Episode 155: The Camp Fire

Exciting news out of Britain, but we're not talking about the news first because that's that comes in the second slide.

We're here, that's right, we're here to talk about other things and then do the news.

That's how that's the format of the show, folks.

Thank you.

We believe in a rigid workflow on this podcast.

You are very,

very rigid, very, very disciplined, very

on topic.

We're like Spartans, we're like monks, you know,

no tangents, just a solid curve of constant radius.

Our podcast is a flat circle.

We stick to sports.

Yes.

Every slide that you will see for the next four and a half hours will be the like stress strain graph of like steel.

Yes.

Well, that has tangents in it.

No jokes.

No jokes.

Well, this sounds cool.

Whatever this is.

Yes.

It's a good time.

Trust me.

Maybe when I hit the fucking vape and keep it.

I don't.

You need to learn to start dipping.

Welcome to Well, There's Your Problem podcast.

I wasn't done.

I was done.

Oh, fuck all

the podcast about engineering disasters with smoking.

I'm Justin Rozniak.

I'm the person who's talking right now.

My pronouns are he and him.

Okay, go.

I am November Kelly.

My pronouns are she and her.

And when I consumed tobacco, I smoked because I was an adult and not a kind of

toothless

farmer.

Yay, Liam.

All right.

Well, now that I've been insulted for no reason.

Hi, I am Liam McAnderson.

Love you, too.

And I am the person currently stuffing myself down your chimney and giving you dipping tobacco, like some sort of even fatter Santa Claus.

Why does it have to be dip Santa?

It's dip Santa, baby.

It's Dinmas.

Every single present under the tree is in the shape of a diptin.

Yes.

Yeah.

And orby snooze.com.

Email me back, fellas.

And we have a guest.

Yeah.

It's Kevin again.

Speaking of tobacco, because I work in Forest Resources, I have a really fun dip in cigarette story.

So I went up and I met this logger for the first time.

He jumps out of his Ponzi, which is like a one and a half million dollar machine for cutting down trees.

He's got a big

lower decker in, and he's got an upper decker in.

So he's just got two horseshoes in his mouth.

And he just taps on the side of his machine, just a cigarette, and he starts smoking a cigarette while he's got an upper and a lower decker.

And I was like, oh, yeah, triple crowning.

You've never done that?

No, no.

But that man was an excellent logger.

Roze has seen me do that.

Yeah, yeah, he rolls up his sleeves, it's just covered in patches.

Capital, trying to quit.

Two things.

Firstly, what's your fucking pronouns?

Oh, sorry.

I'm so sorry.

So my pronouns are he and him.

Nice.

Apologies, though.

The pronoun checks are very important.

This man is a joker.

He laughs when trees fall down.

Yeah, sometimes, yeah.

Listen, I don't want to go back in the forest.

I got a workplace injury from this podcast

doing the Preons episode.

I'm sorry about that episode.

It's all right.

It fucked me up for a while.

So I'm excited to get like depression off of this one.

If I can be honest with you, when we were doing that, I was in the heart of my ecological depression.

I've gotten much better since then.

You know, I went out and killed a bunch of invasive species this summer.

I went on vacation, you know, so we're doing much better, but it's a real thing you got to work through.

I will update you on something you weren't looking for, but the Pryon conference was excellent and it was some of the most depressed drinking you've ever done.

Oh, yeah.

Can I ask something, Devon?

Whenever any of us get like, particularly Doomer, can you just like fade up a like one through 10% opacity image from first reformed?

Just to just to kind of like set the vibe and just kind of use your own judgment on like how first reformed we're getting, you know?

I don't know what that is.

It's a Paul Schrader movie about how we're destroying the planet and also Paul Schrader grew up as a Calvinist, which kind of all Paul Schrader movies are about.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah.

Although Leopold has a fantastic quote about this, which is like, when you learn ecology, you learn about the damaged world around you.

I've just butchered it, but you know, hey,

dude.

Yeah, absolutely.

We butcher shit constantly.

That's kind of our thing, actually.

We butcher shit, people get mad at us, we ignore them, or sometimes we get drunk and don't ignore them.

I'm working on that one as we speak.

My strategy for ecological oppression is: I just get depressed on Monday.

Monday, I'm allowed to do everything sad and be depressed, and then the rest of the week I have to be happy.

But I also don't work on CWD on Mondays

because it will depress you worse.

You will get like 200% opacity first reformed screenshot.

So

what do you see on a screen in front of you is a forest.

Which is on fire.

I'll say one thing.

You see those orange spots?

They're kind of like orange-red spots.

If there's anything that's going to denature the fuck out of a prion, kind of.

Yeah, big ass fire.

We'll get into that.

Oh, Jesus.

I'm not sure here whether I'm supposed to say it's not supposed to be like that or it is supposed to be like that, just less.

It's supposed to be like that.

It's a complicated

issue.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like nuance in here, which is the problem.

It's not.

Oh, Jesus.

Okay.

Well, there's not enough wine left in this bottle.

Yeah, I'm pretty stupid.

It's fine.

I have another one somewhere.

That's why I delayed 15 minutes because I knew I'd have to go to the beer store

after stupidly trying to improve myself by exercising today.

Yeah, but what'd you get?

Oh, I got the Very Mega IPA from Yards.

It's actually pretty good.

I mean, the can makes it look like it's going to be bad, but it's actually good.

No, very mega is decent.

The Bit Viper from them is not exceptionally good.

It took me a long time to try this one because I was like, there's no way that's a good beer.

And then it turned out it was a good beer.

I just, if I never drink another IPA again, it'll be too soon.

Like for some reason.

Oh, that's right.

You're a pussy.

I forgot.

No, no, no.

That's the correct opinion.

November is is correct about that.

Thank you.

Because

I like November.

I like beers, right?

But like, the thing is, I don't know how a bunch of kind of like craft brewers tricked you all into drinking the kind of shit beer we designed to put on boats for a long time.

Mr.

Tree guy here doesn't like a beer that tastes like a tree.

No, my work is like bitter enough.

I don't need bitterness in my beer.

I had a very nice glass before we started recording, a very nice glass of untapped.

It's a fine Pennsylvania whiskey with some maple syrup in there.

Gorgeous.

And now I have a summer shandy because I'm a basic bitch.

I'm not going to issue any pretensions about this just in the fact that I'm drinking wine.

I'm drinking the most expensive wine that the small Tesco near me had, which was £8.50.

There's a 2020 Multipleciano da Bruzzo, which means I'm drinking COVID wine.

I'm drinking wine that was like made by people wearing face masks.

And let me tell you, you can't really taste the COVID, but you can really taste the oak, you know, which is something

that's what we like.

We like to see some nice oak out there.

Is that the one with the really rustic looking label?

It does look pretty rustic, yeah.

It's Tesco Finest, mind you.

I used to drink a nice Monte Pulciano.

It had this like really rustic looking label.

It was very nice.

It was also relatively cheap.

That was bad when you drank wine.

Yeah, well, sometimes wine would make its way into the house and it'd be like, I like this one.

I like an Italian wine.

I like a Barola is the thing.

I don't.

Italian wines are definitely, I never really got a taste for anything else.

You know, it's just like, okay,

I'm drinking the Italian wine because that's where I know, what I know.

Right.

I at least a little bit.

Big fat California cabs.

I was in Italy for work stuff, and I had some great Proseccos.

Like, that's what I was all about there.

Yeah, you know, the Prosecco is, you know, the thing.

Yeah, I mean, at some point, it's like, I could just buy Prosecco all the time.

I don't know why I save it for special occasions.

Put a little limoncella in there with some ice, and now you get a little limoncello spritz, and you're back in the piazza.

It's a great time.

I'm a big Apple Spritz gull.

It cost you like three Euro.

Oh, it was fantastic.

All right, welcome to Waleris Your Problem Podcast, a podcast about wine.

Suck it, Riley.

A podcast of infinite leisure.

I was really transported by Kevin saying, like, you're back in the piazza.

I was like, that's wonderful.

Oh, yes, I would like it.

Yes, please.

If I may just really piss off Riley for a moment here.

Please.

We've never met, so I'm just going to make him have a bad time.

So the only wine in my house is there's a bottle of wine that my now wife and I got when we were in France right before our wedding.

And then we have a box of New York wine.

It's from the New York side of the

Erie.

It's fine.

It's the other side of the microclimate.

The good side, the free side.

Drank whiskey out of a box.

It was scotch in a box and it truly tasted just like piss.

And it was just like, oh, this is the lowest I've been.

I will also come for Riley's microclimate.

So the spotted liner fly kills grapevines in the winter because it sucks out the, you know, the sugars in there that protect the vines over winter.

um and they are moving through pennsylvania rapidly and spreading out so that microclimate is under threat

if you if you have like literally anything technological you ever want to talk about please come on trash future because i need to see you destroy this man's conception of his microclimate we talked about i do carbon credits i have the best idea for a carbon credit program too by the way

yeah we'll get it

in the news yeah i we should we should probably move along here at least a little bit oh fuck yourself.

It's so much fun to talk about this.

You get a couple of glasses of wine and me.

The podcast is six hours long.

What do you want from me?

Oh yeah.

Oh oh I'm gonna do the bomb collars.

Oh you guys are easily distracted.

My name's Dylan McKelly.

You do as I say not as I do.

This is why I knew I needed to go to the beer store before and not after the podcast.

I don't have shit.

I'm gonna after we record.

It's time for the goddamn news.

I'm gonna dunk

myself and scott.

I wasn't done.

I love the ability to just like turn that on you.

Like a kind of like Michael Moore at the Oscars being like, the Iraq war is bad.

It's just, oh, you want to say some shit to me?

You want to say some shit to me right now?

You don't have to be like these.

But I do.

The line.

Oh, I know.

The line.

Go down.

The 170-kilometer-long linear city being built in Saudi Arabia as part of

The line, you'll never believe this.

The line has been shortened to the nub.

Oh.

This kind of walkable, mixed-use urban development is actually impractical to build in most Saudi municipalities.

Yes, they are settling from building the world's longest building to, well, still building the world's longest building.

but considerably shorter.

Yeah, less of a flex about it.

They've cut it down to like 2.6 kilometers or something like that.

Yeah, and the only things that like come close, if you exclude like the Great Wall of China, it's that big, shitty Nazi resort they never finished.

Oprora, yeah,

on the Baltic.

Yeah, sure.

We're all smart intelligent know these things.

Yeah.

And then, like, uh, listen, I don't know that it's something to be very proud of that you just know off the dome the name of the like Nazis doomed Baltic Sea Resort.

I think like the second, the second like longest building is uh uh Karl Marx Hoff in Vienna.

Well, you know, it's a real sort of like

more of ideologies.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Although I feel like if you if you stretch it out, like I feel like there's a bit of like a like an intestinal thing.

Like, you know how your intestines are like fucking as you know, 170 kilometers long if you like stretch them out, right?

But they double back over themselves.

That's a lot of intestines.

November

feels longer.

You should get that checked out.

I literally am having that checked out.

I think if you just do by like length of corridors, probably like the Pentagon is like probably stupid long, right?

I think that one really big building was like Romania or something like that.

Oh,

we did an episode on it with Adams.

Palace of the Palace of the People.

I mean, that's

just big.

That's not long.

Oh, that's what they say about me.

Yeah.

It's

not see how you can unwrap the Pentagon and make it long.

Unwrap the Pentagon.

Yeah, I mean, if you're like...

9-11-2 is when a bunch of like situationist terrorists straighten out the Pentagon.

Well, didn't the Saudis already try that?

It's like the Gordian not the worst.

Oh my god, they linearized the Pentagon.

Would have required like a huge number of planes to do that.

No, they turned it on its side and rolled it out like a spool.

Yeah, I used to have the entire Pentagon like on my back, like one of the old field telephone, like wire spools.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But yeah, so it seems like things are not going well in Saudi because,

you know, they were going to do all of this stuff and it was going to be like Vision 2030.

It was going to be like Silicon Valley.

Every text us-up was going to be there.

And a bunch of like European rimless glasses wearing architects took their money.

laughed in their faces.

Slack, turtlenecks, you know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And then

as they kind of predicted and as we predicted, there wasn't enough money even for the Saudis to do this and they started having to borrow money to do it, which they want to do.

And it's just, it's not going to happen.

I don't,

they will have like displaced and killed a bunch of people in order to dig one ditch.

Right.

And then the ditch is going to fill with water and then the ditch is going to collapse.

I am genuinely surprised at how far they got with sight work though.

My God.

I mean, they they did dig that ditch.

They done they done dig it.

They done dug the ditch.

They done.

Well, I mean, one thing you can say about Wahabism is it makes the ditches run on time.

Apparently, yeah.

I just ordered shorts online.

Not just now, but

the email confirmation was, you done did it.

And it made me want to throw up in my fucking mouth.

Don't give me a cutesy confirmation email.

It's really interesting.

Your order has been shipped.

Thanks, Fabs.

Hurt me a little.

You're like, your three XL shorts are on the way.

Have you considered making some changes to your diet?

They're to Excel.

They're to Excel.

I have little chicken legs.

I promise.

All my weights in my tummy.

I'm kidding myself.

I can fit into a 2XL.

I'm right there with you, brother.

You gotta start eating crappy patties.

I'm gonna start eating less is what I'm gonna start eating.

Yeah, I guess it's easy to motivate a bunch of like feckless Europeans if the threat is, I will give you like a billion dollars, and if you fuck with me, I will cut your arms and legs off.

Oh, actually, I have a fun I have a fun story here so when I was in Italy

I was in the bar I like I like the idea of you like jumping up

I saw the Saudis like cut a guy's arms and legs off close so I was in this bar and it was like a little after midnight so they were just getting going for Italians but there are these two Aussies who are just drunk as skunks and I was chatting with them and you know why they were there

they one of them was selling like cooking equipment to the other guy who worked for neon

So Neom, the loss of Neom is going to cost me a beer the next time I go to Italy because they bought me a beer.

I'm personally affected by this news story.

I'm saddened to hear this.

Yeah, thoughts and prayers with Kevin at this trying time

will continue on, unfortunately.

97-year-old Saudi embassy still mutilates defectors the old-fashioned way.

Oh, very good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I'm still,

I mean, I don't think they're going to build a full line, but I could imagine them eventually extending it another mile.

You think that they're going to build like one block of line, put a big like Saudi flag on it, open a Balenciaga store and declare victory?

Yeah, actually, yeah, yeah, that could be it.

And then they have like line phase two, and then they'll realize, you know, one of the one of the big conceits here is they don't have that hyper loop in the basement.

And like, well, that's not real.

So

that's not happening.

Yeah.

Don't you mean diaper poop?

Yeah.

Please call it by its proper name.

Yeah, the diaper poop.

The diaper poop in the basement.

Yeah.

Well, maybe they can run the guy who's in charge of the line through that a couple of times to see if it works.

Only the line reduces one European architect to a soup-like homogenate in under 30 seconds.

Fucking.

I just don't like Europeans.

Besides, Gareth.

Luckily, I'm not European now.

I don't think Gareth is either because we Brexited.

We're like Atlanticists,

we're anti-woke and we're our own thing, and we're a freewilling buccaneering nation that doesn't have to answer nobody.

Yeah, all right.

That was that you're welcome for the Levly Zach, by the way.

Yeah, we're gonna need another one of those in about five minutes.

We should be doing that in Ukraine right now.

We're gonna introduce Bjark Ingalls to a vacuum environment and watch him expand to the size of his ego.

Yes.

In other news.

Yeah, this is the reason why I'm drinking the most expensive wine in the small Tesco.

I don't know if you know this, but the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland is.

North of Ireland.

Yeah, and the occupied north of Ireland.

Thank you.

That's right.

Thank you.

They just released something called the CAS Report.

Yes.

The CAS review.

I couldn't think of a different picture.

Um, it's more like the more like the ass review because it's ass review, exactly.

That's taken to professionalism there.

Uh, all of you are now uh children until you're 25.

Did I read that right?

Yeah, adults can't make their choices despite being able to do it.

The wedge issue is adults cannot consent to medical procedures.

Okay, you'll find yourself.

They, uh, so this was a an inquiry into like health care for young trans people, right?

And essentially what happens is if you go into that with a huge amount of bias

and discard all the evidence and then say, hey, there's no evidence this works, then the outcome is a report that is just really, really bad science more than anything.

It just, if it doesn't hold up on like scientific merits, even in like a sort of bad faith way.

And it's just full of like irrelevant bullshit.

There's a bit in there that says it's like impossible to tell what sex you were assigned at birth if you're like five foot seven specifically.

This is not a joke.

That's like

verbatim.

It's it's just it

rejected every study that was not double blind, which is not something you can do with hormone therapy.

I really want to do this.

A, it's not ethical.

B, people will find out that they're not on hormones.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's like you kind of get some obvious effects.

For me, you know, the big one was like I started growing tits, right?

Difficult to double-blind that,

but also unethical.

I should have told you.

Sure, stay a try.

Yeah,

I want this to be applied to other things and be like, you're actually like not allowed to do like studies of like developmental linguistics because there's no good double-blind evidence, right?

And until you lock a bunch of kids in a fucking like linguistics department labyrinth and raise them without language, you aren't allowed to draw any conclusions from this.

Yeah, so people have tried doing that, and that's how the children and youth services comes to visit you.

Yeah, it was also like that was one of the problems with trying to test drugs for treating AIDS was, you know, people tried to work out if they had the placebo or the real drug so they could give it to other people who had AIDS.

Yeah, it's

they were in the study.

I mean,

it's not ethical to do these things, you know?

And

wait, I have I have a solution.

You ready for this one?

You take everybody who's on this committee and you put them in the double-blind trial.

Or guillotine them.

Oh, there you go.

Then that's the thing.

The good news is that the Labor Party has already agreed to implement everything that's in it.

Fuck off.

And there's another study, another review that's in the early stages now into adult trans healthcare, all of which is to say, get me out of this fucking country.

Please, God,

they are going to try and make it illegal for me to live here.

Oh, well, at least maybe I can go to the United States.

About About that one.

That's not good.

Yeah.

You're fine if you're in a major city.

Canada is going to try to murder you.

You always have a place with us, Nova.

Yeah.

We have a spare bedroom.

Heavily armed spare bedroom in Philadelphia, please, and thank you.

Yeah.

Oh, that apartment opened up in the Drake with the huge terrace.

We could all live there.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that terrace is fucking huge.

Well, there's your problem hype house.

I mean, subscribe to the Patreon so we can afford it, please.

it is only six thousand six hundred and sixty seven dollars a month

which for the location and the size and the height yeah

for that kind of money you could get like a like a studio no pets no students uh bills not included in like outer london

I was talking to Jay he was like if I had a roommate that would be less than my rent in San Francisco

or Oakland excuse me yeah yeah yeah yeah I just

it's the thing about British transphobia is right is that this country does its level best to socially murder you for being trans.

And the only thing to do about it is to ignore them and transition anyway.

You can get your own hormones off the internet.

You should do that.

