It Could Happen Here Weekly 150

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Al Zone Media.

Speaker 2 (00:03):
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
you know. This is a compilation episode. So every episode
of the week that just happened is here in one
convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
you can make your own decisions.

Speaker 3 (00:27):
Welcome to it.

Speaker 4 (00:27):
Couldop be here a podcast about things falling apart and
how to put them back together again. I'm your host,
Mia Wong. This is a story about Boeing. I'm going
to lay my cards on the table from the stars.
I'm from Chicago, but my family is from Seattle. Some
of my aunts and uncles worked for Boeing in the
eighties or the airline side. Some of our closest family

(00:49):
friends worked there for much longer than that. I grew
up on the periphery of this industry, and I have
never seen the people in it and the people who
have left as angry as they are now. People are pissed,
and they should be. In the last six years, Boeing
has killed three hundred and forty six people. In the
years to come, they may well kill more, and not

(01:10):
a single one of them had to die. This is
how it happened. What is Boeing? The short answer, obviously
is that it's a company that makes both civilian and
military airplanes. It also does some other things, including working
on space travel, but that's not our media concern here.
The long answer, however, and it's the long answer that

(01:32):
we need, is that Boeing is the poster child for
the post World War II labor, corporate, militarist alliance. Boeing
itself was a sometimes uneasy alliance of workers, engineers, and
the army that made civilian and military airplanes. This is
also not a terrible description of the entirety of the
post war United States, with the proviso at the airplanes

(01:55):
the US is making, We're dropping bombs at Vietnam. The
unwinding of Boeing that we're all watching today as doors
fall off of planes and more and more grounded, is
the unwinding of that America. Here I turned to the
anthropologist David Graber from his book The Utopia of Rules quote,
I think what happened is best considered as a kind

(02:18):
of shifting class allegiances on the part of the managerial
staff of major corporations from an uneasy de facto alliance
with their own workers to one with investors. As John
Kenneth Galbraith long ago pointed out, if you create an
organization geared to produce perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft usel lodges,
those who make it up will, if left at their

(02:40):
own devices, tend to concentrate their efforts on producing more
and better perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft usel lodges, rather
than thinking primarily of what will make the most money
for shareholders. What's more, since for most of the twentieth century,
a job in a large bureaucratic megafirm meant a lifetime
promise of employment involved in the process, managers and workers

(03:02):
alike tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common
interest in this regard over and against meddling owners and investors.
This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name.
It's called corporatism. One mustn't romanticize it. It was, among
other things, the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could

(03:23):
well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers
and managers had interest in common, that organizations like corporations
or communities formed organic holes, and that finances were an alien,
parasitic force and drove them to their ultimate murderers.

Speaker 3 (03:37):
Extreme.

Speaker 4 (03:38):
Even in its more benign social democratic versions in America
or Europe, the attendant politics often came tinged with chauvinism,
but they also ensured that the investor class was always
seen as to some extent outsiders, against whom white collar
and blue collar workers could be considered, at least to
some degree, to be in united common front. Now as

(03:59):
a product of the united Front between workers and managers,
the corporate as system of the post war era had
a very different conception of what a corporation is. It
was a social entity composed of a variety of classes
and had an obligation to take care of them. It
had an obligation to its workers, to its engineers, to

(04:21):
its customers, and even to its country. By absorbing unions
into the corporate system, the system itself had been forced
to adapt a more sociological self conception that vastly differed
from the ways corporations both view themselves and behave today.
As Grabern notes this class coalition largely wrote capitalists out

(04:43):
of the equation, reducing them to merror holders of stock,
not managers. In Boeing's case, those managers were engineers at
basically all levels of the company. Now we must note
here that in the post World War two era engineers
were extremely powerful, and this is not just true of

(05:03):
capitalist nations. So the US, to some extent, had an
early start on the power of engineers in the running
of New deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Engineers
are powerful in communist countries as well, and it's true
in quasi socialist countries that have just liberated themselves from
the old European empires. These engineers were both extremely well

(05:24):
paid and very influential everywhere you can find them, from
Belgium to Peru, and the only real difference is whether
they were trained by the Americans or the Soviets. Now,
the fact that you, the listener, are not reporting to
an engineer right now at your job is assigned that
they didn't exactly hold on to power. In fact, the

(05:44):
last vestiges of this class of extremely powerful engineers aren't
really even em Boeing at all. The most prominent remain
of the Great Engineering International is Shijim Ping, who is
part of a class in China known as the Red Engineer.
If you want to know more about the Red Engineers,
we unfortunately do not have time to really go into

(06:05):
them here, but c Joel Andreas's book Rise of the
Red Engineers for the most famous treatment of them.

Speaker 5 (06:13):
Now.

Speaker 4 (06:13):
In China, the Red Engineers effectively seized control of the
states and were the kind of second generation that ruled
back the social changes of the revolution from the Maoist period.
In the US, the story is a bit more complicated.
In some places, the engineers as a class were rolled

(06:33):
up and brutally destroyed in a war with a newly
ascended financed class. In others, engineers, feeling the disciplining effects
of the market, effectively engineered their own destruction. The latter
engineers leading the company to financial ruin is to some
extent the story of Boeing, But to get there we

(06:56):
need to take a look at how the worker management
Alowience Graver described came a part. I have talked at
length on this show about the economic crisis of the
seventies in which everything the entire consensus that had held
the post war era together fell apart. One of the
key elements is that in the nineteen seventies, manufacturing becomes

(07:19):
zero sum. If manufacturing output increases in one country, it
can largely only come at the expense of production somewhere else.
This is the product of a general crisis of structural
overproduction and structural under consumption. This meant that it was
no longer possible to incorporate everyone into the capitalist welfare

(07:40):
system while also retaining corporate profits, and so someone was
going to have to lose everything. It was either going
to be the capitalist or the workers. And the people
who lost everything, as I think we're all aware of
living in the world that we do now, were the
workers whose power was systematically destroyed. But that arly, the
story of the destruction of unions and destruction of the

(08:02):
leftbore broadly is a story for another day for our purposes.
The important class that was destroyed in the period of
the seventies is the class of managerial engineers, and these
engineers were destroyed by a takeover of Corporate America by
the shareholders the Corporatist Alliance had previously held at bay.

(08:24):
The takeover of Corporate America by finance schools had two mechanisms.
The leveraged buyout, better known as corporate rating, was carried
out by people like Michael Milken, and the internal movement
of executives from inside the corporations themselves, led by people
like Jack Welsh, who will meet both of these people
in detail later in this story. But the details of

(08:47):
the process of how exactly the finance schools came to
control Corporate America turn out to be extremely important because
Boeing is destroyed by both of the two mechanisms coming
together at the same time. Now, as the eighties dawned,
the world lived in fear of a new kind of

(09:09):
financial device, the leveraged buyout. The exact mechanisms of the
leveraged buyout are slightly complicated, but the short version is
that Michael Milken, a bond salesman who I eventually am
going to do a fall behind the bastard's episode on
because oh my God is the evil and there simply
is not space to elaborate on all the stuff that

(09:30):
he did here, including this off that eventually is going
to send him to prison, figured out a way for
a person or a group too, with very little actual
cash on hand to very quickly take on an unbelievable
amount of debt, use it to buy a company, and
then sell that company for parts to pay back the debt,

(09:52):
pocketing the difference as profit. This was an instant, existential
danger to a corporate America. Previously, corporate takeovers were extremely difficult.
Attempting to get two hundred million dollars to buy a
company required you to have two hundred million dollars on hand.
But now with the leveraged buyout, a group of yahoos

(10:15):
with a tiny amount of money could simply buy a
company for higher Vans stock price, loot it for parts,
and destroy it. This completely changed the balance of power
between shareholders and corporations. One of the best accounts of
this era is from the anthropologist Karen Hoe in her
book Liquidated in Ethnography of Wall Street. The book was
a product of the field work she did at a

(10:37):
Wall Street investment bank in the nineties. And I really
cannot emphasize this book enough. This book is incredible. Everyone
should read. It is a book that genuinely changed my life.
And one of the things that she talks about is
this moment, the moments of leverage buyouts, and the way
that it is constantly brought up by the people that

(10:57):
she is working with at this bank when she's wing
her which she's doing around topological field work. Everyone she
talks to talks about this moment where the corporate raids
really got going as the moment the shareholder revolution began. Now,
we talked earlier about how in post war America, the
corporation was a social entity with responsibilities to its workers

(11:21):
and country. For the shareholders running the new shareholder revolution,
corporations had exactly one job, getting them more money to
raise stock prices. They called this shareholder value. And now
the disciples of shareholder value were able to wield the
ability to simply buy companies out wholesale and bend them

(11:44):
to the ends of shareholder value directly. This is what
is known as the shareholder revolution. Now, do you know
what else is a revolution in the ways that y'
all experience capitalism and mass culture at our jobs? It
is the products and service is that support this podcast.

Speaker 3 (12:11):
We're back. The first thing that the corporate.

Speaker 4 (12:15):
Raiders and the disciples of shareholder value did when they
started to take over companies was look at the balance
sheets of a company and destroy everything that didn't immediately
look to the Wall Street goruls like they made money. Now,
what are the assets on a balance sheet that do
not immediately increase stock price? Because again they look like costs.

Speaker 6 (12:36):
Right.

Speaker 4 (12:37):
The two assets that don't immediately contribute are funds allocated
for research and developments and pensions, the darlings of the
workers and engineers who comprise the previous corporatist regimes.

Speaker 3 (12:49):
Mass layoffs followed.

Speaker 4 (12:51):
Companies were reduced to debt financing mechanisms for the corporate
raiders who took on the debt to acquire them were still.
As Karen Hie observes, even companies ran by the old
elite were forced to embrace the same methods the raiders
were using, because the only way to keep the raiders
from buying your company was by increasing your stock price,

(13:13):
And the only way to increase your stock price was
to appease the shareholder value fanatics. Control of corporate America
had shifted from the old managerial worker alliance to the
new shareholder value financiers. Now, the problem with these shareholder
value people running companies is that they are viscerally physically

(13:36):
incapable of long term planning. Don't take my word for it,
here's Karen hoe quote to actualize their central identity as
being immediately responsive to their own changing relationship with the market,
including employees, products, and so on. Their strategy is, in
a sense to have no strategy. Ironically, having no law

(14:00):
long term strategy is contradictory and potentially self defeating in
that investment banks often find themselves making drastic changes, only
to realize months or weeks later that those changes who
are unnecessary, premature, and extremely costly. For example, in chapter five,
I describe how investment bankers, in part because of their

(14:22):
access to sensitive proprietary information, are not only fired in
an instance, but must leave the physical premises of the
building within fifteen to thirty minutes. Given how crucial the
control of knowledge and the protection of inside information are
for Wall Street investment banks, it seems self defeating that
they do not praise any premium on loyalty, despite the

(14:45):
fact that firms try above all to enforce secrecy. They
accept and maintained this volatility in revolving door policy. To
make this clear, what carrot Ho is describing is that
investment banks, on the one hand, turn over like a
third of their staff every six months. And yet also

(15:07):
they are so reliant on the secrecy of this proprietary
information that they're using to make their investment decisions that
they are kicking the people. They are firing out of
the building in like fifteen minutes, so they don't have
time to plan or leak information. But again they're also
just firing these people on mass, so they're defeating the
entire point of their operations. These people cannot plan ahead.

(15:31):
And the reason that they cannot plan ahead isn't just
that they're sort of like naked disciples of pure increase
in stock price. What Liquidated describes is that these people
believe that they are effectively constantly reacting to near instantaneous
market changes. Right, they can't sort of make any kind

(15:54):
of long term plan because the market is the thing
that's making the plan, like the sort of mythical abstraction
of them. Market is what is doing all of the
actual allocations. So they just have to sort of like
sit there and have no plan and quote unquote respond
to what the market is doing. Now, large corporations have
always to some extent, acted as long term planning engines

(16:16):
because they have to Corporations have to do things like
research and development, They have to plan product lines, they
have to make long term decisions about resource allocation. The
shareholder value people are incapable of giving a shit about
any of this because all they care about is immediate
stock price movement, because they think that immediate stock price
movement reflects the will of the great efficiency planning engine

(16:39):
of the market. And you could begin to see here
why it would be a bad idea if these people,
who literally cannot create long term plans did something like,
for example, take control of the world's largest manufacturer of
commercial aircraft. Now, the shareholder value people also believe that

(17:02):
people are effectively interchangeable. And they believe this because and
this is a very key part of why the shareholder
value people and why these sort of finance people have
reshaped the world the way they do. They have reshaped
the world in their own image. And all of these
sort of investment bankers are interchangeable, right. All of these

(17:23):
fucking bankers are fired all of the time, and they
move from firm to firm, and it is fine for them.
But the thing is, you can't do this with the
design of your entire aircraft because unlike in finance, where
every single one of these clowns is really just a
replacement level bozo whose qualifications are being able to stumble
through the chain role and vaguely remember calculus, kiss, ask,

(17:46):
and play golf. Aerospace Engineers actually do a difficult job,
and it requires extraordinarily large bodies of embedded knowledge to
do this job correctly. Now, bringing in a bunch of
people who think you can just fucking replace aerospace engineers
will have no negative influences on Boeing in the future.
Pay no attention to the man behind the mirror. Everything

(18:07):
is fine. Do you know what else is fine? It
is the products and services that support this podcast. And
we are back the shareholder value fanatics. The investors who

(18:29):
are now taking control of Corporate America also believe that
mass firings make companies more valuable because it makes them
more efficient. They believe that offshoring makes a company more
valuable because it makes it more efficient. It doesn't actually
matter what the effect these moves have on the company
and its ability to produce products and its ability to

(18:49):
produce money. It doesn't matter at all, because that's how
the people who can control stock prices by buying the
stocks think the world works, and so if you do
these things, the stock price will go up. All quote
unquote creating shareholder value means is convincing a bunch of

(19:10):
dipshit quants working one hundred and twenty hours a week
that your company is valuable, so they buy it for
a higher price. And these are the people who reshape
American capitalism to their whims. Now importantly for our story,
they're also the people who ran the second phase of
the corporate rating era, the mergers and acquisitions boom through

(19:31):
the nineties and really to this day. Wall Street bankers
began to encourage companies to buy out other companies as
a mechanism of raising their stock price. This is, you know,
the acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. They also heavily push
merging companies together. In the nineties. The buzzerod behind this
was quote unquote synergy. Buying companies or merging companies could

(19:54):
quote leverage synergies between companies to grow shareholder value. Side
of the shareholder value fantasy lands, Most of these mergers
and acquisitions either did nothing to help the company if
the acquisitions were small, or were a complete disaster that
destroyed both companies. The bankers who orchestrated these mergers and
acquisitions didn't give a shit though, because they got paid

(20:17):
on commission. It did not matter to them what happened afterwards.
All that matters is that the deal goes through. And
this is where we returned to Boeing because in nineteen
ninety seven Boeing made an acquisition that would fuck the
company forever. They bought one of their longtime rivals, an
aircraft company known as McDonald douglas. Now hitherto, Boeing had

(20:40):
been relatively insulated from the shareholder revolution. McDonald Douglas, however,
was not. Its CEO was a man with the incredible
name Harry Stone Cipher. Stone Cipher is different from most
aerospace executives because he wasn't a McDonald douglas corporate man.
He came from Jack Welch's at a Rule Electric And

(21:01):
it's here we need to introduce the other mechanism through
which the shareholder revolution was realized, a new breed of
CEOs led by the man himself, Jack Welsh. Now we
are not going to spend an enormous amount of time
talking about Jack Welsh in this episode, because Hit Cools

(21:22):
one media podcast behind the Bassard has three hours of
episode about this man, which you should go listen to
their good The short version of it that we're going
to give here is that Jack Welsh is the man
who invented the bass layoff. He was one of the
first CEOs to figure out that, again, you could raise
stock prices by selling off profitable divisions and firing workers
who are making the company money because shareholders are ideologically

(21:43):
driven maniacs who would believe Welsh's manipulated balance sheets that
show the company was doing better than ever even as
it sold off all of its assets. He was also
one of the first people to start practicing mass outsourcing,
replacing workers directly employed by General Electric with contractors. Soon
he was outsourcing entire divisions. Offshoring followed Welsh move jobs

(22:06):
from highly paid and highly trained union employees in the
US to ununionized workers in places like India and Mexico.
I think people generally kind of understand that offshoing lowers quality,
but why does that actually happen. It's not about something
like the natural skill of the workers, which is the
way it can kind of be presented in these sort

(22:27):
of nationalist accounts. It is about the level of violence
that can be inflicted on people. In places like India
and Mexico and China, there is an extraordinary amount of
violence that can be inflicted on the working class. And
because of this violence, because of their ability to destroy
unions and because of their ability to force people into
poverty by taking their land, people get paid less money

(22:49):
to work faster. And those people who are being paid
less money to work faster with worse training are going
to be worse at a job than people who are
paid more to do a better slow. And Jack Welch
wants this. He wants to sell shitty, low cost products
because they're cheaper to make than anything that actually works.
The long term consequences of this are a disaster. Welch

(23:12):
drove General Electric, one of the greatest engines of American
capitalism for a century, into the ground. Even after a
massive government bailout in two thousand and eights, it barely
exists today. Harry Stone Cipher, the CEO of the company
Boeing was about to buy, said this about Jack Welch. Quote, Certainly,
Jack Welch is one of the great leaders in my mind,

(23:34):
and of course he was selected as CEO of the
century by Fortune magazine a couple years ago, and of
course about twenty years ago, that same magazine coined the
phrase neutron Jack, and of course they vilified him at
every turn out. Neutron Jack, by the way, refers to
a neutron bomb, because effectively what he was doing was
firing all the workers and leaving only the sort of
like physical capital assets, like leaving all of the machines intact,

(23:56):
which is what a neutron bomb is supposed to do.

Speaker 3 (23:59):
Let's go back to the UOTE quote.

