Something You Should Know - Uncommon Knowledge You Need to Know & How to Handle All the Paper in Your Life

Episode Date: August 10, 2020

Outdoor cooking and eating can be fun and tasty. Still, there are some potential dangers we all need to be aware of. For example, when was the last time you really cleaned your grill? If you think the fire burns off all the bad stuff, think again. That’s just one of the things about outdoor cooking I discuss as we begin this episode. http://www.menshealth.com/health/5-cookout-mistakes-that-make-you-sick Carrots were not originally orange. Expensive weddings are a bad idea. The Mediterranean Sea will disappear one day. These are just a few items of fascinating knowledge I discuss with Tom Standage, Deputy Editor of The Economist and editor of the book Uncommon Knowledge (https://amzn.to/2DFoeNA). Listen as he explains why kids’ summer vacations are too long, what Interpol really is and who owns all the material in outer space – amongst other things. It’s fairly well accepted that moderate drinking has health benefits. However, that may be a big overstatement. Listen as I discuss research that questions the validity of that idea and why there is a flaw in the theory that a glass of wine is good for you. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-4529928/A-glass-red-wine-NOT-good-heart.html We were supposed to be moving towards a paperless society. That doesn’t really seem to be happening. In fact, a lot of us have more documents, forms, certificates, letters and memos than we know what to do with. If you have filing cabinets, drawers and boxes full of papers, you need to listen to Lisa Woodruff. She is founder of Organize365 (www.organize365.com) which helps people tame all the paper in their lives and she is author of the book The Paper Solution: What to Shred, What to Save, and How to Stop It From Taking Over Your Life (https://amzn.to/3gIojyE). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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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. Today on Something You Should Know, why you really need to clean your barbecue grill. Then fascinating knowledge you never knew, like why expensive weddings are a bad idea. What does Interpol actually do, and why in World War II people started believing carrots are really good for your eyes.

And this led to the myth that British pilots were able to spot the Germans coming was because they were eating lots of carrots and that was giving them fantastic night vision. This story was actually a cover story because what had really happened was that the British had developed radar and they were using radar to spot the Germans coming. Also, why moderate drinking may not be all that good for your health. And how to get rid of all the unnecessary paper, receipts, documents, even manuals. I don't have any manuals in my house anymore for two reasons. Number one, you can find all of them online.

And number two, I am never going to fix my water heater or anything else that I had a manual for. All this today on Something You Should Know. This is an ad for better help. 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. 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. This is the outdoor cooking season.

Probably more people than ever are staying home and cooking outdoors this summer. And there's some things about cooking outdoors that you may not know. Now you probably do know that your chicken shouldn't be pink on the inside and you know to wash your hands after touching raw meat. But there are

some other things people do or don't do that can put them at risk. For example, if you wash your chicken in the sink, not only does that spray chicken bacteria around to other surfaces in your kitchen, it also doesn't really remove the bacteria from the chicken itself. Only cooking will do that. You probably know, too, that if the potato salad with mayonnaise has been sitting out for a long time, you should probably not eat it.

But actually, any food is potentially dangerous if left out too long. Low-acid food like dairy, meats, cooked grains, cooked vegetables, melons, any prepared dish is all potentially dangerous if it's left out too long. And that's basically all food. If you don't clean the grill, that can be a problem. I know a lot of people think that if they just put the grill over the fire that the high temperatures will destroy everything, but that's not true. One British study found that the normal barbecue grill contains 1.7 million microbes per square centimeter. That's worse than your toilet seat.

You really have to clean the grill. You think your burgers are done, but actually eyeballing burgers for doneness is amazingly inaccurate. Some burgers look done, but have not reached the safe temperature of 160 degrees. As a result, you don't kill all the bacteria like E. coli and salmonella. The only way to know is to have a food thermometer and make sure it gets to 160 degrees. And if you use the same tongs to serve the cooked meat that you used to put on the grill when it was raw, there is a high probability for cross-contamination. And that is something you should know.

All of us have information and knowledge coming at us all the time, and even more information at our fingertips whenever we want. So there's a real good chance that you've missed out on some very interesting and uncommon knowledge, facts, and figures. The kind of knowledge that Tom Standage knows a lot about. Tom is the deputy editor at The Economist and editor of several books, his latest being Uncommon Knowledge. Hey Tom, welcome. It's good to be here. So before we dive into why carrots are orange and other fascinating information here, explain where all this uncommon knowledge comes from. Well, this book is a compendium of explainers from The Economist,

and The Economist sort of sees its mission to explain the world to people, help them understand the world. And we don't want that to be kind of boring and mission to explain the world to people, help them understand the world. And we don't want that to be kind of boring and dry. We want that to be fun. And these explainers, the book's called Uncommon Knowledge because uncommon has two meanings. Things that not many people know, that's uncommon. But uncommon also means sort of unusual and striking. And that's what all of the things in this book are. They are things that are both little known but also quite unusual.

