← Something You Should Know
Something You Should Know
How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does
00:50:32
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- [00:01]
Mike Carruthers
Fellas, you know degree Cool Rush deodorant, right? Well, last year they changed the formula and guys were mad about it. One dude even started a petition.
- [00:09]
Cutter Wood
So guess what?
- [00:10]
Mike Carruthers
Degree heard us, admitted they messed up and brought the original Cool Rush scent.
- [00:14]
Cutter Wood
Back exactly how it was.
- [00:16]
Mike Carruthers
And it's in Walmart, Target and other stores now for under $4. So grab some and remember why its cool, crisp and fresh scent made it the number one men's antiperspirant for the last decade. Degree Cool Rush is back and it smells like victory for all of us today on something you should know. Fascinating facts about the food you eat, like why salmon is pink, what's the shelf life of a Twinkie, and more. Then the like button. It's pressed billions of times a day. Why do we like the like button?
- [00:48]
Martin Reeves
When you click the picture of the like button, it creates dopamine release. And it's the same dopamine release as actually being liked. It's the same dopamine release as actually liking somebody.
- [01:01]
Mike Carruthers
Also, the rule about when to repair a pair of shoes or just get new ones. And amazing things about your body you never knew about. Your breath, your tears, even your mucus.
- [01:14]
Cutter Wood
Mucus is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, that your body produces. It lines the nose, the mouth, the eyes, the lungs, the entire digestive tract. All told, your body is making like a gallon of mucus a day.
- [01:26]
Mike Carruthers
Basically all this today on something you should know. I know a lot of business people listen to this podcast because I hear from them on LinkedIn or in emails. And if you're one of those people, there always comes that day when you have to hire someone, which I've had to do as well. And it's tough. Usually you need someone right away. You want to hire the right person, but how do you determine that? Which is why I've come to discover that when it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Indeed has something called Sponsored Jobs. With Sponsored Jobs, your post jumps right to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, Sponsored Jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. And that's what you want. More applications from relevant, qualified candidates. Indeed works. In fact, in the minute I've been Talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed. According to Indeed data worldwide. Look, there's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsor job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com something just go to Indeed.com something right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com something terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. 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 what is the shelf life of a Twinkie? It actually has one, and it's not as long as you think. Hi and welcome to this episode of Something youg Should Know. There are a lot of facts about many of the foods we eat that are pretty interesting and worth knowing. For example, Twinkies really do have a shelf life, and it is about 45 days. Most of the salmon we eat is dyed pink. Wild salmon are pink in color because they eat these little crustaceans called krill that give the salmon that pink color. But farmed salmon, which accounts for about two thirds of the salmon we eat, are fed pellets to dye their flesh pink, which is otherwise naturally gray. An ear of corn will almost always have an even number of rows. Honey, and you've probably heard this before, but honey does not have a shelf life. It can crystallize and it can change color, but it never goes bad. Avocados, pumpkins, bananas, and watermelon are actually all berries. And strawberries are not really berries. Almonds are part of the peach family. And here's something kind of gross. What's in your peanut butter may shock you. According to the FDA, there can be up to an average of 30 or more insect fragments per 100 grams of peanut butter and an average of one or more rodent hairs per 100 grams of peanut butter. And finally, the average American eats about one ton of food per year. And that is something you should know. How many times have you pressed the like button? When you like a post or a video or a product or whatever else, there's often a like button right there and the temptation is to press it. Why? What is it about the like button that we like so much? And what does pressing it do? What does it do for us? What does it do for the person who gets the likes? And where did the idea for the like button come from? Listen to this. Supposedly the like button is pressed over 7 billion times a day. That's almost as many times per day as there are people on the planet. The like button has become part of our lives, or certainly our online lives. And here to talk about it is Martin Reeves. He's chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, which is a think tank for developing new ideas in business. He's co author of the book the Button that Changed the World. Hi, Martin, thanks for coming on. Something youg Should Know.
- [06:14]
Martin Reeves
Thanks for having me, Mike.
- [06:16]
Mike Carruthers
So when and where did the like button first appear?
- [06:21]
Martin Reeves
Oh, well, that's the really interesting thing. It's hard to say. We might popularly believe that it's Facebook because they of course, pioneered the spread of the like button and used it as a central feature of their business model, but it certainly wasn't them. And the guy that I co authored the book with, Bob Goodson, he was the first employee of Yelp and he's one of the contenders. I mean, he has a dated sketch of the like button that precedes Facebook's adoption by many years.
- [06:53]
Mike Carruthers
Well, that's a bit surprising just because the like button doesn't seem like it's that old and seems like a relatively simple thing that caught on that you could find the origins of it pretty clearly.
