Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 155: The Camp Fire

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

let's gather round the camp fire and sing our camp fire song WE HAVE A MERCH STORE NOW: https://www.bonfire.com/store/well-theres-your-problem-podcast/ buy the shirt: https://www.grimgrimgrim.com/products/well-theres-your-problem-x-grimgrimgrim-diy-disastercore Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod/ Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 26929 Philadelphia, PA 19134 DO NOT SEND US LETTER BOMBS thanks in advance in the commercial: Local Forecast - Elevator Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

exciting news out of Britain, but we're not talking about the news first, because that comes in the second slide, we're here to talk about other things, and then do the news. That's the format of the show, folks. ALICE and LIAM Thank you. I'm gonna murder you. ALICE We believe in a rigid workflow on this podcast. JUSTIN You are very rigid, very disciplined, very on topic. ALICE Some might say poetic. Very rigid, very disciplined, very on topic.

We are like Spartans. We're like monks. No tangents, just a solid curve of constant radius. Our podcast is a flat circle. We stick to sports. Every slide that you will see for the next four and a half hours will be the stress strain graph of steel. Yes. Well, that has tangents in it. that you will see for the next four and a half hours will be the stress strain graph of steel.

JUSTIN Yes. Well, that has tangents in it. SEAN No jokes. No jokes. LIAM Fuck! ALICE Well this looks cool. Whatever this is. JUSTIN Yes.

It's a good time, trust me. ALICE Only when I hit the fucking vape. Thank you. SEAN I... I... Don't... You need to learn to start dipping. JUSTIN Welcome to Well There's Your Problem podcast.

I wasn't done. I was done. Oh fuck off with that. A podcast about engineering disasters, with slides. And chewing tobacco. I'm Justin Rosnick, I'm the person who's talking right now, my pronouns are he and him, okay go. I am November Kelly, my pronouns are she and her, and when I consumed tobacco I smoked

because I was an adult, and not a kind of... Oh, fuck yourself, Nova! ...toothless farmer. Yay Liam. Alright, well now that I've been insulted for no reason. Hi, I am Liam McGanderson... Love you too. Love you too.

And I am the person currently stuffing myself down your chinny, and giving you dipping tobacco like some sort of even fatter Santa Claus. Oh my god. It'd have to be Dip Santa. It's Dip Santa, baby! It's Thinmas! Every single present under the tree is in the shape of a dip tin. Yes.

Yeah, and or by snooze dot com. Email me back, fellas. And we have a guest. Yeah, hi. It's Kevin again. Speaking of tobacco, because I work in Forest Resources, I have a really fun dip and cigarette story, so I went up and I met this logger for the first time. He jumps out of his Ponzi, which is like a one and a half million dollar machine for cutting down trees. He's got,

he's got a big like lower decker in and he's got an upper decker. And so he's just got two horseshoes in his mouth and he just taps on the side of his machine, just a cigarette. He starts smoking a cigarette while he's got an upper and a lower decker. And I was like, Oh yeah. Triple crowding. You've never done that? No, no. But that man was an exil longer. Raza seed me do that. He rolls up his sleeves, just covered in patches. I'm really trying to quit. Two things.

Firstly, what's your fucking pronoun? Oh, sorry. I'm so sorry. So, my pronouns are he and him. Nice. Apologies, the pronoun checks are very important. This man is the Joker, he laughs when trees fall down. Yeah, sometimes, yeah.

Listen, I don't wanna go back in the forest, they're fuckin', I got a workplace injury from this podcast doing the pre-ons episode. I'm sorry about that. It's alright, it fucked me up for a while, so I'm excited to get, like, depression off of this one, you know? RIght. If I can be honest with you, when we were doing it I was in the heart of my ecological depression.

I've gotten much better since then. You know, I went out and killed a bunch of invasive species this summer, I went on vacation, you know, so we're doing much better. But it's a real thing you gotta work through. I will update you on something you weren't looking for, but the Prion Conference was excellent, and it was some of the most depressed drinking you've ever done. ALICE & LIAM LAUGH Oh yeah. ALICE Can I ask something, Devon.

Whenever any of us get particularly Duma, can you just, like, fade up a 1 through 10% opacity image from First Reformed. Just to kind of set the vibe, and just kind of use your own judgement on how First Reformed we're getting, y'know? LWX I don't know what that is. ALICE It's a Paul Schrader movie about how we're destroying the planet, and also Paul Schrader grew up as a Calvinist. Which kind of all Paul Schrader movies are about.

LWX Yeah, that makes sense, yeah. JUSTIN All the Leopold has a fantastic quote about this, which is like, when you learn ecology, you learn about the damaged world around you. I've just butchered it, but, you know, hey. SEAN Yeah, absolutely. LIAM We butcher shit constantly. That's kind of our thing, actually. We butcher shit, people get mad at us, we ignore them, or sometimes we get drunk and don't ignore them.

ALICE I'm working on that one as we speak. ZACH So my strategy for ecological depression is I just get depressed on Monday. Monday I'm allowed to do everything sad and be depressed, and then the rest of the week I have to be happy. But I also don't work on CWD on Mondays. ALICE Because it will depress you worse. You will get the like 200% opacity first reformed screenshot. So, what you see on the screen in front of you is a forest.

Which is, on fire. I'll say one thing. You see those orange spots? They're kinda like orange red spots. If there's anything that's gonna denature the fuck out of a prion, kinda... Big ass fire? Yeah, big ass fire. We'll get into that.

Oh Jesus. JUSTIN I'm not sure here whether I'm supposed to say, it's not supposed to be like that, or it is supposed to be like that, just less. ALICE We've broken it! We've broken it! ALICE It's a fucking issue, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, it's like, nuance in here, which is the problem. It's nuance. ALICE Oh, Jesus.

Mmhm. Okay. Well, there's not enough wine left in this bottle. SEAN Yeah, I'm pretty stupid. ALICE It's fine, I have another one somewhere. JUSTIN That's why I delayed fifteen minutes, because I knew I'd have to go to the beer store. After stupidly trying to improve myself by exercising today.

SEAN Yeah, but what'd you get? JUSTIN Oh, I got the very mega IPA from Yards. It's actually pretty good, I mean, the can makes it look like it's gonna be bad, but it's actually good. I know. No, Very Mega is decent, the Bit Viper from them is not exceptionally good. It took me a long time to try this one, cause I was like, there's no way that's a good beer, and then it turned out it was a good beer.

I just, if I never drink another IPA again, it'll be too soon. Like for some reason... ALICE Oh, that's right, you're a pussy, I forgot! LIAM No, no, no, that's the correct opinion. November is correct about that. ALICE Thank you. Because I like a snout. I like beers, right, but like, the thing is, I don't know how a bunch of kind of craft

brewers tricked you all into drinking the kind of shit beer we'd designed to put on boats for a long time? ALICE Mr. Mr. Tree Guy here doesn't like a beer that tastes like a tree. ZACH No, my work is, like, bitter enough. I don't need bitterness in my beer. I had a very nice glass before we started recording, a very nice glass of untapped, it's a fine Pennsylvania whiskey with some maple syrup in there.

Gorgeous. And now I have a summer shandy, cause I'm a basic bitch. ALICE I'm not gonna issue any pretensions about this just from the fact that I'm drinking wine, I'm drinking the most expensive wine that the small Tesco near me had, which was £8.50. There's a 2020 multiple ciano d'abruzzo, which means I'm drinking Covid wine. I'm drinking wine that was like, made by people wearing face masks, and, let me tell you, you can't really taste the Covid, you can really taste the oak.

You know? Which is something... That's what we like, we like to see some nice oak out there. Is that the one with the really rustic looking label? It does look pretty rustic, yeah. It's Tesco finest, mind you. I used to drink a nice Montepulciano, had this really rustic looking label, it was very nice, it was also relatively cheap.

I was back when you drank wine. Yeah, well, sometimes wine would make its way into the house and be like, eh, I like this one. I like an Italian wine, I like a Barolo is the thing. I don't... It's okay. JUSTIN Italian wines are definitely... I never really got a taste for anything else, you know, it's just like, okay, I'm drinking

the Italian wine, because that's what I know. At least a little bit. ALICE Right. I sort of prefer big fat California cabs. JUSTIN I was in Italy for work stuff, and I had some great prosecco's like that's what I was all about there Yeah, you know sec. Oh is another thing. Yeah, I mean at some point. It's like I could just buy prosecco all the time I don't know why I save it for special occasions I don't know them in Chile in there with some ice and then you get a little lemon chiller spritz and you're back in the piazza

It's a great time I'm little lemon chilla spritz, and you're back in the piazza, it's a great time. Oh, spritz is so good. I'm a big Aperol spritz girl. Cost you, like, three euro? Oh, it was fantastic. Um, hey, welcome to Well, There's Your Problem podcast, a podcast about wine. Suck it, Riley. A podcast of infinite leisure.

I was really transported by Kevin saying, like, you're back in the PR, so that's wonderful. It's lovely. SEAN Oh, yes, I would like that, yes, please. RILEY If I may just really piss off Riley for a moment here. We've never met, so I'm just gonna make him have a bad time. So the only wine in my house is, there's a bottle of wine that my now wife and I got when we were in France right before our wedding, And then we have a box of New York wine. It's from the New

York side of the Eerie. It's fine. The other side of the microclimate. The good side, the free side. I once drank whiskey out of a box. It was scotch in a box and it truly tasted just like piss. And it was just like, oh, this is the lowest I've been. I will also come for Riley's microclimate. So the Spideline orfly kills grapevines in the winter, because it sucks out the sugars in there that protect the vines over winter, and they are moving through Pennsylvania rapidly

and spreading out, so that microclimate is under threat. ALICE If you have, like, literally anything technological you ever want to talk about, please come on Trashfuture, because I need to see you destroy this man's conception of his microclimate. ZACH We talked about, I do carbon credits, I have the best idea for a carbon credit program, too, by the way. Yeah. We'll get...

It's news. JUSTIN Yeah. We should probably to it, it's news. Yeah. We should probably move along here at least a little bit. Oh, fuck yourself, bud. It's so much fun not to talk about this. You get a couple of glasses of wine in me, the podcast is six hours long, what do you want from me?

Oh yeah, oh, oh, I'm gonna do the bomb callers, oh, you guys are easily distracted, my name's Dough McKelly, yeah! Do as I say, not as I do. JUSTIN This is why I knew I needed to go to the beer store before and not after the podcast. LIAM I don't have shit. I'm gonna... After we record this...

JUSTIN It's time for the goddamn news! LIAM I've condoned myself and scum. I wasn't done! ALICE I love the ability to just, like, turn that on you, like Michael Moore at the Oscars being like, the Iraq war is bad, just, oh, you wanna say some shit to me, you wanna say some shit to me right now? You don't have to be like this. But I choose to.

Oh, I know. The line... Go down? The 170km long linear city being built in Saudi Arabia as part of NEON. What happened to it, Roz? The line, you'll never believe this, the line has been shortened to the nub. Oh. Noooo.

This kind of walkable, mixed-use urban development is actually impractical to build in most Saudi municipalities. ALICE Yes, they are settling from building the world's longest building, to, well, still building the world's longest building, but considerably shorter. ALICE Yeah, less of a flex about it. They've cut it down to like, 2.6km, or something like that? ALICE Yeah, and the only things that come close, if you exclude the Great Wall of China, it's

that big shitty Nazi resort they never finished. Oh, Praura, yeah. On the Baltic. Yeah. Sure, we're all smart and intelligent and know these things. Yeah, and then like, uh, I dunno. I don't know that it's something to be very proud of, that you just know off the dome the name of the Nazi's doomed Baltic Sea Resort.

I think like, the second, like, longest building is Karl Markshoff in Vienna, so... Well, it's a real sort of like, uh... War of ideologies. Yeah, yeah. Although, I feel like if you stretch it out, I feel like it's a bit of an intestinal thing. You know how your intestines are like, fucking, 170km long if you stretch them out, right, but they double back over themselves. RIght, that's a lot of intestines, Alex, November...

It feels like that some days. I literally am having that checked out. I think if you just do by length of corridors, probably the Pentagon is probably stupid long, right? ZACH What about that one really big building was like Romania or something like that? ALICE Oh, the, we did an episode on it without a reason.

JUSTIN The Palace of the People. I mean, that's just big. That's not long. ALICE Oh, that's what they say about me. JUSTIN I could sort of see how you could unwrap the Pentagon and make it long. Unwrap the Pentagon? Yeah, I mean if you're like...

Yeah, exactly. 9-11-2 is when a bunch of situationist terrorists straighten out the Pentagon. Well didn't the Saudis already try that? It's like the Gordian Knot, but worse. Oh my god, they linearized the Pentagon. It would have required a huge number of planes to do that. No, they turned it on its side and rolled it out like a spool. ALICE LAUGHS.

Yeah, I just have the entire Pentagon on my back, like one of the old field telephone wire spools, yeah. Yeah. But yeah, so, it seems like things are not going well in Saudi, because, y'know, they were gonna do all of this stuff, and it was gonna be like, Vision 2030, it was gonna be like Silicon Valley, every tech startup was gonna be there, and a bunch of European rimless glasses wearing architects took their money, laughed in their faces. JUSTIN Black turtlenecks, y'know.

ALICE Yeah. And then, as they kind of predicted, and as we predicted, there wasn't enough money even for the Saudis to do this, and they started having to borrow money to do it, which they don't want to do, and it's just, it's not gonna happen. They will have, like, displaced and killed a bunch of people in order to dig one ditch. And then the ditch is gonna fill with water, and then the ditch is gonna collapse. JUSTIN I am genuinely surprised at how far they got with site work, though.

My god. I mean, they did dig that ditch. SEAN They done dug the ditch, they done... ALICE Well, I mean, one thing you can say about Wahhabism is it makes the ditches run on time. Like, it's... Apparently, yeah. I just ordered shorts online, not just now, but the email confirmation was, you done did

it, and it made me wanna throw up in my fuckin' mouth. Don't give me a cutesy confirmation email, it's really annoying. You said, your order has been shipped, thanks, fatass. Hurt me a little. You're like, your 3XL shorts are on the way, have you considered making some changes to your diet? They're 2XL. They're 2XL.

I have little chicken legs, I promise. All my weight's in my tummy. I'm kidding myself, I can fit into a 2XL, I'm right there with you, brother. You gotta, you gotta start eating crappy patties. I'm gonna start eating less, is what I'm gonna start eating crappy patties. ALICE And I start eating less is what I'm gonna start eating. Um, yeah, I guess it's easy to motivate a bunch of feckless Europeans if the threat is, I will give you a billion dollars, and if you fuck with me I will cut your arms and

legs off. JUSTIN Oh, actually, I have a fun story here. So when I was in Italy, I was in La Barr. ALICE I liked the idea of you like jumping up and down. I saw the Saudis like cutting guys arms and legs up. Close. So I was in this bar, and it was like a little after midnight. So they were just getting going for Italians, but there are these two Aussies who are just drunk as skunks. And I was chatting with them and you know why they were there?

One of them was selling cooking equipment to the other guy who worked for Neom. So, Neom, the loss of Neom is going to cost me a beer the next time I go to Italy, because they bought me a beer. I'm personally affected by this news story, I'm saddened to hear this. ALICE Yeah, thoughts and prayers with Kevin at this trying time. SEAN My surprise will continue on, unfortunately. 97 year old Saudi embassy still mutilates defectors the old fashioned way. Oh, very good.

Thank you, thank you. I'm still, I mean, I don't think they're gonna build a full line, but I can imagine them eventually extending it another mile. ALICE You think that they're gonna build like one block of line, put a big Saudi flag on it, open a Balenciaga store and declare victory? JUSTIN Yeah, that could be it, and then they have like line phase two, and then they'll realize, y'know, one of the big conceits here is they don't have that hyperloop in the basement, and like, well that's not real.

So... ALICE That's not happening completely. LIAM Don't you mean diaper poop? Please call it by its proper name. JUSTIN Yeah, the diaper poop in the basement. LIAM Well, maybe they can run the guy who's in charge of the line through that a couple of times to see if it works. ALICE Only the line reduces one European architect to a suplike homogenet in under thirty seconds.

LIAM I just don't like Europeans. Besides Gareth. JUSTIN We're gonna pause. ALICE Legally I'm not European now. I don't think Gareth is either, because we Brexited. We're like, Atlanticists, you know? We're anti-woke and we're our own thing and we're a free-willing, buccaneering nation that doesn't have to answer to nobody.

ALICE Yeah, alright. You're welcome for the leatherly sack, by the way. If you could... ALICE Yeah, we're gonna need another one of those in about five minutes. JUSTIN We should be doing that in Ukraine right now. JUSTIN We're gonna introduce Bjark Ingalls to a vacuum environment and watch him expand to the size of his ego.

Yes. In other news... ALICE Yeah, this is the reason why I'm drinking the most expensive wine in the Small Tesco. I don't know if you know this, but the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is... ALICE North of Ireland. ALICE Yeah, and the occupied Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is... North of Ireland. Yeah, and the occupied North of Ireland, thank you. That's right, thank you.

Yeah, do you know, it's... I thought they just released something called the CAS Report? Yes. The CAS Review? I couldn't think of a different picture. Yeah, it's more like the ASS review, because it's bad. The ASS review, because it's bad. JUSTIN The ass review, exactly.

ALICE No, that's decades of professionalism there. ALICE All of you are now children until you're 25, did I read that right? JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, yeah. ALICE Because adults can't make their choices despite being able to do it. JUSTIN The issue is... JUSTIN Adults cannot consent to medical procedures. ALICE Okay, you'll fuck yourself. Yeah, they, so, this was an inquiry into, like, healthcare for young trans people, right?

And essentially what happens is, if you go into that with a huge amount of bias, and discard all the evidence, and then say, hey, there's no evidence this works, then the outcome is a report that is just really really bad science, more than anything. It doesn't hold up on scientific merits, even in a bad faith way, and it's just full of irrelevant bullshit. There's a bit in there that says it's impossible to tell what sex you were assigned at birth if you're like 5'7", specifically, this is not a joke. That's verbatim.

It's just... you're like five foot seven, specifically, this is not a joke, that's like verbatim. It's just... ALICE Rejected every study that was not double blind, which is not something you can do with hormone therapy. ALICE I really wanna do this. ALICE Because it's A, it's not ethical, B, people will find out that they're not on hormones. ALICE Yeah, it's like, you kind of get some obvious

effects for me, you know, the big one was like, I started growing tits, right? Difficult to double-blind that. But also unethical, as you say. LIAM Sure can't try. ALICE Yeah, well, I want this to be applied to other things, and be like, you're actually not allowed to do studies of developmental linguistics, because there's no good double-blind evidence, right? And until you lock a bunch of kids in a fucking linguistics department labyrinth and raise

them without language, you aren't allowed to draw any conclusions from this. SEAN Yeah, so people have tried doing that, and that's how the Children and Youth Services comes to visit you. JUSTIN Yeah, that's also, like, that was one of the problems with trying to test drugs for treating AIDS, was, y'know, people tried to work out if they had the placebo or the real drug, so they could give it to other people who had AIDS. And we're in the study, I mean. ALICE It's not ethical to do these things, y'know?

And, so... RILEY Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I have a solution here, you ready for this one? You take everybody who's on this committee, and you put them in the double blind trial. Or guillotine them. Oh. There you go, now that'd be funny. The good news is that the Labour Party has already agreed to, like, implement everything

that's in it. Fuck off! And there's another study, another review, that's in the early stages now into adult trans healthcare, all of which is to say, get me out of this fucking country, please God, they are gonna try and make it illegal for me to live here. Oh well, at least maybe I can go to the United States. Mmm. Yeah. You're fine if you're in a major city.

Mmm. Canada's gonna try to murder you. You always have a place with us, Nova. We have a spare bedroom. SEAN heavily armed spare bedroom in Philadelphia, please and thank you. ALICE Oh, that apartment opened up in the Drake, with the huge terrace. ALICE We could all live there!

SEAN Yeah, exactly. That terrace is fucking huge. SEAN Well there's your problem, Hype House. I mean, subscribe to the Patreon so we can afford it, exactly. Well, that terrace is fucking huge. Well, there's your problem, Hype House. I mean, subscribe to the Patreon so we can afford it, please. It is only $6667 a month. Whoooo. For the location and the size and the height. So that kind of money you could get like a studio, no pets, no students, uh, bills

not included, in like, outer London. JUSTIN I was talking to Jay, he was like, if I had a roommate that would be less than my rent than San Francisco. ALICE Jesus. JUSTIN Or, okay, what's the good housing? ALICE Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I just...

