Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 78

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to Shitty Mayor Mondays, a name we're not actually allowed to use as the title of our podcast because it breaks a bunch of shit in the background. I'm your host, Mia Wong, coming to you live from a crumbling basement in Contessa, Chicago that may or may not be hit by a tornado in the next hour. This is it could happen here. So, so true. It could all happen within this next recording session.

It could happen in Mia's basement. Yeah, with me, I'm Garrison and James. Hello. Welcome to hell. Hi. I made a tornado free San Diego. You didn't have a tornado warning yesterday. Luckily, I'm in the ever stable Pacific Northwest where nothing bad can happen. Yeah, it's contractually, contractually obligated. It says no, no, no bad things. No, no earthquakes here that that are overdue. No forest fires or record temperatures. It's great of that. So true.

So today we're doing a sort of special episode of Shitty Mayor Mondays, which is that we are we are doing the Chicago double feature because our previous Shitty Mayor Lori Lightfoot, I managed to become the first. I think I think the first Chicago mayoral candidate in 40 years who was an incumbent and lost reelection. And not only did she lose reelection, she went out. So, okay, the way the way the the the Chicago mayor elections have like a trillion candidates, like, I think there were like nine this time. And if no one can get above 50%, it goes to a runoff and she got knocked out before the runoff, which is unbelievably funny. Um, so we're going to talk about her first as the sort of this. What life would is is sort of the Shitty Chicago mayor past. And then we're going to talk about the maybe future Shitty Chicago mayor Paul Valles, who sucks so much that he was the reason I specifically wanted to do this series. But first, what do you talk about fucking Lori Lightfoot, a person who I don't.

I don't know. I feel like people outside of Chicago don't know much about her. Yeah, I mean, I know that she's like, like, has generally failed to do all the things that she was supposed to do. And in the kind of general sort of Democrat man model has sucked. But I'm excited to hear the specifics. Yeah, she's a I know she's a well, OK, a the funniest thing about her is just just Google pictures of her hats. She has just like an incredible hat game. It's just always appearing and just an incredible like she has so many hats. It's it's wild. Just every single picture she's in is just like a random different wild hat.

It's amazing. But she's also kind of in some sense like a kind of uniquely incompetent politician. So OK, so Lightfoot was elected mayor in like an absolute landslide in 2019. And she ran this very weird campaign, which was based on sort of three main things. It was one was not being a machine candidate. And this is actually very important is that Lightfoot is not actually part of the Chicago political machine that controls like most. Why there's there's that kind of that kind of separate parts of the machine. This is a complicated thing. We're not going to fully get into here. But she's like not a machine candidate.

She like kind of is an outsider in some sense. And that was a big part of why people voted for her. There was another thing which is this sort of like identity tokenism thing, which is like I'm going to be the first black lesbian mayor of Chicago, which she is. And then the third thing she was running on was building a shit ton of police academies. No, I know in 2019, I was in Chicago for this election and I was like, do not fucking vote for her. She's going to build these cop academies. Everyone was like, no, it's going to be great. She's not the machine.

She's like, so she gets elected in 2019. And this means that when she gets into office, like almost immediately 2020 happens. And OK, so no mayor has like a good response to 2020. Life was is like catastrophic. So I've talked about this a bit at the show. But it's 2020 in Chicago is this really, really kind of wild and weird thing. It doesn't map onto a lot of the other sort of 2020s. Like the first thing that happens basically is Chicago has this thing called,

I think it's I think it's the magnificent mile. It's something mild. I can remember when I spent a miracle because it's a fucking bullshit tourist thing. But it's like this Chicago is like a mile of like really rich shopping districts. And the cops just lost control of it. Like people just took it. It was like fully looted. It was this is the sort of incredible moments of like Chicago's working class that had been getting shit on for 200 fucking years, like finally stormed their way into just the fucking bougie part of Chicago and destroyed it and it fucking ruled.

But after that happened, life was like, oh shit, we can never let protesters get back there again. So she started raising the fucking draw bridges that lead that lead across the fucking river. So like she was like, she basically turned the entirety of like, like that that part of Chicago into a fucking fortress that you could not get on to. Amazing. And she did this like she raised the bridges multiple fucking times. Like we're going to get to another story of her raising the bridges where it's like, it's on like, like she doesn't so many times that like even times where she claims

she didn't do it on purpose. People are like, I think she raised the bridges. This is, you know, and so this is her basically when she raises the bridges, she just like declares war basically on like half of Chicago. And OK, so this is like not a great thing to do if you are trying to be a popular politician is to just like physically declare war and like do fucking medieval fortress shit to like half half your fucking city. And so her popularity starts tanking immediately.

This is in like the this is I'm guessing as a consequence of the black lives matter protest, right? Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So her reading is like fucking absolutely dog shit. I think I'm trying to find I should have looked this up early. I meant to and I forgot.

I think her approval rating was like 30 percent when she left office. It might even be lower than that. Yes. But you know, but she she does this kind of unique thing where she basically goes around and alienates like every single voting block in the city. I guess before we get to this, we should get we should get to how she pissed off the cops because one of her big things when she came into office was she was trying to sort of like do this alliance with the police.

But instead of her sort of actually like forming this, you know, she was trying to form sort of center right wing base, right? Yeah. She's trying to both sort of play this kind of like identity tokenism thing and then also build a base with the cops. But the cops are racist and be okay. Do you two know the story about the Chicago Columbus statue? I don't think I wait, is that one of the ones that got taken down?

Sort of. I think this is one of the ones that. So in 2020, I wrote a story about how to tear down statues and then became the guy that everybody sent pictures of statues getting torn down to for a while. So I'm sure I've seen amazing. Yeah, I was great. Ben Shapiro had a whole fucking seizure about it. We got lots of trouble with with various federal agencies, but yeah, it was a very amazing

story. Don't don't affiliate link to the ingredients to things which may or may not be illegal buying those ingredients in your story. So true. Yeah. Yeah. There's many popular mechanics editors have tried this. It was great.

I was on Russia today. Not not not with my knowledge. But yeah, tell us about this. Tell us about this other statue me. Okay. So there is a giant like statue thing sitting on like sitting on this big column that was made in 1933. And it is this giant statue of Christopher Columbus also on this statue.

So there's like a series of like important Italian people like on the column. One of these things, one of the people who was depicted on this column, like very much seems to be Benito Mussolini holding a bunch of fascies. That's cool. Now, the sculptors, the sculptor's son denies this, but this was made in 1933. It really looks like he is definitely holding fascies. All right, this this statue, this is like in like the middle of the fucking city, right? In like this park in the middle of the city.

And this became the so. Okay. So in 2020 in Chicago, the way the protests work is you have like the first initial like phase where the cops like lose control of the city. And then the cops kind of like retake it over the next few days. And there's a kind of lull, but then it starts another like sort of wave of it starts back up again, like around specifically around this statue. And there's this whole thing that cops are trying to keep it up.

And there's this whole thing where like, there's like, like rings of activists, like surrounding a group of cops standing around the statue, like throwing shit at them. And it fucking ruled. And eventually the city is like, okay, we're going to, we're just going to take down the fucking statue. And this was a light foot thing. But, but this pissed off the cops specifically. So we've talked about this before on the show, but like this is one of the sort of unique

things about Chicago is that Chicago has like, yeah, I guess the technical term was like white ethnic like groups that like do shit. And one of those things is like, there's like an Italian American cop association that is very powerful. And the Italian American cop association is like, we will keep the statue at all costs. This is like our fucking guy. Like, yeah. And life foot is like, you guys, if you guys don't take this statue down, people are going

to fucking like burn the miracle mile again. And she gets into this giant fight of them. And these emails eventually get, I think, I can't remember if they, I think they get released as part of a court case or something. But these, these emails come out that it like, life foot is yelling that she has the biggest balls of anyone on the table. She's going to put her balls on the table and she's trying to like keep the cops alive. So she, she gets into this giant fight.

It just pisses off all of the cops in the city. So she's, she, she has pissed off like, like, from, from, from the initial wave of protests, the drawbridge stuff. She has pissed off like anyone who's even sort of vaguely center left and anti racist and like a huge portion of the city's black population. And then she like systematically, she's now pissed off like the sort of like white ethnic cop groups who are also very powerful. And then she does something like, like really genuinely unforgivable and horrific, which

is in 2021, Chicago police shot 13 year old Adam Toledo. Here's from a Chicago paper called the tribe. At a press conference after the shooting, Mayor Louis Lightfoot vowed to find the people responsible for quote, putting a gun in the hands of Toledo, who Chicago police and prosecutors insisted was armed. So, okay, they shoot this kid. Who is fucking 13 years old. His name is Adam Toledo.

And immediately the cops, the prosecutors and the mayor said that he's armed. They're going to find the person who put the gun in his hand. So two and a half weeks later, the video comes out and it turns out that not only was Adam Toledo not armed, the cops shot him while he was while his hands were up while complying with their instructions. I think I've seen this body cam. Yeah, it's fucking awful. And then like two year two days later, they killed another guy.

And like there were there was another round of like huge protests and they weren't as big as 2021's, but like there was another round of like really big protests in this. And Lightfoot was, you know, like actively involved in a conspiracy to lie about this fucking 13 year old kid who was killed in cold blood. And so this pisses off like this, this, this like basically means that her, her support among like the Latino population drops to basically zero because she fucking accused a 13 year old kid of being a gang, an armed gang member. And then he got fucking after he got shot by the cops.

So the other fun thing about this is so our like prosecutor Kim Fox is like, there's like this whole thing about how she's like a progressive prosecutor and like the right trying to unseat her. None of the fucking officers involved in this or the other shooting two days later were ever charged with anything after they again, it shot like killed in cold blood, a 13 year old kid with his hands up. Now the sort of regular Chicago right hates her because she's both black and a lesbian. And there's some like, well, we'll talk about this a bit when we get to Valis, but there's

just genuinely unhinged horrifying sort of like racism and like homophobia and like she's getting basically like splash damage transphobia from it because of how racist these people are. And so but that means that like, you know, she has like no support, right? She she managed to get she like she she manages to get into a fight, which a cockles like normally pretty conservative, like black caucus. And the black caucus gets so pissed at her that they force through a police reform bill that has just like oversight committees.

I win. And so, you know, like on February 28, there's an election and all of the sort of like everyone in the city of Chicago is like she's fucked. Like she's a she's a uniquely unpopular candidate. Everyone fucking hates her. She has systematically pissed off every single possible voting block in the entire city of Chicago. And she loses.

And, you know, there's this whole sort of media junket that happens, everyone's like this is like a referendum on crime in Chicago. It's like, no, no, it's not like everyone just hates lightfoot because she sucks. And she sucks in like a unique combination of ways that pisses off everyone who can possibly vote in the city. And so she gets 16 percent of the vote, which I think 16 percent of the vote is like the actual sort of like top limit cap of the number of people in Chicago who genuinely like her. Like I think it's exactly 15, 60 percent of the city and there's fucking no one else.

She so she comes in third. It's also very funny. She spends the entire like a bunch of her money running campaign ads like against a guy who is a fourth instead of the other two people. It's amazing. Completely misses an arc. Yeah. And so the man who came in second, who is on on by the time this episode comes out, the

election will be fucking tomorrow. The person who came in second in that vote is Brandon Johnson, who's a progressive candidate. He's backed by like the teachers union. He's like fine. He is like as good as you're going to get for a mayor. Although I will remind people that like John Johnson is a much better candidate. The other fucking guy we're going to talk about. But we need to talk about a little bit about the limits of electoral politics.

And like, you know, I'm just going to point out here that like Nepal, for example, routinely elects Maoist governments and like, do you know how do you know how much Maoism those guys do? Like fucking none. There was no Maoism happening, right? There were some cool socialist mayors in Spain who led the population of the city to expropriate the landowners around the city in the 1930s. That was 1930s.

This is now 20. Those are mostly those people's fucking grandchildren are like maybe around. But yeah, like you're not going to get, you know, like we're not going to get a socialist city off of this. On the other hand, the person who comes in first who Brandon Johnson will be facing tomorrow when you listen to this is a demon in human form. He is near liberalism. He's a bad man.

He is the fucking reactionary Republican dog of the political machine and that man's name is Paul Vallis and as as as Vallis would fucking want, we are going to talk about him after we go to ads. All right, we're back from ads. We're going to talk about Paul Vallis, just the worst guy. Okay, so Paul Vallis sucks ass. The thing he's most famous for sucking ass for is for being the school privatization guy.

So we're going to start with the beginning of his sort of political career is in 2000. In 1995, he gets appointed as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and he holds that position from 1995 to 2001. Now, okay, so there's a few things that that he like really likes. One is insulating schools entirely and insulating any mechanism and any sort of like part of how a school works from any kind of community democratic control. Chicago used to have these sort of like democratic councils that could like do stuff within the school and Vallis is like, fuck that, we're getting rid of all that shit.

Like, absolutely not. The other thing he loves is charter schools. So we should explain what a charter school is. Yeah. So, okay, the way a charter school works is that instead of like the state or like the city or town or like a local government running a school, which is the way that schools normally work, you instead give out a charter to either like technically an NGO or just a for-profit company.

And then that company takes a bunch of tax money, like takes tax money that would have gone to a public school and then uses it to run their own fucking school. So it is privatization that they've relabelled like charter quote unquote because if they actually called it privatization to school, people would fucking hate it. And Vallis loves this shit. This is what he spends most of his time across like on multiple continents doing schools, bullshit, like attempting to push for. The other specific thing that he really likes, this is like, this is sort of the Paul Vallis

signature like classic thing is military academies. They used to like basically not be military academies in Chicago and Vallis is like, we're going to open so many fucking military academies. And these are like regular and the thing is, okay, like there are sort of like disciplinary quote unquote military academies, which is like you get sent there instead of prison. These are like just like normal schools that are like quote unquote military academies. But these schools, like they're barely schools. Like there are a lot of people who went to these schools in multiple cities and we'll

get into more of this sort of later when we get to Philly, but like people will go to these schools and like their textbooks have pages torn out of them. Which pages? You know, here's the thing, right? You would think this is like a kind of like Republican style like we're taking out the pages to talk about like Columbus being banned. Like no, no, no, no, just random fucking pages torn out of it because these schools don't have any fucking money.

Like they don't have actually curriculars. Like they just like don't have sports. They just don't have like anything to fucking do. And then this and everything with charter schools. So all right, if you want to like be a regular teacher, you have to have like teaching teaching certificates. If you work in a charter school. Yeah.

So I think the standards depend on the state. Some of them, I think Illinois is like two thirds of the teachers have to have teaching certificates. But that means that a lot of kids are being taught by teachers with no teaching certificates, which is like, you know, teaching it turns out is not in fact easy enough that you can put a random person there who doesn't know how to do it and you know, like have kids be taught correctly. And these military academies, these military academies, they have teachers who just like

don't fucking teach. Right. Like they're, they're just a complete shit show, but he opens a bunch of these and but okay. And the other big thing the Valles is supposed to, and this is the thing, all the people who like Valles would do this thing where they're like, he's like a budget wizard. And he's like the guy, he's like the technocrat, like smart policy want guy. Like bring in to like, like bail out a school district that's underwater financially.

And oh boy, oh boy, is that not true. Okay. So there's a very good report called Passing the Buck, which is written by the Action Center on Race and the Economy or Acre, which I recommend people look, genuinely, people should go read this. It's like 12 pages long. It's very short. And like, like it's not even 12, like three of those pages or citations.

And they wrote a report on on Valles's time in various school districts. And here's some of the shit that he did to make it look like he had his balance, his budget balanced. So all right, let's let's talk about his pension scheme. I feel like I actually should explain how pensions work because like nobody fucking has them anymore. So a pension is a thing where like you, the worker, or in this case, like Chicago teachers, you take some of your current pay and instead of taking the money now, it gets taken out

of your paycheck and put in towards a pension fund to fund your retirement. And then this fund is invested in the stock market to get returns to pay out pensions that like support you when you retire. Right? Yeah. So in 1999, Valles was like, Oh, hey, the Chicago pension system is funded. So we're going to take the teacher's money and use it to pay other budget shortfalls. Great.

So this is good. Anyways, after he does this for 13 consecutive years, Chicago stops paying into its pension system altogether. And the result of this is a $9.6 billion hole in the pension system that Chicago has to like pay off. And this is a huge part of like where the sort of modern like budget deficits in Chicago come from. Like things that are used to like justify shutting schools down is that like they just

didn't pay into this. They just stopped paying into the pensions and instead took the money that they're supposed to go to teachers and use it to like make their budgets look clean. So if he had just done this, it would have been bad enough. But Valles is like, is a very, very specific kind of like neoliberal technocrat dipshit. And that kind of neoliberal technocrat dipshit is the extremely interested in financial instruments guy who was like a kind of person that I think I think we see less of these days.

And the modern version of this are like crypto people, right? But back in like the 90s and 2000s, there were a bunch of guys whose things were like really, really conflicted with financial instruments and everyone thought they were fucking geniuses. Now, if you were alive in 2008, you know where this is going. But Valles, the second thing he does to sort of like, like quote unquote balance his budget sheet is he takes out the government equivalent of a payday loan. So here's, here's a passing the buck quote. You know, Valles literally borrowed against Chicago School Children's Futures when he

took out a $666 million in capital appreciation bonds. Also, what I said, he was like a demon. He took out $666 billion. With this satanic loan. Yeah. Yeah, we're doing this a panic, panic, but for this guy who fucking sucks. So yeah, he took out the loans and capital appreciation bonds, a form of debt in which the borrower pays nothing for several years, but then has to pay very large sums to make

up for skipped payments. Capital Appreciation Bond, CAB is a long term bond with compounding interest on which the borrower is not permitted to make any principal or interest payments for many years. But the interest is still a cruise. But you're not allowed to pay. Why would we, why would you take that? Why would you, why would you do that? It seems like a really bad decision.

Oh, it's a terrible. It's a terrible decision. I'm not a big money guy, but Valles's assumption was that like, OK, we don't have any money now, but property values will continue to go up and just keep going up forever. So we can pay this bond back when we have money from higher property taxes and yeah. So, OK, I'm going to finish this thing on these just dog shit bonds. In this way, it is similar to a negative amortization mortgage in which the outstanding principal actually grows over time because the unpaid interest gets tacked on to the amount owed

in compounds. Yeah. Very amusingly, California was doing something similar to this with retitution payments recently or some, some places in California were, and at least in one case that I looked into for a story I wrote, it was, it was ruled illegal under the Eighth Amendment. Oh my God. A cruel and unusual interest payment. It's good to see that Chicago is doing it to itself.

