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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. Hello, and welcome to it
Speaker 1: could Happen here podcast about how the world is falling
Speaker 1: apart and sometimes about how people are putting it back together.
Speaker 1: What is today? It's me. I'm James if you haven't
Speaker 1: worked that out yet, and I'm joined by screen to
Speaker 1: say Hi, Shreen, Hi, This is Sharian, thank you, and
Speaker 1: I'm joined today by Vicente Calderon. He's a freelance journalist
Speaker 1: and they're proprietor publisher of Tijuana Press dot com and
Speaker 1: he's covered the situation on the granted Tijuana for a
Speaker 1: very long time. I'm an excellent work and we've sent
Speaker 1: you what your people know about you. Nice to have
Speaker 1: you here. Thank you to you for the invitation, and
Speaker 1: in advance, I have to apologize for my English, because
Speaker 1: it's a picture of the street and the Tijuana streets.
Speaker 1: It's excellent to take a picture in the world kind
Speaker 1: of English here. I'm a real original psychologist. I graduated
Speaker 1: from the School of Psychology here, but I only worked
Speaker 1: for a couple of years and then I got stuck
Speaker 1: with journalism, and I have been here for more than
Speaker 1: thirty years by now. I've been doing journalism from radio,
Speaker 1: and then I moved to television, and then I went
Speaker 1: to the US to the work with Spanish language media
Speaker 1: twice in l A and then I came back and
Speaker 1: now I'm I'm doing online or or digital medium journalism,
Speaker 1: so to speak. So I'm a native here and again
Speaker 1: I was just supposed to be working on this for
Speaker 1: a while and feel like old enough to look like
Speaker 1: a psychologist. Just got God on the on the um
Speaker 1: addiction for journalism, Yeah I understand. Yeah, yeah, that's fascinating.
Speaker 1: All right. So the reason we to talk to you
Speaker 1: today is that we have seen a dramatic increase in
Speaker 1: violence in Tijuana since Friday. Right, we're recording this on
Speaker 1: the Tuesday, the sixteenth of August, so if people listening
Speaker 1: to it later, they don't know, but can you explain
Speaker 1: a little bit of what happened over the weekend in
Speaker 1: Tijuana and then across Mexico as well. Well, the thing
Speaker 1: began on Friday here in Mexicali and Tijuana. Mexicali is
Speaker 1: the capital of the state of Baja California, which is
Speaker 1: in the northwestern side the end of the US Mexico border. Um,
Speaker 1: So we began seeing people burning cars on the road.
Speaker 1: They were just ordering people from public transportation to get
Speaker 1: off the vehicle. Uh not in a very so to speak,
Speaker 1: threatening matter kind of way, because they said, well, the
Speaker 1: problem is that we do but you have to get
Speaker 1: off because otherwise because when we're going to burn this bus,
Speaker 1: and and nobody was actually no, it was really heard intentionally.
Speaker 1: We have just in Tijuana, we have about fifteen cases
Speaker 1: like that. Was mainly public transportations vehicles or some cases trugs,
Speaker 1: cargo trugs or private vehicles, but most of it were
Speaker 1: public transportation vehicles. But people were working, and we're moving
Speaker 1: people from their homes to their works or to want
Speaker 1: to run one errand to on the other side. So
Speaker 1: we began to see that this was in a very
Speaker 1: limited space of time happening not only in in Tijuana
Speaker 1: and in Mexicali, but also in five out of seven
Speaker 1: cities of Baja California. Nobody was claiming responsibility, but it
Speaker 1: looks like it was a coordinated effort in the basically
Speaker 1: the main cities of the state. We were very surprised
Speaker 1: because even though we have been dealing with drug violence
Speaker 1: for many decades by now, we've never seen something who
Speaker 1: looks like the narco locales or blockades of the streets
Speaker 1: with drug traffickers, which are unfortunately very common in other
Speaker 1: cities like monter Terrey, for example, recently in Jalisco on
Speaker 1: the Pacific coasts in the central part of Mexico, but
Speaker 1: not here in Tijuana. I mean, I know it sounds
Speaker 1: rare or strange for many people who knows one of
Speaker 1: our his bad reputation, but now we never had cases
Speaker 1: like this before. That's why it was so surprising. At
Speaker 1: the end that was on Friday, and then immediate the
Speaker 1: local authorities began to explay, not only police from different
Speaker 1: different agencies or also soldiers who were coincidentally so to speak.
Speaker 1: We're here in big numbers and large numbers because there's
Speaker 1: a really big push to put out more soldiers to
Speaker 1: help with public safety and Mexico. Not everybody is pleased
Speaker 1: with that because they say that Mexico is becoming a
Speaker 1: militarized country and it shouldn't be because we have to
Speaker 1: We're trying to be a democracy, and in a democracy,
Speaker 1: is not the military or the army in charge of
Speaker 1: so much responsibility. But that's something that has been changing,
Speaker 1: specifically with this new federal administration with the president, and
Speaker 1: so they sent out all of the soldiers and police
Speaker 1: officers and things basically diminished. But but that time in
Speaker 1: about let in about less than two hours, people was
Speaker 1: already really scared. Obviously, the news spread and social media
Speaker 1: and people began worrying. Also, they began seeing that the
Speaker 1: public transportation was not enough because many were just came
Speaker 1: to a halt. I mean, and not just the public transportation,
Speaker 1: the officials of the city, but all the digital platform
Speaker 1: like uber Diddy or other services. We're just worried that
Speaker 1: it might be the next one. So if I stay
Speaker 1: on the roads, am I going to be the target
Speaker 1: of these guys. We were not sure what was going on.
Speaker 1: We I guess everything one has like an idea that
Speaker 1: this was coming or linked to drug trafficking, but we
Speaker 1: were not sure at that time. So um in a
Speaker 1: couple of hours every we didn't see more of these cases.
Speaker 1: But at that time the city was really disrupted, so
Speaker 1: they began closing. I mean the first thing who affected
Speaker 1: was public exportation, so people was stranded without with no
Speaker 1: ways to go to back home. And some schools were
Speaker 1: counseling classes and since the students were not able to
Speaker 1: find transportation, some offer places to stay and spend the
Speaker 1: night on the schools. Also that happened in in Um
Speaker 1: with other companies, with the Makila plants, the manufacturing plants
Speaker 1: that are very popular. There's thousands of people here and
Speaker 1: in Tijuana who were there also in medically, but here
Speaker 1: also they in some cases have to open spaces so
Speaker 1: they can spend the night there. And we went out
Speaker 1: and was a lot of people stranded with no place,
Speaker 1: with no way to move from where they were when
Speaker 1: they began. Yeah, I saw even like Kelly Max that
Speaker 1: the supermarket was classed right like the day closed early
Speaker 1: and they announced that the next day they will hold
Speaker 1: the operations that they will not open so they will
Speaker 1: not put in jeopardy to the safety of their workers.
Speaker 1: I mean, and they that during Friday, we didn't know
Speaker 1: what really what was going on, how severe was this happening.
Speaker 1: And just keep in mind that on Friday, Friday was
Speaker 1: the end of the of a week of very violent
Speaker 1: scenes in different cities. It began in Guadalajara when they
Speaker 1: were the army was trying to capture a couple of
Speaker 1: drug lords or chief of cells from the uh calis
Speaker 1: the haliska new generation cartel which is the quote unquote
Speaker 1: newest and the strongest and most rapidly spund the drug
Speaker 1: organization in Mexico. And the progress there, the dynamic was
Speaker 1: very very different. Again in Tijuana, even after the weekend,
Speaker 1: nobody was killed. Just one person in the CALLI got
Speaker 1: injured due to burns when while they were burning his truck,
Speaker 1: but apparently nothing major. So in the case of what
Speaker 1: House a bit different. There were at gunpoint pulling people,
Speaker 1: families out of their private vehicles and also bosses and
Speaker 1: there there they were really actually located roads in an
Speaker 1: effort to disrupt the operation from the soldiers trying to
Speaker 1: capture their their bosses, and so the biody as well
Speaker 1: were way more strong sort of speak there and after
Speaker 1: that he moved to one of Gato, another state where
Speaker 1: well there's high presence of Cartel Alisco New Generation, and
Speaker 1: two days later we saw the worst case into the
Speaker 1: aquaries across from the Passo. Texas is also another border
Speaker 1: town or border city should say that has in dealing
Speaker 1: with a lot of drug trafficking caves and and the
Speaker 1: things was terribly worse there. I mean they were there
Speaker 1: killing civilians randomly. They got to convene its stores like
Speaker 1: think about your seven eleven. The counterparty is called also
Speaker 1: it's a very uh big change chain uh in a.
Speaker 1: In one of these cases they just went in open
Speaker 1: fire to the cashier and they killed him. In other cases,
Speaker 1: a pregnant woman got killed and another one since they
Speaker 1: burned this these places, the woman who there's two persons
Speaker 1: who died due to association because they got were cut up.
Speaker 1: They were not able to flee the place. When this
Speaker 1: guys we were showing up there, many of these guys
Speaker 1: were also yelling or screaming, UM, hooray for the calis
Speaker 1: con and Ras. Young boss's called or Sageta, I can't remember.
Speaker 1: He's not Mencho, Mencho, Mencho his nickname Mencho or Saghara
Speaker 1: is the leader of Calisco New Generation, and they were
Speaker 1: just praising him and just saying that there were people
Speaker 1: from Mencho and just they were just celebrating him as
Speaker 1: they were doing all this destruction and terrorizing people. So
Speaker 1: the worst part was in sadly, I'm not saying that
Speaker 1: this was not bad, but just we have to put
Speaker 1: it on perspective and fortunately here suldly for the people's
Speaker 1: Fortunately for the people here, nobody was injuring those activities
Speaker 1: on Friday. That diminished on Saturday, but we got more
Speaker 1: cases on Sunday night and Mexically and we actually have
Speaker 1: four about four cases on the first the last hours
Speaker 1: of Monday in Ensenada. We are still seeing if all
Speaker 1: of these have been related to the same effort due
Speaker 1: to organized crime, or are just copycats because unfortunately, unfortunately
Speaker 1: that also is happening some of the cases in Vehicali
Speaker 1: that happened on Sunday night. We're according to the chief
Speaker 1: of police there, just copycasts were just taking advantage of
Speaker 1: the situation. I see, Well, that's that's interesting because until
Speaker 1: someone takes responsibility, even if they do, all the talks
Speaker 1: about like what cartels are, what that's just like in
Speaker 1: theory right because there you don't know who's doing what
Speaker 1: Am I understanding correctly? Well, yes, because it's it's not
Speaker 1: like when a terrorist organization claimed responsibility for a vombinum
Speaker 1: in the Middle East, for example. But here the thing
Speaker 1: is now the authorities are saying that it's well, that
Speaker 1: was not just one but different organizations they blame, and
Speaker 1: mainly on Aliska New Generation, because it's one of the
Speaker 1: along with this in a cartel are broadly extended in
Speaker 1: the state, different states, and in this particular case they
Speaker 1: can link it in the case of Jalisco and Guaguato
Speaker 1: because they got information of these two bosses getting into
Speaker 1: a meeting and that's why they reacted. In in the
Speaker 1: case of Gas was different because everything began there with
Speaker 1: a dispute within inmates of the local jail where they
Speaker 1: are clearly two factions from the the two main organisms
Speaker 1: stations who have been controlling turf in the parties. Here
Speaker 1: we were not sure because unfortunately we have not just
Speaker 1: one or two. We have a tree drug cartels or
Speaker 1: trafficing organizations who have been acting or the link in
Speaker 1: UH for the several years right now, which is the
Speaker 1: Realiskan New generation, the one we talked about, which is
Speaker 1: the relatively newest organization they seen. A long cartel who
Speaker 1: has been from the cradle of drug African Mexico steps
Speaker 1: in Alloa, expanding the routes that I'm sure they know.
Speaker 1: A chapel from the Narco series very popular now has
Speaker 1: been the public anime number one according to Chicago for
Speaker 1: about eight years ago and now in a in a
Speaker 1: jail in New York. But there their sons and their
Speaker 1: associates are still operating their trafficing organization along different routes
Speaker 1: in Mexico and and Baha, California is one of those
Speaker 1: routes where they have a lot of strong presence. And
Speaker 1: also the Ariano Felix drug organization, the so called Tijuana
Speaker 1: cartel that is very popular has its own UM series
Speaker 1: on Netflix as part of Narcos Mexico. This is the
Speaker 1: relevance of these kids who who grow up as as
Speaker 1: criminals at the border between Tijuana and San Diego. So
Speaker 1: we nobody has claimed responsibility UM as in other cases,
Speaker 1: but I think it's it's it's safe to know that
Speaker 1: these are the main suspects in the case of Tiquana.
Speaker 1: It's also the possibility that the field between these three
Speaker 1: organizations um was an excuse for this level of violence.
Speaker 1: I mean, everybody is trying to be the strongest force,
Speaker 1: so they challenge themselves not on this not only in
Speaker 1: the streets, but on social media. And this was also
Speaker 1: a way to challenge the authorities because even though the
Speaker 1: authorities reacted quickly kind of subdue more or frustrate more events,
Speaker 1: they were able to burn fifteen cars at the end
Speaker 1: of the week, and we're thirty six in different areas
Speaker 1: in different cities. So that is not something that you
Speaker 1: can say another authorities. The military chief of the country saying,
Speaker 1: well with in Tijuana didn't attempted against so the civilians,
Speaker 1: well they did. They didn't kill them, but they burned
Speaker 1: their property and they disrupted the whole operation. So we
Speaker 1: are also seeing very carefully the way they local, the
Speaker 1: local and national authorities are reacting because we were lucky now,
Speaker 1: but this is probably will happen again if there's not
Speaker 1: a really strong response from an intelligent response from the authorities. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry if I'm sorry if this is silly, but
Speaker 1: is there any deeper meeting to it being specifically public
Speaker 1: transportation like it just seems so specific to like target
Speaker 1: how civilians are like transporting themselves. It's just like a
Speaker 1: show of power to be like We're going to make
Speaker 1: everyone freeze, or there is there any deeper meaning to
Speaker 1: like what they're targeting, not that I understand so far.
Speaker 1: I mean for me right now is because as they did,
Speaker 1: they were successful and bringing the city to a halt.
Speaker 1: I mean we went out and just think this was
Speaker 1: a Friday summer night in a revolution. Who has seen
Speaker 1: a renaissance the last for the last ten years. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of people coming from the U. S Side
Speaker 1: and from Mexico to enjoy the gastronomy, local the bars,
Speaker 1: the party scene, what's dead. The only people we were
Speaker 1: found we found there Friday night was UM workers that
Speaker 1: were not able to find an uber or the uber
Speaker 1: was I talked to some of the uber drivers, the
Speaker 1: did drivers. To me, it went from one to seven.
Speaker 1: I mean something will cost you ten dollars were costing
Speaker 1: the press was now seven seventy dollars due to the
Speaker 1: high demand and poor offer. So no, I don't find
Speaker 1: another another explanations so far, so far with the information
Speaker 1: that we have until now, um that could explain, but
Speaker 1: they did reach a big impact with the relatively easy
Speaker 1: actions after all these coordinator the attacks. Yeah, it's probably
Speaker 1: worth mentioning the context of in one of goose months
Speaker 1: kids was arrested and I believe eighteen I'm not going
Speaker 1: to dates, but around then, and there was a huge,
Speaker 1: huge increase in violence immediately following that, right and eventually
Speaker 1: amblow the president gave the order to release him and
Speaker 1: oh that was yeah, that was my recent was a
Speaker 1: video one of the main sons in in something that
Speaker 1: we call the Kulia is the name of the city,
Speaker 1: is the capital of the status. As we said, I
Speaker 1: have probably my mother is from Sinaloa and some people
Speaker 1: from sin offender when we said that it's a cradle
Speaker 1: of drug trafficking in Mexico because most of the power,
Speaker 1: the law, the drug laws come from from from Sinaloa.
Speaker 1: But yeah, you're right, you're right. Uh, And that's something
Speaker 1: that has become a big recurrent topic when people criticize,
Speaker 1: especially the political opposition the current president, because they said,
Speaker 1: this is the origin of this kind of demonstrations. So
Speaker 1: when when when the government wants to act. Now the
Speaker 1: criminals know that an effort a coordinated effort to get
Speaker 1: out on the streets and to show their muscle, could
Speaker 1: um make the government to think twice, to hold their
Speaker 1: operation and to free in some cases these guys. Again,
Speaker 1: in the case of Jalisco, they were on the way,
Speaker 1: according to the official statement from the Mexican Army, to
Speaker 1: try to capture these two leaders. But didn't happen. I mean,
Speaker 1: the criminals get organized to blockade the actions of the authorities.
Speaker 1: In the case of Iquana, we were not. We didn't
Speaker 1: get to that point. Was more like there's also one
Speaker 1: theory which says that the local chapter or to speak
Speaker 1: of the cat as I was just trying to replicate
Speaker 1: what happened there, just to to show the force, to
Speaker 1: demonstrate the muscle as as a criminal organization here in Tijuana. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's basically the two theories that a dispute between them
Speaker 1: and the other one is that, um, they were just
Speaker 1: replicating a little bit in a in a in a
Speaker 1: different dimension, so to speak, what happened in just to
Speaker 1: tell them, you know the same here, this is what
Speaker 1: you're gonna be facing. And that was a message for
Speaker 1: the authorities. Yeah, I saw a resident compared to what
Speaker 1: it was like in the early stages of COVID, like
Speaker 1: how ghost town it was, and I mean, what do
Speaker 1: you think about it? That's pretty powerful if a cartel
Speaker 1: can have the impact of a pandemic, if not more so,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's terrifying. I can't imagine. I think it's
Speaker 1: worse when we went out when COVID first begun in
Speaker 1: the lockdown. And this will be too silly, but there's
Speaker 1: the red like districts that never sleeps here. We went
Speaker 1: to that particular horridor. Nobody was in the main drag there.
Speaker 1: But it's a reality when we we we just we
Speaker 1: went out and we got video of this streets basically empty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your video on your Twitter. We we'll find a way
Speaker 1: to link to. It was incredible. It was just like
Speaker 1: it it's normally like the Strip in Las Vegas or something,
Speaker 1: and it was just a ghost town ghost Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: the only people we found there was people looking for transportation. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's crazy. So there's been a massive, at least show
Speaker 1: of state power in Tijuan and the last I don't know,
Speaker 1: four or five six months, like they're constantly rotating new
Speaker 1: trips in They do the parades with a big flag
Speaker 1: and it's like to looking from the outside from a
Speaker 1: less informed perspective, it looks like there are these various actors, right,
Speaker 1: and each of them sort of flexes their muscles in
Speaker 1: a different way. And and it is that relevant here
Speaker 1: has to They discovered a tunnel, if I remember correctly,
Speaker 1: Have they done much else in Baja since I started
Speaker 1: these big deployments. No, that's one of the main complaints
Speaker 1: of the locals organizations, civil or civilian organizations here, because
Speaker 1: even though we have I'm gonna I make some notes,
Speaker 1: and we have five thousand, six hundred and sixty soldiers
Speaker 1: UM right now in the state of Baja California, most
Speaker 1: of them in Tijuana, who have been deployed since August
Speaker 1: last year, which is when the natural Australity, Australity of
Speaker 1: peace as the government called it, begun. UM. But unfortunately
Speaker 1: I can give an other statistics. We have only just
Speaker 1: in Tijuana, in the municipality of Tikuana so far this year,
Speaker 1: i'll most one thousand, two hundred homicides. I mean we
Speaker 1: as as a city, as a municipality, we have way
Speaker 1: more homicides than many Mexican states. This is the level
Speaker 1: of violence that we are dealing with in a daily basis.
Speaker 1: And and this is when you hear the authorities talking
Speaker 1: about a reduction on homicides, which is true, probably true
Speaker 1: in terms of the numbers of statistics, but still one thousand.
Speaker 1: We're we're a little bit past half the year, and
Speaker 1: we already passed one thousand homicide. I mean, when people
Speaker 1: get alarmed in Chicago is when you are hitting. I
Speaker 1: remember a couple of years, but like five hundred and
Speaker 1: the whole year. We have this in three months, and
Speaker 1: and and this is the kind of of problems that
Speaker 1: we're dealing with. But you have to also keep it
Speaker 1: in mind. Last week the d o J of the US,
Speaker 1: the FBI, the d A, Customs and Border Protection have
Speaker 1: a gathering to announce that San Diego became the epist
Speaker 1: center for smuggling of fentadel. Six of the seizures of
Speaker 1: Fentonel in all the nations occur between Sanito, the main
Speaker 1: port of entry here in San Diego, to Calexico. And
Speaker 1: there's there's six parts of entry in this stretch of
Speaker 1: land at the end of the border, on the western
Speaker 1: end of the border. Well these places is where more
Speaker 1: than half of the phantomel that is being smuggled to
Speaker 1: the US. It's going through. That will explain partly the
Speaker 1: level of biodies that we've been didn't and how even
Speaker 1: though there's good efforts by the local authorities, state and
Speaker 1: local authorities, I mean, even given that there's cases of
Speaker 1: corruption as in any other agency. UM always say that
Speaker 1: we have great, very capable detectives and police officers and
Speaker 1: Mexico but there but in many cases there's no political
Speaker 1: will from their bosses to really act on on and
Speaker 1: the on the benefited benefiting the public. So this is
Speaker 1: the kind of building the problem the world. You know,
Speaker 1: Fantany is now the most lucrative drug to to transport
Speaker 1: or traffic and between Mexico and the US, even with
Speaker 1: all the problem that is contined in the US with
Speaker 1: more than one and two people dying in the last
Speaker 1: year or overdoses linked to opioids, but also now we
Speaker 1: have a problem that is growing with people dying with
Speaker 1: fantanyl overdose. Besides the fantony, the mental fantamine problem that
Speaker 1: also has been increasing the traffic here and now we
Speaker 1: are seeing the comeback of some drugs trafficking and deep
Speaker 1: and new levels like heroin and cocaine who came out
Speaker 1: of fashion for a while, but I always doing a
Speaker 1: kind of a resurgence at least in this corridor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's fascinating like that that there's been an increase specifically
Speaker 1: coming through that Baja California area. Maybe then we should
Speaker 1: explain a little bit about these three actors, right they
Speaker 1: c J n G will call them the cut the
Speaker 1: Sinaloa and the Ariana Felix or Tijuana cartel. Can you
Speaker 1: explain a little bit about who they are and where
Speaker 1: they sort of fit into this where they come from? Maybe, well,
Speaker 1: I basically all come from the uh people are watching Netflix,
Speaker 1: Narcos and Netflix. They talk about this federation of cartels
Speaker 1: again everything the main power was from the state of Sinaloa,
Speaker 1: and between nineteen mid nineties n mid nineties, when the
Speaker 1: rest of Felix Gayarlo they reestablished. They distribute the route
Speaker 1: and one was the one of the Pacific along the
Speaker 1: Pacific from Sinaloa to the along the Pacific, and they
Speaker 1: basically um cut the country into different the main routes,
Speaker 1: and then you have different organizations. Those organizations who used
Speaker 1: to be together became a powerful house on their own,
Speaker 1: and that has increased the violence from the nineties because
Speaker 1: now you have from the beginning they are Yano Felix
Speaker 1: who used to be partners with the chapel Uh and
Speaker 1: there are been in disputes and feuds among them. So
Speaker 1: the main one is was the main one and oldest
Speaker 1: is the Sinaloa cartel head by the chap cobusman Uh
Speaker 1: and now is myel el Mario Stambada, which is still
Speaker 1: a gentleman, gentleman around probably getting to their eighties, I'm
Speaker 1: not quite sure, but but who has been on the
Speaker 1: run for many years, but relatively calm and with big
Speaker 1: investments and with the high presence here in California, with
Speaker 1: that faction of this in a cartel, and that's a
Speaker 1: local also when after the arrest of the chapel is
Speaker 1: it's run. And the other big faction for the sons
Speaker 1: of Chapo gusman Video and and the lost chapter, they
Speaker 1: call it los Chapitos. There's like three three Ivana, Chivado
Speaker 1: and I can't remember the name of the other one.
Speaker 1: So that's it's in a cartel with with presence but
Speaker 1: mainly in the northern part and really mainly basically basically
Speaker 1: Uh their thing is to manufacturing um madam, petomine and
Speaker 1: now fanelil and send it to the US. UM then
Speaker 1: they are the Yellow Felix Ru organization who became as
Speaker 1: a result of that division, that distribution that according to
Speaker 1: the most commonly non narrative about drug world, um Felix
Speaker 1: the true that after his arrest established themselves in i Juana.
Speaker 1: They are from Sinaloa too, but they established themselves from
Speaker 1: Tijuana in the actually in the eighties. But at the
Speaker 1: nineties they became powerful on its own and they due
Speaker 1: to the proximity of San Diego and to the fact
Speaker 1: that they missed mixed with many of the border lifestyle
Speaker 1: a lad of Tijuana, they changed the image of the
Speaker 1: drug trafficker demor became more entrepreneurs and they wanted to
Speaker 1: become the main the first Mexican cartel, Colombian pabulous of
Speaker 1: our style. According to the narrative, no, and they did.
Speaker 1: They became the nineties they were most one of the
Speaker 1: most powerful drug organization in the world for the amount
Speaker 1: of not just marijuana cocaine that they were moving. I
Speaker 1: mean they established relationships with Colombian and after a while
Speaker 1: Colombians were not trafficking in Mexico. They were just sending
Speaker 1: the drug to the Mexicans. At the beginning, they were
Speaker 1: Columbians were kind of leasing the routes in the Mexican
Speaker 1: territory to send the drugs into the US. But then
Speaker 1: when this division of a new commerce and the drug
Speaker 1: trade in Mexico, they decide, and I think the rio
Speaker 1: Fas have some um something to do with that, they
Speaker 1: want to go and get the drugs from Colombians in
Speaker 1: the South and South America and bringing and just take
Speaker 1: care of the whole thing. So become their own curtel.
