Something You Should Know - Dramatic Ways Your Thoughts Impact Your Health & Understanding Deadly Wildfires

Episode Date: August 28, 2023

People who are confident and powerful tend to exhibit a few critical behaviors to create that impression of power and confidence. This episode begins with a quick list of things anyone can do to present the image of power to others. Source: Robert Greene author of The 48 Laws of Personal Power (https://amzn.to/3EaogJs) There is compelling evidence that your mind and your thoughts can impact your physical health. It isn’t all mystical and magical as you might think. In fact, a lot of it is quite logical and practical – yet it is still amazing, as you are about to discover when you listen to my guest Ellen Langer. She is the first ever tenured female professor at Harvard University and is considered the “mother of mindfulness.” She is author of the book The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health (https://amzn.to/45gn1UO) Wildfires seem to be more destructive than ever before. Flames in forests are scorching about twice as many trees as they did two decades ago, and nearly 100,000 homes, barns, and other structures have gone up in smoke. Plus, wildfires seem to occur in places that never used to have to worry. What is going on and what do we all need to know to protect ourselves? That is what Nick Mott is here to discuss. Nick is a Peabody Award winning journalist, podcast producer and author of the book This is Wildfire: How to Protect Yourself Your Home and Your Community in the Age of Heat (https://amzn.to/3P3nO5W). When someone say, “This goes with out saying…” Why are they saying it if it goes without saying? That is one of several phrases people often use that they probably shouldn’t. Listen as I reveal some other phrases that we should all avoid if we want to make the right impression on people. Paul Yeager author of “Literally The Best Language Book Ever (https://amzn.to/45CUcBM) PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Delete Me helps you keep your personal info private by removing it from hundreds of data broker websites that sell our data online. You tell Delete Me exactly what info you want deleted, and their privacy experts take it from there! It’s really that simple to protect yourself. DeleteMe makes it easy! Right Now get 20% off your DeleteMe plan when you go to https://joindeleteme.com/something and use promo code SOMETHING20 Indeed is the hiring platform where you can Attract, Interview, and Hire all in one place! Start hiring NOW with a $75 SPONSORED JOB CREDIT to upgrade your job post at https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING Offer good for a limited time. Now, your ideas don't have to wait, now, they have everything they need to come to life. Dell Technologies and Intel are pushing what technology can do, so great ideas can happen - right now! Find out how to bring your ideas to life at https://Dell.com/WelcomeToNow If you want to lose weight and keep it off, increase your metabolic efficiency and prevent or reverse health conditions you need to know the truth about why dieting has failed and how to take back control of your body and health! With GOLO you will safely and effectively control sugar cravings, hunger, and minimize muscle loss allowing you to feel good and inspired to reach your goal weight. Learn more at https://golo.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Download June's Journey now on Android or iOS. Today on Something You Should Know, effective techniques powerful people use to exhibit their power. Then, how your thoughts can affect your health and well-being, for better or worse. When you're not feeling good, no matter whether it's psychological, physical, whatever, that all we have are moments, and you can make the moment matter. And if you make this moment matter and the next moment matter, then at the end of the day, you've had a meaningful day.

Also, if something goes without saying, then why do people say it goes without saying? And doesn't it seem like there are a lot more wildfires today than before? That's not necessarily true. If we look at a chart of how many fires per year over time, it's not drastically more now. What we're seeing is more severe fires, fires burning more acreage. A lot of those fires is human-caused stars. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world.

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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. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. There is a book out, it's been out for a while, called The 48 Laws of Personal Power. And it's by Robert Greene, who has been a guest on this podcast in the past. And it's a really great book.

And in it, he offers some really good advice for people who want to appear more powerful. And here's some of that advice. Always say less than necessary. It gives people the impression that you don't need to gab about things because you know them so well. It's chatty people who appear insecure.

