It Could Happen Here Weekly 78

can make your own decisions. Welcome to Shitty mayor Mondays, a name we're not actually allowed to use as a title of our podcast because it breaks a bunch of search shit in the background. I'm your host, Mio Wong coming to you live from a crumbling basement, and he contested Chicago that may or may not be hit by a tornado in the next hour. This is it could happen here, So truly, it could all happen within this next recording session. It could happen in me It's basement, Yeah,

with me of Garrison and James. Hello, Welcome to Hell. Hi, a tornado free San Diego did have a tornado warning yesterday. Luckily I'm in the ever stable Pacific Northwest where nothing bad can happen. Yeah, it's contractually, contractually obligated. It says no, no, no bad things, No no earthquakes here that that are overdue, no forest fires or record temperatures. It's great up there.

It's so true. So today we're doing a sort of special episode of Shitty Mayor Mondays, which is that we are we are doing the Chicago double feature because our previous shitty Mayor, Lloyd Lightfoot I, managed to become the first I think I think, the first Chicago mayoral candidate in forty years. She was an incumbent and lost reelection.

And not only is she lose reelection, she went out so okay the way the way the Chicago mayor elections have like a trillion candidates, like I think they were like nine this time, and if no one can get about fifty percent, it goes to a runoff, and she

got knocked out before the runoff, which is unbelievably funny. Um. So we're gonna talk about her first as the sort of loyal Lifewood is sort of the shitty Chicago mayor past, and then we're gonna talk about the maybe future shitty Chicago Mayor, Paul Vallis, who sucks so much that he was the reason I specifically wanted to do this series. But first, what do you talk about? Fucking Lorily Lightfoot? A person who I don't I don't know. I feel

like people outside of Chicago don't know much about her. Yeah, I mean I know that she's like like has gebody failed to do all the things that he was supposed to do and in a kind of general sort of Democrat Matt model has sucked. But I'm excited to hit his specifics. Yeah, she's a super well okay, Ay. The funniest thing about her is it's just just Google pictures of her hats. She has just like an incredible hat game. It's just all least appearing in just an incredible like

she has so many hats. It's it's wild. It's just every single picture she's in it's just like a random, different, wild hat. It's amazing. But she's also kind of in some sense like a kind of uniquely incompetent politician. So okay, So Lightfoot was elected mayor in like an absolute landside in twenty nineteen, and she ran this very weird campaign which it was based on sort of three main things.

It was one was not being a machine candidate. And this is actually very important, is it Lightfoot is not actually part of the Chicago political machine that controls like most polic Why there's there's the kind of kind of separate parts of the machine. This is a complicated thing we're not going to fully get into here. But she's like not a machine candidate. She like kind of is an outsider in some sense um and that was a

big part of why people voted for her. There's another thing, which is this sort of like identity tokenism thing, which is like, I'm going to be the first black, lesbian mayor of Chicago, which she is. And then the third thing she was running on was building a ship ton of police academies. Now I now in twenty nineteen, I was in Chicago for this election, and I was like, do not fucking vote for her. She's gonna build these cop academies. And everyone was like, no, it's gonna be great.

She's not the machine, She's like. So she gets elected in twenty nineteen, and this means that when she gets into office, like almost immediately, twenty twenty happens, and okay, so no mayor has like a good response of twenty twenty Lightfoot's is like catastrophic. So I've talked about this a bit at the show, but but what twenty twenty in Chicago is this really really kind of wild and

weird thing. It doesn't map onto a lot of the other sort of twenty twenties, but like the first thing that happens basically is Chicago has this thing called I think it's I think it's the Magnificent Mile. It's something milds. I can remember when its magnificent a miracle because it's the fucking bullshit tourist thing. But it's it's like the Chicago's like it's like a mile of like really rich shopping districts, and the I was just lost control of it.

Like people just took it. It was like fully looted. It was just this. It was just this. There was this sort of incredible moments of like Chicago's working class that had been getting shit on for two hundred fucking years like finally stormed their way into their pas and just the fucking boushee part of Chicago would destroyed it and it fucking ruled. But after that happened, life Foot was like, oh shit, we can never let protesters get

back there again. So she started raising the fucking draw bridges that lead that lead across the fucking rivers, like she was like she basically turned the entirety of like like that that event part of Chicago into a fucking fortress that you could not get onto. Amazing, I just raised she did this, Like, she raised the bridges multiple

fucking times. Like we're gonna get to another story of her raising the bridges where it's like it's un like like she doesn't so many times that like even times where she claimed she didn't do it on purpose, people are like, I think she raised the bridges. This is you know, and so this is her basically she when when she raises the bridges, she just like declares war

basically on like half of Chicago. And Okay, so this is like not a great thing to do if if you're trying to be a popular politician is to just like physically declare war and like do fucking medieval fortress shit to like half half your fucking city. And so

her popularity starts tanking immediately. This is in like the this is I'm guessing as a consequence of the Black Lives Matter protest, right, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so her reproove rating is like fucking absolutely dog should I think, Oh, I'm trying to find I should have looked this up earlier. I meant to, and I forgot. I think her APPO rating was like thirty percent when she left office. It

might even be lower than that. Yeah, but you know, but she she does this kind of unique thing where she basically goes around and alienates like every single voting block in the city. I guess before we get to this, we should get we should get to how she pissed off the cops because one big things which she came into office was she was trying to sort of like do this alliance with the police. But instead of her sort of actually like forming this, you know, she she

was trying to form sort of sent a right wing bass. Right, She's trying to both sort of play this kind of like identity tokens something and then also build a bass with the cops. But a, the cops are racist And Okay, do you two know the story about the Chicago Columbus statue. I don't think Wait, is that one of the ones

that got taken down? Sort of? I think this is one of the ones that so in twenty twenty, I wrote a story about how to tie down statues and then became the guy that everybody sent pictures of statues getting torn down to for a while. So I'm sure I seen amazing. Yeah, it was great. Ben Shapira had a whole fucking seizure about it. We got lots of trouble with various federal agencies. But yeah, it was a

very amazing story. I don't don't affiliate link to the ingredients to things which mail made be illegal if you combine those ingredients in your story, so true. Yeah, yeah, many popular mechanics editives have tried this. It's great. I was on Russia today. Uh not not with my knowledge, but yeah, tell us about this, tell us about his other statue. Man. Okay, So there is a giant like statue thing sitting on a like sitting on this big column that was made nineteen thirty three, and it's it's

this giant statue of Christopher Columbus. I'm also on this statue. So there there, there, there's like a series of like important Italian people like on the column. One of these things, one of the people who has picked it on this column, like very much seems to be Benito Mussolini holding a bunch of fascies. That's cool. Now, the sculptors, the sculptor's son denies this, but this was made ninety thirty three.

It really looks like he is definitely holding fascis. So all right, this this statue, this is like in like the middle of the fucking city, right in like this

park in the middle of the city. Um, and this became the so okay, so in twenty twenty in Chicago, the way the protests work is you have like the first initial like phase where the cops like lose control of the city, and then the cops kind of like retake it over the next few days, and there's a kind of lull, but then it starts another like sort of wave of it starts back up again, like a rounds specifically around this statue, and there's this whole thing

that cops are trying to keep it up, and there's this whole thing where like there's like like rings of activists like surrounding a group of cops standing around the statue like throwing shit at them. When it fucking ruled, and eventually the city is like, Okay, we're gonna we're

just gonna take down the fucking statue. And this was a Lightfoot thing, but but this pissed off the cops and specifically, so what I talked about this before on the show, but like this is one of the sort of unique things about Chicago is that Chicago has like, yeah, I guess the technical term is like white ethnic like groups that like do shit. And one of those things is like there's like an Italian American Cop Association that

is very powerful. The Echina American Cop Association is like, like, we will keep the statue at all costs. This is like our fucking guy, like, hey, we're yeah, and and and Lightfoot is like, you guys, if you guys don't take this statue down, people are gonna fucking like burn the Miracle Mile again. And she gets to this giant fight of them, and these emails eventually get I think

I can't remember thaying. I think they get released part of a court case or something, but these these emails come out that it like Lightfoot is yelling that she has the biggest balls of anyone on the table. She's gonna put her balls on the table. She's trying to like keep the cops. So she gets in this giant fight, it just pisses off all of the cops in the city. So she's she she has pissed off like like from from from from the initial wave of protests at the

Drawbridge stuff. She has pissed off like anyone who's even sort of vaguely center left and anti racist and like a huge proportion of the city's black population. And then she like systematically she's now pissed off like the sort of like white ethnic cop groups who are also very powerful, and then she does something like like really genuinely unforgivable and horrific, which she is. In twenty twenty one, Chicago police shot thirteen year old Adam Toledo share so much

Chicago paper called the Tribe. At a press conference after the shooting, Mayor Louis Lightfoot vowed to find the people responsible for quote putting a gun in the hands of Toledo, who Chicago police and prosecutors insisted was armed. So, okay, they shoot this kid who is fucking thirteen years old. His name is Adam Toledo, and immediately the cops of prosecutors and the mayor said that he's armed. They're gonna find the person who put the gun in his hand.

So two and a half weeks later, the video comes out and it turns out that not only was Adam Toledo not armed, the cops shot him while he was while his hands were up while complying with their instructions. I think I've seen this, buddy cam. Yeah, yeah, it's

fucking awful. And then like two year two days later, they killed another guy and like there were there was, there was, there was there was another round of like huge protests, I mean, and they weren't as big as twenty twenty ones, but like there was another round of like really big protests in this and Lightfoot was, you know, like actively involved in a conspiracy to lie about this fucking thirteen year old kid who was killed in cold blood.

And so this pisses off like this. This this like basically means that her her support among like the Latino population drops to basically zero because she fucking accused a thirteen year old kid of being a gang, an armed gang member, and then he got fucking after he got shopped by the cops. So well, the other fun thing about this is so our our like prosecutor Kim Fox is like there's like this whole thing about how she's like a progressive prosecutor and like the rights trying to

unseat her. None of the fucking officers involved in this or the other shooting two days later were ever charged with anything after they again it shot like killed in

cold blood a thirteen year old kid with his hands up. Now, the sort of regular Chicago right hates her because she's both black and a lesbian, and there's some like well we'll talk about this a bit when we gets a Vallis, but there's just genuinely unhinged, horrifying sort of like racism and like homophobia, and like she's getting basically like splash damage transphobia from it because of how racist these people are.

And so but that means that like you know, she has like no support, right, she she managed to get she like she she manages to get into a fight with Chicago is like normally pretty conservative like Black Caucus, and the Black Hawcus gets so pissed at her, but they forced through a police reform bill that has just like oversych committees, just like Rain and so you know, there like on on Forbruary twenty eighth, there's an election and all of the sort of like everyone in the

city of Chicago is like she's fucked. Like she's a unique she's like a uniquely unpopular candidate. Everyone fucking hates her. She has systematically pissed off every single possible voting block in the entire city of Chicago. And she loses, and you know, there's this whole sort of media junket that

happens her. Everyone's like, this is like a referendum on crime in Chicago, and it's like, no, no, it's not like everyone just hates Lightfoot because she sucks, and she sucks in like a unique combination of ways that pisses

off everyone who can possibly vote in the city. And so she gets sixteen percent of the vote, which I think sixteen percent of the vote is like the actual sort of like top limit cap of the number of people in Chicago who Jenny winely like her, Like, I think it's exactly fifteen sixty percent of the city and there's fucking no one else. So she comes in third. It's also very funny she spends the entire like a bunch of her money running campaign ads, like against the

guy who comes in fourth instead of the other two. Yeah, and so the man who came in second, who is on the By the time this episode comes out, the election will be fucking tomorrow. Um. The person who came in second in that vote is Brandon Johnson, who's the progressive candidate. He's backed by like the teachers Union. He's like fine, he is like as good as you're going

to get for a mayor. Oh though I will remind people that like Johnson is say much better candidate the other fucking guy we're gonna talk about, But we need to talk about a little bit about the limits of electoral politics, and like, you know, I'm I'm just gonna point out here if that like Nepal, for example, routinely elects Maoist governments and like do you know, how do you know how much Maaoism those guys do? Like fucking nun,

there was no Maoism happening, right. There were some cool socialist mayors in Spain who led the population of the city to expropriate the landowners around the city in the nineteen thirties. Yeah, that was the nineteen thirties, is twenty those are old. Most people's fucking grandchildren are like maybe around but yeah, like you're you're not gonna get, you know, like, we're not going to get a socialist city off of this.

On the other hand, the person who comes in first, who Brandon Johnson will be facing tomorrow when you listen to this, is a demon in human form. He is near your liberal lives as a bag man. He is the fucking reactionary Republican dog of the Chicago political machine. And that manon's name is Paul Vallis. And as as as Vallis would fucking want, we are going to talk about him after we go to ADS. All right, we're back from ADS. We're going to talk about Paul Vallis.

Just the worst guy. Okay, So Paul Vallis sucks ass um. The thing he's most famous for sucking ass for is for being the school privatization guy. So we're gonna start with him. The beginning of his sort of political career is in two In nineteen ninety five, he gets appointed as the CEO of Chicago Public Schools and he holds that position from nineteen ninety five to two thousand and one. Now, okay, so there's a few things that he like, really likes.

One is insulating schools entirely insulating any mechanism and any sort of like part of how a school works from any kind of community democratic control. Chicago used to have these sort of like democratic councils that could like do stuff within the school and vows is like, fuck that we're getting rid of all that shit, like absolutely not. The other thing he loves is charter schools, So we

should explain what a charter school is. Yeah, so okay, The way a charter school works is that instead of like the state or like the city or a town or like a local government running a school, which is the way that schools normally work, you instead give out a charter to either like technically an NGO or just a for profit company, and then that company takes a bunch of tax money, like takes a tax money that would have gone to a public school, and then uses

it to run their own fucking school. So bait like it is. It is privatization that they've relabeled like charter quote unquote because if they actually called it privatization to schools, people would fucking hate it. And Vallis loves this ship. This is this is what he spends most of his time across like on multiple continents doing schools bullshit like attempting to push for um the other specific thing that he really likes this and this, this is like this

is sort of the Paul Vallis signature. Like classic thing is military academies. They used to like basically not be military academies in Chicago, and Vallis is like, We're gonna open so many fucking military academies and these are these are like regular and the things okay, like there are sort of like disciplinary quote unquote military academies, which is like you get sent there instead of prison. These are like just like normal schools that are like quote unquote

military academies. But these schools like they're they're barely schools.

Like like there there there. There are a lot of people who went to these schools who in multiple cities and multiple get into more of this sort of later when we get to Philly, but like people will go to these schools and like their textbooks have pages torn out of them and like whith you know, here's the thing, right you would think this is like like a kind of like Republican style, like uh, we're taking out the pages to talk about like Columbus being bad, Like no

no, no no, no, just random fucking like just pages torn out of it because they these schools don't be fucking money, like they don't have actual curriculars like they just they just like don't have sports. They just don't have like anything to fucking do. Um. And then this is another thing with charter schools. So all right, if you want to like be a regular teacher, you have to have like teaching teaching certificates if you work at a charter school. Yeah.

So I think that the standards depend on the state some of them. I think Illinois is like two thirds of the teachers have to have teaching certificates. But that means that a lot of kids are being taught by teachers with no teaching certificates, which is like, you know that teaching and it turns out is not in fact easy enough that you could just put a random person there who doesn't know how to do it, and you know,

like have kids be taught correctly. These mil academies, these milter academies, they have teachers who just like don't fucking teach right, like they're they're they're just complete shit show.

But he opens a bunch of these am but okay, and the other big thing the vallas Is supposed and this is the thing all all the people who like Fallos would do this thing where they're like he's like a budget wizard and he's like the guy, he's like the technocrat, like smart policy, want guy who you bring in to like like bail out of school district that's underwater financially and oh boy, oh boy, is that not true?

He okay, So there there, there's there's a very good report called Passing the Buck, which is written by the Action Center on Race in the Economy or ACRE, which I recommend people look genuinely, people should go read this. It's like twelve pages long. It's very short, and like, h like it's not even twelve like three of those pages dissertations um. And they wrote a report on Vallis's time in various school districts. And here's some of the ship that he did to make it look like he

had his balanced, his budget balanced. So all right, let's let's talk about his pension scheme. I feel like I actually should have plain how pensions work, because like nobody fucking has them anymore. So a pension is a thing where like you the worker or in this case, the Chicago teachers, you take some of your current pay and instead of taking the money, now it gets taken out of your paycheck and put towards a pension fund to

fund your retirement. And then this fund is invested in the stock market to get returns to pay out pensions that like support you when you retire. Right. Yeah, So in nineteen ninety nine, Vallis was like, oh, hey, the Chicago pension system is funded, so we're gonna take the teacher's money and use it to pay other budget shortfalls. Great,

so this is good. Anyways, after he does this for for thirteen consecutive years, Chicago stops paying into its pension system altogether, and the result of this is a nine point six billion dollar hole in the pension system that Chicago has to like pay off. And this is a huge part of like where are the sort of modern like budget deficits in Chicago come from, like things that

are used to like justify show schools down. Is that like they just didn't pay into this, They just stop paying into the pensions and instead took the money that they're supposed to go to teachers and use it to like make their budgets look clean. So if if he had just done this, it would have been bad enough.

But but Vallas is like is a very very specific kind of like neoliberal technocrat dip shit, And that kind of neoliberal technicrat dip shit is the the extremely interested in financial instruments guy who was like a kind of person that I think I think we see less of these days because the most not the modern version of this or like crypto people. Right, but back in like the nineties and two thousands, there were a bunch of guys whose things were like really really conflabu of financial

instruments and everyone thought they were fucking geniuses. Um now, now if if you if you were alive in two thousand and eight, you know where this is going. But vallis the second thing he does to sort of like like quote unquote balance his budget sheet is he takes out the government que a payday loan. So here's here's a passing the buck quote. Vallas literally borrowed against Chicago school children's futures when he took out a six hundred

and sixty six million dollars in capital appreciation bonds. Also, when I said he was like like a demon sid sixty six million dollars with the Satanic Yeah, yeah, we're doing the Satanic panic, but for this guy who fucking sucks, So yeah, he took out the loans and capital appreciation bonds a form of debt in which the borrower pays nothing for several years, but then has to pay very

large sums to make up for skipped payments. A capital appreciation bond c a B is a long term bond with compounding interest, on which the borrower is not permitted to make any principal or interest payments for many years, but the interest will. Yeah, crazy, but you're allow Why would we Why would you take that? Why would you? Why would you do? That's like a really bad decision. Oh it's a terrible it's a terrible decision. I'm not

a big money guy. But the Valis's assumption was that, like, Okay, we don't have any money now, but property values will continue to go up, and it just keep going up forever, so we can pay this bond back when we have money from higher from property taxes. And yeah, so okay, I really if I'm gonna finish this thing on these

these just dogshit bonds. In this way, it is similar to a negative amortization mortgage, in which the outstanding principle actually grows over time because the unpaid interest gets tacked onto the amount owed and compounds. Yeah, very Amusingly, California was doing something similar to this with with restitution payments recently, or some some place in California were, at least in one case that I looked into for a story I wrote, it was it was ruled illegal under the Eighth Amendment.

