How the LIKE Button Changed the World & Weird Things Your Body Does

Why is salmon pink? What is the shelf life of a Twinkie? What do almonds and peaches have in common? These are just a few of the fun food facts we cover to kick off this episode. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/food-facts_n_4788746 How many times would you guess the “Like” button is pressed by people every day around the world? You are about to find out and it is a lot! Where did the like button come from? Why is it so important? What does it do for the person who does the liking and for the person (or business) who gets your “like”? Listen to my guest Martin Reeves, who has explored the history of the like button and why it has become such a big part of our lives. Martin is chairman of the BCG Henderson Institute, a think tank for developing new business ideas and he is co-author of the book Like: The Button That Changed the World (https://amzn.to/4cTgCUn). What is going on right now in your body is astonishing. Things like tears and your breath and even mucus. It is all fascinating and worth understanding. (And I promise we do not get really gross!) Joining me for this discussion is Cutter Wood, who has thoroughly explored and researched this topic and written a book called Earthly Materials: Journeys Through Our Bodies' Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations (https://amzn.to/4lPEJHw) You have likely had the dilemma of owning a favorite pair of shoes that need to be repaired and the question is – do you fix them or just get a new pair? Listen as I reveal what the experts say that determines the answer to that question. https://www.businessinsider.com/should-i-repair-or-replace-my-shoes-2015-4 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! FACTOR: Eat smart with Factor! Get 50% off at ⁠https://FactorMeals.com/something50off⁠ TIMELINE: Get 10% off your order of Mitopure! Go to ⁠https://Timeline.com/SOMETHING⁠ INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠ right now! QUINCE: Elevate your shopping with Quince! Go to https://Quince.com/sysk for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! SHOPIFY: Nobody does selling better than Shopify! Sign up for a $1 per-month trial period at⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠ and upgrade your selling today! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mike Carruthers?

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• 1:27Mike Carruthers?

  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?

• 1:44Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:56Mike 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.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Mucus is one of the most important things, if not the most important thing that your body produces. It blinds 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.

• 2:22Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 2:27Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:12Mike Carruthers?

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• 3:57Mike Carruthers?

  Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, please let them know it was something you should know. It's the best way to support the show.

• 4:22Mike 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 You 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 2/3 of the salmon we eat,

• 5:03Mike Carruthers?

  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, eh, kinda 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

• 5:48Mike Carruthers?

  per, oh god, 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 1 ton of food per year. And that is something you should know.

• 6:11Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 6:25Mike Carruthers?

  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? I mean, listen to this. Supposedly, the like button is pressed over seven 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.

• 7:07Mike Carruthers?

  He's co-author of the book Like: The Button That Changed the World. Hi, Martin. Thanks for coming on Something You Should Know.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me, Mike.

• 7:17Mike Carruthers?

  So when and where did the like button first appear?

• 7:23Speaker 01

  Ah, 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.

• 7:55Mike 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.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  You know, 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 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

• 8:54Speaker 01

  encourage user reviews for restaurants that they couldn't afford to pay for 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.

• 9:16Mike 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?

• 9:38Speaker 01

  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 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 there and there 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 if you remember a site called Hot or Not. It was, you know, you voted on people's photographs,

• 10:19Speaker 01

  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 were 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 an opportunity to comment on somebody else's content, 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 not very captivating. You know, that's not going to keep users on your site.

• 11:04Speaker 01

  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 are 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 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.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  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.

• 12:07Mike 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?

• 12:20Speaker 01

  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, you know, hard work. You want to hijack something that's already there. And why the thumb? You know, 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,

• 13:04Speaker 01

  you know, with a visual appearance of a thumbs up.

• 13:07Mike Carruthers?

  But there is something. There's something about the like button that, you know, touches a nerve or something. If it's pressed seven billion times a day, there's something pretty magical about it. What is it that makes it so effective?

• 13:24Speaker 01

  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 reptilian 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 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.

• 14:10Mike 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?

• 14:25Speaker 01

  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 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 very difficult.

• 14:53Mike 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

• 15:08Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:09Mike Carruthers?

  Has the thumbs up and the thumbs down.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Thumbs down was obviously everybody that contemplated a thumbs up also contemplated a 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 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

• 15:54Speaker 01

  with that business model. So the thumbs down button still exists in one or two places, but it died off pretty quickly. It was it was positive attention that people that people wanted.

• 16:05Mike Carruthers?

