Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Avoiding Self-Sabotage & Why All the World’s Sand Is Disappearing

Episode Date: January 23, 2021

When you have pain – you want it to go away. While taking a pill or two can help ease the pain, there are some other interesting and unconventional ways to ease pain that have been proven to work. This episode begins with those and at least most of them will likely be new to you. http://www.msn.com/en-us/health/wellness/12-weird-pain-remedies/ss-AAcuOQ#image=1 Self-sabotage is when you set a goal, attempt to achieve it and in the process screw the whole thing up all by yourself. Seems rather pointless, yet everyone does it according to Pat Pearson author of the book, Stop Self-Sabotage (https://amzn.to/2vV6Eyx). Listen as Pat explains why people do it and how to stop – and it all has to do with what she calls your “deserve level.” Her website is https://www.patpearson.com  “Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!” No doubt you have heard that before but what does the science say? Just how important is breakfast in terms of health and weight loss? Listen to hear some surprising findings. http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2014/06/04/ajcn.114.089573.abstract This may sound crazy but we have a serious sand shortage on this planet. When you hear that you may think – “Wait a minute, what about all the sand at the beach and in the desert?” Well it turns out to be more complicated than you ever imagined and this sand shortage is impacting your life in ways you didn’t realize. Vince Besier has explored the sand shortage and written a book called, The World In A Grain (https://amzn.to/2OJZxje). What he has to say will fascinate you. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! You deserve to know what’s in your multivitamin. That’s why Ritual is offering my listeners 10% off during your first 3 months. Visit https://ritual.com/something to start your Ritual today. Right now, when you purchase of a 3-month Babbel subscription, you’ll get an additional 3 months for FREE. That’s 6 months, for the price of 3! Just go to https://babbel.com and use promo code: SOMETHING https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! M1 Is the finance Super App, where you can invest, borrow, save and spend all in one place! Visit https://m1finance.com/something to sign up and get $30 to invest! The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of our favorite podcasts! Listen at https://jordanharbinger.com/subscribe , Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you enjoy podcasts. Tru Niagen helps us age better by supporting the energy-generating engines that exist in our bodies, helping us restore youthful energy. Go to https://truniagen.com and enter promo code: SOMETHING at checkout to save twenty dollars on your first three-month supply!  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual.

That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. Today on Something You Should Know, effective ways to ease any pain you've likely never heard before. Then, it's weird, but sometimes we are our own worst enemy and sabotage our best efforts. The issue is that you set a goal and then you shoot yourself in the foot and you make sure you don't achieve it.

It all has to do, Mike, with deserve level. And what we believe we deserve, that's what we make happen. Then, is breakfast really the most important meal of the day? The answer may surprise you. Plus, believe it or not, the world is facing a sand shortage. We're seriously running out. Believe it or not, there's so much demand for sand that around the world there's a black market in it run by organized criminal gangs.

They bribe police, they bribe government officials. Keep doing what they want to do, and if you really get in their way, they will kill you. All this today on Something You Should Know. 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.

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. And we start this episode talking about pain. Because when you're in pain, you want relief. And while standard pain relievers may be just the ticket, science has also uncovered some unusual remedies that actually work. For example, sniff a green apple.

Chronic headache sufferers who like the smell reported it eased their pain. Those who didn't like the smell reported no change. It's actually believed that any smell that you find pleasant may work to ease the pain. Count backwards. It may just be as simple as distracting yourself, but counting backwards does seem to help with pain. Sleep more. People who are sleep deprived seem to have more sensitivity to pain. Listen to music. Chronic pain sufferers who listen to music an hour a day report an improvement in their pain. Expect less pain.

If you think it's going to hurt, it probably will. Research shows that a negative expectation of pain at the dentist or doctor will often be a self-fulfilling prophecy. And the opposite is also true. Slow down your breathing. When you're in pain, it usually causes you to quicken your breath, but slow, deep breaths have been shown to help decrease pain. Swear.

Letting loose a few expletives seems to improve pain endurance, as we've discussed just a few episodes ago. Hold a bottle of ibuprofen. In a test, participants were able to tolerate more pain after simply holding a bottle of pain relievers, but not actually taking any. No one's exactly sure why, but it appears to be the environmental factor. Having the pain reliever there makes people feel better. And that is something you should know. I'm sure you've heard of the concept of self-sabotage, right? You want something, you attempt to get it, and then you do something that screws the whole thing up.

