Transcript of The Tech of Tomorrow That Never Arrived & The Remarkable History of Teeth - SYSK Choice

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Today on Something You Should Know, an almost effortless way to cut your grocery bill down. Then, future technologies that never quite seem to arrive, like flying cars. Why don't we have flying cars?

Oh, we do. So the first one that was certified for road and for flight was certified in 1956.

No!

So if you wanted a flying car, you could have bought one ages ago. You just probably didn't want this car.

Then, paying down your debt can do wonders for your health. And the amazing world of teeth— why you have them and why we judge other people by how good their teeth look.

And a lot of that, I think, started in the 1920s when films went from silent films to talkies. And then all of a sudden there were these close-ups, and, and it was clear pretty quickly that some people had really lousy teeth.

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Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Oh, and we have a lot to get to today, everything from technology to your teeth. But we're going to start today at the grocery store with a suggestion that is very likely going to save you money. So first of all, you know that grocery stores are designed to get you to spend money. The longer you stay in the store, the more likely you are to buy stuff. And it comes as no surprise that if you go to the grocery store hungry, you are much more likely to buy more stuff. In fact, one study confirmed that even people who are on a very tight budget will spend more money when they go to the store with an appetite. But get this, by using the self-checkout lane, you will reduce your impulse purchases drastically. In a survey, women bought 32% fewer impulse items and men bought 16% fewer. Because apparently when you know that you have to scan all these items, you become much more selective in what you buy and you spend less money. And that is something you should know. Ever since I remember watching The Jetsons, I have thought, I can't wait for flying cars.

I mean, George Jetson had one that seemed to work pretty well. In Back to the Future, they were predicting flying cars by the year 2015. Well, that didn't seem to work out. It seems that flying cars and other technology that you kind of think we should have had by now— say, robots that really do things and driverless cars— where are they? It makes you wonder what other technologies have we been promised that never quite seem to get here. Well, here to discuss this and the rather interesting path that new technologies take is Nicole Kobe. She is a London-based technology and science journalist who's written for several publications. Her byline appears in Wired, where she is a contributing editor, and she is author of a book called The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here. Hi, Nicole. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, Mike. Thanks so much for having me.

So flying cars, I mean, that's the example everybody uses as a technology that seems like it should be here, but it's not here. And I guess it's such a good example because we have cars, we know how to do that. We know how to fly. We've got planes and helicopters and drones and things like that. So we know how to fly. We have cars. Why can't we put them together and have a flying car?

So a lot of these ideas, they do work. They work according to physics, or they work in a lab. But then when you try to bring them into the real world and, and have them interact with people, or, you know, just everything else that we have to interact with, they start to fall apart a little bit, or they start to— you start to see the weaknesses in them. So a lot of these technologies we, we do have, and we have had for decades. They just don't work quite the way we expected them to in the lab.

Wait, we do have flying cars?

Oh, we do. So the first one, the first one that was certified by the precursor to FAA for road and for flight was certified in 1956.

No.

So if you wanted a flying car, you could have bought one ages ago.

1956?

Yeah. You just probably didn't want this car.

Oh, yeah. And why is that?

Well, when they were, you know, a lot of this happened after kind of after the war, and you had a lot of people coming back as pilots or with the ability to to fly and with engineering skills and this kind of renewed, I don't know, like optimism for what you might be able to do in the future. And people started building these cars with the ability to fly. So they could go, they couldn't take off from your front, you know, your front road, but they could take off from an airport. So the idea was that you would drive it to the airport and then it would take off there. And that's similar to the flying cars that we're kind of hearing about in headlines and stuff now. But that meant that they weren't very good as cars and they weren't very good as planes. They were sort of, you know, slow to drive and, you know, heavy and not very much fun to drive as cars. And then when you got them in the air, they were equally slow and clunky as planes. And they cost a ton of money. So this first one that was certified in 1956 was Molten Taylor's Aerocar.

