It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 78

Episode Date: April 8, 2023

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or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking music, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and

influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight up comedia, and that's a song that only nuestra gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. decisions. Welcome to Shitty Mayor Mondays, a name we're not actually allowed to use as the title of our podcast because it breaks a bunch of cert shit in the background. I'm your host, Mio Wong, coming to you live from a crumbling basement in contested Chicago that may or may not be hit by a tornado in the next hour. This is It Could Happen Here. So true.

It could all happen within this next recording session. It could happen in Mia's basement. Yeah, with me, I have Garrison and James. Hello. Welcome to hell. Hi. I'm in tornado-free San Diego. Did have a tornado warning yesterday.

Luckily, I'm in the ever-stable Pacific Northwest, where nothing bad can happen. Yeah, it's contractually obligated. It says no bad things. No earthquakes here that are overdue. No forest fires or record temperatures. It's great out there.

So true. So today we're doing a sort of special episode of shitty mayor mondays which is that uh we are we are doing the chicago double feature because our previous shitty mayor laurie lightfoot i managed to become the first i think i think the the first chicago mayoral candidate in 40 years who was an incumbent and lost re-election and not only did she lose re-election she went out it so okay the way the way the the the the Chicago mayor elections have like a trillion candidates like I think there were like nine this time and if no one can get

about 50 it goes to a runoff and she got knocked out before the runoff which is unbelievably funny um so we're going to talk about her first as the sort of this what life what is is sort of the shitty chicago mayor past and then we're gonna talk about the maybe future shitty chicago mayor paul valis who sucks so much that he was the reason i specifically wanted to do this series but first what do you talk about fucking loy lightfoot a person who i don't i don't know i feel like people outside of chicago don't know much about her yeah i mean i know that she's like like has generally failed to do all the things that she was supposed to do and in the kind of general sort of democrat mayor model uh has sucked but i'm excited to hear the specifics yeah she's a i know she's

well okay a the funniest thing about her is just just google pictures of her hats she has just like an incredible hat game it's just always appearing and just an incredible like she has so many hats it's it's wild just every single picture she's in, it's just like a random different wild hat. It's amazing. But she's also kind of, in some sense, like a kind of uniquely incompetent politician. So, okay, so Lightfoot was elected mayor in like an absolute landslide in 2019.

And she ran this very weird campaign, which was based on sort of three main things it was one was not being a machine candidate and this is actually very important is that lightfoot is not actually part of the chicago political machine that controls like most politics why there's there's the kind of that kind of separate parts of the machine this is a complicated thing we're not going to fully get into here but she's like not a machine candidate she like kind of is an outsider in some sense um and that was a big part of why people voted for her there's another thing which

is this sort of like identity tokenism thing which is like i'm gonna be the first black lesbian mayor of chicago which she is and then the third thing she was running on was building a shit ton of police academies now i know in 2019 i was in chicago for this election and i was like do not fucking vote for her she's gonna build these cop academies everyone was like no it's gonna be great she's not the machine she's like so she gets elected in 2019 and this means that when she gets into office like almost immediately 2020 happens and okay so no mayor has like a good response to 2020 um lightfoot is like catastrophic so i've talked about this a bit at the show but but what 2020 in chicago is this really really kind of wild and weird thing it doesn't map on to a lot of the other sort of 2020s

like the first thing that happens basically is chicago has this thing called i think it's i think it's the magnificent mile it's something mild i can't remember what is magnificent or miracle because it's a fucking bullshit tourist thing but it's like it's like it's like a mile of like really rich shopping districts and the cops just lost control of it like people just took it it was like fully looted it was just this it was just this there was this sort of incredible moment of like chicago's working class that had been getting shit on for 200 fucking years like finally stormed their way into their pants just the fucking bougie part of chicago and destroyed it and it fucking ruled but after that happened lightfoot was like oh shit we

can never let protesters get back there again so she started raising the fucking draw bridges that lead that lead across the fucking uh river so like she was like she basically turned the entirety of like like that that of that part of chicago into a fucking fortress that you could not get onto amazing i just she did this like she raised the bridges multiple fucking times i like we're gonna get to another story of her raising the bridges where it's like it's on like like she does this so many times that like even times where she claims she didn't do it on purpose people are like i i think she raised the bridges this is you know and so this is her basically she when she raises the bridges she just like declares war basically on like half of chicago and okay so this is like not a great thing

to do if you are trying to be a popular politician is to just like physically declare war and like do fucking medieval fortress shit to like half half your fucking city and so her popularity starts tanking immediately this is in like the this is i i'm guessing as a consequence of like the black lives matter protest right yeah yeah okay yeah yeah so her approval rating is like fucking absolutely dog shit i think oh i'm trying to find i i should have looked this up earlier i meant to and i forgot i think her approval rating was like 30 when she left office it might even be lower than that yeah so but you know but she she does this kind of unique thing where she basically goes around and alienates like every single voting block in the city i guess before we get to this we should get we should get

to how she pissed off the cops because one of her big things when she came into office was she was trying to sort of like do this alliance with the police but instead of her sort of actually like forming this you know she was trying to form sort of center right wing base right she's trying to both sort of play this kind of like identity tokenism thing and then also build a base with the cops but a the cops are racist and b okay do you two know the story about the chicago columbus statue i don't think wait is that one of the ones that got taken down sort of i think this is one of the ones that um so in 2020 i wrote a story about how to tear down statues and uh then became the guy that everybody sent pictures of statues

getting torn down to for a while so i'm sure i've seen amazing yeah i was great ben shapiro had a whole fucking seizure about it uh we got in lots of trouble with with uh various federal agencies but yeah it was a very amazing story i did don't uh don't affiliate link to the ingredients to things which may or may not be illegal if you combine those ingredients in your story so true yeah yeah uh many popular mechanics editors have tried this it was great i was in russia today uh uh not not not with my knowledge but yeah tell us about this tell us about this other statue me okay so there is a giant like statue thing sitting on like sitting on this big column that was made in 1933 and it's this giant statue of Christopher Columbus. Also on this statue

there's like a series of like important Italian people on the column. One of these things, one of the people who was depicted on this column very much seems to be Benito Mussolini holding a bunch of fascis. What the fuck?

That's cool. Now, the sculptor's son denies this but this was made 1933 it really looks like he is definitely holding fascists so all right this this statue this is like in like the middle of the fucking city right in like this park in the middle of the city um and this became the so okay so in 2020 in chicago the way the protests work is you you have like the first initial like phase where the cops like lose control of the city and then the cops kind of like retake it over the next few days and those are kind of lulled but then it starts another like sort of wave of it starts back up again like around specifically around this statue

and there's this whole thing that cops are trying to keep it up and there's this whole thing where like there's like like rings of activists like surrounding a group of cops standing around the statue like throwing shit at them and it fucking ruled and eventually the city is like okay we're gonna we're just gonna take down the fucking statue and this was a light foot thing but but this pissed off the cops and specifically so we've talked about this before on the show, but this is one of the sort of unique things about Chicago is that Chicago has like, I guess a technical term is like white ethnic groups that do shit.

And one of those things is like, there's like an Italian-American cop association that is very powerful. And the Italian-American cop association is like, we will keep the statue at all costs. This is like we like we will keep the statue at all costs this is like our fucking guy like i where yeah and and lightfoot is like you guys if you guys don't take this statue down people are gonna fucking like burn the miracle mile again and she gets in this giant fight of

them and these emails eventually get i think i can't remember if they i think they get released part of a court case or something but these these come out that Lightfoot is yelling that she has the biggest balls of anyone on the table she's gonna put her balls on the table because she's trying to keep the cops alive so she gets in this giant fight and just pisses off all of the cops in the city so she has pissed

off from the initial wave of protests, the drawbridge stuff she has pissed off anyone who's even sort of of vaguely center left and anti-racist and like a huge proportion of the city's black population. And then she like systematically she's now pissed off like the sort of like white ethnic cop groups who are also very powerful. like like really genuinely unforgivable and horrific which is in 2021 chicago police shot 13 year old adam toledo here's from a chicago paper called the tribe at a press conference after the shooting mayor louis lightfoot vowed to find the people responsible for quote, putting a gun in the hands of Toledo, who Chicago police and prosecutors insisted was armed. So, okay, they shoot this kid

who is fucking 13 years old. His name is Adam Toledo. And immediately the cops, the prosecutors and the mayor said that he's armed. They're going to find the person who put the gun in his hand. So two and a half weeks later, the video comes out and it turns out that not only was Adam Toledo not armed, the cops shot him while his hands were up while complying with their instructions. I think I've seen this buddy cam. Yeah, it's fucking awful. And then like two days later,

they killed another guy. And there was another round of like huge protests and they weren't as big as 2020 ones, but like there was another round of huge protests. And they weren't as big as 2020 ones, but there was another round of really big protests in this. And Lightfoot was actively involved in a conspiracy to lie about this fucking 13-year-old kid who was killed in cold blood. And so this pisses off...

This basically means that her support among the Latino population drops to basically zero this this this like basically means that her her support among like the latino population drops to basically zero because she fucking accused a 13 year old kid of being a gang an armed gang member and then he got fucking after he got shot by the cops so oh the other fun thing about this is so our like prosecutor kim fox is like there's like this whole thing about how she's like a progressive prosecutor and like the rights trying to unseat her. None of the fucking officers involved in this or the other shooting two days later were ever charged with anything. After they again shot, like killed in cold blood, a 13 year old kid with his hands up.

Now, the sort of regular Chicago right hates her because she's both black and a lesbian. And there's some like, well, we'll talk about this a bit when we get to Valis, but there's just genuinely unhinged, horrifying sort of like racism and like homophobia. And like, she's getting basically like splash damage transphobia from it because of how

racist these people are. And so, but that means that like, you know, she has like no support. Right. She managed to get like she manages to get into a fight with Chicago's like normally pretty conservative like black caucus. And the black caucus gets so pissed at her that they forced through a police reform bill that has like oversight committees. through a police reform bill that has this like oversight committees just like a rare win and so you know like uh on february 28th there's an election and all of the sort of like everyone in the city of chicago is like she's fucked like she's a unique she's a uniquely unpopular candidate everyone fucking hates her she has systematically pissed off every single possible voting block in the entire city of Chicago.

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

So she comes in third. It's also very funny. She spends the entire like a bunch of her money running campaign ads like against a guy who comes in fourth instead of the other two people it's amazing completely misses a mark yeah and so the the man who came in second who is uh on on by the time this episode comes out the election will be fucking tomorrow um the person who came in second in that vote is brandon johnson who's a progressive candidate he's backed by like the teachers union he's like fine he's like as good as you're going to get for a mayor although i will remind people that like johnson is a much better candidate the other fucking guy we're going to talk about but i we need to talk

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

Yeah, but that was the 1930s. This is now 20. Those people's fucking grandchildren are like maybe around. But yeah, like you're not going to get, you know, like we're not going to get a socialist city off of this. On the other hand,

the person who comes in first, who Brandon Johnson will be facing tomorrow when you listen to this, is a demon in human form. He is neoliberalism's bag man. He is the fucking reactionary republican dog of the chicago political machine and that man's name is paul valis and as as as valis would fucking want we are going to talk about him after we go to ads all right we're back from ads we're just the worst guy. Okay. So Paul Vallis sucks ass.

The thing he's most famous for sucking ass for is for being the school privatization guy. So we're going to start with the beginning of his sort of political career is in 2000 in 1995, he gets appointed as the CEO of Chicago public schools, and he holds that position from 1995 to 2001. Now, OK, so there's a few things that that he like really likes. One is insulating schools entirely, insulating any mechanism and any sort of like part of how a school works from any kind of community democratic control. any sort of like part of how a school works from any kind of community democratic control chicago used to have these sort of like democratic councils that could like

do stuff within the school and vales is like fuck that we're getting rid of all that shit like absolutely not um the other thing he loves is charter schools so we we should explain what a charter school is yeah so okay the way a charter school works is that instead of like the state or like the city or a town or like a local government running a school which is the way that schools normally work you instead give out a charter to either like technically an ngo or just a for-profit company and then that company takes a bunch of tax money like takes tax money that would have gone to a public school and then uses it to run their own fucking school so like it is it is privatization that they've relabeled like charter quote-unquote because if they actually called it

privatization to schools people would fucking hate it and valis loves this shit this is this is what he spends most of his time across, like, on multiple continents doing schools bullshit, like, attempting to push for. The other specific thing that he really likes, and this is, like, this is sort of the Paul Valis signature, like, classic thing, is military academies.

They used to, like, basically not be military academies in Chicago, and Valis is like, we're gonna open so many fucking military academies. So he does. And these are, like, regular, and Valis is like we're gonna open so many fucking military academies and so he does and these are these are like regular and the thing is okay like there are sort of like disciplinary quote unquote military academies which is like you get sent

there instead of prison these are like just like normal schools that are like quote unquote military academies but these schools like they're barely schools like there are a lot of people who went to these schools in multiple cities and we'll get into more of this sort of later when we get to Philly but of people who went to these schools who in multiple cities and we'll get into more of this sort of later when we get to philly but like people will go to these schools and like their textbooks have pages torn out of them and like which pages which pages

you know here's the thing right you you would think this is like a like a kind of like republican style like uh we're taking out the pages that talk about like columbus being bad like no no no just random fucking like just pages torn out of it because they these schools don't have any fucking money like they don't have extra curriculars like they just they just like don't have sports they just don't have like anything to fucking do um and then this is another thing with charter schools so all right if you want to like be a regular teacher you have to have like teaching teaching certificates uh if you work at a charter school regular teacher, you have to have like teaching, teaching certificates. If you work at a charter school.

Yeah. So I think the standards depend on the state. Some of them, I think Illinois is like two thirds of the teachers have to have teaching certificates, but that means that a lot of kids are being taught by teachers with no teaching certificates, which is like, you know,

I, that teaching, it turns out is not in fact easy enough that you can just put a random person there who doesn't know how to do it and, you know, like, have kids be taught correctly. And these military academies, these military academies, they have teachers who just, like, don't fucking teach, right? Like, they're just a complete shit show. But he opens a bunch of these. But, okay, the other big thing the valis is supposed and this is the thing all the people who like valis would do this thing where they're like he's

like a budget wizard and he's like the guy he's like the technocrat like smart policy want guy who you bring in to like like bail out a school district that's underwater financially and oh boy oh boy is that not true he okay so there's there's a very good report called passing the buck which is written by the action center on race in the economy or acre which i recommend people look genuinely people should go read this it's like 12 pages long it's very short and like a like it's not even 12 like three, three of those pages of citations. And they wrote a report on Vallis' time in various school districts. And here's some of the shit that he did to make it look like he had his budget balanced. So, all right, let's talk about his pension scheme. I feel like I actually should explain how pensions work because, like, nobody fucking has them anymore.

work because like nobody fucking has them anymore so a pension is a thing where like you the worker or in this case like chicago teachers you take some of your current pay and instead of taking the money now it gets taken out of your paycheck and put into a towards a pension fund to fund your retirement and then this fund is invested in the stock market to get returns to pay out pensions that like support you when you retire right yeah so in 1999 valis was like oh hey the chicago pension system is funded so we're gonna take the teacher's money and use it to pay other budget shortfalls great so this is good um anyways uh after he does this for for 13 consecutive years chicago stops paying into its pension system altogether. And the result of this is a $9.6 billion hole in the pension system that Chicago has to like pay off.

And this is a huge part of like where the sort of modern like budget deficits in Chicago come from. Like things that are used to like justify shutting schools down is that like they just didn't pay into this. They just stopped paying into the pensions and instead took the money that they're supposed to go to teachers and use it to make their budgets look clean.

So if he had just done this, it would have been bad enough. But Vallis is a very, very specific kind of neoliberal technocrat dipshit. And that kind of neoliberal technocrat dipshit and that kind of neoliberal technocrat dipshit is the the the extremely interested in financial instruments guy who was like a kind of person that i think i think we see less of these days because most not the modern version of this are like crypto people right but back in like the 90s and 2000s there were a bunch of guys

whose things were like really really convoluted financial instruments and everyone thought they were fucking geniuses um now now if if you if you were alive in 2008 you know where this is going but valis the second thing he does to sort of like like quote-unquote balance his budget sheet is he takes out the government equivalent of a payday loan so here's here's a passing the buck quote valis literally borrowed against chicago school children's futures when he took out a 666 million dollars in capital appreciation bonds also i when i said he was like like a demon he took out 666 million dollars satanic line yeah yeah we're doing the satanic panic but for this guy who fucking sucks. So, yeah, he took out the loans and capital appreciation bonds, a form of debt in which the borrower pays nothing for several years, but then has to pay very large sums to make up for skipped payments.

