It Could Happen Here Weekly 150

friends worked there for much longer than that. I grew up on the periphery of this industry, and I have never seen the people in it and the people who have left as angry as they are now. People are pissed, and they should be. In the last six years, Boeing has killed three hundred and forty six people. In the years to come, they may well kill more, and not a single one of them had to die. This is

how it happened. What is Boeing? The short answer, obviously is that it's a company that makes both civilian and military airplanes. It also does some other things, including working on space travel, but that's not our media concern here. The long answer, however, and it's the long answer that we need, is that Boeing is the poster child for the post World War II labor, corporate, militarist alliance. Boeing itself was a sometimes uneasy alliance of workers, engineers, and

the army that made civilian and military airplanes. This is also not a terrible description of the entirety of the post war United States, with the proviso at the airplanes the US is making, We're dropping bombs at Vietnam. The unwinding of Boeing that we're all watching today as doors fall off of planes and more and more grounded, is

the unwinding of that America. Here I turned to the anthropologist David Graber from his book The Utopia of Rules quote, I think what happened is best considered as a kind of shifting class allegiances on the part of the managerial staff of major corporations from an uneasy de facto alliance

with their own workers to one with investors. As John Kenneth Galbraith long ago pointed out, if you create an organization geared to produce perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft usel lodges, those who make it up will, if left at their own devices, tend to concentrate their efforts on producing more and better perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft usel lodges, rather than thinking primarily of what will make the most money

for shareholders. What's more, since for most of the twentieth century, a job in a large bureaucratic megafirm meant a lifetime promise of employment involved in the process, managers and workers alike tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard over and against meddling owners and investors. This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name. It's called corporatism. One mustn't romanticize it. It was, among

other things, the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had interest in common, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic holes, and that finances were an alien, parasitic force and drove them to their ultimate murderers.

a very different conception of what a corporation is. It was a social entity composed of a variety of classes and had an obligation to take care of them. It had an obligation to its workers, to its engineers, to its customers, and even to its country. By absorbing unions into the corporate system, the system itself had been forced to adapt a more sociological self conception that vastly differed from the ways corporations both view themselves and behave today.

As Grabern notes this class coalition largely wrote capitalists out of the equation, reducing them to merror holders of stock, not managers. In Boeing's case, those managers were engineers at basically all levels of the company. Now we must note here that in the post World War two era engineers were extremely powerful, and this is not just true of capitalist nations. So the US, to some extent, had an early start on the power of engineers in the running

of New deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority. Engineers are powerful in communist countries as well, and it's true in quasi socialist countries that have just liberated themselves from the old European empires. These engineers were both extremely well paid and very influential everywhere you can find them, from Belgium to Peru, and the only real difference is whether

they were trained by the Americans or the Soviets. Now, the fact that you, the listener, are not reporting to an engineer right now at your job is assigned that they didn't exactly hold on to power. In fact, the last vestiges of this class of extremely powerful engineers aren't really even em Boeing at all. The most prominent remain of the Great Engineering International is Shijim Ping, who is part of a class in China known as the Red Engineer.

If you want to know more about the Red Engineers, we unfortunately do not have time to really go into them here, but c Joel Andreas's book Rise of the Red Engineers for the most famous treatment of them.

of the market, effectively engineered their own destruction. The latter engineers leading the company to financial ruin is to some extent the story of Boeing, But to get there we need to take a look at how the worker management Alowience Graver described came a part. I have talked at length on this show about the economic crisis of the seventies in which everything the entire consensus that had held

the post war era together fell apart. One of the key elements is that in the nineteen seventies, manufacturing becomes zero sum. If manufacturing output increases in one country, it can largely only come at the expense of production somewhere else. This is the product of a general crisis of structural

overproduction and structural under consumption. This meant that it was no longer possible to incorporate everyone into the capitalist welfare system while also retaining corporate profits, and so someone was going to have to lose everything. It was either going to be the capitalist or the workers. And the people who lost everything, as I think we're all aware of living in the world that we do now, were the

workers whose power was systematically destroyed. But that arly, the story of the destruction of unions and destruction of the leftbore broadly is a story for another day for our purposes. The important class that was destroyed in the period of the seventies is the class of managerial engineers, and these engineers were destroyed by a takeover of Corporate America by the shareholders the Corporatist Alliance had previously held at bay.

The takeover of Corporate America by finance schools had two mechanisms. The leveraged buyout, better known as corporate rating, was carried out by people like Michael Milken, and the internal movement of executives from inside the corporations themselves, led by people like Jack Welsh, who will meet both of these people

in detail later in this story. But the details of the process of how exactly the finance schools came to control Corporate America turn out to be extremely important because Boeing is destroyed by both of the two mechanisms coming together at the same time. Now, as the eighties dawned, the world lived in fear of a new kind of

financial device, the leveraged buyout. The exact mechanisms of the leveraged buyout are slightly complicated, but the short version is that Michael Milken, a bond salesman who I eventually am going to do a fall behind the bastard's episode on because oh my God is the evil and there simply is not space to elaborate on all the stuff that he did here, including this off that eventually is going to send him to prison, figured out a way for a person or a group too, with very little actual

cash on hand to very quickly take on an unbelievable amount of debt, use it to buy a company, and then sell that company for parts to pay back the debt, pocketing the difference as profit. This was an instant, existential danger to a corporate America. Previously, corporate takeovers were extremely difficult. Attempting to get two hundred million dollars to buy a company required you to have two hundred million dollars on hand.

But now with the leveraged buyout, a group of yahoos with a tiny amount of money could simply buy a company for higher Vans stock price, loot it for parts, and destroy it. This completely changed the balance of power between shareholders and corporations. One of the best accounts of this era is from the anthropologist Karen Hoe in her book Liquidated in Ethnography of Wall Street. The book was a product of the field work she did at a Wall Street investment bank in the nineties. And I really

cannot emphasize this book enough. This book is incredible. Everyone should read. It is a book that genuinely changed my life. And one of the things that she talks about is this moment, the moments of leverage buyouts, and the way that it is constantly brought up by the people that she is working with at this bank when she's wing her which she's doing around topological field work. Everyone she talks to talks about this moment where the corporate raids

really got going as the moment the shareholder revolution began. Now, we talked earlier about how in post war America, the corporation was a social entity with responsibilities to its workers and country. For the shareholders running the new shareholder revolution, corporations had exactly one job, getting them more money to

raise stock prices. They called this shareholder value. And now the disciples of shareholder value were able to wield the ability to simply buy companies out wholesale and bend them to the ends of shareholder value directly. This is what is known as the shareholder revolution. Now, do you know what else is a revolution in the ways that y' all experience capitalism and mass culture at our jobs? It is the products and service is that support this podcast.

to appease the shareholder value fanatics. Control of corporate America had shifted from the old managerial worker alliance to the new shareholder value financiers. Now, the problem with these shareholder value people running companies is that they are viscerally physically incapable of long term planning. Don't take my word for it, here's Karen hoe quote to actualize their central identity as being immediately responsive to their own changing relationship with the market,

including employees, products, and so on. Their strategy is, in a sense to have no strategy. Ironically, having no law long term strategy is contradictory and potentially self defeating in that investment banks often find themselves making drastic changes, only to realize months or weeks later that those changes who

are unnecessary, premature, and extremely costly. For example, in chapter five, I describe how investment bankers, in part because of their access to sensitive proprietary information, are not only fired in an instance, but must leave the physical premises of the

building within fifteen to thirty minutes. Given how crucial the control of knowledge and the protection of inside information are for Wall Street investment banks, it seems self defeating that they do not praise any premium on loyalty, despite the fact that firms try above all to enforce secrecy. They accept and maintained this volatility in revolving door policy. To make this clear, what carrot Ho is describing is that investment banks, on the one hand, turn over like a

third of their staff every six months. And yet also they are so reliant on the secrecy of this proprietary information that they're using to make their investment decisions that they are kicking the people. They are firing out of the building in like fifteen minutes, so they don't have time to plan or leak information. But again they're also just firing these people on mass, so they're defeating the entire point of their operations. These people cannot plan ahead.

