Mary Roach on Disgust, Death, and Danger (Live at Mason)
Conversations with Tyler
Conversations with Tyler
4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 October 2017
⏱️ 76 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Legal writing was never Mary Roach’s thing. She describes that short-lived stint as an inscrutable “bringing forth of multisyllabic words.” Instead, she’s forged a career by letting curiosity lead the way. The result has been a series of successful books — Grunt, Gulp, Spook, Stiff, and Bonk among them— that all reveal a specific sense of nonsensibility (and love for monosyllabic titles).
She joins Tyler Cowen for a conversation covering the full range of her curiosity, including fear, acclimating to grossness, chatting with the dead, freezing one’s head, why bedpans can kill you, sex robots, Freud, thinking like an astronaut, the proper way to eat a fry, and why there’s a Medicare reimbursement code for maggots.
Read a full transcript enhanced with helpful links, or watch the full video.
Recorded September 27th, 2017
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, |
| 0:08.3 | bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. |
| 0:12.5 | Learn more at mercatis.org. |
| 0:15.2 | And for more conversations, including videos, transcripts, and upcoming dates, visit |
| 0:20.4 | ConversationsWithT Tyler.com. |
| 0:30.0 | There's one of your talks where you describe a common theme of your books that they're all about |
| 0:35.3 | something anatomical and vaguely gross. |
| 0:39.2 | When you write these books, how long does it take you to get used to the aspects of your topics that are gross? |
| 0:45.4 | Uh, I'm thinking like somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes. |
| 0:51.3 | I like to, I don't want to adjust too quickly actually, because something happens when you dive into a topic, |
| 0:58.8 | and you start out with a sense of wonder and hesitation and curiosity, and it's all very electric and fresh. |
| 1:06.3 | And then after a couple of years, you're like, yeah, gastro-collect reflex, boring. |
| 1:11.1 | You know, you start to become like the people that you're speaking. |
| 1:16.3 | You know, the researchers for whom it's day to day, and I don't want things to be day to day. |
| 1:20.8 | So I actually like to slow down that. |
| 1:23.2 | Or I'd like, if I could, to slow down that process of feeling comfortable. |
| 1:28.2 | So in your book, Gulp, which is about the mechanics of eating, you draw a distinction between stimulated and unstimulated saliva. |
| 1:36.2 | So when you hear that, does it strike you at all as odd? |
| 1:38.7 | Or it's like, oh, of course, here's my unstimulated saliva coming up. |
| 1:43.0 | Well, right now, yes, I've got, I need more unstimulated saliva right now, because otherwise you're getting |
| 1:47.6 | to get those horrible mouth sounds that radio people hate. |
| 1:51.2 | But that was, that was, that's the kind of thing I get very excited about, the fact that there are two different kinds. |
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