It seems a long time ago. On the 24th of April we started. We had 150 people from all over the world come, put them on buses, sent them to nine different places. They spent two nights and then came back. We had a tyre puncture from one bus. The bus got stuck in the mud and had to be pushed out. Fortunately, those were the worst of the disasters so we didn't have a major disaster. As I said to the people who, when they started the evening before they went off in the field, I told them what our criteria for marking or evaluating a successful field visit was. It was a combination of self-evaluation and evaluation by the participants. Marking out of ten for ten being the best and the self-evaluation is nine out of ten for everybody coming back safely. So we self-evaluate. Everybody came back safely. We get nine out of ten. And then the participants can evaluate with the one they can give us a half. They can give us point one. They can give us zero. It doesn't really matter. As long as everybody comes back safely, we are very happy. And I'm fortunate to say, very glad to say that they all did. During that field visit we also heard of the very tragic earthquake in Nepal. We had a good group of people here from Nepal. Last year we were in Nepal at almost the same dates, XCBA 8. And so it was a tragic incident. Unfortunately the immediate families of our participants here were all safe. Some of them have actually gone back early. A few have been stayed till the end. And all of our heartfelt sympathy goes out to our Nepali friends in Nepal and those who are still here with us. After we had the field visits and the people came back, we then had a formal opening with about 400 people. We have approximately 400 people from 90 countries represented this time. It's the biggest gathering we've had so far. In Nepal we had 300 plus. We had an opening by Dr. Julio Bokungu, the Cabinet Secretary for Environment and Natural Resources of the Government of Kenya, formally opened it. We had Vice-Chair of the IPCC, Jean Pasquale Purcell, give us a very good scientific overview of the fifth assessment report. We had a 10-minute presentation of a two and a half thousand word report and he did it very well. We had the Ambassador from Ireland. We had the Representative from the African Development Bank. We had Stephen and Solotoon from the Amadoukicha Trust. We're very happy to see them here as well. And then in the evening we had a reception and a cultural show hosted by the Government of Kenya and with Alice Kaudia representing the Government of Education. We had a grand opening from UNEP and we had Keith Albuson at the dinner. So a large number of social events and then we had a conference with cleaners. We had 24 sessions, cleaners and parallel sessions of different topics, ranging from monitoring and evaluation, which is a theme for this meeting, ecosystem-based adaptation and a variety of other subjects. We played games. We had some fun playing games with our friends from the Red Cross Centre in developing all kinds of games for us. We had two nights of video sessions, sharing videos and evaluating videos as well, having discussions around them. And then we had a lot of social media, Twittering, tweeting. I'm told that we had over 5,000 tweets and we had several hundred people around the world following us in real time on the website. We've been doing video logs and uploading them regularly and a lot of people around the world have been watching and have been receiving messages from people around the world who have been watching us. So that I think is something we can be proud of that is even though we have 400 people here in Nairobi, there are many other hundred people outside Kenya who have been following us in real time as well. The second last thing I want to do is to share some innovative things. Every time we do these conferences, we try and do something new and different. The two things I would say that have been new and different out of this one is firstly a focus on private sector. We have never been able to engage with the private sector effectively on community-based adaptation. I think this time we made a special effort. We had the private sector, we had KEPSA from Kenya, very much involved, a very good session on private sector and they have decided to take this forward. So one of the outcomes from this conference is that the private sector in Kenya are working with others, government and non-government actors and they're going to take forward the concept of community-based adaptation involving the private sector. And here we have to remember the definition that I think reminded us of. The private sector includes every farmer in the country, every fisherman in the country, every little stall worker. By private sector we're not just talking conglomerates or large-scale industries, they are all private sector. The other innovation I would say, and I'm happy to announce, is a follow-up bilateral South-South cooperation between Kenya and Bangladesh, the government of Kenya and the government of Bangladesh representatives over here. At discussion where they were here, acts in Nairobi and my center in Bangladesh will be facilitating this, but we are planning to have a group of Kenyans go to Bangladesh and a group of Bangladeshes come to Kenya.  We'll have a multi-stakeholder group from each country coming to the other country and developing collaborative activities that they can take forward in the future. Something we've not done before, it's innovation in this case. And finally, we tried to, so just one other thing about outputs coming out of this conference, we have proceedings which we normally do which captures the discussions that we have. We are also planning to do a special issue of a journal where we have invited applications or proposals to write papers. You have another few days, I would say no longer than a week to send in your proposals if you want to write a chapter or a group paper. We will look at that and then we will get back to you and you'll have six months to write the paper and send us your manuscript if you're interested. And then, the most important thing which is the final thing that I'll share with you is a declaration from this conference that is aimed at the wider world, at the media and in particular to the government of Kenya on behalf of this meeting, you know, handed over to the official representatives after I've read it. So I'm now going to read the Niroby declaration on community-based adaptation to climate change. From April 2017 to 30th 2015 over 400 representatives from governments, civil society, scientific community, international and national non-governmental organizations and communities gathered in Niroby, Kenya at the ninth international conference on community-based adaptation to climate change. CBA is a participatory community-led, environmentally sustainable approach to adaptation that aims to strengthen the resilience of poor environmental communities. At CBA 9, participants discussed methods for measuring the effectiveness of adaptation to climate change, climate variability and change for the poorest and most vulnerable. Based on discussions, lessons learned and outcomes of this conference, participants of the CBA present in the Niroby present the Niroby declaration which states the importance of addressing the needs and interests of the poorest and most vulnerable in international agreements on sustainable development, development finance and climate change. Climate change has and will continue to have disproportionately negative consequences for the poor and vulnerable. These groups are already adapting and enhancing the resilience to the adverse effects of climate change. It is the responsibility of developed countries to support the adaptation efforts of poor environmental groups. To this end, governments should promote approaches to climate change adaptation that build their capacity of local actors. They should also ensure that vulnerable groups are included in the process of developing goals, strategies for implementation, indicators and evaluative frameworks for adaptation. Consistent with the 2014 Kathmandu Declaration and Read at CBA 8 last year, the CBA community reiterates the importance of securing additional, adequate and transparent adaptation financing especially for community level adaptation efforts. Global agreements must increase and accelerate finance for adaptation in poor and vulnerable communities and establish transparent mechanisms for monitoring adaptation finance. Governments should prioritize the needs and interests of the poorest and most vulnerable in their national adaptation planning processes and provide clear, timely and accurate reports on the extent to which adaptation finances reaches the most vulnerable groups. Finally, world leaders will meet this year to draft agreements on sustainable development goals, financing for development and climate change under the UNFCCC. Leaders must ensure that these agreements reflect the needs and interests of the poorest and most vulnerable communities. Local, regional and national governments should also incorporate the principles of inclusiveness, community leadership and environmental sustainability into all of their plans for adaptation and development.


