Live Like the World is Dying | Podcast kostenlos online hören (2024)

• S1E118 - Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I

  Episode SummaryThis week on Live Like the World is Dying, Spencer and Inmn talk about bike packing and how cool bikes are. What is bike packing? Where can you ride? What do you need? Find the answers here.Guest InfoSpencer can be found on IG @spencerjharding or at www.spencerjharding.comHost InfoInmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificeryPublisher InfoThis show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.TranscriptLive Like the World is Dying: Spencer on Bike Packing Pt. I**Inmn ** 00:15Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be talking about something that I've been wanting to do an episode about for a really long time because I really love to do it. And I think what I'm going to learn in this interview is that I have been doing it really wrong. Or not wrong, but making it so much harder for myself. And it's just going to be...it's going to be a lot of fun. And today we're gonna be talking about different ways that you can travel long distances, or short distances over strange terrain, on a bicycle. And we're gonna be talking about bike packing. But before that, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Net of anarchists podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [singing]**Dissident Island Radio ** 01:27You're listening to Dissident Island Radio, live every first and third Friday of the month at 9pm GMT, check out www.dissidentIsland.org for downloads and more.**Inmn ** 02:15And we're back. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself with your name, pronouns, and just a little bit about what you do in the world? And what you're here to tell us about today?**Spencer ** 02:32Hi, my name is Spencer Harding. My pronouns are he/him/his. I do a lot of things related to bikes and I have for the last...oh, at least 10 or so years. I'm currently a photographer, writer, and editor for a website called theradavist.com. We do all manner of cycling related articles and content reviews. I've worked as a bike mechanic at local community coops and full on bike shops a like, and I've been traveling by bike since 2009 pretty regularly. And that's been a huge focus of my interest in bikes and kind of my forte in bikes.**Inmn ** 03:18Cool, cool. Um, it's funny because I know you real life and we, you know, we like play dnd together and I actually didn't know that's what you for work. And I just knew you knew a lot about bikes. So cool, great.**Spencer ** 03:40I don't love that I'll know people for years and years and years and I think in a lot of the communities I've been in for years, no one really asks what anyone does. And it's not really important because we're all just doing these weird niche activities or hobbies together. And it's kind of fun.**Inmn ** 03:55Yeah. I'm going to immediately go offer a little script. How did you get into bikes?**Spencer ** 04:07I got into bikes right on the verge of the huge fixed gear craze that happened in like the early aughts.**Inmn ** 04:18Oh yeah, I remember.**Spencer ** 04:21So I was in school at Long Beach State in Southern California. I saw some people riding around bikes. It was the begining of my second year of college. I was moving off campus and I realized that I could buy a bicycle for the same price as a parking pass. And it took me as long to ride from my apartment to my classes as it did to walk from the parking lot to my class. So I took the, what, $130 that that parking pass would have been and I bought an old Schwinn off Craigslist. And it's been all downhill from there.**Inmn ** 04:59[Laughing] I'm sure it has not been all downhill, but I appreciate the pun. We'll get into this later, but I did a big--introduction to me and biking--is that I have always just really loved bikes. Like similarly I had this thing in high school where a car became suddenly unavailable to me. And I lived in like a suburb of a suburb of a suburb. And I was like, can I take my dad's old Schwinn that's in the in the crawl space and ride it to the city? And the answer was, yes, I could. But like, fast forward many years to going on my first bike tour, and we like went over the continental divide and I was like, "So it's all downhill from here, right?"06:00[Laughing] That's one of the things. You never trust the elevation profile. There's always more up somehow. You could be on top of a mountain and somehow there will be some more uphill.**Inmn ** 06:11Yeah. Always uphill. Always. Um, cool. Well. So yeah, let's just kind of happen to it. Um, what is like...what are the different kinds of scopes of bike travel? I feel like there's like a lot of words that were new to me as of a couple of years ago where I was just always "bike touring." But now there's all these kind of other words that people use that maybe seem like little subsets of bike touring, like gravel bikes or bike packin or r maybe there's other words that I don't know about.06:50There's so many buzzwords, and most of it is marketing, and like an ever smaller niche-ification of bikes. When we talk about bike travel, I think the word that comes to mind is bike touring, like, everything is bike touring. You're touring on a bike, you're riding, you're exploring, you're traveling by bike. The buzzword of the last decade has been "bike packing." And there's a lot of arguments about what that means, what that constitutes, what's bike packing, what's not bike packing. I won't go down a huge rabbit hole. I feel like the word bike packing ushered in a more modern sense of ways to pack a bicycle as opposed to what was classically bicycle touring. But if you're traveling by bike and you're strapping sh*t to your bike, you're going bike touring, Call it bikepacking. Call it gravel biking. You can call it...there's a multitude of other things like that. But when it boils down to it, it's all bike touring in my mind.**Inmn ** 08:09Yeah. Okay. Um, golly, I'm going to immediately go on another tangent because I... [Spencer encourages it] It's reminding me of like.... I suddenly found myself thinking about like, wait, I wonder if Spencer knows the history...like what the history of the development of the bicycle was? This is a question I should have sent to you yesterday. And I mean, maybe you do, maybe you don't--08:39I'm not super familiar. It popped in my head like I should probably do some sort of research. I mean I know the vagaries of it. But nothing specifically. I couldn't sit tell you names or dates or anything like that.**Inmn ** 08:53Totally. But it's like, it is something that people have...like people have been riding long distances on bikes since bikes were invented, which is something that I find really interesting. Like there's.... Which I know you could take like a rewritten fairy tale and call it like absolute historical fact, you know but have you ever had any Angela Carter books.**Spencer ** 09:22I haven't.**Inmn ** 09:24She got famous for like rewriting the for rewriting a lot of fairy tales. And people were like, "Oh, you rewrote them with like a feminist lens." And she was like, "I absolutely didn't. My goal was to bring out the innate horror in all of these stories, and these stories just happen to be really like femicide-idle. And so that reads is feminism because the main conflicts in them are misogyny." But there's this story called Lady of the House of Love. About this vampiress who like lives in a collapsing, ruinous castle in Transylvania and is the offspring of like Dracula or something, who's just like quite bored in the world at this point. And there's this like whole diatribe in the story about this guy who she lures into the castle who has been traveling around France in Europe on a bicycle. And this is my funny tie in, and this is like in... this is like, in the early days of World War Two when this... Yeah, that's what.... And it's like, it's like these little nods where I'm like, okay, it's it's a fictional story, but I'm like, that sounds like a real thing people did, just travel around Europe on a f*cking bicycle.**Spencer ** 10:56I am 100% sure that there is some real world influence. Yeah, there's all those memes, you'll see. Like, there's some Scandinavian guy who just lived by his bike forever and ever. And, you know, big beard and all that jazz. I can't think of his name. But I can only imagine that there's some truth or they met some weird guy in a cafe one day and decided to just write them into the story after that.**Inmn ** 11:23Yeah. Okay, wait, but back to the things. So if you had to kind of put a definition on what bike packing is, what is bike packing?**Spencer ** 11:37So I would even back up to just bike travel. So bike travel is riding your bike multi day--so that could include a single night--somewhere, taking whatever you need for that journey, whatever that may be. Totally self sufficient. Maybe just change the clothes and a credit card. But using your bike as a means to explore and travel to somewhere.**Inmn ** 12:08Cool. Cool. That sounds right. And what.... I guess maybe this.... It's like maybe some of these specific classifications kind of seems like it maybe gets down to what kind of bike you're riding or what kind of gear you're using? Or like something? I don't know.**Spencer ** 12:35Yeah, there's been some discussion last few years about intent. So by touring, they've gone to the more recreational side of the venn diagram. So people on vacation, people going for a weekend trip, or for enjoyment. And by packing has, since it came at a time when people were packing less stuff on their bikes in new and creative ways that lent itself to more off road or very light and fast travel. So some people had defined bike packing as like a racing intent or like a competitive intent. And there are bike packing races. Someone who's staying with me right now, Austin Trace, she's training to ride the Arizona Trail and possibly some others. And that's an incredibly long distance. That's 800 miles of off road. There's many like 3000 plus mile bike packing races that happen all over the world over. So some people say bike packing for that kind of competitive intent. Some people will say they're going bike packing, when they're going camping for a weekend. There isn't really a line in the sand that I can thoroughly really draw. Bike packing is definitely like a new buzzword that's popped up in the last few years. And it encompasses everything that bike travel or bike touring would, depending on who you talk to or how you want to delineate that.**Spencer ** 14:07Yes. And this is another fun thing where we have like, you know, all bikepacking Is bike touring but maybe not all bike touring is bikepacking. So all road bikes are gravel bikes, but not all gravel bikes or road bikes. If you really want to get into it--and this is even...I just wrote a review talking about how the word gravel needs to be split into two things because we're getting a recreational version of what gravel means and a competitive version of what gravel means, and those things are very different. Roughly speaking a gravel bike is traditional-ish road bike. You know, curvy handlebars, road levers. You're just getting bigger tires and typically a more relaxed geometry. That's the easiest without going into a whole mess of other unnecessary details, but the just is road bikes with bigger tires optimized for riding on dirt roads, like farm roads, forest roads, things of that sort.**Inmn ** 14:07Yeah. Okay, that makes...that makes sense. And then there's this other word that I've been hearing people use a lot lately, which is--and by lately, I mean, this is years ago and I'm just like, really behind the the ball on things--but like, gravel bikes?**Inmn ** 15:35Okay. Where can you ride a bike?**Spencer ** 15:40These days? Where are there**Inmn ** 15:41Or rather where are places that you can not ride your bike to?**Spencer ** 15:46Legally speaking or terrain-limiting speaking?**Inmn ** 15:50Terrain. Let's go with terrain limiting for right now.**Spencer ** 15:54Okay, we don't need to dive into like the Wilderness Act limitations on mechanized travel. There are, if you're looking into that, there are so many crazy bicycles out there these days. There are very few places that you could not ride a bicycle. You're looking at incredibly steep and loose terrain or very deep snow or sand. But even that...like there's so many cool things with...like fat bikes have opened up just an incredible amount of terrain and versatility that wasn't available even like, you know, 20 years ago to bikes. And that's even expanding now. I've heard about some cool stuff I can't talk about, but there is some cool new stuff coming down the line that I'm very excited about in the monster truck realm of bikes. So there's.... Off road in the last few years has just totally exploded with gravel, with the accessibility of fat bikes, and like what those can.... So, fat bike, if I'm talking about, you're talking about four to five inch tires. They're just massive. So you run those incredibly low pressures like 10psi You're riding on snow, you're riding on sand, like, you know, that just opens up so many things that you can experience by bike and can travel across. And you can type in "adventure fat bike," and you'll get some crazy sh*t in f*cking Alaska. A bunch of my friends have done it and they're just like...they have little boats and they're putting a bike on boats and they're riding down beaches and like...just places you would never would ever expect you could ride or get a bike to. And they can get a bike there and they can ride it. So there's obviously limitations like verticality or steep terrain but as far as like surfaces, you're...the world's kind of your oyster these days with that. There's so many options.**Inmn ** 18:07Okay. Wow. Some of those are new to me and I'm like, okay, cool. Cool. Cool.**Spencer ** 18:14I have a fat bike I just built it. You can come over and ride it. Play monster truck. Come over here, Inmn. I'll show you next time you come over for dnd.**Inmn ** 18:22Wow. Love it. I, you know, on.... So like a background for me is my first bike tour, I didn't know anything about bike touring. I just knew that I wanted to do it. And so me and my friend Marie, we like...I met her up in Portland and then we rode our bikes to--Portland, Oregon--and then we rode our bikes to Boston.**Spencer ** 18:56Oh, wow. Okay. [Laughing with incredulity] My first bike tour was taking the train to Santa Barbara with my like messenger bag and then riding back to LA as an overnight. You went full hog. Okay.**Inmn ** 19:11Yeah, first first time ever riding a bike more than I could ride it in a day.**Spencer ** 19:19Impressive**Inmn ** 19:19It...you know, we're gonna go with a blend of impressive and utterly reckless.**Spencer ** 19:30I know and I want to talk to this in the end too. Like, you can be really reckless on a bike and if sh*t goes totally pear shaped just.... Yeah, and like the accessibility of things going wrong and the ability to fix those or to get out of those situations is just such a cool component of bicycle touring that you don't get with like cars or motorcycles or, I mean, I guess hiking even less so, like there's even less to pickup. But yeah, tell me the story. How did it all go, you know, on the way to Boston?**Spencer ** 20:05Oh, those are the worst.**Inmn ** 20:05Um, well actually, you know, we're going to talk about that a little bit later, probably. But just, as this one funny tie in, was that in Glacier National Park, we met a...we met someone who is about to finish his bike tour. And he had been...he'd ridden the entire continental divide on a bicycle with like a little, like one of those little swivel trailers.**Inmn ** 20:06Or, actually I don't know what they're called. They're like two wheels, in line.**Spencer ** 20:20Oh, the bob trailer.**Inmn ** 20:42Yeah, the bob trailer. Yeah, yeah. And he had crossed the Continental Divide like 30 times or something over the course of it. And it was utterly incomprehensible to me at the time. I'm like, "Are you riding on trails?" And he was like, "Sort of?"**Spencer ** 21:03If I may do a quick... So the Continental Divide Trail is a long distance hiking trail that is mostly not bikeable due to the Wilderness Act thing with the wilderness stuff. I think the route you're referring to is the Tour Divide.**Inmn ** 21:18Yes.**Spencer ** 21:20Yeah. So those things kind of get interchanged, but they're vastly different beasts. The Tour Divide is a very popular off road route that a lot of people do these days and is one of the first mapped long distance routes, and still remains one of the longer documented off road touring routes in the world, too, which is super cool.**Inmn ** 21:42Cool. Okay, wait, I'm trying to try to follow a little bit of a thread here. [Pauses, thinking] And maybe this is where to start. How do you...how do you start traveling long distances by bike in, you know, whatever capacity, whether you're like, I want to ride to a neighboring city, I want to ride across the country. I want to ride into the wilderness. These are vastly different. How do you get started? How do you get started?**Spencer ** 22:19So my start was literally, my friend in college gave a talk, and at the time I was a backpacker. I'd done some backpacking, like three, four days. Stuff like that. And my friend gave this talk about how she went to France and took a bunch of kids bike touring and they took all the camping gear and they put it on their bikes and they just rode their bikes for like two months. And that blew my f*cking mind. I was like, wait, I could put all my camping gear on my bike and go ride my bike. And this is in the very like first few years of me riding bikes. I was like, "This is the sh*t. I love this. Wait, I can go camping and do this?" So that was my first introduction. And I literally, New Year's Day, 2009, I took my road bike and my like good o'le Chrome messenger bag and I zip tied my sleeping bag under my saddle rails on my road bike and I took the train to Santa Barbara and I rode from Santa Barbara down like Highway One, like out near point Magoo, and I camped for the night. And I rode back to Long Beach the next day. And that's part of the Pacific Coast bike touring route. So it's just another established route from Adventure Cycling, who also does the Tour Divide, which you mentioned earlier. And that was my first time properly traveling by bike, and I was like, "This is cool." And a few months later a good friend of mine, Julia, who had just ridden across the country, kind of as you did. I can't remeber if she started in San Francisco or Portland as well. But she did that same trans-america ride. And she was like, "Hey, I just got off school. Like, I don't want to drive back to Southern California. Do you want to just like take a bus up here, and we're gonna bike back to LA together?" So I went back a few months later that summer and tried...like I got a different bike that had racks and all that sh*t and some bags. And you know, as that ball rolls, you get more bags, you get more specific stuff, you get bikes that are designed for it. And then I rode back from Santa Cruz to LA and then I was like, "This is f*cking sweet." So, two months later, I flew to Seattle and rode all the way back to Santa Cruz that same summer too. So that ball kind of rolled pretty quickly for me. So, I think it's literally taking...like at the time I had a messenger bag and a sleeping bag and a stuff sack and that was what I took and I had a little tiny pocket stove and a sleeping pad. I don't know if I even brought a sleeping pad. I might not have. I have to look back at the photos. It might have been strapped to my handlebars or something. But it's really what you have. If you have most any kind of like reasonably lightweight camping gear, from car camping to backpacking. Like, all of that gear translates. And if you have a bicycle, there's--especially these days--almost...there's so many ways that you can affix things to your bike.**Inmn ** 25:14And yeah, it's kind of funny, because I feel like I've seen this funny arc of like "bike luggage" or something. I don't know what to call it. [Spencer laughs] Where, like, when I was trying to get into bike touring, it's like--I'm sure like gravel bike/bike packing/offroad stuff, I'm sure I'm sure all that stuff existed, but I was less aware of it. But in the realm of bike touring, it seemed to be all about like how to like really neatly contain a lot of stuff on a bicycle, you know? And, like, now I see people's gravel bike or bike packing setups, and it's literally just like sh*t strapped anywhere that it could be.**Spencer ** 26:02Yeah, so if we're gonna get into like, if we're gonna delineate two words, we're gonna do bike touring on one side and we're gonna do bike packing on the other. If we look at bike touring luggage, or traditional touring luggage, was usually two to four panniers [rhymes with "your"], Panniers [Rhymes with "yay"]. There's a whole video you can watch about someone from Webster's talking to my buddy Russ about how to actually pronounce that f*cking word. It's a bag strapped to a rack. You can argue about it all day long. Typically two to four panniers, maybe a little bag on your handlebars, some water bottles, that was kind of the traditional setup that's been around since the inception of bicycles. Bike packing is when we're moving to more off road focus. So you, obviously panniers are just little hooks on a rack and maybe a bungee. If you've ever written off road with those they don't...they tend to eject. I've got buddies who have got busted collarbones from catching someone's unwanted, flying paneer**Spencer ** 27:02Oh, no.**Spencer ** 27:03So in the other corner, we have more modern bike packing bags, which arose from a cottage industry of people developing bags for things that they wanted to do that didn't exist at the time. There's a ton of them, like Revelate Designs has been around since the beginning and were big pioneers in a lot of these venues. And typically what that looks like is you have a bag on your handlebars. It's typically a double sided stuff sack, say 10 to 15 liters. Smaller, bigger exist. That's rolled on there, secured with some straps. There's harnesses and all that jazz. A big thing in bike packing that has really bled out to a lot of the other aspects of cycling, it's really convenient, is using the main front triangle of your bike. So bags that fit the center of your bike and fill that space.**Inmn ** 27:56That's like the spot kind of like underneath where you're sitting, right? It's like the space between the seat and the handle bars, right?**Spencer ** 28:01Correct. So, if you're thinking about a bike frame, this kind of goes back to the--I wanted to actually mention this in the history too--so a double triangle, like a diamond. So you have two triangles. You have the front triangle and the rear triangle. That design has been around nearly since the inception of bikes and fundamentally hasn't changed, which is kind of miraculous. There's there's always going to be some kooky weird sh*t that people are cooking up to make bikes better. But 99% of bikes that have ever existed have been the same design, and it's still the best and most efficient. So, you're filling that front triangle with gear. So it's where you would typically have your water bottles and things like that, but being able to put four liters of water, as opposed to two bottles, and a bunch of camping gear is more efficient. So frame bag. And then there's a bag attached to your seat post called a rocket bag or a butt bag or...[laughs] And this is where stuff gets real bondage-y. There's like 17 straps holding those f*cking things on. They sway if you don't pack them right. And there's a bunch of designs to make that better, and we're getting really close to really nailing it. So you have those kind of are your three main staples for bike packing bags. There's bags that strap your fork, there's bags that go onto your down tube, there's ones that attach to your stem to put snacks in. If there's a tiny spot in your bike, there's a bag for it, I guarantee it. And those are kind of your two corners of like bicycle luggage.**Inmn ** 29:32I see. I see. You know, what I.... Something I weirdly really appreciate about some of these bike packing luggage, or whatever, is when I was...when I was first hearing about some of this and I was like, oh.... Like I remember like 10 years ago when people were starting to have frame bags and stuff, and I was like "Where do you get a frame bag, like where can I go and buy this?" And the answer was, you had to just know someone who f*cked around and made one and wanted to make you one. And it was like...it's like watching an entire--like, you know, f*ck an industry, but it does make it more accessible for people that there's like more people making these things--but an entire way of making things, or a culture of making things, like erupting from like watching some people just f*ck around with fabric and like cordura and vinyl and sh*t and just like.... Yeah, I don't know. I feel like...yeah, it's like watching that and watching the same thing happen with messenger bags like 15-20--I know, it's been more--years ago. But I don't know, it's something I've weirdly always appreciated about like bikes is that there's been a lot of innovation not on an industrial level. It's like on the level of people just messing around with stuff in their garages and figuring out some really cool things. I don't know, does that...does that track? Is that real? Am I under the right perception?**Spencer ** 31:11100% There are so many cottage bag makers and a lot of them have scaled up and some of them are still really small. And a lot of the innovation is still coming from those cottage industries. Big companies have caught up. So there are a multitude of companies offering frame bags produced overseas that you can get at REI or on Amazon. There's a there's a host of options. Industrial production has caught up to it. One thing that's cool that they will never be able to do is there's a bunch of frame bike bag sewers--builders? What's the word? And you can send them a photo and they've written their various different scripts and computer programs and you send them a photo of your bike with like a ruler in it. And they will make a custom tailored bag exactly to fit your bike where you can put bolts through it, like just over the internet. And that's somethingl.... Like I personally have one from Rogue Panda. Nick is a crazy mad scientist and incredibly innovative. Yeah, you can just send him a photo of your bike or if they have the dimensions already in their system, they just sew you an exactly perfect custom bag. So you can get a bunch of off the shelf things that will work for most bikes, but if you have a weird like I do, or many that I do, you can get a custom one, and that's something that's always going to be around as like a cottage level industry.**Inmn ** 32:38Um, okay, how.... Or.... Okay, so say...let's say I want to...say I want I want to ride my bike from where I live to a neighboring city. It's like...maybe it's four days away, or something, by bike. What...or, this is a regular thing that I want to do. This is a thing that I want to kind of invest in doing. And I'm asking this from the perspective of, so like on my month long bike tour, I feel like there was a way to have a bike that I didn't f*cking hate riding. And so I'm wondering...I'm wondering kind of like what kind of bike do I need to do that? What will make my life be less terrible? I was on an old Schwinn steel frame that I put a mountain bike drive train on, essentially. And some like other mountain bike parts. I like converted it to 700s [wheel size]. I didn't know anything about fat tires. I just had like--**Spencer ** 34:03It barely existed back then. So yeah.**Inmn ** 34:05It was like, I don't know like one and a half inch ties. This is embarrassing to say at this point.**Spencer ** 34:14That's fine. I can't tell you the breadth of dumb ideas around bicycle.**Inmn ** 34:22Yeah, yeah. And it's like my life was so bad in comparison to my road partner who was riding a Surly Long Haul. [Specialty touring bike]**Spencer ** 34:34Yeah. So to segue out of this, if you ask the internet, the internet's gonna tell you the Surly Long Haul Trucker's the best bike touring bike for blah, blah, blah, blah. I'm going to tell you right now, the Surly Long Haul Trucker rides like f*cking dogsh*t without about 100 pounds of gear on it, and I don't think is the right bike for almost anyone in this current day and age ofbike touring. But let's get into your actual question. So the cool thing about touring is the bags will fit to most bikes without racks or rack mount. So if you have a bike that's comfortable, that fits you, it's probably...it can probably be made to be some kind of touring ready. So every bike is a bike touring bike if you have enough gumption. I've written tall bikes halfway across this country on multiple occasions. So I wanna say that you can always a specific bike tailored to the trip or the adventure you want to go on. But you can probably make whatever you have work. And I could recommend, if you give me more specifics, I could be like, yeah, you should get this size tire. This is a great bike for that. Like, height matters. All right, before I run away on this, let's start at the...let's start at the bike. So more important than any other consideration is whether you have a bike that's comfortable for you? Does it fit you?**Inmn ** 36:07What does that mean?**Spencer ** 36:09So bikes come in multiple sizes for different bodies, different heights. Like, I'm all torso. I've got relatively short legs for my height, but I'm like 6'1" so I ride an extra large bike. If you're 5' or shorter, you might write an extra small. That's going to be...those bikes are gonna fit differently. So there's a varying size run. So most importantly, you want a bike that fits you. And that's going to mean different things to different people, depending on if they have any back issues or what have you. So comfort is going to be kind of paramount to start. So your four day trip, is it off road? Is it mixed between the two? Is it single-track mountain biking? You're not going to take your Schwinn Varsity on a bunch of single track trails in Arizona, because you're not going to have any fillings or teeth left at the end of that ride. So, once you have a bike that's comfortable, once you have a bike that fits you, then you want to say, "Does this bike...is it adequate for the terrain?" And that's typically going to be tire size. So tires come in a bunch of different flavors, but you're pretty much looking at anywhere between a 26" rim, a 27.5" rim, or a 29" rim, which is also coloquially referred to as 700c. And those come in--oh my God I'm really in the rabbit hole here--so many sizes. But, so is your bike comfortable? Does your bike fit you? Do you now have the appropriate tire size for the terrain you hope to traverse? And we're going to assume that you have all of those things. And the next consideration will probably be luggage. So how much frame bag space do you have? Can you get a frame bag for it? Do you have mounts to put a rack on the front, or even the back, of the bike? You want to make panniers to go on there? You can strap anything, like anything with the stuff sack, you can strap. I mean the quintessential like bike co-op special is the old kitty litter boxes with hardware hooks and some bungee cords. Like, do you have a cat? Do you use cat litter? And these are all things that can become bike touring luggage. It's so up to you and how you can fit it. I've seen such a plethora. There's such a rich community of people DIYing these things. And there's ways to use like old cutting boards to make handlebar rolls to hold stuff sacks, you know? Like, I could go on and on. So the next thing you want to figure out is how are you going to pack all your sh*t on your bike? And okay, we've got that. There's a plethora. And next thing is food and water. Is there water available? Do I need a water filter along the way? Where can I get more food, snacks, etc... along the way? How many days of food I need to pack? Those water and food options are probably going to inform how you pack or what kind of luggage you're going to need, beecause those your essentials. Like if you want the bike to move, you have to pedal it and you have to be alive to do that. So you're gonna need to eat and drink.**Inmn ** 39:36Yeah, can I have a little segue off that? It was funny on this cross-country bike tour, like our attitude about that changed throughout the trip, you know, where it was like--Marie definitely had more like bike touring experience than I did--but like when we started, we were in rural Oregon, we were in Montana, we were in all of these big western states. And we didn't have a water filter, which is probably something we should have brought. But like, you know, we weren't camping. We weren't--or sorry, we were camping every night, but we weren't trying to ride off to find nice places. We were like, whatever's along the road, you know? And so we were like, "Okay, well, we just have to bring all of this stuff with us." Like, I think we had like two weeks' worth of food each and three gallons of water on us at all times. And it was utterly absurd, like our bikes were so goddamn heavy. But we often went a week without going to a grocery store.**Spencer ** 40:57That could be the reality of your trip. And there's some of these long distance routes, especially the off road ones.... Like road touring, if you're on established routes, like highways or secondary highways, you're gonna hit a gas station hopefully once a day, if not every other day. And like, you know, it's not gonna be great food. But that's...those are all considerations to how much you need to pack. And that's...that's typically the first thing I would be like where's my reasonable resupply? Especially ifwe live down to the desert, like water is the main concern and the limiting factor for a lot of my trips. Like how much do I have to carry? Where can I get it? How can I get it?**Inmn ** 41:39Yeah, cuz it's like, you're not--unlike being in the Northwest or something, you're not just gonna happen on a stream that you can like....**Spencer ** 41:47Exactly. I mean, maybe you can if you know that's there. But that's a big if, and I've planned to get water from a stream and then I got there, and the stream was dry. And I was like, "Oh, this is going to be interesting."**Inmn ** 42:01But yeah, sorry. You're talking about water, food, etc... I don't know what you were going to say next.**Spencer ** 42:09Yeah. So once you figured out how much water and food you need to be able to carry between places that you can get water or food, then you're gonna go to gear. So clothing, is it going to be hot? Is it gonna be cold at night? And then you're thinking about sleeping. So tent, sleeping pad, sleeping bag, at the bare minimum. How warm is that sleeping bag need to be? What's the weather going to be like? Is it going to rain a lot? How nice of a tent do you need? How many people are going to fit in that tent? And once you've figured out those things, those are all going to inform all the decisions we made already about like luggage. Like oh, I need to make a three person tent because there's three of us. Are we going to split it? Yada yada yada. If you've been camping at all, you understand that these are like kind of the basic things you want to have with you. Or maybe you're going there's a hotel every night and you're like, I'm just gonna get a hotel in and take a shower, and people do that and it's great. It's a different way to tour.**Inmn ** 42:10We met someone like that who was credit-card touring, as it's called, I think. And, you know, I have a friend who just writes crazy distances in like single times, but like meeting this person who was like...he had a very fancy performance road bike and a couple regular small water bottles and like some granola bars and in his f*cking lycra pockets, or whatever, and a credit card that was it. That was every single thing this person had.**Inmn ** 43:07Still bike touring. My 20 year old self would be would be shaking at me saying that but still bike touring.**Inmn ** 44:01Yeah, I mean if you got a credit card and he just like f*cking get a hotel every night.**Spencer ** 44:08But, you know, these are considerations with things. Like, I've stayed at hotels on bike tours. Like I had a real sh*t day got rained on for like this last trip I did in the Midwest past summer. We got stuck in like damn near a tornado. And I was putting up our tent in the downpour rain and then it was drizzling the whole next day. And I was like, f*ck it. I'm getting a hotel. Going off route. I'm going to a hotel. Sleep in this hotel and shower and dry all of our sh*t out. And these are things you want to consider and this is all part of what goes into considering to go on a bike trip.**Inmn ** 44:44Yeah, um, so we're getting close to the end of our time for today. I didn't say this at the beginning, but this is a two part episode. And I'm wondering if we could kind of end today's episode with, could you just tell us a story about going on a bike tour. Could have gone well, could have gone horribly. Kind of whatever. Tell us about a trip that you went on and kind of like what... Yeah. Yeah.**Spencer ** 45:21Alright, I'm gonna tell you about my favorite bike tour. And it will bring it back together because you met that lovely gentleman in Glacier on the Tour Divided some years ago. So my buddies Kurt and Sam--this was 2016--so fledgling days of kinda packing bags. This is when one of the bigger companies, Blackburn, was getting into making bags. They sponsored a bunch of folks to go ride big long off-road routes. My friends got this scholarship sponsorship thing. And I was like, okay, cool, like, I'm gonna go meet them. I just finished up work. I worked as a bicycle tour guide, but the van stuff, not so much the touring that we're talking about, but going to hotels, yadda yadda yadda. And I got off work, drove out there. I took my dad's hybrid from like 1994 and I strapped a bunch of bags to it. And we went riding down. They had like slick bikes, all the new bags. But the fun thing was they were big rock climbers at the time. So we were carrying all of our camping gear and a full 60 meter rope, a full trad rack of cams and nuts and like our climbing harnesses and shoes, and every week we were climbing at least once a week. So we're doing trad climbing up some mountains in Montana or Wyoming or wherever the hell we want that being that week. And we packed nothing. We had.... Like none of us had real tents. We have like one spare tube between us because we just didn't have room for anything with all the climbing gear. It was just so reckless and stupid. We hitchhiked a ton and climbed a bunch of sh*t that was really sketchy. And it still to this day is one of my favorite memories of traveling by bike, just getting to go climb and just riding those wide opens stretches of Montana, Wyoming, a little bit in Colorado. And it was just the dumbest fun. God I miss you, Sam and Kurt, if you're out there listening somewhere. That was my bike penultimate trip that had been on. It just...it was silly and dumbn. There's photos and videos of that from years ago that I can send you some links to or whatnot. But the joy I still take from those memories and that trip stick with me.**Inmn ** 47:35Hell yeah. That's wonderful. Um, one of my like, weirdly favorite memories of going on bike tour was--and we'll talk about this a little more in part two--but is preparation, how to prepare for a trip, how tolike plan an actual trip, you know. And me and Marie didn't plan literally at all. We just hopped on our bikes and started riding. Every day we woke up and we were like, "Yeah, let's go on that road. That makes sense. Whatever. It'll be fine." Weirdly, we did end up on...we accidentally ended up on Adventure Cycling routes, you know? Which makes sense. They were the most logical roads to ride on. We just didn't know. But our lack of preparation and planning was actually the most fun part of the trip.**Spencer ** 48:39So my buddy Kurt on that trip, and we did a bunch of subsequent trips, and I'm a big planner and Kurt hates planning. He made me fly to f*cking Columbia with zero plan and like one half contact that we called when we got to Bogota and a bunch of paper maps and was like, "Nah, we're just gonna figure it out." Speaking of accidentally winding up on ACA routes, did you the pro move where you found someone riding in the opposite direction and you asked if they were done with their maps because you were going the opposite way?**Inmn ** 49:11No, that would have been smart. But we didn't... We met a couple other people on bike tour. We were incredibly surprised. We met exactly three people on bike tour on a two month long trip and I was actually surprised about it.**Spencer ** 49:30Wow. I wound up on that TransAm for a little bit. And I didn't have any maps because I was being a total of sh*t bird and would be like, "Hey, you done with that section?" cause I didn't want to buy maps.**Inmn ** 49:42Yeah, they're expensive.**Spencer ** 49:45I mean, Adventure Cycling is a really lovely organization that has done a lot of good and they're a nonprofit. Do you ever, did you guys go through Missoula and go to the headquarts?**Inmn ** 49:55We did. We got the free ice cream.**Spencer ** 49:56Popscicles and soda. Yeah. Okay, well, that's why those maps are so expensive is they gotta give free sodas and ice cream to all the dirt bag toursists that won't buy them.**Inmn ** 50:07Yeah, yeah. Cool. Well, that about does it for the time that we have today. Before we go, are there any things that you want to plug, any projects, any places that people can find you on the internet where you would like to be found? Anything like that?**Spencer ** 50:29Anything on social media, is just Spencer J. Harding. Like I said, I write for the theradavist.com. You can type my name in there and there's a bunch of reviews and trip reports and stuff like that. My website is just SpencerJharding.com. There's a bunch of photos organized there from a bunch of my bicycle travels, if you want to check that out.**Inmn ** 50:50Yeah. Cool. Cool. And for folks who...just to let you know what we're gonna be talking about next time, next time being next week, we're gonna be talking about how to actually plan a bike trip, what are things you should be prepared for kind of like on the road, why traveling by bike is just a really cool idea--if you haven't been swayed already--what are its limitations, and how does this fit into preparedness models for any kind of collapse or disaster situation that we might be in. So tune in next time.**Inmn ** 51:33If you enjoyed this podcast, then go hop on a bike and ride around and see what happens. And also, if you like this podcast, you can please just tell people about it. It's the best way that people hear about the show and one of the best ways to support us. But if you would like to support us in other, I think, sillier ways, you can support the show financially. And you can support us financially by supporting our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And the best way to support us is to go to tangledwilderness.org and buy some books. There's some really cool books you can buy. You can buy a cool TTRPG that me, Margaret, Casandra, and Robin wrote called Penumbra City. You can get a lots lots of other really cool books too. And you can also support us by supporting our Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And there's a bunch of different levels of support that you can give us, anywhere from like $5 a month, which kind of gets you a lot of cool stuff. It gets you discounts, it gets you digital versions of all of the stuff that we publish and just like lots of really cool updates. You can also get a zine mailed to you every month, that we put out as part of our monthly feature, which if you also just want to hear those, you can read them on our website or you can check out another podcast that I do called Ttrangers in a Tangled Wilderness, where we take our monthly feature and turn it into an audio zine and interview the author. And then there's another fun part of it, which is that for $20 a month, you can get us to thank or acknowledge anything that you want us to thank to or acknowledge, whether that be you or a cool organization that you want to get shouted out, or whether it's just someone you love and care about. Or as I'm still plugging for, a fictional or theoretical concept. So check us out on Patreon and we just want to give some special shout outs to these folks right now. Thank you alium, Amber, Ephemoral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck, Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Michaiah, and Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much for everything and we hope that you're doing as well as you can with everything that's going on and we'll see you next time.Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

