Behind the Bastards - Elite Panic: Why The Rich And Powerful Can't Be Trusted

Episode Date: November 19, 2020

Robert is joined by Jamie Loftus to discuss Elite Panic.FOOTNOTES: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/aug/02/3  https://tdn.com/news/survivors-of-paraguay-supermarket-fire-that-killed-318-say-locked-doors-slowed-their-escape/article_87dcf9a6-6adc-5281-88fa-c9c56e01779d.html  https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2004/08/04/six-charged-in-paraguay-supermarket-fire/3b3bb17d-1114-4283-a3b2-abfcc8af8c0e/  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7224653.stm https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3188037/  https://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fnews.bbc.co.uk%2Fhi%2Fspanish%2Flatin_america%2Fnewsid_4728000%2F4728731.stm&sandbox=1  https://www.smh.com.au/world/blaze-witnesses-claim-doors-ordered-shut-20040803-gdjgvx.html  https://www.reuters.com/article/idUSN02490311  https://www.abc.com.py/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.abc.com.py/nacionales/confirman-libertad-de-juan-pio-paiva-1357652.html&usg=ALkJrhg8Xe44M3ukEWLA2aGwY_xM9E73Hg https://www.reuters.com/article/us-paraguay-fire-verdict/violence-erupts-over-paraguay-fire-verdict-idUSN0543778820061205  https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=https://www.abc.es/internacional/abci-carnicero-dueno-cadena-alimentacion-200408030300-9622899738428_noticia.html&usg=ALkJrhj5O5vzrxeObwkLNxUYIJYv83QllQ  https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&pto=aue&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=auto&sp=nmt4&tl=en&u=http://wvw.nacion.com/dominical/2004/agosto/22/dominical11.html&usg=ALkJrhh-HnP-9D-qb5y80uPoHK8PGGxEZg  https://boingboing.net/2013/04/14/elite-panic-why-rich-people-t.html https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/01/why-natural-disasters-are-worse-poor/580846/ https://www.livescience.com/1128-mere-thought-money-people-selfish.html  https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/how-the-ultra-wealthy-are-making-themselves-immune-to-natural-disasters/  https://www.jstor.org/stable/20430900?seq=1  https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/james-meigs/elite-panic-vs-the-resilient-populace/  https://blog.ted.com/6-studies-of-money-and-the-mind/  https://www.amazon.com/dp/B003XQEVLM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1 Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Alphabet Boys is a new podcast series that goes inside undercover investigations. In the first season, we're diving into an FBI investigation of the 2020 protests. It involves a cigar-smoking mystery man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse look like a lot of guns. But are federal agents catching bad guys or creating them? He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then for sure he was trying to get it to happen. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut?

That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know, because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut who found himself stuck in space. With no country to bring him down. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. P-h-h-h-h-h-h-h. S-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h. of, well, yeah, like of dolphins, but in this case also of casts, a cast of pods, for example. Is it coming to Bundle? Like, like attorneys general, podcast. I'm Robert Evans. This is Behind the Bastards, a show where we talk about...

You have a lot of pods, guest. I do have a lot of pods, cast. Thank you, Jamie. Yeah. As you might notice in my show about talking about bad people, I have guests, and today that guest is Madame. Ooh. Jamie Loftist.

I'll take that. Yeah. Loftist. Loftist. Loftist. Yeah. That's when there's more than one of us in the room. Yeah.

It's Loftist. And then there's Sophie's Lichterman. It's all... We should attorneys general, all plurals is what the statement I'm coming into. It's a complicated language, but beautiful. Jamie, how are you doing? You know, all things considered. Robert, you should stop asking that question.

I have HPV. I have HPV I learned. Oh. I have HPV. Yeah. I'm sorry. No, it's fine. Ideal.

It's a fun middle, non-threatening HPV. Oh, good. I guess. Yeah. First thing, it was a fun... It's nice to have some suspense in your life that is like, you know, a little less existential, where they're like, is it good HPV or bad HPV? And they're like, well, it's, you know, it's, it's middling HPV.

Well, I'm going to ask our listeners. I'm going to ask all of our listeners when this episode drops to tag us on Twitter and tell us if you have HPV as well. Do you have HPV? If so... Just fill our Twitter mentions. Individual threads. Don't comment on the episode.

Like tag us individually each time. Absolutely overwhelm our Twitters. Everyone, so many people have HPV and I know it's so, but my dad did see my Twitter post about it and then he was just, he was shocked. He thought HPV was really going to get me. And then I just had to tell him, it's not going to get me. This is, we're going to raise awareness about HPV by overwhelming and making our Twitters unusable for several days with a lot of people discussing their presence or lack thereof

of HPV. Cheers to that. So that's my, between the last episode I was on and this, I learned I had HPV. I don't think I got it then. I just went to a gynecologist for the first time in four years. Because health insurance. Yay. It's good to have health insurance.

I haven't been to a gynecologist in a long time. Well, you really got to get your PAP every couple of years. I know, I know. PAPs and bagels both need smear. Swish. Nailed it. Nailed it. And ends with the swish.

All right. Well, we should talk, we should do the thing that is our job. Yeah. To do. Yes. Casting pods. Yeah. The only thing that matters in this world, what's fun about this episode, Jamie, is

that this is an episode about disasters and how human beings respond to them. And we're recording it right before the election. Every time it drops, the entire world could be a radically different place. And that's fun. I want to, I want to listen back to this episode later and feel absolutely sick to my stomach. Yeah. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be so good.

I can't wait. We're talking today about elite panic. Ooh. Yeah. That's the bastard of today. So. Okay. I want to start our story or our episode today with the story of a man named Juan Pio Piva.

He was born on September 20th, 1946 in a Kazapa Paraguay. And while he is most definitely a bastard, he's not the bastard of our episode. We're going to start with him though. Juan grew up working class in a town of 250 kilometers or fake miles southeast of Paraguay's capital, which is Ansoncion. Now, his dad was a bus driver and he started working at age 16, selling tickets on his father's bus. His family also owned a butcher shop and he worked there as a young adult until he had

enough money to open a small butcher shop of his own in the capital, which is again, Ansoncion. Now, which I'm probably pronouncing somewhat wrong. Well, you famously pronounce everything right. That's what I famously pronounce everything right. I know. By the time he was 30, he owned two butcher shops. And through frugal money management and a keen sense of finances, Juan was able to open

his first grocery store in 1985. He named it Yakuabolaños, which means well of water and was a reference to a mythical ruling spring near his hometown. Now, Juan's business was successful, but his growing wealth was met by a growth in the stingy tendencies that had helped him rise above his humble origins. He kept his own accounts and he paid suppliers himself. He forced his employees to work under what one local paper described as an enslaving regime. Oh, yeah.

So that's not, you know, nice. You get one butcher shop and look what happens. It's funny too, cause like the positive articles that you'd read about him would call him like say he came from a peasant background. But it's like, I mean, I guess like you're not rich just cause your family owns a butcher shop. But like, you're not like, I don't know, peasant seems weird for a family that is a business owner. Owns a business. Yeah.

I don't know. Yeah. Like not that there's anything wrong with owning a butcher shop, but like peasant is a anyway, whatever. Juan kept his office behind the cashiers so he had watched them at all times through the glass windows that he had installed and intervene at once if he was unhappy with their performance, which he frequently was. It's kind of a dick boss, you know, we've all, I mean, I guess most people who have worked in the

service industry have had a boss like that. Sure. He's really unnecessarily obsessed with your, what you're doing at all times. Now, Yquo Bellanos became a modest chain of supermarkets with two full grocery stores and one hypermarket, which is kind of similar to a mall, multiple restaurants, shops, you know, a bunch of, you can hold a shitload of people. Like a really big grocery store, right? Like a normal grocery store in the United States, but big, you know, at the time.

Again, we're talking like the 80s here. Oh, okay. Yeah. His company's slogan was Yquo Bellanos synonymous with quality and low prices. In 1997, Juan, whose nickname was apparently the baby expanded his business into a, yeah. Hold on. What, Jamie? Yes.

He's the baby. He's the baby and you got to love him? Is there any reason? I don't know. I mean, I've only found out that. I can't just say I'm the baby unless you're the rapper. No, that's the baby. I think that's what people call him.

Jamie. The baby. That's true. The baby is from dinosaurs, that TV show, right? Yeah. The baby that, and you got to love him. I don't know. Come on.

Continue. I know the baby from, so he's called the baby and then he's like, but don't ask why I'm called the baby. That's a real fact. Well, no, just, I only, a lot of, so for, because of the story we're about to tell is primarily, there are some international stories because it's wild, but most of the good stories were local. And so I had to Google translate them.

And I was not able to find anything else about why he was called the baby, but his nickname was the baby. Okay. The baby. Okay. I'm going to struggle getting past this, but I, but, but I'm here. I'm here. Yeah.