- [07:08]
Martin Reeves
It turns out that innovation in the case of the like button and in the case of other invention turns out to be messy, serendipitous, social, many forgotten heroes, many delays, and the eventual use of the thing actually turns out to be on often quite different from the initial intention. Of course, the huge economic impact of the like button was that it enabled social media to become a business because by being a feedback loop from users, it could enable Facebook to say to advertisers, hey, we can tell you which part of your advertising is working and which part isn't. You know, that's where all the, all the money was. That was absolutely not the problem that people were trying to solve with the early like button. They were trying to encourage user reviews for restaurants that they couldn't afford to pay without triggering a Page refresh. If you remember the days of the Page refresh, if you, if you clicked any button on your computer, you'd have a 20 second delay while the, while the page refreshed. So it had to be done within the browser. That was the problem that people were trying to solve, and they accidentally solved a much bigger problem.
- [08:14]
Mike Carruthers
So when you look back, since you have probably looked at this better and more deeply than anyone, was somebody trying to create the like button? Or was somebody trying to come up with a, with a way to just solve that refresh problem? Or was somebody trying to. What were they trying to do that resulted in the like button?
- [08:36]
Martin Reeves
Yeah, well, you know, we did personally interview all of these people that were part of that community of people trying to do things with a instant recognition icon. And they were, they often didn't have any awareness that they were doing anything special. I mean, every day consisted for these startups. And this is after the dot com crash. So it was the nuclear winter in Silicon Valley. You know, these companies that were struggling to survive were just trying to solve another tactical problem. And the, and they were, there were various tactical problems at the time. So one of them was voting. How could you do voting? For instance, I'm not sure whether you remember a site called Hot or Not. It was, you know, you voted on people's photographs, were they hot or not? And so you needed some sort of voting mechanism that aggregated clicks, but you needed not to trigger a page refresh. That's one job, that tactical job that people are trying to solve for. There's the one I mentioned about, you know, hey, we're a restaurant review site. We need to attract restaurant reviews. How do we do that? How do we give people incentive? We don't have the money to, to pay for these things like the Michelin guide would. So, you know, how do we do that? Another one was cleaning up content feeds. You know, most people, if you give them a, an opportunity to comment on somebody else's content, they'll, they'll make a trivial comment, right? They'll say okay or great or well done. And if you've got a whole page full of that, that's, that's, that's not very captivating. You know, that's not going to keep users on your site. So if you can clean all of that and compress it into an icon with a little counter or something, that's another problem. And so people trying to solve these various tactical problems and then they bumped into the idea that hey, you know, there's this perpetual problem since the beginning of time in advertising, which is half my advertising, as the joke goes, is ineffective. I just don't know which, which half of my advertising is ineffective. And by enabling this sort of instant low cost response function, I like that, I like that person, I like that content. You know, essentially you had the first effective granular proof of the value of advertising, which was the lifeblood of social media becoming a multi billion dollar business. And the thing that turned the digital marketing and advertising industry upside down. But that was not the original intention. So it's literally the strict definition of serendipity. If serendipity is a search for X and actually bumping into Y, it was essentially Serendipitous.
- [11:05]
Mike Carruthers
So the like button isn't a thing in the sense that there's a patent, there's a patent owner, there's a diagram of how it works. The like button is more of a concept, isn't it?
- [11:18]
Martin Reeves
Well, the like button, it looks like giving somebody a thumbs up symbol. And of course that's not an accident. There was a very popular book amongst web designers at the time called Don't Make Me Think. And the idea of this book was that if you wanted ideas to travel and scale, you didn't want the innovative thing to look innovative, to look unfamiliar, complicated, clever. Because things that make you think, things with unnecessary friction involved are hard work. You want to hijack something that's already there. And why the thumb? Why the thumbs up icon? Well, it was a gesture that already existed in human language. It's not actually a thumbs up, it's a piece of code in JavaScript that, you know, with a visual appearance of a thumbs up.
- [12:05]
Mike Carruthers
But there is something, there's something about the like button that, you know, touches a nerve or something. If it's pressed 7 billion times a day, there's something pretty magical about it. What is it that makes it so effective?
- [12:22]
Martin Reeves
When you click the picture and the piece of code of the like button, it creates dopamine release in the part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens in the reptiles in part of the brain and releases dopamine. And it's the same dopamine release as actually being liked. It's the same dopamine release as actually liking somebody. It's as rewarding to like something and somebody as to be liked. It's the same brain center that causes us to find sex pleasurable. Unfortunately, it's the same brain, brain center that makes cocaine addictive. So why did we never need an instruction book for the like button? Because it's plugging into something that very cleverly that already exists.
- [13:08]
Mike Carruthers
But nobody owns the like button. Which is interesting because you would think that because it is so powerful that someone would lay claim to it, that they would say, I invented the like button. But nobody did. Why didn't they?
- [13:24]
Martin Reeves
Because the culture of Silicon Valley at the time, and still somewhat the case, but maybe less the case, you know, when you have conversations with these people that were involved in, you know, a version of the like button, you know, they were all talk, talking about each other's work in restaurants and bars and there were meetups. There was a famous one called Squid Labs, for example, that it was a place where people gathered and talked about the latest cool stuff they're working on. So attribution is, is, is very difficult.
- [13:51]
Mike Carruthers
What's interesting about to me about the like button, which is the thumbs up sign, typically that there most of the time is not a thumbs down sign. Right. You either like it or you stay silent. I think YouTube has the thumbs up and the thumbs down.
