Something You Should Know - What Are You Afraid Of? & The Strange and Taboo Side of Nature

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Starting point is 00:00:27 Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, some really cool things about bugs that you probably never knew before. Then, fear. What makes us so afraid of things like public speaking or the monster under the bed or that creepy guy in the elevator? That is exactly the type of fear that you should trust and you can figure it out later, but at that point I would say get out of that elevator

Starting point is 00:00:55 because that's your collective wisdom, that's your intuition telling you we're out of here. Also something important to understand about your credit score and some of the fascinatingly gross and gory things in your everyday life. One of my favorite things is that we all have tiny arachnids that actually are living in our faces. These are called face mites. It's really freaky to think of these little tiny mites that are just living inside our pores.

Starting point is 00:01:24 They spend their whole lives there. All this today on Something You Should Know. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe.

Starting point is 00:01:58 Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, Happy New Year, if you are listening to this episode on or around the time it is being published, which is New Year's Day 2024. We start today with something we all have to deal with frequently, although maybe less in the wintertime. But still, we are surrounded by bugs, insects. They're everywhere. They're inside

Starting point is 00:02:35 your house, they're outside in your yard, and often they're a nuisance. However, there are some things about bugs that are really worth knowing. First of all, technically the word bug and insect don't actually mean the same thing. A bug is a certain type of insect. Bugs have a stylet. It's a mouth that's shaped like a straw, which they use to suck juice from plants. So all bugs are insects, but not all insects are bugs. According to the University of Florida Book of Insect Records, the most poisonous insects are wasps, bees, and ants, and the ones with the most toxic venom are certain harvester ants. Best estimates are there are over 1,017,000 species of insects in the world.

Starting point is 00:03:28 Bug longevity varies widely. A lot of bugs, like houseflies and aphids, live only for a few weeks. Queen termites can live 50 years. Wood beetles can make it to 40. People often wonder why insects are so often attracted to light, like they'll fly to a street light or they'll come to your porch light. And actually, nobody really knows. The light seems to appear to mess up their navigation system so they can't fly straight. No one is exactly sure which is the fastest insect on earth, but a horsefly was clocked at 91 miles an hour, so he's right up there. Cockroaches are the fastest runners. They can run at about 3 miles an hour.

Starting point is 00:04:12 And that is something you should know. Everyone is afraid of something. We all have fears. It's part of being human. Fear serves us well by keeping us safe from danger. But some fears might also keep us from reaching our potential and enjoying life. I'm sure you've noticed that some people are just more cautious and fearful than others, while other people are more thrill-seekers than others. Why is that? Are we programmed that way from the start or not?

Starting point is 00:04:44 And if you find that some fears are keeping you from doing important things in life, how do you overcome that? Here with some great insight into how fear works and how to make it work for you is Helen Odesky. She's a licensed clinical psychologist, an anxiety expert, and author of the book Stop Fear from Stopping You, The Art and Science of Becoming Fear Wise. Hi Helen, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, good to be here. So we all have different fears. We all know what fear is. We know what it feels like to feel fear. But from your perspective, what exactly is fear? Fear is our appraisal of danger. So it's the estimate we make when we're faced with a situation

Starting point is 00:05:35 or a potential situation about what might happen to us. And obviously fear is a good thing because if we weren't afraid of anything, we'd all be dead. Absolutely. So fear is life-preserving. And so we want to be able to differentiate between the good fear, the fear that keeps us alive, and the fear that stop us from living the kind of life we'd like to live. And so where do fears come from? Is it evolution? Are we born that way? Or is it the result of life experiences or what? Yeah, so I think it's a part evolution. We have a part of our brain called the amygdala, which is our internal alarm system. And like any alarm, it's prone to false alarms. So it'll go off and make a giant noise inside our head and our bodies about something being

Starting point is 00:06:24 dangerous. And when that happens, unless we literally think through it, if it's not an actual life-threatening danger, we have all the sensations of a life-threatening emergency built right in. Okay. So, but here's an example. So I don't like roller coasters because every time I get on a roller coaster, I think I'm going to die. Even though objectively, I know I'm not going to die. But I don't enjoy it because of the fear, whereas some people can go on a rollercoaster, and that same experience makes them happy, which I can't possibly understand. So sometimes the sensations that are produced are very similar to excitement. And if we label it as a welcome sensation, then our emotions tend to follow.