It's, the thing about British transphobia is that this country does its level best to socially murder you for being trans, and the only thing to do about it is to ignore them and transition anyway. You can get your own hormones off the internet, you should do that. Don't waste any time with the NHS because it's useless anyway and it's about to get worse. And obviously this is highly precarious and it doesn't feel great, but I think it's ultimately gonna be a futile effort, right?

I don't think you can legislate or morally mandate trans people out of existence. It's just gonna make things frustrating and undignified and more precarious for a while, but in the end you have to believe that we will win. And yeah, that's the thing that I have faith in. Because, like... SEAN You have to. ALICE Yeah, and these freaks and assholes cannot

be allowed to triumph. And I think all of their victories will turn to ashes in time. RL. Can I find some bright side of this? Or some bright side of trans folks in England? I've been listening to this small podcast, you may know of, Kill James Bond, it's been excellent for... so in my job I work with a lot of young folks who are figuring themselves out, and it's really helped me to interact with them and help them in their figuring themselves out. So you know, there's always podcasts out there which are very helpful.

ALICE That's true, you know. And it's kind of win-win for me, doing those podcasts, because the people supporting those podcasts go some way to help insulate me personally from the worst bits of this. Which I ultimately feel guilty and insecure about, but it's very much appreciated. You know? LWX It's fantastic. I can't say enough good things about it.

ALICE I think the thing is, right, I empathize with you, Justin, because I want to move to London, another thing that the Patreon is enabling me to do, right. And I do this in the fact that, despite the fact that, like, England is appreciably worse than Scotland on a lot of trans stuff, and also just England itself and the UK generally pretty bad, but I love it. And I don't want to live anywhere else. So sometimes you just have to stay where you want to be. We have to move to the merger of the urban and the rural, the very beating heart of cold country Hazelton.

LIAM I'm not moving to Hazelton. ALICE I mean, I gotta move to London and stay in the UK, because, like, all the other stuff about, like, oh, I should flee the country, without learning another language, fucking to where? Like, where is English-speaking in the world that isn't having a kind of, like, Nazi reaction flee the country, without learning another language, fucking to where? Where is English speaking in the world that isn't having a kind of Nazi reaction right now? How's New Zealand doing?

Bad. Aw shit. I have some Kiwi friends and the answer is not great. Okay. What about, uh, what about, like, uh... Gihanna, fuck it! Yeah, Gihanna, exactly. Fucking throwing my ladder with Giana, hell yeah!

I wanna go to Georgetown. Was Costa Rica the English colony island? Belize. Belize, alright, Belize? I mean, I do think South America might be the move, if you're looking to, like, maximize your kind of, like, survivability, despite a way higher trans murder rate. I think in the long term, if you, like, start learning Spanish, buddy. Y'know.

ALICE You get moved to the Falklands. And, um... ALICE That's true. That's true. I mean, anyone tries to hate crime me in the Falklands, I see him, like, coming through a perfectly flat, unforested field, that's about, like, 15 miles long. Y'know. SEAN I do think, if you decided to martyr yourself

for the cause of the Falklands, they will build a statue for you. They will get it wrong. JUSTIN I think the time is right for a transfemtary pack. Yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, you need the trans-autonomous Oblast. ALICE I would honestly like... Oh, don't fucking tempt me.

We've seen how movements of oppressed minorities towards taking nationhood off someone else has been going lately, you know? You try that shit, and like, in a hundred years' time, the trans-autonomous oblast is ordering airstrikes against the oppressed they them community. Like, yeah, that's a good point. That's a good point. They've declared war on the bisexuals. ALICE I'm not gonna be like the trans femse of Yabotinsky. Like, I don't want to do that, you know?

SEAN A. MADD, but it's just a signed mother of all bombs at birth. ALICE I love my community, and I don't want to hand cover it to the many, many war crimes you were forced to do if you imposed territoriality on it. Yeah, that's fine. Alright, we have to make Transmars. Suck that shit, Elon. Yeah, fuck you, Elon.

Yeah, well, the problem is then you find out that there is, like, indigenous Martian life we're displacing, like, five minutes into it and and you just- the whole cycle starts up over again. ALICE Whatever, dude. No. Humanity's destiny is the stars. I am absolutely subjugating whatever life forms are on Mars. I don't care how intelligent they are. I am doing unlimited genocide on the Martians. This is humanity's destiny. Yeah. no, I have- whenever an ultra-nationalist reverts this, that's me. I don't think there's anything more substantial there than extremophile bacteria. You'll be fine.

I think more extreme- More extremophile bacteria are ten feet tall and intelligent. This is gonna suck. I think this is a good point for me to mention this thing I forgot to mention, which are all of these, these are my own, these have nothing to do with my employer, do not find my employer. Mmhm. Yeah, no, you are all of these, these are my own, these have nothing to do with my employer, do not find my employer. ALICE Yeah, no, you're not in trouble, we're in trouble.

I haven't even said anything that spicy, and I'm more depressed about this than I have been in ages. I ended up avoiding the news for the whole day, like, catastrophizing, spiralling, retweeting a bunch of horrifying shit, and then going to play the like, new Suzerain DLC. Which is really good, by the way. I highly recommend that game. That's a little endorsement for you there. Pretty good.

JUSTIN So he's like, I was like, I'm gonna play some video games today, but my mouse wheel is still broken. ALICE You can... Okay. You can't say, I'm thinking about going on a tour of like a six thousand dollar a month apartment, and then also say, my mouse is broken and I don't know what to do about it. That's a disconnect between income and personal self-sufficiency previously only seen in most

sort of Hungarian empress. He knows what to do about it, he just won't. Yes. No, I did order a new backup mouse, because I intend to get this one running again. Because it's a nice mouse. ALICE I have followed you across a thousand universes, and in every one I'm gonna punch you with a nut. ALICE I really love- there was someone who replied

to us on Twitter that's like, do you think Justin and Liam find each other in every timeline? In every universe? And I'm like, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely. I think that's what the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was about, you know? RILEY What was that shitty Marvel's movie that was like that?

ALICE Madam Web. One of them is Madam and the other one is Web. RILEY What was the one with, it had like, Kamel Nanjiani who got, he got ripped for it, it's a terrible movie. ALICE Oh, Jesus. RILEY It's like that one. ALICE Moon Knight! Was that it?

Was that a TV show? RILEY Or there was that straight to Netflix one with Scarlett Johansson that was also- Was that Marvel Eternals? Was that Eternals? Oh yeah, Eternals! Yeah, it's like Eternals. This is- Yeah, sure.

Which one? The rich Camille Nanjiani. On our very focused, no-dangence podcast. Go fuck yourself, bud. That was, the goddamn news. Hey, so is the recording still working for you guys? Yeah. I'm gonna be honest, it's probably Devon. No, Tangents Podcast. Go fuck yourself, bud. That was. The goddamn news. Hey, so is the recording still working for you guys?

Yeah. Yeah. Okay, because mine's showing invalid date, invalid date, invalid date, but I think it's fine. That's weird, but it looks fine on my end, so, just keep your local recording going and save it. Yeah. I did a podcast where they used Rifferside, I don't know if you guys have tried different

software... I believe, on knowledge and belief, Zancaster is the worst software to exist apart from all the others. Yeah. Okay. Well, that podcast was... Bringing endorsement. Yeah.

The other podcast was very high production budget, I'm not gonna lie to you. Yeah, I've used Riverside for Zico's Kaveti. We are not high production values. Yeah. I would say the name of it here, but I would also dox myself in a second. Mmhm. Yeah, no, you're fine. I have...

I was sitting on a bench by the river earlier today, and I wasn't able to record anything. We're not high production values. Devon adds a lot of production values. Yeah. Devon does add a lot of production value. We love you, Devon. It's like production value on the like, us side, you know? Right.

Well, Devon does a really good joke of really good visual gags. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. No, Devon's fantastic. I got nothing bad to say about them. Fantastic. Why are we looking at the vice president of the United States? Oh, yeah yeah yeah, sorry sorry, I got distracted by other podcasts.

I swear I'm not cheating on you guys. I swear. We were all... We were hanging out of the United States. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, I got distracted with other podcasts. I swear I'm not cheating on you guys. I swear. We were all... But hey, I had the big banner. Welcome home, cheater. Yeah. We were all distracted by thinking about Davin. That's very true.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So... I'm gonna say something that I'm gonna regret saying. I want to disgust our listeners a little bit. I want them to turn this off in anger. Kamala Harris could get it. I... I want to disgust our listeners a little bit, I want them to turn this off in anger. Okay. Hamlet Harris could get it. I...

Well, not none of us fell out of the coconut tree, you know. Well that's exactly what's happening here, we all live in a context... Shake my coconuts, Mrs. Vice President! Not to, like, not to infantilize her, but I don't think it's ethical for a woman as, like, permanently high as she appears to be to get it. ALICE Oh, that's fair. Yeah, give me that shit they gave to Pat Mahomes in the Super Bowl 57, half time, yeah.

JUSTIN They did hit him with some good good. I don't know what it was, but it was something great. ALICE Yeah, whatever it is, the like, 0.01% healthcare is something else, man. I've talked about this before, I think I talked about it when Trump got like, 0.01% healthcare is something else, man. I've talked about this before, I think I talked about it when Trump got COVID, and they juiced him up with the like, this is the drug that makes the president not die. Like, whatever it is, Kamala Harris is on the mental health version of that, you know? LIAM Yeah, it's a maintenance dose, yeah.

That would be fantastic. ALICE Oh, the drug regimen, the drug combination that makes you feel like that. Ohhhh. JUSTIN They must be giving the same thing to the lady who runs Twitter now? ALICE Oh, Lindy Acherino! She's just posting shit that's like, uh, you know, engagement numbers are up with the hashtag metrics, it's all happening on X, the everything app.

And then Elon is posting, like, great replacement things. Just GastheJews88, yeah. Uh huh. Okay, so let's talk about the episode a little bit here. Go fuck yourself, bud. The thing is, we could cut this, and we choose not to, because we know that people like it. I'm not gonna... Yeah, no, obviously you don't cut this.

So for the people who want it, and are just like, uh, we know that people like it. I'm not gonna... JUSTIN No, obviously you don't. That would be silly. ALICE So for the people who want it, and are just like, uh, when are they gonna get to the- never. LIAM If you post a comment, you've already lost. Even if it's a good one. Even if we like it. ALICE I do like the people who are like, this is just for engagement, have a good day! I love those little weird fucks.

JUSTIN Okay, alright, so we live in a context, unfortunately. So, when we discuss fire today, everyone is thinking about that big satellite phone that we saw before, of, oh shit's on fire right now. Oh, well that's crazy, this is a new thing that has never happened before in the history of the western United States. Insane. Um, actually, we have a context around us, and we simply exist within it. There are a couple-

ALICE You didn't fall out of the sequoia tree. JUSTIN No, not in this... Yeah, yeah, I will also agree that coconut trees are not trees, they're grasses. And fuck them grasses. So... ALICE I just walked into a beef I didn't even know that you had. JUSTIN Oh, come on!

Look. ALICE Put the live in the coconut, and it's just Kevin setting fire to a coconut grove. Look, I am a forester and a wildlife biologist. When am I gonna get back on an engineering podcast? Everything is gonna catch straight. Feral horses, I'm coming for you in the burrows next. Watch out.

Yeah, that is a mass helicopter initiated death I would like to discuss later. We'll get there. Okay, so- Cue Fortunate Son. Yeah, it'd be sick. death I would like to discuss later. We'll get there. Okay, so- Cue Fortunate Son. Yeah, it'd be sick. All right, so we're talking about forest fire in the Western United States and how it's kind of like crazy right now. So, fire has always happened in the Western United States. It's not a bad thing. What's bad is what's happening right now, hence the

context. All right, Roz, give me the next slide here. Gotcha. Ooh, triangles. Yeah, so if you're bitch made, you think about fire in the fire triangle, which is oxygen, heat and fuel. Bitch made shit. Alright, so this is just like, oh look, my candle's on fire, wow, isn't that neat. Oh man, I wonder if I reduce the fuel loading in this forest, is that gonna potentially stop fire?

Me doing double award science. Yeah. Yeah. And then maybe, Alice, you finish your BS in environmental science, you're like, oh, we should start looking at, like, the stand health, and see if this, sorry, a stand is just a bunch of trees that are similar species in a geographical location. Shoujo has? I dunno.

I don't know who that is. So that's your next level, is like, okay, so what happened that caused this wildfire? Curiously, this one's also in a triangle. Everything's a triangle here, there's a power shape here. Yeah, this is a very powerful shape, yes. Yeah, also foresters are not the most creative people and neither are fire scientists, so why don't I fucking do a triangle? Alright, so then then now we're starting

to think at the level of like, yeah, this is what I'm talking about. We got some good stuff going on here. This is our context here. The fire doesn't just happen because we have an unput out campsite. There's stuff that contributes to this fire. There's a lot of fine fuels in the ground.

The weather was right for it. We got some wind going, which we'll get to later, you know, the conditions were right. But if we use our big brain here, we can look at the fire regime, like, what is this place supposed to be? And should this fire have happened to begin with? ALICE I have, somehow, a paradigm already in my head for understanding this.

You know what this mirrors? This is tactical, operational, and strategic, is what you're talking about here. You're like, your tactical guy is like, this is why this is on fire, your operational guy is like, this is why this bit is on fire, and your strategic guy is like, this is why there are fires. RILEY Yes. ALICE I was told by Smokey the Bear that only you can prevent sporest fires. Yeah, and I would very much like to say to Smokey the Bear, you know, October is bear

season, come around buddy. Come around. I got my license. Where you at, dog? The hunting success rate is 1% in Pennsylvania. I intend to be in that 1%. Smokey the Bear has fluffed around enough it is time for him to find out. ALICE We... do not give us t-shirt ideas that will also get us a cease and desist.

Smokey the Bear is property of the US Department of the Interior or something. We don't get yelled at. RILEY Interior pffft. Someone did not study their early US Forest Services agriculture thanks to Gifford Pinchot. The Giff, in his ultimate wisdom, decided that Forest Service should be within agriculture, so that way management continues to happen. Well, I agree with that management, it doesn't need to continue to happen.

I do think this is my real... Again, I'm not going to be on here again, so I'm going to get my finite opinions out. Might be, if you want. What are you going to have me talk about? Whatever. think this is my real... again, I'm not gonna be on here again. So I'm gonna get my finite opinions out. ALICE What might be, if you want. ZACH What are you gonna have me talk about? Whatever. But anyway. ALICE Fuckin... what if you... unless you're planning

to get eaten by Smokey the Bear, like, if you want to come back on, we will have you on. ZACH Oh, sick. Yeah, I keep it strapped, Smokey, so don't sleep on me. Anyway. JUSTIN If we had 45 minutes for a single joke, I would tell the fryer joke, but I'm not gonna do that. ALICE Just do the sess up now, put the punchline in at the end in like five hours time. JUSTIN I'm not gonna do it.

I also need to re-up my long-form jokes, I haven't done them in a while. ALICE True, it's been a hot minute. RILEY Okay, so we'll get to Smokey later, and why he's catching nods straight, these are very intentional, and he deserves this. Alright, so fire happens, and happens for a lot of reasons, we'll get to Smokey later and why he's catching not straights. These are very intentional and he deserves this. All right. So, fire happens. It happens for a lot of reasons. We're going to dig through those reasons in a second.

All right. Next slide. I don't know what I was talking about before we started threatening Smokey the bear, but you know what? I'm right too. You were talking about the- Oh, yeah. Gifford Pinchot.

Okay. So, Gifford Pinchot, he was famously governor of Pennsylvania, blah, blah, blah. So, he puts the Forest Service when it's created in the US part of agriculture so that way management happens. Right to make sure management happens. USDA probably an authority agency for it. Forests work on a different time scale than row crops, so there's my slight beef with the gif.

ALICE So what should it be? Like, Interior? ZACHary Probably its own thing. Probably its own thing. Like, with the Fish and Wildlife Service, probably a separate service that's kind of its own thing. Probably its own thing. Like, with the Fish and Wildlife service, probably a separate service that's kind of its own thing. I dunno, Interior's got some issues with it too, so. BLM's got some problems, same with...

ALICE. Fuckin' no. I don't know. The thing is, I really like when a US cabinet-level department has something it shouldn't. I was a huge opponent of the Homeland Security reforms, because I think it was funny that every department had cops, and I think it was great that the Secret Service was Treasury for no reason. Other than history.

So I think, just fuck it. Like, uh, you know, Treasury. SEAN It's the law of counterfeiting! They have to reason to be there. ALICE Yeah, give it to... I guess so. Give it to Treasury! Give it to HUD!

Really fuck around, you know? You gotta give it to a department with an unreasonable amount of authority and ability to cause violence. Oh, Energy! Department of Energy! Department of Energy! Department of Energy! Yes!

I have a friend who works at Los Alamos National Labs, and she does forestry out there. Because it turns out that you don't want the nukes burning down in a forest fire. ALICE Yes. JUSTIN Yeah. Alright, sorry to her, I'm just about to- ALICE Just happened recently! I was gonna say! JUSTIN I mean, it was only like, it got within a mile, it's not almost, it's a mile.

ALICE Ah, it's a mile, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah, I did get some nice pictures of that happening. It did actually burn in 2008. There was a small chunk of fire that got onto it in 2008, but it's 40,000 acres of land, like yeah, it's not the nukes, it's just close to the nukes. Department of Energy protective forces being like, what the fuck, I can't shoot the Mark 19 at the forest fire, it's not working. Okay, so here we have a beautiful fire regime map.

So fire happens. It happens a lot. It happens for a lot of reasons. We're going to discuss some of those reasons. So this is our natural fire history, how things should be behaving. So if we look at the western United States, we'll see that most of the Great Plains should be burning up pretty frequently. So we'll see their replacement severity. That

means it's killing all the trees. Yes, because it's the Great Plains. There are four trees out there. I almost took a job in North Dakota and they were like, yes, here are your six trees that you're in charge of. I was like, no. No, don't do this. I'm actually too young to dive headfirst into a woodchipper, so we'll move on. You have a big belt of, you know, high severity fire. So, everything burns down pretty frequently because grass like burns real hot and fast. And if you look at the inner mountain west, so, Ross, would you mind just like for our non-Americans who are not familiar with geography, just kind of highlighting the inner mountain

west over there? It's like over here, right? They do a nice blue circle. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, over there, so this is, so we have some fire that happens. It's not big. It's kind of like ground fire happens a lot. If we look in California, kind of your Central Valley coastal, your Chaparral system, you got a lot of fire pretty frequently. Pretty frequently. That's a weird green patch.

Yeah. So, you have some really interesting like coastal stuff that happens. If you go up the coast there, you run into like tropic or sorry, temperate rainforests like up into like Astoria. I also almost had a job out there and that was like the Super Bowl of forestry. We were on like $6 million harvests every day. Jesus. Ooh. Jesus, that's some money in them trees there, boy. Oh yeah, money does grow on trees there. So, those are really high site index. It's really wet all the time. You're not lighting that in fire if you want to. Now, if we look at California, we do have this thing in the East Coast. If we look at the East Coast, oh, it's kind of tan, like

orangish, too. Salmon color kind of. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sure, whatever. Yeah. So, the East Coast also has a similar fire regime. If we look at particularly the South, East United States, and kind of, like, if we want to be similar in our mountainous, we can kind of get the Appalachians. Like in South Carolina, down through Georgia, into Alabama, and kind of Mississippi, in there, so the apps have a similar fire frequency as most of California. And so-

ALICE And yeah, you don't hear about Appalachia burning down all the time. We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just...

We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just...

We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... We'll just... And you know what, I've been to Gatlinburg, not that great. I'll say it. There was just a big fire in the Shenandoah Valley. I could see like over the ridge the last time I was in Roanoke. Yeah, so fire should happen on the East Coast. It should be much like California, the different vegetation. You know, we should be burning, you know, every once every couple of

years, it should be pretty low intensity so your leaf litter gets removed. You kind of cycle some nutrients through there. It's fine. It's fine. How you make these fire maps is really interesting. Let me delve into this for a second. So you have, you know, you do social history. So you talk to people who used to live there.

You talk to the First Nations, indigenous people, and you get their stories. You also take tree cores. You get fire-scarring history. They go into mines and they take timber sections out of those mines and they look at like, okay this, you know, mine timber was placed in like 1812. And so we can figure out when, you know, how old this thing is. And there are some really great- Harvest a bunch of old genes from in there. Yup.