Speaker 4 (24:01):
Jack had a style that was one of trying to
change the environment, not to just deal with the environment.
So he inspired people, so he certainly won. So Stone
Cipher is a disciple of Welsh. He immediately starts running
the Jack Watch playbook, and though and behold, McDonald douglas
was failing when Boeing bought it for fourteen billion dollars.
And again, like Boeing at this point controls like sixty

(24:23):
five percent of the commercial aviation market, McDonald douglas controls
like five. Right, so this should have been like Goliath
eating David for breakfast, but the merger didn't go as planned.
Instead of the massive Boeing running the tidy McDonald douglas.
McDonald douglas executives effectively hijacked Boeing and installed themselves in

(24:44):
positions of power. Stone Cipher and his Padre shareholder value
fanatics began to consolidate their position and drive out the
previous Boeing regime. The capstone of this project was moving
Boeing headquarters from Seattle, where it had been since William E.
Boeing founded the company in nineteen sixteen, to Chicago as
a way to shift the physical center of power of

(25:06):
the company away from Boeing's engineers and workers and towards
the McDonald douglas finance goals. Then they began to run
the Jack Walsh playbook on Boeing in earnest. Every single
account of Stonecipher's takeover that I've written quotes this exact
same line quote. When people say I changed the culture
of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run

(25:27):
like a business rather than a great engineering firm. And
what stone Cipher is really talking about here, and what
everyone is really saying when they talk about, you know,
the culture shift Boeing in this period, what this really
is is a change in the balance of powers between
the engineers and workers who actually make the planes and
the finance schools who owned the company. Stone Cipher wanted

(25:48):
to crush the engineers and workers so he could run
Boeing like a business. And when he says like a business,
he doesn't actually mean run it like a business. He
means run the company like a finance guy. Finance guys
don't build planes, which is what Boeing had previously been doing.
Finance guys create shareholder value, which is to say that
they make stock prices go up. So if you're just

(26:11):
trying to raise stock prices, you don't actually need to
make an airplane. You can outsource the different parts of
building the airplane to a bunch of random shops around
the world who work extremely fast, don't have much of
an idea of what they're doing, and do a terrible job.
Long term. Of course, this is an absolute disaster. There
are very good reasons to keep the production line for
something as complicated as commercial aircraft in house efficiency, consolidation

(26:34):
of knowledge, quality control, et cetera, et cetera. But outsourcing
is great for his stock price, and it's the Jack
Welch model, selling shitty products for cheap works, kind of
if you're General Electric making a light bulb. But when
Boeing uses these same principles to build an aircraft, people.

Speaker 3 (26:51):
Begin to die.

Speaker 4 (26:52):
And in the next episode we are going to tell
that story how Boeing killed three hundred and forty six pemple.

(27:19):
Welcome to take it out here a podcast about things
happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Leo Long. When we
last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught
up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the nineteen
nineties and bought out its rival McDonald douglas, after which
McDonald douglas CEO and Jack Welsh disciple Harry stone Zeipher

(27:40):
effectively launched an administrative coup and sees control of the company.
Now stone Ceipher wasn't able to hold onto power for
long because he was very quickly forced to resign after
he had what CNN describes as a quote improper relationship
with a female executive. So things are going great for
every one. I'm realizing reading the script that I should

(28:03):
mention it wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that
he was having a relationship with one of his subordinates,
which is also not great. But it yeah, it wasn't good,
and he gets kicked out of media almost immediately. But
by the time he was forced out, his model for
how Boeing should work going forwards, you know, the layoffs,
the outsourcing, slashing the research and development budget, and above

(28:24):
all taking power from engineers and giving it to the
shareholder value fanatics had already been embedded at the core
of Boeing's management structure. Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in
Courts two decades on. Perhaps the most lasting consequence if
the change in culture has been in Boeing's approach to
building aircraft. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have

(28:49):
served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process
of plane development.

Speaker 3 (28:54):
Oh boy did it not.

Speaker 4 (28:56):
Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago,
the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled.
Boeing would not actually announce even the plans for a
new plane until two thousand and three with the seven
to eighty seven Dreamliner. Throughout this time, Boeing was led
by its first chairman without a traditional aviation background, James McNerney.

(29:20):
James mcnerne had instead spent almost two decades in management
at General Electric. Now he was following a tried and
tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was
applied to upgrading the seven thirty seven, which had become
the victim of its own success. In its five decade history,
airlines have cumulatively ordered more than ten thousand of the plane,

(29:41):
an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane
replacing it with the next big thing, Boeing often to
keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to
fit still more passengers. And this is how you get
planes falling out of the sky instead of you know,
doing the normal thing, which is putting money into building

(30:01):
a new airplane, which is you know expensive in the
short run. And again remember that the finance goals are
now in charge for these people. The only thing that
exists is the short run in immediate stock price. So
instead of doing that, management went, eh, we already have
this plane, were first designed in the fucking sixties. Let's
keep modifying that. And this this is going to kill

(30:23):
an extremely large number of people. Now, the seven thirty
seven again came out originally in nineteen sixty seven. In
the two thousands, in the century, the millennia, the two thousands,
Boeing begins to design a new version of this plane
from the last millennium, called the seven thirty seven Max.

(30:48):
For shareholders. Again, this is this is a great idea.
It's not just that, you know, building new planes is
expensive and this is cheaper because you're not spending the
money on building a new plane. There's a bunch of
other advantages for Boeing for this, and one of the
biggest is that you could tell everyone from you know,
the FAA to the airlines that the pilots that hey,

(31:09):
this is just a regular seven thirty seven. It's it's
just the same plane. You don't need to like retrain
your pilots to learn how our new systems work because
there's really like no new systems and that you know,
that costs money, so they don't want to do it.
You don't need to have the FAA do the regulatory
shit they would do for a new plane, or even
like a substantial change to like the original plane, which

(31:30):
you know, again costs money and time that Boeing does
not want to, you know, do. The problem is that,
you know. I tried to find a sort of delicate
way to say this, and then I realized you simply
should not do it like that. The problem is that
the seven thirty seven Max is a plane that is
trying to kill you. If you know anything about the story,
you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is

(31:52):
trying to kill you, I'm talking about the Maneuvering Characteristics
Augmentation System or MCASTS, the piece of software that directly
cause the crashes, and to some extent, like I am
talking about mcasts. Well, we'll get into it in a second.
It absolutely did kill all those people. But I think
there's a problem with a lot of the way the
story has been covered, which is that a lot of

(32:15):
the coverage of this has been obsessively focused on the
software problem, specifically on MCAST. And I understand why people
focus on the software. It is the immediate cause of
the crash, But the real problem with the seven thirty
seven Max is that the actual physical plane is also
trying to kill you, and the software MCAST was developed

(32:36):
to again stop the plane from trying to kill you.
Now that software is also trying to kill you. But
both the software and the physical plane are trying to
burdy you. So you know what do I mean when
I say the physical plane is trying to kill you.
For this, I'm going to turn to an actual engineer
and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably the best piece

(32:57):
in the technical details of this whole problem that I've
seen for I Triple E met Spectrum. I Triple E
is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They know
what they're talking about spectrums their magazine. So the initial problem,
as Travis explains, was this, The original seven thirty seven
was designed for nineteen sixties engines. Modern airplanes have way

(33:19):
bigger engines because, due to a bunch of engineering stuff
that we're not going to get into here, large engines
are more efficient than small engines, and this is a
huge deal for aircraft which consume unbelievably large quantities of
extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but again expensive
option would have been to design a new aircraft to

(33:41):
replace the seven thirty seven that is actually designed to
accommodate the new giant engines. The chief skate option would
be just bolt the new giant engines onto the old
plane design. Now, the problem is that the only way
to do this is to move the engines forward. The
engines on the seven thirty seven are, you know, under

(34:01):
the wing, which is like the normal thing, But the
engines would no longer fit under the way because they
were too large, and moving the engines forward changes where
the thrust is coming from. Here's Travis quote. Now, when
pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have
a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this,

(34:24):
as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad.
I mean airplanes and Trumps talks about this. Airplanes do
kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane
does it way way more than it's supposed to. So
here's where things, unfortunately, get a bit technical. So the
nose going up increases something called the angle of attack.

(34:44):
I'm going to read a description of this.

Speaker 3 (34:46):
Fully.

Speaker 4 (34:47):
Understanding exactly how the angle of attack works is not
enormously important to understanding the story. But you know, the
crux of this story is angle of attack centers not working,
so we have to explain it a little bit.

Speaker 3 (34:59):
Quote.

Speaker 4 (35:00):
The angle of attack is the angle between the wings
and the airflow over the wings. So if you want
to understand exactly what this is, go read the piece.
The important thing for our purposes is that if the
angle of attack gets too high, right, if the planes
are a level and it's flying normally, the angle of
attack is like zero, but the angle attack can get

(35:20):
higher as like you know, if you're not flying like level,
and if the angle of attack gets too high, the
plane stalls, and this is one of the ways that
you crash a plane. Worse still, in the seven thirty
seven max, basically, the engine casings themselves can at high
angles of attack, work as a wing and produced lift,
and the lift they produce is well ahead of the

(35:43):
wings center of lift. Meeting the engine casings will cause
the seven thirty seven at a high angle of attack
to go to a higher angle of attack. This is
aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an
aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to
go further into the stall. This is called quote dynamic instability,

(36:07):
and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic fighter jets
are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me let
me let me try to kind of like explain the
sort of crux of this well, A, they've they've managed
to position the engines in such a way the engines
can act as a wing, which is insane.

Speaker 3 (36:24):
And B.

Speaker 4 (36:25):
Once you get to a high enough angle of attack,
which again, the higher the angle of attack you're at,
the more risk you're out installing, the plane starts trying
to kill you by making the angle of attack increase.
It is a feedback loop that means when you short
the stall, the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are
not supposed to do this. Again, and I cannot eplicize
this enough quote. This is called dynamic instability. And the

(36:47):
only airplanes which exhibit this characteristic fighter jets, are also
fitted with ejector seats. So again, this is the thing
that is dangerous enough that you get like regular, regular
civilian airplanes are not supposed to do this, they do
it on fighter jets because fighter jets are doing things
that planes aren't supposed to do. And you can leave
the plane if it fucks up it does something like this.

(37:08):
And the worst part about this is that you can
kick off this problem by trying to get the plane
going faster, like while it's going slow. What part of
flying a plane does it start slow, is kind of
at a high angle of attack, and then has to
go faster. Oh wait, take off the thing you have
to do every single time we fly. This is fucking batshit.

(37:29):
No one would intentionally design a new airliner like this, right,
No one, not even modern I mean like Boeings, like
other airplanes, like even the modern ones. Even the Dreamliner
doesn't fucking do this right, It's completely nuts. The only
way that you could get something like this is as
a pure product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines

(37:51):
onto a plane from the sixties, because you are too
cheap to try to do anything new. But you know
who isn't afraid of doing new things? It's the products
and says to support this podcast. We've never gotten a
Boeing ad, but if it was gonna happen, I guess
it'd probably happened now, dear God. But instead of you know,

(38:17):
dealing with this problem by either making a new fucking
plane or figuring out some way to not have the
engines literally become wings, Boeing was like, ah, fuck it,
We'll just build some software that pushes the plane's nose
down if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction
to hearing, let's put software on the plane that makes

(38:39):
it fly towards the ground. Is wait, that's a terrible idea.
You have the right idea. These people did not have
the right idea. But sunningly, there's like a version of
this system that isn't like lethally unsafe. But com Pubbing
did not design a version of this that is even
remotely safe. I don't know if that's more egregious than

(39:01):
designing an aircraft that has that amic CA instability, but
the way they implement this is egregious. They decided in
their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on
a single sensor. And we need to note before we
start this, so this is we're gonna be talking about
angle attack sensors. They're kind of just like pieces of
metal that stick out the side of the plane and

(39:23):
they break a lot, and they break a lot because
flying a plane is like the worst thing you can
possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't involve leaving
the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean. Yeah, so
here's from the Seattle Times, which the Scale Times actually
because you know, Boeing has traditionally been in Seattle like
does a lot of very very good coverage on this.
They have good sources. Yeah, from the Shade Times quote,

(39:45):
the most controversial deal of the MCAST design has been
the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor of
both of the deadly flights. Everything started with a faulty
sensor in the second crash in Ethiopia. The data trace
strongly suggested the sensor was deshortened an instant, likely by
a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one on
either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially after

(40:08):
discarding the g forces a trigger, use both angle of
attack sensors. The thinking was that requiring input from two
angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed,
the system would not function. Now, the article goes on
to talk about how their justification for for why they
only use one sensor, and you know, they talked about

(40:28):
the safety and simplicity if not wanting to add complexity
to a system. You know, because if you have two
things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than
having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind
of sounds reasonable at first glance, but first off, if
your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball
to stalling, and this software system to make it not

(40:48):
do that is so important you can't risk it not
being on. If one of the two sensors breaks, then
maybe you shouldn't have you designed your plane like this.
And second, this entire system violates every design principle that
you see in sort of like Boeing's Good Aircraft Design
for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go
back to that Spectrum article because it lays out how

(41:10):
this kind of thing is supposed to work. Quote, there
were two sets of angle of attack sensors and two
sets of pe hot tubes, one on either side of
the fuselage. Normal usage is to have the set on
the pilot side feed the instruments to the pilot side,
and the set on the copilot side feed the instrument
to the copilot side. That gives a state of natural

(41:31):
redundancy and instrumentation that can be easily cross checked by
either pilot. If the copilot thinks his airspeed indicator is
acting up, he can look over at the pilot's airspeed
indicator and see if it agrees. If not, both pilot
and copilot can engage in a bit of triage, determine
which instrument is profane and which is sacred. Now, this

(41:51):
is great engineering, right, It is simple, it is redundant,
and it allows humans to sort out issues, you know,
And like, this is a product of what aerospace engineering
used to be, you know, and we still have this
in the world. But the fact that there are a
bunch of very very good engineers who have spent an
enormously long time trying to work out how this kind

(42:12):
of stuff should work. Modern Boeing was like, well, you know,
instead of of our system where multiple centers can be
cross referenced by pilots, you know, and the pilots can
then disable the system. Fuck that, what if we insaid,
use a single sensor that can't be overridden. This is
a complete violation of Boeing design principle. The thing about
Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed to be like

(42:33):
automated shit running in the background that pilots don't know
about or don't know how to turn off. The pilot
is supposed to be in complete control of the plane,
you know, the old joke, And I mean I remember
hearing this like every once in a while like when
I was a kid, was that Airbus planes, which you know,
Airbus obviously is a rival to Boeing. Airbus planes were
quote diet by wire because you know, they didn't give
you control. The documentary that Frontline did called Boeing's Fatal Flaw,

(42:57):
which I didn't really use the source for this, but
I kind I just this is this is the one
part that I remember from when I watched this in
twenty nineteen about the crash, described how like pilots trusted
that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing, so
there would be a way to kill the system. And
again there's something I remember like from talking to people
growing up, you know, so these pilots figure that there'd
be a way to kill the system. Those voices a

(43:17):
plane down and they were trying to find it, like
they're trying to figure out how to turn the system
off in the manual when they died, because they didn't
realize the plane wasn't designed by Boeing engineers, was designed
by Boeing shareholders. Going back to the process on how
this was added, the stated reason for again why you
don't want a second sensor is that it the theory

(43:39):
like adds complexity by adding a second sensor. But you know,
that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering, like
of engineering in general, but also like from the perspective
of the engineering that the rest of the plane works on, right,
the rest of the plane works on different principles than this,
and it works well. And it's something that Travis describes

(44:01):
as being a product of the destruction of Bowie's collective
knowledge base, but something I don't know, I don't know
to what extent, Travis, He's kind of writing about this,
but I'm not sure that a lot of the people
writing about this like understand that, like this was the point, right,
destroying this kind of collective knowledge. This is something that

(44:21):
was done deliberately, right, This was the inevitable sort of
product of Boeing management trying to make the company quote
unquote run like a business. They were trying to destroy
the interpersonal bonds that create the system of collective knowledge,
and they were trying to take power out of the
hands that the people who had that collective knowledge and
put it into the hands of people who you could

(44:42):
pay for really cheap and exploit more who did not
have access to that kind of information. Right, This is
a case for like, yeah, you're putting power in the
hands of software engineers instead of sort of aviation engineers
speaking of I don't know, taking power out of the
hands of the consumer and giving it to a corporation.

Speaker 3 (44:58):
Here's ads. Now, if you're trying.

Speaker 4 (45:12):
To make the company quote unquote run like a business,
what else would you do?

Speaker 3 (45:18):
Oh?

Speaker 4 (45:19):
Yeah, you would not tell the pilots about this new
system that you've added to your airplane, because if you
talk about the system, everyone from you know, the FAA
to the airlines of the pilots unions might realize that
this is not the same plane as the seven thirty seven,
and that would require all sorts of stuff like again
re certifying the plane, trading pilots on simulators of your

(45:41):
new plane which.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Is not the old plane.

Speaker 4 (45:44):
It requires all sorts of stuff that would have very
well could have prevented these crashes. But you know that
stuff all costs money, and Boeing doesn't fucking want to
spend money trying to make sure that its planes don't crash.
So when they moved on to this version of like
the seven thirty seven max right, pilots famously got I

(46:05):
think half an hour of iPad training and that maybe
I might have been an hour of iPad training, and
that training that they got on their iPad again, not
on a simulator, didn't even have any information about the
MCAST system that killed all these people. And the product
of this was that on October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen,

(46:25):
a seven thirty seven Max flying from Jakarta crashed as
the pilot was, you know, physically unable to fight the
control stick. And that that's another thing that's going on
with this, you know, with his decision to put Howard
in the hands of software or not pilots, is that
MCAST is also physically exerting control over the pilot stick
and these people are trying to fight it, and they're

(46:46):
not able to fight it enough to stop the plane
from tipping down and crashing into the ground. And Boeing
runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this pilot
who was not white, for this error to try to,
you know, cover up the fact that they fucking did this.
And this maybe would have worked, except a few months later,

(47:09):
Ethiopia Air Flight three ZO two went down and also
killed everyone on board, and you know, all told displayed
the Boeing seventy seven Max killed three hundred and forty
six people. The Seattle Times, which broke a lot of
the initial story, said quote. A variety of employees have
described internal pressure to advance the Max to completion as

(47:29):
Boeing hurried to catch up with the hot selling a
three twenty from rival Airbus. Mark Rabin, an engineer who
had flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said
there was always talk about how delays of even one
day can cause substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to
stay in line. Rebin said it was all about loyalty.
Rebin said, I had managers tell me, don't rock the boat.

