It Could Happen Here - It Could Happen Here Weekly 95

Episode Date: August 12, 2023

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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. It Could Happen Here is the podcast that this is right now. Would you guys solo intro this podcast, James Stout, Mia Wong? Do y'all just like shout atonally ever? Have y'all tried that yet? I haven't.

I struggle with the intros. I just say hello, everyone. Hi, James. Nope. Nope. I could try it next time. the intros, I'd say, hello, everyone. Hi, James. Nope. Nope. I could try it next time. That's your East Coast Ivy League elitism coming through.

Yeah, that's correct. Ever since I was born in Boston, I've had that. Yeah. Growing up on a different side of the tracks to yourself, also from Boston, of course. That's right. That's right, yes. In East Boston. Train tracks In Boston, I'm sure.

I'm not allowed currently to do the accent because Sophie. Is that for legal reasons? Yeah. Yeah. I yeah. Yeah. She's got some dirt on me anyway. We are a podcast about things falling apart. And you know what would make things fall apart worse than they already are is if donald

trump won a second term um so today we're going to talk uh partly about that and we're going to talk about the indictments against him that's the big news right um the most recent big political news unless he's been indicted again by the time this episode drops not impossible another one ready to drop but for my last count i think he's at like 78 charges felony charges at the moment so honestly he might get to triple digits it's not he's not all that far um there's yeah there's stuff like i i didn't realize well i i guess i knew intellectually that you could that you could be charged with conspiracy to do something and then also doing it but i don't think i ever see doing it but i don't think i've ever seen oh yeah like i i don't think i've ever seen a politician charged with both conspiracy and the actual doing of the thing yeah i hope at some

point assuming you know we continue to have something that resembles freedom of speech we'll get a good book about like how the whole process of them like figuring out how and when and whether to actually like go after him um i mean obviously we're talking about both like the feds and um uh the da uh in new york uh but i am interested in both of those stories because it there has to be there have to have been some real interesting conversations. But yeah, we are – right now we're looking at him. He's about to be arraigned as we talk about this for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol. So that's pretty cool. Mia, you wanted to start us off here I think? is an interesting indictment in that like it somehow took them about two years to like actually do the indictment that's like hey it's illegal to overthrow try to overthrow the government by installing yourself as president um and in fairness they don't have a lot of experience charging people with that one well and we should actually mention they should bush well here's the

thing bush bush we're gonna talk about this more later but like bush actually got away with this right like the last time a court ruled on whether a president can use the courts to install themselves as president the supreme court was like yeah that's fine that's like no problem like yeah it's fine you you can you you can have a mob show up and disrupt the counting process and it's fine but trump like fucked up and didn't do it the way you're supposed to um yeah and you know there's something sort of i don't know so there's something i was thinking about while i was reading this which is like the english language doesn't i think part of the issue here is like we don't i don't know the english language doesn't even like have a good word for like the kind of coup that trump was

doing like there's a spanish word which is autogolpe, which is like Spanish coup. In English, they translate it to self-coup and we're just like, yeah, we're done. It's like, no, that sucks. That term sucks. It's really bad. I wish I had a better Trump voice because then I could do autogolpe. What is that? Is that like at 7-Eleven, the big 64-ounce Diet Coke that you get?

But I can't do a good Trump. So that wasn't as funny as it should have. Anyway, whatever. Mia, please continue. We had it. So, you know, I think, you know, I think it's worth kind of thinking a little bit. And we're going to sort of come back to this as we go through this case. But I think it's worth remembering that again like everything trump

is doing in this is based off of um like is is is based off of the the sort of bush thing into in 2000 where he had a bunch of well okay so a bunch of Bush's political operatives like stormed one of the places that was doing the recount in Florida and stopped them from counting the votes. And then they just delayed it and called long enough that he was able to get appointed. The Brooks Brothers riot. Roger Stone was a major part of that. Yeah. So we've done this. We talked about this on the show like the end of last year.

Yeah. But but again, so the reason this worked, though, right, is that Bush made really, really sure that there was like a sound legal case sort of behind this entire thing. He he he made he made really sure to, like, go through all of the proper, like like checks and balances and blah, blah, blah, blah. And Trump just like didn't do this. And the result of this is that Jack Smith, like finally two years later, Jack Smith, who's this guy, he was he was appointed by Merrick Garland to like take over these two Justice Department cases about Trump. It has just indicted him with this stuff. He has, so he's been charged with three counts of criminal conspiracy, but I think it's a count of obstruction. So I'm gonna go through

what he's actually been charged with. And I wanna note something real quick, which is that another reason why it worked for Bush and it didn't for Trump is that with Bush, it was legitimately, the election came down to Florida, right? Like it was extremely close. It was legitimately the election came down to Florida, right? Yeah. Like it was, it was extremely close.

It was really just a couple counties in Florida with Trump. He was not trying to just sort of like jink, jink part of a state. It was like, it was like Biden had a commanding lead. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was a big dub for Uncle Joe.

Yeah. And, and, you know, so yeah, Uncle Joe. Yeah, and you know, obviously Trump just fails at this spectacularly. The law is finally coming after him. So they're charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States, which again is the thing I didn't know you could do. Lance Armstrong got that, didn't he? Did he?

Yeah, because USPS was his sponsor, so he was defrauding the federal government And he was doping Yeah, that's the Don't do post office charges Trump's the first guy who's not rad to get charged with that Sorry, James I didn't mean it

I'm leaving my job Sorry, everyone, I'm out No worries This one is specifically Impairing the specifically like impairing the election like impairing like the the the the votes of the presidential election the first one is mostly we'll talk about this more in a bit like the illegitimate electors thing that he did the second one is just him being charged for they they finally found a thing to charge him for doing

january 6th which was they charged him with like conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. And then they got him also with obstruction, obstructing an official proceeding, which, again, seems like a kind of like this is I don't know. It's not quite getting Al Capone for tax evasion, but like you'd think they'd have something like more powerful to overthrow the government. Yeah, you tried to have him as a dictator. Att government attempting to make yourself a dictator bonapart is well not really bonapartism but yeah yeah like seditions right there sedition that's a fine choice yeah right like it seems like a choice they they got him on obstruction okay sure i don't know like this is i feel like our our i don't know, our legal system seems to be sort of woefully unprepared for this. Well, yeah, it's not. Again, in fairness, everyone has before Trump was willing to play the game. Right.

Like we are like obviously George W. Bush stole the fucking election. No argument there. So did Nixon. But they did it with enough plausible deniability, right? That the elite, that there was not a fear among the quote unquote deep state or the people, the elites in this country that this would obviously be someone overthrowing the government, right? In Nixon's case, fucking LBJ basically refused to go after him for breaking the law and extending the Vietnam War and committing treason because it would be bad in his view for the country. Horrible mistake, obviously. And with George W. Bush, he had the court on his side. So there was enough plausible deniability that it you know, it was not like it is with Trump, where he was just like, I'm going to have a mob. Yeah.

Like, I'll take the Capitol, you know? It's a dude in a Yat Kat. You know, I was thinking about this, like the last time someone actually did something like this, I think it was the corrupt bargain in like 1873, where just like, like they, there was this argument. With a Wilmington coup. were just like like they there was this argument over the wilmington coup yeah well i mean i mean like yeah but like like on on the presidential level of like yeah like literally someone like like rothruby hayes famously like they had basically this incredible thing where like both parties were like they couldn't decide who was supposed to count the votes and which whichever like part of the two parties counted the votes was going to declare what they won,

that they won the election. And so they worked out this like incredibly, basically they worked out this compromise for like the Republicans got Rutherford behaves like in office, but they also ended reconstruction. But that, but, and that,

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

There's a reason San Diego's called Enron by the sea, Mia. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. Look, you have to respect local culture with these kinds of things and and illinois it would actually be like an act of uh of genocide to try to make illinois politics not incredibly oh yeah i mean right that's the destruction of a people yeah like one of the most hated political figures in like the entire history of illinois was this like state senator who went down for corruption but went

down for like a hundred dollars of corruption and despised like one of the most hated political figures in illinois because he only went down for he only did a hundred dollars of uh of crimes whereas like our current governor did like a bunch of really funny fraud and everyone loves him because it's hilarious where he like he like he like took all of the bathrooms out of one of his houses so it wouldn't be classified as a house. See, that's a hero. That's the guy you want in charge of your legislative system. When he sees a loophole. That's the guy, if we ever have a corruption Olympics,

that's our only chance at beating the Russians. Well, but here's the thing. Illinois is going to be our dream team like i gotta say the coach pritzker is the least corrupt governor i've had in my lifetime this is the least corrupt guy he is like like he is corrupt but like who never shits yeah it's i don't know it always sort of amazing uh we should probably get back to yeah yeah this stuff and so the last thing he got was they got him of like conspiracy against rights.

It was like a conspiracy against the right to vote and have your vote counted, which sure. Yeah. Pretty bad thing to do. I think conspiracy. Yeah. I mean,

it's not good. Like all of the things that like they're accusing of, like he pretty clearly did. Yeah. Yeah. So I want to also talk about the way this has been being talked about in the media because one of the things happening here and this is this is sort of a trend with all forms of like things that are in the written language is that everyone only reads the first like maybe one

chapter or like especially the first couple of pages of something from any like written document so this this is why like all the like you know they're like uh uh abandon all hope ye who enter here from dante's inferno that's that's that's the reason that's when everyone knows because it's in like the first couple of chapters and in this one with this case the thing that everyone got to was there's this very early part in the indictment where the guy is like well yeah so like it is legal to like lie about the election like you have the free speech right to do that but then also trump knowingly lied about the election and use it to try to like lie about the election like you have the free speech right to do that but then also trump knowingly lied about the election and use it to try to like fraud do fraud and everyone is getting really hung up on this thing about like trying to like the court having to prove

that he knew he was lying which is kind of like an incidental thing to the actual like like the actual stuff he's getting charged for we'll get into it but like like it's not just that he was lying he said he was like actively trying to get a bunch of state officials to appoint him. Yeah. But, but, you know, this is, this has led to some just like absolutely hilarious shit from Republicans who are like, none of you can prove that Trump knew he was lying. Like there's, there's no way to know. Trump is, Trump is so Trump that like you can't, you can't, you can't convict him of

lying because he, he maybe, maybe you just didn't know. It's like, yeah, guys, that may not be the defense you think it is. No. This motherfucker's so dumb. You can't, like this guy doesn't even know if he's full of shit. It's so good. It's like, it's like arguing that somebody who shoots two or three people to death is not guilty because he had his eyes closed, was pulling the trigger.

He didn't know where he was shooting. You can't, that's not a crime. The other one, the other one they've been pulling is the old, like, uh, he didn't know it was illegal,

which I wish that was how the law works. that is absolutely not how the law works, homies. But this is, this is how you can tell, You know who made that not how the law works by the way this is how you can tell that like none of these people

have ever like had to deal with the legal system at all ever except for maybe like I don't know like one or two of these guys like probably caught weird charges for like unregulated security selling or some shit but like none of these people amongst us you know yeah but yeah so the Republican side of it's been very funny okay so before we get into

what like specific things they're going after trump for i i want to like talk about what his actual what trump's actual plan was because i think a lot of it's kind of been forgotten so yeah the first plan and this is the part that is that is not actually in this trial at all right like not really like there's there's his initial plan to steal the election was that okay so one of the things that happened in 2016 uh was that like absentee voters like over like not overwhelming but absentee voters like swung enormously democrat right and that was one of the things trump had been using to prove there was like voter fraud or whatever um and then you know covet happened and so trump had this like you know had had a

plan which was like on a but he's like okay so on election night it's going to look like i won because they're only going to have counted like they're only going to have counted the votes that were like done in person and those are overwhelmingly trump and i i remember like that night like having to tell all my friends like no no no these are not the real results this is this is this is just the in-person votes the absentee votes are coming yeah and his initial plan was to try to just like declare victory that night basically try to declare victory immediately and then get everyone to stop counting and that didn't work like even like even fox news would it eventually like stop playing along with it like this got them in huge trouble with Trump because they like called Arizona.

Yeah. Yes. He's still pissed about that. Yeah. Now, and again, like this, this didn't work. So they didn't like he's not being tried for that, even though that was also very blatantly an attempt to steal the election. What they are charging him for was so after after.

So there was like that stuff. And there was all these like stop the vote mobs that kept showing up in places yes stop the count right yeah yeah it's not the count but then also in some places they were like we need to count more and so yeah yeah it was like it was a it was a whole thing but you know what once that fails right trump and his coup plotters are like legal people are just sort of like freestyling it and that's the part where you get to the actual conspiracies that is being charged with here. But before we get to those conspiracies,

do you know what else is a conspiracy? The existence of products and services which you think will improve your life. How cheap they are. That's the conspiracy. They've lowered the price so much it is illegal. Of all products and services. Wow. Fascinating. Defl illegal. Of all products and services. Yeah, wow.

Fascinating. Deflation. That's incredible news. Incredible news. We're back. And yeah, I have got some good news for you. We are all sponsored this week by three shipping crates of illegal contraband Marlboro cigarettes that our buddy Jimmy over at the docks managed to get.

So six bucks a pack, guys. Six bucks a pack. Just send them to jimmy at protonmail.com. He'll mail you cigarettes. You Venmo him the cash. He'll send you some cigarettes. There you go. This is probably less illegal

than anything we're talking about right now. Yeah, almost certainly. Look, it's not against the law to sell cigarettes that that you don't pay taxes on i think we can all agree that that's fine actually no yeah you can do that in an airport i think you legally can do that if you're selling it in an airport if you're selling it in an airport yeah if it's duty-free right and i because i have such a childlike imagination the whole world is really my airport ergo yeah i wish we can always sell tax-free cigarettes here at cool zone media that's why we have the uh the small plane that takes off from robin's house every day it's like a remote control plane but that's right that's right from all tax law it it technically counts uh and we are also allowed to run those uh those joe camel ads again um so

you know everybody who's 90s nostalgic there you go once you made it all right so the first conspiracy thing that he's getting charged with is the like fake electors thing he also has like six unnamed co-conspirators and we know we probably know who like five of them are so the first one obviously is rudy giuliani who is having i the the time of his life question mark he is he is like he is melting so funny live on tv like it's um the second one's probably john eastman and this is interesting because eastman is the guy who he's like the legal mind behind january 6th he's the guy who like thinks that he's found a loophole in the law that allows like the vice president and refuse to certify the election yeah and so this is i don't want to make something clear at the outset like he does not have like pence does not have the power

to do this you're not allowed to do that no no like you can't do this right like like this is if if pence had gone along with this that would have been a coup right like that yeah they call this yeah that would have been a coup like there's not a clause in the constitution that says unless this guy doesn't want to have an election this is not right it's some like admiralty flag tia fucking legal conspiracy that's that's not really yeah yeah guaranteed it came from reddit before he found it that's where it originates it's some it's some real bullshit like this somehow again this is the legal basis for what they were trying to do on january 6th i i don't know words words fail me like tragedy is farce of the brooks brothers riot i guess but like this is like farce number three i don't know i think the first one

the first one was nixon extending the vietnam the Vietnam War in order to win his election. The farce was the Brooks Brothers riot. And now we're at like lead poisoning, brain damage. Yeah, like this is this is this is Marx failed to consider that you could have a third or fourth farce. Like he only got to one. So speaking speaking of farts so the third the third uh co-conspirator is probably sydney powell who apparently the the last i heard about sydney powell i he's currently like owns a bed and breakfast and spends all of his time talking with his guests about the trump

administration so things are going great for sydney powell who is one of trump's lawyers more or less what i would like him to do yeah yeah i mean if you can just keep sticking to doing that yeah great yeah so the fourth guy is jeffrey clark who doesn't really matter the fifth guy i just want to like okay so i i partially there's only like only really juliani eastman and pow matter. But I, the fifth guy is named Kenneth Chelsea, bro, which that's okay. No, you're fucking with us now.

That's not a name. That's not a name. I got nothing. I don't know. Like that is not a name. They, they have like dug up members of like the old Chelsea aristocracy that like, I,

I, I got nothing. I don't know. I i've never i've never been this angry in my life that's not a naked shit up now like that's that okay it's not cheese bra it's chelsea bro i can't see this person's name i have no idea it's chese bro chesa bro i don't know there's no version of how you say that name That's like a town outside of Boston Yeah, I I

I know it's something insane like Kybro Is he bro? It's Cheese bro Cheese bro, really? That's so bad. Yeah, no, I know a guy from Central California with that name.

That is viscerally upsetting. Okay, so speaking of viscerally upsetting, so we should remind everyone how... We should remind everyone how American elections work because it's really one of the worst systems anyone's ever developed. So, okay, so as most people probably know, you don't directly elect the president what you do instead is each each state of like you vote well okay so sorry let's run this up each state selects electors now there's

nothing in the constitution that says you have to select electors by like voting for them uh it's just that every state chose to do that there's like a whole crank theory of republican like legal jurisprudence where they're trying to use that to be able to just like not basically not have normal elections but you know so because this is like dog shit right like it's bad for a number of reasons the first obvious one is that like this means you the u.s does not have one person one vote at all like the entire american political system is just a giant violation of the principle of one person one vote because people's votes are just worth more than others because of the electors the second thing

that's really bad right is again like those individual electors can technically vote like however they want to so you could you could be an elector who's supposed to vote for someone and then vote for someone else it's actually happened although it went i'm not mattering but like one of gore's electors i think defected to uh what's his name the third guy who ran uh i can't remember his name someone in 2016 party guy yeah um someone did it in 2016 as well i think rogue yeah um there's a little bit of like i don't know this is a good i was going to talk Someone did it in 2016 as well, I think, Rogue Electra. There's a little bit of like, I don't know if this is a good... I was going to talk about the difference between procedural and substantive democracy. I could talk about it now or later, but I think it relates to what you're talking about.

Sure. Yeah, let's do it now. Do it now. Throw it out. Yeah. There were 10 in 2016. Wow. Some interesting... Oh, Faith Spotted Eagle is the one I'm thinking of.

Someone voted for Faith Spotted Eagle. But yeah. Okay. So one thing I wanted to talk about with relation to what you're saying, Mir, is the difference between procedural and substantive democracy. Because I think it's really important when we're looking at what's happening in the US. So when we talk about... A lot of this language comes from the 1990s obsession with transitions to democracy. That happens a lot of this language comes from the like 1990s obsession with transitions to democracy. That happens a lot in political science, right? Like and history to an extent where we were looking at these like post-Soviet countries

and post-colonial countries. And as they like move towards this, like what's considered a democracy in the kind of neoliberal frame, we talked about procedural and substantive democracy. So procedural democracy, the things which have the institutions and procedures in place, you vote. There are elections, the ballots are cast, and that results in, in this case, the electors going to electoral college and the electoral college delivers a president.

And then substantive democracy is where people have a substantive say, a means of deciding who is in charge, right? Who runs a state. And the US is moving further and further from substantive democracy. Like, it's been interesting to see people bringing that, because of course that 1990s discourse was centered heavily in the US, right?

As like the paragon of democratic virtue. And then it was used to condescend to other countries and be like, oh, you're not a fully consolidated democracy. Linz them linds and stephan if people want to look up linds and stephan if they're really bored they can but um they talk about like a consolidated democracy being one where uh democracy is the only game in town and all of this stuff like was heavily based on kind of aspiring to be the u.s right countries in africa eastern europe aspiring to be the US, right? Countries in Africa or Eastern Europe aspiring to be an American democracy. And it's very funny now to see that the US doesn't fit most definitions of a substantive democracy

or a consolidated one. Like it's not the only game in town for millions of Americans anymore. No. And yeah, it's highly amusing. My other favorite- Yeah, amusing's what I would call it. Absolutely, James.

Yeah, it's funny. It's just funny. Nothing bad will happen. It's fine. yeah my my other favorite example of like those of like how bullshit those like democracy theorists were was like every single one of those people the moment the zapatista uprising happened just like immediately shut the fuck up and never mentioned it ever like it just does not come up like in the thing oh Yeah. I mean, a lot of the, like, yeah,

a lot of them really had a lot of them also were like too busy looking at things and like in Spain, right. People looked at Spain's quote unquote transition as one of the earlier models. And then went on to model things off Spain. Spain is at best an incomplete transition now, right.

People paying attention to the most recent elections will maybe have noticed this. Spain is not a country where democracy is your only game in town, right? They had an attempted coup in 1981. And so they're kind of looking backwards of something because Spain was satisfactory democratic for them, but it certainly wasn't for a lot of Spanish people. So yeah, not a big fan. Yeah. And I don't know about you guys but i think there's nothing wrong with the way we decide things are democracies god gave it on the tablets to some old white men who had slaves and that that is good great yeah it's been funny also watching those people trying to like actually go back and look at like at what point the u.s became a like a democracy in any real sense and it's like they really like if you're gonna do this seriously you cannot argue that it was a democracy until

like after jim crow so like really like the 60s and even then so like i don't know like there's been a lot of attempts to sort of make this stuff work but then also you have all of this bullshit where again like because because it's based on this elector shit you can like this is how trump was able to like to try to do all this very weird stuff and this is the sort of you know this is the part where we get into like trump's second plan which his plan and this is the one he's actually getting charged for so his thing was he was trying to get states to just like ignore the popular vote and decertify so there's this process where like there's a day on which like the like electors that do the electoral votes are like certified and so his he was trying to do a couple things before

that he was trying to like get the actual electors like not certified and then have like another set of electors appointed that would vote for him and then that didn't work and so he was trying to get so like on that same day there were also a bunch of slates of electors that like like did like a fake appointment thing basically like trying to claim they were the real electors in a bunch of states yeah in michigan or somewhere right okay yeah i think yeah and this one was funny too because like some of the people who were like who like were on these slates like didn't know that they weren't the real electors like they had just been told that they were the real so they like unwittingly were like part of this coup attempt um and so the

indictment so that that that's the second part and so that also was kind of falling apart and so then we get to the sort of third thing which is this entire effort to get mike pence to not certify the election or so there's two versions of it one was that he doesn't certify the election at all and the second version of the conspiracy was like. So there were these states set up where Trump had put like a second slate of electors. And the plan was to like have those were like contested states. So the plan was to have Pence say that like none of those states had actually validly selected electors. So their votes don't matter. And then just like say that Trump won the election.

And none of this makes any sense. And the reason this is like incomprehensible is like none of this makes any sense right like this is all just gibberish it's bullshit yeah but but into this mess drops daddy quail now i think everyone so you two know who daddy quail is i i i'm realizing i i was running into people into people when I've been talking about this sort of story I'm about to tell who don't know who Danny Quayle is, and I feel I have a moral obligation to introduce this guy. Yeah. Give the man his full name, Mia. James Danforth Quayle.

