Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: Life Hacks That REALLY Make a Difference & The Extraordinary History of Water

Episode Date: September 2, 2023

Admit it, you have likely snooped or eavesdropped on someone at some point in your life. In fact everyone has done it. This episode begins by discussing why humans and most other creatures on the planet eavesdrop and the important purpose it serves. Source: John Locke author of the book Eavesdropping (https://amzn.to/3l7rIud) When you think about all the tasks you do each day, there are likely some you could do better and easier. And if you listen to my guest, you will discover how. Erin Ruddy interviewed some top experts to learn their secrets and put that information in her book, The Little Book of Life Skills (https://amzn.to/3l4ypxc). Listen as she reveals how to do everyday tasks a little better than you are probably doing them now - from getting up in the morning, to starting your day with a better attitude, to writing a great email, how to clean any room in 10 minutes or less and more. Without water, we wouldn’t be here. It is crucial to our survival. Yet, it seems water is the cause of a lot of problems. In some places on the planet, there isn’t enough of it and in other places there is too much. The story of water is fascinating. Listen as Giulio Boccaletti joins me to tell this riveting tale. Giulio is a globally recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability and author of the book Water: A Biography (https://amzn.to/38UwBBq). We are all aware of the risks and dangers of drinking and driving. What you may not know is that driving when you are tired is also dangerous – really dangerous. Listen to hear why you shouldn’t drive when you are tired and if you have to, what you can do to reduce the risks. Source: Matthew Edlund, M.D. author The Power of Rest (https://amzn.to/3hioMd6)  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, snooping and eavesdropping. It's something we all do, and I'll tell you why we do it. Then, great advice to improve all the little things you do every day, from waking up in the morning to how to clean a room to writing an email. We talk about the subject line. It should be seven words or less. You want to make the experience of reading your email really nice.

You want it to look good. Skip the long greeting. You want to get right to the point. Only CC people who need to be CC'd. Also why driving tired may be just as bad as driving drunk. And what you never knew about water. How much there is, where it came from, and why we've never really had a shortage of it since it got here. The quantity of water on the planet has been essentially fixed ever since. For the most part, it's exactly the same amount of water. Whenever you take a drink of a water mic, you

should consider that it probably went through the kidneys of some dinosaur at some point. 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 to Something You Should Know. You probably don't consider yourself a snoop or an eavesdropper. I don't. But the fact is, we all do it. It's human nature, and snooping and eavesdropping once served a very important purpose, survival. In fact,

all animals eavesdrop. In order to protect ourselves from our enemies, we're wired to try to discover things that they don't want us to know. Conversely, we keep secrets from people about things we don't want them to know. Think about the purpose of a whisper. I mean, the only reason that people whisper is to tell something so that someone else doesn't hear it. Although it's considered bad manners, bad behavior to eavesdrop on others, it's pretty hard not to. Even though we don't need to do it for survival so much anymore, we still have that curiosity to know what other people are doing behind closed doors. We satisfy that desire today with things like reality TV or social media.

All those things tap into our biologically driven need to peek into other people's lives. And that is something you should know. The goal, the aim, the hope, the purpose of this podcast is to give you interesting and useful information, much of which you can use in your life. And so in this segment, you're going to get so much expert intel and information that you can use in your life, you may want to take notes.

Erin Ruddy is a writer who's put together some really practical information to help you live your life better and easier from the time you wake up in the morning until you go to bed. She talked to a lot of top-of-the-line experts, put it all in a book, and it's called The Little Book of Life Skills. Hi, Erin. Welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi, Mike. Thank you so much for having me. So what I really like about this is that, you know, most of us just, we do what we do to get through the day because that's the way we do it. That's the way we've always done it. And we seldom stop and

think, well, maybe there's a better way to do this thing, or maybe there's a better way to do that thing. So what made you stop and think, maybe there's a better way? I think it was right after I turned 40 and realized that I still was not quite adulting. I don't always love that term, but I felt like I wasn't getting through the day with any sort of efficiency or I felt very frazzled at all times. And I'm a magazine writer and I spent 20 years of my life interviewing experts for the best way to do any number of things. But I realized I hadn't quite implemented them in my life. And I thought, what if I took all of that advice and reached out to the top, top experts? Because I am not an expert, right? But I know a lot of experts

after 20 years of doing this for a living. So I said, what if we just, you know, talk to each of them and got their distilled best how-to steps for doing everything from how to wake up in the morning to how to offer condolences, how to write an email, empty your dishwasher, all the things that we do that make up our day just a little bit better. All right. Let's jump in here and start with the best way to wake up in the morning. The best way to get out of bed, this is my expert, Michael Bruce, who is the sleep doctor. He's fantastic. And there really is an actual order in which you're supposed to do these things. I didn't realize that.

