Something You Should Know - The New Science of Love & The Fascinating World of Death

Episode Date: July 3, 2025

Who hasn’t had a brilliant idea or revelation while taking a shower? It seems the shower is a place where we do some of our best thinking. Why is that? This episode starts with an explanation. https://www.headspace.com/articles/shower-epiphanies What is love? Is it an experience, or an emotion or something else? According to Anna Machin, an evolutionary anthropologist at Oxford University, love is a human need that is as important as food, sleep or water. Listen to our discussion and you will realize how important having love in your life is and how it impacts your health and longevity. Anna is the author of the book Why We Love: The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships (https://amzn.to/3SzC8mp). Death is a hard subject for many of us to discuss. Yet, it is hard not to be curious about it because it affects us all – when we lose someone or when ultimately we must face it ourselves. However, it is not a tough topic for Caitlin Doughty to discuss. Caitlin is a mortician, funeral home owner and bestselling author and she talks about death in a much lighter and interesting way. Listen as she joins me to discuss some of the fascinating things about death such as: What happens if the person next to you on an airplane dies? What is embalming? Is it true that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death? Can you keep your father’s skull after he dies? Caitlin is the author of Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? (https://amzn.to/3SArg7C). Your refrigerator likely has a drawer for produce. And that turns out to be a lousy place to keep it. As you have no doubt experienced, the produce drawer is where a lot of food goes to rot and die. There is a better place to keep produce so it actually gets eaten. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/04/120430140027.htm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, why good ideas often come in the shower. Then, just how important is it to have love and connection in your life? Probably more important than you think. We are really recategorizing love now. It's not an emotion. It's far too complex to be an emotion. It's a need. It's a need as fundamental to your survival as water, food, shelter.

And it should sit at that level. It's absolutely fundamental to you. Also, if you throw a lot of produce away because it goes bad before someone eats it, you need to hear something. And a mortician explains some of the fascinating things that go on when people die. For example, people ask me all the time, can I keep my dad's skull after he dies? It's probably one of the top questions that I'm asked. And not really. That's going to be pretty complicated. All this today on Something You Should Know. Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on

Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine and it's good for your eyes too because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Specsavers.ca to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. 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. Hey there, welcome. Today, something you should know with Mike Carruthers. Hey there, welcome. Well, this episode has two interviews that should really grab and hold your attention. One is about love and the other is about death. And both of them I think you'll find interesting. First up today, have you ever had that experience, as I often have, of you need to come up with an idea or solve a problem and you take a shower and bang, the answer just pops in your head?

Well, it turns out it happens to a lot of people. Researchers from Drexel University put showering to the test and found it to be one of the most effective problem-solving techniques out there. It seems that in the shower our attention naturally broadens and our mental barriers tend to fade away. Showering shuts down sensory stimulation from the outside world and puts you in a state similar to meditation. Focus on the issue at hand in the shower and chances are you'll conjure up some more creative solutions than you would have anywhere else.

And that is something you should know. Love is complicated. We all have different loves in our life. Most of us have loved and lost. We've had our hearts broken. We've experienced romantic love, the love of a friend, a sibling, a parent, or a child, even a dog or cat. It seems that love is essential to humans. Where would we be without love? But why is it that love is so important? Can we really understand love and make it better? Joining me for that discussion is Anna Machen. Anna is an evolutionary anthropologist at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, and she's author of the book, Why We Love, The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships. Hi Anna, thanks for coming on.

Thank you for having me. It's great to be here. So what is love? And the reason I want to start with that is because in your book, you say that love is biological bribery. So that's a definition I've never heard before. So maybe start there. Okay. I will just say the answer to the question, what is love has employed me for nearly a decade and a half. So it's not a straightforward answer. However, one of the answers to it, if we look at the basic evolutionary answer to what is love, is it is biological bribery. It's a set of neurochemicals which evolved to motivators and then rewarders for investing in our survival critical relationships because humans are,

