Speaker 1: Get in touch with technology with tex Stuff from stuff
Speaker 1: dot com. Either welcome to text Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland
Speaker 1: and joining me in the studio today is a really
Speaker 1: ram functionous Julie Douglas from Stuff Before Your Mind. Hi, Julie, Hi,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me. I'm so excited to play
Speaker 1: with you today. This is exciting for me too. Julie
Speaker 1: was once upon a time my editor here at Health Stuff.
Speaker 1: It's true, kind of just the boisterous conversations about chord
Speaker 1: versus towards and sell and so forth. Yeah, she did
Speaker 1: not appreciate my Anglo Philip ways. Now, Julie, when I
Speaker 1: invited you onto the show, I did what I normally do,
Speaker 1: and I extended to my guest the opportunity to pick
Speaker 1: whatever topic he or she might like, and you picked
Speaker 1: a really cool one. Yeah. I wanted to talk about water.
Speaker 1: And all of this came from some stuff that's been
Speaker 1: in the news lately thanks to Gwyneth Paltrow talking about
Speaker 1: water and this idea that water might have a conscious,
Speaker 1: which is well interesting, Yeah, a little little let's say, eccentric, uh,
Speaker 1: compared to the standard scientific view. So we're gonna be
Speaker 1: looking at a lot of different kinds of technology and
Speaker 1: water and whether you know, there's gonna be some In fact,
Speaker 1: the first half we're really going to be talking a
Speaker 1: lot about technology that m M, it's probably best described
Speaker 1: as pseudo scientific, and then towards the end we'll talk
Speaker 1: about some actual technology that's based on hard science and
Speaker 1: how that affects water. And so that's we're looking at
Speaker 1: everything here because water, as it turns out, really important
Speaker 1: to us. Yeah, and and I just want to say
Speaker 1: this too. I was thinking about this, um there there's
Speaker 1: some magical you know, thinking that goes into water, and
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, just this really harkens back someone
Speaker 1: like Richard Dawkins, who has this book The Magic of
Speaker 1: Reality and really celebrates, like, you know, the the actual
Speaker 1: reality of our physical world is far more astounding than
Speaker 1: some of the sort of things that we like to
Speaker 1: dream up protect upon it. So that's why I thought
Speaker 1: this is cool. You can you can really look at
Speaker 1: water and see that it is this phenomenal substance, which
Speaker 1: I guess we could kind of tip our hats out
Speaker 1: and say thanks, because we wouldn't really be here at
Speaker 1: least in this form possibly with well definitely not this form.
Speaker 1: We would be a very different form without water. So
Speaker 1: I wanted to start with just some random, uh well
Speaker 1: not really random about some some facts about water. Now,
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff is gonna sound like third
Speaker 1: grade science, and it should, but it's stuff that's important
Speaker 1: because the a lot of the pseudo scientific technology is
Speaker 1: really based upon a lack of understanding or it's dependent
Speaker 1: upon consumers lack of understanding of basic science. So water,
Speaker 1: let's go ahead, get out there. H two O. It's
Speaker 1: a molecule. Two hydrogen atoms and an oxygen atom, making
Speaker 1: sweet sweet molecular love. Until you get a water molecule. Uh.
Speaker 1: And we've got the three basic states, right. You've got
Speaker 1: water is the liquid state. You've got ice, which is
Speaker 1: the solid state, and then water vapor or steam, which
Speaker 1: is the gaseous state, which all contributes to the water cycle.
Speaker 1: Should we do a quick thing on that? For sure?
Speaker 1: The sun burning down so very hot upon like say
Speaker 1: a lake or the ocean, and then what does that
Speaker 1: do with it? It It creates a gaseous state. You get
Speaker 1: some waterporation goes into the atmosphere where it hangs out
Speaker 1: there and it it becomes condensation in those clouds and
Speaker 1: when you get a perfect amount of saturation and condensation
Speaker 1: and you have some particulates in the area, then droplets
Speaker 1: can form around those particulates. If they get heavy enough,
Speaker 1: they fall and then we get and then you have
Speaker 1: the collection of it again in oceans, lakes and rivers. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Magical stuff really. And when you think about it, and
Speaker 1: this is also going to be important in our conversation,
Speaker 1: it's a closed system. This water is not leaving the planet.
Speaker 1: It's not coming in from outside the planet. Pretty much
Speaker 1: the water that we have here today has been here
Speaker 1: for millions of years. Closed system. And I'm doing like
Speaker 1: wild gesticulating hand right now, I'm up at arms and
Speaker 1: an energetically open way, right, so it can change forms.
Speaker 1: And when I say energetically, yes, yes, yes, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not it's not confined to a single state or anything
Speaker 1: like that. Also, what's what I think is one of
Speaker 1: the coolest things about water is it's different from a
Speaker 1: lot of other liquids and that when it freezes, it expands. Now,
Speaker 1: generally speaking, when stuff gets cold, it tends to contract.
Speaker 1: You have molecular movements, slows down, right, That's essentially what
Speaker 1: we're talking about with temperature. If something is hot, you've
Speaker 1: got a lot more molecular movement going on. When something
Speaker 1: is very cold, there's a lot less. So when we
Speaker 1: say zero kelvin, when we talk about absolute zero, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the absence of molecular movement, right, or atomic movement,
Speaker 1: if you want to think of it that way. So,
Speaker 1: if you're talking about water, the interesting thing is that
Speaker 1: as you cool it down own it does start to
Speaker 1: contract until you get to about four degrees celsius and
Speaker 1: between four and zero zero being the freezing point zero celsius,
Speaker 1: water begins to expand and by the time it h's
Speaker 1: freezing point, it will expand about nine. Now this is
Speaker 1: different from most other liquids. Most of the liquids when
Speaker 1: they freeze are they contract, they get they shrink. So
Speaker 1: the reason for this is the actual molecular structure of water.
Speaker 1: It has these hydrogen atoms in it. Hydrogen is a
Speaker 1: very reactive element. It likes to bond with other stuff. Um,
Speaker 1: you'll see that all over nature. When you start looking
Speaker 1: into compounds, hydrogen is in the mix a lot. So
Speaker 1: hydrogen will end up making these uh, these crystalline structures
Speaker 1: as it starts to freeze where it's spaces out the
Speaker 1: molecules a bit, so it doesn't it's not as compact
Speaker 1: as it is in liquid form, and that's unusual. Not
Speaker 1: a lot of liquids do that, So I think that's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. It also means that water ice form is
Speaker 1: less dense than water, so that's my ice floats on
Speaker 1: top of water. Yeah. And according to in October twenty
Speaker 1: nine article in The Medium, So I love this quote.
Speaker 1: It says that's one reason why life on Earth has flourished.
Speaker 1: If ice were denser than water, lakes and oceans would
Speaker 1: freeze from the bottom up, almost certainly preventing the kind
Speaker 1: of chemistry that makes life possible. So thank you weird
Speaker 1: freezing properties of ice. Yeah, we actually really lucked out there.
Speaker 1: And also things to remember water. The boiling point is
Speaker 1: a hundred degrees celsius. That's tune or twelve fahrenheit, and
Speaker 1: that is at sea level because barometric pressure will change
Speaker 1: the boiling point of water in back pressure in general
Speaker 1: changes the boiling point. So if you have lower pressure,
Speaker 1: you need less heat to boil water. If you have
Speaker 1: high pressure, then you need more heat to boil water.
Speaker 1: So if you were at the top of Mount Everest.
Speaker 1: You could boil water if you just get it up
Speaker 1: to sixty eight degrees celsius, which is a hundred fifty
Speaker 1: or degrees fahrenheit. It's kind of cool. I would like
Speaker 1: to boil water on Mount Everest. I really would there.
Speaker 1: That would be the hard part, and I need to
Speaker 1: bring my own oxygen. It might be a bit of
Speaker 1: a thing. It's it's definitely a thing. Now. Um have
Speaker 1: you seen the videos of people taking boiling water, like
Speaker 1: a pan of it and going outside in the freezing
Speaker 1: cold and the ice crystals form. I've seen videos like that.
