It Could Happen Here Weekly 78

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
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 gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
can make your own decisions. Welcome to Shitty mayor Mondays,

(00:28):
a name we're not actually allowed to use as a
title of our podcast because it breaks a bunch of
search shit in the background. I'm your host, Mio Wong
coming to you live from a crumbling basement, and he
contested Chicago that may or may not be hit by
a tornado in the next hour. This is it could
happen here, So truly, it could all happen within this
next recording session. It could happen in me It's basement, Yeah,

(00:54):
with me of Garrison and James. Hello, Welcome to Hell. Hi,
a tornado free San Diego did have a tornado warning yesterday.
Luckily I'm in the ever stable Pacific Northwest where nothing
bad can happen. Yeah, it's contractually, contractually obligated. It says no, no,
no bad things, No no earthquakes here that that are overdue,

(01:18):
no forest fires or record temperatures. It's great up there.
It's so true. So today we're doing a sort of
special episode of Shitty Mayor Mondays, which is that we
are we are doing the Chicago double feature because our
previous shitty Mayor, Lloyd Lightfoot I, managed to become the
first I think I think, the first Chicago mayoral candidate

(01:41):
in forty years. She was an incumbent and lost reelection.
And not only is she lose reelection, she went out
so okay the way the way the Chicago mayor elections
have like a trillion candidates, like I think they were
like nine this time, and if no one can get
about fifty percent, it goes to a runoff, and she
got knocked out before the runoff, which is unbelievably funny. Um.

(02:05):
So we're gonna talk about her first as the sort
of loyal Lifewood is sort of the shitty Chicago mayor past,
and then we're gonna talk about the maybe future shitty
Chicago Mayor, Paul Vallis, who sucks so much that he
was the reason I specifically wanted to do this series.
But first, what do you talk about? Fucking Lorily Lightfoot?

(02:26):
A person who I don't I don't know. I feel
like people outside of Chicago don't know much about her. Yeah,
I mean I know that she's like like has gebody
failed to do all the things that he was supposed
to do and in a kind of general sort of
Democrat Matt model has sucked. But I'm excited to hit

(02:49):
his specifics. Yeah, she's a super well okay, Ay. The
funniest thing about her is it's just just Google pictures
of her hats. She has just like an incredible hat game.
It's just all least appearing in just an incredible like
she has so many hats. It's it's wild. It's just
every single picture she's in it's just like a random, different,
wild hat. It's amazing. But she's also kind of in

(03:13):
some sense like a kind of uniquely incompetent politician. So okay,
So Lightfoot was elected mayor in like an absolute landside
in twenty nineteen, and she ran this very weird campaign
which it was based on sort of three main things.
It was one was not being a machine candidate. And
this is actually very important, is it Lightfoot is not
actually part of the Chicago political machine that controls like

(03:35):
most polic Why there's there's the kind of kind of
separate parts of the machine. This is a complicated thing
we're not going to fully get into here. But she's
like not a machine candidate. She like kind of is
an outsider in some sense um and that was a
big part of why people voted for her. There's another thing,
which is this sort of like identity tokenism thing, which
is like, I'm going to be the first black, lesbian
mayor of Chicago, which she is. And then the third

(03:57):
thing she was running on was building a ship ton
of police academies. Now I now in twenty nineteen, I
was in Chicago for this election, and I was like,
do not fucking vote for her. She's gonna build these
cop academies. And everyone was like, no, it's gonna be great.
She's not the machine, She's like. So she gets elected
in twenty nineteen, and this means that when she gets

(04:18):
into office, like almost immediately, twenty twenty happens, and okay,
so no mayor has like a good response of twenty
twenty Lightfoot's is like catastrophic. So I've talked about this
a bit at the show, but but what twenty twenty
in Chicago is this really really kind of wild and
weird thing. It doesn't map onto a lot of the

(04:40):
other sort of twenty twenties, but like the first thing
that happens basically is Chicago has this thing called I
think it's I think it's the Magnificent Mile. It's something milds.
I can remember when its magnificent a miracle because it's
the fucking bullshit tourist thing. But it's it's like the
Chicago's like it's like a mile of like really rich
shopping districts, and the I was just lost control of it.

(05:01):
Like people just took it. It was like fully looted.
It was just this. It was just this. There was
this sort of incredible moments of like Chicago's working class
that had been getting shit on for two hundred fucking
years like finally stormed their way into their pas and
just the fucking boushee part of Chicago would destroyed it
and it fucking ruled. But after that happened, life Foot
was like, oh shit, we can never let protesters get

(05:22):
back there again. So she started raising the fucking draw
bridges that lead that lead across the fucking rivers, like
she was like she basically turned the entirety of like
like that that event part of Chicago into a fucking
fortress that you could not get onto. Amazing, I just
raised she did this, Like, she raised the bridges multiple
fucking times. Like we're gonna get to another story of

(05:44):
her raising the bridges where it's like it's un like
like she doesn't so many times that like even times
where she claimed she didn't do it on purpose, people
are like, I think she raised the bridges. This is
you know, and so this is her basically she when
when she raises the bridges, she just like declares war
basically on like half of Chicago. And Okay, so this

(06:07):
is like not a great thing to do if if
you're trying to be a popular politician is to just
like physically declare war and like do fucking medieval fortress
shit to like half half your fucking city. And so
her popularity starts tanking immediately. This is in like the
this is I'm guessing as a consequence of the Black

(06:27):
Lives Matter protest, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so her
reproove rating is like fucking absolutely dog should I think, Oh,
I'm trying to find I should have looked this up earlier.
I meant to, and I forgot. I think her APPO
rating was like thirty percent when she left office. It
might even be lower than that. Yeah, but you know,

(06:47):
but she she does this kind of unique thing where
she basically goes around and alienates like every single voting
block in the city. I guess before we get to this,
we should get we should get to how she pissed
off the cops because one big things which she came
into office was she was trying to sort of like
do this alliance with the police. But instead of her
sort of actually like forming this, you know, she she

(07:09):
was trying to form sort of sent a right wing bass. Right,
She's trying to both sort of play this kind of
like identity tokens something and then also build a bass
with the cops. But a, the cops are racist And Okay,
do you two know the story about the Chicago Columbus statue.
I don't think Wait, is that one of the ones
that got taken down? Sort of? I think this is

(07:30):
one of the ones that so in twenty twenty, I
wrote a story about how to tie down statues and
then became the guy that everybody sent pictures of statues
getting torn down to for a while. So I'm sure
I seen amazing. Yeah, it was great. Ben Shapira had
a whole fucking seizure about it. We got lots of
trouble with various federal agencies. But yeah, it was a

(07:53):
very amazing story. I don't don't affiliate link to the
ingredients to things which mail made be illegal if you
combine those ingredients in your story, so true. Yeah, yeah,
many popular mechanics editives have tried this. It's great. I
was on Russia today. Uh not not with my knowledge,

(08:14):
but yeah, tell us about this, tell us about his
other statue. Man. Okay, So there is a giant like
statue thing sitting on a like sitting on this big
column that was made nineteen thirty three, and it's it's
this giant statue of Christopher Columbus. I'm also on this statue.
So there there, there, there's like a series of like
important Italian people like on the column. One of these things,

(08:35):
one of the people who has picked it on this column,
like very much seems to be Benito Mussolini holding a
bunch of fascies. That's cool. Now, the sculptors, the sculptor's
son denies this, but this was made ninety thirty three.
It really looks like he is definitely holding fascis. So
all right, this this statue, this is like in like

(08:58):
the middle of the fucking city, right in like this
park in the middle of the city. Um, and this
became the so okay, so in twenty twenty in Chicago,
the way the protests work is you have like the
first initial like phase where the cops like lose control
of the city, and then the cops kind of like
retake it over the next few days, and there's a
kind of lull, but then it starts another like sort

(09:20):
of wave of it starts back up again, like a
rounds specifically around this statue, and there's this whole thing
that cops are trying to keep it up, and there's
this whole thing where like there's like like rings of
activists like surrounding a group of cops standing around the
statue like throwing shit at them. When it fucking ruled,
and eventually the city is like, Okay, we're gonna we're
just gonna take down the fucking statue. And this was
a Lightfoot thing, but but this pissed off the cops

(09:43):
and specifically, so what I talked about this before on
the show, but like this is one of the sort
of unique things about Chicago is that Chicago has like, yeah,
I guess the technical term is like white ethnic like
groups that like do shit. And one of those things
is like there's like an Italian American Cop Association that
is very powerful. The Echina American Cop Association is like, like,
we will keep the statue at all costs. This is

(10:05):
like our fucking guy, like, hey, we're yeah, and and
and Lightfoot is like, you guys, if you guys don't
take this statue down, people are gonna fucking like burn
the Miracle Mile again. And she gets to this giant
fight of them, and these emails eventually get I think
I can't remember thaying. I think they get released part
of a court case or something, but these these emails
come out that it like Lightfoot is yelling that she

(10:26):
has the biggest balls of anyone on the table. She's
gonna put her balls on the table. She's trying to
like keep the cops. So she gets in this giant fight,
it just pisses off all of the cops in the city.
So she's she she has pissed off like like from
from from from the initial wave of protests at the
Drawbridge stuff. She has pissed off like anyone who's even

(10:46):
sort of vaguely center left and anti racist and like
a huge proportion of the city's black population. And then
she like systematically she's now pissed off like the sort
of like white ethnic cop groups who are also very powerful,
and then she does something like like really genuinely unforgivable

(11:09):
and horrific, which she is. In twenty twenty one, Chicago
police shot thirteen year old Adam Toledo share so much
Chicago paper called the Tribe. At a press conference after
the shooting, Mayor Louis Lightfoot vowed to find the people
responsible for quote putting a gun in the hands of Toledo,
who Chicago police and prosecutors insisted was armed. So, okay,

(11:31):
they shoot this kid who is fucking thirteen years old.
His name is Adam Toledo, and immediately the cops of
prosecutors and the mayor said that he's armed. They're gonna
find the person who put the gun in his hand.
So two and a half weeks later, the video comes
out and it turns out that not only was Adam
Toledo not armed, the cops shot him while he was
while his hands were up while complying with their instructions.

(11:52):
I think I've seen this, buddy cam. Yeah, yeah, it's
fucking awful. And then like two year two days later,
they killed another guy and like there were there was,
there was, there was there was another round of like
huge protests, I mean, and they weren't as big as
twenty twenty ones, but like there was another round of
like really big protests in this and Lightfoot was, you know,

(12:12):
like actively involved in a conspiracy to lie about this
fucking thirteen year old kid who was killed in cold blood.
And so this pisses off like this. This this like
basically means that her her support among like the Latino
population drops to basically zero because she fucking accused a
thirteen year old kid of being a gang, an armed
gang member, and then he got fucking after he got

(12:35):
shopped by the cops. So well, the other fun thing
about this is so our our like prosecutor Kim Fox
is like there's like this whole thing about how she's
like a progressive prosecutor and like the rights trying to
unseat her. None of the fucking officers involved in this
or the other shooting two days later were ever charged
with anything after they again it shot like killed in

(12:55):
cold blood a thirteen year old kid with his hands up. Now,
the sort of regular Chicago right hates her because she's
both black and a lesbian, and there's some like well
we'll talk about this a bit when we gets a Vallis,
but there's just genuinely unhinged, horrifying sort of like racism

(13:17):
and like homophobia, and like she's getting basically like splash
damage transphobia from it because of how racist these people are.
And so but that means that like you know, she
has like no support, right, she she managed to get
she like she she manages to get into a fight
with Chicago is like normally pretty conservative like Black Caucus,

(13:38):
and the Black Hawcus gets so pissed at her, but
they forced through a police reform bill that has just
like oversych committees, just like Rain and so you know,
there like on on Forbruary twenty eighth, there's an election
and all of the sort of like everyone in the
city of Chicago is like she's fucked. Like she's a
unique she's like a uniquely unpopular candidate. Everyone fucking hates her.

(14:02):
She has systematically pissed off every single possible voting block
in the entire city of Chicago. And she loses, and
you know, there's this whole sort of media junket that
happens her. Everyone's like, this is like a referendum on
crime in Chicago, and it's like, no, no, it's not
like everyone just hates Lightfoot because she sucks, and she
sucks in like a unique combination of ways that pisses

(14:23):
off everyone who can possibly vote in the city. And
so she gets sixteen percent of the vote, which I
think sixteen percent of the vote is like the actual
sort of like top limit cap of the number of
people in Chicago who Jenny winely like her, Like, I
think it's exactly fifteen sixty percent of the city and
there's fucking no one else. So she comes in third.
It's also very funny she spends the entire like a

(14:45):
bunch of her money running campaign ads, like against the
guy who comes in fourth instead of the other two. Yeah,
and so the man who came in second, who is
on the By the time this episode comes out, the
election will be fucking tomorrow. Um. The person who came
in second in that vote is Brandon Johnson, who's the

(15:06):
progressive candidate. He's backed by like the teachers Union. He's
like fine, he is like as good as you're going
to get for a mayor. Oh though I will remind
people that like Johnson is say much better candidate the
other fucking guy we're gonna talk about, But we need
to talk about a little bit about the limits of
electoral politics, and like, you know, I'm I'm just gonna

(15:26):
point out here if that like Nepal, for example, routinely
elects Maoist governments and like do you know, how do
you know how much Maaoism those guys do? Like fucking nun,
there was no Maoism happening, right. There were some cool
socialist mayors in Spain who led the population of the
city to expropriate the landowners around the city in the
nineteen thirties. Yeah, that was the nineteen thirties, is twenty
those are old. Most people's fucking grandchildren are like maybe

(15:49):
around but yeah, like you're you're not gonna get, you know, like,
we're not going to get a socialist city off of this.
On the other hand, the person who comes in first,
who Brandon Johnson will be facing tomorrow when you listen
to this, is a demon in human form. He is
near your liberal lives as a bag man. He is
the fucking reactionary Republican dog of the Chicago political machine.
And that manon's name is Paul Vallis. And as as

(16:11):
as Vallis would fucking want, we are going to talk
about him after we go to ADS. All right, we're
back from ADS. We're going to talk about Paul Vallis.
Just the worst guy. Okay, So Paul Vallis sucks ass um.
The thing he's most famous for sucking ass for is

(16:34):
for being the school privatization guy. So we're gonna start
with him. The beginning of his sort of political career
is in two In nineteen ninety five, he gets appointed
as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and he holds
that position from nineteen ninety five to two thousand and one. Now, okay,
so there's a few things that he like, really likes.

(16:55):
One is insulating schools entirely insulating any mechanism and any
sort of like part of how a school works from
any kind of community democratic control. Chicago used to have
these sort of like democratic councils that could like do
stuff within the school and vows is like, fuck that
we're getting rid of all that shit, like absolutely not.

(17:16):
The other thing he loves is charter schools, So we
should explain what a charter school is. Yeah, so okay,
The way a charter school works is that instead of
like the state or like the city or a town
or like a local government running a school, which is
the way that schools normally work, you instead give out

(17:36):
a charter to either like technically an NGO or just
a for profit company, and then that company takes a
bunch of tax money, like takes a tax money that
would have gone to a public school, and then uses
it to run their own fucking school. So bait like
it is. It is privatization that they've relabeled like charter
quote unquote because if they actually called it privatization to schools,

(17:57):
people would fucking hate it. And Vallis loves this ship.
This is this is what he spends most of his
time across like on multiple continents doing schools bullshit like
attempting to push for um the other specific thing that
he really likes this and this, this is like this
is sort of the Paul Vallis signature. Like classic thing
is military academies. They used to like basically not be

(18:20):
military academies in Chicago, and Vallis is like, We're gonna
open so many fucking military academies and these are these
are like regular and the things okay, like there are
sort of like disciplinary quote unquote military academies, which is
like you get sent there instead of prison. These are
like just like normal schools that are like quote unquote
military academies. But these schools like they're they're barely schools.

(18:42):
Like like there there there. There are a lot of
people who went to these schools who in multiple cities
and multiple get into more of this sort of later
when we get to Philly, but like people will go
to these schools and like their textbooks have pages torn
out of them and like whith you know, here's the thing,
right you would think this is like like a kind
of like Republican style, like uh, we're taking out the

(19:04):
pages to talk about like Columbus being bad, Like no
no, no no, no, just random fucking like just pages torn
out of it because they these schools don't be fucking money,
like they don't have actual curriculars like they just they
just like don't have sports. They just don't have like
anything to fucking do. Um. And then this is another
thing with charter schools. So all right, if you want
to like be a regular teacher, you have to have
like teaching teaching certificates if you work at a charter school. Yeah.

(19:27):
So I think that the standards depend on the state
some of them. I think Illinois is like two thirds
of the teachers have to have teaching certificates. But that
means that a lot of kids are being taught by
teachers with no teaching certificates, which is like, you know
that teaching and it turns out is not in fact
easy enough that you could just put a random person

(19:48):
there who doesn't know how to do it, and you know,
like have kids be taught correctly. These mil academies, these
milter academies, they have teachers who just like don't fucking
teach right, like they're they're they're just complete shit show.
But he opens a bunch of these am but okay,
and the other big thing the vallas Is supposed and

(20:08):
this is the thing all all the people who like
Fallos would do this thing where they're like he's like
a budget wizard and he's like the guy, he's like
the technocrat, like smart policy, want guy who you bring
in to like like bail out of school district that's
underwater financially and oh boy, oh boy, is that not true?
He okay, So there there, there's there's a very good

(20:30):
report called Passing the Buck, which is written by the
Action Center on Race in the Economy or ACRE, which
I recommend people look genuinely, people should go read this.
It's like twelve pages long. It's very short, and like,
h like it's not even twelve like three of those
pages dissertations um. And they wrote a report on Vallis's
time in various school districts. And here's some of the

(20:51):
ship that he did to make it look like he
had his balanced, his budget balanced. So all right, let's
let's talk about his pension scheme. I feel like I
actually should have plain how pensions work, because like nobody
fucking has them anymore. So a pension is a thing
where like you the worker or in this case, the
Chicago teachers, you take some of your current pay and
instead of taking the money, now it gets taken out

(21:13):
of your paycheck and put towards a pension fund to
fund your retirement. And then this fund is invested in
the stock market to get returns to pay out pensions
that like support you when you retire. Right. Yeah, So
in nineteen ninety nine, Vallis was like, oh, hey, the
Chicago pension system is funded, so we're gonna take the
teacher's money and use it to pay other budget shortfalls. Great,

(21:36):
so this is good. Anyways, after he does this for
for thirteen consecutive years, Chicago stops paying into its pension
system altogether, and the result of this is a nine
point six billion dollar hole in the pension system that
Chicago has to like pay off. And this is a
huge part of like where are the sort of modern

(21:56):
like budget deficits in Chicago come from, like things that
are used to like justify show schools down. Is that
like they just didn't pay into this, They just stop
paying into the pensions and instead took the money that
they're supposed to go to teachers and use it to
like make their budgets look clean. So if if he
had just done this, it would have been bad enough.

(22:17):
But but Vallas is like is a very very specific
kind of like neoliberal technocrat dip shit, And that kind
of neoliberal technicrat dip shit is the the extremely interested
in financial instruments guy who was like a kind of
person that I think I think we see less of
these days because the most not the modern version of
this or like crypto people. Right, but back in like

(22:39):
the nineties and two thousands, there were a bunch of
guys whose things were like really really conflabu of financial
instruments and everyone thought they were fucking geniuses. Um now,
now if if you if you were alive in two
thousand and eight, you know where this is going. But
vallis the second thing he does to sort of like
like quote unquote balance his budget sheet is he takes
out the government que a payday loan. So here's here's

(23:03):
a passing the buck quote. Vallas literally borrowed against Chicago
school children's futures when he took out a six hundred
and sixty six million dollars in capital appreciation bonds. Also,
when I said he was like like a demon sid
sixty six million dollars with the Satanic Yeah, yeah, we're
doing the Satanic panic, but for this guy who fucking sucks,

(23:25):
So yeah, he took out the loans and capital appreciation
bonds a form of debt in which the borrower pays
nothing for several years, but then has to pay very
large sums to make up for skipped payments. A capital
appreciation bond c a B is a long term bond
with compounding interest, on which the borrower is not permitted

(23:46):
to make any principal or interest payments for many years,
but the interest will. Yeah, crazy, but you're allow Why
would we Why would you take that? Why would you?
Why would you do? That's like a really bad decision.
Oh it's a terrible it's a terrible decision. I'm not
a big money guy. But the Valis's assumption was that, like, Okay,
we don't have any money now, but property values will

(24:08):
continue to go up, and it just keep going up forever,
so we can pay this bond back when we have
money from higher from property taxes. And yeah, so okay,
I really if I'm gonna finish this thing on these
these just dogshit bonds. In this way, it is similar
to a negative amortization mortgage, in which the outstanding principle

(24:28):
actually grows over time because the unpaid interest gets tacked
onto the amount owed and compounds. Yeah, very Amusingly, California
was doing something similar to this with with restitution payments recently,
or some some place in California were, at least in
one case that I looked into for a story I wrote,
it was it was ruled illegal under the Eighth Amendment.

