Listen to Episode

Read Episode Transcript

Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So four whole months, the chimps ran away from me. I mean, they take one look at this peculiar white ape and disappear into the vegetation. In wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts, sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books through your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors, your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing this research. With you for the first time ever in a book format, you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. 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. Get all the Real Housewives to you need on the podcast to tease in a pod. Join Ex housewives, Teddy Mellencamp and Tamra judge as they watch recap, armchair quarterback and breakdown all things from the hit reality TV franchise. This team tells it like it is. Each week we're going to be recapping whatever housewife is currently airing. Lucky for Tamra, we're going to start. Oh my gosh, I know with Orange County. Listen to two peas in a pod on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Mama, what does the chicken say? God what? Ram, 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 by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration 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 meta my verb? Of course, this is it could happen here, a podcast entirely dedicated to the Metaverse, which is the promise of the human future. On with me, as always, is my co-host Mark Zuckerberg. Hello? I know. I don't know how Brokenburg talks. I'm not sure how. I don't know. I don't know who's voice you were doing. Voice, I guess, but, you know, he sounds like nothing. Like no one. With the absence of a soul, you sound like you're the noise when it's dial up. Yeah, that's what's going on inside his head at any moment. When he's not actively making the Internet worse, it's just a dial tone in there. Awesome. Garrison? What are we talking about today? Well, yeah, we're gonna be talking about the metaverse and how how it's different from what people talk about it as and. Yeah, it's it's gonna be, it's gonna, it's gonna touch on a variety of things. It's split up into two parts. But first, I would like to paint you a picture with words, a word picture. So you're a Witcher. A Witcher. Yeah. Well, you're walking, walking through your favorite grocery store. There's, you know, carts passing by, horrible music playing. It's the lighting is white and and like, overexposed and underexposed to the same time. It's it's it's hard. It's hard to see. And this this like a person who looks like an employee keeps keeps popping up and trying to take you to different sections of the store. You're trying to just ignore her. It's a very annoying. All you need to get is the stuff you have on a little list, and it's it's awful. Eventually, you get so fed up with this whole experience that you take out. You go to where the wine bottles are, you take them out, and you arrange them into a giant penis on the floor. Because that's the only thing you can do because you're not actually in a store. You're in your living room and you have a horrible headset on, and you're trying to do shopping in a virtual. The virtual grocery store and that's that's the actual kind of scope of what we're gonna be talking about today is virtual marketplaces and how they interact with seemingly real marketplaces. Yeah, I'm sure this is inspired by, there were a couple of videos that dropped recently, one of them from I think Walmart, we're going to be talking, we're going to, we're going to be talking about it. So yeah, so a couple, a couple days after the 2020 new year, a video went viral across the social medias ranking up over like 11 million views on Twitter. And it was titled how Walmart envisions shopping in the mall in in the Metaverse now. So what? What followed was like 2 minutes of an embarrassing like VR jank, including like throwing around virtual gallons of milk from your cart into a virtual fridge. Many, many dunks are made fun was had, but what few people probably realized is that like this actually this this wasn't a Walmart metaverse test store. This was actually a 5 year old tech demo from before non Neal Stephenson fans even knew what the term. Metaverse meant so a few years back, a tech company called a Mutual mobile partnered with Walmart for a project set to quote, Reimagine, retail virtual reality. Now, that sounds very fancy and important, but considering this was five years ago and you're not hearing about it until now, shows how impactful this thing actually was. The the first stated goal of the tech demo, according to the Mutual Mobile website, was to impress influencers at South by Southwest 2017. So, you know, just like the so-called. Metaverse is now. This was largely a promotional project and a way to attract investors. This was this was never actually a serious thing. It's I'm going to say it right now. South by Southwest was always one of the stupidest things in the world, and when it comes back, it will be still, because it's stupid. It's a stupid place for the most insufferable people in the world to come and talk about technology. Some people also listen to music. That's fine. Yeah, for, for, for the for the experience itself that used in original Oculus Rift and programmed roughly like 4 minute linear expedition into a barren, hellish digital Walmart where you pick up and throw it did it did sound exactly. My favorite thing about this video is they were clearly using the audio of some sort of like shooter game because it was awful, like things would change. It would sound like you were in like ******* doom going through a portal. It was extremely funny. It was bad. It sounded like. No, you you you pick up and throw fake wine bottles into your blue digital cart and the whole thing ends with a fake drone delivering an $800 TV that you fake purchased. It's it's not great what mutual mobile and Walmart was trying to do. They they have a statement on their website back from 2017, it was they said that Walmart envisioned unveiling a fully virtual shopping experience that puts shoppers inside the store without ever leaving their homes, to attract customers and dispel the misconception that they're not as advanced as they're more digital counterparts. Brick and mortar establishments are not only accelerating investments in areas like web and mobile, they're also exploring the very edge of emerging technology. Walmart Virtual Reality is a case in point. Potential shoppers can virtually pick up products, read labels, talk to Virtual Associates, and fill their shopping carts. But the goal wasn't just to create something interactive. Walmart needed something that showed the potential of VR in retail while putting them ahead of the competition. So. I mean, this was like, this was 2017, so this was kind of a head in some ways, but also ahead in the ways that it's kind of showing how not useful this example is. So obviously like this five year old video resurfaced now due to Zuckerberg and Epic games, you know, forcing an Astroturf metaverse into the cultural zeitgeist coupled with their, you know, conflation of anything VR to the legendary metaverse. Right. Because VR does not equal metaverse, nor is it, nor is it necessarily vice versa. But now these terms are getting used. And interchangeably that someone can stumble across this video and be like, oh, look at this metaverse store when like, it's not, it's just a it's just a VR tech demo. The metaverse, in order to be like the thing that people have been imagining through cyberpunk since, like the 90s, it needs to be persistent and interact directly with the real world in a number of ways. Like it it's it's it's this we'll get into. We'll get into kind of what metaverse could be in the future in terms of like, the IT could happen here idea and then not just a metaverse. A series of metaverse is what they could be and how that kind of negates the original idea of it in the 1st place. But when asked by VICE News about the resurgence of their Walmart project, Mutual Mobile replied. The vision of a virtual shopping experience we helped Walmart realize back in 2017 stands validated in the Metaverse era of today. This whole experience has only encouraged us to keep experimenting, innovating, and leading the charge with cutting edge tech. So I mean considering most of the. Virality of this was people joking about it? I I I yeah, sure. OK, OK. Ritual level. Good. Good luck with that. So. I thought a few days after the Walmart video went viral, rumors of another big box store going metaverse started to circulate again, accompanied by a video of a possible like 3D Metaverse storefront. Reports emerged starting in India claiming that H&M had announced that it would offer its customers A3 dimensional shopping experience in its virtual store inside the Metaverse via something called. Now I don't know if it's Geek City or Sikh city. I'm not really comfortable. Either of those things because they sound weird but I'm, I'm, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna go seek city that's a that's a little bit better keep it sounds like it's a slur. I know, I know, I know it sounds, but it sounds it sounds like it's a slur. So I'm going to say seek, but it's it's SEK. So this this account on on Twitter called a seek VR shared the following from its official Twitter account. Shopping in the metaverse with Sikh coin concept VR store presented to H&M by Sikh creates mainstream use cases for Sikh coin and scaling virtual reality beyond games. So I'll get into what seek is in a bit, but the report said that customers would be able to walk through the store, choose the apparel they wanted to purchase in the Sikh city universe, although the clothes could only be worn. In the digital environment, payment would be made with a Sikh coin and customers could have the opportunity to order the same apparel from H&M's physical stores later. But that's you're buying two separate things. One of us, the digital skin, one of it's an actual, you know, real thing. So what a Sikh. Zeke was launched in 2018. It's a metaverse coin project built on the Ethereum blockchain, and they're they're their goal is to connect artists, athletes, and other digital content creators directly with their fans in virtual worlds. Seeks NFT marketplaces is designed to enable real ownership of digital item. The way in which I would actually want that is if it's me having a very sexual zoom chat with Pitt. You know what? We don't need to Garrison. Please continue. OK? And I'm quoting from the six upside seek currently offers a range of immersive VR experiences within six city, including theater, concert arenas, Sports Complex, hangout lounge, and more. End users of things you can do in your real home, but weird and on the Internet. I really hate it. This is horrible. I I see a potential appeal for people who are like out in the sticks or in parts of the world where they're not. They feel no like they're very politically or whatever, disconnected, which is the same thing the Internet already does. I'll talk about being in VR will make it better. I don't know. I've lived in the middle of nowhere and relied on the Internet to be social, and I don't think I would have wanted to change the Internet in for this because it sounds, yeah. Anyway, I'll talk. I'll talk about use cases in a SEC, but yeah. O. End users will be able to use seek token to make purchases, vote for content control program. They get much more after token launch. Seek VR, in partnership with Universal Music, can realize live performances of world famous artists such as Bon Jovi, Lady Gaga, U2, Sting and many more can take place on this platform. So seek is like, it's it's kind of the startup, but it's been around for a while. It's trying to do like you know, virtual venues inside the metaverse they they do have. On tracks with Universal, so it's it's, it's, it's a mix of it's, it's a mix of this coin. So it's a mix of this like cryptocurrency also trying to use this cryptocurrency in this world they're trying to build up. They're, they're, they're they're road map to metaverse right now. First thing is like payment integration. So using seek they want seek coin to be the coin for everything in the metaverse. They want all of the Metaverse be based off this thing that they invented called second because it'll make them money. Next thing they want to do is create. A creator enabled ecosystem, so kind of copy the the content creator thing we have right now, port that into the metaverse. But again have everything, you know, you can invest in your creators so you can vote on what they do using C coins and all of we talked about like personal ownership in the previous episode, but then a lot of it, you know, they have like an NFT marketplace, avatar marketplaces, etcetera, etcetera. But a lot of the stuff is built around like concerts, you know, venues. You know, a lounge, movie? Multiverse. Sorry, one metaverse. Their future milestones are quote a VR Space Academy. They do not, do not say what that means. OK, Keek Studios, again, kind of unclear, I'm guessing, like original content. And then the last one is a blockchain metaverse alliance. Those are those are their three big future milestones after they get their there. What was that last one? Blockchain metaverse alliance. I mean, this was like in the Facebook thing too, right? The idea that we're going to integrate in FT but it was also clearly just like they tossed that in there on the Facebook one. There was no evidence they thought seriously. About NFTS or blockchain, it was just had gotten big while they were preparing the thing, so they they tossed him in there. I get the idea, right? Like the thing that they keep pitching with this is that you'll be able to have an item in one game that is yours. The company doesn't own it. You can take it to other games, which anyone who makes games will tell you is ******* nonsense. It something like that might be vaguely possible in a metaverse where everything was forced to use the same engine and all, everyone was also forced to abide by a bunch of strict rules by Facebook that also that's probably violating antitrust laws. And also, it seems like a ridiculously Sisyphean task with no real benefit. I don't think anyone's going to do it, but I'm guessing that's what they're referring to when they want to jam the blockchain up in the ******* metaverse. Like what? What else could it be? The blockchain Metaverse alliance, all of the blockchains and metaverse is going to aligned into? Yeah, like they don't want to put all of the metaverse stuff into one. Where this shirt in the metaverse? Yeah. So just like the real world. The freedom. The freedom of the Internet. Can't you feel it? The ever expanding possibilities. I do love because they keep talking about within the context of Metaverse games. Like you'll get to unlock a character that's just yours and nobody else can play it and they'll have special abilities. That means he wins all the time. Like why would people play that game? I think it was Business Insider someone's article talking about how neat it would be for games to work this way and like think of all the money you'd make people wanting to watch your character win. It's like people don't want to just, like watch a guy. Who's structurally unable to lose because he he bought the right character in a racing game. Win every race. That's not. No one's going to pay to watch that. Do you understand what people watch races for? Like now, anyway? Well, let's let's hear from our good friends at our products and services before we come back and talk more about seek coins. I guess. I don't know. Seek. All right, we are back. O yeah, see coins virtual reality spaces run on smart contracts through the through the the Biance smart chain and they're they're they're run they run through the Ethereum blockchain. So the the there's about 7. And 744 million seek coincidence supply. The maximum supply capacity is capped at 1 billion coins. See coins a peaked at a one $1.16 a year ago after launching it at around 4:00 cents. They're currently being traded for around $0.60. So that's that's what actual sequence doing like like like people do use this it's not many people like they they they do have these contracts with with with Universal Music but before this. And everything I I never heard of Sikh coins. So two days after the rumors began circulating that H&M whereas you know partnering with seek H&M said, Nope we did not we are we are not doing this but they did not close the door in future possibilities they said we we we like to we like to confirm that H&M is not, is not opening a store in the Metaverse. At this time we're also not collaborating with Sikh. So the official Twitter account for six subsequently clarified later on that the store that they were doing. It was just a concept that was presented to H&M and not a not a launching virtual store yet, but they they do. They do say that they're in discussions with H&M to make this a reality, but it's not a reality as of now, so. This, this, this kind of begs the question, like, what about a 3D digital space is superior to a 2D digital space for simple tasks like shopping online? So once you start, you know, unfolding questions like this about the Internet, metaverse, AR, VR, you there are more in the continual sides to this than you would have initially estimated. But First off, before we kind of have this discussion, we should split this into two categories. One for shopping for like, real physical items that you plan on, like receiving in person. And then digital items that don't physically exist and are just just on your computer and monitor. So obviously, like there's no clear advantage in most cases to traversing an isolated virtual environment in order to order food as opposed to just scrolling through a web page. But once you expand out of the confines of VR's sensory deprivation, 33D technology in AR so augmented reality does actually have some useful prospects, including some that are already in use. Amazon and IKEA, for example, have options on their perspective websites and apps that can like project furniture options into your living space. So you can see that's the kind of thing that has some future, I think. Yeah, yeah. So currently this is being done on your phone screen, but an AR glasses application of this. Actually serve its purpose quite well is something that is something that people would want. Yeah. Yeah, the phone screen version is pretty mediocre and these are. And that's kind of the thing, the place we're at I we make fun of this stuff a lot because most of its nonsense. There are, there are real, there's a lot of potential in some of these ideas, but there's there are potential for like on the same level that the air fryer has potential where it's like a thing a bunch of people will buy, but it's not none of this yet is stuff that's going to completely change. Like, yeah, you might get a few million people to to. You get these glasses and or this app make this glasses for a couple of reasons. But who would use this this app to like, help plan out how they're setting up their houses? You might get a few million people who do that. It's not going to be like an iPod or an iPhone or or like Facebook that no one's had figured that out yet. There's there's some neat products that are going to be valuable, but we're still in the stage where nobody's under, nobody's figured out fundamentally what people want from this as opposed through like tiny specific needs in the same way that like. There was a number of futurists who quite add accurately figured out with a smartphone like, oh, people want a thing that will give them access to all of the the knowledge and ideas in the world and also let them yell at anybody anytime they want. Like that's something that is going to be incredibly successful and it has and it's changed the entire world. Zuckerberg was like, people want to be able to be racist faster and by God we wanted it and and that was huge. I don't like these are it's a good idea like yeah, let people scope out how their room. It's going to look when they're shopping or whatever through R, but we haven't yet hit that. This is going to change the world. Because being slightly better at using IKEA will not change the world. Yeah, I think as an avid air fryer hater, I do think comparing Metaverse to the air fryer is actually a vampire comparison, which I love to say to Garrison. I know Garrison hates it when I use the air fryer. Love my air fryer. Anti Air Fryer action is my new tattoo. They screech like the the person at the end of invasion of the body scanners too. But my goodness, do they cook my food faster? They are fry it. Fry it with the air. Wow. Yeah, almost like it's impossible anyway. Mutual mobiles digital marketing strategists talked with vice after the Walmart video went viral. And he explained that like the demo was made to show the potential of our child reality and shopping experiences that they can have for, you know, different people, including its ability to connect like elderly people or people with disabilities to a shopping experience from the comfort of their own home. Something that he thinks might even be, you know, attractive to people who have been through several rounds of COVID quarantine. And I can kind of. Understand this last argument. You know, during early quarantine, I definitely used my VR headset more often than I had before. And with our alienated capitalist world, I can see the use of walking around a digital store if you're stuck at home due to something like a plague, or if you know if you have a physical or mental reason that makes you know going to a store. Difficult because, but like, it's yes, this, this can help that, but also. This is always very reliant on how these types of stores are set up and how these stories like affect your brain. Like a big part of going to the grocery store. What it's designed to do is make it so that we're not just following a shopping list. There's like a structured joy of discovery. Everything about the design of the store is to get you to buy things you didn't think you needed before you walked in and were trained from birth to like, to find this process pleasurable. So in that way, walking around VR like Walmart or H&M might actually make some people happy, Despite that being. Sat in dystopian, if you stop and think about it, right, like, because that's that's actually like, it's a it's a very capitalist thing, but it does make us happy because that's that's what we've been trained to do since we're babies. Everything about the design of the store is to get you to buy things you didn't think you needed before you walked in and were trained from birth to like, to find this process pleasurable. So in that way, walking around VR like Walmart or H&M might actually make some people happy Despite that being sad and dystopian if you stop to think about it right. Like because that's that's actually like. It's a it's a very capitalist thing, but it does make us happy because that's that's what we've been trained to do since we're babies. So. That there's, there is that side of it for in terms of like, yeah, I can see if I really don't want to leave the house, but I want to get the experience of walking through a place. Maybe I will walk through a target to get groceries. I don't know, like as some people maybe might do that. But otherwise, you know, it's much, it is much simpler and easier to just scroll through a 2D thing on a web page and like and and and and and do the things you need. That's the thing. Like, it's like, yeah, I mean absolutely. Because I I, when I was making fun of one of these videos, somebody like called it out as being abelist and was like. Uses this. As for disabled person if they can use this, they can use Amazon and like as a person who sometimes I don't shop for groceries at Amazon, but I've shopped for groceries online, it's fine. The, the, The It's it's everything it needs to be. You can get your groceries online and the metaverse is just going to make it like weird and off putting and in unnecessarily complicated because at the moment I can get groceries with my phone while I'm like jogging or as I'm like sitting in traffic or like while I'm on a zoom. All listening to Garrison talk about the metaverse as opposed to putting on a headset and like doing the same thing basically as driving there, but more expensively anyway. Are you grocery shopping right now? I am ordering 1700 cans of ZEVIA and 40 pounds of raw beef. Love your breast. Normal weeks worth of food. For