Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gotta be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Welcome to Shitty mayor Mondays,
Speaker 1: a name we're not actually allowed to use as a
Speaker 1: title of our podcast because it breaks a bunch of
Speaker 1: search shit in the background. I'm your host, Mio Wong
Speaker 1: coming to you live from a crumbling basement, and he
Speaker 1: contested Chicago that may or may not be hit by
Speaker 1: a tornado in the next hour. This is it could
Speaker 1: happen here, So truly, it could all happen within this
Speaker 1: next recording session. It could happen in me It's basement, Yeah,
Speaker 1: with me of Garrison and James. Hello, Welcome to Hell. Hi,
Speaker 1: a tornado free San Diego did have a tornado warning yesterday.
Speaker 1: Luckily I'm in the ever stable Pacific Northwest where nothing
Speaker 1: bad can happen. Yeah, it's contractually, contractually obligated. It says no, no,
Speaker 1: no bad things, No no earthquakes here that that are overdue,
Speaker 1: no forest fires or record temperatures. It's great up there.
Speaker 1: It's so true. So today we're doing a sort of
Speaker 1: special episode of Shitty Mayor Mondays, which is that we
Speaker 1: are we are doing the Chicago double feature because our
Speaker 1: previous shitty Mayor, Lloyd Lightfoot I, managed to become the
Speaker 1: first I think I think, the first Chicago mayoral candidate
Speaker 1: in forty years. She was an incumbent and lost reelection.
Speaker 1: And not only is she lose reelection, she went out
Speaker 1: so okay the way the way the Chicago mayor elections
Speaker 1: have like a trillion candidates, like I think they were
Speaker 1: like nine this time, and if no one can get
Speaker 1: about fifty percent, it goes to a runoff, and she
Speaker 1: got knocked out before the runoff, which is unbelievably funny. Um.
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk about her first as the sort
Speaker 1: of loyal Lifewood is sort of the shitty Chicago mayor past,
Speaker 1: and then we're gonna talk about the maybe future shitty
Speaker 1: Chicago Mayor, Paul Vallis, who sucks so much that he
Speaker 1: was the reason I specifically wanted to do this series.
Speaker 1: But first, what do you talk about? Fucking Lorily Lightfoot?
Speaker 1: A person who I don't I don't know. I feel
Speaker 1: like people outside of Chicago don't know much about her. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I know that she's like like has gebody
Speaker 1: failed to do all the things that he was supposed
Speaker 1: to do and in a kind of general sort of
Speaker 1: Democrat Matt model has sucked. But I'm excited to hit
Speaker 1: his specifics. Yeah, she's a super well okay, Ay. The
Speaker 1: funniest thing about her is it's just just Google pictures
Speaker 1: of her hats. She has just like an incredible hat game.
Speaker 1: It's just all least appearing in just an incredible like
Speaker 1: she has so many hats. It's it's wild. It's just
Speaker 1: every single picture she's in it's just like a random, different,
Speaker 1: wild hat. It's amazing. But she's also kind of in
Speaker 1: some sense like a kind of uniquely incompetent politician. So okay,
Speaker 1: So Lightfoot was elected mayor in like an absolute landside
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, and she ran this very weird campaign
Speaker 1: which it was based on sort of three main things.
Speaker 1: It was one was not being a machine candidate. And
Speaker 1: this is actually very important, is it Lightfoot is not
Speaker 1: actually part of the Chicago political machine that controls like
Speaker 1: most polic Why there's there's the kind of kind of
Speaker 1: separate parts of the machine. This is a complicated thing
Speaker 1: we're not going to fully get into here. But she's
Speaker 1: like not a machine candidate. She like kind of is
Speaker 1: an outsider in some sense um and that was a
Speaker 1: big part of why people voted for her. There's another thing,
Speaker 1: which is this sort of like identity tokenism thing, which
Speaker 1: is like, I'm going to be the first black, lesbian
Speaker 1: mayor of Chicago, which she is. And then the third
Speaker 1: thing she was running on was building a ship ton
Speaker 1: of police academies. Now I now in twenty nineteen, I
Speaker 1: was in Chicago for this election, and I was like,
Speaker 1: do not fucking vote for her. She's gonna build these
Speaker 1: cop academies. And everyone was like, no, it's gonna be great.
Speaker 1: She's not the machine, She's like. So she gets elected
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen, and this means that when she gets
Speaker 1: into office, like almost immediately, twenty twenty happens, and okay,
Speaker 1: so no mayor has like a good response of twenty
Speaker 1: twenty Lightfoot's is like catastrophic. So I've talked about this
Speaker 1: a bit at the show, but but what twenty twenty
Speaker 1: in Chicago is this really really kind of wild and
Speaker 1: weird thing. It doesn't map onto a lot of the
Speaker 1: other sort of twenty twenties, but like the first thing
Speaker 1: that happens basically is Chicago has this thing called I
Speaker 1: think it's I think it's the Magnificent Mile. It's something milds.
Speaker 1: I can remember when its magnificent a miracle because it's
Speaker 1: the fucking bullshit tourist thing. But it's it's like the
Speaker 1: Chicago's like it's like a mile of like really rich
Speaker 1: shopping districts, and the I was just lost control of it.
Speaker 1: Like people just took it. It was like fully looted.
Speaker 1: It was just this. It was just this. There was
Speaker 1: this sort of incredible moments of like Chicago's working class
Speaker 1: that had been getting shit on for two hundred fucking
Speaker 1: years like finally stormed their way into their pas and
Speaker 1: just the fucking boushee part of Chicago would destroyed it
Speaker 1: and it fucking ruled. But after that happened, life Foot
Speaker 1: was like, oh shit, we can never let protesters get
Speaker 1: back there again. So she started raising the fucking draw
Speaker 1: bridges that lead that lead across the fucking rivers, like
Speaker 1: she was like she basically turned the entirety of like
Speaker 1: like that that event part of Chicago into a fucking
Speaker 1: fortress that you could not get onto. Amazing, I just
Speaker 1: raised she did this, Like, she raised the bridges multiple
Speaker 1: fucking times. Like we're gonna get to another story of
Speaker 1: her raising the bridges where it's like it's un like
Speaker 1: like she doesn't so many times that like even times
Speaker 1: where she claimed she didn't do it on purpose, people
Speaker 1: are like, I think she raised the bridges. This is
Speaker 1: you know, and so this is her basically she when
Speaker 1: when she raises the bridges, she just like declares war
Speaker 1: basically on like half of Chicago. And Okay, so this
Speaker 1: is like not a great thing to do if if
Speaker 1: you're trying to be a popular politician is to just
Speaker 1: like physically declare war and like do fucking medieval fortress
Speaker 1: shit to like half half your fucking city. And so
Speaker 1: her popularity starts tanking immediately. This is in like the
Speaker 1: this is I'm guessing as a consequence of the Black
Speaker 1: Lives Matter protest, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so her
Speaker 1: reproove rating is like fucking absolutely dog should I think, Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm trying to find I should have looked this up earlier.
Speaker 1: I meant to, and I forgot. I think her APPO
Speaker 1: rating was like thirty percent when she left office. It
Speaker 1: might even be lower than that. Yeah, but you know,
Speaker 1: but she she does this kind of unique thing where
Speaker 1: she basically goes around and alienates like every single voting
Speaker 1: block in the city. I guess before we get to this,
Speaker 1: we should get we should get to how she pissed
Speaker 1: off the cops because one big things which she came
Speaker 1: into office was she was trying to sort of like
Speaker 1: do this alliance with the police. But instead of her
Speaker 1: sort of actually like forming this, you know, she she
Speaker 1: was trying to form sort of sent a right wing bass. Right,
Speaker 1: She's trying to both sort of play this kind of
Speaker 1: like identity tokens something and then also build a bass
Speaker 1: with the cops. But a, the cops are racist And Okay,
Speaker 1: do you two know the story about the Chicago Columbus statue.
Speaker 1: I don't think Wait, is that one of the ones
Speaker 1: that got taken down? Sort of? I think this is
Speaker 1: one of the ones that so in twenty twenty, I
Speaker 1: wrote a story about how to tie down statues and
Speaker 1: then became the guy that everybody sent pictures of statues
Speaker 1: getting torn down to for a while. So I'm sure
Speaker 1: I seen amazing. Yeah, it was great. Ben Shapira had
Speaker 1: a whole fucking seizure about it. We got lots of
Speaker 1: trouble with various federal agencies. But yeah, it was a
Speaker 1: very amazing story. I don't don't affiliate link to the
Speaker 1: ingredients to things which mail made be illegal if you
Speaker 1: combine those ingredients in your story, so true. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: many popular mechanics editives have tried this. It's great. I
Speaker 1: was on Russia today. Uh not not with my knowledge,
Speaker 1: but yeah, tell us about this, tell us about his
Speaker 1: other statue. Man. Okay, So there is a giant like
Speaker 1: statue thing sitting on a like sitting on this big
Speaker 1: column that was made nineteen thirty three, and it's it's
Speaker 1: this giant statue of Christopher Columbus. I'm also on this statue.
Speaker 1: So there there, there, there's like a series of like
Speaker 1: important Italian people like on the column. One of these things,
Speaker 1: one of the people who has picked it on this column,
Speaker 1: like very much seems to be Benito Mussolini holding a
Speaker 1: bunch of fascies. That's cool. Now, the sculptors, the sculptor's
Speaker 1: son denies this, but this was made ninety thirty three.
Speaker 1: It really looks like he is definitely holding fascis. So
Speaker 1: all right, this this statue, this is like in like
Speaker 1: the middle of the fucking city, right in like this
Speaker 1: park in the middle of the city. Um, and this
Speaker 1: became the so okay, so in twenty twenty in Chicago,
Speaker 1: the way the protests work is you have like the
Speaker 1: first initial like phase where the cops like lose control
Speaker 1: of the city, and then the cops kind of like
Speaker 1: retake it over the next few days, and there's a
Speaker 1: kind of lull, but then it starts another like sort
Speaker 1: of wave of it starts back up again, like a
Speaker 1: rounds specifically around this statue, and there's this whole thing
Speaker 1: that cops are trying to keep it up, and there's
Speaker 1: this whole thing where like there's like like rings of
Speaker 1: activists like surrounding a group of cops standing around the
Speaker 1: statue like throwing shit at them. When it fucking ruled,
Speaker 1: and eventually the city is like, Okay, we're gonna we're
Speaker 1: just gonna take down the fucking statue. And this was
Speaker 1: a Lightfoot thing, but but this pissed off the cops
Speaker 1: and specifically, so what I talked about this before on
Speaker 1: the show, but like this is one of the sort
Speaker 1: of unique things about Chicago is that Chicago has like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the technical term is like white ethnic like
Speaker 1: groups that like do shit. And one of those things
Speaker 1: is like there's like an Italian American Cop Association that
Speaker 1: is very powerful. The Echina American Cop Association is like, like,
Speaker 1: we will keep the statue at all costs. This is
Speaker 1: like our fucking guy, like, hey, we're yeah, and and
Speaker 1: and Lightfoot is like, you guys, if you guys don't
Speaker 1: take this statue down, people are gonna fucking like burn
Speaker 1: the Miracle Mile again. And she gets to this giant
Speaker 1: fight of them, and these emails eventually get I think
Speaker 1: I can't remember thaying. I think they get released part
Speaker 1: of a court case or something, but these these emails
Speaker 1: come out that it like Lightfoot is yelling that she
Speaker 1: has the biggest balls of anyone on the table. She's
Speaker 1: gonna put her balls on the table. She's trying to
Speaker 1: like keep the cops. So she gets in this giant fight,
Speaker 1: it just pisses off all of the cops in the city.
Speaker 1: So she's she she has pissed off like like from
Speaker 1: from from from the initial wave of protests at the
Speaker 1: Drawbridge stuff. She has pissed off like anyone who's even
Speaker 1: sort of vaguely center left and anti racist and like
Speaker 1: a huge proportion of the city's black population. And then
Speaker 1: she like systematically she's now pissed off like the sort
Speaker 1: of like white ethnic cop groups who are also very powerful,
Speaker 1: and then she does something like like really genuinely unforgivable
Speaker 1: and horrific, which she is. In twenty twenty one, Chicago
Speaker 1: police shot thirteen year old Adam Toledo share so much
Speaker 1: Chicago paper called the Tribe. At a press conference after
Speaker 1: the shooting, Mayor Louis Lightfoot vowed to find the people
Speaker 1: responsible for quote putting a gun in the hands of Toledo,
Speaker 1: who Chicago police and prosecutors insisted was armed. So, okay,
Speaker 1: they shoot this kid who is fucking thirteen years old.
Speaker 1: His name is Adam Toledo, and immediately the cops of
Speaker 1: prosecutors and the mayor said that he's armed. They're gonna
Speaker 1: find the person who put the gun in his hand.
Speaker 1: So two and a half weeks later, the video comes
Speaker 1: out and it turns out that not only was Adam
Speaker 1: Toledo not armed, the cops shot him while he was
Speaker 1: while his hands were up while complying with their instructions.
Speaker 1: I think I've seen this, buddy cam. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: fucking awful. And then like two year two days later,
Speaker 1: they killed another guy and like there were there was,
Speaker 1: there was, there was there was another round of like
Speaker 1: huge protests, I mean, and they weren't as big as
Speaker 1: twenty twenty ones, but like there was another round of
Speaker 1: like really big protests in this and Lightfoot was, you know,
Speaker 1: like actively involved in a conspiracy to lie about this
Speaker 1: fucking thirteen year old kid who was killed in cold blood.
Speaker 1: And so this pisses off like this. This this like
Speaker 1: basically means that her her support among like the Latino
Speaker 1: population drops to basically zero because she fucking accused a
Speaker 1: thirteen year old kid of being a gang, an armed
Speaker 1: gang member, and then he got fucking after he got
Speaker 1: shopped by the cops. So well, the other fun thing
Speaker 1: about this is so our our like prosecutor Kim Fox
Speaker 1: is like there's like this whole thing about how she's
Speaker 1: like a progressive prosecutor and like the rights trying to
Speaker 1: unseat her. None of the fucking officers involved in this
Speaker 1: or the other shooting two days later were ever charged
Speaker 1: with anything after they again it shot like killed in
Speaker 1: cold blood a thirteen year old kid with his hands up. Now,
Speaker 1: the sort of regular Chicago right hates her because she's
Speaker 1: both black and a lesbian, and there's some like well
Speaker 1: we'll talk about this a bit when we gets a Vallis,
Speaker 1: but there's just genuinely unhinged, horrifying sort of like racism
Speaker 1: and like homophobia, and like she's getting basically like splash
Speaker 1: damage transphobia from it because of how racist these people are.
Speaker 1: And so but that means that like you know, she
Speaker 1: has like no support, right, she she managed to get
Speaker 1: she like she she manages to get into a fight
Speaker 1: with Chicago is like normally pretty conservative like Black Caucus,
Speaker 1: and the Black Hawcus gets so pissed at her, but
Speaker 1: they forced through a police reform bill that has just
Speaker 1: like oversych committees, just like Rain and so you know,
Speaker 1: there like on on Forbruary twenty eighth, there's an election
Speaker 1: and all of the sort of like everyone in the
Speaker 1: city of Chicago is like she's fucked. Like she's a
Speaker 1: unique she's like a uniquely unpopular candidate. Everyone fucking hates her.
Speaker 1: She has systematically pissed off every single possible voting block
Speaker 1: in the entire city of Chicago. And she loses, and
Speaker 1: you know, there's this whole sort of media junket that
Speaker 1: happens her. Everyone's like, this is like a referendum on
Speaker 1: crime in Chicago, and it's like, no, no, it's not
Speaker 1: like everyone just hates Lightfoot because she sucks, and she
Speaker 1: sucks in like a unique combination of ways that pisses
Speaker 1: off everyone who can possibly vote in the city. And
Speaker 1: so she gets sixteen percent of the vote, which I
Speaker 1: think sixteen percent of the vote is like the actual
Speaker 1: sort of like top limit cap of the number of
Speaker 1: people in Chicago who Jenny winely like her, Like, I
Speaker 1: think it's exactly fifteen sixty percent of the city and
Speaker 1: there's fucking no one else. So she comes in third.
Speaker 1: It's also very funny she spends the entire like a
Speaker 1: bunch of her money running campaign ads, like against the
Speaker 1: guy who comes in fourth instead of the other two. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so the man who came in second, who is
Speaker 1: on the By the time this episode comes out, the
Speaker 1: election will be fucking tomorrow. Um. The person who came
Speaker 1: in second in that vote is Brandon Johnson, who's the
Speaker 1: progressive candidate. He's backed by like the teachers Union. He's
Speaker 1: like fine, he is like as good as you're going
Speaker 1: to get for a mayor. Oh though I will remind
Speaker 1: people that like Johnson is say much better candidate the
Speaker 1: other fucking guy we're gonna talk about, But we need
Speaker 1: to talk about a little bit about the limits of
Speaker 1: electoral politics, and like, you know, I'm I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: point out here if that like Nepal, for example, routinely
Speaker 1: elects Maoist governments and like do you know, how do
Speaker 1: you know how much Maaoism those guys do? Like fucking nun,
Speaker 1: there was no Maoism happening, right. There were some cool
Speaker 1: socialist mayors in Spain who led the population of the
Speaker 1: city to expropriate the landowners around the city in the
Speaker 1: nineteen thirties. Yeah, that was the nineteen thirties, is twenty
Speaker 1: those are old. Most people's fucking grandchildren are like maybe
Speaker 1: around but yeah, like you're you're not gonna get, you know, like,
Speaker 1: we're not going to get a socialist city off of this.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, the person who comes in first,
Speaker 1: who Brandon Johnson will be facing tomorrow when you listen
Speaker 1: to this, is a demon in human form. He is
Speaker 1: near your liberal lives as a bag man. He is
Speaker 1: the fucking reactionary Republican dog of the Chicago political machine.
Speaker 1: And that manon's name is Paul Vallis. And as as
Speaker 1: as Vallis would fucking want, we are going to talk
Speaker 1: about him after we go to ADS. All right, we're
Speaker 1: back from ADS. We're going to talk about Paul Vallis.
Speaker 1: Just the worst guy. Okay, So Paul Vallis sucks ass um.
Speaker 1: The thing he's most famous for sucking ass for is
Speaker 1: for being the school privatization guy. So we're gonna start
Speaker 1: with him. The beginning of his sort of political career
Speaker 1: is in two In nineteen ninety five, he gets appointed
Speaker 1: as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and he holds
Speaker 1: that position from nineteen ninety five to two thousand and one. Now, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's a few things that he like, really likes.
Speaker 1: One is insulating schools entirely insulating any mechanism and any
Speaker 1: sort of like part of how a school works from
Speaker 1: any kind of community democratic control. Chicago used to have
Speaker 1: these sort of like democratic councils that could like do
Speaker 1: stuff within the school and vows is like, fuck that
Speaker 1: we're getting rid of all that shit, like absolutely not.
Speaker 1: The other thing he loves is charter schools, So we
Speaker 1: should explain what a charter school is. Yeah, so okay,
Speaker 1: The way a charter school works is that instead of
Speaker 1: like the state or like the city or a town
Speaker 1: or like a local government running a school, which is
Speaker 1: the way that schools normally work, you instead give out
Speaker 1: a charter to either like technically an NGO or just
Speaker 1: a for profit company, and then that company takes a
Speaker 1: bunch of tax money, like takes a tax money that
Speaker 1: would have gone to a public school, and then uses
Speaker 1: it to run their own fucking school. So bait like
Speaker 1: it is. It is privatization that they've relabeled like charter
Speaker 1: quote unquote because if they actually called it privatization to schools,
Speaker 1: people would fucking hate it. And Vallis loves this ship.
Speaker 1: This is this is what he spends most of his
Speaker 1: time across like on multiple continents doing schools bullshit like
Speaker 1: attempting to push for um the other specific thing that
Speaker 1: he really likes this and this, this is like this
Speaker 1: is sort of the Paul Vallis signature. Like classic thing
Speaker 1: is military academies. They used to like basically not be
Speaker 1: military academies in Chicago, and Vallis is like, We're gonna
Speaker 1: open so many fucking military academies and these are these
Speaker 1: are like regular and the things okay, like there are
Speaker 1: sort of like disciplinary quote unquote military academies, which is
Speaker 1: like you get sent there instead of prison. These are
Speaker 1: like just like normal schools that are like quote unquote
Speaker 1: military academies. But these schools like they're they're barely schools.
Speaker 1: Like like there there there. There are a lot of
Speaker 1: people who went to these schools who in multiple cities
Speaker 1: and multiple get into more of this sort of later
Speaker 1: when we get to Philly, but like people will go
Speaker 1: to these schools and like their textbooks have pages torn
Speaker 1: out of them and like whith you know, here's the thing,
Speaker 1: right you would think this is like like a kind
Speaker 1: of like Republican style, like uh, we're taking out the
Speaker 1: pages to talk about like Columbus being bad, Like no
Speaker 1: no, no no, no, just random fucking like just pages torn
Speaker 1: out of it because they these schools don't be fucking money,
Speaker 1: like they don't have actual curriculars like they just they
Speaker 1: just like don't have sports. They just don't have like
Speaker 1: anything to fucking do. Um. And then this is another
Speaker 1: thing with charter schools. So all right, if you want
Speaker 1: to like be a regular teacher, you have to have
Speaker 1: like teaching teaching certificates if you work at a charter school. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I think that the standards depend on the state
Speaker 1: some of them. I think Illinois is like two thirds
Speaker 1: of the teachers have to have teaching certificates. But that
Speaker 1: means that a lot of kids are being taught by
Speaker 1: teachers with no teaching certificates, which is like, you know
Speaker 1: that teaching and it turns out is not in fact
Speaker 1: easy enough that you could just put a random person
Speaker 1: there who doesn't know how to do it, and you know,
Speaker 1: like have kids be taught correctly. These mil academies, these
Speaker 1: milter academies, they have teachers who just like don't fucking
Speaker 1: teach right, like they're they're they're just complete shit show.
Speaker 1: But he opens a bunch of these am but okay,
Speaker 1: and the other big thing the vallas Is supposed and
Speaker 1: this is the thing all all the people who like
Speaker 1: Fallos would do this thing where they're like he's like
Speaker 1: a budget wizard and he's like the guy, he's like
Speaker 1: the technocrat, like smart policy, want guy who you bring
Speaker 1: in to like like bail out of school district that's
Speaker 1: underwater financially and oh boy, oh boy, is that not true?
Speaker 1: He okay, So there there, there's there's a very good
Speaker 1: report called Passing the Buck, which is written by the
Speaker 1: Action Center on Race in the Economy or ACRE, which
Speaker 1: I recommend people look genuinely, people should go read this.
Speaker 1: It's like twelve pages long. It's very short, and like,
Speaker 1: h like it's not even twelve like three of those
Speaker 1: pages dissertations um. And they wrote a report on Vallis's
Speaker 1: time in various school districts. And here's some of the
Speaker 1: ship that he did to make it look like he
Speaker 1: had his balanced, his budget balanced. So all right, let's
Speaker 1: let's talk about his pension scheme. I feel like I
Speaker 1: actually should have plain how pensions work, because like nobody
Speaker 1: fucking has them anymore. So a pension is a thing
Speaker 1: where like you the worker or in this case, the
Speaker 1: Chicago teachers, you take some of your current pay and
Speaker 1: instead of taking the money, now it gets taken out
Speaker 1: of your paycheck and put towards a pension fund to
Speaker 1: fund your retirement. And then this fund is invested in
Speaker 1: the stock market to get returns to pay out pensions
Speaker 1: that like support you when you retire. Right. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety nine, Vallis was like, oh, hey, the
Speaker 1: Chicago pension system is funded, so we're gonna take the
Speaker 1: teacher's money and use it to pay other budget shortfalls. Great,
Speaker 1: so this is good. Anyways, after he does this for
Speaker 1: for thirteen consecutive years, Chicago stops paying into its pension
Speaker 1: system altogether, and the result of this is a nine
Speaker 1: point six billion dollar hole in the pension system that
Speaker 1: Chicago has to like pay off. And this is a
Speaker 1: huge part of like where are the sort of modern
Speaker 1: like budget deficits in Chicago come from, like things that
Speaker 1: are used to like justify show schools down. Is that
Speaker 1: like they just didn't pay into this, They just stop
Speaker 1: paying into the pensions and instead took the money that
Speaker 1: they're supposed to go to teachers and use it to
Speaker 1: like make their budgets look clean. So if if he
Speaker 1: had just done this, it would have been bad enough.
Speaker 1: But but Vallas is like is a very very specific
Speaker 1: kind of like neoliberal technocrat dip shit, And that kind
Speaker 1: of neoliberal technicrat dip shit is the the extremely interested
Speaker 1: in financial instruments guy who was like a kind of
Speaker 1: person that I think I think we see less of
Speaker 1: these days because the most not the modern version of
Speaker 1: this or like crypto people. Right, but back in like
Speaker 1: the nineties and two thousands, there were a bunch of
Speaker 1: guys whose things were like really really conflabu of financial
Speaker 1: instruments and everyone thought they were fucking geniuses. Um now,
Speaker 1: now if if you if you were alive in two
Speaker 1: thousand and eight, you know where this is going. But
Speaker 1: vallis the second thing he does to sort of like
Speaker 1: like quote unquote balance his budget sheet is he takes
Speaker 1: out the government que a payday loan. So here's here's
Speaker 1: a passing the buck quote. Vallas literally borrowed against Chicago
Speaker 1: school children's futures when he took out a six hundred
Speaker 1: and sixty six million dollars in capital appreciation bonds. Also,
Speaker 1: when I said he was like like a demon sid
Speaker 1: sixty six million dollars with the Satanic Yeah, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: doing the Satanic panic, but for this guy who fucking sucks,
Speaker 1: So yeah, he took out the loans and capital appreciation
Speaker 1: bonds a form of debt in which the borrower pays
Speaker 1: nothing for several years, but then has to pay very
Speaker 1: large sums to make up for skipped payments. A capital
Speaker 1: appreciation bond c a B is a long term bond
Speaker 1: with compounding interest, on which the borrower is not permitted
Speaker 1: to make any principal or interest payments for many years,
Speaker 1: but the interest will. Yeah, crazy, but you're allow Why
Speaker 1: would we Why would you take that? Why would you?