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  54:45

• S1E117 - Inmn and Margaret on "Civil War"

  Episode SummaryThis week on Live Like the World is Dying, Inmn and Margaret review the new film Civil War. Spoiler alert, it's all kinda of weird.Host InfoInmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy.Publisher InfoThis show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.TranscriptLive Like the World is Dying: Inmn and Margaret on Civil War**Inmn** 00:14Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm one of your hosts today Inmn Neruin and with me is the always lovely. . . [trails off inviting Margaret to speak]**Margaret** 00:28Margaret. You should do the [intro] as if I'm Garth. You should be like "And with me as always is Margaret." Like...because Wayne's World. Because I'm an elder millennial. Nevermind. Hi, I'm Margaret, I'm your other host.**Inmn** 00:43And today we're going to be talking about...we're kinda going to be doing a movie review about-- [Interrupted]**Margaret** 00:49Wayne's World.**Inmn** 00:50About Wayne's World, the most important movie of our time.**Margaret** 00:53I once...I changed my--actually I dropped out of school--but before I dropped out of school, I was gonna change my major to film because of Wayne's World. This is a true story.**Inmn** 01:03I love that so much. [Laughing]**Margaret** 01:07It's so well done. Woman-directed too. Anyway, what are we talking about?**Inmn** 01:15We're talking about a much less joyful movie today. And that movie is Alex Garland's Civil War. And the reason we're kind of talking about this is that I think this movie feels very relevant to--or at least when I went to go see it, I thought it would be very relevant--to some themes on the podcast. And since then, I've been a little bit confused, but we'll get into that later. And I am told that me and Margaret might have some differing opinions about this movie. And so y'all will get to see us argue.**Margaret** 01:56Yeah, I'm going to argue in favor of Wayne's World, and Inmn is going to argue against Civil War.**Inmn** 02:01Yes. But first off, we are proud members of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's the jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo. [singing]**The Ex-Worker Podcast** 02:18The Border is not just a wall. It's not just a line on the map. It's a power structure, a system of control. The Border does not divide one world from another. There is only one world, and the Border is tearing it apart. The Ex-worker podcast presents "No Wall They Can Build: A Guide to Borders and Migration Across North America," a serialized audio book in eleven chapters, released every Wednesday. Tune in at crimethinc.com/podcast.**Margaret** 02:54[Mimicking a movie trailer voice] In a world... [stopes voice] That's all I got.**Inmn** 03:01[Inmn takes up movie trailer voice] Where a vague civil war has gripped the nation for the last 14 years, we...**Margaret** 03:12About literally nothing.**Inmn** 03:13[continuing] we join a group of war correspondents and photographers who...are kind of sh*tbags.**Margaret** 03:26Don't have any motivation besides art.**Inmn** 03:32[Not movie trailer voice anymore] I don't really have to do a "Introduce yourself" to the thing because we all know who me and Margaret are. But to kind of get right into it, we're going to be talking about the movie Civil War today. And my hard take right now is if you haven't seen it, do NOT subject yourself to having to go see it. But, you know, make your own opinion. I'm not going to tell you what to do. But maybe we can kind of do a brief kind of like overview of the movie and then we'll get into what me and Margaret think--each separately think--about it. How's that sound?**Margaret** 04:17Sounds great. Am I overviewing or are you overviewing?**Inmn** 04:20Um, I can do it, you can do it. I don't care.**Margaret** 04:22Are you prepared to.**Margaret** 04:24I'm not. Let's do it.**Inmn** 04:24I'm prepared to.**Inmn** 04:26I'm gonna do it.**Margaret** 04:27Go ahead. Great. Pew, pew, pew. [mimicking gunfire] I'm gonna make pew-pew-pew noises the whole time you're talking, though, so that people get into the head of the viewer, which is that whatever's happening there's also a lot of gunfire in the background.**Inmn** 04:39So much gunfire. And I have something to say about that gunfire later.**Margaret** 04:44Okay. Okay.**Inmn** 04:45Yeah. Which will be very funny with the pew-pew-pews. [Margaret makes more gunfire noises] So, Civil War is a movie about a... [Margaret makes more gun and explosion noises]**Margaret** 04:57Okay, I'm gonna stop now. This will get old. Go ahead.**Inmn** 05:03The setup for Civil War is it's a movie about a Second American Civil War. And we have a few different sides in it. We have the Western Forces, which are made up of California and Texas. And they have formed a coalition of secessionist forces known as the Western Forces. And they are trying to.... All we really know is that they're trying to kill the president. And that--**Margaret** 05:39Relatable.**Inmn** 05:40Yeah, relatable. And then we have a couple other sides that never make it into the movie. There's.... The ones that do make it into the movie, we have Florida, who is attempting to join the Western Forces. And we have a few other players. The creator's that movie released a map of the US set in the time of the war. There's like the People's Army of the Northwest, or something. It's confusing. And when we join the narrative, it is...I think the war has been going on for about 14 or 15 years at this point. And the Western Forces are closing in on Washington DC and kind of like the East Coast. And we have a...we have a country that has been completely engulfed in in this war for, you know, over the last decade. And it follows a group of war photographers and journalists...correspondent people--I know words--who are out on a strange mission, which is to photograph and interview the president before he gets killed by the Western Forces. This is the setup for our protagonists' journey. And we have Kirsten Dunst as this middle-aged, jaded, war photographer, who is paired up with--I don't remember his name--**Margaret** 07:25Some other guy.**Inmn** 07:26Some other guy, who's a journalist. And as a tagalong they have this older journalist who's trying to tag along with them. He's like, old friend, co--**Margaret** 07:42Wise, old, Black man archetype.**Inmn** 07:44Wise, old, Black man archetype. And then we have a--I think she's 23 in the movie--younger, very excited, and naive photographer who is a fan of Lee (or Kirsten Dunsts' character), and they're all headed to DC to try to photograph the president before he dies and they run into a lot of wacky shenanigans along the way.**Margaret** 08:19It's a road trip movie.**Inmn** 08:21It is a road trip movie at its.... At its core, it is a road trip movie. Margaret, what.... I guess like.... I have quite a lot of opinions about this, but I'm the person who's technically hosting right now. So I'm going to ask you questions. What did you think?**Margaret** 08:42I think we should more duke it out a little bit. But I think we should each just give treat ourselves as having equal time on this. So I went into Civil War expecting to hate it. Most of the movie takes place in West Virginia, Western Pennsylvania, and Western Maryland. It takes place where I live. I drove to go see it in a town that is like, I think one of the towns that they filmed in and I went to the movie theater and I was like, "It's going to be all f*cking chuds. It's all going to be these right-wing motherf*ckers. Like I'm going into enemy territory," you know? I went to a Saturday matinee on the second day the movie was out. And there was like eight old couples. And then one dude who I read as gay, who was there alone like I was, and that's who went to go see it. Some couples in their 70s and some guy who probably went and kind of similar reason I did, to be like, "What does this have to say about the people who are trying to kill me?" you know? And I enjoyed watching it. I got some popcorn. And I watched a movie that had pretty good action, lots of loud bang noises everywhere. I was like, I was glad I saw it in the theater because it was like, I thought the audio was well done. And it seemed to me.... Okay, so it's like, if you go into it being like, this is gonna be a movie that explains where we're at in the country, It's not going to work, because it's not. And it absolutely dropped the ball on that. But that was the point. Now, I don't think that was a good point. I don't think that they made a good decision. Like, if I had made this movie, this is not how I would have made it. I enjoyed watching the movie. I also thought it was really interesting. So I went home, and I was like, "Oh, that was a...that was less bad than I expected." And it was on my mind. You know? It made me think. Mostly it made me think, "The f*ck were they thinking?" But it's like, I was going to do war journalism when I was in high school and I was like, a photo, kid, you know? And then I went off to school for photography. And then I was like, "f*ck this, I'm going to drop out during the revolution," or whatever. And I very quickly was like, the idea of the neutral journalist is nonsense, you know?**Inmn** 11:24f*cking nonsense.**Margaret** 11:26And that is like one of the main things. This is like a statement. It's trying to be this like grand like, "Oh, it's so important to have this neutral position or whatever." But no one's really neutral. And they kind of present it like people are. But I don't think that they try all at hard. And what I realized.... Okay, my takeaway is this movie is centrist propaganda. And this movie is centrist propaganda that is specifically...it doesn't this whole thing where all of this stuff is like, "There's no good guys or bad guys." And they do very intentionally and kind of, honestly, interestingly, have it where you don't know which sides are fighting at any given point.**Inmn** 12:07No clue.**Margaret** 12:09And that is that is very intentional. There's a scene where there's like a sniper and there's a counter sniper. And the people are like, "Wait, which side are you on?" And he's like, "I'm just trying to kill that guy. He's trying to kill me." And like--**Inmn** 12:20And they're like queer-coded.**Margaret** 12:22Yeah, they have pink hair or whatever.**Inmn** 12:25And fingernail polish.**Margaret** 12:28Oh, I didn't catch that. Yeah, no, totally. And it it feels.... That part feels a little bit real. It's a kind of a little bit of a like.... What's that "Heart of Darkness" movie?**Inmn** 12:45Apocalypse Now.**Margaret** 12:46Yeah, like kind of this like, "I don't know, man. War is hell" kind of vibe, right? And like, okay, so it's centrist propaganda because at the end of the day, despite that they make this big deal of like, "Well, we don't know who's the good guys and the bad guys," you do. The President is bad. The Western Forces are good. Now they're not "good: perfect, everything's great." But the movie opens with a person with the United States flag suicide bombing. Noone presents suicide bombing as a positive thing in Western media. The United States government is the bad guys in this movie. That caught me by surprise. I expected passively to think that the way that they would do centrist propaganda--I knew it was gonna be centrist propaganda--is that they would have Texas and California being the far-right and the far-left. And they're the bad guys. Instead, I think they are meant to--and this is a sloppy...it's not how it should have been done--it represents the far-right and--sorry, the center-right--and the center-left teaming up to stop a fascist. Because the President has a couple like.... Okay, so if you like read all these reviews of people talking about it, I remember I was reading these right-wingers on Reddit. Everyone was like, "Oh, it's all neutral." And this right-winger was like, "It's not. It is anti-Trump. It is antifascist." And he was saying.**Inmn** 14:17It's the only clear thing. That's the only clear tie-in in the movie is that Nick Offerman is supposed to be Trump.**Margaret** 14:24And so he noticed everything that I noticed and pointed it out to say "This movie is actually leftist propaganda." In that, for example, the dude's Trump. The only actual bad person--there's people who do war crimes in it. Like they gunned down some prisoners and stuff, and it's a little bit of a like, "War is hell." There's one group of actually bad people and they're the racists.**Inmn** 14:58Or...there's a couple. I don't know. There's the gas station keepers who shots some looters, you know?**Margaret** 15:05I think they're negative, but they're not.... Yeah, no, that's true.**Inmn** 15:11Then like Jesse Plemons' group, which are the racists--**Margaret** 15:16Okay. Yeah.**Inmn** 15:17[Continuing] --or the the anti-immigrants? And yeah, I don't know. And they're confusing to me because when I saw...when I was watching the movie, I was like, "Are these supposed to be the Western Forces?" because the Western Forces are talked about so mysteriously, to the point where it's like vague in a way that is confusing and, I think, harmful.**Margaret** 15:38I don't disagree with you.**Inmn** 15:41But so it's like, and then I was trying to tell where I was like, "Wait, do these characters have the WF on their arm?" And I couldn't really tell. And then I think I read something later that was like they were supposed to be a militia.**Margaret** 15:56Yeah, that was the impression I got. But they also have one of the military Humvees.**Inmn** 16:02Yeah, so it's confusing.**Margaret** 16:04But the Western Forces have the Black woman that kills the president.**Inmn** 16:08Yeah, yeah. Which is where it all starts to get confusing is like the... they really.... When they meet up with those other journalists who are embedded in the Western Forces, they talk about them, really...they talk about it really poorly. They're like...because our protagonist don't like the Western Forces. Our protagonists think the Western Forces are like, are weird. You know, they don't like the president either.**Margaret** 16:34Do they?**Inmn** 16:35Yeah, they say something like "You embedded with them? Like what the f*ck?" And they're like, "This is just what it is now."**Inmn** 16:42I believe you. But I think that the Boogaloo Boys that they were embedded with Western Forces.**Margaret** 16:45Like the Hawaiian shirt wearing folks?**Margaret** 16:45Yeah. So that was one of the other things that was interesting because the Boogaloo Boys are on the good side in this movie.**Inmn** 17:04That was really confusing to me.**Margaret** 17:07Yeah. I think they're trying to present them as like, a center-right force fighting alongside the center-left force of California to overthrow a fascist. That's my takeaway.**Inmn** 17:24Okay. Yeah. Yeah. It's--**Margaret** 17:27I don't--go ahead.**Inmn** 17:30Oh, no. Finish your thing.**Margaret** 17:32I just...I don't think... It was sure ain't how I would have written it. Because I don't think it's realistic at all. But wait, I talked to one journalist friend who also doesn't...isn't a fan. But they pointed out, right, Alex Garland's like not American. He's what, English, maybe? I don't know.**Inmn** 17:52I don't know. He's from London. Or, I think he's an immigrant to London too. I don't remember.**Margaret** 18:01There's this argument that they're kind of doing the thing that American war movies do, where someone who's not from your country oversimplifies and f*cks up all the local politics in order to make a war movie about art.**Inmn** 18:15Oh, god. Yeah. Totally.**Margaret** 18:17And that's kind of interesting? [Said reluctntly and in question] But the person who presented that idea isn't a fan of this movie.**Inmn** 18:23Yeah. I think some of the politically confusing things to me about it were like, the Western forces are ambiguous and, for most of the movie, you're supposed to be...the viewer is kind of supposed to be fearful or confused about them, which makes sense, you know. It's like our protagonists don't really know... Our protagonists are...they're neutral in that they're like, "Yeah, the government sucks. And also the Western Forces probably suck too." Like, there's all these mentions about how they're going to like tear each other apart after they kill the president. Which feels far more realistic.**Margaret** 19:05Totally.**Inmn** 19:06The thing that kind of really did it for me is that it's like whoever Jesse Plemons--red sunglass militia dude--is supposed to be aligned with, the viewer is kind of supposed to think that they're the Western Forces. And then what really cinched it for me is the Western Forces, before they make this final strike on DC, rally in Charlottesville.**Margaret** 19:41Ohhh...**Inmn** 19:43Which in a movie, which in kind of an arthouse movie, where like everything's intentional and not intentional and everything's a reference and not a reference, [Margaret makes affirmatiive noises] it was this thing where I was like, you're having your politically-vague secessionist forces that we're kind of supposed to think are maybe, you know, far-right fascists of their own color, are rallying in Charlottesville of all places.**Margaret** 20:11Yeah. No, and it's funny because we know that they worked with at least the far-right Andy Ngo, right, who's thanked in the credits and we know that they worked with at least--I can remember the prominent TERF's name, who's also thanked in the credits.**Inmn** 20:29Oh yeah, I don't remember.**Margaret** 20:32No, that is the like.... No, that's good point.**Inmn** 20:37Yeah, but I think what it is, the the politics that are confusing for me are that the world that we encounter in Civil War, like the world in their world that existed before the civil war, is not our world. It's like, it is a fantasy. It is a fantasy movie, in that it is not.... It's like, based on our world. But it's not our world.**Margaret** 21:06Yeah, because also it takes place like 20 years from now, and nothing's changed technologically. Iff anything, it's regressed.**Inmn** 21:14Yeah. Which kind of makes sense for a war sometimes, you know? Like wars in some ways halt.**Margaret** 21:22Nah, we get a lot of new technology during wars. I mean, I guess the propagation through civil society of new technology is slowed, but like--**Inmn** 21:29I think that's more what I mean.**Margaret** 21:31Okay.**Inmn** 21:32Like civil technology.**Margaret** 21:36I was left with an uncomfortable feeling about it when I was done, but I didn't hate it as much as I expected because I think...just taken as like, I'm kind of easy to please with movies. And I'm just like, I don't know. Pew, pew. [gun noises] Oh, that's fun. And also, like a Black lady shot the president. That's cool. And like, but then it's like, it does a lot of like, "art is so neutral tropes." I kind of hate self important photographers. It's like a thing. It's like part of why I dropped out of school and didn't get into photography is that photographers are so f*cking self-important.**Inmn** 22:18Yeah, the treatment.... Okay, I think one of the other things I had a really hard time with was its treatment of journalists in a way where I was like.... Like, the whole movie I was like, is the purpose of the movie to make journalists seem like the most like self-important douchebags on the planet? Because that's what I'm getting right now. And I kind of dug into some of it because I knew that Garland, like chose journalists as his protagonists on purpose. And like, part of that was because he like, he sees them as heroes. He grew up with like--I think his dad was like a war correspondent or something--and he like grew up hanging out with all these like old war correspondents and like journalists and photographers. And so like, and he said it publicly that he thinks that they have interesting insight or whatever for telling the stories of this. And then he portrays them to be like, kind of dick bags and kinda just like.... They're portraying this idea of neutrality, which I think is really embraced with Western journalism, over like, "We have to be neutral and our neutrality is important." and then it's like all these like wild things happen. And it's like.... Okay, it's like.... Spoilers. Everyone, there's spoilers. **Margaret** 23:46I think people go that already.**Inmn** 23:48You already got their spoilers. But it's like, we open up on the scene where like Kirsten Dunst and our young protagonist--I can't remember any of these people's names.**Margaret** 23:59Old lady journalist and young lady journalist.**Inmn** 24:03They meet at a rally. The rally gets bombed. And like literally moments later, they're both just snapping photos of people who are dead and dying. And they are not helping anyone. They're not....**Margaret** 24:16Well, and that's the point. I mean, that is the moral of it. I mean, uuuuh, it's not well done. Because she's like-- Sorry, I cut you off. I'm sorry.**Inmn** 24:24Oh no, I think it's like, we see this reproduced throughout the rest of the movie where it's like, they're...like Stanley, they're older, Black, wise...wise Black man character gets shot saving them, saving the group from Jesse Plemons and them. And they like.... You know, because Stanley's like, "This is a bad idea. You're gonna get f*cking killed" and then he's right. And then he saves them. Gets shot doing it. And I know this is how movies work or whatever but he gets shot and they do nothing. They let him bleed out in the f*cking car so they can have a whimsical drive through a forest fire with like whimsical music.**Margaret** 25:12Well he doesn't tell them, but like that's on the writer. You know?**Inmn** 25:16Well when they switch drivers, he's bleeding.**Margaret** 25:19Oh, yeah, you're right. Okay. Yeah.**Inmn** 25:21They know that he's been shot for hours and they do nothing.**Margaret** 25:25I mean, my thought was that they were like trying to get, they were like, "Well, we better get to the place because there's gonna be medics there," or whatever. But they don't say that. And they also like.... No, that scene, and how they treat that character, that was when I was like, these writers are hacks and are playing into bullsh*t, racist tropes. Like, even that scene, that scene where.... All of the people of color die in that scene. That's what happens in that scene. Well, I guess the journalist man is a person of color also. But like, the three.... You know, whatever, like, only white people and this one person of color survives that scene, because because of the fight with the racists. And like, that is lazy, racist writing, I think, to kill all of them off. And then also to like.... Yeah, the way they drive away with it, and they're like, "Oh, I was saved, thank god," or whatever, and like, no one gives a sh*t about.... I mean, but they also tri to do the like, "No, we are f*cking shell shocked." And they try to do this, like weird remove--and they all have mental breakdowns, you know? Like every one of the journalists either dies or has a mental breakdown during--at some point--during this movie. And but I also think that there's this like.... We all know racists are bad, you know? And so it's like a little bit of a like, "Conngratulations, the racists killed all the people of color..." like? The thing that makes me angriest is that they knew that that red sunglasses man would become a meme. That was part of their marketing. He was the most interesting character in the movie.**Inmn** 27:12Yeah, if you watch the trailer, you assume that that interaction is most of the movie.