Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three, twenty five, Episode two.
Of Dy's I Guys Stay production of iHeartRadio.
This is a podcast where we take a deep dib into America's share gosh, and it is Tuesday, almost Thursday, February thirteenth, twenty twenty four. Fuck Valentine's Day.
Shit, fuck tomorrow, isn't it. I guess I better go to CBS and buy some more Google Play gift cards.
This actually did just fuck me up because we're recording this week advance, and I forgot we were recording it a week in advance, and I was like, oh oh you really were like fuck yeah.
I guess for people who don't know it's Gallantine's Day, I thought that was just a bit from Parks and rec It's also a fast knock day. It's I guess, the day before ash Wednesday. It's already ash wedzay ash Wednesday. Hell yea, yeah, Gotley. I hope you all got something to give up.
Catholics mark themselves.
Here National Cheddar Day. Oh right, so it's Fat Tuesday, meaning mon Day Tuesday. As I know, as I grew up in the church, we know it as Monday Tuesday, National to day National Pancake Day. But that's courtesy of the people at the International House of Bond Cake. Oh really, yeah, they you know, because half of these days are you know, half of these days are just like some companies like, just.
Make my fucking product a national day, Big Pancakes House.
Mm hmm.
Well, my name is Jack O'Brien aka Sprained Tain't. I got a real complaint. Why don't my shit smell like fresh mow grass?
Sprained Tain't, I got a real complaint.
Why can I spray alfalfa out my asshole? That is courtesy of Cleo Universe, in reference to.
The discovery last week that sprinked is.
The what which animal water ottershit Otter ship is called sprint. It smells like freshman grass. Yeah, and I'm very jealous of otters. I want my ship to smell like that.
I don't know. I kind of like when I take a nasty shit, it's kind of reminds you that you're alive. Yeah, like, oh yeah, I'm fucking my body processed poison.
That part is just decomposing a little bit faster than the rest of you. This is who I am. Fucking we die. I'm gonna eventually smell like that all over when I'm in the ground, So yeah, stop pretending otherwise. From once weekend, I'm thrilled to be joined as always by my co host.
Mister Miles Gray.
Akay, what that fucking skull do Einstein?
What that fucking skull do? A what that fucking skull do Einstein? No stip to skull based Oh shit, this guy's IQ. We Israeli high. Okay, shut out to blinky head.
Just you know Einstein, whether or not he ever took an IQ test, But what that skull do?
You know?
What that skull do though Einstein? Yeah, doesn't matter. By the way, we're not pro phrenology on this podcast.
I am. I'm pro stinky shits, And for phrenology, you're coming out with all the very I'm just telling you everything is measurable with what you can see or smell. You don't have to do anything. It's just all there. Yeah, I measure and yeah, it's all it's all there. Yeah, don't don't you live. Some people of the NBA also keep employing the dark arts.
Well, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our third seat by an author, musician, Yes and podcast host of the anarchists survivalist podcast Live Like the World Is Dying and the Cool Zone Media Robert and Sophie Lichterman's Cool Zone Media podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff? Please welcome Margaret kill John.
That's me.
I didn't prepare a song. I'm sorry. AKA Magpie. That's right, Yeah, right, that's right.
Yeah.
What's the thing about Magpie is the bird? Like?
What did they steal things?
Yeah?
That is how I got the name.
Oh really, they steal shiny stuff, right, and like build a little shiny like bachelor pad thing to impress.
Yeah, they're a shiny object collector, like like crows and ravens. They're pretty related.
Do they have the same like memory too, Like how crows will be like yo, fukal one crow. It could be smoke from the whole murder. I think.
So, only a group of magpies is called it tiding.
Oh that's so much nicer.
Yeah, that's I mean, I like to take it as ominous instead of direct.
But right with tidings to.
You, they say before they rob your ass, exactly, Wait, what were you what were you stealing?
What were you coming up on all the time?
Mostly food and books? I guess when I was funny. Yeah, I got it for two reasons. One, I would like find little rusty and shiny things in like the street. When I was walking around, I was like a crosspunk squad, and so I would pick up little rusty things and make weird, bad jewelry with it, eventually learn how to make better jewelry. And then the other thing is, yeah, I used to shoplift, yeah, like it was my job, because it kind of was, because that's how I fed myself,
bet my friends. Yeah, I would never advocate.
Oh whatever, do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah, whatever it is. Do what you gotta do, do what you gotta do. Yeah.
Well, we wanted to have you on to talk about cool people, to do cool stuff, and then we found out about Live like the World's dying, and so we're torn. We're going to talk to you about both. I were really interested in that. But before we get into both of those things, we do like to get to know you a little bit better by asking you, Margaret, what's something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?
This week I searched timeline of different countries independence from Britain. Mm hmm, okay, because my job is researching history, and then I want to know all of the fussy details. That's what I came up with.
How's it always how's it usually go for them?
How's that for people who leave Britain or Britain?
Smooth?
Yeah, yeah, really smooth. It is a lot of different methods, most of them involve shooting British people. Yeah, that is the primary way by which people have gained independence from Britain.
Yeah, who Who's who did it? Who did it? Bloodless? Like Ghana?
I mean, oh, I don't actually know. I mean obviously there's the ones like like India was like had a lot of non violence involved in the movement, right sure, and you can contrast that with Ireland, which had a lot of shooting.
Right.
Yeah.
Well, and then there's the whole that's the that's the episode that I just researched and wrote in the past week is the Easter Rising and all of the early Irish independent stuff.
But yeah, no it.
I guess the cleaner break you make with Britain, the less ongoing violence there is. Ireland didn't have a very good clean break with Britain. Yeah, so anyway, but yeah, my sourci history is all I do is sit around and read history books. Now instead of being a like cool thief named after a bird, just allowed to get.
Some shiny shit though, you know, just just just so you can feel it one more time. Yeah right, What's what's something you think is overrated? Okay?
I picked? I picked prepping stuff as for my over and under perfect Okay, overrated is bunkers and canned food.
