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Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar.
I went blank.
I hit a bad note and then I couldn't recover.
And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity.
I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away.
Who am I?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
February is the month of love.
Whether you're in a relationship, casually dating or proudly single, it's a great time to reflect on yourself and what you want.
I'm Hope Woodard, host of the VoiceOver podcast, and each week we're looking at love from every angle.
Listen to Boy Sober.
That's B-O-Y-S-O-B-E-R on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh, and there's Chuck, and Jerry's here too.
And we are saving the day here on Stuff You Should Know.
That's right.
Chuck, I guess I just said that we're here to save the day, and we are.
We're going to talk about the Cajun Navy in a second.
But before we do, we just got back from tour and you did something that I didn't do and I want to hear about it.
Oh, yeah.
I got tabbed to perform in the—
Hang in with Dr Z show which, if you don't know it is comedian Dana Gould has a professional Dr Zayas of Planet of the Apes costume.
Nice.
And he just does a straight up late night talk show as Dr. Zayas.
That's the only sort of wrinkle to it.
And it's it's a lot of fun.
And I was on as kind of a straight guy.
You know clearly wasn't the improvising comedian, but I did an OK job.
But Dave Foley of the kids in the hall was there. and Janet Varney, the great Andy Daly.
And I just got to tell you quickly about the night before in the hotel.
Yeah.
I was hanging out in the lobby with a friend of the show, Adam Pranica, a friend in real life and our good friend and booking agent, Josh Lindgren, having some drinks.
And all of a sudden Cole, co-founder of SketchFest, walks over with Dave Foley and they all sit down and Dave Foley sits next to me and we have like a 30-minute conversation.
That's so cool.
And this is the night before.
So when you guys were on stage together, you were like old pals.
It was a familiarity built in.
Dave Foley was the nicest guy you could ever imagine.
That's so great.
He asked him.
He clearly had listened to Stuff.
You Should Know because he said something about is Josh here?
So he knows your name.
Pretty cool.
And we're sitting there having a conversation and all of a sudden I look up and it's Scott Thompson and Bruce McCullough and Kevin McDonald.
Man.
And they all see Dave and come over.
And this is the first time they'd seen each other.
I mean, I don't know how long, but you know they were doing a screening of Brain Candy the next night.
Oh, cool.
And so they were all just seeing each other for the first time that weekend.
And it warmed your heart so much seeing how much these guys liked each other and how they like seeing each other.
Yeah.
I mean, that makes me really happy to hear that they're as great as they seem.
Yeah.
It was incredible.
They were hugging and laughing and I'm looking across at Lindgren and Adam and we both have looks on our faces like what is happening right now.
And Bruce McCullough had one of the funniest lines I've ever seen.
You know how you just bag on friends as a rule?
They're all standing around and laughing and Bruce McCullough goes.
Isn't it great that Mark isn't here.
Poor Mark.
It was so funny, man.
It was like the perfect line at the perfect time.
And they all busted out laughing.
And it was I got to I got to kind of eavesdrop on their stories.
And then the next night, Scott Thompson telling stories to Dave Foley.
I'm just like a fly on the wall, trying to be invisible, just trying to soak in these stories about Lorne Michaels in the early days and like trashing hotel rooms.
And it was it was just great.
That's really cool, man.
Yeah.
Oh, she could have been there.
That was the only thing missing was you.
I wish I could have too.
And thank you for saying that.
That's nice.
But thanks for telling me all about it.
And congrats on a great showing at the, what is it, Hanging with Dr. Z?
Hanging with Dr. Z. Dana's the best.
He's so funny.
Is it anywhere like somebody can see it online?
I don't know if they, I don't think they shot video for this.
I'm curious.
But go watch episodes of Hanging with Dr. C. It's a lot of fun.
Okay, cool.
Cool.
Well, that was great.
Thank you for telling everybody about it.
And I guess now you want to start the episode about the Cajun Navy?
Yeah, for sure.
Not too long ago in an episode, we had a listener mail that referenced the Cajun Navy.
