It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 48

Episode Date: August 27, 2022

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

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,

there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Hello, and welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about how the world is falling apart, and sometimes about how people are putting it back together what is today it's me i'm james if you haven't worked that out yet and i'm joined by serene say hi serene hi this is serene thank you and i'm joined today by uh vicente calderon uh he's a freelance journalist and the proprietor publisher of TijuanaPress.com. And he's covered the situation on the ground in Tijuana for a very long time. It's an excellent work.

Vicente, what should people know about you? Nice to have you here. Thank you for the invitation. And in advance, I have to apologize for my English, because this is a mixture of Sesame Street and the Tijuana streets. It's excellent. Take a picture in the world kind of English Street and the Tijuana streets. It's excellent. Take a picture in the world kind of English. A wee joke here.

I'm originally a psychologist. I graduated from the School of Psychology here, but I only worked for a couple of years, and then I got stuck with journalism. And I have been here for more than 30 years by now. I've been doing journalism from radio and then I moved to television. And then I went to the U S to work with Spanish language media twice in LA. And then I came back and now I'm, I'm doing online or, or what

digital medium, uh, journalism, so to speak. So I'm a native here. And again, I was just supposed to be working in this for a while until I got old enough to look like a psychologist. I just got caught on the addiction for journalism. i understand yeah yeah uh that's fascinating all right so um the reason we're talking to you today is that we have seen a dramatic increase in violence in tijuana since friday right we're recording this on the tuesday the 16th of august so if people listen to it later they'll know but can you explain a little bit of what happened over the weekend in Tijuana and then across Mexico as well? Well, the thing began on Friday here in Mexicali. And Tijuana, Mexicali is the capital of the state of Baja California, which is in the northwestern side of the U.S.-Mexico border.

So we began seeing people burning cars on the road. They were just ordering people from public transportation to get off the vehicle, not in a very, so to speak, threatening manner kind of way, because they said, well, the problem is not with you, but you have to get off because we're going to burn this bus. And nobody was actually, nobody was really hurt intentionally. We have, just in Tijuana, we have about 15 cases like that. It was mainly public transportation vehicles or some cases, trucks, cargo trucks or private vehicles. But most of it were public transportation vehicles with people were working and were

moving people from their homes to their works or to want to run one errand to another site. So we began to see that this was in a very limited space of time happening not only in Tijuana and in Mexicali, but also in five out of seven cities of Baja California. Nobody was claiming responsibility, but it looks like it was a coordinated effort in basically the main cities of the state. basically the main cities of the state. We were very surprised because even though we have been dealing with drug violence for many decades by now, we've never seen something that looks like the narco-bloqueos or blockades of the streets with drug traffickers, which are unfortunately very common in other cities like Monterrey, for example, recently in Jalisco on the Pacific coast, very in the center part of Mexico, but not here in Tijuana. I mean, I know it sounds rare or strange for many people who know Tijuana for

his bad reputation, but no, we never had cases like this before. That's why it was so surprising. At the end, that was on Friday and then immediately the local authorities began to display not only police from different agencies but also soldiers who were coincidentally, so to speak, were here in big numbers, in large numbers because there's a really big push to put out more soldiers to help with public safety in Mexico. Not everybody's pleased with that because they say that

Mexico is becoming a militarized country and it shouldn't be because we are trying to be a democracy, and in a democracy is not the military or the army in charge of so much responsibility, but that's something that has been changing specifically with this new federal administration with President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador. So they sent out all of the soldiers and police officers, and things basically diminished. But by that time,

in about less than two hours, people were already really scared. Obviously, the news spread on social media and people began worrying. Also,

they began seeing that the public transportation was not enough because many were just into a halt. Not just the public transportation, the officials of the city, but all the digital platforms like Uber, Didi, or other services

were just worried that it might be the next one. If I stay on the roads, am I going to be the target of these guys? We were not sure what was going on. I guess every Tijuana has like an idea that this was coming or linked to drug trafficking, but we were not sure at that time. So in a couple of hours, we didn't see more of these cases. But at that time, the city was really disrupted.

So they began closing. I mean, the first thing that affected was public transportation. So people were stranded with no ways to go back home. And some schools were canceled in classes. And since the students were not able to find transportation, some offered places to stay or spend the night on the schools. Also, that happened with other companies,

with the maquiladora plants, the manufacturing plants that are very popular. There's thousands of people here in Tijuana who work there, also in Mexicali. But here also, they they in some cases have to open spaces so they can spend the night there and we went out and was a lot of people stranded with no place with no way to move from where they were when this began yeah I saw even like Cali Max that the supermarket was closed, right?

They did close early and they announced that the next day they will hold their operation, that they will not open. So they will not put in jeopardy to the safety of their workers. I mean, during Friday, we didn't know really what was going on. How severe was this happening. And just keep in mind that on Friday, Friday was the end of a week of drug lords or chief of cells from the Jalisco Nueva Generación Cartel or the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, which is the quote unquote newest and strongest and most rapidly expanding drug organization in Mexico. And the problem is there, the dynamic was very, very different. Again, in Tijuana, even after the weekend, nobody was killed. Just one person in Mexicali got injured due to burns while they were burning his truck, but apparently nothing major.

So in the case of Guadalajara, it was a bit different. There were at gunpoint pulling people, families out of their private vehicles and also buses. And then there they were really actually blockading roads in an effort to disrupt the operation from the soldiers trying to capture their bosses. And so the violence were way more strong, so to speak, there. And after that, it moved to Guanajuato, another state where there's high presence of Cartel Jalisco New Generation. And two days later, we saw the worst case in Ciudad Juarez, across from El Paso, Texas. We saw the worst case in Ciudad Juarez across from El Paso, Texas. Ciudad Juarez is also another border town or border city, I should say, that has been dealing with a lot of drug trafficking.

And the things were terribly worse there. I mean, they were there killing civilians randomly. They got to convenience stores. Like, think about your 7-Eleven. The counterparty is also a very big chain. In one of these cases, they just went in, opened fire to the cashier, and they killed him. In other cases, a pregnant woman got killed and another one since they burned this these uh places uh the woman who there's two persons who died due to asphyxiation because they got with cut up they were not able to flee the the the place when these guys were were showing up there many of these guys were also yelling or screaming um hooray for the jalisco new generation boss who

is called uh i can remember he's not mencho mencho mentioned his nickname mencho oseguera is the leader of cartel jalisco new generation and they were just praising him and just saying that they were people from Mencho and they were just celebrating him as they were doing all this destruction and terrorizing people. So the worst part was in Ciudad Juarez, sadly. I'm not saying that this was not bad, but just we have to put it in perspective.

And fortunately here, sadly for the people of Ciudad Juarez, fortunately for the fortunately here, sadly for the people of Ciudad Juarez, fortunately for the people here, nobody was injured in those activities on Friday. That diminished on Saturday, but we got more cases on Sunday night in Mexicali. And we actually have about four cases on the last hours of Monday in Ensenada. We are still seeing if all of these have been related to the same effort due to organized crime or are just copycats. Because unfortunately, that also is happening. Some of the cases in Mexicali that happened on Sunday night were, according to the chief of police there, just copycats were just taking advantage of the situation.

I see. Well, that's interesting because until someone takes responsibility, even if they do, all the talks about what cartels are what, that's just in theory, right? Because you don't know who's doing what am i understanding correctly well yes because it's not like when a terrorist organization claimed responsibility for a bombing on the middle east for example but

here the the thing is now the authorities are saying that is what was not just one but different organizations they blame it mainly on Jalisco New Generation because it's one of the, along with the Sinaloa cartel, more broadly extended in the different states. And in this particular case, they can link it in the case of Jalisco and Guanajuato because they got information of these two bosses getting into a meeting, and that's why they reacted. In the case of Ciudad Juarez, it was different because everything began there with a dispute within inmates of the local jail,

where there are clearly two factions from the two main organizations who have been controlling turf in the Ciudad Juarez. Here we were not sure because unfortunately we have not just one or two, we have three drug cartels or trafficking organizations who have been acting or delinquent for several years right now, which is the Jalisco New Generation, the one we talk about, which is the Jalisco New Generation, the one we talk about, which is the relatively newest organization. The Sinaloa Cartel, who has been from the cradle of drug traffic in Mexico, the state of Sinaloa, expanding the routes that I'm sure they know. El Chapo from the

Narcos series, very popular now, has been the public enemy number one, according to Chicago, Public enemy number one, according to Chicago, for about eight years ago, and now in a jail in New York. But their sons and their associates are still operating their trafficking organization along different routes in Mexico. And Baja California is one of those routes where they have a strong presence. And Baja California is one of those routes where they have a strong presence. And also the Arellano Felix Drug Organization, the so-called Tijuana cartel that is very popular, has its own series on Netflix as part of Narcos Mexico. This is the relevance of these kids who grow up as criminals at the border between Tijuana and San Diego. So nobody has claimed responsibility as in other cases, but I think it's safe to know that these are the main suspects. In the case of Tijuana, it's also the possibility that the feud between these three organizations

was an excuse for this level of violence. I mean, everybody's trying to be the strongest force, so they challenged themselves, not only on the streets but on social media. This was also a way to challenge the authorities, because even though the authorities reacted quickly to do more or frustrate more events, they were able to burn 15 cars at the end of the week and were 36 in different areas, in different cities. So that is not something that you can say, not the authorities, the military chief of the country saying,

Now the military chief of the country is saying, well, in Tijuana they attempted against the civilians. Well, they did. They didn't kill them, but they burned their property and they disrupted the whole operation. So we are also seeing very carefully the way the local and national authorities are reacting because we were lucky now but this is probably will happen again if there's not a really strong response from an intelligent response from the authorities yeah okay i'm sorry if i'm sorry if this is silly but is there any deeper meaning to it being specifically public transportation like it just seems so specific to like how civilians are transporting themselves. Is it just a show of power to be like, we're going to make everyone freeze?

Or is there any deeper meaning to what they're targeting? Not that I understand so far. I mean, for me right now, because as they did, they were successful in bringing the city to a halt. I mean, we went out and just think this was a Friday summer night in Avenida Revolucion, who has seen a renaissance for the last 10 years. There's a lot of people coming from the U.S. side and from Mexico to enjoy the gastronomy local, the bars, the party scene, was dead. The only people we found there Friday night was workers that were not able to find an Uber.

I talked to some of the Uber drivers. The DD drivers told me it went from one to seven. I mean, something will cost you $10. The price was now $70 due to the high demand and poor offer. So, no, I don't find another explanation so far with the information that we have until now, that could explain, but they did reach a big impact with these relatively easy actions after all these coordinated attacks.

Yeah, it's probably worth mentioning the context of in one of Guzman's kids was arrested in, I believe, 2018. I'm not good at dates, but around then. And there was a huge, huge increase in violence immediately following that. And eventually AMLO, the president, gave the order to release him. Oh, that was more recent was Ovidio one of the main sons in in something that we call the Culiacanazo. Culiacan is the name of the city is the capital of the state of Sinaloa as we said I have family my mother is from Sinaloa

and some people from Sinaloa get offended when we say that it's a cradle of drug trafficking in Mexico, because most of the power, the drug laws come from Sinaloa. But yeah, you're right. You're right. And that's something that has become a big recurrent topic when people criticize, especially the political opposition, criticize the current president, because they said this is the origin of these kind of demonstrations. So when the government wants to act, now the criminals know that an effort, a coordinated effort to get out on the streets and to show their muscle could make the government to think twice, to hold their operation and to free, in some cases, these guys. Again, in the case of Jalisco, they were on the way, according to the official statement from the Mexican army, to try to capture these two leaders, but it didn't happen.

I mean, the criminals get organized to blockade the actions of the authorities. In the case of Tijuana, we were not, we didn't get to that point. It was more like, there's also one theory that says that the local chapter, so to speak, of the Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación, was just trying to replicate what happened there just to show the force, to demonstrate the muscle as a criminal organization here in Tijuana. Yeah. That's basically the two theories.

Right. A dispute between them, and the other one is that they were just replicating a little bit in a different dimension, so to speak, what happened in Mexicali, just to tell them, if you do do the same here this is what you're going to be facing and that was a message for the authorities yeah I saw a resident compare it to uh what it was like in the early stages of COVID like how ghost town it was and I mean when you think about it that's pretty powerful if a cartel can have the impact of a pandemic if not more so it's it's uh it's terrifying i can't

imagine i think it was worse when we went out when covid first began in the lockdown and this will be too silly but there's the red light districts that never sleeps here we went to that particular corridor nobody was in the main drag there but it's a reality when we we just we went out and we got video of this streets basically empty yeah your video on your twitter we'll find a way to link to it was incredible it was just like this is normally like the strip in las vegas or something and it was just a ghost town a ghost town yeah yeah again the only people we found there was uh people looking for transportation yeah it's crazy so there's been a massive at least show of state power in tijuana in the last i don't know four five six months like they're constantly rotating new troops in

last i don't know four five six months like they're constantly rotating new troops in they do the parades with the big flag uh and it's like to to looking from the outside from a less informed perspective it looks like there are these various actors right and each of them sort of flexes their muscles in a different way um and is that relevant here has the army they discovered a tunnel if I remember correctly. Have they done much else in Baja since they started these big deployments? No, that's one of the main complaints

of the local organizations, civilian organizations here because even though we have, I'm going to make some notes and we have 5,660 soldiers right now in the state of Baja California, most of them in Tijuana, who have been deployed since August last year, which is when the National Strategy of Peace, as the government called it, began. But unfortunately, I can give you another statistics.

We have only just in Tijuana, in the municipality of Tijuana, so far this year, almost 1,200 homicides. I mean, we as a city, as a municipality, we have way more homicides than many Mexican states. This is the level of violence that we are dealing with on a daily basis. And this is when you hear the authorities talking about a reduction on homicides, which is probably true in terms of the numbers, of statistics.

But still, we are a little bit past half the year, and we are already past 1,000 homicides. I mean, when people get alarmed in Chicago is when you are hitting, I remember a couple of years ago, like 500, and the whole year. We have this in three months, and this is the kind of problems that we're dealing with. But you have to also keep in mind, last week, the DOJ of the U.S., the FBI, the DA, Customs and Border Protection, have a gathering to announce that San Diego became the epicenter for smuggling of fentanyl. Sixty percent of the seizures of fentanyl in all the nation occur between San Isidro, the main port of entry here in San Diego, to Calexico. There are six ports of entry in this stretch of land on the end of the border, on the western end of the border. Well, these places is where more than half of the fentanyl that is being smuggled to the U.S. is going through.

to the U.S., it's going through. That will explain partly the level of violence that we've been dealing and how, even though there's good efforts by the local authorities, state and local authorities, I mean, even given that there's cases of corruption as in any other agency, I would say that we have great, very capable detectives and police officers in Mexico, but in many cases there's no political will from their bosses to really act on the benefit in the public. So this is the kind of or overdoses linked to opioids. problem that is growing with people dying with fentanyl overdose besides the fentanyl the the methamphetamine problem that also has been increasing uh the traffic here and now we are seeing the comeback of some drugs trafficking and deep and new levels like heroin and cocaine who

came out of fashion for a while but always doing like kind of a resurgence at least in this corridor yeah that's fascinating like there's been an increase specifically coming through that that baja california area maybe then we should explain a little bit about these three actors right the uh cjng we'll call them the cartel de sinaloa and the Arellano Felix or Tijuana cartel can you explain a little bit about who they are and where they sort of fit into this where they come from maybe well I basically all come from the uh people watching Netflix Narcos and Netflix they talk about this federation of cartels again everything the main power was from the state of Sinaloa. And between mid-90s, 1994, mid-90s, when the arrest of Felix Gallardo, they restablished, they distributed the routes. And one was the one of the Pacific, along the Pacific, from Sinaloa to along the Pacific.

And they basically cut the country into different domain routes. And then you have different organizations. Those organizations who used to be together became a powerful house on their own. And that has increased the violence from the 90s. Because now you have, from the beginning the the arellano felix who used to be partners with el chapo uh uh ended up in disputes and feuds among them so the the main one is was the main one in all this is the sinaloa cartel head by the chapo guzman and now Ismael El Mayo Zambada, which is still a gentleman

around probably getting to their 80s. I'm not quite sure, but who has been on the run for many years, but relatively calm and with big investments and with the high presence here in Baja California, with that faction

of the Sinaloa Cartel. And the Sinaloa Cartel also, after the arrest of El Chapo, it's run and the other big faction for the sons of El Chapo Guzman, Ovidio, and they call it Los Chapitos. Yeah, the little chapos. Yeah, the little chapos. There's like three. Iván Archibaldo, and I can't remember the name of the other one.

So that's the Sinaloa cartel with presence, but mainly in the northern part. And really, mainly, basically, their thing is to manufacturing methamphetamine and now fentanyl and send it to the U.S. methamphetamine, and now fentanyl, and sent it to the U.S. Then the Arellano Felix Drug Organization, who became, as a result of that division, that distribution, according to the most commonly known narrative about the drug world, Felix Ayala distributed it after his arrest, established themselves in Tijuana. They are from Sinaloa, too, but they established themselves from Tijuana in the, actually in the 80s, but the 90s, they became powerful on its own. And they, due to the proximity of San Diego and to the fact that they mix with many of the border lifestyle elite of Tijuana, they changed the image of the drug trafficker.

They became more entrepreneurs and they wanted to become the first Mexican cartel, Colombian Pablo Escobar style, according to the narrative. And they did. They became, in the 90s, they were one of the most powerful drug organizations in the world for the amount of not just marijuana, but cocaine that they were moving. I mean, they established relationships with Colombia.