Act like a king to be treated like a king. If someone asks you how much you want to be paid, aim high. If you show that you think you're valuable, other people will think so too. Don't argue. Powerful people know

that you almost never change someone else's opinion with your words. So, don't try. Stay above it all. And never outshine your master. Make your boss or the person above you think they are bright, witty, and charming. If they feel threatened by you, they will work to sabotage your power. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you've heard people talk about the mind-body connection,

how your thoughts can impact your health and well-being. Well, this conversation is sort of about that, but much more. I think you will find this really fascinating. Meet Ellen Langer. She is kind of a legend in her field. She is the very first woman professor tenured at Harvard. She is considered to be the mother of mindfulness, and she has a book out called The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Hi, Ellen. Pleasure to have you on. Hi Mike,

thank you for having me. So you're the mother of mindfulness and you have a really interesting TED talk in which you say most of us are not mindful, in fact most of us are mindless most of the time. So let's start there. What do you mean by that? Well, mindlessness people have a great sense of. It's when you're acting like a robot. We have expressions like the lights on, nobody's home, and 40 years of research has shown, sadly, most of us are just not home. Now, to be home, so to speak, to be mindful is so easy with consequences that are so extraordinary it almost defies belief how easy it is. All you need to do is notice new things.

As you notice new things, the neurons are firing and all of this research shows that it's literally and figuratively enlivening. Now, we don't notice things because we think we know. And that's the major problem everything is always changing everything looks different from different perspectives so we can't know for sure so I often Mike when I'm giving lectures I'll ask people so how much is one in one to answer how much it to that's what most people assume but not always if you're adding one watt of chewing gum plus one watt of chewing gum one plus one. If you're adding one watt of chewing gum plus one watt of chewing gum,

one plus one is one. You're adding one pile of laundry plus one pile of laundry, one plus one is one. One cloud plus one cloud, one plus one is one, and so on. So in the real world, one plus one may not equal two as or more often as it does. So we have to pay attention. And when we recognize that we don't know, we naturally attend. And that's the essence of our being mindful. So give me some real-life examples, not necessarily the chewing gum and the clouds, but of how we miss things, how we're not seeing things. Like, for example, what?

As soon as we think we know we don't pay attention we don't pay attention if you thought you knew what I was going to say next why bother listening and it turns out that all of this data show that when you're actively noticing new things people find you more attractive when you're actively noticing new things people see it was When you're actively noticing new things, people see you as charismatic, you're likely to be certainly more innovative. So it's so easy to do. Just know you don't know, then you tune in. And then what you're going to do is be able to notice things that otherwise you'd be blind to and avoid dangers before they arise.

Okay, so I get the concept of mindfulness now, but so tie it into health. That's the topic of the book. And so what does this have to do with health? We have very limiting notions regarding our health and our abilities, what we're capable of, all sorts of possibilities because of our mindlessness. People tell us this is, and whatever follows from that, we assume has to be. And we have evidence, some of it is quite extraordinary, I think. And the first test of this we did was called the counterclockwise study where we retrofitted a retreat to 20 years earlier and had elderly men live there for a week as if they were

their younger selves. So their minds are back in the past. As a result, their vision improved, their hearing improved, their memory improved, and they looked noticeably younger in a period of time less than a week and without any medical intervention. Well, that is pretty extraordinary. And talk about that study where you help people or you make people heal faster. We inflict a wound. Now, you know, it would have been more compelling if it could be a big wound, but we don't want to hurt people. So it's a minor wound. People are in front of a clock. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. And for a third

of the people, it's real time. What we found is that the wound heals based on clock time. That means whatever you perceive to be the time. We have people in a sleep lab, they wake up, they think they got two hours more sleep, two hours fewer, or the amount of sleep they actually got. And again, biological and cognitive functions follow our perceptions, our beliefs. So, and we have many, many studies where what we find is that

we have enormous control over our health. Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. So you're saying, you're saying that if a person has a cut on their arm that would take normally a week to heal, and you speed up the clock, so this person's time perception is messed up and time is going by faster, the cut will heal faster based on the person's perception of time? Yes, that's what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. Let me tell you how I got started in all the work on MindBodyUnity. So I was married when I was very young and I went to Paris on my honeymoon and I was trying to be very, very sophisticated. And I ordered this mixed grill in this restaurant and on the plate was a pancreas. I didn't think I could eat it, but it felt like a challenge. I had

to be able to because now I was a grown woman. So I asked my then husband which of these items was the pancreas. He pointed to one. I ate everything. I'm a big eater, a good eater. Now was the moment of truth. Could I eat that pancreas? I start eating it and I'm literally, literally, not just figuratively, literally getting sick. He then starts to laugh.