Oh yeah, well you're down there. Well you're down there, why not? It makes some real money. Denim harvesting at some point, yeah. You gotta watch out for the spider spawner though. Yeah, the creepers? The creepers down there? It's been years since I played Minecraft.

Oh, now they've improved it now, the mineshafts have a spider spawner in them. The thing is, I don't play Minecraft, I play Minecraft until I see one thing that makes me scared and then I quit and don't play Minecraft for ten years, so I've played it like twice. I'm writing up books, I don't have time to play video games right now. ALICE Wow, okay. STAN That's so stupid, don't do that. ALICE Really just making me feel like a human being. STAN Yeah, don't write books, they're silly. Okay, so the eastern United States has a similar

fire frequency for a lot of it as the western United States. So we should be seeing fire across the southeast, why is the southeast United States not burning as frequently or as largely as California and the west coast? ALICE We found a metric the southeastern US does well on. SEAN Yeah, yeah, we'll talk about why it does well there. Alright, next slide please. So that was fire regime, let's talk about fire intensity and what fire looks like. Alright, so here we have some trees. Do we know what these trees are? Don't read the notes. Don't read the notes. It's cheating.

Okay, yeah. I got a hand over my face so I can't see the notes. Spruce? This looks like a really big kind of tree. Nope, not Dougfurs at West. This is jack pine. This is jack pine. Scotch pine is close though. So this is jack pine on the bottom and then Eucalyptus above it. So what we're talking about here is our various plants' fire adaptations and how they want to deal with fire. So some plants are fire adapted, so they want fire to happen.

So here our Eucalyptus emits oil so the world will burn around it and it burns really hot. And the- These things explode, right? Yeah, basically, yeah. This guy up here is the eucalyptus. Yes, yeah, correct. Okay, yeah. Okay, so you see that nice shedding bark there, how it's curled in, you get some good airflow

in there if you're gonna introduce a fire. Oh, it wants to burn. Yeah, yeah, it wants to see the world burn. It does the Terminator thing, you know? Right. Exactly, yeah. Unironically, yeah. It wants to destroy the world around it. It

wants to burn everything really hot. Same. Yeah. Okay. All right. So, it wants the world to burn really hot. And so, it emits oils and has a shedding bark. That's what it wants to do. Oak are fire adapted, so their leaves curl up. And so, that way you get good air movement underneath them. These are fire adapted species. They want fire to happen. Jack pine is a great example of serotonin and serotonin. So we think of serotonin in a kind of a spectrum.

So you have like, you know, more or less adapted species and individuals are more and less. Well, that sounds great. That's about to say, yeah, it's all right. For once, it's not a can opening. Although, that being said. Oh wait, I'll get out of this. Hold on. Very nice. Well done. Thank you. Alright, so we have, we have srot and area that we're discussing. So, these pinecones

will stay on the tree even after the tree is dead and they'll stay closed for like 20 years. And they'll open up in heat. Some of the heat can be fire, you know, we can have like on the tree even after the tree is dead and they'll stay closed for like 20 years. And they'll open up in heat. Now, some of that heat can be fire, you know, we can have like on the right, all right, the world has burned down and now we have a great seed bank for jack pine. We have bare mineral soil, we have lots of nutrients and lots of light. Gonna be real happy there. But also if it's a nice hot day and you're like above a bare rock on the Canadian shield because you're jack pine and you're a shitty tree that lives in shitty sites, you know? You're gonna pop open there, cause it lives in a shitty place, to be real honest. No hate to jack pine, it just is adapted for bad places.

So these are fire adapted species. ALICE This is like, same, I live in Britain. JUSTIN All those, like, right wing prepper guys, you're like, I'm gonna homestead on the Canadian Shield. You can't do that. No, don't work. You're like, I'm gonna homestead on the Canadian Shield. You can't do that. That doesn't work. ALICE Well, ask me about the heat dome.

JUSTIN What is the heat dome? ALICE It's, I mean, so, if you're aware of the Canadian Shield, you'll have seen bits of it now, because of climate change, one of the stranger weather manifestations of it, is it just sits in baking, broiling heat for months at a time now, completely unpredictably. Cool. Cool. Great. That's fun.

I love climate change. It's so fun. Oh, so there's like half an inch of topsoil and then solid rock. Yeah. I used to guide trips out of Atacocca in Canada, shout out to Atacoccan. And that's Canadian Shields. And it's like where you transition from North and Hardwoods into boreal forest. And like, it's really cool if you're canoeing, but it like sucks to be a plant there.

If you want to make that arable, you got to like dig up the entire Midwest and move all the soil up there. Yeah, yeah. We took the Midwest and put it somewhere else. Land back, but for Canada. Losing the war of 1812, 210 years later, yes. I have some bad news about the amount of topsoil left, period, I feel like. You know?

Yeah, yeah. I work with NRCS, they're fine. Okay. So, fire is really good if you're adapted for it, cause you have these wonderful, like, on the right here, these great sites, lots of open soil, lots of free nutrients. Perfect if you're adapted for it. So next slide please. Yes.

So there are other plants that are fire resistant. So they don't want the world to die. They want to live through the fire. So here we have a great example of red pine, Pinus mireza nosa for our botany heads out here. So it's adapted for frequent surface level fire, as we can see on the right. It wants to see some fire come through and kill lots of stuff that's not red pine. So, its needles are kind of long and resinous.

They have good stuff in there for a light fire. But you'll also see there's not a lot of low branches. The branches kind of fox tail up, so that way they're moving away from fire. So, this is – it's got a really thick bark. So it's a fire adapted species, it wants there to be fire, it wants it to be low level, kill everything that's not red pine, and it's gonna have a lovely beautiful stand to live in and to grow. Oh yeah, he's just sitting there like, haha fuck you you dumbass ferns. Eat shit!

Eat a bitch. So that's, this is a fire adapted species. So if you're in the Western United States ponderosa, pine is your like great fire adapted species. If you're in the Southeast, longleaf pine is your classic fire adapted species. Longleaf pine actually in the buds, it has these big water droplets. And so when it gets hot, it'll pop and it'll put out like fire on the needles, but it'll put out fire on the needles, but it wants the world to burn around it. You get grass stages and some stuff, it's crazy. Trees do crazy shit.

ALICE It evolved a sprinkler system. SEAN Yeah, yeah, no, exactly. Unironically, yes. ALICE Nature is amazing. SEAN It is some wild shit out here, it's pretty neat. Not gonna lie. ALICE Science is freaking epic and based. JUSTIN Oh, yeah.

The coolest. Um, that's why it's on fire. Um, so, fire is a natural thing, we can see the landscape is adapted for it. Okay, next slide please. Okay, not only is the landscape adapted for it because the West United States is hot and dry, but also we have people. People are people. ALICE You can just say bastards. They didn't fall out of the coconut tree, they exist in the context of etc etc.

SEAN So when we talked about them last time, we talked about them in the context of eastern forests. Now we're thinking about western forests, people have been there between 60 and 20,000 years. I don't have to take your pick. I'm not an archaeologist. I'm a tree guy. So we've been here a long time. We've been influencing this climate for a real long time. It's just in vegetation history for a real long time. And if you're a person in this time, you are lighting stuff on fire. Some of that is like for medicinal purposes, like if you have like certain crops, you know, certain plants that grow well, you know, post fire like blueberry, you're going to light that shit up every one to three years. So that way you can go out and harvest blueberries. Blueberries are nice and tasty. I like to

eat them. They did too. They also like to eat the things that ate the blueberries. Looking at you, smokey the bear. With my rifle cocked, yes. SEAN Yeah, more like with your atlatl ready to go. ALICE Imagine how good it would feel to kill a bear with an atlatl. SEAN Right, wow. SEAN I have really very limited interest in bear

hunting, so I don't care. To be real honest. It's just not my ship. ALICE I don't know if you're talking about Smoky. SEAN Yeah, that's why I said limited interest. My interest is the one bear. ALICE Just Just smokey. You have a kind of Moby Dick, Ahab situation here.

It's like up there with riding the sandworm, y'know? You're like, you're slicing up the bear and you see he doesn't have the campaign hat on, and you're like, fuck this. Yep. No, that's exactly it. That's exactly it. Unless it's like, smokey little brother? You gotta...

Wububu. You hate him enough you're going after his family? We're going cartel on Smokey. Wow, you know how you're going full of sh**. Jesus, what the fuck happened? Okay, alright, get out of here. Using an AI targeting system to assassinate the members of Smokey Bear's family. Listen, I... We took it as dentury, he's not gonna be around for much longer, we got him, boys. The fucking, the Bear UN is condemning me, I'm ignoring him.

Only kill... Only kill bears in uniform, is all I can say. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie.

I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie. I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonna lie, I'm not gonnary, he's not gonna be around for much longer, we got him, boys. The fucking the bear UN is condemning me, I'm ignoring him. Only kill bears in uniform, is all I can say. ACAB includes Smokey the Bear.

Any bear of fighting age on target. Those are non-compatent bears. Good god. We might honestly have to lose this whole bit. Okay, alright, well, ACAB includes Smokey the Bear, so take that, Smokey. Okay, so people are out there burning for, you know, they're burning for cultural reasons, also if you wanna play lacrosse, like we see in this picture, or ball games, if you wanna play ball game, obviously that's...

I would love to play ball game. Well, that's sweet as for trash future, I don't wanna do it again here. So if you wanna play lacrosse... It's just a network of bits all transiting. In a triangle, basically. It's another fire triangle, except for bits. The bits triangle. So if you wanna play lacrosse, you have two options for a field. You can find a nice meadow that will eventually go away and become forest, or you can take

your nice meadow and you can just burn it once every one to three years and keep them damn trees out, and you get a nice lacrosse field. So we'll use tax payer- they wanna use tax payer money to burn down a forest for a ballgame field, god damn it. ALICE LAUGHS ALICE Moving the ballgame team to Algonquin. We gotta fuckin' move the teepees. To make room for the ballgame field? Come on.

The studies show publicly supported ballgame fields are not worth it. Let the tribal land up. Yeah. I mean, burning the meta makes sense. Saves you scything it, I guess. Yeah, but you also have to remember, there's no reason to invent Smithing here. You got all the shit you need, like, digging sticks are the main way of getting stuff out of the ground, there's no reason

for it. Looking back at some of the historical accounts, you have like six pound lobsters that are hanging out on the beach. ALICE Jesus. Doing the gold, gems, and steel thing backwards in reverse and being like, you got too much abundance and you never had to invent the scythe about it, y'know? Yeah, basically. Can't believe our team moved to the Conestoga because we didn't burn down our own ballgame

field. Just picturing, like, La Crosse owners back in the day, like, kind of... Well, I mean, this is probably more of a communal, so it's more of the Packers version, where you get communal ownership here, it's, again, the Packers are the only correct team to support if you are listening to this podcast. The first colonists get to Wisconsin and they find a Native American guy there wearing the cheese hat. Yeah.

We've been killing bison and making cheese out of it, I don't know why, it's a social thing. What have you guys been doing? Y'all heard of this thing that's called Bratwurst? I don't know, we just kinda just came up with it recently. We're trying it out. See what you think about it. The Europeans showed us long span arches, and

now the fuckin' ballgame team wants a domed meadow? LIAM Oh, well that sounds like Illinois or Minnesota bitch shit right there. Or the fact that we play like God intended on a grass field in the open air. Come on. Jesus. This East Coast elite. ALICE I've been on this La Crosse shit since the days of hill mounds, y'know? Yeah.

Yeah, okay, so we have first-hand... Is there any what-tunneled end to those mounds at Kanokaokia? I don't... Yeah, yeah, they have, they've found, like, interesting archaeology, lots of evidence of like, a recurring theme of like, earthworks and stuff like this, which is like, once you do the main thing of like, temple on top of a temple on top of a temple, I have a plan for an episode about this. One of the things that you do is like, peripheral burials, where you just like, if someone important enough dies, you just like, dig into the mound.

Yeah, you dig into the mound, like horizontally or vertically, and you stick them in there in a little chamber that's otherwise gonna be in the earthwork. It's really cool. Well, that's cool. Yeah, so like, you know, we get people out here burning for a number of reasons, and sometimes it's accidents, and sometimes it's wildfires, you know, lightning strikes. But we know there's a lot of intentional fire happening, especially in the eastern United States. The western United States, you got, you know, looking back at the dendrochronology records,

it's a lot harder to determine intentionality, you know, because like it's more fire prone. But in the eastern United States where we have more rain and the leaflet is a little damper, it's a little bit easier to determine intentionality, so, y'know. We're gonna say the eastern United States definitely burned intentionally, the western United States probably burned intentionally. This is where I have to be a scientist and say, probably. But, yeah, more than likely. ALICE This is also a severe flaw with early Franklin

episodes. Um. ALICE Yeah, I mean, you can kind of like, you can get this wrong in a couple of directions, right? You can be like... SEAN Yeah, we do that all the time. ALICE Yeah, well this is the thing, I feel like you can kind of discount the amount of intentionality and engineering going on here, in either the

sort of ostensibly positive direction of being like, oh, this is mystical, kind of in touch with nature, absolutely freewheeling stuff, or you can be like, oh, these people are primitive and didn't think about this stuff, and instead you look into it and it's mostly guys arguing about where they want the lacrosse field. LASCARIS Yeah, exactly. SEAN I want to answer this question. Alright, so here's the answer to your question, Alice. Or, sorry, Nova.

Sorry, my bad. My bad. It's fine, your bad. This doesn't look like a fucking La Crosse field at all, where are the goals? Where's the pocket? Right, right. We're gonna have to put like a jar every time someone calls Nova, Alice. We have to put a dollar in.

Listen, I am absolutely relaxed about it, I'm transitioning from like, an easy name to a kind of stupid out there name. You know, it's fine. No, it's fine. No, it's my bad, it's my bad. No, no, no, no. I'll do better. We gotta learn somewhere.

We're all learning and growing together. Okay, so here we have two forests, these are the same, basically the same forest, they're separated by a road. Right side of the road is burned, left side of the road is unburned, this is in coastal South Carolina. I'm not gonna say exactly where, it's a very unique place, I'll just tell everyone who I am right away. Alright, so, if you wanna set up a nice place to hunt whitetail deer, where are you gonna do it?

Right? You gotta do it left or right? ALICE I mean, obviously I'm not gonna hike through a big fuckin' fun, and gunnera, and all that shit. SEAN That's a pomelo. ALICE I don't know. SEAN And, uh, these are like, are these the plants that slice you up? JUSTIN Oh, yeah, they're also loud as shit.

And like, the only time you'll ever need to talk- ALICE Yeah, so here's a fun fact about palmetto. So the only time you'll ever need to talk is when someone's going through a palmetto, and it's just the loudest thing in the world. Like, we had, I've been in places, so I've been in places similar to this where there have been air compressed 50 cals, um, you know, they're not 50 cals but they sound just like them going off, and you can't hear them over the palmetto, so this is just a lot of goddamn plant in the world. ALICE This is before Harbor Freight came to America

and you could buy a machete for ten cents. JUSTIN Oh, you can't machete through this, man, you just gotta burn it. So this is why we- ALICE Meanwhile you hunt on the one on the left and you're playing fucking Call of Juicy. You're like stacking up like there. SEAN Exactly. You've got Subway Surfer on the phone. ALICE Goat it on the sticks.

SEAN So this is how we can determine intentionality. We can just say, like, look, if you want to live here, you're gonna burn this every one to three years. On the right is what happens if you burn it every once every ten years. You get crepe myrtle, you get,metto you get all this shit so dense there's so much of it yeah i don't know that's not stupid but jesus christ oh i counted all of those stems by the way looks pretty cool that's terrible the yopon in there makes you want to die um you got any trees that kill you instantly in South Carolina? Just tell me where you are. So going back to your keys episode, I actually had a run in with poison wood.

You don't want to do that. I'm going to tell you right now. I had to go to the hospital and get steroids. It's a bad time. It's also a photo toxin, which, you know, obviously you're in the key. So a photo toxin is the worst time. Not very good. Yeah, that sounds bad.

Yeah, no, it's real bad. It's real bad. And poison wood, it's like, it's kind of this shitty looking tree when it's doing well. So that's that tree you guys talked about, like the pigeons were eating, it's really poisonous. And so if you're just clearing dead wood off a fence, you might grab it and not know that that's incredibly not something you should touch. And that's how I got into it.

I was volunteering and shit, that was a bad time. Don't volunteer, that's bad. ALICE It's like a lesson you learn in like forestry and the military, don't fucking volunteer for anything. SEAN Yeah, yeah. Okay, alright, so we know prescribed fires, we know fires happening, definitely intentionally, eastern United States, eh, maybe more intentionally than the western United States, can't be sure, probably a lot of intentional stuff in the western United States.

Next slide please. ALICE Oh, and then these fuckin' assholes. Oh my god. ALICE Be nice to the guys who wear necklaces with crosses. SEAN No, don't do that. Execute the wholesale. ALICE And the thing is, these guys are like, all

chances. Like, it's like, fifty guys who are like, the fourth sun on their shitty estate in Valencia, who have gotten kicked into the New World to try and, or disgraced for one reason or another to try and make it big, and like, one Jesuit they brought along, who's writing a book about how they're all assholes, he's gonna send back. But he's also incredibly violent too. Oh yeah, of course. He's willing to kill anybody.

He's doing some real fuckshit. I just hate Spanish, man. I mean, I understand that, like, you know, the 2010 World Cup, whatever, I've said enough about it, but I just, I can't stand Spanish. One thing I will say, as far as colonial powers go, the Mauryan helmet here is stylish. It does go hard, yeah. I just, oh god. Yeah, it is pretty good. And the Korean helmet here is stylish. LESLIE It does go hard, yeah. SEAN I just...

Oh god. We're just wandering around with whatever fifteen pounds of shit on my head. No thanks. I could barely keep a yarmulke on without getting annoyed. ALICE This stuff's surprisingly light. I hate to say this is one of the things where, like, re-enactments and experimental archaeology and stuff like that is really really useful for this, because you can build a decent approximation of a lot of different armors, and people haven't changed a huge

amount, so you can be like, this is what it's like to wear and move in and stuff, and it's like really, honestly it's a really exciting time in the field. There's some interesting people on Twitter you can follow about this. The names aren't coming to me at the moment. ALICE Don't forget the notes if you remember. I'm interested in that. SEAN Yeah, yeah, yeah. I names aren't coming to me at the moment. Don't forget the notes if you remember. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm interested in that. I probably won't. So for the listener at home, I have in the notes here, I have, um, Liam says some shit about the Spanish.

Hate him. I should've... November says some shit about the Spanish. Hate him. I'm also willing to say some shit about the Spanish. I think a lot about the Spanish conquest of Mexico, specifically. ALICE. Horrific. Horrific.

ALICE. Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. This is an area of history I come back to every, like, few months, and I read some more about it, because it's like, it's one of the harder things for me to imagine, in terms of, like, an outside context problem. ALICE. Sheer depravity in terms of how you're treating Syriens. That too, but also...

It was tremendously unfair, because on one side you had one of the most advanced civilizations the world had ever known, on the other side you had the Conquistadors, who were simply small greasy Spaniards. Yes! Legitimately, yeah! Pretty much, dude. You are like some guy who has gotten kicked out of Spain to Cuba, and then got kicked out of Cuba to Mexico, and you stumble, like, dick first, onto Tenochtitlan, like, the largest city in the fucking hemisphere, architecture the likes of which you have never seen.

LIAM Oh, and will never be seen again. SEAN This is right for a genocide, yep. ALICE And you're dickhead boss, who is on the run from his boss, who wants to deport him back to Cuba to put him on trial, is like, yeah, we're just gonna walk in, and make like we own the place. And you do. Like, I can't imagine.

ALICE What is the book, whose name I'm forgetting, written by, I believe a Jesuit priest, about the conquest of Mexico? ALICE Oh, you're thinking about Bartolomeo de las Casas. I don't remember what the fucking name of the thing is. I'm sure he hasn't written too many other books. And he's probably not putting anything in recently, so if you can just spell that you'll be fine.

Yeah, his recent bangers. A short account of the destruction of the indies. Yep. Yep. Yep. Oh. Yeah. Again.

He's the one Jesuit who you... Yeah. This is Dominican, actually. Yeah, he's a Dominican, but good enough, whatever, they're all a fucking saved bunch of goddamn hippists. I don't have positive things to say. Weirdly, this is the different thing about, like, De las Casas, is that, like, the Dominicans are typically thought of as being the kind of, like, uh, you know, the conquest ones, and Jesuits are thought of as being like, oh, we feel bad about this, not always the

case, often reversed. Let's talk about the Sagrada Famia, and why it's definitely gonna get finished, and why you have to pay money, pay money to go into an unfinished building. Fuck you. Just for that, I mean, like, hmm. Sorry, El. No, no, no, it's fine, I was threatening to become Catholic just to outvote Liam on the religious like, bastards.

