It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 150

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Sources can be found in the descriptions of each individual episode. What’s the Matter With Boeing, Pt. 1: Shareholders Don't Build Airplanes What’s the Matter With Boeing, Pt. 2: The Plane That’s Trying to Murders You Disaster Relief, Survival & Hurricane Helene Vance & Walz Become Friends During Debate James' Trip To The Darién Gap 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.

Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to Gracias Come Again,

a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us,

and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia. And that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry, submissions close on December 8th.

Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end

of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything. Call Zone Media. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here. And I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been

listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Neo Wong. This is a story about Boeing. I'm going to lay my cards on the table from the start. I'm from Chicago, but my family is from Seattle. Some of my aunts and uncles worked for Boeing in the 80s on the airline side.

Some of our closest family friends worked there for much, much longer than that. the airline side. Some of our closest family friends worked there for much, much longer than that. I grew up on the periphery of this industry, and I have never seen the people in it and the people who have left as angry as they are now. People are pissed, and they should be. In the last six years, Boeing has killed 346 people. In the years to come, they may well kill more. And not a single one of them had to die this is how it happened what is boeing the short answer obviously is that it's a company that makes both civilian and military airplanes it also does some other things including working on space travel but that's not our immediate concern here the, however, and it's the long answer that we need,

is that Boeing is the poster child for the post-World War II labor-corporate militarist alliance. Boeing itself was a sometimes uneasy alliance of workers, engineers, and the army that made civilian and military airplanes. This is also not a terrible description of the entirety of the post-war United States, with the proviso that the airplanes the U.S. was making were dropping bombs at Vietnam. The unwinding of Boeing that we're all watching today, as doors fall off of planes and more and more are grounded, is the unwinding of that America. Here, I turn to the anthropologist David Graeber from his book, The Utopia of Rules. Quote, I think what happened is best considered as a kind of shift in class allegiances on the

part of the managerial staff of major corporations, from an uneasy de facto alliance with their own workers to one with investors. As John Kenneth Galbraith long ago pointed out, if you create an organization geared to produce perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft fuselages, those who make it up will, if left with their own devices, tend to concentrate their efforts on producing more and better perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft fuselages, rather than thinking primarily of what will make the most money for shareholders. What's more, since for most of the 20th century, a job in a large bureaucratic mega-firm meant a lifetime promise of employment, everyone involved in the process, managers and workers alike, tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard, over and against meddling owners and investors.

This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name. It's called corporatism. One mustn't romanticize it. It was, among other things, the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had interest in common, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic holes, and that finances were an alien parasitic force and drove them to their ultimate murderous extreme. Even in its more benign social democratic versions in America or Europe, the attendant politics often came tinged with chauvinism, but they also ensured that the investor class was

always seen as, to some extent, outsiders, against whom white collar and blue collar workers could be considered, at least to some degree, to be in a united common front. Now, as a product of the united front between workers and managers, the corporatist system of the post-war era had a very different conception of what a corporation is. It was a social entity composed of a variety of classes and had an obligation to take care of them. It had an obligation to its workers, to its engineers, to its customers, and even to its country by absorbing unions into the corporate system. The system itself had been forced to adapt a more sociological self-conception that vastly differed from the ways corporations both view themselves and behave today.

As Graeber notes, this class coalition largely wrote capitalists out of the equation, reducing them to mere holders of stock, not managers. In Boeing's case, those managers were engineers at basically all levels of the company. Now, we must note here that in the post-World War II era, engineers were extremely powerful. And this is not just true of capitalist nations. So, the US, to some extent, had an early start on the power of engineers in the running of New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Engineers are powerful in communist countries as well, and it's true in quasi-socialist countries that had just liberated themselves from the old European empires. These engineers were both extremely well-paid and very influential everywhere. You can find them from Belgium to Peru. And the only real difference is whether they were

trained by the Americans or the Soviets. Now, the fact that you, the listener, are not reporting to an engineer right now at your job is a sign that they didn't exactly hold on to power. In fact, the last vestiges of this class of extremely powerful engineers aren't really even in Boeing at all. The most prominent remain of the great engineering international is Xi Jinping, who is part of a class in China known as the Red Engineers. If you want to know more about the Red Engineers, we unfortunately do not have time to really go into them here, but see Joel Andreas's book, Rise of the Red Engineers, for the most famous treatment of them. Now, in China, the Red Engineers effectively seized control of the state and were the kind of second generation that ruled back the social changes of the revolution from the Maoist period.

In the US, the story is a bit more complicated. In some places, the engineers as a class were rolled up and brutally destroyed in a war with a newly ascendant finance class. In others, engineers, feeling the disciplining effects of the market, effectively engineered their own destruction. The latter, engineers leading the company to financial ruin, is, to some extent, the story of Boeing. But to get there, we need to take a look at how the worker management alliance Graeber described came apart. I have talked at length on this show about the economic crisis of the 70s, in which everything, the entire consensus that had held the post-war era together, fell apart. One of the key elements is that in the 1970s, manufacturing becomes zero-sum. If manufacturing

output increases in one country, it can largely only come at the expense of production somewhere else. This is the product of a general crisis of structural overproduction and structural underconsumption. This meant that it was no longer possible to incorporate everyone into the capitalist welfare system while also retaining corporate profits. And so someone was going to have to lose everything. It was either going to be the capitalists or the workers, and the people who lost everything, as I think we're all aware living in the world that we do now, were the workers whose power was systematically destroyed. But that largely, the story of the destruction of unions and destruction of the left more broadly, is a story for another day. For our purposes, the important class that was

destroyed in the period of the 70s is the class of managerial engineers. And these engineers were destroyed by a takeover of corporate America by the shareholders the Corporatist Alliance had previously held at bay. The takeover of corporate America by finance ghouls had two mechanisms. The leveraged buyout, better known as corporate rating, which was carried out by people like Michael Milken, and the internal movement of executives from inside the corporations themselves, led by people like Jack Welsh. We will meet both of these people in detail later in the story. But the details of the process of how exactly the finance schools came to control corporate America turn out to be extremely important because Boeing is destroyed by both of the two mechanisms

coming together at the same time. Now, as the 80s dawned, the world lived in fear of a new kind of financial device, the leveraged buyout. The exact mechanisms of the leveraged buyout are slightly complicated, but the short version is that Michael Milken, a bond salesman who I eventually am going to do a Fall Behind the Bastards episode on because, oh my god, is he evil and there simply is not space to elaborate on all the stuff that he did here, including the stuff that eventually is going to send him to prison, figured out a way for a person or a group to, with very little actual cash on hand, to very quickly take on an unbelievable amount of debt, use it to buy a company, and then sell that company for parts to pay back the debt, pocketing the difference as profit. This was an instant existential danger to a corporate America. Previously, corporate takeovers were extremely difficult. Attempting to get $200 million to buy a company

required you to have $200 million on hand. But now, with the leveraged buyout, a group of yahoos with a tiny amount of money could simply buy a company for higher than its stock price, loot it for parts, and destroy it. This completely changed the balance of power between shareholders and corporations. One of the best accounts of this era is from the anthropologist Karen Ho in her book Liquidated in Ethnography of Wall Street. The book was a product of the fieldwork she did at a Wall Street investment bank in the 90s, and I really cannot emphasize this book enough. This book is incredible. Everyone should read it. It is a book that genuinely changed my life.

And one of the things that she talks about is this moment the moment of leverage buyouts and the way that it is constantly brought up by the people that she is working with at this bank when she's doing her when she's doing her anthropological field work everyone she talks to talks about this moment where the corporate raiders really got going as the moment the shareholder revolution began now we talked earlier about how in post-war america the corporation was a social entity with responsibilities to its workers and country for the shareholders running the new shareholder revolution corporations had exactly one job getting them more money to raise stock prices. They called this shareholder value. And now the disciples of shareholder value were able to wield the ability to simply

buy companies out wholesale and bend them to the ends of shareholder value directly. This is what is known as the shareholder revolution. Now, do you know what else is a revolution in the ways that we all experience capitalism and mass culture at our jobs? It is the products and services that support this podcast. We're back. we're back the first thing that the corporate raiders and the disciples of shareholder value did when they started to take over companies was look at the balance sheets of a company and destroy everything that didn't immediately look to the wall street ghouls like they made money now what are the assets on a balance sheet that do not immediately increase stock price? Because again, they look like costs, right? The two assets that don't immediately

contribute are funds allocated for research and development and pensions. The darlings of the workers and engineers who comprise the previous corporatist regimes. Mass layoffs followed. Companies were reduced to debt financing mechanisms for the corporate raiders who took on the debt to acquire them. Worse still, as Karen Ho observes, even companies ran by the old elite were forced to embrace the same methods the raiders were using because the only way to keep the raiders from buying your company was by increasing your stock price. And the only way to keep the raiders from buying your company was by increasing your stock price. And the only way to increase your stock price was to appease the shareholder value fanatics.

Control of corporate America had shifted from the old managerial worker alliance to the new shareholder value financiers. now the problem with these shareholder value people running companies is that they are viscerally physically incapable of long-term planning don't take my word for it here's karen ho quote to actualize their central identity as being immediately responsive to their own changing relationship with the market including employees products, products, and so on, their strategy is, in a sense, to have no strategy. Ironically, having no long-term strategy is contradictory and potentially self-defeating, in that investment banks often find themselves making drastic changes only to realize months or weeks later that those changes were unnecessary, premature, and extremely costly. For example, in chapter 5, I describe how investment bankers,

in part because of their access to sensitive proprietary information, are not only fired in an instant but must leave the physical premises of the building within 15 to 30 minutes. Given how crucial the control of knowledge and the protection of inside information are for Wall Street investment banks, it seems self-defeating that they do not place any premium on loyalty, despite the fact that firms try, above all, to enforce secrecy, they accept and maintain this volatility and revolving door policy. To make this clear, what Karen Ho is describing is that investment banks, on the one hand, turn over like a third of their staff every six months, and yet also they are so reliant on the

secrecy of this proprietary information that they're using to make their investment decisions that they are kicking the people they are firing out of the building in like 15 minutes. So they don't have time to plan or leak information. But again, they're also just firing these people en masse. So they're defeating the entire point of their operations. These people cannot plan ahead. of their operations. These people cannot plan ahead. And the reason that they cannot plan ahead isn't just that they're sort of like naked disciples

of pure increase in stock price. What Liquidated describes is that these people believe that they are effectively constantly reacting to near instantaneous market changes, right? They can't sort of make any kind of long-term plan because the market is the thing that's making the plan, like the sort of mythical abstraction of the market

is what is doing all of the actual allocations. So they just have to sort of like sit there and have no plan and quote-unquote respond to what the market is doing. Now, large corporations have always, to some extent, acted as long-term planning engines, because they have to. Corporations have to do things like research and development, they have to plan product lines,

they have to make long-term decisions about resource allocation. The shareholder value people are incapable of giving a shit about any of this, because all they care about is immediate stock price movement because they think that immediate stock price movement reflects the will of the great efficiency planning engine of the market and you can begin to see here why it would be a bad idea if these people who literally cannot create long-term plans did something like for example take control of the world's largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft now the shareholder value people also believe that

people are effectively interchangeable and they believe this because and this is a very key part of why the shareholder value people and why these sort of finance people have reshaped the world the way they do. They have reshaped the world in their own image. And all of these sort of investment bankers are interchangeable, right? All of these fucking bankers are fired all of the time and they move from firm to firm and it is fine for them. But the thing is, you can't do this with the design of your entire aircraft. Because unlike in finance, where every single one of these clowns is really just a replacement level bozo whose qualifications are being able to stumble through the chain

rule and vaguely remember calculus, kiss ass, and play golf, aerospace engineers actually do a difficult job. And it requires extraordinarily large bodies of embedded knowledge to do this job correctly now bringing in a bunch of people who think you can just fucking replace aerospace engineers will have no negative influences on boeing in the future pay no attention to the man behind the mirror everything is fine do you know what else is fine it is the products and services that support this podcast. And we are back. The shareholder value fanatics,

the investors who've now taken control of corporate America, also believe that mass firings make companies more valuable because it makes them more efficient. They believe that offshoring makes a company more valuable because it makes it more efficient. It doesn't actually matter what the effect these moves have on the company and its ability to produce products and its ability to produce money. the company and its ability to produce products and its ability to produce money, it doesn't matter at all because that's how the people who can control stock prices by buying the stocks think the world works. And so if you do these things, the stock price will go up. All quote unquote creating shareholder value means is convincing a bunch of dipshit quants

working 120 hours a week that your company is valuable so they buy it for a higher price. And these are the people who reshape American capitalism to their whims. Now, importantly for our story, they're also the people who ran the second phase of the corporate rating era, the mergers and acquisitions boom. Through the 90s, and really to this day, Wall Street bankers began to encourage companies to buy out other companies as a mechanism of raising their stock price. This is, you know, the acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions, they also heavily push merging companies together. In the 90s, the buzzword behind this was quote unquote synergy. Buying companies or

merging companies could quote leverage synergies between companies to grow shareholder value. Outside of the shareholder value fantasy land, most of these mergers and acquisitions either did nothing to help the company if the acquisitions were small or were a complete disaster that destroyed both companies. The bankers who orchestrated these mergers and acquisitions didn't give a shit though, because they got paid on commission. It did not matter to them what happened afterwards. All that matters is that the deal goes through. And this is where we return to Boeing. Because in 1997, Boeing made an acquisition that would fuck the company forever. They bought one of their

longtime rivals, an aircraft company known as McDonnell Douglas. Now, hitherto, Boeing had been relatively insulated from the shareholder revolution. McDonnell Douglas, however, was not. Its CEO was a man with the incredible name Harry Stonecipher. Stonecipher is different from most aerospace executives because he wasn't a McDonnell Douglas corporate man. He came from Jack Welch's General Electric. And it's here we need to introduce the other mechanism through which the shareholder revolution was realized. A new breed of CEOs led by the man himself, Jack Welch. a new breed of CEOs led by the man himself, Jack Welsh. Now, we are not going to spend an enormous amount of time talking about Jack Welsh in this episode because Hit Cool Zone Media Podcast Behind the Basserts has three hours of episode about this man, which you should go listen to.

