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Take five, the stay in your car, 10-minute oil change. Buying a home can be an anxiety-inducing endeavor. But does it have to be? With the SoFi mortgage loan, you can save now with special home buying pricing and down payment options as little as 3-5%. Then, be eligible to save later when rates drop and you refinance. Thanks to SoFi, you don't need anxiety to be on your mind when home shopping. Just saving, visit SoFi.com slash New Home to learn more. Mortgages through SoFi bank and a member FDIC, animal less number 696891, loan and offer terms, conditions, restrictions apply, equal housing, lender. 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. Welcome back to It Could Happen here, a podcast about world stuff falling apart, putting it back together, all that good stuff. Today, we're actually covering something that's at the intersection of all of that, both how fucked up things are and the attempt to make them more just more equitable, less nightmarish. We're talking about war crimes, the international criminal court, and most specifically the warrant that was just issued for Vladimir Putin's arrest, which is something you've probably heard about on the internet. People have various takes on this in order to kind of talk about what's actually been done, what it actually means and sort of the history of attempts to hold the leaders of nations to account for war crimes. I want to talk to Nick Waters. Nick, welcome to the show. Hi, Rob. Nick, you and I have some connections outside of this. First off, you're here on the show today because you work in an investigatory investigative capacity. Can you tell that I'm not used to waking up this early for belling cat, where we both work together. Your focus has been primarily on war crimes. You've been covering Ukraine lately, but you have a pretty wide purview and a pretty wide base of experience, including crimes in Libya. I wanted to talk to you a little bit. First off, welcome to the show. Thanks very much, mate. In honor of behind the bastards, I have the largest knife I could find in this place next to me. It's not quite machete, but I thought I should have one just in case. That's good. I've got, well, yeah, I actually am more or less knifeless here. I do have a 9mm in the desk, but... Some more limited span of uses. Now, Nick, you and I, you and I have shared one of the strongest bonds that Tumen can share, which is eating some really delicious arépus. We also share an interest in the somewhat difficult history of attempts from our species to kind of grapple with the nature of war crimes, of acts of genocide, and hold people to account for them. I kind of think before we get into what's happened with Putin, we should talk about what the ICC is and what its history comes from. Because this, it actually dates back a little over 100 years attempts to make the ICC. I think 1919 was the first convention in which a number of European nations were like, boy, we should really have some sort of court put together to attempt to hold leaders and individuals to account for committing war crimes. I'm not that familiar with the kind of the very long history of attempts at international justice. So, if I was to say that so far, it hasn't worked out quite how I think everyone expects it to. That is the TLDR. International justice. What idea hasn't happened yet? Pretty much. There have been lots of agreements, obviously kind of everyone knows Geneva Convention, etc. Lots of other agreements about how not to kill people in the most horrific way possible in war. And as part of that, Rome Statue, which created the ICC, was agreed in 1998. So, there's been kind of like 100 years or so of efforts before the ICC actually got here. I should probably also, I need to say, before we kind of get going anything, I'm not a lawyer, which is super important because I know all the lawyers out there will be angry about it. So, Nick, I want to talk about what in particular this decision means because there's bit like obviously I think it's fair to say in the immediate term, probably nothing. Like it's not like the international war and agents are going to come out and arrest Vladimir in the Kremlin or in his mansion that you see fake Photoshopped images of on Twitter all the time. But yeah. Yeah. So, in kind of like day to day stuff, yeah, it doesn't have that much in effect. So, Russia doesn't recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC. So, it's not like the FSB are going to storm into the Kremlin and arrest Putin and export him to the Hague in a dip-math bag or something. That's not going to happen. But in other ways, it's a big deal in other ways. And also it's for me like really the biggest thing about this is that it's an indicator about how seriously the ICC is taking this war. International justice moves so slowly. And you know, we're talking like, you know, mentioned in decades. So, to have an arrest warrant out in one year is like a really big deal for the ICC at least. And this is because if I'm not mistaken, both Putin and the woman, because he's not the only one by the way that's been been charged by the ICC. There's also an attempt to get her name right Maria Levova Belova, who is the commissioner for children's rights in Russia. And part of the reason why this has happened so rapidly is that both Putin and Maria have made pretty unequivocal statements about the removal of Ukrainian children from their families forced deportation into Russia and adoption by Russian families. And that is a war crime that is an act of genocide. Yeah, so I think the actual crime is unlawful deportation or the actual citation is unlawful deportation of Ukrainian children, which yes could be arguably and again at this point emphasized not a lawyer. Yeah, yeah, I think can feed into the kind of accusations of genocide. And so it's a pretty big charge to level against Putin and this commissioner, and this I Leon. I think it's also like one of the easier ones. Well, like in the view of the Russian states, this is a wonderful thing they're doing. They are essentially kind of rescuing these children from, and you can't see it by doing airquakes right now like Ukrainian artis. Educating them and bringing them up as Russian children. And you know, they're taking the children away from their culture, their families and their country to basically erase who they are, which yeah plays a quite big part in the accusations that this could be part of an active genocide. Yeah, and it's interesting to me. Louisville, Louisville has kind of described this like her justification of this. And I think the Russian states justification of this is both that yeah, the Ukrainians are Nazis. And also I've heard claims from her that like well, we're removing children from a dangerous war zone, which you know that begs the question, why is it a dangerous war zone right now among other things. But one of the things that's interesting to me is that Louisville, Louisville is not just part of the state apparatus of carrying out this act, but is also thanked Putin publicly for making it possible for her to adopt a child from Don Bos, which is one of the Russian occupied parts of Ukraine. So yeah, it is kind of interesting the stuff that had to fall into place for this to be able to happen in such an expeditious manner. Yeah, I think it helps that they view or the Russian state views this act as something that is beneficial. And so they want to say, hey, look, we're rescuing these children and you can see kind of similar, you've seen similar vibes with like basically stealing Ukrainian cultural heritage from museums and stuff like that. Or the Russian state believes that they are doing the right thing, like we are very proud that we have taken these objects away and we are saving them again from Ukrainian Nazis. And so they make public announcements about it. They say, yeah, we're doing the thing, it's also, isn't it? Yeah. And so the result is quite a lot of evidence that they're doing these pretty bad things. And so yeah, there's there's a lot of evidence there. There are statements from his commissioner for children from Putin. It's pretty clear what's happening. So it's quite a, I think it's quite an interesting charge to bring. Yeah. And we're just so people are aware of the scale. President Zelensky, if Ukraine at least, says that his country has recorded about 16,000 cases of forcible deportations of children, that's not like a final number, just like the death tallies and whatnot or not final numbers. But that's that is the Ukrainian state's estimate of how many kids have been taken away, which is a, I mean, that's a pretty staggering number. Yeah, that's a huge number of children. Yeah. Yeah, I know that's an absolutely huge number of children. And then you have to account, you know, that it's not just a children that the victims say it's also their family. So the victims are talking about like a knock on effect with, you know, tens of thousands of people who've been affected by these acts. If not more than that. Yeah, I think probably I mean 16,000 children that are probably higher than the tens of thousands in terms of family members and whatnot who are impacted by this. In terms of what technically this means for Putin, there's about, there's I think 120 signature, signature nations to the Rome statute. And within those countries, theoretically, if Putin or if Maria were to travel there, they would theoretically be arrested if they were to set foot in one of those signature nations. Yeah, so theoretically theoretically, theoretically, yeah, I'm doing a lot of heavy lifting. Okay, so yeah, in theory of Putin travels down to these nations, you should be arrested. But some of the nations don't recognize or believe that heads of state are basically immune. And I imagine there will be several of those signatories who will likely refuse to act like Putin should Mr. Putin visit them. And this has actually happened before. So I think it was South Africa refused to extradite a former head of state. I think it was a leader of South Sudan, but yeah, wasn't it Omar Bashir? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I believe it was Omar Bashir. Yeah, so he managed to travel around and was not arrested and extradited as theoretically should have been. However, it still gives Mr. Putin, and especially security details on headaches. Because they're still going to have to check with these states when they go and visit, you know, hey, are you going to like arrest him? Yeah, which is not like a cool usually have to ask. And if they were planning to arrest him, you know, they might not tell them that they're planning to arrest them. So there's always going to be, well, at the moment, there's still like a cost applied to Mr. Putin, in terms of traveling to these countries that would still, you know, might still like consider the ICT jurisdiction over heads of state to be lacking. Yeah. Yeah, so there's still like some, some cost applied there. If I'm remembering correctly, there have been three sitting heads of state that have faced ICC charges in office. We talked about Omar Bashir, um, Momar Qaddafi, uh, and now Putin is, is number three, um, which is if we're, if we're looking at the history of the last, you know, I mean, just since the establishment of the ICC, fewer than the number of world leaders who have been involved allegedly in, uh, crimes against humanity, I think fair to say, um, which brings us to the question of like, what does it mean to be a, a signatory, um, to, to roam to the ICC? What does it mean to actually be bound by any of these rules? Because both Russia and the United States, I was looking at a map earlier that kind of lists out every country's relationship to the ICC. Both Russia and the United States are in the position of like having endorsed aspects of the ICC and then not signed on, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Again, not, not that familiar with how the ICC works and in practice. Yeah. But basically if you sign up to the ICC, you have to agree to enforce their judgments, you know, including a restaurant, which again is something like the US and, uh, US and Russia haven't done. Uh, the idea that basically the ICC marks itself as marks itself, basically, uh, thinks of itself as a court of lost resort. Uh, so, you know, they're not going to be out there prosecuting individual sold or fairly likely to be prosecuting like individual soldiers who've like say executed like temperamental war in a ditch. Um, that's something that is unlikely that the ICC is going to prosecute. They are going for, you know, high and commanders, people who've carried out like, uh, extremely severe acts. Yeah. And especially in cases where like a state is not able to carry out such prosecution. Uh, so, uh, for example, uh, take the UK. Um, so UK, uh, has in theory, uh, conducted investigations into allegations of war crimes in Iraq conducted by its troops. Um, that was I had so the Iraq historic allegations team. Um, it was pretty shambolic. It was extremely shambolic. It was a really bad investigation. Uh, the, uh, not just for the victims who basically no one really ever got justice from it. Yeah. Very, very few people ever got justice from it. But also the people are actually accused, uh, were sometimes like investigated multiple multiple times. Um, but because the UK made some kind of effort to investigate it, even if it was absolutely shambolic. It's unlikely that the ICC is ever actually going to investigate UK soldiers for war crimes in Iraq because in theory, that should be the UK carrying out the investigation and in theory, they have carried out that investigation. Um, it's completely inadequate. Um, but yeah, that's, that's the justification. That's incredibly interesting to me because it does seem like on one hand, I can see the logic. And this is part of why like the, the US, the United States, my country's justification for why we are not a signatory. Is that, um, the constitution does not allow us to agree to have our citizens tried for crimes that they are being tried for in the United States by an international court. Um, something along those lines. Uh, and I can understand the idea that like, well, national sovereignty, like the only way we're going to get anyone to agree to let this thing exist and abide by any aspect of its rulings is if it does not overly interfere with their nationalities. It's an interview with their national sovereignty and to, including their ability to prosecute their own soldiers for war crimes. On the other hand, the state of affairs, as you've just related, the state of affairs is an adequate, right? Like that is the, the system that has been developed is not adequate to, to trying or achieving justice in a case like the Iraq war in which there, there were a lot of crimes committed that people have not been punished for. I mean, obviously you have to kind of marry that to the fact that the attempt to do something at all in this way is extremely new, as we've said, like there are, we have like most of the people who work on my show are older than the ICC. And so that's that's still an achievement. I don't know. I'm wondering kind of like what you see is like the positive future for attempts to hold individuals and nations to account here. Like is that is it continuing to grind like this or do you see kind of a more positive opening coming forward as a result of particularly the attention that all of these these war crimes in Ukraine have gotten. I mean, I think it will continue to grind when you look at the history of atrocities that are taking place in conflict over the last, you know, like 20 years, it's just absolutely huge. Yeah, you know, there's like a trustee upon a trustee upon a trustee and the ICC can only investigate a tiny number of those. The reality is that only a tiny fraction of those atrocities will ever actually be investigated in victims face justice. That is the reality of the situation. And the ICC does carry out investigations and does carry out prosecutions. But again, we're talking like the most grave crimes possible. And usually, you know, really senior people who often are able to evade those kind of prosecutions. I think there's a better chance of some kind of justice at like a national level with universal jurisdiction. So recently, universal jurisdiction was used in Germany to prosecute to Syrian officers who basically carry out torture against Syrians during during the revolution. And those those two Syrian officers basically fled to fled to Germany and were later prosecuted there. And so it's not just the ICC. It's also universal jurisdiction. It is, you know, tribunals. There's other stuff there. But again, like this is only a tiny fraction of everything that gets investigated. I've been reading, I've going through several different books about Joseph Mengele, most recently. And including some accounts from, you know, Jewish doctors who were enslaved and who were forced to work at Auschwitz. And I've been thinking a lot about the the Nate, like the different kinds of war crimes, right? And I have a group of Australian or US or British soldiers in Afghanistan or Iraq who commit a massacre kill a number of civilians. And that is a war crime. But there's also the kinds of war crime. That is a war crime that is the result of individuals taking individual actions, right? As opposed to the actions of a state and the actions that are a result of years worth of directed cultural efforts, which I think is part a way to look at what the Russian states attitude towards Ukrainians are. And a lot of the crimes that have been committed over there, the denial of the existence of Ukrainians as a people is deeper and more complex than the kind of crime that a soldier might commit in a moment of passion. And fundamentally different from that. And it's one of those things. If you're like, for example, to go back to Mengele, if you're trying to judge Mengele for his crimes, you have to judge the entire German medical establishment, which joined the Nazi party and higher numbers than any other group in the country. And which was directly implicated in how Auschwitz functioned and why it worked the way it did. And there's realistically, like most of the doctors Mengele, there were attempts to punish him, obviously he escaped. But the doctors who educated him, who taught him, who inculcated him in the attitudes that were directly responsible for the crimes that he committed were never punished. And legally, I don't know how you would punish people for that. How do you punish someone for promulgating ideas, like the ideas that Ukrainians are not a people, which leads to a lot of the violence that you're seeing over there? Like how do you? Like there's not realistically in at least in my understanding of the law a way to punish that. But it is a factor in these crimes. Yeah, the creation of a culture, absolute is a key, like a really good example of this is the radio station, Rwanda, who broadcasts basically what were effectively caused to genocide. And I think they were actually ended up being prosecuted by the ICC. I think actually as well. I believe, yeah, I believe there were at least attempts. Yeah, the international criminal tribunal for Rwanda. Yeah. I mean, it's one thing when you're talking about like direct incitements to violence. It's another when you're talking about like kind of the stuff that Dugan is responsible for, which is absolutely a factor. The kind of ID, the idea is that he is one of the people who is kind of promulgated under the direction of Putin and others in the Russian state are like a factor in the behavior that we've seen over there. It also is harder to kind of qualify it as a direct call for war crimes in some cases. Although some of the stuff Dugan has said, I think you could argue is certainly like a direct call to violence. Yeah, I mean, like, yeah, where it's really difficult to kind of get that to raise that to the threshold of prosecution. It's really difficult thing to do, especially if you are external to the culture that is or to the organization that is creating