Speaker 1: Why would you do? That's like a really bad decision.
Speaker 1: Oh it's a terrible it's a terrible decision. I'm not
Speaker 1: a big money guy. But the Valis's assumption was that, like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we don't have any money now, but property values will
Speaker 1: continue to go up, and it just keep going up forever,
Speaker 1: so we can pay this bond back when we have
Speaker 1: money from higher from property taxes. And yeah, so okay,
Speaker 1: I really if I'm gonna finish this thing on these
Speaker 1: these just dogshit bonds. In this way, it is similar
Speaker 1: to a negative amortization mortgage, in which the outstanding principle
Speaker 1: actually grows over time because the unpaid interest gets tacked
Speaker 1: onto the amount owed and compounds. Yeah, very Amusingly, California
Speaker 1: was doing something similar to this with with restitution payments recently,
Speaker 1: or some some place in California were, at least in
Speaker 1: one case that I looked into for a story I wrote,
Speaker 1: it was it was ruled illegal under the Eighth Amendment.
Speaker 1: Oh my god, a cruel and unusual interest payments. It's
Speaker 1: good to see the Chicago is doing it. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: actually a funny story about this that, like one of
Speaker 1: the size stories of this is that the guy who's
Speaker 1: running the school system in California like gets this same
Speaker 1: offer from like bond salesman people, and he's like, know,
Speaker 1: what the fuck, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen.
Speaker 1: Vallas does this. Vallas is going to do this in
Speaker 1: multiple cities. So I'm gonna finish reading this thing. Because
Speaker 1: of this structure, borrowers often end up paying extraordinarily high
Speaker 1: interest rates over the lifetime of the bonds. Former California
Speaker 1: State Treasurer Bill Lockney called CIABS the school district equivalent
Speaker 1: of a pan a loan. So the result of this
Speaker 1: is that out of the six hundred and sixty six
Speaker 1: point two million dollars right that Valas takes out, they
Speaker 1: pay one point five billion dollars in interest. The interest
Speaker 1: rate over the lifetime of this bond is two hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty three percent. Good. This is the guy who's
Speaker 1: supposed to be like the really smart type, the crack
Speaker 1: reformer guy who understands financial stuff, who you bring into
Speaker 1: like solve school districts, and he took out a load
Speaker 1: two hundred and twenty three percent fucking interest. This is
Speaker 1: this is the kind of interest rate. Then, the words
Speaker 1: of David Graeber were once reserved for organized crime, and
Speaker 1: now is you know, normally normally this kind of loan
Speaker 1: is like a thing. It's like, this is like a
Speaker 1: very predatory sort of like yeah, it's like a predatory
Speaker 1: banking thing. Valis think this to himself on purpose because
Speaker 1: he's dumb, and I mean, also like he's trying to
Speaker 1: I mean and part of part of the other sort
Speaker 1: of undercurrent of this, it's not just that he's really stupid,
Speaker 1: it's that he's trying to pay off his buddies in
Speaker 1: the in the finance sector. Yeah, and then you know,
Speaker 1: there is the other part of the story. Right, It's
Speaker 1: like all of these all these school districts just get
Speaker 1: fucking looted to pay off these like fucking stupid ass
Speaker 1: hedge funds, and then he just bounces somewhere else and
Speaker 1: leaves him people with it. Yeah. And you know, so
Speaker 1: I talked a bit earlier about how like Valis's assumption
Speaker 1: on these bonds was like, well, be fine, because well,
Speaker 1: the housing markets will keep going up forever. But then
Speaker 1: two happens, and this has a bunch of effects. One
Speaker 1: of the big ones is that Vallas was taking out
Speaker 1: bonds with variable interest rates. Oh now, okay, we have
Speaker 1: talked about this on this show before. Right, there are
Speaker 1: entire country they are like entire like like multi national
Speaker 1: political movements that don't exist. There are entire countries who
Speaker 1: fucking don't have manufacturing checkers anymore. Like there are there
Speaker 1: are places with a life expectancy felled by twenty years
Speaker 1: because they're they're they're fucking leaders took out these kind
Speaker 1: of of like variable interest rate loans and got de
Speaker 1: strobe in the interest rate spikes and guess what happened
Speaker 1: in Chicago interest rate spikes. And okay, so Vallas's successors
Speaker 1: look at this and are like, this is the stupidest
Speaker 1: fucking you know well, but okay, Valles' success by the way,
Speaker 1: is Artie Duncan, who's the guy that Obama puts in
Speaker 1: charge of of the Department of Education. And Artie Duncan
Speaker 1: is like, okay, do you know how we're going to
Speaker 1: solve the problem of these the the the risk from
Speaker 1: these adjestable rate interest rates. Credit default swabs? Oh god,
Speaker 1: all right, I'm not going to explain how a credit
Speaker 1: default swap works because it's fucking annoying as hell. But
Speaker 1: credit default swaps are one of the things, like one
Speaker 1: of the very specific financial instruments that are that are
Speaker 1: like specifically responsible for the two thousand and eight collapsed Yes,
Speaker 1: and now these technically aren't credit default swaps, right, These
Speaker 1: These are technically what are called interest default swap or
Speaker 1: like interest swaps, and they're but they're exactly the same
Speaker 1: thing as a credit as a credit default swap, but
Speaker 1: instead of credit, it's interest. So the underlying asset right
Speaker 1: is like as a bond and not like a loan
Speaker 1: or whatever. But otherwise it's exactly the same thing. And
Speaker 1: this this man, you know, and these these swaps have
Speaker 1: this thing where like if you can't pay, you get
Speaker 1: these like unbelievably high like fees that start happening. So
Speaker 1: when when these bonds blow up, they managed to cost
Speaker 1: they managed to cost Chicago another thirty one million dollars
Speaker 1: because they're credit default swaps just blew up. So all right,
Speaker 1: so this has a two thousand too, And she tells
Speaker 1: the two He ran for governor or against Rob fucking Blogoyevich,
Speaker 1: who is Rob who is Rob a Bligoyevich. He just
Speaker 1: did the first syllable and then let your let to
Speaker 1: take the rest. And Valis sucks so much that Rob
Speaker 1: Blugoyevich is able to outflank him on the left bye
Speaker 1: bye bye, running against him saying, hey, look at all
Speaker 1: these schools he privatized. And so he gets claw bared
Speaker 1: in the primaries by Rob fucking Bloyevich, the man who okay,
Speaker 1: so this is what we will cover this one day
Speaker 1: at fully on the show because it's really funny. But
Speaker 1: Rob Lgoievic is the man most famous for getting arrested
Speaker 1: for trying to sell Obama Senate seat like he tried
Speaker 1: to sell a Senate Oh he's Oh, he's amazing. He's
Speaker 1: now just on Tucker talking about political persecution. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: yeah's extremely funny. Yeah he was on yesterday, wasn't he? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, first Trump should Yeah, how he was persecuted first,
Speaker 1: and how Trump is being persecuted too. It's great, really,
Speaker 1: really the canary in the coal mine off, Hey, griffting politicians, look, Garrison,
Speaker 1: look if they if they can go after Rob Lgio
Speaker 1: trying to sell Obama Senate seat, they could go after
Speaker 1: you for trying to sell Barack Obama Senate seat. That's true.
Speaker 1: You know who else is trying to sell Barack Obama
Speaker 1: Senate seat? Products and services that support this very podcast. No,
Speaker 1: they're really not allowed to do that. None of them
Speaker 1: would ever commit a crime I under any circumstances. I
Speaker 1: still think I think a fair number of these corporations
Speaker 1: probably engage in some some sort of political Yeah, that's true,
Speaker 1: but I don't they're trying to buy him a Senate seat, Garrison.
Speaker 1: That's totally different, different, not the same, not the same,
Speaker 1: totally fine. Thanks Ronald Reagan, all right, we're back, and
Speaker 1: we're now, We're we're now, we're now sending Vallis to
Speaker 1: our I don't I don't actually know if Chicago and
Speaker 1: Philadelphia or sister or cities, but like I think they
Speaker 1: should be. I don't know. I am. I am very
Speaker 1: in favor of the Chicago Philadelphia alliance. Same vibe. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so she they both stood in for Gotham City and
Speaker 1: the Christopher Nolan trilogy. So we're doing a Bagman reference again.
Speaker 1: There's there's a whole There are like so many different
Speaker 1: specific there. David Grabber rights about this, like there there
Speaker 1: are so many different like parts of places where they filmed,
Speaker 1: like the Dark Night where people tried to protest and
Speaker 1: got arrested for blocking the road. Like this happened in
Speaker 1: multiple cities. Yeah. No, one wants the city to turn
Speaker 1: into la So you have to stand up against that
Speaker 1: shit immediately. You do not let it happen in your hood.
Speaker 1: Yeah it could, it could happen here. Okay. So after
Speaker 1: Vallas gets clabbered in in in the mayoral race, he
Speaker 1: gets brought in by Philadelphia to try to like fix
Speaker 1: their school system, and he uh me, his plan to
Speaker 1: do this is by doing a bunch of military academies
Speaker 1: again and then doing also doing charter schools, and so
Speaker 1: I should I should explain like his other sort of
Speaker 1: so the big sort of rationale thing behind charter schools,
Speaker 1: this school choice, which is this thing that was specifically
Speaker 1: invented as a way to let Race his parents avoid integration. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is like goes along with sobody mentioned the homeschool
Speaker 1: and when we've talked about this in other episodes. But
Speaker 1: he's like a huge like Valist to this day is
Speaker 1: a giant like school choice guy. Um, and you know,
Speaker 1: but the other thing, the other thing about Valist, I
Speaker 1: don't think people realize that much he even though he's
Speaker 1: a Republican a lot of the time, like he kind
Speaker 1: of flips back and forth being a Democrat being a Republican.
Speaker 1: But he's he's like after he loses to Rob or
Speaker 1: even even sort of before, like he is anual sort
Speaker 1: of Chicago machine guy. And because he's a Chicago machine guy,
Speaker 1: when he gets into Philly, the stuff that he starts doing,
Speaker 1: the stuff where he like he'll just like like he
Speaker 1: takes over the school district and like fires munch people
Speaker 1: and like installs his cronies and all these departments and
Speaker 1: all these people are getting like he's like buying off
Speaker 1: people with budget allocations, and he starts selling off buildings
Speaker 1: to raise money. So he sells off like the district
Speaker 1: headquarters in order to buy like a more expensive district headquarters.
Speaker 1: And here's a quote from the book Not Paid for Us,
Speaker 1: which is a really really great book about sort of
Speaker 1: the history of racism in education in Philadelphia. And this
Speaker 1: is a quote from a long time activist le Roy Simmons.
Speaker 1: Before I start reading this, the district headquarters was called
Speaker 1: twenty first and Parkway. There was doors in twenty first
Speaker 1: and Parkway worth one million dollars, then big brass doors
Speaker 1: in the fronts. Those doors were worth one million dollars
Speaker 1: with all the carving on them. People don't know how
Speaker 1: much they got for it. To this day, I can't
Speaker 1: get an answer about how much did you sell that
Speaker 1: building for? Where the money went? The school district sold
Speaker 1: twenty first and Parkway in a package with Kennedy Center.
Speaker 1: There were brand new trucks parked at Kennedy Center. They
Speaker 1: had forgot were there. There was a printing press in
Speaker 1: the Kennedy Center that could print all new magazines and
Speaker 1: they never used. There were books and calculators and every
Speaker 1: time it went through there there were boxes of unused
Speaker 1: stuff in the Kennedy Center and nobody knew. And they
Speaker 1: sold that in the contents and the package with twenty
Speaker 1: first of Parkway, and nobody knew how much that was.
Speaker 1: There was some art that was priceless on the walls
Speaker 1: at twenty first of Parkway. No one can find the art.
Speaker 1: They were priceless pieces of art hanging in schools across
Speaker 1: the city and all that was sold in a package
Speaker 1: and nobody saw it where it went. Yeah, so this
Speaker 1: is this is again, this is like this is classic
Speaker 1: Chicago corruption shit, right, Like we're not gonna say how
Speaker 1: much we sold this building for. We're not gonna say
Speaker 1: who who we sold it too, Like we're gonna build
Speaker 1: a more expensive building. And you know, if you look
Speaker 1: at you look into who the contractors are as like
Speaker 1: always someone's uncle or like brother or some shit. Um,
Speaker 1: there's just you know, like there's printing presses that are gone,
Speaker 1: like priceless works of art just vanished. It's like this
Speaker 1: is this is like you know, it's sort of incredible
Speaker 1: sort of Chicago political machine stuff. Um, and this gets
Speaker 1: into what I think about I think the Chicago political
Speaker 1: machine that is really interesting, which is that these people
Speaker 1: are like, on the one hand, they're unbelievably corrupt. On
Speaker 1: the other hand, a lot of them are sort of
Speaker 1: real like hardline like doctrinaire neoliberals. This is I mean,
Speaker 1: this is sort of the thing with Arnie Duncan, right, Like,
Speaker 1: like Obama actually comes out of this machine too, when
Speaker 1: he's a lot more sort of like doctrinaire about this
Speaker 1: stuff than the sort of modern people are. And you know,
Speaker 1: and Vallis is like one of the sort of like
Speaker 1: big guys here, and you know, so he's really really
Speaker 1: in favor of charter schools and so they get enormous
Speaker 1: amounts of money. Um, he also does this thing he yeah,
Speaker 1: this is also from Not Paid for Us. He funnels
Speaker 1: money into just like a shit ton of nhos in
Speaker 1: order to like do education programming or whatever. And so
Speaker 1: there's a sort of constellation that forms of these like
Speaker 1: you have you these corporations doing like education stuff or
Speaker 1: like running schools, and you have these like nonprofits running
Speaker 1: like the like the education material. And it's it's this
Speaker 1: sort of like this this is sort of arch neoliberal
Speaker 1: thing where instead of the state administering a service, what
Speaker 1: you have is this like based basically a bunch of
Speaker 1: like contracting grifters who come in and suck up all
Speaker 1: of the money and then provide absolutely dogshit services. Now
Speaker 1: I'm going to read another quote from this book, because
Speaker 1: the people they are paying these contracts who are fucking
Speaker 1: wild on the The SRC is like one of the
Speaker 1: bodies that's in charge of, like one of the state
Speaker 1: bodies as in charge of, like the Philadelphia School District.
Speaker 1: One of the SRC's most problematic contracts was with K
Speaker 1: twelve Inc. For three million dollars to quote provide academic
Speaker 1: and curriculum support access to K twelves online curriculum and assessments,
Speaker 1: academic and richment via summer and extended day programs, professional development,
Speaker 1: teacher planning and training materials, and community involvement activities. Conservative
Speaker 1: radio talk show host William Bennett was the founder of
Speaker 1: K twelve, Inc. He had been an advisor to former
Speaker 1: presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush Durin a
Speaker 1: show in two thousand and five, he said the following,
Speaker 1: and this is a direct quote. If you want to
Speaker 1: reduce crime. You could, if that was your sole purpose,
Speaker 1: you could abort every black baby in this country and
Speaker 1: your crime rate would go down. That would be an
Speaker 1: impossibly ridiculous and wray reprehensible thing to do, but your
Speaker 1: crime weight would go down. So they peeled this guy
Speaker 1: three million fucking dollars to both of VAL's pro choice credentials.
Speaker 1: This is this is the most pro choice thing I've
Speaker 1: ever seen from him, is the genocide guy. Because guy, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: well you see, they all have a have a weakness.
Speaker 1: That is, has anyone looked to the curriculum that they're providing.
Speaker 1: I'm serious the thing, it's unclear to me that they ever,
Speaker 1: like actually really provided much of anything. It does sound
Speaker 1: like a like if you were going to make up
Speaker 1: a company to grift at the education system, K twelve Inc.
Speaker 1: Would be a great name. Yeah, And then that's that's
Speaker 1: the thing about like all these charter schools too, right.
Speaker 1: It's like, like, okay, so like there are some for
Speaker 1: profit corporations you do charter school stuff, and they stick
Speaker 1: in the charter school business because they decide that's how
Speaker 1: they want to make their money. A lot of these
Speaker 1: things come in take a state contract the school immediately
Speaker 1: implodes and then leave and then they just walk out
Speaker 1: with self a million dollars and this is like this
Speaker 1: is a recurring pattern over and over again with charter schools. UM.
Speaker 1: He also brings in Teach for America, who is this
Speaker 1: like just genuinely evil organization that tries to break teachers
Speaker 1: unions by recruiting these like incredibly idealistic and naive young
Speaker 1: college grads and like throwing them into like into failing
Speaker 1: schools as this thing to like, ah, you're gonna like
Speaker 1: go serve the community and like you know, you're you'll
Speaker 1: learn the job and you'll you'll become an educator and
Speaker 1: you're like helping these disadvantaged kids and it's a disaster.
Speaker 1: These these these people, the people who do this have
Speaker 1: no fucking idea how to teach because they know theyn't
Speaker 1: have teachers, gets right, They're just like college grads, and
Speaker 1: at any any of you who have been around college grads,
Speaker 1: like you think those people are responsible enough to fucking
Speaker 1: teach kids, Like Jesus Christ, Yeah, I meant of that
Speaker 1: was like a big thing. Like I don't know if
Speaker 1: it still happens or not. I can remember, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: reference letters for students like ten fifteen years ago for that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like I I mean, I know I had to like
Speaker 1: talk out classmates of mine like out of doing it
Speaker 1: because we were like you are doing you are doing
Speaker 1: union busting and also this will destroy your life and
Speaker 1: the life of the children you have to teach. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a very strange system that, yeah, takes someone who
Speaker 1: by virtue of having any degree is it's automatically an educator.
Speaker 1: But to be fair, that is how universities work as well. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get get your master's degree and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: fuck it, get in there. They'll just give you grad
Speaker 1: students with no degrees, right, Like that's that's the thing too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but yeah, yeah, and you know to to to to
Speaker 1: get up together into those syds of like the other
Speaker 1: thing that's happening here is is he has this really valas,
Speaker 1: has this really really racist kind of like we need
Speaker 1: to like enforce discipline in schools thing, and so they
Speaker 1: have all these and this happened to Chicago too. They
Speaker 1: have these like zero tolerance policies that have done i
Speaker 1: mean irreparable damage to like tons of thousands of kids.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna read I'm going to read a thing from
Speaker 1: tribe about Philadelphia. Quote. Test results were posted on data
Speaker 1: walls in the school buildings to show which classes were
Speaker 1: making the most progress. WHOA, it was humiliating, said Grill
Speaker 1: was a teacher. A lot of our kids were left behind,
Speaker 1: were behind, and a lot of a lot of our
Speaker 1: kids suffered trauma, and trauma affects the way you learn.
Speaker 1: So they were behind, they weren't on grade level, and
Speaker 1: it made them feel like failures. I hated giving those tests. Wow. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: people like to be wrong about Georgia. Well, but that
Speaker 1: that's some more wedding and ship threat that like and
Speaker 1: like these are like fucking yeah, like these are like
Speaker 1: these are literally children like you were. You were publicly
Speaker 1: shaming people who are like twelve. It's just it's just horrible.
Speaker 1: Yeah that, Like we've known for a very long time
Speaker 1: that that doesn't work when you're educating kids. Like I
Speaker 1: have done Pettigougi training and get it. No one with
Speaker 1: any intent to actually help kids is shaming kids in
Speaker 1: the classroom, or young people or anyone of any age
Speaker 1: for that matter. I just checked out what K twelve
Speaker 1: Inca doing. It's great. They're now offering online high school.
Speaker 1: Oh great, yeah, yeah, you can go to a faith
Speaker 1: prep academy, developed Christian character find Yeah, yeah, this is great.
Speaker 1: This is this is what I this is what I
Speaker 1: youth need. Yeah it sucks so Um. The other thing again,
Speaker 1: we keep strinkling around this because this happens a bunch
Speaker 1: of times. Like again, vals, this whole thing is supposed
Speaker 1: to be about, like about balancing budgets. Right in two
Speaker 1: thousand and seven, by the time he's like like at
Speaker 1: the near the end of his like time in Philly,
Speaker 1: he's fucked everything up so badly that that for in
Speaker 1: like just one year of the budget, Philly schools were
Speaker 1: seventy three million dollars in the whole. Now, the thing
Speaker 1: about this is this is where most stories about Valis's
Speaker 1: time in Philadelphia end. But wait, there's fucking more so
Speaker 1: that that seventy three million dollars short fall was. It
Speaker 1: was the one year short fall. Right remember back in
Speaker 1: Chicago where Valas is like variable interest rate bonds like
Speaker 1: blew up in the school's faces. Um, this time, Vallas
Speaker 1: is the guy directly who did the credit the fault
Speaker 1: swaps and uh, these these the interest rates on these
Speaker 1: things are locked in literally for decades and just like
Speaker 1: like some of these aren't expiring to like twenty thirty one, right,
Speaker 1: and just so far they've cost one hundred and sixty
Speaker 1: one million dollars. Great, yeah, and test test scores fucking
Speaker 1: go down under him. It's a ship show. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: so twousand and seven they kick him out because they're like,
Speaker 1: what the fuck are you doing? Like Unfortunately the place
Speaker 1: they kick him out too is is and you're you're
Speaker 1: not gonna like this post Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. So
Speaker 1: for fuck's sake? Yeah, yeah, why why do we have
Speaker 1: to inflict like the fail suns of neoliberalism and the
Speaker 1: people of New Orleans that's gonna get worse by the way, Okay, great, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: so this is really bad, right New Orleans? Now? Okay,
Speaker 1: so I think there's there's some kind of controversy about
Speaker 1: how exactly you calculate this. At the very least sixty
Speaker 1: three out of the sixty six like New Orleans, like big,
Speaker 1: like sorry, let me let me rest at the very
Speaker 1: least sixty three out of the sixty six, like schools
Speaker 1: that they run, like at the very least like that
Speaker 1: that are directly run by the state. Our charter schools. Um,
Speaker 1: there's three more that are also charter schools but are
Speaker 1: kind of administrated by the district. So there is a
Speaker 1: huge debate as to whether there are technically any public
Speaker 1: schools left in in fucking New Orleans. Jesus. Yeah, they
Speaker 1: fired like and this this was this was before Valis
Speaker 1: came into office. But in New Orleans they fired the
Speaker 1: entire every teacher in the fucking city. They fired all
Speaker 1: the unions, literally, all the union teachers were replaced them
Speaker 1: with non union people. M Vallis comes in and starts
Speaker 1: implementing some shit that is just like I like prison
Speaker 1: camp shit. Oh god, here's from here's from tribe again.
Speaker 1: According to Biguard, a lot of kids were arrested for
Speaker 1: quote disruption of a school process if they showed up
Speaker 1: late to class and refused to be kicked out for tardiness.
Speaker 1: And again they are being arrested for refuge for wanting
Speaker 1: to stay in school. Yeah, black kids, black girls were
Speaker 1: arrested for having quote rat tail combs, which have long,
Speaker 1: sharp handles from grating hair. Yeah. In one instance, Gard
Speaker 1: said a six year old student was expelled and charged
Speaker 1: with possession and distribution of a controlled substance because he
Speaker 1: brought toms to school and gave them to his classmates
Speaker 1: thinking they were candy. What the fuck they charged a
Speaker 1: six year old? Yeah? God, yeah, the levels of fucking
Speaker 1: cruelty that have to exist, Like a cop has to
Speaker 1: see a six year old and not be like a lull.
Speaker 1: Those are toms, like the kitch by should neat too
Speaker 1: many of those. Let me go, he didn't know they
Speaker 1: were kiddy because he's six Jesus Christ. Yeah, just like
Speaker 1: just just jetty widely like abhorrently evil shit. Yeah. See
Speaker 1: this is like maybe now is a good time to
Speaker 1: point out that, like U, in the wake of yet
Speaker 1: another terrible school shooting, people will want to put more
Speaker 1: cops in schools. This is what happens when we put
Speaker 1: cops in schools, right, They brutalize our fucking children. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and like it's not yeah, like the state doing vince
Speaker 1: the children is not on the way or protect children. Yeah.
Speaker 1: What I want to say, the more your school represents
Speaker 1: the levels of law enforcement that are in a prison camp,
Speaker 1: the more the actual experience of the children will become
Speaker 1: like prison camps. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, but also just
Speaker 1: literally I mean, that's God. I love to go to
Speaker 1: the Panoptic on high school. Garrison, what are you talking about.
Speaker 1: It's just the panoptic on high school where if you don't,
Speaker 1: if you don't get kicked out of your fucking class
Speaker 1: for being late, they arrest you the coalent again. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just so speaking speaking of disciplining and punishing. So these
Speaker 1: charter schools, they do think that charter schools always do right,
Speaker 1: which is sometimes if you know, if if you look
Speaker 1: at people who talk about educational reform, they'll be like,
Speaker 1: charter schools have like really great like test numbers, and
Speaker 1: a that's just like not true, right, that they're only
Speaker 1: looking at the really good charter schools. But you know,
Speaker 1: here's the thing. If you give a public school the
Speaker 1: amount of money that a really good charter school has,
Speaker 1: it will also be a really good school. But but
Speaker 1: there's the second thing that charter schools can do that
Speaker 1: other schools can't, which is that charter schools could just
Speaker 1: fucking kick students out. And this is one of the
Speaker 1: ways that they maintain their test numbers is they just
Speaker 1: kick out kids over whatever. Yet you don't do who
Speaker 1: aren't initially doing well on tests. So they don't have
Speaker 1: to teach them and like bother to improve their test scores.
Speaker 1: And in New Orleans they get in trouble because the
Speaker 1: kids they were kicking out were kids with disabilities who
Speaker 1: they were illegally yeah, who they were illegally not like
Speaker 1: giving individual education plans too, and also they were these
Speaker 1: everything right, These charter schools are all run by different
Speaker 1: private corporations, and so there's no system of tracking whether
Speaker 1: when a kid gets kicked out whether they can actually
Speaker 1: get it go to another school. So they're just leaving
Speaker 1: these disabled kids, like in the fucking win with no
Speaker 1: school to go to. And this was so illegal that
Speaker 1: after a lawsuit, like I think it might still be
Speaker 1: going to this day. It was going like twenty fourteen.