And the reason that they cannot plan ahead isn't just that they're sort of like naked disciples of pure increase in stock price. What Liquidated describes is that these people believe that they are effectively constantly reacting to near instantaneous market changes. Right, they can't sort of make any kind of long term plan because the market is the thing that's making the plan, like the sort of mythical abstraction of them. Market is what is doing all of the

actual allocations. So they just have to sort of like sit there and have no plan and quote unquote respond to what the market is doing. Now, large corporations have always to some extent, acted as long term planning engines because they have to Corporations have to do things like research and development, They have to plan product lines, they

have to make long term decisions about resource allocation. The shareholder value people are incapable of giving a shit about any of this because all they care about is immediate stock price movement, because they think that immediate stock price movement reflects the will of the great efficiency planning engine

of the market. And you could begin to see here why it would be a bad idea if these people, who literally cannot create long term plans did something like, for example, take control of the world's largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft. Now, the shareholder value people also believe that people are effectively interchangeable. And they believe this because and this is a very key part of why the shareholder value people and why these sort of finance people have

reshaped the world the way they do. They have reshaped the world in their own image. And all of these sort of investment bankers are interchangeable, right. All of these fucking bankers are fired all of the time, and they move from firm to firm, and it is fine for them.

But the thing is, you can't do this with the design of your entire aircraft because unlike in finance, where every single one of these clowns is really just a replacement level bozo whose qualifications are being able to stumble through the chain role and vaguely remember calculus, kiss, ask, and play golf. Aerospace Engineers actually do a difficult job, and it requires extraordinarily large bodies of embedded knowledge to

do this job correctly. Now, bringing in a bunch of people who think you can just fucking replace aerospace engineers will have no negative influences on Boeing in the future. Pay no attention to the man behind the mirror. Everything is fine. Do you know what else is fine? It is the products and services that support this podcast. And

we are back the shareholder value fanatics. The investors who are now taking control of Corporate America also believe that mass firings make companies more valuable because it makes them more efficient. They believe that offshoring makes a company more valuable because it makes it more efficient. It doesn't actually matter what the effect these moves have on the company and its ability to produce products and its ability to

produce money. It doesn't matter at all, because that's how the people who can control stock prices by buying the stocks think the world works, and so if you do these things, the stock price will go up. All quote unquote creating shareholder value means is convincing a bunch of dipshit quants working one hundred and twenty hours a week that your company is valuable, so they buy it for a higher price. And these are the people who reshape

American capitalism to their whims. Now importantly for our story, they're also the people who ran the second phase of the corporate rating era, the mergers and acquisitions boom through the nineties and really to this day. Wall Street bankers began to encourage companies to buy out other companies as a mechanism of raising their stock price. This is, you know, the acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. They also heavily push

merging companies together. In the nineties. The buzzerod behind this was quote unquote synergy. Buying companies or merging companies could quote leverage synergies between companies to grow shareholder value. Side of the shareholder value fantasy lands, Most of these mergers and acquisitions either did nothing to help the company if the acquisitions were small, or were a complete disaster that

destroyed both companies. The bankers who orchestrated these mergers and acquisitions didn't give a shit though, because they got paid on commission. It did not matter to them what happened afterwards. All that matters is that the deal goes through. And this is where we returned to Boeing because in nineteen ninety seven Boeing made an acquisition that would fuck the company forever. They bought one of their longtime rivals, an aircraft company known as McDonald douglas. Now hitherto, Boeing had

been relatively insulated from the shareholder revolution. McDonald Douglas, however, was not. Its CEO was a man with the incredible name Harry Stone Cipher. Stone Cipher is different from most aerospace executives because he wasn't a McDonald douglas corporate man. He came from Jack Welch's at a Rule Electric And it's here we need to introduce the other mechanism through which the shareholder revolution was realized, a new breed of

CEOs led by the man himself, Jack Welsh. Now we are not going to spend an enormous amount of time talking about Jack Welsh in this episode, because Hit Cools one media podcast behind the Bassard has three hours of episode about this man, which you should go listen to their good The short version of it that we're going to give here is that Jack Welsh is the man

who invented the bass layoff. He was one of the first CEOs to figure out that, again, you could raise stock prices by selling off profitable divisions and firing workers who are making the company money because shareholders are ideologically driven maniacs who would believe Welsh's manipulated balance sheets that show the company was doing better than ever even as it sold off all of its assets. He was also one of the first people to start practicing mass outsourcing,

replacing workers directly employed by General Electric with contractors. Soon he was outsourcing entire divisions. Offshoring followed Welsh move jobs from highly paid and highly trained union employees in the US to ununionized workers in places like India and Mexico. I think people generally kind of understand that offshoing lowers quality,

but why does that actually happen. It's not about something like the natural skill of the workers, which is the way it can kind of be presented in these sort of nationalist accounts. It is about the level of violence that can be inflicted on people. In places like India and Mexico and China, there is an extraordinary amount of

violence that can be inflicted on the working class. And because of this violence, because of their ability to destroy unions and because of their ability to force people into poverty by taking their land, people get paid less money to work faster. And those people who are being paid less money to work faster with worse training are going to be worse at a job than people who are paid more to do a better slow. And Jack Welch

wants this. He wants to sell shitty, low cost products because they're cheaper to make than anything that actually works. The long term consequences of this are a disaster. Welch drove General Electric, one of the greatest engines of American capitalism for a century, into the ground. Even after a massive government bailout in two thousand and eights, it barely exists today. Harry Stone Cipher, the CEO of the company

Boeing was about to buy, said this about Jack Welch. Quote, Certainly, Jack Welch is one of the great leaders in my mind, and of course he was selected as CEO of the century by Fortune magazine a couple years ago, and of course about twenty years ago, that same magazine coined the phrase neutron Jack, and of course they vilified him at

every turn out. Neutron Jack, by the way, refers to a neutron bomb, because effectively what he was doing was firing all the workers and leaving only the sort of like physical capital assets, like leaving all of the machines intact, which is what a neutron bomb is supposed to do.

like five. Right, so this should have been like Goliath eating David for breakfast, but the merger didn't go as planned. Instead of the massive Boeing running the tidy McDonald douglas. McDonald douglas executives effectively hijacked Boeing and installed themselves in positions of power. Stone Cipher and his Padre shareholder value fanatics began to consolidate their position and drive out the

previous Boeing regime. The capstone of this project was moving Boeing headquarters from Seattle, where it had been since William E. Boeing founded the company in nineteen sixteen, to Chicago as a way to shift the physical center of power of the company away from Boeing's engineers and workers and towards the McDonald douglas finance goals. Then they began to run the Jack Walsh playbook on Boeing in earnest. Every single account of Stonecipher's takeover that I've written quotes this exact

same line quote. When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. And what stone Cipher is really talking about here, and what everyone is really saying when they talk about, you know, the culture shift Boeing in this period, what this really is is a change in the balance of powers between the engineers and workers who actually make the planes and

the finance schools who owned the company. Stone Cipher wanted to crush the engineers and workers so he could run Boeing like a business. And when he says like a business, he doesn't actually mean run it like a business. He means run the company like a finance guy. Finance guys don't build planes, which is what Boeing had previously been doing. Finance guys create shareholder value, which is to say that

they make stock prices go up. So if you're just trying to raise stock prices, you don't actually need to make an airplane. You can outsource the different parts of building the airplane to a bunch of random shops around the world who work extremely fast, don't have much of an idea of what they're doing, and do a terrible job.

Long term. Of course, this is an absolute disaster. There are very good reasons to keep the production line for something as complicated as commercial aircraft in house efficiency, consolidation of knowledge, quality control, et cetera, et cetera. But outsourcing is great for his stock price, and it's the Jack Welch model, selling shitty products for cheap works, kind of if you're General Electric making a light bulb. But when Boeing uses these same principles to build an aircraft, people.

happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Leo Long. When we last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the nineteen nineties and bought out its rival McDonald douglas, after which McDonald douglas CEO and Jack Welsh disciple Harry stone Zeipher effectively launched an administrative coup and sees control of the company.