I asked him, what are you laughing about? He said, that's chicken. You ate the pancreas ages ago. But by my believing that this was pancreas, I got myself sick. Explain what you mean by the borderline effect. I thought this was really interesting. You know that for every disease, there's a diagnosis where some people fall just below it, and others fall right above it. Those right above are given, are told they have the disease. But if you look at the numbers, there's no meaningful difference. Let's just say for argument's sake, Mike, you and I took an IQ test and you get 70 and I get 69. 69 is the cutoff point.

And that would mean that I'm cognitively deficient, what we used to call retarded. Now, once I'm given that diagnosis and you're told you're normal, if we tune back in in six months, there'd be a very real difference between us. So we did this with diabetes, with cancer, where the difference, that tiny difference that statistically speaking is not different at all, psychologically made an enormous difference where people end up manifesting the disease. We have, if we go back to the mind-body unity studies, one that we did that was great fun was with chambermaids. And these chambermaids didn't think they got exercise because they saw exercise as what you do after work, and they were just too tired after work. And we took them and we taught half of them that their work is exercise. That's all we did was change their mindset. They were told that working on a machine at the gym is like making a bed and so on. So half of them are persuaded their work is exercise. When the study was over, those people who did nothing more but change their mindset, they lost weight. There was

a change in waist to hip ratio, body mass index, and their blood pressure came down. So we have a host of these sorts of studies showing that, my goodness, we have enormous control. We have control over our happiness. Once we recognize that outcomes are not good or bad, they don't come pre-labeled. It's the way we see them. I mean, let's say, for example, Mike, you and I go out to lunch and the food is wonderful. Wonderful. We've had a good meal. We go out to lunch and the food is awful. Wonderful. I won't eat as much and that'll be good for my waistline. No matter what happens, there's a way of understanding it differently.

My guest is Ellen Langer. She is a Harvard professor considered to be the mother of mindfulness. And she's author of a book called The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. Metrolinks and Crosslinks are reminding everyone to be careful as Eglinton Crosstown LRT train testing is in progress. Please be alert as trains can pass at any time on the tracks. Remember to follow all traffic signals. Be careful along our tracks and only make left turns where it's safe to do so. Be alert, be aware, and stay safe. This winter, take a trip to Tampa on Porter Airlines. Enjoy the warm

Tampa Bay temperatures and warm Porter hospitality on your way there. All Porter fares include beer, wine, and snacks, and free fast-streaming Wi-Fi on planes with no middle seats. And your Tampa Bay vacation includes good times, relaxation, and great Gulf Coast weather. Visit FlyPorter.com and actually enjoy economy. So, Ellen, I get what you're saying about mindful, having a mindful attitude and all, but it's hard to look at something in this positive way if objectively that something isn't positive. It's just not. If you were told you've got six months to live, hard to put a positive spin on that, that your mind is going to somehow do something to the disease that's going to kill you in six months.

When people are given, have chronic diseases, excuse me, they presume that the disease is going to get, stay the same or get worse. Nothing stays the same and nothing moves only in one direction. There are little moments where you're a little better, little moments where you're a little worse. So what we did was to call people who have big diseases, we have Parkinson's, stroke, multiple sclerosis, chronic pain, and others. And we call them periodically and say, how are you now? And is it better or worse than before? And why?

Well, asking the why question does three things. The first, by trying to find why now am I a little better than before, you're going to be mindful. And that mindfulness, as I said before in other research, the more mindful we make people, the longer they live, the quicker they heal. Second, by seeing that, gee, sometimes you're better, you instantly become more hopeful and feel better. And third, I think you're more likely to find a solution if you're looking for one. So we did these across all these different diseases and

had wonderful results, very exciting. And you might say, well, but it's still, how can people do this for themselves? Well, most of us have smartphones and you set the smartphone for an hour later and then ask yourself the question, how am I now? Is it better or worse than before? And why? Then set it for an hour and 15 minutes, three hours. Keep doing this in the course of a week and the results that we found are very, very promising. It's also true that we do this with people. We hold them still. We think this person is nasty, that person is angry, this person is lazy, as if they're lazy, angry all the time so we respond to them as if they are those ways but nobody is anything all the time and when we when we do this and we see when they are and when