Oh my god, a cruel and unusual interest payments. It's good to see the Chicago is doing it. Yeah, there's actually a funny story about this that, like one of the size stories of this is that the guy who's running the school system in California like gets this same offer from like bond salesman people, and he's like, know, what the fuck, this is the dumbest thing I've ever seen. Vallas does this. Vallas is going to do this in

multiple cities. So I'm gonna finish reading this thing. Because of this structure, borrowers often end up paying extraordinarily high interest rates over the lifetime of the bonds. Former California State Treasurer Bill Lockney called CIABS the school district equivalent of a pan a loan. So the result of this is that out of the six hundred and sixty six point two million dollars right that Valas takes out, they

pay one point five billion dollars in interest. The interest rate over the lifetime of this bond is two hundred and twenty three percent. Good. This is the guy who's supposed to be like the really smart type, the crack reformer guy who understands financial stuff, who you bring into like solve school districts, and he took out a load two hundred and twenty three percent fucking interest. This is

this is the kind of interest rate. Then, the words of David Graeber were once reserved for organized crime, and now is you know, normally normally this kind of loan is like a thing. It's like, this is like a very predatory sort of like yeah, it's like a predatory

banking thing. Valis think this to himself on purpose because he's dumb, and I mean, also like he's trying to I mean and part of part of the other sort of undercurrent of this, it's not just that he's really stupid, it's that he's trying to pay off his buddies in the in the finance sector. Yeah, and then you know,

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

two happens, and this has a bunch of effects. One of the big ones is that Vallas was taking out bonds with variable interest rates. Oh now, okay, we have talked about this on this show before. Right, there are entire country they are like entire like like multi national political movements that don't exist. There are entire countries who

fucking don't have manufacturing checkers anymore. Like there are there are places with a life expectancy felled by twenty years because they're they're they're fucking leaders took out these kind of of like variable interest rate loans and got de strobe in the interest rate spikes and guess what happened

in Chicago interest rate spikes. And okay, so Vallas's successors look at this and are like, this is the stupidest fucking you know well, but okay, Valles' success by the way, is Artie Duncan, who's the guy that Obama puts in charge of of the Department of Education. And Artie Duncan is like, okay, do you know how we're going to solve the problem of these the the the risk from these adjestable rate interest rates. Credit default swabs? Oh god, all right, I'm not going to explain how a credit

default swap works because it's fucking annoying as hell. But credit default swaps are one of the things, like one of the very specific financial instruments that are that are like specifically responsible for the two thousand and eight collapsed Yes, and now these technically aren't credit default swaps, right, These These are technically what are called interest default swap or like interest swaps, and they're but they're exactly the same thing as a credit as a credit default swap, but

instead of credit, it's interest. So the underlying asset right is like as a bond and not like a loan or whatever. But otherwise it's exactly the same thing. And this this man, you know, and these these swaps have this thing where like if you can't pay, you get these like unbelievably high like fees that start happening. So when when these bonds blow up, they managed to cost they managed to cost Chicago another thirty one million dollars

because they're credit default swaps just blew up. So all right, so this has a two thousand too, And she tells the two He ran for governor or against Rob fucking Blogoyevich, who is Rob who is Rob a Bligoyevich. He just did the first syllable and then let your let to take the rest. And Valis sucks so much that Rob Blugoyevich is able to outflank him on the left bye bye bye, running against him saying, hey, look at all

these schools he privatized. And so he gets claw bared in the primaries by Rob fucking Bloyevich, the man who okay, so this is what we will cover this one day at fully on the show because it's really funny. But Rob Lgoievic is the man most famous for getting arrested for trying to sell Obama Senate seat like he tried to sell a Senate Oh he's Oh, he's amazing. He's now just on Tucker talking about political persecution. Oh yeah, yeah's extremely funny. Yeah he was on yesterday, wasn't he? Yeah?

Yeah yeah, first Trump should Yeah, how he was persecuted first, and how Trump is being persecuted too. It's great, really, really the canary in the coal mine off, Hey, griffting politicians, look, Garrison, look if they if they can go after Rob Lgio trying to sell Obama Senate seat, they could go after you for trying to sell Barack Obama Senate seat. That's true. You know who else is trying to sell Barack Obama Senate seat? Products and services that support this very podcast. No,

they're really not allowed to do that. None of them would ever commit a crime I under any circumstances. I still think I think a fair number of these corporations probably engage in some some sort of political Yeah, that's true, but I don't they're trying to buy him a Senate seat, Garrison. That's totally different, different, not the same, not the same,

totally fine. Thanks Ronald Reagan, all right, we're back, and we're now, We're we're now, we're now sending Vallis to our I don't I don't actually know if Chicago and Philadelphia or sister or cities, but like I think they should be. I don't know. I am. I am very in favor of the Chicago Philadelphia alliance. Same vibe. Yeah, so she they both stood in for Gotham City and the Christopher Nolan trilogy. So we're doing a Bagman reference again.

There's there's a whole There are like so many different specific there. David Grabber rights about this, like there there are so many different like parts of places where they filmed, like the Dark Night where people tried to protest and got arrested for blocking the road. Like this happened in multiple cities. Yeah. No, one wants the city to turn into la So you have to stand up against that shit immediately. You do not let it happen in your hood.

Yeah it could, it could happen here. Okay. So after Vallas gets clabbered in in in the mayoral race, he gets brought in by Philadelphia to try to like fix their school system, and he uh me, his plan to do this is by doing a bunch of military academies again and then doing also doing charter schools, and so I should I should explain like his other sort of so the big sort of rationale thing behind charter schools, this school choice, which is this thing that was specifically

invented as a way to let Race his parents avoid integration. Yeah, this is like goes along with sobody mentioned the homeschool and when we've talked about this in other episodes. But he's like a huge like Valist to this day is a giant like school choice guy. Um, and you know, but the other thing, the other thing about Valist, I don't think people realize that much he even though he's a Republican a lot of the time, like he kind of flips back and forth being a Democrat being a Republican.

But he's he's like after he loses to Rob or even even sort of before, like he is anual sort

of Chicago machine guy. And because he's a Chicago machine guy, when he gets into Philly, the stuff that he starts doing, the stuff where he like he'll just like like he takes over the school district and like fires munch people and like installs his cronies and all these departments and all these people are getting like he's like buying off people with budget allocations, and he starts selling off buildings

to raise money. So he sells off like the district headquarters in order to buy like a more expensive district headquarters. And here's a quote from the book Not Paid for Us, which is a really really great book about sort of the history of racism in education in Philadelphia. And this is a quote from a long time activist le Roy Simmons. Before I start reading this, the district headquarters was called

twenty first and Parkway. There was doors in twenty first and Parkway worth one million dollars, then big brass doors in the fronts. Those doors were worth one million dollars with all the carving on them. People don't know how much they got for it. To this day, I can't get an answer about how much did you sell that building for? Where the money went? The school district sold twenty first and Parkway in a package with Kennedy Center. There were brand new trucks parked at Kennedy Center. They

had forgot were there. There was a printing press in the Kennedy Center that could print all new magazines and they never used. There were books and calculators and every time it went through there there were boxes of unused stuff in the Kennedy Center and nobody knew. And they sold that in the contents and the package with twenty first of Parkway, and nobody knew how much that was. There was some art that was priceless on the walls at twenty first of Parkway. No one can find the art.

They were priceless pieces of art hanging in schools across the city and all that was sold in a package and nobody saw it where it went. Yeah, so this is this is again, this is like this is classic Chicago corruption shit, right, Like we're not gonna say how much we sold this building for. We're not gonna say who who we sold it too, Like we're gonna build a more expensive building. And you know, if you look at you look into who the contractors are as like

always someone's uncle or like brother or some shit. Um, there's just you know, like there's printing presses that are gone, like priceless works of art just vanished. It's like this is this is like you know, it's sort of incredible sort of Chicago political machine stuff. Um, and this gets into what I think about I think the Chicago political machine that is really interesting, which is that these people

are like, on the one hand, they're unbelievably corrupt. On the other hand, a lot of them are sort of real like hardline like doctrinaire neoliberals. This is I mean, this is sort of the thing with Arnie Duncan, right, Like, like Obama actually comes out of this machine too, when he's a lot more sort of like doctrinaire about this

stuff than the sort of modern people are. And you know, and Vallis is like one of the sort of like big guys here, and you know, so he's really really in favor of charter schools and so they get enormous amounts of money. Um, he also does this thing he yeah, this is also from Not Paid for Us. He funnels money into just like a shit ton of nhos in

order to like do education programming or whatever. And so there's a sort of constellation that forms of these like you have you these corporations doing like education stuff or like running schools, and you have these like nonprofits running

like the like the education material. And it's it's this sort of like this this is sort of arch neoliberal thing where instead of the state administering a service, what you have is this like based basically a bunch of like contracting grifters who come in and suck up all

of the money and then provide absolutely dogshit services. Now I'm going to read another quote from this book, because the people they are paying these contracts who are fucking wild on the The SRC is like one of the bodies that's in charge of, like one of the state bodies as in charge of, like the Philadelphia School District.

One of the SRC's most problematic contracts was with K twelve Inc. For three million dollars to quote provide academic and curriculum support access to K twelves online curriculum and assessments, academic and richment via summer and extended day programs, professional development,

teacher planning and training materials, and community involvement activities. Conservative radio talk show host William Bennett was the founder of K twelve, Inc. He had been an advisor to former presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush Durin a show in two thousand and five, he said the following, and this is a direct quote. If you want to reduce crime. You could, if that was your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country and

your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossibly ridiculous and wray reprehensible thing to do, but your crime weight would go down. So they peeled this guy three million fucking dollars to both of VAL's pro choice credentials. This is this is the most pro choice thing I've ever seen from him, is the genocide guy. Because guy, yeah, yeah, well you see, they all have a have a weakness. That is, has anyone looked to the curriculum that they're providing.

I'm serious the thing, it's unclear to me that they ever, like actually really provided much of anything. It does sound like a like if you were going to make up a company to grift at the education system, K twelve Inc. Would be a great name. Yeah, And then that's that's the thing about like all these charter schools too, right.

It's like, like, okay, so like there are some for profit corporations you do charter school stuff, and they stick in the charter school business because they decide that's how they want to make their money. A lot of these things come in take a state contract the school immediately implodes and then leave and then they just walk out with self a million dollars and this is like this

is a recurring pattern over and over again with charter schools. UM. He also brings in Teach for America, who is this like just genuinely evil organization that tries to break teachers unions by recruiting these like incredibly idealistic and naive young college grads and like throwing them into like into failing schools as this thing to like, ah, you're gonna like go serve the community and like you know, you're you'll learn the job and you'll you'll become an educator and

you're like helping these disadvantaged kids and it's a disaster. These these these people, the people who do this have no fucking idea how to teach because they know theyn't have teachers, gets right, They're just like college grads, and at any any of you who have been around college grads, like you think those people are responsible enough to fucking teach kids, Like Jesus Christ, Yeah, I meant of that was like a big thing. Like I don't know if

it still happens or not. I can remember, right, Yeah, reference letters for students like ten fifteen years ago for that. Yeah, Like I I mean, I know I had to like talk out classmates of mine like out of doing it because we were like you are doing you are doing union busting and also this will destroy your life and the life of the children you have to teach. Yeah, it's a very strange system that, yeah, takes someone who by virtue of having any degree is it's automatically an educator.

But to be fair, that is how universities work as well. Yeah, you get get your master's degree and they're like, well, fuck it, get in there. They'll just give you grad students with no degrees, right, Like that's that's the thing too. Yeah, but yeah, yeah, and you know to to to to get up together into those syds of like the other thing that's happening here is is he has this really valas, has this really really racist kind of like we need to like enforce discipline in schools thing, and so they

have all these and this happened to Chicago too. They have these like zero tolerance policies that have done i mean irreparable damage to like tons of thousands of kids. I'm gonna read I'm going to read a thing from tribe about Philadelphia. Quote. Test results were posted on data walls in the school buildings to show which classes were making the most progress. WHOA, it was humiliating, said Grill

was a teacher. A lot of our kids were left behind, were behind, and a lot of a lot of our kids suffered trauma, and trauma affects the way you learn. So they were behind, they weren't on grade level, and it made them feel like failures. I hated giving those tests. Wow. Yeah, yeah, people like to be wrong about Georgia. Well, but that that's some more wedding and ship threat that like and like these are like fucking yeah, like these are like

these are literally children like you were. You were publicly shaming people who are like twelve. It's just it's just horrible. Yeah that, Like we've known for a very long time that that doesn't work when you're educating kids. Like I have done Pettigougi training and get it. No one with any intent to actually help kids is shaming kids in the classroom, or young people or anyone of any age for that matter. I just checked out what K twelve

Inca doing. It's great. They're now offering online high school. Oh great, yeah, yeah, you can go to a faith prep academy, developed Christian character find Yeah, yeah, this is great. This is this is what I this is what I youth need. Yeah it sucks so Um. The other thing again, we keep strinkling around this because this happens a bunch of times. Like again, vals, this whole thing is supposed

to be about, like about balancing budgets. Right in two thousand and seven, by the time he's like like at the near the end of his like time in Philly, he's fucked everything up so badly that that for in like just one year of the budget, Philly schools were seventy three million dollars in the whole. Now, the thing about this is this is where most stories about Valis's time in Philadelphia end. But wait, there's fucking more so that that seventy three million dollars short fall was. It

was the one year short fall. Right remember back in Chicago where Valas is like variable interest rate bonds like blew up in the school's faces. Um, this time, Vallas is the guy directly who did the credit the fault swaps and uh, these these the interest rates on these things are locked in literally for decades and just like like some of these aren't expiring to like twenty thirty one, right, and just so far they've cost one hundred and sixty

one million dollars. Great, yeah, and test test scores fucking go down under him. It's a ship show. Yeah, And so twousand and seven they kick him out because they're like, what the fuck are you doing? Like Unfortunately the place they kick him out too is is and you're you're not gonna like this post Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. So

for fuck's sake? Yeah, yeah, why why do we have to inflict like the fail suns of neoliberalism and the people of New Orleans that's gonna get worse by the way, Okay, great, yeah, um, so this is really bad, right New Orleans? Now? Okay, so I think there's there's some kind of controversy about

how exactly you calculate this. At the very least sixty three out of the sixty six like New Orleans, like big, like sorry, let me let me rest at the very least sixty three out of the sixty six, like schools that they run, like at the very least like that that are directly run by the state. Our charter schools. Um, there's three more that are also charter schools but are kind of administrated by the district. So there is a huge debate as to whether there are technically any public

schools left in in fucking New Orleans. Jesus. Yeah, they fired like and this this was this was before Valis came into office. But in New Orleans they fired the entire every teacher in the fucking city. They fired all the unions, literally, all the union teachers were replaced them with non union people. M Vallis comes in and starts implementing some shit that is just like I like prison camp shit. Oh god, here's from here's from tribe again.

According to Biguard, a lot of kids were arrested for quote disruption of a school process if they showed up late to class and refused to be kicked out for tardiness. And again they are being arrested for refuge for wanting to stay in school. Yeah, black kids, black girls were arrested for having quote rat tail combs, which have long,

sharp handles from grating hair. Yeah. In one instance, Gard said a six year old student was expelled and charged with possession and distribution of a controlled substance because he brought toms to school and gave them to his classmates thinking they were candy. What the fuck they charged a six year old? Yeah? God, yeah, the levels of fucking cruelty that have to exist, Like a cop has to see a six year old and not be like a lull. Those are toms, like the kitch by should neat too

many of those. Let me go, he didn't know they were kiddy because he's six Jesus Christ. Yeah, just like just just jetty widely like abhorrently evil shit. Yeah. See this is like maybe now is a good time to point out that, like U, in the wake of yet another terrible school shooting, people will want to put more cops in schools. This is what happens when we put cops in schools, right, They brutalize our fucking children. Yeah, and like it's not yeah, like the state doing vince

the children is not on the way or protect children. Yeah. What I want to say, the more your school represents the levels of law enforcement that are in a prison camp, the more the actual experience of the children will become like prison camps. Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, but also just literally I mean, that's God. I love to go to the Panoptic on high school. Garrison, what are you talking about.

It's just the panoptic on high school where if you don't, if you don't get kicked out of your fucking class for being late, they arrest you the coalent again. Yeah,

just so speaking speaking of disciplining and punishing. So these charter schools, they do think that charter schools always do right, which is sometimes if you know, if if you look at people who talk about educational reform, they'll be like, charter schools have like really great like test numbers, and a that's just like not true, right, that they're only looking at the really good charter schools. But you know,

here's the thing. If you give a public school the amount of money that a really good charter school has, it will also be a really good school. But but there's the second thing that charter schools can do that other schools can't, which is that charter schools could just fucking kick students out. And this is one of the ways that they maintain their test numbers is they just kick out kids over whatever. Yet you don't do who

aren't initially doing well on tests. So they don't have to teach them and like bother to improve their test scores.