Self-sabotage. You can probably think of someone you know who has done it while you watched in disbelief. Or maybe you've done it yourself, or you've wondered if you've ever self-sabotaged yourself. I think most people have pondered that. So meet Pat Pearson. Pat is a speaker, a coach, and author of several books, including one called Stop Self-Sabotage. Hi Pat, welcome. So when people do this, when we self-sabotage, what's going on here? It's the limiting factor in our personal beliefs that

keeps us from getting all that we really want in our lives. The issue is that you set a goal and then you shoot yourself in the foot and you make sure you don't achieve it. And it all has to do, Mike, with deserve level. And what we believe we deserve in our career, in our relationships, in our finances, in our health, that's what we make happen. So if we don't believe we deserve it, we won't let it happen. Or if we do get it, but we don't believe we deserve it, we're going to give it away.

How do you know this? I mean, I don't have any reason to doubt you, but is this just a theory that you have? Or how do you know this to be true? How do I know this? Well, I've spent 30 years working with people about it. I am a therapist by training, and I've spent a long time hearing people's stories about what they want in their careers, in their relationships. And from that, I, you know, deduced that there was a level in them that they were hitting

because they would work and work and work and not achieve their goals, you know. And you probably know people like that who always date the wrong guy or who never get the right job for them or who can't seem, no matter what they do, to lose the weight they want to lose. Well, there's more going on there than just willpower. There's an internal glass ceiling. And if they don't address that over and over again, they're going to come back to that same self-sabotaging spot.

But why in the world would we do that? Why would we screw things up for ourselves? Well, it's not intentional. Nobody does it intentionally. All of us want the best for ourselves? Well, it's not intentional. Nobody does it intentionally. All of us want the best for ourselves. You know, I've never met anyone who said, Pat, give me the garbage, you know, give me second best. We want the best, but something in us, it's our deserve level, doesn't allow us to have something that we don't believe we deserve. And that deserve level is created internally by the messages we grew up with, by the things we decided about ourselves.

And there are five different sabotage strategies that get in your way. Number one is called throwing it away. I get it, but I can't keep it. So I get what I want, but I don't believe I deserve it, so I get't keep it. So I get what I want, but I don't believe I deserve it, so I get rid of it. And one of the things we see this with is I had a client, a regular person, just out there making her way in the world, and she was in radio sales. And she made $60,000 in one year, which was fabulous for her.

She came from poverty. That was great money. She went home for Christmas that year, and her family started taking pot shots at her. They started to say she was uppity and that she thought she was better than everyone else and kind of belittled her a little bit. So she came back from that vacation feeling really guilty and upset about that. And the next year, she made $30,000. And when I talked to her about it, she said, I'm just not comfortable making that much money.

So your deserved level is your comfort zone. And you have a deserved level in every important area of your life, in your relationships, in your health, in your career. You can be high in one area and low in another. Well, it's interesting that story about the lady in radio sales, because I remember hearing some research that on average, people make about as much money as their parents made adjusted for inflation. That, you know, the apple doesn't fall too far from the financial tree. And maybe it's the kind of messages that she was getting from her family about, you know, you're making too much money, you're uppity, and maybe that's part of the reason why. Well, that's an interesting statistic.

I don't know. Well, I assume that's, of course, true. If it is, then part of that is that they're doing what I would call a loyalty oath to the people that we grew up with. You know, we all took an 18-year course in how to be a person from the people that we grew up with, from our family, our culture, our church. And all those messages became a part of who you are. So many people, I've run into this a lot, when they make more money than their parents, start to feel guilty, and they find ways to give it away.

Another person, another client I worked with, who every year made $50,000, and everyone in her world that she was in, she was in direct selling, was making a lot more money than she was. But once she got to that level, she would just stop working. She'd do her nails for five months. She'd go out and join a health club or something. But what she didn't do is her business. And when we found out, when I talked to her and we found out that her father had never made over $50,000 a year, and she was afraid that he wouldn't love her if she made more money than he did. So she held herself back.

Now, the good news is she talked to him about it. She got new permission from her past, had a breakthrough, and went out and made $150,000 the next year. So how do you up your deserve level? First of all, I mean, this may be the first time anyone's ever heard of a deserve level. You know, you've got to understand you've got one. And it's not a dessert level. It's a dessert level.

