Speaker 1: Al Zone Media.
Speaker 2: Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let
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Speaker 3: Welcome to it.
Speaker 4: Couldop be here a podcast about things falling apart and
Speaker 4: how to put them back together again. I'm your host,
Speaker 4: Mia Wong. This is a story about Boeing. I'm going
Speaker 4: to lay my cards on the table from the stars.
Speaker 4: I'm from Chicago, but my family is from Seattle. Some
Speaker 4: of my aunts and uncles worked for Boeing in the
Speaker 4: eighties or the airline side. Some of our closest family
Speaker 4: friends worked there for much longer than that. I grew
Speaker 4: up on the periphery of this industry, and I have
Speaker 4: never seen the people in it and the people who
Speaker 4: have left as angry as they are now. People are pissed,
Speaker 4: and they should be. In the last six years, Boeing
Speaker 4: has killed three hundred and forty six people. In the
Speaker 4: years to come, they may well kill more, and not
Speaker 4: a single one of them had to die. This is
Speaker 4: how it happened. What is Boeing? The short answer, obviously
Speaker 4: is that it's a company that makes both civilian and
Speaker 4: military airplanes. It also does some other things, including working
Speaker 4: on space travel, but that's not our media concern here.
Speaker 4: The long answer, however, and it's the long answer that
Speaker 4: we need, is that Boeing is the poster child for
Speaker 4: the post World War II labor, corporate, militarist alliance. Boeing
Speaker 4: itself was a sometimes uneasy alliance of workers, engineers, and
Speaker 4: the army that made civilian and military airplanes. This is
Speaker 4: also not a terrible description of the entirety of the
Speaker 4: post war United States, with the proviso at the airplanes
Speaker 4: the US is making, We're dropping bombs at Vietnam. The
Speaker 4: unwinding of Boeing that we're all watching today as doors
Speaker 4: fall off of planes and more and more grounded, is
Speaker 4: the unwinding of that America. Here I turned to the
Speaker 4: anthropologist David Graber from his book The Utopia of Rules quote,
Speaker 4: I think what happened is best considered as a kind
Speaker 4: of shifting class allegiances on the part of the managerial
Speaker 4: staff of major corporations from an uneasy de facto alliance
Speaker 4: with their own workers to one with investors. As John
Speaker 4: Kenneth Galbraith long ago pointed out, if you create an
Speaker 4: organization geared to produce perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft usel lodges,
Speaker 4: those who make it up will, if left at their
Speaker 4: own devices, tend to concentrate their efforts on producing more
Speaker 4: and better perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft usel lodges, rather
Speaker 4: than thinking primarily of what will make the most money
Speaker 4: for shareholders. What's more, since for most of the twentieth century,
Speaker 4: a job in a large bureaucratic megafirm meant a lifetime
Speaker 4: promise of employment involved in the process, managers and workers
Speaker 4: alike tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common
Speaker 4: interest in this regard over and against meddling owners and investors.
Speaker 4: This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name.
Speaker 4: It's called corporatism. One mustn't romanticize it. It was, among
Speaker 4: other things, the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could
Speaker 4: well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers
Speaker 4: and managers had interest in common, that organizations like corporations
Speaker 4: or communities formed organic holes, and that finances were an alien,
Speaker 4: parasitic force and drove them to their ultimate murderers.
Speaker 3: Extreme.
Speaker 4: Even in its more benign social democratic versions in America
Speaker 4: or Europe, the attendant politics often came tinged with chauvinism,
Speaker 4: but they also ensured that the investor class was always
Speaker 4: seen as to some extent outsiders, against whom white collar
Speaker 4: and blue collar workers could be considered, at least to
Speaker 4: some degree, to be in united common front. Now as
Speaker 4: a product of the united Front between workers and managers,
Speaker 4: the corporate as system of the post war era had
Speaker 4: a very different conception of what a corporation is. It
Speaker 4: was a social entity composed of a variety of classes
Speaker 4: and had an obligation to take care of them. It
Speaker 4: had an obligation to its workers, to its engineers, to
Speaker 4: its customers, and even to its country. By absorbing unions
Speaker 4: into the corporate system, the system itself had been forced
Speaker 4: to adapt a more sociological self conception that vastly differed
Speaker 4: from the ways corporations both view themselves and behave today.
Speaker 4: As Grabern notes this class coalition largely wrote capitalists out
Speaker 4: of the equation, reducing them to merror holders of stock,
Speaker 4: not managers. In Boeing's case, those managers were engineers at
Speaker 4: basically all levels of the company. Now we must note
Speaker 4: here that in the post World War two era engineers
Speaker 4: were extremely powerful, and this is not just true of
Speaker 4: capitalist nations. So the US, to some extent, had an
Speaker 4: early start on the power of engineers in the running
Speaker 4: of New deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Engineers
Speaker 4: are powerful in communist countries as well, and it's true
Speaker 4: in quasi socialist countries that have just liberated themselves from
Speaker 4: the old European empires. These engineers were both extremely well
Speaker 4: paid and very influential everywhere you can find them, from
Speaker 4: Belgium to Peru, and the only real difference is whether
Speaker 4: they were trained by the Americans or the Soviets. Now,
Speaker 4: the fact that you, the listener, are not reporting to
Speaker 4: an engineer right now at your job is assigned that
Speaker 4: they didn't exactly hold on to power. In fact, the
Speaker 4: last vestiges of this class of extremely powerful engineers aren't
Speaker 4: really even em Boeing at all. The most prominent remain
Speaker 4: of the Great Engineering International is Shijim Ping, who is
Speaker 4: part of a class in China known as the Red Engineer.
Speaker 4: If you want to know more about the Red Engineers,
Speaker 4: we unfortunately do not have time to really go into
Speaker 4: them here, but c Joel Andreas's book Rise of the
Speaker 4: Red Engineers for the most famous treatment of them.
Speaker 5: Now.
Speaker 4: In China, the Red Engineers effectively seized control of the
Speaker 4: states and were the kind of second generation that ruled
Speaker 4: back the social changes of the revolution from the Maoist period.
Speaker 4: In the US, the story is a bit more complicated.
Speaker 4: In some places, the engineers as a class were rolled
Speaker 4: up and brutally destroyed in a war with a newly
Speaker 4: ascended financed class. In others, engineers, feeling the disciplining effects
Speaker 4: of the market, effectively engineered their own destruction. The latter
Speaker 4: engineers leading the company to financial ruin is to some
Speaker 4: extent the story of Boeing, But to get there we
Speaker 4: need to take a look at how the worker management
Speaker 4: Alowience Graver described came a part. I have talked at
Speaker 4: length on this show about the economic crisis of the
Speaker 4: seventies in which everything the entire consensus that had held
Speaker 4: the post war era together fell apart. One of the
Speaker 4: key elements is that in the nineteen seventies, manufacturing becomes
Speaker 4: zero sum. If manufacturing output increases in one country, it
Speaker 4: can largely only come at the expense of production somewhere else.
Speaker 4: This is the product of a general crisis of structural
Speaker 4: overproduction and structural under consumption. This meant that it was
Speaker 4: no longer possible to incorporate everyone into the capitalist welfare
Speaker 4: system while also retaining corporate profits, and so someone was
Speaker 4: going to have to lose everything. It was either going
Speaker 4: to be the capitalist or the workers. And the people
Speaker 4: who lost everything, as I think we're all aware of
Speaker 4: living in the world that we do now, were the
Speaker 4: workers whose power was systematically destroyed. But that arly, the
Speaker 4: story of the destruction of unions and destruction of the
Speaker 4: leftbore broadly is a story for another day for our purposes.
Speaker 4: The important class that was destroyed in the period of
Speaker 4: the seventies is the class of managerial engineers, and these
Speaker 4: engineers were destroyed by a takeover of Corporate America by
Speaker 4: the shareholders the Corporatist Alliance had previously held at bay.
Speaker 4: The takeover of Corporate America by finance schools had two mechanisms.
Speaker 4: The leveraged buyout, better known as corporate rating, was carried
Speaker 4: out by people like Michael Milken, and the internal movement
Speaker 4: of executives from inside the corporations themselves, led by people
Speaker 4: like Jack Welsh, who will meet both of these people
Speaker 4: in detail later in this story. But the details of
Speaker 4: the process of how exactly the finance schools came to
Speaker 4: control Corporate America turn out to be extremely important because
Speaker 4: Boeing is destroyed by both of the two mechanisms coming
Speaker 4: together at the same time. Now, as the eighties dawned,
Speaker 4: the world lived in fear of a new kind of
Speaker 4: financial device, the leveraged buyout. The exact mechanisms of the
Speaker 4: leveraged buyout are slightly complicated, but the short version is
Speaker 4: that Michael Milken, a bond salesman who I eventually am
Speaker 4: going to do a fall behind the bastard's episode on
Speaker 4: because oh my God is the evil and there simply
Speaker 4: is not space to elaborate on all the stuff that
Speaker 4: he did here, including this off that eventually is going
Speaker 4: to send him to prison, figured out a way for
Speaker 4: a person or a group too, with very little actual
Speaker 4: cash on hand to very quickly take on an unbelievable
Speaker 4: amount of debt, use it to buy a company, and
Speaker 4: then sell that company for parts to pay back the debt,
Speaker 4: pocketing the difference as profit. This was an instant, existential
Speaker 4: danger to a corporate America. Previously, corporate takeovers were extremely difficult.
Speaker 4: Attempting to get two hundred million dollars to buy a
Speaker 4: company required you to have two hundred million dollars on hand.
Speaker 4: But now with the leveraged buyout, a group of yahoos
Speaker 4: with a tiny amount of money could simply buy a
Speaker 4: company for higher Vans stock price, loot it for parts,
Speaker 4: and destroy it. This completely changed the balance of power
Speaker 4: between shareholders and corporations. One of the best accounts of
Speaker 4: this era is from the anthropologist Karen Hoe in her
Speaker 4: book Liquidated in Ethnography of Wall Street. The book was
Speaker 4: a product of the field work she did at a
Speaker 4: Wall Street investment bank in the nineties. And I really
Speaker 4: cannot emphasize this book enough. This book is incredible. Everyone
Speaker 4: should read. It is a book that genuinely changed my life.
Speaker 4: And one of the things that she talks about is
Speaker 4: this moment, the moments of leverage buyouts, and the way
Speaker 4: that it is constantly brought up by the people that
Speaker 4: she is working with at this bank when she's wing
Speaker 4: her which she's doing around topological field work. Everyone she
Speaker 4: talks to talks about this moment where the corporate raids
Speaker 4: really got going as the moment the shareholder revolution began. Now,
Speaker 4: we talked earlier about how in post war America, the
Speaker 4: corporation was a social entity with responsibilities to its workers
Speaker 4: and country. For the shareholders running the new shareholder revolution,
Speaker 4: corporations had exactly one job, getting them more money to
Speaker 4: raise stock prices. They called this shareholder value. And now
Speaker 4: the disciples of shareholder value were able to wield the
Speaker 4: ability to simply buy companies out wholesale and bend them
Speaker 4: to the ends of shareholder value directly. This is what
Speaker 4: is known as the shareholder revolution. Now, do you know
Speaker 4: what else is a revolution in the ways that y'
Speaker 4: all experience capitalism and mass culture at our jobs? It
Speaker 4: is the products and service is that support this podcast.
Speaker 3: We're back. The first thing that the corporate.
Speaker 4: Raiders and the disciples of shareholder value did when they
Speaker 4: started to take over companies was look at the balance
Speaker 4: sheets of a company and destroy everything that didn't immediately
Speaker 4: look to the Wall Street goruls like they made money. Now,
Speaker 4: what are the assets on a balance sheet that do
Speaker 4: not immediately increase stock price? Because again they look like costs.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 4: The two assets that don't immediately contribute are funds allocated
Speaker 4: for research and developments and pensions, the darlings of the
Speaker 4: workers and engineers who comprise the previous corporatist regimes.
Speaker 3: Mass layoffs followed.
Speaker 4: Companies were reduced to debt financing mechanisms for the corporate
Speaker 4: raiders who took on the debt to acquire them were still.
Speaker 4: As Karen Hie observes, even companies ran by the old
Speaker 4: elite were forced to embrace the same methods the raiders
Speaker 4: were using, because the only way to keep the raiders
Speaker 4: from buying your company was by increasing your stock price,
Speaker 4: And the only way to increase your stock price was
Speaker 4: to appease the shareholder value fanatics. Control of corporate America
Speaker 4: had shifted from the old managerial worker alliance to the
Speaker 4: new shareholder value financiers. Now, the problem with these shareholder
Speaker 4: value people running companies is that they are viscerally physically
Speaker 4: incapable of long term planning. Don't take my word for it,
Speaker 4: here's Karen hoe quote to actualize their central identity as
Speaker 4: being immediately responsive to their own changing relationship with the market,
Speaker 4: including employees, products, and so on. Their strategy is, in
Speaker 4: a sense to have no strategy. Ironically, having no law
Speaker 4: long term strategy is contradictory and potentially self defeating in
Speaker 4: that investment banks often find themselves making drastic changes, only
Speaker 4: to realize months or weeks later that those changes who
Speaker 4: are unnecessary, premature, and extremely costly. For example, in chapter five,
Speaker 4: I describe how investment bankers, in part because of their
Speaker 4: access to sensitive proprietary information, are not only fired in
Speaker 4: an instance, but must leave the physical premises of the
Speaker 4: building within fifteen to thirty minutes. Given how crucial the
Speaker 4: control of knowledge and the protection of inside information are
Speaker 4: for Wall Street investment banks, it seems self defeating that
Speaker 4: they do not praise any premium on loyalty, despite the
Speaker 4: fact that firms try above all to enforce secrecy. They
Speaker 4: accept and maintained this volatility in revolving door policy. To
Speaker 4: make this clear, what carrot Ho is describing is that
Speaker 4: investment banks, on the one hand, turn over like a
Speaker 4: third of their staff every six months. And yet also
Speaker 4: they are so reliant on the secrecy of this proprietary
Speaker 4: information that they're using to make their investment decisions that
Speaker 4: they are kicking the people. They are firing out of
Speaker 4: the building in like fifteen minutes, so they don't have
Speaker 4: time to plan or leak information. But again they're also
Speaker 4: just firing these people on mass, so they're defeating the
Speaker 4: entire point of their operations. These people cannot plan ahead.
Speaker 4: And the reason that they cannot plan ahead isn't just
Speaker 4: that they're sort of like naked disciples of pure increase
Speaker 4: in stock price. What Liquidated describes is that these people
Speaker 4: believe that they are effectively constantly reacting to near instantaneous
Speaker 4: market changes. Right, they can't sort of make any kind
Speaker 4: of long term plan because the market is the thing
Speaker 4: that's making the plan, like the sort of mythical abstraction
Speaker 4: of them. Market is what is doing all of the
Speaker 4: actual allocations. So they just have to sort of like
Speaker 4: sit there and have no plan and quote unquote respond
Speaker 4: to what the market is doing. Now, large corporations have
Speaker 4: always to some extent, acted as long term planning engines
Speaker 4: because they have to Corporations have to do things like
Speaker 4: research and development, They have to plan product lines, they
Speaker 4: have to make long term decisions about resource allocation. The
Speaker 4: shareholder value people are incapable of giving a shit about
Speaker 4: any of this because all they care about is immediate
Speaker 4: stock price movement, because they think that immediate stock price
Speaker 4: movement reflects the will of the great efficiency planning engine
Speaker 4: of the market. And you could begin to see here
Speaker 4: why it would be a bad idea if these people,
Speaker 4: who literally cannot create long term plans did something like,
Speaker 4: for example, take control of the world's largest manufacturer of
Speaker 4: commercial aircraft. Now, the shareholder value people also believe that
Speaker 4: people are effectively interchangeable. And they believe this because and
Speaker 4: this is a very key part of why the shareholder
Speaker 4: value people and why these sort of finance people have
Speaker 4: reshaped the world the way they do. They have reshaped
Speaker 4: the world in their own image. And all of these
Speaker 4: sort of investment bankers are interchangeable, right. All of these
Speaker 4: fucking bankers are fired all of the time, and they
Speaker 4: move from firm to firm, and it is fine for them.
Speaker 4: But the thing is, you can't do this with the
Speaker 4: design of your entire aircraft because unlike in finance, where
Speaker 4: every single one of these clowns is really just a
Speaker 4: replacement level bozo whose qualifications are being able to stumble
Speaker 4: through the chain role and vaguely remember calculus, kiss, ask,
Speaker 4: and play golf. Aerospace Engineers actually do a difficult job,
Speaker 4: and it requires extraordinarily large bodies of embedded knowledge to
Speaker 4: do this job correctly. Now, bringing in a bunch of
Speaker 4: people who think you can just fucking replace aerospace engineers
Speaker 4: will have no negative influences on Boeing in the future.
Speaker 4: Pay no attention to the man behind the mirror. Everything
Speaker 4: is fine. Do you know what else is fine? It
Speaker 4: is the products and services that support this podcast. And
Speaker 4: we are back the shareholder value fanatics. The investors who
Speaker 4: are now taking control of Corporate America also believe that
Speaker 4: mass firings make companies more valuable because it makes them
Speaker 4: more efficient. They believe that offshoring makes a company more
Speaker 4: valuable because it makes it more efficient. It doesn't actually
Speaker 4: matter what the effect these moves have on the company
Speaker 4: and its ability to produce products and its ability to
Speaker 4: produce money. It doesn't matter at all, because that's how
Speaker 4: the people who can control stock prices by buying the
Speaker 4: stocks think the world works, and so if you do
Speaker 4: these things, the stock price will go up. All quote
Speaker 4: unquote creating shareholder value means is convincing a bunch of
Speaker 4: dipshit quants working one hundred and twenty hours a week
Speaker 4: that your company is valuable, so they buy it for
Speaker 4: a higher price. And these are the people who reshape
Speaker 4: American capitalism to their whims. Now importantly for our story,
Speaker 4: they're also the people who ran the second phase of
Speaker 4: the corporate rating era, the mergers and acquisitions boom through
Speaker 4: the nineties and really to this day. Wall Street bankers
Speaker 4: began to encourage companies to buy out other companies as
Speaker 4: a mechanism of raising their stock price. This is, you know,
Speaker 4: the acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. They also heavily push
Speaker 4: merging companies together. In the nineties. The buzzerod behind this
Speaker 4: was quote unquote synergy. Buying companies or merging companies could
Speaker 4: quote leverage synergies between companies to grow shareholder value. Side
Speaker 4: of the shareholder value fantasy lands, Most of these mergers
Speaker 4: and acquisitions either did nothing to help the company if
Speaker 4: the acquisitions were small, or were a complete disaster that
Speaker 4: destroyed both companies. The bankers who orchestrated these mergers and
Speaker 4: acquisitions didn't give a shit though, because they got paid
Speaker 4: on commission. It did not matter to them what happened afterwards.
Speaker 4: All that matters is that the deal goes through. And
Speaker 4: this is where we returned to Boeing because in nineteen
Speaker 4: ninety seven Boeing made an acquisition that would fuck the
Speaker 4: company forever. They bought one of their longtime rivals, an
Speaker 4: aircraft company known as McDonald douglas. Now hitherto, Boeing had
Speaker 4: been relatively insulated from the shareholder revolution. McDonald Douglas, however,
Speaker 4: was not. Its CEO was a man with the incredible
Speaker 4: name Harry Stone Cipher. Stone Cipher is different from most
Speaker 4: aerospace executives because he wasn't a McDonald douglas corporate man.
Speaker 4: He came from Jack Welch's at a Rule Electric And
Speaker 4: it's here we need to introduce the other mechanism through
Speaker 4: which the shareholder revolution was realized, a new breed of
Speaker 4: CEOs led by the man himself, Jack Welsh. Now we
Speaker 4: are not going to spend an enormous amount of time
Speaker 4: talking about Jack Welsh in this episode, because Hit Cools
Speaker 4: one media podcast behind the Bassard has three hours of
Speaker 4: episode about this man, which you should go listen to
Speaker 4: their good The short version of it that we're going
Speaker 4: to give here is that Jack Welsh is the man
Speaker 4: who invented the bass layoff. He was one of the
Speaker 4: first CEOs to figure out that, again, you could raise
Speaker 4: stock prices by selling off profitable divisions and firing workers
Speaker 4: who are making the company money because shareholders are ideologically
Speaker 4: driven maniacs who would believe Welsh's manipulated balance sheets that
Speaker 4: show the company was doing better than ever even as
Speaker 4: it sold off all of its assets. He was also
Speaker 4: one of the first people to start practicing mass outsourcing,
Speaker 4: replacing workers directly employed by General Electric with contractors. Soon
Speaker 4: he was outsourcing entire divisions. Offshoring followed Welsh move jobs
Speaker 4: from highly paid and highly trained union employees in the
Speaker 4: US to ununionized workers in places like India and Mexico.
Speaker 4: I think people generally kind of understand that offshoing lowers quality,
Speaker 4: but why does that actually happen. It's not about something
Speaker 4: like the natural skill of the workers, which is the
Speaker 4: way it can kind of be presented in these sort
Speaker 4: of nationalist accounts. It is about the level of violence
Speaker 4: that can be inflicted on people. In places like India
Speaker 4: and Mexico and China, there is an extraordinary amount of
Speaker 4: violence that can be inflicted on the working class. And
Speaker 4: because of this violence, because of their ability to destroy
Speaker 4: unions and because of their ability to force people into
Speaker 4: poverty by taking their land, people get paid less money
Speaker 4: to work faster. And those people who are being paid
Speaker 4: less money to work faster with worse training are going
Speaker 4: to be worse at a job than people who are
Speaker 4: paid more to do a better slow. And Jack Welch
Speaker 4: wants this. He wants to sell shitty, low cost products
Speaker 4: because they're cheaper to make than anything that actually works.
