Big J: All right. So now we're recording and we're talking about Berkeley and apparently their fire alarms. They put it to a student vote and the students elected to use an air raid siren as a fire alarm. So my daughter sent this and I'm going to just play it. I don't know. I don't remember if, did I play this for you already?

The Juice: I don't believe I've heard it yet. 

Big J: Okay. I'm going to play it. I'm going to find where the microphone is and then play it as loud as it's going to 

The Juice: be. That's

horrifying.

Big J: So 1130 at night, my daughter says that she says, I'm in my room and I'm hearing this outside. I'm just like, stay in your room. That's what? I'm, and then I started searching on the internet. Cause that, Like that, isn't that the noise? I think that'd be the noise if San Onofre Was having an issue, like I thought that was the the this is an issue noise like this is like there's incoming 

The Juice: noise.

Yeah, a lot of questions that's the level of alarm Significantly higher than what a fire. 

Big J: I it was apparently on campus if there's a fire That's the alarm. I ended up finding it on the internet at some point They put it to the students to decide what noise they were going to use as a fire alarm.

And they chose World War II air raid siren as the alarm. I just, I was, it's bizarre. She plays that noise for me and it's just what the hell? There could be incoming. 

The Juice: Yeah, that's the sound you would hear if people were going to bomb you. 

Big J: And it turns out Berkeley actually had a nuclear reactor on campus at one point.

I didn't know that. They used to train people on how to do nuclear technology, and then they would, they had one on campus for that purpose, which they don't have anymore. They use it as a molten salt reactor now. But I did commission it and all that. They got rid of the, they don't, they just don't have Obviously that'd be complicated to maintain.

So they just don't have a active nuclear reactor on the Berkeley campus anymore. Probably good. So they don't do that anymore. 

The Juice: No more nuclear reactor, pray. 

Big J: But they still got the air raid siren. 

The Juice: So weird, so horrified. 

Big J: I was I was just, my heart was like, oh my god. Is this World War III?

And Athena's in the front line? What the hell's going on here? 

The Juice: You're like, where did I send my daughter? 

Big J: It means Silicon Valley is going to blow up. And obviously next, that's where my mind went.

So I was very relieved to find out. That's just what they play as their fire alarm. A mere fire.

The Juice: It's the sound of catastrophe. In almost anything I've ever heard it or even seen it represented. It's bad. 

Big J: It was pretty scary. Very bad. It's also 

The Juice: Are you familiar with Silent Hill? 

Big J: What's that? 

The Juice: It's like a video game and then we came to a movie. Essentially, it's like an evil presence somehow transforms the world into just this horrifying place of monsters and whenever that alarm goes off, it happens.

So if they use Those are the two things that those sounds remind me of. 

Big J: So wait, there's a movie where the air raid siren is what plays when a horrifying thing is going to happen? 

Yeah, that's, that sounds just scary, it is. It's not scary even without the bias. I played it for one of my kids though, one of the younger ones, I think Penelope, and she didn't have a, like she didn't have a preconceived notion of it being scary.

I think maybe it came from some movies or something that I know that it's really scary. 

The Juice: She probably has been exposed, which is probably good, but 

Big J: I guess so. 

The Juice: I don't, I can't imagine her playing, watching or anything to do with Todd Hill. I don't think she's got a lot of experience of world war two documentaries would be my guess.

Big J: Oh 

The Juice: yeah. 

Big J: Early 

The Juice: probably in the clear 

Big J: early two thousands history channel, nothing but world war two documentaries, the good old days.

The Juice: There you go. You gotta start showing them teacher. Why is it terrible? Terrible failed. 

Big J: Yeah, they don't have it anymore. Now it's all just ancient aliens and stuff like that.

I don't even know if they have, because history channel, do you get that? Do you know if you have access to that at all? 

The Juice: I probably do. I don't want to watch it. I probably do. 

Big J: I think it's a discovery plus thing. Yeah. 

The Juice: All right. 

Big J: It's 

The Juice: available one way or another. 

Big J: Yeah. Bonafide for real cable.

So it's probably in that package. 

The Juice: All right. Yeah, I could probably get to it. 

Big J: But you just, you never seek it out. 

The Juice: Nah.

Big J: I guess I could.