Now stone Ceipher wasn't able to hold onto power for long because he was very quickly forced to resign after he had what CNN describes as a quote improper relationship with a female executive. So things are going great for every one. I'm realizing reading the script that I should mention it wasn't like an abuse thing. It's just that he was having a relationship with one of his subordinates, which is also not great. But it yeah, it wasn't good,

and he gets kicked out of media almost immediately. But by the time he was forced out, his model for how Boeing should work going forwards, you know, the layoffs, the outsourcing, slashing the research and development budget, and above all taking power from engineers and giving it to the shareholder value fanatics had already been embedded at the core of Boeing's management structure. Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in

Courts two decades on. Perhaps the most lasting consequence if the change in culture has been in Boeing's approach to building aircraft. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development.

at General Electric. Now he was following a tried and tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the seven thirty seven, which had become the victim of its own success. In its five decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more than ten thousand of the plane, an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane replacing it with the next big thing, Boeing often to keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to

fit still more passengers. And this is how you get planes falling out of the sky instead of you know, doing the normal thing, which is putting money into building a new airplane, which is you know expensive in the short run. And again remember that the finance goals are now in charge for these people. The only thing that exists is the short run in immediate stock price. So instead of doing that, management went, eh, we already have this plane, were first designed in the fucking sixties. Let's

keep modifying that. And this this is going to kill an extremely large number of people. Now, the seven thirty seven again came out originally in nineteen sixty seven. In the two thousands, in the century, the millennia, the two thousands, Boeing begins to design a new version of this plane from the last millennium, called the seven thirty seven Max. For shareholders. Again, this is this is a great idea.

It's not just that, you know, building new planes is expensive and this is cheaper because you're not spending the money on building a new plane. There's a bunch of other advantages for Boeing for this, and one of the biggest is that you could tell everyone from you know, the FAA to the airlines that the pilots that hey, this is just a regular seven thirty seven. It's it's

just the same plane. You don't need to like retrain your pilots to learn how our new systems work because there's really like no new systems and that you know, that costs money, so they don't want to do it. You don't need to have the FAA do the regulatory shit they would do for a new plane, or even like a substantial change to like the original plane, which you know, again costs money and time that Boeing does not want to, you know, do. The problem is that,

you know. I tried to find a sort of delicate way to say this, and then I realized you simply should not do it like that. The problem is that the seven thirty seven Max is a plane that is trying to kill you. If you know anything about the story, you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is trying to kill you, I'm talking about the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System or MCASTS, the piece of software that directly cause the crashes, and to some extent, like I am

talking about mcasts. Well, we'll get into it in a second. It absolutely did kill all those people. But I think there's a problem with a lot of the way the story has been covered, which is that a lot of the coverage of this has been obsessively focused on the software problem, specifically on MCAST. And I understand why people

focus on the software. It is the immediate cause of the crash, But the real problem with the seven thirty seven Max is that the actual physical plane is also trying to kill you, and the software MCAST was developed to again stop the plane from trying to kill you. Now that software is also trying to kill you. But both the software and the physical plane are trying to burdy you. So you know what do I mean when I say the physical plane is trying to kill you.

For this, I'm going to turn to an actual engineer and pilot, Gregory Travis, who wrote probably the best piece in the technical details of this whole problem that I've seen for I Triple E met Spectrum. I Triple E is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They know what they're talking about spectrums their magazine. So the initial problem, as Travis explains, was this, The original seven thirty seven

was designed for nineteen sixties engines. Modern airplanes have way bigger engines because, due to a bunch of engineering stuff that we're not going to get into here, large engines are more efficient than small engines, and this is a huge deal for aircraft which consume unbelievably large quantities of extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible, but again expensive option would have been to design a new aircraft to replace the seven thirty seven that is actually designed to

accommodate the new giant engines. The chief skate option would be just bolt the new giant engines onto the old plane design. Now, the problem is that the only way to do this is to move the engines forward. The engines on the seven thirty seven are, you know, under the wing, which is like the normal thing, But the engines would no longer fit under the way because they were too large, and moving the engines forward changes where

the thrust is coming from. Here's Travis quote. Now, when pilots supplied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this, as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad. I mean airplanes and Trumps talks about this. Airplanes do kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane does it way way more than it's supposed to. So

here's where things, unfortunately, get a bit technical. So the nose going up increases something called the angle of attack. I'm going to read a description of this.

The important thing for our purposes is that if the angle of attack gets too high, right, if the planes are a level and it's flying normally, the angle of attack is like zero, but the angle attack can get higher as like you know, if you're not flying like level, and if the angle of attack gets too high, the plane stalls, and this is one of the ways that

you crash a plane. Worse still, in the seven thirty seven max, basically, the engine casings themselves can at high angles of attack, work as a wing and produced lift, and the lift they produce is well ahead of the wings center of lift. Meeting the engine casings will cause the seven thirty seven at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is

aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot, under any circumstances, have the tendency to go further into the stall. This is called quote dynamic instability, and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic fighter jets

are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me let me let me try to kind of like explain the sort of crux of this well, A, they've they've managed to position the engines in such a way the engines can act as a wing, which is insane.

this enough quote. This is called dynamic instability. And the only airplanes which exhibit this characteristic fighter jets, are also fitted with ejector seats. So again, this is the thing that is dangerous enough that you get like regular, regular civilian airplanes are not supposed to do this, they do it on fighter jets because fighter jets are doing things that planes aren't supposed to do. And you can leave the plane if it fucks up it does something like this.

And the worst part about this is that you can kick off this problem by trying to get the plane going faster, like while it's going slow. What part of flying a plane does it start slow, is kind of at a high angle of attack, and then has to go faster. Oh wait, take off the thing you have to do every single time we fly. This is fucking batshit. No one would intentionally design a new airliner like this, right, No one, not even modern I mean like Boeings, like

other airplanes, like even the modern ones. Even the Dreamliner doesn't fucking do this right, It's completely nuts. The only way that you could get something like this is as a pure product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines onto a plane from the sixties, because you are too cheap to try to do anything new. But you know who isn't afraid of doing new things? It's the products and says to support this podcast. We've never gotten a Boeing ad, but if it was gonna happen, I guess

it'd probably happened now, dear God. But instead of you know, dealing with this problem by either making a new fucking plane or figuring out some way to not have the engines literally become wings, Boeing was like, ah, fuck it, We'll just build some software that pushes the plane's nose down if it starts doing this. Now, if your reaction to hearing, let's put software on the plane that makes it fly towards the ground. Is wait, that's a terrible idea.

You have the right idea. These people did not have the right idea. But sunningly, there's like a version of this system that isn't like lethally unsafe. But com Pubbing did not design a version of this that is even remotely safe. I don't know if that's more egregious than designing an aircraft that has that amic CA instability, but the way they implement this is egregious. They decided in their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on

a single sensor. And we need to note before we start this, so this is we're gonna be talking about angle attack sensors. They're kind of just like pieces of metal that stick out the side of the plane and they break a lot, and they break a lot because flying a plane is like the worst thing you can possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't involve leaving

the atmosphere or putting it under the ocean. Yeah, so here's from the Seattle Times, which the Scale Times actually because you know, Boeing has traditionally been in Seattle like does a lot of very very good coverage on this. They have good sources. Yeah, from the Shade Times quote, the most controversial deal of the MCAST design has been the reliance on a single angle of attack sensor of both of the deadly flights. Everything started with a faulty

sensor in the second crash in Ethiopia. The data trace strongly suggested the sensor was deshortened an instant, likely by a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one on either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially after discarding the g forces a trigger, use both angle of attack sensors. The thinking was that requiring input from two angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed,

the system would not function. Now, the article goes on to talk about how their justification for for why they only use one sensor, and you know, they talked about the safety and simplicity if not wanting to add complexity to a system. You know, because if you have two things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than

having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind of sounds reasonable at first glance, but first off, if your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball to stalling, and this software system to make it not do that is so important you can't risk it not being on. If one of the two sensors breaks, then maybe you shouldn't have you designed your plane like this.

