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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. If you could completely remove one phrase from your vocabulary, which phrase would you choose? I don't know. Correct answer. No, I meant I don't know which phrase, and the best way to banish I don't know from your life is by cramming your brain full of stuff you should know. Join your host, Josh and Chuck on the Super Popular podcast packed with fascinating discussions on science, history, pop culture and more episodes that ask, was the lost city of Atlantis Real? I don't know. Is birth order important? I don't know. How does pizza work? Well, I do know. Bit about that see? You can know even more, because stuff you should know has over 1500 immensely interesting episodes for your brain to feast on. So what do you say? I don't want to miss the stuff you should know. Podcast you're learning already. Listen to stuff you should know on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your Co host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast, in this special episode. You're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. For four, oh, months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. Listen to amazing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Here's to the Great American settlers. The millions of you have settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills. Of course, there is something else you could do. If you got something to say, start a podcast with spreaker from iheart and Unleash your creative freedom. Maybe even earn enough money to one day tell your old boss. Hey, I'm no settler, I'm an explorer spreaker.com SPREAKER, hustle on over today. From cavalry audio comes the new True crime podcast The Shadow Girls. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. Serial killer servant. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer, it's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go in the woods. Listen to the shadow girls on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What grows in the forest? Our imagination and our family bonds. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you and discovertheforest.org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad Council. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let you know this is a compilation episode, so every episode of the week that just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to listen to in a long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week, there's going to be nothing new here for you, but you can make your own decisions. What's facing my books? Your grandmother. All of your grandmothers. Wow, Garrison, my grandmother's dead. So well, that was. There's still Facebooking in the grave. I mean, thank God no. I think my grandparents briefly got introduced to Myspace before being too sick to use the Internet anymore. They were on AOL for a while, though. That's that's quaint. Yeah, they were on AOL for a while. You know, it's. I don't often say thank goodness for Lewy body dementia, but at least it stopped them from from knowing the the horrors that were to come in the digital age they they got, they got right off the bus before things got terrible. Yeah, that is so. Friends, Romans, countrymen, how do you feel about meta? Which is totally what we're all going to be calling Facebook for now, on for forever. Thought honestly, is that like the word meta? The past like 2 years the word meta has been ruined by both like pop culture thinking it's smart and then **** like this now that a once useful concept has now been obliterated and we can't use it for anything anymore. You can't be meta. And and the fact that Facebook is attempting to use this as the name of their company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't had a conversation on even footing in his entire adult life. Like everyone is trying to get someone out of him every time he talks to anybody so nobody would say. Like, you know, Mark met is a terrible name for a company, but anyway. They did that, and they had a big event about two weeks ago where they got up and talked for an hour and 20 minutes about the future of the Internet and what Facebook's vision of the Metaverse was going to be. All this, all this very fun stuff. OK, so here's the thing. It's a bad idea, and normally, like, bad tech ideas are a dime a dozen, and we don't cover them on our show because this is a show. It could happen here about collapse, things falling apart in the future, and what's going to come next. But in this case, talking about meta is actually really worthwhile because meta is 1. Example of how the people who are kind of in control, or at least in control of the significant amount of the world that we live in, particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be locked into, see the future. I think the thing that like, makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse is an article from Wired by Matthew Gault who's a buddy of mine. He's a great journalist, and it's titled billionaire CVR as a way to avoid radical social change. And that title does kind of get to the get to the the nut of it. But the quotes in this thing are ******* wild. So before we get into Mark Zuckerberg and his vision of the future of the Internet and of humanity, I want to read some quotes from John Carmack. So John Carmack is the guy he made doom, right? Like, you can't overstate the the impact John Carmack had on gaming. Like he invented the first, like first, effectively the first popular first person shooter. He was the CTO of Oculus for a while, and he's very familiar with like, 3D digital spaces. Yes, and. He's he's very bullish on VR and he gave a quote, well, not gave a quote. He talked to Joe Rogan during an interview in 2020 and he said this. Some people read this the wrong way and react incorrectly to it. The promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible on Earth to give everyone all that they would want. Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island people react negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go economically. You can deliver a lot more value to a lot of people in the digital, in the virtual. Sense. And that's one of those things that. You can see how a guy like John Carmack, who is again a smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a number of important things, could could convince himself this is true. This is absurd. And I think what we see in Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd. One of the reasons that it's absurd is that, like everything else, the people who are building the metaverse have done like what they've done to the Internet, the Internet before Facebook and and and Twitter and these like these behemoths used to be weird. And decentralized and primarily not-for-profit. There was there was a period of time in which like the idea that you would actually make money off the Internet, like really out of like content or whatever was just silly. Because it was this, it was impossible to monetize. It was this weird wild like creative nonsense pile and you could only kind of make money around the edges of it. But the core of it was just just far too strange and and uncontrollable, too wild and free. And that's not the Internet anymore because of the people, because in large part of the people who are trying to build these metaverse. And the idea that they would allow poor people to have the same kind of resources as rich people in the metaverse. They're they can't let that happen. They're not the kind of people who would let that happen. They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing if it becomes real. We ever have like an all-encompassing metaverse. Every, every moment of it and everything you do in it, everything you have in it is going to cost you money. Probably with some kind of ******** subscription plus adding on, you know, like randomized caches and other like, you know, loot box type mechanics, selling, gambling. The children is the business model of the future by the future. I mean, it's now, yeah. Yeah, it's the business. While they want for it now, I will state I think some sort of persistent virtual reality thing will probably happen in some way someday. I don't think any of these people. Part of why my thesis of this is none of these people are capable of making it. It's because they they look at this the same way. Like ****** app developer, ****** like game developers for Facebook, look at gaming where it's like everything should cost money, you should be able to pay to win. And it's like, well nobody likes that. Like nobody, nobody likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful like. And, and it is one of the games that comes up a lot when people talk about the metaverse is Minecraft, and what made Minecraft hugely successful and why. You can kind of plausibly see, like, oh, this has elements of a metaverse where you're everybody's building, these gigantic, persistent things that you can interact with and that you can make. These incredible people may like works of art in Minecraft. They did it for free, and they did it because, like, nothing costs money really in Minecraft, if I'm not mistaken. Like you can make anything with nothing. You just buy the game and then you have the game and you can build. Whatever you want. Your equity is effort, right? Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And, like, you know, like, one of my friends, like, learned computer science so he could like, OK, create circuits. Right. He built a functioning computer in this game, just like you do. The computer is within the game. Yeah. It's pretty. It's pretty cool. Yeah. If you're going to tell me sometime in the future, virtual reality and the Internet is going to get, like, so good and so pervasive that eventually people will bootstrap together some kind of metaverse. Yeah. Maybe like that, that could happen. If it comes from like a cyber like punk aspect where like, yeah, emphasis on the punk, then sure I can see this being a thing, but the way tech companies are talking about this this that's not how people use the Internet currently, specifically like the mainstream people. There's no way. Yeah. And there's there's a few more like one of the things that Matt brings up in this article is like VR is a way to avoid radical social change is a like kind of the one of the reasons why he's number one and I think why we should all be kind of critical about. How realistic it is is is kind of the present state of virtual reality, which is about 1.7% of Steam users have a VR headset, steam being kind of the largest app to try to monitor like, how many people are using VR, right? Like, it's kind of your best. Yeah, it's figuring out the biggest it's the biggest PC gaming yeah yeah, headsets. Sales of VR headsets did go up about 30% during the pandemic, but that was kind of alongside a surge in video game sales, not VR headsets were already we're already boosting and the. Pandemic, definitely it exercise that. It's like, hey, I'm stuck in my house, what can I do? Well, I'll buy like a $200.00 Oculus so I can, you know, walk around and fight ninjas in my living room. And VR is like real like VR's cool. Like it's I have a VR headset. I've had it for years. It it can do one of the things that. I I talk when I talk about like, what it takes for technology, new technology to like go viral, to become like endemic. It has some of that, which is that as soon as you put one of these on most people, unless you're one of the people that it makes sick, most people, if you put the put them on and you show them the right thing, they're like, oh, this is actually way cooler than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, absolutely. So that is like, I'm I'm not, I'm not. Like I'm not Pooh poohing the entire idea of VR. And there's, there's there's been some successes on like half life. Alex sold about 2,000,000 copies. Yeah, which is huge for VR, but like also nothing for a video game. Like that's like for a big, for a ******* half life game, that **** which just it just shows that it's still like fractional, which I I don't think any of these people are kind of missing. But it is kind of point to, again the the degree to which this technology would have to leap up for anything, like what Facebook we're about to like it for that to actually be popular. There's a difference between developing VR gaming and developing this metaverse concept. Which goes way beyond VR gaming. Yeah, yeah. But I So what I find, what I find so, like, doomed about this isn't the technology. Even though I think it's important to acknowledge there's a long way to go, just in terms of like, how heavy it is, how much space you need, how graphics not fully immersive it is, you know? Yeah, yeah. Trying to remove lighthouses, making it more mobile. Yeah, there's a lot. There's a lot of stuff that control schemes are still kind of jank. Like, yeah, there's a lot to be done, but all of that. I mean, think about the first iPhone, right? It was like a ******* brick compared to the **** today. All of that gets better, yeah, and all the first VR headset compared to the Oculus too. It's like a massive improvement in basically every way. I I don't think when people criticize this stuff by pointing out like how primitive VR is today, I don't think that means anything. It is like worth noting, you know, it's current level of adoption, but it's not. People compare this to like 3D TV's and stuff. It's not that 3D TV's were immediately, obviously from the beginning. Nothing but a but a grift. Umm, because there's nobody wanted what they really wanted, what 3D TV's had. Like VR. People do want what VR does, and eventually the tech will get there. What's ******** is the idea, and This is why I think this article by Galt is so good. The idea that VR is going to allow the poor and downtrodden of the world to have a slice of the good life. And this is something Carmack is particularly bullish about. Quote not everyone can have a mansion. Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality. Now the simulation. Not as good as the real thing. If you are rich and you have your own home theater or mansion or in private island, good for you. You're probably not the people who are going to benefit the most. Most of the people in the world lived in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose if to be, if they had unlimited resources. Incredibly deranged. Yeah, it's out of its mind because that's not how VR works like I have. Like I can put on my headset and load up like a nice forest and it's not. It's not the feeling of being in a Fort. Like, no, it's not. That's not how our senses work. So until we can hack our own brains into feeling. Things we don't actually feel. Yeah. Then it's not a thing. And we're nowhere close to that level of technology, even just to the degree that he's talking about. Like, yeah, you could you, if you don't have a big home theater, you could just, like, put it on and have a huge TV and. Which is a thing that VR can do now. Like, I've tried it, but it's not good. It's like, Garrison, you come over 2 three times a week, and we watch movies with all of our friends in my living room. Like the good thing about it, like it's nice to have a large screen. I have a big TV. But like. You with your friends, you're watching them react like you're eating food together. You're doing all this stuff that will never really be possible in VR. I have a lot of respect for John Karma. He made doom, right? Like, that's a third of my childhood. He's out of his mind now. If he thinks that that's like what people want, what poor people want, like, you've been rich for too long, Sir. You you don't understand human beings anymore. A particular type of escape, like using VR as that type of escapism, is totally wrong, because, like, VR can be escapism, but it's not going to trick you into thinking you're living in a mansion. It's not, it's not how VR works because you're walking around a tiny room in your house and you can't feel anything. You can, like, walk through cupboards, which is a great way to play VR games, as you can just, like, hack it by walking into stuff. And they're working on. So the article notes that Elon Musk is working on a brain machine interface called novalink. Yeah, neurolink. Yeah. And who knows what I will say that's a little bit like the how how realistic all of those dreams are is, is is questionable. That said. Something like what they're claiming it is will eventually be figured out. It will and it and it should it'll probably, it probably should be destroyed. It probably should be destroyed. You not put the chip in your brain. Devour it. Valve is is really bullish on that technology. Gabe Newell is the guy we have half life for. Like he and he and John Carmack. If there's a Mount Rushmore of, like, gamer dudes, it's they're on steam. They make, they make one of them when they make one of the better headsets. Yeah, again, like we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg. Who? I do not. Think is a visionary. Both Carmack and Newell are visionaries doesn't mean they're right, because visionaries are wrong all of the ******* time. It's part of their job. But they're both really, really ******* bullish on this. Newell is a big believer in like, the promise of kind of what the neurolink, the brain interface, technology, and VR, he told IGN in 2020. We're way closer to the matrix than people realize, which I don't think is the case. And Newell is the person who I've just talked about, like how smart he is. He is even more out of his mind. John Carmack on this ****. In an interview with New Zealand's one news, he talked about his vision of the near future, which is a world in which brains and computers interface and computers can make changes to the human brain. He called, he called the human body a meat peripheral. Jesus Christ. OK, so this is, this is lost. His mind, this is the, this is the thing about like VR and like the Metaverse in general. Is this over? Like emphasizing that we basically. Us live in the meat space and the meat space exists just to make content for the online, which is so. And the online space is the actual real space and we just have to operate inside our meat space to make content for that. This is like the way technology has been progressing, the way tech companies have been wanting things to go, and it's the most dystopian thing that's going to give so many people like dissociative mental disorders because it sucks horrible for like, I'm going to be super interested to see people of my generation, including myself, like how we develop mentally the next you know, 20 years based on how. Kind of fake our lives have been because of how much we exist and socialize within this like false network. It's going to be interesting to watch. I I used to be really optimistic about aspects of VR. I actually when I was in Mosul I filmed not that like other people did this before I did, but I was kind of one of the early people filming like a a VR documentary of some combat of like the Battle of Mosul, aspects of which were aired as a 360 and a bunch of different like TV networks. And I had this belief that, like, yeah, VR, because the visual aspect of VR is so good, you know? You know, even at that, .2017 was already so good. I had this belief that, like, well, if you could, because the first time I ever went into a war zone, it was such an affecting experience. And I thought, like, Oh my God, if you could somehow carve out this moment of experience and, like, transmit it to other people, maybe that would mean something. Maybe it would, like, have an impact on people. I do think that is possible in the long. Yeah. Yeah, I think maybe we'll like, we'll see. The question is, like, can you ever like give a ****? Yeah, if you like horror games, the level of like anxiety and some degrees trauma of playing like a really well made horror VR game is incredibly intense and that's something to be done very well. So I feel like that type of like surreal experience, like a warzone could actually be carried over to some degree in VR to like change people's minds on like, hey, maybe war is not good. Yeah, I mean that. That's the dream. I don't know how much I still believe that, but reading people? They gave Newell in. How they talk about this technology makes me lose some hope. Yeah, it makes me want to throw all the headsets in a river. Here's another thing Gabe Newell said in that interview, Garrison, after calling the human body and meet peripheral. You're used to experiencing the world through eyes, but eyes were created by this low cost bitter that didn't care about failure rates in RMA's. And if it got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively. Which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but is not at all reflective of consumer preferences. What? The Bureau of the Human Eye? What the ****? No **** like **** eye like like Dave. There is some aspects of transhumanism that I like. I like being able to like change like body parts at will with like my mind. But this type of stuff makes you want to throw all technology in course. I I support the idea of like it would be great if when people lose their eyes completely from like shrapnel or whatever, some sort of like degenerative disease, we could just pop new eyes in there. Absolutely 100% we start cloning eyes. I think that's a great thing. But eyes are amazing. Like the eye is incredible. Like the most. They're most impressive camera ever. Yeah. We're nowhere close to replicating the abilities of the human eye. It it is not a low cost bidder. It is like they're imperfect, like everything that that is part of the human body. Like they break down that he can't monetize it the same way, right. That's that's his problem. He's also talking about like well, they break down. It's like ************ if you used a computer, you're Gabe Newell. I've know you've used a computer. Like you want to talk about breaking every computer I've ever. Owned? I've. I've used steam before. Yeah, like, yeah, you steam, ************. I'd like I would rather have my eyes and I'm wearing glasses right now. Go suck an egg. And it it goes on. Because he he he can't stop **** talking like reality. He talks about like in the in the virtual world he wants to build. The real world will seem flat, colorless, blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create in people's brains. And I want you to keep that in mind. My, my dear friends. And colleagues, as we leap now into the Facebook live stream, first of all, I think would it be worth like explaining to and we we've danced around what the metaverse is. But for people who are totally unfamiliar, do you think it would be worth giving a general explanation? Will that be covered in the Facebook thing? That's kind of covered in the because this is Facebook building it. But I I think you're probably right that we should give a little bit of context about like, where they got this idea because again, Mark Zuckerberg has never had an original thought. He's not the first one to do this. And and Gabe Newell and and. John Carmack have had original thoughts in their life, but this is not an original thought from any of them. All of them. Everyone, anywhere who talks about the metaverse is, whether or not they know it, a fan of Neil Stevenson who wrote based on Neal Stephenson who wrote a book called Snowcrash where the Point was that in the future, the world is a dystopian, corporatized nightmare. And because things are in part because things are so bad and incredibly highly like advertised and monetized persistent Internet called the Metaverse that exists all around us and is totally immersive. Has come to dominate everyday life, and it's a bad thing. Like, Snow Crash is a story of, like, wouldn't this future be horrible? Yeah, it's not like, hey, this is a cool thing, but these tech guys read this and they're like, Oh yeah, that seems like fun. You could do that. Neal Stephenson, who was yet another person I respect, made one crucial flaw, which is he gave the hero in his book a Catana and because the hero in his book. You know, everyone was like, wouldn't this be rad if this were the future? Let's make this be the entire future. It's it's a real tragedy to abolish katanas. Like, we would save so many lives. Honestly, you could probably make a strong case that the Catana has a huge chunk of the cultural weight that it has because of Neal Stephenson. He's a big part of that, right? You know, you've got a lot of movies and stuff, too, but like the punk kind of melding. Yeah. And it's it's a, it's a it's a very. I mean, it's it's a bit dated now, but it's still like a good book. The read like there's a bunch of silly stuff like that. Seen this replicated in a lot of other cyberpunk art. Some better, some worse. Yes, worse. Cough, cough. Ready player one. Yeah, and every like every not every cyberpunk sense, because there's people like Cory Doctorow who do some really cool ****. But most cyberpunk senses to some extent borrowed from from Neal Stephenson's work. And Facebook's entire idea is based on this. And so the idea is that it is a persistent, fully immersive digital world that interacts with the real world. So you can be in VR hanging out with friends from around the world and like a fake living room and then, like, call someone and see like a video of them in the real world is they're like walking to a concert or whatever and like, talk to them and like, make play. Like, that's the idea, right? Yeah. So this video, this face, it opens with, you know, you've got your, your little introduction in music and stuff. And then we see Mark Zuckerberg looking like a ******* Gollum. And yeah, and and the first thing that I really noticed about this is that he talks about how we're all going to do this together. Meaning, invent the technologies and use cases that are going to make the metaverse worthwhile. And when he says all of us. This is not an internal Facebook video, this is a video. The meta video is heavily angled towards developers and investors. And it's been viewed by a lot of people, like 12 million to date. But he's talking about like a big part of what he's saying is that like the technology for all of the stuff that we've rendered, because most of what's rendered in this isn't game footage, so to speak. Like it's not a game, but whatever, it's here's how it might look if the technology is ever invented. Like nothing, nothing is like in engine or anything close to it. It's all, it's all speculative. What's interesting about this to me is that he's he is saying we're going to build this together and and sort of acknowledging that like Facebook does not have. Capacity to make this thing they've dreamed about. But Facebook's going to own it, so he's a lot of like, this is him tacitly admitting, I want to take your surplus value, to make a metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at my own discretion. Which is cool. It's great. It's also like, I think, you know, I think if if if you wanna sign of where this is actually going and like the actual creativity behind this, like, OK, again, everything in that video is a mock up, right? It looks like *** ****. It's so ugly. It's hideous. It looks like a ******* Kinect game or like a ******* Wii game, which is fine. But I don't want to live there. Like, it's all like weird and cartoony. Yeah, so he talks about in in kind of laying out why he thinks this is the future. Zuckerberg talks about how text used to be the basis of everything online, but now, like, photos and videos dominate and that's a visual thing. Yeah, yeah. As that change happened from like text to video to photos to videos, the next change, he kind of frames it like the the the the obvious next evolution is to what he calls an embodied Internet where you're part of the experience. And that's the metaverse, which, again, if you don't, I think that part has some true. I I agree. I don't think he's entirely wrong there. Obviously, that's not his idea. Oh, running out of time. OK, thank you for telling me the host. And that includes unlimited minutes. Great. Thanks, zoom. Speaking of meta verses. So, like, like, like, yeah, I'm, I'm gonna flop on to a share screen and I'm going to show you guys a section from this. From this video. You think about computers or phones today. Now, since we're doing this remotely today, I figured, let's make this special. So we've put together something that I think is really going to give you a feeling. For what this future could be like. We believe the Metaverse will be the successor to the mobile Internet. We'll be able to feel present, like we're right there with people, no matter how far apart we actually are. OK, so I'm pausing it here because I want you to watch this. The room that Mark Zuckerberg in is is in. He's not in the metaverse yet. He's in like a house. I think it's supposed to be his house. It is clearly not a place human beings live. It has been set, dressed you. One of the ways you can tell is that all of the books and picture frames on the bookcase are like the same flat tones. Because they're not meant to stand out. They're meant to blend in. And very tellingly, this is what's interesting to me. As soon as he steps into the frame where he's going to announce this, the thing that is directly next to his head is the only thing that's not, like the same kind of beige as everything. It's a bottle of BBQ sauce that's being used as the bookend to a bunch of books. Now, Meta immediately after this, like, people joked about it online and meta started tweeting about it and, like, trying to make, like, jokes about, oh, Mark just loves his, you know, his, his BBQ. So much like they tried to turn it into a meme. Because they think it's humanizing and and and kind of 1 aspect of the meme they were putting together is that like oh he just forgot to you know he just he's he's so into BBQ that he leaves his sauce around that was put there on someone's orders like that was planned. Seeing marvelous as well, yeah. They're releasing promotional images specifically designed to be turned into memes. And it doesn't work because it's so obvious. Like, people like, you know, we're not going to use this because it's it's a it's a *** ****. Horrible, like, horrible cinematography, bad colors. It's not a fun meme, but people did fall for the Mark Zuckerberg thing. Like, oh, look at the BBQ sauce. But yeah, that was intentional to create like a viral thing to trip. Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to let Mark continue here after I made my little point when I send my parents. Video of my kids they're going to feel like they're right in the moment with us, not peering through a little window. When you play a game with your friends, you'll feel like you're right there together in a different world, not just on your computer by yourself. And when you're in a meeting in the metaverse, it'll feel like you're right in the room together, making eye contact, having a shared sense of space, and not just looking at a grid of faces. So that's important because a big aspect of what he's trying to sell here, why he's he's. Trying to convince people that this is a real thing is that it's a balm for loneliness, right? He is. He is. And he's one of the people who's responsible for pushing our society to such an atomized and isolated direction. Facebook propaganda has isolated huge numbers of people from their families. It's and of course, then there's just the aspect of it that is the lockdown, which is isolated people, a number of a lot of which ties back to disinformation spread on Facebook. But, like, he's he's he's selling this, you know, as a this will make you less lonely. Will make you feel like you're all together. Yeah, and it's it's he. He specifically says at one point, this isn't about spending more time on screens, it's about making the time we spend on screens already better. Which is ********* because as the Facebook papers make clear, Facebook has repeatedly refused to do things that would have reduced the harm of their platform because it would have reduced the traffic that they've got. And I think those are the kind of decisions you can yeah. And still, like, technologically we're still not there. Like when when you're in VR, you even if you're interacting with other like 3D. Like personas of people specifically, like VR chat was very popular among, like furries. And I think they are honestly the best example of what the Metaverse could actually be is how furries use VR chat. But even still, that is very different than standing in a room with someone in a first suit, right? Like it's totally, it's it's totally different and meta versus and this type of thing. I don't think we'll actually solve alienation. I don't think it's because you're not actually touching anyone. Like it's not, it's you're not. There's still that. That that digital fog between you and everything else do. I think there's some elements of it that could be developed specifically using AR that would make things a little bit cool. Yeah, but it's not going to solve alienation as a concept. In fact, it could actually make it worse. It could make it worse. Like, again, there's some use cases for, I don't know, people who have like ALS. Maybe you could develop some sort of rig that would allow them to interact, like more with with people around them and like, that could be useful for those people. But like, it is not a societal answer to loneliness. And I think one thing that makes that clear is you look at their vision of home spaces. So this is kind of the center of the of the Metaverse they want to build is everybody has their little digital home that you can set up and you can design to your liking and you can buy things like NFTS to decorate it. This becomes a big part of the pitch that like, NFTS are going to be in it. And like that way you know that they have at one point like somebody buys like an autographed poster for of of Metaverse concert that's an NFT. And they get to put it in their room and know that it's the only one of those posters or something, which is. The dumbest thing I can imagine. Maybe it'll work. I don't know. I I don't really see how that's any different from an NFT being revolutionary case than like, you know, being able to buy something in a ******* video game. No, it's it's the way people already hate to do. Yeah, it's it's just yeah, skins or whatever ******** cosmetic stuff I want number one of the things that's in entertaining about this is how bad a lot of the acting is for all of the money and time they have. Like Mark Zuckerberg is a **** presenter and and this bit where he tries to. Explain why the home space is so cool and it shows you like that their home space that starts at about 4:30 on the video of people at home want to watch is just a perfect, perfect encapsulation of like how inhuman this this world they want to build really feels. What even when they try to present it in its best face. Hey, mark. Hey, what's going on? Wow, we're floating in space. Huh? Who made this place? It's awesome, right? It's from the crater I met in LA. This place is amazing, boss. That you? Of course it's me. You know, I had to do the robot. Man, I thought I was supposed to be the robot. Whoa. I knew you were bluffing. Hey, wait, where is Naomi? Let's call her. Hey, should we deal you in? Sorry I'm running late, but you've gotta see what we're checking out. There's an artist going around Soho hiding AR pieces for people to find. 3D street art. That's cool. Send that link. So I wanted to stop here because this is also part of like, what's it's this perfect. It's like NFT culture and all this ****. Like the street art they show. This is clearly them trying to be like, here's one of these cool use cases for how the metaverse is going to interact with and influence the real world. Like, this artist pastes this art on a wall that when you look at it in the metaverse, or when you you film it and you send a video to people in the metaverse, it becomes this big 3D thing and it it just looks like ****. It's just a bunch of like. Quickly, lines and stuff. Like, it's not like there's good graffiti, especially in San Francisco, there's incredible ******* graffiti. This is just like, nonsense. It looks like it looks like a ******* NFT, like it's just this this kind of ******. It was obviously designed by a computer, not an actual person. Yeah, and there's nothing like. It doesn't say anything. There's nothing cool about it. And they haven't again, because Mark Zuckerberg can't conceive of art. There's nothing about this that, like, makes me think, oh, what a neat, futuristic thing. It's just like, oh, cool, I can see squiggly lines. Yeah, and it has in person and on my phone. I mean the big part of that person like AR and VR is like, you know, making depth within actually making 2D space appear to be 3D space. This still just looks 2D. Like. It doesn't. It does not. It's not tricking my brain in any way whatsoever, especially with the concept of, like, filming it on your phone. We have the technology now. Like, that's not, that's not the metaverse, that's just filming it already on your little box, as you said. And we have the technology to do, like that AR thing with *******. Like with your Pokémon Go did that like five years ago and it's not what people want. Well, Pokémon Go, Pokémon Go was but like long time. Yeah, but Pokémon Go was the closest we ever got to World Peace and it was a CIA mean. Pokémon Go is probably the closest we ever got to like the metaverse. Like realistically, but people don't want. People don't want to like take photos of crappy street art that then becomes 3D but still isn't like, I don't know, there it is. It is incredibly grim that most of like. The case uses for metaverse stuff. The only thing they can imagine it being is like ******* meetings. This is like the biggest thing that they show is like, oh, we can make virtual meetings. They've tried that. The video that we just played, they're all in like this spaceship and everybody's 3D. Like one person, it looks like kind of a hologram of their real body. Some people are just like 3D rendered cartoons of themselves. One person's a big robot and they're all like floating in 0G and playing cards, sitting at a table, playing virtual cards. There's like a bed in the background, but like, yeah. Go in the bed. Because if not a fake, it's a fake error. And you're not floating in 0G because VR will never be able to trick you into thinking you're sitting in a in a in your chair, in a room with some **** on your face. You're you're ******* Carl havoc and trying to pretend that you're like having a good time playing cards with your friends. Like, yeah, if I could have a space station house where my friends and I could float around and play cards that would be sick, but you're not promising me that. Are you doing that? Like there is there is games that simulate 0G. They don't trick you, they make you nauseous. Sometimes it can be fun, but like, it's I'm not going to be, in the same way that eating Hawaiian baby woodrose seeds can be fun. So he he goes on to talk about the avatars that you'll have, which are basically he describes them as profile pictures, but much richer because they're live, which I find unsettling, in part by thinking about what will happen when people die to their digital avatars, but whatever. At this point, he goes on to talking about how people he thinks people are going to actually use these avatars, and it's it's very unhinged. One for hanging out and maybe it's a fantasy one for gaming. You're gonna have a wardrobe of virtual clothes for different occasions, designed by different creators and from different apps and experiences. So one of the things he's talking about that is exciting is that, like, you'll be able to have a different avatar for like, work if you're in a work meeting or like hanging out with your friends. And to me that says, like, oh, so now I'm gonna be expected to like, maintain and keep up an avatar for, like, my job and like, dress that ******* thing. And then I'll have to like, switch to hang out with people and like, why, why does that, what does that provide me? Being able to, like, sit in a room as an avatar that I don't currently have? Like, through zoom, like, why? Why is in what world is that something people want? Mark, the only only good use case for this is furries. This is the only way it works. Because they. That has almost like a true representation of their own body. What what's this is going to do for regular for like people who are not furries is it'll probably people a lot of weird, like dysmorphia. Yeah, or if you're or if you're trans and you make a female avatar, assuming like, you know, for me, if I was to make like an avatar that's more feminine, that can be fun for me. But for a lot of people, these weird, like, digital versions of themselves will probably just they're just like uncanny valley, and it'll probably make you feel weird. Yeah, and he's he's so focused on like this as a way for people to work together while being remote, which says a lot, like at 7 like about 1/2 a minute after this point or a minute or so after this point. He brags that your home space can even have your own personal office where you work, which is within the Metaverse. Within the Metaverse, which is really bleak to me. Just like you can go to your digitally, yeah, why ruin your eyes? Why you cannot wear VR goggles that long. Eyes get ruined because it's blasting light into your retinas, and it's it's also just like, I like sitting with a laptop, and I have a laptop and I have a a second screen for my laptop, and I sit at my comfortable living room table and I write and browse the Internet and research and stuff. And yeah, every now and then, like, I hunch over too much of my back gets a little bit sore. But like, it's not. It's it's pretty comfortable and I can get up and move and do stuff in the house, putting a bunch of **** on me and sitting still and like, being unable to perceive. The world around me and locked into this uncomfortable digital desk because it's later on, whenever they do, there's this mix of you can see the videos of the the technology as it actually exists and they're aspirational. And the aspirational version, it's like you're in this gorgeous 3 dimensional office that looks like you're playing basketball both in real life and in the hologram, which at first of all just impossible. Like never going to do, never ever going to happen, just physically impossible. But when you see the clips of like what? Because they do have aspects of this build, when you see the clips of like the workspaces. Yeah, but it's like, oh, 80% of my screen is the Microsoft Word app or XLS it or or outlook as it currently exists. And 20% of it is like the edges of this little VR office. So all I'm looking at is I'm seeing a full eye version of like whatever apps I'm using, you can yeah you can, you can get a VR headset, you can download virtual desktop, you can bring your desktop into your VR space. It's not useful. Like it's like, no, it's it's it's novel for the 1st 20 minutes. And then you get bored of it because you realize that you can't actually see your keyboard, so you can't type as fast. Yeah, there's a great joke about this. In the last season of community, you were the best example of the Metaverse, where he's like the big part of, like, Epic games version of the Metaverse is like, interacting with like, brands and all of your apps within A33D digital space, which is what the Dean does in community has, like, run to his e-mail, which is, yeah, like, this is a great example of why this technology is never going to actually catch on for regular people, because that's not how they use the Internet. You. You you don't want to traverse a 3D digital space to get to your e-mail. That's that's asinine. Yeah. And it's there's aspects of it that are asinine, and there's aspects of it that are just impossible. So, like, a big thing that he's hitting on with this is interoperability, which is like, you want to be able to transfer travel between different apps, between different programs that different people have made, and you want to be able to take whatever items you buy, whatever NFTS you have with you. And he's talking about, like, this will work in games. This is a thing that like you've seen. People talk about with like the promise of Ian NFTS for gaming. Like you could get an item that like is yours so they they can't nerf it or or whatever and like it'll travel for you from game to game. There's a a developer I follow on on Twitter, he made the game audios which is about like a A guy who disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit. It's a it's a cool game. He's a good developer Doc something or other. He wrote a huge article about like why none of this NFT's can't work for gaming. That also hits on like why would Zuckerberg saying is impossible which is that? Like, so you're saying that everyone who makes a game has to has to build in like, a way to handle every single item that you could possibly get in the metaverse and everything that you're like for developers? Yeah, it's it's an unthinkable challenge. It's and and like, why? And what if a game shuts down, right? Like, are you saying they have to continue operating the game forever and updating it forever, even once it's no longer profitable so that you can keep using your eye? Like, no, it's just it's it's functionally impossible, but it's. It's what's interesting to me is he's talking about all this. He has to know this is impossible when he does. There's all these scenes, like you said, where people like playing basketball and like one of them's in the real world and one of them's in VR, but they're both playing in a real world. And so the person involved with a with a virtual ball, and it's like #1. How is the person in the real world? How do they feel that ball? He assists some vague **** about, like, haptic feedback, which doesn't work that well. Maybe there's a way if you're wearing like a glove, that it could trick you into believing you were hitting a ball or something. Like like Mint, Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. 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Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love. Spreaker from iheart and not everyone's wearing headsets like, now it's they're just, we'll get to that in Part 2. The headset question. But it what, what what's interesting is that like a huge amount of the the coolest stuff, the stuff that you can be like well, that would be neat. Yeah, if I could *******. If I could ******* play pool with my friend in Germany and it would feel like we were both in the same room even though only one of us is standing around a real pool table, yeah, that would be an amazing feat of technology. It's never going to happen. Certainly not. In any kind of reasonable time frame, Mark knows that all that is going to happen at most is like a digital conference suite that like is damages people's eyes and brains, and he knows that. But he's angry that zoom beat him to the to the punch when the pandemic hit and this is his. Like, that's kind of one of the sinister things about it. There's other sinister **** which we'll talk about in Part 2, but you know what, guys? It's time to end part one. This is enough for part one, we'll we'll we'll talk more about we'll talk about what's really frightening about a lot of what Mark's trying to build in Part 2. But for right now, I want to talk about ending the episode, which I guess I just did. Goodbye. What grows in the forest? Trees? Sure, no one else grows in the forest. Our imagination, our sense of wonder and our family bonds grow too, because when we disconnect from this. And connect with this, we reconnect with each other. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you and start exploring and discovertheforest.org brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the ad Council. Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world for them. You look and see a tree. They see the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to the sky. They see treasure and pebbles. They see a windy path that could lead to adventure. And they see you. They're fearless guide to this fascinating world. Find a forest near you and start exploring at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. The black effect presents features, honest conversations, and exclusive interviews, a space for artists, everyday people, and listeners to amplify, elevate, and empower black voices with great conversations. Make sure to listen to the black Effect Presents podcast on iHeartRadio, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome back. To it could happen here, the show where we're talking right now about the metaverse that a bunch of rich people think that you're going to want to live in once they ruin the regular world. And why? It's *** **** and it is *** ****. So. It's just, it's just, it's just total *** ****. Everything about this, I don't know, seems like a waking nightmare to be to me so far, if we're actually talking about like what they are, what they are immediately trying to. Because a bunch of this is aspirational nonsense that, as we've stated this like, you are never going to play a perfect game of basketball and a mix of real and AR courts with your friend in Hong Kong. Like that's never going to happen. Never. It's not how physics works. That's not how electronics works. Maybe when we find out how to literally hack the human brain we can like put you into a quasi seizure state that that that that mimics that. But like the closest. The closest thing we have to this right now is actually a VR board games is the best is the best example of this. Or you can play with. You can play Settlers of Catan with your friend across the across the globe and there's some cool **** you can do with haptics and haptic feedback is like the the basic example of it is when you like touch your phone and your phone like. Vibrates under your hand to, like, let you know that you've you've touched like a command. Yeah, and there's, there's people who think, like at some point we would be we we may be able to make using haptic feedback, like a virtual keyboard that feels like a real keyboard that might be possible. I'm very skeptical of that's still, that's still like kind of like the idea of a keyboard that isn't there, but feels like a real keyboard might be possible. Nowhere close to that that's still on the fringes of possibility like this. The ******* **** they're showing in this video is like, nonsense. We will have laser cannons before we have any of this ******** like we will be shooting each other in space before we have this nonsense. And thank God for that, because at least that sounds fun. So the actual center of what they've built in terms of the products that that Facebook is launching now for the Metaverse, the core of it is Horizon home and Horizon worlds. And I think horizon is kind of the brand they're going with for all of their different, like, meta programs. Horizon home is the home spaces thing that they discussed earlier, where people can like make their own, like houses. And one of the things they don't talk about in this, they keep saying like you can build whatever you want, you can make it look like anything. They don't say a word about how like decorating your digital home is going to be monetized versus how much of it will be sweat equity. And again, like the smart thing would be make it all sweat equity, make it like Minecraft, make people be able to to build anything they can conceive of if they're actually creative enough and spend the time. They won't do that as they talk about in that, like in the. Video. They played like, we're like, oh, this is a cool world. It was made by a developer. Like, yeah, you're going to buy the cool ****. I don't, I don't know. You're going to buy it and it's going to suck because all you can do is sit at a table. Yeah. And it's like, you can't, like, go into bed. Like, you can't like, all of this stuff is just cosmetic. Like, you're not going to be tricked into thinking it's real. I've, I've been in some cool VR, like, 3D rooms and, like, they're cool to look at for, like, 10 minutes. Yeah. You can't do any boring. Yeah, like, it's easier. Like, Oh yeah. Like the real world, but like, I can't touch anything. And and when they show you the stuff that's closer to real, like, the different, like people chatting in the metaverse and whatever it, it doesn't look fun. There's a there's a scene where they, like, show people, like, watching a YouTube video together in the metaverse, and they're all like these disembodied upper torsos. Because of course VR sets can't can't read your legs. So it's like a bunch of torsos floating around a maximized YouTube video window. And it's like, I would rather just show a friend my phone. I would even rather text them a video. And actually realer than that is being in person with somebody and watching it on a on a phone or even. But even even if without, like, it's the kind I think that they're expecting that. Like everyone's kind of bummed when they send a friend video over signal or text and like, wait for them. No, I