(24:51):
Oh my god, a cruel and unusual interest payments. It's
good to see the Chicago is doing it. Yeah, there's
actually a funny story about this that, like one of
the size stories of this is that the guy who's
running the school system in California like gets this same
offer from like bond salesman people, and he's like, know,
what the fuck, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.

(25:12):
Vallas does this. Vallas is going to do this in
multiple cities. So I'm gonna finish reading this thing. Because
of this structure, borrowers often end up paying extraordinarily high
interest rates over the lifetime of the bonds. Former California
State Treasurer Bill Lockney called CIABS the school district equivalent
of a pan a loan. So the result of this
is that out of the six hundred and sixty six

(25:34):
point two million dollars right that Valas takes out, they
pay one point five billion dollars in interest. The interest
rate over the lifetime of this bond is two hundred
and twenty three percent. Good. This is the guy who's
supposed to be like the really smart type, the crack
reformer guy who understands financial stuff, who you bring into

(25:57):
like solve school districts, and he took out a load
two hundred and twenty three percent fucking interest. This is
this is the kind of interest rate. Then, the words
of David Graeber were once reserved for organized crime, and
now is you know, normally normally this kind of loan
is like a thing. It's like, this is like a
very predatory sort of like yeah, it's like a predatory
banking thing. Valis think this to himself on purpose because

(26:21):
he's dumb, and I mean, also like he's trying to
I mean and part of part of the other sort
of undercurrent of this, it's not just that he's really stupid,
it's that he's trying to pay off his buddies in
the in the finance sector. Yeah, and then you know,
there is the other part of the story. Right, It's
like all of these all these school districts just get
fucking looted to pay off these like fucking stupid ass
hedge funds, and then he just bounces somewhere else and

(26:41):
leaves him people with it. Yeah. And you know, so
I talked a bit earlier about how like Valis's assumption
on these bonds was like, well, be fine, because well,
the housing markets will keep going up forever. But then
two happens, and this has a bunch of effects. One
of the big ones is that Vallas was taking out
bonds with variable interest rates. Oh now, okay, we have

(27:05):
talked about this on this show before. Right, there are
entire country they are like entire like like multi national
political movements that don't exist. There are entire countries who
fucking don't have manufacturing checkers anymore. Like there are there
are places with a life expectancy felled by twenty years
because they're they're they're fucking leaders took out these kind
of of like variable interest rate loans and got de

(27:27):
strobe in the interest rate spikes and guess what happened
in Chicago interest rate spikes. And okay, so Vallas's successors
look at this and are like, this is the stupidest
fucking you know well, but okay, Valles' success by the way,
is Artie Duncan, who's the guy that Obama puts in
charge of of the Department of Education. And Artie Duncan

(27:49):
is like, okay, do you know how we're going to
solve the problem of these the the the risk from
these adjestable rate interest rates. Credit default swabs? Oh god,
all right, I'm not going to explain how a credit
default swap works because it's fucking annoying as hell. But
credit default swaps are one of the things, like one
of the very specific financial instruments that are that are

(28:12):
like specifically responsible for the two thousand and eight collapsed Yes,
and now these technically aren't credit default swaps, right, These
These are technically what are called interest default swap or
like interest swaps, and they're but they're exactly the same
thing as a credit as a credit default swap, but
instead of credit, it's interest. So the underlying asset right
is like as a bond and not like a loan
or whatever. But otherwise it's exactly the same thing. And

(28:36):
this this man, you know, and these these swaps have
this thing where like if you can't pay, you get
these like unbelievably high like fees that start happening. So
when when these bonds blow up, they managed to cost
they managed to cost Chicago another thirty one million dollars
because they're credit default swaps just blew up. So all right,

(28:59):
so this has a two thousand too, And she tells
the two He ran for governor or against Rob fucking Blogoyevich,
who is Rob who is Rob a Bligoyevich. He just
did the first syllable and then let your let to
take the rest. And Valis sucks so much that Rob

(29:19):
Blugoyevich is able to outflank him on the left bye
bye bye, running against him saying, hey, look at all
these schools he privatized. And so he gets claw bared
in the primaries by Rob fucking Bloyevich, the man who okay,
so this is what we will cover this one day
at fully on the show because it's really funny. But

(29:39):
Rob Lgoievic is the man most famous for getting arrested
for trying to sell Obama Senate seat like he tried
to sell a Senate Oh he's Oh, he's amazing. He's
now just on Tucker talking about political persecution. Oh yeah,
yeah's extremely funny. Yeah he was on yesterday, wasn't he? Yeah?

(30:01):
Yeah yeah, first Trump should Yeah, how he was persecuted first,
and how Trump is being persecuted too. It's great, really,
really the canary in the coal mine off, Hey, griffting politicians, look, Garrison,
look if they if they can go after Rob Lgio
trying to sell Obama Senate seat, they could go after

(30:23):
you for trying to sell Barack Obama Senate seat. That's true.
You know who else is trying to sell Barack Obama
Senate seat? Products and services that support this very podcast. No,
they're really not allowed to do that. None of them
would ever commit a crime I under any circumstances. I
still think I think a fair number of these corporations

(30:45):
probably engage in some some sort of political Yeah, that's true,
but I don't they're trying to buy him a Senate seat, Garrison.
That's totally different, different, not the same, not the same,
totally fine. Thanks Ronald Reagan, all right, we're back, and
we're now, We're we're now, we're now sending Vallis to
our I don't I don't actually know if Chicago and

(31:07):
Philadelphia or sister or cities, but like I think they
should be. I don't know. I am. I am very
in favor of the Chicago Philadelphia alliance. Same vibe. Yeah,
so she they both stood in for Gotham City and
the Christopher Nolan trilogy. So we're doing a Bagman reference again.
There's there's a whole There are like so many different

(31:29):
specific there. David Grabber rights about this, like there there
are so many different like parts of places where they filmed,
like the Dark Night where people tried to protest and
got arrested for blocking the road. Like this happened in
multiple cities. Yeah. No, one wants the city to turn
into la So you have to stand up against that

(31:49):
shit immediately. You do not let it happen in your hood.
Yeah it could, it could happen here. Okay. So after
Vallas gets clabbered in in in the mayoral race, he
gets brought in by Philadelphia to try to like fix
their school system, and he uh me, his plan to

(32:13):
do this is by doing a bunch of military academies
again and then doing also doing charter schools, and so
I should I should explain like his other sort of
so the big sort of rationale thing behind charter schools,
this school choice, which is this thing that was specifically
invented as a way to let Race his parents avoid integration. Yeah,
this is like goes along with sobody mentioned the homeschool

(32:35):
and when we've talked about this in other episodes. But
he's like a huge like Valist to this day is
a giant like school choice guy. Um, and you know,
but the other thing, the other thing about Valist, I
don't think people realize that much he even though he's
a Republican a lot of the time, like he kind
of flips back and forth being a Democrat being a Republican.
But he's he's like after he loses to Rob or

(32:57):
even even sort of before, like he is anual sort
of Chicago machine guy. And because he's a Chicago machine guy,
when he gets into Philly, the stuff that he starts doing,
the stuff where he like he'll just like like he
takes over the school district and like fires munch people
and like installs his cronies and all these departments and
all these people are getting like he's like buying off
people with budget allocations, and he starts selling off buildings

(33:20):
to raise money. So he sells off like the district
headquarters in order to buy like a more expensive district headquarters.
And here's a quote from the book Not Paid for Us,
which is a really really great book about sort of
the history of racism in education in Philadelphia. And this
is a quote from a long time activist le Roy Simmons.

(33:41):
Before I start reading this, the district headquarters was called
twenty first and Parkway. There was doors in twenty first
and Parkway worth one million dollars, then big brass doors
in the fronts. Those doors were worth one million dollars
with all the carving on them. People don't know how
much they got for it. To this day, I can't
get an answer about how much did you sell that
building for? Where the money went? The school district sold

(34:04):
twenty first and Parkway in a package with Kennedy Center.
There were brand new trucks parked at Kennedy Center. They
had forgot were there. There was a printing press in
the Kennedy Center that could print all new magazines and
they never used. There were books and calculators and every
time it went through there there were boxes of unused
stuff in the Kennedy Center and nobody knew. And they
sold that in the contents and the package with twenty

(34:26):
first of Parkway, and nobody knew how much that was.
There was some art that was priceless on the walls
at twenty first of Parkway. No one can find the art.
They were priceless pieces of art hanging in schools across
the city and all that was sold in a package
and nobody saw it where it went. Yeah, so this
is this is again, this is like this is classic
Chicago corruption shit, right, Like we're not gonna say how

(34:48):
much we sold this building for. We're not gonna say
who who we sold it too, Like we're gonna build
a more expensive building. And you know, if you look
at you look into who the contractors are as like
always someone's uncle or like brother or some shit. Um,
there's just you know, like there's printing presses that are gone,
like priceless works of art just vanished. It's like this
is this is like you know, it's sort of incredible

(35:10):
sort of Chicago political machine stuff. Um, and this gets
into what I think about I think the Chicago political
machine that is really interesting, which is that these people
are like, on the one hand, they're unbelievably corrupt. On
the other hand, a lot of them are sort of
real like hardline like doctrinaire neoliberals. This is I mean,
this is sort of the thing with Arnie Duncan, right, Like,

(35:32):
like Obama actually comes out of this machine too, when
he's a lot more sort of like doctrinaire about this
stuff than the sort of modern people are. And you know,
and Vallis is like one of the sort of like
big guys here, and you know, so he's really really
in favor of charter schools and so they get enormous
amounts of money. Um, he also does this thing he yeah,

(35:54):
this is also from Not Paid for Us. He funnels
money into just like a shit ton of nhos in
order to like do education programming or whatever. And so
there's a sort of constellation that forms of these like
you have you these corporations doing like education stuff or
like running schools, and you have these like nonprofits running
like the like the education material. And it's it's this
sort of like this this is sort of arch neoliberal

(36:18):
thing where instead of the state administering a service, what
you have is this like based basically a bunch of
like contracting grifters who come in and suck up all
of the money and then provide absolutely dogshit services. Now
I'm going to read another quote from this book, because
the people they are paying these contracts who are fucking
wild on the The SRC is like one of the

(36:40):
bodies that's in charge of, like one of the state
bodies as in charge of, like the Philadelphia School District.
One of the SRC's most problematic contracts was with K
twelve Inc. For three million dollars to quote provide academic
and curriculum support access to K twelves online curriculum and assessments,
academic and richment via summer and extended day programs, professional development,

(37:03):
teacher planning and training materials, and community involvement activities. Conservative
radio talk show host William Bennett was the founder of
K twelve, Inc. He had been an advisor to former
presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush Durin a
show in two thousand and five, he said the following,
and this is a direct quote. If you want to
reduce crime. You could, if that was your sole purpose,

(37:24):
you could abort every black baby in this country and
your crime rate would go down. That would be an
impossibly ridiculous and wray reprehensible thing to do, but your
crime weight would go down. So they peeled this guy
three million fucking dollars to both of VAL's pro choice credentials.

(37:45):
This is this is the most pro choice thing I've
ever seen from him, is the genocide guy. Because guy, yeah, yeah,
well you see, they all have a have a weakness.
That is, has anyone looked to the curriculum that they're providing.
I'm serious the thing, it's unclear to me that they ever,

(38:06):
like actually really provided much of anything. It does sound
like a like if you were going to make up
a company to grift at the education system, K twelve Inc.
Would be a great name. Yeah, And then that's that's
the thing about like all these charter schools too, right.
It's like, like, okay, so like there are some for
profit corporations you do charter school stuff, and they stick
in the charter school business because they decide that's how

(38:27):
they want to make their money. A lot of these
things come in take a state contract the school immediately
implodes and then leave and then they just walk out
with self a million dollars and this is like this
is a recurring pattern over and over again with charter schools. UM.
He also brings in Teach for America, who is this
like just genuinely evil organization that tries to break teachers
unions by recruiting these like incredibly idealistic and naive young

(38:50):
college grads and like throwing them into like into failing
schools as this thing to like, ah, you're gonna like
go serve the community and like you know, you're you'll
learn the job and you'll you'll become an educator and
you're like helping these disadvantaged kids and it's a disaster.
These these these people, the people who do this have
no fucking idea how to teach because they know theyn't
have teachers, gets right, They're just like college grads, and

(39:12):
at any any of you who have been around college grads,
like you think those people are responsible enough to fucking
teach kids, Like Jesus Christ, Yeah, I meant of that
was like a big thing. Like I don't know if
it still happens or not. I can remember, right, Yeah,
reference letters for students like ten fifteen years ago for that. Yeah,
Like I I mean, I know I had to like

(39:33):
talk out classmates of mine like out of doing it
because we were like you are doing you are doing
union busting and also this will destroy your life and
the life of the children you have to teach. Yeah,
it's a very strange system that, yeah, takes someone who
by virtue of having any degree is it's automatically an educator.
But to be fair, that is how universities work as well. Yeah,
you get get your master's degree and they're like, well,

(39:54):
fuck it, get in there. They'll just give you grad
students with no degrees, right, Like that's that's the thing too. Yeah,
but yeah, yeah, and you know to to to to
get up together into those syds of like the other
thing that's happening here is is he has this really valas,
has this really really racist kind of like we need

(40:16):
to like enforce discipline in schools thing, and so they
have all these and this happened to Chicago too. They
have these like zero tolerance policies that have done i
mean irreparable damage to like tons of thousands of kids.
I'm gonna read I'm going to read a thing from
tribe about Philadelphia. Quote. Test results were posted on data
walls in the school buildings to show which classes were

(40:36):
making the most progress. WHOA, it was humiliating, said Grill
was a teacher. A lot of our kids were left behind,
were behind, and a lot of a lot of our
kids suffered trauma, and trauma affects the way you learn.
So they were behind, they weren't on grade level, and
it made them feel like failures. I hated giving those tests. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
people like to be wrong about Georgia. Well, but that

(40:58):
that's some more wedding and ship threat that like and
like these are like fucking yeah, like these are like
these are literally children like you were. You were publicly
shaming people who are like twelve. It's just it's just horrible.
Yeah that, Like we've known for a very long time
that that doesn't work when you're educating kids. Like I

(41:20):
have done Pettigougi training and get it. No one with
any intent to actually help kids is shaming kids in
the classroom, or young people or anyone of any age
for that matter. I just checked out what K twelve
Inca doing. It's great. They're now offering online high school.
Oh great, yeah, yeah, you can go to a faith
prep academy, developed Christian character find Yeah, yeah, this is great.

(41:47):
This is this is what I this is what I
youth need. Yeah it sucks so Um. The other thing again,
we keep strinkling around this because this happens a bunch
of times. Like again, vals, this whole thing is supposed
to be about, like about balancing budgets. Right in two
thousand and seven, by the time he's like like at
the near the end of his like time in Philly,

(42:09):
he's fucked everything up so badly that that for in
like just one year of the budget, Philly schools were
seventy three million dollars in the whole. Now, the thing
about this is this is where most stories about Valis's
time in Philadelphia end. But wait, there's fucking more so
that that seventy three million dollars short fall was. It

(42:29):
was the one year short fall. Right remember back in
Chicago where Valas is like variable interest rate bonds like
blew up in the school's faces. Um, this time, Vallas
is the guy directly who did the credit the fault
swaps and uh, these these the interest rates on these
things are locked in literally for decades and just like
like some of these aren't expiring to like twenty thirty one, right,

(42:50):
and just so far they've cost one hundred and sixty
one million dollars. Great, yeah, and test test scores fucking
go down under him. It's a ship show. Yeah, And
so twousand and seven they kick him out because they're like,
what the fuck are you doing? Like Unfortunately the place
they kick him out too is is and you're you're

(43:12):
not gonna like this post Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. So
for fuck's sake? Yeah, yeah, why why do we have
to inflict like the fail suns of neoliberalism and the
people of New Orleans that's gonna get worse by the way, Okay, great, yeah, um,
so this is really bad, right New Orleans? Now? Okay,

(43:33):
so I think there's there's some kind of controversy about
how exactly you calculate this. At the very least sixty
three out of the sixty six like New Orleans, like big,
like sorry, let me let me rest at the very
least sixty three out of the sixty six, like schools
that they run, like at the very least like that
that are directly run by the state. Our charter schools. Um,

(43:56):
there's three more that are also charter schools but are
kind of administrated by the district. So there is a
huge debate as to whether there are technically any public
schools left in in fucking New Orleans. Jesus. Yeah, they
fired like and this this was this was before Valis
came into office. But in New Orleans they fired the
entire every teacher in the fucking city. They fired all

(44:18):
the unions, literally, all the union teachers were replaced them
with non union people. M Vallis comes in and starts
implementing some shit that is just like I like prison
camp shit. Oh god, here's from here's from tribe again.
According to Biguard, a lot of kids were arrested for
quote disruption of a school process if they showed up

(44:39):
late to class and refused to be kicked out for tardiness.
And again they are being arrested for refuge for wanting
to stay in school. Yeah, black kids, black girls were
arrested for having quote rat tail combs, which have long,
sharp handles from grating hair. Yeah. In one instance, Gard

(45:00):
said a six year old student was expelled and charged
with possession and distribution of a controlled substance because he
brought toms to school and gave them to his classmates
thinking they were candy. What the fuck they charged a
six year old? Yeah? God, yeah, the levels of fucking

(45:21):
cruelty that have to exist, Like a cop has to
see a six year old and not be like a lull.
Those are toms, like the kitch by should neat too
many of those. Let me go, he didn't know they
were kiddy because he's six Jesus Christ. Yeah, just like
just just jetty widely like abhorrently evil shit. Yeah. See

(45:43):
this is like maybe now is a good time to
point out that, like U, in the wake of yet
another terrible school shooting, people will want to put more
cops in schools. This is what happens when we put
cops in schools, right, They brutalize our fucking children. Yeah,
and like it's not yeah, like the state doing vince
the children is not on the way or protect children. Yeah.
What I want to say, the more your school represents

(46:05):
the levels of law enforcement that are in a prison camp,
the more the actual experience of the children will become
like prison camps. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, but also just
literally I mean, that's God. I love to go to
the Panoptic on high school. Garrison, what are you talking about.
It's just the panoptic on high school where if you don't,

(46:26):
if you don't get kicked out of your fucking class
for being late, they arrest you the coalent again. Yeah,
just so speaking speaking of disciplining and punishing. So these
charter schools, they do think that charter schools always do right,
which is sometimes if you know, if if you look
at people who talk about educational reform, they'll be like,
charter schools have like really great like test numbers, and

(46:46):
a that's just like not true, right, that they're only
looking at the really good charter schools. But you know,
here's the thing. If you give a public school the
amount of money that a really good charter school has,
it will also be a really good school. But but
there's the second thing that charter schools can do that
other schools can't, which is that charter schools could just
fucking kick students out. And this is one of the
ways that they maintain their test numbers is they just
kick out kids over whatever. Yet you don't do who

(47:08):
aren't initially doing well on tests. So they don't have
to teach them and like bother to improve their test scores.
And in New Orleans they get in trouble because the
kids they were kicking out were kids with disabilities who
they were illegally yeah, who they were illegally not like
giving individual education plans too, and also they were these
everything right, These charter schools are all run by different
private corporations, and so there's no system of tracking whether

(47:29):
when a kid gets kicked out whether they can actually
get it go to another school. So they're just leaving
these disabled kids, like in the fucking win with no
school to go to. And this was so illegal that
after a lawsuit, like I think it might still be
going to this day. It was going like twenty fourteen.
Like the school the Philadelphia school system was like under

(47:50):
resizaship by the federal government because they committed so many
crimes against disabled students. Jesus Christ, that is brutal. Yeah,
it's awful, fucking sorry. Stuff makes you kind of WoT
an education for a lot of my adult life, and
this ship makes me furious. Yeah, I just wanted to
what do you you to guess? Where do you think
they sent Paul Vallis next after he got kicked out

(48:12):
of I try trying to run of New Orleans. Did
they send him to set up a finishing school for
girls in Kabul? No, but similar similar vibes. Oh, for
fock's sake, it dude, it's outside the continental US. Yes,
it's not a rock no Puerto Rito earthquake. It's Haiti

(48:39):
after the yep yep. So now we've talked about this
in four on the show. In two thousan ten, there
was a just unbelievably heartwrenchingly catastrophic earthquake killed two hundred
and twenty thousand people and also destroyed like almost every
building in Haiti. And this kicks off phase two of
the UN occupation of the country. We talked about out

(49:00):
this in our episodes on Lulu and Bill Snaro. This
is this is when the UN guys from the Paul
bring in Cholerado, a bunch of the operation. Right. Yeah,
So right after this happens, so the US just like
sends Marines in, right, and no one in Haiti asked
for it. We just we just fucking invade um and
they bring in Paul Vallis, like specifically Paul Vallas and

(49:22):
also Arnie Duncan, who's again Obama's fucking education secretary, gets
bring in to rebuild the Haitian school system on the
New Orleans model. Now, okay, weirdly, if they had actually
implemented New Orleans model, it would have been an improvement,
because they hate the way the Haitian school system worked
was it was ninety percent private and the tuition was
forty percent of someone's annual budget, like like a family's

(49:44):
annual budget. Yeah, so that's the friends in Haiti who
couldn't afford to pay for school trying. It's fucking horrible.
Vallis is supposed to like change this, right, he gets
brought in, They bring in the Clinton Foundation. Instead, what
happens is the Clinton Foundation and buys a bunch of
trailers to use as schools for the from from specifically

(50:04):
the same people who got in trouble for selling for
maldehyde ridden trailers to FEMA drink Katrina, and then you know, okay,
and I never think that I I can't emphasize enough
the grifted trailer ink or something. Yeah, they fucking suck well.
But also also even though trailers were good, right, there's
a real issue with trying to use trailers to teach

(50:26):
kids in a place that is hot, yeah, which is
that it is one hundred fucking degrees inside these trailers.
These trailers are made of metal, so if you touch
the side of the thing, you get burned. Kids at people,
people who like teachers who were taught there, routinely talk
about how every kid, and they're every kid in their
fucking class was having heat stroke and they were just
like giving them painkillers for heat stroke because that's all

(50:46):
they could do. And yeah, it is punishingly hot if
you haven't works in that part of the world a lot,
and it is, it's hot enough without banking a tank
can Yeah, and vowless's fucking education form. They don't fucking work.
They don't do shit, right, hate education system is still
fucked despite all the body the Clinton Foundation and the like,
all these experts got paid, Like, it's still really bad.

