Something You Should Know - The Amazing Reason You Get Disgusted & Inventions that Could’ve Happened Much Sooner

Episode Date: October 1, 2018

Not long ago I went to the supermarket only to find everything had been moved around. Nothing was where it used to be. Why? I’ll explain why they do that and other little tricks supermarkets play on you. http://www.popsugar.com/smart-living/Supermarket-Psychology-Tricks-18344600?stream_view=1#photo- Ever wonder why certain things disgust you? The things you find disgusting may be perfectly acceptable – even pleasing to someone else. Disgust turns out to be a fascinating human emotion. No other animals get disgusted by the things we do. And this emotion has served us well. Rachel Herz, a teacher at Brown University is also author of the book, That’s Disgusting: Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion (https://amzn.to/2xTcjVG) joins me to discuss why we get disgusted. Very few people think they look great in photographs. So I have some advice from top photographers on what to do so you look great in every photograph you are in – no matter who is taking the picture. https://www.thrillist.com/lifestyle/nation/how-to-look-better-in-photos-best-ways-to-pose-for-pictures It is amazing to think that so many inventions that changed how we live could’ve been invented a lot sooner. The stethoscope, the compass, human flight and other inventions took way too long to materialize since the technology for them was around a long time ago. It's just that no one figured out how to put it all together. Ryan North, author of the book How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler (https://amzn.to/2DFFLoy) takes us on a journey back in time and explains what went wrong.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, ever go to your supermarket only to find that everything's been moved around? I'll tell you why they do that. Plus, the fascinating emotion of disgust, and why we all find different things disgusting. In Arabic cultures, it's interesting to burp loudly at the end of a meal, so like a big belch is a real compliment to the chef. Whereas if we were sitting around a dinner table in North America and someone let out a giant belch, people

would think, oh my God, how inappropriate, that's disgusting. Also, some professional photographer tips on how to look good in any photograph. And it's amazing how many inventions should have been invented a lot earlier than they were. One that comes to mind is the stethoscope, which we could have invented around 300 BCE. That's when we first invented paper. And they were actually invented in 1816 CE. So that's over 2,000 years we could have invented it and didn't. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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 is 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 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. 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. One of the questions I'm asked most often when people find out I host a podcast is, how do you make money doing that? Can you make any money doing that? Well, we make our money from advertisers, from our sponsors, unlike other podcasts that sometimes ask listeners to donate, which is fine, but we don't do that. We make our money from the sponsors who advertise on the program. So if you want to support this program, support those sponsors if they have something that sounds interesting that you might like to buy,

and that helps us. First up today, have you ever gone to your favorite grocery store only to find that they have rearranged everything? You finally got to the point where you know where everything is, and now it's somewhere else. Well, why would they do that?

It's often done on purpose, because if you don't know where the items are, you'll end up spending more time in the store. And more time in the store means more time to browse and more chances to tempt you into buying more items. Here are some other ways grocery stores get you to spend more money. Those 10 for $10 deals. 10 for $10 sounds like a great deal. However, you'll get the same

savings even if you only buy one item, according to the New York Times. A grocery store survey found that people bought way more items when they saw the 10 for $10 deal versus a 5 for $5 deal and a 1 for $1 deal sale. Bigger carts. Shopping carts are bigger than they used to be, and that's so you'll put more things in it. Research found that when the size of a shopping cart doubled, consumers bought 40% more items. And you've probably heard of this. It's the eye-level trick.

Items that are placed at eye-level on the shelves tend to be pricier, name-brand goods, which are the products the supermarkets want you to buy. Check out the lower shelves for similar items that have lower prices and less of a markup. And that is something you should know. So there are things that absolutely disgust you. I don't necessarily know what they are, but you know what they are. Maybe it's snakes or spiders or the sight of blood or body parts or dead bodies. Whatever it is, disgust is a human emotion. Apparently an exclusively human emotion.

