Something You Should Know - How Just a Little Rest Can Change Your Life & Fascinating Stories You Never Knew

Episode Date: August 29, 2019

You know what customer service people really like? They like when you are nice to them. This episode begins with a magical phrase the next time you need a customer service person to go the extra mile for you. (Lori Jo Vest, author of Who’s Your Gladys?) Your body needs to rest. Not just sleep - rest. And rest isn’t necessarily sitting on the couch watching television. There are different kinds of rest all of which are vital to your function and performance as a human being. Physician Dr. Matthew Edlund, author of the book The Power of Rest: Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough (https://amzn.to/2MJ6S5M) joins me to talk about the importance of rest and how to do it for maximum effect. Dr. Edlund’s website is http://regenerationhealthnews.com/ Ever notice that you never quite look right in a selfie? Your face can sometimes look weird and distorted. That has to do with the camera lens in the phone and when you understand how that works, you can adjust how and where you are in the picture so you look like you actually look. http://www.businessinsider.com/how-to-look-good-in-phone-photos-selfies-2016-8 There are so many strange and fascinating stories you probably never heard like: the time the Soviets invaded Wisconsin or why the scoring system is tennis is so strange or the story of the guy who bought Green Bay Packer tickets by donating blood and it saved his life. Dan Lewis has been collection these stories for his book series Now I Know . His latest book is called Now I Know: The Soviets Invaded Wisconsin: And 99 More Interesting Facts, Plus the Amazing Stories Behind (https://amzn.to/2MJ55O9). Listen as Dan shares some of his best stories. And to subscribe to his newsletter visit: http://nowiknow.com/ This Week's Sponsors -Omax Health Sleep & Stress Remedy. For 50% off your first box and free shipping go to www.OmaxHealth.com and use promo code SYSK. -Daily Harvest. Go to www.DAILY HARVEST.com and enter promo code SOMETHING to get $25 off your first box -Upstart. Find out how low your interest rate is by going to www.Upstart.com/something -Dashlane. For a 30 day free trial plus 10% off Dashlane Premium go to www.Dashlane.com/SYSK Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu.

She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future. Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks Daily wherever you get your podcasts. Like when people are having a very pleasant conversation with somebody they like, or they're reading a good book. Those can be profoundly restful. But I guess the main idea of rest is that it's regenerative. It's not the usual, oh, I gotta rest, I gotta veg out in front of the TV.

Plus, how to make your face not look weird in selfies. And fascinating stories you've probably never heard. Like the guy who saved his own life by buying Green Bay Packer tickets, or the story about the time the Soviets invaded Wisconsin. So at 6 a.m., five armed men raided the house of the mayor. They brought him to prison. They disbanded the police department. They overtook a local newspaper.

All this today on Something You Should Know. Something You Should Know. 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. Hi, welcome. If you're a subscriber to Something You Should Know,

this Saturday morning sometime you will get a new weekend episode on your listening device. Often these episodes will be carefully chosen classic episodes or interviews from classic episodes that you can't access anymore. Because, and you may not be aware of this, but for example on Apple Podcasts, as a podcaster you can only have 300 episodes up there. After you start adding more than 300, the early episodes fall off, and we passed 300 episodes a while ago. So there's a good chance some of those very early episodes you haven't heard before and can't access now. So these episodes will be new to you. Plus, you'll have an extra episode to listen to over the holiday weekend. First up today, as a customer, sometimes you need a little extra help beyond whatever the store policy is. Maybe you need something faster than

the usual delivery time, or maybe something broke two days after the warranty expired, whatever it is, it's a good idea to approach someone who can help and say the following, I need a hero. Can you be that for me? According to customer service expert Lori Jo Vest, we're programmed to want to be helpful to others. And when we're approached in the right way, people will usually be willing to do what they can. So often customers are disrespectful or angry to customer service people. So when you do speak in a pleasant voice and appeal to their good nature, you will very often get what you want. Just say, I need a hero. Can you be that for me? And that is something you should know. So when I say the word rest, you probably think of taking a break. You stop doing what you're

doing. You calm yourself down. You deactivate. Close your eyes. Well, that's one kind of rest. But there's also something called active rest, where it's not that you're not doing anything, it's that you're doing something different. Here to discuss the rather extraordinary power of rest and sleep is physician Dr. Matthew Edlund. Dr. Edlund directs the Center for Circadian Medicine and is an internationally recognized expert on rest and sleep and biological clocks.