It is not something that I had heard of, even though it has been sort of all over the news, but I don't watch news with my eyes and ears.
I generally read stuff, and I guess I just had never read anything about this, even though the Cajun Navy seems like have done a lot of great things.
But there's also some criticism.
Yeah, it's a good example of how absolutely everything in the United States can become politicized.
Yeah, good point.
And it is, like, I get...
Criticisms.
I also get the praise as well.
Like.
At the end of the day, these dudes, as you'll see, are putting their lives on the line to help other people.
That's right.
What we're talking about is a group of men and women.
Now there are many different groups, but it's been dubbed the Cajun Navy and it sprang from Hurricane Katrina, when they were like hey, we need more help.
We need help beyond FEMA in this case.
It's so devastating.
We know that you've got boats, you've got airboats, and you have the will, people of Louisiana.
And the call went out and people came to help and helped a lot.
And they were dubbed the Cajun Navy.
Yeah.
So, although the Cajun Navy, as we'll see, like as we understand it today, really kind of developed in 2016, basically all the origin stories, all competing origin stories, trace themselves back to Katrina.
And that is a good place to start, because that is one of the best examples of government failing its people that has happened in recent history.
Yeah.
And the Bush administration, FEMA, like they just botched helping people.
And so there was a really big vacuum that other people who were just basically moved to go help people who had just been left behind,
Like, hey, good luck on your roof.
Hopefully everything works out.
People got their own boats.
They got their own trailers.
They drove to New Orleans and got as close as they could.
They put their boats in when they hit the water and they went and rescued those people themselves.
No one paid them.
No one even really asked them to do this.
They just knew that people were in trouble.
They knew that they could help them.
And so I think, as Governor Kathleen Blanco later said, When she was kind of talking about this retrospectively, she said it was Louisiana people helping Louisiana people.
Yeah, for sure.
There were some asks and calls for help.
There was a Louisiana state senator named Nick Gautreaux.
And he went on the TV and the radio during Katrina and he said hey, if you've got a boat, we need your help.
There's a mall outside of New Orleans, in Lafayette, about 150 miles away, and we could use some people.
And he thought maybe, you know, 20, 30 people might show up.
Close to 400 people showed up.
And they ended up forming an eight-mile convoy of trucks and boats.
And in the end, CBS News reports that they rescued 10,000 people during Katrina alone.
Yeah.
And this is where they were dubbed the Cajun Navy later on.
But like this is just it's astounding.
Like from the outset, it was just just amazing.
Like just the number of people who showed up, the number of people they saved.
And this is exactly the kind of thing that people love to read about, hear about, see about, because it's like yes, people are still basically good.
And then, on the other hand, we also, as a country in particular, love to start picking apart everybody, including heroes who selflessly act.
That's right.
The guy who would later become one of the founders of the United Cajun Navy.
And like we said, there's, I think, close to 30 or more people or groups, organizations who have dubbed themselves some version of a Cajun Navy like this.
Yeah.
Well, we should point out that only three of those are nonprofits.
Yeah, that's a big, big deal.
Yeah, it's a red flag in some cases.
But this guy's name was Todd Terrell and he owned a seafood business that was completely devastated during the first few days of Katrina.
So he lost everything.
And after that, he didn't take his shrimp net and go home.
He said, I'm going to help rescue people.
And so he kind of headed up a lot of this and ended up one of the actual founders of the United Cajun Navy, like I said.
Yeah, and United Cajun Navy is one of the big ones, maybe the biggest, definitely the most professionalized, and they are a 501c3 nonprofit.
But the Cajun Navy moniker itself is shared by a number of different groups, like you said.
And there's something about these people in particular that make them.
They have a very specific set of skills.
I guess you could say
One.
A lot of them are Cajun and grew up, spent their whole lives and still spend a lot of their time out on the bayou in boats that are designed to navigate obstacles in very shallow water.
Right.
That is to say, airboats?
Airboats, pirogues.
Okay.
Yeah.
Well, those two.
I think bass boats also.
They use a lot of bass boats.