So he's the baby and he expands his business into a joint stock company. So he makes it into a corporation with like stock and shareholders and shit and he starts soliciting investments. Now the number of Yquabalaños hypermarkets increased after this point because now they have a bunch of funding in 2001, one opened his largest store yet, the Yquabalaños botanico named for its proximity to the capital botanical gardens. This massive new building was 12,000 square feet with a dining area that was capable of seating 600 people alone.

So very big fucking store. He's a big baby. Yeah. It's a big baby. It's a big old baby. It's a big old botanical baby. Yes. So yeah, he gets, he gets things going on and everything's, yeah, he's making a lot

of money. He's got a bunch of stores. His net worth climbs to more than $8 million. And at this point, you know, he's too busy and has too many employees to watch over each of them in like the slightly creepy stalking way that he had before. This caused him a lot of anxiety because he was always terrified that his employees might steal from him. Maybe go away.

Yeah. Maybe go away. I'm sure that the crowning jewel of his empire didn't lose a single centavo that was due to it. Juan appointed the only man he could trust to the job of stalking his employees. His son, Victor Daniel. Now Victor had always been something of a disappointment to Juan. The father had hoped his son might one day play for the national soccer team, but Victor

tended towards obesity and was not at all athletically inclined. Still, he was able to earn some amount of his father's pride by being every bit the miser and tyrannical enforcer that Juan had been. One journalist described him as tough on employees and stingy on suppliers. But did they call him the little baby? The baby's baby. Baby. Son of the baby.

Baby junior. Son of the baby. Yeah. I've settled on son of the baby. Yeah. Yeah. So stingy was kind of an ongoing theme in the growing empire of Juan Pio Piva and his son.

While the Yucca Balanios Botanico was a massive structure in the pride of his corporation, corners were cut at every single stage of construction. The ducts from the grill in the kitchen, the bakery and the rotisserie did not vent outside. Instead, they pumped smoke and gas into a chamber between the ceiling and the roof of the building. The roof had no. Hold on. Yeah.

Hold on. Okay. Okay. So there's just, there's just a pollution room. There's just a fire room. Yeah. There's a, there's a room to cause a fire. Oh, okay.

Yes. There is a poison room. Like our recording studio in our, in our, in our beloved place that we can't record it anymore because of the plague, there's a poison room in the Yucca Balanios Botanico. Oh, I miss the poison room. I miss it too. I miss it too. As soon as this plague is over, I'm going to throw more poison into it.

Lock me in the poison room. I'm ready. Yeah. Yeah. We're all ready for the poison room. So they also have a workplace poison room. Now I feel more connected. Yeah.

Except for in theirs, they're venting all of the gas and smoke from their mini ovens, looking for tens of thousands of people on a weekly basis, uh, into this room. And the roof of the room has no wind extractors. Also, you know what else they don't have, Jamie? What? Smoke alarms. No. None of those.

What would you have? Smoke alarms in your death trap. Uh, there's no sprinklers either. Uh, all of the stop cocks on the fire hoses were closed. Um, yeah. So again, absolutely no safety measures taken in this building meant to hold thousands of customers. Yeah.

Okay. Okay. Okay. So it's the Titanic of grocery stores. Yes. It is. It is the Titanic of this. No lifeboats on this business.

Oh God. It's amazing. It's so fucking funny. It's not because what's about to happen is one of the worst things I've ever heard about. One skimped on any emergency training that might have prepared his employees in the event of a fire as well, because if you're not going to take any other preparations for a fire, why would you even think about it? You know?

Start now. Yeah. That would be speaking it into being Jamie. It's like the secret, you know, if you think about it, it will come to you, you don't think of fire. Yeah. I don't want to manifest a gigantic devastating grocery store fire. Yeah.

Yeah. That's why I cut out the seatbelts on all of my cars, you know, absolutely. Otherwise you're just inviting trash. You're inviting an accident. Exactly. I don't want to have an accident when I'm drunk driving my forerunner through a trailer park. No.

No. And that's why you've never gotten into trouble that way. You've been saying that for years. I've been saying that for years, shouting it at police officers, chasing me in my forerunner for years. As you drunk drive your forerunner, I admire it. Yeah. It's always a thing I've really admired.

Yeah. Now, so yeah, Juan takes, again, like aggressively takes no safety precautions for his massive building meant to cook and hold thousands of people. Yeah. I mean, obviously, like if he had done things like train his employees, given to have some sort of fire safety plan that would have distracted from the time they could spend working, which would be the same as them stealing from him. And Juan is not going to allow that to happen.

Show them included a hose or two. These are all unnecessary time sucks. Disabled the hoses that there were like that. That's so funny. More work than not like that's so aggressive. Okay. Yeah. He's begging.

He's begging for this grocery store. He's pleading for an explosion. Yeah. Okay. Now the question, Jamie, of how Juan's company was able to get away with blatant violations of local fire codes. This is an important one because, again, Paraguay is a country. They have laws about making death traps, right?

You're not supposed to. So there's a good question like, how did he get to make a death trap? And it may have had something to do with the fact that he had a cozy friendship with Juan Carlos Wasmosi, the president of Paraguay from 1993 to 1998. In 2002, Wasmosi was convicted of stealing $6 million from the government social welfare institute and diverting it to his personal bank account. So the odds are quite good that Juan Piva bribed him to make concerns over the building safety go away, right?

Yeah. Like the guy who we know was crooked as shit probably was being crooked as shit. And Juan Carlos was like, oh, that's the baby. Yeah. Do whatever you want. That's the baby. Of course, baby. You gotta love him.

You gotta love him. Especially if he pays you. Especially if he pays you. Really cuddly. Baby's on a baby. Let them do whatever they want. Let them do whatever they want. I often say that about babies and about owners of grocery stores.

We've given enough passes to the baby. I'll say it. Yeah. So unfortunately, Jamie, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you cannot bribe the laws of physics yet. I'm working on it. Okay. Life finds a way, as Ian Malcolm said.

So for three years, the many ovens of the Yucabalanius botanica ran all day long, vintage smoke and gas up into the roof without any way for it to escape. Eventually, more than 9,000 cubic meters of flammable gases had accumulated up there, turning the whole roof of the massive complex into a ticking time bomb. And then sometime in the summer of 2004, one of the building's ovens got plugged and timely action was not taken to unplug it, like fix the jam. And unbeknownst to Victor, a fire burned behind the obstruction in the ovens. They weren't cleaning the ovens.

There's a blockage and there's embers burning behind the blockage, so they don't realize that there's embers burning behind it. And yeah, obviously, like, so this fire catches on all of the grease and the grease starts to burn behind the obstruction in this oven and it sends embers up into the sieve. Yeah. No one sees it. They think the oven is just blocked and dead, but behind the obstruction, there are embers burning that catch onto the grease and embers start to float up into the ceiling, which is

again, an enormous bomb. Sounds like a bomb to me. Yeah. On the morning of August 1st, one of those embers finally ignited the pocket of gas in the ceiling. It happened while more than a thousand people were inside the business. Most of them were mothers, many of whom had their children with them. One male customer who was present later recalled, we were entering the supermarket when there

was an explosion. I could see how bodies, especially little ones, flew through the air, arms, legs. Another customer later told press, it was raining fire when I was finishing to pay at the cash register. By miracle, I got out before they closed the doors. Jesus Christ. A little bit of a foreshadow and go, what's about? Close the doors?

Yeah. That's what we're about to talk about. Why did they close the doors? Oh yeah. Great question, Jamie. Thank you. On that horrible August morning, Victor Daniel Paiva, who's again, Juan's son and the guy whose job it is to make sure nobody steals from the baby.

Juan's son, Victor, had arrived late for work because he had been buying his father tickets for an upcoming soccer match. This very likely saved his life because of where his office was located and where the explosion happened. But if it did save his life, his survival damned many more people. Once he arrived on scene, within minutes of the explosion, Victor gave his first order to his security guards. Don't let them out without paying.

Oh my God. Yeah. What? Yeah. Holy shit. I know, right? And the security guards didn't say, fuck that. No.

Oh, jeez. No. It's kind of a, we could talk about Germans here, but I think everybody knows, like the thing that people do when they're given orders, yeah, by the son of the baby. Yeah. Oh my God. So Victor was concerned that the hundreds of customers attempting to escape the Yucca Balaños Botanica death trap wouldn't play out of the exits before leaving the flaming

building. Yeah. He was worried they were going to leave with arms full of groceries and consumer goods. Not the flaming groceries, Jesus Christ. So the idea to Victor that his dad might get angry at him for letting customers get out with free goods of his exploding supermarket was more important to him than the thoughts of the lives of the 1,000 people still inside. So he ordered his guards to close and bar all 10 exits to the store.

