The Cajun Navy: Heroes or Liability?

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1:08Listen to Mind Games on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.

1:55Hey, 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. Yeah, I got tabbed to perform in the Hangin' with Dr. Z show, which if you don't know, it is comedian Dana Gould has a professional Dr. Zaius of Planet of the Apes costume. Nice. And he just does a straight-up late-night talk show as Dr.

2:36Zaius. That's the only sort of wrinkle to it. And it's a lot of fun, and I was on as kind of a straight guy. I clearly wasn't the improvising comedian, but I did an okay job. But Dave Foley of the Kids in the Hall was there. Yeah. And Janet Barney, 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.

3:19That'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, 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 they were doing a screening of Brain Candy the next night.

3:59Oh, 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 liked seeing each other. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, that makes me really happy to hear that they're as great as they seem. Yeah, it was incredible. They were just, 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.

4:35And 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 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 just great. That's really cool, man. Yeah, I wish you could have been there. That was the only thing missing was you. I wish I could have too, and thank you for saying that.

5:09That'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. Z. 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.

5:44It 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 these dudes, as you'll see, are putting their lives on the line to help other people.

6:24That'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, 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.

7:06And 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. 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.

7:46No 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.

8:27And 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. Um, 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, um, because it's like, yes, people are still basically good.

9:09And 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 a, 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.

9:52So 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 the 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.

10:32One, 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. That is to say airboats? Airboats, pirogues. Okay. Yeah, that's, well, those two. Right. 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?

11:16And 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.

11:55the first, you know, when Katrina happened, that was pre-smartphone 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.

12:36Like just their, you know, all the different bells and whistles it has. It is nuts. 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. 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.

13:18And 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 Shachery. Yeah. Shachery. 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.

13:56Yeah, so good. Sausage balls, right? Yeah, that's what it is, right? Bready 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 nonprofits are big, big time. They have multimillion-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.

14:47It 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. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. 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?

15:27When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, aka Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. It's about engineering consciousness. Mind Games is the story of NLP. It's crazy cast of disciples and the fake doctor who invented it at a New Age commune and sold it to guys in suits.

16:06He 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. 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. That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little...

16:46Yeah, 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 a million, how did that shape your sense of self? I went blank. I hit a bad note, then I couldn't kind of 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.

17:34All 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 save 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. Right. 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.

18:13There'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.

19:00Cajun 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.

19:41So 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 like 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.

20:33But 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.

21:14Get 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 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.

22:04That's why this Cajun Navy story is so I find important. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, as far as kind of seeing it both ways, 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, the 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.

22:48Like 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. Right. 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. If not anti-government, maybe be very distrustful of the response to natural disasters.

23:26But 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 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. You won't get fooled again? No. 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.

24:11If 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've 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 bankrupting them, you know? Right. Yeah. And that's definitely a supported, insupportable 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.

24:48Let's do it.

25:02It 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 will 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. Did we mention it's free? Search Two Guys Five Rings and listen now. 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?

25:42When you look at your car, you're going to become overwhelmed with such good feelings. Can you hypnotize someone into sleeping with you? I gave her some suggestions to be sexually aroused. Can you get someone to join your cult? NLP was used on me to access my subconscious. NLP, a.k.a. Neuro Linguistic Programming, is a blend of hypnosis, linguistics, and psychology. Fans say it's like finally getting a user manual for your brain. 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.

26:21He 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. 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. That's so beautiful. I can see that got you a little...