Speaker 1: Hello the Internet, and welcome to season three, twenty five,
Speaker 1: Episode two.
Speaker 2: Of Dy's I Guys Stay production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: This is a podcast where we take a deep dib
Speaker 1: into America's share gosh, and it is Tuesday, almost Thursday,
Speaker 1: February thirteenth, twenty twenty four. Fuck Valentine's Day.
Speaker 2: Shit, fuck tomorrow, isn't it. I guess I better go
Speaker 2: to CBS and buy some more Google Play gift cards.
Speaker 1: This actually did just fuck me up because we're recording
Speaker 1: this week advance, and I forgot we were recording it
Speaker 1: a week in advance, and I was like, oh oh
Speaker 1: you really were like fuck yeah.
Speaker 2: I guess for people who don't know it's Gallantine's Day,
Speaker 2: I thought that was just a bit from Parks and
Speaker 2: rec It's also a fast knock day. It's I guess,
Speaker 2: the day before ash Wednesday. It's already ash wedzay ash Wednesday.
Speaker 2: Hell yea, yeah, Gotley. I hope you all got something
Speaker 2: to give up.
Speaker 1: Catholics mark themselves.
Speaker 2: Here National Cheddar Day. Oh right, so it's Fat Tuesday,
Speaker 2: meaning mon Day Tuesday. As I know, as I grew
Speaker 2: up in the church, we know it as Monday Tuesday,
Speaker 2: National to day National Pancake Day. But that's courtesy of
Speaker 2: the people at the International House of Bond Cake. Oh really, yeah,
Speaker 2: they you know, because half of these days are you know,
Speaker 2: half of these days are just like some companies like, just.
Speaker 3: Make my fucking product a national day, Big Pancakes House.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: Well, my name is Jack O'Brien aka Sprained Tain't. I
Speaker 1: got a real complaint. Why don't my shit smell like
Speaker 1: fresh mow grass?
Speaker 2: Sprained Tain't, I got a real complaint.
Speaker 1: Why can I spray alfalfa out my asshole? That is
Speaker 1: courtesy of Cleo Universe, in reference to.
Speaker 2: The discovery last week that sprinked is.
Speaker 1: The what which animal water ottershit Otter ship is called sprint.
Speaker 1: It smells like freshman grass. Yeah, and I'm very jealous
Speaker 1: of otters. I want my ship to smell like that.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I kind of like when I take
Speaker 2: a nasty shit, it's kind of reminds you that you're alive. Yeah, like,
Speaker 2: oh yeah, I'm fucking my body processed poison.
Speaker 1: That part is just decomposing a little bit faster than
Speaker 1: the rest of you. This is who I am. Fucking
Speaker 1: we die. I'm gonna eventually smell like that all over
Speaker 1: when I'm in the ground, So yeah, stop pretending otherwise.
Speaker 1: From once weekend, I'm thrilled to be joined as always
Speaker 1: by my co host.
Speaker 2: Mister Miles Gray.
Speaker 4: Akay, what that fucking skull do Einstein?
Speaker 2: What that fucking skull do? A what that fucking skull
Speaker 2: do Einstein? No stip to skull based Oh shit, this
Speaker 2: guy's IQ. We Israeli high. Okay, shut out to blinky head.
Speaker 4: Just you know Einstein, whether or not he ever took
Speaker 4: an IQ test, But what that skull do?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 1: What that skull do though Einstein? Yeah, doesn't matter. By
Speaker 1: the way, we're not pro phrenology on this podcast.
Speaker 2: I am. I'm pro stinky shits, And for phrenology, you're
Speaker 2: coming out with all the very I'm just telling you
Speaker 2: everything is measurable with what you can see or smell.
Speaker 2: You don't have to do anything. It's just all there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I measure and yeah, it's all it's all there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: don't don't you live. Some people of the NBA also
Speaker 2: keep employing the dark arts.
Speaker 1: Well, Miles, we are thrilled to be joined in our
Speaker 1: third seat by an author, musician, Yes and podcast host
Speaker 1: of the anarchists survivalist podcast Live Like the World Is
Speaker 1: Dying and the Cool Zone Media Robert and Sophie Lichterman's
Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media podcast Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff?
Speaker 1: Please welcome Margaret kill John.
Speaker 2: That's me.
Speaker 5: I didn't prepare a song. I'm sorry. AKA Magpie. That's right, Yeah, right,
Speaker 5: that's right.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 2: What's the thing about Magpie is the bird? Like?
Speaker 5: What did they steal things?
Speaker 7: Yeah?
Speaker 5: That is how I got the name.
Speaker 1: Oh really, they steal shiny stuff, right, and like build
Speaker 1: a little shiny like bachelor pad thing to impress.
Speaker 5: Yeah, they're a shiny object collector, like like crows and ravens.
Speaker 5: They're pretty related.
Speaker 2: Do they have the same like memory too, Like how
Speaker 2: crows will be like yo, fukal one crow. It could
Speaker 2: be smoke from the whole murder. I think.
Speaker 5: So, only a group of magpies is called it tiding.
Speaker 2: Oh that's so much nicer.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's I mean, I like to take it as
Speaker 5: ominous instead of direct.
Speaker 2: But right with tidings to.
Speaker 1: You, they say before they rob your ass, exactly, Wait,
Speaker 1: what were you what were you stealing?
Speaker 2: What were you coming up on all the time?
Speaker 5: Mostly food and books? I guess when I was funny. Yeah,
Speaker 5: I got it for two reasons. One, I would like
Speaker 5: find little rusty and shiny things in like the street.
Speaker 5: When I was walking around, I was like a crosspunk squad,
Speaker 5: and so I would pick up little rusty things and
Speaker 5: make weird, bad jewelry with it, eventually learn how to
Speaker 5: make better jewelry. And then the other thing is, yeah,
Speaker 5: I used to shoplift, yeah, like it was my job,
Speaker 5: because it kind of was, because that's how I fed myself,
Speaker 5: bet my friends. Yeah, I would never advocate.
Speaker 2: Oh whatever, do whatever you want. Yeah, yeah, whatever it is.
Speaker 2: Do what you gotta do, do what you gotta do. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Well, we wanted to have you on to talk about
Speaker 1: cool people, to do cool stuff, and then we found
Speaker 1: out about Live like the World's dying, and so we're torn.
Speaker 1: We're going to talk to you about both. I were
Speaker 1: really interested in that. But before we get into both
Speaker 1: of those things, we do like to get to know
Speaker 1: you a little bit better by asking you, Margaret, what's
Speaker 1: something from your search history that's revealing about who you are?
Speaker 5: This week I searched timeline of different countries independence from Britain.
Speaker 5: Mm hmm, okay, because my job is researching history, and
Speaker 5: then I want to know all of the fussy details.
Speaker 5: That's what I came up with.
Speaker 2: How's it always how's it usually go for them?
Speaker 5: How's that for people who leave Britain or Britain?
Speaker 2: Smooth?
Speaker 5: Yeah, yeah, really smooth. It is a lot of different methods,
Speaker 5: most of them involve shooting British people. Yeah, that is
Speaker 5: the primary way by which people have gained independence from Britain.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who Who's who did it? Who did it? Bloodless?
Speaker 2: Like Ghana?
Speaker 5: I mean, oh, I don't actually know. I mean obviously
Speaker 5: there's the ones like like India was like had a
Speaker 5: lot of non violence involved in the movement, right sure,
Speaker 5: and you can contrast that with Ireland, which had a
Speaker 5: lot of shooting.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, and then there's the whole that's the that's the
Speaker 5: episode that I just researched and wrote in the past
Speaker 5: week is the Easter Rising and all of the early
Speaker 5: Irish independent stuff.
Speaker 1: But yeah, no it.
Speaker 5: I guess the cleaner break you make with Britain, the
Speaker 5: less ongoing violence there is. Ireland didn't have a very
Speaker 5: good clean break with Britain. Yeah, so anyway, but yeah,
Speaker 5: my sourci history is all I do is sit around
Speaker 5: and read history books. Now instead of being a like
Speaker 5: cool thief named after a bird, just allowed to get.
Speaker 2: Some shiny shit though, you know, just just just so
Speaker 2: you can feel it one more time. Yeah right, What's
Speaker 2: what's something you think is overrated? Okay?
Speaker 5: I picked? I picked prepping stuff as for my over
Speaker 5: and under perfect Okay, overrated is bunkers and canned food.
Speaker 2: M okay for preparedness. Wait and okay, yeah this got
Speaker 2: just flooded back there. This dude just came through my
Speaker 2: neighborhood and convinced me and my neighbors that, like we
Speaker 2: needed to all go in on a bunker. And now
Speaker 2: so bunkers. I think, what the obvious reason? At least
Speaker 2: one thing we learned after talking to like people like
Speaker 2: Douglas Rushcough about like how billionaires are so focused on bunkers.