**Margaret** 27:18Yeah, totally. And there's a couple things that pissed me off about it. That's in West Virginia. And that is the like...they don't hillbilly code them in any other way, except for the fact that they're white racists in West Virginia. But that is still something that is a...that is like a "Yeah, it's West Virginia, so of course all the people..." you know, like it f*cking "Deliverance's" that sh*t. I've never seen "Deliverance," but I know it's the fear of Appalachia thing. And, but also by knowing it's going to be the meme, and then having him be like, really, actually a f*cking monster, you have now.... All of the people who vaguely identify with him.... Like, I watched a bunch of YouTube video responses from tactical and prepper and whatever spaces, which tend center and far right, you know? And, you know, they're all like, kind of mad that they made that red sunglasses guy such a racist, because they're kind of like, "But he was our guy," you know? Which is, in one way, kind of accurate, right? But you also just now have all these people who are excited about this f*cking racist dude. And like, he's a meme. And I've seen memes that are funny and leftist that use it like, "Oh, you're an anarchist. but what kind of anarchist are you?" or whatever. You know, but it's about murdering.... I don't know. It's in bad taste. Dislike it. But, okay, wait, one more thing, sorry. The other thing.... My thoughts are not collected. The other thing that I thought a lot about is that when I watched all these response videos and all these things, the far-right and the left hate this movie, and the center likes it. And I think that's interesting. I actually think that.... The one art thing that I think Garland might have pulled off--I overall feel very negatively about.... You know, I mean, I enjoyed the movie from a like pure popcorn point of view, right? But like, how I feel about the movies is that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. But this thing, the fact that it pisses off the two people who are mad at it, like me and that right-wing guy on Reddit had taken literally the same notes of all of the political coding throughout. So the people who are watching this movie because they think there might be a civil war.... Like, I think there might be a civil war. I don't want there to be. Some of the right-wing people, and probably some of the left-wing people--but I don't think it's as prevalent on the left--want there to be a civil war. And so all of those people, everyone who went at it being like, "Is this an oracle of our future" was like, "This movie sucks." And then everyone who was like, "This reinforced my preexisting beliefs that the extremes are bad, but the right and the left can get together to stop fascism and Trump" liked it. And it's hard, because that's the centrist nonsense position, but it's also like, we got to figure out how to not have a civil war. Like, we got to figure out how to get the center-right to stop going further right. This movie isn't gonna help do that. That's all I got.**Inmn** 31:01Yeah. Oh, no, no, thank you. That's great. I have two more things to say about the journalist treatment. Which is like...and this ties into how the movie was shot. So Garland talks about some of the commitments to realism that he was trying to do with the movie. And specifically, part of that is how gunfire was recorded, which is that gunfire was recorded and projected in different ways than it normally is in movies.**Margaret** 31:37Oh, interesting. **Inmn** 31:38Yeah, it's kind of like the.... I forget the words they use, but normally in movies, you have these kinds of deep, hollow sounds, and they recorded it in a way to make it sound like tinnier and like higher in register.**Margaret** 31:54Like the crack of it?**Inmn** 31:56Yeah, so you feel it in your ears and your shoulders instead of in your chest. Which is how real gunfire works. And so it's like they had commitment to realism where they really wanted people to feel like the reality and discomfort of gunfire. And the war choreographer was this ex-Navy SEALs person. And so that they're this commitment to like portraying combat in realistic ways. And this commitment to portraying war in realistic and horrifying ways. And, I know this is just like a thing with movies, but it's like their commitment to realism was a commitment to realistic violence and not a commitment to what people might actually do in those situations, which is like, you know, back to Stanley. My friend gets shot, and we're driving to a potential medical facility. Let's show some realistic first aid. Let's show...let's show some Stop the Bleed. Let's show some like...let's show a f*cking tourniquet. Let's show holding pressure, doing literally anything.**Margaret** 33:14Totally. Well, when it happens in a battle, they do that. They do a better Stop the Bleed than the average movie, where the guy gets shot, the Bugaloo Boy gets shot. Yeah, but when they're doing plot, that's why I'm mad about them killing that man. It was a plot death. It wasn't a battle death. Like, I knew he was going to die before it happened.**Inmn** 33:42The second asks to tag along, we know he's gonna die.**Margaret** 33:45Oh, yeah, totally. And then even like that scene, it's like, he's like, "Oh, I can't drive anymore." And I'm like, oh, he's dead now. And there is no reason why, realistically, that scene, if he had made it that long, he's suddenly gonna die. You know? Yeah, like the average you get shot once.... Well, actually the average you get shot once with a rifle, I think you do die, but it's not a high...more than.... Whatever. They didn't need to kill him. It was a plot death and it pisses me off as compared to some of the battle scenes. Which is funny because then when they get in DC then the battle scenes kind of like get a little like... like, here comes the helicopter really low among the buildings, and like f*cking Secret Service who are just like, [pew pew] instead of like...you know?**Inmn** 34:38Well, it's not the Secret Service because he dissolved the FBI.**Margaret** 34:42Oh, is Secret Service part of the FBI? Okay. No, yeah, like I liked the gunfire thing, though. It was a tense movie.**Inmn** 34:54Yeah, the gunfire.... I mean, I hated it in the theater. I want to literally f*cking die. It's just the...it's like people who have a commitment to.... I wish that people who had a commitment to realism would have a commitment to like showing a wider spectrum of realism in their movies.**Margaret** 35:13No, I agree.**Inmn** 35:13I think it's a huge failing of like, filmmakers and I think it's a huge failing of Garland to be like, "We're gonna commit this to like making war uncomfortable, but like, we're not going to show realistic ways in which like..." Yeah, I don't know.**Margaret** 35:28Like, again, they did it in the battle, but not in the plot thing, is how I feel about it.**Inmn** 35:34Totally, and then it's like our other plot death is Lee, or Kirsten Dunst, at the end of the movie, and it's like--**Margaret** 35:43Yeah, you knew she was gonna die in that scene.**Inmn** 35:45Totally. And it's like, she, you know, she saves our young protagonist from getting shot, and how does our young protagonist thank her? By photographing her death.**Margaret** 35:58But, see that, I actually liked that plot death. It was a plot death through and through, but it served a purpose, which was the completion of the like, because the girl is like, "What are you gonna do? You gonna f*cking film my death?" And then the other way around happened. And I was like, that's clever.**Inmn** 36:16I guess so.**Margaret** 36:17Because like that.... Okay, so it's like the character arc of older lady, Kirsten Dunst, I thought that was interesting, because she's the, "I'm so hardened. I don't have any emotions." And then she f*cking breaks. She like, shuts down during the siege of Washington in Washington, right? Like, I actually kind of liked that. It was cheesy. It was not a commitment to realism. It was a plot death through and through.**Inmn** 36:54Yeah, she's also wearing a plate carrier and gets shot center mass and just dies.**Margaret** 37:00Oh, sh*t. I didn't think about that. Yeah, totally. It's like, it's cheesy as sh*t, right? But like, I also thought that was like, kind of realistic in a bad way, the like, when they're like...when the Speaker for the President--whatever, the press secretary comes out--and it's like, "We want to negotiate," and they're like, "No, we're gonna shoot you." And then the President's last words, were like, "Don't let them kill me," and gets f*cking popped. Like, I actually like.... No, you're right. I think you've got it. The central tension of this movie is a commitment to realism that doesn't go all the way through. You're right.**Inmn** 37:43Yeah, I don't know.**Margaret** 37:44Wait, I'm supposed to disagree with you?**Inmn** 37:46Yeah, yeah. I think we didn't disagree as much as I thought we would disagree.**Margaret** 37:51Nah, not like this is the f*cking.... I just like.... I like war movies. I don't know. There's something wrong with me.**Inmn** 37:56I think I was more horrified by.... I think I was just more horrified by it than you were. But it's like, okay, so my other thing about journalists is that I think that what I could draw from it is like, "Oh, this is like a critique of this neutrality. It's a critique of non-interference. We're watching these people make really weird decisions." But it wasn't. And I don't think Garland would....I don't think Garland meant it that way. Garland, based on his history and based on this idea, this like Western idea of what journalism is, and based on how these characters behave, there is no critique of this behavior. They are his heroes of the movie.**Margaret** 38:47What he....what I think he thinks he's doing is pointing out how messy and complicated these righteous people are. But what's interesting is you could say the same about the revolutionary forces, you know? Because it's like, he brings up all the gross things that journalists do. But then kind of says it's necessary, right? And then the same as actually happening. Like, in a weird way, there's like this thing where it kind of, you expect it to be an anti civil war movie, like an anti-war movie or whatever. But it's kind of not. The Western Forces in this movie righteously oust a tyrant. And by the end of the movie, you know that. And you're meant to be rooting for them. In the same way, you're rooting for the journalists even as they do things that are bad. They do morally unconscionable things in service of the greater good of art, or whatever f*cking bullsh*t. The Western Forces are doing the same. I got... Yeah, and the movie feels like kind of disjointed in that like as soon as they reach the Western Forces in Charlottesville, you're suddenly like, "Oh, I get it. These are the good guys all along, " or whatever, you know?**Inmn** 40:06Yeah. And I don't know. My other kind of big note is like, I.... It's weird, I never thought I'd have so many opinions about like portrayals of journalism, but it's like I think, you know, all the reasons that I've stated about really feeling like this treatment of journalists is like, you know, both accurate and about, they f*cking suck. Some of them suck. And then also, there's this other context right now, that I think makes it suck even more. And that is that like, you know, this movie is coming out, and was being produced, at a time when the genocide in Gaza was happening, and currently is still happening, and this is a place where, you know, notably, journalists are getting assassinated, bombed, shot, starved. All of these things. And to have this be like the portrayal of journalists as people who like watch a bombing and then like, photograph people as they're dying, or watch their friends get shot and just take pictures of them, and like, all of this stuff, just like, hid in this really weird way where I was like, "I don't think this is how journalists in places where like their homes, the places they live, are reacting to this kind of stuff." And it feels really...it hits really weird, with everything going on in Gaza right now where I'm like, "I don't think people, I don't think like Palestinian journalists are watching their friends get blown up. And then standing by and taking pictures." I think they're like getting down in the rubble and helping like dig people out of buildings. And I don't know. It's like, it's like that aspect. It's because the journalists won't pick aside--I don't want them to pick a side in Civil War--but it's like, I don't know. I don't think any of us are neutral anymore.**Margaret** 42:18Yeah, I think that there is the like, this film, the centrist propaganda part of it is holding on to this fictitious idea of the neutral journalist. I think that that's a good point. That war correspondent, Jake Hanrahan, who does who did Sad Oligarch and does a bunch of other like...did a lot of like...has done a lot of really impressive war journalism, posted about it on Twitter and was just like, "If you hang out with this style of war journalist, you will die. " It's like these are the people who will get you killed. And that like...it's like, hearing that this guy like idolizes this fictitious war journalist is a perfect example of yeah, he's just like, you know, this like Gonzo journalist hero or whatever who puts themselves in dumb danger. Yeah, no, I think they did a terrible job with the journalism. I think they did a terrible job of like.... Also just like, oh, it's so quirky. You brought a 35 millimeter film camera to war....**Inmn** 43:35They did.... They did the bad sci fi trope of inventing technology to have the thing that they wanted aesthetically.**Margaret** 43:45You could do everything that she did. She's developing on the fly. You could do that.**Inmn** 43:53Yeah, I don't know. I talked to some photojournalist person about it. And they were like, "This is complete. This is.... The most absurd part of this movie is that this person is shooting film during this." They like named the film that she's using and she's like, "That's hard to get now. Where the f*ck is this person getting this film?"**Margaret** 44:15No, totally. It would be absolutely nonsensical to shoot film in this kind of situation where anything else is an option. No, just the way that she's developing on the road or whatever. Like, I think you could do, because you can make your own negative. If she had a dark room mother, I'd be like, "What the f*ck?" But it's still like no, it is absolutely like, you know, "Oh, you're a f*cking weird artist," or whatever. No, and like...yeah. Yeah, bad journalism. No, literally the thing that this movie succeeds at is it goes "pew-pew" and the people were like, "Ah, f*ck, I'm getting shot," and then people are like...like me in the audience, I'm like, "I'm feeling really tense right now." And I'm like, "Oh, this is a...this is like." You know, I think I watch war movies like other people watch horror movies, where it's kind of like, oh, to get that safe version of a thing that like.... Like, I've never been in war, but I've been in some pretty tense riots and things like that where like, you know.... So getting little bit of that vibe. Yeah, that's like, I enjoy it. I enjoy a good war movie. And, you know, they shoot the president. And, like, also, I just, I.... And there's like, some interesting...I kind of like the scene where there's the town that's like, "Oh, everything's normal." I think that's Frostburg, Maryland. I'm not 100% certain. A lot of the towns in Western Maryland look kind of similar. But there's a small town vibe of a central Appalachian town, you know? And then it works because there's dudes with guns on the rooftop. I actually thought that was a kind of well done. They're like, "Oh, we're totally out of the war." And you're like, "Just kidding. Our local militia shoots anyone who tries anything." And I'm like, that feels real.**Inmn** 46:03Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's true. That does feel real. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. It was a weird movie. And I think maybe this other thing is, like Garland did like some interviews about it. And like, he's purposefully vague about his politics to the point where he went off record during a interview with The Guardian to explain to the reporter what his actual politics were because he didn't want to say them, but I don't know, I guess was trying to convince the reporter that he wasn't something.**Margaret** 46:48Like a Nazi or some thing?**Inmn** 46:49Like a Nazi or something.**Margaret** 46:53It makes sense that like.... Okay, so I watched a bunch of review videos by random right-wing people, and I was like, "f*ck them." And you watched interviews with Garland and Aarland sucks, it seems like. So it kinda like...I think it kind of like makes sense where we kind of ended in our like.... I'm not, again, I'm not trying to sing this movies praises, you know?**Inmn** 47:14Yeah. But I think there were some.... I don't know, to bring this back to preparedness, because that's where we're always here to talk about.**Margaret** 47:22Okay.**Inmn** 47:23It's like, I guess what I hope is that...what I hope that people don't get from this movie.... Or what I hope that people get from this movie is seeing an absolutely horrifying portrayal of journalism or people that we would kind of see in these kinds of support roles of struggle, you know, that you should spend probably less time worrying about developing film during the civil war and probably more time taking a Stop the Bleed training and developing relationships and community with the people that you're photographing and having real connections to the things that you're reporting on, versus going on a road trip to fuel your gore p*rn lust. I don't know, maybe throw a few more tourniquets in your bag and an IFAK and maybe drop the film/ I mean, you can bring the film, but if you have to choose between an IFAK and an on the road developer kit, choose the IFAK.**Margaret** 48:42No, totally, like, if you have your film camera too, I'm like, "Oh, quirky." If you have only your film camera, you're a joke. Like, you are not prepared to do your job. It would be like if someone had a saber on their side instead of a f*cking AR-15, you know? Like, if you bring your saber, chill you're quirky. If you only bring your saber, you are not prepared to do your job in this war Yeah, no, from a preparedness point of view, the one thing I could say about it, it's kind of a like It Could Happen Here, it's just a like, "Hey everyone, we're not magically, specially immune from being torn apart by crisis. And even some of the like... Okay, I still think it was a coward's move for them to not really talk about any politics at any point during the movie, but they could have--**Inmn** 49:49Totally.**Margaret** 49:51--but they could have done the exact same weird split where Texas and California are on the same side because you could say, "Hey, war makes for weird bedfellows," because it does. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact where the communists are sending the Nazis guns, you know, or like....**Inmn** 50:14Or the Spanish Civil War, where the anarchists were fighting on the barricades with...cops.**Margaret** 50:18Yeah, totally. Cops and anarchists stopped the coup in Barcelona. And then the anarchists joined the government, which made a lot of the anarchists mad, but I think they had bigger problems then.... Everyone's like, "The big problem is we joined the government," but I think the big problem is that Stalin and Franco killed everyone. But whatever. No, it's just like an interesting like.... Like, because you could be like, alright, sh*t could break down in ways that you don't expect. And like, and they could have done that well and they didn't. And then the other thing is that I hate every protesting scene I've ever seen in a mainstream movie.**Inmn** 50:57Yeah, they're always not done well.**Margaret** 50:58I've never seen it done well. The two ways they try and do it is they either use stock footage of riots, like they do in this one where they got it from f*cking Andy Ngo, the f*cking Nazi, or you have this crowd that's not big enough and is either too angry or too passive. It's always like 50 Cops and 50 protesters. That's the way they always do it. And I get it. It's really hard to get 40,000 people, you know, to be extras for your movie. But like, I don't know. None of these motherf*ckers have ever been in a f*cking riot. Whatever. I didn't like the scenes at the beginning. But honestly, the suicide bombing part, I thought was well done.**Inmn** 51:41Yeah. Well, any any final thoughts on it as we near an hour of talking about this, what I will call, strange garbage.**Margaret** 52:05I don't know. Pirate it. If you enjoy it. Don't make memes out of that guy. I'm not like mad. It's not like problematic. I don't give a sh*t on like a real level. But like, f*ck that guy. I don't know. Whatever. That's what I got.**Inmn** 52:27Cool. Yeah, mine is, I don't know, don't let this movie serve as your conception of journalists.**Margaret** 52:38On a one to five stars, I'm giving it a three as a movie, not as a political piece. As a political piece, I give it a two.**Inmn** 52:52I'm giving it like one and a half because I actually just thought it was a bad movie. On political, I'm giving it zero stars. But on a movie, I'm giving it one and a half. My plug for this movie is go see "The People's Joker" if you can, if it is in your city. Go see that instead.**Margaret** 53:18And mine is go watch "Wayne's World." I can't really defend it politically. I don't know. There's probably really f*cked up things in it. Whatever I liked it. Maybe don't go watch "Wayne's World." I just remember really likeing that movie. I tried to do a non-sequitur here. We should end this podcast. My mouth hurts. I had oral surgery. I probably complained about that a lot.**Inmn** 53:46If you enjoyed this podcast, go watch "Wayne's World." That is our weekly.... [Both laughing]**Margaret** 53:54There's probably somehting bad I just don't remember.**Inmn** 53:59If you enjoyed this podcast, enjoy the nostalgia of, not the reality of, "Wayne's World."**Inmn** 54:06The People's Wayne's World.**Inmn** 54:07The People's Wayne's World. Also, if you enjoyed this podcast, we would love for you to tell people about it. It's one of the best ways to support the show. And like I don't know, talk to your friends about it. Talk to your friends about movies. Go to go to the movies with your friends and talk about those movies. And don't let movies define what your concept of the world is because, I don't know, filmmakers are f*cking weird sometimes, you know? But you can also support the show by supporting our publisher Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And you can support Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness by telling people about stuff. You can support it by buying stuff from us. We publish, we put out books, zines, we have shirts, we have cool games, and you can also support us, and the show, by signing up for Patreon at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And there's a bunch of different levels of stuff that you can get for supporting our Patreon, anywhere from discounts on physical things that we make, to just free versions of all of the digital stuff that we put out. And you can also get like a cool zine every month. And you can also give us $20 a month to acknowledge or thank a thing of your choice. This could be you, this could be your friend, this could be a organization that you think is cool, or it could be a fictional or theoretical concept, which no one has asked us to thank yet.**Margaret** 55:43Or.... Sorry, finish your thought. I want to. before you do the list, I want to present another thing that people could do.**Inmn** 55:51Which this is my new post podcast thing, if you liked this podcast, please pay us $20 to thank a fictional concept. That is...that is my plug.**Margaret** 56:04Also, you could troll us by taking one of the names or projects that's already on our list and adding it to our list again, so that we have to read it twice. Like Boise Mutual Aid, what if that got read out twice? Wouldn't that be funny?**Inmn** 56:19Yeah, or what if...what if we thank...we could thank Amber twice. We could think Julia twice. We could think Marm twice. And we're going to thank all of them twice right now. Thank you alium and alium. Thank you, Amber and Amber. Thank you Ephemeral and Ephemeral. I have to transcribe this and I'm going to hate this. Yeah. Thank you Appalachian--I'm going to stop. Thank you Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck, Julia. Look we thanked you three times. Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Miranda, Ben Ben, Anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid. Look, we're thanking you like three times. theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige. Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Mic Aiah, and the immortal Hoss the Dog. Thanks for everything that you've done.[Margaret makes pew-pew gun noises] Pew, pew.**Margaret** 57:24That's a call back of me interrupting you with the.... Evryone will be happy and not think I'm a jerk. Please continue. [Both laughing]**Inmn** 57:24We.... Wait, wait.**Margaret** 57:24I'm like high off of pain and my mouth hurts because I've been talking. Oh, no, was pew-pew.... We recorded two episodes in a row. Was this the one that I pew-pew'd in? This is the one I pew-pew in the middle of, right?**Inmn** 57:45No, no, but just wait for the...wait for it for the visual cue, Margaret.**Margaret** 57:49Okay.**Inmn** 57:51We just hope everyone is doing as well as they can with everything that's going on [Inmn pauses as if winking at Margaret. Margaret makes pew-pew, gun, and explosion noise] and we'll see you next time.Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

