June 1, 2023 • 28 mins
When a benign urban planning concept is co-opted by conspiracy theorists, an unsuspecting professor becomes the target of right-wing death threats. Tiffany Hsu covered the story of the 15 minute city conspiracy for The New York Times.
You can read the full story here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/28/technology/carlos-moreno-15-minute-cities-conspiracy-theories.html
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Tiffany schu and I wrote he wanted to unclog cities.
Now he's public Enemy number one for the New York
Times and it's the story of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Sometime last year, I started to see people declare online
this really weird sentence, I will not eat the bugs.
I thought this was strange because these were adults, and
people over ten don't usually declare that they will not
eat something. So after some searching, I found out why
(00:50):
people were talking about eating bugs. The place I found
this information, to my surprise, was anti COVID vaccine websites.
Anti vaxxers argued that the lockdown, mask mandates and vaccination
cards were the beginning of an elite engineered authoritarian dystopia,
and part of this brief new world will involve forced
(01:14):
insect eating. These elites will use climate change as an
excuse to drive ranchers out of their land so they
can buy it up cheap, and then will be left
eating bugs, which will make us weak and easy to manipulate.
I don't buy this at all. Every single person I've
met who's eating grasshopper tacos or bowls of fried crickets
(01:36):
are tough as hell, and yes I've had them both.
Writing is hard.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to be don't stand so it turns on a mic?
Maybe the twiddles enop because a journalist trand has got
in that jul job out of single story. Just listen
to smart people speak, conversation, film information, this storre.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Tiffany Shue is a reporter who covers conspiracy theories for
The New York Times. She found out what's really behind
the elite's plan to imprison us in Waldorf. Area is
called fifteen minute cities. So, Tiffany, do you live in
a fifteen minute city? Where are you?
Speaker 2 (02:36):
I'm in a little town in the East Bay near
San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You in Fremont? Are you in Piedmont? Where are you?
Speaker 2 (02:44):
You know? I actually prefer not to say, because I
deal with so many crazies in my work.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Oh are you GI mean me?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I don't know yet. We haven't talked for very long.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Okay, Well, how long does it take you to get
to like a coffee shop or a grocery store or
a drug dealer?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I mean, if I if I'm driving, it takes two minutes.
If I'm walking, I could get there in twenty but
I'm a very slow walker.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So you live in a twenty minut Yeah, your story
is about this professor in France who came up with
this idea of the fifteen minute city.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah. So this this guy's named Carlos Moreno. He's a
professor at the University of Paris one Pentheon.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Sorbon, which is not the Sorbun.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Right, it is not the Sorbun. There are apparently many, many,
many different variations of universities with the name Sorbun in them.
He has a long and varied career. He started working
as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab
in nineteen eighty three. This was after he moved to
(03:46):
Paris from Colombia, which is where he was born. He
moved over to France as a political refugee when he
was twenty.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Oh why was he a political refugee?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
When he was very young, he spent some time with
the April nineteenth leftist movement.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
So they were like communist gorillas, right, taking on the
SI right wing party there, right? Oh wow, Okay, so
he was in this gorilla movement and he had to
he had to leave Columbia, but he chose Paris.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
There are worse options, yes.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, And so what did he start doing in France?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
He goes to school and then in nineteen eighty three
he starts working as a researcher. He's worked in fields
like automotive, medical, nuclear, military. He says that he helped
create the first robot vacuum cleaner. He was doing some
home goods work.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Will you sound like you don't believe him?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I mean, I don't know too much about the history
of robot vacuum cleaning.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Do you have one?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
We have a rumba.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, it's amazing, right, like as good as this fifteen
minute city idea. It's not as good as the rumba.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
No, no, no, I mean the baby's terrified of it.
But maybe that's a good thing. She needs to tough enough.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
So what's he like as a person?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
He's lovely. I mean, we had a zoom with him
when I was reporting the story and he shows up.
He's wearing he's wearing that stereotypical French black turtleneck. He's
got the glasses on, he's got that lovely axe, and
he's just like a lovely professorial type.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So he comes up with this idea of the fifteen
minute city.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Not that long ago, right, Yeah, So in twenty ten
he starts thinking about sustainable and tech empowered cities and
eventually that idea gets refined into this twenty sixteen proposal
for fifteen minute cities. And the idea is extremely straightforward,
that residents should be within a fifteen minute walk, bike ride,
(05:41):
or public transportation trip to all the daily necessities that
they need grocery stores, parks, schools, workplaces, medical care, that
sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
A walk or bike those seem like very different fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, The idea is just to give people closer accessibility
to the things that they need in their lives. And
the hope is that you're not using a car.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
So is it a climate change thing or it could
be a traffic thing, or is it a way to
have people socially connect instead of be lonely? Like, what
is the main point of the fifteen minute city?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
So Carlos Moreno makes a point to not call it
a climate change idea or an antiqu car idea. He
always likes to say that it's about making things easier
for the person and the added benefit of that is
that it helps the environment because it limits the amount
of time that you're spending in a car.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So where did Carlos Marino get this idea for the
fifteen minute city.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
It's based on more than a century of related thinking,
stretching back through the eighteen hundreds, neighborhood units, garden cities,
there's a new urbanism and walkable cities in the nineteen nineties,
basically anything that was proposed by the urban activist Jane
Jacobs in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Now, I know, we did this episode on this group
called buy Nothing. People got pissed off because they thought
that would just increase gentrification. That you know, if you
kept people in their area, the rich people would get
to do all their rich things and the poor people
would be kept out of it. That's a concern I
assume with fifteen minute cities, that you know, you're asking
people with less money to stay in their part of
(07:21):
the city.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the criticism, which is that
if only certain areas get the benefits of a fifteen
minute neighborhood, then they obviously become more desirable, and then
poor people get priced out, and you know, of course,
if you're a marginalized community, you're probably going to be
hesitant about amenities that, in your experience are spurring gentrification
and displacement. And this is especially the case in the
(07:45):
US because of the way American cities are designed, because
you would need so much money and so much effort
to rejigger an American city into a fifteen minute format.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Okay, is anyone adopting this or who's into this fifty
minute city idea?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Many, many people are into this. The Parisian mayor and
id Algo made it like a core tenant of her
reelection camp in twenty twenty, which you won. More than
one hundred mayors that are part of this group called
the Sea forty mayors. They all adopted it.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
It should only be forty mayors. You would think, this
is my conspiracy theory. There's something wrong with the Sea forty.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
There are sixty mayors that are being suppressed somehow, they're
not being represented.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Okay, So there's one hundred mayors who are into this
idea right right?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
And you know, there are different variations of this, and
there have been for a while, Like Portland has twenty
minute neighborhoods, Barcelona has these superblocks that are like nine
block chunks. Sweden has a one minute city.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
One minute city.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, one minute city?