they aren't our relationships improve among other things you know most people many people wear glasses and we've done a lot of work with vision. Let me tell you about a fun study. I'm strange, I admit it, that when I go to the doctor and they give me the Snelling eye chart, the first thing I notice is, gee, since they're going from large letters to small letters, I'm supposed to expect that soon I won't be able to see. And what does that expectation do? So what we did to test this was we reversed the eye chart. So now the letters go from small to large. So you know soon you're going to be able to see. And simply by reversing the order and changing the expectation, people could see what they couldn't see before. Now, our vision varies in the course of the day. Most people hold

it still. They wake up and they put their glasses on. Now, if your vision is very bad, perhaps you need them. But for most of us, we don't need them all the time, but we're teaching our eyes to need the glasses. Almost like taking a laxative. You know, after a while, you become dependent on it. And so if we recognize, when do I need the glasses? When don't I? You might see that, gee, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, you don't see as well. Well, then you have alternatives. Maybe you need an energy bar or just a candy bar.

Maybe you need a nap, or you can put your glasses on. And so what happens, do you think, when you do a study and you get people to do any one of the things you've just described, and you say that some people get better and some people don't. So what's the difference? It doesn't work 100% of the time with 100% of the people. So the people it doesn't work with, why the time with 100% of the people. So the people it doesn't work with, why doesn't it work with them? Well, that's a very good question, and I can't be sure. But I believe that the stronger your mindset, you know, when I was younger, many years ago, the notion about cancer was cancer was a killer. And if you believed, if you took in that mindset, cancer is a killer, it's going to be very hard down the road to get you to believe

that, well, maybe not. It's not a killer for everybody and so on. So I guess the answer is the stronger the mindset, the harder it is to undo it. But is there any sense of why, especially something like cancer, where your belief can impact your outcome, how does it impact your outcome? How does your mind talk to the cancer and say, stop it? Let me use a simpler example. So I'm 76 years old. If I took in the mindset when I was younger that when you get old, you simply fall apart and my wrist started to hurt, I wouldn't do anything to heal it. I'd say, oh, well, what do you expect? I'm no longer young. I'm starting to fall apart. If the same symptoms occurred and you were 25 years old, you would do something about it.

So one of the things that happens is that we're out and about taking care of ourselves when we believe change is possible. And we don't do those things that are helpful when we believe it's hopeless. It's also the case that when you believe you have some dread disease, you allow yourself to turn off. And that means you're experiencing mindlessness. And I said before that this act of noticing is energy begetting, the neurons are firing, and it's literally enlivening. And so if you shut yourself down because of the expectation that, well, nobody lives forever and your time is up and so on, that can become the self-fulfilling prophecy. You often hear like when somebody lives to be over a hundred and you'll often hear people say,

she's so feisty or he's so feisty. And I wonder if feisty or that assertiveness that feisty represents, if there's something to that in terms of health and longevity versus passivity, assertiveness versus passivity. There's no question about it, in my mind at least, you know, that passivity robs us of ourselves passivity usually comes about because we're saying to ourselves we can't do it we can never have evidence that we can't do it anything whatever the it is all we can know is what we tried didn't work an interesting thing in that regard is that people think that they want to be expert at everything. And I think that that's a mistake. And if you knew that you didn't need to be expert,

because most of the time, if you become fully expert, you become mindless. You know, if I got a hole in one, every time I swung a golf club, there'd be no game there. So people have to have a better understanding that the game is to mastery, mastering, not having mastered. And that people think they always want to win.

Well, if you always wanna win, play tic-tac-toe against a four-year-old, assuming you know how to do it. So we really don't want that. We want a challenge and that that shouldn't change at any point in our lives. We shouldn't expect or even want perfection because we can either be perfectly mindless or imperfectly mindful. So if you're perfectly mindless, you're not there. And all of this work over 45 years has said that

if you're going to do it, be there for it, no matter what the it is you're doing, or don't bother doing it. It would seem difficult if you're sick or you've gotten a bad diagnosis, or you just feel bad. It seems that it would be difficult to be mindful in the way you're describing it of noticing new things. If you're sick, you don't really want to notice new things. You just want to go to bed. When you're not feeling good, no matter whether it's psychological, physical, whatever, that all we have are moments.

And you can make the moment matter. And if you make this moment matter and the next moment matter, then at the end of the day you've had a meaningful day the most interesting thing i i've of all of that you've said and you've said a lot of really interesting things is how if you speed up time you speed up healing that just i i just don't i don't get that well let me tell you about two other studies that will blow your mind and then the chamber maze. Now, here they just changed their minds and they lost weight. I mean, that's pretty mind-blowing.