I would argue, the most cooperative species on the planet. We cooperate with the largest range of individuals. We cooperate in the largest range of circumstances and also for incredibly long periods of time, sometimes decades. We do that because we absolutely have to to survive. The trouble with cooperation is it's incredibly hard. We all know how irritating our fellow humans can be, and we all know how difficult it can be. Sometimes it can be survival-threateningly difficult. It might be that you have to do something for the good of the group rather than the good of yourself on that particular day. Therefore, we've needed a little bit of help from evolution to make sure that we do do this

investment in these cooperative relationships that are vital to us. And that's that's basically why it is biological bribery. This set of neurochemicals evolved because it works really well at making sure we stick around and that we invest essentially in those relationships. That is such an unromantic anthropology kind of definition of love. But like with so many other things, love isn't just roses and chocolates, love serves a real functional purpose. To put it very clearly, love has two key dimensions. It has the biological dimension, and that's where you find the neurochemistry and the neuroscience and the psychology and the genetics. But it also has a very strong sociological dimension as well, which is about the culture you're brought up in and the rules

you've been taught about love and who you're allowed to love and who you're not allowed to love and all those sorts of things that we all sort of take in as we grow up. So actually, love is very, very complex and there isn't a single answer to the question and there certainly isn't a formula for it. I think we've all heard the expression or variations on the expression that human beings need love. All you need is love. Is that true? Do we actually need love? You certainly need love. The time you critically, critically need love is when you're a very tiny baby. Particularly those first two years of your life, it's absolutely fundamental that you have love and that you have

loving attachments to your carers as a child. The reason for that is because we are born very, very underdeveloped compared to other primates. A lot of our brain development occurs after we're born, which is not seen in the other primates, and that's because we have such massive brains. Particularly the areas that are developing are the prefrontal cortex, which is where all your executive functions sit, all your social cognition sits, all those abilities such as empathizing and trust and all those sorts of things happen.

And we know if a child is brought up in an environment where they are attached securely to their care, where their needs, their emotional, their physical, their practical needs are met, then we see this wonderful density of grey and white matter in that prefrontal cortex. We see the most wonderful levels of the bonding neurohormones. We see low levels of cortisol, which is the stress hormone. If a child is brought up in an unloving environment with an insecure attachment, possibly active neglect, we see neuronal death in those areas. We see children who are much more likely to go forward in life to have antisocial behaviour issues, drug dependence issues, issues with

mental health and an inability to form good attachments when they're older. Going into adulthood, there is a very large body of evidence now that people who have loving, healthy, functioning relationships have much better mental and physical health than those who do not. It's known as your social capital. There's many, many studies. The first in the field was in 2010 by Juliette Holt-Lunsted, who was looking at longevity and recovery from serious illness. She found that having those good, strong relationships in your life was the same as sort of improved your likelihoods of survival, of longevity, of good health by 50%.

Now that's similar to quitting smoking if you smoke or much more than losing weight if you're obese, which is at about 30%. So it's an incredibly powerful thing. And we are really recategorizing love now. It's not an emotion. It's far too complex to be an emotion. It's far too complex to be an emotion. It's a need. It's a need is fundamental to your survival as water, food, shelter. It should sit at that level of need in our sort of needs hierarchy. It's

absolutely fundamental to you. So help me understand this idea that when you say that people who have strong relationships, it improves their physical health. How? How does it, what's the matter? Because when someone stops smoking, okay, we know how that improves your longevity. When someone loses weight, we know that that reduces the strain on the heart and all kinds of other problems. But what's going on internally that love makes you live long? We're not quite sure yet. We've got several hypotheses to work on. The first is that simply by being embedded in a lovely, strong social network means that you get the practical, the financial, the emotional support you need to help you through this period of illness.

So it could be that people are going to care for you. They're going to take away the stress of you having to look after yourself. They might even help you to adhere to your new health plan, for example, by supporting you. It might simply be you're in this wonderful supportive environment and people who are in that wonderful supportive environment tend to perceive their health to be much better than those who aren't. It might just be partly a placebo effect a little bit. It could be that the actual neurochemistry that you get released when you interact with somebody who you're close to, and obviously that's very particularly powerful if you're in a loving attachment with them, is good for your mental health. It's all very positive. It's oxytocin, dopamine, serotonin,

beta endorphin. All of these produce very good positive mental health, euphoria, and they counteract the effect of cortisol. So it could be that that improves your mental health and that helps you physically recover as well because mental and physical health are very tightly bonded to each other. Or, and this is the really interesting area, it could be that one neurochemical in particular, one hormone, beta endorphin, actually underpins your immune system. So that when you interact with people you're in love with, your immune system gets this bolstering effect. It gets this extra supportive effect, particularly when it comes to the white cells. And it could be that that's what's going on. So people have this much stronger immune system

