Why I will NEVER use the Metric System

Summary

The video script humorously explores the United States' resistance to adopting the metric system, contrasting it with the global standard. It delves into the history of measurement, from ancient units like the cubit to the French Revolution's introduction of the metric system. Despite attempts to推行metrication in the US, cultural inertia and practical challenges persist. The script also humorously touches on the confusion between different units within the US and UK systems, highlighting the complexity and occasional absurdity of non-metric measurements.

Takeaways

• 😅 The interviewee humorously guesses there are '3,000-something' feet in a mile, highlighting a common confusion about imperial measurements.
• 🌍 The United States, Liberia, and Myanmar are the only countries that have not fully adopted the metric system, with the US and Myanmar being the primary focus in the script.
• 🏛️ Historically, the US has made attempts to adopt the metric system, but these efforts have been met with resistance and have not fully taken hold in everyday life.
• 👶 Johnny, the video creator, expresses his struggle to adapt to the metric system despite recognizing its rationality and his efforts to teach it to his children.
• 📏 The script humorously points out the arbitrary origins of imperial measurements, such as the foot, inch, yard, and mile, which are based on body parts and farming activities.
• 🔍 The metric system was developed during the French Enlightenment with the aim of creating a universal, precise, and scientific system of measurement.
• 🌐 The metric system is based on the meter, which was originally defined as one ten-millionth of the Earth's quadrant, and it simplifies calculations due to its decimal nature.
• 📉 Despite the metric system's advantages, cultural and political factors have contributed to its slow adoption in the US, including incidents like the loss of the prototype meter stick due to a pirate attack.
• 🚀 The script mentions a significant incident where NASA lost a satellite due to a mix-up between imperial and metric units, costing 125 million dollars.
• 📚 There's an acknowledgment that certain sectors in the US, such as industry, federal government, and pharmaceuticals, have quietly adopted the metric system.

Q & A

How many feet are there in a mile according to the interviewee?

The interviewee estimates there are '3,000-something' feet in a mile.

Why does Johnny decide he will never use the metric system?

Johnny decides he will never use the metric system after realizing the complexity of converting between metric and imperial units, especially when it comes to everyday measurements.

What are the three countries that do not use the metric system?

The three countries that do not use the metric system are the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar.

What historical event is mentioned that relates to the United States' adoption of measurement systems?

The historical event mentioned is the American Revolution, which influenced the US's decision to stick with the imperial system instead of adopting the metric system.

What was the role of the French Revolution in the development of the metric system?

The French Revolution led to a desire for change and standardization, which resulted in the creation of the metric system as a more rational and scientific method of measurement.

How were the initial measurements for the metric system determined?

The initial measurements for the metric system were determined by dividing one-fourth of the Earth's circumference into 10 million parts, with one part being called a 'meter'.

What error was made during the calculation of the meter during the creation of the metric system?

One of the French astronomers made an error in his calculations, making the final meter about 0.2 millimeters shorter than it should have been.

Why did the United States not initially receive the prototype of the kilogram?

The United States did not initially receive the prototype of the kilogram because the ship carrying it was hit by a storm and captured by British pirates, who then delivered it to the wrong Secretary of State.

In what ways has the United States informally adopted the metric system?

The United States has informally adopted the metric system in sectors such as industry, federal government, nutrition labeling, pharmaceuticals, and film.

What example is given of the consequences of using imperial units over metric in a space mission?

An example given is the loss of a NASA satellite that went off-course and burned up in Mars' atmosphere due to a misconversion between imperial and metric units, costing NASA 125 million dollars.

Outlines

00:00

🌍 The Metric System's Global Adoption

The paragraph humorously highlights the global adoption of the metric system, with the exception of the United States, Liberia, and Myanmar. It touches on the historical and cultural reasons behind the United States' resistance to the metric system, including the country's late introduction to it due to geopolitical events and the practical challenges of converting an entire nation's intuitive understanding of measurements. The narrative also includes a personal anecdote from the narrator about their own struggles with converting to the metric system despite recognizing its rationality.

05:02

📏 Origins and Evolution of Traditional Measurements

This paragraph delves into the origins of traditional measurements, such as the foot, inch, yard, and mile, which were based on human body parts and activities. It discusses how these units were imprecise and varied, leading to a plethora of different measurement systems by the 1700s. The paragraph also contrasts this with the French Revolution's pursuit of a more scientific and standardized system, which ultimately led to the development of the metric system.

