Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
We are back with four from the South. It's so
nice to be here with you again, and I have
my co host, Fabrizio Campano is here, fab How are
you doing? Hello everyone. I'm happy we're back as it do.
We're back as a duo, which is good. Um. I
listened to how much you guys made fun of me
in the other episodes, and I'm glad to be here
to defend myself. We need the gringo perspective here. Gringos
(00:38):
are part of Big Latin America and I intend to
represent that view. So here on four from the South,
what we do is we cover the biggest stories going
on in Big Latin America, which extends from oh, Patagonia
all the way up to maybe the Canadian border. So
we're not sure we redefined it. Every episode part of
the growing it's like it's like COVID. It's just like
(01:00):
coming to another there's new variants every week. Yes, yeah,
it's been interesting. By the way, five, I was reading
up on your man Boris, the new president of Chile
and an associate of yours. I saw I hadn't realized
he used from uh Magellan's and chilean Antarctica province the
southernmost problems. He's from the end of the world. He's
(01:22):
exactly at the bottom of the country that it's just
like you you can see the Arctic from his house,
and that's pretty cool. It's a pretty cool place. By
the way. I was there two years ago, uh, doing shows,
and it's everyone is so nice. I think there's something
about those extreme places that people are just they just
(01:44):
love each other because they're survivors in a way. Yeah,
So what is like the sort of the stereotype of
people from there that they're nice or they're sort of
like are they to Yeah, no, no, they're nice people.
They have a weird eating behavior, like they well their
days and that really early and really early. Um. And
(02:07):
at the same time, they because it's so cold, they
need a lot of calories to survive. So I remember
the last time I was there, like there was one
place you have to go called It's like a little
random place that you have to go and the meal
they give to you is bread with Teresa. It's like, um, yeah,
(02:31):
it's like as Teresa spread on bread and you have
to eat that with tomato, no tomato, like with milk
with banana. Okay, banana milk and a chreesa bread. That
sounds pretty good. What kind of meal is that? Is that? Breakfast?
Lunch and dinner? What are we doing this like anytime?
(02:51):
It's kind of like snack. I think it's a very
heavy snack. By the way, I don't think it's it's
just a very weird combination and milk the sausage on
some bread. Just over your your way to the gym's.
That's gonna be a fish heavy situation down there, right. Well,
(03:13):
they have the that is like this, it's not a river.
It's just like the anopenness between one side and the others.
It's just like this thing is just a bunch of
islands at the end. Well, the map, if you've ever
seen the map of the world, just like at the end,
just like fall apart. It's just whatever one of the
(03:34):
god just didn't father filling in the details down there.
It's like whatever, what you wore it. It's like that
that that meme of a horse. You start really carefully
driving the horse. In the end, you're like whatever. And
the the one piece of crumble between one piece and
another piece of crumble, there's this like kind of river
(03:57):
called people swim like there's like a thing about swimming
and going from one side to the other because it's
so cold. That is like such an extreme thing to do.
And I think that's a place where a lot of
fish is fishing is going on. So yeah, there's a
lot of fishing. Is it's exactly from that from that spot, gotcha.
You know, I had the pleasure to be down there
a couple of years ago in that part of the world,
(04:18):
punto Arenas, So it was one of the places Perto
Arenas and Perton tales and what I what I took
away from their ostross beer or is that what it's
called service astral serza astral? That was that was primo stuff.
And you're right, everybody was really nice to me when
I would just stumble into the bar for a nice
cold beer after a cold day of walking the barren wastes.
(04:42):
There's one thing that I remember that my last strip,
last strip, there there's a there's a statue of the
Patagon Indian. Okay, there's it's a native man his his
his statue, and everyone tell you like, if you keeps
the feet of the Patagan in Indian, you will come
back to mais Okay. So it's like a thing and
(05:05):
and and everyone's like, you should do it, they should
do it. And And then a friend of mine who was
actually connected with Borich told me, like, don't do that.
Everyone peace on that statue because they know people will
go in Keece. I've heard this one about the Blarney
Stone in Ireland, and uh, the John Harvard statue on
the Harvard campus. If somebody's telling you to kiss or
(05:27):
touch a statue, somebody has been pissing on it, So
just be careful with that. That's not Yeah, that's not
a great idea. I just eat, just eat the bread
with the Teresa Teresa sausage, a banana bread and a
straw and get out of there. And by the way, like,
are you sure you want to go back there? It's
not I mean, like, is it like the dream of
everyone to return to this place that they have to
(05:47):
kiss the statue? They think? By the way, I think
in an hour, you're like, okay, that's it. Great, Okay.
