Podcasts about after world war two

Every other week, we'll be re-releasing an episode we think deserves more attention. Today, we'll hear about The Candy Bomber. After World War Two, Germany was split up and occupied by the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union. In June of 1948, the U.S., France, and Britain announced they were creating a unified West German currency. Joseph Stalin opposed this unification, and cut off land routes from Berlin to West Germany.  In order to bypass the land routes, bombers transported supplies (primarily food) and delivered them to West Berlin in what was called Operation Vittles. Colonel Gail S. Halvorsen was one of several pilots recruited to fly these missions. One day, after sneaking out and flying to Berlin for some R&R, COL Halvorsen met some local children who were survivors of the war. Talking with them changed his life, and he decided he wanted to do something to help them. He returned to base, gathered as much candy and gum as he could, fashioned parachutes with handkerchiefs, and put all the goodies inside. The next day, he flew over West Berlin and dropped the parachutes full of candy out of his bomb bay.  The children were delighted. COL Halvorsen did this several more times, and gained international acclaim for his actions. To learn more about COL Halvorsen, check out his book, The Berlin Candy Bomber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After World War Two, Egypt's government recruited thousands of Nazis and their collaborators to bolster the country's defence and security. This was part of Egyptian President Nasser's efforts to modernise the country and present himself as the leader of the Arab world in its conflict with Israel. Johann Von Leers was one of Adolf Hitler's Nazi propagandists. Nasser's government recruited him in 1956 to lead Egypt's antisemitic propaganda machine.Frank Gelli was a member of a far-right group in Italy at the time. He was sent to meet Von Leers in Cairo in 1964. He tells Ben Henderson about their conversation. Eye-witness accounts brought to life by archive. Witness History is for those fascinated by the past. We take you to the events that have shaped our world through the eyes of the people who were there. For nine minutes every day, we take you back in time and all over the world, to examine wars, coups, scientific discoveries, cultural moments and much more.Recent episodes explore everything from football in Brazil, the history of the ‘Indian Titanic' and the invention of air fryers, to Public Enemy's Fight The Power, subway art and the political crisis in Georgia. We look at the lives of some of the most famous leaders, artists, scientists and personalities in history, including: visionary architect Antoni Gaudi and the design of the Sagrada Familia; Michael Jordan and his bespoke Nike trainers; Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal; and Görel Hanser, manager of legendary Swedish pop band Abba on the influence they've had on the music industry. You can learn all about fascinating and surprising stories, such as the time an Iraqi journalist hurled his shoes at the President of the United States in protest of America's occupation of Iraq; the creation of the Hollywood commercial that changed advertising forever; and the ascent of the first Aboriginal MP.(Photo: Johann von Leers. Credit: Bernd Settnik/BArch/CC-BY-SA 3.0)

After World War Two, Australia received a host of refugees from war-torn nations, and these included a surprising number of Polish people who had endured what is known as the "Polish Abduction".

After World War Two the world was trying to get back to normal. However in small southwest town in the United States terror would reign for months as a mad man was on the loose praying on the innocent. These crimes would go on to inspire many horror films and books. And is very controversial to this day. --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/matty-matt/support

