Latest / Doug Has Questions / Episode 6: Gershon Cohen; From Philly To The Fjords

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Episode 6: Gershon Cohen; From Philly To The Fjords · Doug Has Questions

• 0:00
  Douglas: Thanks for joining us for this episode of Doug Hands Questions.
• 0:03
  Douglas: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe.
• 0:07
  Douglas: We're available if you want to watch us on uh YouTube or if you just want to listen to the podcast version on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and each episode goes live on Thursday morning.
• 0:20
  Douglas: So I hope you enjoy this episode and we're happy to have you listening.
• 0:25
  Douglas: I'd like to welcome everybody to this uh episode of Doug Has Questions.
• 0:30
  Douglas: My guest today is Gershon Cohen, I believe founder of Alaska Clean Water Alliance.
• 0:36
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 0:36
  Douglas: Yep, and uh longtime Haynes resident.
• 0:39
  Douglas: 42 years.
• 0:40
  Douglas: 42 years.
• 0:41
  Douglas: It's a couple years.
• 0:42
  Douglas: A few?
• 0:43
  Douglas: Yeah, yeah, that'll work.
• 0:44
  Douglas: And so we're looking forward to um talking to him about his upbringing, what brought him to Haynes, and then he's been very involved in clean water, environmental issues here in the community and throughout Alaska, and so talk about that journey with him and whatever other topics we uh might turn into.
• 1:01
  Douglas: Appreciate you joining me, Gersham.
• 1:02
  Douglas: Thank you, Doug.
• 1:03
  Douglas: Always a pleasure.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: So growing up, where where did Gershen grow up at?
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: Uh Gershen grew up in North Philly.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_01: North Philly.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh couldn't be much more different than this and still be in the same country for sure.
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, maybe even the same continent.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um uh very inner city.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: Um every once in a blue moon, you'd see a squirrel, uh, maybe a rat.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, you know, uh, we didn't have any wildlife at all.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and certainly didn't grow up around any water or fish, interestingly enough, considering what I've been working on for a long time.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um I uh was there for my formative years and then uh and left to go to uh basically a a year before college, but went to college in California.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: And uh spent a number of years down in Southern California at some of the UC schools, and uh got a job after grad school in Oregon uh at OSU in the uh uh Department of Veterinary Medicine doing organine toxicology.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_01: And and I was living in uh Eugene area, Corvallis, Eugene area there for about four or five years, uh, which is where I met Kyrie, my wife.
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_01: And a friend of mine uh said, I'm going on a LARK here.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going up to Alaska this summer to be an observer in the foreign fishing fleet for NOAA.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: Where our job is gonna be to make sure nobody catches things they're not supposed to catch.
• 2:40
  SPEAKER_01: King crab, halibut, whatever, right?
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_01: And um and he convinced me to go along.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if I could have found Alaska on the map.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and I for real, because Was that a Dutch harbor then?
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Was that a Dutch harbor?
• 2:55
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_01: They flew me up to Dutch.
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, they had to teach me what fish looked like.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: You know, they were looking for warm bodies, and I mean I had a biology background, but um but I didn't know anything about what year was that that you were heading up there?
• 3:11
  Douglas: 80.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_01: 1980, heading out to heading out to Dutch Harbor to go out on a Korean stern trawler.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um first time I'd ever been on a boat.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: That's a pretty big step.
• 3:23
  Douglas: Uh from never being on a boat to going out into the Bering Sea?
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_01: I actually didn't realize just how big a step that was gonna be, to be on that review.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: I found out moments after as we pulled out, and I realized, oh my gosh, I've got uh I've got some issues here.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um and after a couple of days, I was able to get out of my cabin.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: And um and then I was okay after that and uh had quite an experience of that, but but basically uh that trip to Alaska just blew me away.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've been living in Oregon for a few years, for five years, and um Oregon was just the most incredible place I'd ever seen.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know, comparing that to Southern California, which is very developed, comparing that to Philadelphia, which was very developed, right?
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and then here's Alaska that just made Oregon, I mean, it was just like Oregon on steroids.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_01: And and so I got back and um and then within the year uh Carrie and I decided uh we wanted to come back, we wanted to come up to Alaska.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_01: And um my roommate in grad school was uh actually doing a job up in the Fairbanks area at that time, and we decided to come up and see him and just see what happened.
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: And we got on the ferry in Seattle and came up and uh and actually the the story is that uh we got off in Juneau back then.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_01: You could get on and off the ferries, right?
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we got off in Juneau and the engine on our VW bus blew up, and so we moved to Juneau.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_01: We couldn't leave, we had no vehicle, so we that's how we moved to southeast Alaska.
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: Um and and then we got uh we got married there, and friends said, Oh, you you know, you should go up to Haynes.
• 5:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we were doing ceramic work at the time, both of us, uh professionally, and they said there's a lot of artists up there, you know, you know, you should go up there and check that area out, and we did, and we've been here ever since.
• 5:28
  Douglas: And so that was 83?
• 5:29
  Douglas: 83, yeah.
• 5:30
  Douglas: 83 you got to Haynes.
• 5:31
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 5:32
  Douglas: Okay, so backtracking a little bit.
• 5:33
  Douglas: When you're growing up in kind of inner city Philadelphia, yeah.
• 5:37
  Douglas: What what did your parents do?
• 5:39
  Douglas: What what did they have for occupation or whatever as you were growing up?
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: My father is a mathematician.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: Um he worked on the ENIAC, the first computer uh University of Pennsylvania.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: He was part of the team that built the ENIAC.
• 5:55
  SPEAKER_01: Um my mom, uh housewife with uh a lot of art talent, but uh she just uh was mom, stay-at-home mom.
• 6:03
  SPEAKER_01: And um family um going back a little further, you know, they're we're from Ukraine area, um, and uh came over uh early.
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: Most of my family, the ones that got out, got out in the early 1900s and came to Philadelphia.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: There were some cousins who landed there, and then a few others came over.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_01: And so everybody who got out, that's where they ended up was Philadelphia.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so we had, you know, and then I lived in a neighborhood in Philadelphia that was uh mostly folks from that part of the world.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_01: So it was actually quite um it was quite isolated really in its own way, uh, culturally.
• 6:42
  Douglas: Isn't that interesting when you get these big cities?
• 6:44
  Douglas: There are they're really a lot of them, especially on the east coast, I think.
• 6:48
  Douglas: There's some on the some on the west coast as well, but very ethnically oriented.
• 6:52
  Douglas: That when you come over, that's your neighborhood.
• 6:54
  Douglas: You have the Irish, you have the Ukrainian, you have the Russian kind of neighborhoods there.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so so much of it was a matter of s of safety, you know, that especially going through, you know, what they went through in Europe.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: Uh they for them to be in an area where there were people there were from where they were from, uh made you feel safe, you know.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: So so yeah, that's where I grew up.
• 7:18
  SPEAKER_01: I I was fortunate there was a a school in Philadelphia, a magnet school in Philadelphia that you had to apply to.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_01: It was a public school, public high school.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: You had to apply to go.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: Basically, anybody who got into central went to central because the neighborhood schools weren't the best.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_01: Weren't the best, and who knows whether or not you'd you know, whatever.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to get too far into that.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but they were rougher, let's say.
• 7:49
  SPEAKER_01: And um and so yeah, I got into Central High, and uh, and that's where I was fortunate to go, and and it was a a rigorous high school education, and um, and then when I got out to California, I I jumped into uh studying biology at University of California.
• 8:07
  Douglas: So is that something with with your dad as uh mathematician, college level, you know, on a on a research project, project that he was working on with the computers and stuff.
• 8:17
  Douglas: Did when he came home or with his work comrades, did you have uh I don't know if comrades the best work, but co-workers or whatever, that have have the ability to absorb that, and how do you think that made you how you are today?
• 8:33
  Douglas: Because I and the reason I'm asking that is I look back as with my dad with retail and then him being involved with politics, people who come over for dinner, um, sales reps from different parts when he started with the Ball Eagle Foundation, different biologists and stuff that were coming through town talking about eagles, that just that we didn't have a lot of people over for dinner, but it was usually along those topics.
• 8:55
  Douglas: And so listening to people from such a diverse background, I think is part of the reason why I'm doing this podcast.
• 9:01
  Douglas: Okay.
• 9:02
  Douglas: It was just really fascinating for me seeing people from so many different areas.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the interesting uh question, given what I read in the paper today, uh they that uh Google announced that they had developed a quantum memory system, a quantum computer, basically.
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um again, I don't want to go too far into the physics of it if you know but uh but basically it's a molecular memory system um and that works within the field of quantum mechanics.
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_01: And my dad uh predicted that he's been gone 25 years, he died in 2000.
• 9:45
  SPEAKER_01: He said someday they will be doing this.
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_01: He says, I don't know when it will happen, but at some point, this it's gonna be so much faster that this is where it will go.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Now, back in those days, he would bring home sometimes.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: He would bring home.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when he brought home this box about yay big, and he says, watch this.
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: And it could add, subtract, multiply, and divide.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_01: It was like the the first prototype of a calculator, and a hand calculator.
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, you know, dad, I can do I'm faster on my slide rule, you know.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that and he's like, no, no, no, you don't get it.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: This is where, you know, and uh to be honest, I didn't appreciate it at the time.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_01: I often I I mean I I just like I say this morning, I thought to myself, my gosh, if he could be alive today to see where computers have gone from the ENIAC that filled the gymnasium at the University of Pennsylvania.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_01: They used to climb up on ladders and unscrew tubes, tubes on that, you know, and stuff.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_01: And um and to see where things are today, you know, with with these phones and everything else, he would just, you know, be in awe.
• 11:08
  Douglas: I'm in awe, and I I started off with the Apple II.
• 11:11
  Douglas: Yeah, I remember first Apple II at the at the school, and they had it in the school office, and I was friends with the Heinrichs, and so when Alan was there working, I'd go into a Kurt and Carl and we'd play lemonade stand on the Apple II computer.
• 11:24
  Douglas: And now that was we're like, oh my gosh, this is amazing.
• 11:27
  Douglas: Yeah, this is crazy.
• 11:28
  Douglas: And now you look at the things you're doing, the games you're playing on your phone.
• 11:31
  Douglas: I mean, you're watching movies on your phone, right?
• 11:33
  Douglas: Not just playing games and stuff, but the things that you can do on that small little device, and we were just so blown away with just this crude drawings and selling lemonade.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: I remember when the HP calculator started being able to do statistics, and we used to use statistical programs in the there was a uh an HP calculator that was programmable, yeah.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, so that's you know, so when I was doing uh biology, you know, that's uh you know, research that's what we used for our statistics uh on this little and and again it was just it was a marvel for its time, and yet you look at what's going on today, it's antique.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean it's like more than an antique.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: So but anyway, that's where you know, so we uh interestingly, you know, you mentioned of all the parents, you know, your dad used to have people and you talk about politics and that we never did.
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think there's a lot of people that assume from a lot of the work that I've done that I've I grew up in this very political family and there were always political discussions.
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um I did grow up to some degree having to debate on what was gonna happen at the dinner table, uh, because you know their debating and logic was definitely part of the culture.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we never talked about politics at all.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 12:56
  SPEAKER_01: Interesting.
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I never I I literally did not have any inclination or exposure or experience with politics until I came to Haynes.
• 13:09
  SPEAKER_01: You came to Haynes, yeah, Ray Meneker.
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_01: Ray Meneker, my neighbor.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, Ray Maneker um got me on the KHNS board.
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, you know, people your age need to be involved in the community.
• 13:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, really?
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, I mean, I it was total new total news to me.
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:30
  Douglas: So you were, so we're kind of we're skipping around here, but that's all right.
• 13:35
  Douglas: Okay.
• 13:37
  Douglas: You came, you you're in California studying biology, in Oregon, you go to be an observer in Dutch Harbor, come back, you're trying to get to Fairbanks, stop in Juneau, and then you mentioned ceramics.
• 13:48
  Douglas: When did when did the ceramics come into this?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_01: Well, um, so I had this job at Oregon State University.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Part of my job, um, I had to kill animals.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: I had to kill mice, rats, or rabbits, things, you know.
• 14:06
  SPEAKER_01: My job was to, or my research was I needed their spleens.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Uh because I needed the lymphocytes out of their spleens to see whether or not when we would challenge them with heavy metals or organochlorines, how would their lymphatic systems respond?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I got to a point where I re it just became obvious to me that I didn't like uh killing all these animals.
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and it wasn't that I didn't think the work was important, but I I literally had a mouse have a heart attack and die in my hand.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: When you pick up a mouse to give a mouse an injection or something, you you grab them by the back of the neck, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then you take your baby finger and you wrap your baby finger around their tail, and that's how you pull them, you pull it, stretch them out a little bit, and then you can inject into you know their hind leg muscle, right?
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm giving him cancer to start with, okay?
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'm giving him a virus that's gonna give him cancer because I want to see how he can respond to the cancer based on the dietary regimen that we've had them on.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_01: I had this mouse in my hand, and the mouse is looking at me, and its eyes went like that.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Like doubled in size, got totally cloudy, he had a heart attack, and died out of fear in my hand.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_01: And I just said, you know what?
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I can't do this.
• 15:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so I had recently learned how to throw pots through throw on a wheel.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_01: And but not that that was why I quit, but I that the the incident with the animals with the mouse is why I quit.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: But I I quit my job and I just I had just recently learned how to throw and I and enjoyed it.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so I just started going to the craft center at the university at Oregon State every day and learned how to throw and um and I just I got better and better at it.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_01: And Carrie and I ended up moving to Eugene for our last year in Oregon.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I applied for uh there was a position at the Craft Center at uh at the Oregon uh University of Oregon to uh they needed somebody as an apprentice, kind of you know, makes glazes and whatever.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_01: I'd had a few years of chemistry.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so even though I was the worst person who applied in terms of ceramic skills, I had the best chemistry skills of anybody who applied, and so they picked me, and I ended up spending a year um with these two uh really, really fine potters, and I learned a huge amount, and then it was at the end of that year that we decided to come to Alaska and we got to Juneau, and I had a box of pots with me, coffee mugs and things that today I wouldn't even want anybody to see.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_01: They were, you know.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um we were in we were in Juneau, the car's dead.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_01: I've got this small box of pottery.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: I walked into a gift shop on Franklin Street, and I showed it to the guy, and I said, you know, here's what I can do, da-da-da.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: He buys it on the spot.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, just gives me a check.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: I come out of the store, Carrie's looking at me like, where's the box of pots?