Oh, God, I didn't know his name was Danforth. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Normative determinism at its finest yeah so quail i think is probably most famous for so he was he was george hw bush's vice president right and so okay so i want to tell the actual false so the the common version of the story that happens is that he doesn't know he didn't know how to spell potato and that's true but the actual story is so much funnier than that so okay quail is so okay so quail is george hw bush's vice president right it's 1992 like the like they're on they're like starting to go into election season

yeah and quail goes to like this spelling bee that's happening in this elementary school to like promote some random horrible idea horrible idea. Yeah, and so he asked this kid to spell potato, and the kid walks up and the kid spells potato correctly. This kid is like eight. Right? This is like a middle school. This kid is like tiny. And then

Quail looks at it and looks at, apparently they had a card that was spelled wrong, but Quail doesn't realize that the card's spelled wrong. So he goes to the board, he looks at the kid and goes, well, you need to add something to the end of it. And this kid is just baffled because she spelled the hito correctly. What do you mean? What the fuck are you talking about? The vice president of the United, that kid's an anarchist now. Like there's, there's no way. That kid's an anarchist now. There's no way to keep you.

Someone did a follow-up with him. Apparently, he's a small business owner or something, and he just tells the story all the time. Very funny, though. But, okay, this was a period of American history. This is one of the reasons that George H.W. Bush didn't win re-election. This broke 12 unbroken years of Republicans

winning every single election based he does seem like a plant like i i don't know if you've got some of his other ridiculous oh yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna read some of his quotes okay so so unless you think quail just had like one flub like no he's just like this uh i'm gonna read a couple so there's like a bunch of people who spent a bunch of time extensively documenting Dan Quayle quotes because that's what you did on the Internet in the 90s. Yeah. OK. The Holocaust was an obscene period in our nation's history.

I mean, this century's history. But we all lived in this century. I didn't live in this century. Huh. I feel like I want to diagram that one. Like, what were you trying to get across there, Dan? Yeah, well well cocaine was really kicking in you know he has this kind of in the same way that trump has like this

can't in which he does all of his incorporeal things like quail also has a can't like he does this kind of thing where he does the like he says a sentence and then he says i mean something else i mean something else and it doesn't none of them from the other one. So here's one of the other famous ones. Hawaii has always been a pivotal role in the Pacific. It is in the Pacific. It is a part of the United States. It is an island that is right there. Wow.

Fuck me. That's very Trumpy. Quayle famously went on to write large portions of Wikipedia. So that makes a lot of sense. It's so good yeah quail's own wikipedia calls him an intellectual lightweight and incompetent individual well it's just not untrue pretty hard to argue about that yeah mars is essentially in the same orbit mars is somewhat the same distance from the sun which

is very important we have seen pictures where there are canals, we believe, and water. If there is water, that means there is oxygen. If oxygen, that means we can breathe. Oh, good. Okay. Wow. There's a lot of science coming out of that statement. This man was vice president of the United States.

We have a firm commitment to NATO. We are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of NATO. We have a firm commitment to Europe. We are a part of Europe. Sure, yeah. He's so good. Well, no, you see, Mia, you just, you are not up on your geographic history

because the mountain ranges in Scotland are the same mountain range as the Appalachians. So technically, we are in Europe. In many ways. Damn, okay, I've been styled on by dan quayle there you go yeah yeah yeah now okay other than the fact that it's really funny you like why why am i talking about danny quayle and the answer is that okay so remember trump needs for for his like completely nonsense thing to like even kind of go to the next step of failing. He needs to convince Mike Pence and not certify the election. And Pence is like legitimately going back and forward on this.

He's like he's having this like moral dilemma and like he like wants to do it, but he's having problems making decision. And so he calls his old friend Danny Quayle. friend danny quayle and i think this is a really fascinating moment of sort of you know like this i think it's really fascinating indication of like how off the rails everything has gotten since when we released this 2016 but like 2020 sort of just like accelerates the magnitude of this which is that like quayle is like the human symbol of the decrepitness of american politics in the 80s and 90s right like this is a this is a guy who makes, like, senile Reagan look like a genius. And in 2020, in 2021, like, Pence is supposed to be one of the, like, quote-unquote adults in the room in 2020. And Pence goes to Quayle and is like, I need to do this coup. Like, I don't have a choice. I'm

under so much pressure. And Danny Quayle, the man who can't spell potato instantly is like no what are you talking about like you can't do this coup like you obviously can't do this and and pence pence just like argues with him he's like no no like he keeps arguing with him like no i have to do what i have to do and quayle's like what are you talking about like of course you can't like not certify the election like what what are you doing and this actually works this convinces pence not to not to actually certify the election and so you know we we have reached a point in history where like you can make an argument i don't think it's correct but you can make an argument that danny fucking quail saved the American Republic? Yeah. He saved us from two Republican presidents.

What? He's done better than Hillary Clinton. I don't know. I can't get over this. Danny Quayle is the voice of reason and moderation and like, oh god. I don't know. This country. It's bizarre. The whole thing

is bizarre. It's bleak. We should do an ad break. I don't have a pivot there. Speaking of auto golpe, gulp down these products. Automatic, magical. And we are back to a bit more fraud. So, okay, the other thing is being...

Just like the president. Yeah, this is... Actually, wait, is this the other thing is being just yeah this is actually wait this is actually fraud no i guess this is the fraud one it's still technically a fraud one so yeah that's part of it at least yeah so so we've reached the like third and fourth indictments it's actually really funny if you go read the thing all of the actual text of the indictment with the evidence and stuff is all under the first indictment and then the second third and fourth ones are like yeah go refer to x paragraphs of like the first one so there's the second third and fourth like charges are like like one paragraph long but basically this is about the january 6th stuff they spent a bunch of time listing like all of the random stuff that trump said about the election. That was not true. They also have a very funny list of all of the people who told him that

like this stuff wasn't true, which includes Mike Pence, the leadership of the justice department, the director of national intelligence, the head of CISA, which is the department of Homeland security, cybersecurity agency, a bunch of white house attorneys,

like his own staff, all of his politicians backing him he's like every single person was like this is not real and trump was like no no no hold on we can still win the election you know okay so there's like that stuff and then there's there's the stuff that like he like specifically did to like try to pressure these state politicians into like certifying him as president so like they he had a bunch of calls and like his like staff people had a bunch of calls we were like they tried to get uh like the the speaker of the house in arizona to do this by saying there was voting fraud and the speaker of the house was like okay there's no we haven't found

any fraud. I'm going to read from the thing. Co-conspirator 2 concluded that he, quote, didn't know enough about the facts on the ground in Arizona, but nonetheless told the Speaker of the House to decertify and, quote, let the court sort it out. So, again, this is the Roger Stone strategy, but done, like, so unbelievably poorly. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, and there, there,

there's a bunch of sort of like list. There's like all this list of like this, like Trump does like identical stuff in like Michigan and Pennsylvania. There's like that phone call in Georgia. He gets in trouble for stuff in Wisconsin. There's another thing he tried to do, which I actually hadn't heard about this one. I,

I don't know. It's either. I just forgot it or I just never ran into it where he was trying to like use justice department letterhead and like the the signature of the acting attorney general to like send a fake like pretend to send a letter from the justice department to a bunch of states to tell them there was fraud and get them to like amazing my mom says i'm sick and i can't come to school yeah and the funny thing is the problem is that they so they try to there's a lot that's funny about that i'm not gonna i'm not gonna see yeah we gotta pluralize that fucker it's so good and the scheme falls apart because again

the guy trump appointed as the acting attorney general is like no like you cannot use my name to say the fake letter for the justice department and they keep trying to argue with him and it keeps not working and this is where we get to another part of this whole thing that i this has been getting a lot of press attention and it's interesting but i think there's more to the story that people haven't been talking about which is so the guy who's probably jeffrey clark like gets into an argument with the deputy White House counsel and the deputy White House counsel is, you know, is telling is telling Jeffrey Clark, who I think is one of Trump's lawyers, is telling him like like Trump can't stay in office. Like there's no version of this where Trump stays in office after January 20th. And he says, quote, there would be riots in every major American city. And then the guy who's probably clark says quote well deputy white house

council that's why there's an insurrection act and this is where we need to get to another a couple of interesting parts of the story one you know to be clear when you're saying that's why we have an insurrection act you're saying we can just shoot those people yeah in the streets yeah like that is what that statement means yeah and that is what the stakes were everybody was people in the streets. That is what that statement means. Yeah. And that is what the stakes were. Everybody who was out in the streets in 2020 was aware of this. Yeah.

And this is the thing I kind of want to talk about, which is that part of the reason this coup fails is that, so Trump is talking about doing the Insurrection Act twice in 2020. Well, I guess once in 2020. I think this might've been, the second time might've been 2021 but like in that last year he tries to like use the insurrection act against the uprising in 2020 and his like his chief of stat like like a bunch of like a bunch of

generals his own chief of staff like tell them to fuck off and that's like part of the reason why this didn't happen which is interesting because like don't know, like there there have been like there have been times where the U.S. Army like has been deployed against like riots like this. Right. Like this happened. This happened in the 90s. But in this situation, the army just like absolutely completely refused to play ball. absolutely completely refuse to play ball um and we've we've gotten some really kind of interesting so so the other thing that's happening here is like just the complete hollowing out of journalism as an institution where all of these people know all of the all these journalists like know a bunch of incredibly important stuff and they won't tell anyone because they they're saving it for their books yep and you know and it's like among the things that we sort of learn in this period is like there's basically this like.

I don't know what you call it, like you could either call it like a quad umbrage, basically, or you could call it like a national unity government, which is in power for two weeks, basically, where Pelosi, Miley, who's the chief of staff, who's a general like like Mike Pence, Chuck Schumer, and Mitch McConnell basically are like running the government for two weeks because they've successfully put together this counter coup where the military has refused to like go along with Trump, like trying to overthrow the government. And this is very deeply, I don't know, there's some very deeply interesting stuff here where there's a book called I Alone Can Fix It, which a couple of journalists are coming out with. know there's some very deeply interesting stuff here where there's there's a book called i alone can fix it which a couple of journalists are coming out with and there's some

interesting quotes from it from specifically general mike miley who's like the chairman of the joint chief of staff who was appointed by trump by the way this is this is an important thing because like trump there's like seven guys who are like absolute ghouls like mike pompeo like caa ghoul who are are just like look at this coup and are like no and miley stuff is wild like miley directly can like in meetings he's comparing trump to hitler he says quote yeah this is a reichstag moment miley told aids the gospel of the fearer like and there's there's a i talked about this a little bit ahead of earlier there are some unconfirmed reports that miley and a number of other like US military high ranking officers basically had like a

book club. And one of the books they went through in 2020 was a book about the Nazis rise to power in Germany. I kind of suspect it might have been Death of a Democracy because that was big at the time. But it would make sense because he's talking in substantial detail about like he's very you can tell he's very focused in this period on nazis taking over the government like he talks about it a lot yeah and he has so he's i'm gonna read a couple other quotes from him um he has this

thing where i think he's talking to pompeo here where he's talking about like this coup and he says uh they may try but they're not gonna fucking succeed he told them you can't do this without the military you can't do this without the cia and the fbi we're the guys with the guns and he's right about this and this is a really crucial thing that trump fucks up about how to do a fascist coup is that you can't actually like fascist coups don't work without the at least passive acquiescence of the state like if the state tries if the rb tries to stop you your coup is not going to work, right? Like unless you're someone like Franco

who like has control of a huge portion of the army. If you try to do one of these sort of weird paramilitary things and the army just says no, like you're screwed. And this I think was always part of Trump's sort of problem was that like, you know, if he'd sort of spent his time

consolidating the kind of like fascist institutions the neocons set up, right? Like if he'd sort of spent his time consolidating the kind of like fascist institutions the neocon set up right like if he'd spent his time like you know actually like actually developing loyalty in the fbi and the cia and like going through and like turning department homeland security like you know into like an even more fascist organization he might have been able to do this but like at the very end like you have miley saying this is this is on uh this is on exercises right before the inauguration uh he says quote here's the deal guys these guys are the not are nazis they're bukala boys they're proud boys these are the same people we fought in world war ii miley told them everyone in this room

whether you're a cop whether you're a soldier We're going to stop these guys to make sure We have a peaceful transfer of power we're gonna Put a steel ring around this city And the Nazis aren't getting in Like You know what credit where it's due That's a pretty cool thing to get to Have said

Somehow like Somehow basically him and Zukov Yeah it's like like it's like somehow somehow like all of like suddenly like the american like all of like the senior command of the american army suddenly turned into like 1942 american generals it's like i don't know i i guess again i i try to say this i try to bring this up a lot to like more radical folks when you if you want to get a lot of the centrist lib types on your side,

you could do a lot worse than hearkening back to that whole World War II thing. There's a lot of propaganda invested in getting guys like Millie to want to feel like that. And in this case, it worked out for us. Yeah, apparently. I don't know. Lib Antifa has pulled one out,

I guess. It's certainly better than if the head of the military had been like i guess i'm fine with this so i don't know whatever like i don't know yeah i i have no complaints re his performance in that specific moment uh other than that they did actually get in so you know you know, whatever. But that was afterward, right? Between the 6th and the 20th. When they were drilling for the inauguration. When they stuffed the capital with National Guard soldiers like a sausage.

I guess it worked. I don't know. My other conclusion from this, though, is when you have reached the position of, like, you're trying to figure, like, your top generals are trying to figure out who has enough guns to figure out whether a coup can happen like things are things are not good this is a this is a a bad sign tm for no it's and it's not good like as nice as it is to hear that millie

understood the stakes which is good it's good that he understood the stakes given his position. It's not good that like so much came down to the fact that a couple dudes didn't suck in this specific way. Yeah. Like that's not a great sign for stability of democracy.

No one voted for Miley. Right. That's unsettling. Yeah. The whole democratic system was more or less at the edge of failing and a dude who was good at war because i mean no one voted for miley like right yeah that's unsettling yeah the the whole democratic system was more or less at the edge of failing and a dude who was good at war stepped in and was like yeah okay we don't want to do this this is one of those things right we know what this looks like with bush we're like if if you actually know how to press the buttons of the

system right you can do this but trump just like didn't have enough control of the state apparatus and tried to sort of replicate it with street violence and that just didn't have enough control of the state apparatus and tried to sort of replicate it with street violence and that just didn't work. Trump's problems here are twofold. One of them is that he is not capable of loyalty to anyone or anything else. Whereas a guy like George W. Bush is, which means he's capable of getting teams together who are willing to go out on a limb for him to some extent. And Bush also is system loyal. Now, that doesn't mean he's not willing to fuck with the system for his own benefit, but he has a vested interest in the system continuing more or less the way that it has, right,

as opposed to breaking it specifically forever for his own power. He was not a guy who was interested in staying in office for him. I don't say this to defend the man. He killed hundreds of thousands of people, minimum. But because he was willing, he had a degree of loyalty to the system as it was seen by most people, there was not this kind of rebellion from sort of within it, right? Like, in fact, that deep state was largely sympathetic with them. They were willing to go with like the fucking around with the election, as long as, you know, the broader structures that had given them a place to exert power and influence remained intact. And Trump was basically saying, if Milley had gone with this, if everyone had gone with this, what you are accepting is that nothing matters but this guy's opinion, right?

There's not actually any sort of power in the system that you have risen to the top of. There's not any sort of power in these unelected structures within the system that you clearly think are important because they are where you have seen success, right? And frankly, people aren't willing to do that sort of thing. And also, you're fighting against a lot of people who want to, whatever fucked up things they are willing to do, they have a lot emotionally invested in the idea that they serve a democracy. Now, is that a morally flawless idea? Are they always in fact like, no, of course not. Like everyone, they're hypocrites to certain extents, but you can't push them that far. Like Bush pushed

them about as far as you can push people like that, right? Trump didn't have any respect for dressing it up right, and he didn't have any respect for the thing that they were a part of. And so, of course, a lot of them didn't go with him. Yeah, and I think this gets back to something I've talked about a bit with what the neocons were doing, which the neocons are about the state of exception, right? they're about this like you know we've had the war we now have the war on terror we've had 9-11 and that means the country's in this state where like we have the power to be like the people inside the system who are outbound by it who could do whatever you want and like that is descriptively right like this is

you know both carl schmidt the like nazi jurist like that that was explicitly like his model of how you do fascism yeah and it's also's also like something, you know, and, but, but the thing is, again, like that's a very different thing than what Trump was doing. Right. Like Trump wasn't doing like Trump wasn't doing this thing where he like, you know, uses the apparatus of the state. He was, he was doing a different, like different kind of one of it. different kind of one of this is what a lot of people don't understand about the nazis is that when hitler took power and for the first half to two-thirds of his time in power uh he was very much concerned about the military and constantly making exceptions and altering and moderating aspects of his policy in order to keep the military on his side.

And that continued depending on kind of where you want to put it, either up until the Anschluss or up until the invasion of Poland, really, to a significant extent. Whereas Trump did not, again, there's no sort of, he has no sort of respect. And I'm not saying like you should have respect for the military no but i'm saying that because he did not just have power yeah the fact that he did not or the fbi for that matter is one of the reasons why this didn't work for him yeah and and this was this was always a kind of a problem that he has ideologically which is like one of the things that makes him popular is he was running like against the deep state right and like yeah like yeah like i know lots of people like i don't like the intelligence agencies like the intelligence agencies can fuck off the fact that like the fact

that the intelligence agencies finally found a coup they wouldn't support like it's not a sign they're good but the problem is yeah yeah but like the problem with this is like trump is you know he wins the primary like very explicitly by running against a lot of the he like like by name running against neoconservatism you could argue the extent to which he actually broke with it in terms of like appointing like Gina, he puts a bunch of neocon ghouls like back in power. Right. But like,

like nominally he's running against that specific thing. And it turns out that like, if, if, if your appeal is, you know, being like a nominally anti-systemic force, and then you have to try to use those systems to stay in power.

It's like, well, you know, this, this happens like now you are getting charged by jack smith and you have like 78 counts against you instead of you are now the fuhrer yeah a lot of it is you know first off people want to be able to believe nice things about themselves and trump didn't really give them the option of doing that and second of all people who are achieve this kind of level within the system want you to treat the system

they've succeeded in as if it matters like it's that simple i think in a lot of ways they want to feel validated and valued and he was just like no fuck you all i'm doing my goo and then was genuinely shocked when people like well we ain't coming with you, bro. I really feel no desire or no impetus to move with you. Anyway, this is a good idea. Yeah, so I don't know. We'll see what happens with these indictments. I don't know. This is the important.

Yeah, this is the one that matters. Of all the indictments, this is the one that matters. Yeah, I don't know. We'll see if this actually substantively plays a role in the election I mean I don't think there's a possibility that I can cost Trump the primary like but no no no no yeah nothing nothing but like a heart attack could do that yeah um but it is I will say I had some other stuff prepared that I think we'll move to another episode just because of how this has gone. But I do want to note, I want to talk a little bit at the end here about, is this going to matter? Like, electorally for Trump, right? Is this going to have an impact on his chances of winning the general? I think we're all agreed it's not really worth talking about the primary. He's going to win the primary barring an act of God. And that's where – yeah, anyway. So there's some info on this. Basically on March 29th, he was averaging about 45% in national primary polls, which I'm bringing up here because they help show the impact of the indictment because you don't have a lot of national polls from that time, a national like general election polls. So 45% in March, after his first set of indictments

in April, he was up to 54%. So that first set of indictments did not harm him, may have helped him consolidate power, may have like activated a chunk of his base. The second indictment did not work the same way, though. After June 8th, when it was reported that he was being indicted for the classified document shit and obstructing justice and getting them back. The second indictment hit the towers. Yeah, his average support in the primary fell, not by a massive amount, by a couple of percentage points, as did his average net favorable rating.

So you saw at least a least he hit a wall and bounced back a little bit. Not massive, not a sea change, but enough to show that it's not accurate to say voters don't care. It's more accurate to say, based on what we've seen so far, voters seem to care differently about different indictments. And I want to read a quote from a FiveThirtyEight article about his indictment polls here. Although we can't prove that all these shifts happened because of the indictments, the difference in reaction at least suggests that Americans are drawing distinctions between Trump's various legal troubles. And other polling backs that up. According to a YouGov

Yahoo News poll from July 13th through 17th, 50% of registered voters considered falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star to be a serious crime. But 64% of registered voters considered it a serious crime to take highly classified documents from the White House and obstruct efforts to retrieve them. Similarly, a June 22nd to 26th poll from the Associated Press NORC Center for Public Affairs Research found that only 35% of U.S. adults thought Trump did something illegal when it came to the hush money payments. but 53% thought he did something illegal with regards to classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. By this logic, this third indictment could be even more damaging to Trump than the one involving classified documents.

According to the same YouGov Yahoo News poll, 69% of registered voters considered it a serious crime to attempt to obstruct the certification of a presidential election and 71 said the same about conspiring to overturn the results of a presidential election so it's gonna take a troublingly low number but yeah yeah i wish it would it should be higher you yeah yeah you would think yeah but that does that does suggest that this could do him some damage um and especially since all of this is going to keep getting litigated, right? Like, fucking people who have a decent lawyer and get arrested for, like, a DUI can drag a court case out for a year. This will be going on during the election.

It may hurt him. You know, again, I'm not willing to, like, say, oh, this is going to make it impossible for me. I don't think the data suggests that. But there's, I think, a pretty good chance that this is a net negative for him in terms of the election. And broadly speaking, we gave the Dems a lot of shit for a couple of years for not doing enough to actually seriously strike back at the Republican authoritarian outreach. And so it would be unfair of me to not say it's good that they're doing this. Like, it's good that he's facing legal trouble for what he's done.

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

Happening during the election is a major L in terms of how he can spin this. Yeah. I think that was probably a strategic error. But grand juries take forever. Yeah. Yeah. And the other thing that's happened is like there's been all of this time for sort of the Republican PR machine to like spin all of the stuff that happened.

And we've, we, you know, and I think like part, part of what's been happening the last three years is like everyone kind of just like collectively forgetting what actually happened during 2020 and how absolutely nuts it was. And everyone's sort of going back and pretending that like things are sort of

like normal now. And it's like, no, no, we're still, we're still living in the eternal 2020 and everything is still absolutely nuts but i don't know i it's like there's been this incredible sort of like normalization effort both by biden and also like by the republicans to make it seem like this was like a normal thing that happened as opposed to like the immediate wake of it.

Reverend was like, what the fuck? So hopefully not too little too late. Hopefully this does something, but we shall see. Yes, indeed. All right.

Well, everybody, uh, you know, I guess go back to paying rent and stuff uh i'm sure 2024 will be fine yeah that wouldn't be any problem there's 15 more months of this by the way Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series,

The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens.

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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. 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. Glenn, thank you so much for joining us. Can you, is there anything I missed out, first of all, on your bio there that might be relevant for people?