It was a tremendous honor & pleasure to interview Richard Rhodes, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Making of the Atomic BombWe discuss* similarities between AI progress & Manhattan Project (developing a powerful, unprecedented, & potentially apocalyptic technology within an uncertain arms-race situation)* visiting starving former Soviet scientists during fall of Soviet Union* whether Oppenheimer was a spy, & consulting on the Nolan movie* living through WW2 as a child* odds of nuclear war in Ukraine, Taiwan, Pakistan, & North Korea* how the US pulled of such a massive secret wartime scientific & industrial projectWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Timestamps(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movie(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?(0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombs(0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet program(1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, Taiwan(1:33:12) - Oppenheimer as lab director(1:53:40) - AI progress vs Manhattan Project(1:59:50) - Living through WW2(2:16:45) - Secrecy(2:26:34) - Wisdom & warTranscript(0:00:00) - Oppenheimer movieDwarkesh Patel 0:00:51Today I have the great honor of interviewing Richard Rhodes, who is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Making of the Atomic Bomb, and most recently, the author of Energy, A Human History. I'm really excited about this one. Let's jump in at a current event, which is the fact that there's a new movie about Oppenheimer coming out, which I understand you've been consulted about. What did you think of the trailer? What are your impressions? Richard Rhodes 0:01:22They've really done a good job of things like the Trinity test device, which was the sphere covered with cables of various kinds. I had watched Peaky Blinders, where the actor who's playing Oppenheimer also appeared, and he looked so much like Oppenheimer to start with. Oppenheimer was about six feet tall, he was rail thin, not simply in terms of weight, but in terms of structure. Someone said he could sit in a children's high chair comfortably. But he never weighed more than about 140 pounds and that quality is there in the actor. So who knows? It all depends on how the director decided to tell the story. There are so many aspects of the story that you could never possibly squeeze them into one 2-hour movie. I think that we're waiting for the multi-part series that would really tell a lot more of the story, if not the whole story. But it looks exciting. We'll see. There have been some terrible depictions of Oppenheimer, there've been some terrible depictions of the bomb program. And maybe they'll get this one right. Dwarkesh Patel 0:02:42Yeah, hopefully. It is always great when you get an actor who resembles their role so well. For example, Bryan Cranston who played LBJ, and they have the same physical characteristics of the beady eyes, the big ears. Since we're talking about Oppenheimer, I had one question about him. I understand that there's evidence that's come out that he wasn't directly a communist spy. But is there any possibility that he was leaking information to the Soviets or in some way helping the Soviet program? He was a communist sympathizer, right? Richard Rhodes 0:03:15He had been during the 1930s. But less for the theory than for the practical business of helping Jews escape from Nazi Germany. One of the loves of his life, Jean Tatlock, was also busy working on extracting Jews from Europe during the 30. She was a member of the Communist Party and she, I think, encouraged him to come to meetings. But I don't think there's any possibility whatsoever that he shared information. In fact, he said he read Marx on a train trip between Berkeley and Washington one time and thought it was a bunch of hooey, just ridiculous. He was a very smart man, and he read the book with an eye to its logic, and he didn't think there was much there. He really didn't know anything about human beings and their struggles. He was born into considerable wealth. There were impressionist paintings all over his family apartments in New York City. His father had made a great deal of money cornering the markets on uniform linings for military uniforms during and before the First World War so there was a lot of wealth. I think his income during the war years and before was somewhere around $100,000 a month. And that's a lot of money in the 1930s. So he just lived in his head for most of his early years until he got to Berkeley and discovered that prime students of his were living on cans of god-awful cat food, because they couldn't afford anything else. And once he understood that there was great suffering in the world, he jumped in on it, as he always did when he became interested in something. So all of those things come together. His brother Frank was a member of the party, as was Frank's wife. I think the whole question of Oppenheimer lying to the security people during the Second World War about who approached him and who was trying to get him to sign on to some espionage was primarily an effort to cover up his brother's involvement. Not that his brothers gave away any secrets, I don't think they did. But if the army's security had really understood Frank Oppenheimer's involvement, he probably would have been shipped off to the Aleutians or some other distant place for the duration of the war. And Oppenheimer quite correctly wanted Frank around. He was someone he trusted.(0:06:22) - Was the bomb inevitable?Dwarkesh Patel 0:06:22Let's start talking about The Making of the Bomb. One question I have is — if World War II doesn't happen, is there any possibility that the bomb just never gets developed? Nobody bothers.Richard Rhodes 0:06:34That's really a good question and I've wondered over the years. But the more I look at the sequence of events, the more I think it would have been essentially inevitable, though perhaps not such an accelerated program. The bomb was pushed so hard during the Second World War because we thought the Germans had already started working on one. Nuclear fission had been discovered in Nazi Germany, in Berlin, in 1938, nine months before the beginning of the Second World War in Europe. Technological surveillance was not available during the war. The only way you could find out something was to send in a spy or have a mole or something human. And we didn't have that. So we didn't know where the Germans were, but we knew that the basic physics reaction that could lead to a bomb had been discovered there a year or more before anybody else in the West got started thinking about it. There was that most of all to push the urgency. In your hypothetical there would not have been that urgency. However, as soon as good physicists thought about the reaction that leads to nuclear fission — where a slow room temperature neutron, very little energy, bumps into the nucleus of a uranium-235 atom it would lead to a massive response. Isidore Rabi, one of the great physicists of this era, said it would have been like the moon struck the earth. The reaction was, as physicists say, fiercely exothermic. It puts out a lot more energy than you have to use to get it started. Once they did the numbers on that, and once they figured out how much uranium you would need to have in one place to make a bomb or to make fission get going, and once they were sure that there would be a chain reaction, meaning a couple of neutrons would come out of the reaction from one atom, and those two or three would go on and bump into other Uranium atoms, which would then fission them, and you'd get a geometric exponential. You'd get 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, and off of there. For most of our bombs today the initial fission, in 80 generations, leads to a city-busting explosion. And then they had to figure out how much material they would need, and that's something the Germans never really figured out, fortunately for the rest of us. They were still working on the idea that somehow a reactor would be what you would build. When Niels Bohr, the great Danish physicist, escaped from Denmark in 1943 and came to England and then United States, he brought with him a rough sketch that Werner Heisenberg, the leading scientist in the German program, had handed him in the course of trying to find out what Bohr knew about what America was doing. And he showed it to the guys at Los Alamos and Hans Bethe, one of the great Nobel laureate physicists in the group, said — “Are the Germans trying to throw a reactor down on us?” You can make a reactor blow up, we saw that at Chernobyl, but it's not a nuclear explosion on the scale that we're talking about with the bomb. So when a couple of these emigres Jewish physicists from Nazi Germany were whiling away their time in England after they escaped, because they were still technically enemy aliens and therefore could not be introduced to top secret discussions, one of them asked the other — “How much would we need of pure uranium-235, this rare isotope of uranium that chain reacts? How much would we need to make a bomb?” And they did the numbers and they came up with one pound, which was startling to them. Of course, it is more than that. It's about 125 pounds, but that's just a softball. That's not that much material. And then they did the numbers about what it would cost to build a factory to pull this one rare isotope of uranium out of the natural metal, which has several isotopes mixed together. And they figured it wouldn't cost more than it would cost to build a battleship, which is not that much money for a country at war. Certainly the British had plenty of battleships at that point in time. So they put all this together and they wrote a report which they handed through their superior physicists at Manchester University where they were based, who quickly realized how important this was. The United States lagged behind because we were not yet at war, but the British were. London was being bombed in the blitz. So they saw the urgency, first of all, of eating Germany to the punch, second of all of the possibility of building a bomb. In this report, these two scientists wrote that no physical structure came to their minds which could offer protection against a bomb of such ferocious explosive power. This report was from 1940 long before the Manhattan Project even got started. They said in this report, the only way we could think of to protect you against a bomb would be to have a bomb of similar destructive force that could be threatened for use if the other side attacked you. That's deterrence. That's a concept that was developed even before the war began in the United States. You put all those pieces together and you have a situation where you have to build a bomb because whoever builds the first bomb theoretically could prevent you from building more or prevent another country from building any and could dominate the world. And the notion of Adolf Hitler dominating the world, the Third Reich with nuclear weapons, was horrifying. Put all that together and the answer is every country that had the technological infrastructure to even remotely have the possibility of building everything you'd have to build to get the material for a bomb started work on thinking about it as soon as nuclear fusion was announced to the world. France, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, the United States, even Japan. So I think the bomb would have been developed but maybe not so quickly. Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:10In the book you talk that for some reason the Germans thought that the critical mass was something like 10 tons, they had done some miscalculation.Richard Rhodes 0:14:18A reactor. Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:19You also have some interesting stories in the book about how different countries found out the Americans were working on the bomb. For example, the Russians saw that all the top physicists, chemists, and metallurgists were no longer publishing. They had just gone offline and so they figured that something must be going on. I'm not sure if you're aware that while the subject of the Making of the Atomic Bomb in and of itself is incredibly fascinating, this book has become a cult classic in AI. Are you familiar with this? Richard Rhodes 0:14:52No. Dwarkesh Patel 0:14:53The people who are working on AI right now are huge fans of yours. They're the ones who initially recommended the book to me because the way they see the progress in the field reminded them of this book. Because you start off with these initial scientific hints. With deep learning, for example, here's something that can teach itself any function is similar to Szilárd noticing the nuclear chain reaction. In AI there's these scaling laws that say that if you make the model this much bigger, it gets much better at reasoning, at predicting text, and so on. And then you can extrapolate this curve. And you can see we get two more orders of magnitude, and we get to something that looks like human level intelligence. Anyway, a lot of the people who are working in AI have become huge fans of your book because of this reason. They see a lot of analogies in the next few years. They must be at page 400 in their minds of where the Manhattan Project was.Richard Rhodes 0:15:55We must later on talk about unintended consequences. I find the subject absolutely fascinating. I think my next book might be called Unintended Consequences. Dwarkesh Patel 0:16:10You mentioned that a big reason why many of the scientists wanted to work on the bomb, especially the Jewish emigres, was because they're worried about Hitler getting it first. As you mentioned at some point, 1943, 1944, it was becoming obvious that Hitler, the Nazis were not close to the bomb. And I believe that almost none of the scientists quit after they found out that the Nazis weren't close. So why didn't more of them say — “Oh, I guess we were wrong. The Nazis aren't going to get it. We don't need to be working on it.”?Richard Rhodes 0:16:45There was only one who did that, Joseph Rotblat. In May of 1945 when he heard that Germany had been defeated, he packed up and left. General Groves, the imperious Army Corps of Engineers General who ran the entire Manhattan Project, was really upset. He was afraid he'd spill the beans. So he threatened to have him arrested and put in jail. But Rotblat was quite determined not to stay any longer. He was not interested in building bombs to aggrandize the national power of the United States of America, which is perfectly understandable. But why was no one else? Let me tell it in terms of Victor Weisskopf. He was an Austrian theoretical physicist, who, like the others, escaped when the Nazis took over Germany and then Austria and ended up at Los Alamos. Weisskopf wrote later — “There we were in Los Alamos in the midst of the darkest part of our science.” They were working on a weapon of mass destruction, that's pretty dark. He said “Before it had almost seemed like a spiritual quest.” And it's really interesting how different physics was considered before and after the Second World War. Before the war, one of the physicists in America named Louis Alvarez told me when he got his PhD in physics at Berkeley in 1937 and went to cocktail parties, people would ask, “What's your degree in?” He would tell them “Chemistry.” I said, “Louis, why?” He said, “because I don't really have to explain what physics was.” That's how little known this kind of science was at that time. There were only about 1,000 physicists in the whole world in 1900. By the mid-30s, there were a lot more, of course. There'd been a lot of nuclear physics and other kinds of physics done by them. But it was still arcane. And they didn't feel as if they were doing anything mean or dirty or warlike at all. They were just doing pure science. Then nuclear fission came along. It was publicized worldwide. People who've been born since after the Second World War don't realize that it was not a secret at first. The news was published first in a German chemistry journal, Die Naturwissenschaften, and then in the British journal Nature and then in American journals. And there were headlines in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and all over the world. People had been reading about and thinking about how to get energy out of the atomic nucleus for a long time. It was clear there was a lot there. All you had to do was get a piece of radium and see that it glowed in the dark. This chunk of material just sat there, you didn't plug it into a wall. And if you held it in your hand, it would burn you. So where did that energy come from? The physicists realized it all came from the nucleus of the atom, which is a very small part of the whole thing. The nucleus is 1/100,000th the diameter of the whole atom. Someone in England described it as about the size of a fly in a cathedral. All of the energy that's involved in chemical reactions, comes from the electron cloud that's around the nucleus. But  it was clear that the nucleus was the center of powerful forces. But the question was, how do you get them out? The only way that the nucleus had been studied up to 1938 was by bombarding it with protons, which have the same electric charge as the nucleus, positive charge, which means they were repelled by it. So you had to accelerate them to high speeds with various versions of the big machines that we've all become aware of since then. The cyclotron most obviously built in the 30s, but there were others as well. And even then, at best, you could chip a little piece off. You could change an atom one step up or one step down the periodic table. This was the classic transmutation of medieval alchemy sure but it wasn't much, you didn't get much out. So everyone came to think of the nucleus of the atom like a little rock that you really had to hammer hard to get anything to happen with it because it was so small and dense. That's why nuclear fission, with this slow neutron drifting and then the whole thing just goes bang, was so startling to everybody. So startling that when it happened, most of the physicists who would later work on the bomb and others as well, realized that they had missed the reaction that was something they could have staged on a lab bench with the equipment on the shelf. Didn't have to invent anything new. And Louis Alvarez again, this physicist at Berkeley, he said — “I was getting my hair cut. When I read the newspaper, I pulled off the robe and half with my hair cut, ran to my lab, pulled some equipment off the shelf, set it up and there it was.” So he said, “I discovered nuclear fission, but it was two days too late.” And that happened all over. People were just hitting themselves on the head and saying, well, Niels Bohr said, “What fools we've all been.” So this is a good example of how in science, if your model you're working with is wrong it doesn't lead you down the right path. There was only one physicist who really was thinking the right way about the uranium atom and that was Niels Bohr. He wondered, sometime during the 30s, why uranium was the last natural element in the periodic table? What is different about the others that would come later? He visualized the nucleus as a liquid drop. I always like to visualize it as a water-filled balloon. It's wobbly, it's not very stable. The protons in the nucleus are held together by something called the strong force, but they still have the repellent positive electric charge that's trying to push them apart when you get enough of them into a nucleus. It's almost a standoff between the strong force and all the electrical charge. So it is like a wobbly balloon of water. And then you see why a neutron just falling into the nucleus would make it wobble around even more and in one of its configurations, it might take a dumbbell shape. And then you'd have basically two charged atoms just barely connected, trying to push each other apart. And often enough, they went the whole way. When they did that, these two new elements, half the weight of uranium, way down the periodic table, would reconfigure themselves into two separate nuclei. And in doing so, they would release some energy. And that was the energy that came out of the reaction and there was a lot of energy. So Bohr thought about the model in the right way. The chemists who actually discovered nuclear fusion didn't know what they were gonna get. They were just bombarding a solution of uranium nitrate with neutrons thinking, well, maybe we can make a new element, maybe a first man-made element will come out of our work. So when they analyzed the solution after they bombarded it, they found elements halfway down the periodic table. They shouldn't have been there. And they were totally baffled. What is this doing here? Do we contaminate our solution? No. They had been working with a physicist named Lisa Meitner who was a theoretical physicist, an Austrian Jew. She had gotten out of Nazi Germany not long before. But they were still in correspondence with her. So they wrote her a letter. I held that letter in my hand when I visited Berlin and I was in tears. You don't hold history of that scale in your hands very often. And it said in German — “We found this strange reaction in our solution. What are these elements doing there that don't belong there?” And she went for a walk in a little village in Western Sweden with her nephew, Otto Frisch, who was also a nuclear physicist. And they thought about it for a while and they remembered Bohr's model, the wobbly water-filled balloon. And they suddenly saw what could happen. And that's where the news came from, the physics news as opposed to the chemistry news from the guys in Germany that was published in all the Western journals and all the newspapers. And everybody had been talking about, for years, what you could do if you had that kind of energy. A glass of this material would drive the Queen Mary back and forth from New York to London 20 times and so forth, your automobile could run for months. People were thinking about what would be possible if you had that much available energy. And of course, people had thought about reactors. Robert Oppenheimer was a professor at Berkeley and within a week of the news reaching Berkeley, one of his students told me that he had a drawing on the blackboard, a rather bad drawing of both a reactor and a bomb. So again, because the energy was so great, the physics was pretty obvious. Whether it would actually happen depended on some other things like could you make it chain react? But fundamentally, the idea was all there at the very beginning and everybody jumped on it. Dwarkesh Patel 0:27:54The book is actually the best history of World War II I've ever read. It's about the atomic bomb, but it's interspersed with the events that are happening in World War II, which motivate the creation of the bomb or the release of it, why it had to be dropped on Japan given the Japanese response. The first third is about the scientific roots of the physics and it's also the best book I've read about the history of science in the early 20th century and the organization of it. There's some really interesting stuff in there. For example, there was a passage where you talk about how there's a real master apprentice model in early science where if you wanted to learn to do this kind of experimentation, you will go to Amsterdam where the master of it is residing. It's much more individual focused. Richard Rhodes 0:28:58Yeah, the whole European model of graduate study, which is basically the wandering scholar. You could go wherever you wanted to and sign up with whoever was willing to have you sign up. (0:29:10) - Firebombing vs nuclear vs hydrogen bombsDwarkesh Patel 0:29:10But the question I wanted to ask regarding the history you made of World War II in general is — there's one way you can think about the atom bomb which is that it is completely different from any sort of weaponry that has been developed before it. Another way you can think of it is there's a spectrum where on one end you have the thermonuclear bomb, in the middle you have the atom bomb, and on this end you have the firebombing of cities like Hamburg and Dresden and Tokyo. Do you think of these as completely different categories or does it seem like an escalating gradient to you? Richard Rhodes 0:29:47I think until you get to the hydrogen bomb, it's really an escalating gradient. The hydrogen bomb can be made arbitrarily large. The biggest one ever tested was 56 megatons of TNT equivalent. The Soviet tested that. That had a fireball more than five miles in diameter, just the fireball. So that's really an order of magnitude change. But the other one's no and in fact, I think one of the real problems, this has not been much discussed and it should be, when American officials went to Hiroshima and Nagasaki after the war, one of them said later — “I got on a plane in Tokyo. We flew down the long green archipelago of the Japanese home island. When I left Tokyo, it was all gray broken roof tiles from the fire bombing and the other bombings. And then all this greenery. And then when we flew over Hiroshima, it was just gray broken roof tiles again.” So the scale of the bombing with one bomb, in the case of Hiroshima, was not that different from the scale of the fire bombings that had preceded it with tens of thousands of bombs. The difference was it was just one plane. In fact, the people in Hiroshima didn't even bother to go into their bomb shelters because one plane had always just been a weather plane. Coming over to check the weather before the bombers took off. So they didn't see any reason to hide or protect themselves, which was one of the reasons so many people were killed. The guys at Los Alamos had planned on the Japanese being in their bomb shelters. They did everything they could think of to make the bomb as much like ordinary bombing as they could. And for example, it was exploded high enough above ground, roughly 1,800 yards, so that the fireball that would form from this really very small nuclear weapon — by modern standards — 15 kilotons of TNT equivalent, wouldn't touch the ground and stir up dirt and irradiate it and cause massive radioactive fallout. It never did that. They weren't sure there would be any fallout. They thought the plutonium and the bomb over Nagasaki now would just kind of turn into a gas and blow away. That's not exactly what happened. But people don't seem to realize, and it's never been emphasized enough, these first bombs, like all nuclear weapons, were firebombs. Their job was to start mass fires, just exactly like all the six-pound incendiaries that had been destroying every major city in Japan by then. Every major city above 50,000 population had already been burned out. The only reason Hiroshima and Nagasaki were around to be atomic bombed is because they'd been set aside from the target list, because General Groves wanted to know what the damage effects would be. The bomb that was tested in the desert didn't tell you anything. It killed a lot of rabbits, knocked down a lot of cactus, melted some sand, but you couldn't see its effect on buildings and on people. So the bomb was deliberately intended to be as much not like poison gas, for example, because we didn't want the reputation for being like people in the war in Europe during the First World War, where people were killing each other with horrible gasses. We just wanted people to think this was another bombing. So in that sense, it was. Of course, there was radioactivity. And of course, some people were killed by it. But they calculated that the people who would be killed by the irradiation, the neutron radiation from the original fireball, would be close enough to the epicenter of the explosion that they would be killed by the blast or the flash of light, which was 10,000 degrees. The world's worst sunburn. You've seen stories of people walking around with their skin hanging off their arms. I've had sunburns almost that bad, but not over my whole body, obviously, where the skin actually peeled blisters and peels off. That was a sunburn from a 10,000 degree artificial sun. Dwarkesh Patel 0:34:29So that's not the heat, that's just the light? Richard Rhodes 0:34:32Radiant light, radiant heat. 10,000 degrees. But the blast itself only extended out a certain distance, it was fire. And all the nuclear weapons that have ever been designed are basically firebombs. That's important because the military in the United States after the war was not able to figure out how to calculate the effects of this weapon in a reliable way that matched their previous experience. They would only calculate the blast effects of a nuclear weapon when they figured their targets. That's why we had what came to be called overkill. We wanted redundancy, of course, but 60 nuclear weapons on Moscow was way beyond what would be necessary to destroy even that big a city because they were only calculating the blast. But in fact, if you exploded a 300 kiloton nuclear warhead over the Pentagon at 3,000 feet, it would blast all the way out to the capital, which isn't all that far. But if you counted the fire, it would start a mass-fire and then it would reach all the way out to the Beltway and burn everything between the epicenter of the weapon and the Beltway. All organic matter would be totally burned out, leaving nothing but mineral matter, basically. Dwarkesh Patel 0:36:08I want to emphasize two things you said because they really hit me in reading the book and I'm not sure if the audience has fully integrated them. The first is, in the book, the military planners and Groves, they talk about needing to use the bomb sooner rather than later, because they were running out of cities in Japan where there are enough buildings left that it would be worth bombing in the first place, which is insane. An entire country is almost already destroyed from fire bombing alone. And the second thing about the category difference between thermonuclear and atomic bombs. Daniel Ellsberg, the nuclear planner who wrote the Doomsday machine, he talks about, people don't understand that the atom bomb that resulted in the pictures we see of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, that is simply the detonator of a modern nuclear bomb, which is an insane thing to think about. So for example, 10 and 15 kilotons is the Hiroshima Nagasaki and the Tsar Bomba, which was 50 megatons. So more than 1,000 times as much. And that wasn't even as big as they could make it. They kept the uranium tamper off, because they didn't want to destroy all of Siberia. So you could get more than 10,000 times as powerful. Richard Rhodes 0:37:31When Edward Teller, co-inventor of the hydrogen bomb and one of the dark forces in the story, was consulting with our military, just for his own sake, he sat down and calculated, how big could you make a hydrogen bomb? He came up with 1,000 megatons. And then he looked at the effects. 1,000 megatons would be a fireball 10 miles in diameter. And the atmosphere is only 10 miles deep. He figured that it would just be a waste of energy, because it would all blow out into space. Some of it would go laterally, of course, but most of it would just go out into space. So a bomb more than 100 megatons would just be totally a waste of time. Of course, a 100 megatons bomb is also a total waste, because there's no target on Earth big enough to justify that from a military point of view. Robert Oppenheimer, when he had his security clearance questioned and then lifted when he was being punished for having resisted the development of the hydrogen bomb, was asked by the interrogator at this security hearing — “Well, Dr. Oppenheimer, if you'd had a hydrogen bomb for Hiroshima, wouldn't you have used it?” And Oppenheimer said, “No.” The interrogator asked, “Why is that?” He said because the target was too small. I hope that scene is in the film, I'm sure it will be. So after the war, when our bomb planners and some of our scientists went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just about as soon as the surrender was signed, what they were interested in was the scale of destruction, of course. And those two cities didn't look that different from the other cities that had been firebombed with small incendiaries and ordinary high explosives. They went home to Washington, the policy makers, with the thought that — “Oh, these bombs are not so destructive after all.” They had been touted as city busters, basically, and they weren't. They didn't completely burn out cities. They were not certainly more destructive than the firebombing campaign, when everything of more than 50,000 population had already been destroyed. That, in turn, influenced the judgment about what we needed to do vis-a-vis the Soviet Union when the Soviets got the bomb in 1949. There was a general sense that, when you could fight a war with nuclear weapons, deterrence or not, you would need quite a few of them to do it right. And the Air Force, once it realized that it could aggrandize its own share of the federal budget by cornering the market and delivering nuclear weapons, very quickly decided that they would only look at the blast effect and not the fire effect. It's like tying one hand behind your back. Most of it was a fire effect. So that's where they came up with numbers like we need 60 of these to take out Moscow. And what the Air Force figured out by the late 1940s is that the more targets, the more bombs. The more bombs, the more planes. The more planes, the biggest share of the budget. So by the mid 1950s, the Air Force commanded 47% of the federal defense budget. And the other branches of services, which had not gone nuclear by then, woke up and said, we'd better find some use for these weapons in our branches of service. So the Army discovered that it needed nuclear weapons, tactical weapons for field use, fired out of cannons. There was even one that was fired out of a shoulder mounted rifle. There was a satchel charge that two men could carry, weighed about 150 pounds, that could be used to dig a ditch so that Soviet tanks couldn't cross into Germany. And of course the Navy by then had been working hard with General Rickover on building a nuclear submarine that could carry ballistic missiles underwater in total security. No way anybody could trace those submarines once they were quiet enough. And a nuclear reactor is very quiet. It just sits there with neutrons running around, making heat. So the other services jumped in and this famous triad, we must have these three different kinds of nuclear weapons, baloney. We would be perfectly safe if we only had our nuclear submarines. And only one or two of those. One nuclear submarine can take out all of Europe or all of the Soviet Union.Dwarkesh Patel 0:42:50Because it has multiple nukes on it? Richard Rhodes 0:42:53Because they have 16 intercontinental ballistic missiles with MIRV warheads, at least three per missile. Dwarkesh Patel 0:43:02Wow. I had a former guest, Richard Hanania, who has a book about foreign policy where he points out that our model of thinking about why countries do the things they do, especially in foreign affairs, is wrong because we think of them as individual rational actors, when in fact it's these competing factions within the government. And in fact, you see this especially in the case of Japan in World War II, there was a great book of Japan leading up to World War II, where they talk about how a branch of the Japanese military, I forget which, needed more oil to continue their campaign in Manchuria so they forced these other branches to escalate. But it's so interesting that the reason we have so many nukes is that the different branches are competing for funding. Richard Rhodes 0:43:50Douhet, the theorist of air power, had been in the trenches in the First World War. Somebody (John Masefield) called the trenches of the First World War, the long grave already dug, because millions of men were killed and the trenches never moved, a foot this way, a foot that way, all this horror. And Douhet came up with the idea that if you could fly over the battlefield to the homeland of the enemy and destroy his capacity to make war, then the people of that country, he theorized, would rise up in rebellion and throw out their leaders and sue for peace. And this became the dream of all the Air Forces of the world, but particularly ours. Until around 1943, it was called the US Army Air Force. The dream of every officer in the Air Force was to get out from under the Army, not just be something that delivers ground support or air support to the Army as it advances, but a power that could actually win wars. And the missing piece had always been the scale of the weaponry they carried. So when the bomb came along, you can see why Curtis LeMay, who ran the strategic air command during the prime years of that force, was pushing for bigger and bigger bombs. Because if a plane got shot down, but the one behind it had a hydrogen bomb, then it would be just almost as effective as the two planes together. So they wanted big bombs. And they went after Oppenheimer because he thought that was a terrible way to go, that there was really no military use for these huge weapons. Furthermore, the United States had more cities than Russia did, than the Soviet Union did. And we were making ourselves a better target by introducing a weapon that could destroy a whole state. I used to live in Connecticut and I saw a map that showed the air pollution that blew up from New York City to Boston. And I thought, well, now if that was fallout, we'd be dead up here in green, lovely Connecticut. That was the scale that it was going to be with these big new weapons. So on the one hand, you had some of the important leaders in the government thinking that these weapons were not the war-winning weapons that the Air Force wanted them and realized they could be. And on the other hand, you had the Air Force cornering the market on nuclear solutions to battles. All because some guy in a trench in World War I was sufficiently horrified and sufficiently theoretical about what was possible with air power. Remember, they were still flying biplanes. When H.G. Wells wrote his novel, The World Set Free in 1913, predicting an atomic war that would lead to world government, he had Air Forces delivering atomic bombs, but he forgot to update his planes. The guys in the back seat, the bombardiers, were sitting in a biplane, open cockpit. And when the pilots had dropped the bomb, they would reach down and pick up H.G. Wells' idea of an atomic bomb and throw it over the side. Which is kind of what was happening in Washington after the war. And it led us to a terribly misleading and unfortunate perspective on how many weapons we needed, which in turn fermented the arms race with the Soviets and just chased off. In the Soviet Union, they had a practical perspective on factories. Every factory was supposed to produce 120% of its target every year. That was considered good Soviet realism. And they did that with their nuclear war weapons. So by the height of the Cold War, they had 75,000 nuclear weapons, and nobody had heard yet of nuclear winter. So if both sides had set off this string of mass traps that we had in our arsenals, it would have been the end of the human world without question. Dwarkesh Patel 0:48:27It raises an interesting question, if the military planners thought that the conventional nuclear weapon was like the fire bombing, would it have been the case that if there wasn't a thermonuclear weapon, that there actually would have been a nuclear war by now because people wouldn't have been thinking of it as this hard red line? Richard Rhodes 0:48:47I don't think so because we're talking about one bomb versus 400, and one plane versus 400 planes and thousands of bombs. That scale was clear. Deterrence was the more important business. Everyone seemed to understand even the spies that the Soviets had connected up to were wholesaling information back to the Soviet Union. There's this comic moment when Truman is sitting with Joseph Stalin at Potsdam, and he tells Stalin, we have a powerful new weapon. And that's as much as he's ready to say about it. And Stalin licks at him and says, “Good, I hope you put it to good use with the Japanese.” Stalin knows exactly what he's talking about. He's seen the design of the fat man type Nagasaki plutonium bomb. He has held it in his hands because they had spies all over the place. (0:49:44) - Stalin & the Soviet programDwarkesh Patel 0:49:44How much longer would it have taken the Soviets to develop the bomb if they didn't have any spies? Richard Rhodes 0:49:49Probably not any longer. Dwarkesh Patel 0:49:51Really? Richard Rhodes 0:49:51When the Soviet Union collapsed in the winter of ‘92, I ran over there as quickly as I could get over there. In this limbo between forming a new kind of government and some of the countries pulling out and becoming independent and so forth, their nuclear scientists, the ones who'd worked on their bombs were free to talk. And I found that out through Yelena Bonner, Andrei Sakharov's widow, who was connected to people I knew. And she said, yeah, come on over. Her secretary, Sasha, who was a geologist about 35 years old became my guide around the country. We went to various apartments. They were retired guys from the bomb program and were living on, as far as I could tell, sac-and-potatoes and some salt. They had government pensions and the money was worth a salt, all of a sudden. I was buying photographs from them, partly because I needed the photographs and partly because 20 bucks was two months' income at that point. So it was easy for me and it helped them. They had first class physicists in the Soviet Union, they do in Russian today. They told me that by 1947, they had a design for a bomb that they said was half the weight and twice the yield of the Fat Man bomb. The Fat Man bomb was the plutonium implosion, right? And it weighed about 9,000 pounds. They had a much smaller and much more deliverable bomb with a yield of about 44 kilotons. Dwarkesh Patel 0:51:41Why was Soviet physics so good?Richard Rhodes 0:51:49The Russian mind? I don't know. They learned all their technology from the French in the 19th century, which is why there's so many French words in Russian. So they got good teachers, the French are superb technicians, they aren't so good at building things, but they're very good at designing things. There's something about Russia, I don't know if it's the language or the education. They do have good education, they did. But I remember asking them when they were working, I said — On the hydrogen bomb, you didn't have any computers yet. We only had really early primitive computers to do the complicated calculations of the hydrodynamics of that explosion. I said, “What did you do?” They said, “Oh, we just used nuclear. We just used theoretical physics.” Which is what we did at Los Alamos. We had guys come in who really knew their math and they would sit there and work it out by hand. And women with old Marchant calculators running numbers. So basically they were just good scientists and they had this new design. Kurchatov who ran the program took Lavrentiy Beria, who ran the NKVD who was put in charge of the program and said — “Look, we can build you a better bomb. You really wanna waste the time to make that much more uranium and plutonium?” And Beria said, “Comrade, I want the American bomb. Give me the American bomb or you and all your families will be camp dust.” I talked to one of the leading scientists in the group and he said, we valued our lives, we valued our families. So we gave them a copy of the plutonium implosion bomb. Dwarkesh Patel 0:53:37Now that you explain this, when the Soviet Union fell, why didn't North Korea, Iran or another country, send a few people to the fallen Soviet Union to recruit a few of the scientists to start their own program? Or buy off their stockpiles or something. Or did they?Richard Rhodes 0:53:59There was some effort by countries in the Middle East to get all the enriched uranium, which they wouldn't sell them. These were responsible scientists. They told me — we worked on the bomb because you had it and we didn't want there to be a monopoly on the part of any country in the world. So patriotically, even though Stalin was in charge of our country, he was a monster. We felt that it was our responsibility to work on these things, even Sakharov. There was a great rush at the end of the Second World War to get hold of German scientists. And about an equal number were grabbed by the Soviets. All of the leading German scientists, like Heisenberg and Hans and others, went west as fast as they could. They didn't want to be captured by the Soviets. But there were some who were. And they helped them work. People have the idea that Los Alamos was where the bomb happened. And it's true that at Los Alamos, we had the team that designed, developed, and built the first actual weapons. But the truth is, the important material for weapons is the uranium or plutonium. One of the scientists in the Manhattan Project told me years later, you can make a pretty high-level nuclear explosion just by taking two subcritical pieces of uranium, putting one on the floor and dropping the other by hand from a height of about six feet. If that's true, then all this business about secret designs and so forth is hogwash. What you really need for a weapon is the critical mass of highly enriched uranium, 90% of uranium-235. If you've got that, there are lots of different ways to make the bomb. We had two totally different ways that we used. The gun on the one hand for uranium, and then because plutonium was so reactive that if you fired up the barrel of a cannon at 3,000 feet per second, it would still melt down before the two pieces made it up. So for that reason, they had to invent an entirely new technology, which was an amazing piece of work. From the Soviet point of view, and I think this is something people don't know either, but it puts the Russian experience into a better context. All the way back in the 30s, since the beginning of the Soviet Union after the First World War, they had been sending over espionage agents connected up to Americans who were willing to work for them to collect industrial technology. They didn't have it when they began their country. It was very much an agricultural country. And in that regard, people still talk about all those damn spies stealing our secrets, we did the same thing with the British back in colonial days. We didn't know how to make a canal that wouldn't drain out through the soil. The British had a certain kind of clay that they would line their canals with, and there were canals all over England, even in the 18th century, that were impervious to the flow of water. And we brought a British engineer at great expense to teach us how to make the lining for the canals that opened up the Middle West and then the West. So they were doing the same thing. And one of those spies was a guy named Harry Gold, who was working all the time for them. He gave them some of the basic technology of Kodak filmmaking, for example. Harry Gold was the connection between David Greenglass and one of the American spies at Los Alamos and the Soviet Union. So it was not different. The model was — never give us something that someone dreamed of that hasn't been tested and you know works. So it would actually be blueprints for factories, not just a patent. And therefore when Beria after the war said, give us the bomb, he meant give me the American bomb because we know that works. I don't trust you guys. Who knows what you'll do. You're probably too stupid anyway. He was that kind of man. So for all of those reasons, they built the second bomb they tested was twice the yield and half the way to the first bomb. In other words, it was their new design. And so it was ours because the technology was something that we knew during the war, but it was too theoretical still to use. You just had to put the core and have a little air gap between the core and the explosives so that the blast wave would have a chance to accelerate through an open gap. And Alvarez couldn't tell me what it was but he said, you can get a lot more destructive force with a hammer if you hit something with it, rather than if you put the head on the hammer and push. And it took me several years before I figured out what he meant. I finally understood he was talking about what's called levitation.Dwarkesh Patel 0:59:41On the topic that the major difficulty in developing a bomb is either the refinement of uranium into U-235 or its transmutation into plutonium, I was actually talking to a physicist in preparation for this conversation. He explained the same thing that if you get two subcritical masses of uranium together, you wouldn't have the full bomb because it would start to tear itself apart without the tamper, but you would still have more than one megaton.Richard Rhodes 1:00:12It would be a few kilotons. Alvarez's model would be a few kilotons, but that's a lot. Dwarkesh Patel 1:00:20Yeah, sorry I meant kiloton. He claimed that one of the reasons why we talk so much about Los Alamos is that at the time the government didn't want other countries to know that if you refine uranium, you've got it. So they were like, oh, we did all this fancy physics work in Los Alamos that you're not gonna get to, so don't even worry about it. I don't know what you make of that theory. That basically it was sort of a way to convince people that Los Alamos was important. Richard Rhodes 1:00:49I think all the physics had been checked out by a lot of different countries by then. It was pretty clear to everybody what you needed to do to get to a bomb. That there was a fast fusion reaction, not a slow fusion reaction, like a reactor. They'd worked that out. So I don't think that's really the problem. But to this day, no one ever talks about the fact that the real problem isn't the design of the weapon. You could make one with wooden boxes if you wanted to. The problem is getting the material. And that's good because it's damned hard to make that stuff. And it's something you can protect. Dwarkesh Patel 1:01:30We also have gotten very lucky, if lucky is the word you want to use. I think you mentioned this in the book at some point, but the laws of physics could have been such that unrefined uranium ore was enough to build a nuclear weapon, right? In some sense, we got lucky that it takes a nation-state level actor to really refine and produce the raw substance. Richard Rhodes 1:01:56Yeah, I was thinking about that this morning on the way over. And all the uranium in the world would already have destroyed itself. Most people have never heard of the living reactors that developed on their own in a bed of uranium ore in Africa about two billion years ago, right? When there was more U-235 in a mass of uranium ore than there is today, because it decays like all radioactive elements. And the French discovered it when they were mining the ore and found this bed that had a totally different set of nuclear characteristics. They were like, what happened? But there were natural reactors in Gabon once upon a time. And they started up because some water, a moderator to make the neutrons slow down, washed its way down through a bed of much more highly enriched uranium ore than we still have today. Maybe 5-10% instead of 3.5 or 1.5, whatever it is now. And they ran for about 100,000 years and then shut themselves down because they had accumulated enough fusion products that the U-235 had been used up. Interestingly, this material never migrated out of the bed of ore. People today who are anti-nuclear say, well, what are we gonna do about the waste? Where are we gonna put all that waste? It's silly. Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:35Shove it in a hole. Richard Rhodes 1:03:36Yeah, basically. That's exactly what we're planning to do. Holes that are deep enough and in beds of material that will hold them long enough for everything to decay back to the original ore. It's not a big problem except politically because nobody wants it in their backyard.Dwarkesh Patel 1:03:53On the topic of the Soviets, one question I had while reading the book was — we negotiated with Stalin at Yalta and we surrendered a large part of Eastern Europe to him under his sphere of influence. And obviously we saw 50 years of immiseration there as a result. Given the fact that only we had the bomb, would it have been possible that we could have just knocked out the Soviet Union or at least prevented so much of the world from succumbing to communism in the aftermath of World War II? Is that a possibility? Richard Rhodes 1:04:30When we say we had the bomb, we had a few partly assembled handmade bombs. It took almost as long to assemble one as the battery life of the batteries that would drive the original charge that would set off the explosion. It was a big bluff. You know, when they closed Berlin in 1948 and we had to supply Berlin by air with coal and food for a whole winter, we moved some B-29s to England. The B-29 being the bomber that had carried the bombs. They were not outfitted for nuclear weapons. They didn't have the same kind of bomb-based structure. The weapons that were dropped in Japan had a single hook that held the entire bomb. So when the bay opened and the hook was released, the thing dropped. And that's very different from dropping whole rows of small bombs that you've seen in the photographs and the film footage. So it was a big bluff on our part. We took some time after the war inevitably to pull everything together. Here was a brand new technology. Here was a brand new weapon. Who was gonna be in charge of it? The military wanted control, Truman wasn't about to give the military control. He'd been an artillery officer in the First World War. He used to say — “No, damn artillery captain is gonna start World War III when I'm president.” I grew up in the same town he lived in so I know his accent. Independence, Missouri. Used to see him at his front steps taking pictures with tourists while he was still president. He used to step out on the porch and let the tourists take photographs. About a half a block from my Methodist church where I went to church. It was interesting. Interestingly, his wife was considered much more socially acceptable than he was. She was from an old family in independence, Missouri. And he was some farmer from way out in Grandview, Missouri, South of Kansas City. Values. Anyway, at the end of the war, there was a great rush from the Soviet side of what was already a zone. There was a Soviet zone, a French zone, British zone and an American zone. Germany was divided up into those zones to grab what's left of the uranium ore that the Germans had stockpiled. And there was evidence that there was a number of barrels of the stuff in a warehouse somewhere in the middle of all of this. And there's a very funny story about how the Russians ran in and grabbed off one site full of uranium ore, this yellow black stuff in what were basically wine barrels. And we at the same night, just before the wall came down between the zones, were running in from the other side, grabbing some other ore and then taking it back to our side. But there was also a good deal of requisitioning of German scientists. And the ones who had gotten away early came West, but there were others who didn't and ended up helping the Soviets. And they were told, look, you help us build the reactors and the uranium separation systems that we need. And we'll let you go home and back to your family, which they did. Early 50s by then, the German scientists who had helped the Russians went home. And I think our people stayed here and brought their families over, I don't know. (1:08:24) - Deterrence, disarmament, North Korea, TaiwanDwarkesh Patel 1:08:24Was there an opportunity after the end of World War II, before the Soviets developed the bomb, for the US to do something where either it somehow enforced a monopoly on having the bomb, or if that wasn't possible, make some sort of credible gesture that, we're eliminating this knowledge, you guys don't work on this, we're all just gonna step back from this. Richard Rhodes 1:08:50We tried both before the war. General Groves, who had the mistaken impression that there was a limited amount of high-grade uranium ore in the world, put together a company that tried to corner the market on all the available supply. For some reason, he didn't realize that a country the size of the Soviet Union is going to have some uranium ore somewhere. And of course it did, in Kazakhstan, rich uranium ore, enough for all the bombs they wanted to build. But he didn't know that, and I frankly don't know why he didn't know that, but I guess uranium's use before the Second World War was basically as a glazing agent for pottery, that famous yellow pottery and orange pottery that people owned in the 1930s, those colors came from uranium, and they're sufficiently radioactive, even to this day, that if you wave a Geiger counter over them, you get some clicks. In fact, there have been places where they've gone in with masks and suits on, grabbed the Mexican pottery and taken it out in a lead-lined case. People have been so worried about it but that was the only use for uranium, to make a particular kind of glass. So once it became clear that there was another use for uranium, a much more important one, Groves tried to corner the world market, and he thought he had. So that was one effort to limit what the Soviet Union could do. Another was to negotiate some kind of agreement between the parties. That was something that really never got off the ground, because the German Secretary of State was an old Southern politician and he didn't trust the Soviets. He went to the first meeting, in Geneva in ‘45 after the war was over, and strutted around and said, well, I got the bomb in my pocket, so let's sit down and talk here. And the Soviet basically said, screw you. We don't care. We're not worried about your bomb. Go home. So that didn't work. Then there was the effort to get the United Nations to start to develop some program of international control. And the program was proposed originally by a committee put together by our State Department that included Robert Oppenheimer, rightly so, because the other members of the committee were industrialists, engineers, government officials, people with various kinds of expertise around the very complicated problems of technology and the science and, of course, the politics, the diplomacy. In a couple of weeks, Oppenheimer taught them the basics of the nuclear physics involved and what he knew about bomb design, which was everything, actually, since he'd run Los Alamos. He was a scientist during the war. And they came up with a plan. People have scoffed ever since at what came to be called the Acheson-Lilienthal plan named after the State Department people. But it's the only plan I think anyone has ever devised that makes real sense as to how you could have international control without a world government. Every country would be open to inspection by any agency that was set up. And the inspections would not be at the convenience of the country. But whenever the inspectors felt they needed to inspect. So what Oppenheimer called an open world. And if you had that, and then if each country then developed its own nuclear industries, nuclear power, medical uses, whatever, then if one country tried clandestinely to begin to build bombs, you would know about it at the time of the next inspection. And then you could try diplomacy. If that didn't work, you could try conventional war. If that wasn't sufficient, then you could start building your bombs too. And at the end of this sequence, which would be long enough, assuming that there were no bombs existing in the world, and the ore was stored in a warehouse somewhere, six months maybe, maybe a year, it would be time for everyone to scale up to deterrence with weapons rather than deterrence without weapons, with only the knowledge. That to me is the answer to the whole thing. And it might have worked. But there were two big problems. One, no country is going to allow a monopoly on a nuclear weapon, at least no major power. So the Russians were not willing to sign on from the beginning. They just couldn't. How could they? We would not have. Two, Sherman assigned a kind of a loudmouth, a wise old Wall Street guy to present this program to the United Nations. And he sat down with Oppenheimer after he and his people had studied and said, where's your army? Somebody starts working on a bomb over there. You've got to go in and take that out, don't you? He said, what would happen if one country started building a bomb? Oppenheimer said, well, that would be an act of war. Meaning then the other countries could begin to escalate as they needed to to protect themselves against one power, trying to overwhelm the rest. Well, Bernard Baruch was the name of the man. He didn't get it. So when he presented his revised version of the Acheson–Lilienthal Plan, which was called the Baruch Plan to the United Nations, he included his army. And he insisted that the United States would not give up its nuclear monopoly until everyone else had signed on. So of course, who's going to sign on to that deal? Dwarkesh Patel 1:15:24I feel he has a point in the sense that — World War II took five years or more. If we find that the Soviets are starting to develop a bomb, it's not like within the six months or a year or whatever, it would take them to start refining the ore. And to the point we found out that they've been refining ore to when we start a war and engage in it, and doing all the diplomacy. By that point, they might already have the bomb. And so we're behind because we dismantled our weapons. We are only starting to develop our weapons once we've exhausted these other avenues. Richard Rhodes 1:16:00Not to develop. Presumably we would have developed. And everybody would have developed anyway. Another way to think of this is as delayed delivery times. Takes about 30 minutes to get an ICBM from Central Missouri to Moscow. That's the time window for doing anything other than starting a nuclear war. So take the warhead off those missiles and move it down the road 10 miles. So then it takes three hours. You've got to put the warhead back on the missiles. If the other side is willing to do this too. And you both can watch and see. We require openness. A word Bohr introduced to this whole thing. In order to make this happen, you can't have secrets. And of course, as time passed on, we developed elaborate surveillance from space, surveillance from planes, and so forth. It would not have worked in 1946 for sure. The surveillance wasn't there. But that system is in place today. The International Atomic Energy Agency has detected systems in air, in space, underwater. They can detect 50 pounds of dynamite exploded in England from Australia with the systems that we have in place. It's technical rather than human resources. But it's there. So it's theoretically possible today to get started on such a program. Except, of course, now, in like 1950, the world is awash in nuclear weapons. Despite the reductions that have occurred since the end of the Cold War, there's still 30,000-40,000 nuclear weapons in the world. Way too many. Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:01Yeah. That's really interesting. What percentage of warheads do you think are accounted for by this organization? If there's 30,000 warheads, what percentage are accounted for? Richard Rhodes 1:18:12All.Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:12Oh. Really?  North Korea doesn't have secrets? Richard Rhodes 1:18:13They're allowed to inspect anywhere without having to ask the government for permission. Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:18But presumably not North Korea or something, right? Richard Rhodes 1:18:21North Korea is an exception. But we keep pretty good track of North Korea needless to say. Dwarkesh Patel 1:18:27Are you surprised with how successful non-proliferation has been? The number of countries with nuclear weapons has not gone up for decades. Given the fact, as you were talking about earlier, it's simply a matter of refining or transmuting uranium. Is it surprising that there aren't more countries that have it?Richard Rhodes 1:18:42That's really an interesting part. Again, a part of the story that most people have never really heard. In the 50s, before the development and signing of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which was 1968 and it took effect in 1970, a lot of countries that you would never have imagined were working on nuclear weapons. Sweden, Norway, Japan, South Korea. They had the technology. They just didn't have the materials. It was kind of dicey about what you should do. But I interviewed some of the Swedish scientists who worked on their bomb and they said, well, we were just talking about making some tactical