Starting point is 00:07:14 So if you go into an amusement park with the idea, this is probably, if it's not going to kill me, it's going to emotionally scar me, you're going to feel that dread and you won't have an enjoyable experience. However, if you go in there like a lot of teenagers do saying, I've really been looking forward to it. It's summertime. Let's go. And they welcome that sensation of their stomach dropping. Then you're going to really feel exhilarated at the end of it. And so why are some people one way and other people my way? Is it perhaps it's some horrible experience we had or something, or are we just wired differently? I mean, is there a fear spectrum and we're just kind of naturally on it somewhere

Starting point is 00:08:02 just because it's who we are? Exactly. There is a spectrum, and it is also related to your life experience. So if you think about it as our constitution, our nature, we are probably wired differently for the degree of risk-taking. Some of us are just more cautious by nature. So every time we go into a situation where something might go wrong, we might look at that roller coaster and say, I wonder what time

Starting point is 00:08:30 the last time somebody fell from this thing, or when was this inspected? If our mind is generally wired that way, that's our constitution. However, some people have had negative experiences. Maybe you went on a roller coaster when you were a little kid and you really hated it, or you got really sick. And so that experience is invoked every time you go, unless you have a series of positive experiences to counteract that. So that spectrum that you talked about that we're all on, and I know some people who are extremely cautious and other people who are not really cautious. They're more thrill seekers. Does it tend to apply to different

Starting point is 00:09:12 parts of life? Or if people are cautious, they're cautious in most things and thrill seekers are more thrill seeking in most things? Or is it very individual depending on the situation? This is a really good question. I'll try to tease this out. So fear for some people is a constitutional trait. So they are fearful in most situations. However, I have worked with people who are risk-takers in most of their life and may have had an experience of anxiety where in one area of their life, for example, public speaking, they tend to be very cautious and very afraid.

Starting point is 00:09:53 So let's talk about the fear of public speaking, because I think we've all heard those stories, the surveys of that fear of public speaking is a bigger fear than the fear of death. And, you know, they repeat these surveys year after year, and it keeps coming back as the number one fear. Why? So a lot of that is what we pin onto public speaking. A lot of us have somehow grown up thinking that this is something that you have to be able to do and execute really well to be liked and to be accepted and to be

Starting point is 00:10:34 considered a worthy human being. And so when we can't do it, we start feeling unworthy and less than. And so it's self-protective to say, oh, maybe there's a way to get out of this. So I don't have to look less than or feel less than or not be accepted or feel rejected. But it does sometimes seem when you can't get out of it and you have to go through with it, a lot of people can't kind of buck up and do it, they sabotage themselves, which just reinforces the fact that they didn't do a good job and now nobody accepts them and they've failed. Yes. And I would say a lot of that is because they're in such an anxious state that they're better off taking a few minutes to calm their system down and re-engage. And there's all sorts of tricks that

Starting point is 00:11:25 we can talk about to do that. But bottom line is if you are in the middle of a very high anxiety state, we're talking eight, nine out of 10, it's very hard to get fluent speech out. You're feeling lightheaded. You're feeling like your world's about to crash around you. And it's very hard to produce something that sounds coherent and interesting and relatable. And so what are some of those tricks of the trade that will help people deal with that in the moment? So I think the first few minutes are really crucial. I think once people get into it, most of us are able to just go on and talk about the topics we need to talk about. So one of the things that I like to suggest to my clients who are anxious is, hey, start by asking a question. By the time your audience engages with you and you take the 30 seconds to a couple minutes that that takes,