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Is that just your house? I think I've been living
in a one minute city for since the pandemic.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Started in Sweden. The idea is that residents of a
single street can design how much space on that street
is used for public services like parking, so it's like
a single street.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Oh okay. So they went to implement this fifteen minute
city idea in Oxford in England, home of the of
the college. What was their plan on how to do this?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So the Oxford situation is pretty complicated.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And insane completely, but we'll get to that, okay. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The Oxfordshire County Council had championed this idea called low
Traffic Neighborhoods. That's LTNs for short.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And I I already don't like it once you abbreviate stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, the alphabet soup is not great. But you know
they're not marketers, they're their city planners. And the idea
is that you'd have to get a permit to drive
through certain areas at certain times of day, and that's
enforced by cameras. Right, So it's the same principle as
like a red light camera, which is unfortunately something I'm
very familiar with.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Oh you gotten a lot tickets.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
I mean I live in the bar area.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
The idea in Oxford County was that you would kind
of limit the number of cars that were moving through
high traffic areas and certain times of day, and that
would help with congestion, It would help with traffic flow,
it would be a little bit cleaner for the environment.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
So you have a certain amount of times you're allowed
to leave your zone per.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Year or no. No, I mean you can travel wherever,
wherever you want. It's just that they are using this
to encourage you to avoid traversing through certain areas at
certain times of day. If you really want to go through,
you can go through. They're not stopping you. They're no
physical barriers. It's more of a permitting system so they
can better keep track of how many cars are moving
(10:36):
through like a specific space at a specific time. And
I think there is a fine system in place if
you're going through too often.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Okay, so you can go a certain amount of times.
If you go too many, you get fined.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
That's my understanding.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
And what if you live like right near the border,
and you're like, you know, your sick mom is on
the other side of the border.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
I think the hope is maybe you walk, maybe you
take a bike, maybe take public transit, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Okay, And people did not love this idea.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Some people love the idea, but many, many people did
not love the idea. There was a two thousand person
protest in Oxford in February by people who took the
idea out of context and then conflated it with a
separate idea. And this is where it gets a little
bit complicated.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Okay, Wait, are these Oxford Shurians or are these people
who are coming from elsewhere to protests, because that's a
lot of people.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
No. So this is one of the interesting things about
this particular case, which is that so many people who
have had no prior connection to Oxford suddenly show up
in the debate. There were researchers who were saying that
there was evidence that people had been kind of bussed
in from outside the area to protests, that there were
political groups that have nothing to do with Oxford. There
(11:55):
was this idea that all of a sudden, this Oxfordshire
concept had blown up into a national or international outrage.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, this was a huge deal considering like Oxford, I've
never been there, is it as small as I want
it to be? And as everyone dressed in like the
robes and the cardboard hats, it looks like Harry.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Potter is I've never been. But it's not a big place.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Okay, And what are they pissed off about?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So a lot of these people showed up and they're
waving signs saying, you know, no to the fifteen minute city,
which is ridiculous because what is happening in Oxford County
has nothing to do with the fifteen minute city. Low
traffic neighborhoods are not fifteen minute cities. They're completely different.
One concept is concerned with limiting cars. The other concept
(12:44):
is focused on bringing daily necessities closer to residents. So
Oxford City Council had cited the fifteen minute City as
an inspiration for its like grand vision of the city
in twenty four that's where the mixup comes from.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
So they have a plan to be a fifteen minute
city in twenty forty, which is like a second in
Oxford time. But for now they're just reducing traffic. Two
thousand people protest this, but they're worried about more than
just this rule. They think this is part of a
bigger plan.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Right, the conspiracy theorists get involved.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
This is your stuff, right, Like you cover conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
You see your face starting right eliplically. Yeah. There's this
one tweet from an architecture professor that showed up around
this time, and he said, if I had to guess
what would be the batchitt conspiracy theory of twenty twenty three,
I would have never guessed it would be town planning
where you can walk to the shops.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
When we come back, all these conspiracy theorists are going
to attack a meek old man who is not at
all prepared for it. But first our advertisers are going
to tell you about this cool new electric bike with
zero carbon emissions. Oh god, the socialists have come for
us too. Okay, So there's this conspiracy theory about fifty
(14:09):
minute cities. They're afraid that these are little prisons that
they're fencing people into in order to control them. Is
that the.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Facily what happened in Oxford, It's like they cracked open
the conspiracy theory Bible and started listing off every entry
related to government control. I mean, you had people at
this protest who were accusing the county or the city
whatever of like surveillance, a movement restriction. They were calling
it like a modern goolag prison camps, police state, open
(14:38):
air prisons, fenced off into silent zones. There was like
talk of climate lockdown, climate tyranny, confinement, dystopia, urban incarceration.