This is a feature length presentation of the Adventures of Superman serial on the Mutual Radio Network in 1946. It's called Superman Fights the Clan of the Fiery Cross. After World War Two, the Klu Klux Klan became very popular in the United States. To fight the terrorist group, the producers of Superman had the Man of Steel take on a mythical but similar clan. The series was so successful, it nearly put the real KKK out of business above the Mason-Dixon Line. More at http://krobcollection.com

After World War Two, Germany was split up and occupied by the United States, France, Britain and the Soviet Union. In June of 1948, the U.S., France, and Britain announced they were creating a unified West German currency. Joseph Stalin opposed this unification, and cut off land routes from Berlin to West Germany.  In order to bypass the land routes, bombers transported supplies (primarily food) and delivered them to West Berlin in what was called Operation Vittles. Colonel Gail S. Halvorsen was one of several pilots recruited to fly these missions. One day, after sneaking out and flying to Berlin for some R&R, COL Halvorsen met some local children who were survivors of the war. Talking with them changed his life, and he decided he wanted to do something to help them. He returned to base, gathered as much candy and gum as he could, fashioned parachutes with handkerchiefs, and put all the goodies inside. The next day, he flew over West Berlin and dropped the parachutes full of candy out of his bomb bay.  The children were delighted. COL Halvorsen did this several more times, and gained international acclaim for his actions. To learn more about COL Halvorsen, check out his book, The Berlin Candy Bomber. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Each year, we celebrate Earth Day; and each year, our collective actions lead to more greenhouse gas emissions, more habitat destruction, and more species extinctions. It's hard for Earth Day not to feel like more of a superficial patting of ourselves on the back or a greenwashing opportunity for corporate sponsors than a serious call for transformative change. The first Earth Day, on April 22, 1970, was something totally different. With 12,000 events across the country and more than 35,000 speakers from every walk of life—young and old, scientists and preachers, liberals and conservatives—the transformative power of the first Earth Day, conceived as a teach-in rather than a rally or a protest, is hard for us to imagine in our contemporary era of stark political polarization, hashtag protests, and climate denial politics.Adam Rome is an environmental historian who digs deep into the historical record and emerges with profound insights about the first Earth Day and the origins of the environmental movement. His work reveals the vital importance of understanding our environmental history in order to forge a more promising environmental future.Adam Rome was my advisor many years ago when I studied environmental history and cultural geography in graduate school at Penn State. And now, I'm very happy that he's my good friend and colleague here at the University at Buffalo, where he's Professor of Environment and Sustainability. My conversation with Adam travels through history, long before and after the first Earth Day, from beaver hats in feudal Europe; to the post-WWII era of prosperity and suburban development; and up to the present, as he probes the business world's attempts to become more sustainable. You can listen on Substack, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast platforms.Please rate, review, and share to help us spread the word!Adam RomeAdam Rome is professor of environment and sustainability at the University at Buffalo. A leading expert on the history of environmental activism, his first book, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism, won the Frederick Jackson Turner Award and the Lewis Mumford Prize. His book on the history of the first Earth Day, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation, was featured in The New Yorker. He is co-editor of Green Capitalism? Business and the Environment in the Twentieth Century. From 2002 to 2005, he edited the journal Environmental History. In addition to numerous scholarly publications, he has written essays and op-eds for a variety of publications, including Nature, Smithsonian, The Washington Post, Wired, and The Huffington Post. He has produced two Audible Original audio courses: “The Genius of Earth Day” and “The Enduring Genius of Frederick Law Olmsted.”Quotation read by Adam Rome“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.” — Rachel Carson, from Silent SpringRecommended Readings & MediaTranscription IntroJohn Fiege Each year we celebrate Earth Day. And each year our collective actions lead to more greenhouse gas emissions, more habitat destruction, and more species extinctions. It's hard for Earth Day not to feel like more of a superficial patting of ourselves on the back, or a greenwashing opportunity for corporate sponsors, then a serious call for transformative change.The first Earth Day on April 22, 1970 was something totally different. With 12,000 events across the country, and more than 35,000 speakers from every walk of life, young and old scientists and preachers, liberals and conservatives, the transformative power of the first Earth Day, conceived as a teaching rather than a rally or protest is hard for us to imagine in our contemporary era of stark political polarization, hashtag protests, and climate denial politics.Adam Rome is an environmental historian who digs deep into the historical record and emerges with profound insights about the first Earth Day in the origins of the environmental movement. His work reveals the vital importance of understanding our environmental history in order to forge a more promising environmental future.Adam Rome But mobilizing isn't organizing. And mobilizing isn't empowering. It doesn't take people new places, you know, and then you think about other you know, advertising isn't about teaching you anything. It's about getting you to buy, you know, something. Political messaging isn't about educating you. It's about getting you to vote for this guy or woman rather than that person. So, it's yes or no, you know, Earth Day, the original Earth Day was so much more complicated than that. It left it up to millions of individuals to say, what does this mean to me, what am I going to do? It didn't try to marshal them all in one direction, or to enlist them into a preexisting cause.John Fiege I'm John Fiege, and this is Chrysalis.Adam Rome was my advisor many years ago when I studied environmental history and cultural geography in graduate school at Penn State. And now I'm very happy that he's my good friend and colleague here at the University of Buffalo, where he's professor of Environment and Sustainability.My conversation with Adam travels through history long before and after the first Earth Day, from Beaver hats and feudal Europe to the post World War Two era of prosperity and suburban development, and up to the present, as he probes the business world's attempts to become more sustainable.Here is Adam Rome. ---Conversation John Fiege If you could just tell, tell me a bit about where you grew up, and about your relationship to the rest of nature when you were a kid.Adam Rome I grew up in West Hartford, Connecticut. The town itself is a couple 100 years old. But the particular house that I grew up in, was in a was built in the late 1950s. In what had been a golf course, for some reason, the golf course moved a mile away. And so, when I was growing up, the former golf course was being slowly developed. And in fact, I remember one day, I don't know how old I was maybe eight, seeing bulldozers come and knocking trees down on one of the nearby yards. That that was undeveloped still. And that I think was really crucial, even more than the wild are places that I used to hang out that a couple of friends and I would go in the wild parts, the still undeveloped parts of the old golf course. And back then parents weren't worried about their kids in the way they are now. So, my parents had a big cowbell on their front porch. And when it was, you know, 15 minutes to dinnertime, they would ring the cow bell, and I can hear it anywhere in the neighborhood and come home, and that's so idyllic. But it was a very typical 50s suburban neighborhood.John Fiege So, you, you went to college at Yale, and then you were a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, and then you landed in Kansas. Can you tell me the story of how you got to Kansas and what you did when you were there?Adam Rome Kansas interestingly, I'll answer your question in a second but, but I had a much much more overwhelming emotional response to the landscape in Kansas than I ever did to any place around where I grew up, you know, that that John FiegeWhy do you think that was? Adam Rome I think I I loved the vastness of the sky. I love the spectacular sunsets. I love watching clouds move through the sky. I mean, you know, there's there's no tall buildings even in the cities in Kansas, compared to the northeast. So, you could see forever. And another thing that I really loved was, especially in the Western two thirds of the state. Wherever there was a river, you could tell those 15 or 20 miles away, because that would be the only place there would be trees. Right. And I love that the landscape was so powerful a presence, everybody thought about it all the time.John Fiege So, you eventually landed at University of Kansas, studying environmental history under Dan Webster, who's one of the great minds and founders of the discipline. Tell me what you got what got you interested in environmental history? Had you done anything with that prior to graduate school? And how did you come with? How did you come to work with Don Wooster?Adam Rome Environmental history really didn't exist as a field. That or at least it was in its most infant stage. When I was in college, which was 1976 to 1980. I actually got introduced to Don's work and to one other really renowned, now renowned, environmental historian through this humanities project that I did, about the little-known historical places. One of them was a place that during the dustbowl years of the 1930s, when the great plains were decimated by these unbelievable windstorms that that made up, you know, parts of Kansas look like Cape Cod, the dunes on Cape Cod that I had seen as a kid, devastating dust storms. And the government tried to reclaim some of those lands, it was really a pioneering effort of environmental restoration or ecological restoration. And so, there was this Cimarron grasslands in the very southwest corner of the state. It was one of the little-known historical places that I wrote about. And the background work that I did for that involved Don Westers first prize winning book, which is just called Dustbowl, and that book blew me away, I never imagined that you could write a history that combined environmental history and political history. And it's really an effort to understand the dust storms not as a purely natural phenomenon, but it's something that had been partly, maybe even predominantly caused by human activity in the decades leading up to it. And I read that book and it blew me away. And then right after that, I discovered this one other book that had just come out by William Cronin called changes in the land, which is about Native Americans and English colonists in New England, and all the ways in which they changed the landscape that the colonists did. And it gave a new way of understanding why the colonists were able to supplant the natives. But it also had some brilliant ideas about basic ways that we think about, about nature.John Fiege  08:09Let's turn to your first book, which is the bulldozer in the countryside. And it's a powerful environmental history of suburbia in America and how after World War Two developers brought Henry Ford's assembly line concept to the production of cheap tract housing on cheap land, on the outskirts of cities across the country. I want to read a passage from the book, but first, could you talk about how the suburbs were created and give us a sense of the scale at which this transformation of the countryside took place?Adam Rome Well, first, you have to keep in mind that before World War Two, not counting farm areas, where homeownership was much more common. In cities, there never been a point where more than 40% of Americans owned their own home. And homebuilding in those decades. was was really a mom-and-pop kind of thing. I mean, it was it was a craft. It wasn't it wasn't an industry. A lot of home builders might only build one or two houses a year. So, after World War Two, most famously in Levittown, New York, and then several other Levittowns, but mimicked all across the country. People figured out a way to to turn to mass produce housing, and in order to do that, they also needed cheap land, and large tracts of cheap land. So, although some of these postwar subdivisions that were mass produced were within the boundaries of cities, most of them weren't because the land that was cheap and widely available was was outside the city limits, right and so on. and all kinds of new earth moving equipment, especially the bulldozer had come into common usage during World War Two. And it became possible to turn almost any kind of landscape, you know, a marsh, a steep hillside a forest, into a flat pad, that's like a technical term for building and then breaking down the construction process into, you know, I don't remember the exact number, but let's say 20 different components. So, you know, one crew would would just bring the wood for the roofing, you know, where another would just do the bathroom or, and they could do in the case of Levittown, you know, 17,000 houses in in, you know, a year or two, right. And, and so the new combination of the new mass production method of building houses, and then unbelievable pent-up demand for housing, because there'd been virtually no housing construction during the Great Depression in the 1930s. And then virtually no housing construction during World War Two, right, and then the baby boom after the war. So, you've got millions and millions of people desperate for places to live, they didn't necessarily want to live in the suburbs, but they wanted a place to live and an affordable place, it was often cheaper to buy a Levittown house than to rent an apartment in a city. So, these, and by the late 40s, early 50s 2 million homes a year are getting built, which is an astonishing number. I don't think it had ever been more than 400,000 in a year in American history up to that point. So, a territory the size of Rhode Island, basically, every year is getting turned into new subdivisions, mostly in suburbs. And that that was I write in my book that was in whatever else it was, it was an environmental disaster on the scale of the dust.John Fiege Right, right. Just clearing all that land. Yeah, I grew up in Greenbelt, Maryland, one of Eleanor Roosevelt's plans, communities. Yeah, from the 30s. From the 30s. There's kind of pre pre post war, suburban development, but it was right on the outskirts of Washington DC. And, you know, had a little bit more of a idyllic you know, communitarian feel to it than, than the later suburbs. So, with your book, let me let me read a quote you you quote, the writer, Margo Tupper. Oh, yes. Like millions of Americans moved with her family to the suburbs after World War Two in Maryland. Oh, really? Was that Maryland? Yeah, realize that. Oh, that's interesting. Well, let me read the quote. So, she might have been your neighbor. Yeah. Wow. I had no idea. So let me it's a kind of a long quote, but I think it's worth reading because it's so it's so rich. “At that time, our house was second from the last on the dead end street. Beyond were acres of untouched woodlands, which were a refuge for children, a place to play natural surroundings. Youngsters in the neighborhood would go there build dams or catch minnows and a little creek, gather wildflowers and pick blossoms from the white dog woods. They built tree houses, picnicked under the tall tulip trees, and dog Jack in the pulpits, wild Fern and Violets to transplant to their gardens. Then one day my little girl Jan ran into the house shouting, Mother, there's a bulldozer up the street. The men say they're going to cut down the trees. They can't do that. They're my trees. Where will we play? Please, Mother, please stop them. Jan ran frantically out the door shouting. I'll get Susan Georgie Sissy and all the other children. If they're going to take our woods away. We'll have to save all we can. The children returned several hours later, pulling wagons loaded with flowers and plants. Jan brought home a small dogwood tree and planted among the wildflowers in the South Garden. Indeed, the bulldozers did come, these huge Earth eating machines raped the woods filled up the creek, buried the wildflowers and frightened away the rabbits and the birds. The power saws came too and took part in the murder of the woodlands near our home. Dynamite blasted out the huge tree roots trucks roared past our house carrying the remains sections of murdered trees and tons of earth in which were buried vines, shrubs and flowers. Then the dozers came to level the earth and power shovels to dig grade holes in less than a month, the first of 200 look like closely set small all houses rose to take the place of our beautiful forest.” So, at the heart of your book is this great irony that the experience the experiences of suburbanites like Margot Tupper and her family, who witnessed the destruction, on the frontlines of suburban development firsthand out there, front windows, helped ignite the environmental movement. In the 1950s and 60s, the majority of women had not yet entered the labor force. And it was women in particular, who spearheaded the new environmental movement. Can you talk about what Margo is writing there? And how this played out?Adam Rome Yeah, so that book came out in 1965, as I recall, and at that point, there had already been, maybe I'd say, for six, seven years, mounting concern, for lots of reasons, but, but one of them was the destruction of places for kids to play. And, and yeah, there's a powerful irony that the house that she lived in, and in her daughter, and all the neighbors that her daughter played with, you know, that had been something wild too, before it was made into their house. And, you know, it might have been that, that an earlier generation would have cried about that, you know, earlier generation means, like a year or two before. And she herself was sensitive to that she doesn't, she doesn't want there to be no development at all. But she's part of a movement to try to imagine land saving ways of development, ways of having same number of people have places to live even single-family homes, but clustered together with much larger, open space that wasn't just yard but was truly Wilder. And that was, that's keeps getting rediscovered, by the way, you know, every, like, 10 years people, people realize, that's an interesting idea. It's never become the norm. But but, you know, my whole book is really about people coming to realize that what, and this is part of a broader story and world after World War Two, that, you know, we have all these amazing technological changes, and new products, new ways of doing things that, that seemed miraculous, they allow us to, to have comfort and convenience and, and wealth on a scale that we hadn't imagined before. But they turned out to also have incredibly bad, unexpected environmental costs. And so, my book is really the story of how people try to come to terms with that, how do they try to reduce the cost of suburban development? Without ending it, you know, that they weren't saying no development at all? No one was, but But trying to figure out ways of meeting the need. And, and even that's an interesting question, you know, what, what do we need and housing? What is a good house? But how do you do that at at much less environmental costs. And it turned out that, you know, I was really stunned. I didn't think anyone would have been thinking about that until the 1970s. After the first Earth Day, and after the, you know, the whole environmental movement is obviously roaring along. But in fact, I found that even in the midst of World War Two people were beginning to find fault with some aspects of this new way of building and with each decade, more and more of these horrid side effects come to light and some of them become only of concern to experts. But open space, in particular led to real grassroots activism, real grassroots protests, and a new language. You know, she writes about rape. And no one had talked like that before, not even John Muir, when he was talking about the destruction of wild spaces. He came close but but this was so much more intimate than, you know, some spectacular place in Yosemite Valley getting destroyed for a damn this, this was your backyard. This was the place your kid played. And people start putting the word progress in quotation marks, you know, that, that it's not obvious to them anymore that that that these new homes are, are just purely good. So that's something radically new.John Fiege Yeah, and you bring up property rights in the book and kind of relates So what you're saying about Margo tuber being part of this movement to have more land and common open space. And the new ecological thinking that emerged in this era began to challenge and redefine property rights. Can you? Can you talk a little bit about that, and how that became a central issue and the struggle to protect ecological health?Adam Rome Yeah, this was another huge surprise to me. That, you know, with pollution, it's obvious that the, the biggest polluters are businesses. And, and so challenging corporate polluters is part of a long tradition of trying to rein in corporate power. But there aren't, you know, billions of corporations or millions of corporations, there's, there's only hundreds of really big ones, with with property, millions and millions of people own property. And it had been part of American history, that owning property was easy here, which it wasn't in Europe, and ordinary people could own property. And they could do with it, whatever they wanted. That, you know, that was one of the great freedoms of America in the minds of many people that came here from Europe. And by the 1960s, people are coming to realize, not just with homebuilding with development of all kinds that the way you use your land, couldn't really be entirely private decision, because it had consequences beyond the boundaries of your property. And, and people talked about this in the 60s as a quiet revolution, the growing awareness, both in the courts and in state legislatures, and in national forums, that, that how you use your land, how you developed it, especially could have far reaching detrimental consequences to the public good. And that, therefore, the public ought to have some say in what you did, didn't necessarily mean that it would, that it would bar you from doing certain things, although people said that to you know, in the same way that you're not allowed to sell tainted meat, you know, you shouldn't be able to build in a wetland, if that's going to cause flooding somewhere else. Or you shouldn't be able to build on a hillside, if that's going to endanger people who own property lower down the hill, or, you know, any number of things of that kind, where how you use the land could have far reaching implications beyond your borders. And, you know, that idea then, eventually led to a powerful counterattack. People talked about it, as you know, the new regulations that come in the 1960s and early 70s, as a new feudalism, the opponents called it so Feudalism was, you know, pre capitalist way of thinking about rights and responsibilities that came with land ownership, and only a few people could use it. And they, you know, they had to use it in a way that serve the community, whether they wanted to or not. So that's part of the powerful cause the rise of modern conservatism part of the rise of Ronald Reagan, was this idea that, that among those who own property that that didn't accept that idea that it was really a matter of public interest. They wanted to go back to the days when they could do whatever they wanted with their land.John Fiege  23:36Right, right. Oh, that's so interesting. And I love the title of your book, The Bulldozer in the Countryside. It paints such a vivid visceral image. And and you mentioned somewhere that that echoes The Machine in the Garden, the book by Leo marks, can you talk about that book and how it relates to your work?Adam Rome Yeah, Leo Marx. I'm not sure if he's still alive. I did meet him. He was a professor for a long time at MIT. And I did meet him when I spoke there more than a decade ago. But he wrot e this brilliant book, it's one of the most famous books that any American scholar has ever written in the humanities, called the machine in the garden. And it's a study of the literary responses in America, although it starts with Shakespeare in The Tempest. So, imagining America to the spread of technology of development of modern civilization into seemingly pristine areas. And, and, and, and for much of early American history, people just thought that was great, you know, that was fulfilling a biblical injunction to subdue the earth to write to make to make the wild spaces into a productive garden. But by the time of Thoreau, and others in the, you know, 1830s 1840s 1850s people are starting to have at least a very elite, well-educated group of artists and writers, more mixed feelings about that they, they, they know it's part of America's destiny seemingly to transform the wilderness, but they also lament some of the consequences of that. And, and The Machine in the Garden in in Leo Marxs is the railroad, that that was the great symbol. Once the railroad came, everything was going to change. And and the railroad goes right through Concord, Thoreau could hear it. Nathaniel Hawthorne can hear it. So, I took that image. And actually, the publisher didn't like the title. I had to really...John Fiege Oh really?  Adam Rome yeah, John Fiege wow. Adam RomeIf it was, if it was a trade press, I would have lost they would have been able to title what they want, but because it was a university press, I won.John Fiege Great. Well, moving on from the suburbs. Let's talk about Rachel Carson, who's one of my heroes.Adam RomeMine too. John FiegeYou wrote an article about her legacy that began this way. “In the decades after World War Two, many Americans imagined that modern technology finally would free humanity from the constraints and burdens of nature. We would overcome disease, moderate the extremes of climate, travel great distances in a flash and enjoy abundance of all kinds. Detergents will get clothes cleaner than clean. Nuclear Fission would generate electricity too cheap to meter. Plastics, seemingly inexhaustible, and infinitely malleable, would end our dependence on scarce natural resources. Bulldozers would transform marshes and steep hillsides into buildable land. Soon we would live on a perfected Earth where everything was easy, comfortable, and safe.” And then enter Rachel Carson, and her nineteen's landmark 1962 book, Silent Spring. What did she bring to that mentality that was really dominant in the 50s, and 60s?Adam Rome It's, you know, because we live in a post Rachel Carson world, it's so hard in some ways to imagine just how gung ho people were, especially Americans, but it wasn't it wasn't unique to us. After World War Two, the idea that, that we that we could conquer nature, that we could overcome any natural limit. And, you know, because nowadays, we we all think we love nature. But we're never as honest as we should be about the fact that there are a lot of elements of nature that we don't love, maybe even hate. And, and a lot of those are limits. most obvious one is death, you know. But that was another thing that people thought they could conquer, you know, that they thought modern medicine might allow a kind of immortality almost. Right. So, there's this tremendous faith that in the 50s and 60s that we're bringing nature under control, and that we are, you know, incredibly rapidly overcoming all these natural limits. And, and Rachel Carson is probably the, I mean, lots of people began to have doubts about that. But I would say she is by far the most powerful voice. And it's so amazing. It's just this lone voice, this one woman, she had no institutional by the time she wrote Silent Spring, she's just a writer. John Fiege RightAdam Rome She has no institutional support. And she's taking on one of the most powerful industries in the country. And she's taking on even more powerfully, this whole way of thinking about what our relationship to nature should be, and saying, no, it can't possibly be conquest. You know, nature is bigger than us. We can't conquer nature. And when we try, we may get a lot out of it in the short run, but in the long run, where we're risking undermining the foundations of our life. And and her warning is about that they were specifically about the new chemical pesticides that came into wide use after World War Two like DDT, but but she was really attacking much more broadly a whole kind of technological hubris of thinking that we could change nature in any way and that it would just be for the good, you know, it would be better we could make a better nature than nature had made. And she said that preposterous. And ultimately, it threatens our survival. But even if it didn't threaten our survival, it also was you know, she had different adjectives for it an immature way of thinking, a brute way of thinking, an immoral way of thinking, you know, that, that she too was saying we could do better. That's not our best self, our best self would be finding a way to to thrive while everything else also thrives.John Fiege Right. But you do point out that despite the huge impact of Silent Spring, and the government regulation and pesticides that followed, you write, we use more pesticides now than in 1962. Adam RomeYeah. John Fiege And which makes me think, like, has the change been in our mentality and our actions? Or has it been in our messaging and our vision of ourselves? Like, have we covered things up, but not really dealt with the underlying problems that continue in different forms?Adam Rome So, so one of the reasons why pesticide use is up, it's not just up in the US. But lot of other parts of the world have developed industrialized agriculture that relies heavily on pesticides. And, and, and that's true about a lot of things, you know, our air is cleaner, our water is cleaner. But that's partly because we don't make stuff here as much as we used to, it's made in China or Vietnam or wherever. Yeah, their air is not cleaner. There, you know, we've exported, we've exported our pollution. Yeah, we've outsourced our pollution, as well as a lot of our manufacturing jobs. And, you know, I go back and forth about this, I have a split personality. On the one hand, I'm Dr. Earth Day. You know, so I, I've spent a lot of time thinking about environmental activism in the US in the last 150 years, and how much more powerful environmental activists have become than they were. And that's an inspiring story, you know, but then the other side of me is Mr. Apocalypse, you know, all the ways in which things just keep getting worse, or at least they're still incredibly threatening. John Fiege RightAdam Rome And, and I'm trying to understand why, you know, without understanding why we can't possibly hope to, to avoid those outcomes.John Fiege So that's a great place to jump to your next book, which is The Genius of Earth Day, with a subtitle “How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First Green Generation.” Can you paint a picture for us of the state of the environment on the eve of the first Earth Day on April 22, 1970?Adam Rome Yeah, it's so hard to imagine now, just how much more polluted visibly polluted the country was in 1970. You know, every city was just full of smoke of all kinds. And, you know, smoke from, from burning trash from incinerators, folks, from utilities, from manufacturers, on and on cement places. The waters were just horrid. You know, you couldn't swim in most urban rivers and many, even rural ones. You couldn't eat the fish safely. You couldn't do a lot of other recreational things, you know that the waters would smell they'd be, they might be acidic, they might even burn you if you fell in. You certainly couldn't drink them. And there was no regulation of waste disposal of any kind, not just ordinary trash, but hazardous what we now call hazardous waste. That phrase hadn't been invented yet. There was no regulation of it. So people could just dump incredibly toxic stuff wherever they wanted. And even, you know, things you you can barely imagine when I was in Kansas, canoeing down the biggest river in the middle of the state, which in Kansas is called our Kansas, of course. You know, you'd see rusted hawks of cars