It Could Happen Here - The Next Apocalypse with Chris Begley

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Robert Evans sits down with archaeologist Chris Begley to discuss his book about historical collapse. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into tech's elite and how they've 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

brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his relatives in Miami? Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jacqueline Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit.

The podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners, for those who listen to audio books while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T. Connecting changes everything. Welcome to It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart and how to maybe put them back together a little bit better than they were before. I am Robert Evans, and with me this week is a guest I'm very excited about, Chris Begley,

author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you, Robert. Now, Chris, before we get into the meat of our discussion, I have to talk about what you do for a living because for years and years, it was my job to go around the world. I talk to people on pretty much every continent about their different interesting jobs. So I've talked – interviewed everybody from like brothel workers in Nevada to Iraqi counterterrorism special forces in Iraq. And you have probably the coolest job title of anybody I've met. You're an underwater archaeologist.

That's right. How did you, how did you, I mean, was that, was it just kind of like, were you kind of laser focused on that goal or was it more you were interested in archaeology and you loved diving? And so the two just kind of made sense together. Yeah, well, I started out as a, what I now call a terrestrial archaeologist, working on land as most people do, and worked for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus, as you saw in the book, but other places nearby as well.

And really, it was about, I would say, I don't know, 12, 13, 14 years ago, I wanted to just branch out a little bit from that. And one of the things that all archaeologists have seen is that, you know, there are certain things that really just aren't as explored as other things. And one was all of the archaeological resources underwater. I mean, we hear about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, right, you know, Roman shipwrecks and all that. But there are big chunks of the world where we've done very little to see what's out there, you know.

And one other interesting thing about that is there are many different things you could look at underwater, but often we look at shipwrecks. And shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites because, you know, a shipwreck is a moment in time. That all happened in one instance. And so, when we're looking at that kind of archaeological site, we see this snapshot that we don't see when we look at a place that was occupied over hundreds of years. So, you know, so yeah, so that wasn't my focus, but it became sort of somewhere I wanted to go as I learned more about it. I find really interesting. The basic thrust of your book is that the way in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or however you, you know, the ways in which folks tend to discuss that, and we're talking about the Maya or the Romans, is very different from what

archaeologists who tend to study these cultures, how they tend to perceive of what you might more accurately call a decline or a decentralization or whatever. I think there's a number of terms that we could use. But these ideas that like you have these civilizations and then they suddenly fall apart are not really based in rigorous historical analysis usually. There's some cases as you go into the book. as usually. There's some cases as you go into the book. And I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at from a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book, a lot of the stuff that we talk about on this show in a more contemporary sense. And I'm kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort of came together, because you started it before the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously, that had an impact on the book it's it's it's all over there yeah yeah um well I've I was um

one of the things that I do is teach wilderness survival courses and um and I don't do that as frequently as some people that sort of dedicate themselves to that do, but I do it fairly frequently. And it became obvious to me over time that people were taking these courses, not just to learn how to deal with being lost out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision. What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend a night out in the woods or two or three? They were really thinking about what do I do when things fall apart? How do I take care of myself? How do I take care of my family using these skills that you could use in a situation where things had fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards the fact that, you know, people were worrying about the future. I mean, I could see it. I could see it in my students at the university.

I could see it, you know, in the people's faces at the supermarket. You know, there was something going on there that was concerning people. And a lot of it had to do with climate change. And that I think was, was the focus initially for me writing this. Because what I saw was, you know, sort of the prepper community and survivalist community, looking at things that really seemed to be short term and didn't at all focus on what we really saw historically. So I think that my initial motivation to write this was really just seeing this concern that was growing among people about what the future is going to look like. And then, of course, COVID hit,, that really brought all this to the, to the forefront. And are there any specific ways in your mind that you, you can, you kind of think on how COVID altered what you were, what you were writing

or how you conceived of what you were writing? Like once you, you know, you, you have this kind of vision that's inspired by the things that you're seeing and hearing, particularly in these wilderness survival courses. And then as you get started, we have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of things start to happen very quickly. How does that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah, I guess there were some just sort of practical logistical things, obviously, right? Some things that I intended to do or ways that I'd hoped to interact with folks in the course of interviewing people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about how things happen,