Don't waste any time with the NHS because it's useless anyway and it's about to get worse.

And

obviously this is highly precarious and it doesn't feel great, but I think it's ultimately going to be a futile effort, right?

I don't think you can legislate or morally mandate trans people out of existence.

It's just going to make things

frustrating and undignified and more precarious for a while, but in the end, you have to believe that we will win.

And

yeah, you know, that's the thing that I have faith in.

Because...

like you have to yeah and this these these freaks and assholes cannot be allowed to triumph.

And I think all of their victories will turn to ashes in time.

Can I find some bright side of this?

Well, some bright side of trans folks in England?

One time.

I've been listening to

this small podcast.

You may know of Kill James Bond.

It's been excellent for...

So in my job, I work with a lot of young folks.

who are figuring themselves out and it's really helped me to interact with them and help them in their figuring themselves out.

So, you know, there's always podcasts out there, which are very helpful.

That's that's true, you know, and it's it's kind of win-win for me

doing those podcasts because the people supporting those podcasts go some way to like help insulate me personally from the worst bits of this, uh, which I, you know, alternately feel guilty and insecure about, but it's very much appreciated, you know?

Fantastic.

I can't say enough good things about it.

I think the thing is,

right, like I empathize with you, Justin, because like I want to move to London,

another thing that the Patreon is enabling me to do, right?

And

I do this in the fact that, despite the fact that like England is appreciably worse than Scotland on a lot of trans stuff, and also just England itself and the UK generally, pretty bad.

But I love it and I don't want to live anywhere else.

So sometimes you just have to stay where you want to be.

We have to move to the merger, the merger of the urban and the rural, the very beating heart of cold country Hazelton.

I'm not.

I mean,

I got to move to London and stay in the UK because all the other stuff about like, oh, I should flee the country without learning another language, fucking to where?

Like,

where is English speaking in the world that isn't having a kind of like Nazi reaction right now?

That's a good question.

How's New Zealand doing?

Bad.

Oh, shit.

I have some Kiwi friends, and the answer is not great.

Okay.

What about Aleta?

What about like which one is

yeah kiana exactly

fucking throwing my lotta with kiata hell yeah i want to get

that was the english colony island or

i mean i do think south america might be the move if you're looking to like maximize your kind of like survivability despite a you know way higher trans murder rate i think in the long term if you if like start start learning Spanish, buddy.

You could move to the Falklands.

That's true.

That's true.

I mean, anyone tries to hate crime me in the Falklands, I see him like coming through a perfectly flat, unforested field that's about like 15 miles long.

I do think

if you decided to martyr yourself for the cause of the Falklands, they will build a statue for you.

I think the time is right for a transphemterry pack.

Yeah.

Yeah,

you need the trans-autonomous oblest.

Yeah.

I would honestly like,

oh,

don't fucking tempt me.

We've seen how like movements of oppressed minorities towards taking nationhood off someone else has been going lately.

You know,

you try that shit and like in a hundred years' time, the trans-autonomous oblast is like ordering airstrikes against the oppressed they-them community.

Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

That's a good point.

Um, they're they've they've declared war on the bisexuals.

I'm not going to be like the trans femze of Yabotinsky.

I don't want to do that, you know?

Hey, Mab, but it's just assigned mother of all bombs that burst.

I love my community, and I don't want to handcuff it to the many, many war crimes you are forced to do if you impose territoriality on it.

All right,

we have to make trans Mars.

Suck that shit, Elon.

Yeah, fuck you, Elon.

Yeah, well, the problem is then you find out that there is like indigenous Martian life we're displacing like five minutes into it and you just the whole cycle starts up over again.

Whatever, dude.

No, humanity's destiny is the stars.

I don't care.

I'm absolutely subjugating whatever the life forms are on Mars.

I do.

I don't care how intelligent they are.

I am doing unlimited genocide on the Martians.

This is humanity's destiny.

Yeah.

No, I have, whatever an ultra-nationalist group is, that's me.

Don't be the fuck up.

Do you think there's anything more substantial there than extremophile bacteria.

You'll be fine.

I think more of the extremophile bacteria are 10 feet tall and intelligent.

This is kind of suck.

I think this is a good point for me to mention the thing.

I forgot to mention, which is all of these views are my own.

These have nothing to do with my employer.

Do not find my employer.

Yeah, no,

you're not in trouble.

We're in trouble.

Yes.

I haven't even said anything that spicy, and I'm more depressed about this than I have been in ages.

I ended up like avoiding the news for the whole day, like catastrophizing, spiraling, retweeting a bunch of horrifying shit, and then going to play the like new Suzerain DLC, which is really good, by the way.

I highly recommend that game.

That's a little endorsement for you there.

Pretty good.

I was like, I'm going to play some video games today, but my mouse wheel is still broken.

That's

super fast.

You can't say,

I'm thinking about going on a tour of a $6,000 a month apartment.

And then also say, my mouse is broken and I don't know what to do about it.

That's That's a disconnect between like income and like personality.

He knows what to do about it.

He just won't.

He previously only

blunted Gary and MP.

He knows what to do about it.

He just won't.

Yes.

No, I did order a new backup mouse because I intend to get this one running again.

You are a nice mouse.

I have followed you across a thousand universes and in every one I'm going to punch you in the nuts.

I really love that.

There was someone who replied to us on Twitter that's like, do you think Justin and Liam find each other in every timeline, in every universe?

And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I think that's what the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once was about, you know?

What was it Shitty Marvels movie that was like that?

Madame Webb.

One of them is Madame and the other one is Webb.

What was the one that had like Kamale Nangiani who got like ripped for it's a terrible movie?

Oh Jesus.

It's like that night.

Was that it?

Was that a TV show?

Or there was a straight to Netflix one with like Scarlett Johansson that was awesome.

Was that Marvel Eternals?

Is that Eternal?

Oh, yeah, Eternals.

Yeah, it's like Eternals.

This is.

Yeah, sure.

Which one are the Rich Camille Nanjani?

Hunar, probably.

If we're going to be on

the tangents podcast.

Go fuck yourself, budge.

That was the goddamn news.

Hey, so is the recording still working for you guys?

Yeah.

Okay, because mine's showing invalid date, invalid date, invalid date, but I think it's fine.

That's weird, but it looks fine on my end.

So

just keep your local recording recording going and save it.

Yeah.

I did a podcast where they used Riverside.

I don't know if you guys have tried different software.

On knowledge and belief, Zancastra is the worst software to exist apart from all the others.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, that podcast was a big endorsement.

But the other podcast was very high production budget.

I'm not going to lie to you.

Yeah.

I mean,

we are not.

high production values.

Yeah.

I would say the name of it here, but I would also dox myself in a second.

Yeah, no, you're fine.

I was sitting on a bench by the river earlier today, and I wasn't able to record anything.

Yeah, Devin does that a lot of production value.

We love you, Devin.

It's like production value on the like us side, you know?

Well, Devin does a really good joke of really good visual gags.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

No, Devin's fantastic.

I got nothing bad to say about them.

Fantastic.

Why are we looking at the vice president of the ISIS?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sorry.

Sorry.

I got distracted with other podcasts.

I swear I'm not cheating on you guys.

We were.

We were all

welcome home, cheater.

We were all distracted by thinking about Devin.

It's very true.

Yeah, man.

I'm going to say something that I'm going to regret saying.

I want to disgust our listeners a little bit.

I want them to turn this off in anger.

Pamela Harris could get it.

I'll fell out of the coconut tree you know well that's exactly what's happening here we all live in a contract coconuts mrs vice president not to not to like not to infantilize her but i i don't think it's ethical for a woman as like permanently high as she appears to be to get it oh that's fair

giving that shit they gave to pat mahomes at the the super bowl 57 halftime yeah i i just i i they did hit him with some good good i don't know what it was but it was something great yeah what whatever it is, the like the like 0.01% health care is something else.

I've talked about this before.

I think I talked about it when Trump got COVID.

And they, they

did, yeah.

They juiced him up with the, like, this is the drug that makes the president not die.

Um, like,

whatever it is, Kamala Harris is on, like, the mental health version of that, you know?

Yes, maintenance dose.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She's, she's fantastic.

Oh, the, the, the, like, the drug regimen, the drug combination that makes you feel like that

they must be giving the same thing to that the lady who runs twitter now oh lindy yaccarino yeah she's just posting she's just posting shit that's like uh you know engagement numbers are up with uh hashtag metrics it's all happening on x the everything app and then elon is posting like you know great replacement thing the juice 88 yeah yeah

Okay, so let's talk about the episode a little bit here.

Go fuck yourself, buddy.

The thing is, we could cut this this and we choose not to because we know that people like it.

I'm not sure.

Yeah, no, obviously you don't

want it and are just like, when are they going to get to that?

Never.

If you post a comment, you've already lost.

Yeah.

Even if it's a good one.

Even if you like it.

I do like the people who are like, I do like the people who are just like, this is just for engagement.

Have a good day.

I love those weird fucks.

Okay.

All right.

All right.

So we live in a context, unfortunately.

So fuck.

When we discuss fire today, everyone is thinking about that big satellite photo that we saw before of, oh, shit's on fire right now.

Oh, well, that's crazy.

This is a new thing that has never happened before in the history of the Western United States.

Insane.

Actually, we have a context around us and we simply exist within it.

There are people who didn't fall out of the sequoia tree.

No, not in this.

Yeah, yeah.

I will also agree that coconut trees are not trees, they're grasses.

And fuck them, grasses.

So

I've just walked into a beef I didn't even even know that you had.

Come on.

Look.

Put the lime in the coconut as just Kevin setting fire to a coconut grove.

Look, I am a forester and a wildlife biologist.

When am I going to get back on an engineering podcast?

Everything is going to catch straight.

Feral horses, I'm coming for you and the burrows next.

Watch out.

Yeah, that is a mass helicopter-initiated death I would like to discuss later.

We'll get there.

Okay, so

you fortunate son.

Yeah, it would be sick.

All right, so we're talking about forest fire in the Western United States and how it's kind of like crazy right now.

So fire has always happened in the Western United States.

It's not a bad thing.

What's bad is what's happening right now, hence the context.

All right, Roz, give me the next slide here.

Gotcha.

All right.

Yeah.

So if you're bitch-made, you think about fire in the fire triangle, which is oxygen, heat, and fuel.

Bitch-made shit.

All right.

So this is just like, oh, look, my candle's on fire.

Wow, it's not that neat.

Oh, man.

I wonder if I reduce the fuel loading in this forest.

Is is that gonna like potentially stop fire me doing double award science yeah yeah and then then then maybe alice you like finish your your bs in environmental science you're like oh we should start looking at like the stand health and see if this sorry a stand is just a it's just a bunch of trees that are similar species and size in a geographical location

i don't know i don't know who that is so so that's that's your next level is like okay so what what happened that caused this wildfire curiously this this one's also in a triangle.

Everything is a triangle here.

There's a power shape here.

It has a very powerful shape, yes.

Yeah.

Also, foresters are not the most creative people and neither are fire scientists.

So yeah, why not fucking do a triangle?

All right.

So then now we're starting to think at the level of like, yeah, like this is what I'm talking about.

We got some good stuff going on here.

This is our context here.

You know, the fire doesn't just happen because like, you know, we have an unlike put out campsite.

You know, there's stuff that contributed to this fire.

There's a lot of fine fuels in the ground.

The weather was right for it.

We got some wind going, which we'll get to later.

You know,

the conditions were right.

But if we, you know, use our big brain here, we can look at the fire regime.

Like, what is this place supposed to be?

And like, should this fire have happened to begin with?

I have somehow a paradigm already in my head for understanding this.

You know what, this mirrors?

This is tactical, operational, and strategic.

is uh is what you're talking about here.

You're like, your tactical guy is like, this is why this is on fire, your operational guy is like, this is why, like, this bit is on fire, and your strategic guy is like, this is why there are fires.

Yes, I was, I was told by Smokey the Bear that only you can prevent sporest fires.

Yeah,

very much like to say to Smokey the Bear:

you know, October is bear season.

Come around, buddy.

Come around.

I got my license.

Where are you at, dog?

if the highest success rate is one percent in pennsylvania i intend to be in that one percent

smokey the bear has fucked around enough it is time for him to find out we

do not give us t-shirt ideas that will also get us a cease and desist that is smokey the bear is property of the like u.s department of the interior or something i'll actually yell at

interior

Someone did not study their

USFS

question mark forest service's agriculture thanks to Gifford Pinchot.

The GIF, in his ultimate wisdom, decided that Forest Service should be within agriculture, so that way management continues to happen.

Well, I agree with that management does need to continue to happen.

I do think this is my real, again, I'm not going to be on here again.

So I'm going to get my finite opinion on it.

If you want.

What are you going to have me talk about?

Whatever.

But anyway.

What if you want?

Unless you're planning to get eaten by Smokey the Bear.

Like, if you want to come back on, we will have you on.

Oh, sick.

Yeah.

I keep it strapped, Smokey, so don't sleep on me.

Anyway, if we had 45 minutes for a single joke i would tell the friar joke but i'm not gonna do that

just just do the sess up now put the punchline in at the end in like five hours time i'm not gonna do it i also need to re-up my long form jokes i haven't done them in a while it's true it's been a hot minute

Okay, so we'll get to Smokey later and why he's catching not strays.

These are very intentional and he deserves this.

All right, so fire happens.

It happens for a lot of reasons.

We're going to dig through those reasons in a second.

All right, next slide.

I don't know what I was talking about before we started threatening Smokey the Bear, but you know, I'm right too.

You were talking about the...

Yeah, Gifford Pinchot.

Okay, so Gifford Pinchot puts, he was, you know, famously governor of Pennsylvania, blah, blah, blah.

So he puts the Forest Service when it's created in the U.S.

Department of Agriculture.

So that way management happens.

Right to make sure management happens.

USDA, probably not the right agency for it.

Forests work in a different time scale than like row crops.

So there's my slight beef with the GIF.

So what should it be?

Like interior?

Probably its own thing.

Probably its own thing.

Like with

Fish and Wildlife Service, probably a separate service.

It's kind of like, you know, its own thing.

I don't know.

Interior's got some issues with it too.

So BLM's got some problems.

Same with...

I don't know.

The thing is,

I really like when a US like cabinet level department has something it shouldn't.

I was a huge opponent of the homeland security reforms because I think it was funny that every department had cops.

And I think it was great that the like the Secret Service was treasury for no reason

other than history.

So I think just fuck it.

Like,

you know,

counterfeiting.

Damn.

I guess so.

Give it to Treasury.

You know, give it to, give it to like HUD.

Really fuck around.

You know, you got to give it to a department with like an unreasonable amount of authority and ability to cause violence.

Oh, energy.

Department of Energy.

Yes.

I have a friend who works at Los Alamos National Labs, and she does forestry out there because it turns out that you don't want the nukes burning down in a forest fire.

Yes.

Yeah.

All right.

Sorry to her.

Which almost happened recently.

I was going to say.

I mean, it was only like, it got within a mile.

It's not almost.

It's a mile.

It's a mile.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I did, I did get some nice pictures of that happening.

It did actually burn in 2008.

There was a small chunk of fire that got onto it in 2008, but it's it's 40,000 acres of land.

Like, yeah, it's not the nukes.

This is close to the nukes.

Department of Energy Protective Forces being like, what the fuck?

I can't shoot the Mark 19 at the forest fire.

It's not, it's not working.

Okay, so here we have a beautiful fire regime map.

So fire happens.

It happens a lot, happens for a lot of reasons.

We're going to discuss some of those reasons.

So this is our natural fire history, how things should be behaving.

So if we look at the Western United States, we'll see that most of the Great Plains should be burning up like pretty frequently.

So we'll see their replacement severity.

That means like it's killing all the trees.

Yes, because it's the Great Plains.

There are like four trees out there.

I almost took a job in North Dakota and they were like, yeah, so here are your six trees that you're in charge of.

And I was like, nope.

No, don't do this.

I'm actually too young to dive headfirst into a wood chipper, so we'll move on.

So you have a big belt of, you know, high severity fire.

So everything burns down pretty frequently because grass likes to burns real hot and fast.

Then, if you look at the inner mountain west, so Ross, would you mind just like for our non-Americans who are not familiar with geography, just kind of highlighting the inner mountain west over there?

It's like over,

yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, over there, so this is so we have some fire that happens, and it's not big, it's kind of like ground fire happens a lot.

If we look in California, kind of your Central Valley coastal, your chaparral system, you've got a lot of fire pretty frequently, pretty frequently.

Weird green patch, yeah.

Um, so you have some really interesting like coastal stuff that happens.

If you go up the coast there, you run into like tropical or sorry, temperate rainforests like up into like Astoria.

I also almost had a job out there and that was like the Super Bowl of forestry, man.

We were on like $6 million harvest every day.

Jesus.

Ooh.

Jesus.

That's some money in them trees there, boy.

So yeah, money does grow on trees there.

So those are really high sight index.

It's really wet all the time.

You're not lighting that in fire if you want to.

Now, if we look at California, we do have this thing on the East Coast.

If we look at the East Coast, oh, you know, it's kind of tan, like orangish, orangish, tune color, kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, sure, whatever.

Yeah.

So the East Coast also has a similar fire regime.

If we look at particularly the southeastern United States, and kind of like if we want to be similar in our like mountainous, we can kind of get the Appalachians.

Right.

Like in like South Carolina, down through Georgia into Alabama and kind of Mississippi in there.

So the apps have a similar fire frequency frequency as most of California.

And

so you don't hear about Appalachia burning down all the time.

You don't hear about it, but I have seen it.

We will discuss this.

Yeah.

Okay.

So.

Bear in mind, I am deeply ignorant and also drunk.

Well, Gatlinburg did burn down one time.

And you know what?

I've been to Gatlinburg.

Not that great.

There was just a big fire in the Shenandoah Valley.

Yeah.

I could see like over the ridge the last time I was in Roanoke.

Yeah, so fire should happen in the East Coast.

It should be much like California, though different vegetation.

You know, we should be burning

every once every couple of years.

It should be pretty low intensity.

So your leaf litter gets removed.

You kind of cycle some nutrients through there.

It's fine.

It's fine.

How you make these fire maps is really interesting.

Let me delve into this for a second.

So you have, you know, you do social history.

So you talk to the people who used to live there.

So you talk to the First Nations Indigenous people, and you get their stories.

You also take tree cores, you get fire scarring history.

They go into mines and they take timber sections out of those mines, and they look at, like, okay, this, you know, mine timber was placed in like 1812.

And so we can figure out when, you know, how old this thing is.

And there are some really great...

Harvest a bunch of old genes from in there.

Yep.

Oh, yeah.

Well, while you're down there, while you're down there, why not?

It makes some real money.

Denim harvesting at some point.

Yeah.

You got to watch out for the spider spawner, though.

The creepers?

The creepers down there?

It's been years since I played Minecraft.

No, no, no, they've improved it now.

The Mine Shafts have a spider spawner in them.

The thing is, I don't play Minecraft.