So let's jump in and start discussing some of these. And let's start with one that actually my son asked me about not long ago. He said, in outer space, like if you go to the moon or you go to Mars or you just, you know, see an asteroid, who owns it? Can you claim it? That's a difficult question to answer it turns out there's something called the outer space treaty and the outer space treaty it dates back to the 1960s so it's it's um it's really rather old and out of date um but yeah basically a whole load of countries signed this treaty in order to agree that um they wouldn't militarize space and that they wouldn't try and make profit from space. And we are now in a situation where a lot of companies in America in particular would like

to go and mine asteroids or go to the moon and start doing things. And technically, it belongs to everyone. It belongs to the whole human race. But I think we're going to start seeing this agreement with this treaty starting to fray in the next couple of years because, you know, previously people couldn't go and dig stuff up on the moon, but that's becoming increasingly possible. So the fact that the US was first to the moon and we planted a flag there, that has no legal claim to it? No, not at all. And also people who claim to sell you like space on the moon and stuff like that, it's all nonsense. People who try to sell you the name, you know, you could name a star.

I'm afraid that's all made up as well. Wait, I just bought a vacation home on the moon. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh, no. They said that the crater was going to fill in with water and that I would have lakefront property. No? Well, that's the whole thing.

Actually, water on the moon is the really valuable part of it. That's what people want to go and find. Because if you find water, you can use it to make rocket fuel. And so actually mining water and finding the places where there's the most water and finding craters that have got water in the shadows, that's the kind of stuff that all of these space probes that people want to send, that's what they're going to go and look for. So you make the claim that summer school holidays are too long, and there are plenty of under 18-year-old people who would argue with you and say it's not long enough. But why that claim? What makes you think that summer vacations are too long? It's mainly because when summer holidays are this long, kids basically forget an awful lot.

I mean, I think anyone can relate to that. If you don't use knowledge or you don't use a skill, you know, it's use it or lose it. And the big problem with having a really, really long summer vacation is that the knowledge that you've picked up in the previous academic year, a lot of it will be lost. And so if we had sort of holidays that were more spaced out during the year, instead of this great big summer holiday that you get in many countries, that would be better from an educational perspective. Right. Well, strictly from an educational perspective, but not so much from a summer of fun kind of perspective. Well, I think you could still go and have, I mean, even if you only had a shorter holiday, you could go and have fun at different times of the year. I think the constraint on how much fun you can have in practice is like how many weeks can you get off work? I think for most families, that's the, can you afford to go on holiday? So the fact that children are around for weeks and weeks and weeks in the summer, just, you know, it's not doing their education any good and it would make more sense to space it out.

Why do terrorists claim responsibility for some attacks and not others? So there's a sort of U-shape distribution to this, but it's basically if you do a very small attack and then you claim responsibility for it, does that make you look... If your attack didn't go very well and didn't kill as many people as you wanted it to, looking at it from the terrorist point of view,

does that make you look weak? On the other hand, if you blow something up and the explosion's much bigger than you expect and you kill a lot more people, then that might really work against you. There might be a backlash. Some people who support you might say, well, actually, that was going too far. So it seems that there's a sort of medium-sized terrorist attack, which is the size that terrorist groups are most willing to claim. And it's the small ones or the big ones that they're less interested in. You say there is a global increase in the number of houseplants that people are buying and bringing home. Why would that be?

It seems to be that, basically, if you can't afford to buy a house you can't afford to buy a house plant so it's a way of um personalizing your space um and obviously if you can't afford to to buy a house with a garden which a lot of people can't then um it's a way of you know being a substitute for that so apparently in america millennials are thought to account for about a third of house plant sales um and so that does seem to suggest it's a kind of nesting, but it's a nesting before you actually go into the property market, particularly among people who live in flats without gardens. Really? Some people attribute this to Instagram. So having kind of nice looking cactuses or whatever. I mean, I'm sure that, you know, nowadays everyone's

concerned about what their Zoom background looks like. And do you have a plant in there? And you probably don't want a plant that, you know, looks like it's dying. So a cactus might be a good option there. But, yeah, if you look at this is based on data on worldwide Google searches for selected houseplants. And you can see that succulents and cactus and aloe vera interest in that seems to be going up. I mentioned right at the top of our discussion that I wanted to ask you about why carrots are orange, because carrots weren't originally orange. That's a relatively new development. So what's up with that?