And then you have to assess where you are. Now, in my website I have quizzes that you can take that show you how much you're sabotaging and in what area. Once you see, and we all intrinsically know this, you know, we know that we could be doing better in our health, or we know that we could work more in our relationships with our husband or wife or something. So once you isolate the area that you want to up your deserve level in, you've got to take responsibility for where you are right now. Say, okay, this is where I am, but I want more. I deserve better. Then there are four steps that you can work on to up your deserve level. One of the first ones is self-talk,

and that is that you talk to yourself differently about what you believe you deserve. Because if we actually paid attention to what we said to ourselves, we'd probably be shocked. Well, that's really true. That's really true. And these messages that we say, you know, like there's no good men left, you know, if you're out there trying to date or if you're a woman, obviously, or saying something negative about the opposite sex or all of us Smiths die poor or something. We have these messages, you know, rocking around in our heads. It's like a radio playing in the background

that we don't really hear anymore because we've tuned it out, but it's still loud and strong going on. We're talking about self-sabotage, shooting yourself in the foot, being your own worst enemy. And my guest is speaker, coach, and author Pat Pearson. Her book

is Stop Self-Sabotage. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey, no, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick? That's why Bumble is changing how you start conversations. You can now make the first move or not. With opening moves, you simply choose a question to be automatically sent to your matches. Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. 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. So Pat, one of the things that concerns me a little bit about this is if you listen to what you're saying, you could rush to blame yourself that this is your fault. You're looking for a job, you go on lots of interviews, and nobody's hiring you, and so you start to look inward. Maybe it's my fault. And maybe it is, but maybe it isn't. Maybe it's the economy. Maybe you're looking for a job in an industry that isn't hiring. Maybe it isn't self-sabotage. Maybe it's just circumstance.

It's not always your fault. Oh, no, of course not. You don't control the economy. You don't control other people. You don't control many things in life. I'm talking about what you can do to help yourself through this. And frankly, this is when we really got to stop messing around with all this negativity in our heads because of the negativity in the culture, because it's not going the way we want it to go. And our only antidote, I believe, and our only way to fight back is not let ourselves go down for the count at the same time. We are in control of what we think. We're not in control of the economy or anybody else. But you can stop sabotaging your own thoughts.

And if you do that, it can turn things around. I know you've said that you think that pretty much everybody does this to a greater or lesser degree, but I can imagine people hearing this who haven't heard of this before thinking, well, wait a minute, I don't do that. I don't say these negative things to myself. I don't sabotage my success. What is she talking about? Well, I would say, look at your life and answer the question, am I getting all that I want in three or four major areas? My career, my health,

and that includes weight, my relationships, and my finances. And if the answer is no, I'm not getting all that I want, then there is a way that you are self-sabotaging. So, you know, smart money is I would learn about it and see if I do fit in. Now, you know, Mike, I've spent the last 30 years traveling around the country giving thousands of workshops on this. I've never found anybody who said I'm absolutely not self-sabotaging. Most people know they're doing it somewhere, including me. You know, every year I decide, and a lot of people are like me, in January to go out there and join a health club because I'm going to get in shape, right? Well, I joined a health club, and currently going to get in shape, right? Well, I joined a health club and currently

I belong to two health clubs. I tithe, I send them checks, but I don't go. And they love you. You're like the best possible gym member. Oh, of course. Yeah. They count on me. They count on you to send your money and never show up. Exactly. Exactly. So, you know, you can self-sabotage on a small level. It can be that, you know, extra piece of chocolate that you have every night when you know you really shouldn't. Or you can sabotage on a major level. Well, probably the most common way people self-sabotage

or the most obvious way is dieting, where people, you know, start going on a diet and they're good for a couple of days and then they slip. Then they sabotage themselves by deliberately, willfully putting chocolate cake in their mouth. Well, and so my suggestion, and I think people understand this and intuitively know it, is that there's more going on there than just calories. There's a whole issue of your personal feelings and your personal belief system and your permission from your past. Maybe you grew up in a family that said, we're all overweight. This is how we are.