I mean, you might be disgusted by the sight of that dead possum in the road, but your dog has no problem going over and sniffing it and maybe even giving it a lick. So they're not disgusted by it. But disgust is a fascinating emotion. It has served an evolutionary purpose by keeping us safe. How? Well, here to discuss that is Rachel Herz. Rachel is a psychologist who teaches at Brown University. She is an expert on the psychology of smell, and she's author of the book, That's Disgusting! Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion.

Hey Rachel, you were here back in July talking about why we eat what we eat in episode 192. So, welcome back. Hi Mike, thanks for having me on. So what is it about disgust that is so fascinating to you? Disgust, it seems to me, is an evolutionary add-on to the emotion of fear that enables us to deal with things that are threatening to us in a slower, more indecisive or uncertain kind of a way. So, for example, fear helps us escape from things that are immediately threatening to our survival. So the fire and the tiger, we need to run, we have to get out, we have to do whatever we can

or crouch down and freeze or whatever so as not to be consumed, eliminated by that very serious threat. Now, that's happening all very quickly. Now, disgust is an emotion that evolved to protect us from things like ingesting poison and being contaminated by disease. Those are the sort of the basic elements that trigger the emotion of disgust. Oh, so if something smells disgusting or tastes disgusting, we tend to stay away from it, which protects us from disease and those kinds of things. But as I said in the beginning, you point out that disgust is exclusively a human emotion.

There are no other animals that feel disgust? As far as we know from the way that humans experience disgust, no. It seems that other animals can, for example, learn the connection between a cue like the smell of something or the sight of something and that that means that that food is rotted and I shouldn't eat that. This is sort of the most basic primitive aspect of disgust. But apart from that, no. It seems that even though disgust is there to protect us, things we find disgusting could also harm us, somehow we're attracted to it as well. I mean, we stop at the traffic accident and look and may see something disgusting, but we look anyway.

There is a kind of a paradoxical or perverse attraction to things that are disgusting. I mean, Cicero said that the line between lust and disgust was extremely fine, and as an example of something that could be disgusting or not disgusting, I'll give you this particular scenario. Let's say that your lover licked your cheek. So you might find that, you know, erotic, a-plealing, all kinds of positive emotions. Now, if a stranger walked up to you on the street

and licked your cheek, I can guarantee you'd be totally repulsed. So here you have the exact same behavior, and in one case you code it as being pleasurable, interesting, exciting, erotic, whatever. In the other case, it's disgusting beyond belief. And here we have, you know, this kind of fine line between desire and disgust. Well, we see this in the media all the time. A lot of television shows and movies contain, you know, disgusting-looking alien creatures.

They're full of, you know, death and mayhem and dead bodies and body parts. And it's all quite disgusting, and we all go watch it. Right. Well, we're really drawn to these kinds of things, because one of the major aspects of what disgust is about is about death. So, you know, we look at the traffic accident because in a way it's sort of, thank God that that's not me as part of what's going through your mind. And what happened to those people and how could I avoid having that happen to me? And so part of it is about kind of protecting ourselves with getting a little information about what might be out there and that might help us protect ourselves. But there's still

this strangely perverse desire to sort of expose ourselves to things that are also really unpleasant. And so the horror movie is that exact example where we have, you know, blood and guts and horrifying things happening all over the place, and yet we're attracted to it. Now, there are people who aren't attracted to that at all, and it has to do with a certain degree of what's called sensation-seeking. So people who like a lot of stimulation are going to be more attracted to horror movies and riding roller coasters than people who aren't. And there's

also a bit of an age thing. So the older you get, the less likely you are to want to ride a roller coaster or see a horror movie. But so there are these other factors that are involved, but there is still, you know, a certain degree probably amongst everyone that they are kind of want to see behind the curtain. Is there a gender difference in disgust? I think of perhaps little boys who find certain things fascinating and girls might find them disgusting. Yes, there is a big gender difference in disgust that women are and girls. So all ages of females are more disgust, that women and girls, so all ages of females, are more disgust sensitive than males are. However, in the realm of sexual disgust is where the biggest differences lie. So

things that are sexually inappropriate or perverse or whatever, however you want to call them, women or girls, any age females, are more likely to be disgusted by them and here again we can offer an evolutionary explanation for why because since childbearing and pregnancy and so forth is such a high risk physiological proposition in the first place and sex is how you get there anything that seems risky or possibly that could lead to contamination or disease of any kind are things that is that are beneficial for women to avoid. So there's sort of an explanation biologically for why women are especially sensitive to things that are connected to sex and disgust.