- [14:09]
Martin Reeves
The thumbs down was obviously everybody that contemplated the thumbs up also contemplated the thumbs down. And that would have also been piggybacking on the history of human gestural language. But the way that the business model of social media evolved, the advertisers pay for your attention using the proposition that using their streams of like data and so on, they can tell you whether your advertising is working, whether it's going to work or not with a particular demographic they can target very precisely. And if that's the case, you want to maximize the, the continuity of the attention of your users. So giving people the ability to say, you know, I don't like this, I don't want to do this. It just doesn't fit with that, with that business model. So the thumbs down button still exists in one or two places, but it died off pretty quickly. It was positive attention that people wanted.
- [15:03]
Mike Carruthers
A lot of companies though now certainly Amazon and others have a star system that it isn't I like it or I don't like it, it's I like it a little bit or I like it a lot or I don't like it at all.
- [15:16]
Martin Reeves
Right. I mean, there was never complete convergence, as we've already discussed. I mean, some, some companies use, you know, the heart icon or a smiley icon. There was never complete convergence. The star system. One of the interesting things about the like button is that it's, it's intrinsically ambiguous and usable as humans use language in all sorts of ways. So it can be gamed. And also each company is trying to solve a different problem. So if we take Amazon, I mean, one of the things that Amazon is trying to do is trying to figure out which products to promote, which products not to promote, and also to seem like a trustworthy place to buy things. And one of the ways that they had of doing that, therefore, was to try to figure out a way of having reliable ratings. So they, so they have their star rating system and then they also, I believe they're backing away from this now, but they had their rate, a rating system. So you, you not only rated products, but you rated the raters and you had authorized purchases. And it's, and it's done with stars. So that's a very different thing from trying to encourage restaurant reviews or or clean up content feeds and they happen to go with the star system.
- [16:28]
Mike Carruthers
Yes, we're talking about the like button and what happens when you press it. My guest is Martin Reeves. He is author of the book like the Button that Changed the World. I am definitely not a big clothes shopper and probably like you, I've bought clothes online that were disappointing. But I have a very different experience with quints and I've come to find out that so many people I know shop quints. So far I've gotten a couple of shirts and sweaters from Quince and well, you'll know what I mean when I say this. Every time I get something new from Quince it goes right to the top of the rotation. My Quince clothes are my go to clothes. If you don't know Quince, you are going to love their website. Quince has all the things you actually want to wear, like organic cotton silk polos like the ones I have. European linen beach shorts, pants for every occasion. Really nice pants. And here is the very best part. Everything at quince is priced 50 to 80% less than what you'd find at similar brands. You see, by working directly with top artisans and cutting out the middlemen, Quince gives you luxury pieces without those big markups. I've really been amazed at how many people tell me they shop at Quint's. It's become like the place to go to buy clothes. Elevate your closet with Quince. Go to quince.comsysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. That's Q-U-N-C-E.comSYSK to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quince.comSYSK Here is a dilemma that we have faced in our house. We don't always have time to cook or want to cook. Eating out has gotten so expensive. And fast food, that's no bargain either. Plus it's fast food. We solve this dilemma with Factor. We love Factor meals. Factor meals are freshly prepared restaurant quality meals. Full meals delivered to you that you just heat for 2 minutes and serve. There are 45 weekly menu options to choose from and as a factor meal eating veteran, I do two things. First, I always make sure to choose some of the meals with sauces because for some reason their sauces are spectacular. And the other thing we do is we always take the food out of the container it came in and put it on nice plates. When you do that, you swear you are eating a restaurant quality meal. Ginger teriyaki salmon truffle butter filet mignon, sweet and smoky barbecued grilled chicken. I'm telling you, factor meals are so good. Cheaper than going out. It's better than fast food. Just try it once and you will solve the there's nothing for dinner problem once and for all. And here's a significant discount just to try it. Get started@factormeals.com something 50 off and use code something50OFF to get 50% off plus free shipping on your first box. That's code something50OFF@factormeals.com something50OFF for 50% off plus free shipping. And that promo code is in the show notes. So, Martin, I'm thinking of those times when I'm thinking about pressing the like button. If I'm going to press the like button and no one's liked this thing before, I'm less likely to be. I don't want to be the first. You know, like, there's a hesitation like, well, no one's liked it before me. Why would I like like it now? But if there are 5,000 like likes, yeah, sure, I'll, I'll, I'll pile on.
- [20:27]
Martin Reeves
Well, that goes back to the, what you might call the evolutionary suite of human social behaviors. So, you know, how do, how do humans deploy their superpower of social learning? One, one way is that they have a preference for what the scientists call homophily, which is essentially hanging out with people like me. Why? Because I'm more likely to learn from a community that's like me learning about the same problem than people that are not like me. So, and interestingly, we use the word like to describe that. And there's this ambiguity in like. Like means I like the person. It also means I am like the person. It's an act of homophily. And a second one is, which comes to your point, is a preference for what you might call mild hierarchy. So in the animal kingdom, we have hierarchy. Nobody likes to upset the chief baboon or the chief orangutan. Why? Because they use violence or the threat of violence to maintain the social hierarchy. Humans are a little different. We like to learn from people that other people appear to be learning from. So we like to learn from popular people. So you're quite right. We look at the like count and we like liked people because we become included in a group of people that are liked and we hope to be liked ourselves. And we want to learn from the group of people like us. And from the people that are liked by others.
