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Hey, Robert here. It's been like two months since I had LASIK and I'm still seeing 2020. All I had to do was go in for a consultation, then go in for a maybe 10 minute procedure and then my eyes have been great ever since. You know, I healed up wonderfully. It was very simple, couldn't have been a better experience. So if you want to explore LASIK plus I can't recommend it enough. They have over 20 years experience in the industry and they performed more than two million treatments right now if you want to try getting LASIK plus you can get $1000 off of your surgery when you're treated in September, that's $500. Of per eye, just visitmylasikoffer.com to schedule your free consultation. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried true crime. And if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's breaker handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees SO4-O months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Puds of well yeah, like of dolphins, but in this case also of casts a cast of pods for example like attorneys general podcast. I'm Robert Evans. This is behind the ******** a show where we talk about. I do have a lot of podcasts. Thank you, Jamie. As you might notice in my show about talking about bad people, I have guests. And today that guest is Madame Jamie Loftus. I'll take that. Yeah. The lofts. Lofts us. Lofts us. Yeah. That's when there's more than one of us in the room. And then there's Sophie's lichterman. It's it's all we should, attorneys general, all plurals is what what the statement I'm coming into. It's it's complicated language, but but beautiful. Jamie, how are you doing? Uh, you know, all things considered. Hmm. Could stop. I learned question. I have HPV. I have HPV. I learned oh, I have HPV. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, it's it's fine. It's a it's a fun. It's a fun middle non threatening HPV. I guess, yeah. First it was a fun. It's nice to have some suspense in your life that is like, you know, a little less existential where they're like, is it good HPV or bad HPV? And they're like, well, it's, you know, it's it's middling HPV. Well, I'm going to ask our listeners, I'm going to ask all of our listeners when this episode drops to tag us on Twitter and tell us if you have HPV as well. HPV, if so, fill our Twitter mentions, individual threads. Don't comment on the episode. Like it tag. It's individually each time absolutely overwhelmed. Our Twitters everywhere that there's so many people have HPV, and I know it's so, but my my dad did see my Twitter post about it, and then he was just he he was shocked. He thought HPV was really going to get me, and then I just had to tell him he's not going to get this is we're going to raise awareness about HPV by overwhelming and making our Twitters unusable for several days with a flood of people discussing. Their presence or lack thereof of of HPV, just to that. So that's my since between the the last update the last episode I was on in this I, I, I learned that HPD. I don't think I got it. Then I just went to a gynecologist for the first time in in four years. Because health, yeah, yeah, it's good to have health insurance. I haven't been to a gynecologist in a long time. Well, that's you really got to get your PAP every couple, every couple years. I know. Careful paps and bagels both need Shamir. Sweet. Nailed it. Nailed it with the swish. All right. Well, we should talk. We should do the thing that is our job to do. Casting cast pods. Yeah. The only thing that matters in this world. What's fun about this episode, Jamie, is that this is an episode about disasters and how human beings respond to them, and we're recording it right before the election. And by the time it drops, the entire world could be a radically different place. And that's fun. I want to. I want to listen back to this episode later and feel absolutely sick to my stomach. Yeah, it's going to be awesome. It's going to be. So good. I can't wait. We're talking today about elite panic. Oh yeah, that's the ******* of today. So, OK, I want to start our story, our our episode today with the story of a man named Juan Pio Piva. He was born on September 20th, 1946 in Kasapa, Paraguay, and while he is most definitely a ******* he's not the ******* of our episode. We're going to start with him, though. Juan grew up working class and a town 250 kilometers or fake miles southeast of Paraguay's. Capital UH, which is uh ansion uh now. His dad was a bus driver and he started working at age 16, selling tickets on his father's bus. His family also owned a butcher shop, and he worked there as a young adult until he had enough money to open a small butcher shop of his own in the capital, which is again association now, which I'm I probably pronouncing somewhat wrong, but you famously pronounce everything, but famously pronounce everything right. I know by the time he was 30 he owned two butcher shops and through frugal money management and a keen sense of finances. One was able to open his first grocery store in 1985. He named it Ekua Bolanos, which means well of water and was a reference to a mythical healing spring near his hometown. Now, Juan's business was successful, but his growing wealth was met by a growth in the stingy tendencies that had helped him rise above his humble origins. He kept his own accounts and he paid suppliers himself. He forced his employees to work under what one local paper described as an enslaving regime. Yeah, so that's not, you know, nice. You get one butcher shop and look what happens. It's funny too, because, like, the positive articles that you read about him would call him like, say he came from a peasant background. But it's like, I mean, I guess, like you're not rich just because your family owns a butcher shop, but like, you're not like, I don't know, peasant seems weird for a family that is a business owner. I don't know. Yeah. Yeah, like not. Not that there's anything wrong with owning a butcher shop, but like peasant, is it anyway. Whatever. One kept his office behind the cashier so he could watch them at all times through the large glass windows that he had installed, and intervene at once if he was unhappy with their performance, which he frequently was. Kind of * **** boss, you know, we've all. I mean, I guess most people who have worked in the service industry have had a boss like that. Sure. Really unnecessarily obsessed with your what you're doing at all Times Now you quit. Bolanos became a modest chain of supermarkets with two full grocery stores and one hypermarket, which is kind of similar to a mall, multiple restaurant shops, you know, a bunch of it. You can hold a **** load of people like a really big grocery store, right, like a normal grocery store in the United States. But big, you know, at the time, again, we're talking like the 80s. So OK, yeah, his company slogan was ukwa Balanos synonymous with quality and low prices. In 1997, Juan, whose nickname was apparently the baby, expanded his business into a yeah. Hold on. What? Jamie? Yes. He's the baby. He was the. He's the baby. And you gotta love him. Why? Is there any reason? I don't know. I mean, I I've only found out that baby. Unless you're the rapper. I think that's what people called him. Jamie. The baby. The baby is from dinosaurs. That TV show, right? Yeah, the baby. That. And you gotta love it. I know the baby from So what he's called the baby and then he's like, but don't ask why I'm called the baby. That's alright. No just I only a lot of so for because of the story we're about to tell is primarily there's some international stories because it's wild. But most of the good stories were local and so I had to Google Translate them and I was not able to find anything else about why he was called the baby, but his nickname was the baby. OK, the baby. OK, I'm going to struggle getting past this. But, but but I'm here. Here. Yeah, so he's the baby, and he expands his business into a joint stock company. So he he makes it into a corporation with like stock and shareholders and **** and he starts soliciting investments. Now. The number of Yuki Balanos hypermarkets increased after this point because now they have a bunch of funding. In 2001, one opened his largest store yet, the Aqua Bolanos Botanico, named for its proximity to the Capital Botanical Gardens. This massive new building was 12,000 square feet with a dining area that was capable of. Leading 600 people alone, so very big ******* store. He's he's big baby. Yeah, it's a big baby. It's a big old baby. It's a big old botanical baby. Yes. So yeah, he gets he he he gets things going on and everything's. Yeah, he's making a lot of money. He's got a bunch of stores. His net worth climbs to more than $8 million. And at this point, you know, he's too busy and has too many employees to watch over each of them in, like, the slightly creepy stalking way that he had before. This caused him a lot of anxiety because he was always terrified that his employees might steal from him. Maybe to ensure that the yeah, maybe go away now to ensure that the crowning jewel of his empire didn't lose a single centavo that was due to it. Juan appointed the only man he could trust to the job of stalking his employees. His son, Victor. Daniel, now Victor, had always been something of a disappointment to Juan. The father had hoped his son might one day play for the national soccer team, but Victor tended towards obesity and was not at all athletically inclined. Still, he was able to earn some amount of his. The father's pride by being every bit the miser and tyrannical enforcer that Juan had been. One journalist described him as tough on employees and stingy on suppliers. But did they call him the little baby? The baby's baby. Baby, son of the baby. Baby junior son of the baby. Yeah, look, look, I I've settled on some of the baby. Yeah, yeah. So stingy was kind of an ongoing theme in the growing empire of 1 Peel Piva and his son, while the Yuka Bolanos Botanica was a massive structure in the pride of his corporation. Corners were cut at every single stage of construction. The ducts from the grill in the kitchen, the bakery and the rotisserie did not vent outside. Instead, they pumped smoke and gas into a chamber between the ceiling and the roof of the building. The roof had no hold on. Yeah, hold on. OK. OK. So there there's just there's just a pollution room. There's a fire room. Yeah, there's a there's a room to cause a fire. Yes. There. There is a poison room there they like, like our recording studio in our in our in our beloved place that we can't record it anymore because of the plague. There's a poison room in the UK, Bolanos