Speaker 1: And then then another off off shoot, this is what
Speaker 1: you call it like spinoff, spinoff kind of another way.
Speaker 1: All the of this in a log because they used
Speaker 1: to have a presence in Guallajara and the different factions
Speaker 1: were killing each other, changing loyalties, and then began a
Speaker 1: force on their own um after a big division between
Speaker 1: the beltran Leva group and the Nasal Coronal organization, and
Speaker 1: they become their own cartain on the own. And and
Speaker 1: that's we're according to the d e A and and
Speaker 1: also Mexican authorities is expanding more rapidly in very short
Speaker 1: period of time. And then unfortunately have been moving not
Speaker 1: only to draw trafficing, but there's many small groups that
Speaker 1: now are making their money. And the ole way of
Speaker 1: the mafia, the Cosa Nostra was doing their money in
Speaker 1: New York in the seventies or before, not that they
Speaker 1: were just extorting money out of local businesses, from a
Speaker 1: well established chain of stores to a little tagistan on
Speaker 1: the corner. There's also the trafficking of gasoline in Mexico
Speaker 1: and and has been doubling. I mean anything that they
Speaker 1: once they get powerful, they began to move to other activities.
Speaker 1: For example, in the case of the anothetics, keep tapping
Speaker 1: wasn't a thing, let's say, before the ninety before the
Speaker 1: the nineties in Baha, California, they were kidnapping people who
Speaker 1: owned who used to be there their associates. Is the
Speaker 1: the where's my money kind of thing, you know, like
Speaker 1: you think about good fellows and and and they were
Speaker 1: killing the chother there's everything among themselves. But later they
Speaker 1: began that they were were they were active with a
Speaker 1: lot of impunity. That they had a lot of cobs
Speaker 1: thirties on their payroll. So they began to move to
Speaker 1: other ways to earn money. And that's what we have
Speaker 1: seen now that the expanding this little as in Colombia
Speaker 1: used to go the baby cartels, we now have like
Speaker 1: a new chapters, smaller organization, not as powerful, but as
Speaker 1: violent as as the original. I wanted to ask because
Speaker 1: I saw a lot of these like supposedly like they
Speaker 1: come up on TikTok or Facebook, right, these little announcements
Speaker 1: from the different cartels, and they tend to say, at
Speaker 1: least in the context of California, that like, we didn't
Speaker 1: want to disrupt ordinary people are good people, are good
Speaker 1: citizens about California, you know, but we need you to
Speaker 1: stay in your homes this weekend. Write things like that,
Speaker 1: but it obviously does have an impact on the people
Speaker 1: who I just sort of doing whatever they do, just
Speaker 1: running their business. And so I was wondering sort of
Speaker 1: how people get through these difficult times Antijuan and California. Well,
Speaker 1: times are becoming more difficult because many people believe this
Speaker 1: because the widespread possibility of disseminating these messages now and
Speaker 1: you never know which ones are real, yes, and which
Speaker 1: ones are not. Um. I mean, you guys have the
Speaker 1: same with the gangs. Remember, like don't bling your your
Speaker 1: head lies, because then the gang will start killing people
Speaker 1: left and right. Just take that on steroids. Now with
Speaker 1: social media and and now everybody with the phone that
Speaker 1: can get that messages. And that was that played a
Speaker 1: big role in what happened on writing here in Tijuana,
Speaker 1: they were recycling a video of three guys video taping
Speaker 1: themselves in from of the Attorney General's office in Tijuana.
Speaker 1: Says so mantris here, we're gonna kill everybody, and just
Speaker 1: being very loud and and and and with a lot
Speaker 1: of insults and trying to scare the everybody the rights
Speaker 1: but everybody else. So during the hours of Friday, somebody
Speaker 1: began retreating that when was at least a year old
Speaker 1: of them claiming that that they were they were over here.
Speaker 1: Some people think this all this commotion happening, a lot
Speaker 1: of this cards burn, They didn't know exactly what was
Speaker 1: going on. Some people began to call in narco blocals
Speaker 1: that just scare more people. And then you see this,
Speaker 1: so the level of anxiety increased significantly. You have to
Speaker 1: very careful and there's also you have to also keep
Speaker 1: in mind the political feuds that we are seeing. What
Speaker 1: you have seen between some people loyal to Trump and
Speaker 1: the rebulic comparty and some people that are against Trump.
Speaker 1: Is the same here with Morena and non Morenna actors
Speaker 1: or people who likes the Morena which is the political
Speaker 1: party founded creative by the current president, are the ones
Speaker 1: who are against them and are very unhappy or angry
Speaker 1: with all these social policies. Um and and for example,
Speaker 1: we have here a television station run owned by the
Speaker 1: former governor Obaja California, who has is a very close
Speaker 1: friend of Andres Manuelope or the current president, who became
Speaker 1: a very powerful figure and due to his proximity. Basically
Speaker 1: the current president revived this gentleman, which by the way
Speaker 1: lives in San Diego and Chula Vista in a big
Speaker 1: mansion because he exiled himself from about thirty years ago
Speaker 1: when he was associated with the last p r I government,
Speaker 1: the pre the political party run Mexican for the last
Speaker 1: for seven years in a row. He was a very
Speaker 1: close associate with He could taka Laba Morta, which was
Speaker 1: the the current governor who didn't finish his his turn
Speaker 1: because the and then President of Mexico, Carlos Alina's accused
Speaker 1: him of corruption. So he just removed him and this
Speaker 1: guy Himmonia became a paria. So the p AN the
Speaker 1: new power basically mark him because also he had some
Speaker 1: previous suspicious relationships through the baseball team here in Tejuana
Speaker 1: and from other endeavors. That makes them looks like very
Speaker 1: close to the Ariana Phelix d organization. The Ariana Phelix
Speaker 1: organization has been linked for many years with the last
Speaker 1: administration because they him that that last Prnstrass is the
Speaker 1: one who basically opened the door for the Ariana Felis
Speaker 1: to establish here in BA California. So this is what
Speaker 1: we are seeing that that this messages. Well, now this
Speaker 1: guy who just left the office that the NIA just
Speaker 1: finished his governorship on December last year, so there's a
Speaker 1: new governor. But he also owns a television station, so
Speaker 1: he who is always criticizing the current governor, which is
Speaker 1: where the same political party it was uh using some
Speaker 1: of these messages with no proof or no validity or
Speaker 1: very suspicious and he was saying in their newscasts were saying,
Speaker 1: well there's also this happening. There's the threads and they
Speaker 1: know that this government is corrupt and they were just
Speaker 1: alling too to the fire, and I mean as an analog,
Speaker 1: you know, the the real fight, but to the concern
Speaker 1: of the people. And in this term like saying that
Speaker 1: all we're gonna start a lackdown and we'll be talking
Speaker 1: to what's work for talking expression for tok to like
Speaker 1: that you cannot go out, Yes, martial martial will start
Speaker 1: at six. If we see you on the streets, we're
Speaker 1: gonna killed you. There was a message that that television
Speaker 1: station was repeated once and again every day, so I
Speaker 1: was just added to So all these all these new
Speaker 1: novelty is sort of pick with a digital era are
Speaker 1: also creating bigger fires in the political spectrum and in
Speaker 1: a place where you never know what exactly the line
Speaker 1: is between the criminals and the government. Yeah, I think
Speaker 1: it's a very good thing to hide. I actually this
Speaker 1: idea that there's like distinct blocks right like and that
Speaker 1: this supplies And I don't want to say like this
Speaker 1: is a Mexican thing, because it's not. This is a
Speaker 1: global thing, but like that there's a distinct plug between
Speaker 1: like crime and media that you consume and the government
Speaker 1: and the people that like working for the state, Like
Speaker 1: like the the idea that is a very separate and
Speaker 1: the world off doesn't it doesn't apply here, and I
Speaker 1: don't think we should say elsewhere either. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: a problem. He's becoming it's becoming worse and worse. No,
Speaker 1: because this factions, this other arena. I mean, we are
Speaker 1: seen it here also with the official statements from the authorities.
Speaker 1: I mean I was telling you earlier that that they
Speaker 1: the military had the secretary of the military says, well
Speaker 1: in the one that they didn't went against the civilians,
Speaker 1: and the governor also repeated that. So well here, fortunately
Speaker 1: they didn't affect that the life of the people. Of course,
Speaker 1: of course they did. I mean, we were lucky they
Speaker 1: didn't kill anybody. But but no, they did. And so
Speaker 1: you have to also be finding that propaganda from the
Speaker 1: government against the propaganda from the criminal groups and the
Speaker 1: different political legal factions in other quote unquote non state actors,
Speaker 1: just to put it in in a different context. So it's
Speaker 1: becoming very difficult. And yeah, I always say, excuse me
Speaker 1: if I readat this, but honestly believe, I mean, there's
Speaker 1: always great investigators detectives in Mexico willing to put their
Speaker 1: lives on the line for the good of people, but
Speaker 1: it's not always in the best conditions. And and this
Speaker 1: is like just the character of traffic. Uh, probably you
Speaker 1: were You guys were very young when traffic came across.
Speaker 1: I mean a very popular movie which is about from
Speaker 1: the nineties and the end of the night is probably Yeah,
Speaker 1: where were the One of the three main characters is
Speaker 1: an honest Mexican caps I. Fortunately I met several of
Speaker 1: cases like that, but some of them have been killed
Speaker 1: due to their own estate, but also others that learned
Speaker 1: to survive and play along and try to do as
Speaker 1: much good as they can um within the circumstances they
Speaker 1: are dealing with. Yeah, I think talking of good investigators
Speaker 1: who are trying to heal with difficult circumstances, maybe you
Speaker 1: should touch on the violence against suppress that we've seen
Speaker 1: in California and in Mexico as a whole. I mean,
Speaker 1: you come to talking about yes, yes, unfortunately, and this
Speaker 1: is terribly sad. A couple of hours ago, we just
Speaker 1: learned that the one of the reporters who was reported
Speaker 1: missing in the neighbors in state of Sonora was being
Speaker 1: found dead. So we have another killing of a reporter.
Speaker 1: We also saw that the case of stare as they
Speaker 1: kill poor employees of four workers of a radio station, broadcaster,
Speaker 1: you know, affeelingly, randomly, apparently random, but then I mean
Speaker 1: we I mean depending on which told you take your
Speaker 1: look too. Because there's like the official for the government,
Speaker 1: federal government from the CpG the Committee to Protect Journalists
Speaker 1: and or reports in other organizations, there is not that
Speaker 1: there's about ten or fifteen between I would say ten
Speaker 1: or fourteen or fifteen journalists or media workers skilled. So
Speaker 1: far this year we have two of those killings happening
Speaker 1: here in Tijuana in in January. Um one of them them,
Speaker 1: I'm convinced by now that he was killed for the
Speaker 1: leader of drug trafficking cell was operating in the east
Speaker 1: side of the city, who wasn't pleased with some of
Speaker 1: the stories that one of the media outlets, his name
Speaker 1: is mar One of the media outists that Margharito was
Speaker 1: working too as a freelance swer was was pullishing very
Speaker 1: revealing stories about the operation of the trafficer. So he
Speaker 1: ordered and pay for some other people to kill Margarito
Speaker 1: because he and my humble opinion, was the weakest link,
Speaker 1: because he was living on the same neighborhood. That these
Speaker 1: guys were operating working the night shift. That is very
Speaker 1: common that only a few of them are left to
Speaker 1: to do that. Chief that beat uh, he was easily identifiable,
Speaker 1: identifiable for the crooks because Margito will show up at
Speaker 1: the crime scenes. And in many of these cases you
Speaker 1: have people who work for the same organization. Organization show
Speaker 1: enough to make sure that the guy was really killed
Speaker 1: and who showed up. And and I mean even when
Speaker 1: the killing is done, the criminals are still working the scene.
Speaker 1: And in some cases we met with these guys guys
Speaker 1: without knowing. I mean, these guys were were um even
Speaker 1: willing to go to the funeral of Margarito. The only
Speaker 1: reason they were not there is because they when they
Speaker 1: approached this a lot of military presence on during the funeral.
Speaker 1: So I'm convinced that Margharito was killed due to his
Speaker 1: work as a as a photographer. UM. In the other
Speaker 1: case of my friend all coworker, Lord de Sandoval, I'm
Speaker 1: not sure what was the motive. In both cases are
Speaker 1: two people in jail, but the procedure is still on
Speaker 1: the beginning stages. We are not proved, and the main
Speaker 1: thing is we don't know who order and pay for
Speaker 1: their killings. Well we know, or I think I have
Speaker 1: a big suspicion about which one is the guy who
Speaker 1: killed them in the case of Margharito, not in the
Speaker 1: case of lords and the authorities. I'm not confident enough
Speaker 1: that they're gonna be able to all the crimes in
Speaker 1: this particular cases. The other one, there's two cases, Inn
Speaker 1: there's other cases and tom lipas uh. I guess by
Speaker 1: now we have to count at least two or three
Speaker 1: in Sonora with the sad news that we got today.
Speaker 1: So it's difficult. I mean not everybody is is risking
Speaker 1: their life when they're doing journalism in Mexico, but you
Speaker 1: never know when the danger will jump against you. I
Speaker 1: have a always tell this story about a photographer to
Speaker 1: what was called to cover a traffic accident my minority. No, no, Well,
Speaker 1: the problem is that the the guy who was involved
Speaker 1: in the traffic and the accident was a drug blord,
Speaker 1: very a very well known operator, very dangerous operator, and
Speaker 1: he kept taking pictures thanks to some of the officers,
Speaker 1: firefighters and ladies who saw that he was being um
Speaker 1: treated not very naievely, and they lay it is that intervened,
Speaker 1: he was able to get away. He had to live
Speaker 1: town for a while. Uh, that's it. But that's the
Speaker 1: kind of environment that we are dealing with. Is not
Speaker 1: that every story makes you put you in danger, but
Speaker 1: you never I mean, you can do a lot of
Speaker 1: you can be a reporter and not be on danger.
Speaker 1: Not you don't get into subjects that are tricky, you
Speaker 1: don't get too much in political corruption, and you don't
Speaker 1: do get too much on on drug trafficking, on care
Speaker 1: and homicides. You're pretty much gonna be able to do fine.
Speaker 1: But but the promise sometimes if you're doing a story
Speaker 1: none related, there may be some link to put you
Speaker 1: in danger. And that's the situation. And unfortunately, the level
Speaker 1: of impunity and on crimes again journalists is even worse
Speaker 1: than the level of impunity of general civilians in Mexico.
Speaker 1: I will say that generalists about ninety personal ninety eight
Speaker 1: percent and nine for for case of journalist civilians. So
Speaker 1: our case is worse. The possibility of somebody will be
Speaker 1: punished for killing you. It's it's very, very, very spanning. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, that's terrible. I don't know. It's again, like
Speaker 1: you said, it's not just a Mexican problem. You see
Speaker 1: in so many governments across the world where press our
Speaker 1: targeted specifically. Um. But yeah, and I appreciate your work
Speaker 1: even more knowing that the percentage of cases are just
Speaker 1: violence against you, so against you as a journalist is
Speaker 1: so high. It's very sad and it's very disencouraging. But
Speaker 1: I always, I mean, my I have a familihood, is
Speaker 1: not copy because I'm still working on Friday. They called
Speaker 1: me the one. They want me to stay at the office.
Speaker 1: They don't want me to get out. Um, and I
Speaker 1: under tend. I understand, Pepper, it's one of the men.
Speaker 1: But also on the other hand, it's uh, you know,
Speaker 1: this is important information. Even when we are dealing with
Speaker 1: an avalanche of information that is not necessarily well treated.
Speaker 1: We need to have good information so people will make
Speaker 1: good decisions. We are in a very small joint democracy.
Speaker 1: We just began to make in roads on electoral democracy.
Speaker 1: It's relatively recent. Began basically at the end of the
Speaker 1: nineties here in Baka, California, and has been moving to
Speaker 1: the two thousand's and now we are unfortunately back back
Speaker 1: in many ways. But but now you can rely now
Speaker 1: on who is running the elections together. That information was
Speaker 1: very important. Now we need to be also very make
Speaker 1: a lot of big efforts to explain people that you
Speaker 1: can make Mexico is making progress even in these dire conditions,
Speaker 1: but you have to pay attention and also try to
Speaker 1: to learn where the information is coming from. That not
Speaker 1: all the media is the same that we have do.
Speaker 1: We come from a big tradition of government control media.
Speaker 1: Now media control also due trafficking organizations, and in some
Speaker 1: cases both are linked and and working to give your trouble.
Speaker 1: And also there's a lot of press that has chosen
Speaker 1: to just go with the flock and just live out
Speaker 1: of propaganda. And sometimes they do good things, like they
Speaker 1: go and give boys to the people and the local community,
Speaker 1: so the the water is established or there's more um,
Speaker 1: there's no more need for to fix a park or
Speaker 1: to public transportation, and they do do good. This is important.
Speaker 1: All the the job of the reporters is good, but
Speaker 1: in the in the bigger dimension of the bigger problems,
Speaker 1: they tend to be on the side of the government.
Speaker 1: Because the government found this way to give you a
Speaker 1: lot of public advertisement and to have you under their control.
Speaker 1: And many reporters want to be good journalism with journalists,
Speaker 1: but their editors of the owners of the companies are
Speaker 1: not willing to rouse that easy way to get a
Speaker 1: lot of money from the government and more easily than
Speaker 1: to start putting themselves on the risk, which implies when
Speaker 1: you do heavially digging or criticizing the powers of Yeah,
Speaker 1: how how would someone know that they're getting accurate information?
Speaker 1: In that case? This applies to every country in the world.
Speaker 1: You have to really be conscious and like seek out
Speaker 1: particular sources. But like in this case, what do you
Speaker 1: recommend for people? I mean, it's difficult. You're right, this
Speaker 1: is the simple everywhere. But I guess the same recipe
Speaker 1: works here. I mean, just double chair, double check their sources.
Speaker 1: Try to compare several UM media outlets and to see
Speaker 1: where it's reporting UM, whether each of them is reporting
Speaker 1: UM the same way that you find the way they
Speaker 1: are leaning in the US is the what you find here.
Speaker 1: But the problem is the established media, the how do
Speaker 1: you call it? Um? The traditional media is becoming less
Speaker 1: relevant because most of the main good journalism is done
Speaker 1: by small revolves soup. They began their own entities, their
Speaker 1: own platforms. I mean, some cases there's good reporters working
Speaker 1: for good media outlets. Normally those are not local. I
Speaker 1: mean when you see the big media companies, don't they
Speaker 1: don't have which some exceptional, but they don't have any
Speaker 1: people doing urnalizing at the local level. You will find
Speaker 1: good local journalism with these renegades or rebels that have
Speaker 1: people who have been fired from the big, larger organization,
Speaker 1: and you have to be looking for those options. I
Speaker 1: mean that doesn't mean that it's a guarantee that they're
Speaker 1: gonna gonna be independent completely. You also learn how to
Speaker 1: read them. For example, there's a good case of two reporters.
Speaker 1: We just where they resigned or were fired, we don't
Speaker 1: know exactly, but they from a well prestigious publication locally,
Speaker 1: they began their own operation. They have they are good, proven,
Speaker 1: proven as a reporters. You know what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: say that they have a reporter. Yeah, yeah, I thought
Speaker 1: that was what it was. I was just like, I
Speaker 1: don't actually don't know, I don't know phrases either. Yeah.
Speaker 1: They made a name for from themselves doing good journalism
Speaker 1: with other publications, began their own media outlet, and some
Speaker 1: people was complaining that they were too close to some
Speaker 1: uh state agency with the new government. And they have
Speaker 1: great information. They do good, good um reporting, but you
Speaker 1: have to look curve carefully and which which type and
Speaker 1: where are they leaning to. So I always read them.
Speaker 1: I just take it with a grain nut sal that
Speaker 1: you will see say in English, to try to balance
Speaker 1: my intake of information from different sources. It's difficult to
Speaker 1: tell the people because they are not general The general
Speaker 1: public is not as involved or interested in media on
Speaker 1: and on the newspaper or on the news. We are
Speaker 1: because we live out of it. But people is doing
Speaker 1: their life and making the the will to move around,
Speaker 1: not for all of us in different France as a doctor,
Speaker 1: as a housewife, as a teacher, and they don't have
Speaker 1: enough time to then to analyze media the way we do.
Speaker 1: So we I think we need to do a little
Speaker 1: bit of that. Try to tell them this is for
Speaker 1: this reason we believe this media outlet is living in
Speaker 1: this direction, this is subsidized or is getting We do
Speaker 1: that this is getting this amount of money from the
Speaker 1: government and not this amount of money from the government,
Speaker 1: that that will give you a hand to take it
Speaker 1: and to see who are they dealing with I mean
Speaker 1: there's guys who have been working for the governen now
Speaker 1: are back to reports. I mean therese cases like that
Speaker 1: in the US. Stephanopolis used to work for the for
Speaker 1: the one of the presidents on the guy for of
Speaker 1: Harball from MSNBC used to work for Nixon. I mean,
Speaker 1: we see this, but in this environment it is more
Speaker 1: difficult to to live out those connections. And it's always
Speaker 1: tricky to be moving from government jobs to journalism jobs
Speaker 1: because it's not I mean you have to so. I
Speaker 1: mean when in my perspective I never worked for for
Speaker 1: the government, I hope I would never have to do that.
Speaker 1: I respect the ones they do, but you as we
Speaker 1: need to be more transparent, transparent in that sense to
Speaker 1: be able to be fair with the people. Yeah, that
Speaker 1: makes sense. There's this interesting development in Mexico that I've
Speaker 1: seen in some areas, like if I want to learn
Speaker 1: about like what's happening in the yucky pueblos in Sonora
Speaker 1: or in chapters, like these people who will just be
Speaker 1: like citizen reporters on Facebook, doing very local reporting that
Speaker 1: it seems to get really popular, but that they will
Speaker 1: sort of blow up really quickly doing this like Facebook
Speaker 1: only reporting. It's really interesting because there's a big need
Speaker 1: of information and they know many people in Mexico have
Speaker 1: learned to be distrustful of the quote unquote legacy media.
Speaker 1: The expression I was looking for legacy media, the big companies,
Speaker 1: um and And the problem is there's this risk that
Speaker 1: many of those media, you media outlets, which is basically
Speaker 1: Facebook accounts or TikTok accounts. Now, uh, the people doesn't
Speaker 1: know how to deal with I mean, they they are,
Speaker 1: they have good intentions, but they don't really know how
Speaker 1: journalists should work. And in some cases they think, like
Speaker 1: some for example, that they can take money for different
Speaker 1: actors and that will help them to grow and and
Speaker 1: I guess you can, but but you have to be
Speaker 1: very careful. And this has been a big problem that
Speaker 1: I'll try to emphasize every time I talk about our situation.
Speaker 1: For many years, the government was too close or their
Speaker 1: reporters were too close to the government. The government will
Speaker 1: make easy with a lot of privileges for the reporters,
Speaker 1: so they learned to do this to work in this scenario.
Speaker 1: So if I was close to the government, they will
Speaker 1: expect it's a lot of things for me, so to speak.
Speaker 1: I can get good money. I can get probably a
Speaker 1: license to for a bar way weaker than somebody who
Speaker 1: is not doesn't have that access to the government. I
Speaker 1: can probably get like um taxi licenses for example, because
Speaker 1: I'm a reporter. Because I'm I'm close, I can get
Speaker 1: close to the movies and checkers and the political arena.
Speaker 1: No but you. So they did that, and when the
Speaker 1: drop trafficking with the narcos became another power, many many
Speaker 1: reporters began to see it in the same way. So
Speaker 1: they were closely with the government was powered, and then
Speaker 1: we're coursing with the businessmen, and they were closely with
Speaker 1: the with the unions because they were giving them handouts
Speaker 1: or treat them them prevalently, or they were able to
Speaker 1: do some traffic of influence who will give them some benefits.
Speaker 1: When the narcos became a problem regional power on their own,
Speaker 1: some of the reporters didn't see the different or gain
Speaker 1: too close to that power, and that has put a
Speaker 1: lot of the reporters in danger. I think the reporters
Speaker 1: are learning a little bit more to stay away from
Speaker 1: those But there's also with the abandment of social media,
Speaker 1: many people who are really crooked, or that they were
Speaker 1: not very interested in doing things ethically from the beginning.
Speaker 1: That now see that with a Facebook account, with a
Speaker 1: TikTok account or Instagram or any other platform, you can
Speaker 1: pass by a reporter. So there's this need of information,
Speaker 1: but also it is filled with um with good and
Speaker 1: bad people, as in any other cases I always talk.
Speaker 1: I mean, this is the all analogy of a gun
Speaker 1: is the gang bad or good? All depends on the
Speaker 1: circumstances you are using it. No, yeah, yeah, I'm not
Speaker 1: not a gang guy. But I don't want to get
Speaker 1: into your your your political discourse about your First Amendment. That. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a whole another episode. Need. Yeah, that's line if
Speaker 1: you said, sure, did you have anything else? No, that
Speaker 1: was awesome, Thank you so much for all the information. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and talking of reliable media, where can people find you online?
Speaker 1: Where can they find your work? Where can they find
Speaker 1: your social media? The main thing is Tijuana Press dot com.
Speaker 1: That's back room is just an online needed media outlet.
Speaker 1: Is not a newspaper. It's just when we we have
Speaker 1: been changing our way of work because we began as
Speaker 1: a daily we're no longer to do that because we
Speaker 1: don't have enough resources for that, but also there's plenty
Speaker 1: of daily media outlets, digital media outlets for the daily stories.
Speaker 1: We want to do a little bit more in there,
Speaker 1: more investigative, more give you context of what is going on.