He's the author of several books, including The Power of Rest, Why Sleep Alone is Not Enough. Hi, doctor. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me. So what is so important beyond the obvious? What is so important about rest and sleep? You have to rebuild your body. If you don't rebuild your body, it doesn't work. It turns out that sleep is like food. If you disrupt sleep enough in any organism that sleeps, that organism dies.

So effectively, we need sleep like we need food. And we also need rest because we have to regrow and rebuild our bodies continually or they won't work. Well, what's the difference? When I'm sleeping, I'm resting, so can I kill two birds with one stone or are they two different things? Sleep is a kind of subset of rest. And it's a very special kind of rest because we're generally not conscious. So we used to spend about a third. Now we spend about seven hours a night on average sleeping, at which point we regrow brain cells.

We actually grow new brain cells. We grow our skin at a much more rapid rate. We completely shift over our immune system, we basically reset the whole system while we sleep. But rest itself is the idea of restoring and rebuilding the body. And we're doing that a lot of the time when we're also conscious as well. I think it's easiest to understand it from this standpoint. If you see the body as a giant information system or as a group of information systems that have to update in order to survive, that have to update because the environment themselves that they live in has changed, then you see that rest becomes a necessary part because you've just got to make that system reset, grow, and renew. So what does it look like, ideally?

I mean, am I stopping every hour to rest? Do I rest before dinner? I mean, what is it in a practical, everyday person's life, what's ideal rest look like? Ideal rest looks like a state of relaxed concentration. First, if you hive off sleep as a special kind of rest, during the day, you want to be able to keep your mind in a state where you're able to do what you really want to do well and comfortably. To get there, there are lots and lots of different rest techniques that people have so that they calm themselves down enough to get to that state where they can do more and get more done. From a standpoint of physiology, different parts of their body are resting all the time. For example, if you're not running a marathon,

chances are at this moment you're regrowing your muscle cells, you're regrowing your connective tissue cells, you're regrowing your heart cells, all as a part of rest. Now, if you go out and you start running sprints or you run a marathon, you're not going to be able to do that regrowth at that point. So in that sense, rest is something that we're doing in the background a lot of the time. But in terms of actual conscious rest, another experience for that would be flow. There's that great psychologist, Csikszentmihalyi, who started studying the whole element of flow in the 1960s, and he realized that a lot of people would talk about these periods where they were

really focused on what they were doing, so much so that they weren't paying attention to the time and they weren't paying attention to being self-conscious. When people can get into a state of flow, they often tend to feel a whole lot better. Like when people are having a very pleasant conversation with somebody they like and they're really into it or they're reading a good book, those can be states of flow that are also profoundly restful. But I guess the main idea of rest is that it's regenerative, it's restorative, it's rebuilding, it's renewing. It's not the usual conscious thought of,

oh, I've got to rest, I've got to veg out in front of the TV. We've heard that people don't get enough sleep. Do people not get enough rest? Absolutely. that people don't get enough sleep, do people not get enough rest? Absolutely, because people are so focused on their cell phones, they're so focused on their screens, that in many cases, at least from a mental standpoint, they don't have enough downtime to just recharge themselves. I mean, yes, the population doesn't get enough sleep, and you see that all over the place in grumpy, unhappy people. You see it all over the place in people who just don't feel alert and alive and don't feel relaxed. I mean, one of the more interesting studies that was done many years ago at the National Institutes of Mental Health

is they actually put people into places where there was no clear sun. They controlled their light on their own, and they allowed them to sleep or rest as much as they liked. They could also do a lot of other things, reading, exercising, and so forth. And what happened at the end of the study was that people didn't want it to end because they said they never knew what it was to be alert. They never knew what it was to be this relaxed before in their lives. And I think a large part of the population now never really feels relaxed.

So how do you figure out if you're getting enough rest, and then how do you incorporate more rest into your life? You look first at the issue of sleep. Can you get enough sleep to feel alert and alive during the day? And a lot of people will tell you that with their kids and with their work, they really can't. So you try to say to them, okay, what can you do to hive off as much sleep time as you can so you'll feel alert and alive? And a lot of people will have major tradeoffs. That part of the population that does shift work, that's a really tough one.