Speaker 2: It's like, how are you going to maintain a bunker?
Speaker 2: Like if anything goes wrong? But what from your perspective,
Speaker 2: what's the what's the overrated part of the bunker?
Speaker 5: Well it's like, don't get me wrong, if I had
Speaker 5: an extra seventy thousand dollars, I wasn't doing anything else
Speaker 5: with I'd probably have a bunker for like tornadoes and stuff, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: but overall this like mentality of oh, the way that
Speaker 5: you survive things is that you and maybe your immediate
Speaker 5: family go crawling a hole in the ground and then
Speaker 5: what watch TV until you die?
Speaker 1: You watch Friends until the end of the world, like
Speaker 1: the world behind?
Speaker 2: But yeah, did you really? I say.
Speaker 1: The thing that annoyed me was that they were like
Speaker 1: buying into all of the bullshit. They were like they
Speaker 1: were like, yeah, people who have bunkers, the very wealthy
Speaker 1: people who have bunkers are gonna outlive us all and.
Speaker 5: Well, but the people whose bunkers says are dead are gone.
Speaker 5: They just go and find the people's bunkers. No, No,
Speaker 5: there's some problems with that movie from a preparedness point
Speaker 5: of view.
Speaker 2: And I think it's really.
Speaker 5: Telling that it was produced by the Obamas, and it's
Speaker 5: like this kind of but in a weirdly like they
Speaker 5: go and they convince the Prepper to stop being such
Speaker 5: an asshole.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 5: That's the scene that makes the movie for me, right,
Speaker 5: is that Kevin Bacon's character from Tremor's turns around and
Speaker 5: learns how to share.
Speaker 2: What about canonically same universe as Trevor's right, and what
Speaker 2: about can food?
Speaker 5: Okay, and this one's like more nitpicky. Can food is great.
Speaker 5: Everyone should have enough food to like last a little while,
Speaker 5: right in case like supply chains, which we've also seen.
Speaker 2: In supply chain, I'm sorry, just from your what is
Speaker 2: the standard amount? Just like to write the stone how
Speaker 2: much food should you have?
Speaker 5: I would overall, I would tell people to have a
Speaker 5: between three and six months worth of food in their house. Okay,
Speaker 5: But the thing about canned food is it can food
Speaker 5: isn't like set it and forget it like people treat it.
Speaker 5: You actually can food is pantry food. You have to
Speaker 5: like rotate through it. So if people are just like, oh,
Speaker 5: I'm just going to stockpile food and all they do
Speaker 5: is go out and buy canned food, it's kind of
Speaker 5: weird and it doesn't really like work as well as
Speaker 5: like a system where more like the stuff you eat anyway,
Speaker 5: Like if it's canned food and the stuff you eat, right,
Speaker 5: Like I keep a lot of canned soup and beans
Speaker 5: and stuff around it, right because I.
Speaker 1: Eat it anyway.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Whereas like I do believe in food storage. I
Speaker 5: am kind of a prepper at the end of the day.
Speaker 5: I believe in community might prepare course, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 5: But I like the stuff you can set and forget.
Speaker 5: Like if you store beans and rice properly, you just
Speaker 5: leave it in your basement for the next thirty years.
Speaker 2: It's fine.
Speaker 1: Right, So I got forty days of progresso from the
Speaker 1: late nineties out in the shed in my backyard. It's
Speaker 1: just been baking during the summer and cooling during the winter.
Speaker 1: How we think that's going to hold up? You know,
Speaker 1: you got a chance totally eats like a meal. You
Speaker 1: got a chance, you know. I mean, well, the thing
Speaker 1: is that I can. I'll give it to my enemies first,
Speaker 1: because that's the first So as we know, once society
Speaker 1: falls apart, first thing that comes is your enemies, and
Speaker 1: they're gonna try and eat all your shit.
Speaker 5: Well, everyone's your enemy once the world ends.
Speaker 2: That's right, Zoom out, zoom out.
Speaker 1: Everyone's the enemy. Yeah, but that was the thing about
Speaker 1: leave the world For people who don't know. There's a
Speaker 1: movie on Netflix made by the person who made the show,
Speaker 1: Mister Robot, Sam s Mel. It's produced by the Obamas.
Speaker 1: It's based on a novel from like I think five
Speaker 1: to ten years ago, and the basic plot is that
Speaker 1: like somebody from outside the US attacks the US, like
Speaker 1: infrastructure knocks out, like media knocks out Wi Fi, and
Speaker 1: then everybody starts attacking one another, right, like everybody starts
Speaker 1: killing each other. Like that's basically the end of the movie,
Speaker 1: is that, like people are like setting off bombs. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess I should. I always get to say spoiler
Speaker 1: on this movie in particular because I don't feel that
Speaker 1: bad about spoiling it because I think it's such bulletit. Wait,
Speaker 1: everybody loses their shit, Yeah, but everybody loses their shit
Speaker 1: like immediately because they don't have Internet. I feel like
Speaker 1: it's kind of and because they're scared. But I don't know,
Speaker 1: like I lived it. So it takes place outside of
Speaker 1: New York City, so you only see New York City
Speaker 1: from a distance, but like three days without the Internet
Speaker 1: and electricity, and like all of a sudden, like buildings
Speaker 1: just start falling, just like they've been fucking detonated.
Speaker 5: Internally, I don't want to defend this movie super hard,
Speaker 5: but one of the plot points is that it's not
Speaker 5: just that the Internet went out, but it's also that
Speaker 5: the I mean, you can tell the Obama it's like
Speaker 5: foreign agents are spreading disinformation and turning people against each other.
Speaker 5: There's like an active there's like an active thing to
Speaker 5: turn people against each other.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, that's true.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but I don't want to defend this movie super hard.
Speaker 5: I enjoyed it, and I like Kevin Bacon turns around,
Speaker 5: but I'm not coming to the like yeah, oh yeah,
Speaker 5: the Obama's made the best prepper movie or something.
Speaker 1: I was in New York City during that blackout that
Speaker 1: happened in the early two thousands. Yeah, yeah, mid aughts,
Speaker 1: and everybody just got drunk for like three to four days.
Speaker 1: Like yeah, for the most part, everybody got drunk. There
Speaker 1: was some like nasty price gouging on water and stuff
Speaker 1: like that, but for the most part, like people were
Speaker 1: just sitting in the streets being hammered. Like that's kind
Speaker 1: of it like turned into.
Speaker 2: What it what it's like.
Speaker 1: The nineteen forties were like just everybody's drunk all the time.
Speaker 8: Nobody can fund each other well, and that's what That's
Speaker 8: what disaster studies, like the academic field has shown is
Speaker 8: that by and large, when there's a disaster, everyone takes
Speaker 8: care of each other there's like a notable exception.
Speaker 5: It's called elite panic. I think I can't remember the
Speaker 5: the people who have something to lose, like the people
Speaker 5: who are current previously in control. They're the people we're
Speaker 5: going to run around start shooting looters and all of that, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: But overall people get together pretty naturally and are like, well,
Speaker 5: what needs doing?
Speaker 2: How do we do it?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 5: I got some of that side right right, yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Elite panic, I think is like perfectly summed up in
Speaker 2: that picture of the mccloskey's from the twenty twenty the
Speaker 2: summer of twenty twenty, the uprising is the familychine gun
Speaker 2: and the lady with like the pistol, you know what
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 1: That truly was like, fuck, these people have watched like
Speaker 1: it's a wine glass.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just like loosely had fucking mustard shit stains on
Speaker 2: his fucking polo shirt, like fuckingeps, put the fuck out
Speaker 2: of here.
Speaker 5: But he thinks it's an operator because he has an
Speaker 5: AR fifteen.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, Operator in a golf shirt. Yeah, that's a
Speaker 2: saf specific that's a pretty good band name too, Elite
Speaker 2: operator in a golf shirt. No, elite panic.
Speaker 1: But their first album could be Operator in a golf
Speaker 1: shirt and it's just got that dude on the.
Speaker 2: Cover Country Club Operator. Yeah.
Speaker 5: As long as a death metal band, I'm in.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1: The other thing it reminded me of is when the
Speaker 1: roads were too muddy to leave Burning Man, and like
Speaker 1: Chris Rock was like, they're fucking coming for us, man,
Speaker 1: They're gonna kill us all. We're all gonna die, like you,
Speaker 1: like completely lost his ship, while everyone else was just
Speaker 1: like this is very inconvenient and I might lose my job.