10:03

🔍 The Creation and Logic of the Metric System

The metric system's creation is explored in this paragraph, detailing how it was designed to be a universal and precise system of measurement. It explains the French astronomers' efforts to define the meter based on the Earth's circumference and how this unit was then used to create other metric units like the liter and kilogram. The paragraph also humorously points out an error in the original meter's definition, emphasizing the human element in this supposedly perfect system.

15:03

🏴‍☠️ Geopolitics and the Spread of the Metric System

This paragraph discusses the geopolitical factors that influenced the spread of the metric system. It recounts the story of how the metric system was almost lost at sea due to a pirate encounter, which delayed its introduction to the United States. It also touches on the eventual adoption of the metric system by most of the world, including the UK's partial adoption and the ongoing use of both metric and imperial systems in some countries.

20:06

🚀 The Impact of Measurement Systems on Modern Society

The final paragraph addresses the practical implications of using different measurement systems in modern society. It mentions a notable incident where NASA's Mars Orbiter was lost due to a unit conversion error, costing millions. It also reflects on the quiet adoption of metric units in certain sectors within the United States, such as pharmaceuticals and nutrition labeling, despite the general population's continued use of imperial units. The narrator concludes with a personal commitment to teaching the next generation in metric, acknowledging the challenges of changing intuitive understanding of measurements.

Keywords

💡Metric System

The metric system is a decimal system of measurement based on the meter for length, the kilogram for mass, and the second for time. It is used by most countries in the world. In the video, the metric system is presented as a rational and efficient system of measurement that contrasts with the more traditional and less consistent imperial system used in the United States. The script discusses the history and adoption of the metric system, highlighting its global acceptance and the challenges faced by countries like the US in adopting it.

💡Imperial System

The imperial system, also known as the British Imperial System, is a collection of units of measurement that were historically used in the British Empire and are still used in a few countries, notably the United States. The video script uses the imperial system as a point of comparison to the metric system, illustrating its origins in body parts and farming activities, and how it can be less intuitive and more complex for modern use.

💡Measurement Units

Measurement units are the standards used to express the magnitude of physical quantities. The video script discusses various units such as feet, miles, and pounds within the imperial system and meters, kilometers, and kilograms within the metric system. The contrast between these units is used to highlight the differences in complexity and ease of use between the two systems.

💡Cubit

The cubit is an ancient unit of length roughly equivalent to the length of a man's forearm. In the video, the cubit is mentioned as one of the earliest known units of measurement, illustrating the historical development of measurement systems and how they have evolved from simple body part references to more standardized and scientific units.

💡Acre

An acre is a unit of land area used in the imperial system, originally defined as the amount of land that one man could plow in a day. The video uses the acre as an example of how imperial measurements are tied to historical practices and activities, emphasizing the organic and less scientific nature of these units compared to the metric system.

💡Pound

The pound is a unit of weight in the imperial system, originally defined as the weight of 7,000 grains. The script discusses the pound to highlight the arbitrary nature of some imperial measurements, which can lead to confusion and the need for conversion when compared to the metric system's kilogram.

💡Mile

The mile is a unit of length in the imperial system, defined as 5,280 feet or 1,760 yards. The video script uses the mile as an example of the complexity of the imperial system, where a mile is equivalent to 1,609.34 meters in the metric system. This conversion is used to emphasize the difficulty of intuitively grasping imperial measurements compared to their metric counterparts.

💡Napoleon

Napoleon Bonaparte is mentioned in the video as the French leader who was initially supportive of the metric system but did not enforce its adoption by law due to public skepticism. His role in the narrative serves to illustrate the political and social challenges that can accompany the adoption of new measurement systems.

💡Colonialism

Colonialism is discussed in the context of how the metric system spread alongside European colonial expansion. The video suggests that the metric system's global adoption was partly due to the influence and force of European powers, which is a historical reminder of the interconnectedness of measurement systems with broader cultural and political dynamics.