I could go on and on and on.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Okay, And someone talks about this on the floor of
Parliament right.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Right, So there was a British PM that got involved.
He goes on the floor and he calls it, I
think an international socialist concept that is going to cost
our personal freedom. And this is something that has threads
starting before the pandem but these fears intensify with COVID nineteen.
So a lot of this is is stemming from valid
(15:17):
anxieties about locked down and quarantine and not being able
to go where you want to go. And then that
kind of ties in with climate deniers who say that
the government use the pandemic as an excuse to lock
people down so that they could advance their eco friendly
global warming initiatives. It's a big complicated mess. It's like
(15:42):
a sudden, horrible global convention of extremists and conspiracy theorists
just converging on like a single, really benign topic.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
We've talked about this on podcasts before. I'm still confused
by it. The elites are planning the Great Reset, which
is actually like the title of some World Economic Forum
Davo's presentation during COVID. That's where they get the name
of Great Reset. And the Great Reset pens people into
small areas where they will own nothing and be happy,
(16:11):
and they will have to eat bugs. I do not
understand this plan, Like what is in it for the elites?
Like what how does that benefit the people controlling.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
The world control power? All these amorphous ideas that conspiracy
theories like to clean to. I mean, none of these
ideas make any sense. If they hear a thought from
someone else and they can work its way into the
existing theory, they'll do that. I mean, conspiracy theories are
connected to many other conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Quanon was saying after the Oxford protests that the people
behind fifteen minute Cities were the ones that caused the
Ohio train derailment because it was a plan to move
everyone from their rural homes into the city and then
they could be locked in there.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Oh oh, that's stuff. It's starting to make sense to
me that you would cordon off people and control them
like you were Stalin or pol pot or something. You're
just trying to like, it's just about power and control, control,
but power and control over a pretty crappy little world.
I don't know. I'm not into it. I don't want
to try.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
You would never cut it as Pulpotter, Stalin or Hitler
any reason.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
But then there's this tweet.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
There is this tweet from from Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
That's a weak description of Jordan Peterson, who is Jordan
Peterson in popular culture.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Jordan Peterson is a men's right activist who is really
a conspiracy theorist in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
He was the guy who told guys that they had
to make their bed and start being responsible because men
were in such bad shape, and he gained a lot
of followers.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So Jordan Peterson tweets in December that the idea that
neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely, the idea that idiot
tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fia where you're allowed to
drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea.
And make no mistake, it's part of a well documented plan.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
So all these conspiracy theorists start to point towards one man,
and it's not Soro's or Biden, it's our.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Friend Carlos moreno O.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
That is rough. He can't see this coming.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
He absolutely does not. He spends four decades working pretty
peacefully and quietly on his ideas about robotics and urban planning.
And you know, he's He's won some awards, he's well
respected in the industry, but he is by no means
a household name. He is not used at all to
(18:47):
the level of attention that he suddenly gets this year
from conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
What format does that take.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
He's getting emails, he's getting social media messages. He was
saying things like, I feel like I'm living in a
bad movie. This is a crazy world. He quoted a
philosopher which was very on brand for Carlos, saying ignorance
leads to fear, Fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads
to violence. This is the equation. And he's saying this
(19:17):
because he's getting these horrible, aggressive, hostile messages from total strangers.
I mean, I'll read you some of the snippets. This
madman must be killed, stupid prick. He should be flattened
by a cement roll, or he should be nailed into
a coffin. He sent me one that was written in
(19:37):
Spanish that called Carlos Maldita kukraca restrera and I'm like,
what the hell does that mean? It means damn crawling cockroach.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And it probably fuels the conspiracy theorists that he used
to be a communist. I mean, that fits right in
with their theory.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right, that's definitely come up that he is somehow an
agent of the left because of his gorilla past. Again,
I'm not entirely clear on what the logic there is,
but that was definitely a message he had gotten, the
getting death threats against himself, against his family. He went
(20:13):
to Argentina a few weeks ago for a conference. It
was public and it was out in the open air.
He said he had to be put under police protection.
So for a guy who is used to talking to
other academics and other researchers, he is totally unprepared to
deal with this, So it's a total shock.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, and he's not a politician, he's just some guy
who came with the idea like the university can't be
set up to protect professors.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, he said this to me. He said, I'm not
equipped for this. He said, the university is not equipped
to deal with this. And this is a case for
a lot of people in his position, people who are
more or less anonymous researchers, who are suddenly getting slammed
by harassment.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Right, I mean, now that everything's political, this must be
happening to professors everywhere who deal with like anything that's
become political, like climate research or COVID research.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
There are so many incredibly distressing stories of especially COVID
researchers recently, who have had to go into hiding. You know,
there was one woman in Austria. She was a vaccine
advocate and she committed suitside during the pandemic. It was
just getting too much, the threats, to the harassment, the
(21:30):
online abuse.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
This is the worst kind of fame. You're not famous
to anyone except people who hate you.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Right, and those people are very good at coordinating their attacks,
and many of them are anonymous, so they don't face
repercussions normally.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
God, it sucks to be a professor right now.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Totally. It's especially dangerous now because so many social media
safeguards are disappearing. There's this broader erosion of trusts in
experts and institutions, and conspiracy theorists know that instead of
debating that zero or carbon taxation policies is on their merits,
it's so much easy, easier to try to discredit the
(22:11):
people who are championing those ideas. So people like Carlos
are easier targets than what it is he's proposing.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Right to debate over how much carbon there should be
in the atmosphere is not what this is about. This
is about who gets to control the world under what worldview? Right?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
I mean, that's sort of rhetoric. Is what resonates with
people who are already afraid. And you know, after the pandemic,
people were already on guard against anything that suggested that
their personal freedoms would be restricted, no.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Less their cars. You do not mess with people's trucks
and cars.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Never.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Never. That's what freedom means. I mean, that's what I
was taught in the eighties. That's what Springsteen taught.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Me anything, Springsteen says, goes.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Are people dropping the fifteen minute city concept now that
there's been so much anger.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Leveled at it, there may be a chilling effect for
communities that want to adopt it down the line, Right,
why would we want to deal with hordes of streamists
or really even just average citizens we're going to protest
and picket at our board meetings. You just don't have
to deal with this right now. Ideas like this that
really could help with sustainability efforts, they just won't get
(23:25):
off the ground because.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
With the harassment Planning commission? Why would you ever want
to talk about this when there's like a thousand other
things that no one cares about that you can work on.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Right, there's always the risk that this no longer is
a priority because of the harassment that's associated with it.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, you don't get on a city planning commission to
like get to battle with people. Yeah, no, you go
there to be a walk right and no.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Exactly, you don't get into this job to have people
screaming in your face about how your totalitarian dictator, if
you're fauci, if your bill gates, fine, you know you
are equipped for this sort of thing. You know that
your visibility is going to make you a target. But
so many of the researchers and academics and professors who
(24:12):
are getting it full force now they didn't expect it.