Speaker 4: The long term consequences of this are a disaster. Welch
Speaker 4: drove General Electric, one of the greatest engines of American
Speaker 4: capitalism for a century, into the ground. Even after a
Speaker 4: massive government bailout in two thousand and eights, it barely
Speaker 4: exists today. Harry Stone Cipher, the CEO of the company
Speaker 4: Boeing was about to buy, said this about Jack Welch. Quote, Certainly,
Speaker 4: Jack Welch is one of the great leaders in my mind,
Speaker 4: and of course he was selected as CEO of the
Speaker 4: century by Fortune magazine a couple years ago, and of
Speaker 4: course about twenty years ago, that same magazine coined the
Speaker 4: phrase neutron Jack, and of course they vilified him at
Speaker 4: every turn out. Neutron Jack, by the way, refers to
Speaker 4: a neutron bomb, because effectively what he was doing was
Speaker 4: firing all the workers and leaving only the sort of
Speaker 4: like physical capital assets, like leaving all of the machines intact,
Speaker 4: which is what a neutron bomb is supposed to do.
Speaker 3: Let's go back to the UOTE quote.
Speaker 4: Jack had a style that was one of trying to
Speaker 4: change the environment, not to just deal with the environment.
Speaker 4: So he inspired people, so he certainly won. So Stone
Speaker 4: Cipher is a disciple of Welsh. He immediately starts running
Speaker 4: the Jack Watch playbook, and though and behold, McDonald douglas
Speaker 4: was failing when Boeing bought it for fourteen billion dollars.
Speaker 4: And again, like Boeing at this point controls like sixty
Speaker 4: five percent of the commercial aviation market, McDonald douglas controls
Speaker 4: like five. Right, so this should have been like Goliath
Speaker 4: eating David for breakfast, but the merger didn't go as planned.
Speaker 4: Instead of the massive Boeing running the tidy McDonald douglas.
Speaker 4: McDonald douglas executives effectively hijacked Boeing and installed themselves in
Speaker 4: positions of power. Stone Cipher and his Padre shareholder value
Speaker 4: fanatics began to consolidate their position and drive out the
Speaker 4: previous Boeing regime. The capstone of this project was moving
Speaker 4: Boeing headquarters from Seattle, where it had been since William E.
Speaker 4: Boeing founded the company in nineteen sixteen, to Chicago as
Speaker 4: a way to shift the physical center of power of
Speaker 4: the company away from Boeing's engineers and workers and towards
Speaker 4: the McDonald douglas finance goals. Then they began to run
Speaker 4: the Jack Walsh playbook on Boeing in earnest. Every single
Speaker 4: account of Stonecipher's takeover that I've written quotes this exact
Speaker 4: same line quote. When people say I changed the culture
Speaker 4: of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run
Speaker 4: like a business rather than a great engineering firm. And
Speaker 4: what stone Cipher is really talking about here, and what
Speaker 4: everyone is really saying when they talk about, you know,
Speaker 4: the culture shift Boeing in this period, what this really
Speaker 4: is is a change in the balance of powers between
Speaker 4: the engineers and workers who actually make the planes and
Speaker 4: the finance schools who owned the company. Stone Cipher wanted
Speaker 4: to crush the engineers and workers so he could run
Speaker 4: Boeing like a business. And when he says like a business,
Speaker 4: he doesn't actually mean run it like a business. He
Speaker 4: means run the company like a finance guy. Finance guys
Speaker 4: don't build planes, which is what Boeing had previously been doing.
Speaker 4: Finance guys create shareholder value, which is to say that
Speaker 4: they make stock prices go up. So if you're just
Speaker 4: trying to raise stock prices, you don't actually need to
Speaker 4: make an airplane. You can outsource the different parts of
Speaker 4: building the airplane to a bunch of random shops around
Speaker 4: the world who work extremely fast, don't have much of
Speaker 4: an idea of what they're doing, and do a terrible job.
Speaker 4: Long term. Of course, this is an absolute disaster. There
Speaker 4: are very good reasons to keep the production line for
Speaker 4: something as complicated as commercial aircraft in house efficiency, consolidation
Speaker 4: of knowledge, quality control, et cetera, et cetera. But outsourcing
Speaker 4: is great for his stock price, and it's the Jack
Speaker 4: Welch model, selling shitty products for cheap works, kind of
Speaker 4: if you're General Electric making a light bulb. But when
Speaker 4: Boeing uses these same principles to build an aircraft, people.
Speaker 3: Begin to die.
Speaker 4: And in the next episode we are going to tell
Speaker 4: that story how Boeing killed three hundred and forty six pemple.
Speaker 4: Welcome to take it out here a podcast about things
Speaker 4: happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Leo Long. When we
Speaker 4: last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught
Speaker 4: up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the nineteen
Speaker 4: nineties and bought out its rival McDonald douglas, after which
Speaker 4: McDonald douglas CEO and Jack Welsh disciple Harry stone Zeipher
Speaker 4: effectively launched an administrative coup and sees control of the company.
Speaker 4: Now stone Ceipher wasn't able to hold onto power for
Speaker 4: long because he was very quickly forced to resign after
Speaker 4: he had what CNN describes as a quote improper relationship
Speaker 4: with a female executive. So things are going great for
Speaker 4: every one. I'm realizing reading the script that I should
Speaker 4: mention it wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that
Speaker 4: he was having a relationship with one of his subordinates,
Speaker 4: which is also not great. But it yeah, it wasn't good,
Speaker 4: and he gets kicked out of media almost immediately. But
Speaker 4: by the time he was forced out, his model for
Speaker 4: how Boeing should work going forwards, you know, the layoffs,
Speaker 4: the outsourcing, slashing the research and development budget, and above
Speaker 4: all taking power from engineers and giving it to the
Speaker 4: shareholder value fanatics had already been embedded at the core
Speaker 4: of Boeing's management structure. Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in
Speaker 4: Courts two decades on. Perhaps the most lasting consequence if
Speaker 4: the change in culture has been in Boeing's approach to
Speaker 4: building aircraft. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have
Speaker 4: served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process
Speaker 4: of plane development.
Speaker 3: Oh boy did it not.
Speaker 4: Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago,
Speaker 4: the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled.
Speaker 4: Boeing would not actually announce even the plans for a
Speaker 4: new plane until two thousand and three with the seven
Speaker 4: to eighty seven Dreamliner. Throughout this time, Boeing was led
Speaker 4: by its first chairman without a traditional aviation background, James McNerney.
Speaker 4: James mcnerne had instead spent almost two decades in management
Speaker 4: at General Electric. Now he was following a tried and
Speaker 4: tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was
Speaker 4: applied to upgrading the seven thirty seven, which had become
Speaker 4: the victim of its own success. In its five decade history,
Speaker 4: airlines have cumulatively ordered more than ten thousand of the plane,
Speaker 4: an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane
Speaker 4: replacing it with the next big thing, Boeing often to
Speaker 4: keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to
Speaker 4: fit still more passengers. And this is how you get
Speaker 4: planes falling out of the sky instead of you know,
Speaker 4: doing the normal thing, which is putting money into building
Speaker 4: a new airplane, which is you know expensive in the
Speaker 4: short run. And again remember that the finance goals are
Speaker 4: now in charge for these people. The only thing that
Speaker 4: exists is the short run in immediate stock price. So
Speaker 4: instead of doing that, management went, eh, we already have
Speaker 4: this plane, were first designed in the fucking sixties. Let's
Speaker 4: keep modifying that. And this this is going to kill
Speaker 4: an extremely large number of people. Now, the seven thirty
Speaker 4: seven again came out originally in nineteen sixty seven. In
Speaker 4: the two thousands, in the century, the millennia, the two thousands,
Speaker 4: Boeing begins to design a new version of this plane
Speaker 4: from the last millennium, called the seven thirty seven Max.
Speaker 4: For shareholders. Again, this is this is a great idea.
Speaker 4: It's not just that, you know, building new planes is
Speaker 4: expensive and this is cheaper because you're not spending the
Speaker 4: money on building a new plane. There's a bunch of
Speaker 4: other advantages for Boeing for this, and one of the
Speaker 4: biggest is that you could tell everyone from you know,
Speaker 4: the FAA to the airlines that the pilots that hey,
Speaker 4: this is just a regular seven thirty seven. It's it's
Speaker 4: just the same plane. You don't need to like retrain
Speaker 4: your pilots to learn how our new systems work because
Speaker 4: there's really like no new systems and that you know,
Speaker 4: that costs money, so they don't want to do it.
Speaker 4: You don't need to have the FAA do the regulatory
Speaker 4: shit they would do for a new plane, or even
Speaker 4: like a substantial change to like the original plane, which
Speaker 4: you know, again costs money and time that Boeing does
Speaker 4: not want to, you know, do. The problem is that,
Speaker 4: you know. I tried to find a sort of delicate
Speaker 4: way to say this, and then I realized you simply
Speaker 4: should not do it like that. The problem is that
Speaker 4: the seven thirty seven Max is a plane that is
Speaker 4: trying to kill you. If you know anything about the story,
Speaker 4: you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is
Speaker 4: trying to kill you, I'm talking about the Maneuvering Characteristics
Speaker 4: Augmentation System or MCASTS, the piece of software that directly
Speaker 4: cause the crashes, and to some extent, like I am
Speaker 4: talking about mcasts. Well, we'll get into it in a second.
Speaker 4: It absolutely did kill all those people. But I think
Speaker 4: there's a problem with a lot of the way the
Speaker 4: story has been covered, which is that a lot of
Speaker 4: the coverage of this has been obsessively focused on the
Speaker 4: software problem, specifically on MCAST. And I understand why people
Speaker 4: focus on the software. It is the immediate cause of
Speaker 4: the crash, But the real problem with the seven thirty
Speaker 4: seven Max is that the actual physical plane is also
Speaker 4: trying to kill you, and the software MCAST was developed
Speaker 4: to again stop the plane from trying to kill you.
Speaker 4: Now that software is also trying to kill you. But
Speaker 4: both the software and the physical plane are trying to
Speaker 4: burdy you. So you know what do I mean when
Speaker 4: I say the physical plane is trying to kill you.
Speaker 4: For this, I'm going to turn to an actual engineer
Speaker 4: and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably the best piece
Speaker 4: in the technical details of this whole problem that I've
Speaker 4: seen for I Triple E met Spectrum. I Triple E
Speaker 4: is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They know
Speaker 4: what they're talking about spectrums their magazine. So the initial problem,
Speaker 4: as Travis explains, was this, The original seven thirty seven
Speaker 4: was designed for nineteen sixties engines. Modern airplanes have way
Speaker 4: bigger engines because, due to a bunch of engineering stuff
Speaker 4: that we're not going to get into here, large engines
Speaker 4: are more efficient than small engines, and this is a
Speaker 4: huge deal for aircraft which consume unbelievably large quantities of
Speaker 4: extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but again expensive
Speaker 4: option would have been to design a new aircraft to
Speaker 4: replace the seven thirty seven that is actually designed to
Speaker 4: accommodate the new giant engines. The chief skate option would
Speaker 4: be just bolt the new giant engines onto the old
Speaker 4: plane design. Now, the problem is that the only way
Speaker 4: to do this is to move the engines forward. The
Speaker 4: engines on the seven thirty seven are, you know, under
Speaker 4: the wing, which is like the normal thing, But the
Speaker 4: engines would no longer fit under the way because they
Speaker 4: were too large, and moving the engines forward changes where
Speaker 4: the thrust is coming from. Here's Travis quote. Now, when
Speaker 4: pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have
Speaker 4: a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this,
Speaker 4: as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad.
Speaker 4: I mean airplanes and Trumps talks about this. Airplanes do
Speaker 4: kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane
Speaker 4: does it way way more than it's supposed to. So
Speaker 4: here's where things, unfortunately, get a bit technical. So the
Speaker 4: nose going up increases something called the angle of attack.
Speaker 4: I'm going to read a description of this.
Speaker 3: Fully.
Speaker 4: Understanding exactly how the angle of attack works is not
Speaker 4: enormously important to understanding the story. But you know, the
Speaker 4: crux of this story is angle of attack centers not working,
Speaker 4: so we have to explain it a little bit.
Speaker 3: Quote.
Speaker 4: The angle of attack is the angle between the wings
Speaker 4: and the airflow over the wings. So if you want
Speaker 4: to understand exactly what this is, go read the piece.
Speaker 4: The important thing for our purposes is that if the
Speaker 4: angle of attack gets too high, right, if the planes
Speaker 4: are a level and it's flying normally, the angle of
Speaker 4: attack is like zero, but the angle attack can get
Speaker 4: higher as like you know, if you're not flying like level,
Speaker 4: and if the angle of attack gets too high, the
Speaker 4: plane stalls, and this is one of the ways that
Speaker 4: you crash a plane. Worse still, in the seven thirty
Speaker 4: seven max, basically, the engine casings themselves can at high
Speaker 4: angles of attack, work as a wing and produced lift,
Speaker 4: and the lift they produce is well ahead of the
Speaker 4: wings center of lift. Meeting the engine casings will cause
Speaker 4: the seven thirty seven at a high angle of attack
Speaker 4: to go to a higher angle of attack. This is
Speaker 4: aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an
Speaker 4: aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to
Speaker 4: go further into the stall. This is called quote dynamic instability,
Speaker 4: and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic fighter jets
Speaker 4: are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me let
Speaker 4: me let me try to kind of like explain the
Speaker 4: sort of crux of this well, A, they've they've managed
Speaker 4: to position the engines in such a way the engines
Speaker 4: can act as a wing, which is insane.
Speaker 3: And B.
Speaker 4: Once you get to a high enough angle of attack,
Speaker 4: which again, the higher the angle of attack you're at,
Speaker 4: the more risk you're out installing, the plane starts trying
Speaker 4: to kill you by making the angle of attack increase.
Speaker 4: It is a feedback loop that means when you short
Speaker 4: the stall, the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are
Speaker 4: not supposed to do this. Again, and I cannot eplicize
Speaker 4: this enough quote. This is called dynamic instability. And the
Speaker 4: only airplanes which exhibit this characteristic fighter jets, are also
Speaker 4: fitted with ejector seats. So again, this is the thing
Speaker 4: that is dangerous enough that you get like regular, regular
Speaker 4: civilian airplanes are not supposed to do this, they do
Speaker 4: it on fighter jets because fighter jets are doing things
Speaker 4: that planes aren't supposed to do. And you can leave
Speaker 4: the plane if it fucks up it does something like this.
Speaker 4: And the worst part about this is that you can
Speaker 4: kick off this problem by trying to get the plane
Speaker 4: going faster, like while it's going slow. What part of
Speaker 4: flying a plane does it start slow, is kind of
Speaker 4: at a high angle of attack, and then has to
Speaker 4: go faster. Oh wait, take off the thing you have
Speaker 4: to do every single time we fly. This is fucking batshit.
Speaker 4: No one would intentionally design a new airliner like this, right,
Speaker 4: No one, not even modern I mean like Boeings, like
Speaker 4: other airplanes, like even the modern ones. Even the Dreamliner
Speaker 4: doesn't fucking do this right, It's completely nuts. The only
Speaker 4: way that you could get something like this is as
Speaker 4: a pure product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines
Speaker 4: onto a plane from the sixties, because you are too
Speaker 4: cheap to try to do anything new. But you know
Speaker 4: who isn't afraid of doing new things? It's the products
Speaker 4: and says to support this podcast. We've never gotten a
Speaker 4: Boeing ad, but if it was gonna happen, I guess
Speaker 4: it'd probably happened now, dear God. But instead of you know,
Speaker 4: dealing with this problem by either making a new fucking
Speaker 4: plane or figuring out some way to not have the
Speaker 4: engines literally become wings, Boeing was like, ah, fuck it,
Speaker 4: We'll just build some software that pushes the plane's nose
Speaker 4: down if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction
Speaker 4: to hearing, let's put software on the plane that makes
Speaker 4: it fly towards the ground. Is wait, that's a terrible idea.
Speaker 4: You have the right idea. These people did not have
Speaker 4: the right idea. But sunningly, there's like a version of
Speaker 4: this system that isn't like lethally unsafe. But com Pubbing
Speaker 4: did not design a version of this that is even
Speaker 4: remotely safe. I don't know if that's more egregious than
Speaker 4: designing an aircraft that has that amic CA instability, but
Speaker 4: the way they implement this is egregious. They decided in
Speaker 4: their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on
Speaker 4: a single sensor. And we need to note before we
Speaker 4: start this, so this is we're gonna be talking about
Speaker 4: angle attack sensors. They're kind of just like pieces of
Speaker 4: metal that stick out the side of the plane and
Speaker 4: they break a lot, and they break a lot because
Speaker 4: flying a plane is like the worst thing you can
Speaker 4: possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't involve leaving
Speaker 4: the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean. Yeah, so
Speaker 4: here's from the Seattle Times, which the Scale Times actually
Speaker 4: because you know, Boeing has traditionally been in Seattle like
Speaker 4: does a lot of very very good coverage on this.
Speaker 4: They have good sources. Yeah, from the Shade Times quote,
Speaker 4: the most controversial deal of the MCAST design has been
Speaker 4: the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor of
Speaker 4: both of the deadly flights. Everything started with a faulty
Speaker 4: sensor in the second crash in Ethiopia. The data trace
Speaker 4: strongly suggested the sensor was deshortened an instant, likely by
Speaker 4: a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one on
Speaker 4: either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially after
Speaker 4: discarding the g forces a trigger, use both angle of
Speaker 4: attack sensors. The thinking was that requiring input from two
Speaker 4: angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed,
Speaker 4: the system would not function. Now, the article goes on
Speaker 4: to talk about how their justification for for why they
Speaker 4: only use one sensor, and you know, they talked about
Speaker 4: the safety and simplicity if not wanting to add complexity
Speaker 4: to a system. You know, because if you have two
Speaker 4: things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than
Speaker 4: having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind
Speaker 4: of sounds reasonable at first glance, but first off, if
Speaker 4: your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball
Speaker 4: to stalling, and this software system to make it not
Speaker 4: do that is so important you can't risk it not
Speaker 4: being on. If one of the two sensors breaks, then
Speaker 4: maybe you shouldn't have you designed your plane like this.
Speaker 4: And second, this entire system violates every design principle that
Speaker 4: you see in sort of like Boeing's Good Aircraft Design
Speaker 4: for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go
Speaker 4: back to that Spectrum article because it lays out how
Speaker 4: this kind of thing is supposed to work. Quote, there
Speaker 4: were two sets of angle of attack sensors and two
Speaker 4: sets of pe hot tubes, one on either side of
Speaker 4: the fuselage. Normal usage is to have the set on
Speaker 4: the pilot side feed the instruments to the pilot side,
Speaker 4: and the set on the copilot side feed the instrument
Speaker 4: to the copilot side. That gives a state of natural
Speaker 4: redundancy and instrumentation that can be easily cross checked by
Speaker 4: either pilot. If the copilot thinks his airspeed indicator is
Speaker 4: acting up, he can look over at the pilot's airspeed
Speaker 4: indicator and see if it agrees. If not, both pilot
Speaker 4: and copilot can engage in a bit of triage, determine
Speaker 4: which instrument is profane and which is sacred. Now, this
Speaker 4: is great engineering, right, It is simple, it is redundant,
Speaker 4: and it allows humans to sort out issues, you know,
Speaker 4: And like, this is a product of what aerospace engineering
Speaker 4: used to be, you know, and we still have this
Speaker 4: in the world. But the fact that there are a
Speaker 4: bunch of very very good engineers who have spent an
Speaker 4: enormously long time trying to work out how this kind
Speaker 4: of stuff should work. Modern Boeing was like, well, you know,
Speaker 4: instead of of our system where multiple centers can be
Speaker 4: cross referenced by pilots, you know, and the pilots can
Speaker 4: then disable the system. Fuck that, what if we insaid,
Speaker 4: use a single sensor that can't be overridden. This is
Speaker 4: a complete violation of Boeing design principle. The thing about
Speaker 4: Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed to be like
Speaker 4: automated shit running in the background that pilots don't know
Speaker 4: about or don't know how to turn off. The pilot
Speaker 4: is supposed to be in complete control of the plane,
Speaker 4: you know, the old joke, And I mean I remember
Speaker 4: hearing this like every once in a while like when
Speaker 4: I was a kid, was that Airbus planes, which you know,
Speaker 4: Airbus obviously is a rival to Boeing. Airbus planes were
Speaker 4: quote diet by wire because you know, they didn't give
Speaker 4: you control. The documentary that Frontline did called Boeing's Fatal Flaw,
Speaker 4: which I didn't really use the source for this, but
Speaker 4: I kind I just this is this is the one
Speaker 4: part that I remember from when I watched this in
Speaker 4: twenty nineteen about the crash, described how like pilots trusted
Speaker 4: that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing, so
Speaker 4: there would be a way to kill the system. And
Speaker 4: again there's something I remember like from talking to people
Speaker 4: growing up, you know, so these pilots figure that there'd
Speaker 4: be a way to kill the system. Those voices a
Speaker 4: plane down and they were trying to find it, like
Speaker 4: they're trying to figure out how to turn the system
Speaker 4: off in the manual when they died, because they didn't
Speaker 4: realize the plane wasn't designed by Boeing engineers, was designed
Speaker 4: by Boeing shareholders. Going back to the process on how
Speaker 4: this was added, the stated reason for again why you
Speaker 4: don't want a second sensor is that it the theory
Speaker 4: like adds complexity by adding a second sensor. But you know,
Speaker 4: that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering, like
Speaker 4: of engineering in general, but also like from the perspective
Speaker 4: of the engineering that the rest of the plane works on, right,
Speaker 4: the rest of the plane works on different principles than this,
Speaker 4: and it works well. And it's something that Travis describes
Speaker 4: as being a product of the destruction of Bowie's collective
Speaker 4: knowledge base, but something I don't know, I don't know
Speaker 4: to what extent, Travis, He's kind of writing about this,
Speaker 4: but I'm not sure that a lot of the people
Speaker 4: writing about this like understand that, like this was the point, right,
Speaker 4: destroying this kind of collective knowledge. This is something that
Speaker 4: was done deliberately, right, This was the inevitable sort of
Speaker 4: product of Boeing management trying to make the company quote
Speaker 4: unquote run like a business. They were trying to destroy
Speaker 4: the interpersonal bonds that create the system of collective knowledge,
Speaker 4: and they were trying to take power out of the
Speaker 4: hands that the people who had that collective knowledge and
Speaker 4: put it into the hands of people who you could
Speaker 4: pay for really cheap and exploit more who did not
Speaker 4: have access to that kind of information. Right, This is
Speaker 4: a case for like, yeah, you're putting power in the
Speaker 4: hands of software engineers instead of sort of aviation engineers
Speaker 4: speaking of I don't know, taking power out of the
Speaker 4: hands of the consumer and giving it to a corporation.
