Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 95

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

911 what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. In a killer, we were still on the loose. In the 1980s, we were in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. We weren't safe anywhere. Would we be next? It was getting harder and harder to live in Mompine.

Listen to the Murder Years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The True Crime Podcast Sacred Scandal returns for a second season to investigate a led sexual abuse at Mexico's La Luz del Mundo Mega Church. Journalist Robert Garza explores survivor stories of pure evil experiences at the hands of a self-proclaimed apostle who is now behind bars. I remember as a little girl being groomed

to be his concubine, that's how I was raised. It is not wrong if you take your clothes off for the apostle. Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHR radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is I.C. Over the years, I've compiled thousands of inspiring and thought-provoking quotes. your podcasts. them in action in my life. Listen to I.C. Daily Game every weekday on the I.H.R. Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast and start your morning with me.

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 gonna be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. [♪ OUTRO MUSIC PLAYING [♪ AAAAAAAAHHHHH!

It could happen here is the podcast that this is right now. What do you guys solo intro this podcast, James Stout, me a wang, do you all just like shout atonelly ever? Have you, have you all tried that yet? I haven't, I struggle with the intros. I just say hello everyone. Yeah, you know, James. No, no, that's your, that's your East Coast Ivy League lead Asm coming through the day. Yeah, that's that's correct forever ever since I was born in Boston. I Going up on a different side of the tracks yourself also from Boston, of course, that's right. That's right. Yes

In train tracks and Boston. I'm sure I'm not allowed currently to do the accent Because so the illegal reasons. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, she's got some dirt on me. Anyway, we are a podcast about things falling apart. And you know what would make things fall apart worse than they already are, is if Donald Trump won a second term.

So today, we're going to talk partly about that and we're going to talk about the indictments against and that's the big news, right? The most recent big political news, unless he's been indicted again by the time this episode drops. Not impossible. I just said another one ready to drop, but for my last kind of thing, he's at like 78 charges, felony charges at the moment. So honestly, he might get to triple digits. It's not, he's not all that far. Um, there's, yeah, there's stuff like I didn't realize, well, I, I guess I knew intellectually

that you could, that you could be charged with conspiracy to do something and then also doing it, but I don't think I've ever seen a politician charged with both conspiracy and the actual doing of the thing. Yeah. I hope at some point, assuming, you know, we continue to have something that resembles freedom of speech, we'll get a good book about like how the whole process of them had like figuring out how and when and whether to actually like go after him. Um, I mean, obviously we're talking about both like the feds and, um, uh, the D.A. in New York. Uh, but I am interested in both of those stories because it, there has to be, uh, there have to have been some real interesting conversations. Um, but yeah, we are, um, right now he, we're looking at him, uh, he's about to be arraigned as we talk about this for inciting an insurrection at the

Capitol. So, so that's pretty cool. Mia, you wanted to start us off here, I think. Yeah, yeah. And I think this is, okay, so this is an interesting indictment in that like, it somehow took them about two years to like actually do the indictment. That's like, hey, it's illegal to over try to overthrow the government by installing yourself as president.

In fairness, they don't have a lot of experience judging people with that. What? We should actually mention they should. Bush, we'll use the Bush, Bush, we're gonna talk about this more later, but Bush actually got away with this, right? The last time a court ruled on whether a president

can use the courts to install themselves as president, the Supreme Court was like, yeah, that's fine. That's like no problem. Yeah, it's fine. You can have a mob show up and disrupt the counting process, and it's fine. But Trump like fucked up and didn't do it the way you're supposed to. Yeah, and you know, there's something sort of, I don't know, So there's something I was thinking about why is reading this, which is like, the English language doesn't, I think part of the issue here is like, we don't,

I don't know, the English language doesn't even like have a good word for like the kind of coup that Trump was doing. Like, there's a Spanish word, which is auto golpe, which is like, yeah, it's basically Spanish. Go, you covered it. It's got a great one. In English, it translate to self-coup and we're just like, yeah, we're done. It's like, no, no, that sucks. That's what I'm sucks. say Spanish, you covered French. I just got a great one. In English, you translate the Silph Coo and we're just like, that we're done. It's like, no, no, that sucks.

That sucks. It's really bad. I wish I had a better Trump voice because then I could do the, on a gope, what is that? Does that like a, like a, like a 7-11, the big 64-round style co-ops that you get? Yeah. But I can't do it.

I can't do a good Trump. So that wasn't as funny as it should have been. Anyway, whatever, me up, please continue. With your energy, sorry So we had it. So, you know, I think, you know, I think it's worth kind of thinking a little bit. And we're going to sort of come back to this as we go through this case. But I think it's worth remembering that again, like everything Trump is doing in this is based off of Like is is is is based off of the the sort of bush thing into in 2000 where he had a bunch of well, okay So a bunch of bushes political operatives like stormed

One of the one of the places that was doing the recount in Florida and stopped them from counting the votes. And then they just delayed it long enough that he was able to get appointed. Now the Brooks Brothers riot, Rodgers Stone was a major part of that. Yeah, so we've done this, you know, we talked about this on the show at like the end of last year. But again, so the reason this worked though, right, is that Bush made really, really sure that there was like a sound legal case sort of behind this entire thing.

He made really sure to like go through all of the proper like checks and balances and the bubble blah blah blah. And then Trump just like didn't do this. And the result of this is that Jack Smith, like finally two years later, Jack Smith, whose this guy, he was appointed by Merrick Garland to like take over these two Justice Department cases about Trump has just indicted him with this stuff. He has, so he's been charged with three counts of criminal conspiracy, and I think

his account is obstruction. So I'm gonna go through what he's actually been charged with three counts of criminal conspiracy. And I think as a count of obstruction, so I'm going to go through what he's actually been charged with. And I want to note something real quick, which is that another reason why it worked for Bush and it didn't for Trump is that with Bush, it was legitimately the election came down to Florida, right? Yeah. It was extremely close. It was really just a couple counties in Florida with Trump, he was not trying to just sort of like

jink, jink part of a state. It was like, it was a fact. It was a massive battle. It was a big, like, by nat and commanding lead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a big dub.

Brun cool, Joe. Yeah. And, you know, so, yeah, like obviously like Trump like just fails at this but accurately. The law is finally coming after him. They so they're charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States, which again is the thing I didn't know you could do.

And Lans Armstrong got that, didn't he? Did he? Oh, yes, his USPS with his sponsors. So he was defrauding the federal government. Oh, shit. Yeah, that's the don't. Yeah, don't don't don't you post out so Trump's the first guy who's not rad to get charged with that. the, the don't, yeah, don't, don't, don't you post all the Trumps that are first guy who's not rad to get charged with that. Sorry, James. Okay. I didn't, I didn't

leave it. I mean, sorry, everyone, I'm out. No worries. So this, this one is, this is specifically like impairing the election, like, impairing like the, the, the, pairing like the votes of the presidential election, the first one is mostly, we'll talk about this more in a bit, like the illegitimate electors thing that he did. The second one is just him being charged for, they finally found a thing,

the charge them for doing January 6th, which was they charged them with conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. And then they got them also with obstruction, obstruct an official proceeding. And then they got them also with obstruction, obstruct an official proceeding, which again, seems like a kind of like a crisis, I don't know. It's not quite getting alcohol for tax evasion, but like you'd think they'd have something like

more prone to overthrow the government. Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. To be attempting to make yourself a dictator, Bonapartist, well, not really Bonapartism, but yeah. Yeah, like, seditions right there. Seditions, that seems like a choice. Yeah, right, like it seems like a choice.

Yeah, I don't know, they got him on obstruction. It's like, okay, sure, I don't know. Like, this is, I feel like our legal system seems to be sort of woefully unprepared for this. Well, yeah, it's not, again, in fairness, everyone has before Trump was willing to play the game, right? Like we are, like, obviously George W. Bush stole the fucking election, no argument there. So did Nixon. But they did it with enough plausible deniability, right? That the elite, yes, were that there was not,

there was not a fear among the, the, the, the, the quote unquote, deep state or, you know, the people, the elites in this country that like, this would obviously be someone overthrown the government, right? And Nixon's case, fucking, um, LBJ, like basically refused to go after him for breaking the law and extending the Vietnam more and committing treason because it would be bad in his view for the country, horrible mistake, obviously. And with George W. Bush, you know, he had, he had the court on his side. And it like, so there was, there was enough plausible deniability that, you know, it was not like it is with Trump, where he was just like, I'm going to have a mom. Yeah. A team. A capitol, you know?

It's a dude in a yak hat. You know, I was thinking about this, like the last time someone actually did something like this, I think it was the corrupt bargain in like 1873, we're just like, like they, there was this argument over like, with a Wilmington coup. Yeah, well, I mean, like, yeah,

but like on the presidential level of like, like literally someone, like, like, like, Ruther I mean, like, yeah, but like on the presidential level of like literally someone like like Rutherford behaves famously like They had basically this incredible thing where like both parties were like They couldn't decide who was supposed to count the votes and whichever like part of the two parties counter the votes was going to declare that they won the that they won the election and so they worked out this like Incredibly basically they worked out this compromise where like the Republicans got Rutherford behaves like in office but they also ended reconstruction.

But that was a period that was long ago enough that like you could do that shit without like involving the courts or involving this sort of like massive state apparatus. And you kind of like can't, I don't know, you can't. Outside of like Illinois, you can't really be that corrupt anymore.

You have to sort of like, you have to play. I know, it's a reason San Diego's quote, end run by the sea, Mia. Yeah, look, look, you have to respect, you know, local culture with these kinds of things. And Illinois would actually be like an act of genocide to try to make Illinois politics not incredibly good. Oh yeah, I mean, right.

Like that's the destruction of a people. Yeah, like one of the most hated political figures in like the entire history of Illinois was this like state senator who went down for corruption but went down for like a hundred dollars of corruption and like despise. Like one of the most hated political figures in Illinois

because he only went down, he only did $100 of crimes. Whereas like our current governor did like a bunch of really funny fraud and everyone loves him because it's hilarious. Where he like, he like took all of the bathrooms out of one of his houses, so it wouldn't be classified as a house.

Oh see. That's the idea, Rose. That's the kind of thing. That's the kind of... That's the guy you want to charge your legislative system because he sees a loophole. That's the guy if we ever have a corruption Olympics. That's our only chance at beating the Russians. Well, but here's the... This is Illinois.

He's gonna be our dream team. Like, I gotta say, the same coach. Pritzker is the least corrupt governor I've had in my lifetime. This is the least corrupt guy. He is like, like he is corrupt, but like never shits. Yeah, it's, I don't know, it's always sort of the basic. I, we should probably get back to this stuff. And so the last thing he got was they got him of like conspiracy

against rights. It's like a conspiracy against the right to vote and have your vote counted, which sure, yeah, do you do? Pretty have your vote counted, which sure, yeah. Pretty bad thing to do, I think, conspiracy. Yeah. I mean, it's not good. Like, all of the things that he, like they're accusing of, like he pretty clearly did. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I wanted to also talk about the way this has been being talked about in the media, because one of the things happening here, this is sort of a trend trend with all forms of things that are in the written language, is that everyone only reads the first maybe one chapter, or especially the first couple of pages of something from any written document. This is why all the abandoned all hope you who enter here from Dante's Inferno. That's the reason that someone knows because it's in the first couple of chapters. And in this one, with this case,

the thing that everyone got to was, there's this very early part in the indictment where the guy is like, well, yeah, so it is legal to lie about the election. Like you have the free speech right to do that. But then also Trump knowingly lied about the election and used it to try to fraud, do fraud. And everyone's getting really hung up on this thing about like trying it,

like the court having to prove that he knew he was lying, which is kind of like an incidental thing to the actual like like the actual stuff is getting charged for, we'll get into it, but like like it's not just that he was lying, he was like actively trying to get a bunch of state officials, so like appoint him. Yeah, but, but this has led to some just like absolutely hilarious shit from our publicans who are like, no, if you can prove that Trump knew he was lying, like there's no way to know. Trump is, they so Trump that like,

you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, you can't, know. That's like, yeah, guys, that may not be the defense you think it is. No.

Yeah. This motherfucker's show dumb. You can't, like this guy doesn't even know if he's full of shit. Yeah. It's so good. It's like arguing that somebody who shoots two or three people to death is not guilty because he had his eyes closed

with pulling the trigger. He didn't know where he was shooting. You can't, that's not a crime. Yeah. The other one they've been pulling is the old like, he didn't know it was illegal, which I wish that's how it's going. That is absolutely not how the law works. No, no. But this is the story.

You know who made that not how the law works by the way. Yeah, like this is how you can tell that like none of these people have ever like had to deal with a legal system at all ever, except for baby, like, I don't know, like what are two of these guys? Like probably caught weird charges for like unregulated securities selling or some shit, but like,

no one amongst us, you know? Yeah. But yeah, so they're probably inside of it's been very funny. Okay, so before we get into what like specific things they're going after Trump for, I want to like talk about what his actual, what Trump's actual plan was because I think a lot of it's kind of been forgotten. So the first plan, and this is the part that is that he's not actually in this trial at all, right? Like not really.

Like there's initial plan to steal the election was that, okay, so one of the things that happened in 2016 was that absentee voters like over, like not a woman, absentee voters like swung enormously Democrat, right? And that was one of the things Trump had been using to prove there was like voter fraud or whatever. And then, you know, COVID happened. And so Trump had this, you know, had a plan, which was like, he's like, okay, so on election night,

it's going to look like I won, because they're only going to have counted, like, they're only gonna have counted the votes that were like done in person. And those are overwhelmingly Trump. And I remember that night, like having a tell all my friends, like, no, no, no, these are not the real results.

This is just the in-person votes. The absentee votes are coming. And his initial plan was to try to just like declare victory that night. Basically, he was trying to declare victory immediately and then get everyone to stop counting. And that didn't work. Like, even like, even Fox News would eventually like stop playing along with it. Like, this got them in a huge trouble with Trump because they like called Arizona. Yeah.

He's still pissed about that. Yeah, now, and again, like this, this didn't work. So they didn't like, he's not being tried for that, even though that was also very blatantly in a debt-be-still-be-election. What they are charging him for was so after, after, so there was like that stuff and there was all these like stop-to-vote mobs that kept showing up in places.

Yes, stop the count, right? Yeah, yeah, it's like stop the count, but then also in some places they were like, we need to count more and some more of these stuff. Yeah, it was like, it was a whole thing. But you know, once that fails, right? Trump and his coupplotters are like legal people are just sort of like freestyling it.

And that's the part where you get to the actual conspiracies that is being charged with here. But before we get to those conspiracies, do you know what else is a conspiracy? The existence of products and services which you think will improve your life. What, how cheap they are? That's the conspiracy.

They've lowered the price so much it is illegal. Mm-hmm. Of all products and services. Yeah, wow. That's the deflation news. Incredible news. We're back. And yeah, I, I, I, I've got some good news for you. We are all sponsored this week by three shipping crates of illegal contraband Marbrow cigarettes that are buddy Jimmy over at the docs managed to get. So six bucks a pack guys, six bucks a pack. Just, um, you know,

send him to Jimmy at protonmail.com. He'll, he'll mail you cigarettes. You know, you've been moum the cash. He'll send you some cigarettes. There you go. This is probably less illegal than anything we're talking about right now. Yeah, almost certainly. Look, it's not against the law to sell cigarettes that, that you don't pay taxes on. I think we can all agree that that's fine. You've got an airport. It's not an airport. I think you legally can do that if you're selling it in an airport.

If you're selling it in an airport, yeah, if it's duty free, right? And I, because I have such a childlike imagination, the whole world is really my airport. Ergo, we can always sell tax-free cigarettes here at Cool Zone Media. That's why we have the small plane that takes off from Rome's house every day. It's like a remote control plane. That's what he's doing.

That's right. From all text, no. It technically counts. And we are also allowed to run those Joe Campbell ads again. So, you know, everybody who's 90s nostalgic, there you go, once you made it. All right, so the first conspiracy thing that he's getting charged with is the fake electors thing.

He also has like six unnamed co-conspirators. And we probably know who like five of them are. So the first one obviously is Rudy Giuliani who is having the time of his life question mark. He is like he is so funny. TV like it's the second one's probably John Eastman. And this is interesting because Eastman is the guy who, he's like the legal mind behind January 6th. He's the guy who like thinks that he's found a loophole in the law that allows like the vice president to refuse to certify the election.

Yeah. And so this is, I don't want to make something clear at the outset. Like he does not have, like Pence does not have the power to do this. You're not allowed to make something clear at the outset like he does not have like Pence does not have the power to do this you're not allowed to do that No, no, like you can't do this right like like this is if if if Pence had gone along with this that would have been a coup Right like that yeah, I call this yeah that would have been a coup like there's not a clause in the Constitution It says unless this guy doesn't want to have an election. This is not yeah It says unless this guy doesn't want to have an election. This is not.

Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's some like Admiralty flag to a fucking legal conspiracy. That's that's not really. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

guaranteed it came from Reddit before he found it. Yeah. That's not true. It's some it's some real bullshit like this somehow again. This is the legal basis for what they were trying to do in January 6th. I don't know words words fail me like tragedy as far as of the Brooks Brothers riot, I guess, but like this is like first number three. I don't know. I think the first one, the first one was Nixon extending the Vietnam War in order to win his election. The farce was the Brooks Brothers riot.

And now we're at like lead poisoning brain damage. Yeah, like this is this is Marx failed to consider that you could have a third or fourth farce like he only got to one. So speaking speaking of farce. So the third the third co-conspirator is probably Sidney Powell, who apparently the last I is probably Sidney Powell, who apparently, the last I heard about Sidney Powell, he's currently like owns a bed in breakfast and spends all of his time talking with his guests about the Trump administration. So things are going great

for Sidney Powell who is one of Trump's lawyers. More or less what I would like him to do. Yeah, I mean, if you can just keep sticking to doing that, yeah, great. Yeah, so the fourth guy is Jeffrey Clark who doesn't really matter. The fifth guy I just want to like okay, so I I partially there's only like only really Giuliani Eastman and Powell matter But I the fifth guy is named Kenneth Chelcebroch Which that's okay? You're fucking with us now. Like, that's not a name. That's not a name.

I got nothing. I don't know, like, if you're not a name. They have like dug up members of like the old Chelsea aristocracy that like, I, I got nothing. I don't know. I've never been this angry in my life. That's not a name. That's making shit up now. Like, that's angry in my life. That's not an naked shit. No.

Like that's that. Okay. It's not cheese. Bro, it's Chelsea. Bro. I can't see this best of name. I've no idea. It's it's CH ES E bro.

Chesa bro. I don't know. There's no version of high. It's like a town outside of Boston. Yeah. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.

I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.

I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know.

I know. I know. I know. I no, I know a guy from central California with that name. That is, that is viscerally upsetting. Okay, so speaking of viscerally upsetting, so we should remind everyone how, we should remind everyone how American elections work because it's, it's really one of the worst systems I know ones ever developed. So, okay, so like as, as most people probably know, you don't directly elect the president. What you do instead is each, each state of like you vote, well, okay, so sorry, let's run this up.

Each state selects electors. Now, there's nothing in the constitution that says you have to select electors by like voting for them. It's just that every state shows to do that. There's like a whole crank theory of Republican, like legal jurisprudence, where they're trying to use that to be able to just like not basically not have normal elections, but you know, so because this is like dog shit, right? Like it's bad for a number of reasons. The first obvious one is that like this means you the US does not have one person one vote at all.

Like the entire American political system is just a giant violation of the principle of one person, one vote, because people's votes are just worth more than others because of the electors. The second thing that's really bad, right, is again, like those individual electors can technically vote, like however they want to. So you could be an elector who's supposed to vote for someone, and then vote for someone else. It's actually happened, although it did, it went up not mattering, but like what a gores electors, I think, defected to what's his name, the third guy you ran. I can't remember his name. Someone in 2016, right? Yeah. Someone did

it in 2016 as well. I think rogue elected. Yeah. There's a little bit of like, I don't know, I was going to talk about different gene procedure and unsubstantive democracy. I could talk about it now or later, but I think it relates to what you're talking about. Sure. Yeah, that's not good. That's not what I'm saying. Do it now. But without.

Yeah. There were 10 in 2016. Wow. Oh, face spotted eagle is the one I'm thinking of. Some were voted for face spotted eagle. But yeah, okay. So one thing I wanted to talk about, like, with relation to what you're saying,

me, is like, the difference between procedure on the substantive democracy, because I think it's really important when we're looking at, like, what's happening in the US. So when we talk about, like, a lot of this language comes from the, like, 1990s obsession with transition to democracy, that adds a lot in political science, right?

Like, and history to an extent where we were looking at these like, post-Soviet countries and post-colonial countries. And as they like moved towards this, like, what's considered a democracy in the kind of neoliberal frame, we talked about procedural and substantive democracy. So procedural democracy, the things

which have the institutions and procedures in place, you vote. There are elections, the things which have the institutions and procedures in place, you vote. There are elections, the ballots are cast and that results in in this case, the electors going to electoral college and the electoral college delivers a president. And then substantive democracy is where people have a substantive say, a means of deciding who is in charge, right, who runs a state. And the US is moving further and further from substantive democracy. Like, it's been interesting to see people bringing that like, because of course that 1990s discourse was centered heavily in the US, right, as like the Paragon of Democratic virtue. And then it was used to condescend to other countries and be like, oh, you're not a fully consolidated democracy. You're at them

lins and stephand. If people want to look up lins and step-and, if they're reborn, they can. But they talk about like a consolidated democracy being one where democracy is the only game in town. And all of this stuff was heavily based on kind of aspiring to be the US, right? Countries in Africa, Eastern Europe, aspiring to be an American democracy. And it's very funny now to see that the US doesn't fit most definitions of a substantive democracy or a consolidated one. Like, it's not funny now to see that the US doesn't fit most definitions of a substantive democracy or a consolidated one. Like, it's not the only game in town

for millions of Americans anymore. Now, and it's highly amusing. My, my, my other favorite... Yeah, musings, what I would call it. Absolutely, James. Yeah, it's funny. It's just funny. Nothing bad will happen. It's fine. Yeah, my, my, my other favorite example of like those,

of like how bullshit those like democracy theorists were was like every single one of those people, the moment the zapatiste uprising happened, just like immediately shot the fuck up and never mentioned it ever. Like it just does not come up like in the thing. Oh, yeah, I mean, a lot of the like, yeah, a lot of them really had a lot of them also were like too busy looking at things and like in Spain, right? People looked at Spain's quote unquote transition as one of the earlier models and then went

onto model things off Spain. Spain is at best an incomplete transition now, right? People paying attention to the most recent elections will maybe have noticed this. Like Spain is not a country where democracy is your only game in town, right? They had an attempted coup in 1981. And so like they're kind of looking backwards of something because Spain was satisfactory democratic for them, but it certainly wasn't for a lot of Spanish people. So yeah, not a big fan. Yeah, and I don't know about you guys, but I think there's nothing wrong with the way we do side things with democracies.

It's got to give it on the tablets to some old white men who have slaves and that is good. Great. Yeah, it's been funny also watching those people trying to actually go back and look at what point the US became into like a democracy in any real sense. And it's like, really, like, if you're gonna do this seriously, you cannot argue that it was a democracy until after Jim Crow. So really the 60s and even then,

so I don't know, there's been a lot of attempts to sort of make this stuff work. But then also you have all of this bullshit where again, because of based on this electric shit, you can, this is how Trump was able to try to do all this very weird stuff. And this is the part where we get into Trump's second plan, which his plan, and this is the one he's actually

getting charged for. So his thing was he was trying to get states to just ignore the popular vote and de-cert for. So his thing was he was trying to get states to just like ignore the popular vote and de-certify. So there's this process where like there's a day on which like the like electors that do the electoral votes are like certified. And so he was trying to do a couple things. Before that, he was trying to like get the actual electors like not certified and then

have like another set of electors and point it that would vote for him. And then that didn't work. And so he was trying to get, so like on that same day, there were also a bunch of slates of electors that like did like a fake appointment thing basically, like trying to claim they were the real electors

in a bunch of states. Yeah, in Michigan or somewhere. Oh, okay, my sample wases, I think. Yeah. And this one was funny too, because some of the people who were like, who were on these slates, like didn't know that they weren't the real electors. Like, they had just been told that they were the real,

so they're like unwittingly, we're like part of this cool attempt. And so the indictment, so that's the second part, and so that also was kind of falling apart. And so then we get to so that that's the second part. And so that also was kind of falling apart. And so then we get to the sort of third thing, which is this entire effort to get Mike Pence to not certify the election.

Or so the distribution, one was that he doesn't certify the election at all. And the second version of the conspiracy was like, the so there were these states set up where Trump had put like a second slate of electors. And the plan was to like have Those were like contested states and so the plan was to have

Pents say that like none of those states had actually validly selected electors So their votes don't matter and then just like say that Trump won the election and none of this makes any sense And the reason this is like incomprehensible is it like none of this makes any sense right like this is all just gibberish Should it suppose shit? Yeah but like incomprehensible is it like, no, this makes any sense, right? Like, this is all just gibberish. Should've supposed to. Yeah. But, but into this mess drops daddy quail. Now, I think everyone, I'm like, so you two know who daddy quail is.