They're not ready for it, and it has really hurt them.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
This conspiracy theory about fifteen minute cities. I'm not hearing
anything about drinking children's blood, or pedophiles or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
So that links in because the members of the New
World Order or the elite of all are the ones
who are often associated with the children's blood drinking, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Oh, that's just a perk once you put people in
fifteen minute cities, the baby blood.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Maybe maybe it gives you easier access. Right already, sixy fly.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Totally, they're right there. You don't have to go more
than fifteen minutes to get your baby blood. There you go,
Tiffany Shu, you wrote he wanted to unclog cities. Now
he's public enemy number one for the New York Times.
Thank you so much for coming on and explaining so
much of the world to me.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
You're welcome. You're always welcome.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Okay. According to the rules, I am supposed to be
able to walk in fifteen minutes to work, leisure, shopping, education,
and healthcare. So I'm gonna give it a shot. Live
right next to a park, Griffith Park. There's something you
definitely want in your city, big park. Oh there's the
(25:27):
American Film Institute. The education that counts, right. I don't
think this is explicitly on the list, but I'm walking
by a couple kissing up in the grass. I mean
they're going out of pretty good. It's only six minutes in.
This is impressive, all right. There is a bask In
Robin's ice Cream, my least favorite ice cream chain. I
(25:50):
think they really get by on claiming to have a
lot of flavors, which you know that doesn't make a
good ice cream store. I don't need that many flavors,
or rather have good ice cream than like bubble gum
ice I do like I do like the bubble gum
ice cream. Maybe I should get some bubble gum ice cream.
I've got everything in fifteen minutes. A ralph supermarket, real
(26:11):
estate agent, a dentist. There's a dentist up here the supermarket. Huh,
why don't even known the car? This is great? La
gets a really bad rap. Maybe it's because none of
us walk and find out what's here. Yeah, we deserve it.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
At the end of the show, what's next for Joe Stein?
Maybe you'll take a naple poke around online.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Our show is produced by Joey fish Ground, Mola Board
and Nishavenka. It was edited by Lydia jeden Kot. Our
engineer is Amantha kay Wang, and our executive producer is
catharinal Cheradoh. Our theme song was produced by Jonathan Colton.
A special thanks to my voice coach Picky Merrick and
my consulting producer Laurence Alasni. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
(27:03):
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your podcast. I'm Joel Stein and this is
story of the Week. Where does this rank compared to
other insane conspiracy theory threats that you've written about?
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Oh man, I've written about a lot of insane conspiracy theories.
I just wrote a story about the demon horse of
the Denver Airport, and well.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
You wrote that story. We were also considering doing that story.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It's so funny. You want to just do a two
for now?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, I'm so sorry. I suck with bylines, which makes
me really bad at this job. You did a whole
story about the Denver Airport, but it centers around this
sculpture of a horse.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
And the storyline was that you walked through an opening
in the horses genitals and it was a portal for
like aliens and monsters and other like supernatural beings. I
had a guy email me after the story ran saying
that every time he drove his three young kids past
(28:07):
that statue, he would tell them that once a day
he would shoot lasers out of its eyes and vaporize
a car. He didn't tell me how much he's now
paying for therapy for his kids.
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
I'm Tiffany schu and I wrote he wanted to unclog cities.
Now he's public Enemy number one for the New York
Times and it's the story of the week.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
Sometime last year, I started to see people declare online
this really weird sentence, I will not eat the bugs.
I thought this was strange because these were adults, and
people over ten don't usually declare that they will not
eat something. So after some searching, I found out why
(00:50):
people were talking about eating bugs. The place I found
this information, to my surprise, was anti COVID vaccine websites.
Anti vaxxers argued that the lockdown, mask mandates and vaccination
cards were the beginning of an elite engineered authoritarian dystopia,
and part of this brief new world will involve forced
(01:14):
insect eating. These elites will use climate change as an
excuse to drive ranchers out of their land so they
can buy it up cheap, and then will be left
eating bugs, which will make us weak and easy to manipulate.
I don't buy this at all. Every single person I've
met who's eating grasshopper tacos or bowls of fried crickets
(01:36):
are tough as hell, and yes I've had them both.
Writing is hard.
Speaker 3 (01:48):
Who's got that kind of time when you're already busy
trying to be don't stand so it turns on a mic?
Maybe the twiddles enop because a journalist trand has got
in that jul job out of single story. Just listen
to smart people speak, conversation, film information, this storre.