But yeah, there's actually a funny story about this. One of the side stories of this is that the guy who's running the school system in California like gets this same offer from like bond salesmen people and he's like, no, what the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. But Valles does this. Valles is going to do this in multiple cities. So I'm going to finish reading this thing. Because of this structure, borrowers often end up paying extraordinarily high interest rates

over the lifetime of the bonds. Before California State Treasurer Bill Lockney called CABs the school district equivalent of a payday loan. So the result of this is that out of the 666.2 million dollars right that Valles takes out, they pay 1.5 billion dollars in interest. The interest rate over the lifetime of this bond is 223 percent. This is the guy who's supposed to be like the really smart type of crap reformer guy who understands financial stuff, you bring it to like solve school districts

and he took out a loan with 223 percent fucking interest. This is the kind of interest rate that in the words of David Graber, we're once reserved for organized crime. And normally this kind of loan is like a thing. It's like this is like a very predatory sort of like. It's like a predatory banking thing. He did this to himself on purpose because he's dumb. And I mean also like he's trying to, I mean,

part of the other sort of undercurrent of this is not just that he's really stupid, it's that he's trying to pay off his buddies in the finance sector. Yeah. And then you know, this is the other part of the story, right? It's like all of these, all these school districts just get fucking looted to pay off these like fucking stupid ass hedge funds. And then he just bounces somewhere else and leaves them with it. Yeah.

You know, so I talked a bit earlier about how like Valus's assumption on these bonds was like, well, it'll be fine because well, the housing markets will keep going up forever. But then 2008 happens. And this has a bunch of effects. One of the big ones is that Valus was taking out bonds with variable interest rates. Oh no. Now, okay, we have talked about this on this show before, right? There are entire country, there are like entire like like multinational political movements

that don't exist. There are entire countries who fucking don't have manufacturing checkers anymore. Like there are places where the life expectancy fell by 20 years because their their their fucking leaders took out these kind of like variable interest rate loans and got destroyed with interest rate spikes. And guess what happened in Chicago? Interest rate spikes. And, okay, so Valus's successor is look at this and are like, this is the stupidest fucking,

you know, Valus's successor, by the way, is Arnie Duncan, who's the guy that Obama puts in charge of the Department of Education. And Arnie Duncan is like, okay, do you know how we're going to solve the problem of these, the risk from these adjustable rate interest rates? Credit default swabs. Oh God. So all right, I'm not going to explain how a credit default swap works because it's fucking annoying as hell.

But credit default swaps are one of the things like one of the like very specific financial instruments that are that are like specifically responsible for the 2008 collapse. Yes. And now these technically aren't credit default swaps, right? These are technically what are called interest default swap or like interest swaps. And they're but they're exactly the same thing as a credit as a credit default swap, but instead of credit, it's interest. So the underlying asset right is like a bond and not like a loan or whatever.

But otherwise it's exactly the same thing. And this this man, you know, and these swaps have this thing where like if you can't pay you get these like unbelievably high like fees that start happening. So when these bonds blow up, they managed to cost, they managed to cost Chicago another $31 million because they're credit default swaps just blew up. So all right. So this guy's in 2002 and 2002 he ran for governor against Rob fucking Blagojevich. Who is Rob Blagojevich?

You just do the first syllable and then let your lips take the rest. Uninvigorated. And Valis sucks so much that Rob Blagojevich is able to outflank him on the left by by by running against him saying, Hey, look at all these schools he privatized. And so he gets clobbered in the primary by Rob fucking Blagojevich, the man who. Okay, so I this is what we will cover this one day of fully on the show because it's really funny. But Rob Blagojevich is the man most famous for getting arrested for trying to sell Obama's Senate seat. Like he tried to sell a Senate seat.

Oh, he's amazing. He's now just on Tucker talking about political persecution. Oh yeah. Yeah, great. Extremely funny. Oh yeah. He was on yesterday wasn't he? Yeah.

Yeah. Trump's been persecuted. Yeah. Yeah. It's amazing. It's great. Really, really the canary in the coal mine of grifters, grifting politicians. Look, Garrison, look, if they can go after Rob Blagojevich tried to sell Obama's Senate seat,

they could go after you for trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat. That's true. You know who else is trying to sell Barack Obama's Senate seat? Products and services that support this very podcast. No, they're really not allowed to do that. None of them would ever commit a crime under any circumstances. I still think, I think a fair number of these corporations probably engage in some sort of political lobbying.

That's true. Yeah. That's true. But I don't think any of them should be. They're trying to buy him a Senate seat, Garrison. That's totally different. That's different. That's different.

Not the same. Not the same. Totally fine. Thanks, Ronald Reagan. All right. We're back and we're now sending Vallas to our... I don't actually know if Chicago and Philadelphia are sister cities, but I think they should be.

I don't know. I am very in favor of the Chicago-Philadelphia alliance. Same vibe. Yeah. Well, they both stood in for Gotham City in the Christopher Nolan trilogy. It's true. There you go. You're doing a black man reference again.

There's a whole... There are so many different specific... David Gilbert writes about this. There are so many different parts of places where they filmed the Dark Knight, where people tried to protest and got arrested for blocking the road. This happened in multiple cities. No one wants a city to turn into LA, so you have to stand up against that shit immediately.

You do not let it happen in your hood. It could happen here. Okay, so after Vallas gets clobbered in the mayoral race, he gets brought in by Philadelphia to try to fix their school system. He... Excuse me. His plan to do this is by doing a bunch of military academies again and then also doing charter schools.

I should explain his other sort of... The big sort of rationale thing behind charter schools is school choice, which is this thing that was specifically invented as a way to let racist parents avoid integration. This goes along with the home schooling movement. We talked about this in other episodes. But he's a huge... Vallas, to this day, is a giant school choice guy.

But the other thing about Vallas... I don't think people realize that much. Even though he's a Republican a lot of the time, he kind of flips back and forth between being a Democrat and a Republican, but after he loses to Rob, or even before that, he is an actual sort of Chicago machine guy. And because he's a Chicago machine guy, when he gets into Philly, he starts doing this stuff where he takes over the school district

and fires much people and installs his cronies and all these departments and all these people are getting... He's buying off people with budget allocations and he starts selling off buildings to raise money. So he sells off the district headquarters in order to buy a more expensive district headquarters. And here's a quote from the book Not Paid for Us, which is a really, really great book about the history of racism in education in Philadelphia.

And this is a quote from a longtime activist, Lee Roy Simmons, before I start reading this. The district headquarters was called 21st and Parkway. There was doors in 21st and Parkway worth $1 million. Then big brass doors in the front. Those doors were worth $1 million with all the carving on them. People don't know how much they got for it to this day. I can't get an answer about how much did you sell that building for?

Where the money went? The school district sold 21st and Parkway in a package with Kennedy Center. There were brand new trucks parked at Kennedy Center. They had forgot we're there. There was a printing press in the Kennedy Center that could print all new magazines and they never used. There were books and calculators and every time I went through there, there were boxes of unused stuff in the Kennedy Center.

And nobody knew. And they sold that in the contents in the package with 21st and Parkway. Nobody knew how much that was. There was some art that was priceless on the walls at 21st and Parkway. No one can find the art. There were priceless pieces of art hanging in schools across the city. And all that was sold in a package and nobody saw where it went. Tell you normal?

Yeah. This is classic Chicago corruption shit, right? We're not going to say how much we sold this building for. We're not going to say who we sold it to. We're going to build a more expensive building. If you look into who the contractors are, it's always someone's uncle or brother or some shit. There's just printing presses that are gone.

Priceless works of art just vanish. It's incredible sort of Chicago political machine stuff. And this goes into, I think, the Chicago political machine that is really interesting, which is that these people on the one hand, they're unbelievably corrupt. On the other hand, a lot of them are sort of real hard-line doctrinaire neoliberals. This is sort of the thing with Arnie Duncan, right? Like Obama actually comes out of this machine, too, when he's a lot more doctrinaire about the stuff than the sort of modern people are.

And Valis is one of the sort of big guys here. And so he's really, really in favor of charter schools. And so they get enormous amounts of money. He also does this thing. Yeah, this is also from NotPayForUs. He funnels money into just like a shit ton of NGOs in order to do education programming or whatever. So there's this sort of constellation that forms of these corporations doing education stuff

or running schools. And then you have these non-profits running the education material. And it's this sort of arch neoliberal thing where instead of the state administering a service, what you have is basically a bunch of contracting grifters who come in and suck up all of the money and then provide absolutely dog shit services. Now, I'm going to read another quote from this book because the people there are paying these contracts to are fucking wild. The SRC is one of the state bodies that's in charge of the Philadelphia School District.

One of the SRC's most problematic contracts was with K-12 Inc. for $3 million to, quote, provide academic and curriculum support, access to K-12's online curriculum and assessments, academic enrichment via summer and extended day programs, professional development, teacher planning and training materials, and community involvement activities. Conservative radio talk show host William Bennett was the founder of K-12 Inc. He had been an advisor to former presidents, Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. During a show in 2005, he said the following, and this is a direct quote, if you want to reduce crime, you could, if that was your sole purpose,

you could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do but your crime rate would go down. So they pay this guy $3 million fucking dollars. To most of Alice's pro-choice credentials, I assume. This is the most pro-choice thing I've ever seen from him. Is the genocide guy? Because it's genocide.

The eugenics guy. Yeah, well, you see, they all have a weakness. Has anyone looked at the curriculum that they're providing? Seriously, it's unclear to me that they ever actually really provided much of anything. It does sound like, if you were going to make up a company to grift at the education system, K-12 Inc. would be a great name. Yeah, and that's the thing about all these charter schools too, right? Okay, so there are some four-profit corporations who do charter school stuff

and they stick in the charter school business because they decided that's how they want to make their money. A lot of these things come in, take a state contract, the school immediately implodes and then leaves, and then they just walk out with several million dollars. And this is a recurring pattern over and over again with charter schools. He also brings in Teach for America, who is this just genuinely evil organization that tries to break teachers unions by recruiting these incredibly idealistic and naive young college grads and throwing them into failing schools as this thing to like, you're going to like go serve the community and like, you know, you'll learn on the job

and you'll become an educator and you're like helping these disadvantaged kids. And it's a disaster. These people who do this have no fucking idea how to teach because they're not teaching certificates, right? They're just like college grads. And any of you who have been around college grads, like, you think those people are responsible enough to fucking teach kids? Like, Jesus Christ. Yeah. I remember that was like a big thing. Like, I don't know if it still happens or not. Like, I can remember writing. Oh, it still does. Yeah. Reference letters for students like 10, 15 years ago for that.

Yeah. Like, I mean, I know I had to like talk out classmates of mine, like out of doing it. Because we were like, you are doing, you are doing union busting and also this will destroy your life and the life of the children you have to teach. Yeah. It's a very strange system that, yeah, take some of who by virtue of having any degree is automatically an educator. But to be fair, that is how universities work as well. Yeah. You get your master's degree and they're like, well, fuck it. Get in there. Don't just give you grad students with no degrees, right? Like, that's a thing too. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, to get it together, to get another sense of like, the other thing that's happening here is, is he has this really, Valos has this really, really racist kind of like, we need to like enforce discipline in schools thing. And so they have all these, and this happens in Chicago too, they have these like zero tolerance policies that have done, I mean, irreparable damage to like, tons of thousands of kids. I'm going to read, I'm going to read a thing from Tribe about Philadelphia. Quote, test results were posted on data walls in the school buildings to show which classes were making the most progress. Whoa. It was humiliating, said Grills teacher. A lot of our kids were left behind, were behind, and a lot of our kids suffered trauma and trauma affects the way you learn.

So they were behind, they weren't on grade level and it made them feel like failures. I hated giving those tests. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. People like to be wrong about Georgia World, but that's some Orwellian shit right there. Like, and like these are like fucking, yeah, like these are like, these are literally children. Like you are, you are publicly shaming people who are like 12. There's just, it's just horrible. Yeah. Like we've known for a very long time that that doesn't work when you're educating kids. Like I have done pedagogy training and again, no one with any intent to actually help kids is shaming kids in the classroom,

or young people, or anyone of any age for that matter. I just checked out what K-12 Inka doing. It's great. They're now offering online high school. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. You can go to the Faith Prep Academy and develop Christian character and find, yeah, yeah, this is great. This is what our youth need. Yeah, it sucks. So the other thing, again, we keep circling around this because this happens a bunch of times. Like, again, Valos' whole thing is supposed to be about like balancing budgets, right?

In 2007, by the time he's like, like at the near the end of his like time in Philly, he's fucked everything up so badly that for like just one year of the budget, Philly's schools were $73 million in the whole. Now, the thing about this, this is where most stories about Valos' time in Philadelphia end, but wait, there's fucking more. So that $73 million shortfall was the one year shortfall, right? Remember back in Chicago where Valos' like variable interest rate bonds like blew up in the schools' faces? This time, Valos is the guy directly who did the credit default swaps.

And these, the interest rates on these things are locked in literally for decades and just like, like some of these aren't expiring to like 2031, right? And just so far, they've cost $161 million. Great. Yeah, and test scores fucking go down under him. It's a shit show. And so 2007, they kick him out because they're like, what the fuck are you doing? Unfortunately, the place they kick him out to is,

and you're not going to like this, post Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans. Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah. Yeah. Why? Why do we have to inflict like the failsons of neoliberalism on the people of New Orleans? It's going to get worse, by the way. Okay, great.

Yeah. So this is really bad, right? New Orleans now. Okay. So I think there's some kind of controversy about how exactly you calculate this. At the very least, 63 out of the 66, like New Orleans, like, sorry, let me rephrase it. At the very least, 63 out of the 66, like schools that they run, like at the very least, like that are directly run by the state are charter schools.

There's three more that are also charter schools, but are kind of administrative by the district. So there is a huge debate as to whether there are technically any public schools left in fucking New Orleans. Jesus. Yeah. They fired, like, and this was before Valus came into office, but in New Orleans, they fired the entire, every teacher in the fucking city. They fired all the union, literally all the union teachers replaced them with non-union people.

Valus comes in and starts implementing some shit that is just like, like, prison camp shit. Oh, god. Here's from Tribe again. According to Bygard, a lot of kids were arrested for, quote, disruption of a school process. If they showed up late to class and refused to be kicked out for tardiness, again, they are being arrested. For a refusal for wanting to stay in school.

Yeah. Black kids, black girls were arrested for having, quote, rat tail combs, which have long, sharp handles for braiding hair. Yeah. In the instance, Bygard said a six-year-old student was expelled and charged with possession and distribution of a controlled substance because he brought tums to school and gave them to his classmates thinking they were candy. What the fuck?

They charged a six-year-old. Yeah. God. Yeah. The levels of fucking cruelty that have to exist, like a cop has to see a six-year-old and not be like, oh, lol, those are tums, like the kids probably shouldn't eat too many of those. I didn't know they were candy because he's six.

Six. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Fucking hell. Just, like, just, just, jetty-widely, like, abhorrently evil shit. Yeah. See, this is, like, maybe now is a good time to point out that, like, in the wake of yet another terrible school shooting, people will want to put more cops in schools.

This is what happens when we put cops in schools, right? They brutalize our fucking children. Yeah. And, like, it's not, yeah, like, the state doing violence to children is not the way to protect children. Yeah. That's what I want to say. The more your school represents the levels of law enforcement that are in a prison camp,

the more the actual experience of the children will become like prison camps. Yes. For a good moment. Yes. Yeah. But also just literally, I mean, God, I love to go to the panopticon high school, Garrison. What are you talking about? I just, the panopticon high school where if you don't, if you don't get kicked out of

your fucking class for being late, they arrest you. Who co-movement again? Yeah. And just, so speaking of disciplining and punishing. So these charter schools, they do think that charter schools always do, right? Which is sometimes, you know, if you look at people who talk about educational reform, they'll be like, charter schools have, like, really great, like, test numbers, and A, that's just, like, not true, right?

That they're only looking at the really good charter schools. But you know, here's the thing. If you give a public school the amount of money that a really good charter school has, it will also be a really good school. But there's the second thing that charter schools can do that other schools can't, which is that charter schools can just fucking kick students out. And this is one of the ways that they maintain their test numbers, is they just kick out kids over and over again.

You don't do, who aren't initially doing well on tests. They don't have to teach them and, like, bother to improve their test scores. And in New Orleans, they get in trouble because the kids they were kicking out were kids with disabilities, who they were illegally, yeah, who they were illegally not, like, giving individual education plans to, and also they were, okay, these are everything, right? These charter schools are all run by different private corporations. And so there's no system of tracking whether, when a kid gets kicked out, whether they can actually get it, go to another school.

So they're just leaving these disabled kids, like, in the fucking wind with no school to go to. And this, this was so illegal that after a lawsuit, like, I think it might still be going to this day. But in 2014, like, the, the Philadelphia school system was, like, under research by the federal government because they committed so many crimes against disabled students. Jesus Christ, that is brutal. Yeah, it's awful.

Ah, fuck, sorry, this stuff makes me sick. I've worked in education for a lot of my adult life and this shit makes me furious. Yeah. I, I, I just wanted to, what, what did you two to guess, where, where do you think they sent Paul Valles next after he got kicked out of, I, I try, of trying to run, of, of New Orleans? Did they send him to set up a, a finishing school for girls in Kabul? No, but similar, similar vibes.

Oh, for fuck's sake, dude, it's not, it's outside the continental U.S. Yes. It's not Iraq. No. Puerto Rico? No, but close. It's Haiti. It's Haiti.

After the earthquake. It's Haiti after the earthquake. Yup. Yup. So now we've talked about this before on the show, in 2010, there was a just unbelievably heart wrenchingly catastrophic earthquake that killed 220,000 people and also destroyed like almost every building in Haiti. And this kicks off phase two of the U.N. occupation of the country.

We talked about this in our episodes on Lula and Bolsonaro. This is, this is when the U.N. guys from Nepal bring in, uh, cholera, a bunch of the population, right? Yeah. Um, so right after this happens, so the U.S. just like sends Marines in, right? Right. And they don't, no one in Haiti asked for it. We just, we just fucking invade.

Um, and they bring in Paul Vallis and specifically Paul Vallis and also Arnie Duncan, who's again Obama's fucking education secretary, gets to bring in to rebuild the Haitian school system on the New Orleans model. Now, okay, weirdly, if they had actually implemented New Orleans model, it would have been an improvement because they hate the way the Haitian school system worked was it was 90% private and the tuition was 40% of someone's annual budget, like, like a family's annual budget. Yeah. I've got lots of friends in Haiti who couldn't afford to pay for school or went broke trying.