So, yes, carrots were originally white or purple. And I've seen the kind of original heirloom varieties. You could get them at farmer's markets. And it was a genetic mutation, essentially, that made some carrots sort of yellow. And then people selectively started to breed the yellow ones in particular about a thousand years ago. And that led to the modern orange form of carrot. And there's a theory that this was done in particular by people in the Netherlands because they wanted to do it in honor of William of Orange, the leader of a 17th century rebellion against the Spanish. And so we don't know if

that's true or not. But what is certainly the case is that the carrots became associated with the House of Orange and a way that you could sort of show if you were in the marketplace, you could sort of show carrots as a gesture of support if you had these orange carrots in your home or on your market stall or whatever. So that seems to be that sort of political motivation why carrots became orange. The handy thing about orange carrots is they have a lot more beta carotene in them and they also have the most vitamin A which contributes to the health of the eye and this led to the myth during World War II that the reason that British pilots were able to spot the Germans coming was because they were eating lots of carrots,

and that was giving them fantastic night vision. And this story was actually a cover story because what had really happened was that the British had developed radar, and they were using radar to spot the Germans coming, but carrots were the cover story. So there you are. And my favorite sort of coda to all of this is that a British supermarket tried to reintroduce the original carrots. Because, you know, if you think

about it, the orange ones are sort of genetically modified, right? They've been carefully bred to be a different color. So the idea was that if people want authenticity in their food, they might prefer the white or the purple one. But in fact, that didn't work at all. People didn't want to go near them. They want their carrots to be orange. One thing that caught my eye that you write about is that the global suicide rate is going down. And I think, well, it came as a surprise to me. I think it would come as a surprise to a lot of people who see all the chaos and trouble in the world and would think the suicide rate is going up.

But apparently it's going down this sort of connects to the kind of thing the economist does well which is spot a big global trend and sort of help you make sense of it so the number of suicides around the world has has fallen by 38 it turns out since its peak in 1994 and so you go well that's interesting why is why is that happening and it turns out there's no single reason for it. There's three separate factors. One is that there were a lot of suicides among young women in India and China in particular, because they were basically unhappy. And what's happened is that as women's rights have improved in India and China, they've been less likely to commit suicide. So that's a good sign. The second one was men in

Russia. After the collapse of the Sovietviet union a lot of older men in in russia drank themselves to death and the you know the average uh life expectancy in russia absolutely collapsed and i think that was quite well known that sort of vodka lots of people were just drinking themselves to death and that's actually turned around now so um that's been another uh decline in um in suicides there have been fewer depressed Russians after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And then the third category is old people. So the suicide rate among the elderly is higher than among the rest of the population, but that has also fallen since the turn of the century.

So overall, you put it all together and say, this is why the suicide rate around the world has fallen. Which certainly seems like a good thing. I'm talking with Tom Standage. He is the deputy editor at The Economist, and his latest book is Uncommon Knowledge. 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 Duchovny 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. 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 Tom, you say that it's getting more and more difficult to define what death is, which is a little weird because it would seem pretty clear cut. I mean, if you're dead, you're dead. If you're not, you're not. So explain. Well, this is becoming more blurred. I think, you know, when someone's on a life support machine and the decision is made to withdraw life support, I think we recognize that, you know, we're in a gray area there. If you leave the machine on, they're alive, kind of. And if you turn it off, they're going to die. And essentially, there are more and more situations in these sorts of gray areas.

And so, you know, you've got the whole question of brain death has been used as a way of determining whether someone's alive or not. Basically, if they woke up, would their brain be working and this sort of thing? Or has their brain been irretrievably destroyed um so essentially there are more and more cases that are challenging this sort of binary definition of uh of being alive or being dead because of advances in in medical science and that's why um it's become it's actually become a legal problem that the law hasn't kept up with this and there have been a few jurisdictions that have had to adjust their their rules we have in this country anyway we have had a war on drugs for a long long time and you say that the production of opium and cocaine is at an all-time high which indicates

that maybe the the war on drugs well well why is that why is it at an all-time high well in the case of cocaine there were expectations that the government's deal in colombia with the fart gorillas um would mean that there was less cocaine production but that hasn't happened um because the peace agreement required the government to make payments to coca farmers who would switch to other crops um and so that actually meant if you were already farming coca then you'd get some money but if you weren't you'd get free money from the government so that caused lots of people in colombia to start farming cocaine so that they'd get free money and then meanwhile in afghanistan there's been this increase in poppy cultivation um since the chaos there following the uh the invasion in 2001 and obviously afghanistan is

still a very unruly place and that has led to increased production um so in both cases it's sort of law of unintended consequences interpol everybody's heard of interpol you see it in spy movies and spy novels about interpol is as this apparently some european-based police something. I don't know what it is. So what is Interpol? Well, you think it's a sort of international police force, and it's going to have these sort of shadowy agents, you know, and it's going to be really cool. They're going to go around the world fighting crime.