to fight illness and to fight infection. So it's not yet clear. It's probably a bit of all of that, to be honest. It's not yet clear which one's probably a bit of all of that, to be honest. It's not yet clear, you know, which one's going to come out ahead. But there's definitely something going on there in relation to the importance of social support. Some people do love really well and other people do love not so well. I mean, there are a lot of divorces, lovers leave, hearts break. So if love is so essential, why is it so difficult? Oh, for so many reasons. The most basic of which is cooperation is difficult, being with other people is difficult. Love is not the same for everyone. It's not uniform. And that's partly the reflection of its huge complexity, the number of factors that feed into your experience of love. But for example, on the biological side of things, as I've said, during development, your upbringing will affect how your brain develops and that in itself will

affect how you can handle relationships when you're older. It could be that your genetics mean that you're either better fit or worse fit to be good at having relationships. So we know in particularly the oxytocin receptor gene, for example, which comes in many, many different versions, it's highly polymorphic, has quite a strong influence on whether or not, for example, you're motivated to be in relationships, how much reward you get from those relationships, how likely you are to work to maintain those relationships, even how empathetic you are. And that's the basis of relationships to have an understanding of how the other person feels.

So it could be that your genetics underpinning it aren't so great. It could be that your culture has made it difficult for you to maintain relationships. I do think within the West, the romantic narrative has quite a lot to answer for in terms of what we expect, for example, romantic relationships to be like. And maybe those stories we tell ourselves about, you know, butterflies and birds, and it's all going to be perfect, and you found the one and your soulmates aren't necessarily helpful when you're battling the difficulties of being in a romantic relationship. So there are many things that feed into why some people might struggle.

There also has to be something about the chemistry between the people. We can't love just anybody. There are certain people that we're attracted to and certain people we can't love just anybody there are certain people that we're attracted to and certain people we can get along with and Other people were not attracted to and we don't get along with so there's something to that Attachment profile so we all have a different attachment profile And that's related to again the strongest influence on that is how you were brought up when you were a child. So let's say if you had a secure attachment to your carers, you're much more likely to be a secure attachment to any romantic partners you have. If you had a difficult childhood, it might be that you're more anxious in adult relationships

because you're worried about abandonment or you find intimacy difficult. And we know, for example, that certain ones of those attachment relationships are more compatible than others. So for example, if you are an anxious attachment style, going, ending up with another anxious attachment style is not a good idea because it's much more likely that you will struggle in that relationship because you're both so preoccupied with your anxiety and with the possibility of abandonment. But put an anxious person with a secure person and you've got a really good chance because that secure person is going to buffer that anxiety and prove to that anxious person actually that this is not going to happen

So there is so much that goes into Why a relationship works and why some people just seem to be better at them than other people? The science of love is what we're talking about today and we're speaking with Anna Machen she is an evolutionary biologist and Author of the book why Love, the new science behind our closest relationships. This episode is brought to you by Dzone. For the first time ever, the 32 best soccer clubs from across the world are coming together

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from No Frills with PC Express. Shop online and get $15 in PC optimum points on your first five orders. Shop now at nofrills.ca. So Anna, what about friends? Does friendship count in terms of the love we have in our life? Oh, good heavens, yes, they do. Friends are the neglected section of love, I think. And I think in the West, maybe particularly, you know, Americans, British people, this sort of Northern European view of friends. I quite often, I interviewed a lot of people about the love of their dogs. And at the same interview, I'd also ask them, for example, about the

other loves in their lives, including their friends. And I would say to them, you know, do you love your dog? Oh, yeah, I love my dog. My dog is just the best thing. Then I say to them, do you love your friend? Oh, I'm not sure about that. Do I love my friends? This hesitancy to say we love our friends, whereas if you ask Southern Mediterranean people, oh, yes, they love their friends. Their friends are the center of their life. Friendship love is really, really critical because actually they are the only platonic relationships you choose in your social network and you tend to have quite a few of them. We know from a study we did at Oxford very, very early on that your friends are a particular type of relationship which is really special to both

men and women. It's a relationship that brings non-judgmental support. It brings a sense of relaxation and freedom where you can really be yourself. This is comparing it to romantic relationships. In particular, for women, for example, women tend to be more emotionally intimate, more emotionally vulnerable in front of their female friends than they would be in front of their male lover, for example. men tend to find it a really relaxing, supportive, often jokey atmosphere to be with their best male friends. So friends are really, really critically important. And I think in a world actually, where we're looking at an increase in the

