Something You Should Know - Why Parking is Such a Problem & How Microbes Influence Our Lives - SYSK Choice

Episode Date: May 3, 2025

Are you one of the many people who enjoys a morning cup of coffee? If so, listen to the beginning of this episode which explains why you should smell your coffee when you drink it because it can help you think better and be more productive. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6881620/ In many urban areas, the number one use of land is for – parking. In fact, the United States has 4 parking spaces for every car. So, it makes you wonder then why it is so hard to find a parking spot when you need one. You are about to find out why from my guest Henry Grabar. He is a staff writer at Slate, and author of the book Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World (https://amzn.to/3RyHcbq). Listen and you will understand why parking is such a big deal. Microbes are those tiny organisms you can’t see without using a microscope. This includes things such as germs, bacteria, and fungi. Microbes have a reputation of being something dangerous – that can cause illness. While that is true for some microbes, most of them don’t cause harm and some are even good for you. This should come as good news since you have trillions of microbes on you and inside of you. Here to take us on a journey through the invisible world of microbes is Jake Robinson. He is a microbial ecologist and author of the book Invisible Friends: How Microbes Shape our Lives and the World Around Us (https://amzn.to/44pGRwR) Many people claim to have food allergies – that actually don’t have them. They just think they do. What they really have is a food intolerance and there is a big difference. Listen as I explain. https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/food-allergy/expert-answers/food-allergy/faq-20058538 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Spring is here and you can now get almost anything you need delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? You can't get a well-groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken parmesan delivered. Sunshine? No. Some wine? Yes. Get almost, almost anything delivered with Uber Eats. Order now. Alcohol in select markets. See the app for details. Today on Something You Should Know,

if you drink coffee in the morning, you might want to take a whiff of it too. Then, parking your car. Parking has changed the way we live and taken up a lot of our space. You know, we could pave a small state with the amount of land we have dedicated for parking. There are between four and nine parking spaces per vehicle in this country. There is more space for parking each car than there is for housing each person. Also, the important difference between a food allergy and a food intolerance. And microbes, those little invisible organisms like germs and bacteria, they get a bad rap. We've had this quite negative demonizing view of microbes that microscopic organisms cause

diseases and a few microbes do cause disease, but many of them, over 99%, are actually harmless to us or really beneficial and vital for our survival. All this today on Something You Should Know. We talk a lot about health on Something You Should Know and I guess it motivates me. I mean, I'm not a nut about it, but I try to take care of my health. I want to preserve my mobility and strength as I get older. And I recently started taking this supplement. Maybe you've heard about it. It's called Mitopure. Mitopure is a precise dose of something called Urolithin A

that supports your health by encouraging cellular renewal. Since I started taking it, I can tell I have more energy and I notice I recover faster after I exercise. I did some research on this too. There's some real science here that supports what I'm saying and so does my experience. Mitopure is the only urolithin A supplement on the market that is clinically proven to target the effects of age-related cellular decline. And Mitopur is shown to deliver double-digit increases in muscle strength and endurance

without a change in exercise. From my own experience, I have more energy and strength and just overall feel better every day. And who doesn't want that? And I'm not just recommending it to you on this podcast. I tell friends and other people I know about it because of how it makes me feel. Now, Timeline is the company behind Mitopure

and Timeline is offering 10% off your order of Mitopure. Go to timeline.com slash something. That's T-I-M-E-L-I-N-E dot com slash something. 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. I've been a big coffee drinker most of my life. I'm one of those people that really needs to have a cup of coffee in the morning. Maybe you are too. And it's always been thought, in fact, there used to be a marketing campaign. Coffee was the think drink,

that it was supposed to help you concentrate and think better. Well, maybe drinking coffee does that, but smelling coffee has an effect as well. If you take the time to smell your coffee before you drink it, there's some science that says it can have a powerful effect on your brain. Specifically, inhaling the fragrance of coffee can enhance working memory and stimulate alertness. So drinking coffee may help you stay alert and be more productive, but drinking and smelling coffee can be even better.

And that is something you should know. If you drive a car, there is one big part of that whole experience that you don't think about a lot, except when you have to, and that is parking. Because no matter how convenient it is to have a car, you have to have a place to put it everywhere you go. Parking can be a hassle, it can be expensive, and in some places virtually impossible to find. Then of course there is paid parking and parking meters which can result in

expensive parking tickets if you don't feed the meter. See parking really is a big deal. In fact did you know that in many US cities parking is the number one land use and it has literally shaped the landscape in many parts of the world. Here to explain how and why you should care is Henry Grabar. Henry is a staff writer at Slate and author of the book Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. Hey Henry, welcome to Something You Should Know. Pleasure to be here.