Speaker 3: Here's ads. Now, if you're trying.
Speaker 4: To make the company quote unquote run like a business,
Speaker 4: what else would you do?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, you would not tell the pilots about this new
Speaker 4: system that you've added to your airplane, because if you
Speaker 4: talk about the system, everyone from you know, the FAA
Speaker 4: to the airlines of the pilots unions might realize that
Speaker 4: this is not the same plane as the seven thirty seven,
Speaker 4: and that would require all sorts of stuff like again
Speaker 4: re certifying the plane, trading pilots on simulators of your
Speaker 4: new plane which.
Speaker 3: Is not the old plane.
Speaker 4: It requires all sorts of stuff that would have very
Speaker 4: well could have prevented these crashes. But you know that
Speaker 4: stuff all costs money, and Boeing doesn't fucking want to
Speaker 4: spend money trying to make sure that its planes don't crash.
Speaker 4: So when they moved on to this version of like
Speaker 4: the seven thirty seven max right, pilots famously got I
Speaker 4: think half an hour of iPad training and that maybe
Speaker 4: I might have been an hour of iPad training, and
Speaker 4: that training that they got on their iPad again, not
Speaker 4: on a simulator, didn't even have any information about the
Speaker 4: MCAST system that killed all these people. And the product
Speaker 4: of this was that on October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen,
Speaker 4: a seven thirty seven Max flying from Jakarta crashed as
Speaker 4: the pilot was, you know, physically unable to fight the
Speaker 4: control stick. And that that's another thing that's going on
Speaker 4: with this, you know, with his decision to put Howard
Speaker 4: in the hands of software or not pilots, is that
Speaker 4: MCAST is also physically exerting control over the pilot stick
Speaker 4: and these people are trying to fight it, and they're
Speaker 4: not able to fight it enough to stop the plane
Speaker 4: from tipping down and crashing into the ground. And Boeing
Speaker 4: runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this pilot
Speaker 4: who was not white, for this error to try to,
Speaker 4: you know, cover up the fact that they fucking did this.
Speaker 4: And this maybe would have worked, except a few months later,
Speaker 4: Ethiopia Air Flight three ZO two went down and also
Speaker 4: killed everyone on board, and you know, all told displayed
Speaker 4: the Boeing seventy seven Max killed three hundred and forty
Speaker 4: six people. The Seattle Times, which broke a lot of
Speaker 4: the initial story, said quote. A variety of employees have
Speaker 4: described internal pressure to advance the Max to completion as
Speaker 4: Boeing hurried to catch up with the hot selling a
Speaker 4: three twenty from rival Airbus. Mark Rabin, an engineer who
Speaker 4: had flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said
Speaker 4: there was always talk about how delays of even one
Speaker 4: day can cause substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to
Speaker 4: stay in line. Rebin said it was all about loyalty.
Speaker 4: Rebin said, I had managers tell me, don't rock the boat.
Speaker 4: You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find
Speaker 4: this very funny because again, part of the whole jack
Speaker 4: Well strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to
Speaker 4: like Boeing as a company. But you have to be
Speaker 4: loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives, you know,
Speaker 4: have all of the power in this company and they
Speaker 4: want to make sure they can just ring out every
Speaker 4: single last drop of profit. And if you upset them,
Speaker 4: they're going to fire you. And so the product of
Speaker 4: this is this process that we've seen, which is that
Speaker 4: this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what
Speaker 4: happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course the
Speaker 4: seven thirty seven Max continues to have problems right Earlier
Speaker 4: this year, famously, the fucking door flew off inn Alaska
Speaker 4: air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe I mean,
Speaker 4: just like all of the things that you would have
Speaker 4: expected from Boeing outsourcing shit to overwork and undertrain contractors.
Speaker 4: Now several of those whistle blowers have died. When I
Speaker 4: was originally doing this, I was considering basically making this
Speaker 4: episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I,
Speaker 4: I don't know, I don't really have any more information
Speaker 4: than anyone else about these deaths. So I'm just going
Speaker 4: to put on the record that if I go out here,
Speaker 4: it was murder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I.
Speaker 4: Think the more important story is this one, because I
Speaker 4: think I think at this point everyone everyone kind of
Speaker 4: knows that something is wrong with Boeing, And every day
Speaker 4: we're getting more and more sort of specifics about every
Speaker 4: single part of this production process that you know, used
Speaker 4: to be entirely run by highly paid while at least
Speaker 4: sort of highly paid and highly trained employees that's now
Speaker 4: being run by a bunch of non unionized, underpaid contractors
Speaker 4: who are producing shitty equipments. But what we're looking at
Speaker 4: here is Boeing coming apart somewhat more famously. I think
Speaker 4: that the rescue flight is like being prepped, but a
Speaker 4: bunch of astronauts have been stranded on the space station
Speaker 4: because Boeing's launch craft was like veering off course. There
Speaker 4: are a bunch of issues with it, and so NASA
Speaker 4: just was just like, you know, fuck this. And the
Speaker 4: most hideously galling part of this entire story is that
Speaker 4: the craft that's going to pick up the astronauts is
Speaker 4: made by fucking SpaceX, because we have reached a point
Speaker 4: where an Elon Musk company is somehow designing rockets that
Speaker 4: are you know, like designing spacecraft that are less likely
Speaker 4: to fucking explode than Boeing. That is, that is an
Speaker 4: unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think we need
Speaker 4: to ask who killed these people, because it's not just Boeing.
Speaker 4: Jack Welsh killed these people. Michael Milken killed these people.
Speaker 4: Ronald Reagan killed these people, and in a way all
Speaker 4: of us killed them because none of us stopped them.
Speaker 4: And these people could have been stopped at any point
Speaker 4: in the process. From Reagan to Stonecipher to Kelly or Berg,
Speaker 4: we could have stopped these people. To quote for a
Speaker 4: final time, David Graeber, the ultimate hidden truth of this
Speaker 4: world is that it is something that we make and
Speaker 4: could just as easily make differently. I add only this,
Speaker 4: If we don't make the world differently, people are going
Speaker 4: to die. Why should these murderers be allowed to run
Speaker 4: the world. We know how to make planes. They don't
Speaker 4: fall out of the sky. The people who are fucking
Speaker 4: running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be enormously controversial
Speaker 4: to say that the people who know how to build
Speaker 4: airplanes should control how we fucking design and build airplanes.
Speaker 4: In the nineteenth and twentieth century, this idea was called
Speaker 4: worker self management, and it was considered so dangerous that
Speaker 4: from Chile that sheop us to a jury at a
Speaker 4: Hungary to Korea, capitalist communists and fascists alight killed anyone
Speaker 4: who dared believe it. But now our choices are stark.
Speaker 4: We either let these people continue to drop planes out
Speaker 4: of the sky as the world, burns in our cities,
Speaker 4: sink into the sea, but we do something about it.
Speaker 3: So what are you going to do?
Speaker 6: Hey?
Speaker 2: This is it could happen here. I am Robert Evans.
Speaker 2: This is a podcast about things falling apart. Most of
Speaker 2: this episode is going to be me and James Stout
Speaker 2: discussing the disaster in North Carolina and elsewhere as a
Speaker 2: result of Hurricane Helene. But before we get into that,
Speaker 2: and we'll be talking largely about what this means for
Speaker 2: your own preparations for future disasters, what we can kind
Speaker 2: of learn initially from everything that's been happening. I wanted
Speaker 2: to start with a few minutes of us talking to
Speaker 2: Margaret Kiljoy, who is on the ground in the Asheville
Speaker 2: area doing disaster relief work right now. And obviously the
Speaker 2: audio here is not up to our usual quality, but
Speaker 2: it's only about five minutes, and then you will get
Speaker 2: James and I talking crystal clear into your ears. So
Speaker 2: here is Margaret.
Speaker 5: Hi.
Speaker 7: Everyone, I just got on the ground about two hours
Speaker 7: ago and immediately have been basically running around with my
Speaker 7: van delivering food to different places just because van did
Speaker 7: van thing.
Speaker 5: And it's I mean, it's intense.
Speaker 7: Everyone is having an intense time, but also at the
Speaker 7: same time, there's like, you know, more people are out
Speaker 7: walking around and riding bikes, and you know, there's hundreds
Speaker 7: of people gathering at every place that's passing out food
Speaker 7: and water, and there's a very kind of community spirit
Speaker 7: happening right now.
Speaker 5: I'm actually recording this from up in Marshall.
Speaker 7: Which is a small town immediately north of Asheville that
Speaker 7: also has a mutual Aid distribution hub.
Speaker 5: We just came up here to drop stuff off, and
Speaker 5: even in the twenty minutes that I've been here.
Speaker 7: Other people have come with pickup trucks full of harm
Speaker 7: reduction supplies and diapers and just all the things that
Speaker 7: people need. And everyone is trapped on basically little islands.
Speaker 7: Right There's a very different style of flood than when
Speaker 7: you have like a coastal flood. And what's happened is
Speaker 7: that the houses that are near the river have been
Speaker 7: destroyed and the roads a lot of them have been destroyed,
Speaker 7: and a lot of them went underwater for a long time.
Speaker 7: It's all the infrastructure is down, but many of the houses,
Speaker 7: at least as I record this, seem to be intact
Speaker 7: and then doing well and what it is that everyone
Speaker 7: is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage,
Speaker 7: or even cell signal, although cell signal is kind of
Speaker 7: the first thing to come back, and power is starting
Speaker 7: to filter back in, and we're hoping that some places
Speaker 7: are maybe getting watered. But one of the things that's
Speaker 7: kind of come up is that, again, because it's in
Speaker 7: the mountains, it's a very different setup, it's a very
Speaker 7: different culture and community. And one of the things that's
Speaker 7: happened is that, I mean a lot of people have wells,
Speaker 7: and so immediately the problem has been more about distribution
Speaker 7: of water and also getting generators to.
Speaker 5: People who have well so that they can pump.
Speaker 7: You know, a friend of mine got a generator pretty
Speaker 7: quickly and you know, pull a thousand gallons out of
Speaker 7: their well right away to get and distribute around. And
Speaker 7: there's you know, just while I was waiting outside my
Speaker 7: friend's house, someone drove by and asked us if we
Speaker 7: needed water, and then asked us if we knew about
Speaker 7: each of the neighbors and who did and didn't have water.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And I mean, one of the things that makes
Speaker 2: me think of is like having the generator, having the
Speaker 2: well that's great, the kind of thing that maybe people
Speaker 2: wouldn't think about as much as having the ability to
Speaker 2: put a thousand gallons of water in something. Yes, totally,
Speaker 2: it seems like it was also crucial and is probably
Speaker 2: would have been lowered down the list for a lot
Speaker 2: of people. But there's really no replacing it when you
Speaker 2: need it, totally.
Speaker 5: And but one of the things that again, I mean,
Speaker 5: I'm not sureing to say that everything's fine here, it's
Speaker 5: very much fine.
Speaker 7: For example, the only federal response that anyone is talking
Speaker 7: about is that ice is already in the area, So
Speaker 7: before anyone had been given food by the federal government,
Speaker 7: they have sent ice to detain people and question people.
Speaker 5: At least that is the word on the ground.
Speaker 7: Obviously, you know, details and truths come later when you're
Speaker 7: in a crisis situation, but we do know that ice
Speaker 7: is on the ground, and no one I've talked to
Speaker 7: has seen much in the way a federal response besides
Speaker 7: law enforcement. But one of the things that's happened here
Speaker 7: is that a lot of people have pickup trucks in Appalachia,
Speaker 7: and so a lot of people have you know, you
Speaker 7: call them water buffalos, the big water tanks that you
Speaker 7: can put in a pickup truck or a trailer. I
Speaker 7: definitely left this feeling, you know, my first you know,
Speaker 7: I drove with my van full of stuff and on
Speaker 7: the highway and being passed by pickup trucks pulling flatbeds
Speaker 7: full of palettes of water and things like that. But
Speaker 7: then even yeah, in the city, people are driving around
Speaker 7: in trucks and filling them up with water and delivering them.
Speaker 7: But don't get me wrong, yeah, if you're preparing, think
Speaker 7: about how to deliver water. Even some of the things
Speaker 7: for me, for example, the city government has been doing
Speaker 7: some things and there are places where people can go
Speaker 7: and fill up water containers, but they don't have the
Speaker 7: water containers. So the people who were prepared by having
Speaker 7: a couple five gallon toats in their basement are in
Speaker 7: a much better position. And so that's like some of
Speaker 7: the things that I brought.
Speaker 5: For some of my friends.
Speaker 7: It is litergally just a couple five gallon water containers
Speaker 7: so that people.
Speaker 5: Can go get them filled up.
Speaker 7: Now.
Speaker 2: And obviously you're talking about when we're thinking about the
Speaker 2: places that people are able to drive around, where the
Speaker 2: places that you've been reaching are hit pretty hard. But
Speaker 2: we also then have these more isolated mountain communities that
Speaker 2: both seem to have suffered a lot more physical damage,
Speaker 2: although that's not entirely clear at this moment, but are
Speaker 2: certainly not accessible in.
Speaker 3: The same way.
Speaker 2: And I think that's one of those things we're still
Speaker 2: going to be waiting to hear, like how extreme it is.
Speaker 2: But like we talk a little bit on the episode
Speaker 2: before this about people using burrows to deliver food and
Speaker 2: water in places where vehicles can't even reach.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, And one of the things also, you know, one
Speaker 7: of the things that went out on the mutual aid
Speaker 7: list that I'm on is people are saying, hey, if
Speaker 7: you have your ATV, bring down your ATV, you know,
Speaker 7: and that makes complete sense if you the listener are
Speaker 7: listening to this, don't just drive down with supplies and
Speaker 7: if you are plugged into a mutual age to.
Speaker 3: Just roll to Ashville in your palan arts.
Speaker 7: Yeah yeah, but but yeah, no, one of the hardest
Speaker 7: things has been getting the supplies, you know. I mean,
Speaker 7: the disaster relief is just it's just logistics, and the
Speaker 7: same way that war is just logistics.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 7: It's like, how do you get things from one place
Speaker 7: to another. And what people have set up is all
Speaker 7: of these you know, you centralize the acquisation of supplies
Speaker 7: and then you decentralize getting them out.
Speaker 5: But yeah, people have been working.
Speaker 7: I'm going to know more about what people have been
Speaker 7: doing to get things out, but I've already talked with
Speaker 7: people or heard from people who you know, we're getting
Speaker 7: rescued by people with handsaws, right. And then one of
Speaker 7: the main things that people are doing is that there's
Speaker 7: chainsaw crews, mutual aid chainsaw crews going around. One of
Speaker 7: the big asks that I came with a lot of
Speaker 7: was bar and chain oil, you know. And and it's
Speaker 7: a little bit hard because gas is also until just recently,
Speaker 7: gas is starting to come back online now, but getting
Speaker 7: gas for a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle
Speaker 7: has been tricky.
Speaker 5: But people been working on that too.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, Margaret, I'm not going to take up more of
Speaker 2: your time while you try to help in the wake
Speaker 2: of a disaster, but thank you for being on the ground.
Speaker 2: Good luck to you and everyone else who's out there.
Speaker 2: We will be hearing more from you and more about
Speaker 2: the specifics of what's happened in North Carolina and elsewhere
Speaker 2: in the wake of the hurricane next week. So thank
Speaker 2: you and thank everybody there.
Speaker 3: Good luck.
Speaker 5: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker 3: That is done.
Speaker 2: I am now going to move on with our previously
Speaker 2: recorded episode.
Speaker 3: Here is James and Me.
Speaker 2: Oh, welcome back to it could happen here a podcast
Speaker 2: where it's happened for some chuck of our listeners who
Speaker 2: are probably not listening right now because as we record
Speaker 2: this on Monday, the.
Speaker 3: First technically a Tuesday, we're just.
Speaker 2: Now getting word that internet has come back on, like
Speaker 2: mobile internet has come back on to parts of Asheville
Speaker 2: and North Carolina that were in communicado for several days
Speaker 2: after Hurricane Eleen tore through. You've heard something about this,
Speaker 2: I'm hoping. I'm different things from friends about how much
Speaker 2: news attention there seems to be on this. I'm seeing
Speaker 2: it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social
Speaker 2: But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a
Speaker 2: photo I came across right before getting on here where
Speaker 2: there was a memorial marker for the nineteen sixteen flood
Speaker 2: in Ashville that was knocked out by what used to
Speaker 2: be a road and was now nothing but rushing water
Speaker 2: and mud.
Speaker 3: Beautiful three out of four.
Speaker 2: Highways into Ashville are down. I heard yesterday from people
Speaker 2: who were coming in and doing an AID drop that
Speaker 2: what had been previously a thirty minute drive took twelve
Speaker 2: and a half hours. From the state of the roads
Speaker 2: and the number of checkpoints and stuff. All of this
Speaker 2: is pretty common stuff for a natural disaster. Obviously amped
Speaker 2: up in civil because this disaster was correspondingly worse than
Speaker 2: even most natural disasters tend to.
Speaker 3: Be, you know, yes, in this country. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I was just looking through, just doing a little bit
Speaker 2: of googling before we got on, and I found a
Speaker 2: Reddit post from the Asheville subreddit from two years ago
Speaker 2: saying Asheville is apparently the number one city in the
Speaker 2: United States to be a climate haven, according to the CNBC,
Speaker 2: although that article it just made the list of best
Speaker 2: climate cities, but the original post has been deleted. I
Speaker 2: don't know if that was earlier or as a result
Speaker 2: of this, but that is one of like the side
Speaker 2: stories here is that Ashville is not We're not talking
Speaker 2: about one of these coastal cities in Florida that everyone
Speaker 2: is known as doomed for forever, right, We're not talking
Speaker 2: about New Orleans, which lovely city, great history, doomed as fuck,
Speaker 2: and everyone has known it for quite a while. We're
Speaker 2: talking about places that are many miles inland and that
Speaker 2: something like two thousand feet elevation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's certainly not below sea or even at sea level.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's an inland, mountainous community. It's just not the
Speaker 2: kind of threat that people are used to having here. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and the devastation has been pretty total, like whole communities
Speaker 2: wiped out. I think the death toll from the county
Speaker 2: Ashville is in Let me let me pull this up
Speaker 2: to make sure I'm not getting it wrong. I've just
Speaker 2: now pulled up a story from thirty minutes ago on
Speaker 2: the Independent that says, yeah, at least one hundred and
Speaker 2: forty three people have been killed. Yeah, that's a total
Speaker 2: death toll from Helene forty people in Buncombe County, where
Speaker 2: Ashville is six hundred people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper
Speaker 2: has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped
Speaker 2: off the map. Kind of the first thing that I noticed,
Speaker 2: you know, outside of the footage coming in was friends
Speaker 2: of mine. Because I've spent a decent amount of time
Speaker 2: in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including
Speaker 2: our own Margaret Kiljoy, who has a lot more friends
Speaker 2: in Asheville, and I was in a couple of different
Speaker 2: signal loops where people were trying to contact their people,
Speaker 2: and there was a line from one of the folks
Speaker 2: I was chatting with who had reached out to multiple
Speaker 2: people in the area and said, I have not heard
Speaker 2: anything from anyone in Nashville in hours. Nothing is getting
Speaker 2: in and nothing is getting out, And that seems to
Speaker 2: be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional.
Speaker 2: Starlink doesn't work very well when the weather's really bad.
Speaker 2: SAT phones seem to have had some efficacy. I know
Speaker 2: some people were getting messages in and out, but they
Speaker 2: weren't super reliable because SAT phones also are reliant upon
Speaker 2: climactic conditions. Right, It's certainly better than just trusting your
Speaker 2: normal cell phone, but it's not going to do great
Speaker 2: when you've got a fucking hurricane dumping half an ocean
Speaker 2: on your head. So that was the first thing I
Speaker 2: was thinking about, because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness,
Speaker 2: and we talk a lot about having stuff that would
Speaker 2: have been useful in this that people who were prepared
Speaker 2: and had water set aside and food set aside were
Speaker 2: certainly in a better situation, because those both very quickly
Speaker 2: became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story of
Speaker 2: an old folks home that was completely cut off from
Speaker 2: the outside and didn't have enough water or food. Hoping
Speaker 2: that story ends as well as possible, but there's a
Speaker 2: lot of stories like that. But even outside of that,
Speaker 2: there were people who were prepared, who had food and water,
Speaker 2: but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their
Speaker 2: house because the water just came in so quickly there
Speaker 2: was no chance to really get much other than maybe
Speaker 2: a bag. And when you're stuck up on there, like
Speaker 2: what are you going to do if your SAT phone
Speaker 2: or you don't have a SAT phone and that doesn't
Speaker 2: work and there's no internet and there's no cell service. Well,
Speaker 2: that's why we're going to start today talking about ham radios,
Speaker 2: because those motherfuckers there's actually a I'll see if I
Speaker 2: can pull it up through this like that has been
Speaker 2: the most reliable way for people in the area to
Speaker 2: communicate with the outside world, because if it is possible
Speaker 2: to communicate using technology, you can do it with Ham. Yeah, right,
Speaker 2: Like that's just that's just how Ham radios be.
Speaker 8: Yeah, they don't need to see the sky, like yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: They don't give a fuck it.
Speaker 2: If there is any way to communicate via technology with
Speaker 2: people in a disaster, you will be able to do
Speaker 2: it with a Ham radio. So let's chat about that, James.