No, I think that's short and sweet. We don't need all the details. For sure. Thank you. Yeah, so what we're here to talk about today is these sudden, the phenomenon, I suppose, of sudden cardiac arrest, specifically like in young people and young athletes, because as many of you will have been aware, young athletes, because as many of you will have been aware, this has been increasingly an area in which anti-vaxxers and conspiracy theorists have been trying to leverage what is an unfortunate but not unprecedented cardiac arrest. In this case, most recently,

Bronnie James, but it's happened before in a number of sports. And they've been trying to leverage this as, quote, unquote, or evidence that that vaccines are killing otherwise healthy young people which is nonsense and uh i can tell you it's nonsense but someone who can tell you from much more informed perspective is glenn so glenn could we start out by maybe talking about like how common this sudden cardiac arrest in in young athletes is and what we might what hypotheses we might have as to what causes it sure well i mean first of all if we look more broadly it's it's very common um i'm from canada and we have about 35 000 of these every year um within young athletes um the data out of the u.s says that about 2000 die every year from sudden cardiac arrest,

and two-thirds of these young people do so during some sort of exercise or sporting event. So in the grand scheme of things, when you have a country of several hundred million people, a thousand or so, that's like that is by proportion relatively small, but we've known about this for a long time. And these numbers actually really haven't changed very much in decades. Okay. So yeah, there's obviously been no particular increase due to COVID vaccinations because they're unrelated. I wonder actually, is there evidence, I think I've read some stuff

that having COVID or having had COVID multiple times might increase your risk for cardiac arrest. Is that true? Yeah. So broadly, so they haven't looked specifically at cardiac arrest because cardiac arrest typically is a lot of times the end result of a number of different conditions. So cardiac arrhythmias are known to be increased. A Paton study showed that, what, I guess a year and a half ago by now, certainly early in the pandemic,

one of the first signs we were seeing people who were being infected were having heart attacks, developing heart failure. These things, and in cardiac arrest, the most common cause for cardiac arrhythmias, the Paton study showed, and every time I talk about this, I have to go back and look because the increase was several hundred fold after COVID.

And so I have never really seen anything like that before. So arrhythmias are relatively common in terms in the world of cardiovascular disease. And the fact that COVID, the infection actually increases it, but the vaccines do not, means that the risk for sudden cardiac death really would be highest amongst those who are infected, not those who get vaccines. Okay. Do you know offhand if like um when when we have that that maybe this was too early in the pandemic to tell like that that risk that comes with having covid right for having arrhythmia afterwards is that risk mitigated by if you're vaccinated and then you get covid so yes there's been some more recent studies because obviously early in the pandemic when we didn't have the vaccine, we couldn't answer that.

And then early after vaccines, we're looking at things like infections. And some of these cardiac issues may not arise until even after the infection is cleared. So we see that in people with long COVID, for example, cardiac issues are most common. And so we've seen in some recent studies that people who are, and even what they described as partially vaccinated, so one or two doses had a reduced risk of what we call MACE, which is a major adverse cardiovascular event. And so that's an all encompassencompassing term which would be things like stroke heart attack uh you know things things like that those major cardiac events that's uh data that's come out uh earlier this year within the last year a couple of studies

okay so circling back to those cardiac arrests and i guess brought more broadly like cardiac issues in young people and specifically in young athletes it's something i'm familiar with with a background in cycling like i've known people die of cardiac arrest who are otherwise extremely fit um no i wouldn't necessarily say like sometimes being fit and being healthy are not the same thing um certainly at the very like pointy end of endurance sport, I think the fittest people are not necessarily the healthiest, but very fit, sometimes very healthy people have, friends of mine have had these issues. Is in those cases, I don't know, we might

not know, I don't know. Is being an athlete like increasing someone's chance of having those cardiac arrests or is it that they have some kind of pre-existing condition that's just been underlying for a while? Yeah, that's a good question. What we do know, and this is all data from pre-COVID, so it's not something that's been impacted by the pandemic or vaccines. We do know that the rate of sudden cardiac death in the general population is about one in 100,000. And that in athletes, which is a very broad term, and we can get into that,

how to define an athlete and things like that, is anywhere from two to four times the rate that groups of athletes, subsections are actually higher. So, we know the rate is higher in these athletes, typically these high-performance athletes. You know why that is? It's an interesting question. It could be the training, for example, puts a stressor on them. So, they may have a pre-existing condition. They may have a cardiac arrhythmia like long QT syndrome or even something called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. Sometimes they know about it and sometimes they don't. And then the training on top is enough of a trigger. So one of the examples I use in my class is Anthony Van Loo's, a soccer player.

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

who goes to a gym twice a week is it someone putting in 20 hours on the bike like what so most of the studies that we're talking about so i assume we're not talking about the people who are um claiming that the vaccines are linked to athletes because they have a very different definition. I can talk about that. Most of these studies that we're dealing with where we get these rates that are two to four times higher than the general population or what they refer to as competitive athletes. So for people in the U.S., these would be your NCAA or college athletes. Some of them are professional athletes, soccer players in the British League and things like that. So these are people who play at a competitive level. Oftentimes, they're making a living. I mean, you can argue whether college athletes are making a living out of this, but there's some high level of competition in these athletes that's generally the people that were that these studies are based on not the guy who goes to the gym twice a week or something like that okay yeah yeah so fairly elite and what is it that you were saying that's different from the claims that these

anti-vax people or vaccine skeptics or whatever you know people who want to say that vaccines are killing people which isn't true. What, what, what sort of the definition that they're using or what's the claim that they're making, I guess. Well, they really don't have a definition is the problem. So, so they'll use the term athletes. And I think most people, you know, maybe, maybe you don't see an athlete as necessarily being a college or

professional level. It could be like a high school athlete who's competing once or twice a week or whatever. And that's fair. But when you look at the lists that they have, I mean, I've talked about this recently in the Died Suddenly movie, documentary, whatever you want to call it. Oh, yeah. The list of people that they have on there, for example, they have musicians, they have a Thai princess on there, so a princess from Thailand on there. And they also have people who died of cancer, someone who got an eye injury. So, I'm not really sure, first of all, what their definition of athlete is. I'm not sure what their definition of sudden cardiac death is when you have people dying of cancer or suffering an eye injury. Those

are not related at all. There was an earlier list. I think it's related to the good science thing. I wrote about this probably a year or so ago. I went through the list of people that they had on. At the time, there was just a little over 100 people that they claimed died. There were soccer referees on there. There were retired athletes. There were people, one guy was out for a hike. He was listed there. Now, you could argue a soccer referee is athletic, certainly running around the pitch doing that. I could see that. But that person died at home in their sleep, not in competition. The retired soccer player had been retired for six or seven years. So even in the cases where they have athletes, they're really stretching what we would define as an athlete. Right. Yeah. I wonder, is there data to show that like overall mortality is lower in people who are

vaccinated than unvaccinated? Like does that exist yet? Yeah. So that's what some of these, these studies that I talked about that were done earlier this, this year, there was a, it was a Jack study,

the general American college of Cardiology, showed that even people who are partially vaccinated, there's a reduction in these cardiovascular complications. And the JAMA study, which was done earlier, specifically focused on AMI, so the heart attacks, acute myocardial infarctions, and stroke, also lower risk. You were saying earlier that there might be some sports that had even higher rates than those ones you mentioned overall for athletes. What sports are those? Yeah, so the one that's been raised recently is basketball.

They were, at least in some of these studies done in the US, much higher than other sports. Yeah. So, I mean, you know, basketball can be an aerobic event in that you're running back and forth, you know, up and down the court quite frequently, but it's punctuated by these bursts of, you know, sprints and things like that, which some have speculated that might kind of be the issue, right? That you don't settle into just a simple rhythm. I'll say simple rhythm, like, you know, like riding a bike is, it's not as obviously simple as you describe it.

But at least potentially there, there's periods of time when you can sort of get into a rhythm and stay there. And here it's rest periods punctuated by these rapid bursts and so there's the the possibility that that may be related there okay and so that that might be why that there are higher death rates there it's possible yeah they're not sure why these things happen to specific sports okay are our friends in the anti-vax community sure uh in their own minds why these happen like do they have some kind of hypothesis they're advancing uh no so this is a good point

um they'll say it's the spike protein uh i'm sure i've heard that raised before um but they don't really explain beyond uh that it's interesting about the spike protein in the vaccines is it's been modified to not be active. And so you have the spike protein in the virus, which causes injury, and yet they don't seem to acknowledge that that could cause these issues. And yet the spike protein in the vaccine, which has been designed to limit that injury, somehow overcomes that and actually causes the injury that's not associated with the infection. It makes sense, right? You have to live in these parallel worlds that don't ever mix.

Right, yeah. So they're suggesting that this protein, which is a modified version of the one that's already in the virus, but it's non-harmful, whereas the one in the virus is harmful. It's harmful because of the modification. Yeah, certainly a good number of people

who don't like the vaccines also claim that COVID itself is really not much of a threat. And then, so again, I don't, I don't, I don't see how they can reconcile these, these points, right. Especially when you're arguing about the same protein, one of which has been modified to be less active. And yet you're saying the less active one is actually more dangerous.

It just doesn't make any sense. Right. Yeah. And I think it's kind of not uh i don't know i think people maybe come to it with a with a sort of predetermined desire to conclude that the vaccine is dangerous um i wonder like i'm familiar with the sudden cardiac death from my time cycling and i remember in the early 2000s there was this idea that um people were dying because their blood had turned, like, quote, I'm quoting from newspaper articles at the time, too treacle and had become so thick that their heart couldn't pump it anymore.

And that this was causing people to die. And the reason that they died was because they were taking excessive amounts of blood boosters like EPO or exogenous EPO. And so this wasn't true true at least to my knowledge I don't think any of these people had tested positive um none of them had uh like autopsies that suggested that this is why they had died um but it seems to me that there's this natural desire to try and explain away these deaths of of people who are at the peak of their physical lives, right? People in their teens and 20s who are extremely fit, who we can see doing amazing things.

It doesn't sort of line up for us when they die. It doesn't line up with what we think a healthy person is and what we think a cardiac patient is. And so it seems to me that we create these explanations is that something you've seen in other areas like before the covid vaccine were there other sort of conspiracies or just ways to try and explain this away well i don't know about conspiracy i mean i think people understandably have a hard time reconciling yeah what you just said right you have elite cyclists um or whatever sport it is um i mean cycling is good because aerobically they have to be very fit and then they die potentially of a cardiac

condition right so that that makes no sense um you know so the easiest thing like you said is to play well they must be doping they must be taking steroids you know something that's going to harm your body and so that has to be the explanation because it's easy. That's a simple way to get to this. The reality is that a good number of these people have underlying cardiac conditions. I don't necessarily mean a lot of cyclists have that. What I mean is the people who have these sudden cardiac deaths have undiagnosed cardiac conditions, long QT. There's a condition called CPVT, something like that. And so they're relatively, I'll say benign.

CPVT isn't necessarily, but it's triggered. These things are triggered by stressful events like exercise and things like that. And so they may live a good part of their life to be in our seemingly good health. And then the first sign for many of these people is death. That's the real challenge in dealing with these cases that lead to sudden cardiac death because that's the first symptom. People don't feel tired. Um, they don't, you know, have chest pains, like having a heart attack or anything like that. It's simply something happens.

The wiring goes off in the heart and you put the exercise on top of it and they die. Um, you know, it's, it's not just these athletes. You'll have somebody who has a, has a change in one of their genes. They're perfectly fine. They live into their 60s and then they suddenly die. Well, what allowed them to live 60 years with no symptoms? We don't really know, but it's not uncommon that the first symptom is death in these people. So your friends there who, you know, it's easiest to accuse them of doping

because certainly we a lot of us talked about it at the time as i'm sure uh you know you knew about us there's no no secret um so we connect those dots right we can see that we can see that let's connect them we can't see long qt so we don't know what long qt syndrome is for a lot of people it's hard to make that connection when you don't know. Yeah. And it's hard from the perspective of being someone's friend, or I can only imagine what it's like for their families to have this, like, I guess, them be sort of liable after they die, you know, or sort of accused of something that they may, or in many cases, I don't think did do. It must be very difficult to deal with that on top of losing someone you love.

Yeah, well, and we're seeing that again here with the people who oppose the vaccines, which is either they're assuming things or they're speculating on things. And, you know, unless you're in the circle of care, you don't know what's going on. So, you know, you talked about LeBron James on here, you know, does he have an underlying condition?

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

advance their own agenda, right? Yes. Yeah. I think that is the case. So let's talk a little bit about how we can, I guess, mitigate these risks that exist. I remember when you're getting a license in Spain and they make you take a cardiac stress test there. You ride your bike on a treadmill and they just ramp it up until your heart rate's in the 190s or whatever and and uh i don't know what they were doing uh but that they made us i think that may only have been for like elite athletes but they made us all do that is that something where was if there was an underlying one of these underlying risk factors that you mentioned would would it be spotted on a test like that yeah that's a little bit of a controversial area so i noticed you said in spain

in europe um the consensus is that athletes need to go through these what we call pre-screening um ecgs so you were probably yeah probably had electrodes on your body yeah yeah and so that's a simple non-invasive test and so you're, because some things you can pick up just at rest, but some of these things don't appear until you stress the individual. And so they'll look for rhythm problems. The other test is what we call echocardiography, which is basically an ultrasound of the heart. It's basically an ultrasound of the heart. And there you can look at function, but you can also look at structure because there's a condition called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy that's relatively common in athletes. It's more common there, and that accounts for about 50% of these sudden cardiac deaths.

And so you can pick that up on an ECG, but you can also pick it up using ultrasound. So if you scan the heart, you see that it's very large. That would be a diagnosis. So first, in Europe, they do that. In North America and Canada and the United States, they do not. The concern is, there's a couple of concerns. One is the price. So you're screening large numbers of athletes to pick out a relative small number who may be affected. That's crude, but that is an argument that people make. So I guess the question comes down to how much is life worth to you and how much you want to spend. So there is that. But there is another issue, which is what they call false positives. So, you know, had you been diagnosed as having a condition, then you maybe pulled out of training for a little while while they do more tests and stuff like that. That could be very stressful on you.

And so the view in North America is there's an unacceptably high number of those false positives. And so they feel that it's not worth doing. The other issue, so I'm not sure, when did you do this screening? Was it like 20 years or? No, 10 years ago, probably like 2010, 2011. Yeah. So one of the issues that we have is when you have these high-performance athletes, their hearts change. They get bigger. They get more efficient. Their rhythms change. And they have conditions that we would pick up on ECGs and echo that would be considered pathological, right? But because they're athletes, these are changes that do occur in athletes as their heart is remodeled, and they're not a sign of disease.

If you took someone who wasn't highly fit and had – so, for example, if you screened someone's heart and you saw that it was very large and they didn't exercise, you might be concerned. But if you're an elite cyclist where your heart gets very big, it's going to be bigger. elite cyclist where your heart gets very big, it's going to be bigger. And so, what we have struggled with for a number of years is what is normal in the athlete that would be considered abnormal in the general population. Emily has done a really good job on this. So, going back into the 1980s, they started to collect data because that's what we need, right? We need data from athletes. And they created a huge database, which I actually use in my class now to teach and say, you know, if you have an athlete and you see these things, these are things we wouldn't be concerned about.

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

standards that's okay and we're going to ignore it and and we didn't have that until relatively recently okay yeah i do remember like things like having a resting heart rate which would be considered like pathologically or like dangerously low uh so with the thing right yeah braid braid a card so it's called bradycardia it's obviously very common right and and so i i give an example my class every year where you know you have an athlete their heart rate can be 40 beats per minute um and so i said you know you would ignore that you go oh they're an elite cyclist i get that and then i give an example where it's a woman, she's 63 years old, they're resting, heart rate is 42 beats a minute. She

doesn't do any exercise. And the physicians are like, oh, she must be very healthy. I'm like, no, that's not normal. And so it turned out, so the reason they flagged her was because she kept passing out because she was bradycardic. And she eventually broke her nose and was sent to the hospital. They did a genetic test and found that she had a cardiac arrhythmia, right? So, what I always teach my students is don't just look at the monitor, look at your patient, right? So, when your heart rate's 40 beats a minute and they're cycling away and, you know, doing all these, he's like, yeah, that person's very fit. And it's like, when you look and they're cycling away and you know doing all these he's like yeah that person's very fit and it's like when you look and they're 80 years old and they're passing out 40 beats a minute is not normal right and so we don't need real high standards for some of these things but

some of them we did yeah and i wonder like people listening probably be sufficiently afraid now uh but um hopefully not too afraid but like lots of people these days are monitoring their heart rate all the time, right? They have watches, they have wristbands when they're exercising, they have chest bands, or you can monitor your heart rate, all kinds of places. You can wear a ring. Um, would any of those devices be useful in predicting or seeing some of these things? Not really. Only because they're very limited. So it's great people measure their heart rate

because it is a general sign of health. And so a lower resting heart rate is very good. And when you're exercising, you want to bring your heart rate into certain zones to have effective work. So that's all great. So I'm not trying to discourage people from doing that. But if you want to diagnose long QT syndrome, for example, in somebody,

that requires calculations. So for sure, you need to measure things very accurately. I'm sure when you had your traits done, you would have had multiple electrodes stuck on your body. Yeah, ripple your chest arrow. Yeah, we typically do what's called a 12-lead ECG. And so there's multiple electrodes, and they have to be positioned in certain places in order to measure how the heart, basically the heart's electricity is flowing in certain directions because that actually tells us something. So when you have, i mean i have a a

device that i use to to teach and to to illustrate people it's on the back of my cell phone and they could just you know you put your fingers on it and and you can yeah you can you can measure things and you get an ecg off that and so it looks really neat and it's great for teaching but i'm not going to diagnose somebody with regatta syndrome or long qT or any of those, those things, those are much more, uh, in depth, uh, to, it's required, um, much more in-depth equipment to, to do something like that. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely. Uh, I know like sometimes when you ride under electricity pylons, you'll see a heart rate of 240 and it would be concerning. Oh yeah. Okay. didn't work out what was connected to it um so if these things are occurring and obviously they occur it's sort of at a certain percentage

of young athletes and certain percentage anywhere else are there ways that these sudden cardiac arrests we could reduce the number of them that uh result in deaths yeah no for sure so cpr um so the people who die um quite often die because there's there's nobody there to administer cpr and so you you lose that that very valuable time um and so people are concerned about um you know stepping in and doing something and potentially hurting someone. If someone is dead like that, you're not going to hurt them. So please learn CPR. It's not difficult.

They can certainly do that. I know in Canada, about 10 years ago now, the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada raised a tremendous amount of money to put what we call automatic external defibrillators or AEDs in public places. I think they put 15,000 of them out. Plus, companies will buy them for their workplaces and things like that. And so if someone goes down and their heart stops, you take these things out. There's some patches. It comes with instructions. It will tell you actually what to do. And you take it out, you put the patches on the individual, you step back because it will deliver a shock and it will

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

And I think a lot of places in the US, certainly you can access free CPR, AED training, or your employer might pay for it. Do you know any resources people could use to find free CPR AED training or your employer might pay for it? Or I don't know, do you know any resources people could use to find where they can find that free training? So in the States, the American Heart Association would be a good place to go.

The American Red Cross, I'm sure they'll have resources and Canada's Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, St. John's Ambulance. But like you said, a lot of just, you know, local community centers will put these things on a couple times a year, just so that people are familiar with how to do it. Workplaces will sometimes do it once or twice a year, have training, a lot of people to

just learn how to do it. I'm not sure where people, if you just go on the internet and wherever you are and look for uh first day a lot of times it falls under first day but if you just google your city and cpr i'm sure something will come up and i'm i bet there's something this month you could go to nice yeah yeah we've spoken before about stop the bleed courses and how they're also free and easy to access so people could do both of those to be really set up to help people glenn is there anything else you think people ought to know about these sudden cardiac arrests, either sort of with the conspiracy theories around them or anything else they can do to

protect themselves or other people? Well, I think there's the perception that by saying that there's not an issue, that it means we don't care. In fact, we do care about these issues. Like I said, I've taught about this for over a decade. I have a background in doing some sports medicine work a long time ago. I certainly have a strong interest in helping these people. When we say the risk is not going up, it doesn't mean that we don't care. And so when a soccer player or a football player or somebody goes down on the court, that we just say, well, yeah, it happens.

That's not what we're saying. We're saying we know these things happen. We do care about them. I would actually flip this around the other way and say some of these people, not what we're saying we're saying we know these things happen we do care about them i would actually flip this around the other way and say some of these people the people who i'm talking about the people who are profiting off that's not people who are like i had no idea this is what's happening that's okay you you know not everybody can know everything but the people who are saying this is increasing and they're making money off these things by selling their movies and whatever. Did you not care when someone died in 2015? Because they were.

And 2019, they were dying. And kids were doing it. And if you'd like to come to my class, I can show you the pictures of these people because you weren't around then. And I'm wondering, I'm not really wondering why you're around now. I know why they're around now. They're profiting off of this. And so I would actually flip it the other way and say, have them ask them, why is this new to them? When the data show this has been happening all along. Right, yeah.

And by encouraging people not to get vaccinated, they're encouraging those people to place themselves at a higher risk for cardiac issues right for presumably a profit motive in some cases which is yeah very sad and glenn where can people you do some excellent threads on twitter so uh people can learn a lot about uh heart stuff there is there anywhere else or um where would you prefer people to find you, I guess, online? Yeah, no, we, we do a lot of social media stuff. There's a lot of, I know people complain about Twitter. I complain about Twitter, but there's a lot of really Twitter.

There's a lot of really good people on there who uh you know present their information um you know you can just go on and look for for those people there what i would say is like how do you identify who who are the good people who you can trust and stuff is the people who are able to be transparent with where they get their information, right? So when I say, you know, the vaccines reduce your risk of these major cardiovascular events, I typically provide a study or something like that to show where I got that information. The people who are less trustworthy will say, you know,

either go find it yourself because they don't know, or, well, I can see it. I know what's happening. A lot of these things are measurable, so we should be able to find those. A lot of us write on things I've written for the conversation, Science 2.0, things will be there. But social media is a good place to go because you can interact with people

and you can ask those questions. Yeah. Yeah. You can reach out to me and see who I follow and who I interact with if you're interested. And you could take that as a good or a bad sign, however you want to take it. What's your handle on Twitter? So my handle is glen, G-L-E-N, pile, P-Y-L-E.

