Amy Nicholson
speaker
471 appearances
63 recordings
2 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Jun 2025
Amy Nicholson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
And here to help us understand these things is Cutter Wood, who has explored and researched this topic and has written a book called Earthly Materials, Journeys Through Our Bodies, Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. And I promise, I promise this is not a gross conversation at all, so please stay with me. Hey Cutter, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, thanks for having me.
Let's start with breathing. We all breathe all the time. Most of us don't think much about it or talk about it, but if you stop breathing, that's pretty much the end of you. Breathing is pretty important.
Which is why I suspect the idea of slow, deep breaths is a big part of meditation and mindfulness, that it is a way to calm your brain down, to calm your thoughts down. So let's talk about hair and how hair grows and why it's different colors and all that. Because people spend a lot of time and money on their hair and how they make it look without thinking so much about the biology of it all.
So dive in there.
When you say people with red hair process pain differently, what does that mean? That it feels different or what?
Well, that's weird. It's pretty wild, right? Well, the other thing about hair that I find interesting, well, there's a lot of things about hair that you find interesting, but Like a lot of people, I was one of these people that, you know, when I was very young, I had very blonde hair, but that didn't last very long. It got brown and it stayed brown for the rest of my life.
But why does mucus tend to be more prominent and there's more of it when you're sick? Your nose gets runny. Why?
And so when it attaches to things that are dangerous in my body, does that mean it's trying to take out mucus? the whatever it is in my body that's causing me to have a cold or the flu or is it that fundamental or it's finding other things in there that are also dangerous and trying to take them out or what?
So really, we need to learn to love our mucus because it's pretty important.
So let's talk about urine, pee. We all know you drink something and it goes through your body and does what it does and it comes out. But I don't know that I know much about the process or what happens. So since it is a universal experience that's probably worth understanding, let's talk about that.
And that's why when you go to the doctor, you pee in a cup and they send it to the lab, I guess.
And they still do that?
Another thing humans excrete are tears. And what's interesting to me about tears is they're always there, right, lubricating your eye. But emotions can make lots of tears and they run down your face. And the emotions that create that are both happiness and sadness. So I'd be curious to know more about that.
But what's so interesting to me about tears is, and maybe there's no answer for this, but it's the same reaction, the same reflex for sadness and for happiness. And I've heard the explanation that you cry when you're happy to kind of tone down the happiness, to try to keep you in a range of emotions that you don't go off the scale. I don't know if that's true or not.
But going back to your friend who has never cried, he has never cried and he's proud of that or he's frustrated by that and wish he could or that's a badge of honor that he's never cried.
So the last thing we're going to talk about, and I promise it won't get gross, is throwing up. Vomit. So I will let you take the lead on that one.
Well, thanks for coming on and not getting too gross on a topic that can get pretty gross. Cutter Wood has been my guest. The name of his book is Earthly Materials, Journeys Through Our Bodies, Emissions, Excretions, and Disintegrations. And if you'd like to read more, particularly more gross things, there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Cutter, thank you for being here.
Here's a situation a lot of people find themselves in. You've got a favorite pair of shoes, but there's something wrong with them. They're in need of repair. Do you repair your shoes, or do you just replace them? Well, according to Business Insider, here's the rule. If the upper part of your shoe dries out or starts cracking, then it's not worth repairing.
But if the uppers are fine, the bottoms can always be fixed. And by uppers, that means anything that isn't the sole of the shoe. Even with a really expensive pair of shoes, you may think you're saving money by paying $50 to repair them instead of buying a brand new pair. But if you have to start fixing the uppers now, they're going to need more equally expensive repairs before too long.
On the other hand, if the soles of the shoes are ruined, that's easy and not very expensive to fix and can give you several extra years of life and leave you feeling like you have a brand new pair of shoes. The trick is to make sure you find a good repair shop because they are not all created equal. And that is something you should know.
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