A capital appreciation bond, CAB, is a long term bond with compounding interest on which the borrower is not permitted to make any principal or interest payments for many years but the interest still it accrues but you're not allowed to pay why would we why would you take that why would you why would you do that that seems like a really bad decision oh it's a terrible it's a terrible decision i'm not a big money guy but valis's assumption was that like okay we don't have any money now but property values will continue to go up and just keep going up forever so we can pay this bond back when we have money from higher from property taxes and in in uh yeah uh so okay i'm gonna i'm gonna finish this thing on on these these just dog shit bonds in this way it is similar to a negative amortization mortgage in which the outstanding principal

actually grows over time because the unpaid interest gets tacked on to the amount owed in compounds. Yeah, very amusingly, California was doing something similar to this with restitution payments recently, or some place in California were. And at least in

one case that i looked into for story i wrote it was it was ruled illegal under the eighth amendment a cruel and unusual interest payment but it's good to see that chicago is doing it yeah there's actually a funny story about this like one of the side stories of this is that the guy who's running the school system in uh gets this same offer from bond salesman people, and he's like, no, what the fuck? This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. But Valis does this. Valis is going to do this in multiple cities.

So I'm going to finish reading this thing. Because of this structure, borrowers often end up paying extraordinarily high interest rates over the lifetime of the bonds. Former California State Treasurer Bill Lockney called CABs the school district equivalent of a payday loan. So the result of this is that out of the $666.2 million, right, that Valis takes out, they pay $1.5 billion in interest?

The interest rate over the lifetime of this bond is 223%. Good lord. This is the guy who's supposed to be like the really smart technocrat reformer guy who understands financial stuff, who you bring in to like solve school districts, and he took out a loan with

223% fucking interest? This is the kind of interest rate that in the words of David Graeber were once reserved for organized crime and now is normally this kind of loan is like a thing it's like this is like a very predatory sort of like yeah, this is like a predatory banking thing.

Valis did this to himself on purpose because he's dumb. And I mean also like he's trying I mean and part of the other sort of undercurrent of this. It's not just that he's really stupid. It's that he's trying to, I mean, and part of the other sort of undercurrent of this, it's not just that he's really stupid, it's that he's trying to pay off his buddies in the finance sector. Yeah. And, you know, this is the other part of the story, right?

It's like all of these, all these school districts just get fucking looted to pay off these, like, fucking stupid-ass hedge funds. And then he just bounces somewhere else and leaves them to deal with it. Yeah, and, you know, so I talked a bit earlier about how, like, Valis' assumption on these bonds was like, well, it'll be fine because, well, the housing markets will keep going up forever.

But then 2008 happens. And this has a bunch of effects. One of the big ones is that Valis was taking out bonds with variable interest rates. Oh, no. Now, okay, we have talked about this on this show before right there are entire country like entire like like multinational political movements that don't exist there are entire countries

who fucking don't have manufacturing sectors anymore like there are there are places where the life expectancy fell by 20 years because their their their fucking leaders took out these kind of of like variable interest rate loans and got destroyed when the interest rate spikes and guess what happened in Chicago? Interest rate spikes and okay so Vallis' successors look

at this and are like this is the stupidest fucking you know well okay Vallis' successor by the way is Arne Duncan who's the guy that Obama puts in charge of the Department of education and arnie duncan is like okay do you know how we're going to solve the problem of these these the the risk from these adjustable rate interest rates credit default swabs oh god so all right i'm not going to explain how a credit default swap works because it's fucking annoying as hell

but credit default swaps are it's fucking annoying as hell. But credit default swaps are one of the things, like one of the very specific financial instruments that are like specifically responsible for the 2008 collapse. Yes. And now these technically aren't credit default swaps, right? These are technically what are called interest default swap or like interest swaps. And they're but they're exactly the same thing as a credit as a credit default swap but instead of credit it's interest so the the underlying asset right is like a bond and not like a loan or whatever but otherwise it's exactly the same thing and this this man you know and these these swaps have this thing where like if you can't pay you get these like unbelievably high like fees that start happening so uh but when these bonds

blow up uh they managed to cost they managed to cost chicago another 31 million dollars because their credit default spots just blew up so all right so this guy's in 2002 in 2002 he ran for governor against rob fucking blagojevich he ran for governor against Rob fucking Blagojevich. Who is Rob Blagojevich? You just do the first syllable and then let your lips take the rest. Uninitiated. And Vala sucked so much that Rob Blagojevich is able to outflank him on the left by running against him saying, hey, look at all these schools he privatized.

And so he gets clobbered in the primaries by Rob fucking Blagojevich. The man who, okay, so I, this is, we will cover this one day fully on the show because it's really funny. But Rob Blagojevich is the man most famous for getting arrested for trying to sell

Obama a Senate seat. Like, he tried to sell a senate seat oh he's oh he's amazing he's now just on tucker talking about political persecution oh yeah yeah great extremely funny oh yeah he was on yesterday wasn't he yeah yeah yeah yeah how he was persecuted first and now trump is being persecuted yeah it's great really really the canary in the coal mine of grifters hey grifting politicians look garrison look if they if they can go after rob lagoyevich for trying to sell obama's senate seat they could go after you for trying to sell barack obama's senate seat that's true you know who else is trying to sell barack obama's senate seat products and services that support this very podcast no they're illegally not allowed to do

that none of them would ever commit a crime i under any circumstances i still think i uh i i think a fair number of these corporations probably engage in some sort of political lobbying. That's true. They're trying to buy him a Senate seat, Garrison. That's totally different. Not the same. Not the same. Totally fine.

Thanks, Ronald Reagan. All right, we're back. And we're now sending Vallis to our... I don't actually know if Chicago and Philadelphia are sister cities, but I think they should be. I don't know. I am very in favor of the Chicago-Philadelphia alliance. Same vibe.

Yeah. Well, they both stood in for Gotham City in the Christopher Nolan trilogy, so there you go. You're doing a Batman reference again. There's a whole. There are like so many different specific. David Graeber writes about this, like there are so many different like parts of places where they filmed

like the Dark Knight, where people tried to protest and got arrested for blocking the road. Like this happened in multiple cities. Oh, yeah. No one wants in multiple cities. Oh yeah. No one wants a city to turn into LA. So you have to stand up against that shit immediately. You do not let it happen in your hood. Yeah.

It could, it could happen here. Okay. So after Valis gets clobbered in, in, in the mayoral race, uh, he gets brought in by Philadelphia to try to like fix their school system and he uh

excuse me his plan to do this is by uh doing a bunch of military academies again and then doing also doing charter schools and so i should i should explain like his other sort of so the big sort of rationale thing behind charter schools is school choice, which is this thing that was specifically invented as a way to let racist parents avoid integration. Yeah. This is like, goes along with,

so they mentioned the homeschooling movement. We've talked about this in other episodes, but he's like a huge, like Valis to this day is a giant, like school choice guy. And then, you know, but the other thing,

the other thing about valis i don't think people realize that much is he he even though he's a republican a lot of the time like he kind of flips back and forth between being a democrat being a republican but he's he's like after he loses to rob or even sort of before that like he he is an actual sort of chicago machine guy and because he's a chicago machine guy when he gets into philly the stuff that he starts doing this stuff where he like he'll just like he takes over the school district

and like fires much people and like installs his cronies and all these departments and all these people are getting like he's like buying off people with budget allocations and he starts selling off buildings to raise money so he sells off like the district headquarters in order to buy like a more expensive

district headquarters and here's a quote from the book not paid for us which is a really really great book about sort of the history of racism in education philadelphia and this this is a quote from a longtime activist leroy simmons before i start reading this the district headquarters was called 21st and Parkway. There was doors in 21st and Parkway worth $1 million. Then big brass doors in the front. Those doors were worth $1 million with all the carving on them. People don't know how much they got for it to this day. I can't get an answer about how much did you sell that building for?

Where the money went? The school district sold 21st and Parkway in a package with kennedy center there were brand new trucks parked at kennedy center they had forgot were there there was a printing press in the kennedy center that could print all new magazines and they never used there were books and calculators and every time i went through there there were boxes of unused stuff in the kennedy center and nobody knew And they sold that and the contents and the package were 21st and Parkway. Nobody knew how much that was. There was some art that was priceless

on the walls at 21st and Parkway. No one can find the art. There were priceless pieces of art hanging in schools across the city. And all that was sold in a package and nobody saw where it went. Totally normal. Yeah.

So like all, this is, this is again, this is like, this is classic Chicago corruption shit right like we're not gonna say how much we sold this building for we're not gonna say who we sold it to like we're gonna build a more expensive building and you know if you look into who the contractors are it's like always someone's uncle

or like brother or some shit there's just you know like there's printing presses that are gone like priceless works of art just vanish this is, you know, like there's printing presses that are gone, like priceless works of art just vanish. It's like, this is, this is like, you know, it's sort of incredible sort of Chicago political machine stuff. And this gets into a thing about, I think the Chicago political machine that,

that is really interesting, which is that these people are like, on the one hand, they're unbelievably corrupt. On the other hand, a lot of them are sort of real like hardline hardline, like, doctrinaire neoliberals. I mean, this is sort of the thing with Arne Duncan, right? Like, Obama actually comes out of this machine, too, when he's a lot more sort of, like, doctrinaire about this stuff than the sort of modern people are. And, you know, and Valis is, like, one of the sort of, like, big guys here.

And, you know, so he's really, really in favor of charter schools. And so they get enormous amounts of money. He also does this thing. Yeah, this is also from NotPayForUs. He funnels money into just, like, a shit ton of NGOs in order to, like, do education programming or whatever. And so there's this sort of constellation that forms of these like you have these corporations doing like education stuff or like running schools and you have these like non-profits running like the

like the education material and it's this sort of like this is sort of arch neoliberal thing where instead of the state administering a service what you have is this like basically a bunch of like contracting grifters who come in and suck up all of the money and then provide absolutely dog shit services now i'm gonna read another quote

from this book because the people they are paying these contracts to are fucking wild um the the src is like one of the the bodies that's in charge of uh like one of the state bodies that's in charge of like the the philadelphia school district one of the state bodies that's in charge of like the Philadelphia School District. One of the SRC's most problematic contracts was with K-12 Inc. for $3 million to quote, provide academic and curriculum support, access to K-12's online curriculum and assessments, academic enrichment via summer and extended day programs, professional development, teacher planning and training materials, and community involvement activities. Conservative radio talk show host William Bennett was the founder of K-12 Inc. He had been an advisor to former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.

During a show in 2005, he said the following, and this is a direct quote, If you want to reduce crime, you could, if that was your sole purpose. You could abort every black baby in this country and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and morally reprehensible thing to do, but your crime rate would go down. So they paid this guy three million fucking dollars. To bolster Valis' pro-choice credentials, I assume. This is the most pro-choice thing I I assume. This is the most

pro-choice thing I've ever seen from him. Is the genocide guy. Because it's genocide. The eugenics guy. Yeah, well, you see, they all have a weakness. That is... Has anyone looked at the curriculum that they're providing?

Seriously, it's unclear to me that they ever like actually really provided much of anything it does sound like a like if you were going to make up a company to grift out of the education system k12 inc would be a great name yeah and then that's that's the thing about like all these charter schools too right it's like like okay so like there are some for corporations you do charter school stuff and they stick in the charter school business because they decided that's how they want to make their money. A lot of these things come in, take a state contract,

the school immediately implodes and then leave. And then they just walk out with a million dollars. And this is like, this is a recurring pattern over and over again with charter schools. He also brings in Teach for America, who is this like just genuinely evil organization that tries to break teachers unions by recruiting these like incredibly

idealistic and naive young college grads and like throwing them into like into failing schools as this thing to like ah, you're gonna like go serve the community and like you'll learn on the job and you'll become an educator and you're like helping these disadvantaged kids and

it's a disaster, these people who do this have no fucking idea how to teach because they don't have teaching certificates, right? They're just like college grads. And any of you who have been around college grads, you think those people are responsible enough to fucking teach kids? Like, Jesus Christ. Yeah, I remember that was like a big thing. I don't know if it still happens or not,

but I can remember writing oh it still does yeah reference letters for students like 10 15 years ago for that yeah like i i mean i i know i had to like talk out classmates of mine like out of doing it because we were like you are doing you are doing union busting and also this will destroy your life and the life of the children you have to teach yeah it's a very strange system that yeah take someone by virtue of having any degree is it's automatically an educator but to be fair that is how universities work as well yeah you get get your master's degree and then they're like well fuck it get in there give it your best shot they'll just give you grad students with no degrees right like that's that's a thing too yeah yeah

yeah and you know to to to to to get it to get another sense of like the other thing that's happening here is is he has this really vales has this really really racist kind of like we need to like enforce discipline in schools thing and so they have all these and this happens in chicago too they have these like zero tolerance policies that have done i mean irreparable damage to like tens of thousands of kids. I'm going to read, I'm going to read a thing from tribe about Philadelphia quote test results were posted on data walls in the school buildings to show which classes were

making the most progress. Whoa. It was humiliating. Said grill was a teacher. A lot of our kids were left behind, were behind. And a lot of, a lot of our kids suffered trauma and trauma affects the way you learn. So so they were behind they weren't on grade level and it made them feel like

failures i hated giving those tests wow yeah yeah people like to be wrong about georgia well but that that's some orwellian shit right there it's just like and like these are like fucking yeah like these are like these are literally children like you are you are publicly shaming These are like These are literally children Like you are publicly Shaming people who are like 12 It's just horrible We've known for a very long time That that doesn't work

When you're educating kids I have done pedagogy training And no one With any intent to actually help kids is shaming kids in the classroom or young people or anyone of any age for that matter. I just checked out what K-12 Inc are doing. It's great. Uh,

they're now offering online high school. Oh, great. Yeah. Yeah. You can go to the faith prep Academy and, uh, develop Christian character and find it. Yeah. yeah yeah this is great uh this is this is

what i this is what our youth need oh yeah it sucks so um the other thing again we i mean we keep circling around this because this happens a bunch of times but like again valis's whole thing is supposed to be about like about balancing budgets right uh in 2007 by the time he's like like at the near the end of his like time in philly he's fucked everything up so badly that that for in in like just one year of the budget philly schools were 73 million dollars in the hole now the thing about this this is where most stories about valis's time in in philadelphia end but wait there's fucking more. So that $73 million

shortfall was the one-year shortfall, right? Remember back in Chicago where Valis' variable interest rate bonds blew up in the school's faces? This time, Valis is the guy directly who did the credit default swaps. And the interest rates on these things are locked in

literally for decades, and just like some of these aren't expiring to like 2031 right and just so far they've cost 161 million dollars great yeah and test test scores fucking go down under him it's a shit show yeah and so 2007 they kick him out because they're like, what the fuck are you doing? Unfortunately, the place they kick him out to is, and you're not going to like this, post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Oh, for fuck's sake. Yeah. Yeah.

Why? Why do we have to inflict the fail sons of neoliberalism on the people of New Orleans? It's going to get worse, by the way. Okay, great. So this is really bad, right? New Orleans now, okay, so I think there's some kind of controversy about how exactly you calculate this. At the very least, 63 out of the 66 New Orleans, like, big like let me rephrase it at the very least 63 out of the 66 like schools that they run like at the very least

like that are directly run by the state are charter schools there's three more that are also charter schools but are kind of administrated by the district so there is a huge debate as to whether there are technically any public schools left in fucking New Orleans. Jesus.

Yeah, they fired like, and this was before Valis came into office, but in New Orleans, they fired the entire, every teacher in the fucking city. They fired all the union, literally all the union teachers, replaced them with non-union people. Valis comes in and starts implementing some shit that is just like i like prison camp shit oh god uh here's from here's from tribe again according to by guard a lot of kids were arrested for quote disruption of a school process if they showed up late to class and refused to be kicked out for tardiness. And again, they are being arrested. For wanting to stay in school. Yeah.

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

What the fuck? They charged a six-year-old! Yeah. God. Yeah, the levels of fucking cruelty that have to exist. A cop has to see a six-year-old and not be like oh lol those are tums like the kids probably shouldn't eat too many of those let me go tell them he didn't know they were candy because he's six jesus christ yeah

just like just just jetty widely like abhorrently evil shit yeah see this is like maybe now is a good time to point out that like uh in the wake of yet another terrible school shooting people will want to put more cops in schools this is what happens when we put cops in schools right they brutalize our fucking children yeah and like it's not that yeah like the state doing violence to children is not the way to protect children yeah that's what i want to say the The more your school represents the levels of law enforcement that are in a prison camp, the more the actual experience

of the children will become like prison camps. Yes. For a moment. Yes. Yeah. But also just literally, I mean, God.

I love to go to the Panopticon high school, Garrison. What are you talking about? Just the Panopticon high school where if you don't get kicked out of your fucking class for being late they arrest you who coma went again yeah just so speaking speaking of disciplining and punishing so these charter schools they do think that charter schools always do right which is sometimes if you know if you look at people who talk about educational reform they'll be like

charter schools have like really great like test numbers and a that's just like not true right that they're only looking at the really good charter schools but you know here's the thing if you give a public school the amount of money that a really good charter school has it will also be a really good school but but there's a second thing that charter schools can do that other schools can't which is that charter schools can just fucking kick students out and this is one of the ways that they maintain their test numbers is they just kick out kids over and over again you don't do who aren't initially doing well on tests they don't have to teach them and like bother to improve their test scores and in new orleans they get in trouble because the kids they were kicking out were kids with

disabilities who they were illegally yeah who they were illegally not like giving individual education plans to and also they were okay this is everything right these charter schools are all run by different private corporations and so there's no system of tracking whether when a kid gets kicked out whether they can actually get it go to another school so they're just leaving these disabled kids like in the fucking wind with no school to go to and this this was so illegal that after a lawsuit like, I think it might still be going to this day. It was going like 2014. Like, the Philadelphia school system

was like under receivership by the federal government because they committed so many crimes against disabled students. Jesus Christ, that is brutal. Yeah, it's awful. Fuck, no, sorry, this stuff makes me sad. I've worked in education for a lot of my adult life and this shit makes me furious.