the big thing for me was how it became politicized so quickly, you know, that was, you know, in the, you know, well, now you see all of the memes, you know, talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't believe they're zombies or something, you know, that was never really on the radar, at least not on my radar before. And so now, you know, it is because clearly not only do these things happen and then you have a group of people that are dealing with it. You have obviously the dynamics within the group, which which, we knew, but to see it play out in this way, in this sort of dramatic way that really altered the course of history. I mean, the pandemic could have turned out

differently, but it didn't. And part of the reason that it didn't was because of the way folks reacted to it. And I'm wondering, because a chunk of your career and a big chunk of this book is kind of looking at in places like Honduras where these civilizations entered decline. And in some cases, it was very sharp. Like within a fairly short period of time, 90% of the population leaves or is deceased. And you see like the crumbling of a lot of these governmental institutions and whatnot that had organized life for a while. You see the pretty significant migrations. Is there any ways in which kind of the last two years as an archaeologist has changed or informed how you were thinking about these places that you'd been studying and these moments in history that you'd been studying for so long? Yeah, in some ways, it brings some of it into a little sharper focus. For instance,

you know, one of the things that archaeologists had long talked about was that during these declines or these collapses, that it's uneven. It's not equal for everybody. It's not equal over space and time. And certainly certainly depending on your position in society, there's different ways in which it plays out for you. You know, and that's something that we see, we see it from, you know, access to vaccines to, well, I mean, even things like, you know, if we think about folks that are unvaccinated now, there's a, you know, a chunk of those people that are doing it for a sort of political reasons or other ideological reasons. But there's also a big, a big group of those folks that are doing it because history shows that they

should be wary of anything that, uh, society tries to do to them. And so, you know, you have these, uh, these things playing out for different ways for, um, you know, people from different regions of the country or political orientations or race or ethnicity or, um, you know, a whole variety of things. And so seeing how uneven it was, the pandemic makes me think that, you know, it certainly was that way then. The other thing that we see when we look archaeologically is that it's these big structures or systems that collapse that really is the collapse. And the things that cause it initially, whether it's, I don't know, deforestation or drought

or warfare or even a natural disaster of some sort, that really it's the way people respond to those and the way these systems deal with those changes that really creates the problems that you see later on. And we can see that now, for instance, one of the things that we're talking a lot now about is supply chain issues. we're talking a lot now about is supply chain issues, right? And this is a result of COVID, but it's not a direct result. I mean, it's not because the crews on the ships or at the ports or truck drivers are sick. It's because of the ways in which all of this disrupted things. And especially when we get these really efficient but inflexible systems, like a lot of our shipping system was, these disruptions result in really big changes. So, you know, you have these huge ships that can only dock at a few ports. Once that gets backed up, you can't really shift and adjust. And so that's, I think for me, just a lot of it is seeing it play out where we see the fact that we have something that sets it all off.

But then we have the response of the system or the structure that really creates the day-to-day impact. Welcome, I'm Danny Threl. Won't you join me as the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum, an anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows. As part of My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.

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

to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Hola, mi gente. It's Honey German, and I'm bringing you Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture,

musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities artists and culture shifters this is the podcast for you we're talking real conversations

with our Latin stars from actors and artists to musicians and creators sharing their stories struggles and successes you know it's gonna be filled with chisme laughs

and all the vibes that you love each week we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun,

el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba.

He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh. And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with.

His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network,

the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I suspect a big part of kind of why we conceive popularly of quote unquote collapses in the past is based on, as you talk about extensively in your book, the way in which we look at it kind of in fiction. And in fiction, it's nearly always like the societal equivalent of a bullet in the head, right? The zombie plague is out, and then a couple of days, everything's fallen apart.