Jesus Christ. Okay. Yep. And they do that. They do the shit out of that. Okay, son of baby. I'm going to quote from a journalist in the local newspaper called Nession. Quote, outside in front of the hypermarket, Victor Daniel Piva could not stop sweating.

He called insistently on the phone for the employees to get the money out of the boxes while dozens of people scratched the windows to get out. Oh my God. It's pretty bad, right? This is like so, this is bad writing. This is bad writing. It's horrible. It's horrible.

If you made a bad guy in like a movie or a TV do this, people would be like, nobody would like, come on. And then you're like, no, no, no, no, no, wait. And they call the boss the baby. And they're like, Jesus, don't let him out, they'll steal while the building is actively exploding. Yes. I'm glitching.

Okay. It's going to get so much worse, Jamie. But let's pause for just a moment. Let's pause for just a, just a split second with that horrible vision in our heads of people scratching on the windows of a burning grocery store. And let's have a little conversation about how money affects the human brain. Oh, okay. Yeah.

You want to do that? You like that? You like talking about this? I love talking about how money affects the human brain. It's my, it's my favorite thing to do is my kink. Me too, actually. There have been a lot of fun studies on this. For today's purposes, I want to start with a series of experiments conducted in 2006

by Dr. Kathleen Vos of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. She led a group of, actually, let me mispronounce Minnesota because I probably mispronounced something in Paraguay and I want to be fair, Minisati in Minisati and the University of Minisati. Now she led a group of researchers to conduct nine experiments, all of which primed half of their students with thoughts of money. And I'm going to quote from live science about how they primed people to think about money.

A few methods were used to get the participants thinking about money. And some experiments, a stack of play monopoly money was within a subject's peripheral view or a subject would unscramble word phrases dealing with money. Well in others, a participant would sit in front of a computer screensaver showing pictures of floating money. So one ex, and again, they were not telling the people who were being, who were the subjects of the experiment that money had anything to do with it. Like they were solving puzzles, basically.

And the experiment found that the group who had been primed to think about money persisted longer at solving difficult puzzles than subjects who weren't. And that's probably not so surprising, right? The thought of money makes you willing to kind of like work harder, longer at an otherwise meaningless task. Sure. And that's like not unsettling, right? It's pretty natural.

That's normal. It is. Yeah. The other experiments were a bit more unsettling. Quote. In one test, a participant sat in a lab filling out a questionnaire when a supposed student walked into the room and said, can you come over here and help me? She explained that she was an undergraduate student and needed help coding data sheets,

each of which would take five minutes. Some of the participants didn't help at all, Vos said. The control group volunteered an average of 42.5 minutes of their time, whereas the money group gave about 25 minutes. That's interesting. Another experiment gave participants the opportunity to lend a helping hand in a situation requiring no skills. In a staged accident, a random person walked through a room where a participant sat filling

out a questionnaire and spilled a bunch of pencils. The money participants picked up far fewer pencils than the controls. To understand how money affects interpersonal relationships, the scientists told each participant they would have a conversation to acquaint themselves with another participant. While the experimenter went to retrieve the other subject, the participant was to set up two chairs for the engagement. The subjects in the money group put more physical distance between themselves and new acquaintances compared with control subjects.

Again, interesting stuff, interesting stuff. Now, the write-up I found made a point of noting that the experimental results showed no difference as a result of socioeconomic status or gender of the participants. It seemed like just pretty robust. The only real difference was who had been primed to think about money, which is, again, interesting. Now, this is just one study, obviously. Let's talk about some other studies, because a lot of people have looked into this shit.

All monopoly-based studies are very funny and terrifying, because people just turned into cartoon villains would give it a stack of monopoly money. It's fun because the next study we're about to talk about is a UC Berkeley experiment that involved 100 pairs of strangers playing monopoly, with one player getting double the money of the other. And I'm going to quote from a TED write-up of the psychologist behind the study, a guy named Paul Piff, quote, the rich players moved their pieces more loudly, banging them around the board and displayed a type of enthusiastic gestures that you see from a football player

who's just scored a touchdown. They even ate more pretzels from a bowl setting off to the side than the players had been assigned to the poor condition and started to become rude to their opponents. Moreover, the rich player's understanding of the situation was completely warped. After a game, they talked about how they'd earned their success, even though the game was blatantly rigged and their win should have been seen as inevitable. That's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage, Piff says.

Yeah, it rocks. Right? Did you see the videos of it? The videos of it are very, very funny. It's just a bunch of scrawny college freshmen being like, well, you know, I did good. So that's like, and then just like crunch, crunch, crunch, it's brutal, but very funny. Awesome. I love that shit.

Yeah. Another study in California, which is the sensible place to go if you want to study rich people being assholes, looked into, I find this one really interesting. It looked into how likely drivers of expensive cars were to stop at crosswalks for pedestrians, which they're legally required to do in California. Sure. And they found that, again, I find this very fascinating. The more expensive the car, the less likely the driver was to stop for pedestrians.

No one driving, not a single person, because they studied a different categories of cars and they like categorize them by their cost. Not a single person driving cars in the least expensive car category failed to stop at a crosswalk. Wow. Almost, almost 50% of drivers in expensive cars did. Yay. Corollas.

We did it. Isn't that awesome? Yeah. We did it. Wow. It's like, obviously, if you drive, you know that somebody in a 35-year-old fucking Corolla is going to let you in on the highway and someone driving an infinity is going to run you and your children off the road, if that's what it takes to get out of the exit three

seconds faster. And then if you see someone in a Tesla, they'll run you over, run your family over, and then ask for a thank you. My personal favorite thing I've seen, just of the joys of living in West Los Angeles for a while, was a Lamborghini, rear-ending a another Lamborghini, it was a real let-them-fight moment. I'm broadly fine with all of this. I forgot, you lived in the worst possible area for pedestrians to just get run over

by tech millionaires. It was great. I had a lot of fun jogging. Oddly enough, I will say this, not all rich people this way, because I had Sean Penn would drive through my neighborhood a couple of times, and he was always very good about stopping and giving people time to move. So I'll say that about Sean Penn, a problematic man. I was like, I can tell you, he thinks push.

That's to Sean Penn for stopping, not congrats to Sean Penn for hitting women and marrying Val Kilmer's daughter. I love that marrying Val Kilmer's daughter is an equal crime to violence. Violence against women is the worst crime. Marrying Val Kilmer's 25-year-old daughter is also not right to do. It's not. You know what is right to do, Robert? It doesn't run down joggers, so I'll give him that.

But it's add time. It's add time. All right. During the summer of 2020, some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson, and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys.

Because the FBI sometimes, you got to grab the little guy to go after the big guy. Each season will take you inside an undercover investigation. In the first season of Alphabet Boys, we're revealing how the FBI spied on protesters in Denver. At the center of this story is a raspy-voiced, cigar-smoking man who drives a silver hearse. And inside his hearse were like a lot of guns. He's a shark. And not in the good, bad-ass way.

And nasty sharks. He was just waiting for me to set the date, the time, and then, for sure, he was trying to get it to heaven. Listen to Alphabet Boys on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lance Bass, and you may know me from a little band called NSYNC. What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space.

And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me, about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down. It's 1991, and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world.

Listen to The Last Soviet on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price. Two death sentences and a life without parole.

My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match and when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted before they realize that this stuff's all bogus? It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your

podcasts. And we're returned. That was a good answer. It was really fun because I did live in a very nice neighborhood. It was right on the edge of Santa Monica and the only way I could afford to, because my rent was actually very cheap. I pay like 900 bucks a month, which is cheap for that. Yeah, it's because the building was very illegal.

The landlord had illegally subdivided it. The half of our power came from another unit and half of their power came from our house. So like when power would go out, we'd both lose half of our... We had the city come in once and be like, you realize that you could sue your landlord because of all of the dangerous fire hazards in this apartment because of how illegally she subdivided it. And we said, yes, but here's how much we pay in rent. And they said, oh, I get it.

Take your life in your hands every day, big, total six. Oh, yeah. No, I would risk my life too for a place that cheap. Fuck. God, what a great country. God, the best place in the world, no notes. Yeah. I'm still not over it.

Sean Penn. Oh, I hate Sean Penn. I'm glad he ran you over with his car. He's a terrible person. The only way he could be worse is if he ran you over with his car. So there's that. Yep. There's that.

You upset Jamie. I'm sorry, Jamie. It's okay. I just, I hate Sean Penn. That's all. Yeah. And speaking of, you know what Sean Penn is, a rich person, let's keep talking about how bad that is for you.