would rather do that than this ****. I don't want to hang out as a bunch of torso surround a YouTube don't have to schedule a VR session every time I want to share a YouTube video that sounds horrible. And it sounds like I would constantly have to be in VR. Like, he talks about how we're not trying to. And screen time, but like yeah, am I just waiting around in VR to like show friends YouTube are really unclear about how often you need to be in a headset and it's it's kind of suspicious. It's almost like they don't actually plan on doing anything so there's all ******** and want to play another video that they claim to be a use case. And the way this video starts is like this actual person is in an actual real world concert for some guy. I've never heard of that Facebook. I think he's he's clearly some sort of musician with a following that Facebook hired to do what? Concert for this video. And she, like, calls her friend on the Metaverse, and her friend digitally hops into the concert and they're like the digital girl and the real girl. They like dancing together at the show, which I don't know, whatever. Like that is more possible than the basketball ****. Mean. Yeah, watching having like a VR version of standing in a room where musician plays. Sure. I mean, it's not, yeah, it's fun, but it's yeah. I would debate whether or not it's doable, but then after that, they see, like, during the concert, this, like, digital thing Pops up. It's like, do you want to go to a free after party and 1st off? All of these after parties will cost money and they'll all be *** ****. But that's the same with most real after parties. So I guess that's that's at least Facebook accurately delivering on on the promise of the real world. But I I wanna play like what happens in this metaverse after party that these two both hop into digitally after one of them. So like as this starts, the lady who was actually at the concert like sits down at home and gets on into the metaverse. Imagine your best friend is at a concert somewhere across the world. What if you could be there with her? Yeah. Real. Yeah. Real and clear how that works. Yeah. Real quick. How does the force of the concert see the holographic version? How the holograph person see that? Yeah. Is she wearing all that **** while she's dancing? Is everyone wearing VR and seeing the world through? Because I'll tell you what. Like, right now I'm I in our brain. You're wearing. I put on, I put on, I put on an Oculus as a joke. And right now I have it on the. Pass through which means I can see the real world through my cameras in the Oculus and you know what it looks like **** yeah it's black and white. It's super grainy. I can't there has it has no like exposure range. Yeah everything is like it's it's like you look like you're wearing a sunglasses case in your on your in front of your face like you look like **** but like I can't do anything because it all is like a horrible digital like I'm like I can't like it's not really like again do anything aspects of this like at some point pass through. Will be in color and the latency will be low enough that you won't really notice it. Right. Like and there won't be latency and like yeah, but it'll but it's not gonna be good. It'll be within human eyeball. Yeah it'll it'll still be a thing. So that girl's gonna have to be at a concert, dancing, getting super sweaty and like she's wearing something, even if it's as small as like regular glasses. She's not like I guess that would be better but like at the end, but like if people are actually developed this technology, the real way to do it is with a R not. Not VR because with AR, yeah. You could have put on, like, actual glasses and have like a person show up on the thing and make it look like they're there. Well, actually still seeing the real world, that's going to be the way to do it. Yeah. And I think that is what they want to do it. Yeah. I think that's what they're like, claiming here. But it's really unclear how it's all going to interface, how the AR is going to interface with, like, the full VR stuff. Like, are we going to have two separate sets of gear, one for when we're in the real world and we can't be fully immersive and one for when we want to dive into the metaverse? That around both? Do we always? They get around wherever we go. Yeah, but I I want to play the section. I am sorry I played the video where they were at the concert just cause it. It looks very silly. I wanna play the section where they're at the after party because it it's dystopian as ****. So here's the all all Metaverse after party that looks like a bunch of ******* connect avatars standing around in like a room made out of glowing neon digital room. Yeah, nobody's drinking, which is the only good thing to do at an after party. That's not cocaine. So from from the jump I'm like, well, what is the only good thing about an after party is if you want more. Drugs and all of the drugs places are closed. Be good. Maybe party. Maybe at the end you can hook up with a digital avatar. Yeah, it's anyway, because that could be fun. I'm just gonna play this *** ****. Look, this is wild. Is it? Is it? They're just slowly dancing is a giraffe man. What's up? Charity often NFT yeah charity auction for NFT merchandise. That looks like ****. Your new versions of your favorite song? Yeah, it looks *** **** like that. Got to get it. Yeah. So it's like, it's it's a it's a horrible 3D chat room. We already have these. These already exist, and they're not tons of fun. The only time they're fun is when you're in first suits and you're walking around a fake city destroying it. That's the only fun way to do this. And the thing they're showing in this is that, like, a a an autographed poster for the concert is is an NFT that you can buy for a charity auction. And like, as they're looking at it, the actual musician walks by and tells them it looks cool, and so they buy it. And they, they have the musician come in for that number one to like, try to make this kind of like, yeah, you'll be able to do these digital events where you can meet actual celebrities, which, like, no, I'm sure celebrities will agree to do Q&A's in the multiverse like they do anywhere else. But they're not going to just walk around in some *** **** virtual part because they have money and they can do actual fun things in the actual real world. They're going to be ******* supermodels while skiing down a mountain in Lake Tahoe because they're rich. They're going to be like flying in their private jets or or driving in a ******* yacht. And eating lobster that's been tortured so it tastes better because they're rich. Like they're they're not going to be hanging out in a digital lobby telling you that a ******* *** **** poster in FT is cool and that you should buy it unless you're a millionaire and they want your money because they're Nicolas Cage and they have an addiction to buying Tyrannosaurus parts. I don't know, it's it's silly. It's it's ridiculous. Yeah. So one of the things that I thought about when I was watching this is, like the concept of Metaverse culture. So, like, at some point, if this is a thing, there's going to be like, like, if there ever is a metaverse, people will develop a culture for it. Just like they developed a culture for Twitter, a culture for Reddit, a culture for Facebook, just as there were like, Internet culture or Final Fantasy World of Warcraft. Yeah, it happens with every community you make online. And and that's the thing. Like, there's no, I see no space in this thing that Mark Zuckerberg. Envisioned as he is presenting it for organic, yeah, evolution of one of the things that here are gonna make people want to form a culture around it because it's all it looks like. It looks like boring yuppie ****. All of it. Like none of it is actually looks cool or fun and none of it none of it is. He's not talking about any of it with like, the there's no, there's no openness in it. Like, there's I don't see where a culture could evolve, and if one does, it's going to be directly like in opposition to Facebook moderation. Like, yeah. Well yeah and I mean and there's there's an extension which like they can't, right? Because like if you actually let people just like do things like imagine the griefing that's going to happen in one of these spaces, right? Like every person's avatar is going to be like 16,000 ***** like this is literally that's all it's going to be. Like this is this is what Twitch looks like, right? Like every Twitch chat is just a guy posting a hydra made a ***** like none of this can actually work if you let people do literally anything. If you don't let people do anything, like why would you know it's going to want to do it? Yeah. Like how, how are you going to sell them this crap? Like, Once Upon a time, there was a game called Second Life. I guess it still exists, but still we're talking. People talked about it the way they're talking about the metaverse now. And that became just like it. It. It was never that. But there was like, this beautiful moment where this, I think, Anchi Chung was her name. This, like, culture writer, kind of expert lady was like doing a Q&A in second life that was like, build as being this, like, big event for the platform that was going to, like, make people take it seriously. And a bunch of, like, users showed up and made a bunch of floating ***** like, float through the room during the interview so that, like, while this person was trying to talk seriously about second life, just like floating ***** were zooming past her head the entire time and it was extremely funny. And it's exactly the kind of thing that, like, yeah, Mark, that's what all of this is going to look like. Any massive event is going, people will find a way to grief it. And that will in fact be the thing they most want to do is that will be the actual culture part is ******* with Facebook. Yeah, you know, but the part about that that sucks. It's like, yeah, you know, like, you're universal reality thing, right? So, like, OK, what are people going to do? A virtual reality? It's well, OK, you're going to you're going to get a bunch of Neo Nazis, like, figuring out a way to, like, show you just, like, the worst **** you've ever seen in your life. Like, it's going to be all the stuff in the 2000s were like, half of the Internet was just like a video. Why? This is 2010. So, like, half of Twitter is just beheading videos, except now it's in VR and it's like, yeah, ISIS in the metaverse, it's going to be amazing. That's something that's even already happening. And like VR social media apps, I know of a few specific Nazis involved in January 6th who networked and met with people via specifically VR chat. So like this is this is already a thing? And making it more broad than like this small, you know, because we are right now is mostly just a small subset of like gaming culture, right? And people are into it because there is VR games that are cool, like like, like beat Saber is fun, right? Target games, yeah, absolutely. I in order for them to break this through to the mainstream, they make it appealing to some way. And the only way they're making appealing right now is by doing meetings and, like concerts. So the next part I want to play doesn't say a lot about the future marks trying to build, but it's very funny because it's him sitting down with a woman who works in his gaming department, and she's walking him through like, what games are going to be integrated into the metaverse? And it ******* reads like, and I think you should leave sketch like it feels like a sketch. Where the joke is that everyone is awkward and not talking the way human beings talk. And in case you can't watch this chunk of the video and it starts at about like 1934 in the actual Facebook video, all of the video games they're talking about like look *** ****. They look like the Kirkland brand of like popular like fighting games and FPS and stuff. None of them looked very good. So I'm going to play a clip from this because it's very funny. Bailed out, active communities. Beat Saber has a passionate community. I love beat Saber. So do I. And we're just passed $100 million. And last time Quest alone, it's a great example of the game is releasing fresh content they've actually been working on involving the way that you interact with the tracks and feel the music. Nodding in this like his digital avatar looks more like a person. Well, here's some beat Saber. Yeah, yeah, it it looks like regular beat Saber. Yep. But it's it's VR. It's already is VR. Yeah, yeah, it's already a VR game. Can't wait to play this. You could already play it. Incredible artists to release new music packs all the time. You can do this right now. A little more than I should have. I should been working more on this Metaverse presentation. Well, oh God, every scene where she's talking to him and he's just like bobble head nodding just a little bit, but not in like it's he looks so fake. Mark actually will benefit from the metaverse like outside of a financial thing, because a a sculpted 3D representation of him will be 1000 times better and looks more human than he looks like. More of a person. Yeah, it's I mean, it's just like he's scripted it badly and he's a narcissist, so he has to be the one to present it. Again, a small I love beat Saber #1. If Steve Jobs were doing this, number one, he wouldn't because he understood what people wanted from technology. But if he were doing something like this, he would introduce like little chunks of it and then he would have a famous person whose charismatic introduced the rest of it. Like, yeah, that's like you. It wouldn't be. It wouldn't be introducing him sitting like a bobble head listening like you would introduce VR and AR into a way that actually integrates how people use the Internet already. Because there is ways that there is ways of doing it, but it's not this like. Super monetized NFT, like ******** holographic fake stuff. Yeah, and there's there's aspects of this, like, he goes through after this, like there's a bunch of gaming stuff, which is impossible for the reasons we've talked about. And then there's aspects of it that seem cool. Like there's a scene where like an architect gets on to his digital office and like, somebody sends him a schematics to have a building they're making, and he's able to generate it in 3D and walk around the building like, OK, that actually seems impossible and that seems like useful. Like you've developed. Use case for the all of the architects out there. Yeah, it's it's it's I'm I'm still not convinced that CAD would actually be better in 3D than it would be like sure, it's debatable. I I think like it. Maybe someday that could. I think it could be like if you were one of the increasingly small number of people who can afford to like, build a House of your own. I can see why it would be neat to be like, OK, well, let's do a 3D render of the house and I can walk through and I could maybe make changes at the last moment as I'm kind of experiencing that is that is definitely useful. Window is like, yeah, I can that that seems like something #1 technologically you could do that more or less. Now, I don't think it's going to be as instantaneous as this, but if you give it time to render, it could be done. And it it's something that a number of people might find useful. But again, that's a niche product because like 18 people in our generation are buying homes. I mean, yeah. And also it's it's it's expensive to develop because you would have just modeling an actual real life location is a lot of work. Now there is, there is a lot of lot of technology that's getting way better at it, but yeah, machine cameras and like basically filming a space and and the computer can reconstruct it pretty accurately so that that that is a growing field, but still it is, it's a very niche, you know, area, at least at this point. Yeah. So the thing that is. So anyway, there's aspects of this that are ridiculous, aspects of this that seem neat, but the longer you watch it, the thing that come becomes really clear is that all he's really advertising is mass surveillance. That's the problem with yeah. Yeah. There's a point in this video where they're showing you how they can like map a real world location. So you can be in your actual house, put on your VR glasses, and it can map the your actual home digitally in real time. And as you as you pick up real things in your house, you you see them being picked up in VR and presumably other people in the VR could see it, which we are not quite there yet. I, I stay pretty. We are not in VR technology. We're getting close to this, but we're not, we're not quite there, I mean. We're, we're actually, we actually are aware what they show in the video and I'm going to play you a second from it because I want to show you something here at least. I mean like like consumer products, we're not, we're not at this point yet. Yeah and I, I want to show you. Where we are because this video, they're showing like actual footage, so they have built this thing, but there's a catch. And so I'm just going to play it right now, right out the researcher. So what's critical here is that this is all happening in real time. So if you, I've just paused it, what you've got here, on one side there's a woman in a real like house sitting and picking up like a a, a toy home on her couch. And then on the left you see the VR version of her house, which looks close to photorealistic and like the house that she's holding in the real world is floating. In the same way that she's holding it. Like, her body isn't there, but like the stuff she's interacting with is. But if you look at the house she's holding, the reason that they're able to do this and it really does work, is it's covered in sensors. It's covered. And actually, every single thing in the real house is covered in sensors because that's the only way for this to work right now. Moving is covered in sensors. Yeah. Yeah. And it it is impressive. Like, as a proof of concept like this, this is here, we can do this. But, like, it's still light years away from practical. And more to the point, when you look at this, you realize that, like, well, if this is ever going to work. The only way to make it work is for Facebook through this service to map your entire home. Yeah, in real time, every hour of the day. And they also go on to talk about, like, how you're going to have gesture commands and like. You'll be able to like, make an expression or like a hand gesture, and that will do things. Which means that, like, this service isn't just learning what's in your home and what you do with the things in your home. It's it's learning your facial expressions and your gestures and like what they mean and interpreting those at all. Times I can kind of explain where Oculus, which is owned by Facebook, I think they're technically renaming Oculus. Yeah, spring to just calling it the meta quest. But what? Wait, wait, the meta quest? That that's what they're calling it instead of instead of Oculus Quest can be God. OK, so where we're at right now is basically. Of the only kind of real world interactivity that they have for their VR headsets, again, for like the consumer models, I don't know. What's in link development is hand tracking. This is the thing I've been working on for a long time is that you put on the headset and the camera, like the cameras and depth sensors built into the headset, can see your hands. And like you said, you have like gesture controls where you can do certain things with your hand and it'll make certain things happen. This is the only interactivity that that we have. It's OK. It's not perfect. Like it's it is. It is better than a lot of the other hand tracking systems from other companies, but like it's it's it is very much a work in progress. And the way to make this work is by is very good depth sensing cameras, which I think Apple makes some of the best ones right now that they put into the iPhone. The other way of doing this is with lighthouses. So this is like separate, separate like separate cameras that you set up around the corners of your house that project a different like wavelengths of light and they get it received back. So they can map your house with not just cameras but also like like in like infrared sensors and that kind of thing. So these are like the two methods of doing it. Facebook is really trying to go full out, full on to the everything is built into the headset thing. So yeah, no, so no. Like lighthouses, everything is just depth, depth sensing cameras. So that's why they're working on hand tracking so much because that's you can actually do. But like I can't pick up anything. Like the only thing I can pick up is my controllers, which because they have sensors built in, they can be rendered in the actual game the same way like my hand can be. So that that that's where they're at for that for the consumer products. But more than it's getting developed again. Where they're at. You think about what Facebook has already done with the information you provided, and how so much of their money comes from selling your data. Yes, the only way for this to work that they've they've posted that the cameras are always watching everything. Every moment of your existence, including like your micro expressions, is. Which is why I keep my Oculus in a tiny little box, yeah. And here's the thing. If they were to actually develop the technology, which I don't think is impossible, although it's not particularly close, it's not going to be cheap to store all that. So in order to make it worthwhile outside, well, it's going to be cloud based, but in order to make it like cloud isn't free in order to have to pay you. Script should probably I I think you'll pay some. But I think in order to make it affordable so that more people are on it, they're just going to sell your data, to advertise your data in a way that has never been in an end. The government will have access to it like it is. It's actually like the the thing that he is actually proposing here is I want to build a machine, God that knows your sins, like that knows when your heart rate is elevated, that knows what it looks like before you smile, that can predict, like when you're about to make a gesture. Or laugh because it it it it is so accurately mapped your body and motions. It's actually a nightmare. Like when you really think about what he is trying to build here, it's like, well, what's what's the actual use case for this? And it's like, well, OK, so you have a, you have a bunch of special forces guys, you put them in a VR thing and then, you know, you can, you can, you can have them drill on knowing exactly where all the rooms in the house is, where everyone is in, where everyone is in a house and you given time and it's like, oh, hey, this is, this is going to be great. This is. It's it's great. Yeah, it's it's really cool. They have a. So there is a little bit here briefly about where like Mark talks about how the last year or so has been ******* the term. He uses his humbling for them. Oh God, yeah. And you you kind of think that like he's about to say that, like, oh, because we we made life dramatically worse and our service was integral in several ethnic cleansings. And a couple of civil wars and like hate crimes on a scale that was unimaginable before it it really came into being, or that we thought had been at least we thought had been consigned to a century or so ago before Facebook came into being. But no, that's not why it's humbling. Why he says it's been humbling is that Facebook has been developing services for other platforms, like the App Store, where they don't have total control. And that sucks. And that's like the thing that that's the, that's him admitting a little bit that, like a big part of this is they're trying to build a service. The entire Internet gets filtered through. That they completely control so that they are never in anyone else's wheelhouse. Like, everything is done through Facebook and with Facebook's approval, as opposed to them. They want to get something. Yeah, Facebook. Facebook is going to become the state. Yeah, and that's the thing that's trying to do. It says so much about Mark that he's like, what's humbling isn't all of the mistakes I've made. It's that periodically, I have not had total control. That's great. He then, from immediately from this, says that if we all work at it, all of us, the Metaverse can reach a billion people by the next decade. Which is very funny. Yeah, that he thinks that that's like an enticing ******* thing, so. One of the use cases they try to present is they have a beauty influencer who like made like a a ******* candle liner, something that she sold on Instagram and she's she's very successful on Instagram. They bring this lady in and #1 as soon as they started interviewing her. It's it's it's what I was saying about yeah, have a hire A celebrity to do this. Mark, you're not charismatic. She's immediately the most engaging person in the entire presentation because she's a successful in like she's someone who understands how she appears on camera, how to make herself seem likeable on camera, how to like interact with the world. On the camera, and nobody else in this video understands that, which is just funny. It's not particularly like, say anything other than that. Like, you have professionals do difficult things, Mark, don't don't hire your weird gawky engineering staff to, like, be the faces of this thing. They're not good at this, and neither are you. I just want to point out, so he said that, like, he he can get 1 billion people the next decade. So far, there's only been 16 million VR headsets sold ever. So getting that to the point of a billion. Seems like a quite, quite the challenge. I mean, it is a challenge you, but I you could look at like, how quickly smartphones went from. Yeah, except smartphones were useful in improving the world in very obvious ways, whereas the metaverse and even VR in general doesn't improve the world for most people in obvious ways. Yeah, but that's kind of what I'm saying is that, like, the thing that is stupid and doomed about this isn't like, oh, you would have to sell so many headsets if it was legitimately something every single person wanted on their head. They would sell a billion. They would sell a billion in a couple of years, you know? But they haven't made that look like, like, so this, this beauty influencer thing is an example of them trying to like, explain. Here's something that people will find cool about the metaverse, and the way they do it is like talking about how you can have a digital storefront where, like, people can't just buy products, but