I, I, I'm realizing I, I was running into people when I, when I've been talking about this sort of story I'm about to tell who don't know who daddy quail is. And I, I, I feel I have a moral obligation to introduce This guy. Yeah, give the man its full name here James Danforth quail Oh god, he knows it was damn fourth. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah It's on the tip determinism at its finest. Yeah, so quail. I think it's probably most famous for So she's. He was George H. W. Bush and vice president, right? And so, okay, so I want to tell the actual

false. So the common version of the story that happens is that he doesn't know how to spell potato. And that's true. But the actual story is so much funnier than that. So, okay, quail is. So, okay, so quail is is George H. W. Bush's vice president, right? It's 1992, like they're on, they're like starting to go into election season. And quail goes to like this spelling bee that's happening in this elementary school to like promote some random, horrible idea.

Horrible idea. Yeah, and so, so he asked this kid, he asked this kid to spell potato and the kid walks up and the kid spells potato correctly. This kid is like eight, right? This is like, this is like, that's it. It is like 90. And then, so, and then, I, I, I,

quail looks at it and looks at, apparently they've had a card that was spelled wrong, but quail doesn't realize that the card is spelled wrong. So he, he goes to the port He looks at the kid and goes when you need to ask Somebody to the end and this kid is just baffled because she spelled the hit oh correct What do you mean? I'm talking about the vice president of the United that kids an anarchist now like there's there's no

So someone did a follow up with her apparently he like he's like a small business owner or something and he just tells the story all the time. Yeah, very funny though. But okay, this, this was a theory of a very interesting kid. Like this, like is one of the reasons that George H. W. Bush didn't win re-election. Like this broke 12 unbroken years of Republicans winning every single election. Based.

He does seem like a plant. Like I don't know if you've got some of his other ridiculous things. Oh, yeah, I'm going to read some of this quote. So, so unless you think quail just had like one flood, like no, he's just like this. I'm going to read a couple of it. So there's like a bunch of people who spent a bunch of time

extensively documenting Dan Quail quotes because that's what you did on the internet in the 90s. He's was it. Yeah. The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history. I mean, the century's history, but we all lived in the century. I didn't live in the century. I feel like I want to diagram that one.

What were you trying to get across there, Dan? Yeah. Well, cocaine was really kicking in. You know, she has this kind of, in the same way that Trump has like this can't in which he does all of his incorruptible things, like, well, also has a can. Like, he does this kind of thing where he does the like, he says a sentence

and then he says, I mean something else, I mean something else, and it doesn't, none of them follows from the other one. So here's one of the other famous ones. Who, why he has always been a pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States, and it's in Ireland, it is right there.

Wow. Oh, okay. That's very Trumpian. Very Trumpian. You went on to write large portions of Wikipedia, so that makes a lot of sense. It's so good. Yeah, it.

Quailsown Wikipedia calls him an intellectual lightweight and incompetent individual. Well, it's just not untrue. Pretty hard to argue about that. Yeah, Morris is essentially in the same orbit. Morris is somewhat the same distance from the sun, which is very important. We have seen pictures with their own canals, we believe, and water. If there was water, that means there was oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe.

Okay. Okay. Wow. There's a lot of science coming out of that statement. This man was vice president of the United States. We have a firm commitment to NATO. We are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe.

We are a part of Europe. Sure. Yeah. He's so good. Well, you see, me, you just, you were not, you were not up on your geographic history because the mountain ranges in Scotland are the same mountain range as the Appalachians. So technically, we are in Europe. In many ways. Damn, I've been styled on by Dan Quale. There you go. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, okay, other than the fact that it's really funny, why am I talking about Danny Quale? And the answer is that, okay, so remember, Trump needs for his completely nonsense thing to even kind of go to the next step of failing, he needs to convince Mike Pence to not certify the election. And Pence is legitimately going back and forward on this. He's like, he's having this like moral dilemma and like he like wants to do it.

But he's having problems making decision. And so he calls his old friend Danny Quail. And I think this is a really fascinating moment of sort of, you know, I think it's really fascinating indication of like how off the rails everything has gotten since when we released the 2016, but like 2020 sort of just like accelerated magnitude of this, which is that like, quail is like the human symbol of the decrepiveness of American politics in the 80s and 90s, right? Like, this is a guy who makes like senile Reagan look like a genius. And in 2020 and 2021, like Pence is supposed to be one of the like quote unquote adults

in the room in 2020. And Pence goes to quail and is like, I need to do this coup. Like I don't have a choice and I'm under so much pressure. And Danny quail, the man who can't spell potato instantly is like, no, what are you talking about? Like you can't do this coup. Like, obviously can't do this. And Pence, Pence just like argues with him.

He's like, no, no, he keeps arguing with him. Like, no, I have to do it. I have to do it. And Quayle's like, what are you talking about? Like, of course you can't like not certify the election. Like, what are you doing? And this actually works. This convinces Pence not to actually certify the election.

And so, you know, we have reached a point in history where, like, you can make an argument. I don't think it's correct, but you can make an argument that Danny fucking quail saved the American Republic. He saved us from two Republican presidents. He said, I, it It's about Hillary Clinton. I just, I don't know. I can't get over this.

It's just like, daddy quail is the voice of reason and moderation. And like, oh, God, I don't know this country. It's bizarre. The whole thing is bizarre. Yeah, it's bleak. We should do an ad brick. I don't have a pivot there. Speaking of auto-gulpay, gulp down these products

automatic, matchy cool. And we are back to a bit more fraud. So okay, the other thing is being Yeah, this is actually is this actually fraud. No, I guess this is the fraud one, it's still a tentative, they're a fraud one. So, that's part of it at least. Yeah, so we've reached the like third and fourth indictment. It's actually really funny. If you go read the thing, all of the actual text of the indictment

with the evidence and stuff is all under the first indictment. And then the second, third and fourth ones are like, yeah, go refer to X paragraphs, it's like the first one. So, does the second, third and fourth ones are like, yeah, go refer to X paragraphs. It's like the first one. So does the second, third and fourth like charges are like, like one paragraph long. But basically this is about the January six stuff. They spent a much time listing like all of the random stuff that Trump said about the election. That was not true.

They also have a very funny list of all the people who told him that like this stuff wasn't true, which includes Mike Pence, the leadership of the Justice Department, the director of national intelligence, the head of CISA, which is the Department of Homeland Security, Cybersecurity Agency, a bunch of white-hours attorneys like his own staff at all of his politicians and just like backing him.

He's like every single person was like, this is not real, and Trump was like, no, no, no, hold on. We can still win the election. You know, okay, so there's like that stuff. And then there's the stuff that like he like specifically did to like try to pressure these state politicians and to like certifying him as president. So like they, he had a bunch of calls

and like his like staff people had a bunch of calls and like his like staff people had a bunch of calls We were like they tried to get I like that the the speaker of the house in Arizona To do this by saying there is voting fraud and the speaker of the house was like okay There's no we haven't found any fraud I'm gonna I'm gonna read from the thing co-cons to concluded that he, quote, didn't know enough about the facts on the ground in Arizona, but nonetheless told the speaker the house to desertify and quote,

let the court sort it out, sort it out. So again, this is the Roger Stone strategy, but done like, so unbelievably poorly. Yeah. Yeah, and so there's a bunch of sort of like lists. There's like all this list of like, the Trump does like identical stuff in like Michigan and Pennsylvania.

There's like that phone call in Georgia. He gets in trouble for something Wisconsin. There's no thing he tried to do, which I actually hadn't heard about this one. I don't know, see though, I just forgot it or I just never ran into it where he was trying to like use just this department letterhead and like the signature of the acting

attorney general to like send the fate like pretend to send a letter from the justice department to a bunch of states to tell them there was fraud and get them to like amazing. Yeah, I'm sick and I can't come to school. Yeah, and the funny thing is the problem is that they so they try to There's a lot that's funny about that. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna see it. Yeah, we got to pluralize that.

That's so good. And this game falls apart because again, the guy Trump appointed as the acting attorney general is like, no, like you can't use my name to say the fake letter for the Justice Department and they keep trying to argue with him and it keeps not working. And this is where we get to another part of this whole thing

that I, this has been getting a lot of press attention and it's interesting, but I think there's more to the story that people have been talking about, which is, so the guy who's probably Jeffrey Clark, like gets into an argument with the Deputy White House council and the Deputy White House council is, you know, is telling, is telling Jeffrey Clark, who thinks he's one of Trump's lawyers, is telling him like Trump can't stay in office.

Like there's no version of this where Trump stays in office after the January 20th. And he says, quote, there would be riots in every major of American city. And then the guy who's probably Clark says, quote, well, deputy White House counsel, that's why there's an insurrection act. And this is where we need to get to another couple of interesting parts of the story. One, you know, one of the clear, when you're saying that's why we have an insurrection act, you're saying we can just shoot those people in the streets. Yeah.

That is what that statement means. Yeah. And that is what the stakes were. Everybody was out in the streets in 2020 was aware of this. Yeah, and yeah. And this is the thing I kind of want to talk about, which is that like part of the reason this coup fails is that so Trump is talking about doing the

insurrection act twice in 2020. Well, I guess once in 2020, I think this might have been, the second time I've been in 2021, but like in that last year, she tries to like use the insurrection act against the uprising in 2020. And his like his chief of stat, like a bunch of like a bunch of generals in his own chief of staff,

like tell them the fuck off. And that's like part of the reason why this didn't happen, which is interesting because like, I don't know, like there have been like there have been times where the US army like has been deployed against riots like this, right? This happened in the 90s. But in this situation, the Army just absolutely completely refused to play ball.

We've gotten some really kind of interest. So the other thing that's happening here is just the complete hollowing out of journalism as an institution where all of these people know all of the journalists like know a bunch of incredibly important stuff and they won't tell anyone because they're saving it for their books. Yeah, classic. And it's like among the things

that we sort of learned in this period is there's basically this like, I don't know what you call it. You could either call it like a quadumph it basically or you could call it like a national unity government, which is in power for two weeks basically, where Pelosi, Miley, who's the chief of staff, he's a general, like Mike Pence, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell basically are like running the government for two weeks because they've successfully put together this counter coup where the military has refused to go along with Trump

like trying to overthrow the government. And this is very deeply, I don't know, there's some very deeply interesting stuff here where there's a book called I Alone can Fix It, which a couple of journalists are coming out with. And there's some interesting quotes from it, from a specifically general Mike Miley, who's like the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,

who was appointed by Trump, by the way, this is an important thing because like Trump, there's like seven guys who are like absolute ghouls, like Mike Pompeo, like CAA ghoul, who just like look at this coup and are like no, and Miley stuff is wild, like Miley directly can, like in meetings, he's comparing Trump to Hitler. He says, quote, this is a Reichstag moment.

Miley told AIDS, the gospel of the fear. Oh, yeah. Like, and there's, there's a, I talked about this a little bit ahead of earlier. There are some unconfirmed reports that Miley and a number of other like US military high ranking officers basically had like a book club. And one of the books they went through in 2020 was a book about the Nazis rise to power in Germany. I kind of suspect it might have been death of a democracy because

that was big at the time. But it would make sense because he's talking in substantial detail about like he's very, you can tell he's very focused in this period on Nazis taking over the government. Like he talked about it a lot. Yeah, and he has, so I'm going to read a couple other quotes on him. He has this thing where I think he's talking to Pompeo here where he's talking about like this coup and he says they may try but they're not going to fucking succeed. He told them you can't do this without the military. You can't do this without the CIA and the FBI. We're the guys with the guns. And he's right about this. And this is a really crucial thing that Trump fucks up

about how to do a fascist coup. Is that you can't actually, like, fascist coups don't work without the at least passive acquiescence of the state. Like if the state tries, if the army tries to stop you, your coup is not going to work, right? Like unless you're someone like Franco who like has control of a huge portion of the army. If you try to do one of these sort of weird paramilitary things and the army just says no,

like you're screwed. And this, this I think was always part of Trump sort of problem was that like, you know, if he'd sort of spent his time consolidating the kind of like fascist institutions the Neocon set up, right? Like if he'd spent his time like, you know, actually, like actually developing loyalty in the FBI and the CIA and like going through and like turning department, Homeland Security, like, you know, into like an even more fascist organization, he might have been able to do this. But like at the very end, like you have Miley saying, this is on, this is on exercises right before the inauguration.

He says, quote, here's the deal, guys. These guys are the Nazis, they're Bukaloo boys, they're proud boys. These are the same people we fought in World War II, Miley told them. Everyone in this room, whether you're a cop, whether you're a soldier, we're going to stop these guys to make sure we have a peaceful transfer of power. We're going to put a steel ring around this city and the Nazis aren't getting in. Like somehow, you know what credit would do. That's a pretty cool thing to get to have said.

Yeah. So somehow, like, all somehow basically him and Zoukov. Yeah. It's like, like, it's like some power out. So somehow, like, all of, like, suddenly, like, the America, like, all of, like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's lib types on your side, you could do a lot worse than harcaning back to that whole world war two thing. There's a lot of propaganda invested in getting guys like Millie to want to feel like that. So, and in this case, it worked out for us. Yeah, apparently, I don't know, live live, live Antifa, it has poor, I pulled one out, I guess. It's certainly better than if the head of the military had been like, I guess I'm fine

with this. I have no complaints, RE, his performance in that specific moment. Other than that, they did actually get in. So, you know, whatever. Like, yeah. But that was off to it, right? This was between the six and the 20th. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

When they stuffed the capital with national gods, so just like a sausage. Well, this is how it's between the six and the 20th. It's not like the four years of when they were drilling for the inauguration. When they stuffed the capital with national gods, so just like a sausage. Yeah, it's just, I guess you worked. I don't know. My other conclusion from this though is when you have reached the position of like you're trying to figure, like your top generals are trying to figure out

who has enough guns to figure out whether a coup can happen. Like things are, things are not good. This is a bad sign TM for like a good like as nice as it is to hear that Millie understood the stakes, which is good. It's good that he understood the stakes given his position. It's not good that like so much came down to the fact that a couple dudes didn't suck in this specific way. Like that's not a great sign for the first stability of democracy.

Yeah. Because no one voted for Miley like, right, yeah, that's unsettling. Yeah. The whole democratic system was more or less of the edge of failing and a dude who was good at war stepped in and was like, yeah, okay, we don't want to do this. And this is one of those things, right? We know what this looks like with Bush. We're like, if you actually know how to press the buttons of the system right, you can't

do this. But Trump just like didn't have enough control of the state apparatus and tried to sort of replicate it with street files. And that just didn't work. Trump's problems here are two fold. One of them is that he is not capable of loyalty to anyone or anything else, whereas a guy like George W. Bush is, which means he's capable of getting teams together who are willing to take some of like who are willing to go out on a limb for him to some extent. And Bush also

is system loyal. Now that doesn't mean he's not willing to fuck with on a limb for him to some extent. And Bush also is system loyal. Now, that doesn't mean he's not willing to fuck with the system for his own benefit, but he has a vested interest in the system continuing more or less the way that it has, right? As opposed to breaking it specifically forever for his own like a power. You know, he was not a guy who was interested in staying in office for, I don't say this to defend the man. He killed hundreds of thousands of people, minimum. But because he was willing, he had a degree of loyalty to the system as it was seen by most people, there was not this kind of rebellion from sort of within it, right? Like in fact, that deep state was largely sympathetic with

them. They were willing to go with like the fucking around with the election as long as, you know, the broader structures that had given them a place to exert power and influence remained intact. And Trump was basically saying, if Millie had gone with this, if everyone had gone with this, what you were accepting is that nothing matters, but this guy's opinion, right? There's not actually any sort of power in the system that you have risen to the top of. There's not any sort of power in these unelected structures within the system that you clearly think are important because they are how you, like where you have seen success, right? And frankly, you know, people aren't willing to do that sort

of thing. And also you're fighting against a lot of people who want to whatever fucked up things they are willing to do, they have a lot emotionally invested in the idea that they serve a democracy. Now, is that a morally flawless idea? Are they always in fact like, no, of course not. Like everyone, they're hypocrites to certain extent, but you can't push them that far. Like, bush push them about as far as you can push people like that, right? This Trump didn't have any respect for making it, for dressing it up, right? And he didn't have any respect for the thing that they were a part of. And so, of course, a lot of them didn't go with him.

Yeah, and I think this gets back to something I've talked about a bit with what the Neocons were doing, which is that the Neocons are about like the state of exception, right? They're about this like, you know, we've had the war, we now have the war on terror, we've had 9-11, and that means the countries in this this state where like we have the power to be like the people inside the system who are outbound by it, you could do whatever you want. And like that is descriptively, right? Like this is, you know, both Carl Schmidt, the like Nazi jurist, like that, that was explicitly like his model of how you do fascism. Yeah. And it's also like something, you know, and but the thing is again, like that's a very different thing than what Trump was doing, right?

Like, Trump wasn't doing, like Trump wasn't doing this thing where he like, you know, uses the app right as the state. He was, he was doing a different, like, different kind of, one of the things that this is what a lot of people don't understand about the Nazis is that when Hitler took power and for the first half to two thirds of his time in power, he was very much concerned about the military and constantly making exceptions and altering and moderating aspects of his policy in order to keep the military on his side. And that continued depending on kind of where you want to put it either up until the Anschlusser, up until the invasion of Poland really do a significant extent. He, whereas Trump did not, again, there's no sort of, he hasn't a sort of respect.

And I'm not saying like, you should have respect for the militant. No, no. But I'm saying that because he did not like power. Yeah, the fact that he did not or the FBI for that matter is one of the reasons why this didn't work for him. Yeah, and this was always a kind of a problem that he has ideologically, which is like, one of the things that makes him popular is he was running like against the deep state, right?

And like, yeah, like I know lots of people, like I don't like the intelligence agency, like the intelligence agency can fuck off. The fact that like, the fact that the intelligence agency is finally found to coup coup they wouldn't support, like it's not as if they're good, but the problem with this is Trump is, you know, he wins the primary, like very explicitly, they're running against,

a lot of the, like by may running his neoconservatism, you can argue the extent to which he actually broke with it in terms of like appointing like Gina. He puts a bunch of neocon ghouls like back at power, right? But like, like, nominally, he's running against that specific thing. And it turns out that like if, if you're a peel is, you know, being like a nominally anti-systemic force, and then you have to try to use those systems to stay in power, it's like, well, you know, this, this happens.

Like now you are getting charged by Jack Smith, and you have like 78 counts against you instead of you are now the furor. Yeah, a lot of it is, you know, first off, people want to be able to believe nice things about themselves and Trump didn't really give them the option of doing that. And second of all, people who are achieve this kind of level within the system want you to treat the system they've succeeded in as if it matters. Like, it's that simple. I think it a lot of ways. I think we're going to feel validated and valued.

And he was just like, no, fuck you all I'm doing, my goo. And then with genuinely shocked, people are like, well, we ain't coming with you, bro. I don't, I don't, I've really feel no, no desire or desire or no impetus to move with you. Yeah. I don't know. Anyone. This is a good idea. Yeah. So I don't know. We'll see what happens with these indictments. I don't know. I genuinely, this is the important. Yeah. This is the one that matters.

I've all been indictment. This is the one that matters. Yeah. I don't know. We'll see if this actually subsequently plays a role in the election. I mean, I don't think there's a possibility if this actually subsequently plays a role in the election. I mean, I don't think there's a possibility that I can cost Trump the primary like, but no, no, no, no, nothing, but like a hard attack could do that. But it is, I will say I had some other stuff prepared that I think we'll move to another episode just because of how this is gone. But I do want to note, I want to talk a little bit at the end here about, is this

going to matter like electorally for Trump? Right? Is this going to have an impact on his chances of winning the general? I think we're all agreed. It's not really where I was talking about the primary. He's going to win the primary barring and act of God. And that's where, yeah. Anyway. So there's some info on this. Basically on March 29th, he was averaging about 45% in national primary polls, which I'm bringing up here because they help show the impact of the indictment because you don't have a lot of national polls

from that time. A national like general election polls. So 45% in March after his first set of indictments in April, he was up to 54%. So that first set of indictments did not harm him. May have helped him consolidate power, may have like activated a chunk of his base. The second indictment did not work the same way, though, after June 8th, when it was reported that he was being indicted for the classified document shift and obstructing justice and getting them back. The second indictment is his. His tower is. Yeah, his average support in the primary fell, not by a massive amount,

by a couple of percentage points, as did his average net favorable rating. So you saw at least a, he hit a wall and bounced back a little bit, not massive, not a sea change, but enough to show that it's not accurate to say voters don't care. It's more accurate to say based on what we've seen so far, voters seem to care differently about different indictments. And I want to read a quote from a 538 article about his indictment polls here. Although we can't prove that all these shifts happened because of the indictments, the difference in reaction at least suggests that Americans are drawing distinctions between

Trump's various legal troubles. And other polling backs that up. According to a UG of Yahoo News poll from July 13th through 17th, 50% of registered voters considered falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star to be a serious crime. But 64% of registered voters considered a serious crime to take highly classified documents from the White House and obstruct efforts to retrieve them.

Similarly, Ajun 22nd to 26th poll from the Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only 35% of US adults thought Trump did something illegal when it came to the hush money payments. But 53% thought he did something illegal with regards to classified documents founded his Mar-a-Laga resort in Florida. By this logic, this third indictment could be even more damaging to Trump than the one

involving classified documents. According to the same Yuga-Viyahu news poll, 69% of registered voters considered a serious crime to attempt to obstruct the certification of a presidential election, and 71% said the same about conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election. And 71% said the same about conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election. So it's going to take a struggling low number. Yeah, I wish it were. It should be higher. You think, but that does suggest that this could do him some damage. And especially since all of this is going to keep getting litigated, right? Like fucking people who get who have a decent lawyer

and get arrested for like a DUI can drag a court case out for a year. This will be going on during the election. It may hurt him. You know, again, I'm not willing to like say, oh, this is going to fuck the, make it impossible from the beginning. I don't think the data suggests that. But it, it, there's a, I think a pretty good chance that this is a net negative for him in terms of, you know, the election. Um, and broadly speaking, you know, we gave the dims a lot of shit, uh, for a couple of years for not doing enough to actually seriously strike back at the Republican authoritarian outrage. And so it would be unfair of me to not say, it's good that they're doing this. Like it's good that he's facing legal trouble for what he's done.

That's not enough to stop him. That's not enough to stop the Republican party, but it is good that this has been done. Yeah. Yeah. Progress. Shame it wasn't earlier. Should have been earlier, you know? Yeah. Progress. Shame it wasn't earlier.

Should have been earlier, you know, you know, happening during the election is a major L in terms of how he can spin this. Yeah, I think that was probably a strategic error. Big grand juries take forever. Yeah. Yeah, and the other thing that's happened is like, it's been all of this time for so the Republican PR machine to like spin all of the stuff that happened. And we've, you know, and I think like part of wasn't happening in the last three years is like everyone kind of just like collectively forgetting what actually happened during 2020 and how absolutely nuts it was.

And if one sort of going back and pretending that like things are sort of like normal now and it's like, no, no, we're still we're still living in the eternal 2020 and everything is still absolutely nuts. But I don't know. we're still we're still living in the eternal 2020 and everything is still absolutely nuts, but I don't know, it's like there's been this incredible sort of like normalization effort both both by Biden and also like by the Republicans to make it seem like this was like a normal thing that happened as opposed to like the immediate wake if it were everyone was like what the fuck so if it rev one was like, what the fuck? So hopefully not too little too late. Hopefully this does something, but...

We shall see. Yes indeed. All right, well everybody, you know, I guess go back to paying rent and stuff. I'm sure 2024 will be fine. Yeah, that would be any problem. There's 15 more months to this, by the way. Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the

darkness surrounding Megaturge La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, La Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States, until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him the Apostle.

Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder, and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the iHeartReadyUp, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined.

And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next?

Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm the Wizard of Oz, I'm the one making everything happen. Real housewife of Salt Lake City Star, Jen Shaw, is running the scam of Oz, I'm the one making everything happen. Real housewife of Salt Lake City Star Jen Shaw is running the scam of the century. We probably will never be able to be retired while working to work anymore. Living a fat million dollar lifestyle on the backs of thousands of elderly victims. She turned up their lives for what a fake Fendi bag? Congrats, girl. When you have her confronted, and instead of stopping, she finds ways to be sneaky

or about it and keeps going. I remember one time, Stuart lost, like, like about eight million, and General was very upset, and she came down to the office late at night, with Coach yelling at him, asking him where their money is. Would you call her a con artist? I would just call her a con, she's not very much of an artist.