number of single people, for many people, their friends are actually becoming their key survival critical relationship. For those people who are coupled up, that would probably be their romantic partner. But we're seeing this increase. Six percent of the UK population is probably going to be single its entire life. That's a really, really big number. And therefore, they're going to be turning to other people and it's probably their friends who will do that for them. So our friends are really, really special. They're there for a reason and they've evolved for a reason. There aren't actually many species that have friends. There are a few primates. Some of the higher mammals have friends, but we've really taken it to the next level. We've extrapolated all this neurochemistry from romantic love and from reproductive love,

and we pushed it into our friendships. And that's because we need them. What about cross species love, meaning basically your pet? I mean, is the love of a dog or a cat, is that on the, well, what is that? I think it's difficult to argue that the love of a pet is necessarily as powerful as the love of a child or the love of a partner, but I'm willing to be disproved. However, we do love our pets.

We know that from scanning studies, we know that from neurochemical studies. We know that pets bring the health benefits or some of the health benefits of having human-to-human love relationships. We know that they are incredible and we know therefore that when they die, we grieve. Again, if your dog is the key person in your life, key person, there we go, there's a slip, the key person in your life, let's say you don't really have anyone else, the dog is the person you wake up with, you talk to, you take for a walk. They're the main outlet for your social connections during the day, for example. It's going to feel pretty awful when they go because again, that bit of your identity

has disappeared. That mechanism for getting out in the world has disappeared. It is a very powerful bond and it's actually a two-way bond. We know now from some wonderful work done at Emory University that dogs love us back. It's not just that they love us because we're the source of food. It's that they love us because they're attached to us and we are attached to them. Therefore, it is in the same league as a human to human relationship. It might not be as intense for some people, but it's certainly in the same league. What do you think when you, since you've done the research, do you believe in love at first sight? No, I don't think so. It depends how you define love. There is lust at first sight, most definitely.

So, you know, You can get that absolute wham between the eyeballs chemical coming together when you see somebody. You can certainly experience that unbelievable intense attraction to somebody. Love is a much more complex thing than lust and love comes later. It's underpinned by a slightly different balance of neurochemistry and it's expressed in a much more deeper psychological attachment. It involves different areas of the brain and it's just a very different thing to those early stages of attraction. When people say they fell in love at first sight, often it's one of two things. It's either that it's just a coincidence that that particular time when they saw their friend

half an hour later and said, I've met the person I'm going to marry, it happened to happen. Lots of people say that and it doesn't happen. Or it's that wonderful thing of hindsight and the lack of reliability of the human memory that we can go back and go, oh, yes. Sometimes people say it because it bolsters the relationship they're in. Oh, yes, it was love at first sight. We knew that we loved each other. So I personally do not believe that love at first sight exists. I think we're talking about something very different because love is a, is a profoundly different thing, which can underpin an attachment between two people for their entire lives, which lust and attraction cannot.

What does the research say about monogamy? I mean, are humans meant to be monogamous? Are we built that way? Or is that something that we've created culturally and it just becomes the rule? We aren't, as a species, 100% monogamous. There's actually no 100% monogamous species in the world in terms of the biological definition.

All those species who we thought were monogamous, let's say in terms of the biological definition. All those species who we thought were monogamous, let's say the gibbons, which I was involved in studying very early on in my career, they were off having sneaky matings behind rocks all the time. There is no such thing as pure monogamy. We are obsessed by monogamy, particularly in the West because it is our social lesson. It's what most religions argue. It's what the law is based upon. It's what most of us have been brought up within. Monogamy itself is a social construct in many ways. Actually, what we are as a species is slightly looser than that. What about that phenomenon that happens in very long-term relationships where one of the people in a couple who've been together for decades dies,

and the other one dies shortly after, almost as if it's a broken heart. People who lose a spouse with whom they have a strong attachment and a long relationship, within the first six months after the spouse has died are 50% more likely to die. It's thought that it's probably a mixture between psychological grief in terms of losing love, but also the influence of stress on the heart and the fact that the heart seems to experience much, much more stress and therefore they're much more likely to die very close to the spouse dying. Of a broken heart.