Speaker 1: I've never looked into them. It's pretty cool. It's actually
Speaker 1: called the Ma Pembo or excuse me Pembo effect. It's
Speaker 1: named after Tanzanian student Erasta ma Pembo, and that's in
Speaker 1: the nineties. He actually noticed this. It was like in
Speaker 1: a cookery class or something. And so apparently even Aristotle
Speaker 1: knew about this, and you know, it was wondering like
Speaker 1: why does this happen? And so there is an idea
Speaker 1: out there that warmer water than cold water, yes, because
Speaker 1: it's giving off more of its energy. Interesting, and so
Speaker 1: it's and I'm not gonna go way deep into it.
Speaker 1: But it's sort of like a momentum idea here. There's
Speaker 1: there's a great Have you ever heard of a column
Speaker 1: called the Straight Dope? I have, yeah, Straight Dope. It
Speaker 1: started off as a a weekly column in a Chicago,
Speaker 1: a free Chicago newspaper and eventually became syndicated across the world.
Speaker 1: And one of the questions I remember reading in there
Speaker 1: was does cold water boil faster than hot water? And
Speaker 1: does hot water freeze faster than cold water? And it
Speaker 1: drove the writer insane as he was as he was
Speaker 1: looking more and more deeply into it. He says, all right,
Speaker 1: it turns out that extremely hot water will freeze faster
Speaker 1: than warm water. But you know, okay, wait, wait, no,
Speaker 1: I got that wrong. Wait. It says that you can
Speaker 1: just tell that he was that this was mind bending
Speaker 1: for him. And there are some very kind of mind
Speaker 1: bending facts about water that seems counterintuitive, like why would
Speaker 1: warmer water creeze faster? Right? Cool faster than cold water? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's definitely some some weird sort of contradictions there
Speaker 1: other things that are important to remember. Out of all
Speaker 1: the water that's on Earth, only about three percent of
Speaker 1: it is fresh water. The rest of its sea water,
Speaker 1: and the stuff that we find in lakes, streams, ponds,
Speaker 1: and swamps makes up about point three percent of all
Speaker 1: the world's water. Most of the freshwater on Earth is
Speaker 1: trapped in glaciers. Yeah. Uh, and so we actually don't
Speaker 1: really want to mount No, No, that would be a
Speaker 1: bad thing for many many reasons. Already kind of Miami
Speaker 1: is already really facing some big issues with rising sea levels,
Speaker 1: and it's just gonna get more difficult. Uh So, the
Speaker 1: average American household, this is one of those facts that
Speaker 1: you hear all the time that should really kind of
Speaker 1: open your eyes. The average American household uses more than
Speaker 1: one hundred thousand gallons of water per year, which includes
Speaker 1: both indoor and outdoor use. So watering your law and
Speaker 1: all that kind of stuff. Um, and that means you're
Speaker 1: average family could fill an Olympic size swimming pool in
Speaker 1: a little more than six years time. So have you
Speaker 1: ever seen those signs before that say if it's yellow,
Speaker 1: let it mellow in restrooms? Yes, this is one of
Speaker 1: the reasons a hundred thousand gallons. Yeah, a lot of
Speaker 1: that is from flushing toilets. Yeah, I think stuff you
Speaker 1: should know as Chuck Bryant has talked about that particular
Speaker 1: philosophy before and stuff. You should know. I remember listening
Speaker 1: to an old episode where he talked about it, and
Speaker 1: I thought, you go, dude, uh, and then go again
Speaker 1: because you haven't flushed yet. So he's mellow like that
Speaker 1: he is. Then you have the the fact about the
Speaker 1: average American using about a hundred gallons of water per day.
Speaker 1: Meanwhile your average resident of Sub Saharan Africa uses between
Speaker 1: two to five. Yeah, I look away shamefully. It's tough.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a tough thing to look at.
Speaker 1: And then, of course water is incredibly important. Not only
Speaker 1: is it incredibly prevalent on the Earth, not only does
Speaker 1: it cover most of the surface of the Earth, it
Speaker 1: also accounts for between fifty and seventy of a pers
Speaker 1: body weight, which I think is why, and what will
Speaker 1: come to this later, why we sort of have fetishized
Speaker 1: water is something to consume or to douse ourselves in sure,
Speaker 1: and it comes down to this idea of you know,
Speaker 1: purity in a way, right, we are mostly water, so
Speaker 1: therefore this substance has a particular meaning. In fact, we
Speaker 1: can talk about that a little bit. One of the
Speaker 1: important things to remember. One of the reasons why some
Speaker 1: of the more snake oil type technologies are able to
Speaker 1: flourish is because we have ascribed certain meanings to water.
Speaker 1: I mean, it factors heavily in culture and mythology and legends.
Speaker 1: I mean it's it's a really important idea. Well, I
Speaker 1: have to say that I feel like in terms of religion,
Speaker 1: it really caught hold, you know, around the nine this
Speaker 1: association between cleanliness and godliness social morality, and I thought,
Speaker 1: you know, I wonder what, what was that always the case?
Speaker 1: Then I was looking at a chapter on clean from
Speaker 1: the book How We Got to Now Six Innovations That
Speaker 1: Changed the World by Stephen Johnson, and he was saying, hey,
Speaker 1: that we weren't always so obsessed with water. And he
Speaker 1: said that as a child, Louis the thirteenth of France
Speaker 1: was not bathed once until he was seven years old,
Speaker 1: and basically like that's how people rolled back then. But then,
Speaker 1: you know, you fast forward to a time period in
Speaker 1: which we have a robust plumbing infrastructure and we have
Speaker 1: more access to clean water. And Kellogg comes along, Oh,
Speaker 1: Kellogg Love, do you remember the movie the title that movie? Yes,
Speaker 1: the Road to Wellville. Yes, yes, the road to Wellville. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Kellogg was a little little, a little bit on the
Speaker 1: extreme side with cleanliness and his ideas of you know,
Speaker 1: some some of them were very very well based in science.
Speaker 1: Some of them went well beyond what science could support. Well,
Speaker 1: there was a lot of lon I irrigations. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: less said about that, the happier I am. Really you
Speaker 1: don't want to talk, because we could talk for a
Speaker 1: long time about we could we could do that, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna choose Okay. So anyway, it's a good example
Speaker 1: of how, you know, we take water and we're trying
Speaker 1: to irrigate every single bit of ourselves, inch of us
Speaker 1: because we want to attain some sort of I don't
Speaker 1: know of a symbolic level of purity. And then that's
Speaker 1: where you see all of a sudden, you know, especially
Speaker 1: I want to seem like in the nine nineties, water
Speaker 1: being bottled and distributed with this idea that there's you know,
Speaker 1: you could have some really good, you know, quality water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like there's some not all waters are equivalent, some waters
Speaker 1: are better than others, and that you know, you could
Speaker 1: it doesn't matter if you were able to take two
Speaker 1: different bottles of water or twenty different bottles of water
Speaker 1: plus municipal tap water and do a chemical and now
Speaker 1: this improved that there is no discernible difference in the
Speaker 1: chemical makeup of all of these different things. That's not
Speaker 1: going to change people's minds about which water is best.
Speaker 1: I mean, there are people who are going to be
Speaker 1: convinced about that, and I mean there are things that
Speaker 1: can go into changing uh slight subtle differences in waters,
Speaker 1: like taste or smell that can happen. But it's also
Speaker 1: true that about twenty of all bottled waters are actually
Speaker 1: just municipal tap water that's been put into bottles. Well,
Speaker 1: and you know, you and I were talking about this earlier.
