Behind the Bastards - It Could Happen Here Weekly 150

Episode Date: October 5, 2024

All of this week's episodes of It Could Happen Here put together in one large file. Sources can be found in the descriptions of each individual episode. What’s the Matter With Boeing, Pt. 1: Shareholders Don't Build Airplanes What’s the Matter With Boeing, Pt. 2: The Plane That’s Trying to Murders You Disaster Relief, Survival & Hurricane Helene Vance & Walz Become Friends During Debate James' Trip To The Darién Gap You can now listen to all Cool Zone Media shows, 100% ad-free through the Cooler Zone Media subscription, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. So, open your Apple Podcasts app, search for “Cooler Zone Media” and subscribe today! http://apple.co/coolerzone See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, I'm Gianna Predenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadston. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. There's a lot to figure out when you're just starting your career. That's where we come in. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in people who do, like negotiation expert Maury Tahary-Pore.

If you start thinking about negotiations as just a conversation, then I think it sort of eases us a little bit. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey y'all, Nimini here. I'm the host of a brand new history podcast for kids and families called Historical Records. Executive produced by Questlove, the Story Pirates, and John Glickman, Historical Records brings history to life through hip hop.

Get the kids in your life excited about history by tuning in to Historical Records. Listen to Historical Records on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy. But not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed.

I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. Join me on Tell Me Something Messy. Join me on Tell Me Something Messy with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks Everywhere unearths the plot to murder a warm woman WikiLeaks.

She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a Mafia state. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad free, subscribe to the iHeart True Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple podcasts.

In California, during the summer of 1975, within the span of 17 days and less than 90 miles, two women did something no other woman had done before, try to assassinate the president of the United States. One was the protege of Charles Manson, 26-year-old Lynette Fromm, nicknamed Squeaky. The other, a middle-aged housewife working undercover for the FBI, identified by police as Sarah Jean Moore. The story of one strange and violent summer, this season on the new podcast, Rip Current. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode.

Every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. Welcome to it could happen here. A podcast about things falling apart and how to put them back together again. I'm your host, Mia Wong. This is a story about Boeing. I'm going to lay my cards on the table from the stars.

I'm from Chicago, but my family is from Seattle. Some of my aunts and uncles worked for Boeing in the 80s on the airline side. Some of our closest family friends worked there for much, much longer than that. I grew up on the periphery of this industry and I have never seen the people in it and the people who have left as angry as they are now.

People are pissed and they should be. In the last six years, Boeing has killed 346 people. In the years to come, they may well kill more. And not a single one of them had to die. This is how it happened. What is Boeing? The short answer, obviously, is that it's a company that makes both civilian and military airplanes. It also does some other things, including working on space travel, but that's not our immediate concern here. The long answer, however, and it's the long answer that we need, is that Boeing is the poster child for the post-World War II

labor-corporate-militarist alliance. Boeing itself was a sometimes uneasy alliance of workers, engineers, and the army that made civilian and military airplanes. This is also not a terrible description of the entirety of the post-war United States, with the proviso that the airplanes the US was making were dropping bombs at Vietnam. The unwinding of Boeing that we're all watching today, as doors fall off of planes and more and more are grounded, is the unwinding of that

America. Here I turn to the anthropologist David Graeber from his book, The Utopia of Rules. Quote, I think what happened is best considered as a kind of shifting class allegiances on the part of the managerial staff of major corporations, from an uneasy de facto alliance with their own workers to one with investors. As John Kenneth Galbraith long ago pointed out, if you create an organization geared to produce perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft fuselages, those who make it up will, if left

with their own devices, tend to concentrate their efforts on producing more and better perfumes, dairy products, or aircraft fuselages, rather than thinking primarily of what will make the most money for shareholders. What's more, since for most of the 20th century, a job in a large bureaucratic mega-firm meant a lifetime promise of employment, everyone involved in the process, managers and workers alike, tended to see themselves as sharing a certain common interest in this regard over and against meddling owners and investors. This kind of solidarity across class lines even had a name. It's called corporatism.

One mustn't romanticize it. It was, among other things, the philosophical basis of fascism. Indeed, one could well argue that fascism simply took the idea that workers and managers had interests in common, that organizations like corporations or communities formed organic holes and that finances were an alien parasitic force and drove them to their ultimate murderous extreme. Even in its more benign social democratic versions, in America or Europe, the attendant politics often came tinge with chauvinism, but they

also ensured that the investor class was always seen to some extent as outsiders, against whom white collar and blue collar workers could be considered, at least to some degree, to be in a united common front. Now, as a product of the united front between workers and managers, the corporatist system of the post-war era had a very different conception of what a corporation is. It was a social entity composed of a variety of classes and had an obligation to take care of them. It had an obligation to its workers, to its engineers, to its customers, and even to its country, by absorbing unions into the corporate system.

The system itself had been forced to adapt a more sociological self-conception that vastly differed from the ways corporations both view themselves and behave today. As Graeber notes, this class coalition largely wrote capitalists out of the equation, reducing them to mere holders of stock, not managers. In Boeing's case, those managers were engineers at basically all levels of the company. Now, we must note here that in the post-World War II era, engineers were extremely powerful. And this is not just true of capitalist nations. So, the US, to some extent, had an early start on the power of engineers in the running of New Deal programs like the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Engineers are powerful in communist countries as well, and it's true in quasi-socialist countries that had just liberated themselves from the old European empires. These engineers were both extremely well paid and very influential everywhere. You can find them from Belgium to Peru. And the only real difference is whether they were trained by the Americans or the Soviets. Now the fact that you, the listener, are not reporting to an engineer right now at your job is a sign that they didn't exactly hold on to power. In fact, the last vestiges of this class of extremely powerful engineers

aren't really even in Boeing at all. The most prominent remain of the great engineering international is Xi Jinping, who is part of a class in China known as the Red Engineers. If you want to know more about the Red Engineers, we unfortunately do not have time to really go into them here, but see Joel Andreas's book, Rise of the Red Engineers, we unfortunately do not have time to really go into them here, but see Joel Andreas' book, Rise of the Red Engineers for the most famous treatment of them. Now, in China, the Red Engineers effectively seized control of the states and were

the second generation that ruled back the social changes of the revolution from the Maoist period. In the US, the story is a bit more complicated. In some places, the engineers as a class were rolled up and brutally destroyed in a war with a newly ascendant finance class. In others, engineers feeling the disciplining effects of the market effectively engineered their own destruction. The latter, engineers leading the company to financial ruin, is to some extent the story of Boeing.

But to get there, we need to take a look at how the worker management alliance Graeber described came apart. I have talked at length on this show about the economic crisis of the 70s in which everything, the entire consensus that had held the post-war era together fell apart. One of the key elements is that in the 1970s, manufacturing becomes zero-sum. If manufacturing output increases in one country, it can largely only come at the expense of production somewhere else. This is the product of a general crisis of structural overproduction and structural under consumption. This meant that it was no longer possible to incorporate everyone into the capitalist welfare

system while also retaining corporate profits. And so someone was going to have to lose everything. He was either going to be the capitalists or the workers and the people who lost everything as I think we're all aware living in the world that we do now, were the workers whose power was systematically destroyed. But that largely the story of the destruction of unions and destruction of the left more broadly is a story for another day. For our purposes, the important class that was destroyed in the period of the 70s is the class of managerial engineers. And these engineers were destroyed by a takeover of corporate America by the shareholders the corporatist alliance had previously held at bay.

The takeover of corporate America by finance goals had two mechanisms, the leveraged buyout, better known as corporate rating, which was carried out by people like Michael Milken, and the internal movement of executives from inside the corporations themselves, led by people like Jack Welsh. We will meet both of these people in detail later in the story, but the details of the process of how exactly the finance schools came to control corporate America turn out to be extremely important because Boeing is destroyed by both of the two mechanisms coming together at the same time.

Now, as the 80s dawned, the world lived in fear of a new kind of financial device the leveraged buyout The exact mechanisms of the leveraged buyout are slightly complicated But the short version is that Michael Milken a bond salesman who I eventually am going to do a fall behind the bastards episode On because oh my god is he evil and there simply is not Space to elaborate on all the stuff that he did here Including this off that eventually is going to send him to prison Figured out a way for a person or a group to with very little actual cash on hand to very quickly take on an

on hand to very quickly take on an unbelievable amount of debt, use it to buy a company, and then sell that company for parts to pay back the debt, pocketing the difference as profit. This was an instant existential danger to corporate America. Previously, corporate takeovers were extremely difficult. Attempting to get $200 million to buy a company required you to have $200 million on hand. But now, with the leveraged buyout, a group of yahoos with a tiny amount of money could simply buy a company for higher than its stock price, loot it for parts, and destroy it.

This completely changed the balance of power between shareholders and corporations. One of the best accounts of this era is from the anthropologist Karen Ho in her book, Liquidated and Ethnography of Wall Street. The book was a product of the field work she did at a Wall Street investment bank in the 90s. And I really cannot emphasize this book enough. This book is incredible.

Everyone should read it is a book that genuinely changed my life. And one of the things that she talks about is this moment, the moment of leverage buyouts and the way that it is constantly brought up by the people that she is working with at this bank when she's doing her when she's doing her anthropological fieldwork. Everyone she talks to talks about this moment where the corporate raiders really got going as the moment the shareholder revolution began. Now we talked earlier about how in post-war America the corporation was a social entity with responsibilities to its workers and country. For the shareholders

running the new shareholder revolution, corporations had exactly one job, getting them more money to raise stock prices. They called this shareholder value. And now, the disciples of shareholder value were able to wield the ability to simply buy companies out wholesale and bend them to the ends of shareholder value directly. This is what is known as the shareholder revolution. Now, do you know what else is a revolution in the ways that we all experience capitalism and mass culture at our jobs? It is the products and services that support this podcast. cast. We're back. The first thing that the corporate raiders and the disciples of shareholder

value did when they started to take over companies was look at the balance sheets of a company and destroy everything that didn't immediately look to the Wall Street ghouls like they made money. Now, what are the assets on a balance sheet that do not immediately increase stock price because again, they look like costs, right? The two assets that don't immediately contribute are funds allocated for research and development and pensions, the darlings of the workers and engineers who comprised the previous corporatist regimes. Mass layoffs followed. Companies were reduced to debt financing mechanisms for the corporate raiders who took on the debt to acquire them. Worse still, as Karen Ho observes, even companies ran by the old elite were forced to embrace

the same methods the raiders were using because the only way to keep the raiders from buying your company was by increasing your stock price. And the only way to increase your stock price was to appease the shareholder value fanatics. Control of corporate America had shifted from the old managerial worker alliance to the new shareholder value financiers. Now the problem with these shareholder value people running companies is that they are viscerally physically incapable of long-term planning. Don't take my word for it.

Here's Karen Ho. Quote, to actualize their central identity as being immediately responsive to their own changing relationship with the market, including employees, products, and so on, their strategy is, in a sense, to have no strategy. Ironically, having no long-term strategy is contradictory and potentially self-defeating in that investment banks often find themselves making drastic changes only to realize months or weeks later that those changes were unnecessary, premature, and extremely costly.

For example, in Chapter 5, I describe how investment bankers, in part because of their access to sensitive proprietary information, are not only fired in an instant but must leave the physical premises of the building within 15-30 minutes. Given how crucial the control of knowledge and the protection of inside information are for Wall Street investment banks, it seems self-defeating that they do not place any premium on loyalty, despite the fact that firms try above all to enforce secrecy, they accept and maintain this volatility revolving door policy. To make this clear, what Carrejo is describing is that investment banks on the one hand turn

over like a third of their staff every six months. And yet also they are so reliant on the secrecy of this proprietary information that they're using to make their investment decisions that they are kicking the people they are firing out of the building in like 15 minutes. So like they don't have time to like plan or leak information. But again, they're also just firing these people on mass. So they're defeating the entire point of their of their operations. These people cannot plan ahead. And the reason that they cannot plan ahead isn't just that they're sort of like naked

disciples of pure increase in stock price. But what liquidated describes is that these people believe that they are effectively constantly reacting to near instantaneous market changes, right? They can't sort of make any kind of long-term plan because the market is the thing that's making the plan, like the sort of mythical abstraction of the market is what is doing all of the actual allocations. So they just have to sort of like sit there and have no plan and quote unquote respond to what the market is doing. Now, large corporations have always to some extent acted as long term planning engines, because they have to corporations have to do things like research and development, they have to plan product lines, they have

to make long term decisions about resource allocation. The shareholder value people are incapable of giving a shit about any of this because all they care about is immediate stock price movement because they think that immediate stock price movement reflects the will of the great efficiency planning engine of the market. And you can begin to see here why it would be a bad idea if these people who literally cannot create long term plans Did something like for example take control of the world's largest manufacturer of commercial aircraft now

the shareholder value people also believe That people are effectively interchangeable and they believe this because and this is a very key part of why the shareholder value people and why these sort of finance people have reshaped the world the way they do. They have reshaped the world in their own image. And all of these sort of investment bankers are interchangeable, right? All of these fucking bankers are fired all of the time and they they move from firm to firm, and it is fine for them. But the thing is, you can't do this with the design of your entire aircraft. Because unlike in finance, where every single one

of these clowns is really just a replacement level bozo whose qualifications are being able to stumble through the chain rule and vaguely remember calculus, kiss ass and play golf, aerospace engineers actually do a difficult job, and it requires extraordinarily large bodies of embedded knowledge to do this job correctly. Now bringing in a bunch of people who think you can just fucking replace aerospace engineers will have no negative influences on Boeing in the future. Pay no attention to the man behind the mirror. Everything is fine. Do you know what else is fine? It is the products and services that support this podcast.

And we are back. The shareholder value fanatics, the investors who've now taken control of corporate America, also believe that mass firings make companies more valuable because it makes them more efficient. They believe that offshoring makes a company more valuable because it makes it more efficient. It doesn't actually matter what the effect these moves have on the company and its ability to produce products and its ability to produce money. It doesn't matter at all because that's how the people who can control stock prices by, you know, buying the stocks think the world works.

And so if you do these things, the stock price will go up. All quote unquote creating shareholder value means is convincing a bunch And so if you do these things, the stock price will go up. All quote unquote creating shareholder value means is convincing a bunch of dipshit quants working 120 hours a week that your company is valuable, so they buy it for a higher price. And these are the people who reshape American capitalism to their whims. Now importantly for our story, they're also the people who ran the second phase of the corporate rating era. The mergers and acquisitions boom.

Through the 90s and really to this day, Wall Street bankers began to encourage companies to buy out other companies as a mechanism of raising their stock price. This is, you know, the acquisitions and mergers and acquisitions. They also heavily push merging companies together. In the 90s, the buzzword behind this was quote unquote, synergy. Buying companies or merging companies could quote leverage synergies between companies to grow shareholder value. Outside of the shareholder value fantasy land, most of these mergers and acquisitions either did nothing to help the company if the acquisitions were small, or were a complete disaster that destroyed both companies. The bankers who orchestrated these mergers and

acquisitions didn't give a shit though because they got paid on commission. It did not matter to them what happened afterwards, all that matters is that the deal goes through. And this is where we return to Boeing because in 1997, Boeing made an acquisition that would fuck the company forever. They bought one of their longtime rivals, an aircraft company known as McDonald Douglas. Now, hitherto, Boeing had been relatively insulated from the shareholder revolution. insulated from the shareholder revolution. McDonald Douglas, however, was not. Its CEO was a man with the incredible name Harry Stonecipher. Stonecipher is different from most aerospace executives because he wasn't a McDonald Douglas corporate man. He came from

Jack Welch's General Electric. And it's here we need to introduce the other mechanism through which the shareholder revolution was realized a new breed of CEOs led by the man himself Jack Welsh Now we are not going to spend an enormous amount of time talking about Jack Welsh In this episode because hit coolzone media podcast behind the Basterds has three hours of episode about this man Which you should go listen to they're good Hit Coolzone Media podcast behind the Basterds has three hours of episode about this man, which you should go listen to. They're good.