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  58:23

• S1E116 - Tav on Waterways

  Episode SummaryThis week on Live Like the World is Dying, Tav and Inmn talk about the utility of waterways and the ways that industrialization has changed our relationship to waterways. Inmn learns new terrifying things about river rafting and how river guides really come up with the scariest things to name potential dangers. Guest InfoHost InfoInmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificeryPublisher InfoThis show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.TranscriptLive Like the World is Dying: Tav on Waterways**Inmn** 00:15Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm your host today Inmn Neruin, and today we're going to be revisiting a subject that we've talked about before which is paddling on water. And we're going to talk a lot about rivers and we're gonna talk about—a little bit about planning trips and just generally the importance of getting to know your local waterways, with some specific contexts on places that are really cold. But first, we are a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchists podcasts, and here's a jingle from another show on that network. Doo doo doo doo doo!**Inmn** 01:43And welcome back. Thanks so much for coming on the show today. Could you introduce yourself and tell us just a little bit about what you—what you do in the world and what you're excited to talk about today?**Tav** 01:59Yeah, I'm Tav and I'm a, I guess broadly a wilderness guide from so-called Canada. Yeah, I've worked everywhere from the East Coast to Newfoundland, up to the Yukon. And yeah, I'm mostly a paddling guide, so everything from whitewater rafting, to sea kayaking, to canoeing, but I've also been known to guide hiking trips, and yeah, pretty much that's what I do.**Inmn** 02:32Cool, cool. That's—I feel like, you know, we've had people come on and talk about like, like arctic hiking, or hiking, or paddling, mostly in the desert, and I feel like—maybe this is just me having a very not understanding of all of these things for the most part. But what—I'm curious about, like, what kind of changes, like, in places where it gets super cold and you're having to be in the water? Which sounds cold. It sounds very cold to me.**Tav** 03:06Um, yeah, I think the main thing is that it really depends on what—well, first of all, what time of year it is and, like, what exactly you're doing or planning on doing. So if you're going to be running rapids, you're certainly going to get wet. And so we have these things called dry suits, which are, well, it's kind of exactly what it sounds like. It's a suit that keeps you dry. They have these rubber gaskets on your wrists and your neck. So it, like, suctions completely to your neck and your wrists and the rest of its waterproof, including the feet. And you usually have, like I have these, call them river boots, and you just put them on over the suit. And then you're nice and protected. And you can wear warm stuff underneath if it's super cold out. But personally, I run hot. So generally, I find that like, just a base layer underneath is good enough for me. Because as soon as, like it really traps in all that air, so you stay pretty, you stay pretty warm. Even if you're in like really freezing water. But in other times of year, like to be honest, in the summer here, it gets pretty hot, like people—people don't really think of it. It's not like it's frozen year round. Obviously the waters running at a certain point and, especially these days, the summers can get up to, you know, like 30 degrees. And yeah.**Inmn** 04:40Cool. I'm gonna pretend I know what the conversion is on that. Wow, that's hot.**Tav** 04:46Yeah, I mean, it is pretty—it's probably not hot for you coming from the desert actually. But yeah, I think, I think broadly the biggest thing is always, at least for me, dressing as if you're gonna fall in the water. Unless it's really hot out. If it's really hot out and you fall in, it kind of feels great. But, but if it's chilly, you always dress like you're gonna go in the water, and not like you're just gonna have a nice day on the river. And yeah.**Inmn** 05:25Well, I guess like, I'm curious about, like, what the kind of preparedness like like, what—like, what do you what do you do if you fall in the water? What do you do if you fall in the water and you get wet? Like, what's—and your dry suit doesn't keep you dry? These scary questions that I have about being in the wilderness and being cold and wet.**Tav** 05:50For sure. Definitely, I mean, so the first thing that's gonna happen it—and again, it all really depends on where you fall out. And like, because rivers are a very dynamic environment, actually, as one of my coworkers put it to me. He was more on the hiking side of things. And he told me that like paddling really scared him, because if something goes wrong on the river, you're still moving down the river as this thing is going wrong. So you have to like deal with the problem, but also maybe deal with a hazard that's like right in front of you. And then it's always about, like, figuring out what the best course of action is in regards to, like, dealing with the hazard, but also, you know, saving the person, and making sure everybody else who's still in the boat is safe. But I think broadly, what I tend to tell people if I'm taking them on a trip that's going to involve whitewater, is: the safest place on the river is in the boat. And if you're not in the boat, you should be on shore. So if I'm gonna, like, enter a bunch of rapids—and the other thing is actually, before I say that, you need to know, like, how to swim if you're gonna like be in whitewater. They call it a defensive swimming position. And you kind of sit back like you're in a lawn chair, and put your feet forward. And that way, if you like smashed into a rock, it's not your face that smashes into a rock, it's your feet. And you just kind of, like, you should have a lifejacket on. So that'll keep you floating. And, and then there's also, like, an offensive swimming position, which I wouldn't normally teach somebody, that's, yeah. Anyways, so yeah, so if I'm about to enter a bunch of rapids, I'll tend to tell people like, hey, if you do fall out, and for whatever reason you can't get back to the boat, you need to swim to the left shore or the right shore. Because sometimes it might not be safe to swim a certain direction and people don't know that and they're just gonna panic and swim whatever way seems the best. But if you let them know beforehand, like, hey, swim left, if something goes really wrong, I don't know, then they'll at least know the safer way to swim. Yeah. And then other than that, like, we have, I guess, a couple tools in our arsenal—and this should be the same with rivers everywhere. We'll have throw ropes, which are just some buoyant rope. And it's in a bag, and you throw it at people. And they should hopefully grab on to it and then you can pull them in to safety. And then there's obviously, again, like, as with all things, it can get more and more complicated depending on what the problem is. Actually, this one place I worked—I wasn't on this trip, but there was a person who got stuck on a piece of debris in the middle of a rapid which is, like, absolutely horrifying, especially because we've run that river—or that section of the river, like, a million times and that's never happened. So there was well, so—this is kind of insane, but there was a an old mill there, like a lumber mill. Or maybe it was a paper mill. I don't know, it was some industrial thing. And rather than, like, you know, when it went out of business, disposing of all the waste properly, they just decided, hey, there's this big river right there. Let's just throw the whole factory in the river. Why not? So there was all this big machinery and like metal under the water, and a lot of the rapids are actually created by that like big hunks of metal and stuff. But anyways, we had no idea that that, like, was there. And maybe it was just like the water level was perfectly right that day or perfectly wrong that day. But yeah, this person got like caught on their swim shorts, like, right on the piece of metal. And they were stuck in the middle of a rapid. So I cannot imagine what my friends went through trying to rescue that person. It must have been pretty terrifying. But yeah, so in situations like that, it would be like a much more complicated rescue than just like throwing a rope at them and hoping for the best. So yeah.**Inmn** 10:23Wow, that is—you unlocked a new fear for me. I thought that Blix had like gotten all of my fear out of me, you know, in horrible things that can happen in a river, and new fear unlocked. Thanks.**Tav** 10:39Yeah.**Inmn** 10:43What do you—I guess I'm curious—I guess my guess is, because boats, you just—I didn't know, boats are super interesting to me because, like you said, it's like the boat keeps moving down the river. And so it's like, I want to be like, okay, like, what, like, you know, what do you do if there's an emergency? What do you do if someone needs to be like, medivaced from an area like that? And I guess I'm expecting the answer is: put him in the boat and keep going. But—which is like a cool one interesting thing about boats, is they keep going?**Tav** 11:20Yeah, for sure. I mean, again, it really depends. Like everything is situational, right?**Inmn** 11:26Yeah yeah yeah.**Tav** 11:27And you really have to assess the situation and figure out what the best course of action is. Like, the best thing to do might be to like pull over and call EMS and hope they can land like a bush plane or a helicopter near you, or get to a place where they can land it. I had this one evac where a lady actually had a stroke on the river.**Inmn** 11:53Oh no.**Tav** 11:53Yeah, I was pretty terrible. I was the only person there with, like, you know, decent medical training. I'm not like a doctor or anything, but I have my wilderness first responder and all that fun stuff. And yeah, so it was just like me and these other guides, who had, like, some training, but not as much as me. And my coworker—love this guy, he's amazing—but he said that she had a concussion. And I was like, this is not a concussion. This is a stroke. Yeah. And so, so yeah, so what ended up happening is we had to take one of the boats and—honestly, mad respect to my to my coworker for this—he got her down like a 45 minute section of river and like 15 minutes. We were just lucky because we had a raft there with an oar frame on it. And those, like—an oar frame is just like, you know, like a rowboat—**Tav** 12:51—with like, the two oars and you're like rowing it. It's that, but you like, it's a big metal frame, and you like strap it down to the rafts. So instead of—like, if you have less than the ideal number of people, you can just have one person paddle the boat. So in that case, it was actually my group, where I only had like two people. So I just ended up strapping the warframe on because it's easier than having them paddle. So anyways, my coworker took that boat and just, like, ripped down the river faster than anybody ever has probably since then. So, so yeah, I mean, in that case, like, it was a serious medical problem, we couldn't deal with the problem, you know, you need to like, get that person to definitive care as fast as possible. And in that situation, we were close enough to the end, that the best thing to do was to just call EMS, get them to bring an ambulance to the takeout and get her there as fast as possible. But you might not be in a situation where that's, you know, plausible, you might have to call a bush plane or something like that. Or, even worse, like a bush plane can't come and you're stuck for like days with somebody with a serious medical problem. That can happen, unfortunately. Yeah.**Inmn** 12:51Oh okay.**Inmn** 14:18Yeah. Yeah. I feel like—and I think this is a topic for another time—but I really want to—folks listening out there. This is my plug to our audience. I would really love to talk to someone at some point about like, like we have this idea in, like, wilderness first aid, response, etc. I have like an expired wilderness EMT. I haven't done that work in a very long time and my brain has totally fallen out of it. But like, interested in this conversation of like, long term care in, like, when definitive care is very far away, you know, like, how to troubleshoot situations where it's like, yeah, definitive care is days away. Definitive care is a week away. And I'm like really interested in talking to someone about that. So if that feels like you, Tav, or ambient listener, then send us a message.**Tav** 15:31Yeah, I can't say that's exactly my area of expertise. I can offer like, an anecdote from a friend of mine, who—**Inmn** 15:41Oh yeah. Love anecdotes.**Tav** 15:43—it's pretty, it's pretty grim. I'm not gonna lie. This guy is friend of mine, he's much older than me. He's been doing this river guide stuff for his whole life. And he's had lik three people die in his arms.**Inmn** 16:00Oh my god.**Tav** 16:01Yeah. But like that's, unfortunately, the reality of the situation where, if you're that far away, and someone's not getting there, and there's a serious problem, and you can't deal with it, that's what happens. Right? That's the unfortunate fact of existence. And it's pretty horrifying to realize. Also from a somewhat selfish perspective, like, if I continue along this career path that could very well be me telling another young person and a few years like, oh, yeah, this one horrible thing happened to me. And yeah, like, I've definitely seen my fair share of, like, pretty intense situations that could have gone pretty badly. Thankfully, I haven't had anybody die on any of the excursions I've been on. But be I've had some pretty close calls there. So yeah. It is it is something to always consider, like, when you're heading off on a trip that's going to be far away from a hospital or civilization, I guess. That, yeah, like you are far away, and you need to have a certain level of confidence in yourself to deal with the situations that you might need to deal with. But also, in that, like, for me, it comes with a certain level of, like, risk acceptance. And like, everybody has a different level of risk tolerance. You might not be the person who's going to go, like, on a month long trip through the wilderness. That might not be okay with you. And that's fine, it's not for everybody. You know, in my case, the way I tend to look at it is, like, if there's a problem I can't deal with—pretending I'm alone in this scenario—like, if there's a problem I can't deal with myself, and it's so serious that I'm gonna die, like, in a few minutes, then like, I just accept that, like, that's what's gonna happen. Like, if I can't deal with the problem, and I can't call for help with the problem and it's that bad anyways, then I'm alread—can I swear on this? Is this a no swearing show?**Inmn** 18:31Oh, yeah, you can, yeah.**Tav** 18:32I can swear? Okay, I was gonna say, I'm already in a lot of sh*t if that's—if that's happening. So for me, my risk tolerance, I mean, it might be higher than others. But I don't know—it's just like, something you have to accept when it comes to taking risks. I mean, you can be prepared and informed and know everything and still an accident can happen. And then you just have to accept that, yeah, accidents happen, and it might be a really big, bad accident. So, so yeah.**Inmn** 19:06Yeah. Yeah, that' very true. I feel like—I feel like there's a lot of aspects of our societies that have kind of—have had our, like, brains adapt to this idea that, like, that there is always a solution to something. And I feel like this was like a big thing with, like, with COVID, like, for a lot of people, was the expectation that there was a solution to something, and a lot of people, like, getting to the ER and being like, oh, there actually isn't a solution right now—or there isn't like a one 100%, like guarantee that this problem can be fixed. And yeah, I don't know. It's—I think that's the thing that I've been thinking a lot about, is how our societies have kind of expected there to always be a guaranteed solution to something that there might not be a solution to. And I think that's like—I think that's getting more extreme as things in the world change more. There's—when we are used to certainty, there is now more uncertainty. That is an articulate thought, I'm gonna stand by it.**Tav** 20:42Yeah. No, I mean, definitely. Like, I could see that in society at large, actually, now that you mentioned it. But like, yeah, I mean, with regards to wilderness travel, I think anybody who does this sort of thing, like you have an understanding of the risk involved, and like what—you know, there's things that you can deal with there and there's things you can't deal with. And, yeah, like, but I mean, okay, you know, I also don't want to scare people. It's not—like, yes, you have to kind of look within yourself and accept that something bad might happen. But at the same time, I've done, like, I don't even want to know how many 1000s of hours of paddling in my life. And I, yeah, I've had, like, some problems. But I think a lot of those kind of stem from the fact that it's my job. And I'm taking people out there who aren't necessarily prepared for what they're going to—like, they go online and they're like, oh, I want to go on a guided paddling trip. And they Google, whatever, paddling in the Yukon. And then they find this company and they book a trip and they go. And that's all the preparation and thought that they put into it. Where—and that's exactly what they're paying for, I guess, if you look at it from like a service perspective. They're paying for somebody else to do all of that thought. And what I'm, what I do, like, independently—like if somebody listening wanted to go out paddling, if you just, like, talk to somebody who knows what they're doing locally—like join your local paddling club, a lot of places have those, or like find a group online—and like, learn from people or learn from the Internet. We have a lovely resource of, like, all of the information anyone could ever want. So, yeah, it doesn't have to be dangerous. I think most of the danger, and most of the dangerous situations I've been in, happen simply because it's my job to take unprepared people out into the wilderness. And, like, that kind of sucks. I—that's why I'm not actually working as a guide this summer. One of the reasons is because I'm pretty tired of dealing with unprepared people in the wilderness because it's stressful. It's really stressful. And yeah, so I mean, I guess the the main point is, like, it doesn't have to be dangerous as long as you're prepared. And I think that's a pretty great theme, considering this show.**Inmn** 23:43Yeah, yeah. And it's—I don't know, like, I totally understand the outlook of someone who's like, yes, I want to pay someone else to be prepared for me. And it's like, you know, reality is very different from, like, adventure tourism. But like, it's funny because it's a thing that is like a little antithetical to preparedness in general. And I'm divorcing adventure tourism and preparedness, like, because they're different things.**Tav** 24:21Yeah.**Inmn** 24:21But, yeah, it's like, that is the thing that we're always trying to talk about on this show is, like, if in our own lives, like, if we are all more prepared than it—then like your prepper friend has to, like, do less when stuff goes wrong because everyone's a little bit prepared.**Tav** 24:41Yeah, for sure.**Inmn** 24:44I kind of want to switch tacks a little bit though and talk about this other thing. So I'm curious—I guess in, like, in the Yukon specifically, like, there's places where I live that I'm, like, okay, yes, that is a less accessible place via like roads and things like that. But I'm curious kind of like what the Yukon and, like, that whole area is like in terms of, like, history of transportation and stuff like that. Because, like, waterways have played kind of like a pretty large part in that from what you've told me before this—and now I sound like it's something I already knew.**Tav** 25:27Yeah, for sure. To be honest, it's not just the Yukon. Throughout this country we call Canada, if you actually look at all of Canadian history, like, Canada's like three companies in a trench coat. Always has been. And it was founded on fur trading. Right. And how that was done is basically, like, white people came over, and then they met the ndigenous people. And they were like, wow, these people move pretty far and they have some neat boats. And then they kind of co-opted those boats. And of course, Indigenous people and Metis people took part in the fur trade as well. A very large part, to be honest, in making sure a lot of white people didn't just die in the wilderness. Yeah, but like throughout this entire nation's history, every single place is really connected by water. Like that's just how people got around. Everywhere from, like, the far north, the Inuit had kayaks and—actually dogsleds. ou know, when the sea froze in the winter, they had greater mobility, because—I mean, and they're still moving over water, it's just frozen water, which is kind of like land. But it, yeah, so every single place in this entire so-called country is connected by water in some capacity. And I think that really forms the way that I look at places now. Because yes, we use roads to get around now. But very likely, there is another way to get anywhere you want to get. Because all of these settlements are built on rivers, on lakes, on the ocean, and the way people got there is probably on a boat, and not on a car because we didn't have cars 400 years ago. So yeah, I guess I just, I think it's really important to recognize that and recognize that it's still very very possible to go extremely long distances. And, you know, reach inaccessible, quote/unquote places with relative ease, to be honest. So actually, something that's pretty insane to me—it's mind boggling, to be quite honest: the longest river system in the country is the Mackenzie River. And it's technically, like, if you go by names, it's a bunch of different rivers that are connected. But it's really, like, from source to sea—I don't actually remember how many kilometers it is. But you can go from Alberta, like, around Jasper, if anybody knows where that is, all the way to the Arctic Ocean on a single river. And you can do that in like a single summer, too. And throughout that whole river, there's a bunch of towns. And a lot of them are not accessible by road, but they are very easily accessible by the river. So if you really think about it, like, in my mind, they're not inaccessible places. They seem inaccessible because of our modern transportation infrastructure, which, you know, makes anything that doesn't have a road seem like it's impossible to get to and you have to spend thousands of dollars and fly or whatever. But really, all it takes is, like, one person in a canoe and you can just go anywhere you want. Yeah.**Inmn** 29:31Yeah, that stuff is super interesting. It's like the—I don't know, it's like, I get on some level that, you know, cars are convenient. I love being able to drive somewhere. But it's like, I don't know, obviously cars are also terrible and we need different—we need something different before the planet dies. But It's like also this thing that, like, it's like car—I imagine that like switching over a transportation system to be, like, based on moving around on the river versus based on, like, driving around on some roads that demolish a bunch of sh*t. It also, like, divorces us from nature and like any connection that we have to, like, the natural landscape that we are using. And, like, used to be on the river and now it's put the remains of petrified trees in your thing and blast around on concrete or whatever. I don't know. It's just funny.**Tav** 30:43Yeah. Yeah, no, I mean, I definitely—cars are—I wish I could just live out of a canoe. But that, I can't do that. I mean, I live in my car right now. So I get their convenience. But I do think that as, like, as things progress and the climate gets worse and worse, and I mean, even now, this is probably going to mean absolutely nothing to you—Oh, you know what, actually, I was in Alaska, like, the other day. And it's actually a bit cheaper than here. But the gasoline that I purchased was $5.50 American per gallon, which I think is $1.67, or .68 per liter. What I normally—like in the Yukon, it's like 1$.80 to $1.90 per liter right now, which, it's getting pretty unaffordable to go large, long distances in a in a car. And I think that like as this progresses, like—they're not getting—these prices are not getting cheaper, inflation is continuing, and it's quickly going to become really hard, I think, for your average person to go anywhere in a vehicle when it's costing them, like, over $100 to fill a single tank. And that's, I think, where we have to return to what we did historically, which is travel on rivers. And I mean, it's not even just returning to, like, historical transport, I guess. Like we can still use road infrastructure, a lot of people bike everywhere. And you can go pretty long distance—like actually, it's super common in the Yukon to see people biking the entire Klondike highway, or the entire Dempster highway, like all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is pretty awesome.**Inmn** 31:27Whoa.**Tav** 32:03Yeah, yeah, I see them all the time, actually. Yeah, so—but anyways, the point being like, as we're getting, like, priced out of these things that we once took for granted, we're gonna have to understand that, like, people think about collapse and preparedness from really local perspective. And I think that's great. Really, I think getting more local is awesome. But I think what people also forget about is the fact that, like, we still are really an interconnected species. And we always have been, even before modern globalization. Like people really were traveling very far to go trade or whatever, on rivers or on the sea. And I think it's important to recognize that we probably should still be doing that because it does strengthen everybody's community. Like, just, I don't know, checking in on the community next door, or, you know, a few kilometers down the river is important too and, you know, sharing, I guess. Like, I guess there's inter-community preparedness and then intra-community preparedness. And I like to think that, like, using the environment and more specifically the waterways to like stay connected, even when we can't drive everywhere, is is pretty important.**Inmn** 34:15Yeah, I don't know. We live in a—we live in a strange world now. Um, I, you know, I didn't know this for a while and finding it out kind of blew my mind in a funny little way. But um, as far as like the eastern half of the United States is, like, someone told me that it is technically an island because you can circumnavigate the, like, eastern half of the United States and a boat. And this has, like, always kind of blown my mind. Like I'm not going to remember what the actual waterways all are, but it's like you can go from Lake Michigan to the Mississippi—whichever one of those lakes connects to the Mississippi—and like take the Mississippi down and then, like, get out into the Gulf and like sail around Florida, and like sail up the Atlantic, and then, like, through—it might be through a series of rivers and it might require using a canal, but you can like, get right back into the Great Lakes system. Like the Hudson Bay, or something. And—**Tav** 34:50—probably the same. I mean, if I was gonna do that I'd do the St. Lawrence River.**Inmn** 35:47But cool. Yeah. I don't actually know what these waterways are.**Tav** 35:52Yeah, for sure. I spend, like, way too much time of my life, like, I'm looking at a map and being like, okay, where does this river lead, and I'm, like, follow the river, like, all the way to its source. And then I go, like, all the way to the sea. And I'm like, okay, that's how far I can get there. But what if I portaged to this lake, and then I take that lake to this river. And like, anyways, I have, like, a whole folder have these like map files of just, like, random paddling routes that I've planned out. And I probably won't get to do all of them. But, yeah, I just, I am kind of a nerd in that I just like to go figure out, like, how I can get around places. Yeah. It's really crazy. Like, once you start—once you realize, like, your mind is opened up to the fact that, like, you can travel, basically anywhere on a boat, all you have to do is look at the blue lines on a map and trace them and figure out how you get from point A to point B using them. And I think it's also actually important to note that, like—so in a context of—yeah, like, in a context of a world where we're not able to use our highways and stuff. Like that, following a river or a creek, even if you don't have a boat, is a great way to make sure you know where you're going. Because, yeah, like, I mean, it's like a really obvious landmark. And you can just follow it the whole way. Especially in places where rivers are super seasonal, like, part of the year, it might literally just be like a bit of gravel, and you can just walk on it all the way to where you're going. Yeah, so I think that's also important to mention, that they're not—it's not just boats, it's just that they're very convenient ways to traverse a landscape, especially one that's, like, heavily forested. There might not be like a lot of other clearings nearby, so yeah.**Inmn** 38:01Yeah. Um, have you—so this like folder of, like, wacky routes—I'm gonna call them wacky routes—have you gotten to—could you tell us about a creative, like, trip that you took via waterways. Or, like, what's like the longest that you've traveled in like—I don't have words for the things that I'm asking you...**Tav** 38:28Yeah. Honestly, like, the longest trip I've ever done is unfortunately with my job, and that would be about a 10 day trip on the Yukon River. But—and that's just, it's mostly like a time thing. Like I said, you know, I—it's—we live in this cold place, and the water's only running for, like, a certain amount of time. And unfortunately, I've made it my livelihood to, like, spend my entire summer taking other people on trips. So in terms of my, like, crazy, wacky trips, I haven't gotten to do, like, any of the big ones that I want to actually do. Because, you know, they take, like, a month or more. And I just don't have a month because I need to make money.**Inmn** 39:17Yeah.**Tav** 39:18But I'm hoping that will change this summer. I'm planning on a very long trip at the end of August, and it should be awesome.**Inmn** 39:28Cool.**Tav** 39:29But yeah, so. So yeah, I guess in that respect, I haven't done any of those like ones that I concoct that are kind of wild. But I do like to just go and explore, like, little waterways and figure out, I don't know—I just like find a river and I'll go upstream. Or, actually a few days ago I did—I went just downstream and I I literally walked back to my car at the end, it was just a day thing. And that kind of sucks, being alone, because you're like, oh, cool, I did this river. And now I'm gonna just like walk back to my car and drive and pick up my boat. But yeah, I wish I had more cool stories of me on my own doing things that I want to do, but capitalism exists and all my fun river stories are with tourists that I'm taking. So.**Inmn** 40:31Yeah, that makes sense. What is this trip that you're planning gonna be like?**Tav** 40:40Yeah, so actually I have a couple different options in that regard, and it is kind of gonna depend on, like, what's on fire and what's not on fire. So, but my main route that I want to take is, basically, it'll be I think 1000–1500 kilometers. And, yeah, and it'll be from this place called Eagle Plains, which is, like, in the Arctic—it's like right kind of on, slightly below the Arctic Circle, on the Dempster highway. And I'll start on the Eagle River, and then go through a series of other rivers. I'll reach Old Crow, which is the furthest north settlement in the Yukon. And then I'll take the Porcupine all the way across Alaska—I'll cross into Alaska. And that'll take me down to the Yukon River. I'll hit up a couple towns on the Yukon River in Alaska, and then I'll get off at the last point where there's road access. That the trip that I'd like to do if the fires allow me.**Inmn** 41:58Yeah, yeah. Um, what—are there—I guess like, when planning—when planning a trip that is not, like, a super pre established, I guess, route or something, are there any things that that are important to consider or important to, like, prepare for?**Tav** 42:19Yeah, for sure. The first thing is, I wouldn't recommend doing a non pre established route unless you kind of know what you're doing. But the second thing is that, like, basically, my strategy is: I figured out the route. I map it out. And then I scour the internet for information on any of these rivers. So in this case, all of the rivers—it's actually very likely somebody has done this route before. Like, I'm definitely not the only person to think of it. At the very least, some Indigenous people did it, 100%, before I did.**Tav** 43:01Yeah.**Tav** 43:02Yeah. But yeah, it's a pretty obvious one, as far as routes go. It's just a bunch of rivers, and they all kind of feed into each other. There's no, like, crazy portages I hope—there shouldn't be any crazy portages or anything like that. I have heard one of the rivers runs pretty low sometimes, so I might have to, like, drag my boat along. But um, yeah, so. So yeah, and that—like I met people who've done the route up to Old Crow before. So I know that—I've heard about that portion from a couple of people that I know. And, yeah, other than that, I look online. And, like, you just have to kind of incessantly Google until something comes up about the river you want. And like, it's probably going to be some like, weird, obscure blog from 2006 where someone's like, I paddled this river with my friends and it was cool. And like, it might not even have, like, all the information that you need. But, like, to me, a lot of the time I'm like, okay, cool, if someone did it, that means it's probably fine, right. And that's kind of my strategy. Like, you're not gonna get all of the information you want. But you can get a lot of information just by, like, scouring the internet. And actually, go to your local bookstore. If you're going to like plan a river trip near you, go to a bookstore—or not your local bookstore if it's not near you. Go to the bookstore there and look for maps, because they probably have maps of local places. And if they don't have maps, you should ask them where to get maps, because they probably know where to get maps. I know in Canada, though, you can go on natural resources, Natural Resources Canada, and they should have like topographic maps of the entire country if you need, like, that kind of math. But you can also just, like, go on Google. But, um, but yeah, I guess mostly it comes down to getting information from wherever you can get your information from, whether that's people who've done it, the internet, or your local bookstore. And the second thing is, if you're doing a route you're unfamiliar with, especially if you're alone, you have to be cautious, and you have to know what to look for. And you have to be able to react really quickly to situations. Actually, literally a couple of days ago I was paddling this river in Alaska and the water's really low because of the time of year. And I was coming around a bend and there was a sweeper right across the river. And what happened is the river really, really narrowed, like, in this section. And it just, like, it went right for the sweeper—a sweeper is a tree that's like right across the water. So if you think about it, like, a broom, it'll be like right over up the surface. And then there's all these like branches on the way. And I think there was like a log and there's like other stuff underneath the sweeper. It was not a fun thing to be like hurtling towards really quickly. And yeah, so I was alone. And I, like, swung my boat around and, like, jumped out—because like, it was really low water so that it was shallow, which made it much easier to just, like, jump out of my boat as fast as possible and, like, drag it on shore. But like, it's stuff like that, where you're not necessarily expecting it and then you're like, oh sh*t, like, I need to deal with this right now. Get out of the way. And I actually lost my paddle it went down—I got it. It's fine. That's why you always have a spare paddle. That's the moral of the story. Have two paddles.**Inmn** 47:09I feel like the moral of the story is: river guides continue to come up with horrifying names for dangers in the river. I thought I had heard the worst but "sweeper" is—sorry this is uh, this is a call back to Blix telling me about, like, just the—I forget what they're—I feel like one of them was called a "blender," and I—**Tav** 47:35Blender? I dunno about a blender. Maybe American river guides have different names for stuff. I don't know. I don't know. To me, the most horrifying feature on a river is an undercut. And it's unfortunately something that comes up a lot in places where the rivers freeze. So what will happen is like the banks will be covered in ice. And if you're—and if you're paddling at that time of year, there'll be undercuts along the whole riverbank, like the whole way down the river. And an undercut is basically just where the current goes like underneath a ledge right? At the worst case, it can be, like, a recirculating current under there. So like you get sucked under in like basically an underwater cave. And then it just, like, like, circles you around underneath and like an underwater cave and you just, like, sit there and die.**Inmn** 48:30[Quietly] God.**Tav** 48:30Yeah, so that's what an undercut is. And then like the ice undercuts and kind of terrifying, something to be aware of if you're going to be paddling a river during spring or fall. Yeah, those are—to me, that's the most terrifying thing. Because like a lot of other stuff, there's like a way to kind of get around it or, like, you know, figure it out. But if you get sucked into an undercut you're kind of boned. Like you're pretty—there's not a lot you can do.**Inmn** 49:03Yeah.**Tav** 49:04Especially if you're alone. There's other people—I've heard of someone who got sucked into an undercard on the Ottawa River actually. And, like, there's this—I don't remember the name of the rapid, but there's this one part that's like this crazy undercut. And someone got sucked in there. And they got a rope on them somehow. And they had a truck, like a pickup truck. And they were pulling them out of the current with a pickup truck and the rope snapped. And, like, the pickup truck couldn't even go against the current. Like they were just stuck under—that person didn't live. But yeah, like it can be pretty—those are—yeah, again, that's like the most extreme horrifying thing I think to me, but...**Inmn** 49:50Stay away from—I know we're just—we're talking about our rivers are cool, but everyone's stay away from rivers. Golly. That's not my actual advice.**Tav** 50:02I think it—no—they're definitely—like that's the thing, right? They're definitely a force of nature. I always like to tell people: you will never win a fight against a river. But that doesn't mean you should be afraid of going on the river always, like, yeah, I feel like I've been talking about a lot of negative bad things that can happen. And I don't want to freak people out. Rivers are really nice and cool, and they help you get places, and it can be really fun. It's not all whitewater. Like, the Yukon River is a giant—like it's a highway. It's like, huge, flat river. It goes like 10 kilometers an hour or something crazy. Like, you can paddle it super fast. And there's, like, basically no hazards. Like, there's like some log jams and like stuff like that, but they're very easily avoided. And it's, yeah, as far as, like, as far as rivers go, if you want to go a long distance and not have to worry about any of that scary, complicated stuff, the Yukon river is fantastic. Actually, every year there's a race called the Yukon River Quest, where people paddle from Whitehorse to Dawson City, it's like 730 kilometers, and yeah, people are doing that in like, three days. Well, less than three days actually. Like they're times because you have to like stop-there's a mandatory rest point where you have to sleep for a certain number of hours, and they don't count that towards the final time, but basically the the race lasts like three days. That's like paddling nonstop. But to be honest, if you think about the fact that you don't have a motor, and you're not in a car or anything like that, and you're traveling 730 kilometers in three days, that's crazy. And there's like no hazards. It's so crazy.**Inmn** 50:18That's really cool.**Tav** 50:32Yeah, you can go really fast and get places on certain rivers.**Tav** 51:21Cool. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Okay, that sounds fun now. Now that sounds fun.**Tav** 52:09Yeah.**Inmn** 52:12Um, we're kind of coming up to the end of our time. Is there anything else you want to say about waterways, or paddling, or any questions that I didn't ask you that you're like, golly, why didn't Inman asked me about this.**Tav** 52:29Yeah, um, I guess mainly just—I think I didn't get to talk about oceans as much as I would have liked to. But, like, I think the main thing I would hope people can take away from this is that it's really important to learn about the water near you, if that's the ocean, if that's a river, if that's a lake. You know, learn about whatever boa, the Indigenous people in your area use to travel on that water, because it's probably really well suited for it, to be honest. And yeah, just learn about your local waterway, learn about the ecosystem. I didn't get to talk about that as much too, but—because I'm really into traveling rivers—but they're also sources of food and just, like, life for everyone, you know. So learn about what animals live there, learn about how to help your river, and—or the ocean. And just learn about your local water and have some kind of relationship with it, whether that's, like, paddling or, like, picking blueberries on the riverbank. I think it's just important that everybody is aware of water and the life that it brings us and how it connects all of us. Yeah. I think that's that's it.**Inmn** 54:00Cool. That seems like a great—that is a better place to end on than the blender—the sweeper—whatever that terrifying name was. Is there anything that you want to shout out, whether it's places people can find you on the internet where you would like to be found, or projects, or just anything you want to plug or shout out?**Tav** 54:25Um, yeah, like, I guess I have a tiny YouTube channel that like doesn't have really much—it's mostly just my music, if anybody cares at all. It's, um, I'm birchbark online. You can find me there. That's whatever. But I think the main thing I want to plug is: go have a nice day by the water and be nice to yourself.**Inmn** 55:00Cool. That's a great thing. I'm going to go find water. I think there's water here right now.**Tav** 55:08Awesome.**Inmn** 55:08I will try. Cool. Well, thanks so much for coming on the show.**Tav** 55:14Yeah, for sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me.**Inmn** 55:21Thanks so much for listening. If you enjoyed this podcast, then go learn more about your local waterways. And also come up with a new and terrifying name for a river obstacle so that I might live in fear of water forever. But also, if you liked the show, you can support it. And you can support it by telling people about the show, or doing stuff that involves an algorithm. I don't actually really know anything about any of that. But there is stuff that one can do. Also, if you would like to support the show, you can support it financially. And you can support it financially by supporting our publisher, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. You can find us at patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And you can sign up for different tiers. There's a super basic tier where you just get discounts. I mean, not just you, you get discounts and you get access to digital content. And there's another tier where you can get a zine that we send you every month, and it's a really cool zine. Sometimes it's a short story, sometimes it's poetry, sometimes it's an essay about something. And they're all really cool. And you can listen to those features in audio form on our other podcast, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, and you can listen to interviews with the author, it's really cool. And in all of the ways that you support our publisher financially, it goes towards paying our audio engineer, and paying our transcriptionist, and maybe one day paying the hosts and the guests of the show. And, yeah, that's all that. We would like to give some special shout outs to some of our patrons who support us at the acknowledgement level. And just to plug how cool the acknowledgement level is: If you give us $20 a month, which goes towards us doing really cool things, then you can get us to shout out, acknowledge, or thank an organization, yourself, someone that you love, or a fictional and theoretical concept on all of our shows—except for things like, you know, if you ask us to think the Empire, we're not going to thank the Empire. So don't try. But we would like to give some special things to these folks: Thank you, Amber, Ephemeral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland’s Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patolli Erik, Buck, Julia, CatGut, Marm Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, Ben Ben, Anonymous funder, Janice & O’dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, SJ, Paige, Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah, and Hoss the Dog. Thank you so much for making this show and so many other projects possible. Thanks so much for listening, and we hope that everyone's doing as well as they can with everything that's happening in the world. And we'll see you next time.Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