they can interact with you. She talks about how it will be good for letting her interact with her fans by, like, bringing them into my home. God, sounds like a ******* nightmare. We love our fans, but like, no, I do not want anyone from anybody else. *** **** no. I barely want my friends in my home half the time. Like, absolutely not. They didn't present us with a use case of how a brand, in this case this like candle company this lady made that's being on Instagram, could release like a new candle flavor and launch a digital experience with it so you can buy both real and digital products. It's kind of unclear in the video whether or not you're paying for the digital experience or is it like free when you buy the candle? Yeah, this is like, I don't. Games is like, develop. Yeah. It's like, you know, dropping products at the same time in the real world, in the digital world. But, like, the digital version is free because it's like, because it's like an ad, right? You could try something out virtually before you buy it physically. And that's what, like, Epic games is doing. And honestly, I think epics version of the metaphors is slightly more hinged. They understand more what people actually want. Yeah, because, like all the stuff they're trying with Fortnite, again, it doesn't seem fun for me, but at least it's like an extension of how people use the Internet already. Whereas Facebook is not that. Yeah. And and Mark never really understood what people wanted. He he accidentally did, basically trying to make something else. Like he wanted a place to share pictures of ladies he thought was hot, and he accidentally built the thing that like, gave people something they did want, which was a way to stay in contact with their friends from high school and college as they grew older. Right? Like that was the thing about Facebook that made it get huge originally, and he hasn't learned anything since. He's just been smart. He's he's hired people who are smart enough to be like. My Instagram is probably going to be a big deal by that should buy it. Yeah. You know like that, that. But I I haven't seen anything that's made me think, like, Mark gets what people want and this is just made it clear that like, he absolutely doesn't. So I want to play this video of like, this is the digital experience to go with this ******* candle that they're they're framing is like a piece of art that everybody is going to want to interact with. Who likes candles? It's it's incredible because it again feels like a nightmare. I am, I am a big candle fan. So same here. Butterfly Effect transports us to something magical. It's like a ****** Arboretum. I I don't see what this has to do with candles. It's Jackie as we walked in this amazing world. Doesn't matter. I just feel like this is like endless possibilities with my imagination. I can't even begin to imagine. I don't understand what to do with candles. I yeah, like they have again. Like there's I can walk around it. Like, why can't begin to imagine all the things, people. I can walk around digital spaces and my quest, it's, again, it's fun for like 30 seconds and then you see everything. You're like, well, I can't touch it or smell it or actually feel it or do anything. So I'm going to go back and have a soda and I don't know, yeah, play and like, read a book or something, like. And they they've brought in this influencer who, like, used one of their other services in a way they hadn't initially intended and was successful in that. Which is not a bad idea on its surface. Like, yeah, bring in creative people and let them play around and make something new to show people how exciting this is, right? That's the smart thing to do, but all they've presented is like, look, it's a tiny little weird Arboretum. You can walk around and after buying a candle and it's like, well, I like candles, but that's not fun. That doesn't sound like a fun addition. It's a candle buying process. Part of the universe is like making, like interactivity, more like be able to interact with, with digital things. And, like, that's not interacting, that's just walking around. Like, unless I can like, take of like a bazooka and blow up the armor like our Arboretum, the candle, you know, like the candle candy. You have to do something like all of the VR games that are fun, like, like, like like like a super hot or like something about, you know, picking up objects in VR and throwing them at people. That's fun. Yeah. And you like. Also, unless I can pick up this candle and install people with it in the game, I don't see what really the dry like what's what's exciting about this? You were saying something, Chris? I guess, you know the, the the thing I keep coming back to with this. Is that the only way this, this literally any of this makes any sense if it's just like a chip in your brain. And just because all of it, all of it is built around that, but it's. But it's not like it can't be that, like we don't the technology for that won't exist for like ages. And so there it's like it's like they're they're selling some of it definitely is headset based, like that Arboretum thing, but for a lot of, a lot of it. But even. Yeah. But like, I mean I think even that. Right. Like, OK, so why would you want like, yeah, you're saying like why would you like, OK, it's interesting for like 10 minutes, right? Yeah. The only way that would be, like the only way that would be an actually interesting experience is if you could get all the full sensory experience you could smell. Feel. Yeah. Right. And that that's that's that's like, that's that's the thing. Like this only makes sense if it's like a brain chip. Well, I mean, there's two versions. One, it's a brain chip, or two, it's a video game. Yeah. And Epic games is doing the thing where it's a video game and that's slightly smarter to me. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But like they don't, you know, but they're they're trying to sell like I I think part of what's going on here is also just like this is this is designed to like. Like, this is designed to, like, Trick Silicon Valley investors. Yes. We're, like, going on. Yeah. And those people, I think, are just gonna be like, Oh well, we'll have brain ships eventually. And so we'll just, we'll talk another. We'll probably talk about that part more at the end because, yeah, this is just a scam. This is just a scam. And it is, like, again, to talk about, like, the dystopian aspects of this. Chris, as you brought up, one of the aspects is that, like, it's a complete panopticon, a perfect surveillance. If they actually make this thing. And #2 is the only way to do most of what they're talking about, that's cool. Is to give Mark Zuckerberg physical control over human beings brain chemistry on a global scale, which I think is a bad idea. I'm gonna sign up for that. I'm not gonna say no for that. I don't. I don't want to walk around in a weird candle room that badly. To your point, Chris, about like how it's, you know, there's no sensory stuff is like like the most popular VR games. The reason why they work so well, the reason why they don't like break the uncanny valley, is because you're in like a barren land, like, you know, beat Saber, you're not in a place you know, you're in the in the game interface for like for super Hot. You're in like whitewashed abstract like concrete spaces. Right. So like there's nothing, there is nothing to smell or feel so like you don't feel like you're missing anything because you're in a very like stripped down version of reality. There is a really good. VR game, I forget what it's called, but it's based on like an office and you're like fighting robots to break out of like this capitalist office room. And it's cool because like yeah it's miserable because it's like it's like an office space. You feel like you're in an office because it nothing about it's exciting, right. There are games that are in like lush worlds. They feel so much more like disconnected because you have like a weird, like you have like you have like an uncanny valley thing, but instead of like a face or a person, it's like an environment. We're running low on time. I want to move to something that I think is important here, which is there is one moment in this video where they try to address. The fact that they've done a tremendous amount of damage to the world and they have repeatedly failed to, like, anticipate dangers that their services have, so they need to, like, deal with that at some point in this is like, well, what about if like, what about bad things that could happen? What if, like, what about, like, unintended things? What about like, ways in which this could be harmful to society that you haven't foreseen? So because they're not completely stupid, in order to address that, they bring on a well dressed or not well dressed, but they bring on like a friendly British man who kind of, kind of reads. It's like a like a scientific kind of expert guy. They bring on a charming British person to like talk about how they're going to not, not destroy the world. And this is very telling patients so far it's it's such visionary stuff. But as you mentioned early on with all big technological advances, there are inevitably going to be in all sorts of challenges and uncertainties. And I know you've talked about this a bit already, but people want to know how we're going to do all this in a responsible way, and especially that we play our part in. Helping to keep people safe and protect their privacy online. Yeah, that's right. This is incredibly important. And the way I look at it is that in the past, the speed that new technologies emerge sometimes left policymakers and regulators playing catch up. So on the one hand, companies get accused of charging ahead too quickly, and on the other, tech people feel that progress can't afford to wait for the slower pace of of regulation. And I really think that it doesn't have to be the case this time around because we have years until the Metaverse. The vision is fully realised, so this is the start of the journey, not the end, so that's telling. Uh, that he's like, we don't need to worry about. Like, we don't need it. Like, it'll be fine. It'll get regulated properly. It'll be safe enough because it's going to take so long to figure all this out that surely we will anticipate and deal with all of the potentially toxic side effects of this technology ahead of time. And if you believe that, I would say, take a look at Facebook's track record with that kind of thing. Yeah. But they are smart in having a charming British man do it. That's the right guy to have in, in, in the only aspect of good casting in this. That is the right guy to have come on and try to allay people's fears that this will destroy society. You bring, you bring a charming British man in, you know, that's how you do that kind of thing. That's when I get canceled for the things I've been doing overseas. I'm going to hire A British person to defend myself. Do they make any more comments about, like, AR glasses or VR? With you I wanted to move on to that even though yeah we're we're so they talk about they have a whole section where they're they're talking about the actual glasses they have so they they announced number one they have a a project the goal as he repeatedly says is to make a quote normal good looking pair of glasses that do all this stuff which obviously that is the end goal. Yeah and he he does in order as like a proof of concept he shows us these AR ray bans that actually look legitimately rad they look like normal at least the the private touched. Aware of these in my hands, but the the the videos that are supposed to be these real products show a pair of what looked like normal ray bands that you can take pictures and videos with. You can answer phone calls on. You can do like video phone calls on them and stuff like that. They seem neat and like they look like normal glasses. And that is pretty cool. They go kind of pivot from that to announcing that like they have this new thing, project Nazar, which I looked up what nazar means a little bit ago. It's probably dystopian, no, I think it was just, yeah. It it's a town. Oh, it's a surf spot, right? It's a place, and I think Portugal, where there's like great waves. And Mark Zuckerberg's really into surfing. He plays a surfing game at one point in this. That is one of the most embarrassing things, embarrassing things I've seen in my entire ******* life. But yeah, so project Nazar is they're supposed to be like the first true like VR glasses. So they they do the the good thing, which is like, here's the real technology, these ray-bans and look, these are pretty neat. Obviously that doesn't come close to what they're promising. And this whole thing where they talk about what the the glasses, which they say they're making good progress on are going to do. We don't ever see any ******* glasses. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and that's because they're not really close to to to working yet. I definitely think really hard the AR glasses are going to be the way to act like if the goal is to integrate digital spaces into the physical space, I think it's a good goal because what that's going to do that's gonna make the digital space less fake, right. It's injecting that into the actual real world. So I think that will actually really help with like dissociative stuff because it's actually in it's actually in the real world as well. I think that's going to be wonderful when that gets developed and I think the glasses are are definitely going to be a thing within the next 10 to 20 years. There is ways that like. Figure illuminating glass on the side to make like, you know, like what it looks like an image. This is definitely going to be a thing that's going to be possible. Without like, yeah, surveillance and privacy is like the big your big fears for that because. We're nowhere close to hacking the brain enough to feel sensations and like, the only thing like, I've played a lot of VR, the only thing that you can feel in VR is fear. That's the only thing that VR is capable of replicating that's good as as a feeling. It's like you can feel terrified in VR. That's that's that's it. You can't ever feel like there's one thing you can feel exhausted. I played a game and I was doing like bow draws for like 4 hours and I was like, we've we've developed a way to make you frightened and tired. That is what VR's best, which is all by the way, what Twitter does normally. It's true all of like, all of like the Resident Evil VR games. Yeah, they're going to making you tired and terrified and that's kind of it. So we we have to close out. But I want to do that by playing Mark Zuckerberg lamenting the Internet that he played a major role in, in building, as a way to talk about why we need a metaverse. Because it's. Kind of funny, this we're allowed to build and use are more tightly controlled than ever, and high taxes on creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way that we are meant to use technology. The Metaverse gives us an opportunity to change that, to build it well. But it's going to take all of US creators, developers, companies of all sizes. Together, we can finally put people at the center of our technology and deliver an experience. We were present with each other. Yeah, what? What a ghoul. What a good monster. Like, all of that's nonsense, number one. You're not. You're one of the people who has turned the Internet into an expensive walled garden. It didn't used to be this way. Then Facebook swooped in, made themselves for free, like integral to all content, and then started charging those content creators and, like, ******* them around and lying to them, which led to the destruction of a huge number of websites and a tremendous amount of digital culture. Like, you're why it feels like a dead walled garden and everything you've presented in this video makes. The metaverse feel like a dead walled garden, but I want to play his last lines in the in this video because this is him kind of summing up his vision for the future via the Metaverse, and now it is time to take everything that we have learned and help build the next chapter. I am dedicating our energy to this more than any other company in the world, and if this is the future that you want to see, then I hope that you will join us because the future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine. I agree with that part, mark. The future is going to be beyond what you can imagine. What, a ghoul. Yeah, because you have no imagination. It's just it's just using trendy tech terms to trick investors into giving them billions of dollars. Yeah, that's like, right. That's that's all it is. Because all all of this like this, like haptic feedback, replicating like human feelings and stuff, we're nowhere close to that. And when we do, it's going to be dystopian, but we're not close to it and it's going to be dystopian or it's going to be. Better in ways that, like, we can't yet conceive of. And then eventually it will be destroyed for profit if it actually gets cool like the old Internet was. Yeah, it's yeah, it's yeah. But I think, but both this and even a lot, like a lot of like the epic stuff just seems a it's just the new way that tech companies, that's where they think the money vault is, is by using these terms. And they think using these terms is going to get them lots of extra investor money. So because the actual technology is nowhere really close to this and it's not what people want. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. 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I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Out of the Internet anyway, it absolutely is not, but. I don't know. I think this was important. I think, yeah, Facebook is important and has a major impact on the way the Internet is continuing to evolve, usually in negative ways. But this is how these people who are doing a lot of damage view the future. So you should know what they're looking at and what they anticipate. But I, I think, I think that there's a kind of optimistic note to this though, right? Which is like, OK, so we've we've reached the point where like, even like Boris Johnson is going like, oh God, climate change is coming. Yeah, right. Yeah. And this is the best they've got, right? This is their vision of they have no, they have nothing. They have nothing. And you know, I think like. One of the only ways we can win is if we're facing a uniquely incompetent ruling class. Yeah, and if it if the rule, if the if the guy were if the guy we have to deal with in order to, like, not drown every single whale and like have half of the world's cities consumed about the ocean, is Mark Zuckerberg like? We got a shot. We got a shot. I think there's some smarter people that aren't yeah, that this is behind the scenes, right. Like, yeah. But I I don't think I think that's a nice note to end on because it is it is worth. The nice thing about this is how clearly they don't understand what the future is going to look like online. Yeah, they have ways in which they're trying to direct the future and aspects of that will come true, like they're VR will succeed in some form at some point and it will be potentially an unprecedented surveillance. Breakthrough, I mean like has some unsettling implications. Yeah. As long as the positive ones never setting developed a lot of other stuff. I think the, the move by Twitter to create like this, like it's called like like Twitter spaces where it's like this like, you know, basically like voice chat room. Like a lot of people are moving towards this concept where we try to like inject more like in person interactivity into this virtual framework. Right now. This would like with like a clubhouse last year during during the pandemic where people like watching like Netflix and the quote same room, right like we're seeing people try to do this. With varying, mixed success. But this is the way tech is, is, is inching. So it is a good idea to keep your eye on it because it has a lot of implications for like, privacy and advertising and all that kind of stuff. We'll continue to cover aspects of this. Talk about the technology, talk about the surveillance implications, talk about the visions these people have. But I think this has been these episodes have been useful and, like, here's what Mark thinks is coming, here's what Facebook is pouring like $10 billion into. It's dumb as ****. Have a nice day. Raffi is the voice of some of the happiest songs of our generation. So who is the man behind baby beluga? Every human being wants to feel respected. When we start with young children, all good things can grow from there. I'm Chris Garcia, comedian, new dad, and host of finding Raffi, a new podcast from iHeartRadio and fatherly. Listen, every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Colleen Witt. Join me, the host of eating Wall broke podcast, while I eat a meal created. My self-made entrepreneurs, influencers, and celebrities over a meal they once ate when they were broke. Today I have the lovely AJ Crimson, the official Princess of Compton, Asia, Kid Ink, and Asia. This is the professor we're here on. Eddie Wall broke and today I'm gonna break down my meal that got me through a time when I was broke. Listen to eating while broke on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to check out drink champs. You're #1 music podcast on the black. Effect Podcast network host NO R&D JEFN sat down with artists and icon yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't wanna have to be the villain, but when I went and did the donda thing, yay returned and everybody had to sit back and watch the real leader. Check out drink champs conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Podcast. All right, well, I've done my job for the day. Wow, you've even by our standards. That's it. That's an intro that's actually one of your better ones. Thank you. This is, of course it could happen here, a show about how things aren't going so great, kind of falling apart, crumbling a bit, but also maybe things could be better. That would be nice. Let's try and do that. Today is one of the maybe things could be better episodes. And we are talking about the ongoing wave of strikes. We had strike Tober last month with the John Deer Strikes and and and strikes and like, whatchamacallit, couple of different food companies, bunch of strikes. And today we would like to get an update on all the ************* who are out there striking for better conditions and and better treatment. And today, for that purpose, we've brought on the great Kim Kelly. Kim, you are a journalist who focuses a hell of a lot on labor. You've been up and down to some of the coal strikes that have been going on. You were there for the Amazon attempt to form the Union and oh geez, was that a Arizona? Alabama, Alabama. And you're writing a book on the history of Labor in the United States. So I'd like to just kind of turn the floor over to you. There's a floor, there's OK, there's a floor. There's no feeling there's a floor is filthy. Just as a heads up, you know we're doing our best, aren't we? You are, we are not. I am trying to keep up with all this labor action that's exciting action, hot labor action, you know, with some hot labor action stories. So as you mentioned, we're just kind of coasting off of the peak of strike Koberg, which was such a fun thing to kind of see explode in the mainstream consciousness. Like usually labor stories, they're a big deal to the people that are involved in them and people in the labor world who are watching and like rooting for them, but they don't necessarily end up on like, you know, the mainstream, like the. Yeah. And about the TV, they don't end up with, like, fancy old guys talking about it on Dateline or whatever, right? But that's something that happened. And I think there's been a real shift in consciousness. That is the company that. And of course, you know, it's like strike Tober is fun. There's all these, these big strikes happening at the same time. But we of course need to remember that that didn't happen in a vacuum. There's people on strike now who have been on strike since before. Since before it was cool, right, since much earlier. Like shout out to the Saint Vincent nurses up in Massachusetts. And to the coal miners in Brookwood, Alabama, warrior met who have both been on strike for over 8 months. And they kind of, right. So literally like they're like they're in the middle of their tour drives for their children because they've been on strike for so long and they kind of got a little bit left out of the conversation around striked over. And I think that just kind of shows that we need to be paying attention, even when it's not as flashy or new or exciting, I mean strikes or exciting. But, you know, there's a lot going on and one of the things I think is interesting and important. Especially as we head into strikes giving, which I guess we're doing. Yeah, strikes giving strikes miss striking time. Strikes stay straight tricks Day 4th of strikingly. Strike. Strike yeah yeah, it's it gets worse earlier, really, until we get to Labor Day and by then God strikers day. That one works pretty well. I'm also a fan of strike and Tines Day. Nice day. That's cute. Yeah. Love and rage, baby. Keep this going. Yeah. Strike a ween. Strike which? Strike a ween. There's a missed opportunity there. Although that that frightens me. Garrison. That the band weaned might go on strike and I don't. No. What will we do? We wouldn't have our. We would. We would be completely out of Wayne. Our reserves of Wayne aren't going to last long if they stop. Yeah, that's acceptable. Yeah, there's been a tragic shortage of ween for years now. I don't know that we can handle this. Strike. Please continue. Kim. Didn't realize you were nerd. Robert, this is just kind of throw some things. The question. Yeah, I mean that's a heavy metal dirtbag. I'm like contractually obligated to make say things like that, but. As I was pontificating a minute ago. Oh, right. So as we go into strikes giving, there are still more big strikes on the horizon and potential big strikes on the horizon. But part of the story that I think is also very energizing and important is the organizing that's happening in the new unions that are hopefully going to end up being formed, not necessarily as a result of this wave of attention, but they're kind of caught up in the tide. I mean, when you look at the Starbucks workers in Buffalo who have scared the **** out of their employers. To the point where they're flying executives in to follow them around the store and be like, please don't