Speaker 1: Like the school the Philadelphia school system was like under
Speaker 1: resizaship by the federal government because they committed so many
Speaker 1: crimes against disabled students. Jesus Christ, that is brutal. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's awful, fucking sorry. Stuff makes you kind of WoT
Speaker 1: an education for a lot of my adult life, and
Speaker 1: this ship makes me furious. Yeah, I just wanted to
Speaker 1: what do you you to guess? Where do you think
Speaker 1: they sent Paul Vallis next after he got kicked out
Speaker 1: of I try trying to run of New Orleans. Did
Speaker 1: they send him to set up a finishing school for
Speaker 1: girls in Kabul? No, but similar similar vibes. Oh, for
Speaker 1: fock's sake, it dude, it's outside the continental US. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's not a rock no Puerto Rito earthquake. It's Haiti
Speaker 1: after the yep yep. So now we've talked about this
Speaker 1: in four on the show. In two thousan ten, there
Speaker 1: was a just unbelievably heartwrenchingly catastrophic earthquake killed two hundred
Speaker 1: and twenty thousand people and also destroyed like almost every
Speaker 1: building in Haiti. And this kicks off phase two of
Speaker 1: the UN occupation of the country. We talked about out
Speaker 1: this in our episodes on Lulu and Bill Snaro. This
Speaker 1: is this is when the UN guys from the Paul
Speaker 1: bring in Cholerado, a bunch of the operation. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So right after this happens, so the US just like
Speaker 1: sends Marines in, right, and no one in Haiti asked
Speaker 1: for it. We just we just fucking invade um and
Speaker 1: they bring in Paul Vallis, like specifically Paul Vallas and
Speaker 1: also Arnie Duncan, who's again Obama's fucking education secretary, gets
Speaker 1: bring in to rebuild the Haitian school system on the
Speaker 1: New Orleans model. Now, okay, weirdly, if they had actually
Speaker 1: implemented New Orleans model, it would have been an improvement,
Speaker 1: because they hate the way the Haitian school system worked
Speaker 1: was it was ninety percent private and the tuition was
Speaker 1: forty percent of someone's annual budget, like like a family's
Speaker 1: annual budget. Yeah, so that's the friends in Haiti who
Speaker 1: couldn't afford to pay for school trying. It's fucking horrible.
Speaker 1: Vallis is supposed to like change this, right, he gets
Speaker 1: brought in, They bring in the Clinton Foundation. Instead, what
Speaker 1: happens is the Clinton Foundation and buys a bunch of
Speaker 1: trailers to use as schools for the from from specifically
Speaker 1: the same people who got in trouble for selling for
Speaker 1: maldehyde ridden trailers to FEMA drink Katrina, and then you know, okay,
Speaker 1: and I never think that I I can't emphasize enough
Speaker 1: the grifted trailer ink or something. Yeah, they fucking suck well.
Speaker 1: But also also even though trailers were good, right, there's
Speaker 1: a real issue with trying to use trailers to teach
Speaker 1: kids in a place that is hot, yeah, which is
Speaker 1: that it is one hundred fucking degrees inside these trailers.
Speaker 1: These trailers are made of metal, so if you touch
Speaker 1: the side of the thing, you get burned. Kids at people,
Speaker 1: people who like teachers who were taught there, routinely talk
Speaker 1: about how every kid, and they're every kid in their
Speaker 1: fucking class was having heat stroke and they were just
Speaker 1: like giving them painkillers for heat stroke because that's all
Speaker 1: they could do. And yeah, it is punishingly hot if
Speaker 1: you haven't works in that part of the world a lot,
Speaker 1: and it is, it's hot enough without banking a tank
Speaker 1: can Yeah, and vowless's fucking education form. They don't fucking work.
Speaker 1: They don't do shit, right, hate education system is still
Speaker 1: fucked despite all the body the Clinton Foundation and the like,
Speaker 1: all these experts got paid, Like, it's still really bad.
Speaker 1: I vallist like specifically, like very specifically defended the use
Speaker 1: of trailers is like a thing you teach people in um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know this stuff. I'll continue used to the
Speaker 1: present day. The US has been trying to find another excuse,
Speaker 1: just trying to find a way to do another intervention.
Speaker 1: In Haiti. So she's still on the New Orleans job.
Speaker 1: I think, while he's doing this Haiti job, and then
Speaker 1: he takes another job in Chile. Yeah, why, I don't know.
Speaker 1: The people people get well, because because the the Interamerican
Speaker 1: Development Bank gives him half a million dollars to run
Speaker 1: two thousand schools there. So again he's now he's now
Speaker 1: splitting his time between New Orleans, Haiti, and Chile. It's
Speaker 1: it's almost impossible to find it. I spent a lot
Speaker 1: of time looking. It's like it's really hard to find
Speaker 1: like anything about what actually he was doing in Chile.
Speaker 1: What we do know was when he got there, he
Speaker 1: was met by the enormous two thousand and eleven Chilean
Speaker 1: student protests, which then later turned into the twenty thirteen
Speaker 1: Chilean student protests, which turned into two thousand and fifteen
Speaker 1: Chilean student protests, which turned into the two thousand and
Speaker 1: nineteen Chilean student protests. So you know, I mean, I
Speaker 1: just I just want to like you. It is possible
Speaker 1: to run Paul Vallis out of your country a couple
Speaker 1: of different places, or at least your school. Jesians were
Speaker 1: also a country a couple of places have done it,
Speaker 1: and then after that they ended up Bridgeport, Connecticut for
Speaker 1: some reason, where he gets run out after doing like
Speaker 1: he gets he flees Connecticut, like trying to escape a
Speaker 1: lawsuit about all the illegal anti union stuff that he did.
Speaker 1: I really love the image of someone trying to desperately
Speaker 1: flee from Connecticut. Yeah, like it's so small. How how
Speaker 1: hard is it to leave Connecticut? It seems pretty easy
Speaker 1: to jump over the line. I mean the one the
Speaker 1: video I actually want to see is him getting out
Speaker 1: of Philly. See see, getting out of Philly sounds actually hard.
Speaker 1: Getting out of this Connecticut is like, come on, come on. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the video I want to seuse him getting sent back
Speaker 1: to Haiti by himself. Oh god. Yeah. So he runs
Speaker 1: again and she wasn't fourteen. So Bigovis gets arrested for
Speaker 1: you know, selling a Senate seat, and he tries to
Speaker 1: run for lieutenant governor on on a slate, on like
Speaker 1: a ticket with Pat Quinn who had been the governor
Speaker 1: because he'd been the lieutenant governor under boys, and they like,
Speaker 1: actually they managed to lose in Illinois to a Republican,
Speaker 1: which is like, I think that should not happen unless
Speaker 1: the Democrats would like really fuck up, which I mean
Speaker 1: it happens, right, but like, yeah, so Democrats can make
Speaker 1: can make electoral mistakes. Are you sure to be fair?
Speaker 1: To be fair? This one wasn't. This wasn't even an
Speaker 1: electoral thing. This was just the guy tried to sell
Speaker 1: a fucking Senate and people were so mad at into
Speaker 1: the next election, They're like, we will vote for Bruce Rowner,
Speaker 1: who is just like a fucking absolute dipshit. But okay,
Speaker 1: so she So he has now lost two consecutive runs
Speaker 1: for governor, right governor and lieutenant governor. Now this year
Speaker 1: he actually he would he had another bid where he
Speaker 1: was maybe gonna run, and then he stopped. And now
Speaker 1: now he is one of the candidates for the mayor
Speaker 1: of Chicago. Now, while he's been doing his campaigning for this,
Speaker 1: some other fun stuff has been happening. Um, so he
Speaker 1: has an absolutely unlistenable podcasts please nodered. I considered pulling
Speaker 1: clips from this, and then I was like, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I can't inflict this on you. Absolutely it sucks too much. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I would simply leave this zoom call. I'm not, I'm
Speaker 1: just trauma. I was gonna, like, I was gonna talk
Speaker 1: about one of the things that he said a couple
Speaker 1: of things that he well, okay, one that he said
Speaker 1: on this one of they said on a different show. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the things was he starts ranting about this
Speaker 1: thing called culturally responsive teaching, which is this kind of
Speaker 1: liberal like anti racist. Yeah, this is a big thing.
Speaker 1: Like if anyone ever starts talking about culturally responsive teaching
Speaker 1: and starts yelling about it like they're a racist, like that,
Speaker 1: those are the only people who like actually like consistently.
Speaker 1: I mean, like it's not like there ar't criticisms of it,
Speaker 1: but like almost everyone who talks about this on like
Speaker 1: a school board level is like a really weird racist guy.
Speaker 1: So she starts raving about how this means that everyone's
Speaker 1: gonna get handed a copy of Mao's Little Red Book,
Speaker 1: and then says, quote, what is this the cultural Revolution?
Speaker 1: Now we have covered the cultural revolution over the course
Speaker 1: of the show in the Atlanta episodes, and I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna simply say no and move on to read this
Speaker 1: unbelievably racist thing that he said. I'm just gonna read this.
Speaker 1: It's it's real bad. But for that matter, if you're
Speaker 1: a black child, you go home and listen to your
Speaker 1: parent when your parent has failed to be successful in
Speaker 1: addressing the ways these historically racist obstacles that have denied
Speaker 1: them a chance to equal opportunity. Here's the guy he's
Speaker 1: talking to, Paul. I wonder if you're a black kid,
Speaker 1: why don't you become a criminal? If you're hearing this
Speaker 1: stuff in school, everyone with the white skin is an
Speaker 1: oppress or if you're a black skin, you're the oppressed.
Speaker 1: That makes it pretty easy to justify any pretty bad conduct.
Speaker 1: In my opinion, you're absolutely right. So this is valence
Speaker 1: comes back. But what you're also doing, you're giving these
Speaker 1: You're giving people an excuse for bad behavior. You're almost
Speaker 1: justifying is Rams book in Fox. So you're right, You're
Speaker 1: absolutely right. Where is the accountability? You're the victim. What's
Speaker 1: happening is it becomes a justification for everything, and I
Speaker 1: think that's a very dangerous thing. Sollas arguing that talking
Speaker 1: about racism is actually a thing that encourages black people
Speaker 1: to do crime, which is like, that sounds that sounds
Speaker 1: kind of racist me just a little bit. He maybe
Speaker 1: with supremisist gives up racist vibes. Yeah. Um, so speaking
Speaker 1: of racist vibes, his son is a cop in Santa
Speaker 1: Fe and he was one of three cops who shot
Speaker 1: a black guy in the back after calling him boy. Um.
Speaker 1: The cops, including Vasis. Yeah, they start screaming boy at
Speaker 1: him and they shoot him in the back. And the cops,
Speaker 1: including Valles, his son claimed to have found a gun
Speaker 1: next to his body. Um. And in a completely unrelated story,
Speaker 1: you with special forces units in Afghanistan, Ricie Lee carried
Speaker 1: AK forty sevens in a combat zone so they could
Speaker 1: drop the next to the body of people they killed,
Speaker 1: Ridge and declared them insurgents. This has no relation to
Speaker 1: the previous story at all. I am simply relaying facts
Speaker 1: two interesting and unrelated stories. Yeah, didn't. Valis also is
Speaker 1: he's the guy who claimed his Twitter was hacked, right,
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, so very way back. At the beginning
Speaker 1: of this episode, I talked a bit about the racism
Speaker 1: against Loie Lightfoot and like, one of the tweets that
Speaker 1: he liked is a tweet like calling Lori a man like,
Speaker 1: Lord life Foot a man like. It's just unbelievably racist,
Speaker 1: like homophobic, transphobic shit. And he claims that his account
Speaker 1: was hacked and people were liking tweets without his permission. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: that's all they did. They just liked somebracist sweets. There's
Speaker 1: like a bunch of other like and the other thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, okay, like Paul Bells doesn't like actually live
Speaker 1: in Chicago. You mentioned this. He lives in like he
Speaker 1: claims to live in Polo's Heights, which is also not Chicago,
Speaker 1: but it's unclear whether he even lives there or if
Speaker 1: he's in like some kind of like even more insane
Speaker 1: outlying suburb that's even less Chicago than the stuff is.
Speaker 1: And he like, he likes, he likes he one of
Speaker 1: the things he likeing tweets, calling it like shit cago
Speaker 1: and stuff. And it's like, well, yeah, it's because he
Speaker 1: doesn't live in the city. He's not actually like these
Speaker 1: are like a bunch of his support, a bunch of
Speaker 1: the money he's getting are from like drained suburban like
Speaker 1: reactionary and okay, So I want to tell one last
Speaker 1: story about him that pisses me off a lot, which
Speaker 1: is the story of a Wake Illinois. So Awake Illinois
Speaker 1: is like Illinois version of Protect Texas Kids. It's a
Speaker 1: group that does Nazi protests at drag events. They managed
Speaker 1: to destroy a bakery called Uprising for trying to hold
Speaker 1: a drag bunt brunch so that they Awake did all
Speaker 1: this thing of like, ah, they're grooming kids, and then
Speaker 1: the Proud Boys showed up and attacked it, and then
Speaker 1: someone like vandalized it, and they nearly had to close
Speaker 1: the entire bakery until a go fund me raised thirty
Speaker 1: thousand dollars for them to survive. They are like, these
Speaker 1: people are unbelievably homophobic. They rant about groomers constantly. They're
Speaker 1: like really transphobic. Anyways, Paul Vallis spoke at one of
Speaker 1: their fundraisers. Oh god. So after this came out, Vallis
Speaker 1: distanced himself from the group, saying you didn't know what
Speaker 1: they represented and just wanted to support school choice. Awake
Speaker 1: responded by going, hey, what the fuck. You absolutely know
Speaker 1: who we are, and they released another video of Vallis
Speaker 1: and another Awake event where he said that AWAKES president
Speaker 1: shad An Adcock should run for governor, So if elected,
Speaker 1: would I probably be the most openly homophobic democratic like
Speaker 1: mayor in the country, which is a pretty wild like,
Speaker 1: which is pretty wild claim, but like I can't think
Speaker 1: of anyone else who actually like showed up at an
Speaker 1: event where people just screaming about groomers, like yeah, and
Speaker 1: of the Democrats, he is just a Republican, Like he's
Speaker 1: he's like like a pretty right wing like Republican who
Speaker 1: runs the Democrat because Chicago political machine is also just
Speaker 1: so far right. I thought this was because low Lightfoot
Speaker 1: defounded the police. Mayor. Oh, I thought that's what happened,
Speaker 1: and people want the police back. That's what That's what
Speaker 1: I That's what I've told you know. The thing is
Speaker 1: actually very funny about the elections is like, so there
Speaker 1: is elections for these like police district councils are just
Speaker 1: supposed to be these like civilian oversight boards and the
Speaker 1: like reform. There was kind of there was an alliance
Speaker 1: to sort of like reform defund an abolitionist candidates, and
Speaker 1: they did fucking amazing and the pro police candidates got
Speaker 1: fucking clabbard and it Meanwhile, every single national story about
Speaker 1: the election was like Chicago crime. I was like, you
Speaker 1: guys don't understand how much everyone here hates the police,
Speaker 1: Like I like, they murdered a thirteen year old, like
Speaker 1: fucking two years ago. I yeah, good, Yeah, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna hedge my thing here by saying there's so
Speaker 1: much other Paul Valle shit I couldn't fit, Like I
Speaker 1: really wanted to talk about Keith Thornton, who is Chicago's
Speaker 1: George Santos, who like his thing is that he stole
Speaker 1: nine to eleven dispatcher Valor and is like keep showing
Speaker 1: up in pictures with Vallis. Just just google Keith Thornton
Speaker 1: and you will have a good time. Like, there are
Speaker 1: so many other Valist things that he did that are awful.
Speaker 1: There are probably things that he's done that will never
Speaker 1: know about because he did them in like I don't know,
Speaker 1: like like what the fuck he was doing in Chile.
Speaker 1: We probably won't ever know all the things he didn't
Speaker 1: hate E. Yeah, don't let this guy become the fucking
Speaker 1: mayor of Chicago. He will leave the city utterly destroyed.
Speaker 1: Let's go Brandon. I I'm so annoyed that people are
Speaker 1: on ironically, let's go brandon ing in Chicago now for
Speaker 1: Brandon Johnson. It's bringing it back, We're taking it back,
Speaker 1: We're reclaiming it. I reclaim Brandon. Yeah, I'm so bad
Speaker 1: like bringing Brandon back. Okay, I got in trouble with
Speaker 1: my boss in twenty fifteen for saying fuck Hillary, like
Speaker 1: you fucking little bitches. You could just you can just
Speaker 1: say that. You you could just say fuck Joe Biden
Speaker 1: like all of your cowards. Yes, it was. It is
Speaker 1: deeply cowardly afraid of saying fuck. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: they think they're gonna staged an armed overthrow of the government. Huh. Anyway, Oh,
Speaker 1: there's actually okay, this is the thing I actually should much.
Speaker 1: There are a bunch of ties between um, there are
Speaker 1: a bunch of ties between val Us and guys who
Speaker 1: were at J six, like and like a lot of
Speaker 1: j S people support him. He's like he's like he
Speaker 1: is the MAGA candidate. That's like there's like, oh, there's
Speaker 1: a whole thing there that I didn't get into because
Speaker 1: I don't know. There's so much you could do, like
Speaker 1: seven episodes just about Paul Vallas and how much he sucks.
Speaker 1: But yeah, stop him if he fucking gets elected. We're
Speaker 1: doing that. We're doing that. We're doing the fucking Chilean
Speaker 1: student protests because yeah, hate him. Opie has a bad day. Hey,
Speaker 1: welcome to It could happen here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: falling apart um and today it's kind of going to
Speaker 1: be a conversation about uh, is shit falling apart? Are
Speaker 1: we all about to be devoured by a rogue AI?
Speaker 1: Is your job about to be devowered by a rogue AI?
Speaker 1: These are the questions that we're going to, you know,
Speaker 1: talk around and about and stuff today and with us
Speaker 1: today is Noah John Syracusa, a math professor at Bentley University. Noah,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, and I'm
Speaker 1: reaching out. We're talking right now because there's an article
Speaker 1: that was put up in The New York Times on
Speaker 1: March twenty four, twenty twenty three, titled you can have
Speaker 1: the Blue Pill or the Red Pill and We're out
Speaker 1: of Blue Pills, which is a fun title by Yuval
Speaker 1: Harari Tristan Harris and as a raskin. And it's an
Speaker 1: article that is kind of about the pitfalls and dangers
Speaker 1: of AI research, of which there definitely are some. I
Speaker 1: enjoyed your thread on the matter. I thought it was
Speaker 1: a lucid breakdown of the things the article gets right
Speaker 1: and the areas in which I think they're a bit
Speaker 1: fear mongery. So yeah, I think that's probably a good
Speaker 1: place to start, unless you wanted to start by just
Speaker 1: kind of generally talking about where you kind of are
Speaker 1: on AI and what you kind of think, you know,
Speaker 1: the technology is advancing towards right now. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I think I can probably answer both those questions and
Speaker 1: the same because part of why I enjoyed writing that
Speaker 1: threat dissecting the article is I just had the strangest
Speaker 1: feeling reading it that I agreed with it so much
Speaker 1: in principle and yet somehow objected it to so much
Speaker 1: in detail. Yeah, and it thinking about that article helped
Speaker 1: me think about my own feelings on AI, which you know,
Speaker 1: every day of the week is slightly different because so
Speaker 1: much news happens. Yeah, I found myself overall deeply frustrated
Speaker 1: that I agree with the central conclusion, which is that
Speaker 1: maybe we shouldn't be just like plowing headlong into this
Speaker 1: and should be more careful when we we we screw
Speaker 1: around with technology like this, which I agree with and
Speaker 1: I feel like should have been the thing we did
Speaker 1: with like I don't know, Facebook, Twitter, like all of
Speaker 1: these things like it's less. My obsession is less with
Speaker 1: like the specific dangers of AI and more with what
Speaker 1: we keep letting these guys who are fundamentally like gamblers
Speaker 1: within your capital money really put our society through the
Speaker 1: ringer without ever asking should we like do any research
Speaker 1: on maybe how social media affects children and like how
Speaker 1: all of these different things. And it's it's right that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we should be concerned about what these people are going
Speaker 1: to do with AI, but also why now? Why just now? Yeah?
Speaker 1: And that raises a really good point, which is what's
Speaker 1: different now versus what we've been experiencing with social media?
Speaker 1: And just to give your listeners some context, one of
Speaker 1: the three authors on this New York Times article is
Speaker 1: famous for writing this book Sapiens that's a sweeping history
Speaker 1: of humanity, and the other two are actually most famous
Speaker 1: for the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. So they really
Speaker 1: are in this camp of warning people about social media algorithms.
Speaker 1: And as exactly as you're saying, that's sort of this
Speaker 1: thing that we've been dealing with, probably quite poorly, and
Speaker 1: now we're kind of moving on to the next societal risk,
Speaker 1: which is AI. So that as a really important question
Speaker 1: of what's different now. And I think that's one of
Speaker 1: the things the articles try to address, which is many
Speaker 1: of the problems that we already have with algorithms, data
Speaker 1: driven algorithms, and even AI as it's used in social
Speaker 1: media is still happening now, but somehow things feel like
Speaker 1: they're spiring out of control. Yeah, And I think, I mean, honestly,
Speaker 1: I think a lot of this just has to do
Speaker 1: with culturally, what are touchstones for AI we're going into this,
Speaker 1: you know, which are Skynet? You know, like it's that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, and you do see. I feel like
Speaker 1: the uncredited fourth author on this particular article is James Cameron,
Speaker 1: because there's pieces of it throughout this wellere like there's
Speaker 1: some it opens actually pretty provocatively. Imagine that you are
Speaker 1: boarding an airplane. Half the engineers who built it tell
Speaker 1: you there is a ten percent chance the plane will crash,
Speaker 1: killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board?
Speaker 1: In twenty twenty two, over seven hundred top academics and
Speaker 1: researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in
Speaker 1: a survey about future AI risk. Half of those surveys,
Speaker 1: there was a ten percent or greater chance of human
Speaker 1: extinction from future AI systems, which, yeah, let's zoom it on. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's because what I tried to do in my thread
Speaker 1: was go through all the claims and assertions and really
Speaker 1: pause and say hold on. But that's a great one
Speaker 1: to start, because there's a lot to dig in right there. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: first of all, there's a huge difference in that airplanes
Speaker 1: are based on science and physics and things that we
Speaker 1: understand pretty well. There's a lot to it, and there's
Speaker 1: been millions of flights, so you have a lot of data.
Speaker 1: You know, how many planes crash and how many don't.
Speaker 1: Maybe one engine goes out, you can do the statistics
Speaker 1: and CEO you know whatever percent of planes without that
Speaker 1: engine still land safely. The problem with AI is we're
Speaker 1: just guessing. Yeah, right, there's no way to know one
Speaker 1: hundred years from now or ten years from now what
Speaker 1: it's going to do, what the real risks are, so
Speaker 1: we speculate, and that's not uncharted territory, right Let nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons were first introduced, people had to guess and speculate.
Speaker 1: But the danger, I think is putting it in that
Speaker 1: same category as things like airplanes or climate change. I'll
Speaker 1: like to think about climate change. When you see these,
Speaker 1: you know what's the IPCC. I forget the acronym in
Speaker 1: these reports. That's based on thousands of scientists digging into
Speaker 1: thousands of published papers and all this data really modeling
Speaker 1: the environment. There's a lot of meat and substance to it.
Speaker 1: The problem with the AI is it's mostly people I
Speaker 1: hate to say it, but like me or like you,
Speaker 1: just kind of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen,
Speaker 1: maybe that'll happen. The reasonable thing to say. If you're
Speaker 1: in AARs you just like, yeah, I have concerns that
Speaker 1: AI could cause serious negative externalities for the human race.
Speaker 1: Perfectly reasonable statement. It is physically impossible to say there's
Speaker 1: a ten percent chance, exactly because it's never done that before.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm a math professor, and I'm the first
Speaker 1: to say numbers don't have some intrinsic meaning. Right. If
Speaker 1: I just say something has maybe a fifteen percent, I'm
Speaker 1: just making it up. I'm pulling out of my ass. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it doesn't make it true. So it's this, it's a
Speaker 1: general pet peeve I have of sort of giving a
Speaker 1: false sense of precision by using numbers that you don't
Speaker 1: really know where they came from, or they're just made up.
Speaker 1: So that's one issue is these numbers are made up,
Speaker 1: and asking a thousand people to make up numbers isn't
Speaker 1: necessarily any better than asking one or two. You know,
Speaker 1: then if the numbers made up, it's made up. So
Speaker 1: that's one issue. Yeah, I also do think, and I'm
Speaker 1: not the I saw someone make a note I think
Speaker 1: was Ben Collins, who writes for NBC on Twitter, made
Speaker 1: a note that like, well, the fact that all of
Speaker 1: these statements about like how dangerous they are about human
Speaker 1: extinction are coming out of people in the AI industry
Speaker 1: has started to kind of feel like marketing. That's right, Yeah, exactly,
Speaker 1: it's a little bit of buzz marketing going on here.
Speaker 1: And I think you mentioned social media, and the authors
Speaker 1: of this article mentioned social media, and we have to
Speaker 1: look to the past right to understand the future. I
Speaker 1: think that's the only way to do it. So, what
Speaker 1: was one of the biggest scandals in social media was
Speaker 1: Cambridge Analytica, And as you know, we probably a member.
Speaker 1: This was this data privacy scandal where a bunch of
Speaker 1: data was collected from Facebook users that shouldn't have been
Speaker 1: you know, people didn't realize that the data is being collected,
Speaker 1: they didn't approve it, and it was used for this
Speaker 1: election company or this political company that was trying to
Speaker 1: profile people and influenced campaigns towards Donald Trump, towards Brexit.