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, look at this.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: And the guy paid me, and somebody gave us money for this.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_01: They gave me money for it, and like five times what you could have made in Oregon.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: For it, you know.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so we decided to look, uh well, we like I say, we couldn't, we literally couldn't leave town, and uh, but we looked for a uh place to set up a pottery studio, and I had Seattle Pottery Supply uh ship me up my wheel and a kiln, and uh and we went into business uh doing ceramic work in Juneau.
• 18:40
  Douglas: Okay.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_01: And um and then ceramic work paid the bills.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: And it paid the bills.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_01: And and then we the you know, we got married in Juneau, friends bought us a honeymoon in Haynes, we came to Haynes, and and we ended up uh we ended up buying my friend, my buddy came down from Fairbanks uh with a friend of his.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: Uh you know these people, uh Tim Shields and Rob Gobert.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_01: They were sharing a place up in Fairbanks, and Tim and I had lived together in grad school.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Down at UC Riverside, University of California, Riverside.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: We were roommates in college and grad school.
• 19:17
  SPEAKER_01: He came down to see us, and we all, the three of us, just said, we were all so blown away by Alaska.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And we just said, you know what?
• 19:26
  SPEAKER_01: You guys look for land up there, we'll look for something down here, we'll try to go on something together, because otherwise we couldn't have afforded anything.
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um we ended up finding a piece of property literally across the road from where we had our honeymoon.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: If you know Diane Sly's cabin out there at Rainbow Glacier Camp, right?
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_01: Well, where we ended up uh by the uh Joan Cummerford's property was being she was selling her land across the road, and we moved we moved to Haynes.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_01: So did you know Rob in Philadelphia?
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 19:59
  SPEAKER_01: No, I I I met Rob through Tim.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Oh through Tim?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know Rob at all.
• 20:05
  Douglas: Massachusetts, Massachusetts, and New Jersey.
• 20:07
  Douglas: New Jersey.
• 20:08
  Douglas: Excuse me, New Jersey, not Massachusetts.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: He he grew up in northern New Jersey.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: No, we didn't know each other then.
• 20:13
  Douglas: Okay.
• 20:13
  Douglas: But he was just a friend of Tim's and he was a friend of Tim's, yeah.
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: Uh who was they were together up, they were hanging out together up in Fairbanks.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: And then uh yeah, and so we ended up buying the land right across the road.
• 20:24
  Douglas: All right.
• 20:25
  Douglas: And then when you started here, because you when you brought your kiln up, I think you told me this before, you set it up at the barracks building at Fort Seward, is that correct?
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, our first year here we lived, someone we got to town, we needed a place to live, and uh someone said, Oh, you should talk to Lee Heimiller, he's got all these, there's rooms everywhere, whatever.
• 20:45
  SPEAKER_01: So we go to talk to Lee, and he says, Well, you could set up a pottery studio in the barracks building.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Would you mind if we slept there?
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, because we had nowhere to live, and uh we needed to work, but we also needed to sleep.
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: And he said, I no matter to me.
• 21:04
  SPEAKER_01: I'm hopefully not getting Lee in trouble, but this is 40 years ago.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_01: I think the statute of limitations probably passed on this.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and so yeah, we're our first year here.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: We lived in the barracks building, yeah, built in what, 1906 or 4 or whatever it was.
• 21:21
  SPEAKER_01: 412, something like that.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Something like that.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, 4-6, I think.
• 21:24
  SPEAKER_01: Two by four walls, no insulation.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_01: Uh it was brutal.
• 21:28
  Douglas: Yeah, especially with that Skagway wind coming off the channel coming up there.
• 21:32
  Douglas: We were on that wall.
• 21:32
  Douglas: Yeah, you can get hammered up there.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: We were on the wall facing that.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_01: We weren't on the other side of the building even.
• 21:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was brutal.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: Uh-huh.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and it was actually even a colder than normal winter.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: And they didn't have the heating system working on it.
• 21:46
  Douglas: How'd you guys stay?
• 21:47
  Douglas: How'd you guys keep any heat in there?
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: I had a wood stove in there, I had an earth stove in there, okay, and I used to get that thing red hot, and then I built I had to build an interior structure like a plastic room.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: Inside the room we were in.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: To try and just keep in the heat.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Every morning that winter, first thing you go out, you're breaking ice, but ice off the glaze buckets.
• 22:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was freezing at night.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: We were sleeping in all our clothes.
• 22:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know, somehow we survived.
• 22:21
  Douglas: Our ancestors survived much worse.
• 22:23
  Douglas: That's true.
• 22:24
  Douglas: That's true.
• 22:25
  Douglas: I mean, and that's one of the things you look at it, that no matter what we face now, a hundred years ago, 150 years ago, they'd be looking at us like, what are you whining about?
• 22:35
  Douglas: Right.
• 22:35
  Douglas: Exactly.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: Not that it's not tough, but yeah, no, things were different.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and uh, yeah, so that's what we did.
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: We lived there in the barracks for a year, better part of a year.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_01: And then we moved out.
• 22:46
  SPEAKER_01: We were house sitting out in the Mud Bay area, out near our land, and uh, and then we uh uh Kerry was pregnant with our daughter, and we needed a house and we needed a studio.
• 23:01
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so we started in uh building where we live today.
• 23:08
  Douglas: And so now you're here, got a child on the way, got a pottery studio going up.
• 23:14
  Douglas: Was that gonna be the sole source income?
• 23:16
  Douglas: Was just doing ceramics?
• 23:18
  Douglas: And how long did that, is that still your main income is off the ceramics?
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: No, it was for about 10 years, 10, 12 years, maybe.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then I um I was asked to go to a meeting in um in the early 90s at the Chilcut Center.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_01: Uh fellow from DEC was uh giving uh was doing a dog and pony show around the state, uh trying to convince everybody that it was okay to weaken the rules for uh organochlorines and and some heavy metals uh from the pulp mills and from some mining projects, and the state wanted to weaken the rules.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_01: I was asked to go to this meeting just to be a warm body in the room, along with a whole bunch of other people.
• 24:16
  Douglas: Now, did the people that were asking you to be there know about your background?
• 24:20
  Douglas: No, okay not at all.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_01: So we go in there and this fellow made this presentation and he's talking about organochlorine, he's talking about dioxins and furans, which are like the most toxic things on earth.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, like 2378 TCDD is like like the most toxic material on earth.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_01: If I gave you the numbers about how many mice it could kill with a drop, you wouldn't believe me, okay?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm in there, and this guy's giving this spiel, and I'm just like, no, no, no, some of this isn't right.
• 24:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I put my hand up in the air and I ask a question.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: He gives me an answer, that answer's not right.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: So I ask another question, and pretty soon all my neighbors and you know, other people that had been like me just kind of brought in so it looked like there were people there, they're kind of looking at me like, how does he know how does he know these words?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: How does he know anything about this?
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_01: And it sounds like he knows more than this guy, right?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_01: And and I I kind of did, you know, and uh and people were like, you know, what the hell?
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, this is not this was not expected by anybody, and um the meeting kind of got a little crazy because of that, and I went home, and that night I got a phone call from a legislative staff person up in Anchorage who said to me, Um, I heard what happened in Haynes tonight, and DEC is gonna be doing the same thing around the state, and they're gonna be in Anchorage in a few days.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: My boss, who's on the House Resources Committee, would really appreciate a chance to meet with you.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: And I said, Well, I'm I'm in Haynes.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: He says, We'll fly you up there.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: And I was like, Okay.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_01: So they flew me up to Anchorage, and I met with them, and I said, Look, this is what the guy said the other night.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: He's not gonna say the same thing because it didn't go that well.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: But this is what he said, this is what I asked, this was his responses.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote it out like it was a you know graduate seminar thing, right?
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_01: So we go up there, and I'd stay for the meeting, and this the guy on the committee is chairing the committee, he's got my cheat sheet, if you will, and um and he said uh he asks the first question.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and the fellow from the state gave him the same answer.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: He gave a names.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: And he looks over, he sees me in the back of the room, and he says, I got somebody I'd love to have come up here to the table with us.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: You know, and there were hundreds of people.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is at the Lusack Library, there's a big crowd there, and all this.
• 27:19
  SPEAKER_01: And so I I walked up there and I sat down at the table.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_01: The guy turned around and saw me coming, and it was just like, oh my.
• 27:27
  Douglas: He was like, not again.
• 27:28
  Douglas: You know, this guy have a twin or something?
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_01: So I it it basically went the same way again.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_01: And uh, because he didn't really have anything else to do.
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't have any way to change his story.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_01: That was the story they gave him to tell everybody, right?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_01: And um, and at the end of that meeting, this guy walks up to me and he says, I don't know who you are, but we could really use somebody in the environmental community who knows what you know and can present the way you can present.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: Truth?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't know there was an environmental community.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: I had never been involved in politics, I had never been involved in anything like this at all like that at all, but I was so moved and upset that the state was trying to weaken these rules that I knew were gonna be serious for people, they were gonna make people sick, really sick, and it was gonna be horrible for wildlife, right?
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I said okay.
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: I and he says, I he says, I'll I can pay you to do this.
• 28:46
  SPEAKER_01: I work for a foundation and I will give you a grant and we'll pay you to do this.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And I called up Carrie and I said, you know, I I think uh I think I just changed careers.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's when I started doing environmental work.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Uh doing conservation work to protect water quality, protect fisheries resources.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I've been doing it uh for 30, going on 33 years.
• 29:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it was absolutely a random event.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, completely random, unplanned, just like moving to Alaska was.
• 29:23
  Douglas: I mean, just you know and that's the thing, I've I've I've heard that so many from different people I've met over the years that small things, random things, totally change people's lives or the direction.
• 29:35
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 29:36
  Douglas: Sometimes it could be an accident, it could be a chance encounter, it could be going to a meeting that you weren't planning on, and you don't know what's gonna happen, but it's just showing up to something, doing something.
• 29:46
  Douglas: All of a sudden your life goes like that.
• 29:48
  Douglas: The whole life goes off in a different different tangent.
• 29:51
  Douglas: Yeah, that's what that's definitely my story.
• 29:53
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 29:53
  Douglas: Do you still do pottery?
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 29:56
  SPEAKER_01: Uh not that much, unfortunately.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: I love it.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_01: It was great.
• 29:59
  Douglas: Is it more of a relaxation thing now rather than an income thing?
• 30:02
  Douglas: Or are you still doing pottery?
• 30:03
  Douglas: Oh, it's not an income thing at all.
• 30:04
  Douglas: It's just uh no, it's just relaxation kind of thing.
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: Um I taught an adult class here uh last winter, and I'll probably do another one uh this this winter.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: I had eight people on wheels.
• 30:18
  SPEAKER_01: And uh I love throwing.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was it was a great job.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I mean, uh you weren't gonna get rich, but you were, you know, we paid the bills, and working with clay was just really satisfying.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I was I mean, I was throwing large vases and things that were just challenging and and fun to do, you know, getting a lot of clay on the wheel, and then a lot of it when you when you throw large pieces, there's a lot of physics involved uh in terms of you know, you're basically trying to defy gravity, right?
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_01: You've got this soft material that you're trying to make get taller, and it's spinning and and it wants to go, I mean, you know.
• 31:08
  SPEAKER_01: It wants to go down and out.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and your job is to not have it do that and and make it be attractive in the process.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: And so it was really, I mean, I used to go to I used to just lay in bed and think about the sequence of moves that I would have to do to maintain structures when I started throwing, you know, if you're throwing mugs or little bowls or something, it's different.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_01: But when you're throwing a lot of clay, you know, like 30 pounds of clay, 40 pounds of clay, you have to have a plan ahead of time.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_01: Ahead of time.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so I was doing that, and then, you know, Carrie's doing these beautiful murals, and so we were, you know, she was getting 1% for the arts and schools and various places, um, and um, you know, and doing murals in restaurants and things like that.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so, yeah, we were we were we were doing okay with it.
• 32:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we were making ends meet with it, and uh, and then but then life took us in a different direction.
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: Down a different road.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_01: So I still I work over at the high school every once in a while.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: I'll go over and work with some of the kids at the high school, teaching, you know, and help them with throwing.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, and like I say, I taught a class last winter and probably will teach another class this winter.
• 32:25
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 32:26
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 32:27
  Douglas: And I think it I think it's good to have things like that that we can touch on and go back to that kind of from whether it's childhood or a younger time in our life or an earlier time in our life, I for me, different touchstones that things getting crazy kind of go back to it, and like this is a familiar, fun spot in my life.
• 32:47
  Douglas: Sometimes for me, a lot of times it's just hiking up like Riley or going out to Battery Point.
• 32:52
  Douglas: You know, it's just things that we did with the family, things we did with friends, but just those touchstone activities that when stress is really, it just reminds you of a different time in life or allows you to just kind of breathe a little bit and relax.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: And just change your focus, you know, just get into a different place.
• 33:10
  Douglas: And and and I and I think, and sometimes for me, it's I'm I'm not a very I'm not very good with woodworking, but projects just sanding.
• 33:18
  Douglas: You know, you you just feel as you're sanding something, you can you can see what you don't have to think about it, right?
• 33:25
  Douglas: You don't have to really strategize, but just the movements and and when you do it for a little bit and you can put your hands on it, you can tell the difference.
• 33:32
  Douglas: Something's changed.
• 33:33
  Douglas: Right.
• 33:34
  Douglas: And I would think for me, anyhow, if I was doing pottery, being able to see you're just taking this lump of clay and you're making something out of it at the end that is much more aesthetically pleasing than a lump of clay.
• 33:48
  Douglas: You hope, yeah.
• 33:49
  Douglas: You hope.
• 33:50
  Douglas: Yeah, me, it wouldn't be.
• 33:51
  Douglas: I I still have pottery.
• 33:55
  Douglas: I I don't know if I have the patience for that, but it does sound and it doesn't sound enticing to just be focused on something outside of life, yeah, right?
• 34:05
  Douglas: Because when you're doing, I'm assuming you can correct me if I'm wrong, but what you're saying, when you're doing that, you're 100% focused on that.
• 34:11
  Douglas: That's right.
• 34:12
  Douglas: That's your focus.
• 34:13
  Douglas: The other thoughts kind of go away.