So not only are there boats designed for this, they have a lot of experience say, getting around a dumpster, but say in the form of like a cypress tree and all of the knees.
Like, they know what they're doing.
They're expert boatmen and boat people.
How about that?
Yeah.
And so there's a really like big incentive to welcome these people because they know what they're doing.
The issue is, as we'll see again and again, they are expert boat people.
They don't necessarily have search and rescue training.
And that's one of the probably the biggest, most legitimate criticisms of the whole thing.
Yeah, for sure.
Even though it was born in Katrina.
I believe you kind of hinted that 2016, during the thousand-year flood of Louisiana, when 31 inches of rain fell on Baton Rouge over the course of 24 hours.
Insane.
It was an incredible amount of rain, completely devastating.
The first, you know, when Katrina happened, that was pre-smartphone era.
2016.
That was.
The difference was all of a sudden, you had 56 of Louisiana's 64 parishes were declared federal disaster areas.
And you had a Cajun Navy at work with smartphones and social media that could triangulate and who could post like we need people here, we need people there.
It became much more organized, much more cohesive in 2016, thanks to, you know, social media and smartphones.
Yeah, and in particular, an app called Zello.
This sounds cool.
I'm going to try this out with the family.
Dude, you should go check out the website for the app.
All the different bells and whistles it has.
It is nuts.
Oh, yeah?
So basically, Zello turns a cell phone into a walkie-talkie.
Even if you barely have a signal, you can use it.
Like with a low enough signal that you couldn't make a call.
You can still use your phone as a Zello walkie-talkie.
So cool.
It gets even better.
It translates.
You can speak, and it will translate into another language that you select.
That's cool.
You can coordinate with people who speak different languages.
Cool.
And all of a sudden now, all of these people who only had cell phones can now coordinate and organize and be much more effective than just like say, two guys in a boat.
And there's two other guys in a boat here.
Now they're saying, well, this is where people need the most help.
Let's send these guys out here because they're closest to go get those people.
Like it was a completely different level of coordination and organization than in Katrina.
Does it translate the Cajun accent?
I'm not going to say it, but yes, it does.
I will give you full reassurance.
You know who could help us with that is our old buddy Doug, right?
Doug Chachere.
Yeah.
Chachere.
I've met him backstage at our two New Orleans shows.
What a good guy.
He treats us so well.
He brought us boudin, and we just went to town on those things.
Yeah, so good.
Sausage balls, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, that's what it is, right?
Breadie gravy sausage balls.
They're amazing.
This is so good.
The Cajun Navy these days, though, is a big deal.
Like you said, the three super legitimate and I'm not saying that none others are doing good work, but the three non-profits are big time.
They have multi-million dollar budgets now.
They have chapters even in Hawaii.
They have them all over the country, and they are funded by charitable donations.
They're staffed by volunteers.
And that seems like a good time for a break.
Good intro.
I agree.
All right.
It's an early break, but we'll be right back.
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It seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.
And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys, Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
Open your free iHeartRadio app.
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Search Two Guys, Five Rings and listen now.
Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar.
The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations.
You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
And also, you know, your daughter's incredible.
That's beautiful, man.
Yeah, thank you.
It's so beautiful.
I can see that got you a little... Yeah, for sure.
Our daughter.
She came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances which I've not really talked about ever.
Growing up on Disney in front of millions, how did that shape your sense of self?
I went blank.
I hit a bad note, then I couldn't recover.
And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity.
I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away.
Who am I?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
All right, we're back and we're going to talk about the credo of the Cajun Navy, because if they're known for one thing, that is like don't wait around and just say people just get things done.
And their credo is it's unofficial, but it seems pretty official is act first and deal with the consequences later.
Which, on one hand, is like yep, if you are stuck on your roof, that is the kind of person you want to come get you.
You don't want them filling out forms to get permission to come rescue you from your roof, right?
That's right.
On the other hand, there's reasons for regulations and safety for everybody.
There's reasons for government in that sense, right?
This is where the kind of breakdown starts to occur.
Yeah, let's start with the good of acting first.
You're going to rescue a lot more people a lot quicker.
