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Hello, I'm Erica Kelly from the podcast Southern Fried True crime, and if you want to go from podcast fan to podcast host, do what I did and check out spreaker from iheart. I was working in accounting and hating it. Then after just 18 months of podcasting with Spreaker, I was able to quit my day job. Follow your podcasting dreams, let's break or handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. 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 impactful behavioural discoveries on chimpanzees. It wasn't until one of the chimpanzees began to lose his fear of me, but I began to really make discoveries that actually shook the scientific world. Survive on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Chuck Wicks from loved country. Talk to Chuck where we bring you what's really happening in the country music family. We also if you love country, here's the deal. You love country music. You can be on the podcast. So if you're a fan country music or you can call in anytime. Like I want to talk about this. Hulk Hogan called in. He's like Chuck the hulkster love your podcast. Jason Aldean, Jimmy Allen, Carly Pierce, Lauren Elena. Listen to new episodes of love Country. Talk to Chuck every Monday and Thursday on the Nashville. Podcast network available on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcast. 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. What grows in the forest? Our imagination and our family bonds. The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest near you at discovertheforest.org, brought to you by the United States Forest Service and the Ad Council. 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 Lamorne 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. Each week we answer all your burning questions, like, is there really a bear? In every episode of New Girl plus you'll hear hilarious stories like this that was one of your things you brought back from Latvia. Yeah, I brought because all professional basketball players. Yeah, it's like a little 7 foot poop, yeah, listen to the welcome to our show podcast on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Gonorrhea? Garrison takeover? I asked for some grunting. That was like a word. What? OK, what? It was gonorrhea. *******. So you open a show. I know lots of they could have been openings have become ********. Openings now. Just kind of opening. More than one type of open there. There's two. There's there's grunting and then yelling something weird. That is. That's basically the same. Learning how to do your job is cook ****. Also, to be honest, most of the time doesn't know which podcast he's doing. They're all doing. What is this? Are we doing? Is this the daily zeitgeist? Is this is my Jack O'Brien. Like you as miles this is it could happen here. We're talking about ****. So we're talking today about the different things that are it here being the states this time. But we're talking about basically over the course of the past few months, we have covered a few different topics on the show and some of which have already kind of had some results or had updates to what we've already covered. So we're, I'm going to, I'm going to go through a list of like 3 different things that we've covered and talk about kind of the updates in these stories. You know, most of what? We've covered around these topics, have been like a mix of original reporting and interviews. So now there's been further, further work done on this. And I just want to kind of update people if, you know, they're not as terminally online as us, maybe they have not heard that there's been changes to these stories. And I wanted to kind of put together a nice little concise thing talking about updates to all the things we've covered. So the first thing that we're going to be talking about is the cop city in Atlanta and the defend the Atlanta Forest Coalition. So I think like. The day after our episode dropped on that, Atlantic City Council voted 3:50 in favor of getting the militarized police training facility greenlit, nicknamed Cop City. There was 17 hours of public testimony where 70% of the callers spoke out against the facility. I mean that we had that happen in Portland. It doesn't. It never matters. It doesn't matter what the vast majority, especially when there's, especially when there's money involved. Yeah, yeah. Do not, do not ever be deceived into thinking that you live in a democracy and that what you actually want to matter is in any way, shape or form. This is just not. This is empirically not true. Like like 65% of Texans periods support vaccine mandates in some instances, but the governor just made it illegal to do them ever. Like, it's it's it's that way across the board, across the nation. People ask sometimes because like, you know, when you get into anarchist discussions of politics, there's a lot of criticisms of democracy. I don't. I think democracy is a lovely idea. I would like to try it sometime. It would be nice to give it a go. It would be nice to experience. So yeah, this City Council voted to lease the 350 acres of city owned forest land to the Atlanta Police Foundation, at least 85 acres of which is going to be slated to become the police training facility. The facility is going to cost around $90 million. Jesus Christ, I could. Train cops. Much cheaper than that, although training is the wrong word. Yeah, that is the wrong word for that. So yeah, $90 million it's going to include. It's going to include a state-of-the-art explosive testing facility, firing ranges, emergency vehicle operations course, a classroom space, and an emergency and an emergency helicopter space. Probably learned to read right. I'm sure it's for teaching people to do bad things. It's going to be an emergency helicopter pad and an entire, like, mock town. It is good that they have the emergency helicopter pad because cops shoot each other with live ammunition all the time, and the training that does, happens constantly, does happen a lot. So yeah, the main backer for this project is the Atlanta Police Foundation, which is a political advocacy group that, you know, has a lot of funding from corporations and they try to, you know, sway the political power of the city into giving more power to the police. Uh-huh. So the, the, the the interesting thing about this, though, is like the vote was supposed to happen in August, but it was rescheduled for early September after there was a lot of public backlash around this proposal. Then the, the vote that was supposed to happen on like the 13th got pushed back a whole day because there was too many callers saying that they didn't want the facility. So the vote got pushed back a day in September, but it's they still voted for it. Yeah. So $30 million is going to be footed by taxpayers. And the other 60 million is going to get paid for by the police foundation, which has a lot of different like corporate donors. So that's that's the that's that. And of course, it's on, you know, on this forest land, which is like some of the, you know, biggest forest land in any major American city. So, you know, they're tearing down all this forest to build this concrete city to train cops. And so we should also, we should also mention that at the end of our interview with some of the people resisting this, they basically said, like, if the vote goes through, resistance is going to continue. So yes, we'll continue. There's probably going to be efforts to, like, actually try to physically prevent the construction of this. But the next thing we're going to be talking about is stop line. Which means there was also, you know, physical efforts to prevent that. But the type of efforts that people usually do in, you know, modern green activism usually are a lot more performative. Or they're specifically to pressure to, to create scenes that will try to convince politicians to veto the process. So it's not, you know, it's it's different from the 90s when it was easier to, like, actually physically stop the prevention of things. Now a lot of the people who, you know, are trying to do this. It is. They're not convinced that, you know, doing a lock box is going to actually physically prevent it. What it's going to do is create media coverage, that truck that is going to hopefully convince politicians to be like, hey, maybe we shouldn't do this. And that's a hard bargain, right? That's not, there's no saying that that's actually going to do the thing. You know, if in the case of top line three, that did not stop line 3. There was a really good critique of the Stop Line 3 protests posted in a it's going down by an indigenous anarchist who lives on that land, who was like younger. And they're, you know, watching all of these, you know, older indigenous anarchists, you know, keep on getting arrested and brutalized and, like, but we're not actually doing anything. And the methods that we're doing, the methods that we're trying to like, you know, gain public support, this isn't working in this specific context. Maybe we should reevaluate what we're actually doing. I know it's going down, face a bit of backlash for posting that critique, but I think that I think the critiques actually worth. Are there any other thoughts on the Atlanta thing before we move on to the Stop Line 3 stuff? No, no, other than to note that I think the best brisket I've ever had came from Atlanta. OK, well, I'll probably, I'll probably visit Atlanta in the near future. Maybe they're with you, in which case, I'll get some more ************* brisket. It was actually fun story. We were Rd tripping through town, me and and another friend in another car, and we were talking over radios and a trucker got on like the channel we were on because we were talking about where to get BBQ and he told us where to go. It was neat. It was like an actual nice, like moment of CB Radio connection. Like this guy was just scanning the waves and found us and was like, oh, I can tell you where to go. Anyway, continue Garrison. That was completely unrelated to stopping Line 3. So the next thing is earlier, I think in September, maybe August. I forget it's been a while. We posted two episodes about me visiting the Stop Line 3 protests and the Earth first camp, and a lot of stuff has happened since then. So you know the the main, you know thing is that the pipeline. Has been finished now and is basically getting is ready to be operated or it probably already has some operation. It's unclear how much is being used right now, but it is done construction it it double s the capacity of the original pipeline. It's going to be doing like a 760,000 barrels of oil a day. So in the IT carves out land through through wetlands where people grow wild rice and go hunting. So overall, the past few months, police arrested over 900 people. And it's a, there's been a lot of, like, felony charges specifically for locking down, which is pretty new because they're using felony theft charges for people just locking down to equipment. Yeah, that is an unfortunate escalation. Yeah. So by the time we posted our top line 3 episodes, we kind of already figured this was going to be the result. That's kind of how we ended the episode, saying there's been all this resistance, but probably it's going to get built and, you know, there's other things that we can learn from this movement. Going on into the future, but the new developments that have happened, I I did mention in the episodes how much Enbridge was directly paying cops. That was something we already knew that was happening. But there was an article by The Guardian that really gave a lot of new information around how much police involvement there is with like with Enbridge, like they are actually coordinating a lot. So overall, Enbridge has reimbursed US police almost 2 1/2 million dollars. For arresting and surveying protesters also paying for like food, lodging, gas, it's like it's not just not just paying wages, they're paying like for extra stuff as well. So at least at least two and a half, $1,000,000 that's been paid from the Canadian oil company, you know, including that includes Officer, Officer Training, Police patrol routes, surveillance, all this kind of stuff. But one interesting thing that was noted in the article is that the company Enbridge meets daily with police officers to discuss intelligence gathering and patrols. And when and when Enbridge wants protesters removed, it directly calls or sends letters to police. So they they actually, like, coordinate when to actually get police involved during protests, and they have at least daily information meetings. The other interesting thing besides just directly paying them for food for, you know, training equipment and the coordination between Enbridge and people being on the ground. Is how much that the embridge paid for, like proactive safety patrols and specific, like specific officer surveillance following alleged activists like home. So they would like trail specific cars for a long time and try to like, do like in person surveillance on specific people they thought were activists. And all of this time was paid for by Enbridge and was being coordinated with Enbridge. So it's not just, you know, paying for training, it's not just for paying for equipment. It's specific surveillance of certain people. And that is, I don't know, that's something that we weren't. We did not really know the depths of that for sure, but as pretty, it's pretty messed up. I know we we suspected some of this coordination before, like when we talked about police showing up to the Stop Line 3 camp and blocking off access to the road. This was at the same day that drilling under the river was just being finished. And we so we suspected like, yeah, there's like Enbridge is obviously talking with police to prevent people from leaving so that they can they can finish up this specific drilling project that was, it was pretty obvious to us at the scene and now we have, you know, extra confirmation that, yeah, they do like meet daily to coordinate these types of things. So it's good to have that extra confirmation of the stuff we already like suspected and stuff we already kind of like put together through experience. But now we have like, you know, court documents and like records showing the extent of the coordination. All right. We'll talk about. Terrorism. But you know who else is a terrorist? Oh boy. The products and services that support this podcast are alright in a good way. You know, like, you know like a like a like. Kind of. OK, alright, well, it's it's complicated, all right. What do ads just run? Ads stop. Oh yeah. So it'll probably be funnier if you bleep out the name of the terrorist organization. This is how we this is how we pick up from the ad Breakers. So you're saying that? So, Garrison, we got some, some critiques that came in to the old news line, by which I mean, people deemed me on Reddit, which I read. Yeah, I never respond. I almost never respond. It's nothing against people. I just don't like being communicated with. Yeah, too many people. Too many people asking me to send messages to you and, like, that's annoying. Yeah, Garrison, you're not my secretary. Yes, and welcome to the last three years of my life. Yeah. Anyway, yeah. I mean, but that's funny, Sophie. Ah, well, you just say, Rockford, I don't know, there were people who were like, hey, I don't know if you know this, but Earth first has a problematic history with like Eco fascism and that sort of stuff. Yeah, just like that too. Yeah. And it's it's one of those things. They definitely are an organization that has said things in the past that I don't agree with. Specific people who do organizing with them that don't have great beliefs specifically around like you know, a lot of like in the old green movements as you know a lot of like. Transphobia some like racism. That's because they're the green movements, like all left spaces deal with versions and there's a variety of stuff, you know, not like respecting like indigenous people. Yeah, that's been that's been a thing. But the specific term ecofascism, I believe is incorrect. Because they don't advocate for the genocide of a specific group and they don't have like, far right populist policies. So, like, you can have bad opinions and bad ideas and you can actually be racist without actually being fascist, especially ecofascist. So I feel like people throw that word around a lot and they don't actually know what it means, but I what were you specifically referring to, Robert? I'm, I'm trying to find the message here, but because I got a message saying that. The first is bad because they're antinatalists. That means they're fascists, which isn't isn't. We got that, which isn't actually like, I'm just going to disagree with that because I don't think antinatalism equates fascism, especially antinatalism for like antinatalism is basically saying don't don't make people. Stop having more kids right now because you have a lot of problems to deal with and maybe we shouldn't be having like, you know, three kids, which is not. It's not a take. I'm not an antinatalist. I don't actually disagree with that take though, but I think it's more in the line of like. The most fundamental of all human desires for the majority of the population is to to make more people. Which is kind of why I like antinatalism because it has that thing that's opposite to what of a lot of humans? Natural reaction. And like, no one's forcing antinatalists don't want to force you to be anti natalist they just want to, like, bring up this as an idea. Yeah, and I I think it's a valuable idea to discuss. And I don't think it's, I don't think you're, I don't think you're embracing like, the massacre of human beings. Geno, that's by saying like I think it'd be best if we didn't make anymore. I'm not planning to arguable point. I'm not planning to have any kids because I don't see why it would, especially when there's so many like children that can be adopted and we talked about you having kids so we could experiment with making them blue. This is a separate conversation that we talked about last conversation. We're not talking about involving colloidal silver. We are not talking about this on the plot. We'll just include that tantalizing hint also. Just think in general when we talk about a group that's had a long history and a specific thing they're doing in the present. Yeah, this has happened in other situations. People like, well, you know, they did this or some one of them said this and and there's a couple of things I feel about that. For one thing, it's it's like. It's entirely possible that the people doing the thing in the present day have nothing to do with the people 20 years ago. Yeah. Like, most of the people at the first gathering gathering were like, in their 20s are around my age. Like, they weren't in the they weren't in Earth first in 1980. Like, that's not yeah. So I feel, like, silly about kind of making them be held accountable for something somebody else said under a similar banner decades ago. And on the podcast, I talked about how, like, people either Earth, Earth, Earth first gathering, like, talked about this. Like the people talked about Earth firsts, like history and how they haven't handled some issues very well. There was a lot. There was a massive effort for this gathering to like to like uplift and make sure everyone focuses on indigenous voices. Like they they they invited over multiple indigenous groups to give talks on green resistance and like land back like that was a big focus that like making sure that this actually is something that is heard because people know like this is, yeah, this is something important. This is something that actually should be done. And there are, I think in general when we talk about. Like? Holding organizations and individuals accountable for their past. What matters is like. A mix of what they did and what they're doing. So obviously, if Earth first had been saying 20 years ago we need to wipe out all the Jews, I would be, I wouldn't care what they were saying now. You know, it would be like, yeah, you can't really come back from that. If you want to do a completely different thing, it needs to be a new organization. You don't. Yeah, but they weren't. And I'm not saying that where I'm just making an example. But like, as a rule, I think we should embrace the fact that organizations and people can change throughout time and be better than they were in the past and and learn from mistakes and and flaws. And I I feel pretty unwilling to condemn individuals or organizations for the mistakes of their past, although that is dependent upon the kind of mistake and the harm that it caused. Yeah. And like, and how they address it in the future. It's like a lot of these. Yeah. Because, like, it wasn't like Earth first as an overall organization of specific people they were affiliated with, like, you know, specifically like Edward Abbey has had some not great things around different, different, different social issues. And his books were extremely influential on, on the beginning of green resistance. But that's something people talk about. Like, that's something that is like. Discussed and debated. And he was. And he was like, even in the 80s and 90s, he was like kicked out of her first gatherings for kind of being a loser. Like, for for having these bad views were like, yeah, we probably shouldn't have you here anymore. Leave, go away. It's like that was something that was even talked about back, like, back then as well. That is that isn't just a modern thing. Yeah. And I I think in general, there's a couple of things. Number one, whenever we talk about, like an organization in a specific context, they're doing this. That doesn't mean we're embracing everything they've done. And #2, whenever we talk about the history of of of a movement or a group, I hope nobody ever takes that as, like, here is the authoritative stance on the history of this thing. Like, it's when we talked about the Black Panthers, there's a bunch of stuff we left out that's very important. My hope with those episodes and my hope with anything we do is that it like inspires people to want to learn more and read more, and we're giving them a basis of understanding that they can use to expand their knowledge on an important topic. So. Please, we are. We are. There's like one thing collectively that that Garrison and I have any kind of expertise on. And outside of that, you should not take anything we say as, like, here's the comprehensive history of of this, because it's I I understand one thing, and it's it's how the Internet makes people ******. Yeah. So yeah. Yeah, I mean that that was something. This whole thing was something I thought about when writing the episodes is how much to include of this stuff. And I did not feel like it was super important to discuss this stuff because it wasn't relevant to the topic of stop line three. It wasn't relevant to the topic of like the current ongoing green resistance. If you want to do like a history of green activism, then yes, this is something that would be that would come out and I think, like at some point we probably should do. Absolutely. And like all of that, **** like that, there's a ton of stuff we want to talk about that we haven't yet because it's a Daily Show and my God, give us some ******* time, people. But Speaking of. Edward Abbey. You know what? Uh-huh. Sells quality monkey wrenches. Uh-huh. OK, alright, that's fine. That's OK. The the maybe one of our sponsors. It's possible. I hope so. Ace Hardware. Ace Hardware. Ace Hardware sponsoring us. They do sell. You can get some good monkey wrenches from Ace Hardware quality for fixing your faucet, for fixing your faucets. So go get wrench pilled and then listen to the rest of the show. Well, we're back. We just had a good discussion about what we're gonna talk about and we realized that it wasn't after the ad break. So here we are in in early September, we had an episodes about both California's climate and the ongoing recall election against Gavin Newsom. So a few days after our episodes dropped, I think like the the day, the day the second one dropped was was Election Day. We we we got the results in faster than what I was expecting and Newsom did handily beat. Larry Elder with like, yeah. Not even close. Yeah. So people voted 61% no and like a 38% yes. So he Newsom did a decent job and and pushing off elder so this this this whole recall processed costed California taxpayers $276 million. She's not like we needed the money for anything else. Garrison, come on. Yeah. So you know. You take away those. We're gonna spend it on literally any fighters. Literally anything else. Water make giving how California needs water and firefighters Garrison coming giving houses to people who need houses. I don't