(51:10):
I vallist like specifically, like very specifically defended the use
of trailers is like a thing you teach people in um. Yeah,
and you know this stuff. I'll continue used to the
present day. The US has been trying to find another excuse,
just trying to find a way to do another intervention.
In Haiti. So she's still on the New Orleans job.

(51:31):
I think, while he's doing this Haiti job, and then
he takes another job in Chile. Yeah, why, I don't know.
The people people get well, because because the the Interamerican
Development Bank gives him half a million dollars to run
two thousand schools there. So again he's now he's now
splitting his time between New Orleans, Haiti, and Chile. It's

(51:54):
it's almost impossible to find it. I spent a lot
of time looking. It's like it's really hard to find
like anything about what actually he was doing in Chile.
What we do know was when he got there, he
was met by the enormous two thousand and eleven Chilean
student protests, which then later turned into the twenty thirteen
Chilean student protests, which turned into two thousand and fifteen
Chilean student protests, which turned into the two thousand and

(52:15):
nineteen Chilean student protests. So you know, I mean, I
just I just want to like you. It is possible
to run Paul Vallis out of your country a couple
of different places, or at least your school. Jesians were
also a country a couple of places have done it,
and then after that they ended up Bridgeport, Connecticut for
some reason, where he gets run out after doing like

(52:37):
he gets he flees Connecticut, like trying to escape a
lawsuit about all the illegal anti union stuff that he did.
I really love the image of someone trying to desperately
flee from Connecticut. Yeah, like it's so small. How how
hard is it to leave Connecticut? It seems pretty easy

(52:58):
to jump over the line. I mean the one the
video I actually want to see is him getting out
of Philly. See see, getting out of Philly sounds actually hard.
Getting out of this Connecticut is like, come on, come on. Yeah,
the video I want to seuse him getting sent back
to Haiti by himself. Oh god. Yeah. So he runs

(53:22):
again and she wasn't fourteen. So Bigovis gets arrested for
you know, selling a Senate seat, and he tries to
run for lieutenant governor on on a slate, on like
a ticket with Pat Quinn who had been the governor
because he'd been the lieutenant governor under boys, and they like,
actually they managed to lose in Illinois to a Republican,

(53:42):
which is like, I think that should not happen unless
the Democrats would like really fuck up, which I mean
it happens, right, but like, yeah, so Democrats can make
can make electoral mistakes. Are you sure to be fair?
To be fair? This one wasn't. This wasn't even an
electoral thing. This was just the guy tried to sell
a fucking Senate and people were so mad at into

(54:04):
the next election, They're like, we will vote for Bruce Rowner,
who is just like a fucking absolute dipshit. But okay,
so she So he has now lost two consecutive runs
for governor, right governor and lieutenant governor. Now this year
he actually he would he had another bid where he
was maybe gonna run, and then he stopped. And now

(54:26):
now he is one of the candidates for the mayor
of Chicago. Now, while he's been doing his campaigning for this,
some other fun stuff has been happening. Um, so he
has an absolutely unlistenable podcasts please nodered. I considered pulling

(54:48):
clips from this, and then I was like, I'm not.
I can't inflict this on you. Absolutely it sucks too much. Yeah,
I would simply leave this zoom call. I'm not, I'm
just trauma. I was gonna, like, I was gonna talk
about one of the things that he said a couple
of things that he well, okay, one that he said
on this one of they said on a different show. Um.
One of the things was he starts ranting about this

(55:10):
thing called culturally responsive teaching, which is this kind of
liberal like anti racist. Yeah, this is a big thing.
Like if anyone ever starts talking about culturally responsive teaching
and starts yelling about it like they're a racist, like that,
those are the only people who like actually like consistently.
I mean, like it's not like there ar't criticisms of it,
but like almost everyone who talks about this on like

(55:32):
a school board level is like a really weird racist guy.
So she starts raving about how this means that everyone's
gonna get handed a copy of Mao's Little Red Book,
and then says, quote, what is this the cultural Revolution?
Now we have covered the cultural revolution over the course
of the show in the Atlanta episodes, and I'm just

(55:53):
gonna simply say no and move on to read this
unbelievably racist thing that he said. I'm just gonna read this.
It's it's real bad. But for that matter, if you're
a black child, you go home and listen to your
parent when your parent has failed to be successful in
addressing the ways these historically racist obstacles that have denied

(56:16):
them a chance to equal opportunity. Here's the guy he's
talking to, Paul. I wonder if you're a black kid,
why don't you become a criminal? If you're hearing this
stuff in school, everyone with the white skin is an
oppress or if you're a black skin, you're the oppressed.
That makes it pretty easy to justify any pretty bad conduct.
In my opinion, you're absolutely right. So this is valence
comes back. But what you're also doing, you're giving these

(56:37):
You're giving people an excuse for bad behavior. You're almost
justifying is Rams book in Fox. So you're right, You're
absolutely right. Where is the accountability? You're the victim. What's
happening is it becomes a justification for everything, and I
think that's a very dangerous thing. Sollas arguing that talking
about racism is actually a thing that encourages black people

(56:57):
to do crime, which is like, that sounds that sounds
kind of racist me just a little bit. He maybe
with supremisist gives up racist vibes. Yeah. Um, so speaking
of racist vibes, his son is a cop in Santa
Fe and he was one of three cops who shot
a black guy in the back after calling him boy. Um.

(57:19):
The cops, including Vasis. Yeah, they start screaming boy at
him and they shoot him in the back. And the cops,
including Valles, his son claimed to have found a gun
next to his body. Um. And in a completely unrelated story,
you with special forces units in Afghanistan, Ricie Lee carried
AK forty sevens in a combat zone so they could
drop the next to the body of people they killed,
Ridge and declared them insurgents. This has no relation to

(57:39):
the previous story at all. I am simply relaying facts
two interesting and unrelated stories. Yeah, didn't. Valis also is
he's the guy who claimed his Twitter was hacked, right,
Oh yeah, yeah, so very way back. At the beginning
of this episode, I talked a bit about the racism
against Loie Lightfoot and like, one of the tweets that

(58:01):
he liked is a tweet like calling Lori a man like,
Lord life Foot a man like. It's just unbelievably racist,
like homophobic, transphobic shit. And he claims that his account
was hacked and people were liking tweets without his permission. Yeah, right,
that's all they did. They just liked somebracist sweets. There's
like a bunch of other like and the other thing.
It's like, okay, like Paul Bells doesn't like actually live

(58:24):
in Chicago. You mentioned this. He lives in like he
claims to live in Polo's Heights, which is also not Chicago,
but it's unclear whether he even lives there or if
he's in like some kind of like even more insane
outlying suburb that's even less Chicago than the stuff is.

(58:45):
And he like, he likes, he likes he one of
the things he likeing tweets, calling it like shit cago
and stuff. And it's like, well, yeah, it's because he
doesn't live in the city. He's not actually like these
are like a bunch of his support, a bunch of
the money he's getting are from like drained suburban like
reactionary and okay, So I want to tell one last
story about him that pisses me off a lot, which

(59:06):
is the story of a Wake Illinois. So Awake Illinois
is like Illinois version of Protect Texas Kids. It's a
group that does Nazi protests at drag events. They managed
to destroy a bakery called Uprising for trying to hold
a drag bunt brunch so that they Awake did all
this thing of like, ah, they're grooming kids, and then
the Proud Boys showed up and attacked it, and then

(59:26):
someone like vandalized it, and they nearly had to close
the entire bakery until a go fund me raised thirty
thousand dollars for them to survive. They are like, these
people are unbelievably homophobic. They rant about groomers constantly. They're
like really transphobic. Anyways, Paul Vallis spoke at one of
their fundraisers. Oh god. So after this came out, Vallis
distanced himself from the group, saying you didn't know what

(59:47):
they represented and just wanted to support school choice. Awake
responded by going, hey, what the fuck. You absolutely know
who we are, and they released another video of Vallis
and another Awake event where he said that AWAKES president
shad An Adcock should run for governor, So if elected,
would I probably be the most openly homophobic democratic like

(01:00:10):
mayor in the country, which is a pretty wild like,
which is pretty wild claim, but like I can't think
of anyone else who actually like showed up at an
event where people just screaming about groomers, like yeah, and
of the Democrats, he is just a Republican, Like he's
he's like like a pretty right wing like Republican who

(01:00:32):
runs the Democrat because Chicago political machine is also just
so far right. I thought this was because low Lightfoot
defounded the police. Mayor. Oh, I thought that's what happened,
and people want the police back. That's what That's what
I That's what I've told you know. The thing is
actually very funny about the elections is like, so there
is elections for these like police district councils are just
supposed to be these like civilian oversight boards and the

(01:00:55):
like reform. There was kind of there was an alliance
to sort of like reform defund an abolitionist candidates, and
they did fucking amazing and the pro police candidates got
fucking clabbard and it Meanwhile, every single national story about
the election was like Chicago crime. I was like, you
guys don't understand how much everyone here hates the police,
Like I like, they murdered a thirteen year old, like

(01:01:18):
fucking two years ago. I yeah, good, Yeah, I'm gonna
I'm gonna hedge my thing here by saying there's so
much other Paul Valle shit I couldn't fit, Like I
really wanted to talk about Keith Thornton, who is Chicago's
George Santos, who like his thing is that he stole
nine to eleven dispatcher Valor and is like keep showing

(01:01:40):
up in pictures with Vallis. Just just google Keith Thornton
and you will have a good time. Like, there are
so many other Valist things that he did that are awful.
There are probably things that he's done that will never
know about because he did them in like I don't know,
like like what the fuck he was doing in Chile.
We probably won't ever know all the things he didn't
hate E. Yeah, don't let this guy become the fucking

(01:02:01):
mayor of Chicago. He will leave the city utterly destroyed.
Let's go Brandon. I I'm so annoyed that people are
on ironically, let's go brandon ing in Chicago now for
Brandon Johnson. It's bringing it back, We're taking it back,
We're reclaiming it. I reclaim Brandon. Yeah, I'm so bad

(01:02:24):
like bringing Brandon back. Okay, I got in trouble with
my boss in twenty fifteen for saying fuck Hillary, like
you fucking little bitches. You could just you can just
say that. You you could just say fuck Joe Biden
like all of your cowards. Yes, it was. It is
deeply cowardly afraid of saying fuck. But at the same time,
they think they're gonna staged an armed overthrow of the government. Huh. Anyway, Oh,

(01:02:50):
there's actually okay, this is the thing I actually should much.
There are a bunch of ties between um, there are
a bunch of ties between val Us and guys who
were at J six, like and like a lot of
j S people support him. He's like he's like he
is the MAGA candidate. That's like there's like, oh, there's
a whole thing there that I didn't get into because

(01:03:10):
I don't know. There's so much you could do, like
seven episodes just about Paul Vallas and how much he sucks.
But yeah, stop him if he fucking gets elected. We're
doing that. We're doing that. We're doing the fucking Chilean
student protests because yeah, hate him. Opie has a bad day. Hey,

(01:03:44):
welcome to It could happen here a podcast about things
falling apart um and today it's kind of going to
be a conversation about uh, is shit falling apart? Are
we all about to be devoured by a rogue AI?
Is your job about to be devowered by a rogue AI?
These are the questions that we're going to, you know,

(01:04:05):
talk around and about and stuff today and with us
today is Noah John Syracusa, a math professor at Bentley University. Noah,
welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, and I'm
reaching out. We're talking right now because there's an article
that was put up in The New York Times on
March twenty four, twenty twenty three, titled you can have

(01:04:25):
the Blue Pill or the Red Pill and We're out
of Blue Pills, which is a fun title by Yuval
Harari Tristan Harris and as a raskin. And it's an
article that is kind of about the pitfalls and dangers
of AI research, of which there definitely are some. I
enjoyed your thread on the matter. I thought it was

(01:04:46):
a lucid breakdown of the things the article gets right
and the areas in which I think they're a bit
fear mongery. So yeah, I think that's probably a good
place to start, unless you wanted to start by just
kind of generally talking about where you kind of are
on AI and what you kind of think, you know,
the technology is advancing towards right now. Yeah, I mean,

(01:05:08):
I think I can probably answer both those questions and
the same because part of why I enjoyed writing that
threat dissecting the article is I just had the strangest
feeling reading it that I agreed with it so much
in principle and yet somehow objected it to so much
in detail. Yeah, and it thinking about that article helped
me think about my own feelings on AI, which you know,
every day of the week is slightly different because so

(01:05:29):
much news happens. Yeah, I found myself overall deeply frustrated
that I agree with the central conclusion, which is that
maybe we shouldn't be just like plowing headlong into this
and should be more careful when we we we screw
around with technology like this, which I agree with and
I feel like should have been the thing we did
with like I don't know, Facebook, Twitter, like all of

(01:05:51):
these things like it's less. My obsession is less with
like the specific dangers of AI and more with what
we keep letting these guys who are fundamentally like gamblers
within your capital money really put our society through the
ringer without ever asking should we like do any research
on maybe how social media affects children and like how
all of these different things. And it's it's right that, like, yeah,

(01:06:14):
we should be concerned about what these people are going
to do with AI, but also why now? Why just now? Yeah?
And that raises a really good point, which is what's
different now versus what we've been experiencing with social media?
And just to give your listeners some context, one of
the three authors on this New York Times article is

(01:06:35):
famous for writing this book Sapiens that's a sweeping history
of humanity, and the other two are actually most famous
for the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. So they really
are in this camp of warning people about social media algorithms.
And as exactly as you're saying, that's sort of this
thing that we've been dealing with, probably quite poorly, and
now we're kind of moving on to the next societal risk,

(01:06:56):
which is AI. So that as a really important question
of what's different now. And I think that's one of
the things the articles try to address, which is many
of the problems that we already have with algorithms, data
driven algorithms, and even AI as it's used in social
media is still happening now, but somehow things feel like
they're spiring out of control. Yeah, And I think, I mean, honestly,

(01:07:18):
I think a lot of this just has to do
with culturally, what are touchstones for AI we're going into this,
you know, which are Skynet? You know, like it's that
sort of thing, and you do see. I feel like
the uncredited fourth author on this particular article is James Cameron,
because there's pieces of it throughout this wellere like there's

(01:07:39):
some it opens actually pretty provocatively. Imagine that you are
boarding an airplane. Half the engineers who built it tell
you there is a ten percent chance the plane will crash,
killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board?
In twenty twenty two, over seven hundred top academics and
researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in
a survey about future AI risk. Half of those surveys,

(01:08:00):
there was a ten percent or greater chance of human
extinction from future AI systems, which, yeah, let's zoom it on. Yeah. Yeah,
that's because what I tried to do in my thread
was go through all the claims and assertions and really
pause and say hold on. But that's a great one
to start, because there's a lot to dig in right there. Yeah. So,

(01:08:20):
first of all, there's a huge difference in that airplanes
are based on science and physics and things that we
understand pretty well. There's a lot to it, and there's
been millions of flights, so you have a lot of data.
You know, how many planes crash and how many don't.
Maybe one engine goes out, you can do the statistics
and CEO you know whatever percent of planes without that
engine still land safely. The problem with AI is we're

(01:08:44):
just guessing. Yeah, right, there's no way to know one
hundred years from now or ten years from now what
it's going to do, what the real risks are, so
we speculate, and that's not uncharted territory, right Let nuclear
weapons were first introduced, people had to guess and speculate.
But the danger, I think is putting it in that
same category as things like airplanes or climate change. I'll

(01:09:06):
like to think about climate change. When you see these,
you know what's the IPCC. I forget the acronym in
these reports. That's based on thousands of scientists digging into
thousands of published papers and all this data really modeling
the environment. There's a lot of meat and substance to it.
The problem with the AI is it's mostly people I
hate to say it, but like me or like you,
just kind of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen,

(01:09:29):
maybe that'll happen. The reasonable thing to say. If you're
in AARs you just like, yeah, I have concerns that
AI could cause serious negative externalities for the human race.
Perfectly reasonable statement. It is physically impossible to say there's
a ten percent chance, exactly because it's never done that before.
You know, I'm a math professor, and I'm the first

(01:09:50):
to say numbers don't have some intrinsic meaning. Right. If
I just say something has maybe a fifteen percent, I'm
just making it up. I'm pulling out of my ass. Yeah,
it doesn't make it true. So it's this, it's a
general pet peeve I have of sort of giving a
false sense of precision by using numbers that you don't
really know where they came from, or they're just made up.