The short version of it that we're going to give here is that Jack Welch is the man who invented the bass layoff. He was one of the first CEOs to figure out that again, you could raise stock prices by selling off profitable divisions and firing workers who are making the company money because shareholders are ideologically driven maniacs who would believe Welch's manipulated balance sheets that showed the company was doing better than ever even as it sold off all of its assets. He was also one of the first people to start practicing mass outsourcing, replacing workers directly employed by General Electric with contractors. Soon, he was outsourcing entire divisions. Offshoring followed. Welsh moved jobs from highly paid and highly trained union employees in the US to un-unionized workers in places like India and Mexico. I

think people generally kind of understand that offshoring lowers quality, but why does that actually happen? It's not about something like the natural skill of the workers, which is the way it can kind of be presented in these sort of nationalist accounts. It is about the level of violence that can be inflicted on people. In places like India and Mexico and China, there is an extraordinary amount of violence that can be inflicted on the working class. And because of this violence, because of their ability to destroy unions, because of their ability to force people into poverty by taking their land, people get paid less money to work faster.

And those people who are being paid less money to work faster with worse training are going to be worse at a job than people who are paid more to do it better slower. And Jack Welch wants this. He wants to sell shitty low cost products because they're cheaper to make than anything that actually works. The long term consequences of this are a disaster. Welch drove General Electric, one of the greatest engines of American capitalism for a century, into the ground. Even after a massive government bailout in 2008, it barely exists today. Harry Stone Cipher, the CEO of the company Boeing was about to buy Said this about Jack Welch quote Certainly Jack Welch is one of the great leaders in my mind

and of course he was selected as CEO of the century by Fortune magazine a couple years ago and Of course about 20 years ago that same magazine coined the phrase neutron Jack and of course they vilified him at every turn. Neutron Jack by the way refers to like a neutron bomb because effectively what he was doing was firing all the workers and leaving only the sort of like physical capital assets like leaving all the machines intact which is what a neutron bomb is supposed to do. Let's go back to the quote. Jack had a style that was one of trying to change the environment, not to just deal with the environment. So he inspired people. So he certainly won.

So StoneCypher is a disciple of Welch. He immediately starts running the Jack Welch playbook. And lo and behold, McDonnell Douglas was failing when Boeing bought it for $14 billion. And again, like Boeing at this point controls like 65% of the commercial aviation market. McDonnell Douglas controls like five. Right? So this should have been like Goliath eating David for breakfast. But the merger didn't go as planned.

Instead of the massive Boeing running the tiny McDonnell Douglas, McDonnell Douglas executives effectively hijacked Boeing and installed themselves in positions of power. StoneCipher and his cadre of shareholder value fanatics began to consolidate their position and drive out the previous Boeing regime. The capstone of this project was moving Boeing headquarters from Seattle, where he had been since William E. Boeing founded the company in 1916, to Chicago as a way to shift the physical center of power of the company away from Boeing to Chicago as a way to shift the physical center of power of the company away from Boeing's engineers and workers and towards the McDonnell Douglas

finance goals. Then they began to run the Jack Welch playbook on Boeing and Ernest. Every single account of StoneCypher's takeover that I've written quotes this exact same line. Quote, when people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent. So that it's run like a business rather than a great engineering firm. And what StoneCypher is really talking about here and what everyone is really saying when they talk about, you know, the culture shift of Boeing in this period. What this really is, is a change in the balance of powers between the engineers and workers who actually make the planes and the finance schools who own the company. StoneCypher wanted to crush the engineers and workers who actually make the planes and the finance ghouls who own the company. StoneCypher wanted to crush the engineers and workers so

he could run Boeing like a business. And when he says like a business, he doesn't actually mean run it like a business. He means run the company like a finance guy. And finance guys don't build planes, which is what Boeing had previously been doing. Finance guys create shareholder value, which is to say that they make stock prices go up. So if you're just trying to raise stock prices, you don't actually need to make an airplane. You can outsource the different parts of building the airplane to a bunch of random shops around the world who work extremely fast, don't have much of an idea of what they're doing and do a terrible job.

Long term, of course, this is an absolute disaster. There are very good reasons to keep the production line for something as complicated as commercial aircraft in house, efficiency, consolidation of knowledge, quality control, etc, etc. But outsourcing is great for his stock price. And if the Jack Welch model selling shitty products for cheap works, kind of, if you're General Electric making a light bulb. But when Boeing uses these same principles to build an aircraft, people begin to die. And in the next episode, we are going to tell that story. How Boeing killed 346 people. Hey, I'm Gianna Predenti.

And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadston. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes.

Each week, we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan Sanner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies.

Yeah, I think a lot about that quote. What is it, like, you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up, y'all? This is Questlove, and I'm here to tell you about a new podcast I've been working on with the Story Pirates and John Glickman called Historical Records. It's a family friendly podcast. Yeah, you heard that

right. A podcast for all ages. One you can listen to and enjoy with your kids starting on September 27th. I'm going to toss it over to the host of Historical Records, Nemo needs to tell you all about it. Make sure you check it out. Hey y'all, are you ready for an explosive new podcast that brings together hip hop and history? My name is Nimmini, and I'm the host of Historical Records, a brand new podcast for kids and families that proves in order to make history, you have to make some noise.

Flash slam, another one gone. Bash bam, another one gone. The cracker, the bat, and another one gone. Bash, bam, another one gone. The cracker, the bat, and another one gone. The tip of the cap, there's another one gone. And the best part? I make this show entirely by myself. Impressive, right? Me too, right?

Oh, OK. OK, maybe I get a little bit of help from my sidekick, Tina the Raccoon. Every week on historical records, join me, Nimmini, and Tina the Raccoon as we learn about the unsung heroes of the past and turn their history into hip hop. Listen to Historical Records on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

radio apps, apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel de Lilla. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeartRadio app, price. Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy, but not in the way you think.

Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. OK, let's play this messy round of smash or pass. OK, here it is. Smash or pass.

Spit play. I don't know. I don't know how I feel about bodily fluids being on me unless it's... Oh! Ah! Because we're doing the pull-out message. We're living on the edge.

Oh my god. I was not expecting that. Baby, like I always say, if you know how to work that body, that sexualness, and that heart, you're unstoppable. Embrace your power. That's really what we're gonna do on this show. Join me on Tell Me Something Messy

with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. ["Dio e Zingaro"] When you think of Mexican culture, you think of avocado, mariachi, delicious cuisine and of course lucha libre. It doesn't get more Mexican than this. Lucha libre is known globally because it is much more than just a sport and much more than just entertainment. Lucha libre is a type of storytelling, it's a dance,

its tradition, its culture. This is lucha libre behind the Mask, a 12 episode podcast in both English and Spanish about the history and cultural richness of lucha libre. And I'm your host Santos Escobar, the emperor of lucha libre and a WWE superstar. Join me as we learn more about the history behind this spectacular sport from its inception in the United States to how it became a global symbol of Mexican culture. We learn more about some of the most iconic heroes in the ring. Welcome to Icarapo Deer, a podcast about things happening to Boeing. I'm your host, Leo Wong. When we last left our intrepid aerospace company, Boeing had gotten caught up in the mergers and acquisitions frenzy of the 1990s and bought out its rival, McDonnell Douglas. After which, McDonnell Douglas CEO and Jack Welchch disciple Harry Stonecypher effectively launched an administrative coup and seized control of the company.

Stonecypher wasn't like an abuse thing It's just that he was having a relationship with one of the subordinates, which is also not great But it yeah, it wasn't good and he gets kicked out immediately almost immediately But by the time he was forced out His model for how Boeing should work going forwards, the layoffs, the outsourcing, slashing the research and development budget, and above all, taking power from engineers and giving it to the shareholder value fanatics, had already been embedded at the core of Boeing's management structure. Here's journalist Natasha Frost writing in Quartz,

Two decades on, perhaps the most lasting consequence of the change in culture has been in Boeing's approach to building aircraft. Cutting costs and diversifying revenue ought to have served as an ideal way to subsidize the expensive process of plane development. Oh boy, did it not. Instead, with engineers now disempowered and management far away in Chicago, the actual building of new planes in Seattle all but stalled. Boeing would not actually announce even the plans for a new plane until 2003 with the

787 Dreamliner. Throughout this time, Boeing was led by its first chairman without a traditional aviation background, James McNary. James McNary had instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric. chairman without a traditional aviation background, James McNeary. James McNeary had instead spent almost two decades in management at General Electric. Now he was following a tried and tested route of cutting, downsizing, and shifting. That approach was applied to upgrading the 737, which had become the victim of its own success. In its five-decade history, airlines have cumulatively ordered more

than 10,000 of the plane, an aviation rock star. But rather than retiring the plane, replacing it with the next big thing, Boeing opted to keep costs down by tinkering and adjusting the model to fit still more passengers. And this is how you get planes falling out of the sky. Instead of, you know, doing the normal thing, which is putting money into building a new airplane, which is, you know, expensive in the short run. And again, remember that the finance schools are now in charge for these people.

The only thing that exists is the short run in immediate stock price. So instead of doing that management went, eh, we already have this plane. We first designed in the fucking 60s. Let's keep modifying that. And this this is going to kill an extremely large number of people. Now, the 737 again came out originally in 1967. In the 2000s, in the century, the millennia, the 2000s, Boeing begins to design a new version of this plane

from the last millennium called the 737 Max. For shareholders, again, this is a great idea. It's not just that building new planes is expensive and this is cheaper because you're not spending the money on building a new plane. There's a bunch of other advantages for Boeing for this. And one of the biggest is that you can tell everyone from, you know, the FAA to the airlines to the pilots that, hey, this is just a regular 737. It's just the same plane. You don't need to like retrain your pilots to learn how our new systems work because there's really like no new systems and that, you know, money so they don't want to do it you don't need to

have the FAA do the regulatory shit they would do for a new plane or even like a substantial change to like the original plane which you know again costs money and time that Boeing does not want to you know do the problem is that you know I tried to find a sort of delicate way to say this and then I realized you simply should not do it like that. The problem is that the 737 MAX is a plane that is trying to kill you. If you know anything about the story, you're probably assuming that when I say this plane is trying to kill you, I'm talking about the maneuvering characteristics augmentation system

or MCAS, the piece of software that directly caused the crashes and to some extent, I am talking about MCAS. We'll, we'll get into it in a second. It absolutely did kill all those people. But I think there's a problem with a lot of the way the story has been covered, which is that a lot of the coverage of this has been obsessively focused on the software problem, specifically on MCAS. And I understand why people focused on the software problem, specifically on MCAS. And I understand why people focus on the software. It is the immediate cause of the crash.

But the real problem with the 737 Max is that the actual physical plane is also trying to kill you. And the software MCAS was developed to, again, stop the plane from trying to kill you. Now, that software is from trying to kill you. Now that software is also trying to kill you, but both the software and the physical plane are trying to murder you. So, you know, what do I mean when I say the physical plane is trying to kill you? For this, I'm going to turn to an actual engineer and pilot Gregory Travis who wrote probably the best piece in the technical details of this whole problem that I've seen for IEEE

Spectrum. IEEE is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. They know what they're talking about. Spectrum is their magazine. So the initial problem, as Travis explains, was this. The original 737 was designed for 1960s engines. Modern airplanes have way bigger engines because due to a bunch of engineering stuff that we're not going to get into here, large engines are more efficient than small engines. And this is a huge deal for aircraft which consume unbelievably large quantities of extremely expensive fuel. The safe and sensible but again expensive option would have been to design a new aircraft to replace the 737

That is actually designed to accommodate the new giant engines The cheapskate option would be to just bolt the new giant engines onto the old plane design Now the problem is that the only way to do this is to move the engines forward The engines on the 737 are, you know, under the wing, which is like the normal thing. But the engines would no longer fit under the way because they were too large. And moving the engines forward changes where the thrust is coming from. Here's Travis, quote, Now, when pilots applied power to the engine, the aircraft would have a significant propensity to pitch up or raise its nose. Now, this, as you might expect, is not good. It is quite bad. I mean,

airplanes in trouble talks about this, but airplanes do kind of naturally do this a little bit. This plane does it way, way more than it's supposed to. So here's where things unfortunately get a bit technical. So the nose going up increases something called the angle of attack. I'm going to read a description of this. Fully understanding exactly how the angle of attack works is not enormously important to understanding the story. But you know, the crux of this story is angle of attack sensors not working. So we have to explain it a little bit.

Quote, the angle of attack is the angle between the wings and the airflow over the wings. So if you want to understand exactly what this is, go read the piece. The important thing for our purposes is that if the angle of attack gets too high, right, if the plane is at a level and is flying normally the angle of attack is like zero, but the angle of attack can get higher is like, you if you're not flying like level and if the angle of attack gets too high the plane stalls and this is one of the ways you crash a plane worse still in the 737 max the basically the engine casings themselves can at high angles of attack work as a wing and produce lift and the lift they produce is well ahead of the wing center of lift, meaning the engine casings will

cause the 737 at a high angle of attack to go to a higher angle of attack. This is aerodynamic mispractice of the worst kind. An airplane approaching an aerodynamic stall cannot under under any circumstances, have the tendency to go further into the stall. This is called quote, dynamic instability, and the only airplanes that exhibit that characteristic, fighter jets, are also fitted with ejector seats. So let me let me let me try to kind of like, explain the sort of crux of this. Well, a, they've they've managed to position the engines in such a way that the engines can act as a wing, which is insane. And B, once you get to a high enough

angle of attack, which again, the higher the angle of attack you're at, the more risk you're at of stalling, the plane starts trying to kill you by making the angle of attack increase. It is a feedback loop. That means when you start to stall, the airplane makes you stall more. Planes are not supposed to do this again And I I cannot emphasize this enough quote. This is called dynamic instability and the only airplanes which exhibit this characteristic Fighter jets are also fitted with ejector seats So again, this is a thing that is dangerous enough that you get like regular regular civilian airplanes are not supposed to do this they do it on fighter jets because

fighter jets are doing things that planes aren't supposed to do and You can leave the plane if it fucks up It does something like this and the worst part about this is that you can you can kick off this problem by trying to get the plane going faster like while it's going slow What part of flying a plane does it start slow is kind of at a high angle of attack and then has to go faster? Oh, wait, take off the thing you have to do every single time we fly. This is fucking batshit. No one would intentionally design a new airliner like this. Right? No one like not not not even modern. I mean, like Boeing's like other airplanes, like

even the modern ones, even the dreamliner doesn't fucking do this, right? It's completely nuts. The only way that you could get something like this is as a pure product of trying to bolt increasingly large engines onto a plane from the 60s, because you are too cheap to try to do anything new. But you know who isn't afraid of doing new things? It's the products and services that support this podcast. I've never gotten a Boeing ad, but I if it was going to happen, I guess it'd probably happen now. Dear God.

