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The Science of Soil Engineering · 6 Ranch Podcast

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Worst case scenario is kind of the whole rupture, so it's up and down.
• 0:06
  Speaker 1: The Pacific Northwest Earthquake would last several minutes and in a magnitude 9 earthquake it's like a whole bunch of sevens and seven and a halves kind of put together.
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't necessarily shake.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: You know bigger, it's not, you know greater accelerations, but it's it just lasts a long time.
• 0:31
  Speaker 1: And there's a lot of things that we do that work pretty well for a while, but if you just keep shaking them, eventually they're gonna, they're gonna break right and so you look at, so then that comes with a tsunami and, um, you know, depending on where you are, that tsunami generated from that is um, it's like 40, 45 feet tall.
• 1:05
  Speaker 3: These are stories of outdoor adventure and expert advice from folks with calloused hands.
• 1:10
  Speaker 3: I'm James Nash and this is the Six Ranch Podcast.
• 1:24
  Speaker 3: This episode of the Six Ranch Podcast is brought to you by DECT.
• 1:28
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• 1:32
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• 1:54
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• 2:07
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• 2:29
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• 2:41
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• 2:52
  Speaker 3: All right, scott, what's your profession?
• 2:59
  Speaker 1: I'm an engineer.
• 3:00
  Speaker 1: What does that mean?
• 3:03
  Speaker 3: That word has encompassed a lot of new people in the last 20 years.
• 3:08
  Speaker 3: Right, there's people who are engineers today who, if you dial it back 30 years ago, they don't even have the environment for them to do that type of engineering.
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: So it's become a bit ambiguous.
• 3:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, I think, as an engineer, I think the main thing is you're a problem solver.
• 3:28
  Speaker 1: Okay, whatever that is.
• 3:30
  Speaker 1: If you look at the very early engineers, they were military engineers, right, right, trying to figure out how to win a war, construct catapults and things like that.
• 3:44
  Speaker 3: Those guys were called engineers.
• 3:46
  Speaker 1: A lot of the early engineers were agricultural engineers and they're trying to figure out how to get water to the crops and harvest the crops.
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: Yeah, combat engineers.
• 3:57
  Speaker 3: Today their primary job is minefields, stuff like that.
• 4:03
  Speaker 3: Right job is, uh, you know, minefields, stuff like that, right, and uh, it doesn't necessarily sound like like when you say the word engineer, that's not the first thing that you think about.
• 4:13
  Speaker 3: Um, when you say combat engineer, you might think that they're going to be building bases or things like that.
• 4:20
  Speaker 3: But that often falls onto, at least for the marine corps falls onto, like the cbs and the navy like yeah what lyle did we did.
• 4:31
  Speaker 1: I did a project one time and we were trying to come up with a, a bridge in a box.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: So we had bridges that would fit.
• 4:38
  Speaker 1: We had, we made, we designed bridges that would fit on top of the tank and they.
• 4:43
  Speaker 1: But we had to ship them in.
• 4:45
  Speaker 1: And what we wanted to do they're made out of glass fiber, carbon fiber, okay, and we tried.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: The project was to get everything you needed to build the bridge in a box and also supplement it with locally available materials, so you didn't have the big iron mount, big iron mountain storage right somewhere.
• 5:05
  Speaker 1: Um, that was fun, you know.
• 5:08
  Speaker 3: We uh um just looking at trying to figure something like that out and make it easy and quick to get to get it to where they need it yeah, I remember seeing a vehicle that was like that and I can't remember specifically its model or nomenclature or anything, but it was a tracked vehicle and had a bifolding bridge that it could drive up, offload and then all kinds of vehicles could pass over it.
• 5:38
  Speaker 3: If you look at the history of warfare, crossing water features is an incredibly limiting thing throughout all of warfare right.
• 5:50
  Speaker 1: Still today.
• 5:51
  Speaker 3: Still trying to figure that out.
• 5:52
  Speaker 3: And I remember, on some of our like tactical maneuvers in Afghanistan, coming across little bridges that you know we'd have to cross in a tank.
• 6:01
  Speaker 3: And of course in school you read all these manuals about manuals about how to analyze a bridge and understand what its capabilities are.
• 6:09
  Speaker 3: And then you get out in the real world and it's like, well, I see some concrete, I see zero rebar, but let's try it.
• 6:22
  Speaker 1: Because you are in a hurry Sure.
• 6:24
  Speaker 3: You can't stop right.
• 6:26
  Speaker 3: That's the worst thing of all.
• 6:28
  Speaker 3: So you can either just bypass it, keep going, find something else, hope for the best not a great course of action or you can just go and see what works.
• 6:39
  Speaker 1: You know that's a lot of engineering is you test something, something you see if it works, see how it goes, and then you have a plan b, and I think that's a lot of what we do as engineers is try something out, but have a plan okay.
• 6:52
  Speaker 1: If that doesn't work, what's the what are we going to do when that happens?
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: yeah, in the product development space that I get to work in, there seems to be a disconnect between engineers and normal humans.
• 7:05
  Speaker 3: A lot of times, engineers are incredibly smart people, but they're smart in a way that doesn't necessarily translate to the masses Oftentimes.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: And there'll be all all these pieces of functionality or or pathways to access functionality and different pieces of gear that are very obvious to the engineering mind, but when it gets to a dummy like me, it's like I can't figure this out.
• 7:32
  Speaker 3: And I think that's a really critical phase in development.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: Production is getting dummies into the mix to check the engineers a little bit and make sure that everything is accessible.
• 7:48
  Speaker 1: You mean, get dummies into the mix that actually know how to do something.
• 7:50
  Speaker 1: Is that what you're saying?
• 7:52
  Speaker 1: They're really different minds, I think the engineering mind is really unique.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: Oftentimes it seems like engineers are really introverted.
• 8:01
  Speaker 3: Would you say that that's a fair assessment?
• 8:04
  Speaker 1: like engineers are really introverted.
• 8:07
  Speaker 1: Would you say that that's a fair assessment?
• 8:08
  Speaker 1: I would say that I think engineers used to be introverted, but one of the things is that engineers just kind of that engineering method and that problem-solving technique that they is drilled into them in school.
• 8:18
  Speaker 1: I think they're becoming less introverted and and I think kind of seeing their role in society because you know they can certainly they can design and they can build things, but they can also help out at the city council right or or if there's a you know, some you know, volunteer and help help the public, just with that kind of straight, straightforward problem solving technique what problem are you most proud of having solved?
• 8:52
  Speaker 3: or you know, oftentimes problems are never like truly solved, but they're.
• 8:55
  Speaker 1: They're solved to a point of satisfaction one of the things I'm really uh, I'm really proud of is that I worked with some other people and we've figured out a way to do full scale field liquefaction testing.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: What's liquefaction?
• 9:13
  Speaker 1: So liquefaction if you're in an earthquake, so kind of my specialty is earthquake engineering.
• 9:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so in an earthquake, if you have a, like a sandy soil, high groundwater table, the shaking actually raises the water pressure in the ground and it gets to a certain point it can actually lift all the sand grains off of one another and become a liquid.
• 9:39
  Speaker 1: If you have a building on it or a bridge, that becomes a real problem.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Bridge falls over building sinks into the ground and it really plays havoc with, like the infrastructure Pipelines, roads, railroads.
• 9:59
  Speaker 1: You know bridges.
• 10:02
  Speaker 1: We came to understand, okay, you know how liquefaction, how it happens.
• 10:09
  Speaker 1: We know why it happens.
• 10:10
  Speaker 1: We could predict the soils that it's going to happen in.
• 10:14
  Speaker 1: We didn't.
• 10:15
  Speaker 1: It's really hard to do a full-scale test on a bridge and me and a colleague we figured out we could use explosives buried in the ground and really small I mean kind of small, so like a pound or two and kind of drill them in this loose sand, set them off and we could liquefy the ground.
• 10:40
  Speaker 1: We could do full scale testing of these bridge foundations and understand how they behave and and, and I think our work allowed like the profession I think to move ahead and understand.
• 10:55
  Speaker 1: Actually, in many cases it doesn't.
• 10:57
  Speaker 1: You just don't get any resistance, it just doesn't do much.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: Gotcha.
• 11:01
  Speaker 3: So that explosive is that starting now as a vibrational energy, or is it a wave energy Like, how does that translate to what?
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: we see in earthquakes the same as an earthquake, but what happens is that when you there's a compression wave.