Yeah, it's a real thing. What about puppy love? People tend to dismiss it, but who doesn't remember their first crush? It seems to me anyway that puppy love can be very profound. Puppy love is an important developmental stage in any person's life. It often happens, you know, sort of late childhood during adolescence. And it's a really important training ground for you as an individual to work out your sexuality, for example, who you are, who you think you love, what you like in another partner

without really risking too much in terms of going out and having a full-blown relationship. It's a really important developmental stage. In a way, it's partly what adolescence is for, to enable you to find out who you are in relation to who you will romantically and sexually love. And we know that some of these relationships are really profound, really, really intense. So I don't think we should dismiss this,

and certainly with children and adolescents, I think, yeah, maybe when you're an adult, you think, oh, for heaven's sake, don't think we should dismiss this. And certainly with children and adolescents, I think, yeah, maybe when you're an adult, you think, oh, for heaven's sake, you know, you're a child, you can't possibly know what the pain of a broken heart is. Actually, I think we dismiss it at our peril because it's actually developmentally incredibly important and feels very real. Well, you've certainly confirmed in great detail how complicated love is and how necessary it is for all of us to have it in our lives. Anna Machen's been my guest.

She's an evolutionary anthropologist at the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford. And the name of her book is Why We Love The New Science Behind Our Closest Relationships. And you will find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Anna. Thanks, Mike. It's been a real pleasure to speak to you. Hey, so what did you want to talk about? Well, I want to tell you about Wigovie.

Wigovie? Yeah, Wigovie. What about it? On second thought, I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No. Just ask your doctor. About Wigovie? Yeah. Ask for it by name. Okay. I might not be the right person to tell you. Oh, you're not? No, just ask your doctor about Wakovi.

Yeah, ask for it by name. Okay, so why did you bring me to this circus? Oh, I'm really into lion tamers, you know. With the chair and everything? Ask your doctor for Wakovi by name. Visit wakovi.ca for savings. Exclusions may apply. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time,

an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. We talk about things like sex ed, birth control, pregnancy, bodily autonomy, and of course, kids of all ages. But you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you. Find us in any podcast app or at longestshortesttime.com. While death may not be the cheeriest of topics, it is fascinating. Since we all die and we

all witness death to some degree in our lives, I guess there's something of a morbid curiosity about death. And someone who knows a great deal about the topic is Caitlin Doughty. Caitlin is a mortician. She owns a funeral home in Los Angeles and is a best-selling author on the topic of death. Her latest book is called Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? Well, welcome Caitlin. Thank you so much for having me. So let's start by explaining your interest in the topic because I find that while parts of it are interesting, most of us like to avoid thinking too much about death and

yet you dove right in and became a mortician. So what is it about death that intrigues you? Over the years, I really realized that I was just fascinated by how much we ignore death in our culture and the way that we're not allowed to openly talk about it and engage it. And so you got a job at a crematorium at a pretty young age. What is it about that job that pulled you into the death industry? And what is it that was so fascinating about that? I think what truly fascinated me about it was how hidden it was.

So I was back there cremating six bodies a day, and I was by myself most of the time. Every once in a while, a family would come in and join us for what's called a witness cremation, which is when the family comes and watches the body be loaded into the cremation machine with us, and they push the button to start the machine. But for the most part, it was just this 23 year old, this random 23 year old girl who was cremating all the

bodies. And I'm not saying that everybody needs a little, I guess, you know, you know what, I am saying that I think that we do need a relationship with death. And through tens of thousands of years of human culture, the way that we got to understand all creatures that would someday die was because people died in our community. And we took care of those bodies. And that's not really the case anymore. We hire professionals.

We outsource it to the 23-year-old at the crematory. And that's what really got me so interested long term in how we can change the funeral industry. So I think people are fascinated by death, I guess because we're all headed there one day and we've all had family members who have died. But what happens when you die? What goes on? What happens is normally someone will be picked up as if it's an emergency

Which is kind of ludicrous if you think about it because once someone's dead the emergency is over You know, they're going to be dead two days from now. They're going to be dead two weeks from now And so we treat it now, especially in this new system from the last hundred years or so where death is all professionalized, we treat it as something to be rushed in like we're in an ambulance to come immediately pick up the body from the hospital or the nursing home or the hospice. And we bring it back to our facility. And in a lot of places in the United States, the body is still chemically embalmed, although that is falling interest in chemically preserving the dead body is falling pretty rapidly in a lot of places. I think Time Magazine listed it as one of the top disappearing middle-class careers. And as we turn much more toward cremation,

which is well over 50% of our population now chooses cremation. And so it's a bureaucratic process from then on where a death certificate is filed and at that point the body is maybe given a funeral if that's what the family wants and then it is taken to either be buried cremated or perhaps a new technology a greener technology like aquamation or perhaps human composting. Well, it's interesting to hear you describe that because in my perception, if there's any industry that doesn't change very much, it's the death industry. Someone dies, they go to a funeral home, they are embalmed and they're buried. That's not what you're saying.