Does it seem to you that as we've become more civilized and more, I don't know, proper, that we try to hide things that are disgusting, that we want them out of our sight. Yeah, so I mean, there's sort of the idea that, you know, we're civilized and we don't do, I mean, this is where behaviors get coded as disgusting. So if you do something or you see someone doing something that's quote-unquote animalistic, like sticking your face into a plate of food and slurping it up, you know, we would say that that's disgusting, but why is that disgusting? There's nothing about poison, there's nothing about contamination, but this person is behaving like an animal.

And we are trying to distance ourselves from animals, again, because this whole fear of the fact that, you know, animals can get smushed on the road, just like you mentioned, and we like to pretend that that's not going to happen to us. I remember talking to Dr. Sherwin Newland, who wrote a book called Why We Die, and he talks about how we've sanitized death. That, you know, in previous generations, death happened in the home. Grandma would die at home, grandpa would die at home. And now Grandma and Grandpa die in the nursing home. Nobody sees anything. We've sanitized the whole death thing.

Exactly. And that, again, brings back why disgust is very connected to our fear of death. So not wanting to be connected to animals is because we know animals die and we don't want to die. So lots of the aspects of the things that were discussed by our big reminders are the fact that we are going to die too. Is some of this idea of things being disgusting because we think they should be disgusting, that everybody else thinks, we may not really think it's disgusting, but we say it's disgusting because that's kind of the social norm. Yes, certainly. I mean, that's one of the ways that both culture and social status can differentiate itself.

So one of the things with respect to culture that's very clear are things like what's acceptable to eat. You know, one man's meat is another man's poison. Why are you eating that stinking, rotting cheese versus someone else's eating some gelatinous, gloopy, fermented tofu? You know, so one culture says it's disgusting, the other says it's delicious and this sort of differentiates culture. But, you know, for example, in Arabic cultures, it's interesting to burp loudly at the end of a meal. So like a big belch is a real compliment to the chef. Whereas if we were sitting around a dinner table in North America and someone let out a giant belch,

people would think, oh, my God, how inappropriate. That's disgusting. So there's a lot of cultural coding that's different that's connected to disgust. And then, like you said, there's kind of a personal dimension, too. Like, you actually might find something rather appealing that other people think is disgusting. And that has to do with one of the things I think is so important and interesting about the emotion of disgust, and that it's about whatever it is means to us. And the meaning that we apply to whatever it is, is what makes it disgusting or delightful or somewhere in between.

We're talking about everything that's disgusting, and we're talking with Rachel Herz about it. Rachel is a teacher at Brown University and author of the book, That's Disgusting, Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet.

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but we're looking for like a really intelligent Duchovny type. With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes. So please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now. So Rachel, there are things that most people find disgusting, but some people might not find them disgusting, might actually find them pleasant or examples, and this is something that I bring up in my first book about smell, is that I actually like the smell of skunk. And I attribute this to the first time I was ever exposed to it and learned what it was. And it was a totally positive

experience in every way, shape, and form. And so that smell is connected to a really pleasant past experience for me. But when I was, and I was probably around four or five when I first had this experience. And then when I was a little older on the playground and it came up and I said, oh, I love that smell, all the other kids went, ooh, Rachel's so weird and ran away from me. And that's when I learned not to say that.