And second, this entire system violates every design principle that you see in sort of like Boeing's Good Aircraft Design for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go back to that Spectrum article because it lays out how this kind of thing is supposed to work. Quote, there were two sets of angle of attack sensors and two sets of pe hot tubes, one on either side of

the fuselage. Normal usage is to have the set on the pilot side feed the instruments to the pilot side, and the set on the copilot side feed the instrument to the copilot side. That gives a state of natural redundancy and instrumentation that can be easily cross checked by either pilot. If the copilot thinks his airspeed indicator is acting up, he can look over at the pilot's airspeed indicator and see if it agrees. If not, both pilot and copilot can engage in a bit of triage, determine

which instrument is profane and which is sacred. Now, this is great engineering, right, It is simple, it is redundant, and it allows humans to sort out issues, you know, And like, this is a product of what aerospace engineering used to be, you know, and we still have this in the world. But the fact that there are a bunch of very very good engineers who have spent an enormously long time trying to work out how this kind

of stuff should work. Modern Boeing was like, well, you know, instead of of our system where multiple centers can be cross referenced by pilots, you know, and the pilots can then disable the system. Fuck that, what if we insaid, use a single sensor that can't be overridden. This is a complete violation of Boeing design principle. The thing about Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed to be like automated shit running in the background that pilots don't know

about or don't know how to turn off. The pilot is supposed to be in complete control of the plane, you know, the old joke, And I mean I remember hearing this like every once in a while like when I was a kid, was that Airbus planes, which you know, Airbus obviously is a rival to Boeing. Airbus planes were quote diet by wire because you know, they didn't give

you control. The documentary that Frontline did called Boeing's Fatal Flaw, which I didn't really use the source for this, but I kind I just this is this is the one part that I remember from when I watched this in twenty nineteen about the crash, described how like pilots trusted that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing, so

there would be a way to kill the system. And again there's something I remember like from talking to people growing up, you know, so these pilots figure that there'd be a way to kill the system. Those voices a plane down and they were trying to find it, like they're trying to figure out how to turn the system off in the manual when they died, because they didn't realize the plane wasn't designed by Boeing engineers, was designed

by Boeing shareholders. Going back to the process on how this was added, the stated reason for again why you don't want a second sensor is that it the theory like adds complexity by adding a second sensor. But you know, that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering, like of engineering in general, but also like from the perspective of the engineering that the rest of the plane works on, right, the rest of the plane works on different principles than this,

and it works well. And it's something that Travis describes as being a product of the destruction of Bowie's collective knowledge base, but something I don't know, I don't know to what extent, Travis, He's kind of writing about this, but I'm not sure that a lot of the people writing about this like understand that, like this was the point, right,

destroying this kind of collective knowledge. This is something that was done deliberately, right, This was the inevitable sort of product of Boeing management trying to make the company quote

unquote run like a business. They were trying to destroy the interpersonal bonds that create the system of collective knowledge, and they were trying to take power out of the hands that the people who had that collective knowledge and put it into the hands of people who you could pay for really cheap and exploit more who did not

have access to that kind of information. Right, This is a case for like, yeah, you're putting power in the hands of software engineers instead of sort of aviation engineers speaking of I don't know, taking power out of the hands of the consumer and giving it to a corporation.

So when they moved on to this version of like the seven thirty seven max right, pilots famously got I think half an hour of iPad training and that maybe I might have been an hour of iPad training, and that training that they got on their iPad again, not on a simulator, didn't even have any information about the

MCAST system that killed all these people. And the product of this was that on October twenty ninth, twenty nineteen, a seven thirty seven Max flying from Jakarta crashed as the pilot was, you know, physically unable to fight the

control stick. And that that's another thing that's going on with this, you know, with his decision to put Howard in the hands of software or not pilots, is that MCAST is also physically exerting control over the pilot stick and these people are trying to fight it, and they're not able to fight it enough to stop the plane

from tipping down and crashing into the ground. And Boeing runs this really like pretty racist campaign blaming this pilot who was not white, for this error to try to, you know, cover up the fact that they fucking did this. And this maybe would have worked, except a few months later, Ethiopia Air Flight three ZO two went down and also killed everyone on board, and you know, all told displayed the Boeing seventy seven Max killed three hundred and forty

six people. The Seattle Times, which broke a lot of the initial story, said quote. A variety of employees have described internal pressure to advance the Max to completion as Boeing hurried to catch up with the hot selling a three twenty from rival Airbus. Mark Rabin, an engineer who had flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said there was always talk about how delays of even one day can cause substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to

stay in line. Rebin said it was all about loyalty. Rebin said, I had managers tell me, don't rock the boat. You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find this very funny because again, part of the whole jack Well strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to like Boeing as a company. But you have to be loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives, you know, have all of the power in this company and they want to make sure they can just ring out every

single last drop of profit. And if you upset them, they're going to fire you. And so the product of this is this process that we've seen, which is that this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course the seven thirty seven Max continues to have problems right Earlier this year, famously, the fucking door flew off inn Alaska

air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe I mean, just like all of the things that you would have expected from Boeing outsourcing shit to overwork and undertrain contractors. Now several of those whistle blowers have died. When I was originally doing this, I was considering basically making this episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I, I don't know, I don't really have any more information

than anyone else about these deaths. So I'm just going to put on the record that if I go out here, it was murder.

who are producing shitty equipments. But what we're looking at here is Boeing coming apart somewhat more famously. I think that the rescue flight is like being prepped, but a bunch of astronauts have been stranded on the space station because Boeing's launch craft was like veering off course. There are a bunch of issues with it, and so NASA

just was just like, you know, fuck this. And the most hideously galling part of this entire story is that the craft that's going to pick up the astronauts is made by fucking SpaceX, because we have reached a point where an Elon Musk company is somehow designing rockets that are you know, like designing spacecraft that are less likely to fucking explode than Boeing. That is, that is an

unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think we need to ask who killed these people, because it's not just Boeing. Jack Welsh killed these people. Michael Milken killed these people. Ronald Reagan killed these people, and in a way all of us killed them because none of us stopped them. And these people could have been stopped at any point in the process. From Reagan to Stonecipher to Kelly or Berg,

we could have stopped these people. To quote for a final time, David Graeber, the ultimate hidden truth of this world is that it is something that we make and could just as easily make differently. I add only this, If we don't make the world differently, people are going to die. Why should these murderers be allowed to run the world. We know how to make planes. They don't fall out of the sky. The people who are fucking

running this planet apparently don't. It shouldn't be enormously controversial to say that the people who know how to build airplanes should control how we fucking design and build airplanes. In the nineteenth and twentieth century, this idea was called worker self management, and it was considered so dangerous that from Chile that sheop us to a jury at a Hungary to Korea, capitalist communists and fascists alight killed anyone who dared believe it. But now our choices are stark.

We either let these people continue to drop planes out of the sky as the world, burns in our cities, sink into the sea, but we do something about it.

of learn initially from everything that's been happening. I wanted to start with a few minutes of us talking to Margaret Kiljoy, who is on the ground in the Asheville area doing disaster relief work right now. And obviously the audio here is not up to our usual quality, but it's only about five minutes, and then you will get James and I talking crystal clear into your ears. So here is Margaret.