So yeah, again, another study, because again, you know, reading one of these studies, there's things to criticize, you know, about all of them as they're all with all studies. Sure. But you keep reading all of the many studies that have been done on this and they all make a very, very consistent point. A 2010 study from UCSF asked 300 participants mixed between upper and lower income individuals to analyze facial expressions of people in photos and emotions of people in mock interviews. Poor people were consistently better at reading the emotions of others, but this is neat.

If upper class participants were told to imagine themselves in the position of poorer people, it boosted their ability to read other people's emotions. Oh. Yeah. Okay. Interesting, right? That's fascinating to me. Just encouraging.

You just really hold a rich person's hand to get them to empathy. Yeah. Now imagine other people were capable of feelings. I know this is going to be hard for you. But it's just a creative experiment. Yeah. God. It's not real.

It's not real. The poor don't feel. But imagine they did. But imagine they did. Oh, God. Okay. Okay. So there's a lot more research of this type out there, if you're interested in finding

it. To conclude this portion of the episode, I'd like to read one last quote from Dr. Piff, summarizing a significant body of research into how wealth affects behavior. That's kind of this guy's deal. Okay. Quote, as a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness, and their ideology of self-interest increases.

Neat, huh? Neat. Neat. Yeah. Now, let's return to the Aquabellanio botanica, the supermarket actively inflames with its doors boarded, or yeah, yeah, and locked. While Victor in his guards kept the doors barred and rescued the precious cash from the registers, again, he's actively getting the cash out while he's preventing human beings from exiting.

That is absurd. I mean, but you have to imagine they're seizing the cash from the hands of customers and employees who are on fire? Okay. Like people are literally describing paying, being forced to pay for their groceries while fire rains from the ceiling, guess it's, it's, it's fucking wild. Yeah. So well, this goes on for a while and eventually the ground floor of the supermarket collapses

into an underground car park where dozens and dozens of people were trying to flee in their vehicles. And of course, those people all burned to death. The food court, it was completely engulfed in flames. A lot of people were just incinerated. Cyanide gas given off by toxic paint used on the building's roof, because they used poisonous paint that they weren't supposed to be using on the building's roof, began to suffocate panicked shoppers.

The ones who were closest to the doors and windows started breaking them with whatever they could find. People outside the supermarket realized what was happening and spraying into action, gathering sticks and poles to try to batter down the locked main entrance. Oh, good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Human beings who aren't pieces of shit do attempt to come to the rescue of their fellow human beings. As always happens, we'll keep talking about that. Liliana Hernandez, who lived next door to the market, told reporters, we couldn't get inside and people couldn't get out. When the firefighters arrived, they too were stymied by the locked doors of the Some victims were found hugging each other. One of them a woman with a smile child in her arms, a firefighter told local radio.

A disco opposite to the supermarket was being used as a makeshift morgue. Since a failed military insurrection in 1947 had left around 8,000 people dead. Hmm. of course, denied that they had ordered the doors locked and barred. Victor immediately blamed the store operations manager, Vincente Ruiz, for giving the order. Since Ruiz had died in the fire,

he was a pretty good scapegoat. No, I was like, please don't say he blamed a person who burned up when it was his fault. Holy shit. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, I don't know. I don't even know what to say it is. It's horrible. It's, it's not good.

It's, that's, I can't even like wrap my head around that. That's, and just like a store so obscenely large to have no oversight is so absurd. It's pretty good, Jamie. I say that, but like, I was fucking in tears reading some of these stories. Like so many little kids burnt to death in the arms of their mothers,

trying to shield them from the flames, dozens of them. Like an out, like, like this is, this is like a war crime level tragedy, but it was a supermarket fire. Like, like you could, it couldn't be a more unsuspecting group of people and they're, you have to imagine all like ordinary. I just, I can't even wrap my head around that.

That's so, and then they, and then they blamed someone that they had killed. Yeah. Oh, okay. It's honestly, I think to most people, it is an incomprehensible level of evil. Like in, in fairness, to most people who own supermarkets, it's like, you have insurance.

Why are you? It's like, it's one thing if you're like, you know, fucking big oil did something like that, but it's a supermarket. I mean, I guess Jeff Bezos owns a supermarket, but I don't think of supermarket owners. It's a supervillain. You're watching dying people pound on the windows

of your store as you rescue their cash. Like, it's amazing. I just, the, the, also just like the level of brain dead. Like, how does he think he's going to get away with that? He's like, well, at least I'll have escape money. At least I'll have the escape money. It's, it's, it's supervillain, like cartoon supervillain. Like not honestly not cause a cartoon supervillain

wouldn't do this. No, they would, they would disappear. Captain Planet villains had more nuance. It's amazing. Yeah, so these, obviously they get charged with gross negligence and a bunch of other crimes alongside four security guards. From jail, one issued a proposition

to rebuild his supermarket and make the families of the victims into shareholders. He also offered to give them jobs, which some might call a mixed offer at best. Oh, he really is like the world's dumbest person. There's, oh God, the rich people are horrible, but the children of rich people are worse because they don't, they don't even have a skill.

It's that's fucking, that's so, I can't wrap my head around this story. This is so fucked up. It's pretty fun. So Paraguayans were not enticed by the proposition of a store to profit the families of the dead people. No kidding.

That's a very hardcore libertarian answer for like, well, what if we just make a store that they can profit from that we build over the ashes of where their loved ones died in my supermarket fire? Could be a fun second act. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, it's the kind of thing you do

if other people aren't people to you, you know? Right, right. Yes, so yeah, the obviously the people of Paraguay of Ansocion were not enticed by this proposition. They filled the streets of the capital with graffiti, decrying the pythons as murderers. In December of 2006, Juan Victor and one security guard were convicted of manslaughter,

receiving maximum sentences of five years. Several companies' shareholders had been tried for negligence and they were all acquitted. This did not make people happy. And in the citizens of this- No, five years is fucking nothing. No, yeah, they killed 424 people. Are you kidding me?

They should be killed in the town square. Yeah, they should be publicly executed. I'm okay with that in this case, yeah. Oh my God. The people of Ansocion led by a family member of the dead immediately rioted through the streets, breaking things, lighting police cars on fire, doing totally justified shit, right?

This is absolutely the time to riot, right? Yeah. We can debate over what justifies a riot. This sure does, you know? This is the yardstick to use. Yeah, this is like the clearest justification, I can imagine, a lot of things justify riots, but for sure this, you know?

Yeah, so yeah, they rioted and eventually the government was forced to retry the case because people lit enough cars on fire. Oh good, well that's- Might be a lesson there. Lighting cars on fire gets just accomplishes things. One could argue that, you know? One could, I mean, it's just-

It certainly did in this case, you know? I lit cars on fire in Minecraft and it's really accomplished a lot locally. It got the job done here, sort of. Better than things had been before. One was re-sentenced to 12 years in prison, Victor to 10, the security guard to five, and one company shareholder was sentenced

to two and a half years. Which, yeah, you know, it's better. It's still like not- How many cars need to be set on fire to get a reasonable sentence? Jesus Christ. That's exactly what the people of Paraguay are. They had been agitating for a 25-year sentence,

which is the maximum that is allowed. Now, one of the leaders that evolved out of the protest movement was a guy named Dr. Roberto Almiron. He treated many of the burn victims of the fire all the while unaware that his own son had perished in the blaze. So you see why this guy, you know? Yeah.

Yeah, Dr. Almiron told reporters, this is the country we have where the institutions do not fulfill their function, where the businessmen are capable of creating a crematorium for innocence. A drawer with two doors is a roof of a carafe and closed with fences and jail-like bars for a few dollars. Just in a country with an absent state

where assistance to the victims was only media and temporary. After that, everything remained the same. The same country where the judiciary and the municipality itself are buildings that do not have a fire escape. Devoid of values in a terminal state. God.

I mean, he's talking like, I think we can all identify with what he's saying, right? Yeah. Yeah. The state and the judiciary are buildings with no fire escape. Yes. I don't.

Yeah, I was like, what an unfortunate metaphor, but I see what he's saying. Yeah. The lyrics of a rap song broadcast on Paraguay and television after the verdict were more succinct. Let no one leave without paying. And so it was, they paid with their lives. Yeah.

Yup. Oh, well, that's fucking devastating. You know it's not devastating, Jamie. What? Products and services. Products and that's, you know, I think that that, if there's anything we just learned, it's that the power of products and services

is what's gonna pull us through as a people. That's what's going to save us is products and or services. And or services. All right. I'm so sorry. Here's ads. During the summer of 2020,

some Americans suspected that the FBI had secretly infiltrated the racial justice demonstrations. And you know what? They were right. I'm Trevor Aronson and I'm hosting a new podcast series, Alphabet Boys. As the FBI, sometimes you gotta grab the little guy to go after the big guy.

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What you may not know is that when I was 23, I traveled to Moscow to train to become the youngest person to go to space. And when I was there, as you can imagine, I heard some pretty wild stories. But there was this one that really stuck with me about a Soviet astronaut who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him down.