But it had to do with what the meaning of the smell was to me. You know, I hadn't seen the Pepe Le Pew cartoons and been told that skunk is a bad smell. I had had a totally different experience with it. Isn't that interesting that you like this? Do you like the smell or you just don't find it offensive? No, I actually really like it. There could be also some physiological explanation in the sense that we actually all have a unique nose. So unless you have an identical twin, no one has the exact same olfactory receptors as somebody else. And so I may be somewhat less sensitive to certain elements of the chemical bouquet that is skunk than someone who says they absolutely despise it. But I've actually met quite a lot of people who tell me that they

like the smell of skunk a lot. And interestingly, people who do not know that smell, so people who in Europe, for example, skunks are not indigenous. I did a little informal test with some researchers who were visiting me from Sweden, and we happened to pass the fact that a skunk had been on the street not that long before. And I asked them what they thought of that smell, and they were totally, like, neutral to it. Isn't that interesting? I never heard of that. I've never heard of anyone actually liking that smell.

I think I've heard of people not being as offended as others, but to actually like it is, first I've heard of it, and yet you say there's a lot of people. Yes, and so, but the point that I want to make, and which is what I think is so interesting, both about smell and disgust and how I kind of came to see them as really parallels is, you know, what we like and what we dislike when it comes to scent is to do with the meaning of that smell to us. And the meaning can change potentially as a function of the context, just like the saliva on your cheek can change in terms of disgust or delightful as a function of the context. And it's the same thing with, so the idea that something smells good or smells bad,

you know, for example, you could smell something and be in a fancy French restaurant and someone walks by and you see a cheese tray and you go, oh, that must be that, you know, fabulous cheese I can't wait to have. Or you could smell that smell and be walking behind a dive bar at 2 in the morning and go, oh, gross, I think somebody's probably just been sick, and that's where that smell is coming from. So it's the exact same scent. You interpret in two totally different ways.

In one case, it's really appealing. In the other case, it's really disgusting. And I've actually done research which really hits this point home. The same thing happens with disgust. So you think of something in a certain way, and it's appealing to you, or you think of something in a different way, and it's totally repulsive. In most cases, could you, if you wanted to, desensitize yourself to something that you find disgusting?

Well, one of the things that's interesting, and maybe you've even had this experience with walking your dog, is that the more we're exposed to something, the less we react to it in terms of an emotional intensity. So like people who are rescue workers or people, medical students and so forth, at the beginning of their training or at the beginning of whatever they're doing, they find the dead bodies, the mutilated bodies and so forth, really, really horrible. But over time being exposed and exposed and exposed, they become much less disgusted by that particular thing. Same thing with nurses or doctors and having to deal with, you know,

bodily fluids and all that kind of stuff. But so they may become desensitized to that particular thing from exposure, but still find something else that they're not highly exposed to disgusting. So still be disgusted by snakes, because they don't see them very often, but they're not disgusted by, you know, somebody, you know, being sick, or seeing somebody's insides out, that kind of thing. Ooh, yeah. Well, one of the things you said at the beginning that interests me, and it's clearly apparent on the cover of your book, is that there is that face that when you see something disgusting

and you make that face of disgust, everybody knows exactly what that is. Right. And the other thing that's super interesting about that face is it's actually the same face that you make if you taste something really bitter. So the rejection, this is how the idea about it being about rejecting poison. So poisons tend to be bitter. There's an extremely high correlation between whether or not something is poisonous and whether or not it's bitter.