So we said that we were gonna talk about that CEO guy who was the, he's part of that healthcare company. I don't actually know much about. I think it's, is it Health net? What's the healthcare company? Do you know? It was 

The Juice: United Healthcare, right? 

Big J: It was just, oh, United Healthcare. And they were like known for doing a lot of denials and stuff.

The Juice: insurance companies in general, but yeah, 

Big J: but I mean it's reasonable for your average CEO to be just traveling around without security and stuff. That all makes sense, right? But I'm in a position that if you are in a life and death authority position over somebody, it probably would be to assume people want to kill you.

So that's fair. What's your feeling on that? 

The Juice: I mean it's unprecedented obviously. I can see why people would have a lot of scorn for them. I don't think people usually know who these people are. 

Oh, 

The Juice: and I wonder if there's gonna be attempts to keep that secret, make that more secretive in the future?

I don't know. But there's usually a figurehead of some sort. 

Big J: You can't keep a head of a company's CEO a secret. That's not how that works. Correct. 

The Juice: So I don't think that's really doable. I guess they might start, I'm guessing they're all gonna have security teams now going forward? 

Big J: I think you have to.

That's the only solution, because every freaking, if you got a guy who's spouse, for instance, right? They have, they're like, they got no kids. They have a spouse, right? They just had this romantic getaway, but then she's diagnosed with cancer. And lo and behold, UnitedHealthcare has turned her down for what obviously should have been covered, but there's some technicality, the preventive room being covered.

The Juice: They're subsorting, yeah. 

Big J: Yeah, and so now Got in 

The Juice: some weird 

Big J: He quickly dies, because it was a very thing, and then there was just this bureaucratic thing where, oh, and then they approve it later, but it's too late. She's already dead. He didn't have the money to cover it, so what are you gonna do?

Now the man has nothing left to lose, and it turns out he's former special ops. What's he gonna do with that skill set? I 

The Juice: think it's former special ops. 

Big J: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen this movie before. You know what I'm saying? 

The Juice: Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's true. 

Big J: He's who can I hang for this thing that got effed up?

I swear this is the fricking beehive movie, right? What is it? The beekeeper? 

The Juice: The beekeeper. Yeah. That's like about the one who's seeking vengeance for people who scam the elderly. Against people who scam the other way, 

Big J: it is weird, because yeah, it's that's 

The Juice: an 

Big J: action movie that I would 

The Juice: probably even watch and love.

I don't love it being, I don't love it happening in real life. It's pretty awful, man.

Big J: I think the guy didn't get much. He was probably fine, because I think the company was like based out of Wyoming or something. He's probably good in Wyoming. But, he went to a big city, he did a lot of cover, with other people around and everything like that. But even in Wyoming, you 

The Juice: think there was any part of his mind that ever thought that would try to kill him that right?

Big J: I think it would be nuts not to think that, though. 

The Juice: I 

Big J: think if you're causing like directly or indirectly, if you're causing the death of people there, if you're the Department of the defense guy you got security. It's true. And why do you have security? Is it because you're causing harm to people and they want to cause you harm or is it because they're just, is it because you're just like the representative of a state or something like that?

I don't know. I don't know. I just, I think that it was predictable.

The Juice: Like common sense makes me want to think it's not, but the more you describe it. Yeah, I agree. At 

Big J: the end of the day, like if you're running a healthcare company, you're straight up deciding whether who lives and who dies, and if you ever are deciding who dies, you probably need security.

Yeah, 

The Juice: I guess you do. 

Big J: That's going to be my guess. 

The Juice: I've never seen it as such a direct whoa. So he's the CEO and I can't imagine he designs their policy. No, 

Big J: he's out there. You probably didn't even control what actually happened, right? 

The Juice: Ah, probably not. And if they're a public, publicly traded company, his responsibility is obviously to the shareholders, which makes the whole insurance thing a whole mess, but that's another story.

But what his job is basically, he would make the most amount of money for the people who have shares in his company, not people insured by his company.

I can believe you're doing this job. Is it a normal job necessarily? Yeah, probably not. You know what I

mean? Everyone was there were jobs in the past and these are the people that are evil. But now it's what's the positive review of an insurance company these days? I 

Big J: don't think anybody, I think there's inherent expectation of them and then they can only fall from that.

The Juice: Pretty much.