You're going to get food and aid to people a lot quicker.
A very great example of this was Hurricane Harvey, the Category 4 that dumped 60 inches of rain in Texas over a course of four days.
It was completely devastating.
Apparently the wettest, costliest hurricane in U.S. history.
And because of what happened in 2016, I think they felt like hey, the call is coming now from Texas.
There was a call specifically in one case.
That was a nursing home in Port Arthur that was underwater.
Cajun Navy volunteers rushed out there.
They got there.
They found, you know, People not able to get out of their wheelchair, stuck up to their knees in sewage water.
They hadn't eaten since at least the day before.
They were hydrated.
Many of them were confused.
And it kind of came literally to blows when a Navy volunteer named Ben Husser went to get these people out.
And the director was like our corporate policy sir says it has to be a National Guard evacuating us.
Right.
And so Ben Husser said that he beat the hell out of this guy.
He drew his gun on him at one point to basically say you need to get out of my way because we're evacuating these elderly patients who you're clearly neglecting.
And they did.
They ended up evacuating this group of nursing home patients, got them to, I think, a bowling alley or a movie theater both, which were turned into basically emergency centers for people, shelters.
And this was like, this story is tailor-made for social media, right?
Oh, yeah.
One of the reasons why it's tailor-made for social media is because it only presents one side.
And it presents what seems like the morally correct approach to this situation.
Just like anything, there's another side.
Nothing is black and white.
And so this nursing home director, in one sense yes, he was following his corporate orders that he was not supposed to let anybody else evacuate the patients, but he was responsible for these patients.
On top of that, there are studies that show that evacuating elderly and medically frail people can actually be deadlier than having them shelter in place.
That's even if you're evacuating them ahead of a storm.
This was in the middle of a storm that these elderly and medically frail people were evacuated.
And then thirdly...
These Cajun Navy guys showed up.
They don't have like ID cards that say Cajun Navy signed by the governor of Louisiana.
They're just some dudes that showed up, one of which pulled a gun on the director of the nursing home and said we're getting these old people who you're responsible for out of here.
Get out of our way or we're going to beat you up and shoot you.
So.
Like the Cajun Navy is just such a great flashpoint because it's so easy to almost cartoonize what they're doing, for better or worse, and just completely ignore the reality of the situation.
And I think in that sense it's just so worth talking about because it's an exercise in how, how much emotion and just dumbness we put into evaluating stuff and how tribal that stuff makes us.
And that this is a great example of saying, here's something people are doing.
Here's the problems with it.
Let's figure out how to work everything out together so that they can still save lives without the downsides that are clearly inherently posed in this.
That's why this Cajun Navy story is so, I find important.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, as far as kind of seeing it both ways, that that happened all the way up to the top of the ladder.
Donald Trump became very sort of, I guess, briefly attached to John Bridgers, a founder of the Cajun Navy, specifically Cajun Navy 2016, which is its own group.
Right.
Invited him to the State of the Union address in 2018.
Had him up there when the Houston Astros visited the White House after they won the World Series.
He called out the incredible Cajun Navy.
And then you know, on the other hand, was quoted as sort of saying like hey, you know, stay in your boats.
Like these guys are out here trying to impress their wives and let the professionals do their work.
And I think that just kind of illustrates how, how each side has a leg to stand on.
You know, like sure you want to, you want to rescue people.
But as we'll see, you know, their rules and regulations are there for a reason.
But sometimes it's just dumb red tape.
It's like it's hard to kind of come down for me on hard on one side or the other, because on one hand you have a group that a lot of this comes from, sort of an anti-government sentiment, right.
If not anti-government, maybe be very distrustful of the response to natural disasters.
But then when you see botched responses, you can see where they're coming from.
Yeah.
I mean as far as how these people's direct experience with FEMA was in Katrina.
I think George W Bush put it best when he said fool me once.
Shame on, shame on you.
Fool me, you can't get fooled again.
And that's essentially what happened.
FEMA fooled them once and they have never forgotten it.
I thought that was Roger Daltrey.
No, no, no.