And the word cheap for us is precisely a way of describing how capitalism avoids paying its bills. When you look at the food system, you can see that it is organized so that the urban proletariat, the working class in cities in particular, get access to cheap food as a tool of control. Well, it shouldn't be the Anthropocene. This should be the Capitalocene. And if we call it the Capitalocene, then actually you're in a much better place because it's not all humans who are part of the problem here. There are indigenous civilizations that would never think of doing something like this. And indigenous people are humans, and so it's wrong to say, well, this is Anthropocene because here are some humans who are not doing that. It's the capitalist system that's driving this, and therefore that's called it the Capitalocene because it's a much more accurate word. I'm interested in the idea of the low-carbon economy that is made possible by regimes of care that are radically egalitarian. And if there is a generalization of that idea, I'm all for it. But I also think that, again, you can't have this generalization without remembering how we got here. Otherwise, we fall back into this idea of the capitalist amnesia. And that's what worries me about degrowth. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, the bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with researchers, policymakers and practitioners to better understand the metabolism of our societies, or in other words, their resource use and pollution emissions and how to reduce them in a systemic, socially just and context-specific way. I'm your host, Aristide from Metabolism of Cities, and today we're going to try to unmask the true cost of cheapness in our societies. Over the last decades or even centuries, a small part of the planet has been enjoying more and more cheap stuff. From sugar to coffee to energy, everything seems to get cheaper. However, to keep these prices low, something has to give. Nature, care, labor and even lives are some of the elements capitalism needed to make cheap in order to perpetuate itself. However, what happens when we run out of things, land and people to make cheap? To guide us through this systemic forces of this hyper-exploitation and propose a path out of it, I have the immense pleasure to talk with Raj Patel. Raj is an award-winning author, filmmaker and academic. He is a research professor at the Lyndon Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, and he is the author of Stuff and Starve. I realize I forgot to bring the book, but he's also the co-author of Jason Moore of the book, A History of the Word in Seven Cheap Things. And just before we start, I would like to thank Andreas from the EEV, the European Environmental Bureau, which is the largest network of environmental citizens organizations, and they are also the co-organizer of the Beyond Growth Conference, which this talk is framed within. So with all that out of the way, welcome Raj to the podcast. Thanks so much, Aristides. It's good to meet you. I'm very excited. I'll try to make interesting questions because I'm so excited. I might miss the beat, but before we dive in into word ecology, to cheapness, to structural relationships between society and nature, I want to ask you about your journey. How did you arrive into focusing on these topics, going from economics to sociology to activism? Was there a turning point, or was it a gradual process of things that ticked and made you be interested in all of this? It was a bit of both, Aristides. So initially I came to understand the inequities of poverty in the food system when I was five, and I was in India in the land of my ancestors, and there was a young girl begging at a traffic light, and it was monsoon, and I was inside a car with my parents, and this girl was sort of keening against the door with a little infant knocking in the window saying, look, we're hungry, we're poor, give us something. And I looked up at her and I just lost my mind. I got very, very upset. And eventually my parents cracked down the window and posted some money outside and then off we drove. But then after that, in England, I started renting out my toys in school for the money to give to charity. And since that moment, I've been just trying to figure out what is the best way to stop that feeling. And so I was an activist in my teens, and in Thatcher's Britain, that was a real initiation into really what class struggle was, but also what race was. And I think that that's something that, it was very interesting to be both on the inside of a deep loathing of Thatcher, but also on the outside of not recognizing myself in many of the movements whose meeting I was sort of sideling into. But I also was a technocrat when I was a teen, and I thought, look, maybe the right policy hadn't been written or the right way of understanding the system of the world hadn't been done. So I thought, well... You can change the system from within somehow. All I needed was the tools. And so initially I thought mathematics was the way to go and then economics. And since then, with more exposure to more of the social movements that had interesting questions to ask about, well, if technocracy is so good, why hasn't it been working? And does it matter that people have to agree to something? And increasingly the answer, well, yes, this is how hegemony works. You need a movement to be able to secure power. You can't just write an equation and then go off to the beach. And that understanding that, in fact, the work of change happens through social movements has meant that I'm spending more and more time working with peasant movements, with movements of people who live in shacks, for example. And that kind of work is meant that I moved through UN organizations and NGOs, but now spend my time both working with social movements, but also on the outside trying to explain to people how they might join, why they must join, and how it is that the various kinds of lies that I once believed need to be put in a coffin once and for all. And you mentioned, so food and social injustice are kind of the two corpillars that you're focused, I think, throughout your career, right? That's right, yes. Why so? I mean, you said, you know, this deep memory that you have as a kid, right? So perhaps this kind of...  I was very interested in the metabolism of cities. And it happened through a couple of accidents that I found myself spending more and more time with social movements. So I was in Seattle in 1999 at the World Trade Organization protests. I was there because I was working with an organization called SEATINI, which was the Southern and East African Trade Informations and Negotiations Initiative. But essentially what we were doing was working with civil servants in the Southern and East African region to help them understand that they didn't have to sell out their countries when they were at the World Trade Organization, for instance. And it's very tempting to do that because, you know, the civil services in these countries are very under-resourced and they often bombarded with all these proposals from the European Union or from the United States through the World Trade Organization. And a lot of it didn't make any sense and so they didn't realize what was at stake by agreeing to intellectual property rights provisions or, you know, the agreement on agriculture. And what we... But you had to be in the inside and know the lingo. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. This was a way of me committing class suicide, right? I mean, I'd spent a lot of time learning this lingo and realizing that if I was going to deploy this language within the organization, I would be engaging in various kinds of compromise and I didn't have a constituency to be able to betray. And that, you know, those realizations meant, well, at least I can do something with this language. I can teach other people about it. So that's exactly right, Aristide. It is a facility with this insider language that then I was able to sort of stand on the outside. So anyway, I was in Seattle in 1999 as part of the Zimbabwean Trade Delegation. But I was also working with the... what was then, indie media, this independent media organization that was one of the first to be able to push the idea of Web 2.0 where anyone could publish anything. And in 1999 that was a very new and exciting thing. So I was writing articles and sort of getting the word out about what was happening in Seattle. And on the streets, you know, I was wearing black, a very professional looking black, but it was black.  And I was going inside and outside, very interested in what movements like La Via Campesina were doing. So although I wasn't really specifically focusing on food, it looked like the movements that had the most interesting things to say about globalization in general and about the sort of process of capitalist extraction were the ones who are engaged in food and agriculture and fisheries as well. So those movements are the ones that I spent more and more time with. And then by accident I got a job at an organization called Food First. So after I finished my doctoral work, I was a policy analyst at an organization that worked with some more social movements and in particular worked with La Via Campesina. So that was how it is that I really got steered towards the food world. It wasn't fully intentional. It was, you know, partly accident and partly, you know, I knew some of the language that was useful in translating this very obscure organization to a broader audience. Yeah, and real concrete challenges as well. So yesterday in your panel this term and this process of cheapness was brought up a number of times by yourself but not only by yourself but many of your co-panelists. And I think it is a lens that enables us to look at the world, to understand the world. It enables us to see a number of webs, be them social, be them economic, be them natural, and they're all intermingled somehow. And I think you and your co-author propose a nice story to understand, to re-understand the world. Let's say in this history of 500 years, right? I think it's important to perhaps explain why cheap, what is so important about the cheap, the adjective cheap in all of this, what led you to think you needed this concept? How was the discussion? What was the story back there? So I was very much focused on the idea of cheap food and when you look at the food system you can see that it is organized so that the urban proletariat, the working class in cities in particular, get access to cheap food as a tool of control. And this isn't a particularly capitalist phenomenon, you can read about it in ancient China, you can read about it in the Roman Empire. So it's not new that ruling classes have anxieties about what poor people will do if they're not hungry. But the way that capitalism has structured relationships between rural and urban spaces and even encourages us to think about those places using these words is very novel. And that's something that my first book, Stuffed and Starved, was very interesting and I was looking really at the supply chain from field to plate. But Jason was working not just on cheap food but also a broader context of how cheap, he was looking at cheap nature, cheap food, cheap energy and I'm blanking on the fourth one for the moment. Oh, cheap work of course, cheap labor. Now these ideas, he came