Big J: You're saying those words makes me think about how the vilification of certain trades certain jobs. And one thing that I've always seen in TV and everything like that is they're always vilifying developers. Which I think is really interesting. That it's it's always the developer, like there's, they're always the bad guy, they're always coming into the neighborhood, trying to kick people out, everybody hates them because they're trying to like, change things, you know what I mean by that?

Yeah, I do. Yeah, I do, I think that's really interesting, cause it's like, the conflict between that, and then the idea that, homelessness might have something to do with there not being enough places for people to live. I think there might be a relationship between those two things. But I would imagine.

I think that, I think it's difficult. For some reason, it's difficult for people to see that. The bridge there. 

The Juice: It's I don't know. Yeah, I don't know if it's survival of the fittest. But it's for every person, or, I don't know if it's exactly one person in, one person out sort of thing, but when you're putting people in, you're displacing other people in that scenario.

Big J: When you're, when you put people in as in replacing existing housing with new housing? Yeah. 

The Juice: Yeah. And you're probably placing them out eventually, 

Big J: so say you take a block, and it's got six houses on it, and each one of those houses has a certain amount of space, right? And then you put a building that has a lot of apartments in it, right?

Presumably, because that's usually what happens, right? It's a density increase. Yeah. And people usually fight against that the most because they're like, Oh, there's going to be all this traffic. There's not going to be anything for anybody. Everybody's going to have all this traffic. They're going to have to deal with all these new people.

Plus, they're gonna be, like, all the reasons why they come up with that are not cool. But I think that at the end of the day you get more housing. And if you have people that don't have a place to live, and then you also have if you don't have housing, then they don't have a place to live.

But then if you add housing, they potentially could have a that, that, this is it makes sense to me. But I see what you're saying about where it's not like it's you add 24 units, but you are, if you subtract 6 and replace it with 6, obviously there wouldn't be any added. But if you subtract 6 and you add 24, then you would have a net positive 18, right?

Sure. Theoretically, you could get some kind of benefit out of that. 

The Juice: It depends on the scenario. Yeah. Because that's one scenario. Another scenario is where they're actually putting less people in, but they're making it nicer and pricier. 

Big J: Oh, like they're just making it fancier? Like more expensive? 

The Juice: Yeah, like they're, which is pretty common, where they're, what's the word for it?

I can't remember 

Big J: what it is by now. I really don't see a reduction in density. I can't really think of a project that reduces the density. Can you, what would be a project that reduces density? 

The Juice: That's where they revamp an area, so it might be not as nice of an area that has a higher population, but they're trying to redo the area, so they want to add new restaurants and stuff like that, but they're probably going to push out people's lower economic status.

Big J: Like the gentrification stuff. 

The Juice: Yeah, exactly. 

Big J: So if you don't do gentrification, and if you don't add additional housing with the gentrification, it almost certainly will have a net negative effect on low income housing. 

The Juice: I'm not always sure they do, but I don't think there are laws on that or anything. No, I think 

Big J: that's interesting, because I hadn't really thought about that.

I'm familiar with because most of the stuff that I'm familiar with, I'm thinking about it in terms of, okay, I'm going to develop something, I'm going to add something. And like downtown, And stuff like that. They'll go and they'll create a building. They'll have a ground floor that's doing some commercial and then they'll have upstairs floors that are doing a little bit of residential.

And I thought that would be an increase in density, but I wonder if there's also stuff where they're just making it fancier commercial in order to merely just do the gentrification. Because at that point. You are, for reals, just increasing the value of the existing places, which is, that's a good thing.

It does 

The Juice: better serve developers, actually. For them, that's probably more fruitful. They can charge more, more potential in that financially, yeah. 

Big J: For the commercial, or for the, what do you say, what do you charge more for? 

The Juice: Oh, for gentrification, really, that could be. But I

don't think it's usually only both. I don't know. 

Big J: I personally Am of the opinion that is an unambiguous good to build housing because there's so many dang homeless people and there's just obviously if there's homeless people there's not enough places to put them 

The Juice: so therefore you're talking purely adding housing 

Big J: in general in any level like it could be luxury housing it could be low income housing it doesn't make any difference if you do if you just add housing Right?

You're going to have capacity and you're going to have the same number of people and so the cost will go down. And so I feel if you've got homeless people you should be building houses. That makes sense to me. Maybe there's something missing that I don't see but I think it's 100 percent making sense.