So for you not to be that way is to somehow be disloyal. But there are several other sabotage strategies. Settling for less is a sabotage strategy. That means I say I want it, but I'm not really good enough to get it, so I'll settle for less. Let me give you an example. I worked with a guy who wanted to meet the woman of his life, of course. And so he went to parties, and he was very shy, very bashful. He would stand went to parties, and he was very shy, very bashful. He would stand in the corner, and he would look over all the women at the party. He'd pick the one he wanted to meet, and he would avoid her at all costs. Now, he talked to everybody else, but the one he wanted to talk to, he wouldn't let himself talk to. So he would

settle for less. And we do this, and it's my example about me and exercise. I say I'm going to do it, but then I don't go. I settle for less. So we do it in our finances. We do it in our health. We do it everywhere. So these sabotage strategies I'm talking about, I don't think any one of us doesn't know somebody or ourselves that has it.

Another one is fatal flaw. Fatal flaw is a personality characteristic that snatches defeat from the jaws of victory. You can be almost to a successful position and you have a procrastination issue, so you never finish anything. Or you have a perfectionistic issue and it has to be perfect before it's done. And so we see these things in our fellow human beings, and this is what we worry about most about ourselves and about people we care about. And the last one is denial.

We just deny it's a problem. We all have somebody in our life who's denying that they're drinking too much or denying that they're spending too much or whatever it is. When you're self-sabotaging, you're going to be in one of those categories. Okay, so you've done a really good job of explaining what it is, and I think people listening to you can identify and say, yeah, I've done that, I've been in one of those categories, particularly people who have tried to diet and say, yeah, I've done that. I've been in one of those categories, particularly people who have tried to diet and failed, that, yeah, they have sabotaged themselves, so they know it,

and now they know what it is. But knowing it doesn't fix it. So how do you fix it? How do you, what's the first step to take so that you stop sabotaging yourself? Well, that's a great question, and that's the central question. And there are four steps. Number one, you take charge of your self-talk. You take charge of that chatter in your head that keeps saying, you know, blah, blah, blah, because that's gotten you to where you are. And if you don't like where you are and you want to raise your deserve level,

then you must change some of those thoughts. And there's a very simple way to do that. You learn to be able to pivot, to be able to recognize the negative thought that has kept you stuck and to turn your attention to something more positive and better. That's pivoting. And, you know, there's ways to come up with a phrase to say that. If we're talking about weight, I choose to make healthy food and exercise choices. You know, that's one of mine that I use.

So you give yourself an antidote, if you will, to that conspirator in your head, that internal enemy that says, oh, just go spend more. Oh, go have another piece of cake, who cares, all that kind of stuff that we hate the next minute or the next morning or something. So self-talk. Then self-release. Self-release has to do with getting out the negative feelings that you have associated with the problematic area. And we all do.

We all need to protest, whether it be a career issue that we've been passed over for a promotion again or a love issue, somebody broke our hearts. We need to get those feelings out. So you express and release those feelings. Next step is self-nurturing, coming up with some ways to take care of yourself in a better way, sleeping more, taking a hot bath, giving yourself some time off from all the chaos, you know, going

in and exercising, taking a walk, whatever, a lot of things. And the last one is self-support, surrounding yourself with people who believe in your dream and believe that you do deserve more, that at the heart of it, you know, you're a good person and you deserve to get what you want, whatever dream that is, and who will love you through the process. That, in a nutshell, is how you do it. Excellent, excellent. And I think you're right. As I listen to you, and I think as listeners listen to you,

they can hear themselves in what you're saying. And, yeah, we probably all do this to some degree. And it's good to call it out, identify it, name it for what it is. And it's also good to know that there are things you can do about it. My guest has been Pat Pearson. She is a speaker, a coach, and an author of several books, including Stop Self-Sabotage. And you will find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes for this episode. Her website is patpearson.com.

That's P-E-A-R-S-O-N. And a link to that website is also in the show notes. Thank you, Pat. From the kitchen to the laundry room, your home deserves the best. Give it the upgrade it deserves at Best Buy's Ultimate Appliance Event. Save up to $1,000 on two or more major appliances. Shop now, in-store or online at bestbuy.ca. Exclusions apply.

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. So you're not going to believe this. I mean, it has completely escaped my radar. But there's a serious problem you've likely heard little or nothing about. We have a sand shortage. To which you might say, as I did, what?

That's impossible. How can that be? Sand is everywhere. Have you seen a photo of the Sahara Desert? How can you look at that and say there's a sand shortage? But it turns out it's more complicated than you thought. There's actually a black market in sand. Organized crime is in the sand business. And by the way, the sand in the desert doesn't count.