• 11:26
  Speaker 1: When you set off the explosive, there's a compression wave in the ground.
• 11:30
  Speaker 1: Right.
• 11:31
  Speaker 1: And that wave increases the water pressure and that's kind of what we're really after was that increase in the water pressure, and we increased it enough that you would see like these sand boils, like these little sand volcanoes appearing around the ground.
• 11:47
  Speaker 1: And we were able to.
• 11:51
  Speaker 1: We actually did a.
• 11:54
  Speaker 1: We did a big test in Japan about the size of two football fields and liquefied all the ground and had it caused a slope failure.
• 12:05
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 12:06
  Speaker 1: At a port.
• 12:07
  Speaker 1: It was super fun.
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, that's very interesting.
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: When we were building this building where the studio is, you know, we leveled it, put down some fine crushed gravel and then started running vibrating plates over it and compacting it.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: And when I was talking to the uh, the excavator guy that was helping me with everything, he was talking about percentages of compaction and on commercial projects.
• 12:37
  Speaker 3: That was very, very important and you know I'll get the number wrong, but I want to say it was like 92%, something like that, and I was like why is why is not more better?
• 12:47
  Speaker 3: And he said you know, you can compact to the point where you'll actually liquefy the ground and create something that's that's instable or unstable.
• 12:58
  Speaker 3: That's so interesting to me because we just don't think about solid materials in those terms.
• 13:06
  Speaker 3: You know we don't think about the earth getting on the move like that.
• 13:09
  Speaker 3: And yeah, it's fascinating.
• 13:13
  Speaker 3: On wildfires I saw dirt boil a lot.
• 13:16
  Speaker 3: So if you get dirt hot enough, then all the organic gets consumed out of it and it boils just like a pot on your stove.
• 13:25
  Speaker 3: It has, you know, bubbles that come out of it.
• 13:28
  Speaker 3: It's incredibly soft.
• 13:30
  Speaker 3: If you stick a tool in it, it just sinks.
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: If you stick your leg in it, it's also going to sink you're going to get terrible burns from that and very, very interesting to watch solid materials acted differently from how you're used to?
• 13:45
  Speaker 1: Is that the water boiling in the ground?
• 13:48
  Speaker 1: I guess that would be where the bubbles are coming from.
• 13:51
  Speaker 3: You know, I don't know what kind of gas is escaping, yeah, and it's very dry when it happens, okay, and it tends to be incredibly fine dirt that, you know we we find in this moist mixed conifer type of forest a lot of times and uh, yeah, it'll.
• 14:10
  Speaker 3: It'll be a little bit tan and color a lot of times and, yeah, it just boils incredibly soft and if you shoot water into it, you need to be really careful that your face isn't over the top of that, Cause that steam is going to come up and get you in a big way we found, we did some.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: Uh, we're in a earthquake in japan.
• 14:32
  Speaker 1: It was after.
• 14:33
  Speaker 1: So a lot of times what I do is I go after an earthquake and look at the um, try to assess the damage and learn what we could before they start tearing everything out.
• 14:45
  Speaker 1: So there's kind of a a window.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: You let all the rescue operations take place right and then you get there before they start cleaning up too much.
• 14:55
  Speaker 1: And there is some of these liquefaction sites where I had a friend and he felt he just sunk down into his waist wow in the soil and we're standing right next to a building yeah, that's crazy.
• 15:08
  Speaker 3: Was he scared?
• 15:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know we were right there, so we were able to pull him out but certainly he lost his boot in the process we saw that happen in Afghanistan just because the dust is so fine.
• 15:23
  Speaker 3: Where we were in the helmand province, because there's a hundred hundred day wind every year in the summertime, that is incredibly hot, incredibly dry, and you get the pulverized remains of the himalaya coming down into southern afghanistan and the dust is just finer than than you can imagine and they call it moon dust, which is a dumb thing to say, but I saw marines sink in that and have laced boots come off their feet and it's dry and it's dry, wow, yeah, but if you get down into it enough, there's also enough suction that it's pretty tough to get out of.
• 16:00
  Speaker 3: Yeah, really interesting.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: Uh, something that's less so on the news than it was a couple years ago but is still very much at the top of my mind is the Cascadia fault.
• 16:13
  Speaker 3: Talk us through that, because I'm sure that's been a big part of your life.
• 16:26
  Speaker 1: So the Cascadia Subduction Zone is this huge plate.
• 16:27
  Speaker 1: You know, it's a plate going from Northern California up into British Columbia and actually for years they thought you know the profession thought that it was locked and actually not seismic locked and actually not seismic.
• 16:46
  Speaker 1: And what they found, through really some amazing work and looking at kind of layers of sediment offshore, what they found is that in fact it was the slowest moving plate boundary in the world and so you only get a.
• 17:03
  Speaker 1: You get an earthquake off this Cascadia subduction zone.
• 17:08
  Speaker 1: On average it's about every 300 years.
• 17:13
  Speaker 1: Sometimes it's a thousand, but when you get an earthquake it's like a magnitude nine Biggest one, I think, is a nine and a half that they've been able to back calculate.
• 17:24
  Speaker 1: The last one was in the early 1700s and so we're it's been about 300 years of.
• 17:34
  Speaker 1: A good good friend of mine says that it's kind of past being nine months pregnant okay, so the baby's due any day that's right and it.
• 17:46
  Speaker 1: But it could be, you know, it could be way overdue, it could be another hundred years and and I think that's one of the challenges we have here living in the northwest is that you know, you look at, you live in the bay area or you live in los angeles.
• 18:01
  Speaker 1: You don't have to convince people there's an earthquake problem there, because you get earthquakes pretty regularly and people remember them and you feel them regularly.
• 18:12
  Speaker 1: You know, up here it's such a it happens so rarely.
• 18:17
  Speaker 1: I mean early 1700s.
• 18:18
  Speaker 1: There's not a lot of written history.
• 18:20
  Speaker 1: Actually, you know in the Northwest of written history.
• 18:27
  Speaker 1: Actually you know in the northwest how we even know that we got the day from that because it caused a tsunami that actually killed some people in japan and it was in the newspapers in japan wow and so then you look at this giant earthquake that we get every few hundred years um, but I'm, you know, if I look at what I'm most proud of, I think that I've been able to help kind of move, I think the readiness and this thought about resilience on how are we going to bounce back from something like that.
• 19:01
  Speaker 1: And it's been and that's something that, since living up in Oregon, that's one of the things I've really focused on.
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: What?
• 19:09
  Speaker 3: What's the worst case scenario look like?
• 19:15
  Speaker 1: Worst case scenario is the kind of the whole rupture.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: So it's up and down.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: The Pacific Northwest earthquake would last several minutes and in a magnitude 9 earthquake it's like a whole bunch of sevens and seven and a halves kind of put together.
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: So it doesn't necessarily shake.
• 19:39
  Speaker 1: You know bigger, it's not, you know greaterations, but it's.
• 19:44
  Speaker 1: It just lasts a long time and there's a lot of things that we do that work pretty well for a while.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: But if you just keep shaking them, eventually they're gonna, they're gonna break right and so you look at.
• 19:59
  Speaker 1: So then that comes with a tsunami and, um, you know, depending on where you are, that tsunami generated from that is like 40, 45 feet tall and then if you hit the cliff then you have run up.
• 20:15
  Speaker 1: So the wave comes up and continues to do damage.
• 20:19
  Speaker 1: It goes miles inland to a lot of the rivers along the coast.
• 20:25
  Speaker 1: They find you know tsunami evidence of tsunami sediment miles inland.
• 20:30
  Speaker 1: And on the Columbia right, you'll be able to measure it in Portland.
• 20:34
  Speaker 1: It's not going to be huge but you'd be able to measure it so that you know that type of thing.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: It, you know, affects all your bridges, um, takes out, you know.
• 20:45
  Speaker 1: So then your, your weight ability to move around is is, uh, greatly impacted.
• 20:52
  Speaker 1: You um lose power, water for days, right, especially on the coast.
• 21:01
  Speaker 1: They're looking at several weeks or more depending on where you are.
• 21:07
  Speaker 1: You get over most of the routes to the coast.
• 21:09
  Speaker 1: They have some now that they've in the past 10 years that are called lifeline routes and so they're just roads that they're going to.
• 21:15
  Speaker 1: They're trying to design to keep open, but a lot of the roads over the coast would be closed.