• 34:14
  Douglas: So it's it'd be a nice meditative practice as well.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: The only uh you know, I play chess, I play a lot of chess, and that's what chess does for me as well.
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's just like when I can't think about all the other stuff and that's going on that I think about maybe too much.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Um I play a lot of chess online uh nowadays, and uh and you know, but chess, throwing pot, those are my two, those are my two safe places, you know, that I that I can go and just and just turn off everything else.
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_01: Because when I'm doing either one of those, I'm totally uh that's all I'm doing.
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just it's a it's just so I don't even realize it that I don't I don't realize that as the change is happening, but I know when I'm done that I'm gonna get the change.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_01: You can feel the change afterwards.
• 35:05
  Douglas: Oh, absolutely.
• 35:06
  Douglas: Yeah, yeah.
• 35:07
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 35:08
  Douglas: No, it's good to have those things.
• 35:10
  Douglas: So getting into politics, back into politics.
• 35:15
  Douglas: One of the one of the reasons I wanted to have Vion here is there's I've I've talked to Bart and Duck about you know their tour businesses and everything, and with cruise ships coming into the Hanes, Bart would like to see us get back to that a minimum of uh four days a week having a large cruise ship in Haynes to help figuring that's you know, if you can have a 40-hour week for staff, you can build tourism infrastructure in Hanes.
• 35:41
  Douglas: And correct me if I'm wrong, some people in Haynes think that you're the person responsible for cruise ships not being in Haynes due to due to the clean water.
• 35:54
  Douglas: And that's why I'm giving you a chance to respond.
• 35:57
  Douglas: That that is something there are people that think that's so absurd.
• 36:00
  Douglas: And and and so were you part of the group that when they put in the tour tax in Haynes, when we started that when there was a ballot initiative, were you a part of that group to try and rate, I think it was what it was, a 4% tax on all tours uh sold in Haynes?
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: No, I was not.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_01: Um when the cruise ships first started coming to Haynes, my first um the first thoughts I had about it, and I'd been working at that point on some of the pulp mill-related pollution issues and mining-related issues, you know.
• 36:39
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, wow, this would be great.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_01: The ship comes, they throw a whole bunch of money on the beach, and they go away and get more money.
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: I was like, this sounds like a great thing for Haynes.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_01: I was not opposed to it at all.
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_01: In 1999, um someone shared with me that there had been this major conviction uh that Royal Caribbean had had come upon for dumping.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, You you know, you need to look into this.
• 37:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, uh one of the six jurisdictions where they had been dumping was here.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And that caught my attention.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_01: So it's like, so what is really actually going on with these ships?
• 37:33
  SPEAKER_01: They were dumping, they were this is in the this is in the court records, it's not there's no speculation here.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um it was a 21 felony count conviction and etc.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and kind of an interesting story actually how they got caught.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you would absolutely let's hear it.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: Um they there was a ship that was off the coast of Miami, and and uh someone saw that there was an oil slick, there was a Coast Guard plane, uh saw that there was oil coming out of the back of the ship.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: And they called down to the ship, and they said, Oh, well no, it can't be us, not us.
• 38:14
  SPEAKER_01: And and they said, Well, we're gonna send a ship out here to meet you because we want to take a look around.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: So they did.
• 38:22
  SPEAKER_01: And these Coast Guard guys got on the ship, and one of the guys' jobs was to go around and take pictures of all the equipment on the ship.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_01: And they said, Well, all right, everything here looks fine, and because they were saying, Well, we must have just driven through this oil slug, it wasn't generated by us, right?
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: They get said they said, When you get back to Miami in a couple of days, it was one of these three-day gambling things.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we're gonna board again and take a better look around.
• 38:53
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, fine.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: So they did that.
• 38:55
  SPEAKER_01: Well, the same guys go back, or one of these the guy who took the photographs was back on the ship taking more photographs.
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: He goes back to his office and he lays out the photographs.
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: The plumbing had changed.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, isn't that interesting?
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: This is where the term magic pipes, which I'm sure you've heard, that's where they were, that's how it was discovered that it was basically a fleet-wide conspiracy.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: When they thought nobody was looking, they would bypass, they would put in piping, they would bypass their treatment systems, and they would throw everything overboard because it saves money if you're not having to treat your waste.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_01: So it was perchloroethylene, it was trichloroethylene from the machine shop, uh, methylethyl ketone from the machine shop, it was silver nitrate from the photolabs.
• 39:55
  SPEAKER_01: We're talking serious pollutants, right?
• 39:59
  SPEAKER_01: And this all came out in these convictions.
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: In fact, there was the the per personnel on the ships, I don't know if it's still this way or not, but the back then often the personnel on the ships were very um segregated by nationality.
• 40:20
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the guys on the bridge were Greek, and a lot of the medical personnel were British.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: A lot of the engineers were Norwegian, just the way it worked out, and then people in other departments were from other places in the world, right?
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: And um this Norwegian, the the chief engineer who was a Norwegian man, was on the stand testifying in federal court.
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: And he was asked about, well, how how what where's the accounting?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you guys have logbooks of what you're discharging and where, because these types of materials are supposed to be taken off the ship and processed in a legitimate facility, right?
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, well, it said, well, you're you know, the logbooks that you gave to the Coast Guard all show that everything is fine.
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_01: But now we're finding out that things were actually getting dumped.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, Well, he says, uh, the book that we would give to the Coast Guard, um, that was the eventerbach.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just, excuse me, uh, eventerbach.
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, in Norwegian it means fairy tale.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: So they were giving one set of books to the Coast Guard, and they had a whole different set of books about what was really going on in the ships.
• 41:41
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the reasons they were keeping the books, the other set of books, was because these guys were getting bonuses for saving money.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: For saving money.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_01: So all of this was c all of this came out, and they had this big conviction.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Part of the problem was here.
• 41:59
  SPEAKER_01: It raised a stink here in Alaska.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, Governor uh Knowles asked me if I would participate on a committee to look into cruise ship discharge issues.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Commercial passenger, vessel, environmental compliance committee or something like that.
• 42:19
  SPEAKER_01: So we started having these meetings, and there were people from some agencies and then some independent people like me and other people.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so the first thing that we did was we said, okay, we need to know everything that's going on the ship, off the ship.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: Let's just start there.
• 42:37
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things that we found out, and at that point, I mean, I gotta say that, you know, I didn't really expect that they would keep doing this now that they've been caught.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: And it turns out, like I say, there were a lot of ships doing it, and even that had come out, right?
• 42:52
  SPEAKER_01: That it was a it was not just a single ship doing this, it was a very fleet-wide thing.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but one of the interesting things that came out of our questioning was their sewage treatment plants, which we didn't know had a problem, right?
• 43:09
  SPEAKER_01: They were pegging the test.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: There was a uh the the test for E.
• 43:15
  SPEAKER_01: coli, which is what you would do for testing sewage.
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, they were the the test was pegging for some of the ships at 24 million colonies per hundred milliliter sample.
• 43:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's a lot.
• 43:31
  SPEAKER_01: They were breeding tanks.
• 43:33
  SPEAKER_01: Their sewage treatment facilities were actually breeding tanks for E.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: coli.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: They were not cleaning up the problem, they were creating the problem and then dumping all that over.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: It was like, oh my gosh, these things are a mess.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: The gray water, which is supposed to be just laundry, showers, sinks, was contaminated with E.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_01: coli.
• 43:55
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was just it was a mess.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: I spent the next few years trying to I actually worked with uh the Murkowski and the this uh Frank Murkowski who was uh U.S.
• 44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Senator at the time.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I worked with his staff to um uh it was the uh Coast Guard reauthorization bill of 2000.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: And one of the problems that had existed up to that point was that the discharges from the ships were not regulated under the Clean Water Act, which um I thought was very odd.
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: Um and I knew a little bit about the Clean Water Act at that point because I had gone back to school in the 90s and I got a doctorate in environmental policy and I wrote my dissertation on an aspect of Clean Water Act.
• 44:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so I thought it was really odd that these guys had no permit to discharge.
• 44:52
  SPEAKER_01: How can you be discharging millions of gallons of wastewater and not have a permit?
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it turns out that the federal rule at that time was that discharges that are incidental to the normal operation of a vessel are exempt from the national pollution discharge elimination system and PDS permit system, right?
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of intended for like fishing boats with two guys who might be peeing off the side of the boat.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: It was not intended for cruise ships with three thousand four thousand people on it.
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 45:29
  SPEAKER_01: So uh there was that, and there were the fact that they were using what became known as donut holes.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: They would find a state jurisdiction is only out to three miles.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they found places that were still actually in Alaska, but were three miles from all points of land and whatever, and so they were anyway.
• 45:50
  SPEAKER_01: So uh the Murkowski uh uh Frank Murkowski uh his office um we worked on fixing on fixing these problems and we did uh in the Coast Guard Reauthorization Act of 2000.
• 46:06
  SPEAKER_01: So then I come back to the state and I said, okay, state of Alaska, you have the right to create a discharge program permit program, excuse me, for this industry.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's um the way the the Clean Water Act permitting system works, it's a federal program, but it's delegated to the states.
• 46:28
  SPEAKER_01: And so they actually implement the program.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: So, like here in Alaska, we call it the Alaska Pollution Discharge Elimination System, APDS instead of NPDS.
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_01: So, but the state had to create a program.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_01: Couldn't get them to do it, couldn't get them to do it.
• 46:48
  SPEAKER_01: They were not, they just didn't want to do it.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_01: And so this just went on.
• 46:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I spent a few years trying to make this happen.
• 46:58
  SPEAKER_01: And one day uh fellow comes up to me, he's an attorney in Juno, and he says, I've been trying to work on taxation issues here because the commun because the ships, there's a lot of infrastructure costs, they're being borne by the communities, the ports of call, and that should be getting paid by the people that are making money doing this.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: They should be paying for this, not having Haynes pay for their expenses.
• 47:25
  SPEAKER_01: And um and he said, and uh he knew that I'd been working on the pollution side, and he said, let's write a ballot measure because the state's just not refusing to do it.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: So we wrote a ballot measure to address the taxation issues and the pollution issues.
• 47:47
  SPEAKER_01: We never thought it was gonna go to a vote because there is a uh a principle in state law there's uh that if something is passed by the legislature that is substantially similar, similar, right?
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, it negates the results.
• 48:07
  SPEAKER_01: Even if the thing's already been like agreed, you know, the signatures are all there, it doesn't matter.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: If they pass something substantially similar, it goes away.
• 48:15
  SPEAKER_01: We thought that that's what would happen.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_01: That the cruise lines would go to the state and they go, okay, look, that's you know, we don't want to pay this much in a head tax, and we don't want to have this much in terms of pollution control, but we'll agree to do this.
• 48:30
  SPEAKER_01: Let's make this go away.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's what we thought was gonna happen.
• 48:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: The cruise lines decided they were gonna fight it all the way, and they spent a couple million bucks doing it.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_01: We had no money to fight it because no one thought we had a chance, any chance at all, of winning a statewide election against the industry, with their sending out eight by eleven glossy things three days a week to every person in the state and all the business.
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um we ended up winning.
• 49:08
  SPEAKER_01: And um and that's how the state of Alaska got its ed tax and got its pollution uh got its pollution control laws.
• 49:18
  SPEAKER_01: Um and one other funny little anecdote that we go back.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_01: So when this first album came out in like 2000, every year um all the attorneys general in the state they have a meeting and they discuss things that are between the different states, you know, the areas they have in common, how are you guys dealing with this?
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yep, you know.
• 49:42
  SPEAKER_01: And so that year in 2000, the AG's meeting was being held in Miami, and the topic for the weekend was gonna be cruise ship discharges or cruise ship industry.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: So I got invited to come down there and testify.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: So I go there and I show up in this room.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_01: There's this long table, and we all got our name cards there, and I'm looking around at these other people, and I'm like, wow, I didn't think anybody was even working on this.
• 50:15
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, I haven't heard about anybody else working on the pollution.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it turns out the person next to me, they're there to talk about taxation issues.
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: And the person over here, they're there to talk about medical issues, about people getting dumped off in ports of call and the ships go away and all that.
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: The guy next to him, he's there to talk about slave labor and how these guys are working for like literally next to nothing in the bottoms of these ships.
• 50:42
  SPEAKER_01: And everything, and we're all looking at each other like, wow, I had no idea your issue even existed, right?
• 50:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we were all well, we went out for a beer afterwards, and I'll tell you, we had some conversations among ourselves.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_01: But that was the first idea that I'd had that there's some really some issues here, you know, there are some serious issues here with this industry.
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_01: And um, anyway, then I wasn't able to get the state to change its position.
• 51:08
  SPEAKER_01: I tried, uh, couldn't do it, and so uh Joe and I uh wrote this ballot measure with the help of a few other people.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then it passed.
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_01: And and so the state now has this law.
• 51:23
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the intent, to be clear, the intent was never to eliminate the industry.
• 51:31
  SPEAKER_01: We didn't, there was no way we were ever going to do that.
• 51:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, give me at least enough credit that I'm enough, I'm pragmatic enough and real, enough of an objective observer to know that no, I cannot push that mountain over with my hands, right?
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah and and so there was it wasn't like we were even we weren't even trying to eliminate the industry here in Haynes or anywhere else.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: We just wanted them to pay their fair share in terms of taxation to support the communities, and we wanted them to stop dumping.
• 52:08
  SPEAKER_01: And that was that's what it was about.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: It was not about running the cruise ships out of Alaska, which wasn't gonna happen.
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're making billions of dollars here.
• 52:19
  Douglas: Well, and I and I and I think my take on that 25 years later is and and being in in politics in the ways that I have over the years, is so much of people's reactions to things is fear.
• 52:37
  Douglas: That when there's a change, there's a fear of that change.
• 52:40
  Douglas: And I think one of the one of the problems we have not just in Haynes, but this is where we are, and I see it constantly.
• 52:49
  Douglas: And I I looking back, I see it in that issue.
• 52:52
  Douglas: That in the we've gone through the closure of the sawmills.
• 52:56
  Douglas: Haynes economy was struggling kind of up and down quite a bit for several years.
• 53:01
  Douglas: Cruise ships come in.
• 53:02
  Douglas: Now you have, I think we're four or five ships or four or five days a week that we had a large cruise ship here.