For one, you should not snooze, right? You should never hit the snooze button. There's no way to get back into any kind of deep, fulfilling sleep. It's just going to ultimately make you more groggy. As good as it feels to hit snooze and roll back over, ultimately it's not the best thing for you. So you want to swing your legs over and get your feet on the ground. And once you're there, you're like halfway home, right?

You want to take five deep breaths because the oxygen will stimulate your brain and it will get you kind of waking up. You want to drink a full glass of water. And that's because we lose almost a liter of water through the humidity in our breath at night. So you're waking up already dehydrated. So if you can drink that glass of water, that's going to help you. And if you can get outside within 10 to 15 minutes of waking up into the sunlight, that's really important. And it's because we have this melatonin drip in our brains and it creates this

groggy morning feel and the blue light and sunlight will stop that. It'll stop that melatonin drip and give us, it'll kind of clear that morning fog. And it also just feels really good to get outside. And it's such amazing way to set yourself up for a good day. And you can go outside, get your mail, walk around, pick a few weeds, water your garden, whatever it is. You can also turn your shower water really cold at the end. And that helps you wake up refreshed as well. I do that occasionally because it's a little tough. So help me get out the door in the morning, because I think that's a tough one for a lot of people, especially if you have kids and then where are my keys and I can't find my wallet and I'm running late. So what's the magic to getting out the door on time and stress-free? So Laura Vanderkam, my productivity expert in the book, or one of them, she does the

steps for how to get out of, how to get out the door in the morning calmly. And she has this great quote, which is the space between putting on your shoes and backing out of your driveway is not zero. So many people think that it is, and that's why they're five minutes late everywhere. And I certainly fall in that category. So it's really about designating a place where you keep all of your stuff that you need for your day to get out the door, because that's when we get become late. Oh,'t find my shoes oh I can't find my keys oh I need this I need that but if you have a home for things and you always put things back in their home and that home is maybe a mudroom or a foyer or a little hallway by your front door then when you're walking out the door you always know what you need

to get and there are you know she also talks about which I love is transport less stuff in general right what do you really need for your day edit edit edit if you're going into an office maybe And there are, you know, she also talks about, which I love, is transport less stuff in general, right? What do you really need for your day? Edit, edit, edit. If you're going into an office, maybe you keep two things. Maybe you keep a pair of shoes in your office, you know, running shoes for the gym in the office and a pair at home. An umbrella, keep an umbrella in your car and one at home. One of the great things is just making sure everything has a home and putting it back there.

It's about closing that loop. Let's talk about an effective email because everybody writes emails all the time and I get a lot of emails and some of them are clearly a lot better than others. So what makes an effective email? My email expert is Justin Kerr. He's fantastic. And he basically says that people, the reason we all wind up working late is because we were terrible at writing emails. And it's all about spending a little extra time to get that email crafted in a way that is going to get the answer you need or the response you're waiting for faster. So we talk about the subject line. It should be seven words or less because we might be writing an email on a

laptop and it might look all big and beautiful, but most of the time people are reading it on a device, on a phone while getting into a cab pretty quickly. So you want to make the experience of reading your email really nice. You want it to look good. Skip the long greeting. This is hard for some people. You want to get right to the point. And we're taught in school to do an intro, then supporting evidence, then a conclusion. With an email, you want your conclusion right up top, what it is you're hoping to get from this email. And then we talk about bullet points. Using bullet points, using white space, and making sure that your thoughts are organized so that the person can say yes or whatever it is in order to

get back to you faster. And then delete anything superfluous, add more white space. Again, he's not a big fan of signatures, like long, long, long signatures with quotes and everything else because they junk up people's inbox. But it's really just about spending that little bit of extra time. Check your formatting and always make sure to double check, take that five seconds and say, did I attach the thing that I said I was attaching? Right? Because we all get those emails that are like, oh, sorry, I forgot to attach it, the thing I just sent. And then now you've got two emails in your inbox.

And we just have to be a little bit more careful about how we're junking up other people's inboxes and only put people, you know, only CC people who need to be CC'd. I know you talked to Bobby Slay about how to make the perfect burger. So let's talk about that. You don't want to get fancy meat. You want, you really want some, like, you want fat in your meat, 80-20. It does not have to be like the most incredible whatever. You just want 80-20 meat because you have to have some fat in there. And he's a big fan of a thumbprint, putting a thumbprint in your burger patty, your raw patty that you make. And that's because the burger puffs up and we're tempted to push it down when we're grilling it.

And when we push the burger down, all the juices kind of gush out of it and you don't want that to happen. So if you push this little thumbprint into the raw burger, when it cooks, it just comes back into the shape. So you're not supposed to push it down at all. Hot, hot, hot pan. He's a big fan of cast iron skillet. And he's a huge fan of American cheese. It was kind of hilarious listening to him talk about that. And I loved it. You know, he's like, people get highbrow with their cheeses. People, you know, he's like, American cheese, it's the best melting cheese. Slightly toasted bun.