It's 1991 and that man, Sergei Krekalev, is floating in orbit when he gets a message that down on Earth, his beloved country, the Soviet Union, is falling apart. And now he's left defending the Union's last outpost. This is the crazy story of the 313 days he spent in space, 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What if I told you that much of the forensic science you see on shows like CSI isn't based on actual science? The problem with forensic science in the criminal legal system today is that it's an awful lot of forensic and not an awful lot of science. And the wrongly convicted pay a horrific price.

Two death sentences and a life without parole. My youngest, I was incarcerated two days after her first birthday. I'm Molly Herman. Join me as we put forensic science on trial to discover what happens when a match isn't a match. And when there's no science in CSI. How many people have to be wrongly convicted

before they realize that this stuff's all bogus. It's all made up. Listen to CSI on trial on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. We're talking about how funny it is that attorney general, the plural of it is attorney's general.

Attorney's general. And we were talking about the son's glass. It's very silly to me. I know it's correct grammar, but it's silly. If I clone Sunny, it's son's glasses. Wait, is it son's glass? Son's glass, yeah. Attorney's general son's glass.

Mother's fuck. They should really change that. Yeah, it's funny. You know, it's not funny, Jamie. Oh, whatever you're about to say for the next hour. The Equibolano supermarket fire was not funny. It was a nightmarish tragedy enabled by greedy shareholders of Craven manager, complicit security guards

and a profoundly selfish company founder, Juan Paiva. I meant what I said earlier. One is not the primary bastard of today's story. Our bastard is instead a phenomenon, a concept, the deadly serious thing that he represents in his actions. It's a phenomenon sociologists call elite panic. Okay. Yep.

Sounds like a boutique store where they charged $40 for a pair of socks, but what is it? Well, it's a term that was coined by sociologists Karen Chess and Lee Clark of Rutgers University in a 2008 study they published under the title, elites in panic, more to fear than fear itself. It opens with these words. Sociological research on how people respond to disasters

has been going on for more than 50 years. From that research comes one of the most robust conclusions in sociology, panic is rare. And of course, they mean that panic from regular people directly affected by a disaster is extremely rare. The normal human behavior, regardless of body count, type or duration of tragedy is compassion and collective action.

Mutual aid is far more common than panic. Think of the people outside of the Yquibalano supermarket, right? The ones who rush to help their fellow human beings by trying to batter down the doors with poles that they found nearby. That's a bunch of people, one person made the decision to lock the doors, you know?

Right, so the argument that mutual aid is the more natural instinct than the panic, okay. Is the documented by extensive research most common reaction of people in disasters. Think of the people during Hurricane Katrina who used their boats to search for food and other supplies and abandoned stores that they could then distribute

to their fellow citizens in need. A lot of times they were called looters by the noose, you know, it's like the people being like, well, this place is flooding everything and it's going to go bad and people are hungry. Perhaps we should take the food out of it. They could have sold that, don't you think? They didn't pay for it.

It is the same instinct that led to that, all of those people burning to death in the Yquibalanias. It's like, well, but they're not paying. Yeah, like it doesn't matter that it's all wasted because the building's on fire or flooded, they're not paying, you know? Who would they pay? There are stories, who would they pay?

There's no one to pay. Now, the main argument of Chess and Clark's study is that governments should include the citizenry more in their disaster plans rather than assuming danger will cause the citizenry to collapse into an unruly mob who need to be controlled by armed men. Because that's basically all government plans for disasters, like everyone's going to panic

and the cops will have to beat them into responding properly, right? Like that's how we, yeah, or the National Guard or whatever. Quote, yeah. A classic approach. Classic elites. Birkeland, who is conducted extensively, who's another researcher,

who has conducted extensive research on the matter, argues that the disaster plans of policymakers and emergency management personnel assume it is likely it being panic. Planners and policymakers sometimes act as if the human response to threatening conditions is more dangerous than the threatening conditions themselves. Politically, the problem of panic endures

because as Tierney argues, who's another researcher, it resonates with institutional interests. Operating on the assumption that people panic and disasters leads to a conclusion that disaster preparation means concentrating resources, keeping information close to the vest, and communicating with people in soothing ways, even if the truth is disquieting.

As Tierney points out, such an approach advances the power of those at the top of organizations. Oh, okay, okay. Good stuff. This is, yeah, this is tracking, but I don't hear it phrased this way a lot. All scans. In 2006, and again, one of the fun things

about this is that there's very little disagreement about people who study disasters on this subject. Interesting. In a 2006 study of disaster responses conducted by Dr. Clark, they noted rather cautiously that disaster plans only ever assume panic on behalf of the general public. People in positions of authority, including the cops,

are assumed to keep a cool head at all times. The powerless, not the powerful, are said to panic, but the reality is generally the exact opposite. It's great, it fucking rules. We had a ton of documented evidence of this being exactly the case. If only people had devoted their lives to proving that this was not the case.

Quote, the image of panic is generally associated with large numbers of people and elites do not congregate, making it hard to transfer the image of panic to them. One does not see collections of chief executive officers amassed in a stadium. And so it is unlikely that a story will ever appear about CEO panic in response to a soccer stadium fire. Still, this is not a sufficient explanation for panic

to be so rarely attributed to people in positions of authority. For one could in principle explain the actions of chief executives, heart surgeons, army generals, or university officials by alleging that they panicked in certain situations. Yet, such explanations remain what rare. So Jamie, let's talk about some of those examples.

We opened this episode with the story of a CEO panicking. And I think perhaps we should talk about an army general panicking next. Okay, yeah, let's get a wide genre of people in power losing their shit. Losing their fucking minds, yeah. At 512 of AM, on April 18th, 1906, the city of San Francisco suffered a massive earthquake.

For a full minute, the ground shook, tossing tall buildings to the ground like discarded Legos, cracking the streets, breaking gas lines, crumbling streetcars. It also sent chimneys crumbling to the ground. And when one mixes falling chimneys with punctured gas lines, it's perhaps not surprising that the next thing to strike San Francisco was a Titanic fire.

By the time it was done, 28,000 structures had been incinerated and nearly five square miles of the city was just gone. More than 3,000 people died. And obviously like this is 1906, we're never gonna know the fucking death toll. Half the city was left homeless. People didn't even count to 5,000 back then.

No, no, no, they hadn't invented numbers larger than 3,000. That's why it was 3,000. Right, they're like, well, we've topped out. I guess everyone's dead. We had our scientists, we're trying to count to see how high numbers went, but they kept dying of old age at 3,000.

So that was the ceiling of numbers at this point. Oh, old, timey people. Well, that said, this is very sad. It's a horrible disaster, yeah. Thankfully, they're further away from us in time. So it's easier to- So you're like, but their clothes were so silly. Yeah.

Again, distance creates sociopathy, which is why the rich and powerful act the way they do. And why we're gonna tell jokes about a fire that killed 3,000 people in San Francisco. So where's the problem? Because we're distant from it. Every human beings are the problem, yes. Power is the problem.

Hierarchy is the problem. Distance is the problem. But anyway, so half of the city's left homeless, which is exactly the sort of situation you'd expect to generate a tremendous amount of panic. There are walls of fire eating the city. People's homes are gone. They've just had an earthquake.

Yeah, you would expect panic, right? Like that, yeah. Instead, the very opposite occurred. In her masterpiece, A Paradise Built in Hell, Rebecca Solnit tells the story of Ms. Anna Amelia Holhauser, a middle-aged woman whose home wound up in the path of the fire. So she loses her house and she winds up,

she travels calmly with thousands of other people to Golden Gate Park, where they like are able to hide from the fire basically. And she pretty much immediately decides to establish a mutual aid kitchen. Quote, Holhauser started a tiny soup kitchen with one tin can to drink from and one pie plate to eat from.

All over the city, stoves were hauled out of damaged buildings. Fire was forbidden indoors since many standing homes had gas leaks or damaged flus or chimneys. Or primitive stoves were built out of rubble and people commenced to cook for each other, for strangers, for anyone in need.

Her generosity was typical, even if her initiative was exceptional. Holhauser got funds to buy eating utensils across the bay in Oakland. The kitchen began to grow and she was soon feeding two to 300 people a day. Not a victim of the disaster, but a victor over it and the hostess of a popular social center,

her brothers and sisters keeper. Some visitors from Oakland liked her makeshift dining camp so well they put up a sign. Palace Hotel, naming it after the burned out downtown luxury establishment that was repeatedly once the largest hotel in the world. That's amazing. This was the norm.

She was one of hundreds and thousands of people who made like one of the stories that she tells in this book is of like a local cop who the earthquake hits, he sees people looting and instead of doing anything about that, he starts a kitchen to feed people. Like, and yeah. Like that's what people do.