I play Minecraft until I see one thing that makes me scared, and then I quit and don't play Minecraft for 10 years.

So I've played it like twice.

I'm writing a book, so I don't have time to play video games right now.

Wow.

This is stupid.

Don't do that.

Really just making me feel good.

Don't write books.

They're silly.

Okay, so the eastern United States has a similar fire frequency for a lot of it as the western United States.

So we should be seeing fire across the southeast.

Why is the southeastern United States not burning as frequently or as largely as the north, you know, as you know, California and the West Coast?

If we see it.

We found a metric the southeastern U.S.

does well on.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And we'll talk about why it does well there.

All right.

Next slide, please.

So that was fire regime.

Let's talk about fire intensity and what fire looks like.

All right.

So here we have some trees.

Do we know what these trees are?

Don't read the notes.

Don't read the notes.

It's cheating.

Okay.

Yeah.

I'll put, I got, I got a hand over my face so I can't see the notes.

Bruce?

This looks like a really, a really big kind of tree.

Nope, not Doug Ferzag West.

This is jackpine.

This is jackpine.

Scotch pine is close, though.

So this is jackpine on the bottom and then eucalyptus above it.

So what we're talking about here is our fire, our various plants, fire adaptations, and how they want to deal with fire.

So some plants are fire adapted, so they want fire to happen.

So here our eucalyptus emits oil, so the world will burn around it, and it it burns really hot.

These things explode, right?

Yeah, basically, yeah.

This guy up here is the eucalyptus.

Yes.

Yeah, correct.

Okay, yeah.

Okay.

So you see that nice shedding bark there, how it's curled in.

You get some good airflow in there if you're going to introduce a fire.

Oh, it wants to burn.

Yeah, yeah.

It wants to see the world burn.

It does the Terminator thing, you know?

Right.

No, exactly.

Yeah.

Unironically, yeah.

It wants to destroy the world around it.

It wants to burn everything really hot.

Yeah, okay.

All right.

So it wants the world to burn really hot.

And so it emits oils and has a shedding bark.

That's what it wants to do.

Oak are fire-adapted, so their leaves curl up.

And so that way you get good air movement underneath them.

These are fire-adapted species.

They want fire to happen.

Jackpine is a great, you know, example of serotonin and serroteneity.

So we think of serotoninity in a you know kind of a spectrum.

So you have like, you know, more and less adapted species, and individuals are more and less adapted.

Well, that sounds great.

I was about to say, yeah, for once it's not a can opening.

Although,

that being said,

I'll get on this.

Hold on.

Very nice.

Thank you.

All right.

So we have we have serotoninity that we're discussing.

So these pine cones will stay on the tree even after the tree is dead and they'll stay closed for like 20, yeah, 20 years.

And they'll open up in heat.

Some of that heat can be fire.

You know, we can have like on the right.

All right, the world has burned down and now we have a great seed bank for jackpine.

We have bare mineral soil.

We have lots of nutrients and lots of light.

Gonna be real happy there.

But also, if it's a nice hot day and you're like above a bare rock on the Canadian Shield because you're jackpine and you're a shitty tree that lives in shitty sites, you know, you're going to pop open there because it lives in a shitty place, to be real honest.

No, no hate to jackpine.

It just is adapted for bad places.

So these are fire-adapted species.

I live in Britain.

All those like right-wing prepper guys are like, I'm going to homestead on the Canadian Shield.

You can't do that.

That doesn't.

Well, ask me about the heat dome.

What is the heat dome?

It's, I mean, so

if you're aware of the Canadian Shield, you'll have seen bits of it now because of climate change.

One of the stranger weather manifestations of it is it just sits in like baking, sort of broiling heat for like months at a time now, completely unpredictably.

It's cool.

Cool.

That's fun.

I love climate change.

Also, there's like

half an inch of topsoil and then solid rock.

Yeah.

I used to guide trips out of Atacocan, Canada.

Shout out to Atacocan.

And that's Canadian Shields.

And it's like where you transition from Northern Hardwoods into boreal forest.

And like, it's really cool if you're canoeing, but it like sucks to be a plant there.

If you want to make that arable, you got to like dig up the entire Midwest and move all the soil up there yeah yeah or took the midwest and put it somewhere else land back but for canada yeah

losing the war of 1812 210 years later yes i i got some bad news about the amount of topsoil left period i feel like you know

yeah yeah i've worked with nrcs they're fine okay uh so so fire is really good if you're adapted for it because you have these wonderful like on the right here with these great sites lots of open soil lots of free nutrients perfect if you're adapted for it So next slide, please.

Yes.

So there are other plants that are fire resistant.

So they don't want the world to die.

They want to live through the fire.

So here we have a great example of red pine, pinus resinosa for our botany heads out here.

So it's adapted for frequent, you know, surface level fire, as we can see on the right.

You know, it wants to see some fire come through and kill lots of stuff that's not red pine.

So its needles are kind of long and resinous.

They have good stuff in there for a light fire.

But you'll also see there's not a lot of low branches.

The branches kind of foxtail up, so that way they're moving away from fire.

So, this is, and it's got really thick bark.

So, it's a fire-adapted species.

It wants there to be fire, it wants it to be low-level, kill everything that's not red pine, and it's going to have a lovely, beautiful stand

to live in and to grow.

Oh, yeah, he's just sitting there like, ha ha, fuck you, you dumbass ferns.

So, so that's this is a fire-adapted species.

So, if you're in the western United States, Ponderosa pine is your like great fire-adapted species.

If you're in the southeast, longleaf pine is your classic fire-adapted species.

Longleaf pine, actually, in the buds, it has these big water droplets.

And so when it gets hot, it'll pop and it'll put out like fire on the needles, but it wants the world to burn around it.

You get grass stages and some stuff.

It's crazy.

Trees do crazy shit.

Evolved a look

it evolved a sprinkler system.

Yeah, yeah, no, exactly.

Unironically, yes.

So nature is amazing.

Yeah, there's some wild shit out out here.

It's pretty neat, not going to lie.

Science is freaking epic and based.

Oh, yeah.

The coolest.

That's why it's on fire.

So fire is a natural thing.

We can see the landscape is adapted for it.

Okay, next slide, please.

Okay, not only is the landscape adapted for it because the Eastern United States, or sorry, the Western United States.

is hot and dry, but also we have people.

People are people.

Bastards.

You can just say bastards.

They didn't fall out of the coconut tree.

They exist in the context of et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah, yeah.

So

when we talked about them last time, we talked about them in the context of Eastern forests.

Now we're thinking about Western forests.

People have been there between 60 and 20,000 years.

I don't have to take your pick.

I'm not

an archaeologist.

I'm a tree guy.

So we've been here a long time.

We've been influencing this climate for a real long time.

What's just in like vegetation history for a real long time.

And if you're a person in this time,

you are lighting stuff on fire.

Some of that is like for medicinal purposes.

Like, if you have like certain crops, you know, certain, sorry, certain plants that grow well, you know, post-fire, like blueberry, you're going to light that shit up every one to three years.

So that way you can go out and harvest blueberries.

Blueberries are nice and tasty.

I like to eat them.

They did too.

They also like to eat the things that ate the blueberries.

Looking at you, Smokey the Bear.

With my rifle cocked, yeah.

Yeah, more like with your Adelatl ready to go.

imagine how good it would feel to kill a bear with an athelatli wow i have really very limited interest in bear hunting so i don't care to be real honest i don't

know about smokey you know yeah that's where i said limited interest my interest is the one bear just smokey you have a kind of like moby dick ahab situation here you know it's like up there with riding the sand worm you know

you're like um you're slicing up the bear and you see he doesn't have the campaign hat on and you're like fuck this yeah no that's exactly it that's exactly it unless like he's a little brother.

You gotta.

You hate him enough either going after his family.

We're going cartel on Smokey Bear.

No, you're going full.

Jesus, what the club happens.

Okay,

using an AI targeting system to assassinate the members of Smokey Bear's family.

Listen, we took out his dentry.

He's not going to be around for much longer.

We got him, boys.

The fucking the bear UN is killing me.

I'm ignoring him.

Only kill bears in uniform, is all I I can say.

Any bear of fighting age on Texas.

No, those are non-compatent bears.

Good God.

Not the Israeli military.

I honestly have to lose this whole bet.

Okay.

All right.

Well, it can't include Smokey the Bear.

So take that, Smokey.

Okay.

So people are out there burning for, you know, they burn it for cultural reasons.

Also, if you want to, you know, play lacrosse like we see in this picture or ball game's been, you know, if you want to play ball game, obviously that's.

I would love to play ball game i well it's for trash future i don't want to do it again here yeah so so if you want to play lacrosse bits all transiting in a triangle basically you know it's another fire triangle except yeah bits the bits triangle um so if you want to play lacrosse you have two options for a field you can find a nice meadow that like will eventually go away and become forest or you can take your nice meadow and you can just burn it once every one to three years and keep them damn trees out and you get a nice lacrosse feel so

they want to use taxpayer money to burn down a forest for a ball game field god damn it

moving the ball game team to algonquin uh i gotta we gotta move the tepees to make room for the ball game field come on the studies show publicly supported ball game fields are not worth it let the tribal land

yeah i mean but burning the meadow makes sense saves you like scything it i guess you know yeah but you also have to remember, like, there's no reason to invent, like, smithing here.

Like, you got, like, all the shit you need.

Like, digging sticks are the main way of, like, you know, getting stuff out of the ground.

There's no reason for it.

You know, looking back at some of the historical accounts, like, you have, like, six-pound lobsters that are hanging out in the beach.

Jesus.

Doing the, like, gold, germs, and steel thing and, like, backwards in reverse and being like.

You got too much abundance and you never had to invent the scythe about it, you know?

Yeah, basically.

Can't believe our team moved to the Conestoga because we didn't burn down our own ballgame field.

Just picturing like lacrosse owners back in the day, like the kind of.

Well, I mean, you know, this is probably more of a communal, so it's like more of the Packers, you know, version.

You know, we get communal ownership here.

That's, yeah, again,

the Packers are the only one.

The Packers are the only correct team to support if you are listening to this podcast.

The first colonists get to Wisconsin and they like find a Native American guy there wearing the cheese hat.

We've been killing bison and making cheese out of them.

We don't know why

what have you guys been doing?

Y'all heard of this thing?

It's called Brat Verist.

I don't know.

We just kind of just came up with it recently.

We're trying it out.

See what you think about it.

The Europeans showed us long span arches and now the fucking ballgame team wants a domed meadow.

Oh, boy, well, that sounds some like Illinois or Minnesota bitch shit right there.

Like, God intended, on a grass field in the open air.

Come on.

Jeez.

I've been on

this elite lacrosse shit since the days of hill mounds.

You know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

So, so we get first.

Has anyone tunneled into those mounds at Kanokahokia?

I don't know.

Yeah, yeah, they have.

They found like interesting, interesting archaeology.

Lots of evidence of like a recurring theme of like earthworks for stuff like this which is like once you do the main thing of like temple on top of a temple on top of a temple i have a plan for an episode about this one of the things that you do is like peripheral burials where you just like if someone important enough dies you just like dig stick them in the mound yeah you dig into the mound like horizontally or vertically and you stick them in there in a little chamber that's otherwise going to be in the earthworks it's really cool well that's cool yeah so like you know we got we get people out here who are burning for a number of reasons and sometimes it's accidents and sometimes it's wildfire or you know lightning strikes but we know there's a lot of intentional fire fire happening, especially in the eastern United States.

The western United States, you got, you know, looking back at the dendrochronology records, it's a lot harder to determine intentionality, you know, because like it's more fire prone.

But in the eastern United States, where we have more rain and the leaf litter is a little damper, it's a little bit easier to determine intentionality.

So, you know, we're going to say the eastern United States definitely burned intentionally.

The western United States probably burned intentionally.

This is where I have to be a scientist and say, probably,

but yeah, more than likely.

This is also a severe flaw with early Franklin episodes.

episodes.

Yeah, I mean, you can kind of like, you can, you can get this wrong in a couple of directions, right?

Like, you can be like...

Yeah, we do that all the time.

Yeah, well, this is the thing.

I feel like you can kind of discount the amount of intentionality and engineering going on here in like either the sort of...

ostensibly positive direction of being like, oh, this is like mystical, kind of like in touch with nature, absolutely kind of like freewheeling stuff.

Or you can be like, Oh, these people are like primitive and didn't think about this stuff.

And instead, you look into it, and it's mostly like guys arguing about where they want the lacrosse field.

Yeah, where's the point?

Yeah, exactly.

I want to answer this question.

All right, so here's the answer to your question, Alice.

Or sorry, Nova.

Sorry, my bad.

This doesn't look like this doesn't look like a fucking lacrosse field at all.

Where are the goals?

Where's the

jar every time someone calls Nova, Alice?

You have to put a dollar.

I listen, I am absolutely relaxed about it.

I'm transitioning from like an easy name to a kind of stupid out there name.

You know, it's fine.

No, it's my bad.

It's my bad.

No, no, no, no, no.

I'll do better.

That's we got to learn somewhere.

This, we're all learning and growing together.

Okay.

Yes.

So, so here we have two forests.

These are the same,

basically the same forest.

They're separated by a road.

Right side of the road is burned.

Left side of the road is unburned.

This is in coastal South Carolina.

I'm not going to say exactly where.

It's a very unique place.

I'll just tell myself, tell everyone who I am right away.

All right.

So if you want want to set up like a nice place to hunt whitetail deer, where are you going to do it?

Right.

You know, you're going to do it left or right?

I mean, obviously, I'm not going to like hike through a big fucking like fun and like gunner and all that.

That's a palmetto.

I don't.

And

these are like, are these the plants that like slice you up?

Oh, yeah.

They're also loud as shit.

And like the only time you ever need to talk.

Yeah, so here's a fun fact about palmetto.

So the only time you'll ever need to talk is when someone's going through a palmetto.

And it's just the loudest thing in the world.

um like we had i've been in places like so i've been in places similar to this where there have been air compressed 50 cals um you know they're not 50 cals but they sound just like them going off and you can't hear them over the palmetto so this is just the loudest scout game playing through the world

this is before this is before harbor freight came to america and you could buy a machete for 10 cents oh you can't machete through this man you just gotta burn it so i just

meanwhile you you hunt on the one on the left and you're playing fucking call of duty you know you're like stacking up like deer you've got you've Subway Surfer on the phone, goated on sticks.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Yeah, so this is how we can determine intentionality.

We can just say, Look, if you want to live here, you're going to burn this every one to three years.

On the right is what happens if you burn every once, every 10 years.

You get crepe myrtle, you get um palmetto, you get all this shit.

So dense, there's so much of it.

Yeah, that's not stupid, but Jesus Christ.

Oh, I counted all of those stems, by the way.

Looks pretty cool.

That's terrible.

The yopon in there makes you want to die.

Um, You got any trees that kill you instantly in South Carolina?

Just there you are.

So going back to your Keys episode, I actually had a run-in with poison wood.

You don't want to do that.

I'm going to tell you right now, I had to go to the hospital and get steroids.

It's a bad time.

It's also a phototoxin, which, you know, obviously you're in the keys, so a phototoxin is the worst time.

Not very good.

Yeah.

That sounds bad.

Yeah, no, it's real bad.

It's real bad.

And poison wood, it's like, it's kind of this shitty looking tree when it's like doing well.

So that's that tree you you guys talked about, like the pigeons were eating.

That's like really like poisonous.

Um, and so, like, if you're just like clearing dead wood off a fence, you might grab it and not know that that's incredibly not something you should touch.

And that's how I got into it.

I was volunteering and shit.

That was a bad time.

Don't volunteer.

That's bad.

It's like a lesson you learn in like forestry and the military.

Don't fucking volunteer for anything.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

So, so we know prescribed fire is where we know fire is happening, definitely intentionally.

Eastern United States, maybe more intentionally than the Western United States.

Can't be sure.

Probably a lot of intentional stuff in the Western United States.

Next slide, please.

Oh, and then these fucking assholes.

Yeah.

Oh, my God.

Be nice to the guys who wear necklaces with crosses.

No, don't do that.

Execution of that.

The thing is,

these guys are like all chances.

It's like 50 guys who are like the

fourth son on their shitty estate in Valencia who have gotten kicked into the new world to try and, like, or disgraced for like one reason or another to try and make it big.

And like one Jesuit they brought along who's like writing a book about how they're all assholes that he's gonna like send back.

But he's also incredibly violent too.

He's

willing to kill anybody.

Real fuck shit.

I just hate Spanish, man.

I mean, I understand that like you, you, you know, the 2010 World Cup, whatever, I've said enough about it, but I just, I can't stand Spanish.

I, one thing, one thing I will say, right?

As far as like colonial powers go, the Mauryan helmet here is stylish.

It does go hard, yeah.

I just

actually, yeah, it is just wandering around with whatever 15 pounds of shit on my head.

No, thanks.

I can barely keep a yarmulka on without getting annoyed.

This stuff's surprisingly light.

Like, I hate to say this is one of the things where, like, yeah, reenactment and like experimental like archaeology and stuff like that is like really, really useful for this because, like, you can build a decent approximation of a lot of different armors and like people haven't changed a huge amount.

So you can be like, this is what it's like to wear and like move in and stuff.

And it's like really, honestly, it's a really exciting time in the field.

That's really cool.

There's some people, some interesting people on Twitter you can follow about this.

The names aren't coming to me at the moment.

Double them in the notes if you if you remember.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm interested in that.

I probably won't.

So for the listener at home, I have in the notes here, I have,

Liam says some shit about the Spanish.

I hate him.

I should have.

November says some shit about the Spanish.

I'm also willing willing to say some shit about the Spanish.

I think a lot about the Spanish conquest of Mexico specifically.

Whole restaurant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Like, this is an area of history I come back to every few months and I like read some more about it because it's like, it's one of the harder things for me to imagine in terms of like...

an outside context problem.

Sheer depravity in terms of how you're treating

that too, but it was also tremendously unfair because on the one side you had one of the most advanced civilizations the world had ever known.

On the other side, you have the conquistadors who were simply small, greasy Spaniards.

Yes.

Legitimately.

You are like some guy who has gotten kicked out of Spain to Cuba and then gotten kicked out of Cuba to Mexico.

And you stumble like dick first onto Tenochtitlan, like the largest city in the fucking hemisphere, architecture the likes of which you have never seen.

Oh, and will never be seen again.

This is right for a genocide.

and your dickhead boss who is on the run from his boss who wants to like deport him back to cuba to put him on trial is like yeah we're just gonna walk in and like uh make like we own the place and you do like i i can't imagine what is the book whose name i'm forgetting written by i believe a jesuit priest about the conquest of oh you're thinking about bartolomeo de las casas um sure i don't remember what the fucking name of the thing is i'm sure he hasn't written too many other books and he's he's probably not putting anything recently so if you can just keep spelling that you'll be fine recent recent bangers um a short account of the destruction of the indies yep yep yep oh yeah again i uh if he is the one jesuit who you yeah yeah yeah it's a dominican actually he's a dominican but good enough whatever they're all a fucking saved bunch of goddamn papists yeah i don't have positive things to say weirdly this is the different thing about like de las casas is that like the dominicans are typically thought of as being the kind of like uh you know the the the conquest ones, and Jesuits are like thought of as being like, oh, we feel bad about this.