And He believed that he could sell hundreds of the thing but only managed to actually build 6, and they cost $15,000 at the time, which was obviously a lot of money for then. And at that price, you could have bought a new plane, you know, that was just yours and you kept it parked at the airport, and you could have bought a new car and had well over $10,000 left. So why wouldn't you just do that? Right.

Well, I remember too Years ago, I, I have this vision of seeing it in a magazine or something, that there was a, there was a car that you could drive into the water too, but that generally it looked like it was a really lousy car and a really lousy boat. So it's kind of the same idea, like you can't serve 2 masters.

Exactly. I mean, why not just drive to the lake and then have a beautiful boat waiting for you?

They should have called you. Yeah, it seems pretty logical that way. So the idea of— let's, let's get specific now and talk about the things that we hear about. And we hear about, you know, the driverless car. And, and I've always heard that, you know, driverless cars are fine if everybody was in one, but driverless cars operating on the same road with driven cars by people will never work.

Yeah, that's a big problem because we need a way for the cars to, to kind of communicate to each other. And that's not necessary. Like, we we could have driverless cars on the same roads where there are cars driven by people. And we see that in San Francisco now where Google's Waymo is testing them. And that has worked okay. There's not major problems with that. But the real benefits from driverless cars is when they can all talk to each other and you don't need to have traffic lights and they can kind of all organize themselves and not be running into each other or having to figure out what that person thinks. Because that's the real challenge of driving is figuring out what's going on in that other person's head. So we do, we do have driverless cars that work, and we do have driverless cars that can work on the road with other cars, you know, driven by humans, but it's in really limited places and it's in really limited circumstances. We've made a good start, we're just not there yet.

But isn't that how all this stuff works, that you make a start and it's kind of awkward and clunky and it doesn't work very well, but then you fix that a little bit and you build on that and then you build on what you fixed and eventually, ta-da!

Yeah, and I do think that will happen with driverless cars. I do think they're going to exist at some point in the future. It's just the industry has told us that they would be here by now. And depending on how you define it, you know, they, they are driving around San Francisco. They do exist. It's just, you know, we're not in San Francisco. So if you're willing to wait 100 years for these things, then, then you're fine. The question is, how long is it going to take and what technology is it going to use? And are they going to operate the way that companies like Waymo and Cruise, who are building them now, think they're going to operate? Because we have been building driverless cars for, for several decades at this point, and we have used all different sorts of technologies. We thought that radio would work, that we'd just be able to control them with radio. We thought embedding kind of, you know, cables in the road that they could follow using, you know, like magnetic sensors would work. And it did work. And then kind of in the '90s, there's a researcher in Germany who managed to make it work with computer, like with computer vision, just looking at the lines on the road, which is, you know, how, you know, lane safety technology works now anyway.

So now we're trying it with AI and it's definitely working better. These cars are much more capable than a radio-controlled car. But what's going to happen next? You know, you know, 10, 20, 30 years in the future, what technology is going to step in and make what we're working on now look a little bit silly? And I think that's kind of the interesting thing to look forward to is, is what's going to make driverless cars possible? Because I'm not sure that what we have now is going to do it.

So in my car, I have driver assist in the sense that, you know, it will try to keep you in the lane. It will put the brakes on if you're about to hit a kid on a tricycle. Are those little steps on the way? Because even though it'll keep me in the lane, it says very clearly in the manual, don't take your hands off the wheel and don't take your eyes off the road. Well, then what's the point? I mean, why have it if you can't use it?

Yeah, so what that is is automation. And we have been adding automation to cars for a very long time. Early cars didn't— have, you know, electric windows and all of these fun things that we just kind of take advantage of and believe have always been here. They were really rudimentary, rudimentary things. And in, you know, the past 100 years, we've added all this amazing technology very slowly. And the technology that you're talking about, you know, lane watching and, and automatic braking actually comes from, you know, early driverless efforts, you know, the kind of stuff that people were looking at in the '80s and '90s and early 2000s. And that's what I think should happen with the driverless technology we're working on now, is if we put it into the cars that we have now in like little steps, we can make it useful for safety now, and we can start saving lives with it now instead of waiting, you know, 10, 20 years for this to maybe work or maybe not work. The trick is, as you said, you need to keep your hands on the wheel. You need to keep looking because these, you know, I don't know if you've ever been using, you know, lane control technology.