to the University of Texas, we met, we saw each other over a conference room our eyes locked and we became good friends and we started exploring some of these ideas of cheapness and the word cheap for us is precisely a way of describing how capitalism avoids paying its bills. Jason's ideas in some of his previous work was really sort of pointing to the idea that the way capitalism has structured has always been about providing, generating processes of exploitation and extraction that allow the accumulation of resources and then the extraction of profit through cycles of exchange, of capitalist exchange, that allow the accumulation of profit. Now what we did is essentially marry all those ideas together and then recognize that there are a few really missing ideas in that process and one that we're very much agreed on is the idea of cheap care. You can't have a capitalist system without the provision of cheap care which is usually coded under patriarchy as women's work. Now that work is taken for granted not just by capitalism but often absent the world of work particularly of Silvia Federici even by certain kinds of Marxists and Maria Mies also has incredible work here that we drew on to be able to build that chapter and then there were a couple of other things that were quite important for us. We were interested in the idea of cheapness when it came to money because money itself became a sort of, to use Polanist terms, a sort of fictitious commodity and we were interested also in the racial implications of this and so we looked at the book at cheap lives the way that some people's lives are worth less than others. Now some might argue that that's really what cheap nature means that to be part of nature is to be considered indigenous or a colonized person or a woman or whatever it is but there's something specific about this moment in capitalist history that cheap lives, being able to identify here's the human surplus in particular in Europe at the moment, it's migrants that these people are disposable in a way that other people are not and it points to the way that states operate to cheapen those lives even if the cheapening of those lives is actually quite expensive. So I want to, there is some elements into that which I found fantastic and I think we need to remind them that these seven cheap things, cheap nature we're going to discuss, cheap money, cheap work, cheap care, cheap food, cheap energy and cheap lives and you mentioned, well, capitalism avoids paying its bills but also within the book you mentioned that cheapness is the strategy, the set of strategies to manage relationships between capitalism and the web of life by temporarily fixing capitalism crisis and I think that you unpack a number of terms here so it's strategies, so it's not by accident none of this is by accident, right? Second, it's between capitalism and the web of life because you mentioned web of life instead of nature instead of this fungible arbitrary thing and then lastly you also mentioned fixing capitalism crisis which is kind of a perpetuating vicious circle sometimes and so I'm wondering how, what is this, where are some of these strategies to make things cheap? Well, I mean, let's take the most recent one where in the United States for instance we had Silicon Valley bank collapse and then a number of others in, you know, one by one by one these undercapitalized, medium-sized banks what happened in these relationships was a banking crisis that threatened to sprawl through the international financial system now this banking crisis was predictable and there was even a certain degree of regulation that might have prevented it that was then taken away by the Trump administration but even the regulation that did exist was poorly implemented and you would expect that if it were true that the government is really the executive arm of the bourgeoisie you would expect this regulation to be badly implemented and so it came to pass that there was a banking crisis what did the state do? Even with interest rates at a very high level and you can understand interest rates as the cheapness of money the government found billions of dollars to be able to recapitalize these bank or secure the loans or the deposits of the depositors in this bank and I thought that's an example of how capitalism necessarily generates crisis because banks, bourgeoisie, government this is a normal predictable part of the banking world but it's also predictable that then the government will step in and find cheap money and that process of a crisis that comes from the natural workings of capitalist enterprise then is generated that comes to a head and there are strategies that are developed to be able to fix those crises and again we're using the idea of the fix that understands a temporary patch on the crisis of capitalism but then the fix will come from elsewhere one of the ideas that's central in our book is the idea of the frontier one of the early examples of the frontier is the process of exploration of the discovery of the new world and these are ways of finding new frontiers with new resources new zones by the application of labour and the extraction and accumulation of resources you can find ways of fixing a crisis that's happening elsewhere in the capitalist system so whether it's in the world of banking or whether it's Elon Musk wanting to colonize Mars there are plenty of zones in which we can see these frontiers but you don't have to go to Mars to find these frontiers you can also just find them in the Amazon you can find them in the ways that our daily lives are becoming increasingly zones of extraction you can see it in an Uber so all of these are new and interesting frontiers that again capitalists have found to be able to fix crises that propagate elsewhere within the capitalist system I love this element of frontiers indeed because they also help us understand that it's just an exportation or externalization of the problem until we have no more and we're at this place where we have no more so you have a couple of examples which take all of these cheap strategies together I think perhaps the most striking one is Madeira how it went from reconfiguration within the web of life it started by having let's say it suffered colonialism it suffered exploitation it suffered different ways of extraction going from woods to wheat to sugar to people so perhaps I think the value also of this book is to situate it in examples because it can be overwhelming all of these elements can be understood but then how do we see them? could you perhaps elaborate on the example of Madeira a bit with these seven cheap things and what do they mean? sure, so the island of Madeira was one of the earliest in the archipelago of Portuguese colonialism and initially it was an Isla do Madeira I wish I could pronounce Portuguese better than I can but it means the island of wood, right? it's an island filled with trees and initially the trees were used for shipbuilding then once the trees had been cleared it was used a little bit for wheat growing but then the Portuguese brought hydrological engineers from Egypt who were among the most sophisticated engineers of waterways on the planet they created these systems of irrigation that allowed the production of one of the world's most expensive crops which at that time was sugar and through the application of capital from Genoa and so you have a lot of trade happening between Madeira and Genoa in fact what one of the captains of the ships that goes backwards and forwards is Christopher Columbus he was charged in court with losing some property on that ship on one of his journeys and that's how we know that he was on his way back and forth from Madeira his uncle was the governor of Madeira and so you've got loads of connections with Columbus Columbus is another figure we can get to but so on Madeira now the wood gets turned not into construction material but into fuel and that fuel is used to be able to distill sugarcane into these cones of sugar that then were traded in Europe but it doesn't happen by itself, you need labor and the labor that was brought on was enslaved people from other Portuguese colonies and from the Crusades and their labor was applied to this island the capital came in, they were disciplined in ways that their lives were already regarded as cheap and they were through this sort of process it took about 75 years for the island to be turned from this island of wood into an island that was entirely denuded of wood and so it was about 75 year cycle in which the work on the island relied on cheap care relied on cheap nature, the wood was cheap fuel and the food that the people on the island were given also had been managed in a way to be able to keep them alive though not allow them to thrive in any way and all of us, you have this sort of full system of the seven cheap things through which a vast amount of resources are extracted to Europe and then you have this husk of an island that remains a frontier and I think that this is the interesting thing about frontiers even when they're exhausted there is ample opportunity to reinvent and this is where the techno-futurists come in and say they've always been capitalist crisis, they've always been someone smart enough to figure it out and it's true, Madeira stops being an island where there is sugar production and then becomes a way station for the transatlantic slave trade and now you can go to Madeira and Europeans get to go there on holiday and visit all the places where the sugar was made and look at all the graveyards where all the enslaved people were buried, now it's a tourism destination which is the new reconstructed version of Madeira but every time there is this process of reinvention that again, capitalists like to celebrate well yes, there's been a crisis but look at this new technology, tourism it's going to turn everything around and I think that points to a certain kind of psychology of amnesia where that you need under capitalism to be able to say well, don't worry about that, we're awfully sorry, this island is called the island of wood there's not many trees here yet but don't ask awkward questions about why we live in a place called Oakland whether or not oak trees or why it is that we're in the island of wood with no trees let's instead worry about how are we going to develop this tourism industry and this process of constant amnesia but also saying well actually the real problem is we don't have enough investment or tax breaks for the hotel industry that's our problem right now these processes of constant reinvention is the creative destruction of capital what one doesn't want to underestimate how powerful that is but one also wants to say well this power comes from the deep anxiety that without these fixes the system itself will fall apart and that's why the fixes are central to the system 100% and then I think over there we also had stories before like the Black Death even before the capitalist system there was already some or pre-capitalist system these fixes existed in empires, existed in previous cities but also they exist today I think Madero is so nice because it's a contained example that has as you say in 70 years everything has been transformed most recently it's I think a bit harder to elucidate these seven elements all together in one place and perhaps it's through products or through supply chains or through specific elements that