It's very much fought against because people don't like there to be an increase in density because of traffic and things like that. 

The Juice: Yeah, that's probably more like in the areas where we live, for sure. Yeah, no, I don't understand. 

Big J: Encinitas, where you live, in particular, they don't have a master plan because they've been sued by the state.

I don't know that they've actually been sued by the state, but they've been threatened to be sued by the state. Or have. Huntington Beach has been actually sued by the state. And they refuse to make a master plan because the state requires them to have, like, all this development stuff. All these development requirements, and they just don't want to do it, and so there's a certain level of of what do you call it, where they, like a, there's a stasis where it you've driven around different parts of Encinitas, and sometimes it feels like it's not really a unified city, it's just like a mishmash of neighborhoods a little bit.

Yeah, I agree, and I think that has something to do with the fact that they haven't updated a master plan like they don't have a Unified plan they just do a piecemeal Because in order to do whatever kind of like unified thing they there's some kind of requirements for that this is my thing.

I just it's interesting though how much resistance there is Because all that's from, they don't want to increase the density because you go to like downtown Oceanside, the density there has been increasing radically, right? Downtown La Jolla, you look at that density, not even downtown, it's off of that street where they have all the tall buildings, that density is increased dramatically.

But then certain other places like downtown Encinitas that place, look at that place, right? It's still, you got frickin Angelos just got replaced with another place, and they couldn't even change the building. They're still using the same drive thru. 

The Juice: What? Oh, that's weird. Okay. 

Big J: No, do you know what I'm talking about?

Have you seen it? 

The Juice: No, I haven't seen it yet. But I'm aware of not In N Out. 

Big J: It's still a one story building in the old Angelo's building. There's still a 7 Eleven down there. There's no multi story buildings that I could think of. There probably is, but, there's, it's certainly not aggressively being developed.

The Juice: Anyway. Yeah, it probably won't be for a long while. 

Big J: Yeah, I can't think of anywhere in Encinitas as being aggressively developed actually. No, 

The Juice: They fight it off pretty hard. 

Big J: Yeah, I think they fight it off. A hundred percent I think they fight it off. But, it definitely, the fighting off part definitely contributes to unaffordable housing.

The Juice: I would agree.

Big J: I just I No, 

The Juice: I definitely agree. It's yeah, it's really limited. I don't know if it'll last forever. I remember Carlsbad was that way for a very long time, 

and then 

The Juice: eventually downtown Carlsbad is a bit more like Oceanside, where they redeveloped it. There weren't any more than, there were, like, no two story buildings, even, really.

Now there's quite a few of them. 

Big J: I will say, 

The Juice: aesthetically, it doesn't look as good, but it is definitely a step in the direction of modernizing it, which is probably what eventually will happen to downtown Encinitas, but They've thought really damn hard to make sure it doesn't happen anytime soon.

Big J: Yeah, they really don't like it that way. I just think it's really interesting how much people hate it.

But it's like it People 

The Juice: hate the idea of modernizing it and expanding on it and developing it or just, 

Big J: Density. People hate density. People hate the idea of taking two houses and turning it into taking one house and turning it into two. People hate that.

I don't 

The Juice: like it 

Big J: so much. They talk about traffic. They talk about things like that. It's like they feel they want to maintain the old deal and stuff like that.

The Juice: That I actually still don't understand. I don't like to feel like I'm being crowded.

And obviously I don't like traffic. I don't think there's any human being who likes traffic. 

No one likes traffic. No 

The Juice: one likes traffic. There's just degrees that I'm not sure when to put up with it. But there's actually a pretty significant change for that happening right now. You know what I mean?

Between the freeway and let's say my house, so they actually just built a lot of housing along there and it's already gotten a bit worse traffic wise, but Katie out of my house, it used to be the fastest way from the freeway back to my home. But it's getting significantly worse. It's been pretty bad each like of all the lights.

It's pretty clogged up. And it's probably only getting worse because our is 

Big J: the reason why Yeah, 

The Juice: exactly. Like they have very limited options and they can't expand the roads at all or anything like that But they're inserting a lot more housing. So basically it's going to be a lot more people on the same side of the street 

Big J: There's a train in there a train track right there 

The Juice: That'd be the other side of the freeway 

Big J: Oh, it's on the other side.