M okay for preparedness. Wait and okay, yeah this got just flooded back there. This dude just came through my neighborhood and convinced me and my neighbors that, like we needed to all go in on a bunker. And now so bunkers. I think, what the obvious reason? At least one thing we learned after talking to like people like Douglas Rushcough about like how billionaires are so focused on bunkers. It's like, how are you going to maintain a bunker?
Like if anything goes wrong? But what from your perspective, what's the what's the overrated part of the bunker?
Well it's like, don't get me wrong, if I had an extra seventy thousand dollars, I wasn't doing anything else with I'd probably have a bunker for like tornadoes and stuff, right, yeah, but overall this like mentality of oh, the way that you survive things is that you and maybe your immediate family go crawling a hole in the ground and then what watch TV until you die?
You watch Friends until the end of the world, like the world behind?
But yeah, did you really? I say.
The thing that annoyed me was that they were like buying into all of the bullshit. They were like they were like, yeah, people who have bunkers, the very wealthy people who have bunkers are gonna outlive us all and.
Well, but the people whose bunkers says are dead are gone. They just go and find the people's bunkers. No, No, there's some problems with that movie from a preparedness point of view.
And I think it's really.
Telling that it was produced by the Obamas, and it's like this kind of but in a weirdly like they go and they convince the Prepper to stop being such an asshole.
You know.
That's the scene that makes the movie for me, right, is that Kevin Bacon's character from Tremor's turns around and learns how to share.
What about canonically same universe as Trevor's right, and what about can food?
Okay, and this one's like more nitpicky. Can food is great. Everyone should have enough food to like last a little while, right in case like supply chains, which we've also seen.
In supply chain, I'm sorry, just from your what is the standard amount? Just like to write the stone how much food should you have?
I would overall, I would tell people to have a between three and six months worth of food in their house. Okay, But the thing about canned food is it can food isn't like set it and forget it like people treat it. You actually can food is pantry food. You have to
like rotate through it. So if people are just like, oh, I'm just going to stockpile food and all they do is go out and buy canned food, it's kind of weird and it doesn't really like work as well as like a system where more like the stuff you eat anyway, Like if it's canned food and the stuff you eat, right, Like I keep a lot of canned soup and beans and stuff around it, right because I.
Eat it anyway.
Yeah, Whereas like I do believe in food storage. I am kind of a prepper at the end of the day. I believe in community might prepare course, yeah, yeah, yeah, But I like the stuff you can set and forget. Like if you store beans and rice properly, you just leave it in your basement for the next thirty years.
It's fine.
Right, So I got forty days of progresso from the late nineties out in the shed in my backyard. It's just been baking during the summer and cooling during the winter. How we think that's going to hold up? You know, you got a chance totally eats like a meal. You got a chance, you know. I mean, well, the thing
is that I can. I'll give it to my enemies first, because that's the first So as we know, once society falls apart, first thing that comes is your enemies, and they're gonna try and eat all your shit.
Well, everyone's your enemy once the world ends.
That's right, Zoom out, zoom out.
Everyone's the enemy. Yeah, but that was the thing about leave the world For people who don't know. There's a movie on Netflix made by the person who made the show, Mister Robot, Sam s Mel. It's produced by the Obamas. It's based on a novel from like I think five to ten years ago, and the basic plot is that like somebody from outside the US attacks the US, like infrastructure knocks out, like media knocks out Wi Fi, and then everybody starts attacking one another, right, like everybody starts
killing each other. Like that's basically the end of the movie, is that, like people are like setting off bombs. Yeah, I guess I should. I always get to say spoiler on this movie in particular because I don't feel that bad about spoiling it because I think it's such bulletit. Wait, everybody loses their shit, Yeah, but everybody loses their shit like immediately because they don't have Internet. I feel like it's kind of and because they're scared. But I don't know,
like I lived it. So it takes place outside of New York City, so you only see New York City from a distance, but like three days without the Internet and electricity, and like all of a sudden, like buildings just start falling, just like they've been fucking detonated.
Internally, I don't want to defend this movie super hard, but one of the plot points is that it's not just that the Internet went out, but it's also that the I mean, you can tell the Obama it's like foreign agents are spreading disinformation and turning people against each other. There's like an active there's like an active thing to turn people against each other.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's true.
Yeah, but I don't want to defend this movie super hard. I enjoyed it, and I like Kevin Bacon turns around, but I'm not coming to the like yeah, oh yeah, the Obama's made the best prepper movie or something.
I was in New York City during that blackout that happened in the early two thousands. Yeah, yeah, mid aughts, and everybody just got drunk for like three to four days. Like yeah, for the most part, everybody got drunk. There was some like nasty price gouging on water and stuff like that, but for the most part, like people were just sitting in the streets being hammered. Like that's kind of it like turned into.
What it what it's like.
The nineteen forties were like just everybody's drunk all the time.
Nobody can fund each other well, and that's what That's what disaster studies, like the academic field has shown is that by and large, when there's a disaster, everyone takes care of each other there's like a notable exception.
It's called elite panic. I think I can't remember the the people who have something to lose, like the people who are current previously in control. They're the people we're going to run around start shooting looters and all of that, right, yeah, But overall people get together pretty naturally and are like, well, what needs doing?
How do we do it?
Well?
I got some of that side right right, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Elite panic, I think is like perfectly summed up in that picture of the mccloskey's from the twenty twenty the summer of twenty twenty, the uprising is the familychine gun and the lady with like the pistol, you know what I mean.
That truly was like, fuck, these people have watched like it's a wine glass.
Yeah, just like loosely had fucking mustard shit stains on his fucking polo shirt, like fuckingeps, put the fuck out of here.
But he thinks it's an operator because he has an AR fifteen.
Yeah exactly, Operator in a golf shirt. Yeah, that's a saf specific that's a pretty good band name too, Elite operator in a golf shirt. No, elite panic.
But their first album could be Operator in a golf shirt and it's just got that dude on the.