Starting point is 00:12:21 you're already engaging with them just by virtue of needing to listen and pay attention to what they're telling you. So you're taking the focus off of you. The other thing that I like to say is ask people or tell them simple things like how much you want to be there and how happy you are to talk about whatever you're talking to them about, because that's familiar to you. You know, introducing yourself, saying who you are, saying a little bit about yourself is very familiar. It's automated. It doesn't require much scrutiny. Right. You know who you are, so that should be pretty easy to talk about. It's pretty easy and it's pretty hard to criticize somebody just by telling you,

Starting point is 00:13:05 hey, this is my name. This is what I do. This is where I'm from. So don't launch into the content. Introduce yourself. And then my third thing that I would say is have a bottle of water. Nobody's going to judge you. At some point in the presentation, you say, excuse me, I need to get a drink of water. That slows you down, paces you, and lets you get right back in. So I want to talk about that fear that people have. You're walking down the street and somebody's coming at you the other way and you get that feeling, something's not right here. Has that been studied and is that a thing? That is a thing and that's actually a sign of danger that we teach people to pay attention to. Because if you're walking and all of a sudden you get that spidey sense, that probably is a real danger alert.

Starting point is 00:13:59 But what could it be? And you should heed that. What could it possibly be? Just because someone is walking down the street at you and maybe they look disheveled or they look, you know, in your interpretation, dangerous, it doesn't mean they are. That's true. However, what we know about fear is saying, you don't need to justify why you're afraid in the moment. It's better to cross the street at that point and figure it out later. It could be your internal bias, but it could be your life preserving sense saying, get out of there. And I would rather encourage for personal safety that you got out of there and then thought about why that happened versus you being put in danger. Because a lot of us have that internal dialogue of, oh, you're being silly. You know, grow up.

Starting point is 00:14:59 You're fine. Nothing's going to happen. And probably most of the time, nothing would happen. But still, how many times have we all gotten in an elevator with somebody we hesitated to do, or we saw that person on the street, or something made us feel uncomfortable? That is exactly the type of fear that you should trust. And you can figure it out later. But at that point, I would say, get out of that elevator. There was something off.

Starting point is 00:15:31 You don't need to know what it is. It's almost as if you trust that more than you do your verbal process at that point, because that's your collective wisdom. That's your intuition telling you that's it. We're out of here. Fear is our topic today. And I'm speaking with Helen Odesky. She's a clinical psychologist and author of the book, Stop Fear From Stopping You. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there.

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Starting point is 00:16:55 That's BetterHelp.com. So, Helen, talk about the fear of failure, because a lot of times people will use the fear of failure as the reason why they didn't try something because they didn't want to fail. So is the fear of failure a real fear or is it just an excuse to use when you don't want to do something? The fear of failure is really the fear of what's going to happen when something doesn't go the way that we want it to. And my experience as a psychologist, it's usually a fear more of how hard we're going to come down on ourselves versus how hard somebody else is going to come down on us. So we might phrase it to

Starting point is 00:17:41 ourselves, oh, nobody will let me live this down. But really, it's probably a projection of how we feel and whether we're going to let ourselves live it down. Well, it does seem a lot of times people fear failure. And when they fail, they can't shake it, that they failed and they feel horrible that they failed. Is that part of that? Is that what we're trying to avoid? Yeah, we're trying to avoid that because that doesn't feel good. And we all want to knock it out of the park every time. But we also know that even professional ballplayers don't usually have a rating of anything above 50%. So if you're looking at the Michael Jordans and the LeBron James, they don't dunk the basket every time. And so this idea that we have to,

Starting point is 00:18:34 it is this myth that a lot of us walk around with. Let's talk about the fear of rejection. I think that's one that affects a lot of people. It keeps people from, you know, asking someone out on a date. It keeps people from asking for a raise. They don't want to get rejected, so they just don't. So what's that fear? That's a basic self-protective thing. So we want to be around people, and it's a good rule of thumb, actually, that are accepting of us. So when we're around a lot of negativity or rejection, we tend to recoil. And if we've had those experiences, we tend to get self-protective and avoid those situations.