It's fucking horrible. Yeah. Um, Vallis is supposed to like change this, right? He gets brought in, they bring in the Clinton Foundation, and instead what happens is the Clinton Foundation buys a bunch of trailers to use as schools for the, from, from specifically the same people who got in trouble for selling formaldehyde-ridden trailers to FEMA during Katrina, and then, you know, okay, I never, I never think that I, I, I, I can't emphasize enough where they called that grift trailer ink or something.

Yeah, they fucking suck. Well, there's also, even if the trailers were good, right? There's a real issue with trying to use trailers to teach kids in a place that is hot. Yeah. Which is that it is a hundred fucking degrees inside these trailers, these trailers are made of metal. So if you touch the side of the thing, you get burned, kids, people, people who, like teachers who were taught their routinely talk about how like every kid in their, every kid

in their fucking class was having heat stroke, and they were just like giving them painkillers for heat stroke because that's all they could do. And yeah, it is punishingly hot if you haven't worked in that part of the world a lot, and it is, it's hot enough without being in a tin can. Yeah. And Valis' fucking education reform, they don't fucking work, they don't do shit, right? The Hades' education system is still fucked despite all the money the Clinton Foundation and like all these experts got paid, like it's still really bad.

Valis like specifically, like very specifically defended the use of trailers as like a thing you teach people in, yeah, and you know, this stuff all continues to the present day. The U.S. has been trying to find another excuse, trying to find a way to do another intervention in Haiti. So he's still on the New Orleans job, I think, while he's doing this Haiti job. And then he takes another job in Chile? Yeah. Why?

I don't know. People get, well, because the Inter-American Development Bank gives him half a million dollars to run 2,000 schools there. So again, he's now, he's now splitting his time between New Orleans, Haiti and Chile. It's almost impossible to find, I spent a lot of time looking, it's like, it's really hard to find like anything about what actually he was doing in Chile. What we do know was when he got there, he was met by the enormous 2011 Chilean student protests, which then later turned into the 2013 Chilean student protests, which turned

into the 2015 Chilean student protests, which turned into the 2019 Chilean student protests. So, you know, I mean, I just, I just want to, like, you, you, it is possible to run Paul Valis out of your country, a couple of different places, or at least your school districts were also your country. A couple of places have done it. And then after that, they sent him to Bridgeport, Connecticut for some reason, where he gets run out after doing, like, he gets, he, he, he flees Connecticut, like, trying to escape a lawsuit about all the illegal anti-union stuff that he did.

I really love the image of someone trying to desperately flee from Connecticut. Yeah. It's so small. How, how hard is it to leave Connecticut? It seems pretty easy. You have to, like, jump over the line. I mean, the whole thing, the whole thing, the whole thing of the video I actually want to see is him getting out of Philly.

See, see, getting out of Philly sounds actually hard. Yeah. Getting out of just Connecticut is like, come on, come on. Yeah. The video I want to see is him getting sent back to Haiti by himself. Oh, God. Yeah. That's called violence.

So he runs, again, in, in 2014, so Blagojevich gets arrested for, you know, selling a Senate seat, and he tries to run for Lieutenant Governor on, on a slate, on, like, a ticket with Pat Quinn, who had been the governor because he'd been the Lieutenant Governor under Blagojevich, and they, like, act, they managed to lose in Illinois to a Republican, which is, like, a thing that should not happen unless a Democrat should, like, really fuck up, which, I mean, it happens, right? But, like, yeah. Wait, are you saying Democrats can make, can make electoral mistakes?

Are you sure? To be fair, to be fair, to be fair. This one wasn't, this wasn't even an electoral thing. This was just the guy trying to sell a fucking Senate seat, and people were so mad at him in the next election, they're like, we will vote for Bruce Rauner, who was just, like, a fucking absolute dipshit. But okay, so he, so he, he has now lost two consecutive runs for governor, right? Governor and Lieutenant Governor.

Now, this year, he actually, he had another bid when he was maybe gonna run, and then he stopped, and now, now he is one of the candidates for the mayor of Chicago. Now, while, while he's been doing his campaigning for this, some other fun stuff has been happening. Um, so he has an absolutely unlistenable podcast. Oh, no, no, no, no, no, Mia, please, no, here's the thing, here's the thing, I, I, I considered, I considered pulling clips from this, and then I was like, I'm not, I can't inflict this on you. Absolutely not.

It sucks too much. That's not, I, I would simply leave this Zoom call. I'm not, yeah. Damn, no, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna like, I'm just gonna talk about one of the things that he said, a couple of things that he, well, okay, one that he said on this, and one that he said on a different show, um, one of the things was he, he starts ranting about this thing called culturally responsive teaching, which is just kind of liberal, like, anti-racist.

Uh, the C-O-T. Yeah, this is a big thing, like, if, if, if anyone ever starts talking about culturally responsive teaching and starts yelling about it, like, they're a racist, like, that, those are the only people who, like, actually, like, consistently, I mean, like, it's not like there aren't criticisms of it, but like, almost everyone who talks about this on like, a school board level is like, a, a really weird racist guy, so she starts raving about how this means that everyone's gonna get handed a copy of Mao's little red book and then says, quote, what is this?

The Cultural Revolution? Now, we have covered the Cultural Revolution over the course of the show in the Atlanta episodes, and I, I, I'm just gonna simply say no, and move on to read this unbelievably racist thing that he said. I'm just gonna read this, it's, it's real bad, but for that matter, if you're a black child, you go home and listen to your parent when your parent has failed to be successful in addressing the ways these historically racist obstacles that have denied them a chance to equal opportunity, he's the guy he's talking to.

Paul, I wonder if you're a black kid, why don't you become a criminal? If you're hearing this stuff in school, everyone with the white skin is an oppressor, if you're a black skin, you're the oppressed, that makes it pretty easy to justify any pretty bad conduct in my, in my opinion. You're absolutely right, so this is, Valos comes back. But what you're also doing, you're giving these, you're giving people an excuse for bad behavior, you're almost justifying his rant about Kim Fox. So you're right, you're absolutely right, where is the accountability, you're the victim.

What's happening is it becomes a justification for everything, and I think that's a very dangerous thing. So Valos is arguing that talking about racism is actually a thing that encourages black people to do crime, which is like. That sounds, that sounds kind of racist, Mia. I am just a little bit, like, he, he may be always remiss, I am, he just gives off racist vibes. Yeah.

So speaking of racist vibes, his son is a cop in Santa Fe, and he was one of three cops who shot a black guy in the back after calling him boy. The cops, including Valos, yeah, they start screaming boy at him, and they shoot him in the back, and the cops, including Valos, his son, claim to have found a gun next to his body. In, in, in a completely unrelated story, US Special Forces units in Afghanistan routinely carried AK-47s in the combat zone, so they could drop them next to the body of people they killed in order to declare them insurgents.

This has no relation to the previous story at all, I am simply relaying facts. Too interesting and unrelated stories. Yeah. Didn't Valos also, as he's the guy who claimed his Twitter was hacked, right? Oh yeah, yeah, so, but very, way back at the beginning of this episode, I, I talked a bit about the, the, the racism against Lori Lightfoot, and like one of the tweets that he liked is a tweet, like calling Lori a man, like Lori Lightfoot a man. Like it's just unbelievably racist, like homophobic, transphobic shit.

And he claims that his account was hacked, that people were liking tweets without his permission. Yeah, yeah, right, that's all they did, they just liked some racist tweets. Yeah, there's like a bunch of other, like, and the other thing is like, okay, like Paul Valos doesn't like actually live in Chicago, I should mention this, he lives in, like, he claims to live in Palos Heights, which is also not Chicago, but it's unclear whether he even lives there, or if he's in like some kind of like, even more insane outlying suburb that's even less Chicago than the stuff is, and he likes, he likes, he kept liking tweets

calling it like shit cago and stuff, and it's like, well yeah, it's because he doesn't live in the city. Like he's not actually like, these are like, a bunch of his supporters, a bunch of the money he's getting are from like, deranged suburban, like reactionaries. And okay, so I want to tell one last story about him that pisses me off a lot, which is the story of Awake Illinois. So Awake Illinois is like, Illinois' version of Protect Texas Kids, it's a group that does Nazi protests at drag events, they managed to destroy a bakery called Uprising for trying

to hold a dragbunt brunch, so the Awake did all this thing of like, ah, they're grooming kids, and then the proud boys showed up and attacked it, and then someone like vandalized it, and they nearly had to close the entire bakery until a GoFundMe raised $30,000 for them to survive. They are like, these people are unbelievably homophobic, they rant about groomers constantly, they're like really transphobic. Anyways, Paul Vallis spoke at one of their fundraisers, oh god. So after this came out, Vallis distanced himself from the group saying you didn't know what

they represented and just wanted to support school of choice. Awake responded by going, hey, what the fuck, you absolutely know who we are, and they released another video of Vallis at another Awake event where he said that Awake's president, Shannon Adcock, should run for governor. So if elected, would I probably be the most openly homophobic democratic like mayor in the country, which is a pretty wild like, which is a pretty wild claim, but like I can't think of anyone else who actually like showed up at an event where people are just screaming about groomers, like- Yeah, not for democrats.

He is just a republican, like he's like a pre-right wing, like republican who runs as a democrat because the Chicago political machine is also just so far right. I thought this was Kislari Lightfoot defunded the police mayor. I thought that's what happened and people want the police back, that's what I was told. You know, the thing that's actually very funny about the elections is like, so there is elections for these like police district councils, which are supposed to be these like civilian oversight boards, and the like reform, there was an alliance of sort of like reform, defund and abolitionist candidates, and they did fucking amazing, and the pro-police candidates got

fucking clobbered, and it'd be while every single national story about the election was like, Chicago crime, I was like, you guys don't understand how much everyone here hates the police, like they were the 13-year-old like fucking two years ago. Yeah, good parachute journalism. Yeah, I'm gonna hedge my thing here by saying there's so much other Paul Vowell shit I couldn't fit, like I really wanted to talk about Keith Thornton, who is Chicago's George Santos, who like, his thing is that he stole 9-11 dispatcher Vowell and is like, keep showing up in pictures with Vallas, just Google Keith Thornton and you will have a good time, like

there are so many other Vallas things that he did that are awful, there are probably things that he's done that we'll never know about, because he did them in like, I don't know, like, like what the fuck he was doing in Chile, we probably won't ever know all the things he did in Haiti, yeah, don't let this guy become the fucking mayor of Chicago, he will leave this city utterly destroyed. Let's go Brandon. I'm so annoyed that people are on ironically, let's go Brandon and get Chicago down for Brandon Johnson.

It's great. We're bringing it back, we're taking it back, we're reclaiming it, we're reclaiming Brandon. Yeah. I'm so bad. Like, bringing Brandon back. Okay, I got in trouble with my boss in 2015 for saying fuck Hillary, like you fucking little bitches, you could just say that you, you could just say fuck Joe Biden, like all

of you are cowards. Yes, it was, it is deeply cowardly, afraid of saying fuck, but at the same time, they think they're going to stage an armed overthrow of the government. Anyway, oh, there's actually, okay, this is the thing I actually should mention. There are a bunch of ties between, there are a bunch of ties between Valis and guys who read J6, like, and like a lot of J6 people support him, he's like, he's like, he is the MAGA candidate, that's like, there's like, there's a whole thing there that I didn't get into because I don't know, there's so much, you could do like seven episodes just

about Paul Valis and how much he sucks, but yeah, stop him, if he fucking gets elected, we're doing the, we're doing the, we're doing the fucking Chilean student protests because yeah, hate him, hope he has a bad day. From the creator of the Bright Sessions comes a new fiction podcast for all ages. Jump back to 1997 and follow Maxine Miles as she starts high school in the picturesque town of Hastings, New Hampshire. All is a season in which this small town shines, apple cider, pumpkin patches, farmer's markets, it's idyllic for adults and boring for Max.

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a country in mourning. Listen to Transportista, who murdered Captain Coral as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadioApp Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today it's kind of going to be a conversation about, is shit falling apart? Are we all about to be devoured by a rogue AI? Is your job about to be devoured by a rogue AI? These are the questions that we're going to talk around and about and stuff today.

And with us today is Noah John Siracusa, a math professor at Bentley University. Noah, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. And we're talking right now because there's an article that was put up in The New York Times on March 24, 2023 titled, You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill and We're Out of Blue Pills, which is a fun title by Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Azar Raskin. And it's an article that is kind of about the pitfalls and dangers of AI research, of which there definitely are some.

I enjoyed your thread on the matter. I thought it was a lucid breakdown of the things the article gets right and the areas in which I think they're a bit fear mongering. So yeah, I think that's probably a good place to start, unless you wanted to start by just kind of generally talking about where you kind of are on AI and what you kind of think the technology is advancing towards right now. Yeah. I mean, I think I can probably answer both those questions in the same because part of

why I enjoyed writing that thread dissecting the article is I just had the strangest feeling reading it that I agreed with it so much in principle and yet somehow objected it to so much in detail. Yeah. Thinking about that article helped me think about my own feelings on AI, which every day of the week is slightly different because so much news happens. Yeah. I found myself overall deeply frustrated that I agree with the central conclusion, which

is that maybe we shouldn't be just plowing headlong into this and should be more careful when we screw around with technology like this, which I agree with. And I feel like should have been the thing we did with Facebook, Twitter, all of these things. My obsession is less with the specific dangers of AI and more with, well, we keep letting these guys who are fundamentally gamblers with venture capital money really put our society through the ringer without ever asking, should we do any research on maybe how social media affects children and how all of these different things.

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

Times article is famous for writing this book, Sapiens, that's a sweeping history of humanity. And the other two are actually most famous for the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. So they really are in this camp of warning people about social media algorithms. And that's exactly what you're saying. That's sort of this thing that we've been dealing with probably quite poorly. And now we're kind of moving on to the next societal risk, which is AI. So that is a really important question of what's different now. And I think that's one of the things the articles try to address, which is many of the problems

that we already have with algorithms, data-driven algorithms, and even AI as it's used in social media is still happening now, but somehow things feel like they're spiraling out of control. Yeah. And I think, I mean, honestly, I think a lot of this just has to do with culturally what our touchstones for AI were going into this, which are Skynet, it's that sort of thing. And you do see, I feel like the uncredited fourth author on this particular article is James Cameron, because there's pieces of it throughout this, where it opens actually

pretty provocatively. Imagine that you are boarding an airplane. Half the engineers who built it tell you there is a 10% chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board? In 2022, over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future AI risk. Half of those surveyed stated there was a 10% or greater chance of human extinction from

future AI systems. Which I feel like there's- Yeah, so let's zoom in on that. Yeah, let's talk about that. Because what I tried to do in my thread was go through all the claims and assertions and really pause and say, hold on. But that's a great one to start, because there's a lot to dig in right there. So first of all, there's a huge difference in that airplanes are based on science and

physics and things that we understand pretty well, there's a lot to it. And there's been millions of flights, so you have a lot of data. You know how many planes crash and how many don't. Maybe one engine goes out, you can do the statistics and see whatever percent of planes without that engine still lands safely. The problem with AI is we're just guessing, right? There's no way to know 100 years from now or 10 years from now what it's going to do, what the real risks are.

So we speculate. And that's not uncharted territory, right? Nuclear weapons were first introduced, people had to guess and speculate. But the danger I think is putting it in that same category as things like airplanes or climate change I like to think about. Climate change, when you see these, you know, what's the IP, CC Africa, the acronym, these reports, that's based on thousands of scientists digging into thousands of published papers and all this data, really modeling the environment.

There's a lot of meat and substance to it. The problem with the AI is it's mostly people, I hate to say it, but like me or like you, just kind of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen, maybe that'll happen. The reasonable thing to say if you're in AI or such is like, yeah, I have concerns that AI could cause serious negative externalities for the human race. Perfectly reasonable statement. It is physically impossible to say there's a 10% chance that it's going to. Exactly.

Because it's never done that before. You can't know. I'm a math professor and I'm the first to say numbers don't have some intrinsic meaning, right? If I just say something has maybe a 15%, I'm just making it up, I'm pulling it out of my ass. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That doesn't make it true.

No. It's a general pet peeve I have of sort of giving a false sense of precision by using numbers that you don't really know where they came from or they're just made up. So that's one issue. These numbers are made up and asking a thousand people to make up numbers isn't necessarily any better than asking one or two, then if the number is made up, it's made up. So that's one issue. Yeah, I also do think, and I saw someone make a note, I think it was Ben Collins who writes

for NBC on Twitter made a note that like, well, the fact that all of these statements about like how dangerous they are about human extinction are coming out of people in the AI industry has started to kind of feel like marketing. That's right. Yeah, exactly. There's a little bit of buzz marketing going on here. And I think you mentioned social media and the authors of this article mentioned social media and we have to look to the past to understand the future.

I think that's the only way to do it. So what was one of the biggest scandals in social media was Cambridge Analytica. And as we probably remember, this was this data privacy scandal where a bunch of data was collected from Facebook users that shouldn't have been. People didn't realize that their data was being collected, they didn't approve it. And it was used for this election company or this political company that was trying to profile people and influence campaigns towards Donald Trump, towards Brexit. So this was a huge scandal and Facebook was fined $5 billion or something, very justified.

But I would say what it was in retrospect was a data privacy issue. People's personal data was leaked when it shouldn't have been. The problem was there was so much fear and fear mongering over it that people felt this data was used by these sort of algorithmic mind lasers to kind of know us in such great detail and get us, trick us into voting for Donald Trump and targeting us. And the jury's still kind of out, but most of the evidence looks like Cambridge Analytica, and it wasn't that effective, they just couldn't do it. And it turns out you can know a lot about a person, a lot about their data, and it's

really hard to influence them, to change them. So what happened, I think, was there was a lot of alarm set spread rightly so about the tech companies. They have too much power, too much data, they know too much about us, and this horrible thing happened. The problem was a lot of the alarmism then actually reinforced this aura of power, of Godlike power that the tech companies have. People criticizing them actually gave them more potency than they deserved.

And then suddenly Google and Facebook and all, it wasn't sudden, but it kind of built it up. They had this aura that our algorithms are so insanely powerful, and we have to make sure they stay in the right hands, and we can do so much. And that's unfortunately what I see happening now a lot, and that is kind of the setting for critiquing this article. I absolutely agree that this stuff is risky AI, I absolutely agree that we could go down a dangerous path, but once we start leaving firm ground and speculating wildly and using

the Terminator stuff that you described, even if you think you're criticizing the tech companies, you know what you're doing, giving them the biggest compliment in the world, saying that you guys have created our Godlike and you've created these mining machines. You've created a deity, which is very similar to the language this article has at the end. And I think it's kind of worth, as you're bringing up, there are real threats. There are real threats that are immediately obvious, the threat that a lot of writers are going to lose their jobs because companies like BuzzFeed decide to replace them with chat GPT or whatever.