I'm also on Sky. I just joined that the other day. Nice. Congratulations. Yeah, that's great. I think the last point you made is one that we should maybe pursue another episode on because the difference between anecdote and data and like there is an increasing number, I think,

of people doing things that look a lot like journal articles or a lot like studies that are peer-reviewed that are not uh in trying to kind of leverage the credibility of that without um actually doing peer-reviewed science because the stuff they're doing wouldn't line up with with peer-reviewed science so it'd be interesting to discuss that right yes yes it was a whole episode today yeah yeah next time all right well thank you so much for your time dan thanks very much james i appreciate it hey guys i'm kate max you might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,

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

and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora, an anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America

since the beginning of time. 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 You get your podcast. 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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hi everyone, it's James here and we have a wonderful episode for you today

on heat and heat illness and how to protect yourself and your community and your animals when it is hot, which it is right now. But I just wanted to record this little pickup to tell you that this isn't medical advice, right? We do this every time we do these. I am not that kind of doctor and I'm not your doctor. And I just wanted to reinforce especially that yes, generally if you're hot, it's a good idea to drink fluids and get out of the heat someone is losing consciousness or really really sick you need to get better medical attention and then you can learn how to give on a podcast right so that's

when you call someone whose job it is to look after people and I just wanted to reinforce that obviously pouring water down the throat for someone who's lost consciousness is a very dumb idea. So please, if somebody is seriously unwell, seek medical care. Enjoy the episode. All right. Hi, welcome to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where we thumb our nose at God, which is what I was doing just before the podcast began. and which is what I was doing just before the podcast began maybe we'll include that and today we're here to talk about how God is smiting us with massive heat waves and I'm joined today by Margaret Killjoy and Garrison Davis say hello everyone hello everyone so called free thinkers yeah yeah yeah my sheeple have joined me uh this is this is what i get for

doing an episode about sheep um so as you will be aware if you are in just about anywhere in the northern hemisphere it is very hot at the minute it's very hot in cities in europe it's very hot in the united states uh it's very hot in the United States. It's very hot in parts of North Africa and the Middle East as well. It's the hottest June for how many years, Garrison? July. July, that one. It is the hottest July in, it is 120,000 years,

according to the most recent estimates released like three days ago as of time of recording so yeah yeah and we've had the hottest day in history like four times in the last month or something yes the in the first half of of july we had we had two days in a row where it was the two hottest days on record and we had two other two other days that were also the hottest days on record. It's pretty concerning. It's nothing that people haven't been warning about for many, many decades. But it's bad and it's very warm. Yep. And it will continue probably to get warmer.

So I think the way we want to approach this is i'm going to start off with talking about some uh stuff related to like exertional heat illness because that's the thing that's most acutely concerning for people right especially if they work outside if they recreate outside if they're doing stuff outside where they can't get out of the heat um so i think to start off i want to talk about things that might make you predisposed and then I'm going to explain a little bit of how the body cools and then some of these different stages of heat illnesses and how one might go about treating those or seeking further care if you need to right so to start out with there are some things that can make you predisposed to heat illness right the biggest predisposition I've come across in my reading is previously having heat illness so i can certainly speak to this yeah like i think i got

heat stroke for the first time uh it was racing bikes in spain i think but i then remember getting again racing bikes in vietnam and just like being really bad like having to have iv fluids uh like vomiting uh sort of even some like sort of uh not loss of consciousness but definitely like confusion and erratic behavior and stuff and the line between that and dying is pretty narrow right you can have like multiple organ failure and stuff certainly if yeah if you don't respond to that or if you misdiagnose that and that's definitely um it's like i'm someone with diabetes right so people can sometimes if you're erratic or confused people can assume you're hypoglycemic and you need some sugar but you don't in that situation we need fluids and electrolytes

and to be cooled quickly um so uh yeah that that is yeah you can die people do die actually the mortality is quite high like i i to prepare for this i went and looked at an advanced wilderness life support course i did um and uh people can look it up awls university of utah does one um and you can access lots of the stuff online for free um but they would think the mortality is quite high from these like heat illnesses um and i think that's probably especially true in wilderness medicine because it can be hard to cool someone down right if you don't have means of uh like if you don't have access to ice you obviously not got air conditioning out there um if you the best thing you probably have is running water hopefully you have running water right um and i think probably it's something that like people might

not have been concerned with unless they either lived in a very hot place or very active people or who traveled a lot before um so yeah if you've had heat illness before then you do need to be careful uh and and you will probably know if you've had it before um but if we go through all the symptoms you've had them all and never i guess got diagnosed and lucky you maybe you just found out you had heat illness and other things that can predispose you can be a lack of acclimation again like this is one that i think kind of stands to reason for most people but like if you go from a cold place to a hot place or the place you are suddenly becomes hot having been cold it's going to take you a few days a week to to become acclimatized to that heat right um and

your body will change things about your body will change so we don't need to go into but i don't think so i think um so back when i was exercising more seriously, I would, we would do heat acclimation by going in a sauna after a training ride. And the idea was that like, you gave yourself this big bout of heat stress and then you could go back and cool down, right? So I think if you were in AC for most of the day, it was okay.

I'm sort of guessing here, but if getting that bout of heat stress and then recovering and get just like any other training that you're doing seems so like but if you go outside into the heat and then come back into the cool you're still acclimating yourself yes compared to just great hanging out in in you know uh somewhere where it's cold all the time and you do want it you don't want to overdo it right you don't want to be like oh yeah i'm going to acclimate time to go for a 10 mile run like like ease into it make sure you're hydrating make sure you're taking breaks in the heat um there's also a lack of conditioning right so that's why you see a lot of heat illness

maybe that's the first time i got heat stroke was like uh pre-season workouts for like uh especially like collegiate athletes and things or athletes who are more seasonal athletes. So people who have been parked on their backside for a few months or in class or whatever, and then they come and start doing a rigorous training regime that can, uh, that can predispose you, right. So they can cause you to be more likely to get heat illness. Um, and then there are some medications, right? So you'd probably say on your medications medications but things like beta blockers antihistamines diuretics you don't want to be drinking too much alcohol

and some conditions too right heart disease skin disease existing dehydration fever obviously right your your temperature is higher to begin with and diarrhea and vomiting which can cause that dehydration right so look if you have diarrhea and vomiting it's not a good idea to also be you know going out and exposing yourself to a lot of heat right um so all of those things can make you more predisposed but you can have none of those things and still get heat illness um i think the way to understand it is like the way we'll talk about the way our body cools um so it does that through evaporation uh people will be familiar with sweating most people sweat uh and so if you the sweating allows your body to cool right the evaporation of the sweat

allows your body to cool um so people who don't sweat or or people who have injuries which mean they don't sweat in some of their body, again, are at higher risk for heat illness, right? Well, and this also ties into wet bulb temperature and the fact that if you're in a more humid place, you have to consider the heat very differently, right? Yes, yeah, yeah. And so the East Coast versus the versus the southwest for example of the united states will have very different options available to them both inside and outside about

how to cool down um based on the knowing the humidity outside is going to be as important for people as knowing the actual temperature yes definitely and most of the time now if you're using a phone app which i think most people are doing to check the weather that you can find that uh it'll give you the humidity and might give you a wet bulb or like a real feel uh temperature but certainly like i was i was recently uh on a trip to the marshall islands and i was running at like 85 and i'll run at 85 all the time and i was dying because the humidity was so high. So yeah, where the humidity is high, you're not going to be able to cool as much, right? So you

need to be more careful. Radiation, that's when your body is shedding heat through like, I guess, electromagnetic energy. That makes up most of your cooling when the ambient temperatures are less than body temperature. So once the ambient temperature is above your body temperature, I think in Fahrenheit, it's like 96.6. Your body's going to be relying on other methods, right? That one's not going to work. Conduction. Conduction doesn't really make up much of it. It's not really that useful a way to cool.

It doesn't really make much difference. But like people will be familiar with conduction. If you've ever slept without a sleeping pad, if you've been camping, it's not really that useful a way to cool um it doesn't really make much difference but like people will be familiar with conduction if you've ever slept without a sleeping pad if you've been camping you'll realize how much colder you get on cold ground um and then the last one is convection right so that's heat transfer between the body and a moving gas or liquid that's why wind chills the thing uh okay because that air is whipping past you, right? Cooling you down. And that's also, the convection is one that we can use

to cool people down if they overheat, right? Like jump in the creek. So, yes. Or if we don't have a creek, we can get you wet and then fan you. Okay. So maybe we can, if we're outside

and we have those big Therm-a-Rest sleeping pads, we can get some air moving that way and help you cool down. If we know the ways the body cools, then we can get some air moving that way and help you cool down if we know the ways the body cools and we can maybe use those right and we we have to understand like you said the the relative humidity right so when our body gets hot especially when it starts to overheat it'll shunt some blood uh to the skin right vasodilation um it will also increase cardiac output uh and increase catecholamines which activate the sweat glands um so the uh hypothalamus will also regulate heat production in the body and there's been two so i don't understand two of the words you've recently

used but okay which were the words which are the words about the the catechol the cacophony and the hyper means okay it's sufficient to say that the body you start to sweat more and your body begins to regulate how hot it makes itself okay i got that one kind of from context but what's this next one i guess your hypothalamus is like your um your body's kind of internal regulator. And what it's doing is, in this case, it's regulating the heat production of your body. Okay. It's trying to, it's not making you hotter from the inside, I guess. That's probably a terrible explanation. Okay, so let's go through the different stages of heat illness uh we can start off with things

that people will be i think we can probably skip like sunburn many of us will be familiar with summer many of us will have been sunburned many of us will understand hopefully we're wearing our sun cream when we go outside right um or just wearing our sun cream and covering ourselves up from the sun yeah not just like uh running around with our skin exposed to the sun when it's 110 or what have you um so step up from there would be heat cramps and cramps can come from various things right like i think not all cramps are caused by sodium depletion uh or potassium depletion people sometimes think that it's a potassium thing um some of them can just

be caused by every exertion it can be your body's way of being like hey stop uh so like if you know if it's 50 degrees out and you're trying to run your fastest 10k and you have cramps that's not a heat thing uh that's just your body being like okay you're not ready for this yeah that's that's my experience with running yeah yeah your body's actively rejected it yeah it's because it knows i tried to join track when i was in ninth grade to impress a girl neither part of it worked i'm sorry to hear that it's fine but it's for the best okay i'm glad that you can share that with the audience oh i thought i was just wait i don I don't know, someone's listening. Yeah, anyway. Yeah, unfortunately.

So heat cramps, right, they're mostly going to be in your calves. People will be familiar with the sensation of a cramp, I'm sure. When we're experiencing heat cramps, we want to obviously cool off, stop doing the thing. So if we're running, it's time to stop running. If we're cycling, it's time to stop cycling. It's unlikely you'll get them when you get them swimming. There's other kinds of cramps.

But if we're exercising, it's good to stop. It's good to cool down. It's good to rehydrate. So that's where you're going to start with your oral salt solution. And generally, from what I've seen, it's a sodium thing. So that's just like a quarter to half a teaspoon of table salt and a liter of water um this is the electrolyte thing that people talk about yeah yeah exactly um and as we get further into like these heat illnesses um one of the things

that you want to be careful of you're trying to rehydrate someone when it's overloading on carbohydrate so you want a less than six percent carbohydrate solution um you that can mean just not pounding gatorade which i think can be like the sort of standard response for some people okay um because it just it doesn't empty quite as quickly as something which has a lower uh carbohydrate content right okay but people who are drinking yeah go ahead drinking straight water doesn't rehydrate you as effectively as drinking electrolytes right like if it's really hot out you pretty much need to be hydrating with electrolytes this is unless you're like eating a salty snack or something this is what i've heard from people yeah there's a thing called hyponatremia which

which is um when you the opposite that's like like low sodium, right? Then that's, that can happen sometimes from just drinking straight water without any sodium. It happens rarely, but it definitely can happen. It can happen in like back country travel where people don't think they're exerting themselves. They're just kind of walking and drinking a lot of water. It can happen in marathons.

Like it happens sometimes in marathons, but people are just taking the water from the aid stations, just drinking the water. Yeah, it's never like it's, you know, when it's hot, if you're having, you know, when I was bike racing, I used to do one drink of water and one drink of electrolyte, even in the heat, pretty much like one bottle. There are two bottles on a bicycle.

And I think that's a fine thing to do if you're in the heat and you're exercising. You don't need to be smashing gatorade all the time because that's a lot of sugar and it might that will also not empty from your stomach um so you know a modern sports drink should have the right solution um you know there are lots of brands i'm not going to recommend one but uh there there are lots of different brands which should have a decent sort of four or five percent carbohydrate solution and pick one that tastes nice to you and then we move from there into a couple of different things heat exhaustion and heat syncope um heat syncope is when you'll see people like like fall over um and it happens often like the only time i've seen it happen is people stopping after like a

long run like uh specifically like when they push themselves really hard right and it can actually be um it can be people who are not particularly uh dehydrated or or hypothermic and but in sort of a long run and heat you're not acclimated to uh it can blood can pool in the legs and um it's it's often people who are elderly are not very well acclimated um and it's normally when they're standing and stationary um and that's something that you can treat uh by elevating the feet whereas the person lies down and then just getting them out of direct sun sunlight and helping them rehydrate right so helping them cool rehydrate um you're going to see that in nearly all of these cases cooling someone off it's the most important thing to do um so next one we'll talk about heat

exhaustion again like you'll know something is wrong in in these situations right like if someone's just just like falling over you will know something is wrong if someone's yeah then in case he's like you'll know like having had heat exhaustion heat stroke like you you yourself will also know there are certain like uh like ecstasy is the big one right when people people quite often get heat illness when they're like at raves on ecstasy and that's just because obviously like altered state of mind plus dancing, uh, plus, plus this drug, which is,

um, you know, your body is not, not making its usual responses, I guess. Yeah. And, and that can be so like,

you know, if it's 110 out, maybe that's not the time to be doing MDMA and, and raving. Cop, cop, cop behavior. Yeah.

James. Yeah. I can't stand by it here and just as you spread this mdma slander people should people should absolutely be uh knowledgeable about what causes serotonin syndrome and be careful about mixing other substances but i cannot have you just disparage the good name of mdma like this. Oh, I will take it one step further and tell you that, at least with my research, both caffeine and alcohol make it far more likely

for you to suffer dehydration and related heat things. Dehydration, yes. This is an actual problem that people should make, like with MDMA, this is something to to look up um because because of the way it affects your serotonin levels it can cause you to overheat if you uh take too much or come out with other things or if you're in a hot sweaty crowded room you're dancing too much without taking breaks this is a thing to consider um yes yeah i had uh there was a person i it was i think it was referenced in the in the course i

did where they were talking about using a drone a rave to identify people who are hypothermic and like that's gonna be like you are too hard step away from the dance floor like uh to identify people who are at risk which is an interesting idea that's cool i think yeah um so just you know something to consider as you go forward with your summer plans um so other signs right tiredness weakness dizziness headache fainting nausea vomiting muscle cramps uh nausea and vomiting is rough i remember um the worst heat on us i've ever had was in vietnam doing a bike race uh one of the rules in a bike race is you can't take um supplies from your support car in the last 50 kilometers and it was just so hot i

remember being like i'm baking inside my skull i'm baking inside my skull like and i'd been previously in like a little group in front of the main group so i also hadn't been able to access water from my car then and then drop we got caught by the main group is what happened and i remember being like okay good now i can get my ice socks and put them down my back and i can get my cold water and then i went back and the guy was like no no no uh it's like it's like 49 kilometers and i was like oh this is bad this is really fucking bad and it was really bad. Did you finish the race or did you? Yeah, I did. I finished the race.

I'm not sure that was the right call, but congrats. Yeah, no, no, it was a terrible decision. I had to pitch it somewhere. My teammates put me in a shower with like my legs above my head. It was just like waterboarding me with cold water. And I was being given IV fluids. They were all like, oh uh this is bad he's not he's not in a good way and yeah yeah but you know sport is good for you keep keep sporting out

there kids yeah everyone was very concerned for me my all the stuff i came up with was like stay inside don't exert yourself like avoid caffeine and alcohol james is like if you want to push yourself past your limits yeah yeah don't don't it's bad we did everything wrong right like it was in december the race because um the asia tour doesn't take a break at like the december end of year time it takes a break for Ramadan so obviously coming from the United States we we were relatively less fit than we would have been we were not acclimated I had a fat beard which did not help and like my hair was longer than it is now like my body was not losing heat uh everything was uh just bakuna doing this this race yeah yeah yeah just going out there like

full uh I look if there's nothing that uh what what is more white man on the left and you know like a white dude with a beard it's like all of them right kropotkin bakunin marx and you have to try it and oh yeah don't do that don't do that to yourself we talked about heat syncope and the last one is heat stroke so what differentiates heat stroke uh from heat exhaustion is that higher body temperature above 40 degrees celsius which is 103 104 fahrenheit okay if you're seeing 103 it's time to pick up the telephone and call 911 um if you can if you're in an area where you can do that but it doesn't matter if it's 103 104 i guess it's that you're very hot at that point um you're gonna have hot red skin fast drunk pulse headache

dizziness nausea confusion people can also lose consciousness um so uh the this is very serious right and the line between this and and really serious lasting complications is quite quite small so you do need to be very extremely concerned i will say that like when you're taking someone's temperature um taking it uh at the extremities is not necessarily going to give you the best uh idea of what their core body temperature is right um so that's for the reason that like if they're hot if like if it's hot they're hot on the reason that like, if they're hot, if like, if it's hot, they're hot on the outside, right? Like your ear or what have you. And then if you've then tried to cool the person and you're seeing like a lower body temperature in their hand,

or if their hand's been in ice, you know, in an ice bath, then you might see a cooler temperature there. There are like rectal probes used for this. Not something to be doing in a sort of non-consensual manner um they're not really something to be doing unless you're like a medical professional but um if you're if so just don't be relying i guess like you know people have those little heat guns that they like to use and stuff yeah might not be the most reliable source of information although it might be useful for the initial uh diagnosis right yeah even then like if even if you can just do an oral thermometer as opposed to like the temperature of your forehead

is x yeah like if it's 110 then the temperature of your forehead is going to be hot right oh i see what you're saying yeah yeah totally okay versus you know you're trying to get as inside as possible i I guess. Yeah. I remember people doing cooling experiments where you had to take a pill when it measured your internal temperature and it Bluetoothed it out or something. Wow.

Yeah, so fun times. I think that's cool as hell. I want one. Rescuing it later sounds like not fun um yeah yeah yeah it does make an exit from the body um so with this again right you want to cool the person down uh and the way we can do that it's like ice packs right in the groin neck and scalp so i used to do like um just tights like if you're wearing tights put ice in those and put those down my back of my cycling jersey when i was cycling you can put them in the groin as obviously the person

has become like a heat casualty you can put them in the groin armpits uh the like the neck um and you can also if you don't have access to ac obviously you've got ac you can put the person in an air-conditioned environment to help them cool down you can put them in an ice bath um you'll see that like at hot weather events um i'm trying to think there's there are a lot of other conditions that you'll see at hot weather events we don't really have time to to talk about but things like rhabdo are very very concerning um if someone's exercising in the heat but you'll often see at the end of hot events uh in first aid tents they're popping people in ice in ice baths to cool them down they've got some of these symptoms like 15 20 minutes i think is how long you want to put them

in there for um but like if you're starting to feel headache dizziness nausea i guess my like big take home here is get out the sun stop exercising if you're exercising and start hydrating if you're not hydrating with with that carbohydrate solution and you're looking to drop that cool temperature that core temperature below that that kind of danger zone right and ideally get it back to to where it wants to be which which i think in fahrenheit is around 96.6 um you uh you probably don't want to actively cool someone all the way down because you can overshoot and they can get hypothermic. And so they can get too cold if you're dumping them in a freezer

or actively cooling them too aggressively. So that's something to be concerned with as well. And you don't want the person to start shivering because the body's trying to heat itself back up at that point so you can't be uber aggressive uh but i think having said all this like i said the big take home is like if you start to feel sick dizzy uh under well when you're outside in the heat get out the heat get some water get in the shade if you can get air conditioning if you can uh if you're at a job site you know if there's like a trailer where you with this air conditioned go in the trailer uh like it's not worth your life even if it's your job you want to know it's fun

is that um what's fun in the united states there's no federal law that says you can't make people work in the hot weather. Hell yeah. Some states, less than half. I don't have the notes in front of me. I had the notes for a different thing I recorded recently. Some states, like 16 of them or something maybe, have laws against working people outside in the heat. But most states don't.

The federal government is like considering one right now but that is like probably years away before it could be enacted but it's like basic worker protections like don't have people work outside without enough stuff to make sure they don't die of it um consider forming a union yeah google uh blair mountain for more information on how to respond uh if you're not allowed if you're not allowed to take breaks for the heat yeah um yeah yeah yeah talking of uh how capitalism is killing us all margaret uh it's time for us to break for some adverts of things people can buy oh we have We have some breaking news here, folks. We have some breaking sheep news.

So it turns out, during James's last sheep episode, he talked about having Texel sheep when it's actually Tessel sheep. So this is pretty... No, they're definitely Texels. Pretty exciting here um who uh northwestern islands of the of the netherlands it's one of those european places where the

pronunciation where the pronunciation does not match how it's written and it's tessel sheep not texel sheep so this is pretty exciting for me. And usually James gets to make fun of how I pronounce words. And now, and now, now, now look who's laughing. So here we go. Well, should we, I mean, should we move into like machinations versus machinations or should we just move on? No, I think we could just move on here.

This is fine. We'll just start a Buena sire and move from there uh yeah yeah garrison the speaker of frisian i have a hard life they did not teach me how to say words in canada it was all i know it was all speaking in tongues in this school we couldn't we didn't actually learn much much english so much words yeah don't worry yeah we're we're uh we're all learning as we go you see there we go yeah i've just i've just learned that that the place is called tessel and then that's the sheep from there is there an x in it or something no uh yes when you're uh yeah there's. Is there an X all the time? T-E-X-E-L.

Yeah, oh, I see. But X sounds, the X sounds like an S. Yeah, Tesla. When you're speaking in it. Yeah. Fascinating, yeah, wow. And all my life I've been misnaming the very sheep that many of you enjoyed hearing about.

Sad. No wonder the sheep weren't coming when you called. They felt disrespected. Well, never mind. Well, to be fair, I just go out there and say sheep. So, you know, I'm hedging my bets with the pronunciation of that one. Well, you want to talk about animals and heat waves?

I would love to, yeah. Tell me what to do with your sheep. I can also talk about animals and heat waves I would love to yeah tell me what to do with your sheep I can also talk about humans and heat waves so actually ironically one of the things that I learned I don't know whether or not applies to sheep I was talking before this to one of my professional animal friends who has worked in veterinary clinics and

also as a professional horse person so there's some stuff to know, right? For all of the people who aren't humans. Different animals need different electrolyte formulas if you are going to feed them electrolytes. And for example, dogs need more sugar and less salt because their bodies don't get rid of salt as much, right?

They don't really sweat nearly so much. Um, occasional Pedialyte or some other like non Gatorade thing is, is fine every now and then, and probably Gatorade is probably fine every now and then, but don't be like, like you can go hiking and just drink electrolytes, right? Not sugar water, but electrolytes. Um, but don't do that with your dog, even if it's super hot out. There is dog-specific stuff, and there's formulas you can look up for dog-specific making your own. Don't shave your pets.

This is the one that I don't know if applies to sheep. My friend said... This does not apply to sheep. You have to share your sheep or else they will overheat and die. Yeah, okay. You gotta want to share your sheep. Yeah.

Some animals you want to shave, some animals you don't. If you have animals, you should look this up ahead of time. Some people like run out and shave their cats and dogs in the heat wave. This is a very bad thing. The hair is designed to protect them from the sun. Also, especially like if you have a dog with a double coat, it does a lot of weird heat transfer stuff, and it's really kind of cool and magic.