Yeah, that's yeah. Even cops when they're at ground zero can act that way. Big moment for cops. 1906 cops, they weren't trained yet. So that was helpful. Yeah, that's incredible. Yeah, mutual aid networks were incredibly common in San Francisco.

Butchers opened up their shops and started handing out free meat and masks for kitchens like the Palace Hotel to turn into stew. Cause they were like, well, it's gonna go bad. We might as well just give it away to people. And like there were some large butcher shops who stopped but there were at least a couple of very large like businesses that were like massive butchers

who were, who not only gave away their meat but use their employees and resources and vehicles to cart it around the city for free to hand out to people. So again, again, we're not, I'm not saying that like rich people business always react the way that the Yquibalanius guy did cause they were at ground zero of the disaster. They were affected by it.

And they immediately sue like my house has gone to my city's fucked up. Like this isn't about money, people need to eat. Yeah, I mean, very different situation but I feel like we've even seen some of that this year in like areas that are highly affected by COVID where some businesses that you're like, oh, I wouldn't have expected this business

to have stepped it up, but they're just in the middle of it. So it makes more sense that they would actually do something. Yeah, during the worst of the police and federal riots in Portland, there was a free rib restaurant that started and was given like donated like $350,000. And then there was an armed coup that took it over but like, that's a long story.

I look forward, I look forward. Yeah. So yeah, it was this is like, but again, like this is just what people started doing. They started collecting people like groups of young men spontaneously organized to pick through the ruins and ruins of stores and buildings to grab warm clothing, blankets, medicine and food

that they could then take back and give away to their fellow people to whoever needed it. Selling of such items was all but unheard of during this period. As one man who operated a mutual aid food delivery wagon later recalled, and the reason he did this is cause he had a horse and a cart and he was like, well, obviously the thing I should do

is use my resources to give food to people for free. Right? Yeah. As this guy said, quote, no questions were asked, no investigations were attempted. Whatever the applicant required was given to him or her if I had it and the plan seemed to work excellently. Again, no means testing.

No, do you really need this? Just like you say you need it, here you go. Yeah. Here you go. Like here you fucking go. This is what I have. You know, if I have it, it's yours. Despite the horrors of the quake and the fire,

many San Franciscans who survived described the city in this period as something of a utopia with people coming together to take care of each other in a way that everyone seemed to find more fulfilling than their daily lives had been. The writer Mary Austin noted that the people of her city became houseless, but not homeless. For it comes to this with the bulk of San Franciscans,

that they discovered the place and the spirit to be home rather than the walls and the furnishings. No matter how the insurance totals foot up, what landmarks, what treasures of art are vanished, San Francisco or San Francisco is all there yet. Fast as the tall banners of smoke rose up and the flames reddened them, rose up with it something impalpable, like an exhalation.

That's really beautiful. I feel about that, I feel about that. I made fun of them 10 minutes ago. Yeah, it's beautiful. The tech industry wasn't there yet, so people were better. Before Zuckerberg got there, it sounds like a beautiful place. There was a community spirit at one point. Yeah, I'm sorry San Franciscans,

I know a lot of people who will, yeah, anyway. People doing the right thing in San Francisco, keep doing it, because there's not enough of you. Yeah, or there's too many of the other ones. Yeah, so hundreds of plumbers worked free for a full week to stop broken pipes so that there wouldn't be water flooding everywhere. One automobile dealership lint all of its cars out

as ambulances for the sick and wounded, was just like, here, take all of our fucking cars as ambulances, do whatever with them. We trust that you will use them as they need to be used. Clearly people need vehicles right now. The manager of the dealership later gave a quote to a reporter that was essentially an early summary of the concept of elite panic.

I find this fascinating. Quote, all the big hotels, such as the St. Francis, the palace and others, were filled with eastern and other tourists who seem to have lost their heads entirely. Indeed, the only really scared people that I can remember having seen through the first three days of the fire were people of this class.

In many cases, these would come to the garage offering to pay any price for the use of an automobile that would take them out of the city. However, we absolutely refused to accept money from any such applicant. And as long as we saw that the petitioner was able to walk, we refused to furnish a machine. Hell yeah.

Fuck yeah. Yeah. But it's great. But it's already the rich people trying to prioritize their needs over. Yeah. Yeah, over ambulances, yes. Yeah.

Fucking great. The people of San Francisco, by and large, did not panic. But Brigadier General Frederick Funston, the commanding officer of the Presidio military base, was a different story. According to Rebecca Solnit, he quote, perceived his job as saving the city from the people rather than saving the people from the material city

of cracked and crumbling buildings, fallen power lines and towering flames. So what other people saw is it millennial good fellowship, which is one of the things, ways that like the spirit in San Francisco was described. Funston and others in power saw as a mob to be repressed and a flock to be herded. Sounds familiar.

So Funston, yeah. Funston did the only thing that a guy with an army at his beck and call generally thinks to do, which is send soldiers in about it. Now, he had no legal right to do this because it's illegal to do this without under very specific circumstances. But he forced the city under martial law, again, illegally.

Now, in Funston's eyes, the civilians who picked their way through ruined shops to save precious food before it spoiled, were not engaging in mutual aid. They were, in his words, an unliked mob, licked meaning like them and beaten, you know? We need to beat them to stop this. You gotta spank these law breakers.

Yep. The city mayor, Eugene Schmitz, was a working class labor union supporting populist, but he wound up reacting no differently than Funston, a man whose prior work experience had mostly consisted of violently suppressing the international workers of the world, a quasi anarchist workers union.

Now, Mayor Schmitz issued a proclamation. The federal troops, the members of the regular police force, and all special police officers have been authorized by me to kill any and all persons found engaged in looting or in the commission of any other crime. No, wait. Yeah.

People are feeding each other and he's like, shoot him. Again, this is the populist working class labor union supporting mayor. Because it's just what happens when you're in power, if power's bad. That is a more extreme example than I was expecting. It's pretty great, right? Just do a fucking heel turn on everything you stand for.

Shoot them all. Actually, I've had a change of heart kill them. Like, what the fuck? When the looting starts, the shooting starts, because as we all know, property is the same as human life. Yeah, once you're in charge of a lot of property, that's just how you start to think.

Wow, that's a bad one. That's stinky. Yeah, well, obviously, again, people following orders the federal troops did as they were told. As Solman writes, quote, in treating the citizens as enemies, the occupying armies drove residents and volunteers

away from scenes where fire could be prevented. In many parts of the city, only those who eluded the authorities by diplomacy, stealth or countering invocation of authority were able to fight the blaze. Those who did saved many homes and worksites. There are no reliable figures on mortality in the earthquake. But the best estimates are that about 3,000 died

mostly from the earthquake itself. One historian suspects that as many as 500 citizens were killed by the occupying forces. Another estimates 50 to 75. Again, we'll never know, because when they would shoot people, they would throw their corpses into burning buildings. Oh. Again, this is the US Army.

Okay, okay. Good stuff. Holy shit, okay. Yep. Great shit. So that 3,000 number, you know? Yeah. Yeah, Jesus Christ. Again, who knows how many people they actually shot to death? Sure.

The soldiers didn't only kill people. In many cases, they made the fire worse. So, you know, you have these fires raging through the city. And one of the things you do in that situation is you would demolish a bunch of buildings in order to create a firebreak, right? It's the same thing. If you've got like a fire in the woods,

you might like burn down, you might do a controlled burn to destroy like a strip of trees in order to like create a break that the fire that is uncontrolled can't spread through. It's a pretty normal strategy. It's a fine strategy. And would be demolishing buildings to stop a fire. Not a bad thing to do when you have a situation like this.

However, when you are doing this in a massive urban fire, dynamite is the preferred, or at least at that point was the preferred thing to use because dynamite is less likely to start fires outside of the blast area, just because of the way that dynamite works. Okay. Instead, the soldiers used barrels of gunpowder.

No. And again, you're just like, this is the army. This is supposed to be, there's supposed to know that. You should know this. But again. There's supposed to know that. And you probably have dynamite because you're the army. I was just like, where was all the dynamite at?

Yeah. Spoken for? Obviously the army's failures like massively spread fires and destroyed thousands of buildings that might have otherwise been saved. I really do recommend reading. Like, and there's other shit that they did too. Like one of the things that's most fucked up,

but maybe least obvious is that they started establishing soup kitchens to feed people. And in some cases like pushing other ones out of operation. But when the military did it, everyone got like ration cards and you had a very strict limited set that you could get and you could only come in and it was like, they were basically like,

they were almost like treated as prisoners while they were getting their food and stuff because they didn't want to encourage dependency by giving out too much free food or making it be pleasant. As opposed to the mutual aid kitchens that were like, eat your fill, you know? Yeah. Like, take what you need and people will do that.