• 53:09
  Douglas: There were businesses that were being developed, people were feeling comfortable and safe again that they had something coming in, and now you have a person, a group of people putting something that might take that away.
• 53:21
  Douglas: That has a potential.
• 53:23
  Douglas: Whether or not the rationale is correct or not, they have security in what they are doing, and a threat to that security makes people lash out at the people that they feel are threatening the security.
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: I totally understand that.
• 53:36
  SPEAKER_01: I totally understand that.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: The one thing I would add to that, though, is the reason they felt that was because that was what the cruise industry told them.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and and and so here's literally they said, This is going to run us out of Alaska.
• 53:51
  SPEAKER_01: Don't let this happen.
• 53:53
  SPEAKER_01: That's where that fear came from.
• 53:55
  Douglas: And and the other part of that is when people are in good financial position, they're willing to accept less, or not less, but they're willing to put up with they want higher standards.
• 54:12
  Douglas: So if you have a job that's paying you$100,000 a year and you're like, you know, this might not be the best, and somebody offers you$75,000, you're like, yeah, no, I'm not taking that.
• 54:22
  Douglas: But if they offer you$150, you're like, yeah, I'll probably take that.
• 54:25
  Douglas: And so when you're when you're when you're stressed economically, you're willing to give up more.
• 54:31
  Douglas: And so I think it was easy for the cruise ships, because they knew that at that time that was the main income driver in Haynes was tourism and cruise ships.
• 54:41
  Douglas: So it's easy for them to be able to say, if this happens, no more.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_01: I still have the flyers, a bunch of the flyers that they sent out.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_01: Um, one in particular really well uh, you know, just really stands out in my mind.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's a picture of a school bus.
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: And there's a kid getting off a school bus, and he's looking behind himself with this look of fear.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like we're waiting to run him down in the street.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it was don't let the vote no on ballot measure two, da da da.
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_01: And it was just a pure fear campaign.
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: And they did not want to talk about the fact that it would we weren't going to eliminate the.
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it was it was absurd to think that we would eliminate the industry, but they generated that the industry generated that fear concept, that that paradigm, and people were afraid, uh, people became afraid, and so you they turned against some of us and said, You're trying to kill this industry.
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: And it was like, no, we're not.
• 55:53
  Douglas: Um, but and I think the other part of that too is when Haynes voted to put in the head tax, within two weeks, pretty much all the cruise ships pulled, all the major cruise ships had pulled out.
• 56:04
  Douglas: And I think that was a measure for them as a warning that don't do this, don't do this, or the same thing.
• 56:12
  Douglas: And so I think Haynes started now you have the state one in just about every port also has a cruise ship head tax to pay for.
• 56:19
  Douglas: And so I think if somebody was gonna do that, it would have been better if it was Skagway or Ketchcan or Juno.
• 56:26
  Douglas: Maybe, yeah.
• 56:27
  Douglas: Because they can't, they're not gonna skip Skagway, but they have too much invested in Skagway, they have too much invested in Juno.
• 56:34
  Douglas: And they didn't have much invested in they didn't have much invested in Haynes.
• 56:37
  Douglas: It was easier for them to make an example, not just in Alaska, but worldwide to their ports.
• 56:44
  Douglas: And the same thing, if if this passed, what you were doing in Juneau with that initiative, if that passed, it wasn't just Alaska, it was the Caribbean, all these other places are going to like, well, wait a second, we want you to kick in.
• 56:57
  Douglas: And so the free ride ends.
• 56:59
  Douglas: That they have to start paying for more of the infrastructure, the stuff that they use, their profit margin shrinks, or they just raise their prices, however.
• 57:08
  Douglas: I mean, it obviously hasn't hurt the industry because they're growing by leaps and bounds and escalating and just growing magnitudes that we can't even understand.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_01: The only reason that it took an any bit of a dive at all statewide was because if you recall in 2008 we had that little global economic meltdown, right?
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_01: So after the cruise ship ballot measure got passed, it was started to get implemented in 2007.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then you had this worldwide recession.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: Well, but by 2009, it had already gone back up.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact is, as we said, which wasn't brilliant, but it it's gonna have no effect on the ships coming here.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: And sure enough, I mean, we have more people coming here than we ever did.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, the ballot measure you know, it's still law, it is still the law in Alaska, and it it did not have the effect that the fear-mongering uh people proposed.
• 58:12
  SPEAKER_01: And it's the proof is in the fact that it's that's what we have.
• 58:17
  Douglas: So looking at Haynes now, and we're still once, sometimes twice a week, we'll have a large cruise ship.
• 58:25
  Douglas: It seems to be very uh difficult for re uh for us to regain momentum after that initiative in 20, was it 20 2001 or six to the ballot measure?
• 58:37
  Douglas: No, the Haynes initiative on the head tax.
• 58:39
  Douglas: I think that was 2000 or 2001.
• 58:42
  Douglas: Maybe 2001 that they passed that.
• 58:44
  Douglas: Um, but we really haven't recovered any the the number of ships that we had at that point.
• 58:50
  Douglas: And I in my conversation with Bart, he he was talking about, and I and I understand the economics of it, that you pretty much need ships in town four days a week.
• 59:00
  Douglas: Because if you can have a business, if you're if you've got 40 hours you can operate or you can offer your employees, that's a full-time work week.
• 59:07
  Douglas: If you have two and you're trying to do on 20 hours, it's really tough.
• 59:11
  Douglas: So right now, basically the the tour companies in Haynes are operating off of it's a Skagway tour.
• 59:19
  Douglas: And then when a ship docks in Haynes, that's just something they'll work with because the numbers are so small.
• 59:24
  Douglas: But trying to get it where you actually have tours that are just Haynes centric and that they're in Haynes, and then the stuff from Skagway is the bonus.
• 59:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's uh that's that's true.
• 59:34
  SPEAKER_01: But there is also one other factor I think that's w that's needs to be mentioned, and that is that one of the reasons that they do go to Skagway as much as they do, is because how much ownership they have in the stores and how much ownership they have of the tours.
• 59:48
  Douglas: Yes.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_01: And not having that here in Haynes, as you were saying, as you as you were implying, that's a reason they were able to make an example out of Haynes at one point.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: But but also in terms of them not coming back and rebounding to where we have more and more ships, a big reason we don't have more and more ships is because they don't have the profit margin here that they have in other places.
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_01: And now what are they doing as an industry?
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_01: What's the new model for the industry?
• 1:00:16
  SPEAKER_01: They're building their own ports, they build their own ports because they don't even want to have to try to have old roods give them a cut of everything that's sold, or a tour business here giving them a cut which can be like 40% or something.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, it can be very high, right?
• 1:00:34
  Douglas: Um the cruise ships, I think off of a local tour, the cruise ships have a higher percentage of profit off of it than the people that are operating the tour.
• 1:00:41
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question, right?
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: So what are they doing now?
• 1:00:44
  SPEAKER_01: They're creating their own ports.
• 1:00:45
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:00:46
  Douglas: But what they what they do talking to the people that are in the cruise ship business in Haynes, many of whom are friends, have been for a long time.
• 1:00:54
  Douglas: And are friends of mine.
• 1:00:55
  Douglas: And um, you know, even though they're the cruise ships are making more money than they are, it's still a profitable business for them.
• 1:01:04
  Douglas: It would be better for them if we had more ships in Haynes.
• 1:01:07
  Douglas: Is that something that if there is a push in Haynes to try to get to four or five days a week?
• 1:01:14
  Douglas: With one ship?
• 1:01:15
  Douglas: With one one ship at a time.
• 1:01:16
  Douglas: Yeah, no more than one ship.
• 1:01:18
  Douglas: We've got space in the harbor for one ship.
• 1:01:20
  Douglas: You're not gonna have more than one docked up at a given time, four or five days a week.
• 1:01:25
  Douglas: Do you think there's a possibility that we can make an effort as a community to make that happen?
• 1:01:31
  Douglas: Or is there too many people that don't want that much intrusion on their daily lives?
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't think it has anything to do with people here now, the people here who don't want it.
• 1:01:40
  SPEAKER_01: Um I think it's all about how much money they'll make here.
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_01: If they thought they were gonna make the money here, they'd be here.
• 1:01:47
  SPEAKER_01: They wouldn't, they couldn't care less if there's people on it.
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_01: I personally, I wouldn't care.
• 1:01:52
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't care.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, if that's what the town wants and and and that's what the town can handle.
• 1:02:00
  SPEAKER_01: Um yeah, if I'm driving through town and it's like, come on, people, walk on the sidewalk.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you I mean, it's not that big of a deal to me.
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_01: Um but the connection.
• 1:02:09
  Douglas: The condom I think we have, like what you're talking to with the cruise ships making money, is a couple years ago when I was mayor, we were talking to one of the cruise lines and they they shared their end-of-season report with us on what their passengers thought of Haynes.
• 1:02:25
  Douglas: And none of it was a surprise to me.
• 1:02:27
  Douglas: I was like, yeah, I agree with all of that.
• 1:02:29
  Douglas: We do not have a large tour infrastructure because when you guys are coming once every other week or something, how how is somebody going to build infrastructure or a tour around once a week?
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:02:41
  Douglas: Sometimes you can't you can't do it.
• 1:02:43
  Douglas: How do you there weren't enough restaurants?
• 1:02:45
  Douglas: How do you staff restaurants and make sure they're open for all the hours?
• 1:02:49
  Douglas: How do you develop more gift shops unless you have people coming in and one ship a week isn't really enough?
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:02:56
  Douglas: And and I said, so there has to be, if you want more out of a port, there has to be a two-way commitment to that.
• 1:03:05
  Douglas: Because I think if there was in several people that I've talked to into industry, there's like there is a lot of potential for different things in Haynes.
• 1:03:14
  Douglas: There's a lot of different tours that could be developed.
• 1:03:16
  Douglas: I said, Well, I hope they're not all at Chilku, because we need this we need to spread.
• 1:03:20
  Douglas: And they said, Yeah, if you had more, you could bring people into other areas of the community, not have as much congestion out there.
• 1:03:26
  Douglas: But in order to develop those, you need more passengers.
• 1:03:29
  Douglas: And so it's this conundrum.
• 1:03:31
  Douglas: The cruise ships want more infrastructure here for their tours so they can make more money on their port call here, but you're not going to get that unless you have more cruise ships coming in.
• 1:03:40
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_01: It's a chicken and an egg thing.
• 1:03:43
  SPEAKER_01: Chicken and an egg thing.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:03:44
  SPEAKER_01: And and so don't we have like I think we have ships here like three days, big ships like three three or four days a week, don't we?
• 1:03:51
  SPEAKER_01: We have it's definitely not one.
• 1:03:53
  SPEAKER_01: It depends on it depends on the week.
• 1:03:55
  Douglas: And it depends on what you call a ship.
• 1:03:57
  SPEAKER_01: It depends on what you call a big ship, too.
• 1:03:59
  Douglas: Well, we can't take the big, the real big ships can't take the the 2,000 to 3,000, you know, what used to be the big ships, not the pan X or whatever they're calling.
• 1:04:10
  Douglas: Not those big ones, but the ones that we can get tied up to the dock.
• 1:04:14
  Douglas: And um, yeah, it's a it's a frustrating thing because I I look at that as a good hit for Haynes when they're coming in.
• 1:04:27
  Douglas: That it it spreads the money into quite a different quite a number of different pockets when they're here.
• 1:04:33
  Douglas: It generates a local head tax, it's the state head tax, so it pays for some of our tourism infrastructure and some of those things, sales tax for schools and stuff, and just trying to figure out how to how to make a convincing enough argument with a cruise line or cruise lines to help partner with us as a community to develop some of this.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_01: But another thing that I've also heard that has been a lot of reports from the from the people that visit is that they live they love coming to Haynes because it looks like a real Alaska town.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_01: It's still it has not become a tourist destination, it is still what it was.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_01: And they really they really appreciate that that fact, right?
• 1:05:17
  Douglas: And I think the thing, and this is this is what Bart brought up as well, is when you're limiting it to one ship, sell the aspect that it's just one ship.
• 1:05:28
  Douglas: So when they're telling their clients, yeah, we're not going here, we're not going here, we're going to Haynes.
• 1:05:34
  Douglas: The only ones who are gonna get there.
• 1:05:35
  Douglas: You're gonna be the only people there, you're not it's not gonna be as crowded, it's just our passengers, and Haynes is gonna roll out the red carpet because it's all about you guys today.
• 1:05:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's very that's that's certainly a valid, it would seem to be a valid argument.
• 1:05:50
  SPEAKER_01: Um also, though, I know that from spot from talking to a couple of uh shop owners in town have told me that we do get a lot of the little ship.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_01: You know, the hundred to two hundred person ships.
• 1:06:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I have I've heard from several people that own gift shops in town that they make more money on that ship with 200 people than they do on the ship that's got 2,000 people.
• 1:06:16
  Douglas: And I I think it depends on what brand.
• 1:06:19
  Douglas: Because there's there are we we can tell what cruise line is at the dock.
• 1:06:25
  Douglas: By who's coming in or what they're doing based on how much the purchases are.
• 1:06:30
  Douglas: I'm not going to list any brands, but there are certain cruise lines that their passengers historically spend more money than others.
• 1:06:39
  Douglas: And so I think depending on it's just not little ship versus big ship.
• 1:06:42
  Douglas: It's not little ship versus big ship.
• 1:06:44
  Douglas: It's the brand.
• 1:06:46
  Douglas: And I think you look at when people are paying a certain amount to go on a cruise, especially early season, late season, usually the cruise is discounted.
• 1:06:55
  Douglas: You have people, it's their only time coming to Alaska, they might be bringing their kids, you know, the budget isn't as much.
• 1:07:00
  Douglas: Whereas if you're height of the season, some ships charge more than others.
• 1:07:04
  Douglas: You might have more disposable income, you want to bring back more gifts for your you have you have a larger budget for that.
• 1:07:09
  Douglas: And but I think the clientele off of some of the different cruise lines makes a we can without knowing what ship was in the dock, I can tell you based on the actions of the people in here which cruise line they came off of.
• 1:07:24
  Douglas: Pretty close.
• 1:07:26
  SPEAKER_01: I know that uh when when AIA was functioning, um when the little ships were in, somebody would come in and buy a totem pole.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, three thousand bucks a foot.
• 1:07:39
  Douglas: And I think that's part of that same thing because the people on the little on the smaller ships, usually your cost for your voyage is way higher.