Botanico. I miss it too. I miss it too. As soon as this plague is over, I'm going to throw more poison into it. Poison room. Yeah, yeah. We're all ready for the poison room. So they also have a workplace poison room now. I feel more connected. Yeah, except for. And there's they're venting all of the gas and smoke from their mini ovens, cooking for 10s of thousands of people on a weekly basis into this room. And the roof of the room has no wind extractors. Also. You know what else they don't have, Jamie? Smoke alarms. Did you have smoke alarms in your death trap? There's no sprinklers either. All of the stopcocks on the fire hoses were closed. Yeah. So again, absolutely no safety measures taken in this building meant to hold thousands of customers. OK, OK, OK. So it's the Titanic of grocery stores. Yes, it is. It is the Titanic of this. No lifeboats on this business. Oh God, it's amazing. It's so ******* funny. It's not. Because what's about to happen is one of the worst things I've ever heard about 1 skimped on any emergency training that might have prepared his employees in the event of a fire as well. Because if you're not going to take any other preparations for a fire, why would you even think about it? You know, start now. Yeah, you. That would be speaking it into being Jamie. It's like the secret, you know, if you think about it, it will come to you if you don't think of fire. Yeah, I don't want to manifest a gigantic, devastating grocery store. Higher. Yeah. Yeah. That's why I cut out the seat belts on all of my cars, you know? Absolutely. Otherwise, you're just inviting tragedy. You're inviting an accident in. Exactly. I don't want to have an accident when I'm drunk driving my forerunner through a trailer park, you know? No. And that's why you've never gotten into trouble that way. And that's why I've never gotten into trouble that way. Been saying that for years. I've been saying that for years. Shouting it at police officers chasing me and my forerunner for years. You drunk. Drive your your forerunner. I admire. You're really admired. Yeah. Now. So yeah, Juan takes again, like, not like aggressively takes no safety precautions for his massive building. Meant to cook and hold thousands of people. Yeah. I mean, obviously, like if he had done things like train his employees given to have some sort of fire safety plan that would have distracted from the time they could spend working, which would be the same as them stealing from him. And one is not going to allow that to happen. Showed them included a hose or two. These are all unnecessary times. Sucks disabled the hoses that there were like that. That's funny. More work than not. Like, that's so aggressive. OK, yeah. OK, so funny is the wrong working. He's begging for this, restarted, pleading for explosion. Yeah. OK. Now the question, Jamie, of how one's company was able to get away with blatant violations of local fire codes is an important one because, again, Paraguay is a country they have laws about making death traps, right? You're not supposed to. So there's a good question, like, how did he get to make a death trap? And it may have had something to do with the fact that he had a cozy. Friendship with Juan Carlos Wasmosy, the president of Paraguay from 1993 to 1998. In 2002, Wasmosy was convicted of stealing $6 million from the government Social Welfare Institute and diverting it to his personal bank account. So the odds are quite good that Juan Pivate bribed him to make concerns over the building safety go away, right? Like, yeah, the guy who we know was crooked as **** probably was being crooked as ****. And one Carlos was like, oh, that's the baby. Yeah, do it, baby. Love you. Gotta love. Especially if he pays you really cuddly thousands of dollars. Yeah, baby, son of baby. Let him do whatever they want. Let them do whatever they want. I often say that about babies and about owners of grocery stores. We've given enough passes to the baby. So unfortunately, Jamie, I don't know if you're aware of this, but you cannot bribe the laws of physics yet. I'm working on it, OK? Life finds a way, as Ian Malcolm said. So for three years. Many ovens of the Yaqui, Villanious Botanica, ran all day long venting smoke and gas up into the roof without any way for it to escape. Eventually more than 9000 cubic meters of flammable gases had accumulated up there, turning the whole roof into of the massive complex into a ticking time bomb. And then sometime in the summer of 2004 one of the buildings ovens got plugged and timely action was not taken to unplug it like fix the jam. And unbeknownst to Victor, a fire burned behind the obstruction. In the oven, they weren't cleaning the ovens. There's a blockage and there's embers burning behind the blockage. So they don't realize that there's embers burning behind it. And yeah, obviously, like, so this fire catches on all of the grease, and the grease starts to burn behind the obstruction in this oven and it sends embers. No one sees it into the sea. Yeah, no one sees it. They think the oven is just blocked and dead. But behind the obstruction, there are embers burning that catch on to the grease, and embers start to float up into the ceiling, which is, again, an enormous bomb. Yeah, sounds like a bomb to me. Yeah. On the morning of August 1st, one of those embers finally ignited the pocket of gas in the ceiling. It happened while more than 1000 people were inside the business. Most of them were mothers, many of whom had their children with them. One male customer who was present later recalled we were entering the supermarket when there was an explosion. I could see how bodies, especially little ones, flew through the air, arms, legs. Another customer later told press it was raining fire. When I was finishing to pay at the cash register, by Miracle I got out before they closed the doors. Little bit of a foreshadowing of what's about doors. Yeah, that's what we're about to talk about. The door. Oh yeah. Great question, Jamie. Thank you. On that horrible August morning, Victor Daniel Piva, who's, again one son and the guy whose job it is to make sure nobody steals from the baby. One son. Victor had arrived late for work because he had been buying his father tickets for an upcoming soccer match. This very likely saved his life because of where his office was located and where the explosion happened. But if it did save his life, his survival damned. Many more people once he arrived on scene. Within minutes of the explosion, Victor gave his first order to his security guards. Don't let them out without paying. Oh my God, yeah. Why? Yeah, yeah. Holy ****. I know, right? And the security guards didn't say **** that. No, it's kind of a we could talk about Germans here, but I think everybody knows, like, the thing that people do when they're given orders. Yeah, but the son of the baby. Yeah. So Victor was concerned that the hundreds of customers attempting to escape the Yukon Balanus Botanica death trap wouldn't hang out of the flaming bed before leaving the flaming building. He was worried they were going to leave with arms full of groceries and consumer goods. Victor knew the flaming groceries. Jesus Christ. So the idea that to Victor that his dad might get angry at him for letting customers get out with free goods of his exploding supermarket was more important to him than the thoughts of the lives of the 1000 people still inside. So he ordered his guards to close and bar all 10 exits to the store. Jesus Christ, OK, and they do. And they do that. They do the **** out of that. OK, son, I'm going to quote from a journalist in the local newspaper called. Mission quote outside in front of the hypermarket, Victor Daniel Piva could not stop sweating. He called insistently on the phone for the employees to get the money out of the boxes, while dozens of people scratched the windows to get out. Oh my God, it's pretty bad, right? This is like, so this is bad writing. This is horrible. It's horrible. If you made a, if you made a bad guy in like, a movie or a TV, do this. People would be like, nobody would. Like, and then you're like, no, no, wait. And they call the boss the baby, and they're Jesus. Don't let him out. They'll steal while the building is actively exploding. Yes. Now let's glitching. OK. It's going to get so much worse, Jamie. But let's pause for just a moment. Let's pause for just a just a split second with that horrible vision in our heads of people scratching on the windows of a burning grocery store. And let's have a little conversation about how money affects the human brain. Oh, OK yeah. You want to do that? Like that, like talking about this. I love talking about how money affects the human brain. It's my it's my favorite thing to do. It's my kink. Me too, actually, there have been a lot of fun studies on this. For today's purposes, I want to start with a series of experiments conducted in 2006 by Doctor Kathleen Voss of the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota. She LED a group of actually, let me mispronounce Minnesota because I probably mispronounced something in Paraguay. And I want to be fair. Many Sati in mini Saudi and the University of Minnesota. Now she LED a group of researchers to conduct 9 experiments, all of which primed half of their students with thoughts of money. And I'm going to quote from live science about how they primed people to think about money. A few methods were used to get the participants thinking about money and some experiments. A stack of play monopoly money was within a subject's peripheral view, or a subject would unscramble word phrases dealing with money, while in others a participant would sit in front of a computer screen saver showing pictures of floating money. So one and again, they were not telling the the the the people who were being. Who were the subjects of the experiment? That money had anything to do with it? Like, they were solving puzzles, basically. And the experiment found that the group who had been primed to think about money persisted longer at solving difficult puzzles than subjects who weren't. And that's probably not so surprising, right? The thought of money makes you willing to kind of, like, work harder, longer at an otherwise meaningless task. Sure. And that's, like, not unsettling, right? It's pretty natural. Like, it's normal. Yeah. The other experiments were a bit more unsettling, quote. In one test, a participant sat in a lab filling out a questionnaire when a supposed student walked into the room and said, can you come over here and help me? She explained that she was an undergraduate student and needed help coding data sheets, each of which would take 5 minutes. Some of the participants didn't help at