And in New Orleans they get in trouble because the kids they were kicking out were kids with disabilities who they were illegally yeah, who they were illegally not like giving individual education plans too, and also they were these everything right, These charter schools are all run by different private corporations, and so there's no system of tracking whether when a kid gets kicked out whether they can actually

get it go to another school. So they're just leaving these disabled kids, like in the fucking win with no school to go to. And this was so illegal that after a lawsuit, like I think it might still be going to this day. It was going like twenty fourteen. Like the school the Philadelphia school system was like under resizaship by the federal government because they committed so many crimes against disabled students. Jesus Christ, that is brutal. Yeah,

it's awful, fucking sorry. Stuff makes you kind of WoT an education for a lot of my adult life, and this ship makes me furious. Yeah, I just wanted to what do you you to guess? Where do you think they sent Paul Vallis next after he got kicked out of I try trying to run of New Orleans. Did they send him to set up a finishing school for girls in Kabul? No, but similar similar vibes. Oh, for fock's sake, it dude, it's outside the continental US. Yes,

it's not a rock no Puerto Rito earthquake. It's Haiti after the yep yep. So now we've talked about this in four on the show. In two thousan ten, there was a just unbelievably heartwrenchingly catastrophic earthquake killed two hundred and twenty thousand people and also destroyed like almost every building in Haiti. And this kicks off phase two of the UN occupation of the country. We talked about out this in our episodes on Lulu and Bill Snaro. This is this is when the UN guys from the Paul

bring in Cholerado, a bunch of the operation. Right. Yeah, So right after this happens, so the US just like sends Marines in, right, and no one in Haiti asked for it. We just we just fucking invade um and they bring in Paul Vallis, like specifically Paul Vallas and also Arnie Duncan, who's again Obama's fucking education secretary, gets bring in to rebuild the Haitian school system on the

New Orleans model. Now, okay, weirdly, if they had actually implemented New Orleans model, it would have been an improvement, because they hate the way the Haitian school system worked was it was ninety percent private and the tuition was forty percent of someone's annual budget, like like a family's annual budget. Yeah, so that's the friends in Haiti who couldn't afford to pay for school trying. It's fucking horrible. Vallis is supposed to like change this, right, he gets

brought in, They bring in the Clinton Foundation. Instead, what happens is the Clinton Foundation and buys a bunch of trailers to use as schools for the from from specifically the same people who got in trouble for selling for maldehyde ridden trailers to FEMA drink Katrina, and then you know, okay, and I never think that I I can't emphasize enough the grifted trailer ink or something. Yeah, they fucking suck well.

But also also even though trailers were good, right, there's a real issue with trying to use trailers to teach kids in a place that is hot, yeah, which is that it is one hundred fucking degrees inside these trailers. These trailers are made of metal, so if you touch

the side of the thing, you get burned. Kids at people, people who like teachers who were taught there, routinely talk about how every kid, and they're every kid in their fucking class was having heat stroke and they were just like giving them painkillers for heat stroke because that's all they could do. And yeah, it is punishingly hot if you haven't works in that part of the world a lot, and it is, it's hot enough without banking a tank

can Yeah, and vowless's fucking education form. They don't fucking work. They don't do shit, right, hate education system is still fucked despite all the body the Clinton Foundation and the like, all these experts got paid, Like, it's still really bad. I vallist like specifically, like very specifically defended the use of trailers is like a thing you teach people in um. Yeah, and you know this stuff. I'll continue used to the

present day. The US has been trying to find another excuse, just trying to find a way to do another intervention. In Haiti. So she's still on the New Orleans job. I think, while he's doing this Haiti job, and then he takes another job in Chile. Yeah, why, I don't know. The people people get well, because because the the Interamerican Development Bank gives him half a million dollars to run two thousand schools there. So again he's now he's now

splitting his time between New Orleans, Haiti, and Chile. It's it's almost impossible to find it. I spent a lot of time looking. It's like it's really hard to find like anything about what actually he was doing in Chile.

What we do know was when he got there, he was met by the enormous two thousand and eleven Chilean student protests, which then later turned into the twenty thirteen Chilean student protests, which turned into two thousand and fifteen Chilean student protests, which turned into the two thousand and nineteen Chilean student protests. So you know, I mean, I just I just want to like you. It is possible to run Paul Vallis out of your country a couple

of different places, or at least your school. Jesians were also a country a couple of places have done it, and then after that they ended up Bridgeport, Connecticut for some reason, where he gets run out after doing like he gets he flees Connecticut, like trying to escape a lawsuit about all the illegal anti union stuff that he did. I really love the image of someone trying to desperately flee from Connecticut. Yeah, like it's so small. How how

hard is it to leave Connecticut? It seems pretty easy to jump over the line. I mean the one the video I actually want to see is him getting out of Philly. See see, getting out of Philly sounds actually hard. Getting out of this Connecticut is like, come on, come on. Yeah, the video I want to seuse him getting sent back to Haiti by himself. Oh god. Yeah. So he runs

again and she wasn't fourteen. So Bigovis gets arrested for you know, selling a Senate seat, and he tries to run for lieutenant governor on on a slate, on like a ticket with Pat Quinn who had been the governor because he'd been the lieutenant governor under boys, and they like, actually they managed to lose in Illinois to a Republican, which is like, I think that should not happen unless the Democrats would like really fuck up, which I mean

it happens, right, but like, yeah, so Democrats can make can make electoral mistakes. Are you sure to be fair? To be fair? This one wasn't. This wasn't even an electoral thing. This was just the guy tried to sell a fucking Senate and people were so mad at into the next election, They're like, we will vote for Bruce Rowner, who is just like a fucking absolute dipshit. But okay, so she So he has now lost two consecutive runs

for governor, right governor and lieutenant governor. Now this year he actually he would he had another bid where he was maybe gonna run, and then he stopped. And now now he is one of the candidates for the mayor of Chicago. Now, while he's been doing his campaigning for this, some other fun stuff has been happening. Um, so he has an absolutely unlistenable podcasts please nodered. I considered pulling clips from this, and then I was like, I'm not.

I can't inflict this on you. Absolutely it sucks too much. Yeah, I would simply leave this zoom call. I'm not, I'm just trauma. I was gonna, like, I was gonna talk about one of the things that he said a couple of things that he well, okay, one that he said on this one of they said on a different show. Um. One of the things was he starts ranting about this thing called culturally responsive teaching, which is this kind of liberal like anti racist. Yeah, this is a big thing.

Like if anyone ever starts talking about culturally responsive teaching and starts yelling about it like they're a racist, like that, those are the only people who like actually like consistently. I mean, like it's not like there ar't criticisms of it, but like almost everyone who talks about this on like a school board level is like a really weird racist guy.

So she starts raving about how this means that everyone's gonna get handed a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, and then says, quote, what is this the cultural Revolution? Now we have covered the cultural revolution over the course of the show in the Atlanta episodes, and I'm just gonna simply say no and move on to read this unbelievably racist thing that he said. I'm just gonna read this.

It's it's real bad. But for that matter, if you're a black child, you go home and listen to your parent when your parent has failed to be successful in addressing the ways these historically racist obstacles that have denied them a chance to equal opportunity. Here's the guy he's talking to, Paul. I wonder if you're a black kid, why don't you become a criminal? If you're hearing this stuff in school, everyone with the white skin is an oppress or if you're a black skin, you're the oppressed.

That makes it pretty easy to justify any pretty bad conduct. In my opinion, you're absolutely right. So this is valence comes back. But what you're also doing, you're giving these You're giving people an excuse for bad behavior. You're almost justifying is Rams book in Fox. So you're right, You're absolutely right. Where is the accountability? You're the victim. What's happening is it becomes a justification for everything, and I

think that's a very dangerous thing. Sollas arguing that talking about racism is actually a thing that encourages black people to do crime, which is like, that sounds that sounds kind of racist me just a little bit. He maybe with supremisist gives up racist vibes. Yeah. Um, so speaking of racist vibes, his son is a cop in Santa Fe and he was one of three cops who shot a black guy in the back after calling him boy. Um. The cops, including Vasis. Yeah, they start screaming boy at

him and they shoot him in the back. And the cops, including Valles, his son claimed to have found a gun next to his body. Um. And in a completely unrelated story, you with special forces units in Afghanistan, Ricie Lee carried AK forty sevens in a combat zone so they could drop the next to the body of people they killed, Ridge and declared them insurgents. This has no relation to the previous story at all. I am simply relaying facts

two interesting and unrelated stories. Yeah, didn't. Valis also is he's the guy who claimed his Twitter was hacked, right, Oh yeah, yeah, so very way back. At the beginning of this episode, I talked a bit about the racism against Loie Lightfoot and like, one of the tweets that he liked is a tweet like calling Lori a man like, Lord life Foot a man like. It's just unbelievably racist, like homophobic, transphobic shit. And he claims that his account

was hacked and people were liking tweets without his permission. Yeah, right, that's all they did. They just liked somebracist sweets. There's like a bunch of other like and the other thing. It's like, okay, like Paul Bells doesn't like actually live

in Chicago. You mentioned this. He lives in like he claims to live in Polo's Heights, which is also not Chicago, but it's unclear whether he even lives there or if he's in like some kind of like even more insane outlying suburb that's even less Chicago than the stuff is. And he like, he likes, he likes he one of the things he likeing tweets, calling it like shit cago and stuff. And it's like, well, yeah, it's because he

doesn't live in the city. He's not actually like these are like a bunch of his support, a bunch of the money he's getting are from like drained suburban like reactionary and okay, So I want to tell one last story about him that pisses me off a lot, which is the story of a Wake Illinois. So Awake Illinois is like Illinois version of Protect Texas Kids. It's a

group that does Nazi protests at drag events. They managed to destroy a bakery called Uprising for trying to hold a drag bunt brunch so that they Awake did all this thing of like, ah, they're grooming kids, and then the Proud Boys showed up and attacked it, and then someone like vandalized it, and they nearly had to close the entire bakery until a go fund me raised thirty thousand dollars for them to survive. They are like, these

people are unbelievably homophobic. They rant about groomers constantly. They're like really transphobic. Anyways, Paul Vallis spoke at one of their fundraisers. Oh god. So after this came out, Vallis distanced himself from the group, saying you didn't know what they represented and just wanted to support school choice. Awake

responded by going, hey, what the fuck. You absolutely know who we are, and they released another video of Vallis and another Awake event where he said that AWAKES president shad An Adcock should run for governor, So if elected, would I probably be the most openly homophobic democratic like mayor in the country, which is a pretty wild like, which is pretty wild claim, but like I can't think of anyone else who actually like showed up at an

event where people just screaming about groomers, like yeah, and of the Democrats, he is just a Republican, Like he's he's like like a pretty right wing like Republican who runs the Democrat because Chicago political machine is also just so far right. I thought this was because low Lightfoot defounded the police. Mayor. Oh, I thought that's what happened, and people want the police back. That's what That's what

I That's what I've told you know. The thing is actually very funny about the elections is like, so there is elections for these like police district councils are just supposed to be these like civilian oversight boards and the like reform. There was kind of there was an alliance to sort of like reform defund an abolitionist candidates, and they did fucking amazing and the pro police candidates got fucking clabbard and it Meanwhile, every single national story about

the election was like Chicago crime. I was like, you guys don't understand how much everyone here hates the police, Like I like, they murdered a thirteen year old, like fucking two years ago. I yeah, good, Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna hedge my thing here by saying there's so much other Paul Valle shit I couldn't fit, Like I really wanted to talk about Keith Thornton, who is Chicago's George Santos, who like his thing is that he stole nine to eleven dispatcher Valor and is like keep showing

up in pictures with Vallis. Just just google Keith Thornton and you will have a good time. Like, there are so many other Valist things that he did that are awful. There are probably things that he's done that will never know about because he did them in like I don't know, like like what the fuck he was doing in Chile. We probably won't ever know all the things he didn't hate E. Yeah, don't let this guy become the fucking mayor of Chicago. He will leave the city utterly destroyed.

Let's go Brandon. I I'm so annoyed that people are on ironically, let's go brandon ing in Chicago now for Brandon Johnson. It's bringing it back, We're taking it back, We're reclaiming it. I reclaim Brandon. Yeah, I'm so bad like bringing Brandon back. Okay, I got in trouble with my boss in twenty fifteen for saying fuck Hillary, like you fucking little bitches. You could just you can just say that. You you could just say fuck Joe Biden like all of your cowards. Yes, it was. It is

deeply cowardly afraid of saying fuck. But at the same time, they think they're gonna staged an armed overthrow of the government. Huh. Anyway, Oh, there's actually okay, this is the thing I actually should much. There are a bunch of ties between um, there are a bunch of ties between val Us and guys who were at J six, like and like a lot of j S people support him. He's like he's like he

is the MAGA candidate. That's like there's like, oh, there's a whole thing there that I didn't get into because I don't know. There's so much you could do, like seven episodes just about Paul Vallas and how much he sucks. But yeah, stop him if he fucking gets elected. We're doing that. We're doing that. We're doing the fucking Chilean

student protests because yeah, hate him. Opie has a bad day. Hey, welcome to It could happen here a podcast about things falling apart um and today it's kind of going to be a conversation about uh, is shit falling apart? Are we all about to be devoured by a rogue AI? Is your job about to be devowered by a rogue AI? These are the questions that we're going to, you know, talk around and about and stuff today and with us today is Noah John Syracusa, a math professor at Bentley University. Noah,

welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, and I'm reaching out. We're talking right now because there's an article that was put up in The New York Times on March twenty four, twenty twenty three, titled you can have the Blue Pill or the Red Pill and We're out of Blue Pills, which is a fun title by Yuval Harari Tristan Harris and as a raskin. And it's an article that is kind of about the pitfalls and dangers of AI research, of which there definitely are some. I

enjoyed your thread on the matter. I thought it was a lucid breakdown of the things the article gets right and the areas in which I think they're a bit fear mongery. So yeah, I think that's probably a good place to start, unless you wanted to start by just kind of generally talking about where you kind of are on AI and what you kind of think, you know,

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

much news happens. Yeah, I found myself overall deeply frustrated that I agree with the central conclusion, which is that maybe we shouldn't be just like plowing headlong into this and should be more careful when we we we screw around with technology like this, which I agree with and I feel like should have been the thing we did with like I don't know, Facebook, Twitter, like all of

these things like it's less. My obsession is less with like the specific dangers of AI and more with what we keep letting these guys who are fundamentally like gamblers within your capital money really put our society through the ringer without ever asking should we like do any research on maybe how social media affects children and like how all of these different things. And it's it's right that, like, yeah, we should be concerned about what these people are going

to do with AI, but also why now? Why just now? Yeah? And that raises a really good point, which is what's different now versus what we've been experiencing with social media? And just to give your listeners some context, one of the three authors on this New York Times article is famous for writing this book Sapiens that's a sweeping history of humanity, and the other two are actually most famous

for the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. So they really are in this camp of warning people about social media algorithms. And as exactly as you're saying, that's sort of this thing that we've been dealing with, probably quite poorly, and now we're kind of moving on to the next societal risk, which is AI. So that as a really important question

of what's different now. And I think that's one of the things the articles try to address, which is many of the problems that we already have with algorithms, data driven algorithms, and even AI as it's used in social media is still happening now, but somehow things feel like they're spiring out of control. Yeah, And I think, I mean, honestly, I think a lot of this just has to do with culturally, what are touchstones for AI we're going into this,

you know, which are Skynet? You know, like it's that sort of thing, and you do see. I feel like the uncredited fourth author on this particular article is James Cameron, because there's pieces of it throughout this wellere like there's some it opens actually pretty provocatively. Imagine that you are boarding an airplane. Half the engineers who built it tell you there is a ten percent chance the plane will crash, killing you and everyone else on it. Would you still board?

In twenty twenty two, over seven hundred top academics and researchers behind the leading artificial intelligence companies were asked in a survey about future AI risk. Half of those surveys, there was a ten percent or greater chance of human extinction from future AI systems, which, yeah, let's zoom it on. Yeah. Yeah, that's because what I tried to do in my thread was go through all the claims and assertions and really pause and say hold on. But that's a great one

to start, because there's a lot to dig in right there. Yeah. So, first of all, there's a huge difference in that airplanes are based on science and physics and things that we understand pretty well. There's a lot to it, and there's been millions of flights, so you have a lot of data. You know, how many planes crash and how many don't. Maybe one engine goes out, you can do the statistics and CEO you know whatever percent of planes without that

engine still land safely. The problem with AI is we're just guessing. Yeah, right, there's no way to know one hundred years from now or ten years from now what it's going to do, what the real risks are, so we speculate, and that's not uncharted territory, right Let nuclear weapons were first introduced, people had to guess and speculate. But the danger, I think is putting it in that same category as things like airplanes or climate change. I'll

like to think about climate change. When you see these, you know what's the IPCC. I forget the acronym in these reports. That's based on thousands of scientists digging into thousands of published papers and all this data really modeling the environment. There's a lot of meat and substance to it. The problem with the AI is it's mostly people I hate to say it, but like me or like you, just kind of guessing and thinking, maybe this will happen,

maybe that'll happen. The reasonable thing to say. If you're in AARs you just like, yeah, I have concerns that AI could cause serious negative externalities for the human race. Perfectly reasonable statement. It is physically impossible to say there's a ten percent chance, exactly because it's never done that before. You know, I'm a math professor, and I'm the first to say numbers don't have some intrinsic meaning. Right. If I just say something has maybe a fifteen percent, I'm

just making it up. I'm pulling out of my ass. Yeah, it doesn't make it true. So it's this, it's a general pet peeve I have of sort of giving a false sense of precision by using numbers that you don't really know where they came from, or they're just made up. So that's one issue is these numbers are made up, and asking a thousand people to make up numbers isn't necessarily any better than asking one or two. You know, then if the numbers made up, it's made up. So

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

And I think you mentioned social media, and the authors of this article mentioned social media, and we have to look to the past right to understand the future. I think that's the only way to do it. So, what was one of the biggest scandals in social media was Cambridge Analytica, And as you know, we probably a member.

This was this data privacy scandal where a bunch of data was collected from Facebook users that shouldn't have been you know, people didn't realize that the data is being collected, they didn't approve it, and it was used for this election company or this political company that was trying to profile people and influenced campaigns towards Donald Trump, towards Brexit.