• 21:20
  Speaker 1: You get over to the valley.
• 21:26
  Speaker 1: Still, you know Willamette Valley is still going to be very strong shaking.
• 21:29
  Speaker 1: You know Portland, a lot of.
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: You know damage in Portland.
• 21:33
  Speaker 1: You know several of the bridges aren't.
• 21:35
  Speaker 1: You know some are.
• 21:36
  Speaker 1: You know some, but many aren't designed to withstand it.
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: What about the buildings?
• 21:41
  Speaker 1: You know the modern buildings are.
• 21:43
  Speaker 1: You know a lot of times modern buildings are in pretty good shape.
• 21:45
  Speaker 1: You get to the.
• 21:46
  Speaker 1: It's the older buildings.
• 21:48
  Speaker 3: Older than what.
• 21:49
  Speaker 1: Well, modern earthquake design started.
• 21:53
  Speaker 1: A lot of that started in 1970s.
• 21:56
  Speaker 1: You know the like, the unreinforced masonry.
• 22:01
  Speaker 1: So if you have an old brick building, those are really vulnerable in earthquakes.
• 22:06
  Speaker 1: If you have buildings along the waterways where you get the liquefaction, you get a lot of damage there and it also will, you know, put out the.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: You know power distribution, water systems, electricity, a lot of that is going to be out.
• 22:26
  Speaker 1: Everybody's aware of it and they have plans to fix it.
• 22:31
  Speaker 1: But it's just, it's still going to be.
• 22:33
  Speaker 1: You know, sometimes days or weeks.
• 22:35
  Speaker 1: In the plan Um in the plan um, redmond airport is becomes the primary airport for the state of Oregon.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Uh, highway 97 kind of becomes that main north south route.
• 22:48
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 22:50
  Speaker 1: So that's.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: Interesting.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a um, but the I will say that the state is much better prepared for it now than we were 10, 20 years ago.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: There's been a lot of effort put into it.
• 23:03
  Speaker 1: Yeah, they have a governor, has somebody reporting to them now?
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: That is the earthquake, the earthquake resilience officer, and they're really looking at what are all the different agencies doing to help prepare.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Agencies doing to help prepare?
• 23:25
  Speaker 1: Odot has a a kind of a lifeline route that they're working on to strengthen a route that so people can get get around People along the coast.
• 23:31
  Speaker 1: You know they have the tsunami, you know the, the tsunami line, the evacuation lines for people to know how, you know if they're in the zone and where to go to get out of the zone.
• 23:43
  Speaker 1: So there's a lot of, I think, preparedness and most the biggest thing is saving is life safety.
• 23:48
  Speaker 1: After that, then, it's a community trying to bounce back.
• 23:53
  Speaker 3: Right, but the likelihood if it does go big is that you know it's the loss of tens of thousands of people, probably, right.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: You know, a lot of it depends, I think.
• 24:08
  Speaker 1: And so and there's, you know, there's studies available.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: That kind of it varies quite a bit.
• 24:15
  Speaker 1: I think the in what I've seen just looking at these earthquakes, it just happens.
• 24:20
  Speaker 1: It just depends what what's going on at the time, what time of day it happens, where are people.
• 24:30
  Speaker 1: But it'll certainly disrupt everybody's life, whether you're in the zone that got shaken or you're on the other side of the Cascades and you're helping those people bounce back from it.
• 24:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I don't know how much warning are we going to get.
• 24:51
  Speaker 1: Well.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: Like.
• 24:52
  Speaker 3: Are there indicators that it's about to happen?
• 24:57
  Speaker 1: You won't, so you won't.
• 25:08
  Speaker 1: We can't really predict yet that the earthquake is happening, you know, is going to happen today or tomorrow or next week.
• 25:12
  Speaker 1: For the tsunami, if you're living on the Oregon coast, if you feel the strong shaking, that's your warning.
• 25:18
  Speaker 1: Yeah, to get to the higher ground we would have, you know, in the Willamette Valley, probably minutes, because it takes time for the waves.
• 25:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe not minutes, but we'd have maybe a minute or two of time before we have a chance to you know, for the shaking to make its way all to the, all the way to the Willamette Valley.
• 25:45
  Speaker 3: Wow, that's not much.
• 25:47
  Speaker 1: It's not a lot of time.
• 25:52
  Speaker 3: That's not much yeah.
• 25:57
  Speaker 1: Did you ever read the book Shogun?
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: No.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I watched.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I watched the movie.
• 25:58
  Speaker 1: I don't know if it's the same.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Okay, yeah, I think it is.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: I think it is.
• 26:00
  Speaker 3: I read that movie I don't know if it's the same Okay, yeah, I think it is.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: I think it is.
• 26:02
  Speaker 3: I read that book when I was a kid.
• 26:03
  Speaker 3: I absolutely loved it.
• 26:04
  Speaker 3: It's a sailor that kind of gets captured by the Japanese and learns how to be a samurai.
• 26:09
  Speaker 3: It's a great provocative book for a kid.
• 26:12
  Speaker 3: There's some stuff in there that's not especially kid-friendly, but it was in the library so I got to read it.
• 26:19
  Speaker 3: They recently made a show about that on FX.
• 26:25
  Speaker 3: That's pretty darn good.
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: And, of course, earthquakes are a huge part of life in Japan and they did a good job of showing what earthquakes were like there.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: A lot of the old Japanese infrastructure was either built to be able to withstand earthquakes or to just get immediately destroyed by them so that they could start over really quickly, and I think that that's a fascinating ideology.
• 26:53
  Speaker 3: Fire is a huge, huge, huge part of earthquake damage.
• 26:58
  Speaker 3: It's not necessarily something that we think about, but if I look at earthquake events around the world, it seems like fire causes as much problems as actually buildings and other infrastructure getting destroyed.
• 27:12
  Speaker 3: Is that a fair assessment?
• 27:13
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know.
• 27:15
  Speaker 1: You look at the great San Francisco earthquake in 1906, and fire is what killed most of the people, did most of the damage.
• 27:24
  Speaker 1: And then you know years later they had the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989.
• 27:32
  Speaker 1: And that Loma Prieta earthquake caused a lot of liquefaction and one of the things with liquefaction is that it damaged, it broke a lot of the pipes that are buried underground right in this ground that's liquefied and the entire the marina district in the city of San Francisco.
• 28:02
  Speaker 1: They lost their ability to fight fire.
• 28:06
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: Fire broke out.
• 28:08
  Speaker 1: They were able to get an antique.
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: It was a museum piece, a fireboat.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: Really.
• 28:14
  Speaker 1: Around and they had enough hose, yeah, and they put out that one fire, but the next fire break was down near the San Francisco airport.
• 28:23
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 28:24
  Speaker 1: It's just, you know fire is.
• 28:27
  Speaker 1: You know if you look at an urban area like in Japan, and that fire's been a great risk for them.
• 28:34
  Speaker 1: You know when they've had earthquakes.
• 28:39
  Speaker 3: This is a slightly different subject, but I was looking at the gobi desert last night and, uh, that's another piece of earth that's very much on the move in a different way, but it is, uh, adding gosh I can't even remember, but it was like 6 000 square kilometers a year or something.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: Um, it's growing and it's marching towards beijing, slowly and slowly, and as, as they use more and more of the vegetation and fiber that's holding that desert down, then the desert gets bigger and bigger and continues to move.
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: It's it's going to be, you know, interesting to see if that accelerates.
• 29:22
  Speaker 3: And then what is that like when you have a massive city like Beijing that is being assaulted at the rate of 3 or 10 meters per year and there's not a good place to go?
• 29:40
  Speaker 3: And how do you fight against something like that?
• 29:45
  Speaker 1: yeah, that's a, see, that's a.
• 29:46
  Speaker 1: I mean, it's engineering, one way to look at it.
• 29:50
  Speaker 1: Right, it's an engineering problem, and how can you slow down or stop right?
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: The progression of the desert to the city and mother nature is pretty hard to stop.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's a lot of examples out there of things that we try.
• 30:05
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 30:05
  Speaker 1: But you know they're going to try.
• 30:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 30:08
  Speaker 1: And a lot.
• 30:09
  Speaker 1: You know, sometimes we can do a good job at that stuff.
• 30:13
  Speaker 1: A lot of times it's the, you know, I think there's unintended consequences from some of the actions Of course.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: But it's something.