- [21:59]
Mike Carruthers
So the like button was created, from what you've said so far, it was created for businesses to get likes to promote business. But it's also become a personal thing, right? If people post something on Instagram or Facebook, they want people to like it, and they hate when people don't like it. So it's moved from business to personal.
- [22:26]
Martin Reeves
It's generally the case that when you create an innovation, it has this unintended beneficial effect. You know, like often the thing is good at something you didn't anticipate, and it almost always creates a new problem. With technology, it can happen very fast, so it can create social dilemmas as we try to clamp down on the unintended side effect. And one of the unintended side effects of social media is that it has an addictive quality. Especially for young girls during a formative period of their social development. There's good science showing that they're very sensitive to popularity and perceived popularity. They do compare themselves with others. And of course, the like button feeds directly into that. So if you're, you know, if your daughter's late at night, you know, looking at the, her own like count and the like count of her friends and which of her posts didn't get likes, it can be a very elating experience, but also a very depressing experience. And there's, there's pretty good evidence that there is. There's a pathology of especially young teenage girls that are quite distressed by the social comparative aspect of liking and being liked. It's a very interesting innovation problem in itself, because if you can't foresee the beneficial effects of an invention, how could you possibly foresee the negative consequences, which are really rather surprising? I don't think anyone anticipated them.
- [23:56]
Mike Carruthers
What does the like button do for the person who posted or who's. Who's looking for likes? And then they get a bunch of likes or they don't get a bunch of likes. What does it do to them?
- [24:07]
Martin Reeves
Maybe we all know the answer to that question because it's the same question as what happens when you're liked or disliked in real life. And I think that's broadly true. As far as we can tell, the brain chemistry of being liked and liking is exactly the same as the brain chemistry of being liked or liking digital. Exactly the same. Same part of the brain, the same dopamine release, the same mood effects. You know, we don't like being unpopular, we love being popular. It's. It's as simple as that. So is there a Difference. There is a difference and it's one of quantity. So if I were to try to meet as many people as I could in one day called Mike and, and curry favor with them and I, you know, if I tried really hard, I could probably meet five people called Mike and have a conversation with them, try to curry favor with them and there's a, the, the, the, the friction of social physics means I can't really, it's hard to overexpose myself to these signals. That's not the case online. If, if you go back to this very first question, this important first question you asked, which is how many times is the like button clicked? The people that use social media click it multiple times a day. 10, 20, 50. And so somebody receives or fails to receive those likes and we can do that at this very socially formative early teenage stage and it can be deeply impactful. So it's the overwhelming of our evolutionary circuits by being liked or liking at a frequency that evolution didn't design us to handle.
- [25:40]
Mike Carruthers
Well, I would imagine that most people who hit the like button, and there's zillions of them every day that never think about what you've just been describing for the last half hour about how this all works and what it does and what it doesn't do, and it's just a like button. But boy, there's a lot to the story that people don't know.
- [26:01]
Martin Reeves
Indeed. And the fascinating thing was, you know, I guess technically Bob and I wrote the book, but honestly that was not the way that it felt. It felt like we were being dragged along by this incredibly multi layered story of who invented the like button. How did the like button become the basis for a multi billion dollar business? Why the thumbs up? What has this got to do with brain science? How could you possibly regulate something like that? It felt like we were peeling the onion and observing the story and, and what was fascinating to us, I think was just how much you could see in the microcosm. So from one perspective you could say it's just one icon amongst many in the digital sphere, amongst many in the human language sphere. And you couldn't possibly generalize from this. But by focusing, I think there's a certain fascination in looking at the macrocosm in the microcosm through this lens of this very small humble icon. You can actually see a number of things. You can see the evolution of gestural language, you can see human sociality, you can see how human brain science works, you can see how social and serendipitous innovation works. In Silicon Valley, you can see how businesses are born.
- [27:18]
Mike Carruthers
Well, after listening to you, it's going to be hard to think about the like button in the same way, or press it, or to just press it without thinking about some of the things you've said about it. I've been talking with Martin Reeves. He is chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, which is a think tank for developing new ideas in business, and he's co author of the book like the Button that Changed the World and there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you Martin for coming on and peeling the layers back on the like button.
- [27:50]
Martin Reeves
Yeah, my pleasure.