that internal culture. I'm very familiar with this kind of stuff, having for those of you who listen to me, be familiar, I was an army officer. So quite a big part of my job was making sure that the culture within my tune was a beneficial good culture in which the folks would not go off and murder people. You read about stories like my lie or there's a really good example for this book called Black Hearts, this American plume in the rock. Yeah. And it's really clear where basically institutional culture has completely failed or has created a culture in which basically committing atrocities or murder is either, you know, mildly ignored or actively encouraged. And yeah, that culture is something that is really difficult to police because it really has to come from within the institution itself. You know, unless you just completely destroy the institution itself, which is also another option, which is what Canadians did with the airborne regiment after some of their guys in Somalia, like roasted some poor guy alive on a fire. The Canadians basically just disbanded the entire airborne regiment. They basically said like the culture in this regiment is not. It's too far gone. Basically, we're going to disband this entire regiment, which is what they did. So you can do that too. But it's quite difficult thing to do. The last thing I wanted to go over is the most recent, the response of the Russian state to these warrants. One of them has been they've announced that they are in carrying out an investigation into the ICC, which is, you know, I'm sure as meaningful as the sentence I just said. And I, the other thing that they've done is sort of threatened to launch a hypersonic warhead at the Hague, which I mean like it's not. He does have a lot of missiles. So it's you can't like completely disregard a threat from a nuclear armed nation to launch missiles at the Hague. But it's also just, you know, the threats like these are not completely. And in fact, there's a provision in what is it called? Let me, let me double check on the name here. I'm so bad at remembering the names of laws. The American Service Members Protection Act that does theoretically allow the use of military force by the US if American citizens are extra-dited. So like this is, this is like a much cruder version of that. Like if you arrest us, we'll, we'll, we'll nuke the egg. But it does like it's one of those things we're laughing about it. But if you could, if you were to go back 10 years and imagine that threat being leveled, like even by Putin, it would seem like farcical. I guess it is farcical, but we're here. Yeah, it's, it's completely insane, isn't it? Yeah. I mean, like how do you respond to that? Like, right. I'm gonna, I'm gonna hypersonic the hey. The Hague responds. No. It's just like, I know it's mad. Like when if you go to the Hague, like the ICC, you know, you'll have like the security guards sat there with their little, kind of nine mil pistol and they kind of buzzed you through that kind of stuff. And like the idea of them kind of, you know, trying to fight off like a Delta Force assault on the ICC in the case where I'm like in American soldiers, like, it's farcical. But then the idea that they could do anything because like a hypersonic missile is like 30 seconds away from like obliterating the entire city of the ICC. Nick, you got a really, you got a really really little lead from the assault. I mean, I mean, the only kind of benefit I suppose is that like the ICC is on the outskirts of the Hague. Yeah. So they would irradiate actually quite a bit of residential area and then a lot of sand dunes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one of the upsides is that if Russia does nuke the Hague, we will have deeper concerns than what to do about international criminal law and the wake of that, including taking sufficient iodine pills, which I'm not by, I mean, people, everyone gets is antsy about enough today. I don't think this is like a realistic threat. I don't think it's likely that the Russian state is going to nuke the ICC. Unfortunately, part of why it's unlikely is that it's unlikely that Putin is going to face direct justice for his actions unless he is somehow overthrown. That is realistically the only case by which he winds up in front of the ICC is if he is forced out of power. Yeah. I mean, like when this, you know, news first broke, there were some people who saying, hey, is this a big deal at all? Like we'll never, you know, Pete will never see justice. And like, yeah, he might, he probably won't, but on the off chance, it's always good to have that there. Yeah. You know, I went slumber down in Osovich, you know, step down as president of Serbia. I think there was a law which meant that he couldn't actually be extra-itered to the ICC. So everyone said the same thing. You know, he's never going to face justice. And then he ended up at the ICC. Yeah. And if there is some kind of cool or something, you know, not now, maybe in the years time, two years time, 15 years time, you know, Putin is a very valuable bargaining chip. Yeah. And being able to send in to the Hague would be an extremely powerful message of, hey, guys were entering a new era, like Russian, the Russian state doesn't want to be associated with what happened under Putin's rule. Here you go. Have Mr. Putin put him on trial. And, you know, he becomes like quite an important bargaining chip. And so, yeah, the chance of it happening is like pretty small, but it's still there. It's still worth doing this. And that's, I think, where I land is I've just been, again, reading about in this winter of 1944, there was a rebellion in Auschwitz by a number of members of the Sonder Commando, which was a group of prisoners who were tasked with the actual like job of making the camp function. And these guys rebelled, they blew up a bunch of stuff. And the whole attempt, this whole like attack that cost hundreds of them their lives was in the hope that one of them would get out and tell the story of what had been happening inside. And when you think about it that way, what historically and not just going back to the Holocaust, but the entire long history of, of war like human war crimes which go back as far as war, the desire of victims to have someone be aware of what has happened to them. I think makes this a positive move in the middle of an incredibly dark chapter in human history and an incredibly awful war. The fact that this is happening at all as as flawed as as imperfect as the whole and it's, you know, people keep bringing up things like the inequities of the prosecution of like the United States and Israel for a number of different acts of their states and militaries, but like even given all that the fact that this is happening at all. Is I think meaningful. I do think it matters. It's definitely meaningful. Like it's very much like a statement of intent from the ICC and especially from the new prosecutor, the ICC cream com who came in last year. And he's kind of like as far as I can tell come in and shaken a few cages. And it's a very clear statement of intent from both himself and from the court as well. Yeah. Well, I think that's as good a note as any to end on Nick. Do you want to direct anybody towards a place they can condonate or something they can or a place they can go to to read up more on on this or issue other issues of international criminal justice. I mean, yeah, direct people to bell and cat.com, which is who I work for. My Twitter is and on the school waters 89. I don't really go on Twitter that much anymore. Really something happened. I don't know me. Yeah, but I post a occasionally every so often. But yeah, bell and cat.com would be where I'd recommend. That's where like our work is anyway. Yeah, well, Nick Waters. Thank you so much for coming on for lending your expertise here. That's going to do it for us here. It could happen here. Sorry for using the word here so many times have a lovely day everybody. And now the best man. I was going to play in this speech out while I got my oil change, but I went to take five and it was a lot faster than I thought. So here goes. Tim, you were my first friend. Angela, you were my first. I never thought the two of you would make it, but I guess love really is blind. No, no, no, I mean in a good way. I take five your oil changes faster than you think. Take five the stay in your car. 10 minute oil change. Hi there. I'm Dr. John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host of the spotlight on series from our health discovered podcast in this special episode. We'll hear about living a fulfilling life with chronic heart failure, a condition that doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds. I was outside shoveling snow and I noticed I was coughing up flim. Unbeknownst to me, I left a trail of blood behind me and I was one sign. Now of course prior to I was excessively gaining weight. I had issues breathing, sleep apnea. I had a lot of those classic signs. My legs were beginning to retain fluid and I was having heart pal patients. My heart would be, you know, really excessively fast. And so, but ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought something was seriously wrong. Listen to health discovered on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcast. Going to Walt Disney World this year, visit undercover tourist first with undercover tourist save up to $82 particular. Get your hotel and rental car with undercover tourist and save an extra 30%. Experience Disney for less with undercover tourist and authorized Disney seller with over 20 years of superior service. Visit undercover tourist.com slash podcast for the lowest prices on all Walt Disney World resort tickets. Plus your tickets come with a 365 day refund guarantee that's undercover tourist.com slash podcast. Hey everyone, this is it could happen here a podcast about things falling apart. Sometimes about putting things back together. This is one of the former episodes because we are recording this in the immediate wake within a couple of hours of America's the United States. America's most recent mass shooting in Tennessee at a Christian school called covenant. You know, obviously there are way too many mass shootings in the United States for us to cover each one we are talking about this now in a timely manner. Because there's a bunch of very specific disinformation coming out about it. And particularly disinformation that is part of the broader targeting by the right wing of transgender people. So I'm going to for the first part of this I'm going to turn things over to Garrison who has been doing specific research on the shooter and what we can actually verify at this moment about their identity upfront. Up front I'll say that the police have identified this person as Audrey Hale 28 of Nashville NBC News notes quote who said she identifies as transgender. Again, this is not quite right. We'll talk about it. But the right wing is obviously running with the idea that this is a transgender shooter and part of a trans and a series they will argue of transgender attacks on Christians. We're going to talk about the right wing sort of analysis of this later. But first I'm going to again push to Garrison who will talk about what we actually can verify about this person and about this shooting at this point. Yeah. Just as a note here throughout this episode there will be some what is probably misgendering because we're going to be quoting from a lot of other people's statements. And also there will be a mentions of like a few slurs against trans people just because we are quoting from a whole whole bunch of stuff and some of the details regarding the gender of the person in question is relatively unknown at the time. So just as a heads up. Okay, so yeah, I'm going to just going to go over a few things regarding what we know happened what the what the school was because I think that kind of that might play into it. But that will kind of veer on speculation. So we're just going to limit it towards what we actually know and then to attempt to avoid speculation on this. Yeah. Yes. So someone carrying multiple fire arms entered a private Christian school in Nashville this Monday morning and shot and killed three nine year old students and three adult staff members in their 60s including the head of the school. And then we will doctor Catherine cons police initially claimed the shooter was a teenager but minutes later changed course and described them as a 20 eight year old woman from Nashville. It was then reported pretty quickly in NBC news that the shooter was identified as Audrey Hale 28 of Nashville and the police chief said she identifies as transgender NBC has another article out there that says Audrey Hale 28 who police say was a transgender woman. So we will get into that here in a sec, but the shooter entered the covenant school via a side door according to the Metro Nashville police spokesperson, Dawn Aaron and was armed with at least two, quote, unquote, assault style rifles and a handgun, unquote. It looks like it's a AR rifle and an AR pistol and then also a handgun. Nashville police chief John Drake has said, quote, at one point she was a student at that school, but we are unsure of what year, unquote, and that Hale shot through the door to gain entry into the school. The shooter made their way through the first and second floors at the school firing multiple shots before Hale was killed by police on the school's second floor. So it's assumed by the police at this point and they may have evidence that it's not been like made public yet that the shooter did attend the school, but they are unsure for like exactly how long and what years specifically. I think it's it's important to mention a few things about the school just because this is a very unique mass shooting in a lot of ways. Mass shootings at private schools level and private Christian schools is very rare and this is also like a preschool through sixth grade school. So the covenant school is a preschool through sixth grade private Christian school founded in 2001 and it shares the same location as Covenant's Presbyterian church. The website states it has 33 teaching faculty and around 200 enrolled students per year with tuition at around $16,000 a year according to the school's website to quote the Covenant school is a ministry of Covenant Presbyterian church created to assist Christian parents and the church by providing an exceptional academic experience founded upon and informed by the word of God. So I mean, honestly, this is something that's pretty similar to the type of Christian school that I grew up in. It's this it's the school that's attached to this church. I also had around 200 fellow students so that this seems to be relatively pretty similar and not super uncommon for this type of private Christian school. That's kind of all I'm going to get into that here. I mean, I've looked around the schools website a lot and it it seems pretty pretty basic in terms of these types of Presbyterian private Christian schools. But now we're going to start getting into some of this stuff regarding the identity of the shooter and a lot this because there's a lot of information going around NBC news is now claiming that the shooters are transgender woman. I don't think that's fully accurate. But we're going to be quoting directly from the call. Yeah, this is to be fair. I mean, partly NBC's fault because more recent they should have done as much research as you did, Garrison. Yeah, but they are quoting the police. Yeah, yes. The gist is that the police identified this as a transgender woman. They have a manifesto. We don't know what's in the manifesto. But yeah, please continue. Yeah, I guess I guess one other thing that's reported is this after police said this was a transgender woman. They also talked about how Hale had conductive surveillance and prepared for the attack with detailed maps. And then also the aforementioned manifesto. But yes, we're going to we're going to move on to some of the stuff that we do know using just basic open source research stuff. So there is a LinkedIn page for someone named Audrey Hale in the Nashville area. They list a lot of various like illustration jobs they've had for the past few years. And they do have a little pronoun marker next to their name that says he him. Hale appears to have had a website for their graphic design portfolio called a H illustrations. So just their initials a H. They have posts in there being tagged from 2023 from 2022. So it's been at least up for two years. I tried to do like metadata stuff on some of their artwork. I did not really get much in terms of what year they were posted, but we may be able to learn more about that later. The website has an about page that introduces the person as Audrey Hale. But it also directs you to a now vanished Instagram page called at creative period Aiden. So we're going to go through some of the rights initial stuff a bit later because they were already calling us a transgender shooting before any information came out at all as a part of like the Sam Hyde joke. Yeah, for reference Sam Hyde is kind of a right wing comedian who had a show on adult swim for the last several years. It has been a meme to every time there's a shooting. There's a specific picture of Sam Hyde holding a rifle that people will post and say I'm getting this picture that you know this was the shooter at whatever it's been at Parkland. It's been at El Paso. It's been at Eval the every single shooting this happens. And with this shooting someone Photoshopped some ladies head on the Sam Hyde and claimed immediately that it was a transgender person. This also ties into the the Highland Park shooting where the shooter wore women's clothing at some point to try to escape and the right continually tries to claim that that makes it a trans gender shooting. Anyway, please continue care. Yes, so by going through their online portfolio dated as far back as 2022, I found a self portrait that has a that has a different social media username titled at cre.tv D.Dray, I think Dray is for like Audrey. And this also appears to be an old Instagram handle before they changed it to at creative Aiden. Hale's website also has another self portrait just tagged with the name Aiden and Aiden creates that when appears to be from maybe slightly after but it's kind of unclear with how the website is laid out. So although the Instagram page for this person appears to be taken down with unknown if they took it down or if Instagram took it down. But it is gone and there's no archive of it. It appears that Hale did have other social media accounts that are still online besides the aforementioned LinkedIn a tick talk account by the name of I am underscore Aiden 10 shares a profile picture with Hale's own website. And also links to Hale's Instagram page, which is mentioned on Hale's website. The tick talk was seldom active, but their their first visible post is from March 15th, 2022. There are two other posts from that month and all three of these posts are like about late 90s early 2000s video game nostalgia. And thanks to tick talks, username and betting feature, we can see that the account used to be called Audrey video game nerd underscore 10 before being changed to I am eight in 10 sometime between March 16th and April 15th of last year. Hale's last visible post is just from over a month ago, February 9th, 2023. And yeah, just as a note, kind of I've gone over less of this than you, but I've I've combed over what's available. I don't notice any of the normal red flags. There's not even like pictures of this person posing with firearms. There's not threats. There's one video where they seem to be mourning a friend or a relative, but it's a pretty normal like in memorium style video. None of their art strikes me as disturbing in any way. No, at least one red RAM one, they have, they have one piece of shining fan art that the rights been using. It sticks out, but also like the shining is one of the most popular movies of all time. Yeah, no, nothing, nothing as someone who's looked through the social media accounts of a lot of shooters. This, this account is relatively normal like they, there's nothing in here that would be immediately red flags. They did a lot of like corporate work. I think I think they did artwork for the city of Denver. Yeah, looks like it. They were being commissioned to do graphic design for a lot of businesses, a lot of like local events in Nashville. There is one other thing from their website that I will mention. Part of their bio, they have this sentence that says, there is a child like part of me that loves to go and run around on the playground. And the rights using this and like a, like a weird like a groomer way being like, oh, God, this kid wants, this adult wants to go around to playgrounds and their child like this is, this is a completely normal thing to say. This is like, this is not a red flag. This is, I, I also enjoy going on the playground. This is not a red flag either. This is just part of weird culture war stuff. Yeah, yeah. We have another thing about being a kid forever and ever as well. It just seems that they connected with childhood things and we'll find those kind of things. Yeah, and like psychologically, maybe being kind of stuck in the past or whatever is a part of how they describe or justify this in their manifesto. We just don't know, but the point of the matter is, if you would look at this person's social media prior and this is very different from those shooters, you would not have thought, oh, this is a person who is of danger to people. There's, there's just not signs in it. I mean, the one thing that is the kind of last thing I mentioned is the, I think the two other adults that were shot. One was a custodian. There was a, it was, I think it was like a substitute teacher. Yeah. They were all in their 60s. It's unclear how long those two other people have been with the school. The head of the school has been, been there for a while. But I mean, because it is a preschool through sixth grade school, Hale would not have been at the school relatively recently. I can try to, I'm trying to do like quick math here to be like, if you would, if you'd be in sixth grade and you're now 28. 