Nobody wants that. That's the wrong kind of sand. Now you might say about the sand shortage, so what? But there are actually several important so what's according to Vince Beiser. Vince researched this subject thoroughly and wrote a book about it called The World in a Grain, the story of sand and how it transformed civilization. Hi Vince, welcome. Thanks Mike, it's great to be here. So I think it comes as a surprise to people, it did to me when I first saw your book,

that sand is even such a big deal. But assuming that I missed that part, and that it is a big deal, how could there possibly be a shortage of it when it seems to be everywhere? I had the exact same reaction as you when I first heard about it a few years ago. I was like, sand? I'd never even given it a second thought. But come to find out, actually, sand is the most important solid substance in the world. It's the literal foundation of modern civilization. We could not have modern cities without sand. Sand is the thing that our cities are built out of.

So basically every building that you see in the world today, every shopping mall, every office block, every apartment tower, are made out of concrete. And concrete is nothing but sand and gravel that's been stuck together with cement. Also, all the roads that connect all those buildings are also made from sand. Asphalt and concrete, just sand. The glass in the windows of all those buildings is also made from sand. Asphalt and concrete, just sand. The glass in the windows of all those buildings is also made from sand. Glass is just melted down sand.

The silicon chips that power our computers and our cell phones, also made from sand. So it is no exaggeration to say that without sand, we would not have modern civilization. And the crazy thing is, we're starting to run out. You see, that's the thing that makes no sense to me. How can there be a shortage of it when it's on every beach, on every desert, it's everywhere? How can it be that we just go down to the beach and get some? Well, you'd think, right? But in fact, of course there is a lot of sand in the

world. In fact, it's the most abundant thing on the planet. We have more of it than anything else. But we also use more of it than anything else. It's the natural resource that we consume the most of after water and air. We use about 50 billion tons of sand every year. That's enough to cover the entire state of California, about two inches deep, every single year. So yeah, there's a lot of it. But when you're talking about using that much, eventually it's finite like anything else. And you start to reach the endpoint of how much you can take out. So the bottom line is, to get at all that sand, we're stripping riverbeds and beaches and floodplains bare all over the world,

doing a lot of environmental damage to get at that sand. And in some places, the demand is so intense that organized crime has gotten into the trade. Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in the last few years. Come on. Sand? I promise you, sand. So if there is sand in all these buildings and roads and everything, what about recycling it? When buildings come down, as they do all the time,

could we get the sand back? That does happen to some extent. You can recycle sand from concrete. There's a couple of problems with that. One is that the sand that you get from that doesn't really work for everything because it's got cement on it. It's got maybe other chemicals that they might have added into the concrete. So it doesn't work for all applications, number one. Number two, it's more expensive. It's usually more expensive to crush down concrete than it is to just scoop up fresh sand from the bottom of a river. So those are two problems. But the number one issue is concrete isn't like glass or newspaper.

It's not something – when you build something out of concrete, it's not meant to be just used once and then thrown away, right? You build something out of concrete, you build a hotel or a interstate, it's meant to stay there, right? You want it to stay there for 50, 60, 100 years. So for all intents and purposes, the sand that you put in, the sand that's in most buildings, is there to stay. It's been taken permanently out of the system. So why should we care about this? I mean, this is the first I've ever heard about a sand shortage, and maybe we're running out, but maybe somebody will figure out a solution to that. But why is this a big deal?

The reason we should care is because, like I say, without sand, we don't have modern civilization. If we don't have plenty of sand, then we don't have roads, we don't have buildings, we don't have everything that our lives depend on in the most literal way. So to get at that sand, and the getting of that sand is causing a lot of problems, especially in the developing world. Like I say, we're doing a lot of environmental damage to rivers, to lakes. There are enormous numbers of fish and birds and other kinds of wildlife that are just being annihilated by sand mining.

There are a lot of lives that are being put at risk because a lot of rivers around the world have been mined so heavily that their banks have started to collapse, which means that farmers' fields are collapsing into rivers. Sometimes in places like Vietnam, whole villages have gone sliding into the rivers because of sand mining. There was a terrible bridge collapse in Portugal about 15 years ago

where so much sand had been mined from the river banks that the supports holding up the bridges, there was basically nothing left holding them in place and the bridge collapsed with a bus full of tourists going over it. About 70 people were killed. And again, as I mentioned, believe it or not, there's so much demand for sand that around the world there's a black market in it run by organized criminal gangs who do what organized crime does everywhere.