• 1:07:47
  Douglas: You have a more intimate experience, those people are generally going to have more disposable income.
• 1:07:52
  Douglas: Absolutely.
• 1:07:53
  Douglas: They're gonna they're not gonna want something from China, they're gonna want something handmade in Alaska.
• 1:07:57
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:07:57
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one of the so that is one of the arguments that you hear from people who don't want more big ships.
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_01: They say, Why aren't we catering more to the little ships?
• 1:08:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's less pollution, there's less congestion in town, they spend more money per person.
• 1:08:13
  SPEAKER_01: Why isn't that a better model for Haynes?
• 1:08:16
  Douglas: And I would say if you have not arguing against it, I I agree that we want those smaller ships, but when you have 200 people spending more than 2,000 per person, but when you have 2,000 here and so you've got a hundred times more people off of that, they don't have to have they don't have to spend as much and still have a greater economic benefit.
• 1:08:38
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, there I understand the math, but the flip side of that is that something that the people on the little ships say is they don't want to go to a town where all the big ships are, or it even looks like it caters to the big ships.
• 1:08:54
  SPEAKER_01: They want the experience of being in what looks like a real Alaska town and you know with a more intimate experience.
• 1:09:02
  SPEAKER_01: So it's complicated.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like everything else, right?
• 1:09:07
  SPEAKER_01: There's no easy answer.
• 1:09:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's complicated.
• 1:09:10
  Douglas: It's trying to figure out the the happy medium between I I'm looking at this uh as a financial exercise for the for the borough as a whole.
• 1:09:22
  Douglas: Because we look at how much they took out of reserves this last year for the extra money for the schools.
• 1:09:27
  Douglas: You know, the the this the state's budget is a train wreck.
• 1:09:31
  Douglas: So trying to get more money out of the state for the things we need, I don't see that happen in any time.
• 1:09:36
  Douglas: It's not gonna happen next year either with the price of oil.
• 1:09:38
  Douglas: With the price of oil, the the federal government's budget is a train wreck as well.
• 1:09:42
  Douglas: I mean, we're what$39 trillion in debt.
• 1:09:45
  Douglas: There's and right now everything's shut down.
• 1:09:48
  Douglas: So getting any money out of the feds is a hard thing.
• 1:09:52
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:09:52
  Douglas: So looking at it, we have to figure out a way where we're creating more income to pay for the things we have.
• 1:09:59
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:09:59
  Douglas: And so where does where does that income come from?
• 1:10:03
  Douglas: We have classic economics.
• 1:10:06
  Douglas: If you want to get something, you usually have to give something up.
• 1:10:08
  Douglas: Is it your labor in order to get money back?
• 1:10:11
  Douglas: Is it time in the fields in order to get food?
• 1:10:13
  Douglas: Is it and so in Haynes, I I look at Haynes that we've got kind of four echo four resources that we can sell.
• 1:10:23
  Douglas: We sell fish, we can sell timber, we've got minerals, or we've got just the natural beauty of Haynes that we sell to tourists.
• 1:10:31
  Douglas: And fish, price up and down, that's world markets, we have no idea.
• 1:10:38
  Douglas: Timber, I don't think the in order, the amount of large-scale logging that you'd have to do to make a it's it's it's not happening.
• 1:10:46
  Douglas: There's there's not enough valuable timber there, but I think working with the state, I think Greg Palmery um is trying really hard to have a a small area here in Haynes where you can one of the things that um I've talked to a couple people that have been interested in putting in like uh a a stud mill or something for doing two by fours, two by sixes, where you have a kiln and a planer, and but they they want in order to make that kind of investment, they would they need to make sure they have enough timber for 20 years in order to go to the bank.
• 1:11:19
  Douglas: And so smaller things like that, and maybe where we're doing smaller scale logging, can we develop camping dirt bike or uh mountain bike trails, snow machine trails, ATV trails, skiing trails, camping spots?
• 1:11:37
  Douglas: Yeah, I agree.
• 1:11:37
  Douglas: So we have recreation areas that we can sell or either have camping spots, so there's a way you can generate revenue afterwards.
• 1:11:45
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:11:47
  Douglas: And then and then you have minerals.
• 1:11:49
  Douglas: There's pros and cons to Constantine coming in here and developing the Palmer Project.
• 1:11:55
  Douglas: There's that could I'm not a scientist.
• 1:11:59
  Douglas: I I know what they say is out there.
• 1:12:01
  Douglas: I've heard you and others talk about the the dangers of developing that.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_01: And the fact that it's not actually proven what's up there.
• 1:12:08
  Douglas: They they still have a long ways to go to prove that.
• 1:12:10
  Douglas: Yep.
• 1:12:11
  Douglas: So and but anything out there, you're probably 15 years away before anything would be be done here.
• 1:12:17
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 1:12:18
  Douglas: And so then we have the tourism aspect of it.
• 1:12:21
  Douglas: And we have a pretty good feeling over the last 15-20 years what that brings in, and we're facing a major deficit at the borough.
• 1:12:29
  Douglas: So where do we so I my dilemma is is how do how do we solve that problem?
• 1:12:36
  Douglas: Do we cut things with the borough?
• 1:12:37
  Douglas: Do we try and lean more into tourism?
• 1:12:39
  Douglas: Do we try and lean more into logging, fishing?
• 1:12:43
  Douglas: You got any ideas?
• 1:12:44
  SPEAKER_01: I have a very different, I have a very different approach to it.
• 1:12:48
  Douglas: Doesn't surprise me at all.
• 1:12:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um so to me, the strength of Haynes is the diversity we have in the community.
• 1:12:58
  SPEAKER_01: We have, and I've told this to a lot of people from outside who are, you know, here that I live here, they talk, I talk to them about the town.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_01: I've told people many times, if you have a skill, if you're good at something, you come here, you will get employed here.
• 1:13:16
  SPEAKER_01: There is, you know, I don't know anybody here who is skilled at something, I don't care what it is, who who doesn't, who isn't able to make it here to a great degree.
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, by I'm sure there's exceptions, but I mean to a great degree.
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_01: I truly believe that's true.
• 1:13:33
  SPEAKER_01: We have so many different things.
• 1:13:36
  SPEAKER_01: We have, as you say, you have these four major categories of income.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that it it's there's more categories than that.
• 1:13:45
  SPEAKER_01: There are the trades categories, there's art artists.
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_01: We have the largest professional art community in the state, supposedly, right?
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_01: And more people making their living here being artists than any other community in Alaska, okay?
• 1:13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um so so here's a here's an example of what I would do that's from a very different model, right?
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_01: You hear all the time here in Haynes that there's no housing for younger people people who are trying to get into the market now.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_01: Because God knows what we bought our land for 40 years ago, you cannot buy a piece of land for that today, right?
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_01: Understood.
• 1:14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um but we have young people here who want to be here.
• 1:14:34
  SPEAKER_01: If you have young people here, you have families here, you have kids in the school here, you have all these it it's all tied in together.
• 1:14:41
  SPEAKER_01: So one of the things that we hear all the time that we've been talking about for years, is there's not enough housing.
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:14:48
  SPEAKER_01: And then I've read articles just in the last year, two, year and a half, whatever.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_01: Valdez, same thing.
• 1:14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Skagway, same thing.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Petersburg, same thing.
• 1:14:57
  SPEAKER_01: All these communities do not have enough housing that is starter housing so that people you know, like Marty can get a place and stay here, right?
• 1:15:10
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, you want to have some logging here?
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_01: Fine.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_01: Let's start a business here.
• 1:15:17
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe use some of our permanent fund.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_01: We've got this 10 million, 11 million, whatever it is in the bank.
• 1:15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:15:24
  SPEAKER_01: Right now it's very restricted, what you can spend it on.
• 1:15:26
  SPEAKER_01: I understand it would take changes to the rules.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_01: But what if Haynes started a small house, a small home, a tiny home factory?
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_01: We would employ people to go cut some trees.
• 1:15:42
  SPEAKER_01: We'd employ people to mill lumber.
• 1:15:45
  SPEAKER_01: We'd employ people to design these things.
• 1:15:47
  SPEAKER_01: We'd have people m working in marketing, we'd have people learning how to be plumbers and electricians who could help build these things out.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_01: We used to have, as I know you know, we had the T and I program at the school for years.
• 1:16:00
  SPEAKER_01: There are, I don't know, 25 houses in this town, maybe more, that were built by high school kids with mentors, right?
• 1:16:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, that are still totally functional houses in these schools.
• 1:16:14
  SPEAKER_01: We could be, we could start a tiny home plant here, employ a whole bunch of people year-round, and not only could we use those here, we could be selling them to other places in in Alaska, at least, right?
• 1:16:32
  SPEAKER_01: Other communities in Alaska.
• 1:16:34
  SPEAKER_01: You build them so that they can be moved on a barge or something, right?
• 1:16:38
  SPEAKER_01: And easily, easily transported around.
• 1:16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um we, you know, I remember bringing this up to one of our borough assembly members years ago now.
• 1:16:49
  SPEAKER_01: It's got to be two, three years ago.
• 1:16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Oh no, we can't do that.
• 1:16:53
  SPEAKER_01: The the permanent fund is for our it's our rainy day account.
• 1:16:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can't spend any of that.
• 1:16:59
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, have you looked outside?
• 1:17:02
  SPEAKER_01: It looks like Noah's ready to build an ark out there, right?
• 1:17:05
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, uh, you know, let's use a small percentage.
• 1:17:10
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not saying half the permanent fund, but what if we took a million bucks out of 11 million dollars?
• 1:17:16
  SPEAKER_01: We spent, you know, we took 10% or you know, whatever, and we put it into creating a business.
• 1:17:22
  SPEAKER_01: And I mean, do the business plan, you know, make sure you've got a market, make sure, you know, um, and create a job our own jobs that would hire people, keep them employed year-round.
• 1:17:36
  SPEAKER_01: Kids here, we always hear this thing, oh, the kids here get out of high school, there's nothing for them to do here.
• 1:17:41
  SPEAKER_01: Well, if we had a business here that could employ them and they were gaining skills even while they were in high school, there'd be jobs for them when they got out of out of school, and they wouldn't have to leave town.
• 1:17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so, and I mean that's just one example, but I'm saying if I were king, uh that's what I'd be doing.
• 1:18:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'd be trying to figure out some way that we can create because yes, the mine, I as you know, I'm I'm not supportive of having a copper zinc mine in fish habitat.
• 1:18:14
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a silly thing to do.
• 1:18:16
  SPEAKER_01: Silly is probably the wrong word to use.
• 1:18:19
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we're on tape.
• 1:18:21
  SPEAKER_01: Uh so I'll just leave it at silly.
• 1:18:23
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but yeah, to me that's ridiculous to endanger everything else that we have here to do that.
• 1:18:31
  SPEAKER_01: Same thing with having any, you know, large-scale logging.
• 1:18:35
  SPEAKER_01: Logging ruins fishing habitat.
• 1:18:36
  SPEAKER_01: We know that.
• 1:18:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's there's no question.
• 1:18:38
  SPEAKER_01: It causes siltation and landslides and erosion, and it ruins fishing habitats.
• 1:18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Happened over and over and over again all over the place.
• 1:18:45
  SPEAKER_01: So why do that?
• 1:18:47
  SPEAKER_01: Why do any of those things big scale?
• 1:18:50
  SPEAKER_01: When if we're clever, which I think we could be, we design something that works for us, where it's small scale but broad, and it puts a lot of it puts money in a lot of people's wallets.
• 1:19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Instead of make doing something big, like we need the big industry to come in and save us, we can create our own situation and save ourselves.
• 1:19:13
  Douglas: And so that thank you for that, because that reminds me the fifth one is the people like your Bill Finley's that starts a Sea Auto Woodworks and that becomes a Zen Bathworks.
• 1:19:25
  Douglas: Yes.
• 1:19:26
  Douglas: The brewery, the brewery, the distillery, the metery.
• 1:19:30
  Douglas: Yeah, yeah, yes, the artists and everything that are creating stuff.
• 1:19:35
  Douglas: How do we create more of that in the community, even if we're even if it's not the tiny homes or whatever, but how do we attract more of those people that are like, I've got an idea, and I Bill Finley started in his garage basically making hot tubs.
• 1:19:53
  Douglas: I know, I've got the second hot tub he ever made.
• 1:19:56
  Douglas: Send them all over the world.
• 1:19:57
  Douglas: Yeah, I mean it's it's a very highly the soaking tubs, the Japanese soaking tubs.
• 1:20:02
  Douglas: Zen Bathworks, this is some amazing craftsmanship, and most people that drive through Haynes have no idea it's even there.
• 1:20:10
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:20:11
  Douglas: I mean, it's a small building, they've got like four or five people that are working there, right?
• 1:20:15
  Douglas: And they're selling tubs all over the world.
• 1:20:16
  Douglas: They're selling tubs all over the world, right?
• 1:20:18
  Douglas: So it for me, it doesn't have to be a big thing, but how do you get one Zen bathworks doesn't change the direction of Haynes?
• 1:20:28
  SPEAKER_01: I have faith.
• 1:20:28
  Douglas: But five, and then if they're in different things, that and even Harry bringing back Haynes Packing Company.
• 1:20:36
  Douglas: Okay, good example that was down at Excursion Inlet.
• 1:20:38
  Douglas: Now that's back in Haynes.
• 1:20:39
  Douglas: You have those that crew that he's got here in the summer.
• 1:20:41
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:20:42
  Douglas: Nike said they do over they're probably moving over four million pounds of seafood this year.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:20:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's tremendous.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:20:47
  SPEAKER_01: And he's got a store here.
• 1:20:49
  SPEAKER_01: He's got a store in Whitehorse, he's got a store in California.
• 1:20:52
  Douglas: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:20:53
  Douglas: And so that entrepreneurial spirit.
• 1:20:56
  Douglas: That's exactly my point.
• 1:20:57
  Douglas: How do we biggest for myself as a business owner and talking to other business owners, one of the hardest things about a business in Haynes is dealing with local, state, and federal bureaucracy.
• 1:21:15
  Douglas: It is a pain in the butt on all of those.
• 1:21:18
  Douglas: And I understand that because a lot of it comes out because you'll have a couple bad actors that are doing something forces the and it forces the government to change to address those bad actors, and then everybody else is punished for VMs on that weren't doing anything wrong.