Cover Country Club Operator. Yeah.
As long as a death metal band, I'm in.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
The other thing it reminded me of is when the roads were too muddy to leave Burning Man, and like Chris Rock was like, they're fucking coming for us, man, They're gonna kill us all. We're all gonna die, like you, like completely lost his ship, while everyone else was just like this is very inconvenient and I might lose my job. He you know, he had whatever wealthy people he was like hitchhiking with, were like, this is the end of the world. This is how it ends. They're gonna come for all of us.
Yeah.
Yeah, What is something you think is underrated?
Okay, I'm sticking with the same theme, knowing your neighbors underrated?
Yeah, huh huh.
I think that most people, a lot of people don't know the people in their floor of their apartment building, or the people in their pollor or you know whatever it is, right, like, just yeah, not even necessarily get along with them, not necessarily go to all the same places and invite each other to birthday parties, but just like know who they are, talk to him.
You have the ability to knock on their door and be like, the fuck's gonna happen? You know what I mean? Like, do you have that level of familiarity with something with your neighbor? Yeah?
I just sit by my front door and smoking a cigarette and saying who's this guy?
Who's this guy?
Every time someone walking by my front door, you know, like casino.
Yeah, with binoculars though too, Someone's twenty feet away on the sidewalk, You're like, what, he's walking his dog Jack? Yeah, who's this guy? Who's the guy who lives in the house behind yours? You yell at my dogs all the time, that's where this guy is. Yeah, yeah, I mean what
I mean? I think? Yeah, Well we'll we'll get into that part as we talk a little bit more about preparedness, but like, yeah, like it's knowing people around you is just in general preparedness or not, it's it's just fundamental I think, to understanding that you also live in a functioning world too, because when you're siloed off, like you're just going to fill in the gaps, like I don't
know what the fuck they're doing over there? What they're fucking into or some shit you have like intrusive thinking like that, versus like, oh yeah, that's a Stacey in them, like yeah, they work at the hospital or they do this, and I don't know. We don't have much we talk about other than like exchanging pleasantries. But I have their phone number.
Yeah, my neighbors, this older woman that lives alone. And you know, our communications consist of your power out too. Yeah yeah, yeah, Hey you know a good plumber, right?
Right?
Do you get gravel? Right?
Does your water pressure suck like randomly on like Tuesday mornings sometimes?
Right?
Yeah, there's so much to talk to your neighbors.
Hey, you want to split a cord of wood? Yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah, that kind of stuff.
Yeah, all right, let's let's take a quick break and we'll come back and keep the conversation going.
We'll be right back and we're back.
And yeah, like I said, we wanted to talk cool people, and we will talk about cool people who did cool stuff. But I think there's a lot of people who are having the same thought right now that like maybe I don't want to be living here in this way right now.
Like I grew up with a pretty limited view of what it meant to be a prepper or a survivalist that yeah, it involves you know, people who are like in some branch of Christianity that I'm not familiar with it, you know, like it's it's a lot of people like like with like living with like barrels of gasoline on compound somewhere. And yeah, likes you were saying, you were like searching for prepper stuff on Amazon and yeah, the.
Best place, I think, just to make it fatalistic, complete the most apocalyptic circle because yeah, like you know, to your point, Jack, like a I think most people's perception of this practice is informed by shows like fucking Doomsday Preppers and you're like you have to put dooms Day in front of the word to even like enter like the concept of preparedness or like the internet dunking on like some person who bought like seven thousand cans of
spaghettios and machine guns and you're like, the fuck world is this? But like, yeah, just looking because like I'm always interested because like Amazon is where like most people just shorthanded, like I don't know about this thing, I just need the thing. Yeah. And then so when I started typing in like just prepper. The things that auto filled were so absurd, like some were easy like long
term survival, survival kid and gear. One thing just filled in it said prepper gear and supplies for all out war. It was like something people were just like like you were you looking for this thing like for all out fucking war?
No?
What the fuck? And like the whole aesthetic is just sort of like wrapped up in this like like vision of like you are going to die in a hot war that most likely goes nuclear. I hope you are ready to wear battle fatigues all day and eat your wife's fucking leg.
Like let's say you're gonna want to eat your wife, but if you, if it comes to that, here's how to best prepare her body.
Right, Yeah, it doesn't feel like I wrote how to prepare, how to prepare, Yeah, how to how to prepare, how to prepare hamstring meat seventy different ways.
The le mignon of the thirty year old body filet Manyon. It's like it's doesn't feel you know, it feels it freaks you out. It makes you feel like you're so fucked why even try? Yeah, And I'm like it's just like also really heartening to hear you and others talk about like how this sort of mainstream idea of a person surviving on their own until their death is not only like harmful, but it's like the worst way to
think about surviving through any kind of event ever. So yeah, I mean, like, what what was sort of your entry point? Because when we were talking at like first about having you on to talk about this, We're like, I don't know, we're gonna talk about fuck fucked up doomsday preparedness, But no, you have a much more community minded version because that's the most realistic version of being prepared for any eventual
event that could disrupt our day to day lives. What's like, well, like, are there just like two schools of thought, like the people who are the fully militarized version of like it's fuck you and it's just gonna be me and my dogs type survivalist and people who are more like you, No, like, let's be realistic about what would happen if we had no electricity, we had no running water? What do you do next?
Yeah, I would say that there is there's a there's a split, but it's like less in the sort of slightly more mainstream prepping community is starting to be like, Oh, these people who just want to live in a bunker and shoot everyone who comes near our idiots, you know, And that's like starting to be more and more the understanding they are the people who, like a lot of the people who call themselves preppers for a very long time, or at least the people who are very visible calling
themselves preppers, or a lot of these people were like, Oh, you need your bug out location, you need to train your seventeen children in order to shoot enough rifles or whatever, you know, And.
But I'm making a militia, yeah, exactly, I'm building out by militia.
Yeah.