Another, we have people who have type 2 diabetes. They come into the lab. We take all sorts of measures. And then, for reasons that'll become clear in a moment, we have computers. And they're playing computer games. And they're told, change the game you're playing about every 15 minutes or so. And that's to ensure they'll look at the clock next to the computer. For a third of the people, the clock is going twice as fast as real time. For a third of the people, the clock is going half as fast as real time. And for a third of the people, it's real

time. Blood sugar level follows perceived rather than real time. Well, what a great way to look at health and health challenges, big and small. To look at it through this lens that you've just described, I think gives everybody hope and optimism about their health. I've been speaking with Ellen Langer. She is a professor at Harvard. She is author of the book, The Mindful Body, Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Ellen. It was a real pleasure.

Thank you very much, Mike. It was fun. People who listen to Something You Should Know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to called Intelligence Squared. It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more.

A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today.

Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most.

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The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fire is scary. And we've all seen out-of-control fires on the news in Hawaii and Canada and plenty of other places. Many of those places haven't had wildfires before. And it has to make you worry and wonder, why are there so many of these horrible, often deadly fires? And what if one happened near you? Would you know what to do? I mean, I would imagine there were a lot of vacationers on the island of Maui

when the Lahaina fire hit. And those people came from areas where they would have never needed to worry about something like that. Yet there they were on Maui. This is a topic that's important to everyone, and here to shed some light is Nick Mott. He is a Peabody Award-winning journalist and podcast producer, and he is author of a book called This Is Wildfire, How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and your community in the age of heat. Hi Nick, welcome to Something You Should Know. Thanks so much for having me.

So first, help me understand what's going on here, because we're seeing more fires than we used to. We're seeing more fires in places where we never used to see fires before. I mean, I think of Canada as being very green and not a place where wildfires would rage out of control, yet there they are. And it all seems very different than it used to be not that long ago. So what's going on? Well, several things are going on. You know, to back up, we've gotten ourselves in this situation. You're right that fire seems a lot worse than it used to. We are seeing larger wildfires, more severe wildfires, and wildfires that affect people and property a lot more than we used to. And there are three main things causing that. The first one is climate change. Things are getting hotter and drier.

Our snowpack is melting off earlier. What used to be spring snows is hitting mountains in spring rain and just blasting off snowpack. You know, our night times are warmer, which used to be times when fire could die down more. You get more of a handle on it. So all this is combining to make wildfire worse due to climate. That's also in part why we're seeing this stuff in Canada right now. But two other things are happening too. One is a century of putting out all the fires. So back in 1910, there was this enormous fire that went by the Big Burn, a lot of people call it. Great book

by Tim Egan about it. It burnt a series of fires actually, mostly started by railroads that burnt about 3 million acres in the West. It was this big sort of national wake-up call that led the country to have this sort of war path against wildfire. Shortly after that, we instituted something called the 10 a.m. policy, which meant that we wanted every single wildfire out by 10 a.m. the next day. Wildfire was an enemy enemy and we mobilized our forces very much in a military-like manner to combat it. And the third thing is we built more and more homes in areas that are prone to wildfire. And the other thing to remember about all this is wildfire is natural. So if we look back at historical record, we would see smoky skies at this time of the year very often. We would see

some of these forests burning. So if we were to cut open a tree, look at the rings, you can see when fires burned. And you can see in a lot of forests, especially Ponderosa pine forests in the west and southwest, there were roughly 10 to 30 year fire intervals, but we've severed that. So if you look back, those intervals are gone for the last hundred years. That means there's a lot more growth in forests, and that growth is ready just to go up. So there's all this little stuff, what folks often call ladder fuel, in between the bigger trees that are more fire resilient. So really, all that's combining to create where we're at today. Why are we intentionally building homes in places that are likely to burn? I mean, it seems like there's plenty of other places to build homes. Is it because those places didn't used to be fire danger places and now they are? No. I mean, there's no one answer to this because some areas are becoming more fire prone due

to climate change. But in general, there's a couple answers to this. One is people are attracted to the aesthetic beauty of places that are vulnerable to fire. So like trees and the natural world, all this pretty stuff can be really attractive. If you want to retire out to the mountains, it seems great, except for fires. Fires can happen. And people aren't aware that there are things you can and should do that you have to do to stay safe from fire. Now, that's sort of at one end of the economic spectrum. At the other is a lot of people are being forced out of city centers due to high prices. And, you know, there's a saying, drive till you can afford in a lot of places. And so