Yeah, do it, do it. I love the church! You think most of God will be mad at me? Probably, but who gives a shit, God's not real, do whatever you want. Yeah? I was talking about- It's amazing, you can show up with like 70 guys, and smallpox, and conquer the civilization. I have a joke for you. I have a joke for you.

Let me tell my joke. Let me tell my joke. So my mom told this to me, who had heard it from Rabbi Goldenberg. Rabbi, if you're listening, sorry. So a rabbi dies, gets to heaven, and he's swapping jokes with God. You know, they're telling all the fun ones, they're swapping jokes. They're having a good time.

And the rabbi tells a joke about the holocaust, and God says to him, how can you tell a joke about the holocaust, that's ridiculous, that's so insensitive, and the rabbi says, yes, I guess you had to be there to get it. Maybe I didn't study enough Torah. Fuck you. ALICE I mean, that's the, like, the oven of acne thing, right? It's like, God intervenes in a religious debate and they tell him to, like, fuck off. Because, you know, your job is to deliver the revelation, now it's our job to interpret

it, don't fucking mess around with it. I always admired that story. Yeah. Anyway, the problem with the... Maybe it was... SEAN Spanish. Yeah, the problem with... AL problem with the... Maybe a web. The problem with Catholics. The problem with Spaniards. Oh, we actually are gonna do the Catholicism episode at some point. Yeah, and it's gonna be like me being increasingly tempted.

The thing about the woke pope, right, is that he's not woke enough. He needs to fucking do Vatican III, because it feels like... I can deal with the British government telling me that, like, I should not exist in public, and that I'm a threat to human dignity, but it feels like extra insult coming from the Pope, because that guy doesn't have anything better to do. You know? ALICE I agree with that, but I also think... JUSTIN I have some theories about, like, internal

Vatican politics. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. I do believe that. I want the Pope to issue a bowl, or whatever they do now, that just says, the Pope says trans rights, let it ride. He would alienate the entire American church, but he's going to do that anyway. He's going to do it anyway!

There's no saving it! It's legitimately appeasement. We have like three anti-popes in the US, come on now. It's absolutely just appeasement, to be like, well, I can kind of hold this thing together, it's like, there's no value in holding it together if the way of holding it together is unjust, you have to rip the bandaid off and say trans rights, in Latin and encyclical. Yeah, you've been sort of in a damage control mode since Vatican II, I mean, you know, at some point you have to- Fuck em!

Leave the church! Leave the church! Fuck off! Leave the church! There'll be a Protestant like you fucking would! Get the fuck outta here! Fucking Protest! Get the fuck outta here!

No, no, they should do fucking Vatican III, they should do fucking Vatican III, and from Saint Peter's balcony flies a trans flag with a big ass crucifix in the middle. ALICE Yeah. ALICE Inchela? Question mark? Yeah. Yo. I don't know where I'm at, really, just...

Get fucked. Get fucked. How would you like to be Jewish? ALICE Uhh, I dunno. Yeah, that's fun. Alright, you're Jewish now. Don't worry about it. JUSTIN So, on today's podcast about wildfire, we have now converted November to Judaism. we have now converted November to Judaism.

We've now converted November to Judaism. It's been a long time coming, but it happens to all of us eventually. So these motherfuckers show up, and they kill a bunch of people, both intentionally and unintentionally, through disease, and obviously they got them thangs on them, they got them gats, they got them thangs on them, they got them gats, they got them swords. ALICE The thangs do not make as much difference as you think, it's the tercio system that makes the difference.

JUSTIN Yeah. And the haciendas, we got disease that comes with them. ALICE The tercio system. It means third, it's like the Spanish way of organising an army, and basically it's like, sort of an early pre-cursive to the battalion, it's how the Spanish kicked everyone's dicks in in Europe and then got to the Americas. ALICE Wow, we have a small amount of organization in our army as opposed to everyone else.

LIAM Yeah, basically. ALICE That's why the United States has the greatest fighting force in the world, dude, because we're slightly better at small group tactics. LIAM Yeah, you can- SEAN Oh, Gustav, let's wait, hold on, let's give some respect to the Swedes one time. ALICE No. SEAN No, don some respect to the Swedes one time. No. Don't talk to me about my own people.

Unload a pre-fab Burger King off of the C5 galaxy. Where is this country in the world, asshole?! But what you're talking about when you talk about the tercio is less the introduction of the thang, right, and more effectively mixing the thang and the pike, right, like, that's the big difference. Are you talking about girl dick? No, I'm talking about like and the pike, right? Like, that's the big difference. Are you talking about girl dick? No, I'm talking about like, the arque... I'm talking about the arquebus. Oh yes, yes, yes.

Okay, so the Spanish take over with the Hacienda system, they kill a lot of people. Just a lot of people. Intentionally and unintentionally, and sometimes it makes the two... what are you gonna do? You know, you do colonization, it happens. You know, gonna make some omelets without breaking some eggs, and in this case, yeah, you are gonna break a lot of eggs, it's gonna be bad. ALICE I don't think... ALICE Is the omelet a genocide? ALICE I don't think you can... JUSTIN I don't know how to get this back on track, guys.

Everybody who worked with me here. ALICE You have, like, a sort of a Jesuit-racing home being like, I don't know how to make a torta without breaking some wevus." JUSTIN. Arguably, arguably, all for a long enough period of time, the indigenous peoples of South and Central America have won, because they speak, they are the center of Spanish culture. ALICE. There is revisionist history suggesting that, like, I mean, one of the, like, if you want to read, like, seven myths of the Aztec conquest, right, one of the myths

is that it ended. Like, there are still places, and there's not exactly a shortage of them, where, like, this is still an ongoing, like, conflicted issue as to whether or not a bunch of guys who speak Spanish are allowed to run the government, right? RILEY A good friend of mine is, he's of indigenous people's origin, he's from Juarez, but his family's from outside of Juarez, but he was so concerned about that heritage, he didn't tell me about it until we were just blackout

drunk on tequila. And that's when he told me about his indigenous heritage. So it definitely still is a thing in Mexico, but I am a white dude who lives in the middle. I think... ALICE I mean, you wanna talk about race in America, race in Mexico is like, even wild. SEAN Yeah. From my very limited understanding. ALICE Well, cause like, the different styles, right,

like Spanish colonists were very very keen on taxonomy, and categorizing race, to the point of like... SEAN Yeah, fucking genocide ears love doing it, man. ALICE Yeah, but in a really exacting way of dividing up your genealogy and stuff. SEAN 17th century IBM punch cards, for no reason. ALICE Yeah, yeah. This is why you should not...

SEAN What was that, Nova? ALICE Do not use 23andMe. SEAN Dude, fucking my aunt used 23andMe, the aunt we don't speak to. This is why you get you should not what was that Nova do not do not use 23 and me Fucking my aunt use 23 and me the aunt we don't speak to and I'm just like I don't need to fucking oh She's ah, she's fucking awful mom if you're listening to this. I hope her plane goes down I fucking hate her so much man. Listen, listen, listen, I'm going to tolerate a lot of shit I'm a very tolerant patient person, right? Yeah, yeah, I said this. Yeah, but I fucking you're mean to my mom and I will burn you and I will burn you alive. I will make fucking increased math and look like a pussy. Okay. Okay. Well, so we're all doing great today. So the Spanish

takeover, uh, you know, if we look at California, like 1759, because like, No, but can you drink some water for me real quick, please? Yeah. Thanks, bud. Because, you know, like the Southwest is kind of a motherfucker to walk through. It's a great time, you know, now, but it's kind of a motherfucker to walk through when you're, you know, in steel plate, you know, that kind of stuff and you're killing everybody in front of you.

So there's no there's no park ranger station, you know? No, no. And hey, we're about to get to the park rangers. Don't worry about them. They're in charge for a while there. They banned prescribed fire under the Hacienda system because like Europeans have this super deep fear of fire and I saw this when I was in Europe. It was hilarious to see because over on one hand, I got some Slovenians and Italians who are just like managing managing beach forests and high alps forests and they're super afraid of fire, and on the other hand I got some Oregonians and Californians who are like, let's burn this whole shit down yesteryear.

ALICE And yet the Europeans love road flares! ALICE Yeah, this is the thing about the hacienda system, right, is that you come to Mexico, you colonize Mexico, and you try to run it the only way you know how, which is like Spain. So you're like, well what if we applied feudalism to this? What if this was farms? Um, and... I don't know much about this, does this go anywhere? I mean, I understand...

It kinda works. Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you got a lot of sheep out here, you know. You kill a bunch of people, you depopulate some really intense civilizations out here, like the Pueblo people had some really cool- they were on some cool shit, especially with the pinion pine, and collecting pine

nuts, some cool shit. Anyway, you kill them off and you replace them with, you make them herd sheep and cattle, it doesn't really work that well. ALICE That was my question, yeah. JUSTIN Didn't the Pueblo people also get got by warming climate? SEAN Yeah, well, that doesn't help. I will say this though, introducing sheep and cows and wheat and stuff like that, does lead to the creation of the greatest cuisine ever invented.

Big back, I agree. Tacos are amazing. I love tacos. That is true. I make my own tortillas. I want to flex on all of the other white people out there. ALICE I mean, if you get married to someone who's a weeb for Mexico, then not only do they take you to all the best Mexican places, but also they make their own tacos, and you

have the big cast iron taco press in your house. JUSTIN Oh yeah, I have one of those from Columbia. LIAM That's it. That's fucking dope. ALICE It's easily my favorite piece of kitchen equipment, this fucking thing. It's amazing. JUSTIN Oh. Yeah. We're gonna just, like, easily my favorite piece of kitchen equipment, this fuckin' thing, it's amazing. Oh. Yeah. We're gonna just, like, into tortillas.

If you are buying tortillas from the store, you are a fool, you're a sucker, you've been taken by a scam. It's so easy to make your own tortillas, it is salt, water, and masa. Yep. Mmhm. And you just put it in the big cast iron thing and you squish, and it's just, ah. Fantastic. I buy big flour tortillas from the store, because they're convenient.

Oh, okay, we're gonna fix you. Right, okay. I can do this. I'm making a big burrito. You live... You can fix him. He's fixable. The next country over, from Mexico...

America's really big, no f- You live in a country and a city with a lot of Mexican people in it. We are gonna get you corn tortillas, and specifically purple corn tortillas. I'm making a burrito. I'm making a burrito. It just takes a little lard in there. Yeah, you just need some lard in with your wheat flour. That's what the Binding Asians...

I just, I'm gonna take you to the Mexican grocery store by my house, and then I'll take you to the El Salvadorian grocery store near my house, and then the Costa Rica, they're all in a line of- ALICE. Amazing. ALICE. Flower tortillas are fine, like, I really don't have anything against them by the way. SEAN. I do, yeah, I do.

ALICE. I can't do a burrito with a corn tortilla. SEAN. You're a flowery type, huh? ALICE. You just haven't made your own tortillas. You're working with these, like, preserved things that are not good. You need to just make your own.

SEAN. I, we are an hour twenty plus in, this is amazing. ALICE Yeah, I was about to say... SEAN Apologies to Devin. This is why you can't, like, do this on a day when there's bad news happening to me, because I will drink, and then I'll... SEAN Oh no. Sova talked to her friends for too long.

ALICE Exactly. SEAN We're off the episode, and suck my ass. ALICE I've had a wonderful day. Just, like, I'm sorry for AND SUCK MY ASS. I had a wonderful day. Just like, I'm sorry for you, Novo, but I had a great day. I steamed that cave, also. This is very catharsic for me. I also had a very nice day. I got some ostrich leg boots in the mail today, I had a great day.

You did it out of nowhere, bud. Los Altos, it's a Mexican company. I am also a weeb for Mexico. I think Mexico might be the greatest country on the face of the earth. Mexico rips. I'm sorry, be the greatest country on the face of the earth. I'm sorry, I need you, I hate to interrupt, I need you to go to the Los Altos Boots website right now. It's right now.

It's so good. Right now. It's so good. I'm glad I gave the introduction about no tangents. Yeah. No, this- Oh, this is incredible. Okay, yeah.

JUSTIN It's so good. ALICE Mmhm. Yeah. I need some boots. I need some boots. I think you need them from here. ALICE Yeah, I do. I absolutely do.

ALICE Walsalto's boots, no free advertising. ALICE Yeah, yeah, we'll endorse these. I'll endorse these. ALICE Oh, these fucking slap. JUSTIN Yeah, these are seen like Time Tower, that looks insane. ALICE Actually, let me endorse something else. JUSTIN These are some pretty good looking boots, I gotta say. These fuckin' slap!

If you're in the UK and you wanna eat Mexican food, Santo Remedio in London Bridge is the best Mexican restaurant bar none. Try the Baja Fish Tacos. Incredible. Okay, alright, so back to the colonizer. We're on slide 11 of 36. We have a trialers and Spaniards exist. Yes, so the Spanish come in, they stop prescribed fire,

kind of not all the way because they don't really wanna go outside the hacienda because A, it's hot out there, B, the natives are not that friendly to you because you have killed most of their family. You're doing genocide, yeah, fair enough. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Genocide. I don't know why I fucking said it like that. Yeah.

Genocide. They were living a pretty... Genocide. ...whole life until you showed up and you like fucked it all up for them. I mean, there was like still conflict, but it was pretty alright. And now you gotta work for this fucking friar who doesn't give a shit. So you know, prescribed fire basically stops, and then there's the Spanish-American War that happens, and the US gets most of the western United States under, like, the Hidalgo?

Was it Hidalgo-Gadaloupe Treaty, something like that? Sounds about right. I really appreciate that California's flag to this day is like, what if we just did our own thing? Yeah, like, yeah if we just did our own thing? Yeah, like, yeah, we bought it from him, we definitely didn't just take it in a war, it's cool. Hey, have you guys played Fallout? I am a trans woman?

I just said, have you played Fallout? Yes. There's the answer, yes. I have, yes. Nova has modded with tilts broken in several different forms. I'm mutuals with Josh Sawyer. Are you excited for the TV show? Talk to me.

Okay, so after the US gets most of the western United States, we continue the ban of prescribed fire under the acts for government and protection of Indians. Because obviously First Nations people need to be protected, they haven't been managing this land for thousands of years and don't know what they're doing. So this fire suppression continues out west. Alright, next slide please. ALICE That's like a whole philosophical enlightenment thing, is that the Native Americans have not been good stewards of the land, despite the

fact that they're the only ones who know how to know how anything works. ALICE Also interesting that there's very little daylight between Spanish colonialism and American colonialism in this, y'know? SEAN Right. It's just what Funny Hat It Wears, right? JUSTIN Right. So that's what we're about to get into. So you guys, this is a map of federal landholdings in these United States. As we can see, most of the western US is held in federal land, a good chunk of California. It's like 60% of Washington and Oregon are fed land of one sort or the other.

That's because this land sucks ass, to be real honest. Next, give me a click. Yes. We do high plains drifter because this is- Great moving. Oh, fantastic. Say what you will about Clint Eastwood now, but man, could he play a Western. Alright, so, this land sucks, it's high plains desert, it's not good for cattle, but this is what we try to force on the land, because, like, y'know, Western Europeans, they wanna

raise cattle out there instead of, like, harvest white-tailed and mule deer and black-tailed deer and antelope and all that sort of stuff, we want cows. ALICE Yeah, all the stuff that's possible to do with this land is completely, like, orthogonal to our ways of thinking about stuff, we want cows. ALICE Yeah, all the stuff that's possible to do at this land is completely orthogonal to our ways of thinking about it, you know? JUSTIN There was a cattle bubble at this time. Because there was supposedly a breed of cattle that you could simply say... you could just leave it on the high plains, and it would be able to fend for itself, and you could assume after so many years that you owned so many

cattle and people were trading paper cattle that had died out on the high plains for like decades. ALICE This is the cow... this is legitimately the cow version of full self-driving. JUSTIN Yeah. Well, so this happens, and it turns out this place actually sucks to live in, and so nobody wants to live there. Even like, when you offer it up, like, the Mormons show up, but like, come on, Bible fanfic only gets you so far, you can only do so much with that.

So it becomes federal land. Next slide please. Alright, give me another click. Yeah, there we go. So, this MF shows up right here. You were about to make Smokey's birthday wish come true. By 308. By dropping him, right, yeah.

Actually, I have a 7mm, it's not a 308. ALICE Excuse me. Like a button. LIAM 2000 pound unguided bomb straight to the face. ALICE I named the first calibre that I thought plausibly could kill a bear, y'know? ALICE Welcome to my J-Dub gun! JUSTIN Yeah, yeah, the 3A would work.

I mean, just the 7mm is like three feet from me, so I'm looking out the window, if I see his ass out there, he's grass. ALICE The B2 bomber from the Simpsons Bear Patrol episode. I mean, you can use a knife, the reason why the K-bar is called that is supposedly because a guy wrote in, in like, frontiersman barely literate English to say he had used it to kill a bear. So... ALICE Barely literate, huh? JUSTIN Isn't there like the... what is it, like the...

It's not the Missouri, but there's like, some kind of like, you get the Bowie knife and you get the Missouri big knife shit, you get a bunch of big knives around. Big knife dudes. ALICE I'm a British patriot, give me a Fairbarn Sykes and I will kill Smokey. JUSTIN Yeah, them's words. Alright, I'm gonna go to the bathroom real quick. LIAM What?

No, you can't. Oh crap. It's fine, I can talk about Spanish people some more. So the thing about... Wait, where's the bucket? Did you say, where's the bucket?! Do you ever see those Basque separatists like balaclavas? No.

Okay, so Liam, I'm gonna need you to Google like, ETA, like E-T-A, the Basque separatists like balaclavas? No. Okay, so, Liam, I'm gonna need you to Google, like, ETA, like E-T-A, the Basque terrorist group, and I'm gonna need you to go to Google Images. Okay. Um, cause, let me tell ya, they had some fits. They were getting their fits off. Oh boy. Yeah! It kinda goes, though.

It kinda goes off, is the thing. Like, the thing about Spanish people, right, is that they love colonizing shit so much they did it even within the Iberian peninsula. And so, even to this day, the Basque people labor under the yoke of Madrid's oppression. And you know, the fuckin'... this is not the only one, there's a couple of Spanish separatist movements and they're all justified. And... Oh yeah, she has my boys in Barcelona.

Yeah, right. And like, the Basques, like, in ETA, they were not fucking around. They were fully, like... They created the first Spanish space program. Oh yeah. Oh yes. I've heard of this. Yeah, we've mentioned we've mentioned it before, they killed Franco's prime minister, Luis Guerrero Blanco, by putting him in low Earth orbit. He went to church?

That's very Spanish. I'm just looking at a photo of the... Hard to be a Catholic fascist, because everyone knows where you are on Sunday, etc. etc. None of the funniest things Justin's ever said, as far as I'm gonna push this. ALICE I'm gonna be a Catholic fascist, because everyone knows where you are on Sunday, et cetera, et cetera. So this is one of the funniest things Justin's ever said, as far as I'm concerned. JUSTIN One of the things I was getting to is, you can tell the Spanish are not upset about their colonialism, because the Spanish Foreign Legion has never disavowed Franco. Like, you know, I'm just saying- ALICE I'm just freaks.

Jesus Christ. So, okay. You ever see, like... JUSTIN You can just take him off the rolls, you can be like, well, you know, like, yeah. He was, we don't acknowledge him anymore. We did that to most of the guys who did the Sand Creek massacre in the US. I am reading the international links for the... for the...

Etta? Etta? Uh huh. Etta, yeah. Etta. And I just love, uh, Etta was known to have had, quote, fraternal contacts with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Listen, this is like, go on. Yeah, no, but I do love this.

The IRA received 50 revolvers from that in exchange for explosives training. Do you think it came in a gift box? Like a nice little note? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's like smoke caught in there, you know, because the basket are very fishing people. Harriet David Box in exchange for your revolvers. Yeah. I'm just thinking now that like, you know, Spain has all these disparate separatist groups, you know, they have a million ethnic groups, they have, you know, they're only loosely

affiliated on one flag. they had insane colonial ambitions, I think Spain may be the Russia of Europe. ALICE LAUGHS. RUSSELL LAUGHS. RUSSELL LAUGHS. RUSSELL LAUGHS. No, sure. How about...