we can see them once again I think one of your favorite example are nuggets or chickens which also encapsulate all of the seven elements in one poor animal that wasn't even made to exist one of the most capitalist objects we argue is the chicken nugget and we went for this example because we were really trying to take an aim at people who use the term Anthropocene now listeners will have heard of the idea of the Anthropocene as this moment in geological history that humans have altered the planet irrevocably and if you look in the fossil record and the stratigraphic record what are the signatures of the Anthropocene well it's plastic for example by 2050 there'll be more plastic in the sea than harvestable fish there are traces again in the fossil record of our atmospheric nuclear weapons tests but one of the signatures of what some people are calling the Anthropocene is chicken bones because the chicken is the world's most popular bird there are 12 billion chickens alive now but not for long there's 90 days from egg to nugget and every year we go through 50 billion chickens and that number is only going up so trillions of chicken bones already in the fossil record and that's a sign that it's not a natural part of being human that there should be so many chicken bones there's some process that makes it so that if there's any civilization after that they'll find all these chicken bones and they'll be like well what generated it right and the story isn't about humans being humans because before capitalism humans weren't relying on chickens that much this is a bird that comes from East Asia there's domesticated, certainly it spreads around the world but it's not cultivated in the sort of volume that you see today so the fact that you can take the chicken and do with it what you want that's an example of cheap nature but you need workers to take this chicken and turn it into a nugget and the cheap work here I think is very interesting we found a story alas after we'd finished the book of some chicken executives in Oklahoma in the United States they realized that it's very expensive to have workers work on the chicken plant particularly at night working on a chicken plant is always underpaid these businesses in America had used prison labor that were paid nothing or 25 cents an hour something very small but even that was too much and so what these executives did was set up something called Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery and it's a really clever organization it's about helping people who are suffering the opioid epidemic which is another capitalist crisis there's not even time to get into that but so here are people who are in withdrawal from opioids they could either be sent to jail or they can be sent to this place Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery and by day they pray to the good Lord Jesus Christ and then at night they are sent to work as part of their rehabilitation on the chicken production line where they don't have to be insured they lose a finger they'll suffer repetitive strain injury but this is part of their penance for having become Addicts and we thought this is a really interesting mirroring of the first colonial encounters in the New World where indigenous people were also enslaved and made it to work for most of the week and then on Sunday they used to pray to Jesus here the time coding is slightly different but the object is exactly the same that you're using people who are incarcerated literally to be able to work for you for free and so there's an example of cheap work of course people's bodies get broken by this process but when they get spat out of the Christian Alcoholics and Addicts in Recovery it's up to communities usually to look after the people who are disabled that's the idea of cheap care excuse me the chickens themselves are sort of hyper processed and turned into food that is used that is fed to other people cheaply in order to be able to manage the budgets of the working class cheap food is certainly part of the dividend in the United States all of this requires fossil fuel butane to run the hen houses or fossil fuels to oil the machinery and the transports and the logistics of the food industry to be able to provide the feed all of this so again cheap food, cheap energy and now we're moving into cheap money you need cheap money to be able to sell these products in the United States you can buy chicken nuggets or perhaps a KFC used to be Kentucky Fried Chicken is a KFC here as well but if those are small businesses then you can get a concessional loan from the federal government up to two million dollars and again cheap money there and then of course if you look at who it is that's in the production plants whose work is exploited all the way along these are workers who are usually people of color and disproportionately women again the lives of these people and often immigrants the lives of these people don't matter as much as the the property is or even indeed the consumers so all the way seven cheap things from this chicken all the way to the nugget and that's why we wanted to say well it shouldn't be the Anthropocene this should be the Capitalocene and if we call it the Capitalocene then actually you're in a much better place because it's not all humans who are part of the problem here but there are indigenous civilizations that would never think of doing something like this indigenous people are humans and so it's wrong to say well this is Anthropocene because here are some humans who are not doing that it's the capitalist system that's driving this and therefore let's call it the Capitalocene because it's a much more accurate word Yes and I think we can go on with a number of different of such examples which I think enable us to anchor it once again I mean there are people I mean the workers have to diapers to work all day all night as you mentioned in order to do so I mean when we talk about conditions of labor in the US this is I mean you know we've reached the peak of of dishonesty and not being able to well to feel like a human being anymore so it drops many people as well lives well or dignity at least so we mentioned about the frontiers that's something that strikes me as a as a powerful concept that is worrisome as well because we we have reached many limits we have reached many frontiers do we I mean how does capitalism run when there is no more frontiers or what happens when we run out because I feel that do we double down on people that were exploited once this triple exploitation of people in climate change or what happens there well there are a couple of things to look at one of the ways we situate the capitalist moment is by looking at pre-capitalist history and you know capitalism emerges from a crisis emerges from a crisis in Europe that is about climate change like death and it's about the economics of food production before capitalism feudalism worked by applying more and more labour feudal labour serfs to particular bits of land and because the weather was very cooperative in this moment it was possible to have a certain amount of exploitation of the land that was essentially through the management practices of commoning and of agricultural practices in Europe that recognized that you needed to nonetheless save soil you couldn't just pull resources out of it all the time but the metabolism of the soil itself was respected those systems were robust but when the black death swept through Europe all of a sudden serfs peasants realized that they had the upper hand in negotiating a different kind of post feudal moment and there was an explosion of different kinds of possibility and I think this often gets forgotten in the transition from feudalism to capitalism it seems like they tried one thing then they moved to another but in fact the end of an era is a time of an explosion of lots of different ideas and so you see a number of things happening in the transition from feudalism to capitalism like peasant riots for example peasant rebellions, claims on the forest charters of the forest for example that try to expand a really quite communist idea of how the world should be and how it is that we should hold the world in common and I think that that's rather interesting and Jason's new work is precisely looking at the history of these pre-capitalist communist ideas and that's the possibility here that in fact as we head towards crisis there will be lots of alternatives to capitalism that emerge and flourish but what we also notice is that what feudal elites in Europe wanted was either a return to feudalism so there was a sort of move to sort of re-peasantize but a few of them engaged in this kind of colonial capitalism and they were the ones who really prevailed and they prevailed through a combination not just of the success of their economic exploitation but also the way that they were able to turn money into weapons and back into money again. The arms industry is an important part of the transition and the ready deployment of large garrisons of state sponsored force are precisely what it is that allows capitalism to prevail. Capitalism is born of war and it'll die away and I think this is the worry here that actually while there are lots of social movements around the world doing incredible things almost all of them are being all the activists in these organizations are seeing rates of assassination and state sponsored violence that are much higher than they were even 10 years ago. This is pointing to a sort of general crisis with the rise of fascism again that I am very worried about Jason and I note in the book that we're not pan glossians here we're not saying well of course capitalism is going to end so that we can have lots of communist utopias flourish. We're pointing to what emerges from crisis is not just these wonderful communities where labor is not exploited and care is valued but also fascist communities in which the tendencies of the cheapening particularly of lives are taken to their ultimate extreme where people are returned back to nature to be considered subhuman in order that they be exploited. I mentioned in the talk yesterday that I live in Texas where already we have Nazis and sort of fascists of various kinds who have embraced the logic of climate change and now say well of course climate change is real but what that means is that we need to guard our national resources much more tightly and we need to recognize that it is immigrants who are taking our stuff and therefore they must die and that was part of the manifesto that one of the mass shooters in El Paso had this was his logic and his justification for killing I think it was a dozen migrants or a dozen people of color we don't even know whether they're migrants and it doesn't matter but that was his idea and so I worry about that because it's certainly the case that when the far right embraces climate change and there's a far right writer in the United States who has already embraced some of the logic around the food system and is now advocating a certain kind of racial blood and soil approach to transforming the food system in America these kinds of ideas are equally possible out of the end of capitalism and that's a grave source for worry. Yeah I can imagine I didn't know all of them how well thought things seem to happen right I mean they seem to organize at the same time so it's these two parallel streams that seem to