on the riverbanks, you know, that people would take out the few valuable parts of the car that they could sell and, and then they just dump them on the riverbank, and they were sitting there decades later. So, you know, everywhere people were aware that this wasn't like news. You could see it every day. But what was missing was the will to do something about it, it had always been considered the price of progress. You know, as part of a booming economy, we had to put up with pollution, especially in cities. And finally in 1970, after, you know, growing discontent that leads to the modern environmental movement, and to the first Earth DayJohn Fiege On January 18, 1970, Senator Nelson's environmental Teaching Committee took out a full page ad in the New York Times, announcing the upcoming event for the first time, it read in large font, April 22, Earth Day, and then it went on "A disease has infected our country, it has brought smog to Yosemite, dumped garbage in the Hudson, sprayed DDT in our food and left our cities in decay. The carrier is man”. Can you tell me the story of how earth day got its name? But how the idea of the teach-in that Senator Nelson had remained foundational to to the concept of what Earth Day was.Adam Rome So, Nelson. And he never wrote down anything about the aha moment when he had the seed of the idea that became Earth Day, but apparently, he was flying back to Washington and having gone out to California to see about six months after the devastation in the wake of the first unfortunately, only the first great oil spill in Santa Barbara. And he read about is a tactic that was used by people who were opposed to the Vietnam War called the a teaching, which was essentially a kind of politicized extracurricular, curricular activity on a couple dozen college campuses in the mid 60s, where opponents of the war and proponents of the war would come together and argue, was organized by the opponents, they were convinced that that would inspire people to to action that it would mobilize them against the war. And Nelson was he he was one of the first senators to oppose the war. That was one of his most courageous moves. But he was inspired by that he thought, you know, maybe the President has failed on this Congress has failed in this, maybe young people could could really carry the ball and make the environment a national priority. So, he, he promised in Seattle in September 1969, that he would organize a nationwide environmental teaching. And, and at first, he was only envisioning it as some small number of campuses, only on college campuses. But and he didn't know anything about how to do this, you know, he's at that point was a 53-year-old establishment figure. He wasn't some young Radster. And he rejected the advice that he got from a good friend that he did, he tried to make it a hierarchical top-down kind of thing. Instead, he decided basically, anyone who wanted to have a teaching could have it and they could do anything they wanted. And he just trusted that that would work out that that that would involve a lot of people, and they would do great things. And he was right. And quickly, this overwhelmed his staff, there was a lot more interest in it than he expected. And K to 12 schools got into it. And then people in communities wanted to have events that weren't tied to educational institutions. So, he hires this, this small number of 20-somethings who had been activists mostly and other causes in the 60s, to help him organize it. And, and, and they found this hipster ad guy in New York, Julian Koenig, who was willing, pro bono to come up with better names they thought environmental teaching sounded too academic. Even Nelson's adviser thought that but that he wasn't able to come up with a better name. And and Julian Koenig comes up with the name Earth Day and then this really blows me away this is part of Gaylord Nelson genius was he really he really didn't try to micromanage soJohn Fiege Right Adam Rome These 20 Somethings decide earth day is a much better name and they take out this ad and as far as I could tell they never asked him whether that was okay. They just did and then they changed the name of the of the you know, they weren't technically for this not for profit that Nelson set up called Environmental Teaching Inc. They couldn't legally change the name but they they changed the name on the stationery and everything else to environmental action. You know, again, they were trying to suggest that, that they were about action and protest and transforming America. But but the teach-in ideas still was very, very powerful. And most Earth Day events were places that people talked about these issues, it was an unprecedented discussion that involved, you know, potentially 20 million people. And 10s of 1000s of speakers, who had most had never spoken publicly about environmental issues. And these discussions were very intimate. Some of them were soul searching in the words of the New York Times, and the media to got into it. So, you have all this media discussion, unprecedented media coverage, and then you have these much more intimate settings where people are talking about these issues. And together, that was transformative. I think a lot of people thinking about these issues for the first time realized they cared about them a lot. And they were willing to do a lot to try to solve the problems and to keep doing it, often for decades.John Fiege And, you know, I'm really struck by, you know, you already mentioned this, but his willingness to let go, and the profound significance that had, and I just wanted to kind of revisit that, because particularly from today's today's perspective, it's almost impossible to imagine a US senator, starting something like this, and then just being like, Ah, I'll let it go have a life of its own. And I'll put the kids in charge. And hopefully, it's, it's a thing, but you know, I'm not gonna micromanage it like, that doesn't happen.Adam Rome No, no, I agree. And he didn't just let it go. I mean, he worked like hell, John Fiege right Adam Rome to publicize it, and to raise money for the staff and to, John Fiege right, Adam Rome you know,John Fiege But his, his ego didn't seem to get in the way.Adam Rome He didn't think of it as his thing. And I think, the way I've put it as he led by encouraging other people to lead, and that was brilliant. And, and you're right, especially in politics, that's so rare. You know, most people in politics want to be the center of attention. And, and he didn't. And in fact, you know, the New York Times, the day after day, the man of the man of the day was the 20, something guy that he had hired Denis Hayes, not Gaylord Nelson. But but it was actually Gaylord Nelson, that set the whole thing in motion. And so, I think that that modesty is so amazing. And that, that, that, you know, and I again, I don't know whether this was just a brilliant intuition on his part, or whether it was a little more carefully thought out, but, but I think he understood that it would be more powerful if a lot of other people could take ownership of it, if they could make it their own. And they did. And that was one of the biggest discoveries in the book for me is how many people all across the country had the idea to do this and spent months and months working on it. And, and those months and months were incredibly transformative for many of them. And they were not just an education on the issues, but people realized they had all kinds of skills they didn't think they had, or they had a passion they didn't realize they had. And and so many of those Earth Day organizers come away after Earth Day thinking, I want to keep doing something like this. And there were there were no, you know, books with hundreds and hundreds of eco jobs that you could just pick, you know, there were only a handful of things that were well established careers, and anything remotely to do with the environment. And a lot of these Earth Day organizers and many other people that just participated in Earth Day, they go out, they pioneer new career paths, they create new kinds of jobs and new kinds of organizations and new new ways of being, you know, an architect or a journalist or a professor, for that matter, to to continue to work on this and that that was only because they had already invested so much of themselves in the Earth Day.John Fiege Yeah, and the scale of the first Earth Day is amazing. It generated 12,000 events across the country and more than 35,000 speakers. And, and you write, that this first Earth they brought opposites together in powerful ways. Can you talk about how this big tent of unusual combinations of people gave us Earth Day?Adam RomeWell, it was a big tent and that too, is a almost inconceivable now in or was celebrated everywhere, right red states, blue states purple states. A lot of the places that I ended up writing about in the book are, you know, diehard Trump country now Alabama, you know, Montana, they had incredible Earth Day of events. And so part of it was that it was much more bipartisan than you can imagine. But I think one of the places where it brought people together was it combined the power of the establishment, you know, Gaylord Nelson could open doors, he could do lots of things, with the energy and the creativity of the grassroots. That was incredible. And that was so different than some of the other huge events of the 60s that were either more establishment or more grassroots than Earth Day, which was both. It also brought together young and old. And that was, again, something I didn't think about initially, but was hugely important, because that was a time, you couldn't take that for granted. I mean, a lot of old folks looked at college kids in thought troublemaker. And a lot of kids under 30 looked at old folks and said, can't trust them. You know, right. But Earth Day brought together intergenerational collaboration, all kinds of folks and again, at the national level, but also at the grassroots. And, and again, as I mentioned, a few minutes ago, I think this, it created this unprecedented debate about what people started calling the environmental crisis. And the debate didn't take place purely in the media or purely face to face, it was both. And I think that made it more powerful than it would have been in either of those places alone. And I think there's a lesson in that for our social media age, powerful as social media is it can't do some of the mobilizing, and the educating and the life changing things that the face-to-face conversation and the face-to-face planning of Earth Day. accomplished.John Fiege Right. So, I've always, to me, it's always been strange that the environment is such a political politicized issue, as if pollution and ecological destruction don't affect everybody. And I just when I read you talking about the kind of, you know, specifically democratic liberal intellectuals theorizing about this as like, is that part of the DNA of how we understand the environment, and therefore, it's so politicized in this country as a result?Adam Rome It wasn't, though in 1970. And in the same way, and and even conservatives, except for the most hardcore, you know, the John Birch are far far, far far right, folks, or the, you know, the totally southern segregationist forever, conservatives. Even most conservatives understood that pollution was a real problem, you know, there weren't deniers, then. They they disagreed sometimes with liberals. And as I said, there were liberal Republicans as well as liberal Democrats, right, about what to do about it. But there were a lot of conservatives that spent a lot of time in 1970, trying to figure out what would be a conservative approach? Is there a way to address these issues without big government? And, and so for example, there were people talking about global warming wasn't an issue, yet someone was talking about carbon tax, but there were people talking about pollution taxes, you know, that part of the problem was the market didn't force businesses to pay for the pollution that, but if they did have to pay for it, then they would reconstitute their way of doing things. So, they produced less pollution that was the market. Right. You know, there were conservatives talking about that, in 1970. And I think a couple you know, you there's a whole book about how the Republicans went from supportive to totally opposed, or almost totally opposed. But But I think the biggest thing that happened was, and this is another irony, you know, that modern environmentalism comes out of the prosperity of the post war years, right, and the prosperity is causing a lot of the problems, but it's also creating the political will to do something about them. And and then in 1973, more or less, the post war economic boom comes to an end and and the whole rest of the decade is full of economic turmoil, in fact, unprecedented, you know, high unemployment and high inflation which was supposed to be impossible, that the same, right and, and no one seems to be able to do anything about it. So, in that in that context, it suddenly becomes possible to have people argue again, what, wait a minute, we can't afford to keep going in this direction. Or, you know, these regulations are an onerous burden. By 1980, you know, you have Ronald Reagan saying he's going to undo all the environmental initiatives of the 70s. He doesn't, he can't. But he tries. And he has a lot of support for that that was inconceivable even five years before 10 years before.John Fiege Totally. You write: "Earth Day was an educational experience, as well as a political demonstration, that rare combination enabled Earth Day to have both long term and short-term impact". In the book, you tell this wonderful story of the San Mateo high school in California and its biology teacher, Edmund Home, who mentored students in the ecology club as they plan their Earth Day teaching. What happened there in those interactions between the teacher and his students? And what does it reveal about what the nature of the first Earth Day was?Adam Rome Yeah, so that's one of my favorite stories. I'm glad it struck you too. And that's the sort of thing Gaylord Nelson himself didn't envision, you know, he didn't originally envision high schools doing anything. But, but at this high school in Santa Monica, the teacher was a nature lover. But all the kids in the ecology club, most of them weren't, they were just interested in math and science. And they thought this was a cool thing. The way to be less nerdy was also something that appealed to some of the civic minded people in the school. So they're, you know, student body president, cheerleaders. You know, they met the teacher and the students over lunch, initially, just once a week for months, to talk about, you know, what, what would in environmental teach-in at their school be. And they had the total support of the principal. And, and those discussions in themselves, some of the participants told me were empowering, you know, that they weren't the kids weren't used to having an adult, listen seriously to their ideas about what they might do about anything. Right. And, and then, you know, they had to start doing the planning and figure out who might speak and what the activities were going to be. And you know, whether any of it was going to be funny, even though these were deadly, serious subjects, they decided they wanted humor. And, you know, they had to decide whether to address politically difficult issues, like population growth, which meant talking about sex, which you weren't supposed to do without permission. And, you know, they do all this interesting stuff. And as it gets closer to April 22, then they start, you know, the key organizer start meeting with, with the teacher at home every day. And again, you know, they he didn't tell him what to do. He had some suggestions, but it was their deal. But he, he nurtured them, he gave them the sense that they could do it. And so many people told me that not just the high school kids that I talked about a lot of the college and graduate school organizers to that, that it was empowering to work on this, that they they came away with it with this can-do sense that anything was possible.John Fiege It's so unusual. Adam RomeYeah. John Fiege To have an experience like that, that profound at that age. Adam RomeYeah. John Fiege So, you know, the institutional achievements in the wake of the first Earth Day are really remarkable. The formation of EPA and the passage of the Clean Air Act in 1970, the Clean Water Act in 1972, the Endangered Species Act of 1973, all under a Republican administration, no less. But in 1990, just after climate change, became a widely publicized environmental concern. There was a 20th anniversary celebration of Earth Day. It was also a huge event with more professional planning, better funding, and a more focused message than in 1970. But it didn't lead to an environmental decade that confronted climate change or any other environmental issues. And as the first birthday had, as you write, can you talk a bit about Earth Day 1990. And what it reveals about how remarkable and achievement the first Earth Day was, and what lessons we might draw from those differences.Adam Rome It's interesting. I often hesitate to talk about the personalities involved, but So Dennis Hayes, and he was the guy Dennis Hayes, who, who was the main force behind Earth Day 1990, the 20th anniversary. So, Dennis Hayes was was not Gaylord Nelson. And Denis Hayes, I think drew exactly the wrong lesson. And he's gone on to do incredibly interesting important things as an environmentalist. But the lesson that he drew was top down. And and so an Earth Day 1990 It had, you know, I don't remember the exact numbers, but let's say 20 or 30 times the budget of the first Earth Day, it had all these political consultants and Hollywood gurus and advertising mavens working pro bono, on their on their messaging and polling and tie in merchandise and getting celebrities involved. And, you know, so they made the mistake, I think of of hoping that they could just mobilize people. But mobilizing isn't organizing. And mobilizing isn't empowering. It doesn't take people new places, you know, and then you think about other you know, advertising isn't about teaching you anything, it's about getting you to buy, you know, something. Political messaging isn't about educating you; it's about getting you to vote for this guy or woman rather than that person. So, it's yes or no, you know, Earth Day, the original Earth Day was so much more complicated than that it left it up to millions of individuals to say, what does this mean to me, what am I going to do? It didn't try to marshal them all in one direction, or to enlist them into a preexisting cause. Earth Day 1990 Did Did those other things, it tried to get people to join groups that already existed, and they did. Environmental groups reached their new heights of membership in the wake of Earth Day 1990. And it certainly heightened the message that individuals what they consumed mattered. But I don't think, you know, when you go to a March, that's very powerful. But it's not necessarily life transforming, it's not right to change the way you think. And the same thing when you go into the voting booth. So, taking politics and marketing as your models, that was a mistake. And they got a lot of people involved way more even than the first Earth Day and they made it global. But they didn't understand that the deepest change comes from the empowerment, that's a much slower process and requires more give and take, you know, it's not just getting the message out, and then having people hear it and do something.John Fiege I want to turn to your most recent work, which revolves around business and the environment. With much of your recent writing, you're asking whether it's possible to green capitalism, and if so, what does that look like? you frame the question this way:  "At one extreme critics of capitalism dismiss all corporate talk of sustainability as greenwashing as a way to distract people from the fundamental destructiveness of the system. At the other extreme, the boosters of green business take for granted that sustainability is the inevitable next stage of the evolution of the market. Neither view is historically grounded". Why not?Adam Rome It's really definitional. So, if you can define capitalism, a variety ways, but some of the ways of defining capitalism make it just theoretically impossible that it could ever be green. So there, they don't they're not drawing on any historical data. It's a theoretical argument. The other argument, the booster argument, I'd say the historical record already clearly disproves. Capitalism is not just going to evolve, right, to a more sustainable thing. There are all kinds of reasons why, why the people that even that have tried the hardest to green, their businesses or their industries haven't been able to do it. So, if there's any chance of capitalism becoming green, the historical record, I would say so far, says it can only happen if there's powerful movement, a social movement, a political movement, that rewrites the rules that the change is what guides business. So that, that the default for business becomes doing the green thing rather than the exception.John Fiege Right. Let's talk about a specific example. You write about DuPont. And, you know, at some point in the late 80s, early 90s, DuPont kind of decided to start to lead the way in terms of environmental sustainability. And you really asked the question of how far can the company realistically go and how much can they truly fulfill this idea of, of sustainability, can you tell a little bit about the story of what happened with DuPont and what you drew from that?Adam Rome Sure. And so, it's 1989 that they have a new CEO, Edgar Willard. And he says, we need a new corporate environmentalism that's pretty much a phrase that he coined. And to think that they, they have to go in the phrase of the day beyond compliance. They can't just do what the law requires. That they they'll for all kinds of business reasons, they have to actually do better. They have to start thinking about how to green operations. And that's not just true for manufacturing firms, although it was manufacturers and particularly heavily polluting manufacturers that got the message first. So, I had already been thinking about what's the environmental impact of a company like DuPont, and how has it changed over time, and then I noticed that their CEO, Edgar Willard, becomes this national focal point, for an effort to try to create a corporate environmentalism and the next long serving CEO and board chairman of DuPont, Chad Holliday also becomes a national international leader in this movement. And for him, the key phrase was sustainable growth that he tries to envision to reorient the whole company toward some new areas that he foresaw as great needs if we were to become a more sustainable society. And both of them do real things that are, were hard. And in some cases, I would even say courageous. And they make dramatic improvements in certain ways. But in other ways, they totally fall short and the most egregious of their efforts that are non-efforts. Something that predated either of them that one of their iconic products at DuPont was Teflon —still is— and making Teflon involved a chemical usually just called C8, that they didn't make themselves three M made it and they bought it from 3M. But well before Willard comes into office. 3M begins to think C8 is not safe, or it could be hazardous in certain circumstances. They weren't DuPont. And DuPont has some serious internal debate about this. And they decide not to do anything differently than then. And and, and neither Edgar Willard nor Chad Holliday ever reconsiders that decision. In fact, they do the opposite when, when evidence of how dangerous it is to use C8 and and how C8 has escaped from their factory in West Virginia and is polluting the water and is polluting nearby land where they were dumping waste. They doubled down 3M eventually decides it's not going to make C8 anymore. And DuPont instead of finding an alternative builds their own C8 factory in North Carolina. And all of this is secret. This only comes out as a result of a miraculous series of circumstances, all of which could have easily not happened that allow an attorney Rob Billot to slowly build the evidence of how much DuPont knew, how great lengths they went to keep it secret, how they didn't make decisions that they easily could have made that wouldn't have even been that expensive, that could have avoided an environmental catastrophe. And the more interesting discovery in some way for me with DuPont was they they tried to create sustainable alternative to artificial fibers like polyester and nylon. And they tried to create a sustainable biofuel as an alternative to gasoline and for that matter, ethanol. And they put a huge amount of effort into it. And and they didn't get the results out of it, the financial results out of it that they hoped. And I think that's a key part of the puncturing of the balloon of the boosters, is that, you know, they make it sound like if people just had the will, they could create all these green new products and people would buy them and they'd make money. Green is Gold is the title of one book. It's not that simple. First of all, it's not always clear what is more sustainable product is and most companies don't have any expertise in thinking about this. So, they make mistakes but the market, the fundamental flaws of capitalism mean that greener products are always competing against things that are cheaper but dirtierJohn Fiege right, and then the public absorbs the costs, right? Environmental cost.Adam Rome Exactly. And, and some of those products can still find a niche, you know, like the Prius, or, you know, early on certain kinds of organic food. But a niche doesn't change the world, John Fiege RightAdam Rome and it and it also doesn't make enough money for big multinationals like DuPont that are publicly listed corporations to satisfy the shareholders... Right, and the shareholders rebelled. So, DuPont doesn't exist anymore. And part of what the part of what the shareholders the activist shareholders were rebelling against was the R&D Enterprise, which, which is crucial to sustainability. If you have to only think three months ahead, you're not going to be developing a lot of sustainable products, the things that DuPont was trying to do took a decade or more. And that's hard, even even if it's just a standard product, but especially if it's something that's trying to anticipate what would really be greener, 10 years from now. But, you know, the market doesn't reward that it rewards quick and dirty returns, not long-term farsighted thinking.John Fiege And you make this, this point that I think is really powerful that, you know, there, there are two different types of making business more sustainable, there are things like reducing waste, and being more efficient. And and using fewer materials, those things are all beneficial environmentally, they also make the cost of doing business less right there, they save money for the company. And companies have very enthusiastically taken that side of kind of eco thinking on and and often advertised how great they are for doing that. But there are other things that actually make the cost of doing business much higher, and things more difficult and more risky and less likely to to produce shareholder value. And those are the those are the things that companies haven't done well at all Adam Rome Right.John Fiege I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit more about that. And what you've seen with DuPont and otherAdam Rome Right, so those those win-wins, where it's environmentally better, and it's more profitable, are usually in the category of what's come to be called Eco efficiencies. And even those aren't always easy. That was another lesson for me and DuPont was Woolard pushes his scientists as researchers to find ways to reduce waste. And in their initial response is pushback. No, we can't do that. Are you crazy? If you know if we could do that we would have done it already. It's going to cost more or it's technically impossible. But a lot of times thinking outside the box, in fact, allowed these win-win solutions, these eco efficiencies. And sometimes the savings were gargantuan, really. John Fiege Right. Adam Rome And, and it's not all just in production processes. You know, Xerox, realized that it could take back copiers and use the parts in the copiers to quote remanufactured copiers. And that would save them a lot of money. And it was and then they realized it would save them even more if the copiers were designed from the beginning to be disassembled and reused like that. And that was, you know, hundreds and hundreds of million dollars a year of savings. But only, you know, someone had to prod them to do that. So, it takes leadership. But then there are all these harder things were in the current business model. They're not likely to to be as rewarding as the alternatives. And at the worst extreme, you know, there are incentives in the market right now, to make climate change worse, you know, there are lots of ways not just a fossil fuel, people can profit from some of the things that are going on, rather than trying to solve the problem. So, if your actual goal is a green economy, whether it's a capitalist one or any other kind of one, then the rules have to change fundamentally the way we understand what business is and what it does, and what its responsibilities are having to change fundamentally. Because we're never going to get to a sustainable economy. If some things pay, and some don't that are greenJohn Fiege RightAdam Rome Everything has to be paid to be green, or we have to get to a system where that's not the standard judgment anymore.John Fiege Yeah, yeah. You've also done some really fascinating work around fashion as a driver of consumption, environmental destruction. Could you talk a bit about the story of the Beaver, and kind of the the ascendant merchant class in Europe and the wide-ranging impacts of the fashion aspirations on on rivers, meadows, wetlands in North America, that kind of thing.Adam Rome The reason fashion looms so large for me was you know, there's only so much that you can eat or drink. No matter how wealthy you are, you know, there's, there's a biological limit. And, and that's true for a lot of other things that we consume, but, but fashion creates this potentially unlimited demand, that, that if something goes out of style, and you're no longer willing to use it, even if it's perfectly functional in every other way, and then you buy something new, that's, that's an unbelievable demand on resources, to have, essentially insatiable appetites. And it started with clothing, and especially with the beaver hat, that became a fashion item in Europe, and then and then in the US. But in the 20th century, it's expanded to lots of other things, you know, your, your smartphone is a fashion item, Apple is a fashion company, in many ways, you know, cars became fashion items, and were sold on style, as much as anything else. And so many other things have become like that, that that's become a major form of marketing is to get you to be dissatisfied with what you have, because it no longer is cool, right, and then to junk it and get something else and, and, and that cycle is incredibly destructive, but it starts with beaver. The poor Beaver, you know, their pelt happened to be really good for making hats better than wool, which was the alternative, you know, it was easier to shape, and it was water resistant, and it was easier to dye in it. And it was more expensive. So, it also therefore was more of a status object. And, you know, at the beginnings of modern capitalism, the rising merchant class wanted to have a way of showing that they were important and, and having stylish attire, and especially stylish hats was part of it. And as a result, all the Beaver in Europe is wiped out except for the very far reaches of Siberia, then the New World, new to Europe, at least, is opened up to exploitation. And there's lots of beaver in the northern US and in Canada. And over the course of the centuries, the Beaver is nearly wiped out in North America. All to satisfy this never-ending demand for stylish new hats.John Fiege It always struck me as kind of the perfect example of what environmental history is. Because not only did this fashion sense in Europe, originally, wipe out the Beaver for the most part in North America. But because beavers were no longer making dams, then it changed the dynamics of the rivers. Adam Rome Right.John Fiege and it destroyed wetlands. And it it changed the dynamics of whether there were meadows or not. And this, this very lofty idea of fashion and what people thought of themselves, in a, in a distant land in Europe, had these very real and immediate environmental impacts on the landscape in North America. And that, to me, that seems to be such a perfect encapsulation of the power of what environmental history is combining those two things.Adam Rome You're right, you know, that's part of the