But instead of, you know, dealing with this problem by either making a new fucking plane or figuring out some way to not have the engines literally become wings Boeing was like f fuck it We'll just build some software that pushes the plane's nose down if it starts doing this Now if your reaction to hearing let's put software on the plane that makes it fly towards the ground is wait. That's a terrible idea You have the right idea These people did not have the right idea but stunningly there's like a version of this system that isn't like lethally unsafe

But comma Boeing did not design a version of this that is even remotely safe I don't know if that's more egregious than designing an aircraft that has dynamic instability. But the way they implement this is egregious. They decided in their infinite wisdom that the entire system would work on a single sensor. And I would need to know before we start this. So this is really talking about angle of attack sensors, they're kind of just like pieces of metal that stick out the side of the plane. And they break a lot and they break a lot because flying a plane is like the worst thing you can possibly do to a piece of equipment doesn't involve leaving the

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

The data trace strongly suggests that the sensor was destroyed in an instant, likely by a bird strike. There are two such sensors, one on either side of the fuselage. Why didn't Boeing, especially after discarding the G-Force as a trigger, use both angle of attack sensors? The thinking was that requiring input from two angle of attack sensors would mean that if one failed, the system would not function. Now, the article goes on to talk about how their justification for why they only use one sensor and they, you know, they talked about the safety and simplicity of not wanting to add complexity to a system, you know, because if

you have two things that you're running for, it's slightly more complex than having one thing that you're running from. Now, this kind of sounds reasonable at first glance, but first off, if your plane has dynamic instability that causes it to snowball into stalling, and this software system to make it not do that is so important you can't risk it not being on if one of the two sensors breaks, then maybe you shouldn't have designed your plane like this. And second, this entire system violates every design principle that you see in sort of like Boeing's good aircraft design for simplicity and safety risk. And I want to go back to that spectrum article because it lays out how this kind of thing

is supposed to work. Quote, there were two sets of angle of attack sensors and two sets of pitot tubes, one on either side of the fuselage. Normal usage is to have the set on the pilot side feed the instruments to the pilot side, and the set on the co-pilot side feed the instrument to the co-pilot side. That gives a state of natural redundancy in instrumentation that can be easily cross-checked

by either pilot. If the co-pilot thinks his airspeed indicator is acting up, he can look over at the pilot's airspeed indicator and see if it agrees. If not, both pilot and copilot can engage in a bit of triage to determine which instrument is profane and which is sacred. Now, this is great engineering, right? It is simple, it is redundant, and it allows humans to sort out issues. You know, and like this is a product of what aerospace engineering used to be, you know, and we still have this in the world. But the fact that there are a bunch of very, very good engineers who have spent an enormously long time trying to work out how this kind

of stuff should work. Modern Boeing was like, well, you know, instead of our system where multiple sensors can be cross referenced by pilots, you know, and the pilots can then disable the system. Uh, fuck that. What if we instead use a single sensor that can't be overridden? This is a complete violation of Boeing design principle. The thing about Boeing planes is that there isn't supposed to be like automated shit running in the background that pilots don't know about or don't know how to turn off. The pilot is supposed to be in complete control of the plane. You know, the old joke and I mean, I remember hearing this like every once in a while,

like when I was a kid was that Airbus planes, which you know, Airbus obviously is the rival to Boeing, Airbus planes were quote, die by wire because you know, they didn't give you control. The documentary that frontline did called Boeing's fatal flaw, which I didn't really use as a source for this, but I just from this is the one part that I remember from when I watched this in 2019 about the crash described how like pilots trusted that they were flying an aircraft designed by Boeing. So there'll be a way to kill the system. And again, that's something I remember, like from talking to people growing up, you know, so these pilots figure that there'd be a way to kill the system that was forcing the plane down. And they were trying to find it,

like they're trying to figure out how to turn the system off in the manual when they died, because they didn't realize the plane wasn't designed by Boeing engineers, it was designed by Boeing shareholders. Going back to the process on how this was added, the stated reason for again, why you don't want a second sensor is that it, in theory like adds complexity't want a second sensor is that it, in theory, like adds complexity

by adding a second sensor. But you know, that's actually terrible reasoning from the perspective of engineering, like of engineering in general, but also like, from the perspective of the engineering that the rest of the plane works on, right, the rest of the plane works on different principles in this and it works well. And it's something that Travis describes as being a product of the destruction of Bowie's collective knowledge base. But something I don't know. I don't know to what extent Travis, he's kind of writing about this, but I'm not sure that a lot of the people writing about this like understand that like this was the point, right? destroyingroying this kind of collective knowledge. This is something that was done deliberately, right?

This was the inevitable sort of product of Boeing management trying to make the company quote unquote run like a business. They were trying to destroy the interpersonal bonds that create this system of collective knowledge and they were trying to take power out of the hands of people who had that collective knowledge and put it into the hands of people who you could pay for really cheap and exploit more who did not have access to that that kind of information right this is a case for like yeah you're you're putting power in the hands of software engineers instead of sort of aviation engineers speaking of i don't know taking power out of the hands of the consumer and giving it to a corporation? Here's ads.

Now if you're trying to make the company quote unquote run like a business, what else would you do? Oh yeah, you would not tell the pilots about this new system that you've added to your airplane because if you talk about the system, everyone from the FAA to the airlines to the pilots unions might realize that this is not the same plane, this is 737. And that would require all sorts of stuff like again, recertifying the plane, trading pilots on simulators of your new plane, which is not the old plane, it requires all sorts of stuff that would have very well could

have prevented these crashes. But you know, that stuff all costs money. And Boeing doesn't fucking want to spend money trying to make sure that its planes don't crash. So when they moved on to this version of like the 737 Max, right? Pilots famously got, I think half an hour of iPad training and that maybe that might have been an hour of iPad training. And that training that they got on their iPad, again, not on a simulator,

didn't even have any information about the MCAS system that killed all these people. The product of this was that on October 29th, 2019, a 737 MAX flying from Jakarta crashed as the pilot was physically unable to fight the control stick. And that's another thing that's going on with this, with his decision to put power in the hands of software and not pilots, is that MCAS is also physically exerting control over the pilot stick. And these people are trying to fight it and they're not able to fight it enough to stop the plane from tipping down and crashing into the ground.

And Boeing runs this really like pretty racist campaign, blaming this pilot who was not white for this error to try to you know cover up the fact that they fucking did this and this maybe would have worked except a few months later Ethiopia Air flight 302 went down and also killed everyone on board and you know all told this plane the Boeing 737 Max killed 346 people. The Seattle Times, which broke a lot of the initial story, said, quote, A variety of employees have described internal pressure to advance the MAX to completion as Boeing hurried to catch up with the hot-selling

A320 from rival Airbus. Mark Rabin, an engineer who did flight testing work unrelated to the flight controls, said there was always talk about how delays of even one day can cost substantial amounts. Meanwhile, staff were expected to stay in line, Reben said. It was all about loyalty, Reben said. I had managers tell me don't rock the boat. You don't want to be upsetting executives. And I find this very funny because again, part of the whole Jack Welch strategy was to destroy the concept of loyalty to like Boeing as a company. But you have to be loyal to these shitty fucking executives because these executives, you know,

have have all of the power in this company and they want to make sure they can just ring out every single last drop of profit. And if you upset them, they're going to fire you. And so the product of this is this process that we've seen, which is that this plane isn't being designed by aircraft. This is what happens when shareholders design an airplane. And of course, the 737 MAX continues to have problems, right? Earlier this year, famously, the fucking door flew off an Alaska Air flight. Multiple whistleblowers have come forward to describe, I mean, just like all of the things that you would have expected from Boeing outsourcing shit to overworked and under trained contractors. Now, several of those whistleblowers have died. When I was originally doing this, I was considering

basically making this episode just about the whistleblowers being killed. But like I, I don't know, I don't really have any more information than anyone else about these deaths so I'm just going to put on the record that if I go out here it was murder. Yeah and I think that the more important story is this one because I think at this point everyone kind of knows that something is wrong with Boeing. And every day we're getting more and more sort of specifics about every single part of this production process. That used to be entirely run by highly paid, well at least sort of highly paid and highly trained employees that's now being run by a bunch of non-unionized underpaid contractors. Who are producing shitty equipment.

But what we're looking at here is Boeing coming apart. Somewhat more famously, I think the rescue flight is like being prepped, but a bunch of astronauts have been stranded on the space station because Boeing's launch craft was like veering off course. They were a bunch of issues with it. And so NASA just was just like, no fuck this. And the most hideously galling part of this entire story is that the craft that's going to pick up the astronauts is made by fucking SpaceX, because we have reached a point where an Elon Musk company is somehow designing rockets that are, you

know, is like designing spacecraft that are less likely to fucking explode than Boeing. That is that is an unbelievably depressing idea. And to close, I think we need to ask who killed these people, because it's not just Boeing. Jack Welch killed these people. Michael Milken killed these people. Ronald Reagan killed these people, Michael Milken killed these people, Ronald Reagan killed these people, and in a way, all of us killed them because none of us stopped them. And these people could have been stopped at any point in the process from Reagan to Stone

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

It shouldn't be enormously controversial to say that the people who know how to build airplanes should control how we fucking design and build airplanes. In the 19th and 20th century, this idea was called worker self-management, and it was considered so dangerous that from Chile to Chiapas to Algeria to Hungary to Korea, capitalist, communist, and fascist alike killed anyone who dared believe it. But now our choices are stark. We either let these people continue to drop planes out of the sky as the world burns and our cities sink into the sea, or we do something about it.

So what are you going to do? Hey, I'm Gianna Pedente. And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like, how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or, can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes.

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Listen to Lucha Libre Behind the Mask as part of my cultura podcast network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you stream podcasts. Hey, everyone. This is It Could Happen here. I am Robert Evans. This is a podcast about things falling apart. Most of this episode is going to be me and James Stout discussing the disaster in North Carolina and elsewhere as a result of Hurricane Helene. But before we get into that, we'll be talking largely about what this means for your own preparations for future disasters, what we can kind of learn initially from everything that's been happening.

I wanted to start with a few minutes of us talking to Margaret Kiljoy, who is on the ground in the Asheville area doing disaster relief work right now. And obviously, the audio here is not up to our usual quality, but it's only about five minutes and then you will get James and I talking crystal clear into your ears. So here is Margaret. Hi, everyone. I just got on the ground about two hours ago and immediately have been basically running around with my van, delivering food to different places just because van did van thing. And it's, I mean, it's intense. Everyone is having an intense time. But also at the

same time, there's like, you know, more people are out walking around and riding bikes. And, you know, there's hundreds of people gathering at every place that's passing out food and water. And there's a very kind of community spirit happening right now. I'm actually recording this from up in Marshall, which is a small town immediately north of Asheville that also has a mutual aid distribution hub. We just came up here to drop stuff off. And even in the 20 minutes that I've been here, other people have come with pickup trucks

full of harm reduction supplies and diapers and just all the things that people need. And everyone is trapped on basically little islands, right? There's a very different style of flood than when you have like a coastal flood. And what's happened is that the houses that are near the river have been destroyed. And the roads, a lot of them have been destroyed and a lot of them went underwater for a long time. It's all the infrastructure is down. But many of the houses, at least as I recorded this, seem to be intact and doing well. And what it is that everyone is just trapped and isolated. Most people don't have food, water, sewage, or even cell signal, although cell signal is kind of the first thing to come

back and power is starting to filter back in. And we're hoping that some places are maybe getting water. But one of the things that's kind of come up is that, again, because it's in the mountains, it's a very different setup, it's a very different culture and community. And one of the things that's happened is that, I mean, a lot of people have wells. And so immediately, the problem has been more about distribution of water and also getting generators to people who have wells so that they can pump. A friend of mine got a generator pretty quickly and pulled a thousand gallons out of their

well right away to get and distribute around. of mine got a generator pretty quickly and pulled a thousand gallons out of their well right away to get and distribute around. And there's a, you know, just while I was waiting outside my friend's house, someone drove by and asked us if we needed water and then asked us if we knew about each of the neighbors and who did and didn't have water. Yeah, and I mean, one of the things that makes me think of is like having the generator, having the well, that's great. The kind of thing that maybe people wouldn't think about as much as having the ability to put a thousand gallons of water in something.

Yes, totally. Seems like it was also crucial and is probably would have been lower down the list for a lot of people, but there's really no replacing it when you need it. Totally. But one of the things that, again, I'm not trying to say that everything's fine here. It's very much not fine.

For example, the only federal response that anyone is talking about is that ICE is already in the area. So before anyone has been given food by the federal government, they have sent ICE to detain people and question people. At least that is the word on the ground. Obviously, you know, details and truths come later when you're in a crisis situation. But we do know that ICE is on the ground and no one I've talked to has seen much in the way of federal response besides law enforcement. But one of the things that's happened here is that

a lot of people have pickup trucks in Appalachia. And so a lot of people have, you know, you call them water buffaloes, the big water tanks that you can put in a pickup truck or a trailer. I definitely left this feeling, you know, my first, you know, I drove with my van full of stuff and on the highway and being passed by pickup trucks pulling flat beds full of pallets of water and things like that. But then even, yeah, in the city, people are driving around in trucks and filling them up with water and delivering them. But don't get me wrong. Yeah, if you're preparing, think about how to deliver water, even some of the things for me, for example, the city government

has been doing some things. And there are places where people can go and fill up water containers, but they don't have the water containers. So the people who were prepared by having a couple five gallon totes in their basement are in a much better position. And so that's like some of the things that I brought for some of my friends is literally just a couple five gallon water containers so that people can go get them filled up. Now obviously you're talking about when we're thinking about the places that people are able to drive around where the places that you've been reaching are hit pretty hard, but we also then have these more isolated mountain communities that both seem to have suffered a lot more physical damage, although that's

not entirely clear at this moment, but are certainly not accessible in the same way. And I think that's one of those things we're still going to be waiting to hear, like how extreme it is. But like we talk a little bit on the episode before this about people using burrows to deliver food and water in places where vehicles can't even reach. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things also, one of the things that went out on the mutual aid list that

I'm on is people are saying, hey, if you have your ATV, bring down your ATV. And that makes complete sense. If you, the listener, are listening to this, don't just drive down with supplies. If you are plugged into a mutual aid... Don't just roll to Asheville and you're Polaris. Yeah. But yeah, no, one of the hardest things has been getting the supplies. I mean, disaster relief is just logistics.

In the same way that war is just logistics, it's like, how do you get things from one place to another? And what people have set up is all of these, you know, you centralize the acquisition of supplies and then you decentralized getting them out. But yeah, people have been working. I'm going to know more about what people have been doing to get things out. But I've already talked with people or heard from people who, you know, we're getting rescued by people with hand saws. And then one of the main things that people are doing

is that there's chainsaw crews, mutual aid chainsaw crews, going around. One of the big asks that I came with a lot of was bar and chain oil. And it's a little bit hard because gas is also, until just recently, gas is starting to come back online now. But getting gas for a chainsaw or an ATV or your vehicle has been tricky

But people have been working on that too. Yeah. Well Margaret I'm not gonna take up more of your time while you try to help in the wake of a disaster But thank you for being on the ground. Good luck to you and everyone else who's out there We will be hearing more from you and more about the specifics of what's happened in North Carolina and elsewhere in the wake of the hurricane next week. So thank you and thank everybody there. Good luck.

Yeah. Thank you. That is done. I am now going to move on with our previously recorded episode. Here is James and me. Oh, welcome back to It Could Happen Here, a podcast where it's happened for some chunk of our listeners who are probably not listening right now,

because as we record this on Monday the first, technically a Tuesday, we're just now getting word that internet has come back on, like mobile internet has come back on to parts of Asheville and North Carolina that were in communicado for several days after Hurricane Helene tore through. You've heard something about this, I'm hoping. I'm hearing different things from friends about how much news attention there seems to be on this.

I'm seeing it a lot, but I'm seeing it largely through social. But the gist of it is, I mean, there's a photo I came across right before getting on here, where there was a memorial marker for the 1916 flood in Asheville that was knocked out by what used to be a road and was now nothing but rushing water and mud. Beautiful. Three out of four highways into Asheville are down. I heard yesterday from people who were coming in and doing an aid drop that what had been previously a 30 minute drive took 12 and a half hours from the

state of the roads and the number of checkpoints and stuff. All of this is pretty common stuff for a natural disaster, obviously amped up in severity because this disaster was correspondingly worse than even most natural disasters tend to be. You know? Yeah, certainly in this country. Yeah, I was just looking through,

just doing a little bit of Googling before we got on. And I found a Reddit post from the Asheville subreddit from two years ago saying, Asheville is apparently the number one city in the United States to be a climate haven, according to the CNBC. Although that article, it just made the list of best climate cities,

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

and everyone has known it for quite a while. We're talking about places that are many miles inland and that something like 2000 feet elevation. Yeah, it's certainly not below sea level or even at sea level. Yeah, it's an inland mountainous community. It's just not the kind of threat that people are used to having here.

And the devastation has been pretty total. Like whole communities wiped out. I think the death toll from the County Asheville is in, let me pull this up to make sure I'm not getting it wrong. I've just now pulled up a story from 30 minutes ago on the independent that says, yeah, at least 143 people have been killed. Yeah, I'm sorry, that's a total death toll from Helene.

40 people in Buncombe County where Asheville is, 600 people unaccounted for. Governor Roy Cooper has told CNN that there are communities that were wiped off the map. Kind of the first thing that I noticed, outside of the footage coming in was friends of mine, because I've spent a decent amount of time in Asheville. I have friends on the East Coast, including our own Margaret Killjoy,

who has a lot more friends in Asheville. And I was in a couple of different signal loops where people were trying to contact their people. And there was a line from one of the folks I was chatting with who had had reached out to multiple people in the area and said, I have not heard anything from anyone in Asheville in hours. But nothing is getting in and nothing is getting out. And that seems to be consistent with everyone's experience. Starlink was largely not functional. Starlink doesn't work very well when the weather's really bad.