Speaker 1: The fact of the matter is is that you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's really only two ways that tap water is collected, right,
Speaker 1: and um, one is you know ground water, so all
Speaker 1: that stuff that's seeped into the into the ground, and
Speaker 1: the other is you know lakes and rivers and so
Speaker 1: on and so forth. And of course you know, if
Speaker 1: you're going to collect those things and you're going to
Speaker 1: try to purify them to su yeah, because they're going
Speaker 1: to have some contaminants in them, right, But The fact
Speaker 1: of the matter is all that water eventually has made
Speaker 1: its way through some sort of substance, probably was like
Speaker 1: a fecal matter substance, because if you look at everything
Speaker 1: that has ever lived, every species um you know that
Speaker 1: has lived and died, then you have poop and you
Speaker 1: have their decomposing bodies and oil, not to mention urine. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: In fact, I did an episode of Forward Thinking where
Speaker 1: I talked about water and at the end of it
Speaker 1: they had me have a glass of water and I
Speaker 1: took a sipmen m tristerratops as a little a little
Speaker 1: just a little gag, a little joke. But yes, that's
Speaker 1: absolutely true, and so that is another thing that will
Speaker 1: come into play with the pseudoscience. Let's just kind of
Speaker 1: look at some of these because there's tons of examples
Speaker 1: of different approaches, and they again mostly rely on people
Speaker 1: not really being scientifically literate when it comes to just
Speaker 1: things like water and you know, basic science. So one
Speaker 1: of those, there's Julie drinking water right now on Mike.
Speaker 1: What did you hear it? Oh yeah, I heard that.
Speaker 1: I just want to make sure you guys know it's good. No,
Speaker 1: you really are. I didn't even think to bring water
Speaker 1: in here. So I feel like I've I've been slouching
Speaker 1: off on the research. I'll haven't talking to you after
Speaker 1: the episode. So one of the things that has come
Speaker 1: up is this idea of water clusters and water clusters
Speaker 1: in the technology world. It essentially says that there's usually
Speaker 1: some sort of device that is supposed to induce water
Speaker 1: to like groups of water molecules to cluster together in
Speaker 1: particular patterns, and that this somehow makes water more effective
Speaker 1: in hydration, or it ends up being helpful in some
Speaker 1: other really vague way, like it's supposed to help your
Speaker 1: health somehow, that the actual physical orientation of water molecules
Speaker 1: changes how we take it in where they cluster, yeah,
Speaker 1: or how or what patterns, like if it clusters in
Speaker 1: a hexagonal pattern, or if there or if it's a
Speaker 1: cluster of five molecules rather than ten molecules. That's actually
Speaker 1: one of the products I looked at talked about, like
Speaker 1: the water that comes out of your tap clusters and
Speaker 1: ten molecule groups, but our water clusters and five molecule groups,
Speaker 1: so it'll be absorbed by your body more effectively. All
Speaker 1: of it was meaningless. I know, see, like I'm already
Speaker 1: trying to transpose some sort of meaning on this, like
Speaker 1: numerology or that helps. Yeah, yeah, it's definitely weird. That's
Speaker 1: another thing is that they talk about it removing toxins.
Speaker 1: But again that's a very broad and vague topic that
Speaker 1: doesn't necessarily mean anything. So, uh, here's the deal. Water
Speaker 1: molecules do associate with each other within any body of water,
Speaker 1: like whether that's a lake or a glass of water
Speaker 1: or whatever. They do associate with each other, and we
Speaker 1: often will refer to those associations as clusters. But this
Speaker 1: is purely a conceptual term, like we're using it as
Speaker 1: as a way of describing this very brief association. And
Speaker 1: when I talk about brief, I mean on the matter
Speaker 1: of a few pico seconds, so they might be clustered
Speaker 1: in five or seven this configuration for for for for
Speaker 1: less than a fraction of a second. I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: a pico second is a very short amount of time,
Speaker 1: so it pa say it's one trillionth of a second,
Speaker 1: So we're talking about so short that there's no way
Speaker 1: a human would ever be able to perceive it, much
Speaker 1: less be able to take some sort of beneficial effect
Speaker 1: from it. And it's constantly rearranging itself. It's a fluid,
Speaker 1: it's constantly These associations don't like lock in until you
Speaker 1: free something, and then you've got a crystalline structure. But
Speaker 1: if it's if it's in liquid form, it's never locked in.
Speaker 1: See there's there's no device that you could turn on.
Speaker 1: It's gonna zap it with electricity or shine some sort
Speaker 1: of weird light on it, and that automatically makes the
Speaker 1: water form itself into this molecular structure. That's just not
Speaker 1: the way water works. Well, I feel like in even
Speaker 1: trying to get to some sort of logic on it
Speaker 1: and explain it, it's futile. Like even just trying to
Speaker 1: you can tell like I see right, there's nothing to this, right, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean it's it. And again, like the only reason
Speaker 1: why it works is if someone does not know how water,
Speaker 1: you know, liquid water, how how that's arranged. And that's
Speaker 1: understandable that you wouldn't know that because it's not necessarily
Speaker 1: something you would learn in school. I mean, it certainly
Speaker 1: wasn't something I learned in school until I got up
Speaker 1: to like pretty high level chemistry. But there are other
Speaker 1: ones that rely on things like piezoelectric effect of quartz crystals.
Speaker 1: Which this is where they get you because they mentioned
Speaker 1: something that does have a basis in science, but then
Speaker 1: they apply it in a way that doesn't make anything.
Speaker 1: That's what I was thinking. Okay, we know this as
Speaker 1: kinetic energy, but is this really going to bolster my water? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: in this case, we're talking about things like a water
Speaker 1: filter system that you might have for a picture, like
Speaker 1: you know, a picture of water. You've got the little
Speaker 1: filter built in, but instead of it just being a
Speaker 1: regular filter, filters do work. We'll talk about them later. Uh,
Speaker 1: it would actually include a quartz crystal with the claim
Speaker 1: that there's a piece of electric fact that's going to
Speaker 1: zap the water and structure it in a specific way.
Speaker 1: Now we've already covered the structure. The piece of electric part.
Speaker 1: Quarts does have a piece of electric feature. Piece of
Speaker 1: electric means that if you apply a kinetic stress, like
Speaker 1: you squeeze a crystal, it will induce an electric current
Speaker 1: really and induces voltage. So uh, same sort of thing though,
Speaker 1: if you apply a electricity to a crystal, it will
Speaker 1: then vibrate. This is the basis for quartz watches. So
Speaker 1: that part sounds really cool because you realize, oh, piece
Speaker 1: of electric that's a that's a big scientific word, and
Speaker 1: you look into it. If you do some just casual research,
Speaker 1: Oh this is a real thing. It's not a made
Speaker 1: up word. But if you don't look any further than that,
Speaker 1: then you don't realize that, oh, this is a real word,
Speaker 1: but used for something that makes no sense, like there's
Speaker 1: no scientific basis for what it's being applied toward. Well
Speaker 1: in the mechanism too, right, like you're talking about kind
Speaker 1: of storing this kinetic energy and water, Then yeah, how
Speaker 1: do you do that? That's kind of yeah, you know again,
Speaker 1: sure it's we live in a close system. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a button on the filter that you're supposed to
Speaker 1: push to actually add stress to the courts crystal, because
Speaker 1: I don't understand why. I don't understand where the mechanical
Speaker 1: stress comes from to even affect this voltage change in
Speaker 1: the first place, but at least not in the sense
Speaker 1: of a filter. I mean, obviously in things like watches
Speaker 1: and stuff you have, uh, you know, various mechanisms or
Speaker 1: electronic circuits there that are meant to do this, But
Speaker 1: in a filter, how's that? I don't know. I don't
Speaker 1: know the ends. Well, yeah, I mean there're the how
Speaker 1: do you dispense of the charge in the first place? Um? Yeah,
Speaker 1: what was the charge? Actually? Like how what is the
Speaker 1: mechanism for the charge to quote unquote structure this water?
Speaker 1: As it turns out? And we'll talk about this again.
Speaker 1: Pure water electricity and pure water not not such a
Speaker 1: great mix because you know, you probably have heard like,
Speaker 1: if there's a thunderstorm, you should get out of the pool.