In fact, there aren't Interpol agents who are able to arrest criminals. It's more of an information-sharing network, and it's a way for national police forces to cooperate and coordinate with what they're doing. So it's based in France, and it basically has a centralized criminal database that can have shared information, documents, fingerprint records, and that kind of stuff. And then the other thing it does is it issues these notices, alerts to member states for missing persons. And the most famous one is called the Red Notice. And that's basically, if you see this person, missing persons. And the most famous one is called the Red Notice. And that's basically, if you see this person, arrest them. And the members of Interpol, and it has 194 member countries, so it's pretty much the whole world, they're not obliged to follow these notices.

But essentially, they do. I mean, they respect that. And we've seen in recent months that Russia has been being a bit naughty and issuing notices like this for people that it doesn't like just to sort of make their lives difficult. But what's supposed to happen is it's supposed to be about cooperation in fighting crime. Well, that's not anywhere near as exciting and exotic as... Yeah, I know. I think that the Hollywood movie of Interpol would just involve a whole load of people sitting around a computer with the you know, with the database and it wouldn't, it wouldn't look terribly exciting.

So you say people are working longer. I hadn't heard that. I would have actually thought the opposite. So, so go ahead and explain. People are working longer. I mean, I think people are working even longer now with, with working from home. It does seem to me that people are, instead of sort of taking free time back from not, not commuting, they're just working for longer. And if you look at records like, you know, when Slack messages are sent or emails, that does seem to extend earlier into the morning and later into the evening. But essentially, yes, this is a sort of longer term trend. And this is something like 25 percent of American men over the age of 65 worked in the 80s, and today nearly 40% do. And the same is true for younger men.

So if you look at 60s to 65-year-olds, it's gone up from 53% to 63%. This, I think, broadly reflects the fact that people can't afford to retire. And so people are working longer, not just during the day, they're also working longer in their lives, because fewer people have the kind of, you know, gold plated, final salary pensions that we kind of all imagined from the post war boom. That's just not the case anymore. And that means that more people are having to work if not full time, certainly in part time employment later than they used to have to. Don't you wonder, though, I wonder if part of it is also a kind of a shift in the way people think about work and the fact that people probably now have more freedom to choose to do what they want to do rather than take a job that they don't want.

And so, I mean, I can speak for myself. I couldn't see myself retiring. I mean, I can speak for myself. I couldn't see myself retiring. I mean, I enjoy what I do. Retirement sounds horrible to me. Yeah, I'm with you on that. I enjoy what I do too. My father is a musician and he's 80 and he's still going. And I said, look, you can afford to retire. Why haven't you retired? And he said, because I've seen what happens to musicians when they retire they die and it's the it's the

tension of performing and then sort of the release of having performed and got away with it and it's you know delivering a good performance that's what keeps him alive and so he intends to to keep going for as long as he can but i agree with you i think there is more flexibility and in some ways it's good i think if if people want to work and they want to work later, that's good. And it may, you know, keep them happier, gives them a routine. A lot of people just, you know, when they retire, they don't know what to do with themselves. It's not true of everyone, but it is true of some people. So I think where this is a matter of choice, I think that's a good thing. It's where it's a matter of necessity, because the pension system or the social safety net isn't as strong as it used to be.

That's more of a concern. You say that expensive weddings are a bad idea. And so clearly you must have some evidence to support. You wouldn't just say that. So you must have evidence to support that. There is this study from economists and they found that if you take couples and you basically choose people who have the same income, the same education, the same racial group, those who have married and spent more on their wedding were more likely to get divorced. So you take away all the other reasons why they're from

different backgrounds or they've got different levels of education or whatever. If you normalise for all of that, it turns out that spending more on the wedding makes you more likely to get divorced. And this may be because they were sort of stressed about paying off their wedding debts or something like that. But that was a quite striking finding. So, yeah. And civil unions, you say that they are becoming more popular even for heterosexual couples. So why would that be? Well, I think it's because some people regard weddings, the sort of traditional marriage in particular, as a sort of old-fashioned patriarchal institution. And whereas civil partnerships is sort of a legal thing and, you know, it doesn't have all of the sort of historical and cultural baggage of, you know, the woman's family giving the woman to the man like a thing, you know.