So there are things that are bitter that are healthy, like certain leafy greens, but by and large, things in nature that we might put in our mouth that are bitter are going to be poisonous. And we make that exact same face to the taste of bitter as we make to being told, would you like to hold your neighbor's dirty dentures or something along those lines, or there's an earthworm on your foot and, you know, that kind of thing. And so what's interesting, so the idea of something repulsive or something that we want to get away from is totally scaffolded on this rejection of something

that's in our mouth, that's inside of us, that could kill us because it's poison and we need to get it out. So it's this idea of rejecting and getting rid of something that's dangerous to us. It almost seems as if the emotion of disgust isn't as necessary as it once was. I mean, we know not to drink contaminated water. We know which berries are poison and which aren't. So it's like we don't really need it as much as we used to. Well, I mean, that could be true from the point of view of how we've been able to control disease

and other sorts of things, like we're not so likely to be eating poisonous stuff randomly. So that is partly true. And I think that what's interesting is disgust has really been co-opted into another realm these days, and that particularly being the moral realm. So we talk about somebody doing something, and especially in politics,

we talk about this being disgusting and that being disgusting, when it has absolutely nothing to do with disease contamination or poisonous things that we have in our mouth, but has to do with this idea that poisonous things that we have in our mouth, but has to do with this idea that we're really rejecting that concept or that person as a function of what they've done or said. Do you think we overuse the word disgust? I mean, people will taste something and say, ooh, that's disgusting. Well, it might be unpleasant. It may not really be disgusting. But we use that word to convey unpleasantness, but it may not be disgust. Well, I think it's both.

I mean, the word disgust becomes the representation or the proxy for what it is you're feeling. So if you taste something and it's really bitter, let's just say, you could say this tastes really bitter, or you could say this tastes disgusting. And one of the things that's interesting is how language kind of has become blurred into other sorts of states, such that the language then becomes a stand-in for it. So actually, I and there are another set of, there are a bunch of us disgust researchers who don't think that moral disgust is the same thing as you just stepped on an earthworm with your bare foot. We think it's anger and rejection, but it's not the same as this sort of basic form of disgust I've been talking about. But we think that the word

disgust, because it's so powerful and emphatic, that it really conveys a level of rejection that's above and beyond, you know, saying, I think that was really morally wrong, you know, sort of if the language has more meaning if we use it in a certain way. However, by saying, you know, that politician did that disgusting thing, you actually can trigger these feelings of disgust, these kind of feelings of nausea. Nausea is like the classic physiological symptom of disgust. So that then it kind of backtracks onto itself, and then that moral or immoral behavior, rather, becomes truly physically disgusting.

You can feel nauseated thinking about what some politician did. Well, it's a pretty powerful emotion that has served us well and continues to serve us well that I don't think too many people think much about. Rachel Herz has been my guest. She is a teacher at Brown University, an expert on the psychology of smell, and she is author of the book, That's Disgusting, Unraveling the Mysteries of Repulsion. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Appreciate you coming back. Thanks, Rachel. Thank you. Bye-bye. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast.

And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy,

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Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life.

So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown, wherever you get your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. If you were to travel back in time, you would be a genius because it turns out a lot of the things that weren't invented until much later could have easily been invented a long time ago. It's just no one ever thought to do it. And if you went back in time, you could have shown them how to do it. The technology was there, it's just that nobody figured it out. That's sort of the premise of a new book called How to Invent Everything, a survival guide for the stranded time traveler by Ryan North.

It's an interesting look at what could have been, and if you ever do travel back in time, how you could accelerate civilization. Welcome, Ryan. Thank you for having me. So start with an example of something that probably should have been invented sooner but wasn't. One that comes to mind is the stethoscope,

which we could have invented around 300 BCE. That's when we first invented paper. And they were actually invented in 1816 CE. So that's, you know, over 2,000 years we could have invented it and didn't. And stethoscopes, the ones we're thinking of now, metal and plastic, complicated. The early stethoscope was not that complicated. It was just a rolled up tube of paper. And the reason it was rolled up is because there was a doctor who was heterosexual man and

he had a patient who was a busty woman and he wanted to listen to her heart and didn't want to put his head to her chest because that was too erotic an experience for him and so he rolled up this tube of paper to leave some room for jesus and listened through that and accidentally discovered that this both isolated and uh enhanced the sound he was trying to listen for. Well, isn't that weird? And, you know, that's like the perfect example of the, why didn't I think of that? Or I could have figured that out, but nobody did. Oh, it gets worse.