And more and more people start talking about it as like, look, if you're planning for the zombie apocalypse, you're doing it kind of as almost you're doing it as a joke. But your actual plan is what do you do when a hurricane comes? What do you do when you live in Texas and your electrical grid is completely disconnected from every other electrical grid, Or what do you do when your trends and your existence has been outlawed in the state you live in, Or what do you do when
you know where the power goes out? A lot, right, because I live in the mountains where there's it's kind of an underserved area, and so the trees fall on the power lines and the power goes right.
You know, whatever your health condition is or ability level, like you might need medication or equipment that need electricity, things like that.
Yeah, like you see pat machine, you need to have a battery that runs it, or yeah, you know, or you need to know that you can get out of your driveway, or just like fundamental disaster preparedness. And I think what's happening is that the United States is becoming a less stable place to live over all the world in general, like a lot of the stuff around supply chains is less guaranteed than it was a few years ago, right, And so people are starting to be like, what do
we do about this? And enough people who are coming at it rationally are able to say, like, well, the answer isn't fully automatic weapons. There's very few situations that fully automatic weapons are the correct answer for. And that doesn't mean that, like some stuff that comes from the old school of preparedness doesn't make a certain amount of sense. You know, it is ironic actually would think I don't
know how to cook meat, like I didn't. I I grew up eating fast food and then it became vegan, and so like, I probably need to learn how to cook meat, Like I don't eat it right now, but I'm like, what if? What if I need to cook it for someone? What am I gonna do? I'm gonna kill them by accident, you know. But yeah, I think that the prepper scene is changing. I think that one of the things is that people I'm one of the only peopleho is going to call myself a prepper in
this situation. But I'm used to being kind of antagonistic. I'm kind of used to being antagonistic to the traditional preppers, right right, right, But community preparedness is a growing interest of more and more people, and I'm very happy for that. I actually started living like the world was dining right before COVID, like about a month. I started in January twenty twenty. I think, what's the first episode? So like,
episode three is entirely wrong. It's an interview with a public health professional in the UK who's like, oh, we think COVID's not gonna really be a big deal.
You know, But.
But yeah, like and and you're right that when when people hear this, like, oh, you everyone needs to be ready to live in a foxhole and die of dysentery. People are like, well, I don't want to do that, so I'm just going to prepare to die. Like, you know, I meet a lot of people whose plan is like, oh, there's an earthquake, I'll just be one of the first people to die. That's not a problem because everyone except has to accept their own death because you're alive, right,
that's like part of being alive. But what we can do is we can say, you know, certain things don't need to be a big deal. Like when I when I talk about like people having go bags guess called bug out bags or whatever. I believe in these, but I don't believe in these because I'm like, oh, we got to take to the hills and live in the woods and shoot squirrels because the Antifa have taken over
the government or whatever. I believe in having bug out bags or go bags because sometimes you're in your car and there's an ice storm and you have to sleep in your car, right, So yeah, in the same it's the same reason we have a spare tire and a jack like just also have a sleeping bag. Or a we'll blanket and some cliff bars and you know, a day of water whatever.
Right, Yeah, is there like are there things that people you know like? Because the more I think about it, I'm like I'm shedding the old sort of idea of like skull and crossbones radioactive imagery in my mind of like disaster preparedness. What is like, what's the easiest way to get some momentum going where you're like I want to I actually you know now that have like a
child and things like that. I do think like it only takes a couple of things to go fucking wrong and then you're like I can't go to Trader Joel's and get what I need, Like there are sort of easy ways to sort of look at how what your own situation is and just like be like and also I want to make sure people that I care about in my community, I can also be part of something too, like a network of people that are trying to help
each other. What are like, aside from probably just the easiest thing would be like just get to know your neighbors probably step one. What are just like other ways to sort of like look at that holistically that isn't sort of like, Okay, well do you do you have small arms training and hand to hand combat training, but what are like, how do I how do I sort of help shift my own thinking like that.
Well, you got the first step completely right. The first step is literally just know your neighbors. And then I would say the other stuff start with a little bit of like home preparedness, like three days. Be like, if we were all stuck in the house for three days, do we have the food, do we have the water, do we have the cooking supplies, do we have any
medications that we need? Where any random three day interruption in services or whatever will be fine, you know, because most interruptions in services don't last all that long, right, So and then people tend to go like three days, three months, three years as kind of like the sort of steps one could take. But I would do the three days, and then I would look into a go bag.
I would look into if there's a certain type of crisis if you live on the West Coast, obviously, like earthquakes are a potential risk, right, and so some of the stuff with earthquakes is like not that big of
a deal. You just like, well, you have a go back for everyone in your family where you have like copies of your important papers, and it's less like make sure you have a tent and a hatchet and more like make sure that you have something over the counter beds and like, you know, and make sure that you have copies of your documents and that you can just if you're like, we have ten seconds and we have to get out of the house, this is what we
go and do. And if you live somewhere where cars are part of your life, do you keep your car at more than half gas?
You know?
Right right?
Yeah, So I would start with that, and I would say that one of the best things about preparedness is that you can actually use it to lower anxiety about problems, because once you have done everything that you reasonably are going to do for a problem, it's not always easy, but you can start letting go of that problem in your mind. Like when I lived in a cabin, my
own preparedness journey is a little bit more backwards. I lived in a out of a backpack, and then a van, and then a barn and then a cabin and now I live on grid in a house. But when I lived in a cabin in the woods, I was like well, what happens if there's a forest fire?
What will I do?
And so I prepare to go back. I kept my car half full of gas, and then I stop worrying about it because I was like, right, well, I've done what I'm gonna do, so now I'm not going to lose sleepover a forest fire.
Yeah. And I think to the other point about community preparedness, I think that is actually the best way to look at it, because you know, the way we're talking, all of the imagery around it is like it's you and you fucking alone, and it's off putting. It's like, dude, I don't want to fucking engage with that shit. That's terrifying, Like I don't want to be like, all right, am
I ready to die alone? Versus like I can actually lean into more in like a way that feels optimistic to be like, am I am I tapped into something where I know between everybody we'll be able to figure it out because we're all kind of moving in the same direction. That feels much more like positive and makes me feel more like sort of secure despite the insecurity of it all.