They're good. The short version of it that we're going to give here is that Jack Welsh is the man who invented the bass layoff. He was one of the first CEOs to figure out that, again, you could raise stock prices by selling off profitable divisions and firing workers who were making the company money because shareholders are ideologically driven maniacs who would believe Welch's manipulated balance sheets that showed the company was doing better than ever, even as it sold off all of its assets. He was also one of the first people to start practicing mass outsourcing, replacing workers directly employed by General Electric with contractors. Soon, he was outsourcing entire divisions. Offshoring followed. Welsh moved jobs from highly paid and highly trained union

employees in the US to ununionized workers in places like India and Mexico. I think people generally kind of understand that offshoring lowers quality, but why does that actually happen? It's not about something like the natural skill of the workers, which is the way it can kind of be presented in these sort of nationalist accounts. It is about the level of violence that can be inflicted on people. In places like India and Mexico and China, there is an extraordinary amount of violence that can be inflicted on the working class. And because of this violence, because of their ability to destroy unions, because of their ability to force people into poverty by taking their land,

people get paid less money to work faster. And those people who are being paid less money to work faster with worse training are going to be worse at a job than people who are paid more to do it better slower. And Jack Welch wants this. He wants to sell shitty low-cost products because they're cheaper to make than anything that actually works. The long-term consequences of this are a disaster. Welch drove General Electric, one of the greatest engines of American capitalism for a century, into the ground. Even after a massive government bailout in 2008, it barely exists today. Harry Stonecipher, the CEO of the company Boeing was about to buy, said this about Jack Welch, quote quote certainly jack welch is one of the great leaders

in my mind and of course he was selected as ceo of the century by fortune magazine a couple years ago and of course about 20 years ago that same magazine coined the phrase neutron jack and of course they vilified him at every turn neutron jack by the way refers to like a neutron bomb because effectively what he was doing was firing all the workers and leaving only the sort of like physical capital assets like leaving all the machines intact which is what a neutron bomb is supposed to do let's go back to the quote quote jack had a style that was one of trying to change the environment not to just deal with the environment so he inspired people so he certainly won so stone cipher is a disciple of Welch.

And he immediately starts running the Jack Welch playbook. And lo and behold, McDonnell Douglas was failing when Boeing bought it for $14 billion. And again, like Boeing at this point controls like 65% of the commercial aviation market. McDonnell Douglas controls like five, right? So this should have been like Goliath eating Davidid for breakfast but the merger didn't go as planned instead of the massive boeing running the tiny mcdonald

douglas mcdonald douglas executives effectively hijacked boeing and installed themselves in positions of power stone cypher and his cadre of shareholder value fanatics began to consolidate their position and drive out the previous Boeing regime. The capstone of this project was moving Boeing headquarters from Seattle, where it had been since William E. Boeing founded the company in 1916, to Chicago as a way to shift the physical center of power of the company away from Boeing's engineers and workers and towards the McDonnell Douglas finance schools. Then they began to run the Jack Welch playbook on Boeing in earnest. Every single account of Stonecipher's takeover that I've written quotes this exact same line. Quote, when people say I

changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. And what Stonecipher is really talking about here, and what everyone is really saying when they talk about, you know, the culture shift of Boeing in this period, what this really is, is a change in the balance of powers between the engineers and workers who actually make the planes and the finance ghouls who own the company. Stonecipher wanted to crush the engineers and workers so he could run Boeing like a business. Stone Cipher wanted to crush the engineers and workers so he could run Boeing like a business. And when he says like a business, he doesn't actually mean run it like a business. He means run the company like a finance guy. And finance guys don't build planes, which is what Boeing

had previously been doing. Finance guys create shareholder value, which is to say that they make stock prices go up. So if you're just trying to raise stock prices, you don't actually need to make an airplane. You can outsource the different parts of building the airplane to a bunch of random shops around the world, who work extremely fast, don't have much of an idea of what they're doing, and do a terrible job. Long term, of course, this is an absolute disaster. There are very good reasons to keep the production line for something as complicated as commercial aircraft in-house. Efficiency, consolidation of knowledge, quality control, etc.

But outsourcing is great for the stock price. And it's the Jack Welch model. Selling shitty products for cheap works, kind of, if you're General Electric making a light bulb. But when Boeing uses these same principles to build an aircraft, people begin to die. And in the next episode, we are going to tell that story. How Boeing killed 346 people. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about.

It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.

This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot.

Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit. The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Black Lit on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The 2025 iHeart Podcast Awards

are coming. This is the chance to nominate your podcast for the industry's biggest award. Submit your podcast for nomination now at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. But hurry,

submissions close on December 8th. Hey, you've been doing all that talking. It's time to get rewarded for it. Submit your podcast today at iHeart.com slash podcast awards. That's iHeart.com slash podcast awards. Welcome to A Cadapte Gear, a podcast about things happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Mio Wong. When we last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1990s and bought out its rival, McDonnell Douglas. After which, McDonnell Douglas' CEO and Jack Welch disciple, Harry Stonecipher, effectively launched an administrative coup and seized control of the company. Now, Stonecipher wasn't able to hold on to power for

long because he was very quickly forced to resign after he had what CNN describes as a, quote, improper relationship with a female executive. So things are going great for everyone. I'm realizing reading the script that I should mention, it wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that he was having a relationship with one of his subordinates, which is also not great, but it, yeah, it wasn't good. And he gets kicked out almost immediately. But by the time he was forced out, his model for how Boeing should work going forward, you know, the layoffs, the outsourcing, slashing the research and development budget, and above all, taking power from engineers and giving it

to the shareholder value fanatics had already been embedded at the core of Boeing's management structure. Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in Quartz. Two decades on, perhaps the most lasting consequence of the change in culture has been in Boeing's approach to building aircraft. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development. Oh boy, did it not. Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled. Boeing would not actually announce even the plans for a new plane until 2003 with the 787 Dreamliner. Throughout this time, Boeing was led by its first chairman without a

traditional aviation background, James McNary. McNeary had instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric. Now, he was following a tried and tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the 737, which had become the victim of its own success. In its five-decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more than 10,000 of the plane, an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane and replacing it with the next big thing, Boeing opted to keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers. And this is how you get planes falling out of the sky. Instead of, you know, doing the normal thing, which is putting

money into building a new airplane, which is, you know, expensive in the short run. And again, remember that the finance schools are now in charge. For these people, the only thing that exists is the short run and immediate stock price. So instead of doing that, management went, eh, we already have this plane we first designed in the fucking 60s. Let's keep modifying that. And this is going to kill an extremely large number of people. Now, the 737,

again, came out originally in 1967. In the 2000s, in the century, the millennia, the 2000s, Boeing begins to design a new version of this plane from the last millennium called the 737 MAX. For shareholders, again, this is a great idea. It's not just that, you know, building new planes is expensive and this is cheaper because you're not spending the money

on building a new plane. There's a bunch of other advantages for boeing for this and one of the biggest is that you can tell everyone from you know the faa to the airline to the pilots that hey this is just a regular 737 it's it's just the same plane you don't need to like retrain your pilots to learn how our new systems work because there's really like no new systems and that you know that costs money so they don't want to do it you don't need to have the faa do the regulatory shit they would do for a new plane or even like a substantial change to like the original plane which you know again costs money and time that boeing does not want to you know do the problem is that you know i i tried to find a sort of delicate way to say this and then I realized you simply should not do it like that.

The problem is that the 737 MAX is a plane that is trying to kill you. If you know anything about this story, you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is trying to kill you, I'm talking about the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System, or MCAS, the piece of software that directly caused the crashes. And to some extent, I am talking about MCcast uh we'll we'll get into it in a second it absolutely did kill all those people but i think there's a problem with a lot of the way the story has been covered which is that a lot of the coverage of this has been obsessively focused on the software problem specifically on mcast and i understand why people focus on the software it is the immediate cause of the crash but the real problem with the 737 max is that the actual physical plane is also trying to kill you and the software mcast was developed to again stop the

plane from trying to kill you now that software is also trying to kill you, but both the software and the physical plane are trying to murder you. So, you know, what do I mean when I say the physical plane is trying to kill you? For this, I'm going to turn to an actual engineer and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably the best piece in the technical details of this whole problem that I've seen for IEEE spectrum. IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They know what they're talking about. Spectrum's their magazine. So the initial problem, as Travis explains, was this. The original 737 was designed

for 1960s engines. Modern airplanes have way bigger engines because due to a bunch of engineering stuff that we're not going to get into here, large engines are more efficient than small engines. And this is a huge deal for aircraft, which consume unbelievably large quantities of extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but again expensive, option would have been to design a new aircraft to replace the 737 that is actually designed to design a new aircraft to replace the 737 that

is actually designed to accommodate the new giant engines the cheapskate option would be to just uh bolt the new giant engines onto the old plane design now the problem is that the only way to do this is to move the engines forward the the engines on the 737 are, you know, under the wing, which is like the normal thing, but the engines would no longer fit under the wing because they were too large. And moving the engines forward changes where the thrust is coming from. Here's Travis, quote, now when pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this, as you might expect, is not good. It is

quite bad. I mean, airplanes, and Travis talks about this, but airplanes do kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane does it way, way more than it's supposed to. So, here's where things, unfortunately, get a bit technical. So, the nose going up increases something called the angle

of attack. I'm going to read a description of this. Fully understanding exactly how the angle of attack works is not enormously important to understanding the story, but you know, the crux of the story is angle of attack sensor is not working, so we have to explain it a little bit.

Quote, the angle of attack is the angle between the wings and the airflow over the wings so if you want to understand exactly what this is go read the piece the important thing for our purposes is that if the angle of attack gets too high right if the plane's sort of level and it's flying normally the angle of attack is like zero but the angle of attack can get higher as like you know if you're not flying like level and if the angle of attack is like zero, but the angle of attack can get higher as like, you know, if you're not flying like level. And if the angle of attack gets too high, the plane stalls. And this is one of the ways you crash a plane.

Worse still, in the 737 MAX, basically the engine casings themselves can, at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produce lift. of attack work as a wing and produce lift. And the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing center of lift, meaning the engine casings will cause the 737 at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to go further into the stall. This is called, quote, dynamic instability, and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic, fighter jets, are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me try to kind of like explain the sort of crux of this. Well, A, they've managed to position the engines in such a way that the engines can act as a wing, which is insane. And B, once you get to a high enough angle of attack, which again, the higher the angle of attack you're at, the more risk you're at of stalling,

the plane starts trying to kill you by making the angle of attack increase. It is a feedback loop that means when you start to stall, the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are not supposed to do this. Again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, quote, this is called dynamic instability, and the only airplanes which exhibit this characteristic, fighter jets are also fitted with ejector seats. So, again, this is a thing that is dangerous enough

that, again, like, regular civilian airplanes are not supposed to do this. They do it on fighter jets because fighter jets are doing things that planes aren't supposed to do. And you can leave the plane if it fucks up and does something like this? And the worst part about this is that you can kick off this problem by trying to get the plane going faster, but while it's going slow, what part of flying a plane does it start slow, is kind of at a high angle of attack, and then has to go faster? Oh, wait, takeoff! The thing you have to do every single time you fly. This is fucking

batshit. No one would intentionally design a new airliner like this, right? No one. Not even modern, I mean, Boeing's other airplanes, even the modern ones, even the Dreamliner, doesn't fucking do this. It's completely nuts.

The only way that you could get something like this is as a pure product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines onto a plane from the 60s. Because you are too cheap to try to do anything new. But you know who isn't afraid of doing new things? It's the products and services that support this podcast. We've never gotten a Boeing ad, but if it was going to happen, I guess it'd probably happen now. Dear God.

But instead of, you know, dealing with this problem by either making a new fucking plane or figuring out some way to not have the engines literally become wings. Boeing was like, eh, fuck it. We'll just build some software that pushes the plane's nose down if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction to hearing, let's put software on the plane that makes it fly towards the ground is, wait, that's a terrible idea. You have the right idea. These people did not have the right idea.

But stunningly, there's like a version of this system that isn't like lethally unsafe. But, comma, Boeing did not design a version of this that is even remotely safe. I don't know if that's more egregious than designing an aircraft that has dynamic instability, but the way they implement this is egregious. They decided, in their infinite wisdom, that the entire system would work on a single sensor.

And we need to note before we start this, so this is, we're going to be talking about angled attack sensors. They're kind of just like pieces of metal that stick out the side of the plane and they break a lot and they break a lot because flying a plane is like the worst thing you can possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't involve leaving the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean yeah so here's from the seattle times which is the old times actually because you

know boeing has traditionally been in seattle like does a lot of very, very good coverage on this. They have good sources. Yeah. From the Seattle Times. Quote, the most controversial deal of the MCAS design has been the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor. Of both of the deadly flights, everything started with a faulty sensor. In the second crash in Ethiopia, the data trace strongly suggests that the sensor was destroyed in an instant, likely by a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one on either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially after discarding the G-Force as a trigger, use both angle of attack

sensors? The thinking was that requiring input from two angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed, the system would not function. Now, the article goes on to talk about how their justification for why they only use one sensor. And, you know, they talked about the safety and simplicity of not wanting to add complexity to a system. You know, because if you have two things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind of sounds reasonable at first glance. But first off, if your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball into stalling, and this software system to make it not do that is so important you can't risk it not being on if one of the two sensors breaks, then maybe you shouldn't have designed your plane like this. And second, this entire system violates every design principle that you see in sort of like Boeing's good aircraft design for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go back to that Spectrum article because it lays out how this kind of thing

is supposed to work. Quote, there were two sets of angle of attack sensors and two sets of pitot tubes, one on either side of the fuselage. Normal usage is to have the set on the pilot's side feed the instruments to the pilot's side, and the set on the co-pilot's side feed the instrument to the co-pilot's side. That gives a state of natural redundancy in instrumentation that can be easily cross-checked by either pilot. If the co-pilot thinks his airspeed indicator is acting up, he can look over at the pilot's airspeed indicator

and see if it agrees. If not, both pilot and co-pilot can engage in a bit of triage to determine which instrument is profane and which is sacred. Now, this is great engineering, right? It is simple, it is redundant, and it allows humans to sort out issues. You know, and like, this is a product of what aerospace engineering used to be, you know, and we still have this in the world. But the fact that there are a bunch of very, very good engineers who have spent an enormously long time trying to work out how this kind of stuff should work. Modern Boeing was like, well, you know, instead of our system where multiple sensors can be cross-referenced by pilots, you know, and the pilots can then disable the system. Fuck that. What if we instead use a single sensor that can't be overridden? This is a complete violation of Boeing design principle. The thing about Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed to be like automated shit running in the background that

pilots don't know about or don't know how to turn off. The pilot is supposed to be in complete control of the plane. know the old joke and i mean i remember hearing this like every once in a while like when i was a kid was that airbus planes which you know airbus obviously is a rival to boeing airbus planes were quote die by wire because you know they didn't give you control the documentary that frontline did called boeing's fatal flaw which i didn't really use as a source for this but this is the one part that I remember from when I watched this in 2019 about the crash described how pilots trusted that

they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing so there would be a way to kill the system and again that's something I remember from talking to people growing up you know so these pilots figured that there would be a way to kill the system that was forcing the plane down and they were trying to find it they were trying to figure out how to turn

the system off in the manual when they died because they didn't realize the plane wasn't designed by boeing engineers it was designed by boeing shareholders going back to the process on how this was added the the stated reason for again why you don't want a second sensor is that it in theory like adds complexity by adding a second sensor but you know that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering of like of engineering in general but also like from the perspective of the engineering that the rest of the plane works on right the rest of the plane works on different principles than this and it works well and it's something that travis describes as being a product of the

destruction of bowie's collective knowledge base but something i i don't know i don't know to what extent travis he's kind of writing about this but i'm not sure that a lot of the people writing about this like understand that like this was the point right destroying this kind of collective knowledge this is something that was done deliberately, right? This was the inevitable sort of product of Boeing management trying to make the company quote-unquote run like a business. They were trying to destroy the interpersonal bonds that create this system of collective knowledge, and they were trying to take power out of the hands of people who had that collective knowledge and put it into the hands of people who you could pay for really cheap and exploit more, who did not have access to that

kind of information, right? This is a case for like, yeah, you're putting power in the hands of software engineers instead of sort of aviation engineers. Speaking of, I don't know, taking power out of the hands of the consumer and giving it to a corporation, here's ads. Now, if you're trying to make the company, quote-unquote, run like a business, what else would you do? Oh, yeah, you would not tell the pilots about this new system that you've added to your airplane because if you talk about the system everyone from you know the faa to the airlines the pilots unions might realize that this is not the same plane this is 737 and that would require all sorts of stuff like again recertifying the plane trading pilots on simulators of your new plane which is

not the old plane it requires all sorts of stuff that would have very well could have prevented these crashes but you know that stuff all costs money and boeing doesn't fucking want to spend money trying to make sure that its planes don't crash so when they moved on to this version of like the 737 MAX, right? Pilots famously got, I think, half an hour of iPad training and that, or maybe it might've been an hour of iPad training. And that training that they got on their iPad, again, not on a simulator, didn't even have any information about the MCAS system that killed all these people. And the product of this was that on October 29th, 2019, a 737 MAX flying from Jakarta crashed as the pilot was, you know, physically unable to fight the control stick.