After World War Two, America experienced unprecedented prosperity as the rest of the world lay in smoking ruins. As the world rebuilt, America’s marketshare of global manufacturing shrank. To hide this economic diminution, various scams were undertaken. One of which was using pension fund money from workers to fire those workers and to open plants ... The post The Truth Behind Mergers and Pension Funds appeared first on The New American.

Sophie (age 7) and Ellie (age 5) tell the history of the modern Olympic Games. After last weeks episode on the Ancient Olympic games the girls want to bring the story up to date.----more---- Greece was conquered and the Olympics seemed forgotten for 1,500 years. However, after Greece fought and won her freedom again, people wanted to remember all the amazing things that the Greeks had done. This was science and maths, myths and legends. It was also the Olympic games. A Frenchman called Pierre Coubertin loved that in Britain they were doing lots of sports in schools and writing many rules for sports. He also loved Ancient Greece. He had the idea to bring back the Olympic Games but instead make them for the whole world. He organized the first modern Olympic Games in Athens. Like the ancient games he decided to have them every four years. However, differently to the ancient Olympic games, he decided to have them in a different city every time. The first challenge was to decide on the sports. They decided not to have the old fashioned ancient Olympic Sports like chariot racing. Instead they would have modern sports that people play nowadays. The games were a great success and got bigger and bigger. They even brought back some of the old traditions. For example, they light a flame at Olympia just like in the Ancient Olympic Games. They take the flame on torch to the host city and the flame burns all through the Olympics. However, some traditions have sadly not come back. In the ancient Olympic games all wars stopped during the games. In the World Wars the OIympics stopped, not the wars. One of the most famous games was in 1936 in Germany. Hitler was the leader of Germany and it was when the Nazis were in charge. He was a very evil man. He thought that the Germans were better than anyone else, especially Jews and Black people. However, Jesse Owens, an American, came to the games. He was black. He won every race by miles that he was in. Hitler's stupid ideas about who was best were proved completely wrong. They also realized that they needed to make different types of Olympic Games. They wanted to do skiing. However, that meant they needed a cold place! So they made a second Olympic Games called the Winter games. They have this every four years too but in a cold country in the mountains. After World War Two they had the Olympic Games in London. There were many injured soldiers in the war. So a special competition was organized for them so they could compete fairly. Over time this grew to be a third Olympic Games called the Paralympics. Finally at the end we talk about how every Olympian started as a child with a dream. A child who wasn't good at a sport. But one who wanted to try their best. Perhaps there is a future Olympian listening to this story. PUFFIN PODCAST: MISSION IMAGINATION We talk about the new Puffin Podcast, Mission Imagination, in this podcast. It just started and our girls really enjoyed it. They didn't pay us any money to tell you about it. We would love to share any other podcasts that you like. They have an activity pack too which is here: puffin.co.uk/podcast   PATRONS' CLUB We have a Patrons' Club and we would love you to join. Details are at www.patreon.com/historystorytime.

Israel Palestine conflict explained: A simple timeline and mapDespite international attempts to broker a ceasefire, conflict in the region is intensifying, with civilian casualties increasing and concerns of a full-blown humanitarian crisis mounting. On Monday, Israel conducted dozens of airstrikes on the Gaza Strip, after Palestinian militants fired barrages of rockets at southern Israeli cities in the latest fighting. But while this marks some of the worst violence seen in the region, the history of the conflict goes back decades.A timeline of the conflict1920Britain takes control of the region known as Palestine after the Ottoman Empire is defeated in World War One.At this time, the land is inhabited by an Arab majority, with a Jewish minority, but without conflict.1920s to 1940sBritain begins establishing a 'national home' for Jews in the region as more and more Jewish people flee persecution in Europe.This leads to an increase in tensions between the groups - the area is seen as the ancestral home of both Jews and Arabs, with both groups claiming rights to the land.After World War Two as more Jews flee to the region, violence between the groups grows, as well as against British rule.

After a bomb was found on a ledge of the Con Ed Building in New York City in November 1940 a sixteen year man hunt would ensue for the Mad Bomber. After World War Two had ended Bombs started being placed around New York City. At first the bombs did not go off because they were poorly made. In the 1950 they started going off but only caused injuries. The final bomb would go off in Brooklyn Theater in 1956.Police were hard pressed to find a suspect. Con Ed had an endless list of disgruntled former employees and nothing helped the police narrow down a suspect. They turned to a phycologist James Brussels who came up with a phycological and physical profile of the bomber. Criminal Profiling is born.This helped them track down George Metesky the man who would be dubbed the Mad Bomber. One of America's first serial bombers. In this episode we explore Metesky's life and why he turned to bombing, The investigation, and how he was tracked down.