Speaker 1 (02:20):
Tiffany Shue is a reporter who covers conspiracy theories for
The New York Times. She found out what's really behind
the elite's plan to imprison us in Waldorf. Area is
called fifteen minute cities. So, Tiffany, do you live in
a fifteen minute city? Where are you?
Speaker 2 (02:36):
I'm in a little town in the East Bay near
San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (02:41):
You in Fremont? Are you in Piedmont? Where are you?
Speaker 2 (02:44):
You know? I actually prefer not to say, because I
deal with so many crazies in my work.
Speaker 1 (02:48):
Oh are you GI mean me?
Speaker 2 (02:50):
I don't know yet. We haven't talked for very long.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
Okay, Well, how long does it take you to get
to like a coffee shop or a grocery store or
a drug dealer?
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I mean, if I if I'm driving, it takes two minutes.
If I'm walking, I could get there in twenty but
I'm a very slow walker.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
So you live in a twenty minut Yeah, your story
is about this professor in France who came up with
this idea of the fifteen minute city.
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Yeah. So this this guy's named Carlos Moreno. He's a
professor at the University of Paris one Pentheon.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Sorbon, which is not the Sorbun.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
Right, it is not the Sorbun. There are apparently many, many,
many different variations of universities with the name Sorbun in them.
He has a long and varied career. He started working
as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab
in nineteen eighty three. This was after he moved to
(03:46):
Paris from Colombia, which is where he was born. He
moved over to France as a political refugee when he
was twenty.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
Oh why was he a political refugee?
Speaker 2 (03:56):
When he was very young, he spent some time with
the April nineteenth leftist movement.
Speaker 1 (04:01):
So they were like communist gorillas, right, taking on the
SI right wing party there, right? Oh wow, Okay, so
he was in this gorilla movement and he had to
he had to leave Columbia, but he chose Paris.
Speaker 2 (04:12):
There are worse options, yes.
Speaker 1 (04:14):
Yeah, And so what did he start doing in France?
Speaker 2 (04:17):
He goes to school and then in nineteen eighty three
he starts working as a researcher. He's worked in fields
like automotive, medical, nuclear, military. He says that he helped
create the first robot vacuum cleaner. He was doing some
home goods work.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Will you sound like you don't believe him?
Speaker 2 (04:36):
I mean, I don't know too much about the history
of robot vacuum cleaning.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
Do you have one?
Speaker 2 (04:42):
We have a rumba.
Speaker 1 (04:43):
Yeah, it's amazing, right, like as good as this fifteen
minute city idea. It's not as good as the rumba.
Speaker 2 (04:48):
No, no, no, I mean the baby's terrified of it.
But maybe that's a good thing. She needs to tough enough.
Speaker 1 (04:53):
So what's he like as a person?
Speaker 2 (04:55):
He's lovely. I mean, we had a zoom with him
when I was reporting the story and he shows up.
He's wearing he's wearing that stereotypical French black turtleneck. He's
got the glasses on, he's got that lovely axe, and
he's just like a lovely professorial type.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
So he comes up with this idea of the fifteen
minute city.
Speaker 2 (05:18):
Not that long ago, right, Yeah, So in twenty ten
he starts thinking about sustainable and tech empowered cities and
eventually that idea gets refined into this twenty sixteen proposal
for fifteen minute cities. And the idea is extremely straightforward,
that residents should be within a fifteen minute walk, bike ride,
(05:41):
or public transportation trip to all the daily necessities that
they need grocery stores, parks, schools, workplaces, medical care, that
sort of thing.
Speaker 1 (05:50):
A walk or bike those seem like very different fifteen minutes.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
Yeah, The idea is just to give people closer accessibility
to the things that they need in their lives. And
the hope is that you're not using a car.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
So is it a climate change thing or it could
be a traffic thing, or is it a way to
have people socially connect instead of be lonely? Like, what
is the main point of the fifteen minute city?
Speaker 2 (06:13):
So Carlos Moreno makes a point to not call it
a climate change idea or an antiqu car idea. He
always likes to say that it's about making things easier
for the person and the added benefit of that is
that it helps the environment because it limits the amount
of time that you're spending in a car.
Speaker 1 (06:35):
So where did Carlos Marino get this idea for the
fifteen minute city.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
It's based on more than a century of related thinking,
stretching back through the eighteen hundreds, neighborhood units, garden cities,
there's a new urbanism and walkable cities in the nineteen nineties,
basically anything that was proposed by the urban activist Jane
Jacobs in the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Now, I know, we did this episode on this group
called buy Nothing. People got pissed off because they thought
that would just increase gentrification. That you know, if you
kept people in their area, the rich people would get
to do all their rich things and the poor people
would be kept out of it. That's a concern I
assume with fifteen minute cities, that you know, you're asking
people with less money to stay in their part of
(07:21):
the city.
Speaker 2 (07:22):
Yeah, I mean, that's exactly the criticism, which is that
if only certain areas get the benefits of a fifteen
minute neighborhood, then they obviously become more desirable, and then
poor people get priced out, and you know, of course,
if you're a marginalized community, you're probably going to be
hesitant about amenities that, in your experience are spurring gentrification
and displacement. And this is especially the case in the
(07:45):
US because of the way American cities are designed, because
you would need so much money and so much effort
to rejigger an American city into a fifteen minute format.
Speaker 1 (07:54):
Okay, is anyone adopting this or who's into this fifty
minute city idea?
Speaker 2 (08:00):
Many, many people are into this. The Parisian mayor and
id Algo made it like a core tenant of her
reelection camp in twenty twenty, which you won. More than
one hundred mayors that are part of this group called
the Sea forty mayors. They all adopted it.
Speaker 1 (08:17):
It should only be forty mayors. You would think, this
is my conspiracy theory. There's something wrong with the Sea forty.
Speaker 2 (08:23):
There are sixty mayors that are being suppressed somehow, they're
not being represented.