But yeah, the thumbprint is huge, I think. And he also says, you're not making meatloaf, you're making a burger. So you don't have to put a million different things into your meat. Just meat, salt, pepper, hot, hot, hot grill, or hot, hot, hot pan. Talk about the best ways to keep things from becoming messy. Because you know how that just kind of creeps up on you pretty soon over the course of time. All of a sudden, rooms are messy, the house is messy. How do you prevent that? I love this idea of don't put it down, put it away. And it's a very simple mantra for keeping your house tidy, keeping your office tidy. And it's just this idea that if you your house tidy, keeping your office tidy.

And it's just this idea that if you walk in the door, rather than kicking off your shoes, put them into the closet or put them where they belong, right? Because, you know, it doesn't seem like a big deal, but at the end of the day or two days when you have eight shoes laying around your mudroom, then it's a bigger project. When you take a shirt off that you don't want to wear, don't throw it on your chair in your bedroom. Hang it back up, right? Close that loop. It's all about being kind to your future self, right? It's like, because you're the one that's going to pick it up later anyway. So you may as well just do it. And that Gretchen Rubin is, she did the one minute rule in my book, which I love, which is sort of similar, which is any task that can be done in one minute or less, just do it. Whether it's quickly responding to an email, sending a text,

opening a piece of mail and discarding it, changing the paper towel roll. So I'll walk by the paper towel roll in my kitchen and it's empty, you know, and sometimes you just want to take the paper towel and stick it next to it. But I'm like, Erin, that's a one minute, that is less than one minute, just do it. So I love the one minute rule, too, because it's just like simple things that you can do. You know, it's a nice little mantra, something that I can remember. We are talking about simple little life skills that can have a real positive impact on your life. And my guest is Erin Ruddy. She's author of The Little Book of Life Skills. This episode is brought to you by Melissa and Doug. Wooden puzzles and building toys for problem solving

and arts and crafts for creative thinking. Melissa and Doug makes toys that help kids take on the world because the way they play today shapes who they become tomorrow. Melissa and Doug, the play is pretend, the skills are real. Look for Melissa and Doug wherever you shop for toys. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets.

And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com slash possibilities. So Erin, when a room is messy, though, when it does get messy, how do you tidy up a room in 10 minutes or less? Tidying, and pretty much a lot of these things, one of the tricks is setting a timer.

And the first step to tidying a room in 10 minutes or less is to set a timer. And you're doing that because anyone has 10 minutes, right? But when you think about cleaning a room, you think, oh, it's going to take me hours or I don't have this time for a marathon cleaning session. So if you put on your timer for 10 minutes and you look for the things that are going to smell first, so dirty laundry, garbage, dishes, those are the things you get rid of first and put them where they belong. And then you look at flat surfaces because our eyes go to the flat surfaces. And if you can clear off one or two of those flat surfaces, you know, cleanliness begets cleanliness. You see that, you feel better, then you want to keep going. And I love this trick. And this is from Rachel Hoffman. She's my tidy room expert. Turn around, walk out of the room and then look back into the room. And the first thing that

catches your eye, deal with that because that's often something that's been bothering us, right? If we walk by our dining room and we see a pile of, you know, papers or whatever, like that's the thing that's been bothering us. So take the time and just deal with it. And then you can always set the, you know, set your timer for another 10 minutes if you feel good about it. But setting a timer is such a nice little productivity hack because it reminds you that this stuff is not as big a deal as we make it in our heads when we're procrastinating.

Yeah, I like that. That timer thing is great because you almost like trick yourself into you keep going, but with the timer, you know you can stop because the timer went off. Absolutely. Exactly. The timer thing works for emptying a dishwasher too because the first in my steps for how to empty a dishwasher, and there are specific steps and reasons you want to do things, but the first step is ask yourself what you're doing with the next four to five minutes of your life, right? Like if it's not, you know,

curing cancer or something incredibly important, just empty the dishwasher because it's one of the things we all put off more than anything. And once you, again, if you time yourself doing it a few times, you think, okay, same thing with folding laundry and putting it away. Really takes about five minutes to do a load, you know, to put it away. But I mean, I, for one, will let that load sit and compound. And then there's six loads of laundry to put away. And that's a totally different animal. So how do you empty a dishwasher better? So you want to open the bottom rack first and deal with that first always. And that's because the top rack where you have your cups and some bowls can often collect water. I don't know if you've ever opened the top rack of your dishwasher

and water sloshes around like that dirty water, you know, that gets caught in some of those cups and then it spills all over your dishes on the bottom and that can get very frustrating. And my dishwasher expert just talks about piling, you know, putting them onto the counter first. So you get everything out and lined up your dishes and then you just carry them over to the cabinets rather than taking one, you know, when I watch my kids empty the dishwasher, they take like one spoon and walk it over in one dish, and that's like not so efficient. But really, it's about doing that bottom rack first and piling things together into groups. One of the things you discuss is how to walk into a room with confidence, which I think a lot of us would like to know, because sometimes, depending on the situation, you're walking into a room full of strangers. It's hard to walk into a room with confidence, so how? This is from my