Speaker 1: He you know, he had whatever wealthy people he was
Speaker 1: like hitchhiking with, were like, this is the end of
Speaker 1: the world. This is how it ends. They're gonna come
Speaker 1: for all of us.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, What is something you think is underrated?
Speaker 5: Okay, I'm sticking with the same theme, knowing your neighbors underrated?
Speaker 2: Yeah, huh huh.
Speaker 5: I think that most people, a lot of people don't
Speaker 5: know the people in their floor of their apartment building,
Speaker 5: or the people in their pollor or you know whatever
Speaker 5: it is, right, like, just yeah, not even necessarily get
Speaker 5: along with them, not necessarily go to all the same
Speaker 5: places and invite each other to birthday parties, but just
Speaker 5: like know who they are, talk to him.
Speaker 2: You have the ability to knock on their door and
Speaker 2: be like, the fuck's gonna happen? You know what I mean? Like,
Speaker 2: do you have that level of familiarity with something with
Speaker 2: your neighbor? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I just sit by my front door and smoking a
Speaker 1: cigarette and saying who's this guy?
Speaker 2: Who's this guy?
Speaker 1: Every time someone walking by my front door, you know,
Speaker 1: like casino.
Speaker 2: Yeah, with binoculars though too, Someone's twenty feet away on
Speaker 2: the sidewalk, You're like, what, he's walking his dog Jack? Yeah,
Speaker 2: who's this guy? Who's the guy who lives in the
Speaker 2: house behind yours? You yell at my dogs all the time,
Speaker 2: that's where this guy is. Yeah, yeah, I mean what
Speaker 2: I mean? I think? Yeah, Well we'll we'll get into
Speaker 2: that part as we talk a little bit more about preparedness,
Speaker 2: but like, yeah, like it's knowing people around you is
Speaker 2: just in general preparedness or not, it's it's just fundamental
Speaker 2: I think, to understanding that you also live in a
Speaker 2: functioning world too, because when you're siloed off, like you're
Speaker 2: just going to fill in the gaps, like I don't
Speaker 2: know what the fuck they're doing over there? What they're
Speaker 2: fucking into or some shit you have like intrusive thinking
Speaker 2: like that, versus like, oh yeah, that's a Stacey in them,
Speaker 2: like yeah, they work at the hospital or they do this,
Speaker 2: and I don't know. We don't have much we talk
Speaker 2: about other than like exchanging pleasantries. But I have their
Speaker 2: phone number.
Speaker 5: Yeah, my neighbors, this older woman that lives alone. And
Speaker 5: you know, our communications consist of your power out too.
Speaker 5: Yeah yeah, yeah, Hey you know a good plumber, right?
Speaker 1: Right?
Speaker 2: Do you get gravel? Right?
Speaker 1: Does your water pressure suck like randomly on like Tuesday
Speaker 1: mornings sometimes?
Speaker 2: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's so much to talk to your neighbors.
Speaker 2: Hey, you want to split a cord of wood? Yeah, exactly, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, let's let's take a quick break and
Speaker 1: we'll come back and keep the conversation going.
Speaker 6: We'll be right back and we're back.
Speaker 1: And yeah, like I said, we wanted to talk cool people,
Speaker 1: and we will talk about cool people who did cool stuff.
Speaker 1: But I think there's a lot of people who are
Speaker 1: having the same thought right now that like maybe I
Speaker 1: don't want to be living here in this way right now.
Speaker 1: Like I grew up with a pretty limited view of
Speaker 1: what it meant to be a prepper or a survivalist
Speaker 1: that yeah, it involves you know, people who are like
Speaker 1: in some branch of Christianity that I'm not familiar with it,
Speaker 1: you know, like it's it's a lot of people like
Speaker 1: like with like living with like barrels of gasoline on
Speaker 1: compound somewhere. And yeah, likes you were saying, you were
Speaker 1: like searching for prepper stuff on Amazon and yeah, the.
Speaker 2: Best place, I think, just to make it fatalistic, complete
Speaker 2: the most apocalyptic circle because yeah, like you know, to
Speaker 2: your point, Jack, like a I think most people's perception
Speaker 2: of this practice is informed by shows like fucking Doomsday
Speaker 2: Preppers and you're like you have to put dooms Day
Speaker 2: in front of the word to even like enter like
Speaker 2: the concept of preparedness or like the internet dunking on
Speaker 2: like some person who bought like seven thousand cans of
Speaker 2: spaghettios and machine guns and you're like, the fuck world
Speaker 2: is this? But like, yeah, just looking because like I'm
Speaker 2: always interested because like Amazon is where like most people
Speaker 2: just shorthanded, like I don't know about this thing, I
Speaker 2: just need the thing. Yeah. And then so when I
Speaker 2: started typing in like just prepper. The things that auto
Speaker 2: filled were so absurd, like some were easy like long
Speaker 2: term survival, survival kid and gear. One thing just filled
Speaker 2: in it said prepper gear and supplies for all out war.
Speaker 2: It was like something people were just like like you
Speaker 2: were you looking for this thing like for all out
Speaker 2: fucking war?
Speaker 1: No?
Speaker 2: What the fuck? And like the whole aesthetic is just
Speaker 2: sort of like wrapped up in this like like vision
Speaker 2: of like you are going to die in a hot
Speaker 2: war that most likely goes nuclear. I hope you are
Speaker 2: ready to wear battle fatigues all day and eat your
Speaker 2: wife's fucking leg.
Speaker 1: Like let's say you're gonna want to eat your wife,
Speaker 1: but if you, if it comes to that, here's how
Speaker 1: to best prepare her body.
Speaker 7: Right, Yeah, it doesn't feel like I wrote how to prepare,
Speaker 7: how to prepare, Yeah, how to how to prepare, how
Speaker 7: to prepare hamstring meat seventy different ways.
Speaker 2: The le mignon of the thirty year old body filet Manyon.
Speaker 2: It's like it's doesn't feel you know, it feels it
Speaker 2: freaks you out. It makes you feel like you're so
Speaker 2: fucked why even try? Yeah, And I'm like it's just
Speaker 2: like also really heartening to hear you and others talk
Speaker 2: about like how this sort of mainstream idea of a
Speaker 2: person surviving on their own until their death is not
Speaker 2: only like harmful, but it's like the worst way to
Speaker 2: think about surviving through any kind of event ever. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean, like, what what was sort of your entry point?
Speaker 2: Because when we were talking at like first about having
Speaker 2: you on to talk about this, We're like, I don't know,
Speaker 2: we're gonna talk about fuck fucked up doomsday preparedness, But no,
Speaker 2: you have a much more community minded version because that's
Speaker 2: the most realistic version of being prepared for any eventual
Speaker 2: event that could disrupt our day to day lives. What's like, well, like,
Speaker 2: are there just like two schools of thought, like the
Speaker 2: people who are the fully militarized version of like it's
Speaker 2: fuck you and it's just gonna be me and my
Speaker 2: dogs type survivalist and people who are more like you, No, like,
Speaker 2: let's be realistic about what would happen if we had
Speaker 2: no electricity, we had no running water? What do you
Speaker 2: do next?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I would say that there is there's a there's
Speaker 5: a split, but it's like less in the sort of
Speaker 5: slightly more mainstream prepping community is starting to be like, Oh,
Speaker 5: these people who just want to live in a bunker
Speaker 5: and shoot everyone who comes near our idiots, you know,
Speaker 5: And that's like starting to be more and more the
Speaker 5: understanding they are the people who, like a lot of
Speaker 5: the people who call themselves preppers for a very long time,
Speaker 5: or at least the people who are very visible calling
Speaker 5: themselves preppers, or a lot of these people were like, Oh,
Speaker 5: you need your bug out location, you need to train
Speaker 5: your seventeen children in order to shoot enough rifles or whatever,
Speaker 5: you know, And.
Speaker 1: But I'm making a militia, yeah, exactly, I'm building out
Speaker 1: by militia.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: And more and more people start talking about it as like, look,
Speaker 5: if you're planning for the zombie apocalypse, you're doing it
Speaker 5: kind of as almost you're doing it as a joke.
Speaker 5: But your actual plan is what do you do when
Speaker 5: a hurricane comes? What do you do when you live
Speaker 5: in Texas and your electrical grid is completely disconnected from
Speaker 5: every other electrical grid, Or what do you do when
Speaker 5: your trends and your existence has been outlawed in the
Speaker 5: state you live in, Or what do you do when
Speaker 5: you know where the power goes out? A lot, right,
Speaker 5: because I live in the mountains where there's it's kind
Speaker 5: of an underserved area, and so the trees fall on
Speaker 5: the power lines and the power goes right.