• 30:22
  Speaker 3: You know that their engineers are working on it today yeah, yeah, and what a what a fun problem to try to solve.
• 30:30
  Speaker 3: You know, there's a great video that was going around in iceland not too long ago and there was an excavator that was um piling rocks in the road to try and stop lava flows.
• 30:40
  Speaker 3: And lava is like going around it on all sides.
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: The Icelanders have a long tradition of fighting volcanoes.
• 30:49
  Speaker 3: You know, and I love it.
• 30:51
  Speaker 3: I read this book called the Control of Nature by John McPhee back in college and one of the chapters was on Icelanders, the icelanders fighting, fighting lava, you know, squirting seawater at it and trying to save these little towns, uh, in really important fishing, fishing ports and villages and things like that.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: And I specifically remember that this lava at one point was exploding quite a bit and they would hear it, they would see that it was coming down and the best method that they found to not get hit was to stay there long enough to determine that it was definitely going to hit you and then move at the last second.
• 31:39
  Speaker 1: I love those guys.
• 31:40
  Speaker 1: Oh my gosh.
• 31:41
  Speaker 1: Well, you know, the lava in Iceland is so fluid, it's got a low silica content, so it flows and they can divert it, and they can try to cool it and divert it.
• 31:54
  Speaker 1: You look at the volcanoes we have up here in the northwest and they're a little little more violent.
• 32:02
  Speaker 3: yeah, yeah, something, uh to tie this into hunting a little bit the there's a bunch of ash deposits, especially at the bottom of draws and in canyons around here, that are from the volcano that created crater lake and in the springtime, starting pretty close to now, the elk are going to eat that stuff uh, really hard, and whole herds of elk will find those banks and they'll lick a spot until it looks like somebody's just been scraping it away and they'll consume absolute poundage of this.
• 32:46
  Speaker 3: And I asked a geologist on a fishing trip years ago, like what's in that?
• 32:52
  Speaker 3: And he said, well, everything's in it.
• 32:55
  Speaker 3: Like, if you really start to get into what tephra consists of, it changes place to place but it has just about all of our minerals.
• 33:09
  Speaker 3: But whatever this specific concoction is, our elk absolutely love it in the springtime.
• 33:25
  Speaker 1: You know that, mazama ash, it's so cool because you see it, you see it all over the northwest and for for folks like for geologists, it's a layer that you can identify and date right and so then, everything you know, the age of everything above and below it, it's a, it's a, you know, it's a great marker layer yeah, it's like a bookmark.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 33:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, what's your favorite kind of hunting Duck hunting.
• 33:45
  Speaker 3: Yeah, what's?
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: your favorite duck Pintails.
• 33:49
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: Though you can't shoot very many of them.
• 33:51
  Speaker 1: You can't.
• 33:53
  Speaker 3: And even if you could around here, like that regulation kind of just exists in people's minds, I've never had an issue with going over my pintail limit.
• 34:04
  Speaker 1: You know, we we got in, we were hunting with my, I was hunting with my kids and we had a limit.
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: We were over in at summer lake and we had a limit of canvas backs.
• 34:15
  Speaker 1: Wow, like, and they, normally we didn't see them over there.
• 34:19
  Speaker 1: And so the and and you hit, you get that.
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: And then it's like okay, now you're identifying everything coming in.
• 34:27
  Speaker 1: If it looks like a canned, you know you're staying away from it.
• 34:31
  Speaker 3: Um, that's a good eating duck yeah, it was tough.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: I'll just.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: I wanted one of the things.
• 34:36
  Speaker 1: You know, my um worked in Southern California a long time, yeah, where at Down in San Diego area, okay, and you know, we were raising the kids down there and I realized that if they ever wanted to learn how to hunt, I had to learn how to hunt.
• 34:54
  Speaker 1: I had to take them hunting in Southern California.
• 35:00
  Speaker 1: I grew up hunting but I don't think I ever learned to hunt until I was really down there, and so this was, you know, public hunting in Southern California, and we kind of had two options.
• 35:15
  Speaker 1: The city of San Diego actually has a hunting program on it.
• 35:18
  Speaker 1: It's been around for over 100 years on their drinking, their drinking water reservoirs, okay, and so you put your name in a draw and they give you I think you could get three days per lake and wherever, whenever your day was drawn.
• 35:35
  Speaker 1: Then you can go in and and hunt and they have signs out where your number is and you go to that spot and the lakes were pretty good about that and they gave you a large, pretty large area and they had boats that you'd rent really as part of it.
• 35:51
  Speaker 1: Um, and you knew where all the other hunters were um, we took the kid, you know, take the kids out there.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: And then the other is you could go out to the Salton Sea, which was caused by an engineering malfunction.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: A levee broke a long time ago and flooded.
• 36:11
  Speaker 1: That created the Salton Sea.
• 36:14
  Speaker 1: It's kind of a sink for the entire area, and so there you could also put in your name and get some draws.
• 36:23
  Speaker 1: But you could also just go there and you had to stand in what they called the sweat line, yeah, at three in the morning, and you got in line and then you just you drew and they had I, they had something like 200, 250 blinds all around the area and you'd draw, you'd get your thing and then you'd go find it and then you had to stay within 50 yards of the of the little sign.
• 36:52
  Speaker 1: Wow.
• 36:53
  Speaker 1: And you take your gun.
• 36:56
  Speaker 1: You know, take your gun out of your, out of your case, and immediately starts rusting, because the Salton Sea is aptly named and everything just rusts as soon as you get out there.
• 37:06
  Speaker 1: But we would go out, I'd take the kids and we'd go camp in a gravel parking lot after work and we'd camp out, set up in the dark, which is pretty typical for a scovillan.
• 37:23
  Speaker 1: Right yeah, and then about 2 in the morning, alarms because everybody else is camped out in this gravel parking lot.
• 37:29
  Speaker 1: The alarms start going off and you hear kids complaining and dad's yelling at kids.
• 37:35
  Speaker 1: All these tents We'd get up and we'd get off and you know we'd go.
• 37:39
  Speaker 1: And then we moved back up to oregon and took them, took the boys hunting up here to a friend's.
• 37:47
  Speaker 1: He had a pair of blinds.
• 37:49
  Speaker 1: Pintails were flying all over.
• 37:53
  Speaker 1: It was icy but they had a bubbler.
• 37:55
  Speaker 1: So there was a place you know of open water and we're calling the pintails.
• 38:01
  Speaker 1: The guys in the blind right next to us had a grill going and they were passing hot dogs over to the kids while we're duck hunting.
• 38:10
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 38:11
  Speaker 1: And both kids.
• 38:12
  Speaker 1: They said Dad, this makes up for all the times you made us go hunting in California With a cleaner living.
• 38:20
  Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so it was, but I grew up hunting ducks.
• 38:25
  Speaker 1: It's just something I really enjoy it.
• 38:28
  Speaker 3: Do you have a dog?
• 38:29
  Speaker 1: I do.
• 38:30
  Speaker 1: She's out in the car.
• 38:31
  Speaker 3: Yeah, duck dog.
• 38:32
  Speaker 1: Yep, she is, pepper is a black lab and she's my third duck hunting dog Kids.
• 38:43
  Speaker 1: We didn't have a kid have a dog when the kids were growing up and they had decided they wanted one.
• 38:48
  Speaker 1: And I really tried to stay out of that decision Totally wanted a lab, but I wanted to let the kids decide.
• 38:56
  Speaker 1: So Malia took them down to the library, checked out a dog book and they came home they go dad, dad, we, we figured out what kind of dog we want.
• 39:07
  Speaker 1: I'm just going okay, well, you know who knows.
• 39:12
  Speaker 1: But I said, all right, well, what is it?
• 39:13
  Speaker 1: Oh, we want to.
• 39:14
  Speaker 1: It's called a labrador retriever thank god, yes I'll take over from here.
• 39:22
  Speaker 1: Yeah well, tell me about pepper oh, pepper is, um, probably the best hunting dog I've had, and I read an article in du magazine a while ago and they talked about a pretty good dog.
• 39:38
  Speaker 1: So pepper has her problems, but she's a pretty good.
• 39:41
  Speaker 1: You know, she's a pretty good dog.
• 39:43
  Speaker 1: She will find a duck anywhere.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she's loves retrieving is just just driven.
• 39:51
  Speaker 1: She's 11 now.
• 39:52
  Speaker 1: She's 11 years old yeah she will do the me the courtesy of letting the duck circle three times.