Speaker 1: We we are in Spanish, but you can follow us
Speaker 1: on Twitter on add Tijuana Press. Because we tried to
Speaker 1: with our poor English, try to do some on tweets
Speaker 1: on English with the help of Google Translator or other Hell,
Speaker 1: guys who other call that will correct or spelling. But
Speaker 1: that's the main way to get ahold of us. Well,
Speaker 1: I think you're English is great. Uh, you talked to
Speaker 1: us for an hour and I understood everything. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: but thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you, sante, No, thank you guys. You always help
Speaker 1: us to spread the world and to be able to
Speaker 1: put ourselves to be judged by the public. This is
Speaker 1: what it's more important for us. But we do invest
Speaker 1: in algorithms from any social platform because we believe and
Speaker 1: and that the people will be willing to find us
Speaker 1: if they are really interested, and you guys help us
Speaker 1: about in that sense. Yeah, thank yeah, thank you so
Speaker 1: much giving us some of your time. We really appreciate it.
Speaker 1: Thank you. We'll be here if you would be, it
Speaker 1: would be a big help. Thank you, Thank you. So
Speaker 1: welcome to it could happen here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: falling apart and how to put them back together again. Now,
Speaker 1: a thing that has fallen apart that we have talked
Speaker 1: about at length before is the protection of the right
Speaker 1: to abortions, previously enshrined in Roe v. Wade and no
Speaker 1: longer enshrined in that. And we've come at this from
Speaker 1: a number of angles, but one angle that we've neglected
Speaker 1: so far is is the labor angle. Um. And Okay,
Speaker 1: so for reproductive autonomy to exist, right, you need healthcare,
Speaker 1: and healthcare, especially under capitalism, requires labor. And and that
Speaker 1: labor isn't done by you know, abstract organizations. It's done
Speaker 1: by workers who are facing not only sort of the
Speaker 1: mall of the death of row, but the in transient
Speaker 1: and often the belligerency of the room bosses. And here
Speaker 1: to talk with us about that is Crystal Grabowski and
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Vella Nuevo from the wonderfully named UEI Local six
Speaker 1: nine six UM, and I'm gonna I'm going to read
Speaker 1: a pseudo legal disclaimer here, which is that they are
Speaker 1: not representing Planned parent who they do work at Planned Parenthood.
Speaker 1: They are not representing planned parenthood. They're they're representing themselves
Speaker 1: as individuals and our local union, yes, proud members of
Speaker 1: Local six nine, six impeccably named union, purposefully named right. Well,
Speaker 1: they were like, you have to choose a a number
Speaker 1: that starts with six, and then we just looked at
Speaker 1: each other and we had that moment where it's like, yes,
Speaker 1: and then we can add another one and it'll be
Speaker 1: a good time, fun little threesome. He'll be safe. That's good.
Speaker 1: So sorry, round one of pro union propaganda joining you
Speaker 1: did and YouTube can be in in Union Local sixty
Speaker 1: nine or what if they told you the number could
Speaker 1: start with four, like you know, yeah, boom, there's just
Speaker 1: so many options. I'm sure there's other fun numbers that
Speaker 1: besides those, but you have the entire world in front
Speaker 1: of you. Yeah, we could have done six, you could
Speaker 1: do like boom. Can you imagine if we did six six?
Speaker 1: We could now we had that choice, and we went
Speaker 1: with six nine six. Sexual Health Organization is to prove
Speaker 1: that workers will always make the right decisions. This is
Speaker 1: the power of the union. We can evaluate these decisions
Speaker 1: when when it's important and do the right thing. So yeah,
Speaker 1: thank thank you, thank you to you so much for
Speaker 1: for coming on the show. Thank you for having us.
Speaker 1: We're both super excited. Yeah, thanks for tining us a
Speaker 1: slowly abortion workers. So I'm gonna I'm gonna dispute heavily
Speaker 1: with the term slowly like youall are the people who
Speaker 1: make all of this possible. Bull So yeah. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: and now now having said all of this, I'm about
Speaker 1: I'm going to ask you a very depression question, which
Speaker 1: we have. We've asked a lot of the people who've
Speaker 1: talked about abortion access, uh like who work in abortion
Speaker 1: access stuff this question, but I think you two had
Speaker 1: a very different experience of it. Um. What was it
Speaker 1: like on the day when Roe died? Do you want
Speaker 1: to go first, Crystal? Um? Yeah. I've talked about this
Speaker 1: a lot because I'm getting asked a lot, and it's
Speaker 1: I'm happy to talk about it, um, which is I'm
Speaker 1: actually like, it's been hard to listen to other people
Speaker 1: talk about it because then I start getting in my fields.
Speaker 1: But like when I'm talking about and I'm kind of
Speaker 1: like just processing and it's probably healthy for me, somebody
Speaker 1: would say, but it was incredibly traumatic, and it's been
Speaker 1: incredibly traumatic, um since the fall of Ruby Wade and
Speaker 1: the Dobs decision. And I'm saying this, well, like knowing
Speaker 1: that we all knew it was coming, it was it
Speaker 1: was a given and it wasn't surprising. And there's just
Speaker 1: something about knowing that it's been coming for months and
Speaker 1: years that like just it just did nothing to actually
Speaker 1: inform you, like what would it be like? Um, But
Speaker 1: it was like a it was like a tidal wave
Speaker 1: crashing and just like sweeping you away. And we're still
Speaker 1: swept away. Um. The only language that I can find
Speaker 1: that's appropriate is like natural disaster language, and I just
Speaker 1: I keep repeating it and saying, like it's like a hurricane,
Speaker 1: It's like a tidal wave. But that is the those
Speaker 1: are the words that are most fitting to me, like
Speaker 1: emotionally and just in terms of like the violence and
Speaker 1: the that is that you that people are experiencing, um,
Speaker 1: and just the the emotional and mental and bodily harm
Speaker 1: is equitable to a natural disaster. Yeah. And I think
Speaker 1: during one of our debriefs, during a particularly difficult all day,
Speaker 1: this was pretty um row. We were talking about how
Speaker 1: sometimes it's really hard for us when we can see
Speaker 1: these things coming and yet there's nothing we can really
Speaker 1: do about it. And I know that we talked about
Speaker 1: how it felt like we were just tied to a
Speaker 1: train track, watching and waiting for that train to just
Speaker 1: come and hit us, and then when it did, it
Speaker 1: was just it just knocked I think the wind out
Speaker 1: of all of us. Um, I think we all cried
Speaker 1: for sure, that we all cried, and um, and I'm
Speaker 1: not even like, I don't know, like I feel like
Speaker 1: I am. I'm emotional and I am a crier, but
Speaker 1: a whole I didn't think that I would sob immediately
Speaker 1: the second I saw the news. And then I always
Speaker 1: knew we were going to get a lot more calls
Speaker 1: because um, Elizabeth and I also answered phones in the
Speaker 1: abortion clinic, and I was like, Okay, we're gonna get
Speaker 1: way more calls. But like, you don't know what that
Speaker 1: feels like or looks like. Her sounds like, like, what
Speaker 1: is it I feel like to have a hundred people
Speaker 1: calling you pretty much at the same time? What does
Speaker 1: that look like? Now? I know, and it's traumatic and
Speaker 1: it's awful, and um, it's a natural disaster, but it's
Speaker 1: a man made disaster. Actually it's not a natural disaster.
Speaker 1: We've there are people who have inflicted this upon us, um,
Speaker 1: and now we know what it feels like, and it's
Speaker 1: sucking awful. I should have asked if I was allowed
Speaker 1: to swear. Oh yeah, I swear all the time, okay,
Speaker 1: because like I've been on podcast before where they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: we gotta edit that out, which, well, it's a fucking nightmare. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we work in healthcare. I think we swear more than
Speaker 1: the average lay man because they keep saying something out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's so much more to say, like yeah, please, I
Speaker 1: don't even know where to go from there. It's just yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like a never ending nightmare because like the calls
Speaker 1: started and then it's just like just just person after
Speaker 1: person after person. They driving driving two hours, three hours,
Speaker 1: four hours, five hours, coming from states that are like
Speaker 1: three states away, coming from like states in the South,
Speaker 1: people taking planes and um, people staying in hotels and
Speaker 1: we've had people pay like hundreds of dollars for maneuver
Speaker 1: eshm and um. And then just like bringing in the
Speaker 1: labor angle to as like unionized abortion workers who you know,
Speaker 1: we have been vocal and we've been rallying and making
Speaker 1: our demands like publicly known. But we are doing this
Speaker 1: while under staffed, like skeletal crew staffing. We didn't have
Speaker 1: enough staff before row fell and the jobs decision, and
Speaker 1: now we just it's bare bones and it's like we
Speaker 1: are So we're taking on this title wave, this like
Speaker 1: man made title wave, while just giving every last ounce
Speaker 1: of our energy. Yeah. Um, and do multiple roles at once. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you are able to tell from
Speaker 1: the fact that Crystal and I both work directly in
Speaker 1: the clinic, but we also answer calls. Um. When we
Speaker 1: signed up for our job, Um, we knew that we
Speaker 1: would be doing multiple things around the clinic, and it's
Speaker 1: just it's funny, um to not really know what that
Speaker 1: means until you start doing it. So one day you'll
Speaker 1: be holding a patient's hand while they're having this procedure done,
Speaker 1: like giving them a little baggy in case they feel sick. Um,
Speaker 1: you'll be talking to them on the phone. So some
Speaker 1: there are days where, um, I will meet people who
Speaker 1: I've spoken to on the phone when they called took
Speaker 1: their appointment, and it just hits me like a tidal wave.
Speaker 1: Because I'm like, that's the person, Like, that's this person specifically,
Speaker 1: I remember because I remember hearing the sound of their voice,
Speaker 1: and every single time they call in they are sobbing.
Speaker 1: This is a horrifying moment for them. This is a
Speaker 1: moment where they feel like trapped, They feel like they
Speaker 1: can't share with their family, with their friends. Um, depending
Speaker 1: on what state they're from and the legalities of that state.
Speaker 1: They are even afraid to make these phone calls. Like
Speaker 1: some of the first things that patients say to us
Speaker 1: when they call it is in my is this okay? Like?
Speaker 1: Am I allowed to call you? Um? Amula to talk
Speaker 1: to you? Of my allowed to book an appointment? Um?
Speaker 1: What's going to happen next for me? Appointment? Yeah? Because
Speaker 1: we're not lawyers, because we everything is so fluid right now,
Speaker 1: we don't have answers to give them. Um, we can
Speaker 1: just say, well, you're coming to Pennsylvania and it's stillegal
Speaker 1: in Pennsylvania, so um. And then just to like paint
Speaker 1: the picture a little more too about like both the
Speaker 1: skeletal staffing and the emotional turnoil and the emotional weight
Speaker 1: of it. Um. So that Dobb's decision happened on June,
Speaker 1: which was a Friday, and we're in Pennsylvania, and that
Speaker 1: evening of the evening of June, a trigger man went
Speaker 1: into effect in in Ohio. It was a it's a
Speaker 1: fetal heartbeat bill, which is a deceptive language because it's
Speaker 1: not actually a heartbeat but um, but it's a it's
Speaker 1: technically a fetal heartbeat bill. And so people after six
Speaker 1: weeks um could no longer access abortion services or once
Speaker 1: any sort of like electrical impulse was detected and everyone
Speaker 1: had their appointments canceled. So we were actually at a protest,
Speaker 1: like the staff was like at a protest that evening,
Speaker 1: um with our with our doctors, our abortion providing doctors,
Speaker 1: and the news came out like yeah, shout out to them,
Speaker 1: we love them, um, and we got the news that
Speaker 1: Ohio had just did this, and we were just like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, tomorrow because we knew the second our
Speaker 1: call center and our phone lines opened, everyone whose appointment
Speaker 1: was canceled is going to be calling us. And then
Speaker 1: we pull up the staff schedule and we're like standing
Speaker 1: in the middle of the street at a protest. We
Speaker 1: pull up the staff schedule and we're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: there is one person schedule to answer phones right now,
Speaker 1: and it is an older woman who's been doing this
Speaker 1: since like the seventies or eighties, and it's like we
Speaker 1: cannot like and we were like all as a union, like, um,
Speaker 1: we turn to each other and we're like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: this is the situation. We cannot leave her alone. Um,
Speaker 1: we've already worked our five days, we already worked our
Speaker 1: already five hours, but we are going to call ourselves
Speaker 1: into work. And like we just we were like we've
Speaker 1: notified our managers, like we're gonna come into work and
Speaker 1: we're gonna help too, answer the phones for these canceled
Speaker 1: Ohio patients. Like that was a decision that we made
Speaker 1: to work those extra that that extra time on our
Speaker 1: weekend off because it was a Saturday. But this ties
Speaker 1: into what Elizabeth was saying, where, Um, when you hear
Speaker 1: the person on the phone and then they come to you,
Speaker 1: and like it's very emotional because like you're doing your
Speaker 1: best as a health care worker to get them the
Speaker 1: health service that you have been trained to provide and
Speaker 1: that you know is very important. So knowing that we
Speaker 1: were understaffed, UM, knowing that we're not making that much money,
Speaker 1: and then just being like I have to go in
Speaker 1: and be there. I can't leave my coworker alone because
Speaker 1: I love my coworker and we can't. And like, somebody
Speaker 1: has to be there for these these patients when they're calling.
Speaker 1: And if it's not going to be the employer and
Speaker 1: the bosses, then it's going to be you. And then
Speaker 1: and then we we all just we did that, and
Speaker 1: then um there was another clinic day. We a lot
Speaker 1: of us arranged to come in for an extra work
Speaker 1: day because we were like, we have we have to
Speaker 1: be there for these patients. Um, so we're really giving
Speaker 1: all of our energy and it's exhausting and traumatizing. I
Speaker 1: can't I feel like I can't say that enough. But
Speaker 1: and we we need more staff, we need better wages,
Speaker 1: we need better working conditions because it's so it's like
Speaker 1: at the end of some of these days, it's like,
Speaker 1: how am I going to keep doing this? My body hurts,
Speaker 1: my brain hurts. I started having like issues with my
Speaker 1: memory where like I couldn't remember anything because like brain
Speaker 1: just gave up on retaining information. And I'm like, I
Speaker 1: think this is like a trauma response, like yeah, I'm
Speaker 1: overwhelmed system shock. I think this is one of the
Speaker 1: things you get with with working for NGOs, which is
Speaker 1: that like we're doing something like this is like there
Speaker 1: is work that needs to be done, but you know,
Speaker 1: the employers not giving you the resources that is necessary
Speaker 1: to do it right. You have one person on a
Speaker 1: call line like the day after a fetal heartbeat bill
Speaker 1: goes goes into effect, and and it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: it seems like one of the one of the things
Speaker 1: that's that that these NGOs do is they were you know,
Speaker 1: they make they make a mistake or they do something
Speaker 1: deliberately because they don't want to pay people and then
Speaker 1: they don't want to pay another more people, and they
Speaker 1: make you go deal with it because you know it
Speaker 1: has to get done because these people need you, and
Speaker 1: that nobody has to do it. Yeah, and that's so cruce.
Speaker 1: It's disgusting. So for me, I like to equate it
Speaker 1: as kind of like being emotionally gaslight because the whole
Speaker 1: point of healthcare, and I've said this to other people
Speaker 1: in different health care roles that I've worked before, because
Speaker 1: as we do, health care is chronically understaffed, Like there
Speaker 1: are so many like nursing shortages, and things. UM. Is
Speaker 1: that healthcare is designed to draw people who want to
Speaker 1: help to have these like very strong moral and emotional
Speaker 1: beliefs um. And we are paid to care like it
Speaker 1: is our job to care UM. And that is how
Speaker 1: they can get all of these things out of us.
Speaker 1: Is because it's very easy to feel emotionally manipulated when
Speaker 1: somebody's like, well, somebody has to be there for this patient,
Speaker 1: this person UM, this like thing that can't wait um.
Speaker 1: And so a lot of us UM. Even like I
Speaker 1: said before, I worked here. At like different positions that
Speaker 1: I've held, I've been like, I will take an extra
Speaker 1: shift because somebody has to do it. And I love
Speaker 1: my job so much. I love working in healthcare. It's
Speaker 1: something I've been very passionate about since I was a
Speaker 1: small child. UM. So I for years would burn myself
Speaker 1: out and be like, I'll take the extra shift at
Speaker 1: a different position. UM. When I used to work at
Speaker 1: a care UM. I worked at an intermediate care facility
Speaker 1: for adults with intellectual physical disabilities UM for a couple
Speaker 1: of years, and I remember routinely working sixteen hour shifts
Speaker 1: like day in and day out. I think there was
Speaker 1: like six seven days a week of just doubles where
Speaker 1: I would work like sixteen hour shifts. I don't think
Speaker 1: I like slept or aid or did anything UM. And
Speaker 1: then at one point I was so burnt out that
Speaker 1: I just couldn't do it anymore. And I started to
Speaker 1: get frustrated with the people that I worked with and
Speaker 1: like the patients that I cared about. And this one
Speaker 1: particular day, I like, I noticed myself getting incredibly annoyed
Speaker 1: with everything that was like happening, like sounds, patients like
Speaker 1: just being themselves, Like I didn't, you know, take it
Speaker 1: out on anything or anyone. I just noticed myself getting
Speaker 1: like slightly more irritated. And then I was like, this
Speaker 1: is not sustainable. I can't keep doing this UM. And
Speaker 1: I compared this recent change posted the jobs decision to
Speaker 1: what it was like when I also used to work
Speaker 1: for distributing medical equipment to hospices UM. It felt like
Speaker 1: every single moment was an emergency that I just did
Speaker 1: not have the resources to be able to UM help
Speaker 1: with because is on one end of the line, you
Speaker 1: have somebody that is having this emergency, and then on
Speaker 1: the other end of the line, there's another person pulling
Speaker 1: you because they're also having an emergency, and so you
Speaker 1: have to kind of weigh which one of these patients
Speaker 1: like needs you the most right now, and which one
Speaker 1: of those can you reasonably help. It's like that psychology
Speaker 1: psychology puzzle where they're like, um, if you move the
Speaker 1: thing on the try, yeah, the trolley problem where like
Speaker 1: one of these people will die or seven people will die,
Speaker 1: and you have to decide which one of those you're
Speaker 1: gonna pull. Yeah, there's only so much that we can
Speaker 1: give as healthcare workers, as abortion workers, as reproductive health workers. Um,
Speaker 1: there's only so many hours in a day. And as
Speaker 1: much as we want to keep giving for us to
Speaker 1: keep poor hanging out of an empty cup, it's just
Speaker 1: not sustainable for ourselves. Like I know, many of us
Speaker 1: have lost sleep, many of us have stopped like being
Speaker 1: able to focus on anything outside of work, because as
Speaker 1: soon as like you turn on the news or you
Speaker 1: open your phone or you like open up Twitter, there's
Speaker 1: more and more and more information because everything is consistently
Speaker 1: changing all of the time. And like, um, Western Virginia
Speaker 1: is currently having like there, Um, yeah, so that's new.
Speaker 1: And we had a couple of calls come in from um,
Speaker 1: you know, we had Kentucky. Yeah, so that was new. Um.
Speaker 1: And we're just starting to like really have a good
Speaker 1: pattern of resources for patients coming in from like Ohio. Um,
Speaker 1: and now we're like, okay, well what about Kentucky. So
Speaker 1: we just like we feel like there's just one like
Speaker 1: hole in the dam that we put our finger on
Speaker 1: and then another one shows up that at some point
Speaker 1: we just have to know that we've done our best. Um,
Speaker 1: and then it's okay to take a second to rest
Speaker 1: um and do you know, go home and maybe like
Speaker 1: watch TV or listen to a podcast. Yeah not about abortion. Yeah,
Speaker 1: forget about abortion for two seconds, and because we will
Speaker 1: inevitably have to do it again tomorrow. This reminds me
Speaker 1: a lot of Um, I did an interview like I
Speaker 1: don't actually it will be a couple of weeks, I
Speaker 1: guess by when this comes out. With some organizers who
Speaker 1: were like trying to do like relief and aid for
Speaker 1: the migrants. You're getting bus to d C from Texas,
Speaker 1: I think you talk to and it was like they
Speaker 1: were talking about exactly the same thing where it's like
Speaker 1: we have to do this, we have to do this
Speaker 1: because otherwise no one's gonna help these people, but like
Speaker 1: at a certain point it's like everyone has COVID, like
Speaker 1: we just can't and it I don't know, it's I
Speaker 1: think it's especially frustrating that this is happening because like
Speaker 1: those people were just like they have no resources, right,
Speaker 1: It's just a bunch of people who could drink virtually
Speaker 1: a thing. But like this is planned parenthood, Like they
Speaker 1: have resources and they're not. They're not doing this, and
Speaker 1: they're they're doing this. I talked to a nurse who's
Speaker 1: a friend of mine a long time ago on this show,
Speaker 1: and he talked, you know, he was in nurstring COVID.
Speaker 1: He's gotten COVID twice I think, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: he was talking about how like yeah, he he said,
Speaker 1: to be like thing I've always remember. It was like
Speaker 1: I've seen people die because I've seen people die because
Speaker 1: of staffing decisions. Yeah, and it's like it's this, it's
Speaker 1: this moral blackmail thing where it's like, in order to
Speaker 1: expect this thing needs to be done, we're not going
Speaker 1: to actually supervide you with enough resources to do it,
Speaker 1: and we're going to make you responsible for the consequences
Speaker 1: of our actions. And yeah, it's it's grotesque. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: then that um, really it's just kind of like part
Speaker 1: of the trauma for the workers. And I'm not honest
Speaker 1: to the patients for everyone in our communities because this
Speaker 1: literally everyone is um just like turning. Like we do
Speaker 1: turn people away because pregnancy is a time sensitive issue
Speaker 1: and you know, you have to get in in a
Speaker 1: certain number of weeks in order to get you know,
Speaker 1: the type of procedure that you want in order to
Speaker 1: get a procedure at all. And these are people that
Speaker 1: are often parents, the majority of people who have abortions
Speaker 1: or parents, um, and they have children, and they have
Speaker 1: jobs or they don't have like p t O and
Speaker 1: they live four hours away. So it's like how am
Speaker 1: I going to get to this appointment? So there's so
Speaker 1: many people that we have to refer. So it's it's
Speaker 1: so much on your soul to be on the phones
Speaker 1: and you speak to mother after mother, like a single
Speaker 1: mother or somebody who lost a partner or they are
Speaker 1: you know, um, they got evicted, and you're referring them
Speaker 1: to Detroit, which is an also so four or five
Speaker 1: hours away, and just to refer people to say I
Speaker 1: can't help you, try calling this place and to do
Speaker 1: that like multiple times in a row every day, and
Speaker 1: then you're like you're working seven hour days. It is
Speaker 1: really soul crushing because it feels like and like you
Speaker 1: tell yourself, like it's my you know, we don't have
Speaker 1: the resources, we don't have the staff, we weren't prepared
Speaker 1: for this crisis. It's not on me, but it's very
Speaker 1: hard not to feel awful when you are turning people
Speaker 1: away because you don't I don't know any I've probably
Speaker 1: turned like probably over a hundred people away on the
Speaker 1: phones and told them who to call. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they reach those places. I don't know if they
Speaker 1: called those places. For all I know, they continue to
Speaker 1: hire risk pregnancy, and they might suffer health consequences or
Speaker 1: things that debilitate them for the rest of their life,
Speaker 1: things that make the children's lives worse. And I have
Speaker 1: no way of knowing. So it's just very traumatic to
Speaker 1: constantly be hanging up on the phone with people and
Speaker 1: just like sending them into like just a desert. I
Speaker 1: think the hardest part two is that these phone calls
Speaker 1: aren't like two seconds long. They're not two minutes. When
Speaker 1: we tell when we answer the phones. Abortion appointments take
Speaker 1: about fifteen to twenty minutes to schedule, so this is
Speaker 1: a half an hour that you are getting to know
Speaker 1: an individual. A person, they tell you everything about their lives.
Speaker 1: They tell you exactly what they're feeling, what they're afraid of,
Speaker 1: what they're going through with their families like um, what
Speaker 1: their financial situation is like. And then at the end
Speaker 1: when you tell them or at the beginning, which I
Speaker 1: do often just to let them know what they're getting
Speaker 1: themselves into. When you tell them that you're booking like
Speaker 1: three weeks out, four weeks out, you can just hear
Speaker 1: it in their voice that they are so scared and
Speaker 1: so desperate and there's nothing you can do about it
Speaker 1: because there's just not enough of us. There's not enough days,
Speaker 1: there's not enough hours in the day to see all
Speaker 1: of these patients. There is so much red tape that
Speaker 1: these patients have to go through to even get to
Speaker 1: this appointment. There's a twenty four our phone consent and
Speaker 1: the State of Pennsylvania UM. If they miss that, they
Speaker 1: can't be seen. And these are often like um depending
Speaker 1: on the time of the phone call. Some people work
Speaker 1: multiple jobs. They're like sleep they can't make the phone call.
Speaker 1: They're sick, they're sick, they don't have working cell phones,
Speaker 1: or they're in a yeah, there in a situation where
Speaker 1: they're like have intimate partner violence, so they can't be
Speaker 1: on the phone for that long without risking their personal safety.
Speaker 1: And it's just really traumatizing. And I know that it's
Speaker 1: really common on the left and with like pro abortion
Speaker 1: people to say like, you can't stop abortion, you can
Speaker 1: only start save abortion. And I totally support the sentiment
Speaker 1: behind that, because people are going to get abortions no
Speaker 1: matter what. But people also need to think about the
Speaker 1: people who give up, because I have when I have
Speaker 1: been on the phone with someone and heard them give up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's it's it's it's traumatizing because like, you know
Speaker 1: that you gave them the information that broke them where
Speaker 1: they were. Just like when I'm like, Okay, you have
Speaker 1: to wait four weeks, you have to drive four hours,
Speaker 1: you have to do this, you have to pay this,
Speaker 1: you have to do that, and then just for them
Speaker 1: to say, I'm sorry, I don't want to waste your
Speaker 1: time anymore. I just can't do this much right now.