That was pretty good.
Here's a quote from the vice president of United Cajun Navy, another group.
Brian Trasher said, Katrina is what ultimately showed us in the world that really people, even in the richest country in the world, people cannot rely on their government to save them from the weather.
If a flash flood hits your house and all of a sudden you're on a roof, you're not looking around for FEMA because they're nowhere around.
And a lot of this goes back to not just a distrust of the official systems but sort of the shame of a nation.
Like you got the richest country in the world that's not able to save their citizens from a flood Or people that need to rely on the donations of their friends and neighbors to get over cancer without bankrupt erupting them, you know?
Right.
Yeah.
And that's definitely a supported and supportable viewpoint for sure.
How about this?
We'll take a break and we'll come back and we'll talk some more about the Cajun Navy.
Let's do it.
What if mind control is real?
If you could control the behavior of anybody around you, what kind of life would you have?
Can you hypnotically persuade someone to buy a car?
When you look at your car, you're gonna become overwhelmed with such good feelings.
I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused.
NLP was used on me to access my subconscious.
It's about engineering consciousness.
Mind Games is the story of NLP, its crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.
He stood trial for murder and got acquitted.
The biggest mind game of all?
NLP might actually work.
This is wild.
Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
It seems like just yesterday that the Two Guys, Five Rings podcast was in Paris for the Olympics.
And now we're heading to Milan for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
I'm Bowen Yang.
And I'm Matt Rogers.
And we'll join athletes from 93 countries as Two Guys, Five Rings hits the Italian Alps for the 2026 Milan Cortina Olympic Winter Games.
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Hey, I'm Jay Shetty, host of the On Purpose podcast.
On a recent episode, I sat down with Nick Jonas, singer, songwriter, actor, and global superstar.
The thing I would say to my younger self is congratulations.
You get to marry Priyanka Chopra Jonas.
And also, you know, your daughter is incredible.
Mm-hmm.
That's beautiful, man.
Yeah.
Thank you.
It's so beautiful.
I can see that got you a little.
Yeah, for sure.
Our daughter.
She came to the world under sort of very intense circumstances which I've not really talked about ever.
Growing up on Disney in front of millions, how did that shape your sense of self?
I went blank.
I hit a bad note and then I couldn't recover.
And I built up this idea that music and being a musician was my whole identity.
I had to sort of relearn who I was if you took this thing away.
Who am I?
Listen to On Purpose with Jay Shetty on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
So, Chuck, I think you mentioned that 2016 was a really pivotal time.
Those floods in Baton Rouge were a bunch of different groups that present themselves as Cajun Navy groups formed.
And as some of these groups really started to emerge, in particular Cajun Navy Relief and United Cajun Navy groups, They started to organize.
They started to form 501C3s and accept donations and show up more and more frequently at natural disasters.
They started to get more pushback.
It went from just some guys with boats to this is an actual organization showing up.
Right.
And what they're.
You know they're organizing, they're helping, but they're still, as far as we, the people who are professionals at this stuff are concerned, just some guys with boats.
And there was, you know, I guess tension that started to arise.
Yeah, for sure.
Amanda Faulkner was a spokesperson for the Coast Guard, I believe that said.
You know we have plenty of boats.
We don't need more boats.
The Coast Guard has all the boats that we need.
We know when it's safe to get them out in the water.
At one point...
Do you become a liability is basically what people started asking.
Or when are you in the way?
When are you creating an unsafe situation?
Or, like you said, with the people in the retirement home, like maybe you know, if there were 15 of them, maybe 13 of them, it was great to get them out of there.
But what if two of them had very adverse health outcomes because of that rescue?
Right.
And also, you have not received medical training to evacuate people.
The National Guard, who are supposed to evacuate these people, do get medical training.
Like, there's just a lot of arguments that you can make against it.
And some government agencies have started to make those arguments against it.
And you can say, well, yeah, these guys are upset that their turf is being stepped on.
And, even worse, they're being made to look ineffective, uncaring and just basically concerned with bureaucracy, not saving people's lives, which is what the Cajun Navy is all about.