And after a while, Colombians were not trafficking in Mexico. They were just sending the drug to the Mexicans. At the beginning, Colombians were kind of leasing the routes in the Mexican territory to send the drugs to the Mexicans. At the beginning, Colombians were kind of leasing the routes in the Mexican territory to send the drugs into the U.S. But then when this division and newcomers and the drug trade in Mexico,

they decide, and I think the Arellano Felix have something to do with that, they want to go and get the drugs from Colombians in South America and bring in and just take care of the whole thing. So it becomes their own cartel. And then Jalisco Nueva Generación is another offshoot,

is what you call it? Yes. A spin-off kind of would be another way of the Sinaloa Cartel because they used to have a presence in Guadalajara and the different factions were killing each other, changing loyalties, and they became a force on their own after a big division between the Beltran Leyva group and the Ignacio Coronel organization,

and they become their own cartel on its own. And that's where, according to the DEA and also Mexican authorities, it's expanding more rapidly in a very short period of time. And then, unfortunately, have been moving not only to drug trafficking, but there's many small groups that now are making their money and the old way of the mafia, the Cosa Nostra was doing their money in New York in the 70s or before. They were just extorting money out of local businesses from a well-established chain of stores to a little tag of stand on the corner. There's also the trafficking of gasoline in Mexico and has been doubling.

I mean, anything that they, once they get powerful, they began to move to other activities. For example, in the case of the Arellano Ferriss, kidnapping wasn't a thing, let's say, before the 90s in Baja California. They were kidnapping people who used to be their associates. It's the where's my money kind of thing. Think about good fellows. They were killing each other. There was everything among themselves. But later they began that they were acting with a lot of impunity, that they had a lot of cops and authorities on their payroll.

So they began to move to other ways to earn money. And that's what we are seeing now, that this expanding, this little, as in Colombia, they used to call it baby cartels. We now have like new chapters, smaller organization, not as powerful, but as violent as the original. I wanted to ask, because I saw a lot of these, like, supposedly, like they come up on TikTok or Facebook, right? They're these little announcements from the different cartels. these little announcements from the different cartels and they tend to say at least in the context of Baja California that like we don't want to disrupt uh ordinary people or good people good citizens of Baja California you know but we need you to stay in your homes this weekend right things like that but it obviously does have an impact on the people who are just sort of doing

whatever they do just running their business um so I was wondering sort of doing whatever they do, just running their business. So I was wondering sort of how people get through these difficult times in Tijuana and Baja California. Well, times have become more difficult because many people believe this because the widespread possibility of disseminating these messages, no? And you never know which ones are real

and which ones are not. I mean, you guys have the same with the gangs. Remember, like, don't blink your headlights because then the gang will start killing people left and right. So just take that on steroids now with social media and now everybody with a phone that can get that messages. And that played a big role in what happened on Friday here in Tijuana. They were recycling a video of three guys videotaping themselves in front of the attorney general's office in Tijuana.

general's office in Tijuana says, Mencho is here. We're going to kill everybody and just being very loud and with a lot of insults and trying to scare everybody, the rivals, but everybody else. So during the hours of Friday,

somebody began retweeting that when it was at least a year old video of them claiming that they were already here. So some people think, well, all this commotion happening, all these cars burning, they didn't know exactly what was going on. Some people began to call it narco-bloqueos that just scare more people. And then you see this.

So the level of anxiety increased significantly. You have to be very careful. And you have to also keep in mind the political feuds that we are seeing. What you are seeing between some people loyal to Trump and the Republican Party and some people that are against Trump is the same here with Morena and non-morena actors or people who like the morena, which is the political party funded, created by the current president, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, or the ones who are against them and are very unhappy or angry with all these social policies. We have here a television station run on by the former governor of Baja California, who is a very close friend of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the current president, who became a very powerful figure. And due to his proximity with Lopez Obrador, basically, the current president revived this gentleman, which, by the way, lives in San Diego in Chula Vista in a big mansion because he exiled himself from about 30 years ago when he was associated with the last PRI government, the pre-political party to run Mexico for the last 70 years in a row.

He was a very close associate with Jicotén Catleba Mortera, which was the current governor who didn't finish his term because the then president of Mexico, Carlos Salinas, accused him of corruption, so he just removed him. And this guy, Jaime Bonilla, became a pariah. So the PAN, the new power, basically marked him because also he had some previous suspicious relationships through the baseball team here in Tijuana and from other endeavors that makes them look very close to the Arellano Felix Drug Organization.

The Arellano Felix Drug Organization has been linked for many years with the last administration because they claim that that last PR administration is the one who basically opened the door for the Arianna Felix to establish here in Baja California. So this is what we are seeing, that this message, well, now this guy who just left the office, Jaime Bonilla just finished his governorship on December last year. So there's a new governor, but he also owns a television station. So he who is always criticizing the current governor, which is by the way the same political party, was using some of these messages with no proof or no validity or very suspicious. And he was saying in their newscasts, were saying, well, there's also this happening, there's this threats and they know that this government is corrupt. And they were just adding to the fire.

And I mean, as an analogy, you know, the real fire, but to the concern of the people. And it's like saying that, oh, we're going to start a lockdown and we'll be talking together. What's the word for talking, the expression for talking together? Like you cannot go out. Yeah. Martial law. Yeah. Martial law. Yeah. the expression for toque de queda like the you cannot go out go out in the street martial law

martial law will start at 6 if we see you on the streets we're going to kill you that was a message that that television station was repeating once and again every day so we're just adding to it so all these new

novelties so to, with the digital era are also creating bigger fires in the political spectrum and in a place where you never know what exactly the line is between the criminals and the government.

Yeah, I think that's a very good thing to highlight, actually, this idea that there's distinct blocks, right? And this applies, and I don't want to say this is a Mexican thing because it's not. thing to highlight actually this idea that there's like distinct blocks right like uh and that this applies in i don't want to say like this is a mexican thing because it's not this is a global thing but like that there's a distinct block between like crime and media that you consume

and the government and the people that like are working for the state like like the idea that these are very separate and they're walled off doesn't apply here, and I don't think we should see it elsewhere either. Yeah, it's a problem that is becoming worse and worse, because these factions now have this other arena. I mean, we are seeing it here also with the official statements from the authorities. I mean, I was telling you earlier that the military had the secretary of the military says, well, in Tijuana, they didn't win against the civilians. And the governor also repeated that. So, well, here, fortunately, they didn't affect the life of the people. Of course, of course they did. I mean, we were, they did. And so you have to also be fighting that propaganda

from the government against the propaganda from the criminal groups and the different political legal factions and other quote-unquote non-state actors, just to put it in a different context. So it's becoming very difficult. And I always say, excuse me if I repeat this, but honestly, I mean, there's always great investigators, detectives in Mexico,

willing to put their lives on the line for the good of people, but it's not always in the best conditions. And this is like just the character of traffic. And this is like just the character of Traffic. Probably you guys were very young when Traffic came across, I mean, a very popular movie. She's about from the 90s, end of the 90s probably. Yeah. One of the three main characters is an honest Mexican cop.

Fortunately, I met several of cases like that but some of them have been killed due to the their honesty but also others that learn to survive and play along and try to do as much good as they can within the circumstances they are dealing with. Yeah. I think talking of good investigators who are trying to deal with difficult circumstances, maybe you should touch on the violence against the press that we've seen in Baja California and in Mexico as a whole. Is that something you're comfortable talking about? Yes, yes. Unfortunately, and this is terribly sad,

a couple of hours ago, we just learned that one of the reporters who was reported missing in the neighboring state of Sonora was being found dead. So we have another killing of a reporter. We also saw the case of Ciudad Juarez. They killed four employees or four workers of a radio station. Yeah, that was terrible. Among the broadcaster. Yeah.

Apparently randomly. Apparently randomly. Okay. But I mean, depending on which toll you look to, because there's like the official from the government, federal government, from the CPJ, the Committee to Protect Journalists, or Reporteros Sin Fronteras, other organizations, there's about 10 or 15, I would say 10 or 14 or 15 journalists or media workers killed so far this year. We have two of those killings happening here in Tijuana in January.

killings happening here in Tijuana in January. One of them, I'm convinced by now that he was killed for the leader of a drug trafficking cell was operating in the east side of the city who wasn't pleased with some of the stories that one of the media outlets, his name is Margarito Martinez, one of the media outlets, his name is Margarito Martinez, one of the media outlets that Margarito was working to as a freelancer was publishing very revealing stories about the operation of this drug trafficker. So he ordered and paid for some other people to kill Margarito

because he, in my humble opinion, was the weakest link because he was living in the same neighborhood that these guys were operating, working the night shift that is very common that only a few of them are left to do that shift, that beat. He was easily identifiable for the crooks

because Margarito will show up at the crime scenes. And in many of these cases, you have people who work for the same organization showing up to make sure that the guy was really killed and who showed up. I mean, even when the killing is done, the criminals are still working the scene. And in some cases, we met with these guys without knowing.

I mean, these guys were even willing to go to the funeral of Margarito. The only reason they were not there is because when they approached, they saw a lot of military presence during the funeral. So I'm convinced that Margarito was killed due to his work as a photographer. In the other case of my friend, old co-worker, Lourdes Sandoval, I'm not sure what was the motive. In both cases are three people in jail, but the procedure is still on the beginning stages. We are not proof. And the main thing is we don't know who ordered and paid for their killings.

Well, we know, or I think I have a big suspicion about which one is the guy who killed them in the case of Margarito, not in the case of Lourdes and the authorities. I'm not confident enough that they're going to be able to solve the crime in this particular case. The other one, there's two cases in Michoacán. There's other cases in Tamaulipas. I guess by now we have to count at least two or three in Sonora with the sad news that we got today. So it's difficult. I mean, not everybody is risking their life when they're doing journalism in Mexico, but you never know when the danger will jump against you. I always tell this story about a photographer to what was called to cover a traffic accident.

Minor thing, no, not really. Well, the problem is that the guy who was involved in the traffic and the accident was a drug lord, a very well-known operator, very dangerous operator. And he kept taking pictures. Thanks to some of the officers, firefighters, and ladies who saw that he was being treated not very nicely and the ladies that intervened, he was able to get away. He had to leave town for a while. That's it. But that's the kind of environment that we are dealing with. It's not that every story puts you in danger, but you never...

I mean, you can be a reporter and not be in danger. You don't get into subjects that are tricky. You don't dig up too much in political corruption, and you don't dig up too much on drug trafficking, on killing homicides. You're pretty much going to be able to do fine. But the problem is, sometimes if you are doing a story non-related, there may be some link to put you in danger. And that's the situation. And unfortunately, the level of impunity on crimes against journalists is even worse than the level of impunity of general civilians in Mexico.

I will say that generally it's about 90%, 98% for case of journalists, 90% on civilians. So our case is worse. The possibility of somebody will be punished for killing you, it's very, very, very scary. Yeah, I'm sorry, that's terrible. I don't know. Again, like you said, it's not just a Mexican problem.

You see it in so many governments across the world where press are targeted specifically. But yeah, I appreciate your work even more, knowing that the percentage of cases or just violence against you so against you as a journalist is so high it's very sad and it's very disencouraging but uh i always i mean my i have a family who is not happy because i'm still working. Then Friday, they call me. They want me to stay at the office. They don't want me to get out. I understand. I understand perfectly. It's one of my main concerns. But also, on the other hand, this is important information. Even when we are dealing

with an avalanche of information that is not necessarily well treated. We need to have good information so people will make good decisions. We are in a very small, young democracy. We just began to make inroads on electoral democracy. It's relatively recent. It began basically at the end of the 90s here in Baja California and has been moving to the 2000s. And now we are unfortunately back in many ways, but now you can rely now on who is running the elections. To get that information was very important.

Now we need to be also very make a lot of big efforts to explain people that you can make progress. Mexico is making progress even these dire conditions but you have to pay attention and also try to to learn where the information is coming from. That not all the media is the same, that we come from a big tradition of government-controlled media. Now, media control also do trafficking organizations.

And in some cases, both are linked and working in cahoots to give you trouble. And also, there's a lot of press that has chosen to just go with the flow and just leave out of propaganda. And sometimes they do good things, like they go and give voice to the people in the local community so the water is reestablished or there's more need to fix a park

or to public transportation. And they do good. It's important. All the job of the reporters is good. But in the bigger dimension, in the bigger problem, they tend to be on the side of the government because the government found this way to give you a lot of public advertisement and to have you under their control.

And many reporters want to be good journalists, but their editors or the owners of the companies are not willing to use that easy way to get a lot of money from the government more easily than to start putting themselves on the risk, which implies when you do heavily digging or criticizing the powers of being, no? Yeah.

How would someone know that they're getting accurate information in that case? This applies to like every country in the world. You have to really be conscious and like seek out particular sources. But like in this case, what do you recommend for people? I mean, it's're right it's the same problem everywhere but i guess the same recipe works here i mean just double check double check your their sources try to compare

several um media outlets and to see where it's reporting um whether each of them is reporting. The same way that you find the way they are leaning in the U.S. is what you find here. But the problem is the established media or the, how do you call it, the traditional media is becoming less relevant because most of the main good journalism is done by small rebels who began their own entities, their own platforms. I mean, in some cases, there's good reporters working for good media outlets. Normally, those are not local. I mean, when you see the big media companies, they don't have, with some exceptions, but they don't have many people doing good journalism at the local level.

You will find good local journalism with these renegades or rebels that have people who have been fired from the big, larger organization. And you have to be looking for those options. I mean, that doesn't mean that it's a guarantee that they're going to be independent completely. You also learn how to read them. For example, there's a good case of two reporters who just resigned or were fired. We don't know exactly, but they, from a well-prestigious publication. They began their own operation. They have, they are good proven, proven as a reporters.

You know what I'm trying to say? They have a good track record. Yeah. A good track record. I thought that was what it was. I was just like, I don't, I actually don't know.

Do I don't know phrases either? Yeah. Yeah. They, they, they made a name a name for themselves doing good journalism with other publications. They got their own media outlet. And some people were complaining that they were too close to some state agency with the new government. And they have great information. They do good reporting, but you have to look carefully and which type and where are they leaning to.

So I always read them. I just take it with a grain of salt that you will see, say in English to try to balance my intake of information from different sources. It's difficult to tell the people because the general public is not as involved or interested in media and on the newspaper or on the news as we are because we live out of it. But people are doing their life and making the will to move around for all of us in different fronts,

as a doctor, as a housewife, as a teacher. And they don't have enough time to analyze media the way we do. So I think we need to do a little bit of that. Try to tell them, for this reason, we believe this media outlet is leaning in this direction. This is subsidized or is getting we do that this is getting this amount of money from the government and and not this amount of money from the government that will give you a hand to take it

and and to see who are they dealing with i mean there's guys who have been working for the government now are back to reporters i mean there's cases like that in the U.S. Stephanopoulos used to work for one of the presidents. The guy of Harbaugh from MSNBC used to work for Nixon. I mean, we see this, but in this environment it's more difficult to

leave out those connections. And it's always tricky to be moving from government jobs to journalism jobs because it's not... to be moving from government jobs to journalism jobs because it's not, I mean, you have to, I mean, in my perspective, I never worked for the government. I hope I would never have to do it, but I respect the ones that they do, but we need to be more transparent in that sense to be able to be fair with the people. Yeah, that makes sense.

There's this interesting development in Mexico that I've seen in some areas. If I want to learn about what's happening in the Yaqui Pueblos in Sonora or in Chiapas, these people who will just be citizen reporters on Facebook doing very local reporting. This seems to get really popular, but they'll sort of blow up really quickly doing this like Facebook only reporting it's really interesting. Because there's a big need of information and they know many people

in Mexico have learned to be the strutful of the quote-unquote legacy media the expression I was looking for legacy media and the big companies. And the problem is there's this risk that many of those media, new media outlets, which is basically Facebook accounts or TikTok accounts now, people don't know how to deal with.

I mean, they have good intentions, but they don't really know how journalism should work. In some cases, they think, for example, that they can take money from different actors, and that will help them to grow. I guess you can, but you have to be very careful.

This has been a big problem that I'll try to emphasize every time I talk about our situation. For many years, the government was too close or the reporters were too close to the government. The government will make easy with a lot of privileges for the reporters. So they learn to work in this scenario. So if I was close to the government, they will expedite a lot of things for me, so to speak. I can get money. I can get probably a license for a bar way quicker than somebody who

doesn't have that access to the government. I can probably get taxi licenses, for example, because I'm a reporter, because I'm close. I can get close to the movers and shakers in the political arena, no? So they did that.

And when the drug trafficking, where the narcos became another power, many, many reporters began to see it in the same way. So they were cozy with the government, it was a power. They were cozy with the businessmen and they were cozy with the unions because they were giving them handouts or treating them preferably or they were able to do some traffic of influence will give them some benefits. When the narcos became a regional power on their own, some of the reporters didn't see the difference or getting too close to that power. some of the reporters didn't see the difference or getting too close to that power. That has put a lot of the reporters in danger. I think the reporters are learning a little bit more to stay away from those.

But there's also, with the advent of social media, many people who are really crooks or that they were not very interested in doing things ethically from the beginning that now see that with a Facebook account, with a TikTok account, or Instagram, or any other platform, you can pass by a reporter. So there's this need of information, but also it's filled with good and bad people, as in any other case. I always tell them, I mean, it talk about the whole analogy of a gun. Is the gun bad or good? Well, it depends on the circumstances you are using it, no? I would say. Yeah.

I'm not a gun guy. I don't want to get into your political discourse about your First Amendment, though. Which one is this? Oh, that's a whole... Yeah, that's a whole other episode. Neither do we. Yeah, that's fine. Shireen,

did you have anything else? No, that was awesome. Thank you so much for all the information. Yeah, and talking of reliable media, where can people find you online? Where can they find your work? Where can they find your social media? The main thing is tijuanaopress.com. That's our main platform is just an online native media outlet is not a newspaper is just when we we have been changing our way of work because we

began as a daily, we no longer do that because we don't have enough resources for that. But also, there's plenty of daily media outlets, digital media outlets for the daily stories. We want to do a little bit more in-depth, more investigative, more give you context of what is going on. We are in Spanish, but you can follow us on Twitter on Ad Tijuana Press. Because we try to, with our poor English, tried to do some tweets on English with the help of Google Translator or other guys or their colleagues

that will correct our spelling. But that's the main way to get a hold of us. Well, I think your English is great. You talked to us for an hour and I understood everything. But thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. Yeah.