Speaker 1: It's just too much. And just to hear they're just
Speaker 1: resignation because you know, I think I feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: working in jobs, you might have heard people just like
Speaker 1: reach that moment where they hit their point, um, whatever
Speaker 1: their breaking point might be, whatever the context is, whatever
Speaker 1: the topic is. But like when it's your life and
Speaker 1: it's your health and it's your family and they're just like,
Speaker 1: this is my breaking point and witnessing and that that
Speaker 1: does happen. And it's a tragedy every time that somebody
Speaker 1: abandons what they really want and their health and their
Speaker 1: well being and um, and it does happen. And that's
Speaker 1: why this is a tragedy that needs to stop. And
Speaker 1: I don't know when it's going to stop, because it
Speaker 1: just kind of seems like it's going to keep happening
Speaker 1: and keep going and going and going, in which case
Speaker 1: the trauma is going to like move, Like right now,
Speaker 1: we're like bearing the frunt of it, but it's gonna
Speaker 1: like radiate from us in our patients and we're going
Speaker 1: to see the ripple effects across the whole generational trauma
Speaker 1: that's going to continue for multiple decades. Yeah, And it's
Speaker 1: I mean, just on a basic level, it's not fair
Speaker 1: that even you have to deal with this like this,
Speaker 1: This shouldn't be happening at all like that, And it's
Speaker 1: it's that, it's that like all of the evil of
Speaker 1: the American settler state falling on like a bunch of
Speaker 1: people who have nothing and then a bunch of workers
Speaker 1: who are expected to show up and have to deal
Speaker 1: with all of their all of their trauma to every
Speaker 1: day and it's just like a trauma to loser. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it's like flags and but and then we had
Speaker 1: a union rally recently and uh, we were very open
Speaker 1: and talking about how a lot of us work two
Speaker 1: jobs and and we have staff members who donate plasma,
Speaker 1: so it's like we're doing this on top of a
Speaker 1: second job, and donating are like bodily fluids. I spoke
Speaker 1: at this rally and I was like, we're literally giving
Speaker 1: our flesh, blood and tears to this whole thing. Um
Speaker 1: because it's just we love it. We love all of
Speaker 1: our patients, We care about the work. We really want
Speaker 1: to make sure that our patients are going to be okay.
Speaker 1: And I think that's why we do it, and also
Speaker 1: how we can justify feeling this way day day in
Speaker 1: and day out. I wanna I think moved from this
Speaker 1: to talking about the contract negotiation process, because like, okay,
Speaker 1: it is not okay for anyone to have like a
Speaker 1: fourteen month long contract negotiation process. It's especially not okay
Speaker 1: for you to have to do this. So yeah, can
Speaker 1: we can we talk about what Plant like what Plant
Speaker 1: parents has been doing and would be better at answering
Speaker 1: this because she's on our bargaining committee. I'm on the
Speaker 1: bargaining team, Yam. I've been doing this for fourteen months
Speaker 1: and like just oh god, I'm so sick of these meetings.
Speaker 1: I'm so sick of them, sick of the talking to
Speaker 1: their lawyer. Um, it's been long. They've been just um
Speaker 1: really just dragging themselves. It's like carrying a dead body,
Speaker 1: just like like it's like come on, come on, are you?
Speaker 1: Are you okay? We're gonna We're gonna get there, you know,
Speaker 1: like I'm We're just like dragging them, and they are
Speaker 1: afraid of everything. Everything is we gotta see, we gotta check,
Speaker 1: we gotta we gotta look into it, and then you
Speaker 1: never hear back, or maybe you hear back like three
Speaker 1: months four months later. Um, they constantly want to bring
Speaker 1: in a mediator, constantly and it's like there's nothing to mediate,
Speaker 1: like what are we going to immediate? You telling us
Speaker 1: that you gotta back to us, like what's there to
Speaker 1: mediate there? Um, And they're like it will move it along.
Speaker 1: And it's like yes, because they're doing the job for you.
Speaker 1: We want you to do it. We want you to
Speaker 1: have answers, you to figure it out. You're the bosses,
Speaker 1: you make the money, you're one running the organization. Um. Sorry,
Speaker 1: I start getting salty. The bargaining team has has um.
Speaker 1: Being on the bargaining team has really nurtured my rage. Um.
Speaker 1: It's been very exhausting. And I know we're going to
Speaker 1: win a good contract because we are badasses and I
Speaker 1: think we're really strong union and really strong team. Um,
Speaker 1: and we need we need a livable wage because we're
Speaker 1: we're getting pommelled. So UM, it's been really frustrating. I
Speaker 1: guess it's like in short, it's really drawn out, frustrating, disrespectful.
Speaker 1: I feel like my time has been disrespected. You know,
Speaker 1: I turn up every day, um for for my employer
Speaker 1: in the clinic. I'm an excellent worker and uh and
Speaker 1: they just waste like two three hours of my evening constantly.
Speaker 1: I could have been on my porch drinking tea or something,
Speaker 1: I don't know, something relaxing. Yeah, And I guess like
Speaker 1: any other person, like every every day that they don't
Speaker 1: like sign a contract is another day they get to
Speaker 1: get away with not paying you, not bringing more staff.
Speaker 1: And it's and they're constantly trying to get delay contract
Speaker 1: negotiations to where they're like, oh, if you do this,
Speaker 1: we can we'll give you a couple of pennies and
Speaker 1: then we won't make any you won't be able to
Speaker 1: make any economic changes until the next fiscal year. And
Speaker 1: it's like, do you think I want to wait till
Speaker 1: next July? I have a life plans. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: I think we've talked about on the show before that
Speaker 1: like one of the one of the most common ways
Speaker 1: that one of the most common ways that unions fall apart,
Speaker 1: and one of the things that corporations do and n
Speaker 1: g O s due to crush them is by trying
Speaker 1: to make sure that the first contract fails. And yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a union busting thing, and it's for tesque especially
Speaker 1: that it's like okay, like with capitalist firms, like yeah,
Speaker 1: you expect them to be union busting, right, Like that
Speaker 1: that's their job. Their job is to ruthlessly special lab
Speaker 1: but it's like this is an NGO, Like their job
Speaker 1: is to provide healthcare for people. They're supposed to be
Speaker 1: oppressive organization. They're still doing this and it's I don't know,
Speaker 1: it seems just really grim. Um it is grim and
Speaker 1: it doesn't give a lot of hope too, I think
Speaker 1: just everyone living in this in this country, because it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: so there's been a a uh, I was gonna say attack,
Speaker 1: but like attack doesn't feel appropriate. Like they have gutted
Speaker 1: abortion access, hurting everybody, UM, causing like violence to people,
Speaker 1: and who do you look to? So you would think
Speaker 1: that you would look to these progressive abortion related organizations
Speaker 1: like Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Federation, UM, narrow, but all
Speaker 1: of them have nothing to give and nothing. They're they're you.
Speaker 1: You only hear bad news. You hear them shutting down,
Speaker 1: you hear them union busting, you hear them UM requiring
Speaker 1: ridiculous regulations that aren't even necessary, and it's it's just
Speaker 1: there's no they don't do anything to inspire hope. So
Speaker 1: it's like, well you need you know, like UM, prison
Speaker 1: culture and Mary Mikaba says like, you know, hope as
Speaker 1: a discipline, So I feel like a lot of us
Speaker 1: are always looking to like a place to exercise our hope,
Speaker 1: and you're you're not going to get that here with
Speaker 1: with some of these organizations. I think you are going
Speaker 1: to get it in I think the rebro unions, because
Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of us and I think
Speaker 1: there were I think that we are working our little
Speaker 1: hearts out, and I think you're also going to get
Speaker 1: it with some of these other organizations like the abortion
Speaker 1: like abortion funds and some of the practical support organizations
Speaker 1: that are really like getting on the level of patients
Speaker 1: who are patients for former patients and are like, we're
Speaker 1: going to get people abortions. I think that's where hope
Speaker 1: is right now. Um, but not with our employer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to say, I guess there's some of your
Speaker 1: things I wanted to ask about was sort of on
Speaker 1: a macro level. I mean, just everyone we've talked to
Speaker 1: has talked about how like the ability to get an
Speaker 1: abortion is based on like a pretty small a number
Speaker 1: of people who are like some you know, people who
Speaker 1: are abortion who are escorts, who are who are like
Speaker 1: a lot of time volunteers, or it's people who are
Speaker 1: like you two, who are being like horrifically underpaid to
Speaker 1: you the actual work of this. And I was wondering
Speaker 1: what you two think that, like the like the way
Speaker 1: this like I don't know, I guess, like the way
Speaker 1: everyone has sort of just run ragged even keeping the system.
Speaker 1: How it was like what role that played on a
Speaker 1: sort of macro level in terms of why ROW was
Speaker 1: like destroyed in the first place, and what that's done
Speaker 1: to the sort of the broader movement. I mean, no,
Speaker 1: they didn't do anything to prevent it. Yeah, Like it's
Speaker 1: just what have we seen? What show of force or
Speaker 1: strength or commitment to abortion access have we seen in ever? Honestly,
Speaker 1: like I can't even think other than like some loss
Speaker 1: or some legal wins we've celebrated, Like I do remember
Speaker 1: whole woman's health be Hellerstead, Um, what was that was
Speaker 1: like a win and we were excited and we were like,
Speaker 1: this is good news, and that's honestly the last and
Speaker 1: now again that was just a court decision, so it
Speaker 1: was like not in our hands really anyways. So I
Speaker 1: just either so little, there's so little to work with,
Speaker 1: and so a little look at outside of I think
Speaker 1: just some really excellent organizing from workers and practical support groups.
Speaker 1: And I really think that our community has been fabulous
Speaker 1: this last whole like month. Be All of the support
Speaker 1: that we've gotten, UM for our like personal morale has
Speaker 1: been through like friends or local businesses or like people
Speaker 1: who know people who um like are there to offer
Speaker 1: us like an ear, a hand, a cup of coffee. Um.
Speaker 1: Some of our doctors bring in bagels. Uh, this is
Speaker 1: like from their own pockets. Um, we'll bring in bagels.
Speaker 1: We've had like people donate and organized to bring in
Speaker 1: like coffee and stuff. UM. I know that Crystal was
Speaker 1: receiving a lot of donations herself, UM that we all
Speaker 1: use to buy ourselves, like food, drinks, stuff for people
Speaker 1: are just like sending me money for them. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I thought that was really great. But I also noticed
Speaker 1: that it came from outside sources and not from internal sources. UM.
Speaker 1: These are all other people outside in our community who
Speaker 1: understand and value the work with that we're doing, and
Speaker 1: like actively listen for what we need and what we're
Speaker 1: asking for. Um. And I think that there's a lot
Speaker 1: to be said about that. Yeah, Honestly, the most hope,
Speaker 1: and the most support has come from just like regular people.
Speaker 1: You don't really see it from anyone with anything any
Speaker 1: actual money or power. And on that note, this has
Speaker 1: been Naked Happen Here. You can find us on Twitter
Speaker 1: and Instagram That Happen Here pod, and you can find
Speaker 1: Crystal and Elizabeth Union at PPWP Union on Twitter or
Speaker 1: for part two of this interview and until then, goodbye.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Dick It Happened Here, a podcast about n
Speaker 1: g O is portraying the working class and casting reproductive
Speaker 1: autonomy to the wolves. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and
Speaker 1: this is part two of my interview with Crystal and
Speaker 1: Elizabeth from UEI Local six nine six. They are once
Speaker 1: again representing only themselves in the union and not planned parenthood. Yes,
Speaker 1: so let's get back to the interview. Okay, should should I?
Speaker 1: Should I do a incredibly long and drawn out metaphor
Speaker 1: about migrant workers in China? Go for it? Yeah? Okay,
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna, I'm gonn I'm gonna, I'm gonna do
Speaker 1: a man for it. Okay. So alright, alright, So one
Speaker 1: of one of the sort of engines of Chinese economic
Speaker 1: growth for a long time is that China's economy is
Speaker 1: built on migrant labor. There are I think it's like
Speaker 1: two fifty million migrant workers. It's like like if you
Speaker 1: put them together as a country. I think when I
Speaker 1: got into ninety, if you put together as a country,
Speaker 1: would be like the fourth largest country in the world.
Speaker 1: And this was able to happen, you know, and like
Speaker 1: the sort of like the secret of the Chinese miracle
Speaker 1: is that it was a bunch of workers who were
Speaker 1: exploited horribly and they also had a lot A lot
Speaker 1: of these workers are coming from the countryside, and there's
Speaker 1: still sort of like kinds of forms of like communal
Speaker 1: landownership that are left over from the socialist period there.
Speaker 1: And so what happens is you have these sort of
Speaker 1: like I don't know, like kind of socialist collective air
Speaker 1: like collective land ownership stuff that's like basically subsidizing these
Speaker 1: workers so that they can move into the cities. And
Speaker 1: this means that their bosses have to pay like that
Speaker 1: their their bosses can pay them less because part of
Speaker 1: their income and part of their support network is coming
Speaker 1: from something that's outside of the outside of the such
Speaker 1: a system. And that's what this reminds me of where
Speaker 1: it's like this stuff is happening because of this incredible
Speaker 1: community mobilization and like that's where the support is coming from.
Speaker 1: But that also means that like the actual like the
Speaker 1: organizations who are getting the most money and the most
Speaker 1: resources and who are like you know, who are your bosses,
Speaker 1: don't have to do that because it's it's you know,
Speaker 1: And this is the same thing with your labor to
Speaker 1: where it's it's you have these these like there's this
Speaker 1: way in which solidarity is mobilized as a way to
Speaker 1: sort of like stop gap the fact that these groups
Speaker 1: don't want to pay people and don't want to give
Speaker 1: people the resources that are necessary. And so because it
Speaker 1: has to get done, people will, like people will do it,
Speaker 1: and people will people will donate stuff, people will help support,
Speaker 1: people will do this work. But the thing that it
Speaker 1: winds up doing is that these people are never actually
Speaker 1: forced to see the full consequences of their actions. They
Speaker 1: never never forced to like actually see what what the
Speaker 1: staff and decisions like does what what the fact that
Speaker 1: they don't pay you anything like actually does they don't
Speaker 1: They never have to face it because people are like
Speaker 1: desperately trying to patch the boat together so it doesn't sink. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've been thinking a lot, like what would it be
Speaker 1: like if you know, one of our higher up managers
Speaker 1: turned away all of these patients and it was them, Yeah,
Speaker 1: what if they knew what it was like? I remember
Speaker 1: picking up the phone a couple of weeks ago, and
Speaker 1: the only thing that I heard when I picked up
Speaker 1: that phone was a blood curdling scream, like this was
Speaker 1: like a scream out of a horror movie. And then
Speaker 1: there were two thoughts and then dead side, And I
Speaker 1: don't know what happened to that person. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they were able to call back. I didn't call
Speaker 1: back because if that person is in danger right now,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to subject them to any more danger. Um.
Speaker 1: There's a reason that when we dial out it's the
Speaker 1: restricted or block numbers, But it's moments like that that
Speaker 1: stick with you. And the fact that we're having more
Speaker 1: and more of these moments where like every other call
Speaker 1: is not like exactly to that level, but like emotionally
Speaker 1: still sticks with you. And it's just for some additional um,
Speaker 1: just like to kind of like build out this kind
Speaker 1: of like misogynistic context that we're working in it's actually
Speaker 1: super common to get people calling in for abortion services,
Speaker 1: like in the middle of a fight with their partner. Um.
Speaker 1: I have had had like men like actively obstructing the
Speaker 1: caller and you know, I'm trying to schedule them, and
Speaker 1: they'll have me on speaker phone and everything and you
Speaker 1: were training me to we and I was like, are
Speaker 1: you able to get to like another place because I
Speaker 1: can't hear you over him and you know, and he's like,
Speaker 1: I'm not doing anything, and I'm like I just need
Speaker 1: to be able to hear you, and like, um, yeah,
Speaker 1: So you do you get that? Because that's you know,
Speaker 1: because there's people want abortions for every reason under this sun,
Speaker 1: and it's totally fine. Um, people get abortions for lots
Speaker 1: of different reasons, but a very common reason is because
Speaker 1: the partner sucks and he's a piece of ship. He
Speaker 1: was abusive and they got to get away from him.
Speaker 1: And that's unfortunately common. And we're on the phone getting that.
Speaker 1: Sometimes we get to meet them in real life too,
Speaker 1: and that's always super fun. I always say that, I
Speaker 1: say to patients constantly that boyfriends either go only go
Speaker 1: one of two ways when we meet them in our clinic.
Speaker 1: They're either wonderful and fantastic and very supportive, um or
Speaker 1: they're just the worst. And I've had patients boyfriends who literally,
Speaker 1: while this person is mid procedure will be like, you're
Speaker 1: being dramatic and you need to stop. And they'll take
Speaker 1: a phone call yeah or something. Let's be playing games
Speaker 1: on their phone and they won't look at anybody. Um
Speaker 1: or they'll actively leave their partner there. And these are
Speaker 1: people that like were their rides. Oh yeah, we've had
Speaker 1: people get abandoned. Yeah. Yeah, they'll just be like I'm done,
Speaker 1: I'm bored, and then they'll just leave, and it's just
Speaker 1: so frustrating. A lot to deal with. We have a
Speaker 1: lot to deal with the staff. And I always tell
Speaker 1: people because I trained um staff at the clinic, and
Speaker 1: I'm always like, we see everything here and when I
Speaker 1: say I say that I need it, we see literally
Speaker 1: everything like you just And I'm sure there are other
Speaker 1: similar health provisions like health services that it's kind of similar.
Speaker 1: We just kind of see everything, um but yeah, we
Speaker 1: we literally see everything because people when people come in
Speaker 1: for an abortion appointment, UM, Like, we don't just talk
Speaker 1: about the procedure, you know, we do birth control counseling,
Speaker 1: STD screening, UM, we provide resources for housing, legal support, UM, therapy,
Speaker 1: finding therapists, and we just we we do so much
Speaker 1: because we're providing a comprehensive health care service. And again,
Speaker 1: like something that we tell patients is that they can
Speaker 1: expect to be here for like four hours, six or
Speaker 1: five hours. Yeah, it depends on the individual patients or
Speaker 1: individual needs UM and what services we can provide for them.
Speaker 1: And sometimes patients need a lot of TLC and we're
Speaker 1: not going to rush that. UM. They're going to get
Speaker 1: the services that they need and they want, and we're
Speaker 1: going to do it on their time because they're very
Speaker 1: but they're very fragile and that's not the time to
Speaker 1: run times through. They're not always so sometimes they're fragile,
Speaker 1: and like sometimes they're like let's get this done, you know,
Speaker 1: I just I just want to the whole range of
Speaker 1: we get. We get. Yeah, but sometimes they're very fragile. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We have had some really confident patients that I really
Speaker 1: like talking to though that they're very yeah, like ready
Speaker 1: to get it over with and are like thanks for
Speaker 1: being here, and they just make my day. I love
Speaker 1: it when we're like, oh, how because we have to
Speaker 1: you know, we have to do like make sure that
Speaker 1: they're not being coerced in everything. And it's like, so,
Speaker 1: you know, how are you feeling about everything? And they're like,
Speaker 1: I feel great, I can't wait to not be pregnant,
Speaker 1: and they're like dancing. Obviously that's nice, but you know,
Speaker 1: in reality, a lot of times when we ask someone
Speaker 1: how they're feeling and what's going on, we're like the
Speaker 1: first person to have asked them that in like two years.
Speaker 1: So then we're like opening up a space, which I'm
Speaker 1: glad we get to do. UM. I love working with patients,
Speaker 1: I love the services we provide. UM. But it's it's
Speaker 1: what what sucks and what's a failure is that I'm
Speaker 1: like the first health care provider to like ask them
Speaker 1: how they're feeling and actually care and like years, like
Speaker 1: we really get something. We get some patients who have
Speaker 1: been like shoot up and spit out by the health
Speaker 1: care system, and no one's ever given a ship and
Speaker 1: we all, we all are very good at giving a ship.
Speaker 1: So um yeah, it really seems like just like everything
Speaker 1: that's wrong with this country gets thrown at like you
Speaker 1: specifically because this is like like every every sort of
Speaker 1: like every bit of racism, every bit of sexism, like
Speaker 1: every like failure of the health care system, like every
Speaker 1: every time, like and it's not even like everything on
Speaker 1: a political level and on a social level that goes
Speaker 1: wrong with people's lives. Yeah, yeah, I think it comes
Speaker 1: up a lot with stigmatized healthcare, um, like abortion and
Speaker 1: then also hormontherapy I imagine was pretty similar. Is you're
Speaker 1: facing a lot of obstacles that are put up by
Speaker 1: the communities, the institution, and the health care system. The
Speaker 1: employer is like your family, there's a Remember we did
Speaker 1: an interview with a promotion activist from Mexico. One of
Speaker 1: the things that she was talking about was, um, she
Speaker 1: called it social decriminalization. Oh is it kind of like
Speaker 1: destigmatizing Like yeah, yeah, but it's like like I think
Speaker 1: she didn't talk about it a huge amount, but it
Speaker 1: seemed like the concept behind it. It was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: so you have legal you have like legal criminalization, but
Speaker 1: then yeah, like social stigmatization means that it's still not
Speaker 1: really legal because there's there's like there's you know, there's
Speaker 1: like social laws against the rights. You have to like
Speaker 1: deal with both and that that struck me as like
Speaker 1: a really I don't know, is it really powerful? Like
Speaker 1: way to think about it, I guess, is it kind
Speaker 1: of like a moral thing where people think like it's
Speaker 1: not okay to get an abortion, so you get like
Speaker 1: that pressure and that yeah, and I think and also
Speaker 1: I mean, like it's not it's it's it's the pressure
Speaker 1: like applied on a person from just like you know,
Speaker 1: like I mean in Mexico is a lot of likely
Speaker 1: people who grow up Catholic, right, But also like it's
Speaker 1: the pressure from your family, is pressure from your friends,
Speaker 1: it's a pressure from everyone around you. And you have
Speaker 1: to like socially like legal because Crystal has been doing
Speaker 1: this work longer than I have, Like I said, I've
Speaker 1: only been working at our current job for a year,
Speaker 1: which I love. UM. But definitely when I started UM,
Speaker 1: there were people in my life that I didn't think,
Speaker 1: we're going to get weird about it because I know
Speaker 1: a lot of liberal people. Most of all of my
Speaker 1: friends are very liberal, very open pro choice, like very
Speaker 1: union friendly. And immediately I noticed that when I started
Speaker 1: talking happily about abortions, people would get really quiet and
Speaker 1: really awkward. Um, and they would be like that's great.
Speaker 1: I'm happy for you. But then that was like it
Speaker 1: like I couldn't and I'd be like no, but like
Speaker 1: abortions and then they're great, They're great. People need them.
Speaker 1: It's an essential service. And so I just upped up
Speaker 1: the anti more and I said about it a lot more.
Speaker 1: This is what I gotta do, gotta weed out the week,
Speaker 1: Like if you're uncomfortable with my job job, I'm not
Speaker 1: going to not talk about it with you. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that is a component to like also on top of
Speaker 1: literally everything else, like um, you know, like how hard
Speaker 1: the job is and how then we gotta like rally
Speaker 1: as a union and get better wages and and then
Speaker 1: we can't even sometimes talk about it because because of stigma,
Speaker 1: like with friends or family, like I can't talk about
Speaker 1: my parents or I can't talk with my parents about
Speaker 1: my job. So it's just like this whole big part
Speaker 1: of my life because I'm pretty much like an abortion
Speaker 1: access activist and I just can't talk about it and
Speaker 1: with them, which is just you know, it's it would
Speaker 1: be nice if I could, but I can't, and I
Speaker 1: just kind of deal with it. And then also um,
Speaker 1: even tiny normal situations like getting a haircut or getting
Speaker 1: an uber. It's people ask you what you do all
Speaker 1: the time. I lie every time. But that's a decision
Speaker 1: you have to make because sometimes I lie and sometimes
Speaker 1: I don't know what it is. I'm like, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: tell the truth, and it's like a gamble because I've
Speaker 1: told the truth before and then an uber driver starts
Speaker 1: praying for me. And then I've told the truth before
Speaker 1: and had someone um like open up to me and
Speaker 1: then we have a great conversation. And then I've told
Speaker 1: the truth before and had really awkward conversations were like
Speaker 1: I support abortion. I think some people have too many
Speaker 1: and I don't. And it's like, why are you telling
Speaker 1: me to get out of here? Um? Yeah, this was
Speaker 1: a decision that I made for myself personally because of this.