Contact Clint through TheWritingCompany.com TRANSCRIPTDiane Dayton  0:02  This is changing the rules. A podcast about designing the life you want to live, hosted by KC Dempster and Ray Loewe, the luckiest guy in the world.KC Dempster  0:12  Good morning, everybody. Welcome to changing the rules. I'm KC Dempster. And I'm here with Ray Loewe in the wonderful Wildfire Studios in beautiful downtown Woodbury, New Jersey. And in a couple of minutes, we're going to be speaking with an old friend. And I'm not talking age old. I'm talking. We've known for many years. His name's Clint Willis, and I'm really looking forward to this. So good morning, Ray.Ray Loewe  0:36  Good morning. You stole my line about wonderful, wonderful Wildfire.KC Dempster  0:41  Well, I just thought we could share.Ray Loewe  0:43  So now I have to regroup. Yeah, okay. So anyway, we are fortunate enough to be here in the Wildfire Podcasting Studios. And, and Wildfire has been a wonderful resource for us. About a year ago, we started doing podcasts, we had no idea of what to do. They took us through the process they have is up and running. I'm still not sure we know what we're doing. But ButKC Dempster  1:07  well, we've been through a lot together. I mean, we did a lot, a lot of them from home during the social isolation. And so we've we've had our ups and downs.Ray Loewe  1:17  And if you ever want to go on the podcasting, business, wildfires a place to go, they've got they've got the right people to get us going. And we're thankful for that.KC Dempster  1:26  In this week of Thanksgiving. Yes,Ray Loewe  1:28  that's correct. So when we talk today, we're talking to one of the luckiest people in the world. And the luckiest people in the world are those people who personally design their own lives. And then they step into them and live them to the max. And when we talk to Clint in a minute, you're going to find out he very definitely is one of them. Also, there are a couple of mindsets that the luckiest people in the world have. And if you listen to what Clint says you're going to find that they pop up all the time. One is they know how to be happy. Number two is they tend to follow what's fascinating and motivating and interesting. Mm hmm. Number three, they really know themselves. Mm hmm. And number four, is kind of a little different. But it's how do you get space to do what you want? That's part of designing your own life? Yes. So let's take a quick station break here. So everybody knows they're listening. to us, and then we're gonna come back and start talking to Clint Wallace.Diane Dayton  2:34  You're listening to changing the rules with KC Dempster. And Ray Loewe, the luckiest guy in the world. We will be right back with more exciting information.KC Dempster  2:43  And Welcome back, everybody. And, Ray, please hurry up and introduce Clint because this is going to be a great, great show.Ray Loewe  2:51  We'll Clint Clint is always a hard person to introduce. Because we've known him for a long time we we met him long ago, when he was a writer for Tme/Life and Money Magazine. And we were a source of college planning information for him at the time and, and over a long period of time, we kind of developed this relationship and at the time, Clint was on living in New York City. And Clint, tell us a little bit about your life at time, your life at Time/Life. And and then and then we're going to kind of branch off into where you went, because that's where that's where it gets interesting. Yeah. And that's where that's where you become the luckiest guy and luckiest people in the world.Clint Willis  3:42  Sure, so I went to work at Time Inc, in 1981, I think. And I was I think, 24, almost 25. And, and it was great. I had a great time I learned a lot there I was I started out as a fact checker. So I learned a lot about getting it right. There was a it felt like the stakes were enormous, you know, you would publish a monthly magazine, it would be out there for a month and you couldn't go online and correct your mistakes it was there an any little mistake would be picked up by one of our some point I think we had a couple million readers. And they you know, they paid whatever it was two bucks for the magazine and they see a mistake and that was like, Yes. There. And then, you know, if you had so if you had then it could be the tiniest little mistake. So anyway, I learned a lot there about respect for about getting it right and about making things clear, because a lot of times factchecking was about interpretation. Like how will people read this sentence. Well, you know, so you ended up putting yourself in the readers mind and I spent many long nights really fun but an exciting for me as a young guy sitting in the timeline building with a view of the radio center. You know, radio, music hall across the street, and just sort of like sitting in there with some editor who'd been like, through the wars at Time magazine or wherever, and, and getting grilled by them about stuff. It was really fun. But um, but I had, you know, I was married, and we ended up with a couple of little kids. And after being in and out of that building, kind of take some time off from freelance, and I got recruited through a startup magazine for a while, after about eight or 10 years of that I started to feel like I, you know, I was ready to do something more. That was more mine, you know, cuz you kind of it was a little bit like joining the army or something might be I mean, I never was in the army. But But you're you were in part of this huge organization, and you had your place, and you needed to accommodate the mores and the standards and the history and the culture. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I had my own culture, I was trying to develop like, Who am I, what am I into a woman? So I started looking around,Ray Loewe  6:06  and you ran away to Maine,Clint Willis  6:09  we did. So my wife, Jennifer and I, we had our two little boys at that point, we realized that New York City was a tough place to raise his family on a journalist salary. And I also had ambitions as a writer, you know, at that point, I wanted to write about some other stuff. And so we had friends who moved up to Portland, Maine, and we went to visit them, and we just loved it. I mean, you're so much closer to the to nature, ocean, and the mountains, and the trees and the sky and all that and the quiet. And, and the the quality of life was, you know, way more accessible to us as a young couple. And I figured I could freelance, you know, I had, I had some skills at that point, thanks to my mentors and teachers at Time Inc. And I knew something about how the world worked. I was interested in everything, it felt like I just wanted to know more, you know, and that was a great kind of motivation for a reporter and for a freelancer, because I just went looking for work from everywhere, like I remember, I wrote a tennis column for a magazine I, I wrote a, I wrote personal essays, I wrote a lot of personal finance stuff, because that was where I had a real strong skill set that set me apart from a lot of journalists, there weren't a lot of financial journalists in those days back, this would be back in the early 90s, like 93. So I could make money pretty efficiently doing that and kind of start to clear space to do other work. And I hired a couple of young guys, right when I got here, right out of college, they'd gone to school up here at I think both of them are from Bowden. And we I use them as my fact checkers and my reporters. And eventually, that kind of vary over over many years, and in different ways have evolved into what's now a Content Agency in Portland and it called The Writing Company. And it has a team of about 20 writers and 20. Plus writers and editors are really a community that we develop over the years have have an add three younger partners who run the business now. And that's been part of my journey, you know, figuring out how to own a business and how to build a community and how to be a good mentor myself after having had so many myself. And I just want to give a shout out early in the interview to the folks who run The Writing Company. Now they do an incredible job, doing content for all sorts of big financial service companies, financial advisors, healthcare technology companies, a lot of work with a lot of big agencies. They've really built something amazing up here and I'm my role these days is I'm effectively retired, you know, I kind of have a few years looked up ago and said, you know, it's really time for them to run it. And as long as I'm in the room that's difficult for them. And it's difficult for me, right, I stepped out of decision making and now I'm kind of this not even counted, but like eminence grise or something, old guy. Yeah.Ray Loewe  9:12  Like trot out and ask them a question. You'll figure out your place sooner or later. He said, heKC Dempster  9:16  He's emeritus now,Ray Loewe  9:18  yeah, so so I find this process interesting. So you have to be a pretty gutsy guy. Because to leave a safe, secure situation with a big company, and relocate out of New York domain without really having a firm job. You know, you're reaching into your skill. So why, you know, how did that affect the family? And how did that make you feel at that time?Clint Willis  9:45  Yeah, you know, it's really funny. I felt I felt so excited and so free when we left New York and I left Time Inc. to start my own thing. You know, I had I don't know where I had the confidence to do it. To be honest. I you know, when thing I wanted to talk about today was just when I think about what allowed me to make choices that have led me down a good path in terms of my own happiness and, and, you know, things like that, a lot of it was about getting to that place where you feel safe, where you don't feel quite so scared, or you feel safe enough anyway to take risks. And, you know, for me, as you know, like, early, early in my, well, when I was around 30, I remember one day, my wife looked at me and I looked at her and, and we both just sort of said, I needed to get, I need to get some therapy, like I was acting out, I was still kind of big baby, you know, 30 years old, we went to babe we had a baby of our own at that point, it was like, we don't need two babies in this family ever tantrums. And I was unhappy, you know. And so I went to see a therapist, and that was enormously important in helping me kind of sort through my own issues and grow up enough to realize, to take a more constructive view towards things and to be able to feel safe enough to start to take chances, and do that and start to look for things that would make me happy. You know, and, and that it was so obvious to me, when, towards the end of our time in New York, that it would make me happier to live somewhere like this, that I was willing to risk, you know, taking a hit financially. And, and my wife, Jennifer has always been game for anything that led in the direction of you know, everybody being happier. Yeah. Yeah. It's no fun to be married to someone who's not happy. So your happiness is my happiness to some degree. Yeah.Ray Loewe  11:43  So you know, you seem to dwell on this a lot. And one of the things you said in our pre interview, and I'll get this on the air, because I'm not sure , you put it on there. But one of the reasons you marry Jennifer was because she was a happy person.Clint Willis  11:57  I saw that that sort of oriented, she had an open heart, and you could just see it in her face, like the first time I laid eyes on her, you know, I had a sort of a dark, brooding kind of thing going on. And she just looks filled with joy and the capacity for joy. And I thought, that's the direction I want to go in, I knew that something in me knew that, that that was where, you know, that was the way to go. And I think my whole life since then, has been, and maybe before that, too, we're always looking for where's the light? Where's the joy? Where's the where's the safety first, because I think most people to get to joy, you got to get to safety. First you got to show you got to feel safe. And so I'm always like, when people ask me, like sometimes young people or whatever will ask me about what should I do or whatever. And I'm a firm believer in touchstones, like being able to, to draw back to something you know, deeply, and then operate from that place when you're making choices. And one thing I know deeply, and I feel that way, as an editor and a writer. What's true here is often where I'll be asking myself, what and what will the reader what does the reader want? You know, and in this case, when you're making decisions about happiness, it's like, how, how can I feel safe enough to relax enough to feel like I know what to do, you know which direction to go. And, and that finding that safety is so important, you know, if you just rush forward and make choices, out of desperation, or anxiety, or fear or anger, you're going to make bad choices, generally speaking. And if you come from a place of clarity and calm, even if it's momentary, it'll move you a little bit in the right direction, where safety will be easier to find next time, your decisions just get better and better. And sometimes you need help with that. That's why therapy talk therapy was has been a hugely important part of my, my journey. But there are other ways to find it, too. You know, and I think one of them is finding things you love doing and spending at least a little time doing that, like no matter what it is, how crazy it seems, whether it sort of takes up time that you think you don't have or even money, you think your own have, if you sometimes it's worth making that investment, in your own sense of safety and calm. And then, like I said, that's a platform to look for happiness from.Ray Loewe  14:19  Yeah, you know, you you said a couple of other things, going back to our kind of our pre interview here and, and you said one of the things that excited you about going off on your own was that you always wanted to figure out how the world works. And when you were at  Money, you were kind of constrained to being the financial guy now it paid you okay, but but talk a little bit about this. Your search for how the world works and how writing has helped you and how your journey has helped you do that. Tell me how your journey you know the the the the the trip to Maine, the starting of The Writing Company. Yeah, they all fit I thinkClint Willis  15:01  Yeah, well, you know, growing up as a little kid, I grew up in South Louisiana. I was born in New Orleans, and I grew up there and and Lafayette. And I remember being a really tiny little guy living on Joseph street in New Orleans, and standing on the sidewalk, I guess, and looking up and seeing the cars go by on our little street and thinking, who's in charge of this? How did this happen? Like, what? How did this possibly happen? It's so important. Everyone has a place to live. And there's cars and streets who did because I didn't know anyone who was doing that, as far as I could tell. Right. Yeah. So that sense of puzzlement and and interest in that somehow, I think I think for me, it was part of feeling safe in the world is knowing Well, what's going on, which I think is true for everyone, right? That's why Asian can be such a great empowering thing. Because you're like, Oh, I get it. That's what's happening here. So what's my place in all that? How can I make a contribution? You know, what do I have to worry about? So anyway, like a journal, I started out in college, I thought I was going to be an academic, I thought I was going to study politics. So I even went to grad school briefly. And I realized I didn't want to do the academic thing, where you dive very deeply into one topic, or at least that's how I understood and I think that was the program I was in. But I was like, What about being a journalist where you just get to do a story, ask a bunch of questions, and then move on to the next story The next day, if it's a daily, you know, and I'll learn a lot really quickly. So I'm, that always kind of guided me. And it's got and it guided me as a journalist. And then it guided me as a, as a writer. And it guided me as a, you know, because I ended up with a career in books, I wrote a book, kind of a biography, a group biography of a bunch of English climbers, called The Boys of Everest, which was kind of one of my ambitions was to do a book like that. And it was like, great, I had to learn all about like, English society. After World War Two, and into the 60s and 70s, that I learned, I learned, I had to learn about climbing. And then to do that I got really involved in climbing, partly as a research project, but partly because I had always loved it, because I was introduced to it at summer camp. But I ended up learning all about that little world. And you know, and then in running a business, turning The Writing Company into, you know, some kind of an actual business, I had to learn about small business and making those choices. It's all interesting, right? And it all makes you feel me feel like I know what I'm doing. And I'm a little bit safer in the world.KC Dempster  17:34  And you're an intensely curious person, I think,Ray Loewe  17:36  I think so. You know, talk about surfing, for a minute, surfing, got into your life somehow here, too. Yeah.Clint Willis  17:43  Yeah, yeah, totally. It's related to all this stuff. I mean, in terms of being curious, that comes from anxiety, I think it's a small child, I was very anxious, because my family was like, I really, really have. I've had a really interesting journey with my my birth family, like in terms of coming to terms with who those people were and what they were trying to do and what was going on. And there was some mental illness in my family, and you know, that kind of stuff. So as a little kid, I was kind of looking around going, alright, what's gonna happen next, what's going on here? So I think curiosity is partly grounded, something like anxiety can channel into something like curiosity, which can be really productive, right? And my focus on feeling safe in the world comes from that personal history. So everyone else will have their own narrative and their own story. And maybe safety won't be as big an issue for them, maybe something else will. But uh, I gotta drink something.Ray Loewe  18:44  Well, you know what, while you're taking a drink there, I think there's a pattern here that is really interesting. And it's a role model that you can be for other people. You've taken your curiosity, you've taken your skills, you kind of Escape from New York and rebuild your life. You you founded this Writing Company. And I think one of the other things that you said about the writing company is it was one of the first uh companies of this kind in the country. And that one of the reasons you did it was also to be able to give you a little space to be able to make money and then give you space to follow what you want to do. And and it's that pattern that keeps coming back up. So how would you How would you coach other people who are trying to do things in following what they want?Clint Willis  19:36  Yeah, so yeah, I mean, I shared this with you in the pre interview about this Bible story I was familiar with from my childhood, where someone asked Jesus, should we should you pay taxes? Should people pay taxes and they're trying to trap him into saying, because if he says, Yes, his followers will be angry. And if he says, No, the Romans will, perhaps arrest him and he says, render this to get here. His answer render the Caesar that which is Caesar's, and unto God that which is God's. And I love that story. And it provided a kind of frame for me when I was thinking about how to spend my time, you know, as somebody who wanted to make a living and, and, you know, help support my family and, and all that, I also wanted to do things that was really important to me at the time to do my own writing, actually, that was a real motivator, where I wouldn't necessarily get hired to do it, but I wanted to do it anyway. And, you know, so I wanted to write books and that kind of stuff. And so I decided, I'm going to render unto Caesar that, which is Caesar, I'm going to figure out a way to make a living as efficiently as I can, without, without doing anything that doesn't feel good to me, you know, I'm going to try to enjoy it, I'm going to try to do a good job, I'm going to, you know, be responsible. But I'm also going to try to clear some space to do whatever I want as a writer. And that's the part that goes to God, you know, is a sort of conceptual approach. And so I did you know, and one of the ways to be really efficient, and also to play to some of my own interests was to hire other people, as a writer to support my writing, and then eventually to train them to write and to convince our clients that it was okay, if I didn't write it, it was okay, if I just edited it, I'd make sure it was, you know, it was it was the kind of thing they would get from me. But somebody else was doing a lot of the work. And that was, that was kind of a new thing. I think at the time, there weren't a lot of people doing that. And I was doing it for personal reasons, I didn't have in mind that particular inventing a new kind of editorial agency, and I'm not sure I did invent it, but, but I kind of did mean, maybe someone else did over somewhere else, too. But I was inventing it as I went along. And then I had people who were very early in the process, you know, becoming my partners, as well, as, you know, people I was mentoring. And then, you know, like, so I and I loved that I found it incredibly empowering. And I love collaborating with people that I love. Like, you know, it's amazing to collaborate with someone there where there's mutual respect, and, and a sense of comfort and safety and friendship. And I got a lot of that in my life, which is one reason that I am very lucky. Other people are amazing. And yeah, which is a wholeRay Loewe  22:24  nother show. Yes, you're one of the luckiest people in the world. There's no doubt about that. And, you know, unfortunately, we're at the end of our time limit here. And I think what I'd like to do, I'm going to be really curious to find out what's the next step and where you go. And so what we're going to have to do is do another one of these a year or two down the line here and find out what's changed. And and I think that what I hope a lot of people who listen to this will do is to step out from their their restrictions, create their own life, think about what they want, and then think about how they're going to do it and make it work. And Clint, thank you so much for showing us and telling us about how you did that.Clint Willis  23:06  So much fun. Thank you so much, guys. All right,Ray Loewe  23:09  and have a great day. And KC, we'll be back next week with another.KC Dempster  23:14  Yes, we're going to be talking to Ray's arch nemesis.Ray Loewe  23:18  We're going into the Swimming World next year.KC Dempster  23:20  Don't give it away.Ray Loewe  23:22  It's gonna give me trauma and anxiety, all that stuff that Clint got rid of. All right, everybody. Well, thanks for being with us. And we'll see you next week.Diane Dayton  23:31  Thank you for listening to Changing the Rules, a podcast designed to help you live your life the way you want, and give you what you need to make it happen. Join us in two weeks for our next exciting topics on Changing the Rules with KC Dempster and Ray Loewe the luckiest guy in the world.   

For many thousands of years, bread was made by combining a wild yeast starter with a combination of flours, salt, and water. After World War Two, automation and commercialization took over the bread industry and the old ways were soon practiced only by a few bakers and aritsans. Sourdough bread is now in a resurgence and Greenville's newest sourdough bakery is the garage of Julian Loue at his Rise Bakery. Tune in and hear his story then get a loaf of his bread because it is wonderful.