know. Yeah. So takeaways from this. The recall process still should absolutely be amended. It should, stupid as hell require, should require more than 12% signatures of the last voter turn out and the government should be requiring to get into. If you're going to be elected into government, you should be required to get a majority of votes. Not, not a, not just a plurality of a specific, you know, sect. So there's a whole, and we, we, we, we, we talked about the specific reasons why it was bad in those episodes. Those those are still, those are still like, those are still valid. Those are still relevant because there's still the same issues. Yeah. And none of the fact that this turned out well had anything to do with the Democratic Party who very nearly bungled it. And it doesn't it doesn't really impact, it doesn't impact, you know, the California's climate issues. So much. And like, just because Newsom's in office doesn't mean they're going to get much better. You know, there's still things that he needs to be pushed on to, to, you know, make the climate a little bit more habitable. In the meantime, it it it means that we will continue stumbling towards a Cliff rather than speed running off of it. Yeah. So generally what voting for Democrats means. Yeah. I will say it's interesting to me that. It it doesn't. Seem like you can get a the vote was rigged thing to work. Unless the election is like, kind of this. This is the next thing I was going to talk about. OK yeah, because because like, in the week before the election, Fox News, Republican Party and Larry Elder and even Trump were really starting to ramp up this idea that if Elder loses, that means the election was rigged. This was like they were really pushing this hard and, you know, spreading it like they were giving links to a website like before he lost even be like if, you know, when I lose. Use this website. It was like, OK, that's OK, funny, that's weird. But on the night of the election, Elder seems to kind of claim to climb down from the inflammatory, like, rhetoric around the election. In his concession speech, he told supporters, let's be gracious in defeat. So he once the actual results were in, he really climbed that down. So we can read into that. But the other thing I want us to read into here is that could this, could this rhetoric around if we lose, that means it was rigged, could that distance? Franchise Republican voters from even showing up if they believe that all elections will be stolen from them. Being that they'll be less Republican turn out if there's just if they think that it doesn't matter. So that's the other side of things. It's like I I'm not sure if if if the other side effects that this that this rhetoric could have. Yeah, there's an interesting so. Dream, dream, dream. The last election, like national election cycle. There is a bunch of interviews, people who weren't voting in Florida. And I thought it was really interesting because there were, there were several people they talked to were like, yeah, I don't vote because last time I voted was 2000 and they stole the election. Which, which, which which. Yeah. And, you know, I'd say that. Like it. Yeah. Yeah. Like I think it is slightly different when like 2000 really actually was stolen. Like literally there was. There was the books like there, there, there. Roger. Roger stone. Yeah. Roger Stone LED a riot to stop. Like the votes from being counted, like, whatever. Weird Bush, I think, yeah, people got like, like a bunch of people with like vaguely black names got like their name struck off the like the voting rolls. Like, there was a lot of yeah, but yeah, and I don't know if it'll if if it if the effect can work that strongly when it's like, completely ********. Which was I think it's yeah, I I don't know. It's it's hard to say because. It's it's it's unclear whether the voter turn out on the because like you know there were times where they were polling like 5050 between between between Newsom and Elder and it's unclear. I think definitely the big advertising push that corporate donors gave to Newsom in the month before the election did help get Democratic voter turn out. You know like people voting for New Year getting people scared about ******* Larry Elder as the governor did not was not ineffective that very much works that did increase. There, but I don't know because like with the whole election being stolen rhetoric that could both increase Republican voter turn out and that there's also the side effect now where maybe it could decrease it because they're just disenfranchised about this concept. But this is kind of just speculation at this point. I don't have actual data backing up this claim right now. This is just something that I thought about while running this right up. I'm like, I wonder if this could be a contributing factor in the future. People really feel like they're always going to lose. Maybe they just not even are going to bother, but it's hard to say. It's like, you know, the main reason why. Elder lost wasn't due to Newsome strength. It was because Elder is that like, is completely like he. It was like it was the most extreme qualified, like wildly unqualified and like one of the more extreme candidates like running. And yes, he did get a lot of support among Republicans, but among moderates and people, you know, left of center, in terms of like in American spectrum, they're like, yeah, no, this is going to be a disaster if he gets elected. That's the main reason why he didn't. It's not due to Newsom being great, but I mean, Sophie did mention a few things that Newsom has done since then. So do you want to say the specific details just so I don't have to look? She's famously a big Newsom fan, so, yeah, not come on. So not to give you some credit because this is like an obvious right thing to do situation, but. At the beginning of October, the Senate Bill 796 was signed into law. It was a unanimous vote, and Newsom signed off on it to give back Bruce's speech, which was owned by a black family, Willa and Charles Bruce. Back in 1924, their land was illegally taken away from them. It's a beachfront plot in Manhattan Beach, and I signed into law to give it back. So that's that is good. I mean, yeah, yeah, more of that should be done. I mean, that is kind of the basis of like. You know, that is one side of land. Back is just giving people land back to people who used to have it. Yeah, this is, this isn't really to like indigenous stuff, but, you know, I've seen people make that same comparison for like, yeah, we should just be doing this more in general to a lot of people. Yeah. Yeah. That's a I'm glad that that was done. It's also now illegal to remove a condom without consent in California which is wait, what? Yeah. Years. And you're gonna have to change a lot of things about how you have sex with Californians, that it's the that is state that is real bizarre to prohibit. You didn't realize that was legal action. Yeah. During intercourse. That's the. It's the first state to do that. First of all, huh? Yeah. And it's wild because under any reasonable definition, that's rape. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's 100%. It's just, yeah, it's absolutely rape. California also now requires menstrual products in public schools, so that's bare minimum. That's good. That is. Wow. I didn't realize that it happened. Yeah. And I want to be clear here. I'm not giving you some credit for this, but if he had lost the recall election, none of this would be happening. No, it's nice that he. I'm sure some of this was him kind of providing a SOP to the people who lined up to stop the recall. And those are good things that were done. Yeah, and and I think, I think that's sort of an important thing to understand about when politicians occasionally do good things. It's like. They they don't do good things because they want to do them. They they they they do things that benefit from you because they're either in some way scared of you or it's because they need to buy, they buy you off. And and that that is you know that is that is a legitimate way that good things happen like I've got a couple other there's been a lot signed in recently so I got a couple of other ones that I that I think are relevant to our show. California will now streamline extend assisted death law. So that's that's good that reduces the time until terminal patients can choose to be given fatal drugs. So good starting January 1st the waiting period required time a patient makes separate oral request for medication would drop to 48 hours down from the. Current minimum 15 days, that is. Yeah, that is good. Pretty rad. Yeah. Yeah, that is that sort of that. Yep. I mean, there's just, there's there's a. I mean we'll see if there's yeah it's, it's it's hard to lot. There's a lot. It's hard. It's hard to be like. Worse than Larry elder. Yeah, that's my point. This one definitely would not get get through for Larry. California, California, next law to strip badges from bad officers, like very vaguely written. Yeah, we'll see how it works is very vague. But yeah, we'll see what happens today. Like none of that stuff would have happened under Alerian. One thing, and I am surprised at, like, I'm surprised at some of those things actually got through because I'm, I'm surprised that Democratic politicians would actually vote for those things we put into office. That's why I was like shocked and very specifically like the condom thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And very, I was not expecting that to go through some signs legislation to extend to go cocktails. Wait. Alright, that's fine. Sure. OK. Come on. More more. Drink cocktail heads. Sorry. All right. So at least Larry Elder is not an office. There's still a lot of climate issues and maybe this rhetoric around stealing the elections not going to work every single time they do it. That's kind of the main. That's the main thing that I was going to talk about, and it is it is. I mean, one of the things that people are talking about and a lot of the spaces I generally agree with is like the foolishness of voting as harm reduction. And there's been a lot of, if you want to believe that it isn't, there's been a lot of information coming up. The Biden administration that will support that belief. Yeah. But what we're seeing right now in California is there can be like the these these are not none of this is going to fundamentally change the major problems that are confronting us. But but a bunch of those things are going like, it's life's going to be easier for some little girls whose families don't have much money. You know life got easier for that one family who got their land back. You know, potentially it's going to be easier to get bad police officer or to get particularly. Had police officers off the street and that's not, that's not nothing like when we say voting can be. And I'm not saying that it it usually is, but when it can reduce harm, that's what it means. It means that like, oh, some bad things that that would be worse are not as bad because of this, not that everything is better. A lot of stuff will be the same and is the same in California. Like ecologically, nothing ecologically. Funding fundamentally changed, but some shifts a little easier for certain groups of people as a result of some stuff. And specifically I think the getting, getting more like contraceptive products and menstrual products inside public schools is one of the literally the best things we can do. Like like for the whole country, that is like something that is if that was required in every public school, that would make so many people's lives better. Agree significantly reduces harm in a specific way. And I think that just because, like, yeah, I mean, it's not going to stop us all from burning up, but that doesn't mean it's not worthwhile. So those are the three stories that I wanted to give some updates for because I know, you know, there were changes happened, you know, very soon after posting those episodes. I still think the California ones are worth listening to because they do lay out a lot of stuff around around California's climate and the specific weird stuff that it has with specific weird things it has with its election process. Think the line 3 episodes are going to be pretty good to go back to as well. Umm. And then I add the specific cop city thing in Atlanta. That is the stuff that I am. It's going to be the most like ongoing thing stills because that that's going to be an ongoing project. So I'm sure we'll come back to the cop city at different points throughout the next few months so that that that, that's the updates. Any, any, any closing notes from either Christopher, Robert or Sophie? Yeah, just I do. Well, excuse me. Sorry. OK. Alright, Sophie. Just reminding, we've said this earlier in the episode that like. We're just giving you a brief, brief snippets about this stuff. There's a lot, there's a lot of really good articles online that go go deep into these things and we'll post our sources on the website. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. We we we we do. We do a good job. I think most of the time. Patting ourselves on the back. Chris. Yes, but we're great. Only heroes. I really like that. That's fair to say. Absolutely. But do do not have a podcast be the only source of information. No, absolutely nothing. Like don't do not don't listen. Just I'm begging you. Listen to if if you think more of a of a left perspective, that is that that goes in some directions, we don't. It's going down is a lovely place to check out Margaret Killjoys. Live like the world is dying Saint Andrews YouTube channel. He does some some really incredible stuff. You know there's all sorts of good people out there and then also like history books more than anything like history books. History books were the thing that radicalized me. Yeah. If you want to read more about the the the new SIM notable laws signed recently, the KCR and Sacramento did a really good breakdown article that all note. Oh sorry, Sophie. OK, and and as a note we we will be doing more episodes like this over time as like stories that we come. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that for anyone who hates their phone. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And at Mint family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twists at Mint Mobile. Combehindthatsmintmobile.com behind seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. Now, a word from our sponsor better help. 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Uncle or is cooked in some ****** little place with that pattern that wouldn't pass a code inspection. That is true. The more the more codes it violates, the better the brisket anyway. If you see these chef actively **** on the grill, that means it's going to be incredible. Jesus Christ. Anyways, Twitter and Instagram. What happened here? Particles on media subscribe to the feed and leave a 5 star review. That's it. Don't don't don't **** on your brisket. Grill **** on everything, all right? Life I. Here's to the Great American settlers, the millions of you who settled for unsatisfying jobs because they pay the bills and you just kind of fell into it and you know, it's like, totally fine, just another few decades or so and then you can enjoy yourself. Of course, there is something else you could do if you got something to say. 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Well, it's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind about what's on my mind, and that could be anything. Every week I will be in conversation with an interesting person who has something to say. We're going to talk about feminism, race, writing and books and arts, food, pop culture, and yes, politics. I started each show with a recommendation. Really, I'm just going to share with you a movie or a book or maybe some music. Or a comedy set, something that I really want you to be aware of and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary original podcast, the Roxanne gay agenda, the Bad Feminist podcast of Your Dreams, Every Tuesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ohhh Garrison, is that good? Is that the show? Just keep going though. OK, well it could happen. Here is the show that atonal noise is is my introduction this week. Because I'm a hack and a fraud who isn't a hack and a fraud is a is our guest this week, Saint Andrew. St. Andrew, you are a solar punk anarchist from Trinidad. You have a YouTube channel where you talk about solarpunk, you talk about stuff like seed bombing. Yeah, I'm, I'm just very excited to have you on the show because I'm a big fan of your YouTube channel. Thank you. Good to be here. Big fan of your work as well. Andrew, I kind of wanted to start with. Why this why solar Punk is important? Because. I think it's easy for folks who just kind of skim it to see it. It's just like, oh, it's an aesthetic. It's maybe an art style or a fiction style, maybe something that's neat, but not something that has, like, a lot of inherent value to people trying to change the world. And obviously you disagree with that. I disagree with it too. I quote, I keep coming back to again and again as one from Werner Herzog in the 1970s. And it was something along the lines of, I think, that without better myths were destined to go the way of the dinosaurs, right. Once we actually have. I forget his name right now, but there's this excellent, excellent book called The The Truth About Stories. And I think what it really emphasizes throughout the book is the importance of stories and how stories impact how we navigate the world. Which is why I sort of embraced solarpunk, you know, as a story. That we can work with going forward, yeah, I I think, I think it's incredibly important to have. Better stories, better myths. Because for one thing. I think where the left falls down a lot is not having is is accurately diagnosing the problems without providing. A better look at at the at the future, you know, and when the problems are when the people who do kind of propose solutions, it's often not in a way people can feel. One of the benefits that that that the right has that fascism has is that they they're very good at providing people with myths and providing people with kind of a fictional look at, at their idealized world that draws people in. You know, you can laugh at the right, you know? People that work on like meta narratives, and that's very, very core to their ideology. So I guess where I I'd like to start with you, Andrew, because this is kind of the first time I think we've really talked about solar Punk on a on this show, even though from the beginning before any of these episodes dropped, this was always a central part of our discussion about what the show was was going to be. Would you kind of provide an introduction to, to what solar punk is for our listeners? Sure, sure. So I would say that solarpunk is a vision of the future that. Please this emphasis on the existing world and how we get to that future from where we are now. So it emphasizes the need for environmental sustainability, for self governance, and for autonomy and social justice. It emphasizes the need for, you know, human and ecocentric ends to really be In Sync. And. It aims to really heal the current rift between humanity and nature. It also recognizes, of course, that. There isn't this binary between climate change happens and climate change doesn't happen. Rather, it understands that how we navigate it will. Have a variety of consequences and some will be positive, some will be negative, but it's up to us to really shape that. Yeah and it's Umm. I want to drill into a couple of facets of that but I I want to quickly plug one of your YouTube videos for folks who kind of want a more involved explanation and and and background you have a video called what is solar punk on your channel? Saint Andrew ISM. Like Andrew ISM that I think is a fantastic introduction not just to like the aesthetics of solar punk but some of the practical some of the practical kind of expressions of it and and two of the ones you list is like examples of here's here's what this is. It's like actual practice, you know, and not just an aesthetic is is seed bombing. And then you talk about this, this very interesting kind of like terracotta air conditioning, which I think is I think is neat because it's it's one of the problems that I think with kind of some versions of of of particularly kind of on the more liberal end of of of solar punk imagining is just sort of like ways of replacing ways of gaining the same kind of consumptive benefits that exist. I guess not even, not even solar point like greenwashing. Greenwashing. Yeah, greenwashing. Like here, let's get the same consumptive benefits we get skyscrapers with trees on them. Yeah, skyscrapers with consumerism, same level of, you know, destructive extractive practices. But we have some flowers and some trees, so, yeah, and that's not enough. But at the same time, there are things that aren't like air conditioning is contributes massively to climate change. It's also not a luxury, like if you live in a place where it's 120 degrees. A lot of the summer, that's not a luxury. Yeah, this is coming from someone in a tropical country, yeah. Definitely a necessity, yeah. So I, I wonder if you could talk about kind of those two, I mean, or if you would have different ones you'd like to pick. But just kind of what you see is sort of the praxis expressions of solar punk, sort of beyond the aesthetic. Although we're going to drill into the aesthetic some too, because I also think that's important. Right? So I think some of my favorite manifestations of solarpunk in a practical context are things like Gorilla gardening. Gorilla Gardening is really the biggest one because it's one that someone could literally. Wake up and do today or tomorrow. You know, as soon as they hear about it, being about it, just get some clay, get some seeds, you know, and put those things together. And as you're walking home or walking to the store, just toss them wherever there's some free dude. So that's a fun one. There's also, of course, things like a little bit more involved like community gardening and particularly forest gardening, because that will provide a level of food autonomy and agency for people who have been alienated for a long time from the process of food production. They're also practices like composing or coppicing, and it's like a way to produce lumber. Without chopping down a whole set of trees. So you are able to get the wood from the trees, but the tree remains alive. There is also things like. Of course, solar powered technology, whether it be. Algae beast windows that's, you know, extract energy from the sun or solar seals or solar ovens or like the terracotta air conditioning, which by the way, I learned recently, can't really work in a human environment. Yeah, but yeah, there are a lot of. Different. Opportunities there also there are things like, you know, 2 shares and maker spaces and seed libraries, all different ways to sort of bring it into fruition. Sipon, that is, yeah. And I, I, I I think a lot of that's really valuable. I'm interested in. In part sort of your your attitude on. Umm. What? Let me think about how to phrase this. Umm. What do you think are kind of the things as we talk about sort of the things that can be at least potentially replaced with, with less extractive, less consumptive methods as sort of an example of solar punk practices replacing those things. There's also things that we are not going to be able to have if we actually want to live in a more sustainable future that that doesn't contribute to some of the nightmares that we're all going to be increasingly facing your, you know, and again I I think it's, it's telling that so much of kind of. The, the, the future fantasies of that are written by people who come from, you know, my part of the world, the United States focus on like kind of post scarcity methods of, of guaranteeing the continuation of consumption just through in some cases like fantastic methods, you know, magical 3D printers and the like. You come from a very different part of the world, very different perspective. What do you see as the things that like, we're going to have to give up? Coming from a country that is actually reliant on oil and natural gas production, we have to get rid of cause, yeah, we definitely absolutely have to get rid of cause free to ships as well and really the whole. We that, you know, global supply chains are structured right now. Not to say that there wouldn't be any sort of global sharing of resources in the future, but the way that it's happening right now, it can't continue to go on. We can't continue to structure our cities and our lives around cars, you know, and other methods