(47:52):
You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find
this very funny because again, part of the whole jack
Well strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to
like Boeing as a company. But you have to be
loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives, you know,
have all of the power in this company and they
want to make sure they can just ring out every
single last drop of profit. And if you upset them,

(48:14):
they're going to fire you. And so the product of
this is this process that we've seen, which is that
this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what
happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course the
seven thirty seven Max continues to have problems right Earlier
this year, famously, the fucking door flew off inn Alaska
air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe I mean,

(48:38):
just like all of the things that you would have
expected from Boeing outsourcing shit to overwork and undertrain contractors.
Now several of those whistle blowers have died. When I
was originally doing this, I was considering basically making this
episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I,

(48:59):
I don't know, I don't really have any more information
than anyone else about these deaths. So I'm just going
to put on the record that if I go out here,
it was murder.

Speaker 3 (49:10):
Yeah, And I.

Speaker 4 (49:10):
Think the more important story is this one, because I
think I think at this point everyone everyone kind of
knows that something is wrong with Boeing, And every day
we're getting more and more sort of specifics about every
single part of this production process that you know, used
to be entirely run by highly paid while at least

(49:31):
sort of highly paid and highly trained employees that's now
being run by a bunch of non unionized, underpaid contractors
who are producing shitty equipments. But what we're looking at
here is Boeing coming apart somewhat more famously. I think
that the rescue flight is like being prepped, but a
bunch of astronauts have been stranded on the space station

(49:53):
because Boeing's launch craft was like veering off course. There
are a bunch of issues with it, and so NASA
just was just like, you know, fuck this. And the
most hideously galling part of this entire story is that
the craft that's going to pick up the astronauts is
made by fucking SpaceX, because we have reached a point
where an Elon Musk company is somehow designing rockets that

(50:16):
are you know, like designing spacecraft that are less likely
to fucking explode than Boeing. That is, that is an
unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think we need
to ask who killed these people, because it's not just Boeing.
Jack Welsh killed these people. Michael Milken killed these people.

(50:39):
Ronald Reagan killed these people, and in a way all
of us killed them because none of us stopped them.
And these people could have been stopped at any point
in the process. From Reagan to Stonecipher to Kelly or Berg,
we could have stopped these people. To quote for a
final time, David Graeber, the ultimate hidden truth of this
world is that it is something that we make and

(51:01):
could just as easily make differently. I add only this,
If we don't make the world differently, people are going
to die. Why should these murderers be allowed to run
the world. We know how to make planes. They don't
fall out of the sky. The people who are fucking
running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be enormously controversial
to say that the people who know how to build

(51:23):
airplanes should control how we fucking design and build airplanes.
In the nineteenth and twentieth century, this idea was called
worker self management, and it was considered so dangerous that
from Chile that sheop us to a jury at a
Hungary to Korea, capitalist communists and fascists alight killed anyone
who dared believe it. But now our choices are stark.
We either let these people continue to drop planes out

(51:44):
of the sky as the world, burns in our cities,
sink into the sea, but we do something about it.

Speaker 3 (51:50):
So what are you going to do?

Speaker 6 (52:12):
Hey?

Speaker 2 (52:13):
This is it could happen here. I am Robert Evans.
This is a podcast about things falling apart. Most of
this episode is going to be me and James Stout
discussing the disaster in North Carolina and elsewhere as a
result of Hurricane Helene. But before we get into that,
and we'll be talking largely about what this means for
your own preparations for future disasters, what we can kind

(52:35):
of learn initially from everything that's been happening. I wanted
to start with a few minutes of us talking to
Margaret Kiljoy, who is on the ground in the Asheville
area doing disaster relief work right now. And obviously the
audio here is not up to our usual quality, but
it's only about five minutes, and then you will get
James and I talking crystal clear into your ears. So

(52:58):
here is Margaret.

Speaker 5 (53:00):
Hi.

Speaker 7 (53:00):
Everyone, I just got on the ground about two hours
ago and immediately have been basically running around with my
van delivering food to different places just because van did
van thing.

Speaker 5 (53:13):
And it's I mean, it's intense.

Speaker 7 (53:17):
Everyone is having an intense time, but also at the
same time, there's like, you know, more people are out
walking around and riding bikes, and you know, there's hundreds
of people gathering at every place that's passing out food
and water, and there's a very kind of community spirit
happening right now.

Speaker 5 (53:32):
I'm actually recording this from up in Marshall.

Speaker 7 (53:36):
Which is a small town immediately north of Asheville that
also has a mutual Aid distribution hub.

Speaker 5 (53:41):
We just came up here to drop stuff off, and
even in the twenty minutes that I've been here.

Speaker 7 (53:45):
Other people have come with pickup trucks full of harm
reduction supplies and diapers and just all the things that
people need. And everyone is trapped on basically little islands.
Right There's a very different style of flood than when
you have like a coastal flood. And what's happened is
that the houses that are near the river have been
destroyed and the roads a lot of them have been destroyed,

(54:06):
and a lot of them went underwater for a long time.
It's all the infrastructure is down, but many of the houses,
at least as I record this, seem to be intact
and then doing well and what it is that everyone
is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage,
or even cell signal, although cell signal is kind of
the first thing to come back, and power is starting

(54:26):
to filter back in, and we're hoping that some places
are maybe getting watered. But one of the things that's
kind of come up is that, again, because it's in
the mountains, it's a very different setup, it's a very
different culture and community. And one of the things that's
happened is that, I mean a lot of people have wells,
and so immediately the problem has been more about distribution
of water and also getting generators to.

Speaker 5 (54:47):
People who have well so that they can pump.

Speaker 7 (54:50):
You know, a friend of mine got a generator pretty
quickly and you know, pull a thousand gallons out of
their well right away to get and distribute around. And
there's you know, just while I was waiting outside my
friend's house, someone drove by and asked us if we
needed water, and then asked us if we knew about
each of the neighbors and who did and didn't have water.

Speaker 2 (55:13):
Yeah, And I mean, one of the things that makes
me think of is like having the generator, having the
well that's great, the kind of thing that maybe people
wouldn't think about as much as having the ability to
put a thousand gallons of water in something. Yes, totally,
it seems like it was also crucial and is probably
would have been lowered down the list for a lot
of people. But there's really no replacing it when you

(55:34):
need it, totally.

Speaker 5 (55:36):
And but one of the things that again, I mean,
I'm not sureing to say that everything's fine here, it's
very much fine.

Speaker 7 (55:41):
For example, the only federal response that anyone is talking
about is that ice is already in the area, So
before anyone had been given food by the federal government,
they have sent ice to detain people and question people.

Speaker 5 (55:52):
At least that is the word on the ground.

Speaker 7 (55:55):
Obviously, you know, details and truths come later when you're
in a crisis situation, but we do know that ice
is on the ground, and no one I've talked to
has seen much in the way a federal response besides
law enforcement. But one of the things that's happened here
is that a lot of people have pickup trucks in Appalachia,
and so a lot of people have you know, you
call them water buffalos, the big water tanks that you

(56:16):
can put in a pickup truck or a trailer. I
definitely left this feeling, you know, my first you know,
I drove with my van full of stuff and on
the highway and being passed by pickup trucks pulling flatbeds
full of palettes of water and things like that. But
then even yeah, in the city, people are driving around
in trucks and filling them up with water and delivering them.

(56:37):
But don't get me wrong, yeah, if you're preparing, think
about how to deliver water. Even some of the things
for me, for example, the city government has been doing
some things and there are places where people can go
and fill up water containers, but they don't have the
water containers. So the people who were prepared by having
a couple five gallon toats in their basement are in
a much better position. And so that's like some of
the things that I brought.

Speaker 5 (56:58):
For some of my friends.

Speaker 7 (56:59):
It is litergally just a couple five gallon water containers
so that people.

Speaker 5 (57:02):
Can go get them filled up.

Speaker 7 (57:04):
Now.

Speaker 2 (57:04):
And obviously you're talking about when we're thinking about the
places that people are able to drive around, where the
places that you've been reaching are hit pretty hard. But
we also then have these more isolated mountain communities that
both seem to have suffered a lot more physical damage,
although that's not entirely clear at this moment, but are
certainly not accessible in.

Speaker 3 (57:24):
The same way.

Speaker 2 (57:24):
And I think that's one of those things we're still
going to be waiting to hear, like how extreme it is.
But like we talk a little bit on the episode
before this about people using burrows to deliver food and
water in places where vehicles can't even reach.

Speaker 3 (57:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 7 (57:39):
Yeah, And one of the things also, you know, one
of the things that went out on the mutual aid
list that I'm on is people are saying, hey, if
you have your ATV, bring down your ATV, you know,
and that makes complete sense if you the listener are
listening to this, don't just drive down with supplies and
if you are plugged into a mutual age to.

Speaker 3 (57:58):
Just roll to Ashville in your palan arts.

Speaker 7 (58:01):
Yeah yeah, but but yeah, no, one of the hardest
things has been getting the supplies, you know. I mean,
the disaster relief is just it's just logistics, and the
same way that war is just logistics.

Speaker 3 (58:13):
You know.

Speaker 7 (58:13):
It's like, how do you get things from one place
to another. And what people have set up is all
of these you know, you centralize the acquisation of supplies
and then you decentralize getting them out.

Speaker 5 (58:24):
But yeah, people have been working.

Speaker 7 (58:26):
I'm going to know more about what people have been
doing to get things out, but I've already talked with
people or heard from people who you know, we're getting
rescued by people with handsaws, right. And then one of
the main things that people are doing is that there's
chainsaw crews, mutual aid chainsaw crews going around. One of
the big asks that I came with a lot of
was bar and chain oil, you know. And and it's

(58:48):
a little bit hard because gas is also until just recently,
gas is starting to come back online now, but getting
gas for a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle
has been tricky.

Speaker 5 (58:59):
But people been working on that too.

Speaker 3 (59:01):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (59:02):
Well, Margaret, I'm not going to take up more of
your time while you try to help in the wake
of a disaster, but thank you for being on the ground.
Good luck to you and everyone else who's out there.
We will be hearing more from you and more about
the specifics of what's happened in North Carolina and elsewhere
in the wake of the hurricane next week. So thank

(59:23):
you and thank everybody there.

Speaker 3 (59:24):
Good luck.

Speaker 5 (59:25):
Yeah, thank you.

Speaker 3 (59:27):
That is done.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
I am now going to move on with our previously
recorded episode.

Speaker 3 (59:33):
Here is James and Me.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Oh, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
where it's happened for some chuck of our listeners who
are probably not listening right now because as we record
this on Monday, the.

Speaker 3 (59:50):
First technically a Tuesday, we're just.

Speaker 2 (59:53):
Now getting word that internet has come back on, like
mobile internet has come back on to parts of Asheville
and North Carolina that were in communicado for several days
after Hurricane Eleen tore through. You've heard something about this,
I'm hoping. I'm different things from friends about how much
news attention there seems to be on this. I'm seeing

(01:00:15):
it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social
But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a
photo I came across right before getting on here where
there was a memorial marker for the nineteen sixteen flood
in Ashville that was knocked out by what used to
be a road and was now nothing but rushing water
and mud.

Speaker 3 (01:00:34):
Beautiful three out of four.

Speaker 2 (01:00:36):
Highways into Ashville are down. I heard yesterday from people
who were coming in and doing an AID drop that
what had been previously a thirty minute drive took twelve
and a half hours. From the state of the roads
and the number of checkpoints and stuff. All of this
is pretty common stuff for a natural disaster. Obviously amped

(01:00:59):
up in civil because this disaster was correspondingly worse than
even most natural disasters tend to.

Speaker 3 (01:01:05):
Be, you know, yes, in this country. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:01:09):
I was just looking through, just doing a little bit
of googling before we got on, and I found a
Reddit post from the Asheville subreddit from two years ago
saying Asheville is apparently the number one city in the
United States to be a climate haven, according to the CNBC,
although that article it just made the list of best
climate cities, but the original post has been deleted. I

(01:01:31):
don't know if that was earlier or as a result
of this, but that is one of like the side
stories here is that Ashville is not We're not talking
about one of these coastal cities in Florida that everyone
is known as doomed for forever, right, We're not talking
about New Orleans, which lovely city, great history, doomed as fuck,
and everyone has known it for quite a while. We're

(01:01:52):
talking about places that are many miles inland and that
something like two thousand feet elevation.

Speaker 3 (01:01:58):
Yeah, it's certainly not below sea or even at sea level.

Speaker 2 (01:02:02):
Yeah, it's an inland, mountainous community. It's just not the
kind of threat that people are used to having here. Yeah,
and the devastation has been pretty total, like whole communities
wiped out. I think the death toll from the county
Ashville is in Let me let me pull this up
to make sure I'm not getting it wrong. I've just

(01:02:22):
now pulled up a story from thirty minutes ago on
the Independent that says, yeah, at least one hundred and
forty three people have been killed. Yeah, that's a total
death toll from Helene forty people in Buncombe County, where
Ashville is six hundred people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper
has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped

(01:02:43):
off the map. Kind of the first thing that I noticed,
you know, outside of the footage coming in was friends
of mine. Because I've spent a decent amount of time
in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including
our own Margaret Kiljoy, who has a lot more friends
in Asheville, and I was in a couple of different
signal loops where people were trying to contact their people,

(01:03:05):
and there was a line from one of the folks
I was chatting with who had reached out to multiple
people in the area and said, I have not heard
anything from anyone in Nashville in hours. Nothing is getting
in and nothing is getting out, And that seems to
be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional.

(01:03:25):
Starlink doesn't work very well when the weather's really bad.
SAT phones seem to have had some efficacy. I know
some people were getting messages in and out, but they
weren't super reliable because SAT phones also are reliant upon
climactic conditions. Right, It's certainly better than just trusting your
normal cell phone, but it's not going to do great
when you've got a fucking hurricane dumping half an ocean

(01:03:50):
on your head. So that was the first thing I
was thinking about, because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness,
and we talk a lot about having stuff that would
have been useful in this that people who were prepared
and had water set aside and food set aside were
certainly in a better situation, because those both very quickly
became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story of

(01:04:10):
an old folks home that was completely cut off from
the outside and didn't have enough water or food. Hoping
that story ends as well as possible, but there's a
lot of stories like that. But even outside of that,
there were people who were prepared, who had food and water,
but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their

(01:04:30):
house because the water just came in so quickly there
was no chance to really get much other than maybe
a bag. And when you're stuck up on there, like
what are you going to do if your SAT phone
or you don't have a SAT phone and that doesn't
work and there's no internet and there's no cell service. Well,
that's why we're going to start today talking about ham radios,

(01:04:52):
because those motherfuckers there's actually a I'll see if I
can pull it up through this like that has been
the most reliable way for people in the area to
communicate with the outside world, because if it is possible
to communicate using technology, you can do it with Ham. Yeah, right,
Like that's just that's just how Ham radios be.

Speaker 8 (01:05:12):
Yeah, they don't need to see the sky, like yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:05:16):
They don't give a fuck it.

Speaker 2 (01:05:18):
If there is any way to communicate via technology with
people in a disaster, you will be able to do
it with a Ham radio. So let's chat about that, James.
You have more experience with this than I do. This
is something I have been working on getting into, but
I certainly am not very knowledgeable on the matter. So
we'll start like, what what do people need to think
about when it comes to like actually getting set up

(01:05:40):
to communicate with a Ham radio, Because there's definitely you
could just go buy a Boofang or something like that,
Like you can get ahead. They're not expensive. This is
actually a very affordable thing to have right now. Kind
of the most recommended model is the UV nine R Pro,
which is eight watt instead of five and waterproof, That's what.

Speaker 8 (01:05:59):
I was going to say. And you can charge it
off USBC, which is really nice.

Speaker 2 (01:06:03):
Yeah, they're what like thirty something bucks. Yeah, they're like
you can get them cheaper in bulk.

Speaker 8 (01:06:10):
I think you steel to get them cheaper on Alley Express,
but seems like they're kind of hanging them up in
charging customs, so you end up not getting them cheaper.

Speaker 3 (01:06:17):
Yeah. So yeah, for real basic stuff.

Speaker 8 (01:06:19):
I think you do need to be licensed to operate
these radios on certain bands, right, yes, And that's something
that you you can, I believe in a case of
emergency you can.

Speaker 3 (01:06:29):
You can operate on any band.

Speaker 2 (01:06:31):
No one's going to arrest you for a legal youth
unlicensed used to a ham radio if you're trying to
get people rescued from a flood. Yeah, right, Like that said,
you should not be learning how to use a ham
radio when you're hiding on your roof.

Speaker 8 (01:06:45):
Yeah yeah, yeah, Like this is like you know the
people who buy guns and put them under their bed
and never shoot them and expect to be right because
the fucking marksman in a crisis or by medical gear
and never train with it again. Right, these things you
want to practice before. So we use these that bought it.
We use radios to communicate. When they were higher numbers
in Cucumber, my friends and I put a massive antenna

(01:07:07):
on the roof of the youth center where we were.
I know a lot of listeners have been out there
and they've probably seen antenna that we put up, and
then I was using a radio on my truck, and
then we also all had personal radios, right because cell
phone signal is crap out there, and it was the
only way for us to communicate and it worked really well.
So the things that you need if you want to
get started in this first of all, some kind of
education or a license. There are tons of local groups.

(01:07:31):
Hand people fucking love to be ham radio people. They
love to talk about hand radio. They love to teach
you to do ham radio so like, and it's not
like a hobby, you know, firearms people love to talk
about firearms, but lots of them are really toxic people.
I haven't found that hand radio is premised on talking
to people all over the place and often very.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
Few people killed with ham radio.

Speaker 8 (01:07:50):
Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. But if you can find
a local club, but that's a great way to start.
They can clean you in on stuff. But I think
to begin with your need someone to talk to, right, Like,
if you want to practice with your ham radio, you
need to be talking to other people on it. So
you can just go on to different bands, different repeaters
and do that, or you can get your friends and

(01:08:10):
study together.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Yeah, get your license together.

Speaker 2 (01:08:13):
I too bow things, you know, Yeah, give one to
somebody who you live close to but not right next to,
and work on it with them.

Speaker 3 (01:08:21):
Yeah, work on like, oh how far this workd you know?