(01:10:11):
So that's one issue is these numbers are made up,
and asking a thousand people to make up numbers isn't
necessarily any better than asking one or two. You know,
then if the numbers made up, it's made up. So
that's one issue. Yeah, I also do think, and I'm
not the I saw someone make a note I think
was Ben Collins, who writes for NBC on Twitter, made
a note that like, well, the fact that all of

(01:10:33):
these statements about like how dangerous they are about human
extinction are coming out of people in the AI industry
has started to kind of feel like marketing. That's right, Yeah, exactly,
it's a little bit of buzz marketing going on here.
And I think you mentioned social media, and the authors
of this article mentioned social media, and we have to
look to the past right to understand the future. I
think that's the only way to do it. So, what

(01:10:54):
was one of the biggest scandals in social media was
Cambridge Analytica, And as you know, we probably a member.
This was this data privacy scandal where a bunch of
data was collected from Facebook users that shouldn't have been
you know, people didn't realize that the data is being collected,
they didn't approve it, and it was used for this
election company or this political company that was trying to

(01:11:16):
profile people and influenced campaigns towards Donald Trump, towards Brexit.
So this was a huge scandal, and you know, Facebook
was fine five billion dollars or something, very justifiably, but
I would say what it was in retrospect was a
data privacy issue. People's personal data was leaked when it
shouldn't have been. The problem was there was so much

(01:11:38):
fear and fear monitoring over it that people felt this
data was used by these sort of algorithmic mind lasers
to kind of know us in such great detail and
get us, trick us into voting for Donald Trump and
targeting us. And the journey is still kind of out,
but most of the evidence looks like Cambridge Analytical it

(01:11:58):
wasn't that effective. They couldn't do it. And it turns
out you can know a lot about a person, a
lot about their data, and it's really hard to influence
them to change them. So what happened I think was
there was a lot of alarm set spread rightly so
about the tech companies. They have too much power, too
much data, they know too much about us, and this
horrible thing happened. The problem is a lot of the

(01:12:19):
alarmism then actually reinforce this aura of power, of godlike
power that the tech companies have. People criticizing them actually
gave them more potency than they deserved. And then suddenly
Google and Facebook and all they had. It wasn't sudden,
but it kind of built it up. They had this
aura that our algorithms are it's so insanely powerful, and

(01:12:40):
we have to make sure they stay in the right hands,
and we can do so much. And that's unfortunately what
I see happening now a lot, And that is kind
of the setting for critiquing this article. Yeah, absolutely agree
that this stuff is risky. AI. I absolutely agree that
we could go down a dangerous path. But once we
start leaving firm ground and speculating wildly and using the

(01:13:01):
terminator stuff that you described. Yeah, even if you think
you're criticizing the tech companies, you know what you're doing
giving them the biggest compliment in the world, saying that
you guys have created are godlike and you've created these
mighty machines, You've created a deity, which is very similar
to the language this argue article has at the end,
and I think it's kind of worth like, as you're
bringing up there are real threats. There are real threats

(01:13:25):
that are immediately obvious. The threat that a lot of
writers are going to lose their jobs because companies like
BuzzFeed decide to replace them with you know, chat, GPT
or whatever. The fact that a lot of artists are
going to lose out on work because their work has
been hoovered up and it's being used to generate Like
these are very real and very immediate concerns that we
don't have to They're not hypothetical. We don't have to
theorize about the AI becoming intelligent for this to be

(01:13:48):
a problem. These are things we have to immediately deal
with because it puts people at risk. It's the same
thing with like, you know, there's a lot that gets
talked about with Cambridge in Altica, with kind of like
the different Russian disinformation efforts. But when I think about
the stuff that was happening in the same period that
worries me more. One of the things that occurred is

(01:14:10):
because there was so much money to be made if
you could get certain things to go viral on YouTube
companies that use tools that weren't wildly dissimilar from some
of these basically generated CGI videos based on kind of
random terms that they knew were likely to trick the
algorithm into trending. And god knows how many children were
parked in front of these like very unhinged videos for

(01:14:31):
hours at a time that they would start watching some
normal kid musical video or something, and then they're watching
like the disembodied head of Krusty the crownd bounce around
while like some sort of nonsense song gets sung and
it's like, what is that actually going to do with kids? Like,
we don't know. That's unsettling thought, Yeah, and that's the
kind of thing, you know, and I'm sure there will

(01:14:52):
be obviously, Like one of the things that this article
is not wrong about is that if we kind of
leap forward into this technolog oology with the kind of
abandon that we're used to giving the tech company, there
will be unforeseen externalities that we can't predict right now
that will be very concerning. I just don't sky in it. Yeah,
And that's what was so challenging, not just with that article,

(01:15:14):
but with I think the movement we're having is I
do agree very much in spirit. I agree with the recommendations.
We need to slow down, we need to be more
judicious and cautious, we need to really consider these. But again,
if we overhype the technology, we may be doing ourselves
a disservice by empowering the very entities that we're trying

(01:15:36):
to take power from. And as an example like that,
can I read a quick quote from the article, do
you AI's new mastery of language means it can now
hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By'm gaining
mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key to
civilization from bank vaults to holy sepulchers. That's right, and

(01:15:58):
that I mean, that is fun and you're right to laugh.
Let's actually zoom in a second. And I think this
is such a tempting trap that AI is super intelligent
in some respects. Right, It's done amazing at chats, amazing,
it's jephard be amazing at various things. Chat GPT is
amazing at these conversations. So what happens is it's so
tempting to think AI just equal super smart and because

(01:16:22):
it can do those things, and now, look, it can
converse that it must be the super intelligent conversational entity.
And it's really good at taking text that's on the
web that it's already looked at and kind of spinning
it around and processing. It can come up with poems
and weird forms. But that doesn't mean it is super
intelligent in all respects. For instance, one of the main

(01:16:44):
issues is to hack civilization. To manipulate us with language,
it has to kind of know what impact its words
have on us, and it doesn't really have that. It
just has a little conversation at textbox and I can
give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. So the
only data that it's collecting for me when it talks
to me any of these chat thoughts is did I
like the response or not. That's pretty weak data to

(01:17:07):
try to manipulate me, you know, it's so basic. That's
not that different than when I watch YouTube videos. YouTube
knows what videos I like and what I don't like.
When you say that YouTube is hacked civilization, no, it's
addicted a lot of us, but it's not hacked us. Yeah,
we people have hacked YouTube, and that has done some
damage to other people. Like, but it's like the thing

(01:17:28):
is and that's that's part of why while I have
many concerns about this technology, it's not that it's going
to hack civilization because like, we're really good at doing
that to each other. Like, there's always huge numbers of
people hacking bits of the populace and manipulating each other,
and they're always have been. That's why we figured out
how to paint like it's I do think that there's um,

(01:17:52):
there's an interesting conversation to be had about the part
of why people are kind of willing to leave anything
as possible with this stuff is that for folks who
were just kind of living their lives with a normal
amount of attention paid to the tech industry, it seems
like these tools popped out of nowhere a couple of

(01:18:12):
months ago. Right. It feels like, oh, there has just
suddenly been this massive breakthrough. And the reality is that
all of the stuff that people you know, chat gpt
these different ais that everybody's talking about, this is technology
that people have been pouring resources into for years and
years and years and years and years, and that's why
it's able to do some of these amazing things that
we've seen but it's not. I don't think it means

(01:18:33):
that in a month it's going to be a thousand
times smarter. It's it's it's a process of labor, and
it was finally ready to be unveiled to the extent
that it has been. Maybe that's right. And a good
example as GPT four which recently came out. There was
GPT three before and chat GPT and there is so
much speculation that GPT four is going to be again

(01:18:54):
this godlike thing that just you know, that brings us
to the singularity. And and honestly, it's done better at tests.
You know, I forget the numbers, but maybe one of
them got a twenty percent grade on some tests and
this one got an eighty percent. So that is a
significant improvement. Right, If you're a teacher and your students
improve that much, you should be happy. But as you said,

(01:19:15):
is that a thousand times no, even though the machine
is much bigger, much more data, and it just shows that. Yeah, Like,
the reality is this is incremental progress going at a
very fast rate, very unsettling even for those of us
following the field closely. We're experiencing that kind of vertigo
that you're saying that whoa where did this come from?
So even within the field, and you're absolutely right, if

(01:19:35):
you're just at home, you know, not paying attention for
a week or a month or a year, suddenly the
stuff pops up. It is disorienting. But one thing I
think that's helped me at least kind of clarify what
not even answering what the risks are, but just understanding
the different camps of why certain people are reacting differently,
and why even the people afraid of AI seem to

(01:19:56):
be now fighting amongst each other and why it's getting fractured.
Is are you more afraid of this be AI used
as a tool by people, or are you more afraid
of it kind of taking on its own autonomy and
kind of going rogue and doing its own things. And
I'm very much afraid of people using it. I think
big companies are going to use it and there's going

(01:20:17):
to be a lot of problems, just like we saw
with social media. People will get addicted, democracies will be
flooded with misinformation, It'll be weaponized by various actors, will
be bought accounts. So I am very concerned about it
being used. Basically, it performing the job it was told
to do, but it'll be told to do dangerous jobs,
either making money or making discord. There's another group of

(01:20:39):
people that are more worried about the AI somehow deciding
on its own to do things to take over. And
that's where you know, I can't roll it out, But
that's where I kind of am skeptical. Let's focus on
how people are using it for now, for the foreseeable future.
I don't think we need to worry yet, at least
about the AI somehow having a life of its own

(01:21:01):
and stabbing us in the back and enslaving us, because
there's just so much that can go wrong before you
even get to that point. Yeah, And it's it's not
that that's exactly like it's a threat triage kind of thing,
where like, is it theoretically possible that one day human
beings could create an artificial intelligence that is capable of
having its own agency that is malicious? Yeah, sure, I guess, Like,

(01:21:24):
I mean maybe, but man, we're there's a lot of
us that are very malicious right now that are actively
trying to harm other people at scale. I'm concerned about
how they will use AI to do that. I think
botnets are a really good example. One of the things
that these new this newest generation of AI tools allows
is more realistic and intelligent bots than I think have

(01:21:46):
been accessible at scale before. And that's a very real concern.
I will say when I kind of sorry, when I
kind of wargame this back and forth with myself. One
thing that is oddly comforting is like, well, the shared
comments that we all inhabit of, like ontological truth is

(01:22:06):
already so shattered that like there's there's only so much damage.
I feel like adding additional bots and additional disinformation can
really do um. Like one one thought on that though,
because I've been digging into that too. I've been, you know,
trying to ponder how to feel about that, because a
lot of this I don't know, you know, I'm trying
to make is. I do think if you go back

(01:22:29):
to like twenty sixteen earlier versions of the Internet, you know,
before leading up to Donald Trump's election, Yeah, I think
there was a lot of wild West to Google, to
social media, to all these things. Right, fake news was
just like piling up to the top of Google search results.
That election was so monumental and such a seismic shockwave

(01:22:50):
through a tech that fake news and misinformation might have
played a role, that they really had to do something,
and I think some companies are more effective than others.
I think Google put a lot oft into making sure
authoritative sources rise to the top. So what that means
is when now you go online and you Google for
medical information, the top results yougether WebMD or some official CDC,

(01:23:11):
your government thing. They're pretty decent reliable. It's not to
say there's an all that crap on the Internet, but
Google has done a pretty good job of having the
good stuff float to the top, and that's the information
that people see. So what I'm worried is now we
might be kind of resetting ourselves back to the twenty
sixteen where when you're talking to these chatbots that are
trained on all the internets. Yeah, I don't know if

(01:23:34):
the web mds and the CDC type of information is
necessarily going to float to the top. Maybe they'll work
that out. But I'm also worried that open AI or
Google or Microsoft or wherever, they'll have ones that are
pretty reasonable and kind of you know, tuned to appeal
to a lot of people. But Elon Musk might build
his own competitor one that might be really tuned to

(01:23:54):
elevate the right wing site. So I have been around,
as I mean, and you have been doing so in
a much more rigorous manner, I'm sure. But I've screw
around with a couple of different AI chat and search engines.
I use find PHI and D sometimes. I've been playing
around with being and one of the things I've noticed
is that you know, if you ask it like, hey,

(01:24:16):
summarize for me, like why the Battle of Hastings matter,
You'll get a reasonably decent answer. But if I ask
it like I don't know, specific questions about myself, I've
come to I noticed at first when I did it,
I would get some really weirdly like colloquial vernacular from
it explaining things, and I realized it was just pulling
answers directly that fans had asked about me on the

(01:24:37):
subreddit that this show has. And so when I think
about like ways in which to game the system, well,
you make a bunch of bots. You have them post
questions and answers that are you know, supportive of this
specific product line or whatever on a subreddit and hope
that it gets picked like scanned by an AI, and
that becomes part of its like answer for you know
what happens if you know, I can't stop itching or whatever.

(01:24:58):
I don't know, like, but I like obviously you can
see using them ways in which these cannon will be
gamed to some extent. You know, it's always kind of
a red Queen sort of situation where you have to
disinformation people fighting this info. You're always running as fast
as you can just to stay in place that's right,
And that is that brings up another issue which I

(01:25:20):
do feel like this is possibly really tipping the balance,
and that it takes a certain amount of resources to
create misinformation, it takes a certain amount of resources to
debunk it. Right, A journalist has to sit down, Snopes
has to write a little piece about it. And the
problem is with this AI, it's suddenly just dropping the
price of creation down to essentially zero. Anyone can create

(01:25:43):
essentially limitless supply of quasi information that may or may
not be true. But the problem is, is the price
of journalism of debunking also going down, maybe by fifty percent, right,
maybe it takes you half as much time to write
an article. It's not going to zero, No, So that's
the balance is Creating stuff has gotten a lot cheaper.
Detecting debunking, doing proper journalism it's gotten a little bit cheaper.

(01:26:06):
So I'm worried that that's journalists are already stretched then.
And this is by far my biggest concern because it's
it's not just this that's obviously a significant factor in it.
There will be more disinformation, there will not be more journalists,
in part because I think AI is going to take
jobs from that, particularly low level d It's not going
to replace, you know, prize winning columnists at the New

(01:26:30):
York Times, and it's not going to replace like guys
like me who have a very long and established career
of doing the specific thing that we do. But I
think back to when I got started as a as
a journalist, as a writer, it was as a tech blogger,
and I had an X number of articles that I
had to get out per day, and obviously, like my
boss was essentially trusting that with that many articles, i'd

(01:26:52):
have a few that did well on Google, and that
brings in traffic, and that brought in money. And there's
a degree to which you're just kind of doing seo shit.
But it's also I can did my first interviews for
that job. I went to trade shows for the first time.
I did my first on the ground journalism for that job.
It taught me how to write quickly and an a
polished nature. And I was not writing anything that was
like crucial to the development of humankind, but it made

(01:27:16):
me into the kind of person who was later able
to write things that were read by people all over
the world, and that had an influence on people. And
I worry about the brain dry, not just among journalists,
but among writers, among artists, you know, people who do
illustrations and stuff. Eventually, musicians, at least some kinds of
musicians will probably also run up against this, where the

(01:27:38):
stuff that it was easy for kind of people breaking
in to get a little bit of work that would
hone their skills and allow them to, you know, live
doing the thing that they're interested in, is going to disappear.
And more and more of the stuff that we kind
of casually low level consume, not our high art, not
our favorite movies, not our favorite books, but the stuff

(01:27:59):
that we or when we stumble upon a web page
or like in a commercial or whatever will be increasingly
made by AIS and that AI will be pulling from
an increasingly narrow set of things that humans made because
less humans will get that entry level work, and that
is there's something concerning there that is something that worries
me about the future of just creativity. Yeah, and I think,

(01:28:21):
I mean two points. One is just to kind of
be Devil's advocate a little bit, because I do sympathize
and I think you're right, but a little bit devil's
advocate is it might be on the out flip side
of the coin that there's people that feel like they
have artistic imagination and desires but lack the technical ability,
and suddenly they can paint, so to speak, by using
these aiimage generators. Maybe someone has some form of dyslexia,

(01:28:46):
or they're English as a second language or even native
speaker without any of these issues obstructions, but just finds
the writing process difficult, and maybe AI enables them to
be a writer, to contribute. So I could see, you know,
there's there's going to be the pros and the negatives,
and I don't know how the balance is, but I
think you're right thinking from a profession that's sort of

(01:29:07):
like a passion project view. From a professional view, I
do see the profession narrowing. If it journalists are expected
to work twice as quickly because they're all using chatbots,
there's probably going to be half of half as many
of them, right, I mean, that's that's the economics. But
this brings up a bigger issue, which is I do
think what you're hitting on is there are these long

(01:29:29):
term risks that maybe AI is gonna fuel this rebellion
of robots and this. You know, maybe, but again, we
have an economics, social, political, economic world we live in,
and I just think let's really focus on the issues
we have. Now. That's not discounting the future. It's not
like let's burn a bunch of carbon emitting fuels because

(01:29:49):
who cares about climate change? That's our grandkids problems. Yeah,
this is different. It's like, let's think about the jobs
the world. I mean, another way to put this is
if we mess up our economy, mess up our democracy
by people losing jobs and mass protests and losing trust
in the government and there's just an erosion of truth,
we're not going to be able to handle climate change

(01:30:10):
or any of these big AI know, the singularity type
of risks. So what I feel like is let's focus
on what keeps our economy and our sanity and our humanity.
Let's keep this fabric of society together now so that
we're more equipped in the future to handle all the
risks AI and otherwise. But this goes back to what

(01:30:32):
you're saying, which is, these are real issues in the
short term, and if we don't address them, if we
get distracted by the long term, we're not going to
be ready to address the long term even if we
think about it now, we'll be so distracted and so dismayed. Yeah,
so I think we have to be practical here. I agree,
and I am also I think it's a valid point

(01:30:53):
that you make about the fact that all these are
tools that will reduce options for some people, there are
also tools that create options that can be used for
the creation of art of culture. I do think some
people I know have brought up photoshop when I talk
about my concerns with AI and are like, you know,
there were a lot of you know, people, draftsmen and
whatnot who were concerned when photoshop hit because it was

(01:31:16):
a threat to some of the things that they did
for money. And photoshop effectively has created whole forms of
art that didn't exist or didn't exist in the same
fashion before it did as a tool and tools like it.
And that's not a think I think it's kind of
worth I don't like, I don't want to be kind
of just on the edge of tragedy here. You know,

(01:31:37):
this is a there's a lot of different ways this
could go, and they're not all bad. I think we're
all used to calamity right now, so much so that
we potentially expect it in situations where it's not the
inevitable outcome. Well, I mean that's I think one way
to kind of boil a lot of that down is
we can adapt. We just need time to do so

(01:31:59):
to many things. And what's really challenging and frustrating now
is the pace is so fast. It's not just an illusion.
It's not just oh, if you don't pay attention to AI,
it really is fast. It's very very hard for us
to adapt. So, just thinking of the Internet, we got
a lot, like individuals as users and tech companies got
a lot better at dealing with clickbait. Right, YouTube was

(01:32:20):
tons of clickbait, and they figured out ways to demote
that to some extent. We got a lot better at
keeping fake news out of the high search rankings and Google.
Like I mentioned, a lot of these problems that came up.
We're not perfectly addressed, not even close. But there was
significant progress and that's often understated. But if these problems
are coming so fast and so intense, it's a lot

(01:32:40):
to adapt to. And that's what's really the challenge is
the pace. And I think we're seeing a very, very
breakneck pace that's really hard. Now does that mean you're
on the side of like Elon Musk and some of
those folks who just signed that letter being like, maybe
we should put a pause on AI research because you know,
I'm not one hundred percent against it. Again, I kind

(01:33:02):
of am, like, Man, I wish we'd been having this
conversation when Facebook dropped or YouTube dropped. But I don't
think that's a realistic thing. I'll say that. But I
do think, yeah, yeah, so I would say, no, I'm
not I'm not a favor that For one thing. I mean,
in a very practical sense, you think all these companies

(01:33:23):
that are putting billions of dollars in these investments in
a AI are all going to sit around saying, you
know what, let's just not do this for a few
of course not. So here's what I think, They're not
going to slow down. What's going to happen is going
to happen even if some players decide to be responsible
and slow down. Guess what that means. The only people
plunging ahead are going to be the irresponsible ones. So

(01:33:45):
what I think we need to do is I don't
think we can really slow that down. So what about
the flip side. I think we need to accelerate public
education on artificial intelligence. I think we need to accelerate
government legislation, regulation, intern national cooperation. I don't think we
can solve this by slowing AI down. I do think
we need to find a way to speed up our

(01:34:06):
democratic process processes. It's taken us how many years to
pass basically nothing about social media in the US and
some mixed results in Europe. Yeah, that's the problem, right,
If we could work faster, then I think we could
keep up. And I think that that's actually the long term,
like practical survival thing from this is that I hope

(01:34:27):
we get is like, yeah, we've always needed to be
more careful about the things that we expose billions of
people too. Suddenly it should have happened before now. But
I hope that this I hope that all I hope
the fact that AI, because of James Cameron, is coated
into our brains to be something that triggers a little

(01:34:47):
bit of panic in people. I hope that rather than
reacting with panic, it leads to a more intelligent and
considered state of affairs when potentially embracing technologies that are
going to change life for huge numbers of people. That's right,
and that is I think we have an opportunity here
to experience that and explore than and try, and that
is kind of what I was aiming for. And that

(01:35:08):
threat is again I love that article that you know
you mentioned at the beginning, But if we start going
down this road of hype, there is a danger that
we're going to fall into these traps. And I think
let's stay grounded. Let's say practical, let's really identify the risks.
Not that I'm some guru and know what they are,
but it's almost easier to see what's not true than
what is true. Yeah, and that's I think let's all

(01:35:30):
try to police each other and make sure we're focusing
on practical things that really are manageable, that really are
genuine risks that are impacting people, that are impacting people today,
and especially ones that are impacting marginalized populations. Yes, so
I think let's hope we learn these lessons. And I
am not optimistic, but I'm not as cynical. I think

(01:35:52):
there's a lot of important discussions happening now that let's
just say, there's a lot more discussion now than we
had with social media, and maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, well,
I think that's a good note to end on. Noah,
did you have anything you kind of wanted to plug
before we roll out here? No, I just I think
it's it's a great topic that everyone can be involved in,

(01:36:12):
and I just my plug is just don't be intimidated,
don't be afraid. I am writing a book that's not
going to come up for a couple of years that's
trying to help empower people to kind of be part
of these conversations. But that's far off. I just want
to say broadly, don't be intimidated and don't fall for
this narrative that sometimes happens in tech communities that, oh,

(01:36:33):
you know, I'm not a tech person, I don't have
a chance to understand this stuff. Affects all of us,
and how it affects you matters, and your opinion matters,
and your voice matters. And we're all part of social media,
we're all very soon going to be part of AI
in chat thoughts, So don't be afraid to join the conversation.
You don't need any technical background because I think the
subject is just as much sociological as technical. It's about people.