I'm thinking now, the compass, the Greeks, they knew about magnets around 200 BCE. And we actually meant the compass around 1000 CE. So that's, you know, 1200 years where we could invent it and didn't. And these initial compasses were just used for fortune telling before they were used for navigation. And so you think, oh, well, you know, again, a compass, that's pretty complicated. That's a tiny sliver of magnet on a pin wrapped in plastic. But these first compasses weren't that. If you have a piece of magnetic material,

if you have a rock that's magnetic, you tie that rock to a string, the string lets the rock rotate freely, the rock points towards magnetic north, there's your compass. That's tying a rock to a string took us over a thousand years. And that's even maybe more bizarre than the stethoscope because, you know, back then maybe the medical community was probably pretty small, but the number of people who could have used a compass in those 1,200 years, it seems like somebody, somebody would have said, hey, I've got an idea, and here's my compass. How about another one? Pasteurization, this is the process where you, to make food safe, liquid food, you bring it up to almost the boiling point, which kills the bacteria in it, so it's safer to drink, and then you let it cool. So it's just boil your food, let it cool. We could

have done that any time we were drinking milk that didn't come from other humans. So that brings us back to the invention of farming around 10,500 BCE. We actually invented in 1117 CE as a way to preserve wine, and then it's reinvented by Pasteur hundreds of years later, and he slaps his name all over it. That's 10,000 years where we just thought food goes bad sometimes. Oh, well, there's nothing we can do. And all we had to do was boil it. It's incredible the amount of time where we have this stuff that we can invent invent and we don't actually invent it. And when you look back over time, what are some of the big technologies that appear that seem to change everything? The one that struck me a lot was human flight,

where we have, for basically every generation, seen birds and wondered what we'd like to fly and tried to fly. And we spent centuries making wings and taping chicken feathers to ourselves and nothing worked and we finally get a human flight with a hot air balloon with the montgolfier brothers in 1783 ce but these hot air balloons these early hot air balloons weren't the fancy silks that you see now they were just uh burlap sacks and paper. And the Montgolfier brothers didn't know what they were doing. They thought they had captured a special energized gas called Montgolfier gas that caused things to rise.

It was just hot air. But thousands of years before that, in China, you had paper lanterns, which are the exact same principle, just at a tiny scale, where you have a candle that powers a hot air balloon. And so humanity, on one hand hand knows that hot air rises and in the other hand wants to fly and doesn't actually combine the technologies of the human size for for 2 000 years and this this was the culmination of like untold generations of human dreaming of what would we like to fly what would we like to travel the sky and we could have done it basically at any point in human history because if you want to make a burlap sack or paper, all you need are animal or plant fibers. And, you know, at any

point in history, a human who knows what they're doing could collect the fibers, make the paper, make the burlap, and generate a hot air balloon all on their own over the course of just one human life, just on their own. So that's basically the vast majority of human history where we could have been flying if we just knew how. I like how you talk about how we could have been much further along in medicine much earlier if we weren't so afraid in earlier times to dissect dead bodies and see what's actually going on in there. So talk about that. Because there's, across cultures, there's usually taboos against dissection because it feels weird to cut open a dead human body and see what's going on inside. But

it's how you learn what the organs do and what's going on. I mean, we thought, we weren't sure if lungs moved blood around because we just look at dead bodies and not know what's going on. So it's crazy the amount of stuff that we know now that's just common knowledge that would revolutionize the world even 200, 300 years ago. And what's so interesting to me about that, and I guess it's human nature, is when people don't know how something works and and for example they're reluctant to cut open a dead body and figure it out they make stuff up i mean they come up with theories about well this must be why it works without any real true scientific method to prove it works one of my favorite examples of that is uh phlogiston theory which was the idea that things burned because they were phlogistinated. There's a substance called phlogiston, and that caused things to burn.