Speaker 2: You know, whatever your health condition is or ability level,
Speaker 2: like you might need medication or equipment that need electricity,
Speaker 2: things like that.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like you see pat machine, you need to have
Speaker 5: a battery that runs it, or yeah, you know, or
Speaker 5: you need to know that you can get out of
Speaker 5: your driveway, or just like fundamental disaster preparedness. And I
Speaker 5: think what's happening is that the United States is becoming
Speaker 5: a less stable place to live over all the world
Speaker 5: in general, like a lot of the stuff around supply
Speaker 5: chains is less guaranteed than it was a few years ago, right,
Speaker 5: And so people are starting to be like, what do
Speaker 5: we do about this? And enough people who are coming
Speaker 5: at it rationally are able to say, like, well, the
Speaker 5: answer isn't fully automatic weapons. There's very few situations that
Speaker 5: fully automatic weapons are the correct answer for. And that
Speaker 5: doesn't mean that, like some stuff that comes from the
Speaker 5: old school of preparedness doesn't make a certain amount of sense.
Speaker 5: You know, it is ironic actually would think I don't
Speaker 5: know how to cook meat, like I didn't. I I
Speaker 5: grew up eating fast food and then it became vegan,
Speaker 5: and so like, I probably need to learn how to
Speaker 5: cook meat, Like I don't eat it right now, but
Speaker 5: I'm like, what if? What if I need to cook
Speaker 5: it for someone? What am I gonna do? I'm gonna
Speaker 5: kill them by accident, you know. But yeah, I think
Speaker 5: that the prepper scene is changing. I think that one
Speaker 5: of the things is that people I'm one of the
Speaker 5: only peopleho is going to call myself a prepper in
Speaker 5: this situation. But I'm used to being kind of antagonistic.
Speaker 5: I'm kind of used to being antagonistic to the traditional preppers,
Speaker 5: right right, right, But community preparedness is a growing interest
Speaker 5: of more and more people, and I'm very happy for that.
Speaker 5: I actually started living like the world was dining right
Speaker 5: before COVID, like about a month. I started in January
Speaker 5: twenty twenty. I think, what's the first episode? So like,
Speaker 5: episode three is entirely wrong. It's an interview with a
Speaker 5: public health professional in the UK who's like, oh, we
Speaker 5: think COVID's not gonna really be a big deal.
Speaker 2: You know, But.
Speaker 5: But yeah, like and and you're right that when when
Speaker 5: people hear this, like, oh, you everyone needs to be
Speaker 5: ready to live in a foxhole and die of dysentery.
Speaker 5: People are like, well, I don't want to do that,
Speaker 5: so I'm just going to prepare to die. Like, you know,
Speaker 5: I meet a lot of people whose plan is like, oh,
Speaker 5: there's an earthquake, I'll just be one of the first
Speaker 5: people to die. That's not a problem because everyone except
Speaker 5: has to accept their own death because you're alive, right,
Speaker 5: that's like part of being alive. But what we can
Speaker 5: do is we can say, you know, certain things don't
Speaker 5: need to be a big deal. Like when I when
Speaker 5: I talk about like people having go bags guess called
Speaker 5: bug out bags or whatever. I believe in these, but
Speaker 5: I don't believe in these because I'm like, oh, we
Speaker 5: got to take to the hills and live in the
Speaker 5: woods and shoot squirrels because the Antifa have taken over
Speaker 5: the government or whatever. I believe in having bug out
Speaker 5: bags or go bags because sometimes you're in your car
Speaker 5: and there's an ice storm and you have to sleep
Speaker 5: in your car, right, So yeah, in the same it's
Speaker 5: the same reason we have a spare tire and a
Speaker 5: jack like just also have a sleeping bag. Or a
Speaker 5: we'll blanket and some cliff bars and you know, a
Speaker 5: day of water whatever.
Speaker 2: Right, Yeah, is there like are there things that people
Speaker 2: you know like? Because the more I think about it,
Speaker 2: I'm like I'm shedding the old sort of idea of
Speaker 2: like skull and crossbones radioactive imagery in my mind of
Speaker 2: like disaster preparedness. What is like, what's the easiest way
Speaker 2: to get some momentum going where you're like I want
Speaker 2: to I actually you know now that have like a
Speaker 2: child and things like that. I do think like it
Speaker 2: only takes a couple of things to go fucking wrong
Speaker 2: and then you're like I can't go to Trader Joel's
Speaker 2: and get what I need, Like there are sort of
Speaker 2: easy ways to sort of look at how what your
Speaker 2: own situation is and just like be like and also
Speaker 2: I want to make sure people that I care about
Speaker 2: in my community, I can also be part of something too,
Speaker 2: like a network of people that are trying to help
Speaker 2: each other. What are like, aside from probably just the
Speaker 2: easiest thing would be like just get to know your
Speaker 2: neighbors probably step one. What are just like other ways
Speaker 2: to sort of like look at that holistically that isn't
Speaker 2: sort of like, Okay, well do you do you have
Speaker 2: small arms training and hand to hand combat training, but
Speaker 2: what are like, how do I how do I sort
Speaker 2: of help shift my own thinking like that.
Speaker 5: Well, you got the first step completely right. The first
Speaker 5: step is literally just know your neighbors. And then I
Speaker 5: would say the other stuff start with a little bit
Speaker 5: of like home preparedness, like three days. Be like, if
Speaker 5: we were all stuck in the house for three days,
Speaker 5: do we have the food, do we have the water,
Speaker 5: do we have the cooking supplies, do we have any
Speaker 5: medications that we need? Where any random three day interruption
Speaker 5: in services or whatever will be fine, you know, because
Speaker 5: most interruptions in services don't last all that long, right,
Speaker 5: So and then people tend to go like three days,
Speaker 5: three months, three years as kind of like the sort
Speaker 5: of steps one could take. But I would do the
Speaker 5: three days, and then I would look into a go bag.
Speaker 5: I would look into if there's a certain type of
Speaker 5: crisis if you live on the West Coast, obviously, like
Speaker 5: earthquakes are a potential risk, right, and so some of
Speaker 5: the stuff with earthquakes is like not that big of
Speaker 5: a deal. You just like, well, you have a go
Speaker 5: back for everyone in your family where you have like
Speaker 5: copies of your important papers, and it's less like make
Speaker 5: sure you have a tent and a hatchet and more
Speaker 5: like make sure that you have something over the counter
Speaker 5: beds and like, you know, and make sure that you
Speaker 5: have copies of your documents and that you can just
Speaker 5: if you're like, we have ten seconds and we have
Speaker 5: to get out of the house, this is what we
Speaker 5: go and do. And if you live somewhere where cars
Speaker 5: are part of your life, do you keep your car
Speaker 5: at more than half gas?
Speaker 1: You know?
Speaker 2: Right right?
Speaker 5: Yeah, So I would start with that, and I would
Speaker 5: say that one of the best things about preparedness is
Speaker 5: that you can actually use it to lower anxiety about problems,
Speaker 5: because once you have done everything that you reasonably are
Speaker 5: going to do for a problem, it's not always easy,
Speaker 5: but you can start letting go of that problem in
Speaker 5: your mind. Like when I lived in a cabin, my
Speaker 5: own preparedness journey is a little bit more backwards. I
Speaker 5: lived in a out of a backpack, and then a van,
Speaker 5: and then a barn and then a cabin and now
Speaker 5: I live on grid in a house. But when I
Speaker 5: lived in a cabin in the woods, I was like well,
Speaker 5: what happens if there's a forest fire?
Speaker 6: What will I do?
Speaker 5: And so I prepare to go back. I kept my
Speaker 5: car half full of gas, and then I stop worrying
Speaker 5: about it because I was like, right, well, I've done
Speaker 5: what I'm gonna do, so now I'm not going to
Speaker 5: lose sleepover a forest fire.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think to the other point about community preparedness,
Speaker 2: I think that is actually the best way to look
Speaker 2: at it, because you know, the way we're talking, all
Speaker 2: of the imagery around it is like it's you and
Speaker 2: you fucking alone, and it's off putting. It's like, dude,
Speaker 2: I don't want to fucking engage with that shit. That's terrifying,
Speaker 2: Like I don't want to be like, all right, am
Speaker 2: I ready to die alone? Versus like I can actually
Speaker 2: lean into more in like a way that feels optimistic
Speaker 2: to be like, am I am I tapped into something
Speaker 2: where I know between everybody we'll be able to figure
Speaker 2: it out because we're all kind of moving in the
Speaker 2: same direction. That feels much more like positive and makes
Speaker 2: me feel more like sort of secure despite the insecurity
Speaker 2: of it all.