all, though, said the control group volunteered an average of 42.5 minutes of their time, whereas the money group gave about 25 minutes. That's interesting. Another experiment gave participants the opportunity to lend a helping hand in a situation requiring no skills. In a staged accident, a random person walked through a room where a participant. At filling out a questionnaire and spilled a bunch of pencils. The money participants picked up far fewer pencils than the controls. To understand how money effects interpersonal relationships, the scientists told each participant they would have a conversation to acquaint themselves with another participant while the experimenter went to retrieve the other subject. The participant was to set up two chairs for the engagement. The subjects in the money group put more physical distance between themselves and new acquaintances compared with control subjects. Again, interesting stuff, interesting stuff. Now the write up I found made a point of noting that the experimental results showed no difference. As a result of socioeconomic status or gender of the participants, it seemed like just pretty robust. The only real difference was who had been primed to think about money, which is, again, interesting. Now this is just one study, obviously, so let's talk about some other studies because a lot of people have adopted this all monopoly based studies are very funny and terrifying because people just turn into cartoon villains when given a they really do Gov monopoly money. It's fun because the next study we're about to talk about is a UC Berkeley experiment that involved 100 pairs of strangers playing. Monopoly with one player getting double the money of the other. And I'm gonna quote from this one. Yeah, yeah, it's fun. Yeah. I'm going to quote from a Ted write up of the psychologist behind the study, a guy named Paul Piff. Quote. The rich players moved their pieces more loudly, banging them around the board and displayed a type of enthusiastic gestures that you see from a football player who's just scored a touchdown. They even ate more pretzels from a bowl setting off to the side than the players had been assigned to the poor condition and started to become ruder to their opponents. Moreover, the rich players understanding of the situation was completely warped after a game. Talked about how they've earned their success even though the game was blatantly rigged and their win should have been seen as inevitable. And that's a really, really incredible insight into how the mind makes sense of advantage, Piff says. Yeah, it rocks like. Right. Did you see the, did you see the videos of it? The videos of it are very, very funny. It's just a bunch of, like, scrawny college freshmen being like, well, you know, I did good. So that's why. And then just like, Crunch, Crunch, Crunch, it's it's brutal but very funny. I love that ****. Other study in California, which is the sensible place to go if you want to study rich people being ******** looked into. I find this one really interesting. It looked into how likely drivers of expensive cars were to stop at crosswalks for pedestrians, which they're legally required to do in California, and they found that again. I find this very fascinating. The more expensive the car, the less likely the driver was to stop for pedestrians. No one driving not a single person because they studied a different categories of cars and they like categorize them by their cost. Not a single person driving cars in the least expensive car category failed to stop at a crosswalk. Almost almost 50% of drivers and expensive cars did. Colas. We did a Corolla, owners. We did it, yeah. Wow. And like, obviously if you drive, you know that somebody in a 35 year old ******* Corolla is is going to let you in on the highway and someone driving an Infinity is going to run you and your children off the road if that's what it takes to get out, out of the exit 3 seconds faster. And then if you see someone in a Tesla, they'll run you over, run your family over, and then ask for a thank you. My personal favorite thing I've seen just of the joys of living in West Los Angeles for a while was to land a Lamborghini rear ending of another Lamborghini. It was a real let them fight moment. Yeah, I'm probably fine with all of this. I forgot you lived in like the worst possible area for for pedestrians to just get run over by tech millionaires. It was great. I had a lot of fun jogging. Oddly enough, I will. I will say this, not all rich people are this way. Because I jogging. I had, I had Sean Penn. Would drive through my neighborhood a couple of times and he was always very good about stopping and giving people time to move. So I'll say that about Sean Penn. Well, you problematic man. I was like, he's a polite driver. He he Congrats to Sean Penn for stopping, not Congrats to Sean Penn for hitting women and marrying Val Kilmer's daughter. I I love that marrying Val Kilmer's daughter is an equal crime to violence. Violence against women is the is the worst crime. Marrying Val Kilmer's 25 year old daughter is. It's also not right to do. It's not. You know what is right to do. He doesn't run down joggers. I'll give him that. But, but but but it's time. It's time. It's time. All right. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant. And we start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. 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Option it's convenient, accessible, affordable, and it is entirely online. You can get matched with a therapist after filling out a brief survey, and if the therapist that you get matched with doesn't wind up working out, you can switch therapists at any time. When you want to be a better problem solver, therapy can get you there. Visit betterhelp.com behind today to get 10% off your first month. That's better helpp.com/behind betterhelp.com/behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. Eating particularly young children out into nature so that they can experience it and take time off from this virtual world of being always on your cell phones and so on. And get the feel of nature so that you come to be fascinated, then you come to want to understand it, and then you come to love it, and at that point you want to protect it. And then we'll come to the sort of healthy world that I envision as a good future for us. And the rest of life on this planet. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're returned. That was a good yeah good. What was really fun because I did live in a very nice neighborhood. It was right on the edge of of Santa Monica and the only way I could afford to cause my rent was actually very cheap. I pay like 900 bucks a month, which is cheap for that. Yeah, it's because the building was was very illegal. The landlord had illegally subdivided it. The half of our power was the like came from the another unit and half of their power came from our house. So like when power would go out, we'd both lose half of our like it was. We had the city come in once and be like, you realize that, like, you could sue your landlord because of all of the dangerous fire hazards in this apartment, because of how illegally she subdivided it. And we said, yes, but here's how much we pay in rent. And they said, oh, I get it. Take your life in your hands every day. Makes total sense. Oh yeah, no, I would risk my life too for a place that cheap. **** yeah. God, what a great country. God, what the best, best place in the world. No notes. Yeah, no. Sean Penn. Huh. I hate Sean Penn. I'm glad he's a terrible person. The only way he could be worse is if he ran you over with his car. So there's that. There's that. You upset Jamie. I'm sorry, Jack. It's OK. I just, I, I I I hate Sean Penn. That yeah. And Speaking of, you know what? Sean Penn is a rich person. Let's keep talking about how bad that is for you. So, yeah. Again, another study because again, you know, reading one of these studies, there's things to criticize, you know about all of them, as there are with all studies. But you keep reading all of the many studies that have been done on this, and they all make a very, very consistent point. A 2010 study from UCSF. 300 participants mixed between upper and lower income individuals to analyze facial expressions of people in photos and emotions of people in mock interviews. Poor people were consistently better at reading the emotions of others, but this is neat. If upper class participants were told to imagine themselves in the position of poorer people, it boosted their ability to read other people's emotions. Oh yeah. OK, interesting, right? That's fascinating to me. There's you to really hold a rich person's hand to get them to empathy. Now imagine other people were capable of feelings. I know this is going to be hard for you, just it's just a creative experiment. Yeah, it's not real. It's not real. The poor don't feel but imagine they did, but imagine they. OK, OK. There's a lot more of research on of this type out there if you're interested in finding it. To conclude this portion of the episode, I'd like to read one last quote from Doctor Piff summarizing a significant body of research into how wealth effects behavior. That's kind of this guy's deal. OK, quote. As a person's levels of wealth increase, their feelings of compassion and empathy go down, and their feelings of entitlement, of deservingness and their ideology of self-interest increases. Sweet, huh? Neat. Neat. Now let's return to the Aqua Bolano Botanica. The back to the supermarket actively inflames with its doors boarded or yeah, yeah, and locked. While Victor and his guards kept the doors barred and rescued the precious cash from the registers again, he's actively getting the cash out while he's preventing human beings from exiting. That is absurd. I mean, but you have to imagine they're seizing the cash from the hands of customers and employees who are on fire. Like people are literally describing paying being forced to pay for their groceries while fire reigns from the ceiling. Yes, it's it's it's ******* wild, yeah. So, well, this goes on for a while, and eventually the ground floor of the supermarket collapses into an underground car park where dozens and dozens of people were trying to flee in their vehicles. And of course, those people all burned to death the food court. It was completely engulfed in flames. A lot of people were just incinerated. Cyanide gas given off by toxic paint used on the building's roof because they used poisonous paint that they weren't supposed to be using on the building's roof, began to suffocate panicked shoppers. The ones who are closest to the doors and windows started breaking them with whatever they could