Not always the case, often reversed.

Let's talk about the Sagrada Femille and why it's definitely going to get finished and why you have to pay money, pay money to go into an unfinished building.

Fuck you.

Well, okay, hold on.

Well, we're still on the stage.

Just for that week, like.

Sorry,

no, no, no, no, it's fine.

I was threatening to become Catholic just to out-vote Liam on the religious balance.

Do it.

Do it.

I'd love to see it.

I think

God will be mad at me yeah probably but who gives a god's not real do whatever you want

you know

it's amazing you you can show up with like 70 guys and smallpox and call it i have a joke for you i have a joke for you let me tell my let me tell my joke let me tell my joke so my mom told this to me who had heard it from rabbi goldenberg rabbi if you're listening sorry all right

so

so uh a rabbi dies and gets to heaven and he's swapping jokes with God.

You know, they're telling all the fun ones.

They're swapping jokes.

They're having a good time.

And the rabbi tells a joke about the Holocaust.

And God says to him, How can you tell a joke about the Holocaust?

That's ridiculous.

That's so insensitive.

And the rabbi says, yes, I guess you had to be there to get it.

Maybe I didn't study enough Torah.

Fuck you.

I mean, that's like the Avnavakni thing, right?

Is the like God intervenes in a religious debate and they tell him to, like, fuck off because, you know, your job is to deliver the revelation.

Now it's our job to interpret it.

Don't fucking mess around with it.

I always admired that story.

Yeah.

Anyway, the problem with the problem with the...

You may be aware.

The problem with Catholics.

Problem with Spaniards.

Oh, we actually are going to do the Catholicism episode.

Yeah, and it's going to be like me being increasingly tempted.

The thing about the woke Pope, right, is that he's not woke enough.

No, he needs to fucking do Vatican 3 because it feels like I can deal with the British government telling me that

I should

not exist in public and that I'm a threat to human dignity.

But it feels like extra insult coming from the Pope because that guy doesn't have anything better to do.

Right.

I agree with that.

I think it's about internal Vatican politics.

Yeah.

I do believe that I want the Pope to issue a bull or whatever they do now that just says

the Pope says trans rights, let it ride.

He would alienate the entire American church, but he's going to do that anyway.

He's going to do it anyway.

There's no saving it.

It does legitimately.

It's appeased multi-popes in the U.S.

Come on now.

It's absolutely just appeasement to be like, well, I can kind of like hold this thing together.

It's like, there's no value in holding it together if the way of holding it together is unjust.

You have to rip the band-aid off and say trans rights.

You're sort of cyclical.

Yeah, you've been sort of in a damage control mode since Vatican II.

I mean, you know, at some point you have to.

Fuck them.

Leave the church.

Leave the church.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Leave the church.

Don't be a Protestant like you fucking want.

Get the fuck out of here.

Exactly.

Fucking Protestant.

Get the fuck out of here.

No, no.

They should do fucking Vatican III.

They should do fucking Vatican III.

And from St.

Peter's balcony flies a trans flag with a big-ass crucifix in the middle.

Yeah.

Inshallah, question mark.

Yeah.

Yo, I don't know where I'm at religiously, man.

I don't know.

How would you like to be Jewish?

I don't know.

Yeah, that's fun.

All right, you're Jewish now.

Don't worry about it.

So on today's podcast about wildfire, we have now converted Alice to November to Judaism.

November to Judaism.

We've now converted November to Judaism.

It's been a long time coming, but it happens to all of us eventually.

Sure.

So.

So these motherfuckers show up

and they kill a bunch of people, both intentionally and unintentionally, you know, through disease.

And obviously, they got them things on them.

They got them gats, they got them swords.

The things do not make as much difference as you think.

It's the tercio system that makes the difference a lot more.

Yeah, and the haciendas, we got disease.

It means third.

It's like the Spanish way of organizing an army.

And basically, it's like sort of an early precursor to the battalion.

It's how the Spanish like kicked everyone's dicks in in Europe and then got to the Americas.

Wow, we have like a small amount of organization in our army as opposed to everyone else.

Yeah, basically that's why the United States has the greatest fighting force in the world, dude, because we're slightly better at like small group tactics.

Yeah, you can, let's wait, wait, hold on, let's give some respect to the Swedes one time.

No.

And you can go.

Don't talk to me about

the fab Burger King off of a C5 game.

The greatest country in the world, asshole.

What you're talking about when you talk about the Terseio is less the introduction of the Thang, right?

And more effectively mixing the thang and the pike, right?

Like that's that's the big difference.

Are you talking about girl dick?

No, I'm talking about like

I'm talking about the Aquabus.

Oh, yes, yes, yes.

Okay, so the Spanish take over with the hacienda system, they kill a lot of people.

Just a lot of people, intentionally, unintentionally, and sometimes it makes the two.

What do you got to do?

You know, you do a colonization.

It happens.

You know, you got to make some omelets without breaking some eggs.

And in this case, yeah, you are going to break a lot of eggs.

Omelette genocide.

I don't think you can.

I don't know how to get this back on track, guys.

This is something right now.

You can work with me here.

You have like a sort of a Jesuit writing home being like, I don't know how to make a torso without breaking some wavos.

Arguably, arguably, over a long enough period of time, the indigenous peoples of South and Central America have won because they speak, they are the central, the center of the

Spanish culture.

There is revisionist history suggesting that, like,

I mean, one of the, like, if you want to read like seven myths of the, like, the Aztec conquest, right, one of the myths is that it ended.

Like,

there's, there are still places, and there's not exactly a shortage of them, where, like, this is still like an ongoing

like conflicted issue as to whether or not a bunch of guys who speak Spanish are allowed to run the government, right?

A good friend of mine is, he's a he's of indigenous people's origin.

He's from

Juarez, but he's his family's from outside of Juarez.

But he didn't, he was so concerned about that heritage that he didn't tell me about it until we were just blackout drunk at Tequila.

And that's when he told me about his indigenous heritage.

So it definitely still is a thing in Mexico, but

I think Mexico is like even

wild.

Yeah.

Yeah.

From my very limited understanding.

Well, because like the different styles, right?

Like Spanish colonists were very, very keen on like taxonomy and like categorizing race to the point of like...

Fucking genocide ears love doing it, man.

Yeah, but like in a really like exacting way of like dividing up your like genealogy and stuff.

17th century IBM punch cards for no reason.

Yeah, yeah.

This is why you should not.

What was that, Nova?

Do not use 23 in me.

Fucking my aunt used 23 in me, the aunt we don't speak to.

And I'm just like, I don't need to fucking, oh, she's, oh, she's fucking awful.

Mom, if you're listening to this, I hope her plane goes down.

I fucking, I fucking hate her so much, man.

Listen, listen, listen.

I'm willing to tolerate a lot of shit, but I'm a very tolerant, patient person, right?

Yeah, yeah, I've said this.

Yeah, but I fucking, you're mean to my mom, and I will burn you and I will burn you alive.

I will make fucking increased matter look like a pussy.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, so we're all doing great today.

So so the spanish take over uh you know if we look at california like 1759 because like no but can you drink some water for me real quick please uh yeah thanks bud because you know like the southwest is kind of a motherfucker to walk through it's a great time you know now but it's kind of a motherfucker to walk through when you're you know in steel plate and all that kind of stuff and you're killing everybody in front of you so there's there's no park ranger station you know no no and hey we're about to get to the park rangers don't worry about them so um they're in charge for a while there.

They banned prescribed fire under the hacienda system because like Europeans have this

super deep fear of fire.

And I saw this when I was in Europe.

It was hilarious to see because over, on one hand, I got some Slovenians and Italians who are just like managing like beach forests and high Alps forests and they're super afraid of fire.

And in the other hand, I got some Oregonians and Californians who are like, let's burn this whole shit down yesterday.

And yet the Europeans love road flares.

Well, yeah,

this is the the thing about the hacienda system, right?

Is that like you come to Mexico, you colonize Mexico, and you try to run it the only way you know how, which is like Spain.

So you're like, well, what if we applied feudalism to this?

What if this was farms?

I don't know much about this.

Does this go anywhere?

I mean, I understand.

It can be.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, you got a lot of sheep out here.

You know, you kill a bunch of people.

You depopulate like some really intense civilizations out here.

Like the Pueblo people had some like really cool.

They were on some cool shit, especially with opinion pine and collecting pine nuts.

Some cool shit.

Anyway, you kill them off and you replace them with, you make them herd sheep and cattle.

It doesn't really work that well.

Yeah.

That was my question.

Yeah.

Didn't the Pueblo people also sort of get got by warming climate?

Yeah, yeah.

Well, that doesn't help.

I will say this, though.

Introducing like sheep and cows and wheat and stuff like that

does lead to the creation of the greatest cuisine ever invented.

Big back.

I agree.

Tacos is amazing.

I love tacos.

That's

I make my own tortillas.

I want to flex on all of the other white people out there.

This is the thing.

If you get married to someone who's a weeb from Mexico, then not only do they take you to all the best Mexican places, but also they make their own tacos.

And you have the big cast iron fucking taco press in your house.

Oh, yeah.

I have one of those.

Mine's from Colombia.

That's

it.

It's like easily my favorite piece of kitchen equipment, this fucking thing.

It's amazing.

Yeah, we're going to just like into tortillas.

If you are buying tortillas from the fool, the store, you are a fool.

you're a sucker you've been taken by a scam it's so easy to make your own tortillas it is salt water and masa yep it's it you just you just you put it in the big like cast iron thing you squish and it's just right fantastic i i bought i buy big flower tortillas from the store because they're convenient

okay we're gonna fix you right okay we can i can do this i can make an

extra you live

the next country over from mexico america's really big no nova.

You live in a

country and a city with a lot of Mexican people in it.

We are going to get you corn tortillas and specifically like purple corn tortillas.

Look, I get nothing against you.

You just need a little bit of lard in there.

You just need some lard in with your wheat flour.

That's what the binding agent there is.

I just, I, I, I'm going to take you to the Mexican grocery store by my house, and then I'll take you to the El Salvadorian grocery store near my house, and then the Costa Rica.

They're all in a line.

Flowers.

Flower tortillas are fine.

Like, I really don't know.

I do.

Yeah, I know, you can't do a burrito with a corn tortilla.

You just haven't made your own tortillas.

You're working with these like preserved things that are not good.

You need to just make your own.

I we are an hour 20 plus in.

This is amazing.

I was about to say,

apologies.

This is why you can't

do this on a day when there's bad news happening to me because I will drink.

Oh, no.

Nova talked to her friends for too long.

Exhaust the episode and suck my ass.

I've had a wonderful day.

Just like, I'm sorry for you, Lova, but I've had a great day.

This is very

cathartic for me.

I also had a very nice day.

I got some ostrich-like boots in the mail today.

I had a great booty.

Los Altos.

It's a Mexican company.

I am also a weeb for Mexico.

I think Mexico might be the greatest country on the face of the earth.

I'm sorry.

I need you.

I hate to interrupt.

I need you to go to the Los Altos Boots website right now.

I'm doing it.

It's right now.

It's so good.

Like, right now.

It's so good.

I'm glad I gave the introduction about no tangents.

Yeah.

No, no, this.

Oh, this is incredible.

Okay.

Yeah.

It's so good.

Yeah.

I need some boots.

I need some boots.

I think you need them from here.

Yeah, I do.

Los Altos boots.

No free advertising.

We'll endorse these.

Yeah.

I'll endorse these.

Are these fucking staff?

No one is.

These are Shin-like Time Toe.

That looks insane.

Actually, let me endorse.

These are some pretty good looking boots, I gotta say.

If you're in the UK and you want to eat Mexican food, Santo Romedio in London Bridge is the best Mexican restaurant bar none.

Try the Baja Fish Tacos.

Incredible.

Okay.

All right.

So back to the colonizer.

We're here on slide 11 of 36.

We have travelers and Spaniards exist.

Yes.

So the Spanish come in.

They stop prescribed fire, kind of not all the way because they don't really want to go outside of the hacienda because A, it's hot out there.

B, the natives are not that friendly to you because you have killed most of the time.

Genocide.

Yeah, fair enough.

Genocide.

I don't know why I fucking said it like that.

Yeah, genocide.

They were living a pretty

cruel life until you showed up and you fucked it all up for them.

I mean, there was like still conflict, but it was pretty all right.

And now you got to work for this fucking friar who doesn't give a shit.

So, you know, prescribed fire basically stops.

And then there's the Spanish-American war that happens, and the U.S.

gets most of the Western United States under like the Hidalgo.

Was it Hidalgo-Gadaloop Treaty, something like that?

Sounds about right.

I really appreciate that California's flag to this day is like, what if we just did our own thing?

Yeah, like, yeah, we bought it from them.

We definitely didn't just take it in a war.

It's cool.

Yeah, you you guys played fallout

i am a trans woman

i just said have you played fallout

yes i have yeah nova has modded tilts broken in several different forms i i'm i'm mutuals with josh sawyer are you excited for the for the for the the tv show or no don't talk to me okay so i'm sorry after the u.s gets most of the western united states we continue the ban of prescribed fire under the acts for government and protection of Indians because, you know, obviously First Nations people need to be protected.

They haven't been managing this land for thousands of years and don't know what they're doing.

So this fire suppression continues out west.

All right.

Next slide, please.

That's like a whole, that's like a whole

philosophical enlightenment thing is that the

Native Americans have not been good stewards of the land, despite the fact that they're the only ones who know how to.

know how anything works.

Also interesting that there's like very little daylight between like Spanish colonialism and like American colonialism.

Right.

Just what funny hat it wears, right?

Right.

So that's what we're about to get into.

So, you guys, this is a map of federal land holdings in these United States.

And as we can see, most of the Western U.S.

is held in federal land.

A good chunk of California.

It's like 60% of Washington and Oregon are

Fed land of one sort or the other.

And that's because this land kind of sucks ass, to be real honest.

Next, give me a click.

Ah, yes.

So we do High Planes Drifter because this is.

Oh, fantastic.

Say what you will about Clin Eastwood now, but man, could he play a Western?

All right.

So this land sucks.

It's a high plains desert.

It's not good for cattle, but this is what we try to force on the land because like, you know, Western Europeans are, they want to raise cattle out there instead of like, you know, harvest

white-tailed and mule deer and black-tailed deer and antelope and all this sort of stuff.

We want cows.

All the stuff that's like possible to do with this land is completely like orthogonal to our ways of thinking about it.

There was a cattle bubble at this time because there was supposedly a breed of cattle that you could simply say you could just leave it on the high plains and it would be able to fend for itself.

And you could assume after so many years that you owned so many cattle and people were trading paper cattle.

that had died out on the high plains for like decades.

This is legitimately the cow version of full self-driving.

Yeah, well,

happens, and it turns out this place actually sucks to live in.

And so nobody wants to live there.

Even like when you offer it up, like the Mormons show up, but like, you know, come on, Bible fanfic only gets you so far.

You can only do so much with that.

So it becomes federal land.

Next slide, please.

All right.

Give me another click.

Yeah, there we go.

So this NF shows up.

You are about to make Smokey's birthday wish come true.

Yeah.

308.

By dropping him, right?

Yeah.

Actually, I have a seven millimeter.

It's not a 308.

Excuse me.

Like a thousand-pound unguided bomb straight straight to the face.

I named the first caliber that I thought plausibly could kill a bear.

Welcome to one.

I mean, just the seven mil is like three feet from me.

So I'm looking at the window.

If I see his ass out there, he's grass.

The B2 bomber from the Simpsons Bear Patrol episode.

I mean, you can use a knife.

The reason why the K-bar is called that is supposedly because a guy wrote in in like frontiersman, barely literate English to say he had used it to kill a bear.

Barely literate, huh?

Yeah, isn't there like the what is it?

Like the it's not the Missouri, but there's like some kind of like you get like buoy knife and you get like the Missouri big knife shit.

You got a bunch of big knives around, big knife dudes.

I'm a British patriot.

Give me a Fairbarn Sykes and I will kill Smokey.

Yeah, them words.

All right, I'm gonna go to the bathroom real quick.

What?

No, you can't.

Okay.

It's fine.

I can talk about Spanish people some more.

So the thing about.

No,

those Basque separatists like Balaclavas?

No.

Okay, so Leo, I'm going to need you to Google like Eta, like ETA,

the Basque terrorist group.

And I'm going to need you to go to Google Images.

Okay.

Because let me tell you, they had some fits.

They were getting their fits off.

Oh, boy.

Yes.

It kind of goes, though.

It kind of goes off, is the thing.

Like, the thing about Spanish people, right, is that

they love colonizing shit so much they did it even within the Iberian Peninsula.

Right.

And so even to this day, the Basque people labor under the yoke of Madrid's oppression.

And, you know, the fucking...

This is not, this is not the only one.

There's a couple of Spanish separatist movements, and they're all justified.

And yeah, chat was my boys in Barcelona.

Yeah, right.

And like the Basques, like in Eta, they were not fucking around.

Like they were fully like,

they created the first Spanish space program.

Like, oh, yes.

They killed this.

Yeah, we've mentioned it before.

They killed Franco's prime minister, Luis Queriro Blanco, by putting him in low Earth orbit.

Earth orbit.

Yeah.

I have seen that.

Church?

That's very Spanish.

I'm just looking at a photo of the...

i'm hard to be a catholic fascist because everyone knows where you are on sunday etc etc

so this is one of the things justin's ever said as far as i'm concerned one of the things i was getting to is you can tell the spanish are not upset about their like colonialism because the spanish foreign legion has never disavowed franco like you know i'm just saying like these freaks jesus christ uh so okay they you ever you ever see like you could just take him off the rolls you'd be like well you know like yeah he was we we don't we don't acknowledge him anymore we did that to like most of the guys who did did the sand creek massacre in the us

international links for the for this for the eta ita huh yeah

yeah i just love uh uh eta was known to have had quote fraternal contacts with the provisional irish republican rve listen this is my voice to like go on yeah yeah yeah no question um i do love this the ira received 50 revolvers from eda in exchange for explosives training do you think it came in a gift box

like a nice little note, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Uh, I mean, with some like smoked cod in there, you know, because the Basque are a very fishing people, a Harriet David box in exchange for your revolvers.

Yeah, I'm just thinking now that, like, you know, Spain has all these

disparate separatist groups.

You know, they have a million ethnic groups.

They have, uh, you know, they're only loosely affiliated on one flag.

They had insane colonial ambitions.

I think Spain may be the Russia of Europe.

Russia, the

sure,

yeah, sure.

Fuck it.

I'll incorporate that into my belief system.

Why not?

Yeah,

just throw it.

Just throw it in.

Yeah,

the Spanish Foreign Legion is one of the funniest military formations going.