• 1:21:38
  Douglas: And I look at Haynesborough Code for tourism.
• 1:21:43
  Douglas: We've got what two or three pages on the rules for being a tour operator.
• 1:21:48
  Douglas: Those all came about from one tour operator that wasn't listening to anything else.
• 1:21:54
  Douglas: And I was on the I was on the Borough Assembly when we passed that, and everyone's like, we need something, we need something because this person's making us look terrible.
• 1:22:01
  Douglas: And now everybody's encumbered by this.
• 1:22:03
  Douglas: It's adding cost to every tour company in Haynes, and it was in response to one individual that no longer lives in Haynes.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:22:10
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the only lawsuit we've ever won.
• 1:22:13
  SPEAKER_01: I think I think so.
• 1:22:14
  Douglas: Yeah, it probably is.
• 1:22:16
  Douglas: I think it is the only other topic for another discussion.
• 1:22:18
  Douglas: Another topic for a different discussion.
• 1:22:20
  Douglas: But try it so it's this delicate balancing act, you know, being on the being an elected official in Haynes, also being a business owner.
• 1:22:30
  Douglas: So you see where people are trying to push the boundaries and do things that are not good for the whole, but yet you're punishing the people that follow the rules.
• 1:22:41
  Douglas: Well, I but that that's a that's a tangent from what we're it was.
• 1:22:46
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:22:46
  Douglas: It's just kind of a, but how do we and I guess what I was getting to in a in a very, very roundabout way is how do we make that less cumbersome so when people want to start a business, how do we ins uh how do we take those entrepreneurs that have that idea, support them so they can take those first few steps to because Bill, he was doing it by himself.
• 1:23:12
  Douglas: Now he's got five or six.
• 1:23:13
  Douglas: So it takes time to build up to that.
• 1:23:15
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but it's you know what, it's still happening here.
• 1:23:18
  SPEAKER_01: And and I, you know, look at Found Root.
• 1:23:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you know, doing it right now.
• 1:23:22
  Douglas: Um, you know, it's but how much further would they be?
• 1:23:25
  Douglas: Because they got the um, didn't they get the grant out of uh um because I know the the distillery got the one from um Juno that the seed money deal.
• 1:23:35
  Douglas: Seed money deal, I can't remember what their spruce root, yes.
• 1:23:39
  Douglas: Spruce root.
• 1:23:40
  Douglas: So I think those are both entities that have received that funding in hand to them get started.
• 1:23:46
  Douglas: What else can we do?
• 1:23:47
  Douglas: Because if if that amount of money helped them get started, what else can we do that helps them accelerate their growth?
• 1:23:56
  Douglas: Maybe they don't want to accelerate their growth.
• 1:23:58
  Douglas: I don't know.
• 1:23:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if that, but I don't see, I don't think that's necessarily the answer.
• 1:24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Once they're started, I I I believe that people, the people who are here and the people who would like to live here, because this is such an amazing place to live, are clever enough that they will come up with things to do.
• 1:24:21
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, if you're making a little bit of more money, you're gonna go out to eat more.
• 1:24:26
  SPEAKER_01: And you're gonna buy that piece of artwork, you're gonna buy that piece of furniture.
• 1:24:30
  SPEAKER_01: If you, you know, and then that person who you bought that piece of furniture from, they've got a little bit more money, they're gonna go out to eat, they're gonna do this, they're gonna do that.
• 1:24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's just a to me, it's a just a very different model of we need the ship to come in with thousands of people to spend money in town, is a very different model than let's do what we need to do or what we can do to build up small businesses in Haynes and make it so that young people can afford to live here because they're gonna they're gonna have ideas for things to do, just like we did.
• 1:25:08
  SPEAKER_01: Just like we did, right?
• 1:25:10
  SPEAKER_01: I mean You're saying we're not young anymore?
• 1:25:12
  Douglas: Is that is that what is that is that what I'm hearing?
• 1:25:14
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know.
• 1:25:16
  SPEAKER_01: Um you know, I and I'm gonna be able to do that.
• 1:25:18
  Douglas: So I guess my pushback on that would I I agree with that, that we need to build up and the young people come up with ideas.
• 1:25:25
  Douglas: How how everybody does that all the time.
• 1:25:29
  Douglas: I'm just looking at the the immediacy in my mind, I guess, of where the borough budget is right now and the hard decisions that are gonna have to be made in the next couple years with the lack of funding on things that the the the projects that you're talking about, and I'm talking about of building this up from the ground root.
• 1:25:50
  Douglas: I don't know if there's gonna be enough of those that are gonna be there in enough time.
• 1:25:55
  Douglas: And this kind of goes back to, I think I talked about this earlier of when you are in a stressful financial, stressed financial situation, you're gonna make choices that you might not do if you're in a better financial situation.
• 1:26:09
  Douglas: And the borough as a whole, and and I'm talking borough government, I look at it as a stressed financial situation right now.
• 1:26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't dis I don't disagree with you on that.
• 1:26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that um again, this is why to me, you know, when this other when this borough assembly member said to me we're saving this money for a rainy day, I think it's pouring outside in some ways.
• 1:26:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's necessarily as dire as maybe you or some other people think.
• 1:26:41
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, difference of opinion there.
• 1:26:43
  SPEAKER_01: But um but there but uh but I will acknowledge that there is you know definitely a concern with our budget, with being able to fund our school, which you know how invested I am in in the school system here and how important that is to me.
• 1:26:59
  SPEAKER_01: Um but I so to me I would get our our get our smartest people together and say, look, we got let's come up with a plan.
• 1:27:10
  SPEAKER_01: Let's come up with a plan here that does not require other people from outside helping us because we don't know if that's ever going to happen, and we can't count on it staying.
• 1:27:21
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just came from the KH ⁇ S annual meeting.
• 1:27:25
  SPEAKER_01: The the CPB gets shut down by the federal government, nobody's exp expecting it, right, this past year.
• 1:27:31
  SPEAKER_01: They lost$170,000 that they were expecting here.
• 1:27:36
  SPEAKER_01: So waiting for money or expecting or hoping for money from outside to fix our problems, I think is is more and more as we move forward in time is going to be more and more of a dodgy idea.
• 1:27:49
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so to me, I would take some of the money we have and say, let's come up with some ideas now.
• 1:27:57
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean I think search.
• 1:28:00
  SPEAKER_01: Wanting to build a hospital here is a great idea.
• 1:28:02
  SPEAKER_01: Small hospital.
• 1:28:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, look how much time we spend going outside for things that they'll be able to do here.
• 1:28:09
  SPEAKER_01: It'll also make it more attractive for people to be here and stay here because they can get better medical care here.
• 1:28:15
  SPEAKER_01: There's just, you know, and it doesn't have to be the tiny home idea.
• 1:28:19
  SPEAKER_01: It could be other things.
• 1:28:20
  SPEAKER_01: Could be, you know, we could be using local wood to make musical instruments.
• 1:28:25
  SPEAKER_01: You know, there are other things that we could be doing with the resources that we have, using them in small amounts, relatively small amounts, to make really high value return that would employ a lot of people and that would that would provide for this community to be stable because it's the diversity of the jobs that gives you stability.
• 1:28:51
  SPEAKER_01: It's the towns, it's like look what happened with Skagway with COVID.
• 1:28:55
  Douglas: Oh, yeah, they didn't have a lot of people.
• 1:28:56
  SPEAKER_01: No income for three years, right?
• 1:28:58
  Douglas: 90 some percent of their income was gone.
• 1:29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Was gone.
• 1:29:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what happens with one industry.
• 1:29:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I grew up back east.
• 1:29:04
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happened with all the steel belt, you know, in the you know, in the steel industry.
• 1:29:09
  SPEAKER_01: That's what happens when you put all your eggs in that one basket.
• 1:29:13
  SPEAKER_01: If that basket breaks, you're screwed, right?
• 1:29:16
  SPEAKER_01: You've got broken eggs all over the floor.
• 1:29:18
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have to do that.
• 1:29:20
  SPEAKER_01: We have enough skills here in this town and enough people that want to be here and will figure out a way to make it work because this is such an incredible place to live, that if we just used some of the money that we have, I think we could come up with ideas that would make us so stable because we would not be relying on outside requirements for for funding.
• 1:29:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it would give us the economic base and the social base that we would need to do really, really well and prosper.
• 1:29:52
  SPEAKER_01: Back you, I'm sure you remember that a few years ago I was trying to get the assembly to look into tidal power.
• 1:30:00
  SPEAKER_01: We have some of the biggest tidal exchanges in the world here in Haynes.
• 1:30:05
  SPEAKER_01: Why are we not getting a turbine out there twice a day?
• 1:30:11
  SPEAKER_01: That tide's coming in and going out, and there is no stopping it.
• 1:30:15
  SPEAKER_01: We could be generating our own electricity.
• 1:30:18
  SPEAKER_01: We shouldn't be depending on, we should never be firing up a diesel engine to fire up the to power this town and having to ship diesel uh fuel up here.
• 1:30:30
  SPEAKER_01: It's insane.
• 1:30:31
  SPEAKER_01: We've got the tides here in this in the deepest fjord in North America with these huge tidal exchanges.
• 1:30:38
  SPEAKER_01: Let's generate some power, run greenhouses so we can grow food in the winter and not have to ship so much food in from outside.
• 1:30:47
  SPEAKER_01: Then we don't have as much packaging to deal with, which means we have less solid waste to deal with.
• 1:30:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there are there are so many ways that we could be so much smarter about what we're doing here, and we could make we could this.
• 1:31:03
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I probably don't want to say it too loud because we don't want a million people to live here, but it's but we we could do this on our own, and I am very confident that we could make it work.
• 1:31:15
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but we have to have the right people in power in the and in authority who are willing to sit down and say, okay, let's really give this some thought, instead of like, I don't like you, and I don't like you know.
• 1:31:29
  Douglas: So that and and that leads to the issue.
• 1:31:32
  Douglas: That's why that doesn't hasn't happened yet, is because as you mentioned before, Haynes' diversity.
• 1:31:37
  Douglas: Haynes' diversity is a blessing and a curse.
• 1:31:42
  Douglas: Like everything in life, there's a good side to it and there's a bad side to it.
• 1:31:45
  Douglas: It's great to have people from a ton of different backgrounds, different thoughts, and everything like that.
• 1:31:50
  Douglas: I think it makes for a very vibrant community when it makes time to make a decision, it's very difficult because everybody, instead of looking towards the same end goal, a lot of times it's well, he's gonna benefit more than I am, or this is gonna hurt what I'm doing now, or this isn't gonna be and Well, gotta yeah, I guess getting past that is one of the hardest things for Haynes to do.
• 1:32:17
  SPEAKER_01: But if you went around to this town, if you went around to this town, Doug, and you said, What are your five most important things?
• 1:32:25
  SPEAKER_01: People are gonna say, putting food on the table, having a shelter, my kids have a good school to go to and they're safe.
• 1:32:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, we all share those things.
• 1:32:37
  Douglas: We we all share those things, but the difference is in how we get there.
• 1:32:41
  Douglas: I how do we get there?
• 1:32:43
  Douglas: I agree, and that's that's that's where the difference lies.
• 1:32:46
  Douglas: I agree with that.
• 1:32:47
  Douglas: I think if you 99% of people in Haynes were all here for the same reason, we all have we all it's it all comes down to how do we get there?
• 1:32:55
  Douglas: How do we have that stable economy?
• 1:32:57
  Douglas: How do we have that fully funded school?
• 1:33:00
  Douglas: How are we taking the best care of uh how do we have opportunities to go hiking, to go hunting, to go fishing, what whatever your recreation is, how do we have that?
• 1:33:09
  Douglas: But when different groups view what somebody else is doing as a threat to them, that's when we get the the heads banging together.
• 1:33:20
  Douglas: Well, which and it it can't it and it it's it's never it's never talked about in a way that there's room for all of these to an extent.
• 1:33:31
  Douglas: It's either yes or no.
• 1:33:33
  Douglas: Yeah, there's no gray area on how like with we were talking about with logging.
• 1:33:38
  Douglas: People talk about logging and they think the baby brown sale.
• 1:33:41
  Douglas: It doesn't have to be the baby brown sale to still be successful, like you were talking about with um if we're gonna build tiny homes, if you have somebody here that's got a plane or it's got a kiln that you can harvest 10-15 acres a year.
• 1:33:56
  Douglas: I have no idea what the amount would be.
• 1:33:58
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 1:33:58
  Douglas: And you can so and you're maybe it's more selective logging, so you're not clear-cutting an area, but you're only taking certain species out of it, so you allow for some of that, you're not affecting the biodiversity as much.
• 1:34:09
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:34:10
  Douglas: And the pull the way you're replanting it, the way that you're moving it around the valley, we've got a lot of room in this valley.
• 1:34:15
  Douglas: Oh, yeah.
• 1:34:15
  Douglas: That it's not all in just one spot.
• 1:34:18
  Douglas: I I understand that that takes it's more costly to do it that way, but if we value what we're doing, maybe we want to invest the cost and look at other ways that we can get some of that cost back.
• 1:34:30
  Douglas: I I and so it's it's trying to look at these and and how do we break that black and white yes or no?
• 1:34:37
  Douglas: If Gershen's for it, I'm against it.
• 1:34:39
  Douglas: If Gershen's against it, I'm for it.
• 1:34:41
  Douglas: Kind of because that's what a lot of our community I I would say.
• 1:34:46
  Douglas: I had assembly members when I was mayor come to me and they said, I have an idea that I want to put on the agenda.
• 1:34:52
  Douglas: And from two different sides, I told both of them, I said, That's a great idea, but you can't present it.
• 1:35:00
  Douglas: And they said, What do you mean?
• 1:35:01
  Douglas: I said, It's a great idea, but if you're the person that presents it, it's gonna fail.
• 1:35:05
  Douglas: Because of the makeup, right?
• 1:35:07
  Douglas: It's you're the wrong person to present it.
• 1:35:09
  Douglas: And it's and they're like, I don't understand.
• 1:35:11
  Douglas: I said, This is Haynes.
• 1:35:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, it's everywhere.
• 1:35:13
  Douglas: It's it's everywhere, but we're in Haynes.
• 1:35:16
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:35:16
  Douglas: Uh I'll acknowledge we we have our challenges here.
• 1:35:19
  Douglas: But it was like that, I think it bears some going forward.