emerge as you mentioned them so if capitalism were to end through a crisis how do we get out of this vicious circle you mentioned reparation ecology for instance we also mentioned some social movements at the beginning via Campesina we can also talk about the Zapatistas or the MST can you provide with some alternative storylines that we could you know at least to be inspired of well I'm very excited about some of the work in my latest book that I did with a medical doctor Rupa Maria the book's called Inflamed and we're we use the fact that most people's bodies are suffering some sort of chronic inflammation as a way of telling a story about how health and food capitalism are bound together and what we do is get to look at social movements around the world that are doing it right and a lot of these movements are indigenous and indigenous led and that I find very interesting because again capitalism has not been total capitalism needs these frontiers and right now many of the frontiers certainly in Turtle Island in what's called North America is are trying to move through indigenous land indigenous protest movements have done more than any other policy in North America to be able to keep fossil fuels in the ground through direct action and through mobilizing around being able to protect sacred spaces if you want a policy that keeps fossil fuels in the ground for a decade more effectively than anything else this is your policy it's to put your bodies on the front line guided by indigenous movements that I think is a terrific example but then also and remember you don't have to be indigenous to be part of the movement you can take direction from indigenous leaders you don't have to claim indigeneity yourself and I think that's important particularly with the rise of in the United States of the phenomenon of pretendian of often white people who are who claim an indigenous grandmother back in the day and it turns out that actually they're as white as a driven snow so the but I think that's an example then look at the MST the rural landless workers movement in Brazil who have been occupying unused land legally by the way you know there's in the Napoleonic code for land use in Brazil if land isn't being used for a social purpose after seven years if it's been used for speculation but nothing's happening there then it reverts back to being accessible to people who will improve it that means this land is being occupied by the MST it's terrific but what they're doing is not just farming and engaging in traditional agriculture they're doing really cutting edge agroecological food systems where they're sequestering carbon but they're increasing biodiversity they're not using industrial fertilizers and pesticides they're making sure that everyone gets fed a balanced and nutritious diet and they're working together to be able to build these communities and defend them against the predations of the violence that the capitalist landowners would like to meet out on them but you don't even have to think of rural areas in South Africa I'm lucky enough to work with the movement called Abat Lalibas in Jondolo which is people who live in Shacks it's a movement of now 110,000 people who are fighting for dignity and for housing but we're also engaged in agroecological combining as well so we've got some really good examples around the world I could go on but I think if people want to know more La Via Campesina has some really good examples in their stable so what is to is the idea to generalize these movements and extend them into a mass population you, I mean we also are in this framework of the Beyond Growth Conference and there is this story about the growth as well and how does that converge does it converge you are worried actually that the growth might be just BS or this new term if it does not includes migration challenges if it does not include racial challenges if it does not include many other topics that seem to be missed in this equation or how do we converge these movements for popular movements and then at the same time top level challenges I think that there is a way in which all of these movements can be understood as organizations of radical care and what they're doing is caring for one another and caring for the planet and caring that their exploitation and cheapening should stop I'm interested in the idea of the low carbon economy that is made possible by regimes of care that are radically egalitarian and if there is a generalization of that idea I'm all for it but I also think that again you can't have this generalization without remembering how we got here otherwise we fall back into this idea of the capitalist amnesia and that's what worries me about degrowth is that we can't have a conversation about degrowth in Europe without understanding all the wealth that we're surrounded by people should know right now we're in Brussels we're in Belgium which was made possible by the exploitation of the Congo under King Leopold he owned the country the Congo free state was what it was called it was owned as a piece of private property by the king of Belgium and yet as we heard Ossilo van der Leyen talking about how wonderful it is that our green hydrogen targets which Europe is on course to miss entirely but how our green hydrogen is going to make new worlds possible and everyone's going to be driving a Tesla and where do the raw materials for the production of these things come from but from the remnants of Belgian colonialism you can't imagine this future without reckoning with its past and I worry that degrowth is avoiding the reckoning and not just in terms of European colonialism that's important but India is entirely capable of taking the mantle that the British gave them and deepening the exploitation particularly of indigenous people and of the working class in India so there needs to be a reckoning also not just country by country but also recognizing that there's a class reckoning that's due here and I think perhaps to end this I think you managed to tell stories in interesting in different ways through media, through films through books what is so attractive to you to tell these stories in different media or how do you go about having this non-traditional career between you know very technocratic to activists, to scholars, to mixing all of this together once again what drives you, how do you go about as a human being? Honestly I never wanted to be a writer as I say I wanted to write the equation and then just go to the beach and play computer games or whatever it is but I found the reason I left Food First in part, this organization I was working in the early 2000s was because I was writing this stuff no one was reading it I was writing fantastic policy papers on the world trade really good, really good analysis no one gave a shit and that's not their fault, that's my fault and so I wrote Stuffed and Starved as a way of saying well look, if you don't particularly want to care about the WTO's agreement on agriculture and its sanitary and phytosanitary measures you know, I get that but here's a way in which I can make you care about it and so that's why I wrote Stuffed and Starved and it doesn't come naturally to me it took 26 drafts of that, of the proposal and 16, 17 drafts of the book to get it to where it was okay and I'm still not happy with it, I still would go back and rewrite it completely, considerably if I could but that's been the journey I'm on where I find that I wanted to help folk I want to teach people I kind of have that bone in me that enjoys teaching and I want to work with people to say what, you think this, but actually let me take you on a journey and I have to take you on a journey because otherwise you won't recognize where you started from so let's go on this journey and if people are going to be on a journey with you you have to feed them, you have to entertain them you have to keep people engaged and that's why even though I prefer the theory I would write like Deluz and Gattari if I could but I want to read things like the world ecology ideas in Seven Cheap Things and then particularly these days it's entirely the case that 10 years ago I could say to my students here's a book a week and my students would be like I don't want to do that but they would do it and now it's almost impossible and that's in part because of the attention economy being much more in students' lives but it's also the case that the culture of book reading isn't there and it's also the case that students are much more exploited and so they're working two or three jobs and it's hard for them to pay attention but it's also the case that it's not just students who I want to communicate with so I did a documentary film called The Ants and the Grasshopper it took us 10 years of filming and we then in the end it started off being going to be narrated by Jake Gyllenhaal it was going to be one of these things it was on prestige TV one of these things but it didn't work with the story that we wanted to tell it was a story about Malawi and Farmer and her life and it only made sense for her to be the narrator in the film so we had to decolonize ourselves but that means that this is a film that's not going to be commercially successful instead what we had we raised money for an engagement campaign so that the film was screening in places that films don't normally screen so we screen a lot of churches and a lot of town halls and a lot of community groups because it's a way of reaching a new audience and connecting ideas around race and capital and the environment in ways that these that folk don't normally get to think about and I'm excited about that I enjoyed making the film if I get behind the camera for another one it'll have to be for a very good reason but I don't do this because I desperately want to I don't because it's what the moment needs and even if that moment ten years ago was different for the moment now I think this film is useful right now perhaps to wrap it up there is well we've touched a number of points and I think these can once again I've tried to make them as accessible as possible and you've certainly done so how can we summarize some of these elements perhaps what is a message to be mindful of when we try to look at all of these interconnected systemic challenges is there I don't know if mantra is the word but is there something that we can remind ourselves of paying attention to some specific elements in order to to always keep in mind retrace well being mindful of this amnesia, collective amnesia and bring this to the future that's a great great question Aristean what a wonderful way to end I mean I think I mean the sort of story here is always about hidden things right and if we're looking at the moment then I would say well look who's doing the care work is the hidden thing to be mindful of but that can succumb to the amnesia and so I think the question is who did the care work so that we could be here and if we ask that question then we ask not only how is it that we happen to be having this conversation right here right now but whose work in the past was not just occluded but made it possible for the recognized work to happen and that brings us back to understanding the work of women and usually women of color in the global south whose work made it possible for us to be here today and whose names are not any of the buildings here and asking who's whose care made it possible for us to be here is both a way of embodying a certain kind of gratitude to our ancestors but recognizing that the way we move certainly here in Europe depends on other people's ancestors other people's grandmother and without their care for the resources and the labor that made this wealth possible the ideas of degrowth are for nothing any books or films that you would like to suggest to go deeper on this past care or remembering care or acknowledging care? I mean everything by Silvia Federici is fantastic obviously but we devoted quite a lot of ways of thinking about that care the care that women do but also the care that nature offers in inflamed which I did with Rupa Maria so there are a few references in there that might be worth checking out too great well Brosh thanks so much it's been it has been an awesome pleasure not only to have the privilege to spend an hour with you also please share this discussion with people I think it's going to touch a number of you and a number of your colleagues also don't hesitate to look at the other episode with Jason so that you get the two pieces of the puzzle together it has been challenging for me because it's not my I was or I still am perhaps more of a technocratic point of view that I'm slowly changing and I love getting guided or getting help to do so so yeah thanks to you thanks Raj as well and thanks to Andreas as well for welcoming us here that's it fantastic thank you