Welcome!   We have a lot of technology in the news this week.  I will give you my take on the monitoring that the government is doing and why.  We will discuss contact tracing and how Big Tech is trying to come up with a solution.  What is this 5G conspiracy that is being bantered about and why is Amazon having delivery issues.  Linksys and Zoom are having problems and I will tell you what you need to do. And we will wrap up with China and US and what can be done about intellectual property theft and spying.  So sit back and listen in.  For more tech tips, news, and updates visit - CraigPeterson.com --- Automated Machine Generated Transcript: Hello, everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN and, of course, also heard every Wednesday morning at about 730 with Matt, as we discuss the latest issues of the day. And in fact, that's what we do here every weekend as well. So I do want to welcome you guys who some of you might be new. Some of you have been listening for a while now. I'm trying to remember when was my first time at this station. I've been on the air now for more than 20 years, 25 years, something like that long time. And I always have enjoyed it. And I enjoyed talking with you guys, too. We've had about six or eight calls. I think this week, and we've been setting aside time for people who are having problems with the computers, whether it's kind of work at home situation, maybe it's a small business, just help Send them out helping them understand what's up. So shout out to all you guys. I think the winner this week was Linda, and we spent Wow, an hour and a half, two hours with her trying to help with a few things. She had some questions about emails, and you've been having some problems for about two years now. And so we spent some time going over that with her. Elahh, one of our texts, also one of my daughters, was gracious enough to spend the time with her. And I know Linda appreciated it. And it can get frustrating. I understand that too, is funny because Elahh was saying that, you know, from time to time to Linda was getting a little hot under the collar, but that's understandable. I do that too with computers because they just can get so frustrating. So hey, I get it. I understand. And we also had an email go out this week, and you should have received that. Offering if you wanted help, and you could schedule free calls. You could get any information you wanted to get my earballs and eyeballs if necessary to look at your screen, depending on what's going on. So that's a little bit of what I've been up to this week. We also finished up I did not do any webinars this week. I'm planning on doing some Facebook Lives next week. Maybe some webinars as well depend on how it all goes. And on training, right, we're getting into the basics again, helping you guys out with completely free stuff. I'm going to be redoing my webinars and kind of explaining all of the stuff you need to know, not you know, we're not getting geeky on this. I'm not trying to turn you into a computer expert. But understand modems what they are your routers, your Wi-Fi, your firewalls, your Windows computers with the updates, what's an upgrade How about the patches going through VPN And the major risks of VPN, and when you need to use them when the appropriate time is to use them. And I'm also thinking about maybe putting together a little series for businesses that are starting up, trying to be optimistic here, right? We're starting up again, and we're getting back into the swing of things. And that means there are some things you have to worry about the machines where they shut down properly, how to get them back up and running, do you need to go in and update some of the software, maybe replace some of the just antivirus with real advanced malware protection and all that sort of stuff? So I might be doing that as well. I'm kind of thinking that, and I was talking with my team this last week about trying to do that to be optimistic and help businesses get back going again because I think we're going to have some serious problems. I think that well, frankly, I know that some people have lost their jobs or a friend of mine was saying that a friend of his I just found out that he's not going to be rehired when the business reopens because he had been laid off. And of course, this whole payroll protection plan, frankly, is a scam. It's just crazy. What the Federal Government did, they would be better off giving every family in this country a check for $60,000. Of course, that would not Greece or pockets, would it? And that would help a lot. A lot. Instead, they're spending about $60,000 per family, the spending that money on banks who are already liquid, they can go to the capital markets. You've heard about the public companies that have gotten some of this money. How about the major universities that have multiple 10s of billions of dollars in endowments that got it? And yeah, I'm a little bitter about this because I didn't get any of the money. I applied. I got nothing, nothing. I got an email a couple of weeks after I applied it saying, Well, you know, we need this. We need that. Well, wait a minute, I was supposed to get this, this instant $10,000 loan to help me stay on my feet. So this friend of mine, they got laid off, right? Then even on the PPP, you're given two months' worth of payroll, and you have to keep these people on the payroll for about four months. Well, how can you do that if the government's not letting you make money? If it's not letting you bring people into your restaurant or send people technicians out, whatever it is that you do cut hair, right? You can't you, but you know this already, right? Because this is happening to you. Look at the stats in Maine, and they say okay, well, we helped all of these, you know, these 10s of thousands of companies. Well, maybe they did, but I can tell you from people I know and my personal experience that it hasn't hit any of the pockets of the real small businesses. I haven't even gotten that. The so-called 1200 dollar stimulus check from the Federal Government. It's insane. How many weeks that we've been locked down now? It's what about six weeks? It is not good. It is not fair. It's going to be hard to come back. My friend was saying that his friend found out they're not hiring him back, which is going to be the case for many people. What happened? His friend hanged himself. Yeah, think about that. Think about all of these other consequences. It's the typical thing with the government, right? You've got people highly focused on this pandemic, and what should we do? They are extremely highly focused because last October, there was this major meeting, where they've been getting together and talking about global warming and what we need to do to save the universe. 1000 years from now. And of course, we know just how good these models are that they use for global warming. And I've never really talked about it here. I've talked about it on my other radio shows in the past, I've had the guy who founded the Weather Channel weather.com on, and it's just absolutely crazy how bad those numbers are. But we can't even get the models, right when it comes to a virus that's right in front of us, where we have some real numbers. Okay, well, maybe the numbers coming out of China weren't that wasn't that good. Perhaps those numbers were fake. Maybe, you know, we can't trust them. That's fine. Well, how about Italy? How about all of Europe, the numbers are coming out of there. How about our numbers we're still not getting it right. Remember the initial model talking about millions dead in the United States, a couple of hundred thousand dead over in the UK. We're not even getting get close to that. We're not also going to be close to the UK number that was predicted. And then it's revised down, and it's revised down and as revised down as writes down so we've got these people who are focused on what they learned last year, about pandemics and what the response should be based on this, all of this quote-unquote science. And they, of course, you know, we haven't had pandemics like this to deal with, so in reality, it's a theory, and they have the models which are in reality theory. And all of those models said Oh, no, we're going to have a lot of people that unless we go ahead and quarantine people, we need this social distancing is what they've been calling it. And so a lot of states that Okay, everybody has a social distance you have to get out you have to Oh, my goodness. And you look at the exact opposite look at Sweden and what's happened over there and was Sweden did none of this stuff, they didn't quarantine, they didn't shut down their businesses. People were still sitting in cafes, sipping their coffee, having a pleasant afternoon, and that that springtime sunshine outside, doing everything they wanted to. And it's about the size of Michigan and Sweden has had fewer deaths than my lot fewer deaths than Michigan. And you know, in Michigan, what they did with all of their lockdowns over there. It's it is nuts. These models are, at best, a guesstimate. And there they were saying okay, well we need to do is kind of get rid of that peak because our hospitals aren't going to handle it. Have you noticed how hospitals now are looking to, and some have already not only declared bankruptcy but closed their doors because they are not full. They're not full of Coronavirus cases. They shut down all the elective so-called optional surgeries and other things, right. We haven't gone to see the doctors. How many people's lives were saved the numbers the stats look like this was one of the worst I don't know the flu just a regular flu year even not particularly bad, but that's not what all of these projections said that's not what this just tickle model said. Right? Right. I remember playing the game of life well is you don't play it but writing some of that code, seen it on the computer way back when back in the 70s, it would have been and mid-70s. I was just so impressed with it, and it shows how a cell will replicate you know and replicate and how it will expand. That's about the only I've seen that's correct. So we can't get our models right for COVID-19. We still don't have them, right. We're again revising them. Now they're saying that we could have another resurgence this fall maybe even worse than what we had this year. At the same time, some of these same people are saying, Hey, we're all going to die. Because what was it five years ago or ten years ago, by then we were by 2010. We're supposed to be underwater in Florida, right? You just can't trust it. People are dying. People are losing their jobs. And so we're looking at it saying, what can we do to help businesses get back? Anyways, stick around. That's enough, belly aching for me. We'll be right back here on WGAN. Of course, I'm Craig Peterson. We'll be getting into the tech stories of the week. So stick around. Hey, welcome back, everybody. Craig Peterson here on WGAN and online at Craig Peterson dot com. We are talking today about some of the latest technology as we do every Saturday and Wednesday morning. On Wednesday morning, it's at 738, and on Saturdays, we're on from one end till three. Well, we're going to talk right now about this news surveillance program that's out there. And the whole idea behind this is to map the spread of the Coronavirus. At least that's the rumor, right? A great article you'll find@medium.com about this, but Coronavirus is being used to drive brand new surveillance programs around the world. So let's talk about a few different countries what they're doing. And I've gotten a little bit of a concern we'll talk about later in the show today, about maybe something like that. Patriot act, as we had after 911, that gives the government all kinds of new powers and they may go unchecked, which is a concern for me, particularly looking at the statistics as we know them so far, which is that this isn't just a horrific, horrific thing. It's terrible. It's awful when anybody dies, but it happens every year with the flu too. So we'll see where it all comes out. But we were just talking about the last segment. The whole thing about the models is just ridiculous. Well, in Argentina, their Ministry of Health has built a mandatory app for anyone entering the country, and you have to keep it installed for 14 days, and that requires users to give access to their GPS position. Now, it's not clear if Argentina is keeping track actively of the people with that location data about apparently the province of Santa Fe is Forcing those who have violated the quarantine to download an app that tracks precisely where we are. We're talking about Argentina here, as well as many other countries is that they are putting one of those trackers on you as though you'd been convicted of a crime which bugs me, frankly, Australia. Yeah, and everything down there is trying to kill you, including the Coronavirus. Now those ordered into quarantine could have government surveillance devices installed in their homes or be forced to wear electronic surveillance devices, and that's a new law that went into place in the state of Western Australia. But the Australian government has opted not to use cell phone-based tracking Austria. The Australian telecom con gave two days' worth of anonymized location data to the government to analyze movement in the country. And this is something that I've been saying that governments are doing worldwide. They're asking the cell phone companies that you know, the providers to give them location data, and anything that's anonymized pretty much can be D anonymized. And think about that, think about how easy that is. So if the government has your home address, and they see that person 1750, it is of that place every night, well guess what they can guess who you are, and then they know where you travel, etc., etc. So anonymized location data is ridiculous rain. They've got electronic braces that connect to a mobile app. And this is something similar to what Hong Kong has done. Belgium, they've been hit the worst in Europe when it comes to per capita cases and deaths. But three telecoms over in Belgium are giving data to a private company, and they're analyzing the information and trying to detect Widespread trends of movement in the country. Now they're using drones to make an announcement. But they can also be using the devices to capture surveillance footage. That's according to the top VPN digital rights tracker, Brazil. Let's get into the socialist countries here. Local governments across Brazil are tracking locations from citizens' smartphones. And one city receives alone is tracking 700,000 people's location through their devices. And that's one of Brazil's smaller metropolitan areas. And quote here from one of the Brazilian firms that are doing some of this stuff, we have visibility of specific behaviors that couldn't be captured by other technologies. For example, if an individual leaves their house, we can detect that in a matter of seconds. And then, of course, that ends up in the government's hands China, another socialist country. They're using practically every surveillance system in their toolbox. Publicly located cameras there you go running facial recognition searches, citizens are location tracking through their phones. Drones are being used to give directions from the government. Can you imagine that having a drone over your shoulder yelling at you? We've seen that over in China where they chase you back to your house. The Government in China is socialist, also tracking individuals more than 200 cities through a smartphone app that grades are health and assigns them a classification of green, yellow or red this according to New York Times socialist newspaper, the app sends that data to the police. It works as a hall pass for entry into certain public places, and that has been proposed here in the United States. As well that you can have a little Hall Pass, to let you board planes and go to work, etc. and China, of course, is putting pressure on private companies in the country to hand over data to China. Dubai, I don't know they're, they're a monarchy kind of a, you know, I don't know it's not quite socialist. It's undoubtedly addicted, dictatorial. They're using cameras. And by the way, one of the significant ways they make money in Dubai is these amazingly high fines for speeders. Still, this case, they repurpose the cameras from catching speeding motorists to analyze driver's license plates and determine if they are deemed, essential workers. Ecuador is tracking cellphones. Germany, which is starting to open its businesses, in fact, this week, they started opening while their telecom company they're big firm over there called telecom is providing location data from its customers to the Robert Kok Institute. And that's the organization coordinating their national action against Coronavirus. Now Germany did something right upfront. That was wonderful. I think they went immediately to the private sector and Germany said hey, listen, guys, we're going to need tests so come up with some tests figure out how we can do this how we can do testing quickly. Whereas here in the US where we don't have the private companies right up front getting involved in at CDC said we're the only ones that can do this. We are at let us do it. We're, we have a monopoly on testing. And we don't like those tests because they have 40% negative rates and you know, false positives, false negatives and, and you have to have everything come through us, right, which is a very socialist thing. And, you know, we don't live in a truly capitalist country anymore. We're at best, it's crony capitalism, but in Germany, they did the right thing. They got companies involved right away to figure this out to analyze the data. They weren't relying on a non-reviewed report out of the United Kingdom, to base all of their analysis and projections on. So they're also expected to launch a Bluetooth based app like those that are used in Singapore and Indonesia right now. They've also got a smartwatch app over in Germany, Hong Kong, those quarantines have to wear special electronic wristbands that track the locations are handed out the airport and must be paired with the individual's phone. And then, once they arrive home, they're given one minute to walk around their apartment to calibrate the wristband and the company app to space where they are confined. India oh my gosh, talking about a country that could have problems. They have expanded their programs to track citizens through both digital and analog means They using location data. They're using closed-circuit television footage to track citizens in the southern Indian state of Kerala. According to Reuters, some western states, are stamping the hands of those arriving in airports, with a removable ink stamp detailing the date until which the person must quarantine. They're also taking passenger information, primarily airlines and railroads. Now, the touch base authentication, like fingerprint scanners, are risky, because they require people to touch a surface. They're getting a real boost in facial recognition over in India. So stick around, we'll come back. We're going to go through a few more countries what they're doing, and then we'll talk more about what's going on here. Yeah, Craig Peterson has some concerns. You are listening to WGAN. I will be right back, so stick around. Hey, welcome back everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN, and I had on some good old Herb Alpert, remember him? The Taste of Honey was the one playing during the break. How is that for fun? Man, I haven't listened to Herb Alpert in a lot of years since Well, the 70s, right? I Remember the album's cover and that this particular one was somewhat controversial. Look at the Beatles, all almost all of their stuff was initially done in mono, and then they remastered it into stereo. Some of the purists are pretty upset about that. So we're kind of going through what different countries in the world have been doing when it comes to this Coronavirus. And, you know, we'll talk about the US as well, but there is a trend. I hope you notice seen Indonesia, they've got an app that tracks interactions with nearby Bluetooth. Okay? And it has it is by the way in Indonesia, it's an often and it does help you if you want to notify people who might have been exposed so they can get tested Iran. In contrast, they haven't had as many deaths, because they've just been shooting people in the streets. Well, that is according to a classmate of one of my sons who is living in Jordan, right now. The smartphone app developed by the Iranian government scooped up millions of users' location data, alongside a short questionnaire that claimed to detect the likelihood of infection. And notice about the app was also sent to 10s of millions of Iranians with the director to take the questionnaire before going in for Coronavirus test. At least 3.5 million people, according to Iran, are using this app. Israel government. They are Using data from their telecom providers here telecom, track the location of their citizens. And those people, by the way, who braved quarantine in Israel are facing up to six months of imprisonment. So there you go. They're also using this data they're getting from the telephone companies to track people and potentially quarantine them. In Northern Italy, Vodafone, you might have heard of these guys, this is an English telecom provider. Vodafone also has a presence in Italy. They are providing the Italian government with heat maps, which means general details as to the number of mobile phone users locations. They started over in Lombardi, Italy, of course, that was a bit of a hotspot, and officials do Chairman 40% of the people in Italy are moving around far too much. According to The New York Times, Kenya, they've got aerial surveillance of the border to detect illegal crossings. Norway, the Norwegian Institute of Public Health and Norwegian tech companies, simultaneously built a voluntary app that tracks GPS Bluetooth data to be stored for 30 days. In Pakistan, through location surveillance and mass texts, the Government of Pakistan is tracking confirmed cases Coronavirus. Sending alerts to people found to potentially come in contact with them in the past 14 days is not a bad idea. Poland has an app called home quarantine, which is requiring Polish citizens who are quarantine to check in immediately and intermittently check-in by sending a picture of themselves at home with 20 minutes or within 20 minutes or face to find. So all of this is from the medium you'll find a lot more data. Tell them just kind of rushing through it. Russia has more than 100,000 cameras are in Moscow. And the Russian government is using facial recognition and phone-based tracking to monitor people under quarantine. Local governments in Russia are also kind of doing their own thing. Singapore, very, very socialist authoritarian, really government there. They released an app called trace together pings nearby smartphones through Bluetooth to determine who's come within six and a half feet of each other for more than 30 minutes. That's according to the LA Times, and they record the data they stored for three weeks supposedly and don't record the user's location. South Africa, again, telecom companies, South Korea, they've had an interesting response. You've probably heard about them what they've been doing there. In South Korea, the confirmed cases of Coronavirus are being tracked in using a bunch of different data, collected through data mining. They're taking credit card purchases, smartphone location tracking, closed-circuit TV footage, analyzed by facial recognition. So the Korean government can then reconstruct where a person's been that was diagnosed, and they have just incredible granularity. Like using the person's location data to check the closed-circuit TV footage, see if they were in a mask, etc. Switzerland and they're colossal telecom companies. Swisscom is alerting the federal government when more than 20 phones are located within 100 square meter area. One of my sons has a girlfriend over in Sweden, and they are not doing anything over there. The numbers are fascinating. So we'll see what ends up happening there. Taiwan's government is denying that it's adopting surveillance technology to track citizens' movements, but that is what's happening. Thailand. If you're arriving there from a high-risk area, you're going to get a SIM card for your phone that lets the government track you for two weeks. In Turkey, they are monitoring locations of patients using cellular data and sending messages to them if they should quarantine. The UK is allegedly talking with telecom companies to track citizens' location data. National health servers or services partnered with planets here to track the spread of the virus in the good old United States. Yes, indeed. The mobile advertising industry is the one that's doing the tracking here. They've been supplying data to local state and federal organizations about the location of individuals. And that's according to The Wall Street Journal. Because it's advertising data, they want to know, very, very fine-grained data. So for instance, if you go to Gold's Gym, they somebody who has what Planet Fitness gym can say, hey, I want to send an ad to anyone that went to this Gold's Gym. That's a half a mile down the street from me. And the advertising companies have that data. And so you might have noticed, it's some of its kind of scary. You go into a hospital of a sudden you start getting ads for hospitals, medicine, and even lawyers for malpractice suits. So they have very fine-grain data, and apparently, it is granular enough to let them know whether people are staying at home. If parks are still in use, Foursquare, which has one of the most comprehensive repositories of personal location data, is in talks with a bunch of different government agencies. Most data comes from these apps and bottom line, you've permitted those apps to log your location. So you download that free game that you love to play. It may be tracking your data and sending it up. Now, remember, it doesn't have to use GPS; it only has to do is know the Wi-Fi network in use. Remember, when Google and these other companies have been driving around taking pictures of everything, they are recording the SSIDs and MAC addresses of the Wi-Fi systems all over the country. That way, they can tell where you are based solely on the Wi-Fi connection. So they're taking all that data and then they are reselling it. And the whole goal here is to have a portal that could be used to track citizen movement in up to 500 us citizens cities, Google and Apple have also come up with a new standard for tracking. And this is tracking using Bluetooth again, some troubling state and local policies West Virginia. People who test positive but refused to quarantine are getting ankle bracelets. Yes indeed. Many of the software privacy and privacy guarding mechanisms are unknown about all of these things. There are a bunch of things pred poll predictive policing. All of this is coming in New Jersey, Connecticut using aerial drones with temperature sensors and apparatus to detect people who might have the virus, so it's getting scary. Stick around. We'll be right back. I am Craig Peterson on WGAN with a little Coronavirus information, things we are doing, and what is coming. Hey, welcome back, you're listening to Craig Peterson here on WGAN, every Saturday from one till three. Also, I am on Wednesday mornings with Matt during drive time for those of us that are still driving to work. where we talk about the latest in technology for the week. Then we do some more follow-ups here on the weekend as well. I had mentioned earlier, we're planning on doing something to help businesses get back into the business, and we are going to be focusing in on some of the technologies for that. So keep an ear out. Make sure you sign up for my email list so you can get all of this. You can get stuff like Linda and Joanne and Ted and Danny and many others who listen to me here on Saturdays, and you can get all of the stuff that they get to help stay safe online and to keep up to date on What is happening in that great big world outside? We covered what other countries are doing for surveillance, there was a definite pattern to the socialist countries, demanding people self-isolate, quarantine fines, prison time, right? You notice that, didn't you? Now I want to talk a little bit more about the US because we kind of ended the last segment talking about that. But where I'm getting concerned is what our government will do? The reason I went through all of these other countries is so that we have an idea of what they're doing because, like the UK, okay, they're certainly more socialist than we are. They're not dictatorial at all, but they are doing a lot more with the tracking than we appear to be. Doing. And of course, we have some rights recognized in our Constitution that is going to be difficult for the government to take away, but they have taken them away in emergencies before. Look at what happened during our World Wars, and even what happened in the wars in the 60s in regards to the demonstrations and things. It's not as though nothing could happen here. And there is a great article in TechCrunch this week by Heather Fetterman. And you'll find it up on my website at Craig Peterson dot com, where she's wondering about this potential, what she's calling the Patriot Act for COVID-19. We had this massive knee jerk. What was it about two weeks after the tower Twin Towers came down in New York City after that terrorist attack. About two weeks later, we all of a sudden had this Patriot Act, which gave the government all of these sweeping powers, And they were monitoring all of our calls, which in contact with emails, even locations, etc. Very, very scary stuff. So what's going to happen now because Heather Fetterman is a privacy lawyer, and is the VP of privacy and policy at big ID is a New York-based company that's trying to use AI to help businesses be better privacy stewards for their customer. And now you think of your customers. I think of the data that you have, first of all, do you need it? All right, that's one of the things I talked about and all the training I do. And secondarily, how much of it sensitive, should you be throwing it away? Deleting it because you don't need it. And you certainly don't need the liability or what should you be doing so that's part of what they do. She also has headed up privacy over at Macy's and American Express, and with the code At 19 infections climbing here in the US kind of leveling in some spots, we're saying nationwide, we may be on a bit of a downturn. The officials are starting to panic. And you heard it this week. They're saying, Oh, my, what is going to happen coming up this fall? Are we going to have a massive COVID-19 resurgence in the middle of the flu season? Is this going to double the number of deaths that we would get in a regular flu season? And so they are trying to figure out these government regulators and lobbyists frankly, and of course all of the bureaucrats and, and Congress and everybody, so they're trying to figure out how do we track the people. Now, remember, when we give up a little bit of privacy for some suppose it security trying to think of a time when we got it back. Certainly, we have gotten it back in some cases. After World War Two, of course, you no longer had to have those ration cards. So things got better. Certainly. World War One, for instance, introduced the income tax, and it was guaranteed only to be 3% maximum ever. And the income tax would only be on the richest Americans it would not affect the rest of us. And that was something put in place because of World War One, and they needed funding. But in case you haven't noticed, income tax has not gone away. So will this whole monitoring that they're doing for COVID-19? Will it go away once this epidemic has died down because it is going to die down at some point in time, but frankly, it's going to be with us forever. Whether it was engineered Somewhere whether it was in the wild from a bat and when direct to humans or pigs, and then humans or however it got to us, it's here now, and it's never going away. So is that going to give the government justification to continue to track us all? And when we have limited testing development ability then, of course, it's going to improve. Even if they had 2 billion test kits available, If I test negative today, and I'm exposed this afternoon, are you going to test me again tomorrow? I might have it tomorrow, and I didn't have it today. So even then, testing is not going to solve the problem. So we've talked before about this whole joint effort between Google and Apple, and the idea here is to come up with some standardized software that can monitor the spread of infections by keeping track of infected people. Keeping track of the people they have been close to and how long they've been close to them. And the idea is you download the mobile app from a public health website. And the Public Health website will notify you if you have had prolonged exposure to someone that came down with COVID-19. That will frankly, this would be handy with the flu, for instance, right? There we would cut back the number of flu-related deaths dramatically, absolutely dramatically. And this system is designed to use low Bluetooth Low Energy transmissions rather than GPS. But again, It's just a standard, and it is not a piece of software. And someone could implement using the standard and track your GPS and record as well. Okay. So this is, frankly, if they do this the way they're promoting it, I don't have a huge problem with this as long as it's voluntary. Now, apparently, in Indonesia, it has been voluntary, but only about a third of people have done it. So how are they going to enforce all of this stuff? And these community mobility report, they're showing trends over time by geography, where they're taking data from the phones of people who have Android or who are even with iOS using Google software, and have not turned off the location history setting. And they've got this great little map so they can track all of the people. The CDC is tracking all So the movements of American citizens based on location data from the mobile advertising companies, we mentioned a little bit earlier. So it's great that the government's trying to stop the spread of infections. But ultimately, you can't stop them all. And there has to be a line. Where is it? So the Patriot Act wasn't two weeks. It was six weeks after 911 that gave the government powers that had never had before to spy on American citizens. Yeah, you know, was it constitutional, certainly not in times of peace. I think that argument could be made pretty effectively. But in this case, it was effectively a war. So it may have made sense at the time, but the government's still vacuuming up millions of records of phone calls and text messages to today. Look at that huge data center. The National Security Agency built over in Utah, the point of the mountain. So if companies like Google and Facebook are willing to share data with a government, there needs to be a clear and defined period in which they can share this data, there has to be a clear and defined period in which they can retain the data as well. So civil liberties, of course, are fundamental here. And my gosh, following September 11, of course, the New York Police Department conducted illegal surveillance on some local Muslim populations. Remember what happened during World War Two with the Japanese American internment camps? The FBI is surveillance of African Americans who oppose segregation, the whole civil rights movement. They've got something called the fair information practice principles. These state that personal data should not be used for any purpose beyond the specified object of the data processing activity. So we've got to be careful. The government has proven itself to keep this too much data, keep it for too long, and also not securing it properly. Word gets out, and it gets into the hands of people within the government that probably shouldn't have access to it. It gets into the hands of the bad guys. And if the government starts collecting this are going to see yet another uptick tick in cybercrime. It has already happened. But imagine all of this location data in personal data and how valuable it would be to the hackers. You know, I don't hold hope that our Congress it has learned from the past. I don't Look at what Clearview AI did. We talked about them a month or two ago, where they were scraping information off of websites. They were getting the facial pictures that we had posted, not realizing that a company like Clearview would grab them and use them to identify us and sell the information to the highest bidder. So it's not right. It is not good, but it's very concerning. And you might want to read this. It's on techcrunch.com. Heather Fetterman is the author of the article. And she's been looking at privacy for a very, very long time and thank goodness for that. And you'll find it on my website at Craig Peterson comm make sure you sign up so you can get all of my weekly email summaries of this week in the news, including everything from today. Stick around, and we'll be right back to the top of the hour here on WGAN. Okay, okay, okay. Hi everybody. Craig Peters on here on WGAN. Of course, I'm heard every Saturday from one until 3 pm, Wednesday mornings on with Matt, Wednesday at about 730 is they go over, of course, all of the latest news, keeping you up to date, on your day, what's happening where you should go, where you shouldn't go, what you should do. And in this kind of this day and age, it's maybe you shouldn't go anywhere, right. I was just reading an article during the break about the SARS epidemic. It was written by a guy who was over in Hong Kong at the time and talking about almost the same thing. When SARS broke out, this was slightly after the reunification of China and Hong Kong. The British signed it over the rights one nation to what was it two economies or something like that again, remember, they also, of course, had British common law and stuff. They were doing the same thing back then. The Chinese were presenting doctors who dared talk about a potential pandemic who talked about this respiratory illness that people had. So I guess some things just don't change very much over time. And that's one of them. But he talked about what it was like going out on the roads, not seeing anything, and now he's living in Los Angeles. And he said he was right there in Sunset Boulevard. He stood right in the middle of the intersection through two sets of green lights and didn't see a single car. Then this part I thought was fascinating. At the end of the article, he talked about how the kind of ban was lifted, because people South Korean team they're in Hong Kong, of course, the government stepped in. All these draconian measures kind of like what the socialist government did in Taiwan and throughout China, after this latest COVID virus, hit The you know, so the muon virus is spreading. They're jailing doctors who dare talk about it. They're putting their head in their sand, pretending it's not happening. And then, all of a sudden, they cracked down on everybody and everything. But in the end, he said in Hong Kong, at least for SARS, what ended up happening was all of these people all of a sudden had a desk kind of a Why am I putting on this face mask this morning, and slowly but surely without a government order. People started going out, started walking around, and he said one day, he was sitting there eating noodles in a restaurant, and all of these people were walking by and just really having a normal life. And they thought, wow, this is kind of cool. Wait a minute when did this normal life happen? And I think that might be kind of what happens here, although the governors are slowly starting to open up states and now you know, moving from what Stage one to two to three, that this is going to be fascinating, absolutely fascinating. What would have been the best way to respond? Of course, there'll be a million opinions that will be expressed here over time about the best way to respond. Maybe we could have warned people to try not to spread this saying if you have this respiratory problem or you're obese or whatever that there are major causes of death associated with getting the virus. Who is it that we should recommend quarantine for? I know that some people I think I mentioned on the show before are being advised that in till about 18 months have passed, you should not be going outside. Now I have an aunt who's a transplant patient. She's been advised to stay out of everything for about 18 months because this could nail her. And we know about kidney problems with this virus and liver problems even people getting legs amputated, right? There's a professional sports athlete who had his leg amputated after this and damage of course to the lungs, etc., etc. So would that have been a better response just warning everybody to be careful here the precautions you should take. Then the segment of the population that needs to be quarantined not everybody. We're already hearing about the side effect deaths, if you will, the people committing suicide, getting hooked on drugs, it'll be just in terrible places for a very, very long time. So it's very, very concerning to me. Hey, and I want to give you all quick notice here puts you on notice we are going to be doing Some getting back to business training, where we're talking about security, what you need to do and what you should do, what are the first things you should do when your business reopened? We're going to help you with backups The best way to get the backups done, how to verify them, I'm going to walk you through all of that. And we're going to have all of these free webinars coming up, make sure you are on my email list. And to do that, just go to Craig Peterson dot com you can go to Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe is probably the best place. And you will once you're there, be able to subscribe to my emails and start getting like moving along. So let a little bit of advice there on that side. I thought that article was interesting. So, of course, I shared it with you. And we'll see what happens here. I think we should we're at the point now where we should start getting back to normal. We should have enough data already here in the us that we can trust that tells us Who the most vulnerable populations are. We know nursing homes are vulnerable that people in nursing homes aren't just necessarily older, which is one of the problems associated with death from this virus. Still, they are also many of them are infirmed one way or the other. So we know we got to protect them. Imagine spending a few trillion dollars, hunches, protecting those people, maybe helping them out with some other health issues. And I'm sure going forward many of these convalescent homes nursing homes are going to be more careful with the transmission of disease. While we won't, we won't go down that road. Alright, so let's talk about some conspiracies here. One of the big conspiracies about Coronavirus that people spouting is that these new 5g networks that are growing dramatically across the whole United States and around the world are causing Coronavirus and are where it started. Now, we somehow always get all of these theories, conspiracy theories right. Whenever anything starts happening, well, you know its causation and correlation are not the same things. In other words, if Coronavirus started when 5g networks got turned up that correlation. But that does not mean that 5g is causing this problem. It is a massive conspiracy out there. It's spreading more and more. Even USA Today had an article about it this week, talking about how people are just claiming the man 5g is exacerbating at the very least The spread of Coronavirus. Hence, I think the opposite is true. 5g is allowing people to be entertained, to do research, pick up new hobbies to learn while they're at home. So that's a very, very big deal here. The actor John Cusack spread this social media, right? Isn't that a problem what he tweeted to 1.6 million followers 5g will be proven to be very, very bad for people's health. He deleted the tweet later where he said five G's making people sick, and we're going to regret it. He put another one up, calling people who disagreed with him just dumb and effing sheep. Yeah, who are the sheep here? So there are all kinds of these people out there. There's rapper Wiz Khalifa I have heard of him. Isn't that weird? Singer Keri Hilson at sea judge on Britain's Got Talent, Amanda Holden. I know her because I've watched that show before. And all of these people attended various art schools. So we've got Yeah, one in Pittsburgh, I've got another one in Atlanta and another one over in London. So be very, very careful. There's no evidence that there's any tied to this. I've talked about it before. There are different types of radiation, and when you mentioned, 5g or LTE and radiation, and people just totally freaked out because they think of radiation, like what they use at the dentist's office or in the hospital. That radiation is dangerous, and it is called ionizing radiation. Where ionizes cells, and that's a problem. The type of radiation we're talking about with LTE with 5g With Wi-Fi is non-ionizing radiation. So keep that in mind, and the American Cancer Society says that the frequency of the radio waves that are given off by a cell phone, quote simply does not have sufficient energy to damage all our DNA or cause heating in the body tissues. It has been proven again and again. The Federal Communications Commission ruled months ago that we have nothing to worry about, not that we can necessarily trust it comes from the government. But you know me as an advanced class, Amateur Radio license holder. I've studied this back into the 70s, just trying to figure out what was going on. Am I more dangerous because we're talking about a cell phone or smartphone that gives out milliwatts' worth of power? And as a ham, I was routinely transmitting 50 watts of power relatively near my head, and in some cases, I was 100 watts or even 1500 watts worth of power very close by. So what is it? Okay, so this is not a fact I just wanted to kind of warn you guys. Yeah, 5g is spreading. It's spreading very fast. It's rolling out quickly with the Sprint T-Mobile merger. And T-Mobile has a nationwide 5g right now, that's a cool one there to low enough frequency that looks like T-Mobile may win the whole 5g argument outside of the big cities, because of the lower frequency bands that T-Mobile has access to. It's even worth using in your house. Anyways, of course, you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN. Stick around. We'll be right back. Hi guys, Craig Peterson here. Welcome back. I hope I put that whole 5g Coronavirus myth to bed. Remember, 5g is not going to be harmful. Now some characteristics are a little bit different than what you might expect. With 5g there are going to be transmitters all over the place, particularly in big cities, there'll be one on basically every corner would be on buildings everywhere. Most of the 5g networks using higher frequencies that cannot pierce buildings very well and cannot penetrate even glass. So I know from that standpoint, there will be more radiation, and it will be closer to you. But ultimately, I don't think there's any real risk involved in that. So there you go. I'm thinking back to a speaking engagement for an annual meeting for a bank, and a lady came up to me afterward and said, so what do you think about cell phones causing cancer? And I explained to her what I had just described to you guys here, only last segment, and she said, Well, my sister died of brain cancer. And she got it when she started using her cell phone all the time for work. And, you know, so what do you think of that? And I said, Well, I'm just so terrible thing. That's all I said. But again, correlation versus causation. Did she already have that brain cancer before she started using that cell phone for work? And if you are concerned about it, and you know, some people are very, very worried about The thing to do is always use a headset of some sort. If you're concerned about any kind of electromagnetic radiation, you should probably use a wired headset, which is getting harder and harder to find. And then you hold the cell phone away from you when you're using it because the power drops off very quickly of that signal. It's for those math majors, it drops off as the inverse of the distance squared, in other words, drops off, really, really fast. So if you just hold it a few feet from your body, you have cut down the amount of radiofrequency transmission or radiation, you've cut it down by many factors many multitudes, frankly, as it drops off, but anyway, so that's the way to do it. Some people use Bluetooth nowadays, and you see people walk around all the time with this little apple, ear pod things. And those are using Bluetooth that is much lower power than what your phone is putting out. So there you go some tips if that's what you want to do. This next one, I thought it was funny. And I talked this week on a couple of different times different radio stations about this, and Amazon is actively trying to get people to buy fewer items on its website. Now have you noticed that typically, you go around from website to website, and you see just all kinds of advertisements for things from Amazon, mainly if you've looked at something recently? Well, this week, Amazon lifted its ban that prevented third-party sellers from shipping non-essential items to its warehouses. Before that, they were only accepting household staples, basic stuff, toilet paper, right metal supplies, any other high demand products, but it's also been raining in its tactics used to encourage people to buy stuff, and they have dropped some of their advertising. And remember, they've got this Prime Day deals extravaganza that they have every year where they say, Hey, listen, we're going to save you, and you can save like 3040 50% on some things. That is delayed indefinitely. Now, the traditional Mother's Day Father's Day deals have been canceled for this year. They also remove the recommendation boxes. Have you noticed that if you look at an item, it will show you other related products people bought, and they've removed that as well? And a quote from an unnamed Amazon employee talking to the New York Post. We typically want to sell as much as we can, but our entire network is Full right now with hand sanitizers and toilet paper that we can't serve other demand. The demand we see for essential products has remained high. That's according to Jeff Bezos. But unlike a predictable holiday surge, this spike occurred with little warning, creating significant challenges for our suppliers and Disney Disney network and delivery network. We also have some of these people who are working in the warehouses getting sick with it, and at least one worker has died. So how's that Amazon canceled Father's Day, Mother's Day, and their Prime day for all of us Prime people. A couple of weeks ago, I had a webinar where I discussed Wi-Fi wireless networks. And I told you guys Hey, listen, and I've got this deal. That we put together and we based the deal on some, I think, frankly amazing, some amazing stuff. That is business class, Wi-Fi router-firewall, you know, low-end business class stuff. And, and, man, a lot of you guys bought that. And I thought that was great. And we're getting those set up now. But we've got another warning out if you are a Linksys user if you have a Linksys broadband router, these wireless routers that they've been sending for years. They're saying that they've locked user accounts on their smart Wi-Fi cloud service. It's asking users to reset their passwords. Hackers were using these hijacked accounts and changing router settings to redirect users to malware sites. Now if you're taking if you attended my DNS training Where I told you what the best free DNS services are out there, you came to realize I'm sure pretty quickly that one of the best things you can do is put one of these DNS services, like the open DNS, put them into your router. So what ends up happening is when your web browser program on your computer asked to go somewhere on the internet, it's going to ask a known-good DNS service. I think that's a wonderful thing. And Firefox added in a new service just recently that uses a CloudFlare DNS service to help prevent some of the hijackings that can happen. So apparently, what's happening right now with some of these Linksys routers that are tied into their smart Wi-Fi cloud service is they're changing the DNS settings on your Linksys Wi-Fi router. And they're changing it so that when your machine says, For instance, I want to go to Bank of America, instead of giving Bank of America's real internet address, it gives the internet address of a hacker-controlled website. That is a very, very big deal. So what's going to happen is people are going to be ripped off right, left, and center because instead of going to the real website, they are going to be going to malware sites. And sometimes, it redirects them to the malware site, which tries to install malware and then immediately redirects you to the real site. Now, we've known about this type of attack for a very long time because people just have not been changing the default administrative usernames and passwords on the routers. So either someone breaks in via the internet, or in some cases, they are compromising a home computer and then using that home computer to compromise the router and therefore compromise Do the other business computers and compromise the home router, etc., Right? So that's been around for a long time. This particular problem is only impacting the Smart Wi-Fi account. It is a cloud-based system that if you only have these Linksys devices connect to Linksys routers and other equipment over the Internet to manage the router settings, which has always been a bit of a problem, okay? And I'm on Linksys as website right now, and they're saying, Hey, we're experiencing longer than usual wait times while Yeah, I bet they are. If you have Linksys smart Wi-Fi, if you're using it, make sure you go and change your usernames and passwords right away because it's turning out to be a problem. So we're going to talk about zoom some more when we get back you're listening to Craig Peterson on WGAN and online. Craig Peterson dot com. Hey, welcome back, everybody Craig Peterson here, in case you missed the last segment, if you are using Linksys, you're going to want to go back and listen to it. It's a very, very big deal. Very important. Because of the hack that has just happened with their Smart Wi-Fi service. It's a pretty bad one. Also, we talked about COVID-19 in the show the Patriot Act, 5g rumors, we've got this 5g rumor about how it is accelerating the spread of Coronavirus and the surveillance programs around the world. Now you can listen to all of those on tune in the app. And right there you just search for Craig Peterson you'll see me we post all of these online. So check that out if you missed it. And next week, don't miss any of the show, because I'm on Saturdays from 123 pm. I'd love to hear from you as well. Just send an email to me at Craig Peterson dot com. It is a very, very big deal. Just do that, and we will be reaching out right away. I had promised to get to this ongoing zoom issue. You know I don't like zoom. We after we found out about zooms significant security vulnerabilities. Months ago, we banned it in our company and all of our client's companies out there, and in light of this Coronavirus pandemic, everybody is turned to these apps now FaceTime pretty good, pretty safe. It's encryption, zoom. Not it's pretty good, not safe at all. Currently, hanging out with friends is one thing. But doing work on zoom is entirely different. Because what we found out now is that Zoom is very insecure. You probably heard me last week. I think it was I talked about the thousands of zoom meetings that were found on-line by hackers. Well, this week, we've got yet another zoom story. Researchers found on Monday, according to refinery 29 le Bell's article, that hackers began selling over a half a million zoom accounts for less than one cent per account. And according to findings from the cybersecurity firm Sibyl, which is investigating some of these hacking activities, Sibyl found that more than half a million zoom accounts on hacker forums and the dark web put up for these low prices. Bleeping Computer, which is something that I follow as well and if you are into cybersecurity and understanding some of the computer stuff. I think you'll appreciate it. Bleeping computer has also been reporting on this, some of these accounts are cheap. Cymbal was able to purchase 530,000 Zoom accounts for two-tenths of a cent each. Two-tenths of a cent each, so five for a penny. Now, why are they being hacked so suddenly? Well, it turns out that Zoom has yet another major security problem again, this is what happens when businesses just jump in headfirst without really understanding the implications of what they're doing. And we have seen this over and over again. These hacks are not a traditional hack. In this hack, the hackers used something known as credential stuffing to hack the Zoom accounts. It is something I've warned about, again, and again, and again. I have some features that hopefully we're going to get them running soon here on WGAN, and some of these other radio stations out there. But these credential stuffing attacks take data from the dark web hacks that have happened on other websites where you've got people's usernames, email addresses, or passwords. And then they're compiled into lists that are sold to hackers. There are some huge lists out there that contain millions. I think there's one that had 2 billion usernames and passwords in it. They're being used right now to scam people into sending money from to the hackers. Okay. But then this case what's happening is they are stuffing them into zoom hence credential stuffing, checking to see if zoom will allow them to log in. And of course, Zoom doesn't have the proper security to stop these credential stuffing attacks. Don't use Zoom. Stop using it drives me nuts. So the suspected reason, by the way, that these accounts have been doled out by hackers. It's coming back to this whole Zoom bombing notion where people want to drop in on zoom meetings. Now, Zoom bombing is typically used for trolling and abuse. But if you can go and you can get one of these databases of usernames, email addresses, and passwords. And let's say you want to spy on your competition, and you can now drop in on your competitions' zoom meetings. What do you think is going to happen? If one political party wants to spy on another political party, just look up that person's email address, and you're in. So hackers have been using zoom bombing and virtual synagogue chats during Passover, shouting racial racist slurs at women and people of color berating people attending Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. We've got a high school teacher reporting that her classroom call was accessed by an end on an identified individual who was yelling profanities, putting up swastika tattoos. A woman of color told BuzzFeed that unwelcome parties entered her regular meetings with other women of color and what seemed like 100 people yelling racist slurs at the same time. Cybersecurity experts are suggesting that passwords be changed on all Zoom accounts, that's what I've been saying. Right? Change your password. Don't use your normal Zoom meeting, set up a random Zoom meeting number. It's there now stepping in to help prevent these attacks. The FBI in Boston had to step in and offer tips on how to keep online meetings secure, which is absolutely freaking amazing. So a bit careful and don't use Zoom. A lot of people have switched over to WebEx, which is something I've been using and selling for years now, WebEx teams not only gives you meetings, it gives you all of these different workspaces and things. I like it and recommend it. They are offering their free WebEx meetings for 90 days but had to stop it for a bit because too many people were signing up. WebEx had to open up a whole other data center to be able to handle All of this demand. So it's essential, we need to understand that if you want to have a small meeting with family, friends, even small business and you guys are smart enough to be using iPhones, not Android. Just go ahead and use FaceTime. It's quite good. You'll like FaceTime now. They have meetings for up to 30 people. You can also use a few other apps. You know, some people like WhatsApp, I am not fond of that. Silent Circle has some excellent stuff. They've got a silent phone, and these guys know what they're doing. If you're on Android, the first tip is to get rid of it. Don't use Android if you have anything you're data, and you are concerned about losing. Because Android is not as a secure platform in the least, it's crazy people. Remember, you cannot Get the updates, even with our friends over at Samsung with their Galaxy phones, they only provide updates for a couple of years. So if you are stuck in the Android space, and I get it right, I am not the biggest Apple fan in the world. But their software, their systems are secure. They are not in the business of selling your information. Google Android is in the business of selling your information. Okay. Hey, and when we get back, we're going to talk about iPhones. We're going to talk about what would be the actual cost of an iPhone if it was made in the United States because that may be happening soon. Stick around. We'll be back with more. I'm Craig Peterson, and you're listening to me on WGAN make sure you get my newsletter, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. Hey, welcome back everybody Craig Peterson here on WGAN. And of course, online at Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. Well, we have made it through most of the show today we've been talking about Linksys and significant security problems you have to take care of right away if you're using link system vices. We spoke about Zoom and why you don't want to use Zoom ever again, and I gave you some alternatives. What Amazon is doing with canceling Father's Day, Mother's Day, they've changed right now anyways, for the time being, their entire business model COVID-19 of course, we talked about that about some rumors floating around about the spread of COVID-19 because of 5g. We also talked about what countries are doing around the world to help battle this. What is the US doing with surveillance right now on the COVID-19 front? Where it's all taking us? You'll find all of that by going to Craig Peterson dot com right there on the homepage. You can scroll down and listen to any of the segments that you might have missed. You can also get it right on the TuneIn app, where you might even be listening to me right now. Live as the show is aired Saturdays Of course 123 and looking at the clock, that means we are almost done for the day today. I can't believe how fast it went today. I am delighted to be able to help you guys out we've had hundreds of people who have attended my webinars over the last few weeks. I didn't do any this previous week. I am strongly suspected. I'm going to be doing some this coming week. So keep an ear to the ground on this next week. Okay. Let's Get into that Oh, and to do that, the only way you can have a new to the ground on this is if you are on my email list, Craig Peterson dot com slash subscribe. How's that for easy? So how much would an iPhone cost if we make it in America? You know, some of these iPhones go upwards of over $1,000 depending on what they are. And I want you to think about that for just a minute. Not so much in the context strictly of an iPhone. But what did a first computer cost you? How about a laptop? Because frankly, these devices have almost the same functionality as a functional laptop does or a good computer does. They do. And you could not get this type of computing power just a few years ago. I found a couple of my beloved iPhone pods only a few weeks ago in a drawer as I was doing some cleaning, right, aren't we all right spring cleaning time. And I just was shocked and amazed because these things were huge, I think one was 80 gigabytes. And I think the other might have been 120 gigabytes. And that's huge for the day. Huge. I used to listen to them on airplanes. It was just such a relief because all that was on there was my music. And there was nothing else to tempt me. I didn't even put games on them. Now there's a lot of hacks available for the iPod, you can put on some cool players, but that iPod interface, it could