Yeah. As well, what you two did guess where do you think they sent Paul Vallis next after he got kicked out of trying to run of New Orleans did they send him to set up a finishing school for girls in Kabul

no but similar vibes is it outside the continental US yes girls in Kabul. No, but similar similar vibes. Oh, for fuck's sake. Dude, it's outside the continental US. Yes. It's not Iraq. No. Puerto Rico?

No, but closer. It's Haiti. It's Haiti after the earthquake. Yep. Yep. So, now, we've talked about this before on the show. In 2010, there was a just unbelievably heart-wrenchingly catastrophic earthquake. It killed 220,000 people and also

destroyed, like, almost every building in Haiti. And this kicks off phase two of the UN occupation of the country. We talked about this in our episodes on Lula and Bolsonaro. This is when the UN guys from Nepal bring in cholera and infect a bunch of the population right yeah um so right after this

happens so the US just like sends marines in right and they don't no one in Haiti asked for it we just we just fucking invade um and they bring in Paul Vallis and specifically Paul Vallis and also Arne Duncan who's again Obama's fucking

uh education secretary, gets to bring in to rebuild the Haitian school system on the New Orleans model. Now, okay, weirdly, if they had actually implemented the New Orleans model, it would have been an improvement because the way the Haitian school system worked was it was 90% private

and the tuition was 40% of someone's annual budget, like a family's annual budget. Yeah, I got lots of friends in Haiti who couldn't afford to pay for school or went broke trying. It's fucking horrible. Valis is supposed to change this, right? He gets brought in, they bring in the Clinton Foundation

and instead what happens is the Clinton Foundation buys a bunch of trailers to use as schools from specifically the same people who got in trouble for selling formaldehyde ridden trailers to fema during katrina and then good stuff you know okay i never think that i i i i can't emphasize enough what are they called that grift trailer ink or something yeah they fucking suck well but also also even the trailers were good right there's a real issue with trying to use trailers to teach

kids in a place that is hot yeah which is that it is a hundred fucking degrees inside these trailers these trailers are made of metal so if you touch the side of the thing you get burned kids at people people who like teachers who were taught there routinely talk about how like every kid in their every kid in their fucking class was having heat stroke and they were just like giving them painkillers for heat stroke because that's all they could do and yeah it is punishingly hot if you haven't worked in that part of the world a lot and it is

it's hard enough without being in a tin can yeah and valis is fucking education reform they don't fucking work they don't do shit right hate education system is still fucked despite all the money the Clinton foundation and like all these experts got paid like it's still really bad i valis like specifically like very specifically defended the use of trailers as like a thing you teach people in um yeah and you know this stuff all continues to the the present day the u.s has been trying

to find another excuse to just trying to find a way to do another intervention in haiti so he's still on the new orleans job i think while he's doing this haiti job and then he takes another job in chile yeah why i i don't know the people people get well because because the the-American Development Bank gives him half a million dollars to run 2,000 schools there. So again, he's now splitting his time between New Orleans, Haiti, and Chile. It's almost impossible to find. I spent a lot of time looking. It's really hard to find anything about what actually he was doing in Chile. What we do know is when he got there,

he was met by the enormous 2011 Chilean student protests, which then later turned into the 2013 Chilean student protests, which turned into the 2015 Chilean student protests, which turned into the 2019 Chilean student protests. So, you know, I mean,

I just I just like you. It is possible to run Paul Vallis out of your country. A couple of different places or at least your school district or also your country. A couple of different places, or at least your school district, or also your country. A couple of places have done it. And then, after that, they send him to Bridgeport, Connecticut, for some reason, where he gets run out after doing, like,

he flees Connecticut, like, trying to escape a lawsuit about all the illegal anti-union stuff that he did. I really love the image of someone trying to desperately flee from connecticut yeah like it's so small how how hard is it to leave connecticut it seems pretty easy to like jump over the line i mean the one that the video i actually want to see is him getting out of philly see see getting out of Philly sounds actually hard. Getting out of just Connecticut is like, come on, come on. Yeah, the video I want to see is him getting sent back to Haiti by himself. Oh, God.

Yeah. That's what we call to violence. So he runs again in 2014. So Blagojevich gets arrested for, you know, selling the Senate seat. And he tries to run for lieutenant governor on a slate, on like a ticket with Pat Quinn, who had been the governor because he'd been the lieutenant governor under Blagojevich. And they managed to lose in Illinois to a Republican,

which is like a thing that should not happen unless the Democrats really fuck up, which I mean it happens, right? But like yeah, so he loses. Are you saying Democrats can make electoral mistakes? Are you sure? To be fair, to be fair, to be fair, this wasn't even an

electoral thing. This was just the guy tried to sell a fucking Senate seat and people were so mad at him that the next election they're like, we will vote for Bruce Rauner, who is just like a fucking absolute dipshit. But OK, so he so he has now lost two consecutive runs for governor, right? Governor and lieutenant governor. Now, this year, he actually he had another bid where he was maybe going to run and then he stopped. And now now he is one of the

candidates for the mayor of Chicago now while he's been doing his campaigning for this some other fun stuff has been happening so he has an absolutely unlistenable podcast oh no he has a podcast

no Mia please no I considered pulling clips from this, and then I was like, I can't inflict this on you. Absolutely not. It sucks too much. I would simply leave this Zoom call. I'm not... I'm just going to talk about one of the things that he said,

a couple of things that he... Well, okay, one that he said on this this and one that he said on a different show. One of the things was he starts ranting about this thing called culturally responsive teaching, which is this kind of liberal, like, anti-racist thing. The other CRT. Yeah, this is a big thing. Like, if anyone ever starts talking about culturally responsive teaching

and starts yelling about it like they're a racist, like, those are the only people who like actually like consistently i mean like it's not like there aren't criticisms of it but like almost everyone who talks about this on like a school board level is like a really weird racist guy so she starts raving about how this means that everyone's gonna get handed a copy of mao's little red book and then says, quote, what is this? The cultural revolution. Now we have covered the cultural revolution over the course of the show and the Atlanta episodes. And I,

I'm just going to simply say no and move on to read this unbelievably racist thing that he said. I'm just going to read this. It's it's real bad. But but for that matter if you're a black child do you go home and listen to your parent when your parent has failed to be successful in addressing the ways these historically racist obstacles that have denied them a chance to equal opportunity uh he's the guy he's talking to paul i wonder if you're a black kid why don't you become a criminal if you're hearing this stuff in school everyone with the white skin is an oppressor if you're black skin you're the oppressed that makes

it pretty easy to justify any pretty bad conduct in my in my opinion you're absolutely right says this is valence comes back but what you're also doing you're giving these you're giving people an excuse for bad behavior you're almost justifying his rant smoking fox so you're right you're absolutely right where's the accountability you're right. You're absolutely right. Where is the accountability? You're the victim. What's happening is it becomes a justification for everything. And I think that's a very dangerous thing.

So Valis is arguing that talking about racism is actually a thing that encourages black people to do crime, which is like... That sounds kind of racist, Mia. Just a little bit.

Just off the bat. He may be a white supremacist. Gives off racist vibes. Yeah. So speaking of racist vibes, his son is a cop in Santa Fe, and he was one of three cops who shot a black guy in the back

after calling him boy. The cops, including Veles, they start screaming boy at him, and they shoot him in the back, and the cops, including Valis' son, claim to have found a gun next to his body. In a completely unrelated story, US Special Forces units in Afghanistan

routinely carried AK-47s in the combat zone so they could drop them next to the body of people they killed in order to declare them insurgents. This has no relation to the previous story at all. I am simply relaying facts. Two interesting and unrelated stories yeah didn't valis also is he's the guy who claimed his twitter was hacked right oh yeah yeah so very way back at the beginning of this episode i i talked a bit about the the racism against laurie lightfoot and like

one of the tweets that he liked is a tweet like calling laur a man like lori life what a man like it's just unbelievably racist like homophobic transphobic shit and he claims that his account was hacked and people were liking tweets without his permission yeah right that's all they did they just liked some racist tweets there's like a bunch of other like and the other thing is like okay like paul vales doesn't like actually live in Chicago. You mentioned this. He lives in like, he claims to live in Palos Heights, which is also not Chicago, but it's unclear whether he even lives there or if he's in like some kind of like even more insane outlying suburb that's even less Chicago than this stuff is.

And he like, stuff is and he likes he likes he kept liking tweets calling it like shit cago and stuff and it's like well yeah it's because he doesn't live in the city he's not actually like these are like a bunch of his support a bunch of the money he's getting are from like deranged suburban like reactionaries

and okay so I want to tell one last story about him that pisses me off a lot which is the story of Awake, Illinois. So Awake, Illinois is like Illinois's version of Protect Texas Kids. It's a group that does Nazi protests at drag events. They managed to destroy a bakery called Uprising for trying to hold a drag brunch. So the Awake did all this thing of like, ah, they're grooming kids. And then the Proud Boys showed up and attacked it.

And then someone like vandalized it. And they nearly had to close the entire bakery until a go fund me raised $30,000 for them to survive. They are like, these people are unbelievably homophobic. They, they rant about groomers constantly. They're like really transphobic.

Anyways, Paul Vallis spoke at one of their fundraisers. Oh God. So after this came out, Vallis distanced himself from the group saying he didn't know what they represented and just wanted to support school choice awake responded by going hey what the fuck you absolutely know who we are and they released another video of valis at another awake event where he said that awakes president shannon adcock

should run for governor so if elected would i probably be the most openly homophobic democratic like mayor in the country which is a pretty wild like which is a pretty wild claim but like i i can't think of anyone else who actually like showed up at an event where people are just screaming about groomers like yeah not not for the Democrats. He is just a Republican. He's like a pretty right-wing Republican who runs as a Democrat because the Chicago political machine is also

just so far right. I thought this was because Lori Lightfoot defunded the police from here. I thought that's what happened and people want the police back. That's what I was told. You know, the thing that's actually very funny about the elections is like, so there is elections for these like police district councils, which are supposed to be these like civilian oversight boards.

Yeah. And the like reform, there was an alliance of sort of like reform, defund, and abolitionist candidates. And they did fucking amazing. And the pro-police candidates got fucking clobbered. And then meanwhile, every single national story about the election was like Chicago crime. I was like,

you guys don't understand how much everyone here hates the police. Like I, like they murdered a 13 year old, like fucking two years ago. I did. Yeah. Good parachute journalism. Yeah.

I'm going to, I'm going to hedge my thing here by saying there's so much other paul valis shit i couldn't fit like i really wanted to talk about keith thornton who is chicago's george santos who like his thing is that he stole 9-11 dispatcher valor and is like showing up in pictures with valis just just google keith thornton and you will have a good time like there are so many other valis things that he did that are awful there are probably things that he's done that we'll never know about because he did them in like i don't know like like what the fuck he was doing in chile we probably won't ever know all the things he did in haiti uh yeah don't let this

guy become the fucking mayor of chic he will leave the city utterly destroyed let's go Brandon I I'm so annoyed that people are unironically let's go Brandon-ing in Chicago now for Brandon Johnson it's great we're taking it back we're reclaiming it

reclaim a Brandon bringing Brandon back I got in trouble with my boss in 2015 for saying fuck Hillary like you fucking little bitches you could just say fuck Joe Biden

like all of you are cowards yes it is deeply cowardly they're afraid of saying fuck but at the same time they think they're going to stage an armed overthrow of the government. Anyway. Oh, there's actually, okay, this is the thing I actually should mention. There are a bunch of ties between

there are a bunch of ties between Valus and guys who were at J6. Like, and like a lot of J6 people support him. He is the MAGA candidate. That's, like, there's a whole thing there that I didn't get into because, I don't know, there's so much. You could do, like, seven episodes just about Paul Ballas

and how much he sucks. But, yeah, stop him. If he fucking gets elected, we're doing the fucking Chilean student protest because, yeah, hate him him hope he has a bad day 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 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 Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again,

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Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the i by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,

better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God,

things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hey, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart. And today it's kind of going to be a conversation about is shit falling apart? Are we all about to be devoured by a rogue AI? Is your job about to be devoured by a rogue AI? These are the questions that we're going to, you know, talk around and about and stuff today. And with us today is Noah John Siracusa,

a math professor at Bentley University. Noah, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. And I'm reaching out, we're talking right now because there's an article that was put up in the New York Times on March 24th, 2023, titled, You Can Have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill and We're Out of Blue Pills, which is a fun title, by Yuval Harari, Tristan Harris, and Aza Raskin. And it's an article that is kind of about the pitfalls and dangers of AI research, of which there definitely are some. I enjoyed your thread on the matter. I thought it was a lucid breakdown of the things the article gets right and the areas in which I think they're a bit fear-mongery. So yeah, I think that's probably a good place to start. Unless you wanted to start

by just kind of generally talking about where you kind of are on AI and what you kind of think, you know, the technology is advancing towards right now. Yeah, I mean, I think I can probably answer both those questions in the same because part of why I enjoyed writing that thread, dissecting, I think I can probably answer both those questions in the same because part of why I enjoyed writing that thread, dissecting the article is I just had the strangest feeling reading it that I agreed with it so much in principle and yet somehow objected it to so much in detail. And thinking about that article helped me think about my own feelings on AI, which, you know, every day of the week is slightly different because so much news happens.

Yeah, I found myself overall deeply frustrated that I agree with the central conclusion, which is that maybe we shouldn't be just like plowing headlong into this and should be more careful when we screw around with technology like this, which I agree with. And I feel like should have been the thing we did with like, I don't know, Facebook, Twitter, like all of these things. Like it's less my obsession is less with like the specific dangers of AI and more with what we keep letting these guys who are fundamentally like gamblers with venture capital money really put our society through the ringer without ever asking. Should we like do any research on maybe how social media affects children and how all of these different things? And it's right that, yeah, we should be concerned about what these people are going to do with AI, but also, why now? Why just now? Yeah, and that raises a really good point, which is what's different now versus what we've been experiencing with social media? And just to

give your listeners some context, one of the three authors on this New York Times article is famous for writing this book, Sapiens. That's a sweeping history of humanity. And the other two are actually most famous for the Netflix documentary, The Social Dilemma. So they really are in this camp of warning people about social media algorithms. And as exactly as you're saying,

that's sort of this thing that we've been dealing with probably quite poorly. And now we're kind of moving on to the next societal risk, which is AI. So that is a really important question of what's different now. And I think that's one of the things the articles try to address, which is many of the problems that we already have with algorithms, data-driven algorithms, and even AI as it's used in social media is still happening now, but somehow things feel like they're spiraling out of control. Yeah. And I think, I mean, honestly, I think a lot of this just has to do with culturally what our touchstones for AI were going into this, you know, which are Skynet, you know, like it's that sort of thing. And you do see, I feel like the uncredited fourth author on this particular article is James Cameron, because there's pieces of it throughout this. Like, it opens actually pretty provocatively. Imagine that you are boarding an airplane. Half the engineers who built it tell you there is a 10% chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board? In 2022,

over 700 top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future AI risk. Half of those surveyed stated there was a 10% or greater chance of human extinction from future AI systems. Which I feel like- Let's zoom in on that. Yeah, let's talk about that. Because what I tried to do in my thread was go through all the claims and assertions and really pause and say, hold on. But that's a great one to start

because there's a lot to dig in right there. Yeah. So first of all, there's a huge difference in that airplanes are based on science and physics and things that we understand pretty well. There's a lot to it. And there's been millions of flights. So you have a lot of data. You know how many planes crash and how many don't. Maybe one engine goes out, you can do the statistics and see, oh, you know, whatever percent of planes without that engine still land safely. The problem with AI is we're just guessing, right? There's no way to know 100 years from now or 10 years from now what it's going to do, what the real risks are. So we speculate. And that's not uncharted territory, right? When nuclear weapons were first introduced, people had to guess and speculate. But the danger, I think, is putting it in that same category as things like airplanes or climate change I like to think about. Climate change,

when you see these, what's the IPCC, I forget the acronym, these reports, that's based on thousands of scientists digging into thousands of published papers and all this data, really modeling the environment. There's a lot of meat and substance to it. The problem with the AI is it's mostly people, I hate to say it, but like me or like you, just kind of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen. Maybe that'll happen. just kind of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen. Maybe that'll happen. The reasonable thing to say, if you're in AI research is like, yeah, I have concerns that AI could cause serious negative externalities for the human race. Perfectly reasonable statement. It is physically impossible to say there's a 10% chance that it's going to.