The fact that a lot of artists are going to lose out on work because their work's been hoovered up and it's being used to generate, like these are very real and very immediate concerns that we don't have to, they're not hypothetical. We don't have to theorize about the AI becoming intelligent for this to be a problem. These are things we have to immediately deal with because it puts people at risk. It's the same thing with like, you know, there's a lot that gets talked about with Cambridge Analytica, with kind of like the different Russian disinformation efforts. But when I think about the stuff that was happening in the same period that worries

me more, one of the things that occurred is because there was so much money to be made if you could get certain things to go viral on YouTube, companies that use tools that weren't wildly dissimilar from some of these basically generated CGI videos based on kind of random terms that they knew were likely to trick the algorithm into trending. And God knows how many children were parked in front of these like very unhinged videos for hours at a time that like, they would start watching some normal kid musical video or something. And then they're watching like the disembodied head of Krusty the crown bounce around while

like some sort of nonsense song gets sung and it's like, well, what is that actually going to do with kids? And it's like, we don't know that's unsettling though. And it's deeply unsettling. Yeah. And that's the kind of thing, you know, and I'm sure there will be obviously like one of the things that this article is not wrong about is that if we kind of leap forward into this technology with the kind of abandon that we're used to giving the tech company, there

will be unforeseen externalities that we can't predict right now that will be very concerning. I just don't think it's Skynet. And that that's what was so challenging not just with that article, but with I think the movement we're having is I do agree very much in spirit. I agree with the recommendations. We need to slow down. We need to be more judicious and cautious. We need to really consider these.

But again, if we overhype the technology, we may be doing ourself a disservice by empowering the very entities that we're trying to take power from and as an example like that, could I could I read a quick quote from the article? Do it. A.I.'s new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization by gaining mastery of language. A.I. is seizing the master key to civilization from bank vaults to holy sepulchres. That's right.

And that I mean, that is funny and you're right to laugh. Yeah. Let's actually zoom in a second. And I think this is such a tempting trap that A.I. is super intelligent in some respects, right? It's done amazing at chess, amazing at Jeopardy, amazing at various things. ChatGPT is amazing at these conversations. So what happens is it's so tempting to think A.I. just equals super smart.

And because it can do those things and now look, it can converse that it must be the super intelligent conversational entity. And it's really good at taking texts that's on the web that it's already looked at and kind of spinning it around and processing. It can come up with poems and weird forms, but that doesn't mean it is super intelligent in all respects. For instance, one of the main issues is to hack civilization to manipulate us with language. It has to kind of know what impact its words have on us and it doesn't really have that.

It just has a little conversation at text box and I can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. So the only data that it's collecting for me when it talks to me, any of these chat thoughts, is did I like the response or not? That's pretty weak data to try to manipulate me. It's so basic. That's not that different than when I watch YouTube videos. YouTube knows what videos I like and what I don't like.

Would you say that YouTube is hacked civilization? No, it's addicted a lot of us, but it's not hacked us. Yeah. People have hacked YouTube and that has done some damage to other people. But the thing is, and that's part of why, while I have many concerns about this technology, it's not that it's going to hack civilization because we're really good at doing that to each other. There's always huge numbers of people hacking bits of the populace and manipulating each

other and there always have been. That's why we figured out how to paint. I do think that there's an interesting conversation to be had about the part of why people are kind of willing to believe anything is possible with this stuff is that for folks who were just kind of living their lives with a normal amount of attention paid to the tech industry, it seems like these tools popped out of nowhere a couple of months ago. It feels like, oh, there was just suddenly been this massive breakthrough and the reality is that all of the stuff that people chat GPT, these different AIs that everybody is

talking about, this is technology that people have been pouring resources into for years and years and years and years and years and that's why it's able to do some of these amazing things that we've seen. But I don't think it means that in a month, it's going to be a thousand times smarter. It's a process of labor and it was finally ready to be unveiled to the extent that it has been, maybe. That's right, and a good example is GPT-4, which recently came out. There was GPT-3 before and chat GPT and there was so much speculation that GPT-4 is going

to be, again, this God-like thing that just brings us to the singularity. And honestly, it's done better at tests. I forget the numbers, but maybe one of them got a 20% grade on some tests and this one got an 80%. So that is a significant improvement. If you're a teacher and your students improve that much, you should be happy. But as you said, is that a thousand times? No, even though the machine is much bigger, much more data.

And it just shows that, yeah, the reality is this is incremental progress. Going at a very fast rate, very unsettling, even for those of us following the field closely, we're experiencing that kind of vertigo that you're saying that, whoa, where did this come from? So even within the field, and you're absolutely right, if you're just at home, not paying attention for a week or a month or a year, suddenly this stuff pops up, it is disorienting. But one thing I think that's helped me at least kind of clarify what, not even answering what the risks are, but just understanding the different camps of why certain people

are reacting differently and why even the people afraid of AI seem to be now fighting amongst each other and why it's getting fractured is, are you more afraid of this, the AI used as a tool by people, or are you more afraid of it kind of taking on its own autonomy and kind of going rogue and doing its own things? And I'm very much afraid of people using it. I think big companies are going to use it, and there's going to be a lot of problems just like we saw with social media, people will get addicted, democracies will be flooded with misinformation, it'll be weaponized by various actors, they'll be bought accounts.

So I am very concerned about it being used, basically it performing the job it was told to do, but it'll be told to do dangerous jobs, either making money or making discord. There's another group of people that are more worried about the AI somehow deciding on its own to do things, to take over. And that's where, you know, I can't roll it out, but that's where I kind of am skeptical. Let's focus on how people are using it for now for the foreseeable future. I don't think we need to worry yet at least about the AI somehow having a life of its own and stabbing us in the back and enslaving us because there's just so much that can go

wrong before we even get to that point. Yeah. And it's not, that's exactly like it's a threat triage kind of thing where like, is it theoretically possible that one day human beings could create an artificial intelligence that is capable of having its own agency that is malicious? Yeah, sure, I guess, like, I mean, maybe, but man, we're, there's a lot of us that are very malicious right now that are actively trying to harm other people at scale. I'm concerned about how they will use AI to do that.

And I think botnets are a really good example. One of the things that these new, this newest generation of AI tools allows is more realistic and intelligent bots than I think have been accessible at scale before. And that's a very real concern. I will say when I kind of, sorry, when I kind of war game this back and forth with myself, one thing that is oddly comforting is like, well, the shared comments that we all inhabit of like ontological truth is already so shattered that like, there's, there's only so much damage, I feel like adding additional bots and additional disinformation can really do, like, I don't

know. One thought on that though, because I've been digging into that too, or I've been, you know, trying to ponder how I feel about that, because a lot of this, I don't know, you know, I'm trying to make, I mean, I was like, is, I do think if you go back to like 2016 earlier versions of the internet, you know, before leading up to Donald Trump's election, I think there was a lot of Wild West to Google, to social media, to all these things, right? Fake news was just like piling up to the top of Google search results. That election was so monumental and seismic shockwave through tech that fake news and

misinformation might have played a role that they really had to do something. And I think some companies are more effective than others. I think Google put a lot of effort into making sure authoritative sources rise to the top. So what that means is, when now you go online and you Google for medical information, the top results you get are WebMD or some official CDC, your government thing, they're pretty decent reliable. It's not to say there isn't all that crap on the internet, but Google has done a pretty good job of having the good stuff float to the top.

And that's the information that people see. So what I'm worried is now we might be kind of resetting ourselves back to the 2016 where when you're talking to these chatbots that are trained on all of the internet, I don't know if the WebMDs and the CDC type of information is necessarily going to float to the top. Maybe they'll work that out. But I'm also worried that OpenAI or Google or Microsoft or whatever, they'll have ones that are pretty reasonable and kind of, you know, tuned to appeal to a lot of people. But Elon Musk might build his own competitor one that might be really tuned to elevate

the right wing side. And it'll live in your car. Yeah. So I have been messing around as, I mean, and you have been doing so in a much more rigorous manner, I'm sure, but I've screwed around with a couple of different AI chat and search engines. I use find, PH, IND sometimes, I've been playing around with Bing. And one of the things I've noticed is that, you know, if you ask it like, hey, summarize

for me like why the battle of Hastings mattered, you'll get a reasonably decent answer. But if I ask it like, I don't know, specific questions about myself, I've come to, I noticed at first when I did it, I would get some really weirdly like colloquial vernacular from it, explaining things. And I realized it was just pulling answers directly that fans had asked about me on the subreddit that this show has. That was interesting. And so when I think about like ways in which to game the system, well, you make a bunch

of bots, you have them post questions and answers that are, you know, supportive of this specific product line or whatever on a subreddit and hope that it gets picked like scanned by an AI. And that becomes part of its like answer for, you know, what happens if, you know, I can't stop itching or whatever, I don't know, like, but I like obviously you can see using them ways in which these can and will be gamed to some extent, you know, it's always kind of a red queen sort of situation where you have to disinformation people fighting disinfo. You're always running as fast as you can just to stay in place.

That's right. And that is that brings up another issue, which I do feel like this is possibly really tipping the balance in that it takes a certain amount of resources to create misinformation. It takes a certain amount of resources to debunk it, right? A journalist has to sit down, Snopes has to write a little piece about it. And the problem is with this AI, it's suddenly just dropping the price of creation down to essentially zero. Anyone can create essentially a limitless supply of quasi information that may or may

not be true. But the problem is, is the price of journalism of debunking also going down, maybe by 50%, right? Maybe it takes you half as much time to write an article, it's not going to zero. So that's the balance is creating stuff has gotten a lot cheaper, detecting debunking doing proper journalism has gotten a little bit cheaper. So I'm worried that that's journalists are already stretched thin and this is going to lead out of tension.

By far my biggest concern, because it's not just this, that's obviously a significant factor in it, there will be more disinformation, there will not be more journalists in part because I think AI is going to take jobs from particularly low level. It's not going to replace prize winning columnists at the New York Times. It's not going to replace like guys like me who have a very long and established career of doing the specific thing that we do. But I think back to when I got started as a journalist, as a writer, it was as a tech blogger and I had an X number of articles that I had to get out per day and obviously

like my boss was essentially trusting that with that many articles, I'd have a few that did well on Google and that brings in traffic and that brought in money and there's a degree to which you're just kind of doing SEO shit. But it's also, I conducted my first interviews for that job, I went to trade shows for the first time, I did my first on the ground journalism for that job. It taught me how to write quickly and in a polished nature and I was not writing anything that was like crucial to the development of humankind. But it made me into the kind of person who was later able to write things that were read

by people all over the world and that had an influence on people. And I worry about the brain drain, not just among journalists, but among writers and among artists, you know, people who do illustrations and stuff, eventually musicians, at least some kinds of musicians will probably also run up against this, where the stuff that it was easy for kind of people breaking in to get a little bit of work that would hone their skills and allow them to, you know, live doing the thing that they're interested in is going to disappear. And more and more of the stuff that we kind of casually low level consume, not our high

art, not our favorite movies, not our favorite books, but the stuff that we encounter when we stumble upon a web page or like in a commercial or whatever will be increasingly made by AIs. And that AI will be pulling from an increasingly narrow set of things that humans made because less humans will get that entry level work. And that is, there's something concerning there. That is something that worries me about the future of just creativity. Yeah. And I think, I mean, two points.

One is just to kind of be devil's advocate a little bit, because I do sympathize and I think you're right. But a little bit devil's advocate is it might be on the flip side of the coin that there's people that feel like they have artistic imagination and desires, but lack the technical ability. And suddenly they can paint, so to speak, by using these AI image generators. Maybe someone has some form of dyslexia or their English as a second language or even, you know, native speaker without any of these issues, obstructions, but just finds the writing process difficult and maybe AI enables them to be a writer to contribute.

So I could see, you know, there's going to be the pros and the negatives and I don't know how that balances. But I think you're right. Thinking from a profession, that's sort of like a passion project view. From a professional view, I do see the profession narrowing. If journalists are expected to work twice as quickly because they're all using chatbots, there's probably going to be half as many of them, right? I mean, that's the economics, but this brings up a bigger issue, which is I do think what

you're hitting on is there are these long term risks that maybe AI is going to fuel this rebellion of robots and this, you know, maybe. But again, we have an economics, a social political economic world we live in. And I just think let's really focus on the issues we have now. That's not discounting the future. It's not like let's burn a bunch of carbon emitting fuels because who cares about climate change? That's our grandkids problems.

Yeah. This is different. It's like, let's think about the jobs, the worlds. I mean, another way to put this is if we mess up our economy and mess up our democracy by people losing jobs and mass protests and losing trust in the government and there's just erosion of truth, we're not going to be able to handle climate change or any of these big AI, you know, the singularity type of risks. So what I feel like is let's focus on what keeps our economy and our sanity and our humanity.

Let's keep this fabric of society together now so that we're more equipped in the future to handle all the risks, AI and otherwise. But this goes back to what you're saying, which is these are real issues in the short term. And if we don't address them, if we get distracted by the long term, we're not going to be ready to address the long term. Yeah. We're not going to talk about it now, we'll be so distracted and so dismayed.

Yeah. So I think we have to be practical here. I agree. And I am also, I think it's a valid point that you make about the fact that while these are tools that will reduce options for some people, there are also tools that create options that can be used for the creation of culture. I do think some people I know have brought up Photoshop when I talk about my concerns with AI and they're like, you know, there were a lot of, you know, people, draftsmen

and whatnot who were concerned when Photoshop hit because it was a threat to some of the things that they did for money and Photoshop effectively has created whole forms of art that didn't exist or didn't exist in the same fashion before it did as a tool and tools like it. And that's not a, I think, I think it's kind of worth, I don't like, I don't want to be kind of just on the edge of tragedy here, you know, this is a, there's a lot of different ways this could go and they're not all bad. I think we're all used to calamity right now so much so that we potentially expect it in

situations where it's not the inevitable outcome. Well, I mean, that's, I think one way to kind of boil a lot of that down is we can adapt, we just need time to do so, to many things. And what's really challenging and frustrating now is the pace is so fast. It's not just an illusion. It's not just, oh, if you don't pay attention to AI, it really is fast. It's very, very hard for us to adapt. So just thinking of the internet, we got a lot, like individuals as users and tech companies

got a lot better at dealing with clickbait, right? YouTube was tons of clickbait and they figured out ways to demote that to some extent. We got a lot better at keeping fake news out of the high search rankings in Google, like I mentioned. A lot of these problems that came up were not perfectly addressed, not even close, but there was significant progress and that's often understated. But if these problems are coming so fast and so intense, it's a lot to adapt to. And that's what's really the challenge is the pace.

And I think we're seeing a very, very breakneck pace that's really hard. Now, does that mean you're on the side of like Elon Musk and some of those folks who just signed that letter being like, maybe we should put a pause on AI research because, you know, I'm not 100% against it. And I kind of am like, man, I wish we'd been having this conversation when Facebook dropped or YouTube dropped. But I don't think that's a realistic thing. I'll say that.

But I do think, yeah. Yeah. So I would say, no, I'm not a favor that for one thing, I mean, in a very practical sense, you think all these companies that are putting billions of dollars into these investments in AI are all going to sit around saying, you know what, let's just not do this for a few months. No, of course not. So here's what I think they're not going to slow down.

What's going to happen is going to happen. Even if some players decide to be responsible and slow down, guess what? That means the only people plunging ahead are going to be the irresponsible ones. So what I think we need to do is I don't think we can really slow that down. So what about the flip side? I think we need to accelerate public education on artificial intelligence. I think we need to accelerate government legislation, regulation, international cooperation. I don't think we can solve this by slowing AI down.

I do think we need to find a way to speed up our democratic processes. It's taken us how many years to pass basically nothing about social media in the US and some mixed results in Europe. That's the problem, right? If we could work faster, then I think we could keep up. And I think that that's actually the long-term practical survival thing from this is that I hope we get is like, yeah, we've always needed to be more careful about the things that we expose billions of people to suddenly.

It should have happened before now, but I hope that this, I hope that all, I hope the fact that AI because of James Cameron is coated into our brains to be something that triggers a little bit of panic in people. I hope that rather than reacting with panic, it leads to a more intelligent and considered state of affairs when potentially embracing technologies that are going to change life for huge numbers of people. That's right. And that is, I think we have an opportunity here to experience that and explore that and

try. And that is kind of what I was aiming for in that thread is, again, I love that article that you mentioned in the beginning. But if we start going down this road of hype, there is a danger that we're going to fall into these traps and I think let's stay grounded. Let's say practical. Let's really identify the risks. Not that I'm some guru and know what they are, but it's almost easier to see what's

not true than what is true. And that's, I think, let's all try to police each other and make sure we're focusing on practical things that really are manageable, that really are genuine risks that are impacting people, that are impacting people today, and especially ones that are impacting marginalized populations. Yes. So I think let's hope we learn these lessons and I am not optimistic, but I'm not as cynical. I think there's a lot of important discussions happening now that, let's just say, there's

a lot more discussion now than we had with social media and maybe that's a good thing. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good note to end on. Noah, did you have anything you kind of wanted to plug before we roll out here? No, I just, I think it's a great topic that everyone can be involved in and I just, my plug is just don't be intimidated, don't be afraid. I am writing a book that's not going to come up for a couple of years that's trying to help empower people to kind of be part of these conversations, but that's far off.

I just want to say broadly, don't be intimidated and don't fall for this narrative that sometimes happens in tech communities that, oh, you know, I'm not a tech person. I don't have a chance to understand it. This stuff affects all of us and how it affects you matters and your opinion matters and your voice matters. We're all part of social media, we're all very soon to be part of AI and chatbots. So don't, don't be afraid to join the conversation. You don't need any technical background because I think the subject is just as much sociological

as technical. It's about people. I think that's a great point to end on. Thank you so much, Noah. Really appreciate your time and everybody else have a, have a nice day. I mean, you have a nice day too, also. Thanks to you too, it was lots of fun. From the creator of the Bright Sessions comes a new fiction podcast for all ages.