So this was a huge scandal, and you know, Facebook was fine five billion dollars or something, very justifiably, but I would say what it was in retrospect was a data privacy issue. People's personal data was leaked when it shouldn't have been. The problem was there was so much fear and fear monitoring over it that people felt this data was used by these sort of algorithmic mind lasers to kind of know us in such great detail and get us, trick us into voting for Donald Trump and

targeting us. And the journey is still kind of out, but most of the evidence looks like Cambridge Analytical it wasn't that effective. They couldn't do it. And it turns out you can know a lot about a person, a lot about their data, and it's really hard to influence them to change them. So what happened I think was there was a lot of alarm set spread rightly so about the tech companies. They have too much power, too much data, they know too much about us, and this

horrible thing happened. The problem is a lot of the alarmism then actually reinforce this aura of power, of godlike power that the tech companies have. People criticizing them actually gave them more potency than they deserved. And then suddenly Google and Facebook and all they had. It wasn't sudden, but it kind of built it up. They had this aura that our algorithms are it's so insanely powerful, and we have to make sure they stay in the right hands,

and we can do so much. And that's unfortunately what I see happening now a lot, And that is kind of the setting for critiquing this article. Yeah, absolutely agree that this stuff is risky. AI. I absolutely agree that we could go down a dangerous path. But once we start leaving firm ground and speculating wildly and using the

terminator stuff that you described. Yeah, even if you think you're criticizing the tech companies, you know what you're doing giving them the biggest compliment in the world, saying that you guys have created are godlike and you've created these mighty machines, You've created a deity, which is very similar to the language this argue article has at the end, and I think it's kind of worth like, as you're bringing up there are real threats. There are real threats

that are immediately obvious. The threat that a lot of writers are going to lose their jobs because companies like BuzzFeed decide to replace them with you know, chat, GPT or whatever. The fact that a lot of artists are going to lose out on work because their work has been hoovered up and it's being used to generate Like these are very real and very immediate concerns that we don't have to They're not hypothetical. We don't have to theorize about the AI becoming intelligent for this to be

a problem. These are things we have to immediately deal with because it puts people at risk. It's the same thing with like, you know, there's a lot that gets talked about with Cambridge in Altica, with kind of like the different Russian disinformation efforts. But when I think about the stuff that was happening in the same period that

worries me more. One of the things that occurred is because there was so much money to be made if you could get certain things to go viral on YouTube companies that use tools that weren't wildly dissimilar from some of these basically generated CGI videos based on kind of random terms that they knew were likely to trick the

algorithm into trending. And god knows how many children were parked in front of these like very unhinged videos for hours at a time that they would start watching some normal kid musical video or something, and then they're watching like the disembodied head of Krusty the crownd bounce around while like some sort of nonsense song gets sung and it's like, what is that actually going to do with kids? Like,

we don't know. That's unsettling thought, Yeah, and that's the kind of thing, you know, and I'm sure there will be obviously, Like one of the things that this article is not wrong about is that if we kind of leap forward into this technolog oology with the kind of abandon that we're used to giving the tech company, there will be unforeseen externalities that we can't predict right now

that will be very concerning. I just don't sky in it. Yeah, And that's what was so challenging, not just with that article, but with I think the movement we're having is I do agree very much in spirit. I agree with the recommendations. We need to slow down, we need to be more judicious and cautious, we need to really consider these. But again, if we overhype the technology, we may be doing ourselves a disservice by empowering the very entities that we're trying

to take power from. And as an example like that, can I read a quick quote from the article, do you AI's new mastery of language means it can now hack and manipulate the operating system of civilization. By'm gaining mastery of language, AI is seizing the master key to civilization from bank vaults to holy sepulchers. That's right, and that I mean, that is fun and you're right to laugh. Let's actually zoom in a second. And I think this is such a tempting trap that AI is super intelligent

in some respects. Right, It's done amazing at chats, amazing, it's jephard be amazing at various things. Chat GPT is amazing at these conversations. So what happens is it's so tempting to think AI just equal super smart and because it can do those things, and now, look, it can converse that it must be the super intelligent conversational entity. And it's really good at taking text that's on the web that it's already looked at and kind of spinning

it around and processing. It can come up with poems and weird forms. But that doesn't mean it is super intelligent in all respects. For instance, one of the main issues is to hack civilization. To manipulate us with language, it has to kind of know what impact its words have on us, and it doesn't really have that. It just has a little conversation at textbox and I can

give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. So the only data that it's collecting for me when it talks to me any of these chat thoughts is did I like the response or not. That's pretty weak data to try to manipulate me, you know, it's so basic. That's not that different than when I watch YouTube videos. YouTube knows what videos I like and what I don't like. When you say that YouTube is hacked civilization, no, it's

addicted a lot of us, but it's not hacked us. Yeah, we people have hacked YouTube, and that has done some damage to other people. Like, but it's like the thing is and that's that's part of why while I have many concerns about this technology, it's not that it's going to hack civilization because like, we're really good at doing that to each other. Like, there's always huge numbers of people hacking bits of the populace and manipulating each other,

and they're always have been. That's why we figured out how to paint like it's I do think that there's um, there's an interesting conversation to be had about the part of why people are kind of willing to leave anything as possible with this stuff is that for folks who were just kind of living their lives with a normal amount of attention paid to the tech industry, it seems like these tools popped out of nowhere a couple of months ago. Right. It feels like, oh, there has just

suddenly been this massive breakthrough. And the reality is that all of the stuff that people you know, chat gpt these different ais that everybody's talking about, this is technology that people have been pouring resources into for years and years and years and years and years, and that's why it's able to do some of these amazing things that we've seen but it's not. I don't think it means that in a month it's going to be a thousand

times smarter. It's it's it's a process of labor, and it was finally ready to be unveiled to the extent that it has been. Maybe that's right. And a good example as GPT four which recently came out. There was GPT three before and chat GPT and there is so much speculation that GPT four is going to be again this godlike thing that just you know, that brings us to the singularity. And and honestly, it's done better at tests.

You know, I forget the numbers, but maybe one of them got a twenty percent grade on some tests and this one got an eighty percent. So that is a significant improvement. Right, If you're a teacher and your students improve that much, you should be happy. But as you said, is that a thousand times no, even though the machine is much bigger, much more data, and it just shows that. Yeah, Like, the reality is this is incremental progress going at a very fast rate, very unsettling even for those of us

following the field closely. We're experiencing that kind of vertigo that you're saying that whoa where did this come from? So even within the field, and you're absolutely right, if you're just at home, you know, not paying attention for a week or a month or a year, suddenly the

stuff pops up. It is disorienting. But one thing I think that's helped me at least kind of clarify what not even answering what the risks are, but just understanding the different camps of why certain people are reacting differently, and why even the people afraid of AI seem to be now fighting amongst each other and why it's getting fractured. Is are you more afraid of this be AI used as a tool by people, or are you more afraid of it kind of taking on its own autonomy and

kind of going rogue and doing its own things. And I'm very much afraid of people using it. I think big companies are going to use it and there's going to be a lot of problems, just like we saw with social media. People will get addicted, democracies will be flooded with misinformation, It'll be weaponized by various actors, will be bought accounts. So I am very concerned about it being used. Basically, it performing the job it was told to do, but it'll be told to do dangerous jobs,

either making money or making discord. There's another group of people that are more worried about the AI somehow deciding on its own to do things to take over. And that's where you know, I can't roll it out, But that's where I kind of am skeptical. Let's focus on how people are using it for now, for the foreseeable future.

I don't think we need to worry yet, at least about the AI somehow having a life of its own and stabbing us in the back and enslaving us, because there's just so much that can go wrong before you even get to that point. Yeah, And it's it's not that that's exactly like it's a threat triage kind of thing, where like, is it theoretically possible that one day human beings could create an artificial intelligence that is capable of

having its own agency that is malicious? Yeah, sure, I guess, Like, I mean maybe, but man, we're there's a lot of us that are very malicious right now that are actively trying to harm other people at scale. I'm concerned about how they will use AI to do that. I think botnets are a really good example. One of the things that these new this newest generation of AI tools allows is more realistic and intelligent bots than I think have been accessible at scale before. And that's a very real concern.

I will say when I kind of sorry, when I kind of wargame this back and forth with myself. One thing that is oddly comforting is like, well, the shared comments that we all inhabit of, like ontological truth is already so shattered that like there's there's only so much damage. I feel like adding additional bots and additional disinformation can really do um. Like one one thought on that though,

because I've been digging into that too. I've been, you know, trying to ponder how to feel about that, because a lot of this I don't know, you know, I'm trying to make is. I do think if you go back to like twenty sixteen earlier versions of the Internet, you know, before leading up to Donald Trump's election, Yeah, I think there was a lot of wild West to Google, to social media, to all these things. Right, fake news was just like piling up to the top of Google search results.

That election was so monumental and such a seismic shockwave through a tech that fake news and misinformation might have played a role, that they really had to do something, and I think some companies are more effective than others. I think Google put a lot oft into making sure authoritative sources rise to the top. So what that means is when now you go online and you Google for medical information, the top results yougether WebMD or some official CDC,

your government thing. They're pretty decent reliable. It's not to say there's an all that crap on the Internet, but Google has done a pretty good job of having the good stuff float to the top, and that's the information that people see. So what I'm worried is now we might be kind of resetting ourselves back to the twenty sixteen where when you're talking to these chatbots that are trained on all the internets. Yeah, I don't know if the web mds and the CDC type of information is

necessarily going to float to the top. Maybe they'll work that out. But I'm also worried that open AI or Google or Microsoft or wherever, they'll have ones that are pretty reasonable and kind of you know, tuned to appeal to a lot of people. But Elon Musk might build his own competitor one that might be really tuned to elevate the right wing site. So I have been around, as I mean, and you have been doing so in

a much more rigorous manner, I'm sure. But I've screw around with a couple of different AI chat and search engines. I use find PHI and D sometimes. I've been playing around with being and one of the things I've noticed is that you know, if you ask it like, hey, summarize for me, like why the Battle of Hastings matter,

You'll get a reasonably decent answer. But if I ask it like I don't know, specific questions about myself, I've come to I noticed at first when I did it, I would get some really weirdly like colloquial vernacular from it explaining things, and I realized it was just pulling answers directly that fans had asked about me on the subreddit that this show has. And so when I think about like ways in which to game the system, well,

you make a bunch of bots. You have them post questions and answers that are you know, supportive of this specific product line or whatever on a subreddit and hope that it gets picked like scanned by an AI, and that becomes part of its like answer for you know what happens if you know, I can't stop itching or whatever. I don't know, like, but I like obviously you can see using them ways in which these cannon will be

gamed to some extent. You know, it's always kind of a red Queen sort of situation where you have to disinformation people fighting this info. You're always running as fast as you can just to stay in place that's right, And that is that brings up another issue which I do feel like this is possibly really tipping the balance, and that it takes a certain amount of resources to create misinformation, it takes a certain amount of resources to debunk it. Right, A journalist has to sit down, Snopes

has to write a little piece about it. And the problem is with this AI, it's suddenly just dropping the price of creation down to essentially zero. Anyone can create essentially limitless supply of quasi information that may or may not be true. But the problem is, is the price of journalism of debunking also going down, maybe by fifty percent, right, maybe it takes you half as much time to write

an article. It's not going to zero, No, So that's the balance is Creating stuff has gotten a lot cheaper. Detecting debunking, doing proper journalism it's gotten a little bit cheaper. So I'm worried that that's journalists are already stretched then. And this is by far my biggest concern because it's it's not just this that's obviously a significant factor in it.

There will be more disinformation, there will not be more journalists, in part because I think AI is going to take jobs from that, particularly low level d It's not going to replace, you know, prize winning columnists at the New York Times, and it's not going to replace like guys like me who have a very long and established career

of doing the specific thing that we do. But I think back to when I got started as a as a journalist, as a writer, it was as a tech blogger, and I had an X number of articles that I had to get out per day, and obviously, like my boss was essentially trusting that with that many articles, i'd have a few that did well on Google, and that brings in traffic, and that brought in money. And there's a degree to which you're just kind of doing seo shit. But it's also I can did my first interviews for

that job. I went to trade shows for the first time. I did my first on the ground journalism for that job. It taught me how to write quickly and an a polished nature. And I was not writing anything that was like crucial to the development of humankind, but it made me into the kind of person who was later able to write things that were read by people all over

the world, and that had an influence on people. And I worry about the brain dry, not just among journalists, but among writers, among artists, you know, people who do

illustrations and stuff. Eventually, musicians, at least some kinds of musicians will probably also run up against this, where the stuff that it was easy for kind of people breaking in to get a little bit of work that would hone their skills and allow them to, you know, live doing the thing that they're interested in, is going to disappear.

And more and more of the stuff that we kind of casually low level consume, not our high art, not our favorite movies, not our favorite books, but the stuff that we or when we stumble upon a web page or like in a commercial or whatever will be increasingly made by AIS and that AI will be pulling from an increasingly narrow set of things that humans made because less humans will get that entry level work, and that is there's something concerning there that is something that worries

me about the future of just creativity. Yeah, and I think, I mean two points. One is just to kind of be Devil's advocate a little bit, because I do sympathize and I think you're right, but a little bit devil's advocate is it might be on the out flip side of the coin that there's people that feel like they have artistic imagination and desires but lack the technical ability, and suddenly they can paint, so to speak, by using

these aiimage generators. Maybe someone has some form of dyslexia, or they're English as a second language or even native speaker without any of these issues obstructions, but just finds the writing process difficult, and maybe AI enables them to be a writer, to contribute. So I could see, you know, there's there's going to be the pros and the negatives, and I don't know how the balance is, but I think you're right thinking from a profession that's sort of

like a passion project view. From a professional view, I do see the profession narrowing. If it journalists are expected to work twice as quickly because they're all using chatbots, there's probably going to be half of half as many of them, right, I mean, that's that's the economics. But this brings up a bigger issue, which is I do think what you're hitting on is there are these long term risks that maybe AI is gonna fuel this rebellion

of robots and this. You know, maybe, but again, we have an economics, social, political, economic world we live in, and I just think let's really focus on the issues we have. Now. That's not discounting the future. It's not like let's burn a bunch of carbon emitting fuels because who cares about climate change? That's our grandkids problems. Yeah, this is different. It's like, let's think about the jobs

the world. I mean, another way to put this is if we mess up our economy, mess up our democracy by people losing jobs and mass protests and losing trust in the government and there's just an erosion of truth, we're not going to be able to handle climate change or any of these big AI know, the singularity type of risks. So what I feel like is let's focus on what keeps our economy and our sanity and our humanity.

Let's keep this fabric of society together now so that we're more equipped in the future to handle all the risks AI and otherwise. But this goes back to what you're saying, which is, these are real issues in the short term, and if we don't address them, if we get distracted by the long term, we're not going to be ready to address the long term even if we think about it now, we'll be so distracted and so dismayed. Yeah,

so I think we have to be practical here. I agree, and I am also I think it's a valid point that you make about the fact that all these are tools that will reduce options for some people, there are also tools that create options that can be used for

the creation of art of culture. I do think some people I know have brought up photoshop when I talk about my concerns with AI and are like, you know, there were a lot of you know, people, draftsmen and whatnot who were concerned when photoshop hit because it was a threat to some of the things that they did for money. And photoshop effectively has created whole forms of art that didn't exist or didn't exist in the same fashion before it did as a tool and tools like it.

And that's not a think I think it's kind of worth I don't like, I don't want to be kind of just on the edge of tragedy here. You know, this is a there's a lot of different ways this could go, and they're not all bad. I think we're all used to calamity right now, so much so that we potentially expect it in situations where it's not the inevitable outcome. Well, I mean that's I think one way to kind of boil a lot of that down is we can adapt. We just need time to do so

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

that to some extent. We got a lot better at keeping fake news out of the high search rankings and Google. Like I mentioned, a lot of these problems that came up. We're not perfectly addressed, not even close. But there was significant progress and that's often understated. But if these problems are coming so fast and so intense, it's a lot to adapt to. And that's what's really the challenge is the pace. And I think we're seeing a very, very

breakneck pace that's really hard. Now does that mean you're on the side of like Elon Musk and some of those folks who just signed that letter being like, maybe we should put a pause on AI research because you know, I'm not one hundred percent against it. Again, I kind of am, like, Man, I wish we'd been having this conversation when Facebook dropped or YouTube dropped. But I don't think that's a realistic thing. I'll say that. But I do think, yeah, yeah, so I would say, no, I'm

not I'm not a favor that For one thing. I mean, in a very practical sense, you think all these companies that are putting billions of dollars in these investments in a AI are all going to sit around saying, you know what, let's just not do this for a few of course not. So here's what I think, They're not going to slow down. What's going to happen is going to happen even if some players decide to be responsible and slow down. Guess what that means. The only people

plunging ahead are going to be the irresponsible ones. So what I think we need to do is I don't think we can really slow that down. So what about the flip side. I think we need to accelerate public education on artificial intelligence. I think we need to accelerate government legislation, regulation, intern national cooperation. I don't think we can solve this by slowing AI down. I do think we need to find a way to speed up our

democratic process processes. It's taken us how many years to pass basically nothing about social media in the US and some mixed results in Europe. Yeah, that's the problem, right, If we could work faster, then I think we could keep up. And I think that that's actually the long term, like practical survival thing from this is that I hope we get is like, yeah, we've always needed to be more careful about the things that we expose billions of

people too. Suddenly it should have happened before now. But I hope that this I hope that all I hope the fact that AI, because of James Cameron, is coated into our brains to be something that triggers a little bit of panic in people. I hope that rather than reacting with panic, it leads to a more intelligent and considered state of affairs when potentially embracing technologies that are

going to change life for huge numbers of people. That's right, and that is I think we have an opportunity here to experience that and explore than and try, and that is kind of what I was aiming for. And that threat is again I love that article that you know you mentioned at the beginning, But if we start going down this road of hype, there is a danger that we're going to fall into these traps. And I think let's stay grounded. Let's say practical, let's really identify the risks.