Speaker 5: You know, well, and I would say that, you know,
Speaker 5: there's this classic zombie disaster movie thing where as soon
Speaker 5: as every as soon as the existing system goes away,
Speaker 5: some random strong man steps in and says I'm in charge.
Speaker 5: And it's either if it's like a good guy skull
Speaker 5: for a hat, yeah, totally. If he's the bad guy,
Speaker 5: he's got a skull for a hat, And if he's
Speaker 5: the good guy, he's got an American flag on baseball
Speaker 5: cap and he's like he's still kind of functionally the
Speaker 5: same guy, you know, Jack.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, they always have like the Jesus J name,
Speaker 2: you know, those protagonists. That's why I changed my name.
Speaker 5: Sold I'm trying to prep and so what I've discovered
Speaker 5: is that when there's a small power vacuum, it's not
Speaker 5: that the first person has an idea is in charge.
Speaker 5: It's that the first idea that someone floats that sounds
Speaker 5: reasonable might pull people over. And so one of the
Speaker 5: things is to have experience. Like if you have activist experience,
Speaker 5: for example, you can kind of step in and be like,
Speaker 5: WHOA a bad thing happened. Let's all talk about it
Speaker 5: and figure out together what we should do. So if
Speaker 5: you are the first, the first person to go around
Speaker 5: and start knocking on doors, in your neighborhood and be like, hey,
Speaker 5: the powers out, it's been two days, Like why don't
Speaker 5: we all meet in the street talk about it? You know, yeah,
Speaker 5: can show you okay, yeah, exactly totally. And then the
Speaker 5: other reason to a lot of the individual preparedness stuff
Speaker 5: like having three days worth of stuff, A lot of
Speaker 5: that is so that when someone comes to your door
Speaker 5: and says, are you okay, you can say I am okay,
Speaker 5: Do you need anything? Does anyone else on the street
Speaker 5: need something?
Speaker 2: You know?
Speaker 5: And having enough to share like out the gate, and
Speaker 5: then what you do is that you slowly get other
Speaker 5: people in your neighborhood to also have enough to share.
Speaker 5: You know, only five people on the out of one hundred,
Speaker 5: I don't know whatever, I don't know the numbers here
Speaker 5: of making them up. I live in the middle of
Speaker 5: the woods, but you know, if you live on your
Speaker 5: like suburban street or an urban area or something like,
Speaker 5: not everyone in the stockpile water, but if enough people
Speaker 5: have some water stockpiled, y'all. Yeah, y'all are good.
Speaker 1: And that seems to be the default, like we've got
Speaker 1: I think it was the aftermath of the Texas infrastructure
Speaker 1: breaking down, like and freezing over like everybody's electricity being out,
Speaker 1: or maybe it was one of the hurricanes, but there
Speaker 1: was a lot of shit online that was like Houston
Speaker 1: Luke Crew coming through, like people starting fake accounts to
Speaker 1: like claim that there was this like gang of marauding
Speaker 1: people like coming through to loot. And then like when
Speaker 1: you look at studies that people have done into how
Speaker 1: communities react in these situations, it's the default is they
Speaker 1: come together. They like will share their resources with people
Speaker 1: in need, they'll take care of one another, and it's
Speaker 1: like actually pretty inspiring.
Speaker 2: I Yeah, I.
Speaker 1: Am constantly like I think it's an interesting mystery to
Speaker 1: solve this, to like why we edit that out, Like
Speaker 1: why we tell.
Speaker 2: The story that it is.
Speaker 1: The opposite of that, where like it just you know,
Speaker 1: that might make the local news, but eventually it's going
Speaker 1: to get whittled down to they're killing people in the
Speaker 1: fucking super dome, which didn't Yeah, what was actually not happening.
Speaker 1: But like that's still I think people's one of people's
Speaker 1: main memories of Katrina.
Speaker 2: But like why is it? Because like hyper capitalism relies
Speaker 2: on us to be like kill or that on that
Speaker 2: like kill or be killed mentality do you think or
Speaker 2: why do you think we're so prone to edit the
Speaker 2: people coming together to help each other out of history.
Speaker 5: I think that one of the reasons that Americans in particular,
Speaker 5: especially white Americans, but obviously white Americans, have influenced a
Speaker 5: ton of all American culture. One of the reasons that
Speaker 5: we do it is because the founding myths of this
Speaker 5: country are rugged individualism and like the family homestead versus
Speaker 5: everyone else, and the protection of property rights over everything else.
Speaker 5: I never understood when I was younger. I was like,
Speaker 5: why does America talk about being land of the free?
Speaker 5: It's just hypocrisy. They owned people. What the fuck is
Speaker 5: anyone talking about, right? And eventually you were like, oh,
Speaker 5: when they said free, they meant this really specific defined
Speaker 5: thing around property rights, you know, rather than the rights
Speaker 5: of individuals and human rights and things like that. And
Speaker 5: so I think it it just doesn't tie into the
Speaker 5: the zeitgeist as well. If you have the like people
Speaker 5: coming together versus the like you know, rugged band of
Speaker 5: survivors with the strong leader who then everyone shoots each other.
Speaker 5: And I mean obviously like sometimes firearms and self defense matter, right,
Speaker 5: And the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, you had a multi
Speaker 5: racial alliance of mutual aid people working as common ground,
Speaker 5: and they had armed standoffs against racist militias that we're
Speaker 5: going around and shooting people of color, right, yeah, and
Speaker 5: so like I'm not arguing like there's no place for
Speaker 5: force and there's no enemies ever, right, But overall, I
Speaker 5: think it's just I think it's an American thing. I'm
Speaker 5: not sure. Maybe media from other countries does this too.
Speaker 2: No, yeah, I think it's definitely like it's just that
Speaker 2: cultural momentum from being built on the thing. It's like,
Speaker 2: here's what you do. You see some shit, you fucking
Speaker 2: put point a gun in them and tell me get
Speaker 2: the fuck out, and then that's yours and then rinse
Speaker 2: and repeat. And I think there's also there's just that
Speaker 2: sort of subconscious like, well, the pendulum swing back the
Speaker 2: other way and if it does, and yeah, I think
Speaker 2: it is very different because even for me also being
Speaker 2: half Japanese, like the way in a disaster how people
Speaker 2: look at things is I mean, to a certain extent,
Speaker 2: it's just so communally focused there a certain point you
Speaker 2: have no individualism, which is a whole other issue, but
Speaker 2: that definitely like like there's no fantasy of like and
Speaker 2: then we got to shank people at the convenience store
Speaker 2: for a fucking donut or whatever, Whereas like Americans really
Speaker 2: do like everything about that is sort of like you
Speaker 2: don't know, fucking like, look, man, we're fucking wild out here, yea,
Speaker 2: And yeah, I think it's just it's like this weird
Speaker 2: thing we can't shake and we've just had, whether it's
Speaker 2: like settling the frontier or the Cold War, there's always
Speaker 2: some point to always.
Speaker 3: Be like and then man, you don't know, man, the
Speaker 3: shit might come here and you need a bunker and right,
Speaker 3: you know, like we had movies that were kind of
Speaker 3: like having fun with the idea of like people's like
Speaker 3: atomic atomic bomb bunkers and shit like that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, I mean not only are there like examples
Speaker 1: of movies like that, these are the rules if you
Speaker 1: read a movie like a book about screenwriting and like
Speaker 1: how to write these are the rules. It's like you
Speaker 1: need a protagonist who gets fucked over by everyone around them,
Speaker 1: Like these are the rules of like how to write
Speaker 1: a plot. Like the entire genre of the Western is
Speaker 1: what you just described as like this American founding myth
Speaker 1: of Like well, and I'm all out on the homestead
Speaker 1: and have to like fight off everybody because everything is
Speaker 1: out there trying to kill us. And then every zombie
Speaker 1: movie we've talked through all the tropes of that. But like,
Speaker 1: these are the rules of the stories that we tell
Speaker 1: ourselves about how the world works. And I think movies
Speaker 1: stick in people's minds more than anything else.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, because chances are, if you haven't experienced
Speaker 2: it yourself, you're like, I'm pretty sure I saw a
Speaker 2: movie where that happened, right, Yeah, yeah, yeah, and they
Speaker 2: were shooting each other pretty quickly. So yeah, so well.
Speaker 5: You can you can make it happen by telling enough
Speaker 5: stories about it. Is one of those scary things.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly, because then you have no imagination for
Speaker 2: anything except that you're like, I'm now my thinking has
Speaker 2: been confined to this box where it's fucking thunderdome.