Well, yeah.
And especially if it's a situation where you're rescuing people in Louisiana and a group of Cajuns on an airboat show up, they may be just innately more trusting of them than when the FEMA truck pulls up, you know.
Yeah, for sure.
Like, they're locals.
And, you know, conspiracy started springing up that, like, FEMA was actually, I think this was in...
Yeah.
And Helene in 2024, started in Florida, went up through the East Coast into the Appalachian Mountains, killed a lot of people 250 people.
And I think it was the deadliest hurricane since Katrina.
And this is when conspiracy started to spring up and words getting around that FEMA is using the government's using this as a chance to seize your property so they can have and own your land.
Right.
And just like how, in 2016, social media helped a lot of the Cajun Navy organize and be more effective, this is a great example of how social media helped the whole system just break down all the more completely.
Because if you have people who actually believe that these government agents who are now there like I saw a FEMA truck, FEMA's here and that they're actually going to try to steal your land, maybe kill you, like you're already under the stress of your house is underwater because of the natural disaster that's going to create a climate that you don't really need.
That's not the Cajun Navy's fault.
You can't really lay that on them.
The point is that in that kind of climate, they become all the more vital.
But at the same time them pointing out the failures of the government.
Just by them existing becomes all the more pronounced as well.
Yeah.
And boy, I hope what doesn't happen is that the Cajun Navy doesn't roll in here and disparage more organized governmental efforts at the same time.
You know, the ones that I saw, the ones that, like you, could feel comfortable donating to, or good about donating to don't.
OK.
No, that's actually a pretty good sign.
I think if you actually are looking at a Cajun Navy to donate to and they do that then you should probably keep walking.
Yeah.
And if you look at the sort of more official organized ones, they do try to work with FEMA.
They're not combative.
Sometimes they do work around FEMA if they think that it is holding up a legitimate rescue or aid coming to someone.
But Todd Terrell says, you know, we try to work with the government as best we can.
But the government can't do what we do.
FEMA is not designed to do what the Cajun Navy does.
And that's, you know, that's a fact.
It's it's a quicker moving, quicker operating.
You know they make the point that somebody with a laptop or a satellite phone in the Cajun Navy can get supplies there a lot quicker than going the official route.
You know.
Yeah, like you could say hey, we have a whole bunch of bottled water we want you to take with you when you take your boat to go rescue people.
And that aid that you sent to those people in need could get them in a few hours, rather than having to go to a warehouse, be put on a truck and then the truck has to deliver supplies.
Like it is agile, as they say in like the project management world.
Yeah.
And that's a huge bonus.
I mean in addition to the fact that these people are risking their lives to save other people for no compensation whatsoever.
Yeah, there's a article in GQ by Miriam Markowitz who kind of affirmed what we were saying about you know, it just shows like people love to have faith in, like regular people, and they love the hero stories.
But points out I think the quote is for our efforts to be effective, they need to be large scale and systemic.
Heroism can't be the exception in a civilized society and it shouldn't be financed by micro donations through GoFundMe campaigns.
We pay taxes for firefighters and police because we can't bank on the whims of our neighbors to save us.
And it's these institutions that that have cracks that need to be shored up, along with some of some local volunteer efforts.
I think you know.
Yeah, but those institutions that we pay for through our taxes, like we're owed them, to be effective?
In response
Yeah.
But at the same time, when those things work correctly, that is something that can give the entire nation a sense of pride.
Right.
In just the same way that stories about everyday people joining the Cajun Navy, saving other everyday people, saving their lives literally.
They give you like a reaffirming faith in humanity.
If FEMA had showed up and saved everyone in Katrina, that would have given everybody a reaffirmed faith in like the collective good of say, like an organized government.
Right.
Or maybe even like a sense of patriotism.
That's not what's been happening.
Right.
So that's where the breakdown is.
I think that Markowitz is saying is that our government's failing.
And then the presence of the Cajun Navy is just pointing this out even worse.