Exactly. Because it's never done that before. You can't know. I'm a math professor and I'm the first to say numbers don't have some intrinsic meaning, right? If I just say something has maybe a 15%, I'm just making it up. I'm pulling it out of my ass. That doesn't make it true. So it's a general pet peeve I have of sort of giving a false sense of precision by using numbers that you don't really know where they came from, or they're just made up. So that's one issue is these numbers are made up and asking a thousand people to make up numbers isn't necessarily any better than asking one or two, you know, then if the number is made up,

it's made up. So that's one issue. Yeah. I also do think, and I'm not the, I saw someone make a note, I think it was Ben Collins who writes for NBC on Twitter, made a note that like, well, the fact that all of these statements about like how dangerous they are about human extinction are coming out of people in the AI industry has started to kind of feel like marketing. That's right. Yeah, exactly. There's a little bit of buzz marketing going on here.

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

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

They just couldn't do it. And it turns out you can know a lot about a person, a lot about their data, and it's really hard to influence them, to change them. So what happened, I think, was there was a lot of alarm spread, rightly so, about the tech companies. They have too much power, too much data. They know too much about us. And this horrible thing happened. The problem was a lot of the alarmism then actually reinforced

this aura of power, of godlike power that the tech companies have. People criticizing them actually gave them more potency than they deserved. And then suddenly Google and Facebook and all, it wasn't sudden, but it kind of built it up. They had this aura that our algorithms are so insanely powerful and we have to make sure they stay in the right hands and we can do so much. And that's unfortunately what I see happening now a lot. And that is kind of the setting for critiquing this article. I absolutely agree that this stuff is risky AI. I absolutely agree that we could go down a dangerous path.

But once we start leaving firm ground and speculating wildly and using the Terminator stuff that you described, even if you think you're criticizing the tech companies, you know what you're doing? Giving them the biggest compliment in the world, saying that you guys are godlike and you've created these mighty machines. You've created a deity, which is very similar to the language this article has at the end. And I think it's kind of worth, as you're bringing up, there are real threats. There are real threats that are immediately obvious.

The threat that a lot of writers are going to lose their jobs because companies like BuzzFeed decide to replace them with, you know, chat GPT or whatever. The fact that a lot of artists are going to lose out on work because their work's been hoovered up and it's being used to generate. Like these are very real and very immediate concerns that we don't have to. They're not hypothetical. We don't have to theorize about the AI becoming intelligent for this to be a problem. These are things we we have to immediately deal with, because it puts people at risk. It's the same thing with like, you know, there's a lot that gets talked about with Cambridge Analytica, with kind of like the different Russian disinformation

efforts. But when I think about the stuff that was happening in the same period, that worries me more, one of the things that occurred is because there was so much money to be made, if you could get certain things to go viral on YouTube, companies that use tools that weren't wildly dissimilar from some of these basically generated CGI videos based on kind of random terms that they knew were likely to trick the algorithm into trending. And God knows how many children were parked in front of these like very unhinged videos for hours at a time that like they would start watching some normal kid musical video or something. And then they're watching like the disembodied head of Krusty the Crown bounce around while like some sort of nonsense song gets sung. And it's like, well, what is that actually

going to do with kids? Like, we don't know. That's unsettling, though. And it's deeply unsettling. Yeah. And that's deeply unsettling. can't predict right now that will be very concerning. I just don't think it's Skynet. Yeah. And that's what was so challenging, not just with that article, but with, I think, the movement we're having is I do agree very much in spirit. I agree with the recommendations. We need to slow down. We need to be more judicious and cautious. We need to really consider these. But again, if we overhype the technology, we may be doing ourself a disservice by empowering the very entities that we're trying to take power from and as an example i like that could i could i read a quick quote from the article do you ai's new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization by By gaining mastery of language,

AI is seizing the master key to civilization from bank vaults to holy sepulchers. That's right. And that, I mean, that is funny and you're right to laugh. But let's actually zoom in a second. And I think this is such a tempting trap that AI is super intelligent in some respects, right?

Yeah. It's done amazing at chess, amazing at jeopardy, amazing at various things.. It's done amazing at chess, amazing at Jeopardy, amazing at various things. Chat GPT is amazing at these conversations. So what happens is it's so tempting to think AI just equals super smart. And because it can do those things

and now look, it can converse, that it must be the super intelligent conversational entity. Yeah. And it's really good at, you know, taking text that's on the web that it's already looked at and kind of spinning it around and processing. It can come up with poems and weird forms, but that doesn't mean it is super intelligent in all respects. For instance,

one of the main issues is to hack civilization, to manipulate us with language, it has to kind of know what impact its words have on us. And it doesn't really have that. It just has a little conversation, a text box, and I can give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. So the only data that it's collecting for me when it talks to me, any of these chatbots is, did I like the response or not? That's pretty weak data to try to manipulate me. You know, it's so basic. That's not that different than when I watch YouTube videos, YouTube knows what videos I like and what I don't like. Would you say that YouTube has hacked civilization?

No, it's addicted a lot of us, but it's not hacked us. Yeah. We, people have hacked YouTube and that has done some damage to other people. Like, but it's like,

the thing is, and that's, that's part of why, while I have many concerns about this technology, it's not that it's going to hack civilization because like we're really good at doing that to each other. Like there's always huge numbers of people hacking bits of the populace and manipulating each other. And there always have been. That's why we figured out how to paint. Like it's, I do think that there's, there's an interesting conversation to be had about the part of why people are kind of willing to believe

anything is possible with this stuff is that for folks who were just kind of living their lives with a normal amount of attention paid to the tech industry, it seems like these tools popped out of nowhere a couple of months ago, right? It feels like, oh, there was just suddenly been this massive breakthrough. And the reality is that all of the stuff that people, you know, chat GPT, these different AIs that everybody's talking about,

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

And honestly, it's done better at tests. I forget the numbers, but maybe one of them got a 20% grade on some tests and this one got an 80%. So that is a significant improvement, right? If you're a teacher and your students improve that much, you should be happy. But as you said, is that a thousand times? No, even though the machine is much bigger, much more data. And it just shows that, yeah, like the reality is this is incremental progress going at a very fast rate, very unsettling. Even for those of us following the field closely, we're experiencing that kind of vertigo that

you're saying that, whoa, where did this come from? So even within the field, and you're absolutely right, if you're just at home, you know, not paying attention for a week or a month or a year, suddenly this stuff pops up, it is disorienting. But one thing I think that's helped me at least kind of clarify what, not even answering what the risks are, but just understanding the different camps of why certain people are reacting differently and why even the people afraid of AI seem to be now fighting amongst each other and why it's getting fractured,

is are you more afraid of this AI used as a tool by people or are you more afraid of it kind of taking on its own autonomy and kind of going rogue and doing its own things? And I'm very much afraid of people using it. I think big companies are going to use it, and there's going to be a lot of problems, just like we saw with social media. People will get addicted. Democracies will be flooded with misinformation. It'll be weaponized by various actors. There'll be bot accounts. So I am very concerned about it being used. Basically, it performing the job it was told to do, but it'll be told to do dangerous jobs, either making money

or making discord. There's another group of people that are more worried about the AI somehow deciding on its own to do things, to take over. And that's where, you know, I can't rule it out, but that's where I kind of am skeptical. Let's focus on how people are using it for now, for the foreseeable future. I don't think we need to worry yet, at least, about the AI somehow having a life of its own and stabbing us in the back and enslaving us. Because there's just so much that can go wrong before we even get to that point. can get to that point. Yeah. And it's not, that's exactly like, it's a threat triage kind of thing, where like, is it theoretically possible that one day human beings could create an artificial intelligence that is capable of having its own agency that is malicious? Yeah, sure, I guess. I mean, maybe. But man, there's a lot of us that are very malicious right now that are actively trying to harm other people at scale. I'm concerned about how they will use AI to do that.

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

a lot of this i don't know you know i'm trying to make it up as i go is i do think if you go back to like 2016 earlier versions of the internet, you know, before leading up to Donald Trump's election, I think there was a lot of wild west to Google, to social media, to all these things, right? Fake news was just like piling up to the top of, of Google search results. That election was so monumental and such a seismic shockwave through tech that fake news and misinformation might have played a role that they really had to do something. And I think some companies are more effective than others. I think Google put a lot of effort into making sure authoritative sources

rise to the top. So what that means is when now you go online and you Google for medical information, the top results you get are WebMD or some official CDC, your government thing. They're pretty decent, reliable. It's not to say there isn't all that crap on the internet, but Google has done a pretty good job of having the good stuff float to the top. And that's the information that people see. So what I'm worried is now we might be kind of resetting ourselves back to the 2016, where when you're talking to these chatbots that are trained on all the internet, I don't know if the WebMDs and the CDC type of information is necessarily going to float to the top. Maybe they'll work that out. But I'm also worried that OpenAI or Google or Microsoft or wherever, they'll have ones that are pretty reasonable and kind of

tuned to appeal to a lot of people. But Elon Musk might build his own competitor one that might be really tuned to elevate the right wing side. So I have been messing around as I mean, and you have been doing so in a much more rigorous manner, I'm sure. But I've screw around with a couple of different AI chat and search engines. I use find P-H-I-N-D sometimes. I've been playing around with Bing. And one of the things I've noticed is that, you know, if you ask it like, hey, summarize for me, like why the Battle of Hastings mattered, you'll get a reasonably decent answer. But if I ask it like, I don't know, specific questions about myself, I've come to, I noticed

at first when I did it, I would get some really weirdly like colloquial vernacular from it explaining things. And I realized it was just pulling answers directly that fans had asked first one I did, I would get some really weirdly like colloquial vernacular from it explaining things. And I realized it was just pulling answers directly that fans had asked about me on the subreddit that this show has. And so when I think about like ways in which to game the system, well, you make a bunch of bots, you have them post questions and answers that are, you know, supportive of this specific product line or whatever on a subreddit and hope that it gets picked, like scanned by an AI. And that becomes part of it's like answer for, you know, what happens if, you know, I can't stop itching or whatever.

I don't know. But I like obviously you can see using them ways in which these can and will be gamed to some extent. You know, it's always kind of a Red Queen sort of situation where you have to disinformation people fighting disinfo. You're always running as fast as you can just to stay in place. That's right. And that brings up another issue, which I do feel like this is possibly really tipping the balance in that it takes a certain amount of resources to create misinformation. It takes a certain amount of resources to debunk it, right?

A journalist has to sit down. Snopes has to write a little piece about it. And the problem is with this AI, it's suddenly just dropping the price of creation down to essentially zero. Anyone can create essentially a limitless supply of quasi information that may or may not be true. But the problem is, is the price of journalism, of debunking also going down? Maybe by 50%, right? Maybe it takes you half as much time to write an article. It's not going to zero. So that's the balance is creating stuff has gotten a lot cheaper. Detecting, debunking, doing proper journalism has gotten a little bit cheaper. So I'm worried that that's – journalists are already stretched thin. And this is going to be that attention. By far my biggest concern because it's not just – that's obviously a significant factor in it. There will be more disinformation. There will not be more journalists in part because I think AI is going to take jobs from particularly low-level –

it's not going to replace prize-winning columnist at the New York Times. It's not going to replace, like, guys like me who have a very long and established, you know, career of doing the specific thing that we do. But I think back to when I got started as a journalist, as a writer. It was as a tech blogger, and I had an X number of articles that I had to get out per day. And obviously, like, my boss was essentially trusting that with that many articles, I'd have

a few that did well on Google, and that brings in traffic and that brought in money. And there's a degree to which you're just kind of doing SEO shit. But it's also, I conducted my first interviews for that job. I went to trade shows for the first time. I did my first on the ground journalism for that job. It taught me how to write quickly and in a polished nature. And I was not writing anything that was like crucial to the development of humankind, but it made me into the kind of person who was later able to write things that were read by people all over the world and that had an influence on people. And I worry about the brain drain, not just among journalists, but among writers and among artists, you know, people who do illustrations and stuff, eventually musicians, at least some kinds of musicians will probably also run up against this, where the stuff that it was easy for kind of people

breaking in to get a little bit of work that would hone their skills and allow them to, you know, live doing the thing that they're interested in is going to disappear. And more and more of the stuff that we kind of casually low-level consume, not our high art, not our favorite movies, not our favorite books, but the stuff that we encounter when we stumble upon a webpage or like in a commercial or whatever will be increasingly made by AIs. And that AI will be pulling from an increasingly narrow set of things that humans made because less humans will get that entry-level work. And that is, there's something concerning there. That is

something that worries me about the future of just creativity. Yeah. And I think, I mean, two points. One is just to kind of be devil's advocate a little bit, because I do sympathize and I think you're right. But a little bit devil's advocate is there might be on the flip side of the coin that there's people that feel like they have artistic imagination and desires, but lack the technical ability. And suddenly they can paint, so to speak, by using these AI image generators. Maybe someone has some form of dyslexia or their English is a second language, or even, you know, native speaker without any of these issues, obstructions,

but just finds the writing process difficult. And maybe AI enables them to be a writer, to contribute. So I could see there's going to be the pros and the negatives, and I don't know how that balances. But I think you're right. Thinking from a professional, that's sort of like a passion project view. From a professional view, I do see the profession narrowing. If journalists are expected to work twice as quickly because they're all using chatbots,

there's probably going to be half as many of them, right? I mean, that's the economics. But this brings up a bigger issue, which is I do think what you're hitting on is there are these long-term risks that maybe AI is going to fuel this rebellion of robots in this, you know, maybe, but again, we have an economics, a social, political, economic world we live in. And I just think let's really focus on the issues we have now. That's not discounting the future. It's not like let's burn a bunch of carbon emitting fuels because who cares about climate change? That's our grandkids problems.

Yeah, this is different. It's like, let's think about the jobs, the world. I mean, another way to put this is if we mess up our economy and mess up our democracy by people losing jobs and mass protests and losing trust in the

government, and there's just an erosion of truth, we're not going to be able to handle climate change or any of these big AI, you know, the singularity type of risks. So what I feel like is let's focus on what keeps our economy and our sanity and our humanity. Let's keep this fabric of society together now so that we're more equipped in the future to handle all the risks, AI and otherwise. But this goes back to what you're saying, which is, these are real issues in the short term. And if we don't address them, if we get distracted by the long term, we're not going to be ready to address the long term.

Even if we think about it now, we'll be so distracted and so dismayed. So I think we have to be practical here. I agree. And I am also, I think that's a valid point that you make about the fact that while these are tools that will reduce options for some people, they're also tools that create options that can be used for the creation of art, of culture. Photoshop, when I talk about my concerns with AI and are like, you know, there were a lot of, you know, people, draftsmen and whatnot, who were concerned when Photoshop hit because it was a threat to some of the things that they did for money. And Photoshop effectively has created whole forms of art that didn't exist or didn't exist in the same fashion before it did as a tool and tools like it. it. And that's not a, I think it's kind of worth, I don't like, I don't want to be kind of just on the edge of tragedy here. You know, there's a lot of different ways this could go and they're not all bad. I think we're all used to calamity right now, so much so that we potentially expect it in situations where it's not the inevitable outcome. Well, I mean, that's, I think one way to kind of boil a lot of that down is we can adapt.

We just need time to do so to many things. And what's really challenging and frustrating now is the pace is so fast. It's not just an illusion. It's not just, oh, if you don't pay attention to AI, it really is fast. It's very, very hard for us to adapt. So just thinking of the internet, we got a lot, like individuals as users and tech companies got a lot better at dealing with clickbait, right? YouTube was tons of clickbait and they figured out ways to demote that to some extent.

We got a lot better at keeping fake news out of the high search rankings in Google, like I mentioned. A lot of these problems that came up were not perfectly addressed, not even close, but there was significant progress. And that's often understated. But if these problems are coming so fast and so intense, it's a lot to adapt to. And that's what's really the challenge is the pace. And I think we're seeing a very, very breakneck pace that's really hard. Now, does that mean you're on the side of like Elon Musk and some of those folks who just signed that letter being like, maybe we should put a pause on AI research?

Because, you know, I'm not 100% against it. Again, I kind of am like, man, I wish we'd been having this conversation when Facebook dropped or YouTube dropped. But I don't think that's a realistic thing. I'll say that, but I do think, yeah. Yeah. So I would say, no, I'm not, I'm not a favor that for one thing, I mean, in a very practical sense, you think all these companies that are putting billions of dollars into these investments in AI are all going to sit around saying, you know what, let's just not do this for a few months. No, of course not. So here's what I think. They're not going to sit around saying, you know what, let's just not do this for a few months. No, of course not. So here's what I think. They're not going to slow down. What's going to happen is going to happen.