It's all the infrastructure is down, but many of the houses, at least as I record this, seem to be intact and then doing well and what it is that everyone is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage, or even cell signal, although cell signal is kind of the first thing to come back, and power is starting to filter back in, and we're hoping that some places

are maybe getting watered. But one of the things that's kind of come up is that, again, because it's in the mountains, it's a very different setup, it's a very different culture and community. And one of the things that's happened is that, I mean a lot of people have wells, and so immediately the problem has been more about distribution of water and also getting generators to.

can put in a pickup truck or a trailer. I definitely left this feeling, you know, my first you know, I drove with my van full of stuff and on the highway and being passed by pickup trucks pulling flatbeds full of palettes of water and things like that. But then even yeah, in the city, people are driving around in trucks and filling them up with water and delivering them. But don't get me wrong, yeah, if you're preparing, think

about how to deliver water. Even some of the things for me, for example, the city government has been doing some things and there are places where people can go and fill up water containers, but they don't have the water containers. So the people who were prepared by having a couple five gallon toats in their basement are in a much better position. And so that's like some of the things that I brought.

was bar and chain oil, you know. And and it's a little bit hard because gas is also until just recently, gas is starting to come back online now, but getting gas for a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle has been tricky.

news attention there seems to be on this. I'm seeing it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a photo I came across right before getting on here where there was a memorial marker for the nineteen sixteen flood in Ashville that was knocked out by what used to be a road and was now nothing but rushing water and mud.

climate cities, but the original post has been deleted. I don't know if that was earlier or as a result of this, but that is one of like the side stories here is that Ashville is not We're not talking about one of these coastal cities in Florida that everyone is known as doomed for forever, right, We're not talking about New Orleans, which lovely city, great history, doomed as fuck,

and everyone has known it for quite a while. We're talking about places that are many miles inland and that something like two thousand feet elevation.

forty three people have been killed. Yeah, that's a total death toll from Helene forty people in Buncombe County, where Ashville is six hundred people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped off the map. Kind of the first thing that I noticed, you know, outside of the footage coming in was friends of mine. Because I've spent a decent amount of time

in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including our own Margaret Kiljoy, who has a lot more friends in Asheville, and I was in a couple of different signal loops where people were trying to contact their people, and there was a line from one of the folks I was chatting with who had reached out to multiple people in the area and said, I have not heard anything from anyone in Nashville in hours. Nothing is getting in and nothing is getting out, And that seems to

be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional. Starlink doesn't work very well when the weather's really bad. SAT phones seem to have had some efficacy. I know some people were getting messages in and out, but they weren't super reliable because SAT phones also are reliant upon climactic conditions. Right, It's certainly better than just trusting your normal cell phone, but it's not going to do great when you've got a fucking hurricane dumping half an ocean

on your head. So that was the first thing I was thinking about, because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness, and we talk a lot about having stuff that would have been useful in this that people who were prepared and had water set aside and food set aside were certainly in a better situation, because those both very quickly became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story of an old folks home that was completely cut off from

the outside and didn't have enough water or food. Hoping that story ends as well as possible, but there's a lot of stories like that. But even outside of that, there were people who were prepared, who had food and water, but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their house because the water just came in so quickly there was no chance to really get much other than maybe

a bag. And when you're stuck up on there, like what are you going to do if your SAT phone or you don't have a SAT phone and that doesn't work and there's no internet and there's no cell service. Well, that's why we're going to start today talking about ham radios, because those motherfuckers there's actually a I'll see if I can pull it up through this like that has been the most reliable way for people in the area to communicate with the outside world, because if it is possible

to communicate using technology, you can do it with Ham. Yeah, right, Like that's just that's just how Ham radios be.

I certainly am not very knowledgeable on the matter. So we'll start like, what what do people need to think about when it comes to like actually getting set up to communicate with a Ham radio, Because there's definitely you could just go buy a Boofang or something like that, Like you can get ahead. They're not expensive. This is

actually a very affordable thing to have right now. Kind of the most recommended model is the UV nine R Pro, which is eight watt instead of five and waterproof, That's what.

I know a lot of listeners have been out there and they've probably seen antenna that we put up, and then I was using a radio on my truck, and then we also all had personal radios, right because cell phone signal is crap out there, and it was the only way for us to communicate and it worked really well. So the things that you need if you want to get started in this first of all, some kind of education or a license. There are tons of local groups.

Hand people fucking love to be ham radio people. They love to talk about hand radio. They love to teach you to do ham radio so like, and it's not like a hobby, you know, firearms people love to talk about firearms, but lots of them are really toxic people. I haven't found that hand radio is premised on talking to people all over the place and often very.

work with that UV nine R that I use. I have like a telescoping one and we've had pretty good luck with that, and then I also use one in my bit. So I've hard mounted a radio inside my truck and I have an antenna that uses the frame of the truck as part of the antenna, and I can get really good.

I can food all the time. I have animals, obviously, I have guns, you know, I do stuff like, you know, go foraging in the woods and shit. I had completely because it's a pain in the air. It seemed like a pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers. I hate fucking numbers, and I am choosing to use this. And we're starting out with this as coverage of Halle not because like this is the end of it.

middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people living on the edge of the world, right. We are talking about like one of the what was what was up to this point, one of like the hippest and more popular parts of the Northeast.

Most of the people listening to this. There's not a zero percent chance a freak storm floods your community, right, even if it never has before. It's not exactly a common problem in Asheville, right. The last massive flood thing was like nineteen sixteen, So we're not talking about a place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise, like it's not just flooding, that fire could do this, right, I am thinking the last kind of near disaster we had where I was is in twenty twenty. You know

where I live right now. I am in the city of Portland, and we were like three or four blocks away from where the evacuation orders had spread during the fires in twenty twenty. It was not a foregone conclusion that they would stop before reaching the city.

the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like, you need to be thinking about how am I preparing to be informed during the seasons where this is like of highest likelihood, because the only real safety there is paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding of how quickly things can go badly so that you get out ahead of time, because if the disaster just hits, you're not going to get on the highway and drive through a fire or through a flood. I don't care

if you have a fucking Safari snorkel. I'm looking at those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out land rover on God's green Earth was not getting through some of those waters.

of those buckets of dried food. Because you can keep a bucket of dried food and five gallons of water by the door, you can throw that son of a bitch in your car and carrying the waters might be a pain in the ass, but if you have to get out and run, those buckets of dried food with a weak or so of food in them are not that hard to carry. You hold it under your arm, you keep a backpack on your back, and you run like a son of a bitch to whatever evacuation exists, and you'll have.

Let me pull this up. I've got this bookmarked. Yeah, Mountain Mule Packer Ranch, which I'm guessing is just some sort of like a you know, you go there to vacation and do like mule trips, mule hights and stuff.

a truck into a lot of these areas. And it just kind of goes to I'm not saying like everyone go buy a mule. That's not really practical for most people, although if you've got some land, maybe considered getting the mule. They're real handy. They do come in very useful in situations like this yeah, thinking companion animals as well. I think people haven't, Like, if you have a hole or whatever, I'll pack us too, but they can't carry so much, but I'll pack up. Packing is a thing, and in

like Montana, in places like that, Yeah, they're great. You know, if you've got to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan a mule, you know you can. You can do a lot there, So very useful in a wide variety of situations. And a lot of our listeners are actively fighting in Afghanistan right now, so that that could be very handy for you.

you know, to post on social media. I don't want there to be a lot of people who made the decision to stay longer than they should have because they wanted to get a good shot for social media. But I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm not saying that's what happened to that lady. There's also a matter of like, well, if you are stuck up there, what else are you going to fucking do but document it? Yeah, I have

some sympathy for that. Yeah, I'm not trying to shit on these people, but it is one of these there's that post that goes around every time there's a disaster like this, where you know, climate collapse is watching a series of horrifying videos on cell phones until one day it's you holding the phone.