You know, well, and I would say that, you know, there's this classic zombie disaster movie thing where as soon as every as soon as the existing system goes away, some random strong man steps in and says I'm in charge. And it's either if it's like a good guy skull for a hat, yeah, totally. If he's the bad guy, he's got a skull for a hat, And if he's the good guy, he's got an American flag on baseball cap and he's like he's still kind of functionally the same guy, you know, Jack.
Yeah, absolutely, they always have like the Jesus J name, you know, those protagonists. That's why I changed my name.
Sold I'm trying to prep and so what I've discovered is that when there's a small power vacuum, it's not that the first person has an idea is in charge. It's that the first idea that someone floats that sounds reasonable might pull people over. And so one of the things is to have experience. Like if you have activist experience, for example, you can kind of step in and be like, WHOA a bad thing happened. Let's all talk about it
and figure out together what we should do. So if you are the first, the first person to go around and start knocking on doors, in your neighborhood and be like, hey, the powers out, it's been two days, Like why don't we all meet in the street talk about it? You know, yeah,
can show you okay, yeah, exactly totally. And then the other reason to a lot of the individual preparedness stuff like having three days worth of stuff, A lot of that is so that when someone comes to your door and says, are you okay, you can say I am okay, Do you need anything? Does anyone else on the street need something?
You know?
And having enough to share like out the gate, and then what you do is that you slowly get other people in your neighborhood to also have enough to share. You know, only five people on the out of one hundred, I don't know whatever, I don't know the numbers here of making them up. I live in the middle of the woods, but you know, if you live on your like suburban street or an urban area or something like, not everyone in the stockpile water, but if enough people
have some water stockpiled, y'all. Yeah, y'all are good.
And that seems to be the default, like we've got I think it was the aftermath of the Texas infrastructure breaking down, like and freezing over like everybody's electricity being out, or maybe it was one of the hurricanes, but there was a lot of shit online that was like Houston Luke Crew coming through, like people starting fake accounts to like claim that there was this like gang of marauding
people like coming through to loot. And then like when you look at studies that people have done into how communities react in these situations, it's the default is they come together. They like will share their resources with people in need, they'll take care of one another, and it's like actually pretty inspiring.
I Yeah, I.
Am constantly like I think it's an interesting mystery to solve this, to like why we edit that out, Like why we tell.
The story that it is.
The opposite of that, where like it just you know, that might make the local news, but eventually it's going to get whittled down to they're killing people in the fucking super dome, which didn't Yeah, what was actually not happening. But like that's still I think people's one of people's main memories of Katrina.
But like why is it? Because like hyper capitalism relies on us to be like kill or that on that like kill or be killed mentality do you think or why do you think we're so prone to edit the people coming together to help each other out of history.
I think that one of the reasons that Americans in particular, especially white Americans, but obviously white Americans, have influenced a ton of all American culture. One of the reasons that we do it is because the founding myths of this country are rugged individualism and like the family homestead versus everyone else, and the protection of property rights over everything else. I never understood when I was younger. I was like, why does America talk about being land of the free?
It's just hypocrisy. They owned people. What the fuck is anyone talking about, right? And eventually you were like, oh, when they said free, they meant this really specific defined thing around property rights, you know, rather than the rights of individuals and human rights and things like that. And so I think it it just doesn't tie into the
the zeitgeist as well. If you have the like people coming together versus the like you know, rugged band of survivors with the strong leader who then everyone shoots each other.
And I mean obviously like sometimes firearms and self defense matter, right, And the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, you had a multi racial alliance of mutual aid people working as common ground, and they had armed standoffs against racist militias that we're going around and shooting people of color, right, yeah, and so like I'm not arguing like there's no place for force and there's no enemies ever, right, But overall, I think it's just I think it's an American thing. I'm
not sure. Maybe media from other countries does this too.
No, yeah, I think it's definitely like it's just that cultural momentum from being built on the thing. It's like, here's what you do. You see some shit, you fucking put point a gun in them and tell me get the fuck out, and then that's yours and then rinse
and repeat. And I think there's also there's just that sort of subconscious like, well, the pendulum swing back the other way and if it does, and yeah, I think it is very different because even for me also being half Japanese, like the way in a disaster how people look at things is I mean, to a certain extent, it's just so communally focused there a certain point you have no individualism, which is a whole other issue, but that definitely like like there's no fantasy of like and
then we got to shank people at the convenience store for a fucking donut or whatever, Whereas like Americans really do like everything about that is sort of like you don't know, fucking like, look, man, we're fucking wild out here, yea, And yeah, I think it's just it's like this weird thing we can't shake and we've just had, whether it's like settling the frontier or the Cold War, there's always some point to always.
Be like and then man, you don't know, man, the shit might come here and you need a bunker and right, you know, like we had movies that were kind of like having fun with the idea of like people's like atomic atomic bomb bunkers and shit like that.
But yeah, I mean not only are there like examples of movies like that, these are the rules if you read a movie like a book about screenwriting and like how to write these are the rules. It's like you need a protagonist who gets fucked over by everyone around them, Like these are the rules of like how to write
a plot. Like the entire genre of the Western is what you just described as like this American founding myth of Like well, and I'm all out on the homestead and have to like fight off everybody because everything is out there trying to kill us. And then every zombie movie we've talked through all the tropes of that. But like, these are the rules of the stories that we tell ourselves about how the world works. And I think movies stick in people's minds more than anything else.
So yeah, yeah, because chances are, if you haven't experienced it yourself, you're like, I'm pretty sure I saw a movie where that happened, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they were shooting each other pretty quickly. So yeah, so well.
You can you can make it happen by telling enough stories about it. Is one of those scary things.
Yeah, exactly exactly, because then you have no imagination for anything except that you're like, I'm now my thinking has been confined to this box where it's fucking thunderdome.