Sat phones seem to have had some efficacy. I know some people were getting messages in and out, but they weren't super reliable because sat phones also to have had some efficacy. I know some people were getting messages in and out, but they weren't super reliable because sat phones also are reliant upon climactic conditions, right? It's certainly better than just trusting your normal cell phone, but it's not gonna do great when you've got a fucking hurricane

dumping half an ocean on your head. So that was the first thing I was thinking about because we talk a lot about disaster preparedness and we talk a lot about having, you know, stuff that would have been useful in this and that people who were prepared and had water set aside and food set aside were certainly in a better situation because those both very quickly became problems. I mean, I heard a devastating story of an old folks home that was completely cut off from the outside and didn't have enough water or food. Hoping that story ends as well as possible,

but there's a lot of stories like that. But even outside of that, there were people who were prepared, who had food and water, but who wound up stuck on the roofs of their house because the water just came in so quickly. There was no chance to really get much other than maybe a bag. And when you're stuck up on there,

like what are you gonna do if your sat phone or you don't have a sat phone and that doesn't work and there's no internet and there's no cell service? Well, that's why we're going to start today talking about ham radios. Because those motherfuckers, there's actually a, I'll see if I can pull it up through this. Like that has been the most reliable way for people

in the area to communicate with the outside world. Because if it is possible to communicate using technology, you can do it with ham. Like that's just how ham radios be. Yeah, they don't need to see the sky. Yeah. Yeah. They don't give a fuck. If there is any way to communicate via technology

with people in a disaster, you will be able to do it with a ham radio. So let's chat about that. James, you have more experience with this than I do. This is something I have been working on getting into, but I certainly am not very knowledgeable on the matter. So we'll start, what do people need to think about when it comes to like actually getting set up

to communicate with a ham radio? Because there's definitely, you could just go buy a Baofeng or something like that. Like you can get a, they're not expensive. This is actually a very affordable thing to have. Right now, kind of the most recommended model is the UV9R Pro, which is eight watt instead of five and waterproof.

Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. And you can charge it off USB-C, which is really nice. Yeah, they're what, like 30 something bucks? Yeah, they're like, you can get them cheaper in bulk, I think. You still get them cheaper on AliExpress, but it seems like they're kind of hanging them up and charging custom, so you end up not getting them cheaper.

So yeah, for real basic stuff, I think you do need to be licensed to operate these radios on certain bands, right? Yes. And that's something that you can, I believe in a case of emergency, you can operate on any band. No one's going to arrest you for illegal use,

unlicensed use of a ham radio if you're trying to get people rescued from a flood. Yeah. Like that said, you should not be learning how to use a ham radio when you're hiding on your roof. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is like, you know, the people who buy guns and put them under their bed and never shoot them and expect to be able to become a fucking marksman

in a crisis or buy medical gear and never train with it. Again, right? These things that you want to practice before. So we use these a lot at the border. We use radios to communicate. When there were high numbers in Hacumba, my friends and I put a massive antenna on the roof of the youth center where we were. I know a lot of listeners have been out there and they've probably seen the antenna that

we put up. And then I was using a radio in my truck and then we also all had personal radios, right? Because cell phone signal is crap out there and it was the only way for us to communicate and it worked really well. So the things that you need, if you want to get started in this,

are first of all, some kind of education or a license. There are tons of local groups. Ham people fucking love to be ham radio people. They love to talk about ham radio. They love to teach you to do ham radio. So like, and it's not like a hobby, you know, firearms, people love to talk about firearms, but lots of them are really toxic people. I haven't found that ham radio is premised on talking to people all over the place and often very few people killed with ham radio. Yeah, I'm sure it's possible. But if you can find a local club, that's a great way to start. They can clue you in on stuff.

But I think to begin with, you also need someone to talk to, right? Like if you want to practice with your ham radio, you need to be talking to other people on it. So you can just go on to different bands, different repeaters and do that, or you can get your friends and study together. Yeah. Get your license together. Buy two Bao Fangs, you know?

Yeah. and study together, get your license together. Buy two Bao Fangs, you know? Give one to somebody who you live close to, but not right next to and work on it with them. Yeah, work on like, oh, how far does this work? Like I am one of the former guests for the podcast, James Cordero from Board of Kindness. He and I were doing that, not so long ago talking to each other from our houses. But yeah, you can certainly get into this pretty cheap.

I have a business license, which is another option for people. I would suggest first getting your ham operators license and then going from there. Yeah. That's it's called a radio technician's license, right? Like that's the most basic, cause there's three levels, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, I believe so. Um, it's been a while since I did that.

Yeah. I think it's radio technicians, general, and then amateur extra if the notes I took are accurate still. And then in terms of cost, like the size of your antenna is what's going to determine, you know, how far you can transmit and how you can receive along with like line of sight, right? It's always about size. Yep. It's just as big as one possible. So you want to be a size queen, like you can get yourself a really big antenna. I would say if you're using those handheld radios, there's a company called Nagoya that make pretty decent radios, antennas that work with that UV9R that I use. I have like a telescoping one and we've had pretty good luck with that.

And then I also use one in my, so I've hard mounted a radio inside my truck and I have an antenna that uses the frame of the truck as part of the antenna and I can get really good signal with that. Yeah, that makes sense. If you're just doing it at home, yeah, put something on your roof. Like you can, you can get a pretty good antenna on your roof, you know, and it, it's not that hard and you can get signal much further. I've been recommended a little book that you can get for 20 bucks in Kindle form, or it's like 30 bucks for the spiral bound, which looks pretty durable. I haven't received mine yet.

The ARRL ham radio license manual, which is kind of what I was advised to buy and read through. Yeah. And the advice that I got, and you can correct me here, but this seemed pretty hard to argue with is that like the primary benefit to doing the training and getting the license formally rather than just buying it is it also teaches you how to fix problems if you're trying to like get this thing to work in a stressful dangerous situations.

Yeah. You want to be familiar with it if you're going to rely on it, right? Just like anything else. There's hamstudy.org as well, which helps you. You can also do something called a software defined radio, SDR. I've used those before as well. I'm sure we'll, yeah, we'll do a more dedicated episode

to this kind of thing once I feel a degree of competence too. But I think what's really important with this is, because I can tell you right now, as much time as I spend thinking about water and having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare water stored, I have like, I spend thinking about water and having a bunch of different water treatment options and spare water stored. I have like, I literally have at this point, years of dried food on the property.

I can food all the time. I have animals. Obviously I have guns. I do stuff like go foraging in the woods and shit. I had completely, because it's a pain in the ass. It seemed like a pain in the ass. There's a lot of numbers. I hate fucking numbers.

And I am choosing to use this. And we're starting out with this as coverage of Halle, not because like this is the end of it. We are going to look at what's actually been happening in the community. We have Margaret Killjoy's down there right now. We have some other like friends of the pod who are in the area doing relief work now

It's just too early for those stories and we don't want to like really bug people who are doing useful work down there Yeah, but this is the first thing that terrified me was being like well fuck I have been Negligent in my preparations because I don't have comms locked down Yeah, definitely like and people underestimated because it's not cool and fun, right? Like, I'm too cool and fine. And I have a sat phone. So I was like, that's probably fine, right? Like, well, it wouldn't have been in Asheville. Or people think that they can have Starlink now.

And I think, you know, people place a lot of emphasis on that. But I think going back to basics, we were talking about this in our group chat. But for things that you need, having a primary, secondary and emergency way of doing that makes sense. So your phone, your sat phone, you know, I think Robert and I both use Garmin inReach as like a sat communicator. I have an inReach and I also have a Motorola smartphone that is a sat phone through a, God, I'm forgetting the name of the service, but a separate service.

Like I have two different sat phone services. And then you've got your ham radio as your backup. Well, yeah. After that you got smoke signals and pigeons. Right. Well, that gets us to a general idea of preparation, which I was kind of, when I got advice from a colleague about war reporting, like the best,

it's still to this day, some of the best advice I ever got is two is one and one is none, right? If you have one way of doing something in a disaster, you are very close to having no way of doing it, right? Which brings me to transit, because one of the, the thing that is probably going to wind up being the defining characteristic of this disaster in memory

is the degree to which the ability to reach people in an area that is we're not talking, there definitely are a lot of rural communities impacted by this, but like Asheville is a significant place. We're not talking the middle of nowhere. We are not talking about people living on the edge of the world, right? We are talking about like one of the,

what was up to this point, one of like the hippest and more popular parts of the Northeast, right? The immediacy with which the ability to reach people on the ground was wiped out. And obviously while the storm was going on, there was no way to reach them from air. Like, you know, a helicopter can get places now, but during the worst of the flooding,

you're not reliably getting a fucking chopper into a lot of these places. So people were stranded very quickly, much faster than they had been prepared for. You should be thinking about like, oh shit, I could get flooded because you probably could. Most of the people listening to this, there's not a 0% chance a freak storm floods your community.

Even if it never has before, it's not exactly a common problem in Asheville. The last massive flood thing was like 1916. So we're not talking about a place that's used to flooding all the time. But likewise, it's not just flooding that can do, fire could do this. I am thinking the last kind of near disaster

we had where I was is in 2020, where I live right now, I am in the last kind of near disaster we had where I was is in 2020, you know, where I live right now, I am in the city of Portland and we were like three or four blocks away from where the evacuation orders had spread during the fires in 2020. It was not a foregone conclusion that they would stop before reaching the city. You know, this is also the people in Southern California. Yeah, definitely.

There's a shocking number of communities, communities with money that are really built up that if a fire hit at the wrong time of year, there's no stopping it. And like, you need to be thinking about how am I preparing to be informed during the seasons where this is like of highest likelihood.

Like, because the only real safety there is paying attention to what's happening and building an understanding of how quickly things can go badly so that you get out ahead of time. Because if the disaster just hits, you're not gonna get on the highway and drive through a fire or through a flood.

I don't care if you have a fucking safari snorkel. I'm looking at those waters. You are not getting the most kitted out land rover on God's green earth was not getting through some of those waters. I'm sorry. Yeah, you need a submarine for that shit. Like, I remember my house flooded when I was probably 17, 18. And I remember that a couple of things I remember, first of all, was like, most of your shit is not that important to you

I remember being 17 and being like, oh man We got this back then having a wide-screen TV was a big deal for us and yeah Then thinking like oh my neighbors are 80 something like I fucked the TV. I need to check of those people Okay, and then people completely overestimating the capability of their vehicles in floodwater Yeah Which which they always will do it will always be the people with the biggest trucks that cause the most problems people completely overestimating the capability of their vehicles in floodwater. Yeah. Which they always will do. It will always be the people with the biggest trucks

that cause the most problems for everyone else who overestimate where their vehicles can get them. Yes, and like you can die in your vehicle crossing relatively shallow floodwater. Like this isn't, you know, it's a serious business. Or get burned to death, which happens all the time, has happened very recently in communities in like California, you know,

people just get fucking incinerated. So don't be that person. Pay attention. Like one of the things to pay attention to is like, when the warnings started to come in, there will be good breakdowns fairly soon in places like the New York Times on when warnings came in and how much time people

actually had. But don't gamble with stuff like this. Fucking drive to high ground or drive to whatever seems like the safest place and fucking crash in your car if you have to. And this is why, again, when it does come to survival stuff, I'm a big fan, if you have the money, spend 200 bucks on one of those buckets of dried food

because you can keep a bucket of dried food and five gallons of water by the door. You can throw that son of a bitch in your car and carrying the water might be a pain in the ass, but if you have to get out and run, those buckets of dried food with a week or so of food in them are not that hard to carry. You hold it under your arm,

you keep a backpack on your back, and you run like a son of a bitch to whatever evacuation exists, and you'll have some food with you. You know? This is one of the ways I think about stuff like this. It's obviously preferable if you can just hunker down in your fucking house full of gear and equipment,

but I'm sure there were people who had to evac or who got flooded out in Asheville and their house that got flooded out was full of survival gear. I know for a fact that that happened to people. Yeah, and it happens everywhere to people, right? Talking of happening, Robert, what should be happening right now is an advertising break.

Oh shit, it should have happened 10 fucking minutes ago, James. Yeah, but here we are, buddy. Here we are. We're back. You know, when it comes to talking about, like, the degree to which people's high-tech and expensive equipment, including vehicles has run out very quickly. One of the stories that has been most interesting to me

is of like one of the first groups of people to be able to get supplies and significant quantities to some of these isolated mountain regions was a guy with a shitload of donkeys. Oh yeah, the mule team. The mule team guy, he was, one second, let me pull thiskeys. Oh yeah, the mule team. The mule team guy. He was, one second, let me pull this up.

I've got this book marked. Yeah, Mountain Mule Packer Ranch, which I'm guessing is just some sort of like, you go there to vacation and do like mule trips, mule hikes and stuff. It's kind of people who want to backpack or take like a really luxurious camping setup. Yeah.

They've been doing mule trains into a town called, into a Weaverville it looks like. And yeah, like a mule can carry it's something, at least based on this people article I'm looking at, they're saying about 200 pounds of supplies per animal, which, you know, is actually very significant. That's not a whole lot more than you're going to be fitting in like a compact car, at least.

Obviously a truck's carrying more, but you're not getting a truck into a lot of these areas. And it just kind of goes to, I'm not saying like everyone go buy a mule. That's not really practical for most people. Although if you've got some land, maybe consider getting the mule. They're real, they're real handy. They do come in very useful in situations like this. Yeah, they get companion animals as well. I think people have them for like,

if you have a horse or whatever. Alpacas too, but they can't carry so much, but alpaca packing is a thing in like Montana and places like that. Yeah, they're great. If you've got to fight in the mountains of Afghanistan, a mule, you can do a lot there. So very useful in a wide variety of situations.

I know a lot of our listeners are actively fighting in Afghanistan right now. So that could be very handy for you. Yeah, proud of you guys. Yeah, yeah. Keep it up. America said, we're done there, but you said not me. It could happen here, so fuck no.

You can't stop me going back with my meal. That's why this is the official podcast of the Islamic State Khorasan province. That is, that's, that's, uh, Oh, James, we shouldn't be saying stuff like that. Hopefully, hopefully the government's busy. Well, apparently they're not because they ain't doing shit in the international. Yeah. So, you know, I saw a lot of, one of the more heartbreaking posts that I saw was this lady posting a picture of her parents and her daughter, who was six, on the roof with them.

And she was like, a few minutes later, the roof collapsed and they were dead. Fuck. Like she apparently managed to just kind of barely survive and get out of there. But there's like, I think a lot of people whose last act was trying to get a good photo or video of their location, you know, to post on social media. I, I don't want there to be a lot of people

who made the decision to stay longer than they should have because they wanted to get a good shot for social media, but I'm sure that number wasn't zero. I'm not saying that's what happened to that lady. There's also a matter of like, well, if you are stuck up there, what else are you gonna fucking do but document it? Right, yeah. I have some sympathy for that, yeah.

I'm not trying to shit on these people, but it is one of these, there's that post that goes around every time there's a disaster like this, where climate collapse is watching a series of horrifying videos on cell phones until one day it's you holding the phone. And I think that that's not that we shouldn't think about like what's happened, you know,

to North Carolina, to Tennessee, to these affected communities. There's places in Georgia that got hard hit. Obviously that's a focus, but from a practical standpoint, the only good that you can make of a disaster like this is to try and pay attention to what happened, to what went wrong for other people and make yourself less vulnerable. Because the less vulnerable you are, one of the things that we see every time there's something like this hits, you know, and this is, I would call this a hand of God event, right? You had a bunch of communities that were a part of the developed, whatever term, first world one day

and were completely cut off from everyone else on the planet the next. And all you can really do in the immediate aftermath of something like that is try to figure out what can I do to make it less likely that I'm a strain on resources during an event like this. And obviously the best way is to not be there because then you're not a strain on resources. But the next best thing is to have to pay attention

to what went wrong for other people and try to make yourself less vulnerable to that. Because not only does that protect you, but you protect other people by not needing the resources that rescuers can bring to bear, which will be terribly limited in the immediate wake of the disaster. Yeah, I think like in terms of resources, obviously Margaret does an excellent podcast called Live Like the World is Dying where you can hear more about that stuff.

I think the thing that you can buy, I guess right now, if you have like 30 to 50 bucks and you want to be a little bit more prepared, because I understand that you can buy, I guess right now, if you have like 30 to 50 bucks and you want to be a little bit more prepared, because I understand that for some people, this will be an oh shit moment, right? Where this is something that... And it ought to be. Yeah, no, it really should be. Like, you know, you've seen a city that thought it was completely invulnerable, be very vulnerable.