Speaker 8 (01:08:23):
Like I am one of the former guests for the
podcast James Corderra from Board the Kindness. He and I
were doing that. Not so do't go talking to each
other from our houses, but yeah you can. You can
certainly get into this pretty cheap. I have a business license,
which is another option for people. I would suggest first
getting your ham operator's lecense and then going from there.

Speaker 2 (01:08:44):
Yeah, that's it's called a radio technicians license, right, Like
that's the most basic because there's three levels.

Speaker 3 (01:08:49):
If I'm not a mistaken Yeah, I believe. So it's
been a while since I did that.

Speaker 2 (01:08:54):
Yeah, I think it's Radio Technicians General and then Amateur
extra if.

Speaker 8 (01:08:58):
The notes, Yeah, all right, it still And then in
terms of cost, like the size of your antenna is
what's going to determine, you know, how far you can
transmit and how you can receive along with like line
of sight, right, it's about side just as big as
one possible, So you want to be a size queen
like you can get yourself a really big antenna, I
would say, if you're using those handheld radios. So the

(01:09:20):
company called Nagoya that make pretty decent radio antennas that
work with that UV nine R that I use. I
have like a telescoping one and we've had pretty good
luck with that, and then I also use one in
my bit. So I've hard mounted a radio inside my
truck and I have an antenna that uses the frame
of the truck as part of the antenna, and I
can get really good.

Speaker 3 (01:09:41):
Signal with that. Yeah, that makes sense if you're just
doing it at home.

Speaker 8 (01:09:44):
Yeah, put something on your roof, Like you can get
a pretty good antenna on your roof, you know, and
it's not that hard and you can get signal.

Speaker 3 (01:09:50):
Yeah. Much further.

Speaker 2 (01:09:51):
I've been recommended a little book that you can get
for twenty bucks in kindle form or it's like thirty
bucks for the spiral bound, which looks pretty durable. Haven't
received mine yet. Yeah, the ar rl HAM Radio License Manual,
which is kind of what I was advised to buy
and read through and the advice that I got and
you can correct me here.

Speaker 3 (01:10:12):
But this seemed pretty hard to argue.

Speaker 2 (01:10:14):
With is that like the primary benefit to doing the
training and getting the license formally rather than just buying it,
is it also teaches you how to fix problems if
you're trying to get this thing to work in a stressful,
dangerous situation.

Speaker 8 (01:10:28):
Yeah, you want to be familiar with it if you're
going to rely on it, right, just like anything else,
this ham study dot org as well, which helps you.
You can also do something called a software to find
radio SDR. I've used those before as well.

Speaker 2 (01:10:40):
I'm sure we'll Yeah, we'll do a more dedicated episode
to this kind of thing once I feel a degree
of competence too. But I think what's really important with
this is because I can tell you right now, as
much time as I spend, like thinking about water and
having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare
water stored, and I have like I literally have at
this point years of dried food on the problem property.
I can food all the time. I have animals, obviously,

(01:11:04):
I have guns, you know, I do stuff like, you know,
go foraging in the woods and shit. I had completely
because it's a pain in the air. It seemed like
a pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers.
I hate fucking numbers, and I am choosing to use this.
And we're starting out with this as coverage of Halle
not because like this is the end of it.

Speaker 3 (01:11:24):
We're not.

Speaker 2 (01:11:24):
We are going to look at what's actually been happening
in the community. We have people Margaret Killjoys down there
right now, we have some other like friends of the
pod who are in the area doing relief work. Now
it's just too early for those stories, and we don't
want to like really bug people who are.

Speaker 3 (01:11:40):
Doing useful work down there.

Speaker 2 (01:11:41):
Yeah, but this is the first thing that terrified me
was being like, well, fuck, I have been negligent in
my preparations because I don't have comms lockdown.

Speaker 8 (01:11:52):
Yeah, definitely, Like and people underestimated because it's not cool
and fun, right, Like guns are fun.

Speaker 2 (01:11:56):
I have a sat phone, So I was like, that's
probably fine, right been wouldn't have been an Ashville Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:12:02):
Or people think that they can have stylink now and
I think, yeah, you know, people, it's a lot of
emphasis on that, but I think, yep, going back to basics,
we were talking about this in our group chat. But
for things that you need, having a primary, secondary and
emergency way of doing that makes sense. So yes, your phone,
your SAT phone. You know, I think Robert and I
both use gum and in reaches like a SAT communicator.

Speaker 2 (01:12:24):
I have an in reach and I also have a
Motorola smartphone that is a SAT phone through Uh god,
I'm forgetting the name of the service, but a separate service,
like I have two different SAT phone services.

Speaker 3 (01:12:35):
And then you got your ham radio as your backup.
Well after that you got smoke signals and pigeons right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:42):
Well, that that gets us to a general idea of preparation,
which I was kind of when I started. When I
got advice from a colleague about war reporting, like the best.
It's still to this day some of the best advice
I've ever got is two is one and one is none.

Speaker 9 (01:12:57):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:12:57):
If you have one way of doing something and a disaster,
you are very close to having no way of doing
it right, which brings me to transit because one of
the thing that is probably going to wind up being
the defining characteristic of this disaster in memory is the
degree to which the ability to reach people in an

(01:13:17):
area that is we're not talking, you know, there definitely
are a lot of rural communities impacted by this, But
like Ashville is a significant place, We're not talking the
middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people living
on the edge of the world, right. We are talking
about like one of the what was what was up
to this point, one of like the hippest and more
popular parts of the Northeast.

Speaker 6 (01:13:37):
Right.

Speaker 2 (01:13:38):
The immediacy with which the ability to reach people on
the ground was wiped out, and obviously while the storm
was going on, there was no way to reach them
from air. Like you know, a helicopter can get places now,
but during the worst of the flooding, you're not reliably
getting a fucking chopper into a lot of these places.
So people were stranded very quick, much faster than they

(01:14:01):
had been prepared for. You should be thinking about like,
oh shit, I could get flooded, because you probably could.
Most of the people listening to this. There's not a
zero percent chance a freak storm floods your community, right,
even if it never has before. It's not exactly a
common problem in Asheville, right. The last massive flood thing

(01:14:21):
was like nineteen sixteen, So we're not talking about a
place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise,
like it's not just flooding, that fire could do this, right,
I am thinking the last kind of near disaster we
had where I was is in twenty twenty. You know
where I live right now. I am in the city
of Portland, and we were like three or four blocks

(01:14:42):
away from where the evacuation orders had spread during the
fires in twenty twenty. It was not a foregone conclusion
that they would stop before reaching the city.

Speaker 3 (01:14:51):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:14:51):
This is also I think people in southern California. Yeah, definitely,
there's a shocking number of communities, communities with money that
are really built up that if a f hit at
the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like,
you need to be thinking about how am I preparing
to be informed during the seasons where this is like

(01:15:13):
of highest likelihood, because the only real safety there is
paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding of
how quickly things can go badly so that you get
out ahead of time, because if the disaster just hits,
you're not going to get on the highway and drive
through a fire or through a flood. I don't care

(01:15:34):
if you have a fucking Safari snorkel. I'm looking at
those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out
land rover on God's green Earth was not getting through
some of those waters.

Speaker 8 (01:15:45):
I'm sorry, Yeah, you need a submarine. Like I remember
my house flooded when I was probably seventeen eighteen, and
I remember that. A couple of the things I remember,
first of all, was like, most of your shit is
not that important to you. I remember being seventeen and
being like, oh man, we got it back then. Having
a widescreen TV was a big deal for us. And
just yeah, then thinking like, oh, my name is an

(01:16:06):
eighty something, like I fuck the TV.

Speaker 3 (01:16:08):
I need to check off those people, okay.

Speaker 8 (01:16:09):
And then people completely overestimating the capability of their vehicles
in floodwater, yeah, which.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
Which they always will do.

Speaker 2 (01:16:17):
It will always be the people with the biggest trucks
that cause the most problems for everyone else to overestimate
where their vehicles can get them.

Speaker 8 (01:16:23):
Yes, And like you can die in your vehicle crossing
relatively shallow floodwater.

Speaker 3 (01:16:27):
This isn't yeah, you know, it's a serious business.

Speaker 2 (01:16:30):
Or get burned to death, which happens all the time,
has happened very recently in communities in like California, you know,
people just get fucking incinerated, So don't be that person.

Speaker 3 (01:16:42):
Pay attention.

Speaker 2 (01:16:43):
Like one of the things to pay attention to is
like when the warning started to come in. There will
be good breakdowns fairly soon in places like the New
York Times on when warnings came in and how much
time people actually had.

Speaker 4 (01:16:55):
Ye.

Speaker 2 (01:16:56):
But don't gamble with stuff like this fucking dry to
high ground or you know, drive to whatever seems like
the safest place and fucking crash in your car if
you have to. And this is why again, when it
does come to survival stuff, I'm a big fan. If
you have the money, spend two hundred bucks on one

(01:17:16):
of those buckets of dried food. Because you can keep
a bucket of dried food and five gallons of water
by the door, you can throw that son of a
bitch in your car and carrying the waters might be
a pain in the ass, but if you have to
get out and run, those buckets of dried food with
a weak or so of food in them are not
that hard to carry. You hold it under your arm,
you keep a backpack on your back, and you run

(01:17:38):
like a son of a bitch to whatever evacuation exists,
and you'll have.

Speaker 3 (01:17:41):
Some food with you. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:17:43):
You know, like this is one of the ways I
think about stuff like this. You know, it's obviously preferable
if you can just hunker down in your fucking house
full of gear and equipment. But I'm sure there were
I'm sure there were people who had to evac or
who got flooded out in Ashville and their house that
got flooded out was full.

Speaker 3 (01:18:01):
Of survival gear. I know for a fact that that
happened to people.

Speaker 8 (01:18:04):
Yeah, and it happens everywhere to people right talking of happening,
but what should be happening right now is an advertising break.

Speaker 2 (01:18:10):
Oh shit, should have happened ten fucking minutes ago, James, Yeah,
but he but here we are.

Speaker 3 (01:18:25):
We're back.

Speaker 5 (01:18:26):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:18:26):
When it comes to talking about like the degree to
which people's high tech and expensive equipment, including vehicles, has
run out very quickly, one of the stories that has
been most interesting to me is of like one of
the first groups of people to be able to get
supplies and significant quantities to some of these isolated mountain

(01:18:49):
regions was a guy with a shitload of donkeys. Oh yeah,
the mule team. The mule team guy he was one second.
Let me pull this up. I've got this bookmarked. Yeah,
Mountain Mule Packer Ranch, which I'm guessing is just some
sort of like a you know, you go there to
vacation and do like mule trips, mule hights and stuff.

Speaker 8 (01:19:08):
It's kind of people who want to backpack or take
like a really luxurious camping set up.

Speaker 3 (01:19:12):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:19:13):
Yeah, they've been doing mule trains into a town call
into a Weaverville. It looks like and yeah, like a
mule can carry. It's something at least based on this
people article I'm looking at, they're saying about two hundred
pounds of supplies per animal, which you know is actually
very significant. That's not a whole lot more than you're
going to be fitting in like a compact car at

(01:19:34):
least obviously a truck's carring more. But you're not getting
a truck into a lot of these areas. And it
just kind of goes to I'm not saying like everyone
go buy a mule. That's not really practical for most people,
although if you've got some land, maybe considered getting the mule.
They're real handy. They do come in very useful in
situations like this yeah, thinking companion animals as well. I

(01:19:56):
think people haven't, Like, if you have a hole or whatever,
I'll pack us too, but they can't carry so much,
but I'll pack up. Packing is a thing, and in
like Montana, in places like that, Yeah, they're great. You know,
if you've got to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan
a mule, you know you can. You can do a
lot there, So very useful in a wide variety of situations.
And a lot of our listeners are actively fighting in

(01:20:17):
Afghanistan right now, so that that could be very handy
for you.

Speaker 3 (01:20:21):
Yeah, proud of you guys. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:20:25):
America said we're done there, but you said.

Speaker 1 (01:20:27):
Not me.

Speaker 3 (01:20:27):
It can happen here. You can't stop me going back
with my mule.

Speaker 8 (01:20:34):
That's why this is the official pocast of the Islamic
State Couruson Province.

Speaker 2 (01:20:38):
That is that's that's uh, oh, James, we shouldn't be
saying stuff. We can hopefully hopefully the government's busy.

Speaker 3 (01:20:46):
Well apparently because they ain't doing ship in Ashville.

Speaker 2 (01:20:49):
Yeah, so, you know, I saw a lot of One
of the more heartbreaking posts that I saw was this
this lady posting a picture of her parents and her daughter,
who was six on the roof with them, and she
was like a few minutes later the roof collapsed and
they were dead. Like she apparently managed to just kind

(01:21:11):
of barely survive and get out of there. But there's like,
I think a lot of people whose last act was
trying to get a good photo or video of their location,
you know, to post on social media. I don't want
there to be a lot of people who made the
decision to stay longer than they should have because they
wanted to get a good shot for social media. But

(01:21:33):
I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm not saying that's
what happened to that lady. There's also a matter of like, well,
if you are stuck up there, what else are you
going to fucking do but document it? Yeah, I have
some sympathy for that. Yeah, I'm not trying to shit
on these people, but it is one of these there's
that post that goes around every time there's a disaster
like this, where you know, climate collapse is watching a

(01:21:54):
series of horrifying videos on cell phones until one day
it's you holding the phone.

Speaker 3 (01:21:59):
Yeah, And I think that that.

Speaker 2 (01:22:03):
Not that we shouldn't think about, Like what's happened, you know,
to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to these affected communities. There's
places in Georgia that got hard hit. Obviously that's a focus.
But from a practical standpoint, the only good that you
can make of a disaster like this is to try
and pay attention to what happened, to what went wrong
for other people, and make yourself less vulnerable, because the

(01:22:25):
less vulnerable you are one of the things that we
see every time there's something like this hits, you know,
and this is I would call this a hand of
God event. Right, You had a bunch of communities that
were a part of the developed, you know whatever term
first world one day, and we're completely cut off from
everyone else on the planet the next. And all you

(01:22:46):
can really do in the immediate aftermath of something like
that is try to figure out what can I do
to make it less likely that I'm a strain on
resources during an event like this, And obviously the best
way is to not be there, because then you're not
a strain on resources. But the next best thing is
to have to pay attention to what went wrong for

(01:23:08):
other people and try to make yourself less vulnerable to that,
because not only does that protect you, but you protect
other people by not needing the resources that rescuers can
bring to bear, which will be terribly limited in the
immediate wake of the disaster.

Speaker 8 (01:23:22):
Yeah, I think like in terms of resources. Obviously, Margaret
does an excellent podcast quotedly if the world is dying,
we can hear more about that stuff. I think the
thing that you can buy, I guess right now, if
you have like thirty to fifty bucks and you want
to be a little bit more prepared, because I understand
that for some people this will be an oh shit
moment right where this is something that it ought to be. Yeah, no,

(01:23:43):
it really should be. Like you know, you've seen a
city that thought it was completely invulnerable, be very vulnerable.
You can buy a Sooya Squeeze for like thirty bucks
right now. You can set them up in a off
a five gun and bucket yep, or you can use
the bag that comes with You can buy back from
a company called knock cnoc, which is a much better bag.

(01:24:03):
I would recommend that, but like you can spend thirty
bucks there. Like we said before, you should have backup
and other water filtering options. But yeah, there are whole
countries that use Sayer squeezes, right, the Marshall Islands. I
made a thing about Liberia uses in too, And you
can filter rain water with that, and you could pretty
much have a supply of water for as long as
you need it if you backflush it.

Speaker 2 (01:24:24):
Right, You've got like a family of four and a house.
You have one or two five gallon buckets full at
any time, and you have a Sawyer squeeze, and you
can you know, in this kind of situation, you could
keep filling it up with you know, disaster water for
lack of a better word. And in that sort of
situation too, you can double up and triple up, which
I always recommend in an emergency. I've nearly diet of dysentery,

(01:24:47):
so I don't fuck around with this. Yeah, get a
filterration option that's not the only one. Filter your water
and add iodine tablets too, right, like you know, filter
your water and use something.

Speaker 3 (01:24:59):
Like a UV.

Speaker 2 (01:25:01):
Light, Yeah, a stery pan, sterry pan. You know, don't
just rely on one method. Double up, there's no You're
not going to have a lot to do other than
make sure your water doesn't kill you. And that's a
real good thing to focus on.

Speaker 8 (01:25:14):
Yeah, you could even use bleachhouse help bleach. Just make
sure you'll each sucking around it's not scented, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:25:19):
But yeah, you want to look up that ratio just
or not fucking up the ratio with them. But like, yeah,
that's a great you know. I keep a I usually
keep one or two just big fifty gallon barrels of water.
There's like water stabilization tablets or in liquid that you
can drop in there because water doesn't store indefinitely. But
you can use bleach too. People do I keep at

(01:25:39):
all times. I just have this as part of my
outdoor kit, but it's a good thing to have for
a disaster. You can have a camelback with one company
that makes them as called catod In Kata.

Speaker 3 (01:25:48):
D Ynn Catadyne. Yeah, Catadyne.

Speaker 2 (01:25:51):
Sorry, but there's a couple of different water filters that
you can screw directly onto your camelback. So you pour
water in the camel back and by the time you
get the water in your mouth, it has on through
a very serious filter arrangement, and that again, that could
be part of your I pick this up and I
take this with me, and no matter where I go,
I could pour water into the camel back and me
and my family can drink off of it, or we

(01:26:11):
have two camelbacks or whatever. You know, I have four
leaders on you. This is not free, but it's not
prohibitively expensive. It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right,
and it is considerably likelier to save your life than
an AAR fifty.

Speaker 3 (01:26:25):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:26:26):
Yeah, there are magazines of ammunition that would cost you
more than this would. And like yeah, yeah, with all
of these things, once it's dirty, it's not clean, right,
So like your camelback bladder is now dirty water bladder
and stuff, especially in a disaster situation, to be mixing
a match, just get a shoppie and run it.

Speaker 3 (01:26:43):
Likewise, I have a jerry can.