Like neighbors turning on neighbors in a like disaster or like just in a bad situation. Is like has happened, obviously, but it's very like it's very rare, but we love to fucking focus on it and love to tell fictional stories about it, to the point that I would think it's the default, but it's definitely like a cross history
the vast exception. But speak of movies, I do want to let's take a quick break, and then I want to come back and talk about a couple episodes of cool people who did Cool Stuff that you guys mentioned a couple times during the episode that it's mind blowing that this story is not a movie yet, but it's a great example of the type of story that doesn't get told that should get told. That's like a better story than most stories I've ever ever heard.
It's about the.
Invention of the paramedics in Pittsburgh in the late sixties. So let's take a quick break and we'll come back and get into that.
And we're back, and people need to.
Go check out Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, both of your podcasts. But there are so many great episodes of cool people who did cool stuff. There's the recent one about the Collective and ymar Germany, who like, as Nazism is rising up and you know, the economy is collapsing around them, they collectively like deliver one million illegal abortions a year as birth control as being like just
so incredible and badass. And but I did want to talk about this story about the invention of the paramedics, because it's a group of people, a community suffering under severe systemic racism in Pittsburgh and they come together and become the first paramedics in the history of America, maybe the world. They are the reason we have paramedics today. Like all the life saving care we expect to show up in an ambulance started with them, And it was pretty It was like I would have guessed so much
longer ago, but it was yeah, like nineteen sixty eight. Yeah, yeah, And like I don't know. It's another example I've talked before about how like there are two types of inventions. There's like the iPhone, which is like something that is invented through sheer like tyranny of will, like years before the world might be ready for it, and it's like in in front of And then there are the inventions that like the world is repeatedly calling out for and
like just people just keep fucking fucking it up. Yeah, Like the screwdriver was invented after the screw so they were just like yeah, they like years the screw exist in a chisel. They were just like whatever they said on hand, They're like I guess this coin can kind of get it in there, and took them like fucking decades.
To invent the screwdriver.
But the paramedics seems like just listening to you, like tell the story of you know it starts. You started with like people drunk driving ambulances around the Civil Wars.
Yeah, yeah, Wait, so what what did it look like? Because I haven't listened to this episode. So what we were just just pulling up to the basically to the hospital before, like just in the back of the cars. I get them to the hospital.
So there would be people who would go around. There be someone you could call and they would send an ambulance, and the ambulance would not be an ambulance. They would send a car. And it was different place. It was different in different places. There was no central idea how to do it. A lot of times it was cops, and cops don't always treat different people the same.
Wait, I've heard of this. I've heard of this.
It's crazy, I know, don't worry. It was a long time ago. And then also, uh, funeral homes were a big one. The funeral homes had a hearse and you could put a person in a hearse. So you you're like you're trying not to die of a heart attack and our hearse shows up and they're literally like there's
like pedals left over from the last person. And it was just it was private services, and the other one was firefighters, and then the other one was just like purely private services where there's someone in your neighborhood you can call and like John will come over and drive you to the hospital. Yeah, he's the hero of the story. And so yeah, they just this completely blew my mind too.
Like if you had asked me when the paramedics were invented, I would have been like Victorian era and it was a little bit late that it took that long or literally this has always happened, and people used to do it with litters, you know, where you like carry the person or whatever.
Yeah, you know a picture like somebody coming out and like plugging a fire bellows into your mouth and like.
Yeah, well that was the other thing is that CPR is a recent invention, is the other and they were invented by the same.
Guy Unblieva yeh.
But but yeah, the thing that paramedics changed was that the person who comes to drive you the hospital performs care for you there on the street. And there was a while where people weren't into it. People were scared, especially because the first paramedic team was all black, and so at first they were in an all black neighborhood of in Pittsburgh, and it was like fine. But then eventually, like the white people in the surrounding neighborhoods were like,
we'd rather paramedics came than cops. We keep dying, just so yeah, yeah, And so then black people would come, but then random white racists would be like, no, please, I'd rather die of this heart attack. Just get me to the hospital, all right, no problem, that's all right.
So you know, and that's the weirdest thing about like reading about the medical profession is that that's not the attitude that even like like black doctors and black paramedics who are dealing with racist patients are like, and then we just have to do it anyway. And I'm like, y'all are made of better stuff than me.
Right, Okay, I'll wait, I'll wait. You know, so an important person has a heart attack on stage and a nurse goes and is delivering like CPR life saving and then the cops who are the authority at this time in like getting somebody to the hospital, kick her ass out off stage, and then drag this person of the hospital.
I think say they kicked her as a white nurse.
It was a white So they.
Want to to go bake a pie lady exactly. And they killed this guy by you know, because they don't know shit about they're interrupting the intervention, basically interrupting the CPR, and so this like, people are pissed. They killed a major like political figure, basically the head of Baltimore's Democratic Party at pitt Yeah, Pittsburgh Democratic Party at the time, and so yeah, yeah, so oh.
People are pissed.
And they bring in this guy who had just kind of innovated CPR and was like his theory was that you could teach everyday people to do this thing that would keep people alive for a long time or much longer than they were living before. And so they trained regular people to be the paramedics, like specifically not cops or I guess they were open to cops, and the cops were like, ah, fuck, this that's a training. We don't do this. Sorry, you know, we don't do training.
But so why do you think they went in that direction to like train people who weren't like not being like we're a traveling band of doctors.
Was it just like doctors were in short supply?
It was a couple of different things. One is that they had this idea for this job paramedics, and they were like, who can we get to do this job? Where it is going to take? I don't remember the number of hours, an awful lot of hours of training, like an awfully long intensive thing. We have no idea how financially feasible it will be. We have no idea whether or not this job will exist when you finish all of this training. Who's willing to do that?
Right?
Yeah?
And so it was not the doctors. And then also yeah, like the I'm absolute shit remembering names as soon as I've moved on to the next episode. I remember the story arcs and things. Sure, I can't remember the name of the CPR guy, but he's white.
Is the Stanger?