me, that's a lot of stevia. And that's literally like 2 days for him. See? But Robert, you could be doing this while wearing a bucket on your head and walking around a fake store. I could wear a bucket on my head to the real store. They can't stop me. I usually wear a bathrobe. This is the first half for it's like, you know, buying actual physical items that you plan to receive in stores. You know, furniture is actually kind of makes sense of food. It's a little bit iffy. They'll only kind of consideration there is if people want the mental effect of walking around a store. If they find that pleasurable, then it's a thing. But, you know, it's way more efficient to just scroll through your phone. As for the other side, buying virtual items, whether they be, you know, NFTS video game skins or super special exclusive VR hangout rooms, I don't give a **** how this works. If you want to walk around a VR mall to buy your VR art and your VR clothes, knock yourself out. I I buy Sonic the Hedgehog games. We all have our weird things we do that don't make any sense. Yeah, if that's if that's you. Restores are just going to be like the 700 weirdest people in the country ************ as they buy wine and milk. That's the thing I was when I was when I was doing the digital picture. At the beginning I had two scenarios. One where you align the bottles into a deck. The other one I was going to say you take off your pants and start ************ and I decided not to do that one. So I'm happy that you brought it up because because yeah, that is the actual use case for this is that someone people are going to be walking around these fake Walmarts. It's all jerking off. That's what's gonna happen. They're they're gonna have this animation of a real, real female employee of theirs who, like, pops up when you do something you're not supposed to do and explain something to you. And it's going to be impossible to remove initially. And people are going to turn it into a whole weird, ***** thing and, like, they will appear in all these circumstances. It's going to go, it's going to be the only thing that goes viral, like it's going to be the only thing people remember five years later about the first of these. This is I'm going to circle back to this towards the end of Part 2, but this is the actual way to handle the media. Because we're gonna this this thing is going to be forced on US1 way or another, we're going to have a form of it. And honestly, the best thing we can do with it is either ignore it, ignore it, or maybe more attractively, is to **** with it. Like that's going to be the thing. That's going to be the thing to do. There was an article a few days ago that the headlight is Final Fantasy **** interrupts Italian Senate zoom event someone someone joined in and started playing **** from Final Fantasy 7. Like, this is this is the thing to do. Yeah, this is the way that we need to do it. If there's gonna be ******* like meetings on the Zuckerberg metaverse with people, need to go in and make it weirdly ***** yeah, Garrison, I could not agree more that that's the what you need to do. Citizens of the Internet is is look up something awful habbo HBO hotel. That's the kind of **** that we need to be doing in *******. In in the there was basically a children's video game. It was an early kids MMO and a bunch of weird adults, and something awful decided to create an unsettling cult of people who all looked identical and marched around doing all of these weird, unsettling things in a children's game. It was very fun. Like or or like in in second life when it was the new big sexy thing, there was this was very self important tech writer, investor type person who was doing a Q&A and people just like animated thousands of floating penises going around and this is, this is going to be the thing, this is what you're going to have to do because in order, because if it's going to be this horrible corporate hell, the only way to do it, the only way to deal with that is to make it unusable for everybody so that it so that it doesn't get used. And the way to do that is by putting *****. Everywhere, yeah, *****. And if Joe ever decides to do a multiverse presentation or if one party or another has had decides to do a multiverse debate, it is everyone's moral responsibility. Civic, civic duty. This goes beyond civic. This is as a citizen of the human race, you know, as a Member of this species, you have to try to find a way to **** it up for them. Something could be more important. So yeah. So if if you're buying digital items, you never plan everything in person. I do not care how you do it. Knock yourself out. We all have our weird things. I I buy Sonic DLC's, people do World of Warcraft. If you want to get a art piece you can only hang in your digital room. That sounds miserable, but have fun. I I used the Internet to order very off putting Danish cheese product. Oh yeah, that did happen. That was off putting. It was weird. It was like you. You tried to trick yourself. To liking it when you were eating it, though, I, we I I don't remember not liking it because I ate a good amount, but I've had the second cube sitting around and I've had no desire to open. No desire to. Yeah. Anyway, so I didn't not like it. I just, I don't know that I ever want to eat it again for you. Quality audio content. So here's the thing. I have not actually been talking about the Metaverse. Nothing I've mentioned thus far actually is the Metaverse, and doesn't have really anything to do with the metaverse besides the technology of VR and AR. You know, it turns out companies like Facebook. Epic Microsoft involved? The way they talk about the metaverse is kind of all a big lie. Like, if it's not metaverse, it's it's an astroturfed top down marketing scheme to turn more of you into data, and to create and to create viral marketing like that's. Instead, instead of an interconnected solution to the alienated bubbles of web two, it's just a social media network that encompasses all of your vision and encourages even more digital alienation and less in person socialization. Hey, kids, you know the worst stuff about the Internet? What if it was the only thing about the. What if it was accompanying everything? So I'm going to, I'm going to talk more about Metaverse as big tech or just bigger tech in Part 2. But this, this, this, this, this will be wrapping up part one of the digital storefronts and then we'll get into some more kind of applications of this and how we're actually seeing it in the second-half. So, Robert, do you want to do you want to go buy a virtual block of Danish cheese? No, I I did when I was hanging out on top of mountain the other day. Gonna do a guy flying some drones, which I normally don't like, but this guy had a VR control rig for his very nice drones. Oh yeah, that's those are fun. That's those are dope. I might I might get into that ****. But no, I have no desire to shop. I like going to the grocery store as I do as hey guys, I'm Kaylee short, I'm a singer-songwriter in Nashville, TN and I host a podcast called Too much to say, which is very aptly titled. I write songs most of the time, but I can't keep my feelings to three minutes and 30 seconds, so to have a whole podcast, it's just amazing. So I share stories from my music career, my childhood. I've been known to read diary entries, play. Early songs, but no matter what I'm doing, I'm sharing a strong opinion I have on something. So I share my thoughts on everything from music to martinis, social media to social anxiety, regrets to risky text, and so much more. Sometimes I even have some really special guests on to share their craziness and what they have too much to say about so you guys can listen to new episodes of too much to say every Wednesday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. 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. Just December. From Tenderfoot TV and 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. Hey there. I'm Scott rink, host of the podcast history unplugged. And if you're dreaming of being a full time podcaster someday, you and I have a lot in common. I used to teach history for a living, which was great, but I wanted something more and maybe you know what I mean. So I gave podcasting a try, and I did it with spreaker from iheart. I could explain how it works in about 90 seconds, but all you really need to know now is that in my experience, the ad revenue with speaker has been three to four times higher than it has been with any other host I've worked with. Now I get to do what I'm passionate about. Teach history, but with more freedom and less stress while still earning a respectable salary. From just getting started and doing the very basic stuff to taking your podcast in whatever direction you want to take it, spreaker has all sorts of great tools, so if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try visitspreaker.com that's spreaker.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Much of my shopping that way as possible because it's like soothing and nice and I think very human to go be around other people to to get food. But yeah that's the, you know and things like the pandemic where that becomes harder. I think that is where the use cases for the digital stores actually come in like theoretically, but we've never, you've never seen them feeling that something which I it all just looks deeply off putting it all. The problem is that it's it's it's stuck in the uncanny valley so it's not. Pleasurable to be in those digital spaces, yeah, because you're even though it's being marketed as a solution to alienation, it's just more alienating because it's because it's it's like, very clearly exposing the alienation that we try to avoid. So it falls right in the middle of the uncanny valley, and it's not pleasant. Yeah, but we we, we we we will talk more about that in Part 2. If you want to follow the show on the social medias that is cool down media and happen here pod you can keep up with my tweets when I I don't know. I don't know what I do on Twitter anymore but that's hungry bow tie and you can harass Robert Evans at I read OK. Yeah, ****** *******. Do it. That's the show. Do it. Do it or I'll kill you. This episode is brought to you by Wix. Are you ready to take your business online? You need Wix, the leading website creation platform that's got all the tools you need to create, manage and grow your brand. Over 200 million people are already using wix's wide range of solutions to enhance their businesses, like Ultra Smart SEO tools designed to get you found on search engines. Faster loading. Times to create outstanding user experiences and payment solutions to help you boost your revenue. Plus, with enterprise grade security built into every site, you know you're in safe hands. So whether you're starting your online business or you've got a side hustle with Wix, you can design A site to showcase your work that'll look great on any device. You can also manage everything from 1 dashboard on desktop and mobile so you can be available anywhere at any time in the office, at home, or on the go. Want to get started? Head over to Wix. Com and create your website, todaythatswx.com. Hi, I'm Robert lamb. And I'm Joe McCormick. And we're the hosts of the Science podcast stuff to blow your mind, where every week we get to explore some of the weirdest questions in the universe. Like, if sci-fi teleportation was possible, how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How would an interplanetary civilization function? This free will exist stuff to blow your mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody ever told you you ask the weirdest questions, it is time to come. Join us in the place where you belong, the stuff to blow your mind podcast new episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen to stuff to blow your mind on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Have you ever felt depressed about work, only to have your dad be like, why you're so down? So you told him you hate your job. And he said, well, you better talk yourself out of it. And then you thought, hmm, I love to talk. I could host a podcast. And then you went to spreaker from iheart and started a podcast and got good at it, then monetized it, then quit your boring job, then told your dad thanks for the advice. And he was like, well, that's not what I meant. And I don't understand what a podcast is, but you seem happy. So that's great, kiddo. You ever do that? Well, you could at spreaker.com. That's SPREAKER. Ask your dad. Yeah. Sleep down. Hi, I'm Mark Zuckerberg. Welcome to the podcast where we talk about the metaverse. I enjoy BBQ sauce and you don't. That was that doesn't that was my Mark Zuckerberg. Like, that was pretty good. That that is that is SNL worthy. Thank you, Garrison, because it's because it's so bad right now. We could party. That was that was my only goal. This is this is Part 2 of the Metaverse that never was here at. It could happen here, and we actually be talking about like, the can't wait till we launch portions of the show and pretend we never set all this ****. It's going to be the best Garrison, you know, Robert? Remember Remember when I was talking about Sikh city and all of the virtual venues? Hmm, yeah, I just, I just, I just got a message from our beloved parent company, I heart media. OK, we planned to extend shows into the metaverse, which was, which was announced a few weeks ago. You know, Garrison about always thought that the metaverse was a pretty good idea. I think we we will talk about how the Metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, I I heart media did announce a web three in the metaverse and the newest consumer platforms for iheart media. So sorry, I'm I'm I was just working. Yeah it's I mean it's working in a matrix for reference there. So yes, I I see what you did there, Garrison. Thank you anyway. So I'm guessing for non Neil Stephenson fans, many of you probably had not. Heard of the Metaverse before last year's VR? Sure, you've heard of VR. AR maybe. But probably just as like niche gaming technology, you know? Not not this massive, not like a massive successor to the Internet. Primarily 3 companies, Facebook, Epic games, and Valve. The the latter 2 being mostly gaming and software companies. Kind of all decided the best way to push their niche VR and software technology into the zeitgeist. Was with this flashy new marketing, and it kind of worked. Metaverse is now, and many more peoples like personal lexicon, but it's not really the metaverse. You know, like the Walmart thing. It's a way to attract investors and drum up Free Press, but it's still the same old VR and AR applications of the technology. None of these companies are trying to make Metaverse a thing that we actually want or, you know, working towards an interconnected, immersive, 3D, open source, successor to the Internet, all of the different websites and services. We use united under one digital roof, like a super platform that you know is is made-up of all of these sub platforms. You know, you have social media, online gaming and all of like the, you know, ease of life apps all accessible through the same digital space, under the same digital economy. That that thing isn't happening. People like that. That's not what people with money are actually pushing towards even though they're still using the metaphors term. Yeah, there was a great piece in wire that came out last month as a part of their. Matrix VR issue. It was called the Metaverse is simply big tech, but bigger is by Cecilia Dean Tazio. It was. So it's it's a wonderful piece and I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to say a quote from it right here. By the mid 2000s it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites that we could access on the open web. It was making information sorters, channels, aggregators and publishers open enough to scale with user generated content, but closed. Enough to reap enormous profits. This was the evolution from Web one to Web 2. For nearly 30 years, the gravity of the consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together under the auspice of fewer and fewer corporate Titans. The freaky little planets get drawn together, collide and make bigger planets collide again, and make stars or even black holes. Facebook eats Instagram and WhatsApp. Amazon swallows two dozen ecommerce sites, and you're left with these few supermassive players controlling and appropriating. Celestial motion of billions of users. This is how big tech got big End Quote. So yeah like now we have all of our isolated tool boxes and they really fight against any inter platform integration. You have you know Microsoft Office and they're they're like their office suite. You have like Google Workspace you have apples own like air drop Apple Pages and Final Cut Pro plus the the nightmare that is adobes subscription tools like Google wants you to spend all day. Checking your Gmail, traveling with Google Maps, watching videos on YouTube, and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile, your friend texts you via iMessage, uses Apple Maps, and calls his mom on FaceTime. This is the single person in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true, but like this, this form of the Internet is the one that the men, of course, is growing out of. Metaverse is just a way for tech companies to add VR and AR and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to this poor to like their own portfolio. Of proprietary products. But in order for that to happen, they need to convince us that we need headsets for the next evolution of the Internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook is Zuckerberg were the first ones to crack this thing right open. It's they own not only four of the top six social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most popular manufacturer of VR hardware. VR has been relegated to niche gaming technology for like basically 2 decades, and Zuckerberg decided the best way to sell more of his headsets and software. To give the tech a fresh new paint job and call it metaverse and like, it's sort of working. There were approximately 9.4 million shipments of VR headsets in 2020, one 3.6 million of which were done during the holiday season after Facebook's Big Metaverse event. It's suspected that the Quest 2, which is made by Oculus AKA Facebook, makes up for more than 3/4 of all those headsets sold. So the Democrat demographics data isn't explicitly available, but probably a lot of kids received these things. Holiday gifts Oculus Media Facebook does not release its VR headset sales figures, but the Oculus app that that you need to have to make the headset work a shot to the top spot in Apple's App Store on Christmas Day. That was the first time it's ever been the number one app on the App Store, so indicating a spike in headsets received as holiday gifts. So they're selling a lot of headsets like Oculus is is selling a lot of their things like, you know, I I I got one a few years ago. But you know, now there's, there's there's more and more of them circulating. But you know this. It's still all relegated to VR. Like, I'm not actually metaverse. You know, arguably the closest thing we have to the actual metaverse is stuff like Roblox and Minecraft. Now that that is still not, that's not immersive 3D, it's you're still looking at it through a 2D screen, but it is a software that gives users development tools to create their own projects within the shared 3D space. What separates these things, and basically all attempts from making them adverse from being the ideal metaverse, is still the proprietary. Aspect everything is isolated islands. You can't take your Roblox game into Minecraft, right? It still is isolated to their specific things. But, you know, nevertheless, Roblox's CEO described the company as the shepherds of the Metaverse in early 2021, and he is kind of right. Like, that's not that's not totally inaccurate. I'm gonna quote again from the the Wired piece by Cecilia de Tazio. If big text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple meta verses if there are any at all. Each will be interoperable under one tech giants giant umbrella the same way Apple is both a walled garden and a convenient habitable terrarium for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of apples proprietary operating system by Cecilia Dean Tazio. If big text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple meta verses, if there are any at all. Each will be interoperable under one tech giants giant umbrella, the same way Apple is both a walled garden and a convenient, habitable terrarium for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of Apple's proprietary operating system, the ambiguity of iMessage, and Apple presumably loves the 30% Commission it can charge on developers who sell apps in their App Store. O Epic Games is the other big metaverse proponent right now. You know, they were they were actually making announcements about Metaverse a few months before Facebook did. And the the CEO of Epic games, Tim Sweeney, has been outspoken against him. Universe ran by a big tech giants like Apple. But that's not that's not really genuine, because his version of the metaverse entails the cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic games. So, like, it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an open source thing. He just wants to be the one to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone else might. He tried to. Sue Apple last year and and failed, and the California judge told him that Epic games seeks a systematic change which would result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of Apple and Google, which are an impediment to Mr Sweeney's vision of the oncoming metaverse. So it's not actually about, like, him being against big tech giants and being against a big tech giant Ren metaverse. It's just that he doesn't like that. Won't be able to make as much money with it. If multiple tech companies work together to make it like, that's that's that's really what he's concerned about. He would rather be in control of this thing. Because like, yeah, it would be really interesting to see if multiple tech giants. Work together to create an actual successor to the Internet. Like an actual like, you know how the Internet is just when you open up your computer and you have access to the net? It's not, it's it's not like running a specific program. You get to go on all the things. It would be interesting if people actually work towards creating that. But no, it's all about creating very isolated operating systems with a very isolated tool like tool chest. Like, you can't access Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't these things don't work. Now you can Oculus. You can use the Oculus on Steam Games, but not vice versa. They're making things the way they're making things because they're not trying to design a new Internet. Because for one thing, the Internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of a bunch of people who were doing things that interested them all kind of intersecting and building upon each other. And 2nd like, yeah, they're and they're not. They're making individual profit tunnels they're not actually trying to create. They're not trying to like actually trying to think about what people might want next or what people might might want to be on the Internet. They're thinking how what can we sell that we're not currently selling. And that's never going to be the thing that figures out. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. On on that point, I'm gonna do one final quote from the Wired piece. If if these companies dominating cyberspace did decide to collaborate simultaneously, piercing together opposite sides of the quilt to create a digital textile, that would be very polite. But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook, epic games, Apple, NVIDIA, etc. Combine all of their valuable products, Captain planet style, into an architect of the Metaverse under open source standards nobody in particular reaps. Aliens from that's sort of a tall task, to overhaul your code and collaborate with your competitors. Why would three or four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they already spent decades and billions constructing one of their own? So yeah, it's never going to happen. The way the way society is made, the way Internet works, that's not ever going to be a thing. Speaking of companies and things that you can buy online and advertising, here's some ads. And we're back and we're going to talk about possibly the most successful. Version of a R of of VR technology. We're gonna talk about the actual use cases that are generating actual profit. So. There is a there was a tweet a few days ago that I'm just going to read the tweet and then we'll talk about the implications. This went very, very viral. I caught this very early on though, and I started writing about it and then a whole bunch of articles dropped on the topic. A farmer in Turkey has fitted his cows with virtual reality goggles to make them think they are outside in summer pastures. The farmer found out that these pleasant scenes make the cows happier and produce more milk. Future is metaverse. So we're going to talk, we're going to talk with the cow matrix, we're going to talk about. Yeah, yeah, it is. It is amazing. To go back in time and tell people, hey, you know that hit movie The matrix in the future we're going to do that, but for more milk to get milk. So the thing that went viral about it, that kind of broke the story for a lot of people was this farmer in Turkey with the pictures of the cows with VR goggles on them. Pretty, pretty, pretty ****** **. But the idea and the actual technology used came from came from Russia. Farmers worked together with developers, veterinarians and consultants. At the uh oh boy here here is a Russian town name, or I guess a farm name. Crags kernoff could. I don't know. Yeah, that sounds right. It's it's close that I I think we can we can we we. I think you nailed it. It's it's it's this farm near Moscow and they teamed up. So all these, you know, farmers, developers and vets and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project and there was an official statement from the Moscow Ministry of Food and Agriculture reads the global trend towards universal computerization significant significantly simplifies work processes in many areas. That and allows you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian milk producers keep U with the world standards and are even ready to offer the market new and unexpected solutions. On a farm in the Moscow region, a prototype of virtual reality glasses were tested to improve the conditions for keeping cows. Employees of one of the largest farms in the Moscow region, together with IT specialists, decided to conduct an experiment studying the influence of virtual reality and developed a layout of VR glasses. So the the herd donned these VR systems adapted for the heads of cows so like and they also had to, they had to to to make the imagery work. They need to tweak the color palette in the software to make it suitable for the cows vision because cows can't see red or green, so there's just shades of yellow and blue. So in order to replicate what grass Click to them, they have to, you know, change the stuff. But yeah, and then they programmed a unique summer field simulation program and. Subjected it onto these cows, the ministry the the Russian Ministry of Agriculture concluded that the cow matrix does work in a statement from 2019. This is a few years ago, officials said environmental conditions have significant have a significant impact on cow health and as a consequence, the quality and quantity of milk produced. So, you know, like, this is the thing I I talked with someone I know about this, and they're like, well, if it makes the cow, like, actually happier and healthier than, like, what's the problem? And like, the problem is is that, like, you're gaslighting, an entire creature is reality. Like, you're like, you're you're like a dog essentially cast lighting their reality. And I that is. I don't like that. I know everything we do to cows is without their consent. So I it's one of those things where it's like, we're also not gaslighting their reality in this, like. We're not depriving their senses of what the world is. No, this seems like an escalation in our war on the cow. Yeah, so, you know this other farmer in Turkey heard about this and decided to try it out on his cows. And yeah, the ****** ** cow matrix or the cow tricks does seem to do its job, extracting more milk from the cow to increase profit profitability. The quote from the farmer said we get an average of 22 liters of milk per day from the cows in our farm. The milk. Average of the two cows that were the VR glasses went up to 27 liters. So, yeah, when when the story first broke, there was the most popular article was from a site called Futurism, which made, made made me made me very depressed about this. About futurism. Yeah. Yeah. Impressed. About futurism, Garrison. Yeah. It made me mad enough that I'm going to read some of it to you. Oh, good. Thank God. I haven't been angry in seconds. That cows produce more milk when VR makes them think they're in beautiful green pastures proves that keeping them in agriculture environments isn't healthy, nor does it make them happy. Putting them in a cow matrix does sound a little grim, yes, but you can't argue with the results. Oh my God. I can. I, I say you actually can. All this has shown is that, like potentially if you put cows in this thing during the winter when it's not sunny and bright outside, then they are happier. This is not shown that, for example, taking all cows out of pastures and sticking them in matrix boxes would make them. Yeah, because The thing is they're not, they're not in pastures, they're in little jail cells with VR goggles on their head. So, like, it's that was that was the use case and like. The quote from the farmer is like, they're watching green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost. They are less stressed. And the farmer said he plans to, he plans to buy 10 more. So like, you can spend thousands of dollars on specialized caviar headsets or you can, you know, like use that money to buy more land for the cows to spread out. And and if we're at that point in society that in order to make, in order to in order to make enough cow milk, we need to gaslight cows by over ruling their senses with a clunky VR headset on their little fuzzy faces. Maybe we should start having milk. Maybe we should like, maybe that's it. Like if if we require this to have milk in our cereal, then Nope, no more. Not, not gonna. I'm not gonna do that. I refuse. That's not like it's already. And if you practice, if you don't buy milk, like like locally from a farm, you know, so if if we're doing this that just like immediately checks me out of every like, no, I'm just fully, fully not. Yeah, I think that's kind of evil. I think that's kind of evil. Like the whole industry way by which we produce meat at scale is pretty evil. But that's an escalation. That's an escalation. It's the the specific thing of like of of of overruling their reality and senses of another living creature like that is yeah, for some reason, for some reason that upsets them into a way in order for you to get like meat. And that's just like turning them into food, but like making their living. She's really ******. And then making trying to trick them into thinking they're not. Yeah, it's even worse than just having them live in ****** conditions, I think from an absolute standpoint, and maybe it's more pleasant for the animal, but from like our standpoint, it's worse to me. O Speaking of, uh, I don't know. Don't do this to cows. Is there some segue that we can work this in? You know what does essentially force you to live in an alternate reality that allows you to be more productive for the people who make money based on your existence? Buying these products and services that support this podcast, I was just gonna say podcasts in general do that, but yes, yes, yes. Cool. Alright, we are back and my my last my last big section here is titled we are the cows. So this is that's gonna that's gonna give give you a sense of how of how we're going to talk about what the traffic it don't like it. So what, what what the cow tricks really demonstrates though is that the end goal of all this is to make us the cow, right and we we are and we already are to some degree with like the Internet and smartphones but this is more this is an escalation, right? Like the people, the ghouls at Silicon Valley and you know the whole tech world want they they want a world where we are forced to dawn hardware rigs that block out our body senses and replace the input with digital coded counterfeit that's that's in Internet that tries to convince you that you're inside of it and it is inside of you that that's that's that is what they want really like even if we get the metaverse that I would prefer you know like the mythical, open source interconnected. Successor to the Internet with all the different websites, tools, and games that I like altogether and intuitively accessible through a shared digital space. Even if we get that like which we won't, and if there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in, which there wouldn't be, that doesn't actually make the real world much better. Like in my opinion, AR technology specifically could be really cool, but we just but but redesigning the world to require headsets, goggles, or AR glasses would suck like that would. Not only for people who can't get that technology right, if if if we redesign the world to be, like, the only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens, that's gonna suck. We now we already have that disagree with smartphones and the Internet, but this is another escalation of it. And again, like, like the cow, it's just going to be a way to paint over our late capitalist climate disaster of a world. Metaverse is a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political and ontological problems. And I have to use the bathroom really badly. Well, I'll talk for a little while. I think a big part of what Garrison is saying is that instead of relying on these tech industry goals to to build the future for you, which is a future in which they sell you a way to hide from the hell that they have made of the world and others like them have made of the world. Instead of doing that, you could just spend the rest of your life listening to podcasts. Put put blinders on over your eyes, cover up all of your senses but your ears. And just exist forever in a cocoon made entirely of my voice and and occasionally Garrison and Chris's in Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice. And they're saying not listen to just any podcast, but podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should listen to any podcast that I don't do. That doesn't seem right, Sophie. Where's my angle on that? Huh? I don't know. I don't know how long we should vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle. I I really need. I really need it to be. OK, I just told everybody that we're the metaverse now. Garrison our contact. I drink so much coffee this morning. It was a problem. OK, in similar to all this, you know, remember that John Carmack interview from 2020? Yes. Oh, that's such a bummer. The The Doom Co creator and former CTO of Oculus. Yes, these bodies are a curse. John. Yeah. On the show he openly said the promise of VR is to make the world you wanted. It is not possible on Earth to give everyone what they would want. Not everyone can have. Richard Branson, private islands people react negatively to any talk of economics, but it's a resource allocation. You have to make decisions about where things go economically. You can deliver a lot more value to a lot more people in the virtual sense. We can have virtual devices that can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people will be able to have these. Not everyone can have a mansion. Not everyone can have a home theater. These are things we can simulate, though to some degree in virtual reality now. The simulation is not as good as the as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have your own home theater mansion in private. And good for you. You're not the people who's gonna benefit the most from this thing. Most of the people in the world lived in cramped quarters and are not, and they wouldn't that. That's not what they would choose to be. And if they had unlimited resources, there's this piece of art that goes around the Internet. It's the this dystopian kid in a corner drooling with goggles on with like, Rainbow Pictures. But it's a terrible looking place and people say this is the world you're trying to build, people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them. And CarMax response is encouraging, he, he says. But is his life really better? Both of you takes the goggles off and he's in the horrible place. So I, I, I I think Carmack really has convinced himself that virtual reality is a path to making the world a better place in. In the interview, he compares VR to the invention of, like, air conditioning. He says, like, I live in Dallas, it's 100 degrees here. We change the world around us in all that we do, we live in air conditioning. People don't generally go, oh, you're not experiencing the world around you because of air conditioning. This is what human beings do. We bend the world to our will, and this is how things get better, by building, by building technology and distributing them to people so that they have something better than what we. They would have if they didn't exist. Now, if you dig into what he's saying here is actually a few interesting things because for one, yeah, air conditioning is actually kind of bad, like the way we're using it and what it represents. It is a Band-Aid solution to our continual problem of heating up the Earth. And it's making the problem worse every single day. Yeah. And honestly, it's it's yeah. It's like, it's like a Band-Aid that also makes the problem worse because AC contributes to a lot of energy use and emissions made out of human ****. But, you know, air conditioning is also an actual material change, right? Like it can. It can actually help people not to die due to heat. The Metaverse in VR has talked about does not improve a middle to lower class persons material conditions and to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech pros are from a regular person's reality. The metaphors in VR and like virtual worlds are going to be built based on the perception of reality held by those who create them. That's why we're getting ****** digital private movie theaters fake mansions and metaphors concerts and H&M, NFT. Doors. They're giving us a simulated version of the world that they actually get to live in for real, but we can refuse this we we don't need to take them up on this offer if we're going to be stuck with a with multiple proprietary branded meta verses that are made by rich Tech Bros to mirror a world that the that the rich tech bro gets to live in. The best thing we can do is **** with it. We can sabotage it from the. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on Tik T.O.K. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we hear at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions. Sometimes there are answers that people would rather us not explore. Now we're sharing. This research with you for the first time ever in a book format you can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books. 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. A 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. What's up, you guys it's your girl Betty? Who here and you know this about me it has always been very important to me to stand out and be authentically me not only with my music. But my style and my vibe and JBL really gets that they know your headphones and speakers should look as original as the music. You're listening to or in my case, making that's why I'm obsessed with my JBL headphones and speakers that help me reflect who I really am from true wireless headphones to pulsing party boxes. Ohh yeah, party boxes guys. JBL has a wide and colourful range of products that help me feel myself when I wanna vibe my way. I literally record this entire podcast on my favorite JBL headphones. They are absolutely incredible. So JBL wants us all to listen on our terms living in the moment. Our moment unfiltered. The JBL podcast at jbl.com. Slide we need to spam floating ***** at a metaverse concert. This is the actual thing that needs to happen, because, like we all know, terrorism is fun, right? Everybody loves terrorism, but there's horrible consequences for doing it in the real world. In the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism, yet you don't terrorize however you want in the Metaverse, and it's just trolling, and that's fine. So do as much of it as possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would go really well with this type of thing is the poetic. Terrorism concept of this applies like perfectly to this idea of how we need to **** with these digital spaces that are trying to be created. Because, yeah, like, they're like, they're pretty bad during 2021, but coin consumed all of the electrical energy by equivalent to a country like Argentina in 2021, the Bitcoin network handled like 97 million transactions. So this is roughly 0.01. 2% of the worldwide volume of non cash transactions. But Bitcoin was responsible for 0.54 of global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical. Like all like it's it's it's ridiculous. On average that's like a like 1300 kilowatt hours power per Bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy, the power consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction on average could power an average US household. For 1 1/2 months, it's it is ridiculous how much and how much it's getting used. And they're trying to build, you know, like the six city thing. They're trying to build this metaverse off of crypto, which they're like, I I'm sad because, like, crypto could be really similar to the metaverse. Crypto could be really rad, like, crypto could be an actually super rad thing, but the way it's being used right now is really environmentally damaging. And this this linking of web three, you know, the mythical web three and the Metaverse 2 crypto is showing like yeah it's it's kind of like the Band-Aid solution where it's not it's it's it's not it's not actually fixing the problem and it's kind of making the problem worse because they're so set on linking it to crypto right now that it's it sucks. Like it it's it's it's it's going to happen. It's going to suck. What you can do is you can spam Final Fantasy 7 **** you can spam Sonic the Hedgehog feet pics. This is this is the only tool we have. Save for actual terrorism, which we're not gonna talk about on this podcast, you can, but we can talk about poetic terrorism. That is something that you can do. You can **** with these systems from the inside and make them unusable. And that's that's really the only thing. And that's what I'm going to do in my spare time, because it's fun. Yeah, do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Go **** it up for them. And maybe in the process, here's my dream, Garrison. Yeah, do do poetic terrorism in the metaverse. Go **** it up for them. And maybe in the process, here's my dream, Garrison, that perhaps in the process of ******* it up for them, we build something that we actually like. That's the thing, right? Yeah. That is similar to how the Internet kind of got originally created. Of course, now it's turned into this hellscape, but you know that'll that'll probably happen anyway, 10 years or more for the metal. We could get a little bit of fun out of it, and we can have some fun with it, like we did on the Internet for a couple of years. For it all got real bad. So that is that is the metaverse that doesn't exist. And yeah, so fight against the Cal matrix as best as you can. Do your best. Pull them out. Go to city for the cows in the center of the world. Make a cows die on. It's up to us. God, this is depressing. Alright, that's the episode. Look through 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. Hello? Hello? Hey, I don't know if you heard, but my podcast checking it has been nominated for the end double ACP Image award in the category of outstanding lifestyle and Self-help podcast. I'm grateful for the nomination. I I almost didn't even do a podcast because I was just wondering, there are thousands of podcasts out there and why is my voice needed? But the nomination from the N AA CP lets me know that I made the right choice. And I encourage you to do. Don't worry if they're. Thousands of something else that you want to do. No, nobody has your sauce. So listen, you can still vote. Go to vote.ndoubleacpimageawards.net. You have until February 5th, 9:00 PM Eastern Standard Time. And please listen to my podcast. We're part of the Black Affect Podcast network on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcast. Thank you for checking in. Conquer your New Year's resolution to be more productive with the Before Breakfast podcast and each bite size daily episode time management and productivity expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you how to make the most of your time, both at work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you need to get more done with your day, just as lifting weights keeps our bodies strong as we age. Learning new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen to before breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to it could happen here, a show about things falling apart and how to maybe put them back together a little bit better than they were before. I am Robert Evans, and with me this week as a guest, I'm very excited about Chris Begley, author of the next Apocalypse, The Art and Science of Survival. Chris, welcome to the show. Thank you, Robert. Now, Chris, before we get into the meat of our discussion, I have to talk about what you do for a living. Because for years and years it was my job to go around the world. I I talked to people in pretty much every continent about their different interesting jobs. So I've, I've talked, interviewed everybody from like Bravo workers in Nevada to Iraqi counter terrorism special forces in Iraq. And you have probably the coolest job title of anybody I've met. You're an underwater archaeologist. How did you, how did you, I mean was that was it just kind of like were you kind of laser focused on that goal or was it more you were interested in archaeology and you loved diving and so the two just kind of made sense together. Yeah. Well, I started out as a what I now call a terrestrial archaeologist, you know, working on land as most people do and work for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus, as you saw in the book, but other other places. Nearby as well, and really it was about, I would say I don't know, 121314 years ago. I wanted to just branch out a little bit from that. And one of the things that that all archaeologists have seen is that, you know, there are certain things that really just aren't as explored as other things. And one was all of the archaeological resources underwater. I mean, we hear about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, right, you know, Roman shipwrecks and all that. But there's big chunks of the world where we've done very little to see what's out there. You know, and one other interesting thing about that is there are many different things you could look at underwater. But often we look at shipwrecks, and shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites because, you know, shipwreck is a moment in time that all happened in in one instance. And so when we're looking at that kind of archaeological site, we see this snapshot that we don't see when we look at a place that was occupied over hundreds of years. So, you know, so yeah, so that wasn't my focus. It became sort of somewhere I wanted to go as I learned more about it. And one of the things I find really interesting the, the, the, the basic thrust of your book is that the way in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or or how however you you know, the ways in which folks tend to discuss that when we're talking about the Maya or the Romans is, is very different from what archaeologists who tend to study these cultures, how they. Tend to perceive of of what you might more accurately call a decline or or you know the decentralization or whatever. I think there's a number of terms that we could use, but these ideas that like you have these civilizations and then they suddenly fall apart are not really based in rigorous historical analysis. Usually there's some cases as as you go out into the book. And I'm, I'm, I I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at from a, a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book, a lot of the stuff that we talk about on on this show in a more contemporary sense. I'm, I'm kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort of came together because you you started it before the COVID-19 pandemic. Obviously that had an impact on the book. It's it's it's on all over there. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I've. I was. One of the things that I do is teach wilderness survival courses and. You know, I don't do that as frequently as some people that that sort of dedicate themselves to that do you but but I do fairly frequently. And it became obvious to me over time that people were taking these courses not just to learn how to deal with being lost out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision. What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend the night out in the woods or or two or three? They're really thinking about what about doing things fall apart. I take care of myself. How do I take care of my family using these skills that you could use in a situation where things had fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards the the the fact that, you know, people were worrying about the future. I mean, I could see it, I could see it in my students at the university. I could see it. You know, in the people's faces at the supermarket, you know there was something going on there that was. That was concerning people and a lot of it had to do with climate change. And that I think was was the focus initially for me writing this because what I saw was, you know, sort of. The the Prepper community and survivalist community looking at things that really seem to be short term and didn't at all focus on what we really saw historically. So I think that my. My initial motive to motivation to write this was really just seeing this concern that was that was growing among people about what the future is going to look like. And then of course COVID hitting that that that really brought all this to the to the forefront. And are there any specific ways in your mind that you, you can you kind of think on how COVID altered what you were, what you were writing or how you conceived of what you were writing? Like once you, you know, you, you have this kind of vision that's inspired by the things that you're seeing and hearing, particularly in these wilderness survival courses. And then as you get started, we have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of, of, of things start to happen very quickly. How does that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah, I guess the, you know, the, the. There were some just sort of practical logistical things, obviously, right? Some things that I intended to do or ways that I'd hope to interact with folks in the course of interviewing people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about how things happen, the big thing for me was. How it became politicized? So quickly you know that was. You know in the. You know, you know well now you see all of the memes you know, talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't believe they're zombies or something. You know, that was never really on the radar, at least not on my radar. Before and so now. Umm. You know, it is because clearly not only do these things happen and then you have a group of people that are dealing with it, you have obviously the dynamics within the group which which of course we knew. But to see it play out in this way, in this sort of dramatic way that really altered the course of history, I mean the pandemic could have turned out, you know, differently. But it didn't. And part of the reason it didn't was because of the way folks reacted to it. And I'm I'm wondering because a part, a chunk of your career in a big chunk of this book is kind of looking at in places like Honduras where these, these civilizations entered decline. And in some cases it was very sharp, like within a fairly short period of time, 90% of the population leaves or, you know, is deceased. And you, you see like the crumbling of a lot of these governmental institutions and whatnot that had had organized life for a while, you see them pretty significant migrations. Is there any ways in which kind of the last two years as an archaeologist has changed or informed how you were thinking about these places that you've been, you've been studying in these moments in history that you've been studying for so long? Yeah, in some ways, it brings some of it into a little sharper focus. For instance, you know, one of the things that that archaeologists had long talked about was that during these declines or these collapses that it's uneven, it's not equal for everybody, it's not equal over space and time. And certainly, depending on your position in society, there's different ways in which it it it plays out for you, you know? And that's something that we. See, we see it from, you know, access to vaccines to, well, I mean even things like, you know, if we think about folks that are unvaccinated, now there's a, you know, a chunk of those people that are doing it for a sort of political reasons or other ideological reasons. But there's also a big. A big group of those folks that are doing it because history shows that they should be wary of anything. That. Society tries to do to them and so, you know, you have these, these things playing out for different ways for, you know, people from different regions of the country or political orientations or race or ethnicity or, you know, a whole variety of things. And so seeing how uneven it was, the pandemic makes me think that, you know, it certainly was that way then the other thing that we see when we look archaeologically. Is that it's these big structures or systems that collapse that really is the collapse and the things that cause it initially, whether it's, I don't know, deforestation or drought or warfare or even a natural disaster of some sort. That really it's the way people respond to those and the way these systems. Deal with those changes that really creates the the, the problems that you see later on and we can see that now. For instance, one of the things that we're talking a lot now about is the supply chain issues, right? And this is a result of COVID. But it's not a direct result. I mean it's not because the crews on the ships are at the ports or. Truck drivers have. Our sick. It's because of the ways in which all of this disrupted things, and especially when we get these really efficient. But. Inflexible systems like a lot of our shipping system was, these disruptions result in really big changes. So you know you have these huge ships that can only dock at a few ports. Once that gets backed up, you can't really. Shift and adjust and so that's I think for me just it a lot of it is seeing it play out where we see the fact that we have something that sets it all off but then we have. The the response of the system or the structure that really creates? The the the day-to-day impact. I suspect a big part of kind of why we conceive popularly of of quote UN quote collapses in the past is based on, as you talk about extensively in your book, the way in which we look at it kind of in fiction and in fiction, it's nearly always like the societal equivalent of a bullet in the head. Right you the zombie plague is out and then a couple of days everything's falling apart. And the point that you make in this is that it's probably, I mean, this isn't exactly the phrase, but it's probably better to look at it kind of like it's like a tumor or something where the. The the things are set in motion that are going to lead to to things falling apart much much at a point before a lot of people probably would have noticed it. You know the the problem can be too far gone before it's really obvious and we yeah. Yeah, I think that's that's a good point and that's the. That's really something that, you know, even with COVID it, it it shows that, right. You know, the, the, the problems are not only the existence or the appearance of this virus, but you know, first of all, how did it appear? And that has to do with. You know, decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity of human populations to animals. And then we have increased sort of communication and travel, which, you know, is not a bad thing obviously, but it is going to change the way in which these things spread. But then we have the way that we divide ourselves up into nation States and the way in which we have, you know, economic systems that are working in certain ways. So. You know the vaccine gets here, but not there and and and so forth. But yeah, that's, you know that I think is at the heart of it. You have these things that have been set in place. You have these parameters and in which you're going to have to react and they really set. The stage for what's going to happen, you know, you have, it's like looking backwards four or five moves in chess to see how did we get in this situation. It's not just because of that last move, it's because of the last 10 moves. Yeah. And one of the things that you bring up that I like is that if you're looking for kind of a historical example of a collapse that that most mirrors the way we tend to look at it in fiction, it would probably be what happened to the indigenous population of of particularly. North America after the arrival of colonizers, which was by a lot of accounts like 90% of the population dead within a fairly short span of time, primarily from disease. This this really rapid and cataclysmic. Shock, but also at the same time, as much as it does seem to mirror some of our, you know, kind of fictional depictions of, of viral outbreaks or other sort of of of societal calamities, the ways in which people survived don't really in any meaningful way. Mirror, though, are our kind of popular fictional depiction of, like, who makes it out of that sort of situation, you know, the the the strapping military veteran with a rifle and a stockpile of food or whatever, you know? Yeah, yeah, that that. You know, I would say that certainly having these skills to keep yourself alive is important and it is true that if you don't make it through the 1st 30 days, you're not going to make it through the next 30 years, but. Yeah, the way people survive outside of a few days, perhaps when they're dealing with some of these, what we would think of as survival situations is this a community? I mean, we see that with. You know, when we look at the the Native American history in North America, you know, even as populations and entire groups were being decimated by. These diseases sometimes 75% of a village in a single winter from a wave or waves of disease. Even in the in the face of that, they reconstituted themselves as communities sometimes. Multiethnic or multicultural communities, I mean there was a whole variety of ways in which people regrouped and I think that that, you know, that was the message and, you know, part of the, this image of, you know, grabbing your bug out bag and heading out to the hills is. It's just. Doesn't work, you know, and and the, the, the stockpiling, you know as well. And so, yeah, when we look archaeologically, you know, we always see communities. Yeah. That's something we really try to encourage people to do on this show where obviously some amount of disaster preparation is, is not just helpful, but is I think kind of morally necessary if it's at all financially feasible for you. You know, it it is you are, it is absolutely the right thing to do to try to have 2-3 weeks. Of of relatively storable food, some water, you know, some other emergency supplies, but kind of beyond that, as you said that first like 30 days, if you actually want not just to live but to have, you know, life, have any kind of meaning, you have to be thinking in a community oriented situation. Yeah. I mean, because ultimately, you know, what's the difference between two weeks or two months worth of food, right, you know, it's going to be gone and you know, you have to. Come back. You know, one of the things in in researching for this, for this book, one of the things I looked at was the the history of how we made a living and the the history of agriculture. And one of the things that you know that that I found was that the last time that humans lived. Where a significant portion of the population was hunters and gatherers, that is not farmers. There was like 115th of the current population, you know, less than 500 million people in the world. So. Even a catastrophic disaster that you know reduced us to. 85% of, you know, 15% of current population, we're still going to have more people in the world than ever lived without agriculture. And so we're going to have to. Uh. Recreate some of these systems and you know agriculture by and large is going to be a community based system. It's, I mean you can garden on your own, but but the way that it needs to work is is going to be a collective. Yeah. And I I think, yeah this is we we talk a lot about. I actually live with a couple of wilderness survival instructors and we have about an acre of land and we do a decent amount of of of, you know, gardening, you know, animal husbandry and that sort of thing. And it it is I've, I've spent a lot of my life on farm. So I've kind of always had an appreciation for how much work it is and and one of the things we try to talk about on this show regularly is the value of even just having a garden of things like guerilla gardening. Not because. I'm not one of those people who thinks, like, we need to replace industrial agriculture with, like, individuals tending small gardens. That's not going to work. But because the more you kind of interface directly with the concept of growing food and with working with other people in order to do that, the more prepared you are for any number of things that could go wrong. Like, even if those things don't involve a crunch in the food supply lines, the connections you make with people doing that sort of work will be more valuable than an extra two months of stockpiles. You know, when you're in your food buckets or whatever, you're Alex Jones dried food. Rockets, yeah. Well, that's that's absolutely right. And you know, one of the things that occurred to me looking into the past at some of these, you know, collapses or declines that had happened in the past, was that a huge? Percent of the population. Was engaged directly in agriculture and you know here in the IT well in the industrialized world is typically less than 5% less than that even in the United States most people like me don't. Don't engage in it. And, you know, I know something about gardening, perhaps like everybody else. But, you know, I'm not a farmer. I don't really have that collective wisdom. And if I had to do that. You know. Probably. It's like a lot of other things. When everything's easy, it's not so bad. Yeah, when it goes bad, it really helps to know what you're doing. And of course everything goes bad sooner or later. And so, you know, that's that kind of thing, very important, you know, and I think also there could. Certainly local systems and some flexible scale would be really important, you know, so I'm also like you a proponent of, of, of this sort of thing. You know, if we can get everybody to participate in ways that we aren't now, that'll give us some flexibility. What if, what if we do have supply chain problems? Well, we have a number of people in the Community that are already doing some of this stuff that could maybe be expanded or get us through this. So yeah, yeah. I mean, even if you're not like dealing with everyone's caloric needs, it could be as simple as because of where you're located. You know when when the oranges and other kind of fruits aren't able to come in from a supply line thing, there's a shortage of vitamin C and then knowing how to make tea at a pine needles or whatever or what kind of plants have a lot of vitamin C you know, even though you're not, you're not focused on meeting everyone's, you know, entire caloric needs through small scale farming, but you can deal with them a nutrient deficiency or something because you understand your environment a little bit better. Yeah and and you know, probably quality of life issues too. I mean you know for. You know kids and you know, there's, there's lots of. There's lots of ways you can survive that are pretty miserable. So you you want to, you want to try to. Directed towards those that are desirable. And I think part of that is having this flexibility, having this knowledge, having a lot of people involved in things. And you know, one of the things I talk about in, in in my book or ideas of, you know, diversity and inclusion, which we talk about in certain ways now and often I think unfortunately it's talked about as if it's done to benefit. The people that are marginalized and left out only. And while it is partly that it benefits everybody, of course. I mean, anyone in a business knows anybody in the university knows the the benefits of diversity in the same way anybody that's trying to do something understands the benefit of a diverse range of experiences. You know, that's why we make these multidisciplinary teams that go out and do things, you know, it's so that you have. This will this wide variety that that can help you keep going. Yeah. And one of the things that I really found fascinating in your book and that that kind of made me feel a little bit bad. As I, you know, I've I've spent a lot of time thinking about the what happened, what was done to and what also just kind of happened as a result of the way diseases spread when when colonizers reached North America. I had never really devoted that much thought to the actual actions that in different indigenous groups. Took consciously to prevent, to protect themselves from the spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular in your book. Could you talk a little bit more about that? Because that's something. As soon as I read it, I marked that page because I'm like, I need to look up what the studies he's referencing because I, I, I don't know anything about this. Yeah that you know a lot of that stems from the research of of some other archaeologists and they. You know. You're exactly right. We don't think about that. We're not taught about it that way. You know, we sort of have this. This contradictory and sort of. Doubly problematic way of talking about this first, for a long time we denied sort of the how traumatic and and how much of a genocide it was when Europeans arrived. And then after denying that, we sort of say, well, Native Americans are gone and no longer relevant, so we can. Ceased to talk about them. Of course that's not true, and one of the things that we see when we look more in detail at the histories, or we listen to the oral histories, or we look at the archaeology, is that there are a number of things that. That that people did and due to like the colonizers. You know, but in other ways there are things that are going to be unfamiliar to us and we're not going to see. The effectiveness or the value in it. But one of the things that that all of these things did that these groups were doing was created or maintained the group identity and cohesion and. Allowed the perseverance of of community. And so there are. You know, it's it's easy to think about people as sort of passive victims of something, especially when it serves your purpose to to think about it in these ways, and we just see that it's it's not the case. Yeah. There was a remarkable moment in the book. And I I think it was from when you were in Honduras where you, you talk about you're finding pottery shirts and they have these specific kind of markings on them from I don't like 1000 years ago or so. And you also know a local woman who's a Potter and she's putting the same markings on. And you ask her why. And her answer is like, well, because the the pottery shirts that we find from our ancestors have those on them. And my initial thought was like, oh, what a shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant. But then I thought like, well, but is that any different from like all of the different things that that I do because they're traditions because like, they're things that like people 1000 years ago in in in my line did like, no, it's not like it's it's just what people do and it is a continuation and it's a very, there's some that's a that's that's survival, you know, that's that's conscious survival. Yeah. Yeah. And and in that case, of course, whatever it meant initially. It now means that to her, right? So there's the meaning, you know, and so. It it's it's interesting. You know one of the things, you know, I I'm from and I live in Kentucky and. One of the things, especially when people come to say Appalachia, is they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky, you know, and they already have an idea of what that is. And if you don't see it because that's not really what people do, then the response is never Oh my ideas about what is authentic might be erroneous. It's. I wonder why I didn't see authentic apalache. You know, it's like, well, you did, but. You know there's going to be more hip hop and punk groups than there are bluegrass groups, because, you know, these are. 1820 year old kids that's you know they're doing this as much as this other stuff and you know more probably and so that that is something that that I think of. Often as an archaeologist, you know my focus is in the past. But if I'm going to understand things, of course you also have to understand how are people thinking about in the present and how am I thinking about it in the present. Because, you know, everything. All the stories I tell about the past are coming out of or coming out of my experience in the present too. And it's hard to, it's hard to separate those. And that really, the best we can do is try to. You know, reflect on that and see how is it that I might be limiting my understanding because of my particular experience. And and one of the things I really like about your book that I also found fascinating, so I, you know, I, I for a while did conflict journalism. And before when, when that was just an ambition of mine, before I started to do it, I would see the articles that were being written by all these war correspondents. And I would just be in awe of, like, how did they get that story? How did they get that access? How did they. They must have put so much work in. And then when I actually got there, I realized, like, Oh no, they met. They made a contact with the local who was good at it. And that person showed them around and made all these connections and, like, actually. None of this work happens without these local fixers. And you make the point that in archaeology, you're not generally discovering things like, even when you're finding shipwrecks. It's because these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah, a bunch of shipwrecks over there. Yeah, this is where you're going to find them. You know, it's always the way it is. You know, they're, in the example you're talking about. I was part of this project in Forney in Greece, which, you know, made the news because we found so many shipwrecks there, something ultimately, like 50 shipwrecks around this island. And almost all of them were shown to us by local folks, you know, that sponge divers or people that were fishers or, you know, people that were out on the water all the time. And the few that we found by ourselves, I'm sure people knew about them. We just stumbled on them before. Somebody had a chance to to show us it's the same way in in Honduras when we would be walking through the the rainforest and. You know, maybe we'd been walking for a week, so we're way out in the middle of this place. People were constantly telling me the guys that I was with would say, OK, if we go up this Creek, you know, for about 6 hours and we go over here, here's what we'd find, here's what we'd find over here, here's what we'd find over here. They knew where everything was. And that's, you know, one of the things that you. The that you learn is you know how reliant you are on on. People that live in a place, I mean, they just know it. Yeah, there's no when you get right down to it is as obsessed as we are kind of in in the Western Canon with the idea of lost cities. Hey guys, I'm Kaylee short, I'm a singer-songwriter in Nashville, TN and I host a podcast called Too much to say, which is very aptly titled. I write songs most of the time, but I can't keep my feelings to three minutes and 30 seconds, so to have a whole podcast, it's just amazing. So I share stories from my music career, my childhood. I've been known to read diary entries, play unreleased songs, but no matter what I'm doing, I'm sharing a strong opinion I have on something. So I share my thoughts on everything from. Music to martinis, social media to social anxiety, regrets to risky text, and so much more. Sometimes I even have some really special guests on to share their craziness and what they have too much to say about so you guys can listen to new episodes of too much to say every Wednesday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. 