ALICE LAUGHS. Yeah, sure, fuck it. I'll incorporate that into my belief system, why not? JUSTIN LAUGHS. Yeah, just throw it in. ALICE LAUGHS. Yeah. The Spanish Foreign Legion is one of the funniest military formations going.

I highly recommend having a look at their parade uniforms, their dress uniforms, because they're still doing the shirt open to the waist kind of thing. JUSTIN The fucking goat? ALICE Yeah. I, mmm. Also, by the way, I will say one other thing- JUSTIN I would like a Foreign Legion assignment where I get a siesta. I'll say one other thing about the Spanish Foreign Legion.

The minimum IQ requirement to join the Spanish Foreign Legion is 70. Which is lower than a German Shepherd. Yeah, that's... Disregarding IQ, that's the sort of stuff where my dad had clients who were intellectually disabled, and that's about the cutoff that the SSRI uses. From what I recall, no one yell at me. ALICE You ever think about how Kyle Rittenhouse apparently, like, failed the ASVAB? To, like, join the Marines?

JUSTIN I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that. I saw that, I... How the fuck? I was like... I took the ASVAB to get out of school for a day, but I don't remember what I scored.

It probably wasn't straight. I took some ASVAB sample questions, and like, they're not that difficult. I mean, there was some stuff that was like, technical knowledge, which I just didn't know, because I don't drive a car. It's like, can you rotate gears in your head? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, part of it is that, yeah. I was just like...

It's like the Kujiati, you know? I was just like curious as to what it was. JUSTIN I don't know what that word means. The Kujiati? ALICE It was like an online meme test to see if you were transgender or not. I... Listen, right, let me give you a sample Asva question, right?

If there are three quarts of gas in a gallon container, how full is the container? 50%, 60%, 75%, or 80%? LIAM You're joking. ALICE That is a real question. container, how full is the container, 50%, 60%, 75%, or 80%? You're joking. That is a real question. That's that, I... ugh. What was the fuckin' trans test called? The Koji-Ati.

C-O-G-I... I thought it was, I thought you said Kobayashi Maru. I was like, there's a test out there, like, you are trans, but how much can you resist it? Again, this is what there is in Britain, you know? JUSTIN See, this is why Kill James Bond is so important for us non-trans folks who want to be allies, to be kind of a lid.

We gotta know this stuff. I don't know this stuff otherwise. SEAN Can you do me a favor? Nova, and what we're gonna do is get your passport through, and you'll move here, and then, because this is America, we have no rules about guns, we're gonna arm you to the fucking teeth. Like a Wolfenstein mech. I mean, the problem is, right, now I kind of want to take the ASVAB, and the thing is...

I think you can probably take a more or less complete one somewhere online. ALICE Yeah, and I just end up being like a sort of army officer because... ALICE Scora 99, and just like, the recruiter's just like, alright, I'm gonna make so many exemptions for this lady. ALICE I mean, yeah, basically. Like, there's a cuss off for nuke score and stuff that's pretty high. But alright, I'm gonna do 12 questions on NationalGuard.com.

RILEY Okay, so the US Forest Service takes over a large chunk of land, and under Gafford Pinchot, he's trained in the European style of forestry, and as we have established, the Europeans are deeply afraid of fire. Kind of because their fire rotations and mainly beach dominate stands are much longer and their stands are not developed for fire and also because they're Europeans. I don't like weird shit. It's got to be exactly how it's supposed to be. The whole continent had been like formally cultivated for so long as well, you know. Yeah. Whenever I go to Europe or whenever I talk to Europeans, I hear about

their forestry. They're like, oh, the black forest is go to Europe and I like, or whenever I talk to Europeans, I hear about their forestry, they're like, oh, the black forest is so big. I'm like, bitch, the black forest is like, the Roth Rock State Forest is 40% the size of the black forest. What are you talking about? Get out of here. Like, does one Pennsylvania State Forest owns the black forest? Anyway.

They're like the fucking HS2 going through ancient woodlands and it's kind of like, Oh, yeah. Ancient woodlands. When I was in England, ancient woodlands. This is Doug firm. My guy. This is Douglas fucking for are you telling me somehow Douglas for got from the Pacific Northwest to Outer London like like, ring four or five, like, magically on its own, fuck, all the way off. Yeah, I'm coming for you, the UK. ALICE and LIAM Yeah, you're right to do so. JUSTIN Okay, also, who's about to catch Strasio, is Walter Bitterlich, who was a founder of very important forester in Germany, about 20-30 years after the period we're gonna talk

about, huge Nazi fuck that guy. Like, he joined the Nazi party in the early 30s. About 20-30 years after the period we're gonna talk about, huge Nazi fuck that guy. He joined the Nazi party in the early 30s. ALICE OOF. ALICE OOF. ALICE March violence. RILEY Yeah, he wrote a war memorial about how he liked fighting on the Eastern Front and at D-Day.

Yeah, that's a hard cringe. That's a real hard cringe. ALICE Yeah, I loved being in Saving Private Ryan as the bad guy. RILEY Yeah. RILEY I loved the in Saving Private Ryan as the bad guy. LIAM Yeah. I loved it. I loved it. SEAN I loved the Battle of Kursk.

ALICE Yeah. Being on the MG42 crew when the fuckin' LV-2s opened up, just like, very satisfying, if you're a Nazi, I imagine. SEAN Yeah, so that's what a lot of European forestry is currently based on, they're getting away from that pretty rapidly, because it turns out that it does work on climate change. So Gifford Pinchot and the Forest Service are trained in this European model that's very standardized, excuse me, very anti-fire.

And so they input the 10 AM policy, which is every fire that starts needs to be up by 10 AM the next day. That starts in the 1920s. So we are starting to see fire suppression take over the west coast as it's taking over the east coast. All right, next slide please. All right. Okay. as it's taking over the East Coast. All right, next slide please. All right. Okay, so for the next 100 years,

this is basically how fire is treated, and it's still treated the same way. These poor bastards get out there with shovels and pigmatics and palanquís, and they put it all out. And that's what happens to fire food, like until the mid-60s. In the mid-60s, we start to allow some wildland fire to go through and some fire to happen,

but basically everything gets put out by guys like this. Alright, next slide please. ALICE I got an 80% on the practice as verb, and I'm drunk. JUSTIN Oh, nice. ALICE Alright, well, congratulations Dovah, you're going to nuke school. ALICE I think the count for nuke school was like 90, so...

ALICE Doesn't matter, welcome aboard. Congratulations, you're doing, uh, railway core, I don't know. Yeah, imagine how well I could do if I was sober. So here's how we fight fire today, we now have a chainsaw involved. You dig a trench, you dig a trench. Or like, fire breaks. This is the thing, it's more like combat gardening than anything else. JUSTIN Oh, that's exactly correct, yeah.

We'll look at some in just a second here. LIAM You got the chainsaw, you got the protective clothing, you got the Oakleys, you got the... JUSTIN Oh, Oakleys are not fire rated, there's no way those are Oakleys. LIAM Oh. You got something that's better than Oakleys. JUSTIN Pit vipers are real popular right now, I love me some pit vipers. Oh, I gotta look into that. Fun. Okay, so you can't put out most fires, like, you just have to put a line around them, as we were discussing, and just wait for them to burn out.

You cut this line around them, or you try to guide them into a lake or a highway or somewhere they can't jump over, and you just wait for it to burn out. It's miserable work. Oh yeah, no, that's just sucksass. ALICE You have to, like, do a very aggressive plant clearance, while the thing bears down on you. If the wind changes direction, maybe you, like, die. JUSTIN Yeah, happens pretty frequently.

ALICE Sometimes you have to, like, parachute in there in the first place. LIAM Smoke jumpers. Those are fucking mines, dude. ALICE Well, if you don't, you have to fucking hike out there, the first place. SMOKE JUMPERS. Those dudes are out of their fuckin' minds, dude. Well, if you don't, you have to fucking hike out there, which is worse. Well, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm gonna come for the smoke jumpers real quick here. So let's do the Special Forces meme, where it's like, you know, Chad Forrest, the virgin

smoke jumper. Oh, I have to jump into the fire, oh, I'm so cool and special. What if we just let it burn sometimes, or we manage the vegetation in a way that we didn't have to go out there and jump on, y'know, these crazy fires? What about that, though? ALICE Yeah, jumping's cool. ALICE Are you suggesting that a kind of macho, firefighting

culture leads to a lot of the same problems as, like, the same thing in every other emergency service? JUSTIN Probably, yeah. The smokejumpers were invented in 1949, right after the end of World War Two. You can imagine why. ALICE That's some interesting military history here, because, and I'm trying to remember, I think- RILEY Sorry, 1949.

I meant 1942. ALICE That, like, specifically, the only segregated black parachute infantry regiment ended up doing this because white officers wouldn't trust them to fight in Europe or Asia, but they ended up being detailed to do precursor to this in the US during the war. So there's some interesting black military history there. On knowledge and belief, I could be wrong about that. SEAN I don't know.

I don't know the history of the smokejumpers. ALICE Macho firefighter culture has also done a lot of disservices to building things like better apartment buildings, or doing things like traffic calming on streets and things like that. But then- JUSTIN Yeah, the 555th Airborne Battalion, an all-African American Army paratrooper unit unit served as smokejumpers to combat the Japanese incendiary balloon threat.

Oh, that was some crazy shit. Yeah, that was some crazy shit. Yeah, that actually killed the person. Cause the guy went and poked it with a stick, and it was like, oh, that blew up. And then I think the guy who was apologizing came to Oregon, and was just like, you can kill me, and they were like, what are you talking about, we're friends now, war's over. I don't understand why I've done a couple of fires. I hate it. It sucks. It's a suck mole. Yeah. So actually, fun fact about the Forest Service,

they are grossly underfunded. And so they call all of their forest fires forestry technicians, where they're doing shit like this. And these guys are all guys. I'm using this. Sorry, I'm a midwesterner by culture. So I use guys as an inclusive term. This is not.

You're fine. Don't worry about it. Yeah. OK. So these folks are out here, and they're doing this part time. They work part time. They get paid like shit. culture, so I use guys as an inclusive term, this is not... You're fine, don't worry about it. Yeah, okay. So these folks are out here, and they're doing this part time, they work part time, they get paid like shit, it's real bad, we're not doing right by them. Could be worse, you could be in prison and doing this.

Yeah. Yep. You could just be doing this from... while in prison. Yeah, and you could pay a sense of the dollar and risk your life just like everybody else. Alright, next slide. And, speaking of, like, reforms, right, typically, for a long time, I believe California has changed this now, under a lot of process, you couldn't become a firefighter after you got out of prison, if you'd been a firefighter.

No, you couldn't. I believe that was a change, but you couldn't. I don't know that. SEAN You couldn't work for the Forest Service or CAL FIRE. CAL FIRE now takes you, but the Forest Service still does not. The Forest Service has a lot of issues. I like the Forest Service, they have a lot of potential, but they have a lot of issues

as well. Okay, so I included this specifically for you, November. I thought you would love some air assets. ALICE I do. I always love air assets. And the thing is, right, like, one of the dream jobs, JTAC without the risk of war crimes, right, I get to sit on a mountainside and I get to call in, like, airstrikes on my own position, with flame retardant chemicals.

This is ideal. JUSTIN I've done this a lot in Workers and Resources, Soviet Republic, which is a game I've been trying to play, but I don't have a working mouse wheel at the moment, so I haven't been able to. I'm gonna beat you to death with your own shoes. So... Yeah. My favorite fact about these, by the way, is that occasionally they kill scuba divers

in the funniest possible way. That's a rumor. That's a rumor that hasn't actually happened. It's my favorite rumor, which is that potentially, you could kill a scuba diver in the funniest possible way, scooping him out of a lake and dumping him onto a forest fire. Congratulations, you're a smokejumper now! I'm involuntary from the ocean! I'm doing the Seal Trident thing where I'm hammering a smokejumper insignia into his

coffin. I would also just like to say, remember, this can be inclusive, you know, non-binary folks can die in these kind of accents, they could be dumped onto a fire. ALICE Excuse me, forgive me for assuming the gender of the scuba diver. JUSTIN I believe I've seen this huge fuckin' DC-10 here, in like, the most insane video where it like, dives into a valley and then comes

back out. Oh, and it's like what, like a hundred feet above the ground and you're just like, oh shit. ALICE These are easily, right, like I don't want to speculate about anything else, these are the coolest pilot jobs going. And pilot opens you up to a lot of cool career activities. This is the best one. This is the coolest one you can do.

And you can die doing this so fucking easily. RILEY No, November, can you look to the bottom of your screen there? ALICE Yes. RILEY So this is called a heli-torch. This is one way to light prescribed fire. ALICE I'm sorry, what? Oh, look at it!

RILEY Yeah, yeah. It's on fire, and it's on a helicopter. What else do you want to call it? It's a heli-torch. They also have diads, or DADs, these are basically little ping pong balls that you inject with potassium and some other chemicals and you shoot them out and they light a fire eventually. But this is a great way to get super dead, you know, if you crash, you're not only crashing a helicopter, but you're also crashing into a fire. And you're on fire. Intentionally. So, just some wild ass shootout here.

ALICE This is one of the funniest ways to take your life in your hands. And you're doing public service, so it's like, you go to Firefighter Valhalla if you die to it. JUSTIN Yeah, I believe you do go to Firefighter Valhalla. ALICE You are a thrill boy, but for good. JUSTIN I assume which is where you're drinking all the time and setting each other on fire.

ALICE Reverse buried? ALICE Yeah, Firefighter Valhalla is like a structure fire fully developed, but also you can get the beers in. RILEY No, these guys don't do structure fire, they do wildland fire. That's a different job, we'll talk about that later. But I would like to- ALICE That's their own Dalmatian. RILEY So, is that Dalmatian that lives next to me?

It's a real asshole. Again, everybody is catching strays today. I am coming, I'm taking no prisoners. Alright, so if we look at the top left, look how low that plane is. It is like, no sugar pines, like 150 feet tall. It is brushing the top of these. These guys die more frequently than you would want a pilot to die. I should get my pilot's license.

Oh, you should. Okay, so, I figured we'd have a fun time with that. Oh, you should. Okay. So. I figured we'd have a fun time with that. Alright, next slide please. Sorry, Liam, if you wanted to finish your thought, please do. Oh, it's fine. Uh. I was laughing.

I have seen like, on the ground helmet cam videos of when one of these goes wrong and they just hit like a wildfire firefighter crew with one of these, and it's just like, five guys spitting chemicals out of their mouths, and swearing in a way that I haven't heard anyone else do. ALICE Yeah, it's not great. JUSTIN See, like, the Australian bushfire fighters, they're in the firetruck and then they have to put down all the covers because they can't get away fast enough and then it burns over.

ALICE Oh, those, yeah. Well, those only exist because of a couple of really bad tragedies, where, as I alluded to earlier, the wind change, it just overtook crews digging these lines. LIAM We'll get there. ALICE So now, yeah. Now there's these survival blankets, which sometimes work. LIAM Yeah, they're not great. SEAN My favorite thing is that my wife occasionally

texts me, she's like, how long do you think it'll take? And I'm just like... ALICE Fifteen hours. Fifteen, sixteen hours. SEAN I was like, Nova's been drinking, we're gonna be here'll take? And I'm just like... ALICE 15 hours. 15, 16 hours. SEAN I was like, Nova's been drinking, we're gonna be here for a while. Nova had a bad day, let it go. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah. Those fuckin' survival blankets are up there in terms of technology, where it's like, you

want this rather than not, but like, ehhh, not gonna make any promises. JUSTIN This man's trousers are extremely high-waisted. ALICE That's how you know it's old-timey. Yeah. The, like, sort of belt loops touch the nipples. So this is what a lot of Western forest should've looked like, so we have a lot of ponderosa pine which is a fire adapted species, so we have nice thick bark. If we look up those trees you're not seeing branches for at least 80 feet. Now, this is post thinning.

So there were more trees in here, but pretty open. The initial surveys of this were done and when they did it, they wrote that they could drive a Model T in between all of the trees. So we're looking at like pre-European colonization, well, not European colonization, but pre-American management, like a very open forest. Because like Model T's, I've ridden in one once, are not the most navigable cars. So if you can navigate between trees in a Model T, you're doing just fine on spacing. So it's a pretty open woodlands. Got you. I mean, it looks sparse.

Right. So that's what it is on the left. So this is pre-big management. Again, this is thin, so there should be some more trees in there. And on the right, this is the same stand in the early 2000s. We can see we have a major invasion, I guess not really invasion technically. We have Douglas fir moving in due to the overstory death of the Ponderosa pine and overstory removal and fire suppression. So, Douglas fir is one of these species that doesn't like fire and so it has invaded and we can see it's a lot more, you know, the ars stand density has really increased from like 160 trees per acre, like to 600. And so, if a fire blows through here, now we have a lot more stuff going on. Also, and then for our botanists out there, you'll pick it up right away, we have a lot of cheatgrass

in the photos, so at the bottom here we can see this, this is an invasive grass species that burns at a much higher temperature than our native grass species. You see this with a lot of invasives like Melaleuca in Florida, burns real hot, like where our forests are ready for it. So... Oh, that sucks. You're like this perfectly evolved, you know, fire adapted species that's meant to be like, oh, all my branches are off the ground, I'm adapted to a really sparse sort of situation,

and then all of a sudden everything is full of grass and other bullshit. JUSTIN Yeah, and you just... SEAN These aren't ferns. JUSTIN Yeah. SEAN What's happening? JUSTIN You don't beat Doug Fur, like, in a one-time... Pine of a Spine doesn't beat Doug Fur on most sites one-to-one. Like, it needs fire to...

Doug Fur sounds like a sort of like, 50s quarterback. Oh, you mean, Pseudo-Tasuka-Mensizii? Doug Fur? Douglas Fur? Yeah, Doug Fur. Yeah, my boy, out there, this is number one. Shoutout, Doug Fur. You got Doug Fur.

Never count out Doug Fur. Douglas Fur. Sorry, Douglas Fur. Yeah, Doug Fur and spruce pine. Yep, yep. It's actually not a fur, technically. It's a pseudo-tasuga, so it's a false one. I gotta use the bathroom and keep going.

So we have these changes in our landscape. Now these changes are handleable. We can handle these changes, it just costs time and money. So we have to go through here, we have to clear out the Douglas fir, and then we can regenerate pondyra as a pot. This is handleable, it's fine, it's doable, if you have time and money. ALICE You have to commit tree genocide. SEAN Yeah, it's not tree genocide, these aren't supposed

to be there. So you have to... ALICE Commit tree ethnic cleansing. ALICE You have to do forest decolonization. SEAN Yeah to commit tree ethnic cleanse. You have to do forest de-colonization. Yeah, it's forest management. You have to commit to forest management. You have to invest in the landscape. So this is going to cost you a couple of thousand dollars an acre to manage and then you'll get this up and you'll get Ponderosa pine established. You can burn through there and instead of like a couple of thousand acre, you're going to spend 30

bucks an acre to burn through it. That costs time, money, and effort. And the forest service has none of that. Private landowners have none of that. So we have, instead of the forest we have on the left, we go to the forest on the right, we go from our pond or some pine stands to our dug fur stands. ALICE It's loaded down with fuel. SEAN Yep.

Exactly. Alright, next slide please. ALICE I'm thinking about my little tactical fire triangle. I'm thinking that's a lot of fuel. Yep. Exactly. Alright, next slide please. I'm thinking about my little tactical fire triangle, and I'm thinking that's a lot of fuel. And I'm also thinking, man, it's getting hosser and drier all the time. The context. The context! I hate it.

You hate to see it. Okay. Shoulda had, uh, you shoulda had some coconut trees, y'know? Mmm. Like, once again. That's a grass. We've talked about this twice now. The coconuts are not trees, they're grasses.

They're grasses. Okay. So, we get assholes like this. This is the- these are the Bundys. These people don't believe that the US federal government should own land. They also don't believe the state government should own land, but they exist because of the federal subsidization of cattle ranching. So you get all kinds of assholes like this, who just don't want to fund federal land ownership

in any way, because then they're like, oh... ALICE They don't want to do anything with the federal land either, because it's not very useful to them. SEAN Well, they want to run cows. So the Bundys had like a million dollars in cow fines, and it is a dollar a month ahead of cow. So like, to get the BLM so mad at you that they're gonna fine you a million dollars, is so many issues.

You have messed up so many times. ALICE How many paper cows do they have? ALICE Mostly paper now, buddy. JUSTIN I would imagine so. ALICE I circle back to my thing about giving the weirdest cops to the weirdest departments, I think BLM should have nuclear weapons. JUSTIN Well, yeah, so the BLM eventually gets involved and they see these guys cows, and then... ALICE Either BLM.