But from a practical standpoint, the only good that you can make of a disaster like this is to try and pay attention to what happened, to what went wrong for other people, and make yourself less vulnerable, because the less vulnerable you are one of the things that we see every time there's something like this hits, you know, and this is I would call this a hand of

God event. Right, You had a bunch of communities that were a part of the developed, you know whatever term first world one day, and we're completely cut off from everyone else on the planet the next. And all you can really do in the immediate aftermath of something like that is try to figure out what can I do to make it less likely that I'm a strain on resources during an event like this, And obviously the best way is to not be there, because then you're not

a strain on resources. But the next best thing is to have to pay attention to what went wrong for other people and try to make yourself less vulnerable to that, because not only does that protect you, but you protect other people by not needing the resources that rescuers can bring to bear, which will be terribly limited in the immediate wake of the disaster.

it really should be. Like you know, you've seen a city that thought it was completely invulnerable, be very vulnerable. You can buy a Sooya Squeeze for like thirty bucks right now. You can set them up in a off a five gun and bucket yep, or you can use the bag that comes with You can buy back from a company called knock cnoc, which is a much better bag. I would recommend that, but like you can spend thirty bucks there. Like we said before, you should have backup

and other water filtering options. But yeah, there are whole countries that use Sayer squeezes, right, the Marshall Islands. I made a thing about Liberia uses in too, And you can filter rain water with that, and you could pretty much have a supply of water for as long as you need it if you backflush it.

filterration option that's not the only one. Filter your water and add iodine tablets too, right, like you know, filter your water and use something.

a disaster. You can have a camelback with one company that makes them as called catod In Kata.

leaders on you. This is not free, but it's not prohibitively expensive. It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right, and it is considerably likelier to save your life than an AAR fifty.

But you can always have multiple options for water. And it's the kind of thing where like there's no reason not to a camelback and a filter plus a bunch of pills, plus some sort of like canned pump rig you're maybe out one hundred and fifty bucks. You have three different methods of keeping your water clean.

and you can't in any without water. But if you are in a situation where you're on the roof of your house and your roof is not going to hold out much longer in the floodwaters, colms suddenly become the number one problem that you have, right your inability to reach someone who might be able to get you out of there.

to think about it. You don't forget something that you rely on.

food and obviously things like thank god we are not in a time of the year when this happened where people are going to like freeze to death immediately right in the middle of something like this. But that would I would say, like access to warm and dry clothing could be up there, equal with you know, water and cobs.

If you're talking about a kind of disaster that might put people out of their homes in an area where you can die in minutes in the front, like if you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster that could be right up there. You know, you know what you need based on where you live, but be thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really a lot of disaster preparedness is actually trying to understand what is

it that keeps me alive. A lot of our economy exists in having that not be obvious to you.

people need. Their venmo is at app med solid Their cash app is dollar sign Streets one de put flood support in the description if you send them money through that. The other place is mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Their PayPal is mutual Aid Disaster Relief at gmail dot com. Their venmo is at mutual Aid Disaster Relief. Yeah, just google them if you want to find out more about what they're doing. James, did you have anyone else that you wanted to throw out there?

fact that they want to ban Ir fifteen's. Walls didn't really commit to that until a little bit when he was specifically pushed on whether or not he agreed with an assault weapons ban, and instead his language up until that point was not very different from Vance's aside from their disagreement over fortifying schools. But it was all stuff around the guns, whereas the Democratic parties line and the line of most Democratic politicians has been it's about the guns.

And I did find it interesting that Walls he had to kind of be goaded into really embracing that by the moderator.

real problem. And this just kept happening. They kept trying to like be nice to the actual opponent in the debate by separating them out from their running mate, who's the real source of the problem. And that's just like it just just kept happening, Like what are you doing, Like you're running out a joint ticket. There's no reason to do this. And I think kind of part of

what their strategy may have been. Yes, these debates are probably only watched by freaks, but I think there are also certain freaks who are like weird, like independent centristy freaks, and I think this.

of even even helped him. And in effect, if Vance comes off as just a slightly better debater when they're going after the same base, that just leaves Walls with like not really making any ground where he could have actually just hit hit Vance quite hard and actually gone more on like a party line, or actually just like gone more towards like all the reasons that Advance is fucked up, which he just would, she would, she just

avoided to do. Yeah, So my main takeaway was, like, if they're both courting the center and Vance kind of barely edged him out in some in some regards, maybe Walls should have just actually been way more aggressive, and the kind of lack of aggression really only hurt the Democrats because in the end it kind of benefits Vance. If you give this like half assed mediocre performance.

a benefit to him. I'm not sure in a way that helps the campaign, because most of what Vance did that probably helps him was stuff that I think would set him up better in a world where Trump doesn't win reelection. Sure that would set him up to continue to have a career and to be re embraced by

respectable kind of politics. The thing that makes me kind of doubt myself because I think there's a possibility this comes out as a Walls win, and if that is the case, it will be entirely because of the last question on January sixth, Because the way these things tend to work in popular memory, not again people like us who sit through the whole thing, all of nearly all

of whom are journalists or unusually engaged voters. But the thing that there's two moments that are most like one from each of them, in my opinion, to get clipped

out and go viral. And for Vance it was the January sixth thing where Walls drilled him, and I think this was actually one of his few fairly effective aggressive moments where he was like yeah, forced him to answer, and Vance refused to answer as to whether or not he thought Trump had lost in twenty twenty in a way that was I think kind of embarrassing for him

and is easy, probably pretty easy to clip out. That might wind up being the big kind of viral moment of the night if it's not that it'll be Walls flubbing. We should talk about the China question now. Yeah, but I don't think the China question that Walls flubbed is on an issue that like Americans overall care about, which is Tim Walls now maybe exaggerating when he talked about his vacation in China one time in the eighties.

now escalating war in the in the Middle East. And although that was their kind of opening framing, they really got over those hurdles quite quick and then started talking about me extremely boring shit for the rest of the hour and a half.

on it. Israel has a right to defend itself. October seventh was horrible, but you know, civilian casualty is bad too, So it was a non answer, but it was the same non answer that the campaign has always given, so I was not surprised by it. It was exactly what I expected from him.

maybe slightly favoring walls that whole section. Like he did not, Oh, I don't think he did badly there.

Trump and Trump's climate denial. Tried to press Vance on Trump's climate denial, and Vance kind of you know, again, tried to just blame for manufacturing, saying that Kamala's like Rhetorican record does not match her actual action, which are increasing foreign manufacturing in general. Vans kind of fell back on a whole bunch of like nationalistic framing regarding the environment and regarding like the economy, especially manufacturing. That was one of his reoccurring talking points.

And you know, Walls was good at trying to repeatedly say it's not migrants who are ruining like housing in this country, but he failed to connect enough and he had the pieces there to be like, it's guys like you, Yeah, it's fucking it's fucking white dudes in suits and earpieces who have made housing expensive. It is not people coming here from fucking Honduras, like it's people like you who

need to be reigned in by the government. And he just wasn't willing to commit to the answer that he clearly had in his post.

like Vance? Walls needs to be like on the attack. He actually needs to show like a strong resistance in order to actually like make a large impact in the debate. And that's why I think this kind of largely swung towards Vance. Yes by the end, if they're both trying, if they're trying to court this same like moderate vote. Now, as always, the immigration section of these is always frustrating. No one talks about how fentanyl is largely brought in

via citizens. No one feels the need to bring that up. CBS did have a little fact check, or not a fact check necessarily, but like a little comment talking about how the majority of Americans pulled are in favor of deportations. But they specifically asked Vance, like, how is your military

deportation plan going to work? And willly separate like children that are born in the United States from illegal immigrants, and Vance just refused to answer that question repeatedly to try to get him to answer multiple times, he continually refused it, instead saying that, like Kamlass, border policy is already a child separation policy.