find. People outside the supermarket realized what was happening and sprang into action, gathering sticks and poles to try to batter down the locked main entrance. OK, yeah, yeah. Human beings who aren't pieces of **** do attempt to come to the rescue of their fellow human beings. As always happens, we'll keep talking about that, Liliana Hernandez, who lived next door to the market, told reporters. We couldn't get inside and people couldn't get out. When the firefighters arrived they too were stymied by the locked doors of the Yaqui Bolanos, and eventually they had to go into Liliana's home and batter holes through the walls of her home in order to get into the supermarket. By the time they finally breached the building, there was little for them to drag out but corpses and quote now from a write up in the Guardian. Some victims were found hugging each other, one of them, a woman with a smile, child in her arms, a firefighter told local radio a disco opposite to the supermarket was being used as a makeshift morgue. Overnight, army troops unloaded truckloads of wooden coffins. Early today, tearful relatives were filing in to identify bodies. There are no words for this, said Orlando, Korea, weeping after identifying the corpse of his six month old nephew, he then searched for his sister among the lines of charred bodies. This is a moment of great anguish, said the Paraguayan president, Nicanor Duarte, who declared 3 days of national mourning. Officials said it was the worst tragedy in Paraguay since a failed military insurrection in 1947 had left around 8000 people. Francisco Barrios, who had been shopping at the store but managed to escape, told the confusing scene minutes after the fire started, with people rushing for the doors. There were sparks as if fireworks were going off, he said. The store quickly caught fire and filled with smoke, triggering total confusion. I lost my wife and kids as I rushed to get out. Now I'm trying to find them. By the time the fires were finally extinguished and the last charred corpse was identified, at least 424 people had died. That's about half of the folks who were in there. Yeah, 424 people. More than 300 were injured. 3/4 of the people in Yuko Bolanos Botanica at the time of the fire failed to make it out of the death trap of a market unharmed, 3/4 of the people in there now. Obviously, a nightmare of this scale demands some sort of vengeance and is immediately turned to Juan and Victor Piva. Both father and son, of course, denied that they had ordered the doors locked and barred. Victor immediately blamed the store operations manager, Vincente Ruiz, for giving the order. Since Ruiz had died in the fire. He was a pretty good scape. No, I was like, please don't say he. He blamed a person who burned up when it was his fault. Holy ****. Yeah, it's, it's, it's. I don't know. I don't even know what to say. It is. It's horrible. It's, it's not good. It's that's. I can't even, like, wrap my head around that. That's and and just like a store so obscenely large to have no oversight is, yeah, it's. I. It's pretty good, Jamie. You know, like I say that, but like I was ******* in tears reading some of these stories like so many little kids burnt to death in the arms of their mothers, trying to shield them from the flames. Dozens of them like an out like like, this is this is like a war crime level tragedy. But it was a supermarket fire like like you could. It couldn't be a more unsuspecting group of people. And there you have to imagine all like. Ordinary, I just. I can't even wrap my head around that. That's so and and then they and then they blamed someone that they had killed. It's like, OK, it's honestly I think to most people. It is an incomprehensible level of evil. Like in in, in fairness to most people who own supermarkets, it's like you have insurance. Why are you? It's like, it's one thing if you're like, you know, ******* big oil did something like that, but it's a supermarket. I mean, I guess Jeff Bezos owns a supermarket, but I but I I don't think of supermarket owners as super villain. You're watching dying people pound on the windows of your store as you rescue their cash. Like, it's amazing. I just the, the, the also just like the level of brain dead. Like, how does he think he's going to get away with that? He's like, well, at least I'll have escape money. At least I'll have the money. It's it's it's super villain. Like cartoon supervillain. Like, not honestly, not because a cartoon supervillain wouldn't do this. No, they would. They would disappear. Captain Planet Villains had more nuance. It's amazing. Yeah, so these they obviously they get charged with gross negligence and a bunch of other crimes. Alongside 4 security guards from jail, Juan issued a proposition to rebuild his supermarket and make the families of the victims and to shareholders. He also offered to give them jobs, which some might call them. Mixed offer at best. He really is like the world's dumbest person. There is, yeah. Oh God, the son. The rich people are horrible, but the children of rich people are worse because they don't. They don't even have a skill. It's that's ******* that's so I can't wrap my head around this story. This is so it's it's pretty fun. So Paraguayans were not enticed by the proposition of a store to profit. The families of the dead people, they that's a very ******** libertarian answer for like, what if we just make a story that they can profit from, that we build over the ashes of where their loved ones died? And my supermarket fire could be a fun second act. Yeah, really amazing. Yeah. It's the kind of thing you do with other people aren't people to you, you know? Yes, uh, so yeah, they the obviously the people of Paraguay of and solution were not enticed by this proposition. They they filled the streets of the capital with graffiti decrying the pipes as murderers. In December of 2006, Juan Victor and one security guard were convicted of manslaughter, receiving maximum sentences of five years. Several companies shareholders had been tried for negligence and they were all acquitted. This did not make people happy. And in the citizens of this ******* nothing. Are they killed? 424 people? Are you kidding me? They should be killed in the town square. Yeah. They should be publicly executed. OK with that? In this case, yeah. God. The people of Asuncion, led by a family member of the dead, immediately rioted through the streets, breaking things, lighting police cars on fire, doing totally justified **** right? Yeah. This is absolutely the time to riot, right? We can debate over what justifies a riot. This sure does. This is that, you know. Is the the yardstick to use? Yeah. This this is like the clearest justification I can imagine. A lot of things justify riots, but for sure this, you know. Yeah. So yeah, they they they rioted and eventually the government was forced to retry the case because people lit enough cars on fire. Oh good. Well, that's might be a lesson there. Lighting cars on fire gets accomplishes things. One could argue that, you know, could I mean it's it's it's certainly did in this case. You know, I like cars on fire in Minecraft and it's really accomplished a lot locally. It it got the job done here sort of better than things had been before. One was re sentenced to 12 years in prison, Victor to 10, the security guard to five, and one company shareholder was sentenced to 2 1/2 years. Which yeah, you know, it's better. It's still like not many cars. Need to be set on fire to get a reasonable sentence. Jesus exactly right. People of Paraguay at yeah. They had been agitating for a 25 year sentence, which is the maximum that like they're like is allowed. Now. One of the leaders that evolved out of the protest movement was a guy named Doctor Roberto Almeron. He treated many of the burn victims of the fire, all the while unaware that his own son had perished in the blaze. So you see why this guy you know? Yeah, yeah, Doctor Almaron told reporters. This is the country we have. Where the? Institutions do not fulfill their function. Where the businessmen are capable of creating a crematorium for innocence, a drawer with two doors is a roof of a karaf and closed with fences and jail like bars for a few dollars just in a country with an absent state where assistance to the victims was only media and temporary. After that everything remained the same. The same country where the judiciary and the municipality itself are buildings that do not have a fire escape, devoid of values in a terminal state. God. I mean, he's talking at like, yeah. I think we can all identify with what he's saying, right. Yeah. Yeah. The the state and the judiciary are buildings with no fire escape. Yes. I don't. Yeah. Like, what an unfortunate metaphor. But I I I see what he's saying. Yeah. The lyrics of a rap song broadcast on Paraguay and television after the verdict were more succinct. Let no one leave without paying. And so it was they paid with their lives. Yeah, Yep. Well, that's ******* devastating. You know what's not devastating, Jamie? What products and services hurts products and that's, you know, I I think that that if there's anything we just learned, it's that the power of products and services because what's going to pull us through, the people that's going to save us is products and or services and our services. I'm so sorry, here's ads. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. 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That's better helpp.com/behind. Better helcom behind. Hey, it's Rick Schwartz, one of your hosts for San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we sit down with Doctor Jane Goodall to hear her inspiring thoughts on how we can create a better future for humans, animals and the environment. If we don't help them find ways of making a living without destroying the environment, we can't save chimps, forests or anything else. And that becomes very clear when you look at poverty around the world. If you're living in poverty, you can't afford to ask as we can. Did this product harm the environment? Was it cruel to animals like, was it factory farmed? Is it cheap because of unfair wages paid to people and so alleviating poverty? Is tremendously important. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. We're back. We're talking about how funny it is that attorney general, the plural of it is, is attorneys general. Attorney. And we were talking about Suns glass. It's very, it's very silly to me. I know it's correct grammar, but it's silly. If I clone Sunny, it's sunglasses. Sun. Wait, is it sunglass? Attorneys general? Sons glass? They should. They should really change that. Yeah, it's funny, you know? It's not funny, Jamie, whatever you're about to say for the next hour. Supermarket fire was not was not funny. It was a nightmarish tragedy enabled by greedy shareholders to Craven manager, complicit security guards and a profoundly selfish company founder Juan Paiva. I meant what I said earlier. One is not the primary ******* of today's story. Our ******* is in, said a phenomenon, a concept, the deadly serious thing that he represents in his actions. It's a phenomenon sociologists call elite panic. It sounds like a boutique store where they charged to where they charged $40.00 for a pair of socks. But what is it? Well, it's a term that was coined by sociologists Karen Chess and Lee Clark of Rutgers University in a 2008 study they published under the title elites and Panic. More to fear than fear itself, it opens with these words. Sociological research on how people respond to disasters has been going on for more than 50 years. From that research comes one of the most robust. Conclusions and sociology. Panic is rare, and of course they mean that panic from regular people directly affected by a disaster is extremely rare. The normal human behavior, regardless of body count, type or duration of tragedy, is compassion and collective action. Mutual aid is far more common than panic. Think of the people outside of the Aquilano supermarket, right the ones who rushed to help their fellow human beings by trying to batter down the doors with poles that they found nearby. That's. A bunch of people, one person made the decision to lock the doors, you know, right. So that. So the argument that mutual aid is, is the more natural instinct than the panic, OK, is the documented by extensive research, most common reaction of people in disasters. Think of the people during Hurricane Katrina who used their boats to search for food and other supplies and abandoned stores, but they could then distribute to their fellow citizens in need. A lot of times they were called looters by the news. You know, it's like the people being like, well, this place is flooding everything and it's going to go bad. People are hungry. Perhaps you should take the food out of it. Sold that, don't you? Didn't pay for it? Yeah, it is. It is the same instinct that led to that. All of those people burned to death in the UK. Balanus is like, yeah, well, but they're not paying. Yeah, like it doesn't matter that it's all wasted because the building is on fire or flooded. They're not. They're not paying. You know, who would they pay their stories? Who would they? Hey. Now, the main argument of chess and Clark study is that governments should include the citizenry more in their disaster plans rather than assuming danger will cause the citizenry to collapse into an unruly mob who need to be controlled by armed men. Because that's basically all government plans for disasters. Like, everyone's going to panic and the cops will have to beat them into responding properly, right? Like, that's how we yeah. Or the National Guard or whatever. Quote, yeah. Classic, classic approach. Classic elites berkland who has conducted extensive. Another researcher who has conducted extensive research on the matter argues that the disaster plans of policymakers and Emergency Management personnel assume it is likely it being panic planners and policymakers sometimes act as if the human response to threatening conditions is more dangerous than the threatening conditions themselves. Politically, the problem of panic endures because, as Tierney argues was another researcher, it resonates with institutional interests. Operating on the assumption that people panic and disasters leads to a conclusion that disaster preparation means concentrating resources, keeping information close to the vest, and communicating with people. And soothing ways, even if the truth is disquieting. As Tierney points out, such an approach of advances the power of those the top of organizations. OK, OK, good stuff, this is yeah, this is tracking. But Yep, you don't hear it phrase this way a lot. All scans in a 2006. And again, one of the fun things about this is that, like, there's very little disagreement about from, like, people who study disasters on this subject. In a 2006 study of disaster responses conducted by Doctor Clark, they noted rather cautiously, that disaster plans only ever assume panic on behalf of the general public. People in positions of authority, including the cops, are assumed to keep a cool head. At all times the powerless, not the powerful are said to panic, but the reality is generally the exact opposite. It's great. It ******* rules. We had a ton of documented evidence of this being exactly the case. If only people had devoted their lives to proving that this was not the case. Quote the image of panic is generally associated with large numbers of people and elites do not congregate. Making it hard to transfer the image of panic to them was one does not see collections of chief executive officers amassed in a stadium, and so it is unlikely that a story will ever appear about CEO panic in response to a soccer stadium. Higher still, this is not a sufficient explanation for panic to be so rarely attributed to people in positions of authority, for one, could in principle explain the actions of chief executives, heart surgeons, army generals or university officials by alleging that they panicked in certain situations. Yet such explanations remain rare. So, Jamie, let's talk about some of those examples. We opened this this episode with the story of a CEO panicking, and I think perhaps we should talk about an army general panicking next. OK, yeah, let's get a wide genre of people in power losing their **** losing their ******* minds. Yeah. At 5:12 AM on April 18th, 1906, the city of San Francisco suffered a massive earthquake. For a full minute, the ground shook, tossing tall buildings to the ground like discarded Legos, cracking the streets, breaking gas lines, crumpling streetcars. It also sent chimneys crumbling to the ground. And when one mixes falling chimneys with punctured gas lines, it's perhaps not surprising that the next thing to strike San Francisco was a Titanic fire. By the time it was done, 28,000 structures had been incinerated in nearly five square miles of the city was just gone. More than 3000 people died. And obviously, like, this is 1906, remember? Gonna know the ******* death toll? Yeah, half, half the city was left homeless. People couldn't even count to 5000 back then. No, no, no. They hadn't invented numbers larger than 3000. That's why it was 3000, right? They're like, well, we've topped out. I guess everyone's dead. We had our scientists were trying to count to see how high numbers went, but they kept dying of old age at 3000. So that was the that was the ceiling of numbers at this point. Old timey people. Well, this is very people. That said, this is very sad. It's a horrible disaster. Yeah. Thankfully, they're further away from us in time, so it's it's easier to like. But they're close. Are so silly. Yeah. Again, distance creates sociopathy, which is why the rich and powerful act the way they do, and why we're going to tell jokes about a fire that killed 3000 people in San Francisco. So where's the distance from it? We are every human beings are the problem. Yes. Power is the problem. Hierarchy is the problem. Distance. Is the problem. But anyway, so half of the cities left homeless, which is exactly the sort of situation you'd expect to generate a tremendous amount of panic. There are walls of fire eating the city. People's homes are gone. They've just had an earthquake. Yeah, you would expect panic, right? Like that. That that. Yeah. Instead, the very opposite occurred in her masterpiece, a paradise built in hell. Rebecca Solnit tells the story of Miss Anna Amelia Holzhauser, a middle-aged woman whose home wound up in the path of the fire. So she loses her house and she winds up. She travels. Only uh, with thousands of other people to Golden Gate Park where they like, are able to hide from the fire, basically, and she pretty much immediately decides to establish a mutual aid. Kitchen. Quote whole. Hauser started a tiny soup kitchen with one tin can to drink from and one pie plate to eat from. All over the city stoves were hauled out of damaged buildings. Fire was forbidden indoors, since many standing homes had gas leaks or damaged fluids, or chimneys or primitive stoves were built out of rubble, and people commenced to cook for each other, for strangers, for anyone in need. Her generosity was typical, even if her initiative was exceptional whole. Hauser got funds to buy eating utensils across the Bay in Oakland. The kitchen began to grow and she was soon feeding 2 to 300 people a day. Not a victim of the disaster, but a victor over it and the Hostess of a popular social center, her brothers and sisters keeper. Some visitors from Oakland liked her makeshift dining camp so well they put up a sign palace hotel, naming it after the burned out downtown luxury establishment that was repeatedly once the largest hotel in the world. I think this was the norm. She was one of hundreds of and thousands of people who made like one of the stories that she tells in this book is of, like, a local cop who the earthquake hits. He sees people looting. And instead of doing anything about that, he starts the kitchen to feed people like and. Yeah, like acting. That's what people do. That's what. Yeah. Even cops when they're at Ground Zero connect that way. Yeah. Moment for cops, 1906 cops. They weren't trained yet. So that was helpful. Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah, mutual aid networks were incredibly common in San Francisco. Butchers opened up their shops and started handing out free meat and masks for kitchens like the Palace Hotel to turn into Stew because it was like, it's gonna go bad. We might as well just give it away to people. And like, there were some large butcher shops who stopped, but there were at least a couple of very large, like businesses that were like massive butcher who were, who not only gave away their meat, but used their employees and resources and vehicles to try to, to cart it around the city for free to hand out to people again. Again, we're not. I'm not saying that like rich people business always react the way that the Yaqui Bolanos guy did because they were at Ground Zero of the disaster, they were affected by it and they immediately sue like my house has gone to my city is ****** **. Like this isn't about money, people need to eat, you know, I mean very different situation, but I feel like we've even seen some of that this year in like areas that are highly affected by COVID where some businesses that you're like, oh, I wouldn't have expected this business to to have stepped it up, but they're just in the middle of it. So it makes more sense that they would actually do something. Yeah, during the worst of the of the the police and federal riots in Portland, there was a free rib restaurant that started and was given like donated like $350,000. And then there was an armed coup that took it over. But like, that's a long story. I look forward. I look forward. So, uh, yeah. It was this, like, but again, like, this is just what people started doing. They started collecting people like groups of young men spontaneously organized to pick through the ruins and the ruins of stores and buildings to grab warm clothing, blankets, medicine and food that they could then take back and give away to their fellow people to whoever needed it. Selling of such items was all but unheard of during this. As one man who operated a mutual aid food delivery wagon later recalled. And the reason he did this is because he had a horse in a cart and he was like, well, obviously the thing I should do is use. Get resources to give food to people for free, right? Sure. Yeah. Yeah. As this guy said, quote, no questions were asked, no investigations were attempted. Whatever the applicant required was given to him or her if I had it. And the plan seemed to work excellently. Again, no means testing. No. Do you really need this? Just like you say you need it. Here you go. Here you go. Like here you ******* go. This is what I have. You know, if I have it, it's yours. Despite the horrors of the quake and the fire, many San Franciscans who survived described the city in this. As something of a utopia, with people coming together to take care of each other in a way that everyone seemed to find more fulfilling than their daily lives had been. The writer Mary Austin noted that the people of her city became houseless, but not homeless. For it comes to this with the bulk of San Franciscans, that they discovered the place and the spirit to be home rather than the walls and the furnishings, no matter how the insurance totals foot up, what landmarks, what treasures of art. Were vanished. San Francisco or San Francisco is all there, yet fast. As the tall banners of smoke rose up in the flames, reddened them, rose up with it, something impalpable like an exhalation. That's really beautiful. I feel bad. I made. I mean, I feel, I feel bad that I made fun of them. 10 minutes. Yeah, it's beautiful, dude. You know, the tech industry wasn't there yet, so people were better. Zuckerberg out there? It sounds like a beautiful place. There was a community spirit at one point. Yeah, and not, I'm sorry, San Franciscans. I know a lot of people who will. Yeah. Anyway. You're doing the right thing in San Francisco. Keep keep doing it because there's not enough of you. Yeah, or is there's too many of the other ones? Yeah. So hundreds of plumbers worked free for a full week to, like, stop broken pipes so that, like, there wouldn't be water flooding everywhere. One automobile dealership lint all of its cars out as ambulances for the sick and wounded was just like, here, take all of our ******* cars as ambulances, like you do whatever with them. Like like we trust that you will use them as they need to be used. Clearly people need vehicles right now. The manager of the dealership. Later gave a quote to a reporter that was essentially an early summary of the concept of elite panic. I find this fascinating quote. All the big hotels such as the Saint Francis, the Palace and others were filled with eastern and other tourists who seemed to have lost their heads entirely. Indeed, the only really scared people that I can remember having seen through the 1st 3 days of the fire were people of this class. In many cases these would come to the garage offering to pay any price for the use of an automobile that would take them out of the city. However, we absolutely refused to accept money from any such applicant and as long as we saw that the petitioner was able to walk, we refused to furnish a machine. Hell yeah. **** yeah. Yeah. But it's already there. The rich people trying to prioritize their needs over. Yeah. People over ambulances, yes. Yeah. ******* great. The people of San Francisco, by and large, did not panic, but Brigadier General Frederick Funston, the commanding officer of the Presidio Military Base, was a different story, according to Rebecca Solnit. He quote perceived his job as saving the city from the people rather than saving the people from the material city of cracked and crumbling buildings, falling power lines, and towering flames. So what other people saw? Is it millennial good fellowship? Which is one of the things was that, like the spirit in San Francisco is described, Funston and others in power saw as a mob to be repressed and a flock to be herded. Sounds familiar? Fun? Yeah. Funston did the only thing that a guy with an army at his beckon call generally thinks to do, which is sin soldiers in about it. Now, he had no legal right to do this because it's illegal to do this without under very specific circumstances. But he forced the city under martial law again. Illegally. Now, in Funston's eyes, the civilians who picked their way through ruined shops to save precious food before it spoiled. We're not engaging in mutual aid. They were, in his words, an unlicked mob licked meaning like they have been beaten, you know, we need to beat them to stop this. Spank these, these lawbreakers. The city Mayor Eugene Schmitz was a working class labor union supporting populist, but he wound up reacting no differently than Funston. A man whose prior work experience had mostly consisted of violently suppressing the international workers of the world. A quasi anarchist Workers Union. Yeah, now Mayor Schmitz issued a proclamation. The federal troops, the members of the regular police force, and all special police officers have been authorized by me to kill any and all persons found engaged in looting or in the Commission of any other crime. No wait. People are feeding each other and he's like, shoot him again. This is the populist working class labor union, supporting mayor. This is. It's just what happens when you're in power. Power is bad, bad. That's a that is a more extreme example than I was expecting. Just do a ******* heel. Turn on everything you stand for. Shoot them all. Actually, I've had a change of heart. Kill them. Like, you know when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Because as we all know, property is the same as human life. Yeah, one. Once you get once you're in charge of a lot of property, that just how you start to think, wow, that's a that's a that's a bad one. That's great. Yeah, well, obviously being again people following orders, the federal troops. That as they were told, as Solnit writes quote in treating the citizens as enemies, the occupying armies drove residents and volunteers away from scenes where fire could be prevented. In many parts of the city, only those who eluded the authorities by diplomacy, stealth, or countering invocation of authority were able to fight the blaze. Those who did saved many homes and work sites. There are no reliable figures on mortality in the earthquake, but the best estimates are that about 3000 died mostly from the earthquake itself. One historian suspects that as many as 500 citizens were killed by the occupying. Forces and other estimates 50 to 75. Again, we'll never know because when they would shoot people, they would throw their corpses into burning buildings. Again, this is the US Army. OK, OK, good stuff. Holy ****. OK, so that 3000, so that 3000 number, you know, yeah. Jesus. Again, who knows how many people they actually shot to death? Now, the soldiers didn't only kill people. In many cases, they made the fire worse. So, you know, you have these fires raging through the city, and one of the things you do in that situation is you would demolish a bunch of buildings in order to create a fire break, right? It's the same thing you if you've got like a fire in the woods. You might like like burn down. You might do a controlled burn to destroy like a strip of trees in order to like create a break that the fire that's is uncontrolled can't spread through. It's a pretty normal strategy. It's a fine strategy and would be demolishing buildings to stop a fire. Not a bad thing to do when you have a situation like this. However, when you are doing this in a massive urban fire, dynamite is the preferred, or at least at that point was the preferred thing to use because dynamite is less likely to start fires outside of the blast area just because of the way that dynamite. Works OK instead the soldiers used barrels of gunpowder, no? And again, you're just like, this is the army, this is supposed to be the they're supposed to know this, but supposed to know that. And you probably have dynamite because you're the army. Where was all the dynamite at? Yeah, spoken. Obviously the armies failures like massively spread fires and destroyed thousands of buildings that might have otherwise been saved. I really do recommend reading. Like, and there's there's other **** that they did too, like one of the things that's most ****** ** but maybe least obvious. Is that they started establishing soup kitchens to feed people, in some cases, like, yeah, pushing other ones out of operation. But when the military did it, everyone got like ration cards. And you had a very strict limited set that you could get and you could only come in. And it was like they were basically like, they were almost, like, treated as prisoners while they were getting their food and stuff because they didn't want to encourage dependency by giving out too much free food or making it be pleasant, as opposed to the mutual aid kitchens that were like, eat your fill, you know? Yeah, like, eat what you take what you need and people will do that. But yeah, I yeah, I didn't. I honestly, I didn't know that about this book. And I'm a soulmate head. She's great. You have no idea what this is. This is one of my very favorite books. I really do recommend reading a paradise built in hell. She goes into tremendous and fascinating and it's again for fairness. Like the army did other stuff that was like they are. They organized like medical, like ambulances and ****. Like there were good things that soldiers did and that like individual local leaders did. But there were a lot of bad things and I it in my head. Kind of outweighs the good, yeah. It's Sonic's book has been very influential. It's I think was influential in one of my favorite books, tribe by Sebastian Younger, which delves into some of the same topics, is more about PTSD, but talks a lot about why, like why