💡NASA Mars Orbiter

The NASA Mars Orbiter is mentioned as an example of the consequences of using different measurement systems. The spacecraft was lost due to a unit conversion error between imperial and metric systems, costing NASA $125 million. This incident is used in the video to underscore the practical implications and potential risks of not having a universally adopted system of measurement.

💡Cultural Intuition

Cultural intuition refers to the intuitive understanding and use of measurement systems that are ingrained in a culture or society. The video script discusses how the narrator's cultural intuition is tied to the imperial system, making it difficult for them to adopt the metric system despite recognizing its benefits. This concept is central to the video's exploration of the challenges of changing deeply ingrained practices.

Highlights

The interviewee humorously guesses there are '3,000-something' feet in a mile, illustrating the confusion with imperial measurements.

Johnny's realization that he will never use the metric system due to its unfamiliarity.

A light-hearted moment where Johnny's son insists his jump was six feet, not two meters.

The United States, Liberia, and Myanmar are the only countries not using the metric system, highlighted by their unique color on a world map.

Britain's unofficial use of imperial measurements like pounds and pints, despite being on the metric map.

A historical overview of how the metric system was developed during the French Enlightenment to provide a standardized, scientific measurement system.

The cubit, an ancient unit of measurement based on the length of a forearm, is mentioned as an early human attempt at standardization.

The mile's origin is explained as the distance covered by Roman soldiers walking one thousand paces.

The metric system's simplicity is showcased by the ease of converting between units, all based on tens, hundreds, and thousands.

The story of how the meter was originally defined based on a measurement of the Earth's circumference by French astronomers.

The humorous revelation that the metric system's meter was slightly shorter than intended due to a calculation error.

The international adoption of the metric system, with the US being a notable exception due to historical and political reasons.

The impact of colonialism on the spread of the metric system, as European powers imposed their values and systems globally.

The anecdote of British pirates and a lost kilogram prototype as a symbol of the US's delayed introduction to the metric system.

The persistence of imperial measurements in the US, despite attempts to formally adopt the metric system in the 70's and 80's.

Examples of sectors in the US that have quietly adopted metric measurements, such as pharmaceuticals and nutrition labels.

The personal challenge of adopting the metric system in a country where imperial measurements are deeply ingrained.

The prediction that the US may never fully adopt the metric system due to the deeply rooted imperial system in everyday life.

Transcripts

- [Interviewer] Do you know how many feet

there are in a mile?

- [Interviewee] 3,000-something.

- [Johnny] This is the moment I realized

I will never use the metric system.

Okay, let's see how far you can jump. Ready?

My six year old is constantly asking me

to measure how far he can jump.

- I have to get on that.

- [Johnny] Okay, I'm gonna count it.

Ready, set, go.

And inevitably, this ends up happening.

Okay, stay there, stay there.

One, two, three...

That was two meters.

- No, it was six. No, remember you got...

- [Johnny] Oh, six feet, yeah. Oh, whoof.

- [Son] Yeah.

- You're right.

(upbeat music)

The entire world uses the same measuring system,

except for three countries.

So, you have the richest, most powerful country,

and then you have this small African nation

that the US kind of invented to, like, ship slaves back to.

It's a weird situation that I made a whole video about.

Totally different.

And then you have Myanmar, a Southeast Asian country

that used to be called Burma.

You don't see maps like this very often,

where the whole world is one color,

and then you have three random countries

peppered across the globe that are a different color.

And I'm looking at you, Britain.

I know that you're green on this map, but

we all know you still kinda dabble

in pounds, and pints, and miles.

I want to show you exactly how this happened,

and show you why I will never use the metric system.

- If somebody runs a 5K,

I have no idea what that translates into miles.

- [Announcer] A thousand two-step paces of a Roman soldier.

- We have no reason to be ashamed for using feet and pounds.

- [Narrator] Now, many calculations are merely

a matter of moving the decimal point.

- It's one of the great things about Americans, is:

we won't change no mater how good it would be for us.

(intense instrumental music)

- Hey, real quick.

We'll get back to metric in just a second,

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Let's get back to why I will never use the metric system.

(upbeat instrumental music)

The first thing humans measured was time.

You think of, like, sun, moon, stars,

sundials, constellations.

This was pretty easy because we're all

looking up at the same night sky.

It basically does the same thing every day and every night.

Totally reliable and unchanging.