Not that I'm some guru and know what they are, but it's almost easier to see what's not true than what is true. Yeah, and that's I think let's all try to police each other and make sure we're focusing on practical things that really are manageable, that really are genuine risks that are impacting people, that are impacting people today, and especially ones that are impacting marginalized populations. Yes, so I think let's hope we learn these lessons. And I

am not optimistic, but I'm not as cynical. I think there's a lot of important discussions happening now that let's just say, there's a lot more discussion now than we had with social media, and maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, well, I think that's a good note to end on. Noah, did you have anything you kind of wanted to plug before we roll out here? No, I just I think it's it's a great topic that everyone can be involved in, and I just my plug is just don't be intimidated,

don't be afraid. I am writing a book that's not going to come up for a couple of years that's trying to help empower people to kind of be part of these conversations. But that's far off. I just want to say broadly, don't be intimidated and don't fall for this narrative that sometimes happens in tech communities that, oh, you know, I'm not a tech person, I don't have a chance to understand this stuff. Affects all of us, and how it affects you matters, and your opinion matters,

and your voice matters. And we're all part of social media, we're all very soon going to be part of AI in chat thoughts, So don't be afraid to join the conversation. You don't need any technical background because I think the subject is just as much sociological as technical. It's about people. I think that's a great point to end on. Thank you so much, Noah, really appreciate your time. And uh, everybody else, have a have a nice day. I mean you have a nice day too. Also, thanks to you too.

It's lots of fun. Ah, welcome back to It could Happen here a podcast about things falling apart, sometimes about putting them back together, um, sometimes just about enduring difficult times. And it's it's been a rough couple of weeks, what with the mass shooting in Tennessee and the Right accelerating their anti trans paranoia, the whole you know, Trump getting arrested and all that, all that, Yes, that has really hit all of us really hard, yes, and really yeah deeply.

Now that now that Trump is has been charged with felonies, he's officially a friend of mine. So we're on Trump now. I really convicted. I'm really conflicted between my acab side my illegalist side. It's really it's really hard. I mean, thirty four felonies, that's quite a legalist. Very few of the people I know who commit crimes is like a vocation,

have that many. It's pretty difficult. But at any rate, you know, it's been a rough couple of weeks, and I thought we could use a lighter episode to, you know, help everybody everybody feel better. And I know that you Mia and you Gare are both young uns. H you you missed the earlier age of the Internet and the heroes of that ancient age. You know, when I was a child, you know, it was Jupiter and uh and and all the Greek gods of the old Internet y'all. Y'all have come up more in the Roman gods of

the old Internet era. So yeah, I wanted I wanted to talk about an ancient hero of the Internet. And perhaps this will become a series that we do now and again where we talk about we talk about the gods of the past and today. The ancient deity that we're talking about is kind of like the Internet's Hercules, a man named Troy Hertabes. Have you guys heard of Troy Hertabes. No, I've not. I've not heard of Troy Hernabes, but I do have one correction. Jupiter is actually a

Roman god. The Greek version is Zeus. You're right, You're right, you're right. Before before some freak dms me and sends me like three phs on this, I'm just gonna put that out there. Do not DM me about this. Yeah, wet do that thing where we start, We start including one of these every episode that, yeah, just fucking up purposefully in order to get people. They love doing it,

they love being able to hop on I do. Ever, we did get recently, we did the liver King episodes this week, and somebody popped on to be like, hey, guys, you're probably not aware of this, but the livers of polar bears contain enough vitamin hundred and forty people something like that, Um, don't eat polar bear lovers. This is relevant because we are talking about a man today whose lifelong goal was to develop a suit of armor that allowed him to fight bears in hand to hand compact.

It is actually very applicable to us, because just last week we went to the theater to watch Cocaine Bear. You're right, this man would have been one of the only people capable of dealing with a cocaine bear. So once upon a time, before the breaking of the world, there lived a beautiful maniac named Troy Hertebes. Troy was a simple man. He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, in nineteen sixty three. He liked the outdoors, and he was a dedicated conservationist. The one exception to his abiding love

of nature was bears. On August fourth, nineteen eighty four, when Troy was twenty one years old, he went hiking in central British Columbia. Now he's given a couple of versions of this story over the years. Some that this happened, say that this happened when he was a boy, Others say he was like twenty years old, but all agree that he wound up in close proxim to a grizzly bear.

In the most exciting and almost certainly untrue version of the story, the bear knocked Troy down and he dropped the twenty two caliber rifle he was carrying, which would not have made much difference against a grizzly bear, you will only make it more upset. Two is not the weapon you want to that situation. In a desperate attempt to defend himself, he drew a knife. We're gonna talk

about Troy's knives in a minute here about. In an interview with Mental Flass many years later, Troy claimed that seeing the knife, the bear thought better of attacking him. After this, Okaya a minute, That's not how bears were. Has this bear been like involved in other fights guys like another maniac bear got stabbed behind a seven eleven and is like, na, man, I don't grizz don't funk with knives no more. I've been through that ship like a street gay like na brot na bro are worth it?

And so he later claims an expert told him he would have been mauled if there'd been any cubs this. I believe bears very rarely attack people. Now, a normal man would have taken this number one as boy I sure got lucky, and number two as I should be more careful when out in the woods. But Troy was not a normal man. His first thought was that he needed to invent a new form of mace made specifically

four bears. He had been beaten and developing bear mace by an actual scientist, Although the first paper on bear mace was published in nineteen eighty four, so it makes sense that it wouldn't have been available at the time. It was a reasonable thing to be like, maybe we should have a mace for use against bears. There are

again several versions of what came next. I'm going to quote from one that I found in a write up by the spec Now quote from then, he decided that his destiny in life was to invent a dependable bear spray repellent, but he realized field testing with bears would be needed. This would require a protective suit for the

person doing the test. No. In his interview with Mental Floss, one of the later pieces on the Man, Troy dropped the mace story and claimed that he had the idea just to make bear resistant armor a year after his grizzly encounter when he was watching RoboCop and decided bear researchers would need protective armor that would let them test

bear spray and also safely observed grizzly behavior. Troy is something of an unreliable narrator, but I will say I do not doubt that the film RoboCop influenced his subsequent ass No, he absolutely had this idea that makes that makes the most sense out of anything you said. It is very logical. So it is now Troy, it should be noted, is not the first, probably not the first man who has thought I should develop a suit of armor to allow me to grapple with bears in hand

to hand combat. It is possible that in medieval Europe some people hunted bears while wearing full body suits of armor covered in spikes. There is debate as to whether or not this really happened. The gist of why this is a debate is that there's an insane looking suit of armor currently in a Houston museum that was probably made in switzerlander Germany like four hundred dish years ago.

Researchers have not conclusively determined why it was made or for what purpose, but one theory is that it was used for bear baiting. If so, it was used for European bears, which are significantly smaller than Besty bears, and as far as we know, was never a widespread practice. This is because attempting to fight a bear in hand to hand with a suit of armor is insane and something only a madman would do. But I am going to show you this suit of armor because it looks

like something from a David Lynch movie. Oh I'm so thrilled, specifically the face. So look at that, look at that beautiful thing. Oh my god. Yeah, it's in the chase of that unsettling but they think probably somewhere around Austria or Switzerland, although it's not. I don't think known to a point of certainty. That looks fucked up. It looks like it looks like a like like like a metal casting of someone's head but with like but with like the pinhead thing. Yeah, it's a howlazy I think is

the movie. Yeah, the face on it is distinctly unsettling, like they could have just made a normal helmet, but like no, no, like there's a nose, it's the guy's face. We gotta it's We're not doing this right unless we like peek into the uncanny valley with this thing. Troy was not interested in the fact that attempting to fight a bear and body armor is just objectively nuts, and since he was as handy as he was unhinged, he set swiftly to building a suit of armor and then

testing it. Um, I'm going to read another quote from the specs right up, because it's extremely funny. So the suit became his focus of a putting it through all kinds of tests that included being run down by a pickup truck driven by his pot, rolling off the side of a cliff, and being pummeled by bikers with baseball bats. And I'm gonna play you a video of Troy um one of these tests where Troy gets hit by a tree.

It's almost exactly that scene from hot Rod. If you've watched the movie hot Rod where they like swing a log down at him and hit him. Um, that may in fact be what that scene is based on, but I'm gonna I'm gonna share that with y'all. Now the log is U Oh my gosh, so get them guys. I cannot emphasize enough. It looks like half this armor is held together by duct tape. Just like. This looks like a fever dream combination of the Wizard of Oz

and like and like the Battle of Endor walks. He walks throwing massive logs at the guy in the middle. Tin suit, it's white, it's a white suit too. Yeah, it looks almost like something from um like speed Racer. Is weird the aesthetic that I would reckon, I would closest compare it too. It is kind of like that anime robot style design. Yeah, it's it's it's profoundly unhinged.

So I want to I want to play you a clip of him getting the helmet off so you can listen to Troy talk and see this man's face better than the first. Yeahs, I had that time, that stuff on my mouth. Yeah, if I have a most piece, a mostpiece, you can do that all day long. I got the airbags in the back, so my neck hasn't got a lot of place, so that'll be perfect for the grizzy I can I can take he can give me with that log if that couldn't do anything to me?

And I feel great, like really great. And actually my left hand was asleepist now a week. Really you don't say, yeah, truly damage fascinating man. So I'm gonna play you now him being attacked by a bunch of men with baseball bats as he attempts to move in this suit. And I have to emphasize to you he is not capable of moving in this thing. This is an immobile suit of armor that he can he can almost shuffle in it,

but not quite. His idea with the with the pickup truck and the bikers with regards to big men and being an anthropologist, he yet he looked at the testings we had originally done with normal sized man, you know, one hundred and fifty hundred and eighty pound, he said, the public isn't gonna buy it. They're they're looking at this monstrous, groovy bear and they're looking at a normal size man hitting you with bats and boards and stuff like that. They're not going to buy. You have to

give them reality. This is insane. This is so weird, amazing, amazing, Like a gang of men attacking this nerd in a metal suit is like, yes, it's so funny. It's it's it's extremely funny. They're like and they pick like terminator two looking bikers like it's out of their way. All of the stylization is super super bizarre. Yeah, it's it's such a strained documentary. This is from the documentary project Grizzly, and there's Troy gives. In the various interviews, he does

some pretty incredible quotes. Like years after this, he wrote at fifty two, I have to know whether or not the suit will hold. It's one of the curiosity things. We tested the suit a lot of ways, but never went against the Grizzly. And the suit that you're seeing is like the first version of his suit, the Ursus Mark one. He eventually gets up to the Mark six and spends more than one hundred and fifty thousand dollars

making various versions of these bear suits. Actually, sorry, I think the one that we're looking at in the documentary is the Mark six, because he did eventually, after years of this quest, get a documentary and interested, and the film Project Grizzly was made about his quest. One fun piece of trivia about it is that it's one of Quentin Tarantino's favorite movies. That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense. It makes yeah, it

makes total sense. Now, in order to give you just one last piece of context about the personality, what kind of man is Troy her Tobes or was Troy her Tobes. I am gonna play you a clip of an interview with this man from the documentary. That's just perfect. He's holding in this a gigantic booie knife in his hand, and he has another booie knife strapped across his shoulder in such a way that it's on his shoulder but pointed down. Yeah, which is the way a crazy man

carries a book. He's also, it's worth noting, dressed as like a frontier settler, but wearing like a bread's Harry Baray. I go into the bush. I don't use a gun, never, don't believe in guns. I swear by my knives. They save your life a thousand times around. If a grizzlies gonna come at you. And I'm not saying knives are going to save you, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is you've got a gun, and that grizzlies fifty feet one hundred feet away from you, you got

one shot. I don't give a shit who you are or how steady you are. You've got one shot, not grizzly. And if he's still coming at you that gun, you might as well use the barrel on him, or you can use the stock. That's useless. But if you've got some half decent knives, at least you got a fighting chance. With animals. But that's not the reason why when I go into the mountains, or I go into the bush, or any man goes into the bush, they don't carry

nives for the four legged animals. They carry knives for the two legged animals. Because nowadays it's a lot like the old days. You've got a lot of whackers up there, and it's nivish. Want to close quarters. Yea, you do, indeed have a lot of wackos up there, Troy. Um. So that's that's a brief introduction to Troy Hurdabes. Now, the suit that you've seen in the Project Project Grizzly documentary weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and it was not in any way powered. As you see in the dock.

He can kind of barely shuffle with it. He is unable to move or even stand on uneven ground. He falls over very easily. Um. Troy liked the documentary, felt like it helped expose his work to a wider audience, but he took issue with the fact that the documentary did not delve into what he described as the science behind it all. Adding being able to get hit by the truck took years of development, now years years of

practice of getting hit by trucks. Yeah, it's you can't just jump into getting hit by a truck like that. In two thousand and two, a trainer who probably should not be allowed around animals let Troy get into a cage with a Kodiak bear. Now, thankfully the bear was too confused by Troy's armor to what to get near him, which you might not. This is technically a wind for Troy. The armor did do its job, just scare them away. Yeah, you know, the bear just saw that was like, you

know what this said? Wrong with this guy? It's clearly unwell. I do not want to be around this person right now. Here's mental floss interviewing Troy. She was so terrified she urinated her. To best recalls, I didn't look human enough. Limited mobility and questionable usefulness combined to doom the Mark series.

We would never use a suit like that, says Lana Siernello, PhD. A bare behavior expert, a solid knowledge of bare behaviors, the best thing one can use to avoid being attacked, which is rare, and this is this is common whenever they talk to actual bear experts and researchers, like do you want a suit of armor. They're like, no, that's not at all useful. It's very easy to not get

attacked by bears. Actually, and again, if you watch the documentary Grizzly Man, and the man in the documentary Grizzly Man is a similar type of person to Troy Hertabes. They are both people. I do believe Troy Hertabes might need a suit of bear armor because he seems like the kind of person to push grizzly bears past their limits of comfort. Very rarely will someone else wind up in that situation. Nonetheless, the armor brought Hertabes fame. He

was all over the internet. I found out about him because one of my colleagues at Cracked wrote about him in an article. But like, you would see this guy all the time, I'm sure I ran. I think I also ran across him on something awful. Earlier. He would regularly put out videos he had. He had an early kind of understanding for how to make yourself into a brand on the internet in order to get funding, and so he was very successful at raising money in order

to like make new iterations of his armor. He was also recruited on several JAP and he's game shows, and he inspired a two thousand and three episode of The Simpsons where Homer constructs a bear fighting suit. He even filmed an outie commercial. Of course, he always reinvested the

proceeds directly into making more suits of bear armor. Now, the good news is he eventually moved on from wanting to make armor that was specifically geared towards fighting bears, but he never got over his desire for making a suit of elaborate body armor. So he pivoted, claiming that now his brother was in the military, and so he wanted to make flexible body armor themed after the armor in Halo to help keep soldiers and SWAT officers safe

during dangerous raids. Because next suit was called the Trojan, and it featured a compass in the dick for reasons that are deeply confusing. Wait, that's not even it's not even a useful spot, like put it on your watch him he is adamant that he had talked to Special Forces guys and they said, right in the dick is where you want to compass it, like flip down, So it looks like he has a penis that's made out

of compass. Okay, that is kind of funny. I'm gonna play you a clip of this armor, which I will say looks a lot more professional than the last suit, the first ballistic full exoskeleton body suit of armor. This came from twenty years of development through the bear suits and about seventeen hundred and fifty hours of actual building time, And it came from so many calls I got from

friends of mine in Iraq and an Afghanistan. My brother was in the military, talking about is there can you not go in the direction that we need, which is you know, against the ieeds improvised explosive devices, and you know, build it to the point where you've got the flexibility, the lightness, but with the strength of what the bear suits were, And that's where that's where this came from. So I'm gonna tell you right now that suit is

not going to help you against an IED. The gigantic heavy armor you see in the hurt Locker only kind of helps you if it's a pretty small IED. What he's built is not going to protect you from like an explosively formed penetrator or like a five thousand pound fertilizer five hundred pound fertilizer bomb or something like that.

To test this, though, Troy hired a former military marksman, the guy who he claimed had previously covered him out in the woods on bare expeditions with less lethal AMO, and he asked this man to shoot him point and blank with a rifle. So thankfully, this guy was like Troy, it's illegal to point a loaded weapon at a person in our province. I'm not going to shoot you directly

in the chest with a hunting rifle. So Troy had him take the armor out of the suit and then shoot at it, and the bullet went immediately through the armor. It says a lot about Troy that his first instinct was not shoot the armor without a human being in it. But um, at least, yeah, at least the guy who was testing it did not shoot him directly in the guest and kill him. I'm gonna quote again from Mental Flaws here. Hertibes tweaked the Trojan, which he debuted in

two thousand and seven to little notice. Eventually, he offered his design to the Canadian military for free, but it can take years for armed forces to evaluate new technology, and existing contracts with equipment vendors render it near impossible for independent inventors without backing or references to succeed with industrial military contracts are sewn up and they don't want anyone stepping on toes. He says, engineers pick my brain, but I can't be affiliated with them. I'm a loose

cannon and my methodology is backward. I do not disagree with that statement. He did, however, have several other inventions over the years. For one thing, Troy invented a burn paste, a gooey substance that hardens when exposed to flame in order to protect you. Canada's Discovery Channel documented him covered in the burn pace, being exposed to temperatures above thirty six hundred degrees fahrenheit. He held a blowtorch to his

helmeted head for ten minutes and it worked. This leaves out a fun fact, which is that Troy was inspired to make his burn paste because one day, while wearing his suit, it overheated, burning most of his body very badly. So he needed to make the burn paste in order to protect himself. Yeah, it doesn't seem easy to get in and out of. Like, no, it would not be easy to dawn your If you look at the helmet

there your peripheral version is going to be shit. It's not going to be good for like fighting in and it is going to exhaust you. Like he builds an air conditioner for it, but that's only gonna do so much like body armor is always kind of like a trade off between mobility and protection, and something like a plate carrier is worth it. But full body armor that's not powered in a meaningful way just is not going to be practical yet. This is why I do not

respect the Mandalorians. No, no, you you've been vocal about that for years have I'm gonna play you a video of him testing this fire paste from that Canadian Discovery Channel documentary because it's very funny. Troy envisions neighborhoods in the path of a forest fire being sprayed with a thin layer of fire paste, effectively starving out the fire. And according to Troy, clean up is a breeze due to firepace only weakness water. Just see it turns back

into a paste. See, I'm already into a layer. It's just past now, which is firepiece. This is its natural state. And when it dries, see I'm already slopping it off. Now there's is there It turns to the peace. This is what's gonna happen on your host Now it's a he's chewing it up, and oh that's so cross. He's just spitting it all over his house. The dog comes along, takes a little in his mouth, washes it around, and spits it out. Nothing's gonna happen. It's biden ridable, non topsic.