JUSTIN Yeah. I mean, having a shootout with the BLM is like just a fun weekend out there, I mean. ALICE You have to work to do that, you know? They try and make allowance for it. JUSTIN The BLM shot a guy in this standoff. They seized federal land for weeks and a guy got shot because he tried to kill some BLM guys. ALICE Didn't the FBI shoot him?

JUSTIN I don't remember who shot him, but it took weeks of a standoff after seizing a wildlife refuge and having a million dollars in fine to get shot. Like, you had to do so many things wrong to have a problem here. ALICE I'm giving it to the BLM, cause I support them more than the FBI. ALICE As far as like the BLM or the FBI shooting a guy goes, I come back to the thing that I always say, I love when the bourgeois state defends itself against the right, I hate when it defends

itself against the left. ALICE I co-sign that. JUSTIN I think BLM could maybe take out Black Hammer, I would support that. ALICE The BLM SWAT team is gonna, like, descend on Black Hammer City. JUSTIN I think that was on private land? I don't know, I don't care, that's not my problem. LIAM I have no idea.

Yeah. JUSTIN So these guys are out here and like intentionally undercutting the Forest Service and other federal land managers by like underfunding them. We have the whole state of Jefferson thing. Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Like Western Oregon and Washington wanted to join Idaho. So we got these like nutheads out here who only exist as cattle ranchers because of the federal government, but also hate the federal government. And then on the other side we have, you know, you get your classic hippies who do not believe the four should be managed, they should be left unmanaged, which is, you know, a racist

and colonial ideal, because people have been managing this forever. And so we have lots of people coming at the four service. The four service has been wrong in a number of ways in the past. They think they're doing their best. You know? They're doing their best. You know? They're doing their best. ALICE It was the thing I was saying earlier about, like, two ways of being racist about Native Americans, right?

To be like, this is not managed, or to be like, this is managed so well that no one else need ever manage it. Hi, it's Justin. So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to. People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point. We have this thing called Patreon, right? The deal is you give us two bucks a month and we give you an extra episode once a month. Sometimes it's a little inconsistent, but you know, it's two bucks to get what you pay for.

It also gets you our full back catalog of bonus episodes so you can learn about exciting topics like guns, pickup trucks, or pickup trucks with guns on them. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. The money we raise through Patreon goes to making sure that the only ad you hear on this podcast is this one. Anyway, that's something to consider if you have two bucks to spare each month. Join at patreon.com forward slash WTYP pod. Do it if you want or don't. It's your decision and we respect that. Back to the show. Okay, next slide please.

So, the last domino that we need to set up to understand the campfire here, which we are eventually talking about and not just Spanish. Like four hours in, yeah. Sorry, Devin. All right, so this is our wildland urban interface. So people in California have to live somewhere. It is impossible to live in most of California if you do not make tech money, and even if you do make tech money, you don't live there.

Listen to the ghost ship. Listen to earlier in this episode where we described how the most fabulous penthouse in Philadelphia is cheaper than a two-bedroom in San Francisco. Yeah. He lives in Oakland, but also, they'd give us a penthouse. ALICE It's a British version of this, it's a real shame that I love London as much as I do, because like, your money goes literally ten times as far in Glasgow. JUSTIN So...

ALICE That's insane. Good God. ALICE Oh yeah. No, it's fine. JUSTIN People have to live somewhere, so they live in these canyons, they live away from people. Also, people have wanted to live away from people for as long as there have been people in cities.

And it looks nice, it's pretty. Right, well that's the other problem, there's no defensible space in this photo, if we see this we have some nice beautiful trees right in that trailer park. People like to tree bathe, or whatever the Japanese thing is. Yeah, forest bathing. Yeah, exactly, if you wanna do the thing of, like, if you wanna be like a US embassy and have setback, you know, you wanna have a big, sort of, like, bear trench between you and the forest, it looks fuckin' weird as hell, people don't like it.

RILEY Right, it's weird. You don't move to the mountains to be setback. Yeah, sorry. ALICE This is also Trailer Park, which is the densest form of housing allowed in the United States outside of city centers. Actually, I have a modest proposal, right, which is put the Forest Service under the Department of State, because the Department of State already does a bunch of ways of camouflaging

setback. Like, any time you see a US embassy and you're like, oh we've got a really interesting, like, sort of architectural sculpture garden or something that coincidentally gives you, like, sort of truck bomb stopping distance between the perimeter and the embassy. Like, just do that for, like, every town that's in a forest as well, and just have a fucking like zen garden or something cultural. Y'know? We'll get to efforts about that.

You could just have better foreign policy and you wouldn't need all of that. So let's talk about that right now. So there's this thing that's called... Alright, problem solved! Roz, you're Secretary of State now! I'm thinking about my State Department moots in this difficult time. So there's this thing that's called DNRCS, the Natural Resources Conservation Service, they would fund fire safe communities here here and same with some federal grants.

There are 10 TSP technical service providers in California. So for all those millions of acres, if you want to get fed dollars to help private lands become more fireproof, you have one of 10 people to talk to. So there's money out there to do this. It's just limited. Sure. Okay. That isn't ever the US government. SEAN Oh, yeah. Oh, 100%. We could do anything, it's just like, oh, but we don't give a shit about it.

ALICE Because, like, electing Ronald Reagan as president inculcated you with a fear of the bureaucrat. SEAN Yeah. ALICE Right. SEAN So I'm actually becoming a TSP right now. It's kind of annoying, but there's like billions of dollars I could get access to if I get that. It's annoying, but it's gettable. The problem is, you will run into this when you work with private landowners, they are

sometimes afraid of federal money. It's like, oh, the federal allies, you gotta come out here and say, no. From the government, and I'm here to help. There's a lot, there's a lot of unspent federal money out there. Oh yeah, I'm trying to get that. That's what's gonna fund my trip to the Baltics. This is when we need Mr. Lesko in here to let everyone know the free money

you can get from the government. In a money suit, yeah. In other nations, you just have a government provided forester when you own forest land and that guy or person comes out and they just like, you know, you say you should manage the land. All right, we're gonna do it next. Yeah. All right.

So, there's none of that here. All right, next slide, please. Let's get to some dates and times. Oh. Razirah. Yes. All right. We're not quite to Razirah.

We're very close though. Oh, my bad. Yeah. Yeah, I'm on the next slide. Yeah. Yeah. Alright, so in the summer of 2018, we have a drought. Droughts are common in the West, because of, y'know, it's a droughty place, and also climate change is making everything worse. So as we can- ALICE And specifically climate change makes

everything worse in the kind of all or nothing model of rainfall. You get a lot of rainfall in no time and it floods, or you get no rainfall for months. Yeah. As we can see, we're in that no rainfall. So if we look at our 100 hour fuels, those are gonna be kind of our medium-sized logs and 1000 hours, those are big logs, they take, excuse me, 1000 hours to dry out, everything's real dry for a long time. About November 1st, we should be seeing rain come back to this system, it doesn't really. We have drought

for like, months leading up to November of 2018. Alright. ALICE I think it's cool how I have the thing that, like, I changed my name to something that makes my ears break up when you mention it. SEAN I was gonna say the same thing. I was gonna say the same thing. I was just like, yeah, she's right there, like, what's the problem? ALICE I had a friend of mine recently announce, hey, me and my wife are having a child in November, and I'm like, I don't remember that. JUSTIN I don't think so.

ALICE I think I would've noticed. JUSTIN DRAKE That's a dramatic advance in science. ALICE We finally did it. JUSTIN We did it, yeah. ALICE So 2018 will it, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mmhm, mmhm. RILEY So, 2018 will eventually go down as number 3 in area of lands burned after 2020 and 2021. That's how we're looking right now.

ALICE Oh, we can, we can... I think we can break this record. RILEY Okay, next slide, please. ALICE Oh, Nova, we're sure gonna. We're sure gonna, buddy. ALICE It's probably inevitable to Nova. RILEY We're gonna break a record today. Ooh, yeah.

RILEY Alright, next slide, please. ALICE We're gonna go 5 hours today. Ooh, yeah. Alright, next slide please. We're gonna go 5 hours and 38 minutes, thus toppling Titanic. Oh, hell yeah dog, I'm here for it. So November 7th, 2018. Alright, so the National Weather Service puts out a red flag warning for the 7th through the 9th. Unfortunately, they will be correct.

So if you are not a firehead, a red flag day means it's a really good day for stuff to light on fire. It's hot, it's dry, and it's windy. In this part of California, we have a seasonal winter wind called the Jarbo winds. Sorry, it's probably an H, it's probably Harbo winds. Harbo, yeah. I'm a white guy. What do you do?

We all have these problems. So, it's a pretty persistent wind that runs between 25 and 35 miles an hour almost constantly. They do reach up to 60 miles an hour sometimes past that. Because it's canyons and shit and weather happens, the climate happens. So we have these, it's hot, it's dry, it's windy. Now going back to our tactical situation down to the wildfire level, we have hot, we have dry and we have wind. These are not good. All right. Next slide, please. So PG&E de-energizes a couple of lines in November 7th, but they do not on the 18th

because nothing bad happens. It wouldn't honestly have mattered if they had de-energized the lines. The lines in this picture are not the lines in question because the lines that end up starting the fire are a hundred years old and take a long time to shut down. ALICE Why the fuck is so much of California's electrical infrastructure built in, like, nineteen... Okay. JUSTIN It genuinely is very confusing considering that the general population of California, according to what I've heard from

California... They were like, California. I mean, I understand California has like... These folks are very, very concerned about overhead wires, because they will not allow any electric trains in the state. But they also will not consent to having power lines buried. ALICE I understand California has an almost British level of urban-rural divide, right?

But it's like, one of the biggest economies in the US, if it was its own country, hashtag NCR, hashtag Fallout New Vegas, then it would be like, one of the biggest in the world, it would be in the fucking G20. And yet, for some reason, half the power lines, once you go out to like, Solano County, or like, anywhere in, like, anywhere in rural California, were put up when Ansel Adams was taking photos of them with a tripod. JUSTIN Well, you don't get rich by doing infrastructure investment. ALICE It's like 480 volts.

You could bury this for like, nothing. JUSTIN Okay, so, with these specific lines we have a number of reported issues. In 2009, we have reported issues. In 2011, we have reported issues. In 2012, there's a tower that comes down. They know they have 900 problems on this tower and with this set of equipment, and there are at least two critical threats that they've been given heads up from regulators. They are sitting at 600 days past of like, you need to repair this. sitting at 600 days past of like, you need to repair this, they're 600 days past of like, yeah, we should repair that.

ALICE Yeah, so me with SA extensions, I just... ALICE Also, by the way, some random Nazis are coming by with rifles and shooting at substations and stuff, just to really spice things up. RILEY And so it's hot and these lines are drooping, it's also windy, so we got potential issues, and they're not well secured because they're a hundred year old. You know, this shit ain't ready. ALICE You can grow the economy by providing good jobs

to people to, like, repair and replace and inspect these wires. JUSTIN Yeah, but consider, shut up. RILEY Yeah, next slide please. ALICE In fairness, they were pretty good wires for a hundred years ago, because they were still running ground wire back then. I mean, it turns out that it's not that difficult to run current through a wire. Riz, this next slide you can open up on. At 6.15am, an issue is reported.

Jesus Christ. By 6.33am a fire is reported by a PG&E employee. By 644AM, it's ten acres, so this thing is flying. By 7AM, keep going. Wait, I have a question. Is this just like, this is much faster pace than a normal fire? Like, is there... Oh, yeah.

I mean, wildfires spread crazy fast anyway, and this is like... A fast fire? It's like fast even by that standard? Yes. Crazy fast. Because I'm just talking about from my own knowledge of firefighting, or fires, which is very limited, it's just like, I feel like I hear like, oh yeah, it's 50,000 acres, and I'm just like, I didn't hear about this yesterday.

Or maybe just like, is there like a certain size of fire where it's just like, oh shit, we need to panic? Well, so they catch this fire incredibly fast. So it starts around six in the morning and they're, they know about it right after it happens because this is again, a very rural area, very canyony, not easy to get to a lot of these points, but you know, within half an hour we got 10 acres burning and that's, you know, like a lot of land that's on fire. So this is a big deal. Sorry, Roz, you were saying here? Oh, what?

By 7am a local firefighter gets eyes on it and calls for air support? That's the last time. Mmhm. For some reason, you know what this reminds me of? This reminds me of cancer. Like, in the sense that, like, obviously early diagnosis and early treatment is one of the defining factors, but sometimes the thing just spreads really fucking fast, really aggressively, and sometimes there is nothing you can do.

ALICE And there's nothing you can do about it, I was thinking the same thing. ALICE Yeah, when it does do that, that's, as often as not, a result of environmental conditions, and occupational exposures, y'know? Yep. So, that's why I do controlled burns on my body every day. You shouldn't do that. I mean, this is literally a thing that your cells do, right? This is absolutely a thing that, like, programmed cell death is one of the things that...

Sorry, I... Well, that's what should be happening in this forest. This forest should be burning once every ten years, and it's not. We have a huge fuel buildup. Yeah, this forest did burn in 2008, partially, but not all the way, and also it was ten years ago so we're within the normal fire cycle here. So we should be on fire, we should have reduced fuel loading, which is why we introduced the concept to begin with.

It doesn't happen. So we have this huge buildup. We have an ignition source, and now we got fire. Alright, next slide please. ALICE This is just like telling, like, you know, Cal Fire or whoever, like, hey, I have this gun, and I've like, pointed it at myself, and I've also like, pulled back the hammer. RILEY Yep.

And now we are, as you can see in the slide, we have pulled the trigger. And so here's what happens. ALICE Wow. Holy crap, a gif worked on the podcast once! LIAM Yeah, I was like, this is the first time this has ever you guys! ALICE This is the first time this has ever happened. LIAM Come on, man. ALICE Normally, Roz has to go and do some voodoo magic. ALICE Yeah, thank you for elevating our production

to Artforbes. You and Devon, the only two people to successfully do that. LIAM Yeah, I'm trying to tank it single-handedly, and uh... SEAN Within like three hours of ignition, the town of Paradise burns to the ground. ALICE Jesus. SEAN Yep. No, it, three hours of ignition, the town of Paradise burns to the ground. Jesus. Yep. No, it blows.

And it should wint. I mean, I... It takes a while to organize stuff on, like, even an emergent basis, and you just can't do it that quickly. Yep. No, they know that it's coming, and it still lights up, and you can't stop it, because these winds are going 20 to 60 miles an hour up to 70 miles an hour. So, we have the evacuate the town of Con Cow at 720, doesn't matter because the fire is through there. They try to evacuate

the next town by 723, doesn't matter, it's through there. And these are narrow mountainous canyon roads that the fire is flying through. Now, fire when it moves like this, it's a lot of embers going forward. So, it's not a wall of flame, but it will rapidly become a wall of flame, especially when it's driven by these huge winds. And that's why, by 1030, Paradise is on fire, and by 1045, most of the town is ash. ALICE Am I wrong, and am I insensitive, for saying that in this context, having not fallen out of the coconut tree, it is insane to build a town here? SEAN Yeah, it's probably not the best.

This is probably not a great place to be. With the wires like this, if you had done a smaller settlement and you hadn't had these ignition sources, it's not a huge issue. The town of Paradise has been here for like a hundred years without burning down, so. ALICE What was the reason the town of Paradise was founded? Mining. Mining, okay. I was like, either that or it's logging, in which case it might make sense, you know?

Yeah, so this is... If there's any big logging you get some clearance back. Yeah, this isn't the best forest, it's Ponderosa Pine and California Black Oak mixed, so it's not the best forest for getting big logs out of, but there's enough fuel in there to burn the town to the ground. So this is, within three, four hours, you've run seven miles and you've burned a ton of acreage. Just like, 20,000 acres are burned in seven hours. ALICE Well, while you have firefighters still putting

their boots on, kind of thing. LIAM Wildfire. ALICE It's a wildfire. A wildfire. LIAM Where did Kevin go? I didn't hear what happened. boots on kind of thing. I was- ALICE Wildfire. ALICE It's a wa- wildfire. A wildfire. SEAN Where did Kevin go? I didn't hear what happened. ALICE I believe he is peeing.

SEAN Ah, thank you. That was oddly soothing, the way you said that. ALICE I'm on, like, my fucking sixth glass of wine and I haven't yet, so skill issue. SEAN Well, there you go. SEAN Okay, yeah, I can't match you there, Nova. You give me two beers and I have a fire hose. RILEY Yeah, that's what happened. ALICE Beer is very different.

Beer is a diuretic. I'm the exact same way. You give me like one sip of beer, I'm pissing every ten minutes for the rest of the night. Wine on the other hand, is, you know, delightful. RILEY Alright, next slide please. ALICE Remember to drink water, buddy. RILEY Umm, trying. RILEY Alright, so here's what Paradise looks like.

So they initiate a- ALICE Oh, is that good? JUSTIN It doesn't, like, honestly, you do the best that you can, it doesn't work out that well. We have small mountain roads. There were efforts to do fuel clearance before this fire started, and there were efforts to expand, like to do better fire preparation before this fire started, because all of these events that we're talking about with Western forests are entirely predictable, we've talked

about them in forest literature since the 60s, so. Anyway. ALICE It's interesting, I saw a documentary about Cal Fire, and also some inmate crews, because again, California uses incarcerated people to fight fires, and one of the things is people with isolated property, that's out of town, surrounded by forest, are often reminded very forcefully by CAL FIRE that you need, sort of, American embassy level of setback, you need to be doing this clearance.

And routinely they don't do it and the house burns down, and they get to watch it burn down from next to a forest service or like Cal Fire, like Fire Engine, and they go, well what the fuck, why is my house burning down, and they go, yeah, because it's surrounded by fucking trees. Yeah. If you're, in this case, if you're lucky, you watch your house burn down, if you're unlucky you are in it when it burns down. And that happens to 84 people. 84 people-

Jesus Christ. 84, 85 will eventually be killed in this fire. So there are, you know, the emergency responders are doing the best they can, but this thing is just ripping hot, it's ripping fast, you can't stop it, and these canyons are not a great place for cell service, so you have a failure to communicate in a lot of places. ALICE It's the kind of thing we end up with like, police and sheriffs and whatever, going door to door kind of thing. SEAN That's what happens, usually neighbors going door to door.

Luckily, this evacuation is largely successful, in that we only see 84 people die, but 84 people do die in this fire. Probably, at least 8 of them die while evacuating, so most people are killed in their homes or near their homes. People are escaping in everything they can, in cars, on ATVs and UTVs, and in at least one report jumping into lakes. It's real bad. ALICE I remember seeing, there was something, when the most...

It was like a couple of years ago, Australia had really bad wildfires. And I remember seeing people in the water filming, watching trees burn to the waterline. Yeah. And the problem, and that happened in the US, in the Cloquet fire, and up in the Pestiga River fire, it can get so hot in some of those fires that it will boil you alive. No thanks. Or there will not be enough oxygen for you to breathe, you'll be smothered by carbon dioxide, so being in water is not a saver. In this fire there are at least 19 cases of burn over,

you can read the National Transportation Safety Board about a lot of this stuff, I'm gonna tell you right now after having read it, you don't wanna read it. What is a burn over? JUSTIN So it's when you're somewhere and the fire goes over the top of you. SEAN Fuck that. JUSTIN Yeah, it's real bad. Alright, next slide. Let's look at a couple pictures of what happened here.

Not great. Next slide. ALICE That's a house in the trash. SEAN Jesus Christ. ALICE I actually saw a really interesting photo essay, I'm gonna see if I can find it to credit it later on, but it was like, some photojournalists went back to paradise in the aftermath, and did like, a photo essay. Yeah, so we're gonna look at some of that in a bit here.

Alright, so next slide. So that's the fire in progress. Here are folks trying to fight these fires. Again, this is like 20, at this point, you're looking at like 20-50 thousand acres of fire in deep canyon country that's barely accessible on foot. Tough work here. Alright, so we can see... ALICE Can I say something absolutely superficial?

I really like the Forest Service's green tenders, I think they're really cool looking. JUSTIN I don't think that's a Forest Service, I think it's a city on the side. I think it's a Lake Blue. I dunno, I can't quite tell. Yeah. No, no, that's forest service. It's got a forest service crest on the door. Oh, you're right. No, you're right. You're good. You're good. November. November for the winter. You got to drive a wide load truck in there at high speed. Yeah. And so this is- There's no blocking cars. It's just you and the wide load, baby.