And it starts to pull you the wrong way. And you're like, wait a second, no, you're wrong. I've got to keep my hands on the wheel and pull it back into the lane, right?

Right, yeah.

So they're useful systems, but they're not as useful as having a driver, a human driver in the car. And the more that we can add automation and these kind of these extra tools, hopefully we can build safer cars, you know, now instead of having to wait for a company to deliver a fully driverless one. But there's a whole lot of other safety stuff we could do around road design and speeds and driver training. That would also make our roads much safer. So I don't think this is just a technology, you know, just a question to be answered by technology.

We're talking about technology and why some of those technologies we've been hoping for aren't here yet. My guest is Nicole Kobe. She's author of the book The Long History of the Future: Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here.

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So Nicole, one of the technologies that you say isn't really here yet is AI, but I see AI everywhere. People are talking about it all the time. So what are you talking about?

Artificial intelligence is here. We have had all sorts of different types of and styles of artificial intelligence since, you know, the 1950s when they first started really working on this stuff in earnest. But what I'm talking about is this idea of artificial general intelligence or, you know, superintelligence. The things that, you know, when you hear a CEO of a tech company say, this is what we're worried about, that AI is going to take over the world. They're not talking about, you know, the AI that makes photos on your smartphone look a little bit better. Nobody is scared about that. What they're scared about is a system that starts thinking for itself and starts taking actions for itself. And maybe one day that will exist. I'm not sure. Personally, I don't think it's going to happen, you know, in the immediate future. But people have, you know, people, very smart, smart people who have been building AI for years have believed that it is imminent. for the entirety of AI. So from the very first conference about AI, they believed, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna build a smart system that is gonna be smarter than a human.

They believed they could just put it together over a summer, and they obviously weren't correct with that.

The AI that I, that I think of is more like, as you said, like the photo technology or ChatGPT or something. And, and that seems very benign. It doesn't— and, and I've never understood, like, how could a machine think for itself, and what would be its motives? How would it—

would—

how do, how do How would it choose to be good or evil? I mean, it just seems so impossible to me.

The answer is we don't really know. There's a lot of thought experiments around this one, and there's one that's called the paperclip maximizer problem, which I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have heard of. And it's just this idea of, uh, if we told an AI system, like an intelligent, super intelligent artificial, um, system to produce as many paperclips as it could, and not give it any guardrails about how it was allowed to behave or the damage it could do, it could end up just wiping out all human life. Well, all, all everything on the planet just to make paperclips. And the idea is trying to think through, you know, what rules do we need to give these systems so that they don't decide that getting rid of all human life in order to make a pile of paperclips is the most efficient way to, to solve their problems. But we don't really, we don't really know how these systems are going to work. We don't really know how some of the systems that we're using today work. We just know that they come out, we give them an input and they come out with an answer.

We don't know what they're, you know, quote unquote thinking because they don't think like us. So there's a lot of work that needs to be done to kind of understand all of this. And there is nothing wrong with being concerned about the idea of a superintelligence. It's just the people who are saying they're the most concerned about it are the people who are building it. So if they're so scared about it, why are they building it? And I think that that's a question we kind of need answered. I think the short answer is they want to make sure someone else doesn't build it first.

Well, that's a good answer, actually.

But we'll see. We'll see.

So where are we with robots? I mean, we have robots. We have robotics. We have machines that can do things that they didn't used to be able to do, but we don't have robots like I, you know, Rosie the robot in The Jetsons, you know, robots you can talk to, robots you can tell what to do, maybe. I mean, we have the vacuums that'll vacuum your house for you, but it doesn't, doesn't feel like a robot.