Speaker 1: Like neighbors turning on neighbors in a like disaster or
Speaker 1: like just in a bad situation. Is like has happened, obviously,
Speaker 1: but it's very like it's very rare, but we love
Speaker 1: to fucking focus on it and love to tell fictional
Speaker 1: stories about it, to the point that I would think
Speaker 1: it's the default, but it's definitely like a cross history
Speaker 1: the vast exception. But speak of movies, I do want
Speaker 1: to let's take a quick break, and then I want
Speaker 1: to come back and talk about a couple episodes of
Speaker 1: cool people who did Cool Stuff that you guys mentioned
Speaker 1: a couple times during the episode that it's mind blowing
Speaker 1: that this story is not a movie yet, but it's
Speaker 1: a great example of the type of story that doesn't
Speaker 1: get told that should get told. That's like a better
Speaker 1: story than most stories I've ever ever heard.
Speaker 2: It's about the.
Speaker 1: Invention of the paramedics in Pittsburgh in the late sixties.
Speaker 1: So let's take a quick break and we'll come back
Speaker 1: and get into that.
Speaker 2: And we're back, and people need to.
Speaker 1: Go check out Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff, both
Speaker 1: of your podcasts. But there are so many great episodes
Speaker 1: of cool people who did cool stuff. There's the recent
Speaker 1: one about the Collective and ymar Germany, who like, as
Speaker 1: Nazism is rising up and you know, the economy is
Speaker 1: collapsing around them, they collectively like deliver one million illegal
Speaker 1: abortions a year as birth control as being like just
Speaker 1: so incredible and badass. And but I did want to
Speaker 1: talk about this story about the invention of the paramedics,
Speaker 1: because it's a group of people, a community suffering under
Speaker 1: severe systemic racism in Pittsburgh and they come together and
Speaker 1: become the first paramedics in the history of America, maybe
Speaker 1: the world. They are the reason we have paramedics today.
Speaker 1: Like all the life saving care we expect to show
Speaker 1: up in an ambulance started with them, And it was
Speaker 1: pretty It was like I would have guessed so much
Speaker 1: longer ago, but it was yeah, like nineteen sixty eight. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: And like I don't know. It's another example I've talked
Speaker 1: before about how like there are two types of inventions.
Speaker 1: There's like the iPhone, which is like something that is
Speaker 1: invented through sheer like tyranny of will, like years before
Speaker 1: the world might be ready for it, and it's like
Speaker 1: in in front of And then there are the inventions
Speaker 1: that like the world is repeatedly calling out for and
Speaker 1: like just people just keep fucking fucking it up. Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like the screwdriver was invented after the screw so they
Speaker 1: were just like yeah, they like years the screw exist
Speaker 1: in a chisel. They were just like whatever they said
Speaker 1: on hand, They're like I guess this coin can kind
Speaker 1: of get it in there, and took them like fucking decades.
Speaker 2: To invent the screwdriver.
Speaker 1: But the paramedics seems like just listening to you, like
Speaker 1: tell the story of you know it starts. You started
Speaker 1: with like people drunk driving ambulances around the Civil Wars.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Wait, so what what did it look like?
Speaker 2: Because I haven't listened to this episode. So what we
Speaker 2: were just just pulling up to the basically to the
Speaker 2: hospital before, like just in the back of the cars.
Speaker 2: I get them to the hospital.
Speaker 5: So there would be people who would go around. There
Speaker 5: be someone you could call and they would send an ambulance,
Speaker 5: and the ambulance would not be an ambulance. They would
Speaker 5: send a car. And it was different place. It was
Speaker 5: different in different places. There was no central idea how
Speaker 5: to do it. A lot of times it was cops,
Speaker 5: and cops don't always treat different people the same.
Speaker 2: Wait, I've heard of this. I've heard of this.
Speaker 5: It's crazy, I know, don't worry. It was a long
Speaker 5: time ago. And then also, uh, funeral homes were a
Speaker 5: big one. The funeral homes had a hearse and you
Speaker 5: could put a person in a hearse. So you you're
Speaker 5: like you're trying not to die of a heart attack
Speaker 5: and our hearse shows up and they're literally like there's
Speaker 5: like pedals left over from the last person. And it
Speaker 5: was just it was private services, and the other one
Speaker 5: was firefighters, and then the other one was just like
Speaker 5: purely private services where there's someone in your neighborhood you
Speaker 5: can call and like John will come over and drive
Speaker 5: you to the hospital. Yeah, he's the hero of the story.
Speaker 5: And so yeah, they just this completely blew my mind too.
Speaker 5: Like if you had asked me when the paramedics were invented,
Speaker 5: I would have been like Victorian era and it was
Speaker 5: a little bit late that it took that long or
Speaker 5: literally this has always happened, and people used to do
Speaker 5: it with litters, you know, where you like carry the
Speaker 5: person or whatever.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you know a picture like somebody coming out and
Speaker 1: like plugging a fire bellows into your mouth and like.
Speaker 5: Yeah, well that was the other thing is that CPR
Speaker 5: is a recent invention, is the other and they were
Speaker 5: invented by the same.
Speaker 2: Guy Unblieva yeh.
Speaker 5: But but yeah, the thing that paramedics changed was that
Speaker 5: the person who comes to drive you the hospital performs
Speaker 5: care for you there on the street. And there was
Speaker 5: a while where people weren't into it. People were scared,
Speaker 5: especially because the first paramedic team was all black, and
Speaker 5: so at first they were in an all black neighborhood
Speaker 5: of in Pittsburgh, and it was like fine. But then eventually,
Speaker 5: like the white people in the surrounding neighborhoods were like,
Speaker 5: we'd rather paramedics came than cops. We keep dying, just
Speaker 5: so yeah, yeah, And so then black people would come,
Speaker 5: but then random white racists would be like, no, please,
Speaker 5: I'd rather die of this heart attack. Just get me
Speaker 5: to the hospital, all right, no problem, that's all right.
Speaker 5: So you know, and that's the weirdest thing about like
Speaker 5: reading about the medical profession is that that's not the
Speaker 5: attitude that even like like black doctors and black paramedics
Speaker 5: who are dealing with racist patients are like, and then
Speaker 5: we just have to do it anyway. And I'm like,
Speaker 5: y'all are made of better stuff than me.
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, I'll wait, I'll wait. You know, so an
Speaker 1: important person has a heart attack on stage and a
Speaker 1: nurse goes and is delivering like CPR life saving and
Speaker 1: then the cops who are the authority at this time
Speaker 1: in like getting somebody to the hospital, kick her ass
Speaker 1: out off stage, and then drag this person of the hospital.
Speaker 2: I think say they kicked her as a white nurse.
Speaker 6: It was a white So they.
Speaker 1: Want to to go bake a pie lady exactly. And
Speaker 1: they killed this guy by you know, because they don't
Speaker 1: know shit about they're interrupting the intervention, basically interrupting the CPR,
Speaker 1: and so this like, people are pissed. They killed a
Speaker 1: major like political figure, basically the head of Baltimore's Democratic
Speaker 1: Party at pitt Yeah, Pittsburgh Democratic Party at the time,
Speaker 1: and so yeah, yeah, so oh.
Speaker 2: People are pissed.
Speaker 1: And they bring in this guy who had just kind
Speaker 1: of innovated CPR and was like his theory was that
Speaker 1: you could teach everyday people to do this thing that
Speaker 1: would keep people alive for a long time or much
Speaker 1: longer than they were living before. And so they trained
Speaker 1: regular people to be the paramedics, like specifically not cops
Speaker 1: or I guess they were open to cops, and the
Speaker 1: cops were like, ah, fuck, this that's a training. We
Speaker 1: don't do this. Sorry, you know, we don't do training.
Speaker 1: But so why do you think they went in that
Speaker 1: direction to like train people who weren't like not being
Speaker 1: like we're a traveling band of doctors.
Speaker 2: Was it just like doctors were in short supply?
Speaker 5: It was a couple of different things. One is that
Speaker 5: they had this idea for this job paramedics, and they
Speaker 5: were like, who can we get to do this job?
Speaker 5: Where it is going to take? I don't remember the
Speaker 5: number of hours, an awful lot of hours of training,
Speaker 5: like an awfully long intensive thing. We have no idea
Speaker 5: how financially feasible it will be. We have no idea
Speaker 5: whether or not this job will exist when you finish
Speaker 5: all of this training. Who's willing to do that?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 5: And so it was not the doctors. And then also yeah,
Speaker 5: like the I'm absolute shit remembering names as soon as
Speaker 5: I've moved on to the next episode. I remember the
Speaker 5: story arcs and things. Sure, I can't remember the name
Speaker 5: of the CPR guy, but he's white.
Speaker 2: Is the Stanger?
Speaker 5: Oh that sounds right, but I really don't remember. I
Speaker 5: remember a lot about his backstory. Grew up in the
Speaker 5: Nazi controlled.