But when you explain to people that, for example, sleep is needed to control your weight, that sleep is needed to perform well, that sleep is needed to prevent, for example, what happens on Monday morning when you have the peak of heart attacks in the United States. You basically let people know this is like food, and if you get enough of it or you try to get enough of it, you're going to function better. And then there's the whole aspect of rest where you kind of say to people, all right, your body's not a machine.

Don't treat it like a machine. There are going to be periods of time with your body clocks where you're more alert, periods of time where you're not so alert. Try, if possible, to alternate mental and physical activity. A lot of people tell me that they come back after their work day and they're completely and totally exhausted. Now, are they exhausted from physical exertions? Usually not.

What they're doing during the day is getting mentally exhausted, feeling that they're doing too many things together all at once. They're not finishing the tasks they have in front of them. How do you deal with that? Oddly enough, going to physical activity, alternating mental with physical activity, will often recharge and restart people. So you mean go for a walk? Yeah, go for a walk, especially with a friend, get some sunlight, do things where you can be socially, mentally, physically active. Another way to look at it is to say, what's health?

And a lot of people, like doctors, will tell you, as I just went to my, you know, nearly physical, oh, you're in great shape. You know, your cholesterol is low and all that kind of thing. But that's not what real health is. The World Health Organization talks about health as full physical, mental, and social well-being, to which I would add spiritual well-being, a sense of purpose and meaning, a sense of connection with something larger than yourself. So another way that you can rest through the day is to say, okay, what am I doing now that can help my physical well-being, my social well-being, my mental well-being, and my sense of having some purpose.

And for a lot of people, taking a walk with a friend will accomplish a lot of that. What is your sense for the typical, and obviously everyone's different, but for the typical person, like when they go to work in the morning, they can go full speed ahead for how long before the body starts to compromise what it's doing. Well, obviously, it's going to relate to how much sleep they had the night before and all the things that they're worried about. But there are different cycles in the human body, okay? And there's the 24-hour cycle that I've spent a lot of my career on,

but there are also even 90-minute cycles. And you find, for example, that a lot of people can't do really intense work for more than 90 or 120 minutes at a time, that they have to change tasks for a little while in order to just continue productivity at a similar rate. So what I would say is it has a lot to do with flow, whether you feel really focused on what you're doing. It has a lot to do with how well-rested you were in terms of sleep. It has a lot to do with motivation. If you're on a job you hate, it's a lot harder to really concentrate on it. But basically people can go for several hours in the morning pretty well,

especially from a body clock standpoint. The late morning people tend to get pretty alert. The real problem for a lot of people comes in the afternoon because until we had electric lights and industrialization, people generally napped. And a lot of people are just not that sharp in the early mid-afternoon. They tend to pick up around 4 or 5 p.m. The population can work pretty well, and it's interesting worldwide that you end up in a lot of industrial countries with like 35, 40-hour work weeks.

You don't tend to see them going more than that, and there are arguments that when you start working people more than like 45 hours a week, 45, 50 hours, productivity really falls off. But there's so many different factors in that, that you can't just say it's this one thing. I'm talking with Dr. Matthew Edlund. He's a physician and author of the book, The Power of Rest, Why Sleep Alone Is Not Enough. So Matthew, when I think of rest, when someone says, let's take a rest, rest means get up from here, go sit over there or lie down, close your eyes and rest. And, you know, but that's not necessarily what you're talking about.

I think of rest as active. I think of rest as highly active as where the body and the brain reset and restore themselves, and I think there's literally thousands of ways of doing that. It's not a passive process. If you think of rest in terms of sleep, sure, that's a very passive thing, but that's going to be controlled by body clocks, and that's necessary to life. As they say with any animal, if you sleep to private long enough, it dies. Sleep is like food. Why? Because you're restoring, rebuilding, regrowing large amounts of tissue and the whole human information system while you sleep. Now, during the day, what I would argue

is you try to alternate mental and physical activity because there are such things as active rest, like a very pleasant conversation with friends or colleagues, like going out and taking a walk with your family. Those sorts of things provide a real sense of well-being, and it can be physical, it can be social, it can be mental, but you try to aim for these things. You try to aim for, for example, better physical and mental well-being. You try to aim for flow activities.