expert Lydia Fennett and she's, you know, Christy's auctioneer. She's fantastic. And this is all about knowing what you're going to say when you get there. So the first step is come up with an opening line to use when you get wherever you're going and that can be into a board meeting. It could be into a PTA meeting. It could be into a family dinner, going to a friend's home. But having that, knowing what you're going to say when you get there is kind of like a great little, it's just a great little trick. It could be anything. It could be, you know, oh, how about the weather? What about that flooding or whatever it is? But just knowing what you're going to say.

And then simple things like check yourself out in the mirror or your phone and make adjustments because, you know, if we're pulling on our shirt or fiddling with our hair, that doesn't project confidence, right? And then she talks about the adrenaline that's flooding your body when you're walking in somewhere of importance and focusing on using that to energize yourself. And then this part I love, but say, I've got this out loud, which is a little bit embarrassing, but it just, you know, our brain is like that's the supercomputer that runs us, right? And if we tell it to say, I've got this, then you've got this. And then stand tall and smile and go.

But I think that the nerves can often come from the anticipation of like an awkward silence when you get into a room. And so if you know that you're going to say something, and I actually, when I talk about this, come up with something positive, right? You know, like whatever that first thing is, if it can be something positive, that's great. Rather than saying, oh, my God, I hit so much traffic. Did anyone else hit so much traffic? You know, try to spin it positively because then you're also bringing a positive energy, not just confidence. You have some advice about how to start the day with a good attitude, which I think a lot of us could use. So what's your advice there?

And this one comes from Hoda from the Today Show. And she is, you know, as positive as she seems on television. And she says the first thing you should do when you wake up is write down three things you're grateful for. And what I love about this is it can't be like the sunny day and my family and my health, like just really specific little things, right? Like today, I was grateful that a tree didn't fall in this crazy storm we had last night. And I was grateful that my children are back in school full time, you know, little things.

And I was actually, I said, the other thing I said was, I was grateful to be doing this podcast, you know, because this is fun and I'm grateful to be here. So little specific things. And then write down something great that happened in the last 24 hours. And the idea of this is that if you train yourself to wake up and go to the positive, you're going to look for the positive all day. It takes some time, but often we wake up and we're like, oh, I forgot to do that thing, or oh, I have this work event, or this thing today, or oh,

I didn't get enough sleep or whatever it is. If we wake up and start listing the negatives, our brain's going to go negative all day. And so this is literally just about trying to keep yourself aware of the positives. And, you know, it's been more important those last two years than ever, which is why I like the specificity of it. It doesn't have to be big things. It can literally be like, oh, I'm so glad I washed my sheets last night so I don't have to do it today. Little tiny things. But I love that. And it really does help you reframe

your day to be a good day, no matter what's going on in your life. Talk about, because you have some good advice about how to calm down when you get upset, how to calm yourself before you react and often later regret your reaction. So talk about that. It's from David G., who's a meditation teacher and a stress management expert. This is a great tool for you get an email and before you want to fire off your response or a text or someone says something. Or even in traffic, you can do this without closing your eyes. Whatever it is, calm down before reacting. Take a beat. And what you do, it's 16 seconds, and you close your eyes.

You visualize what it is that's stressing you out. And you inhale slowly to the count of four and visualize your breath kind of going down. And you hold that breath in your belly for four seconds longer, kind of visualizing it. Then you exhale audibly so you can hear it and watch your breath as it flows back out for four seconds. And then you hold the exhale for four seconds. And so you're focusing those 16 seconds, you're focusing on that breath. And then you open your eyes and breathe normally. And what it is, it's just, he calls it a pattern interrupt. It's meant to just reset your brain quickly and stop you from whatever, you know, train of thought is causing you all this anxiety, whatever's going on.

And it just gives you a quick moment to step out of yourself and then go back to that text or email. And you might still be upset, but it just checks you. And what I love too is if you do it four times in a row, you're meditating. You know, he's like, congratulations, you're meditating, right? So that calming breath can be so important. Yeah. Well, as I said at the beginning, you know, we go through our day, we do what we do because that's the way we do it. And it's really good to take a look at how we do some of the things we do and how we might do it better. And you've given a lot of good ideas. Erin Ruddy has been my guest.

The name of her book is The Little Book of Life Skills. And you'll find a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks for being here, Erin. Awesome. That was fun. Thank you so much, Mike. This was awesome. I love chatting with you. 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.

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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. I remember hearing as a young boy someone say, you know, you can go days and days without food, but you won't last very long without water. And that always stuck with me. And it certainly drives home the point that water is so crucial to life. We all need water. And yet there's a real problem with water on this planet.