Speaker 1: One time I took an uber to work and I
Speaker 1: mentioned what I did and then that guy, um, she
Speaker 1: started like talking about me to the antis in front
Speaker 1: of our job and they were like talking about it
Speaker 1: was it was actually it was a woman. It was
Speaker 1: a it was a female uber driver. I mentioned this
Speaker 1: to her, UM, and she went up and was like,
Speaker 1: I think that like what you guys are doing. It's
Speaker 1: like she was talking to the anti specifically, she was like,
Speaker 1: what you're doing is too aggressive. You need to buy
Speaker 1: the building next door. Oh my god, set up shop
Speaker 1: there and make it less antagonizing so people want to
Speaker 1: listen to you. And then immediately in the group chat,
Speaker 1: everybody was like, who's talking to the antis? And I'm like,
Speaker 1: I just mentioned that I worked there. Um, it was
Speaker 1: just a lot. So after that, I was like, on
Speaker 1: my way to work at the very least, I'm just
Speaker 1: not going to talk about it. I'm gonna be like,
Speaker 1: I work at a doctor's office downtown. It's like risk assessment. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like the anti's learned my name by listening
Speaker 1: for the uber drivers and I've got uber drivers. They're like,
Speaker 1: who are you? What's your name? And I'm like, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to tell you because there's a dude standing
Speaker 1: there that wants to follow me. So you're gonna deal
Speaker 1: with that aubrew driver. Yeah, we gotta switch up patterns
Speaker 1: when we come into work sometimes too, And I do
Speaker 1: what I actually started, Um, when I call an uber
Speaker 1: to work because I don't have a car all the
Speaker 1: time because I don't get paid that much. But when
Speaker 1: I have to uber to work. Um, I've started getting
Speaker 1: dropped off like somewhere else and just waking because it's
Speaker 1: just too too many problems, too much Like got I
Speaker 1: get dropped off at like a different location, like a
Speaker 1: couple of blocks away from work, at a different spot usually,
Speaker 1: and then I just walk in, Like if you you
Speaker 1: might just want to go to work and drink your
Speaker 1: coffee and you have like your uber driver joined in
Speaker 1: the protest outside. Let's like and it's worse because they
Speaker 1: know they picked you up, they know where you live,
Speaker 1: and they know your name, your name. They want to
Speaker 1: shout your name out the door. It's like because yeah,
Speaker 1: the protesters learned my name and they like chant my
Speaker 1: name and we're like I'll walk by and like the
Speaker 1: whispering my name, I'm like, what is this? This is
Speaker 1: kind of this is kind of kinky, but like yeah,
Speaker 1: and we decide that they don't actually know who you are.
Speaker 1: They just like everybody with banks, yeah, yeah, yeah, So
Speaker 1: for the listeners, I have like pretty blunt banks. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but I'm not the only worker in the building obviously
Speaker 1: who has banks. But so everyone in the building it's
Speaker 1: like Crystal Crystal, I think everybody with banks, what's your
Speaker 1: worker named Crystal. I guess that's reassuring, but also bad
Speaker 1: for other people with banks because they might get killed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like funny, but not funny. I'm he got We
Speaker 1: try to make light of it real we have to. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the other thing I still wanted to ask about
Speaker 1: was Crystal. Yeah, you've had like the bosses doing disciplinary
Speaker 1: action for stuff that you've been doing in terms of
Speaker 1: unions stuff. Were gonna talk about that a little bit
Speaker 1: technically pre disciplinary, but I mean, like what does it matter,
Speaker 1: because like the point is the same, is is intimidation.
Speaker 1: It's very easy to do, is to get your lawyer,
Speaker 1: get your HR and have them talk to someone and
Speaker 1: then everybody knows about it because everybody talks at work,
Speaker 1: and bad gas travels fast and UM then they and
Speaker 1: the whole idea is to to scare people into not
Speaker 1: talking to reporters, not talking to UM people about what's
Speaker 1: going on. And I feel like it's difficult to talk
Speaker 1: about what's been happening like this is like I keep
Speaker 1: saying it, it's a it's a national health crisis. It's
Speaker 1: a disaster. It's it's a tidal wave, it's a hurricane,
Speaker 1: and it's generational trauma. We're using all of these words,
Speaker 1: and then like I feel like being I'm pressured into
Speaker 1: not even talking about it because I'm talking about everything.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about how we're understaffed, I'm talking about how
Speaker 1: we're seeing patients from all over. I'm talking about, um
Speaker 1: how how traumatizing it is. And for whatever reason, it's
Speaker 1: just more comforting for some of these organizations to hide
Speaker 1: under the table with their lawyer and just like shaking
Speaker 1: their boots and say like we could be sued for this,
Speaker 1: and we could be sued for that, and what if
Speaker 1: that happens? What if this happens? And like for me,
Speaker 1: it's like, well, you know what, what what if someone
Speaker 1: dies because we can't get them in and they can't
Speaker 1: get to us because of legislation and there being no
Speaker 1: health care infrastructure because part of healthcare is also getting
Speaker 1: to the appointment. UM. So it's like that that exists
Speaker 1: and like people are suffering because of it. Like I
Speaker 1: just can't keep my mouth shut about that. And I
Speaker 1: definitely feel like as like somebody a member on the
Speaker 1: bargaining team, and I also am ced our rally. UM,
Speaker 1: I feel like there's been a lot of pressure on
Speaker 1: me and my big mouth. Um, I feel like they
Speaker 1: were trying to intimidate me and scare me. And I'm
Speaker 1: blessed for a couple of reasons. Number one, um my dad,
Speaker 1: who is otherwise conservative and doesn't support anything that I do,
Speaker 1: but he was a union stewart and growing up, I
Speaker 1: would see him resolving conflict as a union stewart, and
Speaker 1: that was very influential and inspirational to me because it
Speaker 1: really instilled some good values, even though we don't have
Speaker 1: the same values obviously, but and you didn't, but there's that,
Speaker 1: Like I I developed like a strong sense of labor
Speaker 1: rights and labor activism from him, and then too, my
Speaker 1: first career choice was a middle school teacher, so I've
Speaker 1: taught seven in the eighth grade for about seven years.
Speaker 1: So like, literally nothing scares me, because after you've talked
Speaker 1: to a cafeteria full of a d twenty thirteen year olds,
Speaker 1: it's like that's it. That's like the scariest thing ever. Um.
Speaker 1: So I'm not really afraid of the bullying and the intimidation. Um,
Speaker 1: which is good because it definitely is very effective and
Speaker 1: I'm sure a lot of people would be pissing themselves
Speaker 1: but um, I'm pissing uself a little bit, but I'm fine, Um,
Speaker 1: I have a second job after all that, Like that's
Speaker 1: like fun, you have to work another job. Like they're
Speaker 1: like one of the things I noticed is they're they're
Speaker 1: doing they're doing the working you for thirty five hours
Speaker 1: and not forty because yeah, benefits. I don't know, like
Speaker 1: the impression that I get from this, and I think
Speaker 1: that makes you really angry is like it really feels
Speaker 1: like like the like how worried they are about being suited.
Speaker 1: It feels like like the fact that that's sort of
Speaker 1: like the basis of all this, and just like they
Speaker 1: the they're behaving as if they've already lost and they're
Speaker 1: trying to sort of like like claw and hold onto
Speaker 1: whatever they have. But it's like if if if you're
Speaker 1: if you're fighting from the position of we have already lost,
Speaker 1: you're you're just gonna keep losing. And it's like and
Speaker 1: and and you know it's not just that it's like okay,
Speaker 1: like if they were just doing that, but then you know,
Speaker 1: like not passing, like not literally forcing everyone else who's
Speaker 1: working with them to also be in the same sort
Speaker 1: of defeatism, Like it would be different, but it's like
Speaker 1: it's like no that they're they're then inflicting that on you,
Speaker 1: and it's just infuriating. Yeah. I think this also UM
Speaker 1: to segue to something that actually had happened to me today. UM.
Speaker 1: As part of UM, you know, being in a call
Speaker 1: center for an abortion provider, is that we think this
Speaker 1: instills like a sense of fear for providers as well,
Speaker 1: UM for their own personal safety. It just makes it
Speaker 1: feel bigger because you have all these other people would
Speaker 1: be like, well, it's it's like these are all these
Speaker 1: things that could happen to you, this is what might
Speaker 1: happen to you. UM. And I think that it makes
Speaker 1: providers have to evaluate, you know, their own risks to
Speaker 1: what they do. UM. And if you are somebody with
Speaker 1: not as strong values for this work, like it's not
Speaker 1: a strong opinion towards this work, it causes UM, you
Speaker 1: to just neglect patients because UM. I had an incident
Speaker 1: that happened today where we had somebody call UM from
Speaker 1: a different state where abortion is not legal, and they
Speaker 1: had their best friend in the car with them I
Speaker 1: and they were like, my friend is like actively hemorrhaging.
Speaker 1: She's been like bleeding for days. Um, do you have
Speaker 1: like an emergency appointment? Like we could drive up to
Speaker 1: p A. UM, Like what do I do? She's been
Speaker 1: to her doctor three different times and they refused to
Speaker 1: treat her because like viable, And in my brain, I'm
Speaker 1: just shaking because I'm like, this is a this is
Speaker 1: your job, Like you're the first thing as a doctor
Speaker 1: is to make sure that your patient doesn't die, and
Speaker 1: they might die. And I'm not a doctor, UM. And
Speaker 1: so I was like, if your friend is losing so
Speaker 1: much blood that you are worried for her safety, UM.
Speaker 1: I know on the phone they were talking about how
Speaker 1: she felt like she it was like getting dizzy and
Speaker 1: like losing a ridiculous amount of blood. And I was like,
Speaker 1: I strongly suggest that you go to a hospital where
Speaker 1: um abortion is legal, since you're planning on, you know,
Speaker 1: coming up for an abortion anyway, UM, because in that case,
Speaker 1: they would have to treat you no matter what. UM.
Speaker 1: And if you know it's going to result in an abortion,
Speaker 1: then at the very least you're protected because you're hearing
Speaker 1: your cross state lines. And I'm like, because any any
Speaker 1: hospital has to treat you, UM for something that's serious
Speaker 1: and it's it's scary to think that there are definitely
Speaker 1: other other providers and other places where this kind of
Speaker 1: thing is also happening. Um. And I just worry that,
Speaker 1: you know, um, what if I was ten minutes, Like
Speaker 1: what if I was two minutes late? What if I
Speaker 1: was thirty seconds? Like what if I told her to wait? Um?
Speaker 1: Like some places kind of have to um or I
Speaker 1: told her that I couldn't help her, like some places
Speaker 1: kind of have to with these laws. I don't think
Speaker 1: that I could live with the guilt of that. M
Speaker 1: hm um. Yeah, it's just another another added trauma to
Speaker 1: the day. And I feel like a lot of people
Speaker 1: said and like these people suck. But a lot of
Speaker 1: people were saying that, like stuff like this wouldn't happen.
Speaker 1: I know for a fact that I had so many
Speaker 1: I'm very vocal about origin access in my work, and
Speaker 1: I've had people tell me like people won't be hemorrhaging
Speaker 1: and driving across state lines, and I'm like, absolutely, they
Speaker 1: will be. Absolutely. And this was like a month ago,
Speaker 1: and then well more than a month ago. Time goes fast,
Speaker 1: but like this was like prior to dobs, I should say,
Speaker 1: but um, and it's just when they were telling me like,
Speaker 1: I don't believe you, and I'm like, what do you
Speaker 1: mean you don't believe me? This is the most believable thing.
Speaker 1: And then to have had people say that it wouldn't
Speaker 1: happen and to call me a liar and like a
Speaker 1: drama queen, and then now to like, I mean, I
Speaker 1: wasn't I didn't get a call like that, but like
Speaker 1: to hear like my co worker and like and then
Speaker 1: just like hearing it happen elsewhere, because like you know,
Speaker 1: we have comrades and and union UM siblings in Ohio
Speaker 1: UM with other unions and they've talked about it happening,
Speaker 1: and just so hearing my my um my peers talking
Speaker 1: about it and just knowing like we knew this would happen,
Speaker 1: and we just it feels like we just like walked
Speaker 1: right into it with no plan. There's still no plan.
Speaker 1: People are still in cars drive across state lines while
Speaker 1: actively hemorrhaging. And I don't know what it will be
Speaker 1: done other than US workers really stepping up and hopefully
Speaker 1: the community then supporting us UM, because we can't do
Speaker 1: it without community support, like like Elizabeth was saying before,
Speaker 1: you know, oh and Elizabeth was actually talking before about
Speaker 1: the food that we've been getting from the community, and
Speaker 1: this also made me think of what it looks like
Speaker 1: to turn up for workers in general, because you know,
Speaker 1: we're all workers here, and like, we know what it
Speaker 1: feels like where you're too busy to stop and eat
Speaker 1: and you're just going through your day and you're running
Speaker 1: on fumes and you're exhausted. But the fact that our
Speaker 1: community was like feeding has been feeding us and like
Speaker 1: turning up for us to the point where like I
Speaker 1: was having good healthy food confused me from day to
Speaker 1: day in that well since then and then it really
Speaker 1: got me wondering, like, is this is what it likes?
Speaker 1: This is what it's like when you have well fed
Speaker 1: workers and that are cared for. So, you know, if
Speaker 1: the only people answering the call for these these people
Speaker 1: who need healthcare are us, We're exhausted, we don't have
Speaker 1: time to go out and get food, especially since we've
Speaker 1: got people following us down the street whatever, um, while
Speaker 1: we go get a hot dog trying to bother us, um.
Speaker 1: But then to have like the community bringing us food
Speaker 1: and then being well fed, it was just like, oh
Speaker 1: my god, what if all workers were well fed and
Speaker 1: all communities turned up for their workers. Wouldn't that be
Speaker 1: so nice? And it got me thinking like like, wow,
Speaker 1: this is like a really positive thing that is not
Speaker 1: really talked about. Like I mean, we talked about feeding people,
Speaker 1: but like what if workers were were well fed? Like
Speaker 1: I don't like healthcare workers. It's just it's been really nice.
Speaker 1: And I love our community. Um, I love our city.
Speaker 1: I love the organizations that have been organizing it. We're
Speaker 1: incredibly grateful. Yeah, they're fantastic, They're they're so good to us. Um.
Speaker 1: I know that for those couple of weeks where we
Speaker 1: had food in our breakroom, UM, I think we worked
Speaker 1: a lot better. Everybody was in much better moods. I
Speaker 1: didn't get shaky hands, you know. Yeah, we were all
Speaker 1: like really excited to see each other and talk to
Speaker 1: each other and talk about our days. Um just over
Speaker 1: like actually good coffee. And it was just a huge
Speaker 1: morale boost to have the community supporting the workers. And
Speaker 1: then now we have the community coming to our union
Speaker 1: rally saying we support you, we want you to get
Speaker 1: paid more, we want you to have better staff, and
Speaker 1: that is just like so necessary right now because we
Speaker 1: need we need the community. We need everyone. What else
Speaker 1: can listeners who are who are like want to help
Speaker 1: but are not in the industry do just uh to
Speaker 1: support you all well? And I guess on two levels,
Speaker 1: like one is like like, what what can they do
Speaker 1: sort of in general in their communities? And then to
Speaker 1: specifically to help y'all with your fight with the hospital,
Speaker 1: the clinic just a little clinic, just a tiny, little,
Speaker 1: tiny little guy. UM. I know that for us specifically,
Speaker 1: I think, do what you do best. If you are
Speaker 1: a person who likes to make art, um, we love
Speaker 1: seeing your drawings. We love seeing like your handwritten notes. UM.
Speaker 1: If you're a person who makes a really good cup
Speaker 1: of coffee um, or if you're a cafe who just
Speaker 1: wants to bring us coffee, we love coffee. UM. If
Speaker 1: you're a bakery that wants to donate like donuts or
Speaker 1: you know, cheesecakes, we will happily eat them. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: If you want to, like send us a Bluetooth speaker
Speaker 1: so we can listen to music during the day. Whatever
Speaker 1: you do best is what we would love as long
Speaker 1: as it comes from like you, comes from your heart
Speaker 1: like we love um. Weighted blankets and fluffy things and
Speaker 1: snacks and just um, all of those things that come
Speaker 1: like from the heart make us feel like it's worth
Speaker 1: it UM at least from the community UM. And things
Speaker 1: also that we don't have to think about UM because
Speaker 1: as beautiful as make your own taco kids are, we
Speaker 1: still have to have time to make our own talks
Speaker 1: the taco. Yeah. So if if there's anything that you
Speaker 1: could just like throw at us, and it's already like
Speaker 1: put together, like assembled, has very little thought, like a UM,
Speaker 1: a zombie or a toddler or a burnt out abortion worker.
Speaker 1: Can you know put two and two together? We love
Speaker 1: those two. And you could also follow our union UM.
Speaker 1: And there's actually a bunch of abortion care worker unions.
Speaker 1: We're not the only one, we are many. We are
Speaker 1: legion UM. So you can really follow any of us
Speaker 1: and just boost what we need because right right now
Speaker 1: the p p f A union like New York City
Speaker 1: San Francisco is needing a lot of boosting what they're
Speaker 1: what they're doing, goot Mocker union needs a lot of
Speaker 1: love and support. But our union UI Local six night
Speaker 1: six UM. Our social media is at p p w
Speaker 1: P Union UM not to self promote, but if you
Speaker 1: go on there. There are videos of our rally and
Speaker 1: I need uter is shaped paniata if anything wants to
Speaker 1: see us busted open. It's pretty good, it's pretty cool.
Speaker 1: We busted open a uterus shaped pinata at our rally
Speaker 1: and as we brought up a UM union family child
Speaker 1: because it was it was the son of a local
Speaker 1: union member. We brought him up and we helped him
Speaker 1: splash the panada, the uterus panada, and as he was swinging,
Speaker 1: it was like, this is what we think about low wages,
Speaker 1: this is what we think about scot is, this is
Speaker 1: what we think about understaffing. And then candy just like
Speaker 1: burst out of it. It was like a normal birth,
Speaker 1: you know, Yeah, glitter and candy pop out, very realistic. Actually,
Speaker 1: abortions to people don't know this, but glitter always comes
Speaker 1: out during an abortion can confirm there's gonna be there's
Speaker 1: gonna be like three people who actually believe you. They're
Speaker 1: gonna they're gonna like tell their friend this and their
Speaker 1: friends gonna be like, what are you talking about there?
Speaker 1: You're like, no, no, I heard it on a podcast,
Speaker 1: or like the servis sprays glitter when you when you
Speaker 1: touch it, dilating the cervix is really just opening it
Speaker 1: up so that it litter come out. Yeah, I guess. Well, okay,
Speaker 1: so logistics wise, Yeah, if you send me links, I
Speaker 1: will we will put them in the episode description. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and yeah, I guess do you two have anything else
Speaker 1: that you want to say? Um? I don't think so,
Speaker 1: other than like thank you for having us. Um, this
Speaker 1: is super fun. We had a great time. Yeah, me too. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it was good. I love talking about abortion. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: oh my god. Me and Elizabeth on the phone, just
Speaker 1: gabbing away and we'll we'll be on twenty on a
Speaker 1: call twenty minutes talking to like someone who who needs help,
Speaker 1: and then we'll like get off and then we'll be
Speaker 1: gavin about whatever for like ten minutes and mostly TikTok's
Speaker 1: mostly TikTok. But um, yeah, I know. It's it's so
Speaker 1: important too that we can be platformed as like abortion
Speaker 1: care workers, as union members, as people working in a
Speaker 1: stigmatized field during a crisis. It's very it means so much,
Speaker 1: and it's meant a lot to me to see how
Speaker 1: many abortion episodes this podcasts, Like, yeah, you're really cover
Speaker 1: and everything. Yeah, I was looking them up and I
Speaker 1: was like there's it's it's every angle of abortion care
Speaker 1: and I love it. We love to see buy a
Speaker 1: knowledge too, and we love to see it. You're gonna
Speaker 1: run out of topics so eventually, but you really should
Speaker 1: have an episode about the serve ex glitter. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: this will this will be our Actually wait are you
Speaker 1: full episodes? Actually booked man be the second apul fulls episode.
Speaker 1: More people need to know about this phenomenon alright, that
Speaker 1: this this has been naked happen here. Uh, you can
Speaker 1: find us in the places where you know where, defind
Speaker 1: us because we see this at the end of every episode.
Speaker 1: H yeah, thank you too again, thank you it could
Speaker 1: happen here is a podcast. Sometimes it's about good stuff
Speaker 1: and ways people can fix things. Sometimes it's about frightening
Speaker 1: stuff like today, today's a scary episode. Joining me to
Speaker 1: scare everybody is Professor Calvin Norman. Calvin, how are you
Speaker 1: doing today? Oh, Robert, I do well some days, but
Speaker 1: most days not. I work on climate change, invasive species,
Speaker 1: forest health issues, a chronic waste disease. So their problems
Speaker 1: with those things. Okay, well, actually, last time were we
Speaker 1: talked abou climate change? Solve that? So We're We're good.
Speaker 1: That's all. We locked that down right, Yeah, you get
Speaker 1: we got the we got the eels fed. That was
Speaker 1: the problem. Oh yeah, yeah, there's like a car company
Speaker 1: that's electric. We're nailing it, so I get. We had
Speaker 1: you on the show once before to talk about how
Speaker 1: the forest is bad. Uh yeah, um, still bad. Still
Speaker 1: a lot of problems in the forest, as the people
Speaker 1: who are watching their forests burn can probably uh say,
Speaker 1: although there's other problems than that, as we talk about
Speaker 1: in your episode. Didn't mean an email a while back.
Speaker 1: It took a bit for me to get my ship
Speaker 1: together to have you back on. But it was a
Speaker 1: frightening email about a disease sweeping through the country that
Speaker 1: could have massive effects on the lives of everybody listening
Speaker 1: to this. Um, And it's not one of the diseases
Speaker 1: that you're all thinking about. I know, there's a couple
Speaker 1: of things that meet that decision that that like, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of different diseases running on checked throughout the
Speaker 1: United States at the moment and the world. Um, we
Speaker 1: are not talking about either of the ones that are
Speaker 1: big in the news right now. We're gonna talk chronic
Speaker 1: wasting disease. Calvin, you want to kind of introduce that
Speaker 1: concept to the people, because this was not something I
Speaker 1: really I had heard of it, but I didn't. It
Speaker 1: was just kind of like, you know, animals have weird diseases, right,
Speaker 1: cats get you know, lymphoma or whatever. I never thought
Speaker 1: about it much as a as a thing that was
Speaker 1: a problem other than a problem for some deer. But
Speaker 1: it is. It is quite an issue. Yeah, yeah, it's
Speaker 1: if it stays in dear, I will be happy. Let's
Speaker 1: put it like that. So, um, we're gonna actually like
Speaker 1: do a little throwback to the past year. Watch watch
Speaker 1: out an We're gonna go back to the nineties. All right,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go We're gonna get I'm gonna get my
Speaker 1: shoulder pads on, I'm gonna get my X Files poster
Speaker 1: stuck up on the wall. I'm gonna vote for a
Speaker 1: serial sexual abuser. Well that's that's every decade. Um, okay, sorry, So,
Speaker 1: so chronic wasting diseases a pry and the reason we're
Speaker 1: going back to is a prime disease. And the reason
Speaker 1: we're going back to the nineties is to to look
Speaker 1: at the the most the biggest like reason any one
Speaker 1: would have heard of a prion disease outside of like
Speaker 1: you know some like you know, brain scientists and stuff,
Speaker 1: and that's you know, bovo line, bovine sponge form and
Speaker 1: sapalopathy or more commonly known as mad cow disease. So
Speaker 1: you know, Robert, I'm not sure how much you are
Speaker 1: aware of mad cow. It popped up in the US
Speaker 1: in the mid two thousand's, but it killed a bunch
Speaker 1: of people in England in the nineties. Yeah, isn't there
Speaker 1: like there's still restrictions on like blood donation and stuff
Speaker 1: if you lived in England at a certain period, right,
Speaker 1: like there's some weird ship like that. Yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: donate blood for that. Um, that's a very good reason.
Speaker 1: We'll go in too that in a second. Actually, I
Speaker 1: wass in England not too long ago, and I did
Speaker 1: not eat beef there because I've read too much about
Speaker 1: prions to mess around with that stuff. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: thankfully here in America we have health food standards, unlike
Speaker 1: those filthy Brits. But yeah, yeah, we had us Scare
Speaker 1: um Canada head of Scare and we'll talk about the
Speaker 1: repercussions of that later. But so the reason we're going
Speaker 1: back is we're gonna look at the most recent time
Speaker 1: prians have become mainstream. So what happened there? So well,
Speaker 1: let me just unfold this a little bit. That's a joke,
Speaker 1: y'all all understand in three minutes hopefully. So a prion,
Speaker 1: it's a protein in your brain. Now, UM, I'm not
Speaker 1: a neurologist. I am a wildlife biologist for sorry, so um,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be answer every question out there about
Speaker 1: brains and proteins and stuff like that. Um, but what
Speaker 1: what the prion protein in your brain does is it
Speaker 1: moves copper around, which is important for cell stuff. I
Speaker 1: personally think that mankind should have never looked through a
Speaker 1: microscope and everything at the cider level is just harresy.
Speaker 1: We shouldn't look at it at all. Now, I'm i'm,
Speaker 1: I'm I'm completely on board with you there. There's certain
Speaker 1: things we never should have studied, and anything that involves
Speaker 1: a microscope is one of them. Oh yeah, you lost
Speaker 1: me there. HandLens I'm good for you can like see
Speaker 1: like small stuff, but microscopes out. Okay. So, so in
Speaker 1: your brain you're moving around copper and stuff and it's
Speaker 1: important for the cell stuff. So, um, we're gonna go
Speaker 1: back to high school biology. For most folks, you know,
Speaker 1: proteins building block of life important. So your protein structure
Speaker 1: is dictated by the elements in it and how they're
Speaker 1: like arranged, you know, like stacked on top of each other.
Speaker 1: So that's that's basic, you know, high school biology. But
Speaker 1: then you know, as you get a little bit further
Speaker 1: in biology, you find out there's it's a little bit
Speaker 1: more complex. So proteins, like you know, all things in
Speaker 1: our real world are unfortunately not like in the textbook,
Speaker 1: and these are three D and so they have like
Speaker 1: shapes and folds. Now, when folded correctly, it just prion
Speaker 1: protein operates normally and just moves copper around. Um, unfortunately
Speaker 1: doesn't always. You know, sometimes it doesn't fold correctly and
Speaker 1: when that happens, it doesn't move copper. And so brains
Speaker 1: have a little bit of an issue because they don't
Speaker 1: get copper. Yeah, and this is why all those trucks
Speaker 1: stops sell those copper bands that you can put on
Speaker 1: your risk to solve diseases. Right, it's to deal with that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you just keep that copper band on your rest. So
Speaker 1: that problem. Yeah, So so what what happens when that
Speaker 1: happens is you get a prion disease. There are some
Speaker 1: that evolved in that just like they don't evolve because
Speaker 1: they're not living. Um that just pop up in nature.