Listen to Queen of the Con season four, the Unreal Housewife, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. podcasts. Hi everyone, it's me James today and I'm joined by Glenn Pyle who's a professor of molecular cardiology and a member of the import network at Dow Housie Medicine. Glenn, thank you so much for joining us. Can you, is there anything I missed out first of all on your bio there that might be relevant for people? No, I think that's a short and sweet.

I don't need all the details. For sure. Thank you. So what we're here to talk about today is these sudden, the phenomenon, I suppose, of sudden cardiac arrest, specifically like in young people and young athletes, because as many of you will have been aware, this has been increasingly an area in which anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists have been trying to leverage what is an unfortunate but not unprecedented cardiac arrest. In this case, most recently, Brony James, but it has happened before in the number of

sports. They've been trying to leverage this as a quote, unquote, proof for evidence that vaccines are killing otherwise healthy young people, which is nonsense. And I could tell you it's nonsense, but someone who can tell you from much more informed perspective is Glenn. So Glenn, could we start out by maybe talking about, like, how common this sudden cardiac arrest in young athletes is? And what we might, what hypotheses we might have

as to what causes it? Well, I mean, first of all, if we look more broadly, it's very common. I'm from Canada and we have about 35,000 of these every year within young athletes. The data out of the US says that about 2000 die every year from sudden cardiac arrest and two-thirds of these young people do so during some sort of exercise or sporting event. So in the grand scheme of things when you have a country

of several hundred million people, a thousand or so, that's like that is, by proportion of relatively small, but we've known about this for a long time and these numbers actually really haven't changed very much in decades. Okay, so yeah, there's obviously been no particularly increase due to COVID vaccinations because they're unrelated. I wonder actually, it's so evident, I think I've read some stuff that having COVID or having had COVID multiple times might increase your risk for cardiac arrest. Is that true? Yeah, so broadly, so they haven't looked risk for cardiac arrest. Is that true? Yeah, so broadly, so they haven't looked specifically at cardiac arrest because cardiac arrest typically is in a lot of times the end result of a number of different conditions.

So cardiac arrhythmias are known to be increased, a petone study showed that what I guess the year and a half ago by now, certainly early in the pandemic, one of the first signs we are seeing people who were being infected were having heart attacks, developing heart failure. These things and in cardiac arrest, the most common cause or cardiac arrhythmias, the toneon study showed. And every time I talk about this, I have to go back and look because the increase was several hundredfold after COVID. And so I have never really seen anything like that before. So arrhythmias are relatively common in terms in the world of cardiovascular disease and the fact that COVID, the infection actually increases it, but the vaccines do not

means that the risk for certain cardiac deaths really would be highest amongst those who are infected out those who get vaccines. Okay. Do you know offhand if like when we have that, maybe this was too early in the pandemic to tell, like that risk that comes with having COVID, right, for having your with me afterwards, is that risk mitigated by if you're vaccinated and then you get COVID? So yes, there's been some more recent studies because obviously early in the pandemic, when we didn't have the vaccine, we couldn't answer that. And then early after vaccines, we're looking at things like infections.

And some of these cardiac issues may not arise until even after the infection is clear. So we see that in people with long COVID, for example, cardiac issues are most common. And so we've seen in some recent studies that people who are, and even what they describe is partially vaccinated, so one or two doses had a reduced risk of what we call mace, which is a major adverse cardiovascular event. And so that's an all-encompassing term, which would

be things like stroke, heart attack, you know, things, things like that, those major cardiac events, that's data that's come out earlier this year, within the last year, a couple of studies. Okay. So circling back to those cardiac arrests, and I guess brought more broadly like cardiac issues in young people and specifically in young athletes. It's something I'm familiar with, with a background in cycling, which I've known people die of cardiac arrest, who are otherwise extremely fit.

No, I wouldn't necessarily say like, sometimes being fit and being healthy are not the same thing. Certainly, the very like pointy end of endurance sport, I think the fittest people are not necessarily the healthiest. But very fit, sometimes very healthy people have friends of mine have had these issues. Is in those cases, I don't know, we might not know, I don't know, is being an athlete like increasing someone's chance of having those cardiac arrest, or is it that they have some kind of preexisting

condition that's just been underlying for a while? Yeah, that's a good question. What we do know, and this is all data from pre-COVID, so it's not something that's been impacted by the pandemic or vaccines. We do know that the rate of sudden cardiac death in the general population is about one in 100,000, and that in athletes, which is a very broad term, and we can get into that how to do an athlete and things like that. Is anywhere from two to four times the rate that that's groups athletes, typically these high performance athletes.

You know why that is? It's an interesting question. It could be the training, for example, puts a stressor on them. So they may have a preexisting condition. They may have a cardiac arrhythmia like long QT syndrome or even something called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Sometimes they know about it and sometimes they don't and then the training on top is enough of a trigger. So one of the examples I use in my class is Anthony Van Lue's a soccer player. I

believe it was in the Netherlands he was playing. He had a known cardiovascular condition. So he had what's called an ICD or an implanted cardio defibrillator while he was playing. And he suffered sudden cardiac death on the field. There's actually video of it and that shocked him back into rhythm. So, you know, some of these people may not know and discover in the corpse of training and some may know and opt to take that risk anyway and then it's the training that or the competition that brings it out. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I have a very good friend with an ICD. It's certainly been at the end of a very difficult process for him to have that and that involved lots of lifestyle changes. So so when we, what exactly is an athlete in these studies?

Like is that somebody goes to gym twice a week? Is it someone put in 20 hours on the bike? Like what? So most of the studies that we're talking about, so I assume we're not talking about the people who are claiming that the vaccines are linked to athletes because they have a very different definition. I can talk about that. Most of these studies that we're dealing with, where we get these rates that

are two to four times higher than the general population or what they refer to as competitive athletes. So for people in the US, these would be your NCAA or college athletes. Some of them are professional athletes, you know, soccer players and the British League and things like that. So these are people who play at a competitive level. Oftentimes they're making a living, I mean, you can argue whether college athletes are making a living out of this. But there's some high level of competition in these athletes. That's generally the people that were that these studies are based on not the guy who goes to the gym twice a week or something like that. Okay. Yeah. So fairly elite. And what is it that you were saying that's different from the claims that these anti-vax people or vaccine skeptics or whatever, you know, people who want to say that vaccines are giving people, which isn't true. What is what sort of the definition that they're using or what's the claim that they're making, I guess? Well, they really don't have a definition.

This is the problem. So they'll use the term athletes. And I think most people, you know, maybe you don't see an athlete is necessarily being a college or professional level. It could be like a high school athlete who's competing, you know, once or twice a week or whatever, and that's fair. But when you look at the lists that they have, I mean, I've talked about this recently in the Died suddenly movie documentary, whatever you want to call it. The list of people that they have on there, for example, to have musicians, they have the Thai princess, on the show, princess from Thailand on there. For example, they have musicians, they have the Thai princess, on the show of princess from Thailand on there. And they also have people who died of cancer, someone who

got an eye injury. So I'm not really sure, first of all, what their definition of athlete is, I'm not sure what their definition of sudden cardiac death is when you have people dying of cancer or suffering in an eye injury, like those are not related at all. There was an earlier list, I think it's related to the good science thing. I wrote about this probably a year or so ago. I went through the list of people that they had on at the time there was about a hundred, just a little over a hundred people that they claimed a died. There were soccer referees on there. There were retired athletes. There were people. One guy was out for a hike. He was listed there. Now you could argue, a soccer referee is athletic, that certainly, you know, running around the pitch doing that. I could see that, but that person died at home in their sleep, not in competition,

the retired soccer player had been retired for six or seven years. So even in the cases where they have athletes, they're really stretching what we would define as an athlete. Right. Yeah. And I wonder is there data to show that overall mortality is lower in people who are vaccinated than vaccinated? Does that exist yet? Yeah, so that's some of these studies that I talked about that were done earlier this year. There was a, it was a Jack study, the journal American College of Cardiology,

showed that even people who are partially vaccinated, there's a reduction in these cardiovascular complications, and the GMS study, which was done earlier, specifically focused on AMI, so the heart attacks acute myocardial infarctions, and stroke also lower risk. You were saying earlier that there might be some sports that had even higher rates than those ones you mentioned overall for athletes. What sport to those? Yeah, so the one that's been raised recently is basketball. They were at least in some of these studies done in the US much higher than other sports. Yeah, so I mean, you know, basketball

can be an aerobic event in that you're running back and forth, you know, up and down the court quite frequently, but it's punctuated by these bursts of, you know, sprints and things like that, which somehow speculated that might kind of be the issue, right? That you don't settle into just a simple rhythm. I'll say simple rhythm. Like, you know, like riding a bike is, it's not as obviously simple as, as you describe it.

But at least potentially there, there's periods of time when you can sort of get into a rhythm and stay there. And here it's, it's, it's, rest periods punctuated by these rapid bursts. And so there's the possibility that that may be related there. Okay. So that that might be why that there are higher death rates there. It's possible. Yeah, they're not sure why these things happen to specific sports. Okay.

Are our friends in the anti-vax community sure in their own minds why these happen? Like do they have some kind of hypothesis there advancing? No, so this is a good point. They'll say it's the spike protein. I'm sure I've heard that raised before, but they don't really explain beyond that. It's interesting about the spike protein in the vaccines is it's been modified to not be active. So you have the spike protein in the virus, which causes injury. And yet they don't seem to acknowledge that could cause these issues. And yet, the despite protein in the vaccine, which has been designed to limit that injury, somehow overcomes that and actually causes the injury that's not associated with

the infection, like none of it makes sense, right? You have to work, leave in these parallel worlds that don't, don't ever mix. Right. Yeah. So they, yeah, that's suggesting that this protein, which is a modified version of the one that's already in the virus, but it's non-harmful, is one of the virus is harmful, because of the modification. Yeah, certainly a good number of people who don't like the vaccines also claim

that COVID itself is really not much of a threat. And then so again, I don't see how they can reconcile self is really not much of a threat. And then so again, I don't see how they can reconcile these points, especially when you're arguing about the same protein, one of which has been modified to be less active. And yeah, you're saying the last active one is actually more dangerous. It just doesn't make any sense. Right. Yeah.

And I think it's kind of not, I don't know, people may become to it with it, with a sort of preterm and desire to conclude that the vaccine is dangerous. And I wonder, like, I'm familiar with the Southern Cardiac death from my time cycling, and I remember in the early 2000s, there was this idea that people were dying because their blood had turned, like, quote,

I'm quoting from like a newspaper article at the time, too treacle, and had become so thick that their heart couldn't pump it anymore. And and that this was causing people to die. And the reason that they died was because they were taking excessive amounts of blood boosters, like EPO and or exogenous EPO. And and so I, I, this wasn't true. To my knowledge, I don't think any of these people had tested positive. None of them had, like, autopsy, so they suggested that this is why they had died.

But it seems to me that there's this natural desire to try and explain away these deaths of what people who are at the peak of their physical lives, right? People in there in their teens and 20s who are extremely fit who we can see doing amazing things. It doesn't sort of line up for us when they die. It doesn't line up with what we think a healthy person is and what we think a cardiac patient is.

And so it seems to me that we create these explanations. Is that something you've seen in other areas before the COVID vaccine, without other sort of conspiracies or just ways to try and explain this away? I don't know about conspiracy. I mean, I think people understandably have a hard time reconciling what you just said, right? You have belief cyclists or whatever sport it is. I mean, cycling is good because aerobically they have to be very fit and then they die potentially of a cardiac condition, right? So that makes no sense.

So the easiest thing, like you said, is to play well, they must be doping, they must be taking steroids, you know, something that's going to harm your body. And so that has to be the explanation because it's easy, that's a simple way to get to this. The reality is that a good number of these people have underlying cardiac conditions. I don't necessarily mean a lot of cyclists have that. What I mean is the people who have these

sudden cardiac deaths have undying those cardiac conditions. Long QT. There's a condition called CPVT, you know, something like that. And so, they're relatively, I'll say benign, CPVT isn't necessarily, but it's triggered. These things are triggered by stressful events, like exercise and things like that. And so, they may live a good part of their life and things like that. And so they may live a good part of their life to be in our seemingly good health. And then the first sign for many of these people is death. That's the real challenge in dealing with these cases

that lead to sudden cardiac death because that's the first symptom. People don't feel tired. They don't have chest pains, like having a heart attack or anything like that. It's simply something happens. The wiring goes off in the heart and you put the exercise on top of it and they die. It's not just these athletes, you'll have somebody who has a change in one of their genes. They're perfectly fine. They live into their 60s and then they suddenly die. Well, what allowed them to live 60 years with, you know, no symptoms? We don't really know,

but it's not uncommon that the first symptom is death in these people. So your friends there who, you know, it's easiest to accuse them of doping because certainly we a lot of us talked about it at the time as I'm sure uh, you know, you know about this, there's no secret um, so we connect those dots, right? We can see that we can see that let's connect it we can't It's a long QT so we don't know what long QT syndrome is for a lot of people. It's hard to make that connection when you don't know Yeah, and it's hard from the perspective of being someone's friend or I can only imagine what it's like for their families to have this, like I guess them be sort of liable after they die, you know, or sort of accused

of something that they may or in many cases, I don't think did do. It must be very difficult to deal with that on top of losing someone you love. Yeah, well, and we're seeing that again here with the people who oppose the vaccines, which is either they're assuming things or they're speculating on things. And you know, unless you're in the circle of care, you don't know what's what's going on. So, you know, you talked about LeBron James

on here. You know, does he have an underlying condition? We don't know. And it, you know, you talked about LeBron James on here, you know, does he have an underlying condition? We don't know. And it, you know, it's really not helpful for me to sit here and say, well, he could have long QT. He could have CPWT like here, you know, to speculate like that. Yeah. I can talk about what are some things that lead to these conditions generally in people. But I don't know anything about his health. And so it's not helpful for me to sit here and speculate on that while his family and then he himself is trying to, you know, sort of get through that. That's, you know, that's, I'm sure that's upsetting for them. So I'm not sure why people feel the need to do that,

except to advance their own agenda. Yes, yeah, I think that is the case. So let's talk a little bit about how we can, I guess, mitigate these risks that exist. I remember when you're getting a license in Spain and they make you take a cardiac stress test there, like you ride your bike on a treadmill and it's ramping up until your heart rates in the 190s or whatever.

And I don't know what they were doing, but they made us, I think that may only have been for like elite athletes, but they made us all do that. Is that something where if there was an underlying one of these underlying risk factors that you mentioned, would it be spotted on a test like that? Yeah, that's a little bit of a controversial area. So I noticed she said in Spain, in Europe, the consensus is that athletes need to go through these, what we call pre-screening, ECGs.

So you were probably, yeah, probably had electrodes on your body, yeah. And so that's a simple non-invasive test. And so you're right. And because some things you can pick up just a rest, but some of these things don't appear until you stress the individual. And so they'll look for rhythm problems. The other test is what we call echocardiography, which is basically an ultrasound in the heart.

And there you can look at function, but you can also look at structure because there's a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that's relatively common in athletes. It's more common there and that accounts for about 50% of the sudden cardiac deaths. And so you can pick that up on an ECG, but you can also pick it up using ultrasound. So if you scan the heart and you see that it's very large, that would be a diagnosis. So first, in Europe, they do that. In North America, in Canada, and the United States, they do not. The concern is, there's a couple of concerns.

One is the price. So you're screening large numbers of athletes to pick out a relative small number, who may be affected. It's crude, but that is an argument that people make. So I guess the question comes down to how much is life worth to you and how much do you wanna spend? So there is that, but there is another issue

which is what they call false positives. So had you been diagnosed as having a condition then you may be pulled out of training for a little while while they do more tests and stuff like that. That could be very stressful on you. And so, the view in North America is there's an unacceptably high number of those false positives. And so, they feel that it's not worth doing. The other issue, so I'm not sure, when did you do this screening?

Was it like 20 years or? No, like 10 years ago, probably like 2010, 2011. Yeah, so one of the issues that we have is when you have these high performance athletes, their hearts change, they get bigger, they get more efficient, their rhythms change, and they have conditions that we would pick up on ACGs and echo that would be considered pathological, right? But because their athletes, these are changes that do occur in athletes as their heart, it's remodel, and they're not a sign of disease. Right. If you took someone who wasn't highly fit and had, so for example, if you screen someone's heart and you saw that it was very large,

and they didn't exercise, you might be concerned. But if you're, you know, an elite cyclist where your heart gets very big, it's going to be bigger. And so what we have struggled with for a number of years is what is normal in the athlete that would be considered abnormal in the general population? Italy has done a really good job on this. So going back into the 1980s, they started to collect data because that's what we need, right? We need data from athletes. And they created a huge database, which I actually use in my class now to teach and say,

you know, if you have an athlete and you see these things, these are things we wouldn't be concerned about. Or here's some markers where we might be concerned. And so we have to look further. And then here's some things where it doesn't matter whether you're an athlete or, you know, someone who sits on their couch all day, that's a problem. But without that data, we didn't have that ability. And so I think the last time is 2018, Europeans updated their criteria each time they update it, you know, we add new things or modify things that are in there. So you would have had abnormal things, you may have had abnormal things on your ACG that the cardiologist would have looked at and said, well, according to our athlete standards,

that's okay, and we're gonna ignore it. And we didn't have that until relatively recently. Okay, yeah, I do remember like things like having a resting heart rate, which we'd be considered like pathologically or like dangerously low with the thing I would get a lot. Yeah, so it's called braided cardio, obviously very common, right?

And so I give an example in my class every year where you have an athlete, their heart rate can be 40 beats per minute. And so I said, you would ignore that. You go, well, I'm going to lead cyclist. I get that. And I give an example where it's a woman, she's 63 years old, her resting heart rate is 42 beats per minute. She doesn't do any exercise. And the physicians are like a woman, she's 63 years old, and her resting heart rate is 42 beats a minute. She doesn't do any exercise.

And the physicians are like, oh, she must be very healthy. I'm like, no, that's not normal. And so it turned out, so the reason they flagged her was because she kept passing out because she was brainacardic. And she eventually broke her nose and was sent to the hospital.

They did a genetic test and found that she had a cardiac arrhythmia, right? So my, what I always teach my students is don't just look at the monitor, look at your patient, right? So when your heart rates 40 beats a minute and they're cycling away and you know, doing all these, he's like, yeah, that person's very fit as like when you look in their 80 years old and they're passing out, 40 beats a minute is not normal. And so we don't need real high standards for some of these things, but some of them we did.

Yeah. And I wonder like people are listening probably be sufficiently afraid now, but hopefully not too afraid, but like lots of people these days are monitoring their heart rate all the time, right? They have watches, they have wristbands when they're exercising. They have chest bands. So you can monitor your heart rate or kind of basically stays. You can wear a ring.

And would any of those devices be useful in predicting or seeing some of these things? Not really. Only because they're very limited. So it's great people measure their heart rate because it is a general sign of health and so a low-wrestling heart rate is very good. And when you're exercising, you wanna bring your heart rate into certain zones

to have an effective work. So that's all great. So I'm not trying to discourage people from doing that. But if you wanna diagnose long QT syndrome, for example, in somebody, that requires calculations. So if you're sure you need to measure things very accurately, when I'm sure when you had your your traits done, you would have had multiple electrodes stuck on your your body. Yeah, because we're. Yeah, we typically do what's called the 12 lead ECG.

And so there's multiple electrodes. And they have to be positioned in certain places in order to measure how the heart, basically the heart's electricity is flowing in certain directions because that actually tells us something. So when you have, I mean, I have a device that I use to teach and to illustrate people inside of my cell phone and they can just, you know, you put your fingers on it and you can, you can, you can, you can measure things and you get an ECG off that. And so it looks really neat. And it's great for teaching, but I'm not going to diagnose somebody who forgot

a syndrome or a long QT or any of those, those things. those are much more in depth. It's required much more in depth equipment to do something like that. Right. Yeah, definitely. Like sometimes when you ride under electricity, you'll see a heart rate of 240 and it will be concerning. Oh yeah, okay. Didn't work out what was connected to it. And so if these things are occurring, and obviously they they occur, it's sort of at a certain percentage of young athletes and certain percentage anywhere else, are there ways that these sudden cardiac arrest we could reduce the number of them that result in death? Yeah, for sure. So CPR, so the people who die quite often die because there's nobody there to administer CPR.

And so you lose that very valuable time. And so people are concerned about stepping in and doing something and potentially hurting someone. If someone is dead like that, you're not going to hurt them. So please learn CPR, it's not difficult. They can certainly do that. I know in Canada, about years ago now, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada raised a tremendous amount of money to put, we call automatic, extra, defibrillators or AEDs in public places.

I think they put 15,000 of them. Plus companies will buy them for their workplaces and things like that. And so if someone goes down in their hard stops, you take these things out. There's some patches, it comes with instructions. Like it will tell you actually what to do. And you take it out out. There's some patches that comes with instructions. Like it will tell you actually what to do. And you take it out, you put the patches on the individual, you step back because it will deliver a shock and it will automatically shock their heart trying to get

it back into rhythm. So knowing where those are, I'll say knowing how to do them, you don't necessarily need to practice because it will walk you through it, but at least knowing where they are and not being afraid to use them. I think it's very important. These quick reactions and administering care before the paramedics or someone else gets there is super important. If you let someone go five, 10 minutes without any CPR or anything like that, there's a tremendous amount of damage that's done and can't be overcome. Okay, yeah, and I think a lot of places in the US certainly, you can access free CPR,

AED training, or your employer might pay for it know if you know many resources people could use to find where they can find that free training. So in the States, the American Heart Association would be a good place to go. The American Red Cross, I'm sure they'll have resources in Canada's Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, St. John's Amulance. But like you said,

a lot of just local community centers will put these things on a couple times a year. You know, just sort of that people are familiar with how to do it. Work places will sometimes do it once or twice a year. Have training a lot of people to just learn how to do it. Yeah, I'm not sure where people, if you just go on the internet and wherever you are and look for first day, a lot of times it falls under first day, but if you just Google on the internet and wherever you are and look for a lot of times it falls under first day, but if you just Google your city and CPR, I'm sure something will come

up and I bet there's something this month you could go to. Nice. Yeah, we've spoken before about stop the bleed causes and how they're also free and easy to access. So people could do both of those to be really set up to help people. Glenn, is there anything else you think people ought to know about these sudden cardiac arrest guy, the sort of with the conspiracy theories around them or anything else they can do to protect themselves or other people?

Well, I think there's the perception that by saying that there's not an issue, that it means we don't care, in fact, we do care about these issues. Like I said, I've talked about this for over a decade. I have a background in doing some sports medicine work a long time ago. I certainly have a strong interest in helping these people. When we say the risk is not going up, it doesn't mean that we don't care. And so, you know, when a soccer player, a football player, somebody goes down on the court that we just say, well, yeah, it happens. It's not what we're saying. We're saying, we know these things happen. We do care about them. I would actually flip this around the other way and say, some of these people, the people

who I'm talking about, the people who are profiting off, that's not people who are like, I had no idea this was happening. That's okay. You know, not everybody can know everything. But the people who are saying this is increasing and they're making money off these things by selling their movies and whatever. Did you not care when someone died in 2015 because they were, and 2019, they were dying, and kids were doing it. And if you'd like to come to my class, I can show you the pictures of these people because you weren't around then, and I'm wondering, I'm not really wondering why you're around now. I know why they're around now. They're profiting off of this. And so I would actually flip it the other way and say, you know, have them ask them, why is this new to them?

When we've, when the data show, this has been happening all along. Right. Yeah. And by encouraging people not to get vaccinated, they're encouraging us. People place themselves at a higher risk for cardiac issues, right? For presumably a profit motive in some cases, which is very sad. Glenn, where can people...

You do some excellent threads on Twitter, so people can learn a lot about heart stuff there. Is there anywhere else or where would you prefer people to find you, I guess, online? Yeah, no, we do lots of social media stuff. There's a lot of, I know people complain about Twitter, I complain about Twitter, but there's a lot of really cool Twitter. There's a lot of really good people on there who, you know, present their information. You can just go on and look for those people there.

What I would say is how do you identify who are the good people who you can trust and stuff, is the people who are able to be transparent with where they get their information. So when I say the vaccines reduce your risk of these major cardiovascular events, I typically provide a study or something like that to show where I got that information. The people who are last trustworthy will say, you know, either go find it yourself because they don't know. Or well, I can see it. I know it's happening. You know, a lot of these things are measurable, so we should be able to find those. A lot of us write on things I've written for the conversation, science 2.0,

you know, things will be there. But social media is a good place to go because you can interact with people and you can ask those questions. So yeah, yeah, you can reach out to me and see who I follow and who I interact with if if you're interested in That you could take that as a good or a bad sign however you want to take it. What's your handle on Twitter? So my handle is a Glangie Le and Kyle PYLE. I'm also on the sky. I just joined that the other day So nice congratulations. Yeah, that's great. I think the last point you made is one that we should maybe pursue another episode on, because the difference between anecdote and data,

and like, there is an increasing number, I think, of people doing things that look a lot like journal articles, or a lot like studies that appear reviewed, that are not trying to kind of leverage the credibility of that without actually doing peer reviewed science because the stuff they're doing wouldn't line up with peer reviewed science. So be interesting to do this. Right, that's right.