Speaker 1 (08:28):
Okay, So there's one hundred mayors who are into this
idea right right?
Speaker 2 (08:31):
And you know, there are different variations of this, and
there have been for a while, Like Portland has twenty
minute neighborhoods, Barcelona has these superblocks that are like nine
block chunks. Sweden has a one minute city.
Speaker 1 (08:44):
One minute city.
Speaker 2 (08:45):
Yeah, one minute city?
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Is that just your house? I think I've been living
in a one minute city for since the pandemic.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Started in Sweden. The idea is that residents of a
single street can design how much space on that street
is used for public services like parking, so it's like
a single street.
Speaker 1 (09:00):
Oh okay. So they went to implement this fifteen minute
city idea in Oxford in England, home of the of
the college. What was their plan on how to do this?
Speaker 2 (09:11):
So the Oxford situation is pretty complicated.
Speaker 1 (09:13):
And insane completely, but we'll get to that, okay. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The Oxfordshire County Council had championed this idea called low
Traffic Neighborhoods. That's LTNs for short.
Speaker 1 (09:27):
And I I already don't like it once you abbreviate stuff.
Speaker 2 (09:30):
Yeah, the alphabet soup is not great. But you know
they're not marketers, they're their city planners. And the idea
is that you'd have to get a permit to drive
through certain areas at certain times of day, and that's
enforced by cameras. Right, So it's the same principle as
like a red light camera, which is unfortunately something I'm
very familiar with.
Speaker 1 (09:48):
Oh you gotten a lot tickets.
Speaker 2 (09:50):
I mean I live in the bar area.
Speaker 1 (09:52):
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:52):
The idea in Oxford County was that you would kind
of limit the number of cars that were moving through
high traffic areas and certain times of day, and that
would help with congestion, It would help with traffic flow,
it would be a little bit cleaner for the environment.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
So you have a certain amount of times you're allowed
to leave your zone per.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Year or no. No, I mean you can travel wherever,
wherever you want. It's just that they are using this
to encourage you to avoid traversing through certain areas at
certain times of day. If you really want to go through,
you can go through. They're not stopping you. They're no
physical barriers. It's more of a permitting system so they
can better keep track of how many cars are moving
(10:36):
through like a specific space at a specific time. And
I think there is a fine system in place if
you're going through too often.
Speaker 1 (10:45):
Okay, so you can go a certain amount of times.
If you go too many, you get fined.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
That's my understanding.
Speaker 1 (10:49):
And what if you live like right near the border,
and you're like, you know, your sick mom is on
the other side of the border.
Speaker 2 (10:56):
I think the hope is maybe you walk, maybe you
take a bike, maybe take public transit, you know.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
Okay, And people did not love this idea.
Speaker 2 (11:07):
Some people love the idea, but many, many people did
not love the idea. There was a two thousand person
protest in Oxford in February by people who took the
idea out of context and then conflated it with a
separate idea. And this is where it gets a little
bit complicated.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
Okay, Wait, are these Oxford Shurians or are these people
who are coming from elsewhere to protests, because that's a
lot of people.
Speaker 2 (11:32):
No. So this is one of the interesting things about
this particular case, which is that so many people who
have had no prior connection to Oxford suddenly show up
in the debate. There were researchers who were saying that
there was evidence that people had been kind of bussed
in from outside the area to protests, that there were
political groups that have nothing to do with Oxford. There
(11:55):
was this idea that all of a sudden, this Oxfordshire
concept had blown up into a national or international outrage.
Speaker 1 (12:04):
Yeah, this was a huge deal considering like Oxford, I've
never been there, is it as small as I want
it to be? And as everyone dressed in like the
robes and the cardboard hats, it looks like Harry.
Speaker 2 (12:15):
Potter is I've never been. But it's not a big place.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
Okay, And what are they pissed off about?
Speaker 2 (12:23):
So a lot of these people showed up and they're
waving signs saying, you know, no to the fifteen minute city,
which is ridiculous because what is happening in Oxford County
has nothing to do with the fifteen minute city. Low
traffic neighborhoods are not fifteen minute cities. They're completely different.
One concept is concerned with limiting cars. The other concept
(12:44):
is focused on bringing daily necessities closer to residents. So
Oxford City Council had cited the fifteen minute City as
an inspiration for its like grand vision of the city
in twenty four that's where the mixup comes from.
Speaker 1 (12:59):
So they have a plan to be a fifteen minute
city in twenty forty, which is like a second in
Oxford time. But for now they're just reducing traffic. Two
thousand people protest this, but they're worried about more than
just this rule. They think this is part of a
bigger plan.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
Right, the conspiracy theorists get involved.
Speaker 1 (13:20):
This is your stuff, right, Like you cover conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 2 (13:23):
You see your face starting right eliplically. Yeah. There's this
one tweet from an architecture professor that showed up around
this time, and he said, if I had to guess
what would be the batchitt conspiracy theory of twenty twenty three,
I would have never guessed it would be town planning
where you can walk to the shops.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
When we come back, all these conspiracy theorists are going
to attack a meek old man who is not at
all prepared for it. But first our advertisers are going
to tell you about this cool new electric bike with
zero carbon emissions. Oh god, the socialists have come for
us too. Okay, So there's this conspiracy theory about fifty
(14:09):
minute cities. They're afraid that these are little prisons that
they're fencing people into in order to control them. Is
that the.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
Facily what happened in Oxford, It's like they cracked open
the conspiracy theory Bible and started listing off every entry
related to government control. I mean, you had people at
this protest who were accusing the county or the city
whatever of like surveillance, a movement restriction. They were calling
it like a modern goolag prison camps, police state, open
(14:38):
air prisons, fenced off into silent zones. There was like
talk of climate lockdown, climate tyranny, confinement, dystopia, urban incarceration.