Measuring stuff like weight and length is way harder,

and for a long time, the best thing we had

was our bodies.

- Humans are about this big.

So we've always wanted a unit of measurement about

this long.

The earliest unit of measurement

that we know of is the cubit,

which was basically the length of a forearm.

Not super precise,

because we all have different-sized forearms,

but it got the job done,

at least in the case of building

giant pyramids in Cairo,

or in Noah's ark, which was apparently 300 of these puppies.

Over time, humans needed to measure

bigger and longer things,

so they began using their daily activities as references,

which was mostly just like, a lot of farming.

Like the acre, which was the amount of land

that a farmer could manage to plow in a day.

Or the hundred-weight which was

kind of how much a man could carry on his back comfortably.

Because, yeah, it's the same for everyone, right?

- What say you, Corey?

- More

weight!

- So by the 1700s, there was, like,

a billion ways of measuring things.

But up here, they had a few popular ones.

So you've got the foot, which was,

well, the average length of a man's foot.

This is a ruler that you always have handy with you.

Handy.

Hand, foot. Handy.

Right? Should we keep that?

- [Crew Member 1] Fuck.

- [Crew Member 2] No, absolutely not.

(upbeat music)

- And then you've got the inch, which, in the 1300s,

was decreed as three grains of barley laid end-to-end.

- From the midst of the ear. Right.

Who knows what a barley corn is.

- Super convenient, right?

(cartoon sound effects)

Who needs a measuring tape

when you could just bring around a little pouch

of all your barley corns to measure things with.

And then there was the yard,

which was the average measurement around someone's chest.

And then King Henry shows up in England, and is like,

"We need to standardize the yard using my body."

And for a while there in England, it was King Henry's body,

like the length from his nose to his thumb,

or like, the length of his arm,

that was used to derive all of these yard-like measurements.

It was his literal body.

Like, that's what they were using.

And then there's the mile, which is the distance

covered by Roman soldiers walking one thousand paces.

They then somehow discovered that the mile

was roughly about eight furlongs,

furlongs, of course, being the distance

that a team of oxen could plow without resting.

The pound was defined at the weight

of seven thousand grains.

6,987. 6,988.

(sighs) This is really terrible.

What is happening?

I mean, all of these measurements seem

so tenuous and inconsistent.

And they were.

6,999.

7,000.

We've got a pound, everyone. We've got a pound!

It was madness!

(aggressive instrumental music)

Meanwhile, down here in France, in the late 1700s,

they were dealing with their own madness,

and it had nothing to do with measurements.

At this time, the French were beheading kings and queens,

and they were drinking lots of coffee,

and sitting around in salons doing science things.

The people of France wanted to change just about everything,

and the measurement systems were not

off the table in these discussions.

So in the middle of all of this Enlightenment,

they look at each other and they're like,

"Why the hell are we using our forearms to measure stuff"?

They needed something precise.

Not like barley corns and forearms,

but something that they could

peg their new measurement system to

that was an unchanging baseline.

"How about the literal planet we live on?"

said the coffee-drinking French science guys.

"We should measure this distance right here,

"and divide it by ten a bunch of times,

"and get a really precise unit of measure

"so that we don't have to use our feet and arms."

Great idea!

But how the hell do you get

this massive measurement in 1792?

And the answer was this thing, plus some math.

So these two French astronomers

go out into the French countryside,

looking for high up places like hills or castle towers.

And then, they look through this fancy little

platinum map telescope and measure

the angles between two points out in the distance.

This fancy telescope allows them to make this measurement

without having to walk these whole distances.

And in this way, they could start making

little triangles across the French countryside.

And then, using some basic math

that we all learned in middle school,

they could start to calculate a hyper-accurate distance

along this straight line.

It took them seven years to calculate all of this,

but they got it!

And once they had this distance,

they were able to calculate this distance:

between the north pole and the equator,

one-fourth of the earth's circumference.

So they took this line, this measurement,

and they chopped it up into 10 million little parts

and one of those parts is called a 'meter'.

Like, this is pegged to a real unchanging measurement

that is our Earth!

I mean, it'll change eventually.

(explosion)

But not in our lifetimes.

The name meter comes from the Greek word "metron,"

which means "a measurement,"

which is just super literal and precise

and exactly what the French Enlightenment was all about.