Thank you, Vicente. No, thank you guys. You always help us to spread the word and to be able to put ourselves to be judged by the public. This is what is more important for us. But we don't invest in algorithms

from any social platform because we believe and that the people will be willing to find us if they are really interested and you guys help us about in that sense yeah thank you yeah thank you so much for giving us some of your time we really appreciate it thank you we'll be here if you will be would be of any help thank you thank you so much Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America I know you. Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again.

Now, a thing that has fallen apart that we have talked about at length before is the protection of the right to abortions previously enshrined in Roe v wade and uh no longer enshrined in that and we've come at this from a number of angles but one angle that we've neglected so far is is the labor angle um and okay so for reproductive autonomy to exist right you? You need healthcare. And healthcare, especially under capitalism, requires labor. And that labor isn't done by abstract organizations. It's done by workers who are facing not only sort of the maul of the death of Roe, but the intransigence and often the belligerence of their own bosses. And here to talk with us about that is Crystal Grabowski and Elizabeth Villanueva from the wonderfully named UE Local 696. And I'm going to read a pseudo legal disclaimer here, which is that they are not representing Planned Parenthood. They do work at Planned Parenthood. They are not representing Planned

Parenthood. They are there representing themselves as individuals. At our local union. Yes. Proud members of Local 696. They are there representing themselves as individuals. At our local union. Yes. Proud members of local 696. Impeccably named union. Purposefully named for anyone. They were like, you have to choose a number that starts with six. And then we just looked at each other.

And we had that moment where it's like, yes. And then we can add another one and it'll be a good time. It's a nice, fun, little threesome of numbers. Healthy, safe. It was good. This is our round one of pro-union

propaganda. Join a union and you too can be in union local 69. Or what if they told you the number could start with four like you know yeah yeah boom there's just so many options i'm sure there's other fun numbers that besides those but you have you have the entire world in front of you yeah we could have done six you could do like boo can you imagine if we did six66 as a abortion worker union? We could have. We had that choice and we went with 696

because we're a sexual health organization. To prove that workers will always make the right decisions. This is the power of the union. We can evaluate these decisions when it's important and do the right thing.

So, yeah, thank you. Thank you too so much for, for coming on the show. Thank you for having us. We're both super excited. Yeah.

Thanks for inviting us. Us lowly abortion workers. So I, I'm going to, I'm going to dispute heavily with the term lowly like y'all are the people who make all of this possible so

yeah yeah now having said all of this I'm going to ask you a very depressing question which we have we've asked a lot of the people who've talked about abortion access like who work in abortion access stuff this question but i think you two had a very different experience of it um what was it like on the day when roe died do you want to go first

crystal um yeah i've talked about this a lot because i'm getting asked a lot and it's i'm happy to talk about it um which is i'm actually like it's, I'm happy to talk about it. Um, which is, I'm actually like, it's been hard to listen to other people talk about it because then I start getting in my feels, but like when I'm talking about it and I'm kind of like just processing it and it's, it's probably healthy for me, somebody would say, but, um, it was incredibly traumatic and it's been incredibly traumatic, um, since the fall of roe v wade and the dobbs decision and i'm saying this while like while knowing that we all knew it was coming it was it was a given yeah and it wasn't surprising and there's just something about knowing that it's

been coming for months and years that like just it just did nothing to actually inform you. Like, what would it be like? But it was like a, it was like a tidal wave crashing and just like sweeping you away. And we're still swept away. The only language that I can find that's appropriate is like natural disaster language. And I just, I keep repeating it and saying like, it's like a hurricane, it's like a tidal wave, but that is the, those are the words that are most fitting to me, like emotionally and just in terms of like the violence and the, that is that you, that people are experiencing. And just the emotional and mental and bodily harm is equitable to a natural disaster. and bodily harm is equitable to a natural disaster. Yeah. And I think during one of our debriefs during a particularly difficult day, this was pre-Roe, we were talking about how sometimes it's really hard for us when we can see these things coming and yet there's nothing we can

really do about it. And I know that we talked about how it felt like we were just tied to a train track, watching and waiting for that train to just come and hit us. And then when it did, it was just, it just knocked, I think, the wind out of all of us. I think we all cried for sure that day. Oh, we all cried. Yeah. And I'm not even like, I don't know, like, I feel like I, I am, I'm emotional and I am a crier, but a whole, I didn't think that I would sob immediately the second I saw the news. And then I always knew we were going to get a lot more calls because, um, Elizabeth and I also

answer phones in the abortion clinic and I was like, okay, we're going to get way more calls, but like it, you don't know what that feels like or looks like or sounds like, like, what does it feel like to have a hundred people calling you pretty much at the same time? What does that look like? Now I know. And it's traumatic and it's awful. And, um, it's a natural disaster, but it's a man-made disaster. Actually. It's not a natural disaster. There are people who have inflicted this upon us. And now we know what it feels like. And it's fucking awful.

Oh, I should have asked if I was allowed to swear. Oh, yeah. I swear all the time. Okay, cool. Because I've been on podcasts before where they were like, oh, we got to edit that out. Which, cool. Well, it's a fucking nightmare. Yeah. We work in healthcare.

I think we swear more than the average layman because they keep saying somehow. Yeah. There's so much more to say. Like, yeah, no, I don't even know where to go from there. It's just, yeah. It's like a never ending nightmare because like the, the call started and then it's just like, just, just person after person after person, they driving, driving two hours, three hours, four hours, five hours coming from states that are like three states away coming from like states in the South, people taking planes and people staying in hotels. And we've had people pay like hundreds of dollars for an uber and um and then just like bringing in the labor angle too as like unionized abortion workers who

you know we have been vocal and we've been rallying and making our demands like publicly known but we are doing this while under staffeded, like skeletal crew staffing. We didn't have enough staff before Rofel and the Dobbs decision. And now we just, it's bare bones. And it's like we are, so we're taking on this tidal wave, this like man-made tidal wave while just giving every last ounce of our energy and doing multiple roles at once. Yeah. I don't know if you are able to tell from the fact that Crystal and I both work directly in the clinic, but we also answer calls. When we signed up for her job, we knew that we would be doing multiple things around the clinic

and it's just, it's funny, um, to not really know what that means until you start doing it. So one day you'll be holding a patient's hand while they're having this procedure done, like giving them a little baggy in case they feel sick. You'll be talking to them on the phone. So there are days where I will meet people who I've spoken to on the phone when they called to book their appointment. And it just hits me like a tidal wave because I'm like, that's the person, like that's this person specifically. I remember because I remember hearing the sound of their voice and every single time they call in, they are sobbing. This is a horrifying moment for them. This is a moment where they feel like trapped. They feel like they can't share with their family,

with their friends, depending on what state they're from and the legalities of that state. They are even afraid to make these phone calls. Like some of the first things that patients say to us when they call in is, am I, is this okay? Like, am I allowed to call you? Am I allowed to talk to you? Am I allowed to book an appointment? What's going to happen next for me? Will my appointment be canceled? Yeah. Because we're not lawyers, because we, everything is so fluid right now we don't have answers to give them um we can just say well you're coming to Pennsylvania and it's still legal in Pennsylvania so um yeah and then just to like paint the picture a little more too about like both the skeletal staffing and the emotional turmoil and the emotional weight of it.

So the Dobbs decision happened on June 24th, which was a Friday and we're in Pennsylvania. And that evening of the evening of June 24th, a trigger band went into effect in, in Ohio. It was a, it's a fetal heartbeat bill, which is a deceptive language because it's not actually a heartbeat, but I'm not, you know, but it's a, it's technically a fetal heartbeat bill. And so people after six weeks could no longer access abortion services or once any sort of like electrical impulse was detected and everyone had their appointments canceled. So we were actually at a protest, like the staff was like at a protest that evening with our, with our doctors, our abortion providing

doctors and the news came out like, yeah, shout out to them. We love them. And we got the news that Ohio had just did this. And we were just like, oh my God, tomorrow, because we knew the second our call center and our phone lines opened, everyone whose appointment was canceled was going to be calling us. And then we pull up the staff schedule and we're like standing in the middle of the street at a protest. We pull up the staff schedule and we're like, oh my God, there is one person scheduled to answer phones right now. And it is an older woman who's been doing this since like the 70s or 80s and it's like we cannot like and we were like all as a union like um you return to each other and we're like oh my god this is the situation we cannot leave her

alone yeah um we've already worked our five days we already worked our 35 hours but we are going to call ourselves into work and like we just we we were like, we've notified our managers, like we're going to come into work and we're going to help to answer the phones for these canceled Ohio patients. Like that was a decision that we made to work those extra, that, that extra time on our weekend off. Cause it was a Saturday, but this ties into what Elizabeth was saying, where, um, when you hear the person on the phone and then they come to you and like it's very emotional because like you're doing your best as a health care worker to get them the health service that you have been trained to provide and that you know is very important. So knowing that we were understaffed, knowing that we're not making that much money and then just being like, I have to go in and be there. I can't leave my coworker alone because I love my coworker.

And we can't, and like, somebody has to be there for these patients when they're calling. And if it's not going to be the employer and the bosses, then it's going to be you. And then then we we all just we did that and then um there was another clinic day we a lot of us arranged to come in for an extra work day because we were like we have to be there for these patients yeah um so we're really giving all of our energy and it's exhausting and traumatizing. I feel like I can't say that enough.

And we need more staff. We need better wages. We need better working conditions. Because at the end of some of these days, it's like, how am I going to keep doing this? My body hurts. My brain hurts. I started having issues with my memory where I couldn't remember body hurts my brain hurts i started having like issues with my memory where like i couldn't remember anything because my brain just gave up on retaining information and i'm like i think this is like a trauma response like yeah yeah i'm overwhelmed system shock i think this

is one of the things you get with with working for ngos which is that like we're doing something like this is like there is work that needs to be done but you know the employer's not giving you the resources that is necessary to do it right you have one person on a call line like the day after a fetal heartbeat bill goes goes into effect and it's i don't know it seems like one of the one of the things that's that that these ngos do is they they really you these NGOs do is they make a mistake or they do something deliberately because they don't want to pay people. And then they don't want to pay more people and they make you go deal with it because it has to get done because these people need you. Somebody has to do it. Yeah, that's so gross.

It's disgusting. do it yeah and that's so gross it's disgusting so for me um i like to equate it as kind of like being emotionally gaslit because the whole point of health care and i've said this to other people in different health care roles that i've worked before because as we know health care is chronically understaffed like there's so many like nursing shortages like and things um is that healthcare is designed to draw people who want to help, who have these very strong moral and emotional beliefs. And we are paid to care. It is our job to care. And that is how they can get all of these things out of us is because it's very easy to feel emotionally manipulated when somebody's like, well, somebody has to be there for this patient, this person, this thing that can't wait.

And so a lot of us, even like I said before, I worked here at different positions that I've held. I've been like, I will take an extra shift because somebody has to do it. And I love my job so much. I love working in healthcare. It's something I've been very passionate about since I was a small child. So I, for years would burn myself out and be like, I'll take the extra shift at a different position. When I used to work at a care, I worked at an intermediate care facility for adults with intellectual and physical disabilities for a couple of years. And I remember routinely working 16 hour shifts like day in and day out.

I think there was like six, seven days a week of just doubles where I would work like 16 hour shifts. I don't think I like slept or ate or did anything. And then at one point, I was so burnt out that I just couldn't do it anymore. And I started to get frustrated with the people that I worked with and like the patients that I cared about. And this one particular day, I like noticed myself getting incredibly annoyed with everything that was like happening, like sounds, patients, like just being themselves. Like I didn't, you know, take it out on anything or anyone. I just like noticed myself getting like slightly more irritated. And then I was like, this is not sustainable. I can't keep doing this. And I compared this like recent change post the Dobbs decision to what it was like when I also used to work for distributing medical equipment to hospices.

that I just did not have the resources to be able to help with. Because on one end of the line, you have somebody that is having this emergency. And then on the other end of the line, there's another person pulling you because they're also having an emergency. And so you have to kind of weigh which one of these patients like needs you the most right now and which one of those can you reasonably help it's like that um psychology like psychology puzzle where they're like um if you move the thing on the track oh the

lever the trolley problem yeah the trolley problem problem where one of these people will die or seven people will die. And you have to decide which one of those you're going to pull. Because there's only so much that we can give as healthcare workers, as abortion workers, as reproductive health workers. There's only so many hours in a day and as much as we want to keep giving for us to keep pouring out of an empty cup it's just not sustainable for ourselves like i know many of us have lost sleep many of us have stopped like being able to focus on anything outside of work because as soon as like you turn on the news or you open your phone or you like open up twitter there's more and more and more information because everything is consistently changing all of

the time and like um west Virginia is currently having like their um their charlottesville clinic yeah so that's new and we had a couple calls come in from um you know we had Kentucky yeah so that's new and we had a couple calls come in from um no we had Kentucky yeah so that was new um and we're just starting to like really have a good pattern of resources for patients coming in from like Ohio um and now we're like okay well what about Kentucky so we just like we feel like there's just one like hole in the dam that we put our finger on and then another one shows up and at some point we just have to know that we've done our best um and that it's okay to take a second to rest and to, you know, go home and maybe like watch TV or listen to a podcast. Yeah.

But not about abortion. Yeah. Forget about abortion for two seconds. And because we will inevitably have to do it again tomorrow. This reminds me a lot of, I did an interview like i don't actually it'll be a couple of weeks i guess by when this comes out with some organizers who were like trying to do like relief and aid for the the migrants who are getting bused to dc from texas i think from utah too and it was like they were talking about exactly the same thing where it's like we have

to do this we have to do this because otherwise no one's gonna help these people but like at a certain point it's like everyone has covid like we just can't and it i don't know it's i think it's especially frustrating that this is happening because like those people were just like they have no resources right it's just a bunch of people who are doing mutual aid thing but like this is planned parenthood like they have resources and they're not they're not doing this they're doing this i i talked to a nurse who's a friend of mine a long time ago um on this show and he talked you know he was a nurse during he's gotten coveted twice i think and like you know he was talking about how like yeah he said this to me like thing i've always remembered was like i've seen people die because of i've seen

people die because of staffing decisions yeah and it's like it's this it's this moral blackmail thing where it's like in in order to this thing needs to be done we're not going to actually provide you with enough resources to do it and we're going to make you responsible for the consequences of our actions and yeah it's it's grotesque i yeah something that um really is just kind of like part of the trauma for the workers and honestly for the patients and for everyone in our communities, because this impacts literally everyone, is just like turning, like we do turn people away. Because pregnancy is a time sensitive issue. And, you know, you have to get in in a certain number of weeks in order to get, you know, the type of procedure that you want in order to get a procedure at all. And these are people that are often parents, the majority of people who have abortions are parents, um, and they have

children and they have jobs and, or they don't have like PTO and they live four hours away. So it's like, how am I going to get to this appointment? So there's so many people that we have to refer. So it's, it's so much on your soul to be on the phones and you speak to mother after mother, like a single mother or somebody who lost a partner or they are, you know, they got evicted and you're referring them to Detroit, which is an also four or five hours away. And just to refer people to say, I can't help you try calling this place. And to do that like multiple times in a row every day. And then you're like, you're working seven hour days. It is really soul crushing because it feels like, and like you tell yourself, like, it's my, you know, we don't have the resources. We don't have

the staff. We weren't prepared for this crisis. It's not on me, but it's very hard not to feel awful when you are turning people away. Cause you don't, I don't know any, I probably turned like probably over a hundred people away on the phones and told them who to call. I don't know any, I probably turned like probably over a hundred people away on the phones and told them who to call. I don't know if they reached those places. I don't know if they called those places for all I know, they continue to high risk pregnancy and they might suffer health consequences or things that debilitate them for the rest of their life. Things that make their children's lives worse. And I have no way of knowing. So it's just very traumatic to constantly be hanging up on the phone with people and just like sending them into like just a desert I think the hardest part too is that these phone calls aren't like two seconds long they're not two minutes when we tell when we answer the

phones abortion appointments take about 15 to 20 minutes to schedule. So this is a half an hour that you are getting to know an individual, a person. They tell you everything about their lives. They tell you exactly what they're feeling, what they're afraid of, what they're going through, what their family's like, what their financial situation is like. And then at the end, when you tell them, or at the beginning, which I do often just to let them know what they're getting themselves into. When you tell them that you're booking like three weeks out, four weeks out, you can just hear it in their voice that they are so scared and so desperate. And there's nothing you can do about it because there's just not enough of us there's not enough clinic days there's not enough hours in the day to see all of these patients there is so much red

tape that these patients have to go through to even get to this appointment there's a 24-hour phone consent in the state of Pennsylvania um If they miss that, they can't be seen. And these are often like, depending on like the time of the phone call, some people work multiple jobs, they're like asleep, they can't make the phone call. They're sick. They're sick. They don't have working cell phones. They're sick. They don't have working cell phones. Or they're in a situation where they have intimate partner violence, so they can't be on the phone for that long without risking their personal safety. And it's just really traumatizing.

And I know that it's really common on the left and with pro-abortion people to say like you can't stop abortion you can only stop save abortion and I I totally support the sentiment behind that because people are going to get abortions no matter what but people also need to think about the people who give up because I have when I have been on the phone with someone and heard them give up yeah and it's it's's, it's traumatizing. Cause like, you know, that you gave them the information that broke them where they were just like, when I'm like, okay, you have to wait four weeks. You have to drive four hours. You have to do this.

