This video is going to be a little different
to normal. I went to a place called Coober Pedy
to tell a story about water. > Coober Pedy is a town
in the Australian Outback. The record high temperature here was set this
summer just gone: 47°C, 118°F. But while the surface may be hot
in the blazing sun, the town has a fairly simple and free
air-conditioning solution: about half of the homes here are underground, and a lot of them were dug out
by hand many years ago. The rock under the surface stays at around
23°C year-round, and so do any rooms that you dig out of it. My hotel room is underground.
I don't mean it's in a basement: I mean the entire hotel is just
dug into the side of this hill. I'm walking on the ceiling. > So here’s the way I make a video. I find the story,
or someone sends me an idea for a story. In this case, it was a local at Coober Pedy who got in touch and said I might find the
place interesting, and yeah, it really is. So then I research a lot, I read around, I contact relevant people to ask for an interview, and once I've worked out the story I write
a script that is as fact-checked as I can make it. By the time I arrive at the location, most of the words I’m going to say to camera
are already written. I might tweak a line or two while I'm there, but there should be no surprises,
because I do the research. And in this case,
the story I had wasn’t about the town, or about the bizarre landscape
caused by opal miners with their mineshafts and
piles of leftover rock. That’s all been done. > This is not a place that's friendly to humans,
but we built a town here anyway. Because there was money to be made:
opal mining is the main industry here. Well, that and tourism, these days. > I talked to a few people in Coober Pedy. One said that opal mining was
still the main industry. One said it was tourism, and that
some people hadn't realised that yet. A couple of folks said that opal mining was
the side gig that a lot of residents had
alongside their regular jobs. So even that seemingly-basic fact turned out
to be complicated and questionable. Now, I’m not great at citing my sources. I used to be a lot worse, these days if I’m doing a monologue I try
to remember my citations, but I’m still not great at it.
And I am sorry about that. But if I’m interviewing people, well,
those are my citations right here, I’m getting first-hand testimony from experts. What happens if those experts disagree? > Coober Pedy is hot, dry, and it barely rains.
Water is expensive here: two and a half times the cost per litre
compared to the big cities. Because it's a local system,
not connected to the rest of the state, it's not subsidised by the government. Plus, you don't get a discount for buying
in bulk: in fact, the cost per litre goes up as you use more. But the reason for that
may not be what you think. > Everything up until that point: confirmed. But this is where it gets tricky. I am bad at conflict and conflict resolution. It’s not what I do. I am not a journalist, I have never had training in determining the
truth when it’s murky because I rely on citations and papers
and scientific consensus and the results from all the folks who
have been trained to do that. I summarise, I condense, I tell stories. If the folks I talk to disagree,
I don't want to be the one in the middle. Plus, to say that someone I have met, who I am now hopefully friendly with and who
gave a lot of their time to talk to me... for me as a non-expert to say "well,
these citations say you're wrong" is a bit presumptuous. I'm not asking for opinions or political comment,
I'm just asking people to tell me facts. > The problem isn't
scarcity of water in a desert. This town sits on top of the
Great Artesian Basin, as does about a fifth of Australia. It's a complex set of groundwater basins,
the largest aquifer in the world, storing somewhere around 60 trillion litres of
fresh water a few dozen metres below ground level. > According to everyone I talked to
in the town, that’s wrong. My research was wrong,
news articles are wrong, Wikipedia is wrong. Instead, they said Coober Pedy sits on
the very outskirts of... something that might eventually feed into
the Basin? Possibly? People disagreed. The folks at the local water plant were kind enough
to actually drive me out to the boreholes, 25 clicks from the town,
and I got to taste the unfiltered water. It is warm full of iron and a bit of salt. There’s a reason that there’s massive
equipment back in the town to filter what's pumped up. Anyway, point is,
while it is groundwater, apparently it's not quite from the
Great Artesian Basin itself. But sure, I can work around that. > A recent long-term study showed that, while everyone here having their own--
a rec-- > A recent long-term study showed that, while everyone here having their own
swimming pool would be a bad idea, there's enough fresh water down in those rocks
to reasonably support everyone here... if they can get that water to the surface. Because pulling it up requires expensive equipment
and a lot of power. > There was a citation there! I looked at the relevant studies for the Basin, and I found that the consensus is that
it is sustainable at current population. Except that Coober Pedy might not
use the Basin? I talked to folks including the Mayor and the
supply manager at the local water plant and all of them gave difficult, complex, hedged, and sometimes-conflicting answers on whether
Coober Pedy can support people into the future. The groundwater level does fluctuate, apparently? It does have to recharge sometimes, apparently? Notice how I’m not quoting
anyone directly there. Because I am trying to avoid conflict, I don’t want someone who has given their
time and patience, someone who has been brave enough to stand
in front of a camera for some British guy
they’ve never met before, I don’t want them to have to risk being
fact-checked, not by everyone online, but by everyone in their own community.
