Hello and welcome to Overthink.

The podcast where we tell you which philosophical ideas don't hold water.

Or ones that do.

I feel like we usually do ones that do more.

Although we, you know, we can be critical here and there.

I'm Ellie Anderson.

And I'm David Peña-Gusman.

And today we are indeed talking about water.

We're in the middle of our series on the four elements. And as I was thinking about what we might say about water, we're in the middle of our series on the four elements. And as I was

thinking about what we might say about water, one thing that I thought about as a place to start is the

fact that water is often associated with scarcity, at least these days. And I think that's different

from the three other elements that we're discussing, fire, earth, and air. Certainly,

fire, we would want less of as a species. Air, obviously, there are a lot of changes that are

happening to our air with climate change, and I think the same is true of Earth. But it doesn't

sound right to say that we wish there were more air or more Earth. Whereas I do think it's right to say that we wish there were more air or more earth.

Whereas I do think it's her to say that we wish there were more water.

David, you and I both live in California and in general even beyond California, the demand for

fresh water globally is outstripping supply.

Many of the water systems around the world are currently overtaxed, and some of them,

including here in California, are already really dangerously close to running dry.

Yeah, I might qualify your claim a little bit because we don't want less fire across the board.

Some fire, as we noted in the fire episode, is good fire that we need as a tool for survival,

...