Brushing and grooming are very good. If your dog is like slow to its summer coat, or its summer is suddenly here 11 months of the year, or as I predict, there's going to be two seasons. There's going to be summer, which will last for nine months, and then there's going to be hell mouth, which will replace what nine months and then there's going to be hell mouth which will replace what was previously summer um don't take your dog out in the hottest weather it is better

that your dog pisses inside that gets heat stroke it is harder to identify heat stroke in a dog but if the dog is like panting a particular amount um there's like other things about looking at the gums and eyes i got bitten by a dog that was having a heat stroke on 4th July. It was good times. I feel bad for both the animals involved in this. Yeah, I feel fairly secure

in saying that the people who were looking after the dog aren't listening, but they made a series of very poor choices. It wasn't wise. Hiking is my main activity and is my main bonding with me and my dog.

And I am not doing it during a lot of the heat wave. Um, and I'm finding other ways. I'm, you know, cause I'm, I have to drive a decent way to go hiking. Right.

So I can't do it early in the morning unless I wake up earlier than I want to. Um, but if you are going to do asset activities with both yourself or with an animal, consider doing them at early in the morning or late in the evening or middle of the night, I don't know, whatever. If you have animals that can't come inside, because overall what was going to apply to your animals is what was going to apply to humans,

like get them into the AC. Like, what are you doing? But a lot of animals you don't have room for inside, right? Unless you're a medieval Irish peasant, in which case I've read way too much about how much those animals live inside. Yeah, cows under the house, so the warmth comes up. Oh.

So you want a cross breeze in your barn or coop or whatever. If it's a coop, you want to make sure there's a place at the top for air to come escape, and you don't want the box-style coop with only one entrance if you're dealing with heat waves. If it's a coop, you want to make sure there's a place at the top for air to come escape. And you don't want the box-style coop with only one entrance if you're dealing with heat waves. You want a lot of cool water that is easy to drink. And so a lot of people who normally feed their animals with the nipple-style feeders, different animals who have different ways of watering them, no nipple-style feeders during a heat wave. The animal needs to be able to get the water easily.

For chickens, you might want to bring your nesting boxes down to the ground floor where it's cooler. You also might want to consider insulating the coop, like with hay bales, for example. You could stack them up next to your coop. Horses have yet another electrolyte mix. My horse professional friend uses one called Gallagher's water, but points out that it's like mostly bougie people use it when they're like, I mean, most people have horses are bougie, but not all of them. Right. Um, at least where I live other places. Okay. So, um, it's only necessary in extreme circumstances. It's only better than water in extreme circumstances. Most animals do very well with just drinking water. Um,

and also you can probably consider if you live somewhere Western than I do, you can consider misting systems. If you have the money and the infrastructure, um, and misting systems is basically just like it, it pumps water out into a mist and the mist cools everything down. And below about 70% humidity, they're fairly effective. Below 50% of humidity, they're incredibly effective. And so they, and it's not that you get wet, it's that they do, it's like the air is sweating. The air is.

They're like you have in, if you go to restaurants in Phoenix outside, they have them. Yeah. I bought some really cheap off Craigslist. Like super cheap. I think I just had to go and get them. Yeah.

No, I'm like so jealous because it wouldn't work where I live. Oh, you can't use them because of the high humidity? I mean, they do a little bit here, but not very effectively yeah i know your chickens don't want to be living in a too damp environment it could be bad for their lungs um so don't don't be running one inside all the time yeah and like inside but i think it it's certainly like my chickens will go around it when it's hot

it seems to work and one person i talked to and is like, I did a bunch of research about this, but it's inconclusive. One person I talked to during the wildfire smoke actually set up a particulate, set up a misting system because mist picks up and drops particulate matter to the ground. There's a lot of research that says this particulate absorption happens. There is no research to say this is how you handle wildfire smoke with outside animals. But that is something that at least one person I heard from is doing and science backs it up. For human animals, in terms of preparedness,

just to run through all this stuff that I've been keeping track of, the way that you're going to deal with all this, if you're not outside, right? If you're outside and you're dealing with this stuff, you're going to use what James talked about, like keep track of how you're feeling and get into the AC. I mean, the main thing you want to do is get into the AC, right? You don't want to do strenuous exercise. You want to check alerts on your phone or your weather radio if you're a cool prepper and have like a little weather radio.

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

your AC is working and theirs isn't. Um, you want to, I mean, one thing that you want to do is just accept that what we're dealing with isn't normal. And I'll get to that in a moment. But so if you're a renter, you have fewer options, right? In terms of like structural preparedness, there are some things that you can do running fans, unless you're a podcaster running fans is a very good idea uh if you have ceiling fans you want to make sure that during the summer they run counterclockwise and during the winter they run clockwise um so it's just look and be like i want it to push air down and you can visualize the direction it'll turn to push air down and that's the summer one i want to change the direction they

spin yes there is a little switch on every ceiling fan. I can see the one behind you. I didn't know this. Don't do it while it's spinning. If you look on your screen, no, don't be a coward, Garrison. Don't be like, walk me through it. Okay, I think I see it now. Yeah, but close your eyes and just go for it.

As it's spinning, you want me to put my arm up and then hit it. It's less because you're going to... Stick your head in there so you can get a good look at where the switch is. I'm going to get... Ow! Ah! Oh, no, Garrison's deceased. Oh, well, good thing they left me their jester costume.

You'll never find out any more about Cop City now. Cop City has to end because there's no other way for us to find out about it yeah they finally stopped all right so other things that you can do evaporative cooling is the coolest thing in the world again if you're not in a humid area this is why humidity is absolutely terrible and i picked the wrong part of the country to be from um wet bandanas wet clothing uh there's actually like it's kind of sad when i'm saying that there's no labor protections about heat some farm workers like developed a like an immigrant farm worker developed a uh cooling vest system that she's

like working on that there's like articles about where it just uses evaporative cooling to cool people and it's like one of those things where i'm like that rules and also it's absolutely awful that that's like where we're at where we're at you know it's not like oh let's have better labor practices and stuff um and if you have a house if you have like a place that you can really do preparedness for um there's i mean we'll just get an air conditioner don't run your air conditioner as like low as it'll go it just doesn't actually make things any cooler air conditioners are generally designed and only cool things

I want to say was it like 30 degrees below outside temperature or something yeah I think also depends on like the size of the relative space you're cooling and the btu capacity well so i'm saying that they're sized for that by like regulation if someone comes and is like oh what size ac should i put into this house it's going to be i want this size house to be be cooled 30 degrees i think it's 30 degrees might be 24 um okay and so if you run your fans you actually can keep your thermostat

up about 4 degrees and if you don't have AC there's a lot you can do with thermal mass is your friend, if you can choose which house you're going to live in, living in brick houses is great, or adobe houses, it depends on where you live and what your climate is

you want to keep your curtains closed during the day and open at night if you're trying to keep out the sun but curtains closed during the day and open at night if you're trying to keep out the sun but then let out the heat into the cool night air assuming that there's still cool night air depends on where you live as we enter into this nightmare world um reflective window insulation things like the thing that you put in your windshield can help there's like stuff you can do when you accept that it's an emergency. And you can, okay, but then the other thing is that running ACs puts a lot of strain on the power grid,

and we're already starting to see more grid failure, usually in the brownout style rather than the blackout style. But when everyone's running their AC, the grid is not designed to handle it. And there are problems. And so one, you get these like citywide text alerts that are like, Hey, everyone, please turn up your AC, like turn down, whatever, make your AC less cold, cold. And, and this is an example of something that we should do and listen to, but it's really fucking annoying because it's not our fucking fault that the world is heating up right and they're not like turning off time square they're telling everyone you know they're not turning off the ads yeah speaking of ads it's a good time to pivot to some some more stuff yeah even it is waste wasting power and even in the emergency there's still the ads here you go and we're back um hopefully it was for gold which

is uh useless in the heat death of the universe just want to throw that out there yeah but it it does keep its value compared to cash just until neither of them have value that's why whiskey oh wait no wait mutual aid now that's why i've been talking about my on my on my series of john zersion inspired nfts that i minted last year and oh boy have they only grown in value am i i'm telling you this is this is what's gonna hold me through whenever the thing happens. Yeah, I will be at your door with my wanting to trade ammunition for apes, as I always am. Find me in the group chat offering bullets for apes.

There's one other group of people that I want to talk about really quickly about who we should check in on, and that is prisoners. There is no way, from my point of view, I'm going to have a lot of bias here, there is no way for us to justly face a climate emergency while we live in a carceral society. In Texas, this is where most of the news is right now, but it's not like it's better other places as far as I can tell. In Texas since mid-June, between 9 and 23 prisoners have died from heat. But no one knows because Texas refuses to say that anyone has died from heat. They haven't done that since I believe 2012 is the last time they admitted someone died from heat. However, two-thirds of Texas prisons don't have air conditioning. And a bunch of people are dying randomly of heart attacks in their 30s because they're dying of heat.

Jesus Christ. Yeah, I think earlier in like the first few weeks of July when it was getting very, very hot, I believe it was a pretty young woman died in the Fulton County Jail here in Atlanta. Yeah, sure. And it's they're doing an investigation to see why so yeah oh good don't worry the Texas State House passed money to put AC into prisons and then the Senate rejected it cool big thing is the money because not much money in law enforcement so I can see how they're struggling to afford that otherwise yeah there was a oh i didn't write down the numbers in my script but there was like a many millions of dollar budget surplus that they didn't apply to oh i don't know

uh not having people die for having been accused of owning weed. Yeah. I don't know, whatever. I get really fucking mad about this. And I think that it is like... Yeah, it's fucking horrific. Okay, and then the last thing I really want to say is that this was the hottest month, right, that any of us have ever experienced.

It will be the coolest month in our memory at some point you know um or rather whatever it's not getting cooler july in our in our memory at some point yeah yeah like like next year might be a little bit cooler because of natural cycles or whatever right but it's not coming back we're not going back to normal. And for me, this month marks a sea change. Literally, the Antarctic ice did not come back this winter. It's winter right now in Antarctica. And there's a five or six standard deviation away from normal amount of ice there right now. Five to six standard deviations is more than if you flipped a coin 100 times and it came up heads every single time.

It is like more than a one in 3.5 million chance, right? It is a very big number. It is a very abnormal thing. Nothing like this has ever been seen before. And I don't want to say this to make people afraid because I don't think we need to be afraid. Whatever. Fear is complicated. You can't be brave unless you're afraid.

That's what I will say. You cannot have courage. Courage is the act of responding to fear. And we should notice the fear and not let it control us. But it really is time for people to very seriously look at not what's going to happen by 2050, but what is happening now? What is happening now? What will happen in the next three years, the next five years, the next 10 years, and start making decisions based on that. That is what I want. I don't want

to tell people what those decisions are. I want people to get together with the people that they care about and figure out what those decisions are. One of the things that I would recommend is building resilient communities, is looking at how to build communities, right? And there's a lot of ways, a lot of like scenes can become communities. A lot of extended families can become communities. A lot of religious organizations are communities. Okay. How, and then how to make them resilient, how to collectively look at how to handle these things, whether it's literally just having a plan for like, okay, if the power goes out, who has the whole house generator where I live, someone around me has got to have a whole house generator. I don't have one. I want one, but they're expensive. Whose AC is still going to be running when the power goes out, right? Or whether it's like,

hey, how can we collectively help each other's houses have rainwater catchment systems, right? How can we collectively be building up food sovereignty as well as food storage? How can we have, I want to see personally, I want to see days of workshops at community centers of all different ideological compositions getting together and being like, here's how you can food. Here's how you dry food. Here is how you set up mesh networks. I just, Here is how you set up mesh networks. I just, I think it's time. I think that I'm tired of saying,

hey, bad stuff might be coming because it's not might be coming now. It's here and it's really bad. And I think people stick to the might be coming because they're afraid of despair. And I will say that despair is not good right um but the but that is something that we can fight how do we fight despair is also part of this and that the answer to that is agency and when we can find ways to act with agency that is i mean there's like studies about like in disasters people who express agency have like less ptsd right when bad

things happen yeah um and even if the agency like i mean i remember like one point getting arrested right and being like all right well i'm keeping track of like i know that cop's badge number i know this i know this i'm you know keeping track of stuff in case there's a lawsuit later i totally lost that lawsuit but like that helped me get through that situation. Right. Everyone else won the lawsuit, but because I was in black block, I did not win the lawsuit. That's funny.

That's funny. Yeah. Anyway, actually it might've been because I refused to give my name. Anyway, whatever. It was a long time ago. Anarchist moments.

And just, so yeah, act with agency. That is the solution solution it is it's like like it's not the solution to despair it's a way to deal with it in the same way that we're not looking at solutions to climate change anymore we're looking at ways to deal with it right because it's already here yeah yeah we did some of the episodes that me and robert researched to put together for the original it could happen near season season two stuff is a lot of us talking about, about like a mitigation versus a adaption.

And almost every day it looks like we're getting more and more committed to just a full, a full adaption model because these things are really not going to be like the most common widespread effects are not going to be mitigated. There's still a few like cataclysmic scenarios that that probably could be averted but things are going to get so much so much worse and that will be to to deal with that we will have to adopt a large variety of adaptions and it's gonna suck uh but it's it's what we're gonna have to do i i don't know but yeah i've but it's what we're going to have to do. I don't know.

There's a variety of reactions to this. I think I should just put together an episode on this sometime in the future, but there's... As the intensity of the situation is more and more... As it becomes more and more clear,

we're going to get a variety of reactions, especially from people on the right who used to be very much purely ignoring or denying this problem. Some on the right have skipped over the whole part where they've been wrong for so many years and are going to start applying extremely authoritarian and nationalist solutions to this.

Others are just doubling down on denial because facing the facts of the horrible situation we're in is more and more frightening. It's harder to admit that you're wrong and realize the terribleness of the situation. situation. The most recent example of this is I've been checking on the replies to CTV News, which is one of the biggest Canadian television news stations. They've put out a few stories about how July is the hottest month. And in the replies to this story, there's just an honestly shocking amount of pure flippant denial of what's going on. And this has been an increasing problem in Canada, which is ironic because actually Canada's economy is probably going to grow during climate change because they're going to take over a whole bunch of agricultural production from the states. They're actually going to become a much bigger economic player. But the amount of just pure denial that we're seeing in Canada and we're seeing get like increased is extremely worrying.

Yeah. And it's one of those things that's really hard to deal with. Like it's also something I talked about in my Hyper Objects episode, but like it's like, it's the same thing if someone's like in QAnon you can't like you can't like out logic them from q anon you have to you have to you have to tell a better story um so yeah this is you need a solid place to stand like before you can push someone if you see what i mean yeah but like i don't know it's it's just been it's been concerning because i've been seeing a whole bunch of, a whole bunch of these things about how this is the hottest month in 120,000 years. And yeah, that is a,

that is a like a horrifying thing to learn. And you can like look at, you know, what this, what the sources for this are. But the fact that so many of us are just, just denying this is that like, as you, like you can go outside and feel it as well like it's like it's and that's not how climate works all the time but like i've certainly i think many of us have have felt the effects of this um and also like the death numbers can't lie either um yeah yeah um and like i just got back from a trip which will be a podcast soon uh to the

marshall islands where like it is extremely evident that sea levels are rising and if they continue to rise at the rate that they're rising then these places will be uninhabitable within the lifetimes of people who are alive today and uh it it's very odd to or very sort of discordant to see that and then yeah log on when you get home and see someone being like oh it's natural variation or you know like oh it snowed last winter or you know some something which shows like an incomplete understanding but still like just a knee-jerk rejection of uh of like all the evidence we have that the climate is changing and it's it's not coming back but i i find myself the same that i have that same feeling sometimes when i see people

refuse to engage with solutions even with people who just are like sure oh that's real there's nothing we can do about it. So we're not going to try. Like, feels very like, and I don't mean like, I don't even mean a specific way of trying. I don't mean everyone has to go get arrested gluing themselves to famous things. Or everyone needs to go set things on fire. Everyone needs to only focus on growing food. Or like, but just when I see people like, just being like, well, there's nothing. So I'm just gonna not take it into account in my decision-making. I'm like, even if your decision-making is like, like I made the decision to move near my family because of climate

change. I didn't move to where the climate is going to be magically stable. I moved to where I can spend more time with the people I love and be in a better position to take care of them. You know, like I just, I feel so like, I don't know. I,

it was whatever. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is. And it's very difficult to see people just sort of, uh, I know sort of fiddle as a Titanic.

I mean, sinks shutting down is one of the easiest reactions to stress and ignoring it both the the denial of this as things are obviously getting more and more intense the denial gets more and more intense but so is

the types of the type of doomerism that leads you just to checking out of being like oh this is so bad there's nothing I can do so I'm just gonna completely ignore this and then that's also another way of just like sectioning off this part of your brain so it so it doesn't actually impact you it's it's it's functionally quite the same and I can't blame people for it and that's what I think people often think that I am judging for them for that. And I'm not, I just feel like I'm, it's just, it's hard to engage with sometimes. Yeah, but I think a good point to end is like maybe the best prep

you can do for climate change is not like buying a bigger air conditioner or moving to somewhere where you think there is a better chance that you personally as an individual will be better but it's building a community that can be resilient and that can like weather the storm and like having seen a country which is losing its very minimal amount of land to climate change and how communities have come together to protect each other uh during that it's kind of reinforced to me how important

community is as opposed to stuff yeah absolutely also with communities you can get more stuff you can make your own stuff that's true seize the means of production but not for the pure marxist point of view but from the i'm I'm like joking, but I'm actually like, this is what people should be preparing to do. Like, yeah. A climate revolution. That's less about like, Oh,

we're going to put in someone smart and charged. He's going to fix everything. And more a climate revolution. That's like, we're going to create bottom up solutions and, uh, not let people stop us from creating bottom up solutions. Yes.

That would be good. Don't be a good revolution. Consider implementing that. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post Run High, is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts

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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. 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. It could happen here, the podcast where things happen and sometimes things maybe don't happen and once again the thing maybe not happening is the strike at ups um yeah so stuff has happened

uh since we last recorded and also there was the thing that happened in the middle of the recording which was the announcement of the tentative agreement and so to talk more about what's been happening since and what's sort of in this deal because we now know more details about it is once again reese smith and oliver rose who are two rank and file ups teamsters and uh once again they do not represent the union are speaking as individuals, etc, etc. Yeah, but welcome back. Yeah, good to be back. Yeah, thanks for having us on again. Yeah, I'm glad I'm happy to talk to you. So. All right. So last last time, we found out in the middle of recording that there is a deal struck. And I guess I wanted to start by talking a bit about what's been

happening since then and what sort of organizing has been happening, what the sort of union bureaucracy has been doing. Yeah. Well, it's been kind of crazy. Basically, we had that highlight reel that we all got. And then it was a bit before we got the actual contract, at least like a few days. And since then, you know, your union bureaucracy has been promoting these contract Q&A sessions and stuff like that. And they had three of them last Sunday and one of them this Monday. And voting has opened up. Yeah, it's been a bit crazy feeling, to be honest. Yeah, yeah, it's been wild.

Yeah, and of course, you know, while we're recording, you know, we get the tentative agreement drop. And, you know, it's framed as, you know, this big historic, you know, this game changer. You know, it's framed as, you know, this big historic, you know, this game changer. So, you know, of course, for the first day, we just had what was in the press release. Even some of that language was a little bit confusing. It wasn't until Teamsters for a Democratic Union also had their own, like, press release, which clarified some language. And then, you know, we're kind of just like, OK, well, you know we're told we'll be getting uh the tentative agreement language next week and chance to you know debrief with the local but really like the the uh i think it was the following day the actual language comes out you know and some of the things where it's um you know there's like a promise with the uh

all the general wage increases going on top of those market rate adjustments we're speaking about, which are basically wages that UPS can add or even remove. That's not actually tied to the contract wages. So one of the things was getting those raises on top. But there was no contract language in there, which definitely caused, I think, a lot of confusion and concern among rank and file members. And it actually took one of the locals, you know, having a no endorsement before we even saw this memorandum of understanding

between the company and the IBT, you know, guaranteeing this was going the IBT you know guaranteeing this was going to happen you know that we would be getting those raises on top which is kind of one of those things where you know there was this kind of really vague language

that was used and I think definitely caused you know people to not really fully understand you know what was going on especially i think it was uh about 75 percent of uh part-timers are uh currently have a market rate adjustment you know that's kind of a very big portion of the workforce yeah it was a i'm gonna be honest it was a real it was kind of a real calm shit show uh from from uh union leadership releasing the information uh in the way they did it absolutely led to a lot of uh

misunderstandings um about what was in the contract which you know kind of spread like wildfire and the union response to what i think is a lot of just genuine misunderstanding is to just label it all as misinformation from people that have, you know, their their own agendas. Right. And you can't you can't like trust those people. You can only trust what's what's coming from the union. trust what's what's coming from the union um and yeah that definitely didn't inspire trust from the people that were leaning no um because in between a lot of these like and there is definitely was some misunderstanding about what was initially into the in the contract but there is also genuine critique about certain things that are in the contract, right? And so instead of like substantively like looking at these genuine critiques, we're all forced in the situation of sorting out what is quote unquote misinformation or, you know, more accurately, people not understanding legalese and also a bad rollout of information versus, okay,

delays and also a bad rollout of information versus, okay, but what is in the contract that really needs improvement? And instead of like substantively getting into the latter, it's just been a pure focus on the former. And yeah, it's been kind of tense. It seems like, you know, it seems like there's a real mix it's real kind of even even how rank-and-file members are responding to this contract you know some have kind of bought in full sale that this is a historic contract and others you know you know such as myself like you know there's still things in this contract that to me are unacceptable. And it's going to be interesting to see where it goes.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I kind of feel like it's hard to get a gauge of where everyone's at. And of course I only have the, you know, kind of my local experience in my specific shift. You know, definitely. Yeah. I haven't, I haven't come across, you know, someone I work with yet, you know, who's totally just like, yeah, this is super historic. This is, you know, game changing, uh, you know, as they were saying, or the union was saying, um, a lot of people, you know, especially long timers are like, yeah, this is a really good contract with, you know, the best I've seen, uh, you know, in my days here.

And then there's, you know, there's been a few other people who are like, yeah, I'm going to vote yes, but it really doesn't really seem like it's matching the framing of this historic contract. And then also know there's, yeah, I mean, other people who are just kind of like, no, this seems, I mean, honestly, kind of like too little too late.