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It's almost like if you were going to imagine a paradise island or draw a picture of one, that's what Kotow looks like. Young tourists from all over the world visit the pristine beaches and crystal clear water. But underneath the surface lies something sinister. A dark cloud has come over the island and cast its shadow, death, mystery, and danger. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island. One thing is certain, in this beautiful place, no coast is clear. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever

you get your podcasts. The podcast Transportista, who murdered Captain Coral, tells the story of Columbia's drug wars. After the death of Pablo Escobar, peace was supposed to come to Medellín, but for Beto Coral, it was a peace that never truly arrived, because his father, Capitan Humberto Coral, was murdered after the final operation against the notorious drug lord. Two sides, criminals and law enforcement, in a battle to the death. In the middle, a city full of innocent people, the result, thousands of forgotten victims.

Join host Álvaro Suspedes, as he shares the tragic tale of the Coral family, caught up in the narcotics wars of the 1990s. The memory of this conflict is still present, the wounds are still open, Columbia is still a country in mourning. Listen to Transportista, who murdered Captain Coral as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadioApp Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, sometimes about putting them back together, sometimes just about enduring difficult times, and it's

been a rough couple of weeks, what with the mass shooting in Tennessee and the right accelerating their anti-trans paranoia, the whole, you know, Trump getting arrested and all that. Yes, that has really hit all of us really hard. Now that Trump has been charged with felonies, he's officially a friend of mine, so we're on Team Trump now. I'm really conflicted between my ACAB side and my illegal side, it's really hard. I mean, 34 felonies, that's quite illegal. Very few of the people I know who commit crimes is like a vocation, have that many.

It's pretty difficult. But at any rate, you know, it's been a rough couple of weeks, and I thought we could use a lighter episode to, you know, help everybody feel better. And I know that you, Mia, and you, Gare, are both youngins. You missed the earlier age of the internet and the heroes of that ancient age, you know. When I was a child, you know, it was Jupiter and all the Greek gods of the old internet. Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of the old internet era. So I wanted to talk about an ancient hero of the internet, and perhaps this will become

a series that we do now and again, where we talk about the gods of the past. And today, the ancient deity that we're talking about is kind of like the internet's Hercules, a man named Troy Herdebees. Have you guys heard of Troy Herdebees? No. I've not, I've not heard of Troy Herdebees, but I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a Roman god. The Greek version is Zeus.

You're right. You're right. You're right. I fucked it up. Before some freak DMs me and sends me like three paragraphs on this, I'm just gonna put that out there. Do not DM me about this. Yeah.

We need to do that thing where we start, we start including one of these every episode through the driver. Yeah, just fucking up purposefully in order to get people. They love doing it. They love being able to hop on. I do. We did get recently, we did the liver king episodes this week, and somebody popped on to be like, hey guys, you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of polar bears

contain enough vitamin A to kill 140 people, something like that. Don't eat polar bear livers. This is relevant because we are talking about a man today whose lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that allowed him to fight bears and hand to hand combat. This is actually very applicable to us because just last week we went to the theater to watch cocaine bear. You're right. This man would have been one of the only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear.

So once upon a time, before the breaking of the world, there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Herdebes. Troy was a simple man. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1963. He liked the outdoors and he was a dedicated conservationist. The one exception to his abiding love of nature was bears. On August 4th, 1984, when Troy was 21 years old, he went hiking in central British Columbia. Now he's given a couple of versions of this story over the years.

Some that this happened say that this happened when he was a boy. Others say he was like 20 years old, but all agree that he wound up in close proximity to a grizzly bear. In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped the.22 caliber rifle he was carrying, which would not have made much difference against a grizzly bear. No, no, no. You will only make it more upset.

A.22 is not the weapon you want in that situation. In a desperate attempt to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're going to talk about Troy's knives in a minute here. In an interview with Mental Floss many years later, Troy claimed that seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him after this. Okay, okay, wait a minute. That's not how bears work. Has this bear been involved in other fights with guys with knives?

Is there another maniac running around? The bear got stabbed behind a 7-11 and is like, no man, I don't grizz don't fuck with knives no more. I've been through that shit. Is he probably like a street gay? No, bro, no, bro, it ain't worth it. So he later claims an expert told him he would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs. This I believe, because bears very rarely attack people.

Now a normal man would have taken this number one as boy I sure got lucky and number two as I should be more careful when out in the woods. But Troy was not a normal man. His first thought was that he needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically for bears. He had been beaten in developing bear mace by an actual scientist, although the first paper on bear mace was published in 1984. So it makes sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time. It was a reasonable thing to be like, maybe we should have a mace for use against bears.

There are again several versions of what came next. I'm going to quote from one that I found in a write up by the spec now quote from then he decided that his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear spray repellent. But he realized field testing with bears would be needed. This would require a protective suit for the person doing the test. No. In his interview with middle floss, one of the later pieces on the man, Troy dropped the mace story and claimed that he had the idea just to make bear resistant armor a year

after his grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear researchers would need protective armor that would let them test bear spray and also safely observe grizzly behavior. Troy is something of an unreliable narrator, but I will say I do not doubt that the film RoboCop influenced his subsequent action. He absolutely had this idea of watching RoboCop. That makes the most sense out of anything you said so far. It is very logical.

So it is now Troy, it should be noted is not the first probably not the first man who has thought I should develop a suit of armor to allow me to grapple with bears in hand to hand combat. It is possible that in medieval Europe, some people hunted bears while wearing full body suits of armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether or not this really happened. The gist of why this is a debate is that there's an insane looking suit of armor currently in a Houston museum that was probably made in Switzerland or Germany like four hundred

ish years ago. Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or for what purpose, but one theory is that it was used for bear baiting. If so, it was used for European bears, which are significantly smaller than grizzly bears. And as far as we know was never a widespread practice. This is because attempting to fight a bear in hand to hand with a suit of armor is insane and something only a madman would do. But I am going to show you this suit of armor because it looks like something from a David

Lynch movie. Oh, but I'm so I'm so thrilled specifically the face. So look at that. Look at that beautiful thing. Oh, I see this. Yeah. It's in the face of that unsettling. They think probably somewhere around Austria or Switzerland, although it's not, I don't

think known to a point of certainty that that looks fucked up. It looks like it looks like a like like like a metal casting or someone's head, but like but with like the pinhead thing. Yeah. It's a hellraiser. I think it's the movie. Yeah. Yeah.

The face on it is distinctly unsettling. Like they could have just made a normal helmet, but like, no, no, it is the guy like there's a nose. It's the guy's face. We got it. We're not doing this right unless we like peek into the uncanny valley with this thing. Troy was not interested in the fact that attempting to fight a bear and body armor is just objectively nuts.

And since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then testing it. I'm going to read another quote from the specs right up because it's extremely funny. So the suit became his focus of attention, putting it through all kinds of tests that included being run down by a pickup truck driven by his mother, rolling off the side of a cliff and being pummeled by bikers with baseball bats. And I'm going to play you a video of Troy, one of these tests where Troy gets hit by a tree.

It's almost exactly that scene from Hot Rod. If you've watched the movie Hot Rod, were they like swing a log down at him and hit him? That may in fact be what that scene is based on, but I'm going to I'm going to share that with y'all now. I can't emphasize enough that it looks like half this armor is held together by duct tape. This looks like a fever dream combination of the Wizard of Oz and like the and like the Battle of Endor. He walks throwing massive logs at the guy in the metal tin suit.

It's white. It's a white suit too. Yeah. It looks almost like something from like Speed Racer is weirdly enough. The aesthetic that I would I would closest compare it to. It is kind of like that anime robot style design. Yeah. It's it's it's profoundly unhinged.

So I want to I want to play you a clip of him getting the helmet off so you can listen to Troy talk and see this man's face. How'd that one go? Better than the first. Yeah. Because I had that stuff on my mouth. Yeah. If I have a mouthpiece, a mouthpiece, you can do that all day long.

I got the airbags in the back, so my neck hasn't got a lot of play so that'll be perfect for the grizzly. I can I can take what he can give me with that if that couldn't do anything to me. And I feel great. Like really great. And actually, my left hand was the sleepiest an hour away. Oh really? You don't say.

Yeah. Troy is a fascinating man. So I'm going to play you now. Him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball bats as he attempts to move in this suit. And I have to emphasize to you, he is not capable of moving in this thing. This is an immobile suit of armor that he can almost shuffle in it, but not quite. I had this idea with the pickup truck and the bikers with regards to big men. Being an anthropologist, he looked at the testings we had originally done with normal

sized men. You know, 150, 180 pounds. He said the public isn't going to buy it. They're looking at this monstrous grizzly bear and they're looking at a normal sized man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff like that. They're not going to buy it. It's just to give them reality. This is insane.

This is so weird. Amazing. Amazing. I have to emphasize to you. It's like a gang of men just attacking this nerd in a metal suit is what it looks like. Yes. It's so funny. It's extremely funny.

And they pick like Terminator 2 looking bikers. They go out of their way. All of the stylization is super bizarre. Yeah, it's such a strange documentary. This is from the documentary Project Grizzly. And there's Troy Gibbs in the various interviews he does, some pretty incredible quotes. Like years after this, he wrote, at 52, I have to know whether or not the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things.

We tested the suit a lot of ways, but never went against the Grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus Mark 1. He gets up to the Mark 6 and spends more than $150,000 making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, so I think the one that we're looking at in the documentary is the Mark 6. Because he did eventually, after years of this quest, get a documentary and interested. And the film Project Grizzly was made about his quest.

One fun piece of trivia about it is that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. It makes total sense. Now, in order to give you just one last piece of context about the personality, what kind of man is Troy Herdebees or was Troy Herdebees, I am going to play you a clip of an interview with this man from the documentary that's just perfect. He's holding in this gigantic buoy knife in his hand, and he has another buoy knife

strapped across his shoulder in such a way that it's on his shoulder, but pointed down. Which is the way a crazy man carries a buoy knife. He's also, it's worth noting, dressed as like a frontier settler, but wearing like a red military beret. If he's still coming at you, that gun, you might as well use the barrel on him, or you can use the stock on him, and that's useless. But if you've got some half decent knives, at least you got a fighting chance with animals. But that's not the reason why when I go into the mountains or I go into the bush or any

man goes into the bush, they don't carry knives for the four-legged animals. They carry knives for the two-legged animals, because nowadays it's a lot like the old days. You've got a lot of wackos up there, and it's knives that you want at close quarters. You do indeed have a lot of wackos up there, Troy. So that's a brief introduction to Troy Herdebees. Now, the suit that you've seen in the Project Grizzly documentary weighed 150 pounds, and it was not in any way powered. As you see in the dock, he can kind of barely shuffle with it.

He is unable to move or even stand on uneven ground. He falls over very easily. Troy liked the documentary, felt like it helped expose his work to a wider audience, but he took issue with the fact that the documentary did not delve into what he described as the science behind it all, adding, being able to get hit by the truck took years of development. Years of practice of getting hit by trucks. You can't just jump into getting hit by a truck like that. In 2002, a trainer who probably should not be allowed around animals let Troy get into

a cage with a Kodiak bear. Now, thankfully, the bear was too confused by Troy's armor to get near him, which you might argue is technically a win for Troy. The armor did do its job. Just scare them away. Yeah, scare them away. You know, the bear just saw that and was like, you know what, there's something wrong with this guy.

This man is cute. It's clearly unwell. I do not want to be around this person right now. Here's mental floss interviewing Troy. She was so terrified she urinated her to be his recalls. I didn't look human enough, limited mobility and questionable usefulness combined to doom the Mark series. We would never use a suit like that says Lana Sierra Nello, PhD, a bear behavior expert,

a solid knowledge of bear behaviors. The best thing one can use to avoid being attacked, which is rare. And this is common whenever they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like, do you want a suit of armor? They're like, no, that's not at all useful. It's very easy to not get attacked by bears, actually. And again, if you watch the documentary Grizzly Man, and the man in the documentary Grizzly Man is a similar type of person to Troy Herdebees, they are both people.

I do believe Troy Herdebees might need a suit of bear armor because he seems like the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Herdebees fame. He was all over the internet. I found out about him because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him in an article. But like, you would see this guy all the time. I'm sure I ran.

I think I also ran across him on something awful earlier. He would regularly put out videos. He had an early kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a brand on the internet in order to get funding. And so he was very successful at raising money in order to make new iterations of his armor. He was also recruited on several Japanese game shows and he inspired a 2003 episode of The Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear fighting suit. He even filmed an Audi commercial.

Of course, he always reinvested the proceeds directly into making more suits of bear armor. Now the good news is he eventually moved on from wanting to make armor that was specifically geared towards fighting bears, but he never got over his desire for making a suit of elaborate body armor. So he pivoted, claiming that now his brother was in the military and so he wanted to make flexible body armor, themed after the armor and halo to help keep soldiers and SWAT officers safe during dangerous raids. His next suit was called the Trojan and it featured a compass in the dick for reasons

that are deeply confusing. How does that, wait, that's not even, it's not even a useful spot, like put it on like you're watching. Like if you watch him, he is adamant that he had talked to special forces guys and they said right in the dick is where you want a compass, it like flipped down so it looks like he has a penis that's made out of compass. Okay, that is kind of funny. I'm going to play you a clip of this armor, which I will say looks a lot more professional

than the last suit. The first ballistic full exoskeleton body suit of armor. This came from 20 years of development through the bare suits and about 1750 hours of actual building time and it came from so many calls I got from friends of mine in Iraq and in Afghanistan, my brother was in the military talking about, can you not go in the direction that we need, which is against the IEDs, improvised explosive devices and build it to the point where you've got the flexibility, the lightness, but with the strength of what the bare suits were and that's where this came from.

So I'm going to tell you right now, that suit is not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic heavy armor you see in the Hurt Locker only kind of helps you if it's a pretty small IED. What he's built is not going to protect you from like an explosively formed penetrator or like a 5,000 pound fertilizer, 500 pound fertilizer bomb or something like that. To test this though, Troy hired a former military marksman, a guy who he claimed had previously covered him out in the woods on bare expeditions with less lethal ammo and he asked this man to shoot him point and blank with a rifle.

So thankfully this guy was like, Troy it's illegal to point a loaded weapon at a person in our province, I'm not going to shoot you directly in the chest with a hunting rifle. So Troy had him take the armor out of the suit and then shoot at it and the bullet went immediately through the armor. It says a lot about Troy that his first instinct was not shoot the armor without a human being in it. But at least he was... Yeah, that's weird.

Yeah, at least the guy who was testing it did not shoot him directly in the chest and kill him. I'm going to quote again from Mental Floss here, Hurt Abyss tweaked the Trojan, which he debuted in 2007 to little notice. Eventually he offered his design to the Canadian military for free, but it can take years for armed forces to evaluate new technology. An existing contracts with equipment vendors render it near impossible for independent inventors without backing or references to succeed.

With industrial military, contracts are sewn up and they don't want anyone stepping on toes, he says. Engineers pick my brain, but I can't be affiliated with them. I'm a loose cannon and my methodology is backward. I do not disagree with that statement. He did, however, have several other inventions over the years, for one thing, Troy invented a burn paste, a gooey substance that hardens when exposed to flame in order to protect you.

Canada's Discovery Channel documented him covered in the burn paste being exposed to temperatures above 3600 degrees Fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his helmeted head for 10 minutes. And it worked. This leaves out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired to make his burn paste because one day while wearing his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly, so he needed to make the burn paste in order to protect himself. Yeah, it doesn't seem easy to get in and out of.

No. It would not be easy to dawn at your, if you look at the helmet there, your peripheral version is going to be shit. It's not going to be good for fighting in and it is going to exhaust you. Like he builds an air conditioner for it, but that's only going to do so much like armor. Body armor is always kind of like a trade off between mobility and protection and something like a plate carrier is worth it. But full body armor that's not powered in a meaningful way just is not going to be practical

yet. This is why I do not respect the Mandalorians. No, no, you you've been vocal about that for years. I have. I'm going to play you a video of him testing this fire paste from that Canadian Discovery Channel documentary because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a thin layer of fire paste, effectively starving out the fire.

And according to Troy, cleanup is a breeze due to fire paste only weakness, water. It turns back into a paste, see, I'm already into a layer. It's just paste now, which is fire paste. This is its natural state. And when it dries, see, I'm already sloughing it off now. There's there's there. It turns the piece. This is what's going to happen on your house.

Now it's, uh, he's chewing it up. Oh, that's so gross. He's just spitting it all over the dog comes along, takes a little in his mouth, washes it around, then spits it out. Nothing's going to happen. It's biodegradable, non-toxic, don't have to worry about anything happening. So how would a homeowner remove the fire paste from the outside of their home? This is going to be Bob's house next door.

Bob's house is going to be fine the next day. He's going to come out with his garden hose and a can of beer. And in two hours, he'll be ready for the football game. Oh, look, there goes the house. After 10 minutes, Troy inspects the fire paste house. Look at, look at this, look at this, there's a little Barbie. She's okay. Barbie's fine.

She's Barbie's sister. The Barbie is clearly cinched. Now, he does note again that the only weakness of the fire paste is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now, why, why does he keep getting platforms? Like why, why does he continue?

He was because, because this was really funny to everyone on the internet. So a documentary that came out would get shared all over. People would watch it. It would get him attention. He would get donations. There was like one point where he had to, he had to sell his, uh, his body armor. He had to like sell it to a pawn shop because he was broke and a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and gave it to him so he could continue his research.

That's fine. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah. That was a hero of the old internet. He did eventually succeed in making an armor suit that was resistant to 12 gauge shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive. Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor.

Most soft body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it. Shotguns are not for penetrating armor. They're for damaging meat. But Troy made a big deal about how this would save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention, as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was something called the Godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much detail on what the Godlight was, but he says it shrunk tumors and mice as well as his sister's tumor.

And he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers. All I did was take all spectrums of light, electromagnetic radiation, and put them together. And it works. I don't know why, but it does. I think that's how you get cancer, but okay. Funny you mentioned that. So obviously, his claims about the Godlight were never validated by any outside force,

in part because shining whatever the fuck he's invented on a bunch of sick people has ethical considerations to it. But Troy turned the light on himself and experienced what he calls the hide effect. I think as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, his hair fell out and he lost 20 pounds. Curious. What a mystery. Then he claims the Godlight mysteriously stopped working and he didn't have the money to fix it up.

There are a man. I love this man. It is fascinating. The closer society comes to this complete collapse. We get more of these little weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to like survive the apocalypse. And they keep coming up with you. In exactly the wrong ways.

Yes. I'm going to read another quote from a mental floss article. Today, Herda Bees operates a scrapyard in Ontario and dismisses notions of patents. The stuff is too easy to duplicate and it costs $80,000 to file an application. He rejects offers to outright sell his creations like firepaste because he frequently sells off shares to fund their development. By the time I got firepaste to the point of testing, 70% of it was owned by investors. So in a university once that I only have 30% left, they're not interested in that.