Yes, that's a whole episode. Yeah, next time. Well, thank you so much for your time, Dan. Thanks Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, La Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community

that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you.

Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder.

There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why?

In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm the Wizard of Oz, I'm the one making everything happen.

Real housewife of Salt Lake City Star Jen Jen Shaw, is running the scam of the century. We probably will never be able to be retired black working to work anymore. Living a fat million dollar lifestyle on the backs of thousands of elderly victims. She turned up their lives for what a fake Fendi bag? Congrats, girl. When you have her confronted, instead of stopping, she finds ways to be sneaky or about it and keeps going. I remember one time Stuart lost like about 8 million and General was very upset and she came down to the office late at night. With Coach, Yall is screaming at him, asking him where their money is.

Would you call her a con artist? I would just call her a con. She's not very much of an artist. Listen to Queen of the Con, season four, The Unreal Housewife, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi everyone, it's James here,

and we have a wonderful episode for you today on Heat and He Onus, and how to protect yourself, for your community and your animals when it is hot which it is right now but I just wanted to record this little pickup to tell you that this isn't medical advice, let me do this every time we do these. I am not that kind of doctor and I'm not your doctor and I just wanted to reinforce especially that yes generally of your hot it's a good idea to drink fluids and get out of the heat. Someone who's losing consciousness or really, really sick, you need to get better medical attention

and then you can learn how to give on a podcast, right? So that's when you call someone who's job-a-days to look after people. I just wanted to reinforce that obviously. Pouring water down the throat if someone has lost consciousness is a very dumb idea. So please, if somebody is seriously and well, seek medical care. Enjoy the episode. All right, hi, welcome to it could happen here, a podcast where we thumb on, knows it God, and which is what I was doing just before the podcast began. Maybe we'll include that. And today we're here to talk about how God is smiting us with massive heat waves. And I'm joined today by Margaret Killjoy and Garrison Davis. Say hello, everyone.

Hello, everyone. Hello, everyone. So close. So close. So so cold. So cold. Three thinkers. Yeah. My sheep all have joined me. This is what I get for doing an episode about sheep. So as you will be aware, if you are in just about anywhere in the northern hemisphere, it is very hot at the minute. It's very hot in cities in Europe. It's very hot in the United States.

It's very hot in parts of North Africa and Middle East as well. It's the hottest June for how many years, Garrison? July. July, that one. It is the hottest July and it is 120,000 years according to the most recent estimates released like three days ago as of time of recording.

So yeah. Yeah, and we've had the hottest day in history, like four times in the last month or something. Yes. The in the first half of July, we had, we had two days in a row where it was the two hottest days on record. And then we had two other, two other days that were also the hottest days on record. It's, it's pretty concerning. It's nothing that people haven't been warning about for many, many decades, but it's bad and it's very warm. Yep, and it will continue probably to get warmer. So I think the way we want to approach this

is I'm going to start off with talking about stuff related to like exertional heat illness because that's the thing that's most acutely concerning for people, right? Especially if they work outside, if they recreate outside, if they're doing stuff outside where they can't get out of the heat. So I think to start off with, I want to talk about things that might make you predisposed. Then I'm going to expand a little bit of how the body cools and then some of these different stages of heat illnesses and how one might go about treating those or seeking further care if you need to, right?

So to start out with, there are some things that can make you predisposed to heat illness, right? The biggest predisposition I've come across in my reading is previously having heat illness. So I can certainly speak to this. Yeah, like, I think I got heatstroke for the first time. It was racing by in Spain, I think, but I then remember getting again racing bikes in

Vietnam and just like being really bad, like having to have IV fluids, like vomiting, sort of even some, like sort of not loss of consciousness, but definitely like confusion and in erratic behavior and stuff. And the line between that and dying is pretty narrow, right? You can have a multiple organ failure and stuff, certainly if you don't respond to that or if you miss diagnosis, and that's definitely, like I'm someone with diabetes rates, so people can sometimes, if you're arctic or confused, people can assume you're hypoglycemic and you need some sugar, but you don't in that situation.

We need fluids and electrolytes and to be cooled quickly. So, yeah, that is, yeah, you can die. People do die. Actually, the mortality is quite high. Like, to prepare for this, I went and looked at advanced wilderness life support course I did. And people couldn't look it up. AWLS University of Utah does one.

And you can act just lots of this stuff online for free. But the thing, the mortality is quite high from these like heat illnesses. And I think that's probably especially true in wilderness medicine because it can be hard to cool someone down, right? If you don't have means of like if you don't have access to ice, you obviously not got air conditioning out there. If you the best thing you probably have is running water. Hopefully you have running water, right? And I think probably it's something that like people might not have been concerned with unless they either lived in a very hot place or a very active people or who traveled a lot before.

So yeah, if you've had heat illness before then you do need to be careful. And you will probably know if you've had it before. But if we go through all the symptoms and you've had a ball and never I guess got diagnosed and lucky you maybe you just found out you had a heat on this. Other things that can be predisposed you can be a lack of acclimation. Again, this is one that I think kind of stands to reason for most people, but if you go from a cold place to a hot place or the place you are suddenly becomes hot, having been cold, it's going to take you a few days a week to become a climatist, so that heat, right?

And your body will change, things about your body will change, so we don't need to go into. But, it's also losing that. I don't think so, I think, so back when I was exercising more seriously, I would, we would do heat acclimation by going in a sauna after a training ride.

And the idea was that you gave yourself this big bout of heat stress and then you could go back and cool down. I think if you were in AC for most of the day, it was okay. I'm guessing here, but if getting that bout of heat stress and then recovering and get just like any other training that you're doing. Okay, so like, but if you go outside into the heat and then come back into the cool, you're still acclimating yourself. Yes, compared to just great hanging out in, you know, somewhere where it's called all the time. And you do want it, you don't want to overdo it, right? You don't want to be like, oh yeah, I'm going to acclimate time to go for a temorat. Like, like ease into it. make sure you're hydrating, make sure you're taking breaks in the heat.

There's also a lack of conditioning, right? So that's why you see a lot of heat illness. Maybe that's the first time I've ever heat stroke. It's like a preseason workouts for like, especially like collegiate athletes and things or athletes who are more seasonal athletes, so people who have been parked on their backside for a few months or in class or whatever,

and then they come and start doing a rigorous training regime. That can prove to you, right? So they can cause you to be more likely to get a heat on this. And then there are some medications, right? So you'd probably say on your medications, but things like beta blockers, anti-histamine, diuretics. You don't want to be drinking too much alcohol.

And some conditions to heart disease, skin disease, existing dehydration, fever, obviously, your temperature's higher to begin with, and diarrhea and vomiting, which can cause that dehydration. So if you have diarrhea and vomiting, it's not a good idea to also be, you know, going out and exposing yourself to a lot of heat, right? So, all of those things can make you more predisposed, but you can have none of those things and still get heat-ilders. I think the way to understand it is like the way, we'll talk about the way our body cools. So it does that through evaporation.

People will be familiar with sweating, most people sweat. And so if you, the sweating allows your body to cool, right? The evaporation of the sweat allows your body to cool. So people who don't sweat or people who have injuries, which mean they don't sweat some of their body, again, are at a higher risk for heat illness, right? Well, in the system, it's like wet bulb temperature. Yes. And the fact that if you're in a more humid place, you have to consider the heat very differently,

right? Yes. And so, yeah, the East Coast versus the Southwest, for example, of the United States, will have very different options available to them, both inside and outside about how to that, it'll give you the humidity and it might give you a wet bulb or like a real feel temperature, but certainly, like I was recently on a trip to the Marshall Islands and I was running at like 85

and I ran at 85 all the time and I was dying because the humidity was so high. So yeah, whether how humidity is high, you're not going to be able to cool as much, right? So you need to be more careful. Radiation, that's when your body is shedding heat through, I guess, electromagnetic energy. That makes up most of your cooling

when the ambient temperature is less than body temperature. So once the ambient temperature is above your body temperature, I think in Fahrenheit, it's like 96.6. Your body's going to be relying on other methods, right? That one's not going to work. Conduction, conducture doesn't really make up much of a, it's not really that useful a way to cool. It doesn't really make much difference,

but like people will be familiar with conduction. If you've ever slept without a sleeping pad, if you've been camping, you'll realize how much colder you get on cold ground. And then the last one is convection, right? So that's heat transfer between the body and a moving gas or liquid. That's why wind chills the thing. Okay. Because the air's whipping past, you're right calling you down.

And that's also the convection is one that we can use to cool people down if they overheat, right? Like jumping the creek. So yes, or if we don't have a creek we can get you wet and then fan you. Okay, maybe we can, if we're outside and we have those big thermoresc sleeping pads, we can get some air moving that way and help you cool down. If we know the ways the body cools, then we can maybe use those, right? And we have to understand, like you said, the relative humidity red. So when our body gets hot, especially when it starts to overheat, it'll shun some blood to the skin, right? Vazor dilation.

It will also increase cardiac output and increase catacolamines, which activate the sweat glands. So the hypothalamus will also regulate heat production in the body. There's been two. So I don't understand two of the words you've recently used, but okay, which would it work? Which would it work? I don't know. The cacophony and the hyperarumines. the car the car the carphony and the high-period. Casacola means. Okay. It's sufficient to say that the body this you start to sweat more and your body begins to

regulate how hot it makes itself. Okay. I got that one kind of from context. Yeah. What's this next one? I guess your hypothalamus is like your your body is kind of internal regulator and what it's doing is it's in this case it's regulating the heat production of your body is kind of internal regulator and what it's doing, it's, in this case, it's regulating the heat production of your body.

Okay. It's trying to, it's not making you hotter from the inside, I guess. That's probably a terrible explanation. Okay, so let's go through the different stages of heat illness. We can start off with things that people will be, I think we can probably skip like sunburn. Many of us will be familiar with sunburn. Many of us will understand. Hopefully we're wearing our suncream when we go outside, right? Or just wearing our suncream and covering ourselves up from the sun, not just like riding around with our skin exposed to the sun when it's 110,

or what have you. So step up from there would be heat cramps. Cramps can come from various things, right? Like, I think not all cramps are caused by sodium depletion or potassium depletion. People sometimes think that it's potassium thing. Some of them can just be caused by every exertion. It can be your body's way of being like, hey, stop. So like, if you know, it bits 50 degrees out and you're trying to run your fastest tanker, you have cramps, that's not a heat thing. That's just your body being like, okay, you're not ready for this. Yeah, that's that's my experience of running. Yeah. Yeah, your body's actively rejected it. Yeah.

Yeah, it knows. I tried to drive track when I was the ninth grade to impress a girl. Neither part of it worked. I'm sorry to hear that. That's fine. But it's for the best. Okay, I'm glad that you can share that with the audience. Oh, I thought I was just waiting.

Oh, no, someone's listening. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, unfortunately. So, if he cr cramps, they're actually going to be in your calves. People will be familiar with the sensation of a cramp, I'm sure. Well, we're experiencing heat cramps.

We want to obviously cool off, stop doing the thing. So if we're running, it's time to start running. If we're cycling, it's time to stop cycling. And likely you'll get swimming. That's other kinds of cramps. But if we're exercising, it's good to cool down, it's good to rehydrate. So that's where you're going to start with your oral salt solution. And generally, from what I've seen, it's a sodium thing, so that's just like a quarter to half a teaspoon of table salt and a liter of water. This is the electrolyte thing that people talk about. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And as we get further into like these heat illnesses, one of the things that you want to be careful of, you're trying to rehydrate someone, it's overloading on carbohydrate. So you want a less than 6% carbohydrate solution. That can mean just not pounding gatorade, which I think can be the sort of standard response for some people. It doesn't empty quite as quickly as something which has a lower carbohydrate content, right? But people who are drinking straight water

doesn't rehydrate you as effectively as drinking electrolytes, right? Like if it's really hot out, you pretty much need to be hydrating with electrolytes. Unless you're like eating a salty snack or something, this is what I've heard from people. Yeah, there's this thing called hyponotremia, which is when you, that's like low sodium, right, then that Then that can happen sometimes from just drinking straight water without any sodium. Maybe it happens rarely, but it big, definitely can happen. It can happen in like back how to travel

where people don't think they're exerting themselves. They're just kind of walking and drinking a lot of water. It can happen in marathons. Like it happens sometimes in marathons, people are just taking the water from the aid stations just drinking the water. Yeah, it's never like, you know, when it's hot, if you're having, you know,

when I was bycricing ice to do one drink of water and one drink of electrolyte, even in the heat, pretty much like one bottle. There are two bottles on a bicycle, and I think that's a fine thing to do if you're in the heat and you're exercising. You don't need to be smashing gay to raid all the time, because that's a lot of sugar, and it might, that will also not empty from your stomach.

So, you know, a modern sport drink should have the right solution, and you know, there are lots of brands, I'm not going to recommend one, but there are lots of different brands which should have a decent sort of four or five percent carbohydrate solution. Pick one that tastes nice to you. And then we move from there into a couple of different things. He exhaustion and heat syncopy. Heat syncopy is when you'll see people fall over. And it happens often, the only time I've seen it happen is people stopping after a long run, specifically when they push themselves really hard, and it can actually be,

it can be people who are not particularly dehydrated or hyperthermic, and sort of a long run and heat you're not acclimated to. It can blood-compould in the legs, and it's often people who are elderly are not very well acclimated and it's normally when they're standing at stationary. And that's something that you can treat by elevating a feet, where's the person lies down and then just getting them out of direct sunlight and helping them rehydrate, right? So helping them call rehydrate. You're gonna see that in nearly all of these cases, calling someone off, it's the most important thing to do.

So they just want to talk about heat exhaustion. Again, you'll know something is wrong in these situations, right? If someone's just falling over, you will know something is wrong. If someone's, then in case of heat, like you'll know, like having had he exhaust you and he'd stroke like you yourself will also know. There was certain like, like ecstasy is the big one.

Right. When people, people quite often get heat on us, when they're like at raves on ecstasy. And that's just because obviously, like altered state of mind plus dancing, plus this drug, which is, you know, your body's not making its usual responses, I guess. Yeah. And that can be, so like, you know, if it's 110 out, maybe that's not the time to be doing MBMA and raving.

Cop, cop, cop behavior games. Yeah. Yeah. I can't stand by in here. Yeah. And just as can't stand by here. And just as you spread this MDMA slander, people should absolutely be knowledgeable about what causes serotonin syndrome and be careful about mixing other substances. But I cannot have you just disparage the good name of MDMA like this.

Oh, I will. I will take it one step further and tell you that at least with my research, both caffeine and alcohol make it far more likely for you to suffer dehydration and related heat. Dehydration, yes. This is just, but this is an actual problem that people should make with MDMA. This is something to to look up because of the way it affects your serotonin levels. It can cause you to overheat if you take too much or come out with other things or if you're in a hot, sweaty, crowded room,

you're dancing too much without taking breaks. This is a thing to consider, yes. Yeah, I had, there was a person, I think it was reference in the course I did where they were talking about using a drone or a rave to identify people who are hypothermic. And like, that's cool. That's cool. You're too hot to step away from the dance floor.

Like, to identify people who are at risk, which is an interesting idea. That's cool. I think. Yeah. So just, you know, something to consider as you go forward with your sample plans. So other signs, right, tiredness, weakness, dizzyness, headache, fainting, nausea, vomiting, muscle cramps, nausea and vomiting is rare, I remember.

The worst he on the side I've ever had was in Vietnam doing a bike race. It's one of the rules in a bike race is you can't take supplies from your support car in the last 50 kilometers. And it was just so hot. I remember being like, I'm baking inside my skull. I'm baking inside my skull. Like, and I've been, it previously in like a little group in front of the main group.

So I also hadn't been able to access water from my car. Then, and then drop, we got caught by the main group. It's what happened. And I remember being like, okay, good. Now I can get my ice then and then drop, we got caught by the main group. It's what happened. And I remember being like, okay, good. Now I can get my ice socks and put them down my back and I can get my cold water. And then I went back and the guy was like, no, no, no, it's like 49 kilometers. And I was like, oh, this is bad. This is really fucking bad.

And it was really bad. Did you finish the race? Did you? I finished the race. I finished the race. BN2, yeah, I did. I finished the race. I'm not sure that I'm right. I'm not sure that I'm right.

Congrats. No, no, it's terrible decision. At the picture somewhere, my teammates put me in a shower with my legs above my head. It was just like waterboarding me with cold water. And I was given IV fluids. They were all like, this is bad. He's not in a good way. Yeah, yeah, that you know, sport is good for you. Keep sporting out their kids. Yeah, everyone was very

concerned for me. All the stuff I came up with was like, stay inside. Don't exert yourself, like avoid caffeine and alcohol. If you you wanna push yourself past your limits. Yeah, yeah, don't, no, it's bad. But we did everything wrong, right? Like it was in December, the race, because the Asian tour doesn't take a break at like the December and a few time, it takes a break for Ramadan.

So obviously coming from the United States, we were relatively less fit and we would have been, we were not acclimated, I had a fat beard which did not help and my hair was longer than it is now. But my body was not losing heat, everything was... To just be cool and like, I was doing this race. Going out there like full, I like if there's nothing that what is more white man on the left than you know, got white dude with a beard. It's like all of them right, Cropoc and Bacoon in marks. And you have to try it. And yeah, don't do that, don't do that to yourself.

We talked about heat simpchopeia and the last one is heat stroke. So what differentiates heat stroke from heat exhaustion is that higher body temperature above 40 degrees Celsius, which is 103, 104 Fahrenheit. Okay. If you're seeing 103, it's time to pick up the telephone and call 911. If you can, if you're in an area where you can do that, but it doesn't matter, it's 103, 104, I guess, it's, it's, you're very hot at that point. You're going to have hot, red skin, fast, strong pulse, headache, dizziness, nausea, confusion.

People can also lose consciousness. So, this is very serious, right, and the line between this and a really serious lasting complication is quite small. So, you do need to be very extremely concerned. I will say that like when you're taking someone's temperature, taking it at the extremities is not necessarily going to give you the best idea of what their core body temperature is, right? So that's for the reason that if it's hot on the outside, like an ear or a have you, and then if you've then're hot on the outside, right? Like a year or a half, you.

And then if you've then tried to cool the person and you're seeing like a lower body temperature in their handle, if your hands been in ice, you know, in ice bath, then you might see a cooler temperature there. There are like rectal probes used for this, not something to be doing in a sort of non-consensual manner, they're not really something to be doing unless you sort of non-consensual manner, and then not really something to be doing

unless you're like a medical professional. But if you're, it, so just don't be relying, I guess, like, you know, people have little heat guns that they like to use and stuff. Yeah. Might not be the most reliable source of information. Although it might be useful for the initial diagnosis, right? Yeah, even then, like, even if you can just do an oral thermometer, I was supposed to, like, the temperature of your forehead is X. Yeah, like, if it's 110, then the temperature of your forehead is going to be hot, right? I see what you're saying. Yeah, yeah, totally. Okay. Versus, you know, you're trying to get as inside as possible, I guess. Yeah. I remember people doing cooling experiments where you have to take a pill

when it measures your internal temperature. And it blew teeth out or something. Whoa. Yeah, so that's a fun times. I think that's cool as hell. You know what one? Yeah. If I did,

rescuing it later sounds like not fun. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does make an exit from the body. So with this again, right, you want to cool the person down. And the way we can do that, it's like ice packs, right, in the groin, neck, and scalp. So I used to do like just tights, like if you're wearing tights, put ice in those, put those down my back of my cycling jersey or no cycling. You can put them in a groin, obviously the person has become like a heat casualty, you can put them in the groin, armpits, the neck, and you can also, if you don't have access to AC, obviously you've got AC, you can put the person in an air-conditioned environment to help them cool down. You can put them in an ice bath.

You'll see that at hot weather events. I'm trying to think, there are a lot of other conditions that you'll see at hot weather events. We don't really have time to talk about that things like rapdo are very, very concerning. If someone's ex-sourcing in the heat, but you'll often see at the end of high events

in first-day tents, they're popping people in ice baths to cool them down. They've got some of these symptoms, like 15, 20 minutes, I think is how long do you want to put them in there for? But like if you're starting to feel headache, this illness knows you, I guess my like big take home here is get out the sun, stop exercising

if you're exercising and start hydrating if you're not hydrating with, with that carbohydrate solution. You're looking to drop that core temperature below that kind of danger zone, right? And I did get it back to where it was to be, which I think in Fahrenheit is around 96.6. You probably don't want to actively cool someone

all the way down because you can overshoot and they can get hypothermic. And I'm sorry, they can get too cold if you're dumping them in a freezer or actively calling them too aggressively. So that's something to be concerned with as well. You don't want the person to start shivering because the body is trying to heat itself back up at that point. So you can't be uber aggressive. But I think having said all this,

like I said, the big take home is like, if you start to feel sick, dizzy, under well, when you're outside, the heat's get out the heat, get some water, get in the shade, if you can't get in there conditioning, if you can. If you're at a job site, it's just like a trailer where you with the sec conditioned going the trailer, like it's not worth your life, even if it's your job.

You want to know it's fun? Is that was fun in the United States. There's no federal law that says you can't make people work in the weather without tell. Yeah. Some states less than half. I don't have the notes in front of me, I have the notes for a different thing I recorded recently. Some states, like 16 of them or something maybe,

have laws against working people outside in the heat, but most states don't. The federal government is like considering one right now, but that is like probably years away before it could be enacted. But it's like basic worker protections like don't have people work outside without enough stuff to make sure they don't die of it. Consider forming a union.

Google Blair Mountain for more information on how to respond if you're not allowed, if you're not allowed to take breaks for the heat. Talking of how capitalism is killing us all Margaret, it's time for us to break for some advert so things people can buy. We have some breaking news here folks, we have some breaking sheep news. So it turns out during during James's last sheep episode He talked about having Texel sheep Yeah, what it's actually

Tessel sheep so this is no that definitely Texels who he's not pretty exciting here Who No, that definitely textiles who he's not pretty exciting here Who Tessles largest northwestern islands of the of the Netherlands. It's one of those European Places where the where the pronunciation where the pronunciation does not match how it's written and it's Tessel sheep not textile sheep So this is pretty exciting for me and Usually James gets to make fun of how I pronounce words. And now, now look who's laughing. So here we go.

Should we move into like machinations versus machinations? Or should we just move on? No, I think we could just move on here. We're just going to start a Buenos could just move on here. We're all learning because we go. You see, there we go. Yeah, I've just learned that. I think we're all learning because we go. We're all learning because we go. You see, there we go. Yeah, I've just learned that.

I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that.

I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. I've just learned that. Yeah, don't worry. Yeah, we're we're we're all learning as we go. You see there we go. Yeah, I've just I've just learned that the place is called Tessle. And then thus the sheep

from there. Is there an X in it or something? No, yes. When you're yeah, there's an ex all the time? T-E-X-E-L. Yeah, I always see. But the X sounds like an S. Yeah, when you're speaking in fascinating. Yeah, wow. And all my life, I've been misnaming the very sheep that many of you enjoyed hearing about. Sad. No wonder the sheep weren't coming when you called.

They felt, no, they come. Disrespected. Yeah, they will never mind. Yeah, well, to be fair, I just go out there and say sheep. So, you know, I'm hedging my bets with the pronunciation of that one. Well, you all talk about animals and heatwaves. I would love to.

Yeah, tell me what to do with your sheep. I could also talk about humans and heatwaves. So actually, ironically. Yeah, tell me what to do with your sheep. I could also talk about humans and heatwaves. So actually, ironically, one of the things that I learned, I don't know whether it applies to sheep. I was talking before this to one of my professional animal friends who has worked in veterinary clinics and also as a professional horse person. So there's some stuff to know, right? For all of our, all of the people who aren't humans. Different animals need different electrolyte field formulas. If you are going to feed them electrolytes, and for example dogs need more sugar and less salt because their bodies don't get rid of salt as much, right? They don't really sweat nearly as much.

Occasional pdolite or some other non-gatoradee thing is fine every now and then, and probably gatorade's probably fine every now and then, but don't be like, like you can go hiking and just drink electrolytes, right? Not sugar, water, but electrolytes. But don't do that with your dog, even if it's super hot out. There is dog specific stuff and there's formulas you can look up for dog specific making your own. Don't shave your pets.

This is the one that I don't know if applies to sheep. My friend said this does not apply to sheep. You have to shear. You have to shear your sheep. We're all stable over heat and die. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.

You go. What a shoe. Your sheep. Yeah. Some animals you want to shave some animals you don't. If you have animals, you should look this up ahead of Yeah. Some animals, you want to shave some animals, you don't. If you have animals, you should look this up ahead of time. Some people run out and shave their cats and dogs in the heatwave. This is a very bad thing.