17 years ago. It's a year and 11 years old, right? American is plus five. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's, it's, it's, it's started in 2001. So yeah, that's, that is, that is, that is possible. Yeah. I do want to know a couple of things before we move on to the right ring, wing reaction. One of them just kind of again took, to sort of boil it down based on what is available publicly. We know this person that seems to have been born and raised as Audrey Hale started going by Aiden at the latest sometime last year. There LinkedIn shows them at that point as using he him pronouns. But still, but still with the name Audrey, but still with the name Audrey, it is actually very much at this point still unclear how they exact precisely identified what pronouns they used. We certainly don't know whether or not they were on any kind of like hormones, not that that would have an impact on any of this. But we have very little actual information. The police are saying that they identify themselves as transgender in the manifesto. At some point, we might learn more as a result of that, but, but it is, it is a lot of what's being put out as either unclear or, you know, wrong in one way or the other. There's just a lot of information that is kind of missing about this person people are jumping to conclusions on stuff. So we will probably learn more there later. One more note on this. The police are the ones that initiated the use of the term manifesto. Now, there was no manifesto published by the shooter. We do not know if this is a quote unquote manifesto, like at all. The police have claimed that they found writing when they raided this person's house. So this writing, discussing things around their gender or what they were doing. This could be anything from like a suicide note to just like a diary or a journal. So by using the word manifesto, they're kind of trying to tie it into that. We simply at this point do not know if this was a manifesto at all. Like we just, that is, that is a very loaded term in this context. I think it's notable that the shooter did not publish anything. Whereas usually when there's like manifestos, they are, they are published online, right? The shooter, the shooter themselves will publish it online. And that is kind of part of their entire attack. That is not the case here. The shooter did not publish anything about this attack online that we've, or that we've found or that anyone's found. So I think that's an important thing to note when we're talking about the use of the word manifesto here. In terms of like the importance of a manifesto, you know, speaking as someone who has written professionally about a number of them, manifestos are obviously useful, especially when trying to analyze why someone did something, what their political goal may have been. If they're indeed there's a political goal, what their radicalization pathway has been. But a crucial thing is to never ever take a manifesto purely at face value. Manifestos are political writings by terrorists, right? That is what a manifesto is. And they are writings that are kind of calculated to achieve a goal. And I don't know what this person put in their manifesto. Their manifesto, a major, it must have just been a perfectly like accurate summation of their feelings of why they did this terrible thing. That's possible. We sit, we don't know at this point, but manifestos are a part of understanding a shooting and what the goal was of the shooting and what the individual hope to accomplish. But they cannot and never should be taken at face value. And that's what a lot of media are going to do if this ever does get public. So please always show care and skepticism of directly reading from a manifesto. Like even in the case, you know, there's just a lot like in the Christchurch manifesto of like bullshit, shit posting jokes and stuff thrown in there with the real stuff. It's generally possible to get to gather and understand motive from a manifesto. And I am, you know, I will read it if it becomes available, but be very careful with such things. Yeah, speaking of not being careful, let's talk about the right wing response to this. Because I think broadly speaking, it's fair to characterize it as they are claiming this is part of a line of terror attacks by transgender people. There's a lot of folks saying that this is reason to ban gender affirming care to ban hormone therapy, to ban trans people from purchasing firearms. This is a pretty rampant on the right already. It became very quickly. So I actually want to go over one thing I just came up and saw while gear was talking that I think is interesting as Candace Owens. Candace Owens is a right wing commentator. Unfortunately, quite influential and has a sizable platform. I want to quote from her response, her initial response is the immediate response when all the information was out was that there had been a shooting at this school. I live in Green Hills, and I'm positively devastated for the families impacted by this tragedy. Please suspend your politics and instead do with these families that this Christian school would want prey. That's a perfectly reasonable response, at least for somebody who believes in prayer. Within a matter of like an hour or so, it became clear that or information began to come out that the shooter was likely transgender. At which point Candace suspended her statement about not making it politics. She posted shortly after transgenderism as a mental illness, keep your children away from transgender individuals and their parents, people that support and encourage us are monsters and should be kept away from children. They yelled at Matt Walsh made a statement, why haven't we begun in the name of the mass shooter yet? And Candace responded because they're wiping the social so they can make things up about the person. She noted as to a post by Matt Walsh being like, the question is why this culture is producing so many people who want to carry out attacks like this, take the guns and you'll still have a country infested by homicide. It'll sociopaths where they coming from what is creating them. Candace responded, I would start with the fact that we now celebrate clinical insanity while we had managed normalcy, people are aspiring to mental illness because they receive attention and oftentimes are awarded for perversity. She is essentially taking the stance of like, we have to blame this on the fact that this person was transgender and being transgender is a mental illness, right? That's the stance Candace is taking. That's the stance a lot of folks are taking. One of the most widely shared posts from a right winger on this was by a guy named DC underscore Drainow. He's notes himself as a husband, Patriot lawyer, constitutionalist and anti woke. He has 686,000 followers on Twitter. He has been relentless in posting about this as an act transgender terror. He has spread some of the information that Garrison added on this podcast about this person's social media posts. And his posts are some of the most widely read and like that I've seen one of them reads unconfirmed reports identify the Nashville shooter is Audrey Hale, a biological female that identifies as he, him on their LinkedIn authorities believe the transgender shooter previously attended the Christian school. He then follows we will not let this story be swept under the rug trans terrorism must be confronted head on and stopped Tennessee just pass laws restricting sexualized drag shows for children and banning the genital mutilation of children was today's mass shooting at a Christian school a train by a transgender killer and active domestic terror. And when we start talking about transgender mass murder is targeting innocent school children in our schools enough as enough. And in this they posted a link to a Reuters story about a shooting from last year. I think it was in Colorado and Denver. This was a shooting where two people one of whom was transgender walked into a school in Denver and shot at several classmates killing one. They claimed it was revenge on classmates over bullying. The McKinney the transgender shooter has been sentenced recently. So it's been in the news. This is being built as like a transgender terrorist attack because spoiler. There's very few cases of trans people carrying out acts of violence. So they're kind of grabbing what they can in order to try and make an argument that this is part of a trend. In the absence of any kind of manifesto people are claiming that trans identity motivated the killings. The police seem to have helped to jump start this. All right. So first off we're going to play before we continue. We're going to play a clip of the police press conference where the police chief of Nashville talks about what has happened and talks about the information that they have about the shooter based on the apparently the manifesto that they have in the maps that they have. So we're going to play that now. Our investigations tell us that she was a former student at the school. I don't know what grade she's attended or grades, but we do. A firm will believe she was a student there. She does identify as a stranger. Yes. No history at all. And no motive because it's going to be discovered in the apartment or house. No, we have a manifesto. We have some writings that we're going over that pertain to this day. The actual incident. We have a map drawn out of how this was all going to take place. There's right now a theory of that that we may be able to talk about later, but it's not confirmed. And so we'll put that out as soon as we can. The reason to believe that how she identifies is has any motive for targeting school. We can give you that at a later time. There is some theory to that. We're investigating all the leads. And once we know exactly, we'll let you know what's this targeted attack. It was. You know about a stranger, a man or woman. Don't know any history of mental illness at this time, but we are looking at that as an investigation is ongoing. And I'm sorry. Should identify as a transgender man or woman. It's woman. All right. So yeah, Garrison, you want to start off here. Yeah, I think giving like the most charitable reading of that. I think it's possible that this police chief just don't have as a. As a full art. I don't think this police chief has as an as an in depth understanding of gender theory as some of us or the listeners do. So it's just confused by that question. Is it a trans man or a trans woman? And he answers by saying, yeah, they're trans, but they are a woman. So I think that that could be what's going on. And then we have outlets like NBC news. Saying that the person's a transgender woman because they also are for one not doing like very basic digging online and are also just making. I just usually enjoy repeating the police's talking points when stuff like this happens because it's just easier. Hey, everybody. Robert here shortly after we finish this. The police chief of Nashville, John Drake, went on Lester Holtz in BC show and gave another statement that was much more accurate than the previous statement that we just played you, which the right wing is making a lot of hay out of. In the statement, they note that the shooter attended the school as a child and was resentful of the school and of being forced to attend it. That the school was the target and not any specific individual and that the victims were random. They also in this statement to Lester Holtz, the police chief makes a lot less of a deal about the fact that the shooter was trans. It seems like the first statement that they made was based on either incomplete information or in the heat of the moment, but I'm going to play you this statement and then we will continue the episode. It sounds like things are moving very quickly you describe this as a targeted attack and you elaborate. Absolutely so the person we know as Audrey Hale, she's a 28 year old Nashvilleian. We have belief or we feel that it's very strongly that she went to school here in the Nashville area and she went to that actual school. There's some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school. Don't have all the details of that just yet and that's why this incident occurred. Did Hale target in your mind? Did Hale target the school or someone in the school? She targeted random students in the school, just whoever and persons, whoever she came in contact with, she fired rounds. You recovered what you described as a manifesto. You've also said that Hale identified as trans. Do you believe there is a connection to that? We feel that she identifies as trans but we're still an initial investigation into all of that and if it actually played a role into this incident. As we know more, we'll definitely make that known but right now we're unsure if that actually played a role. But does the manifesto point you in a particular direction that you can reveal? It has, in the initial investigation, we've turned it over to the FBI. We've looked over it as well and it indicates that there was going to be shootings at multiple locations. And the school was one of them. There was actually a map of the school, detail and surveillance, entry points and how this was going to be carried out on this day. I think a big part of this is that after a mass shooting in any national paper or other media outlet, you're always trying to be first with something and that creates a situation where you don't fact check, you don't do the basic ocean looking up right. You just like cops to say something, get it out, get it most get a ton of clicks. And then that leads to the disappointing sort of repetition of after use that or like in falsehoods that we're seeing. Yeah, and it leads to, it provides a lot of so one thing that the right has always understood is that the immediate aftermath of a story that breaks into the news is you call it the wet cement period where if people are talking about it, if you can, if you can lasso a narrative and drag it out in front of everybody and get momentum behind it, then that effectively becomes reality for an awful lot of people. And it's very important, which is why they're all immediately falling into line on this. One of the posts that I just ran across is from Benny Johnson, who's a right wing media guy. So Benny Johnson says the Colorado spring shooter identified as non binary, the Denver shooter identified as trans, the Aberdeen shooter identified as trans, the Nashville shooter identified as trans. One thing is very clear, the modern trends move in is radicalizing activists and deterists. Elon Musk responded to this with an exclamation point, which is great. The Colorado spring shooter was not non binary, the Colorado spring shooters lawyers made that claim briefly while they were trying to cobble together a defense after this person killed two trans people and shot up an LGBT nightclub. The Denver shooter is the person we just talked about. Well, I mean, also, they also could be referring to that, to that. Yes, probably. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, it's like it's, it's, it's frustrating, like what they're doing with this stuff here. Like it's very obvious, especially in trying to wrap in the attack of a right wing terrorist on an LGBT club to part like to an active, like claiming that it's an active transgender terrorism. A lot of this is spreading particularly among people who paid for blue checkmarks on the new Twitter, because that's like, yeah, this is kind of the first mass shooting we have had in the new. Elon's kind of new checkmark thing where like people are able to kind of verify themselves for money and we're about to see all of the old verified accounts, Lou's verification. We'll talk a little bit more about how well that's actually working for them later, which is actually less clear. So that's possibly a positive thing. But yeah, I mean, it's pretty obvious. Andy knows posted about this. He's another, he works for a place called the post millennial. He's a right wing. He says the shooting comes amid a surge of far left death threats and Tennessee over the states, you know, anti trans laws. He provides no evidence of this. He does quote or cite an im an im's ad that Audrey Hale made that is like a pride ad that says born this way. You know, it's like a rainbow of im an im's that says born this way appears to be something that they may have done for money. I don't know isn't really relevant to the situation. One of the uglier posts that I found on the right comes from a guy who identifies himself as an American dissident stew peters. He's the executive producer of died suddenly, which is one of these right wing attempts to connect every single death of a person who got vaccinated to the vaccination, which is a foolish thing to do anyway. And yeah, they they initially leapt into there's a lot of like ugliness in here stew is one of the more open folks calling them a a tranny named Audrey Hale who is a former student of covenant school. They kind of interpret the police statement, which is at least very warbly as the police saying this was a direct attack on Christians, which the cops have not yet said stew posts police admit this was a targeted attack on Christians by a demonic tranny for some context. Another one of his posts is arguing that Zelensky is waging more on Christians. So, you know, this is this is a should be seen with guys like this in addition to being the troubling thing that it is part of kind of the broader like echo chamber that the right has set up for itself. Like this is troubling and problematic and to a degree frightening and they're going to continue to try to push for disarming trans people as a result of this as a suspect will see states introduced bills that are red flag laws just for trans people. This is the kind of thing that I am worried about, but it also is kind of worth seeing this as this is very much in line with the other kind of right wing echo chamber panic stuff that is that is everywhere and so far, while this is deeply concerning. I'm not seeing evidence that it's breaking out of the right and like that doesn't mean it's not a problem, but it is kind of worth noting the actual trending tags right now on Twitter are not what you'd expect. The Tennessee shooting is not trending on its own in a particularly high position it's substantially lower than the Uvalde and Island Park shootings both of which are trending right now this is based on a Twitter account I use that is not my Twitter account it's just a blank account so I'm hoping to get a little bit less of a bias thing when I looked at my own accounts trending it was you've all the island park as well as Columbine was trending Sam Hyde is trending you know because he always does after a shooting as a result of this stuff. Guns is trending I think AR 15 was trending on one of my accounts, but the I'm not yet seeing evidence that this is anywhere like that the anti trans stuff has made it outside of the right wing fever swamps yeah you are getting like in and again that does not mean it's not troubling it is deeply troubling but it's also not when I'm looking at so I'm not sure if I'm going to get a little bit more of a bias thing. When I'm looking at sort of liberal and centrist responses to this it's it's noteworthy that what is trending is Uvalde and Highland Park and Columbine because what's common is people sort of putting this within the continuum of America's nightmarish problem with mass shootings particularly at schools which is the right way to see this. This is part of a a an ongoing series of island acts and a mass shooter culture that exists within this country and obviously it's tied to the availability of guns it's tied to a number of things but it is kind of worth noting that when it comes to what most people are seeing as a result of this it is another mass shooting in America and not trans people are carrying out terrorist attacks that is so far at least just like a thing I'm seeing in the right wing fever swamp. Yeah I think I think March retailer green is one of the first like sitting politicians to make a statement focused on the shooter's gender identity saying how much hormones like testosterone and medications for mental illness was the transgender Nashville shooter taking everyone can stop blaming guns now and like this style of messaging is just blaming the shooting on like HRT and medical medication but there's no indication at this point that the shooter was taking care of the drug and the drug and the other things that I'm looking at is the most important thing to do is to get a good job. And at this point that the shooter was taking testosterone or was on any medication. But this is just a clear attempt to like tie this shooting into the campaign against trans health care that that green has been doing for years now and to make trans health care seem like the reason that this shooting took place. This person has kind of already become like like showed in just like gender affirming care right where like I'm suggesting they're doing attacks because they can't access gender affirming care. Marjou telegrams is acting that the gender affirming care that did access made them become more violent like same thing with jack so beck who is saying that testosterone increases aggression. Yeah jack Pisobeck is an influential Republican advisor and commentator he's a fat he's a fascist like he's a terrible person he's the guy who initially spread the pizza gate conspiracy theory. But he is influential on the right because of his ability to get stuff to go viral on the base. I guess one thing we should mention that that kind of ties into is that so be asked been repeating some talking points that Tucker Carlson focused on a few nights ago during his show. There was an NPR segment about trans people who are purchasing firearms to defend themselves that interviewed somebody on a number of folks one of the people they interviewed is a person who goes by queer armor on Twitter about why they've chosen to be armed and like advocate. Other trans people armed themselves for self defense. Tucker took quotes from that person and made a very fear mongering piece about how NPR and the liberals want to create an army of trans storm troopers and disarm regular Americans right. That's the peace. Yeah talking of like I guess armed Americans one thing that's also tending is just like incredibly crass photo that the representative for that fifth Tennessee's 50th district which is the district of school was in who's called Andy Ogles. Ogles maybe posted for his Christmas photo I guess which is him it's a classic Republican politician photo right entire family everyone holding a different variant of an AR 15 and it's yeah like look I think regardless of what you think about guns is kind of crass to be parading them as like culture war tokens like this and I've noticed. That's been trending across the list of time that I'm seeing. Yeah this is this is at the nexus of a number of things that are like fucked up about this country. I'm just enjoying Ian Miles Chong's timeline unfortunately who is he? Right we engage in provocateur he lives in Thailand right. Malaysia Malaysia he has like he has like half a million Twitter followers relatively influential on the online sphere his telegram is culture war in which is you know giving you what you need to get I think so I'm just going to read this tweet and obviously like all the all the sort of content warnings you'd expect. Today a mass shoot to murder three children and three adults at a Christian school in national Tennessee the murderer pronouns was were was transgender and had written a manifesto detailing their intentions which come days after Tennessee past child protection laws and the fact that they're not just a curb children from being subjected to transfer to reason other irreversible procedures their heinous actions follow a month of media driven rhetoric about a trans genocide and calls for a so called trans day of retribution in the United States. It is conceivable that much of the conservative public derided assist is now open season for gender extremists who've been terrorizing women who dare to speak out against a woke ideology. So a hail has posted nothing about a trans day of retribution has posted nothing publicly about being trans really there's not a single post discussing their gender identity online. And this is just he's just trying to weird political points by purposely like making it sound like this person was writing about this stuff online and there's no evidence that they had writing about this stuff nor is there any of it online that we can find. And I yeah I don't know I mean it's it's it's basic stuff that people like him do in the aftermath of like any type of event like this. Yeah, you know we're going to end now because anything pretty much anymore we said would be getting into speculation or just belaboring the point about these fucking right wing ghouls. But I do want to end on a post from a a follower a Twitter personality who I consider to be pretty pretty savvy they go by juniper on Twitter they noted this 15 years ago anytime there was a shooting they would on muslims and if it were muslim they would go hog wild trying to indict all muslims they're doing that right now with the Nashville school shooting and we'll try to indict all trans people just don't engage see a matwalsh take that is incredibly aggravating ignore it see a politician tweet misgendering the shooter while simultaneously trying to blame all trans people ignore it anyone with a brain and a shred of empathy will see right wingers is the psychopaths they are a lot of trans people are rightfully scared in the world right now people hate us without even knowing us and how amazing we are just know that you are loved and we will win the world cannot hate us for the world. Hey everybody garrison and I are going to put together a post a sub stack post sort of synthesizing their research and what I've got so far in the right wing response and we'll be posting that up it'll be at the at shatterzone dot sub stack dot com if you wanted an easier text version that you can kind of share with people. And now the best man I was going to play in this speech out while I got my oil change but I went to take five and it was a lot faster than I thought so here goes. Okay Tim you were my first friend Angela you were my first I never thought the two of you would make it but I guess love really is blind. No no no I mean in a good way I take five your oil changes faster than you think take five the stay in your car 10 minute oil change. Hi there I'm dr john white WebMD's chief medical officer and host of the spotlight on series from our health discovered podcast in this special episode we'll hear about living a fulfilling life with chronic heart failure a condition that doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds. I was outside shoveling snow and I noticed I was coughing up flim unbeknownst to me I left a trail of blood behind me and I was one sign now of course prior to I was excessively gaining weight I had issues breathing sleep apnea. I had a lot of those classic signs my legs were beginning to retain fluid and I was having heart pal patients my heart would be you know really excessively fast. So but ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought something was seriously wrong. Listen to health discovered on the I heart radio app or wherever you get your podcast. What spring break or summer without a day at the theme park via hero and skip the ticket counter and save money with undercover tourist you can buy your tickets in advance and save up to 25% on theme park and attraction tickets nationwide. Visit undercover tourist calm slash podcast for all theme park and attraction tickets all tickets come with the best price guarantee and at 365 day refund policy that's undercover tourist calm slash podcast undercover tourist the trusted name in theme park tickets. Welcome to dick at happen here a podcast for the thing is not well where we're here has temporarily been relocated to the UK once again. Oh what a double twice read location. Yeah I'm your host me a long and today with me to talk about things in the kingdom that is united for some reason is Nick who is a resident nurse there Nick how are you doing. I'm doing alright I'm a lot better for being on holiday right now yeah yeah getting getting getting to escape the the the the the the the the the dismal swamp of rainy façade rainy center deal incolored the directions where the the village that does the situation younover am interested in along the city to the last one, but you know, sorry to anyone who's not up to British political memes that's going to be okay and it's good to know that I'm not correct enough. We ran them through like two hour British politics camp a couple of weeks ago, so hopefully they still remember. Yeah, but so the reason thing is so on the day we are recording, there are a bunch of strikes going on in the UK. There have been a bunch of strikes going on in the UK for a while. They keep doing this weird. Okay, this is my, this is my, my, my, my, my, I'm going to do my one bit of what, what are you guys doing strategically thing, which is, okay, so they keep having these strikes and then they'll like go off strike for like three weeks as like a quote, side of good faith for their negotiations and then nothing happens and they go back on strike and it's like, well, okay, like you could just not do this. Yeah, so strikes have been continuing and yeah, I wanted to talk to you about some of the nurses strikes that's been happening and about the sort of organizing that's been going on because that's all been really cool and not reported on enough. I guess the place that I want to start with this is with the last sort of deck. Well, I mean, I guess there's been a lot of us there in the UK, but I want to kind of start with the last sort of decade of austerity and the damage that's been doing to the healthcare system and what, what, what that's looked like on your end. So, there's a couple of ways this manifests. One is like there's been a centralisation of healthcare services, a closing down of hospitals and making large hospitals in container more and more specialties. So for instance, my hospital that I work in, it was the result came about clothing downs about I think three small hospitals. She is. And each hospital that was lost, we lost about at least a hundred beds for each one that was created that centralised into R1. There's been massive cut back in like a lack of funding and preventive healthcare and community healthcare. One interesting example of how that manifests is like they shifted the provision of community healthcare and social care for new mothers to being run by the local council. Just like local, either county or city in larger cities, level government. And then they would put out the process where rather than just it goes automatically to the NHS, it needs to be put out to tender and give like charities or non-profits or even private healthcare providers an opportunity to bid on providing the service. That's a terrible winner on this system. Oh no, it's absolutely insane. And then the end result of this is the NHS service gets it because they're the only one that can actually credibly provide the service. But they have to essentially massively underestimate how much it will cost to run and all to run the service. Oh, because they have to under bid the other services that are not going to do. Wow, that is a terribly designed system. Yeah, and then there's also like introducing like trying to in order to cut back on the backlogs that like the kind down in service is created by like outsourcing some healthcare some surgeries and stuff to private healthcare, private hospitals. But then they're able to just pick and choose the easiest, least risky and profitable ones. And of course any complications that result of the problems of surgery issues with treatment and first reactions, the surgeons fucking it up because they were working overnight in order to get extra money after doing a shift in the NHS hospital, which is often the case then falls back on the NHS proper. And then in terms of workforce, the average on average, this isn't just nurses, there's a universal pay scale using the NHS for everyone called the gender for change. There's a history behind that confusing name. The reason for that is it was a very much, it was a less unified system before like the early 2000s. Everyone knew it was messed up. There was a big like push by unions and also by government who wanted to rationalize the whole thing to make it make more sense in theory, tie people's wage to what they were actually doing more directly in a more consistent way, hence a gender for change because we're in a gender for changing our thoughts happening. But it's been in place for over 20 years now so the name doesn't make sense. But basically everyone on a gender for change has on average in the last 10 years had a 20% pay cut in real term. Jesus. Then doctors and dentists because they're special boys. Love them, but you know, have on a different pay scale and junior doctors on average have had an even worse pay cut in about 28%. Yeah, and they're on strike right now. They're on strike right now and unlike my union, they haven't pissed about the government, they've gone straight to a full three days. No derogations the term for agreeing to not provide services for life in order to protect patient safety, which the RCN went in for a big way. In some ways, they've got it a bit easier in that they can just say, oh, the consultants will do all of this. Like that is to translate to America to make and how to get that would be an attending. And so this strike of junior doctors includes everyone from like their first two years post medical school, what we call foundation years, possibly that'd be equivalent to internship in America and then our registrars so people are resident specialty training equivalent of a like a resident, I believe. The government tried to persuade them to call off in order to go into talks, but they hadn't made a big show. I'm promise of like we were in good faith. We will call off strikes and go into negotiations if the government agrees to have serious formal talks. So they were able to just say to the government, no, you've been too many preconditions on these talks, we're not doing it until you make until you stop messing us about, whereas unfortunately, my union, the RCN is addicted to protecting the image of nursing and like acting in good faith, even when they're dealing with someone who have no intention of dealing in good faith. Yeah, which yeah, that that I don't know, as a strategy, it's really frustrating because you just can get and like you can just get locked in endless negotiations, which is yeah, nothing is happening and yeah, it's really frustrating. So, if you still could contact this, the RCN in England, Wales and Scotland, Northern Islands, a slightly different story had never had a strike until last year. Historically, the RCN was an anti strike union. Wait, that what? Yeah, yes. That's a thing that you can, man, like I know, I know, like the US has a lot of weird not very good unions, but like I don't know, I've ever heard of it, really? That's yes. Wow. So, that changed over in the 90s or the early 2000s, I honestly can't remember when I tried to look it up, but whenever you try to search this stuff, just your search results are like flooded by stuff around the latest round. What do you got on the stand? As the RCN is a hundred and six years old, it only became a union though about 50 years ago. So, the RCN is both a union and a professional body in that. Okay. It also does stuff around developing nursing best practice, research and that kind of thing, and that's what it existed as originally. So yeah, so like a professional association. Yeah. Okay. Exactly. And so it still has a dual structure of its union side, its professional body side that develops nursing practice and stuff like that. Yeah. I guess that raises the sort of question of like, what was so unbelievably like, what happened like such that for the first time in like a hundred and whatever years they finally went on strike? So, it's partially a matter of breaking points. The nursing turned over in the UK's absolute dog shit. Thousands of people leave the profession every year. There's this massive pay cut that's happened over the last ten years and nursing was always underpaid in the UK to be frank. There's also then there was the cut in the nursing busry about five years ago. So it used to be the government would pay for you to train as a nurse. It would also give you not, not like enough to be equivalent to the way to the work you are doing. Nursing in the UK has a far higher amount of practice hours than it does in the US, I believe, it's mild and degree. And like a lot of that time you're essentially working as a, as a HCA, that or CNA as you'd say in America. Can you explain what that is for people who don't know like medical stuff? So HCA health care system or was it CNA certified nursing assistant, I think, what stands for? And eventually, a health care worker who does a range of like what you describe as nursing tasks, but not the role of a nurse. So they would assist with mobilising patients, monitoring observations, hygiene, potentially taking blads and some investigations such as setting up an ECG, but they wouldn't do more and more, quite often investigations, risk management, care planning, medication management, assessing of patients and that kind of stuff. So yeah, like about five years ago, the nursing bus room's cut, so then it became, as with every other degree, having to take out a student loan in order to pursue it. And then in 2018, there was a particularly disastrous pay deal where the RCA in a number of ways is absolutely fun. Not just the RCM, the other health care unions representing health care workers also messed up hugely, but like they really fumbled the ball. It resulted arguably some people described as the leadership setting up the membership. And then after