Oh that sounds right, but I really don't remember. I remember a lot about his backstory. Grew up in the Nazi controlled.
Hven, I don't remember.
And so he also his thing is believing that we need to stop some of the gatekeeping around medical stuff. We still need to train people, and people need to be highly trained. But he was like, I believe we can train regular people. So that was like partly his
crusade around it. It was partly the police unions were blocking cops getting training, and it was partly that the group that stepped up in order to say, hey, we're going to do this was a not really a mutual aid group, but a black empowerment group that taught entrepreneurialship within this neighborhood and and did like stuff like drive around the food van and sell food out of the back to break the food desert. And they were like,
well we can tear it. We have some organizational ideas, and so it was coming out of the civil rights movement also, so it was kind of specific parts of black civil rights stuff, meeting hey, how do we destroy the gatekeeping of the medical industry and just like and then even then they had trouble getting people to come to these trainings, right, and so they were like kind of just rounding people up on the street. So the first people, the first paramedics were not just black folks
who were impoverished systemically. From that reason, but it was also a lot of felons. It was some people who didn't have any like stable places to live, a lot of people who are dealing with unemployment, that's with serious PTSD coming back from the Vietnam War. It was like it was like the fuck ups, you know, and they were like, well, we're not the fuck ups. We're actually really awesome and we're doing all this amazing work, which is part of why it would make such a fucking
killer movie. And then it was even the part like even at one point, in order to get city funding, they were like, sorry, you need to have a white person, and so they were like, like, just one, and so they found a guy who had been the token white soldier in a black unit in Vietnam and we're like, hey, can you be our token white person. He was like sick, Yeah, no, totally, that's fine.
Oh hell.
And so you even have, you know, from a Hollywood point of view where you need that, they even have that. So it's a perfect movie.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have your new trope, the magical white guy. But he just like stays in the bag and doesn't do shit. Yeah, it's like it's like what does he do? It's just amazing his whiteness, just even passively off to the side the doors that it open.
This is also something that we saw when we were talking about alternatives to policing and like this programming Eugene, Oregon that has been going since I think the early eighties.
I feel like it's called.
Like creeps or something like that. They give it the worst acronym possible. But it's like if if you need to call someone for help but you don't want the police showing up with a gun, you have this alternative, and like I remember reading a profile and the things that they're solving are just like, I don't know, this drunk guy is like having a fight.
With his partners and needs what it's called, what is it cahoots? Cahoots? Isn't it cahoots?
Yeah? It might. I think it had a different name for un but I don't it creeps. As Nixon's committee to re elect the president, it was something like more sinister though, but anyways, like they would just like give somebody a ride, you know. It's just like really like community based, like oh, I actually know that guy, uh
or I know his cousin. I'm gonna have his cousin come give him a ride, and like you end up seeing this is what is useful about the Freedom House people being the people who are serving this community is like, you know, I think Margaret in the episode you talked about if someone's odeing, they probably know who dealt them those drugs and can like go talk to that dealer and like find out what they took. You know, it's
like they are plugged into the community. So you're just like paying for somebody within the community who knows people to go in and do the very basic, you know, work of also incredibly complicated and important work of like life saving technology or life saving medical care, but also just having that context and it being someone that like people are comfortable with and not somebody who's pointing a gun.
It is is so important and just like feels like this could be spread applied to like so many other places, right like in the modern world where we're seeing it, where we still have this crisis of the place to call when somebody's having mental health crisis or you know, a lot of different problems is the fucking police.
Like I don't know, no, I mean, it just makes sense to me, and especially when a lot of stuff that puts people in dangerous criminalized you know, you know when when you're dealing with someone who hasn't who's odeane. Oh and then just to throw in that, also, the same guy whose name I can't remember, was I think the first person to administer narcan or like, yeah, use narcan not just as a way to pull people out of anesthesia, but also to pull people out of overdosing.
But yeah, like if you're if someone's overdosing, you call the cops. You don't know whether you say that person's life or killed them.
Right, is it? Doctor Peter Saffhar again, I.
Literally it's just names go in and out of my head.
It's awful.
I need script in front of me in order.
We're like looking and I'm like there, it's like there's like three doctors that made invented CP like there were.
In Jude.
Yeah it's Peter Saffhar.
He born in Vienna, Austria, and yeah, yeah, ended up becoming the Yeah, and he created CPR.
Yeah, and he did all this like tricksy stuff to avoid serving in the Nazi army.
Yeah.
He like like also almost killed himself with medical issues in order to be medically exempt from serving in the Nazi army. Yeah, this is the cool guy. And he also like usually I do these episodes about like great men in history and they turn out to be like awful to the women in their lives. Yeah, total wife guy.
Yeah, great wife guys. Wife guy energy, I mean not just energy.
He they were like ballroom wall champions.
Yeah, and like included her in his plans and like I mean I don't have like I haven't read her, an I've read some quotes from her, right sure, sure, sure, But like compared to a lot of the people that I end up researching in history, where they're like so dedicated to the cause that they treat everyone in their lives, especially the women and who are close to them in their lives like terribly, this man is not an example of that.
Yeah.
But yeah, So they're out there, they're part of the community. They're the first people to like get the paddles out and go clear like on the street. Like they're you know, they are like breaking all this new ground. A racist mayor comes in, pushes them out, starts trying to replace them with cops, like just stops like cuts their funding, keeps cutting their funding. It's like this again, just like a movie scene that is incredible that Hollywood is sleeping
on it. During this period, Freedom House like gets their hands on a police scanner and so like racing the police to get there to save people because the police, the police are taking their sweet ass times, so they're like listening to when they're is a medical emergency and then like racing there to help people before the cops
can show up. But just an amazing story of like, you know, people from the community, like the medical power to the people, like just all these you know, all these really cool ways that this community came together against all odds, and like the fact that that's not.
The story we tell.
Instead, the story we tell is like fucking an entire genre's worth of Westerns, right, like fucking so frustrating.
Yeah, I think important.
Connecting those two things that was well done, oh things, right, I think.