There's too much of it in some places and not enough of it in others. Since water is so key to the survival of virtually every species on this planet, we all have to be concerned. And there is a lot about water I bet you don't know. But you're about to. Giulio Baccaletti is a globally recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability. Trained as a physicist and climate scientist, he is author of the book, Water, a Biography.

Hi, Giulio. So I imagine that in the biography of water on planet Earth, humans are a big part of that biography. So what has been the relationship between water and humans that has led us to where we are today. It's a really interesting story to me because now man, homo sapiens as it were, has been on the planet for something like 300,000 years now. For the vast majority of that time, we were hunter-gatherers. We essentially moved around and adjusted our location depending on what was happening around us and on the availability of food. And then 10,000 years ago, something changed, right? We essentially decided to stand still in a world of moving water. We became sedentary. We decided we would stay in a place and can manage the fact that around us, there would be floods and storms and droughts,

and that we had to kind of cope, right? And so the story of humanity, the story of civilization is a long history, 10,000 year long history, of layers and layers of institutions of trial and error to try and manage this reality. The fact that we've decided to stay in a place, grow our food, have our homes, in a world in which in that particular place, there may not be water one season, or there may be too much another season, right? The last hundred years have been special because, I mean, I think you live in California. The Californians are a good example of this. People living in California might operate under the illusion that we completely control our water environment. You know, nobody

leaves their home and has to wade a river on their way to work, or very few people do, right? Most people can open their tap and get water out of their faucets. And so we live in this constructed illusion that we completely control the world of water. And this is an anomaly in human history. It hasn't been the case for most of our history. It's only been in the last few decades, a century that that's been the case. And it's the result of all the investments that we've made in infrastructure, in the landscape and the institutions that we have to manage water. It's created this illusion, you know, these 45,000 dam landscape and the institutions that we have to manage water. It's created this illusion, you know, these 45,000 dams around the world that have replumbed

the planet, catching almost everything that comes down from the sky has rendered this illusion for us. And so that's been very different, right? And it's gotten us used to thinking that water is not a problem. But in reality, what's happening, what's happened in the last couple of years and what's happening now, and we see it in the West of the US, is that in reality, that illusion is breaking. So let's go back to the beginning, to the beginning of the biography of water. Where did it come from? How did it get on this planet? Where is it? How much do we use of it? And let's start the story. So that's interesting, Mike, because it is, you know,

sometimes people talk about water and they'll say, oh, we'll run out, right? I mean, it's sort of the, they imagine water as if it were oil. We sort of use it until there's no more. And in reality, that's not true, right? I mean, essentially water, we don't know exactly how water appeared on the planet. It either degassed from the interior of the planet, or it most likely came on a series of asteroids billions of years ago. But however it arrived on the planet, whether from the sort of

the debris of a previous star or whether it came from asteroids, the quantity of water on the planet has been essentially fixed ever since. Not exactly. There's a little bit of what's called hydrolysis. So, you know, water can be, the molecule can be destroyed, but for the most part, it's exactly the same amount of water, right? I mean, whenever you take a drink of water, Mike, you should consider that it probably went through the kidneys of some dinosaur at some point, right? That's the same stuff that just keeps recycling around in the planet. So water is not scarce in that sense, but there isn't a lot of it. And most of what is there is in the oceans. Over 95% of what the water is on the planet is in the oceans. And the rest is mostly locked up in ice, much of which is inaccessible or underground,

right? And again, much of that is inaccessible. So what we have to play with, what human beings recognize as water on the landscape, the rivers, the lakes, the wetlands that we see around us, well, that's a tiny, tiny fraction, less than 0.1% of the water on the planet. That's what we have to play with. So even though water is not fine, it's not scarce in the same sense that oil is scarce. You know, we're not going to run out. It's finite, and it can be scarce in any given place at any given time. And so the story of water from the very beginning, from when we became sedentary and kind of created for ourselves this problem of having to move water to where we were,

the problem we have faced is how to build infrastructure and how to organize ourselves to make sure that we had water when we need it and where we needed it. Just to be clear, you said that the accessible water on the planet is one-tenth of one percent of all the water on the planet. That's right. And, you know, for some people, it's even less than that, right? I mean, it's very unevenly distributed. You think about, you know, the fact that that's the water that we see on the landscape.

A quarter of that is in Lake Tanganyika. Most of us don't access water in Lake Tanganyika, right? So in reality, we have a very, very tiny amount of water that's accessible to us at any given time. And we have to do everything with it. We have to grow food. We have to, you know, power industries. You know, remember that water is the principal energy vector

of the industrial economy. And we have to drink and wash ourselves and clean our citizens and so on. So we have to do a lot with very little. Well, why can't we get the rest of it? And why can't we access the water in the ocean and just do something to it that makes it more user-friendly? That's a very good question, Mike.