Starting point is 00:19:12 So in order to overcome that, one of the things that I teach is that we have to start looking at rejection as not personal. So someone may not be rejecting you, particularly if we think about dating. They've just met you. they don't really know you. So whatever they're imposing on you probably has more to say about them than it does about you. And so if you can find a way to look at those situations in neutral terms. So I'm just looking for somebody where it's a goodness of fit, where I feel comfortable, where they like me and I like them and it feels easy. Then I think you depersonalize it from that self-talk that we get often, which is, oh, they didn't think I was good looking enough or they didn't think I was smart enough or funny enough or all those tapes that start playing in our heads. So one of the interesting fears that really seems like a colossal waste of time is the fear of what other people think of you, because you can't make everybody happy and why should you try? But still, you know, many of us

Starting point is 00:20:19 worry about that. We want to be liked. We want people to think well of us. And why is that so? Well, I mean, it's obvious why it's important, but it does seem like kind of a waste of time. It absolutely becomes a waste of time. And it is important because if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, if you weren't accepted, you lost resources. You couldn't get access to food, shelter, or a suitable partner so you could reproduce. So you really had to think about that and make sure that you fit in with the group. Now, a lot of us take it to the extreme and start worrying about what people might think about our hairstyle or our choice of job or even what type of car we have, right? And if we want to get better with trying to say,

Starting point is 00:21:13 okay, it really doesn't much matter what my neighbor thinks about this situation because it's important that I'm okay with it and I am in concert with myself and feel good and accept my choice. One of the things that is interesting to me about fear is that if you look back at all the things you've been afraid of, whether it's monsters under the bed or whatever, almost none of them were worth being too upset about.

Starting point is 00:21:42 Obviously, some would be. But it's like we don't really learn from that, that life isn't necessarily as fearful as we think it is, but it doesn't typically change our behavior. We still act that way. And so I would say it brings us to this interesting idea of what do we consider courage? Do we consider courage to be the absence of fear, or do we just consider fear as part of human condition, notice it when it's helpful, and then decide to live life with it, knowing that it will pass just like our fear of monsters under the bed, and that if we act with it, we stand to gain a whole lot more life choices and opportunities.

Starting point is 00:22:26 So what does it mean then to be courageous? What do you do with the fear and still act courageous? For example, you're petrified to speak in public, so maybe you don't speak in public. Other people might be petrified to speak in public, but they do it anyway. So what are they doing with their fear? How are they moving it over and allowing themselves to go speak in public? So what you do is you have to acknowledge what it is. So it's not life-threatening, it's a fear. You have to accept that sometimes you're going to feel that, and then you have to act with purpose regardless. So if your purpose that day is to tell your company about some bad news and you're understandably afraid of their reaction, then you would do that regardless of whether or not you felt

Starting point is 00:23:17 afraid. And that, in my book, would demonstrate courage. So when you have a fear that you've learned, you're afraid to go in the water because something bad happened to you. You're afraid to go on roller coasters because you had a bad experience. When you have a fear that you've learned, is the trick to unlearn it or is the trick to learn something else? I mean, how do you, how do you cope with that fear and move on? So we can have an experience where danger learning takes place, and then we can have experience where safety learning takes place.

Starting point is 00:23:57 So danger learning is just like it sounds. It's the assessment where we say, uh-oh, if I go in the water, there's a possibility I might drown. Water equals danger. Safety learning is if I go in the water, I better be around other people because that creates safety. Because if I do have a problem, somebody has a chance to help me out. Safety learning is taking a swimming class. Okay, it's really not dangerous to be with your head inside the water. So the more, we can't undo danger learning, but the more safety learning we engage in, we create an equality between those two parts of our brain and we can overcome some of these prior experiences that we've had.