Don't have to worry one anything happening. So how would a homeowner remove the firepace from the outside of their home? This is gonna be bob fuse next door. Bob's house is gonna be fine. The next day, he's gonna come up with his garden, the holes in a cannabier, and in two hours he'll be ready for the football game. Oh what there goes to the house. After ten minutes, Troy inspects the firepaced house. Look at look at this. At this there's a little Barbie. She's all kay. Barbie's

fire same Barbie's sister. The Barbie is clearly sin. Now. He does note again that the only weakness of the fire paste is water. This might reduce its efficacy, but I think he envisions it being dumped on neighborhoods in the path of a fire. They decided not to do this. Now, why why does he keep getting platforms? Like, why why does he continue? He was because because this was really funny to everyone on the Internet. So a documentary that

came out would get shared all over. People would watch it. It would get him attention, he would get donations. There was like one point where he had to he had to sell his body armor. He had to like sell it to a pawn shop because he was broke, and a fan bought it back from the pawn shop and gave it to him so he could continue. Yeah, that's nice. Yeah, he had a fan base. Like I said, he was

a hero of the old Internet. He did eventually succeed in making an armor suit that was resistant to twelve gage shotgun shells, which he acts like is very impressive. Shotgun shells are not good at penetrating armor. Most soft body armor vests will stop a shot shell from penetrating it. Shotguns are not for penetrating armor. There for damaging meat. But Troy made a big deal about how this would

save the lives of soldiers in war. His next invention, as he was continuing to iterate his body armor, was something called the Godlight device. Now, Troy never gave much detail on what the Godlight was, but he says it shrunk tumors and mice as well as his sister's tumor, and he would tell interviewers he was pretty sure it could cure Parkinson's disease. Light is extremely effective against certain cancers. All I did was take all spectrums of light electromagnetic

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

he calls the hide effect. I think, as in doctor Jackline, mister Hyde, his hair fell out and he lost twenty pounds curious a mystery. Then he claims the Godlight mysteriously stopped working and he didn't have the money to fix it up. There are amazing I love this man. It's it is. It is fascinating that the closer society comes to this complete collapse. We get more of these little weirdos who are like trying to figure out how to survive the apocalypse and exactly the wrong way. Yes, um,

I'm going to read another quote from that mental phloss article. Today. Hertabes operates a scrapyard in Ontario and dismisses notions of patents. The stuff is too easy to duplicate and it costs eighty thousand dollars to file an application. He rejects offers to outright sell his creations like Firepaste, because he frequently sells off shares to fund their development. By the time I got Firepace to the point of testing, seventy percent of it was owned by investors, So when a university

wants it, I only have thirty percent left. They're not interested in that. And yet Hernabes can't stop inventing. He still feels compelled to put in twenty one hour days refining his projects. His current plan is to find funding for the Apache, the latest version of his t Oan suit, which he says protects ninety three percent of a user's body and offers ninety six percent flexibility. A prototype will cost seventy thousand dollars. It'll take six to eight months

to build by hand. I'll try to market it to law enforcement like SWAT. He needs another one hundred thousand dollars to rebuild the Godlight, renamed the EMR five, which he now claims will only cure breast cancer. He wants to take it to John's Optics for testing. So well, I'm excited for SWAT teams to be using his inventions. Yes, yes, I do support that. Thanks to that dit compass, they'll never get lost at the wrong house again. Could really save a lot of lives. That's the problem SWAT teams

have is poor land nav I think so. I think the SWAT team should wear that. Every SWAT team member should be forced to wear that barrasuit for everything they do. Yes, the only thing SWAT could get due So tragically, Troy died in like twenty twelve, I think in a fiery collision. Yeah, he drove right into a fuel tanker. Oh yeah, it's very sad. He was fifty four years old old. His widow says that he swerved his car or the police say that he swerved his car into the pathway of

the truck. He had been very depressed because he'd encountered financial difficulties and had not been able to sell his inventions. Um, obviously this is very sad for them. He seems like, despite everything, he was a fun guy to be around and then yeah, fell on hard times. Um it is.

It is a depressing end to the story. But Troy lives on in the documentary project Grizzly, and in the impact he had on all of our hearts, and in the memory that you know, even if your dreams are are crazy, you should you should try and live them because who knows, Maybe maybe you'll develop a suit that allows you to fight a Grizzly bar in hand to hand combat. Anyway. That's that's this Hero of the Internet episode.

I hope you all found it edifying. That is that is an inspiring, inspiring ringtail Yeah, um, it's it's it's you know, he's fucking more of an inventor than Elon Musk has been, and he would have been a better ruler of Twitter if that's true, was in charge of Twitter. He's he's really the last guy from the old error of capitalism where you would actually like return your profits into into R and D instead of just like paying Elon Musk like forty seven million dollars to hire a

bunch of consultants who also make forty million dollars. Yeah. One thing you have to say about Troy is he was not He was not in this for the money. This was a man who believed more strongly than I think I've ever believed in anything about the idea of building a suit of armor to fight grisly bears, um and whatever else you can say about Troy, he was absolutely,

absolutely honest in that belief. And I think I'm going to end by playing a brief montage of him testing out his first version of the armored suit, which looks more or less like a set of heavy base ball armor. Like it looks like someone wearing body armor and a baseball helmet or a sorry, a football helmet. In fact, I think it just is a football helmet. But yeah, here's here's Troy's early tests in nineteen eighty eight. That's definitely a ball helmet. That one looks kind of cool.

That one looks pretty cool too. Yeah, they look increasingly space Marini in this period, and he has some range of motion, doesn't even have his helmet on, just knocking him down with what looked like to buy force. It doesn't it does look more. Oh my gosh, he just he keeps getting he walks right in the face. Yeah, it's it's just amazing. That last one looks super Space Marine es. Yeah. Yeah, some of them looked pretty cool. Um, And he didn't die from anything related to the suit testing,

So you got to give him one thing. He knew how to make a suit of armor that would not get you killed doing the kind of shit Troy Hertabes like to do. It seems like he was good with like with like blunt force trauma armor. Did anyone ever do like a CTE skit like test on him every dime because this man had a thousand micro head injuries. Absolutely. I mean, I think the real lesson here is that he was able. He was he was able to continue

his work thanks to Canadian healthcare. Um, he was probably like five percent of the entire Canadian healthcare system budget just dealing with all of Troy's concussions. Yeah. Anyway, that's the story of Troy Hertabies. I hope you've all found it useful. Um, go into the world and if your dream is to create a suit of powered armor that will allow you to defeat a grizzly bear in unarmed combat. Then, by god, you know, shoot for the stars in a world where you end up standing in a two hour

line to buy mediocre and not climate friendly water. Sorry, this is it could happen here. Uh, this is Sophie. I really wanted to do that for a really long time. Well now I want to watch it. Thank you. Those voices you hear are James Stout and Margaret Killjoy and we're here. We're here to talk about the water crisis that seems to be getting worse and uh, these United States. Yeah, James, what's what's it? What's it? What's what's happening? Well? Uh,

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

East Palestine, Ohio, And in Philadelphia. I believe it's pronounced phil A Delphia. Okay, they did like someone's name, like Phil. It was named for Phil a Delphia. The founder of the city, phil from Delphia, like the oracle. I see ye, he predicted that one day there would be a spill from a POC chemical plant near the Delaware River, and famously he was right. We've they built a city there anyway. Yeah, yeah, and they for years they've been so angry about not

having a chemical plant. They've just climb lamppost and thrown batteries at a boating football teams. Yeah. And I feel really good about starting with such heavy jokes about this thing. Yeah. Yeah,

it's three million people, I think anyway. Yeah, if you're in Philadelphia, we don't want to express solidarity with you, I guess as you wonder what the fuck to do about your water supply, which is currently contaminated, as we understand, by something called beautiful acrelate, which is a chemical that

is found in paint. And the reason that there was a paint chemical in your drinking water if you live in Philadelphia, is that a PLC manufacturing chemical plant called I think it's trinso tr I n SEO had a leak, and that leak, when it's a storm drain, that storm drain went into the Delaware River, and that river feeds into the Samuel s backs to water treatment plant, and obviously that water treatment aren't feeds into the tap that you turn on to drink water when you live in

your house. And this has, as it always does, when there are like these somewhat bungled announcements of chemical contamination in drinking water cause people to rush out to buy bottled water, which is an understandable response if you think you're not going to be able to drink water, which is caused people to wait in long lines to access

sometimes like a limited supply of water. And what we wanted to talk about today a little bit was not so much like what to do if you're in Philadelphia right now, but how we can better prepare to be ready for water emergencies, water shortage, is water contamination, things like that, which is why Margaret has joined us because she is the prepper anarchist queen and knows a lot about these things. So yeah, Margaret, should we I think you said you wanted to break us down by like

bad things. It could be in your water and things you can do to get those bad things away, right, Yeah, although I will say only a minority of this information directly relates to people who are dealing with toxic chemical spills. So if we're I have a lot of information about general water safety, it's long term storage of water, things that you don't want in your water, how to get those things out of your water, And I know you

have a lot of experience with that stuff too. But the very specific thing that people first in Ohio and now in Pennsylvania are dealing with u of chemical stuff is worse than other stuff and way harder to get out, especially on a DIY level. So I don't know what what feels best like, should we do an overview or should we try and first talk about the chemical stuff and then talk about like the fun easy stuff like

not getting giardio when you're camping. Yeah, let's maybe start out with the kind of this is the scary you know, you can't buy a lifestrole for this fear first, fun later. Yeah, people might be listening, I mean it might be afraid of They might be concerned that they might be in one of these places. Right, Flint, Michigan. What we still haven't fucking fixed the water. Yeah, and so yeah, let's

start fucking Flint, Michigan. What a just disastrous incompetence. Yeah, I mean yeah, it's it's extremely sad that the country that is as rich as any country has ever managed to be in human history is still poisoning people with water. But yeah, let's start with that. Let's let's start with what to do when you get a reverse nine or one phone call telling you know, to drink from your tap. I mean, honestly, going out and getting bottled water was

the right move. Or also, since people did have a heads up that their tap water was safe for a period of time, storing water in various containers is the right move, because once your water is contaminated with chemicals, it's really hard to get it out. The main method that well on an industrial scale, the thing that someone can use the way they treat wastewater with beautifle as late. I didn't write down the name in my notes. Acrelate,

Oh like acrylic, that makes sense, slate text paint. It's something called a fluidized bed reactor, which frankly I did not know about until I started doing this specific research for this specific chemical People who are like more at a high science level will know more about this. This is basically like you're using different bacteria to eat and I don't know, fucking clean out this shit. This is not what's going to be happening in your kitchen sink

anytime soon. This is not going to be a part of your bread of filter anytime soon, ironically, And this is not how am I going to say this. Don't drink this chemical water if you have any possibility, right, if you can get other water, do that. And I believe in our current society it is a better and safer bet to get water from elsewhere. If you were in some situation, which I suspect most people are not.

I suspect most people could access supply lines. If you're in some situation where the only water available to you has this these types of chemicals in it, the most likely guess about a way to deal with it is activated carbon charcoal and is actually the home filters that a lot of people use. Is your Britta filter, is your burkey, although I'll talk some shit on burkey in a little bit, and and when we go over the

more like nitty greedy details about each filtration method. Maybe we can we can talk more about this, but basically it is like it is not tested to do this. No one has ever been like, man, what if we get a bunch of budle accrelate in our water, will our britta filter it out? No one is running tests on this because it is not a thing that normally is in the water historically, although clearly it is often

in the water now. However, the method of filtration of the various home level acts various home level methods of filtration adsorption is what it's called with a D instead of a B, is the method that is perceived as most effective at reducing chemicals in water. However, again we're talking about like maybe this reduces some chemicals, maybe not.

Oh you run this through this and now you're fine. Yeah. Yeah, it's there's a lot of things that could get no water right that we don't really have like any any like decent research on how to get them out of

a Yeah. So, Margaret James, is there is there a say, say you're not living in a place where you get a text letting you know that in Tuesday at three pm your water will not be safe to drink, which is really just is there a home testing kit or a water testing kit that that is accessible for for most individuals, or what resources can people use to understand

their water at home? Could you want to I'm not really going to trust the government on that, right, Yeah, And Margaret, do you want to take that I only know about I do not know about testing for beautiless accrelate. I think that this is the kind of thing that they are not people are not prepared for, like at a society level, I don't know. I believe I could

be wrong. All of the water testing that I have done has tended to be around like I live on a well, right, and so there's a lot of testing things that are available to tell you the acidity of your water, the hardness of your water, which is how how many dissolved minerals, whether or not your water contains things like lead and arsnic heavy metals which we'll talk about in a little bit, and also bacteria, right like all of the stuff that we normally prepare to filter

out of water. There are home tests available to you that you can use to determine. UM. I don't know, and I wish I had done more research ahead of time. There's like some talk about like possible smells and stuff, um for some of these, but I don't feel confident. Yeah, I mean, I know there's the ewg's like website where you can put in your your your zip code and get more information on if there's been contamination or anything like that, but like that's you know, reported things, not

necessarily on an individual level for testing. Um. Yeah, I'd definitely do that. Anytime I have moved anywhere, I'll type in my zip code and then I go, ah, that sounds bad. Um, I don't like that. But yeah, you can find out, you know, once you put in you can find out who who, Like you put in your zip code on this is just ewg dot org. You put in your zip code and you can put who you pay for water, and then it goes in and it tells you. You know, it's really it's really fun.

Four In my mind, I read four you Health Guidelines fourteen contaminants. Oh yes, yeah, I think a combination of two is probably your best bet, Like unless you happen to our laboratory, like because there's stuff coming like if there is like lead like in between the water mains and or like you know, wherever the EDWD is getting its information and your tap. Then you're still risking like heavy metal contaminants, right, or if you're on a well,

you should test that it. I think it's every year, right, you're supposed to test your well water. I probably should. You know, you'll be fine, you'll know. But yeah, I think it's important that, like you, I have definitely got super sick from water that looks super clear, had no odor, looked fine, And I have drunk from turbit as fuck stagnant water and not been sick. Like your nose is not going to tell you, and you do need some

kind of help. Yeah, let's talk about storing water first, and then we'll talk about the more sort of established solutions for the more expected contaminants. I guess, Yeah, how would you go about let's say you're not in Philadelphia right now and you want to prepare for something that could happen in your area, how would you go about

storing water? So the easiest ways that you go get bottled water, if it is sealed and you keep it out of the sun, you keep it out of the heat, even though you're it's supposedly good for a year or two whatever. I feel like, really nervous on this, like, this is what's safe, even though it's not safe, right, but you can. Water itself doesn't go bad. That is a thing that is worth understanding. Left to its own devices,

water does not go bad. Water goes bad when there's like something in it that replicates, like bacteria or something like that, or when something leaks into it. The main reason that you want to keep your water out of the sun and out of the heat is because if you're storing it in plastic, that can eventually kind of lead each into it as the plastic degrades, and that

I don't know, there's probably long term health effects. But like I would drink a water bottle that has been in the backseat of my car for a year before I would drink beautile acrelate water, and which is I mean, it's I guess that's just plastic or plastic pick your poison. But but yeah, so bottled water is generally very safe and it is sealed and it has no particular reason to go bad. You don't want to store it next

to kerosene or gasoline. Like if you are the kind of person who keeps five gallon jug of gasoline around, you want that in a different place than your water. Usually you want the gasoline outside your house and outbuilding. Everyone lives on acreage in the rural areas the country, right, so many outbuildings around here. Yeah, everyone's outbuildings. Just go out to my urban bond, Yeah exactly, So okay, Well, okay. Then the other thing, if I'm actually preparing go out

and get some five gallon Jerry cans. You're going to pay between twenty and fifty dollars, and you'll get a little bit of different quality depending on that. You want something that is BPA free, you want something that is opaque, and you want something that is like not really bigger than four or five gallons because it's clumsy and unwieldy. Yeah. You also don't want to stack these things unless they specifically say this one is stackable to such and such depth.