Speaker 1: So this was a huge scandal, and you know, Facebook
Speaker 1: was fine five billion dollars or something, very justifiably, but
Speaker 1: I would say what it was in retrospect was a
Speaker 1: data privacy issue. People's personal data was leaked when it
Speaker 1: shouldn't have been. The problem was there was so much
Speaker 1: fear and fear monitoring over it that people felt this
Speaker 1: data was used by these sort of algorithmic mind lasers
Speaker 1: to kind of know us in such great detail and
Speaker 1: get us, trick us into voting for Donald Trump and
Speaker 1: targeting us. And the journey is still kind of out,
Speaker 1: but most of the evidence looks like Cambridge Analytical it
Speaker 1: wasn't that effective. They couldn't do it. And it turns
Speaker 1: out you can know a lot about a person, a
Speaker 1: lot about their data, and it's really hard to influence
Speaker 1: them to change them. So what happened I think was
Speaker 1: there was a lot of alarm set spread rightly so
Speaker 1: about the tech companies. They have too much power, too
Speaker 1: much data, they know too much about us, and this
Speaker 1: horrible thing happened. The problem is a lot of the
Speaker 1: alarmism then actually reinforce this aura of power, of godlike
Speaker 1: power that the tech companies have. People criticizing them actually
Speaker 1: gave them more potency than they deserved. And then suddenly
Speaker 1: Google and Facebook and all they had. It wasn't sudden,
Speaker 1: but it kind of built it up. They had this
Speaker 1: aura that our algorithms are it's so insanely powerful, and
Speaker 1: we have to make sure they stay in the right hands,
Speaker 1: and we can do so much. And that's unfortunately what
Speaker 1: I see happening now a lot, And that is kind
Speaker 1: of the setting for critiquing this article. Yeah, absolutely agree
Speaker 1: that this stuff is risky. AI. I absolutely agree that
Speaker 1: we could go down a dangerous path. But once we
Speaker 1: start leaving firm ground and speculating wildly and using the
Speaker 1: terminator stuff that you described. Yeah, even if you think
Speaker 1: you're criticizing the tech companies, you know what you're doing
Speaker 1: giving them the biggest compliment in the world, saying that
Speaker 1: you guys have created are godlike and you've created these
Speaker 1: mighty machines, You've created a deity, which is very similar
Speaker 1: to the language this argue article has at the end,
Speaker 1: and I think it's kind of worth like, as you're
Speaker 1: bringing up there are real threats. There are real threats
Speaker 1: that are immediately obvious. The threat that a lot of
Speaker 1: writers are going to lose their jobs because companies like
Speaker 1: BuzzFeed decide to replace them with you know, chat, GPT
Speaker 1: or whatever. The fact that a lot of artists are
Speaker 1: going to lose out on work because their work has
Speaker 1: been hoovered up and it's being used to generate Like
Speaker 1: these are very real and very immediate concerns that we
Speaker 1: don't have to They're not hypothetical. We don't have to
Speaker 1: theorize about the AI becoming intelligent for this to be
Speaker 1: a problem. These are things we have to immediately deal
Speaker 1: with because it puts people at risk. It's the same
Speaker 1: thing with like, you know, there's a lot that gets
Speaker 1: talked about with Cambridge in Altica, with kind of like
Speaker 1: the different Russian disinformation efforts. But when I think about
Speaker 1: the stuff that was happening in the same period that
Speaker 1: worries me more. One of the things that occurred is
Speaker 1: because there was so much money to be made if
Speaker 1: you could get certain things to go viral on YouTube
Speaker 1: companies that use tools that weren't wildly dissimilar from some
Speaker 1: of these basically generated CGI videos based on kind of
Speaker 1: random terms that they knew were likely to trick the
Speaker 1: algorithm into trending. And god knows how many children were
Speaker 1: parked in front of these like very unhinged videos for
Speaker 1: hours at a time that they would start watching some
Speaker 1: normal kid musical video or something, and then they're watching
Speaker 1: like the disembodied head of Krusty the crownd bounce around
Speaker 1: while like some sort of nonsense song gets sung and
Speaker 1: it's like, what is that actually going to do with kids? Like,
Speaker 1: we don't know. That's unsettling thought, Yeah, and that's the
Speaker 1: kind of thing, you know, and I'm sure there will
Speaker 1: be obviously, Like one of the things that this article
Speaker 1: is not wrong about is that if we kind of
Speaker 1: leap forward into this technolog oology with the kind of
Speaker 1: abandon that we're used to giving the tech company, there
Speaker 1: will be unforeseen externalities that we can't predict right now
Speaker 1: that will be very concerning. I just don't sky in it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's what was so challenging, not just with that article,
Speaker 1: but with I think the movement we're having is I
Speaker 1: do agree very much in spirit. I agree with the recommendations.
Speaker 1: We need to slow down, we need to be more
Speaker 1: judicious and cautious, we need to really consider these. But again,
Speaker 1: if we overhype the technology, we may be doing ourselves
Speaker 1: a disservice by empowering the very entities that we're trying
Speaker 1: to take power from. And as an example like that,
Speaker 1: can I read a quick quote from the article, do
Speaker 1: you AI's new mastery of language means it can now
Speaker 1: hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By'm gaining
Speaker 1: mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key to
Speaker 1: civilization from bank vaults to holy sepulchers. That's right, and
Speaker 1: that I mean, that is fun and you're right to laugh.
Speaker 1: Let's actually zoom in a second. And I think this
Speaker 1: is such a tempting trap that AI is super intelligent
Speaker 1: in some respects. Right, It's done amazing at chats, amazing,
Speaker 1: it's jephard be amazing at various things. Chat GPT is
Speaker 1: amazing at these conversations. So what happens is it's so
Speaker 1: tempting to think AI just equal super smart and because
Speaker 1: it can do those things, and now, look, it can
Speaker 1: converse that it must be the super intelligent conversational entity.
Speaker 1: And it's really good at taking text that's on the
Speaker 1: web that it's already looked at and kind of spinning
Speaker 1: it around and processing. It can come up with poems
Speaker 1: and weird forms. But that doesn't mean it is super
Speaker 1: intelligent in all respects. For instance, one of the main
Speaker 1: issues is to hack civilization. To manipulate us with language,
Speaker 1: it has to kind of know what impact its words
Speaker 1: have on us, and it doesn't really have that. It
Speaker 1: just has a little conversation at textbox and I can
Speaker 1: give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. So the
Speaker 1: only data that it's collecting for me when it talks
Speaker 1: to me any of these chat thoughts is did I
Speaker 1: like the response or not. That's pretty weak data to
Speaker 1: try to manipulate me, you know, it's so basic. That's
Speaker 1: not that different than when I watch YouTube videos. YouTube
Speaker 1: knows what videos I like and what I don't like.
Speaker 1: When you say that YouTube is hacked civilization, no, it's
Speaker 1: addicted a lot of us, but it's not hacked us. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we people have hacked YouTube, and that has done some
Speaker 1: damage to other people. Like, but it's like the thing
Speaker 1: is and that's that's part of why while I have
Speaker 1: many concerns about this technology, it's not that it's going
Speaker 1: to hack civilization because like, we're really good at doing
Speaker 1: that to each other. Like, there's always huge numbers of
Speaker 1: people hacking bits of the populace and manipulating each other,
Speaker 1: and they're always have been. That's why we figured out
Speaker 1: how to paint like it's I do think that there's um,
Speaker 1: there's an interesting conversation to be had about the part
Speaker 1: of why people are kind of willing to leave anything
Speaker 1: as possible with this stuff is that for folks who
Speaker 1: were just kind of living their lives with a normal
Speaker 1: amount of attention paid to the tech industry, it seems
Speaker 1: like these tools popped out of nowhere a couple of
Speaker 1: months ago. Right. It feels like, oh, there has just
Speaker 1: suddenly been this massive breakthrough. And the reality is that
Speaker 1: all of the stuff that people you know, chat gpt
Speaker 1: these different ais that everybody's talking about, this is technology
Speaker 1: that people have been pouring resources into for years and
Speaker 1: years and years and years and years, and that's why
Speaker 1: it's able to do some of these amazing things that
Speaker 1: we've seen but it's not. I don't think it means
Speaker 1: that in a month it's going to be a thousand
Speaker 1: times smarter. It's it's it's a process of labor, and
Speaker 1: it was finally ready to be unveiled to the extent
Speaker 1: that it has been. Maybe that's right. And a good
Speaker 1: example as GPT four which recently came out. There was
Speaker 1: GPT three before and chat GPT and there is so
Speaker 1: much speculation that GPT four is going to be again
Speaker 1: this godlike thing that just you know, that brings us
Speaker 1: to the singularity. And and honestly, it's done better at tests.
Speaker 1: You know, I forget the numbers, but maybe one of
Speaker 1: them got a twenty percent grade on some tests and
Speaker 1: this one got an eighty percent. So that is a
Speaker 1: significant improvement. Right, If you're a teacher and your students
Speaker 1: improve that much, you should be happy. But as you said,
Speaker 1: is that a thousand times no, even though the machine
Speaker 1: is much bigger, much more data, and it just shows that. Yeah, Like,
Speaker 1: the reality is this is incremental progress going at a
Speaker 1: very fast rate, very unsettling even for those of us
Speaker 1: following the field closely. We're experiencing that kind of vertigo
Speaker 1: that you're saying that whoa where did this come from?
Speaker 1: So even within the field, and you're absolutely right, if
Speaker 1: you're just at home, you know, not paying attention for
Speaker 1: a week or a month or a year, suddenly the
Speaker 1: stuff pops up. It is disorienting. But one thing I
Speaker 1: think that's helped me at least kind of clarify what
Speaker 1: not even answering what the risks are, but just understanding
Speaker 1: the different camps of why certain people are reacting differently,
Speaker 1: and why even the people afraid of AI seem to
Speaker 1: be now fighting amongst each other and why it's getting fractured.
Speaker 1: Is are you more afraid of this be AI used
Speaker 1: as a tool by people, or are you more afraid
Speaker 1: of it kind of taking on its own autonomy and
Speaker 1: kind of going rogue and doing its own things. And
Speaker 1: I'm very much afraid of people using it. I think
Speaker 1: big companies are going to use it and there's going
Speaker 1: to be a lot of problems, just like we saw
Speaker 1: with social media. People will get addicted, democracies will be
Speaker 1: flooded with misinformation, It'll be weaponized by various actors, will
Speaker 1: be bought accounts. So I am very concerned about it
Speaker 1: being used. Basically, it performing the job it was told
Speaker 1: to do, but it'll be told to do dangerous jobs,
Speaker 1: either making money or making discord. There's another group of
Speaker 1: people that are more worried about the AI somehow deciding
Speaker 1: on its own to do things to take over. And
Speaker 1: that's where you know, I can't roll it out, But
Speaker 1: that's where I kind of am skeptical. Let's focus on
Speaker 1: how people are using it for now, for the foreseeable future.
Speaker 1: I don't think we need to worry yet, at least
Speaker 1: about the AI somehow having a life of its own
Speaker 1: and stabbing us in the back and enslaving us, because
Speaker 1: there's just so much that can go wrong before you
Speaker 1: even get to that point. Yeah, And it's it's not
Speaker 1: that that's exactly like it's a threat triage kind of thing,
Speaker 1: where like, is it theoretically possible that one day human
Speaker 1: beings could create an artificial intelligence that is capable of
Speaker 1: having its own agency that is malicious? Yeah, sure, I guess, Like,
Speaker 1: I mean maybe, but man, we're there's a lot of
Speaker 1: us that are very malicious right now that are actively
Speaker 1: trying to harm other people at scale. I'm concerned about
Speaker 1: how they will use AI to do that. I think
Speaker 1: botnets are a really good example. One of the things
Speaker 1: that these new this newest generation of AI tools allows
Speaker 1: is more realistic and intelligent bots than I think have
Speaker 1: been accessible at scale before. And that's a very real concern.
Speaker 1: I will say when I kind of sorry, when I
Speaker 1: kind of wargame this back and forth with myself. One
Speaker 1: thing that is oddly comforting is like, well, the shared
Speaker 1: comments that we all inhabit of, like ontological truth is
Speaker 1: already so shattered that like there's there's only so much damage.
Speaker 1: I feel like adding additional bots and additional disinformation can
Speaker 1: really do um. Like one one thought on that though,
Speaker 1: because I've been digging into that too. I've been, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to ponder how to feel about that, because a
Speaker 1: lot of this I don't know, you know, I'm trying
Speaker 1: to make is. I do think if you go back
Speaker 1: to like twenty sixteen earlier versions of the Internet, you know,
Speaker 1: before leading up to Donald Trump's election, Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: there was a lot of wild West to Google, to
Speaker 1: social media, to all these things. Right, fake news was
Speaker 1: just like piling up to the top of Google search results.
Speaker 1: That election was so monumental and such a seismic shockwave
Speaker 1: through a tech that fake news and misinformation might have
Speaker 1: played a role, that they really had to do something,
Speaker 1: and I think some companies are more effective than others.
Speaker 1: I think Google put a lot oft into making sure
Speaker 1: authoritative sources rise to the top. So what that means
Speaker 1: is when now you go online and you Google for
Speaker 1: medical information, the top results yougether WebMD or some official CDC,
Speaker 1: your government thing. They're pretty decent reliable. It's not to
Speaker 1: say there's an all that crap on the Internet, but
Speaker 1: Google has done a pretty good job of having the
Speaker 1: good stuff float to the top, and that's the information
Speaker 1: that people see. So what I'm worried is now we
Speaker 1: might be kind of resetting ourselves back to the twenty
Speaker 1: sixteen where when you're talking to these chatbots that are
Speaker 1: trained on all the internets. Yeah, I don't know if
Speaker 1: the web mds and the CDC type of information is
Speaker 1: necessarily going to float to the top. Maybe they'll work
Speaker 1: that out. But I'm also worried that open AI or
Speaker 1: Google or Microsoft or wherever, they'll have ones that are
Speaker 1: pretty reasonable and kind of you know, tuned to appeal
Speaker 1: to a lot of people. But Elon Musk might build
Speaker 1: his own competitor one that might be really tuned to
Speaker 1: elevate the right wing site. So I have been around,
Speaker 1: as I mean, and you have been doing so in
Speaker 1: a much more rigorous manner, I'm sure. But I've screw
Speaker 1: around with a couple of different AI chat and search engines.
Speaker 1: I use find PHI and D sometimes. I've been playing
Speaker 1: around with being and one of the things I've noticed
Speaker 1: is that you know, if you ask it like, hey,
Speaker 1: summarize for me, like why the Battle of Hastings matter,
Speaker 1: You'll get a reasonably decent answer. But if I ask
Speaker 1: it like I don't know, specific questions about myself, I've
Speaker 1: come to I noticed at first when I did it,
Speaker 1: I would get some really weirdly like colloquial vernacular from
Speaker 1: it explaining things, and I realized it was just pulling
Speaker 1: answers directly that fans had asked about me on the
Speaker 1: subreddit that this show has. And so when I think
Speaker 1: about like ways in which to game the system, well,
Speaker 1: you make a bunch of bots. You have them post
Speaker 1: questions and answers that are you know, supportive of this
Speaker 1: specific product line or whatever on a subreddit and hope
Speaker 1: that it gets picked like scanned by an AI, and
Speaker 1: that becomes part of its like answer for you know
Speaker 1: what happens if you know, I can't stop itching or whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't know, like, but I like obviously you can
Speaker 1: see using them ways in which these cannon will be
Speaker 1: gamed to some extent. You know, it's always kind of
Speaker 1: a red Queen sort of situation where you have to
Speaker 1: disinformation people fighting this info. You're always running as fast
Speaker 1: as you can just to stay in place that's right,
Speaker 1: And that is that brings up another issue which I
Speaker 1: do feel like this is possibly really tipping the balance,
Speaker 1: and that it takes a certain amount of resources to
Speaker 1: create misinformation, it takes a certain amount of resources to
Speaker 1: debunk it. Right, A journalist has to sit down, Snopes
Speaker 1: has to write a little piece about it. And the
Speaker 1: problem is with this AI, it's suddenly just dropping the
Speaker 1: price of creation down to essentially zero. Anyone can create
Speaker 1: essentially limitless supply of quasi information that may or may
Speaker 1: not be true. But the problem is, is the price
Speaker 1: of journalism of debunking also going down, maybe by fifty percent, right,
Speaker 1: maybe it takes you half as much time to write
Speaker 1: an article. It's not going to zero, No, So that's
Speaker 1: the balance is Creating stuff has gotten a lot cheaper.
Speaker 1: Detecting debunking, doing proper journalism it's gotten a little bit cheaper.
Speaker 1: So I'm worried that that's journalists are already stretched then.
Speaker 1: And this is by far my biggest concern because it's
Speaker 1: it's not just this that's obviously a significant factor in it.
Speaker 1: There will be more disinformation, there will not be more journalists,
Speaker 1: in part because I think AI is going to take
Speaker 1: jobs from that, particularly low level d It's not going
Speaker 1: to replace, you know, prize winning columnists at the New
Speaker 1: York Times, and it's not going to replace like guys
Speaker 1: like me who have a very long and established career
Speaker 1: of doing the specific thing that we do. But I
Speaker 1: think back to when I got started as a as
Speaker 1: a journalist, as a writer, it was as a tech blogger,
Speaker 1: and I had an X number of articles that I
Speaker 1: had to get out per day, and obviously, like my
Speaker 1: boss was essentially trusting that with that many articles, i'd
Speaker 1: have a few that did well on Google, and that
Speaker 1: brings in traffic, and that brought in money. And there's
Speaker 1: a degree to which you're just kind of doing seo shit.
Speaker 1: But it's also I can did my first interviews for
Speaker 1: that job. I went to trade shows for the first time.
Speaker 1: I did my first on the ground journalism for that job.
Speaker 1: It taught me how to write quickly and an a
Speaker 1: polished nature. And I was not writing anything that was
Speaker 1: like crucial to the development of humankind, but it made
Speaker 1: me into the kind of person who was later able
Speaker 1: to write things that were read by people all over
Speaker 1: the world, and that had an influence on people. And
Speaker 1: I worry about the brain dry, not just among journalists,
Speaker 1: but among writers, among artists, you know, people who do
Speaker 1: illustrations and stuff. Eventually, musicians, at least some kinds of
Speaker 1: musicians will probably also run up against this, where the
Speaker 1: stuff that it was easy for kind of people breaking
Speaker 1: in to get a little bit of work that would
Speaker 1: hone their skills and allow them to, you know, live
Speaker 1: doing the thing that they're interested in, is going to disappear.
Speaker 1: And more and more of the stuff that we kind
Speaker 1: of casually low level consume, not our high art, not
Speaker 1: our favorite movies, not our favorite books, but the stuff
Speaker 1: that we or when we stumble upon a web page
Speaker 1: or like in a commercial or whatever will be increasingly
Speaker 1: made by AIS and that AI will be pulling from
Speaker 1: an increasingly narrow set of things that humans made because
Speaker 1: less humans will get that entry level work, and that
Speaker 1: is there's something concerning there that is something that worries
Speaker 1: me about the future of just creativity. Yeah, and I think,
Speaker 1: I mean two points. One is just to kind of
Speaker 1: be Devil's advocate a little bit, because I do sympathize
Speaker 1: and I think you're right, but a little bit devil's
Speaker 1: advocate is it might be on the out flip side
Speaker 1: of the coin that there's people that feel like they
Speaker 1: have artistic imagination and desires but lack the technical ability,
Speaker 1: and suddenly they can paint, so to speak, by using
Speaker 1: these aiimage generators. Maybe someone has some form of dyslexia,
Speaker 1: or they're English as a second language or even native
Speaker 1: speaker without any of these issues obstructions, but just finds
Speaker 1: the writing process difficult, and maybe AI enables them to
Speaker 1: be a writer, to contribute. So I could see, you know,
Speaker 1: there's there's going to be the pros and the negatives,
Speaker 1: and I don't know how the balance is, but I
Speaker 1: think you're right thinking from a profession that's sort of
Speaker 1: like a passion project view. From a professional view, I
Speaker 1: do see the profession narrowing. If it journalists are expected
Speaker 1: to work twice as quickly because they're all using chatbots,
Speaker 1: there's probably going to be half of half as many
Speaker 1: of them, right, I mean, that's that's the economics. But
Speaker 1: this brings up a bigger issue, which is I do
Speaker 1: think what you're hitting on is there are these long
Speaker 1: term risks that maybe AI is gonna fuel this rebellion
Speaker 1: of robots and this. You know, maybe, but again, we
Speaker 1: have an economics, social, political, economic world we live in,
Speaker 1: and I just think let's really focus on the issues
Speaker 1: we have. Now. That's not discounting the future. It's not
Speaker 1: like let's burn a bunch of carbon emitting fuels because
Speaker 1: who cares about climate change? That's our grandkids problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is different. It's like, let's think about the jobs
Speaker 1: the world. I mean, another way to put this is
Speaker 1: if we mess up our economy, mess up our democracy
Speaker 1: by people losing jobs and mass protests and losing trust
Speaker 1: in the government and there's just an erosion of truth,
Speaker 1: we're not going to be able to handle climate change
Speaker 1: or any of these big AI know, the singularity type
Speaker 1: of risks. So what I feel like is let's focus
Speaker 1: on what keeps our economy and our sanity and our humanity.
Speaker 1: Let's keep this fabric of society together now so that
Speaker 1: we're more equipped in the future to handle all the
Speaker 1: risks AI and otherwise. But this goes back to what
Speaker 1: you're saying, which is, these are real issues in the
Speaker 1: short term, and if we don't address them, if we
Speaker 1: get distracted by the long term, we're not going to
Speaker 1: be ready to address the long term even if we
Speaker 1: think about it now, we'll be so distracted and so dismayed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think we have to be practical here. I agree,
Speaker 1: and I am also I think it's a valid point
Speaker 1: that you make about the fact that all these are
Speaker 1: tools that will reduce options for some people, there are
Speaker 1: also tools that create options that can be used for
Speaker 1: the creation of art of culture. I do think some
Speaker 1: people I know have brought up photoshop when I talk
Speaker 1: about my concerns with AI and are like, you know,
Speaker 1: there were a lot of you know, people, draftsmen and
Speaker 1: whatnot who were concerned when photoshop hit because it was
Speaker 1: a threat to some of the things that they did
Speaker 1: for money. And photoshop effectively has created whole forms of
Speaker 1: art that didn't exist or didn't exist in the same
Speaker 1: fashion before it did as a tool and tools like it.
Speaker 1: And that's not a think I think it's kind of
Speaker 1: worth I don't like, I don't want to be kind
Speaker 1: of just on the edge of tragedy here. You know,
Speaker 1: this is a there's a lot of different ways this
Speaker 1: could go, and they're not all bad. I think we're
Speaker 1: all used to calamity right now, so much so that
Speaker 1: we potentially expect it in situations where it's not the
Speaker 1: inevitable outcome. Well, I mean that's I think one way
Speaker 1: to kind of boil a lot of that down is
Speaker 1: we can adapt. We just need time to do so
Speaker 1: to many things. And what's really challenging and frustrating now
Speaker 1: is the pace is so fast. It's not just an illusion.
Speaker 1: It's not just oh, if you don't pay attention to AI,
Speaker 1: it really is fast. It's very very hard for us
Speaker 1: to adapt. So, just thinking of the Internet, we got
Speaker 1: a lot, like individuals as users and tech companies got
Speaker 1: a lot better at dealing with clickbait. Right, YouTube was
Speaker 1: tons of clickbait, and they figured out ways to demote
Speaker 1: that to some extent. We got a lot better at
Speaker 1: keeping fake news out of the high search rankings and Google.
Speaker 1: Like I mentioned, a lot of these problems that came up.
Speaker 1: We're not perfectly addressed, not even close. But there was
Speaker 1: significant progress and that's often understated. But if these problems
Speaker 1: are coming so fast and so intense, it's a lot
Speaker 1: to adapt to. And that's what's really the challenge is
Speaker 1: the pace. And I think we're seeing a very, very
Speaker 1: breakneck pace that's really hard. Now does that mean you're
Speaker 1: on the side of like Elon Musk and some of
Speaker 1: those folks who just signed that letter being like, maybe
Speaker 1: we should put a pause on AI research because you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not one hundred percent against it. Again, I kind
Speaker 1: of am, like, Man, I wish we'd been having this
Speaker 1: conversation when Facebook dropped or YouTube dropped. But I don't
Speaker 1: think that's a realistic thing. I'll say that. But I
Speaker 1: do think, yeah, yeah, so I would say, no, I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not a favor that For one thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: in a very practical sense, you think all these companies
Speaker 1: that are putting billions of dollars in these investments in
Speaker 1: a AI are all going to sit around saying, you
Speaker 1: know what, let's just not do this for a few
Speaker 1: of course not. So here's what I think, They're not
Speaker 1: going to slow down. What's going to happen is going
Speaker 1: to happen even if some players decide to be responsible
Speaker 1: and slow down. Guess what that means. The only people
Speaker 1: plunging ahead are going to be the irresponsible ones. So
Speaker 1: what I think we need to do is I don't
Speaker 1: think we can really slow that down. So what about
Speaker 1: the flip side. I think we need to accelerate public
Speaker 1: education on artificial intelligence. I think we need to accelerate
Speaker 1: government legislation, regulation, intern national cooperation. I don't think we
Speaker 1: can solve this by slowing AI down. I do think
Speaker 1: we need to find a way to speed up our
Speaker 1: democratic process processes. It's taken us how many years to
Speaker 1: pass basically nothing about social media in the US and
Speaker 1: some mixed results in Europe. Yeah, that's the problem, right,
Speaker 1: If we could work faster, then I think we could
Speaker 1: keep up. And I think that that's actually the long term,
Speaker 1: like practical survival thing from this is that I hope
Speaker 1: we get is like, yeah, we've always needed to be
Speaker 1: more careful about the things that we expose billions of
Speaker 1: people too. Suddenly it should have happened before now. But
Speaker 1: I hope that this I hope that all I hope
Speaker 1: the fact that AI, because of James Cameron, is coated
Speaker 1: into our brains to be something that triggers a little
Speaker 1: bit of panic in people. I hope that rather than
Speaker 1: reacting with panic, it leads to a more intelligent and
Speaker 1: considered state of affairs when potentially embracing technologies that are
Speaker 1: going to change life for huge numbers of people. That's right,
Speaker 1: and that is I think we have an opportunity here
Speaker 1: to experience that and explore than and try, and that
Speaker 1: is kind of what I was aiming for. And that
Speaker 1: threat is again I love that article that you know
Speaker 1: you mentioned at the beginning, But if we start going
Speaker 1: down this road of hype, there is a danger that
Speaker 1: we're going to fall into these traps. And I think
Speaker 1: let's stay grounded. Let's say practical, let's really identify the risks.