You can buy a soya squeeze for like 30 bucks right now. You can set them up off a five gallon bucket or you can use the bag that comes with, you can buy a bag from a company called Knok CNOC, which is a much better bag. I would recommend that. But like you can spend 30 bucks there. Like we said before, you should have backup and other water filtering options. But there are whole countries that use soya squeezes, right? The Marshall Islands, I made a thing about, Liberia uses them too. And you can filter rainwater with that. And you could pretty much have a supply of water for

as long as you need it if you backflush it. Right. You've got like a family of four and a house, you have one or two five gallon buckets full at any time. And you have a soya squeeze and you can, you know, in this kind of situation, you can keep filling it up with, you know, in this kind of situation, you can keep filling it up with, you know, disaster water, for lack of a better word. And in that sort of situation too, you can double up and triple up, which I always recommend in an emergency. I've nearly died of dysentery, so I don't fuck around with this. Get a filtration option. That's not the only one.

Filter your water and add iodine tablets to it. Right? Like, you know, filter your water and use something like a UV light. Yeah, a stereo pen. A stereo pen. Yeah. You know, don't just rely on one method. Double up. There's no, you're not going to have a lot to do other than make sure your water doesn't kill you. And that's a real good thing to focus on. Yeah, you could even use bleach, right? Household bleach, just make sure you're not fucking around. It's not scented, et cetera. Yeah, you wanna look up that ratio

just so we're not fucking up the ratio with them. But like, yeah, that's a great, you know, I usually keep one or two just big 50 gallon barrels of water. There's like water stabilization tablets or in liquid that you can drop in there because water doesn't store indefinitely, but can use bleach too people do yeah I keep it all times I just have this as part of my outdoor kit but it's a good thing to

have for a disaster you can have a camel back with one company that makes them is called Katadyn K A T A D Y N. Katadyn yeah. Katadyn sorry but there's a couple of different water filters that you can screw directly onto your camelback. So you pour water in the camelback, and by the time you get the water in your mouth, it has gone through a very serious filter arrangement. And that, again, that can be part of your, I pick this up and I take this with me,

and no matter where I go, I can pour water into the camelback and me and my family can drink off of it. Or we have two camelbacks or whatever, you know, have four liters on you. This is not free, but it's not prohibitively expensive. It's certainly not like buying nice firearms, right? And it is considerably likelier to save your life than an AR-15.

Yeah, yeah. There are magazines of ammunition that would cost you more than this would. And like, yeah, with all of these things, once you, once it's dirty, it's not clean, right? So like your camelback bladder is now dirty water bladder and stuff. Especially in a disaster situation, don't be mixing and match. Just get a Sharpie and run it. Likewise, I have a Jerry can,

I just wrote the bleach amounts on it with a paint pen and it's there now and now I know. Like none of this stuff is hugely complicated and like everything else, right? Like the more familiar you are with it, that if you go camping a lot, like Robert was saying, you already have a system in place. So you're already ready for that.

Yeah, I keep something called a grail on me, which is just like a cup that has a filter. Like it's a two-part, like almost kind of a thermos type deal. And you fill the bottom part with water and you press the top part in and it fills an internal reservoir with filtered water. And then I'll drop a tablet in there or something and, you know, or I'll pour that into a larger thing

and put the tablet in there. But you can always have multiple options for water. And it's the kind of thing where like, there's no reason not to a Camelback and a filter plus a bunch of pills plus some sort of like hand pump rig you're you're maybe out 150 bucks. Yeah, you have three different methods of keeping your water clean Yeah, I think they're surplusing out a lot of the msr guardians. So the u.s military used to buy you can get those pretty cheap Those are great. Like I have I was just in the derriere gap

Uh, I used one of those and then chemical treatment. And like, you know, I'm okay. And you can also bulk process with the gravity guardian. You can do 10 liters at a time. You know, we're in this kind of conversation. We are triaging by what we think is the most important stuff, which is in a disaster like this, water and combs. And I kind of keep those as relatively equal

because obviously like you can survive without comms in some situations and you can't in any without water. But if you are in a situation where you're on the roof of your house and your roof is not going to hold out much longer in the flood waters, comms suddenly become the number one problem that you have, right?

Your inability to reach someone who might be able to get you out of there. Yeah, if you need to get help, then you need to be able to ask for help. I guess the other thing I would say is if you rely on any medicine, think about how and where you store them. God, yes, a lot of people have been having to figure out,

like I've been reading stories about people needing to set up like battery and solar or generator situations. They're fucking CPAP machines. And they're like, you have people who are on dialysis who are going to need to get evac'd because there's not gonna be reliable dialysis in town in a while.

Right, like that kind of stuff. Some of that, like I have a big cooler and I can chuck ice in there and I can have enough insulin in that bad boy for a year. And other medicines, just putting them in a waterproof bottle and having that in there and I can have enough insulin in that bad boy for a year, you know? And other medicines, you know, just putting them in a waterproof bottle and having that in your, well, I live in California. We have a bag for fires and earthquakes, right?

Everyone here does. And just having a few days of your medicines, you can grab and go, you don't have to think about it. You don't forget something that you rely on. Yeah, and that's also what you should be thinking is like, if it takes me two or three days to get evac'd and out to an area where I can like spend money again to get access to the things that I have on a daily basis,

what shit can't I survive without until I get to a part of the world where I can get access to things again, right? Which is again, why we're kind of focusing on comms so that you know what's happening, so that you can maybe reach people, water, and then underwater like food, and obviously things like, thank God,

we are not at a time of the year when this happened where people are going to like freeze to death immediately, right, in the middle of something like this. But that would, I would say like access to warm and dry clothing could be up there equal with, you know, water and comms. If you're talking about a kind of disaster that might put people out of their homes

in an area where you can die in minutes in the front. Like if you live out in the fucking Great Lakes region, depending on the time of year, we're talking about a disaster that could be right up there, you know? You know what you need based on where you live, but be thinking about what keeps you alive. That's really, a lot of disaster preparedness

is actually trying to understand what is it that keeps me alive? A lot of our economy exists in having that not be obvious to you. Yes, yeah, yeah. You, in putting your priorities elsewhere. But yeah, think about what stops you dying. Maybe have a couple of spares. And have it in a place, think about what stops you dying. Maybe have

a couple of spares and have it in a place. Having all this stuff is great. If it's in 17 different tote bags in your attic, that's not much use to you when you don't have very long to get out your house. So having stuff like Robert said, by the door, in your car, in a backpack, whatever, like that you can easily access and be okay. Then you have it and then you you put in you need it It's there and you know where it is Yeah, yeah well James How we do it? It's happened here, buddy. It's happened here. Yeah, like we said it would yeah

It could like like we said say this this was like I the messages I was sharing with people immediately after this was like, oh, this is the one This is the one we were worried about This is the hand of God sweeping into a community and just knocking it off the edge of the earth Yeah, you know not that this kind of thing doesn't happen But this is this is the first one At least since I've been really focusing on this stuff in the US where it hits somewhere that just was not on my radar as a Super vulnerable place. Definitely. Yeah, and it'll happen again next year and with this it'll happen again

Yeah, and it'll surprise you it'll surprise you again where it hits, you know, that's the thing. There's no climate haven Yeah, no doesn't exist. Yeah Yeah, not on this planet. I would say like if you have money and you want to help, mutilate Disaster Relief are great. Yes, let's talk about that. Let's go to ads one last time. And then we come back, we will tell you who you can send some money to, to help people who are actively suffering.

And we're back before we bounce. We wanted to suggest some places where you could donate if you are looking to help people who are in Asheville, other parts of North Carolina. One of the first places recommended to me is Appalachian Medical Solidarity. They are providing, I mean, it's obvious, but they're providing a lot of like medical care and support, a lot of equipment and stuff that people need. Their Venmo is at AppMedSolid. Their cash app is DollarSignStreets1DE.

Put flood support in the description if you send them money through that. The other place is mutual aid disaster relief. Their PayPal is mutual aid disaster relief at gmail.com. Their Venmo is at mutual aid disaster relief. Yeah, just Google them if you want to find out more about what they're doing. James, did you have anyone else

that you wanted to throw out there? Those are the two, we did an episode, I did an episode a couple of years ago with mutual aid disaster reliefs that you can find in your podcasting app. Those are the two big we did an episode, I did an episode a couple of years ago with mutual aid disaster reliefs that you can find in your podcasting app. Those are the two big ones, I think. If you're on the ground, help each other. I'm sure you already are.

Yeah. But yeah, those would be the two that I would suggest. If you buy yourself your water filter and you have 10 bucks to help out, that's how we make the world better. Yep. So until next week, solidarity to the people who are in the Atlanta area

right now where a chemical fire, very similar chemical fire to the one that happened in a place I used to live, West Texas, has just blanketed the air and chlorine gas. So remember folks, weird disasters could hit too. We're living the dream. We're not just talking about hurricanes and fires here. Anyway, that's it for now, everybody.

Good luck. Stay safe. Make sure you drink plenty of water. Bye. Hey, I'm Gianna Prenti. And I'm Jeme Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions

like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes! Each week we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do like resume specialist Morgan Sanner. The only difference between the person who doesn't get the job and the person who gets the job is usually who applies. Yeah, I think a lot about that quote.

What is it, like you miss 100% of the shots you never take? Yeah, rejection is scary, but it's better than you rejecting yourself. Together, we'll share what it really takes to thrive in the early years of your career without sacrificing your sanity or sleep. Listen to Let's Talk Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

What's up, y'all? This is Questlove, and I'm here to tell you about a new podcast I've been working on with the Story Pirates and John Glickman called Historical Records. It's a family-friendly podcast. Yeah, you heard that right. A podcast for all ages. One you can listen to and enjoy with your kids starting on September 27th. I'm gonna toss it over to the host of Historical Records,

Nimini, to tell you all about it. Make sure you check it out. Hey, y'all. Are you ready for an explosive new podcast that brings together hip hop and history? My name is Nimmini and I'm the host of Historical Records, a brand new podcast for kids and families that proves in order to make history, you have to make some noise. Another one gone, bash bam. Another one gone, the cracker, the bat, and another one gone, the tip of the cap, cause another one gone. And the best part? I make this show entirely by myself.

Impressive, right? Me too, right? OK, OK, maybe I get a little bit of help from my sidekick, Tina the Raccoon. Every week on Historical Records, join me, Nimmini and Tina the Raccoon as we learn about the unsung heroes of the past and turn their history into hip hop. Listen to Historical Records on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. or wherever you get your podcasts.

Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was murdered. There are crooks everywhere you look now. The situation is desperate. My name is Manuel de Lilla. I am one of the hosts of Crooks Everywhere, a podcast that unearths the plot to murder a one-woman WikiLeaks. Daphne exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a mafia state. And she paid the ultimate price. Listen to Crooks Everywhere on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. To listen to new episodes one week early and 100% ad free, subscribe to the iHeart True

Crime Plus channel, available exclusively on Apple Podcasts. to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. OK, let's put in this messy round of smash or pass. OK. OK, here it is. Smash or pass. Spit play.

I don't know. I don't know how I feel about bodily fluids being on me, unless it's... Oh! Ha ha ha! Because we're doing the pull out. We're living on the edge. Oh my god. Oh! Ah! Because we're doing the pullout message. We're living on the edge.

Oh my God! I was not expecting that. Baby, like I always say, if you know how to work that body, that sexualness, and that heart, you're unstoppable. Embrace your power. That's really what we're gonna do on this show. Join me on Tell Me Something Mess messy with brand new episodes every Thursday on the I heart radio app Apple podcast Or wherever you listen to podcasts

Do you ever wonder where your favorite foods come from and like what's the history behind bacon wrapped hot dogs? Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. Hi. I'm Maite Gomez-Rejón. Our podcast, Hungry for History, is back. Season two, season two. Are we recording? Are we good? Oh, we push record, right? And this season, we're taking an even bigger bite out of the most delicious food and its history.

Seeing that the most popular cocktail is the margarita, followed by the mojito from Cuba, and the piñu colada from Puerto Rico. So, all of these things we thank Latin culture. There's a mention of blood sausage in Homer's Odyssey that dates back to the 9th century BC. BC? I didn't realize how old the hot dog was.

Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultultura podcast network available on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I just want to start out by saying I love you. Oh god, yeah. Yeah, I love you. Yeah, I don't think JD Vance should be saying the word love because it just makes it clear every time he does that he's never felt that emotion. No, no.

It was something particularly unsettling about him saying that. It's like when I try to order food in French and it's like, Robert, you're not fooling anyone. Sure. Like you look this up on Google right before getting to the restaurant. Like you're not going to impress anyone.

No. I guess let's start with a fuck Mary kill for the guys. No, the secret service will get pissed at us if we do that one. No. This is, it could happen here and this is the who gives a shit VP debate episode. I'm Sophie Ligtturman. I'm here with Kirsten Davis and Robert Evans. Yeah.

Wow. What a great use of two hours. That was. hours that was. That really was. I am behind this week horribly, still haven't picked the subject for this week, desperately, desperately behind. And I sure did love that this was a complete waste of all of our fucking time. Not a complete waste because we learned something important, which is that the Democrat who

seemed to have the best understanding of how to fight Republicans maybe just got lucky or got coached into some very bad advice by a Democrat who should have known better. Hey, Robert, I just want to say thank you for saying that. I agree with you. I just want to say thank you for saying that. Sophie, you and I are great friends. Everything you say is terrible and wrong, but I agree with you on most of it. And thank you for saying that.

I just really appreciate that, you know? Whoever told him that Americans wanted to see him be friendly with JD Vance was not a friend of the Republic, or of him, I think. I don't think it'll work. I've been wrong before. It definitely seems to have worked. If your recollection of what Fox and the other anchors were saying, they seem to be pretty positive on Walls's performance.

So it may be working on like media ghouls. But that's who watched the V.P. debate. That is who watches the debate. Yeah. Right. I mean, that is that is the audience. Yeah. Only the fucking sickos who are keyed in on politics watch the VP debate. I guess, I don't really believe this, but I'm going to, like my devil's advocate would be,

maybe it's smart strategy to accept that only media ghouls listen to this. The only real way for the debate to matter is if you like fuck up. Sure. And there was more risk of seeming like a lunatic if he went in there attacking JD as hard as he could and getting negative press as opposed to this,

which probably is not going to get him negative press. I think he probably had multiple strategies. And like if JD Vance had come in there and started saying some of the things that he normally says, which are fucking weird and creepy. But he didn't. And unhinged and fascist and misogynistic. And I could continue.

But then we might've seen a different Tim Walls. But because J.D. Vance's entire strategy was like, hey, I can appear normal even though I'm not. Well, I don't quite understand the hesitancy to then actually bring those things to the forefront. They were there. And why not talk about it? Because like my initial takeaway here is I don't think anyone necessarily clearly won. I think both of them did just fine. But if anyone comes out slightly better

than what they were going in, I would say it is Vance. It's Vance, I would agree. Because somehow, Walls was able to humanize Vance over the course of the debate. It was a very, very friendly exchange. And just serves to undercut the the months of work that Walls has done to paint Vance as a weird unhinged extremist, which he is, and instead making him seem like just a reasonable politician that, although we may disagree on a few things, we actually agree on a lot of a lot of the problems

and solutions. We both care about this country We're trying to help people and like no JD Vance like there was that bit where they were talking about mass shootings And he was like I truly believe that Vance. Yeah, you know cares about these kids JD Vance Doesn't give a shit about dead kids never has never will he's not capable of it And it undercut one of the more powerful moments that walls had where he he was like, my son was at a mass shooting. Christ have mercy. I was, it was so interesting too, because I know Walls is, and I know that I'm coming into this

as the guy who's generally pretty anti-gun control, but I'm just from perspective of democratic party strategy. Number one, this is something they go after hard. So you can't half ass it, right? This is not like the border where they really do feel a need to like lean into the right-wing argument. The dims are very unequivocal about what they, about like the fact that they want to ban IRF-15s. Walls didn't really commit to that until a little bit when he was specifically pushed on whether

or not he agreed with an assault weapons ban. And instead, his language up until that point was not very different from Vance's, aside from their disagreement over fortifying schools, but it was all stuff around the guns. Whereas the Democratic Party's line and the line of most Democratic politicians has been, it's about the guns. And I did find it interesting that Walls,

he had to kind of be goaded into really embracing that by the moderator. Now, one of the first things I noticed from watching the debate, which just happened like once or twice, and I realized this was just like a reoccurring trend across the whole night, is that each candidate would try to separate the other from their running mate. Be like, I'm sure Walls or I'm sure Vance agrees with me on this, but their running mate doesn't and that's the real problem.