Speaker 8 (01:26:46):
I just wrote the bleach amounts on it with a
paint pen and it's there now, and now I know,
like none of this stuff is hugely complicated, and like
everything else, right, like the more familiar you are with it,
that if you go camping a lot. Yeah, like Robert
was saying, you already have a system in place, so
you're already ready for that.

Speaker 3 (01:27:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:27:03):
I keep something called a grail on me, which is
just like a cup that has a filter. Like it's
a two part like almost kind of a thermos type deal,
and you fill the bottom part with water and you
press the top part in and it fills an internal
reservoir with filtered water. And then I'll drop a tablet
in there or something and you know, or I'll pour
that into a larger thing and put the tablet in there.

(01:27:25):
But you can always have multiple options for water. And
it's the kind of thing where like there's no reason
not to a camelback and a filter plus a bunch
of pills, plus some sort of like canned pump rig
you're maybe out one hundred and fifty bucks. You have
three different methods of keeping your water clean.

Speaker 8 (01:27:43):
Yeah, I think they're surtplusing out a lot of the
MSR Guardians so the US military used to buy. You
can get those pretty chair those are great, like I have.
I was just in the dairying gap. I used one
of those and then chemical treatment and like, yeah, I'm okay,
And you can if you can also bulk process with
the gravity guiding, you could do ten leads at a time.

Speaker 2 (01:28:04):
You know, we're in this kind of conversation. We are
triaging by what we think is the most important stuff
which is in a disaster like this, water in comms,
and I kind of keep those as relatively equal because obviously,
like you can survive without comms in some situations, yeah,
and you can't in any without water. But if you

(01:28:25):
are in a situation where you're on the roof of
your house and your roof is not going to hold
out much longer in the floodwaters, colms suddenly become the
number one problem that you have, right your inability to
reach someone who might be able to get you out
of there.

Speaker 3 (01:28:38):
Yeah, if you need to get help, then you need
to be able to ask for help. Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:28:41):
I guess the other thing I would say is if
you rely on any medicine, think about how and where
you store them.

Speaker 3 (01:28:46):
God.

Speaker 2 (01:28:47):
Yes, a lot of people have been having to figure out,
Like I've been reading stories about people needing to set
up like battery and solar or generator situation, like their
fucking seapap machines, and they're like, you have people who
are on diet, We're going to need to get evacked
because there's not going to be reliable dialysis you know,
in town in a while, right, Like.

Speaker 8 (01:29:06):
That kind of stuff, Like some of that, you know,
like I have a big cooler and I can chuck
ice in there, and I can have enough insulin in
that bad boy for a year, you know. Yeah, and
other medicines. You know, he's putting them in a waterproof
bottle and having that in your well. I live in California.
We have a bag for fives and earthquakes, right, everyone
here does. And just having a few days of your
medicine so you can grab and go. You don't have

(01:29:26):
to think about it. You don't forget something that you
rely on.

Speaker 2 (01:29:30):
Yeah, And that's that's also what you should be thinking,
is like, if it takes me two or three days
to get evact and out to an area where I
can like spend money again to get access to the
things that I have on a daily basis, what shit
can't I survive without until I get to a part
of the world where I can get access to things again,
right right, Which is again why we're kind of focusing

(01:29:52):
on comms so that you know what's happening, so that
you can maybe reach people water and then underwater like
food and obviously things like thank god we are not
in a time of the year when this happened where
people are going to like freeze to death immediately right
in the middle of something like this. But that would
I would say, like access to warm and dry clothing

(01:30:15):
could be up there, equal with you know, water and cobs.
If you're talking about a kind of disaster that might
put people out of their homes in an area where
you can die in minutes in the front, like if
you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending
on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster
that could be right up there. You know, you know
what you need based on where you live, but be
thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really a lot

(01:30:38):
of disaster preparedness is actually trying to understand what is
it that keeps me alive. A lot of our economy
exists in having that not be obvious to you.

Speaker 8 (01:30:48):
Yes, yeah, yeah, in putting your priority selfwhere But yeah,
think about what stuff's you dying.

Speaker 3 (01:30:54):
Maybe have a couple of spats and have it in
a place.

Speaker 8 (01:30:58):
Having all this stuff is great, if it's in seven
different tote bags in your attic, that's not much use
to you when you don't have very long to get
out your house. So having stuff like Robert said by
the door in your car, in a backpack whatever, like, yeah,
that you can easily access and be okay. Then you
have it and then you when you need it, it's
there and you know where it is.

Speaker 3 (01:31:18):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (01:31:19):
Yeah, well James, how we do it. It's happened here, buddy,
It's happened here. Yeah, like we said it would. Yeah
it could like could, like we keep saying.

Speaker 2 (01:31:29):
This was like the messages I was sharing with people
immediately after this was like, oh, this is the one.
This is the one we were worried about. This is
the hand of God sweeping into a community and just
knocking it off the edge of the earth.

Speaker 10 (01:31:44):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:45):
You know, not that this kind of thing doesn't happen,
but this is the first one, at least since I've
been really focusing on this stuff in the US, where
it hits somewhere that just was not on my radar
as a super vulnerable place.

Speaker 3 (01:31:58):
Definitely. Yeah, and it'll happen again, thanks Jaron. This week.

Speaker 2 (01:32:01):
It'll happen again. Yeah, and it'll surprise you. It'll surprise
you again where it hits.

Speaker 3 (01:32:05):
You know.

Speaker 2 (01:32:05):
That's the thing. There's no climate haven. Yeah, it doesn't exist.

Speaker 3 (01:32:09):
Yeah, yeah, not on this planet.

Speaker 8 (01:32:11):
I would say, like, if you have money and you
want to help, you too, late disaster relief a great.

Speaker 2 (01:32:16):
Yes, let's talk about that. Let's go to ADS one
last time, and then when we come back we will
tell you who you can send some money to to
help people who are actively suffering.

Speaker 3 (01:32:35):
And we're back. Before we bounce, we wanted.

Speaker 2 (01:32:38):
To suggest some places where you could donate if you
are looking to help people who are in Ashville other
parts of North Carolina. One of the first places recommended
to me is Appellation Medical Solidarity. They are providing I mean,
it's obvious what they're providing a lot of like medical
care and support, a lot of equipment and stuff that

(01:32:59):
people need. Their venmo is at app med solid Their
cash app is dollar sign Streets one de put flood
support in the description if you send them money through that.
The other place is mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Their PayPal
is mutual Aid Disaster Relief at gmail dot com. Their

(01:33:20):
venmo is at mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Yeah, just google
them if you want to find out more about what
they're doing. James, did you have anyone else that you
wanted to throw out there?

Speaker 8 (01:33:30):
Those are the two we did an episode I didn't
Upsot a couple of years ago with mutul a disafter
relief that you can now find in your podcasting app.
Those are the two big ones I think, you know,
if you're on the ground, help each other.

Speaker 3 (01:33:41):
I'm sure you already are.

Speaker 8 (01:33:42):
Yeah, yeah, those would be the two that I would suggest,
you know, if you buy yourself your water filter and
you have ten bucks to help out.

Speaker 3 (01:33:49):
Yeah, how we make the world better? Yep. So until
next week.

Speaker 2 (01:33:54):
Solidarity to the people who are in the Atlanta area
right now where chemical fire, very similar chemical fire to
the one that happened in a place I used to
live West Texas, has just blanketed the air in Chlory.
So remember, folks, weird disasters could hit too.

Speaker 3 (01:34:11):
We're living the dream.

Speaker 2 (01:34:12):
We're not just talking about hurricanes and fires here.

Speaker 3 (01:34:18):
Anyway. That's that's it for now.

Speaker 2 (01:34:20):
Everybody, good luck, stay safe, make sure you drink plenty
of water.

Speaker 11 (01:34:46):
I just want to start off by saying I love you.

Speaker 3 (01:34:48):
Oh God, yeah, I love you.

Speaker 4 (01:34:52):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:34:53):
I don't think jd Vance should be saying the word
love because it it just makes it clear every time
he does that he's never felt that emotion.

Speaker 1 (01:35:00):
Oh No, there was something particularly unsettling about him saying that.

Speaker 2 (01:35:04):
It's like when I try to order food in French
and it's like, Robert, you're not fooling anyone if you
look this up on Google right before getting to the restaurant, Like,
you're not going to impress anyone. No, I guess let's
start with fuck Mary kill for the guys that know
the Secret Service will get pissed at us if we
do that one.

Speaker 11 (01:35:21):
No, it could happen here.

Speaker 1 (01:35:24):
And this is the who gives a shit VP Debate episode. Yeah,
I'm Sophielix Triven. I'm here with Kirsten Davis and Robert Evans.

Speaker 3 (01:35:31):
Yeah. Wow, what a great use of two hours that was?
That really was?

Speaker 2 (01:35:36):
I am behind this week horribly, still haven't picked the
subject for this week, desperately desperately behind. And I sure
did love that. This was a complete waste of all
of our fucking time. Not a complete waste because we
learned something important, which is that the Democrat who seemed
to have the best understanding of how to fight Republicans
maybe just got lucky or or got coached into some

(01:35:59):
very bad vice by a Democratic should have known better.

Speaker 1 (01:36:02):
Hey, Robert, I just want to say thank you for
saying that, Like I agree with you, I just want
to say thank you for saying, Zoby.

Speaker 2 (01:36:07):
You and I are great friends. Everything you say is
terrible and wrong, but I agree with you on most of.

Speaker 11 (01:36:12):
It, and thank you, thank you, and thank you for
saying that. I just really appreciate that.

Speaker 2 (01:36:17):
You know, whoever told him that Americans wanted to see
him be friendly with jd Vance was not a friend
of the Republic or of him.

Speaker 3 (01:36:26):
I think I.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
Don't think it'll work. I've been wrong before. It definitely
seems to have worked. If your recollection of like what
Fox and the other anchors were saying, they seem to
be pretty positive on Walls's performance, So it may be
working on like media ghoules.

Speaker 11 (01:36:43):
But that's who watched the VP debate.

Speaker 9 (01:36:46):
That is who watches the debate?

Speaker 3 (01:36:48):
Yeah right, I mean that is that is the audience.

Speaker 1 (01:36:50):
Yeah, only the fucking sickos who are keating on politics
watch the VP debate.

Speaker 2 (01:36:56):
I guess I don't really believe this, but I'm going
to like my devil's advocate would be maybe it's smart
strategy to accept that only media gorules listen to this.
The only real way for the debate to matter is
if you like fuck up, sure, and there was more
risk of seeming like a lunatic if he went in
there attacking JD as hard as he could and getting

(01:37:16):
negative press, as opposed to this, which probably is not
going to get him negative press.

Speaker 1 (01:37:20):
I think he probably had multiple strategies, And like if JD.
Vance had come in there and started saying some of
the things that he normally says, which are fucking weird
and creepy, but he didn't and unhinged and fascist and misogynistic,
and I could continue, But then we might have seen
it different Tim Walls.

Speaker 11 (01:37:36):
But because JD.

Speaker 1 (01:37:37):
Vance's entire strategy was like, hey, I can appear normal
even though I'm not.

Speaker 9 (01:37:43):
Well, I don't quite understand the hesitancy to then actually
bring those things forefront. They were there, and why not
talk about it, because like my initial takeaway here is
I don't think anyone necessarily clearly one. I think both
of them did just fine. But if anyone comes out
slightly better than what they were going in, I would say.

Speaker 3 (01:38:03):
It is Vance. It's Vance.

Speaker 9 (01:38:05):
I would agree, because somehow Walls was able to humanize Vance.
Over the course of the debate, they were. It was
a very very friendly exchange, and that just serves to
undercut the months of work that Walls has done to
paint Vance as a weird, unhinged extremist, which he is,
and instead making him seem like just a reasonable politician

(01:38:27):
that although we may disagree on a few things, we
actually agree on a lot of a lot of the
problems and solutions.

Speaker 2 (01:38:32):
We both care about this country. We're trying to help people,
and like, no Jade Vance. Like there was that bit
where they were talking about mass shootings and he was like,
I truly believe that Vance cares about these kids. That
Jade Vance didn't give a shit about dead kids, never has,
never will. He's not capable of it. And it undercut
one of the more powerful moments that Walls had where
he was like, my son was at a mass shooting.

Speaker 11 (01:38:55):
Christ have mercy.

Speaker 2 (01:38:57):
It was so interesting too, because Walls is and I
know that I'm coming into this as the guy who's
generally pretty anti gun control, but I'm just from perspective
of Democratic Party strategy. Number one, this is something they
go after hard, so you can't half asset right. This
is not like the border where they really do feel
the need to lean into the right wing argument. The

(01:39:19):
dims are very unequivocal about what they about, like the
fact that they want to ban Ir fifteen's. Walls didn't
really commit to that until a little bit when he
was specifically pushed on whether or not he agreed with
an assault weapons ban, and instead his language up until
that point was not very different from Vance's aside from
their disagreement over fortifying schools. But it was all stuff

(01:39:41):
around the guns, whereas the Democratic parties line and the
line of most Democratic politicians has been it's about the guns.
And I did find it interesting that Walls he had
to kind of be goaded into really embracing that by
the moderator.

Speaker 9 (01:39:56):
Now, one of the first things I noticed from watching
the debate, which just happened like once or twice. Then
I realized this was just like a reoccurring trend across
the whole night, is that each candidate would try to
separate the other yeah from their running mate, to be like,
I'm sure Walls or I'm sure Vans agrees with me
on this, but their running mate doesn't, and that's the
real problem. And this just kept happening. They kept trying

(01:40:19):
to like be nice to the actual opponent in the
debate by separating them out from their running mate, who's
the real source of the problem. And that's just like
it just just kept happening, Like what are you doing,
Like you're running out a joint ticket. There's no reason
to do this. And I think kind of part of
what their strategy may have been. Yes, these debates are
probably only watched by freaks, but I think there are

(01:40:40):
also certain freaks who are like weird, like independent centristy freaks,
and I think this.

Speaker 3 (01:40:46):
Is who they were going after.

Speaker 9 (01:40:48):
Yep, this this entire debate was focused on appealing to
the center. It wasn't really based on like going heavy
into like each side's own base because people they've already
made up their minds. And I think the the issue
for me at the end of this debate is because
both of them were we're trying to court the center vote.
I think Vance did about just as good as Walls

(01:41:10):
did going after the center by and and Walls kind
of even even helped him. And in effect, if Vance
comes off as just a slightly better debater when they're
going after the same base, that just leaves Walls with
like not really making any ground where he could have
actually just hit hit Vance quite hard and actually gone
more on like a party line, or actually just like

(01:41:31):
gone more towards like all the reasons that Advance is
fucked up, which he just would, she would, she just
avoided to do. Yeah, So my main takeaway was, like,
if they're both courting the center and Vance kind of
barely edged him out in some in some regards, maybe
Walls should have just actually been way more aggressive, and
the kind of lack of aggression really only hurt the

(01:41:51):
Democrats because in the end it kind of benefits Vance.
If you give this like half assed mediocre performance.

Speaker 2 (01:41:58):
We'll see where it Because again, this is not being
listened to by average people in the same way that
like the last presidential debate was. This is not I
don't think moves the needle one way or the other.
Because it was so close, I would be inclined to
agree with you that I think Vance did more of
the things he needed to do for this to be
a benefit to him. I'm not sure in a way
that helps the campaign, because most of what Vance did

(01:42:20):
that probably helps him was stuff that I think would
set him up better in a world where Trump doesn't
win reelection. Sure that would set him up to continue
to have a career and to be re embraced by
respectable kind of politics. The thing that makes me kind
of doubt myself because I think there's a possibility this
comes out as a Walls win, and if that is

(01:42:42):
the case, it will be entirely because of the last
question on January sixth, Because the way these things tend
to work in popular memory, not again people like us
who sit through the whole thing, all of nearly all
of whom are journalists or unusually engaged voters. But the
thing that there's two moments that are most like one
from each of them, in my opinion, to get clipped

(01:43:02):
out and go viral. And for Vance it was the
January sixth thing where Walls drilled him, and I think
this was actually one of his few fairly effective aggressive
moments where he was like yeah, forced him to answer,
and Vance refused to answer as to whether or not
he thought Trump had lost in twenty twenty in a
way that was I think kind of embarrassing for him

(01:43:23):
and is easy, probably pretty easy to clip out. That
might wind up being the big kind of viral moment
of the night if it's not that it'll be Walls flubbing.
We should talk about the China question now. Yeah, but
I don't think the China question that Walls flubbed is
on an issue that like Americans overall care about, which
is Tim Walls now maybe exaggerating when he talked about
his vacation in China one time in the eighties.

Speaker 1 (01:43:46):
Yeah, let's take a quick break and then let's dive
in a little bit on that.

Speaker 6 (01:43:51):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:44:02):
So, first off, everyone in this debate pronounced China correctly,
which is a step forward from the ones that have
involved Trump the last couple of cycles. The downside is
no one knows how to say it on not a
single person.

Speaker 11 (01:44:15):
And not a single mention of Ukraine.

Speaker 3 (01:44:18):
Oh yeah, well that was interesting to me.

Speaker 9 (01:44:21):
That is interesting.

Speaker 3 (01:44:21):
Yeah, not one moment where we talked about Ukraine, which.

Speaker 9 (01:44:25):
They kind of blazed past foreign policy really quickly, which
is a little surprising considering the events of this morning.

Speaker 2 (01:44:33):
There are literally missiles landing in Tel Aviv right now,
like people are talking with I think some reason as
to whether or not Israel might consider a nuclear response,
like shit is legitimately a problem.

Speaker 9 (01:44:44):
I mean, And this is how they started the debate.
They started by talking about how this was going to
be like a debate focused on how presidents or these
vice presidents will handle like America in a sudden crisis
as you've seen with the hurricane this weekend. Yeah, and
now escalating war in the in the Middle East. And
although that was their kind of opening framing, they really

(01:45:06):
got over those hurdles quite quick and then started talking
about me extremely boring shit for the rest of the
hour and a half.

Speaker 2 (01:45:13):
The very first question was basically, you know, Iran's bombing Israel, which, like,
I don't know, did Israel do anything to fucking Lebanon
right before that? Like interesting context from the journalist there,
But Iran's bombing Israel. If you're in the situation room,
Tim Walls, what do you tell the president if you're
the last voice, should he let Israel carry out a

(01:45:33):
strike on Iran? And his response was a carbon copy
of what Kamala has said every time she's been asked
on it. Israel has a right to defend itself. October
seventh was horrible, but you know, civilian casualty is bad too,
So it was a non answer, but it was the
same non answer that the campaign has always given, so
I was not surprised by it. It was exactly what

(01:45:53):
I expected from him.