I think what happens with a lot of the population is we get used to the passive activities because in many cases they're pretty addictive. I mean, social media can be pretty addictive. TV can be pretty addictive. It's easy. It's comfortable. But it's not necessarily going to restore us the way we really want. But oftentimes, I find myself, I'll work for a couple of hours, I'll sit right here where I am right now,

and I can tell I'm getting tired, and I'll go over to the couch that's six feet away and lie down and close my eyes, and wow, great ideas that I would have never thought of sitting here, I think of over there. Sure, because naps can... Well, it's not a nap. I'm not falling asleep.

I'm just lying there. Basically, then you're thinking. What you're doing, I mean, some people will call that meditating. But that, to me, is a different kind of rest activity. And that's a rest activity which is highly active, but it's mentally active. And you're allowing your brain to go in many different directions, which for a lot of people is among the more creative times they're going to have. And what you're doing is you're alternating activities, which is also really important.

The idea that we can treat ourselves as a machine. My computer doesn't care if it's working 12 or 24 hours a day. I do. We're not built that way. We are built to do things in segments. And it's interesting that you say it's at about two hours because that's true of a large part of the population. They can't really bang away at things with great intensity for more than 90 or 120 minutes.

They do, but they don't necessarily keep being as productive. What is social rest? Social rest is simply connecting with other people. It's having somebody that you feel you can converse with and have not just a conversation but an internal communication. You feel that there is somebody who's behind you. And that's a really big factor in people's overall physical health, as it turns out. When people, for example, have a lot more social support, I mean, these studies were even

done in the 1970s, and they just literally added up how many people you knew and how many people you had contact with, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, and they found that the people who had the most connections had, oh, about three-quarters less heart disease than the people who had relatively few. We are social animals, and we tend to feel a lot better when we're around others we can talk to, communicate with, and have some sense that they care about what's happening to us. It's my experience, anyway, that rest seems to be easier and feels better and more restful in an environment that is uncluttered or at least ordered, as opposed to trying to rest

amidst chaos, that humans seem to have some desire for order? We like order because, to a fair degree, our bodies are built on time. We like order in time, and even aesthetically, we like order in space. We find things to be beautiful if they're well-ordered and they're highly symmetric. If you go into, say, expensive restaurants or you go to very beautiful stores or you go into museums, you're usually not going to see them as disordered and cluttered. A large part of our aesthetics, especially our classical aesthetics, and this is true east and West, involves a cleanness of line, a sense of order, and particular kinds of proportions.

We feel good in those settings, not in very cluttered ones. Now, I know you make the case that rest also helps us become smarter, makes us biologically smarter. So So explain that. For example, physical activity. If you go outside and you walk, even for 20 or 30 minutes, you're going to grow new brain cells. You're going to grow them in sleep, and you're going to grow them in memory areas. We're effectively creating more memory storage because moving in three-dimensional space demands a lot of attention. There are changes neurologically, there are changes in our muscles, there are changes in our immunity, the whole bit. And we actually make

ourselves more adaptable as a result. So basically, if people do the things that you hear about in terms of health, in terms of eating a variety of different foods, having a minimal amount of physical activity, having social support, if they look at it from the standpoint of physical, mental, social, spiritual well-being and do things in all four realms, they will tend to have bodies that are far more resilient. Another example, if you look at the healthy habit studies,

if you have women who over their lives will walk 20 to 30 minutes a day, eat their vegetables, not smoke, not drink that much, keep their body mass index below 25, in other words, not get rather big, the average female who does that, if you could follow them over a lifetime, will have an expected increase in lifespan of 14.4 years versus the average. In other words, if you look at longevity, if you look at preventing Alzheimer's disease, even if you look at preventing cancer, a very, very large part of it is a particular lifestyle that just makes us more resilient and restores us more effectively. This isn't

rocket science. This is stuff that most of us can do. Well, they can do, but they don't necessarily do it. No, because people have jobs, because people have families, because people have obligations. But if you even start to think this way, people get healthier. And people don't even believe this, but there's a matter of just intentionality. There was a study that was done in Boston where they looked at hotel maids, most of whom were Latinas. And they said to one group, okay, what you're doing is really fine. It's really healthy. Keep at it.

And they said to the other group, what you're doing is really fine, really healthy. Keep at it. But you're also fulfilling the Surgeon General's recommendations on healthy physical activity. And that second group, a year later, had lower cholesterols, lower blood pressure, seemed to be in a healthier state than the first group. Now, they're basically the same folks. They're doing the same job. But one group is told that what you're doing is healthier than the other group is told.