Speaker 1: So like a spongef bovine sponge ofform and sepalopathy mad
Speaker 1: cow ropins a little bit earlier, talk about in a
Speaker 1: second scrapey uh, feline spongeform and sepalopathy which comes from
Speaker 1: cats that ate meat that was infected with mad cow um.
Speaker 1: And then there's kuru. I think, yeah, that's the one
Speaker 1: cannibals get, right, Like, this is famously why cannibals quote
Speaker 1: unquote go crazy. Actually a lot of cannibals. We're well
Speaker 1: aware that you don't eat meat from certain areas, but
Speaker 1: it is a thing if you're going to eat people,
Speaker 1: be really careful about the spine. Don't eat brains and spines. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's exactly. Yeah. Um, there's um and in humans
Speaker 1: it's called um. The spongeforms seplopathy. I'm gonna explain the
Speaker 1: big word in one second. It's called crom helds yakops disease.
Speaker 1: It was too Germans really neat stuff. Yeah, it's one
Speaker 1: of my favorite disease names because you just know you're
Speaker 1: in for some like horrifying shit when you when you
Speaker 1: see the that spelled out, you're like, well, that's got
Speaker 1: to be something bad. Yeah. Well, luckily, like you know,
Speaker 1: for two German guys like alive in the thirties deed
Speaker 1: good stuff, like they doctors who weren't not seas in
Speaker 1: that period. Yeah, it seems like one of them died
Speaker 1: right before things like that, you know, things went out
Speaker 1: there and then time Yeah yeah, okay, So so I've
Speaker 1: been throwing around this word spongeform at sepalopathy um and
Speaker 1: then like you know, I changed like the you know, bovine, feline, whatever.
Speaker 1: So it a sponge of form means something looks like
Speaker 1: a sponge. And then it's epalopathy means brain. So your
Speaker 1: brain turns into a sponge. And that's because you're not
Speaker 1: getting copper and so cell cells are falling apart, and
Speaker 1: it's your brain just doesn't work, to be real simple,
Speaker 1: it's kind of like Alzheimer's that's like presents the humans,
Speaker 1: which is why it's really hard to figure out, all right,
Speaker 1: And then when you want to determine that something has spongeform,
Speaker 1: and sepalopathy. You've gotta cut the brain open, look at
Speaker 1: it under a microscope. Hell, yeah, you do. UM. And
Speaker 1: as you can imagine, that doesn't usually happen in people.
Speaker 1: You don't usually cut the brains open. And also in
Speaker 1: a lot of animals, you don't usually cut the brain open,
Speaker 1: look at it under microscope. Well it's bad, that's not. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's always lethal, always a legal example. So like that's
Speaker 1: the basics of like what a prian disease is UM.
Speaker 1: And then when we saw it in in England, what
Speaker 1: had what had happened was got into cows. Cow's got
Speaker 1: it from eating other cows that were fed back to them,
Speaker 1: and then it got into humans because we ate what
Speaker 1: we the Brits in the third in the in the
Speaker 1: nineties eight cows that were infected with bovine sponge of
Speaker 1: formats eplopapy and you had to eat a good amount
Speaker 1: of it for it to build up in your brain.
Speaker 1: And what I mean by that is we're Americans, right, right,
Speaker 1: So not a problem for Americans. I just want to
Speaker 1: kind of like lay a foundation so we all understand
Speaker 1: what's going UM. And so what I mean I build
Speaker 1: up in your brain is like you know, you get
Speaker 1: like one two proteins in there, You're fine, It's okay.
Speaker 1: Protein has been full at the time. It takes you know,
Speaker 1: brains are big, especially in humans, so it takes a
Speaker 1: while for this to becoming problem. But what happens is
Speaker 1: over time is one is, once you build up enough,
Speaker 1: you're get exposed to enough prions that are misfolded, like
Speaker 1: the prions in the brains start misfolding, and then slowly
Speaker 1: your brain just starts stops functioning correctly. Yeah, it you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's like a chain, like a slow chain reaction. UM.
Speaker 1: So that's the basics of of um Prian diseases and
Speaker 1: spongeform and stephalopathies. Now we're talking about chronic wasting disease UM,
Speaker 1: which can be easily described as the deer equivalent of
Speaker 1: mad cow disease. And like when you see a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff about it, people just it's like called like
Speaker 1: zombie deer because like deer get weird when they are
Speaker 1: like dying from chronic wasting disease. Like the name chronic
Speaker 1: wasting disease comes from because they like wasting away. They're
Speaker 1: like drooling and also drinking a lot. They act weird.
Speaker 1: They look dumb. Um, they just do weird stuff, and
Speaker 1: so people call it zombie like, dear, but they're not. Um,
Speaker 1: They're just infected with a prime disease and their brightness
Speaker 1: falling apart. It's like it's like a person getting Alzheimer's, Like,
Speaker 1: you know, they do weird stuff. My grandma has Alzheimer's
Speaker 1: is terrible, don't get it? Yeah, yeah, my grandma had
Speaker 1: um the same thing that Robin Williams got the Loui
Speaker 1: body dimension, and it's it's pretty much the same thing, right,
Speaker 1: Like you can just see somebody kind of falling apart
Speaker 1: piece by piece. But that probably does make the deer
Speaker 1: easier to hunt, yes, and it also makes it really
Speaker 1: easy to identify when it's it's advanced stages in dear.
Speaker 1: So we've got kind of an understanding of about it.
Speaker 1: But like, you know, why do we care? We are people?
Speaker 1: We are not dear, right, Robert, are you a dear? Uh?
Speaker 1: Not right now? I mean I have been to a
Speaker 1: furry convention, but but I didn't commit. So we all
Speaker 1: got our things. Well. Um, so I I hunt, dear Robert,
Speaker 1: I think you hunt. I don't know I'm getting I'm
Speaker 1: getting ready for for hunting season as we as we speak. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so, um, lots of people hunt deer and they
Speaker 1: eat deer, which is which is cool and it's fine
Speaker 1: and it's important to do in you know, certain ecosystems.
Speaker 1: I mean in most of the US, like, deer have
Speaker 1: been hunted by various you know humans for yeah, as
Speaker 1: long as people have been here, so you know, it's
Speaker 1: it's a natural thing to do. It's very normal for
Speaker 1: people to hunt deer and it's very normal. And also
Speaker 1: there are areas where we killed everything else that hunts deer. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's there's anyway whatever. We don't need to defend
Speaker 1: deer hunting here. I I've done hours of webinars on
Speaker 1: the points of deer management. It's it's a real fun
Speaker 1: subject to you. But we do care about that. We're
Speaker 1: talking about chronic waste disease, fun stuff. So so we
Speaker 1: care about that. We care about chronic wasting disease because
Speaker 1: it impacts all members of the servant family or deer.
Speaker 1: So that's you know, elk moose. I just learned the
Speaker 1: Europeans called moose European elk wild arrogant again this, Yeah,
Speaker 1: look at a moose. Look at an elk super different.
Speaker 1: It's wildly different animals. Like they're both very big, but
Speaker 1: they're also different sizes. It's like the difference between like
Speaker 1: an armored car and a tank. Like a fucking moose
Speaker 1: is like it's basically an elephant in terms of its footprints. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: they're so cool to see that enormous Yeah, yeah, the
Speaker 1: impact it can get in all servants that we know
Speaker 1: it's um and you know, people like you know, people
Speaker 1: like to see servants, they like to hunt servants. We'd
Speaker 1: like to do it, you know in different countries. They're delicious.
Speaker 1: They have the best meat. Yes, absolutely, so much better
Speaker 1: than fucking beef, so much better than pork in my opinion,
Speaker 1: Like fucking love venicel Oh yeah, moose. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you had moose. I've had once. Oh it's yeah,
Speaker 1: moose and elk wonderful meats. That's actually a big thing
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan and I talk about when we're hanging out
Speaker 1: is elk meat. He's a big elk meat guy. That's good.
Speaker 1: I've I've never I've never hunted an elk. I've put
Speaker 1: it for the lottery every year, but it's hard to
Speaker 1: get hard to get elk tags in Pennsylvania. I know,
Speaker 1: it's a real surprise. Yeah, you know what, I'll go
Speaker 1: ahead and reach out. Now. It's easy to get the
Speaker 1: tags here, but it is hard unless you have a
Speaker 1: friend with land that elks are on to actually hunt
Speaker 1: them as as much as Yeah. Anyway, if you've got
Speaker 1: land in Oregon and you want me to hunt elk
Speaker 1: on it, hit hit us up. Yeah. So so you know,
Speaker 1: as we can see, this is a clear demand for
Speaker 1: servants and servent products, and so in like the fifties
Speaker 1: and sixties, people started, you know, they're like, well, you know,
Speaker 1: sometimes you're not always good at hunting, and not everyone
Speaker 1: wants to hunt, so they started trying to domesticate and
Speaker 1: farm them, right, um servants famously like running away, I've
Speaker 1: seen a lot of deer tails, Robert, you hunt, I'm
Speaker 1: sure you have, yeah, yeah, and a lot of like
Speaker 1: tracks that you can tell and like with ship or
Speaker 1: something near them that like, oh man, I fucking missed
Speaker 1: that son of a bitch by like thirty seconds. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and if if even if you drive around you'll see
Speaker 1: just they're like, oh car, I'm out in five thousand
Speaker 1: that that don't need to be here. Sometimes they go
Speaker 1: across the road and hit him. That's the story. M
Speaker 1: yeah some states. Yeah, even sometimes it's bruce to heck.
Speaker 1: But that is how I get to eat some moose.
Speaker 1: Someone hit it with a car. Hell yeah. Um but um,
Speaker 1: so they don't like being in captivity at all. Not
Speaker 1: a fan, not a fan, and so they're very they're
Speaker 1: very stressed in captivity. And then like in the sixties
Speaker 1: in Colorado, um at on the Colorado University of Colorado,
Speaker 1: on their deer farm, they noticed like the deer were
Speaker 1: getting skinny and weird. And that's how that's where chronic
Speaker 1: wasting disease was discovered, because we tried to fucking farm
Speaker 1: an animal that's not okay, awesome, I love it. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: there there are some folks who think that it's a
Speaker 1: natural thing. But it doesn't look like it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like it. Uh, no reports of it being around from
Speaker 1: before the sixties. And as we laid out, lots of
Speaker 1: people ate a lot of deer and saw a lot
Speaker 1: of deer before the sixties, so probably came from farming servants.
Speaker 1: So then since then, um, there's the deer farming is
Speaker 1: not really regulated and also deer are not really easy
Speaker 1: to keep in captivity. They like to jump and like
Speaker 1: when fences, fences blow down, and so they'll get out
Speaker 1: of captivity. And like also other deer they like come
Speaker 1: up to you know, captive deer and they're like, yo,
Speaker 1: what's up with you? Though you're in a cage, huh,
Speaker 1: And so you can actually see them. They'll like interact
Speaker 1: through the fence. Um, and that's probably how it got
Speaker 1: out of containment, is through interactions and you know, servants
Speaker 1: being spread around the country. And so now chronic waste
Speaker 1: disease is found in thirty states I think, four Canadian provinces, uh, Scandinavia,
Speaker 1: and Korea, so I think it's four or five countries.
Speaker 1: So so it's out there. It's out there, um, and
Speaker 1: it's it's infecting served populations across the US and across
Speaker 1: the across Canada, the world. Um. It's real bad. It's
Speaker 1: real bad. So it seems like a problem. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So if you're a deer, what happens is you either
Speaker 1: interact with another to pick up chronic wasting disease. We'll
Speaker 1: go through the deer kind of the progression and deer
Speaker 1: to pick it up. Do you either interact with the
Speaker 1: deers that has chronic wasting disease. You go up and
Speaker 1: smell them, you look them a little bit. Deer groom
Speaker 1: each other, you know the animals. Um, you eat a
Speaker 1: plant that another deer pooped on, Now it doesn't have
Speaker 1: to have pooped on that plant, So like this is
Speaker 1: a deal. It's effective with chronic chronic waste disease. Can
Speaker 1: poop in the soil and the plant will pick up
Speaker 1: the pryon from the soil and then yeah, and then
Speaker 1: another deers can come in. It can just spread. Yeah cool,
Speaker 1: that's that's some real scary yeah. Yeah. And it can
Speaker 1: also you can also pick it up from water, but
Speaker 1: it has Spreading in water is really tough. So um,
Speaker 1: those are your main vectors is you know, deer to
Speaker 1: deer and environment to deer um. And that's why it's
Speaker 1: pretty tough to control once it gets into a state
Speaker 1: because to destroy it you have to dig up the
Speaker 1: soil and you have to burned a thousand degrees for
Speaker 1: an hour or you have to expose exposure to bleach
Speaker 1: for an hour to destroy the prion. Because it's not
Speaker 1: a living thing, it's a protein. Yeah, I mean, and
Speaker 1: there are a couple of towns that I would be
Speaker 1: okay doing that too, but on a wide scale that
Speaker 1: seems difficult to pull off. Yeah. I can think of
Speaker 1: a state that starts with an O in an age
Speaker 1: that I wouldn't mind losing, you know, if we just
Speaker 1: were like, why not give it a shot? Right? Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just Ohio, Come on, it's not it's not a
Speaker 1: real state. So in Dear, we're gonna just we're gonna
Speaker 1: stay just in the deer where we're not gonna get
Speaker 1: scary yet. So in in Dear, this slowly builds up
Speaker 1: throughout the population and you get worst case scenarios like
Speaker 1: in south western Wisconsin where like the deer harvested uh
Speaker 1: buck's harvested a year are positive for chronic wasting disease,
Speaker 1: and because it's an always fatal you know, brain disease,
Speaker 1: you're looking at population collapse in extinction. Yeah, because it
Speaker 1: remains in the soil too, Like it's it's around or
Speaker 1: at least two probably more years. But the studies we've
Speaker 1: done our only two years, because um, these are not
Speaker 1: fun things to study. People have died studying these diseases
Speaker 1: from prions, like when they when they've done work on
Speaker 1: like BSc lab tech actually pricked herself with the tool
Speaker 1: uh and got um c j c j D and
Speaker 1: died from it. So yeah, they're not fun to study really,
Speaker 1: you know that's this is like we're talking like Martian
Speaker 1: suit style study stuff. It's not fun. So the stand
Speaker 1: level ship yeah, yeah, yeah exactly. Yeah, so so like
Speaker 1: you know it without you know, when chronic wasting disease
Speaker 1: is not addressed into your populations, like in southeastern or
Speaker 1: southwestern Wisconsin, you're looking at extinction level stuff because all
Speaker 1: of the deer that are out there are most you
Speaker 1: know them have chronic waste disease or at some point
Speaker 1: in getting chronic waste disease, which means that they're putting
Speaker 1: more and more of in the environment and they're more
Speaker 1: like if you're a non affected deer, you're you know,
Speaker 1: three cores, your buddies are infected, so you're going to
Speaker 1: get chronic wasting disease and be dead within two or
Speaker 1: three years. So you're looking at extinction of all servants
Speaker 1: in that area for some amount of time until it
Speaker 1: comes out of the soil. That's bad. That is a problem. Yes, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: as we have established neither of us are dear, So
Speaker 1: why do we care? I mean outside of like the
Speaker 1: fact that deer are pretty important to the ecology of
Speaker 1: local areas and that that collapses bad. Yeah, why what
Speaker 1: is what is the problem? Like, what is the risks
Speaker 1: to human beings beyond that? Yeah? Yeah, yeah, we put
Speaker 1: we put in college all aside all the time, like
Speaker 1: this is the world. We don't really care about that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I ideal with what happened that you pretty college aside.
Speaker 1: So I'm super used to that that being done. So
Speaker 1: the risk is if it jumps into humans, because all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you have a disease that's really hard
Speaker 1: to detect that can live in the ironman that can
Speaker 1: be transferred from not just spinal fluid, but like if
Speaker 1: you eat a lot of infected meat from deer. You know,
Speaker 1: if you eat um, some of the organs you can
Speaker 1: get at a high risk. So so you know, all
Speaker 1: of a sudden, you have a large portion of the
Speaker 1: population that could be exposed through direct consumption. But the
Speaker 1: other thing is is prions are really hard to kill.
Speaker 1: I said, they live in soil. They also live on
Speaker 1: steel surfaces, glass surfaces, every like surface that they've tested,
Speaker 1: like trying to kill prions, like you know, putting prions
Speaker 1: on seeing how long they live there hang out there.
Speaker 1: There was some surgical equipment that was infected with a
Speaker 1: prion gave someone chronic wasting not crying c j D
Speaker 1: three years after using it out someone who had um
Speaker 1: c j D G. Yeah, and that's like you know,
Speaker 1: surgical great stainless steel stuff so like not supposed to
Speaker 1: hold things, gets like cleaned, but not like super like
Speaker 1: not prian level clean because they didn't know about at
Speaker 1: the time. So so there's there's the risk is is
Speaker 1: is it could potentially develop into a human something that
Speaker 1: impacts human's Like right now it hasn't. We do have
Speaker 1: eight different variations of it out there in the landscape,
Speaker 1: and as more and more deer exposed to it, what happens,
Speaker 1: we get more and more variations of it, because that's
Speaker 1: just what happens in nature. As we're all becoming familiar
Speaker 1: with with COVID. Yeah, it keeps changing because it's nothing
Speaker 1: has been done to stop it from spreading. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: like the only thing you can do to stop it
Speaker 1: is just like reduced deer numbers. You can't really eliminate
Speaker 1: out of the landscape because it's in the soil. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you can't you can't test live dear for it.
Speaker 1: You gotta kill him to do it. There's they are developed.
Speaker 1: There are some tests being developed to determine if animals
Speaker 1: are infected UM that are faster, but you know, it's
Speaker 1: still it's still in progress. So that's called art quick.
Speaker 1: It's a protein test that's that's much faster than current testing,
Speaker 1: but it's still in progress. So the thing that really
Speaker 1: scares me is the other, well, the other thing about
Speaker 1: that makes chronic wasting to these different from you know
Speaker 1: BS mad cow diseases. Mad cow was in cows that
Speaker 1: were in you know, captive spaces and you know, you
Speaker 1: know where the cows are. Yeah, it's a problem, but
Speaker 1: it's a problem that you can, like with enough fire
Speaker 1: and or other tools eradicate. Yeah. Yeah, And it didn't
Speaker 1: it didn't seem to be you know, very president soil.
Speaker 1: And it was like you had defeat dead cows to
Speaker 1: dead cow to live cows to get them infected. Chronic
Speaker 1: waste disease is a different beast UM. So the real
Speaker 1: scary potential here is that it's in soil so you
Speaker 1: can get into plants, and we know that plants get
Speaker 1: transmit chronic waste disease other deer, so it could you know,
Speaker 1: transmitted to other animals like things that eat plants. You know,
Speaker 1: for example, you and I eat plants. If you're an American,
Speaker 1: you eat corn and a couple of different forms. Um,
Speaker 1: dear love hanging out in corn fields. Oh yeah, So
Speaker 1: there is an exposure vector right there. And you know
Speaker 1: when you're doing when you're processing cornate corncer Let's say, um,
Speaker 1: you take a bunch of corn from a bunch of
Speaker 1: the places. Uh sposh it up, grind it up. You know,
Speaker 1: you do a bunch of stuff to it in on
Speaker 1: steel surfaces and you don't need to a thousand degrees
Speaker 1: for an hour. So all of a sudden you have
Speaker 1: like a case of sota that could be infected with
Speaker 1: chronic wasting disease. There's the potential, the big potential damage
Speaker 1: if this ship jumps to people, which it hasn't yet.
Speaker 1: I want to be really clear about that, so we're
Speaker 1: not causing to but if it does, the containment thing
Speaker 1: is like even in order of magnitude beyond fucking COVID ship, right,
Speaker 1: like it's because it's spread through the soil, it gets
Speaker 1: into the fucking basic ingredients of food, and we we
Speaker 1: simply the way that we process that stuff isn't set
Speaker 1: up in a way that will eliminate it right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I would tell you you really can't on a
Speaker 1: large scale like process anything that's then make it safe
Speaker 1: from you know, like chronic wasting disease, because you have
Speaker 1: to like you know, if you if you like cut
Speaker 1: up like let's let's let's go back to like assuming
Speaker 1: like you know, it's just in you you're handling an
Speaker 1: affected deer. If you cut that deer up, you use
Speaker 1: your knife, you gotta put it in bleach for an
Speaker 1: hour and then you can come back to bleak is
Speaker 1: really corrosive, so eventually destroy your knife. There's there's your
Speaker 1: end thing there. But you can also be through your hands,
Speaker 1: you know, touching it you can get it. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So there's this's a scary part there. I mean, like
Speaker 1: you like, as you point out and I start, I
Speaker 1: really totally failed on my part to menion. It hasn't
Speaker 1: jumped to humans. Yes not. We are not saying you
Speaker 1: are going to get the disease tomorrow. That is not.
Speaker 1: But it also like isn't it like there's nothing that
Speaker 1: says it can't jump to humans right right right exactly. So, UM,
Speaker 1: there have been a number of like three or four.
Speaker 1: There is two studies I know if I there's a
Speaker 1: third one I've heard about. UM looking at if you know,
Speaker 1: human like animals can get chronic waste and disease. So
Speaker 1: that's macaques, which are a kind of monkey. UM. And
Speaker 1: when they have been fed chronic you know, meat and
Speaker 1: infected chronic waste disease UM, and they were exposed to blood,
Speaker 1: they were fed it, they were exposed to blood and
Speaker 1: so it was just injected right into the back of
Speaker 1: their brain stem um. The monkey's got chronic wasting disease.
Speaker 1: So it looks like it's possible. UM. And then also hamsters,
Speaker 1: which are also used as a human standing have also
Speaker 1: been fed meat infected with chronic wasting disease and they
Speaker 1: were able to get it, and they really get it
Speaker 1: from a number of different sources. UM. There are some
Speaker 1: really like fun and by fun, I mean scary papers
Speaker 1: out there about like all the ways like chronic wasting
Speaker 1: disease moves around and survives. Uh. And the studies about
Speaker 1: like using human standings are not always fun to read,
Speaker 1: and this is this is definitely one of those things
Speaker 1: where it's like, yeah, what is the other option other
Speaker 1: than yeah, you have to try it on ship? That's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's very unsettling, But like, yeah, what else are
Speaker 1: you gonna do? Like, have you this is something you
Speaker 1: do have to know? Yeah, yeah, and um. The other
Speaker 1: problem with prions is detection when it comes to like,
Speaker 1: you know, different species, because it presents like Alzheimer's and
Speaker 1: so the only way you know that something got up
Speaker 1: prion disease is if you cut their head. If you
Speaker 1: cut its head open, you look at its brain. So um.
Speaker 1: When and in humans, it can take a long time
Speaker 1: for these symptoms to present, I think, like if you
Speaker 1: look it up on Wikipedia, it's is like the average
Speaker 1: like age detection is sixty years and then we're good fine. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The researchers that I've spoken to say it takes like
Speaker 1: forty years for enough prions to build up in your
Speaker 1: brain for it to like, you know, start to show symptoms,
Speaker 1: so you know if it is to jump, if it jumps,
Speaker 1: the species bearer the first time we detected will probably
Speaker 1: not be the first time anyone has been infected. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it will already have spread quite widely and then people
Speaker 1: will hopefully not but yeah, so so that that's the
Speaker 1: scary part. That that's the human side scary part. But
Speaker 1: you know, we don't always have to keep human side scary. Sometimes.
Speaker 1: You know, things work in you know, monkeys and hamsters
Speaker 1: that don't work in humans. And we've cured cancer, you know,
Speaker 1: hundreds of times in mice, right yeah, and in humans
Speaker 1: it's a lot harder to do because we're not mice,
Speaker 1: we're not monkeys, we're humans. So it doesn't always work
Speaker 1: like that. But the the other scary part is when
Speaker 1: it comes to agriculture and the impact on agriculture. So
Speaker 1: pigs can pick up chronic wasting disease there what's called
Speaker 1: a prian amplifier, so they can pick it up. They
Speaker 1: can like you know, hangs out in them, just find
Speaker 1: it doesn't kill pigs at all. They can people. That's true.
Speaker 1: That's the truth right there, that's the truth. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: so you know, if if it you know, as people,
Speaker 1: you know, government's become more aware of it and more
Speaker 1: concerned about it. There there's the real possibility of you know,
Speaker 1: agricultural exports get hammered on, you know, exporting it because
Speaker 1: you know other countries you know, are concerned about spreading it.
Speaker 1: So right now, you know it's pretty hard to well,
Speaker 1: it's getting increasingly the harder to export live dear probably
Speaker 1: should be Probably farming service is not a great idea
Speaker 1: for their health and ours. But um, you know, also
Speaker 1: there's the concern about spread. So if if chronic wasting
Speaker 1: disease is you know, crosses from humans to cows like
Speaker 1: we've seen, you know, like if you know BSc just
Speaker 1: pops up in some cows, you know that might be
Speaker 1: from chronic waste disease, and the impact that is going
Speaker 1: to be huge. I mean Canada they were shut out
Speaker 1: of the Japanese market for fourteen years, like Japanese beef
Speaker 1: market for fourteen years following a case of mad cow
Speaker 1: disease and two thousand and six they got let back
Speaker 1: in two years ago and the studies and that was
Speaker 1: like a couple of billion dollars in damage to the
Speaker 1: Canadian beef market. So you know, and that was BSc,
Speaker 1: which does not do it doesn't transfer via plant, So
Speaker 1: imagine it is the US, you know, agricultural sport market
Speaker 1: market got shut down for plants that like economic damage
Speaker 1: is incalculable. Yeah. Yeah, so that's the scary part of
Speaker 1: electronic wasting disease. Those are all the scarinesses. That's what
Speaker 1: keeps me up at night. This is frightening and important
Speaker 1: for people to be aware of because it's a serious threat.