Speaker 1: Not that I'm some guru and know what they are,
Speaker 1: but it's almost easier to see what's not true than
Speaker 1: what is true. Yeah, and that's I think let's all
Speaker 1: try to police each other and make sure we're focusing
Speaker 1: on practical things that really are manageable, that really are
Speaker 1: genuine risks that are impacting people, that are impacting people today,
Speaker 1: and especially ones that are impacting marginalized populations. Yes, so
Speaker 1: I think let's hope we learn these lessons. And I
Speaker 1: am not optimistic, but I'm not as cynical. I think
Speaker 1: there's a lot of important discussions happening now that let's
Speaker 1: just say, there's a lot more discussion now than we
Speaker 1: had with social media, and maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I think that's a good note to end on. Noah,
Speaker 1: did you have anything you kind of wanted to plug
Speaker 1: before we roll out here? No, I just I think
Speaker 1: it's it's a great topic that everyone can be involved in,
Speaker 1: and I just my plug is just don't be intimidated,
Speaker 1: don't be afraid. I am writing a book that's not
Speaker 1: going to come up for a couple of years that's
Speaker 1: trying to help empower people to kind of be part
Speaker 1: of these conversations. But that's far off. I just want
Speaker 1: to say broadly, don't be intimidated and don't fall for
Speaker 1: this narrative that sometimes happens in tech communities that, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a tech person, I don't have
Speaker 1: a chance to understand this stuff. Affects all of us,
Speaker 1: and how it affects you matters, and your opinion matters,
Speaker 1: and your voice matters. And we're all part of social media,
Speaker 1: we're all very soon going to be part of AI
Speaker 1: in chat thoughts, So don't be afraid to join the conversation.
Speaker 1: You don't need any technical background because I think the
Speaker 1: subject is just as much sociological as technical. It's about people.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great point to end on. Thank
Speaker 1: you so much, Noah, really appreciate your time. And uh,
Speaker 1: everybody else, have a have a nice day. I mean
Speaker 1: you have a nice day too. Also, thanks to you too.
Speaker 1: It's lots of fun. Ah, welcome back to It could
Speaker 1: Happen here a podcast about things falling apart, sometimes about
Speaker 1: putting them back together, um, sometimes just about enduring difficult times.
Speaker 1: And it's it's been a rough couple of weeks, what
Speaker 1: with the mass shooting in Tennessee and the Right accelerating
Speaker 1: their anti trans paranoia, the whole you know, Trump getting
Speaker 1: arrested and all that, all that, Yes, that has really
Speaker 1: hit all of us really hard, yes, and really yeah deeply.
Speaker 1: Now that now that Trump is has been charged with felonies,
Speaker 1: he's officially a friend of mine. So we're on Trump now.
Speaker 1: I really convicted. I'm really conflicted between my acab side
Speaker 1: my illegalist side. It's really it's really hard. I mean,
Speaker 1: thirty four felonies, that's quite a legalist. Very few of
Speaker 1: the people I know who commit crimes is like a vocation,
Speaker 1: have that many. It's pretty difficult. But at any rate,
Speaker 1: you know, it's been a rough couple of weeks, and
Speaker 1: I thought we could use a lighter episode to, you know,
Speaker 1: help everybody everybody feel better. And I know that you
Speaker 1: Mia and you Gare are both young uns. H you
Speaker 1: you missed the earlier age of the Internet and the
Speaker 1: heroes of that ancient age. You know, when I was
Speaker 1: a child, you know, it was Jupiter and uh and
Speaker 1: and all the Greek gods of the old Internet y'all.
Speaker 1: Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of
Speaker 1: the old Internet era. So yeah, I wanted I wanted
Speaker 1: to talk about an ancient hero of the Internet. And
Speaker 1: perhaps this will become a series that we do now
Speaker 1: and again where we talk about we talk about the
Speaker 1: gods of the past and today. The ancient deity that
Speaker 1: we're talking about is kind of like the Internet's Hercules,
Speaker 1: a man named Troy Hertabes. Have you guys heard of
Speaker 1: Troy Hertabes. No, I've not. I've not heard of Troy Hernabes,
Speaker 1: but I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a
Speaker 1: Roman god. The Greek version is Zeus. You're right, You're right,
Speaker 1: you're right. Before before some freak dms me and sends
Speaker 1: me like three phs on this, I'm just gonna put
Speaker 1: that out there. Do not DM me about this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: wet do that thing where we start, We start including
Speaker 1: one of these every episode that, yeah, just fucking up
Speaker 1: purposefully in order to get people. They love doing it,
Speaker 1: they love being able to hop on I do. Ever,
Speaker 1: we did get recently, we did the liver King episodes
Speaker 1: this week, and somebody popped on to be like, hey, guys,
Speaker 1: you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of
Speaker 1: polar bears contain enough vitamin hundred and forty people something
Speaker 1: like that, Um, don't eat polar bear lovers. This is
Speaker 1: relevant because we are talking about a man today whose
Speaker 1: lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that
Speaker 1: allowed him to fight bears in hand to hand compact.
Speaker 1: It is actually very applicable to us, because just last
Speaker 1: week we went to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear.
Speaker 1: You're right, this man would have been one of the
Speaker 1: only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear. So
Speaker 1: once upon a time, before the breaking of the world,
Speaker 1: there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Hertebes. Troy was
Speaker 1: a simple man. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty three. He liked the outdoors, and he was
Speaker 1: a dedicated conservationist. The one exception to his abiding love
Speaker 1: of nature was bears. On August fourth, nineteen eighty four,
Speaker 1: when Troy was twenty one years old, he went hiking
Speaker 1: in central British Columbia. Now he's given a couple of
Speaker 1: versions of this story over the years. Some that this happened,
Speaker 1: say that this happened when he was a boy, Others
Speaker 1: say he was like twenty years old, but all agree
Speaker 1: that he wound up in close proxim to a grizzly bear.
Speaker 1: In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of
Speaker 1: the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped
Speaker 1: the twenty two caliber rifle he was carrying, which would
Speaker 1: not have made much difference against a grizzly bear, you
Speaker 1: will only make it more upset. Two is not the
Speaker 1: weapon you want to that situation. In a desperate attempt
Speaker 1: to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're gonna talk
Speaker 1: about Troy's knives in a minute here about. In an
Speaker 1: interview with Mental Flass many years later, Troy claimed that
Speaker 1: seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him.
Speaker 1: After this, Okaya a minute, That's not how bears were.
Speaker 1: Has this bear been like involved in other fights guys
Speaker 1: like another maniac bear got stabbed behind a seven eleven
Speaker 1: and is like, na, man, I don't grizz don't funk
Speaker 1: with knives no more. I've been through that ship like
Speaker 1: a street gay like na brot na bro are worth it?
Speaker 1: And so he later claims an expert told him he
Speaker 1: would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs this.
Speaker 1: I believe bears very rarely attack people. Now, a normal
Speaker 1: man would have taken this number one as boy I
Speaker 1: sure got lucky, and number two as I should be
Speaker 1: more careful when out in the woods. But Troy was
Speaker 1: not a normal man. His first thought was that he
Speaker 1: needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically
Speaker 1: four bears. He had been beaten and developing bear mace
Speaker 1: by an actual scientist, Although the first paper on bear
Speaker 1: mace was published in nineteen eighty four, so it makes
Speaker 1: sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time.
Speaker 1: It was a reasonable thing to be like, maybe we
Speaker 1: should have a mace for use against bears. There are
Speaker 1: again several versions of what came next. I'm going to
Speaker 1: quote from one that I found in a write up
Speaker 1: by the spec Now quote from then, he decided that
Speaker 1: his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear
Speaker 1: spray repellent, but he realized field testing with bears would
Speaker 1: be needed. This would require a protective suit for the
Speaker 1: person doing the test. No. In his interview with Mental Floss,
Speaker 1: one of the later pieces on the Man, Troy dropped
Speaker 1: the mace story and claimed that he had the idea
Speaker 1: just to make bear resistant armor a year after his
Speaker 1: grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear
Speaker 1: researchers would need protective armor that would let them test
Speaker 1: bear spray and also safely observed grizzly behavior. Troy is
Speaker 1: something of an unreliable narrator, but I will say I
Speaker 1: do not doubt that the film RoboCop influenced his subsequent
Speaker 1: ass No, he absolutely had this idea that makes that
Speaker 1: makes the most sense out of anything you said. It
Speaker 1: is very logical. So it is now Troy, it should
Speaker 1: be noted, is not the first, probably not the first
Speaker 1: man who has thought I should develop a suit of
Speaker 1: armor to allow me to grapple with bears in hand
Speaker 1: to hand combat. It is possible that in medieval Europe
Speaker 1: some people hunted bears while wearing full body suits of
Speaker 1: armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether
Speaker 1: or not this really happened. The gist of why this
Speaker 1: is a debate is that there's an insane looking suit
Speaker 1: of armor currently in a Houston museum that was probably
Speaker 1: made in switzerlander Germany like four hundred dish years ago.
Speaker 1: Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or
Speaker 1: for what purpose, but one theory is that it was
Speaker 1: used for bear baiting. If so, it was used for
Speaker 1: European bears, which are significantly smaller than Besty bears, and
Speaker 1: as far as we know, was never a widespread practice.
Speaker 1: This is because attempting to fight a bear in hand
Speaker 1: to hand with a suit of armor is insane and
Speaker 1: something only a madman would do. But I am going
Speaker 1: to show you this suit of armor because it looks
Speaker 1: like something from a David Lynch movie. Oh I'm so thrilled,
Speaker 1: specifically the face. So look at that, look at that
Speaker 1: beautiful thing. Oh my god. Yeah, it's in the chase
Speaker 1: of that unsettling but they think probably somewhere around Austria
Speaker 1: or Switzerland, although it's not. I don't think known to
Speaker 1: a point of certainty. That looks fucked up. It looks
Speaker 1: like it looks like a like like like a metal
Speaker 1: casting of someone's head but with like but with like
Speaker 1: the pinhead thing. Yeah, it's a howlazy I think is
Speaker 1: the movie. Yeah, the face on it is distinctly unsettling,
Speaker 1: like they could have just made a normal helmet, but
Speaker 1: like no, no, like there's a nose, it's the guy's face.
Speaker 1: We gotta it's We're not doing this right unless we
Speaker 1: like peek into the uncanny valley with this thing. Troy
Speaker 1: was not interested in the fact that attempting to fight
Speaker 1: a bear and body armor is just objectively nuts, and
Speaker 1: since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he
Speaker 1: set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then
Speaker 1: testing it. Um, I'm going to read another quote from
Speaker 1: the specs right up, because it's extremely funny. So the
Speaker 1: suit became his focus of a putting it through all
Speaker 1: kinds of tests that included being run down by a
Speaker 1: pickup truck driven by his pot, rolling off the side
Speaker 1: of a cliff, and being pummeled by bikers with baseball bats.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna play you a video of Troy um
Speaker 1: one of these tests where Troy gets hit by a tree.
Speaker 1: It's almost exactly that scene from hot Rod. If you've
Speaker 1: watched the movie hot Rod where they like swing a
Speaker 1: log down at him and hit him. Um, that may
Speaker 1: in fact be what that scene is based on, but
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna share that with y'all. Now the
Speaker 1: log is U Oh my gosh, so get them guys.
Speaker 1: I cannot emphasize enough. It looks like half this armor
Speaker 1: is held together by duct tape. Just like. This looks
Speaker 1: like a fever dream combination of the Wizard of Oz
Speaker 1: and like and like the Battle of Endor walks. He
Speaker 1: walks throwing massive logs at the guy in the middle.
Speaker 1: Tin suit, it's white, it's a white suit too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it looks almost like something from um like speed Racer.
Speaker 1: Is weird the aesthetic that I would reckon, I would
Speaker 1: closest compare it too. It is kind of like that
Speaker 1: anime robot style design. Yeah, it's it's it's profoundly unhinged.
Speaker 1: So I want to I want to play you a
Speaker 1: clip of him getting the helmet off so you can
Speaker 1: listen to Troy talk and see this man's face better
Speaker 1: than the first. Yeahs, I had that time, that stuff
Speaker 1: on my mouth. Yeah, if I have a most piece,
Speaker 1: a mostpiece, you can do that all day long. I
Speaker 1: got the airbags in the back, so my neck hasn't
Speaker 1: got a lot of place, so that'll be perfect for
Speaker 1: the grizzy I can I can take he can give
Speaker 1: me with that log if that couldn't do anything to me?
Speaker 1: And I feel great, like really great. And actually my
Speaker 1: left hand was asleepist now a week. Really you don't say, yeah,
Speaker 1: truly damage fascinating man. So I'm gonna play you now
Speaker 1: him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball
Speaker 1: bats as he attempts to move in this suit. And
Speaker 1: I have to emphasize to you he is not capable
Speaker 1: of moving in this thing. This is an immobile suit
Speaker 1: of armor that he can he can almost shuffle in it,
Speaker 1: but not quite. His idea with the with the pickup
Speaker 1: truck and the bikers with regards to big men and
Speaker 1: being an anthropologist, he yet he looked at the testings
Speaker 1: we had originally done with normal sized man, you know,
Speaker 1: one hundred and fifty hundred and eighty pound, he said,
Speaker 1: the public isn't gonna buy it. They're they're looking at
Speaker 1: this monstrous, groovy bear and they're looking at a normal
Speaker 1: size man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. They're not going to buy. You have to
Speaker 1: give them reality. This is insane. This is so weird, amazing, amazing,
Speaker 1: Like a gang of men attacking this nerd in a
Speaker 1: metal suit is like, yes, it's so funny. It's it's
Speaker 1: it's extremely funny. They're like and they pick like terminator
Speaker 1: two looking bikers like it's out of their way. All
Speaker 1: of the stylization is super super bizarre. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: such a strained documentary. This is from the documentary project Grizzly,
Speaker 1: and there's Troy gives. In the various interviews, he does
Speaker 1: some pretty incredible quotes. Like years after this, he wrote
Speaker 1: at fifty two, I have to know whether or not
Speaker 1: the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things.
Speaker 1: We tested the suit a lot of ways, but never
Speaker 1: went against the Grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing
Speaker 1: is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus
Speaker 1: Mark one. He eventually gets up to the Mark six
Speaker 1: and spends more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars
Speaker 1: making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, sorry, I
Speaker 1: think the one that we're looking at in the documentary
Speaker 1: is the Mark six, because he did eventually, after years
Speaker 1: of this quest, get a documentary and interested, and the
Speaker 1: film Project Grizzly was made about his quest. One fun
Speaker 1: piece of trivia about it is that it's one of
Speaker 1: Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense. It makes yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes total sense. Now, in order to give you just
Speaker 1: one last piece of context about the personality, what kind
Speaker 1: of man is Troy her Tobes or was Troy her Tobes.
Speaker 1: I am gonna play you a clip of an interview
Speaker 1: with this man from the documentary. That's just perfect. He's
Speaker 1: holding in this a gigantic booie knife in his hand,
Speaker 1: and he has another booie knife strapped across his shoulder
Speaker 1: in such a way that it's on his shoulder but
Speaker 1: pointed down. Yeah, which is the way a crazy man
Speaker 1: carries a book. He's also, it's worth noting, dressed as
Speaker 1: like a frontier settler, but wearing like a bread's Harry Baray.
Speaker 1: I go into the bush. I don't use a gun, never,
Speaker 1: don't believe in guns. I swear by my knives. They
Speaker 1: save your life a thousand times around. If a grizzlies
Speaker 1: gonna come at you. And I'm not saying knives are
Speaker 1: going to save you, that's not what I'm saying. What
Speaker 1: I'm saying is you've got a gun, and that grizzlies
Speaker 1: fifty feet one hundred feet away from you, you got
Speaker 1: one shot. I don't give a shit who you are
Speaker 1: or how steady you are. You've got one shot, not grizzly.
Speaker 1: And if he's still coming at you that gun, you
Speaker 1: might as well use the barrel on him, or you
Speaker 1: can use the stock. That's useless. But if you've got
Speaker 1: some half decent knives, at least you got a fighting chance.
Speaker 1: With animals. But that's not the reason why when I
Speaker 1: go into the mountains, or I go into the bush,
Speaker 1: or any man goes into the bush, they don't carry
Speaker 1: nives for the four legged animals. They carry knives for
Speaker 1: the two legged animals. Because nowadays it's a lot like
Speaker 1: the old days. You've got a lot of whackers up there,
Speaker 1: and it's nivish. Want to close quarters. Yea, you do,
Speaker 1: indeed have a lot of wackos up there, Troy. Um.
Speaker 1: So that's that's a brief introduction to Troy Hurdabes. Now,
Speaker 1: the suit that you've seen in the Project Project Grizzly
Speaker 1: documentary weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and it was
Speaker 1: not in any way powered. As you see in the dock.
Speaker 1: He can kind of barely shuffle with it. He is
Speaker 1: unable to move or even stand on uneven ground. He
Speaker 1: falls over very easily. Um. Troy liked the documentary, felt
Speaker 1: like it helped expose his work to a wider audience,
Speaker 1: but he took issue with the fact that the documentary
Speaker 1: did not delve into what he described as the science
Speaker 1: behind it all. Adding being able to get hit by
Speaker 1: the truck took years of development, now years years of
Speaker 1: practice of getting hit by trucks. Yeah, it's you can't
Speaker 1: just jump into getting hit by a truck like that.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and two, a trainer who probably should
Speaker 1: not be allowed around animals let Troy get into a
Speaker 1: cage with a Kodiak bear. Now, thankfully the bear was
Speaker 1: too confused by Troy's armor to what to get near him,
Speaker 1: which you might not. This is technically a wind for Troy.
Speaker 1: The armor did do its job, just scare them away. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, the bear just saw that was like, you
Speaker 1: know what this said? Wrong with this guy? It's clearly unwell.
Speaker 1: I do not want to be around this person right now.
Speaker 1: Here's mental floss interviewing Troy. She was so terrified she
Speaker 1: urinated her. To best recalls, I didn't look human enough.
Speaker 1: Limited mobility and questionable usefulness combined to doom the Mark series.
Speaker 1: We would never use a suit like that, says Lana Siernello, PhD.
Speaker 1: A bare behavior expert, a solid knowledge of bare behaviors,
Speaker 1: the best thing one can use to avoid being attacked,
Speaker 1: which is rare, and this is this is common whenever
Speaker 1: they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like do
Speaker 1: you want a suit of armor. They're like, no, that's
Speaker 1: not at all useful. It's very easy to not get
Speaker 1: attacked by bears. Actually, and again, if you watch the
Speaker 1: documentary Grizzly Man, and the man in the documentary Grizzly
Speaker 1: Man is a similar type of person to Troy Hertabes.
Speaker 1: They are both people. I do believe Troy Hertabes might
Speaker 1: need a suit of bear armor because he seems like
Speaker 1: the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their
Speaker 1: limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up
Speaker 1: in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Hertabes fame. He
Speaker 1: was all over the internet. I found out about him
Speaker 1: because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him
Speaker 1: in an article. But like, you would see this guy
Speaker 1: all the time, I'm sure I ran. I think I
Speaker 1: also ran across him on something awful. Earlier. He would
Speaker 1: regularly put out videos he had. He had an early
Speaker 1: kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a
Speaker 1: brand on the internet in order to get funding, and
Speaker 1: so he was very successful at raising money in order
Speaker 1: to like make new iterations of his armor. He was
Speaker 1: also recruited on several JAP and he's game shows, and
Speaker 1: he inspired a two thousand and three episode of The
Speaker 1: Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear fighting suit. He even
Speaker 1: filmed an outie commercial. Of course, he always reinvested the
Speaker 1: proceeds directly into making more suits of bear armor. Now,
Speaker 1: the good news is he eventually moved on from wanting
Speaker 1: to make armor that was specifically geared towards fighting bears,
Speaker 1: but he never got over his desire for making a
Speaker 1: suit of elaborate body armor. So he pivoted, claiming that
Speaker 1: now his brother was in the military, and so he
Speaker 1: wanted to make flexible body armor themed after the armor
Speaker 1: in Halo to help keep soldiers and SWAT officers safe
Speaker 1: during dangerous raids. Because next suit was called the Trojan,
Speaker 1: and it featured a compass in the dick for reasons
Speaker 1: that are deeply confusing. Wait, that's not even it's not
Speaker 1: even a useful spot, like put it on your watch
Speaker 1: him he is adamant that he had talked to Special
Speaker 1: Forces guys and they said, right in the dick is
Speaker 1: where you want to compass it, like flip down, So
Speaker 1: it looks like he has a penis that's made out
Speaker 1: of compass. Okay, that is kind of funny. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: play you a clip of this armor, which I will
Speaker 1: say looks a lot more professional than the last suit,
Speaker 1: the first ballistic full exoskeleton body suit of armor. This
Speaker 1: came from twenty years of development through the bear suits
Speaker 1: and about seventeen hundred and fifty hours of actual building time,
Speaker 1: And it came from so many calls I got from
Speaker 1: friends of mine in Iraq and an Afghanistan. My brother
Speaker 1: was in the military, talking about is there can you
Speaker 1: not go in the direction that we need, which is
Speaker 1: you know, against the ieeds improvised explosive devices, and you know,
Speaker 1: build it to the point where you've got the flexibility,
Speaker 1: the lightness, but with the strength of what the bear
Speaker 1: suits were, And that's where that's where this came from.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna tell you right now that suit is
Speaker 1: not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic
Speaker 1: heavy armor you see in the hurt Locker only kind
Speaker 1: of helps you if it's a pretty small IED. What
Speaker 1: he's built is not going to protect you from like
Speaker 1: an explosively formed penetrator or like a five thousand pound
Speaker 1: fertilizer five hundred pound fertilizer bomb or something like that.
Speaker 1: To test this, though, Troy hired a former military marksman,
Speaker 1: the guy who he claimed had previously covered him out
Speaker 1: in the woods on bare expeditions with less lethal AMO,
Speaker 1: and he asked this man to shoot him point and
Speaker 1: blank with a rifle. So thankfully, this guy was like Troy,
Speaker 1: it's illegal to point a loaded weapon at a person
Speaker 1: in our province. I'm not going to shoot you directly
Speaker 1: in the chest with a hunting rifle. So Troy had
Speaker 1: him take the armor out of the suit and then
Speaker 1: shoot at it, and the bullet went immediately through the armor.
Speaker 1: It says a lot about Troy that his first instinct
Speaker 1: was not shoot the armor without a human being in it.
Speaker 1: But um, at least, yeah, at least the guy who
Speaker 1: was testing it did not shoot him directly in the
Speaker 1: guest and kill him. I'm gonna quote again from Mental
Speaker 1: Flaws here. Hertibes tweaked the Trojan, which he debuted in
Speaker 1: two thousand and seven to little notice. Eventually, he offered
Speaker 1: his design to the Canadian military for free, but it
Speaker 1: can take years for armed forces to evaluate new technology,
Speaker 1: and existing contracts with equipment vendors render it near impossible
Speaker 1: for independent inventors without backing or references to succeed with
Speaker 1: industrial military contracts are sewn up and they don't want
Speaker 1: anyone stepping on toes. He says, engineers pick my brain,
Speaker 1: but I can't be affiliated with them. I'm a loose
Speaker 1: cannon and my methodology is backward. I do not disagree
Speaker 1: with that statement. He did, however, have several other inventions
Speaker 1: over the years. For one thing, Troy invented a burn paste,
Speaker 1: a gooey substance that hardens when exposed to flame in
Speaker 1: order to protect you. Canada's Discovery Channel documented him covered
Speaker 1: in the burn pace, being exposed to temperatures above thirty
Speaker 1: six hundred degrees fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his
Speaker 1: helmeted head for ten minutes and it worked. This leaves
Speaker 1: out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired
Speaker 1: to make his burn paste because one day, while wearing
Speaker 1: his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly.
Speaker 1: So he needed to make the burn paste in order
Speaker 1: to protect himself. Yeah, it doesn't seem easy to get
Speaker 1: in and out of. Like, no, it would not be
Speaker 1: easy to dawn your If you look at the helmet
Speaker 1: there your peripheral version is going to be shit. It's
Speaker 1: not going to be good for like fighting in and
Speaker 1: it is going to exhaust you. Like he builds an
Speaker 1: air conditioner for it, but that's only gonna do so
Speaker 1: much like body armor is always kind of like a
Speaker 1: trade off between mobility and protection, and something like a
Speaker 1: plate carrier is worth it. But full body armor that's
Speaker 1: not powered in a meaningful way just is not going
Speaker 1: to be practical yet. This is why I do not
Speaker 1: respect the Mandalorians. No, no, you you've been vocal about
Speaker 1: that for years have I'm gonna play you a video
Speaker 1: of him testing this fire paste from that Canadian Discovery
Speaker 1: Channel documentary because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in
Speaker 1: the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a
Speaker 1: thin layer of fire paste, effectively starving out the fire.
Speaker 1: And according to Troy, clean up is a breeze due
Speaker 1: to firepace only weakness water. Just see it turns back
Speaker 1: into a paste. See, I'm already into a layer. It's
Speaker 1: just past now, which is firepiece. This is its natural state.
Speaker 1: And when it dries, see I'm already slopping it off.
Speaker 1: Now there's is there It turns to the peace. This
Speaker 1: is what's gonna happen on your host Now it's a
Speaker 1: he's chewing it up, and oh that's so cross. He's
Speaker 1: just spitting it all over his house. The dog comes along,
Speaker 1: takes a little in his mouth, washes it around, and
Speaker 1: spits it out. Nothing's gonna happen. It's biden ridable, non topsic.
Speaker 1: Don't have to worry one anything happening. So how would
Speaker 1: a homeowner remove the firepace from the outside of their home?