- [27:53]
Amy Nicholson
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- [28:25]
Mike Carruthers
I am a big fan of Shopify. They have been a longtime sponsor here and Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and they should be behind yours too, because they get it right. If you run a business, you know, as I do, that there are so many details that need your attention, it can be overwhelming. Finding the right tool that can handle a lot of those details and simplify the selling process, well, that's a game changer and it makes your life easy and helps you sell more, which is what Shopify does. Shopify handles 10% of all e commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark. If Mattel and Gymshark are using Shopify as their commerce platform along with millions of other businesses, shouldn't you be too? Shopify gets you up and running with your own design studio. They've got hundreds of ready to use templates to build a beautiful online store and AI tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography. If you've ever tried to build an online store, this has got to sound pretty tempting. Turn your big business ideas into With Shopify on your side, sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com sysk go to shopify.com sysk shopify.com sysk all of us human beings have things about our bodies, our physiology that we rarely talk about and we rarely talk about them because, well, we just don't. Either it's not polite to, or we don't think about them. Things like sweat or tears or breathing. I mean, who talks about breathing? Yet these bodily functions that we all have in common are not only fascinating, they're important to understand because they are all involved in keeping you alive and healthy. And here to help us understand these things is Cutter Wood, who has explored and researched this topic and has written a book called Earthly Journeys through our body's emissions, excretions, and disintegrations. And I promise. I promise this is not a gross conversation at all. So please stay with me. Hey, Cutter. Welcome to something you should know.
- [31:03]
Cutter Wood
Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.
- [31:05]
Mike Carruthers
So let's start with breathing. We all breathe all the time. Most of us don't think much about it or talk about it, but, you know, if you stop breathing, that's pretty much the end of you. So breathing's pretty important.
- [31:18]
Cutter Wood
The biggest thing that I think no one really thinks about is you breathe so much about 20,000 times every day. And what folks don't often think is exactly what is occurring in the body when that's happening. Your body has to do this spectacular thing. It's trying to get in as much oxygen as possible as quickly as possible and put that oxygen in contact with the blood, right? So the structure of the lungs, they basically have all these kind of little sacs people know, called alveoli. They're kind of like little grape sacs that the air goes into, and then it gets put into contact with the blood. But what that means is that basically with every one of those 20,000 breaths, you're spreading a soda can or two of blood across an area or soda can or two of air across an area about the size of a tennis court. It's really just this miraculous ability that happens every single time you breathe. My personal favorite detail about breathing is that it is so connected to the brain. You know, that makes a lot of sense, right? This is about the most important thing your brain can be doing. It's about as hardwired as it gets, right? Your brain is controlled by these pulses of activity, you know, kind of washing across the brain, this electrical activity. And there's real evidence that the speed of your breath affects those rhythms, you know? So if your brain is behaving in a way you don't want to, if your thoughts are racing, you can essentially kind of hack into your brain with your breathing and willfully exert some control over that process.
- [32:43]
Martin Reeves
It's.
- [32:43]
Cutter Wood
It's really pretty Amazing. And one of the few ways to actually affect your body's function willfully, which.
- [32:49]
Mike Carruthers
Is why I suspect the idea of slow, deep breaths is a big part of meditation and mindfulness. That, that it is a way to, to calm your brain down, to calm your thoughts down. So let's talk about hair and how hair grows and why it's different colors and all that. Because people spend a lot of time and money on their hair and how they make it look without thinking so much about the biology of it all. So, so dive in there.
- [33:19]
Cutter Wood
You know, for instance, things which seem totally trivial, right? Red hair versus blonde or something like that actually have dramatic consequences for your body. So here's. Here are some big things. The, the color of hair is very complicated, obviously, and determined less by evolution than by genetic drift. Just kind of chance mutations. A couple of cool things here. One, you know, we often have this idea that blonde hair is associated with northern Europe and Scandinavia or that kind of things. We know now, though, from genetic analysis that that's not where blonde hair came from at all. It actually came from over towards Mongolia and Russia, around Lake Baikal, and it was only brought to Europe maybe 17,000 years ago with this mass migration of people. That's a relatively recent one. Much more fundamental, though, is red hair. Red hair is much, much older. So old, in fact, that we know Neanderthals, some Neanderthals had red hair as well, which is really amazing and mind boggling. The mutation that causes red hair comes out of the skin. So it's tied up with a lot of the biology of the skin. It is a much simpler and therefore much more profound mutation. And one of the things that dictates is, well, there are two, really two big ones. One, people with red hair are much more sensitive to ultraviolet rays, which means actually that if, if you have red hair, it's basically equivalent to 21 extra years of exposure to the sun. Pretty, pretty wild. So it makes it important for somebody with red hair to, to wear their sunscreen, right? But then in a stranger and more profound way, people with red hair, they actually process pain differently. The, the mechanisms by which pain is felt by people with red hair are completely different for other people. So if you're prescribing a medication for pain, like an opioid, you have to take that kind of thing. In Canada, you should be considering that when you do.
- [35:12]
Mike Carruthers
So when you say people with red hair process pain differently, what does that mean? That it feels different or.
- [35:21]
Cutter Wood
Not, not necessarily less or more, but that it takes basically a Different pathway. I think that would be the best way to explain it. It takes different pathways so that the drugs you use to treat pain in somebody, say with brown hair or black hair, might not work as effectively in somebody with red hair or different. They might be more sensitive to other drugs.
- [35:39]
Mike Carruthers
Well, that's weird.