Okay. Yeah, 

The Juice: I'm talking about between the freeway and my house. 

Big J: Between Lucadia. I don't think 

The Juice: there's any train tracks on our side. 

Big J: Okay. Yeah. I I'm familiar. Over by the forum. 

The Juice: Yeah, more or less. Yeah. 

Big J: Yeah. There's 

The Juice: just between that and the freeway, there's like a little section where they're building a lot of houses.

There's a lot of land. They just, they've added a few. They're adding a lot more and it's definitely noticeable already. Okay. I think it's good to

have more people housing. That part is good. 

Big J: Yeah, I know. It 

The Juice: changed the way I have to approach. 

Big J: My general I don't know. I really 

The Juice: like that. 

Big J: is if you build more houses, people will have more places to live. That is, It's been good.

I wanted to ask you about the Alaska cruise you're going on. Have you ever been there? 

Sure. 

The Juice: Yeah. One time when I was a bit younger, and my memories of it are hazy, because most of my memories are hazy, but it's from a time when I was like a teenager. Teenager and, I don't know, probably a bit of an asshole.

I remember very faint ideas and images. But I don't have a lot of concrete memories of the experience. 

Big J: So it should be pretty fun to, to go back and check it out. 

The Juice: I think so. Yeah. Serge and I are trying to find some outdoorsy people to there's gonna be, like Like a lot. I don't know what the activity is.

There's been like a lot outdoors been like activities or something. So like people, using chainsaws to do not do each other, but to do certain activities of racing, I'm assuming. I want to find log running, but I haven't liked that hard yet. I want to see people running logs. I love it.

Big J: Besides the chainsaw fight there's going to be what I really like about Alaska, the Alaska cruises, you can actually see really cool stuff without even getting off the boat. 

The Juice: Yeah, I believe so. 

Big J: I'm hoping 

The Juice: so, too. Yeah. 

Big J: Like all the glaciers and everything, you're on the boat to see it. 

The Juice: That would be nice.

Yeah, that would be a lot more manageable, too. All that I don't know. I have to think over out excursions, related activities, and how I can do them, I don't know. A 

Big J: lot of the, I remember last time I went up there we were hauling the kids around and it we ended up, there's like some park in Ketchikan, where we took our kid there, and then there was it turned out that some other random person we knew was also there with their kid of the same age, and so we just met up.

Oh, wow. I know, it's so random. That's 

The Juice: so weird. 

Big J: But they have, that's the kind of stuff they would have. They have, don't they have a, they have a little shows, like they have some really easy accessible stuff. I don't think that the towns are any kind of like big cultural attraction.

It's more about the nature stuff and I don't think you'd be going to that. I think you'd be sticking to the boat and maybe checking out. Yeah, maybe checking out some of the if there was a tour where you were on a bus or something, I know they have some of those. I think they got some stuff like that, but boats.

Great. You know what I'm saying? 

The Juice: Yeah, I've had interesting. I don't know. It'll be good. It'll be good. I'm sure it'll be good because you have a great time. Yeah, I don't know what to expect exactly, but something about being on a wheelchair for portions of it while on a boat. It feels trippy to me.

Bye. Yeah, I'm on water, on a boat, on a wheelchair. I'm like layered. 

Big J: Do you know where you start and end on the thing? 

The Juice: My knowledge of the details is absolute dull. I've been waiting for like the new year to like really start digging in, 

Big J: yeah, you'll be good next year. 

The Juice: Yeah. I'm gonna take a more passive approach to the things that will be affecting my life, which is not a good way to do things, but it's how I do things. 

Big J: I think you said you had something you needed to be getting to. I think we covered a good number of things and talked about stuff and I was I think we're, I think we're good. I think we talked about our stuff. I think we had a 

The Juice: productive podcast.

Big J: Productive podcast. And we'll put all this down and we recorded it. We even remembered. That's great. And so now I'm gonna I'm proud of it. Hopefully I was recording actually. And then I'm gonna turn it off. And let's see what happens. I think, but yeah, signing off. Here we go. Yeah, I don't know if it was recording.

The Juice: Is this one of our lost tapes? The lost tapes? It 

Big J: looks like it, because didn't it say I, it was recording?

Didn't it say it was recording? It said the recording was 

The Juice: started. I, it said.

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