Something You Should Know
How Not to Die Anytime Soon & Why You Need Friction in Your Life
22 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: Why do we feel miserable when we're sick?
Today on Something You Should Know, the real reason you feel so miserable when you get sick. Then, an ER doctor reveals the many things that can kill you, some you may not know.
Water can be deadly in overconsumption, so you never want to give a baby under six months water, and you never, as an adult, want to drink copious amounts of water because it causes something called hyponatremia that can result in brain swelling, seizure, and death.
Also, a simple way to make a good cup of coffee tastes even better. And friction, you know, the force that resists motion. It's a big part of your life.
Every day throughout the day, you're dealing with friction. I'm dealing with friction.
Chapter 2: What common dangers do ER doctors see in their practice?
So I think it's important to be able to recognize friction, to understand friction. And I could even so boldly claim that doing so could help us save the world.
All this today on Something You Should Know.
Ah, the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgerton takes place, or as the time when Jane Austen wrote her books. The Regency era was also an explosive time of social change, sex scandals, and maybe the worst king in British history. Vulgar History's new season is all about the Regency era, the balls, the gowns, and all the scandal.
Chapter 3: How can you avoid common life-threatening conditions?
Listen to Vulgar History, Regency era, wherever you get podcasts. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.
You know when you're sick, like with the cold or the flu, you don't really want to do much of anything. You kind of want to be left alone. Well, there's a really good reason for that. And that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi and welcome, I'm Mike Carruthers. So when you get sick, those symptoms you feel aren't just random misery.
Scientists now understand that many of those symptoms, like fatigue, loss of appetite, low mood, social withdrawal, they're part of what's known as sickness behavior. These responses are triggered by your immune system, which releases signaling molecules that communicate with your brain and deliberately change how you feel and how you behave.
From an evolutionary perspective, these symptoms appear to serve a purpose.
Chapter 4: How can the color of your mug affect your drink's taste?
Feeling tired keeps you from traveling very far. Losing your appetite reduces shared use of food and water. A lack of interest in social contact limits close interaction with other people. Even feeling a little bit down may help encourage isolation and rest. And together, all of these changes in your behavior reduce the chances of you spreading illness to the people around you.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of friction in our daily lives?
So when you're sick and you feel terrible, it may not be your body falling apart. It may be your body doing exactly what it's supposed to do. Slowing you down, keeping you home, and helping protect the rest of the community. And that is something you should know.
Chapter 6: How does friction impact our energy consumption?
Even though we all know that one day we will die, we spend a lifetime trying to avoid it. And sure, the end can come very randomly, from an accident or some rare disease, but we know enough about the big killers to know how to drastically improve the odds of not dying. And you know who's a real expert on this is Dr. Ashley Alker.
Chapter 7: What are the different types of friction and their effects?
She seems to be on a mission to keep people from dying. In fact, it's her job. She's an ER physician, and she's also been a technical consultant and medical screenwriter, improving the medical accuracy on shows for Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Disney. She is the author of a book called 99 Ways to Die and How to Avoid Them. Hi, Doctor. Welcome to Something You Should Know.
Thanks so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.
Well, it's interesting, you know, we interview a lot of people on this show that talk about, you know, how to live, you know, and things to do to stay healthy and live a long life. You're coming at this, I mean, it's kind of the same thing, but it's how not to die, which is a different approach. Why that approach?
First off, it's the easiest approach for me as an emergency medicine physician, because that is my biggest goal every day when I'm at work is to keep people from dying.
And I think that it kind of frames my viewpoint instead of telling people, you know, you need to do these things to be healthier, which most of those things, you know, we already know, eat healthy, exercise, don't smoke, don't drink alcohol, sleep, these things that we... kind of seemed to reiterate a lot of times.
I thought I would come at it at a different way with a bunch of interesting subjects and 99 diseases that you don't have to die from if you have the right information in most cases.
Why do most people die? What causes do we know? People die from what mostly?
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Chapter 8: What surprising ways can friction help us save energy?
Is it just the old age?
It depends on where we're talking demographic-wise. If you're talking about the United States, then mostly it's heart disease and cancer, which when we say old age, a lot of times we're talking about these chronic diseases kind of building through the years. the end result, which in some cases is a heart attack or terminal cancer. Additionally, there are different demographics.
So some people in certain countries will die of certain things more frequently. For instance, in certain Asian countries, stomach cancer is very prevalent, where in the US, the cancers that are most prevalent often are things like Breast cancer in women, colon cancer, used to be lung cancer, but that's reducing. So it depends on where you are and what you do and who you are.
But the most common things in the United States are definitely heart disease and cancer.
What are some of the things that would surprise me that are maybe more common than I would think they are?
Something that I think surprises people that was very deadly was strep throat. So strep throat is a disease that's extremely common, and we treat it with antibiotics. And one of the first antibiotics, penicillin, is very effective at treating the disease. So it seems like it's not a big deal.
But before we had antibiotics, this is something that a lot of people, especially children, would die from. And there's a lot of complicated diseases that can result from untreated strep throat. So strep throat itself isn't helped very much by the antibiotics. It shortens the course a little bit, but that's not why we're treating the disease.
We treat the disease to prevent the complications, which include things like an abscess of the throat called a peritonsillar abscess. Post strep glomular nephritis, which is a kidney disease that can result in kidney failure. And then some things that you might have heard before, rheumatic fever. And lastly, scarlet fever.
So these are all diseases related to strep throat that we don't really see that much anymore because we treat strep throat. Sometimes we take for granted the places that science and medicine have taken us and the safety that those things afford us these days from things like strep throat.
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