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 Le Monstre. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there. I'm Scott rink, host of the podcast history unplugged. And if you're dreaming of being a full time podcaster someday, you and I have a lot in common. I used to teach history for a living, which was great, but I wanted something more and maybe you know what I mean. So I gave podcasting a try, and I did it with spreaker from iheart. I could explain how it works in about 90 seconds, but all you really need to know now is that in my experience, the ad revenue with speaker has been three to four times higher than it has been with any other host I've worked with. Now I get to do what I'm passionate about. Teach history, but with more freedom and less stress while still earning a respectable salary. From just getting started and doing the very basic stuff to taking your podcast in whatever direction you want to take it, spreaker has all sorts of great tools, so if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try visitspreaker.com that's spreaker.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. That's not really a thing that tends to happen. Yeah, yeah. No, it's not. And and in fact, most of the archaeological sites that people didn't know about it was just because they were so small and ephemeral that no one really paid attention anything. Yeah, there's no lost city they're on. They're always known to somebody. Well Chris, I think that's that's most of what I wanted to get into in this conversation. I'm wondering before we kind of close out, because you you are both the author of this book, the next Apocalypse, which is I think a fascinating way of looking at the idea of things Paul falling apart and a wilderness survival instructor if you're going to suggest people you know. A practical kit bag to prepare for short and kind of long term problems. What are you, what are you putting in your bag? Well, you know, there's the two main things that you're always going to want is is a knife, because that allows you to make a lot of other things and what a way to start fire. You know, and we've all seen in the movies rubbing sticks together and, you know, friction methods and that works and you can do that, but it is incredibly difficult to do pain in the **** you know, and for most of us that don't do it all the time. You're just not going to be able to do it when it's 40 degrees and raining and you really need a fire. You know, you'll be able to do it when it's 100 degrees and dry, you know, because everything's about to catch on fire anyway. But, you know, so in what would what would that look like? Well, you need something that will catch on fire pretty quickly. And the thing I always takes cotton balls. You know, if you take cotton balls and a disposable lighter or one of those fire starter sticks, it'll make sparks that those cotton balls will catch fire instantly. And if you take one and you coat half of it with petroleum Jelly, then not only will it catch fire, it'll burn, you know, for, you know, a minute or so long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So, you know, making fire and having some sort of cutting tool are the very basic things. But you know the. Beyond that I would say, you know, clothing or some sort of shelter is. Is the other thing, you know, exposure to elements will kill you quicker than anything. And so having some way to, to protect yourself and that's usually going to be, you know, first line of defense going to be your close. And one of the things that that you'll know anybody that that deals with sort of survival situations is that most people that really get in trouble with things like hypothermia, you know, it's not when it's 30 degrees below and they're out. Doing something, it's when it's 50 degrees and sunny and they're out in a T-shirt. During the day and then at night it drops to 30 degrees and. You know they're stuck out somewhere with without proper clothing that's that is when things get really dangerous. So you know I would say you know if you can have some way to start fire some sort of knife and. Appropriate clothes for spending the night out. You know, then then, and you're probably in pretty good shape for most situations. Well, Chris, thank you so much for talking with with us today. Chris Begley, underwater archaeologist, author of the next Apocalypse, The Art of Science and Survival. Chris, is there anything you'd like else you'd like to say or kind of get into before we we close out for the day? No, just thank you very much for for reading the book and for reaching out to talk with me because I think that you know. Especially now as we go into sort of an uncertain future. I mean, future is always uncertain I suppose, but the. As you know, we're really recognizing some of these challenges. You know, I really am hoping that this sort of. Community based idea becomes the way we think about things. You know, it doesn't mean it's easy or that we're going to like it. It doesn't mean that that's what I want. I mean, to tell you the truth, I would love it if it was just me out in the woods. With my family, you know, I can do that. It's much harder to be part of a community and make things work for a big group of people, but that's just the way it's going to be. And that's that's ultimately the way in which you have a lot more real security because I I think. I think people I don't know the the, the the world seems so complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that that safety comes from getting away from the world. But historically, that's just not how it works. The world finds you, you know it's the best being part of a group is is always best and your. Your little group can never. Defend against the big group. I mean, if we want to put it in those terms, you know you can't just hoard everything and. Just doesn't work. Might work for a little while, but yeah, so that you know that. For me, that's the message I'm hoping people take from. Well, thank you very much, Chris. For those of you listening at home again, please do check out the next Apocalypse, the Art and Science of Survival by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for us all today. Chris, thank you again and have a wonderful day. And you too. Thank you. Hello and welcome to our show. I'm Zoe Deschanel and I'm so excited to be joined by my friends and castmates Hannah Simone and Lamour and Morris to recap our hit television series New Girl. Join us every Monday on the welcome to our show podcast, where we'll share behind the scenes stories of your favorite New Girl episodes, reveal the truth behind the legendary game True American, and discuss how this show got made with the writers, guest stars, and directors who made the show so special. Fans have been begging us to do a New Girl recap for years and we finally made a podcast where we answer all your burning questions. Like, is there really a bear in every episode of New Girl? Plus each week you'll hear hilarious stories like this at the end when he says you got some Schmidt on your face. I feel like I pitched that joke. I believe that I feel like I did. I'm not 1000% I wanna say that was I I tossed that one out. Listen to the welcome to our show podcast on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Oh boy, prop. You know what's fun is is live shows. Live podcast shows. Live podcasts are incredible. But you know what isn't incredible is the plague. Which is why we've decided to find a way to give you all a live show that won't spread the plague. A virtual live show. We had to pivot and and one could say you could really watch it from anywhere. You could watch it from anywhere. You could watch it. If you're on the ISS in space right now. You could watch it. If you're if you're in a trench in in eastern Ukraine, you could watch it. If you were driving and and don't care about paying attention to the road, you could watch it. All of these are options, with the first totally eliminated the problems of living in A3 dimensional plane we have. It's it's groundbreaking. You could call it the metaverse. Anyway, it's going to be February 17th at 6:00 PM PST. Prop is gonna be the guest. Sophie's gonna be there too. And you can buy tickets at momenthouse.com/behind. The ******** slash behind the ******** moment. House.com/behind the ********. Watch it later. You don't have to watch it live so bad, you guys. We gotta do this one. What are you talking about? This is great. It was good. I thought everybody was going to be on board with this ****. We're all just saying the same **** over each other all at once. That's that's so that they they notice it. It's called chemistry. It's called this was really bad. Adoption of teens from foster care is a topic not enough people know about, and we are here to change that. I'm April Dinwoodie, host of the new podcast navigating adoption, presented by adopt US Kids. Each episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by the families that live them with commentary from experts. Visit adoptuskids.org/podcast or subscribe to navigating adoption presented by adoption. Those kids brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for children and Families and the AD Council. Oh boy, it could happen here. That's the name of the podcast. And I'm Robert Evans. The guy hosting the podcast. Who else is with me? Is it? Is it Garrison? Hello. Good morning. Afternoon, evening. Whatever. Garrison Davis. Yep. Visit adoptuskids.org/podcast or subscribe to navigating adoption presented by adopt US kids, brought to you by the US Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families and the AD Council. Oh boy, it could happen here. That's the name of the podcast. And I'm Robert Evans. The guy hosting the podcast. Who else is with me? Is it? Is it Garrison? Hello. Good morning. Afternoon. Evening. Whatever. Garrison Davis. Yep. Not yet. A doctor. Garrison Davis. Not yet. Soon. Soon to be doctor. Garrison Davis. But that's a story. Say, you know, if you're going to pass the exam, that I know you're going to have to pass in order to get through this class, but yeah, sure. Little teaser for the future. Speaking of the future, this is a podcast about the ways in which the future is going to be real ****** ** and ways in which maybe we could try to make it less. Locked up and today we have on a guest, Mr Calvin Norman, who posted a thread on our subreddit with the very simple, very unsettling title, the woods are bad. And Calvin, you want to introduce yourself, your credentials and and what you were trying to get across in that thread because I found it very affecting. Yeah, thanks, Robert. So my name is, like you said, Calvin Norman. I work in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now. I used to be an industrial forester in the Great Lakes region. Like Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in the southeast. I did my masters down there and now I'm in the Mid-Atlantic so I've kind of been around the eastern United States. I haven't gotten out West yet but and I'm a certified force or candidate certified forest. I got like a year left on that so been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty fun and yeah your your thread what what I found interesting about. I have a good friend who is in forestry or wasn't forestry at least and and got their degree and that and we were we were out hunting in the Cascades a little earlier or a little later. Last year, and there's this wonderful moment, we've been following a game trail up like this Steve Pill side, and there was kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut. But there's deep brush all around and we get to the top of this thing. We look out and we just see, you know, these, these rolling mountains of the Cascades all covered in this the most, the this lush, beautiful greenery, all these, these pine trees and everything. And my friend says to me. It's going to be totally different in 20 years. It's already a different force than the one I grew up with. And and that that is, that is kind of the cliffs notes of what, what you're getting into a lot of detail here. And I wonder if you could just kind of like, yeah, start on that, explain kind of what's actually happening in our woods or at least the woods that that you're comfortable talking about here. It's a big. Yeah, yeah. This is a big continent and you have a pretty good international base. And I, I can't speak for the Europeans or the Canadians is a whole different ball game over there. And tropical stuff is just. White, yeah, really cool, but wild stuff. So mainly talk about the US, mainly eastern United States. So if you look at the eastern United States, this is a forest that has never existed before in the history of the United States. You know, prior to like 1920 our force was like it depending on the source you read between 20 and 50% chestnut with other species mixed in there and now we have a mainly oak dominated forest and we lost all of our chest and dude chestnut blight out West, you've got a couple of other things going on, but fire suppression is just changed the force there, same here on the East Coast and in the Midwest. You know, you used to see a lot more fires going through. I mean some of that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of it was you know, intentionally set by the First Nations and. People before the people that we think of as the First Nations and you know that is mainly disappeared except for the Southeast where fire has never really stopped being on the ground, which is really cool. But even their species composition, composition has changed dramatically. A lot of what we're seeing is, you know, changes in human management. But there's also a number of invasive species that have changed things, you know, like chestnut blight, emerald ash borer, Asian Longhorn beetle is coming in. You know, those are just the past. The understory and, you know, plants is a whole different ball game. It's it's it's all not great. It's all not great. I was talking with some colleagues at an agricultural show right before I posted that. We were talking about how the woods were bad, and we very easily laid out a scenario where we lost the most. Our remaining dominant tree species, it was not at all hard to do. It took about 2 minutes, so not great. And then the West Coast things are great either. And when you're talking about, when you're talking about losing these species and stuff like the chestnut blight, where is that coming from? How much of that is sort of as a result of, you know, climate change, like we're having a lot of tree species have trouble here in the West because of of how much hotter the summers are and how much drier things have gotten. So how much, how much of what you're seeing where you are is. Because there's been changes to the climate and how much of it is, you know, I guess kind of like globalism, like people bringing in pests and bringing in blights and stuff from other areas, and it it spreads like wildfire. Well, I think that we're just starting to see the beginning of climate change like driving species, you know, up the mountain. Yeah. Off the mountain out West and here, you know, out of certain regions, you know, as things are getting hotter and drier or as you know climates would become more extreme. You know here in the Mid-Atlantic we had one of the wettest years on record I think was like 5 or 7, whereas in the Midwest they had droughts, but before that we had two years of drought. So, you know, it's it's more extreme and that's that's just starting to take part. But the extinctions in New York extinctions. Have been mainly due to non-native pests and that's just most of it right there. Just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change. Yeah, yeah, impacting diseases. So like out West with the mountain Pine Ville, you're seeing more generations of mountain pine beetle come through. I was just doing a presentation for some folks in South Dakota and something like a third of their total forest was impacted by mountain pine beetle. Geez. And and what is that like when you actually talk about this, these beetles coming in, that's the kind of thing that even as we've got more comfortable talking about sort of of of the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change, I think that they we tend to imagine more spectacular things. These giant sweeping fires that burn through huge chunks of States and these, these huge, like, environmental calamities. What is this like what happens when one of these Beatles hits a forest, one of these beetle species? Obviously not like a singular beetle. Like what? What is actually? How quick is the effect and and what kind of comes after that? Like I I know there's sort of a shockwave. It's kind of like a bomb going off. I'm interested in kind of tracing the root of that explosion if that makes sense. Yeah. So it it depends species, it's species chestnut plate was really fast and it just seems to have torn through the chestnuts native range. So Chestnut went from Florida to to Maine and out West like Tennessee kind of area there and it just you know in like something like 15 years, the entire species gone emerald ash borer is taking a little bit longer. Got here in the 80s, started kind of going off in the mid 2000s and it's killed a couple of billion trees. So when that hits a small forest, you know, if it's a if it's a pretty, you know, beetle that kills pretty fast, like you know, dashboard, it gets into your trees, it starts with one or two and then within four or five years it's it's in most of them in a forest and then with emerald dashboard they're dead. And five hemlock woolly adelgid is pretty similar. It'll just show up one day in a stand and then the hemlocks are dead within 5 seven years and you know, sometimes you know what's going on. You know, because emerald ash borer is very clear science, and other times you don't know what's going on because the tree can't be so tall. All of a sudden trees are getting thinner and thinner, and then they're dead. Or you have pests like oak wilt and that in that trees are dead, you know in two months and then it it spreads out like a circle, you know it kind of exactly. When you see like a bacteria like growth medium with the bacteria spreading out that's open spreads and it's just like trees are dead, you know two months and they spread out and out and out. It's scary sometimes. Is there anything that can be? I mean, it sounds like with with most of these cases, like with what's happened to kind of like the chestnuts and it's it's too late for a lot of that. Is there anything that can actually be done to stop this? Like, I know we have all these structures in place to try to stop the spread of invasive species, but, like, once they're in there, it kind of seems like usually we're ******. Yeah. Yep. OK. Once you get past that, there's what's called the invasive species establishment curve. So it's an curve. And once you get. Right. Like once it starts ticking up, it's like, Oh well we're down here, so let's let's start thinking about the future. And as you lose more species like, ohh, what do we do here? Or if you're like, you know, in the case of the case of actions like this, ash is going into swamp. I have nothing else that's gonna grow here. So now I just have an open wetland like I can't grow any native trees here. We're done. So the biggest thing is prevention, like don't don't bring invasive species in or non-native species in. I was talking to a lady couple of weeks ago and she has enrolled or not, she has hemlock woolly adelgid on her property and she brought in a biocontrol or would she assumed was a biocontrol from Japan. It's a beetle and realized that, yeah, in this case it was one that had been tested and failed because it doesn't make it through the winter. But you know, stuff like that, like just just don't do that. You know, I appreciate the thought there, but don't with some of these. This is, we have, you know, you know, like Hemlock, William Belcher. We have pesticides that work really well and you apply them under the tree. And so it's like, alright, I treated this tree. This tree is good for seven years. Some of them, like emerald ash borer, you're done. There's just nothing you can do. So. Yeah, it's prevention, prevention and then you can quarantine, but. Then, you know, it's like, we're this county's done, so we're going to just try to make sure that only this county dies. Oh jeez. You mentioned a bit earlier, like thinking about the future. What does that actually look like when when we hit a situation as we have with a lot of these species, we're like, alright, well, this ***** we ain't, we ain't stopping this. What is what like what do people like you do next? Like what is the next kind of step for the forests? Or is it just sort of a smoke while you got them kind of thing, sometimes it's smoking while you got them. So like Beech bark disease is going through. Roasting beach in the East Coast, it's going, it's going to the Midwest and so there it's kind of like, well you know if it's in there and your feature dying, take him out. And if they're not, don't there's it's 99% fatal but there's 1% that can make it. So, you know like maybe we find that 1% and we'll ask where is 99% fail. But I've seen you know in the past couple of years I've seen two that made it so like if we don't cut them all maybe someone survive. Yeah theoretically we could then like clone or breed or whatever the trees that live and. In a few generations have more of them, yeah. If other **** doesn't happen, yeah. The chestnut projects been going on for the last 100 years. It looks like 40 more. It's a controversial opinion. Some people say it's faster than 40, but, you know, tell me about three years. The Chestnut Foundation, really, it's a really neat thing. So there were some chestnuts that were found resistant in some plant outside the range of chestnut blight. And so the ideas were they slowly started back breathing. So they crossed in Chinese chestnut, which is resistant to the blight. Which is native to China and East Asia. And so they they crossed them in with the remaining chestnut with the hopes of, you know, kind of eventually breeding out the Chinese, but just maintaining the American chestnut and just getting that gene in there. And so they started that back in like the 30s and 40s when they realized what was happening. Well you know today is 2022 and we are still without you know American chestnut, the forest. There are some back New York Sunni in New York where they altered a chestnut and they put in they they just they just changed the gene. So the you know version that the gene that makes chestnut blight resistant is in that and that's getting approved by the EPA, FDA and USDA. Hopefully that gets approved. If that gets approved we get real, we get real further along. Is the resistant trees are not the same as the American, just thought the resistant trees are more they're shorter and more shrubby, and they don't fulfill the overstory canopy role that chestnut used to play. That's that's best case scenario. Worst case scenario is you're like butternut, which was driven to functional extinction at the same time, and we're just nowhere on that. Purdue is working on some stuff, but it's nowhere. They're not in the woods. Now, how how much of like because I I tend to roll my eyes pretty hard when we're talking in particular about climate change and people are like, well, I think that science is going to save our assets from this one. We're going to, we're going to develop some like miraculous carbon capture method like at the last minute we'll we'll we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll be fine. I intend to roll my eyes at that. But this and maybe I'm not obviously I don't understand this at nearly the level you do is this kind of a thing where if there's hope for a lot of these species and a lot of these biomes, it's going to be in? Stuff like we figure out how to hack these trees to keep them alive and and like, is, is that really kind of where we are? I know some very good regenesis and tree breeders, but I I don't think that they have the capabilities of, you know, coming U with trees that are resistant to all of the various fungi and bugs that are out there. And even if they do, it's, you know, you have to