of gas guzzling transportation because. We're literally gonna run out and we've known this for a long time, but. It's nearing the the D is nearing close on, inclusive and. Yeah, we we have to find a way to do without it. Yeah and it's it's I, I think tell like there's a couple of things that are important. One of them is you can't just say we have to stop global trade because and global travel because the people have have sought and done that for as long as there have been people in one form or another. It's it's a fundamentally human thing. But there are aspects of it like you know expecting that every kind of fruit and vegetable will be available year round, which is certainly a thing that we in the United States expect. That doesn't that that's not part of a realistic future. And if it's part of the future, then it's only going to be part of the future for an ever shrinking chunk of of the country. And you can see that in sort of or of the of the West. And you can see that in kind of the the like what we're dealing right now with like the supply line shortages and failures. And like one of the, I think the symbols of how far we have to go in my country is the degree to which people are freaking out by the fact that Christmas presents might be late. Let alone being like, yeah, you might not be able to buy coffee. Ever or all the time. You know, you might not be able to get tomatoes in December. Which reminds me, I think one benefit to Gorilla gardening, and that's what sort of mindset is. As you learn to sew, you also learn to reap, right? So a lot of people get into gorilla gardening. All end up getting into foraging, and there are apps and stuff you could download that allow you to, you know, learn how to identify plans in your area. And you'd be surprised. A number of plans in your area that are, you know, useful for teas or for salads or for whatever purposes that can be used as replacements. Or I'm not sure if they could replace coffee, but they could be beneficial. In recognizing how we have to live with. Our local ecosystems, basically. Yeah. And a big, you know, when you talk about limit learning how to live with our ecosystem, stuff like planting forest gardens and the like or food forests, I think is the term, I think something that has to be discussed is, is the matter of of indigenous sovereignty, especially when we're talking about, you know, it's not just, you know, North America, a lot of chunks of the globe indigenous people had spent, you know, in some cases thousands of generations setting forests up in order to. Sustainably produce food and when, uh, when colonialism arrived, that was often just seen as like, oh, this is, this is, these are wild places for us to for us to extract or tear down and replace with monocultures, you know, single crops. And so a big part of actually building back that capacity, the capacity of us to to survive off of the food that can sustainably grow where we live is, is looking back to those indigenous methods and and also you know, giving back land in a lot of cases. And yeah, that's something you talk about in your videos that I think is really important to to to, to to explain to people. Yeah, I mean, there's there's really is no way to separate the violent and oppressive institution of colonialism with the ecocidal nature of modern states. You know, those two are deeply intertwined, deeply married together. And so you can't fight climate change without addressing the issue of sovereignty, of indigenous sovereignty. And land back. Yeah. It's some it's really interesting I've been I've been up hunting on Mount Hood with a friend who is who went to school for like forestry management and as we were driving we had to drive through a chunk of the reservation in order to get to the the BLM land where we're we're able to hunt. And he pointed it out and once he did it was immediately obvious just how different the land under indigenous control looked from the the the land you know just feet away that was being managed by the federal government in terms of like how much better the. The forest management was how much, how much smarter it was. It was managed in order to reduce the chances of like a ladder fire that that actually kills, you know, the trees and whatnot. There's this whole thing blowing up on Twitter right now where you've got a chunk of Marxists who are trying to frame land back as. Just like shifting ownership of resources, which I think is really missing the point, but I find interesting about Twitter. Here's the exact same discourses are repeated over and over and over again. So I remember this exact conversation happening around this time last year, around April, last year, earlier this year as well. It's just the sea and discourses get recycled over and over again, and it's reaching point for me where I realized that. These people are don't want to learn about landmark, what it really means because they are invested in. The structures that exists and they don't want to have to interrogate that so. Yeah. This one has to be an interesting thing of note. Yeah, and it's some. It's it's it's frustrating. I I guess that that acts as like a general. Description of of Twitter discourse, but certainly does, yeah, I think it's. I think it's telling the degree to which people even on the left treat it as a fantasy as opposed to. Doggedly pragmatic. And and and proven so like proven by like like you know like you can read UN reports that will, that will essentially say land back in the space of a 500 page. You know study on how indigenous Land Management functions are a great deal better than than a lot of the stuff that's like centralized by the federal government where we like our federal government is terrible at Land Management and it's part of the it's part of the problem. I think one of the things that that excites me about solar punk as an aesthetic and idea is is getting back to this. Relationship with the land as opposed to talking about just preserving it, as talking about managing it because because none of our, none of the land that people live on is like wild in the sense that people mean it as it's been cultivated and that's and that's the thing, right. The whole philosophy of, you know, land preservation as was taken up by the US government with the whole, you know, you can stop forest fires. Everything ended up leading to more forest fires down the line because if there we have a role in the ecosystem, not just there, to stand back from afar and just observe it so we don't do our part to manage the underbrush and whatnot and clear it away and exercise, you know, control fires where we end up in the situation we're in today, you know, cultivation, not just. Sterile preservision, yeah. Now, one of the things that you talk about, well, because one of the more frustrating discourses, this is not just a Twitter thing, this has been going on for years, is the discourse around GMO crops. And usually I would say like the two most commonly heard sides are GMO's are bad because, you know, Monsanto, cancer or whatever, or GMO's are good in in thought. And the thing that you point out, which is I think the accurate take, is GMO's, the preponderance of evidence. Is that like there's nothing inherently dangerous about genetically modified crops, but the way in which they're often used is, in order to create these massive monocultures is really toxic. So there's a lot of promise for GMO's in terms of keeping our our existence on this planet sustainable. But what's not sustainable is the kind of industrialized agriculture where you have 10,000 acres of one thing which just doesn't happen in nature. Exactly, exactly. And if you look at how genetic modification. Took place prior to, you know, advanced ones in genetic modification technology. Event, how many people are familiar with the dozens upon dozens if not hundreds of varieties of just corn that were present in the Americas prior to colonization? A lot of those varieties were wiped out or were suppressed in fear of these monocultures. But. If we're able to cultivate the diversity of these crops and maybe bring some of them back through genetic modification, that would really help us with, you know, food resilience in a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate. Yeah, yeah, I think that. I mean, you, I think you said it perfectly. I want to move back to kind of what I introduced the episode with, which is talking about the value of a fiction and myth making in a in a very pragmatic sense. I guess I'll start by saying I think one of the clearest signs of the danger that we're in and how toxic our society has gotten and I am speaking from a a primarily US centric standpoint here, but I don't think it's unique to the United States is the extent to which trust me as as the saying goes, when the US sneezes. Natasha. Cool. So anytime there's some phenomenon happening in the US, there are the copycats. Yeah, as well. So and I I do think this is pretty global. I mean, you see it in, like, South Korean films and and, yeah, it's all over. I know you're gonna say, yeah, the obsession with apocalypse. And when we when we go to the future, it's always a dystopia. There's a degree to which we've almost forgotten how to imagine. Utopia, or even not just utopia, just a way of living that is an improvement in a lot of ways. A future that's better. We've forgotten to do both utopian fiction and any just kind of like positive fiction in a lot of ways. You yeah, it's understandable because the world is kind of terrible right now and a lot of in a lot of ways. But there's also, there's been utopian fiction inside other terrible worlds as well, I think. Just the modern. Interconnected media sphere has really rewarded this type of like dystopian and collapse based apocalypse fiction and I'm sure that's that's worth interrogating why? But it is a problem that needs to be solved. Yeah, and it is. And and you're. I think it's important. It's not entirely based on how ****** ** things are because like when the first Star Trek came out we were at like the height of the Cold War, things were terrible. There was a lot of utopian fiction during World War Two. During World War Two. I will always be impressed by the fact that. Gene Roddenberry saw it as incredibly important, both to be like, OK, well, in the future, like in the middle of the civil rights movement. In the future we will have overcome, like, racism, but not just that, but like, I'm going to, I'm going to stick a Russian on the bridge too, because nations are going to end as a concept and like, this stuff won't matter. And that's just that kind of utopian. Fiction, at least at the at the scale of popularity that you know Star Trek wasn't its time just isn't present anymore. And I that's tremendously worrying to me and I I see a lot of hope in in solar punk for that. And I guess for starters I'm interested in in your thoughts on this and you're interested in Andrew, what you think is like the pragmatic value of of of positive. A fiction that that that imagines a better world. Yeah, so. I've done probably. I think I've done like 2 videos on solarpunk so far. Two major videos on Solarpunk as well as a smaller video. Two other smaller videos. And what I've seen in the comments and in the general social media reaction again and again is. Solarpunk saved my life. You know, Solarpunk has given me hope. You know, I was slipping into this pair, but this video? Really? Give me a jump. Starts to try something new and to start afresh and to. Pursue action as opposed to just lying down and taking whatever comes next and. That that is it for me, you know, I think the fact that SOLARPUNK offers like. An energizing vision. It's not just evision, it's an energizing vision. Because. In every step with the we. It shows what you can do. You know, when you show, when you look at Sullivan art, or you look at the small but growing genre of sunk literary media. Or, you know, you look at. There's not that many solarpunk video games right now, but. Hopefully there will be in the future when you look at the various forms of solarpunk media that are coming out, and people's responses to them. You see that? It's not like, as you're mentioning, like Star Trek, where it's all this Faro technology that we can only aspire to for now. Yeah, you know, sort of punk is something that you can literally put in your backyard or your balcony or your home or your school or your community. You know, you could put these things in place like from now, you know, and you could incorporate it into your politics. As you know, as they are. And they could also help to push your politics forward, you know, because through solarpunk we can open up discussions about OK, so how do we ensure that people live comfortably within the parameters of you know, the Earth's carrying capacity. You know, you open up a discussions about indigenous sovereignty you open up discussions about. The relationship between the global north and the global S and responsibility with regard to our response to climate change, well, you open up a lot of different discussions through the realm of solarpunk. It energizes people, as I said, and yeah, I think. That is, it's pragmatic bookpost. It doesn't stand alone, of course, but. It is a driving force. Yeah. Would you kind of give out a list of if people are, you know, if this is someone's first introduction to the concept of of solar punk? What is some reading you want to draw people towards? What is some fiction like, I know you mentioned the dispossessed by a leguin, right? Yes, which often gets cited. Yeah, I'm interested in kind of other other recommendations you might have for our listeners are that. Right, so I'm still getting into the genre myself so I don't have too many recommendations. There are some decent short story collections like Sun volts by couple different authors. There's also multi species cities, solarpunk, urban futures, and the one I read most recently was Ecotopia which is quite is much older than all the. Others it's actually a book that was published. And then in 1975? And not all aspects of its politics are things I agree with. But. I think for a first it was one of the really the first of its kind in that sort of equal utopian genre that really laid out what the society would look like. The book is structured in a series of novel entries and notebook reports by a journalist from the United States who has gone to this country called Ecotopia, which is sort of where the Pacific. Northwest eatza. And. He's basically breaking down. He's going to different parts of the country and breaking down how they have lived and how they have decided to structure. Their lives. And even though not every aspect of it is one that I would want to see implemented, I still think that it really. Sparks the imagination really gets you thinking? Well, maybe I wouldn't do it this way, but how else could this be done? And I think the capacity for Solarpunk story suggests. Generate that thought and generate one's imagination is very useful in a world where we don't really get to use our imaginations much. Not really. Since childhood, you know? And Umm. Yeah, I. I think it's often understated the degree to which using your imagination is a vitally necessary part of actual radical politics. Yep. And I think there's a lot of people who consider themselves radicals. You know, some of these, some of these not to, you know, slam every Marxist Leninist on the planet, but certainly some of the ones who are coming up with these bad faith criticisms of land back. It's like you're not a radical, you're a conservative who wants to go back to a different kind of problematic. Thing. Exactly. The fact that the Soviet Union poisoned like the largest body of water in Europe, you know, all the different things that the Soviet Union did that were horrible for the environment and extractive. And it's interesting that, you know that these people who call themselves radicals, but at the very first encounter. With a radical idea that first instinct is to shut down, their first instinct is to just. Push back against it. Whereas. Not to Toot my own horn or anything, but you know, when I see an idea that I haven't encountered before, that may seem strange to me, that challenges from my preconceived notions, my first reaction is not to. Showed about how this goes against everything, Lennon said. You know, my first reaction is to investigate it and to open space for it in my mind, to really, you know, turn it around and. Imagine what it might look like and how it might fit with what I have learned about before. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's. That's that's great advice for radical politics. It's also just good life advice. Yeah, especially for engaging with ideas that you are less keen on at the moment. Or or just unaware of. Yeah, I mean, my whole thing is if I have like a strong gut reaction to something. It might be because it may be hitting a part of me that might be benefiting from that system. You know, I mean, I don't benefit from the system in a lot of respects, you know, as a black guy from the Caribbean, but. As a man, as in as a SIS. Headman, you know I do have privileges that I must be aware of. And. I can't just, like, be so quick to shut down, you know, something that might be a bit uncomfortable, you know? Yeah, I I think that's such a valuable thing to keep in mind, especially as a a more or less SIS white guy. Like a you know, a significant number of people listening are if you're uncomfortable by a new idea, is it is it because the idea is bad or is because it it strikes at an area in which you may not even have like, thought about being privileged like I'm I'm uncomfortable I had even though there's no I have no intellectual argument against it with the idea of. Of ending our use of cars as they exist because I love. I love to drive, but that's also heavily rooted in in in tremendous privilege on my behalf. I can call culture and so yeah. And Umm, you know, we, we we we did talk about that a bit in the opening episodes of season 2. The idea that like a more you know, when we we kind of had our little utopian ending. The idea that like, well maybe you'd have a car that's communally owned and used for certain tasks. But, you know, the idea of of of car culture as the center of a city is, is death. It's just death. When we talk about getting past cars, it's not to say that like people will never use vehicles that move again like obviously we will, they're necessary for. We're not all going back to horse drawn buggies, yeah? I think one of the last things on like solar punk and kind of tying into the whole kind of nature of the shows, like, I really liked Andrew, your point on like how solar punk is like an energizing force. And I feel like we have very few of those on the left and especially on the anarchist left like I've, I've, I've, I've, I've had my decent stint of like anarcho, nihilism and the problem. The problem with that is like, it's very easy. Like anarchy, nihilism is one of the easiest ideologies to to to grasp onto because it vilifies all of your bad feelings. But it also it most of the people who I know who are like real and denialism, they're generally not very happy people like because it's kind of it's kind of miserable all the time. And sure they'll like scoff at like solarpunk is like some like greenwashed yogurt commercial. Like, you know, like utopian thing, but also like, it's actually lots of solar punk that we've talked about. It's like, actually about doing specific things. Like it's actually, like actually going to do something rather than just being an insurrectos kid or just just, you know, talking about nihilist diseases and books on Twitter for all day. And I think one of one of your, one of my favorite videos of yours is your video on the psychology of collapse, because I think that's one of my, my, my favorites as well. It's a it's really just like a masterpiece and how deep you get into every different type of collapse thinking. Because it's not just on the right, it's not not, not not on the left. It's not just whether you're, you know, more, you know, anarchist, more authoritarian. It's like you get into every specific type of thinking that plays into this idea around collapse. And I think if I I recommend everyone check out your channel and especially watch your solarpunk videos. But specifically on the topic of collapse, you know, part of our show, we were trying to kind of be a little bit like anti collapse. And I think your your video really shows the depth of that topic and how to approach this, because the collapse is a feeling, like it's a feeling we all have and it needs to be interrogated. And I think your video does just a magnificent job interrogating that feeling. I can't overemphasize how important that is, because I I one of the major failings, there were a number of victories for kind of anarchist thought, particularly within the United States during the the insurrection last year. One of its tremendous defeats is that. It has become characterized in a huge number of people's eyes as breaking windows and and starting fires. And yeah, that's a lot of that is because the media is trash and is trash at reporting on on all of this stuff. But some of it is because a lot of people have let that be their primary practice. And that, again, I don't care about people breaking Windows, I don't care about people lighting, dumpster fires. But if that's what you're presenting to the world as you practice, that doesn't appeal to people. And you have to, because you have to remember that anarchism is not just destructive, it is also constructive, constructive part. We need to be boosting more than ever. And there were some, you know, from the context of Portland, some really strong examples of that last year. An incredible amount of mutual aid that was was put together a short period of time. Yeah, during the fire relief was was incredible and the Red House, the, the eviction defense occupation was a really good repost to, you know the disaster that was the Chaz in Seattle that this was like, this was an area that was temporarily autonomous from the police, that did not collapse into violence, that succeeded in its goal and that cleaned up after itself and presented an option for people. Like this is how it can look when we try to evict people. You know this is what can happen. So I I think they're I don't wanna like be too negative, but I think that a lot of folks because of for a variety of reasons, you know, the the there's been so much focus on kind of the insurrection, not even that, because I think that building can be insurrectionist. I I think that seed bombing, guerrilla gardening can be profoundly insurrectionist. It's like destruction has an immediate result of making you feel better, right. It has an immediate rush of endorphins and hormones. Makes you happy when you do it. It's it. It is it is an exhilarating act and you feel like you're accomplishing something. Allegedly. What's harder is to like, have that same feeling by doing seed bombing, right, by actually like improving your community slowly through these types of like, so, so the ideas, they don't have the same immediate emotional reaction. So a lot of people like when they, you know, think about what insurrection is, they can add default to this destructive tendency, which destruction has its time and place. But if that's your only practice, we're not going to. Improve the world at all. Like, right, that's not going to do anything. There's helping through, you know, giving out food, helping through giving out socks and clothes, helping through all of these solar punk ways. These are things that actually like are going to improve things on a tangible level and they're going to make more people be like, oh hey, what are these anarchists doing? That's actually interesting. Versus oh, what are these anarchists doing? This is stupid. Ignore everything they say. You have to remember as well that you know there are seeds of solarpunk in Kropotkin's. Eighteens, you know, from the conquest of bread to mutual aid, and there was a sort of things that should be just as emphasized as the destructive. Exaggerating aspects of anarchism, yeah. There's a line in a Frank Turner song, couple of lines, actually, in a song called 1933, that I Go back to a lot. But one of them is you can't fix the world if all you have is a hammer. And and that's, I guess, what I see is like, the primary practical benefit of solar punk, just as an aesthetic as a piece of fiction is. Getting people to expand their toolbox. Yeah, get yourself a trowel. You know, some some screwdrivers, you know. Yeah, keep the hammer. You need that sometimes too. But that's Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. 