So when I think about the subject of parking, it doesn't feel like that's much of a subject except that you know parking is something you complain about, there's never enough of it, you can't find a spot when you need it. So why dive into this topic? Why is this so interesting? I think people rarely think about it and sometimes say to me, well that sounds like sort of a boring thing to write a book about. But then once you get them on the subject and they start talking about parking, you realize that everybody is full of opinions

about parking and actually everybody spends a lot of time thinking about it. The realization that I had was that I realized I was surrounded by parking. I mean, once you start to see it as the number one land use in many American cities, you can't stop seeing it. And it pops out everywhere. And once you begin to understand its cost and its effect on landscape and the architecture and our travel patterns and our housing costs, you never look at it the same way again.

So when you say that parking is the number one land use in many cities, explain what you mean because that's hard to imagine. There is more space for parking each car in this country than there is for housing each person. I think you can sometimes see this when you look at a satellite image of downtown Kansas City or Columbus, Ohio or Little Rock. The parking lots really stand out.

It is the dominant feature of the landscape. In fact, we actually require this by law that many buildings consist more than half of the property has to be devoted to parking, which is to say for your square footage, let's say you run a restaurant, for every 100 square feet of restaurant, which is to say, for your square footage, let's say you run a restaurant, for every 100 square feet of restaurant, you have to provide one parking space. Well, a parking space is bigger than 100 square feet. So you're essentially legislating

that every restaurant have more space for parking than space for restaurant. And those kind of rules apply where? Because obviously you couldn't make that the rule in New York or Chicago because there's no room for, you couldn't open a restaurant because there's no room for those parking spots. Well, those are the rules almost everywhere.

Now, places like New York and Chicago have decided that they are sufficiently dense, that it doesn't make sense to require somebody opening a new restaurant to provide two dozen parking spaces. But that remains the law in most American cities and suburbs. And so when you think about the American architectural vernacular, you're driving down a six lane road, you've got these sort of stores and restaurants and retail set behind parking lots on each side of the road.

That style of architecture is really the architecture of parking requirements because if you're required to build that much parking, that's just what the architecture ends up looking like. It's like the built American form follows from the requirement of providing parking. And that's how we get what the country looks like today. Yeah. With a lot, a lot of strip malls where the front of it is, it's like an L shape and the front of it is all parking. Exactly.

And it's really ugly. Yeah. You know, I, I find it personally not my favorite type of architecture. And what's funny is I think a lot of Americans share this sense that we don't build things the way we used to, that there's this kind of sense that like both for residential and commercial architecture, that there was this golden era in American history where we built things we liked and we stopped doing that. And I would suggest to you that one of the main reasons we stopped doing that was that we imposed the obligation to provide parking and providing parking

just creates unattractive buildings. It creates buildings that are separated from the street by a huge parking lot. It makes it basically impossible to renovate any historic structures because you have to provide a certain number of parking spaces. So you basically have to demolish the building next door. And if you've looked at like a new office building or condo tower in an American downtown, look at the bottom, like six to eight floors. I almost guarantee you they are used for parking.

And in fact, there are some buildings that like by the number of floors are more than half parking. So what you're really building is a parking garage with a little bit of apartment or a little bit of office on top. So I find it surprising that parking is the number one land use in many communities. What else about parking would I find surprising? Well, I think one of the ones that, that always grabs me right away is that there are between four and nine parking spaces per vehicle in this country.

So that means that the national parking stock is only 25% full at its fullest moment. And of course, some of those cars are in motion. So when you think about how full parking is, how hard it is to find a parking spot, there is just an unbelievable quantity of parking in this country. So I think that's one of the things that grabs people right away is we could pave a small state with the amount of land we have dedicated for parking, which suggests that perhaps building more parking is not the solution to making it easier to find a parking spot.

Well, wait a minute. How can that be? Because that is not people's experience frequently, that there's all this abundant parking. It's often very difficult to find a parking spot. So reconcile that. Yeah, it's this crazy paradox, right? So much land for parking, and yet when I need a parking spot. So reconcile that. Yeah, it's this crazy paradox, right? So much land for parking and yet when I need a parking spot, it's so hard to find one.