To make this even worse, so early 2018, Paradise gets a grant to do fuels reduction work around the town that had been funded by tax dollars taken from sales of rural properties that had run from 2008 to 2013. The representative for Paradise had celebrated the end of that tax program. So when you don't take care of your force, they will take care of you. Yep. ALICE Again, sort of like pointing the gun at your own head kind of thing. JUSTIN Right.

Right. Alright, next slide. So by the end of the 9th we have over 7000 acres burned, now this is a day. This is like a day and a half after starting, 7000 acres burned. ALICE It says in the note, 70,000. SEAN Yeah, oh sorry, I meant 70,000. I said 70,000? Eh, we've been going for two, almost two and a half hours.

I can get into this thing. ALICE Is it really only that long? Wow. JUSTIN Any figure we say, assume it's ten times larger. It was not the 9th, it was the 90th. ALICE On the 90th. JUSTIN The time has delayed, the sun is as blood. SEAN Yeah, well, as we saw in the previous picture, you don't really see the sun too much.

ALICE No, I can imagine not. SEAN So this is why I don't do violent firing. This shit sucks. So it takes roughly 5,700 firefighters, including as we mentioned, inmate crews, and crews from 17 states to get this under control, you got 600 engines there, 75 water tenders, 100 fire crews, 100 bulldozers, 24 helicopters, and 12 fixed-wing aircraft on site. SEVENTEEN FIREFIGHTERS WILL BE HEARD IN THIS FIRE. ALICE This is the real, like, send... everything.

SEVENTEEN FIREFIGHTERS Yes. And luckily, this fire is in November, so we have not too many other things going on. If this fire was two months earlier, it's much bigger, because these crews are elsewhere. This is after fire season should have ended. ALICE This is... so, whenever the next big one is, that happens to hit fire season. RILEY The Lanai... the Lanai High? The Lanai Fire? LIAM Oh, in Hawaii, yeah.

ALICE You just burn an entire town to the ground. SEAN Yes. ALICE Well, I mean, you do that here too, but you do that with a lot more people in their houses. JUSTIN I was genuinely surprised by that one, because I didn't think that the fire would get that far past the urban forest interface. SEAN Yeah, that one's largely driven by colonialism and the abandonment of sugar cane plantations that fall into invasive species.

And he says that he's never gonna come back on the podcast, and then hands us the perfect episode, and come back on the podcast. Well, okay. So, people get hurt in this fire. At least hurt on the job. We know that these people are exposed to a lot more fire. Cancer rates among wildland firefighter crews are going up as they work with more intense fires and fires in the urban wildland fire interface.

ALICE Crackpot theory, right. You remember the 9-11 firefighter settlements and stuff? RILEY Yes. ALICE And you remember how the FDNY has done a very extensive job of documenting, like, oh, this guy died like 20 years later, based off of 9-11 exposure, or whatever. I suspect, and this is my crackpot theory, that this is true of more firefighting than it is not, right, and that 9-11 was an opportunity to capture a snapshot of the thing that routinely kills firefighters after the fact, like, 20 years later.

And just all the time, because being around fire and breathing in all that shit is really bad for you. And yeah, as you say, doing the same with not just trees, not just forests, but also people's homes and all the stuff that they have in them. Probably not great for you. The chemicals in modern furniture, modern insulation, and modern building materials are much, much nastier when combusted than they used to be. You're not meant to breathe this stuff, and even if you have the kind of PPE that's meant

to prevent you from breathing and stuff, you're still gonna breathe a dangerous amount of this stuff, just by virtue of the fact that you need to take it off sometimes, even when you're still on the fireground. ZACH Yeah, I would point to the fire-vising question, you'll see that there's no mask sign, because you have to do this for as long as there's daylight and even into the dark. You can't wear a mask this long. You just can't do it and hike in this elevation, in this terrain, you're just not doing it and hence the elevated risks of cancer. The other thing is with – hold on, I'm going

to run you over for a quick second of a – when these fires are burning at this intensity, so that's like the heat coming off of this fire, not the amount that the heat of this fire. So these fires historically had just burned leaf litter and just like stuff on the ground like your pine needles. Now you're burning soil. When you're burning soil, that's a lot. There's a lot of not good things going into your lungs. A colleague of mine did a webinar recently with the folks at Chernobyl and they were fighting fire out there last year, and the damage from those fires was like smoking 60 cigarettes an hour.

FFFFUCK ME. Even when I was at my worst I wasn't that bad. Yeah, me either. So that's an issue straight there. Can we convert that into a taste of dip, though? I spread those 60 cigarettes out over a day. I mean, I think it's bleakly really funny that right before Covid, America produced an HBO documentary about how the Soviet Union had this kind of civilizational struggle against environmental terror, and was like, well, we would never do that.

But also... Well, you know, that's our next episode. ALICE Yeah, well, I think so much about the scene in Chernobyl where the guy's like, this feckless party bureaucrat, is like, I don't know anything about governing, because I used to be the boss of a shoe factory or whatever, and it's just like, oh my god. Yeah, but anyway, I think about these firefighters a lot, right, not just these firefighters, but a lot of people, on the basis of being kind of casualties of this war that a lot of people, despite the most obvious evidence, refuse to admit that we're

in. ALICE But yeah, I mean, there's so much of this stuff where it's like, a person dies, often, in this case, like, heroically, and it's like, obviously a consequence of climate change. ALICE And then you sort of like... the thing that absolutely, like, fucking joke appeals to me, right, this is an insane sentence, the thing that absolutely depresses me, right, you look at the way that the energy industry, particularly oil and gas, speaks to itself, you read their trade papers, and you see guys getting, like, legitimate standing ovations at conferences for saying we have

to get away from this fantasy that we're ever gonna phase out oil and gas anytime soon. And then you think to people who are dying because their houses are being inundated, or dying of diseases that are moving into their biomes because the houses are being inundated, or dying of diseases that are moving into their biomes because the temperatures are changing, or dying because they're inhaling some guy's house, and then you think, well what are we doing about this, and the answer is, we're not even acknowledging this. It's just shuffled off onto an issues section of the website, y'know, you can vote for a fucking green party about it if it means that much to you.

And it's like, we... the amount of stuff, the amount of urgency that we should have about any of this, is nowhere to be seen, and if you try to do this, if you try to even talk about it, people will look at you as if you're insane. SEAN I may be about to say something, Stephen. Based on the earlier slides in this podcast, this is also a regional problem, which has been largely solved on the East Coast. No, it's regional, but it's also escalated by climate change. Like, prior to the 2000s, this fire doesn't happen, because this area is inundated with a seasonal monsoon. ALICE Yeah, this is exactly it.

For so much of our lives, and the lives of our parents, we have skated by on this thing of like, we're in the sort of honeymoon period of this, and then we've ended up in this civilizational planet-wide war against an adversary, a self-created adversary of climate change, that is gonna exploit and exacerbate every single weakness we have laid out for it, and this is one of them, y'know? RILEY Yeah, so this leads us to what I mentioned earlier, I think the best carbon program you could invent is you fund the Ukrainians to do more strikes on Russian oil refineries.

ALICE Yeah, well, yeah. ALICE I agree with that on like, three different levels. Slavo-Krani. Like, yeah, let's do it. So, as we can see, the fire, it gets wrapped up within, y'know, by the 22nd, within a couple of weeks it's wrapped up, it's contained, you get it out by the 25th, it gets out by... I have a question, raising my hand. None of these trees around this little subdivision here, aside from the ones, the interstitial

ones, are like, burned. What's up with that? Is it just burning through grass? Or... It's burning so fast that it's not... so, as we discussed with our fire adapted species, these are the electroponderous pine, and they have this nice thick bark. Additionally, it takes these pine two or three years to show damage, so there's more mortality that happens here.

There's a lot of forest loss because of this fire but a lot of these trees in this picture will survive because the fire is moving so fast. It's just, you know, you need to heat this cambium to like 140-ish degrees on the inside and these are fire adapted species. So, that's why these trees survive. And you get the conspiracists about the Hawaiian fires who are like, look, the trees survived. The trees survived because they're adapted to it. This fire blew through so fast, but the trees are adapted to fire.

So we have some fire adapted species that we're looking at here. Excellent catch there in November. You get bonus points today. Oh, thank you. I would also note that, okay, we got no sidewalks here. This is a relatively modern subdivision. Looking at the urban planning and you're just thinking about how would I cycle in this? Okay, we got no sidewalks here. This is a relatively modern subdivision. ALICE. Looking at the urban planning and you're just thinking about how would I cycle in this?

JUSTIN. There's no defensible space. SEAN. These are all light timber, modern houses made of engineered lumber that's impregnated with petroleum-based glue. So all these things, you know, you have lots of defenses against fire, like the drywall, like various fireproofing systems, once they go, they go. ALICE I hate to say it, but we've found the only

possible plausible application for a lawn, at this point. JUSTIN No, that's not gonna help you at this scale, is the thing. I find a rot garden. At least with a lawn you can put a bulldozer through it and dig a big trench through the middle of it. Let me step back into the fed program here. So with the fire safe community there is both a mowed portion of the lawn, and an unmowed

portion of the lawn, scattered trees, but you have setback, as has been discussed, and you have some space, like, alright we got this ripping fire through here, but it can't light the house on fire because it's mowed grass. I'm a very anti-lawn guy, but in these fire prone communities, there is room for mown native grasses, which as we can see doesn't happen here. But honestly, at this scale, when we're talking about fire has burned this hot and this fast, fire safety community is going to help us, but we're talking about fire has burned this hot and this fast, fire safety means you gotta help us, but we're kinda too late here. Look, the whole shit is burned to the ground.

ALICE This is my house, this is my mile long Japanese rock garden. SEAN Also, useful against truckbobs! So, these uh, these more modern houses, these engineered lumber houses which are almost everything with the platform frame and so forth, they're fairly fire resistant in that the fire won't start, but when the fire starts, oh boy. Yep. Yep. It gets burned down and then everything here is knocked down. This photo's taken a month, excuse me, after the fire.

So there's been a bulldozer through here. So ultimately in this fire, 154,000 acres will be burned, 19,000 structures are destroyed, thousands are displaced. That's the impact. Those are our fire effects here. Damage estimates about $16.5 billion. Smoke from this fire will travel thousands of miles and expose most of the inhabited parts of California to some of the worst air quality they've seen in a long time.

In that smore sky... ALICE I remember all my friends in LA and San Francisco being like, hey, it's cool that I have to wear a respirator, y'know? SEAN Yeah, in that smoke it's not just like ash, but it's this town. It's these people. ALICE It's all the stuff that gives you every cancer not just like ash, but it's this town. It's these people. Literally. ALICE All the stuff that gives you like, every

cancer. Yeah, we're talking heavy metals, dioxins, asbestos, PFAS. Oh, I play with those too, don't play with those, those are a bad time. In 22 out of 24 tested water systems you find benzene. ALICE Oh! What a great chemical. ALICE Yeah, the chemical that gives you cancer instantly. ALICE But the molecular structure is so pleasing, is the thing.

ALICE So, is it a ring molecule, benzene, or am I misremembering? Yeah, okay. ALICE Yeah, benzene is the hexagon. ALICE Oh, nice. RILEY A friend of mine was just at my place, he got back from the Antarctic, he was a fuelie down there and they carried buckets five gallon buckets of benzene between the fuel stations and the benzene disposal. Christ on sale.

The nice thing is you don't have to wear a respirator because winds are between 30 and 50 knots. Cool. Nobody look at the dead zone around the American Antarctic station. Oh Jesus. For those of you who don't know benzeneene is like... if you could put cancer into a molecule, this is it. ALICE Mega cancer, yeah.

ALICE Yeah. JUSTIN Because all the cells see it and say, that looks like such an attractive molecule. ALICE Yeah, it's a ring molecule, I can bond to it on any of these little sites, y'know? JUSTIN Yeah, exactly. JUSTIN Yeah, so if you wanna go back here, you get cancer. You're just going to get cancer in the water. Also in the water you have PFOS and PFAFs, it's like 20 or 12,000 different chemicals, but you got them in there because a town, a couple of towns burned to the ground. It's not good when your town's burned to the ground. So Paradise went from a town of like

25,000 to a town of 5,000. ALICE Fuck. Jesus. JUSTIN Most of those people are never gonna come back, see the cancer stuff. ALICE Again, like, it's not city destroyed by climate change, we will do the Katrina episode, but it is absolutely TOWN destroyed by climate change. JUSTIN Alright, so next slide here.

Okay, so our fire is so big, it's 154,000 acres, you got a lot of dead trees in here. This is so- ALICE I do appreciate anyone wearing M81 woodland, God's plaid. ALICE Oh, I love that Drake song, yeah. ALICE Also, also green helmet. Green helmet. ALICE Yeah, yeah.

RILEY Yeah, you have to wear a helmet to work in these sites because of the overhead obstructions and, you know, problems. Also these are most likely migrant workers, just based on what I know about planting grids. ALICE Of course. It's all different kinds of extraction. Cool, perfect, and that guy's gonna get like fucking fifty different kinds of cancer. SEAN I'm just gonna quick finish my planting crew thought, these planting crews are fantastic.

These guys will put down just acres and acres and acres, and I've planted like acres on my own, and it's fucking hard work, and these guys will put it down like it's nobody's business. Like, these planting crews are just insane. And they get paid like twelve cents a tree. In the eastern US. In the western US it's a little bit more, but it's like cents and dollars a tree. It's insane. Look at where this guy's working. I'm going to zoom gender here. Look at where this person is working. They're working on the side of a mountain on a burned stand.

This is like, slope is like 15, 30%. They're crawling through like down timber. They got overhead obstacles and overhead hazards. This is not a safe environment. So, you're doing this for like maybe a dollar a tree that you put in the ground. But this is not a safe environment. So you're doing this for like, y'know, maybe a dollar a tree, that you put in the ground. But this is what you gotta do. Put trees in the ground. Are we taking a beer break, or are we keeping on? ALRIGHT, BEER BREAK. LIAM Hi, buddy.

ALICE Yeah, hi, buddy. Um, we're back, cool. We don't know where Roz is. I just, not to interrupt, but like, as a believer in socialism or barbarism, the barbarism sucks so fuckin' bad, dude. Like, I honestly like a break from this barbarism. JUSTIN A lot of... You know, I was out, I was, you know, I was trying to like, well now that the weather

is nice, I've been trying to bike again, I wanna do a lot better than last year where I was just depressed all year. This year I'm like, I'm gonna go biking. And I see a lot of people fishing in the Schuylkill and it's like, I always... Don't do that. Yeah. ...fuckin' like, those fish are probably not that good for you, right? Stay away from the benthic fish there. Especially like, right by where the refinery used to be.

Yep. That's where we're doing our sampling. So just don't eat the benthic fish out of the skookle and you'll probably be okay. We were finishing up, so these folks are paid between 12 cents and a dollar a tree, to put trees on this slope. Absolutely fuckin' barbarous. That's between, you know, 15 and 30%. ALICE This is my biggest problem, right. Is that, like, so much of what I want, as far as climate change goes, is a little policy I like to call Climate Stalin.

And people have their own interpretations of what I mean by Climate Stalin. SEAN She's right to say it at Ivan Anarchist. ALICE Yeah, what I mean is, like, total ideological mobilization of a society in favor of fighting climate change and nothing else. But there have been attempts... ALICE There are a couple other ways the biosphere is falling apart. JUSTIN I think that we discussed climate Tito?

That's cool. ALICE Yeah, yeah. There have been attempts, and often very authoritarian attempts, I think a lot about the Great Green Wall in China, which is a reforestation effort to attempt to, like, arrest the progress of the Gobi Desert. LIAM That's likely why we have Asian Longhorn Beetle. ALICE Yep. And it's not going so well. Because it turns out that when you, like, incentivize, not very thoughtfully, people

to, like, just plant trees, and then you get... in such a way that you can kind of go to the UN, or whoever, and say, we planted one billion trees, what happens is that you plant a bunch of monoculture and then, like, some kind of weather event just kills, y'know, four fifths of them the next year. HENRY Weather event would be lucky. Usually it's an invasive forest pest. But again, we're getting back to my workshop, and I'm having beers with my friends here. We're friends, we've been drinking together for six hours.

ALICE We're friends here. RILEY I have bad news. I'm a good hang, usually you guys are asking me about work shit, my work shit is bad shit. ALICE I'm a... I'm not a good hang, I'm a bad hang. SEAN What you, the listeners, don't know, is there's actually been a full three hours of this podcast we have cut out so far. ALICE Yeah, it was just a succession of, like, slurs.

I gave all three of these guys the tea. If you thought what we said about the Spaniards was bad. We were right to say it. The things you said about transgender women. Nova! I don't wanna get cancelled! You're fine. You're fine. Okay.

So, the other problem with these restoration efforts is there are not enough conservation stock nurseries out there. So, these folks are putting out there, they're putting like one-o nursery stock. So, you have to go out, you have to collect the pinecones, get the seeds out of those pinecones, put those seeds into a nursery bed somewhere and then raise them for a year to three years, five years, put them in the ground. So not only are we working with migrant crews who are underpaid and overworked and they're

doing like six, seven hours or six, seven days with 10 to 12 hour days, but also there are not enough conservation stock nurseries. Could all of this be solved with money? Yes. Will we solve this with money? So far, no. Next slide. Oh my God. Going back to civilian conservation for. Yes. Will we solve this with money? So far, no. Oh my god. Bring back the civilian conservation force.

Yes. With their mouth full of biscuits. I like that one. In many ways, FDR was the original climate Stalin. I try to mute myself when I'm eating, but sometimes I have to eat with... I'm sorry. You're fine bud, you're fine bud, this is amazing. The weird thing about the CCC is they made some insane decisions.

If you look at what they did in Pennsylvania, there's a bunch of Japanese and European larch, and you're like, why did you do that? If you wanted to put a conifer out there, there were like seven native species you could have chosen. It was the 30s I said, drunk! SEAN In the Midwest they at least planted red pine. ALICE They gave it a shot. SEAN No, like, these are doable, the reason the

conservation stock nurseries and the seed gatherers are gone is we've just disinvested from them. I just read a New York Times written about this, and it was like, we could just do this. This is just money. ALICE The thing that strikes me about so much reforestation right, is that trees being bitch-made operate on an entirely different time scale from us, and one that's not very convenient to us having realized we fucked up extremely badly, like fifteen years after we should have done.

And so, they take a lot of time to get reestablished and stuff, and a lot of money and effort. ALICE When I was very small, I was at the Vale Brewery in Richmond, Virginia, and I got to see one of those big-ass tree moving machines. ALICE Like log forwarders? LIAM No, no, no, they dig the tree out of the ground. ALICE Oh. Huh. JUSTIN They dig the tree out, and they move it somewhere else.

I forget if it was putting the tree there or taking it out. And I was so disappointed to realize ten years later, that tree died. Yep. ALICE It's sort of like, so much of the tree surgery stuff is if, like, on humans we were like, we invented head transplant surgery and then just refused to accept that it didn't work. LIAM Oh, I played with that. JUSTIN That's called grafting.

Yeah, and grafting does work. So, this is a solvable problem, we know how to do it. These problems are not limited to the west coast, these problems are so bad here on the east coast, myself and other foresters are starting our own nurseries, cause you just can't get baby trees. You just can't, you can't buy them. Like they're just not there, cause we've just fundamentally disinvested it from this. ALICE I thought that the free market... SEAN Yeah, for a month and a- see, here's the thing,

that's why I'm here, is like, the foresters, we are looking at that hundred year cycle and the free market is looking at MAYBE the end of this quarter. Yeah. ALICE and LESTER Yeah. Different time scales. JUSTIN Yeah. So, it's not that this is... ALICE It can only be understood by, like, climate Stalin, if climate Stalin was a kind

of ant. JUSTIN Yeah, I mean, you don't have to be like an unhuman being, you just have to think beyond the end of the quarter cycle. It's very doable. You just have to be trained to think that way, you have to work that way. We just have to get out of this capitalist, colonialist mindset of, it's going to produce money at this rate. Now...

ALICE We have to train a core of climate monk warriors. World monks. JUSTIN They're called... November, they're called foresters. We have a title. We have a whole position. We exist. We have a society.

Nobody gives a shit about us. We do this every fucking day. But what if you ran the forestry like a fool? Ross Perot! Is that you, daddy? Honestly, it can make money. It's just like, you gotta do other shit. You don't know we work as good as you want

So now I do want to dress like the monoculture stuff Yeah, you got a lot of monocultures here because like in the rest in us you have like seven dominant species It's not like the eastern us like where we're like, oh, yeah, it is a normal site We got 15 12 15 species here You got like three or four usually dot that dominate a site because these are different climates and different things So like yeah, it's more monoculture, because that's what it is. So. If I'm not mistaken, even out here in the east, we're still more monoculture than we

were before. Yeah, to some extent. Again, you can only raise so many species in the nursery and work through so many issues. Alright, next slide. Alright, let's get into the Xboxes here. So between the camps... ALICE You know it's bad when like, three guys in Tyvek suits have to stand around in what used to be your house.