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Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SP. RE aker.com, get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart. Let's grab some other tools. Expand, expand the toolbox. Think is a really great metaphor for all of this type of thing. Yeah, yeah. I think that's most of what we're going to get into today. There's a couple of pieces of things I would want to read. One of them isn't. This isn't directly, I think it predates the solar punk, but it it. I think feeds into some of what I think it emotionally feeds into a lot of what we're talking about here. It's an essay from David Graeber called the Shock of Victory, which I think is really useful to me. That's a good one. Yeah. And I would also recommend Cory Doctorow's new fiction novel, Walk Away, which I think is a really wonderful piece. Was a wonderful, wonderful book. I should have included my recommendations. It was really great. Read it recently and it made me it made me feel the way, like, as a fiction writer, that a great piece of fiction should, which is like, I I felt bad. I felt bad about some of the things that I had written because there's, there's, there's such, there's so much more courage because I wrote a piece of fiction that has some solar punk elements, has some quasi utopian elements in the dystopia. But I didn't have the courage to kind of go as far as as Corey did and to imagine a kind of. Pacifism, that he he has the courage to kind of put into the into the hands of his his protagonists like, I I I really respect that about the book. I mean the book was in some very interesting I directions as well, but yeah, it's it's got some great **** and I always enjoy Corey's Corey's love of Burning Man of what it could be is kind of what the what what some of it's turned into. But yeah, Andrew, is there anything else you wanted to get into before we. We close this out. I just want to remind people to check on your friends, you know? We are all going through. Various stages of collapse as I outlined in my video and you know, we shift between them from time to time, so. Try not to go through it alone, you know. There's no, there's no I in solarpunk, yeah. Yeah, check out Saint Andrew on YouTube at Saint Andrew ISM. Andrew, is there any anything else you wanted to kind of plug from your own your own personal work? Yeah, so other than the, you know, the solarpunk videos and the collapse videos, I want to remind sorry, I rather I want to shout out my video on black anarchism. I think that is a pretty essential look into. The history of black anarchism in the United States and in the world I also want to recommend. Video on the psychology of authoritarianism. I know a lot of people have family members who are conservative or on the right, or maybe leading fascist, and I think that might be helpful for. You know, helping them to or rather helping you to understand. Where their mindsets at hmm. And also yeah, you know check out my video on. Put them let's sing. I think that was a pretty fun one as well. It breaks down a lot of. Breaks down how you can go about implementing food forests or permaculture gardens where you find yourself. Awesome. Thank you very much for being on the show, Andrew. Thank you all for listening. We'll be back tomorrow, or if this comes out Friday, we'll be back. You know, another day. We'll be back at some point. You know, you know how this works. You understand podcasts. The art world. It is essentially a money laundering business. The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls. You know, they don't even know or suspect that they're fakes. I'm Alec Baldwin and this is a podcast about deception, greed and forgery in the art world. You knew the painting was fake. Ohm. Listen to art fraud starting February 1st on the iHeartRadio App, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Eve Rodsky, author of the New York Times Bestseller Fair play and find your Unicorn space activists on the gender division of Labor attorney and family mediator. And I'm doctor Edina Rucar, a Harvard physician and medical correspondent with an expertise in the science of stress, resilience, mental health, and burnout. We're so excited to share our podcast, time out, a production of iheart podcasts, and Hello Sunshine, we're uncovering why society makes it so hard for women to treat their time with the. Value it deserves, so take this time out with us. Listen to time out a Fair Play podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Tanya Sam, host of the Money Moves podcast. Powered by Greenwood, This Daily Podcast will help give you the keys to the Kingdom of financial stability, wealth and abundance with celebrity guests like Rick Ross, Amanda Seales, Angela Yee, Roland Martin, JB Smooth and Terrell Owens TuneIn to learn how to turn liabilities into assets and make your money move. Subscribe to the Money Moves podcast powered by Greenman on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts and make sure you leave a review. Hi godcast. Alright Chris, you go. So welcome. Welcome to. It could happen here, a podcast that I think for the first time is just me and Robert. Uh-huh. This is this is the very first time that this is happening. You're, you're you're all here at a moment of legendary significance and historic importance. So. Try to try to face it with the requisite all. That's all I ask, yes, and another thing that man, this is a terrible transition. Something else we're facing with requisite awe is weird. Shortages of goods and price increases. So it's ******* rad. I was just at the the Asian market today and they did not have the snack chips that I most prefer now. Officially a calamity. Entered crisis of historic proportion, yeah, I I think, I don't think we're going to live through this one. Nope. We're we're doomed. We can't look at that without the Asian snack chips like. We're done. It's the ones that are like, they're like pieces of seaweed, but that have been fried in tempura batter. That sounds completely out tragic. Absolutely tragic dying. I I think there's a couple of things. I mean you've got a script so I'll I'll probably just let you do that in the not too distant future. But one of the things that's frustrating to me, although maybe it shouldn't be because I I'm probably partly responsible for this, is that this is being, this is often kind of being talked about with people by people online. It's like, oh it's a sign that like society is is is crumbling and and what they mean by that is that like, Oh well we just don't have stuff like we're we're not able to like keep up with with demand and like the ability to produce. These things is crumbling and it's actually much more complex than that and a lot less rooted in a lack of specific resources and more decisions made under capitalism about how the supply chain would work. And it's, I don't know, I think it's important because it is. You can say it still is like a situation where this is an example of the system falling apart, but it's not falling apart because we don't have the paper to make toilet paper with. It's falling apart because decisions were made in order to increase the stock prices of companies. By reducing the amount of products that they kept on hand. And that's led to an incredibly fragile system that that did nothing well but maximize profits. And I think, well, OK, I think there's a couple of things with that that we should talk about. Yeah. Because there's a lot of different explanations that are floating around for what's happening. And I think some of them are good, but I think a lot of them are missing part of the story. Yeah. And. And I think it's important because he's like, my grandma, like, called me yesterday, like, like. Told our family to like talk about the the the the supply chain problem because someone had like. Hey, she been like feta conspiracy theory that, like, the shortages were because American dock workers, like, didn't want to open containers from China. Yeah. It's like, yeah. Like, I mean, this is not. That's not right. But it's not like, if that had happened, it would be like, well, OK, yeah. That does scan. Like, yeah. And I think, yeah. Yeah. And like, I think this is this is a moment where. Yeah. You know, OK think, think things are not working how they're supposed to. And there's a lot of sort of competing stories about some of which are which are bad and I think. Most of the conventional accounts in Robert was talking about this. You know, even the really good ones, they they start with sort of the the 80s Wall Street takeover corporate America and the transformation to sort of all corporate management into attempt to like raise short term stock prices. And you know part of this is is is lean production and this is true and this is sort of true, but this is about half of the story. And and the part of the story that it misses that's really important and I think is, is the sort of it's it's the broader like frame in which all of this is happening in. Is essentially the story of how the working class essentially loses the class war in the 60s and 70s. And weirdly, it's also a story about fucose Boomerang, which, yeah, hell yeah, yeah, yeah, this is, this is a this is a Daniel long throw in throw in the the music clip that we've all decided is going to be the one we put in whenever someone talks about fucose Boomerang. Yeah, which is probably just going to be another time machine noise so real quick. The code is brain noise. Credit to Cody. OK, continue brief refresher on what that is. So basically the frequency remembering is that OK if you if if a government does something like repressive like technology, repressive technique or passive technology like in a colony like in a war somewhere eventually it'll come back and be used against like the citizens of that country. And yeah, you know, a great example would be fingerprinting was invented for the British like policing insurgents in Malaysia and is now has come back to every you know colonizing Nation now uses fingerprinting, which is also deeply flawed as a technology. But anyway. Yeah, yeah and you know, and I think most people tend to think about this as a armored personnel carriers, but we will eventually get to this the, the Boomerang technology here is actually shipping containers. Hell yeah. Which have done like irreparable damage. To the mankind. Alright, alright, I'm ready for this. I don't know much about this. Hit me. Alright. Bear with me with this, because we're, we're, we're we're going to talk about 2 threads. They're going to seem like they have nothing to do with supply chains, and then they're all going to tie together. It turns out it's literally all supply chains. So in the 60s and 70s you have. You know, in in very, very broad, general strokes, you have two kinds of class war. The first kind is what I'm sort of very broadly calling the war and the factories. And this is, this is an enormous series of sort of strikes and outright uprisings that stretched from sort of Detroit to terrain to Tokyo. And the, you know, the the most famous of these is the student sort of worker uprising in May 68 in France. And they, you know they, they're, they're close enough taking the country that like French President Charles de Gaulle like flees in a helicopter to in in secret and like flees to Germany in secret. And you know and that that that that's like a big event, but it sort of it sort of fades. What doesn't fade is May 68 in Italy and you know it doesn't fade there because Italy, Italy has been in the middle of a strike wave since. 196264 it's the whole 60s, basically just track waves there. And. You know, they have their own 1968 and unlike in France where Peter's out. In Italy you get the just incredibly named hot hot autumn of 69. Which is nice. Yeah, I'll bet it was a hot autumn. Yeah, it's it's great. And so basically what happens is you get. Hundreds of thousands of workers go on strike. They start seizing control of their factories. And most of most of this is playing out in in the Fiat factories is yeah, it's a giant car factories in Italy's industrial triangle and. You know, I mean, they're there for like, they're there for a long time. They're into like 1970 and eventually they lose. But you know it. Italy is just sort of rocked by conflict and sort of class war stuff. And all of this sort of culminates in yet another enormous uprising in 1977, this one driven like in large part by people who. Or basically just like, **** this, I'm not working in the factory anymore. It's awful. Which which I think is something that like. You know, if you're looking at the modern political landscape, you have a bunch of people who are going like, **** this, I'm not going to go like die in these factories anymore. And yeah, those people all have. In in a lot of cases, safer employing situations than many people today. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's starting to get worse than, which is why people are are frustrated. But, like, there were pensions. Yeah. Yeah. You know, and this is sort of interesting because. There there's a kind of like a Vicky Osterweil we've had on here calls it calls it, like the monkeys paw thing, where it's like people in the 70s and Italy wanted like, autonomy and, like freedom from work. And So what? What capitalism gave them was like, oh, we'll give you autonomy. We'll just make you all contract workers. And now, like, yeah, you don't have to, like, wake up every morning and like, go to a job in the factory and leave at 5:00 or whatever. But now you just, you know, you're a contract worker. So you just have no stability whatsoever. And that that's your autonomy. But you know this this is. This is really bad for the Italian ruling class, like they almost lose control of Italy three times in 10 years. And after 1977, they're just like, **** this. And they, I mean they they start to start doing mass arrest. They imprison, like, 10s of thousands of people. They torture a bunch of people. And you know, but but but it becomes clear that, like pure political repression is like not going to be enough to, like just destroy the section of the working class movements that. You know, God help you thinks that you should like run production for themselves. And so they start looking elsewhere for answers. And the place they find these answers, weirdly enough, is in the second set of wars that are going on in this. Which are the sort of National Liberation wars. And you know, these are the National Liberation wars are these, these are full scale, like these aren't sort of metaphor, glassware metaphors. These are, you know, this is, this is guisao, this is Algeria. And you know, importantly for for our purposes, the US fights two of them, which is Korea and Vietnam. Now, Korea and Vietnam are strategically really bad places for the US to fight wars. Like you're on the other side of the world, which? You know it. It makes it more difficult to do war crimes because, you know, if you're fire bombing a village, right, you have to be able to move fire bombs, jet fighters and like oil and rations to the other side of the world. And this is hard, as it turns out, a lot easier when they can commit war crimes and like, I don't know, Duluth. Yeah, yeah. Well, like, even even like, you know, you gotta commit a war crime in Mexico. It's like, OK, you just sent a bunch of people over the border. Would be so easy to commit war crimes in Mexico. Yeah, and really, really up our war crime quote. We do do a lot of work crimes in Mexico. It's just that like they're done basically proxies, that's true. But we feel like we've killed like a million people there in the last like 20 years in the war on drugs, but. Yeah, you know, so the US. You know the US, OK, so it has this logistics problem, and logistics problem is that it can't do war crimes enough. And so it comes up with a couple of solutions to them all. But one of them is essentially they they rebuild the whole Japanese economy in order to just use Japan's industrial base to fight the war in Korea. And then after the war in Korea ends, they rebuild the South Korean economy in order to, you know, fight the war in Vietnam. And this works, but it doesn't solve the problem that, you know, OK, even even even if you're, you know, you, you you have an industrial base in Japan, right? You still need to be able to efficiently move things by sea. To Korea. And you know you still need to steal supplies, you need to move from the US and so. The solution for this is containerized shipping. And container shipping. This is the pivot point. Upon which the entire history of the 20th century and everything that's happened in the 21st century hinges on like this. This is the pivot. And I, you know, like, I'm not even. This isn't even really an exaggeration. Because it turns out that like, the ability to have uniform boxes that you can stack on top of each other like Legos and put on a ship is like. Like it's like comparable to the nuclear bomb in in in terms of how important it is. Which is really, really used to the only way to get things from A to B was a big wooden ship filled with dubloons like pile bags and stuff. Yeah, yeah, you know, how did we like global commerce work before shipping containers? What did we what did we literally like? You just, like, sometimes you would just, like physical like people would just pick up the items and put them on the ship, or they would like, sometimes they put them in boxes, or like you would like, strap them to like the top of the ship. And saying with II trains a lot, they were just like strap, like machinery, like onto a train car. And this was like, not this is, like, really inefficient. It's really slow. Yeah. And so the US in order to, like, do war crimes in Korea and then, you know, just like, oh, hey, what if we just make metal boxes? And then they get, they progressively get better and better at it because, you know, they have to go do more war crimes in in Vietnam and. But by the time you're getting to the end, yeah, yeah. You know, you look lots of war crimes that do you need, you need good logistics networks to do all of these war crimes. I mean, it makes sense that that's where he got shipping containers, but I didn't realize I, I had just assumed it would have come out of the shipping industry as opposed to like we had to get more missiles over to these places. Yeah, well, this is the interesting thing. We'll get to this in a bit, but basically like. A lot of the logistics revolution stuff either comes out of the military or is developed by ex fascists. And and and a lot of the reason for this is OK, I mean this is, you know, this is 70s, there's still R&D happening like this, actual research and developments, but the military is doing just an enormous amount of the research and development for all of global capitalism. And you know and and the the the other thing. What's happening here in this? You know this. This is the sort of fucose boomerang thing is that? You know, so the container is shipping logistics stuff that had been used to just, like, obliterate the global S. Suddenly start spreading into capital like, you know, just into like broader shipping because people look at this and like, oh, this is efficient. And then the contracting companies US is using. This turns into the solution to both sort of the war and the factories are talking about in in in Europe and the US and like Japan itself and then also to the solution of the National Liberation movements and sort of like Communism in East Asia because you know. OK. So you have this question, right, the US. Like, we kind of fight to a draw in Korea. Like we kill enormous number of people, but about 20% of the North Korean population. Yeah. And like, yeah, but we don't really win, right. Like we we we can't actually defeat the Chinese army. Or yeah, and and, you know, and we lose Vietnam. And so the question is, OK, so like how, how are we going to stop communism? And the answer, it turns out, is to just integrate, integrate the communist countries into the capitalist supply chain. And I mean, there's a lot of examples of this, like Margaret Thatcher, for example, is like very good buddies with Nicolette or chest queue. Ah, that's nice. It's that they could be friends, despite their the fact that. They uh, well, I guess they weren't really that different as people. No, not really. Like, basically the difference is that you lost and thus got like murdered on state television and Margaret Thatcher won and murdered out of state funeral. The two Tesco treatment that's why official stance they should have chest scooters. First off, we will talk about in a bit, but yes, but you know the the the archetypal example of this is actually China. And, you know, there's a lot of very sort of skilled diplomatic work by Kissinger and also the US like throughout the 70s, just like they're just like sending entire factories to China, like, like the like the they'll they'll take an entire factory, break it down, put it in boxes and then just like ship it to China. Great. It's the time. And yes, so yeah, they're just like sending technology to China. And the end result of this is that. You know, China goes from, like, fighting American troops with, like, like, doing banet charges, like, through their own human way of ****. Like, yeah, yeah, against nightmare. Yeah, just like, yeah. To to, you know, being an American ally and, like, invading Vietnam as a way to, like, stick it to the Soviets, basically. And so, you know, so the US essentially just integrates China into the global supply chain and they eventually do the same thing to Vietnam, which again is another country that they couldn't defeat militarily. But what they, you know, what they actually beat them with is a shipping container. And before the shipping container this would have been impossible, right? Like basically it was too inefficient and too expensive like the the cost of shipping was too high. To have all of this production, you know, like some half your parts made in China, some of them made India, some of them made in like Japan, some of them made in Korea, and then ship them all around the world, which is how the modern system works. But with with containerized shipping, suddenly shipping is really cheap. And it becomes much cheaper to pay shipping costs. It is to pay labor costs. And this is the solution to the sort of war and the factories. You know, if workers start making too much noise about pay or like, again a God forbid, start talking about like taking control of factories and running them democratically, like some kind of anarchist monsters corporation could just move the factories overseas. And this becomes an incredibly effective way to just destroy the labor movement because anytime, you know, organized labor starts making demands, you can be like, well, OK, sorry, we're just going to pack up and we're going to, you know, we're gonna go to China, we're going to go to somewhere else. And this coincides with, you know, the thing, the thing that gets talked about a lot in. The conventional accounts, which is the Wall Street sort of corporate takeover. Well, but the Wall Street takeover of corporate America, which something, I think that sounds really weird to us now. But. You know, the the whole, the whole story here is really interesting and extremely long and if if you want to like. Have a very detailed account of of how this all played out. The book of liquidated by Karen Ho is just incredible. I like ethnography and history of of Wall Street. She like, yeah, she's Karen has an anthropologist and she, like, went and worked on Wall Street and like, did ethnography there for a bit. And it's very interesting stuff, but it's kind of. Outside of our scope, so the, the, the, the very, very, very short version is that the Wall Street bankers basically figure out a way to just. Like buyout corporations to like raise a bunch of money and just entirely buyout corporations and then once they have the corporation right. What, what, what, what the, you know this. This is corporate rating. So they're, they're, they're, they look all the assets they sell it off and they try to sell off their stock at a higher price. The process of this is sort of complicated, but the net result of this is that Wall Street completely takes over the corporate world the way they hadn't before. Like the Wall Street, the Wall Street like finance people are now, you know, they're the people making all the decisions. And. You know, and and and they're their only goal is to raise the stock price like that's that's the only thing they care about. They don't even care about making money, right? If if you lose money and your stock price still rises like you don't care. And those guys start looking at a lot of the things that had existed in corporations before that, things like pensions, particularly things like