- [Announcer] Now, here's what it's all about.

The meter.

- So now you have this meter,

and if you divide this into a hundred smaller units,

you have a centimeter.

Centimeter.

So put a thousand of these side by side,

and you get yourself a kilometer.

A kilometer.

- The best part about the metric system

is the time it saves in computation.

- Wait a minute. I can do this.

It's all about tens.

So if this measurement was ten million of these,

divide that by a thousand, you get ten thousand kilometers.

(upbeat trumpet music)

Okay, so this is ten thousand kilometers.

(upbeat trumpet music)

One-fourth of the earth's circumference.

(upbeat trumpet music)

Four of these should be...

(upbeat trumpet music)

Forty thousand kilometers!

(upbeat music)

The earth's circumference is 40,000 kilometers!

Wait, what? No, I don't want miles.

Come on, what? It should be 40,000.

What's this extra 75 kilometers doing here?

Well, it turns out that one of these French astronomers

actually made an error in his calculations,

making the final meter about 0.2 millimeters

shorter than it should have been.

The guy quickly discovered this, like in the middle of it,

but he didn't tell anyone because

support for this new system was already really tenuous,

and he didn't want anyone to have

any more doubt or skepticism.

So it turns out the metric system isn't literally perfect.

Take that!

Finding this measurement was the hardest part.

Now that they have it, they were able to build

an entire system purely based off of this.

Let me show you.

Okay, so now we want a unit for volume.

Let's build a hypothetical cube

that is 10 centimeters on all sides.

Fill it up with liquid, and you have a liter.

One liter.

And from there, you can do

the same thing that we did with meters.

Centiliters, kiloliters, you name it.

It's all tens, which makes it so much easier

to convert between these different measurements.

It's a lot easier than barley corns.

Okay, so now we have a liter, which is a volume thing.

Let's use this to make a unit for mass, AKA weight.

(keyboard typing)

I know they're different, but it's like,

the earth's gravity makes weight and mass the same

when you're on Earth, blah, blah, blah.

I get it, commenters. I see you.

I see you typing right now. Back off.

You fill this liter with water, and now you have a kilogram.

Divide that by 1000, and you have a gram.

Add 1000 kilograms together, and you have a metric ton.

I mean, it's simple.

It's tens, it's hundreds, it's thousands.

- [Announcer] Now, many calculations are merely

a matter of moving the decimal point, not the pencil.

- Okay, so now they have all these units

that are scientific and standardized

and founded on concepts of exact measurements.

And this is really the first time that humans ever had this.

The Frenchmen all looked at each other and were like,

"Good work, guys, we did it. The coffee helped.

"This is great. What should we call it?"

And they settled on...

♪ The metric system ♪

♪ The metric system ♪

- Okay, cool, great system.

But why don't I use the metric system?

What happened?

Well, that has to do with

pirates and international politics.

So France is like, this system works pretty damn well.

We're impressed with ourselves.

We should tell the rest of the world posthaste.

So it's the late 1700's,

and France going around country by country

with a literal meter stick, being like,

"Hey guys, look what we invented.

"It's pegged to the earth.

"It's literally like we measured this entire thing,

"and you should adopt it because it's really precise.

"It's gonna make international trade way more efficient."

And people were like,

"oh, this is cool, but we're a little skeptical."

And meanwhile, in France, they were still kind of skeptical.

The current leader at the time was this guy, Napoleon.

We've all heard about him. And he was super into it.

He's like, "metric is awesome."

You know what else he was into?

Making sure everyone liked him.

So when he saw that the French public wasn't super jazzed

about uprooting what was working for them

for hundreds of years,

he decided not to enforce metric by law.

So France ended up in this weird limbo for thirty years,

and meanwhile the US is looking from across the ocean,

and they're like, "dude, metric, it's a total fad.

"There's no way. Napoleon is wishy-washy.

"There's no way this is actually gonna stick.

"Let's hold off on the whole metric thing

"and just industrialize with our very silly system

"that is built on, like, people's feet."

- The metric system is the tool of the devil!

My car gets 40 rods to the hog's head,

and that's the way I likes it!

- But we'll get back to the US in a minute,

because there's still hope.

In the meantime, France finally gets fully on board,

and successfully sells not only their public

on the metric system, but the world.