And we can, of course. I mean, desalination exists, and in principle you can move water around. The problem is that it's very expensive, right? So if you fill up your bathtub with water in your bathroom, that's about kind of a cubic meter of water, and that's a ton, right? Water is very, very heavy. So moving water around ends up being very energy intensive.

You need energy to lift water from the sea up into higher ground. You need water to lift it out of the ground. And it turns out that if you did that at scale, if you ended up relying on converting water that's currently not usable, like the water in the ocean, into water that's usable, even for things like irrigation, say, the cost would be so high that you would end up, you know, essentially distorting the economics of food. You make food effectively unaffordable. Just think of this. If you, you know, when you draw water out of a river, say, the average cost of drawing out a bathtub of water out of the river without cleaning it, right, without treating it, but just literally the cost of the infrastructure to pick it out, that's about one or two cents per cubic meter, right? It's one or two cents per bathtub.

But if you were to do the same in desalination, you're talking about a dollar or two dollars per cubic meter, so a hundred times more, right? And that's without having to then move it from the coast to somewhere else. Now, the story is not quite draconian as that. You can reuse some water. There are sources of water that are easier to treat than the ocean. But on balance, just because of the economics, we need to make do with what the sky provides, essentially, right? Which is the water that falls down in whatever catchment or whatever river basin we live in. Something I think people wonder about, I certainly wonder about, is the water that goes down the drain. Like you're heating up your shower and there's all this water that's coming that is totally unused,

just comes out of the shower and into the drain. Is that pretty much just sent out to the ocean and that's the end of it? Or are we advanced enough where we recapture that water and do something to it? Or what's the deal? For sure. Yeah, we certainly can. You know, reuse is an important lever, particularly in dry places. It's an important solution to the problem of water scarcity, right?

Because, as you say, you're sort of sitting there, you know, standing there in the shower, and most of the water that you're using isn't actually used to wash yourself or rinse yourself. It's simply going down. And it's dirty, but it's not, you know, it's not so dirty that you couldn't imagine cleaning it. In fact, reuse is a perfectly viable solution. And indeed, it's been adopted in California itself and much around the world. The driest places on the planet, places like Dubai or places like Israel, routinely make use of reuse technology. But remember that the problems that we have with water, for the most part, are problems of agriculture and food production. In other words, if you think about if 100 is the whole amount of The problems that we have with water, for the most part, are problems of agriculture

and food production. In other words, if you think about if 100 is the whole amount of water that we're using, 98 of that, 98 units of that 100 are the consumptive use of agriculture, and only two are for everything else. So while the experience of most people of water is the water comes out of your tap or out of the faucet, from a society's perspective, the story of water is fundamentally an agricultural story. And again, for that, at that scale, the use of reuse is not impossible. I mean, it can be done and under certain conditions it can be done, but the economics are tricky. So that's pretty an amazing statistic that if all the water is 100, 98% of it is agriculture,

and a lot of the other 2% is industry, and yet so much emphasis is put on household conservation. Well, how much could we possibly conserve if we did it perfectly? There's a couple of reasons for that. One is that in some places, that percentage is different, right? How much could we possibly conserve if we did it perfectly? There's a couple of reasons for that. One is that in some places, that percentage is different, right? That's the average percentage of the world. But of course, there are places where cities account for a greater fraction of the whole. But it is true that the real, the kind of fundamental story of water is not really the urban story. I mean, there is a story,

another story, Mike, that we might get to later, which is there are a lot of people in the world that don't have access to that water in their home, right, or don't have access to, you know, the shower that we were talking about. So in that sense, there is a story to be told there. But in terms of conservation, in terms of ensuring that society uses less of this scarce resource, you know, yes, you can do some things with lawns, you can do things with bathrooms. I mean, it's not immaterial. And in some places, like around Los Angeles, it's important. But it's mostly important because we spend so much money

and so many resources trying to bring water to where people decide to stay put, right, to cities. So it's mostly an economic story. The volume story, the story of where we can really gain in savings is really an agricultural story. You know, what do we grow? What do we use the water for?

What are we growing with it? How much water do those plants need? If you're growing alfalfa or nuts or something else in a very arid place, are they drawing too much water? Is there an alternative? Those are really the fundamental levers or levers of efficiency in agriculture, things like drip irrigation that some of your listeners will have heard of, or even hydroponics. Those are ways of reducing

the amount of water that gets used in agriculture. And that's really where the wins are. Isn't a lot of the story of water about cycles? And what I mean by that is, for example, where I live in California, we go through periods of drought, recently serious drought. But then we get a lot of rain, as we did recently, and the drought is over for now. But it'll happen again. In other words, it's a cycle that seems to self-correct. Yes, there were cycles in the past, but there were far fewer of us, right? So there was a time when Egypt could feed a third of the world's population.