in many other areas, people are going farther out on the urban fringes to where things are more vulnerable to fire, just because that's the only place where property is affordable. And, you know, there's a really awful acronym for these areas. It's called the WUI, the wildland urban interface is kind of where trees and other flammable stuff and houses intermingle. And this area, this like land type is growing faster than any other land type in the country, both for these two forces, because it's pretty and because people are being forced to there because of skyrocketing prices elsewhere. Aren't fires, forest fires, wildfires, just kind of part of the, there's a cycle of, you know, everything burns and then it comes back and, and that's the way it's been for all eternity. In part, that's true. That's something that we need to grasp more as a society, that not all

wildfire is bad, but the complexity with wildfire we're seeing today is that it's not all just one thing. So there are some good fires that happen that are this ecologically natural thing that we need. And there are other things that are so-called mega fires, fires burning over 100,000 acres, over a million acres that are burning so hot, nothing can grow back. There's almost nothing we can do in terms of our firefighting apparatus to stop the spread of those fires. So we're seeing both fires that we need and fires that are enormously destructive. And it's, you know, it's important for the public to grasp that there's not just like one thing going on with fire, that fire's neither always bad, nor always good. How do these fires tend to start? So two main ways we can talk about, one are natural starts. So from lightning,

that stuff that would have happened historically for a really long time, and happens today all the time when these dry thunderstorms come in across the West. Like right now, I'm in Montana. Fire season's starting in large part because of lightning. But the other big driver of fires are human-caused starts. And that can be anything from campfires left unattended to fireworks on the 4th of July to a car backfiring to a kid with a blade of grass in the lighter. It can be any number of things. And what we find and what the statistics show is that human-caused fire starts are more

destructive than lightning-caused fire starts. I think the perception is that there are a lot more fires than there used to be. Is that true? That's not necessarily true. We're seeing, if we look at sort of a chart of how many fires per year over time, it's not drastically more now. What we're seeing is more severe fires, fires burning more acreage. And a lot of those fires that we see burning that massive amount of acreage and causing a lot of human damage is human-caused stars. And why are these fires more severe than they used to be? It's a couple of those factors I mentioned before.

It's things are hotter and drier, and it's that there's more fuel for them to burn in some forest types where there hasn't been fire in a long time. And often it just seems more destructive when there's houses burning. So we have more houses in fire-prone areas, and it's affecting human property more than it used to. And we just can't get a hand...

Like we were doing so good at this sort of national agenda of putting out all the fires for a really long time. But because of a changing climate, because of the legacy of that fire suppression, and because of all the houses, we just can't do that anymore the fires are we have to recognize or something that we're just not dominant over anymore we have to learn how to live with them at the same time that we combat them too without knowing the details the perception is you know fires in canada canada's you know green and wet And why are there fires there? Maui, Lahaina, it's a tropical climate. It's wet. It rains a lot. So are we seeing fires a lot more in places where we never used to see fires before? One interesting area to look at is in the Arctic. So we can see

what some folks call zombie fires that burn basically year round in the permafrost and peed out there. But I mean, is it possible that one day if it isn't already that that would be an area that would have forest fires or is that area pretty safe from forest fires? Cause it rains a lot. It's pretty wet and nothing to worry about. You know, it's prone to fires of a different kind. We have seen some fires actually, I think in New Jersey over the last year or two and some other areas up there. What's different is that it is much more wet than the West. So we could kind of separate the country into two by the hundredth meridian, which is just the line that separates the middle of the country. And John Wesley Powell described this line a long time ago.