Yeah, I mean, robots is an interesting one because the robot— we have amazing robotics. Like, you know, the idea that you have a robotic vacuum that can just go around your house and do that chore for you is, is amazing. Like, this is the fun bit of living in the future. But we do have this idea of always wanting our robots to look like people and to be shaped like people. And Rosie's kind of a good example of that. You know, why would you want a giant metal person wandering around your house? I mean, I live in London and my flat is very, very tiny. I don't know where a human-sized robot would stay. I don't even have room for my non-robotic vacuum cleaner. So. There's a lot of kind of questions about why we actually want a robot butler. But that idea does not— we are nowhere near being able to really achieve that yet. So when you see sort of the Boston Dynamics videos of dancing humanoid robots, those are heavily programmed. Like, they are not just standing up and dancing because they're able to stand up and dance. It took months of programming to achieve that.

So they're very— they're amazing. You know, feats of engineering, but they're not, you know, intelligent systems that can just go about cleaning our houses while we go to work.

You know, I've thought about this, that you can have a machine do something and the machine is a machine and it does what it does and that's great. But as soon as you make that machine look human, well, then it just changes everything because then now you could have a machine that is your new lover because you've made it look human. And you could buy a doll that is your dream man or dream woman that does things. And I mean, that is so— I don't know, that's just creepy.

Yeah. And we're not there with robots yet. I mean, there are, there are some kind of terrifying examples of that. And there's been some excellent work looking into the idea of, of sex with robots and what that would be like. And personally, that just puts me right off. And there's a lot of AI chatbots and people who are starting to have something approaching a relationship with them. And I do think that's something we have to be really wary of because these aren't, these aren't people and they're not going to react the way that you think they are. And it's tech companies controlling some kind of disturbing things. You know, it starts to get very dystopian when you go down that road.

I know you write about, and I've heard a little bit about this, and it's the concept of a smart And I don't know too much about it, but is a smart city kind of like a smart home, only bigger?

Yes and no. So that's a good framework for thinking about it. You know, if you could control every aspect of your home with technology, that could actually be really beneficial. And, you know, the, the Nest thermostats are a really good example because they have huge benefits for people. The idea that you can just turn on your heating you know, 20 minutes before you get home, come home to a, you know, toasty warm house and not pay huge amounts of heating. You know, that's beneficial financially, it's beneficial environmentally, it's convenient for us, it's all really great. That's not really what smart cities are about, but it could be. So this idea of smart cities, they're kind of, it's almost like a marketing term that got invented by IT companies because they started to see urban planning units and, you know, mayoral offices as targets for their technology. It's a place to sell into. to. So they came up with these systems for, you know, managing everything. The idea that if you could just pull in all of these data points about a city, you could manage the entire city like it was a computer. But the problem is cities aren't computers and people do not behave the way that data points might suggest that they do.

So this idea of a smart city where you can kind of do this top-down management hasn't really worked, but there are some really smart ideas that have come out of it. So you have, in Barcelona, they have bins that alert the central management office when they need to be emptied. And just knowing when your bins need emptying means you don't have to just send people out at a random time. And it means that if you know bins are going to overflow, you can just get people to empty them before you start to have a problem. Those are kind of small little ideas that can be very, very helpful the same way that a Nest thermostat could. But if you try to control an entire city that way without thinking about the people who live in it, it doesn't really work.

Can you mention a couple of technologies that you're really impressed with? Maybe technologies that are already here, but people don't experience them a lot or very close to being here that are really cool?

I picked up an Amazon package from a locker outside of my house. And for that to work, You know, it had— it's, it's a just a locker outside in the elements, and it has, you know, all of these smart technologies, sensors and Bluetooth and all of this to be able to connect to my phone to know that it's me that is picking up a specific item. And, you know, these kinds of lockers are just like everywhere in London, and the amount of technology it takes for something as silly as that to work is just huge. And we just become accustomed to it so, so easily. So, you know, everything from like every single time that you go into a cafe and your phone just picks up the Wi-Fi and starts working. You know, like you say, you know, your car has lane, you know, keeps, can keep you in the lane. Like, um, the Toyota car that we have, it can park itself. You know, like I'm talking about how we don't have driverless cars, but I have a car that can park itself. You know, it's very easy to look at, oh, we don't have flying cars and be disappointed.