There were just a few million people on the planet, right? Not seven billion people. So, yes, the climatology may reach similar points, you know, over time, but our life is different. It's a bit like when people compare the impacts of hurricanes, right? And the question is less whether hurricanes have changed or not and more whether we have changed. We have changed enormously, right? In fact, we've changed exponentially. So that's one aspect of this. The other aspect is that, you know, yes, we recovered, but at what

cost, right? And what happened to the people that lived through that? Yes, we recovered from the dust bowl. But there was immense suffering and great economic upheaval. And, you know, it was a real fault line in society. So, you know, will we disappear completely? Of course not. I mean, life will go on. Suddenly a planet will keep going. But, you know, will we disappear completely? Of course not. I mean, life will go on. Suddenly a planet will keep going. But, you know, how many people have to suffer as a result of going through this is the real question. And what I'm arguing is that we've learned a lot from those past experiences and we can do a lot to mitigate the impacts. But to mitigate the impacts, sometimes we'll have to make some pretty important decisions. So I understand that, you know, we have Mother Nature.

And as a result of Mother Nature, we sometimes have water in places where we don't need it or want it, and we don't have water in places where we do need it and want it. And this causes a lot of problems for people, but on the other side of the coin, we have human ingenuity trying to figure these things out. And just as an example, look at the city of Dubai. I mean, here is seemingly a thriving city in the middle of the desert that has somehow managed to figure out how to have a city and supply the water to people in the desert. Humans figure these things out.

No, no, that's right. And Dubai exists, right? Now, Dubai, the carrying capacity of Dubai in the Emirates is probably 15,000, 20,000 people. The real carrying capacity of that landscape, the amount of water that is there, the amount of land that is there. But, you know, 10 million people live in Dubai.

And why can they live there? Well, because they, you know, have air conditioning and they port everything from everywhere else on the planet. It's a choice. Now, it might not be a very sustainable choice and it may pose enormous costs. Some of them are borne by other people. You know, my point is that we make choices and I think we are at a stage where the changes in the climate system are such that we're going to have to make some other choices. We may still want to live in these places, but we shouldn't fool ourselves into thinking that life can go on as it did before.

Well, how does Dubai get enough water for 10 million people? In part, it desalinates a lot of it, right? So for drinking and for showers and the likes. It also reuses an enormous amount. I mean, if you are staying in a hotel in Dubai, likely is that that water went through a treatment works and was actually used previously by somebody else. So it's, you know, those countries,

particularly the GCC countries are, you know, approaching, you know, 90, 95% reuse when it comes to domestic use. And then critically, I, you know, the story of water, as I said, is a story of food and food is entirely imported, right. So they're entirely dependent on commerce and imports water your garden except on these days of the weekend. The kind of things that individual people and families and households can do to conserve water is literally a drop in the bucket and doesn't really address the problem.

It seems like this is more, you know, a PR thing and a feel-good thing than it is really addressing the problem. I mean, it's not PR. Everything helps, but it's not the crux of the issue, right? It's important, and in some cases, as I said earlier, some cities are dominant water users in the places where they are. So it's not always the case that it's just agriculture. But on average, in balance, whilst it's important for people to conserve, because I think being wasteful for no reason at all doesn't make any sense, I think the framing that this is a problem of consumers is kind of the wrong framing. I think this is a problem of citizens, not consumers. The debate that we should be having is not just what product to buy or which low-flow showerhead to install. I mean, that's important and it's interesting, but far more important is people's engagement on debates

about what the future of the landscape is, right? We want a farming sector because if we do, there's costs and responsibilities that come with that. And we need to support it and we need to figure out how to make it work, And those are about sharing public resources. They're about the role of the government, the state and federal governments and things that may not be particularly fashionable talk about, but the reality Mike is that the West of the United States is inhabited

the way it is today because of the underwriting of the federal government. The Colorado River was plumbed by the Army Corps of Engineers. We made the choice or you made a choice, you guys made a choice a hundred ago, that the West would be populated and that there would be no limits to growth. And you decided to build infrastructure to support that ambition. It worked. It worked for 100 years. It turned the West of the United States into one of the wealthiest and most

productive places in the world. But it turns out the solution has run its course. And now there's an equivalently important discussion about what comes next. Well, it just, I don't know, as I listened to you, it seems like the solution is pretty obvious. It's just really, really expensive. You're going to have to move water from there to here or here to there, and that costs a lot of money, or you're going to have to find some way to treat it,

and that costs money. But there seems like there's plenty of water. It's just, it's in the wrong places, and maybe it's dirty. Yeah. In theory, yes. In practice, the economics just don't work out. I mean, people have thought about this for years and years and years. And, you know, I mean, we may be surprised. You know, someday somebody may come up with a way of very, very cheaply desalinating water. And right now, there still are very specific energy limits to how cheap you can make desalinated water, for example. So there's just a floor, a physical floor, to how much it costs in energy terms to take out salt from water. Maybe we'll be surprised. But at the moment, the reality is that, you know, building a pipeline from Canada to Nevada,