(01:36:56):
I think that's a great point to end on. Thank
you so much, Noah, really appreciate your time. And uh,
everybody else, have a have a nice day. I mean
you have a nice day too. Also, thanks to you too.
It's lots of fun. Ah, welcome back to It could

(01:37:26):
Happen here a podcast about things falling apart, sometimes about
putting them back together, um, sometimes just about enduring difficult times.
And it's it's been a rough couple of weeks, what
with the mass shooting in Tennessee and the Right accelerating
their anti trans paranoia, the whole you know, Trump getting
arrested and all that, all that, Yes, that has really

(01:37:48):
hit all of us really hard, yes, and really yeah deeply.
Now that now that Trump is has been charged with felonies,
he's officially a friend of mine. So we're on Trump now.
I really convicted. I'm really conflicted between my acab side
my illegalist side. It's really it's really hard. I mean,
thirty four felonies, that's quite a legalist. Very few of

(01:38:11):
the people I know who commit crimes is like a vocation,
have that many. It's pretty difficult. But at any rate,
you know, it's been a rough couple of weeks, and
I thought we could use a lighter episode to, you know,
help everybody everybody feel better. And I know that you
Mia and you Gare are both young uns. H you

(01:38:32):
you missed the earlier age of the Internet and the
heroes of that ancient age. You know, when I was
a child, you know, it was Jupiter and uh and
and all the Greek gods of the old Internet y'all.
Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of
the old Internet era. So yeah, I wanted I wanted
to talk about an ancient hero of the Internet. And

(01:38:53):
perhaps this will become a series that we do now
and again where we talk about we talk about the
gods of the past and today. The ancient deity that
we're talking about is kind of like the Internet's Hercules,
a man named Troy Hertabes. Have you guys heard of
Troy Hertabes. No, I've not. I've not heard of Troy Hernabes,
but I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a

(01:39:17):
Roman god. The Greek version is Zeus. You're right, You're right,
you're right. Before before some freak dms me and sends
me like three phs on this, I'm just gonna put
that out there. Do not DM me about this. Yeah,
wet do that thing where we start, We start including
one of these every episode that, yeah, just fucking up
purposefully in order to get people. They love doing it,

(01:39:39):
they love being able to hop on I do. Ever,
we did get recently, we did the liver King episodes
this week, and somebody popped on to be like, hey, guys,
you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of
polar bears contain enough vitamin hundred and forty people something
like that, Um, don't eat polar bear lovers. This is

(01:40:00):
relevant because we are talking about a man today whose
lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that
allowed him to fight bears in hand to hand compact.
It is actually very applicable to us, because just last
week we went to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear.
You're right, this man would have been one of the
only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear. So

(01:40:23):
once upon a time, before the breaking of the world,
there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Hertebes. Troy was
a simple man. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in
nineteen sixty three. He liked the outdoors, and he was
a dedicated conservationist. The one exception to his abiding love
of nature was bears. On August fourth, nineteen eighty four,

(01:40:44):
when Troy was twenty one years old, he went hiking
in central British Columbia. Now he's given a couple of
versions of this story over the years. Some that this happened,
say that this happened when he was a boy, Others
say he was like twenty years old, but all agree
that he wound up in close proxim to a grizzly bear.
In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of

(01:41:04):
the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped
the twenty two caliber rifle he was carrying, which would
not have made much difference against a grizzly bear, you
will only make it more upset. Two is not the
weapon you want to that situation. In a desperate attempt
to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're gonna talk

(01:41:25):
about Troy's knives in a minute here about. In an
interview with Mental Flass many years later, Troy claimed that
seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him.
After this, Okaya a minute, That's not how bears were.
Has this bear been like involved in other fights guys

(01:41:45):
like another maniac bear got stabbed behind a seven eleven
and is like, na, man, I don't grizz don't funk
with knives no more. I've been through that ship like
a street gay like na brot na bro are worth it?
And so he later claims an expert told him he

(01:42:08):
would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs this.
I believe bears very rarely attack people. Now, a normal
man would have taken this number one as boy I
sure got lucky, and number two as I should be
more careful when out in the woods. But Troy was
not a normal man. His first thought was that he
needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically

(01:42:29):
four bears. He had been beaten and developing bear mace
by an actual scientist, Although the first paper on bear
mace was published in nineteen eighty four, so it makes
sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time.
It was a reasonable thing to be like, maybe we
should have a mace for use against bears. There are
again several versions of what came next. I'm going to

(01:42:52):
quote from one that I found in a write up
by the spec Now quote from then, he decided that
his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear
spray repellent, but he realized field testing with bears would
be needed. This would require a protective suit for the
person doing the test. No. In his interview with Mental Floss,

(01:43:12):
one of the later pieces on the Man, Troy dropped
the mace story and claimed that he had the idea
just to make bear resistant armor a year after his
grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear
researchers would need protective armor that would let them test
bear spray and also safely observed grizzly behavior. Troy is
something of an unreliable narrator, but I will say I

(01:43:34):
do not doubt that the film RoboCop influenced his subsequent
ass No, he absolutely had this idea that makes that
makes the most sense out of anything you said. It
is very logical. So it is now Troy, it should
be noted, is not the first, probably not the first

(01:43:55):
man who has thought I should develop a suit of
armor to allow me to grapple with bears in hand
to hand combat. It is possible that in medieval Europe
some people hunted bears while wearing full body suits of
armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether
or not this really happened. The gist of why this
is a debate is that there's an insane looking suit

(01:44:16):
of armor currently in a Houston museum that was probably
made in switzerlander Germany like four hundred dish years ago.
Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or
for what purpose, but one theory is that it was
used for bear baiting. If so, it was used for
European bears, which are significantly smaller than Besty bears, and
as far as we know, was never a widespread practice.

(01:44:39):
This is because attempting to fight a bear in hand
to hand with a suit of armor is insane and
something only a madman would do. But I am going
to show you this suit of armor because it looks
like something from a David Lynch movie. Oh I'm so thrilled,
specifically the face. So look at that, look at that
beautiful thing. Oh my god. Yeah, it's in the chase

(01:45:00):
of that unsettling but they think probably somewhere around Austria
or Switzerland, although it's not. I don't think known to
a point of certainty. That looks fucked up. It looks
like it looks like a like like like a metal
casting of someone's head but with like but with like
the pinhead thing. Yeah, it's a howlazy I think is

(01:45:22):
the movie. Yeah, the face on it is distinctly unsettling,
like they could have just made a normal helmet, but
like no, no, like there's a nose, it's the guy's face.
We gotta it's We're not doing this right unless we
like peek into the uncanny valley with this thing. Troy
was not interested in the fact that attempting to fight

(01:45:44):
a bear and body armor is just objectively nuts, and
since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he
set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then
testing it. Um, I'm going to read another quote from
the specs right up, because it's extremely funny. So the
suit became his focus of a putting it through all
kinds of tests that included being run down by a
pickup truck driven by his pot, rolling off the side

(01:46:06):
of a cliff, and being pummeled by bikers with baseball bats.
And I'm gonna play you a video of Troy um
one of these tests where Troy gets hit by a tree.
It's almost exactly that scene from hot Rod. If you've
watched the movie hot Rod where they like swing a
log down at him and hit him. Um, that may

(01:46:29):
in fact be what that scene is based on, but
I'm gonna I'm gonna share that with y'all. Now the
log is U Oh my gosh, so get them guys.

(01:46:58):
I cannot emphasize enough. It looks like half this armor
is held together by duct tape. Just like. This looks
like a fever dream combination of the Wizard of Oz
and like and like the Battle of Endor walks. He
walks throwing massive logs at the guy in the middle.
Tin suit, it's white, it's a white suit too. Yeah,

(01:47:21):
it looks almost like something from um like speed Racer.
Is weird the aesthetic that I would reckon, I would
closest compare it too. It is kind of like that
anime robot style design. Yeah, it's it's it's profoundly unhinged.
So I want to I want to play you a
clip of him getting the helmet off so you can

(01:47:42):
listen to Troy talk and see this man's face better
than the first. Yeahs, I had that time, that stuff
on my mouth. Yeah, if I have a most piece,
a mostpiece, you can do that all day long. I
got the airbags in the back, so my neck hasn't
got a lot of place, so that'll be perfect for
the grizzy I can I can take he can give
me with that log if that couldn't do anything to me?

(01:48:04):
And I feel great, like really great. And actually my
left hand was asleepist now a week. Really you don't say, yeah,
truly damage fascinating man. So I'm gonna play you now
him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball
bats as he attempts to move in this suit. And

(01:48:25):
I have to emphasize to you he is not capable
of moving in this thing. This is an immobile suit
of armor that he can he can almost shuffle in it,
but not quite. His idea with the with the pickup
truck and the bikers with regards to big men and
being an anthropologist, he yet he looked at the testings
we had originally done with normal sized man, you know,
one hundred and fifty hundred and eighty pound, he said,

(01:48:46):
the public isn't gonna buy it. They're they're looking at
this monstrous, groovy bear and they're looking at a normal
size man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff
like that. They're not going to buy. You have to
give them reality. This is insane. This is so weird, amazing, amazing,

(01:49:21):
Like a gang of men attacking this nerd in a
metal suit is like, yes, it's so funny. It's it's
it's extremely funny. They're like and they pick like terminator
two looking bikers like it's out of their way. All
of the stylization is super super bizarre. Yeah, it's it's

(01:49:44):
such a strained documentary. This is from the documentary project Grizzly,
and there's Troy gives. In the various interviews, he does
some pretty incredible quotes. Like years after this, he wrote
at fifty two, I have to know whether or not
the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things.
We tested the suit a lot of ways, but never
went against the Grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing

(01:50:05):
is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus
Mark one. He eventually gets up to the Mark six
and spends more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, sorry, I
think the one that we're looking at in the documentary
is the Mark six, because he did eventually, after years
of this quest, get a documentary and interested, and the

(01:50:25):
film Project Grizzly was made about his quest. One fun
piece of trivia about it is that it's one of
Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense.
That makes a lot of sense. It makes yeah, it
makes total sense. Now, in order to give you just
one last piece of context about the personality, what kind
of man is Troy her Tobes or was Troy her Tobes.

(01:50:47):
I am gonna play you a clip of an interview
with this man from the documentary. That's just perfect. He's
holding in this a gigantic booie knife in his hand,
and he has another booie knife strapped across his shoulder
in such a way that it's on his shoulder but
pointed down. Yeah, which is the way a crazy man
carries a book. He's also, it's worth noting, dressed as

(01:51:10):
like a frontier settler, but wearing like a bread's Harry Baray.
I go into the bush. I don't use a gun, never,
don't believe in guns. I swear by my knives. They
save your life a thousand times around. If a grizzlies
gonna come at you. And I'm not saying knives are
going to save you, that's not what I'm saying. What

(01:51:31):
I'm saying is you've got a gun, and that grizzlies
fifty feet one hundred feet away from you, you got
one shot. I don't give a shit who you are
or how steady you are. You've got one shot, not grizzly.
And if he's still coming at you that gun, you
might as well use the barrel on him, or you
can use the stock. That's useless. But if you've got
some half decent knives, at least you got a fighting chance.
With animals. But that's not the reason why when I

(01:51:51):
go into the mountains, or I go into the bush,
or any man goes into the bush, they don't carry
nives for the four legged animals. They carry knives for
the two legged animals. Because nowadays it's a lot like
the old days. You've got a lot of whackers up there,
and it's nivish. Want to close quarters. Yea, you do,
indeed have a lot of wackos up there, Troy. Um.

(01:52:12):
So that's that's a brief introduction to Troy Hurdabes. Now,
the suit that you've seen in the Project Project Grizzly
documentary weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and it was
not in any way powered. As you see in the dock.
He can kind of barely shuffle with it. He is
unable to move or even stand on uneven ground. He
falls over very easily. Um. Troy liked the documentary, felt

(01:52:34):
like it helped expose his work to a wider audience,
but he took issue with the fact that the documentary
did not delve into what he described as the science
behind it all. Adding being able to get hit by
the truck took years of development, now years years of
practice of getting hit by trucks. Yeah, it's you can't
just jump into getting hit by a truck like that.

(01:52:56):
In two thousand and two, a trainer who probably should
not be allowed around animals let Troy get into a
cage with a Kodiak bear. Now, thankfully the bear was
too confused by Troy's armor to what to get near him,
which you might not. This is technically a wind for Troy.
The armor did do its job, just scare them away. Yeah,

(01:53:18):
you know, the bear just saw that was like, you
know what this said? Wrong with this guy? It's clearly unwell.
I do not want to be around this person right now.
Here's mental floss interviewing Troy. She was so terrified she
urinated her. To best recalls, I didn't look human enough.

(01:53:39):
Limited mobility and questionable usefulness combined to doom the Mark series.
We would never use a suit like that, says Lana Siernello, PhD.
A bare behavior expert, a solid knowledge of bare behaviors,
the best thing one can use to avoid being attacked,
which is rare, and this is this is common whenever
they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like do

(01:54:00):
you want a suit of armor. They're like, no, that's
not at all useful. It's very easy to not get
attacked by bears. Actually, and again, if you watch the
documentary Grizzly Man, and the man in the documentary Grizzly
Man is a similar type of person to Troy Hertabes.
They are both people. I do believe Troy Hertabes might
need a suit of bear armor because he seems like

(01:54:21):
the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their
limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up
in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Hertabes fame. He
was all over the internet. I found out about him
because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him
in an article. But like, you would see this guy
all the time, I'm sure I ran. I think I
also ran across him on something awful. Earlier. He would

(01:54:44):
regularly put out videos he had. He had an early
kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a
brand on the internet in order to get funding, and
so he was very successful at raising money in order
to like make new iterations of his armor. He was
also recruited on several JAP and he's game shows, and
he inspired a two thousand and three episode of The
Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear fighting suit. He even

(01:55:07):
filmed an outie commercial. Of course, he always reinvested the
proceeds directly into making more suits of bear armor. Now,
the good news is he eventually moved on from wanting
to make armor that was specifically geared towards fighting bears,
but he never got over his desire for making a
suit of elaborate body armor. So he pivoted, claiming that

(01:55:27):
now his brother was in the military, and so he
wanted to make flexible body armor themed after the armor
in Halo to help keep soldiers and SWAT officers safe
during dangerous raids. Because next suit was called the Trojan,
and it featured a compass in the dick for reasons
that are deeply confusing. Wait, that's not even it's not
even a useful spot, like put it on your watch

(01:55:52):
him he is adamant that he had talked to Special
Forces guys and they said, right in the dick is
where you want to compass it, like flip down, So
it looks like he has a penis that's made out
of compass. Okay, that is kind of funny. I'm gonna
play you a clip of this armor, which I will
say looks a lot more professional than the last suit,

(01:56:12):
the first ballistic full exoskeleton body suit of armor. This
came from twenty years of development through the bear suits
and about seventeen hundred and fifty hours of actual building time,
And it came from so many calls I got from
friends of mine in Iraq and an Afghanistan. My brother
was in the military, talking about is there can you

(01:56:34):
not go in the direction that we need, which is
you know, against the ieeds improvised explosive devices, and you know,
build it to the point where you've got the flexibility,
the lightness, but with the strength of what the bear
suits were, And that's where that's where this came from.
So I'm gonna tell you right now that suit is
not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic

(01:56:56):
heavy armor you see in the hurt Locker only kind
of helps you if it's a pretty small IED. What
he's built is not going to protect you from like
an explosively formed penetrator or like a five thousand pound
fertilizer five hundred pound fertilizer bomb or something like that.
To test this, though, Troy hired a former military marksman,

(01:57:17):
the guy who he claimed had previously covered him out
in the woods on bare expeditions with less lethal AMO,
and he asked this man to shoot him point and
blank with a rifle. So thankfully, this guy was like Troy,
it's illegal to point a loaded weapon at a person
in our province. I'm not going to shoot you directly
in the chest with a hunting rifle. So Troy had

(01:57:40):
him take the armor out of the suit and then
shoot at it, and the bullet went immediately through the armor.
It says a lot about Troy that his first instinct
was not shoot the armor without a human being in it.
But um, at least, yeah, at least the guy who
was testing it did not shoot him directly in the
guest and kill him. I'm gonna quote again from Mental

(01:58:03):
Flaws here. Hertibes tweaked the Trojan, which he debuted in
two thousand and seven to little notice. Eventually, he offered
his design to the Canadian military for free, but it
can take years for armed forces to evaluate new technology,
and existing contracts with equipment vendors render it near impossible
for independent inventors without backing or references to succeed with
industrial military contracts are sewn up and they don't want

(01:58:25):
anyone stepping on toes. He says, engineers pick my brain,
but I can't be affiliated with them. I'm a loose
cannon and my methodology is backward. I do not disagree
with that statement. He did, however, have several other inventions
over the years. For one thing, Troy invented a burn paste,
a gooey substance that hardens when exposed to flame in

(01:58:48):
order to protect you. Canada's Discovery Channel documented him covered
in the burn pace, being exposed to temperatures above thirty
six hundred degrees fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his
helmeted head for ten minutes and it worked. This leaves
out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired
to make his burn paste because one day, while wearing

(01:59:09):
his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly.
So he needed to make the burn paste in order
to protect himself. Yeah, it doesn't seem easy to get
in and out of. Like, no, it would not be
easy to dawn your If you look at the helmet
there your peripheral version is going to be shit. It's
not going to be good for like fighting in and

(01:59:31):
it is going to exhaust you. Like he builds an
air conditioner for it, but that's only gonna do so
much like body armor is always kind of like a
trade off between mobility and protection, and something like a
plate carrier is worth it. But full body armor that's
not powered in a meaningful way just is not going

(01:59:52):
to be practical yet. This is why I do not
respect the Mandalorians. No, no, you you've been vocal about
that for years have I'm gonna play you a video
of him testing this fire paste from that Canadian Discovery
Channel documentary because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in
the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a

(02:00:13):
thin layer of fire paste, effectively starving out the fire.
And according to Troy, clean up is a breeze due
to firepace only weakness water. Just see it turns back
into a paste. See, I'm already into a layer. It's
just past now, which is firepiece. This is its natural state.

(02:00:35):
And when it dries, see I'm already slopping it off.
Now there's is there It turns to the peace. This
is what's gonna happen on your host Now it's a
he's chewing it up, and oh that's so cross. He's
just spitting it all over his house. The dog comes along,
takes a little in his mouth, washes it around, and
spits it out. Nothing's gonna happen. It's biden ridable, non topsic.

(02:00:58):
Don't have to worry one anything happening. So how would
a homeowner remove the firepace from the outside of their home?
This is gonna be bob fuse next door. Bob's house
is gonna be fine. The next day, he's gonna come
up with his garden, the holes in a cannabier, and
in two hours he'll be ready for the football game.
Oh what there goes to the house. After ten minutes,

(02:01:18):
Troy inspects the firepaced house. Look at look at this.
At this there's a little Barbie. She's all kay. Barbie's
fire same Barbie's sister. The Barbie is clearly sin. Now.
He does note again that the only weakness of the
fire paste is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but

(02:01:40):
I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in
the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now,
why why does he keep getting platforms? Like, why why
does he continue? He was because because this was really
funny to everyone on the Internet. So a documentary that
came out would get shared all over. People would watch it.
It would get him attention, he would get donations. There

(02:02:01):
was like one point where he had to he had
to sell his body armor. He had to like sell
it to a pawn shop because he was broke, and
a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and
gave it to him so he could continue. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah,
he had a fan base. Like I said, he was
a hero of the old Internet. He did eventually succeed

(02:02:23):
in making an armor suit that was resistant to twelve
gage shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive.
Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor. Most soft
body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it.
Shotguns are not for penetrating armor. There for damaging meat.
But Troy made a big deal about how this would
save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention,

(02:02:46):
as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was
something called the Godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much
detail on what the Godlight was, but he says it
shrunk tumors and mice as well as his sister's tumor,
and he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it
could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers.

