a car, and they can get you from here to there pretty quick.

Jody Rosen
But also, I think the other reason they've stuck around is it's really fun to ride a bike. The feeling you get riding a bike is a special feeling, to feel the wind rushing over your body, to kind of have such control over the machine yourself, to be able to, like, move slow and fast. The pace that you move on a bike is kind of the ideal pace to sort of take in the world, to view the panorama around you, to interact with the environment, the elements. So I think that's part of the eternal appeal of the bicycle, too. They're really fun to ride.

You know that you were speaking earlier about that moment when you're a child and you feel that sense of liberation when suddenly you're pedaling the bike under your own power, and maybe your dad or mom who's behind you holding, steadying the bike isn't there anymore. An adult can reconnect with that feeling every time he or she rides the bike. You know, you kind of want to say we. So that's also part of the appeal. It just feels real good to ride a bike.

Mike Carruthers
So here is something that I've noticed that is reflective, I assume, of the popularity of riding bikes. When I was a kid, people or we didn't so much as go ride bikes. To ride bikes, it was to go to the store or to go to somebody's house or something. But today, around where I live, on the weekends, there's just packs of people with their helmets and spandex suits and riding bikes in groups just to ride bikes. It's the reason for riding.

It isn't just a means of getting from here to there. It was really in the 1970s, when there was an enormous bicycle boom. In 1970, 219 73, and 1974, for a variety of reasons, including the OPEC oil crisis, Americans took to the bike in huge numbers. I was saying in 1970, 319 70, 219 73, and 1974, the bicycle actually outsold cars in this country. That hasn't happened since.

Jody Rosen
But part of the big impetus for that bicycle boom was new ideas about physical fitness, and I think those have really stuck around. You know, people ride bikes because it's a great way to keep your body in shape, and it's a way to keep your body in shape even when you're maybe too old to do things like play a pickup basketball game. Maybe jogging isn't your thing. So there's a lot of fitness cyclists, of course, who are out on the roads. Of course.

Another thing we saw in the pandemic, and we've seen for the past many decades, is a boom in stationary bikes. People ride bikes without going anywhere at all on these bikes that don't move an inch just because it feels good to turn the pedals. And it's a great way to keep yourself physically fit. You talked earlier about the connection and the relationship between the bicycle and the car. But you also say there's a connection between bicycles and airplanes, flying machines.

Mike Carruthers
So explain that. From the very beginning, bicycles were kind of framed by people, framed as maybe a bad pun. Let me say it a different way. People thought of bikes as kind of flying machines. This was because of the.

Jody Rosen
Again, that feeling of freedom you have when you're riding the bike. Even that very first bike, which didn't have pedals, the bike that was invented in 1817 in Germany. People compared that bike to Pegasus, the winged stallion of greek mythology. This was an idea that was really stuck around in culture and popular culture through the decades and across the two centuries of the bike's existence. For instance, in the late 19th century, there are lots of advertisements that depicted bikes in outer space, kind of, you know, flying up to the moon and zooming around the stars.

Think of the very famous scene in Steven Spielberg's et, where Eliot, with et in the handlebar basket, go for this incredible bike ride through the sky, and they're silhouetted against the moon. It's a very dreamy idea, but the fact is, it's not, as it turns out, just a dream, because there was this very important connection between the invention of the bicycle and the invention of the airplane. The Wright brothers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, were, in fact, bicycle mechanics and bike manufacturers. And during the period where they were sort of experimenting, trying to figure out how to invent an airplane, they used parts out of their bike shops to sort of do experiments. They hitched up bicycle wheels in strange configurations to learn about how the phenomena of lift and drag worked and what they realized, kind of the crucial breakthroughs they made in their ideas about how a plane could fly through the sky, what a pilot could do to operate a plane, come from the ideas of balance that they learned from bicycles.

They were bicycle people, and they realized in the same way that a cyclist could, could balance on his bike and keep it moving forward. Well, maybe a pilot could do the same. So the Wright flyer, which, you know, finally touched off above the ground in the, in the early 20th century, was a device that they built using tools straight out of their bike shop. So there's this real kind of direct connection between the first airplane and the bicycle. And as I say, there's also this more nebulous or almost sensual connection between bikes and flying.

If you think about the bicycle tire, it's filled with air. You're really riding on air when you turn the pedals and you zoom across the land. So in that sense, when people say, oh, I feel like I'm flying, when they're riding their bike. Yeah, maybe in a sense they are. Well, it's a great story, the story of the bicycle and a story that, you know, in many ways, we're all part of.

Mike Carruthers
We're all participants in the history of the bicycle. Jody Rosen has been my guest. His book is called two Wheels, the history and mystery of the bicycle, and you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Jody. Thanks, Mike.

Jody Rosen
I really appreciate it.

Mike Carruthers
I grew up in the northeast, in Connecticut mostly. And one of the things I always look forward to in the summer on those hot summer nights was fireflies, or sometimes we called them lightning bugs. But did you know that there arent as many fireflies around as there used to be? The firefly population is shrinking worldwide, and one of the reasons fireflies are fading is due to what scientists call light pollution. Increased artificial illumination in what used to be rural areas are throwing off fireflies.

It interrupts their ability to signal each other for mating, which means fewer baby fireflies for next year's light show. Even natural light sources inhibit them. Fireflies usually take the night off if there's a full moon, and that is something you should know. The next time you and your friends are sitting around talking about podcasts and someone asks what you listen to, I hope you'll tell them something you should know and that you'll suggest they do the same. I'm Mike Ker brothers.

Thanks for listening today to something you should know.