research and development. And they look at it and go, OK, why are we spending money on R&D like this doesn't this doesn't raise our stock price, this doesn't have any immediate short term value. So they cut it right. They start cutting pensions, they start essentially just destroying the unions. And. You know, and and because this is happening at the same time as corporations. Really. Like get the ability to outsource for the first time? You know, they they, they lean into it and they start essentially. We're just just slashing the of people who work for the company, right. And so you know and so instead of having direct employees they start working with contractors and they start moving the contractors overseas and you know and this is this is where we get to sort of. This whole outsourcing wave because. You know something I I don't think I talked about enough with outsourcing is. Why actually, are the labor costs lower in the countries that these people are are moving their factories to? And part of it is, you know, people talk about development like they're moving to undeveloped countries. And you know, part of part of part of development is just, you know, how much technological capacity their manufacturing system has, right. And that you know, but but the other part of it is that if you move your production to say Columbia, right, or like, you know, you're investing in sort of like cocoa bean farming in Columbia. And people try to do union organizing. You can hire death squads to murder them. Yeah and yeah, yeah, it's like it. You can basically just sort of like you, you can you can outsource the violence and you can, you can, you know the, the the corporate term for it is reducing labor costs. But really what you're doing is just like murdering people with death squads and terrorizing them and you know that that does lower labor costs. Right, but you know, and I I think there's another example of this like this is. A lot of what like the killing at Tiananmen was really about. It was, you know, not so much internal score itself in fact, about the software, but like the workers that they kill outside of the square. Like a lot of the reason they're doing, I know very little about Tiananmen Square other than like protesters, China's government, bad. The guy stands up the tank and then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've talked about this Elser, more like the the, the very short version is. So there's much of students in the square, right. And the students in the square itself, like basically they they kind of went democracy mostly. They want, like market reforms to go faster. But then outside of the square, you know like Beijing's like whole working class shows up. And there's these enormous demonstrations. They basically start like, like, barricading like blocks and blocks and blocks and like this radius outside of the street. You get this sort of like mini commune thing. And those guys are like. You know, like they're, they're, they're advocating for democracy in the factory, like they're, you know, they're they're talking about. Things like. Like they're there. Like, you know, they, they, they, they, they they have their like marks out and they're talking about how, like they're they're calculating their rate of surplus value that's being extracted from them by the capitalists. And those are the people, like, almost everyone who dies at Tiananmen is, is from those guys. Like, those are the people that they just get massacred. And you know, and and and the the reason that happens is that the CCP is looking at this and it's like, OK, this, this is this is like this. This is sort of, this is the return of organized labor and we need to destroy it before it like gets anywhere. And so if they do and. Organized labor in China. Just. Implode, I mean it was already pretty weak because you have a lot of control unions, but I mean now it's just nothing. And, you know, and and and there, I mean there have been attempts to labor organizing and trying to sort of recently and like, yeah, this is just arrest everyone, right. And so, you know, this is, this is how this is, this is the price of cheap labor. Right. It's just incredible state repression. But this is also, you know, and this is this is the sort of like macro scale thing of why the supply chains suck, because everyone talks about like the efficiency of the supply chains, but the supply chains. Aren't efficient. They make no sense, right? If, if, if if what you're trying to do is move something quickly from point A to point B, they make no sense because. You know, these supply chains are spread all over the world, like in in individual parts are being made in six countries, right? You have like, people will like for tax dodge purposes, like they'll have one part of a component built in one country, and they'll move it to another country to have another part of it. And then they'll ship all of it to Mexico and they'll ship it across the border and they'll have the whole thing be assembled in the US so they can say it was made in the US like there's all of these things that are just nonsense, right? They're not, they're not efficient at all. It's completely ridiculous. It's it's just, you know, it's just completely absurd web and and. The the the reason why it's designed like this is as as a giant sort of cataract surgery figure like the the the the reason. The reason supply chains are are just bad. Is because. There. You know, they they they're not designed to move things. They're designed as an instrument to just like solve the problem of of of of class power. Right there, there, there. They're designed to destroy unions. They're designed to make sure that nobody ever sort of like, gets any ideas about wages, to make sure nobody gets any ideas about, like, taking anything. And so. You know, but and this this this can work for a while. The problem is again, like they're not efficient. Like it it's it's just it just it is not efficient to like move, have everything made in like 6 countries and then you have to send them somewhere else. Yeah. And so, you know, it's efficient in the sense that it efficiently maximizes the value of stock prices for like stock buybacks and stuff. And that's generally what is meant by like efficiency. Yeah. In that sense is like what makes the 70 people who actually own this company the most money? That's the efficient thing, but it's horribly inefficient in every practical sense of the word. And and and this, this is kind of an interesting change, because, I mean, you know, this isn't to say that like the supply chains that worked before this were like better because they also sucked in a lot of their own ways, but. All of the like efficiency stuff that we're about to talk about like just just in time production, etcetera, etcetera. Like you know what isn't produced just in time. Sorry, but it is an ad break time. Yeah, they're they're not produced just in time anymore because supply chains falling apart. It's our sponsors. That's what that is. Our promise about our sponsors is that they're they're not at all in time. Who knows when they'll get your products to you? There's no way to tell. It's impossible to know. We're back, yeah, we're back to talk about how, you know, having having developed an entire network of extremely inefficient supply chains that just absolutely suck and don't make any sense, people tried to make them efficient. And this, this is where we go back to Japan, because Japan. I, you know, I guess this is, this is, this is the other fucose boomerang, which is that, you know, OK, so we we we industrialized Japan in order to like, fight or colonial wars. Right. But then, you know, this turns into this huge, like, Pikachu face moment when Japan suddenly starts, like, industrializing more efficiently than the US does. Yeah, it's it's very funny. And then Michael Crighton writes a bunch of books that are the premise of all of them. Is Japan scary? Yeah. It's really funny. Yeah. You know, like. It's interesting, isn't it? Sort of interesting thing here, which is that like all of the panic around China. There was exactly the same panic like around Japan in the in the like the 70s and it's exactly the same like right down to like a bunch of socialists going like, hey look this this is a model for anti capitalism. Like people said that about the Japanese model and it's like it's it's all, it's all the same thing. It's just it's just happening again. But you know what? What, what type, what what Japan did and specifically what Toyota does is create this thing called the Toyota production system, which eventually becomes known as just in time production. And this if you've read anything about. Sort of the modern supply chain problems you've almost certainly heard of just in time production or or lean production and just in time and lean production are technically different, but. The differences don't matter for us, so. Yeah, and and this this stuff is derived from what Toyota was sort of doing in the post war era and. Basically. The goal of it is. You're you're never supposed to have any inventory that's just sitting there. So the whole system supposed to be constantly, the whole system is supposed to be constantly in motion. So you have parts come in, they get put into their immediately get put into the production line, then the finished products immediately shipped out to the stores. And, you know, the theory is that the stores are only going to carry exactly enough product to meet demand. And it's supposed to be quote UN quote flexible, which means that it can, like, react to shifts in consumer tastes and demand by, like, increasing or decreasing production, and it can't do this. This is what we've been seeing for the entirety of COVID, which is that you know this. This is why every time there's a run on toilet paper, everyone runs out of toilet paper. Because it turns out that these systems can't even the 10% increase just completely obliterates this entire system and it just collapses and can't produce. Toilet paper. Yeah. And again, just because it's expensive to store things, it's pricey. This is a big part of like, why, actually? The John Deere strike, which has the potential to disrupt the status quo more than more than any strike in in recent history. Is so potent because John Deere tractors are kind of a necessary part of the agricultural industry, not just their ability to sell new tractors, but their ability to repair the extant tractors. Like if Harvest season comes around and there's not spare parts to repair tractors that break like food doesn't get harvested, it's a significant issue. John Deere, we'll talk more about this in another day, but like not only did the most that they could do to squeeze their employees to suck out pensions, to cut, you know, expenditures on wages. But they they set up their factories in such a way that there was no extra space, so they could not scale up any of these factories to increase demand when they needed to, so that now that John Deere is going on strike, if they lose a month of productivity, they can't ever catch up. It's impossible because they can't actually expand the productive capacity of their factories. And the because the strike is hitting, they didn't have any extra spare parts lying around. So if **** gets broken, they can't manufacture the parts necessary to keep tractors functioning. And a lot of American farms, because they didn't store anything. Because that was not the most efficient thing for the economic bottom line of the CEO, who gets $160 million a year anyway. This this is the funny part about this whole thing, which is that you know, OK, this whole supply chain system was based around just like destroying, destroying the organized working class, right? But it's like they they they were so successful at it that they've, like, turned around and ****** themselves with it. Because like, you know, this is, this is the thing about the John Deere strike, right. It used to be, you know, back, back, back. If you look at like, like how how the unions were broken in the 80s, like if you look at like the the giant, like auto strikes you'd have in the 70s, right. And companies still do this to this day, but like, they're worse at it. The thing they would do is so, OK. So you, you, you know, if you're a company, you know roughly when a strike is going to happen, right. And the reason, you know, when a strike is going to happen is because in the US. Like the way labor law works is that like you you can you can basically only strike. Like when a contract is up, I mean you can do Wildcats, but it's illegal. But you know, OK, so they, they, they they knew that the auto unions, for example, were about to go. We're going to go on strike when when the contract like was coming up and, you know, they'd have spies and you can get a sense of like. You know, OK, so are are are. How likely are they to to do this strike and. You know, so so that that that lets you do things like build up an enormous sort of inventory of spare parts and it lets you build up an inventory of supplies and it lets you build U. You know it basically it lets you build up the capacity you need to outlast the strike. But the problem with just in time is they can't do that anymore because yeah, they they've they've, you know, they've they've completely ****** themselves by by then the John Deere situation because they hadn't striked the workers hadn't gone on strike since 86. They'd been putting funds into their strike survival fund for years, but the company had nothing like has. Yeah, it's rare and this is you know this is, this is the other part of of of. Why everything like good that's happening right now is happening, is that? They they they in you know they we everything has circled back around and suddenly all of these companies are you know we are incredibly vulnerable to strikes again because yeah, as you're talking about the the just in time production thing. It only works if if everything actually comes in on time, right? Like if if any if any individual part is late, the whole system starts to fall apart and then and then you can't repair it. And yeah, you know, and there's there's a lot of ways that that this, this, this can be very bad. You know, we've talked about the John Deere, we talked about the labor stuff. The other big thing that's happening is COVID, which has happened and continues to happen and has killed off just enormous parts of the working class. I mean, it's. 4,000,000 dead worldwide or something. And again, that's also probably an undercount because that's just direct us. That's not like, yeah, it's probably like twice that. It's I mean we're looking at a minimum of 725,000 of the US and again that's probably 1,000,000 under counted at least. It's it's a horror show, right. And and the the people they killed with that, you know, like especially in the initial phases, like it was just, it was just they they they took a change chainsaw to the working class. And those are a bunch of people who, you know that they're they're not replaceable. They're they're very highly skilled and they do a bunch of jobs that absolutely suck. And. Now you know one one of one of the places that this this has caused a bunch of problems is isn't the ports. Because the the other thing that the entire supply chain relies on is being able to very quickly and cheaply move parts from, you know, China to the US, from China to Mexico, from like Bangladesh to like Symbolia. You have, you have. You have to be able to continuously like keep moving stuff around in, in. You know, you have to continuously keep moving ships around and you also have to be able to load and unload them. And we, you know, we, we we saw like there, there was the the that when that ship got stuck in the Suez. There is that whole yeah, you know that that that was successes where, where where people couldn't get sex ***** because the the world's supply of sex ***** for months was on that one ship. It was a real crisis for the sex *** community. Those are plastic ***** that you have sex with if you're curious. Yeah, it is. The the the world appears as an immense collection of commodities, some of which are sex assets. Yeah, most of which in terms of the ones that matter. Or sex ***** yes. Success. Industrial complex is really the linchpin of global capital. But please continue. Yeah. Why? You know, with the sex astrial complex falls apart. And, you know, and it's not just the the ship being stuck in the suites, like, made everything way worse. Right. But. And was very funny. Yeah, it was. It was extremely funny. It was extremely funny. Thing is, like, not very funny. Is that like? OK, so in order to get any of this to work right, you have to have a bunch of longshoremen. You have to unload all of this ****. Hmm. And you know, one of one of the problems that is, that is happening in in the sort of global supply chain right now is that the ships can't be unloaded fast enough. And part of this is like, this job sucks and people, just a lot of people don't want to do it. A lot of people died and in the eye, and it's causing this huge problem. And and this and there's there's another, you know, if you want to take like the macro perspective about this, it's that this whole system is reliant on logistics workers and so it also needs, you know, you need truck drivers. And we're coming back in, you know, in in the US is like there's yeah, you know, there's there's a sort of a truck drivers now because again their job sucks and they've been like just absolutely screwing these people over for decades and decades and decades now and turning into the subcontractors, just not paying them and. You know and and this and when you know when the port shut down, like not even shut down. Like when the ports are behind unloading stuff and when the trucks like that are supposed to be moving this stuff, there aren't enough of them. And like the the cost of that increase is it it throws off the whole system. And that's that's another big part of like, why this whole? Thing is, is sort of imploding and and it's interesting because. I remember this. There was like a decade. Where, like every other article, we'll be talking about how they were going to like automate, like truck driving. It looks like, uh, the truck drivers are all gonna go out of business because they're gonna hate it just never happened at all. And say the same thing with with there, you know, there's, I mean, there's been some port automization, like not on the scale that. You know, actually it does anything. And part of the reason for that is, you know, talking about people not investing in research developments. Yeah. So the biggest people who aren't doing that are the shipping companies. And that's a good time because the shipping, basically like container shipping, has been taken over by what's essentially just like a monopoly of two companies. And those two companies make just an indescribable amount of money. They have like 1000% profits and they just pay it all out as dividends. And so they're not, you know, they're not investing in any port infrastructure. They're not investing automation. They're just pocketing the money. And that means that, you know, we have all and they're they're spending in, in the case of John Deere, which I keep going back to a bunch of money lobbying to make it illegal for farmers to repair their tractors. Yeah. Yeah. They're they're you know, they they they figured they figured out that like the the the easiest way to make money. You just get the state to shake people down for you. It's like, ah **** like investing in in making anything that we have better. Let's just, you know, like let's just turn the state into a debt collector. And and it's interesting because so this this is the part of of the supply chain crisis that, like Biden's, been focusing on. But Biden's plan. Biden's plan is great. Biden's plan is literally make the longshoremen work harder. So his plan is and here we go, there we go, there we go. Building back better, baby, yeah, we're going, we're going to make, we're going to keep the ports open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And like make people work weekends now and then. He also got a FedEx, Walmart and UPS to do 24 hour seven day week shipping. So yeah, the solution is literally just like feed more workers into a grinder and make them work longer. Which is which is great and you know, will not in any way backfire. No, it's fine. I don't think we should be talking about it. No, it's great. It's gonna. It's it's yeah, it's, you know. But I get like this is something like, this won't work and like, it can't and the reason it won't work is that like part of the reason there's a shortage is that. You know it. It's it's, it's, it's not. It's not just about the, like, the fact that people aren't paying enough. It's about the fact that these jobs are just awful, like you. You have people. You have people working like 12 hour shifts that start at like 6:00 AM, and then they have to make another 12 hour shift 8 hours later. They keep having to do this over and over and over again, and it's well, and they don't like. The way that these shifts are usually put on them is that, like, you'll find out when you come in that instead of working 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM or whatever, they're actually going to need you to stay until 8:00, and then they're gonna need you to come in. By the way, you're going to come in like 2 hours early tomorrow. So you realize that, like in between your two shifts, you have a total of 8 hours to get home and sleep. And if you say no, uh, well, the idea is that if you say no, like, you won't have the job it's required. Now, the reality is that most of these companies are also pretty desperate to have these workers and a lot of these manufacturing and packing firms that takes time to train people up and then they quit a couple of weeks in because the work is is miserable and the schedule is ******* miserable. And it's, yeah, it's all it's, it's, it's it's simultaneously like deeply inhuman, but also is leading to a situation. There's a reason why there's so many strikes on right now is that there is opportunity. Because in sort of the chasing of short term profits, a lot of these ******* oligarchs have exposed themselves in a in a pretty vulnerable position. Yeah, and and and I think. You know this this is coming back to a sort of. The the The the other way that when when there was a crisis in in the 60s seventies the other way they solved this was just authoritarianism. Right. It was you know is this is the pinotage solution, right. Like oh like workers are using control compromise. OK we'll just shoot them. Right. And we're out of workers. Yeah. And yeah and this is you know they're they're finally running into a point where you know this is this is the solution they've been trying to do now with with with this crisis is you know the the they're relying on the fact that just. The workplace is just indescribably authoritarian. I mean, it's it's like, it's it's. It's a dictatorship on a scale that is like. Like? Even to like the most despotic absolute monarch is just like, unimaginable. Like your boss gets to control, like when you ****. Like, they get a control when you eat. They get to control exactly what you're doing, like at all times. They get control when you do it, they get a control. Like when the next time you're going to do it is. They don't even have to tell you when it's going to be until, like, you show up. And you know, for the this is, this is, this has been the the gamble for for, you know, capitalism, betyr existence, which is that like you just have to take this and eat **** or they get to take away your ability to eat, get medical care and have a place to leave to live. But that's not true anymore. Like, you can just say no. You can tell them to **** ***. You can, you know you can, you can. You can organize a union. You can just ******* just leave your job. Like, just leave it. **** it, we'll walk out. Yeah, This is why we focus. I mean, this is #1 why, within the context of Union strike, funds are so important, but also a mutual aid is so important. Is it it it potentially, when organized well enough, provides people with the option to like, well, how are you going to feed yourself? Well, there's people in my community who want to make sure that I'm fed because they believe in what I'm striking for. That's the promise of all of that. That's the practical behind the kind of high minded, you know, anarchist. Of just, you know, whatever theorizing is the ability that, like, well, this actually is a weapon too. Yeah, and I think. You know what else is a weapon, Chris? Our product. I hope we're not being sponsored somebody. I hope we are, Chris. Yeah. Look, look, I've I've said before for