They're like, "come on, guys.

"We sent two dudes out to do trigonometry

"with their golden telescopes

"for like seven years for this shit!

"Trust me, you don't want to do that on your own.

"Adopt the system."

It was a tough sell at first to get people to switch,

but eventually, they did.

It started with Belgium, then the Netherlands,

then Luxembourg, then Algeria,

a French colony, 20 years later.

And then it kind of snowballed from there,

partly because countries realized how rational it was,

but partly because Europe was

taking over the world at this time,

and bringing their values and language

and systems to every corner of the globe forcibly.

Ah, yes.

Colonialism will make it into every one of my videos.

Okay, but what about the USA?

Well, France had some beef with the US at this point.

It's kind of a long story. Not gonna go into it.

But what's important to know is that the US

was weirdly put in the middle between this, like,

frenemy bromance gone wrong between France and England.

So at first, America wasn't invited

to the inner circle to be introduced to metric,

but as the world was adopting metric,

France finally decided to send a guy over to deliver this:

a prototype of the almighty, ultra-logical kilogram.

Inviting the US to join the rest of the world

in this measurement revolution.

There is hope for the USA to go metric.

So this French ship is sailing across the Atlantic

with the kilogram onboard

and a storm hits it and blows it into the Caribbean,

where it runs into a group of British pirates.

The British pirates capture the emissary from France,

they imprison him,

and they try to gain ransom from France for this guy.

Well, they end up accidentally killing the French guy,

but they notice that he has a package,

and the pirates are like, "Oh, shit, this is addressed to

"the US Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson.

"Us Brits are cool with the US right now,

"so let's bring this over to New York and deliver it."

Super curious pirates. I like these guys.

But when they get to New York,

Thomas Jefferson isn't the Secretary of State anymore.

So they just hand it to the guy

who is now the Secretary of State, Edmund Randolph.

And Randolph is like,

"what the hell is this weird hunk of copper?"

So then he gives it to this other guy, who just keeps it.

So, yeah, thanks to geopolitics and pirates,

the US didn't get the kilo in time

to convince them to maybe adopt

France's new super-logical system of measurement.

Britain also refused for a long time,

sticking with the system that was

developed using some dude's foot,

but eventually, they got on board,

but not fully.

They still dabble in some old Imperial ways.

But get this: they've changed some of the Imperial things

since the US became independent, like their pint,

which is like 25% bigger than the pint here.

They're both called the pint,

but go get a pint of beer in the UK,

and you're actually getting 4 ounces more

than you would in the US.

As if having one highly illogical,

unreliable measuring system

including feet and teaspoons isn't bad enough,

there are now two of them floating around

that have the same names!

It gets real bad when you look at the ounce,

which is a word that is used to define

several different units of mass, weight, or volume.

Same word, bunch of different things.

Okay, okay, but how hard can this be?

This is my home turf. This is my measurement system.

(Pencil sharpening)

I got this.

So an ounce in the UK is one-twentieth an Imperial pint.

That seems nice and easy.

That's one 160th of an Imperial gallon, approximately.

There's approximately 28.41 milliliters.

Kind of gross.

Okay, that's the Imperial fluid ounce used in the UK.

Okay, so then the US ounce

is one-sixteenth of a US liquid pint,

which is one 128th a liquid gallon,

which is exactly 29.5735295625 milliliters,

making it about 4.08% larger

than the Imperial fluid ounce used in the UK.

Okay, but wait. This is just the fluid ounce.

What about the weight ounce?

The one that came from, like,

the seven thousand grains to be a pound.

Okay, so seven thousand grains to a pound,

and there's sixteen ounces to that pound,

so that's 437.5 grains to an ounce.

But if I want to convert

the weight ounce to the fluid ounce,

I just need to multiply the volume by

1.043176 times the density of the ingredient or material

so that we can easily switch between

the fluid ounce and the weight ounce,

and the pound with the 7000 grains, and sixteenth...

There's, one-sixteenth of a pound is the ounce.

So grains are 437.5...

Just convert it with Google, and you've got it.

Just super easy.

(sighs)

Yeah, that's where we're at. It's a total mess.

- [Interviewer] Do you know

how many feet there are in a mile?

- Three thousand something.