Starting point is 00:24:38 And a lot of people want to unlearn the danger, but it's like learning a language. You're never going to unlearn, if you're an English speaker, you're never going to unlearn the danger, but it's like learning a language. You're never going to unlearn, if you're an English speaker, you're never going to unlearn English. If you learn French, you'll know both and you'll be able to communicate on par in both potentially. I don't know if you can answer this or if there's been research that you know off the top of your head, but that spectrum that we were talking about before, is there a sweet spot where most people are? Are most people kind of fearful? Are most people not very fearful? Do you get a sense of that? I mean, obviously the people you talk to are probably fearful or they wouldn't be

Starting point is 00:25:16 coming to see you. So you probably have a skewed view, but is there research on this? There's research on what's called the big five traits, one of which is openness to new experience, which you can look at as risk-taking. And that trait, those big five traits, stay stable over a lifetime. Now, there's a range within them, but we tend to have a spot there. You know, I wonder overall how people feel about their fears.

Starting point is 00:25:50 And what I mean by that is, for example, as I said in the beginning, I'm afraid of roller coasters. I don't like them. And I don't have any big desire to change that, that I'm perfectly fine with that fear. Yes. So that's where, again, brings us to self-acceptance. As long as you can accept that it's okay to be who you are and play to your strength and maybe tweak some skills that you're hoping to expand, you're in pretty good shape. Well, as I listen to you talk, it's so interesting how fears are so important in the sense that they keep us safe, they keep us out of harm's way.

Starting point is 00:26:29 And yet, if we're not careful, we can let fears kind of keep us from life. And it's important to understand the difference and how to manage those fears. My guest has been Helen Odesky. She is a licensed clinical psychologist and author of the book Stop Fear From Stopping You, The Art and Science of Becoming Fear Wise. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Helen. I appreciate your time. I appreciate your time as well. Thank you for having me on. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store, or online at bestbuy.ca.

Starting point is 00:27:14 Exclusions apply. 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

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Starting point is 00:28:54 She knows all about gross and creepy and gory things. Erica is a writer and editor for National Geographic and author of the book Gory Details, Adventures from the Dark Side of Science. Hi, Erica. Thanks for having me on. So what's a nice grown-up like you doing looking at creepy and gross things? You know, I guess if I had to sum it up, I would say I like answering the kinds of questions that people are afraid to ask. So, you know, anything that's kind of creepy, crawly, gross or weird, I've always been very curious about any of that stuff.

Starting point is 00:29:35 Frankly, I think that all of us are. You know, I don't think we ever really lose that childlike curiosity with gross stuff. I think we just maybe get too embarrassed to talk about it. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. So what's like one of your, just to kick it off, one of your favorite gross things to talk about that hopefully isn't too gross, but... Well, everyone's, you know, measure of what's too gross, I guess, can be different. We're all kind of sensitive to different things. But I think personally, one of my favorite things to talk about, and that is often very surprising to people that they didn't know, is that we all have tiny arachnids that actually are living in our faces.

Starting point is 00:30:16 And these are called face mites. Their scientific name is demodex. And we all have them, as far as scientists can tell. And they're probably not doing us any real harm. But it's really freaky to think of these little tiny mites that are just living inside our pores. They spend their whole lives there. And do we think they're serving some sort of purpose? Well, it's entirely possible that they are. When scientists first discovered these little things living in our pores, they were pretty

Starting point is 00:30:50 horrified and they have been found to be higher concentrations of them in people who have rosacea. So for a long time, it's been thought that face mites might cause rosacea. But scientists who I talked to said that it's also entirely possible that we have more of a symbiotic relationship with these face mites. They might be eating bacteria in our pores, you know, doing some housekeeping by eating up all of the oils and things that are in our pores. And so we may be feeding them and they may be giving back to us by you know doing that kind

Starting point is 00:31:26 of housekeeping I actually got to see my own face mites which was a big thrill I mean it's one thing to know that they're in there but to actually see them was a lot of fun so I went to a lab and the scientists you know scraped some oil out of my pores put put it on a microscope slide, and we took a look. And sure enough, there they were. And they're just like these little skinny, almost shaped like a plug because they fit inside a pore. And then they have these eight little itty bitty legs wiggling around. So it's amazing to think that those little critters are just in all of our faces all the time. And for the most part, they're just doing their thing, and we don't even know they're there. Ech. That's kind of gross.