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  59:34

• S1E115 - This Month in the Apocalypse: April, 2024

  Episode SummaryThis week on Live Like the World is Dying, Brooke, Margaret, and Inmn talk about some news from Gaza, the climate, hurricanes, University occupations, Texas' latest attempt to become a mini fief, abortion laws that are older than states, an update on an Arizona gun law, Taylor Swift, and TikTok. Host InfoInmn can be found on Instagram @shadowtail.artificery. Margaret can be found on twitter @magpiekilljoy or instagram at @margaretkilljoy. Brooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.Publisher InfoThis show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.TranscriptLive Like the World is Dying: This Month in the Apocalypse: April, 2024**Margaret** 00:15Hello, and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. Oh, wait. Brooke, you had a better... You wrote us a new jingle to sing, right? Why don't you do that right now?**Brooke** 00:26[Singing] I wrote us to do jingle to sing. Bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling, bling.**Margaret** 00:36And that's now our jingle forever. that doesn't even include our name in it. That's what happens when... Right before we hit record, we were like who's going to record the intro. And I was like, I'm going to record the intro because I have an idea. And my idea was to make Brooke come up with something to sing off the top of her head, because I'm a good person. But who's not a good person.... Wait, I'm not introducing the bad stuff yet. More good stuff. Also a host today is Inmn. Hi, Inmn.**Inmn** 01:06Hello, hello. I hope everyone is doing as well as they can in our in our great times.**Margaret** 01:15Statistically, at least one of you is punched a cop in the last week. So that's pretty cool. And also, we're a proud member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts. And here's a jingle from another show on the network. [Singing] This is a new jingle for a show on the network. It goes like this.**Margaret** 01:46And we're back. So anything happened in the world this month, Inmn?**Inmn** 02:22Nope. Not at all.**Brooke** 02:24Everything was good. Bye, yall! **Inmn** 02:26Absolutely. Absolutely nothing has happened. Only sunshine.**Margaret** 02:29What if we just did updates about like the things that we saw on TV? I guess that's a different kind of podcast. It's the wildest thing. Velma got the Scooby Doo gang together... Anyway.**Inmn** 02:43We do This Month in the Apocalypse, but it's only it's only from the fictional worlds that we spend too much time inhabiting. [Everyone lauging]**Margaret** 02:52I conquered the entire world for my god.**Brooke** 02:56My child has been watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer because she's been curious about this show that was like my formative high school experience**Margaret** 03:05Aw, to like connect with you, watching old people shows like Buffy.**Brooke** 03:09Right? So that's what's happening in the world right now in my world. Yeah. Wow.**Inmn** 03:14You know, every once in a while it lines up though. Because, you know, I was recently watching, as part of my delve back to things I watched in high school, which is the Gilmore Girls, the family that I grew up with on TV. And they actually talk about Palestine quite often in the show. Or like they mentioned that... They mention that that stuff is happening, which lines up politically with like when the show was on the air and there was also a lot of bad stuff happening in Palestine. And but I don't think the show's creators were... They were kind of like adopting a neutral but mostly support Israel thing, which is, you know, it's--**Margaret** 04:07Not our line here.**Inmn** 04:11Which is not our line here, but is... How much can you expect from mainstream TV? Like I wasn't surprised to rewatch it and discover this.**Margaret** 04:24So what's our Gaza update?**Inmn** 04:27Yes, this is my very funny segue into Gaza stuff.**Margaret** 04:31No, it's good.**Inmn** 04:32Yeah, so... Which, I mean, there's nothing absolutely nothing funny about this. But so there's like a big... There's like big kind of like ceasefire talks happening right now, which I feel like this is something... You know, obviously people have been wanting there to be ceasefire talks for a long time and they they sort of happen and then Israel's, like, "We're not doing ceasefire talks. f*ck everyone." But they're... In this more recent round, while people kind of like imminently await a ground invasion of Rafah, which like the last little southern piece of Gaza that pretty much everyone who lives in Gaza has been forced into. And Hamas has responded to a call for ceasefire negotiation talks, saying that in order to start negotiations, they need for there to be a ceasefire. And part of part of what they're asking for at this point is like, yeah, we're willing to talk about hostage stuff, because I think they are still like 130 hostages, or something--**Margaret** 06:03Which is sort of--like from a pure detached point of view--like kind of impressive that they've still held on to these hostages, as the entire region falls?**Inmn** 06:16Yeah, yeah. And--**Margaret** 06:20Like, tactically impressive.**Inmn** 06:25Yeah. And they. So, kind of what they're asking for is like, yeah, we're willing to play ball. We're willing to do... like, we're willing to release hostages. But what we what we need is for Palestinian people to have basic human rights, and to not get bombed, and for there to be a ceasefire. And what do you think Israel's response to these like, pretty, pretty basic requests were?**Margaret** 06:56Did they build a time machine to kill all the peoples'.... No, they probably already did kill all those people's parents. Nevermind. Something really disproportionately, impressively evil. That's my guess.**Inmn** 07:12Yeah, well, it's kind of like.... So you know how this thing happens in politics, sometimes, where people kind of talk up a response as being much more internally conflictual than it actually is? The same things kind of happening in Israel were awaiting Netanyahu's response, like all of the like defense, prime ministers and stuff have been like, "If you don't continue with a ground invasion, we're abdicating and your government's going to fall apart." And Netanyahu was has vowed multiple times that regardless of whether negotiations happen, or there is a ceasefire, that a ground invasion of Rafah will happen. So it's kind of like fake strife, like fake internal strife. You know? Cool. And, yeah, that's kind of the state of the ceasefire talks. And something... This is just a piece that I've been trying to learn a little bit more about, which is a topic on a lot of people's mind, which is like, "Jey, Egypt, what's up? Why aren't you letting people into Egypt to escape genocide?" And there's kind of a few different factors at place. And one interesting development on that is that Egypt has started to build a buffered wall zone. Like a border between the border kind of thing. Which is just like a giant concrete pen that can fit about 150,000, people that they're building in anticipation of the border between Rafah and Egypt rupturing during Israel's ground invasion of Rafah, which they've... which Israel's all but announced is imminently going to happen. And likepart of what Egypt has said about this is they have been saying like, "Oh, well, we don't want to let people cross over into Egypt because we don't want people to then not be allowed back into Palestine when the war is over." It's kind of like this farcical idea that Israel's gonna do a war, take care of Hamas, and then just like peacefully leave Palestinians to like go about their lives.**Margaret** 09:47Yeah, I mean, like, it is true that... It certainly seems likely to me that Israel will not let anyone back in after they leave because Israel seems pretty clear that their goal--and has been their goal since 1895. Can I tell you a thing I learned about this? Sorry.**Inmn** 10:05Yeah, absolutely, please.**Margaret** 10:09I'm not sure when this podcast comes out. I just recently recorded, and it'll be out around the same time, an episode of Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff about Palestinian resistance to the British Mandate of Palestine, basically the period between 1917 and 1948. Well, technically, the Mandate kicked in, in 1922. But after the British control started, right? And in that I learned a little bit more--like maybe a lot of the listeners already know this stuff--but everything that's happening now was in the diaries, and often public statements, of all of the founders of the State of Israel, down to very specifically like, "No, we are going to absolutely remove all of the--" they would never use the word Palestinians. They wouldn't even use the word Arabs. They specifically only said "non Jewish people" when they refer to the people who are already living in Palestine. And it's just really, blatantly clear that since the beginning, the project of Israel has been not just to create an Israeli State--or sorry, a Jewish state--but to remove non Jewish people.**Inmn** 11:24Yeah, yeah. And it's--yeah. Which it's like part of that, that makes it really confusing to see Egypt's response--**Margaret** 11:35I mean, I'm sure they're still doing it because they're bastards. But that part about like, oh, well, no one would be allowed back. That's probably true.**Inmn** 11:45But it's probably true regardless. And like Egypt not wanting people to go into Egypt, I think is probably more based on Egypt's fear of being drawn into a military conflict with Israel or, as they've also stated, Hamas kind of like migrating to Egypt and like taking up the fight in Egypt. And so it's... they're kind of adopting a "tread on no one's feet and just kind of not let anyone in" kind of situation, all while saying that it's for the... it's better for Palestinian people to be trapped in the city. You know?**Margaret** 12:30Can I do one other random history interjection about all this because it's on my mind.**Inmn** 12:34Totally.**Margaret** 12:36Okay, so there's this huge revolt in 1936, where all of the--especially the Muslims and the Christians fought--against the Zionist takeover of their land, you know? And, and their main military enemy at this point wasn't the Israeli settler or the Jewish--the zionist settlers--it was the British, right? Because the British were in control. The British used human shields. The British invented the f*cking Mad Max car.**Inmn** 13:11Oh my god.**Margaret** 13:12They actually invented it in Ireland where they strap a guy.... They invented it by, you take an Irishman and you strap him to the front of a car and now the other Irish are afraid to f*cking shoot the car or blow up the car because they don't want to kill their own guy. And there's photos of this. There is a photo in Palestine of the British in an armored car with like kind of a... It's not like a guy crudely lashed to the front Mad Max style like totally, but it is instead almost worse. It's like they went and manufactured a little cart that sticks in front of the car with two guys tied up on it. Anyway, there's the whole like, every accusation is a confession thing, and I think no government in the world has ever been more guilty of that than Israel.**Inmn** 14:05Yeah, yeah. That's very, very true. But yeah, that's kind of the state of things in Gaza right now. And just because I was curious about this, I looked it up and like, for a lot of folks who are raising money for people to, for families, to get elsewhere from from Rafa, it's like those current... It's like that that is something that is possible to happen but it kind of involves...it involves a lot of bribing and involves a lot of waiting for a long time and a lot of just finagling political situations, and it costs anywhere from like 5000 to like $10,000 per person. So it's very expensive, but but it is something that's happening, but it's mostly available to rich people right now.**Margaret** 15:02And there's a lot of fundraising going on. And I wish I had a link more directly in front of me. There's people who have collected together spreadsheets where they keep track of all of the families that need to get out, and like what their specific fundraisers are and stuff like that.**Inmn** 15:17Yeah. But Margaret, what's kind of been happening with people's responses to stuff going on in Gaza here in the States?**Margaret** 15:29So one of the things about the way that we do the show is that there is a lag between when we record things and when we put things out, so don't... So we're not going to like do like the news about the occupation movement that's happening now in the US, we're going to kind of really briefly touch on it. But I'm guessing most of you all are more familiar already what's happening with that than this show, which will be a little bit out of date by the time you hear it. But there is a huge movement across the US, especially this week, as we record, of--maybe even more so in the future, you know, who knows, every social movement goes different directions--of students taking over their universities and demanding that their universities divest from Israel. And it's really shattered a lot of the.... The more pro-Zionist elements of the mainstream media are still touting the like, "And these are anti-semitic protests." But that line is failing more and more on.... Like, people aren't hearing it anymore. People are like, "That's so clearly not true. The people at the front of this are the Jewish Voices for Peace," like, you know? It's like more and more people aren't falling for it. And so there's a big culture war thing that's happening. I got really lucky in that I was scheduled to speak at the New School anyway last week, or something--I lose track of time, all the time--to some students who had read one of my books, and then the occupation had kicked off. So instead, I was sort of invited--like anyone from the occupation was invited to come--and we talked, instead of talking about my book, we talked about the directions that social movements go and how they succeed and fail. And I don't know, maybe we'll do a episode about that at some point. But those movements are fiery and interesting. Anyone who's listening who's part of them, don't let the f*cking liberal sell you out, and don't let the f*cking authoritarians take you over. And that's what's involved. And don't let the cops divide you into "good protestor, bad protester." Those are the ways that people try to sell you out. And you can not get sold out until you, at the very least, get the demands of divestment. And as we're recording, this is the stuff that might change. As we're recording, I think it's Brown University is starting to enter negotiations about divesting from Israel. Whereas Colombia, where a lot of this started, is promising suspensions. And everyone's like, "You don't understand. Stopping this genocide is more important to us than our stupid--" you know, like, I think people don't get.... And then in the right-wing, and even some of the Liberals, are all like, "I don't get it. This isn't even a war that's happening in the US?" and everyone is like, "Basic f*cking empathy? Like what the f*ck is wrong with you?" Another kind of protest that happened that I actually only found out recently is that around 50 Google employees were fired because of a non-violent protests that they took against a Google contract, a project called Project Nimbus, which is an AI that has been used by the Israeli government that was developed by Google. Google denies certain parts of their claims around project Nimbus. But the 50 employees are currently suing, I think through the Labor Board, to get their jobs back. And so there's other ways that people are standing up about this. And we've been, of course, seen some other ways all across the US for the past six months and all across the world.**Inmn** 18:58Yeah, and just to like shout out this thing real quick because I thought it was really cool. It's this trend of people kind of like...it's like fighting in any possible way they can to do something for people in Palestine. And like outside of university encampments and stuff, it's like finding ways to act in solidarity with those struggles or to just find other little gaps in the armor. But shout out to the bus drivers union in New York City for utterly refusing to transport a bunch of people who were mass arrested at at a demonstration. They're like, "No, no. We're not letting the NYPD commandeer our buses and make us their accomplices," and they just refused to transport people.**Margaret** 19:57I think this is a really important part of why.... Like, labor organizing fell out of style until--well, about five years ago picked back up again--but overall, there's this idea that like, "Oh, class, reductionism. And like, you know, it's boring. And that's the old way of doing organizing and sh*t." And there's like some problems with the way that labor organizing has been done, especially in the middle of the 20th century, when they created a bunch of corrupt organizations--that were still better jobs--but, you know, they lacked the fiery interestingness of early 20th century and late 19th century unions. But sorry, who knew I was just gonna talk about history this whole time. But this is the other thing about what unions are, is like in order to.... This is what is involved when we talk about building workers power, like building power among the people who actually have to work for a living versus the people who can make money off of the fact that we work for a living, like having the bus the union be like, "No, we're not transporting prisoners." and they can say that because they have power within their own workplace, even though they don't own their workplace, which is like the next step. That's what you want to build to after you build a union, you know? But anyway, unions. f*cking cool. Y'all ready to talk about climate?**Inmn** 21:14God, no.**Brooke** 21:16Never.**Margaret** 21:16Well--I know this is the thing I keep coming back to--this is the thing that always slips through the cracks of even radical news because it is easier to wrap our mind around things that feel incredibly direct and present. And that is not to say that these direct and present things don't deserve our attention. They absolutely do. But keeping in mind the climate context that we all live in, I think is important. So I'm gonna tell you some stuff about it. Almost the entire continental US is forecast to have a hotter than usual summer, surprising nobody. The only exception to this is basically North Dakota and some of the like areas that like--nature doesn't really care about our borders-- that might be the same. Everywhere else is expected to be hotter. In particular, the swath cutting across Eastern Oregon and Montana and then cutting all the way down through all of Texas, kind of at an angle, that is the huge swath of the country that is like extra expected to be way hotter. And southern Alaska is the only place in the US on the map that I saw--Hawaii wasn't on this map--where it might be colder than usual. But most of Alaska will still be warmer than usual. The Rocky Mountains are expected to be dry. And the East Coast, especially the South, is expecting a wetter than normal summer. The actual wildfire prediction map for this coming summer is mostly normal--new normal, so bad--but mostly new normal. With the Sierra Nevadas in Southern California, like LA and kind of that surrounding area, are actually less fire likely than normal. And then the more likely fire than normal is Idaho, like southern Idaho into Nevada and Utah.**Brooke** 23:10Was gonna say that a lot of Idaho has had a lot of fires a lot of years.**Margaret** 23:15But it's like this map is like not totally the map of where you look and expect wildfires, which is not to say there's not gonna be wildfires everywhere. It's just that's the current anticipation. The National Weather Service has put together a heat risk website that does a daily forecast and a weekly forecast that also shows like where people are more at risk for heat problems. And it takes into consideration the wet bulb temperature and access to all kinds of stuff. There's actually a fair amount of adaptation that is happening by scientists and some of our infrastructure to try and figure out how to handle.... Because like some people are taking climate seriously and some of those people have access to weather data and sh*t, you know? April, as of this recording on the last day of April, was probably the 11th straight month of the hottest of that month on record across the world. Which means that if we pull it off next year, every single month for a year will have been the hottest ever. There is a 55% chance that this year will top 2023 as the hottest year on record. The reason that we might not beat last year--I know everyone's rooting for us but we might not pull it off because the other side will be like "Well they had us in the first half." We're expecting a slightly cooler than normal fall and stuff because of La Nina weather patterns hitting. However, La Nina weather patterns are gonna f*ck up a whole bunch other stuff. And okay, I know you all are ready to root for America, number one. so you want to hear something else that we are number one about across the world?**Brooke** 24:57No.**Margaret** 24:59Economic impact of natural disasters. Doesn't that kind of surprise you?**Brooke** 25:03What? Say more.**Inmn** 25:06I've heard a little bit about this.**Margaret** 25:09We are number two in our spending related to per capita wealth, but we're number one in total spending on this kind of stuff. It costs us about point .4% of our gross domestic product every year to take care of natural disasters. This is twice China and four times Canada. And, I mean, it's just because we suck and Capitalism sucks, is the is the reason why this is happening. Home Insurance went up 21% between 2002 and 2023. A ton of people are just going uninsured because they can't afford it anymore. Also, insurers are jacking up prices and/or entirely pulling out of certain areas. And now a lot of countries just kind of say, "Well, we kind of just can't build where there's fires and mudslides all the time." But America is like, "No way. This is our country. You can build wherever you want." And so there's also like fewer building codes and stuff around how to make houses that makes sense in your area in terms of disaster and climate and things like that. So that's something we're really good at, is spending money that we shouldn't have had to spend. There's been a whole bunch in the past couple months. In April there's been a whole bunch of tornadoes that have moved through Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and north Texas. However, we are currently lower than normal by a little bit on tornadoes. However, they've been a little bit more deadly than normal, I believe. And overall, this is expected to be a fairly more active than usual tornado season coming up. So if you're in the Great Plains and the tornado lands, which is of course, as I think we've talked about before, the tornado belt is like slowly moving east because of climate change. Speaking of the American South, it is facing some of the most rapid sea rise in the world. We, once again America is number one--I don't know if we're number one. We're actually not number one. But we're doing... We're doing pretty good. We have twice the worldwide average in sea level rise. Isn't that? Anyway...**Inmn** 27:15Which means that there's going to be a lot new beachfront property.**Margaret** 27:22I mean, a lot of the old, a lot the old beachfront property has gone away. Or rather, people are like struggling to hold on to it. A lot of places across the American south have already gotten four, six, or eight inches of sea level rise since 2010. The highest is Galveston, Texas with 8.4 inches. And the results of this, of course, are wetlands are drowning, which leaves areas more vulnerable to storms. We'll talk about the hurricane season in a second. Septic systems are backing up and contaminating waterways. Insurance companies are just dipping out entirely. And roads are now below high tide in plenty of places. People are periodically cut off. Why don't we hear about this more? Well, because the people who are affected are Black. That's why. Environmental racism is a real thing. A lot of these areas have had specific redlining policies in place, or used to be in place, or whatever. The economic landscape is such that people of color, and especially Black people, are living in the flattest areas that are the lowest to sea level and in the most risk, and it is largely poor places that people have already not cared about because this is where a lot of like pollution happens, you know? Other fun news... The kind of thing that like.... I feel like every week there's something that should have been big enough news for us to entirely overthrow the world order, but a whole bunch of--**Brooke** 28:51I'm concerned about what you call fun, Margaret.**Margaret** 28:54You take it where you can find it, ya know? Okay, so I'll explain my idea of fun. The very beginning of the movie Gladiator, right? I don't give a sh*t about the rest of the movie Gladiator. But there's this is one scene where the Roman army, who are somehow the good guys in this situation (they're not the good guys), they're attacking the Goths. And obviously, the Goths are good because they're goths.**Inmn** 29:20Yeah, we love that.**Margaret** 29:20And at one point, the barbarians come out of the woods and they're like holding the Roman messenger's head and then they all grab their axes and run screaming into the Roman army. and to their own death--**Inmn** 29:34Which is how no army ever fought ever.