(06:08):
So I don't know if that counts as one of
our stories. We'll give it half credit. But we have
a couple of items to discuss fab what's going on
down there in Latin America. You're in New York now,
but you're just down in Chile. What's the report? How
are things going? Um? This is a podcast where we
you know, connect the world and the world goes all
the way down there to Antarctica. What's going on in Chile? Well,
(06:29):
first is summer, So summer after elections. You know, like,
what's the name of this weird period between one president?
You could like lame duck. Yeah, they called the lame
duck period. The president is the lame duck because he's
he's about as powerful as lame duck. You know, he's
still the president, but he can't do very much. So
that's what's going on. Still in charge, but he's in charge.
(06:52):
No one's kissing his ass the way they may be
used to. No one cares about this guy. Of course,
he likes attention a lot, so he's trying to like
give some quotes here and there, trying to talk about
his legacy. And at the same time, Bori is like
(07:12):
so cool, such like a new thing, uh that he's
trying to attach himself to the guy. You know, he's
giving like you know, we think differently, but he's a
he's a cool guy, and he was nice with me
and were kind of friends. I remember, like, do you
remember like Trump did that with with Obama Obama Trump transition.
He was like he was cool. He never he would
never say this, but he likes me. Yes. Also, I
(07:37):
remember this is a slight I might be sort of
imagining this or projecting this, but I remember when Trump
and Obama met in the Oval Office. It's the only
time that I ever felt that Trump seemed slightly nervous,
like really realizing that he was going to be the president.
I think did rattle even Donald Trump. And I'm wondering
if that's happening to bored Probably probably they There's some
(08:00):
pictures of him in the Dama that it is like
or White House, the bite, the way people don't sleep there.
This is a very weird American thing. I don't think
you should sleep in the place you work. I don't
think you should be doesn't make it. Why Why why
are you there? Are you camping? Like you? What is this?
(08:22):
Just go home, dude, Like, just find a house a
couple of blocks from there, take the subway, just be
a normal person, wake up in your house and go
to work. Um So, yeah, boris is not It's not
gonna like move to the Lamona, but he's finding a
house close to it, and he's trying to find also
(08:43):
a place that is like uh safe but at the
same time normal, not not in a in in a
castle like far from arms, cards and stuff. Yeah, but
he needs to be near a place that serves banana
milk and trees or bread so he can feel he's
gonna he's gonna take a flight every morning, Yeah, go
(09:04):
to work. That will be insane. If a president I
imagined like a president who was like, guys, I'm staying
in my town. Yeah, some things are going to be
zooms and then I'm just gonna just will do it
on zooming. It's actually, you know, Chile, aside from maybe
like Russia, Chile is the country where you could have
the longest in country commute, Like if you had to
(09:25):
go from Mayolanis to outa Comma, every day could be
longer than the day is long? Is there? But by
the way, is there like a theme restaurant in Santiago
that serves like Mayo Lanist cuisine or something, or like
where the Lanius people hang out. If you're like from
the Deep South to Santiago for for a cool job,
but you just missed that. They just don't make the
(09:47):
banana milks the way the way they do it over
Monster's somewhere where you can go. There's gotta be I
don't think so, I don't. I think if you, if you,
if you try that same food in Santiago, you will die.
It's just like it's so it doesn't work. Yeah, yeah,
your capillary exactly. It's not a great idea. So that's
(10:10):
what's happening right now. Once again, it's summer, so it's
like everyone is on vacations. I think it's getting everyone's
getting on micron right now. In the next couple of
weeks we will get some spikes. Um. But once again
it's like everyone is like in this weird state of
mind of like, is this omnicron important anymore? We should
like just be scared or just act like it was
(10:32):
the old, the old, the delta thing. But with I
don't know, no one knows what to do. Yeah, well
it's kind of it's kind of a weird, like, um,
covid is going to everybody is getting it, but it's
becoming less fatal, which is good. Probably the only way
out of a pandemic. Really is. Basically everybody gets it
and hopefully it devolves because the virus doesn't want to
(10:53):
kill you. It wants to stay alive. It's bad for
it's a bad outcome for the virus if you die. Yeah,
this is like oh I overdid it? Yeah, well yeah,
that's that's the current state of Chile. And they're looking
for a new um like the who's going to be
(11:13):
the secretary of what, like you know, building the teamum.