I think there's three reasons that this happens. The first one is that parking is not shared, right? So we talked about how every apartment building, every office, every courthouse, every movie theater has to provide their own parking spaces well in most cities by law. The office and the condo can't double up and share a garage and they definitely can't share that garage with the people who are going to the sub shop next door. What that means is that when you arrive in a place that appears to have a lot of parking, you quickly realize that each lot is actually proprietary and belongs to a certain business, a certain apartment, et cetera. So it looks like a lot of parking, but when you need one, it's not necessarily available.

The second big part of that is that the parking is free. And because the best street parking in most places is free, it becomes really hard to get a spot there. And if you just charge even a little bit for that really good parking, people who would otherwise get there early in the morning and park all day will park a little further away. And then when you show up at lunch or to run an errand or to do a delivery, there'll be a parking space available to you. I mean, you might have to pay a couple quarters for it it but that's better than driving around the block a hundred times. Is there any sense

or any statistic about how much the typical car owner pays to park their car? Most people park for free most of the time. I would say upwards of 90% of the time, people park for free. And when you, and in fact, parking, free parking is basically the number one determinant of car ownership and car use. So it's one of the great ironies about parking is that one of the reasons we built so much parking and we required people to build so much parking was that we were very concerned about traffic like traffic was a total nightmare in american cities in nineteen forties and fifties. And the reason for this people thought was that there wasn't enough parking so they built all this free parking and one of the great ironies is that all that free parking encourage many many more people to buy cars and drive them everywhere. And as the urban environment degraded with more and more parking lots taking the place

of buildings, it became more and more challenging to say, walk or ride a bike or take transit to a new destination. And so in this way, parking is like this, it's like a narcotic, right? Like the more you have of it, the more you need. Well, you know, when I saw your book and I started thinking about this, what I find interesting is I don't take Ubers or Lyft very often, but I would say at least half of the time

that I do, it's not because I don't want to drive. It's because I don't want to park. I believe it. I think that one of the other statistics that that grabbed me when I first heard it is that studies estimate that a third of downtown traffic is people looking for a place to park. And so that's you, right? That's that's you driving around in circles looking for a place to park. I agree it's maddening and it encourages people to stop driving. And that just goes to show that if you want to control traffic, if you want

to control emissions, cut down on car crashes, on pollutants that drift into the windows of people's apartments, parking is the lever. And I think that's what you're experiencing there is that the challenge of parking motivates you to find another way to get around. I'm speaking with Henry Grabar, and the name of his book is Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World. I'm Anne Foster, host of the feminist women's history comedy podcast, Vulgar History, and every week I share the saga of a woman from history whose story you probably didn't already know and you will never forget after you hear it. Sometimes we re-examine well-known people like Cleopatra or Pocahontas sharing

the truth behind their legends. Sometimes we look at the scandalous women you'll never find in a history textbook. If you can hear my cat purring, she is often on the podcast as well. Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Amy Nicholson, the film critic for the LA Times. And I'm Paul Scheer, an actor, writer and director. You might know me from the league, Veep, or my non eligible for Academy Award role in Twisters. We come together to host Unspooled,

a podcast where we talk about good movies, critical hits, fan favorites, must-sees and in case you missed them, we're talking Parasite the Home Alone, from Grease to the Dark Knight. So if you love movies like we do, come along on our cinematic adventure. Listen to Unspooled wherever you get your podcasts. And don't forget to hit the follow button. So Henry, does it work when communities, city governments, institute paid parking to replace free parking

to discourage people from parking, does that work? In most cases it does, and here's why. Paid parking works best, these city planners say, when it's not designed to raise money. The point of paid parking should be to organize the way people park and how long they park for. So you push the people who are parking all day into the spots a little further away, and the people who are parking for a shorter amount of time can park closer. Unfortunately, in the last 70 years, many governments have thought of parking meters simply as a way to raise money for motorists.

And I think that is not the purpose of parking meters. The purpose of parking meters is to organize parking demand. It's the only way we have, because otherwise, it's just a total free-for-all. Well, I know there are a lot of communities that, for example, at Christmas, they'll put little hoods over the parking meters and let you park for free.

So obviously that's to encourage more business, which would, what I infer from that is by having parking meters, you discourage business. Yeah, unfortunately, I think a lot of those communities have it backwards. The problem with hooding the parking meters is that let's say I want to run an errand downtown, I'll drive there and I will leave my car there all day, right? And I'll go around and do whatever. In fact, you know who's going to leave their car there all day is the people who work in the stores. They're the people who get their first thing in the morning. They may usually pay for parking in a garage or park further away, but when the meters are hooded, they're going gonna park right in front of the shop.