And that's another thing that's going on with this, you know, with his decision to put power in the hands of software and not pilots, is that MCAS is also physically exerting control over the pilot stick and these people are trying to fight it and they're not able to fight it enough to stop the plane from tipping down and crashing into the ground and boeing runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this pilot who was not white for this error to try to you know cover up the fact that they fucking did this and this maybe would have worked except a few months later ethiopia air flight 302 went down and also killed everyone on board and you know all told this plane the boeing

737 max killed 346 people the seattle times which broke a lot of the initial story, said, quote, A variety of employees have described internal pressure to advance the MAX to completion as Boeing hurried to catch up with the hot-selling A320 from rival Airbus. Mark Rabin, an engineer who did flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said there was always talk about how delays of even one day can cost substantial amounts meanwhile staff were expected to stay in line rabin said it was all about loyalty rabin said i had managers tell me don't rock the boat you don't want to be upsetting

executives and i find this very funny because again part of the whole jack welch strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to like boeing as a company but you have to be loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives you know have have all of the power in this company and they want to make sure they can just wring out every single last drop of profit and if you upset them they're going to fire you and so the product of this is this process that we've seen which is that this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course,

the 737 MAX continues to have problems, right? Earlier this year, famously, the fucking door flew off in an Alaska air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe just like all of the things that you would have expected from Boeing outsourcing shit to overworked and under trained contractors.

Now several of those whistleblowers have died. When I was originally doing this I was considering basically making this episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I don't know I don't really have any more information than anyone else about these deaths. So I'm just going to put on the record that if I go out here, it was murder. Yeah. And I think the more important story is this one, because I think I think at this point, everyone, everyone kind of knows that something is wrong with Boeing. And every day we're getting more and more sort of specifics about every single part of this production process that, you know, used to be entirely run by highly paid, well, I mean, like at least sort of highly paid and highly trained

employees that's now being run by a bunch of non-unionized underpaid contractors who are producing shitty equipment. But what we're looking at here is boeing coming apart somewhat more famously i think the rescue flight is like being prepped but a bunch of astronauts have been stranded on the space station because boeing's launch craft was like veering off course there were a bunch of issues with it and so nasa just was just like no fuck this and the most hideously galling part of this entire story is that the craft that's going to pick up the astronauts is made by fucking spacex because we have reached a point where an elon musk company is somehow designing rockets that are you know it's like designing spacecraft that are less likely to fucking explode than Boeing.

That is an unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think we need to ask, who killed these people? Because it's not just Boeing. Jack Welch killed these people. Michael Milken killed these people. Ronald Reagan killed these people. And in a way, all of us killed them because none of us stopped them. And these people could have been stopped

at any point in the process, from Reagan to Stone Cipher to Kelly Orberg. We could have stopped these people. To quote for a final time, David Graeber, the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. I add only this, if we don't make the world differently, people are going to die.

Why should these murderers be allowed to run the world? We know how to make planes that don't fall out of the sky. The people who are fucking running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be enormously controversial to say that the people who know how to build airplanes should control how we fucking design and build airplanes. In the 19th and 20th century, this idea was called worker self-management, and it was considered so dangerous that from Chile

to Chiapas to Algeria to Hungary to Korea, capitalist, communist and fascist alike killed anyone who dared believe it. But now, our choices are stark. We either let these people continue to drop planes out of the sky, as the world burns and our cities sink into the sea, or we do something about it.

So what are you going to do? Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep keep going that's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and I'll be

digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly.

I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives. I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's

head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me in a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Black Lit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Black Lit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola mi gente, it's Honey German and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,

from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral.

Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everyone. This is It Could Happen Here. I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart. Most of this episode is going to be me and James Stout discussing the disaster in North Carolina and elsewhere as a result of Hurricane Helene. But before we get into that, we'll be talking largely about what this means for your own preparations for future disasters, what we can kind of learn initially from everything that's been happening. I wanted to start with a few minutes of us talking to Margaret Kiljoy, who is on the ground in the Asheville area doing disaster relief work right now. And obviously, the audio here is not up to our usual quality, but it's only about five minutes, and then you will get James and I talking crystal clear into your ears.

So here is Margaret. Hi, everyone. I just got on the ground about two hours ago and immediately have been basically running around with my van, delivering food to different places just because van did van thing. And it's, I mean, it's intense. Everyone is having an intense time. But also at the same time, there's like, you know, more people are out walking around and riding bikes. And, you know, there's hundreds of people gathering at every place that's passing out food and water and uh there's a very kind of community spirit happening right now i'm actually recording this from up in marshall which is a small town immediately north

of ashville that also has a mutual aid distribution hub we just came up here to drop stuff off and even in the 20 minutes that i've been here other people have come with pickup trucks full of harm reduction supplies and diapers and just all the things that people need. And everyone is trapped on basically little islands, right? There's a very different style of flood than when you have like a coastal flood. And what's happened is that the houses that are near the river have been destroyed. And the roads, a lot of them have been destroyed. And a lot of them went underwater for a long time.

And so all the infrastructure is down. But many of the houses, at least as I record this, seem to be intact and doing well. And what it is that everyone is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage, or even cell signal. Although cell signal is kind of the first thing to come back. And power is starting to filter back in. And we're hoping that some places are maybe getting water but one of the things that's kind of come up is that again because it's in the mountains it's a very different setup it's a very different culture and community and one of the things that's happened is that i mean a lot

of people have wells and so immediately the problem has been more about distribution of water and also getting generators to people who have wells so that they can pump you know a friend of mine got a generator pretty quickly and you know pulled a thousand gallons out of their well right away to to get and distribute around and there's a you know just while i was waiting outside my friend's house someone drove by and asked us if we needed water and then asked us if we knew about each of the neighbors and who did and didn't have water. Yeah. And I mean, one of the things that makes me think of is like having the generator, having the well, that's great. The kind of thing that maybe people wouldn't think about as much as having the ability to put a thousand gallons of water in something which totally seems like it was also crucial and is probably would

have been lower down the list for a lot of people but there's really no replacing it when you need it totally and but one of the things that again i mean i'm not trying to say that everything's fine here it's very much not fine for example the only federal response that anyone is talking about is that ice is already in the area. So before anyone has been given food by the federal government, they have sent ICE to detain people and question people. At least that is the word on the ground. Obviously, details and truths come later when you're in a crisis situation, but we do know that ICE is on the ground and no one I've talked to has seen much in the way of federal response besides law enforcement.

But one of the things that's happened here is that a lot of people have pickup trucks in Appalachia. And so a lot of people have, you know, you call them water buffaloes, the big water tanks that you can put in a pickup truck or a trailer. I definitely left this feeling, you know, my first, you know, I drove with my van full of stuff and on the highway and being passed by pickup trucks pulling flatbeds full of pallets of water and things like that but then even yeah in the city people are driving around in trucks and filling them up with water and delivering them but don't get me wrong yeah if you're preparing think about how to deliver water even some of the things for me for example the city government has been doing some things and there are places where people can go and fill up water containers, but they don't have the water containers. So the people who are prepared by having a couple of five gallon totes in their

basement are in a much better position. And so that's like some of the things that I brought for some of my friends is literally just a couple of five gallon water containers so that people can go get them filled up. Now, and obviously you're talking about when we're thinking about the places that people are dry able to drive around where the places that you've been reaching are hit pretty hard but we also then have these more isolated mountain communities that both seem to have suffered a lot more physical damage although that's not entirely clear at this moment but are certainly not accessible in the same way and i i think that's one of those things we're still going to be waiting to hear, like how extreme it is.

But like we talked a little bit on the episode before this about people using burrows to deliver food and water in places where vehicles can't even reach. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things also, one of the things that went out on the mutual aid list that I'm on is people are saying,

hey, if you have your ATV, bring your atv you know um and that makes complete sense if you the listener are listening to this don't just drive down with supplies and if you are plugged into a mutual don't just roll to ashville in your polaris yeah yeah uh but but yeah no one of the hardest things has been getting the supplies you you know, I mean, disaster relief is just, it's just logistics. And the same way that war is just logistics, you know, it's like how do you get things from one place to another? And what people have set up is all of these, you know,

you centralize the acquisition of supplies and then you decentralize getting them out. But yeah, people have been working. I'm going to know more about what people have been doing to get things out, but I've already talked with people or heard from people who were getting rescued by people with hand saws. And then one of the main things that people are doing is that there's chainsaw crews, mutual aid chainsaw crews going around. One of the big asks that I came with a lot of was bar and chain oil, you know, and it's a little bit hard because gas is also, until just recently, gas is starting to come back online now. But getting gas for a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle has been tricky, but people have been working on that too. Yeah.

Well, Margaret, I'm not going to take up more of your time while you try to help in the wake of a disaster. But thank you for being on the ground. Good luck to you and everyone else who's out there. We will be hearing more from you and more about the specifics of what's happened in North Carolina and elsewhere in the wake of the hurricane next week. So thank you and thank everybody there. Good luck. Yeah. Thank you. That is done. I am now going to move on with our previously recorded episode. Here is James and me. Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where it's happened for some chunk of our listeners who are probably not listening right now, because as we record this on Monday, the first, technically a Tuesday, we're just now getting word that internet has come back on, like mobile internet has come back on to parts of Asheville and North Carolina that were incommunicado for several days after Hurricane Helene tore through. You've heard something about this, I'm hoping. I'm hearing different things from friends about how much news attention there seems to be on this. I'm seeing it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social. But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a photo I came across right before getting on here where there was a memorial marker for the 1916 flood in Asheville that was knocked out by what used to be a road and was now nothing but rushing water and mud.

Three out of four highways into Asheville are down. from people who were coming in and doing an aid drop that what had been previously a 30-minute drive took 12 and a half hours from the state of the roads and the number of checkpoints and stuff. All of this is pretty common stuff for a natural disaster, obviously amped up in severity because this disaster was correspondingly worse than even most natural disasters tend to be. Yeah, certainly in this country. correspondingly worse than even most natural disasters tend to be you know um yeah certainly in this country i think yeah i i was just looking through just doing a little bit of googling before we got on and i found a reddit post from the ashville subreddit from two years ago saying ashville is apparently the number one city in the united states to be a climate haven according to

the cnbc although that article it just made the list of best climate cities, but the original post has been deleted. I don't know if that was earlier or as a result of this, but that is one of like the side stories here is that Asheville is not, we're not talking about one of these coastal cities in Florida that everyone is known as doomed for forever, right?

We're not talking about New Orleans, which lovely city, great history, doomed as fuck, and everyone has known as doomed for forever right we're not talking about new orleans which lovely city great history doomed as fuck and everyone has known it for quite a while yeah we're talking about places that are many miles inland and that something like 2 000 feet elevation yeah it's certainly not below sea level or even at sea level like yeah it's an inland mountainous community it's just not the kind of threat that people are used to having here. And the devastation has been pretty total. Whole communities wiped out. I think the death toll up a story from 30 minutes ago on The Independent that says, yeah, at least 143 people have been killed. Yeah, that's a total death toll from Helene. 40 people in Buncombe County, where Asheville is, 600 people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped off the map. Kind of the first thing that

I noticed, you know, outside of the footage coming in was friends of mine, because I've spent a decent amount of time in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including our own Margaret Kiljoy, who has a lot more friends in Asheville. And I was in a couple of different signal loops where people were trying to contact their people. And there was a line from one of the folks I was chatting with who had reached out to multiple people in the area and said, I have not heard anything from anyone in Asheville in hours. Nothing is getting in and nothing is getting out. And that seems to be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional. Starlink doesn't work very well when

the weather's really bad yeah uh sat phones seem to have had some efficacy i know some people were getting messages in and out but they weren't super reliable because sat phones also are reliant upon climactic conditions right yeah it's certainly better than just trusting your normal cell phone but it's not going to do great when you've got a fucking hurricane dumping half an ocean on your head. Right. So that was the first thing I was thinking about because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness and we talk a lot about having, you know, stuff, stuff that would have been useful in this and that people who were prepared and had water set aside and food set aside were certainly in a better situation because those both very quickly became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story of an old folks home

that was completely cut off from the outside and didn't have enough water or food. Hoping that story ends as well as possible, but there's a lot of stories like that. But even outside of that, there were people who were prepared, who had food and water, but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their house because the water just came in so

quickly. There was no chance to really get much other than maybe a bag. And when you're stuck up on there, what are you going to do if you're sat phone or you don't have a sat phone and that doesn't work and there's no internet and there's no cell service. Well, that's why we're going to start today talking about ham radios because those motherfuckers, there's actually a, I'll see if I can pull it up through this, like that has been the most reliable way for people in the area to communicate with the outside world because if it is possible to communicate using technology, you can do it with ham, right?

Like that's just how ham radios be. Yeah, they don't need to see the sky. Like, yeah. Yeah. They don't give a fuck. If there is any way to communicate via technology with people in a disaster, you will be able to do it with a ham radio.

Yeah. So let's chat about that. James, you have more experience with this than I do. This is something I have been working on getting into, but I certainly am not very knowledgeable on the matter. So we'll start, like, what do people need to think about when it comes to, like, actually getting set up to communicate with a ham radio?