**Margaret** 29:36Yeah, I know. It's also not a very good way to fight, specifically, the Roman army. nd at least in the movie Gladiator, they all die horribly. There's a certain honesty to that. There's a certain honesty to just being like, "This isn't about winning or losing. This is about like, 'Can we f*cking do this?"" But we can't because we don't have.... We're not in a revolution and individual actions don't.... This is the sketchiest thing I've ever said on the show. So anyway, a slew of documents came out, showing that oil companies in their private correspondence are like, "We're not going to bother meeting any of the Paris agreements. Why would we do that? There's nothing in it for us. We don't care." And they're just ignoring it in their private correspondence, while of course, they're all publicly like, "Oh, we're so committed to it." And it's just like, and the.... You know, and this isn't like weird conspiracy stuff. The Democrats introduced this in Congress, you know? And it's just like one of these things where it's just like, well the oil companies shouldn't be allowed to exist anymore. That seems f*cking obvious, right? Anyway, I don't have a better tactical idea. And that didn't work in Gladiator. So I don't recommend it. Flash floods killed at least 169 people in Kenya in April. About 150,000 people in the country have been displaced by the rains. More than half of the country is facing intense flooding right now. Dubai got two years' worth of rain in one day at the end of April. It was 10 inches in 24 hours, the heaviest it's had in the past 75 years. The more center and center-right media is like, "Oh, it's because they're doing cloud seeding. They reap what they sowed." But the Washington Post article I read about this was like, "It wasn't f*cking cloud seeding. It was f*cking climate change." And that makes sense to me. Hurricanes. I promise you hurricanes. Colorado State University researchers are predicting a very active hurricane season this year. They're guessing there will be 24 named storms. And the way that we like named storms is that there's like 21 letters of the alphabet that we use. I don't know why it's 21 and not 26. I didn't bother looking it up. And then they're like, "Oh, f*ck, we're out of things. And then they like do other sh*t, you know? Because when they first started naming hurricanes and tropical storms, they didn't really imagine that there would be more than 21 of them in a year. But now this is the third or fourth year. There's been like three years in the past couple of years where they've run out of names. And this one, they're expecting probably 24. They're guessing--again, this is all forecasting and this is not certain--that starting June 1st with hurricane season they're guessing it'll be about eleven hurricanes with five of them being major because the accumulated cyclone energy in the...mother of storms--it probably is a science name, but Mother of storms is cooler--is twice normal. And this is bad. It's like only a little bit worse than the new normal. So it's like bad, and the new normal is bad, but what I'm not saying is "2024 year is gonna be the worst ever, and we're all gonna f*cking die in hurricanes. And everyone needs to leave New Orleans." is not what I'm saying. Although, maybe? But it's just the new bad and a little worse than usual, a little incremental.**Brooke** 33:05Maybe they need to give those four-five sidelines letters a chance at being part of the naming process and then--**Margaret** 33:14What five letters is it? I bet it's like X--**Brooke** 33:17Yeah, and Z. Give X a chance.**Margaret** 33:21What about Xereses? Does that start with and X?**Brooke** 33:24There we go. Zeus.**Margaret** 33:26Well, Xerxes is probably not in the Roman alphabet anyway. We can transliterate things however we want.**Inmn** 33:36It's kind of like the emergence of the new category six, the theoretical--we talked about it earlier this year--but the theoretical category six hurricane, which we might see this year.**Margaret** 33:48Cool.**Inmn** 33:52New albums about to drop!**Brooke** 33:58But Taylor Switft already put out a new album. What are you talking about? Oh, that's my news clip for the month. That's all I need to share.**Margaret** 34:05Oh, yeah.**Brooke** 34:06Taylor Swift put out a new album.**Inmn** 34:08I wonder... I wonder how many of our listeners are Swifties?**Margaret** 34:14I bet a good amount.**Inmn** 34:15Yeah, not a condemnation. Just a curiosity.**Margaret** 34:18I think about a quarter of my friends really like Taylor Swift. But the thing that I have said on Twitter that has been the most controversial and the thing that has most people thinking I'm a liar is when I said I cannot name a Taylor Swift song and would not be able to pick her out of a lineup.**Brooke** 34:35What?**Margaret** 34:36People think I'm lying. I'm not lying.**Brooke** 34:38I think you're lying.**Margaret** 34:40I'm not lying.**Inmn** 34:41I do not think Margaret is lying. [Laughing]**Margaret** 34:44If you put three 30 year old blonde, white singers in front of me, it would be a...I'd have a 33% chance of f*cking picking Taylor Swift. Now, I'm certain I've heard some Taylor Swift songs, but I would not know they're Taylor Swift songs. And this is not like.... I'm not even saying this as a a point of pride. I mean, okay a little bit because I'm a f*cking contrarian asshole, but that's not something I'm proud of. I'm not proud of my own pride about this.**Brooke** 35:13This is now going to be a Taylor Swift episode. Goodbye to the news. Hello to me singing Taylor Swift songs to Margaret.**Margaret** 35:21But then do like one of them that's not a Taylor Swift song in the middle and see if I can tell you which one it is.**Margaret** 35:26Totally. Yeah.**Margaret** 35:29[singing] "Where have all the flowers gone." That one's not her.**Inmn** 35:33That is not Taylor Swift. [Brooke singing unknow (presumably) Taylor Swift song in the background]**Margaret** 35:37Wait, we don't want to get sued. And I don't want to hear Taylor Swift. Oh my God, no, I actually am a bad person. There's nothing inherently good or bad about being interested in pop culture. Alright. But speaking of hurricanes, the East Atlantic's warmth is three months ahead of schedule for the average of the past four years. Not for the old average but for the new average. The East Atlantic's warmth is, on April 2nd it was as warm as July 2nd is on the average. And then there's one other piece of bad news. But then I have positive news. Or, then I have like neutral news. The one other piece of bad news is that, as of this recording, King Charles III has not died of cancer. [Disappointed grons] I also wouldn't be able to pick him out of a lineup. That's not... I don't know if that one's true.**Brooke** 36:3770 year old white man. Yeah, no. Yeah, probably not. At least not if he's in normal clothes.**Inmn** 36:43Um, well. Yeah, I absolutely believe all of that. Weirdly in.... I'm gonna say a controversial--**Margaret** 36:51I thought you didn't believe me about Taylor Swift.said you believedno, I, I**Inmn** 36:53What? Margaret I believe you.**Margaret** 36:56Oh, that's right. It was Brooke that didn't believe me.**Brooke** 36:58Inmn trusts you about everything.**Inmn** 37:00I feel like I'm one of the few people that just very much knows this to be true in a real way.**Margaret** 37:09That's true. Inmn has seen me live in an off grid cabin in the middle of the woods.**Inmn** 37:17But, so, like, Arizona... I'm going to talk a little bit about Arizona. Arizona weirdly has been like, like we just had one of our wetter springs ever. And cooler springs. To the point where, there's like a big outdoor thing that happens in the last week of March every year, and we were scrambling to find new places...like an indoor venue for it because it was raining and we were all like, "When the f*ck has it ever rained at the end of March?"**Margaret** 37:49Yeah, you're supposed to only get rain in the monsoon season in like what, Fall or something?**Inmn** 37:56It's in like July-August. And then like, we do have a winter rainy season. It's just hit or miss. But March? March is weird. Like it rained like four times in a week in March. And I was like, "What's going on?" And like, just because it was a big outdoor performance was the only reason I was like that asshole who's like "Why the f*ck is it raining in this desert?" you know? [Everyone laughing]**Margaret** 38:24"I moved here for one reason: I hate water."**Inmn** 38:27Yeah. But I have some other updates from Arizona. Shout out to.... Shout out to Logan, who is a bud who always texts me like weird, really in-depth updates about headlines that we touch on and then is like, "Inmn, the story is so much bigger than you thought it was!" And I'm like--**Margaret** 38:48That's cool. **Inmn** 38:49Please keep sending me these updates. So on a previous This Month, we talked about this expansion of kind of like Castle Doctrine in Arizona, which is like aimed at like, you can defend your...you can like essentially shoot and kill people without repercussions for trespassing, not only into your house, but on your property. And Logan was telling me that.... So the reason that this law was being pursued--you know, there's speculation about it being very anti-migrant--and it was actually in response to this criminal case where George Alan Kelly, who lives just north of Nogales, encountered some people crossing over his land, right near and along the Border, and he, suspecting them of being migrants, just held up an AK-47 and started shooting at them from 100 yards away. And he killed one of them. He killed Cuen-Buetimea, who was a 48 year old man who lived in Nogales. And some of the people in the group, who were then witnesses in the trial, attested to just, you know, crossing for work. And the person who was killed has two adult daughters who live in Nogales. And they were trying to pass this law ahead of the trial so that George Allen Kelly would not be accountable to wildly shooting a gun into the air and killing someone. But George Allen Kelly was...there was a mistrial due to jurors not being able to come to a unanimous decision. And it does not appear, as of right now, that prosecutors are going to try to refile charges. So yeah. Some other stuff going on in Arizona is.... So this is kind of like good news, bad news. And it's gonna start with some bad news. On April 9th, the Arizona Supreme Court made a ruling upholding an 1864 law that declares a near-total ban on all abortions, carrying a two to five year prison sentence for doctors who perform abortions except to preserve the life of the person giving birth. And yeah, so this is like from.... Prior to this, Arizona was a 15 week abortion ban. And currently, as we wait, we're like still waiting for this law to go into effect in like June, I think. But, so in June there will be a near-total ban on abortion in Arizona. But the Arizona House just passed a bill that would repeal this law from 1864. And this is a law that was passed before Arizona was a state.**Margaret** 42:15Yeah, that was like the first thing, when someone was like.... I didn't reshare this when I first came across it because I was like, "Arizona didn't exist. This is..." Because it's always like people come up with this horrible thing that's happening. And about half the time it's true and half the time it's not. Yeah, I totally didn't believe this one at first, because I was like, "There wasn't a state called Arizona. There was a territory and they had their territorial laws."**Inmn** 42:16Yeah. And the Arizona Supreme Court has somehow upheld this law. But the House just passed a bill to repeal it. And we're recording this on Tuesday. As of April 30th, tomorrow, Wednesday May 1st, the Senate is expected to pass the bill that would repeal this 1864 law.**Margaret** 43:09Didn't even Trump come out against that law?**Inmn** 43:13I don't know.**Margaret** 43:14I think I watched a video of Trump kind of being like, "Maybe that one wasn't the move."**Inmn** 43:21That would be wild.**Margaret** 43:23Because that one I think, was bad enough that I think that there's bipartisan anger at it.**Inmn** 43:31Yeah. Which is kind of how.... That's like how stuff has progressed in the House and the Senate is like it... It required bipartisan agreement in the House. And it will require like two Republican senators to get on board for the Senate vote, which there are two that are expected to vote for the bill that would repeal the ban.**Margaret** 43:54They're just trying to not get up put up against the wall. Anyway, Margaret's in a weird mood today.**Inmn** 44:01Yeah, and, you know, one last kind of bad world thing--bad politics--in the realm of some Republican-led states really trying to be their own little mini fiefs and like testing state-federal stress test, whatever shenanigans. So, Title IX regulations were just updated. And they were updated.... They were amended to include specifically protections against discrimination based on sexual-orientation and gender identity. Whereas previously, it was just based on being a woman, essentially. And for folks who don't know, Title IX regulations are for educational institutions that receive federal funding, they have to abide by certain regulations in order to receive that funding, which is, you know, most public schools. And big surprise, guess which three states? Florida, Tennessee, and Texas are all essentially either instructing their education systems to not listen to, to not uphold the regulations, or just straight out suing the Department of Education over it. And the rallying cry around that is, big surprise, sports and trans athletes. Surprisingly, the new Title IX regulations say absolutely nothing about sports. So it's like they're rallying around something that the new regulations have not even codified.**Margaret** 45:55I mean, literally, the only time that these people pay attention to women's sports is when they're worried about trans women existing. So it doesn't surprise me that, you know.**Inmn** 46:08Yeah. But Margaret, you have some maybe good things to tell us?**Margaret** 46:15I got neutral stuff first. TikTok has been officially... The law passed that TikTok is now--not immediately--banned in the United States. TikTok has been.... Its parent company, which is based in Beijing, has nine months to sell it. And so by any realistic standard, it'll be about a year before TikTok would do any disappearing. And then of course, obviously you can ban software. But that's not a easy thing to enforce. It would get taken down off of like the Google Play Store and the Apple Store and stuff like that, but people who had it still would have it. And then it would get buggier and buggier or in sh*ttier and sh*ttier as updates are unable to go out, unless people use VPNs to get from another country, etc, etc.**Margaret** 47:02There's ways around it? What? [Sarcastically]**Margaret** 47:06I know. It's also completely possible that since every one involved is a capitalist, they're probably like, "Alright, well, we'll sell the f*cking thing. Like, who cares?" You know? That's like my guess. I don't know, I could be wrong about that. I would be surprised if TikTok ends up going away because of this. However, the actual thing that I think ties into this is there is a bipartisan bill that people are working on, called Kids Off Social Media Act, which wants to say that kids under 13 should not be on social media, and pass all kinds of like things about how like algorithms can't focus on anyone 17 and under. And just like lots of like, "social media is bad for kids." And now I think social media is probably bad for everyone. However, to me.... I haven't given us a lot of thought. It seems like a basic free speech issue. And also, like, old people fighting the future and screaming at clouds kind of moment. And the idea of banning TikTok, I'm like.... Okay, I'm not accelerationist. I don't think things should get worse before they get better. But the idea of some f*cking 80 year old liches in Congress being like, "I don't like the tocks ticking around like that." And then like, it's like, incredibly popular. I think about half of Americans have a TikTok account. Like, telling half of Americans they can't do a thing sounds like a way to get people really mad. And I know I get really excited by the idea of like.... They have their bipartisan tyranny, and there's this idea that maybe one day we'll get over this f*cking culture war and we can fight back in the class war that is waged against us. And like, if TikTok is the thing that brings it, I'm fear for it. I'm too old for TikTok. I have an account. I don't know how to use it. I've never uploaded a video. TikTok doesn't need me. But like, whatever anyway. But actually, I'm kind of curious, not having a child, Me--I'm the one without a child--Brooke, do you have thoughts on this no social media for the kids thing? Like am I...am I totally off base? Is it just protecting.... Like, I don't know. What's up?**Brooke** 49:28I mean I get where they're coming from with it, and all the research that's shown how negative social media is for--I mean, they've done particular studies for kids and how it affects them--but turns out it's actually bad for all human beings, the way social media has come for us and the atmosphere is it creates. So, I get where they're coming from with it. As a very involved parent, you know, my solution is always to pay attention to and engage with your children, which is not a reasonable thing for all people to have as much engagement as it would take really to have healthy social media interactions. But then, you know, the anarchist side of me says, "No, you don't get to ban things ever."**Margaret** 50:18Well and also like, I don't know, a lot of people are rumbling about how TikTok is why a new generation of people supports Palestine and doesn't buy into the myths about the Zionist project being a thing that represents all Jews, for example, right? And then anti-capitalism is spreading and being pro capitalism is 100% bipartisan for the ghouls who feed off of the youth and somehow live too long. This is the most ageist sh*t I'm ever going to say. Some people are capable of performing their jobs well into their later years and gain wisdom. The people who run this country are nightmare men.**Brooke** 51:00I feel like it's, you know, the same kind of things they've said about all new technologies that have come out over the last,, you know, whatever, 30 years.**Margaret** 51:09And like the only person who said this stuff, and was right, was a little man who had some bad strategic and ethical ideas, but wrote that "industrial society and its future have been a disaster for the human race." At least be consistent.**Inmn** 51:31I was researching this for another episode once, and I didn't end up talking about it because it was hard to learn too much about, but some of the lawmakers have specifically cited youth information spreading about Palestine as a reason for the TikTok ban. It's like a specifically listed reason from lawmakers. And the other thing about the Kids Online Safety, whatever it's called, is it's heralded as a way to protect children from p*rnography and from the proliferation of child p*rnography, which is the thing that lawmakers say all the time, and pretty much all these human rights organizations who are, you know, much more aptly trying to protect children from sh*t are like, "This is most asinine bullsh*t we've ever heard this. This bill is utterly absurd." And it has other implications, which are that it's trying to herald in this idea that you could no longer be like anonymous on the internet, and that the government has a lot more to...has a lot more agency to track your goings on on the internet. So it would.... It's like the bill would require you to essentially show a driver's license in order to engage with a lot of things on the internet, which I think is just trying to...I think it's capitalists' attempt to really make a thing like the internet something that is like more of a interacting with the government process and less a whatever the internet is, you know.**Margaret** 53:24That makes sense to me. and yeah,**Inmn** 53:26And it kind of falls in line with the our futuristic hellscape of like the "One app," for example. Like, you gotta scan your f*cking fingerprint to log into Instagram or do anything on the internet.**Margaret** 53:43It's funny because sometimes they use a VPN just as a basic practice and sometimes I use a VPN that's set in Europe. And when you browse the internet as a European, every site you go to is like, "Hey, do you want us to track you?" And you're like, "No." And it's like, "Okay, fine." Because the EU has some good internet laws, you know? About restricting the tyranny part of it instead of the like.... Whatever. Okay, I'm gonna do my vaguely positive news at the end. Y'all ready?**Inmn** 54:18Yeah, what's good?**Margaret** 54:21People are sleeping more than average than before.**Inmn** 54:25Yay. I'm not. But good for them.**Margaret** 54:2825 minutes more on average for the same people--not like the same individuals, right. Because how often you sleep is dependent on how old you are and also very heavily dependent about whether you have children. But people are sleeping about 25 minutes more on average than they were in 2002. And the best guess is that it started picking up a lot recently because of remote work and a lower percentage of people commuting. The biggest cool thing, the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, has banned non-compete agreements. 30 million people have been freed from non-compete clauses.**Brooke** 55:07Oh, nice.**Margaret** 55:11The EPA is banning most use of methyl chloride, which is a paint stripper that has killed like 88 people or something in the past couple of years and it's just bad. The EPA is actually, for the first time in a while, starting to get like...they're trying to stop forever chemicals. And there's like some sh*t that they're actually trying to do, right? They also--do you want to guess when asbestos was finally banned in the United States?**Margaret** 55:39It was late. It was like the 90s.**Inmn** 55:41Was it last week?**Margaret** 55:45March 2024.**Brooke** 55:47Oh, sh*t.**Inmn** 55:50I was right, sort of.**Margaret** 55:52Yeah, Inmn was closest. There's about six types of asbestos and one of them had been sort of.... Enough people, enough industries had been like, "But we want to use it." And so for the past 33 years, this particular type, people have been trying to ban. Because the 90s is an accurate assessment of when I think most of the others got--I don't know, I'm making that part of it up--all I know is that for 33 years, they've been trying to ban this f*cking asbestos and they finally succeeded in March of this year. Also, the FDA did an emergency approval of pre-exposure prophylaxis for COVID called Pemivibart, which is a dumb name because it rhymes with farts. And nothing should rhyme with fart if it's a drug. And it is for the immunocompromised. So you would take this before, you know, if you're going into a situation where you're worried about getting COVID. And it's an emergency approval like the original vaccines were so it's not through all of testing, but it's important enough that they feel like it's safe enough. Also, recently passed phase three trials is a vaccine to pretend prevent UTIs, or urinary tract infections, which is the kind of thing that I never would have occurred to me you could run it against because it's usually, I believe, bacterial infections. But it's a really common problem. And that's cool if we can f*cking solve it.**Brooke** 57:22And some people are super prone to them just based on, you know, bodily health or genetics or whatever. Like it's a thing. They have ongoing, chronic UTI kind of thing. So f*ck yeah.**Margaret** 57:37It's kind of like when they finally got an HPV vaccine through and it was just like, oh my god, this is actually pretty f*cking game changing, you know? I wish they would give it to f*cking assigned male people. But yeah.**Brooke** 57:47And then conservative Christian types that were like, "Oh, we don't think that our children should have to have this vaccine."**Inmn** 57:54Any kind of person can get the HPV vaccine.**Margaret** 57:57Oh, interesting. Good to know.**Inmn** 58:00Yeah, it's a different vaccine, I think. But anybodied person can get it.**Margaret** 58:07That's good to know. And hopefully, next time, we'll have different news about King Charles III and cancer. But who knows? But that's This Month in the Apocalypse, which you have now listened to, or participated in if you are named Brooke or Inmn or Margaret. Unless your named Brooke, Inmn, or Margaret and you're not on the podcast, in which case you didn't participate in it. You just heard it. And then probably have a different kind of parasocial relationship with us if you share our names, especially if you're Inmn. Like, there's not a ton of you. And like, Inmn's pretty cool. So do you have like a different.... Please write in, Inmn's in the audience. Pretend to be our Inmn and we'll read a prepared script from you next time as if you're our Inmn. This is not true. I'm lying.**Margaret** 59:08But what I'm not lying about is that if you want to support this podcast, you can do so by supporting our publisher, which is Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. And you can do that by going to patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. And if you do, we put up zine and podcasts. We do a lot of f*cking stuff. We are your source for all of your anarchy culture. And another way you can support us this week of all weeks, if you are listening to this during May Day week, like the first week of May in 2024. Although if you listen to it in a different May Day week. It'll probably be true again. We are doing a 50% sale off of everything on our website. And that includes stuff that's really expensive, like the hardcover of Penumbra City, which is a $50 book, but now it's only $25 book. And you use the code MAYDAY24 at checkout and get 50% off because we f*cking love May Day and we care more about our stuff getting out there than anything else about it. And if you support us on Patreon, we might even shout you out like we're going to shout out allium and Amber, Ephemoral, Appalachian Liberation Library, Portland's Hedron Hackerspace, Boldfield, E, Patoli, Eric, Buck ,Julia, Catgut, Marm, Carson, Lord Harken, Trixter, Princess Miranda, BenBen, anonymous, Janice & O'dell, Aly, paparouna, Milica, Boise Mutual Aid, theo, Hunter, S. J., Paige. Nicole, David, Dana, Chelsea, Staro, Jenipher, Kirk, Chris, Micaiah, King Charles III--What?! And Hoss the Dog.Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