weapons all read any ad for a weapons manufacturer. As long as they send me some weapons. So come on, guys. Get on it. You could, you could be, you could be in the middle of this conversation, Raytheon. You know, send me a couple of missile guidance chips. Lockheed Martin, you know you you want to give me an F35, we'll we'll plug you. You know, that's that's that's that's the deal. That's how it works, baby. All right, we're back. Hopefully, hopefully. You have now heard the advertisement for knife missile two knife, missile. Harder now with like 5 knives. A thing that I am not making up and actually exists. Yeah, no, people keep being surprised that the R9X is a real thing. Yeah, but there's another one is there's, there's there's one with more knives. They they put more knives. Again, you can't. It's like with Apple products, right? Planned obsolescence is critical. You have to. You can't just rest on your laurels. You're going to run out of money. So you got to make another knife missile with a couple of more knives. Yeah, just keep keep adding knives. Nothing can ever go wrong. Do not ask any questions about why you're developing knife missiles, please. First place. Send me one and like a drone or three, swear to God I'll use it for legal purposes. Yeah. So I guess the the the last thing that I that that's really interesting about this moment. That doesn't usually happen. Is that? You know, OK. So if if you, if you, if you if you you read your very basic marks. Right. One of the things mark talks about is that there's this thing called the Reserve Army of Labor, which is it's just like, you know, there's a bunch of people who are just always unemployed and they they they they get along by doing sort of like odd jobs like, you know like my MM went essential person for this is like if you ever go on a subway there's, you know, it's it's it's the guy selling candy bars in the subway. Yeah. Right. It's people who quasi legal, you know, sometimes. Yeah. Right. Yeah, legal. They just. Feel like? Doing whatever, you know? Yeah, greats. We call them in in the West Coast. You have a lot of those like. Yeah, people who trim marijuana for a couple of months and then just kind of like crash and, you know, campsites the rest of the year or whatever. Like, yeah, there's a bunch of those folks for sure. Yeah. And you know, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for none of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month, Mint mobile will give you the best rate whether you're buying one or for a family. And it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected. Plot twist at Mint Mobile becom behind. That's mintmobile.com behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at mintmobile.com/behind. My name is Erica Kelly and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight true crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months. After I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job, it was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting creation. Distribution and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's spreaker.com. Get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history. And talked about it. Or if I should have asked you or you'd like to add that seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. And like the the the number of these people who've been just like kicked out of, like the formal labor system has been increasing for a long time. But what's interesting about this moment is that, you know, every, every strike you see has a second strike behind it. And that strike is is is the informal general strike, which is just again, people just quitting their jobs and leaving. And and you have this weird moment where where normally the sort of the reserve army of Labor is this thing that, like capitalism can always sort of rely on as a way to sort of solve its problems. It's like, Oh well, all right, if you're not going to do this job, we can bring another person. But. You know this. This is a weird moment where it, like the reserve Army of Labor, is like fighting on our side. And. The, the, the, the fact that all of these people are just. Like, you know, they're they're seeing the just incredible fruitarianism of these workplaces that just horrific abuse, the fact that, you know, they're, they're being, in a lot of cases, just asked to show up and die. And they're saying no, is, is, is really sort of is a really incredibly powerful. Thing and and when, when, when you add that to the fact that you know all these companies have completely screwed themselves with how they designed the supply chains, it's it's all it's all come back around. And suddenly all the all the supply chain stuff that they carefully laid out over decades and decades, decades as a way to just like, break the union movement and make sure nobody ever asks for more wages. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's it's been revealed to be incredibly fragile and you know, weak to our attack. And that leads us, I think, to this other tension in in Biden's plan to sort of like revive the economy, which is that. So the US, technically speaking, has dislike very large central planning capability. But it only has it to like, build weapons. So, you know, the, the, the, the the army has this incredible ability, like there's a lot of bullets. You know, despite the huge stress on the bullet supply chain, it really has scaled, you know, the prices have increased, but we're we're still still still getting bullets. Yeah. America is great at making bullets. Yeah, it's great at keeping tractors working, but would be a problem. Yeah. Like even if you remember at the beginning of the pandemic, it was like the US just couldn't produce masks like we we we never, we never like. Did that, right? Like, like, the government never at any point was like, we're just going to make masks and give them to people. Like, they just never did it. And so, you know, our mask supply, all those supply chains suck. And the only way that, like, the states can intervene and get the supply chains to work is by doing one of two things. It's by either doing a thing Biden was doing, which is just go to a bunch of companies and tell them to make all of their workers work harder. Which is the thing that like, you know, totally won't backfire or explode in his face. And then the second thing is for Biden basically to like. Do all this Saber rattling about how we have to have like medical supply chains in the US because National Defense or something? And that's the second thing he's trying to do. But. You know. That just that just makes the problem worse, right? Because what? Once you once you lose the ability to outsource you, you lose the hammer you're beating the unions with. And so, you know all all of the sort of. All, all, all of the tendencies that are, you know, making things like bad and scary right now are. Also weirdly making this. You know, the, the, the, the, the, the fact that prices are rising, right? The the fact that there's all these shortages. It's it's. It's making this. Like the best moment? To. You know, it's it's making this the best moment that and that anyone's had in ages to actually try to make something better. Yeah, and and and the important thing is we're we're starting to see it happen. And yeah, and we're going to talk more about strike Tober and sort of the strike wave in the coming. You know, weeks and months, but. Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna be hitting this pretty hard even just next week. We have a lot of stuff in the pipeline. Kind of wish we got into it earlier, but. There's a lot of stuff to talk about in the world. It's happening that that's within our milieu. It turns out when you're when you're specific focus is things falling apart, you're always behind, uncovering all the things that are falling apart. But I think it is a good time to to to drive this to a close to drag this episode out behind the farm, the barn and and and shoot it and bury it in a shallow grave and and break its bones with a hammer so that the police can't identify it. Chris. Thank you for for putting this together. Got anything, anything else to say? I. Quit your job and you or you and or unionize your workplace and or take it over and run it yourselves. Because Lord knows the people who are telling you what to do just literally do not care if you die. Yeah, yeah. And I mean with with that. Ohh, sorry. No, no, no, no. I was just gonna. A I don't know what I was gonna do, Chris. I don't know what I was gonna do. Do, do, go. Go do something. You know you're listening to things. Go do something. Yeah. And and, yeah. And and if you want to listen to us do more things, we are. Allegedly. Allegedly. We are at cool Zone Media on on the Twitter and the Instagram to prove that in court. It's true. Good luck. Good luck to them. And trying to prove that we did this. Yeah, that's right, *************. Alright, bye. I call the Union hall, I said. It's a matter of life and death. I think these people are planning to kill Doctor King. On April 4th, 1968, Doctor Martin Luther King was shot and killed in Memphis. A petty criminal named James Earl Ray was arrested. He pled guilty to the crime and spent the rest of his life in prison. Case closed. Right. James Earl Ray was a pawn for the official story the authorities would parade. Oh, we found a gun that James Earl Ray bought in Birmingham that killed Doctor King. Except it wasn't the gun that killed Doctor King. One of the problems that came out when I got the Ray case was that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned, did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK tapes, the first episodes. Are available now. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Give us your attention, we need everything you got fast. Waiting on reparations would be the endless podcast TuneIn every Thursday. Politics in workplace we fight for the people because they got us in the worst way, from the hill to Brazil, Bombay to Kanye from the left enclave to what the Neo cons say every Thursday. Copperhead in conversation and break us off with some bread cause we waiting on reparations. Listen to waiting on reparations on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. Exercise, Chris. That's good. That's good. That's the kind of atonal grunting that people have come to express, expect from the introductions of my podcasts. I was hoping it wouldn't be that, but then it was so bad that it was great. Like, I loved it. Sara thrilled. That's our brand and now it can't be anything else. We've we've established it. Look, nobody else is doing that. The come town guys. I assume aren't atonally grunting to start their podcast? I don't know actually, but I assume not. What is this is cast, Chris. I guess this is just how we start. It could happen. Here is the podcast. You don't sound like you believe it enthusiastically, Chris, with feeling. This is a podcast. Damn right. Things happening here. That's right. Things falling apart. Yeah. Excellent. That's how we do it. OK, what are we talking about today? Well, one of the things that is happening here, as we have discussed briefly in previous episodes, is a bunch of strikes. And yeah, with us today to talk about one of these strikes, specifically the Kellogg strike, is Mel Buer, an independent researcher, educator and freelance journalist based in Omaha, NE. Where this particular strike? Taking place who has done a lot of journalism previously on the local sort of protests and uprising St in 2020, and is also researching and writing a book. On alternative media. Hi. Hello. Welcome to the show. Thanks. Strikes. Strikes apparently is. What's up? It is. It is. Strike over. We're doing strikes. Strike wave baby. Ye. So this, this specific strike, why don't, can you, can you walk us through a bit about how we got to the point where this Kellogg's factory is on strike? Well, First off, it's four plants. It's all for American Kellogg's cereal plants have gone on strike. The workers in these plants are represented by the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers and Grain Millers International Union. I do love that bakeries and tobacco workers are in the same Union. Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So their contract was up for renegotiation in 2020, actually. And due to a series of weird things happening, they pushed the negotiations to 2021. They renegotiate their contract every five years. And at stake? This year was a sort of pushing back against a recently introduced 2 tier employment system that they company sort of strong armed the Union into in 2015, which essentially is not it's not a good deal for anyone. In 2015 they pushed in this sort of two tier system where one tier is a lower transitional tier and one tier is a legacy or full time employees here. And what it is, is that you know it amounts to a difference of 12 bucks an hour and less benefits. Again, yes, yes. Dan Osborne recently did an interview with Max Alvarez at Working People Podcast and he really kind of talked about exactly what was going on there. And, you know, there's 1400 people who work in four plants. There's about 480 employees at the Omaha plant, which has been around for decades. And essentially what this tier system does is it's capped at 30% of their Union workforce. And the whole idea is as these full-time employees retire or quit, then these transitional employees will sort of be funneled into the full time tier, right? Over the last five years, that hasn't really happened. Really at all. It was a bad deal from the start, according to many of the workers who sort of felt like they, you know, they were backed into a wall because Kellogg's was threatening to close the Memphis plant if they didn't ratify this negotiated contract. So rather than experience, you know? 500 layoffs in Memphis. They just agreed to it. So they knew going to the negotiating table in 2021 and 2020 that they were going to try and sort of. Walk that back because these workers all work in the same plant, same days, first, second, third shift. The transitional workers are working side by side with these full-time employees working the same hours, which can amount to seven days a week, 12 to 16 hours a day on mandatory overtime. And they are making $12.00 an hour less and they are not getting the benefits that these full time employees are getting. So really these full time employees are kind of going to bat for the transitional employees. Kellogg's wants to remove the CAP which the Union negotiated, which is at 30% of their workforce. They want to do that, do away with that so that they can continue hiring more transitional workers, and they they want to **** with the insurance benefits. So. The union. Tried to negotiate this, I think. According to the local union, President Kellogg's negotiators were at the negotiating table for 10 hours and they negotiated 8 hours a day, five days a week for two weeks, 10 hours there at the table. So they weren't interested in negotiating a contract. They had laid out their their terms and they essentially told the Union to go kick rocks, and so the union. Said. You know we have. We have until October 5th and then our contract is up and if we haven't ratified a new contract then we're going out on strike and that's ultimately what happened. So they've been on strike for this will be their 14th day today. I think the fight against the two tier system I think is an interesting part of this because that's been a huge part of a lot of the different strikes we've been seeing has been the John Deere strikes as part of the Kaiser strikes. And yeah, I'm wondering what you think specifically about. The fact that this is like this is the moment that people have decided to like push back against against two or even three tier systems that were introduced in the last really like. 10 or 15 years for the most part. Well, I think it's just, you know, it's a divide and conquer strategy for Kellogg's or for these other companies and ultimately what it looks like is it destabilizes well established unions, especially at Kellogg's. And it pits workers against each other, you know, particularly at Kellogg's, if they are able to remove this cap on this tier system. What they're essentially doing is they're creating a more precarious workplace for these workers. The turnover rate in the lower tier at the Omaha plant is right around 40%. And you know, prior to 2015 you didn't really see a whole lot of people leaving the Kellogg's plant. You know, these were, these are workers who are spending their entire careers at this plant. Their parents work there, their grandparents work there. You know, they because they're all getting paid around the same amount of money. There isn't this tension on the the line. So they're they're working with each other, they're helping each other, right. And. With this tier system, what they're doing is they're throwing these newer workers into a pretty insane factory conditions and making it really difficult for them to feel like they have any reason to stay there, right? A lot of these people will, you know, put in. Some of these workers were transitional workers who weren't officially hired by the company. You know, that aren't full-time employees. They aren't receiving benefits like the full time employees are for five years. They work this every day. Seven days a week, three months on end, right. They have this really, you know, punitive attendance based point system that discourages you calling in sick. There's injuries that happen in the factory all the time. You know, I went out to the line and and wrote a piece for the real news about this and pretty much every person I talked to showed me scars from accidents that happened, injuries in the plant. The Union president himself got his hand stuck in. A like a a mill and broke all the fingers in his hand. He had to have 10 surgeries on his hand. You know, Jesus Christ. There was an accident at the plant two or three weeks ago where a transitional employee got both arms stuck in a conveyor belt, you know? The thing is, is these folks. Super proud of the work that they do, like absolutely, 100% take this work extremely seriously. You know, they're not even asking for changes to their overtime. They are not asking for, you know, anything that you know from me on the outside, I'd be fighting for more humane working conditions, but to them, you know. It's not like it's a point of pride, but they feel that they have put blood, sweat, tears, you know, fractured relationships, time that they could be spending with their children into this factory. And Kellogg's is essentially ******* them over. Yeah. You know, they see it as we have sacrificed for this company for years and years and years, and we are asking for equal pay for all and for everyone to have the same healthcare so that we can do this job. You know, and Kellogg's is saying no, absolutely. You know, I think the Union president said that some of the negotiators called those demands outlandish during negotiations, which I think is just incredible, you know, just corporate greed. Yeah. And I think the other part of the story is that like. I mean, it's kind of a weird consequence of it, but like one of the things, one of the consequences is sort of like rising like stable commodity prices, like staple grain prices and stuff is that Kellogg's like they're doing, they have like record, they have record profits right now. Oh yeah, and they're still just doing this **** because, yeah, they made record profits during the pandemic. Yeah, they gave their CEO's pretty hefty raise bonus. There was a stock buyback program that helped happened among the C-Suite. Books last year, they made a lot of money, a lot of money. And you know, these workers worked every day through the pandemic. Generally understaffed, you know, doing their best because again, they they take this job very seriously and they are proud that they are feeding the American people, you know, and they are proud to work at Kellogg's, and they feel that this contract is just ****. It's just ****. And, you know, the only sensible thing to do is to to walk out on strike because you know, they've been backed into a corner and negotiations have stagnated. Completely, you know. And they don't want to. They don't want to back down from this. You know, they and I agree I feel that what they're asking for is fair. It's very fair. I mean I think it's I think asking for a lot more would be fair. But yeah not my place to be doing. One of the things that strikes me about this, you talk about this tier system that Kellogg's introduced, which I I can't help but think of what happened at John Deere where they I think in 96 cut pensions by 2/3 and then like last year. Eliminated them entirely. And this kind of bid to pit chunks of the workforce against each other where you have like, you know, different groups making different amounts and sort of like, I don't know it, it seems kind of like the strategy that you see in the broader economy like right within within a the the space of a company where you've got like some people who are getting pretty well taken care of in their jobs and other newer people who are who are getting more screwed over in kind of this, this attempt to create. Division within the workforce so that this, this kind of organizing doesn't happen. Hmm. I would agree and you also have to think, you know, if they are able to remove this CAP on the transitional tier, but that means that there's they'll be able to instead of say a full time employee retires. They leave that space empty, but they still need an extra space, an extra person, right? So they can just hire A transitional worker instead of funneling one of those transitional workers into that full-time space. What ends up happening is suddenly you have instead of 70% full time to 30% transitional. The IT starts tipping, right. It becomes a more precarious workforce then say, for example, they do that in the next five years. You know, now they have 70% of these transitional workers who don't think the Union is offering anything for them. They can essentially just offer a better deal to these transitional workers and kick the Union out of the company at some point, you know, and these folks on the line understand that and know that that's kind of Kellogg's plan, right? They know that the Kellogg's, what Kellogg's is trying to do is essentially. Restabilize. The power of the Union inside the plants and everyone on the line that I've spoken with know exactly what's happening, you know, and these full-time employees are out there every day. Making sure that they're transitional. You know, colleagues know that. That's why they're out there, because they they want to not allow this to be something that divides their workforce. It remains to be seen what's going to happen. You know what I mean? Yeah, they've brought in scabs to get the plant up and running again, and most recently yesterday, this morning, yesterday, the building and Construction Trades Council Union. Met with the Union president in Omaha. Uh, because they have about 103rd party ironworkers, carpenters, electricians and skilled tradespeople that are union tradespeople that have contracts at Kellogg's. And they came to what Dan Osborne, the Union president, decided called was a tough decision that those union workers are going to cross the picket line to honor those contracts. So Kellogg's is forcing. The unions in the city in like into a bind, really, because they're they're, you know. Going to lose their own contracts at Kellogg's, so that's kind of been like the most recent development here. Is that rather than just? Temps coming in, we have now skilled union tradespeople from various Omaha unions who are also crossing the picket line to honor their contracts at Kellogg's, you know, past these striking workers, so it's a bit of a mess. A little bit, you know. There's so much going on right now. I'm, I'm kind of wondering what you think are the cause. We've got a number of strikes kind of all coming to a head at the same time. I'm wondering specifically from the Kellogg strike, what do you think are kind of the lessons that should be taken from what's happened so far for the the broader labor movement? I think the biggest thing that it's kind of impacted me as I've gone to the line, I've stood on the picket line, I've covered these, you know, this strike, I've talked to people is that when these types of actions happen. They really only can be sustained because the community comes together to support them, you know? These strike funds that are going around and folks showing up to stand on the picket line who are not part of the Union are really sort of become, you know, they are. Helping support these workers who can only hold