And when you show up at 2 p.m. to do your Christmas shopping, you will find that there is no place to park. And you'll get mad, and you might even drive to the suburbs and shop at the mall. So I think free parking downtown is pretty much a losing proposition for business owners if there's not enough parking. Sure, if you're in some tiny country town

where there's only 100 people live there, yeah, you don't need to make anybody pay for parking. But in a congested city district, it's the only way to make sure that there are spaces available. And I think most people, they don't like paying for parking, but when push comes to shove, they prefer paying for parking

to looking for a space for 20 minutes and then giving up and driving away. Is parking a good business to be in? I would say it's a simple business to be in. I mean, for decades, parking was the largest all cash business in the United States. What? Yeah, yeah, because, you know, everybody, you know, the whole, the whole parking industry was just collecting cash

in boxes nationwide at sports stadiums, downtowns, airports, everywhere. And this created, obviously, this made it a very lucrative business to be in, especially if you weren't properly reporting your income to the IRS. So you said that, you know that if we build more parking, then more cars show up to take it.

And so that doesn't work. And then if you charge a lot for parking, people really hate that. So what's the solution where everybody's happy? Well, I think one solution is the one that we did in the United States, which is you build so much parking that there's not really anything left to drive to. And that's kind of what happened in a lot of American downtowns.

They were obsessed with this idea that to compete with the suburbs, they needed to provide as much free and ample parking as possible. And it turns out that if your number one priority is free parking, downtown is never gonna beat a mall in the suburbs. It's just never gonna compete. And so, one solution we ended up with is you build so much parking that it's not hard to find a spot,

but also there's not that much to do because your town is mostly parking. There's not that much to do because your town is mostly parking. The other option, which I think is coming into fashion now, is to try and find ways to manage demand for parking. So that could take the form of parking meters, trying to discourage people from maybe parking all day on Main Street or encouraging them to carpool instead of the whole family, everyone driving down in their own car. And the other element I think is to help people try not to drive so much if they want to, right? Like obviously, many people depend on their cars

and need their cars to go about their business in America. It's a vast and sprawling country, I recognize that. But lots of people actually live within a pretty close distance of the errands they do every day, whether it's taking the kids to school or going to work or going to the coffee shop or going to the grocery store. The average trip in this country is under three miles. So that's a distance that could be done on a foot or electric bicycle or on a golf cart or something like that, or on a bus. And unfortunately, those modes of travel have become really challenging. And one of the reasons I think that it's so hard

to not drive everywhere is in fact precisely because of parking. I mean, you see this trade-off in major cities where cities will not build protected bike lanes for people to get safely from destination to destination on a bicycle because they are afraid of taking away a lane of parking that's used for parked cars. But if you take away parking for buses or whatever, bike lanes, you add to the traffic because now people are having to keep driving to find a place

somewhere else to park their car, which clogs the roads, which upsets drivers, which upsets bicyclists. So you're really creating more trouble. That was the thinking for most of the 20th century in most US cities. And I get it. It's really intuitive. This idea that if you take away parking and most traffic is people looking for parking, then you are going to create more traffic, make people mad. They're going to leave and go to the suburbs. But I think what the parking reformers are arguing for is not so much, let's get rid of all the parking, but let's manage it. Let's price the busiest parking. Let's get rid of some parking spots where it makes it possible to create a way

for people to get around another way, in a bus, on a bike, et cetera. And let's, for example, direct people away from the main street right in front of the shops and into the public garage a few blocks away if they're parking for more than three or four hours like those are the kinds of policies that can both I think reduce demand for parking But also ultimately for people who are looking for parking make it easier for them to park there are people

Again, I kind of put myself in this category who just hate to pay for parking. It's kind of like ATM fees or high gas prices. It isn't that it's necessarily a lot of money. It's the principle of the thing. Like I guess that's that kind of entitlement that, you know, it's a public street and you should be able to park on it and, you know, not charge me for it and give me a ticket when my meter runs out and now I've got to pay 50 bucks. There's something about it that just really rubs me in and I think a lot of people the

wrong way. Why do you feel that way about parking and not about say any other good or service you consume? I didn't say I have it I have the same thing about ATM fees and high gas prices. So it isn't just parking it's there's something about it though that you know that public street is just as much mine as anybody else's and and but I even don't like valet parking I mean I don't I just think it's such a ripoff because I can park my own car.

