One thing everyone agrees on is that daylight saving time is annoying. Almost everyone

anyway because some people benefit from it. And no, they're not the farmers.

Finding out who benefits and how is the key to figuring out the big question that almost

everyone seems to have a different answer for. Why do we change our clocks twice a year?

It's coming up next. Unskeptoid.

Hey everyone, Brian here. A quick favor. We're conducting an audience survey. We'd be really

grateful if you could take just a few minutes and answer our survey. This is the kind of

thing that's sort of an engineering and marketing necessity to make the whole free podcast

ecosystem flourish. So please check it out. Also, surveys are fun. You get to talk about

yourself. Please visit survey.prx.org slash skeptoid to take the survey today. That's survey.prx.org slash

SKEPTOID. Thanks.

You're listening to Skeptoid. I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com. Daylight Savings Time Myths.

Today, we're going to turn our clock back, or forward as the case may be, and screw up our

sleep cycles, casting everything into disarray for a good week until we recover. For today's topic,

is Daylight Savings Time, the myth, the fallacies, and the facts? Why on earth would we ever want to

change our clocks a few times a year? Is it actually a good idea? In today's day and age, is it

still good? Or is it outdated? Benjamin Franklin is often credited with inventing the concept of

Daylight Savings Time on the principle of conserving candles. However, a closer look at this popular

tale reveals cause for skepticism. Franklin's paper was actually a satire poking fun at the

partying lifestyle of Parisians, not a serious recommendation. It was a letter written in 1784

for the journal de Paris in which he proposed firing cannons at sunrise to wake people up and

break them from their nocturnal habits. To justify this, he suggested that sleeping instead of

...