I highly recommend having a look at their parade uniforms, their dress uniforms, because they're still doing the shirt open to the waist kind of thing.

The fucking goat?

Yeah.

also by the way i will say one like the foreign legion assignment where i get a siesta i'll say one other thing about the spanish foreign legion the minimum iq requirement to join the spanish foreign legion is 70 which is which is lower than a german shepherd

yeah that's

disregarding iq that's that's the sort of stuff where my dad had clients who are intellectually disabled and uh that's that's about the cutoff that the ssr i uses from what i recall no one yell at me you ever you ever think about how kyle rittenhouse apparently like failed the asvab to like join the greens i like it i

i saw that i

i was like i had to get out of school for a day but i don't remember what i scored was probably what i took i i i took some asvab sample questions and like they're not that difficult i mean there was some stuff that was like technical knowledge which i just didn't know because i think like how you rotate like gears in your head yeah yeah yeah part of it is that yeah i was i was just like the kogiati you know but i was just like curious as to what it was means the the kogiati uh it was like an online meme test to see if you were transgender or not i

listen right let me give you a sample as her question right if there are three quarts of gas in a gallon container how full is the container 50 60 75 or 80 you're joking that is a real question that's that i i

What is the fucking trans test called?

The Kojiasi, C-O-G-I-A.

I thought you said Kobayashi Maru.

Yeah, the Kobiashi.

There's a test out there.

Like, you are trans, but how much can you resist it?

Again, this is what there is in Britain, you know?

And see, this is why.

This is why Kill James Bond is so important for us, non-trans folks who want to be, you know, allies to beat.

We got to know this stuff.

You can know your stuff otherwise.

Nova, and what we're going to do is get your passport through.

Yeah.

And you'll move here.

And then, and then, because this is America and we have no rules about guns, we're going to arm you to the fucking teeth like a, like a Wolfenstein mech.

I mean, the problem is, right?

Like now I kind of want to take the ASVAB.

And the thing is, like, I could probably take a, you could probably take like a...

more or less complete one somewhere online.

Yeah, and I just, I just end up being like a sort of army on the bottom.

Score a 99 and just like the recruiter's just like, all right, I'm going to make so many exemptions for this lady.

I mean,

yeah, basically, like, there's, there's a cutoff for like nuke school and stuff that's pretty high.

But I'm going to do 12 questions on nationalguard.com.

Okay, so the U.S.

Forest Service takes over a large chunk of land.

And,

you know, under Gifford Pinchot, you know, he's trained in the European style of forestry.

And as we have established, the Europeans are deeply afraid of fire, you know, kind of because their fire rotations and mainly beach-dominated stands are much longer and their stands are not developed for fire.

And also because they're Europeans, I don't like weird shit.

It's got to be exactly how it's supposed to be.

The whole continent had been like formally cultivated for so long as well, you know?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whenever I go to Europe and I like, or whenever I talk to Europeans, I hear about their forestry, they're like, oh, the Black Forest is so big.

I'm like, bitch, the Black Forest is like

the Rothrock State Forest is 40% the size of the Black Forest.

What are you talking about?

Get out of here.

Like, that's one Pennsylvania State Forest owns the Black Forest.

Anyway,

like the fucking HS2 going through Ancient Woodlands, and it's kind of like, oh,

oh, yeah, Ancient Woodlands.

When I was in England, Ancient Woodlands, this is Doug Fir, my guy.

This is Douglas fucking fir.

Are you telling me somehow Douglas fir got from the Pacific Northwest to outer London, like ring four or five, like magically on its own.

Fuck all the way off.

Yeah, I'm coming for you, the UK.

Yeah, you're right, Jerusalem.

Okay, also, who's about to catch Strazier is Walter Bitterlich, who was a founder of very important forestry in Germany about 20, 30 years after the period we're going to talk about.

Huge Nazi fuck, that guy.

He joined the Nazi Party in the early 30s.

March Violet.

Yeah, he wrote a war memorial about how he liked fighting on the Eastern Front and at D-Day.

Yeah, that's a hard cringe.

That's a real hard cringe.

Yeah,

I loved being in Saving Private Ryan as the bad guy.

Yeah.

I just liked it.

I love Kursk.

Yeah, being on the MG-42 crew when the fucking LV-2s opened up.

Very satisfying if you're a Nazi, I imagine.

Yeah, so that's what a lot of European forestry is currently based on.

They're getting away from that pretty rapidly because it turns out that does order climate change.

But so Gifford Pinchon, the Forest Service, are trained in this European model.

It's very standardized, excuse me, very anti-fire.

And so they input the 10 a.m.

policy, which is every fire that starts needs to be up by 10 a.m.

the next day.

That starts in the 1920s.

So we are starting to see fire suppression take over the East, or sorry, the West Coast as it's taking over the East Coast.

All right, next slide, please.

All right.

Okay, so for the next hundred years, this is basically how fire is treated.

And it's still treated the same way.

These poor bastards get out there with shovels and pigmatics and polanskis and they put it all out.

And that's what happens to fire for like until the mid-60s.

In the mid-60s, we start to allow some wildland fire to go through and some fire to happen.

But basically, everything gets put out by guys like this.

All right.

Next slide, please.

I got a 80% on the practice as fab, and I'm drunk.

Oh, nice.

All right.

Well, congratulations, Nova.

You're going to nuke school.

I think the California nuke school was like 90.

No, Dunn Honor.

Welcome aboard.

Congratulations.

You're doing

Railway Corps.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Imagine how well I could do if I was sober.

Yeah.

So here's how we fight fire today.

We now have a chainsaw involved.

You dig a trench.

You dig a trench or like fire

line.

This is the thing.

It's like more like combat gardening than anything else.

Oh, that's exactly correct.

Yeah.

You got some of the chainsaw.

You You got the protective clothing.

You got the Oakleys.

You got the...

Oh, Oakleys are not fire-rated.

There's no way there's Oakley's.

Oh, you got something that's better than Oakley's.

Pit vipers are real popular right now.

I love me some pit vipers.

Ooh.

I got to look into that.

Fun.

Okay, so you can't put out most fires.

Like, you just have to put a line around them, as we were discussing, and just wait for them to burn out.

So you cut this line around them, or you like try to guide them into a lake or a highway or somewhere they can't jump over and you just kind of wait for it to burn out.

It's miserable work.

Oh, yeah, no, that's really success.

You have to like do like a very aggressive plant clearance while the thing bears down on you.

If the wind changes direction, maybe you like die.

Yeah, it happens pretty frequently.

Sometimes you have to like parachute in there and the first smoke jumpers.

Okay, all those dudes are

those zooms.

Even if you don't,

well, if you don't, you have to fucking hike out there, which is worse.

Well, okay, hold on, hold on, hold on.

I'm going to come for the smoke jumpers real quick here.

So let's do the special forces meme where it's like, you know, like Chad Forrester, virgin smoke jumper.

Oh, I have to jump into the fire.

Oh, I'm so cool and special.

What if we just let it burn sometimes or we manage the vegetation in a way that we didn't have to go out there and jump on, you know, these crazy fires?

What about that, though?

Yeah, jump explained.

Are you suggesting that a kind of like macho firefighting culture leads to a lot of the same problems as like the same thing in every other emergency service probably yeah the smoke drivers were invented in 1949 right after the end of world war ii uh

there's some interesting there's some interesting military history here because and i i i i'm trying to remember i think sorry 1949

that like specifically the only uh like segregated black parachute infantry regiment ended up doing this because no like white officers wouldn't trust them to fight in europe or asia but they ended up being detailed to like do like precursor to this in the u.s during the war so there's some interesting like black military history there on knowledge and belief i could be wrong about that i don't know i don't know this the history of the smoke jumpers macho firefighter culture has also done a lot of disservices to building things like better apartment buildings or doing things like traffic calming on streets and things like that.

Yeah, the 555th Airborne Battalion, an all-African-American army paratrooper unit, served as smoke jumpers to combat the Japanese incendiary balloon threat.

Oh, those were some crazy shit.

Yeah, and watching.

Yeah, that was some crazy shit.

Yeah, that actually killed the person because the guy went and like poked it with a stick, and it was like, oh, that blew up.

And I think the guy who wants to apologize came to Oregon.

And was just like, you can kill me.

And they were like, what are you talking about?

We're friends now.

Only entirely black airborne unit and like a segregated military.

It's wild.

Yeah.

All right.

So we're like halfway through.

Let's keep let's keep rolling here, folks.

Sorry.

All right.

So

Jokasabian is doing this, and it sucks ass.

It's a tough job.

People love it.

I don't understand why I've done a couple of fires.

I hate it.

It sucks.

I wanted to suck more.

Yeah.

So actually, fun fact about the forest service, they're grossly underfunded.

And so they call all of their forest fires forestry technicians where they're doing shit like this.

And these guys are all, you know, guys, I'm using this.

Sorry, I'm a Midwesterner by culture.

so I use guys as an inclusive term.

You're fine.

Don't worry about it.

Yeah.

Okay.

So these folks are out here and they're doing this part-time.

They work part-time.

They get paid like shit.

It's real bad.

We're not doing right by them.

Could be worse.

You could be in prison than doing this.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yep.

Could just

you could just be doing this from

while in prison.

Yeah, and you get paid cents on the dollar and risk your life just like everybody else.

All right, next slide.

And speaking of like

reforms, right?

Typically, for a long time,

I believe California has changed this now under a lot of process.

You couldn't become a firefighter after you got out of prison.

If you had been a firefighter,

you couldn't work for so you couldn't work for the forest service or Cal Fire.

Cal Fire now takes you, but the Forest Service still does not.

The Florida Service has a lot of issues.

I like the Florist Service, they have a lot of potential, but they have a lot of issues as well.

Okay, so I included this specifically for you, November.

I thought you would love some air assets.

I do.

I always love air assets.

And the thing is, right, like one of the dream jobs, JTAC without the risk of war crimes, right?

I get to sit on a mountainside and I get to call in like airstrikes on my own position with flame-retardant chemicals.

I do this a lot in Workers and Resources Soviet Republic, which is a game I've been trying to play, but I don't have a working mouse wheel at the moment, so I haven't been able to.

I don't beat you to death with your own two shoes.

So, yeah,

my favorite fact about these, by the way, is that occasionally they kill scuba divers in the funniest possible way.

That's a rumor.

That's a rumor that hasn't actually happened.

It's my favorite rumor, which is that potentially you could kill a scuba diver in the funniest possible way, scooping him out of a lake and dumping him onto a forest fire.

Congratulations, you're a smoke jumper now.

I would involuntary for a long time.

I'm doing the like seal, uh, like the seal trident thing where I'm like hammering a smoke jumper insignia into his coffin.

I would also like to say, no member, this can be inclusive.

You know, non-binary folks can die in these kinds of accents.

They could be dumped onto a fire.

Excuse me.

Forgive me for assuming the gender of the scuba diver.

I do.

I believe I've seen this huge fucking DC-10 here

in like the most insane video where it like

dives into a valley and then comes back like that.

Oh, and it's like, what, like 100 feet above the ground?

And it's just like, oh, right, right,

these are easily, right?

Like, I don't want to speculate about nothing else.

These are the coolest pilot jobs going.

And pilot opens you up to a lot of cool career activities.

This is the best one.

This is the coolest one you can do.

And you can die doing this so fucking easily.

November, can you look to the bottom of your screen there?

Yes.

So this is called the Hella Torch.

This is one way to light

prescribe fire.

Oh, look at it.

Yeah, yeah.

Shit is on fire and it's on a helicopter.

What else do you want to call it it's a hella torch um they also have dyads or dads these are basically little ping pong balls that you inject with uh potassium and some other chemicals and you shoot them out in the middle of fire eventually but um this is a great way to get super dead you know if you crash you're not only crashing in a helicopter but you're also crashing into a fire and you're on fire intentionally

so um

just some wild ass out here uh I just one of the one of the funniest ways to take your life in your hands.

And you're doing like public service.

So it's like you go to like Firefighter Valhalla if you die, dude.

Yeah, I believe that you do go to Firefighter Valhalla.

You are a thrill boy, but for good, I assume, which is where you are, you know, drinking all the time and setting up.

Yeah, Firefighter Valhalla is like a structure fire fully developed, but also you can get the beers in.

No, these guys don't do structure fire, they do wildland fire.

That's a different job.

We'll talk about that later, but I would like to get a lot of people.

Everyone gets their own Dalmatian.

So there's a Dalmatian that lives next to me.

It's a real asshole.

Again, everybody is catching strays today.

I am coming.

I'm taking no prisoners.

All right.

So if we look at the top left, look how low that plane is.

It is like those sugar pines, like 150 feet tall.

It is brushing the top of these.

These guys die more frequently than you would want a pilot to die.

I should get my pilot's license.

Oh, you should.

Okay, so

I figured we'd have a fun time with that.

All right.

Next slide, please.

Sorry, Liam, if you wanted to finish your thought, please do.

Oh, Oh, it's fine.

I was listening.

I was seeing like on-the-ground helmet cam videos of when one of these goes wrong and they just hit like a wild band firefighter crew with one of these.

And it's just like five guys like spitting chemicals out of their mouths

and like swearing.

I don't care about anyone else dude.

Yeah, it's not.

It seemed like the Australian bushfirefighters, like they...

They're in the fire truck and then like they have to put down all the covers because

they can't get away fast enough and then it burns over oh those yeah well those only exist because of like a couple of really bad tragedies where like as I alluded to earlier the wind changed it just like overtook like crews like digging these lines we'll get there so now yeah yeah now there's these like survival blankets which sometimes work my

thing is that my wife uh occasionally texts me she's like how long do you think it'll take and I'm just like 15 hours 15 16 hours like Nova's been drinking we're gonna be here for a while nova had a bad day let it go yeah yeah yeah

Those fucking survival blankets are like up there in terms of technology where it's like, you want this rather than not, but like,

not going to make any promises.

This man's trousers are extremely high-waisted.

That's how you know it's old-timing.

Yeah, the like sort of belt loops touch the nipples.

So, this is what a lot of western forests should have looked like.

So, we have a lot of ponderosa pine, which is a fire-adapted species.

So, we have nice thick bark.

If we look up those trees, you're not seeing branches for at least 80 feet.

Now, this is post-thinning.

So there was, there were more trees in here, but pretty open.

The initial surveys of this were done.

And when they did it, they wrote that they could drive a Model T in between all of the trees.

So we're looking at like, you know, pre-European colonization, well, not European colonization, but pre-like American management, like a very open forest.

Because like Model T's, I've ridden in one once, are not the most navigable cars so if you can navigate between trees in a model t you're doing just fine on spacing so it's a pretty open woodlands gotcha i mean it looks sparse right so so that's what it that's what it is on the left very so that's this is pre like big management uh again this is thinned so there there should be some more trees in there uh and on the right this is the same stand in the early 2000s.

We can see we have a major invasion.

I guess it's name of the invasion technically.

We have Douglas fir moving in due to the overstory death of the Ponderusa pine and overstory removal and fire suppression.

So Douglas fir is one of these species that doesn't like fire.

And so it has invaded and we can see it's a lot more, you know, our stand density has really increased from like 160 trees per acre, like to 600.

And so if a fire blows through here, now we have a lot more stuff going on.

Also, and for our botanists out there, you'll pick it up right away.

We have a lot of cheatgrass in the photo.

So on the bottom here, we can see this.

This is an invasive grass species that burns at a much higher temperature than our native grass species.

You see this with a lot of invasives, like Melaleuca in Florida, burns real hot, like where our forests are ready for it.

So.

Oh, that sucks.

You're like this perfectly evolved, like, you know, sort of fire-adapted species that's meant to be like, oh, all my branches are off the ground.

I'm like adapted to a really sparse sort of situation.

And then all of a sudden, everything is full of like grass and other bullshit.

Yeah.

And you dark ferns.

Yeah.

What's happening?

You don't beat Doug Fir, like in a one-like Pine of Russ Pine doesn't beat Doug Fur on most sites one-to-one.

Like it needs fire.

Doug Fur sounds like a sort of like 50s quarterback.

Oh, you mean Pseudo Tasuga Menzizii?

Doug Fir?

Douglas Fir?

Doug Fur.

Yeah.

Yeah, my boy out there.

This is number one.

Shout out to Doug.

You got

Doug Fir.

Douglas Fir.

Sorry, Douglas Fir.

Doug Fir and Spruce Pine.

Yep.

Yep.

It's actually not a, it's not a fur, technically.

It's a pseudo-tasuga, so it's, it's a false one.

So we have these changes in our landscape.

Now, these changes are handleable.

We can handle these changes.

It just costs time and money.

So we have to go through here.

We have to clear out the Douglas fir, and then we can regenerate Ponderosa Pie.

This is handable.

It's fine.

It's doable if you have time and money.

You have to commit tree genocide.

It's not tree genocide.

These aren't supposed to be be there so you you have to commit tree ethnic cleaning you have to you have to do free decolonization we yeah we it's it's forest management you have to commit to forest management you have to invest in the landscape so this is going to cost you a couple of thousand dollars an acre to manage and then you'll get this up and you get pine rosa pine established you can burn through there and instead of like a couple thousand acres you're spending 30 bucks an acre to you know, burn through it.

That costs time, money, and effort.

And the Forest Service has none of that.

Private landowners have none of that.

So we have, you know, instead of the forest we have on the left, we go to the forest on the right.

We go from our Ponderosa pine stands to our Doug Fir stands.

It's loaded down with fuel.

Yep, exactly.

All right.

Next slide, please.

I'm thinking about my like little tactical fire triangle.

I'm thinking that's a lot of fuel.

And I'm also thinking, man, it's getting hotter and drier all the time.

The context.

The context.

I hate it.

You hate to see it.

Okay.

You should have had some coconut trees you know

like once again that's a grass we've talked about this twice now the coconuts are not trees they're grasses they're grasses

okay so we get assholes like this this is the these are the bundies uh these people don't believe that the u.s federal government should own land they also don't believe the state government should own land but they exist because of the federal subsid subsidization of cattle ranching.

So you get like all kinds of assholes like this who just like don't want to fund federal land owner, federal land ownership in any way.

Actually, they don't want to do anything with the federal land either because like it's not very useful to them.

Well, they want to run cows.

So the Bundies had like a million dollars in cow fines and it is a dollar a month ahead of cow.

So like

to get the BLM so mad at you that they're going to fine you a million dollars is so many issues.

You have messed up so many times.

How many paper cows do they have?

The thing is, right, mostly paper now, buddy.

I would imagine so.

I circle back to my thing about giving the weirdest cops to the weirdest departments.

I think BLM should have nuclear weapons.

Well, yeah.

So the BLM eventually gets involved and they seize these guys' cows and

either BLM.

Yeah.

I mean,

having a shootout with the BLM is like just, you know, a fun weekend out there.

I mean,

you have to work to do that.

You know, like they're trying to get shot on Uh guy in this standoff.

They seized federal land for weeks, and that ogu got shot because he tried to kill some BLM guys.

Didn't the FBI shoot him?