Even if some players decide to be responsible and slow down, guess what? That means the only people plunging ahead are going to be the irresponsible ones. So what I think we need to do is I don't think we can really slow that down. So what about the flip side? I think we need to accelerate public education on artificial intelligence. I think we need to accelerate government legislation, regulation, international cooperation. I don't think we can solve this by slowing AI down. I do think we need to find a way to speed up our democratic processes. It's taken us how many years to pass basically nothing about social media in the US and some mixed results in Europe. That's the problem, right? If we could work faster,

then I think we could keep up. And I think that that's actually the long-term practical survival thing from this that I hope we get is like, yeah, we've always needed to be more careful about the things that we expose billions of people to suddenly. It should have happened before now, but I hope that this, I hope that all, I hope the fact that AI, because of James Cameron, is coded into our brains to be something that triggers a little bit of panic in people. I hope that rather than reacting with panic, it leads to a more intelligent and considered state of affairs when potentially embracing technologies that are going to change life for huge numbers of people. That's right. And that is, I think we have an opportunity here to experience that and explore

that and try. And that is kind of what I was aiming for in that thread is, again, I love that article that you mentioned in the beginning, but if we start going down this road of hype, there is a danger that we're going to fall into these traps. And I think let's stay grounded. Let's stay practical. Let's really identify the risks. Not that I'm some guru and know what they are, but it's almost easier to see what's not true than what is true. And that's, I think, let's all try to police each other and make sure we're focusing on practical things that really are manageable, that really are genuine risks that are impacting people that are impacting

people today. And especially ones that are impacting marginalized populations. Yes. So I think let's hope we learn these lessons and I am not optimistic, but I'm not as cynical. I think there's a lot of important discussions happening now that let's just say there's a lot more discussion now than we had with social media and maybe that's a good thing. Yeah. Well, I think that's a good note to end on. Noah, did you have anything you kind of wanted to plug before we roll out here?

No, I just, I think it's, it's a great topic that everyone can be involved in. And I just, my plug is just don't be intimidated. Don't be afraid. narrative that sometimes happens in tech communities that, oh, you know, I'm not a tech person. I don't have a chance to understand it. This stuff affects all of us and how it affects you matters and your opinion matters and your voice matters. And we're all part of social media. We're all very soon going to be part of AI and chatbots. So don't be afraid to join the conversation. You don't need any technical background because I think the subject is just as much sociological as technical. It's about people. I think that's a great point to end on.

Thank you so much, Noah. Really appreciate your time. And everybody else, have a nice day. I mean, you have a nice day too, also. Thanks, you too. It was lots of fun. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

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Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how tech's elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be digging

into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you.

We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars, from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun, el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast about things falling apart, sometimes about putting them back together, sometimes just about enduring difficult times. And it's been a rough couple of weeks what with the mass

shooting in tennessee and the right accelerating their anti-trans paranoia uh the whole you know trump getting arrested and all that all the yes that has really hit all of us really hard yeah deeply now that now that trump is has been charged with felies, he's officially a friend of mine. So we're on Team Trump now. I'm really conflicted between my ACAB side and my legalist side. It's really hard. I mean, 34 felonies. That's quite a legalist. Very few of the people I know who commit crimes is like a vocation have that many.

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

where we talk about the gods of the internet. And perhaps this will become a series that we do now and again, where we talk about the gods of the past. And today, the ancient deity that we're talking about is kind of like the internet's Hercules, a man named Troy Herdibes. Have you guys heard of Troy Herdibes? No. I've not heard of Troy Herdibes, but I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a Roman god. greek version is zeus you're right you're right you're right i i before before some freak dms me and sends me like three paragraphs on this i'm just gonna put that out there do not dm me about this i yeah we need to do that thing where we start we start including one of these every episode the driver yeah just just fucking up purposefully in order to get people.

They love doing it. They love being able to hop on. We did get recently, we did the Liver King episodes this week, and somebody popped on to be like, hey, guys, you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of polar bears contain enough vitamin A to kill 140 people, something like that. Don't eat polar bear lippers. This is relevant because we are talking about a man today

whose lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that allowed him to fight bears in hand-to-hand combat. I mean, this is actually very applicable for us because just last week we went to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear. You're right. This man would have been one of the only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear. So once upon a time, before the breaking of the world, there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Herdebees. Troy was a simple man.

He was born in Hamilton, Ontario in 1963. He liked the outdoors and he was a dedicated conservationist. The one exception to his abiding love of nature was bears. On August 4th, 1984, when Troy was 21 years old, he went hiking in central British Columbia. Now, he's given a couple of versions of this story over the years. Some that this happened say that this happened when he was a boy. Others say he was like 20 years old, but all agree that he wound up in close proximity to a grizzly bear.

In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped the.22 caliber rifle he was carrying, which would not have made much difference against a grizzly bear. No, no, no. You will only make it more upset. A.22 is not the weapon you want in that situation.

In a desperate attempt to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're going to talk about Troy's knives in a minute here. Okay. In an interview with Mental Floss many years later, Troy claimed that seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him after this. Okay, okay. Wait a minute.

That's not how bears work. Has this bear been, like, involved in other fights with guys with knives? Is there, like, another maniac running around? This bear got stabbed behind a 7-Eleven and is like, nah, man, I don't, Grizz don't fuck with knives no more. I've been through that

shit. Is he part of, probably like a street gang like nah bro nah bro ain't worth it and so um he later claims an expert told him he would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs this i believe yes bears very rarely attack people now a normal man would have taken this number one as boy i sure got lucky, and number two as, I should be more careful when out in the woods. But

Troy was not a normal man. His first thought was that he needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically for bears. He had been beaten in developing bear mace by an actual scientist, although the first paper on bear mace was published in 1984.

So it makes sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time. It was a reasonable thing to be like, maybe we should have a mace for use against bears. There are, again, several versions of what came next. I'm going to quote from one that I found in a write-up by The Spec Now. Quote, From then he decided that his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear spray repellent,

but he realized field testing with bears would be needed. This would require a protective suit for the person doing the test. No. So, in his interview with Mental Floss, one of the later pieces on the man, Troy dropped the mace story

and claimed that he had the idea just to make bear-resistant armor a year after his grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear researchers would need protective armor that would let them test bear spray and also safely observe grizzly behavior. Troy is something of an unreliable narrator, but I will say I do not doubt that the film Robocop influenced his subsequent action. No, he absolutely had this idea while watching Robocop. That makes the most sense out of anything you said so far. It is very logical. So it is now, Troy, it should be noted, is not the first, probably not the first man who has thought I should develop a suit of armor to allow me to grapple with bears in hand-to-hand combat.

It is possible that in medieval Europe, some people hunted bears while wearing full-body suits of armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether or not this really happened. The gist of why this is a debate is that there's an insane-looking suit of armor currently in a Houston museum that was probably made in Switzerland or Germany like 400-ish years ago. Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or for what purpose, but one theory is that it was used for bear baiting. If so, it was used for European bears, which are significantly smaller than grizzly bears. which are significantly smaller than grizzly bears.

And as far as we know, was never a widespread practice. This is because attempting to fight a bear in hand-to-hand with a suit of armor is insane and something only a madman would do. But I am going to show you the suit of armor because it looks like something from a David Lynch movie. Oh, I'm so thrilled. Specifically the face.

So look at that. Look at that beautiful thing. Oh my God. I've seen this. Yeah. I was told it was Russian. The face at that. Look at that beautiful thing. Oh my god! I've seen this! Yeah! I thought it was Russian. Isn't the face of that unsettling? They think probably somewhere around Austria or Switzerland although it's not, I don't think, known

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

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

And since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then testing it. I'm going to read another quote from the specs write up because it's extremely funny. testing it. I'm going to read another quote from the specs write-up because it's extremely funny. So the suit became his focus of attention, putting it through all kinds of tests that included being run down by a pickup truck driven by his father, rolling off the side of a

cliff, and being pummeled by bikers with baseball bats. And I'm going to play you a video of Troy, one of these tests, where Troy gets hit by a tree. It's almost exactly that scene from Hot Rod, if you've watched the movie Hot Rod,

where they like swing a log down at him and hit him. That may in fact be what that scene is based on. But I'm going to share that with y'all now. Let's go. Oh my gosh. No. No. Oh my gosh. Get on him, guys. Get on him, guys! I can't emphasize enough that it looks like half this armor is held together by duct tape. This looks like a fever dream combination

of the Wizard of Oz and the Battle of Endor. He walks throwing massive logs at the guy in the metal tin suit. It's white. It's a white suit, too. Yeah, it looks almost like something from like Speed Racer is weirdly enough. The aesthetic that I would closest compare it to. It is kind of like that anime robot style design.

Yeah, it's profoundly unhinged. So I want to, I want to play you a clip of him getting the helmet off so you can listen to Troy talk and see this man's face. How'd that one go? Better than the first. Yeah. Cause I had that,

uh, uh, that stuff in my mouth. Yeah. If I have a mouthpiece, a mouthpiece, you can do that all day long. I got the airbags in the back.

So my neck hasn't got a lot of place. So that'll be for the grizzly i can i can take what he can give me with that no problem that log there if that couldn't do anything to me and i feel great like really great and actually uh my left hand was asleep it's now awake oh really you don't say yeah troy is a fascinating man. So I'm going to play you now, him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball bats as he attempts to move in this suit. And I have to emphasize to you, he is not capable of moving in this thing.

This is an immobile suit of armor that he can almost shuffle in it, but not quite. I love his idea with the pickup truck and the bikers with regards to big men. Being an anthropologist, he looked at the testings we had originally done with normal-sized men, you know, 150, 180 pounds. He said

the public isn't going to buy it. They're looking at this monstrous grizzly bear, and they're looking at a normal-sized man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff like that. They're not going to buy it. You have to give them reality. and stuff like that, they're not gonna buy it. You have to give them reality. This is insane. This is so weird.

Amazing, amazing. I have to emphasize. amazing amazing a gang of men just attacking this nerd in a metal suit is is what it looks like yes it's so funny it's it's it's extremely funny they're like and they pick like terminator 2 looking bikers like they go out of their way. All of the stylization is super bizarre. Yeah. It's such a strained documentary. This is from the documentary Project Grizzly. And Troy gives, in the various interviews he does, some pretty incredible quotes.

Like, years after this, he wrote, At 52, I have to know whether or not the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things. We tested the suit a lot of ways, but never went against the grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus Mark I. He eventually gets up to the Mark VI and spends more than $150,000 making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, sorry, I think the one that we're looking at in the documentary is the Mark VI

because he did eventually, after years of this quest, get a documentarian interested and the film Project Grizzly was made about his quest. One fun piece of trivia about it is that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. It makes, yeah, it makes total sense. Now,

in order to give you just one last piece of context about the personality, what kind of man is Troy Herdibes or was Troy Herdibes? I am going to play you a clip of an interview with this man from the documentary that's just perfect. He's holding in this a gigantic Bowie knife in his hand, and he has another Bowie knife strapped across his shoulder in such a way that it's on his shoulder but pointed down. Yeah. Which is the way a crazy man carries a Bowie knife. He's also, it's worth noting, dressed as like a frontier settler but wearing like a red military beret. I go into the bush. I don't use a gun.

Never don't believe in guns. I swear by my knives. They save your life a thousand times around. If a grizzly's gonna come at you, and I'm not saying knives are gonna save you. That's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you've got a gun, and that grizzly is 50 feet, 100 feet away from you. You got one shot, I don't give a shit who you are or how steady you are. You've got one shot in that grizzly is 50 feet 100 feet away from me you got one shot i don't give a shit who you are or how steady you are you've got one shot in that grizzly and if he's still coming at you that gun you might as well use the barrel on him or you can use the stock on him that's useless but if you've

got some half decent knives at least you got a fighting chance with animals but that's not the reason why when i go into the mountains or i go into the bush or any man goes in the bush they don't carry knives for the four-legged animals they carry knives for the two-legged animals because nowadays it's a lot like the old days. You got a lot of wackos up there, and it's knives that you want at close quarters. Yeah, you do indeed have a lot of wackos up there, Troy. So that's a brief introduction to Troy Herdebees.

Now, the suit that you've seen in the Project Grizzly documentary weighed 150 pounds, and it was not in any way powered. As you see in the doc, he can kind of barely shuffle with it. He is unable to move or even stand on uneven ground. He falls over very easily. Troy liked the documentary, felt like it helped expose his work to a wider audience, but he took issue with the fact that the documentary did not delve into what he described as the science behind it all. Adding, being able to get hit

by the truck took years of development. Years. Years of practice of getting hit by trucks. You can't just jump into getting hit by a truck like that. In 2002, a trainer who probably should not be allowed around animals let Troy get into a cage with a Kodiak bear.

Now, thankfully, the bear was too confused by Troy's armor to want to get near him, which you might argue is technically a win for Troy. The armor did do its job. Just scare them away. Yeah. What about you? You know, the bear just saw that and was like you know what there's something wrong with this guy it's clearly unwell i do not want to be around this person right now here's mental floss interviewing troy she was so terrified she urinated her to be recall. I didn't look human enough. Limited mobility and questionable

usefulness combined to doom the Mark series. We would never use a suit like that, says Lana Ciaranello, PhD, a bear behavior expert. A solid knowledge of bear behavior is the best thing one can use to avoid being attacked, which is rare. And this is common. Whenever

they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like, do you want a suit of armor? They're like, no, that's not at all useful. It's very easy to not get attacked by bears, actually. And again, if you watch the documentary Grizzly Man, and the man in the documentary Grizzly Man is a similar type of person to Troy Hurtubese. They are both people. I do believe Troy Hurtubese

might need a suit of bear armor because he seems like the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Hurtubese fame. He was all over the internet. I found out about him because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him in an article. But you would see this guy all the time. I'm sure I ran, I think I also ran across him on Something Awful earlier. He would regularly put out videos. He had an early kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a brand on the internet in order to get funding. And so he was very successful at raising money in order to, like, make new iterations of his armor. He was also recruited on several Japanese game shows, and he inspired a 2003 episode of The Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear fighting suit. He even filmed an Audi commercial.

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

that are deeply confusing. How does that? Wait, that's not even a useful spot. Like, put it on your watch area. If you watch him, he is adamant that he had talked to special forces guys, and they said right in the dick is where you want to compass. It, like, flipped down, so it looks like he has a penis that's made out of compass. Okay, that is kind of funny.

I'm going to play you a clip of this armor, which I will say looks a lot more professional than the last suit. The first ballistic full exoskeleton bodysuit of armor. the first ballistic full exoskeleton bodysuit of armor. This came from 20 years of development through the bear suits and about 1,750 hours of actual building time. And it came from so many calls I got from friends of mine in Iraq and in Afghanistan. My brother was in the military talking about, can you not go in the direction that we need, which is against the IEDs, improvised explosive devices, and, you know, build it to the point where you've got the

flexibility, the lightness, but with the strength of what the bear suits were, and that's where this came from. So I'm going to tell you right now, that suit is not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic heavy armor you see in the Hurt Locker only kind of helps you if it's a pretty small IED. What he's built is not going to protect you from an explosively formed penetrator or a 500-pound fertilizer bomb or something like that. To test this, though, Troy hired a former military marksman, a guy who he claimed had

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

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

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

covered in the burn paste being exposed to temperatures above 3600 degrees Fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his helmeted head for 10 minutes. And it worked. This leaves out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired to make his burn paste because one day while wearing his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly. So he needed to make the burn paste in order to protect himself yeah it doesn't seem easy to get in and out of like no um it would not be easy to dawn at your if you look at the helmet there your peripheral version is going to be shit it's not going to be good for like fighting in and it is going to exhaust you like he builds an air conditioner for it, but that's only going to do so much like armor.

Body armor is always kind of like a trade off between mobility and protection and something like a plate carrier is worth it. But full body armor that's not powered in a meaningful way just is not going to be practical yet. This is why I do not respect the Mandalorians. No, no. You you've been vocal about that for years. I have. I'm going to play you a video of him testing this fire paste

from that Canadian Discovery Channel documentary, because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a thin layer of fire paste, effectively starving out the fire. And according to Troy, clean-up is a breeze, due to fire paste's only weakness, water.

Look at how it's just, see? It turns back into a paste. See? I'm already into a layer. It's just paste now. It's just fire paste. This is its natural state, and when it dries, see, I'm already sloughing it off now. There it is there. It turns to the piece. This is what's gonna happen on your house. Now it's a... He's chewing it up.

Oh, that's so gross. He's just spitting it all over. The dog comes along, takes a little in his mouth, washes it around, then spits it out. Nothing's gonna happen. It's biodegradable, non-toxic, don't have to worry about anything happening. So how would a homeowner remove the fire paste from the outside of their home?

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

Barbie's fine. Save Barbie's sister. The Barbie is clearly singed. No, he hasn't. Now, he does note again that the only weakness of the fire paste is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now, why does he keep getting platforms?

Like, why does he continue? Well, he was because this was really funny to everyone on the Internet. So a documentary that came out would get shared all over. People would watch it. It would get him attention. He would get donations. There was like one point where he had to sell his body armor. He had to like sell it to a pawn shop because he was broke.

And a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and gave it to him so he could continue his research. That's fun. Yeah. That's nice. Yeah, he had a fan base. Like I said, he was a hero of the old internet. He did eventually succeed in making an armor suit that was resistant to 12-gauge shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive. Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor.

Most soft body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it. Shotguns are not for penetrating armor. They're for damaging meat. But Troy made a big deal about how this would save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention, as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was something called the godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much detail on what the godlight was, but he says it shrunk tumors in mice as well as his sister's tumor. And he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers.