And the point that you make in this is that it's probably, I mean, this isn't exactly a good phrase, but it's probably better to look at it kind of like, it's like a tumor or something something where the things are set in motion that are going to lead to things falling apart much, much – at a point before a lot of people probably would have noticed it. The problem can be too far gone before it's really obvious. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a good point. And that's really something that, you know, even with COVID, it shows that, right? You know, the problems are not only the existence

or the appearance of this virus, but, you know, first of all, how did it appear? And that has to do with decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity of human populations to animals. And then we have the way that we divide ourselves up into nation states and the way in which we have, you know, economic systems that are working in certain ways. So, you know, the vaccine gets here, but not there and so forth. and so forth. But yeah, that's, you know, that I think is at the heart of it. You have these things that have been set in place. You have these parameters in which you're going to have to react and they really set the stage for what's going to happen. You know, you have, it's like looking backwards four or five moves in chess to see how did we get in this situation? It's not just because of that

last move it's because of the last 10 moves yeah and one of the things you bring up that i like is that if you're looking for kind of a historical example of a collapse that that most mirrors the way we tend to look at it in fiction it would probably be what happened to the indigenous population of particularly like North America after the arrival of colonizers, which was by a lot of accounts, like 90% of the population dead within a fairly short span of time, primarily from disease. This really rapid and cataclysmic shock, but also at the same time, as much as it does seem to mirror some of our, you know, kind of fictional depictions of viral outbreaks or other sort of societal calamities, the ways in which people survived don't really, in any meaningful way, mirror our kind of popular

fictional depiction of like, who makes it out of that sort of a situation you know the the the strapping military veteran with a rifle and a stockpile of food or whatever you know yeah yeah that that you know i i would say that certainly having these skills to keep yourself alive is important and it is true that if you don't make it through the first 30 days, you're not going to make it through the next 30 years. But the way people survive outside of a few days, perhaps, when they're dealing with some of these, what we would think of as you know, when we look at the Native American history in North America, you know, even as populations and entire groups were being decimated by these diseases, sometimes 75% of a village in a single winter from a wave or waves of disease. winter from a wave or waves of disease, even in the face of that, they reconstituted themselves as communities, sometimes multi-ethnic or multicultural communities. I mean, there was a whole variety of ways in which people regrouped. And I think that that, you know, that was the message. And, you know, part of the, this image of, you know, grabbing your bug out bag and heading out to the hills is, it just doesn't work, you know, and the stockpiling, you know, as well. And so,

yeah, when we look archaeologically, you know, we always see communications. Yeah, that's something we really try to encourage people to do on this show, where obviously some amount of disaster preparation is not just helpful, but is, I think, kind of morally necessary if it's at all financially feasible for you. You know, it is absolutely the right thing to do to try to have two, three weeks of relatively storable food, some water, some other emergency supplies. But kind of beyond that, as you said, that first like 30 days, if you actually want not just to live, but to have life have any kind of meaning, you have to be thinking in a community oriented situation.

Yeah. I mean, because ultimately, what's the difference between two weeks or two months worth of food? Right. It's going to be gone. And you have to come back. For this book, one of the things I looked at was the history of how we made a living and the history of agriculture. And one of the things that I found was that the last time that humans lived where a significant portion of the population was hunters and gatherers, that is not farmers, there was like one-fifteenth of the current population, you know, less than 500 million people in the world. So, even a catastrophic disaster that, you know, reduced us to 85% of, you know, 15% of the current current population we're still going to have more people

in the world than ever lived without agriculture and so we're gonna have to recreate some of these systems and you know agriculture by and large is going to be a community-based yeah system it's uh i mean you can can garden on your own, but the way that it needs to work is going to be a collective. Yeah. And I think, yeah, this is, we talk a lot about, I actually live with a couple of wilderness survival instructors and we have about an acre of land and we do a decent amount of, you know, gardening, you know, animal husbandry and that sort of thing. And it is, I've spent a lot of my life on farms. So I've kind of always had an appreciation for how much work it is. And one of

the things we try to talk about on this show regularly is the value of even just having a garden of things like guerrilla gardening, not because I'm not one of those people who thinks that like, oh, we need to replace industrial agriculture with like individuals tending small gardens. That's not going to work. But because the more you kind of interface directly with the concept of growing food and with working with other people in order to do that, the more prepared you are for any number of things that could go wrong. Like even if those things don't involve a crunch in the food supply lines, the connections you make with people doing that sort of work will be more valuable than an extra two months of stockpiles, you know, when you're in your food buckets or whatever, your Alex Jones dried food buckets. Well, that's absolutely right. And, you know, one of the things that occurred to me looking into the past at some of these, you know, collapses or declines that had happened in the past was that a huge percent of the population

was engaged directly in agriculture. And, you know, here in the, well, in the industrialized world, it's typically less than 5%, less than that even in the United States. Most people like me don't engage in it. And, you know, I know something about gardening perhaps like everybody else, Most people like me don't engage in it. And, you know, I know something about gardening, perhaps like everybody else, but I'm not a farmer. I don't really have that collective wisdom. And if I had to do that, you know, probably it's like a lot of other things. When everything's easy, it's not so bad.