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

yes, these debates are probably only watched by freaks, but I think there are also certain freaks who are like weird, like independent, centrist-y freaks. And I think this is who they were going after. This entire debate was focused on appealing to the center. It wasn't really based on like going heavy into like each side's own base because they've already made up their minds. And I think the issue for me at the end of this debate is because both of them were trying to court the center

vote, I think Vance did about just as good as Walls did going after the center and Walls kind of even helped him. And in effect, if Vance comes off as just a slightly better debater when they're going after the same base, that just leaves Walls with like not really making any ground. Where he could have actually just hit Vance quite hard and actually gone more on like a party line, or actually just like gone more towards like all the reasons that Vance is fucked up, which he just avoided to do. Yeah.

So my main takeaway was like, if they're both courting the center and Vance kind of barely edged him out in some regards, maybe Walls should have just actually been way more aggressive and the kind of lack of aggression really only hurt the Democrats because in the end it kind of benefits Vance if you give this like half-assed mediocre performance. We'll see where it, because again, this is not being listened to by average people in the same way that like the last presidential debate was. This is not, I don't think moves the needle one way or the other because it was so close.

I would be inclined to agree with you that I think Vance did more of the things he needed to do for this to be a benefit to him. I'm not sure in a way that helps the campaign because most of what Vance did that probably helps him was stuff that I think would set him up better in a world where Trump doesn't win reelection. Sure. That would set him up to continue to have a career and to be re-embraced by respectable kind of politics. The thing that makes me kind of doubt myself, because I think there's a possibility this

comes out as a walls win. And if that is the case, it will be entirely because of the last question on January 6th. Because the way these things tend to work in popular memory, not again people like us who sit through the whole thing, nearly all of whom are journalists or unusually engaged voters. But the thing that I, there's two moments that are most likely, one from each of them, in my opinion, to get clipped out and go viral. And for Vance, it was the January 6th thing where Walls drilled him. And I think this was actually one of his few fairly effective aggressive moments where he was like, forced him to answer and Vance refused to answer as to whether or not

he thought Trump had lost in 2020 in a way that was, I think, kind of embarrassing for him. And is easy, probably pretty easy to clip out. That might wind up being the big kind of viral moment of the night. If it's not that, it'll be walls flubbing. We should talk about the China question. But I don't think the China question that walls flubbed is on an issue that like

Americans overall care about which is Tim Walls now may be Exaggerating when he talked about his vacation in China one time in the 80s Yeah, let's uh, let's take a quick break and then let's dive in a little bit on that. Yeah. So first off, everyone in this debate pronounced China correctly, which is a step forward from the ones that have involved Trump the last couple of cycles. The downside is no one knows how to say Iran. Not a single person. And not a single mention of Ukraine. Oh yeah. Well, that was interesting to me.

That is interesting. Yeah. Not one moment where we talked about Ukraine, which- They kind of blazed past foreign policy really quickly, which is a little surprising considering the events of this morning. There are literally missiles landing in Tel Aviv right now, like people are talking with I think some reasons to whether or not Israel might consider a nuclear response like shit is legitimately a problem. I mean and this

is how they started the debate. They started by talking about how this was going to be like a debate focused on how presidents or these vice presidents will handle like America in a sudden crisis. As we've seen with the hurricane this weekend and now escalating war in the Middle East. And although that was their kind of opening framing, they really got over those hurdles quite quick and then started talking about extremely boring shit for the rest of the like hour and a half. The very first question was basically, you know

Iran's bombing Israel which like I would did Israel do anything to fucking Lebanon right before that like interesting context from the Journalist there but Iran's bombing Israel if you're in the situation room Tim walls What do you tell the president if you're the last voice should should he let Israel carry out a strike on Iran and? If you're the last voice, should he let Israel carry out a strike on Iran? And his response was a carbon copy of what Kamala has said every time she's been asked on it. Israel has a right to defend itself. October 7th was horrible. But you know, civilian casualties, bad too.

So it was a non-answer, but it was the same non-answer that the campaign has always given. So I was not surprised by it. It was exactly what I expected from him. He started off a little shaky, certainly sounded nervous. I think this immediately kind of gave Vance a head up. His first like three minutes, he was clearly uncomfortable. He got better. Especially because like Vance has like debate kid energy, right? Yeah.

But Walls did start getting better as soon as he pivoted away from this question to just attacking Trump, which is kind of his strong suit. Yeah, I think Vance's response there is interesting. So Walls gave, he was a little shaky, I think just because they had started because he got better on that. But he gave what has become the standard non-answer answer for the campaign.

JD Vance started his answer on the question of, what would you tell the president if he was asking if he should allow potentially, you know, a massive escalated strike by Israel in Iran, what would you tell him if you're the last guy in the situation room? And JD Vance started the response to that by summarizing the book he'll Billy eligible. That was in fact the bulk of his response was him talking about who he is and where

he comes from. And then being like, yeah, I guess it's fine if Israel does whatever. It was a an incredible response and it struck me as the response of a guy who doesn't think his partner is gonna become the president again. I thought that was very odd. Yeah, yeah. He was positioning himself for future jobs.

Correct. Yeah. I mean, he was different kind of than the other answers. Maybe it was just they were both a little bit off their game first question. That happens to everybody in a debate. They both were nervous. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, this is this also when Vance deployed his one of his reoccurring catchphrases is a peace through strength. Yeah. Oh, I hated that horrible. I hated that because it it's also I mean, that is very close to the quote from the Brotherhood of Nod and Command and Conquer. And JD Vance, you are no Kane, you know,

who lives in death, by the way. In general, I think Vance painted Trump as having like a provable track record of proving him as like, Trump is gonna end the chaos that we faced as a nation the past four years, whether that be economic or with war. He was extremely consistent on that. And he's trying to point to like, was your life better under Trump, especially economically?

And like, everyone's brains were completely fried by 2020. So we actually no one remembers what 2017 was like at all. So you actually can't recall that whatsoever, let alone kind of Trump's mishandling of the pandemic led to like the biggest recession in modern history, which also For some reason walls just never brought up No, well, he does he did a little he said that like he talked about how when they came in they were dealing with A massive recession. Yeah. Yeah, the like second thing they talked about was climate change, which was Jesse Jesse waters of foxes was very mad that that was the second thing they talked about.

Framing through Hurricane Helene. Yeah, he was very upset about it, which is okay, sir. Vance Audley quickly accepted the climate change framing for the sake of the argument. Talked about how moving energy production from the quote-unquote dirtiest parts of the world back to America where we are the cleanest would be one way to help. I think it would have worked on my dad, that response. Like the whole, you know, well, we're clean, so we just got to bring back manufacturing. You know, it was not a bad answer in terms of doing what he needed to do. It was obviously nonsense.

And the moderator called him very well on that, like ended by just being like, by the way, like there's no argument among scientists about like how carbon impacts global warming. I think overall, a tie or maybe slightly favoring Wals, that whole segment, like he did not, I don't think he did badly there. No, I think Wals did a good job connecting the economy to the environment.

Yeah. How as the environment gets worse, the local economy gets worse, especially for like farmers, not like for like Green New Deal Democrats, but for like everyday farmers. And again, pivoted very quickly to just attacking Trump and Trump's climate denial. I tried to press Vance on Trump's climate denial and Vance kind of, you know, again, tried to just blame for manufacturing, saying that Kamala's like rhetoric and record does not match her actual actions, which are which are increasing foreign manufacturing. In general, Vance kind of fell back on a whole bunch of like nationalistic framing regarding the environment and regarding like the economy,

especially manufacturing. That was one of his reoccurring talking points. Yeah. So we are getting to see some of the times this has been in real time, where they just published Ross Duthat's article, Vance's Dominant Debate Performance Shows Why He's Trump's Running Mate. And the URL of the article shows that it was initially put into the CMS about a week ago on the 25th. And they dropped the article about halfway through the debate. So cool. That said, it's kind of unclear to me how the rest of this is going to shake out. They also could have just written two articles, one where Vance did well and one where Walls

did well. Yeah. But that is still that's funny. I don't know that that'll matter either. We'll see where people land. It was interesting to me. Walls did do something that I liked twice. Neither time did he give it enough force, but he pointed out twice that a big part of the

housing crisis is VCs buying up affordable housing, jacking up the price, jacking up the price of rent. That that is like a massive issue. He brought that up. He said housing shouldn't be treated as a commodity, which I never expected to hear from a candidate in one of these debates. But he brought them both up like a guy on a debate who is like just kind of throwing out a side point so you don't forget to say it, as opposed to someone emphasizing it. And the thing to do with JD Vance is to point that

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

It is not people coming here from fucking Honduras. Like, it's people like you who need to be reigned in by the government. And he just wasn't willing to commit to the answer that he clearly had in his pocket. No, he just never went on the attack and it's just odd because he kept he was probably coached on this but like I think it's coaching. He did not do any of the things that gave him this job in the first place. He didn't play to any of his strengths. Instead, Vance was able to play to Vance's own strengths, and Walls was able to just be a slightly less polished moderate, which why are you trying to frame him

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

via citizens. No one feels the need to bring that up. CBS did have a little fact check or not a fact check necessarily, but like a little comment talking about how how the majority of Americans polled are in favor of deportations. But they specifically asked Vance like, how is your military deportation plan going to work? And will you separate like children that are born in the United States from illegal immigrants and Vance just refused to answer that question Repeatedly sure try to get him to answer multiple times He continually refused it instead saying that like com was border policy is already a child separation policy

Yeah, there was a great moment there where he got angry at them for fact-checking fact-checking specifically on his claims But illegal immigrants in Springfield. Yeah, yeah, because those migrants, in fact, had legal status. And he was like, you guys said you weren't going to fact check. No, no, no. He didn't say. He shouted. Yeah, he yelled.

The rules were that you were not going to fact check. That he just explained how immigration works, how legal immigration works. They were like, thank you for explaining how immigration works. Thank you for explaining the legal process of immigration. This has been one thing that Vance has been doing on the campaign trail, is just explaining the legal process of immigration and just saying, I'm still going to call this illegal because I want it to be illegal. And you're like, okay, you can't, like, I guess,

I guess we could just use words to mean whatever we want. Sure, why not mm-hmm yeah If this comes out in the public opinion being in waltz's favor It'll be because of those moments yeah that one at the end and those moments where Vance was like yelling and they they cut out his mic at one point yeah Like that kind of stuff. I don't think I don't know I again I don't think anyone's gonna really listen to this bait enough debate enough for there to be It to make much of an impact, but those were not great moments for him

Yeah, but those are the kind of things that get clipped out and spread across the internet Yeah So we'll see and so the people that didn't didn't watch the entire thing will some of them will see clips like that Yeah, I think the immigration section certainly showed kind of walls in his stronger moments, talking about how the past year we've actually seen a decrease in opiate deaths. He continued to talk about how Trump killed the bipartisan, a conservative immigration bill, which we're probably not fans of, but he's trying to make it play well electorally. And then pivoted to Springfield and said how like the Republican mayor came

out and said none of this stuff was true, but Trump and Vance kept spewing it. State law enforcement had to escort kids to school. But even in this like Springfield section, which Walls was the first one to bring up, Vance was the big driver of this lie. But even in Walls' mention of this, he tries to separate Vance from Trump. He primarily blamed Trump for this and totally just ignored Vance's massive contribution to this big misinformation campaign that led to these bomb threats. He just let Vance get off easy. And I think this part was saved by this little fact check and Vance's little meltdown over

this legal immigration comment. But still, it kind of showed a little bit of even in Walls' stronger moments, he refused to really harp on Vance for being weird. Yeah. Speaking of people who watched the debate, I don't think our sponsors did because they have real jobs. Hello, we are back. Now one of the biggest issues for me in this campaign is how much time exactly did walls spend in Hong Kong?

This is literally one of the primary issues impacting my vote. There were 150,000 people in the streets in New York City today demanding to know whether or not Tim Walz was really in China during the Tiananmen Square uprisings, you know? Thankfully CBS News is on the case. Yes. We didn't have a second for Ukraine. Not one second. There was at no point any questions asked about the loss of life due to the genocide in Gaza.

Not one, but by God. This was this was really goofy. Basically they asked Walls about this comment he made in 2014 about being in Hong Kong during the Tiananmen Square massacre when kind of reporting shows that he only arrived in August, basically like two or three months later. And I don't know if either Walls just misunderstood the question or purposely avoided it, but instead of talking about this, he just summarized his entire career both as a school teacher and in politics. And then emphasized that although he spent time in China, he is loyal to the United States.

And it was just really odd. And like, you could even see Vince slowly like smirking. The longer walls just kept going on about his career. And at the end of his like weird like non-answer about his commitment to the United States, the moderators asked again. They're like, well, were you there for the massacre? And then he very quickly clarified, it was like, I mean, yeah, I might've,

I might've misspoke. I don't understand why you wouldn't just very clearly say, yeah, I misspoke, I was there for the aftermath of the massacre, I was there during the uprising. Or, I got misquoted, I was there the year of the uprising. Yeah. He was there during some of the uprising, but he was there, but he arrived in the aftermath of the massacre. I don't know why you can just say, yes, I arrived in the aftermath of the massacre.

I misspoke 10 years ago. Like, it's very simple. Your weird, long, two minute avoided answer just makes you like look like weak and unnecessarily slimy. It doesn't make any sense. It just is weird because of course they were going to ask that question. Why did you not have a prepared answer? I mean, this only became a new story today.

Like this only became a new story like a few hours ago. Still have some kind of a prepared generic answer. I'm sure he did. My guess is that if I was debate prepping him, I would have assumed they were gonna ask one of the questions about his service based on all of the different sort of like, totally right wing shit coming out.

Everything about his performance was the result of a guy who was over prepared and prepared by people whose focus was on him not upsetting the apple cart and embarrassing the campaign, not on him winning. That is how he was coached. And he was, he was well prepared as a general rule for the most part when JD Vance would like make a claim about, you know, fentanyl, he had a counter fact, right? That he could bring up.

And he did that reasonably well. He seemed confident about the information. He clearly put in the work, but none of what he was prepared for was hurting Vance. He was entirely prepared to not make an easy fuck up, which maybe is the smart move if you're just like, we just don't want this to upset anything because there's no way it'll help. Like my guess is that he was told going into this by his handlers, this debate is not going to win us the election, but it could lose us the election. So what we need to make sure happens is that you don't fuck anything up or seem too mean or seem too weird yourself.

So we are going to like train you to be as boring as possible. And they did that. And like as a follow up, Vance was asked about his previous anti-Trump, Hitler comments. And specifically was asked if he can be trusted to actually give Trump good, honest advice and not just say whatever he thinks Trump wants to hear. Which Vance gave us similarly, avoid an answer and just talked about tariffs. And then the moderators did not follow up with Vance about his avoidant answer. So there you go.

The abortion segment is basically a rehash of what happened in the in the Kamala Trump debate With like bands talking about a bill in Minnesota who that he claimed like leads to the death of like babies who were aborted Like after birth or like some some some kind of odd thing that just isn't true. Yeah, that was that was pretty silly This was one of the issues where he was weakest. And I think we were all maybe slightly upset that Walls again was kind of hands off on this. Historically, Vance has made a lot of crazy comments on podcasts about this topic and neither the moderators nor Walls really pressed him super hard on it. Vance himself tried to largely be on the attack with this like late term abortion,

killing babies after birth thing. That Walls just tried to easily kind of brush aside as just not being true. Yeah. Speaking of healthcare, Vance oddly tried to claim that Trump like saved Obamacare. At this point in the debate, things just kind of started getting a little bit boring. I don't think this debate had as many like good questions as the last one. No. It was a very like 2012 style debate.

It just it was flat. It was flat. It didn't feel kind of like present. So they talked about Obamacare, how Trump saved Obamacare, and Wallace talked about how Trump hurt Obamacare. Just kind of boring back and forth. And then finally, the last question was about like democracy in January 6th, election denial, just kind of boring back and forth. And then finally, the last question was about democracy in January 6th, election denial, that kind of stuff. And Vance opened by saying, we have other issues to solve beyond election denial.