There's a lot of rumors of who's going to be
in charge. Um. So it looks like everyone and this
is this is a very I think that everyone we
couldn't relate to this. It's like they call you for
the first generation of this new government. Probably you will
say no, You'll be like call me in the second round.
(11:36):
Probably you're gonna have to You're gonna have to change
a lot of these people in the middle, like after
the first year, and so you don't want to be
in the in the test run of the new government.
So it looks like that's happening right now. A lot
of people like not not yet work out the kinks
and then call me. That's like sort of like a start.
(11:58):
But on the other there's no like there should be
extend to compensate for that, Like if you join right
at the beginning, you should get the equivalent of stock
options or something, so that encouraged because you want some
top flight people right at the beginning. You don't want
them all waiting for the round of people to get fired.
So maybe there should be some some bonuses or something
that you're giving, like banana milk and lifetime astral beer.
(12:22):
You're all set. Who will do board in the in
Chile today? Is like a position like ambassador to the
United States something that he will appoint or is that
just something that sort of a diplomat service does. Does
he have a lot of perfect kind of jobs to
give out. Yeah, I think there's a lot of positions
to fill. This is another thing that no one thinks.
(12:42):
When you you go to run for government, it's like
then you have to hire. It's like in a month,
you have to hire a thousand people, insane. Of course
it's not gonna work. You're gonna have a lot of
like wrong people in it, a lot of mistakes because
it's a lot of people. Um, and of course you
can you can be like, okay, you know what these
(13:04):
guys in that area. They're doing fine, but they're still
from the other governments. So maybe most of them are
not happy with you or they I don't know, like
they go against what they think government should go and
so did not go go in your direction. So you're like,
what did you replace everyone? Yeah? What what we'll do? Um,
(13:26):
I will call my friends. But that's not a great idea.
That's the worse idea. Actually call your friends to be
part of this. No, yeah, one or two of my friends.
And then I'm calling like people who are kind of
indifferent to me or don't really like me, because I
know that they'll give me the straight truth. Because it's
also like nobody's gonna know. Once you're a powerful guy,
nobody's gonna want to give you bad news. That's no
(13:48):
fun for anybody, So like it's just not gonna Also,
you need you're gonna need to have some friends just
as friends. You know, you can't put them all on
your government. No, no, no, no. A probably for politicians,
all of their friends are politicians. I don't know they
have like a a friend who just played the guitar,
and no, they don't have like a dead beat a
(14:09):
guy who sells a little weed and you know, have
a said rogan friend know somewhere. No, no, they just
all in power. Okay, Well I saw I actually an
interesting story about Chile and the news. It's just it's
not really news because it happened twelve thousand years ago.
But it was talking about how um. I saw this
(14:31):
on the blog. It's called building Blog, but b L
d G blog. It's run by this guy named Jeff
Manna who lives here in Los Angeles. Really interesting guy.
He's a writer. He wrote a book called Burglars Guide
to the City about Los Angeles, which is totally interesting.
But he had a post about how out there in
the Atacama Desert in Chile, uh, twelve thousand years ago,
(14:52):
there was a huge comet that uh sort of exploded
over the desert and as it was exploding, it generated
the super strong wind and it formed glass. And so
there's a line across the desert of this warped, crazy
black glass that exists in the desert. And this is
I think this is the only time we know of
(15:14):
that a comment exploded on Earth. I mean, it probably
happened other times, but we don't have the impact crater
of other comments we have meteors and stuff, but a comment,
as far as we know, the only one, and he
speculates its twelve years ago. There might have been people
in the auta Comma who were watching like basically the
sky explode and spew black glass all over the place,
(15:35):
which could have like really messed with your head if
you were just trying to trap a rabbit for your
dinner or whatever. You know. I know, and actually, like
all the religions I think should be like you came
out from something like this. Now it's like I think
is happening. And then you're like, okay, there must be
like some other entities in the sky who's throwing glass
(15:56):
at us? Yeah, yes, somebody just chucked something. And and
if you didn't die, then it's like, okay, well what
does that mean? What's going on with that? They obviously
threw a comment at me and I'm still alive, So
something's going on here. That's the realization that you live
on Earth and there's like a lot of stuff trying
to kill you, um and and you somehow survive it.