The hair is designed to protect them from the sun. Also, especially if you have a dog with a double coat, it does a lot of weird heat transfer stuff, and it's really cool and magic. Brushing and grooming are very good. If your dog is like slow to its summer coat, or its summer is suddenly here 11 months of the year, or as I predict, there's gonna be two seasons.

There's going to be summer, which will last for nine months, and then there's going to be hell mouth, which will replace what was previously summer. Don't take your dog out in the hottest weather. It is better that your dog pisses inside. It gets heat stroke. It is harder to identify heat stroke in a dog,

but if the dog is like panting a particular amount, there's like other things about looking at the gums and eyes. I got bitten by a dog that was having a heat stroke on there. Oh my God. Forced you like. It was good for both the animals involved and that's the way that good,

feel fairly secure in saying that people who were looking after dog aren't listening, but like they made a series of very poor choices. Yeah. Yeah. And like it wasn't wise. Hiking is my main activity and is like my main bonding with me and my dog

and I am not doing it during a lot of the heat wave. And I'm finding other ways because I have to drive a decent way to go hiking, right? So I can't do it early in the morning and let's say wake up earlier than I want to. But if you are going to do asset activities with both yourself or with an animal, consider doing them at early in the morning or late in the evening, or mill the night, I don't know, whatever. If you have animals that can't come inside,

because overall, it was gonna apply to your animals as it was gonna apply to humans, like get them into the AC, like what are you doing? But a lot of animals you don't have room for inside, right? Unless you're a medieval Irish peasant, in which case I've read way too much about how much those animals live inside. Yeah, cows under the house, so the warmth comes up. So you want to cross breeze in your barn or coop or whatever. If it's a coop, you want to make sure there's a place at the top for air to come escape and you don't want the like box style coop with only one entrance if you're dealing with heat waves. You want a

lot of cool water that is easy to drink and so a lot of people who normally feed their animals with like the nipple style feeders, different animals you have different ways of watering them. No nipple style feeders during a heat wave. The animal needs to be able to get into the get the water easily. For, you might want to bring your nesting boxes down to the ground floor, where it's cooler. You also might want to consider insulating the coop, like with hay bales. For example, you can stack them up next to your coop. Horses have yet another electrolyte mix.

My horse professional friend uses one called Gallagher's Water, but points out that it's like mostly bougie people use it when they're like when the most people of horses are bougie but not all of them, right? At least where I live other places. Okay, so it's only necessary in extreme circumstances. It's only better than water in extreme circumstances. Most animals do very well with just drinking water. very well with just drinking water. And also, you can probably consider, if you live somewhere wester than I do, you can consider misting systems. If you have the money in the infrastructure,

and misting systems is basically just like, it pumps water out into a mist, and the mist cools everything down. And below about 70% humidity, they're fairly effective, below 50% of humidity, they're incredibly effective. And so they, and it's not that you get wet, it's that they do, it's like the air is sweating. The air is... They're like you have in, if you go to restaurants in Phoenix outside, they have them. Yeah.

I bought some really cheap off like Craigslist. They could be super cheap. I just have to go and get them. Yeah. But no, I'm like so jealous because it wouldn't work where I live. Oh, you can't use them because of the high humidity. I mean, they do a little bit here,

but not very effectively. Yeah. And now your chickens don't want to be living in a two damp environment. It can be bad for that a lungs. So dig don't be running one inside all the time. Yeah. And again, side, but I think it's certainly like my chickens will

go around it when it's hot. It seems to work. And one person I talked to and this is like I did a bunch of research about this, but it's inconclusive. One person I talked to during the wildfire smoke actually set up a misting system because mist picks up and drops particularly matter to the ground. There's a lot of research that says this particulate absorption happens. There is no research to say this is how you handle wildfire smoke with outside animals.

But that is something that at least one person I heard from is doing and science backs it up. For human animals, in terms of preparedness, just to run through all this stuff that I'm keeping track of, the way that you're going to deal with all this, if you're not outside, right, if you're outside and you're dealing with the stuff you're going going to use what James talked about, like, keep track of how you're feeling and get into the AC. And the main thing you want to do is get into the AC, right? And you don't want to destroy new exercise. You want to check alerts on your phone or your weather radio, if you're a cool prepper and have like a little weather radio. You probably want to use the buddy system outside

if it's getting really hot, if you can, right? Just like having someone who can keep track of what you're doing. If you don't have another way to get to AC, consider public libraries and other places, this is a very good time. Look after your neighbors and some of your neighbors are housed and might not have AC. Some of your neighbors don't have houses and probably don't have AC unless they live in their vehicles in which case they might have some AC, but not all vehicles do. And so there's a very good time to look after people, whether it's giving people rides to public cooling centers or whether it's setting up public cooling centers or they're just letting your neighbor who like come over because your AC is working and there's isn't. You want to.

isn't. You want to, I mean, one thing that you want to do is it's just accept that what we're dealing with isn't normal. And I'll get to that in a moment. But so if you're a renter, you have fewer options, right? In terms of like structural preparedness. There are some things that you can do running fans, unless you're a podcaster, running fans is a very good idea. If you have ceiling fans, you want to make sure that during the summer, they run counterclockwise and during the winter, they run clockwise. So it's just look and be like, I want it to push air down and you can visualize the direction it'll turn to push air down. And that's the summer one. I want change the direction they spin. Yes, there's a little switch on every ceiling fan. I can see the one behind you.

I didn't know. I can see it on yours. Don't do it while I spin. So if you look on your screen, no, don't be a coward garicent. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no Close your mouth and just go for it. I just didn't want me to put my arm up and then it. So it's less because you're gonna stick your head in there so you can get a good look at all the switches. I'm gonna get, oh! Oh no, garrisons deceased. Oh well, good thing they left me their gestor costume. You'll never find out any more about cops here. Gopcity has to end because there's no other way

for us to find out about it. They finally stop. It's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, it's not like, there's actually like, it's kind of sad, I was saying that there's no labor protections about heat, some farm workers like developed a, like an immigrant farm worker developed a cooling vest system that she's like working on, that there's like articles about where it just uses evaporative cooling to cool people. And it's like one of those things where I'm like, that rules and also it's absolutely awful that that's like where we're at, where we're at. You know, it's not like how it lets have better labor practices and stuff.

And if you have a house, if you have like a place that you can really do preparedness for, there's, I mean, we'll just get an air conditioner. Don't run your air conditioner as low as it'll go. It just doesn't actually make things any cooler. Air conditioners are generally designed and only cool things. I want to say, was it like 30 degrees below outside temperature or something? Yeah. And I think also depends on the size of the relative space you're cooling and the BTU capacity.

Well, so I'm saying that they're sized for that by regulation. If someone comes and is like, oh, what size AC should I put into this house? It's going to be, I want this size house to be cooled 30 degrees. I think it's 30 degrees, it might be 24. And so if you run your fans,

you actually can keep your thermostat up about four degrees. And if you don't have AC, there's a lot you can do with like thermal mass, right? Is your friend like if you have a, if you can choose which house you're going to live in living in brick houses, this is great or a doby houses. It depends on where you live and what your climate is. You want to keep your curtains closed during the day and open at night if you're trying to keep out the sun, but then let out the heat into the cool night air,

assuming that there's still cool night air, depends on where you live as we enter into this nightmare world. Reflective window insulation, anything's like the thing that you put in your windshield can help. There's stuff you can do when you accept that it's an emergency.

And you can, okay, but then the other thing is that running ACs puts a lot of strain on the power grid. And we're already starting to see more grid failure, usually in the brownout style rather than the blackout style. But when everyone's running their AC, the grid is not designed to handle it, and there are problems. And so one, you get these like city wide text alerts that are like, hey, everyone please turn up your AC,

like turn down whatever, make your AC less cold, cold. And this is an example of something that we should do and listen to, but it's really fucking annoying because it's not our fucking fault that the world is heating up, right? And they're not like turning off time square. They're telling everyone, you know, they're not turning off the ads. Yeah, speaking of ads. It's a good time to pivot to some some more stuff. Yeah, even it is wasting power and even in the emergency.

There's still the ads. Here you go. And we're back. Hopefully it was for gold, which is useless in the heat death of Venus. I just want to throw that out there. Yeah, but it does keep its value compared to cash. Just until neither of them have that. That's why whiskey, oh wait, no wait, mutual aid. Now that's why I've been stucking up on my series of John's version inspired NFTs that I minted last year.

And oh boy, have they only grown in value? Emma, I'm telling you, this is what's gonna hold me through whenever the thing happens. Yeah, I would be at your door with my wanting to try ammunition for apes, as I always am. Find me in the group chat. Well, it's for apes. There's one other group of people that I want to talk about

really quickly about who we should check in on. And that is prisoners. There is no way, for my point of view, I'm gonna have a lot of bias here, there is no way for us to justly face a climate emergency while we live in a carceral society. In Texas, this is where most of the news is right now, but that's not like it's better

or other places as far as I can tell. In Texas since mid-June, between nine and 23 prisoners have died from heat. But no one knows because Texas refuses to say that anyone has died from heat. They haven't done that since I believe 2012, is the last time they admitted someone died from heat. However, two thirds of Texas prisons don't have air conditioning.

And a bunch of people are dying randomly of heart attacks in their thirties because they're dying of heat. Jesus Christ. Yeah, I think earlier in like the first few weeks of July when it was getting very, very hot, I think it was a pretty young woman died in the Fulton County jail here in Atlanta. Yeah. Sure. And it's they're doing an investigation to see why. So yeah.

Oh, good. Don't worry. The Texas State House passed money to put AC into prisons. And then the Senate rejected it. Cool. Big thing is for money because not much money in law enforcement. So I can see how this struggling to afford that otherwise. Yeah. There was a, oh, I didn't write down the numbers in my script,

but there was like a, many millions of dollar budgets surplus that they didn't apply to. Oh, I don't know. Not having people die for having been accused of owning weed. Yeah. I don't know, whatever. I get really fucking mad about this and I think that it is like yeah, it's fucking horrific. Okay, and then the last thing I really want to say is that this was

the hottest month, right? That any of us have ever experienced. It will be the coolest month in our memory at some point, you know, or rather whatever. It's not getting coolest month in our memory at some point, or rather, whatever. It's not getting cooler. It's not getting cooler. It's not getting cooler. It's not getting cooler. Yeah, like next year might be a little bit cooler

because of natural cycles or whatever, right? But it's not coming back. We're not going back to normal. And for me, this month marks a sea change, literally and the Arctic, Antarctic eyes This month marks a sea change. Literally, and the Antarctic ice did not come back this winter, it's winter right now in Antarctica. And there's a five or six standard deviation away from normal amount of ice there right now.

Five to six standard deviations is more than if you flipped a coin a hundred times and it came up heads every single time. It is like more than a one in 3.5 million chance, right? It is a very big number. It is a very abnormal thing. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. And I don't want to say this to make people afraid

because I don't think we need to be a free, whatever fear is complicated. You can't be brave unless you're afraid. That's what I will say. You cannot have courage. Courage is the act of responding to fear. And we should notice the fear and not let it control us, but it really is time for people to very seriously look at not what's going to happen by 2050, but what is happening now? What is happening now? What will happen in the next three years, the next five years, the next 10 years? And start making decisions based on that. That is what I want. I don't want to tell people

what those decisions are. I want people to get together with the people that they care about and figure out what those decisions are. One of the things that I would recommend is building resilient communities, is looking at how to build communities, right? And there's a lot of ways, a lot of like scenes can become communities, a lot of extended families can become communities, a lot of religious organizations are communities.

Okay. How and then how to make them resilient, how to collectively look at how to handle these things, whether it's literally just having a plan for like, okay, if the power goes out, who has the whole house generator, where I live, someone around me has, gotta have a whole house generator,

I don't have one, I want one, but they're expensive. Who's AC is still gonna be running when the power goes out, right? Or whether it's like, hey, how can we collectively help each other's houses have rainwater catchment systems, right? How can we collectively be building up food sovereignty as well as food storage?

How can we have, I want to see, personally, I want to see days of workshops at community centers of all different ideological compositions, getting together and being like, here's how you can food, here's how you drive food, here is how you set up mesh networks. I just, I think it's time.

I think that I'm tired of saying, hey, bad stuff might be coming because it's not might be coming now. It's here and it's really bad. And I think people stick to the might be coming because they're afraid of despair. And I will say that despair is not good, right? But that is something that we can fight.

How do we fight despair is also part of this. And the answer to that is agency. And when we can find ways to act with agency, that is, I mean, there's like studies about like in disasters, people who express agency have like less PTSD, right? When bad things happen. Yeah.

And even if the agency, like, I mean, I remember, well, I one point getting arrested, right? And being like, all right, right, when bad things happen. And even if the agency, I remember all I one point getting arrested, right, and being like, all right, well, I'm keeping track of, I know that cops badge number, I know this, I know this, I'm keeping track of stuff in case there's a lawsuit later, I totally lost that lawsuit. But that helped me get through that situation, right? Everyone else won the lawsuit,

but because I was in black block, I did not win the lawsuit. That's funny. That's funny. That's funny. Yeah. Anyway, actually it might have been because I refused to give my name.

Anyway, whatever. It was a long time ago. And I guess filled this. And just. So yeah, act with agency, that is the solution. It is, it's not the solution to despair, it's a way to deal with it. In the same way that we're not looking at solutions to climate change anymore, we're

looking at ways to deal with it, right? Because it's already here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's some of the episodes that mean Robert and research to put together for the original, it could happen in your season two stuff, is yeah.

A lot of us talking about mitigation versus adaption. And almost every day, it looks like we're getting more and more committed to just a full adaption model because these things are really not going to be, like, the most common widespread effects are not going to be mitigated. There's still a few, like, cataclyic scenarios that that probably could be averted, but things are gonna get so much, so much worse. And that will be to deal with that,

we will have to adopt a large variety of adaptions. And it's gonna suck, but it's, it's what we're gonna have to do. I don't know, but there's a variety of reactions to this. I mean, I think I should just put together an episode on this sometime in the future, but as the intensity of the situations, more and more,

as it becomes more and more clear, we're gonna get a variety of reactions, especially for people on the right, who used to be very much purely like a ignoring or denying this problem. Some on the right have like skipped over the whole part where they've been wrong for so many years and are going to start applying extremely authoritarian and like nationalist solutions to this. Others are just doubling down on denial because facing the facts of the horrible situation

we're in is more and more frightening. It's harder to admit that you're wrong and realize the terribleness of the situation. The most recent example of this is I've been checking on the replies to CV news, which is one of the biggest Canadian television news stations. They've put out a few stories about how July's the hottest month. And in the replies to this story, it's just an honestly shocking amount of pure like

flippant denial of what's going on. This has been an increasing problem in Canada, which is ironic because actually Canada's economy is probably going to grow during climate change because they're going to take over a whole bunch of agricultural production from the states. They're actually going to become a much bigger economic player, but the amount of just pure denial that we're seeing in Canada, and we're seeing get increased is extremely worrying. And it's one of those things that's really hard to deal with. This is also something I talked about in my Hyper Object episode, but it's the same thing if someone's in QAnon. You can't out-logic them from QAnon.

You have to tell a better story. So if you need a solid place to stand before you can push someone, if you see what I mean. Yeah, but I don't know. It's just been concerning because I've been seeing a whole bunch of these things about how this is the hottest month in 120,000 years. And yeah, that is a horrifying thing to learn.

And you can look at what this forces for this are. But the fact that so many of us are just denying this is that, as you can go inside and feel it as well, and that's not how climate works all the time. But like, I've certainly, I think many of us have felt the effects of this. And also, like, the death numbers can't lie either. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And like, I just got back from a trip, which will be a podcast soon, to the Marshall Islands, where, like where it is extremely evident that sea levels are rising and if they continue to rise, they're rising, then these places will be uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people who are alive today. And it's very odd to sort of discordant to see that and then you log on when you get home and see someone being like, oh, it's natural variation or, you know, like, oh, it's snowed last winter or some, something which shows like an incomplete understanding, but still just a knee jerk rejection of

like all the evidence we have that the climate is changing and it's not coming back. But I find myself the same, I have that same feeling sometimes when I see people refuse to engage with solutions, even with people who just are like, Sure. Oh, that's real. There's nothing we can do about it. So we're not gonna try.

Like, feels very like, and I don't mean like, I don't even mean a specific way of trying. I don't mean everyone has to go get arrested gluing themselves to famous things, where everyone needs to go set things on fire, everyone needs to only focus on growing food. Or like, but just when I see people like like just being like, well, there's nothing, so I'm just gonna not take it into account in my decision-making. I'm like, even if your decision-making is like, like, I made the decision to move near my family because of climate change.

I didn't move to where the climate is gonna be magically stable. I moved to where I can spend more time with people I love and be in a better position to take care of them. You know, like, I just, I feel so like, I don't know. I was whatever. Yeah. Yeah, no, it is, it is very difficult to see people just sort of, I don't know, a fetal as a Titanic scene.

I mean, like, shutting down is one of the easiest reactions to stress and ignoring both the, both like the, like the, the, the admit like denial of this as things are obviously getting more and more intense, the denial gets more and more intense. But so is like the types of,

like the type of doom orism that leads you just to like checking out to have been like, oh, this is so bad, there's nothing I can do. So I'm just going to completely ignore this. And then that's also another way of just like sectioning off this part of your brain. So it doesn't actually impact you. It's functionally quite the same. And I can't blame people for it. And that's what I think people often think that I am judging for them for that. And I'm not. I just feel like it's hard to engage with sometimes.

Yeah, but I think a good point to end is like, maybe the best prep you can do for climate change is not like a, no, buying a bigger air conditioner or moving to somewhere where you think there is a better chance that you personally as an individual will be better, but it's building a community that can be resilient and that can weather the storm. And having seen a country which is losing, it's very minimal amount of land to climate change

and how communities have come together to protect each other during that, it's kind of reinforced to me how important community is as opposed to stuff. Yeah, absolutely. Also with communities, you can get more stuff. You can make your own stuff. That's true. Seize the means of production, but not for the pure Marxist point of view, but from the...

I'm like joking, but I'm actually like, this is what people should be preparing to do. People like... Yeah. A climate revolution but I'm actually like, this is what people should be preparing to do. People like, yeah. A climate revolution that's less about like, oh, we're gonna put in someone smart and charge who's gonna fix everything and more a climate revolution that's like, we're going to create bottom-up solutions and not let people stop us from creating bottom-up solutions.

Yes, that would be good, don't be good revolution, consider implementing that. Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth. It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, La Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community

that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder and corruption. This is just a business and their product are people. They want to know that they will kill you.

Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. My small town rocked by murder.

There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next? Who is killing all the kids? And why?

In that moment, I saw rage. And why do you some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm the Wizard of Oz, I'm the one making everything happen.

Real housewife of Salt Lake City Star Jen Jen Shaw, is running the scam of the century. We probably will never be able to be retired black working to work anymore. Living a fat million dollar lifestyle on the backs of thousands of elderly victims. She turned up their lives for what a fake Fendi bag? Congrats, girl. When you have her confronted, instead of stopping, she finds ways to be sneaky or about it and keeps going. I remember one time Stuart lost like about 8 million and General was very upset and she came down to the office late at night. With Coach, Yall is screaming at him, asking him where their money is.

Would you call her a con artist? I would just call her a con. She's not very much of an artist. Listen to Queen of the Con, season four, the Unreal Housewife, on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's, it could happen here, a podcast where things happen. Sometimes things maybe don't happen.

Once again, the thing maybe not happening is the strike at UPS. Stuff has happened since we last recorded. There was the thing that happened in the middle of the recording, which was the announcement of the tentative agreement. And so to talk more about what's been happening since and what's sort of in this deal because we don't know more details about it, is once again, resmith and Oliver Rose, who are two rank and file UPS teamsters. And once again, they do not represent the union or speaking as individuals, etc., etc. Yeah, but welcome back. Yeah, good to be back. Yeah, thanks for having us on again.

Yeah, I'm glad I'm happy to talk to you. All right, so last time we found out in the middle of recording that there is a deal struck. And I guess I wanted to start by talking a bit about what's been happening since then and what the sort of what sort of organizing has been happening what what the sort of union bureaucracy has been doing. Yeah, it's well, it's been kind of kind of crazy. Basically, you know, we had that highlight reel that we all got. And then it was a bit before we got the actual contract at least like a few days. And since then, you know, Union bureaucracy has been promoting these contract Q&A sessions and stuff like that. And they had three of them last Sunday and one of them this Monday.

And voting has opened up. Yeah, it's been a bit crazy feeling, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, it's been wild. Yeah, of course, you know, while we're recording, you know, we get the the 10th of an agreement drop and you know, it's framed us, you know, this big historic, you know, this game changer. So, you know, of course, for the first day, we just had what was in the press release. Even some of that language was a little bit confusing. Wasn't until Team Series for a Democratic Union also had their own like press release, which clarified some language. And then, you know, we're kind of just like, okay, we'll get,

you know, we're told we'll be getting the 10 of agreement language next week and chance to debrief with the local. But really, I think it was the following day, the actual language comes out. And some of the things where there's a promise with all the general wage increases going on top of those market rate adjustments. We're speaking about which are basically wages that UPS can add or even remove. That's not actually tied to the contract wages. One of the things was getting those raises on top, but there was no contract language

in there, which definitely caused a lot of confusion and concern among rank and file members. And it actually took one of the locals having a no endorsement before we even saw this memorandum of understanding between the company and the IBT, you know, guaranteeing this is going to happen, you know, that we would be getting those raises on top. Was this kind of one of those things where, you know, there was this kind of really vague language that was used and I think definitely caused, you know, people to not

really fully understand. You know, what was going on, especially? I think it was about 75% of part-timers are currently have a market-rated adjustment. That's kind of a very big portion of the work for us. Yeah, I'm going to be honest. It was a real kind of a real calm shit show from union leadership releasing the information in the way they did.

It absolutely led to a lot of misunderstandings about what was in the contract, which kind of spread like wildfire. And the union response to what I think is a lot of just genuine misunderstanding is to just label it all as misinformation from people that have their own agendas, right? And you can't trust those people, you can only trust what's coming from the union. And yeah, that definitely didn't inspire trust from the people that were leaning no, because in between a lot of these, like, and there is definitely was some misunderstanding

about what was initially in the contract, but there is also genuine critique about certain things that are in the contract, right? And so instead of like, substantively, like looking at these genuine critiques, we're all forced in the situation of sorting out what is, quote unquote, misinformation, or more accurately, people not understanding legalese and also a bad rollout of information versus, okay, but what is in the contract that really needs

improvement? And sort of like, substantively getting into the latter, it's just been a pure focus on the former. And yeah, it's been kind of tense. It seems like there's a real mix. It's real, kind of even even how rank and file members are responding to this contract. Some have kind of bought in full sale

that this is a historic contract. And others, such as myself, like there's still things in this contract that to me are unacceptable. And it's gonna be interesting to see where it goes. Yeah, I mean, I kind of feel like it's hard to get a gauge of where everyone's at. And of course, I only have the, you know,

kind of my local experience in my specific shift. You know, definitely. I haven't come across, you know, someone I work with yet, you know, who's totally just like, yeah, this is super historic, this is game changing, as they were saying, the union is saying. A lot of people, especially long-timers, this is a really good contract with the best I've seen in my days here.

And then there's a few other people who are like, yeah, I'm gonna put, yes, but it really doesn't really seem like, you know, it's matching, you know, the framing of, you know, this historic contract. And then also, you know, there's, yeah, I mean, other people who are just kind of like, no, a seems, I mean, also kind of like too little too late. Like the gains aren't quite there. Yeah, it's there's there's raises. They're also kind of done in a weird way where they're more or less like kind of front loaded towards the first and last year and everything in the middle's lot lower. To the point actually where and it gets confusing because everyone's kind of had a different rate with those market rate adjustments.

You know, the more you're making from, you know, that supplemental pay, the worse this is going to keep with inflation to the point where it's kind of you're only actually going to be just above inflation towards the end of the contract, especially one of the, definitely one of the weaker things in the contract is all new hires or current people without seniority are gonna be on a different tier. And this is for the part timer inside warehouse positions. So you know, the, yeah, so if you have seniority,

it's minimum of 21 an hour to start and that goes up to 25, 75 an hour, versus those new hires or no seniority employees. We're gonna be at 21 with a progression to 23, but 50 cent raises, and of course, once you know, tack on the average, a little bit over 3% inflation, you know, can kind of quickly see, uh, it's those new members who are getting the worst part of the deal.