Speaker 1: This is gonna be bob fuse next door. Bob's house
Speaker 1: is gonna be fine. The next day, he's gonna come
Speaker 1: up with his garden, the holes in a cannabier, and
Speaker 1: in two hours he'll be ready for the football game.
Speaker 1: Oh what there goes to the house. After ten minutes,
Speaker 1: Troy inspects the firepaced house. Look at look at this.
Speaker 1: At this there's a little Barbie. She's all kay. Barbie's
Speaker 1: fire same Barbie's sister. The Barbie is clearly sin. Now.
Speaker 1: He does note again that the only weakness of the
Speaker 1: fire paste is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but
Speaker 1: I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in
Speaker 1: the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now,
Speaker 1: why why does he keep getting platforms? Like, why why
Speaker 1: does he continue? He was because because this was really
Speaker 1: funny to everyone on the Internet. So a documentary that
Speaker 1: came out would get shared all over. People would watch it.
Speaker 1: It would get him attention, he would get donations. There
Speaker 1: was like one point where he had to he had
Speaker 1: to sell his body armor. He had to like sell
Speaker 1: it to a pawn shop because he was broke, and
Speaker 1: a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and
Speaker 1: gave it to him so he could continue. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he had a fan base. Like I said, he was
Speaker 1: a hero of the old Internet. He did eventually succeed
Speaker 1: in making an armor suit that was resistant to twelve
Speaker 1: gage shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive.
Speaker 1: Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor. Most soft
Speaker 1: body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it.
Speaker 1: Shotguns are not for penetrating armor. There for damaging meat.
Speaker 1: But Troy made a big deal about how this would
Speaker 1: save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention,
Speaker 1: as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was
Speaker 1: something called the Godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much
Speaker 1: detail on what the Godlight was, but he says it
Speaker 1: shrunk tumors and mice as well as his sister's tumor,
Speaker 1: and he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it
Speaker 1: could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers.
Speaker 1: All I did was take all spectrums of light electromagnetic
Speaker 1: radiation and put them together, and it works. I don't
Speaker 1: know why, but I think that's how you get cancer.
Speaker 1: But okay, funny you mentioned that. So obviously his claims
Speaker 1: about the Godlight were never validated by any outside force,
Speaker 1: in part because shining whatever the fuck he's invented on
Speaker 1: a bunch of sick people has ethical considerations to it.
Speaker 1: But Troy turned the light on himself and experienced what
Speaker 1: he calls the hide effect. I think, as in doctor Jackline,
Speaker 1: mister Hyde, his hair fell out and he lost twenty
Speaker 1: pounds curious a mystery. Then he claims the Godlight mysteriously
Speaker 1: stopped working and he didn't have the money to fix
Speaker 1: it up. There are amazing I love this man. It's
Speaker 1: it is. It is fascinating that the closer society comes
Speaker 1: to this complete collapse. We get more of these little
Speaker 1: weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to
Speaker 1: survive the apocalypse and exactly the wrong way. Yes, um,
Speaker 1: I'm going to read another quote from that mental phloss article. Today.
Speaker 1: Hertabes operates a scrapyard in Ontario and dismisses notions of patents.
Speaker 1: The stuff is too easy to duplicate and it costs
Speaker 1: eighty thousand dollars to file an application. He rejects offers
Speaker 1: to outright sell his creations like Firepaste, because he frequently
Speaker 1: sells off shares to fund their development. By the time
Speaker 1: I got Firepace to the point of testing, seventy percent
Speaker 1: of it was owned by investors, So when a university
Speaker 1: wants it, I only have thirty percent left. They're not
Speaker 1: interested in that. And yet Hernabes can't stop inventing. He
Speaker 1: still feels compelled to put in twenty one hour days
Speaker 1: refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding
Speaker 1: for the Apache, the latest version of his t Oan suit,
Speaker 1: which he says protects ninety three percent of a user's
Speaker 1: body and offers ninety six percent flexibility. A prototype will
Speaker 1: cost seventy thousand dollars. It'll take six to eight months
Speaker 1: to build by hand. I'll try to market it to
Speaker 1: law enforcement like SWAT. He needs another one hundred thousand
Speaker 1: dollars to rebuild the Godlight, renamed the EMR five, which
Speaker 1: he now claims will only cure breast cancer. He wants
Speaker 1: to take it to John's Optics for testing. So well,
Speaker 1: I'm excited for SWAT teams to be using his inventions. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: I do support that. Thanks to that dit compass, they'll
Speaker 1: never get lost at the wrong house again. Could really
Speaker 1: save a lot of lives. That's the problem SWAT teams
Speaker 1: have is poor land nav I think so. I think
Speaker 1: the SWAT team should wear that. Every SWAT team member
Speaker 1: should be forced to wear that barrasuit for everything they do. Yes,
Speaker 1: the only thing SWAT could get due So tragically, Troy
Speaker 1: died in like twenty twelve, I think in a fiery collision. Yeah,
Speaker 1: he drove right into a fuel tanker. Oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very sad. He was fifty four years old old. His
Speaker 1: widow says that he swerved his car or the police
Speaker 1: say that he swerved his car into the pathway of
Speaker 1: the truck. He had been very depressed because he'd encountered
Speaker 1: financial difficulties and had not been able to sell his inventions. Um,
Speaker 1: obviously this is very sad for them. He seems like,
Speaker 1: despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around
Speaker 1: and then yeah, fell on hard times. Um it is.
Speaker 1: It is a depressing end to the story. But Troy
Speaker 1: lives on in the documentary project Grizzly, and in the
Speaker 1: impact he had on all of our hearts, and in
Speaker 1: the memory that you know, even if your dreams are
Speaker 1: are crazy, you should you should try and live them
Speaker 1: because who knows, Maybe maybe you'll develop a suit that
Speaker 1: allows you to fight a Grizzly bar in hand to
Speaker 1: hand combat. Anyway. That's that's this Hero of the Internet episode.
Speaker 1: I hope you all found it edifying. That is that
Speaker 1: is an inspiring, inspiring ringtail Yeah, um, it's it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, he's fucking more of an inventor than Elon
Speaker 1: Musk has been, and he would have been a better
Speaker 1: ruler of Twitter if that's true, was in charge of Twitter.
Speaker 1: He's he's really the last guy from the old error
Speaker 1: of capitalism where you would actually like return your profits
Speaker 1: into into R and D instead of just like paying
Speaker 1: Elon Musk like forty seven million dollars to hire a
Speaker 1: bunch of consultants who also make forty million dollars. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One thing you have to say about Troy is he
Speaker 1: was not He was not in this for the money.
Speaker 1: This was a man who believed more strongly than I
Speaker 1: think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of
Speaker 1: building a suit of armor to fight grisly bears, um
Speaker 1: and whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely,
Speaker 1: absolutely honest in that belief. And I think I'm going
Speaker 1: to end by playing a brief montage of him testing
Speaker 1: out his first version of the armored suit, which looks
Speaker 1: more or less like a set of heavy base ball armor.
Speaker 1: Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a
Speaker 1: baseball helmet or a sorry, a football helmet. In fact,
Speaker 1: I think it just is a football helmet. But yeah,
Speaker 1: here's here's Troy's early tests in nineteen eighty eight. That's
Speaker 1: definitely a ball helmet. That one looks kind of cool.
Speaker 1: That one looks pretty cool too. Yeah, they look increasingly
Speaker 1: space Marini in this period, and he has some range
Speaker 1: of motion, doesn't even have his helmet on, just knocking
Speaker 1: him down with what looked like to buy force. It
Speaker 1: doesn't it does look more. Oh my gosh, he just
Speaker 1: he keeps getting he walks right in the face. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's just amazing. That last one looks super Space
Speaker 1: Marine es. Yeah. Yeah, some of them looked pretty cool. Um,
Speaker 1: And he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing,
Speaker 1: So you got to give him one thing. He knew
Speaker 1: how to make a suit of armor that would not
Speaker 1: get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Hertabes
Speaker 1: like to do. It seems like he was good with
Speaker 1: like with like blunt force trauma armor. Did anyone ever
Speaker 1: do like a CTE skit like test on him every
Speaker 1: dime because this man had a thousand micro head injuries. Absolutely.
Speaker 1: I mean, I think the real lesson here is that
Speaker 1: he was able. He was he was able to continue
Speaker 1: his work thanks to Canadian healthcare. Um, he was probably
Speaker 1: like five percent of the entire Canadian healthcare system budget
Speaker 1: just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's
Speaker 1: the story of Troy Hertabies. I hope you've all found
Speaker 1: it useful. Um, go into the world and if your
Speaker 1: dream is to create a suit of powered armor that
Speaker 1: will allow you to defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat. Then,
Speaker 1: by god, you know, shoot for the stars in a
Speaker 1: world where you end up standing in a two hour
Speaker 1: line to buy mediocre and not climate friendly water. Sorry,
Speaker 1: this is it could happen here. Uh, this is Sophie.
Speaker 1: I really wanted to do that for a really long time.
Speaker 1: Well now I want to watch it. Thank you. Those
Speaker 1: voices you hear are James Stout and Margaret Killjoy and
Speaker 1: we're here. We're here to talk about the water crisis
Speaker 1: that seems to be getting worse and uh, these United States. Yeah, James,
Speaker 1: what's what's it? What's it? What's what's happening? Well? Uh,
Speaker 1: and ever things are happening, right. I think should probably
Speaker 1: emphasize at the start that water contaminants have been affecting
Speaker 1: people outside of like the kind of colonial core for
Speaker 1: a very long time, and legacy corporate media, whatever you
Speaker 1: want to call it, hasn't given it a solitary fuck
Speaker 1: about it until it affected people inside the colonial core.
Speaker 1: So what we're seeing right now is in two places
Speaker 1: East I believe it's pronounced Palestine, right, I believe so too, Yeah, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: East Palestine, Ohio, And in Philadelphia. I believe it's pronounced
Speaker 1: phil A Delphia. Okay, they did like someone's name, like Phil.
Speaker 1: It was named for Phil a Delphia. The founder of
Speaker 1: the city, phil from Delphia, like the oracle. I see ye,
Speaker 1: he predicted that one day there would be a spill
Speaker 1: from a POC chemical plant near the Delaware River, and
Speaker 1: famously he was right. We've they built a city there anyway. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: and they for years they've been so angry about not
Speaker 1: having a chemical plant. They've just climb lamppost and thrown
Speaker 1: batteries at a boating football teams. Yeah. And I feel
Speaker 1: really good about starting with such heavy jokes about this thing. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's three million people, I think anyway. Yeah, if you're
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia, we don't want to express solidarity with you,
Speaker 1: I guess as you wonder what the fuck to do
Speaker 1: about your water supply, which is currently contaminated, as we understand,
Speaker 1: by something called beautiful acrelate, which is a chemical that
Speaker 1: is found in paint. And the reason that there was
Speaker 1: a paint chemical in your drinking water if you live
Speaker 1: in Philadelphia, is that a PLC manufacturing chemical plant called
Speaker 1: I think it's trinso tr I n SEO had a leak,
Speaker 1: and that leak, when it's a storm drain, that storm
Speaker 1: drain went into the Delaware River, and that river feeds
Speaker 1: into the Samuel s backs to water treatment plant, and
Speaker 1: obviously that water treatment aren't feeds into the tap that
Speaker 1: you turn on to drink water when you live in
Speaker 1: your house. And this has, as it always does, when
Speaker 1: there are like these somewhat bungled announcements of chemical contamination
Speaker 1: in drinking water cause people to rush out to buy
Speaker 1: bottled water, which is an understandable response if you think
Speaker 1: you're not going to be able to drink water, which
Speaker 1: is caused people to wait in long lines to access
Speaker 1: sometimes like a limited supply of water. And what we
Speaker 1: wanted to talk about today a little bit was not
Speaker 1: so much like what to do if you're in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: right now, but how we can better prepare to be
Speaker 1: ready for water emergencies, water shortage, is water contamination, things
Speaker 1: like that, which is why Margaret has joined us because
Speaker 1: she is the prepper anarchist queen and knows a lot
Speaker 1: about these things. So yeah, Margaret, should we I think
Speaker 1: you said you wanted to break us down by like
Speaker 1: bad things. It could be in your water and things
Speaker 1: you can do to get those bad things away, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: although I will say only a minority of this information
Speaker 1: directly relates to people who are dealing with toxic chemical spills.
Speaker 1: So if we're I have a lot of information about
Speaker 1: general water safety, it's long term storage of water, things
Speaker 1: that you don't want in your water, how to get
Speaker 1: those things out of your water, And I know you
Speaker 1: have a lot of experience with that stuff too. But
Speaker 1: the very specific thing that people first in Ohio and
Speaker 1: now in Pennsylvania are dealing with u of chemical stuff
Speaker 1: is worse than other stuff and way harder to get out,
Speaker 1: especially on a DIY level. So I don't know what
Speaker 1: what feels best like, should we do an overview or
Speaker 1: should we try and first talk about the chemical stuff
Speaker 1: and then talk about like the fun easy stuff like
Speaker 1: not getting giardio when you're camping. Yeah, let's maybe start
Speaker 1: out with the kind of this is the scary you know,
Speaker 1: you can't buy a lifestrole for this fear first, fun later. Yeah,
Speaker 1: people might be listening, I mean it might be afraid
Speaker 1: of They might be concerned that they might be in
Speaker 1: one of these places. Right, Flint, Michigan. What we still
Speaker 1: haven't fucking fixed the water. Yeah, and so yeah, let's
Speaker 1: start fucking Flint, Michigan. What a just disastrous incompetence. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean yeah, it's it's extremely sad that the country
Speaker 1: that is as rich as any country has ever managed
Speaker 1: to be in human history is still poisoning people with water.
Speaker 1: But yeah, let's start with that. Let's let's start with
Speaker 1: what to do when you get a reverse nine or
Speaker 1: one phone call telling you know, to drink from your tap.
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, going out and getting bottled water was
Speaker 1: the right move. Or also, since people did have a
Speaker 1: heads up that their tap water was safe for a
Speaker 1: period of time, storing water in various containers is the
Speaker 1: right move, because once your water is contaminated with chemicals,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to get it out. The main method
Speaker 1: that well on an industrial scale, the thing that someone
Speaker 1: can use the way they treat wastewater with beautifle as late.
Speaker 1: I didn't write down the name in my notes. Acrelate,
Speaker 1: Oh like acrylic, that makes sense, slate text paint. It's
Speaker 1: something called a fluidized bed reactor, which frankly I did
Speaker 1: not know about until I started doing this specific research
Speaker 1: for this specific chemical People who are like more at
Speaker 1: a high science level will know more about this. This
Speaker 1: is basically like you're using different bacteria to eat and
Speaker 1: I don't know, fucking clean out this shit. This is
Speaker 1: not what's going to be happening in your kitchen sink
Speaker 1: anytime soon. This is not going to be a part
Speaker 1: of your bread of filter anytime soon, ironically, And this
Speaker 1: is not how am I going to say this. Don't
Speaker 1: drink this chemical water if you have any possibility, right,
Speaker 1: if you can get other water, do that. And I
Speaker 1: believe in our current society it is a better and
Speaker 1: safer bet to get water from elsewhere. If you were
Speaker 1: in some situation, which I suspect most people are not.
Speaker 1: I suspect most people could access supply lines. If you're
Speaker 1: in some situation where the only water available to you
Speaker 1: has this these types of chemicals in it, the most
Speaker 1: likely guess about a way to deal with it is
Speaker 1: activated carbon charcoal and is actually the home filters that
Speaker 1: a lot of people use. Is your Britta filter, is
Speaker 1: your burkey, although I'll talk some shit on burkey in
Speaker 1: a little bit, and and when we go over the
Speaker 1: more like nitty greedy details about each filtration method. Maybe
Speaker 1: we can we can talk more about this, but basically
Speaker 1: it is like it is not tested to do this.
Speaker 1: No one has ever been like, man, what if we
Speaker 1: get a bunch of budle accrelate in our water, will
Speaker 1: our britta filter it out? No one is running tests
Speaker 1: on this because it is not a thing that normally
Speaker 1: is in the water historically, although clearly it is often
Speaker 1: in the water now. However, the method of filtration of
Speaker 1: the various home level acts various home level methods of
Speaker 1: filtration adsorption is what it's called with a D instead
Speaker 1: of a B, is the method that is perceived as
Speaker 1: most effective at reducing chemicals in water. However, again we're
Speaker 1: talking about like maybe this reduces some chemicals, maybe not.
Speaker 1: Oh you run this through this and now you're fine. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's there's a lot of things that could get no
Speaker 1: water right that we don't really have like any any
Speaker 1: like decent research on how to get them out of
Speaker 1: a Yeah. So, Margaret James, is there is there a say,
Speaker 1: say you're not living in a place where you get
Speaker 1: a text letting you know that in Tuesday at three
Speaker 1: pm your water will not be safe to drink, which
Speaker 1: is really just is there a home testing kit or
Speaker 1: a water testing kit that that is accessible for for
Speaker 1: most individuals, or what resources can people use to understand
Speaker 1: their water at home? Could you want to I'm not
Speaker 1: really going to trust the government on that, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: And Margaret, do you want to take that I only
Speaker 1: know about I do not know about testing for beautiless accrelate.
Speaker 1: I think that this is the kind of thing that
Speaker 1: they are not people are not prepared for, like at
Speaker 1: a society level, I don't know. I believe I could
Speaker 1: be wrong. All of the water testing that I have
Speaker 1: done has tended to be around like I live on
Speaker 1: a well, right, and so there's a lot of testing
Speaker 1: things that are available to tell you the acidity of
Speaker 1: your water, the hardness of your water, which is how
Speaker 1: how many dissolved minerals, whether or not your water contains
Speaker 1: things like lead and arsnic heavy metals which we'll talk
Speaker 1: about in a little bit, and also bacteria, right like
Speaker 1: all of the stuff that we normally prepare to filter
Speaker 1: out of water. There are home tests available to you
Speaker 1: that you can use to determine. UM. I don't know,
Speaker 1: and I wish I had done more research ahead of time.
Speaker 1: There's like some talk about like possible smells and stuff,
Speaker 1: um for some of these, but I don't feel confident. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I know there's the ewg's like website where
Speaker 1: you can put in your your your zip code and
Speaker 1: get more information on if there's been contamination or anything
Speaker 1: like that, but like that's you know, reported things, not
Speaker 1: necessarily on an individual level for testing. Um. Yeah, I'd
Speaker 1: definitely do that. Anytime I have moved anywhere, I'll type
Speaker 1: in my zip code and then I go, ah, that
Speaker 1: sounds bad. Um, I don't like that. But yeah, you
Speaker 1: can find out, you know, once you put in you
Speaker 1: can find out who who, Like you put in your
Speaker 1: zip code on this is just ewg dot org. You
Speaker 1: put in your zip code and you can put who
Speaker 1: you pay for water, and then it goes in and
Speaker 1: it tells you. You know, it's really it's really fun.
Speaker 1: Four In my mind, I read four you Health Guidelines
Speaker 1: fourteen contaminants. Oh yes, yeah, I think a combination of
Speaker 1: two is probably your best bet, Like unless you happen
Speaker 1: to our laboratory, like because there's stuff coming like if
Speaker 1: there is like lead like in between the water mains
Speaker 1: and or like you know, wherever the EDWD is getting
Speaker 1: its information and your tap. Then you're still risking like
Speaker 1: heavy metal contaminants, right, or if you're on a well,
Speaker 1: you should test that it. I think it's every year, right,
Speaker 1: you're supposed to test your well water. I probably should.
Speaker 1: You know, you'll be fine, you'll know. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: think it's important that, like you, I have definitely got
Speaker 1: super sick from water that looks super clear, had no odor,
Speaker 1: looked fine, And I have drunk from turbit as fuck
Speaker 1: stagnant water and not been sick. Like your nose is
Speaker 1: not going to tell you, and you do need some
Speaker 1: kind of help. Yeah, let's talk about storing water first,
Speaker 1: and then we'll talk about the more sort of established
Speaker 1: solutions for the more expected contaminants. I guess, Yeah, how
Speaker 1: would you go about let's say you're not in Philadelphia
Speaker 1: right now and you want to prepare for something that
Speaker 1: could happen in your area, how would you go about
Speaker 1: storing water? So the easiest ways that you go get
Speaker 1: bottled water, if it is sealed and you keep it
Speaker 1: out of the sun, you keep it out of the heat,
Speaker 1: even though you're it's supposedly good for a year or
Speaker 1: two whatever. I feel like, really nervous on this, like,
Speaker 1: this is what's safe, even though it's not safe, right,
Speaker 1: but you can. Water itself doesn't go bad. That is
Speaker 1: a thing that is worth understanding. Left to its own devices,
Speaker 1: water does not go bad. Water goes bad when there's
Speaker 1: like something in it that replicates, like bacteria or something
Speaker 1: like that, or when something leaks into it. The main
Speaker 1: reason that you want to keep your water out of
Speaker 1: the sun and out of the heat is because if
Speaker 1: you're storing it in plastic, that can eventually kind of
Speaker 1: lead each into it as the plastic degrades, and that
Speaker 1: I don't know, there's probably long term health effects. But
Speaker 1: like I would drink a water bottle that has been
Speaker 1: in the backseat of my car for a year before
Speaker 1: I would drink beautile acrelate water, and which is I mean,
Speaker 1: it's I guess that's just plastic or plastic pick your poison.
Speaker 1: But but yeah, so bottled water is generally very safe
Speaker 1: and it is sealed and it has no particular reason
Speaker 1: to go bad. You don't want to store it next
Speaker 1: to kerosene or gasoline. Like if you are the kind
Speaker 1: of person who keeps five gallon jug of gasoline around,
Speaker 1: you want that in a different place than your water.
Speaker 1: Usually you want the gasoline outside your house and outbuilding.
Speaker 1: Everyone lives on acreage in the rural areas the country, right,
Speaker 1: so many outbuildings around here. Yeah, everyone's outbuildings. Just go
Speaker 1: out to my urban bond, Yeah exactly, So okay, Well, okay.
Speaker 1: Then the other thing, if I'm actually preparing go out
Speaker 1: and get some five gallon Jerry cans. You're going to
Speaker 1: pay between twenty and fifty dollars, and you'll get a
Speaker 1: little bit of different quality depending on that. You want
Speaker 1: something that is BPA free, you want something that is opaque,
Speaker 1: and you want something that is like not really bigger
Speaker 1: than four or five gallons because it's clumsy and unwieldy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You also don't want to stack these things unless they
Speaker 1: specifically say this one is stackable to such and such depth.
Speaker 1: Like most stackable containers are also only stackable one or
Speaker 1: two high, well two or three high, and I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean, like frankly, on some level, that's what there is, okay,
Speaker 1: And if you're going to fill your own water containers.
Speaker 1: There are a couple weird things about it. One people
Speaker 1: argue about how often you should rotate it. I rotate
Speaker 1: in mind about once a year. You should theoretically rotate
Speaker 1: them somewhere between six months and a year or something
Speaker 1: like that, depending on how you store it. The other
Speaker 1: thing is that if you are I actually think living
Speaker 1: off of well, you should probably rotate it more often.
Speaker 1: If you're on municipal water, don't run it through your
Speaker 1: britta before you store it, because that britta is going
Speaker 1: to pull out all the chlorine, all the bleach, and
Speaker 1: people are like, whoa, I don't want to drink bleach.
Speaker 1: I listen to that punk song Dead Dead milkman, um whatever.
Speaker 1: People don't want to drink bleach? Right, you actually do
Speaker 1: want to drink tiny amounts of bleach. You want Tunico
Speaker 1: medical solution. Yeah, it keeps bacteria from growing. So if
Speaker 1: you filter out all of that and then you put
Speaker 1: it the water in the thing, if there's the tiniest
Speaker 1: little bacteria that got through, it's like sweet, the defenses
Speaker 1: are down, you know. Um so, But yeah, honestly, story
Speaker 1: and water like people like they're going to sell you
Speaker 1: lots of products, and like prepper sites are full of
Speaker 1: people selling you shit. But it's just a matter of
Speaker 1: like finding containers and filling them with water and then
Speaker 1: rotating them every now and then, and it's not actually
Speaker 1: that big of a deal or super complicated. That's my
Speaker 1: take on it. Um. I used to live off of
Speaker 1: I used to live entirely off grid and then had
Speaker 1: to just drink water out of fifty gallon drums, and
Speaker 1: I just I didn't even you know what, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to say how bad my practices were because I
Speaker 1: don't want anyone to emulate me. I was gonna say,
Speaker 1: if you're like, if you're storing on a scale, I
Speaker 1: don't know why they'd say you live on a compound
Speaker 1: in the desert. You know you can get big water tanks, right,
Speaker 1: I'm just looking at moving out to the desert a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago. I didn't, but yeah, you can
Speaker 1: get big water tanks are pretty cheap. You should. I'm
Speaker 1: placed about a dollar a gallon. Last time I looked
Speaker 1: for like a fifteen hundred gallon tank. Yeah, I found
Speaker 1: them cheap, like GOV sp plus ones as well, pretty often.
Speaker 1: Oh really, Yeah, we'll talk later. Yeah, yeah, Well I'll
Speaker 1: send you some send you some links, but you might
Speaker 1: want to check it places you actually can't legally have
Speaker 1: those it's getting better now with that stuff, but you
Speaker 1: do want to check on that. I think if you're
Speaker 1: or you could get like a water buffalo, which is
Speaker 1: an industrial device for shipping water. You can probably pick
Speaker 1: up those pretty cheap. It's an animal. I don't want to.
Speaker 1: Don't dehumanize it calling it an industrial machine. It's an animal.