get them out into the woods, you have to plant. We have like 740 million acres of forest. You got to get them out into the woods. You have to have the nurseries to get them out. There's, you know, even if you were able to create trees that were resistant to all of these pests, it would be impossible. So no, the only, the only answer is. Don't. Don't do climate change. And to the the carbon capture perspective, the only machine that's going to capture the amount of carbon we need are trees. I do. I do forest carbon stuff, which is a whole different episode. I wanna, I mean, I'm, I'm there. I'm extremely interested in that because obviously like we've, we've been supported by a couple of of companies who like one of the things they do to try to be nice is they'll they'll plant trees and stuff, which is not useless, but also a lot of people think that that's what rebuilding a forest is and like, no forests are part huge part of the problem with why the West is so flammable as we chop down all these trees and we grew back just the trees to chop them down again. And that turns out to not be resilient at all to anything because trees do not live on their own. Ever. Yeah. It's why it's a force. It's not just. Yeah, you're exactly right. Yeah. No, it's yeah, that's that's a yeah planting there's not the infrastructure to plant our way out of climate change. There's not the land. It's just impossible. And so even even if the even if there were the infrastructure and the land that we don't have the time, because you know, trees take time to grow, they work on a different time scale than humans do. Even your shortest lived tree is 68 years. Yeah. And it is one of those things where, I mean, we we have, this is what we thought we kind of started this new season, which is forever with which is that, like, there's no, there's nothing we can do that will stop us from continuing to face worse and worse because because like consequences of climate change, because the carbon is already been admitted, right. You can't just pull it out. Warming is going. Even if we were to like, make very revolutionary changes tomorrow, there's still some degree to which it's going to get worse. But when it comes to like within your field, what, like carbon capture using trees and stuff. You talk to us about like what that actually looks like as opposed to sort of the we'll plant a tree for every dollar you spend kind of thing? So yeah, actually, I actually can. It's I do a lot of my work about. Yeah, forest carbon stuff. O yeah. Basically the idea is to make sure you have the, the best way to get carbon sequestration of force is to have a healthy functioning forest. And that's kind of where these pests and climate change are interfering with that. And so, you know, to maintain a healthy functioning forces in the East Coast, you know, some of these you need to have fire, some of them not some of them are too wet to burn. And then, you know, harvesting needs to take place in some of these, some of these don't need to be harvested again, we're talking, you know, millions of acres of forest here. So we're going to be incredibly broad. And we got to keep invasives out. You need to keep forest pests to a minimum and then make sure that you're managing the forest, you know, as best as it can be managed, and I say managed. This is not something new. Humans have been on the East Coast since. It depends on the artifacts you want to look at and what archaeologist you want to trust. But like 25 to 20,000 years ago, and the last glaciers left the East Coast 18,000 years ago. So we had people here before the glaciers were gone. So these forests have never not had humans hands on them. And never not been touched and managed by humans. And you know, we got to make sure we're doing the best we can. You know, some of that means that we're managing for us with what's best with, you know, that means management for us, for what's best with the force in mind, not with best, what's best for the end of the quarter, what's best for your bank account. That's hard to do because force are getting more and more expensive to manage and to, you know, manage this thing here in the East Coast. We got to do a lot of fencing. We got to keep deer out of forest because their populations are so high, it's just ridiculously high and they're never going to come back down. You know, we have to spray invasive species. We had to pull invasive species you gotta go through and you gotta make sure you know you're preventing all those kinds of stuff. And so it could take you could if you do a good shelter would you can like make $40,000 out of it and then you could put all that money back into growing your next generation of force SO4 she is really going from a profit making venture in a lot of cases to like you're barely making money or you're you're like breaking even or losing money it's it's no longer. You know, if you really want to do it, great. You're not always making money, which is hard for people to get their head around. Yeah. I mean, it's the kind of thing that, in a reasonable world, huge amounts of money would be diverted to from other things. Like, I don't know. Yeah, F-30 fives. I feel like you guys could do a lot with 1F35 worth of cash. I feel like that would solve almost all of our problems. Yeah, because the problems that you see in forestry don't cost a lot to fix. But it it costs a lot for a forest owner, be that, you know, an agency or person. It costs a lot. Yeah, it's like all of the issues around climate change kind of all circle around like growth based economics and a lot of like nothing has a shared root cause. But they all have this similar aspect to them where yeah every every part of them gets worse by the extreme focus on economic growth at all costs and that suffers that that that makes everything and everyone suffer. So you know it would be nice if since we have a government it would be nice if they what do you know give more funding towards. Stuff like this type of force management, which I know they do some, but you know a fraction of it compared to what they give to like the Pentagon or you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I mean even big, you know, forestries technically agriculture, but even like you know like corn and like grow agriculture gets a lot more, yeah, they have the corn has massive subsidies compared to, compared to everything else. Yeah, like the NRCS, the natural Resources Conservation service. They do a lot with you know, farm agriculture and you know. Big it's very difficult for forest in order to get that kind of money into forest. If we could get that money, it would be a game changer, but we're not there. There is some change being made in the administration, but yeah, that's like 20222024 stuff and that doesn't help, doesn't help today. That doesn't slow down pest today, you know? You can't unkill trees, yeah? I I guess is there anything that you're optimistic about within your field right now like if you, I think that would be handy both in terms of like. Is there any sort of? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel? Because I'll admit like when I think about not having the forests, that's pretty much the most black Pilling thing I can imagine. Like for myself, like, that's the. That's the thing that I have trouble coping with emotionally more than anything else. There's lots of horrible things about. What's coming? But that's the one that like. Really scares me the most. Yeah. I don't think we're going to lose forest as a thing. They're just going to become, you know, without things being done, they've become less, they're going to be fewer of them and they're going to become much less diverse and functioning. You know, for a lot of these invasive species, be they plants, especially invasive plants, we have a lot of, we know how to control them. I was just writing a thing about controlling WAVY basket, WAVY leaf basket grass. It's a new invasive species to my area. It's highly controllable and we know how to do it. It's just. And a question of people, you know, getting out there and money to do it. If we have the people and the money, we could solve that problem. Oh, also we stop, you know, bringing that in that be even better. We actually took, you know, IBM. Here's the heart. Not IBM, but quarantine and pest management. Seriously. And, you know, people like stopped throwing, you know, they look like plant out into the park just because, like, I don't want to kill it, like, let's let it be free. Don't do that. Goldfish, don't. Don't throw them in the lake. That's why you have huge goldfish coming out of Lake Florida. Don't don't just count pets loose and stuff like that. If we could get a lot of that under control would be in a lot better place. Again, I don't think they're forced to disappearing in the future on managed. I think they just become fewer, less diverse and less functioning and then you lose spaces, species based on them like birds, you know, wildlife, all that kind of stuff. And also I mean one of the things that. Also, they have to become less accessible, both because there will be less of demand as things get more fragile. Like how else do you keep some of these invasive species out but keeping people out, which is I think a bad move for a lot of reasons. But I I don't know. I also don't know like to is it possible to have a global society where there is not just trade but the movement of people on a wide scale and not have? This kind of **** crossing, right? Like that's when I think about as someone who's more or less an anarchist, when I think about the only things that a border should exist to do, it's it's keep stuff like that out. But I just, I don't know how possible that is. Like a lot of this stuff is, I mean is this the kind of thing that's just spread by carelessness? Because it kind of seems like. It can be spread, too, by people who think they're taking care. Yeah, and both is the answer. There's some very good research out there about the relativeness between global trade and invasive species, but that also you look at like colonialism and colonial societies. There were these things called introductory societies. Oh, I'm getting the name wrong. But basically there are clubs. It's like, alright, I would like clubs of people. Like I would like to see, yes, new place that I live in, like the old place, like the European. Starling was introduced in New York because, you know, one guy wanted to see all the birds of Shakespeare in America. Christ. Oh, I get an even better one for you. The Moth formerly known as gypsy Moth, as he was going to say. That word is now found in America because of this one guy. I'll put the name in the chat for you so you can say, because I know how much you love saying French names. This guy is one of the most fiercely uphold through the law. Here comes the wave of comments about an anti French racism. Ohh no no can't be racist guy. Yeah ohh I know it doesn't matter. We still get. Well, this nobody does about my Italian accent. No, it is. It's just the French. It's just the French. Once again, the Italians deserve it as well, yeah. Tell us about at the end. Yeah. So, so this guy, he was a, he's a French scientist who left France. He came to the US for a little while, you know, got Massachusetts. I do it, yeah. So lymantria, dispara. So he brought this, this moth in from Europe and he he started trying to breed these two moths, which are not related at all. It didn't work, obviously. And then he just kind of, you know, he went, he went off to be an astronomer and he just let these moths go in his backyard and he didn't tell anyone they were there. And then all of a sudden these things escaped. And now they're killing trees, you know, across the eastern United States and they're in Washington, Oregon. I think there would be CA little bit too great. Yeah. So, yeah, that's such a good parable, like a parallel to the invasive species that is French people that really, really does just tie up all, all aspects of that. Amazing. I it makes me think a lot. Everything you say about kudzu, which, which is in the I I've heard some people say they're getting a handle on it. I don't know how to evaluate that at the moment, but when I was last living down there, it was just like devouring the entire southeast. We can handle it again if you want to spray it. Yeah, you could. You could get what's called a chew groove, so bunch of goats, you can get a handle on it. But again, that's money and effort. So it's just a question, though. You do get delicious, delicious goat meat. Oh my gosh. I tell you what the people who do goat invasive management, they have it made. Would they do they rent goats out to people? They get paid for the goats and they also get their goats fed so when they slaughter them, they didn't even, you know, that's a good business model. As someone with a couple of goats, that does sound like the dream. Yeah. Yeah. Ohh God. And they don't work on all the invasive species I do. There are folks. So they probably don't eat those beetles, huh? No. No. They also don't like plants with thorns on them, either. No. And it's very few goats can handle an entire French person either. So really? Yeah, we can't. We can't trust the goats to solve all these problems for us. It is nice that they're helping us. I don't know, so I I try to are there things? Either in terms of like, it acts people can. Hey guys, I'm Kaylee short, I'm a singer-songwriter in Nashville, TN and I host a podcast called Too much to say, which is very aptly titled. I write songs most of the time, but I can't keep my feelings to three minutes and 30 seconds, so to have a whole podcast, it's just amazing. So I share stories from my music career, my childhood. I've been known to read diary entries, play unreleased songs, but no matter what I'm doing, I'm sharing a strong. Opinion I have on something, so I share my thoughts on everything from music to martinis, social media to social anxiety, regrets to risky text, and so much more. Sometimes I even have some really special guests on to share their craziness and what they have too much to say about so you guys can listen to new episodes of too much to say every Wednesday on the Nashville podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcast. 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. Justice. 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 Monstre. Listen for free on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there. I'm Scott rink, host of the podcast history unplugged. And if you're dreaming of being a full time podcaster someday, you and I have a lot in common. I used to teach history for a living, which was great, but I wanted something more and maybe you know what I mean. So I gave podcasting a try, and I did it with spreaker from iheart. I could explain how it works in about 90 seconds, but all you really need to know now is that in my experience, the ad revenue with speaker has been three to four times higher than it has been with any other host I've worked with. Now I get to do what I'm passionate about. Teach history, but with more freedom and less stress while still earning a respectable salary. From just getting started and doing the very basic stuff to taking your podcast in whatever direction you want to take it, spreaker has all sorts of great tools, so if you want to turn your passion into a podcast and give this a try visitspreaker.com that's spreaker.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Take or probably more more realistically, organizations people could support that you think are actually helping. Try to stop as much of the woods from going bad as fast or or reverse the some of the stuff we've been talking about today, like how can we we try to have some some room for people to do something if if there is anything people can do other than check your ******* shoes for beetles when you come back from wherever. Burn all of your clothing anytime you leave the state. OK, that's a good start. That's a really good start. Not even to say sometimes it's the county. Go one stop when you go on a road trip, you stop your car at the county line and you roll it off of a Cliff with Tannerite and just let it burn. But don't, don't push out of the woods. We've seen that. How? That not into the woods? No, no, into the ocean where everything's fine. They say that's what they say about the ocean doing great. I work between the farfield and the stream. I don't do stream or water stuff because there's chemistry in there, so I don't know what happens over there. That's fine. I assume everything is great there. It does seem to be going fine. I think the best thing that you could do is an individual is is don't cut random stuff loose. Learn the plants of your area. Yeah, learn what's around you and what should be there. And like when you see something that shouldn't be there and you know it's invasive, remove it where legally possible. Obviously don't go into like someone's like Arboretum and it's like slight pull plants out. No, that'd be real bad. Burn down small farms wherever you find them. Yeah. Oh man, the egg. People would not be happy about that. But yeah, I mean, I'm not going to say anything. So I think, you know, learn plants, trees is neat. And then if you, you know, think of if you're thinking about like, you know, how can you help manage force. You know, if you lots of people either own force or know people who own force and, you know, encourage them to get a forest management plan or Land Management plan and get that. And then also if you got a lawn, rip your lawn out again where possible and use native plants. I do. I do some you know, some lawn change stuff and it's just frustrating the amount of loans out there. It's like, you know when these people, one of these reasons we're losing so many you know birds and we have fewer birds and bird species because like they can't eat grass. You see these things eat fruits and insects and seeds which you don't get in grass. So, you know, if you don't own a forest, that's fine and I'm, I'm a huge advocate of that. I try to be on the show and people again we always get this thing where there are people who critique when we talk about some of these small scale solutions is like. Oh, you know, turning your turning your lawn into a a permaculture garden with local species isn't going to like, produce enough food to feed your family. Like, no, it's not about that. If you could get a couple of 1000 people to do it and they convince another couple and like so on and so on and so on, then suddenly if you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by that lawn and you're also making a better habitat for birds and whatnot, that that scales. That is a thing that scales if we got a significant number of people with lawns to replace them. With something like we're talking about ******* kill. Kill that grass that almost certainly isn't ******* native to your area. Plant stuff that is and and and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into the local ecology. If you got a million Americans to do a version of that you. That's not an insignificant thing. Yeah. Yeah. And it is something that you can do in a lot of states. These programs to support it. In my state, there's a program specifically for like changing lawns over and that program is backed up. They are. Put the money until 2024. They spent it all already. There's definitely interest there again. Give him an F35. Let him sell it to whoever, whoever anyone gets it. If they want it, it just goes up on Craigslist, alright? Yeah, put it on Craigslist. Yeah, give it to the highest bidder. The other thing you could do is go outside. Like support your local Land Management agency. Most of these like Forest Service and Park Service. They depend on money spent by users. So go spend money at the forest. The other thing people can do. Watch your ******* boots first though. Oh yeah, definitely that. And don't don't bring **** in. Don't don't bring your like weird thing in like your weird plan like Forest Service and Park Service. They depend on money spent by users. So go spend money at the forest. The other thing people can do. You're ******* boots first though. Ohh yeah, definitely that. And don't don't bring **** in. Don't don't bring your like weird thing in like your weird plant because you don't want to kill it. Kill. You're entirely seed based diet. Yeah, if you don't, if you hunt, great. That supports conservation. If you don't want to hunt, you could still buy duck stamps and these other things that support wildlife management. In the US, wildlife is is funded by the users, so those people who buy guns and ammo and you buy archery equipment and you buy hunting licenses. So if you want to support wildlife, the best thing you can do is buy a hunting license even if you don't hunt. That's it's kind of counterintuitive, but it's the core of the North American model of wildlife management. Yeah. Yeah. That's a really good point. And it is one of the, it's also one of those areas when we talk about ways in which theoretically there's room to build inroads between left and right in this country, conservation and hunting should be one, right. And there are hunters on the right who are actually talking a pretty good like reasonably about conservation, like it is an area of shared interest. Everybody likes wild places, so to speak, quote, UN quote, while we just talked about. Though none of them are actually wild. They've all existed with human beings for forever. But like, yeah, we like, we like the outdoors. Yes, the outdoors. Yeah. Well, and, you know, people ask me, like, so I hunt. I have microscopes right over there, you know? Sweet crossing crossbow. Yeah. Give me one second. Yeah. You don't have to get a gun. I have been wanting to get crossbow pilled for a while now. Oh yeah, I wouldn't mind getting crossbow killed myself. Yeah, shoulder holster for a crossbow. There we go. Oh yeah, that's great. Oh, that's dumb. Yeah. Yeah. No, this is not a super expensive one, but it's pretty much a rifle. Yeah. I mean, ballistically at the ranges you use them, there's not any meaningful difference, really? Yeah. And if you're a person who, you know, doesn't like guns and doesn't trust yourself around them, they're very safe. So, yeah, get you one of those if you want. It's a fun time. I also like it a lot more than my my guns because it doesn't recoil. But that's enough about that. Well, that's great. Is there anything else you wanted to get into Calvin before we kind of roll out today? You touched on forest carbon stuff. That's a whole bunch of stuff on that. That's a whole other world that I am interested in talking more about that. But perhaps we should do a have a dedicated entire thing. I mean, we should definitely dedicate an entire thing. That's an incredibly important subject, and I think there's a lot to say about how different indigenous groups have been like up up in the Northwest in particular, we have a lot of kind of tribal efforts at at stuff like not just with the with the forest, but also with like the coastline and whatnot and rebuilding certain populations. Along the coast. In the Midwest, when I'm does a great job with forest management, I am actually doing a webinar thing about one of our forests and we're having them come talk about their management. Well, we invited them. I'm not actually sure if they're gonna do it yet, but the practice we use is based on what they use it there. So yeah, it's it's really cool what various First Nations do. Super late. Yeah, I just want to plug trees. Yeah. Neat dope. My favorite type of tree, probably the Redwood. Used to live in Arcadia. Go running in them every day. I know that's kind of a cliche answer. What's your what's your favorite tree? This is one behind me here. No one could see my background. It's white oak. You can't make bird without white oak. So yeah, yeah. What is an important tree? Forest products are like one of the only things that supports supports forest management. So it supports forest. So you don't be afraid to use, you know, sustainably managed wood and wood products. Find a good bourbon company capitalism and drink a **** load of bourbon. Always a good call really. All right. Well, Calvin Norman, any, uh, any less pluggable to plug plants? If you want to learn plants, that's great. If you want to learn about what's going on in your native, you know your areas around you. There's lots of groups that do that. Your local Extension Service helps you out with that. Most of their stuff is free. So plug that. Yeah, go outside and plug that. I don't do Twitter. Good. Yeah. All right. Well, go outside. Hug a tree. Calvin Norman, thank you again so much for coming on. If you wanna see Caleb's original thread, just type in the woods are bad and it could happen here Reddit, or just go to the IT could happen here Reddit and Scroll down a bit. You'll find it. That's going to do it for us today. Until tomorrow. Go out into the woods, go out into the woods. Wash your ******* boots first. 