All I did was take all spectrums of light, electromagnetic radiation, and put them together. And it works. I don't know why, but it does. I think that's how you get cancer, but okay. Funny you mentioned that. So obviously his claims about the godlight were never validated by any outside force, in part because shining whatever the fuck he's invented on a bunch of sick people has ethical considerations to it. But Troy turned the light on himself and experienced what he calls

the Hyde effect. I think as in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. His hair fell out and he lost 20 pounds. How? Curious. What a mystery. Then he claims the god light mysteriously stopped working and he didn't

have the money to fix it up. There are amazing i love this man it's it is it is it is fascinating the closer society comes to this complete collapse we get more of these little weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to like survive the apocalypse and they keep coming in exactly the wrong ways yes um i'm gonna read another quote from that mental floss article today her to bees operates a scrapyard in ontario and dismisses notions of patents the stuff is too easy to duplicate and it costs eighty thousand dollars to file an application he rejects offers to outright sell his creations like fire paste because he frequently sells off shares to fund their development. By the time I

got Firepaste to the point of testing, 70% of it was owned by investors, so when a university wants it, I only have 30% left. They're not interested in that. And yet, Herdaby's can't stop inventing. He still feels compelled to put in 21-hour days refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding for the Apache, the latest version of his Trojan suit, which he says protects 93% of a user's body and offers 96% flexibility. A prototype will cost

$70,000. It'll take six to eight months to build by hand. I'll try to market it to law enforcement, like SWAT. He needs another $100,000 to rebuild the Godlight, renamed the EMR-5, which he now claims will only cure breast cancer. He wants to take it to Johns Hopkins for testing. So, well, I'm excited for SWAT teams to be using his inventions.

Yes, yes, I do support that. Thanks to that dick compass, they'll never get lost at the wrong house again. Could really save a lot of lives. That's the problem SWAT teams have is poor land nav I think so I think the SWAT team should wear that every SWAT team member should be forced to wear that bear suit for everything they do yes the only thing SWAT could get do so tragically Troy died in like 2012 I think in a fiery collision yeah he drove right into a fuel tanker

oh no it's very sad he was 54 years old his widow says that he swerved his car or the police say that he swerved his car into the pathway of the truck he had been very depressed because he'd encountered financial difficulties and had not been

able to sell his inventions. Obviously, this is very sad for them. He seems like, despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around and then fell on hard times. It is a depressing end to the story. But Troy lives on in the documentary Project Grizzly and in the impact he had on all of our hearts and in the memory that you know even if your dreams are are crazy you should you should try and live them because who knows maybe maybe you'll develop a suit that allows you to fight a grizzly bear in hand-to-hand combat anyway that's that's this hero of the internet episode. I hope you all found it edifying. That is an inspiring tale.

Yeah. It's, you know. He's fucking more of an inventor than Elon Musk ever has been. That's true. And he would have been a better ruler of Twitter. That's true. If Troy was in charge of Twitter. He's really the last guy from the old era of capitalism where you would actually return your profits into R&D instead of just paying Elon Musk $47 million to hire a bunch of consultants who also make $47 million.

Yeah, one thing you have to say about Troy is he was not in this for the money. This was a man who believed more strongly than I think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of building a suit of armor to fight grizzly bears. And whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely, absolutely honest in that belief. And I think I'm going to end by playing a brief montage of him testing out his first version of the armored suit, which looks more or less like a set of heavy baseball armor. Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a baseball helmet or a, sorry, a football helmet. In fact, I think it just is a football helmet,

but yeah, here's Troy's early tests in 1988. Oh, that's definitely a football helmet. That one looks kind of cool. That one looks pretty cool too yeah they look increasingly space marini in this period and he has some range of motion just knocking him down with what looked like two by force it doesn't it does look more oh my gosh he just he just he keeps getting ewoks right in the face yeah it's it's amazing that last one looks super Space Marine-esque. Yeah, some of them looked pretty cool.

And he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing. So you've got to give him one thing. He knew how to make a suit of armor that would not get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Herdaby's like to do to his armor. It seems like he was good with blunt force trauma armor. That's right. Did anyone ever do like a cte skit like tests on him after he died oh no because this this man had a thousand micro head injuries

absolutely i mean that i think the real lesson here is that he was able he was he was able to continue his work thanks to canadian health care um yeah healthcare. He was probably like 5% of the entire Canadian healthcare system budget just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Troy Herdibes. I hope you've all found it useful. Go into the world, and if your dream is to create a suit of powered armor that will allow you to defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed

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

me wrong though, I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to god things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.

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In a world where you end up standing in a two-hour line to buy mediocre and not climate-friendly water. Sorry, this is It Could Happen Here. This is Sophie. I really wanted to do that for a really long time. Well, now I want to watch it. Yeah, me too. Thank you. Those voices you hear are James Stout and Margaret Kiljoy. And we're here to talk about the water crisis that seems to be getting worse in these United States. Yeah.

James, what's happening? Well, a number of things are happening, right? I think we should probably emphasize at the start that water contaminants have been affecting people outside of like the kind of colonial core for a very long time long and uh legacy corporate media whatever you want to call it hasn't given it a solitary fuck about it until it affected people inside the colonial core so um what we're seeing right now is in two places uh east i believe it's pronounced Palestine, right? I believe so too, yeah.

Yeah, okay, East Palestine, Ohio, and in Philadelphia. I believe it's pronounced Phil-A-Delphia. Ah, okay, it's like someone's name, like Phil, it was named for Phil-A-Delphia, the founder of the city. Phil from delphia like the oracle ah i see yeah he predicted that one day uh there would be a spill uh from a plc chemical plant near the delaware river and famously he was right uh we've yeah they built the city there anyway yeah yeah and they uh for years they've been so angry about not having a chemical plant they've just uh climbed lampposts and thrown batteries at opposing football teams.

Yeah, and I feel really good about starting with such heavy jokes about this thing. Yeah, I do. It's like three million people, I think. Anyway. Yeah, if you're in Philadelphia, we do want to express solidarity with you, I guess, as you wonder what the fuck to do about your water supply, which is currently contaminated, as we understand, by something called butylacrylate, which is a chemical that is found in paint. And the reason that there is a paint chemical in your drinking water, if you live in Philadelphia, is that a PLC manufacturing chemical plant called,

I think it's Trinseo, T-R-I-N-S-E-O, had a leak. And that leak went into a storm drain. That storm drain went into the Delaware River and that river feeds into the Samuel S. Baxter water treatment plant. And obviously that water treatment plant feeds into the tap that you turn on to drink water when you live in your house.

And this has, as it always does, when there are like these somewhat bungled announcements of chemical contamination in drinking water, cause people to rush out to buy bottled water, which is an understandable response if you think you're not going to be able to drink water, which has caused people to wait in long lines to access uh sometimes like a limited supply of water and what we wanted to talk about today a little bit was not so much like what to do if you're in philadelphia right now um but like how we can better prepare to be ready for water emergencies water shortages water contamination things like that, which is why Margaret has joined us because she is the prepper anarchist queen and knows a lot about these things. So yeah, Margaret, should we, I think you said you wanted to break this down by like bad things that can be in your water and things you can

do to get those bad things away, right? Yeah. Although I will say only a minority of this information directly relates to people who are dealing with toxic chemical spills. So if we're, I have a lot of information about general water safety, long-term storage of water, things that you don't want in your water, how to get those things out of your water. And I know you have a lot of experience with that stuff too. But the very specific thing that people first in ohio and now in pennsylvania are dealing with um of chemical stuff is worse than other stuff and way harder to get out especially on a diy level um so i don't know what what feels best

like should we do an overview or should we try and first talk about the chemical stuff and then talk about like the fun, easy stuff like not getting Giardia when you're camping? Yeah, let's maybe start out with the kind of this is the scary, you know, you can't buy a life straw for this. Fear first, fun later. Yeah, because people might be listening and they might be afraid or they might be concerned or they might be in one of these places, right? Or Flint, Michigan, where we still haven't fucking fixed the water. Fuck say, fucking Flint, Michigan. What a just disastrous incompetence. Yeah, I mean, yeah.

It's extremely sad that the country that is as rich as any country has ever managed to be in human history history is still uh poisoning people with water but yeah let's start with that let's start with what to do uh when you get a reverse 9-1-1 phone call telling you not to drink from your tap i mean honestly going out and getting bottled water was the right move um or also since people did have a heads up that their tap water was safe for a period of time um storing water in various containers is the right move. Because once your water is contaminated with chemicals, it's really hard to get it out. The main method that, well, on an industrial scale,

the thing that someone can use, the way they treat wastewater with butyl acylate i didn't write down the name in my notes acrylate i think acrylate um oh like acrylic that makes sense because latex paint it's something called a fluidized bed reactor which frankly i did not know about until i started doing this specific research for this specific chemical um people who are like more at a high science level will know more about this. This is basically like you're using different bacteria to eat and I don't know, fucking clean out this shit. This is not what's going to be happening in your kitchen sink anytime soon. This is not going to be part of your Brita filter anytime soon. Ironically, and this is not,

Brita filter anytime soon. Ironically, and this is not, how am I going to say this? Don't drink this chemical water if you have any possibility, right? If you can get other water, do that. And I believe in our current society, it is a better and safer bet to get water from elsewhere. If you were in some situation, which I suspect most people are not, I suspect most people could access supply lines if you're in some situation where the only water available to you has this these types of chemicals in it the most likely guess about a way to deal with it is activated carbon charcoal um and is uh is actually the home filters that a lot of people use is your Brita filter is your Berkey, although I'll talk some shit on Berkey in a little bit. And, and when we go over the more

like nitty gritty details about each filtration method, maybe we can we can talk more about this. But basically, it is like, it is not tested to do this. No one has ever been like, man, what if we get a bunch of butyl acrylate in our water? Will our Brita filter it out? No one is running tests on this because it is not a thing that normally is in the water historically, although clearly it is often in the water now. However, the method of filtration of the various home level acts various home level methods of filtration adsorption is what it's called with a d instead of a b is the method that is perceived as most effective at reducing chemicals in water however again we're talking about like maybe this reduces some chemicals maybe not oh you run this through this and now you're fine yeah yeah it's there's a lot

of things that could get no water right that we don't really have like any any like decent research on how to get them out of our water yeah so margaret james is there is there a say say you're not living in a place where you get a text letting you know that on Tuesday at 3 p.m. your water will not be safe to drink, which is really just... Is there a home testing kit or a water testing kit that is accessible for most individuals? Or what resources can people use to to understand their water at home because i'm not really going to trust the government on that yeah um margaret do you want to take that i only know about i do not know about testing for butyl acrylate um i think that this is the kind of thing that they are not, people are not prepared for,

like at a society level. I don't, I believe I could be wrong. All of the water testing that I have done has tended to be around, like I live on a well, right? And so there's a lot of testing things that are available to tell you the acidity of your water, the hardness of your water, which is how many dissolved minerals, whether or not your water contains things like lead and arsenic, heavy metals, which we'll talk about in a little bit, and also bacteria, right? Like all of the stuff that we normally prepare to filter out of water, there are home tests available to you that you can use to determine. I don't know.

And I wish I had done more research ahead of time. There's like some talk about like possible smells and stuff for some of these, but I don't feel confident. Yeah. I mean, I know there's the EWGs like website where you can put in your, your,

your zip code and get more information on if there's been contamination or anything like that. But like that's, know reported things not necessarily like on an individual level for testing um yeah i definitely do that anytime i have moved anywhere i'll type in my zip code and then i go ah that sounds really bad um i don't like that but yeah you can find out you know once you put in you can find out who who like you you put in your zip code on uh this is just ewg.org you put in your zip code and you can put who you pay for water and then it goes in and it tells you you know it's really it's really fun for in my in

my neighborhood for ewg guidelines, 14 contaminants. Oh, congrats. Yeah. I think a combination of two is probably your best bet, like unless you happen to have a laboratory, like because there's stuff coming, like if there is like lead, like in between the water mains and all like, you know,

wherever the EWG is getting its information and your tap, then you're still risking like heavy metal contaminants, right? you're on a well you should test that i think it's every year right you're supposed to test your well water i probably should you know you'll be fine you'll know but yeah i think it's important that like you i have definitely got super sick from water that looks super clear, had no odor, looked fine. And I have drunk from turbid as fuck, stagnant water and not been sick. So like your nose is not going to tell you, you do need some kind of help.

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

Right. But, um, you can, but water itself doesn't go bad. That is a thing that is worth understanding left to its own devices. Water does not go bad. Water goes bad when there's like something in it that replicates, like bacteria or something like that. Or when something leaks into it. The main reason that you want to keep your water out of the sun and out of the heat is because if you're storing it in plastic, that can eventually kind of leach into it as the plastic degrades. And that, I don't know, there's probably long-term

health effects, but like I would drink a water bottle that has been in the backseat of my car for a year before I would drink butyl acrylate water. And which is, I mean, it's, I guess that's just plastic or plastic, pick your poison. But yeah, so bottled water is generally very safe and it is sealed and it has no particular reason to go bad. You don't want to store it next to kerosene or gasoline. Like if you are the kind of person who keeps a five-gallon jug of gasoline around, you want that in a different place than your water. Usually you want the gasoline outside your house in an outbuilding. Everyone lives on acreage in the rural areas of the country, right? So many outbuildings around here. Yeah, everyone has outbuildings.

I just go out to my urban barn. Yeah, exactly. So, okay. Well, okay. Then the other thing, if I'm actually preparing, go out and get some five gallongallon jerry cans. You're going to pay between $20 and $50, and you'll get a little bit of different quality depending on that. You want something that is BPA-free. You want something that is opaque.

And you want something that is, like, not really bigger than four or five gallons because it's clumsy and unwieldy. Yeah. You also don't want to stack these things unless they specifically say this one is stackable to such and such depth like most stackable containers are also only stackable one or two um high well two or three high and i don't know i mean like frankly on some level that's what there is okay and if you're

going to fill your own water containers there are a couple weird things about it. One, you, people argue about how often you should rotate it. I, I rotate mine about once a year. You should theoretically rotate them somewhere between six months and a year or something like that, depending on how you store it. The other thing is that if you are, I actually think living off of a well, you should probably rotate it more often. If you're on municipal water, don't run it through your Brita before you store it, because that Brita is going to pull out all the chlorine, all the bleach. And people are like, whoa, I don't want to drink bleach. I listened to that punk song, dead, dead milkman, um, whatever. Uh, people don't want to drink bleach right you actually do want

to drink tiny amounts of bleach you want tiny amounts of miracle medical solution yeah um it keeps bacteria from growing so if you filter out all of that and then you put it the water in the thing if there's the tiniest little bacteria that got through it's like sweet the defenses are down you know um so but yeah honestly storing water like people like they're gonna sell you lots of products and like prepper sites are full of people selling you shit um but it's just a matter of like finding containers and filling them with water and then rotating them every now and then and it's not actually that big of a deal or super complicated that's my take on it um i used to live off of i used to live entirely off grid and then had to just drink water out of 50 gallon drums and i just i didn't even you know what i'm not going to say

how bad my practices were because i don't want anyone to emulate me. What were you going to say, James? I was going to say, if you're storing on a scale, I don't know why they'd say you live on a compound in the desert, you can get big water tanks, right? I was looking at moving out to the desert a couple of years ago. I didn't. But yeah, you can get big water tanks. They're pretty cheap. It's about a dollar a gallon last time I looked,

for like a 1,500-gallon tank. Yeah. They're pretty cheap. You should, some places- It's about a dollar a gallon last time I looked for like a 1500 gallon tank. Yeah. I found them cheap, like GovSurplus ones as well, pretty often. Oh, really? Yeah. We'll talk later. Yeah, yeah.

We'll send you some links. But you might want to check it. Some places you actually can't legally have those. It's getting better now with that stuff, but you do want to check on that. I think if you're, or you could get like a water buffalo, which is an industrial device for shipping water. You can probably pick up those pretty cheap as well.

No, it's an animal. I don't want you to, don't dehumanize it, calling it an industrial machine. It's an animal. It has feelings. Yeah, it does. And you just keep that in your backyard and then what that does is attack anyone who comes after your water.

So it's quite effective. They are tough as nails. I've had some run-ins with buffalo. Bathhouse animals. Okay. Another thing I guess that like if you're like going hardcore on this and storing thousands of gallons of water, maybe you could invest in something like a chlorine maker and that way if you do

like mess up with your storage i guess that that could maybe give you some leeway in terms of purifying afterwards is that fair to say margaret yeah i mean it makes sense like chlorine maker is the next step up from basically because like bleach itself does go bad and if you it's not shelf stable for i don't remember itself does go bad and it's not shelf stable for i don't remember how long it lasts um it's not indefinitely shelf stable and so people often especially in places without access to clean water and stuff um i will say though when we get into it chemical treatment is really good for the main stuff that people normally worry about such as protozoa, bacteria, and viruses,

but once again, isn't going to do shit for some stuff that goes bad. Yeah, I think it might. There's one thing, maybe cryptosporidium. There's something that chlorine specifically doesn't work for. Oh, that's right. Actually, yeah, it's actually not very good at protozoa. It's weirdly good at viruses. Whereas most of the filters are not good at viruses

and are good at bacteria and protozoa. So we should probably explain these different things, right? These different ways you can treat your water. Okay. There's a bunch of stuff that you can be in your water that you don't wish was in the water. The one that is like kind of off the top of my head, the one that I think about the most

because I've had to deal with it and it sucked, are protozoa. The two big ones are Giardia and Cryptosporidium. And these are tiny little animals in the water. If you can look at pictures of them, they're really cute. And they make you shit a lot forever, sometimes until you die.