Speaker 2: Hven, I don't remember.
Speaker 5: And so he also his thing is believing that we
Speaker 5: need to stop some of the gatekeeping around medical stuff.
Speaker 5: We still need to train people, and people need to
Speaker 5: be highly trained. But he was like, I believe we
Speaker 5: can train regular people. So that was like partly his
Speaker 5: crusade around it. It was partly the police unions were
Speaker 5: blocking cops getting training, and it was partly that the
Speaker 5: group that stepped up in order to say, hey, we're
Speaker 5: going to do this was a not really a mutual
Speaker 5: aid group, but a black empowerment group that taught entrepreneurialship
Speaker 5: within this neighborhood and and did like stuff like drive
Speaker 5: around the food van and sell food out of the
Speaker 5: back to break the food desert. And they were like,
Speaker 5: well we can tear it. We have some organizational ideas,
Speaker 5: and so it was coming out of the civil rights
Speaker 5: movement also, so it was kind of specific parts of
Speaker 5: black civil rights stuff, meeting hey, how do we destroy
Speaker 5: the gatekeeping of the medical industry and just like and
Speaker 5: then even then they had trouble getting people to come
Speaker 5: to these trainings, right, and so they were like kind
Speaker 5: of just rounding people up on the street. So the
Speaker 5: first people, the first paramedics were not just black folks
Speaker 5: who were impoverished systemically. From that reason, but it was
Speaker 5: also a lot of felons. It was some people who
Speaker 5: didn't have any like stable places to live, a lot
Speaker 5: of people who are dealing with unemployment, that's with serious
Speaker 5: PTSD coming back from the Vietnam War. It was like
Speaker 5: it was like the fuck ups, you know, and they
Speaker 5: were like, well, we're not the fuck ups. We're actually
Speaker 5: really awesome and we're doing all this amazing work, which
Speaker 5: is part of why it would make such a fucking
Speaker 5: killer movie. And then it was even the part like
Speaker 5: even at one point, in order to get city funding,
Speaker 5: they were like, sorry, you need to have a white person,
Speaker 5: and so they were like, like, just one, and so
Speaker 5: they found a guy who had been the token white
Speaker 5: soldier in a black unit in Vietnam and we're like, hey,
Speaker 5: can you be our token white person. He was like sick, Yeah, no, totally,
Speaker 5: that's fine.
Speaker 2: Oh hell.
Speaker 5: And so you even have, you know, from a Hollywood
Speaker 5: point of view where you need that, they even have that.
Speaker 5: So it's a perfect movie.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have your new trope, the magical
Speaker 2: white guy. But he just like stays in the bag
Speaker 2: and doesn't do shit. Yeah, it's like it's like what
Speaker 2: does he do? It's just amazing his whiteness, just even
Speaker 2: passively off to the side the doors that it open.
Speaker 1: This is also something that we saw when we were
Speaker 1: talking about alternatives to policing and like this programming Eugene,
Speaker 1: Oregon that has been going since I think the early eighties.
Speaker 2: I feel like it's called.
Speaker 1: Like creeps or something like that. They give it the
Speaker 1: worst acronym possible. But it's like if if you need
Speaker 1: to call someone for help but you don't want the
Speaker 1: police showing up with a gun, you have this alternative,
Speaker 1: and like I remember reading a profile and the things
Speaker 1: that they're solving are just like, I don't know, this
Speaker 1: drunk guy is like having a fight.
Speaker 2: With his partners and needs what it's called, what is
Speaker 2: it cahoots? Cahoots? Isn't it cahoots?
Speaker 1: Yeah? It might. I think it had a different name
Speaker 1: for un but I don't it creeps. As Nixon's committee
Speaker 1: to re elect the president, it was something like more
Speaker 1: sinister though, but anyways, like they would just like give
Speaker 1: somebody a ride, you know. It's just like really like
Speaker 1: community based, like oh, I actually know that guy, uh
Speaker 1: or I know his cousin. I'm gonna have his cousin
Speaker 1: come give him a ride, and like you end up
Speaker 1: seeing this is what is useful about the Freedom House
Speaker 1: people being the people who are serving this community is like,
Speaker 1: you know, I think Margaret in the episode you talked
Speaker 1: about if someone's odeing, they probably know who dealt them
Speaker 1: those drugs and can like go talk to that dealer
Speaker 1: and like find out what they took. You know, it's
Speaker 1: like they are plugged into the community. So you're just
Speaker 1: like paying for somebody within the community who knows people
Speaker 1: to go in and do the very basic, you know,
Speaker 1: work of also incredibly complicated and important work of like
Speaker 1: life saving technology or life saving medical care, but also
Speaker 1: just having that context and it being someone that like
Speaker 1: people are comfortable with and not somebody who's pointing a gun.
Speaker 1: It is is so important and just like feels like
Speaker 1: this could be spread applied to like so many other places,
Speaker 1: right like in the modern world where we're seeing it,
Speaker 1: where we still have this crisis of the place to
Speaker 1: call when somebody's having mental health crisis or you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of different problems is the fucking police.
Speaker 5: Like I don't know, no, I mean, it just makes
Speaker 5: sense to me, and especially when a lot of stuff
Speaker 5: that puts people in dangerous criminalized you know, you know
Speaker 5: when when you're dealing with someone who hasn't who's odeane.
Speaker 5: Oh and then just to throw in that, also, the
Speaker 5: same guy whose name I can't remember, was I think
Speaker 5: the first person to administer narcan or like, yeah, use
Speaker 5: narcan not just as a way to pull people out
Speaker 5: of anesthesia, but also to pull people out of overdosing.
Speaker 5: But yeah, like if you're if someone's overdosing, you call
Speaker 5: the cops. You don't know whether you say that person's
Speaker 5: life or killed them.
Speaker 2: Right, is it? Doctor Peter Saffhar again, I.
Speaker 5: Literally it's just names go in and out of my head.
Speaker 2: It's awful.
Speaker 5: I need script in front of me in order.
Speaker 2: We're like looking and I'm like there, it's like there's
Speaker 2: like three doctors that made invented CP like there were.
Speaker 3: In Jude.
Speaker 2: Yeah it's Peter Saffhar.
Speaker 1: He born in Vienna, Austria, and yeah, yeah, ended up
Speaker 1: becoming the Yeah, and he created CPR.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and he did all this like tricksy stuff to
Speaker 5: avoid serving in the Nazi army.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 5: He like like also almost killed himself with medical issues
Speaker 5: in order to be medically exempt from serving in the
Speaker 5: Nazi army. Yeah, this is the cool guy. And he
Speaker 5: also like usually I do these episodes about like great
Speaker 5: men in history and they turn out to be like
Speaker 5: awful to the women in their lives. Yeah, total wife guy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, great wife guys. Wife guy energy, I mean not
Speaker 2: just energy.
Speaker 1: He they were like ballroom wall champions.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and like included her in his plans and like
Speaker 5: I mean I don't have like I haven't read her,
Speaker 5: an I've read some quotes from her, right sure, sure, sure,
Speaker 5: But like compared to a lot of the people that
Speaker 5: I end up researching in history, where they're like so
Speaker 5: dedicated to the cause that they treat everyone in their lives,
Speaker 5: especially the women and who are close to them in
Speaker 5: their lives like terribly, this man is not an example
Speaker 5: of that.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: But yeah, So they're out there, they're part of the community.
Speaker 1: They're the first people to like get the paddles out
Speaker 1: and go clear like on the street. Like they're you know,
Speaker 1: they are like breaking all this new ground. A racist
Speaker 1: mayor comes in, pushes them out, starts trying to replace
Speaker 1: them with cops, like just stops like cuts their funding,
Speaker 1: keeps cutting their funding. It's like this again, just like
Speaker 1: a movie scene that is incredible that Hollywood is sleeping
Speaker 1: on it. During this period, Freedom House like gets their
Speaker 1: hands on a police scanner and so like racing the
Speaker 1: police to get there to save people because the police,
Speaker 1: the police are taking their sweet ass times, so they're
Speaker 1: like listening to when they're is a medical emergency and
Speaker 1: then like racing there to help people before the cops
Speaker 1: can show up. But just an amazing story of like,
Speaker 1: you know, people from the community, like the medical power
Speaker 1: to the people, like just all these you know, all
Speaker 1: these really cool ways that this community came together against
Speaker 1: all odds, and like the fact that that's not.
Speaker 2: The story we tell.
Speaker 1: Instead, the story we tell is like fucking an entire
Speaker 1: genre's worth of Westerns, right, like fucking so frustrating.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think important.
Speaker 5: Connecting those two things that was well done, oh things, right,
Speaker 5: I think.