I could go on and on and on.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
Okay, And someone talks about this on the floor of
Parliament right.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Right, So there was a British PM that got involved.
He goes on the floor and he calls it, I
think an international socialist concept that is going to cost
our personal freedom. And this is something that has threads
starting before the pandem but these fears intensify with COVID nineteen.
So a lot of this is is stemming from valid
(15:17):
anxieties about locked down and quarantine and not being able
to go where you want to go. And then that
kind of ties in with climate deniers who say that
the government use the pandemic as an excuse to lock
people down so that they could advance their eco friendly
global warming initiatives. It's a big complicated mess. It's like
(15:42):
a sudden, horrible global convention of extremists and conspiracy theorists
just converging on like a single, really benign topic.
Speaker 1 (15:50):
We've talked about this on podcasts before. I'm still confused
by it. The elites are planning the Great Reset, which
is actually like the title of some World Economic Forum
Davo's presentation during COVID. That's where they get the name
of Great Reset. And the Great Reset pens people into
small areas where they will own nothing and be happy,
(16:11):
and they will have to eat bugs. I do not
understand this plan, Like what is in it for the elites?
Like what how does that benefit the people controlling.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
The world control power? All these amorphous ideas that conspiracy
theories like to clean to. I mean, none of these
ideas make any sense. If they hear a thought from
someone else and they can work its way into the
existing theory, they'll do that. I mean, conspiracy theories are
connected to many other conspiracy theories.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
You know.
Speaker 2 (16:39):
Quanon was saying after the Oxford protests that the people
behind fifteen minute Cities were the ones that caused the
Ohio train derailment because it was a plan to move
everyone from their rural homes into the city and then
they could be locked in there.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Oh oh, that's stuff. It's starting to make sense to
me that you would cordon off people and control them
like you were Stalin or pol pot or something. You're
just trying to like, it's just about power and control, control,
but power and control over a pretty crappy little world.
I don't know. I'm not into it. I don't want
to try.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
You would never cut it as Pulpotter, Stalin or Hitler
any reason.
Speaker 1 (17:24):
But then there's this tweet.
Speaker 2 (17:25):
There is this tweet from from Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist.
Speaker 1 (17:31):
That's a weak description of Jordan Peterson, who is Jordan
Peterson in popular culture.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
Jordan Peterson is a men's right activist who is really
a conspiracy theorist in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1 (17:41):
He was the guy who told guys that they had
to make their bed and start being responsible because men
were in such bad shape, and he gained a lot
of followers.
Speaker 2 (17:50):
So Jordan Peterson tweets in December that the idea that
neighborhoods should be walkable is lovely, the idea that idiot
tyrannical bureaucrats can decide by fia where you're allowed to
drive is perhaps the worst imaginable perversion of that idea.
And make no mistake, it's part of a well documented plan.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
So all these conspiracy theorists start to point towards one man,
and it's not Soro's or Biden, it's our.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
Friend Carlos moreno O.
Speaker 1 (18:21):
That is rough. He can't see this coming.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
He absolutely does not. He spends four decades working pretty
peacefully and quietly on his ideas about robotics and urban planning.
And you know, he's He's won some awards, he's well
respected in the industry, but he is by no means
a household name. He is not used at all to
(18:47):
the level of attention that he suddenly gets this year
from conspiracy theorists.
Speaker 1 (18:52):
What format does that take.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
He's getting emails, he's getting social media messages. He was
saying things like, I feel like I'm living in a
bad movie. This is a crazy world. He quoted a
philosopher which was very on brand for Carlos, saying ignorance
leads to fear, Fear leads to hatred, and hatred leads
to violence. This is the equation. And he's saying this
(19:17):
because he's getting these horrible, aggressive, hostile messages from total strangers.
I mean, I'll read you some of the snippets. This
madman must be killed, stupid prick. He should be flattened
by a cement roll, or he should be nailed into
a coffin. He sent me one that was written in
(19:37):
Spanish that called Carlos Maldita kukraca restrera and I'm like,
what the hell does that mean? It means damn crawling cockroach.
Speaker 1 (19:46):
And it probably fuels the conspiracy theorists that he used
to be a communist. I mean, that fits right in
with their theory.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
Right, that's definitely come up that he is somehow an
agent of the left because of his gorilla past. Again,
I'm not entirely clear on what the logic there is,
but that was definitely a message he had gotten, the
getting death threats against himself, against his family. He went
(20:13):
to Argentina a few weeks ago for a conference. It
was public and it was out in the open air.
He said he had to be put under police protection.
So for a guy who is used to talking to
other academics and other researchers, he is totally unprepared to
deal with this, So it's a total shock.
Speaker 1 (20:35):
Yeah, and he's not a politician, he's just some guy
who came with the idea like the university can't be
set up to protect professors.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, he said this to me. He said, I'm not
equipped for this. He said, the university is not equipped
to deal with this. And this is a case for
a lot of people in his position, people who are
more or less anonymous researchers, who are suddenly getting slammed
by harassment.
Speaker 1 (20:59):
Right, I mean, now that everything's political, this must be
happening to professors everywhere who deal with like anything that's
become political, like climate research or COVID research.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
There are so many incredibly distressing stories of especially COVID
researchers recently, who have had to go into hiding. You know,
there was one woman in Austria. She was a vaccine
advocate and she committed suitside during the pandemic. It was
just getting too much, the threats, to the harassment, the
(21:30):
online abuse.
Speaker 1 (21:31):
This is the worst kind of fame. You're not famous
to anyone except people who hate you.
Speaker 2 (21:37):
Right, and those people are very good at coordinating their attacks,
and many of them are anonymous, so they don't face
repercussions normally.
Speaker 1 (21:47):
God, it sucks to be a professor right now.