Mostly immunocompromised folks, but everyone really unhappy. And if you're in a survival situation already, diarrhea is like no laughing matter. Your inability to keep in fluids and nutrients will dramatically affect your your chance of survival um so that's protozoa they are the biggest of these things and therefore sort of the easiest to actually don't know whether they're bigger than bacteria or not then there's bacteria which it can also be in water and do bad

stuff to you and then there's viruses and viruses can be in the water and do bad stuff to you largely in the united states and people don't worry about viruses in water. And that's not because our heads are in the sand. It's because we don't have as many viruses in our water. Then there's chemicals you could have in your water. We don't like them. There's dirt that can be in your water, which is just like not fun. There's heavy metals like lead and iron um that can have

deleterious effects on your health some people want to get water hardening minerals like calcium and magnesium out of their water but you actually don't want to get rid of all of them that's the catch that's what we're going to talk about because your body wants some of those things. They mostly just like make your house has all the, all the plumbing breaks. That's like the main stuff. There's also things like nitrates that I don't understand well enough to talk about how we get rid of things. The most common way that like backpackers and stuff who are a lot of the

people who DIY this on a regular basis use is is something called filtration, or I'm going to call filtration. First, you screen your water, as in you get out the large chunks. Usually people use like a bandana or a sock or just some piece of cloth, right? And you want to use that so you're not gumming up your filter. And then it goes into something where it's forced through a membrane with micropores. These used to be ceramic, but these days they're like a bunch of tiny little tubes like the internet. And most of these are basically, the tubes have holes in them that are so small that it stops protozoa and bacteria from going through it. That is its main claim to fame. It is very effective at it.

Now that they're not ceramic, you don't have to clean it like every fucking gallon. And these are really good. Top brands that I am not sponsored by are Sawyer and LifeStraw. They're going to use slightly different methods. People have opinions about them. I'm not going to offer mine right now. And they're measured in the size of the holes. Anything that's like one micron is small enough to stop most protozoa. Most of these ones are either 0.1 or 0.2. These don't block viruses. So they make ones that have even smaller holes that can deal with viruses. And this also blocks microplastics, but you know, whatever. Then there's chemical treatment.

Chemical treatment, the two most common ones are bleach, chlorine, or iodine. And there's also like chemical tablets that you can buy that are like worth keeping around. They weigh almost nothing, whatever. I am not going to give you the chart of how much bleach to add to your water and don't just go listen to me and add bleach to your water fucking look it up uh do not use

color safe bleach do not use scented bleach it's just disinfected bleach which will probably either come in six percent or eight point two five percent sodium hypochlorite Chlorite Scented bleach sounds so gross just that those combinations of words I know What do they scent it with? The blood of I don't know

Poison You could have it smelled like hot dogs or something That sounds so gross I used it's lavender you could have smelled like hot dogs or something that sounds so gross yeah I used to wear lavender all the time I actually

I stopped for two reasons first I stopped when I was in college because like my girlfriend was like you smell like soap and was like really mad at me

if you're listening whatever I don't care and then I stopped because get one in Margaret go on go off if you're listening

what's good look at me now yeah thanks for turning me on to lots of cool stuff um that was much healthier than i would have been i'm proud of you and then uh um the other reason i stopped wearing lavender is it attracts ticks if you're out in the out in the woods um anyway okay so that's chemical treatment chemical treatment is really good for bacteria and viruses it's not great for parasites it is a really good backup system right um actually i'll go over the fucking king of all of them for for bacteria virus and parasites you want to get rid of it you fucking boil your water um the like classic way to deal with it is you boil your water and it only needs to get above 60 degrees celsius uh which is like 140 something in regular human um and i

actually don't know the conversion i actually no when you're talking about quibble regular human as fahrenheit okay fahrenheit is really good about humans because zero is cold and 100 is hot yes celsius is really good about water so we're we actually are talking about water right now so celsius is the proper scale because it goes from zero is freezing to 100 is boiling yeah um go ahead yeah it's uh you know what we should do before before we talk further about water do you know what will not make you shit yourself to death uh reagan coins yeah it probably is ronald reagan coins again all right we're back thank you very much uncle ron uh for continuing to pay for my health care and insulin needs so we were we were talking about uh boiling fuck boiling water that's it yeah yeah so how long do we need to boil stuff for to change depending on what we got it does

but not really it's like the all of the main and do the actual instructions. Overkill is better than regular get killed, right? But most shit dies off at 60 degrees Celsius, which is below the boiling point of water, even at high elevation. However, basically the deal is you want to boil your water for one minute at sea level, three minutes above 5,000 feet or five kilometers. No, wait, no.

It's not a thousand feet. Okay. And yeah, so, so boiling water is actually the, one of the main things you can do. It doesn't get rid of everything. It gets rid of those three things, protozoa, bacteria, and viruses very effectively. And that is most of the time what most people are treating water for. A lot of the other stuff is like long-term health effects, like heavy metals and chemicals, right? Other methods that you can use. The other like kind of gold standard, which isn't as good as it seems like it should be, is distillation. Distillation gets out lots of stuff. Distillation is basically you evaporate the water and then let it run down into another container um your moon shining your own water and um and you can do this diy fairly well and there's like solar stills that are really cool i've never actually built one i've always wanted

to um the downside is if you live off of distilled water for a long time it gets out the magnesium and the calcium it gets gets out the minerals that you actually want in your water. So it can have negative effects on your long-term health if you only drink distilled water. The main thing that distillation does that I think no other method on this does besides a reverse osmosis, which I'm not really going to get into, is it desalinates water. Yeah. Go ahead. That's a big deal, right? like if we look at long-term water insecurity like certainly where i live uh we live in a place where people like to play golf

in the desert and that has become an issue as far as water supplies go and so desalination is often proposed as like a way to deal with our water crisis in california and the fact that the colorado river River is getting lower and lower and we rely on it. But like you said, lots of these methods aren't going to pull the salt out of water. They don't let you drink seawater. Right. But this one does. And so, I mean, actually, I don't really care about the health of golf courses. I have actually negative feelings about the health of golf courses. But theoretically, maybe watering your lawn with the desalinated distilled water and then drinking the water that actually has minerals in it but then again like maybe the plants need that shit

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

There's adsorption. Adsorption rules. This is the thing that I always misspell. And so that's why I emphasize the adsorption. I don't really understand. Go ahead. How do we adsorb is that just like absorption with adverts what you know it's like yeah it's like uh i took three years of latin and

all i remember is that ad means towards and ab means away from um and maybe a greek ally is either farmer or farmhouse yeah i got poor poor ream yeah sumas sumas as a son aramaras aramaras aramaras aramaras i can remember that one now yeah great yeah well there you go you've all learned something today yeah uh i wish that my school had made me take spanish instead of letting me take some bullshit like latin um myself spanish yeah exactly so adsorption is good for pesticides, heavy metals, chemicals, viruses, and bad tastes. It's the only one of these things that I'm aware of that actually can get rid of bad tastes. Because this is pulling out all the weird stuff in the water. And what it is, is it uses activated carbon, which is basically just some shit that's fucking burned and then crunched up real small.

It is a huge surface area cause it's like little powder. Right. Um, and then the water passes through it. And then by some weird science shit, the bad stuff tends to stick to the carbon. Um, this is great.

This is what your Brita filter does. This is what your, uh, Berkey does. This is what your pure filter does. Um, it, it's not as good, I believe, for bacteria and stuff. And specifically, the biggest problem with these things is that bacteria can grow on

them. And so some people, I mean, that's why you replace it every so often. It's not because it's like slow or clogged. It's like literally unhealthy um and so sometimes what people do is they treat for bacteria with uv or some other method bleach whatever all the other shit that we talked about we haven't talked about uv yet um after it goes to the carbon filter i'm really excited about like kind of learning more about these because you can theoretically diy carbon right um yeah yeah you definitely could right like uh i know that it's not the same as this but uh one of the things you can do if you're in the back country is like if you have water with a lot of turbidity which is um stuff in the water right like uh like if you can't see through the

water you know if it's got a lot of cloudiness uh you can use white ash from a fire uh and that will increase the rate at which it deposits the sediment if you see what i mean so you have oh interesting because it yeah it sticks to it and then slowly filters to the bottom of them i think the gold standard is a loom which is something using canning uh and that increases it even quicker but uh yeah you can use white ash from a fire if you're dealing with that's cool i think that's i don't think that's activated carbon i think that's a different mechanism yeah no i i don't know um and then one of the methods that is actually mostly done on an industrial scale that actually is like i think the main way that people filter water in this world is through sand and i didn't do enough research

about um there's both slow slow sand filters and fast sand filters. And some of them like literally depend on certain bacteria, good bacteria, like having a healthy culture of them that like eat the bad stuff and things. I used to know more about that than I do currently. And then the last one I'm going to cover. Okay. Then there's reverse osmosis, which you might have a kitchen thing that does. And it, um, it also removes minerals. It's a very effective method of filtering out lots of stuff. It also, I don't know, causes wastewater and is complicated in some ways. And then there's UV disinfection. And this is like one of the ones that gets touted as this like,

this is going to save the developing world or whatever, right? Yeah. And UV disinfection is cool and good. Basically, it uses UV light to kill off bacteria parasites and viruses again these three things that are the main things people are usually going for um the biggest downside of uv disinfection there's two of them one is that it requires low turbidity water thanks for introducing that term uh clear water it has to be fairly clear water because it's about light right that makes sense um and because you have to like be careful to do it right you just have to like actually get all of it with all of it um yeah so this is why i haven't like for a moment i got

really excited about these things and in the end i was like i like my water filter that i already have yeah i think with with UV filtration as well, it's been big in the outdoor world kind of relatively recently. You have to be conscious of storing it in a opaque container afterwards because the bacteria can UV reactivate. Oh, yeah.

If it's like any of it that it doesn't get, it's like, fuck yeah, it's my time. Yeah, because it stops them reproducing. That's how it... Oh, interesting. They're still in there, but they don't... So it doesn't really matter. You drink them and then you pass them through your system and it's my time yeah because it stops them reproducing that's how it uh they're still in there but they don't so it doesn't really matter you drink them and then you pass them through your system and it's fine but if they reproduce that's when you get sick so somehow they can uv reactivate um so like if you have a you know the classic like uh like through hiking thing if you use a

smart water bottle right because it's cheap and it's dirty and but if you were uv filtering and then shoving in your smart water bottle and then putting that on the back of your pack and hiking all day you might get in some difficulty so yeah i don't know it's not yeah i haven't really messed with it much uh i've like like yeah i have my comfortable setup and that's what i like to use and i will say that like something that people who don't go camping much might not be aware of. There's almost nowhere in the United States that you can be confidently drink wild water without it, without risking something like Giardia. There are places where you can directly from a spring is the most likely to be good. People used to say that you can drink high elevation water

if you're up in an alpine area because there's like no cows or whatever. Because like Giardia and I believe also crypto, but the other poop transferred crypto, the Cryptosporodia, not the multi-level marketing scam. It's passed in the fecal oral oral tradition what's the word here uh there's a word here i'm forgetting mouth pathway yeah pathway yeah and so um because it's passed that way it's like basically the fact that there's livestock everywhere is the reason that's

not safe to drink the water and so people are like oh if you go up high enough you're safe but there's still animals up there and that's not safe to drink the water. And so people are like, oh, if you go up high enough, you're safe. But there's still animals up there. And there's also like more and more hikers up there. Almost anywhere you're going to be hiking, someone else is hiked. And someone else is hiked and they have drank the water without filtering it because they're not thinking properly. And then they've shit not in a hole, but just shit somewhere on the ground because they're also a bad person in that way. Yeah. And so they've like tested a while ago at the,

in the high Sierras that there's Giardia everywhere, which doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make you sick, but it can make you sick. So it's just like worth knowing that this is the reason that backpackers know so much about water filtration. Although again, they don't know as much about chemical spill filtration, which is why I had to go and learn more about that.

Less because I'm a backpacker and more because I used to live off grid. Yeah, they're different. There are definitely a lot of products out there that are very affordable that work for that specific, specifically the Giardia concern, right? Which is one that most people have. And that's probably if you're like if you're in a place where you hear there's industrial water contamination and you go to rei and you buy a soya make a tap filter for instance um it just clamps onto your tap it probably won't work for

the stuff that you're concerned about um but it will work if you're yeah off a well and you have giardia or something yeah and it also won't work for like lead which is one of the reasons why the carbon filters are the more common ones at home because uh city water that is a a higher you know if you live in some cities you're gonna have lead in your water right yeah because we used it in pipes for decades yeah but i don't know um oh let's talk shit on berkey's really quick yeah let's do it. What's up with Berkey? Why are they bad? So I was like, I posted the other day after this thing,

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

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

NSF slash ANSI standard that all of your other filters are testing themselves to. So everyone else is saying, we have passed this following certification and Berkey is saying, oh, we tested it and it does all this stuff. All the other ones probably do kind of all this stuff too, but the only things that they're actually certified to do

are what they say they do. And so Berkey basically charges a mint in exchange for using their own testing standards instead of the testing standards of other people. Independent testers. Google Berkey wire cutter and you'll find a good article where people conducted a bunch of tests. And it's a shame because it would be nice to have this sort of all-in-one filter because it's very annoying. If you want to filter something out of your water, you have to go, okay, what's in my water that I don't want?

And then you have to go find the filter for that, and it's not going to be the same as the other filter. It's not going to be the same as the other filter. Like, oh, you live somewhere with lead in your pipes, you can't buy a regular Brita. You've got to buy the lead pipe Montreal special Brita. And you want an under-sink water sink water filter well do you want this one or this one or this one and it it would be nice if there was a uh uh yeah like a buy once cry once

yeah yeah go to amazon two days later you'll find kind of situation yeah but there isn't one no i was gonna go over like just in case people are curious more about the backcountry stuff, I guess. I have three different levels of stuff that I use for backcountry. If I'm just going out and I don't think I'm going to filter water, I just take a stainless steel single-wall water bottle and some iodine or another chemical purifier. Iodine works pretty well, but you don't want to be using it long-term. It's not good for you long-term for your thyroid. And then I'll filter it through like a buff

or a kefir or something to get the turbidity out and use that. If it's a trip where I'm just in the back country in America, I take a squeezy filtration system. Catadine B3 is the one I tend to use. And you want to have a dirty bag and a clean bottle right so you're squeezing from the dirty water into the clean water um and then if i'm going somewhere for work where there are virus risks and where it might be like what you'd call like

a non-permissive environment a place where you don't want to hang around near a water source for a long time in case it's dangerous i have this thing called an msr guardian which is not cheap and you probably don't need it for what you're doing. But if you are concerned about viruses, it has a dirty bag and a clean bag, and it's a hang filter, so you can fill up three liters of water, bugger off to somewhere safe, hang it up, and let that filter from the dirty bag into the clean bag, and then you're not standing by the water filtering or pumping.

I've used that in some pretty fetid situations and been fine. And I'll say, though, pretty fetid situations and been fine. And I'll say though, the thing that I used off-grid was I used a Sawyer, just a regular Sawyer water filter. They're like 30 bucks. And I attached it to a five gallon bucket with some hoses and then I gravity fed it. And I just left it dripping from one five gallon bucket to another.