Speaker 2: You have more experience with this than I do. This
Speaker 2: is something I have been working on getting into, but
Speaker 2: I certainly am not very knowledgeable on the matter. So
Speaker 2: we'll start like, what what do people need to think
Speaker 2: about when it comes to like actually getting set up
Speaker 2: to communicate with a Ham radio, Because there's definitely you
Speaker 2: could just go buy a Boofang or something like that,
Speaker 2: Like you can get ahead. They're not expensive. This is
Speaker 2: actually a very affordable thing to have right now. Kind
Speaker 2: of the most recommended model is the UV nine R Pro,
Speaker 2: which is eight watt instead of five and waterproof, That's what.
Speaker 8: I was going to say. And you can charge it
Speaker 8: off USBC, which is really nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they're what like thirty something bucks. Yeah, they're like
Speaker 2: you can get them cheaper in bulk.
Speaker 8: I think you steel to get them cheaper on Alley Express,
Speaker 8: but seems like they're kind of hanging them up in
Speaker 8: charging customs, so you end up not getting them cheaper.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So yeah, for real basic stuff.
Speaker 8: I think you do need to be licensed to operate
Speaker 8: these radios on certain bands, right, yes, And that's something
Speaker 8: that you you can, I believe in a case of
Speaker 8: emergency you can.
Speaker 3: You can operate on any band.
Speaker 2: No one's going to arrest you for a legal youth
Speaker 2: unlicensed used to a ham radio if you're trying to
Speaker 2: get people rescued from a flood. Yeah, right, Like that said,
Speaker 2: you should not be learning how to use a ham
Speaker 2: radio when you're hiding on your roof.
Speaker 8: Yeah yeah, yeah, Like this is like you know the
Speaker 8: people who buy guns and put them under their bed
Speaker 8: and never shoot them and expect to be right because
Speaker 8: the fucking marksman in a crisis or by medical gear
Speaker 8: and never train with it again. Right, these things you
Speaker 8: want to practice before. So we use these that bought it.
Speaker 8: We use radios to communicate. When they were higher numbers
Speaker 8: in Cucumber, my friends and I put a massive antenna
Speaker 8: on the roof of the youth center where we were.
Speaker 8: I know a lot of listeners have been out there
Speaker 8: and they've probably seen antenna that we put up, and
Speaker 8: then I was using a radio on my truck, and
Speaker 8: then we also all had personal radios, right because cell
Speaker 8: phone signal is crap out there, and it was the
Speaker 8: only way for us to communicate and it worked really well.
Speaker 8: So the things that you need if you want to
Speaker 8: get started in this first of all, some kind of
Speaker 8: education or a license. There are tons of local groups.
Speaker 8: Hand people fucking love to be ham radio people. They
Speaker 8: love to talk about hand radio. They love to teach
Speaker 8: you to do ham radio so like, and it's not
Speaker 8: like a hobby, you know, firearms people love to talk
Speaker 8: about firearms, but lots of them are really toxic people.
Speaker 8: I haven't found that hand radio is premised on talking
Speaker 8: to people all over the place and often very.
Speaker 3: Few people killed with ham radio.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. But if you can find
Speaker 8: a local club, but that's a great way to start.
Speaker 8: They can clean you in on stuff. But I think
Speaker 8: to begin with your need someone to talk to, right, Like,
Speaker 8: if you want to practice with your ham radio, you
Speaker 8: need to be talking to other people on it. So
Speaker 8: you can just go on to different bands, different repeaters
Speaker 8: and do that, or you can get your friends and
Speaker 8: study together.
Speaker 3: Yeah, get your license together.
Speaker 2: I too bow things, you know, Yeah, give one to
Speaker 2: somebody who you live close to but not right next to,
Speaker 2: and work on it with them.
Speaker 3: Yeah, work on like, oh how far this workd you know?
Speaker 8: Like I am one of the former guests for the
Speaker 8: podcast James Corderra from Board the Kindness. He and I
Speaker 8: were doing that. Not so do't go talking to each
Speaker 8: other from our houses, but yeah you can. You can
Speaker 8: certainly get into this pretty cheap. I have a business license,
Speaker 8: which is another option for people. I would suggest first
Speaker 8: getting your ham operator's lecense and then going from there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's it's called a radio technicians license, right, Like
Speaker 2: that's the most basic because there's three levels.
Speaker 3: If I'm not a mistaken Yeah, I believe. So it's
Speaker 3: been a while since I did that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think it's Radio Technicians General and then Amateur
Speaker 2: extra if.
Speaker 8: The notes, Yeah, all right, it still And then in
Speaker 8: terms of cost, like the size of your antenna is
Speaker 8: what's going to determine, you know, how far you can
Speaker 8: transmit and how you can receive along with like line
Speaker 8: of sight, right, it's about side just as big as
Speaker 8: one possible, So you want to be a size queen
Speaker 8: like you can get yourself a really big antenna, I
Speaker 8: would say, if you're using those handheld radios. So the
Speaker 8: company called Nagoya that make pretty decent radio antennas that
Speaker 8: work with that UV nine R that I use. I
Speaker 8: have like a telescoping one and we've had pretty good
Speaker 8: luck with that, and then I also use one in
Speaker 8: my bit. So I've hard mounted a radio inside my
Speaker 8: truck and I have an antenna that uses the frame
Speaker 8: of the truck as part of the antenna, and I
Speaker 8: can get really good.
Speaker 3: Signal with that. Yeah, that makes sense if you're just
Speaker 3: doing it at home.
Speaker 8: Yeah, put something on your roof, Like you can get
Speaker 8: a pretty good antenna on your roof, you know, and
Speaker 8: it's not that hard and you can get signal.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Much further.
Speaker 2: I've been recommended a little book that you can get
Speaker 2: for twenty bucks in kindle form or it's like thirty
Speaker 2: bucks for the spiral bound, which looks pretty durable. Haven't
Speaker 2: received mine yet. Yeah, the ar rl HAM Radio License Manual,
Speaker 2: which is kind of what I was advised to buy
Speaker 2: and read through and the advice that I got and
Speaker 2: you can correct me here.
Speaker 3: But this seemed pretty hard to argue.
Speaker 2: With is that like the primary benefit to doing the
Speaker 2: training and getting the license formally rather than just buying it,
Speaker 2: is it also teaches you how to fix problems if
Speaker 2: you're trying to get this thing to work in a stressful,
Speaker 2: dangerous situation.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you want to be familiar with it if you're
Speaker 8: going to rely on it, right, just like anything else,
Speaker 8: this ham study dot org as well, which helps you.
Speaker 8: You can also do something called a software to find
Speaker 8: radio SDR. I've used those before as well.
Speaker 2: I'm sure we'll Yeah, we'll do a more dedicated episode
Speaker 2: to this kind of thing once I feel a degree
Speaker 2: of competence too. But I think what's really important with
Speaker 2: this is because I can tell you right now, as
Speaker 2: much time as I spend, like thinking about water and
Speaker 2: having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare
Speaker 2: water stored, and I have like I literally have at
Speaker 2: this point years of dried food on the problem property.
Speaker 2: I can food all the time. I have animals, obviously,
Speaker 2: I have guns, you know, I do stuff like, you know,
Speaker 2: go foraging in the woods and shit. I had completely
Speaker 2: because it's a pain in the air. It seemed like
Speaker 2: a pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers.
Speaker 2: I hate fucking numbers, and I am choosing to use this.
Speaker 2: And we're starting out with this as coverage of Halle
Speaker 2: not because like this is the end of it.
Speaker 3: We're not.
Speaker 2: We are going to look at what's actually been happening
Speaker 2: in the community. We have people Margaret Killjoys down there
Speaker 2: right now, we have some other like friends of the
Speaker 2: pod who are in the area doing relief work. Now
Speaker 2: it's just too early for those stories, and we don't
Speaker 2: want to like really bug people who are.
Speaker 3: Doing useful work down there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but this is the first thing that terrified me
Speaker 2: was being like, well, fuck, I have been negligent in
Speaker 2: my preparations because I don't have comms lockdown.
Speaker 8: Yeah, definitely, Like and people underestimated because it's not cool
Speaker 8: and fun, right, Like guns are fun.
Speaker 2: I have a sat phone, So I was like, that's
Speaker 2: probably fine, right been wouldn't have been an Ashville Yeah.
Speaker 8: Or people think that they can have stylink now and
Speaker 8: I think, yeah, you know, people, it's a lot of
Speaker 8: emphasis on that, but I think, yep, going back to basics,
Speaker 8: we were talking about this in our group chat. But
Speaker 8: for things that you need, having a primary, secondary and
Speaker 8: emergency way of doing that makes sense. So yes, your phone,
Speaker 8: your SAT phone. You know, I think Robert and I
Speaker 8: both use gum and in reaches like a SAT communicator.
Speaker 2: I have an in reach and I also have a
Speaker 2: Motorola smartphone that is a SAT phone through Uh god,
Speaker 2: I'm forgetting the name of the service, but a separate service,
Speaker 2: like I have two different SAT phone services.
Speaker 3: And then you got your ham radio as your backup.
Speaker 3: Well after that you got smoke signals and pigeons right.
Speaker 2: Well, that that gets us to a general idea of preparation,
Speaker 2: which I was kind of when I started. When I
Speaker 2: got advice from a colleague about war reporting, like the best.
Speaker 2: It's still to this day some of the best advice
Speaker 2: I've ever got is two is one and one is none.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 2: If you have one way of doing something and a disaster,
Speaker 2: you are very close to having no way of doing
Speaker 2: it right, which brings me to transit because one of
Speaker 2: the thing that is probably going to wind up being
Speaker 2: the defining characteristic of this disaster in memory is the
Speaker 2: degree to which the ability to reach people in an
Speaker 2: area that is we're not talking, you know, there definitely
Speaker 2: are a lot of rural communities impacted by this, But
Speaker 2: like Ashville is a significant place, We're not talking the
Speaker 2: middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people living
Speaker 2: on the edge of the world, right. We are talking
Speaker 2: about like one of the what was what was up
Speaker 2: to this point, one of like the hippest and more
Speaker 2: popular parts of the Northeast.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 2: The immediacy with which the ability to reach people on
Speaker 2: the ground was wiped out, and obviously while the storm
Speaker 2: was going on, there was no way to reach them
Speaker 2: from air. Like you know, a helicopter can get places now,
Speaker 2: but during the worst of the flooding, you're not reliably
Speaker 2: getting a fucking chopper into a lot of these places.
Speaker 2: So people were stranded very quick, much faster than they
Speaker 2: had been prepared for. You should be thinking about like,
Speaker 2: oh shit, I could get flooded, because you probably could.
Speaker 2: Most of the people listening to this. There's not a
Speaker 2: zero percent chance a freak storm floods your community, right,
Speaker 2: even if it never has before. It's not exactly a
Speaker 2: common problem in Asheville, right. The last massive flood thing
Speaker 2: was like nineteen sixteen, So we're not talking about a
Speaker 2: place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise,
Speaker 2: like it's not just flooding, that fire could do this, right,
Speaker 2: I am thinking the last kind of near disaster we
Speaker 2: had where I was is in twenty twenty. You know
Speaker 2: where I live right now. I am in the city
Speaker 2: of Portland, and we were like three or four blocks
Speaker 2: away from where the evacuation orders had spread during the
Speaker 2: fires in twenty twenty. It was not a foregone conclusion
Speaker 2: that they would stop before reaching the city.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: This is also I think people in southern California. Yeah, definitely,
Speaker 2: there's a shocking number of communities, communities with money that
Speaker 2: are really built up that if a f hit at
Speaker 2: the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like,
Speaker 2: you need to be thinking about how am I preparing
Speaker 2: to be informed during the seasons where this is like
Speaker 2: of highest likelihood, because the only real safety there is
Speaker 2: paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding of
Speaker 2: how quickly things can go badly so that you get
Speaker 2: out ahead of time, because if the disaster just hits,
Speaker 2: you're not going to get on the highway and drive
Speaker 2: through a fire or through a flood. I don't care
Speaker 2: if you have a fucking Safari snorkel. I'm looking at
Speaker 2: those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out
Speaker 2: land rover on God's green Earth was not getting through
Speaker 2: some of those waters.
Speaker 8: I'm sorry, Yeah, you need a submarine. Like I remember
Speaker 8: my house flooded when I was probably seventeen eighteen, and
Speaker 8: I remember that. A couple of the things I remember,
Speaker 8: first of all, was like, most of your shit is
Speaker 8: not that important to you. I remember being seventeen and
Speaker 8: being like, oh man, we got it back then. Having
Speaker 8: a widescreen TV was a big deal for us. And
Speaker 8: just yeah, then thinking like, oh, my name is an
Speaker 8: eighty something, like I fuck the TV.
Speaker 3: I need to check off those people, okay.
Speaker 8: And then people completely overestimating the capability of their vehicles
Speaker 8: in floodwater, yeah, which.
Speaker 3: Which they always will do.
Speaker 2: It will always be the people with the biggest trucks
Speaker 2: that cause the most problems for everyone else to overestimate
Speaker 2: where their vehicles can get them.
Speaker 8: Yes, And like you can die in your vehicle crossing
Speaker 8: relatively shallow floodwater.
Speaker 3: This isn't yeah, you know, it's a serious business.
Speaker 2: Or get burned to death, which happens all the time,
Speaker 2: has happened very recently in communities in like California, you know,
Speaker 2: people just get fucking incinerated, So don't be that person.
Speaker 3: Pay attention.
Speaker 2: Like one of the things to pay attention to is
Speaker 2: like when the warning started to come in. There will
Speaker 2: be good breakdowns fairly soon in places like the New
Speaker 2: York Times on when warnings came in and how much
Speaker 2: time people actually had.
Speaker 4: Ye.
Speaker 2: But don't gamble with stuff like this fucking dry to
Speaker 2: high ground or you know, drive to whatever seems like
Speaker 2: the safest place and fucking crash in your car if
Speaker 2: you have to. And this is why again, when it
Speaker 2: does come to survival stuff, I'm a big fan. If
Speaker 2: you have the money, spend two hundred bucks on one
Speaker 2: of those buckets of dried food. Because you can keep
Speaker 2: a bucket of dried food and five gallons of water
Speaker 2: by the door, you can throw that son of a
Speaker 2: bitch in your car and carrying the waters might be
Speaker 2: a pain in the ass, but if you have to
Speaker 2: get out and run, those buckets of dried food with
Speaker 2: a weak or so of food in them are not
Speaker 2: that hard to carry. You hold it under your arm,
Speaker 2: you keep a backpack on your back, and you run
Speaker 2: like a son of a bitch to whatever evacuation exists,
Speaker 2: and you'll have.
Speaker 3: Some food with you. Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, like this is one of the ways I
Speaker 2: think about stuff like this. You know, it's obviously preferable
Speaker 2: if you can just hunker down in your fucking house
Speaker 2: full of gear and equipment. But I'm sure there were
Speaker 2: I'm sure there were people who had to evac or
Speaker 2: who got flooded out in Ashville and their house that
Speaker 2: got flooded out was full.
Speaker 3: Of survival gear. I know for a fact that that
Speaker 3: happened to people.
Speaker 8: Yeah, and it happens everywhere to people right talking of happening,
Speaker 8: but what should be happening right now is an advertising break.
Speaker 2: Oh shit, should have happened ten fucking minutes ago, James, Yeah,
Speaker 2: but he but here we are.
Speaker 3: We're back.
Speaker 5: You know.
Speaker 2: When it comes to talking about like the degree to
Speaker 2: which people's high tech and expensive equipment, including vehicles, has
Speaker 2: run out very quickly, one of the stories that has
Speaker 2: been most interesting to me is of like one of
Speaker 2: the first groups of people to be able to get
Speaker 2: supplies and significant quantities to some of these isolated mountain
Speaker 2: regions was a guy with a shitload of donkeys. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: the mule team. The mule team guy he was one second.
Speaker 2: Let me pull this up. I've got this bookmarked. Yeah,
Speaker 2: Mountain Mule Packer Ranch, which I'm guessing is just some
Speaker 2: sort of like a you know, you go there to
Speaker 2: vacation and do like mule trips, mule hights and stuff.
Speaker 8: It's kind of people who want to backpack or take
Speaker 8: like a really luxurious camping set up.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they've been doing mule trains into a town call
Speaker 2: into a Weaverville. It looks like and yeah, like a
Speaker 2: mule can carry. It's something at least based on this
Speaker 2: people article I'm looking at, they're saying about two hundred
Speaker 2: pounds of supplies per animal, which you know is actually
Speaker 2: very significant. That's not a whole lot more than you're
Speaker 2: going to be fitting in like a compact car at
Speaker 2: least obviously a truck's carring more. But you're not getting
Speaker 2: a truck into a lot of these areas. And it
Speaker 2: just kind of goes to I'm not saying like everyone
Speaker 2: go buy a mule. That's not really practical for most people,
Speaker 2: although if you've got some land, maybe considered getting the mule.
Speaker 2: They're real handy. They do come in very useful in
Speaker 2: situations like this yeah, thinking companion animals as well. I
Speaker 2: think people haven't, Like, if you have a hole or whatever,
Speaker 2: I'll pack us too, but they can't carry so much,
Speaker 2: but I'll pack up. Packing is a thing, and in
Speaker 2: like Montana, in places like that, Yeah, they're great. You know,
Speaker 2: if you've got to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan
Speaker 2: a mule, you know you can. You can do a
Speaker 2: lot there, So very useful in a wide variety of situations.
Speaker 2: And a lot of our listeners are actively fighting in
Speaker 2: Afghanistan right now, so that that could be very handy
Speaker 2: for you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, proud of you guys. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: America said we're done there, but you said.
Speaker 1: Not me.
Speaker 3: It can happen here. You can't stop me going back
Speaker 3: with my mule.
Speaker 8: That's why this is the official pocast of the Islamic
Speaker 8: State Couruson Province.
Speaker 2: That is that's that's uh, oh, James, we shouldn't be
Speaker 2: saying stuff. We can hopefully hopefully the government's busy.
Speaker 3: Well apparently because they ain't doing ship in Ashville.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, you know, I saw a lot of One
Speaker 2: of the more heartbreaking posts that I saw was this
Speaker 2: this lady posting a picture of her parents and her daughter,
Speaker 2: who was six on the roof with them, and she
Speaker 2: was like a few minutes later the roof collapsed and
Speaker 2: they were dead. Like she apparently managed to just kind
Speaker 2: of barely survive and get out of there. But there's like,
Speaker 2: I think a lot of people whose last act was
Speaker 2: trying to get a good photo or video of their location,
Speaker 2: you know, to post on social media. I don't want
Speaker 2: there to be a lot of people who made the
Speaker 2: decision to stay longer than they should have because they
Speaker 2: wanted to get a good shot for social media. But
Speaker 2: I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm not saying that's
Speaker 2: what happened to that lady. There's also a matter of like, well,
Speaker 2: if you are stuck up there, what else are you
Speaker 2: going to fucking do but document it? Yeah, I have
Speaker 2: some sympathy for that. Yeah, I'm not trying to shit
Speaker 2: on these people, but it is one of these there's
Speaker 2: that post that goes around every time there's a disaster
Speaker 2: like this, where you know, climate collapse is watching a
Speaker 2: series of horrifying videos on cell phones until one day
Speaker 2: it's you holding the phone.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I think that that.
Speaker 2: Not that we shouldn't think about, Like what's happened, you know,
Speaker 2: to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to these affected communities. There's
Speaker 2: places in Georgia that got hard hit. Obviously that's a focus.
Speaker 2: But from a practical standpoint, the only good that you
Speaker 2: can make of a disaster like this is to try
Speaker 2: and pay attention to what happened, to what went wrong
Speaker 2: for other people, and make yourself less vulnerable, because the
Speaker 2: less vulnerable you are one of the things that we
Speaker 2: see every time there's something like this hits, you know,
Speaker 2: and this is I would call this a hand of
Speaker 2: God event. Right, You had a bunch of communities that
Speaker 2: were a part of the developed, you know whatever term
Speaker 2: first world one day, and we're completely cut off from
Speaker 2: everyone else on the planet the next. And all you
Speaker 2: can really do in the immediate aftermath of something like
Speaker 2: that is try to figure out what can I do
Speaker 2: to make it less likely that I'm a strain on
Speaker 2: resources during an event like this, And obviously the best
Speaker 2: way is to not be there, because then you're not
Speaker 2: a strain on resources. But the next best thing is
Speaker 2: to have to pay attention to what went wrong for
Speaker 2: other people and try to make yourself less vulnerable to that,
Speaker 2: because not only does that protect you, but you protect
Speaker 2: other people by not needing the resources that rescuers can
Speaker 2: bring to bear, which will be terribly limited in the
Speaker 2: immediate wake of the disaster.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think like in terms of resources. Obviously, Margaret
Speaker 8: does an excellent podcast quotedly if the world is dying,
Speaker 8: we can hear more about that stuff. I think the
Speaker 8: thing that you can buy, I guess right now, if
Speaker 8: you have like thirty to fifty bucks and you want
Speaker 8: to be a little bit more prepared, because I understand
Speaker 8: that for some people this will be an oh shit
Speaker 8: moment right where this is something that it ought to be. Yeah, no,
Speaker 8: it really should be. Like you know, you've seen a
Speaker 8: city that thought it was completely invulnerable, be very vulnerable.
Speaker 8: You can buy a Sooya Squeeze for like thirty bucks
Speaker 8: right now. You can set them up in a off
Speaker 8: a five gun and bucket yep, or you can use
Speaker 8: the bag that comes with You can buy back from
Speaker 8: a company called knock cnoc, which is a much better bag.
Speaker 8: I would recommend that, but like you can spend thirty
Speaker 8: bucks there. Like we said before, you should have backup
Speaker 8: and other water filtering options. But yeah, there are whole
Speaker 8: countries that use Sayer squeezes, right, the Marshall Islands. I
Speaker 8: made a thing about Liberia uses in too, And you
Speaker 8: can filter rain water with that, and you could pretty
Speaker 8: much have a supply of water for as long as
Speaker 8: you need it if you backflush it.