Starting point is 00:32:09 Well, you know what's interesting? As you're describing these face mites that are living in my pores, which is just so gross, but my reaction is that that's disgusting. I think that's the reaction of a lot of people. And yet, so much of nature is kind of gross. Why, I wonder, are we so disgusted by these things that are really just part of nature? Disgust is a pretty universal emotion. Everyone feels it. People around the world even make the same kind of facial expression for

Starting point is 00:32:45 something that's gross where you kind of scrunch up your face and nose and maybe even stick your tongue out if it's really gross and we tend to be disgusted by the same kind of things for the most part so things like insects and pests you know they can potentially carry diseases and might be a sign that something's dirty. So it makes good sense that we might be grossed out by those kinds of things. And we're grossed out by any kind of sign of illness or bodily fluids, things like that. So it really makes sense that the kinds of things that gross us out tend to be things that could potentially harm us or make us sick. That said, you know, we're surrounded by these things all the time. How many people are actually going into emergency rooms with insects that have gotten into their ears or even up their noses?

Starting point is 00:33:51 I mean, this was just a kind of a weird little thing. I've always heard these stories of you accidentally swallow eight spiders a year or there's, you know, some kind of numbers. And I think that those things are mostly made up. But it is true that it's pretty common for doctors to see people coming into emergency rooms with roaches in their ear. And I thought, you know, I could give people one little piece of practical advice based on this, which is that something you should know is that if a roach does get in your ear, it's probably going to be while you're asleep at night. And what you want to do is keep that roach alive until you can get to an emergency room to get it out. You know, I read a really funny story about doctors who tried to test ways of getting roaches out of people's ears.

Starting point is 00:34:41 And this is I think this is something that everyone is horrified thinking about, but it happens so frequently that doctors have actually written about the best ways to get roaches out of people's ears. And why did they go in there in the first place? Well, probably because your ear has wax in it and that wax makes some of the same kind of fatty acids that are in meat. And so probably roaches are smelling that and going in to investigate, and then they just get stuck. So, yeah, I mean, I know it's horrifying to think about, but this is something that happens to lots and lots of people. There are tens of thousands of people that go into emergency rooms every year with something in their ears. And roaches tend to be the thing that is one of the most common types of critters that tends to try to crawl in. Well, you were talking a moment ago. It's so interesting that we're grossed out by so many things like this, but other animals aren't.

Starting point is 00:35:46 If I see a dead animal in the road, I mean, I kind of look away. That's kind of gross. My dog will go right up to it and sniff it and maybe take a bite, if I let it. It's just humans are grossed out, but nobody else is. That's right. You know, humans have a really finely tuned sense of disgust. We probably have the best sense of disgust of any animal, I think, you know, so greatly that we have this sense of manners. And when you think about it, manners are really largely something that we've developed to

Starting point is 00:36:22 protect each other from disgust, to protect each other from being disgusted. We don't want to make noises that are disgusting to other people. We don't want other people to see things, you know, that would be potentially disgusting to them. So that sense of manners really protects us from disgust. And as far as we know, we're the only animals that have that sense of propriety. Well, one thing that grosses out a lot of people is the sight of blood. And I know you talk about bloodletting and how that became a thing to treat illnesses. So talk about how that became a thing. Bloodletting has been around for so long, you know, for thousands of years. And I think that So talk about how that became a thing. different body fluids being in balance or out of balance. And so the idea was, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:26 maybe you have too much of one thing and you need to get rid of some of it. So bloodletting has been around for a really long time. It may even be one of the reasons why George Washington died. He was very sick. And he had a doctor who drained so much of his blood that doctors now look back on it and think that that probably contributed to his death. One common gross thing that people think about, especially when they're about to go into a pool, is, you know, people pee in the pool, and that's kind of gross. Is it kind of gross? So scientists have actually looked at what happens when you pee in the pool. And the news isn't great because when you pee in the pool, all of that urine contains a lot of nitrogen and urea. And that can combine with the chlorine in a pool to actually create some very toxic chemicals. One of them is even classified as an agent of warfare, that's cyanogen