I mean, obviously this varies enormously and sort of, you know, marriage is what you make of it. But there are some people who feel very strongly that they don't want to be part of an institution that, you know, is associated with, you know, traditions, and those sorts of behaviors that they don't approve of. And so a civil partnership is much more straightforward. It's something where the state is involved and sort of says, yes, legally married um and and there you go the funny thing was in britain um civil partnerships were introduced as a way for same-sex couples um to get together and tie the knot and um people of different sexes weren't allowed to have a civil partnership uh until the law was changed um but uh and people thought well hang on a minute that's

silly if if gay people can have a civil, why can't straight people have a civil partnership? So it is just a form of union that some people prefer to get away from the baggage of marriage. One thing you talk about that I think many people haven't heard before, I've certainly never heard it before, thatiterranean sea is going to disappear it is yeah it's going to close up and it's um basically uh africa is sort of charging towards europe they're colliding with each other this has pushed up the alps and the pyrenees already um and about 50 years from now they're going to merge sorry 50 million years from now excuse me they're going to merge together to make this mega continent and um the mediterranean will just disappear it will turn into a mountain range possibly as big as the himalayas uh but it's

all right you've got you know you don't have to worry because this is going to be in like tens of millions of years time so um it's not going to spoil anyone's holiday assuming we can start going on holidays in the mediterranean again sometime soon well i always enjoy these kind of conversations because i learned so much things I never knew before and probably would have never run into if we hadn't run into you. Tom Standage has been my guest. He's the deputy editor at The Economist and editor of several books, his latest being Uncommon Knowledge. There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. And The Economist also has a series of podcasts, too, that if you like our discussion today, you might enjoy their podcasts.

There's a link to those podcasts also in the show notes. Thank you, Tom. Thank you very much. Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years.

She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and

in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed critical thinker. Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do you love Disney? 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. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed,

but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. 43% of the American population considers themselves to be disorganized, according to my guest. And I suspect there are plenty more people who maybe don't say they are disorganized, but wish they were more organized. And a big part of any disorganization problem is likely paper, receipts, bills, documents, letters, forms. There is so much paper. What do we do with all this paper?

Well, someone who has thought through the answer to that problem rather thoroughly is Lisa Woodruff. Lisa has really become one of the leading experts on how to tame the paper monster in your life. She's the founder of Organize 365, which offers products and workshops to help people get organized. And she is the author of the book, The Paper Solution, What to Shred, What to Save, and How to Stop It from Taking Over Your Life. Hi, Lisa. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me.

So, for a long time, we've been hearing about the coming paperless society, but it never seems to come. It never gets here. I mean, it's happened here and there, but there is still a lot of paper being passed around. And I thought by now we would be, if not paperless, at least more paperless than we are. I did too. And you know, for years, I kept trying to figure out why this problem wasn't solved and very frustrated and had a lot of migraines over the fact that I must be doing something wrong because we're supposed to be paperless. And when I finally realized we're never going to be paperless, it was a huge relief for me.

And I was like, OK, fine. So we're not going to be paperless. Can we have less paper? And if we can have less paper, then what is the solution within that constraint versus trying to figure out how to eliminate paper entirely? legal and other reasons. I mean, try taking out a paperless mortgage. I mean, it's impossible. I mean, there are legal reasons why paper is required, and there's probably lots of other good reasons. I kind of like paper receipts, but paper just doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. It's really not. I mean, to get a compliant driver's license in the United States, you need three pieces of paper just to do that.

I mean, America is a very paper-based society for legal reasons. But also, like just for my own personal sanity, I write down lists of things I need to do or things I need to remember. Our brains weren't meant to retain all of our to-do lists and information in our head. We need to write things down. We need to have paper. We don't have to have a lot of it, but we need some of it. And so my theory is that there are people who are like, just, they have something in their brain, you probably have it, you must have it, that you have this thing that allows you to see it and organize it and nail it.