Speaker 2: Right, You've got like a family of four and a house.
Speaker 2: You have one or two five gallon buckets full at
Speaker 2: any time, and you have a Sawyer squeeze, and you
Speaker 2: can you know, in this kind of situation, you could
Speaker 2: keep filling it up with you know, disaster water for
Speaker 2: lack of a better word. And in that sort of
Speaker 2: situation too, you can double up and triple up, which
Speaker 2: I always recommend in an emergency. I've nearly diet of dysentery,
Speaker 2: so I don't fuck around with this. Yeah, get a
Speaker 2: filterration option that's not the only one. Filter your water
Speaker 2: and add iodine tablets too, right, like you know, filter
Speaker 2: your water and use something.
Speaker 3: Like a UV.
Speaker 2: Light, Yeah, a stery pan, sterry pan. You know, don't
Speaker 2: just rely on one method. Double up, there's no You're
Speaker 2: not going to have a lot to do other than
Speaker 2: make sure your water doesn't kill you. And that's a
Speaker 2: real good thing to focus on.
Speaker 8: Yeah, you could even use bleachhouse help bleach. Just make
Speaker 8: sure you'll each sucking around it's not scented, et cetera.
Speaker 2: But yeah, you want to look up that ratio just
Speaker 2: or not fucking up the ratio with them. But like, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's a great you know. I keep a I usually
Speaker 2: keep one or two just big fifty gallon barrels of water.
Speaker 2: There's like water stabilization tablets or in liquid that you
Speaker 2: can drop in there because water doesn't store indefinitely. But
Speaker 2: you can use bleach too. People do I keep at
Speaker 2: all times. I just have this as part of my
Speaker 2: outdoor kit, but it's a good thing to have for
Speaker 2: a disaster. You can have a camelback with one company
Speaker 2: that makes them as called catod In Kata.
Speaker 3: D Ynn Catadyne. Yeah, Catadyne.
Speaker 2: Sorry, but there's a couple of different water filters that
Speaker 2: you can screw directly onto your camelback. So you pour
Speaker 2: water in the camel back and by the time you
Speaker 2: get the water in your mouth, it has on through
Speaker 2: a very serious filter arrangement, and that again, that could
Speaker 2: be part of your I pick this up and I
Speaker 2: take this with me, and no matter where I go,
Speaker 2: I could pour water into the camel back and me
Speaker 2: and my family can drink off of it, or we
Speaker 2: have two camelbacks or whatever. You know, I have four
Speaker 2: leaders on you. This is not free, but it's not
Speaker 2: prohibitively expensive. It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right,
Speaker 2: and it is considerably likelier to save your life than
Speaker 2: an AAR fifty.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, there are magazines of ammunition that would cost you
Speaker 8: more than this would. And like yeah, yeah, with all
Speaker 8: of these things, once it's dirty, it's not clean, right,
Speaker 8: So like your camelback bladder is now dirty water bladder
Speaker 8: and stuff, especially in a disaster situation, to be mixing
Speaker 8: a match, just get a shoppie and run it.
Speaker 3: Likewise, I have a jerry can.
Speaker 8: I just wrote the bleach amounts on it with a
Speaker 8: paint pen and it's there now, and now I know,
Speaker 8: like none of this stuff is hugely complicated, and like
Speaker 8: everything else, right, like the more familiar you are with it,
Speaker 8: that if you go camping a lot. Yeah, like Robert
Speaker 8: was saying, you already have a system in place, so
Speaker 8: you're already ready for that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I keep something called a grail on me, which is
Speaker 2: just like a cup that has a filter. Like it's
Speaker 2: a two part like almost kind of a thermos type deal,
Speaker 2: and you fill the bottom part with water and you
Speaker 2: press the top part in and it fills an internal
Speaker 2: reservoir with filtered water. And then I'll drop a tablet
Speaker 2: in there or something and you know, or I'll pour
Speaker 2: that into a larger thing and put the tablet in there.
Speaker 2: But you can always have multiple options for water. And
Speaker 2: it's the kind of thing where like there's no reason
Speaker 2: not to a camelback and a filter plus a bunch
Speaker 2: of pills, plus some sort of like canned pump rig
Speaker 2: you're maybe out one hundred and fifty bucks. You have
Speaker 2: three different methods of keeping your water clean.
Speaker 8: Yeah, I think they're surtplusing out a lot of the
Speaker 8: MSR Guardians so the US military used to buy. You
Speaker 8: can get those pretty chair those are great, like I have.
Speaker 8: I was just in the dairying gap. I used one
Speaker 8: of those and then chemical treatment and like, yeah, I'm okay,
Speaker 8: And you can if you can also bulk process with
Speaker 8: the gravity guiding, you could do ten leads at a time.
Speaker 2: You know, we're in this kind of conversation. We are
Speaker 2: triaging by what we think is the most important stuff
Speaker 2: which is in a disaster like this, water in comms,
Speaker 2: and I kind of keep those as relatively equal because obviously,
Speaker 2: like you can survive without comms in some situations, yeah,
Speaker 2: and you can't in any without water. But if you
Speaker 2: are in a situation where you're on the roof of
Speaker 2: your house and your roof is not going to hold
Speaker 2: out much longer in the floodwaters, colms suddenly become the
Speaker 2: number one problem that you have, right your inability to
Speaker 2: reach someone who might be able to get you out
Speaker 2: of there.
Speaker 3: Yeah, if you need to get help, then you need
Speaker 3: to be able to ask for help. Yeah.
Speaker 8: I guess the other thing I would say is if
Speaker 8: you rely on any medicine, think about how and where
Speaker 8: you store them.
Speaker 3: God.
Speaker 2: Yes, a lot of people have been having to figure out,
Speaker 2: Like I've been reading stories about people needing to set
Speaker 2: up like battery and solar or generator situation, like their
Speaker 2: fucking seapap machines, and they're like, you have people who
Speaker 2: are on diet, We're going to need to get evacked
Speaker 2: because there's not going to be reliable dialysis you know,
Speaker 2: in town in a while, right, Like.
Speaker 8: That kind of stuff, Like some of that, you know,
Speaker 8: like I have a big cooler and I can chuck
Speaker 8: ice in there, and I can have enough insulin in
Speaker 8: that bad boy for a year, you know. Yeah, and
Speaker 8: other medicines. You know, he's putting them in a waterproof
Speaker 8: bottle and having that in your well. I live in California.
Speaker 8: We have a bag for fives and earthquakes, right, everyone
Speaker 8: here does. And just having a few days of your
Speaker 8: medicine so you can grab and go. You don't have
Speaker 8: to think about it. You don't forget something that you
Speaker 8: rely on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And that's that's also what you should be thinking,
Speaker 2: is like, if it takes me two or three days
Speaker 2: to get evact and out to an area where I
Speaker 2: can like spend money again to get access to the
Speaker 2: things that I have on a daily basis, what shit
Speaker 2: can't I survive without until I get to a part
Speaker 2: of the world where I can get access to things again,
Speaker 2: right right, Which is again why we're kind of focusing
Speaker 2: on comms so that you know what's happening, so that
Speaker 2: you can maybe reach people water and then underwater like
Speaker 2: food and obviously things like thank god we are not
Speaker 2: in a time of the year when this happened where
Speaker 2: people are going to like freeze to death immediately right
Speaker 2: in the middle of something like this. But that would
Speaker 2: I would say, like access to warm and dry clothing
Speaker 2: could be up there, equal with you know, water and cobs.
Speaker 2: If you're talking about a kind of disaster that might
Speaker 2: put people out of their homes in an area where
Speaker 2: you can die in minutes in the front, like if
Speaker 2: you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending
Speaker 2: on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster
Speaker 2: that could be right up there. You know, you know
Speaker 2: what you need based on where you live, but be
Speaker 2: thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really a lot
Speaker 2: of disaster preparedness is actually trying to understand what is
Speaker 2: it that keeps me alive. A lot of our economy
Speaker 2: exists in having that not be obvious to you.
Speaker 8: Yes, yeah, yeah, in putting your priority selfwhere But yeah,
Speaker 8: think about what stuff's you dying.
Speaker 3: Maybe have a couple of spats and have it in
Speaker 3: a place.
Speaker 8: Having all this stuff is great, if it's in seven
Speaker 8: different tote bags in your attic, that's not much use
Speaker 8: to you when you don't have very long to get
Speaker 8: out your house. So having stuff like Robert said by
Speaker 8: the door in your car, in a backpack whatever, like, yeah,
Speaker 8: that you can easily access and be okay. Then you
Speaker 8: have it and then you when you need it, it's
Speaker 8: there and you know where it is.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: Yeah, well James, how we do it. It's happened here, buddy,
Speaker 8: It's happened here. Yeah, like we said it would. Yeah
Speaker 8: it could like could, like we keep saying.
Speaker 2: This was like the messages I was sharing with people
Speaker 2: immediately after this was like, oh, this is the one.
Speaker 2: This is the one we were worried about. This is
Speaker 2: the hand of God sweeping into a community and just
Speaker 2: knocking it off the edge of the earth.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 2: You know, not that this kind of thing doesn't happen,
Speaker 2: but this is the first one, at least since I've
Speaker 2: been really focusing on this stuff in the US, where
Speaker 2: it hits somewhere that just was not on my radar
Speaker 2: as a super vulnerable place.
Speaker 3: Definitely. Yeah, and it'll happen again, thanks Jaron. This week.
Speaker 2: It'll happen again. Yeah, and it'll surprise you. It'll surprise
Speaker 2: you again where it hits.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: That's the thing. There's no climate haven. Yeah, it doesn't exist.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, not on this planet.
Speaker 8: I would say, like, if you have money and you
Speaker 8: want to help, you too, late disaster relief a great.
Speaker 2: Yes, let's talk about that. Let's go to ADS one
Speaker 2: last time, and then when we come back we will
Speaker 2: tell you who you can send some money to to
Speaker 2: help people who are actively suffering.
Speaker 3: And we're back. Before we bounce, we wanted.
Speaker 2: To suggest some places where you could donate if you
Speaker 2: are looking to help people who are in Ashville other
Speaker 2: parts of North Carolina. One of the first places recommended
Speaker 2: to me is Appellation Medical Solidarity. They are providing I mean,
Speaker 2: it's obvious what they're providing a lot of like medical
Speaker 2: care and support, a lot of equipment and stuff that
Speaker 2: people need. Their venmo is at app med solid Their
Speaker 2: cash app is dollar sign Streets one de put flood
Speaker 2: support in the description if you send them money through that.
Speaker 2: The other place is mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Their PayPal
Speaker 2: is mutual Aid Disaster Relief at gmail dot com. Their
Speaker 2: venmo is at mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Yeah, just google
Speaker 2: them if you want to find out more about what
Speaker 2: they're doing. James, did you have anyone else that you
Speaker 2: wanted to throw out there?
Speaker 8: Those are the two we did an episode I didn't
Speaker 8: Upsot a couple of years ago with mutul a disafter
Speaker 8: relief that you can now find in your podcasting app.
Speaker 8: Those are the two big ones I think, you know,
Speaker 8: if you're on the ground, help each other.
Speaker 3: I'm sure you already are.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, those would be the two that I would suggest,
Speaker 8: you know, if you buy yourself your water filter and
Speaker 8: you have ten bucks to help out.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how we make the world better? Yep. So until
Speaker 3: next week.
Speaker 2: Solidarity to the people who are in the Atlanta area
Speaker 2: right now where chemical fire, very similar chemical fire to
Speaker 2: the one that happened in a place I used to
Speaker 2: live West Texas, has just blanketed the air in Chlory.
Speaker 2: So remember, folks, weird disasters could hit too.
Speaker 3: We're living the dream.
Speaker 2: We're not just talking about hurricanes and fires here.
Speaker 3: Anyway. That's that's it for now.
Speaker 2: Everybody, good luck, stay safe, make sure you drink plenty
Speaker 2: of water.
Speaker 11: I just want to start off by saying I love you.
Speaker 3: Oh God, yeah, I love you.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't think jd Vance should be saying the word
Speaker 2: love because it it just makes it clear every time
Speaker 2: he does that he's never felt that emotion.
Speaker 1: Oh No, there was something particularly unsettling about him saying that.
Speaker 2: It's like when I try to order food in French
Speaker 2: and it's like, Robert, you're not fooling anyone if you
Speaker 2: look this up on Google right before getting to the restaurant, Like,
Speaker 2: you're not going to impress anyone. No, I guess let's
Speaker 2: start with fuck Mary kill for the guys that know
Speaker 2: the Secret Service will get pissed at us if we
Speaker 2: do that one.
Speaker 11: No, it could happen here.
Speaker 1: And this is the who gives a shit VP Debate episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm Sophielix Triven. I'm here with Kirsten Davis and Robert Evans.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Wow, what a great use of two hours that was?
Speaker 3: That really was?
Speaker 2: I am behind this week horribly, still haven't picked the
Speaker 2: subject for this week, desperately desperately behind. And I sure
Speaker 2: did love that. This was a complete waste of all
Speaker 2: of our fucking time. Not a complete waste because we
Speaker 2: learned something important, which is that the Democrat who seemed
Speaker 2: to have the best understanding of how to fight Republicans
Speaker 2: maybe just got lucky or or got coached into some
Speaker 2: very bad vice by a Democratic should have known better.
Speaker 1: Hey, Robert, I just want to say thank you for
Speaker 1: saying that, Like I agree with you, I just want
Speaker 1: to say thank you for saying, Zoby.
Speaker 2: You and I are great friends. Everything you say is
Speaker 2: terrible and wrong, but I agree with you on most of.
Speaker 11: It, and thank you, thank you, and thank you for
Speaker 11: saying that. I just really appreciate that.
Speaker 2: You know, whoever told him that Americans wanted to see
Speaker 2: him be friendly with jd Vance was not a friend
Speaker 2: of the Republic or of him.
Speaker 3: I think I.
Speaker 2: Don't think it'll work. I've been wrong before. It definitely
Speaker 2: seems to have worked. If your recollection of like what
Speaker 2: Fox and the other anchors were saying, they seem to
Speaker 2: be pretty positive on Walls's performance, So it may be
Speaker 2: working on like media ghoules.
Speaker 11: But that's who watched the VP debate.
Speaker 9: That is who watches the debate?
Speaker 3: Yeah right, I mean that is that is the audience.
Speaker 1: Yeah, only the fucking sickos who are keating on politics
Speaker 1: watch the VP debate.
Speaker 2: I guess I don't really believe this, but I'm going
Speaker 2: to like my devil's advocate would be maybe it's smart
Speaker 2: strategy to accept that only media gorules listen to this.
Speaker 2: The only real way for the debate to matter is
Speaker 2: if you like fuck up, sure, and there was more
Speaker 2: risk of seeming like a lunatic if he went in
Speaker 2: there attacking JD as hard as he could and getting
Speaker 2: negative press, as opposed to this, which probably is not
Speaker 2: going to get him negative press.
Speaker 1: I think he probably had multiple strategies, And like if JD.
Speaker 1: Vance had come in there and started saying some of
Speaker 1: the things that he normally says, which are fucking weird
Speaker 1: and creepy, but he didn't and unhinged and fascist and misogynistic,
Speaker 1: and I could continue, But then we might have seen
Speaker 1: it different Tim Walls.
Speaker 11: But because JD.
Speaker 1: Vance's entire strategy was like, hey, I can appear normal
Speaker 1: even though I'm not.
Speaker 9: Well, I don't quite understand the hesitancy to then actually
Speaker 9: bring those things forefront. They were there, and why not
Speaker 9: talk about it, because like my initial takeaway here is
Speaker 9: I don't think anyone necessarily clearly one. I think both
Speaker 9: of them did just fine. But if anyone comes out
Speaker 9: slightly better than what they were going in, I would say.
Speaker 3: It is Vance. It's Vance.
Speaker 9: I would agree, because somehow Walls was able to humanize Vance.
Speaker 9: Over the course of the debate, they were. It was
Speaker 9: a very very friendly exchange, and that just serves to
Speaker 9: undercut the months of work that Walls has done to
Speaker 9: paint Vance as a weird, unhinged extremist, which he is,
Speaker 9: and instead making him seem like just a reasonable politician
Speaker 9: that although we may disagree on a few things, we
Speaker 9: actually agree on a lot of a lot of the
Speaker 9: problems and solutions.
Speaker 2: We both care about this country. We're trying to help people,
Speaker 2: and like, no Jade Vance. Like there was that bit
Speaker 2: where they were talking about mass shootings and he was like,
Speaker 2: I truly believe that Vance cares about these kids. That
Speaker 2: Jade Vance didn't give a shit about dead kids, never has,
Speaker 2: never will. He's not capable of it. And it undercut
Speaker 2: one of the more powerful moments that Walls had where
Speaker 2: he was like, my son was at a mass shooting.
Speaker 11: Christ have mercy.
Speaker 2: It was so interesting too, because Walls is and I
Speaker 2: know that I'm coming into this as the guy who's
Speaker 2: generally pretty anti gun control, but I'm just from perspective
Speaker 2: of Democratic Party strategy. Number one, this is something they
Speaker 2: go after hard, so you can't half asset right. This
Speaker 2: is not like the border where they really do feel
Speaker 2: the need to lean into the right wing argument. The
Speaker 2: dims are very unequivocal about what they about, like the
Speaker 2: fact that they want to ban Ir fifteen's. Walls didn't
Speaker 2: really commit to that until a little bit when he
Speaker 2: was specifically pushed on whether or not he agreed with
Speaker 2: an assault weapons ban, and instead his language up until
Speaker 2: that point was not very different from Vance's aside from
Speaker 2: their disagreement over fortifying schools. But it was all stuff
Speaker 2: around the guns, whereas the Democratic parties line and the
Speaker 2: line of most Democratic politicians has been it's about the guns.
Speaker 2: And I did find it interesting that Walls he had
Speaker 2: to kind of be goaded into really embracing that by
Speaker 2: the moderator.
Speaker 9: Now, one of the first things I noticed from watching
Speaker 9: the debate, which just happened like once or twice. Then
Speaker 9: I realized this was just like a reoccurring trend across
Speaker 9: the whole night, is that each candidate would try to
Speaker 9: separate the other yeah from their running mate, to be like,
Speaker 9: I'm sure Walls or I'm sure Vans agrees with me
Speaker 9: on this, but their running mate doesn't, and that's the
Speaker 9: real problem. And this just kept happening. They kept trying
Speaker 9: to like be nice to the actual opponent in the
Speaker 9: debate by separating them out from their running mate, who's
Speaker 9: the real source of the problem. And that's just like
Speaker 9: it just just kept happening, Like what are you doing,
Speaker 9: Like you're running out a joint ticket. There's no reason
Speaker 9: to do this. And I think kind of part of
Speaker 9: what their strategy may have been. Yes, these debates are
Speaker 9: probably only watched by freaks, but I think there are
Speaker 9: also certain freaks who are like weird, like independent centristy freaks,
Speaker 9: and I think this.
Speaker 3: Is who they were going after.
Speaker 9: Yep, this this entire debate was focused on appealing to
Speaker 9: the center. It wasn't really based on like going heavy
Speaker 9: into like each side's own base because people they've already
Speaker 9: made up their minds. And I think the the issue
Speaker 9: for me at the end of this debate is because
Speaker 9: both of them were we're trying to court the center vote.
Speaker 9: I think Vance did about just as good as Walls
Speaker 9: did going after the center by and and Walls kind
Speaker 9: of even even helped him. And in effect, if Vance
Speaker 9: comes off as just a slightly better debater when they're
Speaker 9: going after the same base, that just leaves Walls with
Speaker 9: like not really making any ground where he could have
Speaker 9: actually just hit hit Vance quite hard and actually gone
Speaker 9: more on like a party line, or actually just like
Speaker 9: gone more towards like all the reasons that Advance is
Speaker 9: fucked up, which he just would, she would, she just
Speaker 9: avoided to do. Yeah, So my main takeaway was, like,
Speaker 9: if they're both courting the center and Vance kind of
Speaker 9: barely edged him out in some in some regards, maybe
Speaker 9: Walls should have just actually been way more aggressive, and
Speaker 9: the kind of lack of aggression really only hurt the
Speaker 9: Democrats because in the end it kind of benefits Vance.
Speaker 9: If you give this like half assed mediocre performance.
Speaker 2: We'll see where it Because again, this is not being
Speaker 2: listened to by average people in the same way that
Speaker 2: like the last presidential debate was. This is not I
Speaker 2: don't think moves the needle one way or the other.
Speaker 2: Because it was so close, I would be inclined to
Speaker 2: agree with you that I think Vance did more of
Speaker 2: the things he needed to do for this to be
Speaker 2: a benefit to him. I'm not sure in a way
Speaker 2: that helps the campaign, because most of what Vance did
Speaker 2: that probably helps him was stuff that I think would
Speaker 2: set him up better in a world where Trump doesn't
Speaker 2: win reelection. Sure that would set him up to continue
Speaker 2: to have a career and to be re embraced by
Speaker 2: respectable kind of politics. The thing that makes me kind
Speaker 2: of doubt myself because I think there's a possibility this
Speaker 2: comes out as a Walls win, and if that is
Speaker 2: the case, it will be entirely because of the last
Speaker 2: question on January sixth, Because the way these things tend
Speaker 2: to work in popular memory, not again people like us
Speaker 2: who sit through the whole thing, all of nearly all
Speaker 2: of whom are journalists or unusually engaged voters. But the
Speaker 2: thing that there's two moments that are most like one
Speaker 2: from each of them, in my opinion, to get clipped
Speaker 2: out and go viral. And for Vance it was the
Speaker 2: January sixth thing where Walls drilled him, and I think
Speaker 2: this was actually one of his few fairly effective aggressive
Speaker 2: moments where he was like yeah, forced him to answer,
Speaker 2: and Vance refused to answer as to whether or not
Speaker 2: he thought Trump had lost in twenty twenty in a
Speaker 2: way that was I think kind of embarrassing for him
Speaker 2: and is easy, probably pretty easy to clip out. That
Speaker 2: might wind up being the big kind of viral moment
Speaker 2: of the night if it's not that it'll be Walls flubbing.