Yeah, and that comes to I think another thing that that is like, I don't know, so when this was all first happening and I've seen this like a lot from people talking about this, is people talking about this as a contract that ends the tier systems, and that just doesn't seem to be true at all. Yeah, and so one of the things, so there's the, I believe we spoke to this last time, but the 2.2.4 is what it's called,

where it's a combo driver and inside warehouse position. And most of the time, they were just more or less practically full-time drivers, except for a few times where you know, they're like earlier this year, they try to transition them to mostly like inside full-time. But so the thing is yeah, those will all get, you know, converted to the package car drivers with that. I believe with that rate or at least very similar. Yeah, yeah, so we did get rid of the the 224s and that was the big promise, you know, going into this contract fight. But yeah, no, there are definitely still remaining

tiers within UPS. You know, there's this new one that's been created, which is the tier between what they call the unborn. That's how they refer to people that have not yet been hired by UPS that have stipulations in the contract, right? Yeah, they call them the unborn. It's kind of funny. And their whole thing is that they just have a completely different wage progression

than the rest of us do. But in addition to that tier, which was introduced, there are tiers elsewhere. Sometimes it's a tier between the hubs. All of the hubs are making different MRAs and not stuff like that. But additionally, there are some hubs that don't have a daily guarantee of hours, like regular hubs do, like, for instance, air hubs, right? So, like, that's another, basically, another tier,

because it's, you know, people doing the same work, but not guaranteed the same things. And, yeah, yeah. So, there's definitely tiers remaining in this contract, for sure. And it's really unfortunate to see that the one existing didn't get addressed. And that they just created a whole new one, even though they're adamantly insisting it is not a tear.

Yeah, and this goes back to, I believe, the 1982 contract, which is when the full-time and part-time pay was changed to different different tiers with part-time getting like four dollars less and four full-time, which was I think 12 12 an hour back in 82 versus eight an hour for the part-timers. You know, so that's continued, you know, across all these decades. And so now with the current contract

we provided you're getting paid, the contract minimums. Yeah, you're looking at full-time inside warehouse, their top rate going to $36 an hour, I believe. And then you're gonna have part-timers who have seniority, just below 26 an hour. Then you're going to have those people who weren't quite in the door yet at 23. Of course, it's doing more or less the same work inside.

You're doing your loading, unloading, sorting, the other various positions there. And of course, one of the things I've seen, particularly online, I haven't heard this on the shop floor, but just like, oh, well, they're working more. So of course, they're going to get paid more. But it's like, okay, well, yeah, they have more hours, so they would get more paid, but that doesn't mean that they should be at a higher hourly rate. Yeah. Plus, it's going to be other things to like the pension of a cruel and vacation time where you're working more,

you're going to get more of that too. It's kind of has its own reward. There's really no reason to have like a $10 discrepancy or that type of work performed. I also always do some quick math in the background and the 1982 wage is like $36 an hour So that's correct. That's fine. That's correct. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's, when I think about, you know, this union being touted as historic, I like actually think about like, what are the actual historic wins of the labor movement? And you know, I'm thinking about like, you know, the right to a five day work week.

Meanwhile, this historic contract, you know, it ended six day punches, but that's not a new historical thing. That was something we lost and then regained with this contract. In my mind, it's not really breaking any barriers or blowing blowing anyone's minds. Especially when we have Sean Fein of the U.A.W.D. who is talking about one of their demands is a 32-hour work week. He's advocating that every worker needs a 40% increase in pay because the CEO got a 40% increase in pay. the CEO got a 40% increase in pay. And yeah, it's just, yeah, our contract just,

it isn't at that level by any means. When you use that word, historic. You know, like I think there could be times where you can call something historic before it stands the test of time. But this is kind of like, okay, this is kind of, I feel like the contract, you know, you would expect a union to bargain. Maybe it's, I mean, partly it's historic because it just really hasn't been really any gains. And so it's

kind of like, okay, you've got this wage increases. Isn't that kind of just like what you should be doing? Yeah, well, I mean, this has been, there's been like, this has been like the, there's been a bunch of unions in the last like, maybe like eight months who have like settled and been like, we've gotten historic raises and it's like, I don't know, it's, the thing that seems actually historic about it is essentially

a verdict, a verdict, this massive strike wave. Yeah, one of the things I wanted to add was, you know, especially with those combo positions, ending that tier, that was something that was introduced in the previous contract, which Ranking File Members voted down. It was a no vote, but it was just because of this, you know, kind of obscure rule in the Constitution, where it was just like, oh, 50% of people don't vote, then it required the two thirds, you know, no vote. So, you know, that was just completely, you know, over a role by the union.

They're like, ah, we're going to do this anyways. So, it kind of, you know, it's good that we rated that wrong. You know, it's good to reduce the tier. Of course, I'm not going to knock that. But just kind of one of those things where it's like, yeah, but membership already didn't want that or at least you know. Yeah, I was like, you guys did this. Yeah, so you guys did, you didn't want that or at least we really don't know. Yeah, I was like, you guys did introduce this in the first place. Like, come on. Yeah, yeah, it's also worth noting that the 224 position, you know, it wasn't working for our members, but it also wasn't working for the company either.

They were having significant trouble trying to fill all the shifts that were needed and required by the position. And to the point that workers ended up kind of being slotted into one or the other with like really bad schedules, and it wasn't, it wasn't working for either is the thing. So it is, it's great that we got rid of it, but it seems like it was somewhat of an easy thing to win. It made mutual sense, right? And yeah, yeah, it's just there were, you know, there were bigger, there could have been bigger fights over other things in this contract that weren't pursued, right? So. weren't pursued, right? So. Yeah, I mean, that's the thing from everything that I've seen from it.

It seems like, it seems like the goal of this contract is to get a contract that's exactly good enough to get 51% of the voter in a contract to avoid UPS having to actually deal with a contract that a stripper would produce. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of the, I mean, whether I'm probably intentional, where it's just like,

you know, it's like just good enough, you know, to maybe warrant like a yes vote, and especially, I mean, in contact of, you know, the last, however many contracts. But it's kind of one of those things where it's like, okay, by comparison, it's good. But again, you know, I don't think it quite goes far enough. Either on the wage side, you know, on the on the wages or, you know, especially one of the issues, they've been focused on a lot is the heat protections. Yeah, can we can we talk about, well, specifically the heat protections, but then also kind of talk a bit about what is in the contract and what like isn't in the contract that should be?

Yeah, I can start with the heat production stuff. Yeah, so one of the things, so they'll be rolling out air conditioners in the the all trucks package cars. I purchased the believe after August of a next year and they'll be kind of distributing them by zones. And current ones will be retrofitted with my heat shields and events. I'm not quite sure how effective that'll be. One of the things for the inside people, you know, is they're, you know, they'll be installing, you know, tens of thousands

of more fans, which, you know, I'm not gonna lie, but that will feel really nice, because those trailers just get so hot and stuffy. There's no air flow, especially like, if it's been sitting for a while you open the door, it's just like a glass of heat. But the problem with fans is they're only so effective, particularly once it reaches 95 degrees, they don't do anything.

And so, you know, there's a lot of places where it'll probably feel nice and it might help some degree. But, you know, especially right now in, you know, like the Southwest and the South, where you've just had these, you know, 110 plus degree days, you know, like over a month, like that's not going to do really do much, especially if you're anywhere. Depending on if you've got dry heat or higher humidity in the latter of fans can and sometimes make it worse, I'm also worried it's gonna kind of be like this,

kind of like a comparison to a security theater, but like more like safety theater, where it's this appearance of doing something, should say like, look, we're doing this thing, it's going to keep you safe, but whether that's, you know, actually true or not, well, I mean, we'll kind of find out, but definitely, I'm pretty worried about, you know, what's going to happen, especially in the next five years. worried about what's going to happen, especially in the next five years. We already have, I think it was the world meteorological organization. Now has their researchers have 98% certainty that we're going to reach a high mark for global warming before 2027. So you know, I'm pretty sure last July was already the hottest month

on record globally. And it's something I believe this. And I think in that report, it was like a 66% chance of passing that 1.5 degrees Celsius global warming between now and 2027. So it's kind of one of those things where, you know, I don't think we necessarily have five years to wait to, you know, address this contract language and add further protections, especially we got other unions like the International Longshore and warehouse union.

They had an article that was talking about their heat protections, which have things like stewards that are equipped with a heat monitoring equipment versus the current contract language for us would be, they can just use like the OSHA app or like weather service to check, you know, like a weather station versus like the actual specific conditions

you're working in. Yeah, yeah, that's like, they're both huge. It seems like there's a huge discrepancy there because the, like the indoor temperatures and temperatures in these trailers are way hotter than, like, the reported conditions. Yeah, and it can be like, five, ten degrees hotter at least. I bought a little thermometer and, uh, high, high, hydrometer, hydrometer, something like that, whatever measure to midity. Because that's kind of how, because there are states with heat protections, there's like seven of them.

A lot of times they're using the heat index when you're factoring in the temperature and humidity to get the feels like temperature. And yeah, and with the ILWU, you know, they're also getting rest breaks as part of their contract language, which I believe two or three states have those of the seven total that actually have heat protections. And, you know, the ILWU was kind of talking about even though they have heat protections that kind of match or even though they have heat protections that kind of match

or even kind of exceed partly what some of the states have, you know, they're kind of saying, this isn't enough for the current extreme heat we're facing. Yeah, and I mean, you know, we talked about this in the show before, but like whatever heat protections get negotiated in a contract, like the company is going to basically the instant negotiations are over is going to figure out what the, well, A, what the cheapest possible way to do this is with the shittiest equipment. And then B, like, they're going to immediately try to figure out like how, you know, like, how, how to actually subvert it.

And you know, this is the thing we've seen all over the world, even in places that are sort of national heat protection laws, is that even if you have a law, or even if you have a thing in the contract, even if you have something in your contract, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be enforced and that requires a, it requires a pretty significant degree of organization to make sure it stays enforced. And that's true, both of stuff that's in contract

and stuff that's legally required. And so, if the thing that they're nominally required to do is still insufficient, it's going to end up being way worse than that on the ground. Yeah, we're seeing that with our existing heat protection at the state level where they're, you know, falling short and especially, you know, there's either, you know, there's kind of loopholes or even just kind of like murky language that makes it really hard to enforce in some cases. I do not have a good transition, but it's hot. Yeah, here, here are some ads that are, I don't know, hopefully not making the climate worse. And we're back. So outside of the concerns around heat, what else has been going, like what else is in the

contract that there's been sort of dispute over? So if you look online, and this is an instance of not really quite understanding what's in the contract, but if you go online, a lot of people think that there are pension freezes in the contract. And one, once again, I think we can contribute this misunderstanding to a calm strategy failure as well as a lack of open bargaining. The pension contribution rate has decreased, but money is still going in to the pension fund. Not as much as it was is my understanding. The way

the union broke it down for me was like there's a dollar and 25 cents of that dollar is going to health care, 25 cents of that dollar is going to the pension and then 50 cents of it is going to wages. And I'm gonna be honest with you I don't super understand all this money stuff either. But we, yeah, they showed us a thing where like the contributions are going to keep happening. Other things that have been in the kind of in the like what we've all, what people have been thinking about is the full time jobs, which I know I, we talked a lot about on the last one.

And yeah, I think we were using the 7,500 for newly created jobs, but apparently the contract also specifically requires them to actually fill the 22,000 full-time jobs that exist, that they just have not been filling, but even with that additional 22,000, that's still roughly 30,000 full-time jobs. That is for the full-time workforce, of 340,000 people. And something I learned is that full-time drivers

can bid into those positions and get them because they will likely have this in your to do so because that's how we determine how to fill jobs. It's by seniority, you know, how long have you been there? And usually, you know, I think that makes sense. But, you know, that really just contributes to the long, long way of part-timers trying to get full-time work, right? And yeah, like the thing, thing kind of related to that,

we have these, if you have a market rate adjustment and you get your 2.75, for me, that's going to be 26, 75 an hour. And that looks great until you remember that we are part-time. It is like, we are supposed to work half a work week. I work less than because of the hub that I am at, which is not great. But, you know, we need the hours and there's not the, there isn't enough jobs.

And that's stipulated by this contract. I think that there probably could be a lot more jobs. Yeah, I wanna say something about that specifically too, which is that like when you, random listener who's not working UPS, whenever you see someone talking about a wage number and it's for part-timers, if you want to try to figure out can this person survive, you need to divide that number by two. At the very least, divide it by two, possibly divided by more, because again, if you're a port timer, obviously, yeah, you're not getting the hours

that you would know, if you can't just immediately convert that to what would this gallery be if you got 40 hours a week or whatever. You can't do that. I've seen a lot, I've seen this a lot, a lot. Like on the internet, I've seen pundits talking about it like this and it's just like a incomprehensible

misunderstanding of the action of like, how this stuff actually works for you to be going like, oh, look at all those money that people are making assuming that, like, you know, and then using calculations that are based on like someone working full time, which is most of the workforce, like a significant, significant majority of the workforce

is not working full time and will not be even after this contract. Yes, yeah, it's estimated there are 60% of the workforce is part-timers. So yeah, no, that is a huge issue. A lot of people also, like when this is brought up, a lot of people like to then say, well, you know, get a second job.

But our jobs aren't flexible. Like, first of all, fuck having a second job. I am kind of staunchly opposed to the entire concept. But even if I wasn't, this job is not flexible enough to account for a second job. Not unless you never want to sleep and your second job is when you should be like sleeping. Because we have our start times,

those are given to us a week in advance, but we don't know when our end times are because the end times are when we run out of packages. So some days, in my hub, it's always just going to be the two hours. But in other hubs, you know, like in my hub, it's always just gonna be the two hours, but like in other hubs, you could be there, you know, you could be trying to get your three and a half hour daily guarantee,

like employing that when they're trying to send you home, or you could be there six, seven hours. And, you know, how is another employer supposed to operate with that? You call in three times saying, oh, I can't actually leave my first job. You're not gonna have that second job much longer. So yeah, in addition to the lack of full-time jobs,

the way this job is makes a second one impossible. So a lot of our part-timers really are relying on that part-time wage to get them through and picking up doubles when they can, which means you kind of end up having a 10-hour day because there's like about a two-hour space of time in between the shifts. So yeah, those are some of the big issues. So. Yeah, that's one of my words.

If I want to go full time or not, it can be at least in the hub I work at. I would say usually I'm getting 24 hours a week. If I'm going full time, double that, because now I'm working two shifts, but also, you know, gotta have that like hour or two of weight time between shifts. So, you know, it's just a lot of time to be spending at work, especially on paid time at work. That is the worst. You know, it's not quite long enough stretched to like go home or at least if you know, you

have a decent commute to work. And you know, another thing kind of came to my mind a little earlier, was that, and it sounds like at least talking with new hires that this is still continuing, which is kind of this really deceptive hiring practice where the hours are posted. When I got the job, you know,

it was posted as part-time, forget it was something like 9-4, but it had that schedule for five days a week, seven hour shifts, 35 hours a week, times by the 26 starting pay. I was like, oh, perfect. I'll be making somewhere like mid 40,000. That's livable at least for my specific circumstances.

But of course, get there and, you know, the, yeah, we get two days notice for a start time it's posted on our, either end of the week. So don't know exactly when I'm working, you know, until right before the next week, and you know, at least they're an orientation. So when asked, oh, what's actually the end time?

I was just like, oh, well, when the last package is loaded. Now, of course, if you know what, when the next shift starts, you can kind of get a better idea of when you'll actually be out of there. But still, it's just kind of, it's this claim flexibility, but it's very difficult to it's, you know, it's this claim flexibility, but it's very difficult, you know, to actually work a second job or even, you know, they offer tuition reimbursement and it's a number of students who have had, you know, a hard time actually like, you know, getting

the time off to attend their classes. And I also second anywhere that's part time work that offers tuition reimbursement, you know, I would say there's an expectation that, okay, well, you're going to school and you're working part-time. You would think the wages then should at least provide enough for rent, food, gas, tax boats, all that. Yeah, to piggyback off of what Oliver just said regarding, you know, like this is a wage that is good for, you know, their situation when they were assuming it was at the, you know, like this is a wage that is good for, you know, their situation when they were assuming it was at the, you know, 35 hours a week. You know, another thing to think about

is a lot of these part-timers, you know, they have families, they have significant others that they're caring for, like, you know, a lot of people look at this wage, and one, make the faulty assumption that you talked about earlier by multiplying it by 40 to get the 40. And then they assume that's for just that one person.

And like, there are part-timers of every age, right? And they all have their own families and stuff like that that they are expected to care for as well. So like, when you look at all of this and the, you know, the rate of inflation and the way the economy is, and you take all of these things into account, Like the gains that are provided for in this contract is Not enough when you consider the whole of everyone who works at UPS You know, it's leaving behind families, right like yeah It's it's wild Yeah, and I think another thing that isn't talked about that much in terms of this is

like the actual physical effect on your body of doing this kind of work because this is like, I don't know, this kind of work is intense enough that I mean, there's very rare risk of injury and there's also, I mean, just like, oh, over the course of time, doing this kind of shit is going to like fuck up your body and, you know, like part of the sort of bargain of like part of the bargain of bargain of this work

is that you're getting, it's in some ways like, it's in some ways like you could think about it. If you're a middle of a football player, like you're gonna get your fucking brain destroyed by just repeated head trauma, right? And so there's only a limited amount of time your body can physically handle this.

And it's like, yeah, okay, it looks like you're getting a lot of money in a very short amount of time, but you have to, you know, you have to live with the sort of physical consequences of what happened, of what happened to you on that job, getting the money. So that money also, like, not just, it doesn't just have to get you through like now, right? Like it also, it has to also essentially be compensation to the physical damage that you're doing to your body by doing this shit. And, you know, I, I think, I think it, I think these wages look even worse when you look at like,

when you think of it in terms of, not just in terms of immediate rep, but in the really long term of having to live with the sort of physical damage that you take from doing this stuff. of having to live with the physical damage that you take from doing this stuff. Yeah, absolutely. I just had a coworker talking about that today actually. Because there are a lot of college-aged kids, the early 20s. At least from my experience of nose, kind of usually they're kind of like the quick turnover. Feel like a lot of people are staying more like they're, you know, 30s, 40s, you know, we have people older than that too, on my line. And I think part of that's just like,

kind of we understand the importance of, I mean, a gold tier health insurance plan and a pension. But, you know, of course, with, you know, being older, it's going to, you know, have even more of an effect on the body. And yeah, I know I've heard people talking about this, where it's just like, oh, well, it's just part time, or it's, you know, entry level, you know, quote unquote, you don't need a degree for this. So like, why do you think it should be paid more? It's like, well, it's brutal. I mean, we get a 10 minute break

for working up to six hours. That is it. Why they don't have to do a lunch break? I don't know. It seems like UPS just always gets their way. And that's, you know, like state, local, federal law, they don't care. Even though they had even this last contract, Whether that's, you know, like state, local, federal law, laid up, they don't care. Even the last contract,

and there's so many violations. Of course, you know, we gotta, whether, you know, this is yes or no, whatever the next contract is, you know, that's gonna be a big part of the fight is just holding them accountable into the terms. is just holding them accountable into the terms. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like, I've had co-workers out on,

you know, workers comp for like, you know, doing physical therapy for the injuries that they got on the job for like months at a time, right? These like, you know, we're sitting around loading boxes all day, and some of them are very light, but some of them are really fucking heavy. Some of them are really awkward to hold. They're weirdly shaped.

Like, there are some boxes where, like they tell you about, the UPS tells you about methods, the eight keys of lifting and lowering, that, you know, should make it safe. But there are some boxes where it's impossible to follow those methods. The absolute bane of my existence, and I recognize them every time I see them, I swear to God these things must be just filled with lead because you look at them and it's a very small box. It's not more than probably 12 inches long, not even 12 inches, probably more like seven inches long,

like six, seven inches wide, and then two and a half inches deep. And that should be a very easy box, but it's filled with lead, and for whatever reason, it can weigh 35 to 50 pounds. Jesus. And it's like one, that box is too small to have a team lift on,

because you can't have two people around something like that. And when you pick up a box, you're supposed to keep the natural curve of your back, but do not overextend the curve. And you have to for those packages like that, right? Like there's not a way to position yourself to lift them safely. And you kinda have to a little bit jerk up,

which they tell you not to do, but that's the only way to get leverage on it. And yeah, like, and you know, I've been in trailers where a box like that was loaded precariously, like just and you know, I've been in trailers where like a box like that was loaded precariously, like just slightly above my head and one time it came crashing down and I like me out of the way, like I was like in the fucking matrix. And I was just like, oh, if I had just been a little bit less responsive, that could have been a very serious head injury for me. that could have been a very serious head injury for me.

And so, yeah, the risk of very severe injury, I busted my face open on a grate outside of where what we call the cans, which are the things that have all the packages, they bring them to the bay doors, I was unloading and I had to go between them. And there was motor oil spilled. I tripped and I like smashed my face open on a fucking grate and had to get stitches. Like, it's, yeah, no, the safety involved

with this job is not extremely guaranteed. And yeah, the risk of injury is high and we should be preemptively compensated for that. Yeah, it's like, and even somehow if you managed to go like your whole career without a single injury, you know, there's, well, at least like more of the kind of like accidental injury, because it's still, it's a lot of repetitive motion and you're going to, I mean, eventually, it's going to take its toll. We're doing, we're doing some more ads. Yeah, by things.

All right, we are back. So I guess I know another aspect of this that I wanted to talk about has been of this that I wanted to talk about has been the sort of broader strategy of trying to avoid strikes. And this has been both sort of to some extent run by unions to some extent like imposed from the top down. One of the things I wanted to start talking about, yeah, I think in a sort of kind of underdiscussed aspect of what's been happening in the last sort of year or so has been Biden's willingness to get involved in strikes earlier. Obama eventually got involved in a couple of strikes during his tenure, but he tended to not get involved until like a strike had been

going on for like nine months or whatever. And Biden's been taking like a very, very proactive approach to sort of, I don't know, strike mitigation, I guess is the sort of like sanitized term you take, you're like keeping labor peace, but he seems to have a sort of, you know, he seems to be getting very, very involved very quickly in trying to make sure strikes don't happen. And, you know, the consequence of this is that we didn't get the real strike that we should have gotten. And there's been a few other strikes

that has sort of been averted. And I wanted to ask, I guess, how you're thinking about this strike, not just sort of in terms of, like, the immediate benefits, but in terms of what it would actually mean if, like, another major strike sort of get shut down before we can get going in a year that is, I mean, still even even even if this strike doesn't happen, a pretty sort of full year in labor terms.

Yeah, yeah. Well, one, I guess I got to say thank you to the most pro labor president of our lifetime. Yeah, no, you're absolutely right. He does seem to be getting involved early and mitigating them. If I had to speculate, he's very concerned about this whole economy thing that we keep talking about, right? And he doesn't want to see any big shocks to the economy. And that's something where I guess I disagree. I think a shock to the economy that is brought about by workers going on strike is a reminds them of what they

have and what they move and what they create, right? And I think, yeah, the ruling class, our politicians and the capitalists who own our politicians, they don't want us to experience that. But I remember even during the Trump administration, during the government shutdown, and Sarah Nelson got all the flight attendants to do a sick out and stuff like that. Kind of just like that, the government shutdown had ended and they all went back to do government things, whatever those government things are. And people on Twitter, they were talking about, yeah, this is like workers have power to affect not only their own work conditions,

but they can have broad implications on society, on the political climate, on what's going on. And yeah, there was absolutely, I think, a contingent of centrist liberals that were like, really frightened by that idea. You know, they like a society in which the right people who went to the right schools

and all of that, like, were there the ones are in charge and they are the ones that are shaping history with the pen strokes on, like, you strokes on whatever bills they're legislating. And yeah, I think they have a vested interest in making sure that workers don't get to experience that sense of autonomy, that they can experience by going on strike, and by seeing exactly what kind of power they have and what it does. Because they don't want it, they don't want it to get beyond what's going on in the workplace. They barely want it there.

I think there is a vested interest and I have not been able to see it confirmed, but I have seen in articles where they will say that, you know, Sean O'Brien had met with President Biden, but then there isn't a link click through, so I can't figure out what the initial thing is, but I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. And it's a damn shame. It's a shame that the president of our local union, you know, should that have happened to come to it, right? Yeah, that's the thing where it's like, it's been really hard to get reliable information on.

It's also possible they were sort of behind the scenes talks that we just don't know about. But, you know, the place we know this happened is we know this happened between the rail strikes, but there was a lot of pressure from rail unions to like on their rank and file to like get to just like sign on to some kind of agreement. And I think, I think this is something that,

you know, in terms of sort of political repression, like it's something that's not understood in the same way. But like that is also still like that, like that, that, like, negotiating behind the scenes and putting pressure on and then, you know, eventually Biden does just actively, like, mandate that the strike can't happen, right? Like that is like that. I will argue that that is in fact a form of strike breaking. Mm hmm. I agree. And I think I think people are

tend to be less, but you know the ability to cut deals with unions like this is something that the Republicans have really good at. It's not an ability that they really have. It's something that is largely limited to the Democrats. This means that they have a unique capacity to repress social movements that isn't as obvious as a bunch of strike breakers showing up or the cops showing up. But is there all the same? I think it's in some ways more dangerous because you get these arguments with the rail strike where technically eventually Biden was able to get some kind of deal through for some

sec time, right? But, you know, and you have this sort of like liberal conception of what labor is with it. Like, oh, well, everyone was wrong to like be mad at Biden for this, like they got the thing eventually. But, you know, the problem here isn't just, you know, strikes aren't just about the immediate thing that you're fighting for, right? Like they're also about, like moving the classes

a whole, they're about the experience of striking, they're about, and they're also about the fact that you will get a better deal if you win a strike than you will if you get like, you will, if you get one of these negotiated deals cut in the back room by Biden and 17 unions in the Manufacturers Association. And so I think it's important to understand that there is a fundamental sort of difference between liberalism sort of conception of, you achieve material gains, and it doesn't really matter what the process is, or the process is like you go through the legislative domain.