vote for a union. We need all of our billions of dollars we can't share or you know, even workers at wire cutter who are threatening to strike on Black Friday and their whole thing is telling people what stuff to buy, you know, and McDonald's workers and I think 10 different, these are 10 different cities or 10 different states, 10 different locations just went out on like a one day strike over sexual harassment in the workplace. Kroger workers are taking his. Drake authorization vote in Texas. We have multiple Amazon organizing attempts happening in Staten Island and a rerun of the election coming up in Bessemer, AL. And there's just so much happening that, you know, I I hope that the novelty idea of the strikes overstrikes giving. I hope. Like that was fun. But I hope now that people are paying attention that they stay interested and realize that, you know, labor stories. Maybe it's not necessarily always like a big strike or like a cool picket line to look at, but there's a lot going on. Like every story is a work story, every story is a labor story. And people seem like they're finally catching on to the fact that, you know, we're all workers and wow, cool things happen when we come together. Yeah, I I hope that too. And I hope that you know the, the word on everybody's lips who's, I don't know. Coming at this from kind of a little bit of a more either radical or desperate point of view depending on how you want to frame it, is like general strike. General strike. And you know, there's there's been some, there's been people online who keep saying like, OK, well we're all just going to go on on Black Friday. Everybody. General strike. And it's like, yeah well you don't you don't set that up on Twitter. Like the the unions that are striking now have strike funds. And and put a lot of thought into it and have like had to take there's things you have to do in order to not irresponsibly like just screw over a bunch of working people. But it is like I I'm a believer in the potential of something like a general strike to to force significant concessions. Did it right? Yeah, I guess I if it, I mean, it's a huge if because it's never really effectively been like there's been pieces of it done like we saw. I think the closest we've gotten in like my lifetime has been when the airline workers threatened to go on strike over the over the budget thing and you just saw the federal government go, oh **** Nope. You know what? We can actually pass this thing. I mean that's the thing. Like that threat that I think that when Sarah Nelson said that even like hinted towards that in 2019 when the government shutdown, that sort of that was a tipping point. I think that's the first time people would. Well, really, it was probably the first time that many people's lifetimes that an actual labour leader with that platform had even mentioned those words. Because general like general strikes historically kind of are more situated in that late 19th century, early 20th century, like labor swinging its **** around. Era and we've been kneecapped so much. Yeah, that doesn't feel as as possible. But I mean the fact that she said and she was part of the airline industry. If we're ever gonna actually, you know, bring capital to its knees, we're going to need the transportation workers. We're going to need the dock workers. We're going to need to like actually analyze who is moving things around the country, who's making sure things work and how can we get them to put down to down their tools and be like, OK, we're going to do something about this, you know, the whole general strike. Idea, I mean, I mean, and arguably like one of the first ones was, you know, black reconstruction. They we do the book, there's a this argument that the first general strike was enslaved, enslaved people leaving the plantations and and withdrawing their labour from that situation. Like that was a form of striking. And I think the general strike is kind of a amorphous idea, especially online as more people learn about labor and learn about it, but it's also like kind of a specific thing. Yeah, you can't just declare like, OK, we're all not going to go to work tomorrow. Like, cool. But there's so much planning that goes into that to make sure that people are able to do that and sustain that. And the people that are traditionally, you know, already left out or the most vulnerable and marginalized like that, their needs are prioritized because the people that can afford to declare general strike and not show up for a week, like, that's all well and good for them, but what about everyone else who can barely afford to go to work at all? Yeah. I've, I've had these arguments with people online, and it's often like, well, you're saying we shouldn't be like, if we just do it, people will figure it out. Like, the infrastructure will be built after the fact. And I'm like, that's, I'm glad that you're in a situation where you feel like you could, you could handle that kind of uncertainty. But like a single mother of four who relies on her, her job to, like, keep them fed and alive isn't going to be like, someone will figure out how to feed my kids. Like, well, like, that's not how people work, you know? Yeah, this is where. Having like a robust commitment to mutual aid and yeah, strike funds and like an actual fabric, like having the fabric of community where you can depend on your neighbors instead of never talking to them like a general strike would have a huge impact. But. On who? Like, who would it hurt more if you didn't plan it properly, if you didn't have a, if you didn't have an actual grassroots network of people ready to help, if you didn't have the understanding that not everyone can just go run off in the streets. And people, like, have mobility issues. Some people have children, some people are older or sicker. Like, there's so much that goes into it. Yeah, it's like your car is ****** ** and you know, you need to take it in to get some stuff fixed or it's eventually going to break down entirely. But that doesn't mean the right solution is just get in there. And and start hitting **** with a hammer like you need. There needs to be like some systemic way you approach it, right? Like there's a proper way to fix an engine, OK, and we can do that. Like, we can start building those networks. We can start. You can organize your workplace and plug into the organized labor framework, which obviously has many flaws, not as radical as I and many other people would like it to be, but they know how to do this ****. Like there. There's a lot of different pieces that can be pulled together, different organizations. And populations that need to work together if we're actually going to accomplish something like this. Yep. And I don't know if people are ready to put in all that work because it's more fun to tweet. Yeah. But I am wondering. Yeah. As I say in Alabama, bless their hearts, you're you're spending a tremendous amount. As you just noted, you're spending a tremendous amount of time on the ground with a lot of these people talking with them. Are you are you seeing? Kind of. How how are you hearing them talk about the other strike efforts, you know, in other industries that are going on right now? Because it has been more in the news than it's been at any point I can recall in the recent past. And I'm wondering how in places like Bessemer, you know, in places like you know that coal miners strike, you've been at like how are they being are to what extent are they talking about other strike efforts? Like is that does that seem to be something that there's a lot of kind of consciousness and discussion about or is it just kind of in the background? I mean it really depends. I like you said, I've spent, I've spent most of my time with the. All matters. Over the past years, I've been writing a book and I spend my one, my one fun thing. But I've been, I mean, I talked to them every single day, and I've been to Alabama lots of times. And I, you know, I'm in a group chat with the wives. Like, I, I, I know I have a decent grasp what's going on. And honestly, the thing about it is that some there, there are some folks who are very engaged and who have made Twitter, and they have their Facebook groups, and they do pay attention to what's happening. And I do think they feel that kind of excitement and that widespread sense of solidarity. But one thing that's important to remember, especially for workers. We're already disadvantaged or they're dealing with low wage laborers, like, it's really hard to go on strike. Like, there's a lot of **** they have to figure out. Like there's kids, there's health issues, there's how am I going to pay my rent? Like, yeah, like funds are great, but they don't cover everything. Like, I think that's one of the realities that maybe gets sort of glossed over because we're also online and we like to you and me feels like, oh, everyone's ******* stoked about these strikes. But for someone in rural Alabama who is just hoping this strike is over soon. So they can go back to work and have some financial stability. They're not necessarily reading your tweets or like signing up for webinars or even paying attention to like cool other strike efforts. I'm sure some some folks are aware and they find have that time to plug in, but most people are just trying to get by. And these are folks who spend like 8 hours a day on the picket lines and there's no cell phone service out where their picket lines are. Like there's only so much that a normal regular worker on the picket line can do to keep up. Yeah. And you came into this, I think, unlike a lot of the people who are, who are actually striking you. You came into this with a lifelong history of the like of interest in kind of Labor justice movements and and whatnot, which I don't think most people who are in unions necessarily spend a ton of time studying the last 100 years of Labor relations. What has surprised you? Like what, what, what what is like been a new realization that you've gotten since you started covering the stuff on the ground in this most recent. So the thing that's really sticks with me and I'm going back to my miners again because that's, you know, my one of the most familiarity, but something that I think has so much potential and I'm not going to entirely sure how to articulate what that potential is. But so something I have seen is when the strike began, most, not all, but the majority of the folks involved in this particular strike were conservative Christian people who were a lot and voted for Trump. But a lot of them were like just in that world, maybe not like you know, wild. Mega people, but that's just what was the norm, where they are in their community and they really think about it that much. But there are some people that I see, especially those who are involved in the mutual aid efforts or have been, who have seen Birmingham DSA come out, who have kind of taken this kind of like wider view of what's happening, how they fit in. I've seen their politics and their perspective shifts, like there are some people who are like straight up socialist now that seven months ago would have probably spit in your face or at least. Giving you a hell of a look, if you would even suggested such a thing. And this is a small sample size and this is a unique situation, but I think it really speaks to the potential there to like reach people who are very ideologically, politically different from what we maybe think of as labour people, as progressive, radical, whatever. People on like our team, right. But the the power of the strike and the power of Labor is that there is so much there. There's kind of an inherent common ground because so many people, most people. A lot of people, most people have the job. A lot of people hate their boss. You can kind of build from that very, very low baseline and find more common ground and kind of. You can you can work towards a better understanding. Like, maybe you're not going to be best friends, but you can potentially shift someone's harmful worldview by exposing them to new ideas. Once they trust that you're not just there to tell them they're wrong and stupid and bad. Really. Look, we we're we're coming at this. Like, I'm going to talk to you like a person. I understand we see the world differently, but like, you know, I'm here to support you. I'm here listening to you. Maybe you could listen to what I have to say, too. Maybe it might change how you see things. And sometimes it works. Yeah, yeah. You know what else works, Kim? Blowing **** up. Well, OK. Alleged. Allegedly. They Minecraft. Yeah, I was gonna say cap adds cap adelisa AMS ads and services, but. I like your answer better, so let's just, let's just let's just roll out with that. Material support, right? Like, yeah, another concrete example there. The Birmingham D SA has been very active in fundraising and showing up and just providing support for the miners and the people on strike. And this is not necessarily a population of people that like the idea of socialism, whatever idea of it is that they hold. Because Fox News and Rush Limbaugh are big cultural standbys there, like whatever they think socialism is, and then have a bunch of socialists show up and just practice solidarity and mutual aid. Practice socialism. And they're like, oh this, these guys are great. Thank you for coming out. It's things like that where it's like, I feel like so much of of radical politics and various, you know, various tendencies. There's just like a branding problem and there's a propaganda problem on the right wing, and the mainstream media doesn't tell anybody what anything means like. Yeah, and it's it's a broader conversation, right? But it's yeah. I felt for a while like one of the things that leftist organizers need to get better at doing is is being willing to like. Drop names when they're not productive. Like, OK, maybe these people, because of the media environment, they've grown up and are never going to want to consider themselves socialists. But if they are willing to organize together and support the efforts of other working people to organize together against the capital holding class like, then OK, like what is it? Why do you need them to like, start quoting Karl Marx? Or is it just cool that you've you've got them doing what they like? Yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me. That like. Yeah. So that you can get a lot of these people on board with, again, pretty radical things if you're, if you're kind of approaching it from within their world, from within. Like, I'm not trying to talk to you about burning down the system. I'm trying to talk to you about how you get what you need. And it just so happens that how you get what you need is taking the system on in a very direct way. I mean, so many ideas that are painted as radical, just like, aren't like that's normal people caring for them like it was like community. Hair and common sense. It's just been politicized to this insane extent. And places like, Ohh sorry, just like even like a lot of the tenants of mutual aid you could even see pop up in a lot of like church communities as well. At least, like, at least, like smaller, you know, closer knit, like communities that are actually based around helping each other. At least I've, I've, I've, I've observed that and a lot of my time traveling across the states. Yeah, absolutely. That's a huge part of, like, the the church is the only mutual aid option. And so many like, smaller and more isolated rural communities or just communities where the church is a big deal. Like, there's always ways to chip away at these institutions and eventually hopefully burn them down, right, without alienating people and making them feel like you're coming in and telling them everything you believe is wrong. And you know, making a mistake, some of these folks, I'm sure they believe things that are absolute garbage and I would never, yeah, everybody does. But yeah, you know, like there's, you know, but there's, there's just they're covering the strike in particular has really just taught me a lot about the Gray areas in between. Not in like wishy washy liberal way, but just in a way of like, how do you relate to normal ******* people who see the world differently but are in ultimately the same struggle as you? Like maybe I could I, I mean going down there. The only time I've been around that many Trump supporters was like at protests where I was yelling at them or like at my family dinners. So I wasn't, you know? I wasn't expecting to make friends, but then I did. And I think hopefully we've we've shifted each other's perspectives a little bit in a way that's beneficial. I don't know, it's been it's been interesting. Yes, talking to people really is a lot different than tweeting at them. Yeah, as a rule, don't tweet would be my recommendation to people. Ever take your yeah, talk to your neighbors and be nice to people when you buy coffee or food from them. And yeah, amaze what happens. And yeah, tell your neighbors, hey, I'm taking my phone down to the river to throw it in. Can I take your phone with me? Can we just all throw our phones in the river? Yeah, it's worth a shot. If you're going to start out being the weird neighbor, it's a strong start. Like, we've already killed the water system, so it's fine. Like just right in the river with the car batteries, you know? Good for the eels. The thing I love about our show is just the hope is is the incredibly hope injected optimism that we start and end every episode with. No, maybe like me, like, yeah, the more people you know in your community, especially people who are like working class, you know, when bad stuff starts happening, the more people you know, the better. Because that's all I'm guessing a lot of the a lot of these people who are like, you know, like, like, like, like old, like old union workers, they have a lot of, like, physical skills. Like they they they they know how to do a whole bunch of stuff. And it might be worth getting to know some of those people, even if, you know, depending where you live, like, yeah, they'll probably say something not great. At least for, you know, the first bit. But once, you know, I've, I've a lot of family in like a rural area of Alberta and like, yeah my my family is like pretty gay. So, you know, once you're in close to those people, yeah they're they're going to say something that's maybe not great. But once they get to like know you and really be like, oh, like you're another person. They like people, actually, you know, people want to be around other people and they'll even change the way they talk to be like, Oh yeah, maybe this isn't the best way to hang out around people because it's going to drive people away. So yeah. I'll, I'll change the way I say some things because like, turns out people actually like a lot of a lot of folks just kind of want to make their lives a bit better. And that's really their main focus. Yeah. So it's hard to know to do that. And it's it's it's just this matter of like. So much of what, so much of what kind of the the way that discourse happens online has poisoned aspects of activism is in like making it difficult for people to. Relate in that way without feeling like, well, OK, but if I can't get them on board with all of these other things, like, I can't talk with them or whatever, like, because they're because they don't agree with you like this and this, like, we can't organize, you know, like, no. The purity of ideology. Yeah. Like, I feel like most people who aren't terminally online don't even necessarily have, like, a specific ideology. Absolutely not. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, there's just stuff that they have learned or they've decided that is true about the world. They just kind of go with it and they're like, interrogate it. All the time. And you can, like, those are people you can talk to and maybe ****. Like, I've done it with my dad. Like, I've seen it happen with some of these conservative coal miner folks. Like, even something as small as being able to humanize, like, like, OK, if you're talking about something like, well, the thing you said, like that really upset Joey and you like Joey. So, like, maybe think about that and they'll probably be chiller because like, Oh well, that's yeah, that's Joey. I can't. I don't wanna be * **** to him. If we can just find a way to enact that on a very broad scale, life would be a lot better. A lot of people, yeah. It's this. It's this dichotomy between. A lot of people want to own the folks they see as like, being against them or being on the other side. But also people don't want to be * **** to people that like they like. You don't want to feel like you're * ****. So if you if you lean more into the weird in opposition, then you're going to trigger the well, I want to, I want to make the person who disagrees with me angry side of the brain. But if you can lean into the like, hey like, we can get along like and I. And and and maybe you don't want to feel like an ******* if we get along, then I don't know. That's a productive place to to continue conversations from and a good way to shift people, I think. And then when you're when you're area floods because of severe rain and storms, then you have people that can help. Yeah. It's the importance of interacting with people in person, like offline, which is like obviously more difficult to do because we're still trapped in. Yeah. There's not like they're caveat, caveat, caveat, but like it's so much easier to talk to someone and kind of. And, like, see their worldview shift or even just humanize yourself to someone who is inclined to not thinking of you as someone worth talking to. Like, yeah, as long as it's not, you're not putting yourself in danger. Like, there's. Yeah, obviously it's easy for me to say stuff like this. I'm a blonde lady, you know? But yeah, still, we're not talking about, like, oh, you have to go be friendly to people who, like, want to murder you because you're trans. No, no, it's it's about no, we're not saying that, but most of these people don't think that maybe they have some regressive attitude. No. Or they'll use the word gay. To mean something, you know, not cool. And you be like, hey, I have to be like, hey, you know, I'm, you know, I'm actually engaged and maybe don't open that. Maybe you do, depending on situation to be like, hey, maybe there's other words that we can use for this because yeah, whatever. Yeah. And and you can shift people into a closer alliance just by becoming a human in their eyes and also letting them become a human in your eyes. Which is necessary. The other option is not a pleasant one, so I would prefer the option where more people grow to see each other as human and worth supporting. Their tactic to me. Yeah, I know. There's this argument where like, no one is like, I shouldn't have to educate you. I shouldn't have to put the time into to shift you. And like, that is valid. That's fair. Like, you shouldn't have to, but ideally, no. No. But yeah. But if you want to that change to happen, it's probably not gonna happen unless you put some effort in, because they're probably not gonna actually think they're fine. Yeah. And. I don't know. There's a bunch of **** that you shouldn't have to do that we're also all going to have to do. Like, I I shouldn't. I shouldn't have to say, hey, guys, maybe we don't kill the ocean. Maybe killing the ocean is a bad idea. Like, I shouldn't have to. No one should have to say that. But we do, could we not? Could we do? Otherwise we just stop. Can we just not please? The fact that you shouldn't have to do something also doesn't mean that, like, the thing doesn't need to be done. And obviously, I don't think that the primary onus on speaking. To, let's say the kind of increasingly radicalized white, lower middle and middle class, I don't think that falls primarily on people of color on the LGBT community. It falls on people like you and me, Kim, you know, literally, yeah. Yeah. But it still has to be done. Like, it's a thing that needs to be done. And I'm not saying, hey, you out there who, you know, left where you grew up in rural Alabama because someone was going to ******* murder you and you had to get to a place where you could not deal with that. I'm not saying you need to go rolling back to to Alabama, but it's good that people are talking and and working with and trying to build connections with folks out there and change the nature of kind of aspects of the culture and make things better because that needs to be done. We can't just be like, well, **** some of those people. Yeah and that is definitely easier if you are like one of the Bros if if you are, you know, a bit of a bigger cyst adjacent dude that is, that is of course going to make things easier. Yeah. I mean you think about like that's kind of the tax the right word. But the fact that you do feel comfortable and you're, you're safe and you're not under a threat in those spaces because of who you are like as like a white sister even white sis lady like you like the price you pay for that is making it easier for everyone. Has to feel that too, like that's what, like that's your job, other people's jobs to survive and be sure you can be the one that pushes the boundaries on these things. So when someone says something not great, you can kind of call them out and like a brownish way and they can respond to that a lot better than, you know, than a lot of other people who they don't know, you know, screaming at them in a no context scenario. I'm a pretty lady. I don't want to make me upset by being rude. That's exactly. Yeah, like you shouldn't. You should see this thing as rude and not OK. Like the amount of men who have apologized to me down there for swearing, it's so funny. Yeah, man, my dude. I live in Philadelphia, but that's cute. But if I could just harness any of that, like, chivalrous, whatever, chivalrous, patriarchal viewpoint, like, hey, apply this to being cool to my trans friends or, like, not being rude to anyone else, like, sure, I'm down. Yeah, we don't take kindly to misgendering around these parts. Yeah. For a lot of people at least, you know, when I worked at like smaller workplaces, you know, where it's like a small business where I know the owner, even if me and some other employees want to unionize, the prospect is always kind of more weird or challenging because you know, it's a smaller business. Maybe it's like connected to like a larger, you know, larger overall industry. You know, like when I was like when I when I was like a parkour instructor, right. I I had discussions with other with other like employees about doing, you know like a parkour instructors union type thing. But it's it's it's hard when there's there's like not many of you or like you know, the owner. What would you say is like. Good, good ways to at least get that, get that conversation going among other employees and then, you know, like similar similar examples from other stuff for people who deal with like smaller workplaces that aren't, you know, like a coworker, they're not working like Amazon or anything, you know, it's it's more like small local stuff, right? So like the the most important basic building block of of all this is 1 on one conversation that's organizing, right? Even if you just work with like three or four other people. And maybe unionizing in a formal structure doesn't necessarily make sense. Seems like it might be too much of a headache. You're still, you know, like a group of workers coming together. Still a union doesn't matter with the NLRB has to say about it. And you you have shared interests and shared challenges, and there's things that work you probably want to change. So even coming together and discussing that with your coworkers, like there's no law that says you have to be in the Union if you want to get some **** done. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping. Went to a two year contract? You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and. Keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service. Starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twist at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea. About some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. Always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with speaker and when I find a new friend. That has an incredible show. I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. His unspeakable crimes and the incompetence or unwillingness of the police to stop him brought the entire country of Belgium to the brink of revolution. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is la Monstra. A story of abomination and conspiracy that led to the demise of the entire institution of Belgian federal police and rattled the foundations of its government. The story about the man who simply become known as La Monster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can March on your boss, IWW style, and make them and demand a meeting. You can make a petition. You can do public pressure campaigns. Like all of the things we're not all of them, but a lot of the tools that we see organized labor engaging in and union is engaging in, those are those are available to everyone else, too. It's easier if you're within that framework because you have that firepower behind you. You have maybe some legal protections, but just as workers, you know, I guess that's more like the IWW solidarity you news and model like, we're like. We don't like we don't need no stinking badges like where union, because we say we're a Union we're going to take control of things in our own way. Like you see this in I'm trying to, I think what's it called diversity threads. There's a there's a thrift shop and I think Richmond, VA, where workers just like they weren't being treated properly. I think it was like a like a queer community space that wasn't living up to its values due to actions by management. And so they just put a a letter on the door and said we're not coming into work until you fix this here are clear. Commands. Here's what we need. Here you go figure it out. Like, I don't think they're in a formal union, but they're acting collectively and that's something that is totally available that to everyone as long as you're in a workplace. If you're independent contractor like me and probably some of you, that sucks and it's harder, but you can always find your people and you can always. There's always options, right? Like you don't have to just join a Union, you don't have to be a teamster to get **** done. Yeah. I think, you know, when you were saying that I was going through my past experiences, a place like that, I'm like, yeah, we we kind of did do some of that stuff to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it works out well, sometimes it doesn't work out so well. But yeah, I mean there was definitely a while where we did that did definitely make some, make some decent changes kind of based on on that model. Yeah. It's kind of a shift of perception where like you were just doing this because this is because you're a worker and like we we need to do this. But if you just take a step back and think of it as like, this is a labor action. We're a union of workers. Like, even just that little shift where it's like it's, you know, it's always US against them. But look, it's us as a little girl, as a group, as a collective against this manager, against this exploitative practice. I think that adds a little bit of power and a little bit of energy because you realize, you know, I'm still, I think maybe it makes you feel a little less alone. And also, yeah, absolutely. And like, you know, concerted activity is illegally protected, right, too. So, like, there are some bits and pieces of Labor law that are useful in these situations too, if you have a nerdy friend who would like to read about them for you. All right. Well, I think that's gonna do it for us here. And it could happen here until next time, remember? You ******* organize. And where can people find Kim Kelly online if we want to send angry tweets? Oh well, just try me, buddy. Yeah. At Grim Kim, because my college radio DJ name will never die. And you can, if you are thus inclined, you can pre-order my book fight like hell, the untold history of American labor on the Internet. Hopefully not Amazon. Hopefully not. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you do like, thank you. But there's other places that are better. If you do, you want people to send you a bunch of random knives, Kim? Knives, I mean. I wouldn't. We've had a lot of luck with that in the past. I like knives. I like skin care. I like loose leaf tea. I contain multitudes. Really. Send Kim a loose leaf tea. Skin care knife. One of those. One of those exfoliating knives with a with a tea infuser. In the in the hilt. Somebody make that great. Somebody that sounds like that sounds like the next behind the ********. Merch, the tea knife? Yeah, we'll we'll put that out after we get finished where we've got a very exciting Black Friday product this year, which is a male to male. Like something adapter people say you shouldn't do it. They say it causes electrocution and fires and death. And I think those people are cucks by our male to male adapter show the the woke establishment that you won't be, you won't be chained. From cavalry audio comes the new True crime podcast, The Shadow Girls. Wanted to know what it felt like to kill somebody, and he started laughing. Prosecutors described him as a serial killer servant, picking up his girls, getting him in a position of vulnerability. When he got ahold of their neck. That was it. I'm Carolyn Ossorio, a journalist and lifelong resident of the Pacific Northwest. I grew up near the banks of the Green River and in the shadow of the killer that bears its name. How many times did you bring the camera to? One time. Fantasizing about having sex with his mother? Then he fantasized about killing her. But this podcast isn't only about tracking down the killer. It's about the victims. We stayed in the woods. He always liked to go into the woods. He was just, to all of us, kind of strange. You know how he feels about prostitutes. Listen to the shadow girls on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times Bestseller Fair play and find your Unicorn space activists on the gender division of Labor attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor Edina Rucar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, time out, a production of iheart podcasts, and Hello Sunshine, we're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the. Value it deserves, so take this time out with us. Listen to time out a Fair Play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. The art world. It is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake. Umm. Listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. This is it could happen here. The show about how things are falling apart and how maybe they could be made a bit better. Right now, today we're doing an episode that is based on a, I don't know, essay Garrison wrote and I edited that we think you'll find interesting. So. Here it goes. Green capitalism promises to deliver us all the same luxuries and commodities that we enjoy today, but without doing net harm to the biosphere. It's the message liberal elites try to hold on when they make their case for being better stewards of the environment than Republicans. This is not untrue, but it's also not true enough to stop your house from flooding or your town from being incinerated in a hell storm when it comes to the methods green capitalism posits, by which we might reverse course without changing the direction of the ship. One term you'll hear often is energy efficiency. I want to read a statement I found on Whitehouse, Gov a fact sheet on the new US government commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 50 to 52% by 2030. I should note that's 50% of the 2005 levels, which were like 15% higher or something like that. Anyway, here's the quote. The United States can create good paying jobs and cut emissions and energy costs for families by supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification and buildings through support for job creating retrofit programs and sustainable affordable housing, wider use of heat pumps and induction stoves, adoption of modern energy codes for new buildings. the United States will also invest in new technologies to reduce emissions associated with construction, including for high performance electrified buildings. Now, energy efficiency is in fact a fine goal, and trying to reduce emissions is broadly good. But the sad and kind of weird fact is that increasing efficiency can sometimes mean increasing pollution through what's known as the efficiency paradox, which is of course the title of the episode. Because what you want, you want us to think of a second title of a separate title from that. Come on. So First off, what does energy efficiency mean? In general terms, energy efficiency refers to the amount of output. That can be produced with a given input of energy, output being stuff that energy is used to do, like light your house or wash your clothing or power your wall mounted 20 Volt vibrator that requires as much electricity as an arc welder in order to use. Energy savings are the reduction of energy use without the loss of output produced. Improved energy efficiency is expected to bring a number of benefits. First of all, reducing energy usage should result in lower energy bills. Ideally, reduced energy demand also means that. Energy imports can be decreased. The International Energy Agency has estimated that strict efficiency policies could allow the world to achieve more than 40% of the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to reach its climate goals, even without new technology. So there is considerable wiggle room within the existing structures of global society to reduce emissions a lot without fancy space technology, but despite substantial energy efficiency gains in the past few decades and decreases in output from places like the United States. We as a species are using more energy than we have pretty much forever, and emissions wildly surpass are or the Earth's ability to handle them. Quoting from the Global Carbon Project quote global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. Despite positive progress in 20 countries whose economies have grown over the last decade and their emissions have declined, growth in energy use from fossil fuel sources is still outpacing the rise of low carbon sources and activities a robust global economy, insufficient emission reductions in developed countries. And a need for increased energy use in developing countries, where per capita emissions remain far below those of wealthier nations, will continue to put upward pressure on CO2 emissions. They use the term developing and developed. We don't prefer those, but obviously population growth contributes to all that. The the growth and the use of energy and the emissions of carbon, you know, more people, more cars in the road, whatever, but it's not really the primary factor that's adding on to the increase in energy use for the human race. We'll talk about that. Here though, for now, it's important to note that the full potential energy savings, like in these kind of hypotheticals about how much could be saved by improving efficiency, are usually estimated by assuming that demand for energy services will remain unchanged after energy efficiency gains. So when they say that we can get 40% of the greenhouse emissions, gases, gas reductions we need by increasing efficiency, they're doing that, assuming that nothing will change about our overall energy use when we make things more efficient. But time and time again. They see that once products are made more energy efficient, people often end up consuming, producing, or even using more of the thing, which makes the potential savings less meaningful. And a net result doesn't mean that it's not a net good, but it's not as much as is often calculated in these climate proposals. You can see this demonstrated on the job if you're in, say, food services. If you happen to figure out how to do a task faster, your boss probably isn't going to let you use that extra time to just chill out and do stuff on your phone. What is the phrase? If you can lean, you can clean. So if you do something faster now, you're just expected to do it faster all the time and output more total work for your boss. This is the paradox of efficiency, and it applies to energy as well. On a societal level, increased energy efficiency is a double edged sword, having the potential to help cut emissions by a significant factor and having the potential to increase our total energy use depending on what is made more efficient and how people react to it. The idea that energy efficiency improvements can actually lead to more overall energy use. It goes all the way back to the start of the industrial revolution. In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons published a book called the Coal Question, in which he argued that innovation and efficiency, particularly in the case of the coal powered steam engine, would actually increase the overall consumption of coal rather than reducing it as it had been intended to do. His prediction that efficiency improvements on steam engines would lead to massive economic expansion accelerating coal consumption was very much correct. This idea, then dubbed the Jeevans paradox. Is still very much worth considering when we discuss efficiency gains and policies that are meant to reduce energy consumption and thereby fight climate change. In modern terms, we describe the process by which potential energy savings can be cut by greater use of the energy efficient product as the rebound effect. There are two different kinds of rebound effects observed, the most obvious of which is dubbed the direct rebound effect. Direct rebounds are observed when improvements in energy efficiency for a particular energy service. Reduces the effective price of that service and thus provides incentives to increase its demand. This leads to the overall increased efficiency not equaling to a reduction in energy use. As good as you might think, direct rebounds are observed when improvements in energy efficiency for a particular energy service reduces the effective price of that enough that it provides incentives to increase its demand. You may upgrade to a more energy efficient appliance, but because of the lower energy costs, you'll use the appliance more often and thus use more total energy, or in some cases. Energy efficiency gains are cut by the fact that more efficient products allow people to use more of that product. For example, someone may get a more efficient fridge that's also much larger, and so even though it cools more efficiently, it's also consuming overall more energy. Transportation has a lot of direct rebounds. Despite massive fuel efficiency gains in recent years, transportation is still responsible for 23% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transportations contribution to global warming is quickly increasing with travel. Producing greater and greater percentages of the planet's carbon footprint, private automobile tailpipes will drive this phenomenon for the foreseeable future, as the number of active vehicles on the road is projected to grow from 700 million in the year 2000 to 2 billion by 2040. So even though cars are a lot more efficient, vastly more cars are being used. And of course, that's not entirely it. It doesn't mean that, like more efficient cars cause people to buy more cars, but it does make it more affordable for more people to own cars and to drive them further, which drives up. You know, fuel use and drives up emissions and you see how the whole problem works. And it's not just cars. When planes became more fuel efficient, ticket prices decreased and more people started to travel by plane. As cost per mile dropped, more miles were flown. The fact that airplanes got more fuel efficient didn't reduce general pollution by the air travel industry. Quite to the contrary, in fact, the decreased emissions led to an increase in air travel, which shot a hell of a lot more poison out into the sky and also gave us eat, pray, love. So the other kinds of rebounds. Are indirect rebound effects. This refers to when energy efficiency leads to monetary savings for a producer or consumer, who then can spend those extra savings on other carbon emitting goods and services that otherwise they couldn't afford. For example, you buy a more fuel efficient car, you save money on fuel, and you went up with extra funds in your bank account that you can use on a vacation, and maybe you take a flight on that vacation. So in the end you emit more CO2 despite the fact that you're getting less CO2 through your car. You've got 500 bucks extra in the bank, and you fly to Mexico on it. Right. That's an indirect rebound effect. So even if a product is replaced by a more efficient one with similar specs, lower energy bills can mean that more consumers will have more money to spend on goods and services. This is generally seen as desirable from a social and economic standpoint and probably from an individual standpoint. Having more money is always useful, but it involves additional energy consumption. It means that you're consuming more, you're emitting more. And so the savings and whatnot haven't actually led to a savings in terms of. You know from an environmental perspective. An analysis of EU data shows that out of 29 EU countries, 11 experienced rebound effects of over 50%, which means more than half of the gains in energy efficiency were consumed by increases in energy use. Six of those countries, including Denmark and Finland, reached over 100% rebound effects. This is called a backfire, and it means that in those six countries, extra energy spending overtook all of the efficiency gains achieved. Air conditioning and heating are large contributors to both direct. And indirect rebounds. A rebound effect as large as 60% has been shown in increased improvements in efficiency in the residential heating sector, which is something that the White House specifically crowed about in their paper in China. Long term rebound effects ranging from 46% to 56% for residential electricity consumption in Beijing have been estimated. All of this data casts doubt on the wisdom of relying on energy efficiency policies to reduce energy demand. I'm going to quote here from a report by the Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure. In recent decades, large increases in demand for energy services have globally driven energy consumption. As a counterbalance, energy efficiency has become a key energy policy mechanism to tackle higher energy consumption and emissions, and countries and regions have adopted different targets and policies to achieve energy and environmental objectives. The main goals of these policies are to minimize the dependence on fossil fuels and mitigate local air pollution and GHG emissions. This has been particularly relevant for the energy intensive sectors, the development and deployment of more efficient technologies. Are, along with more technology management, the main channel to achieve these environmental and energy objectives. However, energy efficiency improvements can lead to changes in the demand for energy services, changes that offset some of the expected energy savings. Consequently, forecasts of energy consumption reductions may be overstated. As evidenced by the empirical literature, rebound effects can be a non negligible issue. Therefore, ignoring them can imply an overestimation of the benefits coming from energy efficiency improvements. This can in turn lead to decisions such as the overallocation of public funds. Ineffective environmental and energy policies. Policymakers need to take rebound effects into account for air quality, energy security, and climate change policy reasons. A rebound effect different from zero implies that the expected proportional reductions in emissions from fuel efficiency improvements might not be achieved. Therefore, the policy goals to reach specific levels of emissions through fuel efficiency enhancements may need to be adjusted accordingly. And again, we have nothing against the idea of making more efficient devices. The point is that energy efficiency can't be pursued. In a vacuum, it has to coincide with changes to a less extractive, cancerous mindset regarding the Earth's resources and carrying capacity. Just telling someone you can drive more for less money now, or you can afford to keep your TV on all the time, doesn't really help anything. My fear is that governments and corporations, the neoliberal Leviathan as we've come to call it on this show, will focus almost overwhelmingly on energy efficiency to maintain economic growth and obscure the overall lack of action on stopping carbon emissions. Think Joe Biden. Doing Donuts and an electric Jeep through such a lens as the Biden administration. Energy efficiency is a foil to climate change is a charade being used to keep relentless economic growth viewed as a net good. It plays into the myth that we'll be able to mitigate, adapt, and survive the effects of climate change with little to no change to our current lifestyles. What we need to do is decouple human well-being from energy consumption and consumption in general to effectively combat climate change. This needs to happen at such a scale that advocating for individual. Changes in lifestyle will never be enough, but that is still a significant part of the puzzle. The trick comes in getting people to accept the fact that their life will need to change without them telling them, and buying this product instead of that product is how you do it. That said, populations of people can and do change their behaviors in pretty profound ways. In 1950, abortion was not at all an issue for the religious right. Resistance to abortion might make some Protestants distrust you, because that was seen as a Catholic concern. Now, abortion is the defining political issue of the ascendant right they're promised to destroy. It is the rock upon which their Titanic power is based in a less calamitous sense, since 2007, we've gone from a time in which smartphones were expensive trash for rich people to buy, to today, when they're expensive trash that every human being who can afford to has to carry at all times because they're so utterly integrated. To our daily life. So yes, people can change. A bigger challenge, though, will be to change the mindset of industry, which is not entirely or even often driven by consumer demand. As we've seen with the release of papers proving Chevron and other oil and gas companies knew about and deliberately hid research on climate change for decades, big capital will put its thumb on the scale every step of the way. In other words, if you come at the behemoth that is the integrated industrial economy, you'd best come correct. How do we do that? Yeah, if anybody really knew, they would have, you know, done it by now. The human infrastructure of extractive capitalism is deep and vast and tightly woven into the structure of every government with any real power. So with the full understanding and admission that we aren't claiming to have solutions to that problem, let's talk about something that will at least be part of any real solution to the problem, degrowth. This is a term we'll explain in more detail later, but we mean it simply as a holistic approach to encouraging reduction in energy consumption. And global environmental justice, a paper on the Jevons paradox and the link between innovation, efficiency, and sustainability for the frontiers and energy research concluded quote the Jevons paradox and tales that sustainability problems cannot be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be solved through institutional and behavioral changes. While there are still differences of opinion about the scale of rebound effects and ongoing arguments about the macro and micro and longer and shorter term consequences of efficiency, our interest in this topic. The day is driven by the goal of improving how we use energy rather than totally overhauling or abandoning efficiency. One example would be the current fight in Europe over smartphone chargers. Most of the rest of the smartphone industry worldwide has jumped on to USB C as the right kind of port for charging, etcetera. With your device before this point, those of you have been using smartphones for a decade or more. Remember, there were tons of different charges and thus a ton of different ways. Every phone had to come with a new charger. A lot of them wound up in the trash. That has been reduced. By everyone jumping on the USBC, but Apple continues to use their own special charger and now the EU is promising to make a law to mandate USBC for charging new phones in an attempt to reduce waste. This isn't, again, a bad thing, but if someone's really concerned with waste among the smartphone industry, planned obsolescence is the thing to go after now, targeting planned obsolescence, stopping it includes a number of things. And for one thing, you have to fight for the right to repair devices, which is something that a number of corporations, not just in the smartphone industry, have lobbied to in some cases, make illegal. More than that, it's stopping somehow these companies from making the conscious decision to brick old technology, to increase profits and that aspect of it. Is the bigger enemy than even the right to repair. As electronic devices become common in more sectors of daily life via the Internet of Things, the overall share of global energy use that goes to making new versions of old products that could still be working but are designed to break is is really quite depressing. For one example of how large it must be, I haven't found any solid information. On the total side, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless. 