Speaker 2: We should talk about the China question now. Yeah, but
Speaker 2: I don't think the China question that Walls flubbed is
Speaker 2: on an issue that like Americans overall care about, which
Speaker 2: is Tim Walls now maybe exaggerating when he talked about
Speaker 2: his vacation in China one time in the eighties.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's take a quick break and then let's dive
Speaker 1: in a little bit on that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So, first off, everyone in this debate pronounced China correctly,
Speaker 2: which is a step forward from the ones that have
Speaker 2: involved Trump the last couple of cycles. The downside is
Speaker 2: no one knows how to say it on not a
Speaker 2: single person.
Speaker 11: And not a single mention of Ukraine.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, well that was interesting to me.
Speaker 9: That is interesting.
Speaker 3: Yeah, not one moment where we talked about Ukraine, which.
Speaker 9: They kind of blazed past foreign policy really quickly, which
Speaker 9: is a little surprising considering the events of this morning.
Speaker 2: There are literally missiles landing in Tel Aviv right now,
Speaker 2: like people are talking with I think some reason as
Speaker 2: to whether or not Israel might consider a nuclear response,
Speaker 2: like shit is legitimately a problem.
Speaker 9: I mean, And this is how they started the debate.
Speaker 9: They started by talking about how this was going to
Speaker 9: be like a debate focused on how presidents or these
Speaker 9: vice presidents will handle like America in a sudden crisis
Speaker 9: as you've seen with the hurricane this weekend. Yeah, and
Speaker 9: now escalating war in the in the Middle East. And
Speaker 9: although that was their kind of opening framing, they really
Speaker 9: got over those hurdles quite quick and then started talking
Speaker 9: about me extremely boring shit for the rest of the
Speaker 9: hour and a half.
Speaker 2: The very first question was basically, you know, Iran's bombing Israel, which, like,
Speaker 2: I don't know, did Israel do anything to fucking Lebanon
Speaker 2: right before that? Like interesting context from the journalist there,
Speaker 2: But Iran's bombing Israel. If you're in the situation room,
Speaker 2: Tim Walls, what do you tell the president if you're
Speaker 2: the last voice, should he let Israel carry out a
Speaker 2: strike on Iran? And his response was a carbon copy
Speaker 2: of what Kamala has said every time she's been asked
Speaker 2: on it. Israel has a right to defend itself. October
Speaker 2: seventh was horrible, but you know, civilian casualty is bad too,
Speaker 2: So it was a non answer, but it was the
Speaker 2: same non answer that the campaign has always given, so
Speaker 2: I was not surprised by it. It was exactly what
Speaker 2: I expected from him.
Speaker 9: Started off a little shakey, certainly sounded nervous. I think
Speaker 9: this immediately kind of gave Vance a head up.
Speaker 3: His first like three minutes, he was clearly uncomfortable.
Speaker 9: He got better, especially because like Vance has like debate
Speaker 9: kid energy, right. But Walls did start getting better as
Speaker 9: soon as he pivoted away from this question to just
Speaker 9: attacking Trump, which is kind of his strong suit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think Vance's responsor is interesting. So Walls gave
Speaker 2: He was a little shaky, I think just because they
Speaker 2: had started because he got better on that, But he
Speaker 2: gave what has become the standard non answer answer for
Speaker 2: the campaign.
Speaker 1: JD.
Speaker 2: Vance started his answer on the question of what would
Speaker 2: you tell the president if he was asking if he
Speaker 2: should allow potentially, you know, a massive escalative strike by
Speaker 2: Israel and Iran. What would you tell him if you're
Speaker 2: the last guy in the situation room?
Speaker 3: And JD.
Speaker 2: Vance started the response to that by summarizing the book
Speaker 2: He'll Billy ellig That was in fact, the bulk of
Speaker 2: his response was him talking about who he is and
Speaker 2: where he comes from and then being like yeah, I
Speaker 2: guess it's fine if Israel does whatever. It was an
Speaker 2: incredible response, and it struck me as the response of
Speaker 2: a guy who doesn't think his partner is going to
Speaker 2: become president.
Speaker 3: Again, I thought that was very odd.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was positioning himself for future jobs, correct.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean he was different kind of than the
Speaker 2: other answers. Maybe it was just they were both a
Speaker 2: little bit off their game.
Speaker 3: First question.
Speaker 2: You know that happens to everybody in a debate.
Speaker 11: They both were nervous.
Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, I mean, and this is this also when
Speaker 9: Vance deployed his one of his reoccurring catchphrases is a
Speaker 9: peace through strength.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Oh, I hated that.
Speaker 2: I hated that because it's also I mean, that is
Speaker 2: very close to the quote from the Brotherhood of Nod
Speaker 2: and Command and Conquer and JD.
Speaker 3: Vance, you are no Kine, you know who lives in death.
Speaker 3: By the way.
Speaker 9: In general, I think Vance painted Trump is having like
Speaker 9: approvable track record of proving him as like like Trump
Speaker 9: is going to end the chaos that we faced as
Speaker 9: a nation the past four years, whether that be economic
Speaker 9: or with war.
Speaker 3: He was extremely consistent on that.
Speaker 9: And he's trying to point to like, was your life
Speaker 9: better under Trump? Especially economically, and like everyone's brains were
Speaker 9: completely fired by twenty twenty, so we actually no one
Speaker 9: remembers what twenty seventeen was like at all, So you
Speaker 9: actually can't recall that because whatsoever, let alone kind of
Speaker 9: Trump's mishandling of the pandemic led to like the biggest
Speaker 9: recession in modern history, which also for some reason Walls
Speaker 9: just never brought up.
Speaker 3: No, well, he did it. He did a little.
Speaker 2: He said that, Like he talked about how when they
Speaker 2: came in they were dealing with a massive recession.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The second thing they talked about was climate change, which
Speaker 1: was Jesse Waters of Foxies was very mad that that
Speaker 1: was the second thing they talked about.
Speaker 9: We were framing through Hurricane Helene.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he was very He was very upset about it,
Speaker 1: which is okay, sir.
Speaker 9: Vance Oddly, you know, quickly accepted the climate change framing
Speaker 9: for the sake of the argument. Talked about how moving
Speaker 9: energy production from the quote unquote dirtiest parts of the
Speaker 9: world back to America, where we are the cleanest, would
Speaker 9: be one way to help.
Speaker 2: I think it would have worked on my dad. That response,
Speaker 2: Like the whole you know, well, weird claim, so we
Speaker 2: just got to bring back manufacturing. You know, it was
Speaker 2: not a bad answer in terms of doing what he
Speaker 2: needed to do. It was obviously nonsense, and the moderator
Speaker 2: called him very well on that, liked by just being like,
Speaker 2: by the way, like there's no argument amongst scientists about
Speaker 2: like how carbon impacts global warming. I think overall a tie,
Speaker 2: maybe slightly favoring walls that whole section. Like he did not, Oh,
Speaker 2: I don't think he did badly there.
Speaker 9: No, I think Wills did a good job connecting the
Speaker 9: economy to the environment. Yeah, how as the environment gets worse,
Speaker 9: the local economy gets worse, especially for like farmers, not
Speaker 9: like for yeah green New Deal Democrats, but for like
Speaker 9: everyday farmers, and again pivoted very quickly to just attacking
Speaker 9: Trump and Trump's climate denial. Tried to press Vance on
Speaker 9: Trump's climate denial, and Vance kind of you know, again,
Speaker 9: tried to just blame for manufacturing, saying that Kamala's like
Speaker 9: Rhetorican record does not match her actual action, which are
Speaker 9: increasing foreign manufacturing in general. Vans kind of fell back
Speaker 9: on a whole bunch of like nationalistic framing regarding the
Speaker 9: environment and regarding like the economy, especially manufacturing. That was
Speaker 9: one of his reoccurring talking points.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we are getting to see some of the
Speaker 2: times as spend in real time where they just published
Speaker 2: Ross Duthat's article Vance's dominant debate performance shows why he's
Speaker 2: Trump's running mate, And the url of the article shows
Speaker 2: that it was initially put into the CMS about a
Speaker 2: week ago on the twenty fifth, and they dropped the
Speaker 2: article about halfway through the debate.
Speaker 11: So cool.
Speaker 2: That said, it's kind of unclear to me how the
Speaker 2: rest of this is going to shake out.
Speaker 9: I also could have written two articles, one where Vance
Speaker 9: did well and one where Walls did well. Yeah, but
Speaker 9: that is still that's funny.
Speaker 2: I don't know that that'll matter either. We'll see where
Speaker 2: people land. It was interesting to me Walls did do
Speaker 2: something that I liked twice. Neither time did he give
Speaker 2: it enough force, But he pointed out twice that a
Speaker 2: big part of the housing crisis is vcs buying up
Speaker 2: affordable housing, jacking up the price, jacking up the price
Speaker 2: of rent.
Speaker 3: That that is like a massive issue. He brought that up.
Speaker 2: He said housing shouldn't be treated as a commodity, which
Speaker 2: I never expected to hear from a candidate in one
Speaker 2: of these debates, but he brought them both up, like
Speaker 2: like a guy on a debate who is like just
Speaker 2: kind of throwing out a side point so you don't
Speaker 2: forget to say it as opposed to someone emphasizing it.
Speaker 2: The thing to do with jd. Vance is to point
Speaker 2: that you are one of those venture capitalists. You are
Speaker 2: one of the people who was hollowing out this country.
Speaker 2: And you know, Walls was good at trying to repeatedly
Speaker 2: say it's not migrants who are ruining like housing in
Speaker 2: this country, but he failed to connect enough and he
Speaker 2: had the pieces there to be like, it's guys like you, Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's fucking it's fucking white dudes in suits and earpieces
Speaker 2: who have made housing expensive. It is not people coming
Speaker 2: here from fucking Honduras, like it's people like you who
Speaker 2: need to be reigned in by the government. And he
Speaker 2: just wasn't willing to commit to the answer that he
Speaker 2: clearly had in his post.
Speaker 9: No, he just never went on the attack. And it's
Speaker 9: just odd because he kept he was probably coached on this,
Speaker 9: but like I think it's coaching. He did not do
Speaker 9: any of the things that gave him this job in
Speaker 9: the first place. He didn't play to any of his strengths. Instead,
Speaker 9: Vance was able to play to Vance's own strengths, and
Speaker 9: Walls was able to just be a slightly less polished moderate,
Speaker 9: Which why are you trying to frame him as a
Speaker 9: slightly less polished moderate going up against a debate kid
Speaker 9: like Vance? Walls needs to be like on the attack.
Speaker 9: He actually needs to show like a strong resistance in
Speaker 9: order to actually like make a large impact in the debate.
Speaker 9: And that's why I think this kind of largely swung
Speaker 9: towards Vance. Yes by the end, if they're both trying,
Speaker 9: if they're trying to court this same like moderate vote. Now,
Speaker 9: as always, the immigration section of these is always frustrating.
Speaker 9: No one talks about how fentanyl is largely brought in
Speaker 9: via citizens. No one feels the need to bring that up.
Speaker 9: CBS did have a little fact check, or not a
Speaker 9: fact check necessarily, but like a little comment talking about
Speaker 9: how the majority of Americans pulled are in favor of deportations.
Speaker 9: But they specifically asked Vance, like, how is your military
Speaker 9: deportation plan going to work? And willly separate like children
Speaker 9: that are born in the United States from illegal immigrants,
Speaker 9: and Vance just refused to answer that question repeatedly to
Speaker 9: try to get him to answer multiple times, he continually
Speaker 9: refused it, instead saying that, like Kamlass, border policy is
Speaker 9: already a child separation policy.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: There was a great moment there where he got angry
Speaker 2: at them for fact checking, fact checking specifically on.
Speaker 9: His close but illegal immigrants in Springfield.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, because those migrants in fact had legal status.
Speaker 2: And he was like, you guys said you weren't going
Speaker 2: to fact check.
Speaker 11: No, no, no, he didn't say, he shouted, yeah.
Speaker 9: He yelled the rules were that you were not going
Speaker 9: to fact check that. He just explained how immigration like works,
Speaker 9: how legal immigration works.
Speaker 2: They were like, thank you for explaining how immigration were
Speaker 2: thank you.
Speaker 9: For explaining the legal process of immigration. This has been
Speaker 9: one thing that it has been doing on the campaign trails,
Speaker 9: just explaining the legal process of immigration and just saying
Speaker 9: I'm still going to call this illegal because I wanted
Speaker 9: to be illegal, And you're like, okay, you can't, Like
Speaker 9: I guess, I guess we could just use words to
Speaker 9: read whatever we want.
Speaker 3: Sure, why not?
Speaker 2: Yeah, if this comes out in the public opinion being
Speaker 2: in Walls's favor, it'll be because of those moments that
Speaker 2: one at the end, in those moments where Vance was
Speaker 2: like yelling and they cut out his mic at one point. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like that kind of stuff. I don't think.
Speaker 3: I don't know. Again, I don't think.
Speaker 2: Anyone's going to really listen to this be debate enough
Speaker 2: for there to be it to make much of an impact.
Speaker 2: But those were not great moments for him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but those are the kind of things that get
Speaker 1: clipped out and spread across the internet. Yeah, so we'll see,
Speaker 1: and so the people that didn't watch the entire thing,
Speaker 1: well some of them will see clips like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 9: I think the immigration section certainly showed kind of Walls
Speaker 9: in his stronger moments, talking about how the past year
Speaker 9: we've actually seen a decrease in opia deaths. He continued
Speaker 9: to talk about how Trump killed the bipartisan, a conservative
Speaker 9: immigration bill, which we're probably not fans of, but he's
Speaker 9: trying to make it play well electorally, and then pivoted
Speaker 9: to Springfield and said how like the Republican mayor came
Speaker 9: out and said none of this stuff was true, but
Speaker 9: Trump and Vance kept viewing it. State law enforcement had
Speaker 9: to escort kids to school. But even in this like
Speaker 9: Springfield section, which Walls was the first one to bring up,
Speaker 9: Vance was the big driver of this lie. But even
Speaker 9: in Walls's mention of this, he tried to separate Vance
Speaker 9: from Trump. He primarily blamed Trump for this and totally
Speaker 9: just like ignored Vance's massive contribution to this like big
Speaker 9: misinformation campaign that led to these bomb threats. He just
Speaker 9: let Vance get off easy. And I think this part
Speaker 9: was saved. Kind of buy this little fact check and
Speaker 9: Vance's little meltdown over this legal immigration comment. But still
Speaker 9: it kind of showed a little bit of Even in
Speaker 9: Walls's stronger moments, he refused to like really harp on
Speaker 9: Vance for being weird.
Speaker 2: Yeah, speaking of people who watched the debate, I don't
Speaker 2: think our sponsors did because they have real jobs.
Speaker 3: Hello, we are back now.
Speaker 9: One of the biggest issues for me in this campaign
Speaker 9: is how much time exactly did Walls spend in Hong Kong.
Speaker 9: This is literally one of the primary issues impacting my vote.
Speaker 2: There were one hundred and fifty thousand people in the
Speaker 2: streets in New York City today demanding to know whether
Speaker 2: or not Tim Walls was really in China during the
Speaker 2: Taneman Square uprisings.
Speaker 3: You know, thankfully CBS News is on the case.
Speaker 2: Yes, we didn't have a second for Ukraine, not one second.
Speaker 2: There was at no point any questions asked about the
Speaker 2: loss of life due to the had a side in Gaza,
Speaker 2: not one.
Speaker 3: But by god, this this was really goofy.
Speaker 9: Basically, they asked Walls with this comment he made in
Speaker 9: twenty fourteen about being in Hong Kong during the Taneman
Speaker 9: Square massacre, when kind of reporting shows that he only
Speaker 9: arrived in August basically like two or three months later.
Speaker 9: And I don't know if either Walls just misunderstood the
Speaker 9: question or purposely avoided it. But instead of talking with this,
Speaker 9: he summarized his entire career, both as a school teacher
Speaker 9: and in politics, and then emphasized that although he spent
Speaker 9: time in China, he is loyal to the United States.
Speaker 9: And it was just really odd and like you can
Speaker 9: even see events like slowly like smirking the longer. Walls
Speaker 9: just kept going on about his career, and at the
Speaker 9: end of his like weird like non answer about his
Speaker 9: commitment to the United States, the moderators asked again, They're like, well,
Speaker 9: were you there for the massacre, and then he very
Speaker 9: quickly clarified. I was like, uh, I mean, yeah, I
Speaker 9: might have. I might have misspoke. I don't understand why
Speaker 9: you wouldn't just very clearly say yeah, I misspoke. I
Speaker 9: was there for the aftermath of the massacre. I was
Speaker 9: there during the uprising.
Speaker 2: More I got misquoted. I was there the year of
Speaker 2: the uprising.
Speaker 9: Yeah, he was there during some of the uprising, but
Speaker 9: he was but he arrived in the aftermath of the massacre.
Speaker 9: I don't know why I can just say, yes, I
Speaker 9: arrived the aftermath of the massacre. I misspoke ten years ago.
Speaker 9: Like it's very simple. Your weird, long, two minute avoided
Speaker 9: answer just makes you, like look like weak and unnecessarily slimy.
Speaker 9: It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 1: It just is weird because of course were gonna ask
Speaker 1: that question. Why why did you not have a prepared answer?
Speaker 9: I mean, this only became a new story today like this, this,
Speaker 9: this only became a new story like like a few
Speaker 9: hours ago.
Speaker 1: Still have some kind of a prepared generic answer.
Speaker 3: I'm sure he did.
Speaker 2: My guess is that if I was debate prepping him,
Speaker 2: I would have assumed they were going to ask one
Speaker 2: of the questions about his service based on all of
Speaker 2: like the different sort of like totally right wing shit
Speaker 2: coming out. Everything about his performance was the result of
Speaker 2: a guy who was over prepared and prepared by people
Speaker 2: whose focus was on him not upsetting the apple cart
Speaker 2: and embarrassing the campaign, not on him winning. That is
Speaker 2: how he was coached, and he was well prepared. As
Speaker 2: a general rule for the most part.
Speaker 3: When JD.
Speaker 2: Vance would like make a claim about Fitanel, he had
Speaker 2: a counter fact right that he could bring up, and
Speaker 2: he did that reasonably well. He seemed confident about the
Speaker 2: information he clearly put in the work, but none of
Speaker 2: what he was prepared for was hurting Vance. He was
Speaker 2: entirely prepared to not make an easy fuck up, which
Speaker 2: maybe is the smart move if you're just like, we
Speaker 2: just don't want this to upset anything, because there's no
Speaker 2: way it'll help. Like, my guess is that he was
Speaker 2: told going into this by his handlers, this debate is
Speaker 2: not going to win us the election, but it could
Speaker 2: lose us the election. So what we need to make
Speaker 2: sure happens is that you don't fuck anything up or
Speaker 2: seem too mean or seem too weird. Yourself, so we
Speaker 2: are going to like train you to be as boring
Speaker 2: as possible, and they did.
Speaker 9: That, and like, as a follow up, Vance was asked
Speaker 9: about his previous like anti Trump like Hitler comments and
Speaker 9: specifically was asked, like if he can be trusted to
Speaker 9: actually like give Trump good honest advice and not just
Speaker 9: to say whatever he thinks Trump wants to hear, which
Speaker 9: Vance gave us similarly avoidant answer and just talked about tariffs.
Speaker 3: And then the moderators did not.
Speaker 9: Follow up with Vance no about his avoided answers, So
Speaker 9: there you go. The abortion segment is basically a rehash
Speaker 9: of what happened in the in the Kamala Trump debate,
Speaker 9: with like Vance talking about a villain Minnesota who that
Speaker 9: he claimed like leads to the death of of like
Speaker 9: babies who were aborted like after birth or like some
Speaker 9: some some kind of odd thing that just isn't true. Yeah,
Speaker 9: that was That was pretty silly. This was one of
Speaker 9: the issues where he was weakest, and I think we
Speaker 9: were als maybe slightly upset that that Walls again was
Speaker 9: kind of was kind of hands off on this. Historically,
Speaker 9: Vance has made some a lot of crazy comments on
Speaker 9: podcasts about this topic, and neither the moderators nor Walls
Speaker 9: really pressed him super hard on it, and Advanced himself
Speaker 9: tried to largely be on the attack with this like
Speaker 9: late term abortion, killing babies after birth thing that Walls
Speaker 9: just tried to easily kind of brush aside.
Speaker 3: As just not being true.
Speaker 9: Speaking of healthcare, Vance oddly tried to claim that Trump
Speaker 9: like saved Obamacare. At this point in the debate, things
Speaker 9: just kind of started getting a little bit boring. I
Speaker 9: don't think this debate had as many like good questions
Speaker 9: as the last one. It was a very like twenty
Speaker 9: twelve style debate.
Speaker 11: It just flat.
Speaker 9: It was flat, It didn't feel kind of like present.
Speaker 9: So they talked about Obamacare, how Trump saved Obamacare, and
Speaker 9: Walls talking about how Trump hurt Obamacare. Just kind of
Speaker 9: boring back and forth, and then finally the last question
Speaker 9: was about like democracy in January sixth, election denial, that
Speaker 9: kind of stuff, and Vance opened by set like, we
Speaker 9: have other issues to solve beyond election denial. He said
Speaker 9: that we should we should have like open debate about
Speaker 9: the issues of the twenty twenty election. He then downplayed
Speaker 9: January sixth and emphasized instead the bigger threat to democracy
Speaker 9: was Facebook censorship and how people are like ending friendships
Speaker 9: over political disagreements, and this was bizarre. I think this
Speaker 9: was Wall's strongest moment. He talked about how there was
Speaker 9: one hundred and forty police officers assaulted on January sixth,
Speaker 9: some who later died. He mentioned this other story about
Speaker 9: how like on January sixth, there were similar protests in
Speaker 9: a whole bunch of different states, and he mentioned one
Speaker 9: in Minnesota where people threatened to march to his home
Speaker 9: and his kid and his dog needed to be like
Speaker 9: escorted out by police because people were like threatening to
Speaker 9: go to his home saying that there might be casualties.