Yeah. Oh yeah. I didn't, I honestly, I didn't know that about this book and I'm a soul knit head. She's great. I have no idea what this book is about. This is one of my very favorite books. I really do recommend reading A Paradise Built in Hell.

She goes into tremendous and fascinating. And it's again, for fairness, like the army did other stuff that was like, they organized like medical like ambulances and shit. Like there were good things that soldiers did and that like individual local leaders did. But there were a lot of bad things. And in my head, it kind of outweighs the good.

Yeah, it's, soul knit's book has been very influential. It's, I think was influential in one of my favorite books, Tribe by Sebastian Younger, which delves into some of the same topics is more about PTSD, but talks a lot about why like, why US soldiers probably suffer PTSD at a higher rate than any other soldiers in the history of warfare. And it, his, the kind of conclusion he comes to

is that it's because of the society they come home to, rather than the specific details of modern combat. It's because of how fucked civilization is. It's because like, when you break down, it's when you head home to an empty apartment, you know? It's not when you're out in the field with your buddies and shit. It's when you come home and you're in an empty building,

the way that we tend to live alone and isolated, then you shatter into a thousand pieces. Anyway, also a good book. Tried very good. Relatable content. Yeah, soul knit's book has been very influential to a number of people who I think are pretty darn smart. One example would be Corey Doctorow, who I like quite a lot.

Yeah, and he wrote this on the subject of elite panic. Quote, elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don't become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line.

And that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface. That was very clear in Katrina. Tim Lee, Garden Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true.

A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn't actually happen. It's tragic. Now, I found another writeup in commentary magazine that continues Doctorow's line of thought with more concrete examples, both from Katrina and from our present disaster.

Okay. Quote, elite panic frequently brings out another unsavory quirk on the part of some authorities. A tendency to believe the worst about their own citizens. In the midst of the Hurricane Katrina crisis in 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagan found time to go on Oprah Winfrey's show and lament, hooligans killing people, raping people in the Superdome.

Public officials in the media credulously repeated rumors about street violence, snipers shooting at helicopters and hundreds of bodies piled in the Superdome. These all turned out to be wild exaggerations or falsehoods, arguably tinged by racism. But the stories had an impact. Away from the media's cameras, a massive rescue effort made up of freelance volunteers, coast guard helicopters

and other first responders was underway across the city. But city officials, fearing attacks on rescuers, frequently delayed these operations. They ordered that precious space and boats and helicopters be reserved for armed escorts. Jesus Christ. If that doesn't sum up America, failing to rescue people because you needed more room

for guns is like, yup. Like, yup. We famously love guns more than we love our own citizens. That's such a strange thing to even hear repeated back because it's like, I mean, in certain circles, it's like known that that is not something that happened. But I clearly remember when I was a kid, when that was happening,

that being just fully the only coverage you would really see was like that first off, there was a horrific tragedy. And second off, that the citizens were being blamed for a thing. Like that was so, there was more of that and you didn't really hear the other side at all. Nope. No, why would you?

Again, it's the same thing that is Twitter's purpose, which is so that you can tell a lie and then correct it with the truth, but nobody reads that second tweet. But no one needs, it's there, it's all there. It's there, but we don't read it. No. I'm gonna continue that quote from commentary magazine

as it moves into the present day. Too often, the need to avoid panic serves as a retroactive justification for all manner of official missteps. In late March, as the coronavirus pandemic was climbing towards its crest in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on CNN's State of the Union to defend his record.

Host Jake Tapper pressed the mayor on his many statements as recently as two weeks earlier, urging New Yorkers to go about their lives. Tapper asked whether those statements were at least in part to blame for how the virus is spread across the city. De Blasio didn't give an inch. Everybody was working with the information we had,

he explained, and trying, of course, to avoid panic. How advising people to avoid bars and Broadway shows would have been tantamount to panic was left unexplained. And again, yeah, it's the same thing, right? If people had shut down earlier, it would have meant less money. It's locking the doors and saving the money from the cash registers while people burn to death.

That's the same thing, they all do it. Just after the period of days and months instead, and then people still praise De Blasio for his, you know, whatever, such bullshit. He's a piece of shit, he did a terrible job. He's a monster, like he's... Yeah, they're all trash, that's the point, you know? Like, and the fact that he's better than someone

who has actively pretended that the virus isn't a problem, doesn't say anything good about him. It just, it's like... The bar is beneath the floor, the bar is in the parking garage. Like it's... It's like if you step on a rusty rake and it goes through your foot

and then the person 10 feet away steps on a landmine, like you're like, well, I'm glad I didn't step on the landmine, but you're not happy, you know? But I'm still gonna die if I didn't get my 10th shot. Yeah, you still have a problem. Jesus Christ, yeah. Vote tetanus rake in 2020. Wow. Tetanus rake v. landmine, the election of our lives.

Well, this horrifying metaphor has really come full circle. Thank you. Now, that commentary magazine article goes into detail about another disaster. A 9.2 magnitude earthquake off the Alaskan coast in March of 1962. Anchorage, the state's largest city, was devastated. Thousands were rendered homeless.

Whole neighborhoods fell off of cliff sides. And then the thing that happens in every disaster happened, people spontaneously organized search and rescue teams to find their trapped neighbors. Meanwhile, the people in charge panicked. In order to protect local businesses from looting, the police immediately deputized a crowd of volunteers, many of whom had been drinking in bars

and instant like right before the quake hit. So they find a bunch of drunk men and give them armbands with the word police written on them in lipstick. No. No. It's very funny. They also gave a lot of them guns.

But it's Alaska, everybody was already packing. I mean, let's be honest here. Yeah. Yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. In doing this, cops were acting in accordance with the science of the day,

as embodied by the work of social scientist Richard Titmuss, which let's just, let's take a moment for Titmuss. Titmuss. It's like a boo-based Christmas celebrate. I was going to say, that sounds like either a really terrible disease or a really funny Christmas. Oh, she's got the Titmuss. Yeah.

Oh, the Titmuss. Or Mary Titmuss, and then you're like boo. It's very aggressive. Yeah. All right. So he believed Titmuss, believed that any major disaster would cause, quote, a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis

among the civilian population. Civilians traumatized by death and destruction, he thought, would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children. The only way for authorities to avoid such horror was to use force and the threat of force immediately. And again, this was very heavily influenced over the Cold War, right?

People are, everyone in the government's thinking what's going to happen when the nukes fall and the assumption is everyone will panic and we'll have to shoot a bunch of them in order to maintain order. The fucked up thing about this is, they don't even have the excuse of like, well, they didn't know at the time,

they hadn't done as much research. The bombing of London had happened. Like the Blitz had occurred. Right. And they had, going into the Blitz, we talked about this and it could happen here. Younger talks about it in tribe. Going into the Blitz, everyone had expected

that the entire city would panic and people would be like eating each other and like committing rape and murder. And instead, everyone did the thing people always do in disasters and took care of each other. Yeah, collectively cared. Okay. Everybody listened, no one in charge paid attention

because they just can't imagine that that's the case. It fucking rules. You have to imagine it, it actively benefits them to make people afraid of each other, yeah. Yes, absolutely. Cause then other things might happen that they wouldn't like. So the elite panic over the possible chaos outweighed any obligation to protect

the citizens of Anchorage. The police chief immediately suspended the search for survivors in the rubble. Because he's worried about chaos. No, we don't have time to look for any survivors. Like we have to get these lipstick cops out on the street. Give guns to more drunks, that's what's gonna protect people.

Okay, I would see a movie called Lipstick Cops. Lipstick cops, absolutely. We would all see it. Especially if they're police who only police the quality of people's use of lipstick. Right, and those exist on YouTube. But with the same violence as modern cops. Yeah, but the same amount of baseless judgment

and violence as a modern cop. Like SWAT teams just opening up in Los Angeles malls. There's whole corners of YouTube devoted to this very lipstick coppery. Not after the lipstick cops get in it, there won't be, they'll be purged. So yeah, so again, everyone in charge, a lot of them at least panic.

The people of course do not. And since the police chief has called off the search for survivors, the citizens of Anchorage spontaneously organize groups of citizens and pull every single survivor from the ruins. And in fact, they had done it by the time the police chiefs like while the police chief was like panicking about chaos. Like people were actively like finishing

the search for survivors. Like it's very funny. Quote, by the morning after the quake, more than 200 volunteers were jammed inside the Anchorage public safety building. And they brought equipment, earth movers and dump trucks lying the street outside. Two volunteers took it upon themselves

to organize the crowd. They wrote down names and skills, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and started matching people to the tasks that were pouring in. Somebody hung up a sign, manpower control. In little more than 12 hours, the gangs of shouting pastors

by pulling victims from the wreckage had turned into a workforce where authorities expected panicked crowds. Instead, they found gung-ho volunteers, skilled workers asking only to be pointed towards jobs that needed doing. In the end, and this is the writing of a social scientist named Muallim who studied this.