There's an actual difference between that and the things that happens through to strike, which is, you know, there's an actual process of like the building of power of workers and, you know, building the autonomy of the class itself. And I don't know. I think those are very different. And I think I think a lot of what we've been seeing here is in attempt both by unions themselves, by business leaders, and also by the president and the Democratic Party to try to make sure that this doesn't happen and that they can sort of contain this really explosive labor moments and prevent it from sort of turning it into anything more.

Yeah, I think that's very true. I think that, you know, the unions, you know, have long been divorced from their original roots as like, you know, this was a communist social, the sprung out of communism, socialism, anarchism. It was about workers banding together to not only collectively bargain just for the workplaces, but for society-wide issues. Unions used to be explicitly political. As we've seen this rise in political conscience over this last decade, the ruling class and the entrenched union bureaucrats that have long been divorced from those origins, I think have a very vested interest. And not having labor go back to those roots

to and stuff like that. It obviously threatens the working or the ruling class power, excuse me. And it threatens union bureaucrat jobs when workers start demanding more from what the labor movement can provide for them. So I think that's all very true. And it's just that this is another avenue where collective change is possible, and the state and capital will always clamp down on any avenue

where change can be achieved through those means. So I think that's really, really what we're seeing here. Yeah, and I don't know. I mean, I think I think another thing that's worth pointing out is that like part of the reason that like part of the reason that, part of the reason that, if you go back to sort of like went when the era of the sort of decline of unionism happened, right, like part of the reason why the Reagan era repression worked was that a lot of these unions

had already sort of hollowed out the radical core of like what had been their union organizers, they had purged, the CIO, even back, as early as the 40s, the CIO purged all of its leftist members. And you got these successive these successive iterations of unionism that were less and less militants. You can literally see what the result of that has been, right? Like, he intensities down to like 6%. And so, you know, if it keeps going like this,

and we keep getting these sort of like sustained efforts to make sure that it never redevelopes again, like, yeah, like, we're gonna be stuck there. Yeah, I mean, it's just, yeah, I mean, it's specific to the UPS contract. You can absolutely see that by looking at the wage growth through the last 40 years, or maybe the lack of their own, with the stagnating wages. Just between either union officials or even the Biden coming in, I think it's like more or less like these people who aren't going, you know, who didn't enter the economy, you know, within the last decade or two, you know, and don't know

at all really what our experiences are, you know, what kind of challenges and struggles and burdens we're facing. And I mean, especially and not prepared at all for just world with a drastically changing climate. Yeah, and then also to go back to the decline of how unions have operated over these last of how unions have operated over these last four some decades, right? I think this is something I talked about a lot, and I talked about it, I think, on the last podcast. But once the organized left was kind of purged out of all of these unions, unions kind of became about a service

model. And that's when the union leadership does, like, does, you know, like you on the floor are enforcing your contract, you're bringing your grievances to the union and the union is getting something done about them, right? And I think, you know, that model in and of itself is indicative of a decline of a collective action, right? That reduces the union too. Yeah, that's the entity you're going, you go to when there is an issue in the enforcement of your contract,

and they negotiate a new contract for you. That's the service model type, right? That's what we're seeing a lot of, that's what a lot of the business unions do and stuff like that. Some of them do it better than others. But then there's also the organizing model where you use the union as a means to make your members militant. And they do contract enforcement on the floor. And they like, organize protests at their work site. And they get involved in issues outside of the work site. Watching the service model prevail over these last some decades over the organizing model.

It's just another sign of collective action being stamped down wherever it can be. There's this interesting thing with the service model that I see a lot where it's like, when you're getting sort of union and accumulation stuff, they'll be like, ah, the management is going to tell you that the union is an outside force and it's not, the union is actually you. And it's like, this is true, but also like damn, I wonder where the idea that the union is an outside forest, and it's not the union is actually you. And it's like, this is true, but also like damn,

I wonder where the idea that the union is an outside forest, and it's not actually you came from, like it couldn't, you know, it's it like, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the way you run your union. Like, okay. Yep. Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, I think we're talking about that last time, like the kind of like the lack of onboarding engagement by the union. Yeah. I mean, especially, yeah, I mean, yeah, I mean, I know this, I mean, other union members too, where it like, does kind of feel like they're like,

oh, I don't have all these benefits or higher pay or, or you know, we're thinking about striking, but we don't even have a strike fund. You know, we don't know how exactly will weather the storm. I mean, that's something I hear, you know, a lot on the shop floors, like when talking about, you know, our union, you know, it's, it's always the union. I know I say that a ton too, but I kind of feel like the language we just use, like day-to-day talking about it. You know, a kind of, there's that inherent separation.

It's like, oh, it's the union. It's this, you know, it's this outside thing. It's not, oh, it's a collection of all, you know, rank and file members. It's us. Where are the, you know? Yeah, and it doesn't, and the thing is, yeah, it doesn't become that unless you have a really high level of participation and then also like a systemic effort to make sure that, to make sure everyone's involved and to make sure that, you know, the union functions in

such a way that you've, that, like, you know, that, that decision to membership actually matters. And I don't know, I think, I think it's really, I think it's really easy to, you know, in this moment where unions are incredibly like, you know, we're the total, the actual amount of like unions in the US is really small. And also simultaneously, small and also simultaneously, we're seeing a sort of resurgence of union organizing. I think it's really, really easy to sort of fall into this trap and be completely

uncritical of the way that unions have functioned. Because again, if the current model of unions that exists right now, if that stuff worked, we wouldn't be in the sort of conditions that we're in now. And that calls for, you know, like that calls for collective action. And one of the things that calls for is being willing to go on strike. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Do you two have anything else that you wanted to add?

Yeah, no, because like something that, you know, when I think about like, you know, how do we get back to like this sort of, you know, where union is, you know, we are the union. A union is a collective of workers advocating for their rights, right? They are banding together, they're negotiating together. And when I think about the teamsters and how they operate right now,

and we just had that big reform slate when where Sean O'Brien won and then delivered us this contract. And Sean O'Brien did do, in TDU, did do other good things. They got rid of that constitutional rule that all of her mentioned earlier. But I think when we talk about bringing down that barrier between the union and the members, the next most obvious step for me is that we need to get to open bargaining in this union. And frankly, I think open bargaining,

or the fact that this bargaining was closed, it was behind closed doors. There were NDAs signed. There were rank and file members there, but they also couldn't tell us about it because of those NDAs. Open bargaining is what's going to solve this because this, like, the whole fiasco about this tentative agreement and now all the kind of resulting hostility that is felt between

members and leadership and members and even other members, I think it's, you know, like so much of this is due to a failure of cons. And the fact that we did not know what was being discussed in these negotiations at any time except for the big highlights that they could tell us about, right? And then, you know, they release a highlight reel that has very confusing language. They eventually do release the contract, but not all of the memorandums of understanding that would help us understand what is actually

in that contract. And, you know, they're releasing all of this information in a way that is going to result in people not understanding what's in it. And I really do think open bargaining is the next step that reformers in this union need to be advocating and organizing for because this has just kind of been a real shit show, this has just kind of been a real shit show, to be honest. And yeah, I think it's a comms failure to be perfectly honest, so. Yeah, and I would absolutely agree with that. And I know like there was a IBT webinar with Sean O'Brien, and he even spoke to Mr. Information,

but didn't elaborate on what it was or how or why it's wrong. And I was just like, hey, you got our emails, address is phone numbers, we're here on this webinar. Like, you can correct the record anytime. If you're worried about something that's not true and may or may not influence people's votes, like you can do something about that. Like you, you have a lot of money. You have, you know, a comms team, but you use it.

You know, just talk to your members like they're real people. You know, we can. We can understand shit. You don't gotta just get angry or even kind of like I was saying earlier, where it's just like, almost this feels like this framing where anything that's a dissenting view or a critique. So it's almost information. Don't pay any attention to it. Yeah, which know, so it's just it's all misinformation. Don't don't pay any attention

to it. Yeah, which is, you know, I don't know, I've seen this in a couple of, I don't know, like this, I've seen this in a couple of sort of union things we've coupled on this show is like, I don't know. And an incredible unwillingness of union leadership to even consider a position as not the own and to just immediately, when confronted with another thing, just immediately attempt to completely delegiate them. And that sucks.

Yeah, it's just not a great way to run a union. No, no, you definitely, and I've been seeing this, this closing, like, sort of rank around, around leadership, right? And it's not something that inspires trust in union leadership whatsoever, right? Like, you know, you could be a member that, you know, doesn't understand something, just has a question. And then you kind of getting, and you kind of just end up being stone walled. And, you know, you're told, well, you know,

go to this meeting where we're gonna explain things and da da da da da da da da da. And it's like, yeah, but, you know, I have you on the phone now. Can you explain it now? And, you know, and it's as it's like they're taking all of these concerns as a personal blow to their ego, right? Like they're taking it personally as if people having concerns about what this contract does and does not stipulate is like an attack on their moral character. And it's just really fucking frustrating. I gotta be real with you.

And it doesn't say a lot for the overall democratic nature of the union either, right? Like, you know, this is like, you know, you're kind of being told, well, you know, keep your opinions to yourself, accept our word for it. Like you can vote however you want. You know, this is opinions to yourself, accept our word for it. Like, you can vote however you want. You know, this is one member, one vote.

But, you know, you can't be going online talking about it. You, like, can't be going talking to your coworker because of that, because you don't have all the information. You're not understanding it correctly. And it's just like, well, can you get better at explaining it? Can you not react this way? Like, can we have a thing where we can just like, fucking talk about what's in it and what's not in it?

And yeah, it's just, again, been real fucking frustrating. Yeah, it's another thing. I mean, too, as, you know, any contract language, maybe it should either be more clear concise or if it's going to be more legal East side, you know, put out a little like contract, like explainer guide, maybe a special around key language or language that they know is maybe vague or going to cause, you know, issues of like understanding it. or going to cause issues of understanding it. And even one other thing about open bargaining was looking at the IBT press release. There's one paragraph and it starts, rank and file members served on the committee for the first time.

Continues on later saying, our hard work has finally paid, or our hard work has paid off. And it goes on to then say, this is the most historic contract we've ever had. So it kind of seems like right there, where it's like, well, if limited member participation bound by NDAs led to this historic contract, maybe it's time to involve all of us. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, you know, the rank and file that are on these committees are appointed by leadership. So we don't get to choose who these people are. And it's like leadership absolutely just has the ability to be like, well, I'm going to, you know, appoint the ones that I like the most that I have the best relationship with that I know thanks the sun kind of shines out of my ass. And yeah, there's just this this absolutely overall lack of a democratic lack of a democratic internal culture. You know, we elect, you know, our officers, most of them.

But we don't elect stewards. We don't really, we don't elect our business agents or like anything like that. We vote on our contracts and that's it. At our union meetings, I have had one union meeting where we did a vote that was introduced by leadership. It's not the most democratic culture and that's another thing that needs to change as well. Yeah, and I think that goes back to a fundamental political conflict, which is, is democracy when you vote for someone else to make every decision or is democracy when people collectively make decisions themselves? And the sort of slip-readess of those two things causes, you know,

causes, you know, allows people who essentially want to be the only ones who ever get to make decisions to be able to claim that they are in favor of democracy or whatever. But, you know, mean, like mean that they get to make all decisions after they get elected and not mean actual people sort of make decisions for themselves. Yeah, 1000%. That's like we need a more song that serves as more of a delicate role than a, you know, representative.

Okay, I guess I guess my final thing is I yeah, you two are both encouraging. I going to encourage people to vote no on this contract for the people to vote no on this contract for it. The, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, correct. Yeah, I'll be voting now and also advocating for that. And also, I mean, just also advocating people to vote as well. Yes, big same on that. Low, low union participation sends both and continuing to have those conversations on the shop floors with folks explaining my concerns and stuff like that. But yeah, no, I'm also going to be voting no on this contract as well.

Yeah, so that is, yeah, I guess that is our coverage of this. There is still time for, there is still time for there to actually be a strike and for this contract to fail and for people to fight for a better one. And yeah, I wish both of you two could luck in fighting this.

And yeah, and thank you both for coming on. Yeah, yeah, thanks so much for having us. I was excited to give you guys an update about all the crazy shit we talked about in the first episode. Yeah. Glad, glad we got to talk about it. That was a pleasure being on and appreciate the time.

Yeah, do you have anything to plug before? You know, yes or no vote, solidarity, all workers and everyone on the shop floor. And you know, we'll keep on fighting for better conditions. Yeah. And I you two, dear listener, can fight for better conditions in your own workplace. And, yeah, one day, one day fight for a world where we don't have workplaces like this at all. Amen. Hallelujah. Sacred Skando, one of the best new podcasts of 2022, is back with a closer look at the darkness surrounding mega-church La Luz del Mundo and its leader, Nasson Joaquin Garcia. They believe that he was Jesus Christ on Earth.

It wasn't even so much that he liked sex. He wanted something to pray. It's the largest cult in the world that no one has ever heard of. For three generations, the Luz del Mundo had an incredible control on his community that began in Mexico and then grew across the United States, until one day. A day of reckoning for the man whose millions of followers called him the Apostle. Their leader was arrested and survivors began to speak out about the sexual abuse, the murder, and corruption.

This is just a business and their product are people. They want to kill you. Listen to all episodes now on the I Heart Ready Up, Apple Podcasts, or whatever you get your podcasts. 911, what's your emergency? You shot her! Oh my God! It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose.

My small town rocked by murder. There are certain murders I'm scared to discuss. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. One after another, after another, for a decade. We weren't safe anywhere. We're teenagers terrified to leave our own homes. Would we be next?

Who is killing all the kids? And why? In that moment, I saw rage. And why do some want the town secrets to stay dead and buried forever? I'm not sure why you're digging up all this old stuff again, but I'd be careful. Don't say I didn't warn you, Nancy.

Listen to the murder years on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm the Wizard of Oz. I'm the one making everything happen. Real housewife of Salt Lake City star Jen Shaw is running the scam of the century. We probably will never be able to be

retired black working to work any more. Living a fat million dollar lifestyle on the backs of thousands of elderly victims. She turned up their lives for what a fake Fendi bag? Congrats, girl. When you have her confronted, instead of stopping, she finds ways to be sneaky or about it and

keeps going. I remember one time Stuart lost like about 8 million and General was very upset and she came down to the office late at night with Coach Y'all are going to scream out and I am asking him where their money is. Would you call her a con artist? I would just call her a con. She's not very much of an artist. Listen to Queen of the Con season 4, the Unreal Housewife, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's foreign my policy? I don't know, I don't know guys.

I don't know. I got like trapped into this like pattern of doing introductions a certain way, and I don't really, I don't really like feel good about it, but how do you, how does one break their patterns? Speaking of patterns, let's talk about Syria. Beautiful. That was awesome. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like one of the basketball guys when someone lays him up and he just does a dunk. Yeah. That's what I feel like. No, not about green, green, green Bay Packers swish.

Yep, go Tom Brady. Sports talk aside, I'm wearing my Rwanda football shirt today. We are gathered here today to talk about Turkey's drone strikes on the SDS. Yeah, not funny, not funny. Yeah, the SDS, yeah, we're talking about like Turkish, the continued Turkish military operations across their border in Northeast Syria, the area commonly known as Rojava, and also in Southern Turkey as well. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So just to give some numbers around this to start off right in year of 2022, which there wasn't a territorial offensive. So like you're not seeing like troops on the ground. Turkey carried out 130 drone strikes in the autonomous administration of North East Syria. Yeah, that's the place that is more commonly known as Rojava. And the killed, at least eight YPJ members, sort of YPJ, would be the women's protection forces who are a unit within the Syrian Democratic forces, which is the armed forces of the AAAS, Autonomous area of Northeastern Syria.

I will come at you really hard with acronyms in this. I think if people haven't listened to Robert Sirius Women's War, maybe the Women's War, that would be a good place to start, because we only have half an hour or 45 minutes or whatever, and we can't explain an extremely complicated conflict, which has been going on for 12 years in that time. So I think some grounding in who is who and what is what, you can find it there, I guess. And but it's that a fair summary of who those people are, Robert.

Yeah, basically. So you had kind of the gist of the story is that for very long time starting in Southern Turkey, there's been a Kurdish militant group called the PKK. They were way back in the day, originally Maoist. They had a bunch of internal power struggles within their own organization. And then wound up taking a pretty wide turn away from Maoism towards a kind of political theory heavily influenced by the work of an American anarchist, thinker named Mare Bookchin. This was largely due to the fact that their leader, a guy named Bedoula Ojelon, got while he was in Turkish prison,

kind of piled on a lot of these, this kind of like fringe American libertarian-ish sort of political philosophy. Yeah, with this, basically, the gist of it is this kind of synthesis of a lot of booktions ideas with some of the stuff that Ozilod had been thinking about for years, kind of culminated in a political philosophy called libertarian municipalism, which is more or less the governing philosophy that these different armed militant organizations kind of clustered around the PKK and Northeast Syria, because the PKK for years were just kind of like cross the border in the Northeast Syria when they were fighting with the Turks and they had to get away. And they had a bunch of inroads with local Kurdish organizations in Northeast Syria.

And when the Assad regime pulled out of the area in the early stages of the Syrian civil war, a lot of these groups that were affiliated with the PKK were kind of the best organized organizations in the area. And so they took over a lot of civil administration and basing a lot of their plans and functional activities around these ideas that Ojelon had been writing about for years and years. And so you kind of have this mix of all these armed organizations that are to some extent descended from the PKK, but are now much broader than just sort of a Kurdish liberatory organization. These are the folks who fought and defeated ISIS in Northeast Syria.

Yeah, that's, I don't know. There's so much to get into, but I guess that's kind of the broad strokes. And all of these different, because there's a bunch of different militias, you know, there's militias that are kind of more traditionalist Arab militias. There's Armenian militias in the area. There's obviously these Kurdish militias, the YPG and the YPJ, primarily Kurdish militias, but they all fight under the banner of the SDF. And to the Turks, they're all the PKK.

Yes. I'm glad you mentioned all the PKK. Yes. I'm glad you mentioned all the different militias and stuff because it gets really confusing. Like even I mean, I'm Syrian and I'm just like, I cannot keep up. I talked to my parents about it too. And they're just like, that's, it's, it's, it's complicated. So I think you did a good job breaking that down. I also want to mention they were the only people fighting ISIS in Syria. Yeah.

So I think it's pretty notable to be in Syria. Yeah. Yeah. I got a list of the founding groups of the SDF. So this happens in 2015, right? Sort of earlier in the fight against ISIS. And some of these groups that descended, like she said, not from the YPG or the YPG.

And Robert said this too, they come from the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, like specifically the FSA around the Kobani area, contribute to elements, there's the Syriac Military Council, so that's a distinct ethnic group, there is the Jaya Shor Al-Fawar, if I said that right. No, but I can say if you are. Please do. No, but I can say if you are. Please do. Magical. Thank you. J.S. at the war.

J.S. means army or like army. Yeah, J.S. It's annoying because there is English as well. J.S. but it's just a J.S. Yeah, the revolutionary army of revolutionaries, I guess more accurately, we're a mixed ethnicity group. They like Zed include Turkmen, Armenians, all kinds of different ethnic groups. So, at this point, the entity that is the SDF is a majority Arab entity. It's not like an ethnic Kurdish thing, and the autonomous

administration is not like a Kurdish ethno state, which I think is something that people can sometimes either confuse or conflate, but that's not the case, right? That's not what this sort of democratic federalism is about, nor is it what's represented in terms of the composition of the people there, so people doing the fighting, right? So sometimes these groups will be referred to on masses that quote unquote the Kurds. You should say by how kind of messy my explanation was, it is hard to walk people through this.

Folks' eyes tend to glaze over for one thing when you mention a certain number of acronyms, but this is a situation whereby the US news is just like the Kurds defeated ISIS to Northeast Syria. Like, no, there were a whole lot of other people who did a lot of dying to win some kind of one involved. And some Kurds who were not involved. There's also just so much infighting I think that it gets, I don't know, it's a lot.

It is a lot like saying the Americans defeated the Nazis and it's like, well, there are some other people involved in that. Well, yeah, I've seen some films from it. Let me tell you, yes, I think Robert is right. It collapses two things, right? Like the heterogeneity of Kurdish people, different Kurdish areas, different Kurdish movements, and the heterogeneity of the SDF. So yeah, mainstream use sometimes. Yeah, it is also worth Yeah, because it's shocking.

It is also worth noting, like, curds are not certainly not a monolithic group for examining, Northeast Syria is like flatlands, lowlands, and there's a big difference between the mountain curds and the curds who live in these lowlands, and traditionally even like a lot of like bad blood and stuff between different groups

because you know that's just the way human beings are like. Yeah. Yeah. For you, it's really easy I think for when we're consuming news especially news about the part of the world that the the popular here hasn't been spectacularly well informed on to break things down into easy groups, right? Like, you'll see a lot as well, like, Sunni and Shia, like the two categories that can exist within, like, and then people get very confused when there are categories within that,

when there are Sunni groups fighting each other. And the same with, like, Kurds, Turkmen, or whatever, like, none of these groups are homogenous. And sometimes, yeah, if you're, I get it, if you're doing a five minute piece for TV, you do that's what you do. But here we are, not doing a five minute piece for TV. So, yeah, this has not been like a Kurdish history 101.

Please read some more books about that. I'll put some in the sources. But what I want to talk about today is some of these baractara attacks on specifically YPJ, right? So the YPJ would be the women's defense forces. So that's a women's militia within the SDF. As Robert said, it's based heavily, I guess, on the outlook of Abdul- Ossalan, who sometimes called Apple. So I might use that for brevity here. So in one attack in April 2022, three YPJ fighters were killed. Dilar Halib, who had participated in the resistance of their Shigmasud district of Aleppo in 2012. She became a leading YPJ commander and participated in the fight against ISIS, playing a leading role in the liberation

of the city of Mimbik, Rahani Kabani. It's worth knowing, I guess, sorry, I just stop every 15 seconds to explain context. You'll hear sometimes place names in people's names, that's because they're like, Norm DeGier, rather than that this is not their legal name necessarily, but it's standard practice for these people to take a movement name or a non-degare, much like Rubber and I explained in the episodes on Myanmar. It seems a lot of people do this a lot of places. Is that fair Rubber? Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of, like oftentimes people just take a name based on their city that they came from like Kobani or whatever. But yeah, it's pretty much the norm. The most people, most fighters will introduce themselves by some sort of knob to gear. Yeah. And even some of the, I know people who are like British, or American who have been over there, who are over there, and they also have these.

Yeah. And there's a lot in that. One thing you have to keep in mind is that like a lot of these people who are revolutionaries, who consider themselves revolutionaries, have family in regime controlled parts of town or parts of Syria or in Idlib, which is largely controlled by these more Turkish-backed

Islamist groups. And so part of why you do this is like, I don't want my family getting caught up in this shit. Like if they live somewhere else, like I don't wanna bring family like getting caught up in this shit. Like if they live somewhere else, like I don't want to like bring that down on them, it's just safer. Yeah, just like when we did our PMO episodes, right? We had Miyauka and Andy and Sarah. Another woman, as I said, Rahani Kabani joined the YPGA in 2014. She fought against ISIS, she was wounded, she participated after recovering in the liberation of Raka, and she was the co-chair of the Defense Committee in Kobani.

Then there was the youngest woman she just joined, I guess, or her joined at a young age, and she was called Kobani, and she joined after the fight against ISIS. She was very young. There are pictures, I'll include a report. It's very sad ISIS. She was very young. There are pictures. I'll include a report. It's very sad to see someone like so young. They look, they look like, there's a couple of them that look like babies. Like it's really devastating because it's,

I don't know, their lives are taken from them and they join to, it's empowering and then it's devastating because it's just like they fought so, and then it's devastating, because it's just like they fought so hard, and then they were assassinated, literally, they were murdered. Yeah, especially when you consider that so many of these like the women who fought against ISIS,

like, and I think we could all probably understand why women would want to do that. Like, wanted to create a place where young girls could grow up and be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do. And like, not have to obviously like cow-towel, so it's extremely violent misogynist organization like ISIS, but also not necessarily have to fight either. And you know, it could be self-realized in whatever way they wanted to. And so to see these people having achieved their goal largely of, I guess, ISIS still exists, right? And ISIS still continues to kill people.