And yet Herda Bees can't stop inventing. He still feels compelled to put in 21 hour days refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding for the Apache, the latest version of his Trojan suit, which he says protects 93% of a user's body and offers 96% flexibility. A prototype will cost $70,000. It'll take six to eight months to build by hand. I'll try to market it to law enforcement like SWAT. He needs another $100,000 to rebuild the godlight renamed the EMR-5, which he now claims will

only cure breast cancer. He wants to take it to John's options for testing. So well, I'm excited for SWAT teams to be using his inventions. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Thanks to that dick compass, they'll never get lost at the wrong house again, could really save a lot of lives.

That's the problem SWAT teams have is poor land nav. I think the SWAT team should wear that. Every SWAT team member should be forced to wear that bare suit for everything they do. Yes. The only thing SWAT could get do. So tragically, Troy died in like 2012, I think in a fiery collision. Yeah. He drove right into a fuel tanker.

Oh no. Oh no. Yeah. It's very sad. He was 54 years old. His widow says that he swerved his car or the police say that he swerved his car into the pathway of the truck. He had been very depressed because he'd encountered financial difficulties and had not been able

to sell his inventions. Obviously, this is very sad for them. He seems like, despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around and then fell on hard times. It is a depressing end to the story, but Troy lives on in the documentary project Grizzly and in the impact he had on all of our hearts and in the memory that, you know, even if your dreams are crazy, you should try and live them because who knows, maybe you'll develop a suit that allows you to fight a grizzly bear in hand to hand combat.

Anyway, that's this hero of the internet episode. I hope you all found it edifying. That is an inspiring tale. Yeah. It's, you know. He's fucking more of an inventor than Elon Musk ever has been. And he would have been a better ruler of Twitter if Troy was in charge of Twitter. He's really the last guy from the old era of capitalism where you would actually return

your profits into R&D instead of just like paying Elon Musk like $47 million to hire a bunch of consultants who also make $47 million. Yeah. One thing you have to say about Troy is he was not in this for the money. This was a man who believed more strongly than I think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of building a suit of armor to fight grizzly bears. And whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely, absolutely honest in that belief.

I'm going to end by playing a brief montage of him testing out his first version of the armored suit, which looks more or less like a set of heavy baseball armor. Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a baseball helmet or a foot, sorry, a football helmet. In fact, I think it just is a football helmet. But yeah, here's here's Troy's early tests in 1988. Oh yeah, that's definitely a football helmet. That one looks kind of cool.

That one looks pretty cool too. Yeah. They look increasingly space marini in this period and he has some range of motion. It's so fat. His French is beating him with sticks. He doesn't even have his helmet on. Just knocking him down with what looked like two by fours. It doesn't look more.

Oh my gosh. He just pulled and walked. He just looked like he keeps going. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. He just keeps getting you walked right in the face. Yeah.

It's amazing. That last one looks super space marine ass. Yeah. Yeah. Some of them looked pretty cool and he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing. So you've got to give him one thing. He knew how to make a suit of armor that would not get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Herdeby's like to do to his armor.

It seems like he was good with like with like blunt force trauma armor. That's right. Did anyone ever do like a CTE like test on him after he died? I don't know. This man had a thousand micro head injuries. Absolutely. I mean I think the real lesson here is that he was able to continue his work thanks to Canadian health care.

He was probably like 5% of the entire Canadian health care system budget. Just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Troy Herdeby's. I hope you've all found it useful. Go into the world and if your dream is to create a suit of powered armor that will allow you to defeat a grisly bear in unarmed combat, then by God, you know, shoot for the stars. From the creator of the Bright Sessions comes a new fiction podcast for all ages.

Jump back to 1997 and follow Maxine Miles as she starts high school in the picturesque town of Hastings, New Hampshire. School is a season in which this small town shines. Apple Cider, pumpkin patches, farmer's markets, it's idyllic for adults and boring for Max. But suddenly, Max's school year starts to look a bit more interesting when a fellow student vanishes. With help of her misanthropic classmate Ross, Max starts to look into the disappearance. Her investigation draws her deep into the dark woods around Hastings and even deeper into

the secrets and lies that course the veins of this sleepy town. This new YA mystery from writer-director Lauren Chippen is an audio drama with heart and wit that involves the audience in a way no fiction podcast ever has. Listen to all episodes of Maxine Miles now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the studio who brought you the number one podcast, the Python Massacre, this is Death Island. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Kotao looks like a postcard.

It's almost like if you were going to imagine a paradise island or draw a picture of one, that's what Kotao looks like. Young tourists from all over the world visit the pristine beaches and crystal clear water. But underneath the surface lies something sinister. A dark cloud has come over the island and cast its shadow, death, mystery, and danger. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island. One thing is certain, in this beautiful place, no coast is clear. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you get your podcasts. The podcast Transportista, who murdered Captain Coral, tells the story of Columbia's drug wars. After the death of Pablo Escobar, peace was supposed to come to Medellín, but for Beto Coral, it was a peace that never truly arrived, because his father, Capitan Humberto Coral, was murdered after the final operation against the notorious drug lord. Two sides, criminals and law enforcement, in a battle to the death. In the middle, a city full of innocent people, the result, thousands of forgotten victims.

Join host Álvaro Suspedes, as he shares the tragic tale of the Coral family, caught up in the narcotics wars of the 1990s. The memory of this conflict is still present, the wounds are still open, Columbia is still a country in mourning. Listen to Transportista, who murdered Captain Coral as part of the MyCultura podcast network on the iHeartRadioApp Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. In a world where you end up standing in a two-hour line to buy mediocre and not climate-friendly water.

Sorry, this is it could happen here. This is Sophie, I really wanted to do that for a really long time. Well, now I want to watch it. Oh, thank you. Those voices you hear are James Stout and Margaret Kiljoy, and we're here to talk about the water crisis that seems to be getting worse in these United States. James, what's happening? Well, a number of things are happening, right?

I think we should probably emphasize at the start that water contaminants have been affecting people outside of the colonial core for a very long time. And legacy corporate media, whatever you want to call it, hasn't given it a solitary fuck about it until it affected people inside the colonial core. So, what we're seeing right now is in two places, East, I believe it's pronounced Palestine, right? I believe it is so too, yeah. Yeah, okay, East Palestine, Ohio, and in Philadelphia.

I believe it's pronounced Phil-A-Delfia. Ah, okay, it's like someone's name, like Phil, it was named for Phil-A-Delfia, the founder of the city. Phil from Delphia, like the Oracle. Ah, I see, yeah, yeah, he predicted that one day there would be a spill from a PLC chemical plant near the Delaware River, and famously, he was right. Yeah, they built a city there anyway. Yeah, and for years, they've been so angry about not having a chemical plant, they've

just climbed lampposts and thrown batteries at boating football teams, but. Yeah, and I feel really good about starting with such heavy jokes about this thing, yes. Yeah, yeah. It's like three million people, I think, anyway. Yeah, if you're in Philadelphia, we do want to express solidarity with you, I guess, as you wonder what the fuck to do about your water supply, which is currently contaminated, as we understand by something called butylacrylate, which is a chemical that is found in paint, and the reason that there is a paint chemical in your drinking water if you live in Philadelphia

is that a PLC manufacturing chemical plant called, I think it's Trinseo, T-R-I-N-S-E-O had a leak, and that leak went into a storm drain, that storm drain went into the Delaware River, and that river feeds into the Samuel S. Baxter water treatment plant, and obviously that water treatment plant feeds into the tap that you turn on to drink water when you live in your house, and this has, as it always does, when there are like these somewhat bungled announcements of chemical contamination in drinking water, it caused people to rush out to buy bottled water, which is an understandable response if you think you're not going to be able to drink water, which has caused people to wait in long lines, to access sometimes

like a limited supply of water, and what we wanted to talk about today a little bit was not so much like what to do if you're in Philadelphia right now, but like how we can better prepare to be ready for water emergencies, water shortages, water contamination, which is why Margaret has joined us because she is the prepper, anarchist queen, and knows a lot about these things, so yeah, Margaret, should we, I think you said you wanted to break this down by like bad things that can be in your water and things you can do to get those bad things away, right? Yeah, although I will say only a minority of this information directly relates to people

who are dealing with toxic chemical spills, so if we're, I have a lot of information about general water safety, it's long-term storage of water, things that you don't want in your water, how to get those things out of your water, and I know you have a lot of experience with that stuff too, but the very specific thing that people first in Ohio and now in Pennsylvania are dealing with of chemical stuff is worse than other stuff and way harder to get out, especially on a DIY level, so I don't know, what feels best, like should we do an overview or should we try and first talk about the chemical stuff and then talk about like the fun, easy stuff, like not getting giardio when you're camping?

Yeah, let's maybe start out with the kind of, this is the scary, you know, you can't buy a life straw for this. Fear first, fun later. Yeah, people might be listening and they might be afraid or they might be concerned or they might be in one of these places, right, or Flint, Michigan, where we still haven't fucking fixed the water. Yeah. So yeah, let's start with fucking Flint, Michigan, what a just disasters and competence.

Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's extremely sad that the country that is as rich as any country has ever managed to be in human history is still poisoning people with water, but yeah, let's start with that. Let's start with what to do when you get a reverse 911 phone call telling you not to drink from your tap. I mean, honestly, going out and getting bottled water was the right move. Or also, since people did have a heads up that their tap water was safe for a period of time, storing water in various containers is the right move.

Because once your water is contaminated with chemicals, it's really hard to get it out. The main method that, well, on an industrial scale, the thing that someone can use the way they treat wastewater with butyl acylate, I didn't write down the name in my notes. Acrylate, I think. Acrylate. Oh, like acrylic, that makes sense, because latex paint is something called a fluidized bed reactor, which frankly, I did not know about until I started doing this specific research for this specific chemical.

People who are like more at a high science level will know more about this. This is basically like you're using different bacteria to eat and, I don't know, fucking clean out this shit. This is not what's going to be happening in your kitchen sink anytime soon. This is not going to be part of your Brita filter anytime soon. Ironically, and this is not, how am I going to say this? Don't drink this chemical water if you have any possibility, right? If you can get other water, do that, and I believe in our current society, it is a better

and safer bet to get water from elsewhere. If you were in some situation, which I suspect most people are not, I suspect most people could access supply lines. If you were in some situation where the only water available to you has these types of chemicals in it, the most likely guess about a way to deal with it is activated carbon charcoal and is actually the home filters that a lot of people use. Is your Brita filter? Is your Berkey, although I'll talk some shit on Berkey in a little bit, and when we go

over the more nitty-gritty details about each filtration method, maybe we can talk more about this, but basically it is not tested to do this. No one has ever been like, man, what if we get a bunch of butylacrylate in our water? Will our Brita filter it out? No one is running tests on this because it is not a thing that normally is in the water historically, although clearly it is often in the water now. However, the method of filtration of the various home level methods of filtration, adsorption is what it's called with a D instead of a B, is the method that is perceived as most

effective at reducing chemicals in water. However, again, we're talking about maybe this reduces some chemicals, maybe not, oh, you run this through this and now you're fine. Yeah. There's a lot of things that could get in our water that we don't really have any decent research on how to get them out of our water. So Margaret, James, say you're not living in a place where you get a text letting you know that in Tuesday at 3 PM your water will not be safe to drink, which is really just...

Is there a home testing kit or a water testing kit that is accessible for most individuals or what resources can people use to understand their water at home because I'm not really going to trust the government on that. Yeah. Margaret, do you want to take that? I only know about... I do not know about testing for butylacerylate. I think that this is the kind of thing that people are not prepared for, like at a society

level, I believe. I could be wrong. All of the water testing that I have done has tended to be around... I live on a well, right? And so there's a lot of testing things that are available to tell you. The acidity of your water, the hardness of your water, which is how many dissolved minerals, whether or not your water contains things like lead and arsenic, heavy metals, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and also bacteria, right?

Like all of the stuff that we normally prepare to filter out of water, there are home tests available to you that you can use to determine. I don't know and I wish I had done more research ahead of time. There's some talk about possible smells and stuff for some of these, but I don't feel confident. Yeah. I mean, I know there's the EWGs website where you can put in your zip code and get more information on if there's been contamination or anything like that.

But that's reported things, not necessarily on an individual level for testing. I definitely do that any time I have moved anywhere. I'll type in my zip code and then I go, ah, that sounds really bad. I don't like that. But yeah, you can find out once you put it, you can find out who you put in your zip code on. This is just ewg.org. You put in your zip code and you can put who you pay for water and then it goes in and

it tells you, it's really fun. Sure, in my neighborhood, four EWG health guidelines, 14 contaminants. Oh, congrats. I think a combination of two is probably your best bet, unless you happen to own a laboratory. Because there's stuff coming, if there is lead in between the water mains and wherever the EWG is getting its information on your tap, then you're still risking heavy metal contaminants, right, or if you're on a well, you should test that out. I think it's every year, right?

You're supposed to test your well water. I probably should. You'll be fine, you'll know. But yeah, I think it's important that you, I have definitely got super sick from water that looks super clear, had no odor, looked fine. And I have drunk from turbid as fuck, stagnant water and not been sick, so your nose is not going to tell you, you do need some kind of help. Yeah.

Let's talk about storing water first, and then we'll talk about the more sort of established solutions for the more expected contaminants, I guess. How would you go about, let's say you're not in Philadelphia right now, and you want to prepare for something that could happen in your area, how would you go about storing water? So the easiest way is that you go get bottled water. If it is sealed, and you keep it out of the sun, you keep it out of the heat. Even though it's supposedly good for a year or two, whatever, I feel like really nervous on this.

Like, this is what's safe, even though it's not safe, right? But you can, but water itself doesn't go bad. That is a thing that is worth understanding. Left to its own devices, water does not go bad. Water goes bad when there's like something in it that replicates, like bacteria or something like that, or when something leaks into it. The main reason that you want to keep your water out of the sun and out of the heat is because if you're storing it in plastic, that can eventually kind of leach into it as the

plastic degrades. And that, I don't know, there's probably long-term health effects, but like I would drink a water bottle that has been in the backseat of my car for a year before I would drink butyl acrylate water, which is, I guess that's just plastic or plastic, pick your poison. But yeah, so bottled water is generally very safe, and it is sealed, and it has no particular reason to go bad. You don't want to store it next to kerosene or gasoline, like if you are the kind of person who keeps a five-gallon jug of gasoline around.

You want that in a different place than your water. Normally you want the gasoline outside your house in an outbuilding. Everyone lives on acreage in the rural areas of the country, right? So many outbuildings around here. Yeah, everyone is outbuilding. You have to just go out to my urban barn. Yeah, exactly. So okay, then the other thing, if I'm actually preparing, go out and get some five-gallon

cherry cans. You're going to pay between $20 and $50, and you'll get a little bit of different quality, depending on that, you want something that is BPA-free, you want something that is opaque, and you want something that is not really bigger than four or five gallons because it's clumsy and unwieldy. You also don't want to stack these things unless they specifically say, this one is stackable to such and such depth, like most stackable containers are also only stackable one or two high, well, two or three high.

And I don't know, I mean, like frankly, on some level, that's what there is. Okay, and if you're going to fill your own water containers, there are a couple of weird things about it. One, people argue about how often you should rotate it. I rotate mine about once a year. You should theoretically rotate them somewhere between six months and a year or something like that, depending on how you store it. The other thing is that if you are, I actually think living off of a well, you should probably

rotate it more often. If you're on municipal water, don't run it through your Brita before you store it because that Brita is going to pull out all the chlorine, all the bleach, and people are like, whoa, I don't want to drink bleach. I listened to that punk song, Dead Milkman, whatever. People don't want to drink bleach, right? You actually do want to drink tiny amounts of bleach. You want tiny amounts of bleach.

What's a miracle medical solution? Yeah, it keeps bacteria from growing. If you filter out all of that, and then you put the water in a thing, if there's the tiniest little bacteria that got through, it's sweet. The defenses are down, but yeah, honestly, storing water, people are going to sell you lots of products and prepper sites are full of people selling you shit, but it's just a matter of finding containers and filling them with water and then rotating them every now and then, and it's not actually that big of a deal or super complicated.

That's my take on it. I used to live off of, I used to live entirely off grid and then had to just drink water out of 50 gallon drums, and I just, I didn't even, you know what, I'm not going to say how bad my practices were because I don't want anyone to emulate me when we sit down. I was going to say, if you're like, if you're storing on a scale, I don't know why they say you live on a compound in the desert, you know, you can get big water tanks, right? I was looking at moving out to the desert a couple of years ago, I didn't, but yeah, you can get big water tanks that are pretty cheap.

You should some places- It's about a dollar a gallon last time I looked for like a 1500 gallon tank. Yeah. I found them cheap, like GovCert plus ones as well pretty often. Oh really? Yeah. We'll talk later. Yeah.

We'll send you some links. But you might want to check it someplace because you actually can't legally have those. It's getting better now with that stuff, but you do want to check on that. I think if you're, or you could get like a water buffalo, which is an industrial device for shipping water, you can probably pick up those pretty cheap as well. No, it's an animal. I don't want you to- Yes, you-

Don't dehumanize it, calling it an industrial machine. It's an animal. It has feelings. Yeah, it does. You just keep that in your backyard, and then what that does is attack anyone who comes after your water. So it's quite effective. Yeah.

They are tough as nails. I've had some runners with a buffalo, but they're animals. Okay. Another thing I guess that like, if you're like going hardcore on this and storing thousands of gallons of water, maybe you could invest in something like a chlorine maker. And that way, if you do like mess up with your storage, I guess that that could maybe give you some leeway in terms of purifying afterwards. Is that fair to say Margaret?

Yeah. I mean, that makes sense. Like chlorine maker is the next step up from basically because like bleach itself does go bad and it's not shelf stable for, I don't remember how long it lasts. It's not indefinitely shelf stable. And so people often, especially in places without access to clean water and stuff. I will say though, when we get into it, chemical treatment is really good for the main stuff that people normally worry about, such as protozoa, bacteria and viruses, but once again

isn't going to do shit for some stuff that goes bad. Yeah. I think it might, there's one thing, maybe cryptosporidium, there's something that chlorine specifically doesn't work for. Oh, that's right. Actually, yeah. It's actually not very good at protozoa. It's weirdly good at viruses.

And then whereas most of the filters are not good at viruses and are good at bacteria and protozoa. So we should probably explain these different things, right? Right. How do you treat your water? Okay. There's a bunch of stuff that you can be in your water that you don't wish was in the water.