that, there was a general, an emergency general meeting called the RCM which resulted in the entire executive being booted. Wow. And around this leading up to that, there had been like increasing like grassroots militancy around nurses who were recognising that this was an awful situation when we were in. Their, their, also then resulted in, like there were various grassroots campaigns started such as like a nurses United UK, we started employing, organising the UK to like, actually take nurses, there was a concerted effort to put pressure on the RCM. I would say a radical minority, but one that represented like a general, general feeling among nurses on the, on the front line to push for the RCM to take a more radical stance. Then at the same time, I don't know if this was covered in your talk in about English politics, you like to our deep dive, but Northern Ireland didn't have a government. At this point, because as they are now, the DUP and Sinn Fein had fallen out. And legally, it has to be both with them together as the largest Republican and largest unionist party, unionist Sin Pro, the United Kingdom party, after former government, which meant it was impossible, legally, for any, for any pay rise in the NHS in Northern Ireland at that time. So it was not a government that could legally enact one. It was very amazing. And this resulted in the, in 2019, the first strikes by the RCM ever, and also like the first nursing strikes in the NHS in a very long time. I might be wrong about this. I think the last ones were like in the 80s or the 70s. I might, I might be wrong about this though. And this was both called by the RCM and one of the other biggest trade unions in the, the biggest trade union as it's a generalist trade union in the NHS Unison. They both called strikes at this time and they were significant factor in getting the Northern Ireland government back meeting alongside other things. I'm not going to give ourselves all the credit, but it was a significant factor that often gets overlooked. And actually having any pay rise in that to the tool on the, in Northern Ireland. Just to clarify for a second, this, this strike was a, specifically, like a strike that was happening for nurses in Northern Ireland. Yeah, in 2019, I think it's very important. I think that triggered something of a she sea change in the RCM and that was kind of the culminating point of like trying to push for a more militant attitude on the RCM. And it really like broke the fog gates open and made what's happening now possible even though a lot of nurses in England, I think I can't come on the situation in Northern Ireland like how much people know about, you know, about what was going on. But like a lot of nurses in England didn't even know about it. And when I was going around the wards pushing for people to vote in favor of the strike action, a lot of people didn't weren't aware of that. That had been a thing that had happened until I told them about it. Because people in England, as much as England is determined to keep Northern Ireland, don't know what's going on in Northern Ireland to any degree. To a terrifying degree sometimes, I would say. Yeah, that sounds like that sounds like a thing that happens when you're a colonial power, etc. Well, I mean, like there was, I feel like well, our equivalent isn't the right term, but like I robbed the same time. Like people in Puerto Rico ran out their government and almost no one in the US like, like in the continental US has like ever heard of it. Yeah, I would say if there's not forms going off in Northern Ireland, people in England aren't paying attention, I would say. Yeah, that makes sense. And it's also really depressing. Yeah, and which like I would say Northern Ireland is something that he'd been in some ways in the better of his in Puerto Rico, in that it actually has a degree of political representation in the main in the Westminster and South. Even though it obviously should have its independence, but yeah, the Puerto Rico doesn't even have that as my understanding. Yeah, and I mean, there's a whole thing there, like the Puerto Rican stay-hood people are like weird reactionaries. The independence people are cooler, but also there's this whole sort of, I don't know, there's a kind of paralysis in the New York, it's like that and it, like DC's kind of similar, but there's this whole sort of, there's this kind of paralysis where like nothing's ever going to be done about it other than the US just like basically imposing whatever random colonial governor that they've decided to bring in as an emergency manager or whatever. Yeah, sorry. Okay, but we are getting far afield from it. Yeah. I'm also going to start before I put my foot in there and say something about Northern Ireland that will piss off everyone. Yeah, and also, I'd like, I'd even know even less about what's got about Puerto Rico. Yeah, and then the average person in Britain, but you've got to be honest with that. I would also say, okay, like so people don't get mad at me. Like all of the US is a quality. It's like the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the substance of difference between New York and Hawaii and Puerto Rico is when like, when, when we took it over. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So we're sure we're sure. Actually, well, you know, okay. All right. I will, I will take this complete interruption of the flow as a point to do an ad break. So I do know what else is an extensive colonial power that who's might get off the check. It's, it's the products services that the support this podcast. Yay. All right. And we are back. Yeah. So I wanted to move from the North and Ireland strikes to talk about the sort of broader strikes that I've been happening in the last, my understanding about year or so. Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Is it, is it, is it been going on longer than that? Yeah. I just want to talk about like, you know, like what, what happens to move from the North and Ireland strikes to the current situation? So do you mean with specifically NHS strikes or like a smaller strike? Specifically with the NHS strikes. But I guess we can talk about the broader way if you want to, too. Okay. So obviously all the ship with COVID happened. Yeah. And then we came to the pay offer of last year. And at this point, there'd been general building on an attitude that we don't just need to do some pay rise to keep some inflation. We need one that goes towards restoring lost pay. And the RCM leadership after the kicking out of the entire executive in 2018, kind of on the back foot, kind of like wanting to appease the membership, go along with it a bit more. Also, we had new General Secretary Pat Cullen, who was the Secretary of the Northern Ireland, section of the RCM during this Northern Ireland strikes. Took a more militant position in the joint union pay negotiations with the government towards the end, towards the beginning of last year, where the RCM took a position of, we need inflation plus 5%. Now this is a bit of inside baseball, which like, I don't think I've ever seen like part officially, but what I know from various people involved in these things and like statements by different unions, what my understanding of it is, the biggest of the trade unions in the NHS in general, the unison, put forward line, it was only willing to go for a generic significantly better than inflation pay ballot, or like pay demand from the government, with the RCM was due to like changing attitude of his membership, what happened when it accepted a bad deal last time, was not willing to go for and resulted in the RCM splitting from the joint union like pay council, like joint union council over this issue. Which then the government's pay thing came in, it said, we will do a flat 1,400 for everyone like on all bands, so not percentage like it normally does. And to be honest, if it was a significantly higher amount that was bigger than inflation for the lower bands, like the lower paid works in the NHS, wouldn't be the worst thing in the world, but this 1,400 isn't good enough for anyone. And while I'm talking about this, I'm talking about specifically in England, it was slightly different in Wales and Scotland. I think generally slightly better, but still far lower than it should have been than it needs to be. So the RCM was the first of the, any unions in the NHS to say it was about doing the pay ballot. And this kind of sprung on the other unions like a week, two weeks, three weeks later all said that they were doing it as well. The RCM also at the same time hired a load of organized, like paid organizers to support the pay ballot effort. And what I'll say is obviously paid organizers, they're no substitute for what rank and file militancy, but it was very helpful to be honest, because I think there was a lot of like militant sentiment in the RCM, but although there were some like rank and file initiatives, which had a massive impact on like pressing the RCM to a stronger position, I don't think that could have materialised, there wasn't enough people like Atsy who had an idea about organising about what it meant to go and push for this kind of thing to get what we needed in that time frame sadly. I wish there wasn't the case, but I do think these paid organizers must have not had what I think the credit model for workplace organising is did help a lot. And this then resulted in the RCM strike ballot passing in 176 NHS trusts across the UK. Let me just check that I've got that right. Which is huge, it's not all, but it's over 50%, it's pretty much all trusts in Scotland, all trusts in Scotland, all trusts in Northern Ireland, I think all by one or two in Wales and the majority in England. It's also worth pointing out the ones that didn't pass it, they didn't pass by less than a percentage. Wow, they didn't pass by like 10 votes in all cases. I think the one in Wales that didn't pass, it was literally by three votes. And it's also worth looking at, I think in 2016 or 2015, anti-union legislation was passed by the Conservative government, which raised the bar you need in order to have legal strike, industrial action. Under the law as it existed a decade ago, every NHS trust that the RCM ballot had in would have passed the ballot. Also, unfortunate timing, it was happening at the same time as the postal strikes were happening and in the UK, industrial ballots for industrial actions to be legal have to happen by post. A little bit of sad timing. Yeah. It's like it's bad timing, guys. Yeah. Full power to you. You're getting fucked up by God. I wish the timing of the slightly different. Yeah. And of all the trust of all the unions in the NHS that were passing ballots, the RCM was the most successful. We passed it in significantly more places than other unions did. To my shock to be honest, because when I was going around, balloting or talking to people like on my days off, going on the wards, talking people while I was at work, everyone's like, yes, it was in other unions. Yes, I'm voting for it. I'm waiting on 10 to 10 to my ballot. When's my ballot arriving? Why is my union not open their ballot yet? And so when particularly other unions didn't pass in my trust, I was really shocked. I was really confused. And it seems like a lot of them didn't actually want to fight to a degree in that they were opening it because the RCM had opened it. I'm certain people in those unions might disagree with me. That's really, I find it really hard to understand how these unions that have historically, they're all not only about that in that militant, but they all have a history of strikes in other sectors. Or organizing for this, they've never had been anti-strike unions, unison in particular. It came about like several unions being collaborated, like joining together, including unions that had been founded by nurses in the 70s in reaction to like the RCM being anti-strike and going on like, that was the last big wave of nursing strikes at that time. So that really shocked me. This has been it can happen here. Join us tomorrow for a part two of the interview. And in the meantime, you can find us on Twitter and Instagram. That happened here, pod. And you can find us on Instagram, that calls on media. And now the best man. I was going to play in this speech out while I got my oil change, but I went to take five and it was a lot faster than I thought, so here he goes. Okay. Tim, you were my first friend. Angela, you were my first. I never thought the two of you would make it, but I guess love really is blind. No, no, no, I mean in a good way. I'd take five, your oil change is faster than you think. Take five, the stay in your car, 10 minute oil change. Hi there, I'm Dr. John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host of the Spotlight On series from our health discovered podcast. In this special episode, we'll hear about living a fulfilling life with chronic heart failure, the condition that doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds. I was outside shoveling snow and I noticed I was coughing up flim. Unbeknownst to me, I left a trail of blood behind me and I was one sign. Now, of course, prior to, I was excessively gaining weight. I had issues breathing, sleep apnea. I had a lot of those classic signs. My legs were beginning to retain fluid and I was having heart pal patients. My heart would be really excessively fast. But ultimately, it was when that occurred that I thought something was seriously wrong. Listen to Health Discovered on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Going to Walt Disney World this year, visit undercover tourist first. With undercover tourist, save up to $82 per ticket. Get your hotel and rental car with undercover tourist and save an extra 30%. Experience Disney for less with undercover tourist and authorize Disney seller with over 20 years of superior service. Visit undercovertourist.com slash podcast for the lowest prices on all Walt Disney World resort tickets. Plus, your tickets come with a 365-day refund guarantee. That's undercovertourist.com slash podcast. Welcome to it can happen here, a podcast increasingly about nurses strikes. Yeah, this is part two of our interview with Nick, a nurse in the UK. Enjoy. We've entered the Trophy Turvy Land where the RCN sees people who are leading on a built-in scene in this French. Yeah. And I think part of it comes down to us because the RCN was historically a significant part of the city was not a union. It came a union late in the day. Then a was for ages, anti-strike, a lot of unions because we could talk about the general critique of unions and particularly like institutional unions, how they can serve as providers, how they build up like a protective bureaucracy against Bert and Struggle or against like grassroots militancy, the RCN. It's not a particularly democratic as these things go, but it doesn't have that kind of built up institutional inertia in the trade union side because it's not really has a need of it. And that meant I think it was actually far more susceptible to grassroots pressure and militancy than some of the other more established unions were. And that's all, sorry. And that kind of like was the thin end of the wedge for the RCN to take its very strong stance over the pay rising response to like grassroots organizing and like a demand from the grassroots to do that, which then resulted in them like bad infrastructure action first, which then meant other unions had to. And then we got the and then the cascade of like strikes in the NHS ever occurred since then. So this is a very, very broad question to be asking, but how have the strikes been going? That's kind of a difficult one to say. So Scotland for instance has not been called out, has not actually had any strike days because the Scottish government went into negotiations begin with and then made an offer, it was rejected, strike through announced, they made another agreed to come back negotiations. So like it's been effective in getting something moving in Scotland that current offer of 15% over two years. So six something this year, five something next year is currently being voted on by the RCN membership. It's not a good, but it's a significant move in what came before. Wales, the Welsh Government after saying no, we can't have any more money. We can't, we literally can't because Westminster controls our budget. Westminster won't give us any more budget for this. It has now made an improved, an improved offer. It's crap, but it's like something. It's forced them to shift when they were claiming it was physically impossible for them to do it. Which every single time, like I can think of exactly one time ever where I've seen an employer make that demand and it was actually true, but this is not like that was, that was like what Norfolk Southern in like the 1970s and it was only true once and it's never been true ever since then. You will hear this from every fucking employer who you attempt to go on track against and they're always lying like every single time. What I will say is like in the case of Wales, it is very true. The Welsh Government's budget is set by Westminster by the central government. So it's a lie, but it's a plausible lie. And Wales is generally massive. Wales has like some of the highest rates of child poverty outside of Eastern Europe in Europe. The reasons, past the reasons for this is because the Welsh Government is chronically underfunded. Yeah, yeah. Due to political decisions made in England, but it's still not true. And then in England, right, it's got to the point where a government who are categorically opposed to any negotiations with trade unions, have actually come to negotiating table so from that, although I suspect from loads of preconditions that haven't been public talked about, they're going to not make a credible offer in my view and as a stalling tactic, but the fact they even chose to come to the table at all. I hate saying this because it's the kind of thing that makes people complacent, but that is actually quite big. That the Conservative Government actually agreed to do it, to come to negotiating table, stopped hiding behind, oh, there's an independent pay body that decides these things, stopped saying it's in, we can't afford to fund the NHS anymore as he's just coming sitting at the table at all to negotiate. It's like a big move in on itself. Now, if we talk about numbers of participation in strikes, there's been a lot of difficulties, a lot of nowhere near as many people have participated in the strikes as should have been, I will be frank and say. So now we're going to talk about the situations, the situations, which is like the RCN voluntary saying we will allow this many people to continue working these days and these areas in order to maintain patient safety, which is a one hand, we don't want any patients to die, obviously. On the other hand, it's a very easily abused stance to take and there are just nurses who in other trade unions who aren't in trade unions as well. And ultimately, if they want that not to happen, they need to just come to the table earlier. And so this was also an approach that's where so I tell you and like time sensitive chemo and pediatric A and E's were derogated by default. And then there was an agreement of if the wards had less than like nighttime numbers, we would agree for a small amount of our membership to go in to work on those wards to maintain nighttime numbers for the sake of patient safety. But that had to be applied for on a case by case basis. But there's a couple of problems with this one, trust just not taking it seriously, not trying to establish these things to make accurate requests, leaving it to the last minute and then asking for blanket derogations. We don't know if it's going to be safe or not. Managers, like ward managers, not actually knowing what was agreed and giving incorrect information to their staff, people not understanding what was or wasn't derogated. And just generally it was a system that was very open to abuse. And so a lot of things were just left open in general or like that shouldn't have been. But at the