And then there are people, other people, I think I'm somewhere in the middle of people who just don't know what to do. You know, does the insurance bill, does the car insurance bill go under car or does it go under insurance? I don't know. Because when you go look for it, where would I look for it? So, but people like you probably go, oh, well, you just put it right there. See? No, I think the truth of the matter is nobody had a system that was working at all. Like 99.9% of us don't. I didn't. I did. I would have car files and then insurance, exactly what you're saying. And what I realized was after years of trying to perfect my own

filing cabinet and my client clients filing cabinets and no one being able to maintain them no matter how perfectly we set it up that filing cabinets were not the answer we just need to categorize paper in just a few categories i put them in binders and four binders really handles 99 of all the paperwork that you have in your filing cabinet so it doesn't matter if you file it by car or by insurance, you just file it in the financial binder. And then when you have an issue with your car, you go into that one two-inch binder and it's right there.

I think people perhaps lose sight of the fact that filing's good, storing stuff, paper, putting it where it's supposed to go is good. But the real reason that you file things is in the event you need it again later. You have to be able to find it. There's no other reason to file anything. Exactly. Right.

You hit the nail on the head. So you could have the greatest systems in the world, but if and when you need it again, you can't find it, then your system sucks. Exactly. Well said. I should have put that in the book. Well, feel free. Next book.

And that's why filing cabinets didn't work for me. And the other reason filing cabinets didn't work for me was because they weren't portable. I almost never need my paper at home. I almost always need it when I'm out. When you're settling in a state, when you're in a school meeting for your child, when you're meeting with a new doctor, when you're moving and you're meeting with the realtor, you need the paper when you're with other people. You don't usually need it in your filing cabinet or when you're organizing your filing cabinet. And so what's your approach?

So my approach is to completely get rid of your filing cabinet and only have four binders. And they are a medical binder, a financial binder, a household reference binder with everything related to your house if you were to sell it or if you were to move, and then a household binder related to how you run your household, your pets, your vacations, your holidays. Okay, so explain then how the system works or how it works better than just putting things in a filing cabinet. So when we go to our filing cabinets, 85% of what's in there you really don't need. You put it in there because you watched your parents do it. Someone told you to do it that way. You're really not sure what else you would do with it. It seemed like it was important.

But like, for example, I had like multiple files of manuals. I don't have any manuals in my house anymore for two reasons. Number one, you can find all of them online. They're all available online if you need them. And number two, I am never going to fix my water heater or anything else that I had a manual for. And I've never had a service professional come to my house and say, OK, first, I am never going to fix my water heater or anything else that I had a manual for. And I've never had a service professional come to my house and say, OK, first I need to see your manual and then I will fix whatever it is I'm going. They don't need it. Nobody needs these manuals.

So getting rid of those literally cleared out inside of a filing cabinet, I decided to create these four categories of paper that I put in the binders and go into my filing cabinet and like on a scavenger hunt, find the papers I needed to fill these binders. And then the rest of it pretty much usually was papers we didn't need anymore. Well, I mean, when I moved last year and was going through things, I had stuff, you know, old phone bills and things from... But why? I mean, some of them I kept for, you know, tax reasons, but that's three years. So why am I keeping this stuff for 10 years? And I think it's just people just have a habit. As you say, you saw your parents do it. You keep this stuff.

You never know. Well, you kind of do. Well, and I don't know how old you are, Mike, but I mean, when I was, I'm 48. And so when I was 16 and I got my first checkbook, we were taught how to reconcile your checkbook. And if there was a discrepancy, you literally could take your bank statement to the bank and talk to them about why there was a discrepancy and you could get money back. Do you remember those days in the 80s? Like try that today. I would love to see somebody go to a bank today and say, I'm sorry, but your electronic record doesn't match my paper record that I have over here. So you owe me $5.22. We used to be able to do that. That was a legit thing that you did. That's not the way we do banking anymore. So

that kind of paperwork does not substantiate anything. The bank is always right in those issues. So it's just a different way of using our paper and organizing ourselves. Well, it does seem that a big part of the solution isn't necessarily so much to organize your paper, although that's important, but to get rid of it because so much of it is just clutter. It really is. And it's confusing. It's confusing for us as it comes in. We don't know what to do with it. So we put it in the filing cabinets. But the bigger problem is it's really confusing when you're going through a life altering event. So if someone is sick, if someone has passed away, if you're going through a life altering event. So if someone is sick, if someone has passed away,

if you're going through a divorce, this is when you actually do go through those filing cabinets because you have to settle these things. And now you're like, what, you know, what is all of this paperwork? And you're going through all of this paperwork that is genuinely has no information that you need and is just trash. But in amongst there will be papers that are worth a lot of money or are very important. And you're doing this at a time where your brain isn't as clear thinking as it normally would be. So paper is something you're going to have to deal with at some time. You can either deal with it when it seems like a monotonous thing that you don't really want to deal with. But I guess we have the time because we're locked at home in coronavirus pandemic anyway. Or you could deal with it when you're going through trauma and handling all these big life events. You're going to have to deal with your paperwork sometime. You just get to pick when.