And the way phlogiston theory worked was things stopped burning when you used up all their phlogiston. And it was only when we noticed that some things didn't quite match that theory that we came up with the oxygen theory of combustion, where things burn because of a chemical reaction. And that's what we operate under now. But we could still be wrong, or rather, we could still be more correct. Science is a process of getting knowledge gradually more correct. And that's what gets you medicine, what gets you computers, what gets you everything else we rely upon. Well, that's really interesting that there was, I've never even heard that word until you just said it, phlogiston. But did somebody just pull that out of the air and say, well, here's a, maybe this explains it. The problem was, if you put something burning in a glass jar and sealed

it, the fire would go out. So what causes this? And the way phlogiston explained that was, well, the thing that was burning was burning off its phlogiston, and that was going into the air. And once the air held as much phlogiston as it could then it would no longer burn and so that's why things were snuffed out if you put a glass jar on top of them and it's why they continue burning in the air and it seems to make sense it seems very scientific and that's what we all thought and what happened was um some metals when they burn actually gain mass instead of losing it like most things do so if phlogiston is happening then how do actually gain mass instead of losing it like most things do. So if phlogiston is happening, then how do they gain mass? And people thought, well, maybe there's this form of phlogiston that has negative mass,

and that seemed crazy. And then when you look closer, you think, oh, well, maybe it's a chemical reaction. In some ways, this can cause you to gain atoms, and that's how you gain mass. Basically, the first step in science is you're making something up. You're coming up with a theory which is just saying i don't know maybe this is what happens that can be anything you imagine and it's only by testing it that you eliminate the the bad theories and confirm the good theories so i mean to answer your question yeah it was just something someone made up but most of science is

just something someone made up and we just tested it to confirm that it was true and not just a wild idea. While you don't necessarily think of art and music as technology, there is technology in it. And you talk about perspective, where art is on a two-dimensional surface, but it looks three-dimensional. It has depth and height. And you look at that now, and it seems pretty basic. And somebody could have invented that a long time ago, but it really wasn't until the Renaissance that people actually figured out how to put perspective into art. If you look at Western European Renaissance art, it is filled with these drawings of perspective because perspective is a thing that was had just been invented around that time and you look at like the last supper it's drawn like baby's first perspective

drawing where there's these cubes in the background moving towards a rectangle everything is perfect perspective and it's it really drives through like the idea that art also has innovations that come along and then change everything. And so if you want to invent art, sure, there's different styles you can invent. You can bring a hold of, say, postmodernism sooner than would normally happen. But just by knowing the rules of perspective, you can change the whole course of artistic history. I like this idea that you talk about of we could have invented computers and we sort of did invent computers long long time ago before electricity there were machines that

could compute. We build these electronic computers you don't need electricity for them you can make them out of anything you can make them out of ropes and pulleys. A simple pulley moves something up and down. If up is one and down is zero, pulling the rope in that pulley turns a zero into a one. And it goes all the way to this recent paper, I think 2012 in Japan, they found a species of crab that moves predictably when it encounters another group of the same crab. And so you can build logic gates out of living crabs if you're if you know which crabs and you're clever about it and the idea of just like building a computational machine out of rope or or water or crabs at any point in history

is such a fascinating idea because the main idea of computers like the fantasy and the reality of computers is here's a machine where you either feed electricity or turn a crank you're doing something physical and it thinks for you it does the mathematics for you turning mental labor into physical labor is such a brilliant thing that we've accomplished and we almost don't even think about it but we've made machines that can think so we don't have to that's the ultimate form of laziness but it's a really productive laziness one of the things that you would think when you look back in history that humans would have figured out gotten together on and harnessed a little better is the measurement of the passing of time but in fact we humans really took our time

getting a handle on that. We sure did. And it's funny because you can think of, oh, well, how useful is knowing what time it is? People can just look at the sun and estimate. But latitude is based on knowing what time it is. You measure your latitude by measuring how far away your local noon is from where noon is at some point in the Earth, like Greenwich, where we decided's the reference frame and for that to work all you need is a clock that can keep track of time accurately while on a boat and that is turns out really really hard to do it took us a really long time to figure out because most clocks are based on repeating movement like a pendulum or something moving back and forth regularly and on a boat everything's shaking and clocks drift out of sync