You have to pay this. You have to do that. And then just for them to say, I'm sorry, I don't want to waste your time anymore. I just can't do this much right now. It's just too much. And just to hear their just resignation, because I feel like working in jobs, you might have heard people just reach that moment where they hit their point, whatever their breaking point might be, whatever the context is, whatever the topic is. But when it's your life and it's

your health and it's your family, and they're just like, this is my breaking point and witnessing that that does happen. And it's a tragedy every time that somebody abandons what they really want and their health and their wellbeing. And, um, and it does happen. And that's why this is a tragedy that needs to stop. And I don't know when it's going to stop. Cause like, just kind of seems like it's going to keep happening and keep going and going and going in which case the trauma is going to like move like right now we're like bearing the brunt of it but it's going to like radiate from us and our patients and we're going to see the ripple effects across the whole country generational trauma that's going to continue for multiple decades yeah yeah and it's i mean just on a basic like level it it's not fair

that even you have to deal with this like this this shouldn't be happening at all like and it's it's that it's that like like all of the evil of the american settler state falling on like a bunch of people who have nothing and then a bunch of workers who are expected to show up and have to deal with all of their, all of their trauma too every day. And it's just like a trauma palooza. Yeah. And it's like flags and teachers. But, um, and then we had a union rally recently and um uh we were very open and talking about

how a lot of us work two jobs and and we have staff members who donate plasma so it's like we're doing this on top of a second job and donating our like bodily fluids i spoke at this rally and i was like we're literally giving our flesh blood and tears to this whole thing um because it's just we love it we love all of our patients we care about the work we really want to make sure that our patients are going to be okay and I think that's why we do it and also how we can justify feeling this way day in and day out. I want to, I think, move from this to talking about the contract negotiation process, because like, okay, it is not okay for anyone to have like a 14 month long contract negotiation

process. It is especially not okay for you to have to do this. So yeah. Can we, can we talk about what plant, like what plan Paris has been doing and. Yeah. Crystal might be better at answering the questions. She's on our bargaining committee.

I'm on the bargaining team. Yay me. I've been doing this for 14 months and like, just, Oh God, I'm so sick of these meetings. I'm so sick of them. I'm sick of talking to their lawyer. Um, it's been long. They've been just, um, really just dragging themselves. It's like carrying a dead body. It's just like, like, it's like, Oh, come on, come on. Are you, are you okay? We're we're gonna get there you know like we're just like dragging them and um they are afraid of everything everything is we gotta see

we gotta check we gotta we gotta look into it and then you never hear back or maybe you hear back like three months four months later um they constantly want to bring in a mediator constantly and it's like there's nothing to mediate like yeah what are we going to mediate you telling us that you gotta get back to us like what's there to mediate there and they're like it'll move it along and it's like yes because they're doing the job for you we want you to do it we want you to have answers you to figure it out you're the bosses. You make the money. You're the one running the organization. Sorry, I started getting salty. No, it's completely valid. Being on the bargaining team has really nurtured my rage. It's been very exhausting.

And I know we're going to win a good contract because we are badasses. And I think we're going to win a good contract because we are bad asses. And I think we're a really strong union and really strong team. And we need, we need a livable wage because we're, we're getting pummeled. So it's been really frustrating, I guess it's like in short, it's really drawn out, frustrating,

disrespectful. I feel like my time's been disrespected. You know, I turn up every day for my employer in the clinic. I'm an excellent worker. And they just waste like two, three hours of my evening constantly. I could have been on my porch drinking tea or something. I don't know something relaxing yeah and i guess like any i could the other part was like every every day that they don't

like sign a contract is another day they get to get away with not paying you not bringing more staff and it's and they're constantly trying to get delay contract negotiations too where they're like oh if you do this we can we'll give you a couple pennies and then we won't make any you won't be able to make any economic changes until the next fiscal year and it's like you think i want to wait till next july i have a life i have plans yeah i mean i think we've talked about on the show before that like one of the one of the most common ways that one of the most common ways that unions fall apart and one of the things that

corporations do and ngos do to crush them is by trying to make sure the first contract fails and yeah it's a union busting thing and it's grotesque especially that it is like okay like with capitalist firms like yeah you expect them to be union busting, right? Like that's their job. Their job is to ruthlessly smash labor. But it's like, this is an NGO. Like their job is to provide healthcare for people. They're supposed to be a progressive organization.

They're still doing this. And it's, I don't know. It seems just really grim. It is grim and it doesn't give a lot of hope to, I think just everyone living in this, in this country. Cause it's like, okay, so there's been a, a, uh, I was going to say attack, but like attack doesn't feel appropriate. Like they have gutted abortion access, hurting everybody,

causing like violence to people. And who do you look to? So you would think that you would look to these progressive abortion related organizations like Planned Parenthood, National Abortion Federation, NARAL, but all of them have nothing to give and nothing they're they're you you only hear bad news you hear them shutting down you hear them union busting you hear them um requiring ridiculous regulations that aren't even necessary and it just there's no they don't do anything to inspire hope so it's like well you need you know like um prison culture and uh mariam mikaba says like you know hope is a discipline so i feel like a lot of us are like always looking to like a place to

exercise our hope and you're you're not going to get that here with with some of these organizations i think you are going to get it in I think the repro unions because I think there's a lot of us and I think that we're I think that we are working our little hearts out and I think you're also going to get it with some of these other organizations like um the abortion like abortion funds and some of the practical support organizations that are really like getting on the level of patients who are patients or former patients and are like, we're going to get people abortions. I think that's where hope is right now. Um, but not

with our employer. Yeah. I wanted to, I guess that was one of the things I wanted to ask about was sort of on a macro level. I mean, basically everyone we've talked to has talked about how, like, the ability to get an abortion is based on, like, a pretty small number of people who are, like, some people who are abortion, who are escorts, who are, like, a lot of time volunteers. Or it's people who are, like you two, who are being, like like horrifically underpaid to do the actual work of this. And I was wondering what you two think that like, like the, the way this, like,

I don't know, I guess like the, the way everyone has sort of just been run ragged, even keeping the system, how it was like, what role that played on a sort of macro level in terms of why row was like destroyed in the first place and what that's done to the sort of the broader movement.

I mean, no, they didn't do anything to prevent it. Like, it's just, what have we seen? What show of force or strength or commitment to abortion access have we seen in ever, honestly, like yeah I can't even think other than like some loss or uh some legal wins we've celebrated like I do remember whole woman's health v hellerstedt um what was that 2016 that was like a win and we were excited and we were like this is good news and that's honestly the last. And again, that was just a court decision.

So it was like not in our hands really anyways. So there's so little to work with and so little to look at outside of, I think, just some really excellent organizing from workers and practical support groups. And I, I really think that our community has been fabulous this last whole like month. We, uh, all of the support that we've gotten, um, for our like personal morale has been through like friends or local businesses or like people who know people who, people who like are there to offer us like an ear, a hand, a cup of coffee. Some of our doctors bring in bagels. This is like from their own pockets. We'll bring in bagels.

We've had like people donate and organize to bring in like coffee and stuff. I know that Crystal was receiving a lot of like donations herself that we all use to buy ourselves like food, drinks, stuff. People were just like sending me money for the staff. Yeah. And I thought that was really great, but I also noticed that it came from outside sources and not from internal sources um these are all other people outside in our community who understand and value the work that we're doing and like actively listen for what we need and what we're asking for um

and I think that there's a lot to be said about that. Yeah. Honestly, the, the, the most hope and the most support has come from just like regular people. You don't really see it from anyone with anything, any actual money or power. And on that note, this has been Naked Happened Here. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Happened Here Pod, and you can find Crystal and Elizabeth Union instagram at happen here pod and you can find crystal and elizabeth union at ppwp union on twitter all for part two of this interview and until then goodbye

welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about NGOs portraying the working class and casting reproductive autonomy to the wolves. I'm your host, Christopher Wong, and this is part two of my interview with Crystal and Elizabeth from UE Local 696. They are once again representing only themselves and the union and not Planned Parenthood. Yeah, so let's get back to the interview okay should should i should i do a incredibly long and drawn out metaphor about migrant workers in china go for it it's your podcast yeah okay so i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna do a metaphor okay so all right all right so one of the one of the sort

of engines of chinese economic growth for a long time is that china's economy is built on migrant labor there are i think it's like 250 million migrant workers it's like like if if you put them together as a country i think like on 290 if you put together as a country it'd be like the fourth largest country in the world and this was able to happen you know and like the the sort of like the secret of the chinese miracle is that it was a bunch of workers who were exploited horribly and they also had a lot a lot of these workers are coming from the countryside and they're still sort of like kinds of forms of like communal land ownership that are left over from the socialist period

there and so what happens is you have these sort of like i don't know like kind of socialist collective air like collective land ownership stuff that's like basically subsidizing these workers so that they can move into the cities and this means that their bosses have to pay like their bosses can pay them less because part of their income and part of their support network is coming from something that's outside of this or outside of the system and that's what this reminds me of where it's like this stuff is happening because of this incredible community mobilization and like that's where the support's coming from but that also means that like the actual like the organizations who are getting the most money and the most resources and who are like

you know who are your bosses don't have to do that because it's you know and this is the same thing with with your labor too where it's it's you have these these like there's this way in which solidarity is mobilized as a way to sort of like stop gap the fact that these groups don't want to pay people and don't want to give people the resources that are necessary and so because it has to get done people will like people will do it and people will people will donate stuff people will help support people will do this work but the thing that it winds up doing is that these people are never actually forced to see the full consequences of their actions they're never never forced to like actually see what what the staffing decisions like does what what the fact that they don't pay you anything like actually does they don't they

never have to face it because people are like desperately trying to patch the boat together so it doesn't sink yeah i've been thinking a lot like what would it be like if you know one of our higher up managers turned away all of these patients and it was them yeah what if they knew what it was like i remember picking up the phone um a couple weeks ago and the only thing that i heard when i picked up that phone was a blood curdling scream like this was like a scream out of a horror movie and then there were two thoughts and then dead silence. And I don't know what happened to that person. I don't know if they were able to call back. I didn't call back because if that person is in danger right now,

I'm not going to subject them to any more danger. There's a reason that when we dial out, it's through restricted or blocked numbers. There's a reason that when we dial out, it's through restricted or blocked numbers. But it's moments like that that stick with you. And the fact that we're having more and more of these moments where every other call is not exactly to that level, but emotionally still sticks with you and just for some additional um just like to kind of like build out this kind of like misogynistic context that we're working in it's actually super common to get people calling in for abortion services like in the middle of a fight with their partner yeah um i have had like men like actively obstructing the caller and um

you know i'm trying to schedule them and like they'll have me on speakerphone and everything and i'll be like you were training me too we had those and i was like are you able to get to like another place because i can't hear you over him and you, you know, and he's like, I'm not doing anything. And I'm like, I just need to be able to hear you. And like, um, yeah, so you do, you get that because that's, you know, cause there's people want abortions for every reason under the sun and it's totally fine. Um, people get abortions for lots of different reasons, but a very common reason is because their partner sucks and he's a piece of shit. He was abusive and they got to get away from him.

And that's unfortunately common. And we're on the phone getting that. Sometimes we get to meet them in real life too. And that's always super fun. I always say that, I say to patients constantly that boyfriends either only go one of two ways when we meet them in our clinic they're either wonderful and fantastic and very supportive um or they're just the worst and i've had patients boyfriends who literally while this person is mid

procedure will be like you're being dramatic and you need to stop and they'll like take a phone call yeah or something they'll be playing games on their phone and they won't look at anybody um or they'll actively leave their partner there and these are people that like were their ride oh yeah we've had people get abandoned yeah yeah they'll just be like I'm done I'm bored and then they'll just leave yeah and it's just so frustrating lots to deal with we have a lot to deal with the staff and I always tell people because I train um staff at the clinic and I'm always like we see everything here and when I say I say that I mean it we see literally everything like you just and I'm sure there are other similar health provisions like

health services that it's kind of similar or you just kind of see everything um but yeah we we literally see everything because people when people come in for an abortion appointment um yeah like we don't just talk about the procedure. We do birth control counseling, STD screening. We provide resources for housing, legal support, finding therapists. And we do so much because we're providing a comprehensive health care service. much because we're providing a comprehensive healthcare service. And again,

like something that we tell patients is that they can expect to be here for like four hours, six hours, five hours. Yeah. It depends on the individual patient, their individual needs, and what services we can provide for them. And sometimes patients need a lot of TLC and we're not going to rush that. They're going to get the services that they need and they want. And we're going to do it on their time because they're very, they're very fragile and that's not the time to run through. They're not always.

So sometimes they're fragile and like, sometimes they're like, let's get this done. I just, I just want to, the whole range of we get it. We get it. Yeah. But sometimes they're very, let's get this done. I just, I just want to, the whole range of, we get it. We get it. Yeah. But sometimes they're very fragile. Yeah. We have had some really confident patients that I really like talking to though, that they're very like ready to get it over with and are like, thanks for being here. And they just make my day. I love it when we're like oh how do because we have to you know we have to do like um make sure that they're not being coerced and everything and it's like so you know how are you feeling about everything and they're like I feel great

I can't wait to not be pregnant and they're like dancing obviously that's nice but you know in reality a lot of times when we ask someone how they're feeling and what's going on we're like the first person to have asked them that in like two years. So then we're like opening up a space, which I'm so glad we get to do. I love working with patients. I love the services we provide. But it's, it's what, what sucks and what's a failure is that I'm like the first healthcare provider to like ask them how they're feeling.

And actually care. And actually care. And years. We get some patients who have been chewed up and spit out by the healthcare system. And no one's ever given a shit. And we all are very good at giving a shit so um yeah it really seems like just like everything that's wrong with this country gets thrown at like you specifically because this is like it's like like every every sort of like every bit of racism every bit of sexism like every like failure of the health care system like

every every like it's not even like everything on a political level and on a social level that goes wrong with people's lives it's just good old ableism too yeah yeah i think it comes up a lot with stigmatized health care um like abortion and then also hormone therapy i imagine pretty similar as you're facing a lot of obstacles that are put up by the communities the institutions and the health care system the employers like your family there's a remember we did an interview with a uh pro-ocean activist from mexico and one of the things that she was talking about was um uh she called it social decriminalization oh oh Is it kind of like destigmatizing? Yeah, yeah.

But it's like, I think, she didn't talk about it a huge amount, but it seemed like the concept behind it was like, okay, so you have legal criminalization, but then, yeah, social stigmatization means that it's still not really legal because there's social laws against it, right? So you have to like deal with both and that that struck me as like a really i don't know it's a really powerful like way to think about it i guess is it kind of like a moral thing where people think like it's not okay to get an abortion so you get like that pressure and that yeah and and i think and also i mean like it's not it's it's it's the pressure like applied on a person from just like you know like i mean in mexico is a lot of like people were growing up catholic right but also like it's the pressure from your family it's pressure from your friends it's pressure from everyone around you and you have to like

socially like legalize it because crystal's been doing this work longer than i have like i said i've only been working um at our current job for a, which I love. But definitely when I started, there were people in my life that I didn't think were going to get weird about it. Oh, no. I know a lot of liberal people. Most of all of my friends are very liberal, very open, pro-choice, open uh pro-choice like very union friendly and immediately I noticed that when I started talking happily about abortions people would get really quiet and really awkward um and they would be like that's great I'm happy for you but then that was like like it, like I couldn't. And I'd be like, no, but like abortions and then they're great. People need them. It's an essential service.

And so I just upped up the ante more and I started talking about it a lot more. This is what I got to do. Got to weed out the week. Like if you're uncomfortable with my job, my job my job I'm not gonna talk about it with you yeah but yeah that is a component to like also on top of literally everything else like um you know like how hard the job is and how then we gotta like rally as a union and get better wages and everything and then we like can't even sometimes talk about it because um because of stigma like with friends or family like I can't even sometimes talk about it because of stigma, like with friends or family. Like I can't talk about my parents or I can't talk with my parents about my job. So it's just like this whole big part of my life because I'm pretty much like an abortion access activist.

And I just can't talk about it with them, which is just, you know, it would be nice if I could, but I can't. And I just kind of deal with it. which is just, you know, it would be nice if I could, but I can't. And I just kind of deal with it. And then also even tiny normal situations like getting a haircut or getting an Uber, it's people ask you what you do all the time. I lie every time. But that's a decision you have to make because sometimes I lie and sometimes I don't know what it is. I'm going to tell the truth. And it's like a gamble because I've told the truth before and then an uber driver starts praying for me and then I've told the truth before and had someone um like open up to me and we have a great conversation and then I've told the truth before and had really awkward conversations they're like I support

abortion I think some people have too many and it's's like, why are you telling me this? Get out of here. But yeah, this was a decision that I made for myself personally, because of this one time I took an Uber to work and I mentioned what I did. And then that guy started talking about me to the antis in front of our job. And they were like talking about it was it was actually it was a woman it was a it was a female uber driver i mentioned this to her um and she went up and was like i think that like what you guys are doing is like she was talking to the anti specifically she was like what you're doing is too aggressive you need to buy the building next door oh my god set up shop there and make it less antagonizing so people want to listen to you and then immediately in the group chat everybody was like who's talking to the

antis and i'm like i just mentioned that i worked there um it was just a lot so after that i was like on my way to work at the very least. I'm just not going to talk about it. I'm going to be like, I work at a doctor's office downtown. I know. It's like risk assessment. Yeah. I feel like the antis learned my name by listening for the Uber drivers. And I've gotten Uber drivers.