Right. Okay. So you say you've got these four binders. So explain what you mean. You mean like a fan fold? What do you mean four binders? Like traditional school binder. Like I use a two-inch binder. I like the ones that have the D-ring in there. A deluxe one-touch binder is what I like. And I literally have one for each category of fileable paper. You have all your financial documents. You have all your health documents.

You have all your documents related to your house. And then all your documents related to how you run your house. And then within the binder, is there a system within the binder? So, oh, the, you know, the ophthalmologist is here and the, you know, dermatologist is here. Explain that. Yes. So in each binder, I have them divided into five categories. So for the medical, it would be your medical history is one category.

Medications and current diagnosis would be another category. So it isn't based on each doctor. It's more based on each person. Your financial binder is organized by your current money, your future money, and your legal documents and insurances that you have. Do you have a sense, because you really have studied this, what papers people typically need or don't need that they keep? Or just a sense of like, what is really important? Well, I think we all know that your social security card,

your birth certificate is important. What was surprising for me when settling my dad's estate was how much information was important but isn't actually on paper. So like I needed to know my dad's driver's license number. I needed to know if he had any military service, which he did, that I didn't know about. So he received a flag when he was buried. You need to know mother's maiden name, passwords, things like that that aren't necessarily in the filing cabinet. So the binder is a combination of papers you would find in your filing cabinet, things that you saved on your computer, and information that's in your head. Like when you're creating the medical binder, a lot of that is in your head.

What past surgeries have you had? What's your family history? What medications have you taken in the past that haven't worked? That information isn't written down anywhere. Yeah, right, exactly. And at some point you even forget it because if like a medication didn't work, well, there isn't much point in remembering that. You kind of remember the ones that do, not the ones that don't. I totally thought that. And in two instances, it's really important to know what medications don't work. If you or a family member has had cancer, often they'll try a lot of different cancer protocols in order to figure out what is going to work for

you. So keeping track of your medications is super important then. And then also my children are diagnosed with ADHD and there are a lot of different medications that work for ADHD and each body type is different. So knowing what didn't work when my children were in grade school really is helping them in their young adult life. When new doctors want to try different medications, I have a list of all the medications we tried and what worked, what didn't work, why it didn't work, and what the side effects were for our kids, which is helping them getting better care as young adults. So I get the four binders, but life has a lot of paper that comes in and out of it. It's very transient. It's the phone bills, it's the electric bills, it's the whatever, credit card bills. How do you handle those? And if you need them again, where do you find them?

That kind of thing. So we've been talking about archive paper, reference paper. Now we're moving to actionable paper. And you know it's actionable because it's probably in a pile on your kitchen counter. And I say, leave it there, only put it in a basket. So I have this thing called the Sunday basket. It looks like a box. And it's a place where you put all of those papers that are actionable, that need you to do something with them. And we give it a day and time. So I do mine Sunday afternoon. You can pick a different day and time, but you need one day every single week and around the same time where you process through all of that that's come in and plan out your week, kind of like you have a day or a couple of days that you do laundry, similar to that. And people also have a lot of papers they keep because no apparent reason. Old magazines, old recipes, old things that they, I don't know why people don't throw

them away. You probably do. But it seems like that old archive-y stuff needs to be tackled at some point. Yeah, and there are a lot of different things that are happening inside of that kind of paper. Two things I want to say to that. First of all, you can keep all the paper you want. I am not a minimalist. I don't think you should end up going 100% paperless. I think the more you have permission to keep paper longer,

you will stop resisting getting rid of paper. So that's the first thing. You don't have to get rid of everything right away. And second, why do you have those papers? So for me, I used to have recipes. I don't cook. My husband, luckily, cooks for us, and I buy a lot of takeout, which all has been available

in my area during the pandemic, which has been great for me because I'm just not a good cook. I'm never going to be a good cook. I have recipes that are written in my mother-in-law and my grandmother's handwriting and they were great cooks and I'm keeping those for nostalgia reasons. But even as my husband and I went through all of our recipe books a few years ago, we don't eat that way anymore. Our recipe books were from the 80s, 90s, early 2000s. No one eats that way anymore. And so when you realize that it is hard for me to say I'm never going to be a good cook or I don't desire to put the time in to learn that. And I feel as a woman, I should, but I don't, I finally got rid of all of those reminders that that wasn't something that I was skilled at or was going to be good at, and I just got rid of all of the recipes

and all of the books related to that. Good for you. That makes sense. That makes perfect sense. It's kind of like, it's almost like therapy to like let it go. Let that part of you go that you think you should do, now you don't have to do it.