Trump and Vance kept viewing it. State law enforcement had to escort kids to school. But even in this like Springfield section, which Walls was the first one to bring up, Vance was the big driver of this lie. But even in Walls's mention of this, he tried to separate Vance from Trump. He primarily blamed Trump for this and totally just like ignored Vance's massive contribution to this like big misinformation campaign that led to these bomb threats. He just

let Vance get off easy. And I think this part was saved. Kind of buy this little fact check and Vance's little meltdown over this legal immigration comment. But still it kind of showed a little bit of Even in Walls's stronger moments, he refused to like really harp on Vance for being weird.

question or purposely avoided it. But instead of talking with this, he summarized his entire career, both as a school teacher and in politics, and then emphasized that although he spent time in China, he is loyal to the United States. And it was just really odd and like you can

even see events like slowly like smirking the longer. Walls just kept going on about his career, and at the end of his like weird like non answer about his commitment to the United States, the moderators asked again, They're like, well, were you there for the massacre, and then he very quickly clarified. I was like, uh, I mean, yeah, I might have. I might have misspoke. I don't understand why you wouldn't just very clearly say yeah, I misspoke. I

was there for the aftermath of the massacre. I was there during the uprising.

how he was coached, and he was well prepared. As a general rule for the most part.

way it'll help. Like, my guess is that he was told going into this by his handlers, this debate is not going to win us the election, but it could lose us the election. So what we need to make sure happens is that you don't fuck anything up or seem too mean or seem too weird. Yourself, so we are going to like train you to be as boring as possible, and they did.

that was That was pretty silly. This was one of the issues where he was weakest, and I think we were als maybe slightly upset that that Walls again was

kind of was kind of hands off on this. Historically, Vance has made some a lot of crazy comments on podcasts about this topic, and neither the moderators nor Walls really pressed him super hard on it, and Advanced himself tried to largely be on the attack with this like late term abortion, killing babies after birth thing that Walls just tried to easily kind of brush aside.

the issues of the twenty twenty election. He then downplayed January sixth and emphasized instead the bigger threat to democracy was Facebook censorship and how people are like ending friendships over political disagreements, and this was bizarre. I think this was Wall's strongest moment. He talked about how there was one hundred and forty police officers assaulted on January sixth,

some who later died. He mentioned this other story about how like on January sixth, there were similar protests in a whole bunch of different states, and he mentioned one in Minnesota where people threatened to march to his home and his kid and his dog needed to be like escorted out by police because people were like threatening to go to his home saying that there might be casualties. I thought that was maybe that was That was a

pretty good moment. Four Walls brought up how people in January sixth tried to kill Mike Pence, which everyone seems to forget.

any of that. But even in this section about Jay six he still like thanked Vance for having this conversation and then asked him if Trump lost the election, which Vance just avoided avoided answering, instead asking Walls, did convalesce censor Americans on Facebook? Which is just great. Yeah, it's a great, equally important problem.

be more of a unique candidate. In stead dead they both came off as just kind of boring moderates, which just doesn't make sense because that's like the opposite reason that both of these men were picked for their chops. They were both picked to represent this slightly more extreme wing of the party, with Walls being a bit more progressive and Vance being a bit more fascist. Now it makes sense that Vance is going to go after the moderates.

I just don't think Walls needed to agree. That's kind of all my all my thoughts on this riveting to our debate.

that I think. I hope that Democrats would like reevaluate going forward, but they're the Democrats, So.

always always a good time. So if I had any advice to end on, it's people who are currently in Los Angeles move to Minnesota. You will be beloved. People will want to listen to your policy ideas.

you have to cross as you travel there. And for about half a million migrants last year, it was the only way that they could come from South America to Central America and they continue their journey on to North America.

begin making their way north. Geography understanders will realize that Brazil is a very long way from the United States.

maxed out a week. There is nowhere to get water, there is nowhere to get food. You have to walk through mud that can come up to your waste. You have to cross rivers that are higher than you are tall.

You have to climb boulders, shemier across cliff faces. The accounts I heard and the things I saw were pretty horrible, like and we've kind of had a fun introduction, but I would rather go back to the uncertainty I had of like being in Syria last year and knowing that there were bombs falling on people every night, then have to see some of that stuff again. It's horrific. Like I can't really. I'm obviously working on a scripted series

and we'll have that out soon. But like, in terms of the things that we do to each other, a humans, like little children die in the dairying gap all the time. People carry their babies across rivers on their shoulders. People carry other people's babies when people are too tired from carrying their own children.

spoke to more people than that. The bust bulk of them were from Venezuela and a place where I used to live, And like, I understand that they lots of them have children, Some of them are bringing their children, some of them are going ahead and trying to send money, right, remittances back to their children. Right.

were deeply, deeply upsetting. And I think it's really important that we, I guess, kind of bear witness to this because it doesn't really get discussed when the US media talks about migration. Maybe, if we're lucky, they'll come to the southern border for a day, right, And do some

impressionistic peace on it. But like, pretty often they talk about migrants, but they don't talk to them, and so, like, I think it's important that we talk to them, and I think it's important that we face up to the fact that, like, this is a choice that the people who have been elected in this country have made. They've decided that the only way, for instance, the only place to use CBP one right is in southern.

is to cross the dairy end. And then when you get there, you realize that this thing requires you'd have a special telephone that you don't have.

is their own death. Like, nothing you're ever going to do to these fucking immigrants is ever going to make these people like like you could, You could, fucking you could put these people in a country that has zero immigrants at all, and they would still scream about it. There's there's nothing you can fucking do. And people have decided that in order to basically people have decided in order to try to get like a one percent higher margin in an election, they're probably still going to lose.

They're going to just fucking inflict inhuman suffering on unbelievably large numbers of people.

a thousand people day crossing. None of them had seen a barrier, none of them had seen the razor wire, but he's posted about they didn't know that it was this thing. What they did know was that the US had an election in November, and everybody wants to get here before that. Yeah, you know, I tried to explain that, like we actually don't transition power immediately right that that happens in January, but everybody is concerned to get here

before the election. And what the US is doing in Panama is the US is currently funding deportations, and I like saw that happening firsthand. With this is this is honestly one of those things that just really fucks me up, and like I need to ye like I don't know it just I tried to record stuff at a time, and I just it's all just me saying this sucks, this is terrible. This like what it looks like is so you leave bab Jaqito, right, which is Barjiquito is

an indigenous village. It's a village of the Ember people who will wonderful. There were nothing but kind to me. I stayed in their houses for a week and slept in my hammock in their house. I shared their food, held their little babies like they were incredible and client hosts and very grateful to them. From Baljaquito, which is this tiny village right. The population of Barjiqito triples every day.

Five hundred people live there. A thousand people roll up every day and then they're transported in dugout canoes, like a tiny canoe that is carved out from the trunk of a tree. They're two stroke bolted on the bag. I think I posted a picture on Twitter. If not, I will do. The micros are taken upstream. They paid twenty five bucks each and they're taken five hours upstream.

If they don't have the money, there's three canoes every day that are provided for free, and they generally try and make sure that all the women and children get in those canoes right.

En Comarcas. So they're in sort of outside of an almost entirely indigenous state of Panama and in like what you would consider like Panamanian government custody.

the bus. I was told these buses are owned by Panamanian parliamentary deputies, but I haven't been able to confirm that.

Deli end. They leave from neck or Clee in Colombia, come across on a lancha like a speedboat, and then they walk up to the Columbian border where the guides and leave them. Now the guides are obviously like this area is controlled by the golf cartel in Columbia, right, so they have safe passage through that area. None of them had anything bad to say about that area. It's when the guides leave them and they're on their own

into Panama. That's when they didn't have water. They didn't have food because no one's told them they need water and food to be fair, right like that they weren't. I didn't think it was going to take as long as it was, be as hard as it was. It's not. So I've learned a little bit from tiktoks and stuff, so some of them bring a bit more. But four days of water is a lot of water, like speaking from experience. So backpack in the desert. If you don't have the right equipment, it's hard to carry.

It's non fine, it's not very hours of walking, right, And then some of those guys one day and I gave them water filters and stuff.

and most people don't even get that, right. Most people are looking for a flat spot to pitch the shitty tent that they bought in Colombia. And then they're just stuck there. And there's obviously a relatively new policy. They used to take five free people per bus, but they don't anymore.

moving through. And every day new people arrive who can't afford it, and so the population is growing and growing and growing, and there seems to be no solution. No one I spoke to could point to what they want them to do right, Like they're being given free food by the government. Some of them said the food wasn't great. I'm not sure if it's halal like sometimes some of them said they'd seen food that had pork in it.