And then, worse than that, if we come to rely on essentially crowdsourced or vigilante forms of violence um, like supportive efforts, whether it be say, a fire department, you know that just basically is a bunch of guys who who come out on saturday nights but not on tuesday night if your house is on fire, to say, like the cajun navy, who may or may not make it out to the natural disaster in your neck of the woods, like we, you just can't.
You can't rely on people.
They're not.
These people have jobs, They have families.
They have stuff they have to do.
They're not getting paid for this.
So you inherently can't rely on them.
Even though they are reliable people, you can't rely on them in every situation.
That's why we have these institutions.
That's why these institutions have to be, like you said, shored up and step up so that we don't need the Cajun Navy.
Yeah.
I mean, one of the criticisms or potential criticisms is that it might discourage evacuation.
If the storm is impending and people knew from the news or social media that, like hey man, you're on your roof, the Cajun Navy will be there, toot sweet, get you out of there with a bottle of water in their hand.
A lot of people might like not follow evacuation orders because they're relying on something that may happen, but it may not.
But you could also say the same for for the government institutions, you know.
Yeah.
Apparently, you really, as a government spokesperson, shouldn't say like it's going to be worse than this last storm, or it's as bad as say, this last hurricane, because people will be like oh, I didn't evacuate for that and I made it through fine.
You know, so, yeah, you can definitely misstep.
I think getting people to evacuate has got to be one of the harder things you could possibly do.
Oh, yeah.
Another criticism is that You know when you've got people in there.
All of a sudden there's more people on the scene.
It could create confusion and maybe even hazardous situations, and perhaps even a situation where you're needing to then rescue people from the Cajun Navy who have run ashore, or whatever happened that was, you know, bad for their efforts.
Yeah, there's a rumor that's not true that some Cajun Navy people showed up to help after or during even Hurricane Michael and got stranded in a hotel and had to be rescued.
And they did have to ride out some of the storm in the hotel, but they didn't need to be rescued and they left from the hotel to go help people.
So it seems I couldn't find any instance where somebody who was in the Cajun Navy needed to be rescued themselves.
And that seems like the kind of thing that would have made news everywhere if that had happened.
So it seems to be like a theoretical issue that hasn't happened but could happen.
Yeah, but it's also like hey, we rescued 10000 people in Katrina, but this group of six needed some help themselves.
It's sort of a flimsy argument, you know?
Yeah, for sure.
It's not like every part of the Cajun Navy all of a sudden all needs rescue as well, you know?
Like maybe that kind of thing could happen, but on a pretty small scale.
Agreed.
Another one is that it just straight up encourages vigilantism or vigilantism.
And you know, on the one hand, if the government institutions were there, the Cajun Navy wouldn't necessarily be there, because they wouldn't be needed.
So there's, you know, there is a place for this, but...
On the other hand, even if it's morally correct in an instance, you do not want to encourage vigilantism in any form whatsoever, because that is a major facet of mob rule and you don't want mob rule.
So, even though this makes a lot of sense, you can make a really good argument that If you look far enough down the road, it's not.
Because how long would it be potentially, again, theoretically, before, say, a Cajun Navy guy takes it on himself to start looking for looters and he starts patrolling things with looters and he starts shooting at looters?
Right.
This is not this guy's place to shoot at looters, and yet he's taking it upon himself.
Like, again, this hasn't happened.
It's theoretical.
But the point is that encouraging any form of vigilantism can have these knock-on effects.
That says well, if you're willing to let people do this, this makes sense too.
So let's start doing this as well.
Yeah, I mean I could see that happening, because we've seen it happen with the strapped neighborhood watch situation.
Sure, yeah.
And it's not hard to draw a line there.
So yeah, I see where you're coming from.
My big thing is to think about the legal liabilities.
I don't know how it works when you're an official nonprofit with multimillion dollar budgets.
You're way more official.
But what if you're just one of these other sort of startup Cajun navies and something happens where you cause the loss of life or you cause something terrible to happen?
Like the liability, the legal liability and just the sort of ethical and moral liabilities are pretty tremendous.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think people who are like say, working for a state agency or a government agency or like the National Guard, they are immunized from civil lawsuits for like, if they, if somebody gets injured while they're rescuing them, you can't sue that person.