Because there's definitely, you could just go buy a Baofeng or something like that. Like, you could get a ham, because there there's definitely you could just go buy a bow fang or something like that like you can get ahead they're not expensive this is actually a very affordable thing to have right now kind of the most recommended model is the uv9r pro which is eight watt instead of five and waterproof yeah that's what i was gonna say and you can charge it off usbc which is really nice yeah they're what like 30 something bucks yeah they're like you can get them cheaper in bulk i think you used to be able to get them cheaper on aliexpress but seems like they're kind of hanging them up and charging customs so you end up not getting them cheaper

yeah so yeah for real basic stuff i think you do need to be licensed to operate these radios on certain bands right yes and that's something that you can, I believe in a case of emergency, you can operate on any band. No one's going to arrest you for illegal use, unlicensed use of a ham radio if you're trying to get people rescued from a flood, right? Like that said,

you should not be learning how to use a ham radio when you're hiding on your roof. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like, you know, the people who buy guns and put them under their bed and never shoot them and expect to be right become a fucking marksman in a crisis or yeah buy medical gear and never train with it again right these things that you want to practice before so we use these a lot at the border we use radios to communicate when there were higher numbers in hakumba we my friends and i put a massive antenna on the roof of the hakumba we my friends and i put a

massive antenna on the roof of the youth center where we were yeah i know a lot of listeners have been out there and they've probably seen the antenna that we put up and then i was using a radio in my truck and then we also all had personal radios right because cell phone signal is crap out there and it was the only way for us to communicate and it worked really well so the things that you need if you want to get started in this are first of all some kind of education or a license there are yeah tons of local groups ham people fucking love to be ham radio people they love to talk about ham radio they love to teach you to do ham radio so like and it's not like a hobby you know firearms people love to talk about firearms but lots of them are really toxic people i haven't found that ham radio is

premised on talking to people all over the place, and often... Very few people killed with ham radio. Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. But if you can find a local club, that's a great way to start. They can clue you in on stuff. But I think to begin with, you also need someone to talk to, right? Like, if you want to practice with your ham radio,

you need to be talking to other people on it. So you can just go on to different bands, different repeaters and do that. Or you can get your friends and study together. Get your license together. Buy two bow fangs. Give one to somebody who you live close to, but not right next to and work on it with them.

Yeah, work on like, oh, how far does this work? One of the former guests for the podcast uh james cordero from uh border kindness he and i were doing that not so long ago talking to each other from our houses but yeah you can you can certainly get into this pretty cheap i have a business license which is another option for people i would suggest first getting your ham operators license and then going from there yeah that's it's called a radio technicians license right like that's the most basic because there's three levels if i'm not mistaken yeah i believe so um it's been a while since i did that yeah i think it's radio technicians general and then amateur extra if the notes i took yeah are accurate still and then in terms of cost

like the size of your antenna is what's going to determine you know how far you can transmit and how you can receive along with like line of sight right it's always about size yep it's just as big as one possible so you want to be a size queen like you can get yourself a really big antenna i would say if you're using those handheld radios there's a company called nagoya that make pretty decent radios antennas that work work with that UV9R that I use. I have like a telescoping one and we've had pretty good luck with that. And then I also use one in my,

so I've hard mounted a radio inside my truck and I have an antenna that uses the frame of the truck as part of the antenna and I can get really good signal with that. Yeah, that makes sense. If you're just doing it at home, yeah, put something on your roof. Like you can get a pretty good antenna on your roof, roof you know and it's not that hard and you can

get signal yeah much further i've been recommended a little book that you can get for 20 bucks in kindle form or it's like 30 bucks for the spiral bound which looks pretty durable i haven't received mine yet yeah uh the ar rl ham radio license manual which is kind of what i was advised to buy and read through yeah and the advice that i got and you can correct me here but this seemed pretty hard to argue with is that like the primary benefit to doing the training and getting the license formally rather than just buying it is it also teaches you how to fix problems if you're trying to like get this thing to work in a stressful dangerous situation yeah you want to be familiar with it if you're going to rely on it right just like anything

else there's hamstudy.org as well which helps you you can also do something called a software defined radio str i've used those before as well i'm sure we'll yeah we'll do a more dedicated episode to this kind of thing once i feel a degree of competence, too. But I think what's really important with this is because I can tell you right now, as much time as I spend like thinking about water and having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare water stored. And I have like I literally have at this point years of dried food on the property. I can food all the time. I have animals. Obviously, I have guns. You know, I do stuff like, do stuff like go foraging in the woods

and shit. I had completely, because it's a pain in the ass. It seemed like a pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers. I hate fucking numbers. And I am choosing to use this. And we're starting out with this as coverage of Helene, not because this is the end of it. We are going to look at what's actually been happening in the community. We have Margaret Killjoy is down there right now. We have some other friends of the pod who are in the area doing relief work now.

It's just too early for those stories, and we don't want to really bug people who are doing useful work down there. But this is the first thing that terrified me was being like, well, fuck, I have been negligent in my preparations because I don't have comms locked down. Yeah, definitely.

Again, people underestimate it because it's not cool and fun, right? Like, I'm too cool and fun. And I have a sat phone. So I was like, that's probably fine, right? Like, well, it wouldn't have been in Asheville. Or people think that they can have Starlink now. And I think people place a lot of emphasis on that. But I think going back to basics,

we were talking about this in our group chat, but for things that you need, having a primary, secondary, and emergency way of doing that makes sense. So your phone, your sat phone, I think Robert and I both use Garmin inReach as a sat communicator. I have an inReach and i also have a motorola smartphone that is a sat phone through uh uh god i'm forgetting the name of the service but a separate service like i have two different sat phone services and then you got your ham radio as your backup well after that you got smoke signals and pigeons right well that that

gets us to a general idea of preparation which i I was kind of, when I started, when I got advice from a colleague about war reporting, like the best, still to this day, some of the best advice I ever got is two is one and one is none, right? If you have one way of doing something in a disaster, you are very close to having no way of doing it, right? no way of doing it, right? Which brings me to transit, because one of the, the thing that is probably going to wind up being the defining characteristic of this disaster in memory is the degree to which the ability to reach people

in an area that is, we're not talking, you know, there definitely are a lot of rural communities impacted by this, but like Asheville is a significant place. We're not talking the middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people living on the edge of the world, right? Yeah. We are talking about like one of the, what was up to this point, one of like the hippest and more popular parts of the Northeast, right? The immediacy with which the ability to reach people

on the ground was wiped out. And obviously while the storm was going on, there was no way to reach people on the ground was wiped out. And obviously, while the storm was going on, there was no way to reach them from air. Like, you know, a helicopter can get places now, but during the worst of the flooding, you're not reliably getting a fucking chopper into a lot of these places. So people were stranded very quickly, much faster than they had been prepared for.

You should be thinking about like, oh shit, I could get flooded because you probably could. Most of the people listening to this, there's not a 0% chance a freak storm floods your community, right? Even if it never has before, it's not exactly a common problem in Asheville, right? The last massive flood thing was like 1916. So we're not talking about a place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise, like it's not just flooding that can do fire could do this, right? I am thinking the last kind of near disaster we had where I was is in 2020. You know, where I live right now, I am in the city of Portland. And we were like three or four blocks away from where the evacuation

orders had spread during the fires in 2020. It was not a foregone conclusion that they would stop before reaching the city. You know, this is also the people in Southern California. Yeah, definitely. There's a shocking number of communities, communities with money that are really built up that if a fire hit at the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like, you need to be thinking about how am I preparing to be informed during the seasons where this is of highest likelihood? Because the only real safety there is paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding of how quickly things can go badly so that you get out ahead of time.

Because if the disaster just hits, you're not going to get on the highway and drive through a fire or through a flood. I don't care if you have a fucking safari snorkel. I'm looking at those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out land rover on God's green earth was not getting through some of those waters. I'm sorry. sorry yeah you need a submarine for that shit like i remember my house flooded when i was probably 17 18 and i remember that a couple of things i remember first of all was like most of your shit is not that important to you i remember being 17 and being like oh man we got this back then having a widescreen tv was a big deal for us and yeah then thinking like, oh, my neighbors are 80-something. Like, fuck the TV.

I need to check if those people are okay. And then people completely overestimating the capability of their vehicles in floodwater. Yeah. Which they always will do. It will always be the people with the biggest trucks that cause the most problems for everyone else who overestimate where their vehicles can get them.

Yes. And like, you can die in your vehicle crossing relatively shallow flood water. This isn't. Yeah. You know, it's a serious business. Or get burned to death, which happens all the time, has happened very recently in communities in like California. You know, people just get fucking incinerated.

So don't be that person. Pay attention. Like one of the things to pay attention to is like when the warnings started to come in there will be good breakdowns fairly soon in places like the new york times on when warnings came in and how much time people actually had yeah but don't gamble with stuff like this fucking drive to high ground or you know drive to whatever seems like the safest place and fucking crash in your car if you have to. And this is why, again, when it does come to survival stuff,

I'm a big fan, if you have the money, spend 200 bucks on one of those buckets of dried food because you can keep a bucket of dried food and five gallons of water by the door. You can throw that son of a bitch in your car and carrying the water might be a pain in the ass. But if you have to get out and run, those buckets of dried food with a week or so of food in them are not that hard to carry. You hold it under your arm, you keep a backpack on your

back and you run like a son of a bitch to whatever evacuation exists and you'll have some food with you. Yeah. You know, like this is this is one of the ways I think about stuff like this. You know, it's obviously preferable if you can just hunker down in your fucking house full of gear and equipment. But I'm sure there were I'm sure there were people who had to evac or who got flooded out in Asheville and their house that got flooded out was full of survival gear. I know for a fact that that happened to people. Yeah. And it happens everywhere to people. Right. Talking of happening, Robert, what should be happening right now is an advertising break oh shit it should have happened 10 fucking minutes ago james yeah but here we are buddy here we are we're back you know when it comes to talking about like the degree to which people's high tech and expensive uh equipment including vehicles has run out very quickly one of the stories that

has been most interesting to me is of like one of the first groups of people to be able to get supplies in significant quantities to some of these isolated mountain regions was a guy with a shitload of donkeys. Oh yeah, the mule team. The mule team guy. He was, one sec, let me pull this up. I've got this bookmarked. Yeah, Mountain Mule Packer Ranch,

which I'm guessing is just some sort of like, you know, you go there to vacation and do like mule trips, mule hikes and stuff. It's kind of people who want to backpack or take like a really luxurious camping setup. Yeah. Yeah. They've been doing mule trains into a town called into Weaverville, it looks like. And yeah, like a mule can carry it. Something at least based on this People article I'm looking at, they're saying about 200 pounds of supplies per animal, which, you know, is actually very significant. That's not a whole lot more than you're going to be fitting

in like a compact car, at least. Obviously a truck's carrying more, but you're not getting a truck into a lot of these areas. And it just kind of goes to show, I'm not saying like everyone go buy a mule. That's not really practical for most people. Although if you've got some land, maybe consider getting the mule. That's not really practical for most people. Although if you've got some land, maybe consider getting the mule.

They're real handy. They do come in very useful in situations like this. They're good companion animals as well. I think people have them for like, if you have a horse or whatever. Alpacas too, but they can't carry so much. But alpaca packing is a thing in like Montana and places like that.

Yeah, they're great. If you've got a fight in the mountains of Afghanistan, a mule, you can do a lot there. So very useful in a wide variety of situations. I know a lot of our listeners are actively fighting in Afghanistan right now. So that could be very handy for you. Yeah, proud of you guys. Yeah, yeah. America said we're done there, but you said not me.

It could happen here. It's just fuck no. You can't stop me going back with my mule. That's why this is the official podcast of the Islamic State Khorasan province. That is. That's, oh, James, we shouldn't be saying stuff like that. Hopefully the government's busy. Well, apparently they're not because they ain't doing shit in the A&R show.

Yeah. So, you know, I saw a lot of, one of the more heartbreaking posts that I saw was this lady posting a picture of her parents and her daughter, who was six, on the roof with them. And she was like, a few minutes minutes later the roof collapsed and they were dead like she apparently managed to just kind of barely survive and get out of there but there's there's like i'm i i think a lot of people whose last act was trying to get a good photo or video of their location you know to post on social media i i don't want there to be a lot of people who made the decision to stay longer than they should have because they wanted to get a good shot for social media, but I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm not saying that's what happened to that lady.

There's also a matter of like, well, if you are stuck up there, what else are you going to fucking do but document it? Right, yeah. I have some sympathy for that, yeah. I'm not trying to shit on these people, but it is one of these, there's that post that goes around every time there's a disaster like this where climate collapse is watching a series of horrifying videos on cell phones until one day it's you holding the phone.

Yeah. And I think that that, not that we shouldn't think about what's happened to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to these affected communities. There's places in Georgia that got hard hit. Obviously, that's a focus. But from a practical standpoint, the only good that you can make of a disaster like this is to try and pay attention to what happened, to what went wrong for other people, and make yourself less vulnerable. Because the less vulnerable you are, one of the things that we see every time there's something like this hits, you know,

and this is, I would call this a hand of God event, right? You had a bunch of communities that were a part of the developed, you know, whatever term first world one day, and we're completely cut off from everyone else on the planet the next. And all you can really do in the immediate aftermath of something like that is try to figure out what can I do to make it less likely that I'm a strain on resources during an event like this. And obviously the best way is to not be there because then you're not a strain on resources. But the next best thing is to have, to pay attention to what went wrong for other people and try to make yourself less vulnerable to that because not only does that protect you,

but you protect other people by not needing the resources that rescuers can bring to bear, which will be terribly limited in the immediate wake of the disaster. Yeah, I think like in terms of resources, obviously Margaret does an excellent podcast called Live Like the World is Dying, where you can hear more about that stuff. yeah i think like in terms of resources obviously margaret does an excellent podcast called live

like the world is dying we can hear more about that stuff yeah i think the thing that you can buy i guess right now if you have like 30 to 50 bucks and you want to be a little bit more prepared because i understand that for some people this will be an oh shit moment right where this is something that it ought to be yeah no it really should really should be. You've seen a city that thought it was completely invulnerable be very vulnerable. You can buy a Soya Squeeze for like $30 right now. You can set them up off a five-gallon bucket. Yep. Or you can use the bag that it comes with.

You can buy a bag from a company called Canock, C-N-O-C, which is a much better bag. I would recommend that. But you can spend 30 bucks there like we said before you should have backup and other water filtering options but yeah there are whole countries that use soya squeezes right the marshall islands i made a thing about liberia uses them too and you can filter rainwater with that and you could pretty much have a supply of water for as long as you need it if you back flush it right you've got like a family of four in a house you have one or two five gallon buckets full at any time and you have a soy squeeze and you can you know in this kind of situation you can keep filling it up with you know disaster

water for lack of a better word and in that sort of situation too you can double up and triple up which i always recommend in an emergency. I have nearly died of dysentery, so I don't fuck around with this. Get a filtration option. That's not the only one. Filter your water and add iodine tablets to it, right? Filter your water and use something like a UV light. Yeah, a SteriPen. A SteriPen. Don't just rely. You know, don't just rely on one method. Double up. There's no, you're not going to have a lot to do other than make sure your water doesn't kill you. And that's a real good thing to focus on.