same time, I know that it didn't happen in every case but there was a lot of success in the strike committee going round, wards are saying, no, you're overnumber, you need to come out and people doing it or like surgery is being cancelled, like elective surgeries, non-time sensitive surgeries being cancelled due to it of like really making hospital managers sweat over like proving each thing needed to happen. They wanted needed to happen those days, all of which built up, even if we didn't get the full amount of people we should have had out on strike on strike, really built up the pressure, significant degrees on them to then put the pressure up, the chain of the NHS to the government, like we can't keep on going on like this. And at the same time, each set of strikes, the number of people participating did increase. So like for instance, I've just got the government statistics from the 15th of December, I think it is. So this was the first strike day that was called. It was 9,999 absences due to industrial action. Then on the 20th, it was 11,500 and 9, then on the 18th and 19th of January. And just one important factor, they didn't call all hospitals out at once. Again, I think a mistake, a strategic mistake should have gone hard, gone hard fast, but the argument was we don't have the facilities to organise all of this effectively, every one of these massive amounts because like, it was a huge amount of trusts they needed to do that with. But then on those days, it was then 11,363 and 11,219 across those two days. Then in February, it was 15,9998 and then I'm 14 on the second day, 14,000 and then 58 people, which is far lower than it should have been. I can't remember how many people there are on the NHS, so I should have had that statistically. But it's not an inconsiderate amount. It meant lots of our patients, opponents being cancelled, a lot of surgeries being cancelled, a lot of chaos and stress for managers of the NHS and therefore for the government are looking really bad for them. And it's a clear upward trajectory, which meant that when the RCN announced, we're going to do two days, consecutive, we're going to keep it going for the night with the hand on previously and we're not doing derogations. ITU will be starved, nothing that we're not doing anything else. I think no, even ITU wasn't starved. We would consider on a case-by-case basis, we won't be considered. What's ITU, sorry. Intensive care. I see you for America. Oh, actually, okay. Okay, yeah. So, at that point, the government put, like, okay, we need to move to a new delaying tactic. They're not just going to give up. So I think with that, as it went on, like, people were itching an itching to go further. And so, for instance, like, A&E was derogated, so which is the area I work in, but like, a lot of people, and this is reflective of like most areas that were derogated when I spoke to people who weren't them, like, no, we need to be out. We need to be out the pick-align. And like, after the first two rounds, there was also a growing effort to, like, try and find out from the membership what the actual situation was so that, like, staffing on the wards, because all wards are chronically understaffed. So when they said, oh, well, we need this and all people to say, no, we know that's alive. We know one night's, there's actually only three registered nurses. There's not the four-year claiming and stuff like that. It's, again, I think, was a really positive move in, like, embedding a kind of, like, works inquiry and work as knowledge about their workplace into the organizing of the strike that had been quite a top-down process. But yeah. And I'm kind of worried about how this delay and break in the strike action will affect that momentum that had been building up. I think, like, to a large degree, people are, like, itching to go again. And I think that desire to go again is building as it goes, like, when it initially happened, when this strike was initially called off, there was a lot of, like, trust, like, in, like, the big WhatsApp groups and stuff and told people there was a lot of, like, people thinking up, at least, I don't know if this was actually a general opinion, but people being quite vulgarly saying, no, we need to trust, like, Pat knows what she's doing. They wouldn't have called it off of this thing. It's like, let's get more and more of those people being, like, no, we need to, we need to go, we need to get back on the picket line. And there's been a petition that's been going around. There's been quite a bit of news, like, setting out some hard lines, like, four to the end. R and C leadership about what kind of stuff is she's set, like, saying, no, we need to stick to the above inflation busting. We need to not compromise on this. We need to not compromise on this, which is, I think, got 880 signatures. At the moment, it doesn't sound like a huge amount, but, like, again, you're going through quite a lot of inertia of, like, attitude of, like, you've got to leave it to the leadership among the members should be, even when they were unhappy with it. And it's only 1,000 signatures that are necessary in the RCANs, where the RCAN works to call an extraordinary general meeting, which then can do pretty much whatever it wants. And that's how the leadership in 2018 was kicked out after the bad pay deal then. But that's really interesting. Yeah. So, the RCAN very undemocratic, except for this one particular thing. Yeah. Is that a normal thing that, is it like a normal thing for unions in the UK? Or is that just like a merge? Most, I think all unions have a amount of people, a set amount where, if, like, membership is calling for an extraordinary general meeting, they have to do it. The RCANs one is really low. Interesting. Essentially, the RCANs. And, like, there are some moves where, like, people in the RCANs, they're like, oh, we need to change it. We need to get rid of that. And we need to raise it to be more in line with other unions. But, again, it's something that will have to, that, if that does happen, that kind of change, we'd have to go through, like, a membership wide vote. It's not something that the executive leadership could just impose. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. So, like, there is a process of, like, these strikes were, like, a result of, like, increasing general level of militancy with, among nurses in general and among NHS workers. I think particularly because everyone knows it's awful the situation. Yeah. And then, with, like, a slightly more organised and spear in it, that resulted in that, in that petition in 2018, arguing for staff at, like, Congress and things. And then, that's what active strike has, like, got the membership feeling, like, they should have a more active role. And I think it's pushing things in a positive direction, even though I think the RCM needs to have just gotten to a point where, by mistake, it ended up way ahead of other unions. And it's now trying to beg for a panel. But I don't, I think there's a lot of potential for, like, more grassroots organised by the membership to prevent that happening. Yeah. We are in a difficult position, though, in that the time is running out, strike mandates in the UK only last for six months. We are up. When the government agreed to the negotiations were at two and a half months left of the mandate, it's now two months left of the mandate, you have to give two weeks notice before strike action. Oh, so that's what the sort of, like, run out the clock strategies on their side. Okay, that makes sense. Exactly. Now, nothing's to stop us from re-balloting, but it will be a whole process. It has to be a month. You have to go through the mail. Yeah. It'll be drawn out. We'll buy them a lot more time. Yeah. Also, post-workers, I think are on strike again today, too. I think I've maybe... I think so. I've got the strike counter up on my computer. Let's see who's on strike today. I can absolutely fraud. I have it on my other computer, but I don't have it on this one. Yeah. So, phase the 15. Today, Amazon's on strike and commentary. The BBC's Regional Services, the Civil Service, which will kind of be equivalent to, like, a federal staff in America. So like, for instance, my dad, who's a health and safety inspector, is on strike today. HMRC, which is the tax office on strike, junior docs on strike, off-stead, the school of structures on strike, the rail, the two main rail unions on strike, teachers on strike, and university staff on strike, not the postal service today. But, yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess I wanted to ask a bit about that, too, about sort of just what's been happening. I don't know. What you see is sort of the potential of the broader strikes I've been happening, because this is a... I don't know. It's not like a 1970s style strike wave, but it's a lot of strikes for the UK in the last sort of decade. Yeah. It's big. There isn't the level of cross-union cooperation and talks that you would want. There's a lot of people turning up to each other's picket lines. There's a lot of solidarity present, but it's not coalescing into like a unified movement which you'd hope to be, although I do think if something doesn't change, it is moving in that direction. And the Conservative government is at like an all-time loan. It's popularity ratings. Yeah. I think... I don't know if you were aware from this quote from Margaret Fattia about how much her main political goal was remaking the soul of Britain. A way because like up until that period there was a very strong trade union movement in the UK that it had like one of the best social democracies in the world like comparable to Scandinavia today. It was... It was far more like a collective attitude in the UK. And like Margaret Fattia's explicit, I can't even be exact quote, but explicit project of the Conservative Party at the time. It's not put it all on her. Great woman-team, history is as bad as great man theory. History to move the soul of the like general social action person out of like people in Britain away from that like orientations like community and collective struggle and action. And there is a part of me that the feels like this is a move away from that because like everyone you go to, there's a winging about like an inconvenience caused by strike. But pretty much everyone is like, yeah, they have it, it's awful for them. The strike drivers, good on them for standing up for themselves, good on the teachers for standing up for themselves, good on postal workers for standing up for themselves, good on nurses for standing up for themselves. Like the amount of like stuff I've been brought by people on the picket lines has been cr… it's like I, each day I've just been like rolling down the hill from my hospital to my house like I've been bloated stomach from like stuff, numbers of the public have been brought and dropped off at the picket line. It makes me feel like it's, there is, not to as part of me, it does feel like there is a reorientation in general of British public to my idea that we don't have to put up with this. Yeah. And you don't have to struggle and try and get it on your own. And like it's early days yet, but I do see something positive moving in that direction in the UK as well to this strike wave. Yeah, that's a, that is, I don't know, that is great news from a place that does not usually generate great news. This is like the, this is the deeply optimistic part of me. On the other hand, you have like bad, a lot of bad news coming out of the UK in the moment, but like this strike wave is good news, it is the fact that it's happening in the NHS in particular, which has been so resistant to industrial action historically and also just because of how what's significant part of the economy it is as well. Because like, you know, the NHS is the eighth biggest employee of the world. Wow, I didn't know it wasn't the world, that's, that's why I like, it used to be like the fifth biggest in the world. Wow. It's good. Yeah, it used to only be that the American Army, the Chinese Army, the dawns of Walmart would be important to the NHS. And we've been overtaken by Amazon and such now. Yeah. Yeah. And like, like strike action. So like, from like a worker's perspective, like strike action of like the largest section of the workforce nurses in the NHS, the biggest in plow in the world. Starting aside the situation for everything else in the UK, leaving aside the history of the opposition, like the act of opposition to the idea of striking within nursing historically in the UK is huge news and something to be hopeful about. And then put into context that the more broader strike wave in the UK and within the NHS in general, this is huge. And it is a sign, I think, of positive change and like re-orientation towards workplace struggle occurring, I think. So I've now heard two different places do this, which was, I heard this in Chile in 2019, I heard this also on my picket line at the University of Chicago in 2019, which is not, I like, this is the place de-alibalism was born and we will kill it here. Well, I mean, those are the three places that are here in Chicago and the UK. Yeah, I think I think also arguably Germany, although that has a whole other, the Dorne Libs are, I don't know, I think, although Libs from my understanding of it, from listening to some things about years ago, it's more of a family resemblance than the exact same thing as neoliberalism. Yeah, I mean, I think I, if we're going, I think they got absorbed into the neoliberal bubble so far as like, like they're, they're, the ornalibs are where the neoliberals got the sort of like, we need to have like an international bureaucracy, like sort of legal bureaucracy from, like, Hayek is also like, have involved, yeah, that's, that's a whole of this for, but yeah, like it is, it is encouraging to me that it's like, I don't know, like, the, the, the, it really does seem like in the places where the neoliberalism was born, it's like, it's starting to come apart. Yeah. And, you know, I know people, people have been predicting the death of the neoliberalism for like long, well, almost as long as I've been alive, but I don't know this, this, like, the fact that it's happening in these places seems different than it does have a single unit. It, I think it is significant. I think I'm, I am cautiously excited. Every time I hope something bad happens, but I am hopeful now. And, you know, my brain is a magic. So it can't be a cause of the fact there. Yeah. But I don't know. I mean, like, you are the second person I've interviewed from the UK who actually seem to be like somewhat optimistic about the direction it could possibly be going, which is the first time I've heard that in like, I mean, I guess there are people who are optimistic about Corbin, but yeah, I don't know. This is the first sort of like signs of that sense. I don't know a long time. And I think, yeah, look, like, yeah, I was at the American list. You're like, if turf island isn't doomed, then we're not doomed either. I don't know. Here's what I guess science. Well, you're overtaking us. It's very weird. Yeah, we have. Yeah. I, I, I, yeah. I don't know when this is coming out, but I'm going to be honest, man. Like, there's a lot of ways the UK is better than America. Yeah, the US like is, it's a, it's a real disaster. Like, it's, it's, yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we're both equally bad in a lot of ways. Yeah. I think the things, the things that like people in the US look at, England say, this is awful. And the things people in the UK look at the US and say, this is awful. It's, it's kind of a child looking at their parent and being pissed off at them and a child and a child and a parent looking at their child and being disappointed in them. You know, no, no, you both suck. This is family resemblance. It's a, we hate us for, it's a narcissism of small differences like between the US and the US and the US and the UK a lot of the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I guess do you have anything else do you want to say about the strikes? I think the fact that God this far is incredible. There's so much further that needs to go. I'm really excited and I'm really scared. I think this is a potential for like a turning point round both for the NHS, but for my profession for nursing and also like in general in the context of the West right grad for the UK. But you know, the higher the stakes, the higher the powerals like this is our, I think this is our fight to lose essentially. I think if we do it, if we go seriously and like the membership takes control of it from like the lead from their union leadership, which is very cautious, which has been put into position of being more mille of like unprecedented millions to see almost by accident, we'll try and to appease the membership. We can achieve something incredible, but it's really the books I believe can go either away. I'm excited and I'm terrified by it. Yeah, if people want to support the strikes, where can they go? Is there a strike fund they can donate to? Yeah, the RCM has an open strike fund that I would invite anyone listening to donate to. I would also like find the articles about the petition that been going around like the money of the RCM leadership takes a stronger stance and like just share that around generally create more visibility on that. Yeah, we'll put links to both of those in the description. Yeah, those are the main things I would suggest. Again, the national nature of this struggle and the fact that it's not even really against our direct employers makes it harder to talk specifically about this thing or that thing in some ways, but yeah, those are the two things I would ask. The big-ass strike poll, the easier it is to argue for more aggressive action and more visibility goes on that petition the more. It will take a lot more than a petition to like shift things through the being in the forefront and the leadership position of this, but it's something that will make people feel more empowered, put more pressure on the leadership. It's like a small stepping point towards what we need. I'd also like to recommend a book to anyone who wants to find out more about the history of the NHS and the current situation there. Some commos of mine like from a group called the Anvy Workers and also for always forget the other group they did it with name. This is embarrassing. Yeah, Anikis Communist Group wrote and healthcare workers united which is like a network I'm involved in, put together a book called Sik of it which is like a collection of workers and priorities and reflections on the NHS its history, its potentials and what and it and stuff that's really a great book. Sadly not available as a neat book, but it's an excellent read and it will tell you give you a real insight into what the NHS has been historically and what it is now for anyone who's interested in that. That's awesome. Yeah, the anger workers are really cool by the way. You're on Twitter, I probably should have, it's probably just angry workers. Yeah. Yeah, wait no, I'm wrong, it's at workers angry. I think, wait no. Wait no, it's not work is angry, it is not work is angry. I'm not on Twitter, I don't know about these things. It is a cursed place. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. If you want to find us at Twitter, we are at Coz on Media. Yeah, we're also on Instagram. I'm told we're on Instagram, I don't have one so I don't know. This is what I've been being told for many years if we don't tell me. Yeah, and thank you all for listening and yeah, go do your own strikes. Make bosses lives miserable. Please, the more strikes are going on, the more people want to go on strike. Hey. And now the best man. I was going to play in this speech while I got my oil change, but I went to take five and it was a lot faster than I thought so here he goes. Okay. Tim, you were my first friend. Angela, you were my first. Yeah, I never thought the two of you would make it, but I guess love really is blind. No, no, no, no, I mean in a good way. I'd take five. Your oil change is faster than you think. Take five. The stay in your car. 10 minute oil change. Hi there. I'm Dr. John White, WebMD's chief medical officer and host of the Spotlight on series from our health discovered podcast. In this special episode, we'll hear about living a fulfilling life with chronic heart failure. The condition that doesn't have to be as scary as it sounds. I was outside shoveling snow and I noticed I was coughing up flim. Unbeknownst to me, I left a trail of blood behind me and I was one sign. Now, of course, prior to, I was excessively gaining weight. I had issues breathing, sleep apnea. I had a lot of those classic signs. My legs were beginning to retain fluid and I was having heart pal patients. My heart would be, you know, really excessively fast. And so, but ultimately it was when that occurred that I thought something was seriously wrong. Listen to health discovered on the iHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. What spring break or summer without a day at the theme park? Via hero and skip the ticket counter and save money. With undercover tourists, you can buy your tickets in advance and save up to 25% on theme park and attraction tickets nationwide. Visit undercovertourist.com slash podcast for all theme park and attraction tickets. All tickets come with a best price guarantee and a 365 day refund policy. That's undercovertourist.com slash podcast undercover tourist, the trusted name in theme park tickets. Okay, hello and welcome to Ike It Happen here. Hello cast, it is about today about labor organizing and about what happens after a strike in a labor organization. I'm joined. I'm James, if you hadn't guessed, and I'm joined by several people from the UCSD Dollar Lunch Club. We're going to talk about the UC strike and we're going to talk about mutual aid organizing in the wake of the strike. If you would like to introduce yourselves, that would be great. Alex, I use she they friends. I'm Matt and I use he him. Hi, everyone. My name is Maria. PhD student at UCSD and I use she her pronouns. I'm Anna and I use she they pronouns. Amazing. Thank you very much guys. So I think people probably haven't heard much from us about the UC strike since we last sort of had some episodes around December and January. And obviously it's been a couple of months since then. So the resolution of that strike was kind of contentious right and a lot of the organizing that you guys have been doing came out of the campaign to vote no on the I guess the ballot after the strike right on the vote no and the alternative agreement which ultimately didn't succeed right the tentative agreement with there was a yes vote and I wonder if you could all explain kind of a like it's obvious how the yes vote was organized right with the within the structure of a union which which exists to which I had obviously made this agreement with the UC in this case and then it's a job of the people who made that agreement to then get a yes vote on that agreement but can you explain a little bit about how the no vote campaign came together and maybe if someone could also explain some of the substantive issues that you felt weren't and satisfactory resolved in that tentative agreement. Yeah. The the no vote was the end of a very long process of us feeling like the bargaining team was making progressively worse and worse decisions and basically using submission as a tactic to improve gains in bargaining we felt like that was not a great tactic. So the the upshot of the no vote campaign was that fundamentally we felt that the bargaining team had not fought hard enough. They made repeated sacrifices of our core demands drastically cutting our 54,000 wage demands are cola and that we felt particularly since it was during the winter break and we had some time to you know stretch it out a little bit further that if we had gone back to the bargaining table at that point that we would have been able to recoup some of those demands. I don't think there was like consensus that it was like obvious that like union resources would exclusively be used for yes vote stuff either maybe partially but that was one part of like the major conflict was that like when some of us were trying to do like a text banking campaign for like no vote stuff I know of at least one person who like feared for their career because like their colleague was like you're misusing like personally I personal information that like this isn't why people like agreed to give it to the union and like you can't just take it and use it for like you know campaigning for your no vote stuff but then we were like this is for a union purpose. Why can't we like contact people on the same topic that all of us are getting a bajillion mass texts about and so like I do think that was also a point of contention within that but like like the union does not share resources amongst like amongst people who are campaigning for different sides of like ballot issues. Right yeah yeah so wasn't like there wasn't like like an open channel where like people could have an open discussion but at least using the text banking function at least. Yeah we have been told that in the event that a bargaining change did not have a unanimous vote in favor of taing the agreement that both sides would have the opportunity to use union resources in order to campaign for their preference and that didn't turn out to be the case. Yeah that's this upsetting and so how did you organize because it was if it wasn't at the no vote campaign is only the four people here right like it was a very substantive campaign that did a large number of people supported and voted for it wasn't like this is a kind of 99% yes situations. How did you all organize for the no vote campaign when you didn't have access to those resources? It was a pretty distributed network of for instance signal chats so a lot of signal WhatsApp discord groups and it was it was very grassroots so if you knew someone in one of those groups they would add you yeah I'm sure Matt and Allison have more to add I think they were in some very large group chats. Yes and those group chats were both on the UC San Diego campus as well as statewide so you know this wasn't just something that UC San Diego was voting on right this was all of the California campuses. We also had strike center which involved in towards the end of our active picketing before winter break a number of people from all different departments migrated from their pickets to a more central location and although it was not synonymous with and it was unofficially kind of seen as the dissidents side the vast majority of people who participated in the strike center were ended up being no voters for the time came. I think Anna is pretty right in saying that a lot of the organization was like a distributed decentralized thing across signal chats like in my experience there was for example the disability justice coalition who've done a lot on you know accommodations and disability rights and things like that and so they were approaching things from different angles than other chats that were like you know doing like oh here is a list of emails from you know UCI of grad students in this department please feel free to email it and you know like so there was like a diversity of tactics there if that makes sense so it was like a lot of like petitioning emails talking one-on-one with people so me personally and several people that I know like set up meetings with like their lab mates and just be like hey how are you doing so have you heard of what's going on things like that which I think are very normal union things to do I did find that like official like not maybe not official but in my department we had two people kind of take up like union liaison roles and they tended to be more like yes voters rather than no voters and I found that a form of communication to us never had that kind of like reaching out to other people they would say like hey there's a campus OC happening at 5 p.m. but they wouldn't reach out to members of the department to get everyone's opinion until like week three week four of the strike so you know I think what no voters did excel at was reaching out to people individually and like actually like going out to different labs to different departments and talking with people like either one-on-one or within small groups so me personally as well as another member of the dollar lunch club actually canvassed around graduate housing so we during the ratification but we were literally like holding stacks of paper and saying like hey this is kind of the layout of what you'll be paid for each month that the union like the UAW is not showing you like if you're in you know in this year you're going to be getting a barely like two hundred dollar raise for these several months that kind of thing which is like very you know that information just was not made accessible or made clear by the UAW and for me that was purposefully done at least in my opinion that was purposefully done so I think the diversity of tactics there that the no voters incorporated and it was only after we started canvassing around graduate housing that we started seeing yes voters also canvassing around graduate housing and tearing down the posters that we had put on other people's doors yeah so it got contentious but I think because we didn't have those official resources that the UAW usually or at least our chapter of the UAW usually can depend on such as like oh an official mailing list and then we'll just like send you or basically spam you a bunch of updates we have to work around that by doing more personal meetings by for example in the last week of the strike facilitating group lunches right where multiple departments would come together bring food cook like 9 10 Insta Pots worth of stews for everyone and then that would be an opportunity for me to talk to people that I have like never talked to in my life from like completely different departments and tell them like hey I don't think this is looking really good for us especially like we have very different conditions you very different working conditions and just overall you may be part of the S.R.U. I'm part of 2865 here's how we should talk so again that was because the UAW was not utilizing those avenues of getting people to talk to each other so I'm not sure I kind of went off topic but I I wanted to like really hammer home that because we didn't have all those resources we had to rely on kind of these like how should I say like very distributed piece meal strategies of like oh well let's do something here this isn't going to work for this department let's do that for this department you know if that makes sense it does I think it's really cool because I think that's how there's a lot that people can learn if they're interested in organising their own workplaces right whether it's organising for a vote on the sensitive agreement or if it's just organising to form a collective bargaining at the first place or to deal with a particular issue with your bosses whatever it is those grassroots things work especially when you don't have the this giant sort of massive union apparatus I wanted to say like just with like what it feels like like to be in like all of the different chats because like at at the peak of everything I was like probably sending you like a dozen different Google docs a day it was all just like like we'll start a different group chat for it was all just we'll start a different group chat for the specific purpose of like nobody's talking about disability justice and so we want to talk about disability justice in here and we've decided this this forum is not good and then somebody in the chat goes like well I'm with people who are also interested in like furthering this topic and I don't see them any of them doing something like you know like analysing like re-analyzing the like housing market data and not just like taking the UAW's word for it or like like doing a little bit of like forensic accounting on the university and then posting the Google doc and saying like hey I did some like forensic accounting on the university this is something that we can use in arguments and also is like evidence of x or y so yeah just a lot of people it helps also it helps to be in any union full of grad students. Yeah, you have a lot of useful skills it can also be very taxing organising that way like it can be really I know it's a lot of being on your phone and it's a lot of like your phone vibrating and you're having to switch your focus from some like in-depth discussion of disability justice to a discussion of like why the rent is so damn high in Santa Cruz and so like it can be really like I guess I don't know I'm not a person who does well with that kind of shit and so like I wonder if there's anything because this happened a lot in in 2022 right when we look at how the George Floyd uprising or the uprising for back lives or if you want to call it was organised it was also a whole lot of signal chats that I know for a lot of people I spoke to like they just couldn't handle the signal chats and so I wonder if there's any think that you learned during that organising process that you would like to pass on to people who are interested in organising going forward. One thing I'll say is it became pretty clear that you know the people who had created the signal chats or the WhatsApp chats were the ones who were able to monitor manipulate shut it down which happens to our campus picket leaders organising chat. After the NOVO had already failed so a couple of weeks later during the joint council meeting of the AWP and you know the discourse and the arguments that were happening there while certainly very painful and vociferous were also you know very connecting to the campus lots of different departments were on there so we still got a lot of ideas about you know what other departments were thinking of and with the locking down of that chat which was kind of a unilateral action on the part of one of the moderators that just really ended a lot of campus discussion and I in my opinion further the divide between the two sides and the other thing that I'll say is you know it's really hard from a historical perspective from a communications perspective to see like that people who are typing slower are not getting their opinions out people who are in multiple chats are getting certain types of information that other people are not getting and my words of advice to any any mass movement that is attempting to use these kinds of chat applications are one to be sure that you are monitoring for accountability I've realized very late in the game that you can actually download what's happened transcripts so I downloaded the entire transcript just in case you've gotten new screenshots also you know people would say why I said this and you know to this person say no you know somebody took screenshot of that before you deleted it and the other thing is you know to always have backups always have back channels because there were so many instances of you know moderator led or uh uaw sanctions chats that did not permit discussion and yes since you know we we were talking about that shit in our in our back channels yeah I think I think that's good advice Ken has just joined us and I'm just gonna allow them to introduce themselves before we go forward with discussing these organizing tactics go ahead Ken uh hi I'm Ken I am a graduate student in the literature department so I've been organizing with dollar lunch club from day like week zero before the strike started with with Anna and yeah yeah that will not not was from day one that's true I wanted to say with respect to the question about like just on my phone fatigue um I think a large like part of like why we are now like this group of us here is dollar lunch club is because we were just like we all have on my phone fatigue and we want to do something actually like uh community building and like meaningful uh for like ourselves and other grad students um and yeah getting off the phone and making soup together has been very uh uh very good for that yeah Maria do you want to add to that? yeah yeah I I was going to say the same like because I I think I think phone chats are vital right like I'm thinking about how important Facebook messenger chats were to the teacher's strike a couple of years ago so those were like really important and they were really important in our strike as well but I think because of the limitations of like as Matt mentioned uh someone can just unilaterally say none of you can reply only I can post updates uh people can like erase their messages they can nuke the entire chat disable it all of that because of that it really tells you like oh you can't just rely on online organizing a lot of times you're going to have to do in person organizing which again as Alex said really well um part of that is just community building like to me what dollar lunch club is uh it's like a continuation of that community building so that we maintain contacts so that we maintain having conversations with people that generally we wouldn't really be meeting every day or maybe would wouldn't even be meeting like like once a quarter that kind of thing you know there's people that I talk to in scripts that I never would have talked to if we weren't doing some of these lunches together and finding out uh their situation so they're a kind of tough situation that I think would be good to talk about in soon but I guess what I would say as advice for other people who are trying to unionize their workplace is to get people um kind of in engaged you have to start with some of that community building and I think food is one of those really good places to start community building it could be also other types of activities so all throughout the strike there was you know times when people would be like hey let's do yoga by the beach you know or let's do yoga on this picket or let's do a dance on this picket or let's do like a fashion show on this picket those are all like fun activities that I think people who like do not want to be at their workplace all the time people who like just want to catch a break you can engage those like disengaged people that are just not paying attention to politics by offering activities that are important for community building and forgetting to meet people that you wouldn't have talked to before so I think that's kind of like vital to a union functioning is building all of these contacts and then when you have talked to someone several times when you have had lunch with them several times then you can really get into the nitty gritty of like well how do you feel about the contract how do you feel about you know unionizing how do you feel about so and so I think that kind of community building is something that like our the UAW-2865 at least really just like neglected so my my example here is on one of the pickets not the picket that I was on but on one of the pickets I later talked to a guy who was saying like oh yeah our picket is really militant we're supposed to be like shouting at people on the street the entire time and you know our picket leader she's like going all out and she you know has lost her voice because of that and all of that and I was thinking like okay but what do you don't you want to arrest you know like what like do you do anything for fun to keep people going to the picket because his picket had dropped in numbers so much that they had to combine numbers with another picket right and to me that was like you are making this really really stressful for people that's not to say that you know like preventing people from parking there is an important it is but most people can only do that for a couple of days and then they're like stressed out and they do not want to contribute to that strike situation anymore they just want to sit at home and not do work right which is kind of what a strike can be but to keep people on the picket lines and to keep in contact with them because they're coming on campus or you know at the workplace every day you have to make it like pleasant to be there and so that that was one of the things that I learned