U.S. soldiers probably suffer PTSD at a higher rate than any other soldiers in the history of warfare. And it it his, the kind of conclusion he comes to is that it's because of the society they come home to rather than the specific details of modern. Combat. It's because of how ****** civilization is. It's because, like when when you break down is when you head home to an empty apartment. You know it's not when you're out in the field with your buddies and ****. It's when you come home and you're in an empty building the way that we tend to live alone and isolated. Then you shatter into 1000 pieces anyway. Also a good book. Try variable content. Yeah, Solonetz book has been very influential to a number of people who I think are pretty darn smart. One example would be Cory Doctorow, who I like quite a lot. Yeah, and he wrote this on the subject. Elite panic quote. Elites tend to believe in a venal, selfish, and essentially monstrous version of human nature, which I sometimes think is their own human nature. I mean, people don't become incredibly wealthy and powerful by being angelic, necessarily. They believe that only their power keeps the rest of us in line, and that when it somehow shrinks away, our seething violence will rise to the surface. That was very clear in Katrina. Timley, garden Ash and Maureen Dowd and all these other people immediately jumped on the bandwagon and started writing commentaries based on the assumption that the rumors of mass violence during Katrina were true. A lot of people have never understood that the rumors were dispelled and that those things didn't actually happen. It's tragic. Now I found another write up in Commentary magazine that continues Doctor Rose line of thought with more concrete examples, both from Katrina and from our present disaster quote. Elite panic frequently brings out another unsavory quirk on the part of some authorities, a tendency to believe the worst about their own citizens in the midst of the Hurricane Katrina crisis. In 2005, New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin found time to go on Oprah Winfrey Show and Lament Hooligan's killing people ****** people in the Superdome. Public officials in the media credulously repeated rumors about St. Violence, snipers shooting at helicopters, and hundreds of bodies piled in the Superdome. These all turned out to be wild exaggerations or falsehoods, arguably tinged by racism. But the stories had an impact away from the media's cameras. A massive rescue effort made-up of freelance volunteers, Coast Guard helicopters and other first responders was underway across the city. But city officials, fearing attacks on rescuers, frequently delayed these operations. They ordered that precious space and boats and helicopters be reserved for armed escorts. Jesus Christ. If that doesn't sum up, America failing to rescue people because you needed more room for guns is like, Yup. We also love guns more than we love our own citizens. Ohh. So that's such a strange thing to even like hear repeated back because it's like, I mean in certain certain circle that it's like known that that is not something that happened. But I I clearly remember when I was a kid when that was happening, that being just fully the only coverage you would really see is like that First off there there was a horrific tragedy and 2nd off that the citizens were being. Blamed for thing like that was. So there was more of that, and you didn't really hear the other side at all. Nope. Yeah. No. Why would you? Again, it's the same thing. That is Twitter's purpose, which is so that you can tell a lie and then correct it with the truth, but nobody reads that second tweet, but no one knows it's there. It's all there. It's there, but we don't read it. I'm going to continue that quote from Commentary magazine as it moves into the present day. Too often the need to avoid panic serves as a retroactive justification for all. Manner of official missteps in late March, as the coronavirus pandemic was climbing towards its Crest in New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio appeared on CNN's state of the Union to defend his record. Host Jake Tapper pressed the mayor on his many statements as recently as two weeks earlier, urging New Yorkers to go about their lives. Tapper asked whether those statements were, at least in part to blame for how the virus is spread across the city. de Blasio didn't give an inch. Everybody was working with the information we had, he explained. And trying, of course, to avoid panic. How advising people to avoid bars and Broadway shows would have been tantamount to panic was left unexplained. And again, yeah, it's the same thing, right? Yeah. People had shut down earlier. It would have meant less money. It's locking the doors and saving the money from the cash registers while people burned to death. That's the it's the same thing. They all do it, just for the period of days and months instead. And then people still praise de Blasio for his, you know, whatever. He's a ***** ** ****. He did a terrible job. He's a monster. Like he's he. Yeah, they're all. They're all trash. That's the point. Yeah. You know, like. And the fact that he's better than someone who has actively pretended that the virus isn't a problem doesn't say anything good about him. It just me. It's like the bar is beneath the floor. The bar is in the parking garage. Like, it's like if you step on a rusty rake and it goes through your foot, and then the person 10 feet away steps on a landmine. Like, like, you're like, well, I'm glad I didn't step on the landmine, but you're not happy, you know? But I'm still gonna die. I didn't get my shot. Yeah. You still have a problem, yeah. Vote Tennis Rake 2020 wow. Tetanus. Rake V landmine. Well, the election of our lives. It's like, well, this is this horrifying metaphor has has really come full circle. Thank you. Now that commentary magazine article goes into detail about another disaster, a 9.2 magnitude earthquake off the Alaskan coast. In March of 1962. Anchorage, the state's largest city, was devastated. Thousands were rendered homeless. Whole neighborhoods fell off of Cliffsides. And then the thing that happens in every disaster happened. People spontaneously organize search and rescue teams to find their trapped neighbors. Meanwhile, the people in charge panicked. In order to protect local businesses from looting, the police immediately deputized a crowd of volunteers, many of whom had been drinking in bars and instant like right before the quake hit. So, they think, find a bunch of drunk men and give them arm bands with the word police written on them. And lipstick, no. No, it's very funny. They also gave a lot of them guns. But it's Alaska. Everybody was already packing. I mean, let's be honest here. Yeah, yeah. Oh my God. Yeah. Now, in doing this, cops were acting in accordance with the science of the day, as embodied by the work of social scientist Richard Titmus. Which let's just, let's take a moment for Titmus like Titmus. It's like a **** based Christmas. It's like either a really terrible disease or a really fun. She's got the Titmus. Yeah, ohh the title, or Mary Titmus. And then you're like very aggressive. Yeah, yeah. Alright, so he believed Titmus. Believe that any major disaster would cause, quote, a mass outbreak of hysterical neurosis among the civilian population. Civilians traumatized by death and destruction he thought would behave like frightened and unsatisfied children. The only way for authorities to avoid such horror was to use force and the threat of force immediately. And again, this was very heavily influenced over the Cold War, right people are every one of the governments thinking what's going to happen with the nukes fall, and the assumption is everyone will panic and we'll have to shoot a bunch of them in order to maintain order. The ****** ** thing about this is they don't even have the excuse of like, well, they didn't know at the time they had done as much research the the bombing of London had happened like the Blitz had occurred, right? And they've had going into the blitz. We talked about this and it could happen here. Younger talks about it and tried going into the blitz. Everyone had expected that the entire city would panic. People be like eating each other and like committing rape and murder. And instead everyone did the thing people always do in disasters and took care of each other collectively cared. But nobody listened, you know. No, no one, no one in charge paid attention. Because they just can't imagine that that's the case. It's *******. You have to imagine it actively benefits them to make people afraid of each other. Yeah, yes, absolutely. Because then other things might happen that they wouldn't like. So the elite panic over the possible chaos outweighed any obligation to protect the citizens of anchorage. The police chief immediately suspended the search for survivors in the rubble because he's worried about chaos. No, we don't have time to look for any survivors. Like we have to get these lipstick cops out on the street, give guns to more. Drunks. That's what's gonna protect people. OK. I would see a movie called Lipstick Cuffs. Lipstick, lipstick. We would. Especially if they're police who only police the quality of people's use of lipstick, right? And those but with the same violence as modern cops. Yeah, with the same amount of baseless judgment and violence as a model. Like SWAT teams just opening up in Los Angeles malls. There's there's whole corners of YouTube devoted to this. This very lipstick. Opry not after the lipstick cops get in that there won't be purged. So yeah, so again, everyone in charge. A lot of them at least panic. The people, of course, do not. And since the police chief has called off the search for survivors, the citizens of Anchorage spontaneously organized groups of citizens and pull every single survivor from the ruins. And in fact, they had done it by the time the police chiefs like, like, by the way, like, while the police chief was like panicking about chaos, like people were actively, like, finishing the search for survivors. Like, it's very funny quote by the morning after the quake, more than 200 volunteers were jammed inside the Anchorage Public Safety building and they brought equipment. Earth movers and dump trucks lined the street outside. 