Yeah. You could even use bleach, right? Household bleach. Just make sure you're not fucking around. It's not scented, et cetera. But yeah, you want to look up that ratio just so we're not fucking up the ratio with them. But like, yeah, that's a great, you know,

I keep, I usually keep one or two just big 50 gallon barrels of water there's like water stabilization tablets or and and liquid that you can drop in there because water doesn't store indefinitely but you can use bleach too people do yeah i keep it all times i just have this as part of my outdoor kit but it's a good thing to have for a disaster you can have a camelback with one company that makes them is called Katadyn, K-A-T-A-D-Y-N. Katadyn, yeah. Katadyn, sorry. But there's a couple of different water filters that you can screw directly onto your camelback. So you pour water in the camelback, and by the time you get the water in your mouth, it has gone through a very serious filter arrangement. And that, again, that can be part of your, I pick this

up and I take this with me, and no matter where I go, I can pour water into the camelback and me and my family can drink off of it. Or we have two camelbacks or whatever, you know, have four liters on you. This is not free, but it's not prohibitively expensive. It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right? And it is considerably likelier to save your life than an AR-15. Yeah, yeah. There are magazines of ammunition that would cost you more than this would. And like, yeah, with all of these things, once it's dirty, it's not clean, right? So like your camelback bladder is now dirty, water bladder and stuff. Especially in a disaster situation, don't be mixing and matching. Just get a Sharpie and write on it.

Likewise, I have a jerry can i just wrote the bleach amounts on it with a paint pen and it's there now and now i know like none of this stuff is hugely complicated and like everything else right like the more familiar you are with it that if you go camping a lot yeah like robert was saying you already have a system in place so you're already ready for that yeah i keep something called a grail on me, which is just like a cup that has a filter, like it's a two-part, like almost kind of a thermos type deal. And you fill the bottom part with water

and you press the top part in and it fills an internal reservoir with filtered water. And then I'll drop a tablet in there or something. And, you know, or I'll pour that into a larger thing and put the tablet in there. But you can always have multiple options for water. And it's the kind of thing where there's no reason not to. A CamelBak and a filter, plus a bunch of pills, plus some sort of hand pump rig,

you're maybe out $150. You have three different methods of keeping your water clean. I think they're surplusing out a lot of the MSR Guardians that the US military used to buy. You can get those pretty cheap. Those are great. I was just in the Darien Gap. I used one of those and then chemical treatment and I'm okay. You can also bulk process with the Gravity Guardian. You can do 10 liters at a time. We're in this kind of conversation. We are triaging by what we think is the most important stuff, which is in a disaster like this, water and comms. And I kind of keep those as relatively equal because obviously you can survive without comms in some situations. Yeah. And you can't in any without water.

Yeah. And you can't in any without water. But if you are in a situation where you're on the roof of your house and your roof is not going to hold out much longer in the floodwaters, comms suddenly become the number one problem that you have, right? Your inability to reach someone who might be able to get you out of there. Yeah. If you need to get help, then you need to be able to ask for help. Yeah. I guess the other thing I would say is if you rely on any medicine, think about how and where you store them. God, yes. A lot of people have been having to figure out, like I've been reading stories about people needing to set up like battery and solar or generator situations. Like they're fucking CPAP machines. And they're like, you have people who are on dialysis who are going to need to get evac'd because there's not going to be reliable dialysis, you know, in town in a while. Right.

Like that kind of stuff. Like some of that, you know, like I have a big cooler and I can chuck ice in there and I can have enough insulin in that bad boy for a year, you know? Yeah. And other medicines, you know, just putting them in a waterproof bottle and having that in your, well, I live in California. We have a bag for fires and earthquakes, right? Everyone here does. And just having a few days of your medicine so you can grab and go, you don't have to think about it. You don't forget something that you rely on. Yeah.

And that's also what you should be thinking is like, if it takes me two or three days to get evac'd and out to an area where I can like spend money again to get access to the things that I have on a daily basis, what shit can't I survive without until I get to a part of the world where I can get access to things again? Right. Which is, again, why we're kind of focusing on comms so that you know what's happening so that you can maybe reach people.

Water and then underwater, like food and obviously things like, thank God we are not at a time of the year when this happened where people are going to freeze to death immediately in the middle of something like this. But that would, I would say, access to warm and dry clothing could be up there equal with water and comms if you're talking about a kind of disaster that might put people out of their homes in an area where you can die in minutes. If you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster that could be right up there. You know, you know what you need based on where you live, but be thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really a lot of disaster preparedness is actually trying to understand what is it

that keeps me alive. A lot of our economy exists in having that not be obvious to you. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. You, uh, and then putting your priorities elsewhere,

but yeah, think, think about what stops you dying. Maybe have a couple of spares and have it in a place. Having all this stuff is great. If it's in 17 different tote bags in your attic, that's not much use to you when you don't have very long to get out your house.

So having stuff like robert said by the door in your car in a backpack whatever like yeah that you can easily access and be okay then you have it and then you when you need it it's there and you know where it is yeah yeah well james how we do it it's happened here buddy it's happened here yeah like we said it would yeah it could like could like we said say this this was like i the messages i was sharing with people immediately after this was like oh this is the one this is the one we were worried about this is the hand of god sweeping into a community and just knocking it off the edge of the earth yeah you know not that this kind of thing doesn't happen,

but this is the first one, at least since I've been really focusing on this stuff in the US where it hits somewhere that just was not on my radar as a super vulnerable place. Definitely, yeah. And it'll happen again next year. It'll happen again. Yeah.

And it'll surprise you again where it hits. You know, that's the thing. There's no climate haven. Yeah, no. It doesn't exist. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Not on this planet. I would say, like, if you have money and you want to help, Mutual Aid Disaster Relief are great.

Yes. Let's talk about that. Let's go to ads one last time. And then when we come back, we will tell you who you can send some money to to help people who are actively suffering. And we're back. Before we bounce, we wanted to suggest some places where you can donate if you are looking to help people who are in Asheville, other parts of North Carolina. One of the first places recommended to me is Appalachian Medical Solidarity. They are providing, I mean, it's obvious, but they're providing a lot of medical care and support, a lot of equipment and stuff that people need. Their Venmo is at AppMedSolid. Their cash app is $streets1de.

Put flood support in the description if you send the money through that. The other place is Mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Their PayPal is mutualaiddisasterrelief at gmail.com. Their Venmo is at mutualaiddisasterrelief. Yeah, just Google them if you want to find out more about what they're doing. James, did you have anyone else that you wanted to throw out there? Those are the two.

We did an episode, I did an episode a couple of years ago with mutual aid disaster relief that you can find in your podcasting app. Those are the two big ones. I think, you know, if you're on the ground, help each other.

I'm sure you already are. Yeah. Yeah. Those would be the two that I would suggest. You know, if you buy yourself your water filter and you have 10 bucks to help out. Yeah. That's how we make the world better.

Yep. So until next week, solidarity to the people who are in the Atlanta area right now. Yeah. Where a chemical fire, very similar chemical fire to the one that happened in a place I used to live, West Texas, has just blanketed the air and chlorine gas. So remember, folks, weird disasters can hit, too. We're living the dream. We're not just talking about hurricanes and

fires here. Anyway, that's it for now, everybody. Good luck. Stay safe. Make sure you drink plenty of water. Bye. uh stay safe make sure you drink plenty of water bye hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series the running interview show where i run with celebrities athletes entrepreneurs and more after those runs the conversations keep going that's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests

and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all. It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology.

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Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just want to start off by saying I love ya. Oh, God. Yeah. Love ya. Yeah. I don't. Yeah. Yeah. Love you. Yeah. I don't think J.D. Vance should be saying the word love because it just makes it clear every time he does that he's never felt that emotion. No, no. There was something particularly unsettling about him saying that.

It's like when I try to order food in French and it's like, Robert, you're not fooling anyone. Sure. You look this up on Google right before getting to the restaurant. Like you're not going to impress anyone. No. I guess let's start with a fuck Mary kill for the guys. No, the secret service will get pissed at us if we do that one. No, this is it could happen here.

And this is the who gives a shit VP debate episode. Yeah. I'm Sophie Lichterman. I'm here with Kirsten Davis and Robert Evans. Yeah. Wow. What a great use of two hours that was. That really was. I am behind this week horribly. Still haven't picked the subject for this week. Desperately, desperately behind. And I sure did love that this was a complete waste of all of our fucking time. Not a complete waste because we learned something important, which is that

the Democrat who seemed to have the best understanding of how to fight Republicans maybe just got lucky or got coached into some very bad advice by a Democrat who should have known better.

Hey, Robert, I just want to say thank you for saying that. Like, I agree with you. I just want to say thank you for saying that. Sophie, you and I are great friends.

Everything you say is terrible and wrong, but I agree with you on most of it. And thank you for saying that. Sobi, you and I are great friends. Everything you say is terrible and wrong, but I agree with you on most of it. And thank you for saying that. I just really appreciate that, you know? Whoever told him that Americans wanted to see him be friendly with J.D. Vance was not a friend of the Republic or of him, I think. I don't think it'll work. I've been wrong before. It definitely seems to have worked. If your recollection of like what Fox and the other anchors were saying, they seem to be pretty positive on Walls' performance. So it may be working on like media ghouls. But that's who watched the VP debate. That is who watches the debate. Yeah. Right. I mean, that is that is the audience. Yeah.

Only the fucking sickos who are keyed in on politics watch the VP debate. I guess I don't really believe this, but I'm going to like my devil's advocate would be maybe it's smart strategy to accept that only media ghouls listen to this. The only real way for the debate to matter is if you like fuck up. Sure. the real way for the debate to matter is if you like fuck up. Sure. And there was more risk of seeming like a lunatic. If he went in there attacking JD as hard as he could and getting negative press, as opposed to this,

which probably is not going to get him negative press. I think he probably had multiple strategies. And like if, if JD Vance had come in there and started saying some of the things that he normally says, which are fucking weird and creepy, but he didn't and unhinged and fascist and misogynistic. I could continue. But

then we might have seen a different Tim Walz. But because J.D. Vance's entire strategy was like, hey, I can appear normal even though I'm not. Well, I don't quite understand the hesitancy to then actually bring those things to the forefront. Why? They were there.

And why not talk about it? Because my my initial takeaway here is I don't think anyone necessarily clearly won. I think both of them did just fine. Yeah. But if, if anyone comes out slightly better than what they were going in, I would say it is Vance. It's Vance.

I would agree. Because somehow walls, uh, was able to humanize Vance over the course of the debate. It was a very friendly exchange and that just serves to undercut the months of work that Walls has done

to paint Vance as a weird, unhinged extremist, which he is. And instead making him seem like just a reasonable politician that although we may disagree on a few things, we actually agree on a lot of the problems and solutions. We both care about this country. We're trying to help people. And like, no, J.D. Vance, like there was that bit where they were talking about mass shootings. And he was like, I truly believe that Vance, you know, cares about these kids. J.D.

Vance doesn't give a shit about dead kids. Never has, never will. He's not capable of it. And it undercut one of the more powerful moments that Walls had where he was like, my son was at a mass shooting. Christ have mercy. It was so interesting, too, because I know Walls is, and I know that I'm coming into this as the guy who's generally pretty anti-gun control. But just from perspective of Democratic Party strategy, number one, this is something they go after hard, so you can't half-ass it, right? This is not like the border where they really do feel a need to lean into the right-wing argument. The Dems are very unequivocal about the fact that they want to ban IR-15s. Walls didn't really commit to that until a little bit when he was specifically pushed on whether or

not he agreed with an assault weapons ban. And instead, his language up until that point was not very different from Vance's, aside from their disagreement over fortifying schools. But it was all stuff around the guns, whereas the Democratic Party's line and the line of most Democratic politicians has been it's about the guns. And I did find it interesting that Walls, he had to kind of be goaded into really embracing that by the moderator. Now, one of the first things I noticed from watching the debate, which just happened like once or twice, and I realized this was just like a reoccurring trend across the whole night, is that each candidate would try to separate the other from their running mate. Be like,

I'm sure Walls or I'm sure Vance agrees with me on this, but their running mate to be like i'm sure walls or i'm sure vance agrees with me on this but their running mate doesn't and that's the real problem and this just kept happening they kept trying to like yeah be nice to the actual like opponent in the debate by separating them out from their running mate who's the real source of the problem and that's just like it just just kept happening like what are you doing like you're running on a joint ticket there's no reason to do this and i i think kind of part of what their strategy may have been yes these debates are probably only watched by freaks but i think they're also certain freaks who are like weird like independent centrist freaks and yeah i think

this is who they were going after yep this This entire debate was focused on appealing to the center. It wasn't really based on going heavy into each side's own base, because they've already made up their minds. And I think the issue for me at the end of this debate is, because both of them were trying to court the center vote, I think Vance did about just as good as Walls did going after the center, and Walls kind of even helped him. And in effect, if Vance comes off as just a slightly better debater

when they're going after the same base, that just leaves Walls with not really making any ground, where he could have actually just hit Vance quite hard and actually gone more on a party line, or actually just gone more towards all the reasons that Vance is hard and actually gone more on like a party line or actually just like gone more towards like all the reasons that Vance is fucked up, which he just, which he just avoided to do. Yeah. So my, my, my main takeaway was like, if they're both courting the center and Vance kind of barely

edged him out in some, in some regards, maybe Walls should have just actually been way more aggressive. And the kind of lack of aggression really only hurt the Democrats because in the end, it kind of benefits Vance if you give this like half-assed mediocre performance. We'll see where it, because again, this is not being listened to by average people in the same way that like the last presidential debate was. This is not, I don't think moves the needle one way or the other because it was so close. I would be inclined to agree with you that I think Vance did more of the things he needed to do for this to be a benefit to him. I'm not sure in a way that helps the campaign because most of what Vance did that probably helps him was stuff that I think would set him up better in a world where Trump doesn't win re-election.

Sure. That would set him up to continue to have a career and to be re-embraced by respectable kind of politics. The thing that makes me kind of doubt myself, because I think there's a possibility this comes out as a Walls win, and if that is the case, it will be entirely because of the last question on January 6th. Because the way these things tend to work in popular memory, not again people like us who sit through the whole thing, nearly all of whom are journalists or unusually engaged voters. But the thing that I, there's two moments that are most likely, one from each of them, in my opinion, to get clipped out and go viral. And for Vance, it was the January 6th thing where

Walls drilled him. And I think this was actually one of his few fairly effective, aggressive moments where he was like, yeah, forced him to answer. And Vance refused to answer as to whether or not he thought Trump had lost in 2020 in a way that was, I think, kind of embarrassing for him and is easy, probably pretty easy to clip out. That might wind up being the big kind of viral moment of the night. If it's not that, it'll be Walls flubbing. We should talk about the China question. But I don't think the China question that Walls flubbed is on an issue that Americans overall care about, which is Tim Walls maybe exaggerating when he talked about his vacation in China one time in the 80s. Yeah. Let's take a quick break and then let's dive in a little bit on that.