• 39:58
  Speaker 1: If you let them come around a fourth time, it's kind of 50 50 whether or not you're actually going to be able to do anything.
• 40:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, with them she broke, uh, my wife's hip when she was a puppy, which so they have a special relationship.
• 40:16
  Speaker 1: She was just charging after a retrieve and we had her on a check cord and the retrieve was just a little further than the check cord.
• 40:25
  Speaker 1: Oh, it just didn't work out very well.
• 40:28
  Speaker 3: Well, that's a lot of drive, it's.
• 40:31
  Speaker 3: You know, I can appreciate that.
• 40:33
  Speaker 3: Like I'm sorry for for the drama, but you got to admire the drive.
• 40:39
  Speaker 1: It's a and she's finally calming down yeah I mean, labs are puppies for a long time and I think after she turned about eight or nine she kind of started calming down a little bit.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: Yeah, she just loves hunting, loves retrieving.
• 40:54
  Speaker 1: She'll break the ice and, um, I love going out with her and if my, my boys can get a duck and the dog retrieves them, then you know I'm good, it's perfect.
• 41:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's really good.
• 41:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah Well, you'll have to.
• 41:09
  Speaker 3: We'll have to hunt ducks together.
• 41:11
  Speaker 3: I enjoy duck hunting a lot and I think it's one of the most just, purely enjoyable hunts that there is.
• 41:19
  Speaker 3: And duck hunting can be really miserable too, like you can.
• 41:25
  Speaker 3: You can put yourself in situations where it's very dark, it's very early, it's very cold, there's there's wind and wet, and you know all kinds of distractions that make a guy go internal a little bit.
• 41:37
  Speaker 3: But you can also pick your days and go when the hunting is going to be really good.
• 41:43
  Speaker 3: And you know you can go out to the blind and have a cup of coffee and a breakfast burrito.
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: You know wait for it to get light.
• 41:52
  Speaker 3: You know hunt some birds, watch your dog do its thing and, and you know, be all wrapped up and cleaned up by 9 o'clock in the morning and it's pretty nice yeah.
• 42:03
  Speaker 1: My blind is 20 minutes from my house, yep, and it's a lot of times I go by myself, just Pepper and I.
• 42:10
  Speaker 1: And the other thing I like about duck hunting is you there is a lot of opportunity when you go with somebody, that you have a chance to talk.
• 42:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you know, and you know, know some of the other you know types of hunting.
• 42:23
  Speaker 1: It's harder to kind of have that kind of build that community because it's but duck hunting, you're spending a lot of time just and then you're talking and then the ducks fly in and you, you know, sure, totally, totally miss out on yeah, sometimes, sometimes I've definitely.
• 42:41
  Speaker 3: Uh, I I yelled at some friends last year because we were just kind of yucking it up in the blind and birds would would start to work and I'd be calling a little bit and my buddies would be still be talking and I I did snap once.
• 42:57
  Speaker 3: I was like hey, like they can hear, that's why I'm calling like they know, the sound of a human voice too.
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: Um, like, let's tighten it up.
• 43:07
  Speaker 3: Tighten it up a little bit.
• 43:09
  Speaker 3: What have you done, uh, to get other people interested in duck hunting?
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: I try to.
• 43:14
  Speaker 1: Well, I think teaching the kids to hunt was super important.
• 43:21
  Speaker 1: And then I've taken people out to the blind that have never haven't hunted before or they haven't hunted for a long time, so we can go out to the blind.
• 43:34
  Speaker 1: I took a friend out one time to the blind he and his kid, and I forgot my gun gun.
• 43:41
  Speaker 1: I just forgot my gun completely and I called and I managed pepper.
• 43:48
  Speaker 1: It was super fun and they, uh, kids, you know, the kid had a good time.
• 43:52
  Speaker 1: They got some ducks.
• 43:53
  Speaker 1: They didn't realize I didn't have my gun for for uh, two or three hours, sure, and I volunteered some, you know, do the banquets and that sort of thing.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: I think that kind of next generation is what I think.
• 44:06
  Speaker 1: Getting the kid, getting kids to hunt and understand what's it about, I think is that's one of the biggest, most important things we can do I went to the oregon hunters association banquet in pendleton week or so ago.
• 44:21
  Speaker 3: I was a little bit scared at the lack of youth that was there, and there was kids who were there with their parents, but what there was a desperate lack for was 20 year olds.
• 44:32
  Speaker 3: There was one or two in the building and one of them was working at the banquet.
• 44:42
  Speaker 3: There's a bit of a forgotten generation there right now.
• 44:45
  Speaker 3: So the people who are between, I'd say, 18 and 32 years old, there's just not a lot of them out there, at least in this area, but I feel like that's a problem nationwide.
• 45:04
  Speaker 3: Is they got, they got?
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: forgotten about?
• 45:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, and there's.
• 45:07
  Speaker 1: You know, I think as the nation becomes more urbanized, there's less opportunities and people just if they don't grow up with it.
• 45:19
  Speaker 1: I, I just don't think they yeah, a lot of times.
• 45:22
  Speaker 1: They just don't understand it and it's.
• 45:24
  Speaker 3: There's a lot of barriers to entry.
• 45:26
  Speaker 3: I've talked about this a lot before, but trying to navigate hunting regulations, seasons, limits, equipment, just everything that goes into it it's not an easy thing to step into.
• 45:40
  Speaker 3: What is nice today is access to information is better than it's ever been before.
• 45:46
  Speaker 3: So if, if all you have is the desire to go and you have nothing else, if you just have the desire to go, you have the information available to you to figure it out and to find mentors and find support, and you don't have to buy all the gear to get started.
• 46:05
  Speaker 3: Like, if you want to learn how to duck hunt, you can get ahold of your local ducks unlimited chapter and say, hey, I really want to learn how to duck hunt.
• 46:14
  Speaker 3: Is there anybody that can teach me about this?
• 46:16
  Speaker 3: And a hundred percent chance, there is a hundred percent chance Somebody's going to step up and be like yeah, I'll show you what I know and take it from there.
• 46:25
  Speaker 3: Got an extra shotgun, got anything that's brown you can wear, that's halfway warm.
• 46:30
  Speaker 3: Let's do that.
• 46:31
  Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be crazy.
• 46:33
  Speaker 3: Yeah, duck hunting's great.
• 46:37
  Speaker 3: Duck eating isn't always good, right, and that's one of the problems.
• 46:42
  Speaker 3: They're they're not the most palatable animal out there, but there's lots of ways to make them taste good and uh, and there's a there's a lot of ways to make them taste bad, and that's that's part of part of the learning process, I think we're good, you know, we, um, when I was a, we used to pluck them, roast them, and that was didn't taste all that great, but we, you know, anything we shot we'd always eat.
• 47:13
  Speaker 1: Now we do a lot of.
• 47:14
  Speaker 1: We do a duck stew that everybody loves in the family, and Malia and I now we do.
• 47:21
  Speaker 1: We just do a lot of medallions, stir fries and medallions and are, I think, appreciating the taste a lot more Right Maybe, than we used to.
• 47:31
  Speaker 3: I think for me, soaking them in salt water makes all the difference in the world, at least 24 hours of soaking them in cold water.
• 47:39
  Speaker 3: That's got a bunch of uh, kosher salt in it and I massage them in in that water when I first put it in there and, uh man, it just gets so bloody almost immediately.
• 47:51
  Speaker 3: Just watching the osmosis occur in real time.
• 47:54
  Speaker 3: I mean it just pumps all that stuff out of that meat and that makes just a world of difference for how good it tastes.
• 48:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you say at least 24 hours, and I think for me, because I get them in there and then it's like, oh, I got to freeze the ducks.
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 48:10
  Speaker 1: So easy.
• 48:13
  Speaker 1: At least 24 hours I'm working on.
• 48:15
  Speaker 1: Okay, what's the other end of that that?
• 48:18
  Speaker 1: I got to get them Right.
• 48:19
  Speaker 1: Got to get them, yeah.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah.
• 48:20
  Speaker 3: So what I do is when I get back I'll clean all my birds.
• 48:26
  Speaker 3: I'll get all the meat in that salt water and a lot of times it's cold enough that I don't need to take up fridge space, so I'll just leave it here in my shop, leave in your garage something like that, put some saran wrap over it and then I'll take, take them out of that brine, put them in a ziploc bag and then I'll fill that up with fresh water and then I'll freeze them in that block of ice.