That's not the way it really is so much anymore. Yeah, and that does still happen. But just like a lot of the new funeral directors aren't coming from generations of family funeral homes, a lot of the practices that people are choosing, for many reasons, reasons of changing in religious traditions or lack of religious traditions or because that kind of embalming casket, burial,

headstone, etc. just doesn't mean as much to people anymore. It's not giving them the sense of ritual and community than it maybe once did. It's wildly expensive. You know, it's ten thousand dollars for a funeral or much, much more expensive than that, and that's just too expensive for a lot of families. And so there's a lot of reasons that people are looking for more simple, less expensive, more environmentally friendly ways to die. So it seems like there are a lot more options than there

used to be, but still there are rules, there are laws about what can happen to a body after someone dies, right? You are legally bound and I say that most of the things that we do with our dead bodies or want to do with our dead bodies, they're kind of guilty until proven innocent. So there may be something that you want to do with your body. For example, people ask me all the time, can I keep my dad's skull after he dies? And not really. That's going to be pretty complicated. It's hard to find someone to essentially deflesh your father's head and return the skull to you. And even then,

it's breaking certain laws which say that you're not supposed to abuse the corpse. Because, you know, and why is defleshing dad's skull abusing the corpse and cremating him not abusing the corpse? That's entirely just up to kind of law and standards that we have in our particular country at any given time. Wait a minute people Actually ask you if they can keep their father's skull and this this comes up frequently It's probably one of the top questions that I'm asked And what what is it they plan to do with it? I think they have a sense of that that's going to be on their mantle piece and they'll look up and say, father, you know, I think of you often or something. I mean, I don't

think they think it through that much and it may not be something that they actually want, but I think more than actually wanting it, it's something that people want to know that they can do. They want to know that they have this option available to them. You say that 50% or more of people elect to be cremated. And that is a surprising number to me. My perception is that if it is that high, that's happened fairly recently because it seems like it wasn't that long ago that cremation was unusual. So the groundwork for this was really laid in the 1960s.

Some people may remember Jessica Mitford, who was English but living in the United States and was this crusader who wrote The American Way of Death. And her thing was funeral homes are charging you an arm and a leg. They're corrupt. They do this weird embalming thing. What's going on there?

And it was just massive, massive bestseller. And really from that era, you get the talking points that a lot of your friends or people that you know in your community probably say today, which is something like, oh, just cremate me. Don't go to all the trouble. It's probably better for the environment. Keep it simple. I don't even need a funeral.

That all really started in the 1960s, but took many decades to take root and be the main idea that people have about what they want today. So let me ask you a couple of questions from the book, and since the title is Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs, I assume that means like if you die and nobody finds you for a while and your cat's with you, would your cat eat your eyeballs? Is that what you mean? That is what I mean. And these questions are from children, by the way. So I mostly deal with adults, but I decided

to take questions from children. And the title comes from a kid in the audience at a talk I did in Australia, who raised their hand and boldly said, if I die, will my cat eat my eyeballs? Meaning like eat my body. And the answer to that question is yes, they will. And unfortunately, well, depending on how you look on it, whether you're a cat or dog person, your cat is more likely to eat you than your dog.

I love this question that if you ate popcorn and then were cremated, would the popcorn pop? I've got to hear the answer to that. Well, that actually comes from the meme, which I started seeing everywhere. Well, it, basically that, that when I die my kind of prankster thing is I'm going to swallow a whole bag of popcorn and won't the crematory operator be surprised when they open the chamber and it's popcorn everywhere? And unfortunately I had to debunk that, which is to say that the average temperature for popping popcorn, I think, is in the sort

of 300s, is what you want to keep the oil at and to keep it popping and get the nice fluffy white kernels that you want. But a cremation machine, we start at 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. And then throughout the cremation, it goes to 1800 degrees or even 2000 degrees and so you're blasting that popcorn out of existence almost immediately. We hear stories about people after they die, we hear things like you know their hair continues to grow, their fingernails continue to grow, their body will move. What about that stuff? Most of those things have a very easy to understand once you know it, biological reason behind them. So fingers and hair, for example.