But I didn't see any food to have pork in it when I was there, so maybe that's been changed. But they're just stuck there. Yeah, there's nothing they can do right. If they want to have money transferred there, they can do it through a local intermediary who charges the twenty five percent fee. If you don't have sixty list Yeah, like you need seventy five bucks now, right to get your sixty bucks. Now multiply that by a family of five. You can start to see where it becomes inaccessible to people.

way any of this shit works. And it's like like these are people from countries and you know it's like, yeah, obviously, like my parents were like leading from Taiwan to the US, right, which makes it easier. But these are also these are people from places that the US fucking hates. Yeah, and so like you would expect them to get like at least somewhat similar treatment to people who came from like Taiwan, which is at the time, you know, like US ally

anti China stuff. But like, no, we've just decided to just feed these people into a fucking meek rinder.

States immigration law. Yeah, we gave On the day that Molino took office. Alejandro Majorcas himself the child of migrants from Cuba, I believe, went to Panama attended the inauguration and then announced this six million dollar aid package right which the US was going to give to fun deportations from Panama directly. And I got to see those deportations happening right like you'll hear them in my scripted series.

But like watching somebody take a dad away from his baby, or a mother away from her children, or one man's brother away from his brother, Like it's just heartbreaking. These people have crossed the Daddy in right. They've undertaken a journey like I've done a lot of mountaineering. I've done a lot of climbing. I like to fuck around outside, but like I've never done anything where I didn't know if I was going to come back, really, and like

they've done that. They've taken this incredibly difficult journey. And then when they get to the other side, you, you, and you, they get picked out and they get deported back right on flights that are paid for by your tax dollars and my tax dollars. And this includes flights to Cuba. This includes flights to Venezuela, right places that

the US considers to be like dictatorial regimes. And now these people are back in Cuba they're back in Venezuela, but their government knows that they tried to leave, and they've spent all their fucking savings, so they're back in square one. I spoke to a few Colombians. They've also deported a lot of Colombian people. Most of the Colombian

people I spoke to in Las Blancats were deported. They called all the Colombian nationals to choose the office and then these I was told that they were only deporting people who had like warrants, like pending cases. But when these people got back to Colombia, they were just free to go, right, Like if you have a pending case and someone delivers you to the government. Non expert in Colombian law enforcement, but it seems like that would be a good time to prosecute that casey, and these people

tell me that they've been let go. None of them told me if they had warrants. Now, like, I'm just going off what they said. But that night they were

texting me pictures themselves in handcuffs. By the next day they were back in medine telling me that they'd been sent home, including like I was talking to a lady just before we recorded who she doesn't know where her children's father her husband is right, And lots of people will have like I guess what's the English translation, like free unions, Like when they're like married for legal reasons, they don't go and have a wedding, but they're considered

to be married common law marriage, I guess would be the phrase, right, like they've lived together for a number of years, share a house, etc. Often have children, but they're not like they never had a wedding. So I don't know if that document makes difference, but I watched people have their children taken out their arms and be shoved into back of trucks and be deported, and like that fucking sucks. That is not something that I want

to see again. And it happens every single day there, and it happens because your taxes are paying for It didn't used to happen and now it does, and it's just heartbreaking. Like I don't really like it's there's nothing you can do. You know that there's no you know,

I can't do anything to stop it. You can't do anything to stop it, right, Like what you can vote for Donald Trump, who would like to machine down every asylum secret at the border if you got a chance, or you can vote to Kamala Harris, who has presided over record migrant deaths every year of her administration, who's sending your money to deport people in Panama, who knows that the choices that she's made are resulting in like death in Panama, death here right, Like there were four

people who died and then the heat wave in the first week September, four people who died in o Time mount and wilderness, like in a tiny area ten miles across of border in San Diego, and my friends had to go in search their bodies, and my friends found their remains, and I had to confront the fact that, like this is the toll of the rhetoric, Like this

is what the rhetoric costs. The other thing I want to mention is that like, even in the most desperate moments of their lives, everyone looked out for one another in a way that like we don't hear. Like one of the things that really struck me was that, like everyone's kids are just kind of out and about, right.

No one's particularly afraid of anyone hurting their kids, Like all of these kids, and I saw people who'd got split up in the gap, find each other again in Bahojikito, and like, you know, there were strangers who had carried someone's children for two days because that other person was so tired or they had another child they needed to carry, and like, yeah, I'm strangely comfortable, I guess in refugee camps, Like I went to Panama City after its like I

couldn't have it. It was too much for me and I had to stay in my hotel room, and I guess it was just difficult, but like I feel safe in those places. I feel comfortable and like in a sense it's well, you see the best of us and the worst of us. I guess, like I can't imagine being in a place where I know I could lose my life if I slip and fall, and then thinking well, I've got to carry this little kid. Never met this

kid before. I don't share a language. You know, there was a group from Angola and they'd been carrying Venezuelan children, right they can't even talk to one another, but they potentially risk their lives to help. Yeah, it's it's pretty fucking bleak. I'm staying in touch with everyone I met, and they're telling me about their journeys to the border. Unfortunately, the thing that comes next is eight to nine month delay as they apply for a CVP one appointment. And like,

I wish I could offer something hopeful. Guess what I'll say is what I always say that, Like, there isn't anyone you can vote for who will fix this, Like you can vote for Cornel West with Jill Stein, Like I'm not going to vote for someone who fucking supports the policies that are creating refugees in Syria, right whatever, I'm not suggesting that that's a solution either. Like the things that you need to do are like there is a person helping moments in your community. I spoke to

a Jesuit shelter. I'll put them in my scripted episode. Like I'm not a big religious shelter guy, but these

guys were fucking great. These guys are saving people's lives and making sure that people have the basic necessity like literally turning up at the refuge camp and making sure everyone had toilet roll and toothbrushes and things that yeah, you don't need for one night, but you're going to be there for a month, you don't have, you know, what are you going to do spend five bucks on toothbrush and toothpaste, but that's five less bucks you have for your bus fare, right, So like I'll put them

out there. I would love to do a fundraiser, like if anyone can work out how to facilitate transfers to migrants who are in the camp for free, that would be great, Like that would be a service that would make things considerably easier for people. But the way that you fix this is showing up, Like it's showing up at the border if you live near the border, it's showing up in your community. It's countering this like with people in your family and your circle, like there's a

tacit agreement. I think in the entire corporate media that migrants are humans without rights, Like they're just numbers to these people, because I don't see them talking to migrants, right, Like these are people who you know, like I help them change their babies, I carried their bags for them, I played with their kids so they could go take a shower like that. They're people just like anyone else.

Of course they are right that, Like, yeah, they're important to me, and it's fucking miserable to see my tax dollars use to make these people suffer.

I'm somewhat ranting now, but like, yeah, the pivot that even the Democrats have done in the last four years, right, Like, those people need to be held accountable for what is resulting in like babies dying.

don't see it in your community. And of course they want people to die crossing the Darien and not at our border, because that's removed, and you don't hear it reported on right, Like it's not a Venezuelan woman died

on Thursday. We're recording this on Tuesday, like Wednesday. You don't see that reported, right, You don't see that there are little kids' bodies in the jungle reported because it's out of sight and out of mind, And like, I guess the thing you can do is constantly bring it back into people's minds and make them accountable for their choices. And like, I guess this is the point where the electoralists get mad at me. I'm not voting for someone who chose that. Yeah, like, and I never could, Like

I couldn't live with myself if I did. I know a system which reduces our political engagement taking a box every four years is asinine and child like, Like I would much rather be out there every day helping people than voting once every four years, And like, you can do both, of course you can, but yeah, there's not a voting solution for this, Like, it requires all of us to do a lot of work because we're so

far down the path which ends in a really terrible place. Right, it's already a terrible place that these people's lives don't matter, and that their children's lives don't matter, and that we shouldn't care if they're dying in the jungle. And we've got a lot of work to do to get back from that, because apparently it's okay with a lot of people in this country.

need to do something to stop this because it's horrific. Yeah, and so it's a genocide in Ghaza, like we can we need to do something to stop that too, but we're not going to do it through voting.