But man, do we have so many exciting things that make our lives so much easier. You know, from bins to amazing, you know, instant deliveries and all of this kind of stuff. So I don't want people to ever feel pessimistic. Like, I think we live at amazing times and that we have amazing benefits and privileges from having all of these, these technologies now. I just think we can be a little bit more realistic about some of the things that we don't have yet. And it just, it's fine. We'll get there in the end, or we won't, because some of these technologies are a bit silly. Um, but we do have amazing things, uh, around us now that it's so easy to forget that they're there.

Well, this has been really fun to look at these different technologies and why they either don't show up or why they show up in a different way or why they may never show up. I really like this. I've been talking with Nicole Kobe. She is a technology and science journalist, and she's author of the book The Long History of the Future. Why Tomorrow's Technology Still Isn't Here. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you for being here, Nicole. Imagine life without teeth. Your teeth are pretty important. You couldn't eat much without them. Yet it seems compared to other animals, our teeth, human teeth, are pretty high maintenance. Brushing, flossing, trips to the dentist. Other animals don't do that. In fact, some animals don't even have teeth. Birds, frogs, no teeth. Your teeth are pretty amazing, and here to explain why that is so is Bill Schutt. He is a vertebrate zoologist and author of 6 nonfiction books. His research has been featured in the New York Times, Newsday, The Economist, and Discover.

Hello, Bill.

And he is author of a book called Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth from Hagfish to Humans. Hi, Bill. Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Really nice to be here, Mike.

So what are teeth exactly?

What are teeth? Well, they're bony structures primarily composed of a substance called dentin, and they are covered with the hardest substance known to vertebrates, and that's enamel.

So why is it that we see some animals have teeth? We have teeth. A lot of animals have teeth, but birds don't have teeth. A lot of animals don't have teeth, it seems. So why is that?

Yeah. When you look at the vertebrates, the backboned animals, they all had teeth. And the ancestors of birds had teeth. The ancestors of toothless creatures like frogs and toads, they all had teeth, but they lost them For various reasons. Much of it has to do with diet. If you look at baleen whales, like a blue whale, largest mammal, largest creature on the planet, they don't have teeth. They've got these cartilaginous filters, and these evolved to filter out small prey, you know, plankton, things that— small crustaceans. So they didn't really need them, and they're expensive to maintain. So they were lost in all sorts of different species. Toads, for example, frogs, anteaters, and mainly the same reason there, because of the evolution of ants and termites. If you're feeding on ants and termites, you don't need teeth. You need a sticky tongue.

So one thing I've always wondered is, so humans have teeth and, you know, we are pretty good, I guess, at Taking care of them, but they tend to need a lot of care. We brush them, we go to the dentist, he pulls them out, he fills them up with stuff and gets rid of cavities. But all these other animals don't have dentists for the most part. So how is it that ours are so high maintenance in comparison? Or yeah, so that, that's the question.

I think it's a great question. And, and most of it goes back to diet. That we were not— we— our teeth did not evolve to deal with, uh, with processed sugar. And the fact that early on in the 17th century, when, when, when processed sugar became popular with, with folks other than really rich people, we had really bad dental hygiene. And, and, and the plaque that would build up, the sort of film that, that builds up on your teeth, was a perfect barrier for for the bacteria that live in our mouths to live and grow behind. And what they— these creatures do is they take the sugar that, that, that we have in our mouths and they process it. They break it down. They release ATP for their own benefit, but they release acid. And that acid just tears up the enamel and, and the bony parts of the tooth. So that's something that, that creatures in the wild don't really run into. And like I said, some of them are able to, if they lose their teeth, they were able to, to replace them, which is not the case with humans.