That's not true for the Cajun Navy.
And that's actually one argument for solving a lot of these problems is enticing them to kind of become more part of the larger search and rescue community that responds to natural disasters, to coordinate more with them.
Still be a Cajun Navy, but... come here and get training.
Come here and figure out how you can coordinate with us for all of us to be the most effective.
And in return, we'll extend this legal immunity to you when you're operating in these natural disaster areas.
Yeah.
But then the headline is government ruins Cajun Navy.
Right.
I think that's why there's some resistance to it.
But I believe both the Cajun Navy Relief and the United Cajun Navy both require their members to undergo training.
Yeah.
Like official training, I believe.
And they do, like you said, tend to coordinate with responders more than just like go out and say to hell with you, I'm going, you know.
Yeah.
And I'm sure as they... I mean, this was... not that long ago that all this started up.
I'm sure as it grows, if it's allowed to grow, it will become more rigorous in the training.
And, you know, because they're out to do good.
They want to do good things and they want to solve problems on the ground.
So they're not like, yeah, we don't need no training.
You know like I'm sure, given time and you know the donation of funds coming in, they're trying to do just that, I imagine.
Right.
So there are, again, I think you said most of them are for-profit.
There's some that are nonprofit.
And two rise to the top, again, United Cajun Navy and Cajun Navy Relief.
On Charity Navigator, they have an 85 and an 87 rating, respectively, which is pretty good.
Charity Navigator says you can donate to these groups with confidence, right?
Yeah. that they're going to use your money wisely.
I didn't see on Cajun Navy Relief, but I'm guessing it's the same.
United Cajun Navy, their officers, the people who run the show, get $0 compensation.
Wow.
So you don't like.
There are groups of these people who are genuinely dedicated to this, who are doing it right.
Then there are others who are like getting arrested for fraud.
So do your homework before you like make a donation.
But if you feel moved to donate, go donate.
But just do a little bit of research first.
Don't listen to somebody on the Internet who says you know, stay away from this group because this group's better.
Go do your own research.
And Charity Navigator is usually a pretty good place to start.
Yeah, totally.
Totally.
You got anything else?
I got nothing else.
This is a rare shortish long or an extra-sized short.
Nice.
Well put, Chuck.
Yeah.
Since Chuck said what he just said, I think it's time for Listener Mail.
Yeah, we're going to forego listener mail this week just because we wanted to take a quick moment.
We just got back from our first tour in a year and a half.
Back out on the road doing shows in Denver and Seattle, Washington and San Francisco, California.
So great.
Just wanted to thank everybody at the Paramount Theater in Denver, the Paramount in Seattle and the Sidney Goldstein and SF Sketch Fest, who always does such a great job.
I feel like we don't often thank the people there that put these shows on, and the crews were all great.
The people that came out to see us, thank you so much.
It's hard to part with the dollar these days.
I know times are tight.
So we really really, really means a lot that you would spend some of your money to come out and hear us talk for a couple of hours.
Yeah, and your time and yeah, just leaving your house is a ordeal these days anyway.
So yeah, we genuinely appreciate everybody who came out and like that was really a great way to get back on the road after 18 months.
You know, it was a great welcome back.
So, thank you guys, it was a lot of fun.
The show is really fun and great.
Uh, and we say this also as a reminder that we'll be doing shows in Madison Wisconsin, Chicago and Akron Ohio, before hitting the road for Canada this summer.
And there are still plenty of great seats.
And like I said, it's a fun show.
There's a lot of bad stuff in the news going on.
And it's nice to go sit around for a couple of hours with a bunch of curious smart, compassionate people, which is the stuff you should know Army.
That's right.
Well put, Chuck.
Yeah.
If you want to get tickets or whatever.
I think we basically have like a clearinghouse on stuffyoushouldknowcom and you just click on the on tour tab and it will take you to heaven.
Yay.
If you want to get in touch with us in the meantime, you can send us an email.
We always love it when you send us an email.
Send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.
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