• 48:49
  Speaker 3: I don't have any issues when I do it that way with freezer burn.
• 48:55
  Speaker 3: It protects that meat extremely well and it also lays nice and flat.
• 49:02
  Speaker 3: So you get all these stackable blocks that you can put in your freezer and then, if I'm going to be taking them out like I'm, you know, planning my menu for bear camp this spring and I've got 18, you know duck breasts and thighs that are ready to go that I can just take that whole block out and that's a perfect like day four or day five meal, because I can throw that in the bottom of my cooler and by the time it's thawed out and it's done the additional job of helping keep everything else cool.
• 49:34
  Speaker 3: By the time it's thawed out, then I'm ready for that meal and you know, those are the.
• 49:40
  Speaker 3: The ways that I think about.
• 49:41
  Speaker 3: Like, keeping that meat and making sure that it's ready to go is really on a long-term schedule uh-huh, we do.
• 49:50
  Speaker 1: we used to do them in freshwater and then we started just vacuum, started vacuum packing them, and that for us that works really well, because you're usually taking them out in the morning and you know, frying them up at night for, you know, just a, just a meal during the week.
• 50:08
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay, I want to talk engineering as it pertains to duck hunting a little bit.
• 50:13
  Speaker 3: Okay, I am straight up mad at this stage of my life about shotguns.
• 50:21
  Speaker 3: I think that that engineers in in the gun industry have focused on some low-hanging fruit for a long time, and I see advancements in areas that are not needed.
• 50:38
  Speaker 3: On a monthly basis, somebody will come out with a new rifle cartridge that does something incredibly similar to what something else does.
• 50:51
  Speaker 3: I see small changes in optics.
• 50:55
  Speaker 3: I see small changes in lots of areas.
• 50:58
  Speaker 3: The shotgun, however, it is just lagging behind.
• 51:03
  Speaker 3: You know, we have a cylinder with two flat edges on it and a rim that goes out from a.
• 51:11
  Speaker 3: It's not, it's not recessed, uh.
• 51:15
  Speaker 3: So I mean, we don't use rims in anything other than like rim fires, like little 22s and stuff, and yet the, the 12 gauge and every other shotgun remains with a rim.
• 51:27
  Speaker 3: Uh, and then, when we get to the actual shotgun itself, if you look at, say, a semi-automatic shotgun probably the most common that's used for duck hunting today, I'm asking that you know, two and a half ounce cylinder that's square, ended to change directions five times before it gets into the barrel of that gun.
• 51:50
  Speaker 3: You know it's.
• 51:52
  Speaker 3: It's just crazy the amount of work that needs to be done.
• 51:54
  Speaker 3: And if I look at shotgun history, that shell, that cartridge has changed very, very little since the 1800s and it was built for a break-action gun to be dropped into those two barrels, closed again fired and ejected and extracted.
• 52:13
  Speaker 3: But for whatever reason, we've just left that ammo behind and we haven't tried to improve on it in ways other than like what the what the shot is, and wads have changed, forcing cones inside barrels, that that geometry has changed a little bit.
• 52:31
  Speaker 3: Another thing that drives me absolutely bonkers and I'm just going to get kind of through my list here and then we can start solving these problems.
• 52:39
  Speaker 3: All we have to aim the shotgun is the bead on the end of the barrel right, and the first thing that any shotgun instructor is going to tell you is don't look at the bead, which is the most obnoxious color that you could ever have.
• 52:55
  Speaker 3: It's right in your way.
• 52:56
  Speaker 3: It's like, well, why is it there?
• 52:58
  Speaker 3: I don't know, just don't look at it.
• 53:01
  Speaker 3: Okay, that drives me nuts.
• 53:05
  Speaker 3: So I started putting red dots reflex sights on shotguns 12 years ago and now there's a little bit of ground swell around it and people are starting to realize that with that red dot you can have the dot and the target in the same plane of focus, so you can actually see them both at the same time and you can know where your shotgun is pointed, instead of just using the force like some kind of duck hunting Jedi.
• 53:31
  Speaker 3: But it just drove me nuts for the longest time that when you missed, you didn't really know which way you missed.
• 53:39
  Speaker 3: So how do you correct a mistake if you don't know in which direction the mistake was made?
• 53:44
  Speaker 3: So, from the actual function of the gun to the way the ammo is shaped, to the way we aim, the guns shotguns have just lagged and lagged and there is just, there's just the glow of an ember, of people who are starting to think well, maybe we should take this on.
• 54:04
  Speaker 3: What do you think like?
• 54:05
  Speaker 1: from from an engineer standpoint, do any?
• 54:08
  Speaker 3: of these things hit you or do, or do you just accept this on the bill of sale, that this is what shotguns are?
• 54:14
  Speaker 1: No, well one, I'm a dirt mechanic, so just so you know it's a bit out of my area expertise, but you know, I think that not looking at that thing on the end of the gun, because everybody will tell you oh, you're behind it, yeah, I mean, and that's yeah, whether you are or not.
• 54:36
  Speaker 3: That's what I tell people when they miss.
• 54:38
  Speaker 3: It's the safest option.
• 54:40
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, for sure.
• 54:41
  Speaker 3: Try and miss in front of it next time.
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: But the I think, helping people, Because that's and that's helping people get better.
• 54:50
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 54:54
  Speaker 1: Right, and that's helping people get better.
• 54:56
  Speaker 1: Yeah Right, I had a.
• 54:57
  Speaker 1: I went to do sporting clay, I'd won a gun.
• 54:59
  Speaker 1: It was an over and under.
• 55:00
  Speaker 1: And I went to go do sporting clays with my new gun and I couldn't hit anything, anything at all and it turned out that it had a cant for right handers okay, you're left and I'm left-handed, so I asked yeah, a cast, and so it was yeah I was actually double off for everything.
• 55:23
  Speaker 1: Um, you know, for the shells, the thing is the shells are so they get.
• 55:28
  Speaker 1: They can get expensive.
• 55:29
  Speaker 1: I bet a lot of.
• 55:31
  Speaker 1: It is just that it's a relatively inexpensive shell to make and I think people are worried.
• 55:37
  Speaker 1: I think there's a lot of concern about getting a.
• 55:43
  Speaker 3: If you invest the engineering to get a better shell, the cost is going to put it out of most people's reach yeah, initially yeah you've got to make new tools and that's the reason why in in rifle cartridges we see wildcat cartridges come off of things that already exist and we change, you know, maybe, the angle of the shoulder or the diameter.
• 56:09
  Speaker 3: You know we can neck it up or neck it down.
• 56:12
  Speaker 3: You can change some little things there.
• 56:16
  Speaker 3: But usually you tweak off of an existing platform.
• 56:19
  Speaker 3: So the 30-06 became the 270 by necking it down, the the 308 became the 7mm08, became the 243.
• 56:29
  Speaker 3: Uh, you know we see lots of stuff that starts with this parent cartridge and then it has a family tree that comes off of it.
• 56:38
  Speaker 3: You know you can take a 7mm STW and 300 Win Mag and 338 Win Mag and 375 H&H and they all share the same foundation with just little tweaks to make them do other jobs.
• 56:52
  Speaker 3: And tooling is a big part of the reason for that is once you have this tool that can create this parent cartridge, modifying that tool a little bit is not a big deal, but making a brand new one that is expensive initially.
• 57:07
  Speaker 3: But if somebody said, all right, I'm in, I'm going to recess the rim on the 12 gauge right, that would cause that would allow that cartridge to be so much smoother inside of a tube magazine all throughout the operating system.
• 57:25
  Speaker 3: Not having a ledge on the back of that cartridge would just be wonderful for making it move around a little bit.
• 57:31
  Speaker 3: If we put a shoulder on the front end of it so that it wasn't square, then it would be that much smoother and that much faster.
• 57:38
  Speaker 3: There's huge gains that could be made, but we're just reticent to take that step.
• 57:46
  Speaker 3: And red dots are a huge one and I've talked to a couple shotgun companies about this and they're like, yeah, whatever, we don't care.
• 57:52
  Speaker 3: Or a huge one.
• 57:53
  Speaker 3: And I've talked to a couple shotgun companies about this and they're like, yeah, whatever, we don't care.
• 57:56
  Speaker 3: But a couple of them are starting to realize that we want to be able to aim these guns with a little bit more precision.
• 58:05
  Speaker 3: You know I've talked with companies about having a red dot that could induce lead, right, right.