And this is a line that separates the very arid west from the relatively wet east. So if we talk about that, that just means that fires are easier to start and will burn longer out west than they will out east. That said, there are often huge destructive fires in areas like the Great Lakes. There can be grass fires all over the Great Plains. Florida has a long history with fire, and the South is actually doing a whole lot to bring back prescribed fire counterintuitively. Like a controlled burn to burn it before it gets out of hand. Yeah, a controlled burn to burn it before it gets out of hand to simulate what actually would have

happened naturally before there were roads and people putting out all the fires and to enhance habitat for wildlife. One of the things that we can do to get ourselves out of the fire problem more broadly is learn from what's going on in the south and get more prescribed fire on the ground everywhere because forests need it. You know, that's been a goal of the Forest Service for a long time is to have more prescribed fire, but it's really hard to do with the resources they have with the environmental studies that have to be done. And also, you know, if we were to look at the Calf Canyon and Hermit's Peak fire in New Mexico last year, they were the biggest in the state's history

and they were started by prescribed fires. So that stuff just gives prescribed fires a bad rap, even though 99.9% of them go as planned. So often when you see footage on TV of a big fire, there's always that guy, and he's out on the roof of his house with his garden hose, and either he knows something I don't know, or maybe he doesn't understand the severity of these fires and how little he's going to accomplish and how dangerous it is to get up

on the roof of your house in a fire with a garden hose. Yeah, I think that person misunderstands how to prepare for a fire. Now, I grew up in Kansas and there always used to be the same kind of folks or like my dad, for example, you know, when there is a tornado alarm, all the men in the neighborhood would go out and sit on the porch and wait for it and watch for it. And I think it's kind of the same deal with wildfires sometime, but you know, a hose on your roof isn't going to do a thing when it comes to a wildfire. What researchers now know is that wildfires don't set houses ablaze by like this big flame front coming into the neighborhood and going up against a house and starting it, what actually happens is the embers off the fire sometimes miles away float onto the

house. They'll get into like soffits and eaves or into the trees that are next to your house. And so there's a lot you can do as a homeowner to be safe and prepare for a fire. That means like getting rid of trees that are touching your roof. That means thinning out a lot of trees in your lawn, getting rid of other flammable stuff. That's on your house, including like a wood roof is an expensive fix, but something that can be really dangerous when it comes to those floating embers. There's some really great resources online available for folks if they're interested

on what's called firewise practices for making your homes less vulnerable to wildfire. And that seriously goes a long way. So in terms of fighting fires, has there been a lot of advancement in the technology and the methods of fighting fires that it's better than it used to be? Or is it always just, you know, pour water on it or pour stuff on it and try to break the fire? It's less water pouring, but it hasn't changed that much in a long time, except for how things are organized. So the way firefighting works is we have a bunch of we have fire crews all over the nation, federal, state, county, like local municipalities and private. And those are all mobilized to go to event to go to big fire events. federal, state, county, local municipalities, and private.

And those are all mobilized to go to event, to go to big fire events. And what folks are doing, you'll see the media images of those planes dropping that red stuff on fires or dropping water on fires. And the jury's kind of out on how effective that stuff is. Some people just call those things media drops, especially the red stuff you see. But what's really going on is folks are digging what's called fire line. They're getting rid of fuel in certain areas to create kind of a perimeter around a wildfire that it can't jump over. So when you see, if you like look up a fire near you and you see it's 60% contained, that basically means that there's fire line around 60% of that fire, and that's not going to cross those lines. Now, when weather conditions are wrong, it can jump fire line, and that's really bad. What we're seeing with increased severity of

fire too is often folks where you used to be up, where often in lower intensity fire, you can be up pretty close to the fire trying to contain it in these big mega fires. You're actually often engaged in what's called indirect attack. So you're building fire line farther out to kind of preemptively and safely because firefighter safety is a huge thing here. Be able to slow or stop the spread of the fire from a distance when it's just too dangerous to be up close. Where I live in California, we've always had what's called

fire season, you know, late summer, autumn fire season. And you point out that fire season has now become the whole year long. There is no more fire season. When did that start? You know, I would say over the last 20 odd years, it's hard since it's sort of something that's emerged. It's hard to say exactly it started this year, but we can look at the statistics of how much burns each year. If you look back in like the 1980s, there are a lot of years with only like 1.3, 1.1 million acres burned. And it kind of stays that way through the 90s. You know, 1999 did have 5 million acres burned. Then you hit the 2000s and things just get so much worse. So the year 2000, you get 7 million acres burned, which was a record at the time. 2006, 9.8. You know, you get up to several more years with not more than 9 million acres burned. 2015, 2017, 2020, all over 10 million acres burned.