JUSTIN There's at least one lady there. ALICE I don't assume... It seems to be ten ladies. JUSTIN At least. Okay. So, again, November is just out here. ALICE Two female presenting persons. JUSTIN Two women doing left, right, and center.

Okay, so PG&E will eventually declare bankruptcy in 2019 following the campfire in the Ghost Ship Fire Sea previous episode. They shouldn't have been allowed to do that, they should have guillotined the executives. It'll get worse in a second. Alright, so they're looking at $30 billion of fire damage from the campfire and a couple other fires that they're found to have fought for because of these lines they know they have issues with. So they will eventually be fined for 25 billion dollars, 13 of which go to the victims in

the fire victims fund, half of that is cash and half of that is stock in PG&E. One PG&E executive, and November holds yourself for this one, calls this an unjustified windfall. ALICE Gie-la-teen. ALICE Yep. ALICE Three simple syllables that ease our way to the path of climate style and considerably. RILEY You could just live in paradise for a while and tell me how that works for you, bud. Drink the benzene water.

ALICE Yeah, I was gonna say, go like, move buckets of benzene back and forth, and then tell me how you feel about it. JUSTIN Yeah, you gotta do some manual labor, I think. Or you choose the PTA. ALICE Moving to South America is the only continent that has any hope of putting guys like this in our lulag. ZACH So by the end of 2023, because that's when I wrote this slide originally, there were

at least $19.9 billion in damages given out, or sorry, at least $19.9 billion in damages awarded, $11 billion given out to 720,000 claimants across a couple of fires. I mean, that's a decent number of Xboxes. It's not worth it. Shit ain't worth it. No. No. Yeah, it's not worth it. Shit ain't worth it. No. No.

Yeah. And, like, you don't get a billion dollars for filing this suit, you just don't get that. A lot of that money went to the state for putting the fire out. Mmhm. And to, y'know, lawyers. And I say this as a former law student, like... Okay. Ah.

As much as you try and, like, Aron Brockovich this shit, you're also diminishing the amount of, like, sass... ZACH Yeah, so there are a lot of people hurt by this fire who will never see a dime from this, like, if you have an asthma attack, and you live in San Francisco but you have an asthma attack because of the ash and the stuff, eh, you're kinda fucked on this one, bud. If you get cancer from, y' cancer from the asbestos that was airborne, but you live in Sacramento, it's just kind of the way it is.

Yeah, it's not great. Out of the $25 billion fine, $11 billion would go to insurance companies and reinsurance companies as well as hedge funds that own various investments into these things. A lot of money goes to the state and feds for putting the fire out, which obviously they deserve, they put the fire out, PG&E started it, PG&E eventually gets convicted for 84 counts of manslaughter and pays a maximum fine of, hold on for this one, $3.5 million. Nobody goes to jail, and by the end of twenty... Yeah. That's, uh, so, like, one of the more, like, interesting lectures I ever had in law school

was I, um, so, I went to law school in Glasgow, the professor of commercial law, um, there was a guy called Mark Versp, um, very very impressive, I only had a couple of lectures, but, like, I had a corporate regulation lecture from him, and one of the things he suggested was like, start putting motherfuckers in prison. He didn't use the word motherfuckers, right? He just said executives. But like, he was right. It's the only thing that, like, has any plausible effects.

And even then, it's easy to control for. You have to come up with some kind of effective sanctions on these people, otherwise it's just gonna keep being like this, while the situation worsens forever. ALICE In China, they will execute you. And... ALICE See, this is always... I was like, ahhh... JUSTIN This results in a significantly less high amount of bullshit.

ALICE I have mixed feelings, right, because a lot This results in a significantly less high amount of bullshit. I have mixed feelings, right, because a lot of the stuff about, like, in China they will execute you is based on a lot of internal politics about who gets executed and who doesn't, right? But like, you do have to f*** at least some of them. You have to... You have to f***. You gotta break a few eggs!

Bring us back to Spanish. What's the thing the French said about admirals? Pour en cruiser les autres. You have to, like, execute a few of them to encourage the rest. Right? Otherwise... Once you hit a net worth of one billion dollars, you are fair game. Taylor Swift, we're coming for you.

In this case you get convicted of 84 counts of manslaughter. At least. And this is, again, we're discounting everybody who is impacted in the future. We're saying today we know 84 people died, and everybody who gets cancer from this, eh, it's not my fucking problem. ALICE I just... Oh my god. I think part of it is, like, just the kind of unattributability, right? If fucking... If when you got cancer, when you got diagnosed with cancer, you had a Call of Duty kill cam

that showed you the fucking cell replication thing that caused your cancer, we would be like, a lot less insane about this, because we would be able to know, we would be able to say, it is this specific guy, wearing his grey t-shirt, who has hedge fund opinions about San Francisco local politics, who is responsible for having given you cancer, and then you could go to his house and you could f***ing Tana. ALICE Yes. Leave that in. Leave that in.

ALICE Leave it in! Leave it in! Leave it in! Leave it in! You know, the people who are really deserving a punishment by society are, you know, 45 guys in Texas with an IQ of 68. Oh, so this is Spanish Foreign Legion. They're enjoying the Spanish Foreign Legion. I got you, Niffa.

I got you! This is the thing, anyone can do my job, so long as you have a concept of the callback you can do my job. That's not true though, you guys did just an episode and you guys were calling out, on Trash Truth you guys called out ballgame and a bunch of weird shit, and I was like, look, I'm an educated person, I have elevated degrees, I don't know what is happening here. I don't have an undergraduate degree. I don't believe you need to be high IQ to be a fan of ball games.

Those hips don't lie. This is the thing, yeah, for... You imagine the fuckin' Lenape ball game. That's lacrosse. People are throwing like, uh... I'm the like, Bell Baller chick. I'm the Bill Baller chick from lacrosse. I believe in you.

That's just Bellachick. That dude's a fuckin'... We had a good system. I remember when they saw Jacob Hollister. I was thinking, we cheated every game, we had a good system, don't worry about it. You're throwing... You had a good system. Honest and synadic.

The thing I gotta stress about this, is specifically it's the thing Felix Biedemann said that always stuck with me, which is that, like, podcasting is a very very easy job that's difficult to do, and that very few people can do well. That's the thing I'm clinging to, because if that's not true, and anybody can do this, I'm fucked. LIAM No you can't! ALICE Shut up!

Speaking of which, let's move on. My wife is starting to get mad at me. JUSTIN Yeah, my wife is just giving up on me at this point. ALICE She... they should be mad at me, I'm not holding this up. LIAM It doesn't matter, you're lovely and everybody loves you. So by... I will have. Think of Milkshake!

By June 2020, PG&E exits bankruptcy, and they're back as a functioning country, or company. So. So bankruptcy has no consequences. Only the katana has consequences. You can buy them off the internet. They're a utility company. They are a utility company. They cannot go bankrupt and not come back because no one would have electricity.

You would not have the institutional knowledge. Obviously you should nationalize them, we don't live in that society because of California ideology as well as several other things like this podcast to an end kicking and screaming you can't just probably not you cannot you cannot just nationalize it because we don't live there anymore Ross I, I'm going to break your leg. All right. We got rid of that in 1918. All right. What did we learn here?

What did we learn? So did this fire need to happen at all? No. No. Could we have prevented this, class? No. We could have prevented this a number of ways. In 2009, we could have intervened in the wires.

In 2011, in 2012, we could have intervened on those wires. We could have done any fuel reductions work at all in the West Coast. It largely has not happened since the 90s and is still – Biden put a bunch of money into the Forest Service and fuels reduction, still still getting underway because every time the Forest Service goes out there, they're getting their shit sued. Again, the Forest Service has been wrong before, but you do have to do forest management. Okay. So, people are doing stuff. Does this need to happen? Absolutely not. As we discussed with the Southeast United States, it has a similar fire regime, slightly

different elevation, similar conifer dominance, and we do not see Athens burning to the ground like we saw Paradise burning to the ground. And that is because in the southeast, you still have a prescribed fire culture that was largely held onto by the Cherokee and other First Nations, despite Jaboy, who was his name? The president, I just went right out of my head, I see his face, Jackson. Andrew Jackson's attempt to eliminate the First Nations. Boo!

The Cherokee tried to assimilate and they were punished hard as farts. Yeah, them and the other First Nations down there, like the Seminoles, you have strong fire culture in the Southeastern United States, and so where you have strong prescribed fire culture in these fire adapted systems, you don't have huge wildfire because you don't have fire fuels build up. It's just gone. You know, you just burn that shit off. This is like the one metric the southeastern

US does better than anywhere else. SEAN 100%. ALICE That in like, Buc-ee's locations, like... SEAN When I was getting my parents in Wisconsin I saw a sign for Buc-ee's, and it was like, Buc-ee's, that way, 800 miles, and I was like, fuck. The south comes for us all. I will not go back.

You will not take me back below the Mason, Dixon line, except for like when you pay me to go back, then I will go back. I do have a price. I'm very viable. It's very low. All right. Next slide, please. I work in forestry.

This is not a big money sector. All right. What do you want from me? Okay. So these are some pictures that I took yesterday in the field. So this is how you return fire to an area. So you cannot just go out there with a drip torch or with your helotorch and just throw fire at shit

and expect it to work. So photo one is where we want the stand to be. This is a week after fire. We can see fire happen. We have good fire effects in there. Photo two is what this site used to be. We can bring this site into a place where we can burn it again

effectively. We can, excuse me, knock the maples out, knock these invasive species out in here. Ross, you see that green in there? You want to highlight that for me real quick? So, that is largely Japanese Barbary and the Florida Rose. These are invasive. Prescribed fire is the thing. It's kind of made at controlling invasive species. you have a stand established for fire, you can kill it But if it's like three and four you can't burn that shit out So, okay So to get these stands in a place where you can return fire to them then again This is in the East Coast context you have to work on them

these these stands are like if you had a fireplace and you have a butler who comes into the fireplace every day, and they say, ah, master you're expecting a fire, I'm gonna load the fireplace up across the western United States, and this fireplace has been loaded for the last 100 years, and then someone goes and lights a fire. That fire's gonna burn the house down. So you have to do fuels reduction work before you can start lighting fires in there. You gotta get rid of these big ass logs in this grass. And fire doesn't get, like, prescribed fire burns too low of a temperature and too quickly

to get rid of these big logs. So you have to go through, you have to masticate, you have to do like hand stuff to get it out of there. This is all doable and achievable, it just takes money. To get three and four in a place where we can burn it, we have to masticate this, we have to spray this, and then we can start to introduce fire. We cannot burn our way through this. As you can see in three and four, we tried to burn it in this stand, and that shit ain't

work, dog. You can see the fire scar. ALICE I can see the char on four, and it doesn't matter, because it hasn't- SEAN All of these stands are within 500 feet of each other. It's a matter of setting this up and doing fire. Alright. So, next slide please.

Oh, this is a fuckin' cool as hell phone. This is Lessons of Darkness right here. Yeah, so let's wrap this up. We don't need to see this every day, we will, until we continue to take natural systems seriously and invest in them. And if we don't, we're gonna see more bad stuff. As I've been proven right, by time. ALICE You gotta divest from oil and gas, regardless

of what the oil and gas industry says. SEAN Yeah, we need climate solid yesterday. ALICE Like now, literally yesterday, you need to do renewable energy, and I hate to say it, but you gotta do nuclear. Actually, I don't hate to say it, I love to say it. SEAN Shit works. ALICE Irradiate the shit out of people, you gotta do it. SEAN I think we're all big nuclear guys love to say it. Shit works. Irradiate the shit out of people, you gotta do it.

I think we're all big nuclear guys. Shit works, we're the one. Big nuclear guys and gals, yeah. And then invasive species just makes our fuel loading problems worse because they burn in different ways, they burn hotter, and they interrupt the natural cycle and climate change, and it throws all of it in the whack, you just throw the fire seasons off, you throw the climate off, you throw all this shit off. So if you could do climate change, I would say don't. You happen to be leaning on the big climate change button, I'd say, yeah, they kinda move

off there, bud. Come over here. Let's have a beer. ALICE Yeah, everything I read about climate change is like, scientists worry about whether or not we've hit the tipping point for accelerated warming, but we don't know yet. And then a bunch of things about how maybe... We stopped worrying a loooong time ago.

We stopped worrying so long ago. I don't talk about how doomer I am on the podcast, and I probably won't. Excellent. Alright, so that's me done. Moving along. If we ever push to do the fossil fuels episode, then we'll talk about how doomer we all are. Yeah, well, that'll be a fun one And by fun one I mean, mhm. Moving along, I'm done.

Thank you- Oh, sorry. The last thing is, we can apply most of these lessons broadly, like if we look at fire in Brazil, that's mostly human driven, fire in Australia, again, it's mostly a fuels problem, the Quebec fires, that shit shouldn't have been on fire, most of that is peat stuff. And you need to see some of the cattle ranches to the loo lugs. JUSTIN Some of these wildfire problems seem relatively easy to solve, just with manpower. And money. ALICE So much of the Californian context of this, specifically, is like, one of these

so-called technocrats refused to do any of the obvious technocratic solutions for some fucking reason. Well, y'know, they all have economics degrees. This shit burned down Nancy Pelosi's winery, y'know? And if that isn't the biggest tragedy here, I don't know what is. It's not my fault I was stupid enough to get an economics degree. Well, y'know, that's kind of... Criminology degree, and fuck if this shit isn't a crime. And a math degree, because I'm stupid enough to get an economics degree. ALICE Well, you know, that's kind of... SEAN Well, a criminology degree, and fuck if this

shit isn't a crime. ALICE And a math degree, because I'm stupid. SEAN This is an interesting, this is like a live discussion in criminology, because one of the problems with criminology is that it was largely invented to measure motherfuckers' skulls to see why they were stabbing people, and it's a remarkably poor way of understanding, like, not just crime, but also harm. And if you wanna be extremely woke about this, as I do, you might, instead of criminology, call it zemiology, the study of harm, and start thinking about things like this, instead of, y'know, like, muggings, or whatever.

Or as much as, I guess. So I have just this deep, dark desire to work in the worst things possible, and unfortunately gotten myself involved in ecocide, and there's a lot of ecocide we could discuss with some of this stuff. But... Depressing episode, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third. ALICE'S SONG PLAYS... music guy you ought to know. Hello, November, Liam, Roz, and Guest. And Nailed It!

Nailed It! And got them in the right order. Thank you, I've been here for hours and I finally get some appreciation. In my younger years, before my body betrayed me, I did the type of work known as lifting boxes of things. ALICE Oh, don't do that, it's really bad for you. JUSTIN On the plus side, this usually came with the benefit of driving a forklift. ALICE Sick.

JUSTIN Which is objectively fun as hell. So I was mostly okay with- yep, forklifts are fun. This story is about the first warehouse I worked in, and one which had boxes of the worst things to lift, rocks. Or more specifically, flooring tile. Oh, okay. To give you an image of this warehouse, imagine a place with 25 rows of three-story racking systems filled with one-ton skids of flooring tile. These racks, in particular, looked, well, let's say a bit suspect, with the uprights

being only about three inches thick. The uprights, I assume, are these guys here. And while I learned, after I departed, that the Ministry of Labour had come in and ordered all the racks taken down and replaced. Their abject shittiness was helpful to me, as you will see below. It was a huge building to be sure, and one belonging to a company that had safety training that amounted to... Well, try not to break anything. ALICE At least put on the boss a video of like,

stop, Lefue or Klaus. JUSTIN LAUGHS. JUSTIN That is something that happens in American warehouses. ALICE Oh, I believe it, yeah. JUSTIN Yeah. JUSTIN Whether this referred to bones or tile remained unclear. I had asked when I first started if we got hard hats, to which the foreman replied, "'If a box falls and hits you in the head, the hard hat is only gonna keep your face

pretty for the coffin.'" ALRIGHT, OKAY. ALRIGHT, hold on, aren't forklifts meant to come with an overhead protection on the roll cage anyway? You might be walking by the shelf and the thing falls on you. ALICE Don't get out of the forklift. Stay in the forklift the whole time.

Do a kind of like, mecha thing. JUSTIN The thing is, for the sake of your mother, you should look pretty for the coffin. ALICE That's true. You don't want to close the casket. JUSTIN Yeah. Exactly. So, the answer was no, we did not get hard hats. Now, these skids...

ALICE Close casket at my Muslim Catholic funeral. Muslim Catholic Jewish funeral. Yeah. Oh, we're multicultural here. Yeah. I have to find some people who like each other, oh my god. Now these skids came in different dimensions, and most were your standard skid size. But there was, however, one particular company that used long skids,

just to be fuckin' special. We had a specific bay layout for these, but because training was lacking, new operators didn't always know this. ALICE Oh boy. JUSTIN On the day in question I was working on one of the aisles adjacent to a regular width rack. Unbeknownst to me, earlier in the week, a new operator had placed a long skid on the top level of the rack.

ALICE It's the one that keeps the long skids in their special long skid quarantine area. JUSTIN You would hope so, yeah. Now this isn't necessarily a problem, because rags can hold one, brackets one as a numeral, long skid. But somewhat critically, it cannot hold two. And due to the size, you won't be able to see the long skid from one side. Well, I was picking my order, blissfully unaware of the goings on in the aisle next to me, an operator was putting a long skid into the bay that already had a long skid.

ALICE So, hitting the critical two long skid limit. JUSTIN There was no way for him to see the long skid from where he was, so I don't fault him at all for what happens next. I heard a creak, and saw the rack in front of me move about two inches. So I ran, thinking the rack was giving way. This almost definitely saved my life, as the forklift on the other side pushed the long skid out of the bay, where it fell twenty feet, and landed about two feet from where I ended up. ALICE If it sucks, hit the bricks.

Just start running. LIAM Yeah, run for it. JUSTIN Well, you gotta hit the bricks or the bricks are gonna hit you. ALICE Yeah. Yeah. Now... ALICE You can turn some switch, like... JUSTIN I could say, I shit myself, but all I remember was numbness and detachment.

So you wouldn't know if you shit yourself. ALICE Yeah, yeah, that's something you find out later after the fact. I put my order sheet down on my forklift, looked at the foreman who would come running, and said, I'm going to the bar for a bit, I won't be in tomorrow. ALICE Fuck yeah. Hell yeah. JUSTIN I did end up going back to work there for another

six months. ALICE Oh, hell yeah. JUSTIN I wore a hard hat every day, and I guess my advice is to be very discerning about which warehouses you work in. ALICE I mean, you do your best, but there's, like, not a lot of warehouse jobs. JUSTIN Well, y'know, you have to work in Amazon now, they will just crush you deliberately. ALICE Yeah, yeah, yeah, the robot, like, the humanoid

robot will crush you as part of its training program. JUSTIN Yes. Love the show, all, keep up the good work. From Jim. ALICE Thank you, Jim. Sorry that you almost got crushed, uh, that you almost got crushed. Glad that you didn't get crushed. JUSTIN Hope they're in a better place now.

LIAM Yeah, what helps, Jesus Christ. ALICE Not an Amazon fulfillment center, is the main thing. JUSTIN Yes. Well this was a paving, uh, flooring fulfillment warehouse. ALICE Amazon will sell you floor tiles, I'm pretty sure. JUSTIN This is... I don't think they've indicated flooring tiles. ALICE Jeff Bezos didn't get dedicated flooring... ALICE This is a good point, yeah, halfway through

the podcast I had to go out and grab the mouse I ordered earlier today. ALICE Do you have a mouse wheel now? Do you have a functioning mouse wheel? JUSTIN No, I haven't put it on the computer yet. ALICE I'm gonna light you on fire. All right. That's the shit. And the shit. You're doing a full burn on the podcast. If the people want more Kevin, hey, if they want more Kevin, where can they find you?

God damn. I don't. All right, cool. I didn't we got any commercials before we go thing in Philly that I will be hosting. It involves disaster movies. I don't have all the details for it yet, I will in the next episode. ALICE Alright, good night everybody.

JUSTIN Wait wait wait wait. In this, the month of Playprol, we must plug Boonta Vista. JUSTIN Yes, that's a good point. It is Playprol. Yeah. Boonta Vista podcast. It's the only podcast I have merchandise from. ALICE OOOOOOOOH!