Yeah. Yeah, let's let's take a quick break and then let's dive in a little bit on that. Yeah. So first off, everyone in this debate pronounced China correctly, which is a step forward from the ones that have involved Trump the last couple of cycles the downside is no one knows how to say iran not not a single person and not a single mention of ukraine oh yeah well that was interesting to me that is interesting yeah not one moment where we talked about ukraine which they kind of blazed past foreign policy uh really quickly which is a little uh surprising considering the events of this morning there are literally missiles landing in tel aviv right now like people are talking with i think some reason as to whether or not israel might consider a nuclear response like shit is

legitimately a problem i mean and this is how they started the the debate they started by talking about how this was going to be like a debate focused on how presidents or these vice presidents will handle like America in a sudden crisis, as we've seen with the hurricane this weekend and now escalating war in the Middle East. And although that was their kind of opening framing, they really got over those hurdles quite quick and then started talking about extremely boring shit for the rest of the like hour and a half. The very first question was basically, you know, Iran's bombing Israel, which like, I don't know, did Israel do anything to fucking Lebanon right before that? Like interesting context from the journalist there. But Iran's bombing Israel. If you're in the situation room, Tim Walls, what do you tell the president? If you're the last voice,

should he let Israel carry out a strike on Iran? And his response was a carbon copy of what Kamala has said every time she's been asked on it. Israel has a right to defend itself. October 7th was horrible. But, you know, civilian casualties, bad too. So it was a non-answer, but it was the same non-answer that the campaign has always given. So I was not surprised by it. It was exactly what I expected from him. He started off a little shaky, certainly sounded nervous. I think this immediately kind of gave Vance a head up. His first like three minutes, he was clearly uncomfortable. He got better. Especially because like Vance has like debate kid energy, right? But Walls did start getting better as soon as he pivoted away from this question

to just attacking Trump, which is kind of his strong suit. Yeah, I think Vance's response there is interesting. So Walls gave he was a little shaky, I think just because they had started because he got better on that. But he gave what has become the standard non answer answer for the campaign. J.D. Vance started his answer on the question of what would you tell the president if he was asking if he should allow potentially, you know, a massive escalative strike by Israel in Iran? What would you tell him if you're the last guy in the situation room? And J.D. Vance started the response to that by summarizing the book, Hillbilly Elegy. That was, in fact, the bulk of his response

was him talking about who he is and where he comes from and then being like, yeah, I guess it's fine if Israel does whatever. It was a an incredible response. And it struck me as the response of a guy who doesn't think his partner is going to become the president again. I thought that was very odd. Yeah. Yeah. He was positioning himself for future jobs. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he was different kind of than the other answers.

Maybe it was just they were both a little bit off their game. First question. You know, that happens to everybody in a debate. They both were nervous. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, this is this also when Vance deployed his one of his reoccurring catchphrases is a peace through strength.

Yeah. Oh, I hated that. Horrible. I hated that because it's also I mean, that is very close to the quote from the Brotherhood of Nod and Command and Conquer. And J.D. Vance, you are no Cain, you know, who lives in death, by the way. In general, I think Vance painted Trump as having like a provable track record of proving him as like, like Trump is going to end the chaos that we faced as a nation the past four years, whether that be economic or with war. He was extremely consistent on that. And he's trying to point to like, was your life better under Trump, especially economically?

And like, everyone's brains were completely fried by 2020. So actually, no one remembers what 2017 was like at all. So you actually can't recall that whatsoever, let alone kind of trump's mishandling of the pandemic led to like the biggest recession in modern history which also for some reason wallace just never brought up no well he does he did a little he said that like he talked about how when they came in they were dealing with a massive recession yeah yeah the like second thing they talked about was climate change which was jesse jesse waters of Fox News was very mad that that was the second thing they talked about. Framing through Hurricane Helene. Yeah, he was very upset about it, which is okay, sir.

Vance Audley quickly accepted the climate change framing for the sake of the argument. the climate change framing for the sake of the argument. Talked about how moving energy production from the quote-unquote dirtiest parts of the world back to America where we are the cleanest would be one way to help. I think it would have worked on my dad, that response. Like the whole, you know, well, we're clean, so we just got to bring back manufacturing.

You know, it was not a bad answer in terms of doing what he needed to do. It was obviously nonsense. And the moderator called him very well on that, like ended by just being like, by the way, like there's no argument among scientists about like how carbon impacts global warming. I think overall, a tie or maybe slightly favoring Walls,

that whole segment, like he did not, I don't think he did badly there. No, I think Walls a tie or maybe slightly favoring Walls, that whole segment. Like he did not. I don't think he did badly there. No, I think Walls did a good job connecting the economy to the environment. Yeah. How as the environment gets worse, the local economy gets worse, especially for like farmers, not like for like Green New Deal Democrats, but for like everyday farmers. And again, pivoted very quickly to just attacking Trump and Trump's climate denial.

Tried to press Vance and Trump's climate denial. He tried to press Vance on Trump's climate denial. And Vance kind of, you know, again, tried to just blame foreign manufacturing, saying that Kamala's rhetoric and record does not match her actual actions, which are increasing foreign manufacturing. In general, Vance kind of fell back on a whole bunch of nationalistic framing regarding the environment and regarding the economy, especially manufacturing. That was one of his reoccurring talking points. Yeah. So we are getting to see some of the times this spin in real time where they just published Ross Dufat's article. Vance's dominant debate performance shows why he's Trump's running mate. And the URL of the article shows that it was initially put into the CMS about a week ago on the 25th. And they dropped the article

about halfway through the debate. So cool. That said, it's kind of unclear to me how the rest of this is going to shake out. They also could have just written two articles, one where Vance did well and one where Walls did well. Yeah.

But that is still that's funny. I don't know that that'll matter either. We'll see where people land. It was interesting to me. Walls did do something that I liked twice. Neither time did he give it enough force. But he pointed out twice that a big part of the housing crisis is VCs buying up affordable housing. Yes.

Jacking up the price. Jacking up the price of rent. That that is like a massive issue. He brought that up. He said housing shouldn't be treated as a commodity, which I never expected to hear from a candidate in one of these debates. But he brought them both up like a guy on a debate who is like just kind of throwing out a side point so you don't forget to say it, as opposed to someone emphasizing it. And the thing to do with J.D. Vance is to point that you are one of those venture capitalists. You are one of the people who is hollowing out this country. And, you know,

capitalist. You are one of the people who is hollowing out this country. And, you know, Walls was good at trying to repeatedly say it's not migrants who are ruining like housing in this country, but he failed to connect enough. And he had the pieces there to be like, it's guys like you. Yeah, it's fucking it's fucking white dudes in suits and earpieces who have made housing expensive. It is not people coming here from fucking honduras like it's people like you who need to be reined in by the government and he just wasn't willing to commit to the answer that he clearly had in his pocket no he just he just never went on the attack and it's just odd because he kept he was probably coached on this but like i think it's coaching he did not do any of the things that gave him this job in the first place. He didn't play to any of his strengths. Instead, Vance

was able to play to Vance's own strengths, and Walls was able to just be a slightly less polished moderate. Why are you trying to frame him as a slightly less polished moderate going up against a debate kid like Vance? Walls needs to be on the attack.

He actually needs to show like a strong resistance in order to actually like make a large impact in the debate. And that's why I think this kind of largely swung towards Vance. Yes. By the end, if they're both trying, if they're both trying to court this same like moderate vote. Now, as always, the immigration section of these is always frustrating. No one talks about how fentanyl is largely brought in via citizens. No one feels the need to bring that up. CBS did have a little fact check or not a fact check necessarily, but like a little comment talking about how the majority of Americans polled are in favor of deportations. But they specifically asked Vance, like, how is your military deportation plan going to work? And will you separate like children that

are born in the united states from illegal immigrants and vance just refused to answer that question repeatedly they tried to get him to answer multiple times he continually refused it instead saying that like comless border policy is already a child separation policy yeah there was a great moment there where he got angry at them for fact checking, fact checking specifically on his claims about illegal immigrants in Springfield. Yeah, yeah. Because those those migrants, in fact, had legal status. And he was like, you guys said you weren't going to fact check. No, no, no. He didn't say he shouted. Yeah, he yelled.

The rules were that you were not going to fact check that Then he just explained how immigration works, how legal immigration works. They were like, thank you for explaining how immigration works. Thank you for explaining the legal process of immigration. This has been one thing that Vance has been doing on the campaign trail, is just explaining the legal process of immigration and just saying, I'm still going to call this illegal because I want it to be illegal. And you're like, okay, you can't. I guess we could just use words to,

to mean whatever we want. Sure. Why not? Yeah. If this comes out in the public opinion, being in walls, his favor, it'll be because of those moments.

Yeah. That one at the end and those moments where Vance was like yelling and they, they cut out his mic at one point. Yeah. Like that kind of stuff. I don't think I don't know. Again, I don't think anyone's going to really listen to this beta debate enough for there to be it to make much of an impact. But those were not great moments for him.

Yeah. But those are the kind of things that get clipped out and spread across the Internet. Yeah. So we'll see. And so the people that didn't didn't watch the entire thing will some of them will see clips like that. Yeah. So we'll see. And so the people that didn't didn't watch the entire thing, some of them will see clips like that. I think the immigration section certainly showed kind of walls in his stronger moments, talking about how the past year we've actually seen a decrease in opiate deaths. He continued to talk about how Trump killed the bipartisan conservative immigration bill, which we're probably not fans of, but he's trying to make it play well electorally. immigration bill, which we're probably not fans of, but he's trying to make it play well electorally and then pivoted to Springfield and said how like the Republican mayor came out and

said none of this stuff was true. But Trump and Vance kept spewing it. State law enforcement had to escort kids to school. But even in this like Springfield section, which which Walls was the first one to bring up, Vance was the big driver of this lie but even even in walls is a mention of this he tries to separate vance from trump he primarily blamed trump for this and totally just like ignored vance's massive contribution to this like big misinformation campaign that led to these bomb threats he just let vance get off easy and i think this part was saved kind of by this little fact check and vance's little meltdown over this legal immigration comment. But still, it kind of showed a little bit of even in Walls' stronger moments, he refused to like really harp on Vance for being weird.

Yeah. Speaking of people who watched the debate, I don't think our sponsors did because they have real jobs. I don't think our sponsors did because they have real jobs. Hello, we are back. Now, one of the biggest issues for me in this campaign is how much time exactly did Walls spend in Hong Kong? This is really one of the primary issues impacting my vote. There were 150,000 people in the streets in New York City today demanding to know whether or not Tim Walls was really in China during the Tiananmen Square uprisings. Thankfully, CBS News is on the case. Yes.

We didn't have a second for Ukraine. Not one second. There was at no point any questions asked about the loss of life due to the genocide in Gaza. Not one. But by God. This was this was really goofy. Basically, they asked Walls about this comment he made in 2014 about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre when kind of reporting shows that he only arrived in August, basically like two or three months later. And I don't know if either Walls just misunderstood the question or purposely avoided it, but instead of talking about this, he just summarized his entire career, both as a school teacher and in politics, and then emphasized that although he spent time in china he is he is loyal to the united states and it was just really odd and like you can even see vince like slowly like smirking the longer walls just kept going on about his

career and at the end of his like weird like non-answer about his commitment to the united states the moderators asked again they're like well were you there for the massacre and then he very quickly clarified it was like uh i mean yeah i might have i might have misspoke i don't understand why you wouldn't just very clearly say yeah i misspoke i was there for the aftermath of the massacre i was there during the uprising or i got misquoted i was there the year of the uprising yeah he was there for the aftermath of the massacre. I was there during the uprising. Or I got misquoted. I was there the year of the uprising. Yeah. He was there during some of the uprising,

but he arrived in the aftermath of the massacre. I don't know why you can just say, yes, I arrived at the aftermath of the massacre. I misspoke 10 years ago. Like, it's very simple. Your weird, long, two-minute avoided answer just makes you look weak and unnecessarily slimy. It doesn't make any sense.

It just is weird because, of course, they were going to ask that question. Why did you not have a prepared answer? I mean, this only became a new story today. This only became a new story a few hours ago. Still, have some kind of a prepared, generic answer. I'm sure he did my guess is that if i was debate prepping him i would have assumed they were going to ask one of the questions about his service based on all of like the different sort of like totally right wing shit

coming out everything about his performance was the result of a guy who was over prepared and prepared by people whose focus was on him not upsetting the apple cart and embarrassing the campaign, not on him winning. That is how he was coached. And he was well prepared as a general rule. For the most part, when J.D. Vance would make a claim about fentanyl, he had a counter fact that he could bring up. And he did that reasonably well.

He seemed confident about the information. He clearly put in the work, but none of what he was prepared for was hurting Vance. He was entirely prepared to not make an easy fuck up, which maybe is the smart move if you're just like, we just don't want this to upset anything because there's no way it'll help. Like, my guess is that he was told going into this by his handlers this debate is not going to win us the election but it could lose us the election so what we need to make sure happens is that you don't fuck anything up or seem too mean or seem too weird yourself so we are going

to like train you to be as boring as possible and they did did that. And like, as a follow-up, Vance was asked about his like previous, like anti-Trump, like Hitler comments and specifically was asked, like if he can be trusted to actually like give Trump good, honest advice and not just to say whatever he thinks Trump wants to hear, which Vance gave us similarly avoid an answer and just talked about tariffs. And then the moderators did not follow up with vance no about his avoided answer so there you go the abortion segment is basically a rehash of what happened in the in the kamala trump debate with like vance talking about a bill in minnesota who that he claimed like leads to the death of of like babies who were aborted like after birth or like some some some

kind of odd thing that just isn't true. That was pretty silly. This was one of the issues where he was weakest, and I think we were all maybe slightly upset that Walls, again, was kind of hands-off on this. Historically, Vance has made a lot of crazy comments on podcasts

about this topic, and neither the moderators nor Walls really pressed him super hard on it advance himself tried to largely be on the attack with this like late-term abortion killing babies after birth thing that walls just tried to easily kind of brush aside as just not being true yeah speaking of health care vance oddly tried to claim that trump like saved obamacare at this point in the debate things just kind of started getting a little bit boring. I don't think this debate

had as many like good questions as the last one. No. It was a very like 2012 style debate. It just, it just. It was flat. It was flat. It didn't feel kind of like present.

So they talked about Obamacare, how Trump saved Obamacare and Wallace talked about how Trump hurt Obamacare. Just kind of boring back and forth. And then finally, the last question was about democracy on January 6th, election denial, that kind of stuff. And Vance opened by saying,

we have other issues to solve beyond election denial. He said that we should have open debate about the issues of the 2020 election. He then downplayed january 6th and emphasized instead the bigger threat to democracy was facebook censorship and and how people are like ending friendships over political disagreements and this was bizarre i think this was wall's like strongest moment uh he talked about how there was 140 police officers assaulted on january 6th some who later died he mentioned this other story about how like on january 6th there were similar protests in a whole bunch of different states and he mentioned one in minnesota where

people like threatened to like march to his home and his kid and his dog needed to be like escorted out by police because people were like threatening to go to his home saying that there might be casualties i thought that was maybe that that was that was a pretty good moment four walls brought up how people on january 6th uh tried to kill mike pence which everyone seems to forget it's not talked about enough i mean yeah look that's one of those things where like my issues there are political not about the specific. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Vance tried to be like, hey, you know, everyone does a little election denial. In 2016, there was Russiagate.