I don't remember who shot him, but some it took like weeks of a standoff after seizing a wildlife refuge and having a million dollars in fine to get shot.

Like you had to do so many things wrong to have a problem here.

I'm giving it to the BLM because I support them more than the FBI.

As far as like the BLM or the FBI shooting a guy goes, I come back to the thing that I always say.

It's just like,

I love when the bourgeois state defends itself against the right.

I hate when it defends itself against the left.

Yeah.

I'll cosine that.

I think BLM could maybe take out Black Hammer.

I would support that.

The BLM SWAT team is going to disclose

Black Hammer City.

I think that was on private land.

I don't know.

I don't care.

That's not my problem.

I have no idea.

Yeah.

So

these guys are out here

intentionally undercutting the forest service and other federal land managers by underfunding them.

We have the whole state of Jefferson thing.

Oh,

Jesus, yeah.

Like Western Oregon and I and Western Oregon and Washington wanted to join Idaho.

So we got these like nutheads out here who only exist as cattle ranchers because of the federal government, but also hate the federal government.

And then on the other side, we have, you know, you get your classic hippies who do not believe the forest should be managed.

They should be left unmanaged, which is, you know, a racist and colonial ideal because people have been managing this forever.

And so we have lots of people coming at the Forest Service.

The Forest Service has been wrong in a number of ways in the past.

They think they're doing their best.

You know, they're doing their best.

It's like it was the thing I was saying earlier about like two ways of going, like, uh, being racist about Native Americans, right?

To be like, this is not managed, or to be like, this is managed so well that like no one else need ever manage it, right?

Hi, it's Justin.

So this is a commercial for the podcast that you're already listening to.

People are annoyed by these, so let me get to the point.

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You get what you pay for.

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Back to the show.

Okay, next slide, please.

So, so the last time that we decided to understand the campfire here, which we are eventually talking about, and not just finished like four hours in, yeah.

Sorry, Devin.

All right.

So, our is our wildland urban interface.

So, people in California have to live somewhere.

It is impossible to live in most of California if you do not make tech money.

And even when you do make tech money, you don't

live there.

Listen to the ghost ship.

Listen to earlier in this episode where we described how the most fabulous penthouse in Philadelphia is cheaper than a two-bedroom in San Francisco.

Yeah.

You listen up to them, but also

give us the penthouse.

For British version of this, it's a real shame that I love London as much as I do because your money goes literally 10 times as far in Glasgow.

That's insane.

Good God.

Oh, yeah.

People got to live.

People have to live somewhere.

So they live in these canyons.

They live away from people.

Also, people have wanted to live away from people for as long as there have been people in cities.

And it looks nice.

It's pretty.

Right.

Well, that's the other problem.

There's no defensible space in this photo.

If we see this, we have some nice, beautiful trees right in that trailer park.

People like to like tree bathe or whatever the like Japanese thing is.

Yeah, force bathing.

Yeah, exactly.

If you want to do the thing of like, if you want to be like a U.S.

embassy and have setback, you know, you want to have like a big sort of like bare trench between you and the forest, it looks fucking weird as hell.

People don't like it.

Right.

It's weird.

You don't move to the mountains to like be setback.

Yeah, Sorry.

Yeah.

This is also a trailer park, which is the densest form of housing allowed in the United States outside of city centers.

Actually, I have a modest proposal, right?

Which is put the Forest Service under the Department of State because the Department of State already does a bunch of ways of camouflaging setback.

Like anytime you see a U.S.

embassy and you're like, oh, we've got a really interesting like sort of architectural sculpture garden or something that coincidentally gives you like sort sort of truck bomb stopping distance between the perimeter and the embassy.

Like just do that for like every town that's in a forest as well.

And just have a fucking like Zen garden or something cultural.

You know, we'll get to efforts about that.

You could just have better foreign policy and you wouldn't need all of that.

So

let's talk about that right now.

So there's this thing.

All right, problem solved.

Ross, you're Secretary of State now.

I'm thinking about my State Department moots in this difficult time so there's this thing it's called the nrcs the natural resources conservation service they would fund fire safe communities here and same with some federal grants um there are 10 tsps technical service providers in california so for all those millions of acres if you want to get fed dollars to help private lands become more fireproof you have one of 10 people to talk to so there's money out there to do this it's just limited sure

that isn't ever the u.s government oh yeah oh 100 we could we could do anything.

It's just like, oh, but we don't give a shit.

Because electing Ronald Reagan as president inculcated you with a fear of the bureaucrats.

Yeah.

Right.

So I'm actually becoming a TSP right now.

It's kind of annoying, but there's like billions of dollars I could get access to if I get that.

It's annoying, but it's gettable.

The problem is you will run into this when you work with private landowners.

They are sometimes afraid of federal money.

It's like, oh, the federal allies have gotten out here.

Yeah.

You're from the government and I'm here to help.

There's a lot.

There's a lot of unspent federal money out there.

Oh, yeah, I'm trying to get that.

That's what's going to fund my trip to the Baltics.

You know, this is how, this is when we need

Mr.

Lesco in here to let everyone know the free money you can get for the government.

And the money suit, yeah.

Yeah.

In other nations,

you just have a government-provided forester where you own forest land and that guy or person comes out and they just like, you know, you say you should manage the land.

All right, we're going to do it.

Next.

Yeah.

All right.

So there's none of that here.

All right.

Next slide, please.

Let's, let's get to some dates and times.

Oh, Raziro.

Yes.

All right.

We're not quite to Raz here.

We're very close, though.

Oh, my bad.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I was, I'm on the next slide.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So in the summer of 2018, we have a drought.

Droughts are common in the West because of, you know, it's a droughty place and also like climate change is making everything worse.

So as we can.

Specifically, climate change makes everything worse in the kind of all or nothing like model of rainfall.

You get a lot of like a lot of rainfall in no time and it floods or you get no rainfall for months.

Yeah.

As we can see, we're in that no rainfall.

Yes.

So if we look at our 100-hour fuels, those are going to be kind of our medium-sized logs and the thousand hours.

Those are big logs.

They take 1,000 hours to dry out.

Everything's real dry for a long time.

About November 1st, we should be seeing rain come back to this system.

It doesn't really.

We have drought for like months leading up to November of 2018.

All right.

I think it's cool how I have the thing that I changed my name to something that makes my ears brick up when you mentioned it.

I was going to say the same thing.

I was going to say the same thing.

I was just like, yeah, she's right there.

Like, what's the problem?

I had a friend of mine recently announced, hey, me and my wife are like

having a child in November.

And I'm like, I don't remember that.

I don't think.

I think I would have noticed.

It's a dramatic advance in science.

The hands of scientists.

So 2018 will eventually go down as number three in area of lands burned after 2020 and 2021.

That's how we're looking right now.

Oh,

we can...

I think we can break this record.

Okay.

Oh, next slide, please.

Oh, Nova.

We're sure get it.

We're sure get it, buddy.

It's probably a record today.

Ooh, yeah.

All right.

Next slide, please.

We're going to go five hours and 38 minutes, thus toppling Titanic.

Oh, hell yeah, dog.

I'm here for it.

So, November 7th, 2018.

All right, so the National Weather Service puts out a red flag warning for the 7th through the 9th.

Unfortunately, they will be correct.

So, if you are not a firehead, a red flag day means it's a really good day for stuff to light on fire.

It's hot, it's dry, and it's windy.

In this part of California, we have a seasonal winter wind called the Jarbo winds.

Sorry, this is probably, it's probably an H is probably like Harbo winds, but Harbo, yeah.

Yeah, I'm a white guy.

What do you We all have these problems.

Yeah,

so it's, it's a, it's a pretty persistent wind that runs between 25 and 35 miles an hour almost constantly.

They do reach up to 60 miles an hour, sometimes past that.

You know, because it's in canyons and shit, and weather happens, the climate happens.

So we have these, it's hot, it's dry, it's windy.

Now, going back to our tactical situation, down to the wildfire level, we have hot, we have dry, and we have wind.

These are not good.

All right, next slide, please.

So PG ⁇ E de-energizes a couple of lines in 20 or in November of November 7th, but they do not on the 18th because nothing bad happens.

It wouldn't honestly have mattered if they had de-energized the lines.

The lines in this picture are not the lines in question because the lines that end up starting the fire are 100 years old and take a long time to shut down.

Why the fuck is so much of California's like electrical infrastructure built in like 19?

Okay.

It genuinely is very confusing considering that the general population of California, according to

what I've heard from

California, California,

California, or pornography.

Wow, far.

Wow,

far.

Yeah, I mean, I understand California.

Some folks are very, very concerned about overhead wires because they will not allow any electric trains in the state.

But they also will not consent to having power lines buried.

I just

understand.

I understand California has an almost British level of like urban-rural divide, right?

But like it's like the one of the biggest economies in the U.S.

If it was its own country, hashtag NCR, hashtag Fallout New Vegas, then it would be like one of the biggest in the world.

It would be in the fucking G20.

And yet, for some reason, half the power lines, once you go out to like solano county or like anywhere in like anywhere in rural california were put up when like ansel adams was taking photos of them with a tripod well you don't get rich by like doing infrastructure investment like it's like 480 volts

you could bury this for like nothing

okay

so with these specific lines we have a number of reported issues in 2009 we got reported issues.

In 2011, we have reported issues.

In 2012, there's a tower that comes down.

They are nine, they're know, they know they have 900 problems on this tower and with this set of equipment.

And there are at least two critical threats that they've been given, you know, heads up from regulators.

They are sitting at 600 days past of like, you need to repair this.

They're 600 days past of like, yeah, we should repair that.

Yeah, so me with SA extensions.

I just also by the, also, by the way, like

some random like Nazis are coming by with like rifles and like shooting at substations and stuff.

Just really spice things up.

And so it's hot and these lines are drooping.

It's also windy.

So we get potential issues.

And they're not well secured because they're 100-year-old.

You can grow the economy by providing good jobs to people to repair and replace and inspect these wires.

Yeah, but consider shut up.

Yeah.

Next line.

Inferno.

They were pretty good wires for 100 years ago because they were still running groundwire back then.

I mean, it turns out that it's not that difficult to run current through a wire.

Ross, this next slide you can open up on.

At 6.15 a.m.,

an issue is reported.

Jesus Christ.

So by 6.33 a.m.,

a fire is reported by a PGE employee.

By 6.44 a.m., it's 10 acres.

So this thing is flying.

By 7 a.m., I'll keep going.

I have a question.

Is this just like this is much faster pace than a normal fire?

Yeah, okay.

I mean, wildfires spread crazy fast anyway, and this is like

fast even by that standard.

Yes, because like

I'm just talking about for my own like knowledge of firefighting, which or fires, which is very limited, it's just like, I feel like I hear like, oh yeah, it's 50,000 acres, and I'm just like, I didn't hear about this yesterday.

Yeah.

Or maybe just like, is there like a certain size of fire where it's just like, oh shit, we need to panic?

Well, so they catch this fire incredibly fast.

So it starts at around six in the morning and they're, they know about it right after it happens because this is, again, a very rural area, very canyon-y, not easy to get to a lot of these points.

But, you know, within half an hour, we got 10 acres burning.

And that's, you know, like a lot of land that's on fire.

So this is, this is a big deal.

Sorry, Rod, you were saying here.

Oh, what?

By 7 a.m., a local firefighter gets eyes on it and calls for air support.

That's the last time.

For some reason, you know what this reminds me of?

This reminds me of cancer, right?

Like, in the sense that, like, obviously, early diagnosis and like early treatment is the like one of the defining factors, but sometimes the thing just like spreads really fucking fast, really aggressively.

And sometimes there is nothing you can do

about it.

When it does do that, that's like as often as not a result of like environmental conditions and like occupational exposures, you know?

Yep.

So that's why I do controlled burns on my body every day

this is literally a thing that your cells do right like this is this is absolutely a thing that like it like programmed cell death is one of the things that like

sorry i well that's what should be happening in this forest this forest should be burning once every 10 years and it's not we have a huge fuel buildup yeah this forest did burn in 2008 partially but not all the way and also it was 10 years ago so we're within the normal fire cycle here so we should be on fire we should have reduced fuel loading which is why we introduced the concept to begin with it doesn't happen so we have this huge buildup and we have an ignition source and now we got fire.

All right, next slide, please.

This is like telling, like, you know, Cal Fire or whoever, like, hey, I have this gun and I've like pointed it at myself.

And I've also like pulled back the hammer.

Yep.

And now we are, as you can see in the slide, we have pulled the trigger.

And so here's what happens.

Within the crap, a gif worked on the pipe.

Yeah,

this is the first time this has ever happened.

Come on, man.

Normally, Roz has to go and do some like voodoo magic.

Yeah.

Thank you for elevating our production art form.

Yeah.

You and Evan, the only two people to successfully do this.

Yeah, I'm trying to tank it single-handedly.

And

within like three hours of ignition, the town's paradise breaks to the ground.

Jesus.

Yep.

No, it blows.

It takes a while

to organize stuff on like even an emergent basis and you just can't do it that quickly.

Yep.

No, they know, but they know that it's coming and it still lights up and you can't stop it because these winds are going 20 to 60 miles an hour, up to 70 miles an hour.

So we have, they evacuate the town of Con Kau at 7.20.

It doesn't matter because the fire is through there.

They try to evacuate the next town by 7.23.

Doesn't matter.

It's through there.

And these are narrow.

mountainous canyon roads that the fire is flying through.

Now fire, when it moves like this, it's a lot of embers going forward.

So it's not a wall of flame, but it will rapidly become

a wall of flame, especially when it's driven by these huge winds.

And that's why by 10.30, Paradise is on fire.

And 10.45, most of the town is ash.

Am I wrong?

And am I insensitive for saying that in this context, having not fallen out of the coconut tree, it is insane to build a town here?

Yeah, it's probably not the best.

This is probably not a great place to be.

With like the wires like this, if you had done a smaller settlement and you hadn't had these ignition sources, it's not a huge issue.

The town of Paradise has has been here for like a hundred years without getting burned down.

So,

what was the uh, what was the reason the town of Paradise was founded?

Mining, okay.

I was like, either that or it's logging, in which case it might make sense, you know.

Yeah, so this is logging, you get some like clearance back, but yeah, this isn't the best forest, it's Ponderosa Pine and California black oak mix, so it's not the best forest for like you know getting big logs out of, but there's there's enough fuel in there to burn the town to the ground.

Um, so like this is within three, four hours, you've run seven miles and you've burned a ton of acreage.

Just like 20,000 acres are burned in seven hours.

While you have like firefighters still putting their boots on kind of thing.

Wildfire.

It's a wildfire.

A wild fire.

Where did Kevin go?

I didn't hear what happened.

I believe he is peeing.

Ah, thank you.

That was oddly soothing the way you said that.

I'm on like my fucking sixth glass of wine and I haven't yet.

So skeleton.

Well, there you go.

Okay.

Yeah, i can't i can't batch you there nova i you give me two beers and i have a fire hose yeah that's what happened

beer is very different beer is a diuretic i i'm the exact same way you give me like one sip of beer i'm pissing every 10 minutes for the rest of the night wine on the other hand is you know delightful all right next slide please remember to drink water buddy

i'm trying please all right so here's what paradise looks like so they initiate the initiate evacuation

it doesn't it like honestly, you do the best that you can.

It doesn't work out that well.

We have small mountain roads.

There were efforts to do fuel clearance before this fire started.

And there were efforts to expand and to do better fire

preparation before this fire started.

Because all of these events that we're talking about with Western Forest are entirely predictable.

We've talked about them in forest literature since the 60s.

Anyways, it's interesting.

I saw a documentary about Cal Fire and also some

inmate crews because again, California uses incarcerated people to fight fires.

And one of the things is like people with like isolated property that's like out of town, surrounded by forest, are like

often reminded very forcefully by CAL FIRE that you need sort of American embassy level of setback.

You need to be doing this clearance.

And routinely, they don't do it and the house burns down and they get to watch it burn down from like next to a like Forest Service or like CAL FIRE

fire engine.

And they go, well, what the fuck?

Why is my house burning down?

And they go, yeah, because it's surrounded by fucking trees.

Yeah.

In this case, if you're lucky, you watch your house burn down.

If you're unlucky, you are in it when it burns down.

And that happens to 84 people.

84 people,

84, 85 will eventually be killed in this fire.

So there are, you know,

the emergency responders are doing the best that they can, but this thing is just ripping hot.

It's ripping fast.

You can't stop it.

And these canyons are not a great place for cell service so you have a failure to communicate in a lot of places it's kind of thing we end up with like police and like sheriffs and whatever like going like door to door kind of

that's what happens is usually neighbors going door to door um luckily this evacuation is largely successful in that we only see 84 people die but 84 people do die in this fire um

you know probably at least eight of them die while evacuating so most people are killed in their homes or near their homes people are escaping in everything they can in cars on atvs and u tvs and in at least one report jumping into lakes uh it's real bad i i remember seeing there was something when uh the most i it was like a couple of years ago australia had like really bad wildfires um and i remember seeing people like in the water like filming watching like trees like burn to the waterline yeah um

and the problem and that happened in the us in the uh cloquet fire and the up in the Peshtiga River fire, it can get so hot in some of those fires that it will boil you alive.

No, thanks.

Or there will not be enough oxygen for you to breathe.

You'll be smothered by carbon dioxide.

So being in water is not a savior.

In this fire, there are at least 19 cases of burnover.

You can read the National Transportation Safety Board about a lot of this stuff.

I'm going to tell you right now after having read it, you don't want to read it.

What is a burnover?

So it's when you're somewhere and the fire goes over the top of you.

Fuck that yeah it's real bad all right next slide let's look at a couple pictures of what happened here not great next slide

that's a house

christ i actually saw a really interesting photo essay i i'm gonna see if i can find it to credit it later on um but it was like uh some some photo journalists went back to paradise in the aftermath um and did like did like a photo essay yeah so we're gonna look at some of that in a bit here all right so next slide So that's that's the fire in progress.

Here are folks trying to fight these fires.

Again, this is like 20, at this point, you're looking at like 20, 50,000 acres of fire in

deep canyon country that's barely accessible on foot.

Tough work here.

All right.

Can I say something absolutely superficial?

I really like the Forest Service's green tenders.

I think they're really cool looking.

I don't think that's the Forest Service.

I think it's a city on the side.

I think it's a light blue.

I don't know.

I can't quite tell.

Yeah.

That's Forest Service.

It's got a Forest Service crest on the door.

Oh, you're you're right.

No, you're right.

You're good.

You're good.

November.

November for the winning.

You got to drive a wide load truck in there at high speed.

Yeah.

And so this is.

There's no block of cars.

It's just you with the wide load, baby.

To make this even worse, so

early 2018, this

Paradise gets a grant to do fuels reduction work around the town that had been funded by tax dollars taken from sales of rural properties that had run from 2008 to 2013.

And the representative for Paradise had celebrated the end of that tax program.

So when you don't take care of your force, they will take care of you.

Yep.