Speaker 1: It has feelings, Yeah, it does. And you just keep
Speaker 1: that in your backyard and then well that is is
Speaker 1: attack anyone who comes after your water. So it's quite effective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: they are toughest nails. I've had some brunners with buffalo animals. Okay,
Speaker 1: another thing, I guess that like, if you're like going
Speaker 1: hardcore on this and storing thousands of guyans of water,
Speaker 1: maybe you could invested something like a chlorine maker, and
Speaker 1: that way, if you do like mess up with your storage,
Speaker 1: I guess that that could maybe give you some leeway
Speaker 1: in terms of purifying afterwards. It's out fair to say, Margaret, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that makes sense. Like chlorine maker is the
Speaker 1: next step up from basically because like bleach itself does
Speaker 1: go bad and it's not shelf stable for I don't
Speaker 1: remember how long it lasts. It's not indefinitely shelf stable,
Speaker 1: and so people often, especially in places of that, access
Speaker 1: to clean water and stuff. I will say, though, when
Speaker 1: we get into it, chemical treatment is really good for
Speaker 1: the main stuff that people normally worry about, such as protozoa, bacteria,
Speaker 1: and viruses. But once again, isn't going to do shit
Speaker 1: for some stuff that goes bad? Yeah? I think it might.
Speaker 1: There's one thing, maybe cryptosporidian. There's something that chlorine specifically
Speaker 1: doesn't work for. Oh, that's right. Actually, yeah, it's actually
Speaker 1: not very good at protozoa. It's weirdly good at viruses,
Speaker 1: and then whereas most of the filters are not good
Speaker 1: at viruses and are good at bacteria and protozoa. So
Speaker 1: we should probably explain these different things right right, ways
Speaker 1: you can treat your water. Okay, there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff that you can be in your water you don't
Speaker 1: wish was in the water. The one that is like
Speaker 1: kind of off the top of my head, the one
Speaker 1: that I think about the most because if I had
Speaker 1: to deal with it, it sucked our protozoa. The two
Speaker 1: big one are Giardia and Cryptospuridium. And these are tiny
Speaker 1: little animals in the water. If you can look at
Speaker 1: pictures of them, they're really cute, and they make you
Speaker 1: shit a lot forever, sometimes until you die, mostly immunocompromise folks,
Speaker 1: but everyone really unhappy. And if you're in a survival
Speaker 1: situation already, diarrhea is like no laughing matter. Your inability
Speaker 1: to keep in fluids and nutrients will dramatically affect your
Speaker 1: your chance of survival. So that's protozoa. They are the
Speaker 1: biggest of these things and therefore sort of the easiest
Speaker 1: to actually don't whether they're bigger in bacteria or not.
Speaker 1: Then there's bacteria, which it can also be in water
Speaker 1: and do bad stuff to you. And then there's viruses,
Speaker 1: and viruses can be in the water and do bad
Speaker 1: stuff to you. Largely in the United States, and people
Speaker 1: don't worry about viruses and water, and that's not because
Speaker 1: our heads are in the sand. It's because we don't
Speaker 1: have as many viruses in our water. Then there's chemicals
Speaker 1: you could have in your water. We don't like them.
Speaker 1: There's dirt that can be in your water, which is
Speaker 1: just like not fun. There's heavy metals like lead and
Speaker 1: iron that can have deliterious effects on your health. Some
Speaker 1: people want to get water hardening minerals like calcium and
Speaker 1: magnesium out of their water, but you actually don't want
Speaker 1: to get rid of all of them. That's the catch.
Speaker 1: That's what we're gonna have to talk about, because your
Speaker 1: body wants some of those things. They mostly just like
Speaker 1: make your house has all the all the plumbing brakes.
Speaker 1: That's like the main stuff. There's also things like nitrates
Speaker 1: that I don't understand well enough to talk about how
Speaker 1: we get rid of things. The most common way that
Speaker 1: like backpackers and stuff who are a lot of the
Speaker 1: people who diy this on a regular basis use is
Speaker 1: something called filtration, or I'm going to call filtration. First
Speaker 1: use you screen your water as in, you get out
Speaker 1: the large chunks usually people use like a bandana or
Speaker 1: a sock or just some piece of cloth, right, and
Speaker 1: you want to use that so you're not gumming up
Speaker 1: your filter, and then it goes into something where it's
Speaker 1: forced through a membrane with micropores. These used to be ceramic,
Speaker 1: but these days they're like a bunch of tiny little
Speaker 1: tubes like the internet, and most of these are basically
Speaker 1: la tubes have holes in them that are so small
Speaker 1: that it stops protozoa and bacteria from going through it.
Speaker 1: That is, it's like main claim to fame. It is
Speaker 1: very effective at it. Now that they're not ceramic, you
Speaker 1: don't have to clean it like every fucking gallon. And
Speaker 1: these are really good top brands that I am not
Speaker 1: sponsored by our sawyer and life straw. They're going to
Speaker 1: use slightly different methods. People have opinions about them. I'm
Speaker 1: not going to offer mine right now. And they're measured
Speaker 1: in the size of the holes. Anything that's like one
Speaker 1: micron is small enough to stop most protozoa. Most of
Speaker 1: these ones are either point one or point two. These
Speaker 1: don't block viruses, so they make ones that have even
Speaker 1: smaller holes that can deal with viruses. And this also
Speaker 1: blocks microplastics, but you know whatever. Then there's chemical treatment.
Speaker 1: Chemical treatment. The two most common ones are bleach chlorine
Speaker 1: or iodine. And there's also like chemical tablets that you
Speaker 1: can buy that are like worth keeping around. They weigh
Speaker 1: almost nothing. Whatever. Um, I am not going to give
Speaker 1: you the chart of how much bleached to add your water,
Speaker 1: and don't just go listen to me and add bleach
Speaker 1: to your water. Fucking look it up. Do not use
Speaker 1: color safe bleach. Do not use scented bleach. It's just
Speaker 1: disinfected bleach, which will probably either come in six percent
Speaker 1: or eight point two five percent sodium hypochlorite chlorite. Um
Speaker 1: and sounds so growths just that those commination. Yeah, what
Speaker 1: do they sent it with the blood of I don't know.
Speaker 1: I got yeah, poisoned something that sounds so gross. I
Speaker 1: used to wear lavender all the time. I actually I
Speaker 1: stopped for two reasons. First, I stopped when I was
Speaker 1: in college because like my girlfriend was like, you smell
Speaker 1: like soap and was like really mad at me. Um,
Speaker 1: if you're listening whatever, I don't care. And then I
Speaker 1: stopped get what in Margaret go on Off's good look
Speaker 1: at me now? Yeah, thanks for turning me on the
Speaker 1: lots of cool stuff. Um, that was much healthier than
Speaker 1: I would have been. I'm proud of you. And then uh,
Speaker 1: um the other reason I stopped wearing lavenders. That attracts
Speaker 1: ticks if you're out in the out in the woods.
Speaker 1: Um anyway, okay, so that's chemical treatment. Chemical treatment is
Speaker 1: really good for bacteria and viruses. It's not great for parasites.
Speaker 1: It is a really good backup system. Right. Um, actually
Speaker 1: I'll go over the fucking king of all of them
Speaker 1: for for bacteria, bas and parasites. You want to get
Speaker 1: rid of it, you fucking boil your water. Um. The
Speaker 1: like classic way to deal with it is you boil
Speaker 1: your water and it only needs to get above sixty
Speaker 1: degrees celsius, which is like one hundred and forty something
Speaker 1: in regular human um. And I actually don't know the conversion.
Speaker 1: I actually know when you're talking about fahrenheit. Okay, fahrenheit
Speaker 1: is really good about humans because zero is cold and
Speaker 1: a hundred is hot. Yes, celsius is really good about
Speaker 1: for water. So we're we actually are talking about water
Speaker 1: right now. So celsius is the proper scale because it
Speaker 1: goes from zero is freezing to one hundred is boiling. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: go ahead, Yeah, it's uh, you know what we should
Speaker 1: do before before we talk fother about water? Do you
Speaker 1: know what will not make you shot yourself to death?
Speaker 1: H Reagan coins? Yeah, it probably is Ronald Reagan coins. Again.
Speaker 1: All right, we thank you very much, Uncle ron for
Speaker 1: continuing to pay for my healthcare and insulin needs. So, Margaret,
Speaker 1: we were we were talking about boiling. Fuck boiling water.
Speaker 1: That's it. Yeah, yeah, so how long do we need
Speaker 1: to boil stuff for? Change? Depending on what we got.
Speaker 1: It does but not really, it's like all of the
Speaker 1: main and do do the actual instructions. Overkill is better
Speaker 1: than regular get killed, right, um, but most shit dies
Speaker 1: off at sixty degrees celsius, which is below the boiling
Speaker 1: point of water even at high elevation. However, basically the
Speaker 1: deal is at you want to boil water for one
Speaker 1: minute at sea level three minutes above five thousand feet
Speaker 1: um or five kilometer. No wait, no, go on, it's
Speaker 1: not a thousand feet okay, um and yeah, so so
Speaker 1: boiling water is actually the one of the main things
Speaker 1: you can do. It doesn't get rid of everything. It
Speaker 1: gets rid of those three things protozoa, bacteria, and viruses
Speaker 1: very effectively. And that is most of the time what
Speaker 1: most people are treating water for. A lot of the
Speaker 1: other stuff is like long term health effects like heavy
Speaker 1: metals and chemicals, right yea. Other methods that you can use.
Speaker 1: The other like kind of gold standard, which isn't as
Speaker 1: good as it seems like it should be, is distillation.
Speaker 1: Distillation gets out lots of stuff. Distillation is basically you
Speaker 1: evaporate the water and then let it run down into
Speaker 1: another container. You're moonshining your own water, and and you
Speaker 1: can do this DIY fairly well. And there's like solar
Speaker 1: stills that are really cool. I've never actually built one,
Speaker 1: I've always wanted to. The downside is if you'd live
Speaker 1: off of distilled water for a long time, it gets
Speaker 1: out the magnesium and the calcium, It gets out the
Speaker 1: minerals that you actually want in your water, so it
Speaker 1: can have negative effects on your long term health if
Speaker 1: you only drink distilled water. The main thing that distillation
Speaker 1: does that I think no other method on this does
Speaker 1: besides a reverse osmosis, which I'm not really going to
Speaker 1: get into, is it desalinates water. Go ahead. That's a
Speaker 1: big deal, right because like if we look at long
Speaker 1: term water insecurity, like certainly where I live, we live
Speaker 1: in a place where people like to play golf in
Speaker 1: the desert and that has become an issue as far
Speaker 1: as water supplies go, and so desalination is often proposed.
Speaker 1: It's like a way to deal with our water crisis
Speaker 1: in California and the fact that the Colorado River is
Speaker 1: getting lower and lower and we rely on it. But
Speaker 1: like you said, lots of these methods aren't going to
Speaker 1: pull the salt out of water, right, didn't let you
Speaker 1: drink seawater, right, But this one does. And so I mean, actually,
Speaker 1: I don't really care about the health of golf course.
Speaker 1: I have actually negative feelings about the health of golf courses.
Speaker 1: But theoretically, maybe water in your lawn with the desalinated
Speaker 1: distilled water and then drinking the water that actually has
Speaker 1: minerals in it. But then again, like maybe the plants
Speaker 1: need that shit too, I don't fucking no. So, And
Speaker 1: in distillation, it's very good at getting out heavy metals
Speaker 1: also like iron and lead, and it the reason it
Speaker 1: gets out the bacteria and viruses. It's not because they
Speaker 1: can evaporate, but because they die getting boiled because you
Speaker 1: boiled distill. Yeah, and some pesticides are filtered out if
Speaker 1: their boiling point is greater than the boiling point of water.
Speaker 1: Benzene and too lean which I don't know what is.
Speaker 1: I don't know too lean is. These are examples of
Speaker 1: things that do not get distilled out. Then there's a
Speaker 1: couple more. There's absorption adsorption rules. This is the thing
Speaker 1: that I always misspell and so that's why I emphasize
Speaker 1: the ad absorption, and I don't really understand. Go ahead,
Speaker 1: how do we adsorb? Is that just like absorption with adverts?
Speaker 1: You know? It's like, yeah, it's like I took three
Speaker 1: years of ladin and all I remember is that ad
Speaker 1: means towards, an ab means away from, and maybe a
Speaker 1: gorkoli is either farmer or farmhouse. Yeah, I got poor
Speaker 1: poor sums suma aramat aramasama sartta. I remember that one. Now, Yeah, great, Yeah,
Speaker 1: there you go. You've something today. Yeah. I wish that
Speaker 1: my school had made me take Spanish instead of letting
Speaker 1: me take some bullshit like Latin. H Yeah, exactly. So
Speaker 1: adsorption is good for pesticides, heavy medicals, heavy metals, chemicals, viruses,
Speaker 1: and bad tastes. It's the only one of these things
Speaker 1: that I'm aware of that actually use can get rid
Speaker 1: of bad taste because this is pulling out all the
Speaker 1: weird stuff in the water. And what it is is
Speaker 1: it uses activated carbon, which is basically just some shit
Speaker 1: that's fucking burned and then crunched up real small. It
Speaker 1: is a huge surface area because it's like little powder, right, Um,
Speaker 1: and then the water passes through it, and then by
Speaker 1: some weird science shit, the bad stuff tends to stick
Speaker 1: to the carbon um. This is great. This is what
Speaker 1: your bread of filter does. This is what you're b
Speaker 1: key does. This is what you're pure filter does. It
Speaker 1: It's not as good, I believe for bacteria and stuff,
Speaker 1: and specifically the biggest problem with these things is that
Speaker 1: bacteria can grow on them, and so some people, I mean,
Speaker 1: that's why you replace it every so often. It's not
Speaker 1: because it's like slow or clogged. It's like literally unhealthy.
Speaker 1: And so sometimes what people do is they treat for
Speaker 1: bacteria with UV or some other method, bleach whatever, all
Speaker 1: the other shit that we talked about. We haven't talked
Speaker 1: about u V yet. After it goes to the carbon filter.
Speaker 1: I'm really excited about like kind of learning more about
Speaker 1: these because you can theoretically diy carbon right, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're definitely could, right. I know that it's not the
Speaker 1: same as this, but one of the things you can
Speaker 1: do if you're in the back country is that if
Speaker 1: you have water with a lot of turbidity, which is
Speaker 1: stuff in the water, right, if you can't see through
Speaker 1: the water, you know, if it's got a lot of cloudiness.
Speaker 1: You can use white ash from a fire and that
Speaker 1: will increase the rate of which it deposits a sediment
Speaker 1: if you see what I mean. So you interesting because yeah,
Speaker 1: it sticks to it and then slowly filters through the
Speaker 1: bottom of them. I think the gold standard is a loom,
Speaker 1: which is something using canning. Okay, that increases it even quicker.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you can use white ash from a fire
Speaker 1: if you're dealing with I think that's I don't think
Speaker 1: that's activated coup but I think that's a different mechanism. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I don't know. UM. And then one of the methods
Speaker 1: that is actually mostly done on an industrial scale that
Speaker 1: actually is like I think the main way that people
Speaker 1: filter water in this world is through sand, and I
Speaker 1: didn't do enough research about um. There's both slow sand
Speaker 1: filters and fast sand filters, and some of them like
Speaker 1: literally depend on certain bacteria, good bacteria, like having a
Speaker 1: healthy culture of them that like eat the bad stuff
Speaker 1: and things. I used to know more about that than
Speaker 1: I do currently. And then the last one I'm going
Speaker 1: to cover, Okay, then those reverse osmosis, which you might
Speaker 1: have a kitchen thing that does and it also removes minerals.
Speaker 1: It's a very effective method of filtering out lots of stuff.
Speaker 1: It also, I don't know, causes wastewater, and it's complicated
Speaker 1: in some ways. And then there's UV disinfection, and this
Speaker 1: is like one of the ones that gets touted as
Speaker 1: this like this is going to save the developing world
Speaker 1: or whatever, right, And UV disinfection is cool and good.
Speaker 1: Basically it uses UV light to kill off bacteria, parasites,
Speaker 1: and viruses. Again, these three things that are the main
Speaker 1: things people are usually going for. The biggest downside of
Speaker 1: UV disinfection, there's two of them. One is that it
Speaker 1: requires low turbidity water. Thanks for introducing that term clear water.
Speaker 1: It has to be fairly clear water because it's about light, right,
Speaker 1: this makes sense, and because you have to be careful
Speaker 1: to do it right, you just have to like actually
Speaker 1: get all of it with all of it. Yeah, So
Speaker 1: this is why I haven't, like, for a moment, I
Speaker 1: got really excited about these things, and then in the
Speaker 1: end I was like, I like my water filter that
Speaker 1: I already have. Yeah, I think with UV filteration as well,
Speaker 1: it's been big and the outdoor world kind of relatively recently.
Speaker 1: You have to be conscious of storing it in a
Speaker 1: opaque container afterwards because the bacteria can UV like reactivate.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I f that's like any of it that
Speaker 1: it doesn't get is like fuck, yeah, it's my time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it stops them reproducing. That's how it interested in there.
Speaker 1: But they don't so it doesn't really matter. You drink
Speaker 1: them and then you pass them through your system and
Speaker 1: it's fine, but if they reproduce, that's when you get sick.
Speaker 1: So somehow they can UV reactivate. So like if you
Speaker 1: have a you know, the classic like like through hiking thing,
Speaker 1: it's to use a smart water bottle, right because it's cheaping,
Speaker 1: it's dirty, and but if you are UV filtering and
Speaker 1: then traveling in your smart water bottle and then putting
Speaker 1: that in the back of your pack and hiking all day,
Speaker 1: you might get some difficulty. So yeah, I know it's
Speaker 1: not Yeah, I haven't really messed with it much, like like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I have my comfortable setup and that's what I'd like
Speaker 1: to use. And I will say that something that people
Speaker 1: who don't go camping much might not be aware of.
Speaker 1: There's almost nowhere in the United States that you can
Speaker 1: be confidently drink wild water without it without risking something
Speaker 1: like giardia. Um, there are places where you can directly
Speaker 1: from a spring is the most likely to be good. Um.
Speaker 1: People used to say that you can you can drink
Speaker 1: high elevation water if you're up in an alpine area
Speaker 1: because there's like no calves or whatever, because like Giardia,
Speaker 1: and I believe also crypto, but I'm um the other
Speaker 1: poop transferred crypto, the cryptosparodia, not the not the multi
Speaker 1: level marketing scam. Um. They it's it's passed in the
Speaker 1: fecal oral tradition. What's the word here, Uh, there's a
Speaker 1: word here for yeah pathway Yeah, and so um, because
Speaker 1: it's passed that way. It's like basically the fact that
Speaker 1: there's livestyle everywhere is the reason that's not safe to
Speaker 1: drink the water. And so people are like, oh, if
Speaker 1: you go up high enough, you're safe. But there's still
Speaker 1: animals up there, and there's also like more and more
Speaker 1: hikers up there. Almost anywhere you're going to be hiking,
Speaker 1: someone else is hiked, and someone else is hiked, and
Speaker 1: they have drank the water without filtering it because they're
Speaker 1: not thinking properly. And then they've shit in not in
Speaker 1: a hole, but just shit somewhere on the ground because
Speaker 1: they're also a bad person in that way. Yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: And so they've like tested a while ago at in
Speaker 1: the high Sierras that there's giardia everywhere, which doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: mean it's going to make you sick, but it can
Speaker 1: make you sick. So it's just like worth knowing that.
Speaker 1: This is the reason that backpackers know so much about
Speaker 1: water filtration, although again they don't know as much about
Speaker 1: chemicals filtration, which is why I had to go and
Speaker 1: learn more about that, less because I'm a backpacker and
Speaker 1: more because they used to live off grid. But yeah,
Speaker 1: they're different, Like like there there are definitely a lot
Speaker 1: of products out there that are very affordable that work
Speaker 1: for like that specific specifically the giardia concern, right, which
Speaker 1: is one that most people have, And that's probably if
Speaker 1: you're like if you're in a place where you hear
Speaker 1: there's industrial water contamination and you go to RII and
Speaker 1: you buy a sawyer make a tap filter, for instance,
Speaker 1: it just clamps onto your tap. It probably won't work
Speaker 1: for the stuff that you're concerned about, but it will
Speaker 1: work if you're yeah, off a while, then you have
Speaker 1: garda or something. Yeah, And it also won't work for
Speaker 1: like lead, which is one of the reasons why the
Speaker 1: carbon filters are the more common ones at home, because
Speaker 1: city water that is a higher you know, if you
Speaker 1: live in some cities, you're gonna have lead in your water, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because we used it in pipes for decades. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: I don't know. Oh, let's talk shit on Burkey's really quick. Yeah,
Speaker 1: let's do it. What's up with Burkey? Why are they bad? So?
Speaker 1: I was like, I personally the other day after this thing,
Speaker 1: because that's my fun joy of being a prepper is
Speaker 1: going to Twitter and being like, here's what I know
Speaker 1: about that thing. You know, whenever a thing happens while
Speaker 1: like safe on my mountain top and drinking out of
Speaker 1: my well, which whatever has its own problems, I'll take
Speaker 1: those problems anyway, Okay. So so I post about this
Speaker 1: and then I pointed out that like, overall, there's like
Speaker 1: the different filters that you can have her home, and
Speaker 1: then the only one that seems to sort of do
Speaker 1: it all is the Burkey. It's this very expensive brand.
Speaker 1: You've probably seen them in your hippie friend's house, or
Speaker 1: you're the hippie and there's one in your house, there's
Speaker 1: one in my house. And it's a big silver canister
Speaker 1: that looks like it comes from the fifties or whatever,
Speaker 1: and and it's a filter, and it's somehow filters more
Speaker 1: than everything else. And the way that it does that
Speaker 1: is by lying or rather, I don't know what using
Speaker 1: the way. Yeah, the way it does it is it
Speaker 1: says it can do these things, and it is not
Speaker 1: certified to the what is it a NSF slash ANCI
Speaker 1: standard that all of your other filters are testing themselves too.
Speaker 1: So everyone else is saying we have passed this following certification,
Speaker 1: and Burkey is saying, oh, we tested, and it does
Speaker 1: all the stuff. All the other ones probably do kind
Speaker 1: of all the stuff too, but the only things that
Speaker 1: they're actually certified to do or what they say they do.
Speaker 1: And so Burkey basically charges a mint in exchange for
Speaker 1: using their own testing standards instead of the testing standards
Speaker 1: of other people independent testers. Google Burkey wire cutter and
Speaker 1: you'll find a good article that where people conducted a
Speaker 1: bunch of tests. And it's a shame because it would
Speaker 1: be nice to have this sort of all in one
Speaker 1: filter because it's very annoying. If you want to filter
Speaker 1: something out of your water, you have to go, Okay,
Speaker 1: what's in my water that I don't want? And then
Speaker 1: you have to go find the filter for that, and
Speaker 1: it's not going to be the same as the other filter.
Speaker 1: Is not gonna be same as the other filter. Like, oh,
Speaker 1: you live some more leading your pipes. You can't buy
Speaker 1: a regular Britta. You got to buy the lead pipe
Speaker 1: Montreal special Britta, you know, and like, you know you
Speaker 1: want an undersinc water filter, Well do you want this
Speaker 1: one or this one or this one? It would be
Speaker 1: nice if there was a yeah, like buy once, cry once, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: go to Amazon two days later you're fine. Kind of situation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but there isn't one new I was going to go over,
Speaker 1: like just in case people are curious more about the
Speaker 1: back country stuff. I guess I have three different levels
Speaker 1: of stuff that I use for back country. If I'm
Speaker 1: just going out and I don't think I'm going to
Speaker 1: filter water, I just take a stainless steel single wall
Speaker 1: water bottle and some iodine or another chemical purifier. I
Speaker 1: didn't works really well. But you don't want to be
Speaker 1: using it long term, it's not good for you long
Speaker 1: term for your thyroid, and then I'll filter it through
Speaker 1: like a buff or a kaffir or something to get
Speaker 1: the tability out and use that. If it's a trip
Speaker 1: where I'm just in the backcountry in America, I take
Speaker 1: a squeezy filteration system Catadine bee Free is the one
Speaker 1: I tend to use. And you want to have a
Speaker 1: dirty bag and a clean bottle, right, so you're squeezing
Speaker 1: from the dirty water into the clean water. And then
Speaker 1: if I'm going somewhere for work where there are virus
Speaker 1: risks and where it might be like what you'd call
Speaker 1: like a non permissive environment, at place where you don't
Speaker 1: want to hang around near a water source for a
Speaker 1: long time because it's dangerous. I have this thing called
Speaker 1: an MSR Guardian, which is not cheap, and you probably
Speaker 1: don't need it for what you're doing, but if you
Speaker 1: are concerned about viruses, it has a dirty bag and
Speaker 1: a clean bag, and it's a hang filter, so you
Speaker 1: can fill up three liters of water, bugger off to
Speaker 1: somewhere safe, hang it up, and let that filter from
Speaker 1: the dirty bag into the clean bag, and then you're
Speaker 1: not standing by the water filtering or pumping. I'm a
Speaker 1: few seconds a pretty fettied. Situations have been fine. And
Speaker 1: I'll say the thing that I used off grid as
Speaker 1: they used a sawyer, just a regular sawyer water filter.
Speaker 1: They're like thirty bucks. And I attached it to a
Speaker 1: five gallon bucket with some hoss and then I gravity
Speaker 1: fed it and I just left it drip in from
Speaker 1: one five gallon bucket to another. And that's for a
Speaker 1: stationary bas in the United States. That worked for me. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can see that working really well, Margaret. Do you
Speaker 1: want to think where can people learn more about prepping?
Speaker 1: Would there be a podcast they could listen to? You
Speaker 1: mean one that just went weekly, Live Like the World
Speaker 1: Is Dying. I am one of the hosts of Live
Speaker 1: Like the World is Dying. The reason it went weekly
Speaker 1: is now there's more hosts and you can listen to
Speaker 1: that wherever. You listen to podcasts every Friday, and soon
Speaker 1: you'll be able to hear James on it. But I
Speaker 1: don't know when you just have to listen to all
Speaker 1: of them. Yeah, where can people see you gloating on
Speaker 1: Twitter from your mountaintop? Magpie killed Joy until I finally
Speaker 1: get sick of Twitter, which is increasingly likely every single day.