What's the end result? They end up healthier. Why? In part, probably because they were told, this is good for you, and they did more of it. Instead of this being, you know, the imposition of hard labor, which for many it is, the idea that this is actually healthy for me, this will give my body a better chance to feel good and have, you know, less heart disease, for example. They did more.

That seems to be what happened. Our ideologies change us. If we believe certain things, it changes what we do. And when we change what we do, it changes what we are, what we become. And what we do is what we become. I mean, if you look at what happens to a human organism, what it does has a profound effect everywhere. And clearly rest is one of those things that has a profound positive effect.

Dr. Matthew Edlund has been my guest. He directs the Center for Circadian Medicine, and he's an internationally recognized expert on rest, sleep, and biological clocks. His book is called The Power of Rest, Why Sleep Alone is Not Enough. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes, and there's also a link to his website, which is regenerationhealthnews.com. There's a link to that in the show notes as well. Thanks, Doctor.

My pleasure. One of my favorite overall topics that we occasionally discuss on this podcast is the topic of fascinating, some might call them trivial or unusual, but interesting facts and stories that are almost too strange to believe. And there is no one better at gathering these stories than Dan Lewis. Dan has authored a couple of books. One is called Now I Know. The other is called Now I Know More. And his latest is called Now I Know, The Soviets Invaded Wisconsin, and 99 more interesting facts plus the amazing stories behind them. Hey, Dan, welcome.

Hi, thank you for having me. So before we get into when and why and how the Soviets invaded Wisconsin, how did you get interested in this? How did you decide that gathering these kind of unusual stories was so interesting? I've always been the person who wants to have a fun story at the ready. So I'm naturally curious. I love to read. I love to learn new things, even if they're minutiae, maybe even specifically if it's minutiae. I want to have a story at the ready about any topic. And clearly you do. So and let's start with when the Soviets invaded Wisconsin, because I don't think a lot of people are aware that the Soviets invaded Wisconsin. So tell that story.

After World War II, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in the Cold War. The threat of nuclear war made both sides very afraid of one another. And the communist threat in the United States was something that loomed over everything. Day-to-day life went by as normal, but on May 1, 1950, something changed in the town of, I think it's pronounced Mawsony, Wisconsin, where all of a sudden, the whole town seemed to be taken over by communists. So at 6 a.m., five armed men raided the house of the mayor. They brought him to prison.

They were self-described agents of something called the United Soviet States of America. They said they were taking over the town. They disbanded the police department. Some others joined them, and they overtook the local newspaper. They brought nuns out of a local Catholic school and brought them to stockades. And they even arrested the executives at the local paper mill, which employedover of the town. And then that night it ended, and it ended totally peacefully because it was a stunt. The American Legion, which was made mostly of war veterans, was trying to make a point, which is that the communist threat was real and it was dramatic and it was something that every citizen should be aware of. But the whole point was to get attention. They were looking to tell a story about what would happen under communist rule

if America were to allow it to happen. The stunt was pretty successful. It got the attention of newspapers across the country. Life magazine had a photojournalist there, and they covered it in extraordinary detail. And for one day, the people of this town in Wisconsin really thought they were living under communist rule, or at least they were willing to play along. Unfortunately, the mayor led a rally at the end of the day to celebrate the freedom that they had not actually lost. And he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage during it. He ended up losing consciousness, and he passed away five days later.

You know, I don't think I ever heard that story before, and yet I've Googled it, and indeed it's true as you say, but I don't think most people know that. Now, you talk about carrots, and most of us think of carrots as orange carrots, but there's more to the story than that. If you were looking at wild carrots, you'd find that they came in a rainbow of colors. There were white ones, there were yellow ones, and every once in a while there was an orange one, but that was not the typical one. What happened was the Dutch carrot growers saw these orange carrots, and in the Netherlands, orange is a color of pride.