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

The reason it went weekly is now there's more hosts. And you can listen to that wherever you listen to podcasts every Friday. And soon you'll be able to hear James on it. But I don't know when. Ooh, you'll just have to hear james on it but i don't know when oh you just have to listen to all of them yeah uh where can people see you gloating on twitter from your mountaintop uh magpie killjoy until i finally get sick of twitter which is increasingly likely every single day the hell so yeah yeah well thank you very much margaret that was thanks for having me informative you are welcome alright bye everyone bye

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Hello and welcome to It Could Happen Here with me, Andrew, of the YouTube channel Andrewism. And today I'm joined by... Garrison is here. Greetings. also here hello and i wanted to talk about the idea of the noble savage it's something that people have occasionally brought up in my comment section when i discuss really anything related to, hmm, maybe there's something to learn, something to be learned from the indigenous people of pre-colonial period. There's often this accusation levied against any sort of positive representation of their society,

any sort of generous reading of their society as something to be scoffed at as something to be ridiculed as something to be you know seen as perpetuating this trope of the noble savage and so i was in some sort of at first i was in sort of a, I got into a sort of defense mood and I was like, well, hmm, I really don't want to do that, right? I don't want to create this caricature of indigenous peoples in my videos that, you know, falsely represents all their complexities and stuff. Obviously, every group throughout history has had many layers to them. And then in reading Dawn of Everything by David Graeber and David Wenger,

I ended up stumbling upon even further information on the subject. And so that's something that I want to talk about. You know, this idea, where the idea of the Noble Savage came from, how it's used, and I think how we should be approaching it today but before i even get into all of that are you familiar with this term and how it's used

yeah i mean i i think it's i don't know it it is interesting in the way that it kind of like i don't know there was kind of this shift of it being used as a term to critique sort of like racist white fantasy to being a term that's used to sort of bludgeon anytime anyone like has the temerity to suggest anything in another society then this one could have possibly have been better which is a kind of grim shift i think in a lot of ways and i think has done a lot of political damage by people who sort of don't quite understand what was going on yeah uh and that is a shift that i noticed as well and for a while i thought that was really how the term was originally meant to be applied. I mean, we see it all over discussions of anthropology and philosophy and literature,

which could be extended to media as a whole, right? You have this sort of stock character of the noble savage, this person that's uncorrupted by civilization, uncorrupted by civilization something that's a person that symbolizes this sort of innate goodness and moral superiority living in harmony with nature that we don't have access to because we've been corrupted by the influences of civilization right it's this idealized concept of an uncivilized or sort of base man right or rather person and i mean we see it a lot in rightist discourse being used as a term of derision for example a right-wing australian politician named dennis jensen once told parliament that the australian government should not be funding people to live a noble savage lifestyle in remote indigenous communities

jesus yeah christ and it's it's used to mock the so-called backwards lifestyles of indigenous people and really try to reinforce this um white supremacist idea of their inferiority or their backwardness, their regressiveness, whatever the case may be. And then on the other side, in leftist political discourse, you also see it being used as a term of derision. So in both cases, it's being used as a term of derision without really a good grasp of what the term is, where it came from. For example, anarcho-primitivists are criticized for upholding this trope. And of course, leftists criticize other leftists for falling for the trope when describing indigenous histories, spiritualities, and social ecologies. for the trope when describing indigenous histories spiritualities and social ecologies it seems like you can't even bring up um any sort of reciprocal gift economy based relationship

the land that indigenous group might have had without somebody saying oh well did you know that indigenous people also perpetuated extinctions and genocides and this and the other um so i i really don't think that anytime you learn from a society that predates your own and may still persist that you're doing a noble savage but it is um something that i had become very conscious of in my approach to any sort of discussion I feel like it sort of haunts the discourse among other sort of stock characters and troops that permeate in our political conversations within media the trope has you know come in and out of fashion um but the two main forms that it appears in is one that life is strenuous the life of a quote-unquote primitive is strenuous and therefore this

savage is nobly brave hardworking and honorable and you have this other depiction which is that the savage and again it pains me to use the term every time but the savage is not greedy and just doesn't have a taste for luxury so it might be seen in in certain media it's been a long time since i've watched the road to el dorado but if i recall there is this sort of idea within um the movie that they're so used to this the decadence and stuff of of gold and whatnot that they don't consider it as valuable they consider it worthless so there's this aspect of the trope that treats materials traditionally considered valuable um to be something to be sort of shrugged off or flaunted. And then of course, because what is philosophy?

What is really our ontology without some sort of reference to the stories embedded within the Christian canon, right? There is this sort of interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden as Adam and Eve being these noble savages that live in this uncorrupted innocence and harmony with nature. And then they partake in this fruit from the tree of knowledge, or they become, quote unquote, civilized.

And then they're punished by having to engage in agriculture and have to labor over the land instead of living in harmony with it. So one interpretation of that story is that it's a metaphor for the dawn of agriculture and the Garden of Eden is a sort of nostalgic take. Even later on, when Europeans first encountered hunter-gatherer communities in the Americas, they compared them to being living in a sort of Eden.

And today, you still find comparisons to eden um used to describe certain hunter-gatherer societies and of course as this is quite topical you often see this criticism of noble Savage and whatever being levied against Avatar, as in the blue people, not the last airbender. Because they have this sort of, oh, we are these utterly perfect, you know, peace-loving space hippies all in harmony with nature, chilling and vibing. We literally have sex with trees kind of vibe um and i haven't seen the second movie in the series i only saw the first but i wouldn't be surprised if that trend

continues i don't know have you all seen either or both of them i saw the first one and i was like i'm no not nothing on earth can compel me to see the second one so i have no idea if it's true or not yeah and i mean the the concept of the noble savage it has its roots a lot further back than european encounters with native americans right that's sort of the intellectual lineage of the concept could actually be traced back to ancient Greece so if you really want to reach you could say that even back in the Akkadian epic of Gilgamesh that Enkidu as a sort of bushman was a kind of a depiction of that contrast between hunter-gatherer societies and agricultural societies that gilgamesh

representing of course you know civilization um but if we start in from ancient greece uh we could say we've seen huma and pliny and xenophon all idealizing the arcadians and other groups whether they were real or not and then later on in rome um you find tacitus for example writing of the noble germanic and caledonian tribes in contrast with his view of roman society as this sort of corrupt and decadent place he even wrote speeches like he practically wrote fan fiction about liberty and honor for his sort of caricatures of these people um other writers would also treat the scythians comparably you'll see it in the works of Horace and Virgil and Ovid. And then further on, you know, in the 12th century,

the polymath Ibn Tufayl wrote in his novel, The Living Son of the Vigilant, this idea of this sort of stripped down, back to the roots, earthy wild man who is isolated from society and has a series of trials and tribulations that lead him to knowledge of Allah by living this life in harmony with Mother Nature. life in harmony with mother nature basically theorizing this idea that people can find can find their way to to god just by being exposed to nature finding a sort of a theological understanding by understanding the natural world all of this is sort of a preamble to really what most people point to as the origins of the concept the modern myth of the noble savage it's most usually attributed to 18th

century enlightenment philosopher jean-jacques rousseau and he believed the original man was somebody that was free from sin appetite appetite, or the concept of right and wrong. And those deemed savages were not brutal, but noble. Or at least this is how the story goes. The idea can also be found in theology. The founder of the Methodistusian novel writer, believe that, you know, there's this idea of man in the beginning at the roots connected with nature is not as corrupted,

is more connected with nature and with God compared to the so-called degeneracy found in 18th century society, compared to the disease and materialism seen throughout the world. David Graeber, in one of his recent posthumous works, Pirate Enlightenment, and in a lot of his other works as well, he sort of grapples with this idea of the enlightenment right and how flawed our understanding of the enlightenment is how our approach to enlightenment

as a sort of era um unique to europe or this era centered upon europe is flawed in its approach because it leaves out the realities that the enlightenment occurred um as a result of europeans interactions and exposure to the rest of the world you had these um european explorers and colonizers and scientists venturing out, trading, interacting with these different groups of people, hearing their ideas about things, and then going back and writing best-selling books about these societies and how they believe and what they think and how they organize their society. One chronicler, for example,

noted that among the Indians or Native Americans, that land belonged to all, just like the sun and water. Mine and thine, the seeds of all evils, do not exist for those people. They live in a golden age, in open gardens, without laws or books, without judges, and they naturally follow goodness. Rousseau, Thomas More, and others also idealized the naked savages as innocent of sin. Another one wrote about how they are equal in every respect, and so in harmony with their surroundings, they all live justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. surroundings, they all live justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. Basically, we just found a whole continent of people basically living in a garden of Eden. But then this concept of ecological nobility that is perpetuated is, of course, flawed. Like I mentioned earlier, there were cases of overexploitation and damage done to the environment.

And yet, we also find in a lot of indigenous groups, the living in compatibility with the ecological limitations of their home area, getting familiar with the lands that they live on and what it takes to preserve them for the next generations. A lot of what is seen as a sort of virgin landscape was profoundly shaped by the controlled burns, the horticulture, the herding, and other activities done by indigenous groups throughout the Americas, for example, in the case of the Amazon rainforest, and in Australia, as another case, where the controlled burns really shaped that landscape over thousands and thousands of years. to this day you know the methods used by indigenous peoples have been found to be you know superior to those used by non-indigenous peoples living in the same habitat methods like polycropping techniques to enhance soil fertility sustainable harvesting and of course there are these culturally encoded mores that are placed in these communities

that help result in the preservation of these resources. Then you also have to account for the fact that no culture is stagnant. Every culture changes over time. And as a result of the capitalist market economy, a result of the capitalist market economy there is this pressure to over exploit the land for the sake of profit you know a lot of where these documented patterns of land cultivation and land preservation are found is usually in the outskirts and the margins of the capitalist market economy. Such practices can be more difficult to find right in the belly of the beast. For example, the Irapa Yukpa in Western Venezuela, they were traditionally mobile over an extensive area,

plants and food, search and game. And now they're stationary, now they're settled, and now they sort of are forced to adopt a different lifestyle in response to their new material conditions. When you had that lesser population density and greater freedom to roam, it was easier to both satisfy subsistence needs and also maintain the health and vitality of the ecosystem over an extended period of time but now that surpluses are needed now that agriculture has been reduced to a very small portion of the population and that those techniques are now expected to be more intensive in order to keep up with the demands those lifestyles and those cultural mores and those practices have had to change. But back to the idea of the noble savage, right?

And particularly drilling into this idea of the noble aspect of it, right? Because there's some confusion, as Graeber points out, between these two meanings associated with the word nobility. points out between these two meanings associated with the word nobility you could say someone is noble in the sense that they are you know moral good exemplary in their behavior and their etiquette in their ethical standards or you could say somebody is noble in the sense they have this position in a sort of a class system a hereditary position in a class system an elevated economic status Rousseau didn't come up with the phrase and in fact he never never used in his writings. What Ter Ellingson, a historian, discovered, or rather explored in his book, The Myth of the Noble Savage, is that the term was coined over a century before Rousseau's birth by a guy named, by a French lawyer, ethnographer named Marc Lescarbeau.

And Lescarbeau described indigenous peoples as truly noble, not having any action, but as generous, whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars. The nobility was more so associated not with just moral qualities like generosity and good behavior, but also nobility from a legal standpoint. The lives of freedom, the privileges and the responsibilities that the indigenous people enjoyed were also found, according to Lescarbot, within the European nobility. In Cannibals and Kings, an anthropologist by the name of Marvin Harris went on to explain why Lescarbot had recognized nobility among the indigenous people that he visited. In a lot of the band and village societies societies there was a level of economic and political freedom that very few enjoyed in his day and even today you know people decided for themselves how long they wanted to work on a particular day

what they would do or if they would even work at all you know they didn't have to deal with taxes and rents and tribute payments that and and one could even extend to say debts, that keep people today and in the past so confined and restricted in their limited life on this earth. What should have been, you know, this sort of normal standard, you know, of human freedom is in contrast with european society just like mind blow in yeah there's another david graber actually i've been talking about there never was a west a lot recently and one of the things that he he talks about in that in in there ever was a west is this like trick that european writers use when they're looking at another society which is like they they present themselves as like people whose behaviors are sort of are entirely rational and they're solving a logic puzzle and then they go find like i don't know what they consider to be the weirdest thing

and so like sorry they go find what they consider to be the weirdest thing that like another culture does and look at it through this, you know, this lens, which draws in the reader to be doing this sort of logic puzzle and trying to figure out, Oh, how could these people do this thing? And then,

you know, if you, if you pull back the lens a little bit and look at like what these supposedly objective European like theorists are doing, it's like, well, okay, these guys all have these really weird tea ceremonies and like they eat the they eat the flesh of their god every weekend and stuff like that and so you

get this really interesting but the the when when you read it through their sort of colonial ethnography you get this image of both societies that's very weird that that lets you sort of that conceals the fact that yeah like when these european writers are talking about meeting indigenous people like you kind of the way that it's written makes it very easy to sort of like do this colonial thing where you forget that every single french writer who is writing about this lives in like the most hierarchical society the world's ever seen yeah yeah that's so true and it's like well yeah of course like they they they went to literally any other place on earth and talked to people and were like oh my god these people are like are really free it's like well yeah it's because these guys live under the french like they're like french absolutism this is like i think

graber's line was like this is a society where every single person, when they walk into a dining room, immediately knows the class of every single other person sitting around the table by how they hold their silverware. Yeah, it's absurd. living on the generosity of the people around them being reliable in you know the foundations of you know community not even necessarily because i mean obviously there were hierarchies to be found within a lot of these cultures and communities but not to the extent that you would have found in some of these European societies. Not even close. Yeah, these are the European, like, I don't know, like Europe has been really, really, I mean, you know, this is the sort of organizational trend of European society for like last,

like four or 500 years has been just incredible, unfathomable centralization on a level that was just, it's just sort of incomprehensible to most of the people who've ever lived. But we treat as sort of normal now because it's a society that we've grown up under. Yes, it's, I'm trying to draw a comparison between Europeans and Contra in this level of freedom in other societies. europeans encountering this level of freedom in other societies and sort of like i can't think of any specific example right now but you know how you know growing up as a child in a particular household your house would have certain norms that you think is just like universal you know like everybody does this obviously this is just a fact of life in the universe.

But in reality, it's just like some weird quirk one of your parents had that you just had to grow up with. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like for example, this is a really weird example, but let's say for example, you had like ceramic dishes would not allow to be used ever right they were purely for decoration and your parents told you that it's some grave moral sin to eat off of ceramic dishes and then you go to somebody's house and they have all their plates laid out and you're like you're utterly baffled by how they're able to eat off of ceramic dishes if i could think of a better example

um but for now yeah that's what i wrote i wrote with anyway despite recognizing all of this freedom and stuff they were kind of like disgusted by it, at least some of them. You know, some of them, when publishing their texts in Europe, would put their own liberal ideas into the mouths of indigenous people to say, oh, I'm not saying this. This is obviously like treasonous, and I would never say this. But this indigenous guy who I spoke to the other day, he said it. And so I'm just publishing what he said. So that took place sometimes um and then there also those who were like utterly disgusted by

the liberty uh exhibited in in some of these societies but whether they saw that freedom as a positive or as a negative um despite all their fluffy words about indigenous liberties, that didn't really matter for indigenous people at the end of the day. Because, you know, through the centuries, empires continued to swallow indigenous lands. And the phrase basically disappeared for about 250 years because the idea of the noble savage was reversed by this stereotype of the dangerous

brutal savage like how dare they defend their land and way of life right it wasn't until 1859 that the term was resurrected by a guy named john crawford a white supremacist uh he wanted to become president or rather right he was attempting to become president of the Ethnological Society of London. And he was very disdainful of this idea emerging in anthropology and philosophy of universal human rights. Like, how dare you? So he introduced the phrase, resurrecting it after 250 years to make a speech to the society. And by the way,

he's the one who first misattributed this speech, the phrase to Rousseau. Basically ridiculing, using the noble savage as a term to ridicule those who sympathized with such, quote, less advanced cultures and so that sort of fabrication where he attributed it to russo and he built up this straw man to blow it

down you know it's basically this myth of the myth of the noble savage he creates a straw man of the noble savage as a myth and then that's what perpetuated but his myth of the noble savage wasn't was the one that was a myth so it's you know the myth of the myth of noble savage and so as the british empire was reaching the height of its power and he was you know trying to ridicule anybody who had anything nice to say about indigenous people that straw man was used to continue to advocate for the extermination crawford's version of noble savage became the source for every citation of the myth by anthropologists from lubach tyler or boss through the scholars of the late 20th century so even 100 years later people were still using the term that he came up with this rhetorical cheap shot that he used and to this day it continues to polarize our discussions

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

it really keeps us from engaging with history properly and i mean even if somebody is exaggerating or expunging certain aspects of a particular society or culture that should be engaged with directly you know i don't think you should fall back on a lazy troop popularized by a white supremacist. I mean, we live under states now. We live under capitalism now. And I don't think, I don't fault people for trying to imagine what life must have been like before then, before these institutions

became so all-encompassing what becomes an issue is when we take you know these past societies and we use them as these beacons of virtue instead of going back and trying to take their their lessons and their practices and adopting them and interpreting them to move forward there was a lot of freedom and there still is a lot of freedom left to be uncovered in our history it is obscured in our history classes it isn't taught instead we're taught facts and figures and wars and notable individuals we're taught of kings and dictators and high priests and emperors and prime ministers and presidents and chiefs and judges and jailers and dungeons penitentiaries and concentration camps

this is our existence now but it doesn't have to be and if we're going to have an honest exploration of our history in order to inform our future we have to free our imaginations of this lazy troop of the noble savage that's it for me for this episode you can check me out on youtube.com slash andrewism and also on twitter at underscore stdrew as well as on patreon.com slash stdrew. This is It Could Happen Here. You can find us in the usual places on Twitter, Instagram. And yeah, go be free. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.

For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, 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.

Curious about queer sexuality, cruising, and expanding your horizons? Hit play on the sex-positive and deeply entertaining podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Join hosts Gabe Gonzalez and Chris Patterson Rosso as they explore queer sex, cruising, relationships, and culture in the new iHeart podcast, Sniffy's Cruising Confessions. Sniffy's Cruising Confessions will broaden minds and help you pursue your true goals. You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. Welcome to Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get real and dive straight into todo lo actual y viral. We're talking música, los premios, el chisme, and all things trending in my cultura. I'm bringing you all the latest happening in our entertainment world and some fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin

artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get fun and impactful interviews with your favorite Latin artists, comedians, actors, and influencers. Each week, we get deep and raw life stories, combos on the issues that matter to us, and it's all packed with gems, fun, straight-up comedia, and that's a song that only Nuestra Gente can sprinkle. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.