That’s not fair to them. And, even now after spending time
researching it further, I can’t find the truth about whether
Coober Pedy is sustainable or not. It's possible that no-one actually knows. > In an interview in March 2019,
the water manager here said that there's a failure somewhere in Coober Pedy's
pipe network that's leaking 30 percent of
the town's water into the rock. > Full citation!
It’s a direct quote from the water manager, in an article in the ABC, a respected broadcaster,
that is clearly an acceptable source. Except two separate people in the town said,
no, that’s probably wrong, the 30% was probably the
peak effect of several leaks, it was either a misstatement or a misquote. Was it? To make it worse, when I got to the town, I found that the politics were far more complicated
than I’d realised. The Mayor was lovely. He was the one that drove me out
to see the opal mines, he was the one who showed me how close I could
safely get to the mine shafts without falling in. But he’s also not actually in charge of
the town right now, because the entire local government has been
suspended and an administrator's been appointed because of decisions that the council made
before that Mayor was the Mayor. I had missed that entirely in many research
because I was focusing on the water and I didn't look at the politics. So let’s skip all my now-questionable
discussion and jump to my conclusion. > Humans expand into
any environment that we can. And no matter the problems we encounter, it's almost always cheaper and politically easier
to patch up what's currently working and avoid radical change and high cost. Long-term planning has never been
our strong point as a species. > That was a wonderful point to end on before
I got to the town and discovered years of political wrangling that my interviewees and my contacts there
are in the middle of, about exactly those issues of sustainability
and long-term planning. Is it still true generally? Yeah. Is it much more complicated in this context, and do I look like a jackass for being all
highfalutin' about it after talking to everyone there? Also yes. But by the time I knew that, it was time to
head to the airport. So this time, I spotted the problem. The video didn’t work, my research was inadequate,
you got this instead. But: how many times have I
failed to spot that? How many times have I got it wrong
and never known? You should not trust me implicitly, the same way that no-one should trust a
single source to get things right. But I can be more accountable. So, I’m going to endeavour
to cite my sources better, but also I have put together every significant
factual error in my videos into one list. It's on my web site. For each error,
I have gone to that video, pinned the correction,
and linked to that list. Because if anyone on the internet says you
can trust them: they're probably selling something. Which reminds me, this video's
sponsored by Audible. Seriously, it is, that isn't just
a cheap joke. If you're an Amazon Prime member, then
for a limited time you can start an Audible membership
and save 66% on your first three months,
which is $30 off. It's $4.95 a month for the first three months,
and after that it's only $14.95 a month. The offer is valid from the 1st July
to the 31st July 2019. Every month, you get one free audiobook and two
free Audible Originals from an ever-changing list. I've spent a lot of times
on planes recently, and a good way for me to pass that time
without constantly staring at a screen is to listen to audiobooks. I really enjoyed Seanan McGuire's
Sparrow Hill Road, it is a lovely set of ghost stories set on
the sort of American backroads that only exist in the imagination. Go to audible.com/trustme
or text ‘trustme’ to 500 500 and start listening. It'll help keep your mind occupied
wherever you are, even if you're not about to spend another
ten hours solid awake on a plane. Now, the question is: is this really a
sponsorship by Audible? Did I record this entire endorsement just
to set up a joke, or will that link in the description actually
take you somewhere and show you that offer? Can you genuinely sign up? You'll just have to trust me. [car horn] You had to honk over my last line,
didn't you? That was a great delivery. Right.
This video is a great reminder to everyone about what we watch online, or anywhere else really. Funny enough this made me subscribe to his channel, I like his honesty(or maybe modesty?).
Great way to introduce the complexity of forming factual statements and supporting them. Everyone is working with different webs of beliefs that support what they believe to be factual. It can be so difficult to navigate these because so much of the reasoning for why we believe what we do is unknown to us. We forget why certain ideas were supported. We forget which ideas we used to support beliefs, but remember that at one point we were confident in their support. Wish he would do some more videos where he delves deeper into this. This is a problem that requires everyone in society to do constant work.
Expected him to follow this up with: "Unless you ask local expert historian Daniel Stephens, who tells us that Coober Pedy has a cool and humid climate with frequent rainfall, and where water is very inexpensive."
Well, what he does here is actually journalism even if he says that it's not. Good journalism doesn't always give a definitive answer, but rather points out that a situation is complicated and that there are conflicting views. The real world is rarely a place of 1/0.
A geniune, down to earth, self-conscious, self-accountable person on youtube? wHaT??
Seriously though, one of the few informative people on youtube who i enjoy listening to. Interesting topics, fun attitude (although serious) and very respectful of whatever it is he's making a video about.
...this only makes me trust him more. Love this man.
To be fair Tom Scott, you probably do your research better than I'd do mine.
This guys hair is like 20 years older than him
Holy crap that sponsor tie-in was amazing.