pulmonary edema is accumulation of fluid in the interstitial tissue and then in the alveoli in the lungs. Now this accumulation of fluid in the interstitial tissue and the alveoli depends on the balance of the starling's forces and these starling's forces operate everywhere in the body. So these starling's forces as you might be aware are the hydrostatic pressure and the oncotic pressure within the vessels and the hydrostatic pressure and oncotic pressure in the interstitial tissue and also the amount of the fluid movement depends on the capillary wall permeability. If it becomes more permeability then with the same balance of forces more fluid movement will occur. So with this let us see that what are the starling's forces which operate in the lungs. So here this diagram taken from Gaiden shows the starling's forces operating in the lungs and let us see that what are the forces which are promoting the fluid movement and what are the forces which are opposing the fluid movement. Now in pulmonary capillaries the hydrostatic pressure is quite less. Pulmonary capillary hydrostatic pressure is plus 7 millimeter mercury and as we know that the hydrostatic pressure is the push force which will cause the movement of fluid from the capillary towards the interstitial side.  So normally everywhere else the interstitial hydrostatic pressure acts as a push force but here it is negative that means it will cause the fluid pull from the vessels towards the interstitial side and why it is negative that is because of the surface tension which is operating at the level of the alveoli. See surface tension is causing the collapse of the alveoli and all these tissues are interconnected the interstitial tissue and the alveolar wall are interconnected. So when the alveoli are collapsing they are pulling this interstitial tissue with them and this pull creates a negative hydrostatic pressure force within the interstitial tissue. So this interstitial hydrostatic pressure again is one of the forces which will cause the fluid movement towards the interstitial side. So we have to add all the forces which are causing the movement of fluid from the capillary towards the interstitial. So pulmonary capillary hydrostatic pressure interstitial tissue hydrostatic pressure then there is oncotic pressure of the interstitial tissue and that is also quite high that is 14 millimeter mercury. So these forces are trying to move the fluid from the capillary towards the interstitial side and let us add them up and see how much it comes it comes to 29 millimeter mercury. So this is the push force right coming to the pull force which will cause the fluid movement from the interstitial side towards the capillary that is the capillary oncotic pressure capillary oncotic pressure and here as it is shown it is 28 millimeter mercury. Now if we see the net balance of forces push force is 29 millimeter mercury and pull force is 28 millimeter mercury so we have to subtract these to get the net force and it comes to plus 1 millimeter mercury. So plus 1 millimeter mercury as shown here also it is the force which will drive the fluid from the capillary towards the interstitial lymphatics. However normally this interstitial tissue and the alveoli are kept dry because of the presence of the lymphatics and lymphatics by their expansion they will cause the movement of the fluid from the interstitial tissue into the lymphatics and these lymphatics will carry the excess fluid which has leaked out from the vessels. So that is the normal physiology. Now when will pulmonary edema developed? So if you get this concept that it is this is balance of forces which determines the fluid movement you can very well predict that when will pulmonary edema develop. So let us try to understand it in terms of where the disbalance will occur. Suppose if the pulmonary capillary hydrostatic pressure increases then this push force is going to increase so the force driving the fluid from the capillary to the interstitial tissue is going to increase so that is 1 here it is affected. Suppose this increases interstitial hydrostatic pressure it becomes more negative and when will it become more negative. See we are telling that interstitial hydrostatic pressure is negative because of the surface tension and you know that this surface tension is decreased because of the presence of surfactant. So if there is surfactant deficiency surface tension will be more so that pull force is going to be more and in this case interstitial hydrostatic pressure is going to increase. So that is why in surfactant deficiency that is acute respiratory distress syndrome that is a hyaline membrane disease we get pulmonary edema as well. Then obviously if this osmotic pressure becomes less then also there will be chances of developing the pulmonary edema and fourth as I told you before that it is the pulmonary permeability which also determines that how much fluid is going to move so with the presence of the same forces if the pulmonary permeability increases pulmonary capillary permeability increases then more fluid will move out of the pulmonary capillaries. So fundamentally these are the causes of pulmonary edema. Now based on this what are the cause pulmonary edema causes are broadly classified into two types one whether it is a cardiogenic origin cardiogenic edema and whether it is non-cardiogenic in origin so that is known as non-cardiogenic edema. Broadly we see in cardiogenic edema it is increased in the pulmonary capillary hydrostatic pressure so that is also known as high pressure edema high pressure pulmonary edema and non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema pressures are normal normal pressure pulmonary edema develops. So let us see that why this is happening you know that pulmonary vessels arise from the light ventricles so that is the pulmonary artery then goes into the lungs and divides into the pulmonary capillaries and from there again the blood is collected and the pulmonary veins drain into the left atrium and from there into the left ventricle. Now suppose if there is malfunction of the left ventricle or there is any problem in the valves which are between the left atrium and the left ventricle like mitral valves stenosis occurs, mitral valve regurgitation or aortic valve problems occurs suppose aortic stenosis is there then left ventricle has to generate more force ultimately left ventricular failure marker okay in that case basically if we classify in left heart failure conditions the blood will start accumulating in the pulmonary veins so back pressure will develop and this ultimately will lead to increase in the pulmonary capillary pressure and you have seen that how pulmonary capillary pressure if it increases there will be increase in the push force leading to the movement of fluid from the vessels into the interstitial site. Now before we proceed I want to here present a concept known as safety factor see we have seen that plus one millimeter mercury is the push force which is normally there and the the lymphatics are there which will take away the excess fluid now when this pulmonary capillary pressure starts rising actually it can rise up to 25 millimeter mercury before there we get the pulmonary edema so from plus seven millimeter mercury it can rise to plus 25 millimeter mercury and why is that because the lungs have capacity to carry that excess fluid that is the lymphatics are there so that excess fluid will be carried by lymphatics so even with the development of the left heart failure pulmonary edema will not develop till the pulmonary capillary pressure has risen to 25 millimeter mercury so that is known as safety factor and that is in acute cases if we go to chronic cases in which slowly the left atrial pressure and then the pulmonary capillary pressure is rising in that case the pulmonary capillary pressure can increase even up to 40 millimeter mercury without the development of pulmonary edema why again because of more expansion of the lymphatics it can carry approximately 10 times more fluid than in the normal physiological conditions so that is the safety factor now coming to the causes of non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema non-cardiogenic edema develops basically either directly there is injury to the lungs or there is injury to the lungs indirectly via blood stream so there might be certain systemic diseases which can lead to development of pulmonary edema and the injurative lungs say suppose as I spoke before about ARDS ARDS there will be surfactant deficiency so that is going to create the pull force so that will also lead to pulmonary edema then there can be infections like in case of pneumonia these infections will damage the alveolar walls so the fluid from the interstitium is going to enter into the alveoli so that can also lead to non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema and finally if there is increase in the pulmonary vessel permeability so any damage to the pulmonary vessel permeability that is going to increase the movement of the fluid and hence with the same forces that is going to lead to development of this pulmonary edema so I hope you got the concept of cardiogenic pulmonary edema and non-cardiogenic pulmonary edema coming to the signs and symptoms and what is their physiological basis so first thing you remember that if there is development of pulmonary edema that is accumulation of fluid here and in the alveoli ultimately because whenever you see accumulation of fluid will occur what will happen that these alveolar walls are very weak they will be damaged so ultimately the interstitial fluid is going to enter into the alveoli so when this occurs you see what will happen here oxygen is there the diffusion distance will increase so it will be very difficult for the oxygen to diffuse into the alveoli for this concept on diffusion of gases I have made another video you can have a look on that also so anyways this diffusion of oxygen will decrease and that will lead ultimately