Speaker 2: It's just yeah, it's probably important to like even think
Speaker 2: of it in that context of just sort of like
Speaker 2: you know, being fed this these kinds of stories over
Speaker 2: and over again, and it's like, you know, to your
Speaker 2: point market, it's like you can almost manifest it through
Speaker 2: like the repetition of that kind of like story arc
Speaker 2: whereas like we're now. I think a lot of people
Speaker 2: are feeling like we need to like transition to something different,
Speaker 2: something that feels more connected, something that feels more humane
Speaker 2: and actually treats people with dignity. And yeah, and all
Speaker 2: these stories have been like in a way buried or
Speaker 2: whether that's intentionally or because they don't think it sells
Speaker 2: tickets or whatever, you know, we're seeing it like that's
Speaker 2: actually our impulse is to just is to invent and
Speaker 2: iterate and do something that is actually for a communal
Speaker 2: benefit rather than like, here's a story of the guy
Speaker 2: who got so pissed off he beat up everyone in
Speaker 2: town and then races or whatever. That's so many movies.
Speaker 1: Catline fucking like John Wick, nobody beat up everybody in town.
Speaker 1: This guy so pissed, Yeah, gets so pissed that you
Speaker 1: just like beat up everybody in town, like.
Speaker 2: All those Bowl films or like that, or it's just
Speaker 2: like Jesus christistoff guy on a mission.
Speaker 5: Oh man, that's because every American man is told that
Speaker 5: that's in his heart and he could do that if
Speaker 5: he had to. You're like, not every man can beat
Speaker 5: up every other man.
Speaker 4: That is clearly not true. That is not how mad
Speaker 4: it works? You know what I'm really good at going hell, yeah,
Speaker 4: help me. I think most men are because of patriarchy
Speaker 4: to be like.
Speaker 2: And then someone fixed it for me. And then I
Speaker 2: told myself I did it all myself because.
Speaker 1: Well, Margaret killed Joy, what a pleasure having you on
Speaker 1: the daily He's like, Yeah, the podcasts are cool people
Speaker 1: who did cool stuff and live like the world is dying.
Speaker 1: Where else can people find you? Follow you, experience you
Speaker 1: all that good stuff.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 5: I have a weekly substack called I don't even know
Speaker 5: it's called. It's just Margaret Killjoy that substack or whatever,
Speaker 5: and it I put out a post every week. Half
Speaker 5: of them are free and tend to be more public
Speaker 5: and political and talking about you know, different ideological positions
Speaker 5: and history and things like that. And then the other
Speaker 5: half are for pay subscribers and are more personal. You
Speaker 5: find me on social media by searching my name. My
Speaker 5: latest book is a tabletop role playing game called Panumber
Speaker 5: City that I did with a couple of people that
Speaker 5: comes out a week or so ago. As people listen
Speaker 5: to this, and so if you like tabletop role playing,
Speaker 5: that works, And then if you don't but want to
Speaker 5: read my fiction, my most recent book I think is
Speaker 5: my most recent I don't know. Escape from in Cell
Speaker 5: Island is one of my books that listeners might enjoy
Speaker 5: where I make fun of not all masculinity, but the
Speaker 5: more toxic side of it on an island full of
Speaker 5: in cells.
Speaker 2: Amazing.
Speaker 1: Is there a work of media that you've been enjoying.
Speaker 5: I've been watching Star Trek, Okay, Lower Decks whatever. The
Speaker 5: other new one is that I watched a bunch of
Speaker 5: It's been my favorite comfort food lately.
Speaker 2: I like a lot of the writers on Lower Decks
Speaker 2: and I haven't watched it.
Speaker 1: Yet, but oh that makes sense.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 5: That one of the main characters is I don't remember
Speaker 5: actors names to save my life, but with like an
Speaker 5: actor in the Space Force that I really liked, and
Speaker 5: I was like, oh this is good.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, totally all right, Miles, Where can people find you?
Speaker 1: Is their working media you've been enjoying?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: Find me on Twitter, Instagram, threads anywhere with the AT
Speaker 2: symbol at Miles of Gray. Find Jack and I on
Speaker 2: our basketball podcast when I was in Jack Combat Boosties,
Speaker 2: and also catch me talking shit about reality TV on
Speaker 2: four to twenty Day Fiance with Sophia Alexandra tweet, I've
Speaker 2: been the thing. I've been really, I've been been real
Speaker 2: busy with the reins and the baby's birthday and things
Speaker 2: like that. I did, though, watch the first episode of
Speaker 2: Mister and Missus Smith and that was pretty good. It's
Speaker 2: pretty good. It feels like it's obviously like the whole
Speaker 2: thing was like, it's not the like the film with
Speaker 2: Brad and Branjelina or whatever like that. It just feels
Speaker 2: it feels like it's a it's a really good reimagining. Uh.
Speaker 2: And it feels like cool for lack of a better word,
Speaker 2: like you know, like when you use like when you're
Speaker 2: like a teenagent, she's like, oh, this is cool. Dang dark.
Speaker 2: I mean like like now like as you get older,
Speaker 2: you're like, I really enjoyed like the cinematography or whatever.
Speaker 2: Like on top of being able to say that, I
Speaker 2: also watch and go, this is like fucking cool. I
Speaker 2: don't know how to sort of describe it, but anyway, yeah,
Speaker 2: I enjoyed tweet. I've been enjoying.
Speaker 1: Stephanie Insley Hirsch and now tweeted showing the kids, Honey,
Speaker 1: I shrunk the kids and having to explain which inventions
Speaker 1: are Zany Rick Moranis originals, shrink ray and which are
Speaker 1: normal household objects phone attached to the wall, or which
Speaker 1: were normal household objects which I just I just had
Speaker 1: that same experience, and Honey, I shrunk the kids still
Speaker 1: holds up, still goes, like to the point that when
Speaker 1: it's raining, my seven year old's like, oh man, could
Speaker 1: you imagine this if it was Honey, I shrunk the
Speaker 1: kids with a sprinklers and it was fucking cataclysmic. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So anyways, classic. I think there was an attempt in
Speaker 1: the works to reboot with or like make a remake
Speaker 1: of that called Shrunk, But I feel like they would
Speaker 1: fuck it up because they wouldn't be using like, you know,
Speaker 1: built sets. They would be just like trying to see.
Speaker 5: Gi Yeah, and it would all be jokes about how
Speaker 5: the kids are upset that they can't look at their phones.
Speaker 2: Yeah exactly, or like yeah, or like they're all trying
Speaker 2: to get to their phone like that's the end games,
Speaker 2: like we just have to get to my phone. Yeah, totally,
Speaker 2: and all will be solved.
Speaker 1: I think it actually would be pretty funny because it's
Speaker 1: apparently supposed to start Josh kadd so should be good
Speaker 1: all right. You can find me on Twitter at Jack
Speaker 1: Underscore O'Brian. You can find us on Twitter at Daily Zeitgeist,
Speaker 1: where at d Daily Zeitgeist on Instagram.
Speaker 2: We have a Facebook fan page and a.
Speaker 1: Website, Daily Zeitgeist dot com, where we post our episode
Speaker 1: and our footnotes. No, we we link off to the
Speaker 1: information that we talked about in today's episode. Well, it
Speaker 1: was a song that we think you might enjoy, Miles,
Speaker 1: what song do you think people might enjoy it?
Speaker 2: You know, it's just you know, feeling cozy. I like
Speaker 2: some new jazz and there is a UK new jazz
Speaker 2: group called the Tan High Collective t A n h
Speaker 2: ai uh and they're just funky.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: It's just like people always say, like people don't play
Speaker 2: jazz anymore or whatever. It's that jazz, just especially new jazz.
Speaker 2: It's evolving. It's like feeling more like R and B
Speaker 2: or hip hop adjacent. But trust me, and people still
Speaker 2: have the same level of you know, chops on their
Speaker 2: instruments and are able to do really interesting things. So
Speaker 2: check this one out. It's called Sal's Groove by the
Speaker 2: Tan High Collective.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Also because footnotes, we're probably just gonna be linking
Speaker 1: off to the book that you used as your main source,
Speaker 1: which I believe is American Sirens by Hazard, Yeah, from
Speaker 1: that episode, So we'll leak off to that. It sounds
Speaker 1: like an incredible book telling the story that we just
Speaker 1: kind of went over. And then we'll link off to
Speaker 1: the two podcasts which everybody should go check out. Lick
Speaker 1: off to all that in the footnotes. The Daily Zeitgeist
Speaker 1: is the production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to your favorite shows. That is going to do it
Speaker 1: for us this morning. We're back this afternoon to tell
Speaker 1: you what is trending and we will talk to you
Speaker 1: all then.
Speaker 6: Bye bye