Speaker 2 (21:49):
Totally. It's especially dangerous now because so many social media
safeguards are disappearing. There's this broader erosion of trusts in
experts and institutions, and conspiracy theorists know that instead of
debating that zero or carbon taxation policies is on their merits,
it's so much easy, easier to try to discredit the
(22:11):
people who are championing those ideas. So people like Carlos
are easier targets than what it is he's proposing.
Speaker 1 (22:20):
Right to debate over how much carbon there should be
in the atmosphere is not what this is about. This
is about who gets to control the world under what worldview? Right?
Speaker 2 (22:30):
I mean, that's sort of rhetoric. Is what resonates with
people who are already afraid. And you know, after the pandemic,
people were already on guard against anything that suggested that
their personal freedoms would be restricted, no.
Speaker 1 (22:45):
Less their cars. You do not mess with people's trucks
and cars.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
Never.
Speaker 1 (22:48):
Never. That's what freedom means. I mean, that's what I
was taught in the eighties. That's what Springsteen taught.
Speaker 2 (22:52):
Me anything, Springsteen says, goes.
Speaker 1 (22:55):
Are people dropping the fifteen minute city concept now that
there's been so much anger.
Speaker 2 (23:00):
Leveled at it, there may be a chilling effect for
communities that want to adopt it down the line, Right,
why would we want to deal with hordes of streamists
or really even just average citizens we're going to protest
and picket at our board meetings. You just don't have
to deal with this right now. Ideas like this that
really could help with sustainability efforts, they just won't get
(23:25):
off the ground because.
Speaker 1 (23:28):
With the harassment Planning commission? Why would you ever want
to talk about this when there's like a thousand other
things that no one cares about that you can work on.
Speaker 2 (23:35):
Right, there's always the risk that this no longer is
a priority because of the harassment that's associated with it.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Yeah, you don't get on a city planning commission to
like get to battle with people. Yeah, no, you go
there to be a walk right and no.
Speaker 2 (23:50):
Exactly, you don't get into this job to have people
screaming in your face about how your totalitarian dictator, if
you're fauci, if your bill gates, fine, you know you
are equipped for this sort of thing. You know that
your visibility is going to make you a target. But
so many of the researchers and academics and professors who
(24:12):
are getting it full force now they didn't expect it.
They're not ready for it, and it has really hurt them.
Speaker 1 (24:20):
This conspiracy theory about fifteen minute cities. I'm not hearing
anything about drinking children's blood, or pedophiles or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (24:27):
So that links in because the members of the New
World Order or the elite of all are the ones
who are often associated with the children's blood drinking, et cetera.
Speaker 1 (24:39):
Oh, that's just a perk once you put people in
fifteen minute cities, the baby blood.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
Maybe maybe it gives you easier access. Right already, sixy fly.
Speaker 1 (24:46):
Totally, they're right there. You don't have to go more
than fifteen minutes to get your baby blood. There you go,
Tiffany Shu, you wrote he wanted to unclog cities. Now
he's public enemy number one for the New York Times.
Thank you so much for coming on and explaining so
much of the world to me.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
You're welcome. You're always welcome.
Speaker 1 (25:06):
Okay. According to the rules, I am supposed to be
able to walk in fifteen minutes to work, leisure, shopping, education,
and healthcare. So I'm gonna give it a shot. Live
right next to a park, Griffith Park. There's something you
definitely want in your city, big park. Oh there's the
(25:27):
American Film Institute. The education that counts, right. I don't
think this is explicitly on the list, but I'm walking
by a couple kissing up in the grass. I mean
they're going out of pretty good. It's only six minutes in.
This is impressive, all right. There is a bask In
Robin's ice Cream, my least favorite ice cream chain. I
(25:50):
think they really get by on claiming to have a
lot of flavors, which you know that doesn't make a
good ice cream store. I don't need that many flavors,
or rather have good ice cream than like bubble gum
ice I do like I do like the bubble gum
ice cream. Maybe I should get some bubble gum ice cream.
I've got everything in fifteen minutes. A ralph supermarket, real
(26:11):
estate agent, a dentist. There's a dentist up here the supermarket. Huh,
why don't even known the car? This is great? La
gets a really bad rap. Maybe it's because none of
us walk and find out what's here. Yeah, we deserve it.
Speaker 3 (26:32):
At the end of the show, what's next for Joe Stein?
Maybe you'll take a naple poke around online.
Speaker 1 (26:40):
Our show is produced by Joey fish Ground, Mola Board
and Nishavenka. It was edited by Lydia jeden Kot. Our
engineer is Amantha kay Wang, and our executive producer is
catharinal Cheradoh. Our theme song was produced by Jonathan Colton.
A special thanks to my voice coach Picky Merrick and
my consulting producer Laurence Alasni. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
(27:03):
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
listen to your podcast. I'm Joel Stein and this is
story of the Week. Where does this rank compared to
other insane conspiracy theory threats that you've written about?
Speaker 2 (27:21):
Oh man, I've written about a lot of insane conspiracy theories.
I just wrote a story about the demon horse of
the Denver Airport, and well.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
You wrote that story. We were also considering doing that story.
Speaker 2 (27:33):
It's so funny. You want to just do a two
for now?
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, I'm so sorry. I suck with bylines, which makes
me really bad at this job. You did a whole
story about the Denver Airport, but it centers around this
sculpture of a horse.
Speaker 2 (27:46):
And the storyline was that you walked through an opening
in the horses genitals and it was a portal for
like aliens and monsters and other like supernatural beings. I
had a guy email me after the story ran saying
that every time he drove his three young kids past
(28:07):
that statue, he would tell them that once a day
he would shoot lasers out of its eyes and vaporize
a car. He didn't tell me how much he's now
paying for therapy for his kids.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.