Speaker 1: Are there things that can be done at the moment? Like,
Speaker 1: is there is there inactionable You're not just like not
Speaker 1: on a what can our audience do? But like, is
Speaker 1: there a thing that could potentially be done by you know,
Speaker 1: states or the federal government never that would help this?
Speaker 1: Like is there actually do we do it? Do we
Speaker 1: have any fucking idea of like what could be done
Speaker 1: to make it less likely for the kind of nightmare
Speaker 1: scenarios that we've alluded to to occur here. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: the best kit, you know, the best things we can
Speaker 1: do are to you know, hunt deer, reduced der population,
Speaker 1: so that way you're you know, taking deer out that
Speaker 1: might be infected. And when you hunt deer in most
Speaker 1: areas that infected you, there's a you test them for free,
Speaker 1: you with your state or various authorities, and so then
Speaker 1: those carcasses are destroyed, so you can remove you know,
Speaker 1: disease off the landscape that way. Um. And then by
Speaker 1: also just hunting deer, you reduce population levels and so
Speaker 1: you make it you make the disease loading in the
Speaker 1: landscape lower and it less likely to spread, you know,
Speaker 1: both to other deers and then potentially vector to other
Speaker 1: animals exposed to other animals. Um. Excuse me. New York
Speaker 1: is a great example of this. They had a case
Speaker 1: of chronic waste and disease pop up, took it out really,
Speaker 1: you know, hunted that area hard. I think that they
Speaker 1: even brought in professionals and did some real serious deer
Speaker 1: reduction and they haven't had a case since. So you know,
Speaker 1: in areas where it pops up, you can just hammer
Speaker 1: it with you know, lethal removal of animals, harvesting whatever,
Speaker 1: and um, you can prevent spread um, and you cannot
Speaker 1: you can really not get back the other thing we
Speaker 1: got to do. We need to be very serious about
Speaker 1: we need to take the captive servant industry. So I've
Speaker 1: used the word server a couple of times. I never
Speaker 1: defined it, my apologies. Servants are members of the deer family,
Speaker 1: so elk moose yeah, seek a deer. All those guys
Speaker 1: read deer fatility or what a bunch of them? Um,
Speaker 1: we need to make sure that we're very closely regulating
Speaker 1: that industry because of the potential spread. There was a
Speaker 1: farmer in Wisconsin that sent like almost four hundred different
Speaker 1: infected deer to like a hundred nineties seven different farms
Speaker 1: UM over the course of like four years. So you know,
Speaker 1: it's regulation is incredibly important. UM, and it's it's rarely.
Speaker 1: You know, it's not really enough on most farms. My
Speaker 1: home state here we have UM. You know, if you
Speaker 1: make less than ten thousand dollars from your servant farm,
Speaker 1: you don't have to report it, you don't have to
Speaker 1: track it or anything. That's a real problem because we
Speaker 1: are experiencing expanding chronic waste disease. So regulation, you know,
Speaker 1: that's fun. Maybe we just shouldn't be farming servants. Maybe
Speaker 1: that's bad. Yeah. I don't disagree with you at all there. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not not a fan. Yeah. From the ethical standpoint too,
Speaker 1: there's there's many I raise a several different I raised
Speaker 1: bunnies and chickens and goats, and I help raise sheep
Speaker 1: for for meat. Uh, there's plenty of different things that
Speaker 1: you can raise for meat that are used to it
Speaker 1: because we've been raising them for meat for like tens
Speaker 1: of thousands of fucking years. Like the sheep. I have orangoras,
Speaker 1: which I didn't go back like twenty thirty thousand years,
Speaker 1: Like they're they're they're they're meant for it. We have
Speaker 1: changed them into animals that are supposed to be raised
Speaker 1: for meat. Don't take new animals and try to farm
Speaker 1: them like that because it seems like it causes problems. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: there's a really neat there's a really neat work out
Speaker 1: there about the about domestications stress and like you know,
Speaker 1: domestic kids sheep don't care about being domesticated, whereas like
Speaker 1: they've compared like domesticate cheap to wild cheep. Wild sheep
Speaker 1: die really quick when you put the domestication from the stress.
Speaker 1: But yeah, like you said, uh, maybe maybe we don't
Speaker 1: Maybe we don't play around with some of these animals
Speaker 1: to try to force them to do human what we
Speaker 1: humans want them to do. You know, it's okay for
Speaker 1: animals to just be animals. Wrong with that? Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So the other thing, there was a large amount of
Speaker 1: money set aside, and I can't remember which legislative packager
Speaker 1: was they got defeated a while back that put money
Speaker 1: towards chronic wasting disease research. So you know, legislators and
Speaker 1: states can be you know, legislatures and government can be
Speaker 1: taken seriously putting money towards it. Right now, it's there's
Speaker 1: not a lot of money going towards it because it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a zombie deer thing, who cares. Yeah, well, you
Speaker 1: could get into this is not just a problem for
Speaker 1: deer hunters. This could be a real issue for everybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so yeah, I mean, I mean it's kind of like
Speaker 1: a larger symptomatic thing too. We don't really take environmental
Speaker 1: problems that seriously. Um yeah, yeah, I mean the yeah,
Speaker 1: the scary thing about this is we don't treat the
Speaker 1: environmental problem seriously. When everyone's saying, like, hey, the consequence
Speaker 1: is that like all of Florida will be uninhabitable, right, Like,
Speaker 1: we don't take that seriously. So when you're saying, this
Speaker 1: is much wonkier, which is definitely a barrier to effective action. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I did a legislative testimony about chronic wasting disease a
Speaker 1: couple of months back, and no one was paying attention,
Speaker 1: but you know, it made me feel good. I was
Speaker 1: doing something. Oh he was a fun thing about Florida
Speaker 1: and chronic waste disease. So Florida, you know, full of
Speaker 1: invasive species. Obviously it has chronic waste disease. Like it's
Speaker 1: a Florida obviously gotta pick up a new disease. You
Speaker 1: know what else is in Florida Colonies of macaques. There's
Speaker 1: like two colonies of I was unaware of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: was it because people were an ill advisedly keeping pets.
Speaker 1: I think one of them started that way, and I
Speaker 1: think one of them was like some monkeys that have
Speaker 1: been like kept for testing or zoo stuff escaped. But
Speaker 1: there are at least like two like colonies of like
Speaker 1: maccas in Florida, which also has chronic waste disease. So
Speaker 1: you know there's I don't think the chronic they're like
Speaker 1: near the Everglades. I don't think chronic waste disease made
Speaker 1: that far south of Florida. So there's a there's a
Speaker 1: fun possibility of the lab experiments under highly control conditions
Speaker 1: getting um, you know, performed in in the wild setting.
Speaker 1: We could see if if mccax can pick up chronic
Speaker 1: waste disease in the wild. Um, there's a there's a
Speaker 1: fun research project for someone who uh, you know is
Speaker 1: able to handle dark sides of things. Yeah, thank you Florida. Um.
Speaker 1: But more importantly, thank you flow right. Uh. And a
Speaker 1: lot of people are unaware of this was just a
Speaker 1: couple of years ago in the Eurovision Song Awards representing
Speaker 1: San Marino. So you know, twenty two overall not bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good, better than I could do. Good day.
Speaker 1: And also, you are not technically a citizen of the
Speaker 1: Republic of San Marino. No, but yet they offered me citizenship.
Speaker 1: I would consider it absolutely. Who wouldn't want to be
Speaker 1: a citizen of the most serene Republic of San Marino. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I I've looked at Andorra, so you know it would
Speaker 1: be a really we're looking at European micro nations. I mean,
Speaker 1: if and door came knock in versus San Marino, obviously
Speaker 1: sam Real is getting kicked to the curb. I love
Speaker 1: that like dual like government between the President of France
Speaker 1: and like the Pope of or not the Bishop. It's
Speaker 1: like a bishop of like somewhere in Italy. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: very funny. Um yeah, you gotta love those weird little
Speaker 1: micro republics. Huge fan. Yeah. Um, so okay, well this
Speaker 1: has been great. Yeah, I'm glad this is happening. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's cool and fun. Yeah. I'm not usually fun to
Speaker 1: hang out with when I talk about work stuff, I know,
Speaker 1: but it's like it's again, people need to be aware
Speaker 1: of this, Like this is one of those just in
Speaker 1: the same way that like people were talking about for
Speaker 1: years prior to COVID. Hey, we we actually really need
Speaker 1: to be aware, like a coronavirus could break out and
Speaker 1: it will spread really quickly due to the way that
Speaker 1: global travel and transit and stuff works, and it'll be
Speaker 1: almost impossible to control. Um, you know, we should we
Speaker 1: should build structures into our societies to make it easier
Speaker 1: for us to deal with a coronavirus, which we didn't do,
Speaker 1: but maybe we'll do it this time. Yeah, well what
Speaker 1: makes it really fun? I'm just gonna I'm gonna build
Speaker 1: off you for a second. You've fallen into my trap here.
Speaker 1: The same people who were writing about like mers and
Speaker 1: predicted you know, I can't remember which game first merser Stars,
Speaker 1: I can't remember which one. The same people who predicted
Speaker 1: that and then who are also predicting um COVID are
Speaker 1: also talking about chronic wasting disease. So it's like, you know,
Speaker 1: I really hope you don't get to be right on
Speaker 1: this one. You know, I just want you to lose
Speaker 1: one of these times here, Bud. You're a nice guy,
Speaker 1: real smart guy, but can you be wrong occasionally, just
Speaker 1: for just for like you know, old time's sake. Just
Speaker 1: be nice to me. Yeah, well, there we go. Um,
Speaker 1: that's been a fun episode. Everybody have a good time. Um,
Speaker 1: thank you, Calvin. Do you have anything you want to
Speaker 1: like plug before we roll out here? Yeah? I would
Speaker 1: like to plug. Trees' is real neat try that we
Speaker 1: are supported by trees. Um, not the plant, but a
Speaker 1: club in Dallas that I took ecstasy at once. That's
Speaker 1: a primary sponsors physically supported by trees. My computers on
Speaker 1: wood so oh excellent? Yeah? Is that also good? Yeah,
Speaker 1: trees like to plug. Also getting outside, that's good for you?
Speaker 1: Do that consolutely get outside for sure? Yeah. Uh. Tweet
Speaker 1: tweets from from birds. I don't do the twitters, not
Speaker 1: not from Twitter yes, definitely. Yeah, those are things that
Speaker 1: I'd like to plug. Yeah, Replacing the tweets from Twitter
Speaker 1: that you encounter with tweets from birds is probably among
Speaker 1: the best things you can do for your mental health,
Speaker 1: unless it's this one bird that lived outside of my
Speaker 1: apartment in Los Angeles. But anyway, um well, Calvin, thank
Speaker 1: you for coming on. I appreciate your expertise, even though
Speaker 1: it's always deeply unsettling. Um that's gonna do it for
Speaker 1: all of us here today. And it could happen here,
Speaker 1: by which I mean you would me, oh boy, it
Speaker 1: is behind the it happened could here. I'm Evans Robert
Speaker 1: podcast song. Hello, who else is on the call? What
Speaker 1: are we doing? Where are we? It's it's it's me. Uh,
Speaker 1: It's Christopher Wong. I'm gonna talk a lot this episode.
Speaker 1: There's also other people are here you are now. Before
Speaker 1: we get into that, I should note that we were
Speaker 1: all just looking at the latest episode of podcast Magazine,
Speaker 1: which of course we all read regularly. That's the list
Speaker 1: I do like that to describe you as uh uh,
Speaker 1: they they describe you in a few funny ways. Actually,
Speaker 1: yes they do. It's a list of the most powerful
Speaker 1: people in podcasting, Um, of course gotten me obviously all
Speaker 1: the greats. On page forty seven we have Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: who and they do say that he has also undertaken
Speaker 1: an ambitious daily series called It Could Happen Here that
Speaker 1: takes us on some of the weightiest issues and problems
Speaker 1: facing policymakers. I will say this, if you are a
Speaker 1: policymaker and you have ever taken a policy suggestion for us,
Speaker 1: you have a legal obligation to like light your own
Speaker 1: office on fire with a molotov. I do like that
Speaker 1: Robert Evans don't listen to Chris do it policymakers. I
Speaker 1: do like that Robert Evans is right above the serial creators.
Speaker 1: So that's that is above Trevor Noah. I mean I don't,
Speaker 1: I literally don't think it's like it listed because there
Speaker 1: is no way in in the list. Bin Shapiro is
Speaker 1: above Joe Rogan, and that's just not accurate to the
Speaker 1: to the to the to the way the industry functions.
Speaker 1: But it's a very silly. Listen. It's been fun reading
Speaker 1: through our latest issue of our favorite of our favorite
Speaker 1: podcast magazine, podcast magazine made by podcast News Daily, where
Speaker 1: you can get all your news about podcasts. The thing
Speaker 1: that I totally knew about for I've known about this
Speaker 1: clearly for longer than fifteen minutes. Actually, that's that's not true.
Speaker 1: I've known about it for longer than eight minutes. Maybe twelve. Yeah,
Speaker 1: m hmm. It's an amazing photo. Was happy to get
Speaker 1: I was it was happy. Was happy to get in
Speaker 1: some fine reading today. Uh So, anyway, what's what's what's this?
Speaker 1: What's our episode actually about? It's a great question. It's
Speaker 1: a podcast power rating episode. Yeah, yeah, we're We're I
Speaker 1: don't even have anywhere to go with that. No, the thing,
Speaker 1: the thing the episode is actually about is heat waves,
Speaker 1: and very specifically a heat wave in China that has
Speaker 1: been going on for Why this is day seven as
Speaker 1: we're recording, this is day seventy two. I think by
Speaker 1: the time Let's Go Out goes out, it will probably
Speaker 1: be like day seventy four. Um. Yeah, And this is
Speaker 1: and and incomparable heat wave. I'm just gonna read this
Speaker 1: from Axios. The extreme heat and drought that has been
Speaker 1: most roasting a vast swath of southern China for at
Speaker 1: least seventy days straight has no parallel and modern record
Speaker 1: keeping in China or anywhere else around the world for
Speaker 1: that matter. Now, Okay, so that sounds bad, right, but
Speaker 1: it's actually worse than that because okay, so if if
Speaker 1: if you were to read that, you you might believe
Speaker 1: that this heat wave is just affecting southern China, and
Speaker 1: that's like not true. It's also affecting northern China. It
Speaker 1: is affecting like most of China. It's like affecting almost
Speaker 1: like most people alive is nine million people, which is
Speaker 1: like Chris quick question, is that a lot? So? Okay,
Speaker 1: so if if if you rank all the countries in
Speaker 1: the world, right, the people affected by this heat wave
Speaker 1: would be the third largest country in the world, only
Speaker 1: behind China and India. Okay, so that's that's several people.
Speaker 1: It's it's fun, is it more people than the British
Speaker 1: people who have been logging onto post about it being
Speaker 1: like five degrees and them like, I do love. One
Speaker 1: of the things that's keeping me alive during this ugly
Speaker 1: summer is like all of the photos of British people
Speaker 1: just getting as red as possible because they think the
Speaker 1: tanning means burning of your body. It's hard for me
Speaker 1: to explain how difficult it was for me to comprehend
Speaker 1: that in California they won't serve you if you have
Speaker 1: your shirt off, because it is a national tradition in
Speaker 1: Britain to take off your shirt and get as much
Speaker 1: some note as possible, or if you're getting into a
Speaker 1: fist fight as well. Well, the number of folks pull
Speaker 1: their shirts off and fights in London. Yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: part of a natural heritage. It's it's a beautiful country.
Speaker 1: But please continue, Chris, Yeah, okay, So so you know,
Speaker 1: to get a sense of like the stakes of this, right,
Speaker 1: so okay, and like they just just the sheer scale
Speaker 1: of this because people is an amount of people that, like,
Speaker 1: we like is incomprehensible. Think that's a number that's too large.
Speaker 1: So okay. Sichuan Province, right, this is this is one
Speaker 1: province that is being affected by this. This province has
Speaker 1: eighty three million people in it. This is the entire
Speaker 1: combined population of California, Texas, Indiana, and New York City. Um,
Speaker 1: here's here's in France twenty four about what's happening here.
Speaker 1: Since July this year, the province has faced the most
Speaker 1: extreme high temperatures the lowest rainfall in the corresponding period
Speaker 1: in history and the highest power load in history. Local
Speaker 1: authorities said, so it is hotter than it has ever been.
Speaker 1: It is drier than it has ever been except and
Speaker 1: and this is the fun part. This is the similar
Speaker 1: similar was happening in Texas, and I think, yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I'm texts probably the best example of this. Okay, So
Speaker 1: it's really really really unbelievably dry, except for when there's
Speaker 1: giant flash floods and they've killed like twenty two people
Speaker 1: already have have died from the flash floods um the
Speaker 1: different province. But yeah, it is unbelievably bleak. Um. One
Speaker 1: of the big things that's happening is that the Yanksy
Speaker 1: River is like the lowest anyone has ever seen it.
Speaker 1: Who's like, anyone alive has ever seen it. It's the
Speaker 1: lowest we have recorded measurements of because like I, this
Speaker 1: is everything is happening here, like there is no record
Speaker 1: of it ever being this bad. And this is a
Speaker 1: real problem because particularly in such one because of this
Speaker 1: province's power is drawn from hydro electric and you know,
Speaker 1: it turns out it's it's really bad if the rivers
Speaker 1: that you are relying on for your hydro electric power
Speaker 1: are basically drying up, and like like there's there's pictures
Speaker 1: of like like you can go find pictures of this
Speaker 1: that there are pictures of the yankste that like it
Speaker 1: looks like a riverbed on Mars, like is just just
Speaker 1: completely dry, Like it's like dry cragged stuff. It's really Again,
Speaker 1: this is just to kind of bring out how worldwide
Speaker 1: this problem is. We're seeing pieces of this everywhere else,
Speaker 1: right Like Texas, which is also in a horrible drought,
Speaker 1: has been having flash floods that have been disastrous recently
Speaker 1: because when it's been super dry for a while and
Speaker 1: you have these these heavy rains, it's it's a huge
Speaker 1: fucking problem. And you've got riverbeds drying up all across
Speaker 1: the Southwest and things like Lake Mead getting low enough
Speaker 1: that hydro electric power isn't going to be reliable. A
Speaker 1: huge chunk about like the the again, because it's important
Speaker 1: not to distract from like what's happening in China, but
Speaker 1: because it's important, like this is this is everybody, This
Speaker 1: is everybody, yes in India all over yeah yeah, and
Speaker 1: and you know, okay, so the seat wave and trying to, like,
Speaker 1: there's been very very little English coverage of it, and
Speaker 1: the thing that everyone focuses on is the fact that
Speaker 1: like the power audergy, well, the the reduced ability to
Speaker 1: generate power and the fact that everyone has to turn
Speaker 1: on the air conditions and not like literally die is
Speaker 1: you know, it's wreaking havoc on China set of productive
Speaker 1: capacity since such one has like there there there's an
Speaker 1: enormous like industrial base there that you know, produces stuff
Speaker 1: from everything from like Tesla to Apple. And this is
Speaker 1: what the sort of the anglephone media cares about, right,
Speaker 1: like everything that almost everything written about the heat wave
Speaker 1: is about its effect on like supply chain disruption, disruption
Speaker 1: to like semi conduct your production and like batteries for
Speaker 1: electronic exs on and so forth. And I do not
Speaker 1: give a shit about this, um And the reason I
Speaker 1: don't give a shit about this is because the actual
Speaker 1: human impact of this is just sort of unfathomable, and
Speaker 1: the media outlets we're talking about it like don't seem
Speaker 1: to be paying attention to it at all. Um So,
Speaker 1: while I was originally okay, so uh when I when
Speaker 1: I was originally writing part of this episode owed I
Speaker 1: went and like looked back at weather data for Shanghai
Speaker 1: and so okay, when I was running this on August,
Speaker 1: that day was a hundred and three in Shanghai, like
Speaker 1: two weeks before that it was a hundred and eleven.
Speaker 1: And I found out that from July to August, the
Speaker 1: like the high temperature, like the daily high temperature like
Speaker 1: did not go below a hundred. On the one it
Speaker 1: finally rained and that dropped the temperature to merely four.
Speaker 1: I think either tomorrow today or tomorrow, I think it
Speaker 1: will go below ninety. This is all now, this is
Speaker 1: this is this is this is the temperature of the day.
Speaker 1: But after during the night aren't going below like seventy either,
Speaker 1: then a lot a lot of times are in the
Speaker 1: eighties or nineties, And and that the temperature at night
Speaker 1: does just for people who are not aware of like heat.
Speaker 1: One of the things that's most important for like the
Speaker 1: survivability of a heat wave is whether or not it
Speaker 1: gets cool at night, because can survive pretty hot temperatures
Speaker 1: during the day. If you were able to cool your
Speaker 1: body down at night, it's one of the like one
Speaker 1: of the saving grace is the Pacific Northwest had during
Speaker 1: its seat waves. But yeah, and and this is this
Speaker 1: is a really like so Chunking, which is an enormous city.
Speaker 1: It has nine million people like regularly in the city.
Speaker 1: It's Chunking. The city is also the municipal like government there,
Speaker 1: so there's a whole sort of complicate thing there. But
Speaker 1: like the municipality of Chunking is thirty two million people
Speaker 1: in it. Uh. They had a night I a couple
Speaker 1: I think a couple of weeks ago that was ninety
Speaker 1: four point eight degrees and which is again like that
Speaker 1: is a night that is significantly hotter than the average
Speaker 1: summer day. And you know, I mean, like I want
Speaker 1: to go back to Shanghai for just like a second,
Speaker 1: because like Shanghai, I looked this, I I looked this up.
Speaker 1: Shanghai has not had a day where the high has
Speaker 1: been below eighty nine degrees for two consecutive days since
Speaker 1: mid June. It has been over ninety degrees every single
Speaker 1: day like with without two days back to back. It
Speaker 1: wasn't that hot since mid June um And you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so like the this is having enormous effects. One of
Speaker 1: the big ones, the most noticeable ones is like basically
Speaker 1: like any excess power usage that a city can have
Speaker 1: is just getting shut off. There's been a lot of uh,
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of stuff where like businesses aren't
Speaker 1: allowed to open before like four pm because it's literally
Speaker 1: just too hot and you can't deal with electricity load
Speaker 1: and yeah, like and you know the other the other
Speaker 1: problem here again it's like it's not cooling off at night.
Speaker 1: And if it's not cooling off at night, yeah, like
Speaker 1: that this is this is the thing that kills people. Um,
Speaker 1: and so well, the one of the things I want
Speaker 1: to talk about this is just like looking at this,
Speaker 1: looking at what this looks like on like a very
Speaker 1: very granular individual level, because this stuff also just sort
Speaker 1: of gets ignored. Um. There is a really horrible story
Speaker 1: in six Tone, which is like it's hard to describe them.
Speaker 1: So six Tone is a state media outlet, but they're
Speaker 1: like I don't know, I guess you consider them like
Speaker 1: they're they're like the left wing state media outlet, which
Speaker 1: means that like they have somewhat more like editorial independence
Speaker 1: than like something like China Daily or like a lot
Speaker 1: of the other state run things, and they like they
Speaker 1: criticize the government a lot more than uh, most of
Speaker 1: the sort of state run outlets. And they did this
Speaker 1: story about a migrant worker who was working at a
Speaker 1: freight depot about like he's this is this depos about
Speaker 1: like two and a half hours outside of Shanghai, and okay,
Speaker 1: so he's he's working and it is you know, it is.
Speaker 1: It is unbelievably hot. I think. I think the last
Speaker 1: day that he's working here, it's a hundred and four
Speaker 1: degrees and that night it only cooled off to four.
Speaker 1: Here's from six toned about sort of just the conditions
Speaker 1: that people are working in here. On the hottest days,
Speaker 1: the temper side the carriages is at least fifty degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: which is a hundred and twenty two degrees fahrenheit, says you.
Speaker 1: He had Dong, a worker from Junk c and other
Speaker 1: Inland Province. It feels like you're on fire standing here.
Speaker 1: Around noon, his employer, an outsourcing agency, hands out heat
Speaker 1: stroke profession drugs, which he takes twice a day. At
Speaker 1: the freight depot. Managers sit in air conditioned rooms, but
Speaker 1: workers like him rest under trees. The office is not
Speaker 1: for us, you says, now, okay. In theory, under Chinese
Speaker 1: law if it hits a hundred and four degrees, outdoor
Speaker 1: work is supposed to immediately stop, and you're supposed to
Speaker 1: move everyone indoors and like give them water and stuff.