They're like, who are you? What's your name? And I'm like, I'm not going to tell you because there's a dude standing there that wants to follow me. So you're going to deal with an there's a dude standing there that wants to follow me so you're gonna deal with an uber driver yep we gotta switch up patterns when we come into work sometimes too and i do what i actually started um when i call an uber to work because i don't have a car all the time because i don't get paid that much but um uh when i have to uber to work um uh I've started getting dropped off like somewhere else and just walking because it's just too too many problems too much like it's yeah I

got I get dropped off at like a different location like a couple blocks away from work at a different spot usually and then I just walk in like if you you might just want to go to work and drink your coffee and you have like your uber driver joining the protest outside it's like then it's worse because they know they picked you up they know where you live yeah and they know your name yep your name they want to shout your name out the door it's like oh god because yeah the protesters learned my name and they like chant my name and we're like I'll walk by and they'll be like whispering my name I'm like what is this this is kind of this is kind of kinky but like yeah and we decide that they don't actually know who you are they just think everybody with bangs is

yeah yeah yeah so for the listeners I have like pretty um blunt bangs yeah but i'm not the only worker in the building obviously who has bangs but so everyone in the building it's like crystal everybody with bangs is an abortion worker named crystal i guess that's reassuring but also bad for other people with bangs because they might get killed yeah it's like funny but not funny I'm just you got we try to like make light of it we all we have to yeah so the other thing I just wanted to ask about was crystal yeah you've had like the bosses doing disciplinary action for stuff that you've been doing in terms of union stuff we'll talk about that a little bit technically pre-disciplinary but i mean like what does it matter because like

the point is the same is is intimidation yeah um it's very easy to do is to get your lawyer get your hr and have them talk to someone and then everybody knows about it because everybody talks at work and bad gas travels fast. And then they, and the whole idea is to, to scare people into not talking to reporters, not talking to people about what's going on. And I feel like it's difficult to talk about what's been happening. Like this is like, I keep saying it, it's a, it's a national health crisis. It's a disaster. It's, it's a tidal wave. It's a hurricane and it's generational trauma. We're using all of these words. And then like, I feel like I'm pressured into not even talking about it because I'm talking about everything. I'm talking about how we're understaffed. I'm talking about how we're seeing patients from all over. I'm talking about how traumatizing it is. And for whatever reason, it's just more comforting for some of these organizations to

hide under the table with their lawyer and just like shake in their boots and say like we could be sued for this we could be sued for that and what if that happens what if this happens and like for me it's like well you know what what what if someone dies because we can't get them in and they can't get to us because of legislation and there being no healthcare infrastructure because part of healthcare is also getting to the appointment. So if like none of that exists and like people are suffering because of it, like I just can't keep my mouth shut about that. And I've definitely feel like as like somebody,

a member on the bargaining team and I also emceed our rally. I feel like there's been a lot of pressure on me and my big mouth. I feel like they're trying to intimidate me and scare me. And I'm blessed for a couple of reasons. Number one, my dad, who is otherwise conservative and doesn't support anything that I do, but he was a union steward. And growing up, I would see him resolving conflict as a union steward. And that was very influential and inspirational to me because it really instilled some good values, even though we don't have the same values, obviously. But there's that. I

developed a strong sense of labor rights and labor activism from him. And then two, my first career choice was a middle school teacher. So I taught seventh and eighth grade for about seven years. So like literally nothing scares me because after you've talked to a cafeteria full of 120 13 year olds, it's like, that's it. That's like the scariest thing ever. So i'm not really afraid of the bullying and the intimidation um which is good because it definitely is very effective and i'm sure a lot of people would be pissing themselves but um i'm pissing myself a little bit but no i'm fine um i have a second job after all that like that's like fuck the fact you have to work another job like what they're like one of the things i noticed is they're they're

doing they're doing the uh working you for 35 hours and not 40 because yep yeah so they don't pay benefits i don't know like the the impression that i get from this the thing that makes me really angry is like it really feels like like the impression that I get from this, and the thing that makes me really angry is, like, it really feels like, like, how worried they are about being sued. It feels like, like, the fact that that's sort of, like, the basis of all this, and just, like, they're behaving as if they've already lost, and they're trying to just sort of, like, claw and hold on to whatever they have,

but it's like if if if you're if you're fighting from the position of we have already lost you're you're just going to keep losing and it's like and and and you know it's not just that but it's like okay like if they were just doing that but then you know like not passing like not literally forcing everyone else who's working with them to also be in the same sort of defeatism, like it would be different, but it's like, it's like, no, they're, they're then inflicting that on you and it's just infuriating. Yeah. I think this also, um, to segue to something that actually had happened to me today, um, as part of, um, you know, being in a call center for an abortion provider is that we, I think this

instills like a sense of fear for providers as well, for their own personal safety. It just makes it feel bigger because you have all these other people. It'd be like, well, it's, it's like, these are all these things that could happen to you, this is what might happen to you. And I think that it makes providers have to evaluate, you know, their own risks to what they do. And if you are somebody with not as strong values for this work, like it's not a strong opinion towards this work, it causes you to just neglect patients. Because I had an incident that happened today where we had somebody call from a different state where abortion is not legal. And they had their best friend in the car with them and they were like my friend is like actively hemorrhaging she's been like bleeding for days um do you have like an emergency appointment like we can drive up to PA um like what do I do

she's been to her doctor three different times and they refuse to treat her because the pregnancy is like viable and in my brain I'm just shaking because I'm like this is a this is your job like your first thing as a doctor is to make sure that your patient doesn't die and they might die. And I'm not a doctor. And so I was like, if your friend is losing so much blood that you are worried for her safety, um, uh, I know on the phone, they were talking about how she felt like she was like getting dizzy and like losing a ridiculous amount of blood. And I was like, I strongly suggest that you go to a hospital where abortion is legal since you're planning on, you know, coming up for an abortion, then at the very least,

you're protected because you're here, you're cross state lines. And I'm like, because any hospital has to treat you for something that serious. And it's scary to think that there are definitely other other providers and other like places where this kind of thing is also happening um and I just worry that you know um what if I was 10 minutes late what if I was two minutes late what if I was 10 minutes late. What if I was two minutes late? What if I was 30 seconds late? What if I told her to wait? Like some places kind of have to, or I told her that I couldn't help her. Like some places kind of have to with these laws. I don't think that I could live with the guilt of that.

I could live with the guilt of that. It's just another added trauma to the day. And I feel like a lot of people said, and these people suck, but a lot of people were saying that stuff like this wouldn't happen. I know for a fact that I had so many, I'm very vocal about abortion access in my work. And I've had people tell me like, people won't be hemorrhaging and driving across state lines.

And I'm like, absolutely. They will be absolutely. And this was like a month ago. And then, well, more than a month ago, time goes fast, but like, this was like prior to Dobbs, I should say. But, um, and it's just when they were telling me, like, I don't believe you. And I'm like, what do you mean? You don't believe me. This is the most believable thing. And then to have had people say that it wouldn't happen and to like, call me a liar and like a drama queen. And then now to like, I mean, I wasn't, I didn't get a call like that, but like to hear like my coworker and like, and then just like hearing it happen elsewhere because like you know we have comrades and and union um siblings in Ohio um with other unions and they've talked about it happening and just so hearing my my um my peers talking about it and just knowing like we knew this would

happen and we I just it feels like we just like walked right into it with no plan there's still no plan people are still in cars driving across state lines while actively hemorrhaging and I don't know what it'll be done other than us workers really stepping up and hopefully the community then supporting us. Because we can't do it without community support. Like, like Elizabeth was saying before, you know, Oh, and when Elizabeth was actually talking to me before about the food that we've been getting from the community. And this also made me think of what it looks like to turn up for workers in

general, because, you know, we're all workers here. And like, we know what it feels like where you're too busy to stop and eat and you're just going through your day and you're running on fumes and you're exhausted. But the fact that our community was like feeding, has been feeding us and like turning up for us to the point where like, I was having good, healthy food consistently from day to day. I haven't eaten that well since then. And then it really got me wondering, like, is this is what it likes? This is what it's like when you have well-fed workers and that are cared for. So, you know, if the only people answering the call for these, these people who need healthcare are us, we're exhausted.

We don't have time to go out and get food, especially since we got people following us down the street and whatever, while we go get a hot dog, trying to bother us. But then to have like the community bringing us food and then being well fed, it was just like, oh my God, what if all workers were well fed and all communities turned up for their workers? all communities turned up for their workers. Wouldn't that be so nice? And it got me thinking like, like, wow, this is like a really positive thing that is not really talked about. Like, I mean, we talk about feeding people, but like, what if workers were well-fed?

Like, I don't know, like healthcare workers. It's just, it's been really nice. And I love our community. I love our city. I love the organizations that have been organizing it. We're incredibly grateful. Yeah, they're fantastic. They're so good to us. I know that for those couple of weeks where we had food in our break room, I think we worked a lot better. Everybody was in like much better moods didn't get shaky hands you know yeah we were all like really excited to like see each other and talk to each other

and talk about our days um just over like actually good coffee and it was just a huge morale boost to have the community supporting the workers and then now we have the community coming to our union rally saying we support you we want you to get paid more we want you to have the community supporting the workers. And then now we have the community coming to our union rally saying, we support you. We want you to get paid more. We want you to have better staff. And that is just like, oh, so necessary right now. Because we need the community. We need everyone.

What else can listeners who want to help but are not in the industry do just uh to support y'all well i guess on on two levels like one is like it like what can they do sort of in general in their communities and then two specifically to help y'all with your fight with the hospital we're not the clinic yeah we're just a little clinic yeah Yeah. We're just a tiny little guy. I know that for us specifically, I think do what you do best. If you are a person who likes to make art, we love seeing your drawings. We love seeing your handwritten notes. If you're a person who makes a really good cup of coffee, or if you're a cafe who just wants to bring us coffee, we love coffee.

If you're a bakery that wants to donate like donuts or, you know, cheesecakes, we will happily eat them. Happily. Yeah. If you want to like send us a Bluetooth speaker so we can like listen to music during the day, whatever you do best is what we would love. As long as it comes from like you, comes from your heart. Like we love weighted blankets and fluffy things and snacks and just all of those things that come like from the heart make us feel like it's worth it

um at least from the community um and things also that we don't have to think about um because as beautiful as make your own taco kits are we still have to have time to make our own tacos the taco yeah so if if there's anything that you could just like throw at us and it's already like put together, like assembled, has very little thought, like a zombie or a toddler or a burnt out abortion worker can put two and two together. We'd love those two. And you could also follow our union. And there's actually a bunch of abortion care worker unions. We're not the only one. We are many, we are Legion. So you could really follow any of us and just boost what we need because

right now the PPFA union, like New York city, San Francisco is, is needing a lot of boosting with their, what they're doing. Guttmacher union needs a lot of love and support, but our union, Guttmacher Union needs a lot of love and support. But our union, UE Local 696, our social media is at PPWP Union. Not to self-promote, but if you go on there, there are videos of our rally and I made a uterus-shaped pinata. If anyone wants to see us bust it open. It's pretty cool.

We busted open a uterus-shaped pinata at our rally. And as we brought up a union family child, because it was the son of a local union member. We brought him up and we helped him smash the pinata, the uterus pinata. And as he was swinging, it was like, this is what we think about low wages. This is what we think about about scotus this is what we think about understaffing and then candy just like burst out of it it was like a normal birth you know yeah glitter and candy pop out very

realistic actually abortions too people don't know this but glitter always comes out during an abortion can confirm there's gonna be there's gonna be like three people who actually believe you they're gonna they're gonna like tell their friend this and their friend's gonna be like what are you talking about they're like no no i heard it on a podcast we're like the cervix sprays glitter when you when you touch it dilating the cervix is really just opening it up so that it can have glitter come out yeah i guess well okay so logistics wise yeah if you send me links i will we will put them in the episode description um sweet yeah and uh yeah i guess do you two have anything else that you want to say?

I don't think so other than thank you for having us this was super fun we had a great time yeah me too I love talking about abortion oh my god me and Elizabeth on the phone just gabbing away we'll be on like be on 20 on a call 20 minutes talking to like someone who who needs help and then we'll like get off and then

we'll be gabbing about whatever for like 10 minutes and mostly TikToks mostly TikToks but um yeah no it's it's so important to that we can be platformed as like abortion care workers as union members as people working in a stigmatized field during a crisis it's very it means so much and it's meant a lot to me to see how many abortion episodes this podcast has like yeah you're really covering everything yeah I was looking them up and I was like there's it's it's every angle of abortion care and I love it it we love to see my knowledge too and we love to see it you're gonna run out of topics though eventually but you really should have an episode about the

cervix glitter yeah so this will this will be our well actually wait our april fools episode is actually booked give me the second april fools episode more people need to know about this phenomenon. Alright, this has been It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the places where you know where to find us because we say this at the end of every episode. Yeah, thank you two again. No problem. Thank you. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill.

Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters. To bone chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. I know you. Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

It Could Happen Here is a podcast. Sometimes it's about good stuff and ways people can fix things. Sometimes it's about frightening stuff, like today. Today's a scary episode. Joining me to scare everybody is Professor Calvin Norman. Calvin, how are you doing today? Oh, Robert, I do well some days, but most days not. I work on climate change, invasive species,

forest health issues, and chronic waste disease. Oh, are there problems with those things? Okay. Well, actually, last time we were on, we talked about climate change. Solve that. We're good there. That's all been solved. Yeah, we locked that down, right?

Yeah. We got the eels fed. That was the problem. Oh, yeah, yeah. There's like a car company that's electric now. We're good. We're nailing it. So we had you on the show once before to talk about how the forest is bad.

Yeah, still bad. Still bad. Still a lot of problems in the forest, as the people who are watching their forests burn can probably say. Although there's other problems than that, as we talk about in your episode. You sent me an email a while back. It took a bit for me to get my shit together to have you back on, but it was a frightening email about a disease sweeping through the country that could have massive effects on the lives of everybody listening to this. And it's not one of the diseases that you're all thinking about. I know there's a couple things that meet that decision, that like, there's a couple of different diseases running unchecked throughout the United States at the

moment and the world. We are not talking about either of the ones that areed throughout the United States at the moment and the world. We are not talking about either of the ones that are big in the news right now. We're going to talk about chronic wasting disease. Calvin, do you want to kind of introduce that concept to the people? Because this was not something I really, I'd heard of it, but I didn't. It was just kind of like, you know, animals have weird diseases, right? Cats get, you know, lymphoma or whatever. I never thought about it much as a thing that was a problem other than a problem for some deer but it is it is quite an issue yeah yeah it's if it stays in deer i will be happy let's put it like that yeah so um we're gonna actually like do a

little throwback to the past year watch watch out everyone hold on so we're gonna go back to the 90s Watch out. Hold on. So we're going to go back to the 90s. Ooh. All right. One sec. I'm going to get my shoulder pads on.

I'm going to get my X-Files poster stuck up on the wall. I'm going to vote for a serial sexual abuser. Well, that's every decade. Okay. Sorry. So chronic wasting disease is a prion. The reason we're going back to is a prion disease. So, chronic wasting disease is a prion. The reason we're going back to the 90s is to look at the biggest reason anyone would have heard of a prion disease outside of some brain scientists and stuff. And that's bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or more commonly known as mad cow disease. Yeah. So, you know, Robert, I'm not sure how much you are aware of mad cow.

It popped up in the U.S. in the mid-2000s, but it killed a bunch of people in England in the 90s. Yeah, isn't there, like, there's still restrictions on, like, blood donation and stuff if you lived in England at a certain period, right? Like, there's some weird shit like that. Yeah, you can't donate blood for that. It's a very good reason we'll go into that in a second actually i was in england not too long ago

and i did not eat beef there uh because i've read too much about prions to mess around with that stuff yeah i mean thankfully here in america we have health food standards unlike those filthy brits but yeah yeah we had a scare um canada had scare. And we'll talk about the repercussions of that later. But so the reason we're going back is we're going to look at the most recent time prions have become mainstream. So what happened there? So let me just unfold this a little bit. That's a joke you'll all understand in three minutes, hopefully. A prion, it's a protein in your brain. Now, I am not a neurologist. I am a wildlife biologist and forester, so I'm not going to be able to answer every question out there about brains and proteins and stuff like that. But what the prion protein in your brain does is it moves copper around, which is important for cell stuff. I personally think that mankind should have never looked through a microscope, and everything at the cellular level is just heresy. We shouldn't look at it at all.

No, I'm completely on board with you there. There's certain things we never should have studied and anything that involves a microscope is one of them. Oh yeah. You lost me there. A hand lens, I'm good for. You can see small stuff, but microscopes, Audi 5000. Okay. So in your brain, you're moving around copper and stuff, and it's important for like cell stuff. So, um, we're going to go back to high school biology for most folks, you know, proteins building block of life important. So your protein structure is dictated by the elements in it and how they're like arranged, you know, like stacked on top of each other. So that's, that's basic, you know, uh, high school biology, but then, you know,

as you get a little bit further in biology, you find out that it's a little bit more complex. So proteins like, you know, all things in our real world are unfortunately not like in the textbook. And these are 3D. And so they have like shapes and folds. Now, when folded correctly, it just, the prion protein operates normally and just moves copper around. Unfortunately, it doesn't always, you Unfortunately, sometimes it doesn't fold correctly. And when that happens, it doesn't move copper. And so brains have a little bit of an issue because they don't get copper to the right place.

Yeah, and this is why all those truck stops sell those copper bands that you can put on your wrist to solve diseases, right? It's to deal with that. Yeah, you just keep that copper band on your wrist, sure. Solves that problem. Yeah, so what happens that copper band on your wrist, sure. Solve that problem. Yeah, so what happens when that happens is you get a prion disease. There are some that evolve in, that just like, they don't evolve

because they're not living, that just pop up in nature. So like bovine spongiform encephalopathy, mad cow. We referenced that a little bit earlier, talk about that in a second. Scrapey, feline spongiform encephalopathy, which comes from cats that ate meat that was infected with mad cow. And then there's kuru. Yeah, kuru.