- [35:41]
Cutter Wood
Pretty wild, right?
- [35:42]
Mike Carruthers
Well, the other thing about hair that I find interesting. Well, there's a lot of things about hair that you find interesting. But like a lot of people, I was one of these people that, you know, when I was very young, I had very blonde hair, but that didn't last very long. Got brown and it stayed brown for the rest of my life.
- [36:01]
Cutter Wood
Yeah, yeah. So one of the interesting things with hair is it's really. It's almost kind of a biomarker. Right. Because it is so intimately tied up with your hormones. It's changing throughout your life. People's hair actually, it gets thicker and thicker. Like it actually gets. The diameter increases up through your 20s, usually in men, before slowly decreasing. And of course with a lot of men, the hair going away entirely.
- [36:24]
Mike Carruthers
I want to talk about, and I, you know, it's as. Because as I said before we started, you know, I don't want to get too gross, but mucus is something that I find interesting in the sense that what is it doing here? I mean, I'm already sick. Why do I also have to deal with all the runny nose and the junk in my chest? And it must be serving a purpose, but. But I find it rather gross and distasteful.
- [36:54]
Cutter Wood
Well, here's the good news. The purpose it's serving actually, I think is really amazing and one of the least gross and distasteful things possible. Mucus, when I started this project was not one that I was extremely interested in. I'm not one to incline necessarily to the gross out material, but I was interested in it because I had heard that they had this amazing lab up at MIT called the Biogel Lab. The only woman run lab at MIT that was really basically devoted to the study of mucus. So I went up there and visited this lab and it turns out mucus is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing, that your body produces. We often just think of blowing your nose. That's what mucus is. But really it lines the nose, the mouth, the eyes, the lungs, the entire digestive tract. All told, your body's making like a gallon of mucus a day, basically. And as for what it actually does, you probably think of it the way I was taught to Think of it as a filter. Some pollen or some dust goes into your nose and mucus stops. Turns out that could almost not be further from the truth. It does do that, but it also plays a ton of different roles. In fact, probably the most important role it does is it's not about what it keeps out, it's about what it keeps in. So I'm sure you've heard of the microbiome, this kind of collection of thousands of species of microbes that live on and in the human body, they've got more cells than the body itself, more DNA than the body itself, and they take care of all these vital functions for you. They help to digest our food, they break down fiber and complex carbohydrates, things like that, producing energy for us. They also discourage bad microbes. They stimulate the production of neurotransmitters, they help to regulate metabolism and hunger. Just this kind of really amazing suite of vital functions that these microbes provide. So what it turns out is that mucus is actually the soil that the microbiome grows in. This is where it lives, this is where it grows. It is actually actively fed by your mucus. A single strand of mucus is basically like a long protein backbone studded with all these sugars. And those sugars are there to feed your microbiome. That's pretty wild, right?
- [39:18]
Mike Carruthers
But why does mucus tend to be more prominent and there's more of it when you're sick, your nose gets runny. Why?
- [39:29]
Cutter Wood
So that's, again, part of its role is also keeping stuff out. And one of the neat things it does is, let's say, any microbe, a bacteria, it can look one way, but it can actually evolve depending on its. Its circumstances. Right? What. What mucus can also do is when it realizes that something is in your body that shouldn't be, it latches onto that and can carry it away. And it turns out actually there are. We think of mucus as being one thing. There are 20 more than 20 different kinds of mucus, and each of these fulfill a different function. And one of those is to specifically attach to dangerous things that are in your body and take them out.
- [40:07]
Mike Carruthers
And so when it attaches to things that are dangerous in my body, does that mean it's trying to take out whatever it is in my body that's causing me to have a cold or the flu, or is it that fundamental? Or it's finding other things in there that are also dangerous and trying to take them out or what?
- [40:27]
Cutter Wood
Well, it's doing a lot of different Things, you know, it really depends on what the material is. You know, for instance, like an environmental contaminant, say dust right there. It's a very simple process of just, we're going to increase the flow and wash this stuff away, but with a, you know, a different material like a microbe, then it can be a much more complicated process.
- [40:49]
Mike Carruthers
So really, we need to learn to love our mucus because it, it, it's pretty important.
- [40:56]
Cutter Wood
Absolutely. I mean, you would not last long without it. One of the, the biggest things here, the NIH, the National Institute of Health, they estimate that 80% of all internal infections are related to dysfunction of your mucus. Isn't that crazy? 80%. You know, almost anything that goes wrong in there somehow is related to mucus.
- [41:18]
Mike Carruthers
So let's talk about urine pee. We all know you drink something and it goes through your body and does what it does and it comes out. But I don't know that I know much about the process or what happened. So since it is a universal experience, that's probably worth understanding. Let's talk about that.