out so long with finite resources, right? So the big thing to me is that. Past these news cycles of excitement of strike, Tober of, you know, these people just walked out today. Well, they may, you know, they may be on the line for months and months on end and the new cycle is going to move on and these communities are still going to have to try and and and back up these labor actions, right. You really can't have. A true. You know, you can't have a labor movement without, you know, support, right? And that's kind of been the biggest thing that has impacted me. Particularly, you know, this Omaha used to be a really formidable Union, Tom. You know, back in the 80s it was really, really something to see that the business unions and and the various locals here are really some of these union leaders had more political power than the mayor. Right. And that has gone downhill over the last 40 years and it's really cool to see. Uh, the the level of solidarity that's happening amongst the community, you know, and the ways in which people are kind of coming out to talk to and and be a part of this strike. And to remind these Kellogg's workers that they're not operating in a bubble, you know, and that the rest of the Community really hopes that the strike will end quickly and peacefully and with a really good. Resolution for these workers you know. One other thing I wanted to ask about in in in terms of sort of this, this kind of research into the Union movements. And in in in terms of sort of community support is the level of violence that there's been against a like against these strikes I've seen a lot of. Like a stuff about people getting hit by buses and like and I don't I don't know if. I think, I think I'm getting my stress. I don't know if they've been direct car attacks on this specific picket line, but that's been a thing that it's been happening a lot and I was wondering couple of documented cases, yeah, yeah. And yeah, I was wondering what you think about that and like what actually can be done about the fact that like? You know that, you know, like just just the fact that we're just seeing auto attacks on picket lines regularly now. I mean, that's, you know. It's a it's a ****** development, you know? I was out on the picket line last Thursday and. They were attempting to bring in buses at shift change past the the picketers who walk slowly, you know, they don't stop in front of the bus. It's illegal to stop and and, you know, make it, you know, so that they can't pass through the gates. But they slow them down for a little bit. And one gentleman was trying, you know, was standing there and this bus just. Bumped right into him. You know, there's videos that have been shared through local news of buses knocking down workers as they're trying to cross the picket line. And I, you know, there are also like personal vehicles that go through, and it could be the private security that's been hired. It could be managers. But you know, they're running through these lines really quickly, dangerously. It's unfortunate and you know, I I don't have an answer for what the best. A solution for that is, you know, but vehicle tax have become sort of. More uh? I don't want to say commonplace. Mint Mobile offers premium wireless starting at just 15 bucks a month. And now for the plot twist. Nope, there isn't one. Mint Mobile just has premium wireless from 15 bucks a month. There's no trapping you into a two year contract. You're opening the bill to find all these nuts fees. There's no luring you in with free subscriptions or streaming services that you'll forget to cancel and then be charged full price for. None of that. For anyone who hates their phone Bill, Mint Mobile offers premium wireless for just $15.00 a month. Mint Mobile will give you the best rate. Whether you're buying one or for a family, and it meant family start at 2 lines. All plans come with unlimited talk and text, plus high speed data delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. You can use your own phone with any mint mobile plan and keep your same phone number along with all your existing contacts. Just switch to Mint mobile and get premium wireless service starting at 15 bucks a month. Get premium wireless service from just $15.00 a month and no one expected plot twist at mintmobile.com/behind. That's mintmobile.com/behind. Seriously, you'll make your wallet very happy at Mint Mobilcom behind my name is Erica Kelly, and I am the host and creator of Southern Freight True crime. There are so many people that just have no idea about some injustices in the world, and if you can give a voice to them, you can create change. To be able to do it within podcasting is just such a gift. I believe it was 18 months after I got on with Spreaker that I was making enough that I could quit my day job. It was incredible. I always feel like an ambassador for speaker, but that's because I'm passionate about podcasting. It's really easy to use. I always tell people I am so not tech. Took me 5 minutes to get comfortable with spreaker, and when I find a new friend that has an incredible show, I want them to make money. I want them to be able to do what I did. Follow your podcasting dreams. Let's break your handle the hosting, creation, distribution, and monetization of your podcast. Go to spreaker.com. That's SPREAK. Er.com get paid to talk about the things you love with spreaker from iheart this fall on revisionist history. Is there anything that we haven't talked about or or? Vascular you'd like to add that? Seems relevant. You should have asked me why I'm missing fingers on my left hand. A story about sacrifice. I think his suffering drove him to try to alleviate suffering. And the shocking discovery I made where I faced the consequences of writing a book I thought would help people? Isn't that funny? It's not funny at all. It's depressing. Very depressing. Revisionist history is back with more. Listen to revisionist history on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. I've never seen less enthusiasm for a great idea in my life. This, but you see them happening a lot, both at protests last year and yeah, you know, I think warrior Matt Cole had some bosses running through the lines and and being reckless with their vehicles, you know? The problem is, is on the on the back end. The police don't step in when they see these instances, you know, and in fact last Thursday when we had 100 plus motorcyclists from various MC's show up to support the strike. The police were the ones who protected the scabs and made sure that they made it through the picket line. So you know the answer to that. Not sure. You know, yeah. I mean, that's a time honored police tradition. Yeah. They they historically don't don't exist to protect laborers with the notable exception of a of the the the sheriff and what was it mattawan and during the. The coal miner strike in West Virginia? Well, yeah, they shot him so well. Yeah, but he shot some people first. Yeah. Sid Hatfield. That was the name. Yeah, I don't know. I've gotten to know some of these folks on the line of the last two weeks and they're just fantastic human beings, you know? They are accommodating and hardworking and they come from all age brackets and they bring their families out and you know, they're getting, they're getting a raw deal from Kellogg's and. So far, the Community support has been overwhelmingly positive, and there hasn't really been like at the John Deere strike. They're not getting eggs thrown out them. You know, they get a lot more honking and messages of support than they do people driving by to yell at them for. Uh, you know, being on strike. So that's been nice to see, you know, and actually this weekend, on Saturday, there's going to be a like. Cool. Vintage car show Cruise around, Kellogg's event that they've got planned, the fire departments bringing rigs and Teamsters are fire department. Yeah, yeah. And the Teamsters are bringing cars and the there's a bunch of vintage car clubs that are going to be coming out. So you know, those types of things have like really kind of like fired up these people to keep them out on the line as long as they need to be, you know? So communities there for him. One of the things I'm continuing to wonder about is. What it takes to close the gap between? Understanding that you and your colleagues are getting screwed over by this system, and understanding that you and all of the other people striking at the same time, and perhaps even a bunch of people not striking. Are all kind of fighting the same fight and then maybe there's. Grander things to achieve than the negotiation of a single contract, because that seems like the big leap that is going to be the real struggle to clear. I yeah, you know. I will say that some of the workers are fully aware that this is not just about a single contract negotiation and is actually, you know. More about struggles of the working class against corporate greed and the ways in which the working class gets their ***** handed to them all the time. And they know that. They know that at some point, perhaps at some point in the future, someone else is going to look at their example and be inspired by it, right? As far as, like, maybe, I don't know, ideologically speaking or politically speaking, for these folks, it's doesn't fit into any sort of. Ideology, leftist or conservative or whatever. Everyone's got their own personal politics, but they don't really talk about it on the line. What they talk about is working class versus ruling class, that you know. That's their sense. It's corporate greed. It's ******* CEO's making $11.6 million a year while they're struggling to pay their own bills, you know, and. And you know that conversation is more common than. Trying to fit this into a larger political movement or revolutionary movement, if that makes sense. You know, yeah. But I would say that the vast majority of the workers, regardless of their own personal politics, have a very clear sense of where they sit in terms of class consciousness. And understand that this is one of one of the most effective tactics to try and and force the hand of these ******** you know, is to withhold work and withhold their labor. So. Well, this has been great. I mean, that's everything I had asked Chris. Anything else? Not that, not that I have. So is there A, is there a call to action we could have for our listeners or pages people should be following strike fund? Yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a go fund me and there's a PayPal set up for the Omaha strikers. I believe the BCTGM international page has. Like a page of each of the strike funds for each of the four plants. So that might be something that you might not want to share with your listeners. I can send you an e-mail with that. Because it's probably going to be easier to do, but yeah, as far as I know, BCTGM hasn't called for an official boycott of Kellogg's products. However, they wouldn't be mad if you just didn't buy any right now. There was some talk last week that some of the picketers might, you know, be flyering outside of grocery stores to try and educate the community on what's going on with this strike. But beyond that, they also are concerned about the quality of the food being produced by scabs, so it probably would be healthy for you to not. Buy the food, you know, because I think it was in, what, 2000? 18. During a works a lockout in Memphis, the same company that they brought in then that they're bringing in now, ****** in the cereal on the line. And they didn't release video of that for two years after the incident. So it ended up in someone's home, you know? Gross. Yikes. Yikes. Yeah, I guess that's some scab **** but scabs. Yeah, that's pretty ****** right? So yeah, you know, support your local strike fund. And if you are in a city where Kellogg's plant is striking, I'm sure those workers would love love to to. Hear from you, fill your support so. And where and where can our listeners follow you? I am on Twitter primarily at cold brewed tool. I don't know why I picked that name, but I like it. Yeah, yeah, I got. I haven't changed that handle since I got on Twitter, so. Yeah, that's usually where I'm at. Otherwise, you know, I teach locally and and to have a podcast that I'm developing and and do a bunch of different projects. So Twitter's the best way to get ahold of me if you have questions. Awesome. All right. Thanks for having me on, folks. I appreciate it to us, Mel. Good. Thanks for thanks for joining us. I'll be back at the picket line, you know, talking to these folks, and I'm gonna do my best to keep this **** in the news cycle so that they aren't forgotten. So awesome. We've got a link to the strike fund and some other ways to help in the description. So yeah, this has been a could happen here pod, follow us on Twitter and Instagram at happened here pod and at close on media for all the rest of our shows. Make sure to check out drink champs, your number one music podcast on the Black Effect podcast network. Host NOREDJEFN sat down with artists and icon yay, which Vulture called one of 2021's most significant interviews. I literally had to go like Thanos, and I don't want to have to be the villain, but when I went and did the donda thing, yay returned, and everybody had to sit back and watch. The real leader check out drink champ's conversation with yay and many more legendary artists each and every Friday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. I'm Jake Halpern's, host of deep cover. Our new season is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago. We controlled the courts. We controlled absolutely everything. 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. From my perspective, Bob was too good to be true. There's got to be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust that guy. He looks like a little scumbag liar, stool pigeon. He looked like what? He was a rat. I can say with all certainty I think he's a hero because he didn't have to do what he did, and he did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around the first time my life was over. If it ever got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen to deep cover on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here. Your favorite podcast are also legally the only podcaster that that people are allowed to enjoy on the Internet here to introduce a really exciting episode of it could happen here. So for the last bit of time I've been in and out of touch with a number of members of the Puget Sound John Brown Club. They have provided armed self-defense groups for a couple of different protests in the Washington area over the last year. And change. And we wanted to sit down and talk to them about the ideas behind Community self-defense, how to do it responsibly, how to do it irresponsibly. We also had some discussions with them about the disasters that happened at the chop slash Chaz last year. They were not involved with that as an organization, but they have some insights on the matter that's going to be coming at you in a separate episode or maybe even a couple of episodes in the near future. Today we're just kind of talking about the concepts of armed community self-defense. You know what's responsible, what's irresponsible, how people should think about it. Uh, I think you'll enjoy the conversation. Here it is. A decent chunk of the folks listening, especially the Portlanders, will have experience with and that that Garrison and I have certainly had experience with it is people at protests declaring themselves security, sometimes even wearing shirts that say security, and picking up a variety of weapons, often paintball guns and Mace, and using them, often irresponsibly, on other protesters, on on bystanders in the name of of of keeping things safe. And I think we're pretty clear. I think most reasonable people can see that that's not community self-defense, but often those people certainly claim that what they're doing is community self-defense. And I'm specifically wanting to start by getting a kind of a range of definitions from folks as you are all people who have engaged in community self-defense and particularly armed community self-defense. What do you see as the actual role of Community self-defense and and how should it look as opposed to? You know a guy with a paintball gun yelling at kids for tagging a window? Ray, you wanna you wanna kick us off with an answer there? I do. Community defense should be part of the A broad health and safety infrastructure set up for a protest movement or community being deliberately vague here. But specifically, armed community defense deals with mitigating lethal and egregious harm to members of a community. The goal is forced and foremost prevention, mitigation, and control of those threats. In my mind, ideally, Community defense would involve no one doing anything, carrying around a bunch of really heavy **** and nothing happening, but deterring those from harming others. In the absolute worst case, it means you have to actually do something that can get messy pretty quickly. I want to circle back to a couple of things, actually. I do have one quick follow-up question for you before we move on to the next people, Ray, would you say? Like carrying heavy things and and whatnot? I'm wondering, like, what do you think? I I'm interested in you, and I'll probably ask. Other people just follow up when it when it comes to carrying, bringing a firearm to either a protest situation or some other community self-defense situation. What is going through your head when you determine what to bring? Because I've seen people carry a variety of different guns from like shotguns and in one case is a Mosin-nagant to AR or handguns. What do you think is kind of the the the logic train I guess that you would take and like what is the appropriate tool to bring like in this situation? So that depends entirely on what the anticipated threat is and how one plans to mitigate the anticipated threat. There's no correct answer for that. Sometimes the answer to mitigate lethal or regious bodily harm is not a firearm at all. Indeed, firearms are applicable in an extraordinarily narrow range of scenarios, but those range of scenarios are catastrophic and need extreme measures to be mitigated. So it depends on what. If you are considering bringing firearm, what is the firearm good at? And then you get into the minutiae of what firearms good for, what thing, which depends on your legal context and particular threat. But I think one has to start with the question is, is the thing I'm bringing able to mitigate the type of harm I might see happen to my community and to get a little bit less vague? There are people who think that bringing a shotgun is a good way to stop a car speeding into a crowd when it clearly isn't right. So one has to make sure that the tool, whatever they have, is you is appropriate for the task at hand and the the threat you anticipate. Yeah, that was great. Thank you, ray. OK, D you wanna, you want to give us your answer next? I agree with everything that Ray said and the only addition that I'd make is that. It's specifically in our in our cases generally doesn't mean. Standing between protesters and police. But more guiding protesters, you know, are activists or or participants away from potential situations of harm. It's like we can't stand in front of police and stop cops from doing their job. Like that just gets you arrested and or worse or worse. And that's not what we're here for. So yeah. That's all I wanted to ask you because I have chatted with a couple of your number about this, about kind of the the role that that an armed contingent at a protest can play in kind of allowing an avenue of retreat, you know, especially during confrontations with non state actors. I am interested in kind of what you. You know, you're not you're not to kind of, as you did to kind of clarify misconception. You don't see your role as standing in front of the protesters, between them and the cops and like presenting a threat to the cops. What is the utility and kind of an active protest situation that you've seen of of of what you all do. So I that's a good question. And. If we're doing our job well. Then most people think we don't do anything at all. A lot of what we do is we're we're watching. External potential threats. Who might try to come in? The most common factor these days is a car. But generally we're looking for folks that might cause trouble and finding ensuring that we're not putting ourselves in a position where we're going to get cornered or trapped and and really, you know, just trying to help facilitate and work with the facilitators and organizers. To keep things you know, progressing in a safe way. So. As far as what we're protecting against threat wise, that that ranges from everything from like angry people who are just angry and trying to go home and getting blocked by a protest to. People who are who are actively looking to do harm to a movement that happens to be involved in the protest or. You know, maybe it's something as as as specific as a person who's looking to specifically do harm to organizers. So most of the time it's we're we're focused outward and and just making sure that our exits are are covered and that we have ways to get people away from potential bad situations. That was great. Thank you. Katie. Shannon, you want to give your answer now? Absolutely, thanks. I would add there's a really critical element to community defense that begins and ends with the word community. Obviously, there's a big difference between proclaiming yourself security and showing up someplace and being there as an intentional community support where the community plays a role in you being there and also has some influence on that question of what are you carrying and what is the response. I think it's just really important that. You keep the community aspect at the forefront, and that's a huge part of our collective work, is making sure that when we're providing community defense, we're aligning ourselves with. The desires of the Community group that has asked us to be there also filtering it through our judgment as to what's safe and appropriate under the circumstances, using some of those filters that Ray mentioned when they were answering. And what do you see as? Like, like this is something that I kind of gets to both what what is an issue with me and kind of the folks who declare themselves as security, which is that they're often kind of separating themselves from the rest of the movement. Specifically in a cop like way to say like, well, it's my job to keep you safe even if that means or it's my job to keep things orderly even if that means attacking some other people. At this protest, one of the things that Scott Crow in his in setting sites, which is a really good book on community self-defense does is set out. That a key aspect of Community self-defense as you said, is that you're like a member of the community. And I think I guess the question I have is because guns are what they are and have the kind of cultural weight that they have, it's you people are always people who accept being armed as an aspect of their personality are always going to be kind of fighting having that dominate their personality. And it it it wouldn't, it's clearly. Something that a lot of people have an issue with. The thing that is important is to be a member of the Community who happens to be armed, as opposed to an armed activist who's whose role is being armed, right? Like I I mean, do you agree with what I'm saying or kind of like, I'm wondering how you think about it because this is something that I'm kind of going around in my head about as well, because it's it's it's clearly where a lot of the problems happen, right, that the gun becomes central to the identity of the people who bring it, which is something that happens to the cops. Yes, and also the mentality of separating yourself from the community and not being part of. The purpose of being there, and so I'll defer to my my comrades here to go a little bit further with it. But I would just say that there's a significant difference between armed community defense and having a intentional presence of armed community defense at an event or a protest and being a person who shows up with a gun. Those are two really different things. And so I think that's the that's. One of the benefits of being. Part of an organization that does this collectively with accountability with. Training with a known role in the community so that there is consistency among what we do and why we do it. And a history of folks understanding that if we're present somewhere, it's because we've been asked to be there and that what we're doing there is aligned with and approved of by the people who are organizing the event. And then