to hypoxia that is decrease in partial pressure of oxygen in the vessel so basically hypoxia hypoxia is going to occur and when this occurs ultimately it is going to stimulate the peripheral chemo receptors and when that happens you know the stimulation of the peripheral chemo receptors will lead to increase in respiratory rate and depth and that is known as tachypnea so one sign and symptom is tachypnea then peripheral chemo receptors not only affect the respiratory system they also cause increase in the sympathetic activity so stimulation of peripheral chemo receptors increases the sympathetic activity and this in turn is leading to tachycardia that is the increase in the heart rate so that is another symptom of pulmonary edema next there is development of orthopnea especially in case of cardiogenic pulmonary edema what is that orthopnea is breathlessness occurs in supine position why well in supine position because of now lack of the effect of the gravity there is increase in the venous return and this increased venous return what happens ultimately from right ventricle it will enter into the pulmonary vasculature but you see there is left heart failure which is not going to pump that extra blood forward isn't it so there will be accumulation of more blood into the pulmonary vasculature leading to increase in hydrostatic pressure right so further increase in pulmonary hydrostatic pressure is there and as in cardiogenic edema this is the main cause increase in pulmonary capillary hydrostatic pressure so this is going to further increase the fluid movement so that what is happening that more fluid accumulation is occurring when the person is in supine position so in supine position this hypoxia is increasing right so let me just put it in a flow chart supine position okay what happens increase in venous return increase pulmonary blood flow right so that is going to increase the pulmonary capillary hydrostatic pressure increased fluid movement and that is going to increase the hypoxia which further is going to stimulate the peripheral chemo receptors more and hence causing more tachypnea and once the tachypnea is much more the person will feel breathless so that is orthopnea so here I just have to use one more term that is the disnea more tachypnea ultimately results in disnea that is the subjective unpleasant sensation of breathlessness so that was all about the concept of pulmonary edema thanks for watching the video if you liked it do press the like button share the video with others and don't forget to subscribe to the channel Physiology Open thank you


Hi, I'm Clarence from St. Paul, Minnesota, and you are watching Trucker Josh vlogs on YouTube base Wednesday morning everybody I Have a letter. Do you guys know that I have a snail mail PO box? Someone sent me it's from Michael Hummel in Munchin Germany did I say that right munchin like munching on some Cheetos Probably said that on munchin Munchin I'm German, and I don't even know how to pronounce German. I don't speak any German Canadian let's just leave it at that I'm gonna open this up see what it is You guys don't mind just hang out right there for a second See what he sent me you can find my PO box If you're wondering if you want to get a hold of me down below in the description of all my videos It's got bubble wrap Oh, there's a there's a card in here Card in here. What's going on? Oh, it's got some weight to it. What's in here? No writing. They're writing all the way from Germany. It's in German It says Weinachten Und ein Gütz Nussjahr Oh It's English inside. Okay, I'll let you read it yourself. So that's the title up on top Did I pronounce it right my German friends? My German friends who actually speak German not like me And there's a Tim's card in here. You guys are Tim Hortons in Germany Thank you Tim card. What's this? Oh? I think he has a YouTube channel You guys know this guy Bavarian globe Trotter travel adventure trip reports join the fun Bavarian globe Trotter Cool, I'll leave a link to his channel down below in the description right by my peel a box Peel box down there if you guys want to go check it out Josh don't forget to go put that in the description later. Don't forget talking to you the one editing this video right now. Don't forget Cool Nice, let's read what it says inside. I'm excited. Oh, this was sent in December. It just got to me now It's April did it take that long to get here from Germany? Did you put it on a boat? How did it take so long to get here? Okay, dear Josh don't panic. It's not already time for Christmas. Oh, okay, whoo too late. I already panicked I Get the card in December or I got the card in December, but did not have an address To send it to all that's right because we just set up this mailing address after Christmas So this card was supposed to get here earlier, but because I was late really releasing this peel box He sent it later. Okay, gotcha gotcha Thank you for your daily effort to make great vlogs. They've become a part of my day for a long time already Please spoil yourself at Timmy's feel free to mention my name channel in your vlogs Thank you greetings to Brittany and the pups. I think I'm allergic to compliments Thank you Absolutely, I'll put his I'll put his channel. I don't go check it out and I'm gonna put his channel down below in the description there. Okay Thank you so much Little bit of late Christmas card, but hey, maybe it's an early Christmas card for next Christmas. I'm already excited for next Christmas I love Christmas You're gonna have some Christmas Christmas Christmas Christmas German Christmas. Is that what that means for all vine nectar? For all vine nectar. We're gonna Google this. There's my phone. I want to know what this says there's a Translate Translate come on Google do your job Okay, enter text fro FROHE in German means happy. Okay, so happy wi No, W E I H N A C H T E N wine Weihnachten It means Christmas. Merry Christmas is what it means That makes sense Merry Christmas, and I guess that you didn't get new year means and a happy new and a good new year good That's as good. Yeah in low German. They would say say a good say a good I know low German that we that the minute I spoke is a little bit different than the German in Germany right now That's because our family lines Left Germany in like the 15 1600s. I think it was the 16th century when we left Germany We took the German German and Dutch with us at the time sort of blended it into our own language And then our people lived in Ukraine for another hundred and fifty two hundred years So there's some Ukrainian mixed in with that there and we took their pierogies there ours now now We have midnight pierogies. Thanks, Ukraine. I love pierogies. That's where you get midnight pierogies from and Took some of that and then you know 18 late 1800s Russia came in and kicked us out. You know, they were all mean about it Not much has changed in the world But yeah, we had to run away from them Because we didn't want to I Guess submit that's a story for a different time. They chased us out Anyways, we imagine like we had these farm lines in southern Ukraine for a hundred and fifty years If you think about it, Canada is a hundred and fifty years old right now So for a hundred and fifty years back then generation after generation after generation lived on that land developed it And that was their home and one day the neighbor walks in and says no This is our home now You become us or you leave And we're like, well, I guess we're leaving So now we're here story for another time story for another time But that's why we have Dutch German and Ukrainian mixed In our culture as Mennonites and then we we moved to Canada Western Canada a bunch of them moved to the US and Here we are today just normal every old everyday old goofy Canadians I don't follow Mennonite culture at all either. That's my heritage both sides of my family were Mennonite So everything all the way back through the whole gene line that that was my whole family line and now and same with Britt most half of her family line The part of her family's Polish as well So There's German and Polish in our household Extremely diverse extremely diverse household. So it's very good very good. Our children will be 1 8th Polish And the rest German But we don't speak German or Polish. We speak English. What a weird world Hey, what a weird world cabin you happen for a long time and you happen seven minutes already I got stuff to do we got motorsports to deliver today They want me to deliver a load of ATV's and they want me to show you how we do it at work So we have two levels. I'll show you once we get there. It's gonna be a lot of fun Thanks for listening to my whole little spiel there See you at the truck I've gotten some new products from bolsternoff to try out. I'm gonna tell you a little bit more about them later Look at the difference between the front of this tank and the front of this tank It's hard to see because this side is not in the sunlight, right? The difference Here's our trailer We have some motorsports in here couple of crates and one side by side that we're gonna drive off I'm gonna show you how we do this today, and I'm gonna make a separate video about this, too So you'll see this the part of it of unloading twice Once here and then once in a separate video, but I'll show you how we do this We have a pretty intricate system of ramps that we can set up since I only have three in here I only have them on the main level so I only have to set up one set of ramps But we can fit up to ten side by side ATVs in here And we put five on the bottom and five on the second level and we have ramps where we drive them right off the back of the Trailer at the dealer. It's pretty neat Looks like we have a slight delay Track cross here. This is doogled road. I thought the tracks ran parallel to the road But apparently they skip over here and then run parallel to the road on that side just for fun Just to keep it interesting, you know I was talking with my friend Martin from Germany He was talking to me about the train He takes in the train the bullet trains in Germany and they get you all around Europe And you know go visit Amsterdam and be back in the evening by train and in Canada We were talking that we don't have a lot of passenger trains. We have a huge network of freight train rails And our trains are miles long Super long But as for getting around the country by train like as a passenger, you know We have via rail which it's sort of like a scenic thing that you would take to as a special trip Most people in Canada if you want to get from one city to the next you drive Or you fly Depending on what your budget is and how much time you have like I flew out to Toronto, Mississauga Because of time I had to get there quick get back quick. That's why we flew otherwise I would have driven to drive there takes two days to fly there takes two hours To take a train there. Who knows? I don't know. I know I could do it There is a train that'll take me there, but it'll probably take weeks. Who knows? Canada's passenger trains are sort of non-existent. They're there, but This is what you'll see North America our countries here were built on rail right but freight rails There they go done my first delivery I had to go down this dirt road well, it's gravel road, but this season it's kind of a mud road We're taking her easy so we don't splash up too much mud that we have to wash