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  1:01:16

• S1E114 - Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage

  Episode SummaryThis week on Live Like the World is Dying, Colin and Brooke talk about flooding, water damage, and how to avoid having your home damaged by those things. Guest InfoColin (he/him) is a carpenter, industrial electrician, and backpacker.Host InfoBrooke can be found on Twitter or Mastodon @ogemakweBrooke.Publisher InfoThis show is published by Strangers in A Tangled Wilderness. We can be found at www.tangledwilderness.org, or on Twitter @TangledWild and Instagram @Tangled_Wilderness. You can support the show on Patreon at www.patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness.TranscriptLive Like the World is Dying: Colin on Flood Plains and Water Damage**Brooke ** 00:15Hello and welcome to Live Like the World is Dying, your podcast for what feels like the end times. I'm Brooke Jackson, your host for this episode. And today our friend Colin is joining us again, this time to talk about flooding and dealing with water damage. But first we'd like to celebrate being a member of the Channel Zero Network of anarchist podcasts by playing a little jingle from one of the other podcasts on the network. Doo doo jingo here!**Brooke ** 01:40And we're back. Colin, thank you for joining us again today. And this time to talk about dealing with floods and water damage. Would you remind your pronouns, where you hail from if you want, and a bit about your background?**Colin ** 01:52Yeah, my name is Colin, he him. I'm from Pittsburgh. And I've been a contractor sort of on and off for the last about 20 years, as well as working in the power plants and industrial electricity, and sort of in and around industry for about the second half of my life. And, yeah, it's, I'm glad to talk about floods, because it's one of those things we're seeing more and more. And unfortunately, it's probably going to happen to pretty much everybody who's listening to this podcast at some point in their life in one form or another.**Brooke ** 02:27Yeah. And we've talked about flooding on the podcast before. I don't know that we've ever done a whole episode on it by any means. But it has definitely come up as we've talked about news and other major events. And you and I even talked about it when we did our first episode, a little bit. So I think it's—itll be good to dig into, you know, a nice reminder of what to do and not to do in a flood. And then also, I don't think we've ever talked much about flood recovery. So I'm excited to learn and teach more about that today. I wanted to share one of my own stories about flooding, if you don't mind me kicking off with that before we get into all the do's and don'ts and how tos.**Colin ** 03:12Yeah go for it.**Brooke ** 03:13Okay, cool.**Colin ** 03:14Everybody's got one of those stories.**Brooke ** 03:16Seems like it. Well, when I was growing up in the 90s, there was a major flooding event where I live. My hometown. It was built around a river, which of course is true of most older cities, right, because access to fresh water is critical for survival. And then there are also a lot of creeks that run through my town and feed into the river. And I live in the Pacific Northwest and it rains a whole lot here. So we're kind of accustomed to having occasional sudden and heavy downpours and the possibility of some rainwater pooling or briefly flooding. It's not uncommon. But this particular event when I was a teenager was something else. It was a really complicated set of weather events that led to it. But the important part is that, so the creeks that are all over town are overflowing. And then the river, it doubled its level on the first day of the heavy rains. And then within the next two days had crashed at its banks, and then for three days after that remained at flood levels. So the city's downtown area, for instance, it's fairly flat, it's right along the river, and most of the homes there have basem*nts. So in addition to streets flooding, the basem*nts flooded, filled with water. There were houses that got washed off their foundations, of course cars got washed away. And then even in other parts of town where there wasn't, you know they were more on the hills or what have you, there was so much water in the ground that it caused foundational issues to a lot of houses because the pressure of the water pushing on home foundations are running around it. And there had been an ice event right before the rain started that had caused his damage to a lot of pipes. So there were pipes that were bursting and breaking because they'd been weakened or already had broken because of the ice storm. And it led to all this flooding. And it's interesting as I've grown up in the town and come back to it as adult, that the damage of this event, the way it's imprinted itself on the psyche of the city, even my mom, when she comes back to visit will drive around, she'll go, oh, you know, such and such creek looks a little high today. You know, this creek is, you know, she always looks around at all the creeks to see where the waters levels are kind of this caution about how high is the water. Like, are we in danger of having some kind of event again. And anyone that lived here, you know, had or knew someone that had some kind of really severe damage or loss because of that flood. So that's really imprinted into my psyche because, of course, I was still a young person at the time this happened. And it's really impactful to me. So when we talk about flooding, it's like, oh, yeah, that was one of the major traumatic events of my youth, at least collectively in my society or my, you know, my town.**Colin ** 06:13Yeah, that's actually a really common situation you describe, of having an ice event or cold weather and then a warm front comes through, drops several inches of rain onto frozen ground, there's nowhere for it to go, and it just goes straight into rivers. Like you're seeing that more and more and that's actually exactly what I was gonna open with is that, with climate change, even if you're not living in someplace like Charleston, or Miami, or one of the other low lying areas that everybody knows is at risk for flooding either from rising ocean levels or because you're in a major floodplain. Just having these wild swings in temperature and rainfall makes flooding a much bigger issue. It's like living in Pittsburgh, it seems like we don't get mild old rains anymore, we either get four inches right now, or nothing. So it's not the, like, nice, gentle soaking rains that I remember from being a kid, it's like everything comes in a burst. And when that happens, dry ground does not soak up water nearly as well as slightly damp ground. So dropping lots of rain onto parched ground, you end up with lots of run off, and even though it's very, very dry, you end up with massive flooding.**Brooke ** 07:35Yeah, one of our cohosts and one of the collective members was—we were talking about it and she was describing, like, if you go to water your garden and you haven't watered your garden in a while, and like the first water that you put on, it kind of rolls off. It takes it a minute to actually, like, settle and sink in, and then it's easier to water the ground. And it's the same kind of thing with these flooding events which I, you know, had never thought about but can picture in my mind how that, oh yeah, how that happens, how that works. So it's, you know, we're at risk of flooding for so many different reasons than ever we were before because of super dryness or, you know, I feel like we've seen more atmospheric rivers in the news as well. Maybe I'm just paying more attention, but that seems to becoming more common too.**Colin ** 08:26Yeah, and with the big events, like, there is a definite limit on how much you can really do to prepare yourself short of just moving to someplace where these things don't happen, you know. Somebody told me, water always wins.**Brooke ** 08:44Ah!**Colin ** 08:45You're not going to beat it. It's heavy, it's powerful, and if it wants to come into your house, you're gonna have a really hard time stopping it.**Brooke ** 08:56Okay.**Colin ** 08:57You know, you can fight back against the inch or two, but if nine feet of water comes knocking at your front door, you're not gonna win.**Brooke ** 09:06Sure, but surely there are some things that we could do that would, you know, maybe help prevent the smaller amounts of water or help make it less bad, yeah?**Colin ** 09:16Oh, yeah, definitely. And especially if you're in one of the areas like sounds like you are, or like I am in Pittsburgh, where there's enough terrain that I'm not worried about a flood filling up the valley nine feet deep, because if that happens, you know, we have bigger problems. The issue is more, you know, an inch or two of water flowing along the surface running down the street, coming across the yard and down to the basem*nt steps. Like that kind of stuff you can defend against, and it's really not that hard to do. But it takes a lot of preparation and, particularly if you're in an area where this has simply never happened before, it's very easy for that to catch everyone off guard. Sounds like that's the situation with the floods you described was this was what used to be a what they call, you know, a 100 year storm.**Brooke ** 10:07Uh huh, uh huh!**Colin ** 10:09Now the 100 year storms are happening every six months or so.**Brooke ** 10:13Yeah, well, we haven't, you know, had another one quite like that since the 90s. But also, I know that a lot of, you know, houses and whatnot are much better setup for it, you know. For instance, the downtown houses that got basem*nts flooded so badly, a lot of them—I want to say all of them, but that might not be true—had sump pumps installed after that. And, you know, I would hope that many of those houses have done a good job of maintaining those pumps. Which, you know, I think probably wouldn't prevent the kind of flooding from the storm that we had back in the 90s, but would certainly help, you know, mitigate a smaller storm or recover from it more quickly. Whereas they didn't have them before that that wasn't a common thing.**Colin ** 11:04Right, and it doesn't really take very much water in a basem*nt to cause major problems. You don't need three feet of standing water in your basem*nt to ruin your day. Just an inch or two is enough to really mess things up, especially if it happens to an entire town and everyone is dealing with it at the same time. The disaster recovery services that're around to help out when that happens to one or two people can't handle it when it's suddenly 5000 people that all have the exact same problem. There's just not the capacity and you're going to be more or less on your own to at least get through, you know, a few days to a week before they can get around to helping you out. Again, with the idea of triage, like just trying to buy yourself a little bit of time before all the services come back online.**Brooke ** 11:53My former husband worked for drain plumbing company that went around and did a lot of those installations of sump pumps and it was, like, a couple of years he worked for them and that was basically what he did. And it took, yeah, that long to get them installed in that many houses. It was a long—and that wasn't even just the recovery from the flood, but that was helping, you know, prevent it with things in the in the future. But yeah, a very long time. For sure.**Colin ** 12:28Yeah, so just to kind of dive right into it.**Brooke ** 12:30Yes please!**Colin ** 12:31The first step in trying to prepare yourself a little bit better than you are is to just walk around the house and take a quick assessment of sort of where and how water can get in. Four big ones: the obvious one is rain. Things like, make sure your roof is intact, make sure your gutters work.**Brooke ** 12:55Windows? Doors?**Colin ** 12:55Windows, doors, but they're usually fine. Water hits those and runs off, and if water is trying to come in your door, you're already—it's already too late. Then surface water this is things like grading around the house to make sure that the water doesn't get too close, and any water that does get close goes away. After that is below grade water, so this is, you know, what you're talking about, where the ground was so saturated the pressure of the water in the ground pushing against foundations damaged the foundations. And then you also mentioned the last one which is one that gets overlooked which is burst pipes. You have water in your house all the time, it's just normally it stays inside the pipes where it belongs, until those pipes freeze, and then it ends up places that you really don't want it.**Brooke ** 13:44Yeah. Can the pipes break from flooding, like that water pressure that damaged foundations, I imagine that could also damage then piping—pipe systems.**Colin ** 13:59Yes. When the ground gets soft and has more flexibility in it—usually not just the water in the ground itself, but because the ground is softer—if you live in an area that has lots of hills, you end up with a higher risk of landslides and things shifting and that will definitely break water mains.**Brooke ** 14:17Okay.**Colin ** 14:17That happens a lot in California.**Brooke ** 14:20Okay.**Colin ** 14:20Where you get—you get heavy rain combined with landslide and now you have additional, either just people not having water because the mains are broken, or you have the mains flooding a section of a town because there's spewing water out.**Brooke ** 14:35Yeah, it's not just the dirt that moved, it's all the sh*t that's in the dirt, like the pipes! [Laughing]**Colin ** 14:43And that's another thing complicating factor with floods is that usually flooding is not a disaster that happens by itself. It comes with loss of electricity, loss of water, loss of gas, because all these things are buried in the ground.**Brooke ** 14:58Yeah. Okay, now, you must and floods and we have said this several times on this podcast and we'll say it many more: don't go into the water. If it's flooding, stay out of the floodwater.**Brooke ** 15:09I'm glad to hear that your puppy is joining us again on this episode.**Colin ** 15:09Yes, that was my very first point before we even got into talking about any of the, you know, how to deal with things like rain surface water is, like I said before, you know, when you're in a disaster, there's always a way that you can make it worse. So don't don't get sick and don't get hurt. Floodwater is full of mud, trash, sewage. It's usually cloudy and turbid, so you can't see what's down there. The risk of you stepping on something or kicking something is really high. So just don't go into it if you don't have to. And if you have to wear rubber gloves, wear boots, try to keep it off your skin as much as you possibly can. Most people probably have some kind of rubber boots in their home, I would hope. If you don't, they're cheap, I'd recommend keeping a pair around. The one thing that people probably don't think about is rubber gloves—even dishwashing gloves are fine for keeping the water away from your skin, but they're not very sturdy. So if you're doing work in floodwater, put on rubber gloves, and then put on some kind of regular work glove overtop of that to protect the rubber, and make sure that barrier stays intact. Just the inexpensive knit work gloves from like Harbor Freight or something like that, that are $1 a piece. It's all you need. All you're trying to do is keep that robber from getting cut by sharp things in the water when you're handling them. [Dog barking]**Colin ** 16:40Yes. There's somebody outside that doesn't belong there, clearly. It's probably the mailman**Brooke ** 16:46That's all right. We are dog friendly on this podcast.**Colin ** 16:51Okay, so, rain is probably the easiest one to keep out of the house. It's the one that everybody is aware is a problem because you see on a fairly regular basis. And for the most part, it's not that hard. You know, it's, make sure that there's no holes in your roof, make sure your gutters actually drain the way they're supposed to and don't get clogged. And the one part that people occasionally overlook is: make sure that your downspouts discharge far enough away from the house. You're not pumping water back in against the foundation.**Brooke ** 17:23Yes,**Colin ** 17:25I work in houses all the time, I see the downspout that comes straight down off the roof and dumps on to the ground six inches away from the wall. And just like, that's just going to end up straight in the basem*nt. So.**Colin ** 17:37Yeah.**Colin ** 17:38This is something—a lot of the things I'm gonna talk about, you really kind of need to be the homeowner to do, but moving downspout discharge further away from the walls, even if you're gonna rental, that's something you can do. Get a piece of plastic pipe, anything to just move it as far from the house as you possibly can.**Brooke ** 17:56Yeah. That's a cheap, that's a cheap and fairly quick fix that can make a world of difference. And even if you don't have a basem*nt, just the water pouring into the foundation at one consistent spot over and over and over again can, you know, damage that part of it and cause a much bigger problem.**Colin ** 18:17And the biggest one, if you are the homeowner, is take a look at the grading around your house. This is something that, at least in the area that I am, I would say 75–90% of the houses that I see have inadequate drainage. You're supposed to have ideally 10 inches of fall in the first 10 feet away from the house. Six inches is the bare minimum, but 10 is a lot better. In most cases I see no fall at all, or even the yard slipping back in towards the house. When you have that means that any water that lands in the yard is gonna try to come into the house. It doesn't take a whole lot of elevation change to really dry out a basem*nt.**Brooke ** 19:08So those who aren't construction nerds like the two of us, when when Colin's talking about grading here he's talking about the incline or decline, the direction that the ground is going towards the house, away from the house. That's what "grading" means. Just in case somebody needs that.**Colin ** 19:24Yes, you are 100% correct. This is a thing that is—it's labor intensive, but it's actually fairly cheap. I don't know what dirt costs on average across the country, but where I am it's around $50 per ton for just—you don't need topsoil, it doesn't need to be good quality. It just needs to be dirt, and does not require any skill at all. If you can wield a shovel, you can fix the grading around your house.**Brooke ** 19:58How would they check the grading, Colin?**Colin ** 19:59For that you need a level—it can tell you, you know, when something is level. If you own a cell phone, you already have one, because cell phones have accelerometers in them that can tell the phone which position it's in. That's how it knows how to change your screen from one orientation to the other when you move the phone. So there—are there are apps that are just a visualization of a physical bubble level. All it's doing is telling you, you know, how tilted is the phone? They're not the most accurate thing in the world, but for grading dirt, we're not going for high precision, you just need to know more or less where level is.**Brooke ** 20:37Yeah, okay. All right. So you mentioned like buying dirt. So if people have a spot in the yard that's higher than the where the foundation is, are you—are you saying they should put dirt between the high spot in the house to make it level? Or go the other way? Are there other ways to solve it? Sorry to get so pedantic.**Colin ** 20:58No, no, it's a very good question. And that's why the rule of like, you know, 10 inches in the first 10 feet or 6 inches in the first 10 feet, if you can't manage that, is a rule of thumb. But you kind of have to look at your yard. And unless you have a perfectly flat manicured yard, you've got humps here and there and some parts are higher than the other. Having one or two high spots near the house, not really a big deal, as long as the water is generally going to go away from the house. And this is one of those things that you kind of just have to look at it and eyeball where downhill is. If nothing else, you know, you can take a five gallon bucket of water, dump it on the ground, and see where it goes. If it heads towards the house, hat's bad. If it heads parallel to the house and kind of away from the house, that's probably fine.**Brooke ** 21:53Yeah. Okay, so solution might be taking away dirt. You might buy dirt to regrade, or you might need to dig out some dirt and haul it some place.**Colin ** 22:03You can have a very, you know, lumpy yard, you can move dirt around. Really what you want is just to pay attention to that 10 feet immediately around the house. And make sure that's as high as you can possibly get it. If you can't get it high enough, there are other options like French drains and building drainage swales and berms. Those get more complicated. They're still well within the capability of the average homeowner, but you kind of need to see a demonstration of it. So that's what YouTube is for.**Brooke ** 22:36Got it. Okay, sorry to spend so much time on that.**Colin ** 22:38Those are fantastic questions. I can go on and on about drainage swales for the rest of the hour, but—**Brooke ** 22:43[Laughing] Yeah, how about we not. Now tell me about some other ways to keep the water out.**Colin ** 22:52Okay, so the one that everybody knows about and has seen and news and movies are sandbags. And they're okay in some situations. But the problem with them is that sandbags leak.**Brooke ** 23:09Yeah.**Colin ** 23:10So no matter how good your sandbag wall is, it's not going to stop the water, it's just going to slow it down. And once the water is on the wrong side of your wall, now you have to get it back out. And that means using a pump of some kind. And as we've already said, if you're in a flooding situation, there's a good chance that you're going to lose power. So relying on any kind of active pump to keep your house and your basem*nt dry is not ideal. So your comment about people having sump pumps in their basem*nt, that's fantastic for average storms and normal amounts of rainfall where you just have a trickle of water coming into the basem*nt and nothing is really going that wrong. But when you get to the point where, you have, water sheeting across the ground several inches deep, lots of water coming into the house, most sump pumps aren't going to be able to keep up with that in the first place. And even if they are, the risk of you losing power at some point and now you have water in the basem*nt is too high. So that's why I'd normally recommend, if you can do it, do it with grading, do it with dirt. Keep the water from ever getting close enough to the house to be a problem. Don't rely on being able to block it with things like sandbags.**Brooke ** 24:30Yeah, okay. That makes a lot of sense. So should people not use sandbags or just...?**Colin ** 24:37Oh, no, they're fantastic when you have, you know, things like hurricanes where you have a lot of water coming in a hurry, and you're just trying to keep the entire house from going underwater. Or if you have an area where you have water sheeting across the yard towards the house and overall your drainage is fine, ou just need to deflect the a little bit. So you can build temporary wall of sandbags just to kind of get the water pointed in a better direction. Relying on them to actually totally barricade the house is not going to work.**Brooke ** 25:12Make sense? So this there's some limitations.**Colin ** 25:14Yeah, the last one that almost nobody thinks about is what's called backflow prevention. And this refers to the sewer line that, ideally, you want your poo to go into the sewer and away from the house and not come back.**Brooke ** 25:34Always.**Colin ** 25:35When the poop comes back, you're gonna have a bad day.**Brooke ** 25:40I want that on a sweatshirt now. Whoever's listening, somebody make us a sweatshirt design—a tshirt or something with that. I want that. When the poo comes back, you're gonna have a bad day. Okay.**Colin ** 25:54This is something that, if you live in an area, if you're in a floodplain, if you have a high water table, where there's a risk that the sewer system is going to flood at the same time as the ground floods, look into this. It's a very complicated topic, and I am definitely not qualified to talk about it. This is the thing that, you know, you need a PhD to understand the exact, you know, flow of everything. The poo flow It's very complicated. It's not that expensive, but beyond what a homeowner can do by themselves.**Brooke ** 26:31Do homeschool you have some kind of backflow prevention, or is that not common?**Colin ** 26:35It depends. If your house is older than I'm gonna say 50 years old, it's very, very unlikely that you have it if you haven't installed it yourself. In Pittsburgh where I am, we have what's called a combined flow sewer system. Which means the sanitary sewer from your toilet and the storm sewer from the drains in the street all go into the same set of pipes.**Brooke ** 27:04Okay, yes, so do mine.**Colin ** 27:05Yeah, it's, again, not uncommon in older systems. But it means that every time you get heavy rainfall, all that water has to go into the sewers, and it overloads them. So in Pittsburgh, every time we get more than about a half inch of rain, we just end up with sewage flowing straight into the rivers and they put out an alert, you know, don't go into the rivers for a couple days until everything has a chance to clear out. But when you do that, it also means that the risk that you're going to overflow the sewer and cause backflow into houses that are lower down on the sewer system goes up. So if you happen to be one of those houses, look into getting a backflow valve installed on the sewer where it leaves the house so that the poo stays on the correct side.**Colin ** 27:52So once the water gets in, the first thing to know is you're probably not going to get it back out by hand. I have occasionally seen advertisem*nts for the little tiny, like, siphon hand pumps at Home Depot, the other big box stores, advertising: you can use this to pump out your basem*nt. No. Just no.**Brooke ** 27:52Yeah, geez louise. The sh*t we do to our rivers. [Laughing] Alright, so keeping the water out, check. We've got some methods for that. Okay, what about after the water gets in.**Brooke ** 28:29Why not?**Colin ** 28:31Water weighs—I'm gonna say 64 pounds per cubic foot.**Brooke ** 28:377 pounds a gallon, roughly.**Colin ** 28:37Yeah, 7 pounds a gallon. And if you have even a small house, say like 20 by 30, and you got a foot of water in your basem*nt, that's something like 19 tons of water—**Brooke ** 28:38Oh my gosh, wow.**Colin ** 28:50—that you have to lift up 6 or 8 feet to get it high enough that it's above ground, and then move it out of the house.**Brooke ** 29:03Okay.**Colin ** 29:04You're not doing that by hand. There are—there are really big pumps that are designed for places where there's no power and you have to get water out of mines and things like that. They work very well. They're also I want to say between $5,000 and $10,000.**Brooke ** 29:20Oh my gosh.**Colin ** 29:21So you're...**Colin ** 29:24Not practical. So sump pumps: fantastic as long as you have electricity, but if you don't have electricity, you're gonna be in trouble. You're probably going to have to wait until the water level goes down and it's able to drain back out on its own. So you're not gonna be cleaning up 3 feet of water in the basem*nt. You're going to be dealing with the last inch or two that doesn't make it over to the drains and out of the house on its own. So for that your two best weapons are honestly a good old fashioned floor squeegee, and a wet/dry vacuum with what's called a dust separator. It looks kind of like a 5 gallon bucket with a cone on top of it. And it works by pulling the air into the cone and spinning it like a cyclone. So all the water gets flung to the outside, the air goes up the center and the water falls down into the bucket. The advantage of those is you can work kind of like a bucket brigade, because it's just a lid that goes on top of a five gallon bucket and that way your shop vac never fills up.**Brooke ** 29:24Not practical.**Brooke ** 30:40Oh! I was just picturing using my shop vac for this because I know it can do water. And then it's like, oh yeah, and then we're talking about the weight of water just now. I have to stop, unclick the lid, you know, take it out or hand it out or whatever, wait for them to go dump it, bring it back in, put the lid back on. So, but man, something that attaches to a 5 gallon bucket which is like such a common thing to have around. That's awesome.**Colin ** 31:02The first time I saw one of those it was revelation. I was like, oh my god, I need one of these. And then, yeah, it means you have, you know, one person vacuuming, filling buckets, and the other person running them outside and dumping them. It dramatically speeds up the process. And they're—I wanna say they're between $20 and $50 depending on where you get them and what the exact design is. You don't need anything super high quality, all you need is a way to separate the water and the air so that you can get the water back out of the house as quickly as possible. And then the floors for squeegee can move a lot of water in a hurry, assuming you have a working for drain. And also really good for getting mud moved around because it kind of scrapes the floor as it goes. Again, that's the thing that is not very expensive.**Brooke ** 31:51Yeah. Cool. I was just just—for price purposes, I just quickly looked on like Amazon for—and it looks like the— no sorry, not the squeegees, but the cyclone dust thing is maybe starting about 50 bucks and going up from there.**Colin ** 32:06Okay, they've gone up a little bit since I bought mine.**Brooke ** 32:07Yeah.**Colin ** 32:08It was a few years ago.