- Every country on earth

adopted the metric system eventually

besides these three countries:

the US, Myanmar, and Liberia.

- The United States just gave the rest of the world

a big finger and said, "(beep) your metric system!"

- Over the years, the US has attempted

really formally to go metric.

Like, in the 70's and 80's, there were all these debates

and there were boards created by the government

to find a way to migrate over to metric.

But, of course, Ronald Reagan shut it down,

because of, you know, the whole government spending thing.

This was an actual public debate.

Like, this documentary I keep showing was from a PSA

trying to convince people to get on board with metric.

And then on the other side, in the 80's,

there was this anti-metric group.

Yes, anti-metric groups. That was a thing.

They even hosted a gala, where they featured

the Most Beautiful Foot contest.

Don't you just love American culture?

We just love to stick it to people.

Just look at us, being individuals in our own ways.

But this stuff actually matters, okay?

In 1999, NASA sent a satellite to Mars,

and it went off-course

and burned up in the planet's atmosphere

all because of a misconversion between units of measure.

One of the contractors was using imperial units

while NASA Ground was using metric,

and it ended up costing NASA 125 million dollars.

But what's interesting is that the US has kind of

secretly quietly got on board with metric,

but it's just sort of behind the scenes

in boring sectors that none of us really think about

and that don't actually make it

into all of our intuitions.

It's like industry, or the federal government.

Or, like, nutrition labels.

I don't look at nutrition labels, but if I did,

I would see grams

and milligrams.

And on liquid-based things, I would see milliliters,

because nutrition labels are in metric.

It doesn't matter that I don't really know

what a gram or a kilogram or a milligram even is,

but when I go to the pharmacy,

the pharmacist gives me my medicine in milligrams.

Progress. (chews)

So, yeah, it's pharmaceuticals,

it's nutrition, it's film, it's tools,

it's bicycles, it's running races.

Oh, and for some reason, this one highway sign in Arizona.

For all of these efforts, none of them have succeeded

in getting metric into the brains

of everyday people like me.

And this is why I will never use the metric system.

I can't! I literally cannot.

You don't realize how your intuition is calibrated

in certain systems of measurements

until you try to change it.

I started traveling in my early 20's,

really for the first time abroad.

And I saw them using metric,

and I saw how easy it was and how rational it was.

And I made a commitment to myself.

I'm like, I'm gonna change from my imperial intuition

to adopting metric.

And I even swore, I'm going to teach

my future children metric from an early age.

And since then, over a decade, I have been trying.

I look at this distance, and to me,

oh, that's ten meters away, not thirty feet.

It feels like it's 20 degrees Celsius outside right now,

I would say.

Oh, yeah, it's like five kilometers down the road.

Oh, I'm gonna pick up two kilos of short rib

to make the soup tonight.

But my dirty little secret is that

I've totally been faking it.

Ten meters doesn't mean anything to me.

What it means is thirty feet divided by three.

What I've really been doing this whole time

is intuitively estimating things based on the system I know,

which is pegged to farming activities and body parts,

and then doing the rough math

based on the numbers I know about converting to metric.

Without those conversion numbers,

I honestly cannot estimate what fifty meters looks like.

I can't grasp what running five kilometers feels like.

I don't know what twenty-two centimeters is

outside of the context of a one-foot-long ruler

that I know is thirty centimeters.

And so I'll never use the metric system.

I don't know how, and I can't teach myself.

I've tried.

But then I had kids!

There's hope. The next generation.

I vowed to instill them with metric intuition

and found that it's basically been impossible

because everything they're exposed to

at school, in math, on road trips while we're driving,

all of it is in feet and miles

and cups and pints and teaspoons and tons.

I mean, I try.

I tell my kids measurements in meters,

and my six-year-old will literally respond with,

"Well, how far is that in feet?"

He is six. Like, this isn't happening.

The ship has sailed on changing to metric here in the US

for everyday people.

It'll likely never happen.

I'm trapped in a system that was developed

using people's body parts and farming activities

and King Henry's arm.

- [Announcer] We interrupt this film

to bring you a special bulletin from Metric News.

(jaunty big band music)

As America moves toward the metric system,

the last holdouts have been seen finally switching over.

Soon, it is predicted, the whole world will be unified

under this easier system of measurement.