They bribe police. They bribe government officials to keep doing what they want to do. And if you really get in their way, they will kill you. Hundreds of people have been murdered over sand in places like India, in Kenya, Indonesia, all around the world. People who try to stop illegal sand mining from going on have been murdered. There have been killings between sand gangs, just like you have between rival drug gangs. Journalists looking into this, trying to expose it, have been killed, chopped to death with machetes, burned alive. A lot of mayhem being caused by the sand trade around the world.

So the question I think people who are listening to this are thinking, and I was thinking, so I'll ask it. If you need sand, if you need lots and lots of sand, there is plenty of it in the desert. So why don't people who need sand just go to the desert and get it? Right. Good question. So the problem is, all that desert sand is pretty much useless to us human beings. And the reason for that is, the grains of sand that you find in the desert have the wrong shape. They've been eroded by wind over thousands or millions of years. And as a result, those grains are kind of rounded. They've been worn smooth and kind of had all their sharp edges and corners rounded off. And so that means they

don't lock together the way that you need them to to form concrete, whereas the sand that you find on river bottoms and floodplains, even on beaches, that sand is a lot more angular, and so it locks together. So it's like the difference between trying to build something out of a stack of marbles as opposed to trying to build something out of a stack of little bricks. But doesn't it seem like, just like you can now take the salt out of salt water and use it, that yeah, it's going to make it more expensive, but there would be some way to process that sand to make it usable and then problem solved? Maybe. I mean, theoretically, that's possible. And I know there's at least one company, a private company in Denmark, that claims to have come up with a way to do that, to use desert sand

to make concrete. So far, though, nobody has really come up with a way to do it on a major scale. And I should say also the other big problem with desert sand, or with sand in general, is it's really heavy, right? A cubic yard of sand weighs more than a ton. So anytime you have to start transporting sand, the price of it goes up really fast. Even if we could, if we had a way that we could use that desert sand, we'd have to transport it. Somehow we'd have to haul, I mean, I'm talking about thousands of truckloads of sand all the way from the Sahara Desert to wherever you need it. You know what I mean? Yeah. And that would just make it a lot more expensive.

But just as we can create fake rocks, can't we create artificial sand? Yeah, we can. Like I said, you can crush down rocks and make artificial sand that way. But the problem with it is, similar to recycling concrete, the shape of the grains that you get by doing that isn't always that great. It's just not as well-suited for concrete as naturally occurring sand. And again, it's a lot more expensive. So, of course, it can be done.

If price is no object, you can do it. And it is being done in a lot of places in the world where they really don't have any choice. But in the long run, if you keep doing that, if you have to keep doing that, it drives the price way up. And if the price of sand goes up, the price of concrete goes up. And if the price of concrete goes up, the price of basically everything goes up. The price of your house goes up. The price of the office that you rent goes up. The price of your house goes up. The price of, you know, the office that you rent goes up. Everything becomes more expensive. And if you think about, you know, what a shock to the economy it was in the 1970s

when the price of oil, another thing, another raw material that we're totally dependent on, you know, it was a big shock to the economy when the price of oil suddenly jumped up. A similar thing could happen with sand, ultimately. If we have to rely on more and more expensive methods of getting it, that drives up the price, which can really be bad for all of us. And I should say also the price of sand has already quintupled. It's gone up fivefold just in the United States just in the last 30 years. Really? And I'm sure that is one reason why the price of housing in most cities has just in the last 30 years. Really? And I'm sure that that is one

reason why the price of housing in most cities has been going up by so much. When I think of sand, I think of the beach, and I think of the desert, which you say that sand is useless for the most part. And then you've mentioned that it's also at the bottom of some rivers. Is that about it? Or is sand in other places? Is sand everywhere? That's a really good question. So there is lots and lots of sand around in lots of different places. Like I said, that desert sand is useless to us.

You can cross that off the list. And then the other places where you really find sand is the beach, of course, bottom of rivers, bottom of lakes, and in places where rivers used to be, right? Because over the centuries, over the millennia, rivers flood, they overflow their banks, and they drop off sand in what's now dry land, or they change course. So you can find sand in lots and lots of places. I mean, just about every country in the world has sand that can be used for construction. Just about every state in the United States has sand that can be used for construction.

It's very, you know, obviously it's really common. In fact, it's the most common thing on the planet. So there is a lot of it out there. But like I say, the stuff that's easiest to get to has been largely tapped out. And so we're having to do things. Yeah, you're having to move more and more stuff out of the way. I mean, in some places, they're literally cutting down forests and tearing up farmland to get at the sand below the ground because there's so much demand for it. I mean, interesting in here in the United States, for instance, in western Wisconsin, they just happen to have a very specific kind of sand that's used for fracking.