And now you can't do it because you don't have those recipes anymore. Or we can go, like my husband and I did go to the bookstore and we looked at all these books and I was going to buy, and I did buy a recipe book and I brought it home. And three months later, I realized, yep, nope, this one also is being donated. So you can try again. You can always get this paper again in the future. Well, that I think is really important that almost everything is retrievable from somewhere else. If

you really need something that you threw away, chances are, paper-wise anyway, chances are you could get it again. It might take a little effort, but you could get that receipt again or you could get that whatever it is. Yeah, it's just going to take time and money. And if your papers aren't organized now, they're costing you time and money anyway. So either way, it's costing you time and money. Well, what do you do with old bills and things that, I mean, when you pay the electric bill,

do you just throw it away? I do. We just have a shredder and I just shred them at the end of my Sunday basket session. Unless it is that I need to keep it for tax documentation, we do still itemize our taxes. I know very few people do, but we have a home-based business, so we do itemize our taxes. So I keep it for that reason. But most things that you buy at the store, like at the grocery store, you leave and they go, here's your receipt.

And you will never, ever need that again because you're not going to take back the grapefruit that didn't taste good. You don't do that. So why keep it? Right. And, you know, there are some stores where you need to have the receipt for return. But then there are other stores where they look up your purchases on your credit card. And I don't want to quote because I'm terrible at details. But I know one store I go to, I have to have the receipt to return it.

And the other store I go to, if you use the same credit card, which we use one credit card for everything, they'll pull up your order and do the return right from your credit card. So you don't even need the receipt at that store. So maybe it's worth the next time you do a return from the favorite store that you shop at all the time, what is their return policy? How many days do you need the receipt? Can they look it up on your credit card? Yeah. Well, you know, when you think about it, your system, your four binder system makes all the sense in the world. And yet there's been a lot of people who have talked about

efficiency and time management and organizing and all this. And it gets very complicated. And again, going back to what I said at the beginning, that for people like me, I can't do those systems. I could try and I'll do them for three days, but pretty soon I do what I do. So I'm a teacher by trade. I taught middle school algebra and not everybody likes to take middle school algebra, but I will teach it to you no matter what. So I found eight different ways to teach algebra. So I would find a way to teach it that would engage each of the students in my class. And I've done the same with paper organization. So our Sunday basket system that we do on Sunday is on your kitchen counter. I have so many

different learning modalities in there. No matter what kind of an organizer you are, if you like really detailed organizing or if you like big bucket organizing, the Sunday basket is going to speak to you in some way, shape or form. And then the simplicity of the four binders for your filing cabinet, it's such a relief to know like, oh, it's only four binders and the operations is optional. So really three binders. I can go through this entire filing cabinet, fill up these binders, and this is the essential paper I need is a relief to people. And once it's created, it's really easy to maintain it. Now,

it will take, you know, three to six months to get through all your backlog of paper and get these systems up and running. But once they're up and running, they almost maintain themselves. Well, I think this is excellent advice for anybody who has struggled with, you know, where is my passport? Where do we keep the title to the car? Anything like that. This can really come in handy where everything is in one place and you know where it is. Lisa Woodruff has been my guest. She is author of the book, The Paper Solution, What to Shred, What to Save, and How to Stop It from Taking Over Your Life. She's the founder of Organize 365, which offers products and workshops on helping people get organized. And she sells some of the products that she's talked about in this conversation.

Her website is Organize365.com. And there's a link to her book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Lisa. Thank you so much, Mike. How many times have you heard that a glass of wine is good for your health, or that drinking in moderation can have health benefits? Well, hold on a sec. There may be a flaw in that statement, according to a review of 45 studies. When moderate drinkers are compared to people who don't drink, yes, they may be healthier,

but in many cases, it's because those people who don't drink used to drink, but stopped drinking because they had a health problem. In other words, the teetotalers were less healthy to begin with by comparison. Healthy older people may also

be more inclined to enjoy an occasional alcoholic beverage than those with existing health problems. This gives the false illusion of an association between moderate drinking and better health. So if you drink alcohol for health benefits, water might be a better choice. And that is something you should know. I know that you know somebody who would love this podcast. So please send them a link, let them hear it, share it with a friend. 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, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network Called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.