Speaker 1: Hell so, yeah, yeah, thank you very much, Margaret, thanks
Speaker 1: for having me informative. You are welcome, all right, Ali,
Speaker 1: everyone maybe and welcome. So it could happen here with
Speaker 1: me Andrew of the YouTube channel andrewism and today I'm
Speaker 1: joined by Garrison is here, greetings, and Mia also here. Hello.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to talk about the idea of the
Speaker 1: noble savage. It's something that people have occasionally brought up
Speaker 1: in my common section when I discuss really anything related
Speaker 1: to m Maybe there's something to learn, something to be
Speaker 1: learned from the Indigenous people of pre colonial period. There's
Speaker 1: often this accusation levied against any sort of positive representation
Speaker 1: of their society, any sort of generous reading of their society,
Speaker 1: as something to be scoffed at, as something to be ridicule,
Speaker 1: as something to be seen as perpetually and this troope
Speaker 1: of the noble savage. And so I was in some
Speaker 1: sort of I feel I was in sort of am
Speaker 1: I got into a sort of defense mood, and I
Speaker 1: was like, well, I really don't want to do that, right,
Speaker 1: I don't want to want to create this caricature of
Speaker 1: indigenous peoples in my videos that you know, Forster represents
Speaker 1: all their complexities and stuff. Obviously, every group throughout history
Speaker 1: has had many layers to them. And then in reading
Speaker 1: to one of Everything by David Grieber and David wen
Speaker 1: Grew ended up stumbling upon even further information on the subject.
Speaker 1: And so that's something that I want to talk about.
Speaker 1: You know, this idea where the idea of the noble
Speaker 1: savage came from how it's used, and I think how
Speaker 1: we should be approaching it today. But before I even
Speaker 1: get into all of that, are all familiar with this
Speaker 1: term and how it's used. Yeah, I mean I think
Speaker 1: I don't know. It is interesting in the way that
Speaker 1: it kind of like, I don't know, there was kind
Speaker 1: of this shift of it being uses a term to
Speaker 1: critique sort of like racist white fantasy to being a
Speaker 1: term that's used to sort of bludge at anytime anyone
Speaker 1: like has the temerity to suggest anything in another society
Speaker 1: than this one could have possibly have been better, which
Speaker 1: is a kind of grim shift I think in a
Speaker 1: lot of ways, and I think has done a lot
Speaker 1: of political damage by people who sort of don't quite
Speaker 1: understand what was going on. Yeah, and that is a
Speaker 1: shift that I noticed as well, and for a while
Speaker 1: I thought that was really how the term was originally
Speaker 1: meant to be applied. I mean we see it all
Speaker 1: over discussions of anthropology and philosophy and literature, which it
Speaker 1: could be extended to media as a whole. Right, you
Speaker 1: have this sort of stock character of the noble savage person.
Speaker 1: It's uncorrupted by civilization. Something that's a person that symbolizes
Speaker 1: this sort of any goodness and moral superiority, living in
Speaker 1: harmony with nature that we don't have access to because
Speaker 1: we've been corrupted by the influences of civilization. Right, it's
Speaker 1: this idealized concept of an uncivilized or sort of base
Speaker 1: man right or rather person, And I mean we see
Speaker 1: it a lot in rights discourse, being used as a
Speaker 1: tomb of derision. For example, a right being Australian politician
Speaker 1: named Dennis Jensen once told Parliament that the Australian government
Speaker 1: should not be funding people to live a noble savage
Speaker 1: lifestyle in remote indigenous communities. Yeah, christ and it's used
Speaker 1: to mock the so called backwards lifestyles of Indigenous people
Speaker 1: and really try to reinforce this white supremacist idea of
Speaker 1: their inferiority or their backwardness, their regressiveness, whatever the case
Speaker 1: may be. And then on the other side, in leftist
Speaker 1: political discourse, you also see it being used as a
Speaker 1: tomb of derision. So in both cases it's being used
Speaker 1: as a term of derision without really a good grasp
Speaker 1: of what the term is where it came from. For example,
Speaker 1: anarcho primitivists are criticized for upholding this troope, and of
Speaker 1: course leftists criticize a leftist when fallen for the troope
Speaker 1: for fallen for the troope. When describing indigenous histories, spiritualities,
Speaker 1: and social ecologies, it seems like you can't even bring
Speaker 1: up any sort of reciprocal gift economy based relationship of
Speaker 1: the land that indigenous group might have had without somebody saying, oh, well,
Speaker 1: did you know that indigenous people also perpetuated extinctions and
Speaker 1: genocides and this than the other. So I really don't
Speaker 1: think that any time you learn from a society that
Speaker 1: predates your own and may still persist, that you're doing
Speaker 1: a noble savage But it is something that I had
Speaker 1: become very conscious of in my approach to any sort
Speaker 1: of discussion. I feel like it sort of haunts the
Speaker 1: discourse among other sort of stock characters and troops that
Speaker 1: permeate in or political conversations within media. The troope has,
Speaker 1: you know, come in and out of fashion. But the
Speaker 1: two main forms that it appears in is one that
Speaker 1: life is strenuous, a life of quote and quote primitive
Speaker 1: is strenuous, and therefore this savage is nobody, brave, hard work,
Speaker 1: and an honorable And then you have this other depiction,
Speaker 1: which is that the savage and I can it pains
Speaker 1: me to use the term every time, but the savage
Speaker 1: is not greedy and just as now a teat for luxury.
Speaker 1: So might you see it in instant media. It's been
Speaker 1: a long time since I've watched The Road to Eldorado,
Speaker 1: but if I recall, there is this sort of idea
Speaker 1: within the movie that they're so used to this the
Speaker 1: decadence and stuff of gold and whatnot, that they don't
Speaker 1: consider it as valuable, they considered wruthless. So there's this
Speaker 1: aspect of the Troope that treats materials traditionally considered valuable
Speaker 1: to be something to be sort of shrugged off or flaunted.
Speaker 1: And then of course because what is philosophy, what is
Speaker 1: really our ontology without some sort of reference to the
Speaker 1: story is embedded within the Christian cannon, right there is
Speaker 1: this sort of interpretation of the story of the God
Speaker 1: of Eden as this as Adam and Eve and these
Speaker 1: noble savages that live in this uncorrupted innocence and harmony
Speaker 1: with nature, and then they have to they partaken this
Speaker 1: fruit from the tree of knowledge or you know, they
Speaker 1: become quote unquote civilized, and then they're punished by having
Speaker 1: to engage in agriculture and have to labor over the
Speaker 1: land instead of living in harmony with it. Just one
Speaker 1: interpretation of that story is that it's a metaphor for
Speaker 1: the dawn of agriculture and the god have eaten as
Speaker 1: a sort of nostalgic take. Even later on, when Europeans
Speaker 1: first encountered hunter gatherer communities in the Americas, they compared
Speaker 1: them to being living and they're sort of eaton. And
Speaker 1: today you still find comparisons to eat on used to
Speaker 1: describe certain hunter gather societies. And of course, as this
Speaker 1: is quite topical, you often see this criticism of noble
Speaker 1: savage and whatever being lefted against Avatar, as in the
Speaker 1: Blue People, not the not the Last Day of Bender,
Speaker 1: because they have this sort of oh we are these
Speaker 1: utterly perfect, you know, peace loving space hippies or in
Speaker 1: harmony with nature, chilling vibing, we literally have sex with
Speaker 1: trees kind of vibe. Um. And I haven't seen the
Speaker 1: second movie in the series. I only saw the first,
Speaker 1: but I wouldn't be surprised if that trend and continues.
Speaker 1: I don't know, have you all seen either both of them.
Speaker 1: I saw the first one and I was like, I, no,
Speaker 1: nothing on earth can can call me to see the
Speaker 1: second one. So I have no idea how you or not? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean the conspt the noble savage. It has
Speaker 1: its roots a lot further back than European encounters with
Speaker 1: Native Americans, Right, that's sort of the intellectual lineage of
Speaker 1: the concept could actually be traced back to ancient Greece.
Speaker 1: So if you really want to reach you could say
Speaker 1: that even back in the Acadia and epic of Gilgamesh,
Speaker 1: that Akudo as a sort of bushman was a kind
Speaker 1: of depiction of that contract between hunter gatherer societies and
Speaker 1: agricultural societies, a Gilgamesh representing, of course, you know, civilization,
Speaker 1: but if he starts in from ancient Greece, we could
Speaker 1: say you're seeing Homer and Pliny and Xenophon all idealizing
Speaker 1: the Arcadians and other groups, whether they were real or not.
Speaker 1: And then later on in Rome you find Tacitus, for example,
Speaker 1: writing of the noble Germanic and Caledonian tribes in contrast
Speaker 1: with his view of Roman society as this sort of
Speaker 1: corrupt and decadent place. Even wrote speeches like he practically
Speaker 1: wrote fan fiction about liberty and honor for his sort
Speaker 1: of caricatures of these people. Other writers would also treat
Speaker 1: the Scythians comparably, You've seen in the works of Horace
Speaker 1: and Futil and Ovid. And then further on, you know,
Speaker 1: in the twelfth century the polymath even to Fail wrote
Speaker 1: in his novel The Living Son of the Vigilant this
Speaker 1: idea of this sort of stripped down back to the
Speaker 1: roots earthy wild man who is isolated from society and
Speaker 1: has a series of trials and tribulations that lead him
Speaker 1: to knowledge of Allah by living this life and harmony
Speaker 1: with Mother Nature, basically theorizing this idea that people can
Speaker 1: find can find their way to God just by being
Speaker 1: exposed to nature, finding a sort of a theological understanding
Speaker 1: by understanding the natural world. All of this is sort
Speaker 1: of a preamble to really what most people point to
Speaker 1: as the origins of the concept, the modern myth of
Speaker 1: the noble savage. It's most usually attributed to eighteenth century Enlightenment.
Speaker 1: For plosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he believed the original
Speaker 1: man was somebody who was free from sin, appetite, or
Speaker 1: the concept of right and wrong, and those deemed savages
Speaker 1: were not brutal, but noble, or at least this is
Speaker 1: how the story goes. The idea can also be found
Speaker 1: in theology the founder of the Methodist Church, for example,
Speaker 1: John Wesley. Again, just like the Andalusian novel writer, believe
Speaker 1: that you know, there's this idea of man in the
Speaker 1: beginning at the roots connected with nature, is not as corrupted,
Speaker 1: is more connected with nature and with God, compared to
Speaker 1: the so called de generous he found in eighteenth century society,
Speaker 1: compared to the disease and materialism seeing throughout the world.
Speaker 1: David Grieber, in one of his recent posthumous works, Pirate Enlightenment,
Speaker 1: I don't know. In a lot of his other works,
Speaker 1: as well. He sort of grapples with this idea of
Speaker 1: the Enlightenment, right, and how flawed our understanding of the
Speaker 1: Enlictenment is. How our approach the Enlightenment as a sort
Speaker 1: of era unique to Europe or this era centered upon
Speaker 1: Europe is flawed in its approach because it leaves out
Speaker 1: the realities of the Enlictenment occurred as a result of
Speaker 1: Europeans interactions and exposure to the rest of the world.
Speaker 1: You had these European explorers and colonizers and scientists venturing out, trading,
Speaker 1: interacting with these different groups of people, hearing their ideas
Speaker 1: about things, and then going back and writing best best
Speaker 1: selling books about these societies and how they believe and
Speaker 1: what they think and how they organize their society. One chronicler,
Speaker 1: for example, noted that among the Indians or Native Americans,
Speaker 1: that land belonged to all, just like the sun and water,
Speaker 1: mine and thine. The seeds of all evils do not
Speaker 1: exist for those people. They live in a golden age
Speaker 1: and open gardens, thought, laws or books thout judges, and
Speaker 1: they naturally follow goodness. Rousseau, Thomas Moore and others also
Speaker 1: idealized the naked savages as innocent of sin. Another one
Speaker 1: wrote about how they are equal in every respect and
Speaker 1: so in how many of their surroundings they all live
Speaker 1: justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. Basically
Speaker 1: we have we just found a whole continent of people
Speaker 1: basically lived in a garden of da But then this
Speaker 1: concept of ecological nobility that is perpetuated is of course flawed.
Speaker 1: I mean, like I mentioned earlier, there were cases of
Speaker 1: overexploitation and damage done to the environment. And yet we
Speaker 1: also find a lot of indigenous groups living in compatibility
Speaker 1: of the ecological limitations of their home area, getting familiar
Speaker 1: with the lands that they live on and what it
Speaker 1: takes to preserve them for the next generations. A lot
Speaker 1: of what is seen as the sort of virgin landscape
Speaker 1: was profoundly shaped by the controlled boons, the horticulture, the
Speaker 1: hooden and other activities done by indigenous groups throughout the Americas,
Speaker 1: for example, in the case of the Amazon rainforest, and
Speaker 1: in Australia as another case where the controlled boons really
Speaker 1: shaped that landscape over thousands and thousands of years. To
Speaker 1: this day, you know, the methods used by indigenous peoples
Speaker 1: have been found to be you know, superior to that
Speaker 1: was used by non indigenous peoples living in the same
Speaker 1: habitat methods like poly cropping techniques, to enhanced soil fertility,
Speaker 1: sustainable harvesting, and of course there are these culturally encoded
Speaker 1: morays that are you know, placed in these communities that
Speaker 1: helped result in the preservation of these resources. Then he
Speaker 1: also had account for the fact that no culture has stagnant.
Speaker 1: Every culture changes over time, and as a result of
Speaker 1: the capitalist market economy, there is this pressure to overexploit
Speaker 1: the land for the sake of profit. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of way of these documented patterns of land cultivation
Speaker 1: and land preservation are found is usually in the outskirts
Speaker 1: and the margins of the capitalist market economy. Such practices
Speaker 1: can be more difficult to find right in the belly
Speaker 1: of the beast. For example, the rappapa in western Venezuela,
Speaker 1: they were traditionally mobile over an extensive area plants and food,
Speaker 1: search and game, and now they are stationary. Now they
Speaker 1: are settled, and now they sort of are forced to
Speaker 1: adopt a different lifestyle in response to their new material conditions.
Speaker 1: When you had that lesser population density and greater freedom
Speaker 1: to roame. It was easier to both satisfy subsistence needs
Speaker 1: and also maintain the health and vitality of the ecosystem
Speaker 1: over an extended period of time. But now that sill
Speaker 1: pluses are needed, now that agriculture has been reduced to
Speaker 1: a very small portion of the population, and that those
Speaker 1: techniques are now expected to be more intensive in order
Speaker 1: to keep up with the demands, those lifestyles and those
Speaker 1: cultural moras and those practices have had to change. But
Speaker 1: back to the idea of the noble savage right, and
Speaker 1: particularly drilling into this idea of the noble aspect of
Speaker 1: it right, because there's some confusion, as Groupate points out,
Speaker 1: between these two meanings associated with the word nobility. You
Speaker 1: could say someone is noble in this sense that they
Speaker 1: are you know, moral good, exemplary in their heavia and
Speaker 1: their exequette in their ethical standards. But you could say
Speaker 1: somebody is noble in the sense they have this position
Speaker 1: in a sort of a class system, a hereditary position
Speaker 1: in a class system, and elevated economic status. Rousseau didn't
Speaker 1: come up with the phrase, and in fact he never
Speaker 1: used in his writings. What terre ellingson historian discovered, or
Speaker 1: rather explored in his book The Myth of the Noble
Speaker 1: Savage is that the term was coined over a century
Speaker 1: before Russo's birth by a guy named by a French
Speaker 1: lawyer ethnographer named marcol Escarboo. And Escarboo described indigenous peoples
Speaker 1: as truly noble, not having any action, but it's generous,
Speaker 1: whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars.
Speaker 1: The nobility was more so associated not with just moral
Speaker 1: qualities like generosity and you know, good behavior, but also
Speaker 1: nobility from a legal standpoint. The lives of freedom, the privileges,
Speaker 1: and the responsibilities that the Indienous people enjoyed were also found,
Speaker 1: according to less Carboo, within the European nobility in Cannibals
Speaker 1: and kings nance prot just the name of Marvin. Harris
Speaker 1: went on to explain why less Carboo had recognized nobility
Speaker 1: among the Indienous people that he visited. You know, a
Speaker 1: lot of the band and village societies, there was a
Speaker 1: level of economic and political freedom that very few enjoyed
Speaker 1: in his day and even today. You know, people decided
Speaker 1: for themselves how long they wanted to work on a
Speaker 1: particular day. What they would do or if they would
Speaker 1: even work at all. You know, they didn't have to
Speaker 1: deal with the taxes and rents and tribute payments that
Speaker 1: and one I could even extend to say, debts that
Speaker 1: keep people today and in the past so confined and
Speaker 1: restricted in their limited life on this earth. What should
Speaker 1: have been you know, the sort of normal standard you know,
Speaker 1: of human freedom is in contrast with European society, just
Speaker 1: like mind blew in. Yeah, there's another David Graeber. Actually,
Speaker 1: I've been talking about their Never was at West a
Speaker 1: lot recently, and one of the things that he talks
Speaker 1: about in that in the Devery was a West. Is
Speaker 1: this like trick that European writers use when they're looking
Speaker 1: at another society, which is like they present themselves as
Speaker 1: like people whose behaviors are sort of are entirely rational,
Speaker 1: and they're solving a logic puzzle, and then they go find, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, what they consider to be the weirdest thing,
Speaker 1: and so like sorry, they go find what they consider
Speaker 1: to be the weirdest thing that like another culture does
Speaker 1: and look at it through this you know, this lens
Speaker 1: which it draws in the reader to be doing this
Speaker 1: sort of logic puzzle and trying to figure out, oh,
Speaker 1: how could these people do this thing? And then you know,
Speaker 1: if if you pull back the lens a little bit
Speaker 1: look at like what these supposedly objective European like theorists
Speaker 1: of doing, it's like, well, okay, these guys all have
Speaker 1: these really weird ceremonies and like they eat they they
Speaker 1: eat the flesh of their God every weekend and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, and so you get this really interesting But
Speaker 1: but the when when you read it through their their
Speaker 1: sort of colonial ethnography, you get this image of both
Speaker 1: societies that's very weird that that lets you sort of
Speaker 1: that conceals the fact that, yeah, like when when these
Speaker 1: European writers are talking about meeting addious people like you
Speaker 1: kind of the way that it's and makes it very
Speaker 1: easy to sort of like do this colonial thing where
Speaker 1: you forget that every single French writer who is writing
Speaker 1: about this lives in like the most hierarchical society of
Speaker 1: the world has ever seen. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, yeah, of course, like they they
Speaker 1: went to literally any other place on Earth and talk
Speaker 1: to people and they are like, oh my god, these
Speaker 1: people are like are really freed. It's like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's because these guys live under the French like they're
Speaker 1: like French absolutism. This is like I think Grab's line was, like,
Speaker 1: this is a society where every single person when they walk,
Speaker 1: when they walk into a dining room immediately knows the
Speaker 1: class of every single other person sitting around the table
Speaker 1: by like how they hold their silverware. Yes, it's absurd,
Speaker 1: you know when a lot of the rest of the
Speaker 1: world is like, you know, living on the generosity of
Speaker 1: the people around them, being reliable in you know, the
Speaker 1: phone deations of you know, community, not even necessarily because
Speaker 1: I mean obviously a hierarchies to be found within a
Speaker 1: lot of these colleges and communities, but not to the
Speaker 1: extent that you would have you fallen in. And some
Speaker 1: of these European societies not even close. Yeah, these are
Speaker 1: the European like I don't know, like Europe has been
Speaker 1: really really I mean, you know, this is the sort
Speaker 1: of organizational trend of European society for like the last
Speaker 1: like four or five hundred years has been just an incredible,
Speaker 1: unfathomable centralization on a level that was just it's just
Speaker 1: sort of incomprehensible to most of the people who've ever lived,
Speaker 1: but we treat as sort of normal now because it's
Speaker 1: a society that we've grown up under. Yes, it's a
Speaker 1: I'm trying to draw a comparison between Europeans and culture
Speaker 1: and this level of freedom and other societies and sort
Speaker 1: of like I can't think of any specific example right now,
Speaker 1: but you know how, you know, grown up as a
Speaker 1: child in a particular household, your house would have certain
Speaker 1: norms that you think is just like universal, you know,
Speaker 1: like everybody does this. Obviously this is just a fact
Speaker 1: of life in the universe. But in reality, it's just
Speaker 1: like some way at quirk when you appearance had that
Speaker 1: you just had to grow up with. Yeah, yeah, like like,
Speaker 1: for example, this is a really weird example, but let's say,
Speaker 1: for example, you had like ceramic dishes. Would not allow
Speaker 1: it to be used ever, right, they were purely for
Speaker 1: decoration and appearance. Tooled you that it's some grave moral
Speaker 1: sin to eat off of ceramic dishes. And then you
Speaker 1: go to somebody's house and they have all their plates
Speaker 1: laid out, and you're like utterly baffled by how they're
Speaker 1: able to eat off ceramic dishes. If I could think
Speaker 1: of a better example, but for now, Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I'm a role with. Anyway, despite recognizing all of this
Speaker 1: freedom and stuff, they were kind of like disgusted by it,
Speaker 1: at least some of them, you know, some of them,
Speaker 1: when publishing their texts in Europe, would put their own
Speaker 1: liberal ideas into the mouths of indigenous people to say, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm not saying this. This is obviously like trees in
Speaker 1: US and I would never say this, but this indigenous
Speaker 1: guy who I spoke to the other day, he said it,
Speaker 1: and so I'm just publishing what he said. So that
Speaker 1: took place sometimes. And then they're also those who would
Speaker 1: like actually disgusted by the liberty exhibited in so many societies.
Speaker 1: But whether they saw that freedom as a positive or
Speaker 1: as a negative despite all their fluffy words about intigenous liberties,
Speaker 1: that doesn't really matter of indigenous people at the end
Speaker 1: of the day, because you know, through the centuries, empires
Speaker 1: continue to swallow indigenous lands. And the phrase basically disappeared
Speaker 1: for about two hundred and fifty years because the idea
Speaker 1: of the noble savage was reversed by this stereotype of
Speaker 1: the dangerous, brutal savage like whole day are they defend
Speaker 1: their land and way of life? Right. It was until
Speaker 1: eighteen fifty nine that the term was resurrected by a
Speaker 1: guy named John Crawford, a white supremacist. He wanted to
Speaker 1: become president, or rather he was attempted to become president
Speaker 1: of the Ethnological Society of London, and he was very
Speaker 1: disdainful of this idea emergin and anthropology and philosophy of
Speaker 1: universal human rights, like how dare you? You know? So
Speaker 1: he introduced the phrase resurrecting after two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: years to make a speech to the society, and by
Speaker 1: the way, he missed. He's the one who first misattributed
Speaker 1: this speech the phrase to russ basically ridiculing using the
Speaker 1: noble savage as a term to ridicule those who sympathized
Speaker 1: with such quote less advanced cultures. And so that sort
Speaker 1: of fabrication where he attributed it to Russu and he
Speaker 1: built up this straw man to blew it down. You know,
Speaker 1: it's basically this myth of the myth of the noble savage.
Speaker 1: He creates a straw band of the noble savage as
Speaker 1: a myth, and then that's what's perpetuated. But his myth
Speaker 1: of the noble savage was the one that was a myth.
Speaker 1: So it's, you know, the myth of the myth the
Speaker 1: noble savage. And so as the British Empire was reaching
Speaker 1: the height of its power, and he was, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to ridicule anybody who had anything nice to say
Speaker 1: about Indigenous people, that straw Band was used to continue
Speaker 1: to advocate for the extermination. Crawford's version of noble Savage
Speaker 1: became the source for every citation of the myth by
Speaker 1: anthropologists from Lubbock, Tyler or Boas through the scholars of
Speaker 1: the late twentieth century. So even one hundred years later,
Speaker 1: people were still using the term that he came up with,
Speaker 1: this rhetorical cheap shots that he used, and to this
Speaker 1: day it continues to polarize our discussions and obstruct any
Speaker 1: sort of nuanced approach to hunt to gather life. And
Speaker 1: having discovered all of this, I have to say, it
Speaker 1: really made me feel like a part of history. There
Speaker 1: never was a noble savage myth, at least on the
Speaker 1: sense of this strong man of simple societies living in
Speaker 1: happy innocence. Travelers usually accounted for both virtues and vices.
Speaker 1: They spoke of the positives of these societies and also
Speaker 1: things that they weren't too fond of. Both the concept
Speaker 1: of the noble savage and the concept of the brutal
Speaker 1: savage a fantasies constructions of a European mind that was
Speaker 1: intent on boxing Indigenous people in this sort of suspended
Speaker 1: state of either purity or evil going forward. I think
Speaker 1: it's really silly to continue to perpetuate the tim I
Speaker 1: think it really keeps us from engaging with history properly.
Speaker 1: And I mean, even if somebody is exaggerating or expungentertain
Speaker 1: aspects of a particular society or culture that should be
Speaker 1: engaged with directly. You know, I don't think you should
Speaker 1: fall back on a lazy troope popularized by a white supremacist.
Speaker 1: I mean, we live under states now, we live on
Speaker 1: the capitalism now, and I don't think I don't fault
Speaker 1: people for trying to imagine what life must have been
Speaker 1: like before then, before these institutions became so all in compassing.
Speaker 1: What becomes an issue is when we take these past
Speaker 1: societies and we use them as these speakers of virtue
Speaker 1: instead of going back and trying to take their lessons
Speaker 1: and their practices and adopting them and interpreting them to
Speaker 1: move forward. There was a lot of freedom and there
Speaker 1: still is a lot of freedom left to be uncovered
Speaker 1: in our history. It is obscured in our history classes.
Speaker 1: It isn't taught. Instead, we're taught facts and figures and
Speaker 1: wars and notable notable individuals. We're taught of kings and
Speaker 1: dictators and high priests and emperors and prime ministers and
Speaker 1: presidents and chiefs and judges and jailers and dungeons, penitentiaries
Speaker 1: and concentration camps. This is always a stance now, but
Speaker 1: it doesn't have to be. And if we go into
Speaker 1: have an honest exploration of our history in order to
Speaker 1: inform our future, we have to free our imaginations of
Speaker 1: this lazy troop of the noble savage. That's it for
Speaker 1: me for this episode. Can check me out on YouTube
Speaker 1: dot com slash Aurism and also on Twitter at underscore
Speaker 1: sat Drew, as well as when patreon dot com slash
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