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
We're talking about why it is our electronic devices are so easily damaged and destroyed by liquids. And my guest is Rachel Plotnick. She's author of a book called License to Spill, Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives.
So Rachel, we were talking earlier. It does seem to me that everybody has had this happen or knows someone who's lost a device because of dropping it in the toilet or whatever. Are there any statistics as to how many devices or how many people this happens to?
My sense and my experience, because I once took my phone in my pocket into a hot tub, which I got out of the hot tub and felt my pocket and went, oh, God. And, of course, it didn't work. And I took it to the place. And my sense is that if your phone is submerged in water, it's never going to work right again. I mean, it's never going to come back to where it was.
Maybe it can work again, but it seems like it's always going to be something's, yeah, I dropped it in water, so it doesn't do that thing anymore.
In your research into this, is this a topic that comes up much in the halls of Apple and the other manufacturers of these electronic devices, or is their position more that it's really up to the consumer to take care of these things once they buy them?
Well, these devices have become so much a part of our life that when you think about all the times we interact with them, just the law of averages is going to say there's going to be accidents. Things are going to go wrong and they're going to break.
What is it that happens to the phone when it, I mean, as you said, it depends on the liquid, but just with regular fresh water, what is it that it does to the phone that makes it so if it just dries out, it should work fine. I have the key fob for my car. I've put it in the wash twice now. It works fine after it gets dry. It doesn't ruin it. Of course, that's just a key fob. It's not a computer.
But still, what is it that happens that is so fatal to the phone?
But you're not suggesting, I don't think, you're not suggesting that manufacturers are up to something here, that they're trying to not make them more water resistant so that they can make more money. Or are you?
Because it does seem that all these products are tested to some extent for durability. They must throw them around and kick them. I mean, they must put them through their paces because as we were talking about before, I mean, my phone's been kicked and hit and dropped and works fine.
But it does seem that people know going in. It's not like when you drop your phone in the toilet that you're shocked that it doesn't work anymore. I mean, you know you should have not done that and that you probably shouldn't have brought the phone into the bathroom in the first place. It's not an educational thing. People know that they're fragile to some extent.
It's just that life happens and that's the intersection where things go wrong.
You know what I like about having this discussion is that for everyone who has had this happen to them, where you've dropped the phone in the toilet or taken it into the pool by accident, and it's happened to apparently just about everyone, you feel so foolish, you feel so guilty, and And you feel like you're probably the only one that's ever done this.
And I love taking this topic out of the shadows. And now we all know, we all do it. It's going to happen. And maybe someday they'll find a way to fix this. Rachel Plotnick has been my guest. She is a historian and cultural theorist. And she is author of a book called License to Spill, Where Dry Devices Meet Liquid Lives. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes.
Rachel, it's always a pleasure. You always have really interesting topics. Thank you.
You have probably noticed that people tend to talk a lot about how stressed out they are. And they don't mean it in a good way. No one says, oh, I'm so stressed out and boy, does that feel fabulous. No, most of us think of stress as a bad thing. But it appears we may not be thinking about stress in the right way. There is good stress and there is bad stress.
And the more good stress you can bring into your life, the more it fights the negative effects of the bad stress. That's according to my guest, Dr. Sharon Berquist. She's an award-winning physician and researcher known for her science-based approach to lifestyle medicine. She's contributed to hundreds of news segments, including Good Morning America, ABC News, and The Wall Street Journal.
She has a TED-Ed talk about how stress affects you, and it has been viewed over 8 million times. She's the author of a book called The Stress Paradox, Why You Need Stress to Live Longer, Healthier, and Happier. Hello, Sharon. Welcome. Thank you for coming on Something You Should Know today.
So there seems to be some confusion about what stress is, what it does and all. So can you explain exactly what stress is?
And the difference between those two types of stress, the kind that is harmful and the kind that is not, is what?
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