It's just yeah, it's probably important to like even think of it in that context of just sort of like you know, being fed this these kinds of stories over and over again, and it's like, you know, to your point market, it's like you can almost manifest it through like the repetition of that kind of like story arc whereas like we're now. I think a lot of people are feeling like we need to like transition to something different, something that feels more connected, something that feels more humane
and actually treats people with dignity. And yeah, and all these stories have been like in a way buried or whether that's intentionally or because they don't think it sells tickets or whatever, you know, we're seeing it like that's actually our impulse is to just is to invent and iterate and do something that is actually for a communal benefit rather than like, here's a story of the guy who got so pissed off he beat up everyone in town and then races or whatever. That's so many movies.
Catline fucking like John Wick, nobody beat up everybody in town. This guy so pissed, Yeah, gets so pissed that you just like beat up everybody in town, like.
All those Bowl films or like that, or it's just like Jesus christistoff guy on a mission.
Oh man, that's because every American man is told that that's in his heart and he could do that if he had to. You're like, not every man can beat up every other man.
That is clearly not true. That is not how mad it works? You know what I'm really good at going hell, yeah, help me. I think most men are because of patriarchy to be like.
And then someone fixed it for me. And then I told myself I did it all myself because.
Well, Margaret killed Joy, what a pleasure having you on the daily He's like, Yeah, the podcasts are cool people who did cool stuff and live like the world is dying. Where else can people find you? Follow you, experience you all that good stuff.
Yeah.
I have a weekly substack called I don't even know it's called. It's just Margaret Killjoy that substack or whatever, and it I put out a post every week. Half of them are free and tend to be more public and political and talking about you know, different ideological positions and history and things like that. And then the other half are for pay subscribers and are more personal. You
find me on social media by searching my name. My latest book is a tabletop role playing game called Panumber City that I did with a couple of people that comes out a week or so ago. As people listen to this, and so if you like tabletop role playing, that works, And then if you don't but want to read my fiction, my most recent book I think is
my most recent I don't know. Escape from in Cell Island is one of my books that listeners might enjoy where I make fun of not all masculinity, but the more toxic side of it on an island full of in cells.
Amazing.
Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying.
I've been watching Star Trek, Okay, Lower Decks whatever. The other new one is that I watched a bunch of It's been my favorite comfort food lately.
I like a lot of the writers on Lower Decks and I haven't watched it.
Yet, but oh that makes sense.
Yeah.
That one of the main characters is I don't remember actors names to save my life, but with like an actor in the Space Force that I really liked, and I was like, oh this is good.
Yeah, yeah, totally all right, Miles, Where can people find you? Is their working media you've been enjoying?
Yeah?
Find me on Twitter, Instagram, threads anywhere with the AT symbol at Miles of Gray. Find Jack and I on our basketball podcast when I was in Jack Combat Boosties, and also catch me talking shit about reality TV on four to twenty Day Fiance with Sophia Alexandra tweet, I've been the thing. I've been really, I've been been real busy with the reins and the baby's birthday and things like that. I did, though, watch the first episode of Mister and Missus Smith and that was pretty good. It's
pretty good. It feels like it's obviously like the whole thing was like, it's not the like the film with Brad and Branjelina or whatever like that. It just feels it feels like it's a it's a really good reimagining. Uh. And it feels like cool for lack of a better word, like you know, like when you use like when you're like a teenagent, she's like, oh, this is cool. Dang dark. I mean like like now like as you get older, you're like, I really enjoyed like the cinematography or whatever.
Like on top of being able to say that, I also watch and go, this is like fucking cool. I don't know how to sort of describe it, but anyway, yeah, I enjoyed tweet. I've been enjoying.
Stephanie Insley Hirsch and now tweeted showing the kids, Honey, I shrunk the kids and having to explain which inventions are Zany Rick Moranis originals, shrink ray and which are normal household objects phone attached to the wall, or which were normal household objects which I just I just had that same experience, and Honey, I shrunk the kids still holds up, still goes, like to the point that when it's raining, my seven year old's like, oh man, could
you imagine this if it was Honey, I shrunk the kids with a sprinklers and it was fucking cataclysmic. Yeah, So anyways, classic. I think there was an attempt in the works to reboot with or like make a remake of that called Shrunk, But I feel like they would fuck it up because they wouldn't be using like, you know, built sets. They would be just like trying to see.
Gi Yeah, and it would all be jokes about how the kids are upset that they can't look at their phones.
Yeah exactly, or like yeah, or like they're all trying to get to their phone like that's the end games, like we just have to get to my phone. Yeah, totally, and all will be solved.
I think it actually would be pretty funny because it's apparently supposed to start Josh kadd so should be good all right. You can find me on Twitter at Jack Underscore O'Brian. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist, where at d Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram.
We have a Facebook fan page and a.
Website, Daily Zeitgeist dot com, where we post our episode and our footnotes. No, we we link off to the information that we talked about in today's episode. Well, it was a song that we think you might enjoy, Miles, what song do you think people might enjoy it?
You know, it's just you know, feeling cozy. I like some new jazz and there is a UK new jazz group called the Tan High Collective t A n h ai uh and they're just funky.
You know.
It's just like people always say, like people don't play jazz anymore or whatever. It's that jazz, just especially new jazz. It's evolving. It's like feeling more like R and B or hip hop adjacent. But trust me, and people still have the same level of you know, chops on their instruments and are able to do really interesting things. So check this one out. It's called Sal's Groove by the Tan High Collective.
Yeah.
Yeah, Also because footnotes, we're probably just gonna be linking off to the book that you used as your main source, which I believe is American Sirens by Hazard, Yeah, from that episode, So we'll leak off to that. It sounds like an incredible book telling the story that we just kind of went over. And then we'll link off to the two podcasts which everybody should go check out. Lick off to all that in the footnotes. The Daily Zeitgeist
is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. That is going to do it for us this morning. We're back this afternoon to tell you what is trending and we will talk to you all then.
Bye bye