That really has to do with dehydration. Once you die, you become dehydrated and your skin on your fingers starts to shrivel up and pull back. The skin on your scalp starts to shrivel up and pull back. The skin on your scalp starts to shrivel up and pull back. And it's not so much that your nail and the hairs are growing, it's that they're being revealed more as the dehydration sort of shows them more. And the same thing with making noises after death. Yes, sometimes when you move a body or it's just lying

there it can kind of go, but that's not because the ghostly spirit is finally being released, it's because gas is probably building up after a certain amount of time in the stomach and air is being pushed from the lungs and if the body moves it's probably a nerve reaction. So even though these things are spooky and you can absolutely see why before we had the science, it was quite terrifying for someone in the 18th century or 17th century to see this happening, it really can be pretty easily explained

by what we now know scientifically. I remember the first time and really every time since that I've been to an open casket funeral. I think most people have this perception that the body in the casket, the face looks very mannequin-like. It doesn't look like Aunt Rose. It looks like a mannequin of Aunt Rose. Right, and I do think that's probably one of the reasons why embalming is falling in popularity somewhat,

because so many people for so many years have had that same response to actually seeing someone in a casket. And the embalming process initially, which is essentially for those who don't know, it's the draining of the blood out of the circulatory system and replacing it with a fixation chemical like a formaldehyde to keep the tissues fixed. But unfortunately, what that does is it smooths out the face. And for some people, it's like, oh, mom looks

so much younger than she did. And for other people, that kind of poofing and smoothing out and hardening of the skin, it's like, she looks like a wax and figure version of who she was. And then when they put makeup on, especially when they put makeup on potentially your grandfather, and there's kind of a red tint to his lips and his cheeks, it becomes even more, I would call it uncanny valley to see. And so, you know, my my personal advocacy is I think dead people

should look dead. And so I personally would not want to be embalmed because when people come and see my dead body, it shouldn't look like a mannequin. It should look dead, however. These traditions, though, they do kind of come and go. I remember when my grandmother died and her sister died and that an open casket funeral wasn't a discussion. That's just what you did. And

then that seems to have really fallen out of favor. I mean it still happens but but it doesn't happen as often. I mean many people still do it and many cultures still do it so I don't mean in any way to say it's fuddy-duddy and in fact a lot of what we're seeing now is a return to traditions that are even older than the open casket wake, to just having the body at home and taken care of by the family. So really bypassing the funeral industry altogether. And if your mom dies at home, say under hospice, just keeping her body there and washing her hair perhaps, putting on her favorite sweater, singing songs, being present with her,

until such a time that maybe you decide to call the funeral director to come pick her up. And traditions like that are even older than, you know, the kind of embalmed open casket wake. For a lot of people the idea of keeping a body and washing its hair, that's just too gross to imagine. I mean, it's just something you would never think to do. You wouldn't think to do it, but that is such a recent thing. Up until 100 years ago, 150 years ago, that is what you did.

That's what every community did. And that was the universal human experience. And it's really only been since the turn of the 20th century when this became kind of a capitalist outsourced process that was professionalized, that we lost our connection to it. And it became gross. And we decided that dead bodies are dangerous or dirty or morbid or gross.

That's very, very recent. So, yes, you may feel that way, and it's absolutely fine if you feel that way, but until very recently, that was not how we dealt with our dead. One of the questions that you have in the book that you were asked was, and I've often wondered about this. Like, say you're traveling on an airplane, and the person in the seat next to you dies. Well, then what happens? If you die in a plane, basically, they, for the most part, will just leave you there.