And I think Walls did a pretty good follow up by saying like January 6th wasn't about Facebook ads. It wasn't like that wasn't the problem. The problem was the people storming the Capitol trying to kill everyone inside. Like that was the real issue. And real censorship is stuff like book banning. first time we had a mention of any of that but even in this section about j6 he still like thanked vance for having this conversation and then asked him if trump lost the election which vance just avoided avoided answering instead asking walls did comaless censor americans on facebook which is just great yeah it's a great equally important problem yeah these two these two issues and unfortunately walls's initial response was like i don't run facebook which just say he's lying like

just call him a liar tim yeah he's a liar It's wild that like we're talking about like January 6th and advance his biggest concern is people being banned on Facebook. Like, I think that's not going to play well for him. It's not going to play well, but also, yeah, it was just a missed opportunity. There were a lot of those. The entire debate was a missed opportunity, Robert. Yeah. And like Walls is, I think, slight fumble here. yeah and like walls is i think slight fumble here you can point out his like closing statement saying like i'm surprised that we have this coalition from like bernie sanders to dick

cheney to taylor swift you're like yeah that is that is a little surprising maybe that's a bit of the problem oh that was a nightmare line for me of all the names to drop dick cheney dick cheney and taylor swift hand in hand well because like even among moderates do you think dick cheney? Dick Cheney and Taylor Swift, hand in hand. Well, because like even among moderates, do you think Dick Cheney's popular? That was my last straw. I was like, who prepped him? Who did his debate prep? Who agreed that statement?

Someone who really likes fucking Dick Cheney. Was it Karl Rove? Did they get Karl Rove again? God damn it. Was Hillary involved with this debate prep? Like, shoot, like I know the Clintons were involved with Kamala's debate prep. Were they. Was Hillary involved with this debate prep? Like, shoot, like, I know the Clintons were involved with Kamala's debate prep. Were they involved with Tim Walz's debate prep? Yeah, I'm

not sure, but I think this kind of underlines I know this is kind of a larger issue with, like, the Democratic Party in the year 2024, but I think this also underlines, like, my issue with Walz's performance here is, like, this debate, both candidates were going after the Dick Cheney voter. They were going after, dick cheney voter they were going after like

neocons and independents the literal devil yes and and like for for that base i think vance does appeal to them more in this debate i think vance did a better job appealing to those people in this debate which left walls coming off as just slightly worse and not really giving him any like standout like performances i think if walls actually like emphasized all the reasons that vance is a freak and is bad i think that may have showed him to be more of a unique candidate instead they both came off as just kind of boring moderates which just doesn't make sense because that's like the opposite reason that both of these men were picked for their chops they were both picked to represent this slightly more extreme wing of the

party with walls being a bit more progressive with Walls being a bit more progressive and Vance being a bit more fascist. Now, it makes sense that Vance is going to go after the moderates. I just don't think Walls needed to. Agree. That's kind of all my thoughts on this riveting two-hour debate. I have to say, me too, man.

Well, we've got a flash poll from CBS News. 42% for Vance, 41%ance 41 for walls great 17 set a tie great yeah that was the general that was the general like that was the general vibe yep fox fox news was walls was good enough vance did just fine no moderators obnoxious moderators smug and arrogant bias, but that's just typical. I think the moderators were fine. I think overall, it wasn't a very well laid out debate.

I think the fact that Vance was able to be humanized with the assistance of Walls makes Vance kind of the winner in the way that this did more to benefit Vance than it did to benefit Walls. This did more to benefit Vance than it did to benefit Walls. And the fact that Walls kind of acted counterintuitively to his whole line of messaging from the past year is a fundamental mistake that I think I hope the Democrats would like re-evaluate going forward. But they're the Democrats. So just just interesting, interesting take that I've seen online and also a take from my Midwest moderate Democrat mother is she said to me, just remember, Tim is from the Midwest and Minnesota is the most Midwest there is. It is not in his nature to be anything but

polite. Not what we're used to seeing in a debate, but it was a little refreshing. So okay, so I'm just saying, yeah, if you went into this already liking walls, this won't make you dislike Walls. My mom definitely already liked Walls. Right?

And that's why I think this is largely inconsequential. Even if Vance got a little bit of a leg up, it is largely inconsequential. Do you know who the winner of the debate was? Minnesota. Sounds like a great place to live. Got great PR tonight. I guess so. Walls was clearly doing the

best here when he was just talking about how nice Minnesota is. He's like, it's great here. And Tim, we all know what the winters are like there. You're not fooling anybody. Like, come on. That said, if you live in the Portland area or really anywhere in

Southern California, move to Minnesota. Just get on out of here. You'll love it. You're going to have a great time. Everyone in Southern California, move to Minnesota. Just get on out of here. You'll love it. You're going to have a great time. Everyone in Minnesota is going to love you. People love Californians when they move other places. It goes well. It's always happy. Always, always a good time. So if I had any advice to end on, it's people who are currently in Los Angeles, move to Minnesota. You will be beloved. People will want to listen to your policy ideas. It'll be great. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.

It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season or wherever you get your podcasts. unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God,

things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I am talking to a felon right now, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take real phone calls from anonymous strangers all over the world as a fake gecko therapist and try to dig into their brains and learn a little bit about their lives.

I know that's a weird concept, but I promise it's pretty interesting if you give it a shot. Matter of fact, here's a few more examples of the kinds of calls we get on this show. I live with my boyfriend and I found his piss jar in our apartment. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails.

I have very overbearing parents. Even at the age of 29, they won't let me move out of their house. So if you want an excuse to get out of your own head and see what's going on in someone else's head, search for Therapy Gecko on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's the one with the green guy on it. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature.

I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting We'll be right back. or the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life.

Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities,

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Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, the podcast where i take an entire kind line put it in my mouth at once and then try not to suffocate that's that's what's already happened you missed that uh maybe if you were a subscriber to cooler zone media you would have uh been you wouldn't i'm sorry i'm not doing that i'm not doing the weird yeah fcc no cool as own media will not provide you access to footage of james choking on a climb far yeah no that's only in a premium package but we're not here today to talk about snacks um sadly that will be another podcast we are here today to talk about my recent trip to the dalian gap in panama so i guess to start off with, we should probably explain, do you think, Miro, I need

to explain where it is and what? Look, I went to school with a kid who actually, this happened multiple times. Now I'm thinking back on it. People who thought that the Arabian Peninsula was in Mexico, so we do

in fact need to explain this. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Okay. I'm just imagining that. What a culture. It somehow got it mixed up with a Yucatan.

It was really sort of. Oh, wow. Incredible stuff happening in my schools. Yeah. Fascinating. Yeah. Okay. So for those of you who are not familiar, the Dalian Gap is an area between Colombia and Panama

that has historically, like, I've seen a lot of characterizations of this, which I think erase the existence of indigenous people, which shouldn't be shocking given the corporate media, right? But people have lived in this area for thousands of years. They have happy and fulfilled lives. They thrive there. It's not a desolate place.

It's just a place that hasn't made itself amenable to capitalism, really. It's a place between Colombia and Panama where there are no roads. There are not navigable rivers. It is extremely mountainous. It is one of the most humid places on earth. It is covered in incredibly dense jungle. There are fast flowing rivers, which you have to cross as you travel there.

And for about half a million migrants last year, it was the only way that they could come from South America to Central America. And they continue their journey on to North America. From my understanding, like this isn't just people like from South America. Like there's a bunch of other't just people from South America. There's a bunch of other people who come into South America because it's easier to get in who are taking this route too. Yeah, that's right. So for most people who want to come to the United States, they can't fly directly to the United States, right? It's quite rare to get their asylum that

way. Very rare. And there's a chnv cuba haiti nicaragua venezuela program which in theory allows that it's backed up for like two years so most people will fly to a country in south america the most regular one is brazil because brazil doesn't impose visas on countries that don't impose visas on it and then from there they begin making their way north um geography understanders will realize that brazil is a very long way from the united states yeah that's very bad like that's that's not good that's yeah it's not good at all short of argentina you really you really can get that much further away you know in the continental southern america so what people tend to do

especially so i spoke to just off the top of my head people from nepal people from india people from venezuela people from colombia people from angola people from cameroon togo iran i spoke to a kurdish guy but he was from iran i'm trying to think off the top of my head that's most of them probably china China, right? I know there's been... I didn't speak to any Chinese migrants. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting.

I went fully prepared with like a machine to translate and everything. And I didn't see any Chinese migrants, which is quite surprising. Haitian people, of course, I spoke to a lot of Haitian people. The Chinese were coming through the Darien Gap in big numbers last year. The only thing I heard about Chinese migrants was that someone had seen The Chinese were coming through the Darien Gap in big numbers last year. The only thing I heard about Chinese migrants was that someone had seen the remains of someone who they described as Chinese. Yeah. Yeah. So if you're not familiar with the journey, it is the most dangerous part of the migration route in the Americas, right?

It's one of the most dangerous migration routes on Earth. People have to walk for between two days and a week i've heard even 15 days but the accounts i had maxed out a week there is nowhere to get water there is nowhere to get food you have to walk through mud that can come up to your waist you have to cross rivers that are higher than you are tall you have to climb boulders shimmy across cliff faces the accounts i heard and the things i saw were pretty horrible like and we've kind of had a fun introduction but i would rather go back to the uncertainty i had of like being in syria last year and knowing that there were bombs falling on people every night and have to see some of that stuff again it's horrific like I can't really

I'm obviously working on a scripted series and we'll have that out soon but like in terms of the things that we do to each other as humans like little children die in the derring gab all the time and people carry their babies across rivers on their shoulders people carry other people's babies when when people are too tired from carrying their own children and not everyone who enters leaves right it's if you drink the water from the river you'll probably die because there are dead bodies upstream right this human waste in that river if you fall and break your leg you'll die if you run out of water you're not really in a place where anyone has any spare water to give you it's horrific every single account of the gap that i heard was that no one should do it that it's's, it's terrible, that it's inhuman. It's like

nothing people have ever seen, but people don't have a choice, right? It's the only way for people. I spoke to probably, I have over a hundred interviews recorded. Um, you know, I spoke to more people than that. The vast bulk of them were from Venezuela, a place where I used to live. And like, I understand that they, lots of them have children. Some of them are bringing their children. Some of them are going ahead and trying to send money, right? Remittances back to their children, right? And everyone said the same thing, that there's no future for them in their country, that they don't see a way of succeeding, of raising their families,

of having a future for themselves there um i met a trans lady from venezuela who was saying that like there are legal things in place that won't allow her to have her gender affirmed by documents where she wasn't able to graduate with her degree jesus christ yeah like like things that just completely deliberately torpedo your life just being who you are as yourself right people aren't doing this because they want this fictional housing assistance or whatever it is that trump and jd vance people are doing this because they don't see a future for themselves i spoke to iranian women right who had been on the road for nearly a year trying to avoid prosecution at home for having participated in in protests for like basic human rights yeah um it it just

the things I heard and saw were deeply deeply uh upsetting and I think it's really important that we I guess kind of bear witness to this because it doesn't really get discussed. When the US media talks about migration, maybe if we're lucky, they'll come to the southern border for a day and do some impressionistic piece on it. But pretty often they talk about migrants, but they don't talk to them and so like i think it's important that we talk to them and i think it's important that we face up to the fact that like this is a choice that the people who have been elected in this country have made they have decided that the the only way for instance the only place to use cbp1 right is in southern mexico or north of mexico city can you explain what cbp1 is for people who don't remember? Yeah, sorry.

So CBP1 is an app that allows people to apply for an interview for asylum. Just to sort of skip ahead, I guess, people understand that they have to use CBP1 and they understand that they can only do it in Mexico. And the people who I met in the Darien are now in Mexico, right? They take a series of buses north, not all of them. I'll explain why, but some of them haven't been able to leave Panama yet. They take a series of buses north and they get to the Guatemala-Mexico border

and they cross in Tapachula. And then they work out that CBP1 is not compatible with the vast majority of cell phones. It doesn't work with older android like samsung phones oh my fucking god yeah yeah it uh it works with iphones and i didn't see a single person with an iphone if you're wealthy you can avoid the daddy and right there are ways you can go around in a boat there are ways that you can sort of take a shorter route the route that i was on is the route that people who do not have the resources to avoid this dreadful journey take and now they get to mexico and they realize that yeah they you have to get to mexico to make the application right and the way to get there is to cross to darien and then when you get there you

realize that this thing requires you to have a special telephone that you don't have it's just very bleak it's a level of human evil both in the sense of it has been actively designed like this and in the sense that they don't give a shit like the fact that that fucking app doesn't work on androids and doesn't work older androids back at the app fucking sucks shit like the entire way yeah like everything about this journey is designed to be painful to kill people to to strip away like the hope that people have yeah and it's and it's designed to do this to like attempt to satiate the fucking insane bloodlust of like seven dipshits in fucking like rural southern illinois And it's like, okay, there's literally nothing you can do to ever appease these people. The only

thing that will ever appease them is their own death. Like, nothing you're ever going to do to these fucking immigrants is ever going to make these people like... Like, you could fucking... You could put these people in a country that has zero immigrants at all and they would still scream about it. There's nothing you can fucking do.

And people have decided that in order to... Basically, people have decided in order to try to get a 1% higher margin in an election, they're probably still going to lose. They're going to just fucking inflict inhuman suffering on unbelievably large numbers of people. Yeah. Like, I think that's the thing I want people to really, like, grasp is that, like, somebody has made a decision. Maybe we should take an ad break here. All right, advertising break. All right, we're back. So specifically, I want to talk about what the U.S. is doing right now in Panama,

what it started doing since July, right? That's why I wanted to go when I did. Panama had a change of presidency in July. We have Molina as president now. And he's promised to close the Darien, right? If your source was his social media then you would think it was closed I saw about a thousand people a day crossing none of them had seen a barrier none of them had seen the razor wire that he's posted about they didn't know that it was this thing what they did know was that the US had an election

in November and everybody wants to get here before that yeah you know i tried to explain that like we actually don't transition power immediately right that happens in january but everybody is concerned to get here before the election and what the u.s is doing in panama is the u.s is currently funding deportations and i like saw that happening firsthand with... This is honestly one of those things that just really fucks me up. And I need to... I tried to record stuff at a time. And it's all just me saying, this sucks.

This is terrible. What it looks like is... So you leave Bajo Chiquito, right? Which is... Bajo Chiquito is an indigenous village. It's a village of the Embara people who were wonderful. They were nothing but kind to me. I stayed in their houses for a week and slept in my hammock in their house.