(02:03:07):
All I did was take all spectrums of light electromagnetic
radiation and put them together, and it works. I don't
know why, but I think that's how you get cancer.
But okay, funny you mentioned that. So obviously his claims
about the Godlight were never validated by any outside force,

(02:03:27):
in part because shining whatever the fuck he's invented on
a bunch of sick people has ethical considerations to it.
But Troy turned the light on himself and experienced what
he calls the hide effect. I think, as in doctor Jackline,
mister Hyde, his hair fell out and he lost twenty
pounds curious a mystery. Then he claims the Godlight mysteriously

(02:03:53):
stopped working and he didn't have the money to fix
it up. There are amazing I love this man. It's
it is. It is fascinating that the closer society comes
to this complete collapse. We get more of these little
weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to

(02:04:14):
survive the apocalypse and exactly the wrong way. Yes, um,
I'm going to read another quote from that mental phloss article. Today.
Hertabes operates a scrapyard in Ontario and dismisses notions of patents.
The stuff is too easy to duplicate and it costs
eighty thousand dollars to file an application. He rejects offers

(02:04:36):
to outright sell his creations like Firepaste, because he frequently
sells off shares to fund their development. By the time
I got Firepace to the point of testing, seventy percent
of it was owned by investors, So when a university
wants it, I only have thirty percent left. They're not
interested in that. And yet Hernabes can't stop inventing. He
still feels compelled to put in twenty one hour days
refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding

(02:04:57):
for the Apache, the latest version of his t Oan suit,
which he says protects ninety three percent of a user's
body and offers ninety six percent flexibility. A prototype will
cost seventy thousand dollars. It'll take six to eight months
to build by hand. I'll try to market it to
law enforcement like SWAT. He needs another one hundred thousand
dollars to rebuild the Godlight, renamed the EMR five, which
he now claims will only cure breast cancer. He wants

(02:05:20):
to take it to John's Optics for testing. So well,
I'm excited for SWAT teams to be using his inventions. Yes, yes,
I do support that. Thanks to that dit compass, they'll
never get lost at the wrong house again. Could really
save a lot of lives. That's the problem SWAT teams
have is poor land nav I think so. I think

(02:05:41):
the SWAT team should wear that. Every SWAT team member
should be forced to wear that barrasuit for everything they do. Yes,
the only thing SWAT could get due So tragically, Troy
died in like twenty twelve, I think in a fiery collision. Yeah,
he drove right into a fuel tanker. Oh yeah, it's

(02:06:02):
very sad. He was fifty four years old old. His
widow says that he swerved his car or the police
say that he swerved his car into the pathway of
the truck. He had been very depressed because he'd encountered
financial difficulties and had not been able to sell his inventions. Um,
obviously this is very sad for them. He seems like,

(02:06:23):
despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around
and then yeah, fell on hard times. Um it is.
It is a depressing end to the story. But Troy
lives on in the documentary project Grizzly, and in the
impact he had on all of our hearts, and in
the memory that you know, even if your dreams are
are crazy, you should you should try and live them

(02:06:44):
because who knows, Maybe maybe you'll develop a suit that
allows you to fight a Grizzly bar in hand to
hand combat. Anyway. That's that's this Hero of the Internet episode.
I hope you all found it edifying. That is that
is an inspiring, inspiring ringtail Yeah, um, it's it's it's
you know, he's fucking more of an inventor than Elon

(02:07:07):
Musk has been, and he would have been a better
ruler of Twitter if that's true, was in charge of Twitter.
He's he's really the last guy from the old error
of capitalism where you would actually like return your profits
into into R and D instead of just like paying
Elon Musk like forty seven million dollars to hire a
bunch of consultants who also make forty million dollars. Yeah.

(02:07:30):
One thing you have to say about Troy is he
was not He was not in this for the money.
This was a man who believed more strongly than I
think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of
building a suit of armor to fight grisly bears, um
and whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely,
absolutely honest in that belief. And I think I'm going
to end by playing a brief montage of him testing

(02:07:53):
out his first version of the armored suit, which looks
more or less like a set of heavy base ball armor.
Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a
baseball helmet or a sorry, a football helmet. In fact,
I think it just is a football helmet. But yeah,
here's here's Troy's early tests in nineteen eighty eight. That's
definitely a ball helmet. That one looks kind of cool.

(02:08:18):
That one looks pretty cool too. Yeah, they look increasingly
space Marini in this period, and he has some range
of motion, doesn't even have his helmet on, just knocking
him down with what looked like to buy force. It

(02:08:42):
doesn't it does look more. Oh my gosh, he just
he keeps getting he walks right in the face. Yeah,
it's it's just amazing. That last one looks super Space
Marine es. Yeah. Yeah, some of them looked pretty cool. Um,
And he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing,

(02:09:04):
So you got to give him one thing. He knew
how to make a suit of armor that would not
get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Hertabes
like to do. It seems like he was good with
like with like blunt force trauma armor. Did anyone ever
do like a CTE skit like test on him every
dime because this man had a thousand micro head injuries. Absolutely.

(02:09:28):
I mean, I think the real lesson here is that
he was able. He was he was able to continue
his work thanks to Canadian healthcare. Um, he was probably
like five percent of the entire Canadian healthcare system budget
just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's

(02:09:49):
the story of Troy Hertabies. I hope you've all found
it useful. Um, go into the world and if your
dream is to create a suit of powered armor that
will allow you to defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat. Then,
by god, you know, shoot for the stars in a

(02:10:21):
world where you end up standing in a two hour
line to buy mediocre and not climate friendly water. Sorry,
this is it could happen here. Uh, this is Sophie.
I really wanted to do that for a really long time.
Well now I want to watch it. Thank you. Those

(02:10:42):
voices you hear are James Stout and Margaret Killjoy and
we're here. We're here to talk about the water crisis
that seems to be getting worse and uh, these United States. Yeah, James,
what's what's it? What's it? What's what's happening? Well? Uh,
and ever things are happening, right. I think should probably
emphasize at the start that water contaminants have been affecting

(02:11:04):
people outside of like the kind of colonial core for
a very long time, and legacy corporate media, whatever you
want to call it, hasn't given it a solitary fuck
about it until it affected people inside the colonial core.
So what we're seeing right now is in two places
East I believe it's pronounced Palestine, right, I believe so too, Yeah, yeah, okay,

(02:11:27):
East Palestine, Ohio, And in Philadelphia. I believe it's pronounced
phil A Delphia. Okay, they did like someone's name, like Phil.
It was named for Phil a Delphia. The founder of
the city, phil from Delphia, like the oracle. I see ye,
he predicted that one day there would be a spill

(02:11:51):
from a POC chemical plant near the Delaware River, and
famously he was right. We've they built a city there anyway. Yeah, yeah,
and they for years they've been so angry about not
having a chemical plant. They've just climb lamppost and thrown
batteries at a boating football teams. Yeah. And I feel
really good about starting with such heavy jokes about this thing. Yeah. Yeah,

(02:12:12):
it's three million people, I think anyway. Yeah, if you're
in Philadelphia, we don't want to express solidarity with you,
I guess as you wonder what the fuck to do
about your water supply, which is currently contaminated, as we understand,
by something called beautiful acrelate, which is a chemical that

(02:12:33):
is found in paint. And the reason that there was
a paint chemical in your drinking water if you live
in Philadelphia, is that a PLC manufacturing chemical plant called
I think it's trinso tr I n SEO had a leak,
and that leak, when it's a storm drain, that storm
drain went into the Delaware River, and that river feeds

(02:12:54):
into the Samuel s backs to water treatment plant, and
obviously that water treatment aren't feeds into the tap that
you turn on to drink water when you live in
your house. And this has, as it always does, when
there are like these somewhat bungled announcements of chemical contamination
in drinking water cause people to rush out to buy

(02:13:17):
bottled water, which is an understandable response if you think
you're not going to be able to drink water, which
is caused people to wait in long lines to access
sometimes like a limited supply of water. And what we
wanted to talk about today a little bit was not
so much like what to do if you're in Philadelphia
right now, but how we can better prepare to be

(02:13:38):
ready for water emergencies, water shortage, is water contamination, things
like that, which is why Margaret has joined us because
she is the prepper anarchist queen and knows a lot
about these things. So yeah, Margaret, should we I think
you said you wanted to break us down by like
bad things. It could be in your water and things
you can do to get those bad things away, right, Yeah,

(02:14:00):
although I will say only a minority of this information
directly relates to people who are dealing with toxic chemical spills.
So if we're I have a lot of information about
general water safety, it's long term storage of water, things
that you don't want in your water, how to get
those things out of your water, And I know you
have a lot of experience with that stuff too. But

(02:14:22):
the very specific thing that people first in Ohio and
now in Pennsylvania are dealing with u of chemical stuff
is worse than other stuff and way harder to get out,
especially on a DIY level. So I don't know what
what feels best like, should we do an overview or
should we try and first talk about the chemical stuff

(02:14:44):
and then talk about like the fun easy stuff like
not getting giardio when you're camping. Yeah, let's maybe start
out with the kind of this is the scary you know,
you can't buy a lifestrole for this fear first, fun later. Yeah,
people might be listening, I mean it might be afraid
of They might be concerned that they might be in
one of these places. Right, Flint, Michigan. What we still

(02:15:05):
haven't fucking fixed the water. Yeah, and so yeah, let's
start fucking Flint, Michigan. What a just disastrous incompetence. Yeah,
I mean yeah, it's it's extremely sad that the country
that is as rich as any country has ever managed
to be in human history is still poisoning people with water.
But yeah, let's start with that. Let's let's start with

(02:15:27):
what to do when you get a reverse nine or
one phone call telling you know, to drink from your tap.
I mean, honestly, going out and getting bottled water was
the right move. Or also, since people did have a
heads up that their tap water was safe for a
period of time, storing water in various containers is the
right move, because once your water is contaminated with chemicals,

(02:15:51):
it's really hard to get it out. The main method
that well on an industrial scale, the thing that someone
can use the way they treat wastewater with beautifle as late.
I didn't write down the name in my notes. Acrelate,
Oh like acrylic, that makes sense, slate text paint. It's

(02:16:13):
something called a fluidized bed reactor, which frankly I did
not know about until I started doing this specific research
for this specific chemical People who are like more at
a high science level will know more about this. This
is basically like you're using different bacteria to eat and
I don't know, fucking clean out this shit. This is

(02:16:34):
not what's going to be happening in your kitchen sink
anytime soon. This is not going to be a part
of your bread of filter anytime soon, ironically, And this
is not how am I going to say this. Don't
drink this chemical water if you have any possibility, right,
if you can get other water, do that. And I
believe in our current society it is a better and

(02:16:55):
safer bet to get water from elsewhere. If you were
in some situation, which I suspect most people are not.
I suspect most people could access supply lines. If you're
in some situation where the only water available to you
has this these types of chemicals in it, the most
likely guess about a way to deal with it is
activated carbon charcoal and is actually the home filters that

(02:17:21):
a lot of people use. Is your Britta filter, is
your burkey, although I'll talk some shit on burkey in
a little bit, and and when we go over the
more like nitty greedy details about each filtration method. Maybe
we can we can talk more about this, but basically
it is like it is not tested to do this.
No one has ever been like, man, what if we

(02:17:42):
get a bunch of budle accrelate in our water, will
our britta filter it out? No one is running tests
on this because it is not a thing that normally
is in the water historically, although clearly it is often
in the water now. However, the method of filtration of
the various home level acts various home level methods of

(02:18:04):
filtration adsorption is what it's called with a D instead
of a B, is the method that is perceived as
most effective at reducing chemicals in water. However, again we're
talking about like maybe this reduces some chemicals, maybe not.
Oh you run this through this and now you're fine. Yeah. Yeah,

(02:18:26):
it's there's a lot of things that could get no
water right that we don't really have like any any
like decent research on how to get them out of
a Yeah. So, Margaret James, is there is there a say,
say you're not living in a place where you get
a text letting you know that in Tuesday at three
pm your water will not be safe to drink, which
is really just is there a home testing kit or

(02:18:53):
a water testing kit that that is accessible for for
most individuals, or what resources can people use to understand
their water at home? Could you want to I'm not
really going to trust the government on that, right, Yeah,
And Margaret, do you want to take that I only

(02:19:16):
know about I do not know about testing for beautiless accrelate.
I think that this is the kind of thing that
they are not people are not prepared for, like at
a society level, I don't know. I believe I could
be wrong. All of the water testing that I have
done has tended to be around like I live on
a well, right, and so there's a lot of testing

(02:19:37):
things that are available to tell you the acidity of
your water, the hardness of your water, which is how
how many dissolved minerals, whether or not your water contains
things like lead and arsnic heavy metals which we'll talk
about in a little bit, and also bacteria, right like
all of the stuff that we normally prepare to filter
out of water. There are home tests available to you

(02:20:01):
that you can use to determine. UM. I don't know,
and I wish I had done more research ahead of time.
There's like some talk about like possible smells and stuff,
um for some of these, but I don't feel confident. Yeah,
I mean, I know there's the ewg's like website where
you can put in your your your zip code and
get more information on if there's been contamination or anything

(02:20:22):
like that, but like that's you know, reported things, not
necessarily on an individual level for testing. Um. Yeah, I'd
definitely do that. Anytime I have moved anywhere, I'll type
in my zip code and then I go, ah, that
sounds bad. Um, I don't like that. But yeah, you
can find out, you know, once you put in you
can find out who who, Like you put in your

(02:20:45):
zip code on this is just ewg dot org. You
put in your zip code and you can put who
you pay for water, and then it goes in and
it tells you. You know, it's really it's really fun.
Four In my mind, I read four you Health Guidelines
fourteen contaminants. Oh yes, yeah, I think a combination of

(02:21:08):
two is probably your best bet, Like unless you happen
to our laboratory, like because there's stuff coming like if
there is like lead like in between the water mains
and or like you know, wherever the EDWD is getting
its information and your tap. Then you're still risking like
heavy metal contaminants, right, or if you're on a well,
you should test that it. I think it's every year, right,

(02:21:28):
you're supposed to test your well water. I probably should.
You know, you'll be fine, you'll know. But yeah, I
think it's important that, like you, I have definitely got
super sick from water that looks super clear, had no odor,
looked fine, And I have drunk from turbit as fuck

(02:21:50):
stagnant water and not been sick. Like your nose is
not going to tell you, and you do need some
kind of help. Yeah, let's talk about storing water first,
and then we'll talk about the more sort of established
solutions for the more expected contaminants. I guess, Yeah, how
would you go about let's say you're not in Philadelphia

(02:22:11):
right now and you want to prepare for something that
could happen in your area, how would you go about
storing water? So the easiest ways that you go get
bottled water, if it is sealed and you keep it
out of the sun, you keep it out of the heat,
even though you're it's supposedly good for a year or
two whatever. I feel like, really nervous on this, like,
this is what's safe, even though it's not safe, right,

(02:22:34):
but you can. Water itself doesn't go bad. That is
a thing that is worth understanding. Left to its own devices,
water does not go bad. Water goes bad when there's
like something in it that replicates, like bacteria or something
like that, or when something leaks into it. The main
reason that you want to keep your water out of
the sun and out of the heat is because if

(02:22:55):
you're storing it in plastic, that can eventually kind of
lead each into it as the plastic degrades, and that
I don't know, there's probably long term health effects. But
like I would drink a water bottle that has been
in the backseat of my car for a year before
I would drink beautile acrelate water, and which is I mean,

(02:23:18):
it's I guess that's just plastic or plastic pick your poison.
But but yeah, so bottled water is generally very safe
and it is sealed and it has no particular reason
to go bad. You don't want to store it next
to kerosene or gasoline. Like if you are the kind
of person who keeps five gallon jug of gasoline around,

(02:23:39):
you want that in a different place than your water.
Usually you want the gasoline outside your house and outbuilding.
Everyone lives on acreage in the rural areas the country, right,
so many outbuildings around here. Yeah, everyone's outbuildings. Just go
out to my urban bond, Yeah exactly, So okay, Well, okay.

(02:24:00):
Then the other thing, if I'm actually preparing go out
and get some five gallon Jerry cans. You're going to
pay between twenty and fifty dollars, and you'll get a
little bit of different quality depending on that. You want
something that is BPA free, you want something that is opaque,
and you want something that is like not really bigger
than four or five gallons because it's clumsy and unwieldy. Yeah.

(02:24:22):
You also don't want to stack these things unless they
specifically say this one is stackable to such and such depth.
Like most stackable containers are also only stackable one or
two high, well two or three high, and I don't know,
I mean, like frankly, on some level, that's what there is, okay,
And if you're going to fill your own water containers.

(02:24:44):
There are a couple weird things about it. One people
argue about how often you should rotate it. I rotate
in mind about once a year. You should theoretically rotate
them somewhere between six months and a year or something
like that, depending on how you store it. The other
thing is that if you are I actually think living
off of well, you should probably rotate it more often.

(02:25:06):
If you're on municipal water, don't run it through your
britta before you store it, because that britta is going
to pull out all the chlorine, all the bleach, and
people are like, whoa, I don't want to drink bleach.
I listen to that punk song Dead Dead milkman, um whatever.
People don't want to drink bleach? Right, you actually do
want to drink tiny amounts of bleach. You want Tunico

(02:25:29):
medical solution. Yeah, it keeps bacteria from growing. So if
you filter out all of that and then you put
it the water in the thing, if there's the tiniest
little bacteria that got through, it's like sweet, the defenses
are down, you know. Um so, But yeah, honestly, story
and water like people like they're going to sell you

(02:25:49):
lots of products, and like prepper sites are full of
people selling you shit. But it's just a matter of
like finding containers and filling them with water and then
rotating them every now and then, and it's not actually
that big of a deal or super complicated. That's my
take on it. Um. I used to live off of
I used to live entirely off grid and then had

(02:26:11):
to just drink water out of fifty gallon drums, and
I just I didn't even you know what, I'm not
going to say how bad my practices were because I
don't want anyone to emulate me. I was gonna say,
if you're like, if you're storing on a scale, I
don't know why they'd say you live on a compound
in the desert. You know you can get big water tanks, right,

(02:26:32):
I'm just looking at moving out to the desert a
couple of years ago. I didn't, but yeah, you can
get big water tanks are pretty cheap. You should. I'm
placed about a dollar a gallon. Last time I looked
for like a fifteen hundred gallon tank. Yeah, I found
them cheap, like GOV sp plus ones as well, pretty often.
Oh really, Yeah, we'll talk later. Yeah, yeah, Well I'll

(02:26:56):
send you some send you some links, but you might
want to check it places you actually can't legally have
those it's getting better now with that stuff, but you
do want to check on that. I think if you're
or you could get like a water buffalo, which is
an industrial device for shipping water. You can probably pick
up those pretty cheap. It's an animal. I don't want to.