And they said, hey, we want to cultivate these, and we want to grow these and make them something that people, at least locally, I don't think they had aspirations to grow them for people around the world, but at least locally. The 17th century Dutch farmers said, hey, we're going to cultivate these carrots because they're orange and that's pretty cool. As it turns out, those probably taste better. They have a different set of vitamins that you were not going to find in other carrots. So they kind of won out in the marketplace. You know, all of a sudden the orange carrots were popular, not because it was a point of national pride, but because they just happened to be better food. And you can still find purple carrots and yellow carrots and white carrots

if you go to the right grocery store and you really look for it. But by and large, we think of carrots as orange, and the purple ones have kind of fallen to the wayside. So talk about, because I know you investigated the story about why tennis is scored the way it is, love, 15, 30, and so forth. How come? If you're playing tennis, basically, it's a game to four points, right? Whoever scores four points first wins. But we don't say one, two, three, 4. We say you start at love, not zero, which is in and of itself odd. Then you go to 15 points if you score, if you win the first point, and then you go to 30.

So now we're counting by increments of 15. But instead of going to 45, we stop at 40. And then if there is a 40-40 tie, you have to win by two. So we drop numbers altogether and say, no, Mike, if you and I were playing and you got a point, it would be Mike's advantage. If I got a point, it would be Dan's advantage. And if we're tied, we don't say tie, we say deuce. There are two different reasons why we do different parts. The first one, and I apologize, I don't speak French, so I'm going to not do a great job pronouncing this word. But the word egg in French is l'oeuf. And if you are looking at the number zero, you could reasonably say, okay, you have an egg. In baseball, and I'm a big baseball fan, we often say that if a batter, if the team doesn't score any runs, they put up goose eggs.

If a, in cricket, they say ducks eggs. But in tennis, I guess in France back in the day, they would say that you start off egg, egg, or zero, zero. Or if you're winning, you know, you have 15 points, but your opponent has zero egg. And the oeuf sounds like the English word love or close enough to it, where over time it just kind of merged into an English word and became love. So the word love is just a natural progression of English-speaking people

mishearing French-speaking people say the word egg in their own native language. As for the 15-30, et cetera, most likely the way that early tennis matches were scored, the score was displayed on a clock face. And we divide clock faces in quarters, and we do so in increments of 15. So if you score that first point, we move the clock face a quarter of the way clockwise, so that's to the 15. If you score that second point, you get to 30. And that's how we got the 15-point increments in the sport. But then something went wrong because at some point or another,

someone realized, you know what, we want the winning person to be able to win by two. But unfortunately, 45 to 60, or if you complete the clock face, that doesn't divide evenly. You end up with 52.5, and there's no great way to show 52.5 on a clock face. So somebody, and we're not sure who, most likely said, you know what, let's figure out a way to make it an even increment. So instead of going from 30 to 45, you go from 30 to 40. That makes it easy for you to show someone's advantage by moving from 40 to 50

if somebody has scored that point when you were otherwise tied. So what's the story behind the mattress tag, those ugly, huge tags on pillows and mattresses? Why do we have them, and why is it against the law to take them off? So the short version is that you have no idea what's in your mattress except for what you're told. I sleep on probably springs and coils and all that other stuff. Some people sleep on memory foam or some space-age stuff.

Who knows? But the only way to actually check is to cut a hole in your mattress and look, and if you're going to do that, you're ruining your mattress. That's a bad idea. A century or so ago, before we had consumer protection laws, mattress manufacturers took advantage of this, and they would stuff the mattress with literally anything they could find. Corn husks were very popular.

Old rags, especially oily ones, were popular. Basically, a mattress was a great place to hide your garbage and then sell it to somebody else. So in order to protect consumers all the way down, the government now requires that you have a mattress tag that says what's inside the mattress. One of the stories I found was really interesting was about phone numbers,

and that phone numbers, although they might have eventually been invented anyway, originally were invented as a result of the measles. So when phones were new, it didn't have the modern infrastructure we have today. Somebody had to actually connect you to the other person you were calling, and that was a job. And that job required that you have some understanding of who's in your town and what wire connects to what port in order for a person in one house to speak to a person in another house. That didn't require phone numbers. That just required a switchboard operator who knew who the customers in the area were.

Unfortunately, when it comes to people doing jobs like that, they need to be healthy. And when a measles epidemic swept Lowell, Massachusetts, they realized they had a problem. The switchboard operators were getting sick, and no one was able to connect the call. So a doctor, his name was Moses Greeley Parker, he came up with a solution. The solution was very simple.

The phone company would assign a unique ID number to all of their customers, and at the time we're only talking about 200 customers. And on the switchboard, you'd see that identification number displayed. So anybody without any training could connect the call because instead of connecting to a specific person, you're connecting to the number that the caller knows and has provided. So instead of saying, hey, connect me to Mr. or Mrs. such and such, you say, oh, connect me to number 135.