He said that we should have open debate about the issues of the 2020 election. He then downplayed January 6th and emphasized instead the bigger threat to democracy was Facebook censorship and how people are like ending friendships over political disagreements. And this was bizarre. I think this was Wall's like strongest moment. He talked about how there was 140 police officers assaulted on January 6th, some who later died. He mentioned this other story about how like on January 6th, some who later died. He mentioned this other story about how, like, on January 6th, there were similar protests in a whole bunch of different states.

And he mentioned one in Minnesota where people threatened to march to his home and his kid and his dog needed to be escorted out by police because people were threatening to go to his home saying that there might be casualties. I thought that was maybe, that was a pretty good moment. Four walls brought up how people in January 6th tried to kill Mike Pence, which everyone seems to forget. It's not talked about enough. I mean, yeah.

Look, that's one of those things where like, my issues, they are political, not about the specific death. Yes, yes. Yeah. Vance tried to be like, hey, you know, everyone does a little election denial. In 2016, there was Russia Gate. And I think Walls did a pretty good follow up by saying like, January 6th wasn't about

Facebook ads. It wasn't like that wasn't the problem. The problem was the people storming the Capitol trying to kill everyone inside. Like that was the real issue. And real censorship is stuff like book banning. First time we had to mention of any of that. But even in this section about J6, he still like thanked Vance for having this conversation

and then asked him if Trump lost the election, which Vance just avoided answering instead asking Walls, did Kamala censor Americans on Facebook? Which is just a great, just a great equally important problem. Yeah, these two, these two issues. And unfortunately, Waltz's initial response was like, I don't run Facebook, which just say he's lying. Like, just call him a liar, Tim. Yeah, he's a liar.

It's wild that like, we're talking about like January 6th, and advanced his biggest concern is people being banned on Facebook. Like, I think that it's not gonna play well for him It's not gonna play well, but also yeah, it was just a missed opportunity There were a lot of those the entire debate was a missed opportunity Robert. Yeah, and like Walls is I think slight fumble here you can point out his like closing statement saying like I'm surprised that we have this coalition From like Bernie Sanders to Dick Cheney It's a Taylor Swift. You're like, yeah, that is that is a little surprising. Maybe that's a bit of the problem Oh, that was a nightmare line for me of all the names to drop

Dick Cheney Dick Cheney and Taylor Swift hand in hand. Well cuz like even among moderates. Do you think dick Cheney's popular? That was my that was my last straw. I was like I was like who? hand in hand. Well, because like even among moderates, do you think Dick Cheney is popular? That was my last straw. I was like, who, who prepped him? Who did his debate prep? Who agreed that statement? Someone who really likes fucking Dick Cheney. Was it Karl Rove?

Did they get Karl Rove again? God damn it. Was Hillary involved with this debate prep? Like shoot, like I know the Clintons were involved with Kamala's debate prep. Were they involved with with Tim Walz's debate prep? Yeah, I'm not sure but I think this kind of underlines I know this is kind of a larger issue with like the Democratic Party in the year 2024 but I think this also underlines like the my issue with Walz's performance here is like this

debate both candidates were going after the Dick Cheney voter they were going after like neocons and independents. The literal devil, yes. And like for that base, I think Vance does appeal to them more in this debate. I think Vance did a better job appealing to those people in this debate, which left Walls coming off as just slightly worse and not really giving him any like standout like performances. I think if Walls actually like emphasized all the reasons that Vance is a freak and is bad, I think that may have showed him

to be more of a unique candidate. Instead, they both came off as just kind of boring moderates, which just doesn't make sense because that's like the opposite reason that both of these men were picked for their chaffs. They were both picked to represent this slightly more extreme wing of the party with Walls being a bit more progressive

and Vance being a bit more fascist. Now it makes sense that Vance is gonna go after the moderates. I just don't think Walls being a bit more progressive and Vance being a bit more fascist. Now it makes sense that Vance is going to go after the moderates. I just don't think Walls needed to. Agree. That's kind of all my all my thoughts on this riveting, riveting two hour debate. I have to say me too, man. Well, we've got a flash poll from CBS News. 42% for Vance, 41% for Walls, 17% set a tie.

Great. Yeah, that was the general vibe. That was the general vibe. Yep, yep, yep. Fox News was Walls was good enough, Vance did just fine. Moderators obnoxious, moderators smug and arrogant bias, but that's just typical. I think the moderators were fine. I think overall it wasn't a very well laid out debate.

Yeah. I think the fact that Vance was able to be humanized with the assistance of Walls makes Vance kind of the winner in the way that like this did more to benefit Vance than it did to benefit Walls. And the fact that Walls kind of acted counter intuitively to his whole line of messaging from the past year is a fundamental mistake that I think I hope the Democrats would like re-evaluate going forward. But they're the Democrats.

So just just interesting, interesting take that I've seen online and also a take for my Midwest moderate Democrat mother is she said to me, just remember, Tim is from the Midwest and Minnesota is The most Midwest there is it is not in his nature to be anything but polite Not what we're used to seeing in a debate, but it was a little refreshing so okay, so Yeah, if you went into this already liking walls this this won't make you dislike well I already my mom definitely already liked walls. Right? And that's why I think this is largely inconsequential.

Even if Vance got a little bit of a leg up, it is largely inconsequential. Do you know who the winner of the debate was? Minnesota. Sounds like a great place to live. Got great PR tonight. I guess so. Walls was clearly doing the best here when he was like just talking about how nice Minnesota is. It's great here. And Tim, we all know what the winters are like there. Yeah, sir.

You're not fooling anybody. Like, come on. Sir. That said, if you live in the Portland area or really anywhere in Southern California, move to Minnesota. Just get on out of here. You'll love it.

You're gonna have a great time. Everyone in Minnesota is gonna love you. People love Californians when they move other places. It goes well, it's always happy, always a good time. So if I had any advice to end on, it's people who are currently in Los Angeles, move to Minnesota, you will be beloved. People will wanna listen to your policy ideas.

It'll be great. Hey, I'm Gianna Prenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadsden. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline, a new podcast from LinkedIn News and iHeart podcasts. When you're just starting out in your career, you have a lot of questions. Like how do I speak up when I'm feeling overwhelmed? Or can I negotiate a higher salary if this is my first real job? Girl, yes. Each week we answer your unfiltered work questions. Think of us as your work besties you can turn to for advice. And if we don't know the answer, we bring in experts who do, like resume specialist Morgan

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my mouth at once and then try not to suffocate. That's that's what's already happened. You missed that. Maybe if you were a subscriber to Cooler Zone Media, you would have been you wouldn't. I'm sorry. I'm not doing that.

Not doing the weird FCC note. Cool'm not doing that not doing the weird FCC no cool as our media will not provide you access to footage of games Suddenly in a premium package, but we're not here today to talk about snacks sadly. There will be another podcast We are here today to talk about my recent trip to the daddy and gap in We are here today to talk about my recent trip to the Dalyan Gap in Panama. So, I guess to start off with, we should probably explain, like, do you think, Meera, I need to explain, like, where it is and what? Look, I went to school with a kid who, actually, this happened multiple times. Now I'm thinking back on it. Like, people who thought that the Arabian Peninsula was in Mexico so like yeah wow yeah okay I'm just imagining that what a culture somehow

got it mixed up with a Yucatan it was really sort of oh wow incredible stuff happening in in in my schools yeah Yeah, fascinating. Yeah. Okay. So for those of you who are not familiar, the Dalyan Gap is an area between Columbia and Panama that has historically like, I've seen a lot of characterizations of this, which I think erase the existence to indigenous people, which shouldn't be shocking given the corporate media, right? But people have lived in this area for thousands of years. They have happy and fulfilled lives. They thrive.

There is no desolate place. It's just a place that hasn't made itself amenable to capitalism. Really. It's a place between Columbia and Panama where there are no roads. There are not navigable rivers. It is extremely mountainous. It is one of the most humid places on earth, it is covered in incredibly dense jungle, there are fast-flowing rivers which you have to cross as you travel there and for about

half a million migrants last year it was the only way that they could come from South America to Central America and they continued their journey on to North America. From my understanding, like this isn't just people like from South America, like there's a bunch of other people who come into South America because it's easier to get in who are taking this route too. Yeah, that's right. So for most people who are coming to want to come to the United States, they can't fly directly to the United States, right? It's quite rare to get their asylum that way. Very rare. And there's a CHNV Cuba Haiti Nicaragua Venezuela program, which in theory allows that it's backed up for like two years. So most people will fly to a country in South America.

The most regular one is Brazil because Brazil doesn't impose visas on countries that don't impose visas on it. And then from there, they begin making their way north. Brazil because Brazil doesn't impose visas on countries that don't impose visas on it. And then from there, they begin making their way north. Um, geography, understanders will realize that Brazil is a very long way from the United States. Yeah, that's very bad. Like that's, that's not good. That's not good at all. Short of Argentina, you really, you really can get that much further away,

you know, in the continental Southern America. So what people tend to do, especially, so I spoke to just off the top of my head, people from Nepal, people from India, people from Venezuela, people from Columbia, people from Angola, people from Cameroon, Togo, Iran. I spoke to a Kurdish guy, but he was from Iran. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. That's most of them. Probably China. Right. I know, I spoke to a Kurdish guy, but he was from Iran. I'm trying to think off the top of my head. That's most of them. Probably China.

Right. I know, I know there's, I didn't speak to any Chinese migrants. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. I went fully prepared with like a machine to translate and everything. And, um, I didn't see any Chinese migrants, which is quite surprising. Haitian people, of course, especially Haitian people. The Chinese were coming through the Daring Gap

in big numbers last year. The only thing I heard about Chinese migrants was that someone had seen the remains of someone who they described as Chinese. Yeah. If you're not familiar with the journey, it is the most dangerous part of the migration route in the Americas, right?

It's one of the most dangerous migration routes on Earth. People have to walk for between two days and a week. I've heard even 15 days, but the accounts I had maxed out a week. There is nowhere to get water. There is nowhere to get food. You have to walk through mud that can come up to your waist. You have to cross rivers that are higher than you are tall. You have to climb boulders, shimmy across cliff faces. The accounts I heard and the things I saw were pretty horrible.

We've kind of had a fun introduction, but I would rather go back to the uncertainty I had of being in Syria last year and knowing that there were bombs falling on people every night, than have to see some of that stuff again. It's horrific. Like, I can't really... I'm obviously working on a scripted series and we'll have that out soon, but in terms of the things that we do to each other as humans, like little children die in the Dering Gap all the time. People carry their babies across rivers on their shoulders. People carry other people's babies when people are too tired from carrying their own children.

And not everyone who enters leaves, right? If you drink the water from the river, you'll probably die because there are dead bodies in the river further upstream, right? There's human waste in that river. If you fall and break your leg, you'll die. If you run out of water, you're not really in a place where anyone has any spare water to give you. It's horrific. Every single account of the gap that I heard was that no one should do it. That it's terrible, that it's inhuman, it's like nothing people have ever seen.

But people don't have a choice, right? It's the only way for people. I spoke to probably, I have over a hundred interviews recorded. I spoke to more people than that. The vast bulk of them were from Venezuela, a place where I used to live. I understand that lots of them have children. Some of them are bringing their children, some of them are going ahead and trying to send money, remittances back to their children. And everyone said the same thing, that there's no future for them in their country, that they don't see a way of succeeding, of raising their families, of having a future for themselves there.

I met a trans lady from Venezuela who was saying that there are legal things in place that won't allow her to have her gender affirmed by documents, where she wasn't able to graduate with her degree. Jesus Christ. Yeah, like things that just completely, that deliberately torpedo your life, just being who you are as yourself, right? People aren't doing this because they want this fictional housing assistance

or whatever it is, Trump and J.D. Vance. People are doing this because they don't see a future for themselves. I spoke to Iranian women, right, who had been on the road for nearly a year trying to avoid prosecution at home for having participated in protests for like basic human rights. Yeah. It's just the things I heard and saw were deeply, deeply upsetting. And I think it's really important that we, I guess, kind of bear witness to this because it doesn't really get discussed. When the US media talks

about migration, maybe if we're lucky, they'll come to the southern border for a day, right, and do some impressionistic piece on it. But like, pretty often they talk about migrants, but they don't talk to them. And so like, I think it's important that we talk to them. And I think and do some impressionistic piece on it. But pretty often they talk about migrants, but they don't talk to them. And so I think it's important that we talk to them. And I think it's important that we face up to the fact that this is a choice that the people who have been elected in this country have made.

They've decided that the only way, for instance, the only place to use CBP-1, right, is in southern Mexico or north of Mexico City. Can you explain what CBP One is for people who don't remember? Yeah, sorry. So CBP One is an app that allows people to apply for an interview for asylum. Just to sort of skip ahead, I guess, people understand that they have to use CBP One and

they understand that they can only do it in Mexico. And the people who I met in the Darien are now in Mexico, right? They take a series of buses north, not all of them. I'll explain why, but some of them haven't been able to leave Panama yet. They take a series of buses north, and they get to the Guatemala-Mexico border, and they cross in Tapachula, and then they work out that CBP-1 is not compatible with the vast majority of cell phones It doesn't work with older Android like Samsung phones. Oh my fucking god. Yeah. Yeah, it uh it works with iPhones and

The I didn't see a single person with an iPhone if you're wealthy You can avoid the daddy end right there are ways you can go around in a boat. There are ways that you can sort of take a shorter route. The route that I was on is the route that people who do not have the resources to avoid this dreadful journey take. And now they get to Mexico and they realize that, yeah, you have to get to Mexico to make the application, right?

And the way to get there is to cross the Darien. And then when you get there, you realize that this thing requires you to have a special telephone that you don't have. It's just very bleak. It's a level of human evil, both in the sense of it has been actively designed like this and in the sense that they don't give a shit. Like the fact that that fucking app doesn't work on androids and doesn't work on older androids back at the app fucking suck shit.

Like the entire way yeah like everything about this journey is designed to be painful to kill people to to strip away like the hope that people have yeah and it's and it's designed to do this to like attempt to satiate the fucking insane bloodlust of like seven dipshits and fucking like rural southern Illinois. It's like, okay, there's literally nothing you could do to ever appease these people. The only the only thing that will ever appease them is their own death. Like nothing you're ever going to do to these fucking immigrants is ever going to make these people like, like you could you could fucking you could put these people in a country that has zero immigrants at all and they would still scream

About it. There's there's nothing you can fucking do and people have decided that in order to Basically people have decided in order to try to get like a 1% higher margin in an election They're probably still going to lose. They're going to just fucking inflict inhuman suffering on unbelievably large numbers of people. Yeah, like, I think that's the thing I want people to really like grasp is that like somebody has made a decision. Maybe we should take an ad break here.

All right, advertising break. All right, we're back. So specifically, I want to talk about what the US is doing right now in Panama, what it started doing since July. That's why I wanted to go when I did. Panama had a change of presidency in July. We have Molina as president now, and he's promised to close the Darien, right? If your source was his social media, then you would think it was closed. I saw about a thousand people a day crossing. None of them had seen a barrier.

None of them had seen the razor wire that he's posted about. They didn't know that it was this thing. What they did know was that the US had an election in November and everybody wants to get here before that. Yeah. You know, I tried to explain that like, we actually don't transition power immediately, right? That happens in January, but everybody is concerned to get here before the election. And what the US is doing in Panama is the US

is currently funding deportations. And I like saw that happening firsthand with sorry, this is, this is honestly one of those things that just really fucks me up. And like I need to, like, I know it just, I tried to record stuff at a time and I just, it's all just me saying this sucks. This is terrible. This like what it looks like. And so you leave Bajo Chiquito, right? Which is Bajo Chiquito is an indigenous village. It's a village of the Embra people who were wonderful. They were nothing but kind to me.