(02:27:17):
Don't dehumanize it calling it an industrial machine. It's an animal.
It has feelings, Yeah, it does. And you just keep
that in your backyard and then well that is is
attack anyone who comes after your water. So it's quite effective. Yeah,
they are toughest nails. I've had some brunners with buffalo animals. Okay,

(02:27:38):
another thing, I guess that like, if you're like going
hardcore on this and storing thousands of guyans of water,
maybe you could invested something like a chlorine maker, and
that way, if you do like mess up with your storage,
I guess that that could maybe give you some leeway
in terms of purifying afterwards. It's out fair to say, Margaret, Yeah,
I mean that makes sense. Like chlorine maker is the

(02:27:58):
next step up from basically because like bleach itself does
go bad and it's not shelf stable for I don't
remember how long it lasts. It's not indefinitely shelf stable,
and so people often, especially in places of that, access
to clean water and stuff. I will say, though, when
we get into it, chemical treatment is really good for
the main stuff that people normally worry about, such as protozoa, bacteria,

(02:28:22):
and viruses. But once again, isn't going to do shit
for some stuff that goes bad? Yeah? I think it might.
There's one thing, maybe cryptosporidian. There's something that chlorine specifically
doesn't work for. Oh, that's right. Actually, yeah, it's actually
not very good at protozoa. It's weirdly good at viruses,
and then whereas most of the filters are not good
at viruses and are good at bacteria and protozoa. So

(02:28:44):
we should probably explain these different things right right, ways
you can treat your water. Okay, there's a bunch of
stuff that you can be in your water you don't
wish was in the water. The one that is like
kind of off the top of my head, the one
that I think about the most because if I had
to deal with it, it sucked our protozoa. The two
big one are Giardia and Cryptospuridium. And these are tiny
little animals in the water. If you can look at

(02:29:06):
pictures of them, they're really cute, and they make you
shit a lot forever, sometimes until you die, mostly immunocompromise folks,
but everyone really unhappy. And if you're in a survival
situation already, diarrhea is like no laughing matter. Your inability
to keep in fluids and nutrients will dramatically affect your

(02:29:26):
your chance of survival. So that's protozoa. They are the
biggest of these things and therefore sort of the easiest
to actually don't whether they're bigger in bacteria or not.
Then there's bacteria, which it can also be in water
and do bad stuff to you. And then there's viruses,
and viruses can be in the water and do bad
stuff to you. Largely in the United States, and people
don't worry about viruses and water, and that's not because

(02:29:49):
our heads are in the sand. It's because we don't
have as many viruses in our water. Then there's chemicals
you could have in your water. We don't like them.
There's dirt that can be in your water, which is
just like not fun. There's heavy metals like lead and
iron that can have deliterious effects on your health. Some
people want to get water hardening minerals like calcium and

(02:30:12):
magnesium out of their water, but you actually don't want
to get rid of all of them. That's the catch.
That's what we're gonna have to talk about, because your
body wants some of those things. They mostly just like
make your house has all the all the plumbing brakes.
That's like the main stuff. There's also things like nitrates
that I don't understand well enough to talk about how

(02:30:33):
we get rid of things. The most common way that
like backpackers and stuff who are a lot of the
people who diy this on a regular basis use is
something called filtration, or I'm going to call filtration. First
use you screen your water as in, you get out
the large chunks usually people use like a bandana or
a sock or just some piece of cloth, right, and

(02:30:55):
you want to use that so you're not gumming up
your filter, and then it goes into something where it's
forced through a membrane with micropores. These used to be ceramic,
but these days they're like a bunch of tiny little
tubes like the internet, and most of these are basically
la tubes have holes in them that are so small

(02:31:16):
that it stops protozoa and bacteria from going through it.
That is, it's like main claim to fame. It is
very effective at it. Now that they're not ceramic, you
don't have to clean it like every fucking gallon. And
these are really good top brands that I am not
sponsored by our sawyer and life straw. They're going to
use slightly different methods. People have opinions about them. I'm

(02:31:37):
not going to offer mine right now. And they're measured
in the size of the holes. Anything that's like one
micron is small enough to stop most protozoa. Most of
these ones are either point one or point two. These
don't block viruses, so they make ones that have even

(02:31:59):
smaller holes that can deal with viruses. And this also
blocks microplastics, but you know whatever. Then there's chemical treatment.
Chemical treatment. The two most common ones are bleach chlorine
or iodine. And there's also like chemical tablets that you
can buy that are like worth keeping around. They weigh
almost nothing. Whatever. Um, I am not going to give

(02:32:21):
you the chart of how much bleached to add your water,
and don't just go listen to me and add bleach
to your water. Fucking look it up. Do not use
color safe bleach. Do not use scented bleach. It's just
disinfected bleach, which will probably either come in six percent
or eight point two five percent sodium hypochlorite chlorite. Um

(02:32:43):
and sounds so growths just that those commination. Yeah, what
do they sent it with the blood of I don't know.
I got yeah, poisoned something that sounds so gross. I

(02:33:07):
used to wear lavender all the time. I actually I
stopped for two reasons. First, I stopped when I was
in college because like my girlfriend was like, you smell
like soap and was like really mad at me. Um,
if you're listening whatever, I don't care. And then I
stopped get what in Margaret go on Off's good look
at me now? Yeah, thanks for turning me on the

(02:33:30):
lots of cool stuff. Um, that was much healthier than
I would have been. I'm proud of you. And then uh,
um the other reason I stopped wearing lavenders. That attracts
ticks if you're out in the out in the woods.
Um anyway, okay, so that's chemical treatment. Chemical treatment is
really good for bacteria and viruses. It's not great for parasites.

(02:33:54):
It is a really good backup system. Right. Um, actually
I'll go over the fucking king of all of them
for for bacteria, bas and parasites. You want to get
rid of it, you fucking boil your water. Um. The
like classic way to deal with it is you boil
your water and it only needs to get above sixty
degrees celsius, which is like one hundred and forty something

(02:34:14):
in regular human um. And I actually don't know the conversion.
I actually know when you're talking about fahrenheit. Okay, fahrenheit
is really good about humans because zero is cold and
a hundred is hot. Yes, celsius is really good about
for water. So we're we actually are talking about water

(02:34:35):
right now. So celsius is the proper scale because it
goes from zero is freezing to one hundred is boiling. Yeah, um,
go ahead, Yeah, it's uh, you know what we should
do before before we talk fother about water? Do you
know what will not make you shot yourself to death?
H Reagan coins? Yeah, it probably is Ronald Reagan coins. Again.

(02:34:59):
All right, we thank you very much, Uncle ron for
continuing to pay for my healthcare and insulin needs. So, Margaret,
we were we were talking about boiling. Fuck boiling water.
That's it. Yeah, yeah, so how long do we need
to boil stuff for? Change? Depending on what we got.
It does but not really, it's like all of the

(02:35:20):
main and do do the actual instructions. Overkill is better
than regular get killed, right, um, but most shit dies
off at sixty degrees celsius, which is below the boiling
point of water even at high elevation. However, basically the
deal is at you want to boil water for one
minute at sea level three minutes above five thousand feet

(02:35:40):
um or five kilometer. No wait, no, go on, it's
not a thousand feet okay, um and yeah, so so
boiling water is actually the one of the main things
you can do. It doesn't get rid of everything. It
gets rid of those three things protozoa, bacteria, and viruses
very effectively. And that is most of the time what

(02:36:01):
most people are treating water for. A lot of the
other stuff is like long term health effects like heavy
metals and chemicals, right yea. Other methods that you can use.
The other like kind of gold standard, which isn't as
good as it seems like it should be, is distillation.
Distillation gets out lots of stuff. Distillation is basically you
evaporate the water and then let it run down into

(02:36:23):
another container. You're moonshining your own water, and and you
can do this DIY fairly well. And there's like solar
stills that are really cool. I've never actually built one,
I've always wanted to. The downside is if you'd live
off of distilled water for a long time, it gets
out the magnesium and the calcium, It gets out the
minerals that you actually want in your water, so it

(02:36:45):
can have negative effects on your long term health if
you only drink distilled water. The main thing that distillation
does that I think no other method on this does
besides a reverse osmosis, which I'm not really going to
get into, is it desalinates water. Go ahead. That's a
big deal, right because like if we look at long
term water insecurity, like certainly where I live, we live

(02:37:08):
in a place where people like to play golf in
the desert and that has become an issue as far
as water supplies go, and so desalination is often proposed.
It's like a way to deal with our water crisis
in California and the fact that the Colorado River is
getting lower and lower and we rely on it. But
like you said, lots of these methods aren't going to
pull the salt out of water, right, didn't let you

(02:37:29):
drink seawater, right, But this one does. And so I mean, actually,
I don't really care about the health of golf course.
I have actually negative feelings about the health of golf courses.
But theoretically, maybe water in your lawn with the desalinated
distilled water and then drinking the water that actually has
minerals in it. But then again, like maybe the plants

(02:37:52):
need that shit too, I don't fucking no. So, And
in distillation, it's very good at getting out heavy metals
also like iron and lead, and it the reason it
gets out the bacteria and viruses. It's not because they
can evaporate, but because they die getting boiled because you
boiled distill. Yeah, and some pesticides are filtered out if

(02:38:17):
their boiling point is greater than the boiling point of water.
Benzene and too lean which I don't know what is.
I don't know too lean is. These are examples of
things that do not get distilled out. Then there's a
couple more. There's absorption adsorption rules. This is the thing
that I always misspell and so that's why I emphasize

(02:38:38):
the ad absorption, and I don't really understand. Go ahead,
how do we adsorb? Is that just like absorption with adverts?
You know? It's like, yeah, it's like I took three
years of ladin and all I remember is that ad
means towards, an ab means away from, and maybe a
gorkoli is either farmer or farmhouse. Yeah, I got poor

(02:39:01):
poor sums suma aramat aramasama sartta. I remember that one. Now, Yeah, great, Yeah,
there you go. You've something today. Yeah. I wish that
my school had made me take Spanish instead of letting
me take some bullshit like Latin. H Yeah, exactly. So
adsorption is good for pesticides, heavy medicals, heavy metals, chemicals, viruses,

(02:39:26):
and bad tastes. It's the only one of these things
that I'm aware of that actually use can get rid
of bad taste because this is pulling out all the
weird stuff in the water. And what it is is
it uses activated carbon, which is basically just some shit
that's fucking burned and then crunched up real small. It
is a huge surface area because it's like little powder, right, Um,

(02:39:47):
and then the water passes through it, and then by
some weird science shit, the bad stuff tends to stick
to the carbon um. This is great. This is what
your bread of filter does. This is what you're b
key does. This is what you're pure filter does. It
It's not as good, I believe for bacteria and stuff,

(02:40:08):
and specifically the biggest problem with these things is that
bacteria can grow on them, and so some people, I mean,
that's why you replace it every so often. It's not
because it's like slow or clogged. It's like literally unhealthy.
And so sometimes what people do is they treat for
bacteria with UV or some other method, bleach whatever, all

(02:40:28):
the other shit that we talked about. We haven't talked
about u V yet. After it goes to the carbon filter.
I'm really excited about like kind of learning more about
these because you can theoretically diy carbon right, Yeah, yeah,
you're definitely could, right. I know that it's not the
same as this, but one of the things you can
do if you're in the back country is that if

(02:40:49):
you have water with a lot of turbidity, which is
stuff in the water, right, if you can't see through
the water, you know, if it's got a lot of cloudiness.
You can use white ash from a fire and that
will increase the rate of which it deposits a sediment
if you see what I mean. So you interesting because yeah,
it sticks to it and then slowly filters through the

(02:41:09):
bottom of them. I think the gold standard is a loom,
which is something using canning. Okay, that increases it even quicker.
But yeah, you can use white ash from a fire
if you're dealing with I think that's I don't think
that's activated coup but I think that's a different mechanism. Yeah, no,
I don't know. UM. And then one of the methods
that is actually mostly done on an industrial scale that

(02:41:31):
actually is like I think the main way that people
filter water in this world is through sand, and I
didn't do enough research about um. There's both slow sand
filters and fast sand filters, and some of them like
literally depend on certain bacteria, good bacteria, like having a
healthy culture of them that like eat the bad stuff

(02:41:52):
and things. I used to know more about that than
I do currently. And then the last one I'm going
to cover, Okay, then those reverse osmosis, which you might
have a kitchen thing that does and it also removes minerals.
It's a very effective method of filtering out lots of stuff.
It also, I don't know, causes wastewater, and it's complicated
in some ways. And then there's UV disinfection, and this
is like one of the ones that gets touted as

(02:42:13):
this like this is going to save the developing world
or whatever, right, And UV disinfection is cool and good.
Basically it uses UV light to kill off bacteria, parasites,
and viruses. Again, these three things that are the main
things people are usually going for. The biggest downside of

(02:42:33):
UV disinfection, there's two of them. One is that it
requires low turbidity water. Thanks for introducing that term clear water.
It has to be fairly clear water because it's about light, right,
this makes sense, and because you have to be careful
to do it right, you just have to like actually
get all of it with all of it. Yeah, So

(02:42:54):
this is why I haven't, like, for a moment, I
got really excited about these things, and then in the
end I was like, I like my water filter that
I already have. Yeah, I think with UV filteration as well,
it's been big and the outdoor world kind of relatively recently.
You have to be conscious of storing it in a
opaque container afterwards because the bacteria can UV like reactivate.

(02:43:16):
Oh yeah, I f that's like any of it that
it doesn't get is like fuck, yeah, it's my time. Yeah,
because it stops them reproducing. That's how it interested in there.
But they don't so it doesn't really matter. You drink
them and then you pass them through your system and
it's fine, but if they reproduce, that's when you get sick.
So somehow they can UV reactivate. So like if you
have a you know, the classic like like through hiking thing,

(02:43:37):
it's to use a smart water bottle, right because it's cheaping,
it's dirty, and but if you are UV filtering and
then traveling in your smart water bottle and then putting
that in the back of your pack and hiking all day,
you might get some difficulty. So yeah, I know it's
not Yeah, I haven't really messed with it much, like like, yeah,
I have my comfortable setup and that's what I'd like
to use. And I will say that something that people

(02:44:01):
who don't go camping much might not be aware of.
There's almost nowhere in the United States that you can
be confidently drink wild water without it without risking something
like giardia. Um, there are places where you can directly
from a spring is the most likely to be good. Um.
People used to say that you can you can drink

(02:44:23):
high elevation water if you're up in an alpine area
because there's like no calves or whatever, because like Giardia,
and I believe also crypto, but I'm um the other
poop transferred crypto, the cryptosparodia, not the not the multi
level marketing scam. Um. They it's it's passed in the

(02:44:44):
fecal oral tradition. What's the word here, Uh, there's a
word here for yeah pathway Yeah, and so um, because
it's passed that way. It's like basically the fact that
there's livestyle everywhere is the reason that's not safe to
drink the water. And so people are like, oh, if
you go up high enough, you're safe. But there's still

(02:45:04):
animals up there, and there's also like more and more
hikers up there. Almost anywhere you're going to be hiking,
someone else is hiked, and someone else is hiked, and
they have drank the water without filtering it because they're
not thinking properly. And then they've shit in not in
a hole, but just shit somewhere on the ground because
they're also a bad person in that way. Yeah. Um,

(02:45:25):
And so they've like tested a while ago at in
the high Sierras that there's giardia everywhere, which doesn't necessarily
mean it's going to make you sick, but it can
make you sick. So it's just like worth knowing that.
This is the reason that backpackers know so much about
water filtration, although again they don't know as much about
chemicals filtration, which is why I had to go and

(02:45:46):
learn more about that, less because I'm a backpacker and
more because they used to live off grid. But yeah,
they're different, Like like there there are definitely a lot
of products out there that are very affordable that work
for like that specific specifically the giardia concern, right, which
is one that most people have, And that's probably if
you're like if you're in a place where you hear
there's industrial water contamination and you go to RII and

(02:46:07):
you buy a sawyer make a tap filter, for instance,
it just clamps onto your tap. It probably won't work
for the stuff that you're concerned about, but it will
work if you're yeah, off a while, then you have
garda or something. Yeah, And it also won't work for
like lead, which is one of the reasons why the
carbon filters are the more common ones at home, because

(02:46:28):
city water that is a higher you know, if you
live in some cities, you're gonna have lead in your water, right, Yeah,
because we used it in pipes for decades. Yeah, but
I don't know. Oh, let's talk shit on Burkey's really quick. Yeah,
let's do it. What's up with Burkey? Why are they bad? So?
I was like, I personally the other day after this thing,
because that's my fun joy of being a prepper is

(02:46:52):
going to Twitter and being like, here's what I know
about that thing. You know, whenever a thing happens while
like safe on my mountain top and drinking out of
my well, which whatever has its own problems, I'll take
those problems anyway, Okay. So so I post about this
and then I pointed out that like, overall, there's like

(02:47:13):
the different filters that you can have her home, and
then the only one that seems to sort of do
it all is the Burkey. It's this very expensive brand.
You've probably seen them in your hippie friend's house, or
you're the hippie and there's one in your house, there's
one in my house. And it's a big silver canister
that looks like it comes from the fifties or whatever,
and and it's a filter, and it's somehow filters more

(02:47:36):
than everything else. And the way that it does that
is by lying or rather, I don't know what using
the way. Yeah, the way it does it is it
says it can do these things, and it is not
certified to the what is it a NSF slash ANCI

(02:47:57):
standard that all of your other filters are testing themselves too.
So everyone else is saying we have passed this following certification,
and Burkey is saying, oh, we tested, and it does
all the stuff. All the other ones probably do kind
of all the stuff too, but the only things that
they're actually certified to do or what they say they do.

(02:48:18):
And so Burkey basically charges a mint in exchange for
using their own testing standards instead of the testing standards
of other people independent testers. Google Burkey wire cutter and
you'll find a good article that where people conducted a
bunch of tests. And it's a shame because it would

(02:48:39):
be nice to have this sort of all in one
filter because it's very annoying. If you want to filter
something out of your water, you have to go, Okay,
what's in my water that I don't want? And then
you have to go find the filter for that, and
it's not going to be the same as the other filter.
Is not gonna be same as the other filter. Like, oh,
you live some more leading your pipes. You can't buy
a regular Britta. You got to buy the lead pipe
Montreal special Britta, you know, and like, you know you

(02:49:02):
want an undersinc water filter, Well do you want this
one or this one or this one? It would be
nice if there was a yeah, like buy once, cry once, Yeah, yeah,
go to Amazon two days later you're fine. Kind of situation. Yeah,
but there isn't one new I was going to go over,
like just in case people are curious more about the

(02:49:23):
back country stuff. I guess I have three different levels
of stuff that I use for back country. If I'm
just going out and I don't think I'm going to
filter water, I just take a stainless steel single wall
water bottle and some iodine or another chemical purifier. I
didn't works really well. But you don't want to be
using it long term, it's not good for you long

(02:49:44):
term for your thyroid, and then I'll filter it through
like a buff or a kaffir or something to get
the tability out and use that. If it's a trip
where I'm just in the backcountry in America, I take
a squeezy filteration system Catadine bee Free is the one
I tend to use. And you want to have a
dirty bag and a clean bottle, right, so you're squeezing

(02:50:05):
from the dirty water into the clean water. And then
if I'm going somewhere for work where there are virus
risks and where it might be like what you'd call
like a non permissive environment, at place where you don't
want to hang around near a water source for a
long time because it's dangerous. I have this thing called
an MSR Guardian, which is not cheap, and you probably
don't need it for what you're doing, but if you
are concerned about viruses, it has a dirty bag and

(02:50:27):
a clean bag, and it's a hang filter, so you
can fill up three liters of water, bugger off to
somewhere safe, hang it up, and let that filter from
the dirty bag into the clean bag, and then you're
not standing by the water filtering or pumping. I'm a
few seconds a pretty fettied. Situations have been fine. And
I'll say the thing that I used off grid as
they used a sawyer, just a regular sawyer water filter.