Just give me a spot. I'll be fine. I don't need you. Yeah, I get it. I, you know, I don't like paying for parking either. Nobody to be sure. Nobody likes paying for parking. I think the question is not do we want to pay for parking? The question is, do we want to accept the trade-offs that come with free parking everywhere all the time? And in the case of basically the last century

of American planning, we've learned that free parking for everyone all the time is a recipe for traffic congestion, high housing costs, ugly architecture, dangerous streets, and ultimately a place that's less accessible, not more accessible. Well it would seem that there's gonna have to be, for any of this to work, some sort of collective mind shift about this whole thing because I think people who drive cars believe that if they drive a car somewhere they're entitled to a place to put it. Even if they drive a car somewhere, they're entitled to a place to put it.

Even if they have to pay for it, there should be a place to put it. Otherwise, they're not going to drive there. And it's an entitlement almost. And to change that mindset seems like it's going to be hard. I think one thing to drive home about parking is that it feels like it costs nothing because it's free for you most of the time. But building parking is actually really, really expensive. Like just building a parking lot can cost five, $10,000 a space and building a parking

garage can cost $50,000 a space. And if it's underground, it can be up to $100,000 of space. And so when we ask for more parking, we are folding in hidden and massive costs that aren't paid for by drivers when they show up at the parking garage, but they're paid for by everybody else. If you rent an apartment in a building

with a 50-space parking garage, the cost of building that garage is folded into your rent, whether you drive or not. And I don't think that's fair. Well, after listening to you, I don't think I'm gonna look at parking quite the same way again. I've been talking to Henry Gravar.

He is a staff writer at Slate, and the name of his book is, "'Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World and there's a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it. Thanks, Henry. All right. Thanks a lot. Take care. From the podcast that brought you to each of the last lesbian bars in the country and back in time through the sapphic history that shaped them comes a brand new season of cruising beyond the bars. This is your host Sarah Gabrielli and I've spent the past year interviewing history-making lesbians and queer folks about all kinds

of queer spaces from bookstores to farms to line dancing and much more. You can listen to Cruising on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes air every other Tuesday starting February 4th. 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. You have no doubt heard of microbes, tiny little things.

But what are they exactly? What do they do? Where do they come from? And how do they affect you? Well, it's actually a fascinating topic and here to explain it is Jake Robinson. Jake is a microbial ecologist and author of the book Invisible Friends, How Microbes Shape Our Lives and the World Around Us. Hi Jake, welcome to Something You Should Know. Hi Mike, thank you very much. So what are microbes? What does that word microbe mean? So a microbe is any organism that you essentially need a microscope to see,

so any living thing that's invisible to the naked eye. So these include things like bacteria, fungi, also known as fungi, fungi, depending where you are in the world, algae, these tiny organisms called archaea, and so these prefer extreme environments, things like hot springs, but they also occur in the human body too. There's protozoa as well, so these are tiny animal-like creatures. And some consider viruses to be microbes too, but there's a debate about whether they're alive or There's protozoa as well. So these are tiny animal-like creatures. And some consider viruses to be microbes too. But there's a debate about whether they're alive or not.

And most people would say that they're not alive. And so microbes are everywhere. They're inside us, they're on us, they're in the environment around us, in the soils, on plant leaves, in the air. So yeah, they're essentially any organism that you wouldn't be able to see with the naked eye. So things like germs, those are microbes

because you can't see them. Anything you can't see is a microbe. Yeah, anything that's living is a microscopic organism, or a microbe for short. And you study them why? What is it about them that fascinates you? And why is it important to shine a light on this? So over the kind of last 150 years or so,

we've had this quite negative demonizing view of microbes because germ theory suggested that microscopic organisms cause diseases. And a few microbes do cause disease, but many of them, over 99%, are actually harmless to us or really beneficial and vital for our survival. And so I'm trying to change the narrative along with many other people that we need

to look at microbes in a more positive way and try and understand their functional roles in keeping us alive and all of our life alive on the planet. Isn't that interesting that the general sense is that microbes, little germy things are bad for you when you say that 99% of them are not. So I wonder how they got that reputation. Sure, I mean, we didn't know much about them

until the 19th century. Germ theory kind of, you know, it is this leading theory that suggested that we really need an explanation for why so many people had diseases and why so many people were dying. And so it's just sort of, it created a storm from there, I guess that, you know, all microbes are bad. And we thought we didn't have the technology to understand that microbes can actually do good things as well. And they're really complex communities of life. And so the last sort of 10, well, between 10 and 30 years, we've developed much more

advanced technology in order to understand them at the community level. So I have all these microbes, probably millions, billions of microbes in my body, yes? Yep. How'd they get there? Trillions. So they get there? Trillions. So they get there from largely from the environment around us. So when we're born, we pick them up from our mothers, we pick them up from our food, we pick them up from spending time in the natural environments around us.