Like most stackable containers are also only stackable one or two high, well two or three high, and I don't know, I mean, like frankly, on some level, that's what there is, okay, And if you're going to fill your own water containers. There are a couple weird things about it. One people argue about how often you should rotate it. I rotate in mind about once a year. You should theoretically rotate them somewhere between six months and a year or something

like that, depending on how you store it. The other thing is that if you are I actually think living off of well, you should probably rotate it more often. If you're on municipal water, don't run it through your britta before you store it, because that britta is going to pull out all the chlorine, all the bleach, and people are like, whoa, I don't want to drink bleach. I listen to that punk song Dead Dead milkman, um whatever. People don't want to drink bleach? Right, you actually do

want to drink tiny amounts of bleach. You want Tunico medical solution. Yeah, it keeps bacteria from growing. So if you filter out all of that and then you put it the water in the thing, if there's the tiniest little bacteria that got through, it's like sweet, the defenses are down, you know. Um so, But yeah, honestly, story and water like people like they're going to sell you lots of products, and like prepper sites are full of

people selling you shit. But it's just a matter of like finding containers and filling them with water and then rotating them every now and then, and it's not actually that big of a deal or super complicated. That's my take on it. Um. I used to live off of I used to live entirely off grid and then had to just drink water out of fifty gallon drums, and I just I didn't even you know what, I'm not going to say how bad my practices were because I

don't want anyone to emulate me. I was gonna say, if you're like, if you're storing on a scale, I don't know why they'd say you live on a compound in the desert. You know you can get big water tanks, right, I'm just looking at moving out to the desert a couple of years ago. I didn't, but yeah, you can get big water tanks are pretty cheap. You should. I'm placed about a dollar a gallon. Last time I looked

for like a fifteen hundred gallon tank. Yeah, I found them cheap, like GOV sp plus ones as well, pretty often. Oh really, Yeah, we'll talk later. Yeah, yeah, Well I'll send you some send you some links, but you might want to check it places you actually can't legally have those it's getting better now with that stuff, but you do want to check on that. I think if you're or you could get like a water buffalo, which is an industrial device for shipping water. You can probably pick

up those pretty cheap. It's an animal. I don't want to. Don't dehumanize it calling it an industrial machine. It's an animal. It has feelings, Yeah, it does. And you just keep that in your backyard and then well that is is attack anyone who comes after your water. So it's quite effective. Yeah,

they are toughest nails. I've had some brunners with buffalo animals. Okay, another thing, I guess that like, if you're like going hardcore on this and storing thousands of guyans of water, maybe you could invested something like a chlorine maker, and that way, if you do like mess up with your storage, I guess that that could maybe give you some leeway in terms of purifying afterwards. It's out fair to say, Margaret, Yeah,

I mean that makes sense. Like chlorine maker is the next step up from basically because like bleach itself does go bad and it's not shelf stable for I don't remember how long it lasts. It's not indefinitely shelf stable, and so people often, especially in places of that, access to clean water and stuff. I will say, though, when we get into it, chemical treatment is really good for the main stuff that people normally worry about, such as protozoa, bacteria,

and viruses. But once again, isn't going to do shit for some stuff that goes bad? Yeah? I think it might. There's one thing, maybe cryptosporidian. There's something that chlorine specifically doesn't work for. Oh, that's right. Actually, yeah, it's actually not very good at protozoa. It's weirdly good at viruses, and then whereas most of the filters are not good at viruses and are good at bacteria and protozoa. So we should probably explain these different things right right, ways

you can treat your water. Okay, there's a bunch of stuff that you can be in your water you don't wish was in the water. The one that is like kind of off the top of my head, the one that I think about the most because if I had to deal with it, it sucked our protozoa. The two big one are Giardia and Cryptospuridium. And these are tiny

little animals in the water. If you can look at pictures of them, they're really cute, and they make you shit a lot forever, sometimes until you die, mostly immunocompromise folks, but everyone really unhappy. And if you're in a survival situation already, diarrhea is like no laughing matter. Your inability to keep in fluids and nutrients will dramatically affect your

your chance of survival. So that's protozoa. They are the biggest of these things and therefore sort of the easiest to actually don't whether they're bigger in bacteria or not. Then there's bacteria, which it can also be in water and do bad stuff to you. And then there's viruses, and viruses can be in the water and do bad stuff to you. Largely in the United States, and people don't worry about viruses and water, and that's not because our heads are in the sand. It's because we don't

have as many viruses in our water. Then there's chemicals you could have in your water. We don't like them. There's dirt that can be in your water, which is just like not fun. There's heavy metals like lead and iron that can have deliterious effects on your health. Some people want to get water hardening minerals like calcium and magnesium out of their water, but you actually don't want to get rid of all of them. That's the catch. That's what we're gonna have to talk about, because your

body wants some of those things. They mostly just like make your house has all the all the plumbing brakes. That's like the main stuff. There's also things like nitrates that I don't understand well enough to talk about how we get rid of things. The most common way that like backpackers and stuff who are a lot of the people who diy this on a regular basis use is

something called filtration, or I'm going to call filtration. First use you screen your water as in, you get out the large chunks usually people use like a bandana or a sock or just some piece of cloth, right, and you want to use that so you're not gumming up your filter, and then it goes into something where it's

forced through a membrane with micropores. These used to be ceramic, but these days they're like a bunch of tiny little tubes like the internet, and most of these are basically la tubes have holes in them that are so small that it stops protozoa and bacteria from going through it. That is, it's like main claim to fame. It is very effective at it. Now that they're not ceramic, you don't have to clean it like every fucking gallon. And these are really good top brands that I am not

sponsored by our sawyer and life straw. They're going to use slightly different methods. People have opinions about them. I'm not going to offer mine right now. And they're measured in the size of the holes. Anything that's like one micron is small enough to stop most protozoa. Most of these ones are either point one or point two. These don't block viruses, so they make ones that have even smaller holes that can deal with viruses. And this also

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

color safe bleach. Do not use scented bleach. It's just disinfected bleach, which will probably either come in six percent or eight point two five percent sodium hypochlorite chlorite. Um and sounds so growths just that those commination. Yeah, what do they sent it with the blood of I don't know. I got yeah, poisoned something that sounds so gross. I used to wear lavender all the time. I actually I

stopped for two reasons. First, I stopped when I was in college because like my girlfriend was like, you smell like soap and was like really mad at me. Um, if you're listening whatever, I don't care. And then I stopped get what in Margaret go on Off's good look at me now? Yeah, thanks for turning me on the lots of cool stuff. Um, that was much healthier than I would have been. I'm proud of you. And then uh,

um the other reason I stopped wearing lavenders. That attracts ticks if you're out in the out in the woods. Um anyway, okay, so that's chemical treatment. Chemical treatment is really good for bacteria and viruses. It's not great for parasites. It is a really good backup system. Right. Um, actually I'll go over the fucking king of all of them for for bacteria, bas and parasites. You want to get

rid of it, you fucking boil your water. Um. The like classic way to deal with it is you boil your water and it only needs to get above sixty degrees celsius, which is like one hundred and forty something in regular human um. And I actually don't know the conversion. I actually know when you're talking about fahrenheit. Okay, fahrenheit is really good about humans because zero is cold and a hundred is hot. Yes, celsius is really good about for water. So we're we actually are talking about water

right now. So celsius is the proper scale because it goes from zero is freezing to one hundred is boiling. Yeah, um, go ahead, Yeah, it's uh, you know what we should do before before we talk fother about water? Do you know what will not make you shot yourself to death? H Reagan coins? Yeah, it probably is Ronald Reagan coins. Again. All right, we thank you very much, Uncle ron for continuing to pay for my healthcare and insulin needs. So, Margaret,

we were we were talking about boiling. Fuck boiling water. That's it. Yeah, yeah, so how long do we need to boil stuff for? Change? Depending on what we got. It does but not really, it's like all of the main and do do the actual instructions. Overkill is better than regular get killed, right, um, but most shit dies off at sixty degrees celsius, which is below the boiling

point of water even at high elevation. However, basically the deal is at you want to boil water for one minute at sea level three minutes above five thousand feet um or five kilometer. No wait, no, go on, it's not a thousand feet okay, um and yeah, so so boiling water is actually the one of the main things you can do. It doesn't get rid of everything. It gets rid of those three things protozoa, bacteria, and viruses very effectively. And that is most of the time what

most people are treating water for. A lot of the other stuff is like long term health effects like heavy metals and chemicals, right yea. Other methods that you can use. The other like kind of gold standard, which isn't as good as it seems like it should be, is distillation. Distillation gets out lots of stuff. Distillation is basically you evaporate the water and then let it run down into another container. You're moonshining your own water, and and you

can do this DIY fairly well. And there's like solar stills that are really cool. I've never actually built one, I've always wanted to. The downside is if you'd live off of distilled water for a long time, it gets out the magnesium and the calcium, It gets out the minerals that you actually want in your water, so it can have negative effects on your long term health if

you only drink distilled water. The main thing that distillation does that I think no other method on this does besides a reverse osmosis, which I'm not really going to get into, is it desalinates water. Go ahead. That's a big deal, right because like if we look at long term water insecurity, like certainly where I live, we live in a place where people like to play golf in the desert and that has become an issue as far as water supplies go, and so desalination is often proposed.

It's like a way to deal with our water crisis in California and the fact that the Colorado River is getting lower and lower and we rely on it. But like you said, lots of these methods aren't going to pull the salt out of water, right, didn't let you drink seawater, right, But this one does. And so I mean, actually, I don't really care about the health of golf course. I have actually negative feelings about the health of golf courses.

But theoretically, maybe water in your lawn with the desalinated distilled water and then drinking the water that actually has minerals in it. But then again, like maybe the plants need that shit too, I don't fucking no. So, And in distillation, it's very good at getting out heavy metals also like iron and lead, and it the reason it gets out the bacteria and viruses. It's not because they can evaporate, but because they die getting boiled because you

boiled distill. Yeah, and some pesticides are filtered out if their boiling point is greater than the boiling point of water. Benzene and too lean which I don't know what is. I don't know too lean is. These are examples of things that do not get distilled out. Then there's a couple more. There's absorption adsorption rules. This is the thing that I always misspell and so that's why I emphasize the ad absorption, and I don't really understand. Go ahead,

how do we adsorb? Is that just like absorption with adverts? You know? It's like, yeah, it's like I took three years of ladin and all I remember is that ad means towards, an ab means away from, and maybe a gorkoli is either farmer or farmhouse. Yeah, I got poor poor sums suma aramat aramasama sartta. I remember that one. Now, Yeah, great, Yeah, there you go. You've something today. Yeah. I wish that my school had made me take Spanish instead of letting

me take some bullshit like Latin. H Yeah, exactly. So adsorption is good for pesticides, heavy medicals, heavy metals, chemicals, viruses, and bad tastes. It's the only one of these things that I'm aware of that actually use can get rid of bad taste because this is pulling out all the weird stuff in the water. And what it is is it uses activated carbon, which is basically just some shit

that's fucking burned and then crunched up real small. It is a huge surface area because it's like little powder, right, Um, and then the water passes through it, and then by some weird science shit, the bad stuff tends to stick to the carbon um. This is great. This is what your bread of filter does. This is what you're b

key does. This is what you're pure filter does. It It's not as good, I believe for bacteria and stuff, and specifically the biggest problem with these things is that bacteria can grow on them, and so some people, I mean, that's why you replace it every so often. It's not because it's like slow or clogged. It's like literally unhealthy. And so sometimes what people do is they treat for bacteria with UV or some other method, bleach whatever, all

the other shit that we talked about. We haven't talked about u V yet. After it goes to the carbon filter. I'm really excited about like kind of learning more about these because you can theoretically diy carbon right, Yeah, yeah,

you're definitely could, right. I know that it's not the same as this, but one of the things you can do if you're in the back country is that if you have water with a lot of turbidity, which is stuff in the water, right, if you can't see through the water, you know, if it's got a lot of cloudiness. You can use white ash from a fire and that will increase the rate of which it deposits a sediment

if you see what I mean. So you interesting because yeah, it sticks to it and then slowly filters through the bottom of them. I think the gold standard is a loom, which is something using canning. Okay, that increases it even quicker. But yeah, you can use white ash from a fire if you're dealing with I think that's I don't think that's activated coup but I think that's a different mechanism. Yeah, no,

I don't know. UM. And then one of the methods that is actually mostly done on an industrial scale that actually is like I think the main way that people filter water in this world is through sand, and I didn't do enough research about um. There's both slow sand filters and fast sand filters, and some of them like literally depend on certain bacteria, good bacteria, like having a healthy culture of them that like eat the bad stuff and things. I used to know more about that than

I do currently. And then the last one I'm going to cover, Okay, then those reverse osmosis, which you might have a kitchen thing that does and it also removes minerals. It's a very effective method of filtering out lots of stuff. It also, I don't know, causes wastewater, and it's complicated

in some ways. And then there's UV disinfection, and this is like one of the ones that gets touted as this like this is going to save the developing world or whatever, right, And UV disinfection is cool and good. Basically it uses UV light to kill off bacteria, parasites, and viruses. Again, these three things that are the main things people are usually going for. The biggest downside of UV disinfection, there's two of them. One is that it

requires low turbidity water. Thanks for introducing that term clear water. It has to be fairly clear water because it's about light, right, this makes sense, and because you have to be careful to do it right, you just have to like actually get all of it with all of it. Yeah, So this is why I haven't, like, for a moment, I got really excited about these things, and then in the end I was like, I like my water filter that

I already have. Yeah, I think with UV filteration as well, it's been big and the outdoor world kind of relatively recently. You have to be conscious of storing it in a opaque container afterwards because the bacteria can UV like reactivate. Oh yeah, I f that's like any of it that it doesn't get is like fuck, yeah, it's my time. Yeah, because it stops them reproducing. That's how it interested in there.

But they don't so it doesn't really matter. You drink them and then you pass them through your system and it's fine, but if they reproduce, that's when you get sick. So somehow they can UV reactivate. So like if you have a you know, the classic like like through hiking thing, it's to use a smart water bottle, right because it's cheaping, it's dirty, and but if you are UV filtering and then traveling in your smart water bottle and then putting that in the back of your pack and hiking all day,

you might get some difficulty. So yeah, I know it's not Yeah, I haven't really messed with it much, like like, yeah, I have my comfortable setup and that's what I'd like to use. And I will say that something that people who don't go camping much might not be aware of. There's almost nowhere in the United States that you can be confidently drink wild water without it without risking something like giardia. Um, there are places where you can directly

from a spring is the most likely to be good. Um. People used to say that you can you can drink high elevation water if you're up in an alpine area because there's like no calves or whatever, because like Giardia, and I believe also crypto, but I'm um the other poop transferred crypto, the cryptosparodia, not the not the multi level marketing scam. Um. They it's it's passed in the fecal oral tradition. What's the word here, Uh, there's a word here for yeah pathway Yeah, and so um, because

it's passed that way. It's like basically the fact that there's livestyle everywhere is the reason that's not safe to drink the water. And so people are like, oh, if you go up high enough, you're safe. But there's still animals up there, and there's also like more and more hikers up there. Almost anywhere you're going to be hiking, someone else is hiked, and someone else is hiked, and they have drank the water without filtering it because they're

not thinking properly. And then they've shit in not in a hole, but just shit somewhere on the ground because they're also a bad person in that way. Yeah. Um, And so they've like tested a while ago at in the high Sierras that there's giardia everywhere, which doesn't necessarily mean it's going to make you sick, but it can make you sick. So it's just like worth knowing that.

This is the reason that backpackers know so much about water filtration, although again they don't know as much about chemicals filtration, which is why I had to go and learn more about that, less because I'm a backpacker and

more because they used to live off grid. But yeah, they're different, Like like there there are definitely a lot of products out there that are very affordable that work for like that specific specifically the giardia concern, right, which is one that most people have, And that's probably if you're like if you're in a place where you hear there's industrial water contamination and you go to RII and you buy a sawyer make a tap filter, for instance,

it just clamps onto your tap. It probably won't work for the stuff that you're concerned about, but it will work if you're yeah, off a while, then you have garda or something. Yeah, And it also won't work for like lead, which is one of the reasons why the carbon filters are the more common ones at home, because city water that is a higher you know, if you live in some cities, you're gonna have lead in your water, right, Yeah, because we used it in pipes for decades. Yeah, but

I don't know. Oh, let's talk shit on Burkey's really quick. Yeah, let's do it. What's up with Burkey? Why are they bad? So? I was like, I personally the other day after this thing, because that's my fun joy of being a prepper is going to Twitter and being like, here's what I know about that thing. You know, whenever a thing happens while like safe on my mountain top and drinking out of my well, which whatever has its own problems, I'll take

those problems anyway, Okay. So so I post about this and then I pointed out that like, overall, there's like the different filters that you can have her home, and then the only one that seems to sort of do it all is the Burkey. It's this very expensive brand. You've probably seen them in your hippie friend's house, or you're the hippie and there's one in your house, there's

one in my house. And it's a big silver canister that looks like it comes from the fifties or whatever, and and it's a filter, and it's somehow filters more than everything else. And the way that it does that is by lying or rather, I don't know what using the way. Yeah, the way it does it is it says it can do these things, and it is not certified to the what is it a NSF slash ANCI standard that all of your other filters are testing themselves too.

So everyone else is saying we have passed this following certification, and Burkey is saying, oh, we tested, and it does all the stuff. All the other ones probably do kind of all the stuff too, but the only things that they're actually certified to do or what they say they do. And so Burkey basically charges a mint in exchange for using their own testing standards instead of the testing standards

of other people independent testers. Google Burkey wire cutter and you'll find a good article that where people conducted a bunch of tests. And it's a shame because it would be nice to have this sort of all in one filter because it's very annoying. If you want to filter something out of your water, you have to go, Okay, what's in my water that I don't want? And then you have to go find the filter for that, and it's not going to be the same as the other filter.

Is not gonna be same as the other filter. Like, oh, you live some more leading your pipes. You can't buy a regular Britta. You got to buy the lead pipe Montreal special Britta, you know, and like, you know you want an undersinc water filter, Well do you want this one or this one or this one? It would be nice if there was a yeah, like buy once, cry once, Yeah, yeah,

go to Amazon two days later you're fine. Kind of situation. Yeah, but there isn't one new I was going to go over, like just in case people are curious more about the back country stuff. I guess I have three different levels of stuff that I use for back country. If I'm just going out and I don't think I'm going to filter water, I just take a stainless steel single wall water bottle and some iodine or another chemical purifier. I

didn't works really well. But you don't want to be using it long term, it's not good for you long term for your thyroid, and then I'll filter it through like a buff or a kaffir or something to get the tability out and use that. If it's a trip where I'm just in the backcountry in America, I take a squeezy filteration system Catadine bee Free is the one I tend to use. And you want to have a dirty bag and a clean bottle, right, so you're squeezing

from the dirty water into the clean water. And then if I'm going somewhere for work where there are virus risks and where it might be like what you'd call like a non permissive environment, at place where you don't want to hang around near a water source for a

long time because it's dangerous. I have this thing called an MSR Guardian, which is not cheap, and you probably don't need it for what you're doing, but if you are concerned about viruses, it has a dirty bag and a clean bag, and it's a hang filter, so you can fill up three liters of water, bugger off to somewhere safe, hang it up, and let that filter from the dirty bag into the clean bag, and then you're not standing by the water filtering or pumping. I'm a

few seconds a pretty fettied. Situations have been fine. And I'll say the thing that I used off grid as they used a sawyer, just a regular sawyer water filter. They're like thirty bucks. And I attached it to a five gallon bucket with some hoss and then I gravity fed it and I just left it drip in from one five gallon bucket to another. And that's for a stationary bas in the United States. That worked for me. Yeah,

I can see that working really well, Margaret. Do you want to think where can people learn more about prepping? Would there be a podcast they could listen to? You mean one that just went weekly, Live Like the World Is Dying. I am one of the hosts of Live Like the World is Dying. The reason it went weekly is now there's more hosts and you can listen to that wherever. You listen to podcasts every Friday, and soon

you'll be able to hear James on it. But I don't know when you just have to listen to all of them. Yeah, where can people see you gloating on Twitter from your mountaintop? Magpie killed Joy until I finally get sick of Twitter, which is increasingly likely every single day. Hell so, yeah, yeah, thank you very much, Margaret, thanks for having me informative. You are welcome, all right, Ali,

everyone maybe and welcome. So it could happen here with me Andrew of the YouTube channel andrewism and today I'm joined by Garrison is here, greetings, and Mia also here. Hello. And I wanted to talk about the idea of the noble savage. It's something that people have occasionally brought up in my common section when I discuss really anything related to m Maybe there's something to learn, something to be

learned from the Indigenous people of pre colonial period. There's often this accusation levied against any sort of positive representation of their society, any sort of generous reading of their society, as something to be scoffed at, as something to be ridicule, as something to be seen as perpetually and this troope

of the noble savage. And so I was in some sort of I feel I was in sort of am I got into a sort of defense mood, and I was like, well, I really don't want to do that, right, I don't want to want to create this caricature of indigenous peoples in my videos that you know, Forster represents all their complexities and stuff. Obviously, every group throughout history

has had many layers to them. And then in reading to one of Everything by David Grieber and David wen Grew ended up stumbling upon even further information on the subject. And so that's something that I want to talk about. You know, this idea where the idea of the noble savage came from how it's used, and I think how we should be approaching it today. But before I even get into all of that, are all familiar with this term and how it's used. Yeah, I mean I think

I don't know. It is interesting in the way that it kind of like, I don't know, there was kind of this shift of it being uses a term to critique sort of like racist white fantasy to being a term that's used to sort of bludge at anytime anyone like has the temerity to suggest anything in another society than this one could have possibly have been better, which is a kind of grim shift I think in a lot of ways, and I think has done a lot of political damage by people who sort of don't quite

understand what was going on. Yeah, and that is a shift that I noticed as well, and for a while I thought that was really how the term was originally meant to be applied. I mean we see it all over discussions of anthropology and philosophy and literature, which it could be extended to media as a whole. Right, you have this sort of stock character of the noble savage person.