Speaker 9 (01:45:54):
Started off a little shakey, certainly sounded nervous. I think
this immediately kind of gave Vance a head up.

Speaker 3 (01:46:00):
His first like three minutes, he was clearly uncomfortable.

Speaker 9 (01:46:03):
He got better, especially because like Vance has like debate
kid energy, right. But Walls did start getting better as
soon as he pivoted away from this question to just
attacking Trump, which is kind of his strong suit.

Speaker 2 (01:46:14):
Yeah, I think Vance's responsor is interesting. So Walls gave
He was a little shaky, I think just because they
had started because he got better on that, But he
gave what has become the standard non answer answer for
the campaign.

Speaker 1 (01:46:25):
JD.

Speaker 2 (01:46:25):
Vance started his answer on the question of what would
you tell the president if he was asking if he
should allow potentially, you know, a massive escalative strike by
Israel and Iran. What would you tell him if you're
the last guy in the situation room?

Speaker 3 (01:46:40):
And JD.

Speaker 2 (01:46:41):
Vance started the response to that by summarizing the book
He'll Billy ellig That was in fact, the bulk of
his response was him talking about who he is and
where he comes from and then being like yeah, I
guess it's fine if Israel does whatever. It was an
incredible response, and it struck me as the response of
a guy who doesn't think his partner is going to
become president.

Speaker 3 (01:47:00):
Again, I thought that was very odd.

Speaker 8 (01:47:02):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:47:03):
Yeah, he was positioning himself for future jobs, correct.

Speaker 2 (01:47:06):
Yeah, I mean he was different kind of than the
other answers. Maybe it was just they were both a
little bit off their game.

Speaker 3 (01:47:12):
First question.

Speaker 2 (01:47:13):
You know that happens to everybody in a debate.

Speaker 11 (01:47:15):
They both were nervous.

Speaker 9 (01:47:16):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, and this is this also when
Vance deployed his one of his reoccurring catchphrases is a
peace through strength.

Speaker 3 (01:47:24):
Yeah. Oh, I hated that.

Speaker 2 (01:47:26):
I hated that because it's also I mean, that is
very close to the quote from the Brotherhood of Nod
and Command and Conquer and JD.

Speaker 3 (01:47:34):
Vance, you are no Kine, you know who lives in death.
By the way.

Speaker 9 (01:47:38):
In general, I think Vance painted Trump is having like
approvable track record of proving him as like like Trump
is going to end the chaos that we faced as
a nation the past four years, whether that be economic
or with war.

Speaker 3 (01:47:52):
He was extremely consistent on that.

Speaker 9 (01:47:54):
And he's trying to point to like, was your life
better under Trump? Especially economically, and like everyone's brains were
completely fired by twenty twenty, so we actually no one
remembers what twenty seventeen was like at all, So you
actually can't recall that because whatsoever, let alone kind of
Trump's mishandling of the pandemic led to like the biggest
recession in modern history, which also for some reason Walls

(01:48:17):
just never brought up.

Speaker 3 (01:48:18):
No, well, he did it. He did a little.

Speaker 2 (01:48:20):
He said that, Like he talked about how when they
came in they were dealing with a massive recession.

Speaker 3 (01:48:24):
Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:48:25):
The second thing they talked about was climate change, which
was Jesse Waters of Foxies was very mad that that
was the second thing they talked about.

Speaker 9 (01:48:35):
We were framing through Hurricane Helene.

Speaker 1 (01:48:38):
Yeah, he was very He was very upset about it,
which is okay, sir.

Speaker 9 (01:48:43):
Vance Oddly, you know, quickly accepted the climate change framing
for the sake of the argument. Talked about how moving
energy production from the quote unquote dirtiest parts of the
world back to America, where we are the cleanest, would
be one way to help.

Speaker 2 (01:49:00):
I think it would have worked on my dad. That response,
Like the whole you know, well, weird claim, so we
just got to bring back manufacturing. You know, it was
not a bad answer in terms of doing what he
needed to do. It was obviously nonsense, and the moderator
called him very well on that, liked by just being like,
by the way, like there's no argument amongst scientists about

(01:49:23):
like how carbon impacts global warming. I think overall a tie,
maybe slightly favoring walls that whole section. Like he did not, Oh,
I don't think he did badly there.

Speaker 9 (01:49:33):
No, I think Wills did a good job connecting the
economy to the environment. Yeah, how as the environment gets worse,
the local economy gets worse, especially for like farmers, not
like for yeah green New Deal Democrats, but for like
everyday farmers, and again pivoted very quickly to just attacking
Trump and Trump's climate denial. Tried to press Vance on
Trump's climate denial, and Vance kind of you know, again,
tried to just blame for manufacturing, saying that Kamala's like

(01:49:57):
Rhetorican record does not match her actual action, which are
increasing foreign manufacturing in general. Vans kind of fell back
on a whole bunch of like nationalistic framing regarding the
environment and regarding like the economy, especially manufacturing. That was
one of his reoccurring talking points.

Speaker 2 (01:50:14):
Yeah, so we are getting to see some of the
times as spend in real time where they just published
Ross Duthat's article Vance's dominant debate performance shows why he's
Trump's running mate, And the url of the article shows
that it was initially put into the CMS about a
week ago on the twenty fifth, and they dropped the
article about halfway through the debate.

Speaker 11 (01:50:34):
So cool.

Speaker 2 (01:50:36):
That said, it's kind of unclear to me how the
rest of this is going to shake out.

Speaker 9 (01:50:39):
I also could have written two articles, one where Vance
did well and one where Walls did well. Yeah, but
that is still that's funny.

Speaker 2 (01:50:47):
I don't know that that'll matter either. We'll see where
people land. It was interesting to me Walls did do
something that I liked twice. Neither time did he give
it enough force, But he pointed out twice that a
big part of the housing crisis is vcs buying up
affordable housing, jacking up the price, jacking up the price
of rent.

Speaker 3 (01:51:03):
That that is like a massive issue. He brought that up.

Speaker 2 (01:51:06):
He said housing shouldn't be treated as a commodity, which
I never expected to hear from a candidate in one
of these debates, but he brought them both up, like
like a guy on a debate who is like just
kind of throwing out a side point so you don't
forget to say it as opposed to someone emphasizing it.
The thing to do with jd. Vance is to point
that you are one of those venture capitalists. You are

(01:51:27):
one of the people who was hollowing out this country.
And you know, Walls was good at trying to repeatedly
say it's not migrants who are ruining like housing in
this country, but he failed to connect enough and he
had the pieces there to be like, it's guys like you, Yeah,
it's fucking it's fucking white dudes in suits and earpieces
who have made housing expensive. It is not people coming

(01:51:49):
here from fucking Honduras, like it's people like you who
need to be reigned in by the government. And he
just wasn't willing to commit to the answer that he
clearly had in his post.

Speaker 9 (01:52:00):
No, he just never went on the attack. And it's
just odd because he kept he was probably coached on this,
but like I think it's coaching. He did not do
any of the things that gave him this job in
the first place. He didn't play to any of his strengths. Instead,
Vance was able to play to Vance's own strengths, and
Walls was able to just be a slightly less polished moderate,

(01:52:22):
Which why are you trying to frame him as a
slightly less polished moderate going up against a debate kid
like Vance? Walls needs to be like on the attack.
He actually needs to show like a strong resistance in
order to actually like make a large impact in the debate.
And that's why I think this kind of largely swung
towards Vance. Yes by the end, if they're both trying,
if they're trying to court this same like moderate vote. Now,

(01:52:43):
as always, the immigration section of these is always frustrating.
No one talks about how fentanyl is largely brought in
via citizens. No one feels the need to bring that up.
CBS did have a little fact check, or not a
fact check necessarily, but like a little comment talking about
how the majority of Americans pulled are in favor of deportations.

(01:53:04):
But they specifically asked Vance, like, how is your military
deportation plan going to work? And willly separate like children
that are born in the United States from illegal immigrants,
and Vance just refused to answer that question repeatedly to
try to get him to answer multiple times, he continually
refused it, instead saying that, like Kamlass, border policy is
already a child separation policy.

Speaker 3 (01:53:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:53:27):
There was a great moment there where he got angry
at them for fact checking, fact checking specifically on.

Speaker 9 (01:53:33):
His close but illegal immigrants in Springfield.

Speaker 2 (01:53:36):
Yeah, yeah, because those migrants in fact had legal status.
And he was like, you guys said you weren't going
to fact check.

Speaker 11 (01:53:42):
No, no, no, he didn't say, he shouted, yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:53:44):
He yelled the rules were that you were not going
to fact check that. He just explained how immigration like works,
how legal immigration works.

Speaker 2 (01:53:53):
They were like, thank you for explaining how immigration were
thank you.

Speaker 9 (01:53:56):
For explaining the legal process of immigration. This has been
one thing that it has been doing on the campaign trails,
just explaining the legal process of immigration and just saying
I'm still going to call this illegal because I wanted
to be illegal, And you're like, okay, you can't, Like
I guess, I guess we could just use words to
read whatever we want.

Speaker 3 (01:54:13):
Sure, why not?

Speaker 2 (01:54:15):
Yeah, if this comes out in the public opinion being
in Walls's favor, it'll be because of those moments that
one at the end, in those moments where Vance was
like yelling and they cut out his mic at one point. Yeah,
like that kind of stuff. I don't think.

Speaker 3 (01:54:32):
I don't know. Again, I don't think.

Speaker 2 (01:54:34):
Anyone's going to really listen to this be debate enough
for there to be it to make much of an impact.
But those were not great moments for him.

Speaker 1 (01:54:42):
Yeah, but those are the kind of things that get
clipped out and spread across the internet. Yeah, so we'll see,
and so the people that didn't watch the entire thing,
well some of them will see clips like that.

Speaker 3 (01:54:53):
Yeah.

Speaker 9 (01:54:53):
I think the immigration section certainly showed kind of Walls
in his stronger moments, talking about how the past year
we've actually seen a decrease in opia deaths. He continued
to talk about how Trump killed the bipartisan, a conservative
immigration bill, which we're probably not fans of, but he's
trying to make it play well electorally, and then pivoted
to Springfield and said how like the Republican mayor came

(01:55:15):
out and said none of this stuff was true, but
Trump and Vance kept viewing it. State law enforcement had
to escort kids to school. But even in this like
Springfield section, which Walls was the first one to bring up,
Vance was the big driver of this lie. But even
in Walls's mention of this, he tried to separate Vance
from Trump. He primarily blamed Trump for this and totally

(01:55:36):
just like ignored Vance's massive contribution to this like big
misinformation campaign that led to these bomb threats. He just
let Vance get off easy. And I think this part
was saved. Kind of buy this little fact check and
Vance's little meltdown over this legal immigration comment. But still
it kind of showed a little bit of Even in

(01:55:57):
Walls's stronger moments, he refused to like really harp on
Vance for being weird.

Speaker 2 (01:56:02):
Yeah, speaking of people who watched the debate, I don't
think our sponsors did because they have real jobs.

Speaker 3 (01:56:20):
Hello, we are back now.

Speaker 9 (01:56:23):
One of the biggest issues for me in this campaign
is how much time exactly did Walls spend in Hong Kong.
This is literally one of the primary issues impacting my vote.

Speaker 2 (01:56:34):
There were one hundred and fifty thousand people in the
streets in New York City today demanding to know whether
or not Tim Walls was really in China during the
Taneman Square uprisings.

Speaker 3 (01:56:46):
You know, thankfully CBS News is on the case.

Speaker 2 (01:56:50):
Yes, we didn't have a second for Ukraine, not one second.
There was at no point any questions asked about the
loss of life due to the had a side in Gaza,
not one.

Speaker 3 (01:57:01):
But by god, this this was really goofy.

Speaker 9 (01:57:05):
Basically, they asked Walls with this comment he made in
twenty fourteen about being in Hong Kong during the Taneman
Square massacre, when kind of reporting shows that he only
arrived in August basically like two or three months later.
And I don't know if either Walls just misunderstood the
question or purposely avoided it. But instead of talking with this,

(01:57:25):
he summarized his entire career, both as a school teacher
and in politics, and then emphasized that although he spent
time in China, he is loyal to the United States.
And it was just really odd and like you can
even see events like slowly like smirking the longer. Walls
just kept going on about his career, and at the

(01:57:47):
end of his like weird like non answer about his
commitment to the United States, the moderators asked again, They're like, well,
were you there for the massacre, and then he very
quickly clarified. I was like, uh, I mean, yeah, I
might have. I might have misspoke. I don't understand why
you wouldn't just very clearly say yeah, I misspoke. I
was there for the aftermath of the massacre. I was

(01:58:09):
there during the uprising.

Speaker 2 (01:58:10):
More I got misquoted. I was there the year of
the uprising.

Speaker 9 (01:58:15):
Yeah, he was there during some of the uprising, but
he was but he arrived in the aftermath of the massacre.
I don't know why I can just say, yes, I
arrived the aftermath of the massacre. I misspoke ten years ago.
Like it's very simple. Your weird, long, two minute avoided
answer just makes you, like look like weak and unnecessarily slimy.
It doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 1 (01:58:33):
It just is weird because of course were gonna ask
that question. Why why did you not have a prepared answer?

Speaker 9 (01:58:40):
I mean, this only became a new story today like this, this,
this only became a new story like like a few
hours ago.

Speaker 1 (01:58:47):
Still have some kind of a prepared generic answer.

Speaker 3 (01:58:50):
I'm sure he did.

Speaker 2 (01:58:52):
My guess is that if I was debate prepping him,
I would have assumed they were going to ask one
of the questions about his service based on all of
like the different sort of like totally right wing shit
coming out. Everything about his performance was the result of
a guy who was over prepared and prepared by people
whose focus was on him not upsetting the apple cart
and embarrassing the campaign, not on him winning. That is

(01:59:14):
how he was coached, and he was well prepared. As
a general rule for the most part.

Speaker 3 (01:59:19):
When JD.

Speaker 2 (01:59:20):
Vance would like make a claim about Fitanel, he had
a counter fact right that he could bring up, and
he did that reasonably well. He seemed confident about the
information he clearly put in the work, but none of
what he was prepared for was hurting Vance. He was
entirely prepared to not make an easy fuck up, which

(01:59:41):
maybe is the smart move if you're just like, we
just don't want this to upset anything, because there's no
way it'll help. Like, my guess is that he was
told going into this by his handlers, this debate is
not going to win us the election, but it could
lose us the election. So what we need to make
sure happens is that you don't fuck anything up or
seem too mean or seem too weird. Yourself, so we

(02:00:03):
are going to like train you to be as boring
as possible, and they did.

Speaker 9 (02:00:09):
That, and like, as a follow up, Vance was asked
about his previous like anti Trump like Hitler comments and
specifically was asked, like if he can be trusted to
actually like give Trump good honest advice and not just
to say whatever he thinks Trump wants to hear, which
Vance gave us similarly avoidant answer and just talked about tariffs.

Speaker 3 (02:00:27):
And then the moderators did not.

Speaker 9 (02:00:28):
Follow up with Vance no about his avoided answers, So
there you go. The abortion segment is basically a rehash
of what happened in the in the Kamala Trump debate,
with like Vance talking about a villain Minnesota who that
he claimed like leads to the death of of like
babies who were aborted like after birth or like some
some some kind of odd thing that just isn't true. Yeah,

(02:00:50):
that was That was pretty silly. This was one of
the issues where he was weakest, and I think we
were als maybe slightly upset that that Walls again was
kind of was kind of hands off on this. Historically,
Vance has made some a lot of crazy comments on
podcasts about this topic, and neither the moderators nor Walls
really pressed him super hard on it, and Advanced himself

(02:01:13):
tried to largely be on the attack with this like
late term abortion, killing babies after birth thing that Walls
just tried to easily kind of brush aside.

Speaker 3 (02:01:20):
As just not being true.

Speaker 9 (02:01:22):
Speaking of healthcare, Vance oddly tried to claim that Trump
like saved Obamacare. At this point in the debate, things
just kind of started getting a little bit boring. I
don't think this debate had as many like good questions
as the last one. It was a very like twenty
twelve style debate.

Speaker 11 (02:01:40):
It just flat.

Speaker 9 (02:01:41):
It was flat, It didn't feel kind of like present.
So they talked about Obamacare, how Trump saved Obamacare, and
Walls talking about how Trump hurt Obamacare. Just kind of
boring back and forth, and then finally the last question
was about like democracy in January sixth, election denial, that
kind of stuff, and Vance opened by set like, we
have other issues to solve beyond election denial. He said

(02:02:04):
that we should we should have like open debate about
the issues of the twenty twenty election. He then downplayed
January sixth and emphasized instead the bigger threat to democracy
was Facebook censorship and how people are like ending friendships
over political disagreements, and this was bizarre. I think this

(02:02:26):
was Wall's strongest moment. He talked about how there was
one hundred and forty police officers assaulted on January sixth,
some who later died. He mentioned this other story about
how like on January sixth, there were similar protests in
a whole bunch of different states, and he mentioned one
in Minnesota where people threatened to march to his home
and his kid and his dog needed to be like
escorted out by police because people were like threatening to

(02:02:48):
go to his home saying that there might be casualties.
I thought that was maybe that was That was a
pretty good moment. Four Walls brought up how people in
January sixth tried to kill Mike Pence, which everyone seems
to forget.

Speaker 11 (02:03:00):
It's not talked about enough.

Speaker 2 (02:03:02):
I mean, yeah, look, that's one of those things where
like my issues, so there are political, not about the
specific add yes.

Speaker 11 (02:03:09):
Yes, yeah.

Speaker 9 (02:03:11):
Vance tried to be like, hey, you know, everyone does
a little election denial. In twenty sixteen, there was Russia Gate,
and I think Walls did a pretty good follow up
by saying, like January sixth wasn't about Facebook ads, It
wasn't like that wasn't the problem. The problem was the
people storming the capital trying to kill everyone inside, like
that was the real issue. And real censorship is stuff

(02:03:32):
like book banning. First time we had a mention of
any of that. But even in this section about Jay
six he still like thanked Vance for having this conversation
and then asked him if Trump lost the election, which
Vance just avoided avoided answering, instead asking Walls, did convalesce
censor Americans on Facebook? Which is just great. Yeah, it's

(02:03:54):
a great, equally important problem.