2 volunteers took it upon themselves to organize the crowd. They wrote down names and skills, carpenters, plumbers, electricians and started matching people to the tasks that were pouring in. Somebody hung up a sign. Manpower control. In little more than 12 hours, the gangs of shedding passers by, pulling victims from the wreckage had turned into a workforce where authorities expected panicked crowds. Instead, they found gung ho volunteers. Skilled workers asking only to be pointed towards jobs that needed doing in the end. And this is the writing of a social scientist named Muallem who studied this. In the end, this diffuse wave of unofficial first responders had reclaimed almost all the city's engine dead before nightfall on Friday morning. All over the city, ordinary people urge surgeon to action, teaming up and switching on like a kind of civic immune response, which is how Muallem describes this, which I really find that. Yeah. Yeah. When reporters from what Alaskans call outside. Again reaching the city, many were openly skeptical of the low fatality numbers being reported by Davis's search crews. At first, twelve were believed to be lost, but survivors kept turning up. Eventually, the Anchorage death toll settled at an almost miraculous 5 people. Wow. So thankfully not another supermarket fire right now. This situation fascinated a team of social scientists from Ohio State University who arrived a day and 1/2 after the disaster. And there they were studying people's disaster response under funding from the US Army because the military like it was the Cold War again. The defense industry had a deep and abiding interest of knowing, like, if there's a mass disaster in a city, how do people react? And they had, the military had sent them there basically being like, tell us how they panic, like, so we can figure out ways to like. Violently corral the citizenry once they panic and a disaster. God. So these guys are some blame tactics. We're always looking for new material here. Yeah, give us, give us like who? Tell us who we need to shoot next time this happens. They suck, right? They suck. Go on. Yeah, tell us how bad they sucked. Yeah, researchers, though, like, again, they they come. So they come expecting chaos and violence and instead they find like, people taking care of each other the way they always do. Researchers approached citizen after citizen in the work groups and asked them each variations of the same question. Who told you to do this? And the answer always boiled down to nobody like that someone needed to do this. So here I am, just I'm a person. Yeah, I'm a person doing the the thing that people do in this situation. Bare minimum. What about you? Yeah, why aren't you ******* helping put the ******* clipboard down? Dude, look. Kinda question. Is that yeah, yeah, there's people who are hurt. Like, what do you ******* mean? What am I who told me to do this? Yeah, quote from commentary. The team stayed for a week and interviewed nearly 500 people in Waco. Quaran telli, this leader of the study, was particularly interested in anchorages. Small Civil defence office. It should have been in charge of search and rescue, but Korinteli noted it had quickly become bogged down over questions of bureaucratic protocol. Of course, the amateur Mountaineers. People who would like basically volunteered to do search and rescue had taken over that function almost immediately. Korinteli used the term emergent groups to describe teams of self organized volunteers like Davis's searchers. He didn't miss the irony that the agency created to protect civilians soon became an obstacle that this emergent group of rescuers had to work around. OK. Yeah. You could argue that, especially in times of this, the states really just an obstacle for people, you know, trying to do important work. Yeah, they're just getting in the way of people doing the, the the work that needs to be done better and for free. Yeah, you could argue that. You could argue that, but then arguing that would lead you to other things that are very radical. And so we well, let's never continue this line of thinking. Definitely don't continue this line of thinking in your own house. Don't read a paradise built in hell and tribe and then think about the implications of that in terms of like how a policy should actually. Action. No, I wouldn't. I would never lead with empathy. I think that that's actually kind of a dangerous path to go down. Horrible, horrible. Find yourself doing things, thinking thoughts. You might find yourself as part of an emergent group taking the responsibility for the safety and security of your fellow citizens into your own hands. I would never yeah, that then we're then we're really ******. Then we're ******. These are banding together. We're ******. Yeah. My God, if we're taking care of each other instead of letting the the armed and angry young like men with yeah. We've talked enough about cops. It is funny that the story that I read right before recording this episode is about how a group of the state police in Kentucky, one of their training documents about a warrior mentality came out, and in it they quote Hitler positively. Perceptions and actions are not hindered by the potential of death. He also quoted Robert E Lee. They encourage police to be ruthless killers. I don't know. I prefer emergent groups of people taking care of each other. But whatever. Emerging groups, I love that they're that. Yeah, they would still found. Sounds scary. Don't want any of those emergent groups getting near you and saving your life. You wouldn't want that. No, no, no, no, no. They might loot. They might look food from a burning building. So that, yeah. Like, but you didn't pay. You're like, yeah, they're building is full of water, building is on fire. Yeah. Ohh. It's just like, shove a dollar bill in a fishes mouth. They're like, OK, we're going to square here. Yeah, well Jamie, yeah, that's my episode on Elite Panic. First of all, I think we should start a band called the I agree, we should start a punk band. We should start a band 25 years ago called Elite Panic, gets some wigs, do some metal and and get really addicted to cocaine. Later be found to have engaged in a whole bunch of questionable sexual behaviors, like just oodles of them on our private jet. Like, yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And then and then and then 20 years after that, someone writes a bestseller about that and we get canceled in the present. There's an HBO miniseries based on us. Yeah, we're played by that same guy who played David Koresh, the second big Koresh and you both played by both played. We're both played by David Koresh. Absolutely. And humans and Emmy, he wins all of the. Been nominated for an Emmy, but then he loses to Forkey. That's what I would say to him. Nice, nice callback to your last episode and to the thing that happened to you with the images. Ohh, I'd never over it. Saw. OK, so this is being recorded like the day before Halloween. Did see a child dressed as Forky on the street today and I was triggered? I was. I still have no idea who Forky is good and I will. And that's what I use every weapon at my disposal to avoid learning. That was, I have to say, this is for all of the horrible atrocities we talked about today there there was some optimism to be found in. In this one, I feel, I feel not completely terrible, no, because again, the lesson that people learn over and over again in times like this is like, oh, people. Take care of each other. When things are bad, like when everything goes to **** at once, people tend to be like, well, how can I help? That's the normal human response, unless you're rich or the mayor. Or a general or the CEO of a supermarket chain. Or a rich mayor. Yeah. If you're the baby, you're not. Yeah. Don't be the baby. Don't be the baby. Don't be save babies. Don't let them burn to death while saving cash registers. Don't be the baby. And definitely don't be the son of a baby. Be a person. Babies aren't people, is what I'm saying. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Well. This will drop after the election, so it may launch land in a world incomprehensibly different than the one that we're currently in. But we'll probably be broadly similar to the one that we're in, but either ******** or. Maybe slightly less ******. No, no real way to know. Yeah, this this podcast exists in a strange void in time. It does. It sure does. It is weird recording this and being like, who the **** knows where everything's going to be? So yeah, give us a give us 96 hours. Who ******* knows? Yeah? Anyway, well, I had fun. I had fun, too, Jamie. I enjoy talking about elite panic. It turns out I do too, now that I know what it is. Well, for the people who are not elites, who have panicked already, you want to give your plegables plugging away? You can follow me on Twitter.com at Jamie Loftus. Help. You can listen to my new show, Lolita podcast, which examines the legacy of the book. Belita and gets really into who the character Dolores Hayes was and how she got lost in translation throughout the adaptations that that this book was given over the years. And yeah, that starts on Monday, November 23rd and episodes will release every Monday. And Robert, you're going to be playing Vladimir Nabokov. The the role of a lifetime. The role of a lifetime. It's the part. I shouldn't say that. This is not a time for it's the part I was born to play. He's actually not a terrible person. So he's, uh, and I've looked, but wait, wasn't he didn't? Oh, wait, no. Lolita was supposed to be like Auntie that, right? Like the guy ******* the kid was supposed to be a bad guy, right? He was a villain. Yeah, the book. OK, pretty never read it because it seemed OK. That's good. But everyone's interpretation, like the the the greater cultures. Tasha was the exact opposite. Is it kind of like, like Starship Troopers where it's like they made a movie to make fun of how bad fascism is and how bad how close to fascism America was, but instead everyone was like, look at those cool guns. I wanna be those guys. It's literally that. Yeah. It's just like the smartest people in the world being like, so I think there's how ****** you are. Yeah. So it's it's it's interesting and ****** ** and it's been, you know, ruining my day every day for a while, so you should listen to it. Never make anything with a message because people will misinterpret it and molest children. That's the message of today. And now there's going to be a whole podcast about it. Yeah, alright, well, the episodes ******* over go. Whatever. I know it's reasonable and the incomprehensible world you live in right now. Bye. Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break our handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her impactful behavioral discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. From Tenderfoot TV and iHeartRadio, this is La Monstra, a story of abomination and conspiracy. The story about the man who simply become known as. Lamaster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.