Saul Dreier is a Holocaust survivor and musician. He’s always tried to find the joy in life – even in Nazi concentration camps where he taught himself to play the spoons. After World War Two, he moved to the US and stopped playing music. That is until he was 89 years old, when he felt the urge to buy a drum kit and start a klezmer band. (Photo courtesy of Saul Dreier.)

Railways are a key part of Britain's national heritage and identity. After World War Two, the Labour government undertook a large programme of nationalisation as part of their quest to create a 'New Jerusalem'. Britain's railways were nationalised in 1948, becoming 'British Railways', and then 'British Rail', until it was privatisated by John Major's Conservative government, beginning with the 'Railways Act' of 1993. From this point onwards, the ownership of track and train was split. In this '15 Minute Frenzy', Patrick (@historychappy) discusses why he has a passion for British Rail, while Elliott (@thelibrarian6) peppers him with questions. For terms of use, please visit www.versushistory.com

This week's show is part two of the Time-Life Swing Era set, "The Postwar Years". We are winding down this great set as there are only a few more volumes in the series. On the show today we will be hearing the bands of Woody Herman, Tommy Dorsey, Benny Goodman, Harry James, Nat King Cole and others. After World War Two ended the big bands became less popular and vocalists seemed to gain in popularity. I hope you enjoy the music in this set and don't forget, The Big Band Bansh Puzzler is back this week. Please visit this podcast at http://bigbandbashfm.blogspot.com

This is an independent, three part episode, featuring a special guest who lived through the massacres, repression, assassinations, and government upheaval in Indonesia during the tumultuous political period following independence from the Dutch, about which many Americans have not heard. It is our intention that this episode can serve as an oral history source to document these events. This recording was made on April 28th 2017 with the interviewee, Kemal Taruc, and recorded with PhD students James Robinson, Bridget Keown, Jamie Parker, Matt Bowser, and Professor Heather Streets-Salter. Indonesia, like many other places, was a site of anti-colonial struggle. These global anti-colonial struggles often took the form of nascent nationalism, that utilized a variety of different ideologies, including communism, socialism, religious, and military ideology. In Indonesia specifically, these struggles took three unique forms: there was the Communist Party, which was one of the largest in the world; the Islamic movement, Nagara, which was sizeable as Indonesia has the largest population of Muslims in the world; the third was the Indonesia Armed Forces, which played a significant role in the armed struggle against the Dutch and the Japanese. After World War Two, the Dutch tried to reclaim the country, and the various Indonesian factions fought back under a united banner. An intellectual named Sukarno, a long time symbol of anti colonialism, became recognized as a leader of the movement, and gradually rose to power by making promises to each faction. By 1957, he tired of political infighting among the factions, and instituted the idea of ‘guided democracy’, which was in reality a transition to an autocracy that lasted until his overthrow in 1965. Throughout his rule, he was still playing sides in order to retain power. Eventually however, the military began to grow suspicious of his leftist leanings, and his growing alliance with the Soviets. They instituted a coup, aided by the CIA, that overthrew Sukarno’s government, and instituted a conservative, right wing government that allied with Muslims and immediately began taking action against Communists and suspected Communists. This resulted in the death of an estimated 1 million people, and the torture and displacement of millions more. In the 1970s, the government was still trying to put down perceived dissidence, and this is where our subject’s story really begins. He was one of the leaders of the student movement which pushed back against the dictatorship. Because of the United States covert involvement in Sukarno’s overthrow, especially because of the list they supplied to the military about Communists and suspected Communists, very little personal history of this period has emerged, especially in western schools. We hope that this oral history will help students learn more about what life was like during this period in Indonesia, and about the activism that students engaged in during this time. This is episode three. In this episode, Kemal discusses his life in the years after the student movement and how he remained involved in the struggle to build a better and just Indonesia. For a full transcription of this episode, go here: https://breakinghistorypodcast.com/kamal-taruc-interview-transcript-part-3/ The Breaking History podcast is a production of the Northeastern University History Graduate Student Association. Producers and Sound Editors: Matt Bowser and Dan Squizzero Theme Music: Kieran Legg

This is an independent, three part episode, featuring a special guest who lived through the massacres, repression, assassinations, and government upheaval in Indonesia during the tumultuous political period following independence from the Dutch, about which many Americans have not heard. It is our intention that this episode can serve as an oral history source to document these events. This recording was made on April 28th 2017 with the interviewee, Kemal Taruc, and recorded with PhD students James Robinson, Bridget Keown, Jamie Parker, Matt Bowser, and Professor Heather Streets-Salter. Indonesia, like many other places, was a site of anti-colonial struggle. These global anti-colonial struggles often took the form of nascent nationalism, that utilized a variety of different ideologies, including communism, socialism, religious, and military ideology. In Indonesia specifically, these struggles took three unique forms: there was the Communist Party, which was one of the largest in the world; the Islamic movement, Nagara, which was sizeable as Indonesia has the largest population of Muslims in the world; the third was the Indonesia Armed Forces, which played a significant role in the armed struggle against the Dutch and the Japanese. After World War Two, the Dutch tried to reclaim the country, and the various Indonesian factions fought back under a united banner. An intellectual named Sukarno, a long time symbol of anti colonialism, became recognized as a leader of the movement, and gradually rose to power by making promises to each faction. By 1957, he tired of political infighting among the factions, and instituted the idea of ‘guided democracy’, which was in reality a transition to an autocracy that lasted until his overthrow in 1965. Throughout his rule, he was still playing sides in order to retain power. Eventually however, the military began to grow suspicious of his leftist leanings, and his growing alliance with the Soviets. They instituted a coup, aided by the CIA, that overthrew Sukarno’s government, and instituted a conservative, right wing government that allied with Muslims and immediately began taking action against Communists and suspected Communists. This resulted in the death of an estimated 1 million people, and the torture and displacement of millions more. In the 1970s, the government was still trying to put down perceived dissidence, and this is where our subject’s story really begins. He was one of the leaders of the student movement which pushed back against the dictatorship. Because of the United States covert involvement in Sukarno’s overthrow, especially because of the list they supplied to the military about Communists and suspected Communists, very little personal history of this period has emerged, especially in western schools. We hope that this oral history will help students learn more about what life was like during this period in Indonesia, and about the activism that students engaged in during this time. This is episode two. In this episode, we discuss Kemal Taruc's life in the student movement, one of the few avenues of opposition to the regime, and the choices and sacrifices made in order to keep alive the flame of resistance. For a full transcription of this episode, go here: https://breakinghistorypodcast.com/kemal-taruc-interview-transcript-part-1/kemal-taruc-interview-part-2/ The Breaking History podcast is a production of the Northeastern University History Graduate Student Association. Producers and Sound Editors: Matt Bowser and Dan Squizzero Theme Music: Kieran Legg

This is an independent, three part episode, featuring a special guest who lived through the massacres, repression, assassinations, and government upheaval in Indonesia during the tumultuous political period following independence from the Dutch, about which many Americans have not heard. It is our intention that this episode can serve as an oral history source to document these events. This recording was made on April 28th 2017 with the interviewee, Kemal Taruc, and recorded with PhD students James Robinson, Bridget Keown, Jamie Parker, Matt Bowser, and Professor Heather Streets-Salter. Indonesia, like many other places, was a site of anti-colonial struggle. These global anti-colonial struggles often took the form of nascent nationalism, that utilized a variety of different ideologies, including communism, socialism, religious, and military ideology. In Indonesia specifically, these struggles took three unique forms: there was the Communist Party, which was one of the largest in the world; the Islamic movement, Nagara, which was sizeable as Indonesia has the largest population of Muslims in the world; the third was the Indonesia Armed Forces, which played a significant role in the armed struggle against the Dutch and the Japanese. After World War Two, the Dutch tried to reclaim the country, and the various Indonesian factions fought back under a united banner. An intellectual named Sukarno, a long time symbol of anti colonialism, became recognized as a leader of the movement, and gradually rose to power by making promises to each faction. By 1957, he tired of political infighting among the factions, and instituted the idea of ‘guided democracy’, which was in reality a transition to an autocracy that lasted until his overthrow in 1965. Throughout his rule, he was still playing sides in order to retain power. Eventually however, the military began to grow suspicious of his leftist leanings, and his growing alliance with the Soviets. They instituted a coup, aided by the CIA, that overthrew Sukarno’s government, and instituted a conservative, right wing government that allied with Muslims and immediately began taking action against Communists and suspected Communists. This resulted in the death of an estimated 1 million people, and the torture and displacement of millions more. In the 1970s, the government was still trying to put down perceived dissidence, and this is where our subject’s story really begins. He was one of the leaders of the student movement which pushed back against the dictatorship. Because of the United States covert involvement in Sukarno’s overthrow, especially because of the list they supplied to the military about Communists and suspected Communists, very little personal history of this period has emerged, especially in western schools. We hope that this oral history will help students learn more about what life was like during this period in Indonesia, and about the activism that students engaged in during this time. This is episode one. In this episode, we trace the history of the Indonesian struggle for independence, and the resulting political upheaval, through the actions of Kemal’s politically active family. He also discusses his experiences during the coup, and how he and his family survived the massacres that followed. For a full transcription of this episode, go here: https://breakinghistorypodcast.com/kemal-taruc-interview-transcript-part-1/ The Breaking History podcast is a production of the Northeastern University History Graduate Student Association. Producers and Sound Editors: Matt Bowser and Dan Squizzero Theme Music: Kieran Legg

After World War Two, details emerged of Nazi Germany's nuclear weapons programme, which could have given Hitler an atomic bomb. Witness hears material from the BBC archives. (Photo: Hiroshima mushroom cloud after the first atomic bomb used in warfare was dropped by a US Air Force B-29, 6 August 1945. Credit: Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum/Associated Press)

After World War Two, former New Zealand prisoner of war Gunner Jim Henderson wrote "We used to say after the war the Red Cross should take over the world and run it. They'd shown what they could do in a world mad with war." Most people know about the Red Cross: during the War of Italian Unification between imperial Austria and the Franco-Sardinian alliance, Swiss businessman Henri Dunant visited the northern Italian battlefield of Solferino in 1859. Deeply affected by the 40,000 mostly unattended casualties on the battlefield, Dunant wrote A Memory of Solferino, founded the relief society that became the Red Cross and was the first recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Dur: 36mins File: .mp3

After World War Two, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor - formerly King Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson - settled in Paris. Hear archive accounts of their life in effective royal exile, after the Duke gave up his crown to marry divorcee Simpson. Plus royal historian Hugo Vickers. (Photo: The Duke and Duchess of Windsor in June 1967. Credit: Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

After World War Two, European visionaries dreamed of cooperation and peace between countries in the hopes to prevent another devastating war. Today, we celebrate this vision through Europe Day and the European Union with a panel of European citizens who discuss the political and social issues facing the E.U. Out of the rubble of World War Two, European visionaries came up with a way to get their countries to cooperate and to prevent another devastating war. We're commemorating Europe Day with a panel of European citizens. Join us as we discuss how the E-U addresses the political and social issues facing Europe today. For more information on Travel with Rick Steves - including episode descriptions, program archives and related details - visit www.ricksteves.com.