Speaker 1: Well that's absolutely true. But the water itself is not
Speaker 1: a good conductor of electricity, not not if you don't
Speaker 1: have ions dissolved in the water. If you have ions
Speaker 1: dissolved in the water, then those ions are a great
Speaker 1: conductor for electricity, But pure water not such a good conductor.
Speaker 1: What about hydrogen eated water? Have you heard of this before?
Speaker 1: I had not until until you had brought it to
Speaker 1: my attention. Yeah. So if you think, oh, hydrogen eated,
Speaker 1: does that mean you add hydrogen? Yeah, that's what it means. Uh.
Speaker 1: The claim is that the water offers some sort of
Speaker 1: active hydrogen, which in chemistry would refer to atomic hydrogen,
Speaker 1: as in a single hydrogen atom. But we usually encounter
Speaker 1: hydrogen as H two where two hydrogen atoms have bonded together.
Speaker 1: What's the that's the ordinary elemental hydrogen. So hydrogenated water, boy,
Speaker 1: I'm never gonna be able to say it without HyG
Speaker 1: is rural juror yeah, bob blah blah blab blog is
Speaker 1: really tripping me up. Hydrogenated water. It's um often referred
Speaker 1: to as being filled with like an antioxidant kind of effect.
Speaker 1: It can take care of free radicals, which you know,
Speaker 1: in health terms, you probably have heard these before. They
Speaker 1: have some link to various ailments, including things like cancer
Speaker 1: and so any oxidants are important in the sense that
Speaker 1: it helps eliminate these free radicals so that they don't
Speaker 1: have the opportunity to, you know, trigger something catastrophic. But
Speaker 1: the thing is that your body already has any occidents,
Speaker 1: and in fact, usually it is more than capable of
Speaker 1: handling the vast majority of things that you're going to
Speaker 1: encounter alone. You don't need to supplement it um. And
Speaker 1: that's assuming that the water that you're having actually does
Speaker 1: have a supplement to it. As for adding actual hydrogen,
Speaker 1: atomic hydrogen to water not so effective. Because we just
Speaker 1: mentioned that hydrogen is incredibly reactive. It wants to bond.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like you, Julie, just wants to make friends.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm sitting right next to you so uncomfortably
Speaker 1: close right now, just trying to bond with you. It's
Speaker 1: actually been very difficult for us to make sure that
Speaker 1: the microphones don't have feedback from their proximity. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: this isn't weird right right away from your head? You
Speaker 1: know it's weird? Is a is a charged word. I
Speaker 1: don't like to use the word weird. Uncomfortable, certainly physically uncomfortable.
Speaker 1: But getting back to the hydrogenated water, so, yeah, you
Speaker 1: might get like a concentration of H two in water.
Speaker 1: In effect, when you do that, you're really talking about
Speaker 1: a hydrogen suspension in water. So it's not exactly the
Speaker 1: same thing. Um, but there have been some studies I've
Speaker 1: shown that hydrogen can act kind of light in any
Speaker 1: like an antioxidant, but it may not be that it's
Speaker 1: truly effective in the amounts you're going to find and
Speaker 1: in hydrogenated water. So it's yeah, so you're saying that
Speaker 1: I can't go smoke like hot box an entire boxes
Speaker 1: cigarettes and then just drink some hydrogenated water and cancel
Speaker 1: it out. I'm sad to tell you that that in
Speaker 1: fact is yeah, you can't do that. I mean you
Speaker 1: can't expect it to work. I mean and talk about
Speaker 1: magical thinking. Yeah, right there, Yeah, it really is. So. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's H two water would be a molecular hydrogen in water,
Speaker 1: and if you drank it, you might have some mild
Speaker 1: antioxidant effects, but it's very little measurable effect for some reason.
Speaker 1: I just I imagine that would give you the toots.
Speaker 1: That's probably not right, but no, no, but you know
Speaker 1: that is one other thing to remember though, not the toots,
Speaker 1: but the idea that hydrogen gas is a dangerous substance.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's extremely flammable. Uh, it's you know, I
Speaker 1: think there was one resource I was reading they're referred
Speaker 1: to hydrogenated water that would give you explosive results about
Speaker 1: what poor wording considering what hydrogen You know, you could
Speaker 1: blow up if you had an amount of hydrogen gas
Speaker 1: that caught fire. Now you probably have heard about this
Speaker 1: Ignoble award. Uh that was given to someone who actually
Speaker 1: did some research on colonoscopies that went awry. Wow, do
Speaker 1: you know what I'm talking about hydrogen that was ignited
Speaker 1: when people were getting like polyps auterized or whatever. So
Speaker 1: we went from don't know why how we got yeah,
Speaker 1: colonics to colonoscopies. We're really, you know, really scraping the
Speaker 1: bottom now. Okay, so let's move on to ionized water. Okay,
Speaker 1: do you know about the ionized footpaths? I don't know
Speaker 1: about these. Please tell me about a long time ago,
Speaker 1: because you know, I'm that kind of gal. I like
Speaker 1: to experiment. Um, you know, going to an isolation chamber
Speaker 1: and into into a big thing of water, right, um,
Speaker 1: and just see what that's like. I'll do that, right,
Speaker 1: Get a foot bath that's going to take out the
Speaker 1: toxins o my body? Sure, okay, yeah, this is called
Speaker 1: ionic detoxification footpaths, and they were touted as removing toxins
Speaker 1: from your body and balancing the cellular energy. Of course
Speaker 1: they do. Now when you do it, they put you know,
Speaker 1: some stuff in there. I don't know, like bath salts
Speaker 1: or something. Sure, you're talking about actual bath salts, not
Speaker 1: not the street name for that methamphetamine variant, right, the
Speaker 1: face bath salts. No, But then they give that to you.
Speaker 1: So it's all inclusive, is what you're telling me. A
Speaker 1: twenty minutes later, you look down at the water and
Speaker 1: it's disgusting and sort of orangey brown and bubbling. It
Speaker 1: looks like some sort of acidic cauldron. And it's great
Speaker 1: because it's absolute hooey. Yeah yeah, but I mean it's
Speaker 1: one of those sort of snake oil thinks, because people
Speaker 1: who will do these will say, well, look there's the
Speaker 1: evidence right there of all the impurities in your body
Speaker 1: coming out. Well, you know, I wanted to look at
Speaker 1: Dr Andrew Wild and see what he had to say
Speaker 1: about this, because he takes it integrative medical approach to everything.
Speaker 1: So here's someone who's pretty steeped in science, but he's
Speaker 1: got sort of open mind in terms of like what
Speaker 1: holistically might be able to to help people anyway. He says, quote,
Speaker 1: this is all complete nonsense. The Guardian, unlimited and unlined
Speaker 1: British newspaper sent a doctor to have an ionic detox
Speaker 1: foot bath. He took water samples before and after and
Speaker 1: sent into a lab for analysis, and neither sample contained
Speaker 1: any toxins. And when the reporter suspected that the discolored
Speaker 1: water might be due to rust, he tried an experiment.
Speaker 1: He rigged up a bowl of salt water with two
Speaker 1: metal nails attached to a car battery to simulate the
Speaker 1: metal electrodes or excuse me, electrodes used in ionic detox
Speaker 1: foot baths. And that water turned brand with some sludge
Speaker 1: on top, and the same thing that happens with these footbaths,
Speaker 1: and the change in color was due to iron from
Speaker 1: the nails. Uh. Yeah, yeah, we see this a lot too, righte.
Speaker 1: We see we see treatments, not just water treatments, but
Speaker 1: other treatments where there are alternative explanations for the transformation
Speaker 1: of some material that's made contact with you, rather than
Speaker 1: just you know, this was in your body and now
Speaker 1: it's out. Sometimes it's no, this is what happens after
Speaker 1: a chemical reaction has occurred that may or may not
Speaker 1: require a person to be present for it to actually happen. Um.