That's the one cannibals get, right? Like this is famously why cannibals, quote unquote, go crazy. Actually, a lot of cannibals were well aware that you don't eat meat from certain areas, but it is a thing. If you're going to eat people, be really careful about the spine. Don't eat brains and spines. Yeah, that's it.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Um, there's, um, and in humans it's called,

um, the spongiform encephalopathy. I'm going to explain the big word in one second. It's called, uh, Kramholtz-Jakob's disease. It was, uh,

figured out by two Germans. Really neat stuff. Yeah. It's one of my favorite disease names because you just know you're in for some like horrifying shit when you when you see the the that spelled out you're like well that's got to be something bad yeah well yeah luckily like you know for two german guys like alive in the 30s yeah did good stuff like they they two of the four german doctors who weren't nazis

in that period yeah yeah it seems like one of them died right before things like the you know things went south there and what great timing yeah yeah okay so so i've been throwing around this word spongiform encephalopathy um and then like you know i changed like the you know bovine feline whatever so it a spongiform means something looks like a sponge. And an encephalopathy means brain. So your brain turns into a sponge. And that's because you're not getting copper. And so cells are falling apart.

And your brain just doesn't work, to be real simple. It's kind of like Alzheimer's. That's how it presents in humans, which is why it's really hard to figure out. And then when you want to determine that something has spongiform encephalopathy you got to cut the brain open and look at it under a microscope hell yeah you do um and as you can imagine uh that doesn't usually happen in people you don't usually cut their brains open and also in a lot of animals you don't usually cut their brain open look at it under a microscope. Well, it's bad for them, right? Like that's not, yeah. It's always lethal.

Always a lethal sample. So like that's the basics of like what a prion disease is. And then when we saw it in England, what had happened was got it into cows, cows got it from eating other cows that were fed back to them. And then it got into humans because we ate, well, we, the Brits in the 30s, in the 90s, ate cows that were infected with bovine spongiform encephalopathy. And you had to eat a good amount of it for it to build up in your brain.

And what I mean by that is- But we're Americans. Right, right. So not a problem for Americans. Yeah. I just want to kind of like lay a foundation so we all understand what's going on. Yeah. And so what I mean by build up in your brain is like, you know, you get like one, two proteins in there.

You're fine. It's okay. Proteins misfold all the time. It takes, you know, brains are big, especially in humans. So it takes a while for this to become a problem. But what happens is over time is one is once you build up enough, you're getting exposed to enough prions that are misfolded. Like the prions in the brain start misfolding. And then slowly your brain just starts, stops functioning correctly.

Yeah. It, you know, it's, it's like a chain, like a slow chain reaction. So that's the basics of, of prion diseases and spongiform encephalopathy. Now we're talking about chronic wasting disease um which can be easily described as the deer equivalent of mad cow disease and like when you see a lot of stuff about it people just it's like called like zombie deer because like deer get weird when they are like dying from chronic wasting disease like the name chronic wasting disease comes from because they like wasting away they're like drooling and also drinking a lot they act weird they look dumb um they just do weird stuff and

so people call it zombie like fear but they're not um they're just infected with a prior disease and their brain is falling apart it's like it's like a person getting alzheimer's like yeah they do weird stuff my grandma has alzheimer's it is terrible yeah don't get it right yeah I yeah my grandma had um uh the same thing that Robin Williams got the uh Lewy body dimension it's pretty much the same thing right like you can just see somebody kind of falling apart piece by piece but that probably does make the deer easier to hunt yes and it also makes it really easy to identify what it's in its advanced stages in deer so we got a kind of an understanding of about it but like you know why do we care we are people we are not deer right robert are you a deer uh not right now i mean i have been to a furry convention

but but i didn't commit so we all got our things. Well, so I, I hunt deer, Robert, I think you hunt. I don't know. I'm getting, I'm getting ready for, for hunting season as we,

as we speak. Yeah. So, so lots of people hunt deer and they eat deer, which is, which is cool and it's fine. And it's important to do in, you know,

certain ecosystems. I mean, in most of the U S like deer have been hunted by various you know humans for as long as people have been here yeah so you know it's it's a natural thing to do yeah it's very normal for people to hunt deer and it's very normal and also there are areas where we killed everything else that hunts deer yeah so there's there's anyway whatever we don't need to defend deer hunting here i i've done yeah hours of webinars on the importance of deer management it's it's a real fun subject to go into but yeah we don't care about that we're talking about chronic wasting

disease fun stuff so so we care about that we care about chronic wasting disease because it impacts all members of the cervid family or deer so so that's elk, moose. I just learned the Europeans call moose European elk wild. Arrogant. Arrogant. Look at a moose, look at an elk, super different. Wildly different animals. They're both very big, but they're also different sizes. It's like the difference between an armored car and a tank.

A fucking moose is like it's basically an elephant in terms of its footprint like oh yeah they're so cool to see but so enormous yeah yeah the impact it it can get in all cervids that we know of it's um and you know people like you know people like to see cervids they like to hunt cervids we'd like to do it you know in different countries they're delicious they have the best meat yes absolutely yeah so much better than fucking beef so much better than uh uh pork in my opinion like i fucking love venison oh yeah moose i don't know if you had moose i've had it once oh it's delicious yeah moose and elk wonderful meats uh that's actually a big thing joe rogan and I talk about when we're hanging out is elk meat.

He's a big elk meat guy. That's good. I, I've, uh, I've never, I've never hunted an elk. I've put him for the lottery every year, but it's hard to get hard to get elk tags in Pennsylvania. I know it's a real surprise. Yeah. You know what? I'll, I'll go ahead and reach out now.

It's easy to get the tags here, but it is hard unless you have a friend with land that elks are on to actually hunt them as as much as it could yeah anyway if you've got land in oregon and you want me to hunt elk on it hit us up yeah so so you know as we could see there's a clear demand for cervids and cervid products and so in like the 50s and 60s people started you know they're like well you know sometimes you're not always good at hunting and not everyone wants to hunt so they started trying to domesticate and farm them right um cervids famously like running away i've seen a lot of deer tails robert you hunt i'm sure you have yeah yeah and a lot of like tracks that you can tell and like with shit or something near

them but like oh man i fucking missed that son of a bitch by like 30 seconds yeah yeah and if you even if you drive around you'll see just like they're like oh car i'm out of 5 000 they don't need to be here uh sometimes they go across the road and hit him that's a different story um then you get your free meat in some states yeah sometimes it's bruised to heck but uh that is how I get to eat some moose. Someone hit it with a car. Hell yeah. Um, but, um, so they don't like being in captivity at all.

Not a fan, not a fan. Uh, and so they're very, they were very stressed in captivity. And then like in the sixties in Colorado, um, at,

on the Colorado university of Colorado on their deer farm, they noticed like the deer were getting skinny and weird and that's how that's where uh chronic wasting disease was discovered because we tried to farm an animal that's not okay awesome love it yeah yeah there there are some folks who think that it's a natural thing but doesn't look like it doesn't look like it uh no reports of it being around from before the 60s and as we we laid out, lots of people ate a lot of deer and saw a lot of deer before the 60s. So probably came from farming servants. So then since then,

deer farming is not really regulated. And also deer are not really easy to keep in captivity. They like to jump when fences blow down. And so they'll get out of captivity. And also other deer they like come up to you know captive deer and they're like yo what's up with you though you're in a cage huh and so you you can actually see them they'll like interact through the fence um and that's probably how it got out of containment is through interactions and you know cervids being spread uh the country. And so now chronic waste disease is found in 30 states, I think four Canadian provinces, Scandinavia, and Korea. So I think it's four or five countries.

So it's out there. It's out there. And it's infecting cervid populations across the US and across Canada and the world. It's real bad. it's real bad it's real bad so yeah it seems like a problem yeah yeah so if you're a deer what happens is you either interact with enough to pick up chronic wasting disease we'll go through the deer kind of the progression in deer to pick it up you either interact with the deer that has chronic wasting disease so you go up and smell them you lick lick them a little bit, deer groom each other, you know, animals.

You eat a plant that another deer pooped on. Now, it doesn't have to have pooped on that plant. So, like, this is a deer that's infected with chronic wasting disease, can poop in the soil, and the plant will pick up the prion from the soil. Awesome. Yeah, and then another deer can come in. So it can just spread, yeah. Cool. That's some real scary shit, yeah.

And you can also pick it up from water, but spreading it in water is really tough. So those are your main vectors, is deer to deer and environment to deer. And that's why it's pretty tough to control once it gets into a state, because to destroy it, you have to dig up the soil and you have to burn it at a thousand degrees for an hour. Or you have to expose it to bleach for an hour to destroy the prion.

Because it's not a living thing, it's a protein. Yeah, I mean, and there are a couple of towns that I would be okay doing that to, but on a nationwide scale, that seems difficult to pull off. that I would be okay doing that too, but on a nationwide scale, that seems difficult to pull off. Yeah, I can think of a state that starts with an O and an H that I wouldn't mind losing. You know, if we just were like,

you know, we'll take it. Yeah, let's just try it. Why not give it a shot, right? Yeah, it's just Ohio. Come on. It's not a real state. So in deer, we're going to stay just in the deer world.

We're not going to get scary yet. So in deer, this slowly builds up throughout the population. And you get worst case scenarios like in southwestern Wisconsin, where like 50 to 75% of the deer harvested, bucks harvested a year are positive for chronic wasting disease. And because it's an always fatal brain disease, you're looking at population collapse and extinction. Great. Yeah, because it remains in the soil too. It's around for at least two, probably more years,

but the studies we've done are only two years because these are not fun things to study. People have died studying these diseases from prions. When they've done work on BSE, a lab tech actually uh pricked herself with the tool uh and got um cj cjd and died from it so oh my god yeah they're not fun to study really you know that's this is like we're talking like martian suit style study stuff it's not fun cool so like yeah the stand level shit yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah so so like you know it

without you know when chronic wasting disease is not addressed in deer populations like in southeast or southwestern wisconsin you're looking at extinction level stuff because all of the deer that are out there are most you know 75 of them have chronic wasting disease or at some point in getting chronic wasting disease, which means that they're putting more and more of it in the environment. And they're more like, if you're an uninfected deer, you're, you know, three quarters of your buddies are infected. So you're going to get chronic wasting disease and be dead within two or three years. So you're looking at extinction of all cervids in that area for some amount of time until it comes out of the soil. That's bad. that is a problem yes

yeah yeah as we have established neither of us are deer so why do we care i mean outside of like the fact that deer are pretty important to the the ecology of local areas and that that collapses bad yeah why what is what is the problem like what is the risk to human beings beyond that yeah yeah yeah we put ecology all aside all the time right this is the world we don't really care about that yeah i i deal with what happens when you put ecology aside so i'm super used to that that yeah so the the risk is if it jumps into humans. Because all of a sudden, you have a disease that's really hard to detect that can live in the environment, that can be transferred from not just spinal fluid, but if you eat a lot of infected meat from deer, if you eat some of the organs, you can get it at high risk. So all of a sudden, you have a large portion of the population that could be exposed through

direct consumption. But the other thing is, prions are really hard to kill. I said they live in soil. They also live on steel surfaces, glass surfaces. Every surface that they've tested, like trying to kill prions, putting prions on and seeing how long they live there, hang out there. There was some surgical equipment that was infected with the prion. It gave someone chronic wasting... Not chronic. CJD three years after using it on someone who had CJD. Great.

That's surgical-grade stainless steel stuff. Not supposed to hold things. Gets cleaned, but not super, not prion-level clean, because they didn't know about it at the time. There's the risk. Is it good to potentially develop into a human you know something that impacts humans like right now it hasn't we do have eight different variations of it out there in the landscape and as more and more deer are exposed to it what happens we get more and more variations

of it because that's just what happens in nature. Yeah. As we're all becoming familiar with, with COVID. Yeah. It keeps changing because it, nothing has been done to stop it from spreading. Yeah. And like the only thing you can do to stop it is just like reduce deer numbers. You can't really eliminate out of the landscape because it's in the soil.

Yeah. Yeah. And you can't, you can't test live deer for it. You got to kill them to do it there's they are developed there are some tests being developed to determine if animals are infected um that are faster but i you know it's still it's still in progress so that's called rt quick it's a protein test that's that's much faster than current testing but it's still in progress so the the

thing that really scares me is the other well the other thing about that makes chronic wasting disease different from you know bse uh mad cow diseases mad cow was in cows that were in you know captive spaces right and you know you know where the cows are yeah it's a problem but it's a problem that you can, with enough fire and or other tools, eradicate. Yeah, and it didn't seem to be very present in soil. And it was like you had to feed dead cows to live cows to get them infected. Chronic waste disease is a different beast. So the real scary potential here is that it's in soil so it can get into plants and we know that

plants could transmit uh chronic wasting disease to other deer so it could you know transmit it to other animals like things that eat plants you know for example you and i eat plants if you're an american uh you eat corn in a couple of different forms um deer love hanging out in cornfields corn in a couple of different forms um deer love hanging out in cornfields oh yeah so there is an exposure vector right there and it's you know when you're due when you're processing corn into corn syrup let's say um you take a bunch of corn from a bunch of different places uh smoosh it up grind it up you know you do a bunch of stuff to it in on steel surfaces and you don't heat it to a thousand degrees for an hour so all of a sudden you have like a case of soda that could be infected with chronic wasting disease oh cool

there's the potential the big potential damage if this shit jumps to people which it hasn't yet well i want to be really clear about that so we're not causing too but if it does the containment thing is like even an order of magnitude beyond fucking COVID shit, right? Like it's because it's spread through the soil. It gets into the fucking basic ingredients of food. And we simply – the way that we process that stuff isn't set up in a way that will eliminate it right now. Yeah, and I would tell you, you really can't on a large scale like process anything that's then make it safe from you know like chronic wasting disease because you have to like you know if you if you like cut up like let's let's let's

go back to like assuming like you know it's just in you you're handling an infected deer if you cut that deer up you use your knife you got to put it in bleach for an hour and then you can come back to it bleak does really corrosive so eventually'll eventually destroy your knife so there's there's your end thing there but you can also go through your hands you know touching it you can get it um yeah so that's the scary part there i mean like you like as you pointed out and i start i really totally failed on my part to mention it hasn't jumped to humans yes you're not we are not saying you are going to get the disease tomorrow that is not the but it also like isn't like there's nothing that says it can't jump to humans right right yeah right exactly so um there have been a number

of like three or four there are two studies i know of i there's a third one i've heard about um looking at if you know human like animals can get chronic wasting disease. So that's macaques, which are kind of monkey. And when they have been fed meat infected with chronic wasting disease, and they were exposed to blood, they were fed it, they were exposed to blood, and some of it was just injected right into the back of their brainstem. The monkeys got chronic wasting disease. That's good.

So it looks like it's possible um and then also hamsters which are also used as a human stand-in have also been fed meat infected with chronic wasting disease and they were able to get it and they really get it from a number of different uh sources um there are some really like fun and by fun i mean scary uh papers out there about like all the ways you like chronic wasting disease moves around and survives uh and the the studies about like using human stand-ins are not always fun to read i know and this is this is definitely one of those things where it's like yeah what is the other option other than yeah you have to try it on shit that's yeah that's that's very unsettling but like yeah what else are you gonna do like you have you this is something you do have to know yeah yeah and um the other problem with prions is detection when it comes to like you

know different species because it presents like alzheimer's and so the only way you know that something got a prion disease is if you cut their head, you, if you cut his head open, you look at its brain. So when, and in humans, it can take a long time for these symptoms to present. I think like if you look it up on Wikipedia, it says like the average like age detection is 60 years. Oh, then we're good. Fine.

Yeah. Yeah. The researchers that i've spoken to say it takes like 40 years for enough prions to build up and in your brain for it to like you know start to show symptoms so it you know if it is to jump if it jumps the species barrier the first time we detect it will probably not be the first time anyone has been infected. Yeah. It will already have spread quite widely and then people will. Yeah. Hopefully not. But yeah.

So, so that, that's the scary part. That, that's the human side scary part. But you know, we don't always have to keep human side scary. Sometimes, you know, things work in, you know, monkeys and hamsters that don't work in humans. And we've cured cancer, you know, hundreds of times in mice, right? Yeah. And in humans, it's a lot harder to do because we're not mice we're not monkeys we're humans so it doesn't always work like that but the the other scary part is when it comes to agriculture and the impact on

agriculture so pigs can pick up chronic wasting disease they're what's called a prion amplifier so they can pick it up they can it you know, hangs out in them just fine. It doesn't kill pigs at all, but they can pick it up and spread it around. Nothing kills pigs, but people. Yeah, it's true. That's the truth right there. That's the truth. Yeah.