In the end, this diffuse wave of unofficial first responders had reclaimed almost all the cities injured and dead before nightfall on Friday morning. All over the city, ordinary people urged, surged into action, teaming up and switching on like a kind of civic immune response, which is how Muallim describes this,

which I really find interesting. I like that, yeah. Yeah. When reporters from what Alaskans call outside began reaching the city, many were openly skeptical of the low fatality numbers being reported by Davis's search crews. At first, 12 were believed to be lost,

but survivors kept turning up. Eventually, the Anchorage death toll settled in an almost miraculous five people. Wow. So thankfully, not another supermarket fire. Right, yeah. This situation fascinated a team of social scientists from Ohio State University,

who arrived a day and a half after the disaster. And they were studying people's disaster response underfunding from the US Army. Because the military, like it was the Cold War, again, the defense industry had a deep and abiding interest of knowing like, if there's a mass disaster in the city, how do people react?

And they had, the military had sent them there, basically being like, tell us how they panic. Like, so we can figure out ways to like violently corral the citizenry once they panic in a disaster. God, please, give us some blame tactics. We're always looking for new material here. Yeah, give us, like, tell us who we need to shoot

next time this happens. They suck, right? They suck. Go on. Yeah, tell us how bad they sucked, yeah. Researchers, like again, they come, so they come expecting chaos and violence, and instead they find like,

people taking care of each other the way they always do. Researchers approached citizen after citizen in the work groups and asked them each variations of the same question. Who told you to do this? And the answer always boiled down to nobody. Like, someone needed to do this, so here I am. I'm a person.

Yeah, I'm a person doing the thing that people do in this situation. I know you're doing the bare minimum, what about you? Yeah, yeah, why aren't you fucking helping? Put the fucking clipboard down, dude. What kind of question is that? Yeah, yeah, there's people who are hurt. Like, what do you fucking mean?

What am I, who told me to do this? Yeah, quote from commentary. The team stayed for a week and interviewed nearly 500 people. In Wico Quarantelli, the leader of the study was particularly interested in Anchorage's small civil defense office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but Quarantelli noted it had quickly become bogged down

over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, the amateur mountaineers, the people who had like basically volunteered to do search and rescue, had taken over that function almost immediately. Quarantelli used the term emergent groups to describe teams of self-organized volunteers like Davis's searchers.

He didn't miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle, that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. God, okay, yeah. You could argue, especially in times of this, the state's really just an obstacle for people, you know, trying to do important work. Yeah, they're just getting in the way of people

doing the work that needs to be done better and for free. Yeah, you could argue that. I could argue that. But then arguing that would lead you to other things that are very radical. And so we will, let's never continue this line of thinking. Definitely don't continue this line of thinking in your own house.

Don't read a paradise built in hell and tribe and then think about the implications of that in terms of like how a polity should actually function. No, I would never, I would never lead with empathy. I think that that's actually kind of a dangerous path to go down. Oh, horrible, horrible. You might find yourself doing things, thinking thoughts.

You might find yourself as part of an emergent group taking the responsibility for the safety and security of your fellow citizens into your own hands. And then where would it be? I would never, yeah, then we're really fucked. Then we're fucked. If these are banding together, we're fucked. Yeah, my God, if we're taking care of each other

instead of letting the armed and angry young men with, yeah. We've talked enough about cops. It is funny that the story that I read right before recording this episode is about how a group of the state police in Kentucky, one of their training documents about a warrior mentality came out and in it, they quote Hitler positively. Perceptions and actions are not hindered

by the potential of death. It's just fucking exhausting. They also quoted Robert E. Lee. Oh, shit. They encourage police to be ruthless killers. I don't know, I prefer emergent groups of people taking care of each other, but whatever. I love emergent groups.

I love that they're, yeah, they would still found it. Sounds scary. Don't want any of those emergent groups getting near you and saving your life. You wouldn't want that, no, no, no, no, no. They might loot, they might loot food from a burning building. That is so, yeah, they're like, but you didn't pay.

You're like, yeah, the building is full of water. The building is on fire. Yeah. Oh, you just like shove a dollar bill in a fish's mouth. They're like, okay, we're going to square here. Yeah. Well, Jamie. Yeah.

That's my episode on Elite Panic. I, first of all, I think we should start a band called Elite Panic. I agree, we should start a punk band. We should start a band 25 years ago called Elite Panic, get some wigs, do some metal. Absolutely. Get really addicted to cocaine, later be found

to have engaged in a whole bunch of questionable sexual behaviors, like just oodles of them on our private jet, like, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then 20 years after that, someone writes a bestseller about that and we get canceled in the present day. And then there's an HBO mini series based on us. Yeah.

And we're played by that same guy who played David Koresh, the sexy David Koresh in the new video. Oh, we're both played by David Koresh. Yeah, we're both played by David Koresh. Absolutely. And he wins an Emmy. He wins all of the Emmys. Well, no, actually, I would say she's nominated for an Emmy,

but that he loses to Forky. That's what I would say happens to him. Nice, nice call back to your last episode. And to the thing that happened to you at the Emmys. Oh, I'm never over it. So, okay, so this is being recorded like the day before Halloween. Did see a child dressed as Forky on the street today

and I was triggered, I was. I still have no idea who Forky is. Good. And I will use every weapon at my disposal to avoid learning. That was, I have to say, this is, for all of the horrible atrocities we talked about today, there was some optimism to be found

in this one. I feel not completely terrible. No, because again, the lesson that people learn over and over again in times like this is like, oh, people take care of each other when things are bad. Like when everything goes to shit at once, people tend to be like, well, how can I help? That's the normal human response.

Unless you're rich or the mayor, or a general, or the CEO of a supermarket chain. Or a rich mayor. Yeah. If you're the baby, you're not, yeah. Don't be the baby. Don't be the baby. Don't be the baby.

Save babies. Don't let them burn to death while saving cash registers. Don't be the baby. And definitely don't be the son of a baby. Be a person. Babies aren't people is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah.

All right. Well, this will drop after the election. So it may land in a world incomprehensibly different than the one that we're currently in. But it will probably be broadly similar to the one that we're in, but either shittier or maybe slightly less shitty. No real way to know.

Yeah. This podcast exists in a strange void in time. It does. It sure does. It is weird recording this and being like, who the fuck knows where everything's gonna be? So yeah, give us 96 hours who fucking knows. Yeah.

Anyway. Well, I had fun. I have fun too, Jamie. I enjoy talking about elite panic. It turns out I do too. Now that I know what it is. Well, for the people who are not elites who have panicked already,

you wanna give your plugables? Plugging away. You can follow me on Twitter.com at JamieLoftisHelp. You can listen to my new show Lolita podcast, which examines the legacy of the book Lolita and gets really into who the character Dolores Hayes was and how she got lost in translation throughout the adaptations that this book was given

over the years. And yeah, that starts on Monday, November 23rd, and episodes will release every Monday. And Robert, you're gonna be playing Vladimir Nabokov, the role of a lifetime. The role of a lifetime. It's the part, I shouldn't say that. This is not a time for it's the part I was born to play.

He's actually not a terrible person. So he's, and I've looked, but... Wait, wasn't he didn't... Oh, wait, no, Lolita was supposed to be like anti that, right? Like the guy fucking the kid was supposed to be a bad guy, right? He was a villain, yeah.

The book is pretty scurly. Okay, okay, I've never read it. Cause it seemed gross. The book is anti pedophile. Okay, that's good. But everyone's interpretation, like the greater cultures interpretation was the exact opposite.

Is it kind of like Starship Troopers where it's like they made a movie to make fun of how bad fascism is and how bad, how close to fascism America was, but instead everyone was like, look at those cool guns. I want to be those guys. It's literally that, yeah. It's just like the smartest people in the world

being like, so, I think I get it. Here's how fucked you are. Yeah. So it's interesting and fucked up and it's been ruining my day every day for a while. So you should listen to it. Never make anything with a message because people will misinterpret it

and molest children. That's the message of today. And now there's going to be a whole podcast about it. All right. Well, the episode's fucking over. Go whatever feels reasonable in the incomprehensible world you live in right now. Bye.

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Did you know Lance Bass is a Russian-trained astronaut? That he went through training in a secret facility outside Moscow, hoping to become the youngest person to go to space? Well, I ought to know because I'm Lance Bass. And I'm hosting a new podcast that tells my crazy story and an even crazier story about a Russian astronaut

who found himself stuck in space with no country to bring him back to. With the Soviet Union collapsing around him, he orbited the Earth for 313 days that changed the world. Listen to the last Soviet on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.