The Stuff of Life: Episode Zero

Eavesdrop on experts and researchers as they ponder what makes our world so maddening, so strange and so achingly beautiful. Not to mention ridiculous. Join Julie Douglas for The Stuff of Life, a new immersive podcast by HowStuffWorks.com.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My name is Julie Douglas and I'm the host of
the Stuff of Life, a podcast produced by How Stuff Works.
We humans are storytelling machines. From the moment we're born.
We organize our world through story, trying to figure out
what all the data points mean, which is why The
Stuff of Life aims to pull apart those stories and

(00:20):
discuss them, looking at how they explain our existence on
planet Earth. That nothing is too beautiful to happen in life.
On the Stuff of Life, we do this with a
little help from a few experts along with our friends
here at How Stuff Works. Every week we'll drop an
episode on your doorstep, some of them dealing with the
biggias like fear. Fear has this double power over us.

(00:43):
It has the power to to you know, of course,
frighten us, to make us coward, to change our behavior,
but also the power to make us ask all these
questions about ourselves and the question who we are. A
week later, we'll have a companion episode, like the Fear
of public speaking. We get up in front of an
audience the first time and see all those people out

(01:07):
there looking at us. You start to think, am I ready?
Can I do this? What? Was I thinking, maybe this
was a really really bad idea along the way we
look at making our memories immortal. Right now, the only
way to donald our memories is by actually writing this stuff.

(01:31):
We don't have to get a cable to blog into
our head and don't of everything. We question our attachment
to objects. Remember that movie with Tom Hanksby got attached
to the ball and he named it Wilson. I think
that was part of his survival mechanism, is to feel
like he had a connection to something or someone. And
so people often who have been hurt by individuals throughout

(01:53):
their lives through by people, turned to objects and or
even animals to feel like they have a sense of connection.
We visit a conference on laughter and we take a
stroll through a haunted house to find out why we'd

(02:14):
want to scare the opinions off of ourselves Willingly. Most
people come to a haunted house to be scared, to
be entertained, to have a great time. But there are
people who get the deeper meanings. They get the roots
of things, the roots of Halloween. They can see the
references many ways. It's a ride of passage. It's the
heroes journey join us on Janu the very first episode.

(02:36):
You can find the Stuff of Life anywhere you get
your podcasts, including iTunes,