• 1:35:22
  Douglas: We should have a discussion about it.
• 1:35:24
  Douglas: But if you're the person that presents it based on the composition of the assembly at this point in time, it's not going to go anywhere.
• 1:35:30
  Douglas: And they looked at me like I was crazy.
• 1:35:32
  Douglas: I said, you have to admit that I'm right.
• 1:35:34
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, no, there's no question that the messengers uh and and they and finally they're like, yeah, and it's really sad.
• 1:35:39
  Douglas: I said, yes, it is sad that that's the case.
• 1:35:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:35:43
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what and and I think this is kind of extrapolating on that a little bit, but what to me the the problem in some ways could be dealt with by having more of this.
• 1:35:56
  SPEAKER_01: And more meetings.
• 1:35:58
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:35:58
  Douglas: That's one of the reasons I wanted to do this, it's because one of the things that was hard for me as mayor on a lot of the topics is you get to a meeting, you got three minutes of public comment.
• 1:36:08
  Douglas: So Gershen gets to say his thing, Marty gets to say his thing, Doug gets to say his thing.
• 1:36:12
  Douglas: We all get we all we all get to talk about of our opinion for up to three minutes, and then the mayor closes it, you go up the assembly, goes back and forth, they and it's not usually a debate.
• 1:36:23
  Douglas: You're you teach debating, it's not necessarily a debate, it's more opinions.
• 1:36:27
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:36:27
  Douglas: And then at the end of the third meeting, people raise their hand and vote.
• 1:36:31
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:36:32
  Douglas: And so there's there's not an area in Haynes for having a public discussion with people with different viewpoints.
• 1:36:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I was gonna say was that's what we need to do, is we need to have what are truly town halls and have opportunities for 20, 50, whatever it is, people to sit around and for as long as it takes really talk to each other.
• 1:36:55
  SPEAKER_01: And the the big the the problem that on one of the problems with it right now that uh unfortunately is getting worse and that troubles me significantly, you know, really deeply, is that so many people are the the disinformation in the world is increasing at such an insane rate that you know 10 years ago, five years ago, 50 of us, 20 of us, whatever, could sit around at a table and we would pretty much agree on the same basic facts, and then we would go from there and we have different opinions on how to go about different things, but but we wouldn't be arguing whether or not the sun comes up in the morning.
• 1:37:47
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, one of the things in debate, uh that you one of the first things that often will happen in a debate is you define terms.
• 1:37:56
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we're not if we're not defining terms the same, then we are ships in the night when it comes to a debate, right?
• 1:38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we are we are not in the same world.
• 1:38:05
  SPEAKER_01: So that's a real concern that to me for the future literally of the planet, and I don't mean the planet as a rock, I mean society.
• 1:38:17
  SPEAKER_01: Um one of my really big concerns is that we are we, the royal we here, are operating on such different um uh sources of information that I'll s I'll say things and someone will say, that's fake, that never happened, that's not real, and then they'll say something and I'll say that never happened, that's not real.
• 1:38:39
  SPEAKER_01: And so at some point, but and I but again I think it's doable here locally, I would hope, that we could get there's enough rational people in this town, enough rational civil people in this town that if they were to sit around, they'd be able to agree on some basic ideas and some basic um not just the ideas of where we should go, but the basic facts of where we are, so that a discussion could happen.
• 1:39:13
  SPEAKER_01: Because I talk with you, and you know, we come from very different backgrounds, we've had very different perspectives over the years over different things, yet we've always been civil with each other and we've always been able to exchange views.
• 1:39:26
  SPEAKER_01: Yep and and I have that relationship with other people in town.
• 1:39:31
  SPEAKER_01: So are there people in town who would never want to sit across the table from me?
• 1:39:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely there are.
• 1:39:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know what?
• 1:39:38
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe they don't maybe we don't invite them.
• 1:39:40
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we only invite the people that are willing to sit with other people who are different.
• 1:39:46
  SPEAKER_01: And we sit down and we go, okay, and you know what?
• 1:39:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think that most people in town would see that going on and they'd say, Thank you very much.
• 1:39:55
  Douglas: Thank you very much for doing that.
• 1:39:57
  Douglas: So how do we because you're on the code commission, right?
• 1:40:00
  Douglas: Uh code review commission?
• 1:40:01
  SPEAKER_01: I I was, you know, I I re I had to resign.
• 1:40:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:40:04
  SPEAKER_01: I had to resign from it.
• 1:40:05
  Douglas: Because there's now that was the that was the crazy thing as mayor, is all the ways that you can have a public meeting to discuss stuff for the borough, that is not an option on any of them.
• 1:40:18
  Douglas: So it had those kind of meetings pretty much have to take place outside of the borough, and then you're bringing something to the borough, to our leadership.
• 1:40:26
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:40:26
  Douglas: And that that was the that was the hard part because you have to have the assembly there, and then just on the different like a town hall meeting, it's it can't be binding.
• 1:40:35
  SPEAKER_01: It can't be it can't be binding.
• 1:40:36
  SPEAKER_01: I can understand that.
• 1:40:37
  Douglas: But you know, your town hall meeting, it's basically the same as assembly meeting, except people get to talk, you can talk numerous times.
• 1:40:44
  Douglas: It's just one subject, and everybody gets to say their opinion.
• 1:40:47
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know where the whole three-minute thing came from in public?
• 1:40:50
  SPEAKER_01: You know, this was you mentioned, you know, you give it three minutes.
• 1:40:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40:53
  SPEAKER_01: You know where it started?
• 1:40:54
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:40:55
  SPEAKER_01: It started back in the late 1800s.
• 1:40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:40:58
  SPEAKER_01: Very end of the 1800s, when the railroad industry, the robber barons, yeah, were basically taking over the western part of the United States.
• 1:41:10
  SPEAKER_01: And there were people, for a variety of reasons, who were really upset about it.
• 1:41:15
  SPEAKER_01: And the robber barons went to the federal government and said, we need to create a system here so that these people feel that they've been heard.
• 1:41:26
  SPEAKER_01: And the first one, if memory serves me correctly, was the Interstate Commerce Commission.
• 1:41:32
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's the first one of these.
• 1:41:34
  SPEAKER_01: You know, now we have, you know, the we have for uh federal airwaves, right?
• 1:41:38
  SPEAKER_01: We got the FCC, we got all these different commissions and whatever.
• 1:41:41
  SPEAKER_01: I believe the first one, again, I could be wrong, I but I'm if memory serves me, uh it was the Interstate Commerce Commission.
• 1:41:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was like in the late, maybe 1899, something around there.
• 1:41:52
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:41:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it was it was put together by the people who did not want to be regulated, but who realized these people need to be able to, they need to be given some opportunity to speak, even though it's meaningless.
• 1:42:12
  SPEAKER_01: And so they said, you will get three minutes.
• 1:42:15
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, the rules have changed.
• 1:42:17
  SPEAKER_01: You will have your public comment opportunity.
• 1:42:19
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for your public comment.
• 1:42:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, what were we gonna do here?
• 1:42:23
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, and that's where that whole system comes from.
• 1:42:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so, believe me, when I go and I'm gonna testify on something to me that is so nothing could be more absurd than having a ferry terminal at Cascade Point where people who walk onto the ferry in Haynes are gonna get dropped off 43 miles from downtown Juneau.
• 1:42:47
  SPEAKER_01: Really?
• 1:42:47
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, don't don't get me started on it, because I could go on for that for half an hour.
• 1:42:53
  SPEAKER_01: But what do I get to how do I get to comment?
• 1:42:56
  SPEAKER_01: I get three minutes.
• 1:42:58
  SPEAKER_01: I get three minutes in front of the in front of the people who want to do it.
• 1:43:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm supposed and and then there thank you very much for your comments.
• 1:43:06
  SPEAKER_01: And like as if that's gonna do anything, right?
• 1:43:10
  SPEAKER_01: So that's one that's why we need to do a different format.
• 1:43:13
  SPEAKER_01: Is it binding on our elected officials?
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:43:16
  SPEAKER_01: But I think our elected officials, officials, if they would see this type of format happening and see who was involved and how many people were involved and how many people supported it, I would hope that our elected officials would go, okay, we need to we need to listen to what the public wants here, because that's actually our job.
• 1:43:38
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know what?
• 1:43:39
  SPEAKER_01: If some of our elected officials don't want to listen to what truly what a majority of the town wants, they get voted out.
• 1:43:48
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 1:43:49
  SPEAKER_01: That's why they don't have those jobs for life.
• 1:43:51
  SPEAKER_01: They're not judicial appointments.
• 1:43:53
  Douglas: Right?
• 1:43:54
  Douglas: So in your mind, yeah.
• 1:43:57
  Douglas: How do you how do you set that up?
• 1:44:01
  SPEAKER_01: You set that up by having just winging it here.
• 1:44:04
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:44:08
  SPEAKER_01: I wing things all the time.
• 1:44:09
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:44:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um I none of this is binding.
• 1:44:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:44:14
  SPEAKER_01: I would, I would I what would I do?
• 1:44:17
  SPEAKER_01: I would uh get half a dozen people together from very different parts of the community and have have lunch, have a beer, whatever, and sit down and talk this through and decide if they want to do it and want to participate.
• 1:44:34
  SPEAKER_01: And if they do, they go out to their constituencies and they go, This is what we're gonna do.
• 1:44:42
  SPEAKER_01: We're gonna try this and see if it works, and see if we can actually get most of the people in this town involved in a civil discussion of reality.
• 1:44:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I would do.
• 1:44:55
  SPEAKER_01: You know, get people from very different parts of the community together, the people who are willing from those different parts of the community to talk, to sit down and be civil with each other, get them together, and then they go out, they disseminate it to their people, and they go, I think this is a good idea, I think this is what the town really needs, and see if it can happen.
• 1:45:17
  SPEAKER_01: Because right now we have all these different groups, we have all these different factions, and they're all just talking to each other.
• 1:45:25
  SPEAKER_01: And we've got to get them talking to each other.
• 1:45:28
  Douglas: And and kind of to your point earlier, is there are groups that their fundraising and their ability to exist is much greater if we're at each other's throats.
• 1:45:42
  Douglas: Yeah, of course.
• 1:45:43
  Douglas: There's money to be made in pushing us apart.
• 1:45:46
  Douglas: Well, you gotta do is it's a lot harder to make money when everybody's together and getting along.
• 1:45:52
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question.
• 1:45:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:45:55
  SPEAKER_01: No question.
• 1:45:56
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you look at the polarization in our society, that's being driven.
• 1:46:00
  SPEAKER_01: That's not chance.
• 1:46:02
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 1:46:02
  SPEAKER_01: That's being driven.
• 1:46:04
  SPEAKER_01: Both poles of that polarization.
• 1:46:09
  Douglas: Every single touch issue out there, you have an interest group on both sides, and if there actually became a solution to the problem, they would be out of order.
• 1:46:18
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:46:19
  Douglas: And so you you know, all these executives that are doing these polling and all this become unnecessary.
• 1:46:25
  Douglas: They become unnecessary.
• 1:46:27
  Douglas: And so there's there's no incentive for them to push a solution, but to make the the opposition as evil as possible so they can raise as much money as possible so they can push us further apart.
• 1:46:41
  Douglas: And and it's they're toxic.
• 1:46:42
  Douglas: How do we ban them?
• 1:46:43
  Douglas: Well, we don't have to ban them.
• 1:46:45
  Douglas: What we do is we just we we ignore them.
• 1:46:48
  Douglas: We ignore them, but the ones that the ones that agree with us, we're like, they're doing God's work, let's give them some money.
• 1:46:54
  Douglas: Well.
• 1:46:55
  Douglas: And it's it's on both sides.
• 1:46:56
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:46:57
  Douglas: It's like, yeah, they're they're fighting for me.
• 1:47:00
  Douglas: And when you get that message, and when you're on social media and you're in this tunnel of everybody thinks the same as you, it's really easy to go, yeah, they are the solution because these other people are nut jobs.
• 1:47:12
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the answer to that is that we do have elections.
• 1:47:16
  SPEAKER_01: And hopefully we're still gonna have, you know, as my mother would say, from your lips to God's ears, um, hopefully we're still gonna have meaningful elections in this country as time goes on.
• 1:47:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um and you get to a point, you know, if most of the people in this town who I believe do not want to be in conflict with each other, um, and who I believe really have the same basic values at heart, if most of those people decide that yes, this is a format that will work for us, and we're gonna put our, we're gonna try to make this really work, then the people, at least in our community, I can't fix the world, but in the in just in our community, the people that are on the on the, you know, that are that are pulling apart, they'll get ignored.
• 1:48:07
  SPEAKER_01: They will lose power.
• 1:48:09
  SPEAKER_01: They will just sorry, they're just gonna be out of power.
• 1:48:13
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the answer for this town.
• 1:48:15
  SPEAKER_01: And I think it's I think it's a totally viable answer for this town.
• 1:48:21
  Douglas: We'll see.
• 1:48:23
  Douglas: Are you gonna start working on that?
• 1:48:24
  Douglas: Is that gonna be your next project?
• 1:48:26
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 1:48:26
  SPEAKER_01: You and me both get five people together?
• 1:48:29
  Douglas: Who would I ask?
• 1:48:31
  Douglas: I don't I don't know.
• 1:48:32
  Douglas: That's what that's what I was sitting here thinking while you're talking about that.
• 1:48:35
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know.
• 1:48:36
  Douglas: You and I may be able to get it.
• 1:48:36
  Douglas: So if we got to sit down and think about it.
• 1:48:38
  Douglas: If you got six, I mean I think we're proving to people that you and I can have a civil conversation without coming to blows.
• 1:48:44
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:48:44
  Douglas: And so where are there four coming from?
• 1:48:47
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's you know, uh I wouldn't want to put anybody on the spot here on you know at this moment, but maybe you and I need to sit down and think about that.
• 1:48:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm willing to have that conversation.
• 1:48:56
  SPEAKER_01: So am I.
• 1:48:57
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:48:58
  Douglas: All right.
• 1:49:00
  Douglas: We'll keep everybody posted.
• 1:49:02
  Douglas: Okay.
• 1:49:04
  SPEAKER_01: This might go somewhere, it might not.
• 1:49:05
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know.
• 1:49:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but we sure won't know if we don't try.
• 1:49:09
  Douglas: Correct.