  A lot of companies though now, certainly Amazon and others, have a star system. 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.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  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 there was never complete convergence, the star system. One of the interesting things about the like button is that it's it's it's intrinsically ambiguous and usable as humans use language in all sorts of ways. So 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 is trying to figure out which products to promote, which products not promote, and also to seem like a trustworthy place to buy things. And and one of the ways

• 17:02Speaker 01

  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 rater rating system. So 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 cleanup content feeds. And they happen to go with the star system. Yes.

• 17:31Mike Carruthers?

  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.

• 17:42Mike Carruthers?

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• 19:08Mike Carruthers?

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• 20:32Mike Carruthers?

  for a truly great night of sleep? Beam is just 83 cents per night. So, go to shopbeam.com/sysk now. That's shopbeam.com/sysk. So, Martin, I'm thinking of those times when I'm thinking about pressing the like button. If I'm gonna press the like button and no one's liked this thing before, I'm less likely to be... I don't wanna be the first. You know, like, there's a hesitation, like, "Well, no one's liked it before me. Why would I like it now?" But if there are 5,000 likes, yeah, sure, I'll pile on.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Well, that goes back to the, um, what you might call the evolutionary suite of human social behaviors. So, you know, how do humans deploy their superpower of social learning? 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. Uh, learning about the same problem than people that are not like me. So, um, 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, it's an act of homophily. And a second

• 21:57Speaker 01

  one is, um, which, which comes to your point is a, a preference for what you might call mild hierarchy. So in the animal kingdom, we have hierarchy. Um, nobody, uh, likes to upset the chief baboon or the chief orangutan. Why? Because they use violence or the threat of violence, 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, we, we like liked people because we become included in a group of people that, 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

• 22:42Speaker 01

  that are liked by others.

• 22:44Mike Carruthers?

  So the like button was created, from what you've said so far. It was created for businesses to, 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, it's moved from business to personal.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  It's generally the case that when you create an innovation, it has unintended beneficial effect, you know, like the, 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, you know, 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, um, it has an addictive quality, um, especially for, um, young girls during a, a, a, a formative period of their social development. They're, they're very, um, I mean, it's good science showing that they're, 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.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  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, pretty good evidence that there is, there's a pathology of especially young teenage girls that are quite, quite distressed by the social comparative aspect of liking and being liked. It's a very interesting innovation problem in itself because if you, if you can't foresee the beneficial effects of an invention, how could you possibly foresee the, the negative consequences, which are really rather surprising. I don't think anyone anticipated them.

• 24:40Mike 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?

• 24:52Speaker 01

  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 camp, as, as the brain chemistry of being liked or liking digitally, exactly the same, same part of the brain, 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.

• 25:33Speaker 01

  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 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 you go back to this very first question, this important first question you asked, which is, how many times does the like button click? 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, and we could do that at this very socially formative early teenage stage, and it can be deeply impactful. So it's, so it's the overwhelming

• 26:15Speaker 01

  of our evolutionary circuits by being liked or liking at a frequency that evolution didn't design us to handle.

• 26:25Mike 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, 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.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  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, 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

• 27:28Speaker 01

  many in the digital sphere, amongst many in the human language sphere, and you couldn't possibly generalize in this. But, but by focusing, I think there's a certain fascination in looking at the macrocosm in the microcosm. Through, through this lens of this very small humble icon, you can actually see a number of things, right? 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 the social and serendipitous innovation works in Silicon Valley. You can see how businesses are born.

• 28:03Mike 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 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.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, my pleasure.

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• 30:20Mike Carruthers?

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• 31:51Mike Carruthers?

  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. You know, 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.

• 32:24Mike Carruthers?

  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 Materials: Journeys Through Our Body's Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations." And I promise, I promise that this is not a gross conversation at all. So, so please, stay with me. Hey Cutter, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 32:46Speaker 02

  Hi Mike, thanks for having me.

• 32:48Mike 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.

• 33:02Speaker 02

  The biggest thing that I think no one really thinks about is you, 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 sacks, 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, a soda can or two of air, across an area about the size of a tennis court.

• 33:46Speaker 02

  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, it makes, 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.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  It's really pretty amazing and one of the few ways to actually affect your body's function willfully.

• 34:33Mike Carruthers?

  Which is why I suspect the idea of slow, deep breaths is a big part of meditation and mindfulness, that it is a way 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 dive in there.