The gains aren't quite there. Yeah, there's raises. They're also kind of done in a weird way where they're more or less like kind of front loaded towards the first and last year. And everything in the middle is a lot lower to the point actually where, and it gets confusing because everyone's kind of at a different rate with those market rate adjustments. The more you're making from that supplemental pay, the worse this is going to keep with inflation to the point where you're only actually going to be just above inflation towards the end of the contract. towards the end of the contract. Especially one of the, definitely one of the weaker things in the contract is all new hires

or current people without seniority are going to be on a different tier. And this is for the part-timer inside warehouse positions. So, you know, the, yeah. So if you have seniority, it's minimum of 21 an hour to start. and that goes up to 25.75 an hour versus those new hires or no seniority employees are going to be at 21 with a progression to 23. you know, once, you know, tech on the average, you know, a little bit over 3% inflation, you know, you can kind of quickly see, uh, it's those new members who are getting the

worst part of the deal. Yeah. And that comes to, I think another thing that, that is like, I don't know. So when this was all first happening and I've seen this like a lot from people talking about this as people talking about this is people talking about this as like a contract that like ends the tier systems and that just like doesn't seem to be true at all yeah and so one of the things so there's the and i believe we spoke to this last time but the 224 is what it's called where it's a combo driver and inside warehouse position and

most of the time you know they were just more or less practically uh full-time drivers except for a few times where you know they'd especially like earlier this year they tried to transition them to mostly like in inside full-time but so the thing is yeah those will all get you know converted to the the package car uh drivers with that, I believe with that rate, or at least very similar. Yeah, yeah. So we did get rid of the 22.4s. And that was the big promise, you know, going into this contract fight. But yeah, no, there are definitely still remaining tiers within UPS. You know, there's this new one that's been created, which is the tier between what they call the unborn. That's how they refer to people that have not yet been hired by UPS that

have stipulations in the contract, right? Yeah, they call them the unborn. It's kind of funny. And their whole thing is that they just have a completely different wage progression than the rest of us do but in addition to that tier which was introduced you know there are tiers elsewhere sometimes it's a tier between the hubs like all of the hubs are making different mras and stuff like that but additionally there are some hubs that don't have a daily guarantee of hours like regular hubs do. Like, for instance, air hubs, right? So like that's another basically another tier because it's, you know, people doing the same work, but not guaranteed the same things. And yeah, yeah. So there's definitely tiers remaining in this contract for sure. And it's, uh, it's really unfortunate to see that the one existing didn't get addressed and that they just created a whole new one, even though they're adamantly insisting it is not a tear.

tier yeah that's uh you know this goes back to i i believe the 1982 contract which is uh when the full-time and part-time pay was uh changed to different different tiers uh with part-time getting like four dollars less than for uh full-time which was i think 12 12 an hour back in 82 versus uh eight an hour for the part-timers, you know, so that that's continued, you know, across all these decades. And so now with the current contract provided you're getting paid the contract minimums. Yeah. You're looking at full-time inside warehouse, their top rate going to a $36 an hour, I believe.

And then you're going to have a an hour, I believe. And then you're going to have part-timers who have seniority just below $26 an hour. And then you're going to have those people who weren't quite in the door yet at $23. And of course, it's doing more or less the same work inside. You're doing your loading, unloading, sorting, the other various positions there. And of course, one of the things I've seen, particularly online, I haven't heard this on the shop floor, but it's just like, oh, well, they're working more.

So of course they're going to get paid more. But it's like, okay, well, yeah, they have more hours, so they would get more pay, but that doesn't mean that they should be at a higher hourly rate. Plus, there's going to be other things too, like the pension accrual and vacation time where you're working more, you're going to get more of that too. It kind of has its own reward. There's really no reason to have a $10 discrepancy for that type of work performed also i was doing some quick math in the background and the the the the 1982

uh wage is like 36 an hour and uh with with uh inflation now so that's great. That's fun. Yeah, I don't know. I think it's when I think about, you know, this union being touted as historic, I like actually think about like, what are the actual historic wins of the labor movement? And, you know, I'm thinking about like, you know, the right to a five day work week. Meanwhile, this historic contract, you know, I'm thinking about like, you know, the right to a five day work week. Meanwhile, this historic contract, you know, it ended six day punches, but that's, that's not a new historical thing. That was something we lost and then regained with this contract. So it's, you know, in my mind, it's not really breaking any barriers or like, you know, blowing anyone's minds, you know, especially when we have Sean Fain of the UAWD, who is talking about, you know, one of their demands is a 32

hour work week, right? Like, he's, he's advocating that every worker needs a 40% increase in pay because the CEO got a 40% increase in pay. And yeah, it's just, yeah, our contract just, you know, it isn't at that level by any means. When you use that word historic, you know, like I think there could be times where you can, you know, call something historic before it stands the test of time. But this is kind of like, okay, this is kind of, I feel like the contract, you would expect a union to bargain. Maybe it's, I mean, partly it's historic because there just really hasn't been really any gains.

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

One of the things I wanted to add was, you know, especially with those combo positions, you know, ending that tier, that that was something that was introduced in the previous contract, which rank and file members voted down it was a no vote but it was just because of this uh you know a kind of obscure uh you know

rule in the constitution where it's just like oh if 50 of people don't vote then it requires a two thirds you know uh no vote so you know that was, you know, over, overruled by the union. Like, ah, we're going to do this anyways. So it kind of, you know, it's good that we righted that wrong. You know, it's good to reduce a tier. Of course, I'm not going to knock that. But just kind of one of those things where it's like, yeah, but membership already didn't want that.

Or at least. Yeah. It's like you guys did. You guys introduced this in the first place like come on yeah yeah it's also worth noting that um the 22-4 position you know it wasn't working for our members but it also wasn't working for the company either they were having significant trouble trying to fill all the shifts that were needed and required by the position. And to the point that workers ended up kind of being slotted into one or the other with like really bad schedules. And it wasn't it wasn't working for either is the thing. So it is it's great that we got rid of it. But it seems like it was somewhat of an easy thing to win. It made mutual sense, right?

And yeah, yeah, it's just there were, you know, there were bigger, there could have been bigger fights over other things in this contract that weren't pursued, right? So. in this contract that weren't pursued, right? Yeah, I mean, that's the thing. From everything that I've seen from it, it seems like the goal of this contract is to get a contract that's exactly good enough to get 51% of the voter in a contract to avoid UPS having to actually deal

with a contract that a strike would produce. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. That's kind of the, I mean, whether, I mean, probably intentional where it's just like, you know, it's like just good enough, you know, to maybe warrant like a yes vote. And especially, I mean, in context of, you know, the last, however many contracts,

but it's kind of one of those things where it's like, okay, of the last however many contracts. But it's kind of one of those things where it's like, okay, by comparison, it's good. But again, I don't think it quite goes far enough, either on the wages or especially one of the issues that I've been focused on a lot is the heat protections. Yeah. Can we talk about, well, specifically the heat protections. Yeah. Can we, can we talk about, well, specifically the heat protections, but then also kind of talk a bit about what's,

what is in the contract and what like, isn't in the contract that should be. Oh yeah. I can start with the heat production stuff. Yeah. So one of the things, so they'll be rolling out air conditioners in the, the all trucks,

package cars purchased, I believe, after August of next year. And they'll be kind of distributing them by zones. And current ones will be retrofitted with heat shields and vents. I'm not quite sure how effective that'll be. One of the things for the inside people, you know, is there, you know,

there'll be installing, you know, tens of thousands of more fans, which, you know, I'm not going to lie, that will feel really nice because those trailers just get so hot and stuffy. There's no airflow.

Especially like if it's been sitting for a while, you open the door. It's just like a blast of heat. But the problem with fans is they're only so effective. Particularly once it reaches 95 degrees. They don't do anything. And so, you know, there's a lot of places where it'll probably feel nice. And it might help to some degree. But, you know, especially like right now in, you know, like the Southwest and the South, where you've just had these, you know, 110 plus degree days, you know, for like over a month. Like that's not going to do, really do much.

not going to do really do much um especially if you're anywhere depending on if you've got dry heat or you know higher humidity um and the latter uh fans can and sometimes make it worse i'm also worried it's going to kind of be like this uh you know kind of like a comparison to uh like um security theater but like more like safety theater where it's, there's appearance of doing something to say like, look, we're doing this thing. It's going to keep you safe. But whether that's, you know, actually true or not, well, I mean, we'll kind of find out, but definitely I'm pretty worried about, you know, what's going to happen, especially in the next five years. We already have, I mean, I think it was the, who was it?

It was the World Meteorological Organization. You know, now has a, their researchers have like a 98% certainty that we're going to reach a high mark for global warming before 2027. high mark for global warming before 2027 so you know and i'm pretty sure last july was already the the hottest um month on record globally and it's something i believe there's and i think in that report it was like a 66 chance of passing that 1.5 degrees celsius warming global warming between now and 2027 so it's kind of one of those things where you know i don't think we necessarily have five years to wait to you know address this contract language and add further protections especially we got other unions um like the international longshore and warehouse union they had an article that was talking about their heat protections which have things like stewards that are equipped

with uh heat monitoring equipment versus the current contract language for us would be they can just use like the osha app or um you know like weather service to check you know like a weather station versus like the actual specific conditions you're working in. Yeah. Yeah. That seems like there'd be a huge, it seems like there's a huge discrepancy there because the,

like the indoor temperatures and temperatures in these trailers are way hotter than like the reported conditions. Yeah. And it can be like five, 10 degrees hotter. At least I bought a little thermometer and a high uh high hydrometer hygrometer something like that whatever measures humidity because that's kind of how because there are states with with heat protections it's like seven of them a lot of times they're using the the heat index when

you're factoring in the temperature and humidity to get the feels like temperature. And yeah, and with the ILWU, you know, they're also getting rest breaks as part of their contract language, which I believe two or three states have those of the seven total that actually have heat protections. And, you know, the ILWU was kind of talking about even though they have heat protections that kind of match or even kind of exceed partly what some of the states have, you know, they're kind of saying this isn't enough for the current extreme heat we're facing. talked about this on the show before but like whatever heat protections get negotiated in a contract like the company is going to basically the instant negotiations are over is going to

figure out what the well a what the cheapest possible way to do this is with the shittiest equipment and then be like try to they're going to immediately try to figure out like how you know like how how to actually subvert it and you know this is this is the thing we've seen all over the world even in places that have sort of national heat protection laws is that you know, like how, how to actually subvert it. And, you know, this is, this is a thing we've seen all over the world, even in places that have sort of national heat protection laws is that, you know, even, even if you have a law, or even if you have a thing in the contract, even if you have something in your contract, it doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be enforced. And that requires a,

you know, it requires like a, a pretty significant degree of organization to make sure it stays enforced. And that's, you know, that, that's true both of stuff that's in contract and stuff that's like legally required. And so like if, if, if, if, if the thing that they're nominally required to do is still insufficient, it's going to end up being way worse than that on the ground. Yeah, we're, we're seeing that with our, I mean, existing heat protections at the state level where they're

you know falling short and especially you know there's either you know there's kind of loopholes or even just kind of like murky language that makes it really hard to enforce in some cases uh do not have a good transition but uh it's hot uh yeah here here are some ads that are i don't know hopefully not making the climate worse and we're back so outside of the sort of of the concerns around heat what what else has been going like what what else is in the contract that there's been sort of dispute over? So if you look online, and this is an instance of not really quite understanding what's in the contract, but if you go online,

a lot of people think that there are pension freezes in the contract. And once again, I think we can contribute this misunderstanding to a calm strategy failure, as well as a lack of open bargaining. The the not comms, the pension contribution rate has decreased, but money is still going in to the pension fund. but money is still going in to the pension fund. Not as much as it was, is my understanding. The way the union broke it down for me was,

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

And yeah, that's it. I think we were using the 7,500 for newly created jobs, but apparently the contract also specifically requires them to actually fill the 22,000 some full-time jobs that exist that they just have not been filling. But even with that additional 22,000, that's still roughly 30,000 full-time jobs. That is for the whole workforce of 340,000 people. And something I learned is that full-time drivers can bid into those positions and get them because they will likely have the seniority to do so. Because that's how we determine how to fill jobs. It's by seniority. You know, how long have you been there?

And usually, you know, I think that makes sense. But, you know, that really just contributes to the long, long wait of part-timers trying to get full-time work, right? to the long, long wait of part-timers trying to get full-time work, right? And yeah, like the thing like kind of related to that, you know, we have these, like if you have a market rate adjustment and you get your 275, for me, that's going to be 26.75 an hour. And that looks great until you remember that we are part-time. It is like we are supposed to work half a work week. I work less than because of the hub that I am at, which is not great. But, you know, we need the hours

and there isn't enough jobs. And that's stipulated by this contract. I think that there probably could be a lot more jobs. Yeah, I want to see something about that specifically too which is that like when when like you random listener who does not work at ups whenever you see someone like talking about a wage number and it's for part-timers like if you want to try to figure out can this person survive you need to divide that number by two at like at the very least divided by two possibly divided by more because again like you they don't there you know no one's like if you're a part-timer like obviously yeah you're not you're not getting the hours that you know that that that you that

you would normally you know if you you can't just immediately convert that to what would the salary be if you worked if you got like 40 hours a week or whatever like you can't do that i've seen a lot i've seen this a lot a lot like on the internet. I've seen pundits talking about it like this. And it's just like a. Incomprehensible misunderstanding of the act of like how, how this stuff actually works for you to be going like, oh,

look at all this money that people are making, assuming that like, you know, and then, and then using calculations that are based on like someone working full time, which is most of the workforce like a significant significant majority of the workforce is not is not working full-time and will not be even after this contract yes yeah it's uh yeah it's estimated there are 60 percent of the workforce is uh is part-timers um so yeah no that

that is a that is a huge issue uh you know A lot of people also, when this is brought up, a lot of people like to then say, well, get a second job. But our jobs aren't flexible. First of all, fuck having a second job. I am kind of staunchly opposed to the entire concept. But even if I wasn't, this job is not flexible enough to account for a second job. Not unless you never want to sleep and your second job is when you should be like sleeping. Because you know, we have our start times, those are given to us a week in advance. But we don't know when our end times are because the end times are when we run out of packages. So you know, some days, you know some days you know like in my hub it's always just going to be the two hours but like in other hubs you could be there you know you could be trying to get your three and a half

hour daily guarantee like employing that when they're trying to send you home or you could be there six seven hours and you know how how how is another employer supposed to operate with that? You know, you call in like three times saying like, oh, I can't actually leave my first job. You're not going to have that second job much longer. So, yeah, in addition to the lack of full-time jobs, the way this job is makes a second one impossible. job is makes a second one impossible so a lot of our part-timers really are relying on that on that part-time wage to get them through and picking up doubles when they can which means you kind of end up having a 10-hour day because there's like about a two-hour uh like space of time in between the shifts so yeah yeah it's uh yeah those are those are some some of the big issues so yeah that's one

of my worries you know if i about you know if i want to go full time or not is you know can be at least in the hub i work at um i would say usually i i'm getting like 24 hours a week you know if i'm going full time what double double that, cause now I'm working two shifts, but also, you know, got to have that like hour or two of wait time between shifts. So, you know, it's just a lot of time to be spending at work,

especially unpaid time at work. That is, that is the worst. You know, it's not quite a long enough stretch to like go home or at least, you know, you have a decent commute to work. And another thing that came to my mind a little earlier was that, and it sounds like, at least talking with new hires, that this is still continuing, which is kind of this really deceptive hiring practice where the hours are posted. deceptive hiring practice where the hours are posted. When I got the job, it was posted as part-time.

I forget, it was something like, I don't know, nine to four. But I had that schedule for five days a week, seven-hour shifts, 35 hours a week, times by the 26th starting pay. I was like, oh, perfect. I'll be making somewhere like mid-40,000. That's livable, at least for my specific, you know, circumstances. But then of course, get there and, you know, the, yeah, we get two days notice for start time.

It's posted on our either, you know, end of the week. So don't know exactly when I'm working, you know, until right before the next week. And, you know, at least during orientation, someone asked, oh, like, what's actually the end time? I was just like, oh, well, when the last package is loaded. Now, of course, if you know when the next shift starts, you can kind of get a better idea of when you'll actually be out of there. But still, it's just kind of, you know, it's this claimed flexibility, but it's very difficult, you know, to actually work a second job or even, you know, they offer tuition reimbursement.

And it's a number of students who have had, you know, a hard time actually, like, you know, getting the time off to attend their classes. And also, in anywhere that's part-time work that offers tuition reimbursement, you know, I would say there's an expectation that, OK, well, you're going to school and you're working part-time. You would think the wages then should at least, you know, provide enough for rent, food, gas, textbooks, all that. what Oliver just said regarding, you know, like this is a wage that is good for, you know, their situation when they were assuming it was at the, you know, 35 hours a week. You know, another thing to think about is a lot of these part timers, you know, they have families, they have significant others that they're caring for. Like, you know, a lot of people look at this wage and one make the faulty assumption that you talked about earlier by multiplying it by 40 to get the 40 and then they assume that's for just that one person and like there are part-timers of every age right and they all have their own their own families and

stuff like that that they are expected to care for as well so like when you look at all of this and the you know the rate of inflation and the way the economy is, and you take all of these things into account, the gains that are provided for in this contract is not enough when you consider the whole of everyone who works at UPS. It's leaving behind families, right? Like, yeah. It's wild. Yeah. It's wild. this is like i don't know this kind of work is intense enough that i mean there's there's there's very real risk of injury and there's also i mean just like you know over the course of time doing

this kind of shit is going to like fuck up your body and you know like part part of the sort of bargain of like like part part of the bargain of bargain of like like part part of the bargain of this work is that you're getting you know it's it's in some ways like it's in some ways like you you could think about it like if you're a mid-level football player like you're gonna get your fucking brain destroyed by just repeated head trauma right and you know so so there's only a limited amount of time your body can physically handle this and it's like yeah okay it looks like you're getting a lot of money in a very short amount of time but you have to you know you have to live with the sort of physical consequences of what happened of what happened to you on that job getting the money so that money also like not just it doesn't just have

to get you through like now right like it also it has to also essentially be compensation to the physical damage that you're doing to your body by doing this shit. Oh, yeah. I think these wages look even worse when you think of it in terms of – not just in terms of immediate rent, but in the really long term of having to live with the sort of physical damage that you take from doing this stuff. Yeah. 1,000%. Absolutely. And that's fine.

I just had a coworker talking about that today, actually. And cause that's, I mean, there are a lot of like college age kids, you know, the early twenties. They, I've at least from, you know, my experience of notes kind of usually they're kind of like the quick turnover. I feel like a lot of people are staying more usually they're kind of like the quick turnover. I feel like a lot of people are staying more like their 30s, 40s. We have people older than that, too, on my line.

I think part of that's just like we understand the importance of a gold-tier health insurance plan and a pension. I mean, a gold tier health insurance plan and a pension. But, you know, of course, with, you know, being older, it's going to, you know, have even more of an effect on the body. And yeah, I know I've heard people talking about this where it's just like, oh, well, it's just part time or it's, you know, entry level, you know, quote unquote. You don't need a degree for this. So like, why do you think you should be paid more it's like well it's it's brutal i mean we get a 10 minute break we're working up to six hours that is it why they don't have to do a lunch break i don't know it seems like ups just always gets their their way and uh that's you know like state uh local federal law they don't they don't care anyway

even this last contract and there's so many violations um of course you know we gotta whether you know this is yes or no um whatever the next contract is you know that's going to be a big part of the fight is just holding them accountable and to the terms. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Like I, you know, I've had coworkers out on, you know, workers comp for like, you know, doing physical therapy for the injuries that they got on the job for like months at a time, right? These like, you know, we're sitting around loading boxes all day and some of them are very light but some of them are really fucking heavy some of them are really awkward to hold they're weirdly shaped like there are some boxes where like they they tell you about the UPS tells you about methods the eight keys of lifting and lowering that, you know, should make it safe.

But like, there are some boxes where it's impossible to follow those methods. The absolute bane of my existence, and I recognize them every time I see them, I swear to God, these things must be just filled with lead because you look at them and it's a very small box you know it's not more than like probably 12 inches long you know like no not even 12 inches probably more like seven inches long you know like six seven inches wide and then like two and a half inches you know deep and that should be a very easy box but it's like filled with lead and for whatever reason it can weigh like 35 to 50 pounds jesus and it's like one that box is too small to like have a team lift on because you can't have two people around something like that and like you know when you pick up a box you're supposed to keep the natural curve of your back but do not overextend the curve

and you have to for those like packages like that right like there's not a way to position yourself to lift them safely and you kind of have to a little bit jerk up which they tell you not to do but that's the only way to get leverage on it and yeah like and you know i've been in trailers where like a box like that was loaded precariously like just slightly above my head and one time it came crashing down and i like neo'd out of the way like i was like in the fucking matrix and i was just like oh if i had just been a little bit less responsive that could have been a very serious head injury for me. And so, yeah, the risk of like very severe injury, like, you know, I busted my face open on a grate outside of where the what we call the cans, which are like the things that have all the packages, they bring them to the bay doors.

I was unloading and I had to go between them. And I like there was motor oil spilled i tripped and i like smashed my open my face open on a fucking grate and had to get stitches like it's yeah no the the safety involved with this job is not extremely guaranteed and yeah the risk of injury is high and we should be preemptively compensated for that yeah it's like and even somehow if you manage to go like your whole career without a single injury um you know there's well at least like more the kind of like accidental injury um because it's still it still a lot of repetitive motion. And eventually, it's going to take its toll. We're doing some more ads.

Yeah, buy things. All right, we are back. So I guess another aspect of this that I wanted to talk about has been the sort of broader strategy of trying to avoid strikes. And this has been both sort of, to some extent run by unions, to some extent imposed from the top down. I think a sort of kind of under-discussed aspect of what's been happening in the last sort of year or so has been Biden's willingness to get involved in strikes earlier. Obama eventually got involved in a couple of strikes during his tenure, but he tended to not get involved until a strike had been going on for like nine months or whatever and biden's been taking like a very very proactive approach to sort of i don't know strike mitigation i guess is the sort of like sanitized term you take either like keeping labor peace but he seems to have a sort of

you know he seems to be getting very very involved very quickly in trying to make sure strikes don't happen and you know, the consequence of this is that we didn't get the rail strike that we should have gotten. And there's, there's been a few other strikes that has sort of been averted. And I wanted to ask, I guess how you're thinking about this strike,

not just sort of in terms of like the immediate benefits, but in terms of what it would actually mean if like another major strike sort of gets shut down before we can get going in a year that is i mean still even even even if this strike doesn't happen a pretty sort of full year in labor terms yeah yeah well one i Yeah, yeah. Well, one, I guess I got to say thank you to the most pro-labor president of our lifetime. Yeah, no, he, yeah, you're absolutely right. He does seem to be getting involved early and mitigating them. I, you know, I, he's very concerned about this whole economy thing that we keep talking about, right? And he doesn't want to see any big shocks to the economy. And, you know, that's something where I guess I disagree. I think, you know, I think a shock to the economy that is brought about by workers going on strike is a, reminds them of what they have and what they move and what they create. Right. And I think,

yeah, the ruling class, you know, our politicians and the capitalists who own our politicians, they, they don't want us to experience that. You know, like I remember even during the, you know, the Trump administration, when, you know, it was when during the government shutdown and Sarah Nelson got all the flight attendants to do a sick out and stuff like that. And kind of just like that, the government shutdown had ended and they all went back to do government things whatever those government things are um and you know like people on twitter you know they were talking about like yeah this is like workers have power to affect not only their own work conditions but they can have broad implications on society on the political climate on what's going on. And yeah, there was absolutely, I think, a contingent of centrist liberals that were like really frightened by that idea. You know, they like a society in which the right people who went to the right schools and all of that, like,

where they're the ones that are in charge and they are the ones that are shaping history with the pen strokes on like, you know, whatever bills they're legislating. And yeah, I think they have a vested interest in making sure that workers don't get to experience that sense of autonomy that they can experience by going on strike. And by seeing, you know, exactly what kind of power they have and what it does. Because they don't want it. They don't want it to get beyond what's going on in the workplace. They barely want it there, you know, like. So, yeah, yeah, I think there is a vested interest. And yeah, I have not been able to see it confirmed, but I have seen in articles where they will say that, you know, Sean O'Brien had met with President Biden. But then there isn't a link click through. So I can't figure out what the initial thing is.