Again, sort of like pointing the gun at your own head kind of thing.

Right, right.

All right.

Next slide.

So by the end of the ninth, we have over 7,000 acres burned.

Now, this is a day.

This is like a day and a half after starting.

7,000 acres.

It says in the notes 70,000.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

I meant 70,000.

I say 7,000.

We've been going for two, almost two and a half hours.

I can get it.

I can get it really.

Is it really only that long?

Wow.

Any figure we say, assume it's 10 times larger.

Yeah.

Okay.

It was not the 9th, it was the 90th.

On the 90th.

The time has delayed.

The sun is as blood.

Yeah.

Well, as we saw in the previous picture, you don't really see the sun too much.

No, I can imagine not.

So this is why I don't do wildland fire.

This shit sucks.

So it takes roughly 5,700 firefighters, including, as we mentioned, inmate crews and crews from 17 states to get this under control.

You got 600 engines there, 750, or sorry, 75 water tenders, 100 fire crews, 100 bulldozers, 24 helicopters, and 12 fixed-wing aircraft on site.

17 firefighters will be hurting this fire.

everything.

Yes.

And luckily, this fire is in November.

So we have not too many other things going on.

If this fire was two months earlier it's much bigger because these crews are elsewhere this is after fire season should have ended this is so whenever the next big one is that happens to hit fire season the lanai the lanai high the lanai fire oh

yeah yeah oh you just burn the entire town to the ground yes well i mean you do that here too but you do that with like a lot more people in their houses i was genuinely surprised by that one because i didn't think that the uh fire would get that far past the urban forest interface.

Yeah, that one's largely driven by colonialism and abandonment of sugar plantations, or like sugar cane plantations that fall into invasive species.

He says that he's never going to come back on the podcast and then hands us the perfect episode to come back on the podcast.

Well, okay.

So

people get hurt in this fire, at least hurt on the job.

We know that these people are exposed to a lot more fire.

Cancer rates among wildland firefighter crews are going up as they work with more intense fires and fires in the urban wildland fire interface a crackpot theory right you remember the the 9-11 uh like firefighter settlements and stuff yes and you remember how the fdny has done like a very extensive job of documenting like oh this guy died like like 20 years later based off of like 9-11 exposure or whatever um

I suspect, and this is my like crackpot theory, that this is true of like more firefighting that it is not, right?

And And that like 9-11 was like an opportunity to capture a snapshot of the thing that routinely kills firefighters after the fact, like 20 years later, right?

And just all the time, because being around fire and like breathing in all that shit is really bad for you.

And yeah,

as you say, doing the same

with not just...

trees, not just forests, but like also people's homes and all the stuff that they have in them.

Probably not.

The chemicals in modern furniture, modern insulation,

building materials are much, much uh nastier when combusted than they used to be.

You're not meant to breathe this stuff, and like even if you have the kind of PPE that's meant to prevent you from breathing and stuff, you're still going to breathe a dangerous amount of the stuff just by virtue of the fact that you need to like take it off sometimes once you like, even when you're still on the fire ground.

Yeah, I would point to the fire visor question.

You'll see that there's no masks on because you have to do this for as long as there's daylight and even into the dark.

You can't wear a mask this long.

It just, you just can't do it.

And hike in this elevation in this terrain, you're just not doing it and hence the elevated risks of cancer.

The other thing is with, hold on, I'm going to run you over for a quick second, Nova.

When you are, when these fires are burning at this intensity, so that's like the heat coming off of this fire, not the amount, the heat of this fire.

So these fires historically had just burned leaf litter and just like stuff on the ground like your pine needles.

Now you're burning soil.

When you're burning soil, that's a lot.

That's a lot of not good things going into your lungs.

A colleague of mine did a webinar recently with the folks at Chernobyl, and they were fighting fire out there last year.

And the damage from those fires was like smoking 60 cigarettes an hour.

Fuck me.

Even when I was at my worst, I wasn't that bad.

Yeah, so that's ambitious right there.

I'm a dip, though.

I spread those 60 cigarettes out over a day.

I mean, I think it's bleakly really funny that right before COVID, America produced an HBO documentary about how the Soviet Union had this kind of like civilizational struggle against like environmental terror and was like, well, we would never do that.

But also,

you know, that's our next episode.

Yeah, well, I, I, I, I, I, God, I think so much about the, the,

the, the like scene in Chernobyl where the guy's like, this kind of like feckless party bureaucrat is like, I don't know anything about governing because I used to be like the boss of a shoe factory or whatever.

And it's just like, oh my God.

Yeah.

But anyway, I think about these firefighters a lot, right?

Not just these firefighters, but a lot of people on the basis of being kind of...

casualties of this war that a lot of people, despite the most obvious evidence, refuse to admit that we're in.

But yeah, no,

I mean, there's so much of this stuff where it's like a person dies often in this case, like heroically.

And it's like, obviously a consequence of climate change.

Yeah.

And then you sort of like,

the thing that absolutely like fucking joke appeals me, right?

This is an insane sentence to say, the thing that absolutely depresses me, right, is

you look at the way that the energy industry, particularly oil and gas, like speaks to itself, right?

You read their trade papers.

And you see guys getting like legitimate like standing ovations at conferences for saying like we have to get away from this fantasy that we're ever going to phase out oil and gas anytime soon.

And then you think to like people who like,

you know, are dying because their houses are being like inundated or, you know, dying of diseases that are like moving into their like biomes because the temperatures are changing or like dying because they're inhaling some like guy's house.

And then you think, well, what are we doing about this?

And the answer is, we're not even acknowledging this.

It's just like shuffled off onto like an issues section of the website.

You know, you can vote for a fucking green party about it if it means that much to you.

And it's like, we, we,

the amount of stuff, the amount of urgency that we should have about any of this is nowhere to be seen.

And if you try to do this, if you try to like even talk about it, people will look at you as if you're insane.

I may be about to say something stupid, but based on the earlier slides in this podcast, this is also a regional problem which has been largely solved on the east coast.

No, it's it's regional, but it's also excalibrated by climate change.

Like prior to the 2000s, this fire doesn't happen because this area is inundated with a you know seasonal monsoon.

Yeah, this is this is this is exactly

for like so much of like our lives and like the lives of like our parents, right?

We have skated by on this thing of like, we're in the like sort of like honeymoon period of this.

And then we've we've ended up in this like civilizational like planet-wide war against like an adversary like a self-created adversary of climate change that is going to like exploit and exacerbate every single weakness we have laid out for it and this is one of them you know yeah so this leads us to what i mentioned earlier i think the best carbon program you could invent is you fund the ukrainians to do more strikes on russian oil uh refineries yeah well i i i i i agree with that on like three different levels slavo krainy like yeah let's do it um so as we can see the fire it gets wrapped up within you know by the 22nd within a couple of weeks it's wrapped up it's contained you get it out by the 25th it gets out i do have a question raising my hand none none of these trees around the this little subdivision here aside from the ones the interstitial ones are like burned yeah

what's up with that is it just burning through grass or it's it's burning so fast that it's not so as we discussed with our fire adapted species these are like two ponderous pine and they have this nice thick bark Additionally, it takes trees, it takes these pines two to three years to show damage.

So there's more mortality that happens here.

There's a lot of forest loss because of this fire, but a lot of these trees in this picture will survive because the fire is moving so fast.

It's just, you know, you need to heat this cambium to like 140-ish degrees on the inside.

And you get, these are fire-adapted species.

So that's why these trees survive.

And you get the conspiracists about the Hawaiian fires who are like, look, the trees survived.

Yeah, the trees survived because they're adapted to it.

This fire blew through so fast, but the trees are adapted to fire.

So we have some fire-adapted species that we're looking at here.

Excellent, excellent potentially in November.

You get bonus points today.

Oh, thank you.

I would also note that, okay, we got no sidewalks here.

This is a relatively modern subdivision.

I'm looking at the urban planning.

And you're just thinking

there's no defensible space.

These are all light timber, modern houses made of engineered lumber that's impregnated with, you know, petroleum-based glue.

So, all these things, you know, you have lots of defenses against fire, like the drywall, like various fireproofing systems.

Once they go, they go.

Yep.

I hate to say it, but like we found the only possible, like, plausible application for a lawn at this point.

Like, yeah, no, that's that's not going to help you at this scale, is the thing.

Find a rock garden.

At least with a lawn, you can like put a bulldozer through it and dig a big trench through the middle of it.

Let me step back into the Fed program here.

So with the fire-safe community, there is both a mowed portion of the lawn, an unmowed portion of the lawn, scattered trees, but you have setback, as has been discussed.

And you have some space like, all right, we got this ripping fire through here, but it can't like the house on fire because it's mowed grass.

I'm a very anti-lawn guy.

But in these fire-prone communities, there is room for mown native grasses, which as we can see doesn't happen here.

But honestly, at this scale, when we're talking about fire that has burned this hot and this fast,

you know, fire safe community's got to help us, but we're kind of too late here.

Look, it's the whole shit is burned to the ground.

This is my house.

This is my mile-long Japanese rock garden.

Also, also

useful against truck bombs.

So

these more modern houses, these engineered lumber houses, which are almost everything with the platform frame and so forth, they're fairly fire resistant in that the fire won't start.

But when the fire starts, oh boy.

Yep.

Yep.

It gets burned down and then everything here is knocked down.

This photo's taken a month

after the fire.

So there's been a bulldozer through here.

Ultimately, in this fire, 154,000 acres will be burned.

19,000 structures are destroyed.

Thousands are displaced.

That's the impact.

Those are our fire effects here.

Damage estimates about $16.5 billion.

Smoke from this fire will travel thousands of miles and expose most of the inhabited parts of California to some of the worst air quality they've seen in a long time.

I remember one of my

friends in like LA and San Francisco being like, hey, it's cool that I have to wear like a respirator.

Yeah.

In that smoke, it's not just like ash, but it's this town.

It's these people.

It's all the stuff that gives you like every cancer.

Yeah, we're talking heavy metals, dioxins, asbestos,

PFAS, PFAS.

Oh, I play with those too.

Don't play with those.

Those are a bad time.

In 22 out of 24 tested water

systems, you find benzene.

Oh,

what a great chemical.

Yeah.

The chemical that gives you cancer instantly.

The molecular structure is so pleasing is the thing.

Is it a ring molecule, benzene?

Oh, I'm misremembering.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, benzene is the hexagon.

Oh, nice.

A friend of mine mine was just at my place.

He got back from the Antarctic.

He was a fuelie down there.

And they carried buckets, five-gallon buckets of benzene between the fuel stations and the benzene disposal.

On sale.

The nice thing is you don't have to wear a respirator because winds are between 30 and 50 knots.

Cool.

Nobody look at the dead zone around the American Antarctic station.

Oh, Jesus.

For those of you who don't know, benzene is like,

if you could like put cancer into a molecule, this is it.

It's not

yeah, yeah, yeah, because all the all the all the cells see it and say that looks like such an attractive molecule, you know, that's a ring molecule, I can bond to it on any of these little sites, you know, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, so you, you, if you want to go back here, you get cancer, you're just going to get cancer in the water.

In also in the water, you have PFAFs and PFAFs, it's like 20 or 12,000 different chemicals, but you got them in there because a town, a couple of towns, burned to the ground.

It's not good when you, when your towns burn to the ground.

So Paradise went from a town of like 25,000 to a town of 5,000.

Fuck.

Jesus.

Most of those people are never going to come back, see the cancer stuff.

Again, like it's not city destroyed by climate change.

We will do the Katrina episode, but it is absolutely town destroyed by climate change.

Yeah.

All right, so next slide here.

Okay, so our fire is so big.

It's 154,000 acres.

You got a lot of dead trees in here.

This is so...

I do appreciate anyone wearing M81 Woodland Gods plaid.

Oh, I know that Drake song.

Yeah.

Also, green helmet.

Green helmet.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, you have to wear a helmet to work in these sites because of the overhead obstructions and

problems.

Also, these are most likely migrant workers, just based on what I know about...

uh planting groups of course it's all different kinds of extraction cool perfect and that guy's guy's going to get like fucking 50 different kinds of cancer.

I'm just going to quick finish my planting crew.

Like, these planting crews are fantastic.

These guys will put down just acres and acres and acres.

And I've planted like acres on my own.

And it's fucking hard work.

And these guys will put it down like it's nobody's business.

Like these planting crews are just insane.

And they get paid like 12 cents a tree in the eastern U.S.

In the Western U.S., it's a little bit more, but it's like cents and dollars a tree.

It's insane.

Look at where this guy's working.

I'm going to assume gender here.

Look at where this person is working.

They're working on the side of a mountain on a burned stand.

This is like, you know, slope is like 15, 30%.

They're crawling through like downtime where they got overhead obstacles and overhead hazards.

Like, this is not a safe environment.

So you're doing this for like, you know, maybe a dollar a tree that you put in the ground.

But this is what you got to do.

Put trees in the ground.

Are we taking a beer break?

Are we keeping up?

I don't think so.

All right, beer break.

Hi, buddy.

Yeah, hi, buddy.

We're back.

Cool.

we don't know where ros is i i i i just no not to not to interrupt but like

as as as a believer in like socialism or barbarism the barbarism sucks so bad dude yeah like i i would honestly like a break from this barbarism

a lot of i you know i was out i was you know i've been trying to like well now that the weather is nice i've been trying to bike again i want to do a lot better than last year where i was just depressed all year this year i'm like i'm gonna go biking And I see a lot of people fishing in the skuyl.

And it's like, I always don't do that.

They're like, Yeah, those fish are probably not that good for you, right?

Stay away from the benthic fish there.

Especially like right by where the refinery used to be.

That's where we're doing our sampling.

So just don't eat the benthic fish out of the skuyl, and you'll probably be okay.

We were finishing up.

So these, these folks are paid between 12 and 12 cents and a dollar a tree to put trees on this slope.

Absolutely fucking barbarous.

That's between, you know, 30, you know, 15 and 30%.

This is my biggest problem, right?

Is that like so much of what I want as far as climate change goes is a little policy I like to call climate Stalin, right?

And people...

have their own interpretations of what i mean by climate stale right to say and i'm an anarchist yeah what what i mean is like total like ideological motor like mobilization of a society in favor of like fighting climate change and nothing else right but there have been

a couple other ways the biosphere is falling.

I think that we discussed climate change.

That's cool.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There have been attempts and like often very authoritarian attempts.

I think a lot about the Great Green Wall in China, which is a reforestation effort to attempt to arrest the progress of the Gobi Desert.

That's likely why we have Asian Longhorn Beetle.

Yep.

And

it's not going so well because it turns out that when you incentivize, not very thoughtfully, people to just plant trees and then you get in such a way that you can kind of go to the UN or whoever and say we planted one billion trees what happens is that you plant a bunch of monoculture and then like some kind of weather event just kills you know four-fifths of them the next year a weather event would be lucky usually it's an invasive forest pest but again this is we're getting back to my workshop and i'm having beers with my friends here we're friends we've been drinking together for six hours

we're friends here i have bad news i'm a good hang usually you guys are asking me about workshop.

My workshit is bad shit.

I'm not a good hang.

I'm a bad one.

What you, the listeners, don't know is there's actually been a full three hours of this podcast we have cut out so far.

Yeah, it was just a succession of like slurs.

Okay.

I gave all of the all three of these guys the TV.

If you thought what we said about the Spaniards was bad,

the things you like to say, transgender women.

Nova.

I don't want to get canceled.

So the other problem with these restoration efforts is there are not enough conservation stock nurseries out there.

So these folks are putting out there, they're putting like 1-0 nursery stocks.

So you have to go out, you have to collect the pine cones, get the seeds out of those pine cones, put those seeds into a nursery bed somewhere, and then raise them for a year to three years, five years, put them in the ground.

So not only are we working with migrant crews who are underpaid and overworked, and they're doing like six, seven hours or six, seven days with 10 to 12 hour days, but also there are not enough conservation stock nurseries.

Could all of this be solved with money?

Yes.

Will we solve this with money?

So far, no.

Oh, my God.

Next slide.

Going back to the civilian conservation force.

Yes,

yes.

I liked that one.

In many ways, FDR was the original Flymet Stalin.

I try to mute myself when I'm eating, but sometimes I have to eat with my mind.

You're fine, bud.

You're fine, bud.

This is amazing.

The weird thing about the CCC is they made some insane decisions.

Like, if you look at what they did in Pennsylvania, there's a bunch of Japanese and European large, and you're like, why did you do that?

If you wanted to put a conifer out, there were like seven native species you could have chosen for.

Yeah.

In the Midwest, they at least planted red pine.

They gave it a shot.

No, like, it's, these are doable.

The reason the conservation stock nurseries and the seed gatherers are gone is we've just disinvested from them.

I just wrote New York Times.

We could just do this.

This is just money.

The thing that strikes me about so much reforestation, right, is that trees being bitch made operate in an entirely different time scale from us and one that's not very convenient to us having realized we fucked up extremely badly, like 15 years after we should have done.

And so

they take a lot of time to get re-established and stuff and a lot of money and effort.

When I was very small, I was at the Vail Brewery in Richmond, Virginia.

And I got to see one of those big-ass tree-moving machines.

Like log forwarders?

Yeah.

No, no, no.

They dig the trees out of the ground.

Oh.

They dig the tree out and they move it somewhere else.

I forget if it was putting the tree there or taking it out.

And I was so disappointed to realize 10 years later that tree died.

Yep.

It's sort of so much of the like tree surgery stuff is if like on humans we were like we invented head transplant surgery and then just refused to accept that it didn't work.

Oh, I've lived in grafting.

Yeah.

And then grafting does work.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So like this is a solvable problem.

We know how to do it.

The problems, these problems are not limited to the west Coast.

These problems are so bad here in the East Coast.

Myself and other foresters are starting our own nurseries because you just can't get baby trees.

You just can't you can't buy them.

Like they're just not there because we've just fundamentally disinvested it from this.

I thought that the free market.

Yeah, from Marketing Agreement.

See, see, here's the thing is

why I'm here is like the foresters, we are looking at that 100-year cycle and the free market is looking at maybe the end of this quarter.

Yeah.

Different time scales.

Yeah.

So it's not that this is.

This is going to be understood by like climate Stalin if climate Stalin was a kind of ant.

Yeah.

I mean, you don't have to be like an un-human being.

You just have to think beyond the end of the quarter cycle.

It's very doable.

You just have to be trained to think that way.

You have to work that way.

We just have to get out of this capitalist colonialist mindset of it's going to like produce money at this rate.

Now,

we have to train a core of climate monk warriors.

They're called.

november they're called foresters we have a title we have a

position we exist we have a society nobody gives a about us we have we do this every fucking day

but what if you ran the forestry like a

ross barrel is that you daddy yeah honestly it can make money it just like you gotta do other shit and then we work as good as you want um so now i do want to address like the monoculture stuff yeah you got a lot of monocultures here because like in the western us you have like seven dominant species it's not like the eastern u.s like where we're like oh yeah it is a normal site we got 15 12 15 species here you got like three or four usually that dominate a site because these are different climates and different things so like yeah it's more monoculture because that's what it is so if i'm not if i'm not mistaken even out here in the east our mon we're still more monoculture than we were before to some extent yeah again like you can only raise so many species in a in the nursery and work through so many issues.