- [41:38]
Cutter Wood
Urine is a pretty amazing one. It is actually. This is the beginning of laboratory medicine, right. If you go back to ancient Sumeria, you have actually like uroscopy, right? These, the original form of, of evaluating a fluid to try and tell something about a human being's body. You know, they actually have symptoms and, and charts to, as a way of diagnose what's wrong with you. And yet turns out that, that urine is this amazing diagnostic tool, right? You can tell all kinds of things. You know, if, if, if your urine is purple, right, it means you have porphyria and it actually will glow under a black light. If it's green or blue, that might indicate an issue with some antidepressants. If it's very dark, it can indicate that you're dehydrated or too light, you have too much water in your system. It's really this amazing substance just for learning about your own body.
- [42:30]
Mike Carruthers
And that's why when you go to the doctor, you pee in a cup and they send it to the lab, I guess.
- [42:34]
Cutter Wood
Absolutely. And it's, you know, now these days it's also, it is chock full of hormones. Right? You can, people will, they'll put vanilla actually into medication sometimes because then you can tell just by the scent of the urine whether or not somebody is sticking with their medication regiment. You can tell by whether or not it has certain aromatics in it, whether or not somebody's been exposed to wood smoke for like a You know, a fire hazard, whether or not they need be treated for that. One of the most amazing things is for years, actually, up in Manitoba, hundreds of thousands of horses were yet raised solely for their urine, just to produce the, the medication Premarin, which actually comes from pregnant mare urine, to, to treat symptoms of menopause.
- [43:22]
Mike Carruthers
And still, and they still do that.
- [43:24]
Cutter Wood
It's, it's gone down now. You know, Premarin is not in its heyday. It was at one point in time one of the most prescribed medications in the. The country, though. My favorite detail about that is that actually is one of those ones. You know, I, I gave a reading and a doctor came up afterwards and they said, you have to get Premarin in there. Hundreds of thousands of horses, their only reason to exist is just basically to, to pee in a cup and have it made into a pill.
- [43:47]
Mike Carruthers
Another thing humans excrete are tears. And what's interesting to me about tears is they're always there, right, Lubricating your eye. But emotions can make lots of tears and they run down your face and the emotions that create that are both happiness and sadness. So I'd be curious to know more about that.
- [44:11]
Cutter Wood
Yeah, yeah. So the important thing here, there are three kinds of tears, right? There are the kind of everyday tears, basal tears that your eyes just produce, trying to keep your eye lubricated and moving around. Then there are reflex tears, right? You know, something blows into your eye. If you get a bug in your eye, your eyes cry then. But, and this is one of the things that makes tears the most fascinating. Humans, and only humans, have this third kind of tier, emotional tears, really. And we don't, we still don't have any idea why. They could also be used as a diagnostic tool, much like urine is, you know, if you were able to simply kind of harness the, the minute quantities there. And two, the thing I find most fascinating with tears is people are so afraid of them, right? Especially, you know, a lot of people are uncomfortable with the idea of crying, especially men. And I have a good friend, for instance, he's a lawyer, has never cried in his entire life. And when his first child was born, he was so overcome with emotion that he passed out. He just lost consciousness because he didn't know how to deal with it.
- [45:18]
Mike Carruthers
But what's so interesting to me about tears is, and maybe there's no answer for this, but it's the same reaction, the same reflex for sadness and for happiness. And I've heard the explanation that you cry when you're happy to kind of tone down the happiness to try to keep you in a range of emotions that you don't go off the scale. I don't know if that's true or not.
- [45:45]
Cutter Wood
It's not clear why people cry from both happiness and sadness. But what is interesting about tears is that they do have this emotionally regulatory effect, it seems. And again, this is one of those things that can really vary person to person. But what they found with studies is that when you cry, actually it changes the ratio of activity in your parasympathetic and your sympathetic nervous system. So now one of these is kind of your fight or flight instinct, right? And one is kind of your just kind of relaxing instinct. And one of the things that tears seem to do is they. They amp up that fight or flight instinct and then they suddenly quiet it down. So, yeah, again, I think it does have some. There's some evidence there to back up your idea that that crime really kind of keeps you in this safe range.
- [46:33]
Mike Carruthers
But going back to your friend who has never cried, he has never cried and he's proud of that, or he's frustrated by that and wish he could, or that's a badge of honor that he's never cried.
- [46:45]
Cutter Wood
I don't think he's particularly proud of it. I don't think he's particularly disturbed by it either. But I think he had never thought about it too much when we talked about it. And then I, I think through our conversation, he realized it was something that he should be thinking about more. Because one of the. My biggest things that I took away from researching crying is just. It is a good way to realize what is important in life. This is how we realize that a. A relationship is important to us, right? Because we say goodbye to that person and we feel sad and we cry. This is how we realize that we loved that movie because we laughed so hard that we cried. This is. It's just a great signifier. It can tell you so much about how you actually feel.
- [47:25]
Mike Carruthers
So the last thing we're going to talk about, and I promise it won't get gross, is throwing up vomit. So I will let you take the lead on that one.