They stayed in their houses for a week and slept in my hammock in the house. I shared their food, held their little babies. Like they, they were incredible and kind hosts and, uh, very grateful to them. From Bajiquito, which is this tiny village, right? The population of Bajiquito triples every day. 500 people live there. A thousand people roll up every day. And then they're transported in dugout canoes, like a tiny canoe that is carved out from the trunk

of a tree with a two-stroke bolted on the back. I think I posted a picture on Twitter. If not, I will do. The migrants are taken upstream. They pay 25 bucks each and they're taken five hours upstream. If they don't have the money, there's three canoes every day that are provided for free. And they generally try and make sure that all the women and children get in those canoes, right? One of the things that Embra has done

is made everyone wear life jackets, just because a lot of these people can't swim, right? They've been crossing rivers above their heads. They told me that they made human chains, right? So everybody sort of locks their arms together because the rivers wash people away. They're transported from Bajo Chiquito to a place called Lajas Blancas,

which is the first migrant reception center in Panama. So they're now leaving, like, they don't have reservations in Panama, but they're in the Embraer, Wunan, Comarca, and then when they get there, they're in the Italian Comarca. So they're in sort of outside of an almost entirely indigenous, like, state of Panama and in what you would consider like Panamanian government custody, I guess, when they enter in La Hasblancas. And when they get there, they register, right? They show their passport, they do all that stuff. And that's where UN has shelters, the Red Cross has a facility there, the HIAS has the

Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Global Brigades, all these big NGOs that you're used to seeing in these places have facilities there. But to leave Las Blancas, they need 60 bucks per person to get on a bus, right? And if they don't have 60 bucks to get on a bus, I was told these buses are owned by Panamanian parliamentary deputies, but I haven't been able to confirm that. Jesus fucking Christ. Yeah, someone is putting 55 people on a bus, taking 60 bucks from each of them and sending about 20 buses a day.

Like someone is making a lot of money. Yeah. People will remember that one of these buses crashed last year killing 42 migrants. But the really bleak thing is it's not the bus, it's not the 10 hour bus ride. Like those people are so happy to be getting on the bus because they're continuing. It's the people who don't have 60 bucks.

And like they've made it this far with a combination of whatever savings they had and like incredible tenacity, right? Like they pay someone in Colombia, obviously to bring them, so to get to the start of their walk in Dalián, they leave from Neco Clea in Colombia, come across on a lancha like a speedboat, and then they walk up to the Colombian border where the guides then leave them. Now the guides are obviously like, this area is controlled by the golf cartel in Colombia, right? So they have safe passage through that area. None of them had anything bad to say about that area. It's when the guides leave them and they're on their own into Panama.

That's when they didn't have water. They didn't have food because no one's told them they need water and food, to be fair, right? Like they weren't, they didn't think it was going to take as long as it was, be as hard as it was. There's lots of them have learned a little bit from TikToks and stuff. So some of them bring a bit more, but four days of water is a lot of water. Like speaking from experience, I backpack in the desert. If you don't have the right equipment, it's hard to carry.

So yeah, it's just heavy. Yeah, right. Like you like that's the other part. Like, if you want four liters of person, right, that's like gonna be four kilograms. And that's a day. So you multiply that by four days. What is it? What is it in pounds? 8.8 pounds is four liters of water. Yeah. You're also carrying this through the fucking jungle, which is... Yeah. Just like...

Everything's wet all the time, right? You're sweating, you're crossing rivers, your feet are always wet. Like everyone's feet when they arrive in La Hacblanca, so I took pictures of this, but they all have these crappy boots that they buy in N Blanca, so I took pictures of this, but they all have these crappy boots that they buy in Neco Clea in Colombia. And every bin in Bajo Chiquito is full of these boots because they suck and people's like the blisters I saw and like people getting trench foot, right? Like where the entire skin on their foot is just ready to slough off like a glove. Like everyone buys these crocs from a vendor in Bajo Chiquito

there. But like they can get through all that. Everyone who I met in Bajo Chiquito, everyone who I met on the trail, I had made, right? They did through tenacity. And like a lot of people said it, like it's a roulette. You go in there and you hope for the best. Not everyone makes it, but most of them do. So the people who had made it get to go to La Has Blancas, right? And if they can't afford the boat from Bahá'u'lláh to La Has Blancas, they can walk. It's not fun.

It's another eight hours of walking, right? I met some of those guys one day and I gave them water filters and stuff. I wasn't allowed to walk with them, but I was able to talk with them. I spoke to allowed to walk with them, but I was able to like talk with them and I spoke to them again when they arrived, right? And they get to last blankets and they're just, if they don't have 60 bucks and they don't have it, and then they stay there sometimes for months. And this is not a place to stay for months. Like I, they have little casitas, which they have for

like this one for unaccompanied children and then others, I think are allocated to families. But it's not much more than four walls and a roof. And most people don't even get that, right? Most people are looking for a flat spot to pitch the shitty tent that they bought in Columbia. And then they're just stuck there. And this is obviously a relatively new policy. They used to take five free people per bus, but they don't anymore. new policy, they used to take five free people per bus, but they don't anymore. Um, like from Baja Chiquito, they have three free boats a day, right? But leaving La Has Blanca, if you don't have the money, then you don't leave. And the people I spoke to that who were stuck there are still stuck there. People have been stuck there for more than a month.

Their children aren't going to school. They're sleeping on the ground. It, if this is not a place that's designed to be a long-term residence, it's designed to be like one night and moving through and every day new people arrive who can't afford it. And so the population is growing and growing and growing. And there seems to be no solution. No one I spoke to could point to what they want them to do. Right? Like they're being given free food by the government. Some of them said the food wasn't great. I'm not sure if

it's halal. Like sometimes some of them said they'd seen food that had pork in it, but I didn't see any food to have pork in it when I was there. So maybe that's been changed, but they're just stuck there. Yeah. There's nothing they can do. Right. If they want to have money transferred there, they can do it through a local intermediary who charges a 25% fee. So now if you don't have 60, yeah, like you need 75 bucks now, right. To get your 60 bucks now multiply that by a family of five.

You can start to see where it becomes inaccessible to people. Yeah. And that's, that's a lot of money. Yeah. Like if you're in this position, like that's, yeah. It costs so much more to travel on buses and by foot across the Americans than it would to fly. Yeah. Like all of them would love to fly, but they can't because we have this system that makes everyone money apart from the migrants. Yeah. And it's like it didn't fucking it didn't fucking used to be like this. Like when my family came to the US, like we didn't have to like, you know, we had a bunch of fucking

harrowing shit to like, flee the Japanese and like get to Taiwan. But it was like, like when my parents like, and like their parents like came to the US, they just they fucking flew in. Yeah. None of this fucking has to be the way any of this shit works It didn't used to be the way any of this shit works And it's like like these are people from countries and you know, it's like yeah, obviously like my parents were like bleeding from Taiwan to the US right which makes it easier But these are also these are people from places that the US fucking hates Yeah

and so like you you would expect them to get like At least somewhat similar treatment to people who came from like Taiwan Which is at the time, you know like US ally anti-china stuff But like no we've just decided to just feed these people to a fucking meat grinder. Yeah, and then gets me to my next fucking trauma Dump let's take a nap break before that. Yeah. Yeah. We're back. Okay. So yeah, as Mia mentioned, right, these are places that the US considers to be dictatorial or oppressive regimes, right, around Venezuela, Cuba, the three that come to mind, the people that I met, right?

And so a lot of these people have what's called a temporary protected status in the U S it doesn't mean that they necessarily can't be deported. Sometimes they can, but sometimes it makes it a bit harder, right? To deport to those countries. Panama, it's not governed by United States immigration law. Yeah. We gave on the day that Molino took office, Alejandro Mayorkas himself, the child of migrants from Cuba, I believe, went to Panama, attended the inauguration, and then announced this $6 million aid package, right?

Which the US was going to give to fund deportations from Panama directly. And I got to see those deportations happening, right? Like you'll hear them in my scripted series. Yeah. to see those deportations happening, right? Like you'll hear them in my scripted series. Yeah. But like watching somebody take a dad away from his baby or a mother away from her children

or one man's brother away from his brother, like it's just heartbreaking. These people have crossed the daddy end, right? They've undertaken a journey. Like I've done a lot of mountaineering. I've done a lot of climbing. I like to fuck around outside, but like I've never done anything

where I didn't know if I was gonna come back really. And like they've done that. They've taken this incredibly difficult journey. And then when they get to the other side, you, you, you, you and you, they get picked out and they get deported back, right? On flights that are paid for by your tax dollars and my tax dollars. Yeah.

And this includes flights to Cuba. This includes flights to Venezuela, right? Places that the US considers to be like dictatorial regimes. And now these people are back in Cuba. They're back in Venezuela, but their government knows that they tried to leave and they've spent all their fucking savings. So they're back in square one. I spoke to a few Colombians.

They've also deported a lot of Colombian people. Most of the Colombian people I spoke to in Las Blancas were deported. They called all the Colombian nationals to the office. And then these, I was told that they were only deporting people who had like warrants, like pending cases. But when these people got back to Colombia, they were just free to go, right? Like if you have a pending case and someone delivers you to the government, I'm not an expert in Colombian law enforcement, but it seems like that will be a good time to prosecute

that case. Yeah. And these people tell me that they've been let go. None of them told me if they had warrants. Now, like I'm just going off where they said. But that night they were texting me pictures themselves in handcuffs. By the next day they were back in Medellin telling me that they'd been sent home, including like, I was talking to a lady just before we recorded who, she doesn't

know where her children's father, her husband is, right? Jesus. Lots of people will have like, I guess, what's the English translation, like free unions. Like when they're like married for legal reasons, they don't go and have a wedding, but they're considered to be married. Common law marriage, I guess, would be the phrase, right?

Like they've lived together for a number of years, share a house, et cetera, often have children, but they're not like, they never had a wedding. So I don't know if that document makes difference, but I watched people have their children taken out their arms and be shoved in the back of trucks and be deported. And like, that fucking sucks. That is not something that I want to see again. And it happens every single day there.

And it happens because your taxes are paying for it. Didn't used to happen and now it does. And it's just heartbreaking. Like I don't really like it's, there's nothing you can do. You know, there's no, you know, I can't do anything to stop it. You can't do anything to stop it, right? Like what you can vote for Donald Trump who would like to machine gun every asylum seeker at the

border if he got a chance. Or you can vote to Kamala Harris, who has presided over record migrant deaths every year of her administration, who's sending your money to deport people in Panama, who knows that the choices that she's made are resulting in like deaths in Panama, death here, right? Like there were four people who died in a heat wave in the first week of September, four people who died in Otaimante wilderness, like in a tiny area 10 miles across of border in San Diego.

And my friends had to go and search their bodies and my friends found their remains and I had to confront the fact that like This is the toll of The rhetoric like this is what the rhetoric costs The other thing I want to mention is that like even in the most desperate moments of their lives Everyone looked out for one another in a way that like we don hear. Like one of the things that really struck me was that like everyone's kids are just kind of out and about, right? No, no one's particularly afraid of anyone hurting their kids. Like all of these kids.

And I saw people who'd got split up in the gap, find each other again in Bajo Chiquito and like, you know, there were strangers who'd carried someone's children for two days because that other person was so tired or they had another child they needed to carry. And like, I'm strangely comfortable, I guess, in refugee camps. Like I went to Panama City afterwards and like I couldn't handle it. It was too much for me and I had to stay in my hotel room. And like, I guess it was just difficult. But like, I feel safe in those places.

I feel comfortable. And in a sense, it's where you see the best of us and the worst of us, I guess. I can't imagine being in a place where I know I could lose my life if I slip and fall and then thinking, well, I've got to carry this little kid. Never met this kid before. I don't share a language You know, there was a group from Angola and they'd been carrying Venezuelan children, right? They can't even talk to one another but they they'd potentially risk their lives to help Yeah, it's it's it's pretty fucking bleak. I'm staying in touch with everyone

I met and and they're telling me about their journeys to the border Unfortunately, the thing that comes next is that eight to nine months delay as they apply for a CBP one appointment. And like, I wish I could offer something hopeful. Like, I guess what I'll say is what I always say that like, there isn't anyone you can vote for who will fix this. Like you can vote for corner West with Jill Stein. Like I'm not going to vote for someone who fucking supports the policies that are creating refugees

in Syria, right? Whatever. I'm not suggesting that that's the solution either. The things that you need to do are like, there is a person helping migrants in your community. I spoke to a Jesuit shelter. I'll put them in my scripted episode. I'm not a big religious shelter guy, but these guys were fucking great. Uh, these guys are saving people's lives and making sure that people

have the basic necessity, like literally turning up at the refugee camp and making sure everyone had toilet roll and, uh, toothbrushes and things that yeah, you don't need for one night, but you're going to be there for a month. You don't have, you know, what are you going to do? Spend five bucks on toothbrush and toothpaste, but that's five less bucks you have for your bus fare, right? So like, I'll put them out there. I would love to do a fundraiser.

Like if anyone can work out how to facilitate transfers to migrants who are in the camp for free, that would be great. That would be a service that would make things considerably easier for people. But the way that you fix this is showing up. It's showing up at the border if you live near the border. It's showing up in your community. It's countering this with people in your family, in your circle. There's a tacit agreement, I think, in the entire corporate media that migrants are humans without rights. Like, they're just numbers to these people because I don't see them talking to migrants,

right? Like, these are people who, you know, like I helped them change their babies. I carried their bags for them. I played with their kids so they could go take a shower. Like, they're people just like anyone else. Of course they are, right? But like, I don't know, they're important to me. And it's fucking miserable to see my tax dollars used

to make these people suffer. Yeah. These people should be more important than the fucking sons of boat dealers who's fucking got the land they live on because their ancestors fucking shot a bunch of people. Yeah. Like that's what's happening here is that these people who are, you know,

some of the most courageous people in the entire world are being sacrificed to appease a bunch of fucking shits. It's a level of evil that is just. Unfathomable. Yeah, I think like we really shouldn't. I'm somewhat ranting now, but like the pivot that even the Democrats have done in the last four years, right? Like those people need to be held accountable for what is resulting in like babies dying. Like I saw dead kids. I saw that because Kamala

Harris and Joe Biden, whichever other fucking Democrat senators and representatives keep voting for this shit, decided that it was okay for those babies to die because they didn't want Fox News to say mean stuff about them, or NBC to say mean stuff about them, right? Like, of course they're trying to move that stuff as far away from you as possible. Of course they want the deportations to be done in Panama, not here, so you don't see it in your community. And of course they want people to die crossing the Darien and not at our border because that's removed and you don't hear it Reported on right like it's not a Venezuelan woman died on Thursday. We're recording this on Tuesday

Wednesday you don't see that reported right you don't see that there are little kids bodies in the jungle reported because it's out of sight and out of mind. And like, I guess the thing you can do is constantly bring it back into people's minds and make them accountable for their choices. And like, I guess this is a point where the electoralists get mad at me. I'm not, I'm not voting for someone who chose that. Yeah. Like, and I never could, like I couldn't live with myself if I did. I know a system which reduces our political engagement to ticking a box every four years is asinine and childlike. Like I would much rather be out there every day helping people than voting once every four years. And like you can do both. Of course you can, but yeah,

there's not a voting solution for this. Like it requires all of us to do a lot of work because we're so far down the path, which ends in a really terrible place, right? It's already a terrible place. So these people's lives don't matter and that their children's lives don't matter and that we shouldn't care if they're dying in the jungle. And we've got a lot of work to do to get back from that because apparently it's okay with a lot of people in this country. Yeah. I think part of the reason why it's gotten this bad is that the social movements that had pushed the Democrats in a slightly better direction in the late 2010s stopped

social movement thing so the only thing that these people will respond to is Like they're actually being mass mobilizations and them to be feeling politically threatened by it So, you know, we've done it before, we can do it again. Yeah, the biggest march in this country's history was a march of migrants, right? We can do that again. So many of us, myself included, came here to have a chance at a better future. And like, even if you didn't, show some solidarity with people.

Like showing up in massive numbers. Yeah, these movements stop social movement and people fell out of the little things. But like this shit is important and I think we can build some bridges and like we need to do something to stop this because it's horrific. Yeah. And so it's a genocide in Gaza. Like we can we need to do something to stop that too. But we're not going to do it through voting.

to stop that tune. But we're not going to do it through voting. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions. Thanks for listening. Hey, I'm Gianna Perdenti. And I'm Jemay Jackson-Gadston. We're the hosts of Let's Talk Offline from LinkedIn News and iHeart Podcasts.

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My name is Brandon Kyle Goodman. I'm a black, gay, non-binary author, TV writer, actor, and I'm messy. But not in the way you think. Messy as in I'm human and flawed. I'm on a mission to destroy shame around sex. And the only way to do that is to talk about sex. So that's what we'll do on my brand new podcast, Tell Me Something Messy. Join me on Tell Me Something Messy with brand new episodes every Thursday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Daphne Caruana Galizia was a Maltese investigative journalist who on October 16th 2017 was assassinated. Crooks everywhere unearthed the plot to murder a one woman WikiLeaks. She exposed the culture of crime and corruption that were turning her beloved country into a Mafia state.

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