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 at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. It could happen. Here is the podcast you're listening to with your ears or perhaps other parts of your body if you have, I don't know, some bizarre form of synesthesia that causes you to taste sound. Maybe you're tasting us right now, in which case I'm going to open up the flavor bouquet by introducing my co-host Garrison and our guest for today. Why don't you take over now, Garrison? I've done my job. Great. That sounds lovely. Yeah. Hey, Garrison here. It could happen. Here is the podcast. We have a special guest today, journalist and researcher, WF Thomas. Hello. Hello. It's so good to be here on behind the women's revolution, the police insurrection daily thank thank you. Lovely to have you. A lot of people say Garrison's voice tastes like sorbet, by the way. It's a comment. We get a lot of time, a lot of those DMS. It's probably stopped that. Umm. So we're going to be talking about something I've wanted to actually bring up myself for a while now, but I just have not put the work in. And now luckily someone else did the actual work, so we now we could just talk about it. We're talking about something called disclose TV. Which is a broad range of things. It's not, it's, it's not just one thing and I guess I'll, I'll hand it over to the person who did the actual work in terms of like how, how would you describe what disclose TV is. But like before we get into like the journey of the platform and thing like what like what is it? Yeah, let me start this off by saying I've already, before the publication of the article, been publicly threatened vaguely with legal action from disclosed TV. So that will be largely informing what I say today. But we do have a lot of receipts, right? You have very scary lawyers here, so I'm excited whatever happens. So feel free to say whatever you want to say, but disclose TV markets itself and presents itself as. Yeah and I think disclose TV for our purposes despite like they they have a very large Facebook presence. But the way that we usually interact with them specifically like me and Robert and then other people who are like journalists or just anti fascist researchers. Usually we interact with disclose TB on telegram or through Twitter, Twitter through like it's how they like break a lot of current events in like a where like you know a lot of like political figures talk about them is his Twitter. And then Telegram is where they really disseminate these out into more obscure groups. And maybe they change their wording because they know the audience is a little bit different and. They've been. A vector of information for a while, really, really with the 2020 protests, they kind of picked up a lot of there. Was they, they they were everywhere in terms of like saying specific things, not doing sourcing and just having like basically they are a place where they kind of create what the they they try to create what the news is because of how isolated they are from the sources that they actually pull info from. And they're very, they're very interested in kind of crafting. Their own version of events, which appeals to people across the spectrum like they they they don't just market towards the the far right wing. Sometimes they frame things to kind of attract of a variety of people on like the under the extremist banner let's say Umm so you know you you don't just see them in far right circles. You see disclosed pop up in a lot of places because of the way they frame news and breaking events. But they didn't always start out with this. This isn't what they always were. They weren't always this kind of content aggregator that creates their version of news. And Thomas did more research into what they were before, which I actually had not done that research yet. So yeah, let's let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah, so I'm going to start off with talking about how I first. Heard about this close so I was living in Germany when the pandemic hit and got COVID first wave in Germany in the middle of March. Luckily I was totally asymptomatic, but I was kind of stranded in Germany for a couple of weeks and had to isolate in a vacation rental, and the Bavarian man who owned it just kept coming and talking to me and I would tell him, hey. It's probably not the best idea for you to be coming by and chatting with me all the time and. You know, he got into talking and we're talking in German. He got, we got into talking about the pandemic, what he thought about it. And he started talking about how he thought, oh, the government's making this seem way worse than it is, you know, the deep state, if you know anything about that, any. And he said deep state in English, and I was familiar with German far right currents at that time, but I had never encountered a pilled German dude. And that's when I realized this is going to be a ******* problem, yeah? Yeah, and and it. Lo and behold, it has continued to be a problem. So as I got back to the US and and the other thing, when I was in Germany, the first time I entered, I encountered telegram when a German news said, hey, I I just don't trust WhatsApp because it's owned by Facebook. Why don't you download telegram in 2019 I think, and it was pretty innocuous to me at the time. I didn't realize this would become a problem. Yeah, yeah. Fast forward. I was working on my Masters project which. You can talk about more later on because it's kind of besides the point if you'll want to hear about it, but looking at Telegram is the cultic milieu using Colin Campbell's framework of the cultic milieu? To understand specifically how Q Anon spread in Germany and how Q Anon interacted with these native. Underlying conspiracy narratives within Germany. Because Telegram is already massively popular in Germany before. After J6 I think of the band wave came down and there was much more migration to the platform. So, you know, I did the social network analysis looking at the conspiracy German conspiracy scene on Telegram and one of the biggest notes that came up and I was looking at a number of times shared into other groups or channels was disclosed TV and that's the first time I came. Into it. I look through it and realize, OK, they. There is an editorial stance within this, and that editorial stance largely attracts conspiracists and far right extremists to this coverage and to. This is widely shared among conspiracists and far right extremists, yeah. Fast forward, I I'm on Twitter, as many of us are, unfortunately, and I saw disclosed TV just popping up everywhere, even from people who who I would think should know better. Yeah, yeah, absolutely are. Big extremism researchers and journalists shared it. I remember their one specific one that really came across my feed disclosed had taken a video from like the blaze, Glenn Beck's. Whatever, empire, whatever you're doing, yeah, about the firefighters who were quitting over vaccine mandate or something and had all of their boots or whatever. And I saw. Yeah, lots of people sharing that as well. And eventually I got tired of saying hey. They should have suspect don't share it. Umm. And decided to write an article about it so I could just send my article to people and it's really interesting. What I found disclose TV started off in the mid 2000s as just this forum for UFOs, paranormal stuff, cryptids, Bigfoot sightings and existed in largely the same format until 2021. There were some shifts in the way the site. Presented itself. It was. It started off as a member login, where members could write articles that were largely long form forum posts, and then have people comment on them and reply. And at one point. Disclose made the jump to. Functioning as a news aggregator while. Including an editorial spin on that and including some of their own articles. Do you want me to get more into that now? Yeah, because yeah, because like the the the shift was was it wasn't like immediate as well, right. Like they were starting to kind of present themselves in more of a news gathering way, you know, around the late 20 teens. Of course, during 2020, this became a big thing in terms of their social media presence. They were trying to present themselves as like a news aggregator, right, but they still operated that, but they still operated the forum on their site throughout most of that time and it's only until recently where they shut that forum down. Which is, you know, full of, full of all kinds of conspiratorial nonsense. That's very easy to see past for most people. Secret, you know, secret Arctic **** which is, yeah, fly. It's always, that's usually a red flag. Yeah, evening and get stuff like. Watch this SJWS. Get wrecked at which, which is not a quotation but just that kind of yeah vibe that style of content. Yeah going from the forum operating than with you know their social media accounts to the shift to this more of like presenting as a news website talking about that and the potential effects that we see this having on both like the social media sites and just the overall trend of news aggregation in general I guess. Yeah. So the first big shift that I found was the creation of their telegram channel, which is in January of 2021 actually. So this is OK, relatively more recent than yeah, shift that happened. And they operated their telegram as a as more in this traditional news aggregator sense. And so that's how they really blew up on Telegram. At some point they deleted all of their old tweets and started operating their Twitter in a similar manner it was after. They created this telegram channel. In September, so actually overnight on September 20th of 2021, they completely rebranded the site. They took out all the user forums, they included backdated articles to a year prior. And looking, looking through archives of that, there was a note saying. Something along the lines of we have found so much growth on our social media, our growing telegram channel, our growing Twitter account. And. Something to the effect of we we are changing our strategy and going about this a different way. And you can, if you were into the forum, you can join our discord, which is now funct and I'll get. I'll get into that later. And yeah, looking it was really interesting too because looking at these back dated articles. Included very obviously plagiarized content they had. I believe it's all in the article, but they had four. Journalists names attached with the article using. The I generated images for their pictures. Yeah, yeah. Umm. And. The, especially the articles that they themselves published were very focused on UFOs, paranormal, paranormal phenomenon as well as. Content that could cause skepticism within an audience about vaccines and lockdowns, and I do not know the intent of their editorial board and so I cannot speak on that, but of course not it generated this effect, yes. That is, they found a way of creating content which develops a very specific audience, which grew their numbers, which made them, you know, what one could assume would make them want to make more of that content because that makes more numbers than they can. Use that to grow their platform. Yeah. Specifically leading up like after after January 2021 ramping up when the vaccines were coming more and more common in the States and then across the world, they have seen a pretty significant growth and have changed their platform accordingly. Exactly. So we began looking into. Who The Who the **** owns this? What's going on with this? Like all German companies. And it is based in Germany. There's a requirement by law to include an imprint or an impressum that includes an address, contact information. For the site and the company that owns it. A company called Future Bites operates disclosed TV, which describes itself as a private equity firm and Media Group. And looking into the ownership, behind future bytes is a man by the name of UVA Brown, who has a pretty interesting back story. He's hosted. He's made numerous web hosting sites. I believe he created some dating sites as well, but my research was not conclusive, so that's a maybe. But eventually, he sold. He had his most success when he sold one of his web hosting sites to GoDaddy for. A lot of money. And along the way in his own, as he described, booked a flight on Virgin to go into space and see for himself if the earth if the earth was flat. My God, awesome. Cool that. This is great. Thank you. Yeah. So this this is who we're dealing with. Sweet. And the thing about disclose being based in Germany that. Becomes an issue is that Germany has a very different look at free speech than in the US. For example, even online, displaying swastikas and denying the Holocaust is illegal and is a prosecutable crime that can get you jail time. So as we explored as I mostly and there's additional reporting from Ernie Piper and I'll talk a bit more about that later explored. Their discord and their telegram, we realized. Hum. Seems to be a lot of Nazis here. And by which when I say seems to be a lot of Nazis, I mean people with swastikas in their profile builds. Yeah, with, you know, names referencing the Holocaust with the whispers parentheses and saying denying that the Holocaust happened. And also sharing the neo-Nazi, famous neo-Nazi, infamous neo-Nazi propaganda film Europa. The last battle, which was. Shared by prominent Q Anon Influencer, Ghost Ezra. Yeah, I know. Oh man, this this came up a few days ago. One of the. One of the channels that me and someone else have been watching. Forwarded me it being that that that film being shared at the IT was it was it was at the the Free Organ Telegram channel was sharing links to that and I I wonder I I would I would like to track back where that link came from yeah not not great seeing that film circulate more and more especially among like you know the the Free Organ Telegram channels you know like anti mask, anti VAX, anti lockdown channel. Yeah, and seeing the proliferation of that type of content. Yeah, so. In preparing for this article. With the help of of the logically editorial team, I'm a freelancer. Their current head of content, or any? Piper, sent an e-mail basically asking hey. What's going on? You all seem to have a Nazi problem. That's kind of. Borderline illegal in Germany. Umm. To which? For a while this for. For about 24 hours this closed. Just went totally quiet and didn't post and then came out with. A post specifically targeting Ernie by name and with a picture of him and linking to some of his old reporting work. As well. Saying yes. With the help of the logically editorial team, I'm a freelancer. Their current head of content, Ernie Piper, sent an e-mail basically asking. Hey. What's going on? You all seem to have a Nazi problem. That's kind of. Borderline illegal in Germany. Umm. To which? For a while this for for about 24 hours it's closed. Just went totally quiet and didn't post and then came out with. A post specifically targeting Ernie UM Telegram channel as well with the excuse. Oh well, we're glowing growing platform. We can't moderate everything as well they have. They just crossed 400,000 in their telegram channel and I think about 30,000 in their telegram group. Which is, frankly ********. Yeah, that is if my personal opinion is that if you. Cannot don't have the resources to moderate this space. You probably shouldn't. Then you shouldn't have the space. Yeah, the space. And additionally confirming oh OK, we made our new version of the site. Yes, we backdated some articles from previous user generated content that we didn't vet properly. Were trying to fix that. Now they removed some of those articles and that yeah, none of the people. Who who are the authors of our articles or real people? And they're all pen names. You know they they also have or at least had a tab on their website that said right for us and and looking for people to send them things and saying you know we we will disclose your bio and link to all your social media if you write a story for us and they're. Was zero of that happening as well. So do you think that I know like on the rules for their telegram they have the neo-Nazi stuff rule. Do you think they're actually trying to discourage that because they're scared of legal stuff or is that just presenter Mary and they, I guess, you know, this is just going into speculation. So I think this might be more a question for even Robert in terms of. Yeah like. Is the anti Nazi stuff presenter Gary and because it does seem to be a lot of their user base is fostering that type of thing or is you know being moved over from other similar channels because yeah like a lot of like the amount that we see disclosed like you know intercept with channels like you know the rise above movement channel and a whole bunch of like eco fascist channels and a whole bunch of channels you know on the bridge like a broad range of like actual like fascist topics like people who are like into fascist theory is quite high like the amount that. Disclose shows up and I don't know, like you could look at all their stuff saying me like yeah on on their rule page saying no Nazi ******** but that if you spend any amount of time looking at where their posts are forwarded, it's almost primarily people who are self describe themselves as fascists. So, I mean, yeah, it's hard. Or Donald J Trump junior who likes. Yes, yes. It expands out into a lot of, you know, just like, you know, American journalist sues study extremism could also share discloses stuff on Twitter, right. That is part of their thing is making that and you know that that does strengthen them because it gives them that legitimacy. So then when people point out that the Nazi problem like, no, that's not us, that's just some of our users who are trolling or, you know, whatever, whatever ******** they they they want to say. So I guess, like how I guess the the real way to frame this is like how often have you seen Nazi stuff associated with the, with the disclosed TV brand? Because that's the one thing we actually can't measure, right? We can't measure their intentions, but we can't measure how often this stuff happens. Yeah, I mean that's always like the best way to measure that kind of thing rather than just sort of like making the allegation listing like we find it in this many channels. We see it shared in these areas. It's being discussed by these people and like it like that. That's I think always kind of how you actually build. These these sort of networks, is by looking at at what is actually spreading where like that's it? Is thankfully something that you can measure pretty objectively and like they are fostering it with the. Amount of stuff they talk about like George Soros and you know, the amount of stuff that they like. The way they frame breaking news is, is has that editorial bent where it's very clear that it's getting pushed in a specific direction. Like there is that is, that is a thing that you can't observe by reading the type of narratives they're weaving via how they report information. Yeah, the, the the topics that they choose to cover are topics that resonate very deeply with conspiracist and with far right extremist communities. If I had to speculate, I will say. At least since the article has come out. They have done a better job of moderating their telegram channel, at least for now. So good job. Disclose TV. No one you can't find links to Europe with the last battle there anymore, you can still find you can still find very rampant homophobia slurs. Because you know. They didn't. They clearly auto blocked some words, but people can shorten them or use different spellings for those words to still be used in the channel. There's still. Anti-Semitic. Coded anti-Semitic references as well, responding to something saying olivey for example, which is something that tends to be used by a lot of Neo Nazis and anti Semites. Yeah, I mean even and if you do any amount of research on Telegram you will you will find forward link forwarded links to this channel. All, everywhere. Like if it's it is. It is so massive the footprint that they have currently in the in, like the the the cycle of of forwarding posts specifically on telegram. And yeah, they're getting a lot of traction on it because they have stuff framed in a way that's really easy for them. To have those stuff, like line up with the communities that promote those types of worldviews and promote the, you know, the the narratives that they want to foster. O let's see. Let's have another quick break and then let's maybe talk about your big Masters project, which is really interesting. Yeah, can I, can I, can I do it? Yeah, do the, you know, the the narratives that they want to foster? So let's see, let's have another quick break and then let's maybe talk about your big Masters project, which is really interesting. Yeah, can I, can I, can I do it? Yeah, do the, you know, you know what isn't telegram? Literally these ads, unless we get an ad by telegram, which we we are primarily sponsored by the duo of brothers, but that's for a separate project. Great. My favorite ad is the is the one where it's the kid playing and they find a gun. Oh yeah, that's my favorite. And we're back. Well, we are. Thanks. Great job. Great. Hope everybody enjoyed that kid finding a gun kit and firing it. Yeah. So there's one of my favorite tweets recently was like somebody, it was somebody like clipped it a screen grab a news article that was like a toddler has shot someone every day in the United States for the last three years and somebody quote tweeted and said somebody ******* stop him. It's very good. The last thing I want to talk about is just kind of why news aggregators are bad in the 1st place and examples of which we've seen the past few years and how they contribute to this information specifically and how they don't do sourcing for any claims and they try to make themselves a primary source even though they're not. And then also love to talk about your very fancy project, so. Yeah. We saw a lot of news aggregators in 2020 that like during the protest specifically that that spawned and killed many a news aggregator account which did not help things very much. And this is, this is an issue that strikes across the political spectrum, yes. I mean one of the biggest instances of that would be an account called Annon Cat, right. That was the, that was what they called thinking of, yeah, who you know, marketed. Themselves towards the left wing. And I, again, I don't know what their intentionality was. They may have had their heart in the right place. I have no idea and I'm not going to speculate on that right now, but the effect that they caused was damaging to how information is disseminated, specifically in high stress events, you know, like, for instance, the written house shooting, you know, like stuff like that, like big accounts, the, the, the demos around that, before that, before that, yes. Yeah, like in fostering. That very fast-paced, unverified information circulation that gets, you know, a lot of retweets, it gets it gets a lot of eyeballs on it. But but it's hard. It makes it very hard to backtrack claims because they do not want to link to other accounts because they're mostly interested in growing their own account. So, and I will say disclose has gotten better about linking to the sources, even if. The title and the tweet don't necessarily match what is in the story they link to. Yeah, at least someone could take a different interpretation from the two, yes. So just like, you know, news aggregation and the way it intersects with disinformation and misinformation, not just a problem for the far right, not just a problem for the right wing, not just a problem for liberals, not just problem for leftists. This is the thing that anyone, anyone can really grasp on to. And some of its accidental, some of its intentional right, there's some, some people might just do this kind of mindlessly, and some people may, you know, do this aggregation with a very specific intent in mind. So just be very careful. Whenever. You have an account that always leads with the all caps, like breaking like news, like if if if you have an account that always does that, maybe, maybe, maybe don't take that account super seriously all the time. Maybe you should find other sources of info that don't always