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Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change to be able to do it within podcasting. It's just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with speaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always felt like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable. Spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. In the 1980s and 90s, a psychopath terrorized the country of Belgium. A serial killer and kidnapper was abducting children in the bright light of day. His unspeakable crimes and the incompetence or unwillingness of the police to stop him brought the entire country of Belgium to the brink of revolution. From Tenderfoot TV in iHeartRadio this is la Monstra. The story of abomination and conspiracy that led to the demise of the entire institution of Belgian federal police and rattled the foundations of its government. The story about the man who simply become known as La Monster. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Eyes of of this industry, things that you have to repeatedly rebuy because they're meant to break. But the mobile phone industry in 2019 alone was 4.6% of global GDP. So that's close to 5% of global GDP just from making phones that are designed to break. So you have to buy a new phone. This is an example of an area in which people's perspectives have to be changed. And I I think actually that digital fatigue, the fact that we're all so ******* exhausted with these devices these days, may provide somewhat of an inroad for convincing people that they need to buy. New gadgets less often. But because these gadgets are so crucial to daily life, the industry actually also has to be forced to change. And again, right repair is one part of this, but that doesn't stop Apple from just deciding to throttle their old devices whenever they need to add a new layer to the money pile. Our overall point with all this is that solutions to climate change have to be cultural and not just based in some version of will invent a better version, and that will solve the problem. Hybrid gas burning cars and standardized charging cords are nibbling around the edges of the problem. Relying on technological advances pacifies us in the present, and it reinforces the need for certain types of human material codependence and that kind of codependence leads to increased dependency and more extraction. By no means am I trying to say that innovation is bad. I love gadgets as much as the next person's. Innovation also has the capacity to heavily decrease resource extraction. It just has to be tailored with something more than just we'll make this device more efficient so we can use it more or sell more of them. The capitalist mode of mass. Resource extraction and grind for efficiency are intertwined, and if we are to limit the most catastrophic effects of climate change, we as a culture need to rethink how we view efficiency and energy use. For the past few 100 years, economic growth has been the road that has led to our current ecological dilemma. The fantasy of switching over to nuclear and renewable energy with a perfectly efficient electric grid to just sidestep climate collapse is it's a fantasy. We missed our chance to do that, even if we stop all carbon emissions right now. All of them. The carbon already in the atmosphere would push us past 2 degrees Celsius of warming in about 50 years. So what, besides carbon capture, can we do about this? We, as in both you, the regular listener, and the goals with power and real influence? Well, the 2018 International Panel on Climate Change Special report indicated that in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies, the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets was for high income nations to actively slow down the pace of material. Production and consumption D growth is the planned reduction of energy use, corporate profits, overproduction and excess consumption designed to bring the economy back into balance with the living world in a way that reduces inequality while focusing on human and ecological well-being. This isn't just some sort of utopian Marxist thinking, and in fact a lot of Marxists have critiques of degrowth, and growth could be applied to a number of different economic and governmental systems. There are even some weirdo capitalist advocates of degrowth discussion about solving. Climate change can get into uncomfortable eugenics territory if you aren't careful. So why should emphasize here that degrowth is primarily about already wealthy countries limiting their economic growth when aggregated in terms of income? The richest half of the world high in upper middle income countries amid 86% of global CO2 emissions. The bottom half lower and middle income countries amid only 14%, with very few exceptions. The richer the nation is, the more it emits. It's all part of the resource. Distraction. Infinite growth lie we tell ourselves to keep growing wealth is so much more of a factor in emissions than population. North America is home to only 5% of the world population, but amidst nearly 18% of CO2. Asia is home to 60% of the world's population but emits just 49% of CO2. Africa has 16% of the population, but amidst just 4% of its CO2. This is reflected in per capita emissions. The average North American emits 17 times more than the. Average African this inequality in global emissions lies at the heart of why international agreement on climate change has and continues to be so contentious. The richest countries in the world are home to half the world population and emit 86% of CO2. We want global incomes and living standards, especially for those of the poorest half of the world, to rise. The only way to do that while limiting climate change is to shrink the emissions of high income countries. Even several billion additional people in low income nations would leave global emissions almost unchanged. 3 or 4 billion poor individuals would only account for a few percent of global CO2 at the other end of the distribution. However, adding only 1 billion high income individuals to the wealthiest parts of the world would increase global emissions by almost a third. A programmer in the United States has a higher CO2 footprint than 50 farmers in Uganda. A decent chunk of this is just due to meat consumption. Meat consumption per capita in the richest 15. Countries is 750% higher than in the poorest 24 countries. Lowering the population of, say, Uruguay won't do much for emissions. This is not the case when you talk about wealthy nations. In fact, if you live in, say, the United States, possibly the biggest thing you as an individual could do to reduce emissions is to have fewer or no children. It's estimated that dedicated recycling curbs about .3 metric tons of CO2 emissions per year, while having one fewer child is equivalent to preventing over 58 tons of CO2 emissions a year. Better sex Ed and free access to contraceptives could also go a shockingly long way to curbing individual emission in wealthy countries, these numbers are averaged across a whole nation. And just like the case in less wealthy countries, the impact on emissions by having one fewer kid will be far lesser if you're middle class or poor than it would be if you're upper middle class or rich. But of course, none of that is going to be enough if industrial production keeps chugging along and advising people not to have children, one of the singular driving motivations for human beings across history isn't exactly a vote. Letter of a proposition degrowth is critical, but the question of how to get there is thorny as hell, there are a few easy answers. Abolishing planned obsolescence could be pretty easily pitched to the average person. Cutting down on the number of people who have to commute could have a significant impact on toxic car culture, and again, you can sell that to people. The obvious solutions are good places to start, but they should be seen as opening incisions meant to clear the way to make deeper, more expansive cuts, and eventually hew away at the cancer we've planted in the heart of our civilization. After 30 years, it's time to return to the halls of W Beverly High and hang out at the Peach Pit on the podcast 9021 OMG. Join Jennie Garth and Tori Spelling for a rewatch of the hit series Beverly Hills 90210. From the very beginning we get to tell the fans all of the behind the scenes stories to actually happen so they know what happened on camera, obviously, but we can tell them. All the good stuff that happened off camera get all the juicy details of every episode that you've been wondering about for decades as 90210 Super fan and radio host Cincinnati sits in with Jenny and Tori to reminisce, reflect, and relive each moment. From Brandon and Kelly's first kiss to shouting Donna Martin graduates, you have an amazing memory. You remember everything about the entire 10 years that we filmed that show, and you remember absolutely nothing of the 10 years that we filmed that show. Listen to 9021 OMG on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What's up guys? I'm Rashad Bilal and I am Troy Millings and we owe the host of the earn your Leisure podcast where we break down business models and examine the latest trends in finance. We hold court and have exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in business, sport and entertainment, from DJ Khaled to Mark Cuban, Rick Ross and Shaquille O'Neal. I mean, our alumni list is expansive. Listen in as our guests reveal their business models, hardships and triumphs in their respective fields. The knowledge is in depth and the questions are always delivered. From your standpoint, we want to know what you want to know. We talked to the legends of business. What's an entertainment about how they got their start and most importantly how they make their money earning. Alicia is a college business class mixed with pop culture. Want to learn about the real estate game? Unclear is how the stock market works. We got you interested in starting a trucking company or a vending machine business? Not really sure about how taxes or credit work? We got it all covered. The earning Leisure podcast is available now. Listen to earn your leisure on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. It's it's happened. Could hear Robert Evans, the podcast that is now begun. This is a show about how things are falling apart and occasionally how to how to maybe deal with that. Maybe you try to steer things in a better direction. We talk about a bunch of stuff today. We're going to be talking about more supply line. Some stuff. And and in order to kind of introduce this episode, we wanted to bring in Alexis who posted a thread on Twitter about some of their experiences in the industry in which they work that that we all found very interesting. And so we just wanted to bring Alexis on and and and 1st off have you kind of go over what what you went over in that thread and then kind of 0 went and talk about that. So Alexis, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Yeah, uh, I'm going to let you take it from here and then we'll we'll drill in once you once you get through your your piece. Alright. So I'm just going to go ahead and read the thread that I posted and then yeah, we'll go from there. So labor shortage discourse time. I work for a food manufacturing company, specifically bottling and canning various beverages and we are desperately understaffed. The wages are competitive, but they can't keep anyone on after they hire them. Why? Because we're short on people. As soon as someone is trained, they start throwing massive amounts of mandatory. Overtime on them to try and cover the missing pieces while they look for more people to hire in. Folks get burned out and quit. And this is where my hate of just in time manufacturing comes in. Now obviously in food manufacturing you can't just stock a warehouse with stuff and let it sit for a year, but you can keep a couple of weeks of stock rotating at all times if you devote the warehouse space, employees, etcetera to doing so. This would give you some flex time to train your new people without having to run everyone into the dirt. So even with a place that is offering decent money and benefits because this is a union shop, we can't keep people because we're making a conscious decision to only ever have one to two days of stock on hand to increase profits. Meanwhile, thanks to lean manufacturing, we don't keep a ton of spare parts for our equipment on hand thanks to the supply chain just disruption. We've got packaging equipment that's been waiting on replacement parts for six months, which further ***** our productivity due to downtime, which makes the company schedule even more overtime to try and make up for the lost cases from. Equipment downtime, which burns out more employees, which puts us in an even deeper labor hole. I've been warning about Justin time being a time bomb in the making for over a decade now. When it works perfectly, you're fine. A single interruption causes cascade effects, and since everyone has been doing the just in time thing, there's zero slack anywhere in the system. Grocery stores don't have any extra soda in the back. They get behind demand, builds up. Distribution doesn't have any pallets in the warehouse. Ha what warehouse? So they can't answer the surge in demand from grocery stores. Manufacturing doesn't have spare parts for aging equipment, so we can't boost production. Spare parts makers don't have stock build up. So on and on it goes. The actual proximate cause of this is deregulation of capitalism that is incentivized quarterly profits and made long term thinking anathema to CEO's. But share conservatives blame California for not letting old trucks offload at the ports. That's it. And that's that's the essence of my thread. I then plugged my podcast at the end, right? Yeah. So I wanted to. I'm curious as to kind of like. Uh. To what it? I'm trying to understand like what the solution is like. We've talked a bit about, OK, just in time. Manufacturing is is problematic for a lot of reasons. Keeping more like on the shelves is going to allow you to avoid these crunches and is going to like make supply line issues like the ones we've been experiencing since the start of the COVID pandemic less severe and less common. But how do you actually, how do you actually make that happen? Because I guess the traditional free market thing is that like, well, because this has been such a problem for companies, you know, they'll naturally. Change the system in order to avoid this in the future. I don't feel like that's likely to happen. And I I'm wondering like what do we uh what what what what do you think is the the way forward here? Well cause some of the problem is, is right now like most most companies you will pay taxes on stuff that you have stored in a warehouse, things like that. So no company is going to voluntarily lower their profit margins if the other companies don't do it themselves as well. So really there's going to have to be some sort of forcing of companies to have that on hand. And I don't see just being able to write a law that says, Oh well, you're required to have this much back stock on hand as as being a functional way to work and really. As I'm sure you know, Robert, I know you're well aware the capitalism itself is kind of the problem, but as far as I I guess a solution to this sort of thing, you would have to disincentivize the quarterly profits above all in order to force companies back into long term thinking. Now from a purely like mechanical standpoint. I guess if you. If you did something to incentivize companies having back stock or flex stock on sale on hand, that might help. But. I mean I'm just, I'm just a cog in the machine getting ground up. So as far as like big solutions that's, I mean I've been looking at it ever since I worked in a freaking casket factory and we started doing just in time there and just every time that I've been in a place of manufacturing place and seeing it happen, I'm just like oh, this is going to go wrong because you can't you can do just in time if all of your suppliers are local. But having it stretched across the global supply chain, it just it it's inevitably going to. Collapse in on itself. I'm, I'm sorry that I'm not more helpful. No, no, but I mean this is, this is like the problem because there's a lot of reasons why the supply chain is global. Some of them are like labor related reasons, some of them are cost cutting, some of them are just like peer pragmatism. But it's trying to like, I I I don't I feel like you. It's it's one thing to say like, well, part of the problem is that like all of these different pieces come from different countries and there's a number of shady reasons for aspects of that, but it makes for greater problems when there's a pipeline. Storage and then like, OK, well what are we, what are we gonna are are you suggesting that we make everything domestically? Because I I don't feel like that's a realistic solution. Yeah. No. Yeah. And it's like it's just it's I'm trying to get a handle on. There's a couple of angles on this. There's there's what we think is going to happen and then there's the question of, like, is there a way that the system as it exists could make this whole thing less vulnerable? And in a lot of ways, that's going to be separate from the question of what would be better for everyone to happen. Because a lot of what would be better for everyone to happen is a wide, a significant chunk of these things that we have constantly stocked on the shelves are no longer parts of our life, right? There's a lot of things that are made that we do not need and that are there's an environmental cost and a social cost. Yadda yadda yadda. But I I guess first I'm kind of curious to drilling in like how realistic do you think it is that the system as it exists is going to like mitigate this and come up with better ways to to do this that render us less vulnerable to these supply crunches? Like is there I I don't see a great financial incentive in it for them yet because they they don't seem to be hurting, right, like that's that's the thing. Well actually. And and again, please keep in mind this is limited anecdotal evidence. Yeah, because it's going to be like, John Deere I know, was making record profits before all that this union stuff happened, but, like, that's not everyone, right? So again, I work for a soda manufacturer, so every time you're in, you know, enjoying your your Schmetzer smola or your or your smego, whatever, whatever. I'm, I'm not going to explain which company I work for because I don't want to get in trouble. And we're we're actually a captive bottler, which means that it's a separate company, but we work for the the Big Soda corporation. I think that in certain instances those things will change because for example just last week we had one of our four lines go down. So 25% of our production capacity went down because we had a motor burnout on the rollers that would move a full pallet out to be picked up by a forklift and there was no replacement motor. In stock. And so we had I think 48 hours of downtime on this now all the way up at the top, the company executives, you know, we're one of 30 some plants. They don't care about why it was down, just that it was down. So in our position here, the people a little higher up the food chain than me are insisting like, hey, we've been after you guys for months that we need spares like this. And I think that as that sort of stuff happens, as it. Cuts into potential future profits. You know, it's not dropping their profits, but it's keeping them from being even higher. Maybe some certain companies are going to be like, OK, maybe we do need a couple more spares on the shelves. As far as on the production side of it, I don't see that happening. I think we're still going to be shipping out pallets of, you know, pallets of corn syrup in infected carbonated water as fast as we can make them. Which you and you were talking about the environmental cost, like you do not want to know how much water it takes to make. A single leader of soda. You really don't. Yeah, but. On this, on the production like input side, I think that companies are going to start stocking spare parts because it has been and I still have friends who work for other companies that I used to work for. It has been all throughout the system and I live in the Midwest. Every company is going through this where they're having huge amounts of downtime because they things as small as a gasket or an o-ring are not on the shelf. And they're finally, companies are finally going to listen to what their maintenance people have been screaming at them that we can't just stagger along and then, Oh well, it's next day delivery. Yeah. And then you freak out that this line was down for 24 hours now that it's not even next day delivery, it's next week delivery. I think that side of it, they're going to probably try and fix, but the other side shipping. To the consumer, I really don't see that they're going to change that. Yeah, I mean that makes that makes sense and I we are, you're kind of led thinking about this inevitably to like 2 conclusions. One of them is that. I have my I'm I'm sure parts of this the the system will adapt as it already has been, in fact, which is why I, like you, haven't seen toilet paper run out as bad as it did at the start of the pandemic again, right? There is a degree to which the system is capable of adjustment, but kind of in a larger sense. This is number one. I I'm kind of left with the feeling that because of the way the system was set up, the and the fact that it was disrupted so severely, it's kind of impossible to get 100% back on track, especially considering the disruptions are going to continue. Not just waves of COVID, but you know, in natural disasters and whatnot, shortages of of things like truck drivers like these different little hits are going to keep coming. And I I just don't know that we're ever going to like, catch up everywhere enough that. Like shortages of some sort aren't an aspect of our lives kind of forever. And this is one of those things that if you've spent a lot of time outside of the United States, that's something a lot of people have been dealing with for years. It's just not something Americans are used to dealing with. And I think. I kind of feel like that's just where it is now. Like I don't feel like every aspect of our our production and consumption system is going to get back where to where it was February of 2020. I think maybe that's never happening again. No, absolutely it will not ever happen again. You were saying earlier that, you know, there's some practical reasons for the global supply chain. Like one of the things that we've had such hard time getting in is any of our concentrates that contain real vanilla. Obviously, we can't grow vanilla in the United States. That's the thing you have to. I mean, that's part of why colonialism exists, right, is you need to go get vanilla. Yeah. So, yeah. So like there are certain things that are going to be stage. You have to stay global if we're going to continue to make the things that we make. And just from my side of it, being able to see, Oh well, why can't we get this concentrate in, oh, because it has vanilla as an ingredient, and there's been a bunch of droughts and **** and so vanilla is in a crunch, you know, that sort of thing. So I just, you're right in that, yeah. We're going to have shortages. There's it's, you know, and it's not just the mechanical side on ours. It's like we can't get cans in, we can't get concentrated in. We can't, you know, whatever it is that we can't get in is going to slow us down and demand will build up. I did have somebody in that thread respond and say, I don't see how demand for soda will build up. And I'm like, no, I have a friend who's like a diet doctor pepper fiend. And as soon as diet doctor Pepper shows up now she buys like 824 packs. And will absolutely build up for stuff. When people feel like they're being deprived of something, yeah. They when it becomes available, they are going to hoard it as best they can. Yeah. And that's again with soda, just kind of an annoyance, although that can because individual people can react in extreme ways, can snowball. I'm not going to be surprised if one of these days we have somebody shoot up a ******* grocery store because they're whatever was out. But that's also not a necessity and I I think that like. The the concern is that especially when you you you look at stuff like, you know, there's a couple of states that have like their wheat harvests and corn harvests that were like half or less than half of normal in big chunks of a rack. It was like down by I think like 70 or 80% like these massive shortages of of growing basic foodstuffs. And that's all that's all tied into this. Like it's not the same business that you're on, but it's all tied into aspects of this and it's all tied into like a lot of our ability to get that food out. Of the field is reliant upon different kinds of mechanical harvesting equipment. The materials to which to like fix and replace it are often like caught up in this whole just in time problem because they don't make enough of them. And sometimes they don't have them in stores. And then there's like a strike at John Deere and so more aren't getting made. And so there's not what you need to repair the equipment in time to get stuff out of the field everywhere. And in a year when you already have a reduction of harvests like that cuts down on it further. Like I I think, I don't know it it's it's this. There's always a couple of things to look at, which is like #1, as we've talked about, like how is the system going to try to handle this? What ways are they going to be successful? What ways are going to fail? What things are you going to have to endure and what things? I think what I want to talk about