And so we're, we emit actually, it was this kind of constant flux between our bodies and the environment around us. So we emit emit a million biological particles every single hour. So every one of us is kind of surrounded by this microbial cloud that's emitting from our body. But we're also ingesting and we're also inhaling millions of microscopic organisms every single day. And so again, it's this kind of two way exchange between our bodies and our environments. And these microbes, trillions you say, that I have in my body, do they all play a role or is this just very benign they're passing through or why are they there? Yes, so many of them will be benign.

So many of them will just be fleeting. But some of them will play really important roles in keeping you alive. So some microbes are really important for digestion in the body. So what you eat needs to be broken down in order so that you can use the micronutrients. Some microbes are important in cell signaling, and so they produce chemicals that allow our cells to communicate. So every cell in our body is needed, requires these chemicals in order to communicate with each other. And the thoughts are important in brain health, lots of different things in our bodies. Yeah, so they play important functional roles in keeping us alive.

And do we all have basically the same microbes in our body? I mean, what are the chances that the microbes in my body are more or less the same as the ones in your body, or are they really different? Yeah, so it'll be likely very different. So you'll likely have different species in there, depending on how you treat your body, what kind of food you eat, whether you exercise regularly, whether you spend time in certain environments,

how much pollution you're exposed to, these kind of things, these all affect your walking ecosystem. So your body is essentially a walking ecosystem. And yeah, so your microbiome will be quite different to somebody else's, but it might be more similar to someone you live with, because you're kind of exchanging microbes with the people that you interact with every day. So yeah, it would likely be quite different to mine, because I'm at the other side of the world not interacting with you. And if you were to, you know, crack each of us open and take a look, like, is one better than the other or they're just different?

Defining a healthy micro-volume is an ongoing debate at the minute, so it's kind of difficult to define and sort of extrapolate to everybody across the world. So each of us have different requirements. And one microbiome might look different to the other, but it might not necessarily be healthier than the other. So there's an ongoing debate at the minute. It's likely that our microbiomes will be very different,

but everybody has kind of different requirements and different species. But there's also a concept called functional redundancies to even though you might have different species in your body to mine, they may have the same functional roles, providing chemicals and all sorts of different compounds that our bodies need.

So we hear things like, oh, you should take probiotics because that's good for your microbiome. And is that all nonsense or is there some science there or what? Yeah. So there is some science. It's some of it's conflicting. So we need more evidence, need more randomized control trials, but there is

some evidence that suggests that taking probiotics can improve the balance, the ratio of, you know, healthy or good microbes to, to these opportunistic pathogens for sure. And it makes sense as well. And prebiotics are really important as well. So these are the foods that your microbes feed on. And so having diverse prebiotics in the form of diverse vegetables and fruits, etc., provides the nutrients that a healthy gut ecosystem requires. And so that's good for you as well.

Well, what about the supplements, the probiotic supplements? Because they can be quite expensive. Are they worth it? I think this is decent evidence, but it's not compelling necessarily. And it's mostly, I'd advise to take a more holistic approach. So having a more diverse diet with lots of different

colored fruits and vegetables, spending time in biodiverse environments, these kind of holistic approaches. It's likely that supplements will have a small effect. But again, I'd advise to take more of a lifestyle, holistic approach to your health. How do these microbes in our bodies affect things like our thinking, our mood, our cognitive

function, that kind of thing? Yeah, so it's a really exciting field of research at the minute on the microbiota gut-brain axis. And it's thought that microbes in the gut can communicate with the brain by various different pathways, for instance, releasing certain chemicals and compounds that tinker with the cells and the fibers of our nerve cells that link the gut to the brain and vice versa as well. It's thought that the brain can communicate with the gut and its microbes via what's called a vagus nerve. This is the largest cranial nerve in the human body. But there are other pathways as well.

But it's early days, early research, but it's really exciting. It's thought that these microbes can produce these chemicals that do have an effect on our brains. So for instance, they could affect our moods. So experiments have shown that animals, non-human animals, that is, have shown that gut microbes can influence feeding decisions, sexual preferences, mood, how attracted or averse an animal is to a particular smell, and even the types of environments that animals choose to spend time in, which is quite incredible really. One recent study showed that gut microbes in mice

had a direct significant influence on their desire to exercise by regulating chemical signaling in the brain, particularly related to dopamine. So yeah, so microbes, we need more studies in humans, but microbes could potentially influence all sorts of behaviors. So when we talk about microbes in the human body, it seems like the conversation is always about the gut, but aren't there microbes everywhere?