It's uncorrupted by civilization. Something that's a person that symbolizes this sort of any goodness and moral superiority, living in harmony with nature that we don't have access to because we've been corrupted by the influences of civilization. Right, it's this idealized concept of an uncivilized or sort of base man right or rather person, And I mean we see it a lot in rights discourse, being used as a

tomb of derision. For example, a right being Australian politician named Dennis Jensen once told Parliament that the Australian government should not be funding people to live a noble savage lifestyle in remote indigenous communities. Yeah, christ and it's used to mock the so called backwards lifestyles of Indigenous people and really try to reinforce this white supremacist idea of their inferiority or their backwardness, their regressiveness, whatever the case

may be. And then on the other side, in leftist political discourse, you also see it being used as a tomb of derision. So in both cases it's being used as a term of derision without really a good grasp of what the term is where it came from. For example, anarcho primitivists are criticized for upholding this troope, and of course leftists criticize a leftist when fallen for the troope

for fallen for the troope. When describing indigenous histories, spiritualities, and social ecologies, it seems like you can't even bring up any sort of reciprocal gift economy based relationship of the land that indigenous group might have had without somebody saying, oh, well, did you know that indigenous people also perpetuated extinctions and

genocides and this than the other. So I really don't think that any time you learn from a society that predates your own and may still persist, that you're doing a noble savage But it is something that I had become very conscious of in my approach to any sort of discussion. I feel like it sort of haunts the discourse among other sort of stock characters and troops that permeate in or political conversations within media. The troope has,

you know, come in and out of fashion. But the two main forms that it appears in is one that life is strenuous, a life of quote and quote primitive is strenuous, and therefore this savage is nobody, brave, hard work, and an honorable And then you have this other depiction, which is that the savage and I can it pains me to use the term every time, but the savage is not greedy and just as now a teat for luxury.

So might you see it in instant media. It's been a long time since I've watched The Road to Eldorado, but if I recall, there is this sort of idea within the movie that they're so used to this the decadence and stuff of gold and whatnot, that they don't consider it as valuable, they considered wruthless. So there's this aspect of the Troope that treats materials traditionally considered valuable to be something to be sort of shrugged off or flaunted.

And then of course because what is philosophy, what is really our ontology without some sort of reference to the story is embedded within the Christian cannon, right there is this sort of interpretation of the story of the God of Eden as this as Adam and Eve and these noble savages that live in this uncorrupted innocence and harmony with nature, and then they have to they partaken this fruit from the tree of knowledge or you know, they

become quote unquote civilized, and then they're punished by having to engage in agriculture and have to labor over the land instead of living in harmony with it. Just one interpretation of that story is that it's a metaphor for the dawn of agriculture and the god have eaten as a sort of nostalgic take. Even later on, when Europeans first encountered hunter gatherer communities in the Americas, they compared

them to being living and they're sort of eaton. And today you still find comparisons to eat on used to

describe certain hunter gather societies. And of course, as this is quite topical, you often see this criticism of noble savage and whatever being lefted against Avatar, as in the Blue People, not the not the Last Day of Bender, because they have this sort of oh we are these utterly perfect, you know, peace loving space hippies or in harmony with nature, chilling vibing, we literally have sex with trees kind of vibe. Um. And I haven't seen the

second movie in the series. I only saw the first, but I wouldn't be surprised if that trend and continues. I don't know, have you all seen either both of them. I saw the first one and I was like, I, no, nothing on earth can can call me to see the second one. So I have no idea how you or not? Yeah,

and I mean the conspt the noble savage. It has its roots a lot further back than European encounters with Native Americans, Right, that's sort of the intellectual lineage of the concept could actually be traced back to ancient Greece.

So if you really want to reach you could say that even back in the Acadia and epic of Gilgamesh, that Akudo as a sort of bushman was a kind of depiction of that contract between hunter gatherer societies and agricultural societies, a Gilgamesh representing, of course, you know, civilization, but if he starts in from ancient Greece, we could say you're seeing Homer and Pliny and Xenophon all idealizing the Arcadians and other groups, whether they were real or not.

And then later on in Rome you find Tacitus, for example, writing of the noble Germanic and Caledonian tribes in contrast with his view of Roman society as this sort of corrupt and decadent place. Even wrote speeches like he practically wrote fan fiction about liberty and honor for his sort of caricatures of these people. Other writers would also treat the Scythians comparably, You've seen in the works of Horace

and Futil and Ovid. And then further on, you know, in the twelfth century the polymath even to Fail wrote in his novel The Living Son of the Vigilant this idea of this sort of stripped down back to the roots earthy wild man who is isolated from society and has a series of trials and tribulations that lead him to knowledge of Allah by living this life and harmony with Mother Nature, basically theorizing this idea that people can find can find their way to God just by being

exposed to nature, finding a sort of a theological understanding by understanding the natural world. All of this is sort of a preamble to really what most people point to as the origins of the concept, the modern myth of the noble savage. It's most usually attributed to eighteenth century Enlightenment.

For plosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, and he believed the original man was somebody who was free from sin, appetite, or the concept of right and wrong, and those deemed savages were not brutal, but noble, or at least this is how the story goes. The idea can also be found in theology the founder of the Methodist Church, for example,

John Wesley. Again, just like the Andalusian novel writer, believe that you know, there's this idea of man in the beginning at the roots connected with nature, is not as corrupted, is more connected with nature and with God, compared to the so called de generous he found in eighteenth century society, compared to the disease and materialism seeing throughout the world. David Grieber, in one of his recent posthumous works, Pirate Enlightenment, I don't know. In a lot of his other works,

as well. He sort of grapples with this idea of the Enlightenment, right, and how flawed our understanding of the Enlictenment is. How our approach the Enlightenment as a sort of era unique to Europe or this era centered upon Europe is flawed in its approach because it leaves out the realities of the Enlictenment occurred as a result of Europeans interactions and exposure to the rest of the world.

You had these European explorers and colonizers and scientists venturing out, trading, interacting with these different groups of people, hearing their ideas about things, and then going back and writing best best selling books about these societies and how they believe and what they think and how they organize their society. One chronicler, for example, noted that among the Indians or Native Americans, that land belonged to all, just like the sun and water,

mine and thine. The seeds of all evils do not exist for those people. They live in a golden age and open gardens, thought, laws or books thout judges, and they naturally follow goodness. Rousseau, Thomas Moore and others also idealized the naked savages as innocent of sin. Another one wrote about how they are equal in every respect and so in how many of their surroundings they all live

justly and in conformity with the laws of nature. Basically we have we just found a whole continent of people basically lived in a garden of da But then this concept of ecological nobility that is perpetuated is of course flawed. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, there were cases of

overexploitation and damage done to the environment. And yet we also find a lot of indigenous groups living in compatibility of the ecological limitations of their home area, getting familiar with the lands that they live on and what it

takes to preserve them for the next generations. A lot of what is seen as the sort of virgin landscape was profoundly shaped by the controlled boons, the horticulture, the hooden and other activities done by indigenous groups throughout the Americas, for example, in the case of the Amazon rainforest, and in Australia as another case where the controlled boons really

shaped that landscape over thousands and thousands of years. To this day, you know, the methods used by indigenous peoples have been found to be you know, superior to that was used by non indigenous peoples living in the same habitat methods like poly cropping techniques, to enhanced soil fertility, sustainable harvesting, and of course there are these culturally encoded morays that are you know, placed in these communities that

helped result in the preservation of these resources. Then he also had account for the fact that no culture has stagnant. Every culture changes over time, and as a result of the capitalist market economy, there is this pressure to overexploit the land for the sake of profit. You know, a lot of way of these documented patterns of land cultivation and land preservation are found is usually in the outskirts

and the margins of the capitalist market economy. Such practices can be more difficult to find right in the belly of the beast. For example, the rappapa in western Venezuela, they were traditionally mobile over an extensive area plants and food, search and game, and now they are stationary. Now they are settled, and now they sort of are forced to adopt a different lifestyle in response to their new material conditions. When you had that lesser population density and greater freedom

to roame. It was easier to both satisfy subsistence needs and also maintain the health and vitality of the ecosystem over an extended period of time. But now that sill pluses are needed, now that agriculture has been reduced to a very small portion of the population, and that those techniques are now expected to be more intensive in order to keep up with the demands, those lifestyles and those

cultural moras and those practices have had to change. But back to the idea of the noble savage right, and particularly drilling into this idea of the noble aspect of it right, because there's some confusion, as Groupate points out, between these two meanings associated with the word nobility. You could say someone is noble in this sense that they are you know, moral good, exemplary in their heavia and

their exequette in their ethical standards. But you could say somebody is noble in the sense they have this position in a sort of a class system, a hereditary position in a class system, and elevated economic status. Rousseau didn't come up with the phrase, and in fact he never used in his writings. What terre ellingson historian discovered, or rather explored in his book The Myth of the Noble Savage is that the term was coined over a century before Russo's birth by a guy named by a French

lawyer ethnographer named marcol Escarboo. And Escarboo described indigenous peoples as truly noble, not having any action, but it's generous, whether we consider their hunting or their employment in the wars. The nobility was more so associated not with just moral qualities like generosity and you know, good behavior, but also

nobility from a legal standpoint. The lives of freedom, the privileges, and the responsibilities that the Indienous people enjoyed were also found, according to less Carboo, within the European nobility in Cannibals and kings nance prot just the name of Marvin. Harris went on to explain why less Carboo had recognized nobility among the Indienous people that he visited. You know, a lot of the band and village societies, there was a level of economic and political freedom that very few enjoyed

in his day and even today. You know, people decided for themselves how long they wanted to work on a particular day. What they would do or if they would even work at all. You know, they didn't have to deal with the taxes and rents and tribute payments that and one I could even extend to say, debts that keep people today and in the past so confined and

restricted in their limited life on this earth. What should have been you know, the sort of normal standard you know, of human freedom is in contrast with European society, just like mind blew in. Yeah, there's another David Graeber. Actually, I've been talking about their Never was at West a lot recently, and one of the things that he talks

about in that in the Devery was a West. Is this like trick that European writers use when they're looking at another society, which is like they present themselves as like people whose behaviors are sort of are entirely rational, and they're solving a logic puzzle, and then they go find, like, I don't know, what they consider to be the weirdest thing, and so like sorry, they go find what they consider to be the weirdest thing that like another culture does

and look at it through this you know, this lens which it draws in the reader to be doing this sort of logic puzzle and trying to figure out, oh,

how could these people do this thing? And then you know, if if you pull back the lens a little bit look at like what these supposedly objective European like theorists of doing, it's like, well, okay, these guys all have these really weird ceremonies and like they eat they they eat the flesh of their God every weekend and stuff like that, and so you get this really interesting But but the when when you read it through their their sort of colonial ethnography, you get this image of both

societies that's very weird that that lets you sort of that conceals the fact that, yeah, like when when these European writers are talking about meeting addious people like you kind of the way that it's and makes it very easy to sort of like do this colonial thing where you forget that every single French writer who is writing about this lives in like the most hierarchical society of the world has ever seen. Yeah, yeah, that's so true.

And it's like, well, yeah, of course, like they they went to literally any other place on Earth and talk to people and they are like, oh my god, these people are like are really freed. It's like, well, yeah, it's because these guys live under the French like they're

like French absolutism. This is like I think Grab's line was, like, this is a society where every single person when they walk, when they walk into a dining room immediately knows the class of every single other person sitting around the table

by like how they hold their silverware. Yes, it's absurd, you know when a lot of the rest of the world is like, you know, living on the generosity of the people around them, being reliable in you know, the phone deations of you know, community, not even necessarily because I mean obviously a hierarchies to be found within a lot of these colleges and communities, but not to the extent that you would have you fallen in. And some

of these European societies not even close. Yeah, these are the European like I don't know, like Europe has been really really I mean, you know, this is the sort of organizational trend of European society for like the last like four or five hundred years has been just an incredible, unfathomable centralization on a level that was just it's just sort of incomprehensible to most of the people who've ever lived, but we treat as sort of normal now because it's

a society that we've grown up under. Yes, it's a I'm trying to draw a comparison between Europeans and culture and this level of freedom and other societies and sort of like I can't think of any specific example right now, but you know how, you know, grown up as a child in a particular household, your house would have certain norms that you think is just like universal, you know, like everybody does this. Obviously this is just a fact

of life in the universe. But in reality, it's just like some way at quirk when you appearance had that you just had to grow up with. Yeah, yeah, like like, for example, this is a really weird example, but let's say, for example, you had like ceramic dishes. Would not allow it to be used ever, right, they were purely for decoration and appearance. Tooled you that it's some grave moral

sin to eat off of ceramic dishes. And then you go to somebody's house and they have all their plates laid out, and you're like utterly baffled by how they're able to eat off ceramic dishes. If I could think of a better example, but for now, Yeah, that's what

I'm a role with. Anyway, despite recognizing all of this freedom and stuff, they were kind of like disgusted by it, at least some of them, you know, some of them, when publishing their texts in Europe, would put their own liberal ideas into the mouths of indigenous people to say, oh, I'm not saying this. This is obviously like trees in US and I would never say this, but this indigenous guy who I spoke to the other day, he said it, and so I'm just publishing what he said. So that

took place sometimes. And then they're also those who would like actually disgusted by the liberty exhibited in so many societies. But whether they saw that freedom as a positive or as a negative despite all their fluffy words about intigenous liberties, that doesn't really matter of indigenous people at the end of the day, because you know, through the centuries, empires

continue to swallow indigenous lands. And the phrase basically disappeared for about two hundred and fifty years because the idea of the noble savage was reversed by this stereotype of the dangerous, brutal savage like whole day are they defend their land and way of life? Right. It was until eighteen fifty nine that the term was resurrected by a

guy named John Crawford, a white supremacist. He wanted to become president, or rather he was attempted to become president of the Ethnological Society of London, and he was very disdainful of this idea emergin and anthropology and philosophy of universal human rights, like how dare you? You know? So he introduced the phrase resurrecting after two hundred and fifty years to make a speech to the society, and by

the way, he missed. He's the one who first misattributed this speech the phrase to russ basically ridiculing using the noble savage as a term to ridicule those who sympathized with such quote less advanced cultures. And so that sort of fabrication where he attributed it to Russu and he built up this straw man to blew it down. You know, it's basically this myth of the myth of the noble savage. He creates a straw band of the noble savage as

a myth, and then that's what's perpetuated. But his myth of the noble savage was the one that was a myth. So it's, you know, the myth of the myth the noble savage. And so as the British Empire was reaching the height of its power, and he was, you know, trying to ridicule anybody who had anything nice to say about Indigenous people, that straw Band was used to continue

to advocate for the extermination. Crawford's version of noble Savage became the source for every citation of the myth by anthropologists from Lubbock, Tyler or Boas through the scholars of the late twentieth century. So even one hundred years later, people were still using the term that he came up with, this rhetorical cheap shots that he used, and to this day it continues to polarize our discussions and obstruct any

sort of nuanced approach to hunt to gather life. And having discovered all of this, I have to say, it really made me feel like a part of history. There never was a noble savage myth, at least on the sense of this strong man of simple societies living in happy innocence. Travelers usually accounted for both virtues and vices. They spoke of the positives of these societies and also

things that they weren't too fond of. Both the concept of the noble savage and the concept of the brutal savage a fantasies constructions of a European mind that was intent on boxing Indigenous people in this sort of suspended state of either purity or evil going forward. I think it's really silly to continue to perpetuate the tim I think it really keeps us from engaging with history properly.

And I mean, even if somebody is exaggerating or expungentertain aspects of a particular society or culture that should be engaged with directly. You know, I don't think you should fall back on a lazy troope popularized by a white supremacist. I mean, we live under states now, we live on the capitalism now, and I don't think I don't fault people for trying to imagine what life must have been like before then, before these institutions became so all in compassing.

What becomes an issue is when we take these past societies and we use them as these speakers of virtue instead of going back and trying to take their lessons and their practices and adopting them and interpreting them to move forward. There was a lot of freedom and there still is a lot of freedom left to be uncovered in our history. It is obscured in our history classes. It isn't taught. Instead, we're taught facts and figures and

wars and notable notable individuals. We're taught of kings and dictators and high priests and emperors and prime ministers and presidents and chiefs and judges and jailers and dungeons, penitentiaries and concentration camps. This is always a stance now, but it doesn't have to be. And if we go into have an honest exploration of our history in order to inform our future, we have to free our imaginations of this lazy troop of the noble savage. That's it for

me for this episode. Can check me out on YouTube dot com slash Aurism and also on Twitter at underscore sat Drew, as well as when patreon dot com slash Saint Drew. This is it could happen here. Yeah, you can find us in the usual places on Twitter, Instagram, and Yeah, go be free. Hey, We'll be back Monday, with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the Universe. It Could Happen Here as a

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