start the tweets with breaking news in all caps. Or my advice to people, if they do want something like that, find an actual news source that yeah, there is plenty of valid criticism to be made against. You know, these mainstream media, MSM, centrist stuff from from, you know, even from the left there's there's criticism, but you have to find some way of of finding your own meaning and understanding of what is going on in the world around you, I think. AP, CNN, Reuters. Yeah. And on that point, I think that is part of why I think disclose can succeed and or like what they did can succeed even like when I see stuff shared on the left even by like anarchists because it is a not mainstream media news source. The way they can frame things of sometimes rarely will match up with like an actual anarchist views and like yeah, I'm going to share it from this thing because it does feel like an underground, you know source. It doesn't. It's not, you're not sharing a CNN article so you feel better. Because instead you're sharing something that is not in the mainstream. So, like, I I get that. I get that pull to not something that for that generous reading of a CNN article instead. Yeah, but instead you're it's not actually better, it's just marketing. They're just tricking you via esthetics and branding and that's all that it is, right? So maybe you should. Learn. Learn to see past the marketing and branding of those types of things and look at the actual content of what's being shared. What is the university project thing that has been taking up a lot of your time? Yeah, and. So you're back in the US and I got interested. Especially in looking at the spread of Q Anon in Germany and that led me down this research path. And brought me especially to telegram again. Before it was largely used in right wing circles in the US, although the Nazis have have pretty regularly in the US been on Telegram as well. But this led me to look at this and and especially to to look at Telegram in the context of, as I mentioned, Colin Campbell's concept of the cultic milieu. Which I don't know if you all have talked about that on this. We have been behind the generally a couple of times. OK. But yeah to to give a quick summary is is the concept that? There is the space and and when Colin Campbell wrote that, it was in, I believe, the 70s. So it was a physical space where people go to find these rejected narratives, you know, reject the idea of rejected knowledge and they go to seek this kind of knowledge and and and these things. So he's talking about things like UFO conferences or meetups or or alternative bookstores or perhaps maybe signing up at an institute to get a degree in metaphysics. Yeah, is what a weirdly specific example, Gary. What? Yeah, sorry, I just read, read them. Thought. Yeah. Anyway, how's that going? By the way, Garrison? It's going good. Good. Yeah and and what you find is, is people can very easily move between ideologies and as they move between ideologies, concepts, specific schools, they cross pollinate these schools. And this is how you get these kind of highly syncretic movements like Q Anon, like the modern conspiracy movement, which is incredibly syncretic and some of the other really bad ones that are out there as well. That combine these different views specifically when you start. When you start combining this type of cultural mysticism with politics, often you can have very volatile results. Yes, exactly. Can you think of any examples? I'm not, I mean in some ways the modern eco fascist movement is built on a lot of this type of stuff. So that that would be the easiest, that would be the easiest one. I think that the syncretism of, because I think a lot of people have been surprised to see like, you know, kind of like natural medicine and and and whatnot, subcultures and eight like alien subcultures kind of colliding with Q, Anon and and these like more like far right neo-Nazi type groups and the fact that there are all of these things that were associated for years. Kind of more with the left have been increasingly pulled into this. This sort of weather system of conspiratorial thinking has been surprising to a lot of people who don't understand this stuff. But it makes total sense if you, if you have been paying attention to the scholarship on on what is actually like how cults sort of form like, it's it's it's it's like a weather pattern that's been building for quite a while. There's a gravity to it that sucks everything in together and it all kind of. It's as you said, syncretic. It's interesting because not to get into horseshoe theory, but this is even how you get some of that crossover, right? Yes. Yeah, that was that was, that was what I was going to mention is that even a lot of like the left wing authors or you know, post left wing authors who got into this like cultural mysticism, you see their texts now getting shared by like like open fascists even though these authors were anti fascist. They are able to still pick and choose what parts they're writing to appropriate because some of it can kind of synchronize and despite them coming at it from opposite ends. A very long time, like if you we, we talked about in our Gabriel Denunzio episodes, fume, which was this kind of like where a large chunk of like the the fascist intellectual movement got started in the post World War One period. But also there were like a ton of anarchists and a lot of like left wing, like thought leaders and whatnot were kind of all it was again, kind of there. There was this kind of like gravity center that pulled everything in and it all started churning together and yeah, we're, we're. Where we're seeing that happen now? And yeah, it sucks and that's that's that's great. Yeah, to jump back to camp, that's one of those examples of those physical spaces that call in that Colin Campbell was talking about, right. Where it's it's any place that ideas that are rejected by, you know, the Orthodox kind of the establishment, there is overlap. There is not necessarily ideological overlap. There is an interplay between them as people move between them and as these ideas come into collision with one another and with the Internet, right? Whole different ******* ball game. Yeah, because that space is now everywhere. Yeah, exactly. And and telegram. Specifically, has these specific affordances that make it ideal for having this soup of ******** on it as well. It's it's additionally one of, and this may be changing, there's a lot of discussion going on about this, especially within the German government. Who who could actually, they already have a law that they could use to say, hey, you can't have Nazis on, you can't have this Nazi **** in telegram. But Telegram is one of the last places where where things are largely allowed to spread without any kind of interruption, right, which I do think, you know, you look at. Telegram is used in the Hong Kong Uprising as well. It was used for it was used in the George, George, Floyd Uprising as well. And it's the same things that attract different people to at time is fake. Linear time. But shoot your clock. Shoot the ******* clock. But OK, OK Sir, I said. Let's get back to the topic. Yeah, but, but but but drumming back into this telegram markets itself is this very secure platform. It's probably not right. It does have. It's certainly not. No, absolutely not. It it does have, it does have encrypted chats, but that's only for one to one messaging between people. And even then you need to go and make sure that security settings are right. And again, I don't fully trust that. I don't fully trust. I mean, signal is about what's good as it gets, and we barely trust signal. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I trust conversations when everyone has put their phone inside a Faraday bag in a house and then we walked two miles into the woods, we walked two miles into the woods, then you can have a conversation. Yeah. But Telegram market itself is very secure app, right, which is which is largely marketing. You know, it's it's appeal is that it's not WhatsApp. It's not owned by Facebook. It's probably worth acknowledging that for because it's also very popular with a lot of people in, you know, parts of the global S and countries with authoritarian governments, and it is has been used for a lot of organizing. It can be more secure and also more secure, but also more accessible than what than any other tool people have access to in Syria. It's like it's again extremely common for like neighbor like neighborhoods and towns will have like telegram groups for this little village where they a lot of stuff gets done over telegram. Places like that and telegram sits in this interesting space between social media. It's not a full on social media site, but it's also not just a messaging app. Telegram is hard to categorize. It is an interesting sort of like in between type thing. Yeah, because you can have essentially unlimited. I think the number is in the hundreds of thousands for how many people can join a group message on Telegram. And you also have these one way messaging thing called channels where one person or group of people can send out messages that appear alongside everyone else's message feed as well. And that can, you can also enable comments on that, which I'll get into in a second, but but it's a great way to share information as well. And what I was specifically looking at is the forwarding of messages, because you can forward a message from this one channel into whatever group chat you're in and it links back to that Channel. And I was interested in seeing how far, you know, what connections can we make from this, what kind of zig zagging can we find? And the answer is ******* a lot. Where where someone may may. Use telegram for, for example, a neighborhood group message, right? And then someone forwards a message, a message for this channel or for this other group message where they talk about, oh, here's kind of health practices to use. And then you get into the pseudoscience of things crossing into further messages from us forward, forward groups and channels, from what's forwarded into that group and channel, and so on and so on until you get to the Neo Nazis eventually. And it's also, it is it is a concerted effort. On the part. Of people pushing their ideology. Who will go in the comments of these giant channels and say, hey, check out my channel? What's not a real one, you know? Airy and cooking, which is probably a channel, but probably is. Yeah, great job checking. Sorry, but but check out, check out, check out, check out this or whatever. And and especially when Q Anon moved on. A lot of promoters because it was awful. There, there was organized. Groups of of Internet neonazis going on and trying to pill boomers into Neo Nazism. Yeah, and they're still are because of the because of the mesh like network of Telegram, they try to make those meshes connect via dissemination, right? You can, you know, people who are dedicated to these more esoteric groups can join more regular like Malaga groups or cute on groups and start slowly bringing links to them to start doing links and forwarding to the more extreme channels. And eventually, yeah, that does. That does work. It can be a slow, careful process, or it can be very fast and like bombastic. And it'll depending on the person. One of them will latch on to 11, will latch on to the other, yeah, and and. Before the article came out, what I did see was the specific thing of of. Accounts that I would associate or believe to be neo-Nazi, encouraging people to join their groups and channels in the in the Telegram group message as well. And I cannot speak to what that looks like right now after the article has come out. Yeah, and I've been trying to take a break from telegram for my day-to-day life and focus on reading actual books. So but yeah, that is how I can always tell when one of us has been spending time on telegram, because the the the things we consider jokes get much worse. Yeah, you remember when I found that playlist of Blink 182 Nazi covers covers? It was that there was like 100 of them, like 1488 or something like 14. Yeah, me and Aussies. You always you can. You can find the most ****** ** stuff a don't don't do it. Don't don't scroll until you absolutely do not do. You're not going to get this isn't like covering this. You don't need to be on Twitter, let alone ******* hell yeah. It's it's not even. It's not worth it. Like there's there's no sacred of it like knowledge that we're hiding. It's just. Yeah, it's it's just kind of sucks. Like it just like it just sucks so bad. Yeah. It just makes you feel worse about life and yourself and the people around you. So the scope. Your Masters project, what is kind of the what's the what's the deal with like? Tying these things together I guess. Yeah, yeah. So, so using this social network analysis to argue that that telegram does function as this cultic milieu. Which? Yeah, it seems to be hers, which seems to be the case. Yeah, you know, and the question gets into what is the responsibility of the platform, right? Because I fully believe there should be something. At least similar to this, it has been used for, you know, purposes, the line with my politics in which I would call good and needed. However, they've also allowed this ******* awful ecosystem to spread. It's interesting to see when Telegram has had to step in and they, you know, they have pulled down some ISIS accounts and channels. And and yeah, they have pulled down. When I was in Al Hull, which is that the camp where all the ISIS prisoners were in Syria, like, Wow, Jake and I were in the camp. We could see on telegram like ISIS supporters in Al Hole talking about stabbing guards like in real time. It was not a particularly. They've done like a lot. There's less of it than there used to be. But it is still not hard to find ISIS on telegram. Yeah. And they they've taken down. A few amount of neo-Nazi channels. It's it's funny because oh God, maybe cut this, but they've taken something, you know, channels when they shared ISIS **** for example. Yeah, yeah, I think we're, we've, we're familiar with that line of thing. That's something we've mentioned before. OK, cool. There has been pressure from from the Play Store and Google as well or the Play Store from Google and the App Store and App Store. Yeah, Apple's App Store from Apple to say we aren't going to carry the app if you don't. Do just a tiny bit better. Essentially which, which which. Also, it exists as a web client, both as a web client and as a desktop app as well, but that would. You know, limit some of it. So, so this has become largely discussed in the German, in the German Parliament there's a new. There's a new government in Germany and and. There is a history of. Germany kind of is the lead for. Doing things about this digital content, especially within the EU and and as I mentioned, there's already a law called after Enforcement Act that requires. Platforms to takedown content in Germany that could be implemented on Telegram as well. There's already a law. Yeah, I mean this is. They like the thing. Like, you know, what I watch happen lots is, you know, these channels will get shut down and they'll make a new one and they'll shut down that one and make a new one, right? It's this. You see this with like discord servers, Telegram channels. It is kind of this endless cycle. And seeking an end to the cycle is always not as easy as what one would hope. Because of the cyclical nature of building these platforms and connections and how the people who run these, you know, intersect, and specifically with Telegram, it's really easy because of the channel gets shut down, you're still part of 12 other channels, and odds are one of those channels is going to forward you the link to the new channel that was that was lost. Yeah. And this is the thing you see where they send lists of channels within extremist groups and channels they will send out a list of here's other groups and channels to check out as well. Yeah but I mean I would. So that's something that's you know hard for regular people to actually do. But something I think that people who do not own these platforms nor lawmakers can't think about is, is particularly the the the cultic milieu that does, you know go past regular left right divisions in terms of politics and how you know symbol like symbology and stuff that was you know initially you know perhaps more anarchist or or left wing is is being used. Like people on the right and some people are really confused by that and there is ways to, there is ways to understand it like it is it is I I'm very frustrated when I look at you know, people online who. Don't understand why Nazis can use 10K and. Right. It's like, yeah, like it's it's not, it's, it's not, it's not, it's not really about what I actually wrote. It's more the the symbolic meme of Ted K and trying to, you know, get that get that line of thinking across is not the easiest thing because sometimes it'll go in the other direction and be like, oh, 10K is a Nazi, which isn't accurate either. Like that's that's not also the most accurate thing to say. So it's it's the cultic milieu framework of being. Yeah. Sometimes these symbols can crossover from one thing to another, and sometimes the action can be the same. You know, both anarchists and like insurrectionary fascists both want to like attack like industrialization and attack points of industry, right? But maybe their ideologies are slightly different sometimes in specific ways, so it's always a tricky thing to kind of navigate. So I think in terms of, you know, people should think about what symbols they promote like publicly and stuff is a good thing, and think about news aggregation and how to maybe. Not not just share something because it's countercultural trying to figure out what other what other types of narratives the source is spreading. Yeah, journalists support the work of real. Journalists cause a bunch of ******** people out there who are doing awesome research and work. So I think that kind of wraps up the scope of what I want to talk about around disclose specifically because we disclose is a thing but it's also like it's good, it's just like an example to like this over like this like broader like phenomenon I think because like disclose won't be here forever hopefully like you know hopefully in a few years it's something that we can just like look back on and laugh about but it's you know it's still a good signifier for a phenomenon that happens and the phenomenon even even if disclose goes away the phenomenon is still going to stay. And it's important to point it out when you see whatever the next version of this is. So, and I'll also say that the cultic value isn't necessarily a bad thing, right? This is. You know where where stuff that is rejected by the Orthodox goes and. You know, clearly eliminating right any kind of cultic will you just means everything is exactly the ******* same and falls in line with Orthodox belief, which I strongly disagree with as well. No, there's there is a way to be countercultural without being a conspiratorial fascist. I would say most, most responsibility in which you were consuming and sharing. Yes. And I would say like most people who are actually counterculture are, yeah like actual punk is, is is that, you know once you're enforcing traditional hierarchical viewpoints. That that ain't punk, that is, that's playing into what the status quo was. That isn't. That isn't revolutionary. That is, the living members of the Sex Pistols would disagree with you. Aren't they all? Yeah, yeah, but I think we can all agree that having living members of the Sex Pistols was a mistake. And I would I prefer Lana Wachowski's version of Punk to theirs anyway. So, hey, who cares? So thank you for your work, Thomas. I would recommend people read your article, which you can do by Googling disclosed TV. Now it will be it for me. It's the 2nd result that pops up. So that's goal of send it to all your friends and mutuals who are sharing disclose TV. You can find it on logically. dot AI is the website and the full title of the article is disclosed. TV Conspiracy Forum turned disinformation factory. Thank you. Thank you for that. Do you want to direct people to your Twitter account? Do you want to be a ghost that fades away in their memory? Just don't be ******* weird. You can find me on Twitter at W under score ******* weird. Do under score Thomas. God ******* damn it. Jesus Christ be weird, all right? I guess I'm keeping my account locked for more weeks. Yeah, I also want to shout out. Some of the local mutual aid or one of the local mutual aid groups in the town where I live or in the area where I live is the Atlanta Justice Alliance. Their cash app is. Cash symbol, ATL mutual fund other venmo's ATL mutual fund. They're helping out. They they've done weekly. Weekly provided food and resources for people, unhoused people living in downtown Atlanta and are a great group. And then also people want to give more money to things. Shout out eight Atlanta Solidarity Fund, who have helped many of my friends get out of jail after they were arrested at protests. And also you can hire me if yes, if you researchers, yes you can, you can't. You can hire Thomas if you want. I mean, I've, I've, I've, I've known Thomas for a bit. They do really good work. Yeah, they're very, they're very, they're. In my experience they're very careful researcher. They will not say things without thinking about them a lot first, which is always great in a researcher or at least not publicly send them money and off putting comments and even mix of money and really off putting Twitter comments. Oh and one more shout out to my one more shout out to my friends at terrorism Bad pod, which you should listen to and is on Twitter at terrorism bad pod. Well, that does it for us today. If you for some reason are on social media and you want to follow us, you can follow us at cool zone media or absolutely don't do or happen. Here. Pod, you can follow Robert Evans at I right. OK, send him. We are messages. Do not do that and you can send me weird messages at hungry. All right, Sean Garrison, pictures of salads that you make and and keep keep doing that for like 5 or six years to the point that it it actually becomes funny because it's going to take awhile. I'm just happy that people stop sending me all ****. So that's honestly that's a win. That's that one's on you though. Goodbye everybody. 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 or 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. 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. I'm Jake Halpern's, host of deep cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. He bribed judges and even helped a hit man walk free until one day when he started talking with the FBI and promised that he could take the mob down. I've spent the past year trying to figure out why he flipped and what he was really after. Listen to deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Hey there, it's Ebony Monet, your co-host for the San Diego Zoo's Amazing Wildlife podcast. In this special episode, we're speaking with Doctor Jane Goodall about the fascinating journey that led to her social discoveries on chimpanzees. So, 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. Bing wildlife on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts, sisters of the Underground is a podcast about fearless Dominican women who stood up against the brutal dictator Kapal Trujillo. He needs to be stopped. We've been silent and complacent for far too long. I am Daniel Ramirez, and as a Dominicana myself, I am proud to be narrating this true story that is often left out of the history books to read. Your has blood on his hands. Listen to sisters of the underground wherever you get your podcasts. So by now we imagine that you've seen the theories on tick tock. You maybe even heard the rumors from your friends and loved ones. But are any of the stories about government conspiracies and cover ups actually true? The answer is surprisingly or unsurprisingly, yes. For more than a decade, we here at stuff they don't want you to know have been seeking answers to these questions, sometimes their answers, that people would rather us not. Explore now we're sharing this research with you for the first time ever in a book format. You can pre-order stuff they don't want you to know now. It's the new book from us, the creators of the podcast and video series. You can turn back now or read the stuff they don't want you to know. Available for pre-order now, it's stuff you should read books.com or wherever you find your favorite books.