• 58:10
  Speaker 3: So as I'm swinging the gun, the speed that I'm swinging the gun at should be able to tell an optic how far in front of a target in in an amount of declination in degrees, mils, moa, whatever you want to use to measure it if I'm swinging the gun, if if I'm swinging left to right, then we should be able to have a smart enough red dot that moves that dot to the right, that induces my lead, so I can put the dot directly on the target.
• 58:38
  Speaker 1: Yeah, because your range is not going to be that much different.
• 58:42
  Speaker 1: No, right it for over your decoys, whatever that you know 25 yards or or something like that, and having it kind of preset, because you're not going to have a chance to adjust it as they're flying through but kind of know where it is sure.
• 59:01
  Speaker 1: No, that's.
• 59:02
  Speaker 1: Uh, you could totally get the lead.
• 59:04
  Speaker 1: You could get your lead down yeah with that.
• 59:07
  Speaker 3: And if I'm swinging to the right, then it's gonna shift the dot to the right.
• 59:11
  Speaker 3: If I'm dropping down it, it can shift it down.
• 59:13
  Speaker 3: You know there's ways for this to be done, but they are initially expensive.
• 59:19
  Speaker 3: I would just love for people to stop missing so much, and when I say people, I mean me.
• 59:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 59:32
  Speaker 3: My dog gets like like physically upset at missus and she doesn't understand because, frankly, it doesn't happen that much, honestly, in in the situations that we hunt in they're pretty high success and, uh, when everybody stands up and shoots, or when one person stands up and shoots, I I never taught her to hold, I wasn, wasn't interested in that.
• 59:55
  Speaker 3: So as soon as people stand up, she's going and there's almost always a duck for her to go find and when there's not, she just runs around like she's trying to, you know, solve something that's unsolvable because there's no duck for her to find.
• 1:00:10
  Speaker 3: She doesn't get it and she's like, puffs her cheeks out, she pops her jaws a little bit and she's mad.
• 1:00:16
  Speaker 3: It's a horrible feeling to disappoint your dog oh, pepper, she'll get.
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 1: What happens with her is if and I miss, I miss regularly and that's so if I, if I get a, if I get a duck right, you know right away she gets the retrieve.
• 1:00:33
  Speaker 1: Then the rest of the day is going to go pretty well.
• 1:00:36
  Speaker 1: If I shoot and miss a few times, she's like if you can't get it, I'm going to get it, and so then she'll.
• 1:00:44
  Speaker 1: Uh, that's when I got to be careful how many times they come by, cause they'll.
• 1:00:49
  Speaker 1: She'll take off after them and try to think she can get them before I shoot what are some problems uh, professionally that you're working on trying to solve right now?
• 1:01:01
  Speaker 3: a couple years ago, we talked about wave energy so a lot of uh things.
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 1: That were things that we're working on.
• 1:01:14
  Speaker 1: Actually, one of the big things looking at saving energy is how to cool computer chips and there's a movement now to cool that.
• 1:01:32
  Speaker 1: It's called on-chip cooling Because you're actually trying to develop technology that you're cooling the chip right at the source and that has potential to, you know, because there's all these big you know, you have these big data centers around that has potential to save half the energy that's going into those things.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 3: And a lot of water.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 1: And a lot of water Right, because energy and water are just are just like this.
• 1:02:06
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think getting clean water to people, you know that's a, that's a and keeping water clean, I think those are some big problems that we're working on.
• 1:02:16
  Speaker 1: Part of that right, part of it is kind of the watershed, you know, keeping the water clean at the source.
• 1:02:23
  Speaker 1: Part of it, then, is also looking at, you know, as the water is used by man and goes through a you, an urban area.
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 1: How do you clean up that water right, and how do you and make that water of you know one, how people can drink the water, but also, then, how can you put it back into the environment and minimize the?
• 1:02:44
  Speaker 1: You know the damage that it right, it causes, heat being one of the biggest, just that, it's hot water coming out of people's homes, and so, I think, clean water, talking a lot about AI, right, and a lot of opportunities, I think, coming up around that, and there was a big push on AI a couple decades ago.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 1: There was a big push on AI a couple decades ago and I think we're really hitting it now.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: And I think it's real opportunities for us and I think we're just starting to scratch the surface.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 3: Yeah, AI is changing so much.
• 1:03:24
  Speaker 3: Right now it's changing by the second probably faster.
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 3: Honestly, yeah, by the second probably faster, you know.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:03:31
  Speaker 3: Honestly, and it's hard to know.
• 1:03:34
  Speaker 3: You know we're sitting here recording in the springtime.
• 1:03:39
  Speaker 3: This episode's coming out in the middle of June.
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 3: Between now and when this comes out, ai is going to look totally different, totally different, and it's pretty exciting to see where that's going.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 3: And it's really up to people's imaginations, to a large extent, how it's going to be used, how it's going to be leveraged.
• 1:04:01
  Speaker 1: I think a big part of that is people educating themselves and understanding it.
• 1:04:08
  Speaker 1: I think there's going to be a time where everybody needs to be ai literate, know how people you know how your data gets used, also know how it can help you and everybody's um starting to play with it.
• 1:04:25
  Speaker 1: Now, right, and you know even the script for the podcast you could put in.
• 1:04:29
  Speaker 1: You can put in some keywords and and go write a.
• 1:04:33
  Speaker 1: You know write a set of questions for a podcast and um you can.
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 3: It's amazing if I had a script yeah, I know, I know, I know everybody, uh, you know, new guests especially, are like okay, so what are we going to talk about?
• 1:04:48
  Speaker 3: I don't know, we'll see.
• 1:04:50
  Speaker 3: I used to lay out plans and I'd have, you know, a dozen different questions and the most questions I've ever had in mind that we actually got to in an hour was three.
• 1:05:02
  Speaker 3: Uh, and it's.
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 3: It's just the the nature of conversation and I try to let it.
• 1:05:08
  Speaker 3: I try to let it go where it's going to go.
• 1:05:10
  Speaker 3: Um, I tried to keep my hands off the steering wheel for the most part and, uh that that that feels a lot more natural and and less, uh, less jarring to like keep trying to steer back on the course.
• 1:05:22
  Speaker 3: But no, I use, I use AI regularly.
• 1:05:27
  Speaker 3: Um, you know, talking about my my menu for bear hunting camp, talking about my menu for bear hunting camp, I used AI to do that and it was so interesting.
• 1:05:39
  Speaker 3: I said I was using ChatGPT.
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 3: I said, all right, this is what is in my kitchen.
• 1:05:44
  Speaker 3: This is the situation that I'm going to be in.
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 3: I have to bring in all my food in coolers.
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 3: This is what the weather is going to be like.
• 1:05:52
  Speaker 3: These are the types of coolers that I'm going to be using.
• 1:05:55
  Speaker 3: I don't want to spend more than two hours cooking and cleaning per day.
• 1:05:59
  Speaker 3: This is how many people that are coming, these are their preferences, these are their allergies, and I want to keep my food bill under $400 for six guys for a week.
• 1:06:13
  Speaker 3: Please, you know, give me a menu, tell me how to cook everything, and then give me a grocery list and 15 seconds later I've got it.
• 1:06:21
  Speaker 3: You know it's incredible.
• 1:06:23
  Speaker 3: It is incredible how time-saving that is, and it wasn't perfect, but it was a blueprint that I could edit off of and if I would have taken the time to do that editing with that AI, it would be learning for next time that much faster.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so I'm still very analog in the way that I'm using it.
• 1:06:44
  Speaker 3: But, yeah, so would you recommend and this is something that I did want to get to for students or people who want to become engineers, is AI a field that they should be looking at getting into?
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 3: Like, what's your recommendation for today's young engineers?
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think.
• 1:07:06
  Speaker 1: So there are, like there are, you can get an AI degree and there literate and there's kind of two levels.
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 1: One is for everybody coming out of high school.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 1: Anybody going to college should understand kind of the basics of AI and then how it affects maybe the field that you're going to go into.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 1: Whatever that field is going to go into, whatever that field is, I think for for engineers, you know computer science, computer science and AI.
• 1:07:56
  Speaker 1: Those are types of things that make you more marketable, right?
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 1: If you want to go out and you know if you're, if you're going to college you want to get a you know job as an engineer, having that AI certificate, having that sequence of courses in AI, and then know that you know I'm a soils engineer, how can AI help me in soils engineering?