Speaker 9: I thought that was maybe that was That was a
Speaker 9: pretty good moment. Four Walls brought up how people in
Speaker 9: January sixth tried to kill Mike Pence, which everyone seems
Speaker 9: to forget.
Speaker 11: It's not talked about enough.
Speaker 2: I mean, yeah, look, that's one of those things where
Speaker 2: like my issues, so there are political, not about the
Speaker 2: specific add yes.
Speaker 11: Yes, yeah.
Speaker 9: Vance tried to be like, hey, you know, everyone does
Speaker 9: a little election denial. In twenty sixteen, there was Russia Gate,
Speaker 9: and I think Walls did a pretty good follow up
Speaker 9: by saying, like January sixth wasn't about Facebook ads, It
Speaker 9: wasn't like that wasn't the problem. The problem was the
Speaker 9: people storming the capital trying to kill everyone inside, like
Speaker 9: that was the real issue. And real censorship is stuff
Speaker 9: like book banning. First time we had a mention of
Speaker 9: any of that. But even in this section about Jay
Speaker 9: six he still like thanked Vance for having this conversation
Speaker 9: and then asked him if Trump lost the election, which
Speaker 9: Vance just avoided avoided answering, instead asking Walls, did convalesce
Speaker 9: censor Americans on Facebook? Which is just great. Yeah, it's
Speaker 9: a great, equally important problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these two issues, And unfortunately Walls's initial response was
Speaker 2: like I don't run Facebook, which just say he's lying, Like,
Speaker 2: just call him a liar to him, Yeah, he's a liar.
Speaker 9: It's wild that like we're talking about like January sixth,
Speaker 9: and Advance's biggest concern is people being banned on Facebook, Like,
Speaker 9: I think that's not going to play well for him.
Speaker 3: It's not going to play well.
Speaker 2: But also, yeah, it was just a missed opportunity. There
Speaker 2: were a lot of those.
Speaker 11: The entire debate was a missed opportunity.
Speaker 9: RT yeah, and like Walls is I think slight fumble here.
Speaker 9: You can point to his like closing statements saying like,
Speaker 9: I'm surprised that we have this coalition from like Bernie
Speaker 9: Sanders to Dick Cheney to Taylor Swift. You're like, yeah,
Speaker 9: that is that is a little surprising. Maybe that's the
Speaker 9: bit of the problem.
Speaker 3: Oh, that was a nightmare line for me.
Speaker 11: Of all the names to drop Dick Cheney.
Speaker 3: Dick Cheney and Taylor Swift hand in hands.
Speaker 2: Well, because like even among moderates, do you think Dick
Speaker 2: Cheney's popular?
Speaker 1: That was That was my last straw. I was like,
Speaker 1: who who prepped him? Who who did his debate prep?
Speaker 1: Who agreed that statement?
Speaker 2: Someone who really likes fucking Dick Cheney? Was it Carl Rove?
Speaker 2: Did they get Carl Rove?
Speaker 3: Again? God damn? It?
Speaker 11: Was Hillary involved with this debate prep?
Speaker 1: Like? Shoot, like, I know the Clinton's were involved with
Speaker 1: with Kalmwall's debate prep. Were they involved with with Tim
Speaker 1: Wallas's debate prep?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 9: I'm not sure, But I think this kind of underlines
Speaker 9: I know this is kind of a larger issue with
Speaker 9: like the Democratic Party in the year twenty twenty four,
Speaker 9: but I think this also underlines, like my issue with
Speaker 9: Walls's performance here is, like this debate, both candidates were
Speaker 9: going after the Dick Cheney voter. They were going after
Speaker 9: like neo Khns and independence.
Speaker 3: The literal devil, yes and like for that base.
Speaker 9: I think Vance does appeal to them more in this debate.
Speaker 9: I think Vance did a better job appealing to those
Speaker 9: people in this debate, which left Walls coming off is
Speaker 9: just slightly worse and not really giving him any like
Speaker 9: standout like performances. I think if if Walls actually like
Speaker 9: emphasized all the reasons that Vance is a freak and
Speaker 9: is bad, I think that may have showed him to
Speaker 9: be more of a unique candidate. In stead dead they
Speaker 9: both came off as just kind of boring moderates, which
Speaker 9: just doesn't make sense because that's like the opposite reason
Speaker 9: that both of these men were picked for their chops.
Speaker 9: They were both picked to represent this slightly more extreme
Speaker 9: wing of the party, with Walls being a bit more
Speaker 9: progressive and Vance being a bit more fascist. Now it
Speaker 9: makes sense that Vance is going to go after the moderates.
Speaker 9: I just don't think Walls needed to agree. That's kind
Speaker 9: of all my all my thoughts on this riveting to
Speaker 9: our debate.
Speaker 11: I have to say me too.
Speaker 2: Man, Well, we've got a flash poll from CBS News
Speaker 2: forty two percent for Vance, forty one percent for Walls
Speaker 2: sixteen percent set a tie.
Speaker 11: Great, Yeah, that was the general. That was the general.
Speaker 3: That was the general vibe.
Speaker 11: Yep, Fox Fox News was Walls was good enough. Vance
Speaker 11: did just fine.
Speaker 1: No moderator's obnoxious, moderators smug an arrogant bias, but that's
Speaker 1: just typical.
Speaker 9: I think the moderators were fine. I think overall it
Speaker 9: wasn't a very well laid out debate. I think the
Speaker 9: fact that Vans was able to to be humanized with
Speaker 9: the assistance of Walls makes Vance kind of the winner
Speaker 9: in the way that like this did more to benefit
Speaker 9: Advance than it did to benefit Walls. And the fact
Speaker 9: that Walls kind of acted counterintuitively to his whole line
Speaker 9: of messaging from the past year is a fundamental mistake
Speaker 9: that I think. I hope that Democrats would like reevaluate
Speaker 9: going forward, but they're the Democrats, So.
Speaker 1: Just interesting, interesting take that I've seen online, and also
Speaker 1: a take for my Midwest moderate Democrat mother is she
Speaker 1: said to me, just remember Tim is from the Midwest.
Speaker 1: In Minnesota is the most Midwest there is. It is
Speaker 1: not it is nature to be anything but polite. Not
Speaker 1: what we're used to seeing in a debate, but it
Speaker 1: was a little refreshing.
Speaker 11: So okay, So I'm just.
Speaker 9: Saying, yeah, if you went into this already liking Walls,
Speaker 9: this won't make you dislike Walls.
Speaker 11: I'm already My mom definitely already liked.
Speaker 9: Right like and like. That's why I think this is
Speaker 9: largely just largely inconsequential. Even a vance got a little
Speaker 9: bit of a like up, it is largely inconsequential.
Speaker 11: Do you know who the winner of the debate was?
Speaker 1: Minnesota sounds like a great place to live, got great
Speaker 1: pr tonight.
Speaker 2: I guess so Walls was clearly doing the best here
Speaker 2: when he was like just talking about how nice Minnesota is.
Speaker 3: It's great here, and Tim, we.
Speaker 2: All know what the winters are like there. You're not
Speaker 2: fool You're not fooling anybody, Like, come on, sir. That said,
Speaker 2: if you live in the Portland area or really anywhere
Speaker 2: in southern California, move to Minnesota. Just get on out
Speaker 2: of here. You'll love it. You're gonna have a great time.
Speaker 2: Everyone in Minnesota is gonna love you. People love Californians
Speaker 2: when they move other places, it goes well. It's always happy,
Speaker 2: always always a good time. So if I had any
Speaker 2: advice to end on, it's people who are currently in
Speaker 2: Los Angeles move to Minnesota. You will be beloved. People
Speaker 2: will want to listen to your policy ideas.
Speaker 3: It'll be great. Hello and welcome. Pick it happened here
Speaker 3: the podcast where I take.
Speaker 8: An entire clidvine, put it in my mouth at once,
Speaker 8: and then try not to suffocate.
Speaker 3: That's that's what's already happened. You missed that.
Speaker 8: Maybe if you were a subscriber to Cooler Zone Media
Speaker 8: you would have been you wouldn't.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry, I'm not doing that, not doing them with FCC.
Speaker 4: Note, Cooler Zone Media will not provide you access to
Speaker 4: footage the games Choking Client far.
Speaker 8: Yeah, that's only in a premium package. But we're not
Speaker 8: here today to talk about snacks. Sadly, that will be
Speaker 8: another podcast. We are here today to talk about my
Speaker 8: recent trip to the daddy En Gap in Panama. So
Speaker 8: I guess to start off with we should probably explain,
Speaker 8: like do you think me or I need to explain
Speaker 8: like where it is and what.
Speaker 4: Look I would the school with a kid who actually
Speaker 4: this happened multiple times more. No, I'm thinking back on it,
Speaker 4: like people who thought that the Arabian Peninsula was in Mexico.
Speaker 3: So like we in fact need to explain this.
Speaker 8: Yeah wow, yeah, okay, I'm just imagining that what a color?
Speaker 4: So how got it mixed up with mixed up with
Speaker 4: the Yucatan. It was really sort of wow, incredible stuff
Speaker 4: happening in my schools.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fascinating.
Speaker 8: Yeah, okay, So for those of you who are not familiar,
Speaker 8: the Dadian Gap is an area between Colombia and Panama
Speaker 8: that has historically, like I've seen a lot of characterizations
Speaker 8: of this which I think erased the existence to indigenous people,
Speaker 8: which shouldn't be shocking given the corporate media, right, But yeah,
Speaker 8: people have lived in this area for thousands of years.
Speaker 8: They have happy and fulfilled lives.
Speaker 3: They thrive.
Speaker 8: There is no desolate place. It's just a place that
Speaker 8: hasn't made itself amenable to capitalism. Really, it's a place
Speaker 8: between Colombia and Panama where there are no roads, there
Speaker 8: are not navigable rivers. It is extremely mountainous. It's one
Speaker 8: of the most humid places on Earth. It is covered
Speaker 8: in incredibly dense jungle. There are fast flowing rivers which
Speaker 8: you have to cross as you travel there. And for
Speaker 8: about half a million migrants last year, it was the
Speaker 8: only way that they could come from South America to
Speaker 8: Central America and they continue their journey on to North America.
Speaker 4: From a minder saying like, this isn't just people like
Speaker 4: from South America, Like, there's a bunch of other people
Speaker 4: who come into South America because it's easier to get
Speaker 4: in who are taking this route too.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right.
Speaker 8: So for most people who are coming to want to
Speaker 8: come to the United States, they can't fly directly the
Speaker 8: United States, right, it's quite rare to get their asylum
Speaker 8: that way, very rare. And there's a HNV Cuba, Haiti,
Speaker 8: nicaragu Venezuela program which in theory allows that it's backed
Speaker 8: up for like two years. So most people will fly
Speaker 8: to a country in South America. The most regular one
Speaker 8: is Brazil because Brazil doesn't impose visas on countries that
Speaker 8: don't impose visas on it, and then from there they
Speaker 8: begin making their way north. Geography understanders will realize that
Speaker 8: Brazil is a very long way from the United States.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that's very bad. Like that's that's not good. That's yeah,
Speaker 4: it's not good at all.
Speaker 8: Short of Argentina, you really, you really can't get that
Speaker 8: much further away, you know, in the continental southern America.
Speaker 8: So what people tend to do, especially so I spoke to,
Speaker 8: just off the top of my head, people from Nepal,
Speaker 8: people from India, people from Venezuela, people from Colombia, people
Speaker 8: from Angola, people from Cameroon, Togo, Iran. I spoke to
Speaker 8: a Kurdish guy that he was from Iran. I'm trying
Speaker 8: to think off the top of my head, that's most
Speaker 8: of them.
Speaker 3: Probably China, I know, there's I didn't speak to any
Speaker 3: Chinese migrants. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.
Speaker 8: I went fully prepared with like a machine to translate
Speaker 8: and everything, and I didn't see any Chinese migrants, which
Speaker 8: is quite surprising.
Speaker 3: Haitian people, of course, respectal Lo Haitian people.
Speaker 8: The Chinese were coming through the dairy and gap in
Speaker 8: big numbers last year. The only thing I heard about
Speaker 8: Chinese migrants was that someone had seen the remains of
Speaker 8: someone who they described as Chinese. Yeah, so if you're
Speaker 8: not familiar with the journey. It is the most dangerous
Speaker 8: part of the migration route in the Americas right, It's
Speaker 8: one of the most dangerous migration routes on Earth. People
Speaker 8: have to walk for between two days and a week.
Speaker 8: I've heard even fifteen days, but the accounts I had
Speaker 8: maxed out a week. There is nowhere to get water,
Speaker 8: there is nowhere to get food. You have to walk
Speaker 8: through mud that can come up to your waste. You
Speaker 8: have to cross rivers that are higher than you are tall.
Speaker 8: You have to climb boulders, shemier across cliff faces. The
Speaker 8: accounts I heard and the things I saw were pretty horrible,
Speaker 8: like and we've kind of had a fun introduction, but
Speaker 8: I would rather go back to the uncertainty I had
Speaker 8: of like being in Syria last year and knowing that
Speaker 8: there were bombs falling on people every night, then have
Speaker 8: to see some of that stuff again. It's horrific. Like
Speaker 8: I can't really. I'm obviously working on a scripted series
Speaker 8: and we'll have that out soon. But like, in terms
Speaker 8: of the things that we do to each other, a humans,
Speaker 8: like little children die in the dairying gap all the time.
Speaker 8: People carry their babies across rivers on their shoulders. People
Speaker 8: carry other people's babies when people are too tired from
Speaker 8: carrying their own children.
Speaker 3: And not everyone who enters sleeves.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 8: It's if you drink the water from the river, you'll
Speaker 8: probably die because there are dead bodies and upstream, right,
Speaker 8: this human waste in that river. If you fall and
Speaker 8: break your leg, you'll die. If you run out of water,
Speaker 8: You're not really in a place where anyone has any
Speaker 8: spare water to give you.
Speaker 3: It's horrific. Every single account of the gap that I
Speaker 3: heard was that no one should do it, that it's
Speaker 3: it's terrible, that it's in human, it's like nothing people
Speaker 3: have ever seen. But people don't have a choice, right,
Speaker 3: it's the only way for people I spoke to, Probably
Speaker 3: I have over one hundred interviews recorded, you know, I
Speaker 3: spoke to more people than that. The bust bulk of
Speaker 3: them were from Venezuela and a place where I used
Speaker 3: to live, And like, I understand that they lots of
Speaker 3: them have children, Some of them are bringing their children,
Speaker 3: some of them are going ahead and trying to send money, right,
Speaker 3: remittances back to their children. Right.
Speaker 8: And everyone said the same thing, that there's no future
Speaker 8: for them in their country, that they don't see a
Speaker 8: way of succeeding, of raising their families, of having a
Speaker 8: future for themselves. There, I met a translady from Venezuela
Speaker 8: who is saying that there are legal things in place
Speaker 8: that won't allow her to have her gender affirmed by documents. Right,
Speaker 8: she wasn't able to graduate with her degree.
Speaker 3: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 8: Yeah, like things are just completely deliberately torpedo.
Speaker 3: Your life just being who you are as yourself. Right.
Speaker 8: People aren't doing this because they want this fictional housing
Speaker 8: assistance or whatever it is that Trump and jadivans. People
Speaker 8: are doing this because they don't see a future for themselves.
Speaker 8: I spoke to Iranian women right who had been on
Speaker 8: the road for nearly a year trying to avoid prosecution
Speaker 8: at home for having participated in protests for like basic
Speaker 8: human rights. It's just the things I heard and saw
Speaker 8: were deeply, deeply upsetting. And I think it's really important
Speaker 8: that we, I guess, kind of bear witness to this
Speaker 8: because it doesn't really get discussed when the US media
Speaker 8: talks about migration. Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll come to
Speaker 8: the southern border for a day, right, And do some
Speaker 8: impressionistic peace on it. But like, pretty often they talk
Speaker 8: about migrants, but they don't talk to them, and so, like,
Speaker 8: I think it's important that we talk to them, and
Speaker 8: I think it's important that we face up to the
Speaker 8: fact that, like, this is a choice that the people
Speaker 8: who have been elected in this country have made. They've
Speaker 8: decided that the only way, for instance, the only place
Speaker 8: to use CBP one right is in southern.
Speaker 3: Mexico or north of Mexico City.
Speaker 4: Can you explain what CVP one is for people who
Speaker 4: don't remember.
Speaker 8: Yeah, sorry, So CBP one is an app that allows
Speaker 8: people to apply for an interview for asylum. Just to
Speaker 8: sort of skip ahead, I guess people understand that they
Speaker 8: have to use CBP one, and they understand that they
Speaker 8: can only do it in Mexico. And the people who
Speaker 8: I met in the dai Enna are now in Mexico.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 8: They take a series of buses north, not all of them,
Speaker 8: I'll explain why of them haven't been able to leave
Speaker 8: Panama yet. They take a series of buses north and
Speaker 8: they get to the Guatemala Mexico border and they cross
Speaker 8: in Tapatula and then they work out the CBP one
Speaker 8: is not compatible with the vast majority of cell phones.
Speaker 8: It doesn't work with older Android like Samsung phones.
Speaker 3: Oh my fucking god.
Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah, it works with iPhones. And I didn't see
Speaker 8: a thing or person with an iPhone. If you're wealthy,
Speaker 8: you can avoid the daily end, right. There are ways
Speaker 8: you can go around in a boat. There are ways
Speaker 8: that you can sort of take a shorter route. The
Speaker 8: route that I was on is the route that people
Speaker 8: who do not have the resources to avoid this dreadful
Speaker 8: journey take. And now they get to Mexico and they
Speaker 8: realize that, yeah, you have to get to Mexico to
Speaker 8: make the application right, and the way to get there
Speaker 8: is to cross the dairy end. And then when you
Speaker 8: get there, you realize that this thing requires you'd have
Speaker 8: a special telephone that you don't have.
Speaker 4: And it's just very bleak. It's a level of human evil,
Speaker 4: both in the sense of it has been actively designed
Speaker 4: like this and in this sense that they don't give
Speaker 4: a shit, like the fact that that fucking app doesn't
Speaker 4: work on androids, it doesn't work older androids, the fact
Speaker 4: that the app fucking sucks shit like the entire way. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like everything about this, Johnny, it's.
Speaker 8: Designed to be painful, to kill people, to strip away
Speaker 8: like the hope that people have.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and it's and it's designed to do this to
Speaker 4: like attempt to satiate the fucking insane bloodlust of like
Speaker 4: seven dipshits and fucking like rural southern Illinois. And it's like, Okay,
Speaker 4: there's literally nothing you can do to ever appease these people.
Speaker 4: The only the only thing that will ever appease them
Speaker 4: is their own death. Like, nothing you're ever going to
Speaker 4: do to these fucking immigrants is ever going to make
Speaker 4: these people like like you could, You could, fucking you
Speaker 4: could put these people in a country that has zero
Speaker 4: immigrants at all, and they would still scream about it.
Speaker 4: There's there's nothing you can fucking do. And people have
Speaker 4: decided that in order to basically people have decided in
Speaker 4: order to try to get like a one percent higher
Speaker 4: margin in an election, they're probably still going to lose.
Speaker 4: They're going to just fucking inflict inhuman suffering on unbelievably
Speaker 4: large numbers of people.
Speaker 8: Yeah, Like I think that's the thing I want people
Speaker 8: to really like grasp is like somebody has made a
Speaker 8: decision maybe we should take an ad break care advertising break.
Speaker 3: All right, we're back.
Speaker 8: So specifically, I want to talk about what the US
Speaker 8: is doing right now in Panama, what it started doing
Speaker 8: since July. Right, that's why I wanted to go when
Speaker 8: I did. Panama had to change the presidency in July.
Speaker 8: We have Molina as president now and he's promised to
Speaker 8: close the Darien. Right, if your source was his social media,
Speaker 8: then you would think it was closed. I saw about
Speaker 8: a thousand people day crossing. None of them had seen
Speaker 8: a barrier, none of them had seen the razor wire,
Speaker 8: but he's posted about they didn't know that it was
Speaker 8: this thing. What they did know was that the US
Speaker 8: had an election in November, and everybody wants to get
Speaker 8: here before that. Yeah, you know, I tried to explain that,
Speaker 8: like we actually don't transition power immediately right that that
Speaker 8: happens in January, but everybody is concerned to get here
Speaker 8: before the election. And what the US is doing in
Speaker 8: Panama is the US is currently funding deportations, and I
Speaker 8: like saw that happening firsthand. With this is this is
Speaker 8: honestly one of those things that just really fucks me up,
Speaker 8: and like I need to ye like I don't know
Speaker 8: it just I tried to record stuff at a time,
Speaker 8: and I just it's all just me saying this sucks,
Speaker 8: this is terrible. This like what it looks like is
Speaker 8: so you leave bab Jaqito, right, which is Barjiquito is
Speaker 8: an indigenous village. It's a village of the Ember people
Speaker 8: who will wonderful. There were nothing but kind to me.
Speaker 8: I stayed in their houses for a week and slept
Speaker 8: in my hammock in their house. I shared their food,
Speaker 8: held their little babies like they were incredible and client
Speaker 8: hosts and very grateful to them. From Baljaquito, which is
Speaker 8: this tiny village right. The population of Barjiqito triples every day.
Speaker 8: Five hundred people live there. A thousand people roll up
Speaker 8: every day and then they're transported in dugout canoes, like
Speaker 8: a tiny canoe that is carved out from the trunk
Speaker 8: of a tree. They're two stroke bolted on the bag.
Speaker 8: I think I posted a picture on Twitter. If not,
Speaker 8: I will do. The micros are taken upstream. They paid
Speaker 8: twenty five bucks each and they're taken five hours upstream.
Speaker 8: If they don't have the money, there's three canoes every
Speaker 8: day that are provided for free, and they generally try
Speaker 8: and make sure that all the women and children get
Speaker 8: in those canoes right.
Speaker 3: One of the things that them but I has done
Speaker 3: has made everyone.