off later Less mud we get on the truck the less we have to wash off at the end of the day Gotta wash it every day So I'm looking at my GPS here, right? I'm using my my phone GPS Google since when did Google start telling me where there's stop signs? Like right there. It tells me there's a stop sign coming and then I turn left and then there's another stop sign Just in case you don't see the actual stop sign Google's got your back Google's like hey The stop sign up ahead. I wonder if it tells you when there's roundabouts now Probably not because if it keeps telling me there's a roundabout coming. I'm just gonna throw it right out the window So I'm just parked here on the side of the road And this is where I'm going to be unloading. It's just like sort of a side street Hopefully won't be too much in the way here not much traffic goes past here But I'm gonna be unloading here and you remember a few days ago We unloaded those cars off the flatbed with the ramps It's the same idea except it's out of a van trailer and we get these ramps custom made and we have two floors in our Trailer, however, I've only got one floor down right now So I'm actually gonna use another day to show you when I have a full load double-decker Because I think that would be the most interesting way to show you Otherwise, I'm only showing you half of the process right because I want to show you what it's like Those signals are driving me nuts four ways I want to show you what it's like Delivering a full load So we're gonna line something up in the future and then I can show you how I set up those ramps for the second level and How I set them up for the bottom level how we unload them for now? It's pretty straightforward. We have ramps that are custom-built like I said for our trailer everything's on the bottom level I can drive these machines right off So I set up the ramps on the bottom start the machines and just drive them right out of the trailer right up to the gate Where the customer wants them so we're gonna save it for another time. I apologize I thought that it was a bit of a different scenario today, but I'll show you these ramps that we have in the meantime Just gonna walk on the Shoulder sides that I'm not driving. Oh, and it's mud straight mud right away Maybe I should have walked on the driver's side I was gonna say I was gonna walk along the shoulder because it's safer than walking on the traffic side I'm actually going to Back into their yard after all then I have a smet surface to work with I don't want to get all muddy It changed my mind again. I actually just moved over onto the left side of the road I guess as the back rows are like a back alley type of road This side's not muddy and the ramps are stored on the passenger side of my trailer So when I'm putting away and taking out the ramps I'm on the hard-packed dirt gravel instead of in the mud This should be better here. There's not quite enough room in their yard over there So we make the situation as good as we can. Hey, let's try this again Just got to be careful for traffic And here we go Much better It's all muddy over on the side over there and cars still have plenty enough room to get past if they need to get through here To any of these businesses or anything And there we go like I said earlier I was hoping to be able to show you the whole unloading process And I didn't mean to get you all excited and then let you down now that wasn't my plan But we are planning another day where we can show you how this whole ramp system works You see these two floors here fold down onto all these load bars And then we have our ramp system that's stored along the side here Right there We can put away And there's stands for them that are in the belly box On the other side there All the other equipment is in there these load bars They all stay in here all the way at the front. So I'm gonna quickly put those away Clean them up real nice sweep this trailer out and then head back All of these bars we use all of these for the floor in here And this is not how they're supposed to be stored This trailer is a little different than our usual ones our usual ones have just enough space in here To line up all the bars so they don't do that but these trailers tend to do this I Have a solution for that.  I'll show you in a sec You're gonna put them all away. I'll show you Hey, we got lights up here. That's cool Just one there. How do we turn the lights on? I've never noticed other trailers have lights before that's handy Oh, I bet you this is it They don't work Surprise surprise imagine my shock. Oh, you bet. You know what I bet I bet you have to have the marker lights on first I don't think I have my marker lights on come with me. Let's just try this theory This means we got to get out and back into the trailer an extra time If the lights work, it'll be worth it because then we can go haha And that's that that's it. That's all we can do but it'll be can go haha right Just cleaned up my wheels here while I was waiting to be unloaded. Okay, let's Let's turn these on marker lights. I think it would be on the marker lights, right? Let's try that So what do you guys think place your bets the lights gonna be on now? Are they gonna work now? I'm excited Okay, let me let me climb back up here Okay, I'm gonna Aha They work Can you see that? Holy smokes. It's official See you's worth it It's worth it check it out. There's lights in here. They're not very bright, but brighten off set at night Because this roof isn't fiberglass like a lot of our other ones the sunlight doesn't get through here, so I Mean if you get locked in the trailer at least you got light and you can See while you're locked in here Cool learn something today That was a good moment Lights in the trailer all it needs is a sweep now I don't have his water got in here. There's been some snow on one of the crates, but that's how we pack All the load bars This trailer is a little special Not all of them have this but since there's such a big gap that I was talking to you about before In here we have these on here you strap them there like that and down there So those are strapped against the front wall and then I put these bars in front of it here Just so that when the driver undoes those straps that you can take a couple of these bars off the top one maybe or whatever but When you take those straps off it not all the the bars will fall out on you, right? Got these bars protecting them for then and then our freight can go right up to right up to here and It's very very rare that we actually would have freight that would need that little extra bit of room so it's no problem. We still fit a full load into here and It does add extra weight to the trailer though these ramp systems that we have Like I said, I'm gonna have to show you the whole thing So I'm gonna unload the top here at the ramps going down and we drive them right out off the top, right? The whole ramp system last I heard Adds an extra 1500 pounds to our unit that we have to take off of what we would put on the trailer But for the most part the freight that we haul doesn't matter because we don't haul max weight very often anyways Unless you're hauling like peep malls out of northern New Brunswick or something or you know some steel other things but very often 1500 pounds you don't even whatever and we need that most of our trailers have this system and The wonderful people in the office Want me to display it for you and show you how it works. So we're gonna try to find us a load We're hoping this load would work. Ah didn't work out But then they'll find me another one where I'm using both floors and that will give you a detailed look into how we load these trailers and how we unload them It's pretty fun actually It's not every company gets to say that they deliver stuff like this. That's why we always say you know What if you want to have some fun while you're working? Come work with us We are extraordinary. We do things out of the ordinary, but we do things Amazingly out of the or I don't know what I'm trying to say here It's fun. You'd like it. It's me again Putting this together and uh, yeah one of the many things we specialize in is uh motor sports transport and that's why we have the two levels on the on the trailers and They really want me out in the office. They want me to make a video of how it works How we unload off the top level how we unload off the bottom Uh, we just got to sort of figure out when we're going to do that because I'm also needed around the yard and to perform my regular duties Uh, but this is going to be like a special delivery that I've got to film from start to finish It's going to be for their website And also for you guys here. We're going to show you guys how we uh, how we get these ATVs and snowmobiles and stuff well ATVs in the trailer because you roll them off, right inside by sides how we deliver them And sort of give you an inside look of how we do it sort of uh, try to attract you guys Maybe you guys want to come work for us Uh, I know I bug you guys about that quite a bit, but uh the more I say it, you know Eventually one day there'll be a couple of guys that say, you know what? I want to give it a shot I'm gonna go help them over there keystone and Uh, we'll appreciate the help because we have so much work we We need you We're very busy and uh I'll give you an inside look into what we do as we go along here But thanks for watching today anyways that video will be coming in the future We're gonna try to get that done as soon as possible. We've got to try to arrange it Maybe they'll send me out overnight like into Saskatchewan and Alberta for like a week or something And I can show you like from start to finish in one video uh sort of Of the trip they're unloading I don't know. We're gonna talk about it more in our next meeting anyways. We have a meeting coming up So again, thank you for watching everybody if you haven't already hit that like button Uh, don't forget It's just a click of the button below the video and it really helps me out If you want to help me out even more you can leave me a comment down below And if you want to help me even more than that I do have a patreon where you can come and help us out that way But uh, if you just want to help us out here on the page here comment and like go a long ways And follow me on social media if I know all the links are down below my videos facebook twitter instagram I'm spending a little bit more time on twitter nowadays since things seem to be getting a little bit better there, hopefully I'm hoping that uh, well Elon musk bought out twitter That's a story for another vlog We're not gonna talk about that now But he has a lot of ideas for the platform that I think are really gonna help because I absolutely hated that app I thought it was a toxic environment. It was just It was very unbalanced and Maybe you know, what he wants to do now make it better. Maybe it won't I don't know, but I'm keeping my eye on it and spending a little bit more time on twitter now as well So I have my twitter my facebook is my main social media That's where you'll find me the most uh, the most active. I have a tick tock. I have a I have a snapchat. I never use that. I have all of the apps all of them I don't want you to follow me on all of them Please i'm not desperate. Please follow me. I need followers And share the video with your friends, okay, and I'll talk to you guys tomorrow. Take care