So, so, you know, if, if it, you know, as people, you know, governments become more aware of it and more concerned about it, there, there's the real possibility of, you know as people you know governments become more aware of it and more concerned about it there there's the real possibility of you know agricultural exports getting hammered on you know exporting it because you know other countries you know are concerned about spreading it so right now you know it's pretty hard to well it's getting increasingly harder to export live deer is it probably should be probably farming servants is not a great idea for their health and ours but um you know also there's the concern about spread so if if chronic wasting disease is you know crosses from humans to cows like we've seen you know like if you know bse just

pops up in some cows yeah it you know that might be from chronic wasting disease and the impact of that is going to be huge i mean canada they, they were shut out of the Japanese beef market for 14 years following a case of mad cow disease in 2006. They got let back in two years ago. And the studies on that was like a couple of billion dollars in damage to the Canadian beef market. And that was BSE, which does not do, doesn't transfer via plants. So imagine if the U.S., you know, agricultural export market got shut down

for plants. That economic damage is incalculable. Yeah, so that's the scary part about chronic wasting disease. Those are all the scarinesses. That's what keeps me up at night. This is frightening and important for people to be aware of because it's a serious threat are there things that can be done at the moment like is there uh is there an actionable even not

just like not on a what can our audience do but like is there a thing that could potentially be done by you know states or or the federal government or whatever that would help this? Like, is there actually, do we have any fucking idea of like, what could be done to make it less likely for the kind of nightmare scenarios that we've alluded to to occur here? Yeah, so the best, you know, the best things we can do are to, you know, hunt deer, reduce deer population. So that way you're, you you're taking deer out that might be infected. And when you hunt deer in most areas that are infected, you test them for free with your state or various authorities. And so then those carcasses are destroyed. So you can remove

disease off the landscape that way. And then by also just hunting deer, you reduce population levels. And so you make the disease loading in the landscape lower and it less likely to spread, you know, both to other deers and then potentially vector to other animals, be exposed to other animals. Um, excuse me, New York is a great example of this. They had a case of chronic wasting disease pop up, uh, took it out really, you know, hunted that area hard. I think that they even brought in professionals and did some real serious deer reduction and they haven't had a case since. So it, you know know in areas where it pops up you can just hammer it with you know lethal removal of animals harvesting whatever and um you can prevent spread um and you can knock it you can really knock it back the other thing we got to do we need to be very serious about we need to

take the the captive servant industry so i've used the word cervid a couple of times. I never defined it. My apologies. Cervids are members of the deer family. So elk, moose, sika deer, all those guys, red deer, fallow deer, whatever, a bunch of them. We need to make sure that we're very closely regulating that industry because of the potential spread. There was a farmer in Wisconsin that sent almost 400 different infected deer to 197 different farms over the course of four years. So regulation is incredibly important and it's rarely, it's not really enough on most farms. My home state here, we have, if you make less than $10,000 from your cervid farm, you don't have to report it. You don't have to track it or anything. That's a real problem because we are experiencing expanding chronic waste disease.

So regulation, you know, that's not fun. Maybe we just shouldn't be farming cervids. Maybe that's bad. Yeah, I don't disagree with you at all there. Yeah. Yeah. Not a fan. Yeah. I don't disagree with you at all there. Yeah. Yeah, not a fan. Yeah, don't.

From an ethical standpoint, too. There's many. I raise several different. I raise bunnies and chickens and goats, and I help raise sheep for meat. There's plenty of different things that you can raise for meat that are used to it because we've been raising them for meat for like tens of thousands of fucking years like the sheep i have are angoras which i didn't go back like 20 30 000 years like they're they're they're they're meant for it we have changed them into animals that are supposed to be raised for meat don't take new animals and try to farm them like

that because it seems like it causes problems yeah well there's a really neat there's a really neat work out there about the about domestication stress and like you know domesticated sheep don't care about being domesticated whereas like they've compared like domesticated sheep to wild sheep wild sheep die really quick when you put them in domestication from the stress but yeah like you said uh maybe maybe we don't maybe we don't play around with some of these animals and try to force them to do what we humans want them to do. It's okay for animals to just be animals. Nothing wrong with that. Yeah, so the other thing, there was a large amount of money set aside.

And I can't remember which legislative package it was that got defeated a while back that put money towards chronic wasting disease research. So legislatures and states can be – legislatures and governments can be taking this seriously and putting money towards chronic wasting disease research so you know legislatures and states can be you know legislatures and governments can be taken seriously putting money towards it right now it's it's not a lot of money going towards it because it's like yeah it's a zombie deer thing who cares yeah well you could get into agriculture this is not just a problem for deer hunters this could be a real issue for everybody yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah i mean mean, it's kind of like a larger symptomatic thing, too. We don't really take environmental problems that seriously. No. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, the scary thing about this is we don't treat the environmental problems seriously when everyone's saying, hey, the consequences that like all of Florida will be uninhabitable. Right. Like we don't take that seriously. So when you're saying this is much wonkier, which is definitely a barrier to effective action. Yeah, I did a legislative testimony about chronic wasting disease a couple of months back. No one was paying attention,

but it made me feel good. I was doing something. Oh, here's a fun thing about Florida and chronic wasting disease. So Florida, full of invasive species. Obviously, it has chronic wasting disease. Come on, this is Florida invasive species obviously it has chronic wasting disease like yeah that's a come on this is florida obviously i pick up a new disease yeah you know what else is in florida huh colonies of macaques there's like two colonies of wild macaques i was unaware of that yeah was it because people were unill advisedly keeping pets i think

one of them started that way and i think one one of them was some monkeys that had been kept for testing or zoo stuff escaped. But there are at least two colonies of macaques in Florida, which also has chronic wasting disease. So I don't think that chronic – they're near the Everglades. I don't think chronic wasting disease is made that far south of Florida. near the Everglades. I don't think chronic wasting disease is made that far South of Florida. So there's a, there's a fun possibility of the lab experiments done under highly controlled conditions getting,

um, you know, performed in, in the wild setting. We could see if, if mechanics can pick up chronic wasting disease in the wild. Um, there's a,

there's a fun research project for someone who, uh, you know, is able to handle dark sides of things. Yeah. Uh, thank you, Florida.

Um, but more importantly, thank you florida um but more importantly thank you flow rider uh and a lot of people are unaware of this was just a couple of years ago in the eurovision song awards representing san marino so you know 20 second overall not bad yeah that's pretty good better than I could do. I think I would have done a good day. Yeah. And also, you are not technically a citizen of the Republic of San Marino. No, but if they offered me citizenship, I would consider it. Absolutely.

Who wouldn't want to be a citizen of the most serene republic of San Marino? Yeah, I looked at Andorra. So, you you know it would be a really we're looking at european micronations i mean if andorra came knocking versus san marino obviously san marino's getting kicked to the curb i love that like dual like government between the president of france like the pope of or not the bishop it's like a bishop of like somewhere in italy, it's very funny. Yeah, you gotta love those weird little micro-republics. Oh, huge fan. Yeah. So, okay, well, this has been great.

Yeah. I'm glad this is happening. Yeah, yeah, it's cool and fun. Yeah, I'm not usually fun to hang out with when I talk about work stuff. Yeah. I know, but it's like, it's, again, people need to be aware of this. This is one of those, just in same way that like people were talking about for years prior to COVID hey we we actually really

need to be aware like a coronavirus could break out and it'll spread really quickly due to the way that global travel and transit and stuff works and it'll be almost impossible to control um you know we should we should build structures into our societies to make it easier for us to deal with a coronavirus, which we didn't do, but maybe we'll do it this time. Yeah, well, what makes it really fun, I'm just going to build off you for a second. You've fallen into my trap here.

The same people who were writing about MERS and predicted, I can't remember which came first, MERS or SARS. I can't remember which one. The same people who were writing about like uh mers and predicted you know uh i can't remember which came first mers or sars i can't remember which one the same people who predicted that and then who are also predicting um covet are also talking about chronic wasting disease so it's like you know i really hope you don't get to be right on this one yeah there i just want you to lose one of these times here bud you're a nice guy smart guy, but can you be wrong occasionally just for, just for like, you know,

old time's sake, just be nice to me. Yeah. Well, there we go. Um, that's been a fun episode. Everybody have a good time.

Um, thank you, Calvin. Do you have anything you want to like plug before we roll out here yeah i would like to plug trees trees is real neat try that um we are supported by trees um not the plant but a club in dallas that i took ecstasy at once that's our primary sponsor i'm physically supported by trees my my computer is on wood so oh excellent yeah there's that also good yeah uh trees like to plug also on wood so oh excellent yeah there's that also good

yeah uh trees like to plug also getting outside that's good for you do that absolutely get outside for sure yeah uh uh tweet tweets from from birds i don't do the twitter not not from twitter yes definitely yeah those are things i'd like to plug yeah replacing the tweets from twitter that you encounter with tweets from birds is probably among the best things you can do for your mental health. Unless it's this one bird that lived outside of my apartment in Los Angeles. But anyway. Well, Calvin, thank you for coming on. I appreciate your expertise, even though it's always deeply unsettling.

That's going to do it for all of us here today. It could happen here, by which I mean you and me. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows Presented by I Heart and Sonorum An anthology of modern day horror stories

Inspired by the legends of Latin America From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning

of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Oh boy. oh boy it is behind the it happened could hear i'm evans robert podcast song hello who else is on the call what are we doing where are we it's it's it's me uh it's christopher wong i'm gonna talk a lot this episode there's also other people here you are now before we get into that i should note that we we're all just looking at the latest episode of podcast magazine which of

course we all read regularly that That's got a list. I do like that they describe you as, they describe you in a few funny ways, actually. Yes, they do. It's a list of the most powerful people in podcasting. It's, of course, got me, obviously. Trevor Noah, Joe Rogan, all the greats. On page 47, we have Robert Evans,

and they do say that he has also undertaken an ambitious daily series called it could happen here that takes on some of the weightiest issues and problems facing policymakers around the world i i will say this if you are a policymaker and you have ever taken a policy suggestion from us you have a legal obligation to like light your own office on fire with a molotov i do like that robert evans no no no don't listen to chris do it policymakers i do like that robert evans is right above the serial creators so that's that is nice that is i'm above trevor noah i mean i don't i literally don't think it's

like it listed because there is no way in the list Ben Shapiro is above Joe Rogan, and that's just not accurate to the way the industry functions. But it's a very silly list anyway. It's been fun reading through our latest issue of our favorite

podcast magazine. Podcast magazine, of course. Made by Podcast News Daily, where you can get all your news about podcasts. A thing that I totally knew about. I've known about this, clearly, for longer than 15 minutes. Actually, that's not true.

I've known about it for longer than eight minutes, maybe 12. Yeah. It's an amazing photo of Robert. I was happy to get in some fine reading today. yeah yeah it's an amazing photo of Robert he looks like a giga Chad meme I was happy to get in some fine reading today so anyway what's our episode actually about

that's a great question it's a podcast power rating episode yeah yeah I don't even have anywhere to go with that no the thing the episode is actually about is heatwaves. And very specifically, a heatwave in China that has been going on for... As we're recording, this is day 72, I think.

By the time this goes out, it will probably be like day 74. Yeah, and this is... An incomparable heat wave uh i'm just gonna read this from axios the extreme heat and drought that has been roasting a vast swath of southern china for at least 70 days straight has no parallel in modern record keeping in china or anywhere else around the world for that matter now okay so that sounds bad right but it's actually worse than that because okay so if if if you were to read that you you might believe that this heat wave is just affecting southern china and that's like not true it's also affecting northern china it is affecting like most of china it's like affecting almost like most people alive. It is 900 million people.

Now, Chris, quick question. Is that a lot? So, okay. So if you rank all the countries in the world, right, the people affected by this heat wave would be the third largest country in the world only behind China and India. Okay. Okay.

So that's it. That's several peoples. It's fun. Is it more people than the British people who have been logging on to post about it being like 85 degrees and them dying? I do love one of the things that's keeping me alive during this ugly summer

is like all of the photos of British people just getting as red as possible because they think that tanning means burning 80% of the surface of your body. It's hard for me to explain how difficult it was for me to comprehend that in California, they won't serve you if you have your shirt off

because it is a national tradition in Britain to take off your shirt and get as much sunburn as possible. Or if you're getting into a fist fight as well. I have witnessed a number of folks pull their shirts off and fights in london yep it's it's part of our natural heritage patrimony it's it's a beautiful country but please continue chris yeah okay so so you know to get a sense of like the stakes of this right So, okay. And just the sheer scale of this, because 900 million people is an amount of people

that is incomprehensible. Yeah, you can't get that. That's a number that's too large. So, okay. Sichuan province, right? This is one province that is being affected by this. This province has 83 million people in it. This is the entire combined population

of California, Texas, Indiana, and New York City. million people in it this is the entire combined population of california texas indiana and new york city um here's here's from france 24 about what's happening here since july this year the province has faced the most extreme high temperatures the lowest rainfall in the corresponding period in history and the highest power load in history local authorities said so it is hotter than it has ever been it is uh drier than it has ever been except and and this is the fun part uh this is the similar similar what's been happening in texas and i think yeah well i'm texas probably the best example of this uh okay so it's really really really unbelievably dry except for when there's giant flash floods and they've killed like 22 people already have died from the flash floods um the different

province but yeah it is unbelievably bleak um one of the big things that's happening is that the yangtze river is like the lowest anyone has ever seen it who's like anyone alive has ever seen it it's the lowest we have recorded measurements of because like and this is everything that's happening here like there is no record of it ever being this bad and this is a real problem because particularly in such one because 80 of this province's power is drawn from hydroelectric and you know it turns out i it's it's really bad if the rivers that you are relying on for your hydroelectric power are basically drying up. And like like there's there's pictures of like like you can go find pictures of this.

There are pictures of the Yangtze that like it looks like a riverbed on Mars, like is just just completely dry. Like it's like dry, cragged stuff. It's really. It's like dry, cragged stuff. It's really good. Yeah, I mean, again, this is just to kind of bring out how worldwide this problem is. We're seeing pieces of this everywhere else, right? Like Texas, which is also in a horrible drought, has been having flash floods that have been disastrous recently. Because when it's been super dry for a while and you have these these heavy rains it's it's a huge fucking problem and you've got riverbeds drying up all across the southwest and things like lake mead getting low

enough that hydroelectric power isn't going to be reliable in a huge chunk of like the the again because it's important not to distract from like what's happening in china but because it's important like this is this is everybody this is everybody all the now yes in india all over yeah yeah and and you know okay so the the the sea wave in china like there's been very very little english coverage of it and the thing that everyone focuses on is the fact that like the power outage is well the the reduced ability to generate power and the fact that everyone has to turn on their air conditions to not like literally die is you know it's wreaking havoc on china's sort of productive capacity since such one has like there there's an enormous like industrial base there that you know produces stuff from everything from like tesla to apple and this is what the sort of the

anglophone media cares about right like everything almost everything written about the heat wave is about its effect on like supply chain disruption disruption to like semiconductor production and like batteries for electronics and so on and so forth. And I do not give a shit about this. And the reason I don't give a shit about this is because the actual human impact of this is just sort of unfathomable, and the media outlets who are talking about it

don't seem to be paying attention to it at all. So while I was originally okay so uh uh when i was originally writing part of this episode i went and like looked back at weather data for shanghai and so okay when i was writing this on august 23rd um that day was 103 in shanghai uh like two weeks before that it was 111 and i found out that from july 30th to august 20th the temp like the the high temperature like the the daily high temperature like did not go below 100 on the 21st it finally rained and that dropped the temperature to merely 94 i think either tomorrow today or tomorrow I think it will go below

90 this is at night as well this is the temperature of the day but the temperatures during the night aren't going below like 70 either, a lot of times they're in the 80s or 90s and the temperature at night does, just for people who are not aware

of like heat, one of the things that's most important for like the survivability of a heat wave is whether or not it gets cool at night because you can survive pretty hot temperatures during the day. If you're able to cool your body down at night, it's one of the, like one of the saving graces, the Pacific Northwest had during its heat waves,

but yeah. And, and this is, this is a real like, so trunking, which is an enormous city. It has 9 million people like regularly in the city. It's trunking. Chongqing, which is an enormous city, it has 9 million people, like, regularly in the city. Chongqing is,

the city is also the municipal, like, government, there's a whole sort of complicated thing there, but, like, the municipality of Chongqing has 32 million people in it. They had a night, I think a couple of weeks ago that was 94.8 degrees, and, which is, again, like like that is a night that is significantly

hotter than the average summer day and you know i mean like i want to go back to shanghai for just like a second because like shanghai i i i looked this i i looked this up shanghai has not had a day where the high has been below 89 degrees for two consecutive days since mid-june it has been over 90 degrees every single day like without two days back to back it wasn't that hot since mid-june um and you know okay so like the effect this is having enormous effects uh one of the big ones this is the most noticeable ones is like basically like any excess power usage that a city can have is just getting shut off there's been a lot of uh there's been a lot of stuff where like businesses aren't allowed to open before like 4 p.m because it's literally just too hot and you can't deal with electricity

load and yeah like and you know the other the other problem here again is like it's not cooling off at night and if it's not cooling off at night yeah like this is this is the thing that kills people um and so i well one of the things i want to talk about this is just like looking at this looking at what this looks like on like a very very granular individual level because this stuff also just sort of gets ignored um there is a really horrible story in six tone which is like it's hard to describe them. So Six Tone is a state media outlet, but they're like, I don't know, I guess you consider them like they're like the left wing state media outlet. Which means that like they have somewhat more like editorial independence than like something like China Daily or like a lot of the other state run things.

And they like they criticize the government a lot more than uh most of the sort of state-run outlets and they did this story about a migrant worker who was working at a freight depot about like he's this is this depot is about like two and a half hours outside of shanghai and okay so he he's he's working and it is unbelievably hot. I think the last day that he's working here, it's 104 degrees. And that night, it only cooled off to 84. Here's from Six Tone about sort of just the conditions that people are working in here. On the hottest days, the temperature side of the carriages is at least 50 degrees Celsius, which is 122 degrees Fahrenheit, says Yu Yidong, a worker from Jiangxi, another inland province.