is like, what things do we need to change in order to like as communities, be more resilient to this stuff, which you know has less to do with soda, which again is not a necessity, but more to do with figuring out how to anticipate and endure supply line disruptions. Right, absolutely. And and while I'm currently in soda, I have been in everything from automotive to, I think as I mentioned, or casket manufacturer. So you know that I can go through a casket a week, you know? Especially when you're driving your your well yeah when I'm drunk driving in a pool boy right. Right through a trailer park. I mean you're you're I mean you're casket orders got to be through the roof. It is it is a lot, a lot of people. Yeah. I mean I I do actually wonder how ****. I mean, like, I I do actually wonder how much like the casket industry and stuff like that has been affected by the by, like, by the pandemic, with the, you know, an influx of dead people and how that's how that's affected things. That's been wondering about, but I've not actually spent time looking into. I can't speak to the pandemic specifically. I quit. I quit the casket industry in 2008. But I do recall my boss, the owner at the time, being very, very upset that Hurricane Katrina had a lower death toll than he anticipated. No, that's really, yeah, that's it. Over ordered the sheet metal to make the caskets and he was very ****** *** about having all that extra stock because they were transferred to just in time society. Yeah. So that's good to hear. Yeah, great. He was in a bad mood for like a month after Katrina because God, it hadn't reached his expectation. Well sure, that's a real problem for for absolutely. No, he's got, that's all the sympathy, critical support. That job was grim. I'm just going to say that that sounds like it. I I have a through a through a loved 1A connection to somebody who is like works for a company that makes body bags. And 2020 was amazing for them. They did incredible in 2020. I didn't hear any ghoulish stories. It's just like, yeah, of course you guys made a bunch of extra money, like, yeah, sounds like that was great for you. Putting in putting in a mental note to go through a bunch of the campaign contributions of people who make body bags, check if they're supporting anti Massachusetts. Yeah, CF big Corpse got into this at all. Yeah. I mean, honestly, the thing to the thing to do is, you know, I'm, I'm not a big fan of the stock market in general. But next time the next time that there's a pandemic, find out which companies make body bags on the stock market and invest in those as soon as as soon as the pandemic starts. I mean I can tell you what I'm I'm putting money into big corps as soon as soon as the next pandemic hits. That's absolutely going to happen. Oh, boy. All right. Yeah, that's grim. Yeah, I think it's fine. There's a reason why after after I started working there, I immediately told my husband, hey, make sure if I die before you, I'm cremated. So. I don't want to give these monsters any of my money. What I what I'm looking into is just full, full body stuffing that people can pose me around it. But that's a separate topic. Yeah, you talk about that a lot, Garrison. What I did want to mention is like actually when you were talking about how they hire in a lot of employees and they make them work horrible hours and then they, you know, they quit. This is kind of a constant kind of process and like, this isn't exclusive to that industry at all. I think one of the worst offenders of this is actually the Postal Service. I think the the Postal Service has like the lowest employee satisfaction out of any shipping company and like my my my father worked for the Postal Service for a bit and when you first join up you join us like you you join us on like a non career employee path and then you can get promoted to a career employee path after a few years. But the turnaround for the non career employee paths is massive. Like local branches can say up to like 90% of people who start working at the Postal Service will end up quitting within the year. Now that number could be different. Like nationally and for based on like you know based on what state you're in but but across the board it's always around at least 50% for employee turn around for people who join up the Postal Service on these like City carrier assistant positions that's fascinating yeah because because when you when you're a non career employee path you have to work seven days a week and you can be called into work basically anytime usually working around 11:50 hour days all of the career employees all of the right sounds like what I put you guys through. Like all of all, all of, like, all of like the regular carriers get to work like their specific route and that's it. That's their whole day. For the for the people who are new to the job, they're forced to work tons of routes, fill in whenever someone else can't. And we constantly be doing overtime and working like basically nonstop, nonstop with only like 2 like only two holidays off a year or something. It's it's pretty intense. Which is why, you know, when the Postal Service comes, have problems. And because and because there's so there's generally not tons of employees. I mean like there is lots like compared to like the Postal Service is one of the bigger employers in in in the whole country. But the for people when, when, when employees drop off filling those positions can be really hard in times of like crisis. So like you know last year when there's problems with the Postal Service, all of these kind of issues around the supply chain, around how people treat their workers, all of them like like you know compound to create one like much bigger problem which we saw last year with the Postal Service and like late in like the late summer. So I find it interesting how it's like you know these same issues around like how we treat workers. Is adding on to this problem of like supply chains and getting stuff delivered and all this kind of stuff. And So what I find interesting there is so, you know, we're talking about the the employee issue and yeah, it churn. So I've been the plant I was working in, which is 20 minutes from my house closed down and now I'm working 90 miles away, literally an hour and 40. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. I am. I am working 4 twelves a week and I'm crashing at my parents. House which they live about 60 miles away, so it's a little bit better, but also my still sucks. Yeah. And my parents are hard, right evangelicals who do not agree with you know this. So that's fun. But the plant that I was in was a non union plant and the one I'm in now is a union plant. And one of the things that I've noticed that's actually kind of different is. For once in the non union plant things were actually better because what we could do, what could be done is all right, we're all working seven days a week. We have enough staffing that if nobody calls in we have one spare person who normally goes around and gives breaks and stuff like that. Well we could you know basically all take turns taking a day off during that seven day week at the Union plant that I'm at now though it's all seniority based. So anytime that they force overtime they go from the the. Bottom of the seniority list on up yeah. So the people the people who are being forced into those which I described in the thread I think it was it was split off in the thread. But the the the people who were being forced to stay over 4 hours and then come in four hours early where you oh you were working six to two now you're working you know six to six and then you're coming in at. Two in the morning instead of six in the morning. The next day are always the people who are the lowest on the seniority list, which is why. Same thing with the Postal Service. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's not. There's a number of different. I mean, I've heard that complaint from a couple of different union gigs and it's. Yeah, it's a problem. Yeah. And it's that's why we get these new people and they get trained up and now they're trained and and they're signed off. And then they immediately go from because when you're training, you're not, you can't train on overtime or whatever, but now it's oh, OK, well, now you're working every weekend you're being forced over. You're being forced in early, just nonstop. And so yeah, they get trained for a month, and then a month after that, they quit because they went from working a relatively sane amount to. 8 hours a week. We went 58 days at one point without a day off. Yeah. Oh my God, my dad went like, almost, I think like 300 days without without a day off when he started the Postal Service. A kind of funny thing is, like when you hear the Postal Service talk about this like from the in their own reports and on their own website, what they find a problem with is not not the turn around in and of itself, but how they're basically wasting money on training for people that don't end up working. It's like that is their main concern is that they're spending all this money on, like, training for people that don't stick around. Often and like, yeah. Well, maybe you should address why they don't stick around often. That's that seems to be kind of the actual issue here. Yeah. And what I've been pushing for and I know this is more on the labor side than on the on the supply chain side that we were focusing on. I've been pushing for instead of three shifts where we keep just getting just hammered with this stuff, I want us to do 4 shifts, 12 hour days and do like A2 on two off, 3 on three off type swing shift where you have. Like one shift that works. You know, you work three days, one week, four days the next week and you work 12 hour days, but really you wind up getting a bunch of days off. You know, like that's if you're going to work seven days a week, that's the best way to do it in my opinion. I mean, like, you know, it's there's a lot of resistance to what would. Well, then we have to hire these extra people. We're hiring those people anyway and then they're quitting. I mean like they're not even getting your value out of them. Slave drivers, I mean, like you said, this is more the labor side than the supply chain side. But honestly these are these are like the same side right because if you don't have employee like this is you know this is a fundamental you know thing and like how capitalism works right. You need to have you know workers to make there have be any value at all right. So if there's if there isn't any people to working then there is no supply chain it's gone because we need people to do it both on like the production side and both in like the transportation side that's like you know UPS USPS you know FedEx you know so like the mail carriers and stuff is very important to all of this because you you you need in order for there to be a supply chain there needs to be. The the chain part right where you carry it from one place to to another. So it's both it's both on the production side and on like the transportation side for how all these problems you know get and one and one of the things that I in the replies to my thread which I got into was that. Part of the the only slack in just in time manufacturing is the employees. They've pulled all of the slack out of the system on the mechanical side and on the production side of it. On all the physical side. The only slack left is people and they have stretched us all to the absolute breaking point. Now I'm lucky, relatively speaking, in that I'm salary, so like I'm more on the inventory side of things, so I'm not doing the hourly production seven day a week thing. Like I said, I work 4 twelves, but. I can still, you know and that that's this job. Every other previous job, not the same thing, but I can still see where they've taken out like. Once again, we used to have spares on the shelf so that when something broke down we could fix the machine and keep running. Now, instead of the spare, the spare is people working weekends. That's the spare part. And that makes total sense, right? You're, you're the capitalist. A better a spare that is an apart on the shelf costs you money in terms of like, you need to have that space, that's extra rent you're paying, you need to have bought that part. Having your people just kill themselves is much cheaper. You can sort of misuse a Marx here, right? Like one of these things is like, OK, well you know, you, you, you have you have this increased machinery, you have this increased machinery. But that means you producing less value because you put more people out of work was like, OK, well what if what if we just we re extend the work day again. And sort of, you know, reverse all of the gains that have been happening. Well, OK, I say have been happening. Reverse all the gains that happened between about 1930 and like 1970 and just. Oh well, what if we just make everyone for 12 hour days again? And that that was, you know, one of those things that struck you both listening to this and reading the thread was that it's. It's not even just weight. It's just, it's, it's. It's it's it's just the fundamental power imbalance and then it's a fundamental power imbalance. It's gotten so bad that even like, you know, the, the, the, like sometimes the remains of the Union system, it's like it's not even, you know, like the unions like. In this particular case like this, they're not even, it's not even really helping. It's just creating like you have a small labor aristocracy that you have everyone else getting just like ground down. In this case, it's that we've got, we've got a small core of people who've been there 20 or 30 years. And and whereas before, maybe even ten years ago, they might have viewed the Union as a vehicle to help everybody, things have gotten so bad that now it's just, OK, I'm going to use this system as much as I can to cover my own *** because things have gotten so damn. Bad and obviously, you know. Reagan destroying the unions and stuff like that. Help with that. But yeah, it's. The I and I feel like the Union in in my job could be very helpful, but it would require certain people in it to instead of looking out for just their own interest because hey, I've been here 25 years so I'm in the clear like actually go, OK maybe I should you know sacrifice a little bit of of that power or that privilege to help the people who are just hiring in so that we can keep them so that that. This doesn't have to keep happening. Yeah. And it's, you know, this is one of the things that has made the John Deere strike that made it so powerful was these those older workers who, I mean, they they had a tiered system, right. So you had workers hired, I think before like 97 got a full pension and then like, after 97 was like 1/3 of that. And then workers hired in the last couple of years weren't getting any pension at all. And a big part of the strike is like. All of the workers saying that's not acceptable, including the ones who had a full pension, who had some of a pension. Like, saying that, like, the fact that the newer people are getting screwed over isn't acceptable. And I've heard different reasons for why that happened because this is this tactic, what you're talking about and kind of like what happened at John Deere. It was a common tactic. You know, it's the thing we talked about in colonialism all the time you want to divide the population against, you know, each each other one way or the other. Give them like, make it, make them feel as if their interests are not necessarily aligned, you know, so that people who. And there's reasons I've heard different reasons for why John Deere was different, including the idea that, like, a lot of these are family jobs. So it was not people. It was people being like, well, my kids not going to get a pension. And that's ******** anyway. Yeah, I just it's it's. It's important to talk about like that as a problem and also to highlight different strikes where that seems to have been overcome by the workers like this fact that they were attempted to be played against each other didn't really work out. And where in my case it very much is like another another example being. So we'll have people who are are lower on the seniority list and like let's say for example one weekend we're running lines three and five and not the other two. Well, the the newer people might only know stuff online for. But. If the new people don't get scheduled to do something, even if they're just being forced in to sweep the floor, the people who have the higher seniority will throw a fit saying, well, they're lower seniority. Why aren't they in here as opposed to, well, because they can't run that machine? And then they don't want to train them to run that machine. It's it's very they've managed to succeed where the John Deere capitalists might have failed in making this all about like, all right working and and I don't blame. The people who have the higher seniority on this because if my, you know, if if you're working conditions are hell and you have the option of OK, well, on a short-term scale, I can screw over this other person and actually see my family once in a while. Most people are going to do it. And especially if that person is somebody who just hired in that you don't know, well, screw that guy. And that's where, once again, if unions were stronger, if there was more than what is it right now? Like 2-3 percent of jobs are a union job. But unions have been so like, just weakened. That this sort of situation is allowed to happen, I guess you could say. Yeah. And I think, yeah, that comes back just like the the, the solute, the solution to the supply chain problem. Isn't really a like. It's it's. It's not. It's not a logistical solution. It's not even really like a capital gain solution, like a tax solution. The solution is that. You know you you have to fundamentally change the balance of power between capital and labor. And no, you know, I mean that that that that can be like, you know, think things will get better if it's, if it's more unions but like. Things are going to continue to suck until, like the capitalists ceased to exist as a class. Yeah. And I think that's like, yeah, yeah, that's yeah. That's always the and it's one of those like we get, we get critiqued on the Internets sometimes because I think people will say like, well, you know is your only solution to this. You keep talking about like mutual aid and and anarchism and like, I just don't feel like that's a big scale solutions like, yeah, but the current system isn't going to work very well on a big scale. Part of what we're always talking about is like how to, how to get your, how to get yourself and your people through the situation. Because that's also important. And it's the same thing with like a union, right? Unionizing you and your fellow laborers and your factory or or making your Union more effective and more able to like, advocate for everyone. That's not going to fix the bigger problem. That's not going to deal with the the issues that, like, that's not going to stop climate change. That's not going to stop supply line crunches in a grand scale. It's not going to stop creeping authoritarianism, but it can make life more bearable for you and the people around you. And that's that's also part of like, getting by in a crumbling world. Absolutely. Yeah. And. Yep, it's it. It requires a bit of more foresight, which I think goes one of the other purposes behind working us as many hours as they do is when you're so ******* tired all the time from working what you're working, you don't have time to stop and think about the larger implications of things. Mm-hmm. And yeah. And that's part of what they're going for. Yep. Yeah. So I don't know anyone else got anything? I guess just the clear solution to this is that I need to just stock up on bang, right. I just need to buy all of them because I I love bang. I I can't stop drinking bang. I I will say, are you scared of how much you love bang? I'm scared of how much bag I drink. I will say one of the wonderful mutual aid solutions. Is if you're very, very nice to the syrup mixing people. They will be kind to you if you are are working a double and they will give you a shot of the energy drink syrup before it's been mixed. Oh my God. Oh, oh boy, you shouldn't. You should not have told Garrison that. Problem Garrison's going to quit his job podcasting just to be able to get his shots? Just going to be shooting up energy drink here on out. That's all I'm doing with my time. I'm sitting, I'm leaving, leaving the call right now, finding the nearest factory and my my second day on the on the job in the soda manufacturing thing, I had a 24 pack of energy drink explode all over me. I didn't have a change of clothes, and that's when I learned that caffeine and taurine can soak through your skin. Yes. Oh yeah. No, I mean, basically was seeing sound. OK, so I I've just been looking up inflatable hot tubs, and I feel like if I could order enough pure energy drink syrup and an inflatable hot tub, I could build basically the equivalent of Baron Harkonnen's rejuvenation bath. Yeah, but with, like, peer bang syrup. Yeah, that is that is that is my plan. B12, caffeine and Tori. It's just gonna be we're all gonna quit our jobs. We're gonna have the same amount of money they get slower overtime. Because we're, again spending it all on banks. Obviously you need, you need the inside person to supply you with the syrup. So we'll just have sort of an Ocean's 11 situation where you guys pull up to the loading dock and with a tanker and I'm just hooking the truck up, you know, it's going to be like Scarface, but we're selling pure syrup. And then Garrison loses his mind. Yeah, and winds up in a machine gun fight in a mansion. Seeing his face into a mountain of cocaine, he's instead got just a large Pyrex bowl full of snow. He's just sticking his hand into a bowl of syrup to absorb the the the caffeinated nutrients when it's just going to be straight syrup. Now that is. Yeah, anyway, well, that's the episode. If people want to find you a lot, where can they find you? So I host, along with my husband and our friend Justin, we host a trans comedy and pop culture podcast where we also interview interesting people. It's called the Violet Wanderers, so you can find us on Twitter at Violet Wanderers or the Violet wanderers.com, or e-mail the Violet wanderers@gmail.com. And that's basically, that's my. Twitter handle and I just slowly got sucked into the Twitter hellscape where I yeah, that happened originally, went on just like, oh, I'm going to just promote my show. And then I started responding to people and before you know it, I'm writing twenty tweet rants about Justin time on my stupid gay podcast account. I got into Twitter to converse with a Young Justice podcast and that's why I created my Twitter account and here I am now. So because I was trying to get a Planetside 2 beta key and I I got it, but the consequences were I am now here. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter and its consequences have been a disaster for your you're this. You're such a child. I remember the 1st Planet side beta of the day, Chris. It was an age undreamed of. Ohh, Chris, and you all are welcome to come on the show. Anytime. I will. I will bother you to come on my show sometime. And. Excellent. Yeah, give it good plugs. Plugs probably. Yeah. Yeah. Like I said, the violent Wanderers were on Apple, were on Spotify. They're on podcast addict whatever, you know, rates all your major podcast platforms. The tagline of the show is made for no one, so expect a lot of queer humor. A lot of me calling my husband a **** and us talking about video games, comic books, movies, and then occasionally just randomly interviewing really interesting people who I harass in the coming on the show. Like which Robert, I know you know Daniel Harper from. I don't speak German. Where do he's been on a few times? We've had him on and and had some fun talking about Nazis, which seems kind of, you know, counterintuitive, but there's a lot of humor that can be found in Nazis if you know the right places to look. And yeah, I, you know what? I just watched a German language movie about Hitler that was made in 2007 by a Jewish German comedian that includes, I've watched a lot of Hitler movies. You know, periodically I just get on Netflix and Hulu type and Hitler just kind of watch whatever is there. This is the first time I have seen Hitler ******* in a movie. I've never seen anybody who had the courage to do that. And he is just, yeah, he's it's it's uncommon. His one ball just swinging. In the end it is it is an uncomfortable scene, but not the most uncomfortable scene in that particular movie. It's quite a film. That's that's pretty amazing. But yeah, come on, come on sometime we'll play around Vince Armageddon, which is a game that I've created. And, you know, if you guys don't want to kill yourselves afterwards, then, hey, you survived the game. As long as I can get some syrup out of the deal. That's that's all I want. I will, I will. I will smuggle you some syrup out and mail it to you. OK. Perfect. Well, that's that's going to do it for all of us here today. And it could happen here until next time, I don't know. Go go read. Go read the. The dawn of everything. It's good. It's worth reading. Check it out. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. Thanks for listening. We've all felt left out, and for people who moved to this country, that feeling lasts more than a moment. We can change that, learn how it belonging begins with us.org, brought to you by the ad council. Mama, what does the chicken say? Job. Giraffe, giraffe. Really. Giraffe, giraffe. You're not going to get it, all right? Just make sure you nail the big stuff, like making sure your kids are buckled correctly in the right seat for their age and size. Get it right visitnhtsa.gov/the right seat brought to you by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the ad Council. The Gangster Chronicles Podcast is a weekly conversation that revolves around underworld criminals and entertainers to victims of crime and law enforcement. We cover all facets of the game. Gangster Chronicles podcast doesn't glorify promoting mission activities. We just discussed the ramifications and repercussions of these activities because after all, if you play gangster games, you are ultimately rewarded with gangster prizes. iHeartRadio is number one for podcast, but don't take our word for it. Find the Gangster Chronicles podcast on. By heart radio app or wherever you get your podcast. 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