Is there such a thing as dental hygiene in other animals? Do other animals like actually take care of their teeth or they just live their lives and hope their teeth stick around?

Well, if you look at rodents, they've got these, these chisels. And so the tips of their teeth are beveled and they keep them sharp. And the reason that, that the reason that they look like that is because the outer surface, the surface that's closest to the gums on these teeth in the front of the mouth, like the incisors, are covered by enamel, really hard substance. The inner portion of the tooth, the sort of tongue side portion of the tooth, is not. So that wears— that inner portion wears down quicker than the enamel-covered portion. And if you're gnawing on wood, for example, that will keep that chisel sharp. So yeah, they do maintain their teeth.

So we humans have the teeth we have, and we can eat meat and we can eat plants and, and all that. So makes me wonder, when you look at the teeth of other animals, do they eat what they eat because of the teeth they have? Or do they have the teeth they have because of what they eat?

Well, you've got to understand that So let's take, for example, teeth in horses. They're really long and they grind down really slowly over time because of the fact that these are animals that are specialists, and they specialize in a type of food, grass, that not many other animals eat because it's that tough, because it's got silica in it, and that just tears up enamel. And if you look back in the fossil record, if you look back 50 million years ago, the ancestors of horses did not have long teeth that were used to process grass. They had short little teeth that were that that were more typical of an animal that would live in the forest and eat leafy greens. As the environments changed, some of these creatures, because of mutations, because of genetic variation, had longer teeth, and these are the ones that survived when. The forest disappeared and the grasslands started to take over. And so they passed those traits on to the next generation and the next generation.

But like humans, you know, we eat meat and we eat, we eat all kinds of things. And, you know, I've heard people talk about, well, whether we're carnivores or not because we have teeth that can chew meat. Well, do we have teeth that can chew meat because we want to eat meat so we Over evolution, we developed those teeth, or we had those teeth and that's why we eat meat. And I, I've never really gotten a good answer to that.

Well, we are, we're omnivores. So humans, pigs, we're, we're the opposite of a specialist. We can eat plant matter, we can eat meat because our teeth are adapted for whatever type of food happens to be there. Omnivores got a survival advantage by, by being able to take advantage of whatever types of nutrition were around.

That's what happened to Something humans do, at least in some cultures, in this culture, we make judgments about people based on what their teeth look like. You know, if they look like they have good teeth, we, you know, that's more highly regarded than someone whose teeth don't look very good. So, and I wonder, does that happen with other species? Do other species use teeth as a guide to like, I like this other animal or I don't, or what? Yeah, I think that's a good question.

Well, there are examples in the animal kingdom where a large set of tusks, for example, might mean that this is a more formidable individual and one that you might want to mate with. But as far as the idea of you don't have a good place in society because you have lousy teeth, that's a human trait. And a lot of that, I think, started In the 1920s, when films went from silent films to talkies, and then all of a sudden there were these close-ups, and people— it was clear pretty quickly that some people had really lousy teeth. And so you had people like Charles Pincus, who was called the dentist to the stars, would build veneers and use them in actors and actresses who had problems. Shirley Temple's teeth fell out when she was a kid, which was completely normal, but they would've lost $10,000 a day if they were not— if they had to stop filming because she had no teeth. So they built veneers to make her teeth look good. Same thing with Judy Garland, had a big space between her upper— her 2 upper incisors, and they filled it with these veneers. And when The Wizard of Oz came out, you saw this spectacular smile, and people fell in love with that.

And I think that that was really the—

The beginning.

The birth of the great American smile was people looking at Judy Garland's shiny, spectacular teeth, and they wanted to look like that. So people who couldn't get their teeth to look spectacular were looked down upon.

And so the whole idea of dental care, dental hygiene, I mean, you know, supposedly George Washington had wooden teeth, but like, when did people start saying, you know, let's do something about your teeth? Rather than just, you know, get on with life and ignore them? I mean, when did that become a thing?