The one that is like kind of off the top of my head, the one that I think about the most because I've had to deal with it and it sucked, are protozoa. The two big ones are giardia and cryptosporidium. And these are tiny little animals in the water. If you can look at pictures of them, they're really cute and they make you shit a lot forever, sometimes until you die. Really immunocompromised folks, but everyone really unhappy and if you're in a survival situation already, diarrhea is like no laughing matter.

Your inability to keep in fluids and nutrients will dramatically affect your chance of survival. So that's protozoa. They are the biggest of these things and therefore sort of the easiest to do. Actually, you don't know whether they're bigger in bacteria or not. Then there's bacteria, which it can also be in water and do bad stuff to you. And then there's viruses and viruses can be in the water and do bad stuff to you. Really in the United States and people don't worry about viruses and water. And that's not because our heads are in the sand.

It's because we don't have as many viruses in our water. Then there's chemicals you could have in your water. We don't like them. There's dirt that can be in your water, which is just like not fun. There's heavy metals like lead and iron that can have deleterious effects on your health. Some people want to get water-hardening minerals like calcium and magnesium out of their water, but you actually don't want to get rid of all of them. That's the catch.

That's what we're going to have to talk about because your body wants some of those things. They mostly just make your house has all the plumbing breaks. That's like the main stuff. There's also things like nitrates that I don't understand well enough to talk about. How we get rid of things. The most common way that backpackers and stuff who are a lot of the people who DIY this on a regular basis use is something called filtration or I'm going to call filtration. First you screen your water as in you get out the large chunks.

Usually people use like a bandana or a sock or just some piece of cloth, right? And you want to use that so you're not gumming up your filter. And then it goes into something where it's forced through a membrane with micro pores. These used to be ceramic, but these days they're like a bunch of tiny little tubes like the internet. And most of these are basically the tubes have holes in them that are so small that it stops protozoa and bacteria from going through it. That is it's like main claim to fame.

It is very effective at it. Now that they're not ceramic, you don't have to clean it like every fucking gallon. And these are really good top brands that I'm not sponsored by are Sawyer and Lifestraw. They're going to use slightly different methods. People have opinions about them. I'm not going to offer mine right now. And they're measured in the size of the holes. Anything that's like one micron is small enough to stop most protozoa.

Most of these ones are either 0.1 or 0.2. These don't block viruses. So they make ones that have even smaller holes that can deal with viruses. And this also blocks microplastics, but you know, whatever. Then there's chemical treatment. Chemical treatment. The two most common ones are bleach, chlorine or iodine. And there's also like chemical tablets that you can buy that are like worth keeping around

they weigh almost nothing, whatever. I am not going to give you the chart of how much bleach to add to your water. And don't just go listen to me and add bleach to your water. Fucking look it up. Do not use color safe bleach. Do not use scented bleach. It's just disinfected bleach, which will probably either come in 6% or 8.25% sodium hypochlorite.

Scented bleach sounds so gross, just that there's combinations of words. Yeah. I know. It's what they sent it with. The blood of, I don't know, I got nothing. Poison. Yeah. Poison blood.

No, it's laughing there then. You could have asked about like hot dogs or something. That sounds so gross. Yeah. I used to wear lavender all the time. I actually, I stopped for two reasons. First I stopped when I was in college because like my girlfriend was like, you smell like soap and was like really mad at me.

If you're listening, whatever, I don't care. And then I stopped because- Get one in Margaret, go on. Go off. If you're listening, what's good? Look at me now. Yeah. Thanks for turning me on to lots of cool stuff.

That was much healthier than I would have been. I'm proud of you. And then the other reason I stopped wearing lavenders is it attracts ticks if you're out in the woods. Anyway, okay, so that's chemical treatment. Chemical treatment is really good for bacteria and viruses. It's not great for parasites. It is a really good backup system.

Actually, I'll go over the fucking king of all of them for bacteria, virus, and parasites you want to get rid of it. You fucking boil your water. The classic way to deal with it is you boil your water and it only needs to get above 60 degrees Celsius, which is like 140 something in regular human. And I actually don't know the conversion. When you're talking about regular human as Fahrenheit, okay, Fahrenheit is really good about humans because zero is cold and 100 is hot.

Yes. Celsius is really good about water. So we actually are talking about water right now. So Celsius is the proper scale because it goes from zero is freezing to 100 is boiling. Yeah. Go ahead. Yeah. You know what we should do before we talk further about water?

Do you know what will not make you shit yourself to death? Reagan coins. Yeah. It probably is Ronald Reagan coins again. All right, we're back. Thank you very much, Uncle Run for continuing to pay for my health care and insulin needs. So Margaret, we were talking about boiling water. That's it.

Yeah. Yeah. So how long do we need to boil stuff for to change depending on what we got? It does, but not really. It's like all of the main and do the actual instructions. Overkill is better than regular get killed, right? But most shit dies off at 60 degrees Celsius, which is below the boiling point of water even at high elevation.

However, basically the deal is you want to boil your water for one minute at sea level, three minutes above 5,000 feet or five kilometer, no, wait, no, it's not 1,000 feet. It's just under two kilometers. And yeah, so boiling water is actually one of the main things you can do. It doesn't get rid of everything. It gets rid of those three things, protozoa, bacteria and viruses very effectively. And that is most of the time what most people are treating water for. A lot of the other stuff is like long-term health effects, like heavy metals and chemicals.

Other methods that you can use. The other like kind of gold standard, which isn't as good as it seems like it should be, is distillation. Distillation gets out lots of stuff. Distillation is basically you evaporate the water and then let it run down into another container, your moon shining your own water. And you can do this DIY fairly well, and there's like solar stills that are really cool. I've never actually built one.

I've always wanted to. The downside is if you live off of distilled water for a long time, it gets out the magnesium and the calcium, it gets out the minerals that you actually want in your water. So it can have negative effects on your long-term health if you only drink distilled water. The main thing that distillation does that I think no other method on this does besides a reverse osmosis, which I'm not really going to get into, is it desalinates water. Yeah. Go ahead.

That's a big deal, right? Because if we look at long-term water insecurity, like certainly where I live, we live in a place where people like to play golf in the desert, and that has become an issue as far as water supplies go. And so desalination is often proposed as like a way to deal with our water crisis in California and the fact that the Colorado River is getting lower and lower and we rely on it. But like you said, lots of these methods aren't going to pull the salt out of water, right? Then you drink seawater.

Right. But this one does. And so, I mean, actually, I don't really care about the health of golf course. I have actually negative feelings about the health of golf courses. But theoretically, maybe watering your lawn with the desalinated distilled water and then drinking the water that actually has minerals in it. But then again, like maybe the plants need that shit too. I don't fucking know.

So and in distillation, it's very good at getting out heavy metals also like iron and lead and the reason it gets out the bacteria and viruses is not because they can't evaporate, but because they die getting boiled because you boil to distill. And some pesticides are filtered out if their boiling point is greater than the boiling point of water. Benzene and Tulene, which I don't know what Tulene is. These are examples of things that do not get distilled out. Then there's a couple more.

There's adsorption, adsorption rules. This is the thing that I always misspell. And so, that's why I emphasize the adsorption and I don't really understand. Go ahead. How do we adsorb? Is that just like absorption with adverts? You know, it's like, yeah, it's like I took three years of Latin and all I remember is that ad means towards and ab means away from.

And maybe a gorilla is either a farmer or a farmhouse. Yeah. I got puerine. Yeah. Sumas es. Sumas es. Aramara sarat. Arama sarama sarant.

I can remember that one now. Yeah. Great. Yeah. Well, there you go. You've all learned something today. Yeah. I wish that my school had made me take Spanish instead of letting me take some bullshit like

Latin. To teach myself Spanish. Yeah, exactly. So adsorption is good for pesticides, heavy metals, chemicals, viruses, and bad tastes. It's the only one of these things that I'm aware of that actually use can get rid of bad taste because this is pulling out all the weird stuff in the water. And what it is, is it uses activated carbon, which is basically just some shit that's fucking burned and then crunched up real small.

It is a huge surface area because it's like little powder, right? And then the water passes through it and then by some weird science shit, the bad stuff tends to stick to the carbon. This is great. This is what your Brita filter does. This is what your Berkey does. This is what your pure filter does. It's not as good, I believe, for bacteria and stuff and specifically the biggest problem

with these things is that bacteria can grow on them. And so some people, I mean, that's why you replace it every so often. It's not because it's like slow or clogged, it's like literally unhealthy. And so sometimes what people do is they treat for bacteria with UV or some other method, bleach, whatever, all the other shit that we talked about. We haven't talked about UV yet. After it goes to the carbon filter, I'm really excited about like kind of learning more about these because you can theoretically DIY carbon, right?

Yeah. Yeah, you definitely could, right? I know that it's not the same as this, but one of the things you can do if you're in the back country is like, if you have water with a lot of turbidity, which is stuff in the water, right? If you can't see through the water, you know, if it's got a lot of cloudiness, you can use the white ash from a fire and that will increase the rate at which it deposits the sediment, if you see what I mean.

So you have a lot of water. Oh, interesting. Because it sticks to it and then slowly filters to the bottom of the, I think the gold standard is a loom, which is something you use in canning and that increases it even quicker. But yeah, you can use white ash from a fire if you're dealing with, I don't think that's an activated carbon. I think that's a different mechanism. Yeah.

No, I don't know. And then one of the methods that is actually mostly done on an industrial scale that actually is like, I think the main way that people filter water in this world is through sand. And I didn't do enough research about, there's both slow sand filters and fast sand filters. And some of them like literally depend on certain bacteria, good bacteria, like having a healthy culture of them that like eat the bad stuff and things. I used to know more about that than I do currently. And then the last one I'm going to cover, okay, then there's reverse osmosis, which you might

have a kitchen thing that does and it also removes minerals. It's a very effective method of filtering out lots of stuff. It also, I don't know, causes wastewater and is complicated in some ways. And then there's UV disinfection. And this is like one of the ones that gets touted is this like, this is going to save the developing world or whatever, right? When UV disinfection is cool and good, basically it uses UV light to kill off bacteria, parasites and viruses.

Again, these three things that are the main things people are usually going for. The biggest downside of UV disinfection, there's two of them. One is that it requires low turbidity water, thanks for introducing that term, clear water. It has to be fairly clear water because it's about light, right? That makes sense. It's because you have to be careful to do it right. You just have to actually get all of it with all of it. So this is why I haven't, for a moment I got really excited about these things and in the

end I was like, I like my water filter that I already have. Yeah. I think with UV filtration as well, it's been big in the outdoor world kind of relatively recently. You have to be conscious of storing it in a opaque container afterwards because the bacteria can UV reactivate. Oh yeah, if it's like any of it that it doesn't get, it's like, fuck yeah, it's my time. Yeah, because it stops them reproducing.

That's how it, they're still in there, but they don't, so it doesn't really matter. You drink them and then you pass them through your system and it's fine. But if they reproduce, that's when you get sick. So somehow they can UV reactivate. So like if you have a, you know, the classic like, like through hiking thing is to use a smart water bottle, right, because it's cheap and it's dirty and, but if you were UV filtering and then traveling in your smart water bottle and then putting that in the back of your pack and hiking all day, you might get some difficulty.

So yeah, I don't know, it's not, I haven't really messed with it much. I've like, yeah, I have my comfortable setup and that's what I like to use. And I will say that like something that people who don't go camping much might not be aware of there's almost nowhere in the United States that you can be confidently drink wild water without it, without risking something like Giardia. There are places where you can directly from a spring is the most likely to be good. People used to say that you can, you can drink high elevation water if you're up in an alpine area because there's like no cows or whatever, because like Giardia and I believe also crypto,

but the other poop transferred crypto, the Cryptosporodia, not the multi-level marketing scam. So I would say it's passed in the fecal oral tradition. What's the word here? Oral tradition. There's a word here. You passed a mouse pathway. Yeah, pathway, yeah.

And so because it's passed that way, it's like basically the fact that there's livestock everywhere is the reason that's not safe to drink the water. And so people are like, oh, if you go up high enough, you're safe, but there's still animals up there. And there's also like more and more hikers up there, almost anywhere you're going to be hiking, someone else is hiked and someone else is hiked and they have drank the water without filtering it because they're not thinking properly. And then they've shit in not in a hole, but just shit somewhere on the ground because

they're also a bad person in that way. And so they've like tested a while ago in the high Sierras that there's Giardia everywhere, which doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make you sick, but it can make you sick. So it's just like worth knowing that this is the reason that backpackers know so much about water filtration, although again, they don't know as much about chemical spill filtration, which is why I had to go and learn more about that, less because I'm a backpacker and more because I used to live off grid, but yeah, they're different like, like there are definitely a lot of products out there that are very affordable that work for like that specific, specifically

the Giardia concern, right, which is one that most people have. And that's probably if you're like, if you're in a place where you hear there's industrial water contamination and you go to REI and you buy a Sawyer make a tap filter, for instance, and it clamps onto your tap, it probably won't work for the stuff that you're concerned about. But it will work if you're, yeah, off a well and you have Giardia or something. Yeah. And it also won't work for like lead, which is one of the reasons why the carbon filters are the more common ones at home because city water, that is a higher, you know, if you live

in some cities, you're going to have lead in your water, right? Yeah, because we used in pipes for decades. Yeah. But I don't know, um, oh, let's talk shit on Berkey's really quick. Yeah, let's do it. What's up with Berkey? Why are they bad? So I was like, I posted the other day after this thing, because that's my fun joy of

being a prepper is going to Twitter and being like, here's what I know about that thing, you know, whenever a thing happens while like safe on my mountaintop and drinking out of my well, which whatever has its own problems, um, I'll take those problems anyway. Okay, so, um, so I posted about this and then I pointed out that like overall there's like the different filters that you can have at home and then the only one that seems to sort of do it all is the Berkey. It's this very expensive brand. You've probably seen them in your hippie friend's house or you're the hippie and there's one

in your house. Um, there's one in my house and it's a big silver canister that looks like it comes from the fifties or whatever. And, uh, and it's a filter and it somehow filters more than everything else. And the way that it does that is by line, um, or rather, I don't know what I'm using marketing. The way it, yeah, the way it does it is it says it can do these things and it is not certified to the, what is it, a NSF slash ANSI standard that all of your other filters

are testing themselves to. So everyone else is saying, we have passed this following certification and Berkey is saying, oh, we tested and it does all this stuff. All the other ones probably do kind of all this stuff too, but the only things that they're actually certified to do, they, or what they say they do. And so Berkey basically charges a mint in exchange for, uh, using their own testing standards instead of the testing standards of other people, independent testers. And Google Berkey wire cutter and you'll find a good article that, where people conducted

a bunch of tests. Um, and it's a shame because it would be nice to have this sort of all in one filter because it's very annoying. If you want to filter something out of your water, you have to go, okay, what's in my water that I don't want? And then you have to go find the filter for that and it's not going to be the same as the other filters. Not going to be the same as the other filter.

Like, oh, you live some more with lead in your pipes, you can't buy a regular Brita. You got to buy the, the lead pipe Montreal special Brita, you know, um, and like, you know, you want an under sink water filter. Well, do you want this one or this one or this one? And it, it would be nice if there was a, uh, uh, buy once cry once. Yeah. Yeah. Go to Amazon.

Two days later, you'll find kind of situation. Yeah. But there isn't one. No. I was going to go over like just in, in case people are curious more about the back country stuff, I guess, um, I have, uh, three different levels of stuff that I use for back country. If I'm just going out and I don't think I'm going to filter water, I just take a stainless steel single wall water bottle and some, uh, iodine or another chemical purifier and iodine

works pretty well, but you don't want to be using it longterm. It's not good for you longterm for your thyroid. And then I'll filter it through like a buff or a kefir or something to get the turbidity out and use that. Um, if it's a trip where I'm just in the back country in America, I take a squeezy, uh, filtration system, catadine B3 is the one I tend to use. Um, and you want to have a dirty bag and a clean bottle, right? So you're squeezing from the dirty water into the clean water.

Um, and then if I'm going somewhere for work where there are virus risks and where it might be a liquid, you'd call it a non permissive environment, a place where you don't want to hang around near a water source for a long time. In case it's dangerous. Uh, I have this thing called an MSR guardian, which is not cheap and you probably don't need it for what you're doing. But if you, if you are concerned about viruses, it has a dirty bag and a clean bag and it's a hang filter.

So you can fill up three liters of water, bugger off to somewhere safe, hang it up and let that filter from the dirty bag into the clean bag. And then, uh, you're not standing by the water filtering or pumping. Um, I've used that in some pretty fetid situations and been fine. And I'll say though, the thing that I used off grid was I used a Sawyer, um, just a regular Sawyer, but water filter, they're like 30 bucks. And I attached it to a five gallon bucket with some hoses and then I had gravity fed it and I just left it dripping from one five gallon bucket to another.

And that's for a stationary place in the United States. That worked for me. Yeah. I can see that working really well. Uh, Margaret, is there anything, where can people learn more about prepping? Would that be a podcast they could listen to? You mean one that just went weekly, live like the world is dying. I am one of the hosts of live like the world is dying.

Uh, the reason it went weekly is now there's more hosts. And you can listen to that wherever you listen to podcasts every Friday. And soon you'll be able to hear James on it. But I don't know when you just have to listen to all of them. Yeah. Uh, where can people see you gloating on Twitter from your mountaintop? Uh, magpie killjoy until I finally get sick of Twitter, which is increasingly likely every single day.

The hell so? Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you very much, Margaret. Thanks for having me informative. You are welcome. All right. Bye everyone.

From the creator of the bright sessions comes a new fiction podcast for all ages. Jump back to 1997 and follow Maxine Miles as she starts high school in the picturesque town of Hastings, New Hampshire. Fall is a season in which this small town shines. Apple cider, pumpkin patches, farmer's markets, it's idyllic for adults and boring for Max. But suddenly Max's school year starts to look a bit more interesting when a fellow student vanishes. With help of her misanthropic classmate Ross, Max starts to look into the disappearance.

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Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here, with me, Andrew of the YouTube channel, Andrewism. And today I'm joined by... Garrison is here, greetings. And Mia also here, hello. And I wanted to talk about the idea of the Noble Savage. It's something that people have occasionally brought up in my comment section, when I discuss really anything related to, hmm, maybe there's something to learn, something to be learned from the indigenous people of preclonial period.

There's often this accusation levied against any sort of positive representation of their society. Any sort of generous reading of their society as something to be scoffed at, as something to be ridiculed, as something to be seen as perpetuates in this trope of the Noble Savage. And so I was in some sort of, at first I was in sort of a, I got into a sort of defense mode and I was like, well, hmm, I really don't want to do that, right? I don't want to want to create this caricature of indigenous peoples in my videos that, you know, forcefully represents all their complexities and stuff.