• 35:02Speaker 02

  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 some big things. The color of hair is very complicated, obviously, and determined less by evolution and 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.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  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 kind of amazing and mind-boggling. So the mutation that causes red hair, you know, 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, you know, much more profound mutation. And one of the things it 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

• 36:24Speaker 02

  that if you have red hair, it's basically equivalent to 21 extra years of exposure to the sun. Pretty wild, so it makes it important for somebody with red hair to wear their sunscreen, right? But then in a stranger and more profound way, people with red hair, they actually process pain differently. 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 into account, or you should be considering that when you do so.

• 36:56Mike Carruthers?

  When you say people with red hair process pain differently, what does that mean? That it feels different?

• 37:04Speaker 02

  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 a different pathway 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 a different, you know, they might be more sensitive to other drugs.

• 37:23Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's weird.

• 37:24Speaker 02

  Pretty wild, right?

• 37:26Mike 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. It got brown and it stayed brown for the rest of my life.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, yes. 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 twenties usually in men, before slowly decreasing. And of course, with a lot of men, the hair going away entirely.

• 38:08Mike Carruthers?

  I want to talk about, and I, you know, it's, 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 I find it rather gross and distasteful.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  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. You know, I'm not, I'm not one to incline necessarily to the gross that material. But I was interested in it because I'd 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. You know, we often just think of blowing your nose, that's what mucus is, right? But

• 39:22Speaker 02

  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 know, you probably think of it the way I was taught to think of it, as a filter, right? You know, some pollen or some dust goes into your nose and mucus stops it. It turns out, that could almost not be further from the truth. It does do that, but it also plays a ton of different roles. And 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, right? This kind of collection

• 40:04Speaker 02

  of thousands of species of microbes that live on and in the human body. You know, 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, right? 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, right? This is where it lives, this is where it grows. It is actually actively fed by your mucus, right?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  A mute, 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?

• 41:01Mike Carruthers?

  But why does mucus tend to be more prominent and there's more of it when you're sick? Your nose gets runny, you're, why?

• 41:12Speaker 02

  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, any microbe, you know, 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, and take them out.

• 41:50Mike Carruthers?

  And so when it attaches to things that are dangerous in my body, does that mean it's trying to take out the, whatever it is in my body that's causing me to have a cold or the flu, or is, is it that fundamental? Or it's finding other things in there that are also dangerous and trying to take them out, or what?

• 42:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 42:32Mike Carruthers?

  So really, we need to learn to love our mucus because it, it, it's pretty important.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  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 a dysfunction of your mucus. Isn't that crazy? 80%. You know, any, almost anything that goes wrong in there somehow is related to mucus.

• 43:00Mike 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.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  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 evaluating a fluid to try and tell something about a human being's body, you know? They actually have symptoms and charts to, as a way of diagnose what's wrong with you. And yet it turns out that urine is this amazing diagnostic tool, right? You can tell all kinds of things, you know? 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.

• 44:05Speaker 02

  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.

• 44:13Mike 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.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And it's, you know, now, these days, it's also, it is chock full of hormones, right? You can, people, well, 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 a medication regimen. 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, or whether or not they need to be treated for that.

• 44:47Speaker 02

  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 medication Premarin, which actually comes from pregnant mare urine, to treat symptoms of menopause.

• 45:05Mike Carruthers?

  And still, and they still do that?

• 45:08Speaker 02

  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 country, though. My favorite detail about that is that actually is one of those ones, you know, 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 pee in a cup and have it made into a pill.

• 45:31Mike 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.

• 45:55Speaker 02

  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, if 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 tear. 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 minute quantities there.

• 46:36Speaker 02

  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. You know, he just lost consciousness because he didn't know how to deal with it.

• 47:01Mike 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.

• 47:29Speaker 02

  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 they 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 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 amp up that fight or flight instinct and then they suddenly quiet it down. So again, I think it does have some, there's some evidence there to back up your idea

• 48:12Speaker 02

  that crying really kind of keeps you in this safe range.

• 48:16Mike 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?

• 48:27Speaker 02

  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 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 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.

• 49:08Mike 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.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  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 joined a cult in Orlando called the Soul Quest Church of Mother Earth.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  And this cult uses as its kind of quote unquote holy medicine, 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 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.

• 50:18Speaker 02

  And of course, you know, I'm lying out there in the sun in this ridiculously humid day. 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 so, yeah, 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

• 51:03Speaker 02

  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 was only 18 and had already lost count of all the times that she'd 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 cellphone. 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,

• 51:47Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:54Mike 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 Materials: 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.

• 52:20Speaker 02

  Thank you, Mike. I really appreciate you having me on the show, and I'm looking forward to following along.

• 52:28Mike 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.

• 53:10Mike Carruthers?

  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 Herrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

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