Speaker 1: So yeah, well, uh, there's also ionized water that's meant
Speaker 1: for drinking, not just for dunking your tip season two
Speaker 1: and um. One of the one of the products that
Speaker 1: I've seen has actually a whole suite of products claims
Speaker 1: to use electrolysis to ionize water. So this water is
Speaker 1: supposed to be better for you in lots of different ways,
Speaker 1: depending upon which company is offering the product. But it's
Speaker 1: very similar to the other claims, like it's supposed to
Speaker 1: get you hydrated faster, or remove toxins, are healthier in
Speaker 1: some other way. But here's the thing. To a chemist,
Speaker 1: ionized water doesn't mean anything. Uh. You can't really ionize water.
Speaker 1: You can have dissolved ions in water. Uh. And ions
Speaker 1: are are atoms that have either gained or lost an
Speaker 1: electron from their elemental form. And so at this point
Speaker 1: when you talk about or their atomic form, I should
Speaker 1: say so when you're looking at an ion, it has
Speaker 1: a net charge because it means that now there are
Speaker 1: an unequal number of protons to electrons. So if there
Speaker 1: are too fuel electrons, that has a positive charge. If
Speaker 1: there are too many has a negative charge, too many
Speaker 1: being compared to the atomic version of that particular element.
Speaker 1: So you can have those dissolved in water. But that's
Speaker 1: different than saying ionized water. It's saying that would be
Speaker 1: water with ionized particles dissolved in it. It's two different things.
Speaker 1: So once in a while, water molecules will dissociate and
Speaker 1: turn into hydrogen ions and hydroxide ions. That's still not
Speaker 1: ionized water, but it means that the that one of
Speaker 1: the hydrogen atoms splits off and comes an ion, and
Speaker 1: you have the hydroxide. That's hydrogen and oxygen just one
Speaker 1: single hydrogen atom one single oxygen atom. So you could
Speaker 1: have ions of both of those, but that process doesn't.
Speaker 1: It takes a while, and the reverse process takes very
Speaker 1: little time. So the process of hydrogen and hydroxide ions
Speaker 1: recombining to make water happens very very quickly. So it
Speaker 1: turns out that if you were to look at a
Speaker 1: billion hydrogen or a billion water molecules, you might find
Speaker 1: two instances of hydrogen and hydroxide ions out of it,
Speaker 1: out of a billion. So very little of it happens.
Speaker 1: It doesn't, It doesn't have any sort of meaningful amount. Now,
Speaker 1: electrolysis is a real thing too, just like piece electric,
Speaker 1: so that that's using electricity to break down stuff. Well yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean actually it's used to turn purified urine into
Speaker 1: breathable air and has been used by NASA for thirteen years. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also what some companies are using to harvest hydrogen.
Speaker 1: Hydrogen as it turns out as hard to get hold of.
Speaker 1: It's usually bonded with something else, and so we have
Speaker 1: to spend energy to get hydrogen. One of the ways
Speaker 1: is to run an electric current through water to break
Speaker 1: down molecular bonds and release oxygen and hydrogen and then
Speaker 1: harvest hydrogen that way. So you can do it, but
Speaker 1: using pure water is very difficult because, like I was
Speaker 1: saying before, pure water doesn't really conduct electricity if you
Speaker 1: have ions in the water that allows electricity to conduct
Speaker 1: through it. So you might have something like a um
Speaker 1: magnesium ions in there in order for you to be
Speaker 1: able to do some electrolysis of the water. Uh, but
Speaker 1: it is, it is a real thing. So often you'll
Speaker 1: again find claims from from technology manufacturers that say this
Speaker 1: electrolysis device will ionize your water, and that doesn't mean anything.
Speaker 1: And also the devices they're selling probably not putting out
Speaker 1: enough electric current to actually do anything to the water.
Speaker 1: So yeah, I mean, one of the themes that keeps
Speaker 1: emerging when we're talking about this is this idea that
Speaker 1: these um the molecular structures, Yes, you can manipulate them,
Speaker 1: but that but these sort of changes or splits are
Speaker 1: less transient. Yeah, yeah, they are minor, they don't last
Speaker 1: very long, so it's, you know, effectively, most people just
Speaker 1: say there's no change because in a meaningful way, there
Speaker 1: isn't a real change. But what if you're like, you
Speaker 1: have this this cup of water, you're staring on it
Speaker 1: and you're really concentrating, like you are thinking of the
Speaker 1: most beautiful unicorn ever. Okay, well that existed before the dinosaurs. Right,
Speaker 1: So it's a Thursday, is what you're saying. Right, That's
Speaker 1: how I spend my thursdays. Yeah, okay, say I'm having
Speaker 1: really super fantasies, warm fuzzy thoughts while staring at water. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what are you getting out? What I'm getting is like
Speaker 1: maybe like maybe that water can be like conscious, Like
Speaker 1: it could really jive to this idea that you have
Speaker 1: of this magical you know, creature. So you're and then
Speaker 1: you would drink it and you would feel magical. So
Speaker 1: you're talking, you're talking about some some beliefs that would
Speaker 1: be championed by masaru Imoto. Then yes, so Masumoto, who
Speaker 1: we're recording this in November two thousand fourteen. He passed
Speaker 1: away in October. Yeah, so, uh. Mr Ramoto was a
Speaker 1: Japanese entrepreneur among other things, and an author, and he
Speaker 1: had written a couple of books about his personal experiments
Speaker 1: with water and emotions. And his claim was that your
Speaker 1: emotional state could affect the quality of water, and you
Speaker 1: would be able to see this effect when you would
Speaker 1: do things like freeze the water. Was about to say, like,
Speaker 1: we've talked about water being transparent, how do you how
Speaker 1: do you glimpse into this water consciousness? You freeze it? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that he he had claimed that water that came
Speaker 1: from a pure source, not just pure and chemically, but
Speaker 1: pure with emotion would form more beautiful crystalline structures. So
Speaker 1: a snowflake from such water would be, uh, would be
Speaker 1: more beautiful than water from some other like negative source,
Speaker 1: Like he had a bunch of a bunch of negative
Speaker 1: nancies who were just hanging out next to the water
Speaker 1: water cooler. The water from that would make ugly snowflakes.
Speaker 1: I think his initial experiment. And this, by the way,
Speaker 1: if you guys aren't familiar with this and you've ever
Speaker 1: seen the movie What the Bleep do we know? He
Speaker 1: is featured pretty heavily in this movie. Um talking about this,
Speaker 1: and initially in his experiment, he took something like a
Speaker 1: hundred Patrio dishes filled with water, and then he froze them.
Speaker 1: And then some of those Petrio dishes had you know,
Speaker 1: positive vibes, the other had negative ones. And that's and
Speaker 1: then when he looked out in a microscope, he thought
Speaker 1: he saw these you know, let's not say that. He
Speaker 1: thought he saw patterns that he felt were as you say,
Speaker 1: um more symmetrical and beautiful, whereas the negative ones were
Speaker 1: duller jagged and asymmetrical. And then like he kind of
Speaker 1: felt fueled by that. So then he did uh sort
Speaker 1: of variants of this experiment. He taped the name Adolf
Speaker 1: Hitler to one to a glass of water to see
Speaker 1: what happened with that. So clearly water can also read yes,
Speaker 1: well no, it's just the thought, just even the right
Speaker 1: if you look at I like your joke, but you
Speaker 1: know what I'm saying. His idea was like, now I'm
Speaker 1: looking at this glass of water and Hitler's water. And
Speaker 1: then he had some other water that was blessed with
Speaker 1: holy up by a monk or someone. And then he
Speaker 1: had another experiment in which I don't know, people two
Speaker 1: thousand miles away, we're thinking good pure thoughts about this
Speaker 1: water that he had in his lap, if good vibes
Speaker 1: at a distance could have effect on this water. So
Speaker 1: here's the thing, though he didn't really engage in any
Speaker 1: sort of blinded tests. No, that is, there was no
Speaker 1: scientific rigor here, right if he if if you want
Speaker 1: to prove that there is some sort of emotional effect
Speaker 1: on water, like from a molecular structure standpoint, which by
Speaker 1: the way, has absolutely no basis in any kind of science,
Speaker 1: than what you would have to do is have a
Speaker 1: double blinded test in which the person observing these crystals
Speaker 1: has no idea what the origin source of that water was.