But I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised. Like. And it's it's a it's a damn shame. And it's a damn shame. It's a shame that the president of our rank and file to like get to just like sign on to some kind of agreement and i think i think this is something that you know in terms of sort of political repression like it's something that's not understood in the same way but like that is also still like that like that that like negotiating behind the scenes and putting pressure on and then you know eventually biden does just actively like mandate that the strike can't happen right like that is like that i i i will argue that that is in fact a form of strike breaking i agree and and I think, I think people are tend to be less,

but, but, you know, specifically the, the, the ability to sort of cut deals with unions like this is something that the Republicans have, like,

aren't like really good at. Like it's, it's not, it's not an ability that they really have. It's, it's something that like is, is largely limited to the Democrats. And,

but it, you know, but this, this means that they have sort of, they have a unique capacity to repress social movements that isn't as obvious as sort of like, you know, just like a bunch of strike breakers showing up or the cops showing up, but is there all the same? And I think is in some ways more dangerous because, you know, like you get these arguments with like with the rail strike where like technically eventually biden was able to get some kind of deal through for some sick time right but you know and and you have you have this sort of like liberal conception of

of what labor is where they're like oh well yeah you everyone was wrong to like be mad at biden for this like they got the thing eventually. But, you know, the problem here isn't it isn't just, you know, strikes aren't just about the immediate thing that you're fighting for. Right. Like they're also about like moving the class as a whole. They're about the they're also about the fact that you will get a better deal if you win a strike than you will if you get like, you know, if you get one of these sort of like negotiated deals like cut in the back room of difference between like liberalism sort of conception of you know you you achieve material gains and it doesn't really matter what the process is right or you know the process is like you go through the legislative domain there there's an actual difference between that and the things that happens during a strike, which is, you know, there's, there's an actual process of like the building of by unions themselves by and you know by by business leaders and also by like the president and the democratic party to try to make sure that this

doesn't happen and that they can sort of contain this really explosive uh labor moment and prevent it from sort of turning into anything more yeah Yeah, I think that's very true. I think that, you know, the unions, you know, have long been divorced from their original roots as like, you know, this was a communist social, this sprung out of communism, socialism, anarchism. It was about workers banding together to not only collectively bargain just for the workplaces, but for society-wide issues, right? Unions used to be explicitly political. And as we've seen this rise in political conscience over this last decade, the ruling class and the entrenched union bureaucrats that have long been, you know, divorced from those origins, I think, have a very vested interest in, you know, not having labor go back to those roots and stuff like that. You know, it threatens it obviously threatens the working or the ruling class power.

It obviously threatens the ruling class power, excuse me. And it threatens union bureaucrat jobs when workers start demanding more from what the labor movement can provide for them. This is another avenue where collective change is possible and the state and capital will always clamp down on any avenue where change can be achieved through those means. So I think that's really, really what we're seeing here. Yeah, and I don't know. worth pointing out is that like part of the reason that like part of the reason that you know if you if you go back to sort of like when when the era of the sort of decline of unionism happened right like part part of the reason why the reagan era repression worked was that a lot of these unions had already sort of hollowed out the radical core of like what had been their union organizers they had purged you know like the the cio and even back as early as like the 40s like the cio purged like all of its leftist members um and you know you got these successive like these these successive sort of

iterations of unionism that were less and less militant and you know like you you can you can you can literally see what the result of that has been right like union density down to like six percent and so you know if if if if it keeps going like this and we keep getting these sort of like sustained efforts to make sure that it never redevelops again like yeah like it's we're gonna we're gonna be stuck there yeah and i mean it's just yeah i mean specific to those ups contracts can absolutely see that you know by looking at the wage growth you know through the last 40 years or maybe uh the lack thereof uh more the stagnating wages just uh you know between either you know union officials or you Biden coming in. It's more or less people who aren't going

who didn't enter the economy within the last decade or two and don't know at all really what our experiences are, what kind of challenges and struggles

and burdens we're facing. And I mean, especially in not prepared at all for, you know, this world with a drastically changing climate. Yeah, yeah. And then like, you know, also to go back to like, you know, the decline of, you know, how unions have operated, you know, over these last, like, for some decades, right? I think this is something I talked about a lot. And I talked about it, I think, on the last podcast. But, you know, once the organized left was kind of purged out of all of these unions, you know, unions kind of became about a service model. And, you know, that's when the union leadership, you know, does, you know, like you on the floor are enforcing your contract, you're bringing your

grievances to the union, and the union is getting something done about them, right? And I think, you know, that model in and of itself is indicative of a decline of a collective action, of a decline of a collective action, right? That reduces the union to, yeah, that's the entity you go to when there is an issue in the enforcement of your contract and they negotiate a new contract for you. And, you know, that's the service model type, right?

And that's like what we're seeing a lot of, that's what like, you know, a lot of the business unions do and stuff like that. Some of them do it better what like, you know, a lot of the business unions do and stuff like that. Some of them do it better than others, you know. But then there's also the organizing model where you use the union as a means to make your members militant. And they do contract enforcement on the floor. And they like, you know, organize protests at their work site. And they like, you know, organize protests at their work site and they like, you know, they get involved in, you know, issues outside of the work site. Right. And I think, yeah, like watching the service model kind of prevail over these last, you know, some decades over the organizing model is just, yeah, it's absolutely just another sign of collective action being stamped down wherever it can be.

You know, there's, there's an interesting thing with the, there's an interesting thing with the service model that I see a lot where it's like, you know, when, when,

when, when you're getting like sort of union inoculation like stuff, right. They'll be like, ah, like the management is going to tell you that like the union is an outside force and it's not, the union is actually you.

And it's like, this is true, but also like damn i i wonder where the idea that the union is an outside force and it's not actually you came from like it couldn't you know it's it like it it could it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the way you run your union like okay yep absolutely absolutely yeah i think we were talking about that last time like the kind of like the lack of onboarding engagement by the union yeah um i mean especially you know i mean yeah i mean i know there's i mean other union members too where like does kind of feel like they're like oh i don't have all these benefits or higher pay or, or, you know, we're thinking about striking, but we don't even have a strike fund. You know, we don't know how exactly we'll weather the storm. I mean, that's something I hear,

you know, a lot on the shop floor is like when talking about, you know, our union, you know, it's, it's always the union. I know I say that a ton too, but I mean, I kind of feel like the language we just use like day to day talking about it. You know, it kind of, there's not like inherent separation when it's like, oh, it's the union. It's this, you know, it's this outside thing. It's not, oh, it's a collection of all, you know, rank and file members. It's us. We're the union. And it doesn't

yeah it doesn't become that unless you have a really high level of participation and then also like a systemic effort to make sure that to make sure everyone's involved and to make sure that you know the union functions in such a

way that even that that like you know that that decisions membership actually matters. And I don't know, I think, I think, I think it's really, I think it's really easy to, you know, in this moment where unions are incredibly, like, you know, with the total, the actual amount of like unions in the US is really small. Like, you know, the actual amount of, like, unions in the U.S. is really small. And also simultaneously, like, you know, we're seeing a sort of resurgence of union organizing. I think it's really, really easy to sort of fall into this trap and, like, be completely uncritical of the way that unions have functioned. the way that unions have functioned because again like if the current model of unions that exists right now like if that stuff worked like we wouldn't be in in in the sort of conditions that we're in now and that calls for you know like that that that calls for collective action

and you know one of the things that calls for is being willing to go on strike. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Do you two have anything else that you wanted to add? Yeah, no, because like something that, you know, when I think about like, you know, how do we get back to like this sort of, you know, where a union is, you know, we are the union. A union is a cult, like is a collective of workers advocating for their rights. Right. They are banding together. You know, they're negotiating together. And when I think about, you know, won and then, you know, delivered us this contract. And, you know, Sean O'Brien did do like they did in TDU, did do other good things. They got rid of that constitutional rule that Oliver mentioned earlier. But I think, you know, when we talk about like bringing down that barrier between the union and the members, the next most obvious step for me is that we need to get to open bargaining in this union. And frankly, I think open bargaining or the fact that this bargaining was closed, you know, it was behind closed doors, you know,

there were NDAs signed, there were rank and file members there, but they also couldn't tell us about it because of those, you know, NDAs. Open bargaining is what's going to solve this because this like the whole fiasco about this tentative agreement and now all the kind of resulting hostility that is felt between members and leadership and members and even other members. I think it's, you know, like so much of this is due to a failure of comms and the fact that we did not know what was being discussed in this, in these negotiations at any time, except for the big highlights that they could tell us about, right? And then, you know, they release a highlight reel that has very confusing language. They eventually do release the contract, but not all of the memorandums of understanding

that would help us understand what is actually in that contract. And, you know, they're releasing all of this information in a way that is going to result in people not understanding what's in it. And I really do think open bargaining is the next step that reformers in this union need to be advocating and organizing for. Because this has just kind of been a real shit show, um, to be honest. And I, yeah, I think it's a comms failure to be perfectly honest. So, yeah. Yeah.

And I would, I would absolutely agree with that. Um, you know, and I know like there was, there was a IBT webinar with, um, Sean O'Brien and, you know, he even spoke to misinformation, but didn't, you know, elaborate on what it was or, you know, how or why it's wrong. And I was just like, man, you got our emails, addresses, phone numbers. We're here on this webinar. Like you can correct the record anytime, you know,

it's if you're worried about something that's not true and may may or may not influence people's votes like you can do something about that like you you have a lot of money uh you have you know comms team so use it uh you know just talk to your members. Like they're real people. Uh, you know, we can, we can understand shit. Uh, you don't gotta just, you know, get, get angry or even kind of like I was saying earlier, where it's just like, almost this like feels like this framing where anything, you know, that's a dissenting view or a critique, you know, it's a, Oh, it's just, it's all misinformation don't

don't pay any attention to it yeah which is you know i i don't know like i i've seen this in a couple of i don't know like i this i've seen this in a couple of sort of union things we've covered on this show is like i don't know and and an incredible unwillingness of union leadership to even like consider a position that's not their own and to just sort of like immediately you know when confronted with another thing to just immediately attempt to completely delegitimate them and that sucks um yeah yeah it's just not a not a great way to run a union no no you definitely you know and i've been seeing this this uh this closing like sort of rank around around leadership right and it's not something that inspires trust in union leadership whatsoever right like you know you could be a member that

you know doesn't understand something just has a member that, you know, doesn't understand something, just has a question, and then you kind of getting, and you kind of just end up being stonewalled. And, you know, you're told, well, you know, go to this meeting where we're going to explain things and da da da da da da da da. And it's like, yeah, but you know, I have you on the phone now. Can you explain it now? And, you know, and it's as it's like they're taking all of these concerns as a personal blow to their ego. Right. Like they're taking it personally as if people having concerns about what this contract does and does not stipulate is like an attack on their moral character. And it's just really fucking

frustrating. I got to be real with you. And, you know, it doesn't say a lot for the overall democratic nature of the union either. Right. Like, you know, this is like, you know, you're kind of being told, well, you know, keep your opinions to yourself, accept our word for it. Like you can vote however you want. You know, this is one member, one vote. well, you know, keep your opinions to yourself, accept our word for it. Like you can vote however you want. You know, this is one member, one vote, but you know, you can't be going online talking about it. You like can't be going talking to your coworkers about it because you don't have all the information. You're not understanding it correctly. And it's just like, well, can you get better at explaining it? Can you not react this way? Like, can we have like a thing where like, we can just like fucking talk about what's in it and what's

not in it? And yeah, it's, it's just, again, been real fucking frustrating. Yeah. It's another thing. I mean, too, as you know, any contract language, maybe it should either be more clear or concise, or if it's going to be more in the legal East side, you know, put out a little like contract, like explainer guide,

maybe especially around key language or language that they know is maybe vague or going to cause, you know, issues of like understanding it. And even, you know, one other thing about like, you know, open bargaining was, you know, looking at the IBT press release, you know, there's one paragraph and it starts, rank and file members served on the committee for the first time. It continues on later saying, you know,

our hard work has finally paid for our hard work has paid off. And I, you know, and it goes on to then say, you know, this is the most historic contract we've ever had. So it kind of seems like right there where it's like, well, if limited member participation found by ndas led to this historic contract maybe it's time to involve all of us yeah and also you know the rank and file that are on these committees are appointed by leadership so we don't we don't get to choose who these people are and it's like leadership absolutely just has the ability to be

like, well, I'm going to, you know, appoint the ones that I like the most, that I have the best relationship with, that I know thinks the sun kind of shines out of my ass. And yeah, there's just this absolutely overall lack of a democratic internal culture. You know, we elect, you know, our officers, most of them, but we don't elect stewards. We don't really, we don't elect our business agents or like anything like that. We vote on our contracts and that's it. You know, at our union meetings, I've had one union meeting where we did a vote that was introduced by leadership, right? It's just, it's, yeah, it's not the most democratic culture. And that's another thing that needs to, that needs to change as well. Yeah. And I mean, i think that goes back to

sort of like you know a fundamental political conflict which is like is is democracy when you vote for someone else to make every decision or is democracy when people collectively make decisions themselves and the sort of slipperiness of those two things causes you know like causes you know allows people who essentially want to be the only ones who ever get to make decisions to be able to claim that they are in favor of democracy or whatever but you know mean like mean that they get to make all decisions after they get elected and not mean actual people sort of make decisions for themselves yeah one thousand percent yeah it's like we need a you know more someone who serves as more of a delegate role than a uh you know representative okay i guess i guess my my final thing is i

yeah you you two are both encouraging are going to encourage people to vote no on this contract for the extremely long list of both technical, procedural, material, and broadly social reasons. Yeah, that's correct. I'll be voting no and also advocating for that and also advocating people to vote as well. low union participation sends a bad message to the company. So definitely, definitely doing both and continuing to have those conversations on the shop floors with folks explaining my concerns and stuff like that. But yeah, no, I'm,

I'm also going to be voting no on this contract as well. Yeah. So that is... Yeah, I guess that is our coverage of this. There is still time for there to actually be a strike and for this contract to fail and for people to fight for a better one. And yeah, I wish both of you two good luck in fighting this.

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

Yeah. Do you have anything to plug before? Yes or no vote. Solidarity. All workers and everyone on the shop floor. And, you know, we'll keep on fighting for better conditions. Yeah. And you too, dear listener, can fight for better conditions in your own workplace

and yeah if one day one day fight for a world where we don't have workplaces like this at all amen hallelujah Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast, Post High is all about. It's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout? Well, that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for Post Run High.

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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 betteroff offline.com what's foreign my policy i don't know i don't know guys i don't know i i got like trapped into this like pattern of doing introductions a certain way and i don't really i don't like feel good about it but how do you how does one break their patterns speaking of patterns let's talk about syria beautiful that was awesome

yeah i understood exactly what that meant i feel like one of the basketball guys when someone lays him up and he just does a dunk uh yeah that's what i feel like don't know enough about green green green bay packers swish yep go tom brady okay uh okay sports sports talk aside i'm wearing my rwanda football shirt today uh we we are gathered here today um to talk about uh turkish drone strikes on the SDF. Not funny, not funny. Yeah, the SDF, yeah. We're talking about the continued Turkish military operations across their border in northeast Syria,

the area commonly known as Rojava, and also in southern Turkey as well. Yeah. Yeah. So just to give some numbers around this to start off, right, in year of 2022, which there wasn't a territorial offensive, so you're not seeing troops on the ground, Turkey carried out 130 drone strikes

in the Autonomous Administration of Northeast Syria. Yeah, that's the place that is more commonly known as rojava and um the they killed at least eight ypj members and sort of ypj would be the women's protection forces who are a unit within the syrian democratic forces which is the armed forces of the aanes autonomous areaonomous Area of Northeast Syria. I will come at you really hard with acronyms in this. I think if people haven't listened to Robert's series, Women's War, maybe The Women's War, that would be a good place to start

because we only have half an hour or 45 minutes or whatever and we can't explain an extremely complicated conflict which has been going on for 12 years in that time. So I think some grounding in who is who and what is what, you can find it there, I guess. But is that a fair summary of who those people are, Robert? Yeah, basically. So you had kind of the gist of the story is that for a very long time, starting in Southern Turkey, there's been a Kurdish militant group called the PKK. They were way back in the day originally Maoist.

They had a bunch of internal power struggles within their own organization. a wide turn away from Maoism towards a kind of political theory heavily influenced by the work of an American anarchist thinker named Murray Bookchin. This was largely due to the fact that the, their leader, a guy named Abdullah Azzalon got while he was in Turkish prison, kind of pilled on a lot of these, this kind of like a fringe American libertarian ish sort of, um,

uh, political philosophy. Yeah. With, with, with this, basically the, the,

the gist of it is this, this kind of, the, this kind of synthetic, this kind of synthesis of a lot of bookchains ideas with some of the stuff that, um, Ajalot had been, had been thinking about for years,

kind of culminated in a political philosophy called libertarian municipalism, which is more or less the governing philosophy that these different armed militant organizations kind of clustered around the PKK in northeast Syria, because the PKK for years was just kind of like cross the border in the northeast Syria when they were fighting with the Turks and they had to get away. And they had a bunch of inroads with local Kurdish organizations in northeast Syria. And when the Assad regime pulled out of the area in the early stages of the Syrian civil war, a lot of these groups that were affiliated with the PKK were kind of the best organized organizations in the area. And so they took

over a lot of civil administration and basing a lot of their plans and functional activities around these ideas that Ajaan had been writing about for years and years. And so you kind of have this mix of all these armed organizations that are to some extent descended from the PKK, but are now much broader than just sort of a Kurdish liberatory organization. These are the folks who fought and defeated ISIS in northeast Syria. Yeah, that's I don't know. There's there's so much to get into. But I guess that's kind of the the broad strokes and all of these different, because there's a bunch of different militias. There's militias that are kind of more traditionalist Arab militias. There's Armenian militias in the area. There's obviously these Kurdish militias,

the YPG and the YPJ, primarily Kurdish militias, but they all fight under the banner of the SDF. And to the Turks, they're all the PKK. Yes. I'm glad you mentioned all the different militias and stuff because it gets really confusing. Like even, I mean, I'm Syrian and I'm just like, I cannot keep up. I talked to my parents about it too. And they're just like, that's, it's, it's, it's complicated. So I think you did a good job breaking that down. I also want to mention they were the only people fighting ISIS in Syria. So I think it's pretty notable to mention. Yeah. I got a list of the founding groups of the SDF.

So this happens in 2015, right? Sort of earlier in the fight against ISIS. And some of these groups are descended, like Shireen said, not from the YPJ or the YPG. And Robert said this too, that they come from the FSA, the Free Syrian Army, like specifically the FSA around the Kobani area, contributed elements. There's the Syriac Military Council. So that's a distinct ethnic group. There is the Jayash or Al Thuar. Have I said that right?

No, but I can say it if you want. Please do. Magical. Thank you. Jeish-et-Tawar. Jeish means army or like, yeah, army. Yeah, Jeish. It's annoying because English is spelled Jeish, but it's just Jeish. Yeah. The revolutionary army, army of revolutionaries, I guess more accurately, who are another mixed ethnicity group. They, like Robert said, include I guess, more accurately, who are another mixed ethnicity group. They, like Robert said, include Turkmen, Armenians, all kinds of different ethnic groups. So at this point, the entity that is the SDF is a majority Arab entity.

It's not like an ethnic Kurdish thing. And the autonomous administration is not like a Kurdish ethno-state, which I think is something that people can sometimes either confuse or conflate, but that's not the case, right? That's not what this sort of democratic federalism is about, nor is it what's represented in terms of the composition of the people there,

so people doing the fighting, right? So sometimes these groups will be referred to on mass as like quote unquote the kurds you should by how kind of messy my explanation was it is hard to walk people through this folks eyes tend to glaze over for one thing when you mention a certain number of acronyms um but this leads to a situation whereby the u.s news is just like the kurds defeated isis in northeast syria it was like northeast Syria no there were a whole lot of other people who did a lot of dying to win that battle

and some Kurds who weren't involved and some Kurds who were not involved there's also just so much infighting I think that it gets I don't know it's a lot it is a lot like saying the Americans defeated the Nazis and it's like well there were some other people involved in that fight yeah well yeah I've seen some films robert let me tell you um yes i think i think robert is

right like it collapses two things right like the uh heterogeneity of of kurdish people right different kurdish areas different kurdish movements and the heterogeneity of the stf so uh yeah mainstream news sometimes shocking. It is also worth noting like Kurds are not, certainly not a like a monolithic group for examining. Northeast Syria is like flatlands, lowlands. And there's a big difference between the mountain Kurds and the Kurds who live in these like lowlands.

And traditionally even like a lot of like bad blood and stuff between different groups because you know that's just the way human beings are like yeah yeah um for yeah like it did um it's really easy i think for when we're consuming news especially news about the part of the world that the uh the populace here hasn't been spectacularly well informed on to break things down into easy groups right like you'll see a lot as well like sunni and shias like the two categories that can exist within uh like and then people get very confused when there are categories within that when when

there are where there are sunni groups fighting each other um yeah and the same with like kurds or turkmen or whatever like none of these groups are homogenous. And sometimes, yeah, I get it. If you're doing a five minute piece for TV, that's what you do. But here we are not doing a five minute piece for TV. So this is this has not been like Kurdish history 101. Please read some more books about that. I'll put some in the sources.