aside from all the geopolitical and environmental issues that you'd face, simply is not economically viable. You just, it doesn't work. You know, it just, you can't make it work. And so we're left with other options. You know, we have to talk about what it is that we grow. We have to talk about how much we grow. Now we have to talk about what people that, you know, were growing but don't we know what to do, or at least what to start to do and stop talking about it and actually do something? Are we doing something? Yes. I mean, we know what to do. As I said,

what is a relatively low tech sector. So aside from the high end stuff of desalination reuse, we know how to make agriculture more efficient. We know how to make agriculture more productive. And we also know which crops might use more or less. I mean, we can imagine a transition and we also can imagine, you know, that we can add some infrastructure. But none of this is a flip of the switch. Right. I mean, it takes time to build things. It takes time to transition, you know, economic businesses from one type of production to another. It takes time to switch from one type of irrigation to another.

And so the sooner we start, the better. Because we've wasted a lot of time. But have we started? Is the clock now running? Or are we still talking about starting? I don't know that it's as fast and as universal as some might like, and we started late, but I think many farming communities are now realizing that this is a problem.

Many cities are realizing that their surroundings are in trouble. And so I think people are doing things. Whether they're doing them fast enough, probably not. And, you know, in the end, the sort of natural system, climate system will define the conditions in which we operate. So if we don't move, you know, it will move for us. When there isn't enough water to go around, then somebody needs to decide how to allocate it, you know. And so in a way, it will solve itself. The problem is how much pain will we have? And I'm saying the sooner we start making the investments, the sooner we start transitioning

some of these farms, the sooner we start kind of dealing with this as the significant political problem that it is, the better equipped we'll be to face the challenges that are ahead. One of the interesting things you point out is that oftentimes or sometimes the solutions that we come up with create new problems. And so give me a couple of examples of what you mean. For example, we were incredibly successful at making it possible to grow food in arid environments like the West. When John Wesley Powell went around the West, he didn't think anything could grow there, right? It needed the intervention of the federal government. We were very successful, so successful, in fact, that everybody moved there, thus creating

the problem that we have now. You know, levees are incredibly successful at keeping floods at bay, so successful that then people live under them until they fail. And then, you know, you have a catastrophe. So it's 10,000 years across the world of constant struggle and dialectic. And we're never static, right? It's a dynamic relationship. And I guess where we are today is that the dynamics has accelerated.

And so it's a really interesting time if it wasn't so difficult. And I think we'll see over the next 10, 15 years some profound changes. Well, given how important water is to the survival of everybody and everything on the planet, it's really interesting to hear how it works and what the challenges are and what the potential solutions are. Giulio Baccaletti has been my guest. He is a recognized expert on natural resource security and environmental sustainability, and he is author of the book Water, a Biography. And there's a link to that book in the show notes. Thanks, Giulio.

Thank you, Mike. It was a great pleasure. You are likely well aware of the dangers and the risks of driving drunk. But you may not be aware that driving tired is also extremely dangerous, even though it doesn't quite have the taboo that driving drunk does. If you are tired, you shouldn't drive, is the recommendation of Dr. Matthew Edlund, who is an internationally renowned rest, sleep, and body clock expert. If you must drive when you're tired, the old standbys like coffee and opening up the car window

may not be enough to keep you awake. So here are a few other techniques. Sing while you're driving. Singing makes you move. It fills your body with action and pumps up the lungs. Move to the music. It may be hard to dance while you're driving, but you can sort of try it. If you feel the music you love in your body and get going with it, it should help wake up a sleepy brain and prepare you for travel. Try taking a nap. If you didn't get enough sleep, try parking and napping for just

10 or 15 minutes. It can prevent accidents and make you far more functional later on. And rest enough. Even if you slept good the night before, you may be operating on a sleep debt from getting too little sleep over the last few days or weeks. That can catch up with you very quickly on a long, monotonous drive. And that is something you should know. If you like this podcast, please tell someone you know, ask them to listen. If you like it, they're probably going to like it, and it helps us grow our audience. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook, where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper.

In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, this is Rob Benedict. And I am Richard Spate. We were both on a little show you might know called Supernatural. It had a pretty good run, 15 seasons, 327 episodes. And though we have seen, of course, every episode many times, we figured, hey, now that we're wrapped, let's watch it all again. And we can't do that alone. So we're inviting the cast and crew that made the show along for the ride. We've got writers, producers, composers, directors, and we'll of course have some actors on as well,

including some certain guys that played some certain pretty iconic brothers. It was kind of a little bit of a left field choice in the best way possible. The note from Kripke was, "'He's great, we love him, "'but we're looking for like a really intelligent "'Dicovany type.'"

With 15 seasons to explore, it's going to be the road trip of several lifetimes, so please join us and subscribe to Supernatural then and now.