Speaker 1: They could not know because he knew which samples were
Speaker 1: supposed to be the pure ones versus the ugly ones,
Speaker 1: which automatically enters bias into the picture. Beyond that, you're
Speaker 1: talking about something that's subjective as well. You would have
Speaker 1: to have a much more objective approach by saying, all right, well,
Speaker 1: what what constitutes the molecular patterns we would expect with
Speaker 1: this happy water versus sad water? Because beautiful is not
Speaker 1: going to cut it, because beauty is in the eye
Speaker 1: of the beholder, as we have all heard, and what
Speaker 1: one person might find esthetically pleasing, someone else might think
Speaker 1: is ugly or uh, is not as pleasing, And so
Speaker 1: this was problematic from start to fill. And the other
Speaker 1: thing is that no scientists could ever reproduce his results.
Speaker 1: That's flag And the other thing is okay, so why
Speaker 1: can why couldn't they reproduce his results? Well, I mean
Speaker 1: there's a couple of things that could be going on.
Speaker 1: One is that you can easily have conta contaminants that
Speaker 1: would change the structure of the ice crystals. Yeah. In fact,
Speaker 1: you know, for things like snowflakes and rain drops are
Speaker 1: particulate is particulate matter is necessary so that they can
Speaker 1: form around it. Right, So if you had a pure
Speaker 1: source of water with no contaminants at all, it would
Speaker 1: actually be harder for you to form any kind of
Speaker 1: crystalline structure because it would have a thing to form around.
Speaker 1: And then the second thing is that that structure is
Speaker 1: going to vary widely based on the cooling rate. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so obviously not so scientific. How about have you heard
Speaker 1: of alkaline water or alkaline water if you prefer Noway,
Speaker 1: so it's it's the battery in water. Not quite. I
Speaker 1: mean you could, but I wouldn't recommend it. Now. This
Speaker 1: is this is supposed to be water that's supposed to
Speaker 1: restore your body's pH levels, that you are you are
Speaker 1: balanced properly um and you know it. The way you
Speaker 1: do it is you have water that raises the pH level,
Speaker 1: like the water itself has got a higher pH level
Speaker 1: than water typically does, and that this can counteract the
Speaker 1: acids that you encounter. Here's some problems. First of all,
Speaker 1: pure water can't be alkaline oristic by its very nature.
Speaker 1: It can't. It's chemically impossible. Electrolysis won't affect pH levels.
Speaker 1: Although a lot of places claimed that they have boosted
Speaker 1: pH levels through electrolysis, that's just not true. For water
Speaker 1: to be alkaline, you actually have to add metallic ions
Speaker 1: to it, so that might be sodium or calcium or magnesium.
Speaker 1: And we get rid of excess acid already we don't
Speaker 1: need this, uh, we do it through respiration by by
Speaker 1: exiling carbon dioxide, we get rid of some acid. Um.
Speaker 1: We also have this gastric fluid in our stomach that's
Speaker 1: highly acidic. It would immediately counteract in any kind of
Speaker 1: alkaline substance that we would drink in. And not only that,
Speaker 1: but we don't absorb water primarily through our stomachs. We
Speaker 1: absorb most of the water through our intestines. Well, when
Speaker 1: water passes from the stomach to the intestines, you get
Speaker 1: some pancreatic secretions which raised the pH level and make
Speaker 1: it alkaline anyway, so you don't even need alkaline water.
Speaker 1: Regular water becomes alkaline after it goes into your intestine.
Speaker 1: Your body does it for you, you know. Rubbert and
Speaker 1: I just did an episode on oxygen, and mainly because
Speaker 1: we really want to explore the new material that will
Speaker 1: store and bind release the gas, not the television network.
Speaker 1: Does that still exist? I don't know. I haven't watched
Speaker 1: TV in a while, you know, and I don't know
Speaker 1: that you can't store and then bind and release that
Speaker 1: the actual TV channels. Yeah, but you can with oxygen right. Anyway,
Speaker 1: we wanted to to explore that, and then we thought, well,
Speaker 1: let's just look into other matters of oxygen and oxygen bars.
Speaker 1: And it's the whole thing about like, you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's twenty one percent oxygen in our atmosphere and that's perfect.
Speaker 1: That's what we've evolved into, right or that's that's the
Speaker 1: thing that makes our bodies work. There's no reason to
Speaker 1: go into an oxygen bar and have oxygen put up
Speaker 1: into your nose holes for twenty minutes. It's not. Your
Speaker 1: body is already perfectly calibrated with the amount that's available
Speaker 1: in the atmosphere. And that's what reminds me a lot
Speaker 1: about what we're talking about today, is you know, all
Speaker 1: these sort of ideas at least like a sort of
Speaker 1: foe technology, yeah, and are delivering Actually are you know,
Speaker 1: flying the face of what are finely tuned systems are
Speaker 1: doing naturally right? That that is definitely odd because the
Speaker 1: messages that this is supposed to restore balance, but in
Speaker 1: reality it's it's taking the thing that actually is balanced
Speaker 1: and putting it out of whack. Or if if in
Speaker 1: fact it works and the technology is actually doing what
Speaker 1: is claimed to be doing, I haven't even gone into that,
Speaker 1: but there are a lot of these examples where it
Speaker 1: may very well be that if you were to disassemble
Speaker 1: such a device uh that was supposed to change water
Speaker 1: in some meaningful way, you might find that there's nothing
Speaker 1: at all there, just a charcoal filter maybe yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: which definitely does work. But that's a totally known quantity um.
Speaker 1: There's also just a round out the various types of
Speaker 1: crazy water stuff. There's the concept of energized water, which
Speaker 1: can cover a huge spectrum of pseudo scientific claims, including
Speaker 1: things like that use words like vibration, the piece of
Speaker 1: electric one would be very similar to that, or quantum.
Speaker 1: Quantum is a great word that can mean anything that
Speaker 1: anyone wants it to mean. It's actually I've heard some
Speaker 1: scientists say that we should retire the word quantum wells
Speaker 1: and yeah, because it no longer means what it was
Speaker 1: intended to mean. Now it just kind of means mystical, like,
Speaker 1: you know, because because things on the quantum level behave
Speaker 1: in a way that's very different from the classic level
Speaker 1: of physics. And and because these things that would be
Speaker 1: impossible on the macro scale are commonplace on the quantum scale.
Speaker 1: The quantum world now has this, you know, it's kind
Speaker 1: of replaced magic for some people. Like now now it's
Speaker 1: because certain things are possible on the quantum scale. Everything
Speaker 1: is possible on the quantums. Gale that that's the way
Speaker 1: the thinking seems to progress. And water is water, right,
Speaker 1: like the state of water is you know, well, you
Speaker 1: could have three different states of water, But that doesn't
Speaker 1: make it quantum and it's still water. It's still a thing.
Speaker 1: I guess I'm trying to say is like if it
Speaker 1: could just magically poof water would be gone, then maybe
Speaker 1: we would say it's it's water, not water quantum state.
Speaker 1: Yeah right, it's short injer's water. It's here, but it's
Speaker 1: not here. The water is only in the pool. If
Speaker 1: you look at the pool, look in the box. If
Speaker 1: you look away from the pool, there's no water in
Speaker 1: the pool. Uh. Yeah, no, we don't. It's it's a
Speaker 1: bogus term. But there is plenty of real technology that
Speaker 1: we use with water to make it uh potable, make it,
Speaker 1: make it something that we can actually make use of.
Speaker 1: Filtration is a very basic one. Filtering water is it's
Speaker 1: incredibly simple. Essentially, you need a filter that has pores,
Speaker 1: and the smaller those poores, the more uh contaminants it's
Speaker 1: going to keep out of your water. So essentially you
Speaker 1: just pass water through the filter. It holds back the impurities,
Speaker 1: the pollution microorganisms, uh, and you have a poorous substance.