Yeah. When it goes bad, it really helps to know what you're doing. And of course, everything goes bad sooner or later. And so, you know, that kind scale would be really important. You know, so I'm also like you, a proponent of this sort of thing. You know, if we can get everybody to participate in ways that we aren't now, that'll give us some flexibility. What if we do have supply chain problems? What if we do have supply chain problems?

Well, we have a number of people in the community that are already doing some of this stuff that could maybe be expanded or get us through this period. So, yeah. Yeah, I mean, even if you're not dealing with everyone's caloric needs, it could be as simple as because of where you're located. When the oranges and other kind of fruits aren't able to come in from a supply line thing, there's a shortage of vitamin C. And then knowing how to make tea out of pine needles or whatever, or what kind of plants have a lot of vitamin C, you know, even though you're not focused on meeting everyone's, you know, entire caloric needs through small-scale farming, but you can deal with a nutrient deficiency or something because you understand your environment a little bit better. Yeah. And, and, you know, probably quality of life issues too. I mean, you know, for, you know, kids and you know, there's,

there's lots of, there's lots of ways you can survive that are pretty miserable. So you want to, you want to try to direct it towards those that are desirable. And I think part of that's having this flexibility, having this knowledge, having a lot of people involved in things. And, you know, one of the things I talk about in my book are ideas of, you know, diversity and inclusion, which we talk about in certain ways now. And often, I think, unfortunately, it's talked about as if it's done to benefit the people that are marginalized and left out only. And while it is partly that, it benefits everybody, of course. I mean, anyone in a business knows, anybody in a university knows the benefits of diversity.

knows the benefits of diversity. In the same way, anybody that's trying to do something understands the benefit of a diverse range of experiences. That's why we make these multidisciplinary teams that go out and do things. It's so that you have this wide variety that can help you keep going. Yeah. yeah now one of the things that i really found fascinating in your book and that that kind of made me feel a little bit um bad is i you know i've i've spent a lot of time thinking about the what happened what was done to and what also just kind of happened as a result of the way diseases spread when when colonizers reached North America. I had never really devoted that much thought to the actual actions that different indigenous groups took consciously to protect themselves from the spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular in your book.

Could you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's something, as soon as I read it, I marked that page because I'm like, I need to look up what the studies he's referencing because I don't know anything about this. Yeah, that, you know, a lot of that stems from the research of some other archaeologists. And they, you know, you're exactly right. We don't think about that. We're not taught about it that way. You know, we sort of have this contradictory and sort of doubly problematic way of talking about this. First, for a long time, we denied sort of how traumatic and how much of a genocide it was when Europeans arrived.

genocide it was when Europeans arrived. And then after denying that, we sort of say, well, Native Americans are gone and no longer relevant, so we can cease to talk about them. Of course, that's not true. And one of the things that we see when we look more in detail at the histories, or we listen to the oral histories, or we look at the archaeology is that there are a number of things that that that people did and do to to create the outcomes that they want and that was no different for the Native American groups. You know, I mean, they had ways of dealing with disease and some of them will be able to understand it via our sort of problematic groups like the colonizers. You know, but in other ways, there are things that are going to be unfamiliar to us, and we're not going to see the effectiveness or the value in it. But one of the things that all of these things did that these groups were doing was created or maintained group identity and cohesion and allowed the perseverance of community. And it's easy to think about people as sort of passive victims of from, I don't know, like a thousand years ago or so.