Yeah, so we have distinct microbial communities, for instance, on our skin, in our airways, you know, under our armpits, the micro microbial community is going to be different to the the microbial communities in our guts, and they all play really important roles or important functional roles in our health. So microbes on our skin play an important role in our guts, and they all play really important roles, or important functional roles in our health. So microbes on our skin play an important role in our immune system, protecting it from those few pathogens that do cause disease. So if you have a diverse microbiome,

then it's more likely to, you know, they're more likely to say, you know, there's no room at the inn and boot out these opportunistic pathogens that try and invade our bodies. And the same goes for the gut microbiome as well with the gut microbiome is the most this sort of the densest habitat on our body. So it has the most number of species, and it plays various other roles, you know, like

breaking our food down. So it's important in digestion as well. But yes, like you said, there's a lot of microbe communities in different parts of our bodies in our mouths and our skin, etc. that also have really important roles in keeping us alive So you said we have trillions of these micro microbes in us and on us. Yes Yeah, so around a hundred trillion bacteria, I believe and I think there's many more viruses as well. And how long do they? Typically last and and then in an if and when they die, where do they go?

Yes, and microbes have a really short lifespan, but they also are able to kind of reproduce rapidly as well. So they'll they may die, you know, within hours or days. But they also rapidly reproduce, they replace themselves as well. And the same kind of predator prey dynamics that you see in ecosystems, for example, when a lion hunts down an antelope, these same principles of ecology apply at the microscopic scale

as well. And so we have these turnovers of microbial communities as a result of predator prey dynamics. So viruses will hunt down bacteria much like again the lion hunt down an antelope. So these these viruses called bacteria phages specialize in hunting down bacteria and in fact this is quite an interesting statistic. So every 48 hours half of all the bacteria on the entire planet are killed by

phages. So that's quite mind blowing to think about. And what, I'm sorry, what is that word again? What? Phages, yeah. So some people call them phages, but in the UK we call them phages and they're called bacteria phages. They're like these tiny little spider-like spaceships

from Mars. If you Google them, you'll see what I mean. They have these landing gear and they land on the bacteria and then inject their DNA into the bacteria and it ends up killing them. So I've heard, for example, that you're supposed to let your kids play in the dirt, that the microbes in soil and that the microbes in the environment, that we don't want to be too clean, that we want to interact with these microbes. Can you talk about that? So Professor Graham Rook, he's an immunologist from London, he put forward what's called the old friends hypothesis. And this suggests that we've co-evolved with these microorganisms,

these specific microbes over hundreds of thousands of years, and they've played a key role in shaping and regulating our immune system. And that's why they're called old friends. And it's important that we expose these old friends in order for them to regulate what's called our innate immune system. And our innate immune system is also known as non-specific immunity. And so it will attack anything that tries to invade the body

in the absence of proper regulation. So it'll attack ordinarily innocuous substances like dust and pollen, and in extreme cases it will attack our own cells as well, and that's what manifests as an autoimmune disease. And so we need to be exposed to these different microbes from the environment in order for them to play this regulatory role in our innate immune system. But it's also really important to be exposed to as many different microbes as possible as well in order to train what's called our adaptive immune system. And so Graham like likens the human immune system at birth to a computer. And so we at birth, we have our, we have the hardware, which is analogous to

the cellular structures of our immune system. We also have the software, which is analogous to the cellular structures of our immune system. We also have the software, which is analogous to the genes that encode for proteins and functions that allowed our immune system to function. But the thing that's missing at birth is data. And much like a computer model or computer system requires data in order to be trained, in order to be functional, so does our immune system.

And so by being exposed to as many different species of microbes from a young age as possible, we're able to build up this large repertoire of what's called tiny immune cells. And these are memory cells. Remember all these different shapes and sizes of microbes and allow us to mount a much more efficient immune response to pathogens in the future.

And so these are two of the reasons why we need to be exposed to the microorganisms in the natural environment from a young age as well. Because as I mentioned earlier, it's the period between sort of zero and two or three years old, which is when our gut microbiomes are most plastic or most able to be colonized from the microbes in the environment.