Starting point is 00:38:36 chloride. And so when you pee in the pool, you're not just grossing other people out, you're actually producing very tiny amounts of, you know, chemical warfare substances that can be quite toxic. Now, how much pee would it take in a pool to actually, you know, harm someone with these substances? Well, we don't know, but it would be probably quite a lot. However, I would say that there's probably no amount of, you know, chemical warfare agent that you really want in your pool anyway. And isn't there some advice that like, if you get a jellyfish sting, you should pee on it, that that would help it somehow? Yeah, this keeps going around. And, you know, for a long time, people have said, if you get a jellyfish sting, you should pee on it, for example, or that if you have a deep wound and you don't have access bacteria in it, and therefore it's almost as good as, you know,

Starting point is 00:39:45 clean, pure water for washing out a wound or something. That is absolutely not true. There's definitely bacteria in all of our urine. Urine is not sterile. Neither is almost anything else in our body, for that matter. There are bacteria literally in pretty much every part of our body, including even in the brain. There are bacteria and viruses that can get in there. So certainly don't pee on things and thinking that it's so clean and pure. And also the thing with jellyfish, jellyfish release these stinging cells, and those are actually sensitive to any kind of change in salinity. So by peeing on a jellyfish sting, you might actually make it worse by triggering more of those stinging cells. So what you should actually do instead, it's stung by a jellyfish,

Starting point is 00:40:42 you're probably close to salt water. That's what you would want to use. You'd want to use seawater to rinse off. You say we should be eating insects. Why would I want to do that? So eating insects is one of those things that was a challenge, even for me. And you know, I have a background studying environmental science, and I want to do the right thing for the environment. So I went to a conference that was all about eating insects and scientists who are studying this and people who have started a whole industry in edible insects, both for humans to eat and for the animals that we raise as livestock to eat. And what they are finding is that it is very

Starting point is 00:41:26 environmentally friendly. When you think about how many insects you can grow in a small area and how efficiently you can grow them, it's much better for the environment than raising hogs and cattle and all of these things that we do. But there's that disgust factor. Like I said, you know, it's pretty common for people to be grossed out by insects and bugs. So the idea of eating them, if that's not part of your culture's cuisine, is, you know, really repulsive to most people. And I have to admit that even for me, it was hard to give it a try. I went to this whole bug buffet where a chef had prepared all different kinds of food using insects, you know, in his cuisine, and that's what he specializes in. So it was really nice stuff. But for me, it was still it was still a little hard to give it a first try, you know. But I will say it really, it wasn't too bad. Once you kind of get past that ick factor,

Starting point is 00:42:27 if you just kind of focus on it, like, well, it's just another little animal, you know, it's not really much uglier than a shrimp, for example. So if you just kind of focus on that and think about it, and it really, it doesn't taste like anything all that unusual for the most part. Like crickets, those were pretty easy. We had mealworms. We had even ants. Ants had a surprisingly light lemony kind of like the teenager form of a silkworm in between a baby and an adult. And that was, you know, a couple of inches long and segmented and really looked insecty. And I have to admit, that one was pretty tough for me

Starting point is 00:43:21 to swallow. What did it taste like? You know, a lot of it was about the texture because it was, it was a little, it was bigger. And so it was a little bit meaty, but on the squishy side, it was kind of a unique taste, but, you know, almost a little bit papery to me. It wasn't that it tasted so bad necessarily. It was more that the texture was like squishy, like I was really eating a bug at that point. Well, I know it came up in a conversation on a previous episode, but you know, one way to eat bugs like crickets is cricket flour and you can buy cricket flour at Amazon or lots of places. Well, you know, cricket flour is also really high in protein. And so a lot of people are using that for things like making protein rich smoothies and things like

Starting point is 00:44:10 that. And I've tried that. That was one of the things that they were talking about a lot at the eating insects conference that I went to. And, you know, I tried some of that in a drink. It, you can't even really taste it, you wouldn't even know, it just tastes like protein powder, like any other kind of commercial protein powder you would buy. And yeah, so that's a great kind of, again, an environmentally friendly way of, you know, adding some protein to your diet. And again, like once you try it, I find it's not so gross. Once you've tasted it and said, oh, actually, it tastes like nothing. Then, you know, I think most people are more afraid of trying something than they really need to be. You know, give it one shot.