And you also know a local woman who's a potter and she's putting the same markings on and you ask her why. And her answer is like, well, because the pottery sherds that we find from our ancestors have those on them. And my initial thought was like, oh, what a shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant. But then I thought, well, but is that any different from all of the different things that I do because they're traditions, because they're things that people a thousand years ago in my line did? No, it's not. It's just what people do, and it is a continuation. And it's a very – that's survival. That's conscious survival. Yeah, yeah.

And in that case, of course, whatever it meant initially, it now means that to her, right? So there's the meaning, you know? And so it's interesting. You know, one of the things, you know, I from, and I live in Kentucky and one of the things, especially when people come to say Appalachians, they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky. Sure. You know, and they already have an idea of what that is.

And if you don't see it because that's not really what people do then the response is never oh my ideas about what is authentic might be erroneous it's i wonder why i didn't see authentic appalachians you know yeah it's like well you did but you know there's going to be more hip-hop and punk groups than there are bluegrass groups, because, you know, these are 18, 20 year old kids. That's, you know, they're doing this as much as this other stuff. And, you know, more probably. And so that, that is something that I think of often as an archaeologist.

You know, my focus is in the past, but if I'm going to understand things, of course, you also have to understand how are people thinking about it in the present and how am I thinking about it in the present? Because, you know, everything, all the stories I tell about the past are coming out of my experience in the present, too. And it's hard to separate those. And really the best we can do is try to reflect on that and see how is it that I might be limiting my understanding because of my particular experience.

And one of the things I really liked about your book that I also found fascinating. So I, for a while, did conflict journalism. before when, when that was just a, an ambition of mine, before I started to do it, I would see the articles that were being written by all these war correspondents. And I would just be in awe of like, how did they get that story? How did they get that access? How did they, they must've put so much work in. And then when I actually got there, I realized like, oh no, they met, they made a contact with a local who was good at it. And that person showed them around and made all these connections.

And like, actually none of this work happens without these local fixers. And you make the point that in archaeology, you're not generally discovering things. Like even when you're finding shipwrecks, it's because these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah, a bunch of shipwrecks over there. Yeah. This is where you're going to go find them, you know. It's always the way it is. You know, there in the example you're talking about, I was part of this project in Forni in Greece, which, you know, made the news because we found so many shipwrecks there. Something ultimately like 50 shipwrecks around this island.

like 50 shipwrecks around this island. And almost all of them were shown to us by local folks, you know, that sponge divers or people that were fishers, you know, people that were out on the water all the time. And the few that we found by ourselves, I'm sure people knew about them. We just stumbled on them before somebody had a chance to show us. It's the same way in Honduras, where we would be walking through the rainforest. And, you know, maybe we'd been walking for a week. So we're way out in the middle of this place. People were constantly telling me, the guys that I was with would say, okay, if we go up this creek, you know, for about six hours, and we go over here, here's what we'd find. Here's what we'd find over here. Here's what we'd find over here. They knew where everything was.

And that's, you know, one of the things that you, that you learn is, you know, how reliant you are on people that live in a place. I mean, they just know it. Yeah. There's no, when you get right down to it as obsessed as we are kind of in in the western canon with the idea of lost cities um that's not really a thing that tends to happen um yeah no no no it's not and in fact most of the archaeological sites that people didn't know about, it was just because they were so small and ephemeral that no one really paid attention. Anything.

Yeah, there's no lost city. They're always known to somebody. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. Gracias, Come Again, the podcast where we dive deep into the world of Latin culture, musica, peliculas, and entertainment with some of the biggest names in the game. If you love hearing real conversations with your favorite Latin celebrities, artists, and culture shifters, this is the podcast for you. We're talking real conversations with our Latin stars,

from actors and artists to musicians and creators, sharing their stories, struggles, and successes. You know it's going to be filled with chisme laughs and all the vibes that you love. Each week, we'll explore everything from music and pop culture to deeper topics like identity, community, and breaking down barriers in all sorts of industries. Don't miss out on the fun,

el té caliente, and life stories. Join me for Gracias Come Again, a podcast by Honey German, where we get into todo lo actual y viral. Listen to Gracias Come Again on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian Gonzalez. Elian. Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba.

Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story, as part of the My Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Well, Chris, I think that's most of what I wanted to get into in this conversation. I'm wondering, before we kind of close out, because you are both the author of this book, The Next Apocalypse, which is, I think, a fascinating way of looking at the idea of things falling apart, and a wilderness survival instructor. If you're going to suggest people a practical kit bag to prepare for short and kind of long-term problems. What do you, what are you putting in your bag? Well, you know, there's the two main things that you're always going to want is, is a knife because that allows you to make a lot of other things and a way to start fire, you know, and we've all seen in the movies, rubbing sticks together and, you know, friction methods all seen in the movies rubbing sticks together and you know friction methods

and that works yeah and you can do that but it is incredibly difficult to do pain in the butt you know and for most of us that don't do it all the time uh you're just not going to be able to do it when it's 40 degrees and raining and you really need a fire you know you'll be able to do it when it's 100 degrees and dry, you know, because everything's about to catch on fire anyway. But, you know, so, and what would that look like? Well, you need something that will catch on fire pretty quickly. And the thing I always take is cotton balls. You know, if you take cotton balls and a disposable lighter or one of those fire starter sticks that'll make sparks, those cotton balls will catch fire instantly. And if you take one

and you coat half of it with petroleum jelly, then not only will it catch fire, it'll burn, you know, for, you know, a minute or so long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So, you know, for, you know, a minute or so long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So, you know, making fire and having some sort of cutting tool are the very basic things. But, um, you know, the, um, uh, beyond that, I would say, uh, you know, clothing or some sort of shelter is, is the other thing. You know, exposure to elements will kill you quicker than anything. And so having some way to protect yourself, and that's usually going to be, you know, first line of defense is going to be your clothes.

And one of the things that you'll know, anybody that deals with sort of survival situations, is that most people that really get in trouble with things like hypothermia, you know, it's not when it's 30 degrees below and they're out doing something. It's when it's 50 degrees and sunny and they're out in a t-shirt during the day and then at night it drops to 30 degrees and, you know, they're stuck out somewhere without proper clothing. That is when things get really dangerous. So, you know, I would say, you know, if you can have somebody to start fire, some sort of knife and appropriate clothes for spending the night out,

you know, then you're probably in pretty good shape for most situations. Well, Chris, thank you so much for talking with us today. Chris Begley, underwater archaeologist, author of The Next Apocalypse, The Art of Science and Survival. Chris, is there anything you'd like else you'd like to say or kind of get into before we close out for the day? anything else you'd like to say or kind of get into before we close out for the day?

No, just thank you very much for reading the book and for reaching out to talk with me, because I think that, you know, especially now as we go into sort of an uncertain future, I mean, the future is always uncertain, I suppose, but as, you know, we're really recognizing some of these challenges, you know, I really am hoping that this sort of community-based idea becomes the way we think about things. You know, it doesn't mean it's easy or that we're going to like it. It doesn't mean that that's what I want. I mean, tell you the truth, I would love it if it was just me out in the woods with my family. I can do that. It's much harder to be part of a community and make things work for a big group of people, but that's just the way it's going to be. way in which you have a lot more real security because i i think um uh i think people i don't know the the the world seems so complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that that safety comes from getting away from the world but historically that's just not how it works no the world finds you you know yeah uh it's the best being part of a group is,

is always best. And your, your little group can never defend against the big group. I mean, if we want to put it in those terms, you know, you can't just hoard everything and just doesn't work. Might work for a little while. But yeah, so for me, that's the message I'm hoping people take from it. Well, thank you very much, Chris. For those of you listening at home,

again, please do check out the next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for us all today. Chris, thank you again and have a wonderful day. Yeah, you too. Thank you. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us

out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. An anthology podcast of modern- day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying

legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturno 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 tech's elite and how they've 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 brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, five-year-old Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez was found off the coast of Florida. And the question was, should the boy go back to his father in Cuba? Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home, and he wanted to take his son with him. Or stay with his father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzalez wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him.

Or stay with his relatives in Miami. Imagine that your mother died trying to get you to freedom. Listen to Chess Peace, the Elian Gonzalez story on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. Black Lit is for the page turners,

for those who listen to audiobooks while running errands or at the end of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories of a busy day. From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Listen to Black Lit on the Black Effect Podcast Network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. AT&T, connecting changes everything.