Speaker 2 (02:03:56):
Yeah, these two issues, And unfortunately Walls's initial response was
like I don't run Facebook, which just say he's lying, Like,
just call him a liar to him, Yeah, he's a liar.

Speaker 9 (02:04:09):
It's wild that like we're talking about like January sixth,
and Advance's biggest concern is people being banned on Facebook, Like,
I think that's not going to play well for him.

Speaker 3 (02:04:18):
It's not going to play well.

Speaker 2 (02:04:19):
But also, yeah, it was just a missed opportunity. There
were a lot of those.

Speaker 11 (02:04:23):
The entire debate was a missed opportunity.

Speaker 9 (02:04:25):
RT yeah, and like Walls is I think slight fumble here.
You can point to his like closing statements saying like,
I'm surprised that we have this coalition from like Bernie
Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift. You're like, yeah,
that is that is a little surprising. Maybe that's the
bit of the problem.

Speaker 3 (02:04:41):
Oh, that was a nightmare line for me.

Speaker 11 (02:04:44):
Of all the names to drop Dick Cheney.

Speaker 3 (02:04:48):
Dick Cheney and Taylor Swift hand in hands.

Speaker 2 (02:04:50):
Well, because like even among moderates, do you think Dick
Cheney's popular?

Speaker 1 (02:04:54):
That was That was my last straw. I was like,
who who prepped him? Who who did his debate prep?
Who agreed that statement?

Speaker 2 (02:05:02):
Someone who really likes fucking Dick Cheney? Was it Carl Rove?
Did they get Carl Rove?

Speaker 3 (02:05:07):
Again? God damn? It?

Speaker 11 (02:05:08):
Was Hillary involved with this debate prep?

Speaker 1 (02:05:10):
Like? Shoot, like, I know the Clinton's were involved with
with Kalmwall's debate prep. Were they involved with with Tim
Wallas's debate prep?

Speaker 3 (02:05:15):
Yeah?

Speaker 9 (02:05:15):
I'm not sure, But I think this kind of underlines
I know this is kind of a larger issue with
like the Democratic Party in the year twenty twenty four,
but I think this also underlines, like my issue with
Walls's performance here is, like this debate, both candidates were
going after the Dick Cheney voter. They were going after
like neo Khns and independence.

Speaker 3 (02:05:34):
The literal devil, yes and like for that base.

Speaker 9 (02:05:38):
I think Vance does appeal to them more in this debate.
I think Vance did a better job appealing to those
people in this debate, which left Walls coming off is
just slightly worse and not really giving him any like
standout like performances. I think if if Walls actually like
emphasized all the reasons that Vance is a freak and
is bad, I think that may have showed him to
be more of a unique candidate. In stead dead they

(02:06:00):
both came off as just kind of boring moderates, which
just doesn't make sense because that's like the opposite reason
that both of these men were picked for their chops.
They were both picked to represent this slightly more extreme
wing of the party, with Walls being a bit more
progressive and Vance being a bit more fascist. Now it
makes sense that Vance is going to go after the moderates.
I just don't think Walls needed to agree. That's kind

(02:06:21):
of all my all my thoughts on this riveting to
our debate.

Speaker 11 (02:06:24):
I have to say me too.

Speaker 2 (02:06:26):
Man, Well, we've got a flash poll from CBS News
forty two percent for Vance, forty one percent for Walls
sixteen percent set a tie.

Speaker 11 (02:06:34):
Great, Yeah, that was the general. That was the general.

Speaker 3 (02:06:38):
That was the general vibe.

Speaker 11 (02:06:39):
Yep, Fox Fox News was Walls was good enough. Vance
did just fine.

Speaker 1 (02:06:45):
No moderator's obnoxious, moderators smug an arrogant bias, but that's
just typical.

Speaker 9 (02:06:52):
I think the moderators were fine. I think overall it
wasn't a very well laid out debate. I think the
fact that Vans was able to to be humanized with
the assistance of Walls makes Vance kind of the winner
in the way that like this did more to benefit
Advance than it did to benefit Walls. And the fact
that Walls kind of acted counterintuitively to his whole line

(02:07:13):
of messaging from the past year is a fundamental mistake
that I think. I hope that Democrats would like reevaluate
going forward, but they're the Democrats, So.

Speaker 1 (02:07:24):
Just interesting, interesting take that I've seen online, and also
a take for my Midwest moderate Democrat mother is she
said to me, just remember Tim is from the Midwest.
In Minnesota is the most Midwest there is. It is
not it is nature to be anything but polite. Not
what we're used to seeing in a debate, but it

(02:07:44):
was a little refreshing.

Speaker 11 (02:07:45):
So okay, So I'm just.

Speaker 9 (02:07:48):
Saying, yeah, if you went into this already liking Walls,
this won't make you dislike Walls.

Speaker 11 (02:07:53):
I'm already My mom definitely already liked.

Speaker 9 (02:07:54):
Right like and like. That's why I think this is
largely just largely inconsequential. Even a vance got a little
bit of a like up, it is largely inconsequential.

Speaker 11 (02:08:02):
Do you know who the winner of the debate was?

Speaker 1 (02:08:04):
Minnesota sounds like a great place to live, got great
pr tonight.

Speaker 2 (02:08:08):
I guess so Walls was clearly doing the best here
when he was like just talking about how nice Minnesota is.

Speaker 3 (02:08:16):
It's great here, and Tim, we.

Speaker 2 (02:08:18):
All know what the winters are like there. You're not
fool You're not fooling anybody, Like, come on, sir. That said,
if you live in the Portland area or really anywhere
in southern California, move to Minnesota. Just get on out
of here. You'll love it. You're gonna have a great time.
Everyone in Minnesota is gonna love you. People love Californians
when they move other places, it goes well. It's always happy,

(02:08:40):
always always a good time. So if I had any
advice to end on, it's people who are currently in
Los Angeles move to Minnesota. You will be beloved. People
will want to listen to your policy ideas.

Speaker 3 (02:08:52):
It'll be great. Hello and welcome. Pick it happened here

(02:09:14):
the podcast where I take.

Speaker 8 (02:09:15):
An entire clidvine, put it in my mouth at once,
and then try not to suffocate.

Speaker 3 (02:09:21):
That's that's what's already happened. You missed that.

Speaker 8 (02:09:23):
Maybe if you were a subscriber to Cooler Zone Media
you would have been you wouldn't.

Speaker 3 (02:09:29):
I'm sorry, I'm not doing that, not doing them with FCC.

Speaker 4 (02:09:32):
Note, Cooler Zone Media will not provide you access to
footage the games Choking Client far.

Speaker 8 (02:09:38):
Yeah, that's only in a premium package. But we're not
here today to talk about snacks. Sadly, that will be
another podcast. We are here today to talk about my
recent trip to the daddy En Gap in Panama. So
I guess to start off with we should probably explain,
like do you think me or I need to explain
like where it is and what.

Speaker 4 (02:09:58):
Look I would the school with a kid who actually
this happened multiple times more. No, I'm thinking back on it,
like people who thought that the Arabian Peninsula was in Mexico.

Speaker 3 (02:10:10):
So like we in fact need to explain this.

Speaker 8 (02:10:16):
Yeah wow, yeah, okay, I'm just imagining that what a color?

Speaker 4 (02:10:21):
So how got it mixed up with mixed up with
the Yucatan. It was really sort of wow, incredible stuff
happening in my schools.

Speaker 3 (02:10:31):
Yeah, fascinating.

Speaker 8 (02:10:33):
Yeah, okay, So for those of you who are not familiar,
the Dadian Gap is an area between Colombia and Panama
that has historically, like I've seen a lot of characterizations
of this which I think erased the existence to indigenous people,
which shouldn't be shocking given the corporate media, right, But yeah,
people have lived in this area for thousands of years.

(02:10:54):
They have happy and fulfilled lives.

Speaker 3 (02:10:57):
They thrive.

Speaker 8 (02:10:57):
There is no desolate place. It's just a place that
hasn't made itself amenable to capitalism. Really, it's a place
between Colombia and Panama where there are no roads, there
are not navigable rivers. It is extremely mountainous. It's one
of the most humid places on Earth. It is covered
in incredibly dense jungle. There are fast flowing rivers which

(02:11:19):
you have to cross as you travel there. And for
about half a million migrants last year, it was the
only way that they could come from South America to
Central America and they continue their journey on to North America.

Speaker 4 (02:11:31):
From a minder saying like, this isn't just people like
from South America, Like, there's a bunch of other people
who come into South America because it's easier to get
in who are taking this route too.

Speaker 3 (02:11:43):
Yeah, that's right.

Speaker 8 (02:11:43):
So for most people who are coming to want to
come to the United States, they can't fly directly the
United States, right, it's quite rare to get their asylum
that way, very rare. And there's a HNV Cuba, Haiti,
nicaragu Venezuela program which in theory allows that it's backed
up for like two years. So most people will fly
to a country in South America. The most regular one

(02:12:06):
is Brazil because Brazil doesn't impose visas on countries that
don't impose visas on it, and then from there they
begin making their way north. Geography understanders will realize that
Brazil is a very long way from the United States.

Speaker 4 (02:12:19):
Yeah, that's very bad. Like that's that's not good. That's yeah,
it's not good at all.

Speaker 8 (02:12:25):
Short of Argentina, you really, you really can't get that
much further away, you know, in the continental southern America.
So what people tend to do, especially so I spoke to,
just off the top of my head, people from Nepal,
people from India, people from Venezuela, people from Colombia, people
from Angola, people from Cameroon, Togo, Iran. I spoke to

(02:12:48):
a Kurdish guy that he was from Iran. I'm trying
to think off the top of my head, that's most
of them.

Speaker 3 (02:12:53):
Probably China, I know, there's I didn't speak to any
Chinese migrants. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

Speaker 8 (02:13:00):
I went fully prepared with like a machine to translate
and everything, and I didn't see any Chinese migrants, which
is quite surprising.

Speaker 3 (02:13:08):
Haitian people, of course, respectal Lo Haitian people.

Speaker 8 (02:13:11):
The Chinese were coming through the dairy and gap in
big numbers last year. The only thing I heard about
Chinese migrants was that someone had seen the remains of
someone who they described as Chinese. Yeah, so if you're
not familiar with the journey. It is the most dangerous
part of the migration route in the Americas right, It's

(02:13:33):
one of the most dangerous migration routes on Earth. People
have to walk for between two days and a week.
I've heard even fifteen days, but the accounts I had
maxed out a week. There is nowhere to get water,
there is nowhere to get food. You have to walk
through mud that can come up to your waste. You
have to cross rivers that are higher than you are tall.

(02:13:55):
You have to climb boulders, shemier across cliff faces. The
accounts I heard and the things I saw were pretty horrible,
like and we've kind of had a fun introduction, but
I would rather go back to the uncertainty I had
of like being in Syria last year and knowing that
there were bombs falling on people every night, then have

(02:14:18):
to see some of that stuff again. It's horrific. Like
I can't really. I'm obviously working on a scripted series
and we'll have that out soon. But like, in terms
of the things that we do to each other, a humans,
like little children die in the dairying gap all the time.
People carry their babies across rivers on their shoulders. People

(02:14:40):
carry other people's babies when people are too tired from
carrying their own children.

Speaker 3 (02:14:45):
And not everyone who enters sleeves.

Speaker 6 (02:14:48):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:14:48):
It's if you drink the water from the river, you'll
probably die because there are dead bodies and upstream, right,
this human waste in that river. If you fall and
break your leg, you'll die. If you run out of water,
You're not really in a place where anyone has any
spare water to give you.

Speaker 3 (02:15:07):
It's horrific. Every single account of the gap that I
heard was that no one should do it, that it's
it's terrible, that it's in human, it's like nothing people
have ever seen. But people don't have a choice, right,
it's the only way for people I spoke to, Probably
I have over one hundred interviews recorded, you know, I

(02:15:28):
spoke to more people than that. The bust bulk of
them were from Venezuela and a place where I used
to live, And like, I understand that they lots of
them have children, Some of them are bringing their children,
some of them are going ahead and trying to send money, right,
remittances back to their children. Right.

Speaker 8 (02:15:45):
And everyone said the same thing, that there's no future
for them in their country, that they don't see a
way of succeeding, of raising their families, of having a
future for themselves. There, I met a translady from Venezuela
who is saying that there are legal things in place
that won't allow her to have her gender affirmed by documents. Right,

(02:16:06):
she wasn't able to graduate with her degree.

Speaker 3 (02:16:10):
Jesus Christ.

Speaker 8 (02:16:11):
Yeah, like things are just completely deliberately torpedo.

Speaker 3 (02:16:16):
Your life just being who you are as yourself. Right.

Speaker 8 (02:16:19):
People aren't doing this because they want this fictional housing
assistance or whatever it is that Trump and jadivans. People
are doing this because they don't see a future for themselves.
I spoke to Iranian women right who had been on
the road for nearly a year trying to avoid prosecution
at home for having participated in protests for like basic

(02:16:41):
human rights. It's just the things I heard and saw
were deeply, deeply upsetting. And I think it's really important
that we, I guess, kind of bear witness to this
because it doesn't really get discussed when the US media
talks about migration. Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll come to

(02:17:04):
the southern border for a day, right, And do some
impressionistic peace on it. But like, pretty often they talk
about migrants, but they don't talk to them, and so, like,
I think it's important that we talk to them, and
I think it's important that we face up to the
fact that, like, this is a choice that the people
who have been elected in this country have made. They've

(02:17:25):
decided that the only way, for instance, the only place
to use CBP one right is in southern.

Speaker 3 (02:17:31):
Mexico or north of Mexico City.

Speaker 4 (02:17:34):
Can you explain what CVP one is for people who
don't remember.

Speaker 8 (02:17:38):
Yeah, sorry, So CBP one is an app that allows
people to apply for an interview for asylum. Just to
sort of skip ahead, I guess people understand that they
have to use CBP one, and they understand that they
can only do it in Mexico. And the people who
I met in the dai Enna are now in Mexico.

Speaker 3 (02:17:56):
Right.

Speaker 8 (02:17:56):
They take a series of buses north, not all of them,
I'll explain why of them haven't been able to leave
Panama yet. They take a series of buses north and
they get to the Guatemala Mexico border and they cross
in Tapatula and then they work out the CBP one
is not compatible with the vast majority of cell phones.
It doesn't work with older Android like Samsung phones.

Speaker 3 (02:18:17):
Oh my fucking god.

Speaker 8 (02:18:18):
Yeah, yeah, it works with iPhones. And I didn't see
a thing or person with an iPhone. If you're wealthy,
you can avoid the daily end, right. There are ways
you can go around in a boat. There are ways
that you can sort of take a shorter route. The
route that I was on is the route that people
who do not have the resources to avoid this dreadful

(02:18:40):
journey take. And now they get to Mexico and they
realize that, yeah, you have to get to Mexico to
make the application right, and the way to get there
is to cross the dairy end. And then when you
get there, you realize that this thing requires you'd have
a special telephone that you don't have.

Speaker 4 (02:18:55):
And it's just very bleak. It's a level of human evil,
both in the sense of it has been actively designed
like this and in this sense that they don't give
a shit, like the fact that that fucking app doesn't
work on androids, it doesn't work older androids, the fact
that the app fucking sucks shit like the entire way. Yeah,
like everything about this, Johnny, it's.

Speaker 8 (02:19:15):
Designed to be painful, to kill people, to strip away
like the hope that people have.

Speaker 4 (02:19:25):
Yeah, and it's and it's designed to do this to
like attempt to satiate the fucking insane bloodlust of like
seven dipshits and fucking like rural southern Illinois. And it's like, Okay,
there's literally nothing you can do to ever appease these people.
The only the only thing that will ever appease them
is their own death. Like, nothing you're ever going to

(02:19:45):
do to these fucking immigrants is ever going to make
these people like like you could, You could, fucking you
could put these people in a country that has zero
immigrants at all, and they would still scream about it.
There's there's nothing you can fucking do. And people have
decided that in order to basically people have decided in
order to try to get like a one percent higher
margin in an election, they're probably still going to lose.

(02:20:07):
They're going to just fucking inflict inhuman suffering on unbelievably
large numbers of people.

Speaker 8 (02:20:14):
Yeah, Like I think that's the thing I want people
to really like grasp is like somebody has made a
decision maybe we should take an ad break care advertising break.

Speaker 3 (02:20:38):
All right, we're back.

Speaker 8 (02:20:40):
So specifically, I want to talk about what the US
is doing right now in Panama, what it started doing
since July. Right, that's why I wanted to go when
I did. Panama had to change the presidency in July.
We have Molina as president now and he's promised to
close the Darien. Right, if your source was his social media,
then you would think it was closed. I saw about
a thousand people day crossing. None of them had seen

(02:21:02):
a barrier, none of them had seen the razor wire,
but he's posted about they didn't know that it was
this thing. What they did know was that the US
had an election in November, and everybody wants to get
here before that. Yeah, you know, I tried to explain that,
like we actually don't transition power immediately right that that
happens in January, but everybody is concerned to get here

(02:21:23):
before the election. And what the US is doing in
Panama is the US is currently funding deportations, and I
like saw that happening firsthand. With this is this is
honestly one of those things that just really fucks me up,
and like I need to ye like I don't know
it just I tried to record stuff at a time,

(02:21:45):
and I just it's all just me saying this sucks,
this is terrible. This like what it looks like is
so you leave bab Jaqito, right, which is Barjiquito is
an indigenous village. It's a village of the Ember people
who will wonderful. There were nothing but kind to me.
I stayed in their houses for a week and slept
in my hammock in their house. I shared their food,

(02:22:08):
held their little babies like they were incredible and client
hosts and very grateful to them. From Baljaquito, which is
this tiny village right. The population of Barjiqito triples every day.
Five hundred people live there. A thousand people roll up
every day and then they're transported in dugout canoes, like

(02:22:29):
a tiny canoe that is carved out from the trunk
of a tree. They're two stroke bolted on the bag.
I think I posted a picture on Twitter. If not,
I will do. The micros are taken upstream. They paid
twenty five bucks each and they're taken five hours upstream.
If they don't have the money, there's three canoes every
day that are provided for free, and they generally try

(02:22:49):
and make sure that all the women and children get
in those canoes right.