It killed 10 people yesterday. But that's the eighth of August, because you weren't here this today. But to see these people who have like successfully at least liberated the territory and then their young women are still dying. But not finding ISIS, but find Turkey. I can go on and give, like, there are dozens of examples of this report. Another one I'll just give in July 2022. There's a YPJ commander called Rojur, and a fighter called Barin Botan.

So, one of them had been, and then another one called, another YPJ commander, called Gian Tolhiden. Tolhiden. So these two women have been involved in the fight against ISIS, like from the beginning, having, like, liberated cities, liberated territory, and then they were with this young woman who was 19 years old and had relatively recently joined the YPJ, right? And it was killed by a drone strike. It's particularly galling, I think, for me at least, to, so that the YPJ information office is someone I communicate with, for work stuff. And it's particularly

galling to wake up, Brent, see that on your phone, to get a message and look at a report, see a picture of a car blown to pieces. At the same time, the directories had drawn Turkey has sold to Ukraine in large numbers, which has been hugely effective in destroying Russian armor. And like, it's currently Iran, at least, was. It's, it's, it's not really where I mean, a lot of stuff has changed, obviously, like new technologies, extremely effective early on before there's countermeasure. Anyway, whatever, we don't need to get nerdy about this. Yeah, yeah, it's certainly like in the first months of the war, like the war in Ukraine became like a meme. You can buy a stuffed by Raktor on Etsy or eBay,

like a soft toy, like a teddy bear. There are songs about it. That's what it's doing. That is so to say. It's not great. Yeah, it was, and it was one of those things where like obviously I was happy to see effective tools being used by the Ukrainians to defend their home.

Yes, of course. But I'm not ever going to get up and stand the Turkish defense industry. Yeah, defense industry. And for the record, I feel the same way about the people standing different US defense contractors making stuff like, you know, long-range missile systems. Like, no, I'm not, I'm not really a fan of that. Like, I get it

sometimes, you know, when you're being invaded, you use the tools available, but I, that doesn't mean we need to celebrate that. Yeah, exactly. I think the tools are largely kind of agnostic. Anyone who sort of is making things to kill people purely for profit, it's not necessarily a good thing to do with your life, I guess. And like, it's just troubling to me to see people like cheering this on without like, it highlights one like the way that people engage

with conflict, especially online, especially in the US, which is... Yeah. Like, it's not a computer game. It's someone's 19 year old fucking daughter. It's someone's mum or sister or brother or uncle or dad or the binary relative. I mean, the fact that you can buy like a stuffed fucking weapon, like little drone thing on eBay, it's,

it's just so disturbing. I really just don't like humans when I think about that. Yeah. I understand why it happens this way. And I understand why if your country is being invaded and you can get more support from the international community by leaning into this shit, you lean into this shit. But I don't like the idea of like some, I don't know, fucking accountant in Iowa watching hundreds of videos of like Russian soldiers being killed and then like getting a fucking Lockheed Martin tattoo. Like the like the like like turning, turning your support for people, you know, in a deadly

military conflict into like fandom, treating it the way you treat like a Marvel movie or whatever. I find not great. Yeah, it's just not like, I understand why. Like, I wouldn't blame anyone for being super excited about having barraptos because it stops people burning their homes and killing their children. Yeah, fair. I would want that to.

No, just like, if you're, if you're, like, I have a friend who I went, like, we, we were in fucking of divka together, like, sheltering with people from Russian shells and stuff, who then went on to join the Ukrainian military and has been fighting since the expanded invasion. If he wants to share videos or watch videos of, like, you know, dead Russian soldiers from telegram, like, that's war. It's unpleasant, but I get it. Like, again, if you're some dude in fucking Wisconsin doing the same thing, I find that pretty unsettling. Like, yeah. Because you don't need to. Yeah.

No, you don't need to, you don't need to dehumanize those people so you can kill them because you're not killing them. Yeah, but you seem to have engaged in that same dehumanization which is necessary for people fighting because I don't know, maybe you think you're helping. It's hard to shoot people otherwise. Like, yes. There's a reason it's hard to fucking bayonet people, right? There's a reason that bayonet training is one of these things that's particularly just kind of, it has to be violent.

You have to be horrible, you know, like it's, there's no nice way to stab someone. But the, yeah, it doesn't mean that you need to tweet about it, especially folks who maybe aren't, perhaps, is on the ground familiar as what this looks like. So, I wanted to maybe get into a little bit. There are, as I said, dozens of these drone attacks. They really ramped up in early 2023, along with a kind of a larger air offensive. They continue to happen almost weekly. If people want to keep tabs, YPJ info is the YPJ's public-facing press website, roger information center is a good English language resource.

Both of those you can find on X or if you can't. Oh, God. You want to let them. You can also search for them. So we say no, we just say X. No, we should. No, we absolutely. We can allege. Yeah.

Okay. Thanks, great. Thanks. Yeah. X is not in fact going to give it to us. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry.

We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry.

We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. We say the word, sorry. What is going to give it and buy it? I mean the money that pays our wages to us. No. What is it James? It is this combination of products and services. I love a good product. Mm-hmm. Me too.

I don't love services actually, very anti-service, but you know, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. It might change your opinion. It might be something amazing. Unlikely, probably gold. Yeah. Gold. That's hip from the advertisers. All right. We're back. might change your opinion, might be something amazing. Unlikely, probably gold. But let's hear from the advertisers. We're back. We hope you enjoyed those adverts as much as we did. So I want to talk about in the second half of the episode, why Turkey is using these drones to bomb people who, like we said, have for and largely defeated the territorial caliphate of ISIS. I did want to bring up one more drone incident actually, which is particularly bad.

So one of the things that you're often see the SDF and specifically the YPG and the YPJ kind of accused of is having child soldiers or having recruiting people who are under age to fight. Part of a program they've implemented to stop this with consultation with the United Nations is building education centers, right? I'm not going to comment morally on who should be fighting at what age because I think it's not a judgment for us to make when like we do not have ISIS in the fucking streets. Yeah, I look, I think there's a degree to which people are being unreasonable about this. I met a number of 17 year olds. It's generally when people talk about child soldiers,

they are talking about 17 year olds. I have friends who joined the US Army when they were 17 years old. Like I have friends who were learning how to drive a tank for the US military at age 17. And quite frankly, if you look at wars in history, 16 to 20 years old, that's most of the people who have fought most of the wars and most of history, that's like the way that it is.

That's not pleasant, but when we are talking, I certainly, I would be very supportive of laws put in place in our country to raise the age at which people can join the military so that they are not young and not getting taken advantage of to as much of a degree, but we are not fighting in any conflicts for our survival.

Yeah, I think people that point the finger and like talk about child soldiers, whatever the shit, and they are referencing basic teens. They have the privilege of doing that. They don't have to even think about protecting themselves or their family or whatever. I think when you are raised in a situation of violence, like the Palestine is a great example of that. You see boys trying to defend their country. It's the same situation where you don't have the privilege of that, you see like boys like trying to defend their country.

It's like the same situation where there's, you don't have the privilege of waiting until you're fucking 21 or whatever. It's just like you have to, you have to like protect yourself. Yeah, it's not the, it's not a situation. You are not being, it's not like, again, it's not like it is often when we talk about child soldiers

like in the Liberian Civil War, right? Yeah, yeah. Kids being pulled in, you know, for the advantage of some warlord, nor is it like in the United States where you have 17 to 8 year old, 18 year olds being recruited in a predatory way off and by military recruiters and sent overseas in conflicts that are not necessary. We are talking about like, ISIS is five blocks away. And like, God knows what they'll do to my mom and my sister if they take over. Like, I'm going to pick up a fuck and gun, you know, what else what else are you going to do? That's the that's the world. Like they're living in a different set of realities than we are. Yeah. Anyone that places judgment on that is just ignorant and

not understanding of the reality of the world. They're just like in their little bubble. Yeah, so on August the 18th, 2022, Turkish drone targeted one of these UN Affiliated Education centers, right. It was two kilometers from the US coalition base and targeted group of teenage girls playing volleyball. It's very hard to see these education centers as like anywhere military target, right? They're literally designed to divert young people from becoming fighters and to sell out with the consultation United Nations, with this you know, like with this budget oversight, it's one can expect an area which is sort of the middle of a civil war and to be drowned striking schools is pretty callous. It's also worth noting that like a phrase or content, it gets

thrown around a lot in discussion about the Middle East, right? It's the only democracy in the Middle East. And it's, let me tell you, it's not normally referring to this part of the world, it's referring to Israel. And A, I don't think that's true, Israel. I mean, it's actually in the part I, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does it. What fucking death? Well, democracy is an extremely nebulous concept. Right, yeah, sure. So like So, this is an area where people's votes have a substantive impact on how their lives are lives. Certainly more so than people who are Arabs in Israel. Yeah, and so Kurds and Southern Turkey

Syrians in Syria, like, yeah, Kurds in Syria, yeah. Yes, exactly. People in parts of Iran, like Iraq, people in northern or in the Baghdad government control junks of Iraq for that matter. Yes. Yeah. Like all over, right? Like, so this isn't just an attack on like individual women. It's an attack on a state which is genuinely, at least attempting to establish a new form of democracy, right? Like a more partisan, more horizontally organized democracy. It's an attack on a state in the Middle East which is like anti-patriarchal, which is

something that we don't have here in the United States, right? Like we have still failed to have a woman be president. Like, it's an attack on these things, which most decent human beings should be able to get behind. These attacks also don't just affect the people who are killed, right? They continue to displace families, they contribute to fuel shortages. They create power cuts, they suspend schools, they stop aid, organizations working in the area because it's too high risk or they perceive it to be too high risk. And they stop the SDF continuing their operations against ISIS,

right? Like ISIS, as I said, continue to exist. They have sleeper cells. There was an attempted prison break last year, two of the women from the WPJ who had fought to stop those ISIS prisoners breaking out of their prison were late to kill in the drone strike. It's very hard to see this as not helping that ISIS insurgency that they're fighting and hindering their operations. And I'm not just saying this based on sources that are the Roger Information Center are people in the AANES, but this is the policy of the United States, right? Before we started this, I looked up some of the Inspector General's reports from Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the United States Operation

Toledo Coalition, which includes the SDF against ISIS, and they were talking about how the SDF's operations are hindered because they keep getting shot by drones. And that's not much that they can do about it. Unlike Ukraine, we're not sending a ton of surface-to-air missiles or things that you could use to defend yourself against drones. Not that it's very easy to defend yourself against a drone. So why is Turkey doing this? I think firstly because, as Robert said, it sees the SDF and the PKK is the same thing, right? And so the PKK most of the operates like Robert said in the mountains of Sathy St. Turkey, and it's been fighting this asymmetrical war against

the Turkish state since 1984. So Erdogan, so Erdogan is the president of Turkey, right? He entered office in 2003 and he's sort of pivoted on Turkish issues, uncurtish issues, sorry he's continued used to be Turkish, But he was initially in favor of like a negotiated peace with the PKK and his early years included proposals for linguistic autonomy, the right to a Kurdish press, and even like the return of Kurdish place names, which is a big deal still. You'll see like a Komislo or Al-Kamly, like one being Arab, but they're latter being Arabic, the form of being Kurdish, right? Yeah, I mean, it's just a huge deal because you're not just killing people, you're killing a culture that's like in like it's not, what's still like a different

word to say extinct, like it's in danger of like not being there if it's offered the people protecting it, right? And I think it's like a classic tactic to stop people from using their language or customs or whatever to just try to erase them and make them Turk or whatever they want them to be. And so the proposal of that, I think is significant but then obviously the follow-through is a different story. Yeah, the follow-through is not there, right?

Yeah. So after 2015, he's really pivoted and he's pursued like a really violent anti-curse policy. And it's worth noting, as you said, that for much of a 20th century, the Turkish state denied the existence of Kurdish people altogether. They called them mountain Turks.

And even in March 2021, the Turkish Ministry of Education released a book in the Kurdish Maritime Erdogan. It's a province called Diyarbakir. Diyarbakir, I guess it's Turkish, which it doesn't mention Kurds. It's a Kurdish majority province. It doesn't mention the Kurdish language.

It claims that it's a Turkish dialect that's spoken there. They changed the name in August 2021 of the 17th century mosque, from the word translating from the Turkish to the Kurds mosque and they called it the Turks mosque. In 2023, Turkey dropped its objection. So, it's objections and effective veto, right? To Finland, Sweden joining NATO,

when the latter pledged to devote more attention to the PKK and effectively end its decades-old tradition of giving protection and asylum to Kurdish refugees. So if people aren't familiar, Sweden has been a country that's offered asylum to a lot of different groups of people. Like, I have a lot of friends from various stories I've done all over the world who have ended up living in Sweden. And Kurdish people are among those people right who have found a home and a safe place in Sweden. So encouraging Sweden to not do that gives people one less safe place to go.

This was kind of turkeys like cost of entry for those people in to NATO. Now obviously there's a reason that Sweden and Finland want to join NATO, right? And that's the rusher is like right there and has been doing some invasion recently. And so they want that as kind of mutual aid, that mutual defense. And so they're being forced to give up this very reasonable policy of offering people asylum. Hi everyone, it's me James. And I'm back after what I hope was a fruitful and enjoyable advertising break for you. It is just me and the reason for that is someone outside is currently severing my telephone cable judging by what I can hear and the fact that I no longer have the internet. So the second part of this episode will be me reading my script by myself

without the interesting and often entertaining input of my colleagues. So sorry about that, but you will just have to make do. Turkey has been involved in a series of awards since the beginning. Initially it armed and equipped the anti-Assad FSA. But in August 2016 it began a direct occupation of parts of northern Syria under Operation Euphrates Shield. In 2017 it facilitated the establishment of the Syrian National Army and the Syrian Intering Government which it financed. Turkey has accused the Syrian Democratic forces to which the YPG and YPJ belong, of quote,

ceasing and ethnically clandering territories which don't belong to Kurds. There isn't really any credible evidence for this and the UN has refuted these claims. Some people have moved, right? Like it happens in many conflicts but the SMICS always like 25 families. Early on has openly expressed a sentiment that Kurdish people don't belong in North and East Syria,

saying, these areas are not suitable for the lifestyle of Kurds because these areas are virtually desert. Deportations of Syrians who have been, who have sought refuge in Turkey, right? So people from Syria who fled the civil war, about three and just over three and a half million people are living in Turkey, right? Turkey has declared its intention to move one million of these

people back to Syria. It has already begun moving these people back to North West Syria in the areas occupied. The US State Department in a press conference on the 4th of August denied that this constituted a demographic change, but I think that that's very heavily disputed by people on the ground. Certainly the YPGA and the YPGA would dispute that, right? The Kurdish people who have been driven out of some of the areas that Turkey occupies are being replaced by these people that are being moved back in by Turkey. Turkey was of course the entry point for much of the weaponry and many of the people who joined ISIS in Syria. For policy, the publication has estimated that more than 30,000 people cross Turkey along the so-called Jihadi highway.

Later Turkey clamped down on this a bit, but in my coverage of the smuggling of weapons and equipment to ISIS, they were going through Turkey. Turkey was also directly engaged with the defeat of ISIS, right? Turkey's troops for ISIS in parts of northern Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey is also enforced an economic blockade of the autonomous area of northeast Syria, and it's even restricted water flowing into the region, right? So at some point, weapons and humans have flown through Turkey to ISIS, and at this point, water is not flowing in sufficient quantities through Turkey to the autonomous area of North and East Syria. In 2018, Turkey started what's called Operation Olive Branch. It's a military operation in which

Turkish and Syrian National Army forces took control of the city of Afrin. The assault included the alleged use of chemical gas, shelling of civilian areas and shooting of fleeing refugees. Kurdish-shuriant flags, cultural and historical sites were targeted to destroy by Turkish military forces, a hospital was bombed. Reports without borders noted that reporting on the conflict had been hamstrung by the Turkish government, and more than 30,000 Kurdish people have been displaced, and their homes have been taken by those relocated refugees who we spoke about.

Oleh Farms in the area have been seized, and then leased to fund the operation of the pro-Turkish Syrian National Army. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented these forces threatening to be head-curds, and the independent, that's the newspaper, has noted that some of the people fighting alongside the SNA are themselves former carders of ISIS. In his reporting, the independent reported that, and I quote, video posted online shows

three uniform jihadis singing a song in praise of their past battles. And it says, quote, how we were steadfast and grossly, that's in Chechnya, a dougastan, and we took the Torah Borah, that's Torah Borah, it's a cave complex, formally the headquarters of some have been laden, and now a Freen is calling to us, that's the song they were singing, right? They're suggesting that they sort of fight, they's casting this in a long line of these battles that have been fought by these various Islamist groups. Just to be super clear on Islamist versus Islamic, because I don't want people to confuse the two things.

One is a political outlook, right? Being an Islamist is a political outlook. It focuses on, it uses an interpretation of Islam, which is certainly not the mainstream one. It's not my place to say whether or not it's a correct one, but it's certainly not the one that most Muslims in the world agree with. And it's the interpretation of that faith that you'll have seen with groups like ISIS and Al-Qaeda, right?

But that does not say by any means that all Muslim people agree with this because they don't, there are Muslim people, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of them who have been targeted killed by these people, right? And this is one of them to be super clear on that distinction. This hearing observatory for human rights has also noted members of the Turkish fascist group, the Grey Walls fighting alongside alongside the SNA. So, standing in the United States is easy to see this Turkish operation as a consequence of Trump's choice to abandon the SDF and the people who defeated ISIS. And to a large degree it is, but it also represents a long-term goal of Vertigant's Turkey, which is try without success to get support for its plans to build a buffer zone 30 kilometers deep along this border with Syria. And to fill that buffer zone with Syrian

refugees who increasingly end up in Turkey. In particular, Turkey has objected to plans by the United States to train and equip a 30,000 person strong border force. This went through several different naming iterations, so it's not really matter to the board of force, right? Before the attack, Russian military officials propose handing over a freeing to Assad as a compromise. So we haven't talked about Russia, much. Robert talks about this in his series, but Russia is in Syria as an ally of the Assad regime, and it has sort of acted as a go-between between the SDF and the Assad regime, and it has sort of acted as go between the SDF and the Assad regime and it has proposed in this instance that the SDF withdraw from a frame which is the area that Turkey invaded in Operation Olive Branch in 2018 and it said if you guys pull out and you

hand it over to Assad, the Turks won't invade. They won't directly take on Assad like that. The SDF refused, the authorities are in a very tense relationship with Damascus, which is where Bashar on the sides government is based, right? They've both received aid from them. I've been attacked by them. After they rebounded by the US and Russia, and they knew that Turkey, Russia was aware that Turkey had plans to invade, right? And obviously didn't do anything to stop it. So these SDF felt that they were banned by the US

and Russia with very good reason to feel that way. The A and ES scrambled to find new allies to protect them, and they found one in the Assad government. This wasn't like, I don't think, a choice that they wanted to make, but I think the rest of the world didn't leave them any options. So I'm quoting here from most loomabidi, the SDF's commander in chief, he wrote an op-ed and foreign policy. It'll be linked in our sources at the end of the month.

If we have to choose between compromise and genocide, we will choose our people," he said. Numerous fighters who fought ISIS and foreign volunteers have died in a frame. So in that initial operation, right, when the SDF opposed Turkish invasion, Numerous people died. One of them was a Britain-Nadean-Anna Campbell. She went by Helene Kerakogs. I might have felt that pronunciation, but not by tend to be disrespectful that I have. She was killed by Turkish Michelin Afreen. Her father, Durk Campbell,

has been campaigning ever since to have his daughters remain returned. His case remains with the courts and has been entirely crowdfunded. He submitted a claim to the European Court of Human Rights after hearing nothing from the Turkish courts. When he did that, the Turkish courts picked up the case that he'd submitted there. You can also find a link to this in the sources, but it's crowdjustice.com, slash case, slash help, hyphen, bring, hyphen, and hyphen home. They've raised all the money they need at the

moment, but doubtless they will need more in the future. They've raised all the money they need at the moment, but doubtless, they will need more in the future. So where does all this leave the people of North and East Syria, right? These are people who have been impacted by the territorial caliph of the Islamic state and all the horrific things that people will be aware of happen there. They're people who have successfully fought for and achieved their freedom, only to be attacked by another state. And they are people who have suffered the same earthquake that Turkey suffered

in February of this year, 2023, 4,000 people died in a freeing, which is a city which is now occupied by Turkish and SNA troops. Turkey pushed a little bit further east in Operation Quote Peace Spring a year after Olive Branch. And currently Turkey is cutting water flow to pumping stations, it controls the feed water to the area. It combines with the impact of the earthquake and the ongoing burden of controlling one of the largest prisons in Earth, which is the our whole prison, which holds the majority of the ISIS fighters and their families who were not

either killed or returned to the states from which they came. And we'll have more on the Alholt prison next week. There's infighting between militias in the Turkish areas, which obviously impact Turkish controlled areas. Obviously, that impacts civilians, this arbitrary arrest. There's the increasing Turkification of areas like a freeing, including instruction in the Turkish language, Lake Cherine said earlier. One of the things that's integral to maintaining national identity is education. In my experience studying the Catalan identity,

getting education in Catalan was vital to fermenting and continuing Catalan identity. Catalan identity is not national in the same way. The identity in the AANES, I guess, is not national, but this Turkification, the flying of Turkish flags above buildings which are not military buildings, above hospitals, and that kind of thing again, is a marginalization of the people who already live there and who have lived there for a long time. SDF guerrilla units like Rath of Olives and a free liberation front are involved in fighting with a Syrian National Army and that fighting kills civilians, right, and throughout a free and there have been things like car bombs.

The free liberation front goes about HRE from the Kurdish initials, right? And they've carried out some attacks on SNA militias in the last few days. You can often see videos of those online, if it's the sort of thing you like to see. There are still land mines that kill civilians in the area, and there are still ISIS sleeper cells bombing and killing people. Last week, the autonomous administration of North and East Syria responded to Turkey's ongoing aggression by shooting a statement claiming Turkey's operations forcing the SDF to divert personnel away from countering ISIS and threatening the stability of the

area. Obviously, this is all after an earthquake which called 4,000 people in a friend. People that have access to as many hospitals there, for instance, not some still have to travel to Turkey to get cancer treatment. So is this leaves? The people of North and East Syrian in a very precarious situation, in which they are now left largely without the solidarity that they experience when they were fighting ISIS. And it's very difficult, just like in so many cases, I feel this way about the M.R.2 to see the US and Europe expressing solidarity and solidarity in the form of lethal aid, solidarity in the form of surface-to-web missiles and tanks and rifles and bulletproof deaths and

medical aid and all the things that you need to sustain a fight to Ukraine. And they should. They should do that. I'm not saying for a moment that they shouldn't, right? Ukraine has been invaded by a much bigger and more powerful military and it has every right to defend itself. And I'm glad that we're helping. But I wish that we would help other people too, especially people who we have sort of

made promises to that we've not kept or people who we've encouraged to believe. In the case of Myanmar, they have a right to a better life and then when they decided to defend that we don't stand behind them. So yeah, that's my episode. Sorry for the weird juxtaposition of me doing the last part scripted, but somebody outside is drilling through my phone cable. So yeah, thank you for joining me. but somebody outside is drilling through my phone cable. So yeah, thank you for joining me. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It could happen here as a production of CoolZone Media. For more podcasts from CoolZone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the I Heart radio app, Apple Podcasts, 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. 911, what's your emergency? It's a nightmare we could never have imagined. And a killer who is still on the loose. In the 1980s, we're in high school losing friends, teachers, and community members. We weren't safe anywhere.

Would we be next? It was getting harder and harder to live in Mompine. Listen to the murder years on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. The True Crime Podcast, Sacred Scandal, returns for a second season to investigate a led sexual abuse at Mexico's La Luz del Mundo Mega Church. Journalist Robert Garza explores survivor stories of pure evil experiences at the hands of a self-proclaimed apostle who is now behind bars.

I remember as a little girl being groomed to be his concubine, that's how I was raised. It is not wrong if you take your clothes off for the impossible. Listen to Sacred Scandal on the IHort Radio App Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up? This iced tea was something I know you're gonna want to hear. In my new podcast, iced tea's daily game, I'll be dropping some daily wisdom and personal insight that I believe is essential to achieving success in business, love, life, hustling, whatever.

I'll be coming to you every single weekday with a fresh new quote that speaks directly to me and I hope to you as well. In five minutes or less, I'll break down why these words matter and reveal personal stories and experiences that show them in action in my life. My goal is to inspire all of you out there to achieve success and happiness, whatever that means to you. So start every week day morning with me and get inspired. Listen to IEC's Daily Game every weekday morning with me and get inspired. Listen to IEC's daily game every weekday

on the I Heart Radio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts and start your morning with me.