Speaker 1: The pores might be if there let's say, oh a
Speaker 1: micron in size or smaller, that's gonna filter up microns
Speaker 1: super small. We're talking of a millimeter or one millions
Speaker 1: of a meter. So from micron you would then go
Speaker 1: down to nanometer, so we're talking really small. But if
Speaker 1: it's a micron in size, it's gonna filter out all
Speaker 1: the parasitic eggs and larva, which account for a large
Speaker 1: number of problems where you have people who don't have
Speaker 1: access to pure, clean drinking water. I mean, larva and
Speaker 1: parasites cause enormous health problems and a large large populations
Speaker 1: around the world, serious serious problem. Um, if you go
Speaker 1: down to point four microns, so less than half of micron,
Speaker 1: that's how small you need to get in order to
Speaker 1: filter out bacteria. So we're talking like a super tiny
Speaker 1: hole in the filter, uh, or the super tiny holes
Speaker 1: because we talked about pores in order to be able
Speaker 1: to filter out bacteria. So that's okay, So tell me
Speaker 1: if I'm wrong about this. It's like fifty microns that
Speaker 1: across that would equal one a little sprig of hair.
Speaker 1: Let's see it's a hundred it's it's around eighty thousand,
Speaker 1: a hundred thousand nanometers. So I always try to get
Speaker 1: some sort of microns really for the diameter of a
Speaker 1: human hair. But there's no there's a very wide range, yes,
Speaker 1: And I keep that in mind. Yeah, And then you're
Speaker 1: talking about so you might say, well, how is that
Speaker 1: even possible to make filters that have these pores that's small? Well,
Speaker 1: a lot of filters end up using other things to
Speaker 1: help so that they don't need poor is the small
Speaker 1: So you were mentioning when we were talking about this
Speaker 1: before we went into the studio. You you say, hey,
Speaker 1: are you gonna talk about the life straw? And I
Speaker 1: completely forgot about it, So I'm glad you brought it up.
Speaker 1: The life straws are really cool device, very simple device.
Speaker 1: It's a pipe filter and it's a It's called straw
Speaker 1: because the way it works is you put one end
Speaker 1: of it into a body of water and you suck
Speaker 1: on the other end. It pulls the water through a
Speaker 1: filtration system so that it filters out the vast majority
Speaker 1: of things that would be potentially hazardous to you, so
Speaker 1: you get you get relatively clean drinking water. The reason
Speaker 1: I use those qualifiers is because the filter on the
Speaker 1: life straw has much larger pores than what I was
Speaker 1: just talking about, So it has has two filters that
Speaker 1: are porous filters. One of them has pours a hundred
Speaker 1: microns in size, so that gets the large particulates out
Speaker 1: of the water, and the next one has poors of
Speaker 1: fifteen microns in size, so at that size you can
Speaker 1: still get like um, some stuff that would be pretty dangerous. However,
Speaker 1: it also has a chamber that has little beads filled
Speaker 1: with iodine, and iodine will kill most of the microorganisms
Speaker 1: that would cause you real problems. After that is an
Speaker 1: empty chamber where the iodine can continue to work on
Speaker 1: any kind of micro organisms as it continues through the
Speaker 1: pipe filter. Next you have active carbon, and the active
Speaker 1: carbon is meant to do two things. Attract any other
Speaker 1: things that have gotten through, and also to remove the
Speaker 1: terrible smell and taste of iodine from your water, because
Speaker 1: iodine will create this bitter taste. It does have a
Speaker 1: distinct smell. It's unpleasant, so the carbon is meant to
Speaker 1: help take that out. And I've seen different figures on
Speaker 1: how expensive each LifeStraw would be. Uh the lowest I
Speaker 1: saw was two dollars per straw, and it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be able to last for sevens, which is about a
Speaker 1: year's worth of water for a single person. And it's
Speaker 1: great because it's portable, right, I mean, with you anywhere exactly.
Speaker 1: It's a tiny little thing comparatively speaking, compared to like
Speaker 1: a municipal filtration system. It's it's it's microscopic practically, but yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's a neat device, and it's very neat
Speaker 1: because of its simplicity. But you also have other technology.
Speaker 1: Desalination a big one. The basic way of doing this,
Speaker 1: I mean, there's lots of different ways if you if
Speaker 1: you really just want to have a very simple way.
Speaker 1: Let's say you have a bucket and you go out
Speaker 1: and get some sea water, and you fill you buck
Speaker 1: it up with some seawater, and then you put a
Speaker 1: plastic bag over the bucket so you've sealed it off,
Speaker 1: and you you edge the plastic bag so that it
Speaker 1: kind of tilts downward at an angle to one side
Speaker 1: of the bucket. Heat is going to cause water to evaporate,
Speaker 1: which will then condense on the inside of the plastic bag,
Speaker 1: and some of that's going to run down and go
Speaker 1: into the other end of the plastic bag off to
Speaker 1: this out of the bucket. That water is going to
Speaker 1: be pure water it's gonna leave behind the salt. Uh.
Speaker 1: So that's your basic desalination. So a desalination plant tends
Speaker 1: to have an enormous boiler where you put seawater, you
Speaker 1: heat it up to boiling, and you collect the steam
Speaker 1: and allow it to condense back into fresh water. That's
Speaker 1: pretty cool. It's like on a microscale the water cycle. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it really is the only But there are some issues.
Speaker 1: One is that you're left with this kind of salty
Speaker 1: slurry at the end, and uh, what do you do
Speaker 1: with that? Um, you could body scrap. Yeah, that'd be
Speaker 1: a good one. That'd be a much better one than
Speaker 1: what a lot of desalination plants do, which is that
Speaker 1: they'll return it to the ocean. Uh. The issue there
Speaker 1: is that you have this concentrated amount of salt that
Speaker 1: can do damage to ecosystems. So if you just dump
Speaker 1: it like on a coral reef, then you've suddenly drastically
Speaker 1: increased the salinity of that area. That's a problem. Uh,
Speaker 1: but it is certainly an interesting technology and necessary for
Speaker 1: a lot of communities that don't have access to freshwater. Uh.
Speaker 1: Then there's the sling shot, and this is an invention
Speaker 1: by a certain Dean Cayman. Are you familiar when Mr
Speaker 1: Dean Cayman. Yep, that's him, That's the guy. And he
Speaker 1: created the Segue. He also created the Luke arm which
Speaker 1: is a cyborg arm that is awesome. It's amazing. There
Speaker 1: are very variations. If if I were to lose an arm,
Speaker 1: I would definitely want to look arm. I would prefer
Speaker 1: to keep my arm, I mean like attached to me,
Speaker 1: not just in a case. I would like to have
Speaker 1: my arm. But if I were to lose an arm,
Speaker 1: I would want to look arm um. And it was
Speaker 1: named after Luke Skywalker's kind of awesome. Yeah, yeah, so
Speaker 1: but the the sling Shot was his approach to how
Speaker 1: do you get a clean water supply to people who
Speaker 1: other eyes would not have it in all parts of
Speaker 1: the world. What what is the most efficient system that
Speaker 1: he could come up with. And it's similar to a
Speaker 1: desalination approach. So it's the sling shot uses uh it, well,
Speaker 1: it can. It can make up to a quarter of
Speaker 1: million leaders of clean water per year um with a
Speaker 1: single one, which is enough to serve the needs of
Speaker 1: about three people for that year. So that's just one
Speaker 1: sling shot. You could get multiple ones and obviously increase
Speaker 1: that number. And it can turn anything like seawater, sewage,
Speaker 1: or even chemical waste into pure drinking water, which is
Speaker 1: pretty cool. And he's partnered with Coca Cola in Or
Speaker 1: to distribute this two different areas. They actually had a
Speaker 1: couple of tests UM runs out in Africa that went
Speaker 1: really well. And they they also try to train like
Speaker 1: they'll they'll find people local to the community to train
Speaker 1: them to run the business so that it's all Coca
Speaker 1: Cola does not have an interest in a direct interest anyway.
Speaker 1: They're not profiting from it, which is a great thing. UM.