Speaker 3 (02:22:52):
One of the things that them but I has done
has made everyone.

Speaker 8 (02:22:55):
Wear life jackets just because a lot of these people
can't swim.

Speaker 4 (02:22:58):
Right.

Speaker 3 (02:22:58):
They've been crossing rivers above their head.

Speaker 8 (02:23:00):
They told me that they made human chains, right, so
everybody sort of locks their arms together because the rivers
wash people away. They're transported from Bajuguesel to a place
called Lajas Blancas, which is the first migrant reception center
in Panama. So they're now leaving like they don't have
reservations in Panama. But they're in the Embra Bunan comarca.

(02:23:21):
And then when they get there, they're in the daddy
En Comarcas. So they're in sort of outside of an
almost entirely indigenous state of Panama and in like what
you would consider like Panamanian government custody.

Speaker 3 (02:23:33):
I guess when they enter in Lahas Blancas, and.

Speaker 8 (02:23:36):
When they get there, they register, right, they show their passport,
they do all that stuff, and that's where the UN
has shelters with the Red Cross has a facility there.
The Highs has of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Global brigades,
all these big NGOs that you're used to seeing in
these places have facilities there. But to leave Las Blancas,
they need sixty bucks per person to get on a bus, right,

(02:24:00):
and if they don't have sixty bucks to get on
the bus. I was told these buses are owned by
Panamanian parliamentary deputies, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

Speaker 3 (02:24:08):
Uh fucking crush.

Speaker 8 (02:24:09):
Yeah, someone is putting fifty five people on a bus,
taking sixty bucks from each of them, and sending about
twenty buses a day, Like someone is making a lot
of money.

Speaker 3 (02:24:21):
Yeah, people will remember that.

Speaker 8 (02:24:23):
One of these buses crashed last year, killing forty two migrants.
But the really big thing is it is not the bus.
It's not the ten hour bus ride. Like those people
are so happy to be getting on the bus because
they're continuing. It's the people who don't have sixty bucks
and like, yeah, they've made it this far with a
combination of whatever savings they had and like incredible tenacity. Right,

(02:24:46):
Like they pay someone in Columbia obviously to bring them
so to get to the start of their walk in
Deli end. They leave from neck or Clee in Colombia,
come across on a lancha like a speedboat, and then
they walk up to the Columbian border where the guides
and leave them. Now the guides are obviously like this
area is controlled by the golf cartel in Columbia, right,
so they have safe passage through that area. None of

(02:25:09):
them had anything bad to say about that area. It's
when the guides leave them and they're on their own
into Panama. That's when they didn't have water. They didn't
have food because no one's told them they need water
and food to be fair, right like that they weren't.
I didn't think it was going to take as long
as it was, be as hard as it was. It's not.
So I've learned a little bit from tiktoks and stuff,
so some of them bring a bit more. But four

(02:25:29):
days of water is a lot of water, like speaking
from experience. So backpack in the desert. If you don't
have the right equipment, it's hard to carry.

Speaker 4 (02:25:36):
So yeah, suit is heavy, yeah right, like you like
that's the other part, Like if you want four liters
a person, right, that's like going to be four kilograms
and that's a day.

Speaker 3 (02:25:48):
So most like that. By four days.

Speaker 4 (02:25:50):
What is it in pounds eight point eight pounds, it's
four liters. Yeah, you're also carrying this like through the
fucking jungle, which is just like everything's wet all the time, right,
you're sweating, you're crossing rivers, your feet are always wet,
like everyone's feet when they arrive in Last Blankas.

Speaker 3 (02:26:08):
I took pictures of this.

Speaker 8 (02:26:09):
But they all have these crappy boots that they buy
Nika Clean Plumbia, and every bin in Baquito is full
of these boots because they suck, and people like the
blisters I saw, and like people getting trench foot right,
like where the entire skin on their foot is just
ready to slough off like a glove. Like everyone buys

(02:26:31):
these crocs from a vendor in Bajiquito there, but.

Speaker 3 (02:26:35):
Like they can get through all that.

Speaker 8 (02:26:36):
They everyone who I met in Bajo Chiquito, everyone who
I met on the trail, had made right. They through tenacity,
and like a lot of people said it like it's
a roulette. You go in there and you hope for
the best. Not everyone makes it, but most of them do.
So the people who had made it get to go
to LaaS Blankets, right, and if they can't afford the

(02:26:57):
boat from Bak to the last blank they can walk.
It's non fine, it's not very hours of walking, right,
And then some of those guys one day and I
gave them water filters and stuff.

Speaker 3 (02:27:07):
I wasn't allowed to walk.

Speaker 8 (02:27:08):
With them, but I was able to talk with them,
and I spoke to them again when they arrived, right,
And they get to last blankets and they just if
they don't have sixty bucks, then they don't have it. And
then they stay there sometimes for months, and this is
not a place to stay for months. Like they have
little casitas which they have for like this one for
unaccompanied children, and then others I think are allocated to families.

(02:27:33):
But it's not much more than four walls in a roof,
and most people don't even get that, right. Most people
are looking for a flat spot to pitch the shitty
tent that they bought in Colombia. And then they're just
stuck there. And there's obviously a relatively new policy. They
used to take five free people per bus, but they
don't anymore.

Speaker 3 (02:27:51):
Like from bar.

Speaker 8 (02:27:52):
Jigito they have three free boats a day, right, but
leaving last blancats, if you don't have the money, then
you don't leave. And the people I spoke to there
who are stuck there are still stuck there. People have
been stuck there for more than a month. Their children
aren't going to school, they're sleeping on the ground. This
is not a place that's designed to be a long

(02:28:13):
term residence. It's designed to be like one night and
moving through. And every day new people arrive who can't
afford it, and so the population is growing and growing
and growing, and there seems to be no solution. No
one I spoke to could point to what they want
them to do right, Like they're being given free food

(02:28:34):
by the government. Some of them said the food wasn't great.
I'm not sure if it's halal like sometimes some of
them said they'd seen food that had pork in it.
But I didn't see any food to have pork in
it when I was there, so maybe that's been changed.
But they're just stuck there. Yeah, there's nothing they can
do right. If they want to have money transferred there,

(02:28:55):
they can do it through a local intermediary who charges
the twenty five percent fee. If you don't have sixty
list Yeah, like you need seventy five bucks now, right
to get your sixty bucks. Now multiply that by a
family of five. You can start to see where it
becomes inaccessible to people.

Speaker 4 (02:29:12):
And that's that's a lot of money. Like if you're
in this position, like that's yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:29:19):
It costs so much more to travel on buses and
by foot across the Americans and it would to fly, Yeah,
like all of them would love to fly, but they
can't because we have this system that makes everyone money
apart from the migrants.

Speaker 4 (02:29:33):
Yeah, And it's like it didn't fucking it didn't fucking
used to be like this, Like when my family came
to the US, like we didn't have to like you know,
we had a bunch of fucking harrowing shit to like
flee the Japanese and like get to Taiwan. But it
was like like when my parents, like like their parents
like came to the US, they just they fucking flew in.
None of this fucking has to be the way any
of this shit works. It didn't used to be the

(02:29:54):
way any of this shit works. And it's like like
these are people from countries and you know it's like, yeah, obviously,
like my parents were like leading from Taiwan to the US, right,
which makes it easier. But these are also these are
people from places that the US fucking hates. Yeah, and
so like you would expect them to get like at
least somewhat similar treatment to people who came from like Taiwan,
which is at the time, you know, like US ally

(02:30:15):
anti China stuff. But like, no, we've just decided to
just feed these people into a fucking meek rinder.

Speaker 3 (02:30:19):
Yeah, and it gets me to my next fucking trauma.

Speaker 10 (02:30:24):
Dum let's sick an et break before the Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3 (02:30:38):
They're back, Okay.

Speaker 8 (02:30:40):
So yeah, as me I mentioned, right, these are places
that the US considers to be dictatorial or impressive regimes
right around Venezuela, Cuba three to come to mind of
people that I met, right, and so a lot of
these people have what's called a temporary protected states in
the US. It doesn't mean that they necessarily can't be deported.
Sometimes they can, but sometimes it makes it a bit harder, right,
deport to those countries. Panama, it's not governed by United

(02:31:04):
States immigration law. Yeah, we gave On the day that
Molino took office. Alejandro Majorcas himself the child of migrants
from Cuba, I believe, went to Panama attended the inauguration
and then announced this six million dollar aid package right
which the US was going to give to fun deportations

(02:31:24):
from Panama directly. And I got to see those deportations
happening right like you'll hear them in my scripted series.
But like watching somebody take a dad away from his baby,
or a mother away from her children, or one man's
brother away from his brother, Like it's just heartbreaking. These

(02:31:48):
people have crossed the Daddy in right. They've undertaken a
journey like I've done a lot of mountaineering. I've done
a lot of climbing. I like to fuck around outside,
but like I've never done anything where I didn't know
if I was going to come back, really, and like
they've done that. They've taken this incredibly difficult journey. And
then when they get to the other side, you, you,

(02:32:08):
and you, they get picked out and they get deported
back right on flights that are paid for by your
tax dollars and my tax dollars. And this includes flights
to Cuba. This includes flights to Venezuela, right places that
the US considers to be like dictatorial regimes. And now
these people are back in Cuba they're back in Venezuela,
but their government knows that they tried to leave, and

(02:32:29):
they've spent all their fucking savings, so they're back in
square one. I spoke to a few Colombians. They've also
deported a lot of Colombian people. Most of the Colombian
people I spoke to in Las Blancats were deported. They
called all the Colombian nationals to choose the office and
then these I was told that they were only deporting
people who had like warrants, like pending cases. But when

(02:32:52):
these people got back to Colombia, they were just free
to go, right, Like if you have a pending case
and someone delivers you to the government. Non expert in
Colombian law enforcement, but it seems like that would be
a good time to prosecute that casey, and these people
tell me that they've been let go. None of them
told me if they had warrants. Now, like, I'm just
going off what they said. But that night they were

(02:33:14):
texting me pictures themselves in handcuffs. By the next day
they were back in medine telling me that they'd been
sent home, including like I was talking to a lady
just before we recorded who she doesn't know where her
children's father her husband is right, And lots of people
will have like I guess what's the English translation, like
free unions, Like when they're like married for legal reasons,

(02:33:38):
they don't go and have a wedding, but they're considered
to be married common law marriage, I guess would be
the phrase, right, like they've lived together for a number
of years, share a house, etc. Often have children, but
they're not like they never had a wedding. So I
don't know if that document makes difference, but I watched
people have their children taken out their arms and be
shoved into back of trucks and be deported, and like

(02:34:02):
that fucking sucks. That is not something that I want
to see again. And it happens every single day there,
and it happens because your taxes are paying for It
didn't used to happen and now it does, and it's
just heartbreaking. Like I don't really like it's there's nothing

(02:34:23):
you can do. You know that there's no you know,
I can't do anything to stop it. You can't do
anything to stop it, right, Like what you can vote
for Donald Trump, who would like to machine down every
asylum secret at the border if you got a chance,
or you can vote to Kamala Harris, who has presided
over record migrant deaths every year of her administration, who's

(02:34:45):
sending your money to deport people in Panama, who knows
that the choices that she's made are resulting in like
death in Panama, death here right, Like there were four
people who died and then the heat wave in the
first week September, four people who died in o Time
mount and wilderness, like in a tiny area ten miles
across of border in San Diego, and my friends had

(02:35:08):
to go in search their bodies, and my friends found
their remains, and I had to confront the fact that,
like this is the toll of the rhetoric, Like this
is what the rhetoric costs. The other thing I want
to mention is that like, even in the most desperate
moments of their lives, everyone looked out for one another
in a way that like we don't hear. Like one

(02:35:30):
of the things that really struck me was that, like
everyone's kids are just kind of out and about, right.
No one's particularly afraid of anyone hurting their kids, Like
all of these kids, and I saw people who'd got
split up in the gap, find each other again in Bahojikito,
and like, you know, there were strangers who had carried
someone's children for two days because that other person was

(02:35:52):
so tired or they had another child they needed to carry,
and like, yeah, I'm strangely comfortable, I guess in refugee camps,
Like I went to Panama City after its like I
couldn't have it. It was too much for me and
I had to stay in my hotel room, and I
guess it was just difficult, but like I feel safe
in those places. I feel comfortable and like in a

(02:36:14):
sense it's well, you see the best of us and
the worst of us. I guess, like I can't imagine
being in a place where I know I could lose
my life if I slip and fall, and then thinking well,
I've got to carry this little kid. Never met this
kid before. I don't share a language. You know, there
was a group from Angola and they'd been carrying Venezuelan children,

(02:36:36):
right they can't even talk to one another, but they
potentially risk their lives to help. Yeah, it's it's pretty
fucking bleak. I'm staying in touch with everyone I met,
and they're telling me about their journeys to the border. Unfortunately,
the thing that comes next is eight to nine month
delay as they apply for a CVP one appointment. And like,
I wish I could offer something hopeful. Guess what I'll

(02:37:00):
say is what I always say that, Like, there isn't
anyone you can vote for who will fix this, Like
you can vote for Cornel West with Jill Stein, Like
I'm not going to vote for someone who fucking supports
the policies that are creating refugees in Syria, right whatever,
I'm not suggesting that that's a solution either. Like the
things that you need to do are like there is

(02:37:23):
a person helping moments in your community. I spoke to
a Jesuit shelter. I'll put them in my scripted episode.
Like I'm not a big religious shelter guy, but these
guys were fucking great. These guys are saving people's lives
and making sure that people have the basic necessity like
literally turning up at the refuge camp and making sure
everyone had toilet roll and toothbrushes and things that yeah,

(02:37:46):
you don't need for one night, but you're going to
be there for a month, you don't have, you know,
what are you going to do spend five bucks on
toothbrush and toothpaste, but that's five less bucks you have
for your bus fare, right, So like I'll put them
out there. I would love to do a fundraiser, like
if anyone can work out how to facilitate transfers to
migrants who are in the camp for free, that would

(02:38:07):
be great, Like that would be a service that would
make things considerably easier for people. But the way that
you fix this is showing up, Like it's showing up
at the border if you live near the border, it's
showing up in your community. It's countering this like with
people in your family and your circle, like there's a

(02:38:27):
tacit agreement. I think in the entire corporate media that
migrants are humans without rights, Like they're just numbers to
these people, because I don't see them talking to migrants, right,
Like these are people who you know, like I help
them change their babies, I carried their bags for them,
I played with their kids so they could go take

(02:38:47):
a shower like that. They're people just like anyone else.
Of course they are right that, Like, yeah, they're important
to me, and it's fucking miserable to see my tax
dollars use to make these people suffer.

Speaker 4 (02:39:01):
Yeah, these people should be more important than the fucking
sons of boat dealers. Who's fucking got the land they
live on because their ancestors fucking shot a bunch of people. Yeah,
like that's that's what's happening here, is that these people
who are you know, some of the most courageous people
in the entire world, are being sacrificed to appease a
bunch of fucking shits. It's a level of evil that

(02:39:21):
is just unfathomable. Yeah, I think, like we really shouldn't.
I'm somewhat ranting now, but like, yeah, the pivot that
even the Democrats have done in the last four years, right, Like,
those people need to be held accountable for what is
resulting in like babies dying.

Speaker 3 (02:39:41):
Like I saw dead kids.

Speaker 8 (02:39:43):
I saw that because Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, whichever other
fucking Democrat senators and representatives keep voting for this shit,
decided that it was okay for those babies to die
because they didn't want Fox News to say mean stuff
about them or NBC to say mean stuff about them. Right, Yeah,
of course they're trying to move that stuff as far
away from you as possible. Of course, they want the

(02:40:06):
deportation to be done in Panama, not here, so you
don't see it in your community. And of course they
want people to die crossing the Darien and not at
our border, because that's removed, and you don't hear it
reported on right, Like it's not a Venezuelan woman died
on Thursday. We're recording this on Tuesday, like Wednesday. You
don't see that reported, right, You don't see that there

(02:40:26):
are little kids' bodies in the jungle reported because it's
out of sight and out of mind, And like, I
guess the thing you can do is constantly bring it
back into people's minds and make them accountable for their choices.
And like, I guess this is the point where the
electoralists get mad at me. I'm not voting for someone
who chose that. Yeah, like, and I never could, Like
I couldn't live with myself if I did. I know

(02:40:48):
a system which reduces our political engagement taking a box
every four years is asinine and child like, Like I
would much rather be out there every day helping people
than voting once every four years, And like, you can
do both, of course you can, but yeah, there's not
a voting solution for this, Like, it requires all of
us to do a lot of work because we're so

(02:41:10):
far down the path which ends in a really terrible place. Right,
it's already a terrible place that these people's lives don't matter,
and that their children's lives don't matter, and that we
shouldn't care if they're dying in the jungle. And we've
got a lot of work to do to get back
from that, because apparently it's okay with a lot of
people in this country.

Speaker 4 (02:41:29):
Yeah, I think part of the reason why it's gotten
this bad is that the social ruvements that had pushed
the Democrats in a slightly better direction in the late
twenty tens stopped social movement thing. So you know, the
only thing that these people will respond to is like
they're actually being mass mobilizations and them be feeling politically

(02:41:49):
threatened by it. So you know, we've done it before,
we can do it again.

Speaker 3 (02:41:54):
Yeah.

Speaker 8 (02:41:55):
The biggest march in this country's history was the March
of migrants, Right, we can do that again. So many
of us, myself included, came here to have a chance
at better future. And like, even if you didn't share
some solidarity with people like showing up in massive numbers.
Yet these movement stop social movementing and people fell out
of a little things. But like, this shit is important,

(02:42:16):
and I think we can build some bridges and we
need to do something to stop this because it's horrific. Yeah,
and so it's a genocide in Ghaza, like we can
we need to do something to stop that too, but
we're not going to do it through voting.

Speaker 2 (02:42:32):
Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
from now until the heat death of the Universe.

Speaker 1 (02:42:38):
It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website
cool Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the
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You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here.
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