I'll, I'll let somebody else who's more. Look, with that I am answer that further if they feel like they can. Yeah, I think, uh, Nova is up now. If you wanted to give your answer in kind of also comment on what we've been chatting about what Shannon and I were just chatting about. Nova, hi, thank you so much. I, I would say that folks like Ray and Katie and of course Shannon really put it very succinctly, very well together and answered a lot of the things that I was going to already provided, things that I was going to add to it, but the specifically the part about the gun becoming the driving factor. In summaries presence at a protest or the gun being a part of the personality of somebody who's going to appoint themselves as a guardian towards bunch people. I would I would say that with any responsible Community, Community defense role within a protest context that the act of being a body in between a threat and your Community has to come first and that the that the firearm has to be secondary. Umm there there was an incident on the 300th night of protest where many of us were at risk of being harmed by a vehicle attack. And in retrospect, a firearm would not have mitigated that threat terribly well. But the idea of being in between a threat such as that and somebody else who is possibly more vulnerable than you are for a lot more of a significance on that, so that the firearm being there to respond to a threat and perhaps mitigate an active ongoing deadly threat to your community is one thing. But I think the primary thing is going to be just. Putting yourself in harm's way so that you can spare that responsibility from somebody possibly more vulnerable than you, if that makes sense. That should be the primary responsibility. And how do you avoid letting that turn people doing that into feeling like a separate? And even elevated chunk of of the community because that, again, that's what happens with police. You know, this idea that it starts is like, well, we're here to serve and protect and that that through a variety of toxic alchemies turns into this idea of the thin blue line. What is the way you push back on that? How do you actually stop it from going from. I'm someone who is accepting personal responsibility for the well-being of the people around me and putting my body in between them in harm's way if necessary to I it's my job to protect people too. It's my job to, you know from turning that into kind of this idea of I think stewardship in some ways that like some people in law enforcement have were like they're they they get to tell you what to do. Is that's their responsibility, to keep you safe? Like, how do you, how do you stop that attitude from evolving? Because I've seen it happen to people fairly quickly when they put themselves in some of these situations sometimes, and it's certainly not like most people, but it is. It doesn't take a long time for somebody to like. Especially if they're vulnerable to to get in that position. So how do you, especially if you're approaching it from an organizational standpoint, right? You're an organization made-up of people who come to do this. How do you fight back against that? Like what is the active kind of counter programming if you will? I see. I don't have an easy answer for that question, to be completely honest with you. But I'd say that the closest thing to an answer to that would be that in almost, you know, monastic devotion to the task that was asked of you by the group that asked you there. So if somebody asks us to be a part of a March and to simply look outward for external threats and. To be willing to respond to those threats if need be, again putting our bodies in harm's way, but also be willing to respond to lethal force and kind should the worst case scenario arise. I'd say that the. Ultimate accountability rests with the people who asked you to be there. And there's no easy answer as to what that mechanism of accountability looks like. But I, you know, in several layers that would start with your teammates, the people who are part of your organization that asked you to, that is asked to be there. So other members of, of JB GC are, you know, definitely going to try and keep each other accountable, but it's also the larger. The the the the the larger contingent of the action that you're a part of to be ultimately willing to back down from whatever you're doing if a concern is voiced by that community and. I I wish I had a better way to word that, but just the. The, the, the constant vigilance within oneself against overstepping the boundaries that were clearly set by people who invited you into a space. That's really the best answer I can give for that at the moment without further percolating. Well, I mean, yeah, for for one thing, I think this is the reason we're having this conversation, and I'm getting ahead of us a little, is because this is still very much a developing thing on the left and and I don't think anybody has all the answers on how to do it. Well, although I think an increasing number of folks accept the necessity. So I think that's part of the reason for the conversation is this like continuing exploration of how to actually do this responsibly. But I do think you hit on something important there when you talked about. The that you're there at the invitation of a community, as opposed to you are there to to police or to maintain order, like the idea of approaching it as if you're a guest strikes me as a really good idea. In order to to keep yourself on a certain behavioral standpoint, like I'm I'm I'm here at the request of this community as their guest as opposed to I am here to protect this community, you know? Absolutely. I that's a, that's a that's a perfect way to summarize what I was trying to go for with that one. I think that the ultimately to be averse to being put in a position of power or authority is the best way to check against that and to simply be a servant to the community. That is, again, inviting you into that space and putting yourself in a. Servile is not the right word. I'm looking for a different word for that, but a a A position of service. A true position. Like like I. Yes. Uh, what? What? What community defense should be is ultimately a service and a burden rather than a reward of responsibility and power over your fellow Community members. OK, yeah, great. I think next was Ray again. You had something to say there. Yeah. To finish that thought in my notes, I did a section of what happens when things go right. I think one thing that can go right is normalizing that firearms are just a thing that can be around and they don't have to be your entire *** personality, nor do they have to be a differentiating factor. Indeed, I think one of the successes, they're not many, but of a Community defense. In the chop was normalizing the idea that people can have firearms and they're not an inherent threat. I'm thinking of people who were armed often and were pointed out routinely, and it was like, Nah, he's still, he's he's a cool dude, you know, just a guy. Just like. Things like. You know, do you really think the black guy is going to shoot up the top? I don't know that he's he's totally fine. I know him. His jokes are great. They got an overhearing of these kind of conversations. It it helps, you know, firearms become like part of the tapestry of life. Not this differentiating factor, not of beauty item, not something to wrap your personality around. It's just like they're there and that they they can be good, bad, right, wrong or indifferent. And I think that normalizing effect is one of the successes Community defense can have. And I'm happy to talk about other things that Community defense. Normalized, but I wanted to emphasize the you just have a firearm, you're not talking about it, you're not touching it, you're not thinking about it. You know, people have that. It's just around and it became pretty chill. And there is kind of at the top specifically, there's an area where firearms just kind of were around and nothing happened really. And it that was kind of wonderful in my mind. So from my experience with the with the club. It's basically like even though we are the John Brown Gun Club, the guns are like the last thing that we even consider like it would technically if we were to actually rename the club, it would be the John Brown Deescalation Club we would like most of the time any any anything that's going on. Even when I did visit the chop and there were some weird stuff going on like Brother Matthew being brother Matthew, people were. Using their skills to. To to deescalate the situation, to calm the calm out, calm down individuals to make sure that that whatever hostility they have would be abated through just verbal, verbal communication. Talk about that in a little more detail, because I don't know who. I mean, I was at the Chaz briefly, but I don't know who brother Matthew was or like what incident you're talking about. So I'm kind of curious about you is a guy who shows up up here all around the Seattle area. And also I think he's even got up in Portland. Well, Preacher Guy gets in everybody's faces. Usually not liked by everybody. Super afraid of snakes. Thanks Jerry, but yeah, he like like he he's he's a person who thrives off of confrontation and uses the Bible as as his mode of operation. But I remember distinctly at at the chop he was getting it in, getting into it with people, but everybody who was around. Tried to talk him down, they tried to make him chill out, even though he was continually screaming for attention and. Just being weird, but Umm. But in the end, like, that's just like that happens more often with protest situations or March situations or direct action situations where we're asked to be a part of it by the organizers and and as Ray had mentioned in Nova had mentioned we like, we're asked to be there and we're not just asked. And then we suddenly show up like we get. Involved with the people who are organizing any of the partners that they, that they, that they get, that they bring into it. We try to learn as much about what's going on with them, who are the threats, where, where the event is, how the event is going to be thought of. We ask a lot of questions about it, like we plan and plan and plan and plan to make sure that everything is super safe or as safe as possible based on all known variables. And and then the stuff that's unknown, we do our best to mitigate that somehow. Yes, we are armed, but that's like the last thing that we ever even think of and that's even in our planning, like we say flat out. Deescalate first. If things start to ratchet up, respond in kind. So like if someone. You know, like tries to, like, I don't know, like starts to fistfight. We're not going to. Pull out a gun on someone who wants to box somebody on the street. We're going to do our best to stop so. Stop them through other means, like whether if it's just to block a punch or whatever. But the first things and foremost is deescalation. Calm. Calm that person down and tell them to go away, or just to chill out, or whatever the whatever is necessary. I mean D escalation, all of the best community self-defense that I've personally watched has been de escalation. You know, they're they're not the only situations I've seen. I've seen force used a couple of times in situations that were necessary, but by far de escalation is the thing I've seen. Actually protect people in dicey situations the most and generally that's that's going to be the case. Yeah, I know for myself, like my attitude is. We all go home. Everybody who shows up there goes home. Not to the hospital, not to jail every or not to the morgue. We all go home. Yeah, I think that's definitely seems like the best way to look at it. So into the specific question of how not to become a cop. In this position and become the gun. The only way I've been able to do anything in that regard. Has been to not have that be my primary thing that I fulfill. I'm part of a community and I'm a mechanical person. In this Community, I try to have my mission be not that other skill set or that other access to being of an aide to a community. Be my actual purpose in the community. If that makes any sense. Yeah, that makes complete sense and yeah, I think is the healthiest way to to deal with it. So something I've been wondering about as so I'm like not armed at all so. I guess I'm on like the other the other side of the fence of the sort of community self-defense. Thing people show up to protests and something I was wondering about is, is the relationship between this stuff and, you know, between this sort of mentality developments and the difficulty of sort of integrating into the community of. Having organizations that are basically independent security groups and not for example like. Taking like, I don't know, take like an historical example. Like there was a thing in China you'd see a lot in, in like the 1900s where you know you'd have armed pickets, right. And so you, you, you have an armed force there, but the armed force is like, you know, this is, this is like a branch of the Union, right. And that's that's how they sort of like. Like that that was their sort of solution to how do you stop Cop syndrome is that, you know, they're, they're they're basically like a part of another community organization. And so I'm curious. What you all think about? What the sort of, I guess, the strengths and weaknesses of of being an independent? Or having having sort of independent. Security organizations versus having. Like a subsections of other organizations that are armed. Yeah, I feel like I can offer a unique perspective here as someone who's been Privy to multiple angles of this, including separate organizations, ones integrated with others, and ones that are sort of just parts of the community. I don't think there's any like. Inherent sort of best answer here. I do think being part of a a separate organization makes it harder to be. In the community versus of the community, meaning you came from the community and now you're sort of kind of separate, but not really. Like, JB in particular has a perpetual problem with people saying, oh, you know, John Brown will do X. And then this is something that has been discussed, and often this is to people's immense fire. I don't want to speak for everyone here, but it does seem to be that so seldom does one wish to be said, oh, hello. It's kind of like saying, oh, the Union will solve this. And it's like, turns out you're the union buddy. Right. And it's never referred to being in the first person. So I do think being embedded into other groups or being sort of this loose diffuse group can make it easier to be. Part of the community because of the structural forces that make that it is easier to get there. A separate organization can help focus and codify certain procedures. Training, you know, make sure that people have some sort of unified goals and values at the expense of making it a bit harder to integrate into one's community. I think given the era we're in, I'm not surprised. We see many, many approaches to community defense with varying effectiveness at different times, including JB's. Perspective. Yeah, and I I guess I'm interested as we. As we move on here and like one of the one of the questions I see is. How do you the difficulty in kind of? You don't want to have a situation where there's absolutely no. Where the Community self-defense contention is anyone who shows up with a gun, because then anyone can show up with a gun and you as someone else who's showing up with a weapon or potentially like if that person. Makes a bad decision that's going to, I mean, as it as it has in the past that has significant repercussions on everybody else and I that is one of the thornier points because I do. One of the things I see is valuable. Someone mentioned earlier like. The nice thing about it just it not being firearms being normalized, not as a like gun culture thing, but as of this is just a thing that is present in the Community. And I saw that a lot in Rojava, right, that everybody was armed or at least the significant chunk of the populace had access to arms, but nobody was showing off with them. They were not like anybody's like piece of identity. They were just one of the tools like a like a like a spade or a shovel that were present in the community. OK, I think I've skipped over a couple of people. I wanted to give a thud a chance to talk. That's actually very much sort of in line with what the point I was going to make, which is for me a huge part of Community defense, is making sure that the aspect that is defending the Community is not alienated from the Community because. It isn't concentrated in just a few people because I think one of the other things that we emphasize a lot through outside of direct protest actions is we try to teach people how to safely operate firearms, but also to give firearms the respect that they deserve, that firearms are not there so that you are *** ***. Firearms are not there because you know you're going to get into a gunfight. And it's the first rule. I mean, one of the one of the things that we stress. Sort of. Beyond the basic 4 rules of gun safety is the first rule of gun type is don't get into a gunfight that it's, you know you want to exhaust every possible option that you have. And when the community at large is engaged and like prey was saying that it's sort of, it becomes normalized that, oh, we're not relying on these several people to keep us safe, but that in fact. As an entire collective, we are keeping us safe, and that gives recognition to the fact that some people it's not, it's not the right choice for them to carry a gun for one reason or another. And the at the same time the the power that is present in that particular tool is dispersed to the point where it doesn't. You know, you don't have people getting. Self aggrandizing thoughts because of the fact that they're possessing firearms, and I think that's something that we. You know, work really hard to instill in people in a variety of contexts, and I think is really critical to this question. So the question just trying to summarize what the question was earlier, what the strengths and weaknesses of having an organized armed response are. Umm. One of the things that that I wanted to bring up. As the historical context of armed response, specifically Community armed response in Seattle, I did some digging. And found in a a book called History of Seattle from the earliest settlement to the present time, volume 2. Which I started pouring through and found that there was in 1874 there was a group called the Seattle Amateur Rifle Association which leased planned for a range on current present day Capitol Hill like right where the train station is if you're familiar with the area. So like. Right where protests always happen these days, yeah. Later on, there's record record in 1877 of the Seattle rifle team organizing a shooting contest. And then later on in 1886, which is a number that probably rings a bell, the Chinese riots, as they called them at the time. Happened, which was sort of the start of the labor movement, where everyone decided that Chinese immigrants were the cause of all of our woes, that the low wages being paid to Chinese immigrants were. Because of Chinese immigrants and not racism. So they decided to run. Every person who looked Chinese out of town, literally, they referred to this as the Tacoma method. And I'm guessing cause that's what they did in Tacoma exactly. It started there and. There was a February 7th of 1886. This massive, angry racist mob tried to push all of the the Chinese folks out of Seattle or anyone they thought might look like Chinese. And they tried to push them onto a Steamboat, but there weren't. There wasn't enough room for them all there. Cops got involved. A bunch of other stuff happened. They decided no give them time in court. But in the process. Of of making this decision, you know, the racist got a mob together. And we're basically just going to try and put a stop to this before they the the legal proceedings could to go forward. So they reached out to local allies in arms. They had the home guards, which I'm not exactly sure exactly what the home guards were, but I assume there's something related to National Guard later on, or maybe just an extension of military. But the home guards and the Seattle Rifles, as well as the university cadets, which I'm assuming are of course soldiers and training. And pulled them all out. And made a community self-defense group out of them. They didn't put a rifle line and held the mob back. And enabled those folks to get, you know, safely to have their day in court, and then to protect them for a while afterward, they actually organized a sort of a a watch. Because they didn't have enough police to to manage the mob, they used folks from the Seattle Rifles and these other groups. To to sort of bolster the police forces and keep peace in the town. So. The the sort of thing that we do is long standing historical presence, but I think there's a lot of things you can look at the the history of and sort of take lessons from so. Umm, as as Ray mentioned, a unified response is of course a huge benefit of having a huge strength of having an organized armed group. And it's it's literally. If someone reaches out and says we need help, help is available. But there are a lot of weaknesses of businesses and clubs can be held liable legally, and this is an endemic problem within gun law. As it stands, the laws are written in such that they effectively they're. That it comes down to situational context to determine how a gun law should be enforced. And the law will never be on the side of a group trying to abolish parts of the law. So you have to be very careful about how you how. Especially an organized or formally organized armed group has to be very careful about how they put their their work in play with that in mind. Yeah, that was great. And I was unaware actually I was aware of the of the riots. I was unaware of that part of the history which is fascinating and I think very important. Yeah. Ray, did you want to explain the threat onion? Yeah, the integrated threat onion. So this is kind of a, a well known meme in certain circles. Slash actual thing and it's designed to help you understand how to like mitigate threat and. Sorry, integrated survivability onion. Mitigate threats, right. So the teal deer is, you know, do you want to try to preserve life by having body armor and hoping a bullet hits you in the body armor, or do you want to preserve life by, I don't know, not showing the **** ** to something where you might get shot? And the idea is, is it's it's a meme because so often you know, people are like, oh, I want to get in there and get engaged with conflict and be the hero. And the answer is, you know, you could just like, not go there, right? And it would probably be a lot easier to do that. But there's some real weight to the survivability onion, which is like there are many, many ways to mitigate threats to yourself in your community, and then very often the most boring and mundane answer is probably the one that's going to actually result in the biggest impact. And the heroic answer is probably the absolute worst answer, and only what you rely on if everything else has gone to hell. So that's someone I think it was fun spoke to, alluded to the threat union. And ways to mitigate harm to oneself and one's community. And I have to repeat it, because it's this, this meme that's been coming up forever. Yeah. And it is like the basic idea of the thread union is that you have like this again. You, you you think of it in layers. That's why they call it an onion of like things that protect you. And the things that provide the most protection are stuff like not being seen or present when somebody wants to harm you, not or being behind cover when somebody wants to harm you. And the thing that offers the least protection is having body armor. You know, it's this the idea that like the things that people buy and. And focus on because they look cool. All things that offer less protection than situational awareness and good judgment is kind of the actual like lesson I think to take out of the threat union. That would be my opinion on the matter. This has been it could happen here. That's all for this week. Find us at happen here pod on Instagram and Twitter, and find the rest of her shows at Coulson Media in the same places. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from now until the heat death of the universe. It could happen here as a production of cool zone media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for. It could happen here, updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com/sources. 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