Well, first of all, George Washington didn't have wooden teeth, which is something that really interested me initially, and that got me working on the whole idea of George Washington, who had one, a single tooth, when he became president in 1789. But when you look back—

Wait, what? He only had one tooth when he became president?

Yeah, he, he had some real problems with, with his teeth. And, and like I mentioned before, a lot of this started in, in, in folks when, when, when processed sugar became more popular in the, in the 18th century and 17th century. And, but, but we don't think that Washington's problems were sugar-related. We think that it was either genetic or the fact that he was, at an earlier time had taken medicine that had mercury in it and that loosened up his teeth and they started to fall out. But he had 4 sets, at least 4 sets of dentures over the course of his adult life and throughout the presidency. And they were pretty much useless for eating because they were these big, clunky, painful, lead-based contraptions. There were teeth that were in these dentures that were made of ivory from elephants, from hippos. There were also horse teeth that had been fashioned into— to fit into these dentures, or teeth from cows. But there were also human teeth. And that led to this controversy that I was able to jump into because a question arose about where he got those teeth from.

And some people claimed that it So when people finally figured out that, you know, maybe we need to do something to take care of our teeth, to preserve them, to make them last longer, or, you know, have mintier breath or whatever it is, whatever dental hygiene looked like when it first started, what did it look like?

Well, it was primitive. They used to use picks. They used to use all sorts of weird stuff to rinse their mouths with. Urine was used. This is—

Ooh.

Yeah, and they used abrasive pastes that would wear teeth down. So tooth care was pretty awful, and that carried on right into the early part of the 20th century. You know, it wasn't until the 1950s when fluoride— when we got fluoride in the drinking water across most of the United States and in places like toothpaste, that problems started to decline with regard to what we did with our teeth. And the whole dentist industry changed from, you know, if somebody came into a dentist's office and looked at the dentist wrong, they would pull all their teeth out because they figured they're preventing problems down the road. If they can afford dentures, fine. If not, then they're going to be toothless. But in the 1950s, right around in there, it started to— dentistry took on a more, instead of restoration, instead of just jumping in there and pulling teeth out, but preserving the teeth that were there.

Do other animals, or maybe even early humans— I mean, we think of teeth as being something that we use to eat, but are teeth ever used for anything else?

Oh, sure. Teeth are used for— think of them as tools. So these are teeth, these are structures that are used for defense. They are used to fight. They're used to build. For example, beavers use their teeth to cut down trees to make dams. Elephants clear out trees. They wind up building watering holes with their teeth because of the fact that they're clearing out areas and forming these depressions where that water gathers in. But yeah, teeth are used for far more than just eating.

In the research that you've done, what are some things that you found out that were just really fascinating, blew your mind, like, I never knew this about teeth?

I guess one of the things that really blew me away was just how diverse teeth are, how different they are, how you could have, you know, in venomous creatures, you could have snakes that whose, whose, whose teeth were, were literally hypodermic needles to deliver venom. You have the same thing if you looked at shrews, but They also deliver venom with their teeth, but not in the style of a hypodermic. So what blew me away, there was the fact that narwhal, they're famous for having this singular 10-foot-long tusk, that they're sensory organs. They weren't just used for jostling around with competitors. There are nerves inside these. These tusks that enable narwhals to determine the salinity changes in water, which— and that's vital if you're trying to locate an area, a break in the ice where you can surface because the water there has a different salinity than the normal ocean water. So the list just went on and on and on as far as that went. And I was really struck by the whole story of George Washington. I was fascinated by that once I got into it. Because of the controversy that, that was ongoing when I decided to write a book about teeth.

There were these sensationalized headlines that, that Washington's dentures contained the teeth of, of enslaved people, and I went in there to figure out if that was so.

And was it?