All right, next slide.

All right, let's get into the Xboxes here.

So between the campfire.

You know it's bad when like three guys in Tyvek suits have to stand around in what used to be your house.

Yeah.

There's at least one lady there.

I don't assume.

It seems to be

at least.

Okay.

So again, November is just out here.

Two female presenting persons.

You're in this doing left, right, and center.

Okay, so PG ⁇ E will eventually declare bankruptcy in 2019 following the campfire and the go-shaped fire seed previous episode.

They shouldn't have been allowed to do that.

They should have guillotined the executives.

It'll get worse in a second.

All right, so they're looking at $30 billion of fire damage from the campfire and a couple other fires that they're found at fault for because of these lines they know they have issues with.

So they will eventually be fined for $25 billion, 13 of which go to the victims.

in the fire victims fund.

Half of that is cash and half of that is stock in PG ⁇ E.

One PG ⁇ E executive and November holds yourself for this one calls this an unjustified windfall.

Guy La Teen.

Yep.

Three simple syllables that ease our way to the path of climate style and considerably.

You could just live in paradise for a while and tell me how that works for you, bud.

Yeah.

Drink the benzene water.

Yeah, I was going to say, go like move buckets of benzene back and forth and then tell me how you feel about it.

Yeah,

you gotta do some manual labor, right?

Or are you cheap?

I'm moving, moving into South America as the only continent that has any hope of putting guys like this in our loot lab.

So, by the end of 2023, because that's when I wrote this slide originally,

there were at least $19.9 billion in damages given out, or sorry, at least $99 billion in damages awarded, $11 billion

given out to 720,000 claimants.

This is across a couple of fires.

I mean,

it's a decent number of Xboxes.

Yeah, it's not worth it.

Shit ain't worth it.

No,

no.

Yeah.

And like, you, you don't get a billion dollars for filing the suit.

You just don't get that.

A lot of that money went to the state for putting the fire out.

And to, you know, the lawyers.

And I say this as a former law student, insurance company.

Okay.

As much as you try and like Aaron Brockovich this shit, you're also like diminishing the amount of like set.

Yeah, so there are a lot of people hurt by this fire who will never see a dime from this.

Like if you have an asthma attack and you live in San Francisco, but you have an asthma attack because of the ash and the stuff,

you're kind of fucked on this one, bud.

If you get cancer from the asbestos that was airborne, but you live in Sacramento, that's just kind of the way it is.

So every

out of the that fund, or sorry, out of the $25 billion fine, $11 billion would go to insurance companies and reinsurance companies, as well as hedge funds that own various investments into these things.

A lot of money goes to the state and feds for putting the fire out, which, you know, obviously they deserve.

They put the fire out.

PGE started it.

PGE eventually gets convicted for 84 counts of manslaughter and pays a maximum fine of, hold on for this one, $3.5 million.

Nobody goes to jail.

And by the end of 20

that's

one of the more

interesting lectures I ever had in law school was I um so I went to law school in Glasgow.

The professor of commercial law um there was a guy called Mark First,

um, very, very impressive.

I only had a couple of lectures, um, but like I had a corporate regulation lecture from him, and one of the things he suggested was like start putting motherfuckers in prison.

He didn't use the word motherfuckers, right?

He just said executives, but like, he was right.

It's the only thing that like has any plausible effects.

And even then, it's like easy to control for.

Like,

you just, you have to come up with some kind of effective sanctions on these people.

Otherwise, it's just going to keep being like this while the situation worsens forever.

In China, they will execute you.

See, this is always...

I was thinking...

This results in a significantly less amount of bullshit.

I have mixed feelings, right?

Because a lot of the stuff about like in China, they will execute you is is like based on a lot of internal politics about who gets executed and who doesn't, right?

But like, right, right.

Yeah, you do have to

at least some of them.

You have to, you have to.

Bring a flags.

Bring your flags to Spanish.

What's the thing the French said about admirals?

Pour encourage les autre.

You have to like execute a few of them to encourage the rest, right?

Otherwise,

once you hit a net worth of $1 billion,

you are fair game.

Taylor Swift, we're coming for it.

In this case, you'd be convicted of 84 counts of manslaughter, at least.

And this is, again,

we're discounting everybody who is impacted in the future.

We're saying today we know 84 people died.

Everybody who gets cancer from this, it's not a fucking problem.

I just, oh my God.

I think part of it is like just the kind of unattributability, right?

Like if fucking if when you got cancer, if when you got diagnosed with cancer, you had a Call of Duty kill cam that showed you the fucking cell replication thing that caused your cancer, we would be like a lot less insane about this because we would be able to know, we'll be able to say, it is this specific guy.

wearing his like gray t-shirt who has like a hedge fund opinions about like San Francisco local politics who is responsible for having given you cancer and then you could go to his house you get to haunt him yes

yes like but leave that in leave that in leave it in leave it in leave it in you know i the people who are really deserving of punishment by society are um you know 45 guys in texas with an iq oh this is

the spanish foreign legion i got you

i got you yeah but

this is the thing like anyone can do my job so long as you have a concept of the callback you can

you guys like just did an episode and you guys were like calling out like you guys on trash reach you guys call it a ball game, and like a bunch of like weird shit.

And I was like, Look, I'm an educated person, I have elevated degrees.

I don't know what is happening here.

I don't, I don't have, I don't have an undergraduate degree.

I don't believe you need to be high IQ to be a fan of ball games.

Those hips don't lie.

This is the thing.

Yeah,

you imagine the fucking, like, like the fucking Lenape ball game.

That's La Crosse.

They're throwing like,

I'm the like Bel Balichick at the Billboard.

I i believe in you that's just belichick dudes are fucking weird

jacob holla

we cheated every game

about it

yeah the good system on a cincinnatic the the the thing i gotta i gotta stress about this is specifically it's the thing felix biederman said that always stuck with me which is that like podcasting is a very very easy job that's difficult to do and that like very few people can do well that's the thing i'm clinging to because if that's not true, and anybody can do this, I'm fucked.

No, you can't.

Shut up.

Speaking of which, let's move on.

My wife is starting to get mad.

My wife is just giving up on me at this point.

They should be mad at me.

I'm not setting this up.

It doesn't matter.

You're lovely and everybody loves you.

So, my wife.

Think of May.

Back in June 2020,

PGE exits bankruptcy and they're back as a functioning country or company.

So bankruptcy has no consequences.

Only the katana has consequences.

You can buy them off the instructions.

They're a utility company.

They are a utility company.

They cannot go bankrupt and not come back because no one would have elections.

Nationalize.

You would not have the institutional knowledge.

Obviously, you should nationalize them.

We don't live in that society because of California ideology.

As well as several other people.

I will drag this podcast to an end, kicking and screaming.

You can't just.

Probably not.

You cannot just nationalize it because we don't live there anymore.

Bros, I'm going to break your leg.

All right, I'm going to get rid of that in 1918.

All right.

All right.

What did we learn here?

What did we learn?

So did this fire need to happen at all?

No.

No.

No.

No.

Could we have prevented this?

Class?

No.

We could have prevented this a number of ways.

In 2009,

we could have we could have intervened in the wires in 2011 in 2012 we could have intervened on those wires we could have done any fuel reductions work at all in the west coast it largely has not happened since the 90s uh and is still you know biden put a bunch of money into the forest service and fuels reduction still slowly getting underway because every time the forest service goes out there they're getting their shit sued again the forest service is not wrong in the forest service has been wrong before but you do have to do forest management okay so sure people are doing stuff.

Does this need to happen?

Absolutely not.

As we discussed with the Southeast United States, it has a similar fire regime, slightly different elevation, similar conifer dominance, and we do not see Athens burning to the ground like we saw camp or paradise burning to the ground.

And that is because in the southeast, you still have a prescribed fire culture that was largely held on to by the Cherokee and other First Nations, despite Jaboy.

What was his name?

The president.

I just went right out of my head.

I see his face.

Jackson.

Andrew Jackson's attempt to eliminate the First Nations.

Cherokee tried to assimilate and they were punished.

You know, them and the other First Nations down there, like the Seminoles.

So you have strong fire culture in the southeastern United States.

And so where you have strong prescribed fire culture in these fire-adapted systems, you don't have huge wildfire because you don't have fire fuels buildup.

It's just gone.

You know, you just burn that shit off.

This is like the one metric the southeastern U.S.

does better than anywhere else.

100%.

That, that, that and like bucky's locations like when i was getting my parents in wisconsin i saw a sign for buckies and it was like buckies that way 800 miles i was like

the south comes for us all i will not go back you will not take me back below the mason dixon line except for like when you pay me to go back then i will go back i do have a price i'm very viable it's very low all right next slide please

I work in Forestry.

This is not a big money sector.

All right.

What do you want from me?

Okay, so these are some pictures that I took took yesterday in the field.

So this is how you return fire to an area.

So you cannot just go out there with a drip torch or with your hella torch and just throw fire at shit and expect it to work.

So photo one is where we want the stand to be.

This is a week after fire.

We can see fire happen.

We have good fire effects in here.

Photo two is what this site used to be.

We can bring this site into a place where we can burn it again effectively.

We can, excuse me, knock the maples out, knock these invasive species out in here um

where i see that green in there you want to highlight that for me real quick so that is largely uh japanese barbary and the flora rose these are invasive prescribed fire stain it's kind of mid at controlling invasive species once you have a stand established for a fire you can kill it uh but if it's like three and four you can't bring that shit out so okay so um to get these stands in a place where you can return fire to them.

And again, this is in the East Coast context.

You have to work on them.

These stands are like if you had a fireplace and you have a butler who comes into the fireplace every day and they say, Ah, master, you're expecting a fire.

I'm going to load the fireplace up across the western United States.

And this fireplace has been loaded for the last 100 years.

And then someone goes and lights a fire.

That fire is going to burn the house down.

So you have to do fuels reduction work before you can start lighting fires in there.

You got to get rid of these big ass logs in this grass.

And fire doesn't get like prescribed fire burns too, at too low of a temperature and too quickly to get rid of these big logs.

So you have to go through, you have to masticate, you have to do like hand stuff to get it out of there.

This is all doable and achievable.

It just takes money.

To get three and four in a place where we can burn it, we have to masticate this.

We have to spray this, and then we can start to introduce fire.

We cannot burn our way through this.

As you can see in three and four, we tried to burn it in this stand, and that shit ain't worked, dog.

You can see the fire scar.

Yeah, I can see the char on on four.

Like, and it doesn't matter.

All of these stands are within 500 feet of each other.

It's a matter of setting this up and doing fire.

All right.

So, next slide, please.

Oh, this is a fucking coolest hell.

This is lessons of data.

So, let's wrap this up.

We don't need to see this every day.

We will until we continue to take natural systems seriously and invest in them.

And if we don't, we're going to see more bad stuff.

As I've been proven right by time,

you got to divest from oil and gas, regardless of what the oil and gas industry is.

We need now.

Like literally yesterday, you need to do renewable energy.

And I hate to say it, but you gotta do nuclear.

Actually, I don't hate to say it.

I love

to irradiate the shit out of people.

You gotta do it.

I think we're all big nuclear.

Shit works.

21.

Big nuclear guys and gals.

Yeah.

And then invasive species just makes our fuel loading.

uh problems worse because they burn in different ways they burn hotter and they interrupt the natural cycle and climate change and it throws all of it in the whack.

You just throw the fire seasons off, you throw the climate off, you throw all this shit off.

So, if you could do climate change, I would say don't.

You happen to be leaning on the big climate change button, I'd say, Yeah, kind of move off there, bud.

Yeah, come over here.

Yeah,

everything I read about climate change is like scientists worry about whether or not we've hit the tipping point for accelerated warming, but we don't know yet.

And then a bunch of things about how

we stopped worrying a lot.

We stopped worrying so long long ago i don't talk about how doomer i am on the podcast and i probably won't excellent all right yeah so that's me

if we if we if we have a push to do the the the fossil fuels episode then we'll talk about how doomer we all are yeah well yeah by fun one i mean

moving along i'm done thank you oh sorry the last thing is we can apply most of these lessons broadly like if we look at fire in brazil that's mostly human driven fire in uh australia again it's mostly a fuels problem.

The Quebec fires, that shit shouldn't have been on fire.

Most of that is peat stuff.

He needs to send the castle ranches to the Lulags.

Some of these wildfire problems seem relatively easy to solve just with manpower.

With money and so much of the Californian context of their specific money and manpower.

And these so-called technocrats refuse to do any of the obvious technocratic solutions for some fucking reason.

Well, you know,

they all have economics degrees.

This shit burned down Nancy Pelosi's winery, you know, and if that isn't the biggest tragedy here, I don't know what is.

It's not my fault I was stupid enough to get an economics degree.

Well, you know, a criminology degree, and fuck if this shit isn't a crime.

And a math degree because I'm stupid.

Actually,

this is an interesting, this is like a live sort of like discussion in criminology because one of the problems with criminology is that it wasn't like largely invented to measure motherfuckers' skulls to see why they were stabbing people.

And it's a remarkably poor way of understanding

not just crime, but also harm.

And if you want to be like extremely woke about this, as I do, you might instead of criminal criminology, call it zemiology, the study of harm, and start thinking about things like this instead of, you know, like muggings or whatever, or as much as I guess.

So I have just this deep, dark desire to work in the worst things possible, and unfortunately gotten myself involved in ecocide, and there's a lot of ecocide we could discuss with some of this stuff.

Depressing episode, we have a segment on this podcast called Safety Third.

Shake hands with danger.

Meet a guy you ought to know.

Hello, November, Liam, Roz, and guests.

And got it this time.

And got it this time.

And got him in the right hole.

I've been here for hours, and I finally get some appreciation.

In my younger years, before my body betrayed me, I did the type of work known as lifting boxes of things.

Oh, don't do that, it's really bad for you.

On the plus side, this usually came with the benefit of driving a forklift,

which it is objectively fun as hell.

Yeah, so I was mostly okay with yep, forklifts are fun.

Um,

this story is about the first warehouse I worked in, and one which had boxes of the worst things to lift, rocks, or more specifically, specifically, flooring tile.

Oh, okay.

To give you an image of this warehouse, imagine a place with 25 rows of three-story racking systems filled with one-ton skids of flooring tile.

These racks, in particular, looked, well, let's say a bit suspect, with the uprights being only about three inches thick.

The uprights, I assume, are these guys here.

And well, I learned after I departed that the Ministry of Labor had come in and ordered all the racks taken down and replaced, their abject shittiness was helpful to me, as you will see below.

It was a huge building, to be sure, and one belonging to a company that had safety training that amounted to,

well, try not to break anything.

At least put on

a video of like, stop Lefiera Klaus.

Whether this that is something that happens in American warehouses.

Oh, I believe it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Whether this referred to bones or tile remained unclear.

I had asked when I first started if we got hard hats, to which the foreman replied, If a box falls and hits you in the head, the hard hat is only going to keep your face pretty for the coffin.

Aren't forclifts meant to come with like an overhead protection on the roll cage anyway?

You might be walking by the shelf and the

forklift.

Stay in the forklift the whole time.

Do a kind of like mecca thing.

The thing is, for the sake of your mother, you should look pretty for the coffin.

That's true.

My mother is.

You don't want a closed cask out.

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

So the answer was no.

We did not get hard hats.

Now, these closed casks.

I just get at my Muslim Catholic funeral.

Muslim Catholic Jewish funeral.

Yeah.

Oh,

we're multicultural here.

Yeah.

I have to find some people who like each other.

Oh, my God.

Now, these skids came in different dimensions, and most were your standard skid size.

But there was, however, one particular company that used long skids just to be fucking special.

We had a specific bay layout for these, but because training was lacking, New operators didn't always know this.

Oh, boy.

On the day in question, I was working on one of the aisles adjacent to a regular width rack.

Unbeknownst to me, earlier in the week, a new operator had placed a long skid on the top level of the rack.

It's the one that keeps the long skids in their special long skid quarantine area.

You would hope so, yeah.

Now, this isn't necessarily a problem because the racks can hold one brackets one as a numeral long skid

but somewhat critically it cannot hold two

and due to the size you won't be able to see the long skid from one side while i was picking my order blissfully unaware of the goings-on in the aisle next to me an operator was putting a long skid into the bay that already had a long skid

hitting the critical two long skid limit there was no way for him to see the long skid from where he was, so I don't fault him at all for what happens next.

I heard a creak and saw the rack in front of me move about two inches.

So I ran, thinking the rack was giving way.

This almost definitely saved my life as the forklift on the other side pushed the long skid out of the bay where it fell 20 feet.

and landed about two feet from where I ended up.

If it sucks, hit the bricks.

Just start running.

Run for it.

Well, you got to hit the bricks, or the bricks are going to hit you.

Yeah.

Being a 10-sem switch, like.

I could say I shit myself, but all I remember was numbness and detachment.

So you wouldn't know if you shit yourself.

Yeah, yeah, it's something you find out later after the fact.

I put my order sheet down on my forklift, looked at the foreman who had come running and said, I'm going to the bar for a bit.

I won't be in tomorrow.

Fuck yeah.

Hell yeah.

I did end up going back to work there for another six months.

Hell yeah.

I wore a hard hat every day.

And I guess my advice is to be very discerning about which

warehouses you work in.

I mean, you do your best, but there's like not a lot of warehouse jobs.

Well, you know, you have to work in Amazon now where they will just crush you deliberately.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The robot, like the humanoid robot, will crush you as part of its training program.

Yes.

Love the show, all.

Keep up the good work from Jim.

Thank you, Jim.

Sorry

that you almost got crushed.

Glad that you didn't get crushed.

Hope they're in a better place now.

God hopes.

Jesus.

Not an Amazon fulfillment center is the main thing.

Well, this was a paving

flooring fulfillment warehouse.

Amazon will sell you floor tiles, I'm pretty sure.

I don't think they're

key to get displays by not selling you stuff.

This is a good point.

Yeah, I'm halfway through the podcast.

I had to go out and grab the mouse I ordered earlier today.

Do you have a mouse wheel now?

Do you have a functioning mouse wheel?

No, I haven't put it on the computer yet.

I'm going to light you on fire.

All right, that's all.

End of shit.

End the shit.

End the shit.

You're doing it with all the shit.

You're going to turn on the podcast.

If the

Hey, if they want more Kevin, where can they find you?

God damn.

I don't.

All right, cool.

Anyone got any commercials before we go?

There's a thing in Philly that I will be hosting.

It involves disaster movies.

I don't have all the details for it yet.

I will end the next episode.

All right.

Good night, everybody.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

In this, the month of Playprol, we must plug Bunta Vista.

Yes, that's a good point.

It is Playpro.

Yeah.

Bunta Vista podcast.

And it.

This is the only podcast I have merchandise from.