And the switchboard operator says, great, here's 135, plugs in the right wire, and your call is good to go. Amazingly, a lot of people were upset by this. They were horrified that their identity could be boiled down to a unique identification number. So there was this crazy backlash to having a phone number where people said, you know, I don't want to be, what's the quote I have here? It says, many customers expressed that they would sooner give up their phones entirely rather than submit themselves to the dehumanizing indignity

of being identified by a number. But it stuck anyway because, you know, pragmatically there wasn't another option. So I like the story about the Green Bay Packers fan who basically gave blood, sold his blood, to buy season tickets to see the Green Bay Packers and what happened as a result. There see the Green Bay Packers and what happened as a result? There's a Green Bay Packers fan. His name is Jim Becker. If you don't know the Packers,

if you're not a sports fan, if you're not a football fan, the Packers are an interesting football team to begin with because they are owned by their town and Green Bay, Wisconsin is very much all about the Packers. So Mr. Becker was one such resident, and he wanted to go to as many games as possible. But, you know, football tickets cost money, and he ended up selling his blood. He would get his blood drawn, I think, over the course of a decade,

more than 100 times. He sold 145 pints of blood to pay for season tickets over the course of his fan career. That's weird enough, but it turns out that doing so probably saved his life. Becker had a genetic disorder, a disorder where his body retains so much iron in the bloodstream, and left untreated, it's fatal. His father passed away when he was younger, I think around in his 40s. His grandfather, it seems, was also in a similar position. His blood disorder needed to be treated, otherwise he was likely to suffer the same fate. And as it turns out, the way you treat this disorder is through bloodletting, basically by donating blood.

He wasn't aware of the problem when he decided that this was a great way to buy Packer tickets, but by donating blood, or by rather selling his blood to buy these season tickets, he also ended up treating his disease that he didn't even know he had. So talk about Abraham Lincoln and the founding of the Secret Service. I think that's a really interesting story. As you know, Abraham Lincoln and the founding of the Secret Service. I think that's a really interesting story. As you know, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated on April 15th, 1865 at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C. John Wilkes Booth shot him while he was watching a play. He actually shot him on April 14th, and Lincoln died the next day.

Today, the president is protected by the Secret Service, and we think of the Secret Service as focused on protecting the president, the first family, and former presidents as well. But that's actually not their role. We think that if the Secret Service had existed when Abraham Lincoln was shot, he wouldn't have died that day, and he would have lived out his term and the rest of his life. But as it turns out, that's not quite true, because on the morning of April 14, 1865, Abraham Lincoln signed the executive order which created what is now the Secret Service. So the Secret Service actually was founded on the day Lincoln was shot.

He wasn't trying to protect himself, though. The Secret Service's main job is to stop counterfeiting. The Secret Service is the police department, if you will, of the Department of the Treasury. And at the time, with the Civil War having just ended, there was a lot of fake money flowing in the United States. And Lincoln decided that the Department of the Treasury needed a police force in order to stop this. So his point in forming the Secret Service was to stop counterfeiting, and they still do that today. But over time, the agency that he created

on the day that he was shot would end up protecting future presidents from a similar fate. Great. And there's seemingly an endless supply of these stories because you've got your several books and there's also a daily, a free daily newsletter that Dan sends out with more of these stories. If you're interested, you can sign up for his newsletter at nowiknow.com. And there's a link to that also in the show notes. And there's also a link to his latest book, Now I Know, The Soviets Invaded Wisconsin,

and 99 more interesting facts, plus the amazing stories behind them. Thanks for being here, Dan. Appreciate it. Great. Thank you very much. Have you ever looked at a selfie of yourself and thought, wait a minute, I don't look like that? That's because of the properties of a smartphone lens. They can stretch and distort your face when it's close to the camera.

The trick is to understand that the distortion is worse at the edges of the frames, and what gets exaggerated are facial features that project towards the camera, like noses or foreheads, depending on the pose. So the trick is to move a little farther away from the camera, move your head a little closer to the middle of the picture, and keep your chin and forehead equidistant from the camera. The result is a selfie that looks a lot more like how you really look to other people. And that is something you should know.

Be on the lookout for our new Saturday episode that starts this Saturday. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook, starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Shinnok wherever you get your podcasts. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot.

Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.