horribly and if your clock dr drift out of sync horribly. And if your clock drifts out of sync, you don't know where you are and your boat can sink. So it's a really practical problem that we only ever solved by inventing really, really good clocks. But luckily, you can sidestep it. Because if you can invent radio, then all you need to do is send it a broadcast at noon every day. And that tells you what time it is. So it's this neat thing where had we invented these technologies in a slightly different order we could have saved ourselves a lot of hassle we could have not invented nautical clocks and said just broadcast

what time it is once an hour and saved hundreds thousands possibly millions of lives just by having now a reliable way of calculating latitude or longitude. Certainly, you would think that the development of agriculture, of farming food rather than hunting and gathering it would be a big game changer. Talk about that. Yeah, we tend to think of hunting and gathering, which is what happened before. We just walked around finding food where you found it. We tend to think of that as being the hard option, like you have to go out and hunt food. But in a lot of times, that's the easy option. That's the option where you just walk around and find food, eat berries that are there. It's relaxing. It frees up time. If you're inventing agriculture, now you have to work in a field. You're plowing, you're planting, you're harvesting, you're

smashing grain up. This is now way more work than what it used to be. And so one of the questions is, well, what would encourage people to give up hunting and gathering and start farming? And if it's a time of famine, then sure, if the farm was the only place that has the food, that makes sense. But in times of plenty, why would you ever want to do this? And one of the theories is that, well, it's interesting because if you want to make beer you need to have some resources need to be there you need to have grain that you can get reliably you need to get need to ferment it in a vat you need to have these things that are stationary

that you get with farming so one of the theories is that a way to induce people to give up hunting and gathering and start farming is want to have beer on a reliable basis you need to work on a farm or eventually build a civilization based on farming so it's kind of interesting to think we all might be here because our early early ancestors enjoyed beer more than they enjoyed raw berries when i listened to you talk about all the things that could have been invented sooner the technology existed it's just that nobody put two and two together and figured it out. It makes me wonder what in a hundred or five hundred years from now, or a thousand years from now, people will look back at us and say,

there it was, they had the technology, they just didn't put two and two together and figure it out. And I wonder what that could be. Ryan North has been my guest. His book is How to Invent Everything, a survival guide for the stranded time traveler. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Ryan. Oh, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

It does seem to be a pretty universal complaint that people don't like the way they usually look in photographs. But with so many cameras snapping pictures today, you're bound to be in some. So here are some top photographer tips to make sure you look your best in pictures. Push out your forehead. You'll feel like a complete idiot doing this, but tipping your forehead towards the camera with your chin slightly down can do wonders for any headshot. Don't face the camera directly. When you look straight on at the camera, you flatten your appearance and risk exposing a double chin. Instead, position your body slightly away from the camera,

then turn your head towards the lens and drop your front-facing shoulder a bit. This will result in a far more flattering picture. Put your tongue behind your teeth when you smile. It protects you from going into a grin that's just too big,

which not only comes across as fake, it can also look pretty scary. Take a deep breath to relax. It can really help calm yourself, which helps you look more at ease and natural in the picture. And master the squinch. Squinching is the number one tip from famed New York photographer Peter Hurley. A squinch is halfway between a squint and a wide-eyed stare. It takes practice and it's hard to explain, but if you search YouTube for squinch or Peter Hurley, he will teach you in a video how to master the squinch. And that is something you should know. If you like this podcast, please tell your friends,

share the link, and help the audience grow. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Hey, hey, are you ready for some real talk and some fantastic laughs? Join me, Megan Rinks. And me, Melissa DeMonts for Don't Blame Me, But Am I Wrong? We're serving up for hilarious shows every week designed to entertain and engage and,

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