**Brooke ** 32:09Yeah, if you're doing some community emergency preparedness, and if you work with friends or whatever to collect and have some of these tools—I'm trying to do more of that in my own life so that we don't all own every single tool you might need. Might be a good one to go in on together and, you know, somebody stores or keeps track of it or whatever.**Colin ** 32:30Yeah, definitely. And a lot of the preparation for construction-related disasters is tool and equipment heavy. And there's no reason for everybody in your social circle to have duplicates of all the tools, because you're also going to need lots of hands helping out. So as long as one person has the tool that you need, everybody has access to it.**Brooke ** 32:56Okay, awesome. I'm just adding one of those to my wish list now to look at some more later. Okay, so that's some of the ways we get the water out of that. And I assume that, like, if you're in a basem*nt, and you've got stuff in your basem*nt, you probably want to like get your sh*t out of the basem*nt and then start attacking the water, right? Like get your belongings to dry ground before you do that, or, you tell me.**Colin ** 33:24Um. It depends on sort of, you know, do you have a place to put all of your belongings or are you going to need to move them out into the front yard once the rain stops? So it's kind of a judgment call as to whether you can deal with water first or get your belongings out of the house first. It's whatever you have time and space and energy to do. As long as you are making progress on one of the fronts, it's all going to have to happen at some point in the next, you know, 24 to 48 hours. The exact order that things happen doesn't matter all that much.**Brooke ** 34:03Nobody's sleeping for a little while after the disaster, and that's okay.**Colin ** 34:06Yes.**Brooke ** 34:06I mean, it sucks, but.**Colin ** 34:10So yeah, that is the next point is dealing with all your belongings. And step one is just separate the wet and dry things. Anything that has managed to avoid the water, get it out of the basem*nt and get it out of that damp room as fast as you possibly can. Because once things get wet, your next big issue is going to be mold. Even if you have things sitting in the basem*nt that didn't get wet with the floodwater, they're now in a damp space that has been contaminated with all sorts of wonderful biological material for mold to grow in, and basem*nts tend not to be the best ventilated places in the house.**Brooke ** 34:53Yeah.**Colin ** 34:54And your mold spores are everywhere all the time. You can't avoid them. All you can do is try to make a environment that mold does not like to grow in. And once the house has been flooded, mold becomes very, very, very happy.**Brooke ** 35:09Okay. Yeah, a lot of moisture.**Colin ** 35:12So get everything out of the basem*nt, dry things can go upstairs, wet things need to be moved someplace away from the dry things so that they don't contaminate those as well. So if it's—ifyou have things that are totally soaked, furniture, carpet, things like that, they're not going to get any worse by just chucking them into the front yard. So you can put down a tarp to keep them out of the mud. But once they've been soaked, the damage has already been done, just get them out of the house, that's easier. Throw a tarp over it to, you know, keep the worst of the weather off. But your big concern is getting the space emptied out. And also, mold does not like UV radiation, and we have a great source of radiation outside in the form of the sun.**Brooke ** 36:04Hey!**Colin ** 36:04So just parking things out in bright light is going to help slow down that mold.**Brooke ** 36:08Yeah. And so even if you've got an apartment or what have you, you know, if you can put things out on a porch. If you've got things that are really soaked, you could take them into the bathroom and you can put things in the in the tub or the shower. And, just as the initial, like, letting some of that water run off, while you then go deal with other issues, or sending them in a sink—not for long term but, like, short term places to stick things if it's still raining outside and you've got wet stuff.**Colin ** 36:38Yeah, put them someplace where they can drain and start to dry out a little bit. Your most important thing is keep the airflow going. Because if you've got good airflow, that's going to slow down the growth of mold.**Brooke ** 36:52And even cold air flow, right? Like—**Colin ** 36:54Even cold air flow.**Brooke ** 36:55—blowing a fan even if it's, yeah, okay.**Brooke ** 36:57Okay, but what about if it was like brief flooding in your carpet—like this is not quite we're talking about, but if a pipe burst—a waterline burst in my basem*nt and gets everything wet? I get that turned off and dried back out.**Colin ** 36:57So once you have your belongings out, take a look at the walls and flooring. And pretty much anything that is wet and porous, like drywall or carpet pads., if it's wet and porous, it's probably trash. It's not in most cases worth salvaging carpet that has been totally saturated with floodwater because you're never going to get the mud and all the sewage back out of that carpet. Now you have your antique oriental rug, that can be salvaged. But just regular old wall to wall carpet and the padding behind it, it's going to be cheaper to replace that than it is to try to salvage it.**Colin ** 37:56Yeah, that is salvageable. For that you don't need to trash it. I was thinking more along the lines of, you know, muddy, sewage filled water in your basem*nt. But no, if you just have—if you have clean water on a carpet, as long as you can get it dried out before the mold starts, you'll be fine.**Brooke ** 38:13Okay.**Colin ** 38:13And again, this is where that shopvac and the dust separator really shine, because you can suck the water out of the carpet. And that means there's a whole lot less work for the fans and the dehumidifier to do to try to get that carpet dried back out before the mold starts.**Brooke ** 38:30Okay. So the type of water matters a lot. Like if you're basem*nt window, the seal breaks and you've got maybe your downspout water is going into the basem*nt. That might be salvageable, again, if you don't have mold and stuff, right?**Colin ** 38:45Right. If it's clean water and you can get it dried out, you're fine. But once it has been contaminated with groundwater, think long and hard about how important it is to salvage it. Because, again, once you have stuff like sewage and mud into the carpet and into the backing, the odds that you will develop mold problem later on if it gets wet again are significantly higher, because now you have all that food for the mold to grow on.**Brooke ** 39:14Yeah, and then that mold of course, you know, ongoing health issues can be caused, you know, mold sucks. But yeah, it's not just that mold sucks and it's gross and smelly. It's like literally bad for you.**Colin ** 39:31You're two best weapons, in addition to air and light, are honestly vinegar and borax. Both of which are available at pretty much any grocery store. They both work by the same mechanism but at opposite ends of the spectrum. Mold needs a certain pH to be able to grow. Believe it's between 4 and 8. But it can go as far as between like 3 and 9. And vinegar is just outside that range on the acidic end, and Borax is just outside it on the basic end.**Brooke ** 40:10So I should pour vinegar on my carpet,**Brooke ** 40:12Oh, okay.**Colin ** 40:12You can do that.**Colin ** 40:13Yeah, just use full strength vinegar, put it in a sprayer or, you know, slosh it around, you know, spread it out the squeegee. But if you—**Brooke ** 40:21Full strength do you mean the normal, like 5%, white vinegar at the store?**Colin ** 40:255%, yeah.**Brooke ** 40:25Okay, because you can buy, in case folks don't know this, 10%, 20%, 30% vinegar at department stores that works well as a weed killer.**Colin ** 40:35Yeah, that's actually what I keep around for cleaning because it takes up less space, and if you have the 30% vinegar, you just dilute it with water to get it back down to 5%. And now you have—**Brooke ** 40:45Just don't spill it on your skin.**Colin ** 40:47Yes.**Brooke ** 40:48I've done that.**Colin ** 40:49Coming back to the safety issue. You do not—like, even regular strength vinegar, I've used for cleaning walls in a basem*nt before and walked back into the room after I had a chance to off gas a little bit and walk right back out again because I couldn't breathe. Vinegar is pretty safe, but it's still an acid and your lungs don't like breathing it. So open the windows, wear gloves, keep it off your skin, and by all means keep it out of your eyes. Same is true for borax. As chemicals go, they're pretty safe, but you still don't want them in your eyes. Safety glasses, chemical goggles if you have them. Again, Harbor Freight, 2 bucks for a pair of inexpensive plastic goggles is all you need.**Brooke ** 41:39Hopefully at this point, a lot of us have respirators, you know, post COVID and protests and whatever. You probably don't need to go that hard, but you can, right?**Colin ** 41:51Correct.**Brooke ** 41:52Yeah.**Colin ** 41:53So it's just the full strength vinegar, the 5%, on anything that is going to take a long time to dry out or you don't have time to deal with. So if you have a pile of soggy bedding, and your washing machine doesn't work because you don't have power, just go ahead and dump vinegar all over that. Vinegar is fine for most fabrics. And as long as it's acidic, as long as the clothing is too acidic for mold to grow, it can sit there for a week and it'll be probably fine.**Brooke ** 42:26So you could like, put them in your sink, stopper it, and pour some vinegar over the top of the bedding or the clothes or whatever it is that you need to soak. Do they need to be like, do they just need to be damp with the vinegar, or do they need to like sit in vinegar?**Colin ** 42:40It depends on what you're trying to do. Vinegar will kill mold, but it takes a long time as chemical methods of killing mold goes. You figure, most people know, like, bleach will kill mold in a couple minutes. Full strength vinegar can take an hour or more depending on the surface. So if you're using it to disinfect a surface, it needs to stay on there for a long time. Usually with fabric if you just dunk it in vinegar and hang it up to dry, by the time the fabric is dry, the vinegar has been on there long enough that anything that was on there is now dead. So even if your clothes aren't clean, dunk it in vinegar, hang it up outside on a clothesline, let it dry, and the vinegar will keep any mold from developing in the time that it takes the clothing to dry.**Brooke ** 43:32If bleach is so much faster and more effective, why not use bleach to clean the walls, clean the carpets, all of that kind of stuff.**Colin ** 43:42You can do that. Bleach, as everybody knows, is a little more dangerous. Not good to get on your skin. Not good to breathe. And bleach bleaches things. So if you use chlorine bleach on your, you know, vintage clothing, you're going to be in the market for some new vintage clothing.**Brooke ** 44:05Yeah, okay.**Colin ** 44:06Vinegar is—if you read online, there are articles of clothing and fabric that you're not supposed to use vinegar on. But I can attest to the fact that you can get away with using it on pretty much anything, including—the friend of mine that I've mentioned, I think last time, that had the apartment fire was using vinegar to clean a lot of like vintage suede. And it wasn't happy about it, but it survived and it came through it.**Brooke ** 44:37So you can use bleach, it just comes with more caveats and dangers and you're less likely to maybe screw something up if you're using vinegar as your agent.**Colin ** 44:47Right.**Brooke ** 44:47It sounds—that's what I'm hearing, is that accurate?**Colin ** 44:49Bleach will definitely work. Vinegar is nice because almost everything, you can just dunk it in vinegar and let it dry and it's not going to do that much damage to it. I used it on furniture, leather clothing, silk, everything. Even things that you're like, oh this should be dry cleaned only. Eh, vinegar is generally okay. It's not gonna love it but it'll be fine.**Brooke ** 44:51[Laughing] Gotcha.**Colin ** 44:52Borax is, you know, you've probably seen it in your grandmother's basem*nt as a laundry booster. Borax is a—**Brooke ** 45:27White powder**Colin ** 45:28Yeah, white powder, sodium metaborate, I think? It's a caustic alkaline salt. So it has the advantage of being persistent where vinegar is not. So once the vinegar dries out, it's gone. Which is nice because your clothes will not smell like vinegar forever, you know, after a week or two, the smell totally goes away. Borax, it's like table salt. Once it dries out, you're left with a white powder on everything.**Colin ** 46:00Which is probably not what you want for all of your possessions because you don't want them covered and white powder. The advantage it has is that it does stay around. So if you are trying to get mold off of the walls and the joists in your basem*nt, if you spray them with borax, once the water dries that powder is still going to be there and it's still going to prevent mold from growing. So the borax, once you put it down, will continue working until you clean it up. Yeah, so if you have a basem*nt that has a major mold problem, just coat everything with borax, you can leave it on, there even when you put drywall and insulation everything back up, it's not going to hurt anything.**Brooke ** 46:00Okay.**Brooke ** 46:42Okay. You're wet clothing that's at risk of molding. Can you dust that with borax? Does that work?**Colin ** 46:47You can. That would work just fine if you happen to have borax not vinegar. So the vinegar I like just because it doesn't leave a residue on things. You can use it on everything. So when you have a giant pile of belongings, of some clothing, some furniture, or some antiques, just hose everything down with vinegar and sort it out later.**Brooke ** 47:08Yeah, I was imagining a circ*mstance where it's, you know, I can't get to the store, the store is out of things, and I have half a gallon of vinegar and half a jar of borax and, you know, Dollar Store tiny container of bleach and, you know, what can I use where and what can't I use where and how would I spread out what I have available?**Brooke ** 47:30Why not? Sounds like fun!**Colin ** 47:30You should not mix the vinegar and the bleach, that's the first thing. [Laughing]**Colin ** 47:35For some definition of the word fun, yeah. It's exciting. In general, don't mix anything with bleach because bleach is a sodium hypochlorite I believe is the chemical? There's different versions of it. But anyway, it contains chlorine. And when that chlorine breaks three of the things that are holding it to the rest of the molecule, you now have chlorine gas in your house, and that makes it really hard to breathe, and it's a good way to put yourself in the hospital. So if you're going to use bleach, do not use anything else. Vinegar and borax, they can actually be mixed. If you do that, the downside is that because vinegar is acidic, and borax is alkaline, you pull the pH a little bit closer to the center and it's not going to be as effective against mold. But then when the vinegar disappears and evaporates, the borax will still be there to help prevent the mold from coming back. So there's no harm in mixing them. And a lot of websites that talk about mold cleanup will actually recommend it because the Borax is persistent and the vinegar will generally be enough to kill them all quickly and the borax keeps it from coming back. But for the purposes of just trying to inhibit low growth immediately after the flooding event, either one is fine. You don't need to mix them to get the best effect and you'll be able to cover more of your possessions if you're not using both products on everything. So vinegar on some, borax and others, there's no reason to hit them double strength.**Brooke ** 49:18Right. Yeah, so I'm imagining, like, I might bleach spray the walls, dust some powdered borax on the carpet, soak the clothes and vinegar. Again, this is like, if I don't have enough of one thing or a couple things to do everything that needs to get done, you know, what benefits the most from each thing or how can I use each one individually most effectively. But yeah, very good, important thing about mixing chemicals. There's another one too I think ammonia and bleach you're not supposed to mix, it also has a bad chemical...? Yeah.**Colin ** 49:48Ammonia and bleach does the same thing. It's still—the chlorine is the ones gonna get you. Chlorine gas is nasty nasty stuff.**Brooke ** 49:54Seems like they use that at one point and like did bad things to people with it.**Colin ** 49:58Yeah, yeah, we don't like chlorine gas. It's not fun.**Brooke ** 50:01Yeah, I'm not a history person but boy, that sounds familiar.**Colin ** 50:04Speaking of gases, one of the things that people may see, as far as mold abatement goes, is the use of ozone.**Colin ** 50:12And I have used that. I actually have an ozone generator, and it does a fantastic job of getting rid of the, you know, the few mold spores that are in places where you can't get to them. But I will say, in general, for anybody listening to this, don't bother.**Brooke ** 50:12Oh, uh huh.**Colin ** 50:30Oh, okay.**Colin ** 50:30The ozone generators that you can afford are not going to be big enough and powerful enough to take care of like an entire room. And ozone is maybe not quite as bad as chlorine gas, but it is still a nasty toxic gas. And it can cause both you and your possessions serious harm. The reason it works is because it has—it's O3, so it has an extra oxygen atom or molecule—attached the molecule. That makes it very, very active, and it tries to oxidize everything that it comes in contact with. Which if it's coming in contact with mold that you want to kill, that's fantastic. If it's oxidizing all of the plastics and all of your synthetic fabrics and turning them into, you know, various nasty compounds like formaldehyde, that's not so good. And I've read horror stories about people getting, you know, small ozone generators off Amazon and saying, well, you know, this is not powerful enough to get the levels up high enough in an hour, so I'll just let it run for three days.**Brooke ** 51:41[Laughing] That's three days, that's not an hour.**Colin ** 51:45Yeah, when you do that, it's sort of like the difference between baking something in the oven at 150 degrees for 8 hours versus searing a steak at 500 degrees for 5 minutes. They do very different things. And letting everything just kind of stew in ozone for a very long time is not a good idea. You do not want to do that. And I would just say steer clear of those. Leave that to the professionals. Save your money. Buy more vinegar and borax.**Brooke ** 52:19Okay, that's good to know. And if you want to learn more about chemical combinations, I created a board game for children. That's totally an aside thing. Okay, I want to go back to one thing here and I'm sorry, I'm risking going long, but um, we talked about removing like walls and carpet and I sidetracked us and talking a lot about carpet. You mentioned briefly about, like, taking out what drywall material, right, if there's water damage. And with the carpet I had asked about like freshwater versus, you know, sewage water. Does the same thing go for removing walls? Like if I have a pipe burst and it's, you know, just fresh water that person got the walls wet. Can they be recovered? Or is that a situation where, sorry, it got wet, you pretty much got to take it out? Um, I don't know I'm asking.**Colin ** 53:12It depends on how wet it got. If it's just a pipe that burst in the ceiling and it sprayed a little bit of water on the wall, that's probably fine. That's salvageable. If you have a pipe burst inside the wall and it saturated all the insulation and soak the drywall through, that needs to come out. Not because the water is necessarily going to damage the drywall, but now you have created a damp space with no airflow inside the wall. And if you can't get that opened up and dry it out, you're going to end up with mold.**Brooke ** 53:45Can you dry out insulation? Like if you take out a piece of wet insulation and put a fan on it and dry it out, can you put it back in or does it get ruined?**Colin ** 53:56With fiberglass insulation, you could do it but there's no reason to.**Brooke ** 54:02Okay.**Colin ** 54:02The cost of replacing the insulation is going to be less than probably the cost of trying to get it dried back out and salvageable.**Brooke ** 54:11Okay. Okay.**Colin ** 54:13And a lot of houses have insulation that has already been contaminated somewhat with mold over the years. Usually when insulation comes out of walls, it's not perfectly clean. It already has some mold and things in it just because temperature fluctuations, you know, that's why you have the insulation there is to help slow down the temperature changes. But that means that the insulation is constantly going up and down in temperature. It has a small amount of condensation in it. Over time, little bits of organic matter and mold start to grow on it. It's not a huge problem until it gets soaked and now it takes off. So basically once installation gets wet, it's trash. And along those lines with drywall, another thing that I've seen a lot in basem*nts that have had some water damage is either the homeowner or the contractor that they paid to do the recovery was trying to be as...**Brooke ** 55:12Cost efficient?**Colin ** 55:13Cost efficient, yes, that's a good way of putting it, as possible. Fake cost efficiency. And they pull out the bare minimum of insulation and drywall, basically the only things that came in direct contact with water, and they put new drywall back up, and six months later you have a mold problem, because there was still moisture higher up in the wall that was not addressed. So once a wall gets wet, you want to remove the drywall to, I'm gonna say, a good foot or more above the waterline at minimum. If you want to take out the entire wall, that's probably overkill but it's not the worst idea. But, you know, minimum of a foot above the waterline. And then for any insulation in the wall, reach your arm or up inside the bay as far as you can and get out anything you can possibly reach. The more space and the more airflow you get inside that wall, the better off you're going to be in the long run. And coming back to the borax, if there's any doubt about whether or not you've gotten anything, hose some borax water up inside there, let that dry out, and now you have something that's going to inhibit mold growing in that space for the remainder of the life of the house.**Brooke ** 56:34Okay, now I know this is going to be probably beyond the average homeowner's ability to to judge, but what about the framing, the studs, you know, the the wood that's in the walls that your your drywall is attached to and your insulation runs between? Any tips on being able to tell whether or not that needs to be replaced? Or is it just a, sorry, you got to call a contractor at that point to figure out if that needs to get redone.**Colin ** 57:04It's probably going to be fine. I'm sure there are exceptions. But, you know, wood is used to being outside. And as long as it has a chance to dry back out after it's gotten wet, it'll be fine. If it's sitting in water for weeks or months, you may have an issue. Your biggest problem honestly, with wet wood, is that it attracts termites. So you don't want to have damp wood. But as long as it gets dried back out, again, not too much of an issue.**Brooke ** 57:37Okay, that's really great. Okay, I feel like I am much better prepared to deal with flooding, hopefully make it happen, less things to look out for. And then definitely after it comes, knowing what I should do immediately and fairly quickly in that process. And that's awesome. I like learning things. Is there anything more you want to say about dealing with flooding and/or water damage that we haven't talked about?**Colin ** 58:10Oh, the one thing I didn't didn't get to was the burst pipe.**Brooke ** 58:13Sure.**Colin ** 58:13So let's run through that real quickly.**Brooke ** 58:15Okay.**Colin ** 58:15This is something pretty much everybody's gonna experience at some point in their life. I don't know of anybody that has not had to deal with leaking pipe or burst pipe at some point, even if it's not during a disaster. It's just like, sometimes it just happens because pipes get old and they break. So we talked about, you know, in the triage episode, the know where your shut offs are, and hopefully you can just run them down to the basem*nt and shut the water to the house off, and then you have as much time as you need to deal with the broken pipe. If that doesn't happen, because you don't have a working shut off or you can't get to it, there are these brand of plumbing fittings called SharkBites which don't require any real skill to use. Sort of like, if you are capable of using a can opener and putting a cork in a bottle of wine, you can use a SharkBite fitting. Go on YouTube, there's good demonstrations of how to use them. And all you need is a set of cheap tubing cutters for cutting through the pipe, and either a valve or cap to go on the pipe after you cut it. I recommend, if you're going to keep one thing around, keep the tubing cutter and a valve. Because if you have a valve, you can use that for capping off a pipe that is under pressure. So if you can't shut the water off in your house, and you have a leaking pipe, you're gonna have a mess on your hands. But what you can do is cut through the pipe, open it all the way up. Now you have a pipe spraying water everywhere, and if you try to put a cap on that, you're fighting against the pressure and you can't do it. But if you've a valve, you can put the valve onto the pipe in the open position. So the water just flows through the valve and you close the valve and the water stops.**Brooke ** 1:00:10But that's—that whole set's only going to be true if you have like a PVC or PEX pipe, right? If you have—**Colin ** 1:00:17No, they work against copper too.**Brooke ** 1:00:20Okay, but you need a different tool to cut—well I have like galvanized steel I think it is or, you know, much older pipes than that that are metal.**Colin ** 1:00:29Cast iron.**Brooke ** 1:00:30Yeah.**Colin ** 1:00:31That's a different story. But if you have PEX or copper or PVC, the little cheap tubing cutters that will kind of like a C clamp with a little blade, and you just clamp it down and spin it in the circle until the blade cuts through, one of those and a 90 degree shut off valve is going to get you through a lot of problems because it works against pipes that have pressure in them. And again, there's demonstrations of how to do this on YouTube. It's kind of hard to explain an audio format. But once you see it, you're like, oh, yeah, that's really easy.**Brooke ** 1:01:02Yeah, I'm visualizing it really well, only because I've built water systems with PEX pipe, and I've used shark bites and all of that. So it's clear to me, but no sense of if it translates if you don't know that. But um, yeah, okay, that's really great. But just the caveat, it doesn't work on all types of pipes. Most types, apparently, I didn't realize the copper also. So that's pretty great.**Colin ** 1:01:24No, so yeah, it's—watch the videos, familiarize yourself with how you do it beforehand so that you know what to do. But it's really, really simple. And it'll buy you plenty of time until the plumbers can come out and fix the right way.**Brooke ** 1:01:38Cool, great. And again, that's only if you can't get to the shutoff valve because that would be your first choice in handling that, is to get to the shutoff valve rather than trying to cap the pipe off flowing.**Colin ** 1:01:49Yeah, cutting into your plumbing is the last resort. Hopefully you can just turn it off, but...**Brooke ** 1:01:54[Laughing] Just wanted to make sure we say that one twice.**Colin ** 1:01:59[Laughing] Yeah, that should be the last resort, not the first resort. Excellent point.**Brooke ** 1:02:04Thanks. All right. Colin, thank you so much for joining us today. I have learned a bunch of stuff and I've had a really great conversation with you. And I'm so happy that you're willing to do this with us again. Do you have anything that you want to plug or promote or otherwise share in closing?**Colin ** 1:02:22Nope, that's it.**Brooke ** 1:02:27Okay, that's it, folks. To our listeners, thanks so much for listening. If you enjoy our podcast, please share it. Feel free to drop a comment on any of our social media pages or Patreon account. We do read all of your comments and we talk about them collectively. And personally, I love engaging on these subjects further with you all when you reach out to me. I can be found on Mastodon @OgemakweBrooke, that's Brooke with an E. This podcast is produced by the anarchists publishing collective, Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness. We are on Twitter @tangledwild and also on Instagram. Plus, we have a rad website at tangledwilderness.org where you can find our extensive list of projects and publications. This podcast and much of the work of Strangers is made possible by our Patreon supporters. If you want to become a supporter, check out patreon.com/strangersinatangledwilderness. There are cool benefits at various support tiers on Patreon. For instance, if you support the collective at just $5 a month, we mail you a monthly zine. There are special Patreon supporters that support us at $20 or more a month and we give them a shout out and all of our podcasts and publications. So I want to say thanks to Eric, Julia, Patoli, Staro, Theo, Boise Mutual Aid, Princess Miranda, Jenipher, Micaiah, Dana, Buck, David, Janice & O’dell, Thunder, Percival, Lord Harken, Marm, Hunter, Milissia, Kirk, SJ, Anonymous, Chris, Nicole, Carson, Paige, Aly, CatGut, Trixter, Chelsea, paparouna, BenBen, and an always, Hoss the Dog.Find out more at https://live-like-the-world-is-dying.pinecast.co

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