(02:50:50):
They're like thirty bucks. And I attached it to a
five gallon bucket with some hoss and then I gravity
fed it and I just left it drip in from
one five gallon bucket to another. And that's for a
stationary bas in the United States. That worked for me. Yeah,
I can see that working really well, Margaret. Do you
want to think where can people learn more about prepping?
Would there be a podcast they could listen to? You
mean one that just went weekly, Live Like the World

(02:51:11):
Is Dying. I am one of the hosts of Live
Like the World is Dying. The reason it went weekly
is now there's more hosts and you can listen to
that wherever. You listen to podcasts every Friday, and soon
you'll be able to hear James on it. But I
don't know when you just have to listen to all
of them. Yeah, where can people see you gloating on
Twitter from your mountaintop? Magpie killed Joy until I finally

(02:51:32):
get sick of Twitter, which is increasingly likely every single day.
Hell so, yeah, yeah, thank you very much, Margaret, thanks
for having me informative. You are welcome, all right, Ali,
everyone maybe and welcome. So it could happen here with

(02:52:02):
me Andrew of the YouTube channel andrewism and today I'm
joined by Garrison is here, greetings, and Mia also here. Hello.
And I wanted to talk about the idea of the
noble savage. It's something that people have occasionally brought up
in my common section when I discuss really anything related

(02:52:26):
to m Maybe there's something to learn, something to be
learned from the Indigenous people of pre colonial period. There's
often this accusation levied against any sort of positive representation

(02:52:47):
of their society, any sort of generous reading of their society,
as something to be scoffed at, as something to be ridicule,
as something to be seen as perpetually and this troope
of the noble savage. And so I was in some

(02:53:07):
sort of I feel I was in sort of am
I got into a sort of defense mood, and I
was like, well, I really don't want to do that, right,
I don't want to want to create this caricature of
indigenous peoples in my videos that you know, Forster represents
all their complexities and stuff. Obviously, every group throughout history

(02:53:28):
has had many layers to them. And then in reading
to one of Everything by David Grieber and David wen
Grew ended up stumbling upon even further information on the subject.
And so that's something that I want to talk about.
You know, this idea where the idea of the noble
savage came from how it's used, and I think how

(02:53:49):
we should be approaching it today. But before I even
get into all of that, are all familiar with this
term and how it's used. Yeah, I mean I think
I don't know. It is interesting in the way that
it kind of like, I don't know, there was kind

(02:54:09):
of this shift of it being uses a term to
critique sort of like racist white fantasy to being a
term that's used to sort of bludge at anytime anyone
like has the temerity to suggest anything in another society
than this one could have possibly have been better, which
is a kind of grim shift I think in a
lot of ways, and I think has done a lot

(02:54:32):
of political damage by people who sort of don't quite
understand what was going on. Yeah, and that is a
shift that I noticed as well, and for a while
I thought that was really how the term was originally
meant to be applied. I mean we see it all

(02:54:53):
over discussions of anthropology and philosophy and literature, which it
could be extended to media as a whole. Right, you
have this sort of stock character of the noble savage person.
It's uncorrupted by civilization. Something that's a person that symbolizes
this sort of any goodness and moral superiority, living in

(02:55:15):
harmony with nature that we don't have access to because
we've been corrupted by the influences of civilization. Right, it's
this idealized concept of an uncivilized or sort of base
man right or rather person, And I mean we see

(02:55:36):
it a lot in rights discourse, being used as a
tomb of derision. For example, a right being Australian politician
named Dennis Jensen once told Parliament that the Australian government
should not be funding people to live a noble savage
lifestyle in remote indigenous communities. Yeah, christ and it's used

(02:56:01):
to mock the so called backwards lifestyles of Indigenous people
and really try to reinforce this white supremacist idea of
their inferiority or their backwardness, their regressiveness, whatever the case
may be. And then on the other side, in leftist
political discourse, you also see it being used as a

(02:56:23):
tomb of derision. So in both cases it's being used
as a term of derision without really a good grasp
of what the term is where it came from. For example,
anarcho primitivists are criticized for upholding this troope, and of
course leftists criticize a leftist when fallen for the troope

(02:56:44):
for fallen for the troope. When describing indigenous histories, spiritualities,
and social ecologies, it seems like you can't even bring
up any sort of reciprocal gift economy based relationship of
the land that indigenous group might have had without somebody saying, oh, well,
did you know that indigenous people also perpetuated extinctions and

(02:57:07):
genocides and this than the other. So I really don't
think that any time you learn from a society that
predates your own and may still persist, that you're doing
a noble savage But it is something that I had
become very conscious of in my approach to any sort

(02:57:29):
of discussion. I feel like it sort of haunts the
discourse among other sort of stock characters and troops that
permeate in or political conversations within media. The troope has,
you know, come in and out of fashion. But the

(02:57:50):
two main forms that it appears in is one that
life is strenuous, a life of quote and quote primitive
is strenuous, and therefore this savage is nobody, brave, hard work,
and an honorable And then you have this other depiction,
which is that the savage and I can it pains

(02:58:13):
me to use the term every time, but the savage
is not greedy and just as now a teat for luxury.
So might you see it in instant media. It's been
a long time since I've watched The Road to Eldorado,
but if I recall, there is this sort of idea
within the movie that they're so used to this the

(02:58:36):
decadence and stuff of gold and whatnot, that they don't
consider it as valuable, they considered wruthless. So there's this
aspect of the Troope that treats materials traditionally considered valuable
to be something to be sort of shrugged off or flaunted.
And then of course because what is philosophy, what is

(02:59:01):
really our ontology without some sort of reference to the
story is embedded within the Christian cannon, right there is
this sort of interpretation of the story of the God
of Eden as this as Adam and Eve and these

(02:59:23):
noble savages that live in this uncorrupted innocence and harmony
with nature, and then they have to they partaken this
fruit from the tree of knowledge or you know, they
become quote unquote civilized, and then they're punished by having
to engage in agriculture and have to labor over the

(02:59:44):
land instead of living in harmony with it. Just one
interpretation of that story is that it's a metaphor for
the dawn of agriculture and the god have eaten as
a sort of nostalgic take. Even later on, when Europeans
first encountered hunter gatherer communities in the Americas, they compared

(03:00:06):
them to being living and they're sort of eaton. And
today you still find comparisons to eat on used to
describe certain hunter gather societies. And of course, as this
is quite topical, you often see this criticism of noble

(03:00:27):
savage and whatever being lefted against Avatar, as in the
Blue People, not the not the Last Day of Bender,
because they have this sort of oh we are these
utterly perfect, you know, peace loving space hippies or in
harmony with nature, chilling vibing, we literally have sex with

(03:00:49):
trees kind of vibe. Um. And I haven't seen the
second movie in the series. I only saw the first,
but I wouldn't be surprised if that trend and continues.
I don't know, have you all seen either both of them.
I saw the first one and I was like, I, no,
nothing on earth can can call me to see the

(03:01:10):
second one. So I have no idea how you or not? Yeah,
and I mean the conspt the noble savage. It has
its roots a lot further back than European encounters with
Native Americans, Right, that's sort of the intellectual lineage of
the concept could actually be traced back to ancient Greece.

(03:01:33):
So if you really want to reach you could say
that even back in the Acadia and epic of Gilgamesh,
that Akudo as a sort of bushman was a kind
of depiction of that contract between hunter gatherer societies and
agricultural societies, a Gilgamesh representing, of course, you know, civilization,

(03:01:55):
but if he starts in from ancient Greece, we could
say you're seeing Homer and Pliny and Xenophon all idealizing
the Arcadians and other groups, whether they were real or not.
And then later on in Rome you find Tacitus, for example,

(03:02:16):
writing of the noble Germanic and Caledonian tribes in contrast
with his view of Roman society as this sort of
corrupt and decadent place. Even wrote speeches like he practically
wrote fan fiction about liberty and honor for his sort
of caricatures of these people. Other writers would also treat

(03:02:42):
the Scythians comparably, You've seen in the works of Horace
and Futil and Ovid. And then further on, you know,
in the twelfth century the polymath even to Fail wrote
in his novel The Living Son of the Vigilant this

(03:03:06):
idea of this sort of stripped down back to the
roots earthy wild man who is isolated from society and
has a series of trials and tribulations that lead him
to knowledge of Allah by living this life and harmony
with Mother Nature, basically theorizing this idea that people can

(03:03:33):
find can find their way to God just by being
exposed to nature, finding a sort of a theological understanding
by understanding the natural world. All of this is sort
of a preamble to really what most people point to
as the origins of the concept, the modern myth of

(03:03:54):
the noble savage. It's most usually attributed to eighteenth century Enlightenment.
For plosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he believed the original
man was somebody who was free from sin, appetite, or
the concept of right and wrong, and those deemed savages
were not brutal, but noble, or at least this is

(03:04:15):
how the story goes. The idea can also be found
in theology the founder of the Methodist Church, for example,
John Wesley. Again, just like the Andalusian novel writer, believe
that you know, there's this idea of man in the
beginning at the roots connected with nature, is not as corrupted,

(03:04:42):
is more connected with nature and with God, compared to
the so called de generous he found in eighteenth century society,
compared to the disease and materialism seeing throughout the world.
David Grieber, in one of his recent posthumous works, Pirate Enlightenment,

(03:05:04):
I don't know. In a lot of his other works,
as well. He sort of grapples with this idea of
the Enlightenment, right, and how flawed our understanding of the
Enlictenment is. How our approach the Enlightenment as a sort
of era unique to Europe or this era centered upon

(03:05:25):
Europe is flawed in its approach because it leaves out
the realities of the Enlictenment occurred as a result of
Europeans interactions and exposure to the rest of the world.
You had these European explorers and colonizers and scientists venturing out, trading,

(03:05:49):
interacting with these different groups of people, hearing their ideas
about things, and then going back and writing best best
selling books about these societies and how they believe and
what they think and how they organize their society. One chronicler,
for example, noted that among the Indians or Native Americans,

(03:06:15):
that land belonged to all, just like the sun and water,
mine and thine. The seeds of all evils do not
exist for those people. They live in a golden age
and open gardens, thought, laws or books thout judges, and
they naturally follow goodness. Rousseau, Thomas Moore and others also
idealized the naked savages as innocent of sin. Another one

(03:06:40):
wrote about how they are equal in every respect and
so in how many of their surroundings they all live
justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. Basically
we have we just found a whole continent of people
basically lived in a garden of da But then this
concept of ecological nobility that is perpetuated is of course flawed.

(03:07:04):
I mean, like I mentioned earlier, there were cases of
overexploitation and damage done to the environment. And yet we
also find a lot of indigenous groups living in compatibility
of the ecological limitations of their home area, getting familiar

(03:07:25):
with the lands that they live on and what it
takes to preserve them for the next generations. A lot
of what is seen as the sort of virgin landscape
was profoundly shaped by the controlled boons, the horticulture, the
hooden and other activities done by indigenous groups throughout the Americas,

(03:07:52):
for example, in the case of the Amazon rainforest, and
in Australia as another case where the controlled boons really
shaped that landscape over thousands and thousands of years. To
this day, you know, the methods used by indigenous peoples
have been found to be you know, superior to that
was used by non indigenous peoples living in the same

(03:08:14):
habitat methods like poly cropping techniques, to enhanced soil fertility,
sustainable harvesting, and of course there are these culturally encoded
morays that are you know, placed in these communities that
helped result in the preservation of these resources. Then he

(03:08:36):
also had account for the fact that no culture has stagnant.
Every culture changes over time, and as a result of
the capitalist market economy, there is this pressure to overexploit
the land for the sake of profit. You know, a
lot of way of these documented patterns of land cultivation

(03:09:03):
and land preservation are found is usually in the outskirts
and the margins of the capitalist market economy. Such practices
can be more difficult to find right in the belly
of the beast. For example, the rappapa in western Venezuela,

(03:09:29):
they were traditionally mobile over an extensive area plants and food,
search and game, and now they are stationary. Now they
are settled, and now they sort of are forced to
adopt a different lifestyle in response to their new material conditions.
When you had that lesser population density and greater freedom

(03:09:51):
to roame. It was easier to both satisfy subsistence needs
and also maintain the health and vitality of the ecosystem
over an extended period of time. But now that sill
pluses are needed, now that agriculture has been reduced to

(03:10:16):
a very small portion of the population, and that those
techniques are now expected to be more intensive in order
to keep up with the demands, those lifestyles and those
cultural moras and those practices have had to change. But
back to the idea of the noble savage right, and

(03:10:38):
particularly drilling into this idea of the noble aspect of
it right, because there's some confusion, as Groupate points out,
between these two meanings associated with the word nobility. You
could say someone is noble in this sense that they
are you know, moral good, exemplary in their heavia and

(03:11:00):
their exequette in their ethical standards. But you could say
somebody is noble in the sense they have this position
in a sort of a class system, a hereditary position
in a class system, and elevated economic status. Rousseau didn't

(03:11:23):
come up with the phrase, and in fact he never
used in his writings. What terre ellingson historian discovered, or
rather explored in his book The Myth of the Noble
Savage is that the term was coined over a century
before Russo's birth by a guy named by a French

(03:11:44):
lawyer ethnographer named marcol Escarboo. And Escarboo described indigenous peoples
as truly noble, not having any action, but it's generous,
whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars.
The nobility was more so associated not with just moral

(03:12:07):
qualities like generosity and you know, good behavior, but also
nobility from a legal standpoint. The lives of freedom, the privileges,
and the responsibilities that the Indienous people enjoyed were also found,

(03:12:28):
according to less Carboo, within the European nobility in Cannibals
and kings nance prot just the name of Marvin. Harris
went on to explain why less Carboo had recognized nobility
among the Indienous people that he visited. You know, a
lot of the band and village societies, there was a

(03:12:50):
level of economic and political freedom that very few enjoyed
in his day and even today. You know, people decided
for themselves how long they wanted to work on a
particular day. What they would do or if they would
even work at all. You know, they didn't have to
deal with the taxes and rents and tribute payments that
and one I could even extend to say, debts that

(03:13:13):
keep people today and in the past so confined and
restricted in their limited life on this earth. What should
have been you know, the sort of normal standard you know,
of human freedom is in contrast with European society, just
like mind blew in. Yeah, there's another David Graeber. Actually,

(03:13:35):
I've been talking about their Never was at West a
lot recently, and one of the things that he talks
about in that in the Devery was a West. Is
this like trick that European writers use when they're looking
at another society, which is like they present themselves as
like people whose behaviors are sort of are entirely rational,
and they're solving a logic puzzle, and then they go find, like,

(03:14:00):
I don't know, what they consider to be the weirdest thing,
and so like sorry, they go find what they consider
to be the weirdest thing that like another culture does
and look at it through this you know, this lens
which it draws in the reader to be doing this
sort of logic puzzle and trying to figure out, oh,
how could these people do this thing? And then you know,

(03:14:20):
if if you pull back the lens a little bit
look at like what these supposedly objective European like theorists
of doing, it's like, well, okay, these guys all have
these really weird ceremonies and like they eat they they
eat the flesh of their God every weekend and stuff
like that, and so you get this really interesting But
but the when when you read it through their their
sort of colonial ethnography, you get this image of both

(03:14:48):
societies that's very weird that that lets you sort of
that conceals the fact that, yeah, like when when these
European writers are talking about meeting addious people like you
kind of the way that it's and makes it very
easy to sort of like do this colonial thing where
you forget that every single French writer who is writing
about this lives in like the most hierarchical society of

(03:15:09):
the world has ever seen. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.
And it's like, well, yeah, of course, like they they
went to literally any other place on Earth and talk
to people and they are like, oh my god, these
people are like are really freed. It's like, well, yeah,
it's because these guys live under the French like they're
like French absolutism. This is like I think Grab's line was, like,
this is a society where every single person when they walk,

(03:15:31):
when they walk into a dining room immediately knows the
class of every single other person sitting around the table
by like how they hold their silverware. Yes, it's absurd,
you know when a lot of the rest of the
world is like, you know, living on the generosity of
the people around them, being reliable in you know, the

(03:15:53):
phone deations of you know, community, not even necessarily because
I mean obviously a hierarchies to be found within a
lot of these colleges and communities, but not to the
extent that you would have you fallen in. And some
of these European societies not even close. Yeah, these are

(03:16:14):
the European like I don't know, like Europe has been
really really I mean, you know, this is the sort
of organizational trend of European society for like the last
like four or five hundred years has been just an incredible,
unfathomable centralization on a level that was just it's just
sort of incomprehensible to most of the people who've ever lived,

(03:16:35):
but we treat as sort of normal now because it's
a society that we've grown up under. Yes, it's a
I'm trying to draw a comparison between Europeans and culture
and this level of freedom and other societies and sort
of like I can't think of any specific example right now,

(03:16:55):
but you know how, you know, grown up as a
child in a particular household, your house would have certain
norms that you think is just like universal, you know,
like everybody does this. Obviously this is just a fact
of life in the universe. But in reality, it's just
like some way at quirk when you appearance had that
you just had to grow up with. Yeah, yeah, like like,

(03:17:19):
for example, this is a really weird example, but let's say,
for example, you had like ceramic dishes. Would not allow
it to be used ever, right, they were purely for
decoration and appearance. Tooled you that it's some grave moral

(03:17:40):
sin to eat off of ceramic dishes. And then you
go to somebody's house and they have all their plates
laid out, and you're like utterly baffled by how they're
able to eat off ceramic dishes. If I could think
of a better example, but for now, Yeah, that's what
I'm a role with. Anyway, despite recognizing all of this

(03:18:02):
freedom and stuff, they were kind of like disgusted by it,
at least some of them, you know, some of them,
when publishing their texts in Europe, would put their own
liberal ideas into the mouths of indigenous people to say, oh,
I'm not saying this. This is obviously like trees in
US and I would never say this, but this indigenous

(03:18:25):
guy who I spoke to the other day, he said it,
and so I'm just publishing what he said. So that
took place sometimes. And then they're also those who would
like actually disgusted by the liberty exhibited in so many societies.
But whether they saw that freedom as a positive or

(03:18:46):
as a negative despite all their fluffy words about intigenous liberties,
that doesn't really matter of indigenous people at the end
of the day, because you know, through the centuries, empires
continue to swallow indigenous lands. And the phrase basically disappeared
for about two hundred and fifty years because the idea
of the noble savage was reversed by this stereotype of

(03:19:10):
the dangerous, brutal savage like whole day are they defend
their land and way of life? Right. It was until
eighteen fifty nine that the term was resurrected by a
guy named John Crawford, a white supremacist. He wanted to
become president, or rather he was attempted to become president
of the Ethnological Society of London, and he was very

(03:19:34):
disdainful of this idea emergin and anthropology and philosophy of
universal human rights, like how dare you? You know? So
he introduced the phrase resurrecting after two hundred and fifty
years to make a speech to the society, and by

(03:19:55):
the way, he missed. He's the one who first misattributed
this speech the phrase to russ basically ridiculing using the
noble savage as a term to ridicule those who sympathized
with such quote less advanced cultures. And so that sort
of fabrication where he attributed it to Russu and he

(03:20:16):
built up this straw man to blew it down. You know,
it's basically this myth of the myth of the noble savage.
He creates a straw band of the noble savage as
a myth, and then that's what's perpetuated. But his myth

(03:20:36):
of the noble savage was the one that was a myth.
So it's, you know, the myth of the myth the
noble savage. And so as the British Empire was reaching
the height of its power, and he was, you know,
trying to ridicule anybody who had anything nice to say
about Indigenous people, that straw Band was used to continue
to advocate for the extermination. Crawford's version of noble Savage

(03:20:57):
became the source for every citation of the myth by
anthropologists from Lubbock, Tyler or Boas through the scholars of
the late twentieth century. So even one hundred years later,
people were still using the term that he came up with,
this rhetorical cheap shots that he used, and to this

(03:21:19):
day it continues to polarize our discussions and obstruct any
sort of nuanced approach to hunt to gather life. And
having discovered all of this, I have to say, it
really made me feel like a part of history. There
never was a noble savage myth, at least on the

(03:21:41):
sense of this strong man of simple societies living in
happy innocence. Travelers usually accounted for both virtues and vices.
They spoke of the positives of these societies and also

(03:22:02):
things that they weren't too fond of. Both the concept
of the noble savage and the concept of the brutal
savage a fantasies constructions of a European mind that was
intent on boxing Indigenous people in this sort of suspended

(03:22:23):
state of either purity or evil going forward. I think
it's really silly to continue to perpetuate the tim I
think it really keeps us from engaging with history properly.
And I mean, even if somebody is exaggerating or expungentertain
aspects of a particular society or culture that should be

(03:22:45):
engaged with directly. You know, I don't think you should
fall back on a lazy troope popularized by a white supremacist.
I mean, we live under states now, we live on
the capitalism now, and I don't think I don't fault
people for trying to imagine what life must have been

(03:23:06):
like before then, before these institutions became so all in compassing.
What becomes an issue is when we take these past
societies and we use them as these speakers of virtue
instead of going back and trying to take their lessons
and their practices and adopting them and interpreting them to
move forward. There was a lot of freedom and there

(03:23:31):
still is a lot of freedom left to be uncovered
in our history. It is obscured in our history classes.
It isn't taught. Instead, we're taught facts and figures and
wars and notable notable individuals. We're taught of kings and
dictators and high priests and emperors and prime ministers and
presidents and chiefs and judges and jailers and dungeons, penitentiaries

(03:23:57):
and concentration camps. This is always a stance now, but
it doesn't have to be. And if we go into
have an honest exploration of our history in order to
inform our future, we have to free our imaginations of
this lazy troop of the noble savage. That's it for

(03:24:22):
me for this episode. Can check me out on YouTube
dot com slash Aurism and also on Twitter at underscore
sat Drew, as well as when patreon dot com slash
Saint Drew. This is it could happen here. Yeah, you
can find us in the usual places on Twitter, Instagram,
and Yeah, go be free. Hey, We'll be back Monday,

(03:24:48):
with more episodes every week from now until the heat
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(03:25:08):
slash sources. Thanks for listening.