But what I want to talk about today is some of these Bayraktar attacks on specifically YPJ, right? So the YPJ would be the Women's Defense Forces. So that's a women's militia within the SDF that, as Robert said, is based heavily, I guess, on the outlook of Abdullah Ocalan, who's sometimes called Apo. So we might use that for brevity here. So in one attack in April 2022, three YPGA fighters were killed. Dila Haleb,

who had participated in the resistance of the Sheikh Massoud district of Aleppo in 2012. She'd become a leading YPGA commander and participated in the fight against ISIS, playing a leading role in the liberation of the city of Mimbek. Rohani Kobani. It's worth noting, I guess, sorry, I stop every 15 seconds to explain context, that you'll hear sometimes place names in people's names. That's because they're like Nom de Guerre, rather than that this is not their legal name necessarily,

but it's standard practice for these people to take like a movement name or nom de guerre um much like robert and i explained in the episodes on myanmar uh it's a lot of people do this a lot of places um is that fair robert yeah yeah yeah there's um um a lot of like oftentimes people just like take a name based on their city that they came from like kobani or whatever um but yeah it's pretty much the norm that most people most fighters will introduce themselves by some sort of nom de guerre yeah um even some of the I know people who are like British or American who have been over there who are over there and they also have these uh yeah and there's a there's a lot in that one thing you have to keep in mind

is that like a lot of these people who are revolutionaries who consider themselves revolutionaries have family in regime controlled parts of town or or parts of syria or in um you know in idlib which is largely controlled by these like more turkish backed uh uh islamist groups and so part of why you do this is like i don't want my family like getting caught up in in this shit like if they live somewhere else like i don't want my family like getting caught up in in this shit like if they live somewhere else like i don't want to like bring that down on them it's just safer yeah just like when we did our miyama episodes right we had meowka and andy and sarah um another woman as i said rahani kabani joined the ypga in 2014 she fought against isis she was wounded she participated after recovering in the in the liberation of raka and she was wounded she participated after recovering in the liberation

of Raqqa and she was the co-chair of the defense committee in Kobani and then there was a youngest the youngest woman she just joined I guess or had joined at a young age and she was called Kobani and she like she joined

after the fight against ISIS she was very young there are, I'll include a report. It's very sad to see someone so young. They look like, there's a couple of them that look like babies. Like it's really devastating because it's, I don't know, their lives are taken from them and they joined to, it's empowering and then it's devastating

because it's just like they fought so hard and then they they were assassinated literally they were murdered yeah it's when especially when you consider that so many of these like uh the women who fought against isis right like and i think we could all probably understand why women would would want to do that um like wanted to create a place where young girls could grow up and be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do and like not have to, obviously like kowtows, it's extremely violent misogynist organization like ISIS, but also not necessarily have to fight either and, you know, could be self-realized in whatever way they wanted to.

And so to see these people having achieved their goal largely of i guess isis still exists right now isis still continues to kill people it killed 10 people yesterday um but that's the 8th of august because you won't hear this uh today but um to see these people who have like successfully at least liberated the territory and then their young women are still dying uh yeah but not fighting isis uh but fighting turkey i can go on and give like there are dozens of examples of this report um another one i'll just give in july 2022 uh there's a ypj commander called roj Kabur and a fighter called Barin Botan. So one of them had been, and then another YPJ commander called Jian Tolhidan.

So these two women had been involved in the fight against ISIS from the beginning, having liberated cities, liberated territory territory and then they were with this young woman who was 19 years old uh and had relatively recently joined the ypj right and was was killed by a drone strike it's like it's particularly galling i think for me at least to so that the ypj information office is someone i communicate with like for work stuff and um information office is someone i communicate with like for work stuff and um it's particularly galling to like wake up right and see that on your phone uh like to get a message and look at a report see a picture of a car like blown to pieces at the same time as like the biraktar is a drone that uh turkey has sold to ukraine in large numbers right which has been hugely effective in

destroying russian armor and like it's earlier on at least was it's it's it seems to not really work i mean a lot of stuff has changed obviously like new technology is extremely effective early on before there's countermeasures anyway whatever we don't need to get nerdy about this yeah yeah it's certainly like in the first months of their war uh like the war in Ukraine became like a meme. You can, you can buy a stuffed by Raktar on Etsy or eBay, like,

like a soft toy, like a teddy bear. There are songs about it. That is so disturbing. That is so disturbing. It's not, it's not great. Yeah.

It was, and it was one of those things where like, obviously I was happy to see effective tools being used by the Ukrainians to, like, defend their home. Yes, of course. But I'm not ever going to get up and stand the Turkish defense industry. Or, yeah, defense, like, industry. And for the record, I feel the same way about, like, the people standing, you know, different U.S. defense contractors making stuff like you know long-range missile systems like no i'm not i'm not really a fan of that like i get it sometimes you know

when you're being invaded you use the tools available but i that doesn't mean we need to celebrate that yeah exactly i think the tools are largely kind of agnostic um anyone who sort of is is making things to kill people purely for profit it's not necessarily a good a good thing to do with your life i guess uh and like it's just troubling to me to see people like cheering this on without like it highlights one like the way that people engage with conflict um especially online especially in the u.s which is yeah it's not a computer game it's someone's 19 year old fucking daughter it's someone's mom or sister or brother or uncle or dad or non-binary relative the fact that you can buy like a stuffed fucking weapon like little drone

thing on ebay it's it's that's just so disturbing i i really just don't like humans when i think about that yeah i understand why it happens this way and i understand why if your country is being invaded and you can get more support from the international community by leaning into this shit you lean into this shit but i don't like the idea of like some i don't know fucking uh accountant in iowa uh watching hundreds of videos of like russian soldiers being killed and then like getting a lockheed martin tattoo um like the like the like like turning turning uh your support for people you know in a deadly military conflict into like fandom treating it the way you treat like a marvel

movie or whatever i i find not great yeah it's just not like um i understand why like i wouldn't blame anyone in ukraine for being super excited about having barak dolls because it stops people burning their homes and killing their children yeah like i would want that too no just like if you're if you're like i have a friend who i went like we we were in fucking of Divka together, like sheltering with people from Russian shells and stuff who then went on to join the Ukrainian military and has been fighting since the expanded invasion. If he wants to share videos or watch videos of like, you know, dead Russian soldiers from Telegram, like that's war. It's unpleasant but i i get it like again if you're some dude in fucking wisconsin doing the same thing i i find that pretty unsettling like yeah because you don't need to yeah no you don't need to you don't need to

dehumanize those people so you can kill them because you're not killing them yeah but you seem to have engaged in that same dehumanization which is necessary for people fighting because i don't know maybe you think you're helping it's hard to shoot people otherwise like yeah there's a reason it's hard to fucking bayonet people right there's a reason that bayonet training is is one of these things that's particularly just kind of it has to be violent. You have to be horrible. You know, like it's, there's no nice way to stab someone. But the, yeah, it doesn't mean that you need to tweet about it. Especially folks who maybe aren't,

perhaps is on the ground familiar with what this looks like. So I wanted to maybe get into a little bit, and there are, as I said, dozens of these drone attacks. They really ramped up in early 2023, along with like a kind of a larger air offensive, right? They continue to happen like almost weekly. If people want to, I guess, keep tabs, YPJ Info is the YPJ's kind of public-facing press website.

Roger Information Center is a good English language resource. Both of those you can find on X, or if you want to look somewhere else, you can also search for them and go to their website. Did we just say X? No, we only say it. We absolutely do not. Wink and a nudge.

Okay, great. Thanks. X is not, in fact in fact gonna give it to us only like a certain generation will understand that one that i like that yeah there's a narrow overlap there buddy yeah you shot the gap though yeah you know what is gonna give it and by it i mean uh the money that pays our wages to us. No. What is it, James? It is this combination of products and services. Oh, man, I love a good product.

Me too. I don't love services, actually. I'm very anti-service, but, you know, we'll see. Yeah, we'll see. It might change your opinion. It might be something amazing. Unlikely. Probably gold.

Gold. Let's hear from the advertisers. All right, we're back. We hope you enjoyed those adverts as much as we did. So I want to talk about, in the second half of the episode, why Turkey is using these drones to bomb people who, like we said, have fought and largely defeated the territorial caliphate of ISIS.

I did want to bring up one more drone incident, actually, which is particularly bad. So one of the things that you'll often see the SDF, and specifically the YPG and the YPJ kind of accused of, is having child soldiers or having recruiting people who are under-aged to fight um part of a program they've implemented to stop this with a consultation with the united nations is building education centers right i'm not gonna comment morally on who should be fighting at what age

because i think it's not a judgment for us to make when like we didn't have isis in the fucking streets yeah i i look i think there's a degree to which people are being unreasonable about this. I met a number of 17 year olds. It's generally when people talk about child soldiers, they are talking about 17 year olds. I have friends who joined the US Army when they were 17 years old. Like I have friends who were learning how to drive a tank for the US military at age 17. I have friends who were learning how to drive a tank for the US military at age 17. And quite frankly, if you look at wars in history, 16 to 20 years old, that's most of the people who have fought most of the wars in most of history.

That's the way that it is. That's not pleasant. But when we are talking, I certainly, I would be very supportive of laws put in place in our country to raise the age at which people can join the military so that they are not young and not getting taken advantage of to as much of a degree. But we are not fighting in any conflicts for our survival. Yeah. I think people that point the finger and like talk about child soldiers, whatever the shit. And they're in, they are referencing like basic teens. They, they have the privilege of doing that.

They don't have to even think about protecting themselves or their family or whatever. I think when you are raised and in like a situation of violence, like Palestine's a great example of that. You see like boys like trying to defend their, their country. It's like boys like trying to defend their their country. It's like the same situation where there's you don't have the privilege of waiting until you're fucking 21 or whatever. It's just like you have to you have to like protect yourself.

Yeah, it's not the it's not a situation you are not being. It's not like again, it's not like it is often when we talk about child soldiers like in the Liberian Civil War, right, where you've got kids being pulled in for the advantage of some warlord. Nor is it like in the United States where you have 17 and 18-year-olds being recruited in a predatory way often by military recruiters and sent overseas in conflicts that are not necessary. We are talking about like ISIS is five blocks away and like God knows what they'll do to my mom and my sister if they take over. Like I'm going to pick up a fucking gun, you know? What else are you going to do? That's the world.

Like they're living in a different set of realities than we are. Yeah. And anyone that places judgment on that is just ignorant and not understanding of the reality of the world. They're just like in their little bubble. Yeah. So on August the 18th, 2022, a Turkish drone targeted one of these UN-affiliated education centers.

Right. It was two kilometers from the US coalition base and targeted a group of teenage girls playing volleyball. It's very hard to see these education centers as like in any way a military target, right? They're literally designed to divert young people from becoming fighters. And to set up with the consultation United Nations,

with as much oversight as one can expect in an area which is still in the middle of a civil war. And to be drone striking schools is pretty callous. It's also worth noting that a phrase that constantly gets thrown around a lot in discussion about the Middle East, right? It's the only democracy in the Middle East. Right. And let me tell you, it's not normally referring to this part of the world

uh it's referring to israel um and yeah a i don't think that's true israel it i mean it's factually incorrect yeah yeah yeah it does it what fucking def well democracy is an extremely nebulous concept right yeah sure so like this is this is an area nebulous continent, right? Yeah, sure. So, like, this is an area where people's votes have a substantive impact on how their lives are lived. Certainly more so than people who are Arabs in Israel. Yeah, Arabs in Israel, Kurds

in southern Turkey, Syrians in Syria, like, yeah. Yep. Kurds in Syria, yeah. Yeah. Yes, exactly. People in parts of iran like in iraq like people in northern or in yes in the baghdad government controlled chunks of iraq for that matter yes yeah like all over right like um so this isn't just an attack on like individual women it's an attack on a state which is genuinely at least attempting

to establish a new form of democracy, right? Like a more participatory, more horizontally organized democracy. It's an attack on a state in the Middle East, which is like anti-patriarchal, which is something that we don't have here in the United States, right? Like we have still failed to have a woman be president. Like, it's an attack on these things which most decent human beings should be able to get behind. These attacks also don't just affect the people who are killed, right?

They continue to displace families. They contribute to fuel shortages. They create power cuts. They suspend schools they stop aid organizations working in the area because it's too high risk or they perceive it to be too high risk um and they stop the sdf continuing their operations against isis right like um isis as i said continue to exist they have sleeper cells uh there was an attempted prison break last year. Two of the women from the YPJ

who had fought to stop those ISIS prisoners breaking out of their prison were later killed in the drone strike. It's very hard to see this as not helping that ISIS insurgency that they're fighting and hindering their operations. And I'm not just saying this based on sources that are the Roger Information Center or people in the ANES, but this is the policy of the United States, right?

Before we started this, I looked up some of the inspector general's reports from Operation Inherent Resolve, which is the United States operation to lead a coalition, which includes SDF against ISIS. And they were talking about how the SDF's operations are hindered because they keep getting shot by drones. And that there's not much that they can do about it. Unlike Ukraine, we're not sending a ton of surface-to-air missiles or things that you could use to defend yourself against drones. Not that it's very easy to defend yourself against a drone.

So why is Turkey doing this? I think firstly because, as Robert said, it sees the SDF and the PKK as the same thing. So the PKK mostly operates, like Robert said, in the mountains of southeastern Turkey, and it's been fighting this asymmetrical war against the Turkish state since 1984. So Erdogan is the president of Turkey, right?

He entered office in 2003 and he's sort of pivoted on Turkish issues, on Kurdish issues. Sorry, he continues to be Turkish. But he was initially in favor of of a negotiated peace with the PKK in his early years, included proposals for linguistic autonomy, the right to a Kurdish press, and even the return of Kurdish place names, which is a big deal still.

You'll see Kamishlo or Al--kamishli like one being arab the latter being arabic the form of being kurdish right yeah i mean it's just it's a huge deal because you're not just killing like people you're killing a a culture that's like in like it's not what's the like a different word to say extinct like it's in danger of like not being there if it's not for the people protecting it right and i think it's uh like a classic tactic to stop people from using their language or customs or whatever to just like try to erase them and like make them turk or whatever they want them to be and so the proposal of that i think is significant but then obviously the follow-through is a different story yeah the follow-through is not different story. Yeah, the follow-through is not there, right?

So after 2015, he's really pivoted and he's pursued like a really violent anti-Kurdish policy. And it's worth noting, as you said, that for much of the 20th century, the Turkish state denied the existence of Kurdish people altogether. They called them mountain Turks. And even in March, 2021,

the Turkish Ministry of Education released a book in the kurdish minority it's a province called diyarbakir diyarbakir i guess it's it's turkish uh which it doesn't mention kurds it's a kurdish majority province it doesn't mention the kurdish language uh it claims that it's a turkish dialect that's spoken there. They changed the name in August 2021 of a 17th century mosque, words translating from the Turkish to the Kurds mosque, and they called it the Turks Mosque. In 2023, Turkey dropped its subjection, and so subjection is an effective veto, to Finland and Sweden joining NATO, when the latter pledged to devote more attention to the PKK

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

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

myself without the interesting and often entertaining input of my colleagues. So sorry about that, but you will just have to make do. Turkey's been involved in a Syrian civil war since the beginning. Initially, it armed and equipped the anti-Assad FSA. But in August 2016, it began a direct occupation of parts of northern Syria under Operation Euphrates Shield. In 2017 it facilitated the establishment of the Syrian National Army and the Syrian Interim Government, which it finances. Turkey is accused of Syrian democratic forces, to which the YPG and YPJ belong, of, quote, seizing and ethnically cleansing territories which don't belong to Kurds.

There isn't really any credible evidence for this, and the UN has refuted these claims. Some people have moved, right, like as happens in many conflicts, but the SMI saw was like 25 families. Erdogan has openly expressed the sentiment that Kurdish people don't belong in north and east Syria, saying, these areas are not suitable for the lifestyle of Kurds because these areas are virtually desert. Deportations of Syrians who have sought refuge in Turkey, so people from Syria who have fled the civil war, just over three and a half million people are living in Turkey. Turkey has declared its intention to move one million of these people

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

crossed Turkey along the so-called Jihadi Highway. Later, Turkey clamped down on this a bit, but certainly in my coverage of the smuggling of weapons and equipment to ISIS, they were going through Turkey. Turkey was also directly engaged with the defeat of ISIS, right? Turkey's troops fought ISIS in parts of northern Syria. Meanwhile, Turkey has also enforced an economic blockade of the autonomous area of northeast Syria,

and it's even restricted water flowing into the region, right? So at some point, weapons and humans have flowed through Turkey to ISIS, and at this point, water is not flowing in sufficient quantities through Turkey to the autonomous area of north-east Syria. In 2018, Turkey started what's called Operation Olive Branch. It's a military operation in which Turkish and Syrian National Army forces took control of the city of Afrin. The assault included the alleged use of chemical gas,

shelling of civilian areas, and shooting of fleeing refugees. Kurdish shrines, flags, cultural and historical sites were targeted and destroyed by Turkish military forces. A hospital was bombed. Reporters without borders noted that reporting on the conflict had been hand-strung by the Turkish government, and more than 30,000 Kurdish people have been displaced and their homes have been taken by those relocated refugees who we spoke about. Olive farms in the area have been seized and then leased to fund the operation of the pro-Turkish Syrian National Army. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has documented these forces threatening to behead Kurds, and The Independent, that's the newspaper, has noted that some of the people fighting alongside the SNA are themselves former cadres of ISIS.

In its reporting, The Independent reported that, and I quote, video posted online shows three uniformed jihadis singing a song in praise of their past battles. And it says, quote, how we were steadfast in Grozny, that's in Chechnya, Dagestan, and we took the Tora Bora. The Tora Bora is a cave complex, formerly the headquarters of Osama bin Laden. And now Afrin is calling to us. There's a song they were singing, right?

Suggesting that they're sort of a fight. They're casting this in a long line of these battles that have been fought um by these various i guess islamist groups um just to be super clear on islamist versus islamic because i don't want people to confuse the two things uh one is a political outlook right being an islamist is a political uh outlook and it focuses on uh it uses an interpretation of islam which is certainly not the mainstream one uh it's not my place to say whether or not it's a correct one but it's certainly not the one that most muslims in the world agree with and it's it's the interpretation

of that faith that you'll have seen uh with groups like isis and al-qaeda right um but that that is not to say by any means that all Muslim people agree with this because they don't. There are Muslim people, many thousands, hundreds of thousands of them who have been targeted, killed by these people, right? I just wanted to be super clear on that distinction. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights has also noted members of the Turkish fascist group, the Gray Wolves, fighting alongside the SNA. So standing in the United States, it's easy to see this Turkish operation as a consequence of Trump's choice to abandon the SDF and the people who defeated ISIS. And to a large degree it is, but it also represents a long-term goal of Erdogan's Turkey, which has tried without

success to get support for its plans to build a buffer zone 30 kilometers deep along this border with Syria and to fill that buffer zone with Syrian refugees who increasingly end up in Turkey. In particular, Turkey has objected to plans by the United States to train and equip a 30,000 person strong border force. This went through several different naming iterations, so it doesn't really matter, it's a border force, right? Before the attack, Russian military officials proposed handing over a frame to Assad as a compromise. So we haven't talked about Russia much. Robert talks about this in his series, but Russia is in Syria as an ally of the Assad regime. And it has sort of acted as a go-between between the SDF and the Assad regime.

And it has proposed in this instance, right, that the SDF withdraw from Afrin, which is the area that Turkey invaded in Operation Olive Branch in 2018. And it said, if you guys pull out and you hand this over to Assad, the Turks won't invade. They won't directly take on assad like that the sdf refused right the authorities are in a very tense relationship with damascus which is where bashar al-assad's

government is based right and they've both received aid from them and been attacked by them uh after they were abandoned by the US and Russia, and they knew that Turkey... Russia was aware that Turkey had plans to invade, right? And obviously didn't do anything to stop it. And so these SDF felt that they were abandoned by the US and Russia with very good reason to feel that way. The ANES scrambled to find new allies to protect them.

And they found one in the Assad government. This wasn't, like, I don't, a choice that they wanted to make, but I think the rest of the world didn't leave them with many options. So I'm quoting here from Mosluma Bidi, the SDF's commander-in-chief. He wrote an op-ed on foreign policy. It'll be linked in our sources at the end of the month. If we have to choose between compromise and genocide we will choose our people he said numerous fighters who fought isis and foreign volunteers have died in

a free so in that initial operation right um when the sdf opposed turkish invasion numerous people died one of them was a britain named anna camp Campbell. She went by Helene Kerakogs. I might have fucked that pronunciation up, but it might tend to be disrespectful to what I have. She was killed by Turkish Michelina Afrin. Her father, Dirk Campbell, has been campaigning ever since to have his daughter's remains returned. His case remains with the courts and has been entirely crowdfunded. He submitted a claim to the European Court of Human Rights after hearing nothing from the Turkish courts. And when he did that, the Turkish courts picked up the case that he'd submitted there. You can also find a link to this in the sources, but it's crowdjustice.com slash case slash help hyphen bring hyphen Anna hyphen home.

They've raised all the money they need at the moment but doubtless they will need more in the future so where does all this leave the people of north and east syria right these are people who have been impacted by the uh territorial caliphate of the islamic state and all the horrific things that people will be aware happened there they're people who have successfully fought for and achieved their freedom only to be attacked by another state and they are people who have suffered the same earthquake that turkey suffered in february of this year 2023 4 000 people died in a freeing right which is a city which is now occupied by turkish and sna troops and turkey pushed a little bit further east in Operation Peace Spring,

a year after Olive Branch. And currently, Turkey is cutting water flow to pumping stations it controls that feed water to the area. This combines with the impact of the earthquake and the ongoing burden of controlling one of the largest prisons on earth which is the al-hol prison which holds the majority of the isis fighters and their families who were not either killed or returned to the states from which they came and we'll have more on the al-hol prison next week uh there's infighting between militias in the turkish areas which obviously impact turkish controlled areas obviously that impacts civilians it It's arbitrary arrests. There's the increasing Turkification of areas like Afrin, including instruction in the Turkish language. Like Shirin said earlier, one of the things that's integral to maintaining national identity is education. In my experience, studying Catalan identity,

getting education in Catalan was vital to fermenting and continuing Catalan identity, getting education in Catalan was vital to fermenting and continuing Catalan identity. Catalan identity is not national in the same way. The identity in the AANES, I guess, is not national. But this Turkification, the flying of Turkish flags above buildings which are not military buildings, like above hospitals and that kind of thing, again, is a marginalization of the people who already live there and who have lived there for a long time. SDF guerrilla units like Wrath of Olives and Afrin Liberation Front are involved in fighting with the Syrian National Army.

And that fighting kills civilians. Throughout Afrin, there have been things like car bombs. The Afrin Liberation Front goes by HRE from the Kurdish initials, right? And they've carried out some attacks on SNA militias in the last few days. You can often see videos of those online if it's the sort of thing you like to see. There are still landmines that kill civilians in the area, and there are still ISIS sleeper cells bombing and killing people. Last week, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria responded

to Turkey's ongoing aggression by issuing a statement claiming Turkey's operations are forcing the SDF to divert personnel away from countering ISIS and threatening the stability of the area. Obviously, this is all after an earthquake which killed 4,000 people in Afrin. People that have access to as many hospitals

there, for instance, still have to travel to Turkey to get cancer treatment, right? And so this leaves the people of North and East Syria in a very precarious situation, right? In which they're now left largely without the solidarity that they experienced when they were fighting ISIS, right? And it's very difficult, just like in so many cases, like I feel this way about Myanmar, too, to see the US and Europe expressing solidarity and solidarity in the form of lethal aid, right? Solidarity in the form of surface-to-air missiles and tanks and rifles and bulletproof vests and medical aid and all the things that you need to sustain a fight to Ukraine. And they should. They should do that.

I'm not saying for a moment that they shouldn't. Ukraine has been invaded by a much bigger and more powerful military, and it has every right to defend itself. And I'm glad that we're helping. But I wish that we would help other people too, especially people who we have sort of made promises to that we've not kept, or people who we've encouraged to believe in the case of Myanmar right that they have a right to a better life and then

when they decide to defend that we don't stand behind them so yeah that's my episode sorry for the weird juxtaposition of me doing the last part scripted but somebody outside is drilling through my phone cable. So yeah, thank you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show, where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs, the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance

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