So it's important that our kids spend time in natural environments, playing in the climbing trees, et cetera. So I assume if we all humans have these microbes all over us and in us, every other living thing must too that we see. Yeah, exactly. So there's a phrase I like to use, it's all the nature you can see

intimately depends on all the nature you can't see. And by this, I mean that, you know, the animals, the plants, everything that we can see intimately depends on these symbiotic relationships with the invisible world. And so microbes are really important. They live in and on plants. So they live in the soil on plant roots inside plant roots, everything you can think of

microbes live in on. And as I said, just like the human body, so this has been quite human centric talk, but just like the human body, how microbes play these core functional roles in keeping us alive, they also play these important functional roles in keeping all other animals and plants alive too. You know, as I was looking through your book, I landed on something that I'm not sure exactly how this fits into this discussion, but I'd never even heard of this, about nutrient density and how it's diminishing since over the last several decades. Can you explain what that is and some examples and then how it fits into this discussion?

We've degraded over the last century, we've degraded the soil so much through adverse farming practices, etc. And these monoculture fields are not applying principles of ecology to our agriculture. And so we've, and so in order to have soil health, in order to have soil healthy soils, we need to think about the biology of the soil, it's a really important factor. So the microbes in the soil play really important roles, again, in decomposition and providing nutrients for plants, etc. And because we've had this soil degradation over time, we're actually losing the micronutrients in the soil. And then the micronutrients that would ordinarily transfer

to the plants and the fruits and vegetables that we eat are becoming less dense because of this degradation. And so in relation, how it relates to this conversation is that we need to understand the microbial ecology of the soil and protect it in order to protect the nutrients of our foods, basically. I'd never heard of that. And according to you, it says you would have to eat four carrots today to get the same amount of magnesium from one carrot in 1940. Yeah, it's mind blowing. How come I never heard of this? I know, I don't know.

I've never heard it until I researched it for the book, to be honest, but there's some figure about apples as well with iron content, I think that's quite mind blowing. 26 apples to get the same amount of iron from a single apple in 1940. That's amazing. It is amazing. It'll depend on where the apple's grown

and where these vegetables are grown. So, you know, organic or regenerative agricultural principles will, that figure probably doesn't apply to those situations. It's these kind of mass monoculture agricultural situations where the nutrients will be less dense, essentially. So when people take an antibiotic to help kill whatever bad thing is causing them to be sick,

an antibiotic will kill lots of things, I assume lots of microbes within the body. So can you talk about that? So we have these broad spectrum or more specific antibiotics, particularly the broad spectrum ones, these will destroy lots of different microbes that are living in your body and many of these may play those important roles in keeping you healthy. So if we take antibiotics regularly, then we're essentially napalming that rainforest regularly with we're destroying the gut ecosystem. So it's going to have a really detrimental effect on your health and your immune

system. You can bounce back again by applying more holistic principles to your life, you know, how to make sure you have a diverse diet, lots of fruits and vegetables, exercise plenty, you know, spend time in biodiverse environments, these kinds of things, but the longer you live, the longer it takes to bounce back from these events. And so, when you're much younger, you're more likely to, your gut ecosystem's more likely to recover much quicker than when you're older. What would exercise have to do with it?

So exercise has been shown to be really important in providing certain chemicals that gut microbes need in order to select those more beneficial microbes as opposed to pathogens. It's also good for bowel movement so it moves toxins and away from building up in certain areas. And also if we think about the microbiota gut brain axis, so this two-way communication system linking our brains to our guts, exercise is really system linking our brains to our guts. Exercise is really important for our brains and our moods, et cetera, so it's likely to have an important role

in our gut ecosystem as well via our brain and vice versa. So there's various ways in which exercise is good for our microbes. Well, it is amazing to think of all this little tiny microbial life going on around us and in us, and we're to think of all this little tiny microbial life going on around us and in us and we're so unaware of it and yet there's so much going on. I've been talking to Jake Robinson. He is a microbial ecologist and the name of his book is Invisible Friends, how microbes

shape our lives and the world around us. And there is a link to that book in the show notes. Appreciate it, Jake. Thanks for taking the time. Cheers, Mike. Thanks for having me on. A lot of people who think they have a food allergy actually have a food intolerance.

If you suddenly, for example, develop a reaction to a certain food or beverage, you're probably intolerant, not allergic. Allergies generally start in childhood and they might even disappear over time. Allergies involve the immune system and are generally more serious. Food intolerances tend to increase with age and are more of a digestive matter and usually just a nuisance. The most common food intolerances are lactose, gluten and MSG.

A lot of people develop intolerances for sulfites too, that's the compound found in beer, wine and champagne and is sometimes added to dried fruit or canned foods as a preservative. If any of those things make you itchy, congested or swollen, you're intolerant, but not allergic. And that is something you should know. This would be a good time. In fact, there would be no better time for you to leave a rating and review of this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. I'm Mike Carruthers.

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