Starting point is 00:44:56 And if it's really not that bad, I think you'll find that you're not so afraid of it the second time around. You know, one thing I saw in your book, one thing that really kind of grossed me out was these fatbergs. It's like icebergs, only they're made out of fat. So lurking under the sewers, these are giant mountains of fat, grease, and whether it comes from, you know, what goes down toilets to what doesn't go down grease traps in restaurants and things like that. These can build up into these massive clogs that in London have even been found to be as big as city buses in some cases. But it's not just London. You know, these have been found in cities across the U S New York

Starting point is 00:45:46 city has had some famous fatbergs as well. And it's another area where scientists are trying to figure out how these fatbergs form, what causes them, how to prevent them. And, you know, one of the biggest things is just getting people not to put so much gunk down into the sewers. It's amazingly hard. People flush, there are all these wet wipes that say they're flushable. They're really not. And so they develop into these just enormous accumulations that have been probably around since as long as we've had sewers. The Romans, for example, had sewers. Famously, they developed a sewer system and they used to send slaves down to go clean all of this gunk out. These days, we have to send people down with heavy equipment to blast the stuff out.

Starting point is 00:46:41 Something else that plagues major cities often is rats. And, you know, I get creeped out by rats. I've never liked rats. And then we hear these stories about how they are getting so big and so indestructible, and they're the size of a small dog. So can you talk a bit about rats? So rats are the ultimate survivors. Rats today are all over the world. Anywhere where there are people, there are rats. And so in that sense, I guess you could say that they're taking over the world. But they're really adapted to live alongside humans these days. You know, they really are dependent on us for the most part for their food and shelter. What's amazing is that as much as we hate rats, we know so little about them. We know so little about their actual ecology and how they live in the wild. In this case, the wild for rats is now mostly, you know, in our homes and in our cities. So one ecologist even told me, you know, she said, we probably know

Starting point is 00:47:54 more about the ecology of polar bears than we know about rats. And so they have been trying to study and understand rats and how rats move around different places and what causes, you know, large infestations of rats to happen in some places. And one of the big things is that when you try to eradicate rats, when you try to kill all the rats in one place, they will just move to another. And so, you know, you'll end up with kind of a wave of rats that moves, that can move around, you know, from city block to city block. Well, we all are surrounded by gross and creepy things. And you know what's interesting is the more we talk about them, the less creepy they sound. Erica Engelhaupt has been my guest.

Starting point is 00:48:42 She is a writer and editor for National Geographic, and her book is called Gory Details, Adventures from the Dark Side of Science. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Erica. Thanks. Take care. Everybody's concerned or should be concerned about their credit score, but there are some things about your credit score you may not understand. First of all, there are five major factors that have an impact on your FICO credit score. They are payment history, your level of debt and credit utilization, the age of the credit, the mix of the credit, and the number of credit inquiries. 30% of the score is utilization, and a lot of people don't really understand what credit utilization means. For example, you might think that if you pay off a credit card, the financially responsible thing

Starting point is 00:49:38 to do would be to close that account. But credit utilization, remember that's one-third of your credit score, means how much of your available credit are you currently using. So you want to have a good portion of your credit available that's not being used. If you close the account, you lower the amount of available credit, which could hurt your credit score. Now, some cards charge a fee if you don't use their card for a long time, so you want to watch out for that and try to use the card once in a while to avoid that charge. But having credit that you don't use is generally a good thing.

Starting point is 00:50:18 And that is something you should know. There are lots of things we discuss on this podcast that I bet your friends would like to hear, so please tell them about this podcast, share the link with them, and let them listen as well. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group.

Starting point is 00:50:56 Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot,

Starting point is 00:51:15 and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes.

Starting point is 00:51:41 And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well, including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible.

Starting point is 00:52:09 The note from Kripke was, he's great, we love him, 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.

Something You Should Know - What Are You Afraid Of? & The Strange and Taboo Side of Nature

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