And the hope is that there's an extra seat somewhere, maybe in first class, that they can put you by yourself. But if they can't, somebody's got to sit next to someone who died, basically, and just hopefully put a blanket over them. And you would think, don't they have a special compartment in the plane for this? And I think it was Singapore Airlines at one point did design corpse cupboards,

especially since they had such long haul flights. But most planes do not have that. And really, they just have to find some place like in the galley or in some seat. They can't put them in the bathroom because the body might flop over and make it impossible to open the bathroom. So they just have to find some place in the plane to put the person until they can get them off the plane. I wonder how often that happens that people die on planes. I've never been on a plane where that's happened at least that I know of, but I've always thought that because of my experience and you know being a mortician that I should be the one that volunteers to sit next to the dead body Yeah, I think you know just like normally a doctor would be like, oh I can help

I can't really help but I could be the one who was comfortable sitting next to the dead body Or yeah, you wouldn't be as grossed out as a lot of other people. Yeah, it's one It's one very small skill But I bet it I wouldn't be surprised if it happened because they're not going to get on the piano This year captain speaking we have a dead body in row seven. Exactly, they are certainly not. No, and what most people don't realize is that there's very, very often dead people flying on your plane because they take normal flights. So when somebody dies, come to our funeral home and they need to go to say Kansas, we book a commercial flight for them.

We book them through Delta or United and then bring their casket to the airport and it's loaded in with your baggage onto the plane. So more often than you know, you are probably flying with a dead person on your flight. You know, it's so, so weird is that we, we want to know about this, but we don't want, we don't want to know too much about this we don't want to because one day we'll be there and this is not a niche topic that just I am interested in and more morbidly interested in this is something that's going to happen to us all and

it's okay to be interested in what's going to happen to you it's extremely natural to be interested and I hope I can happen to you. It's extremely natural to be interested. And I hope I can help you out a little bit by taking you through the weeds. Well, I like the way you talk about this, because you make it, I don't know, you just make it not quite so scary, even though it's still kind of scary.

But the way you talk about it, I'm more open to hearing it. So thanks. Caitlin Doughty has been my guest. She is a mortician. She owns a funeral home in Los Angeles. And she is a bestselling author. The latest book is called Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs? And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes.

Thanks for explaining all this, Caitlin. I really appreciate it. Yes, thank you, Michael. explaining all this, Caitlin, I really appreciate it. Yes, thank you, Michael. You know those produce drawers in your refrigerator? It's probably the worst place to keep your produce. You see, fruits and vegetables shouldn't be crammed or stacked together out of sight.

That just increases the odds that they'll spoil faster and that you'll forget about them altogether. In a study, college students reached for the most produce when it was displayed in clear, uncovered containers within arm's reach. So, if you want your family to reach for the healthy food first, location and presentation is everything. The best spot for fresh healthy produce is front and center. Keeping them in clear glass bowls either on the counter or eye level in the fridge will almost guarantee that they will be seen and they will be eaten. And if you make sure they're washed and ready to eat a lot less will go to waste. And that is something you should know. Now having just heard this fascinating episode

about love and death, I'm sure you're gonna wanna share it with someone you know so they can hear it too. So please kindly share this podcast with one or two or three of your friends. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening to Something You Should Know. Hey, it's Hillary Frank from The Longest Shortest Time,

an award-winning podcast about parenthood and reproductive health. There is so much going on right now in the world of reproductive health, and we're covering it all. Birth control, pregnancy, gender, bodily autonomy, menopause, consent, sperm, so many stories about sperm, and of course the joys and absurdities of raising kids of all ages. If you're new to the show, check out an episode called The Staircase.

It's a personal story of mine about trying to get my kids' school to teach sex ed. Spoiler, I get it to happen, but not at all in the way that I wanted. We also talk to plenty of non-parents, so you don't have to be a parent to listen. If you like surprising, funny, poignant stories about human relationships and, you know, periods, The Longest Shortest Time is for you.

Find us in any podcast app or at longestshortesttime.com. You might think you know fairy tales, and you might think they are cute and sweet and boring, but the real grim fairy tales were not cute at all. They were very dark, and they were often very grim. On Grim Grimmer Grimmest, we tell a grim fairy tale to a bunch of kids. Perfect for car rides or screen-free entertainment, Gr Grimmer, Grimmest activates kids' imaginations and instigates fun conversation. Because fairy tales speak to all of us

at a very deep primal level. And they raise interesting topics and questions that are worth chewing over together as a family. Every episode is rated Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmest. So you, your kids, your whole family can choose what is the right level of grim for you. Though if you're listening with grandma, she's just gonna go for Grimmest, so you, your kids, your whole family can choose what is the right level of grim for you. Though, if you're listening with Grandma, she's just gonna go for Grimmest. Trust me on this one. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmest, and our new season, available now.