I shared their food, held their little babies. They were incredible and kind hosts and I'm very grateful to them. From Bajo Chiquito, which is this tiny village, right? The population of Bajo Chiquito triples every day. 500 people live there, a thousand people roll up every day. And then they're transported in dugout canoes, like a tiny canoe that is carved out from the trunk of a tree. They're two-stroke bolted on the back.

I think I posted a picture on Twitter. If not, I will do. The migrants are taken upstream. They pay 25 bucks each and they're taken five hours upstream. If they don't have the money, there's three canoes every day that are provided for free.

And they generally try and make sure that all the women and children get in those canoes, right? One of the things that Embara has done is made everyone wear life jackets just because a lot of these people can't swim right they've been crossing rivers above their heads they told me that they made human chains right so everybody sort of locks their arms together because the rivers wash people away they're transported from bajo chiquito to a place called las blancas which is the first migrant reception center in panama so they're now leaving like they don't

have reservations in in panama but they're in the embra wunan comarca and then when they get there they're in the italian comarca so they're in sort of outside of an almost entirely indigenous like state of panama and in like what you would consider like panamanian government custody i guess when they enter in lajas blancas and when they get there they register right they show their passport they do all that stuff and that's where like un has shelters the red cross has a facility there the um highest has the hebrew immigrant aid society global brigades all these big ngos that you're used to seeing in these places have facilities there but to to leave Las Blancas,

they need 60 bucks per person to get on a bus. Right. And if they don't have 60 bucks to get on the bus, I was told these buses are owned by Panamanian parliamentary deputies, but I haven't been able to confirm that. Jesus Christ. Yeah. Someone is putting 55 people on a bus,

taking 60 bucks from each of them and sending about 20 buses a day. Like someone is making a lot of money. People will remember that one of these buses crashed last year, killing 42 migrants. But the really bleak thing is it's not the bus. It's not the 10 hour bus ride. Like those people are so happy to be getting on the bus because they're continuing it's the people who don't have 60 bucks and like yeah they've made it this far with a combination of whatever savings they had and like incredible tenacity right like

they pay someone in colombia obviously to bring them so to get to the start of their walk in dalian they leave from necocli in col, come across an Alancha, like a speedboat, and then they walk up to the Colombian border where the guides then leave them. Now, the guides are obviously, like, this area is controlled by the Gulf Cartel in Colombia, right? So they have safe passage through that area. None of them had anything bad to say about that area.

It's when the guides leave them and they're on their own into Panama, that's when they didn't have water. They didn't have food because no one's told them they need water and food, to be fair, right? They didn't think it was going to take as long as it was, be as hard as it was. Lots of them have learned a little bit from TikToks and stuff, so some of them bring a bit more.

But four days of water is a lot of water. Speaking from experience, a backpack in the desert, if you don't have the right equipment, it's hard carry so yeah it should is heavy yeah right like you like that's the other part like if you want four liters a person right that's like gonna be four kilograms and and that's a day so you multiply that by four days what is it what is it in pounds 8.8 pounds it's four liters yeah You're also carrying this through the fucking jungle, which is just like...

Everything's wet all the time, right? You're sweating. You're crossing rivers. Your feet are always wet. Everyone's feet, when they arrive in La Hasblanca, so I took pictures of this, they all have these crappy boots

that they buy in Necoclí in Colombia. And every bin in Bajo Chiquito is full of these boots because they suck and people like the blisters I saw and like people getting trench foot right like where the entire skin on their foot is just ready to slough off like a glove like everyone buys these crocs from a vendor in Bajo Chiquito there. But they can get through all that. Everyone who I met in Bajo Chiquito, everyone who I met on the trail had made, right? Through tenacity, and a lot of people said it's a roulette. You go in there and you hope for the best.

Not everyone makes it, but most of them do. So the people who had made it get to go to Las Blancas, right? And if they can't afford the the boat from bajo chiquito to las blancas they can walk it's it's not fun it's another eight hours of walking right i met some of those guys one day and i like gave them water filters and stuff i wasn't allowed to walk with them but i was able to like talk with them and i spoke to them again when they arrived right and they get to get to Las Blancas and they're just, if they don't have 60 bucks and they don't have it.

And then they stay there sometimes for months. And this is not a place to stay for months. Like I, they have little casitas, which they have for like this one for unaccompanied children. And then others I think are allocated to families, but it's not much more than four walls and a roof. And most people don't even get that, right?

Most people are looking for a flat spot to pitch the shitty tent that they bought in Colombia. And then they're just stuck there. And this is obviously a relatively new policy. They used to take five free people per bus, but they don't anymore. Like from Baja Chiquito, they have three free boats a day, right?

But leaving Las Bl las blancas if you don't have the money then you don't leave and the people i spoke to there who were stuck there are still stuck there people have been stuck there for more than a month their children aren't going to school they're sleeping on the ground it if this is not a place that's designed to be a long-term residence it's designed to be like one night and moving through. And every day new people arrive who can't afford it. And so the population is growing and growing and growing. And there seems to be no solution.

No one I spoke to could point to what they want them to do, right? Like they're being given free food by the government. Some of them said the food wasn't great. i'm not sure if it's halal like sometimes some of them said they'd seen food that had pork in it but i didn't see any food to have pork in it when i was there so maybe that's been changed but they're just stuck there yeah there's nothing they can do right if they want to have money transferred there they can do it through a local intermediary who charges a 25 fee so now if you don't have 60 yeah like you need 75 bucks now right to get your 60 bucks now multiply that by a family of five you can start to see where it

becomes inaccessible to people yeah and that's that's a lot of money like if you're in this position like that's yeah it costs so much more to travel on buses and by foot across the americans than it would to fly yeah like all of them would love to fly but they can't because we have this system that makes everyone money apart from the migrants yeah and it's like it didn't fucking it didn't fucking used to be like this like when my family came to the u.'s like it didn't fucking it didn't fucking used to be like this like when my family came to the u.s like we didn't have to like you know we had a bunch of fucking harrowing shit to like flee the japanese and like get to taiwan but it was like like when my parents like and like their parents like came to the u.s they just they

fucking flew in yeah none of this fucking has to be the way any of this shit works it didn't used to be the way any of this shit works and It didn't used to be the way any of this shit works. And it's like, like these are people from countries and you know, it's like, yeah, obviously like my parents were like bleeding from Taiwan to the U S right. Which makes it easier. But these are also,

these are people from places that the U S fucking hates. Yeah. And so like you, you would expect them to get like at least somewhat similar treatment to people who came from like Taiwan, which is at the time, you know, like U S ally anti-china stuff but

like no we've just decided to just feed these people into a fucking meat grinder yeah and it gets me to my next fucking trauma dump let's take a nap break before that yeah yeah we're back okay so yeah as for me i mentioned right these are places that the u.s considers to be dictatorial or oppressive regimes right around venezuela cuba the three that come to mind of people that i met right and so a lot of these people have what's called a temporary protected status in the u.s it doesn't mean that they necessarily can't be deported. Sometimes they can, but sometimes it makes it a bit harder, right, to deport to those countries. Panama, it's not governed by United States immigration law. Yeah.

We gave on the day that Molino took office, Alejandro Mayorkas himself, the child of migrants from Cuba, I believe, went to Panama, attended the inauguration and then announced this six million dollar aid package right which the u.s was going to give to fund deportations from panama directly and i got to see those deportations happening right like you'll hear them in my scripted series yeah but like watching somebody take a dad away from his baby or a mother away from her children or one man's brother away from his brother. Like it's just heartbreaking.

These people have crossed the daddy end, right? They've undertaken a journey. Like I've done a lot of mountaineering. I've done a lot of climbing. I like to fuck around outside, but like I've never done anything where i didn't know if i was going to come back really and like they've done that they've taken this incredibly difficult journey and then when they get to the other side you you you you and you they get picked out and they get

deported back right on flights that are paid for by your tax dollars and my tax dollars yeah and this includes flights to cuba this includes flights to venezuela right places that the u.s considers to be like dictatorial regimes and now these people are back in cuba they're back in venezuela but their government knows that they tried to leave and they've spent all their fucking savings so they're back in square one i spoke to a few colombians they've also deported a lot of colombian people most of the colombian people i spoke to in las blancas were deported they called all the colombian nationals to jesus the office and then these i was told that they were only

deporting people who had like warrants like pending cases but when these people got back to colombia they were just free to go right like if you have a pending case and someone delivers you to the government yeah i'm not an expert in colombian law enforcement but it seems like that would be a good time to prosecute that case yeah and these people tell me that they've been let go none of them told me if they had warrants now like i'm just going off what they said but that night they were texting me pictures themselves in handcuffs by the next day they were back in medellin telling me that they'd been sent home including like i was talking to a lady just before we recorded who she doesn't know where her

children's father her husband is right she's and lots of people will have like i guess what's the english translation like free unions like a um when they're like married for legal reasons they don't go and have a wedding but they're considered to be married common law marriage i guess would be the phrase right like they've lived together for a number of years share a house etc often have children but they're not like they never had a wedding so i don't know if that document makes difference but I've watched people have their children taken out their arms and be shoved in the back of trucks and be deported. And like, that fucking sucks. That is not something that I want to see again.

And it happens every single day there. And it happens because your taxes are paying for it. It didn't used to happen and now it does and it's just heartbreaking like i don't really like it's there's nothing you can do you know there's no you know i can't do anything to stop it um you can't do anything to stop it right like what you can vote for donald trump who would like to machine gun every asylum seeker at the border if he got a chance or you can vote to kamala harris who has presided over record migrant deaths every year of her administration who's sending your money to deport people in panama

who knows that the choices that she's made are resulting in like deaths in panama death here right like there were four people who died in the heat wave in the first week of September, four people who died in Otay Mountain wilderness, like in a tiny area, 10 miles across the border in San Diego. And my friends had to go and search their bodies and my friends found their remains. And I had to confront the fact that like, this is the toll of the rhetoric like this is what the rhetoric costs the other thing I want to mention is that like even in the most desperate moments of their lives everyone looked out for one another in a way that like we don't hear like

one of the things that really struck me was that like everyone's kids are just kind of out and about right no one's particularly afraid of anyone hurting their kids like all of these kids and i saw people who got split up in the gap find each other again in bahutikito and like you know there were strangers who'd carried someone's children for two days because that other person was so tired or they had another child they needed to carry and like yeah i'm strangely comfortable i guess in refugee camps like i'm i i went to panama city afterwards and like i couldn't handle it it was too much for me and i had to stay in my hotel room and like i guess it was just difficult but like i feel safe in those places i feel comfortable and like in a sense it's where you see the best of us

and the worst of us, I guess. Like, I can't imagine being in a place where I know I could lose my life if I slip and fall. And then thinking, well, I've got to carry this little kid. Never met this kid before. I don't share a language. You know, there was a group from Angola and they'd been carrying venezuelan children right they can't even talk to one another but they they'd potentially risk their lives to help yeah it's it's it's pretty fucking bleak i'm staying in touch with everyone i met and and they're telling me about their journeys to the border unfortunately the thing that comes next is an eight to nine month delay as they apply for a cbp1 appointment and like i

wish i could offer something hopeful like i guess what i'll say is what i always say that like there isn't anyone you can vote for who will fix this like you can vote for cornell west or jill stein like i'm not going to vote for someone who fucking supports the policies that are creating refugees in Syria, right? Whatever. I'm not suggesting that that's the solution either. The things that you need to do are like, there is a person helping migrants in your community. I spoke to a Jesuit shelter. I'll put them in my scripted episode. I'm not a big religious shelter guy, but these guys were fucking great.

These guys are saving people's lives and making sure that people have the basic necessity like literally turning up at the refugee camp and making sure everyone had toilet roll and uh toothbrushes and things that yeah you don't need for one night but you're going to be there for a month you don't have you know what are you going to do spend five bucks on toothbrush and toothpaste but that's five less bucks you have for your bus fare right so like i'll put them out there i would love to do a fundraiser like if anyone can work out how to facilitate transfers to migrants who are in the camp for free that would be great uh that would be a service that would make things considerably easier for people but the way that you fix this is showing up like it's showing

up at the border if you live near the border it's showing up in your community it's countering this like with people in your family in your circle like there's a tacit agreement i think in in the entire corporate media that migrants are humans without rights like they're just numbers to these people because i don't see them talking to migrants right like these are people who you know like i help them change their babies i carried their bags for them i played with their kids so they could go take a shower like that they're people just like anyone else of course they are right but like yeah i know they're important to me and it's fucking miserable to see my tax dollars used to make these people suffer yeah these people should

be more important than the fucking sons of boat dealers who's fucking got the land they live on because their ancestors fucking shot a bunch of people yeah like that's that's what's happening here is that these people who are you know some of the most courageous people in the entire world are being sacrificed to appease a bunch of fucking shits. It's a level of evil that is just unfathomable. Yeah. And I think like we really shouldn't, I'm,

I'm somewhat ranting now, but like the pivot that even the Democrats have done in the last four years, right? Like those people need to be held accountable for what is resulting in like babies dying. Like I saw dead kids. I saw that because Kamala Harris and Joe Biden, whichever other fucking Democrat senators and representatives keep voting for this shit, decided that it was okay for those babies to die because they didn't want fox news to say mean stuff about them or nbc to say mean stuff about them right like of course they're trying to move that stuff as far away from you as possible of course they want the deportations to

be done in panama not here so you don't see it in your community and of course they want people to die crossing the darien and not at our border because that's removed and you don't hear it reported on right like it's not a Venezuelan woman died on Thursday we're recording this on Tuesday like Wednesday you don't see that reported right you don't see that there are little kids bodies in the jungle reported because it's out of sight and out of mind and like I guess the thing you can do is constantly bring it back into people's minds and make them accountable for their choices and like i guess this is a point where the electoralists get mad at me i'm not i'm not voting for someone who chose that yeah like and i never could like i couldn't live with myself if i did i know a system which reduces our political engagement

ticking a box every four years is asinine and and child like like i would much rather be out there every day helping people than voting once every four years and and like you can do both of course you can but yeah there's not a voting solution for this like it requires all of us to do a lot of work because we're so far down the path which ends in a really terrible place right it's already a terrible place so these people's lives don't matter and that their children's lives don't matter and that we shouldn't care if they're dying in the jungle and we've got a lot of work to do to get back from that because apparently it's okay with a lot of people in this country yeah i think part of the

reason why it's gotten this bad is that the social movements that had pushed the Democrats in a slightly better direction in the late 2010s stopped social movement. So, you know, the only thing that these people will respond to is like there are actually being mass mobilizations and them feeling politically threatened by it. So, you know, we've done it before. We can do it again. Yeah, the biggest march in this country's history was a march of migrants, right before we can do it again yeah the biggest march in this country's history was a march of migrants right we can do that again so many of us myself included came here to have a chance at a better future and like even if you didn't show some solidarity with people like showing up in massive numbers yeah these movements stop social movementing and people

fell out of the little things but like this shit is important and I think we can build some bridges and like we need to do something to stop this because it's horrific yeah

and so is the genocide in Gaza like we can we need to do something to stop that too but we're not going to do it through voting hey we'll be back

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