It feels like you're on fire standing here around noon. His employer, an outsourcing agency, hands out heat stroke prevention drugs, which he takes twice a day. At the freight depot, managers sit in air-conditioned rooms, but workers like him rest under trees. The office is not for us you says now okay in theory under chinese law uh if if it hits 104 degrees outdoor work is supposed to immediately stop and you're supposed to move everyone indoors and like give them water and stuff because it turns out if you're working like a hard manual labor job outside 104 uh you might die but you know you're and you're also supposed to get paid heat breaks

and you're a bit like you know as as anyone who is familiar with for example how american farm labor works uh you know what happens about to happen next uh it turns out that you know okay so you can take a break but your employers won't pay you for it because like they don't like who's who's gonna who's gonna actually force them to do it jong who's the the the worker the story is about you know is extremely poor his family is poor he's trying to support a family like back home because again he's a migrant worker and he you know he can't he can't afford to take a break on his shift so he doesn't die and so he he literally collapses on the job and then gets back up and finishes his work and he tries to cool down by like laying in his tiny young un-air-conditioned apartments with like an electric fan pointed at his head and he died on a bed that was held up by two broken

cinder blocks making maybe four dollars an hour oh yeah and you know it's paradise yeah and i mean you know the thing about this right is so in theory he's working for for a state-owned company right but you know as as we talked about like a little bit in the sort of quote earlier he's not actually working for the state-owned firm what he's working for is one of these like labor agencies which are these like sort of contracting things that allow you to actually get a job. But what happens is that the state-owned firms outsource

labor to these contracting firms, and the contracting firms just pick people up and bring them to the site. But this means he doesn't have a contract. And the problem is, if you don't have a contract, you can't get any government benefits, you can't get insurance. And it turns out this matters because China has a payout that they're supposed to pay to families if someone dies in the job. But it's almost impossible to collect, especially if you don't have a contract. It is almost impossible to get this thing. it is it is almost impossible to to get this thing um and you know like this is this is how like most of the chinese economy works uh the chinese journal chuang calculated that in

thong kwan which is one of like china's big industrial cities if companies actually paid out the insurance benefits they were legally required to pay out uh it would cut corporate profit by 50 and bankrupt like most of the companies working here. The entire economy is based on this. And Jong's family drives 350 miles to the city where he died and starts harassing government officials and bosses for literally weeks. They are trying to get people to, hey, will you pay out the insurance money you're legally required to pay us and they refuse uh like the local officials like won't even give them like surveillance footage of like what like of him on the job dying and you know after like several weeks of there's like four or five weeks they're finally able to get a sixth of the money

they're supposed to get if you die if someone dies under sort, they're finally able to get a sixth of the money they're supposed to get if you die, if someone dies under sort of, like they're able to get a sixth of the money that you're supposed to get under Chinese law if one of your family members dies in the workplace. And, you know, I'm focusing on this story because it's one of the few stories that we have directly about sort of the sheer magnitude of the suffering this heat wave is causing.

And part of what's going on here is that we don't know what the death toll of the heat wave is. There's nothing about it, right? You'll see a couple of reports that talk about like two or three heat-related deaths, but it is literally impossible that there are that few deaths. There was a study in the journal Lancet that was looking at heat-related deaths in China

over the last 30 years. And it showed that like heat related deaths have died have increased by a factor of four since 1990 and you know so there was there was another heat wave in china that was like pretty bad in 2019 and uh they they calculated that uh 26,800 people had died from heat related deaths jesus and you know and again that that heat wave the 2019 heat wave was pretty bad uh this heat wave like it has just utterly destroyed every single record that heat wave set like it is in like its own universe of heat waves so it has killed it like probably by the end of this it will have killed like tens of thousands of people yep and yeah which is really bleak and you know i mean i think like part of the reason also i wanted to talk about like this specific story is that like

you know so the weather itself like is trying to like is is enough to kill you right but like okay so like like this kind of heat is survivable if like, you know, if you're in a situation where you can be inside and where you can be hydrated and stuff like that. But, you know, hey, capitalism exists. That means you have to keep working during this shit, and that's just going to keep killing people. I wanted to sort of also look at sort of some of the historical heat waves to also to get a sense of how many people like probably died in this one um i think like maybe the most famous heat wave like in in my lifetime well until this one i guess was a heat wave in europe 2003 and that one killed something like 70 000 people um and there's a lot of very interesting stuff that we learned from this heat wave about what heat waves do is sort of in general uh the united nations like environmental program like released

a report about this and there's a lot of really interesting stuff in it i mean okay so the the obvious one is that this has a massive effect on agriculture which okay yeah like you can ask a four-year-old and they will tell you that uh this is bad and this is happening this is affecting china right now too because um this drought is hitting like right in the middle of a lot of china's bread basket so yeah there's all these sort of like downstream effects that we'll see later um one of the other fun parts about this this is from 2003 heat wave uh i'm just going to read this quote massive alpine glaciers decreased by 10 in 2003 and yeah okay so you know what you're seeing here right is this sort of secular thing where each each heat wave you know does things like melt glaciers right and that makes the next heat wave worse because when when you when you lose glacier mass you're you're you're losing surface area that reflects light, which increases the level of warming.

And this is sort of, you know, this is one of the sort of feedback loops that we're dealing with. You know, another thing that we've been seeing a lot in the US, 2020 had this like pretty badly. I mean, I guess like anyone who lives in the Pacific Northwest like understands this. There's just, there are just fires constantly because it turns out that when it's really hot, things just light on fire.

In the 2003 one, there were 25,000 fires, and they burned something like 650,000 hectares of forest. And even the places it didn't burn, it causes sort of like severe ecological damage to these forests because like the heat leaves trees, for example, like a lot weaker than they're supposed to be. And this leaves them vulnerable to things like plagues and to like into the waves of insects. And this, you know, like everything that's happening here with these heat waves, like weakens the environments that are supposed to be sort of like mitigating the effects of climate change um we so we also like on the sort of like human front we talked about how uh heat waves can knock out uh uh heat waves can knock out hydroelectric power it turns out uh they can also knock out nuclear power plants because nuclear power plants rely on like dumping their cooling water back into rivers now there's like there's there's legal limits on how hot like the water you can dump into these rivers is supposed to be because it turns out you know if okay if you dump a bunch of boiling water

into a river it's going to kill everything in it but as the sort of cooling process like gets more difficult because the water levels are lower uh you have to take power plants offline because otherwise you're going to just kill everything in the river when you when you're venting your sort of exhaust heat and into it got in 2003 it gets bad enough that like a bunch of companies get exemptions right they're like okay it's an emergency we can turn this on we can like we can vent all this hot water back in the rivers but you know you can only do this so many times before you irrevocably fuck up the ecosystem of the river and again this is this is this is the problem right like you you you get you're getting into these feedback loops you're destroying it you're destroying the

ecosystem you're showing the river ecosystems this also again has problems with like it reduces it's the river's ability to serve as a carbon sink and but but it's like you know what choice you have, right? Because the energy consumption between heat waves massively increases because you need to cool yourself down. You need air conditioning, you need things like fans, or people are going to die. And so every single one of these heat waves just sort of spirals. Yeah, I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about is something that we haven't... Yeah, I guess the last thing I wanted to talk about is something that we haven't... We talked about this in the very, very early episodes of the show,

but haven't talked about much since, which is wet bulb temperature. Oh, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so for people who don't remember what this is... I mean, we were talking a little bit about it earlier, and that when you can't cool down at night, that's one of the big things about a wet bulb temperature. But yeah, it's more complicated than that.

Yeah, so I guess the basics of it is that, okay, so your body cools itself down by sweating. And when the water evaporates off your skin, it cools you off. And this is one of the big ways that your body sort of keeps your internal temperature under control. The problem basically is, what if your sweat can't evaporate? And that, that brings us to, uh, what, what web bulb, wet bulb temperature is, uh, here, here's NASA quote, wet bulb, wet bulb temperature is the lowest temperature to which an object can cool down when moisture evaporates from it. So what, what is measuring for us is how cool our bodies can actually get from sweating.

The problem is that at a wet bulb temperature of about 97 degrees Fahrenheit, your sweat stops evaporating and you can't cool yourself. And this kills you really, really fast. Here's NASA again, talking to Colin Ramins, who's from, I think he does climate stuff at NASA's Jet Propulsion propulsion laboratory once wet bulb temperature exceeds 35 degrees celsius or 95 degrees fahrenheit no amount of sweating or other adaptive behavior is enough to lower your body to a safe operating temperature said raymond most of the time it's not a problem because the wet bulb temperature is usually 5 to 10 degrees celsius below body temperature even in hot humid places but you know it's a point to know here by

the way that like the wet bulb wet bulb temperature is like not the same thing as regular temperature um it's it's measuring something like that's different from how hot it is and and it's worth noting that like the current heat waves like they're really bad but it hasn't really been hitting the wet bulb temperature hasn't really been hitting the place places where they just are absolutely lethal and start killing hundreds of thousands of people but that is going to happen right even even in sort of like even even even in like even in the climate models where you know we act we keep emissions to like two degrees right which which at this point is looking like

some of the optimistic models like this stuff is going to happen in the next 30 50 years and unless something drastically changes like we're we're we're going to watch this happen we're going to watch countries hit these temperatures we're going to watch enormous numbers of people fall over dead and yeah this is um this this is where climate change is heading and it sucks. And the heat waves that are hitting China, the heat waves that are hitting India, the heat waves we've seen here are – this is as good as it's going to get. It's just going to keep getting worse. I guess I should back up one second and talk a bit about the Chinese heat wave, which is that the Chinese heat wave isn't just like a is it just a climate change thing there's other stuff going on here there's there's there's like a very specific like confluence of like weather phenomenon like

leninia and stuff like that that like coinc had to coincide to make a heat wave this bad but the problem is like that stuff is all gonna happen again and you know so we're gonna we're gonna get like yeah we're gonna keep getting heat waves like this and yeah unless we do something differently yeah i mean we won't uh i mean we'll you know we'll twiddle around the edges um the biden administration snuck some language into the the the inflation bill that might allow the federal government to regulate co2 still after the supreme court said they couldn't but maybe not could you chris would you why don't we send a message to the people in Shanghai and let them know that?

That'll, that'll help. They'll feel better. Policymakers who listen to the podcast. Yeah, all the policymakers who listen to the podcast. I don't know, like, this is, it's one of those, if we were to take, if all of the policymakers who listen to our show were to take uh all of our advice immediately um and we were to transition every city away from being vehicle centered and like effectively cut our emissions by 70 80 percent or more we would still be locked

in to escalating heat waves like this all over the world for the rest of our natural lives because of the way the carbon cycle works. Not that that wouldn't help in the long run, but it would certainly not. That's one of the things that's so scary about this, is we're all girding ourselves for the inevitability that this will just become more common and more devastating. So true. And for everyone that has a hard time breathing, devastating. So true. And for everyone that has a hard time breathing, there's always, always the hope that via geoengineering, we can just pump more pollution into the air to reflect more sunlight, which will increase a whole bunch of other diseases. You know, I watched the first seven seconds of the movie Snowpiercer, and that does seem like an idea that would work.

It's funny, when I was in school i read like i read one of the first papers that was talking about this and like the guy in the paper is like the opening of the paper is him literally going this is a bad idea we should only do this if there's literally no other choice and then also like this is a thing we do for like 10 years to buy us more time to deal with regular climate change and then as the years have gone on and as nothing has happened, you just get to watch like, well, yeah,

there's, um, Barack Obama's favorite book ministry for the future, uh, which is a legitimately very good book. It's just funny that he likes it. Cause it absolutely embraces terrorism in defense. It embraces like killing politicians.

It embraces sneaking into the house of oil and gas executives and murdering them in the night like half as well as a wonky carbon crypto uh fucking investment portfolio but like there's a lot of different ideas yeah like like a lot of the characters in that book would have killed obama like it's yes it's a very like um but one of the things that book deals with so the inciting incident of that book is a horrible wet bulb um moment in india that kills i think it's millions of people just like a nightmare disaster um and one of the things the indian government does as a result against the express wishes of the global community is start like a essentially like an atmospheric seeding program in order to mitigate how bad the heat waves are and like

there's a bunch of consequences to that and i kind of think one of the things that's most realistic about that book is as we have more shit like this happen you will have nations on their own carry out climate mitigation efforts that could have serious effects on other countries because any of this stuff you do like if you if you if you seed clouds in the southwest or whatever in order to increase rain to raise the level at lake mead um that will like you can't fuck with the water cycle like that and not have impacts other places um and and this is a thing that certainly global law like like the international legal system, is not ready to deal with. And it's certainly something that our media ecosystem is not ready to deal with. And it

will happen. This is an inevitability, in my opinion. I mean, yeah, one of the things that we do want to talk more about is the reaction to this type of thing is going to be, by capitalist countries and like the climate Leviathan model, is going to be by capitalist countries and like the climate leviathan model is going to be to basically privatize the atmosphere and privatize the sky and different ways that Skyvatize

Sure I saw pure hate in your face there Garrison But between all of like the corporate space projects and then stuff with geoengineering it's just going to be renting out sections of the atmosphere so that people can pump things into uh to for whatever for whatever kind of carbon neutral thing they want to do or yeah pumping shit into the atmosphere is what got us into this problem and it's what's gonna get us out so true make money somehow it's uh it's kind of funny that in the u.s i don't know

if you saw this but like this month uh which we're recording this in august uh there was a discussion about how the water was going to be used in the colorado river by the various states that i did i did read that yeah it was a very very depressing report it's it's yeah yeah i just i it ended with like basically each of them chest thumping at each other and being like no fuck you i'll take as much water as i want i'm upstream of you i think utah were the ones particularly uh yeah belligerent in that case but yeah it is the opposite of what we need to do but here we are doing it i was in utah last this month uh looking at new golf courses being built uh by fisher tower sound of the desert there and it's great there's a fun okay so uh andreas mom's last book before he kind of went off the weird Nicolenninist rails was called Fossil Capital.

And he has a really interesting argument that one of the reasons that we got into this mess in the first place, one of the reasons companies started adopting coal was that even though coal was less efficient as a source of electricity than having water mills, a source of electricity than having like water mills water like having a succession of water mills going down the same river requires a bunch of different corporations to like coordinate with each other and they don't want to do that and because sort of like the the the laws around who controls rivers is really sort of unclear like they were just like now screw this we're just gonna use coal even though it's worse and the fun part about this is now we get to get this again, like river law where it's like, oh, hey, it turns out that capitalists and capitalist states are just utterly incapable of like sharing resources with each other. And they're just going to try to section off increasingly large parts of it, which is going to go increasingly badly. badly yeah i mean it's like one of the things you're the failure to be able to imagine anything that exists outside of a profit and loss kind of mentality um is is one of the major problems that we have like all over with this like there's right now one of the big stories coming out of the uk

is that as a result of the war in ukraine and prices, the cost of heating has risen fucking massively. This is a problem for all of Europe. And a lot of families in the UK are looking at the numbers I've seen are anywhere from like 4,000 to even 6,000, 7,000 pounds to heat their houses during the winter, which is like 10,000 to 15,000 real dollars. It's a lot of money. And it's substantially in excess of what they have been paying in the past. And it's like, that is enough. I mean, imagine yourself, how many people, I'm going to guess it's a small fraction of people listening who could afford an extra $10,000 to $12,000 in bills this winter and not have it completely fuck their lives up. So obviously people cannot

pay for their heating this winter. And like, if you can't pay a bill, you're not going to pay a bill, right? That's one of the laws of the iron laws of finance bills that can't be paid, won't be paid. So the state is coming in, but the state is not, again, these companies, basically all of these companies are, would be essentially insolvent. Like if things were allowed to proceed naturally. So the government's going to have to do something.

But the thing the government isn't going to do is, like, actually nationalize any of these heating companies. It's just going to, like, pump more tax. Anyway, it's the same thing. It's a failure to kind of imagine anything outside of this. Well, maybe if capitalism has broken down around this issue, this isn't an issue that should continue to be in the hands of corporations. Yeah, well, but the fun part about this, too, is that, like, be in the hands of corporations yeah well and but

the fun part about this too is that like okay it's like well okay well okay we'll nationalize this and that will save us and then you look at like what do you act what do most of the world's nationally owned corporations look like and it's like well okay so the government owns it like 51 percent of the stock but then it functions exactly like a normal company. Well, right. I'm not saying... The solution is not... Sorry, James. You're the actual Briton in this room. Yes. It's kind of

funny because in Britain, people living on state pensions or certain other state programs, state disability and stuff, get a winter fuel allowance normally. The winter fuel allowance is scheduled to go up like less than a tenth of that that amount that you just said would be the uh the increase in the cost of heating right and it's still sort of it's just so funny to see like in theory britain has

several political parties all of them especially with labor under kirst Starmer, are clustered under a neoliberal consensus. And rather than considering doing anything, they are bickering over how much of a pittance they want to throw to poor people. Yeah, I mean, yes. Yeah. It's also very funny that Britain did build a desalination plant in the Thames estuary

and forgot to account for the fact that due to it being an estuary the river coming in and out uh the levels of salt in the water would change and that would make the desalination and it's fucking i think it's biodiesel fueled it's just awesome it's magnificent yeah we've got great leaders over there and we don't need to change yeah no you you you seem to whenever i think of countries that have their shit together i think the uk um yeah you've got to remember that nazis use bicycles when you're considering your options for transport and climate change in the future deranged british tweets of the day yeah i mean hey okay look look the the the the one the one very dim silver lining is that maybe this will cause the

british got the entire british political system to collapse like you never know like twice a year right well no but but what is collapse here well like okay here's the thing right if you have enough people who the government is trying to pay their bills they start throwing molotovs at stuff like this is actually a pretty reliable one of the very reliable things that gets people to go fight police is

like you suddenly increase the price of gas that they either need to drive or need to like heat their houses so maybe i don't know but then british people will also be barking for us to send the troops against the people who are protesting for the right to yeah live with dignity that's one thing we love to do yeah it's it's a it's a it's a fun it's a fun country oh yeah it's a fun tree. Yeah, yeah. It's a fun tree. Mental asshole. Oh, man.

All right. Well, are we good? Have we solved this one for all the policymakers who listen to our show? Yeah, yeah. Throw a brick at your sheriff. Yeah. Hit me up, fucking Lindsey Graham. Huge fan of the pod, Lindsey Graham. Get a Molotov if you're old.

Yeah. Lindsey Graham's actually just voted to subsidize Molotov cocktail production. So thank you. Thank you, Lindsey, our based fan of the policymakers who listen to our show. He must have been looking at a research. It's the only real way to stop climate change the only legitimate use of fossil fuels is in cocktails yeah hey we'll be back monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe.

It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tale. updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.