Speaker 1: Because it turns out if you're working like a hard
Speaker 1: man or labor job outside and a hundred and four
Speaker 1: you might die. But you know, you and you're a
Speaker 1: you're supposed to get paid heat breaks, and like, you know,
Speaker 1: as as anyone who is familiar with, for example, how
Speaker 1: American farm labor works, you know what happens about to
Speaker 1: happen next. Uh, it turns out that you know, okay,
Speaker 1: so you can take a break, but your employers won't
Speaker 1: pay you for it because like they don't know who's who,
Speaker 1: who's gonna who's gonna actually force them to do it. John,
Speaker 1: who's the work of the story is about, you know,
Speaker 1: is extremely poor. His family is poor. He's on his
Speaker 1: support a family like back home because again he's he's
Speaker 1: a migrant worker and he you know, he can't he
Speaker 1: can't afford to take a break on his ship. So
Speaker 1: he doesn't die, and so he he literally collapses on
Speaker 1: the job and then gets back up and finishes his work,
Speaker 1: and he tries to cool down by like laying in
Speaker 1: his tiny, young, un air conditioned apartments with like an
Speaker 1: electric fan pointed at his head. And he died on
Speaker 1: a bed that was held up by two broken cinder blocks,
Speaker 1: making maybe four dollars an hour. M Yeah, and you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean, you know, the thing about this, right
Speaker 1: is so in theory, he's working for for a state
Speaker 1: owned company, right, but you know, as as as we
Speaker 1: talked about like a little bit in that the sort
Speaker 1: of quote earlier, he's not actually working for the state
Speaker 1: owned firm. What he's working for is one of these
Speaker 1: like labor agencies, which are these like sort of contracting
Speaker 1: things that allow you to actually get a job. But
Speaker 1: you know what what happens is the state of firms
Speaker 1: like outsourced of labor to the the two these contracting firms,
Speaker 1: and the contracting firms just like pick people up and
Speaker 1: bring them to the site. But this means he doesn't
Speaker 1: have a contract. And the problem is if you don't
Speaker 1: have if you don't have a contract, right, you can't
Speaker 1: get any government benefits, you can't get insurance. And it
Speaker 1: turns out this matters because you know, China, China has
Speaker 1: like a payout right that they're supposed to pay to
Speaker 1: families when you know, if someone dies in the job,
Speaker 1: but you know, it's almost impossible to collect, especially if
Speaker 1: you don't have a contract. It is it is almost
Speaker 1: impossible to to get this thing, um, And you know,
Speaker 1: like this is this is how like most of the
Speaker 1: Chinese economy works. The Chinese General Trong calculated that in
Speaker 1: Funk One, which is one of like China's big industrial cities,
Speaker 1: if companies actually paid out the insurance benefits they were
Speaker 1: legally required to pay out, it would cut corporate profit
Speaker 1: by and bankrupt like most of the company's working. Here's
Speaker 1: you know, the entire economy is based on this. And
Speaker 1: John's family drives like three d and fifty miles to
Speaker 1: the city where he died and starts like harassing government
Speaker 1: officials and bosses for like literally weeks. They are trying
Speaker 1: to get people to like, hey, you know, will you
Speaker 1: pay out the insurance money you're legally required to pay us?
Speaker 1: And they refuse, like the local officials like won't even
Speaker 1: give them like surveillance footage of like what like of
Speaker 1: him on the job dying. And you know, after like
Speaker 1: several weeks of his like four or five weeks, their
Speaker 1: finally able to get a sixth of the money they're
Speaker 1: supposed to get if you die, if someone dies under
Speaker 1: sort of like they're able to get a six of
Speaker 1: the money that you're supposed to get into Chinese law
Speaker 1: if one of your family embraers dies into workplace. And
Speaker 1: you know, I'm focusing on this story because it's one
Speaker 1: of the few stories that we have directly about sort
Speaker 1: of the sheer magnitude of the suffering the heat wave
Speaker 1: is causing. And part of part of what's going on
Speaker 1: here is that we don't know what the death told
Speaker 1: the heat wave is. There's there's nothing about it, right
Speaker 1: you You'll see a couple reports I'll talk about like
Speaker 1: two or three heat related death but it's it is
Speaker 1: literally impossible that there are that few deaths um there.
Speaker 1: There there was a study in the journal Lancet that
Speaker 1: was looking at heat related deaths in China over the
Speaker 1: last thirty years, and it showed that like heat related
Speaker 1: deaths have died increased by a factor of four since
Speaker 1: and you know, so there was there was another heatwave
Speaker 1: in China that was like pretty bad in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: and they calculated that eight hundred people had died from
Speaker 1: heat related deaths Jesus, and you know and again that
Speaker 1: that that heat wave heat wave was pretty bad. This
Speaker 1: heat wave, like it has just utterly destroyed every single
Speaker 1: record that heat waves set, Like it is in like
Speaker 1: its own universe of heat waves. So it has killed
Speaker 1: like probably by the end of this it will have
Speaker 1: killed like tens of thousands of people. Yep. And yeah,
Speaker 1: which is really bleak. And you know what I'm I
Speaker 1: think like part of the reason also I wanted to
Speaker 1: talk about, like the specific story is that like you know,
Speaker 1: so the weather itself like is trying to like is
Speaker 1: enough to kill you, right, But like okay, so like this,
Speaker 1: like this kind of heat is survivable if like you know,
Speaker 1: if if if you're in a situation where you can
Speaker 1: be inside and where you can be hydrated and stuff
Speaker 1: like that. But you know, hey, capitalism exists. I means
Speaker 1: you have to keep working during this ship and that's
Speaker 1: just going to keep killing people. UM. I wanted to
Speaker 1: sort of also look at sort of some of the
Speaker 1: historical heat waves to also to get a sense of
Speaker 1: how many people like probably died in this one. Um.
Speaker 1: I think like maybe the most famous heat wave like
Speaker 1: in in my lifetime, well until this one, I guess
Speaker 1: was that heat wave in Europe thousand three and that
Speaker 1: one killed something like seventy people. Um, and there's a
Speaker 1: lot of very interesting stuff that we learned from this
Speaker 1: heat wave about what heat waves to you. It's sort
Speaker 1: of in general. The United Nations, like in fine mental program,
Speaker 1: like released a report about this, and there's ulti really
Speaker 1: interesting stuff and I mean, okay, so the obvious one
Speaker 1: is that this has a massive effect on agriculture, which okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: Like you can ask a four year old and they
Speaker 1: will tell you that this is bad and this is happening.
Speaker 1: This is affecting China right now too, because um, this
Speaker 1: drought is hitting like right in the middle of a
Speaker 1: lot of kind of bread basket. So yeah, there's all
Speaker 1: these sort of like downstream effects that we'll see later. Um.
Speaker 1: One of the other fun parts about this this is
Speaker 1: when she doesn't three heat wave. I'm just gonna read
Speaker 1: this quote. Massive alpine glaciers decreased by ten in two
Speaker 1: thousand three. And yeah, okay, so you know what you're
Speaker 1: seeing here, right is this sort of sickler thing where
Speaker 1: each each heat wave, you know, does things like melt glaciers, right,
Speaker 1: and that makes the next heat wave worse because when
Speaker 1: when you when you lose glacier mass, you're you're you're
Speaker 1: you're losing surface area that reflects light, which increases level
Speaker 1: of warming. And this is sort of you know, this
Speaker 1: is one of those sort of feedback loops that where
Speaker 1: we're dealing with. Um uh, you know another thing that
Speaker 1: we've been seeing a lot in the US had this
Speaker 1: like pretty badly. I mean, I guess like anyone who
Speaker 1: lives in the Pacific Northwest like understands this. There's just
Speaker 1: there are just fires constantly because it turns out that
Speaker 1: when it's really hot, things just lead on fire. Um.
Speaker 1: In the in the two three one there were twenty
Speaker 1: five thousand fires and they burned something like six fifty
Speaker 1: thousand head acres of forest. And even the places it
Speaker 1: didn't burn, it causes sort of like severe, severe ecological
Speaker 1: damage to these forests because like the they the heat
Speaker 1: leaves trees, for example, like a lot weaker than're supposed
Speaker 1: to mean, this leaves in vulnerable to things like plagues
Speaker 1: and like into the waves of insects and this, you know,
Speaker 1: like everything that's happening here with these heat waves, like
Speaker 1: we weakens the environments that are supposed to be sort
Speaker 1: of like mitigating the effects of climate change. Um we
Speaker 1: were so we also like on the sort of like
Speaker 1: human front, we we talked about how heat waves can
Speaker 1: knock out uh he waves can knock out hydro electric power.
Speaker 1: It turns out they can also knock out nuclear power
Speaker 1: plants because nuclear power plants rely on like dumping their
Speaker 1: cooling water back into rivers. Now there's like there's there's
Speaker 1: legal limits on how hot like the water you can
Speaker 1: dump into these rivers is supposed to be. Because it
Speaker 1: turns out, you know if okay, if you have a
Speaker 1: bunch of boiling water into river is gonna kill everything
Speaker 1: in it. But as the sort of cooling process like
Speaker 1: gets more difficult because the water levels are lower, you
Speaker 1: have to take power plants offline because otherwise you're going
Speaker 1: to just kill everything in the river when you when
Speaker 1: you're venting your sort of exhaust heat and into it
Speaker 1: got into three it gets bad enough that like a
Speaker 1: bunch of companies get exemptions right there, like Okay, it's
Speaker 1: an emergency, we can turn this on. We can like
Speaker 1: we can vent all this hot water back in the rivers.
Speaker 1: But you know, you can only do this so many
Speaker 1: times before your revocably funk up the ecosystem of the river.
Speaker 1: And again this is this is this is the problem, right,
Speaker 1: Like you get you're getting into these feedback loops. You're
Speaker 1: destroying it, You're destroying the ecosystem, You're showing the river ecosystems.
Speaker 1: This also again has problems with like it produces. It's
Speaker 1: it's the river's ability to serve as a carbon sink.
Speaker 1: And but but it's like, you know, what, what choice
Speaker 1: do you have? Right? Because you're energy the energy consumption
Speaker 1: heat waves massively increases because you need to cool yourself down,
Speaker 1: you need air conditioning, you need things like fans or
Speaker 1: people are going to die, and so like every single
Speaker 1: one of these like heat waves just sort of spirals. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about
Speaker 1: is something that we haven't We talked about this in
Speaker 1: like the very very early episodes of the show, but
Speaker 1: like haven't talked about much sense, which is wet bulb temperature.
Speaker 1: Oh yes, yeah, so for for for people who don't
Speaker 1: remember what this is, um, I mean we're talking a
Speaker 1: little bit about it earlier and that when you can't
Speaker 1: cool down at night, like the big things about a
Speaker 1: wet bulb temperature. But yeah, it's it's more complicated than that. Yeah, So,
Speaker 1: like I guess the basics of it is that, Okay,
Speaker 1: so your body like cools itself down by sweating, and
Speaker 1: when when the water evaporates off your skin, it cools
Speaker 1: you off and this is one of the big ways
Speaker 1: that your body sort of keeps your internal temperature under control.
Speaker 1: The problem basically is what if your sweat can't evaporate,
Speaker 1: and that that brings us to what what web bult
Speaker 1: wet bulb temperature is here here's NASA quote. Web bulb
Speaker 1: wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which an
Speaker 1: object can cool down when moisture evaporates from it. So
Speaker 1: what is measuring for us is how cool our bodies
Speaker 1: can actually get from sweating. The problem is that at
Speaker 1: a web bulb temperature for about nineties seven degrees fahrenheight,
Speaker 1: your sweatsofts evaporating and you can't cool yourself and this
Speaker 1: kills you really really fast. Um. Here's NASA again talking
Speaker 1: to Colin Raymonds, who's from Who's I think he does
Speaker 1: climate stuff at the nasag Gempropulsion Laboratory. Once wet bulb
Speaker 1: temperature exceeds thirty five degrees celsia's or ninety five degrees fahrenheit,
Speaker 1: no amount of sweating or other adapt behavior is enough
Speaker 1: to lower your body to a safe operating temperature, said Raymond.
Speaker 1: Most of the time it's not a problem because the
Speaker 1: wet bulb temperature is usually five to tend degree celsius
Speaker 1: blow body temperature, even in hot, humid places. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's a point of no here by the way, that
Speaker 1: like the wet bulb wet bowl temperature is like not
Speaker 1: the same thing as regular temperature. Um. It's it's measuring
Speaker 1: something like that's different from how hot it is. And
Speaker 1: and it's worth noting that like the current heat waves,
Speaker 1: like they're really bad, but it hasn't really been hitting
Speaker 1: the web bowl temperature hasn't really been hitting the place
Speaker 1: places where they just are absolutely lethal and start killing
Speaker 1: hundreds of thousands of people. But that is going to happen,
Speaker 1: right even even in sort of like if even even
Speaker 1: in even in the climate models where you know, we
Speaker 1: we keep emissions to like two degrees right, which which
Speaker 1: at this point is looking like some of the optimistic
Speaker 1: models like this stuff is going to happen in the
Speaker 1: ex third fifty years and unless something drastically changes, like
Speaker 1: we're we're going to watch this happen. We're gonna watch
Speaker 1: country city seperatures, We're going to watch enormous numbers of
Speaker 1: people fall over dead. And yeah, this is um this
Speaker 1: this is where climate change is heading and it sucks.
Speaker 1: And the heat waves better that are hitting China, the
Speaker 1: heat waves are hitting India. The heat waves and we've
Speaker 1: seen here are like this is this is as goodes
Speaker 1: is going to get. It's just going to keep getting worse.
Speaker 1: I guess I should back up one second and talk
Speaker 1: a bit about the Chinese heat wave, which is that,
Speaker 1: like the Chinese seat wave isn't just like it just
Speaker 1: a climate change thing. There's other stuff going on here.
Speaker 1: There's there's there's like a very specific like confluence of
Speaker 1: like weather phenomenon like the Indi India and stuff like
Speaker 1: that that like Cohen's had to coincide to make a
Speaker 1: heat wave this bad. But the the problem is like
Speaker 1: that stuff is all going to happen again, and you know,
Speaker 1: so we're we're gonna we're gonna get like, yeah, we're
Speaker 1: gonna keep getting heat waves like this, and yeah unless
Speaker 1: we do something differently, Yeah, I mean we won't. I mean, well,
Speaker 1: you know, we'll twiddle around the edges. Um. The bind
Speaker 1: administration snug some language into the inflation bill that might
Speaker 1: allow the federal government to regulate CEO to still after
Speaker 1: the Supreme Court said they couldn't, but maybe not, could you, Chris?
Speaker 1: Would you why why don't we send a message to
Speaker 1: the people in Shanghai and let him know that that'll
Speaker 1: that'll help you listen to the podcast, Yeah, policymakers who
Speaker 1: listen to the podcast, Um, I don't know like it.
Speaker 1: This is it's one of those if we were to
Speaker 1: take if all of the policymakers who listened to our
Speaker 1: show were to take all of our advice immediately, um,
Speaker 1: and we were to transition every city away from being
Speaker 1: vehicle centered and like effectively cut our emissions by or more,
Speaker 1: we would still be locked into escalating heat waves like
Speaker 1: this all over the world for the rest of our
Speaker 1: natural lives because of the way the carbon cycle works. Um.
Speaker 1: Not that that wouldn't help in the long run, but
Speaker 1: it would certainly not. Like that's one of the things
Speaker 1: that's so scary about this is we're all girding ourselves
Speaker 1: for the inevitability that this will just become more common
Speaker 1: and more devastating. So true, Um, and for everyone that
Speaker 1: has a hard time breathing, there's always always the hope
Speaker 1: that via geoengineering, we can just pump more pollution into
Speaker 1: the air to reflect more sunlight, which will increase whole
Speaker 1: much of other diseases. You know, I watched the first
Speaker 1: seven seconds of the movie snow Piercer, and that does
Speaker 1: seem like an idea that would work. It's funny when
Speaker 1: when I was in school, I read like I read
Speaker 1: one of the first papers that was talking about this,
Speaker 1: and like the guy in the paper is like the
Speaker 1: opening of the paper is him literally going, this is
Speaker 1: a bad idea. We should only do this if there's
Speaker 1: literally no other choice. And then also like, this is
Speaker 1: the thing we do for like ten years to buy
Speaker 1: us more time to deal with regular climate change, and
Speaker 1: then as the years have gone on and as nothing
Speaker 1: has happened, you just gotta watch like, well, yeah, there's
Speaker 1: a Barack Obama's favorite book, Ministry for the Future, which
Speaker 1: is legitimately very good book. It's just funny that he
Speaker 1: likes it because it absolutely embraces terrorism in different killing politicians,
Speaker 1: it embraces sneaking into the house of oil and gas
Speaker 1: executives and murdering them in the night, as well as
Speaker 1: a wonky carbon crypto fucking investment portfolio. But like there's
Speaker 1: a lot of different ideas of that. Yeah, Like like
Speaker 1: a lot of the characters in that book would have
Speaker 1: killed Obama. Like it's yes, it's very like um. But
Speaker 1: one of the things that book deals with, the inciting
Speaker 1: incident of that book is a horrible wet bulb um
Speaker 1: moment in India that kills I think it's millions of
Speaker 1: people and just that like a nightmare disaster um. And
Speaker 1: one of the things the Indian government does, as a result,
Speaker 1: against the express wishes of the global community, is start
Speaker 1: like essentially like an atmosphere exceeding program in order to
Speaker 1: mitigate how bad the heat waves are. And like there's
Speaker 1: a bunch of consequences to that, And I kind of
Speaker 1: think one of the things that's most realistic about that
Speaker 1: book is as we have more ship like this happen,
Speaker 1: you will have nations on their own carry out climate
Speaker 1: mitigation efforts that could have serious effects on other countries
Speaker 1: because any of this stuff you do, like if you
Speaker 1: if you, if you seed clouds in the Southwest or
Speaker 1: whatever in order to increase rain, to raise the level
Speaker 1: of Lake mead um, that will like you can't funk
Speaker 1: with the water cycle like that and not have impacts
Speaker 1: other places. Um. And And this is a thing that
Speaker 1: certainly global law, like like the international legal system is
Speaker 1: not ready to deal with um And it's certainly something
Speaker 1: that our media ecosystem is not ready to deal with.
Speaker 1: And it will happen. This is an inevitability in my opinion.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, one of the things that we do
Speaker 1: want to talk more about is the reaction to this
Speaker 1: type of thing is going to be by capitalist countries,
Speaker 1: and like the climate Leviathan model is going to be
Speaker 1: too basically privatize the atmosphere and privatize the sky um
Speaker 1: and different ways that conrivatize sure, but pure hate in
Speaker 1: your face their gear. But between all of like the
Speaker 1: corporate like space projects and then stuff with g engineering,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna be renting out sections of the atmosphere
Speaker 1: so that the people can pump things into uh to
Speaker 1: for whatever, for whatever kind of carbon neutral thing they
Speaker 1: want to do or pumping ship into the atmosphere is
Speaker 1: what got us into this problem and it's what's going
Speaker 1: to get us out. So true. It's uh, it's kind
Speaker 1: of funny that in the U s H. I don't
Speaker 1: know if you saw this, but like this month which
Speaker 1: we were recording this in August, there was a discussion
Speaker 1: about how the water was going to be used in
Speaker 1: the Colorado River by the various states that I did.
Speaker 1: I did read that, Yeah, very depressing report. It's it's yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I just it ended with like basically each of them
Speaker 1: chest stumping at each other and big like no, funk you.
Speaker 1: I'll take as much water as I want. I'm upstream
Speaker 1: of you. I think Utah were the ones particularly belligerent
Speaker 1: in that case. But it is the opposite of what
Speaker 1: we need to do. But here we are doing it.
Speaker 1: I was in Utah last this month looking at new
Speaker 1: golf courses being built by Fisher Towers sounded the desert
Speaker 1: there and it's great. There's a fun Okay, So Andreas
Speaker 1: Mom's last book before he kind of went off the
Speaker 1: like weird Nicole leninist rails, it was called Fossil Capital,
Speaker 1: and he's a interesting argument that like one of the
Speaker 1: reasons that we got into this mess in the first place,
Speaker 1: one of the reasons like country companies started adopting coal
Speaker 1: was that even though coal was less efficient as like
Speaker 1: a source of electricity than having like water mills water
Speaker 1: like having a succession of water mills going down the
Speaker 1: same river requires a bunch of different corporations to like
Speaker 1: coordinate with each other, and they don't want to do that.
Speaker 1: And because sort of like the laws around who controls
Speaker 1: rivers is really sort of unclear, like they were just like, now,
Speaker 1: screwed this where it's gonna use coal even though it's worse.
Speaker 1: And the fun part about this is now we get
Speaker 1: to get this again with like river law, where it's like,
Speaker 1: oh hey, it turns out that capitalists and capitalist states
Speaker 1: are just utterly incapable of like sharing resources with each other,
Speaker 1: and they're just gonna try to section off increasing in
Speaker 1: large parts of it, which is going to go increasingly badly. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's like one of the things, you're the
Speaker 1: failure to be able to imagine anything that exists outside
Speaker 1: of a profit and loss kind of mentality. Um is
Speaker 1: one of the major problems that we have, like all
Speaker 1: over with this, like there's right now. One of the
Speaker 1: big stories coming out of the UK is that as
Speaker 1: a result of the war in Ukraine and gas prices,
Speaker 1: the cost of heating has risen fucking massively. This is
Speaker 1: a problem for all of Europe um. And a lot
Speaker 1: of families in the UK are looking at the numbers
Speaker 1: I've seen in any like four thousand and even six
Speaker 1: seven thousand pounds to heat their houses during the winter,
Speaker 1: which is like ten to fifteen thousand real dollars. It's
Speaker 1: a lot of money, um, and it's substantially an excess
Speaker 1: of of what they have been paying in the past.
Speaker 1: And it's like that is enough. I mean, imagine yourself
Speaker 1: how many people live. I mean, I guess it's a
Speaker 1: small fraction of people listening who could afford an extra
Speaker 1: ten to twelve thousand dollars in bills this winter and
Speaker 1: not have it completely fucked their lives up. So obviously
Speaker 1: people cannot pay for their heating um this winter. And like,
Speaker 1: if you can't pay a bill, you're not going to
Speaker 1: pay a bill, right, That's one of the laws of
Speaker 1: the iron laws of finance. Bills that can't be paid
Speaker 1: won't be paid. So the state is coming in, but
Speaker 1: the state is not. Again, these companies, basically all of
Speaker 1: these companies are would be essentially insolvent, like if things
Speaker 1: were allowed to proceed naturally. So the government's going to
Speaker 1: have to do something. But the thing the government isn't
Speaker 1: going to do is like actually nationalize any of these
Speaker 1: heating companies. It's it's just going to like pump more
Speaker 1: tax anyway. It's it's it's it's the same thing. It's
Speaker 1: a failure to kind of imagine anything outside of this. Well,
Speaker 1: maybe if capitalism has broken down around this issue, this
Speaker 1: isn't an issue that should continue to be in the
Speaker 1: hands of corporations. Yeah. Well, and but the fun part
Speaker 1: about this too is that like okay, it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: well okay, well nationalize this and that will save us.
Speaker 1: And then you look at like what do act what
Speaker 1: do most of the world's nationally owned corporations look like?
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, okay, so the government owns it
Speaker 1: the stock, but then it functions exactly like a normal company.
Speaker 1: And I'm not saying like the solution is is not
Speaker 1: Sorry James, You're you're the actual Britain in this room. Yes,
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny because in Britain people are living
Speaker 1: on state pensions or a certain other like state programs,
Speaker 1: state disability and stuff. Get a winter fuel allowance normally,
Speaker 1: and the winter fuel allowance to schedule to go up
Speaker 1: like like less than a tenth of that that that
Speaker 1: amount that you just said would be the increased in
Speaker 1: the cost of heating, right, And it's still sort of
Speaker 1: it's just so funny to see, like in theory. Britain
Speaker 1: has several political parties, all of them especially with labor
Speaker 1: under kiss DAMA like a clustered under a neoliberal consensus
Speaker 1: and kiss that like rather than considering doing anything, they
Speaker 1: are bickering over like how much of a pittance they
Speaker 1: want to throw to poor people. I mean, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's also very funny that Britain did build a desalination
Speaker 1: plant in the Thames Estuary um and forgot to account
Speaker 1: for the fact that due to it being an estuary,
Speaker 1: the river coming in and our h the levels of
Speaker 1: salt in the water would change and that would make
Speaker 1: the deceation. And it's fucking I think it's biodiesel fueled.
Speaker 1: It's just awesome, it's magnificent. Yeah, we've got great leaders
Speaker 1: over there and we don't need to change. Yeah, no,
Speaker 1: you you you seem to. Whenever I think of countries
Speaker 1: that have their ship together, I think the UK um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you've got to remember that Nazis used bicycles when you're
Speaker 1: considering your options for transport and climate change in the future.
Speaker 1: Deranged British tweets of the day. Yeah, I mean, hey, okay, look, look,
Speaker 1: the one the one very dim silver lining is that
Speaker 1: maybe this will cause the British the entire British political
Speaker 1: system to collapse. Happens like twice a year, right, No,
Speaker 1: but but collapse here? Well, like, okay, here's the thing,
Speaker 1: right if if you have enough people who the government
Speaker 1: is trying to pay their bills, they start throwing Maltov's
Speaker 1: that stuff like this is a it's like this, this
Speaker 1: is actually a pretty reliable like one of the very
Speaker 1: reliable things that gets people to go fight police is
Speaker 1: like you suddenly increased the price of gas that that
Speaker 1: you don't need to drive or need to like heat
Speaker 1: their houses. So maybe I don't know, but then British
Speaker 1: people will also be barking for us to send the
Speaker 1: troops against the people who are protesting. For the right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: with dignity. It's one thing we love to do. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a it's a it's a fun it's a
Speaker 1: fun country. Oh yeah, it's a fun tream. Oh man,
Speaker 1: ye all right? Well are we are? We? Are we good?
Speaker 1: Have we? Have we solved this one? For all the
Speaker 1: policy makers who listened to our show? Yeah yeah, hit
Speaker 1: me up, fucking Lindsey Graham heat fan of the pod,
Speaker 1: Lindsey Graham. Yeah, Lindsey Graham is actually just voted to
Speaker 1: subsidize Molotov cocktail production. So thank you, thank you, Lindsay
Speaker 1: are are based fan of the policymakers who listen to
Speaker 1: our show. He must have been looking at the research.
Speaker 1: Mm hmmm. It's the only way, it's the only real
Speaker 1: way to stop climate change. You to make use of
Speaker 1: fossil fuels cotails. Yeah. Hey, we'll be back Monday with
Speaker 1: more episodes every week from now until the heat death
Speaker 1: of the universe. It could happen. Here is a production
Speaker 1: of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources
Speaker 1: for it could happen here. Updated monthly at cool Zone
Speaker 1: Media dot com slash Sources. Thanks for listening.