(16:17):
That would open your mind spiritually and for them just
keeping track of time and like figure out like days
and nights and skies and then Sally Glass from the
Sky must be like Okay, let's stop science, let's just
go back to let's just go back to the corn
or you know, it's not even try to learn anything. Um,
(16:38):
but yeah, it's quite amazing. There's any anything you can
do with this. I mean, it's it's jually like rich
on this glass from the sky that we can I
was gonna ask you because I would think that people
would collect this. Yeah, you could. It would be cool
to have a giant piece of warped comment out of
common glass in your living room. But I think um
going out to collect it as a bit of a
(16:59):
pain in the butt and it's just not that in demand.
But I was, I was wondering if you've ever heard
of people gathering this stuff for being into out of Coma,
out of Coma glass collectors, You ever heard of the scene,
it's got to be there. If there's if there's someone
doing that, it's it's it's probably a white woman in
l a s or where they put it in the chain,
(17:24):
You put it in your and you can and don't know,
spiritually be safe of COVID. Yeah, to connect the world again,
like Auta Comma does have a slight Joshua Tree vibe. Right,
People go out there to sort of like hippy out
and do psychedelics and stuff. There's a lot of It's
just it's that's the really, I mean, do you probably
know more about this than me. You you you you
(17:45):
live in the desert. But it's like, is there reason
why people choose the desert for for this? Is just
because it's safe. It's like, you can't, you can't, it's
harder to die from. I don't know what you had
to do. I don't know. That's a great question. There
was an article in the l A Times just the
other day that was like why do people go out
to Joshua Tree to do mushrooms? And I read the
(18:06):
article and it didn't really come up with a conclusive answer.
One thing is that like the light, you know, there's
something religious about the desert, your stark. It's pretty much
just you know, there's it's just you and God out there, right,
like if he's going to talk to you and you're
gonna hear him. There's no distractions. There's a little bush
and you and there's no animals and nothing, you know,
like send and receive should have a clear signal on
(18:28):
the god cell phone. And then of course there's weird
looking plants and the light, uh, sunset is kind of
interesting at night, the stars are pretty crazy. But I
think it mostly just like people don't want You don't
want to do psychedelics, Like in your house, you don't
want to run into somebody. You don't want to run
into your boss. You don't want to have to go
to seven eleven. You don't want to see your like
(18:48):
dirty socks lying around. You have to be in a
different place to have a knife. There's a lot of
the roof ups, there's there's a lot of like dangers
stuff in the in the modern world. Maybe the desert
is just like flat and there's no way, I mean,
the heat can kill you, but nothing else. Yeah, if
you're like but like, let's say you haven't experience with
(19:11):
your dog, and like it's weird forever after that when
you go back to normal, that's kind of strange. He
was talking to you when you're in psychedelics, and then
you realize he's just a dog. That could be I
don't know. You kind of have to get out of there.
It's the pole point is to take a mental vacation,
I suppose, yeah, and then glasses coming down from and
then suddenly the sky is on fire and you're being
(19:32):
rained on with deadly, deadly glass. Well, possible business for
us would be getting a truck and going out there.
I don't know if you have any partners in the
Atacama who are looking to um get in the hauling
of glass business, but I think there might be opportunity here.
Um And what with the Boris administration, maybe they'll have
loose rules on glass collecting. Who knows what is the
(19:52):
boards Board's like more of an environmentalist than his predecessor. Yeah,
he's like the green guy. Yeah. Any new government is like, hey, guys,
I care about the animals and they care about the plans.
And I'm young, and you know that's like the new thing.
(20:13):
Probably like the next American president. I mean, if someone's
gonna run against Trump, it should be someone like that.
You know, Like, I'm young, I care, I have empathy.