So we're seeing just more and more acres burned at more times of the year as well. And certainly over the last 20 years. What else about this? Because, you know, I have to admit, and perhaps it comes out in the conversation here. This is not something I think most people think about that I don't I mean, and I live in fire country. But I mean, I know the basics, basically to the hell out if fire's coming, that I'm not going to be the guy on the roof with the garden hose. But what else about this do you think people don't really get? You know, two things. I think one is it's easy to forget about fire until it's here. We need to be thinking about fire year round, not just when fires are nearby.

So that means doing things like talking with your family and friends about an evacuation plan if there is a fire nearby, getting a go bag full of stuff that you need on the go if you have to evacuate in just a few minutes. And that means doing the work on your property that can make it more resilient to fire. Also, we need to understand that not all fires bad. Like as soon as fire season starts, every fire seems like a tragedy, but a lot of those fires in reality can be things that the ecosystem needs that are paving the way for less severe fires in the future. So we need to understand that one fires are here.

They're not all bad. And two, we can prepare ourselves to live with them when they happen one thing that i think surprises people is how fast these fires move i know people and you hear stories about people who were in a fire or you know a fire was approaching and it was approaching so fast that they literally got out with the clothes on their back and I don't think people realize that really does happen. I think you're totally right. And, you know, I think there's something about sadly human nature where we're like, oh, this will never happen to us.

You know, I feel the same way here. And I feel the same way about floods. Last summer, I live, you know, an hour north of Yellowstone and we got hit by the flooding in the area and we got evacuated. And until then, I was like, oh, no way are we going to get flooded. And it's the same thing with all kinds of disasters, with all kinds of just risky things. As humans, we're like, I understand this in the abstract, but it's not real to me until it's too late, right? I recently, just in the last few days, got an email, a press release, talking about this policy of using goats

to eat up fuel, fire fuel, grass, and things that fires would otherwise burn, to have the goats go graze there and eat up all that fuel to help prevent serious fire. Is that a real thing? That stuff that's been going on for years. Yeah. I grew up in Kansas and I moved west after college and started doing, I was doing an AmeriCorps job for a while and it was my first real encounter with wildfire. So I was felling trees and sage

grouse habitats to sort of simulate what a wildfire would have done. Because all these pine trees, pennies and junipers had grown in because of a lack of fire and it was bad for the birds. So I was cutting down those trees. And I remember one day I was out cutting down the trees and just watched a fire, fire start in the distance, watch this plume go up. And, uh, you know, it was the first experience I had with wildfire out in the world. And at the same time, like a little bit later, I learned about goats.

I, this was, I was over in the Tahoe area and they were telling me about how they were bringing goats in to get rid of these fuels. And what goats are doing is they eat what's called fine or flashy fuels. They're eating this grass that could help fire spread across a landscape. And that helps, but that stuff comes back fast. So you got to keep those goats there year after year for it to be effective. Well, I like this conversation because you've painted a picture that is more hopeful and optimistic than I would have imagined it would be, that there are things we can do, strategies that will work. It's just a matter of putting them into practice. I've been speaking with Nick Mott.

He's a Peabody Award-winning journalist, podcast producer, and author of the book, This is Wildfire, How to Protect Yourself, Your Home, and Your Community in the Age of Heat. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for coming on. Well, thank you. There are some quirky expressions in the English language that people use. We probably all use some of them at some point, and we probably shouldn't. For example, this goes without saying, and then it's usually followed by the person saying it anyway.

I'm not one to complain, but... and that's usually followed with a complaint. Let me be perfectly honest. When someone says that, it makes you wonder if they've been lying up till now. According to linguist Paul Yeager, these expressions really get in the way of what you're trying to say and can, in fact, weaken the impact of the point you're trying to make. Another one is, it literally, as in, it literally took forever to get here. Well, no, it didn't.

And according to Paul Yeager, that makes people sound unintelligent when they use phrases inappropriately like that. And that is something you should know. You know, I often hear conversations people have about, oh, what podcast do you listen to? And I hope if you ever find yourself in that conversation, you'll mention this one. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney.

The parks, the movies, the music, the food, the lore. There is nothing we don't cover on our show. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed. I had Danielle and Megan record some answers to seemingly meaningless questions. I asked Danielle, what insect song is typically higher pitched in hotter temperatures and lower pitched in cooler temperatures? You got this.

No, I didn't. Don't believe that. About a witch coming true? Well, I didn't either. Of course, I'm just a cicada. I'm crying. I'm so sorry. You win that one.

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