• 1:49:10
  Douglas: Correct.
• 1:49:11
  Douglas: So just I appreciate you showing up and having the conversation.
• 1:49:15
  Douglas: I appreciate you asking me.
• 1:49:16
  Douglas: Yeah.
• 1:49:16
  Douglas: No, I I think it's my whole idea on this is just talking to people from a lot of different backgrounds, a lot of businesses, a lot of viewpoints in Haynes, just listening to their ideas.
• 1:49:26
  Douglas: And and because we do need to come together as a community, whether it's your idea of having this group, however it is, the vitriol and the anger against people with different opinions or different backgrounds, we cannot move forward in a productive way where that is as prevalent in our community and in our public discourse as it is today.
• 1:49:51
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and you know what, look, the the truth of it is we can't control what's gonna happen at the state level.
• 1:49:56
  SPEAKER_01: We cannot control what's gonna happen at the federal level.
• 1:49:58
  SPEAKER_01: We can control this.
• 1:50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Control this place.
• 1:50:02
  SPEAKER_01: And does that mean we're gonna be immune from the rest of the world forever?
• 1:50:06
  SPEAKER_01: No, absolutely not.
• 1:50:07
  SPEAKER_01: But boy, we can make a stand here for a while.
• 1:50:10
  SPEAKER_01: And I've got an eight-year-old and a ten-year-old grand, you know, grandchildren, and it is not about me for them.
• 1:50:19
  SPEAKER_01: This is about them.
• 1:50:21
  SPEAKER_01: My passion on this is all about them.
• 1:50:25
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've got who knows how much time left.
• 1:50:28
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I don't mean to sound maudlin there about that, but it's true.
• 1:50:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm in my 70s, and it's like it's true, right?
• 1:50:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um, but my grandkids are eight and ten, they're gonna hopefully be here.
• 1:50:41
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, if I can do something to help this place be a place for them to have a decent life, you bet.
• 1:50:52
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's my goal.
• 1:50:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:50:54
  SPEAKER_01: That is absolutely my goal.
• 1:50:57
  SPEAKER_01: And if that's so if that's self-serving, I I I I you know, whatever.
• 1:51:02
  SPEAKER_01: I I'll accept that.
• 1:51:04
  Douglas: Yeah, and and I think on top of that, uh we if if people haven't picked this up already on this, is your definition of what's going to be best for your grandchildren is probably a little bit different than what I want from my great-niece and my great nephew.
• 1:51:20
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 1:51:20
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe not that different.
• 1:51:21
  SPEAKER_01: But not that different.
• 1:51:22
  Douglas: The the end goal, I think, is the same.
• 1:51:25
  Douglas: How we get there might be different.
• 1:51:28
  Douglas: Why can't we sit down and figure out a way that we can get them all at the same spot?
• 1:51:36
  Douglas: It's all about the journey to get there.
• 1:51:38
  SPEAKER_01: I I totally agree.
• 1:51:40
  SPEAKER_01: We I I think we have the capacity here to do it.
• 1:51:43
  SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you one thing, another thing that I've told the people who I've talked to about this community, I said, I've never been in a place in my life that had so many talented people who had so many, not only so many skills, but so many individuals who had multiple skills.
• 1:52:02
  SPEAKER_01: I know so many people here who can do two or three things really well.
• 1:52:08
  SPEAKER_01: And you're kind of like, wow, you know how to do that?
• 1:52:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, where I grew up, it just doesn't seem like it was that way.
• 1:52:16
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, people had their jobs, you know, they were like they maybe I just didn't know them well enough, but but I don't think so because living here forced it forced, for example, for me as an example.
• 1:52:29
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, no great shakes as a home builder, but I built my own house and it's still standing 42 years later, right?
• 1:52:39
  SPEAKER_02: Yep.
• 1:52:40
  SPEAKER_01: My father, the mathematician, never hung a painting on a wall.
• 1:52:46
  SPEAKER_01: I never, um this is the truth.
• 1:52:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I never used a hammer once.
• 1:52:51
  SPEAKER_01: Until you started building your house?
• 1:52:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 1:52:54
  SPEAKER_01: Wow.
• 1:52:55
  SPEAKER_01: I had never built a set of shelves, nothing.
• 1:52:58
  SPEAKER_01: The first thing I ever built was my house.
• 1:53:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because I had to.
• 1:53:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I learned, I talked to people, and and I and there I said, I need to build a simple structure, but it's got, and somehow or another, like I say, it's still there, which is I can't even fucking believe somehow, but it is, and it's nice to live in and all that.
• 1:53:22
  SPEAKER_01: But the point is you know, you talk to this person and they've got they have this in their background and that in their skill and this skill.
• 1:53:30
  SPEAKER_01: I've never been in a place where more where so many people had so many things that they were actually pretty good at.
• 1:53:39
  SPEAKER_01: This is a remarkable community.
• 1:53:41
  Douglas: When I had mentioned the idea for this show in the spring, one of the people that I talked to, they said, you need to have 20 to 30 show topics or people that you want to talk to before you even start.
• 1:53:53
  Douglas: Because if you can't come up with 20 to 30, your your show's gonna die.
• 1:53:57
  Douglas: And I was like, okay.
• 1:53:59
  Douglas: So I went home and literally within half an hour, I had about 80 people in Haynes that I wanted to interview on there.
• 1:54:07
  Douglas: Just because, like you're saying, the unique background they have, the different things that they've done or are doing right now, it did not take me very long to come up with a very extensive list of interesting people in Haynes that have done some really cool stuff or have a really cool background that's like I think more people need to know more about this person rather than just hey, there's Ted going down the street.
• 1:54:31
  Douglas: Right.
• 1:54:32
  Douglas: And I'm looking forward to those conversations.
• 1:54:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, and and and maybe this takes off, and maybe it will whatever, but yeah, and I hope it does uh because you're making a real effort at it, and I appreciate that.
• 1:54:46
  SPEAKER_01: But on aside from that, we can actually, this town can just be in an incredible place to live for a long time yet, probably, much longer than most than many places.
• 1:55:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're not gonna go underwater.
• 1:55:02
  SPEAKER_01: Because believe me, 10, 15 years from now, there are gonna be a lot of places underwater.
• 1:55:08
  SPEAKER_01: It's gonna happen.
• 1:55:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's not hyperbole, it's really happening.
• 1:55:13
  Douglas: Um, you look back, how long ago was it that we're under a mile and a half of ice?
• 1:55:16
  SPEAKER_01: Well, there's that, but the everything's everything's changing and it's happening rapidly.
• 1:55:22
  SPEAKER_01: And the ice that's now melting is raises.
• 1:55:28
  Douglas: It's melts water.
• 1:55:29
  Douglas: I mean, it's just it's it's in another phase.
• 1:55:31
  Douglas: Simple physics.
• 1:55:32
  Douglas: H2O has got three phases.
• 1:55:34
  Douglas: Got water, steam, or ice.
• 1:55:36
  SPEAKER_01: Well, actually four plasma, but okay.
• 1:55:38
  SPEAKER_01: We're never gonna talk about that.
• 1:55:39
  SPEAKER_01: But um, but yeah, no, it's um yeah, it is it's it's undeniable that it's gonna happen.
• 1:55:46
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, robotics.
• 1:55:49
  SPEAKER_01: There's no question that robotics and AI, there's no question it's gonna put millions of people out of work.
• 1:55:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yep.
• 1:55:57
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 1:55:58
  SPEAKER_01: When those millions of people are out of work, how are they gonna feed their families?
• 1:56:04
  SPEAKER_01: What are they gonna do for a job when there's no more warehouse jobs?
• 1:56:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I read an article this morning about Amazon and all the robot stuff they're doing in their warehouse.
• 1:56:15
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, so what are all those and is it our responsibility to give them jobs?
• 1:56:21
  SPEAKER_01: No, not necessarily.
• 1:56:23
  SPEAKER_01: But the m but the point is what are they gonna do for food?
• 1:56:27
  Douglas: Well, even in construction as well, you've got robots that are 3D printing a house in like two days.
• 1:56:34
  SPEAKER_01: How are what are what's gonna be competing with that?
• 1:56:37
  SPEAKER_01: What's gonna happen when there aren't the jobs for people to be able to feed their jobs?
• 1:56:41
  SPEAKER_01: So I am the way that I look at it is I'm worried about the future.
• 1:56:48
  Douglas: I I am, but at the same time, you look back at all the major changes that have happened in the last several centuries where it was this huge change, and you started having um you got rid of horses, you had cars, hard cars and airplanes and all these big changes.
• 1:57:07
  Douglas: And there's always been another job that kind of comes out of that.
• 1:57:12
  SPEAKER_01: I know.
• 1:57:12
  Douglas: This here's I I I agree.
• 1:57:14
  Douglas: I'm worried about the future as well because I think with the robotics and the AI, that's a much larger shock to the system.
• 1:57:20
  Douglas: It could be a much larger shock to the system than anything that's happened previously.
• 1:57:25
  SPEAKER_01: Not only that, but the difference between now and when we went from horses to cars, and this applies to environmental issues and all the rest of it.
• 1:57:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's not so much the change, it's the rate of change.
• 1:57:38
  Douglas: Correct.
• 1:57:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's how quickly things change.
• 1:57:41
  SPEAKER_01: You change the environment out there, plants and animals, many of them can adapt and survive if they have enough time, enough generations to make it work.
• 1:57:52
  SPEAKER_01: You can only change DNA so fast.
• 1:57:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem now is the rate of change isn't like nothing we've ever seen before.
• 1:58:03
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's gonna make this way more challenging.
• 1:58:08
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, horses to cars or whatever these are yeah, they were big changes, and then there were new jobs for this.
• 1:58:16
  SPEAKER_01: But oh boy, we're gonna have we're gonna have we're gonna have such displacement in society in so many ways within ten years that um it uh you know, it it kind it keeps me up at night a little bit because it's gonna things are gonna people are gonna be people are gonna be desperate.
• 1:58:39
  SPEAKER_01: They're not just gonna sit there on the side of the road and starve to death.
• 1:58:42
  SPEAKER_01: They're gonna have to figure they're gonna try to figure out some way to get food.
• 1:58:45
  SPEAKER_01: It ain't gonna be pretty.
• 1:58:49
  SPEAKER_01: Because it's gonna be like millions and millions of people.
• 1:58:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then when you add into that the fact that forget Miami and Manhattan and these places, I mean, if you've seen the models, you've watched the video visual models, go ahead and try stop the ocean.
• 1:59:05
  SPEAKER_01: Go ahead and try it.
• 1:59:07
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I mean, you look at um something you know that that is you never even hear about anymore, that's gonna be just so catastrophic is uh ocean acidification.
• 1:59:22
  SPEAKER_01: You never hear about it anymore.
• 1:59:23
  SPEAKER_01: No the ocean's getting more acidic.
• 1:59:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's getting to a point where it's not gonna sustain calcium carbonate.
• 1:59:33
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
• 1:59:34
  SPEAKER_01: You get to a certain pH and calcium carbonate dissociates into calcium ions and carbonate ions.
• 1:59:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's a fact.
• 1:59:41
  SPEAKER_01: That's just chemistry, okay?
• 1:59:43
  SPEAKER_01: When you don't have calcium carbonate, you don't have shells.
• 1:59:47
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't have shells, you don't have plankton.
• 1:59:51
  SPEAKER_01: And if you don't have plankton, you don't have oxygen.
• 1:59:55
  SPEAKER_01: So anybody who thinks that we can do this to the ocean and not affect those of us living on land doesn't understand some basic chemistry and biology because it's serious.
• 2:00:08
  SPEAKER_01: We are literally going to dissociate calcium carbonate in the oceans because of fossil fuel production, CO2 dissolves in the water, forms carbonic acid, carbonic acid breaks down the calcium carbonate.
• 2:00:24
  SPEAKER_01: This is just like first year in organic chemistry, it's real, and it's like nobody's even talking about it anymore because of all the other shit that's going on, which I understand why that's so serious, but we are literally talking about the systems that support all life on the planet.
• 2:00:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so I look at my grandkids almost like, oh my god, North and Garland.
• 2:00:54
  SPEAKER_01: What are we gonna do?
• 2:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: What are we gonna do?
• 2:00:58
  SPEAKER_01: They're eight and ten years old, and it's like, are they gonna even make it to 71?
• 2:01:04
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, oh Doug, I tell you what, it's just it's hard for me.
• 2:01:10
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard for me.
• 2:01:11
  Douglas: Yeah, yeah, true.
• 2:01:13
  Douglas: There's there's there's challenges out there in so many different areas, and it's I I stress out a lot about it on what's gonna happen in the future, but then I also hear stories about people that are just doing some amazing things that it's I know I are that are they gonna be able to produce it quick enough to change the tide?
• 2:01:43
  Douglas: I don't know.
• 2:01:44
  Douglas: I don't know, I don't know.
• 2:01:45
  Douglas: I don't have the mental capacity or the skill set to change any of that.
• 2:01:52
  Douglas: And so it's it's something that um I w I worry about, but at the same time, I'm like I try to I I try to worry about the things that I can control.
• 2:02:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and that's why I try to work on local issues.
• 2:02:08
  Douglas: Yeah, and so is that I can as an individual.
• 2:02:12
  Douglas: Yeah, I I can't control what everybody else does.
• 2:02:15
  Douglas: I'm probably doing better than some and worse than others.
• 2:02:18
  Douglas: Right.
• 2:02:19
  Douglas: And it is where I am, and you know, you try and do the best you can, and we'll see where we end up.
• 2:02:24
  Douglas: Yeah, no, I agree.
• 2:02:25
  Douglas: That's what I'm doing too.
• 2:02:27
  Douglas: So all right.
• 2:02:28
  Douglas: Well, I appreciate you coming in.
• 2:02:29
  Douglas: It's been great having a conversation.
• 2:02:31
  Douglas: Very nice, very nice to chat.
• 2:02:33
  Douglas: Thanks for watching this episode of Doug Had's Questions.
• 2:02:36
  Douglas: Just a reminder: if you've enjoyed the conversation today, please like, subscribe, and we're available on YouTube if you want to watch us, if you just want to listen.
• 2:02:45
  Douglas: Uh, it's on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you have new uh episodes being launched every Thursday.
• 2:02:53
  Douglas: So thanks again for watching or listening and following us.
• 2:02:57
  Douglas: We appreciate your support.