There's absolutely no evidence that George Washington had his enslaved people provide teeth for his dentures. Now, with that said, the caveat there would be I also found no indication that if there were the teeth of enslaved people in his dentures that he would have had any problem with it because it was done. People had their teeth pulled. They sold them. And that's what the enslaved people on Washington's plantation did to make extra money. If you remember Fantine in Les Misérables, the play, she had her teeth pulled and sold them. And this was popular. It was a way to provide teeth for dentures. And also this pretty insane when you think of it, tooth transplantation that used to be popular back in the 18th and 17th centuries. Just pulling out a tooth and somebody's tooth that you'd had and, and sticking it in someone else's mouth because their tooth fell out. And, and that really, you know, I couldn't figure out how that, how that worked. And, and, and apparently it didn't.

Talk about the link, because I don't, I don't think I've heard this talked about much before. The link between dental health and Alzheimer's disease.

There's a link between the bacteria in your gums and Alzheimer's disease. We think that these bacteria are crossing the blood-brain barrier and they're releasing substances that, that cause a reaction in the brain. And that the result of that may be the formation of these protein plaques that are characteristic of Alzheimer's. That's something that's really at the top of the list of research that's being done, dental mouth-related research.

And is there any sense yet as to what's the difference between somebody who has that and somebody who doesn't have that bacteria?

Yeah. Yeah, great question. The people who don't have Alzheimer's in these tests have a much lower population of these bacteria that are being detected. So you might be able to tie that into dental health. It appears that cognitive function is affected by dental health and that it can decline in people who have poor dental health. And you don't see that in folks who of the same age who, who take care of their teeth or, or have dentures. And that's something that's, that, that's ongoing research. And to me, it's, it's fascinating. So stay tuned.

What about wisdom teeth? Why do we have them? Why are they so much trouble? Why do people have to have them taken out? What is that whole story?

If you look back at, at human ancestors, pre-15,000 years ago, roughly, Our jaws were longer. This made perfect sense that this was a great adaptation for processing rough food, stuff that was not processed, stuff that was not soft, much of it. And then somewhere around 15,000 years ago, as we began to, to process food and, and, and make food softer, our jaws became shorter. And in that genetic blueprint, Unfortunately, the number of teeth stayed the same. So we had a shorter jaw, but we now had the same 3 sets of dentures. So when this 3rd set comes in, somewhere between, I don't know, 18 years of age and 23 or so, it causes problems because there's not enough room, pushes on other teeth, bends them, causes teeth to be misaligned. So this is something that is that, that took place because of— apparently because of human behavior. As there was this trend towards softer processed food, we did not need that extra jaw material, so we got rid of it, uh, through, through mutations. Uh, the muscles, the large muscles that we had got smaller, our jaws got shorter. There's less bone to maintain if you think of it from, from, from that perspective.

But unfortunately, the number of Well, when you think about it, you know, since the time you got your teeth, they have been literally front and center. I mean, you have to take care of them, you have to brush them, you have to go to the dentist, you eat with them. Yeah, I mean, teeth are so essential to every single day of your life. It's interesting to hear the story of teeth and, and how we got to where we are. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting. Bill Schutt has been my guest. He's a vertebrate zoologist and author of the book Bite: An Incisive History of Teeth from Hagfish to Humans. And there is a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks for coming along and talking about this, Bill.

Sure. Thank you very much.

It turns out that being in the hole isn't just bad for your psychological well-being. It can take a serious toll on your health. And the higher the debt, the sicker you get. Researchers found that those with high debt had high blood pressure, which puts you at risk for hypertension and stroke. Those who owe a lot of money are also more prone to depression, stress, and heart attack. So if the high interest rates on debt aren't reason enough, think about your health. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And pay down that debt. And that is something you should know. Since you seem to like this podcast, I would like to appoint you one of our ambassadors to tell other people about it, get them to listen, and help us grow our audience. It's a great way for you to support this podcast and help ensure our success so we can continue publishing episodes. And it, it's very easy to do. Just use the share button on the app that you're using to listen. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.