Fracking, you probably, you know what fracking is, of course, right? shooting a high pressure mix of water and chemicals and sand down into the ground to shatter that rock, to fracture that rock so that the oil can seep through the cracks and into your well. And you need sand to keep those cracks open. That sand shoots out into the cracks and holds them open. And you need a very specific kind of sand for that. It's got to be especially hard and have a particular shape. So there's a

lot of that sand in western Wisconsin. As a result of that, there's so much, there's such a big market now for this western Wisconsin frac sand that all over western Wisconsin, which is mostly farmland, they are ripping up hundreds and thousands of acres of farmland and forests to basically strip mine that frack sand out. A lot of people in western Wisconsin are mighty upset about that. There's a lot of concern about what that might be doing to water resources in the area and just to the character of the area. Well, it certainly is an interesting problem.

It's like a big problem that no one's ever heard of until, until you came along. I mean, I've never heard of this. I've never thought, even thought about, I guess it's because you see so much sand everywhere. You figure, how are we ever going to run out of this? And who knew it was used in, in so many things? Yeah, exactly. I mean, Mike, I had the exact same reaction, you know, three years ago when I first heard about it and started looking into it. It just never even occurred to me that we used sand at all for anything, much less that we could possibly be running out of it. But of course, once you start to think about it, you think especially about concrete, which is another thing that barely anybody ever thinks about, right? It just seems like the air we breathe, concrete, it's just there.

But when you stop and think, of course, concrete, it's made out of something, which turns out to be sand, and that sand has to come from somewhere. And when you stop, when you realize that, and you just look around, look at all of the concrete that's around us everywhere you go in the world today, that's when you really realize, holy smokes, sand is absolutely critical and the amounts of it that we're using is just mind-blowing. Is there no substitute? I mean, what if there was no sand? Has anyone thought about, well, maybe we could use something else? There is a lot of research going on around the world of people looking into ways to come up with

substitutes for it. Folks who are looking into using hemp, believe it or not. Other folks are looking into shredded plastic, bamboo, stuff like that. You know, I wish them all well. I think all of those efforts, you know, should be supported, and I hope that they work out. So far, we haven't come up with anything that's really a large-scale solution. Yeah, because as great as those ideas are, to find a substitute, none of them sound like they're big enough to really make a dent. Exactly. I mean, the real problem is it's really one of scale. Like I said, we use 50 billion tons of sand every year. So even if you could come up with a way to replace all of that with, you know, say, bamboo, then we'd need to use 50 billion tons of bamboo every year.

And then you'd write a book called Bamboo and come on and talk about that we're running out of bamboo. And I have to admit that I feel somewhat helpless in the fight against the sand shortage. I mean, I have no sand to give. It's not like recycling where I can recycle my sand like I do my cans and plastic. But it is interesting that it is such a big problem. And it's certainly worth paying attention to. Vince Beiser has been my guest. His book is The World in a Grain, The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization. There's a link to his book in the show notes for this episode.

Thanks, Vince. Well, thanks for helping spread the word, and thanks for having me on. It was a lot of fun. How many times have you heard someone say breakfast is the most important meal of the day? So maybe you've wondered, is it better to eat a junk breakfast like a donut or is it better to eat nothing at all? After all, the argument is that eating something in the morning kickstarts your metabolism and helps you lose weight by burning more calories throughout the day. Well, according to the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, breakfast may be overrated.

In a study, 300 overweight participants consumed diets that included either eating or skipping breakfast. At the end of 16 weeks, the dieters who ate breakfast lost no more weight than the people who skipped breakfast. And a second study in the same journal found that eating breakfast had zero impact on your resting metabolism the rest of the day. Breakfast is an ideal place to squeeze in protein, fiber, and other nutrients into your diet. But if the choice is to eat a donut or nothing, you're probably better off opting for nothing.

And that is something you should know. I know I've mentioned it in past episodes, but we have now started to put all of our advertisers' websites, links, promo codes, everything in the show notes for each episode. So if any of our advertisers sound interesting to you, and I suspect they do, you can find the links to their websites and everything in the show notes. I'm Micah Ruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Do you love Disney? Do you love top ten lists? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. 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.

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