I'm a normal person. I can walk to home to
like to my house, and I'll be fine, you know. Like,
see the problem is that everything you just said, like
by definition, you wouldn't go into politics, right, I'm a
(20:33):
normal guy young. I like walking to my house, I
have normal interactions with people. It's just not studed to
the system of going on Fox News and being talked
about on talk radio and like deliberately pressing the buttons
that are the most divisive. One of my favorite things
about the and we're going back to the to the
new Bodyach era, but one of the coolest things like
(20:56):
because he's thirty five, they have all his tweets, and
that could be dangerous because it could be bad tweets,
but most of them are just dumb, are just silly,
I just funny. It's like there's this this Instagram account
called Tweets, and every day they're like I can't believe
Tool released his new album and it's so bad, or
(21:19):
you know, it's like what is the sweet Like it's
just like these tweets or like just a normal person
watching TV and tweeting about what happened that week. Um.
So once again, it's like there's someone like that in
the US. There's anyone like that right now? I don't know.
(21:40):
This might be the closest, but even she I don't
know what her like music, case star or anything, like
if if a politician like mentions a band or watching
a show. It's anything normal ish. It's so shocking and
surprising that you're kind of blown away. There was a
guy who was the governor of Wisconsin and his name
was Scott Walker, and uh, he would he had an
(22:01):
Instagram where he was trying really hard to like pretend
to be a normal guy, but it was like a
space alien posing as a human. For instance, he went to, uh,
maybe you know if the ice cream shop called cold
Stone Creamery, which is like the ideas you get some
ice cream and then they put a bunch of junk
in it. They put some uh you know, peanut butter
cups and sprinkles and there's six hundred thousand options and whatever.
(22:25):
You get some oreo bits in there. And he posted
he'd gone to Coldstone Creamery and he just had just
this is how I like it, just plain vanilla ice creams.
And it's just like, come on, you're too weird. You
shouldn't be in politics. I don't know what you should do,
but it's it's definitely not leading the people the story.
(22:54):
I've heard this mentioned to me a couple of times
by American people. A story about board like a reporter
asking Borage if he liked Taylor Swift and he had
a picture of Taylor Swift in his pocket. Have you
heard this? You know what I'm talking about? What's going
on with that? Because that's that actually seemed like a
little weird. Why are you carrying a picture of Taylor
Swift around? I think I think he well, what I
(23:15):
know about that story. He's like he's not like it's
like a Taylor Swift fan. But like there was a
when when everyone was thinking that he will lose at
some point. There was always like Instagram, tweet talk and
Twitter movements, so there was like I don't know bikers
for bor Each and uh. And it started like normal,
(23:38):
like a teacher's for Boridage, and and then it came
really weird, like I don't know, uh, Swifties for Borage.
People who love animal like anime fans for Borage just
like go to more specific groups. So I think before that,
like Swifties for Boriage made a video give him that picture. Okay,
(24:02):
that's he That's a sensible explanation. Good, Okay, I'm glad
to hear that. That resolved it mystery moment. By the way,
off what you just said, I think, UM, any politician,
now you're launching a campaign, have somebody on your team
who's sort of like the liaison to the anime people.
I think they're stronger than you think. They're connected, they're
(24:24):
on the internet, they're making our way. Those those guys
are in control of the TikTok. They can they can
take down someone. They have the time, the resources. They
just taken take down someone's uh TikTok account, just or
(24:45):
changed the the the algorithm to just posted on the
video and you put more of those videos in the feed.
So you have those guys. You need these By definition,
there are people with a lot of time and internet
access and you're going to need those people and political campaign. Well,
you know, I think this has been a pretty good episode.
We brought a wrap up of the Chilean election. We
(25:06):
learned about UM, what people are eating down in Madelenez,
We UH talked about the Autacama, We covered the span
of chile geography. We discussed why UM psychedelics would be
popular in the desert, and who president should a point
in their cabinet. So I think that was a pretty
solid discussion here. And fourth from the South, I think
(25:26):
I can claim safely that this is the premier English
language podcast about Chilean politics, and I'm proud of that.
So thank you for joining us. Hit us up at
four from the South on Twitter, four from the South
at Gmail and let us know what you're talking about
in your portion of Big Latin America. Four from the
(25:47):
South is hosted by Me, Steve Healey and Fabrizio Capano.
Robert O'Shaughnessy is our producer. Original theme song by Amy Stolsenbach.
Four from the South is a production of Exile Content
Studio in partnership with I Heart Radio's Michael to a
podcast network. For more podcasts from my Heart, visit the
I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows. M