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 1: That's going to put you in a position where it's going to make it easier to get a job.
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 3: Do you have a favorite kind of soil?
• 1:08:33
  Speaker 1: You know I do, I do San Francisco Bay mud.
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 3: Okay, yeah, it's a it raised it's raised a lot of havoc in the Bay area and it's what they teach us in school.
• 1:08:50
  Speaker 1: So Okay, Tell me about San Francisco Bay mud.
• 1:08:53
  Speaker 1: Well, San Francisco Bay mud is gray and it is what we call normally consolidated, which means that it's never been loaded and unloaded.
• 1:09:06
  Speaker 3: Okay.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: So that means when you load it it compresses a lot like feet, okay, and that can cause a problem when you're trying to build something and it keeps, keeps sinking right.
• 1:09:17
  Speaker 1: It takes time to do it and so there's ways you can speed it up, but there's all throughout the san francisco bay area.
• 1:09:28
  Speaker 1: It has this weak, normally consolidated san Francisco Bay mud and it causes underground, it causes slope failures around the bay.
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 1: Things settle and, like I said, it's what they teach in school, so it's fun.
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 3: How would a layperson collect a soil sample and where would they send it to determine what it is?
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 1: A shovel and a bucket work pretty well.
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 1: I think there's a couple options, right, you know we talked about hunting earlier and there's so much information online you could probably somebody could probably take a bucket of soil.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: Much information online.
• 1:10:12
  Speaker 1: You could probably somebody could probably take a bucket of soil, go through some basic tests that you can just do on your kitchen table or out in the shop and figure out what kind of soil you know, kind of a broad category, what type of soil it is.
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: I think you can also go to the, I think, the county or the extension service.
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 1: You can actually have soil you can take, have soil, you can take a bag of soil in and they'll do a test, they can test it and tell you what you have.
• 1:10:38
  Speaker 1: And then there's soil, soil maps.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 1: One of the Scovelins that went camping with us down in Mnaha he's a soil scientist and so you know there are nationwide soil maps and you can look those up online and figure out probably what it is before you even take a shovel full of it.
• 1:11:00
  Speaker 3: So here's where I'm going with that.
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 3: I'm going to give people a smoking hot tip for those, for those nerdy hunters out there the next time you harvest um an elk, uh say, you get yourself a nice bull elk and you would like to replicate that experience figure out what kind of dirt he died on and then go and start looking at those soil maps and find the other places that have it, because the soil determines so much about the vegetation that can come off of it, right down to the, the aspect or slope that that it's on.
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 3: If you can find, figure out what that is and start looking at maps, you're going to find yourself some new hunting areas that you and everybody else have been overlooking.
• 1:11:52
  Speaker 3: It works.
• 1:11:53
  Speaker 3: My favorite is Tolo.
• 1:11:57
  Speaker 1: Tolo yeah.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: Never heard of it.
• 1:11:58
  Speaker 3: It's good stuff.
• 1:12:00
  Speaker 3: Yep.
• 1:12:01
  Speaker 3: There's Tolo, there's elk.
• 1:12:05
  Speaker 1: I'm looking for me.
• 1:12:06
  Speaker 1: It's like I'm looking for problem soils.
• 1:12:09
  Speaker 1: Yeah, Because then there's jobs for soils engineers.
• 1:12:12
  Speaker 3: Yeah, okay.
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 3: I often try to end shows with people imparting some advice for young folks who are getting into your profession.
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 3: We hit on that a little bit.
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 3: But to wrap this up, what piece of advice would you offer to young engineers or people who are interested in engineering?
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 1: I think for a couple things, for the kids that are in junior high, high school, the math, what I'm finding now, what we see.
• 1:12:48
  Speaker 1: The math you want to keep your options open and I think in the in the schools, there's a trend to kind of have people pick a math, a math track that may not prepare you for not only engineering, but for a lot of the, I'd say, stem fields, and so you kind of want to.
• 1:13:12
  Speaker 1: You know, as a kid, keeping your options open, with math in particular it's just kind of that track makes a big difference.
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 1: That's probably kind of boring advice.
• 1:13:25
  Speaker 1: So, you know, if I look at you know somebody wanting, somebody wanting to become an engineer and I see a lot of kids that have great.
• 1:13:32
  Speaker 1: You know, if I look at you know somebody wanting, somebody wanting to become an engineer and I see a lot of kids that have great.
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 1: You know, they do a lot of math and physics in high school.
• 1:13:37
  Speaker 1: I tell them that writing, communication, those English classes are probably more important.
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the other thing that I'm seeing is that there's a lot of.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 1: We have a lot of students, especially online.
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 1: They get a degree in something else and then they want to go back and change careers and you can always become an engineer and I think that life experience that people have in getting another degree, having a different career for a number of years and then going back and becoming an an engineer, that adds so much, I think, richness to the workforce, that it's a, I think it's a great thing and so, having that, I think it's never too late, and there's just so many opportunities in engineering yeah you know, you can I.
• 1:14:27
  Speaker 1: One of the things I just I is engineering is everywhere.
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 1: You know, just during this podcast, lots of different elements of engineering.
• 1:14:39
  Speaker 1: I guess just give it a shot.
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 1: I think lots of opportunities for women in engineering, and I think companies are realizing that you really need all perspectives to achieve excellence, right?
• 1:14:56
  Speaker 1: Just like you need people that know how to hunt If you're going to design a gun, you want to go to a hunter and figure out what they need.
• 1:15:07
  Speaker 3: You need engineering things for everybody, right, and so you need everybody at the table to come up with a, a well engineered solution yeah, and at different stages too, like you've got to revisit that as it goes and it's, it's sort of this uh, I don't know, looks, looks like the way a bumblebee flies.
• 1:15:28
  Speaker 3: Um, you're, you're circling back on, back on things, oftentimes to edit along the way, and that seems to be the products that have so much resilience and become classics.
• 1:15:39
  Speaker 1: Well and being willing to go back and do it.
• 1:15:41
  Speaker 1: You know I think that's a problem.
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 1: You know a lot of kids today, but I think a lot of folks are afraid to fail.
• 1:15:53
  Speaker 1: And you know a lot of kids that you know that come to school.
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 1: They're in.
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 1: You know they go to engineering.
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 1: They've always had really good grades, they've always done really well and you gotta be able to fail and just mess up, because that's, I think that's that willingness is going to allow you to be a much better engineer yeah, and there's we're living in the best time that's ever existed for failure to lack consequence, negative consequence.
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 3: You know there's a lot of positive consequences of failure and I don't think anybody should ever set out to fail, but they shouldn't ever, um, not set out because they're afraid of failing.
• 1:16:41
  Speaker 3: Like there's so much support that's around us.
• 1:16:44
  Speaker 3: If you bought them out, there's a ladder for you down there and, uh, it has not always been like that.
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 3: It's maybe never been like that to the extent that it is now.
• 1:16:53
  Speaker 3: So I I fully agree with you.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 3: Like get out there and try it and I love what you said about uh, and not being too late to start.
• 1:17:02
  Speaker 3: You know, if, if, if somebody's of any age and is interested and has that desire, they can get after it and get involved.
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 1: Pretty cool and they just they bring so much to the table yeah, awesome.
• 1:17:15
  Speaker 3: Well, I uh really appreciate your time, appreciate the conversation and uh, and thanks for everything that you've done to get us ready for a great big earthquake it's uh, it's uh, I'm uh.
• 1:17:29
  Speaker 1: I don't have calluses anymore but, I'm happy, happy to be on the Six Ranch.
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 1: Podcast.
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 3: All right, I appreciate you, scott.
• 1:17:35
  Speaker 3: I just want to take a second and thank everyone who's written a review, who has sent mail, who's sent emails, who's sent messages.
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 3: Your support is incredible, and I also love running into you at trade shows and events and just out on the hillside when we're hunting.
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 3: I think that that's fantastic.
• 1:17:55
  Speaker 3: I hope you guys keep adventuring as hard and as often as you can.
• 1:17:59
  Speaker 3: Art for the Six Ranch Podcast was created by John Chatelain and was digitized by Celia Harlander.
• 1:18:07
  Speaker 3: Original music was written and performed by Justin Hay, and the Six Ranch podcast is now produced by Six Ranch Media.
• 1:18:16
  Speaker 3: Thank you all so much for your continued support of the show and I look forward to next week when we can bring you a brand new episode.