Obviously, every group throughout history has had many layers to them. And then in reading, Don't Have Everything by David Greber and David Wengrew, ended up something upon even further information on the subject. And so that's something that I want to talk about, you know, this idea, where the idea of the Noble Savage came from, how it's used, and I think how we should be approaching it today. But before I even get into all of that, are you all familiar with this term and how it's used?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's, I don't know, it is interesting in the way that it kind of like, I don't know, there was kind of this shift of it being used as a term to critique sort of like, racist white fantasy to being a term that's used to sort of bludgeon any time anyone like has the temerity to suggest anything in another society than this one could have possibly have been better, which is a kind of grim shift, I think, in a lot of ways. And I think has done a lot of political damage by people who sort of don't quite understand what was going on.

Yeah. And that is a shift that I noticed as well. And for a while, I thought that was really how the term was originally meant to be applied. I mean, we see it all over discussions of anthropology and philosophy and literature, which could be extended to media as a whole, right? You have this sort of stock character of the Noble Savage, this person that's uncorrupted by civilization, something that some person that symbolizes the sort of innate goodness and moral superiority, living in harmony with nature that we don't have access to because

we've been corrupted by the influences of civilization, right, as this idealized concept of an uncivilized or sort of base man, right, or other person. And I mean, we see it a lot in rightist discourse being used as a term of derision. For example, a right wing Australian politician named Dennis Jensen once told parliament that the Australian government should not be funding people to live a noble savage lifestyle in remote indigenous communities. Jesus. Yeah, Christ, it's used to mock the so-called backwards lifestyles of indigenous people

and really try to reinforce this white supremacist idea of their inferiority or their backwardness, their regressiveness, whatever the case may be. And then on the other side, in leftist political discourse, you also see it being used as a term of derision. So in both cases, it's being used as a term of derision without really a good grasp of what the term is, where it came from. For example, anarcho-primitivists are criticized for upholding this trope, and of course leftists are leftists for falling for the trope, for falling for the trope when describing indigenous

histories, spiritualities, and social ecologies. It seems like you can't even bring up any sort of reciprocal, gift-economy-based relationship to the land that indigenous group might have had without somebody saying, oh, well, did you know that indigenous people also perpetuated extinctions and genocides and this and the other? So I really don't think that any time you learn from a society that predates your own and may still persist that you're doing a noble savage, but it is something that I had become very conscious of in my approach to any sort of discussion.

I feel like it sort of haunts the discourse, among other sort of stock characters and troops that permeate and are political conversations. In media, the trope has come in and out of fashion, but the two main forms that it appears in is one that life is strenuous, the life of a quote unquote primitive is strenuous and therefore this savage is nobly brave, hard-working, and honorable, and you have this other depiction, which is that the savage again, it pains me to use the term every time, but the savage is not greedy and just does not have a taste for luxury. So you see it in certain media, it's been a long time since I've watched The Road

to El Dorado, but if I recall, there is this sort of idea within the movie that they're so used to this, the decadence and stuff of gold and whatnot, that they don't consider it as valuable, they consider it worthless, so there's this aspect of the trope that treats materials traditionally considered valuable to be something to be sort of shrubbed off or flaunted, and then of course, because what is philosophy, what is really our ontology without some sort of reference to the stories embedded within the Christian canon, there is this sort of interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden as Adam and Eve be in these noble savages that live in this uncorrupted innocence and harmony with nature, and then

they have to partake in this fruit from the tree of knowledge, or they become quote unquote civilized, and then they're punished by having to engage in agriculture and have to lever over the land instead of living in harmony with it, so one interpretation of that story is that it's a metaphor for the dawn of agriculture, and the Garden of Eden is a sort of nostalgic take, even later on when Europeans first encountered hunter-gatherer communities in the Americas, they compared them to being living in this sort of Eden, and today you still find comparisons to Eden used to describe certain hunter-gatherer societies, and then of course, as this is quite topical, you often see this criticism of noble savage and whatever being levied

against Avatar, as in the blue people, not the last airbender, because they have this sort of, oh we are these utterly perfect, you know, peace-loving space hippies, all in harmony with nature, chilling, vibing, we literally have sex with trees kind of vibe, and I haven't seen the second movie in the series, I only saw the first, but I wouldn't be surprised if that trend continues, I don't know, have you all seen either or both of them? I saw the first one, I was like, no, nothing on Earth can compel me to see the second one, so I have no idea if it's true or not. Yeah, and I mean the cons of the noble savage, it has its roots a lot further back than European

encounters with Native Americans, right? That sort of the intellectual lineage of the cons that could actually be traced back to ancient Greece, so if you really want to reach, you could say that even back in the Akkadian epoch of Gilgamesh, that Enkidu as a sort of Bushman was a kind of a depiction of that contrast between hunter-gathered societies and agricultural societies that Gilgamesh represented, of course, civilization, but if we start in from ancient Greece, we could say we're seeing Homer and Pliny and Xenophon all idealizing the Akkadians and other groups, whether they were real or not, and then later on in Rome, you find Tacitus, for example,

writing of the noble Germanic and Caledonian tribes in contrast with his view of Roman society as this sort of corrupt and decadent place. He even wrote speeches, like he practically wrote fan fiction about liberty and honor for his sort of caricatures of these people. Other writers would also treat the Scythians comparably, you'll see them in the works of Horace and Fugil and Ovid, and then further on, you know, in the 12th century, the polymath, Ibn Fatih, to fail, wrote in his novel The Living Son of the Vigilant this idea of this sort of stripped down, back to the roots, earthy wild man who is isolated from society and has a series of trials and tribulations that lead him to knowledge of Allah

by living this life in harmony with Mother Nature, basically theorizing this idea that people can find their way to God just by being exposed to nature, finding a sort of a theological understanding by understanding the natural world. All of this is sort of a preamble to really what most people point to as the origins of the concept, the modern myth of the noble savage. It's most usually attributed to 18th century Enlightenment philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and he believed the original man was somebody who was free from sin, appetite, or the concept of right and wrong, and those deemed savages were not brutal but noble, or at least this is how the story goes. The idea can also be found in theology. The founder of the Methodist Church, for example,

John Wesley, again, just like the Andalusian novel writer, believed that, you know, there's this idea of man in the beginning at the roots connected with nature is not as corrupted, is more connected with nature and with God compared to the so-called degeneracy found in 18th century society, compared to the disease and materialism seen throughout the world. David Graver, in one of his recent posthumous works, Pirate Enlightenment, and in a lot of his other works as well, he sort of grapples with this idea of the Enlightenment, right, and how flawed our understanding of the Enlightenment is, how our approach to the Enlightenment as a sort of era unique to Europe or this era centered upon Europe is flawed in its approach because it leaves out the realities that the Enlightenment

occurred as a result of the Europeans interactions and exposure to the rest of the world. You had these European explorers and colonizers and scientists venturing out, trading, interacting with these different groups of people, hearing their ideas about things and then going back and writing bestselling books about these societies and how they believe and what they think and how they organize their society. One chronicler, for example, noted that among the Indians or Native Americans, that land belonged to all just like the sun and water. Mine and thine, the seeds of all evils do not exist for those people. They live in a golden age and open gardens without laws or books, without judges, and they naturally follow goodness. Rousseau, Thomas More, and others

also idealized the naked savages as innocent of sin. Another one wrote about how they are equal in every respect and so in harmony with their surroundings, they all live justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. Basically, we just found a whole continent of people basically living in a garden of Eden. But then this concept of ecological mobility that is perpetuated is, of course, flawed. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, there were cases of over-exploitation and damage done to the environment. And yet, we also find in a lot of indigenous groups, the living in compatibility with the ecological limitations of their home area, getting familiar with the lands that they live on and what it takes to preserve them for the next generations. A lot of what is

seen as a sort of virgin landscape was profoundly shaped by the controlled boons, the horticulture, the hooding, and other activities done by indigenous groups throughout the Americas, for example, in the case of the Amazon rainforest, and in Australia as another case, where the controlled boons really shaped that landscape over thousands and thousands of years. To this day, the methods used by indigenous peoples have been found to be superior to those used by non-indigenous peoples living in the same habitat. Methods like polycropping, techniques to enhance soil fertility, sustainable harvesting, and of course, there are these culturally encoded mores that are placed in these communities that help

results in the preservation of these resources. Then you also account for the fact that no culture is stagnant, every culture changes over time. And as a result of the capitalist market economy, there is this pressure to over exploit the land for the sake of profit. A lot of where these documented patterns of land cultivation and land preservation are found is usually the outskirts and the margins of the capitalist market economy. Such practices can be more difficult to find right in the belly of the beast. For example, the Irapa, Yucpe in western Venezuela, they were traditionally mobile over an extensive area, plants and food, search and game, and now they are stationary, now they are settled, and now they are forced to adopt

a different lifestyle in response to their new material conditions. When you had that lesser population density and greater freedom to roam, it was easier to both satisfy subsistence needs and also maintain the health and vitality of the ecosystem over an extended period of time. But now that surpluses are needed, now that agriculture has been reduced to a very small portion of the population and that those techniques are now expected to be more intensive in order to keep up with the demands, those lifestyles and those cultural mores and those practices have had to change. But back to the idea of the noble savage, right? And particularly drilling into this idea of the noble aspect of it, right? Because there's some confusion, as

Gribba points out, between these two meanings associated with the word nobility. You could say someone is noble in the sense that they are, you know, moral, good, exemplary in their behavior, in their etiquette, in their ethical standards. Or you could say somebody is noble in the sense they have this position in a sort of a class system, a hereditary position in a class system, an elevated economic status. Rousseau didn't come up with the phrase, and in fact he never used in his writings, what Ter Ellingson, historian, discovered, or rather explored in his book, The Myth of the Noble Savage, is that the tomb was coined over a century before Rousseau's birth by a French lawyer ethnographer named Marc Escobo. And Escobo described Indigenous

peoples as truly noble, not having any action, but as generous, whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars. The nobility was more so associated not with just moral qualities like generosity and, you know, good behavior, but also nobility from a legal standpoint. The lives of freedom, the privileges, and the responsibilities that the Indigenous people enjoyed were also found, according to Escobo, within the European nobility. In Cannibals and Kings, an anthropologist named Marvin Harris went on to explain why Escobo had recognized nobility among the Indigenous people that he visited. You know, a lot of the band and village societies, there was a level of economic and political freedom that very few

enjoyed in his day. And even today, you know, people decided for themselves how long they wanted to work on a particular day, what they would do, or if they would even work at all. You know, they didn't have to deal with the taxes and rents and tribute payments that, and one could even exclaim to say, debts that keep people today and in the past so confined and restricted in their limited life on this earth. What should have been, you know, the sort of norm or standard, you know, of human freedom is in contrast with European society, just like mind blowing. Yeah, there's another David Graber. Actually, I've been talking about The Never Was a West a lot recently. And one of the things that he talks about in The Never Was

a West is this like trick that European writers use when they're looking at another society, which is like, they present themselves as like people whose behaviors are sort of are entirely rational, and they're solving a logic puzzle. And then they go find like, I don't know what they consider to be the weirdest thing. And so like, sorry, they go find what they consider to be the weirdest thing that like another culture does. And look at it through this, you know, this lens, which draws in the reader to be doing this sort of logic puzzle and trying to figure out, oh, how could these people do this thing? And then, you know, if you pull back the lens a little bit and look at like what these supposedly

objective European, like theorists are doing, it's like, well, okay, these guys all have these really weird tea ceremonies and like they eat the they eat the flesh of their God every weekend and stuff like that. And so you get this really interesting, but when you read it through that they're sort of colonial ethnography, you get this image of both societies as very weird that lets you sort of that conceals the fact that yeah, like when when these European writers are talking about meeting indigenous people, like you kind of the way that it's written makes it very easy to sort of like, do this colonial thing where you forget that every single French writer who is writing about this lives in like the most hierarchical society

in the world has ever seen. Yeah, yeah, that's so true. And it's like, well, yeah, of course, like they went to literally any other place on earth and talked to people and were like, oh my God, these people are like, are really free. And it's like, well, yes, because these guys live under the French, like under like French absolutism. This is like, I think Graber's line was like, this is a society where every single person when they walk into a dining room immediately knows the class of every single other person sitting around the table by like how they hold their silverware. Yes, it's absurd, you know, when a lot of the rest of the world is like, you know, living on the generosity of the people around them, being reliable in, you know,

the foundations of, you know, community, not even necessarily, because I mean, obviously, there were hierarchies to be found within a lot of these cultures and communities, but not to the extent that you would have found in, in some of these European societies, not even close. Yeah, these are the European, like, I don't know, like Europe has been really, really, I mean, you know, this is the sort of organizational trend of European society for like last, like, four, 500 years has been just incredible, unfathomable centralization on a level that was just, it's just sort of incomprehensible to most of the people who've ever lived, but we treat it sort of normal now because it's the society that we've grown up under.

Yes, it's in, I'm trying to draw a comparison between Europeans encountering this level of freedom in other societies, and sort of like, I can't think of any specific example right now, but you know how, you know, growing up as a child in a particular household, your house would have certain norms that you think is just like universal, you know, like everybody does this, obviously, this is just a fact of life in the universe. But in reality, it's just like some weird quirk when a appearance had that you just had to grow up with. Yeah. Yeah, like, like, for example, this is a really weird example, but let's say for example, you had like ceramic dishes would not allow to be used ever, right? They were purely for decoration. And the appearance

told you that it's some grave moral sin to eat off of ceramic dishes. And then you go to somebody's house and they have all their plates laid out and you're like, they're utterly baffled by how they're able to eat off of ceramic dishes. If I could think of a better example. But for now, yeah, that's what I wrote a row with. Anyway, despite recognizing all of this freedom and stuff, they were kind of like disgusted by at least some of them, you know, some of them, when publishing their texts in Europe would put their own liberal ideas into the mouths of indigenous people to say, Oh, I'm not saying this. This is obviously like treasonous. And I would never say this. But this indigenous guy who I spoke to the other day, he said it. And so I'm just publishing what

he said. So that took place sometimes. And then there also those who like actually disgusted by the liberty exhibited in in some of these societies. But whether they saw that freedom as a positive or as a negative, despite all their fluffy words about indigenous liberties, that didn't really matter for indigenous people at the end of the day, because, you know, through the centuries, empires continue to swallow indigenous lands. And the phrase basically disappeared for about 250 years, because the idea of the noble savage was reversed by this stereotype of the dangerous, brutal savage, like how dare they defend their land and way of life, right? It wasn't until 1859 that the term was resurrected by a guy named John Crawford, a white supremacist. He wanted to become

president or rather, he was attempting to become president of the Ethnological Society of London. And he was very disdainful of this idea, emerging in anthropology and philosophy of universal human rights, like how dare you, you know? So he introduced the phrase resurrecting after 250 years to make a speech to the society. And by the way, he missed he's one who first misattributed this speech, the phrase to Rousseau, basically ridiculing using the noble savage as a term to ridicule those who sympathized with such quote, less advanced cultures. And so that sort of fabrication where he attributed it to Rousseau, and he built up this straw man to blow it down. You know, it's basically this myth of the myth of the noble savage. He creates a straw man of the noble savage

as a myth. And then that's what perpetuated. But his myth of the noble savage isn't was the one that was a myth. So it's, you know, the myth of the myth of noble savage. And so as the British Empire was reaching the height of its power, and he was, you know, trying to ridicule anybody who had anything nice to say about indigenous people, that straw man was used to continue to advocate for their extermination. Crawford's version of noble savage became the source for every citation of the myth by anthropologists from Luboc, Tyler or Bois through the scholars of the late 20th century. So even 100 years later, people were still using the term that he came up with, with this rhetorical cheap shot that he used. And to this day, it continues to polarize our

discussions and obstruct any sort of nuanced approach to hunter-gather life. And having discovered all of this, I have to say it really made me feel like a part of history. There never was a noble savage myth, at least not in the sense of the straw man of simple societies living in happy innocence. Travellers usually accounted for both virtues and vices. They spoke of the positives of these societies and also things that they were too fond of. Both the concept of the noble savage and the concept of the brutal savage are fantasies, constructions of a European mind that was intent on boxing indigenous people in this sort of suspended state of either purity or evil. Going forward, I think it's really silly

to continue to perpetuate the term. I think it really keeps us from engaging with history properly. And I mean, even if somebody is exaggerating or expunging certain aspects of a particular society or culture, that should be engaged with directly. I don't think you should fall back on a lazy trope popularized by a white supremacist. I mean, we live under states now, we live under capitalism now. And I don't think I don't fault people for trying to imagine what life must have been like before then, before these institutions became so all-encompassing. What becomes an issue is when we take these past societies and we use them as the speakers of virtue instead of going back and trying to take their lessons and their practices and adopting them

and interpreting them to move forward. There was a lot of freedom and there still is a lot of freedom left to be uncovered in our history. It is obscured in our history classes. It isn't taught instead we're taught facts and figures and wars and notable individuals. We're taught of kings and dictators and high priests and emperors and prime ministers and presidents and chiefs and judges and jailers and dungeons, penitentiaries and concentration camps. This is all existence now, but it doesn't have to be. And if we're going to have an honest exploration of our history in order to inform our future, we have to free our imaginations of this lazy trope of the noble savage. That's it from me for this episode. You can check me out on youtube.com slash andeurism

and also on twitter at underscore saint drew as well as my patreon.com slash saint drew. This is a good happen here. Yeah, you can find us in the usual places on Twitter, Instagram. And yeah, go be free. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.

From the creator of the bright sessions comes a new fiction podcast for all ages. When a fellow student vanishes, Max starts to look into the disappearance. Her investigation draws her deep into the dark woods around Hastings and even deeper into the secrets and lies that course through the veins of this sleepy town. This new YA mystery from writer director Lauren Chippen is an audio drama with heart and wit that involves the audience in a way no fiction podcast ever has. Listen to all episodes of Maxine Miles now on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm David Eagleman. I have a new podcast called Inner Cosmos on iHeart. I'm going to explore the relationship between our brains and our

experiences by tackling unusual questions like can we create new senses for humans? So join me weekly to uncover how your brain steers your behavior, your perception and your reality. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Just a few miles off the Thailand coast, the island of Kotao looks like a postcard. But underneath the surface lies something sinister. In the last 20 years, dozens of tourists have died mysteriously on the island. A dark cloud has come over the island. Death, mystery and danger. Listen to Death Island every Wednesday on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.