Speaker 1: They're allowing the locals to take charge of it. They're
Speaker 1: just providing the technology. But essentially what goes What happens
Speaker 1: is dirty water goes into the sling shot through a hose. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a pump that pulls the water into a boiling chamber. Now,
Speaker 1: if you're just starting this thing up for the first time,
Speaker 1: you're having to spend some energy to heat up the
Speaker 1: boiling chamber to boiling two hundred degrees celsius. The water boils,
Speaker 1: uh the water vapor the steam that comes up is
Speaker 1: clean and so that then goes into a compressor. Now
Speaker 1: you would think it would normally go through a condensation
Speaker 1: coil and turn into water. Instead, he puts it through
Speaker 1: a condenser. And here's why. Remember when we said early
Speaker 1: on that if you increase the pressure of liquid, it
Speaker 1: increases the boiling point. That's why. So he compresses the
Speaker 1: water vapor. That adds about ten degrees celsius of temperature
Speaker 1: to it in the process, but it also raises the
Speaker 1: boiling point of the water, so it starts to condense
Speaker 1: down into water superheated water. It's above the boiling point,
Speaker 1: but because of the compression, that boiling point has been raised,
Speaker 1: so you get superheated water on one side. Now that
Speaker 1: superheated water goes through a heat exchanger so that the
Speaker 1: incoming dirty water and the superheated pure water exchange heat.
Speaker 1: They're in separate parts of the system, so there's no contamination.
Speaker 1: But the cold dirty water gets flash boiled because it's
Speaker 1: pulling heat from the superheated water, which then is cool
Speaker 1: to room temperature. So you get room temperature water on
Speaker 1: one side and flash boiling the dirty water on the
Speaker 1: other side. There's also an exhaust hose that takes all
Speaker 1: the super nasty gunk of whatever it is that was
Speaker 1: going in there in the first place, so you do
Speaker 1: have an exhaust hose as well. But I thought this
Speaker 1: was a really cool thing. And the neatest thing about
Speaker 1: it is that that superheated water provides all the heat
Speaker 1: necessary to keep the boiling chamber at the right temperature.
Speaker 1: So once once it gets started, the heat is self sustaining. Okay,
Speaker 1: now you still have to you still have to pour
Speaker 1: energy in for the pomps, but not for the boiling chamber.
Speaker 1: That's very cool, you know, And when when you look
Speaker 1: at this sort of technology in place, which is so
Speaker 1: important for countries that don't have access to clean water,
Speaker 1: it really puts into perspective like, stay here in the
Speaker 1: United States, how crazy it is that we engage in
Speaker 1: this kind of yuck factor. You know, when we talk
Speaker 1: about water reclamation, we're talking about taking sewer water and
Speaker 1: essentially purifying it so that it's potable, and a lot
Speaker 1: of communities will sometimes push back on that because there's
Speaker 1: that association of you know, fecle met or in my water.
Speaker 1: Even though the end result is that you have pure,
Speaker 1: clean drinking water, you can chemically demonstrate that the water
Speaker 1: itself is not contaminated by any of these other things
Speaker 1: that it used to be part of. But there is
Speaker 1: that there's that psychological barrier. Same thing is true, like
Speaker 1: we've talked about on tech stuff and on forward thinking
Speaker 1: about the International Space Station and how they take extremes
Speaker 1: to try and conserve water as much as possible, and
Speaker 1: then an ideal system would conserve water from everything from
Speaker 1: urine to your sweat. It would all get captured, processed,
Speaker 1: and then you would have clean drinking water and you
Speaker 1: would expel anything else in any other contaminants out of space. Um.
Speaker 1: So there is that thought of people are like, oh,
Speaker 1: I don't want to drink my own P. You're not
Speaker 1: drinking You're drinking water that was reclaimed from P and
Speaker 1: is chemically the exact same stuff that's coming out of
Speaker 1: your faucet, which spoiler alert has probably been pid at
Speaker 1: least once through the history of the Earth through something
Speaker 1: some creatures. Yeah, something somewhere that water has been through it,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, so you know, and it might think, well,
Speaker 1: with enough time, well that's a thing like you you get. Um.
Speaker 1: A lot of this is just semantics. We're talking about
Speaker 1: this earlier, Like there's a sthantic distancing, like if you
Speaker 1: can just name it in a different way, you can
Speaker 1: market it or spin it, then you can get that
Speaker 1: sort of psychological distancing from the thing that it is.
Speaker 1: But that being said, I always go back to this
Speaker 1: microbiologist whose name escapes me at the moment, but he says,
Speaker 1: there's a fine patina of feces covering the world, and
Speaker 1: we forget that. You know every surface, and in the
Speaker 1: same way, there's your in everywhere in the world. I
Speaker 1: used to have a an interior design company where our
Speaker 1: slogan was there's a fine patina of FECs covering everything,
Speaker 1: but uh, we went business. I would have thought that
Speaker 1: you would have had at least some scatological minded No,
Speaker 1: I don't like that the guy who created the Kloaka bot.
Speaker 1: Perhaps I did want to mention an unsung hero of
Speaker 1: water and again Stephen Johnson, he's got that chapter on
Speaker 1: clean in his book. He has a PBS series too,
Speaker 1: called How We Got to Now, But he points out
Speaker 1: that we largely owe our clean drinking water to this
Speaker 1: physician John Leal, who had this little idea of like
Speaker 1: maybe if I put a little chlorine in the water,
Speaker 1: it would clean it I wonder how I could get
Speaker 1: a large enough body of water to test this out.
Speaker 1: And surreptitiously, he goes to a plant in I believe
Speaker 1: in New Jersey, Jersey City, and he puts chlorine into
Speaker 1: the water supply in the early nineteen hundreds to see
Speaker 1: if if he has any could clean the water or
Speaker 1: I might poison the entire population of this area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was a palsy thing to do. That's a pretty
Speaker 1: Yeah that science does require courage, but sometimes courage can
Speaker 1: border on the scary. But that was awesome that it
Speaker 1: turned out all right? Isn't it right? Isn't it great
Speaker 1: that it turned out all right? And then he turned
Speaker 1: around and officially like presented his results drinking Jersey City.
Speaker 1: But in doing this and adopting this um, he actually
Speaker 1: cut the infant and child mortality rate in half over
Speaker 1: a thirty year period. Yeah, because of all the junk
Speaker 1: that was in their previous to that, not to mention
Speaker 1: making public swimming pools reality as well as all lifeguards saying,
Speaker 1: oh the pool, we have a f R incident. I
Speaker 1: think I think I could take a guess as to
Speaker 1: what it means. But what is that stand for? Accidental
Speaker 1: fecal release. Yeah, you see how you brought that all
Speaker 1: through sixty Yeah. Uh, I'm glad that. Uh. I'm glad
Speaker 1: you were here to to walk me through all things
Speaker 1: poop and water related. That's generally, that's what's going to happen.
Speaker 1: When when when you ask a Julie Douglas on the show. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: uh but no, Julie, thank you so much for joining
Speaker 1: me for this episode. It was a lot of fun.
Speaker 1: You're welcome. Thanks for having me. I learned a lot.
Speaker 1: This is great. Yeah. Maybe uh we'll have you back
Speaker 1: on soon so we can talk about some other kind
Speaker 1: of crazy technology. Yeah. Probably throwing a lot more science too,
Speaker 1: because that's that's your your stuff. They actually tell people
Speaker 1: where they can find you. Yeah, okay, check it out
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind dot com. Um, we we
Speaker 1: cover pretty much everything under this fun and we have
Speaker 1: some videos out there so you can check out on
Speaker 1: the website. Yeah, some great one like the elevator one. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we might be bringing that back. All right. Well, guys,
Speaker 1: if you have any suggestion for future episode of tech Stuff,
Speaker 1: whether it's a topic or a guest I should have
Speaker 1: on maybe the interview I should do. Let me know,
Speaker 1: send me an email the addresses tech stuff at how
Speaker 1: stuff works dot com, or drop me a line on
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