- [47:35]
Cutter Wood
Well, yeah, so vomit. I decided that if I was going to write about this, I should experience it for myself in the most intense way possible. So I, I joined a cult in Orlando called the Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth. And this cult uses as its kind of, you know, quote unquote holy medicine, a. A drink called ayahuasca made of this Amazonian vine. And what this drink does, basically, you Know, basically causes people to experience the most excruciating nausea they've ever experienced in their entire lives. So I signed up for this, much to my wife's dismay, and went down there. You know, they. They do this basically because you feel very, very sick. So sick that eventually you vomit. And in vomiting, they think you. You know, you meet God, you commune with the spirit world, and you're healed of all this trauma. And for me, that was not the case. I just kept feeling sicker and sicker and sicker. And of course, you know, I'm lying out there in the sun in this ridiculously humid day. It's. It's basically like being in a sweat lodge. And so I didn't have any transcendent experience except the experience of realizing that I was so dehydrated I was about to die and say I had to be evacuated from this place. I never actually even experienced my own vomiting. But this is the craziest thing. I am still so thankful for this experience because despite all of the personal unpleasantness for it, the crazy thing of going down there is seeing the other people who had come to this place looking for relief. You know, like I've said, this is. This is basically the most punishing thing you can do to yourself. So the people who go there hoping to find kind of healing or help help from this, they're really. This is their option of last resort. So you have people who are struggling with addiction. There was a woman there who's only 18 and had already lost count of all the times that she tried to commit suicide. One of the favorite people I met was a man who was a veteran of the Korean War, and he had such terrible PTSD that he could barely use his cell phone, you know. And were they healed by ayahuasca? Not really, but it was this really kind of beautiful atmosphere that you could get to meet these other people and actually kind of get a glimpse into the most kind of tender parts of their lives. And also, while it was hard to see, I think it was an important, for me, a very important thing to see about the United States. You know, this is what contemporary life is doing to us a lot.
- [50:10]
Mike Carruthers
Well, thanks for coming on and not getting too gross on a topic that can get pretty gross. Cutter Wood has been my guest. The name of his book is Earthly Journeys Through Our Body's Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. And if you'd like to read more, particularly more gross things, there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show Notes Cutter, thank you for being here.
- [50:36]
Cutter Wood
Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on the show and I'm looking forward to following along.
- [50:44]
Mike Carruthers
Here's a situation a lot of people find themselves in. You've got a favorite pair of shoes, but there's something wrong with them. They're in need of repair. Do you repair your shoes or do you just replace them? Well, according to Business Insider, here's the rule. If the upper part of your shoe dries out or starts cracking, then it's not worth repairing. But if the uppers are fine, the bottoms can always be fixed. And by uppers, that means anything that isn't the sole of the shoe. Even with a really expensive pair of shoes, you may think you're saving money by paying $50 to repair them instead of buying a brand new pair. But if you have to start fixing the uppers now, they're going to need more equally expensive repairs before too long. On the other hand, if the soles of the shoes are ruined, that's easy and not very expensive to fix and can give you several extra years of life and leave you feeling like you have a brand new pair of shoes. The trick is to make sure you find a good repair shop because they are not all created equal. And that is something you should know if you enjoyed hearing about the like button today or about your body's excretions, I hope you will share this podcast with someone else who would also enjoy hearing about those topics. I'm Mike Herruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know.
- [52:14]
Amy Nicholson
I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times.
- [52:16]
Mike Carruthers
And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director. You might know me from the League.
- [52:20]
Cutter Wood
Veep, or my non eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters.
- [52:25]
Amy Nicholson
We love movies and we come at them from different perspectives.
- [52:29]
Mike Carruthers
Yeah, like Amy thinks that you know Joe Pesci was miscast in Goodfellas and I don't. He's too old.
- [52:35]
Cutter Wood
Let's not forget that Paul thinks that.
- [52:36]
Amy Nicholson
Dune 2 is overrated.
- [52:38]
Mike Carruthers
It is.
- [52:40]
Cutter Wood
Anyway, despite this, we come together to host Unspooled, a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites.
- [52:47]
Mike Carruthers
Must sees, and in case you missed.
- [52:48]
Amy Nicholson
Ems, we're talking Parasite, the Home Alone.
- [52:50]
Mike Carruthers
From Grease to the Dark Knight.
- [52:52]
Amy Nicholson
We've done deep dives on popcorn flicks, we've talked about why Independence Day deserves.
- [52:56]
Mike Carruthers
A second look, and we've talked about horror movies, some that you've never even.
- [52:59]
Cutter Wood
Heard of, like Ganja and Hess.
- [53:01]
Amy Nicholson
So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure.
- [53:04]
Mike Carruthers
Listen to unspooled wherever you get your.
- [53:06]
Cutter Wood
Podcasts and don't forget to hit the follow button.
- [53:18]
Amy Nicholson
Have you ever heard about the 19th century French actress with so many lovers that they formed a lovers union? Or what about the aboriginal Australian bandit who faked going into labor just to escape the police? Which she did escape from them. It was a great plan. How about the French queen who murdered her rival with poison gloves? I'm Ann Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast Vulgar History. Every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we reexamine well known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas, sharing the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts. And if you're curious, the people I was talking about before the Australian woman named Marianne Bug and the French actress was named Rochelle no less. Name just Rochelle. And the queen who poisoned her rival is Catherine de Medici. I have episodes about all of them.