Speaker 8: Wear life jackets just because a lot of these people
Speaker 8: can't swim.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: They've been crossing rivers above their head.
Speaker 8: They told me that they made human chains, right, so
Speaker 8: everybody sort of locks their arms together because the rivers
Speaker 8: wash people away. They're transported from Bajuguesel to a place
Speaker 8: called Lajas Blancas, which is the first migrant reception center
Speaker 8: in Panama. So they're now leaving like they don't have
Speaker 8: reservations in Panama. But they're in the Embra Bunan comarca.
Speaker 8: And then when they get there, they're in the daddy
Speaker 8: En Comarcas. So they're in sort of outside of an
Speaker 8: almost entirely indigenous state of Panama and in like what
Speaker 8: you would consider like Panamanian government custody.
Speaker 3: I guess when they enter in Lahas Blancas, and.
Speaker 8: When they get there, they register, right, they show their passport,
Speaker 8: they do all that stuff, and that's where the UN
Speaker 8: has shelters with the Red Cross has a facility there.
Speaker 8: The Highs has of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society Global brigades,
Speaker 8: all these big NGOs that you're used to seeing in
Speaker 8: these places have facilities there. But to leave Las Blancas,
Speaker 8: they need sixty bucks per person to get on a bus, right,
Speaker 8: and if they don't have sixty bucks to get on
Speaker 8: the bus. I was told these buses are owned by
Speaker 8: Panamanian parliamentary deputies, but I haven't been able to confirm that.
Speaker 3: Uh fucking crush.
Speaker 8: Yeah, someone is putting fifty five people on a bus,
Speaker 8: taking sixty bucks from each of them, and sending about
Speaker 8: twenty buses a day, Like someone is making a lot
Speaker 8: of money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people will remember that.
Speaker 8: One of these buses crashed last year, killing forty two migrants.
Speaker 8: But the really big thing is it is not the bus.
Speaker 8: It's not the ten hour bus ride. Like those people
Speaker 8: are so happy to be getting on the bus because
Speaker 8: they're continuing. It's the people who don't have sixty bucks
Speaker 8: and like, yeah, they've made it this far with a
Speaker 8: combination of whatever savings they had and like incredible tenacity. Right,
Speaker 8: Like they pay someone in Columbia obviously to bring them
Speaker 8: so to get to the start of their walk in
Speaker 8: Deli end. They leave from neck or Clee in Colombia,
Speaker 8: come across on a lancha like a speedboat, and then
Speaker 8: they walk up to the Columbian border where the guides
Speaker 8: and leave them. Now the guides are obviously like this
Speaker 8: area is controlled by the golf cartel in Columbia, right,
Speaker 8: so they have safe passage through that area. None of
Speaker 8: them had anything bad to say about that area. It's
Speaker 8: when the guides leave them and they're on their own
Speaker 8: into Panama. That's when they didn't have water. They didn't
Speaker 8: have food because no one's told them they need water
Speaker 8: and food to be fair, right like that they weren't.
Speaker 8: I didn't think it was going to take as long
Speaker 8: as it was, be as hard as it was. It's not.
Speaker 8: So I've learned a little bit from tiktoks and stuff,
Speaker 8: so some of them bring a bit more. But four
Speaker 8: days of water is a lot of water, like speaking
Speaker 8: from experience. So backpack in the desert. If you don't
Speaker 8: have the right equipment, it's hard to carry.
Speaker 4: So yeah, suit is heavy, yeah right, like you like
Speaker 4: that's the other part, Like if you want four liters
Speaker 4: a person, right, that's like going to be four kilograms
Speaker 4: and that's a day.
Speaker 3: So most like that. By four days.
Speaker 4: What is it in pounds eight point eight pounds, it's
Speaker 4: four liters. Yeah, you're also carrying this like through the
Speaker 4: fucking jungle, which is just like everything's wet all the time, right,
Speaker 4: you're sweating, you're crossing rivers, your feet are always wet,
Speaker 4: like everyone's feet when they arrive in Last Blankas.
Speaker 3: I took pictures of this.
Speaker 8: But they all have these crappy boots that they buy
Speaker 8: Nika Clean Plumbia, and every bin in Baquito is full
Speaker 8: of these boots because they suck, and people like the
Speaker 8: blisters I saw, and like people getting trench foot right,
Speaker 8: like where the entire skin on their foot is just
Speaker 8: ready to slough off like a glove. Like everyone buys
Speaker 8: these crocs from a vendor in Bajiquito there, but.
Speaker 3: Like they can get through all that.
Speaker 8: They everyone who I met in Bajo Chiquito, everyone who
Speaker 8: I met on the trail, had made right. They through tenacity,
Speaker 8: and like a lot of people said it like it's
Speaker 8: a roulette. You go in there and you hope for
Speaker 8: the best. Not everyone makes it, but most of them do.
Speaker 8: So the people who had made it get to go
Speaker 8: to LaaS Blankets, right, and if they can't afford the
Speaker 8: boat from Bak to the last blank they can walk.
Speaker 8: It's non fine, it's not very hours of walking, right,
Speaker 8: And then some of those guys one day and I
Speaker 8: gave them water filters and stuff.
Speaker 3: I wasn't allowed to walk.
Speaker 8: With them, but I was able to talk with them,
Speaker 8: and I spoke to them again when they arrived, right,
Speaker 8: And they get to last blankets and they just if
Speaker 8: they don't have sixty bucks, then they don't have it. And
Speaker 8: then they stay there sometimes for months, and this is
Speaker 8: not a place to stay for months. Like they have
Speaker 8: little casitas which they have for like this one for
Speaker 8: unaccompanied children, and then others I think are allocated to families.
Speaker 8: But it's not much more than four walls in a roof,
Speaker 8: and most people don't even get that, right. Most people
Speaker 8: are looking for a flat spot to pitch the shitty
Speaker 8: tent that they bought in Colombia. And then they're just
Speaker 8: stuck there. And there's obviously a relatively new policy. They
Speaker 8: used to take five free people per bus, but they
Speaker 8: don't anymore.
Speaker 3: Like from bar.
Speaker 8: Jigito they have three free boats a day, right, but
Speaker 8: leaving last blancats, if you don't have the money, then
Speaker 8: you don't leave. And the people I spoke to there
Speaker 8: who are stuck there are still stuck there. People have
Speaker 8: been stuck there for more than a month. Their children
Speaker 8: aren't going to school, they're sleeping on the ground. This
Speaker 8: is not a place that's designed to be a long
Speaker 8: term residence. It's designed to be like one night and
Speaker 8: moving through. And every day new people arrive who can't
Speaker 8: afford it, and so the population is growing and growing
Speaker 8: and growing, and there seems to be no solution. No
Speaker 8: one I spoke to could point to what they want
Speaker 8: them to do right, Like they're being given free food
Speaker 8: by the government. Some of them said the food wasn't great.
Speaker 8: I'm not sure if it's halal like sometimes some of
Speaker 8: them said they'd seen food that had pork in it.
Speaker 8: But I didn't see any food to have pork in
Speaker 8: it when I was there, so maybe that's been changed.
Speaker 8: But they're just stuck there. Yeah, there's nothing they can
Speaker 8: do right. If they want to have money transferred there,
Speaker 8: they can do it through a local intermediary who charges
Speaker 8: the twenty five percent fee. If you don't have sixty
Speaker 8: list Yeah, like you need seventy five bucks now, right
Speaker 8: to get your sixty bucks. Now multiply that by a
Speaker 8: family of five. You can start to see where it
Speaker 8: becomes inaccessible to people.
Speaker 4: And that's that's a lot of money. Like if you're
Speaker 4: in this position, like that's yeah.
Speaker 8: It costs so much more to travel on buses and
Speaker 8: by foot across the Americans and it would to fly, Yeah,
Speaker 8: like all of them would love to fly, but they
Speaker 8: can't because we have this system that makes everyone money
Speaker 8: apart from the migrants.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's like it didn't fucking it didn't fucking
Speaker 4: used to be like this, Like when my family came
Speaker 4: to the US, like we didn't have to like you know,
Speaker 4: we had a bunch of fucking harrowing shit to like
Speaker 4: flee the Japanese and like get to Taiwan. But it
Speaker 4: was like like when my parents, like like their parents
Speaker 4: like came to the US, they just they fucking flew in.
Speaker 4: None of this fucking has to be the way any
Speaker 4: of this shit works. It didn't used to be the
Speaker 4: way any of this shit works. And it's like like
Speaker 4: these are people from countries and you know it's like, yeah, obviously,
Speaker 4: like my parents were like leading from Taiwan to the US, right,
Speaker 4: which makes it easier. But these are also these are
Speaker 4: people from places that the US fucking hates. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: so like you would expect them to get like at
Speaker 4: least somewhat similar treatment to people who came from like Taiwan,
Speaker 4: which is at the time, you know, like US ally
Speaker 4: anti China stuff. But like, no, we've just decided to
Speaker 4: just feed these people into a fucking meek rinder.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and it gets me to my next fucking trauma.
Speaker 10: Dum let's sick an et break before the Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: They're back, Okay.
Speaker 8: So yeah, as me I mentioned, right, these are places
Speaker 8: that the US considers to be dictatorial or impressive regimes
Speaker 8: right around Venezuela, Cuba three to come to mind of
Speaker 8: people that I met, right, and so a lot of
Speaker 8: these people have what's called a temporary protected states in
Speaker 8: the US. It doesn't mean that they necessarily can't be deported.
Speaker 8: Sometimes they can, but sometimes it makes it a bit harder, right,
Speaker 8: deport to those countries. Panama, it's not governed by United
Speaker 8: States immigration law. Yeah, we gave On the day that
Speaker 8: Molino took office. Alejandro Majorcas himself the child of migrants
Speaker 8: from Cuba, I believe, went to Panama attended the inauguration
Speaker 8: and then announced this six million dollar aid package right
Speaker 8: which the US was going to give to fun deportations
Speaker 8: from Panama directly. And I got to see those deportations
Speaker 8: happening right like you'll hear them in my scripted series.
Speaker 8: But like watching somebody take a dad away from his baby,
Speaker 8: or a mother away from her children, or one man's
Speaker 8: brother away from his brother, Like it's just heartbreaking. These
Speaker 8: people have crossed the Daddy in right. They've undertaken a
Speaker 8: journey like I've done a lot of mountaineering. I've done
Speaker 8: a lot of climbing. I like to fuck around outside,
Speaker 8: but like I've never done anything where I didn't know
Speaker 8: if I was going to come back, really, and like
Speaker 8: they've done that. They've taken this incredibly difficult journey. And
Speaker 8: then when they get to the other side, you, you,
Speaker 8: and you, they get picked out and they get deported
Speaker 8: back right on flights that are paid for by your
Speaker 8: tax dollars and my tax dollars. And this includes flights
Speaker 8: to Cuba. This includes flights to Venezuela, right places that
Speaker 8: the US considers to be like dictatorial regimes. And now
Speaker 8: these people are back in Cuba they're back in Venezuela,
Speaker 8: but their government knows that they tried to leave, and
Speaker 8: they've spent all their fucking savings, so they're back in
Speaker 8: square one. I spoke to a few Colombians. They've also
Speaker 8: deported a lot of Colombian people. Most of the Colombian
Speaker 8: people I spoke to in Las Blancats were deported. They
Speaker 8: called all the Colombian nationals to choose the office and
Speaker 8: then these I was told that they were only deporting
Speaker 8: people who had like warrants, like pending cases. But when
Speaker 8: these people got back to Colombia, they were just free
Speaker 8: to go, right, Like if you have a pending case
Speaker 8: and someone delivers you to the government. Non expert in
Speaker 8: Colombian law enforcement, but it seems like that would be
Speaker 8: a good time to prosecute that casey, and these people
Speaker 8: tell me that they've been let go. None of them
Speaker 8: told me if they had warrants. Now, like, I'm just
Speaker 8: going off what they said. But that night they were
Speaker 8: texting me pictures themselves in handcuffs. By the next day
Speaker 8: they were back in medine telling me that they'd been
Speaker 8: sent home, including like I was talking to a lady
Speaker 8: just before we recorded who she doesn't know where her
Speaker 8: children's father her husband is right, And lots of people
Speaker 8: will have like I guess what's the English translation, like
Speaker 8: free unions, Like when they're like married for legal reasons,
Speaker 8: they don't go and have a wedding, but they're considered
Speaker 8: to be married common law marriage, I guess would be
Speaker 8: the phrase, right, like they've lived together for a number
Speaker 8: of years, share a house, etc. Often have children, but
Speaker 8: they're not like they never had a wedding. So I
Speaker 8: don't know if that document makes difference, but I watched
Speaker 8: people have their children taken out their arms and be
Speaker 8: shoved into back of trucks and be deported, and like
Speaker 8: that fucking sucks. That is not something that I want
Speaker 8: to see again. And it happens every single day there,
Speaker 8: and it happens because your taxes are paying for It
Speaker 8: didn't used to happen and now it does, and it's
Speaker 8: just heartbreaking. Like I don't really like it's there's nothing
Speaker 8: you can do. You know that there's no you know,
Speaker 8: I can't do anything to stop it. You can't do
Speaker 8: anything to stop it, right, Like what you can vote
Speaker 8: for Donald Trump, who would like to machine down every
Speaker 8: asylum secret at the border if you got a chance,
Speaker 8: or you can vote to Kamala Harris, who has presided
Speaker 8: over record migrant deaths every year of her administration, who's
Speaker 8: sending your money to deport people in Panama, who knows
Speaker 8: that the choices that she's made are resulting in like
Speaker 8: death in Panama, death here right, Like there were four
Speaker 8: people who died and then the heat wave in the
Speaker 8: first week September, four people who died in o Time
Speaker 8: mount and wilderness, like in a tiny area ten miles
Speaker 8: across of border in San Diego, and my friends had
Speaker 8: to go in search their bodies, and my friends found
Speaker 8: their remains, and I had to confront the fact that,
Speaker 8: like this is the toll of the rhetoric, Like this
Speaker 8: is what the rhetoric costs. The other thing I want
Speaker 8: to mention is that like, even in the most desperate
Speaker 8: moments of their lives, everyone looked out for one another
Speaker 8: in a way that like we don't hear. Like one
Speaker 8: of the things that really struck me was that, like
Speaker 8: everyone's kids are just kind of out and about, right.
Speaker 8: No one's particularly afraid of anyone hurting their kids, Like
Speaker 8: all of these kids, and I saw people who'd got
Speaker 8: split up in the gap, find each other again in Bahojikito,
Speaker 8: and like, you know, there were strangers who had carried
Speaker 8: someone's children for two days because that other person was
Speaker 8: so tired or they had another child they needed to carry,
Speaker 8: and like, yeah, I'm strangely comfortable, I guess in refugee camps,
Speaker 8: Like I went to Panama City after its like I
Speaker 8: couldn't have it. It was too much for me and
Speaker 8: I had to stay in my hotel room, and I
Speaker 8: guess it was just difficult, but like I feel safe
Speaker 8: in those places. I feel comfortable and like in a
Speaker 8: sense it's well, you see the best of us and
Speaker 8: the worst of us. I guess, like I can't imagine
Speaker 8: being in a place where I know I could lose
Speaker 8: my life if I slip and fall, and then thinking well,
Speaker 8: I've got to carry this little kid. Never met this
Speaker 8: kid before. I don't share a language. You know, there
Speaker 8: was a group from Angola and they'd been carrying Venezuelan children,
Speaker 8: right they can't even talk to one another, but they
Speaker 8: potentially risk their lives to help. Yeah, it's it's pretty
Speaker 8: fucking bleak. I'm staying in touch with everyone I met,
Speaker 8: and they're telling me about their journeys to the border. Unfortunately,
Speaker 8: the thing that comes next is eight to nine month
Speaker 8: delay as they apply for a CVP one appointment. And like,
Speaker 8: I wish I could offer something hopeful. Guess what I'll
Speaker 8: say is what I always say that, Like, there isn't
Speaker 8: anyone you can vote for who will fix this, Like
Speaker 8: you can vote for Cornel West with Jill Stein, Like
Speaker 8: I'm not going to vote for someone who fucking supports
Speaker 8: the policies that are creating refugees in Syria, right whatever,
Speaker 8: I'm not suggesting that that's a solution either. Like the
Speaker 8: things that you need to do are like there is
Speaker 8: a person helping moments in your community. I spoke to
Speaker 8: a Jesuit shelter. I'll put them in my scripted episode.
Speaker 8: Like I'm not a big religious shelter guy, but these
Speaker 8: guys were fucking great. These guys are saving people's lives
Speaker 8: and making sure that people have the basic necessity like
Speaker 8: literally turning up at the refuge camp and making sure
Speaker 8: everyone had toilet roll and toothbrushes and things that yeah,
Speaker 8: you don't need for one night, but you're going to
Speaker 8: be there for a month, you don't have, you know,
Speaker 8: what are you going to do spend five bucks on
Speaker 8: toothbrush and toothpaste, but that's five less bucks you have
Speaker 8: for your bus fare, right, So like I'll put them
Speaker 8: out there. I would love to do a fundraiser, like
Speaker 8: if anyone can work out how to facilitate transfers to
Speaker 8: migrants who are in the camp for free, that would
Speaker 8: be great, Like that would be a service that would
Speaker 8: make things considerably easier for people. But the way that
Speaker 8: you fix this is showing up, Like it's showing up
Speaker 8: at the border if you live near the border, it's
Speaker 8: showing up in your community. It's countering this like with
Speaker 8: people in your family and your circle, like there's a
Speaker 8: tacit agreement. I think in the entire corporate media that
Speaker 8: migrants are humans without rights, Like they're just numbers to
Speaker 8: these people, because I don't see them talking to migrants, right,
Speaker 8: Like these are people who you know, like I help
Speaker 8: them change their babies, I carried their bags for them,
Speaker 8: I played with their kids so they could go take
Speaker 8: a shower like that. They're people just like anyone else.
Speaker 8: Of course they are right that, Like, yeah, they're important
Speaker 8: to me, and it's fucking miserable to see my tax
Speaker 8: dollars use to make these people suffer.
Speaker 4: Yeah, these people should be more important than the fucking
Speaker 4: sons of boat dealers. Who's fucking got the land they
Speaker 4: live on because their ancestors fucking shot a bunch of people. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like that's that's what's happening here, is that these people
Speaker 4: who are you know, some of the most courageous people
Speaker 4: in the entire world, are being sacrificed to appease a
Speaker 4: bunch of fucking shits. It's a level of evil that
Speaker 4: is just unfathomable. Yeah, I think, like we really shouldn't.
Speaker 4: I'm somewhat ranting now, but like, yeah, the pivot that
Speaker 4: even the Democrats have done in the last four years, right, Like,
Speaker 4: those people need to be held accountable for what is
Speaker 4: resulting in like babies dying.
Speaker 3: Like I saw dead kids.
Speaker 8: I saw that because Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, whichever other
Speaker 8: fucking Democrat senators and representatives keep voting for this shit,
Speaker 8: decided that it was okay for those babies to die
Speaker 8: because they didn't want Fox News to say mean stuff
Speaker 8: about them or NBC to say mean stuff about them. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 8: of course they're trying to move that stuff as far
Speaker 8: away from you as possible. Of course, they want the
Speaker 8: deportation to be done in Panama, not here, so you
Speaker 8: don't see it in your community. And of course they
Speaker 8: want people to die crossing the Darien and not at
Speaker 8: our border, because that's removed, and you don't hear it
Speaker 8: reported on right, Like it's not a Venezuelan woman died
Speaker 8: on Thursday. We're recording this on Tuesday, like Wednesday. You
Speaker 8: don't see that reported, right, You don't see that there
Speaker 8: are little kids' bodies in the jungle reported because it's
Speaker 8: out of sight and out of mind, And like, I
Speaker 8: guess the thing you can do is constantly bring it
Speaker 8: back into people's minds and make them accountable for their choices.
Speaker 8: And like, I guess this is the point where the
Speaker 8: electoralists get mad at me. I'm not voting for someone
Speaker 8: who chose that. Yeah, like, and I never could, Like
Speaker 8: I couldn't live with myself if I did. I know
Speaker 8: a system which reduces our political engagement taking a box
Speaker 8: every four years is asinine and child like, Like I
Speaker 8: would much rather be out there every day helping people
Speaker 8: than voting once every four years, And like, you can
Speaker 8: do both, of course you can, but yeah, there's not
Speaker 8: a voting solution for this, Like, it requires all of
Speaker 8: us to do a lot of work because we're so
Speaker 8: far down the path which ends in a really terrible place. Right,
Speaker 8: it's already a terrible place that these people's lives don't matter,
Speaker 8: and that their children's lives don't matter, and that we
Speaker 8: shouldn't care if they're dying in the jungle. And we've
Speaker 8: got a lot of work to do to get back
Speaker 8: from that, because apparently it's okay with a lot of
Speaker 8: people in this country.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I think part of the reason why it's gotten
Speaker 4: this bad is that the social ruvements that had pushed
Speaker 4: the Democrats in a slightly better direction in the late
Speaker 4: twenty tens stopped social movement thing. So you know, the
Speaker 4: only thing that these people will respond to is like
Speaker 4: they're actually being mass mobilizations and them be feeling politically
Speaker 4: threatened by it. So you know, we've done it before,
Speaker 4: we can do it again.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 8: The biggest march in this country's history was the March
Speaker 8: of migrants, Right, we can do that again. So many
Speaker 8: of us, myself included, came here to have a chance
Speaker 8: at better future. And like, even if you didn't share
Speaker 8: some solidarity with people like showing up in massive numbers.
Speaker 8: Yet these movement stop social movementing and people fell out
Speaker 8: of a little things. But like, this shit is important,
Speaker 8: and I think we can build some bridges and we
Speaker 8: need to do something to stop this because it's horrific. Yeah,
Speaker 8: and so it's a genocide in Ghaza, like we can
Speaker 8: we need to do something to stop that too, but
Speaker 8: we're not going to do it through voting.
Speaker 2: Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week
Speaker 2: from now until the heat death of the Universe.
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