from one of those pickets where like you aren't doing any community building like your community building is a single basketball hoop that you brought and you put on the parking lot and like that's not enough you have to do like food you have to do some kind of rest you have to do some kind of art so in one of the other pickets that I participated in there was like chalking everywhere we were playing we were making like you know like a monopoly board but like you would just be losing $200 every time you pass the step and things like that right you have to let people express themselves in this way for them to keep coming back and back and being engaged for you to be able to facilitate conversations and to ask like hey what do you think about the contract hey what do you want to do I think community building is the most important thing and that can be online but it also should have an in-person component to it yeah I think that's pretty well said fun is a way like like intentionally making time and space and energy for having fun as a community and just like doing things that are just like like this is because all of us need to eat and all of us need a break like that is a way to like keep up your to like keep up your stamina and like help people keep up your stamina for something taxing like the eighth strike and also like to help people find the kind of meaning that helps them like want to come back and continue devoting energy to the thing and yeah that I just wanted to echo that like that like it was only through like finding this group that I was able to like find people of of similar minds on this it was not in the like UAW department organized and committing meetings that I could find like minds on this our our picket I don't think ever like like died off like other pickets did and our picket I'm referring to like most of the other people here we were together on one picket part of that is because we were allowing like space for so many different activities to do like there is one person in my department who kept coming despite my department being like really politically disengaged because we had like a button maker and we could make buttons and he was like hey this is fun I'm just gonna like continue drawing buttons for people I like doing that and it was like go for it you know like as long as you're here as long as we can communicate with you and like uh hear your opinions and see what you want out of the contract and you keep on coming like we love that you know like if you allow space for different people to do different things if there's like a diversity of tactics I think you're going to get people a lot more engaged than if you have this like top down like no we should only be preventing people from parking here we should only be shouting at students to not go to class like they have to be a diversity of tactics that will be a good time I think for us to explain exactly what dollar lunch club is and and what it does so to someone want to take take on explaining that a dollar lunch club is very much like I would say ground up organizing tactics I guess um it's it's everything is sort of collectively decided in a weekly meeting and in the past quarter it's it's been lunch it's we've been providing lunch for um it's targeted at grad students but really um welcoming all of all community members uh regardless of like affiliation with UCSD although it's mostly UCSD students and grad students that have been attending but um we've been doing lunch for a dollar two to three times a week in different places on the UCSD campus sort of like uh and some of it is just lunches of it is sort of like uh ad hoc catering I would say of different kinds of organizing efforts or like inter departmental lunches so um it's not it's not totally fixed in terms of location or affiliation and um all of the members are uh doing this totally voluntarily um and the one dollar that we collect for the lunches or or greater donations if community members want um go straight into um just sustaining the lunch project and groceries and um but mostly yeah there's been a lot of efforts to sort of diversify and make the make our lunches as sustainable cost wise as possible um so this last quarter folks have been working with the food recovery network to sort of supply some of the ingredients it is very much donate what you want as Ken said we generally suggest a dollar donation but it's um I think one of our signs says eat first donate maybe um so it's very much pay what you want pay what you can yeah and I wanted to say and um like Matt was most uh directly involved in this transition but what it grew out of was the facts that like uh the humanities picket um started doing daily lunches together and um um after the strike ended because of the ratification vote um uh Matt and uh some other folks who had been doing those lunches were just like we should keep doing this this feels good and right and um more people like me jumped on afterwards um and we all have been making it into this mutually thing for like we need to like you know humanize ourselves to each other and like you know shore up the like community bonds that we notice we're missing um so that way maybe in the future like people will care a little more about like people that maybe they uh couldn't care less about this time around I want to just jump in and give credit where credit is due or Ken and Anna actually uh word the um originators of the striker food um and I jumped on day one because I I knew for I used a professional cook for a while I was really into food and I wanted to do that um and so I guess you could say it was just three of us and then expanded. Fair fair I don't I don't have my origin story nailed them yeah you gotta get it on par it's uh it's something I miss greatly from like uh leftist organizing in certainly in like Southern Europe uh which is you know where I spend a lot of my life like you're always well fed uh and you think where you're in Spain or Italy or even in France and and like yeah American labor organizing black sets so it's cool to see you guys doing it uh yeah kind of to summarize what Alex is saying for me the goal is very much to prong one is food justice um so food for everyone I think everyone should have it it's great to hear that that's kind of uh a built-in thing in Europe I didn't know that but it sounds pretty on-brand um disappointingly that is not the case here so yeah everyone needs food um so that's that's one goal and then for me the other goal is to get people talking across uh departments so I think a big issue in the strike was that um some departments were paid much more than others um and I think for that reason the ones who were paid more were often less radical because they were kind of already slightly more comfortable of course no one is paid a huge amount as a grad student but um they had I guess uh you could say more to lose um and maybe were less pressed to urgently start earning more um and of course accessibility needs and there are many other considerations basically if you're already somewhat comfortable with your living situation you're less likely to be super radical um and so I think just not even being in the same spheres together uh people in those more comfortable departments kind of did not really have any reason to interact with people in the less comfortable departments and they just didn't see them at all and so just like what Alex is saying um that food is a way to humanize us all to each other um it's very hard to have everyone in the same room together without you know seeing and talking to each other um so food was a way for us to do that and I thought that that was a really important continued slow moving goal um so weekly lunches are a way for us to invite people from across the campus and say hey there's free food here and it's also really good uh so you should come by and eat some and while you're here talk to some students from the humanities department and recognize that they have real needs and they are people too and maybe next time you vote you should keep their thoughts in mind um and vote a little bit less selfishly if you can um so that that's what it is for me I think getting a little deeper dig a little deeper into the origin of like how this all started my department has been like very suspicious I guess of the the UAW previous efforts for fair for fair reasons you know um and so in terms of getting folks out to strike and then also to be on the picket line it was definitely a struggle not just not really so much in that folks didn't believe in the cause but they were like pretty aware that um you know as as literature students you're not the university or the union's priority um you know because humanities you know that you know that trend right and so um there is also a lot of the whole um strike pay systems scared a lot of folks and it was like I have to switch from this uh you know like different kind of labor which is not really about me physically being in a place for 20 hours a week into this labor that is like me walking around for 20 hours a week in order to make sure that I am not gonna go broke um and basically there was not a funded there wasn't funded snacks or lunch um by the UAW and I had actually a mat and I or yeah mat and I had asked at an early meeting I guess about getting a sort of like seed fund of like maybe $50 to just get us rolling on the lunch and the UAW staff was like nope lunch is just not included in our budget um sorry about that like if you want to do that you'll have to figure out how to get this organizing going on your own um and so part of doing the fundraising from the beginning was about that and actually the strike food funds that um I also want to throw some credit to Anna also as like one of the people that was like most focused on building uh sort of the fundraising materials and and actively fundraising in different places and making sure that then ultimately um in terms of being able to supply food lunch funds to other pickets um that was something that we started doing about midway through the strike because we had had some fundraising success um and it was kind of crazy because it was I remember just like the last day of the strike itself just being at another picket where you know that had sort of developed more of its own like lunch culture like using some of that like that fundraised cash and like also using efforts from other folks but um um just the picket being like somebody at the picket being like damn they got to get on that lunch thing next time this was key and I was just like no yeah um but yeah like exactly the lunch is key like how are you gonna expect to have people building community you know and you know the the cheapest the the cheapest like lunch you can I mean outside of basically during the strike people were eating all of the food out of the um the food co-op which is another community group that supplies food on campus um but outside of that pretty much there is not an meal to be had on campus for less than like thirteen dollars without tax so yeah that's that's about that Alex can I add something like before you just like a tiny thing based on Ken's point I was going to say at one point I think it was week two or week three of the strike we were making so much food we were feeding like probably a hundred people and then we would have leftovers and we would literally walk the leftovers to the other pickets and it surprised me so much that the other picket would just be eating like chips and donuts and here I am like dropping off like cooked you know like bean burritos or like salads or things like that like actual food for them so like to me this was like not even a failure on the UAW's part it was like very intentional of like well you're a kind of on your own you know so that's like the power of food to me is like well fed people are going to keep coming back you know people that don't have to spend like a bunch of money on getting like donuts I don't I don't think they're going to keep coming back you know yeah what Ken was saying earlier about props to Anna nobody moves a second hand Instapod at San Diego County without Anna knowing about it is one of our our groups jokes thank you all yeah we love you we do yeah um but yeah I wanted to offer some contrast to like uh how uh like the other folks's departments have been um like have been responsive to things and like what the attitudes are um so I am in the computer science department uh we have plenty of money comparatively um and we are I think steps uh what the previous steps were like steps eight and nine um and we organize a lot with like the electrical engineering department which is like step uh like also like steps seven eight nine um and I remember very vividly this town hall we had before the the ratification vote got announced where like uh there was some temperature checking about like how does everybody feel about this um like if we if we put this up for vote um and everybody was just like oh you know it looks all right to me I think I uh this like you know not not incredible but like I'd be able to to handle this and then I come in and get my turn and go like guys um everything I'm hearing from the other side of campus is them panicking uh and very upset um I don't think we should do this if the rest of the campus is panicking and upset and I was just like not heard and kind of ignored um so yeah um a lot of the community building stuff like when we talk about like trying to get people to like humanize like other people that they didn't seem to care about um we're talking about like the departments that didn't need as much help like some of mine and like um the strike for me personally was like it definitely transformed a lot of like my friendships um for that reason um because like I don't know how to be friends with people that are like I I see and hear that the people that you're talking to I see and hear that you're talking to people who are absolutely freaking the hell out because like we'll have struck for six weeks or so and they'll still be poor but like uh I don't know how to be friends after that I just wanted to touch a little bit more on the idea of uh feeding strikers and the the massive logistical uh boom that that was for a movement um there's anybody we call off hand how many weeks the strike went on oh oh we're say six you and we were also were um in order 12 or five for strike pay we needed to have uh uh 20 hours of striking the week so that boiled down to three shits um you could do them every you know you could you two in one day and one in another day but by and large uh at least most of the people on i pick it were there you know five days a week but let's just say you got three shits lunches we've already established that the UC San Diego campus is around 13 dollars a person right so that's $39 you're spending just on lunch not on gas which for me is it's quite expensive today live somewhat far from campus um so 39 i'm six is is $234 and when we struck for uh for for these these high wages you know that was worth it we put in our effort and I sweat but at the end of the day those of us in the arts and humanities and ASCs are seeing this year uh $200 base um for a month so just in our lunch that would have obviated the raises just that we got during the strike uh so I think you know that this shows really the necessity for a mutual aid in uh in workers movements like this because you know we we if nobody else is going to beat us we have to beat ourselves yeah i think that's really it's good to put numbers on it live x it's a serious expensive it's not getting any cheaper another way that I see this is it's not just for workers like the way that I see what dollar lunch club is doing by saying hey we will provide either free or very cheap a dollar you know uh for lunch on these days of the week basically every week whoever wants to come can come whoever wants to help can help go for it that to me is basically like a soup kitchen like it is a i the way that I see it is it's like a uh communist anarchist type project of making like i i'm not sure if i can say it's building power but i feel that it's not just building community but like allowing people to worry less about expenses which means that they can put their energy into a lot of other things like the way that i would want dollar lunch club to continue to evolve is that we would be able to offer lunch for you know people who can't afford the like $12 campus lunches every day of the week all week like imagining the difference of you know like okay there's 10 weeks in a quarter five days in a week so like 50 days that like you might be buying lunch at least half of those days the difference of one dollar lunch versus like $10 lunch is like hundreds of dollars right so to me if we can provide that you know as we grow in time to all five days of the week you know on several locations on campus and we provide that for a couple of hundred students or community members or what have you we will be making a material difference in these people's lives and we will be showing them a different way that like organizing or not even just organizing but like that accessibility to food can be organized if that makes sense but it doesn't you know like getting food doesn't have to be this like capitalist project of like i am ordering this sort of thing and i am getting this back it can be like the more along the terms of like what we're doing which is like we are seeing what food has been donated to the pantry that we work a lot with the basic needs hub the food pantry and so on to get a bunch of like donated produce out of which we make foods right so we're reducing food waste we're trying to you know contribute to like food justice making food as free as cheap as possible and allowing people to be like hey actually the cafeterias that you see on campus you getting lunch doesn't have to be this way it doesn't have to you know like you pay you know like two bucks for an apple or things like that and then another thing that occasionally we've been doing is also foraging so here in southern california there's a lot of edible non-native species such as like mustard curly dock wild radish things like that and so we can like forage those and even make food out of them along with food from the food pantry so i you know not that we're really doing this right now but my dream would be to really kind of revolutionize the way that food culture is in uc sc and show people like no it can be a food kitchen where you don't have to like expressly worry about where you're getting your your meal the next day you don't have to pay three dollars for a banana you don't have to do any of that you can have like a better future you can have like a better experience at the university or just like in life in general yeah yeah i think that's uh and that's really i know like i teach the community college sometimes so it's a little different from the uc but maybe not as different as people might imagine and and like one thing that i've noticed i get always have food in my office and i a lot of my students are in through precarity and have been for a while and like certainly around like the time of the fucking travel ban when when people's parents were stuck outside the country and they you know had to fend for themselves it's a way that like we can move from this moment of alienation which is like you know your interaction with pandar express uh wait you you you give money and you get a box of food you eat by yourself uh to like a moment of solidarity which is cool um yeah it's great you're foraging too um i wanted to a foraging episode one day so i have to have you back for for that i want to like finish up maybe by just talking about some logistical stuff um again anarchists have been feeding people communist or leftist or whatever like for a quite a long time right like i can some of my best food memories are like uh eating beans with with people you know like food not bomb things at the um i do a lot of work with refugees so like food not bomb things in 2018 with the migrant caravan or uh people making pancakes at the g8 protest in the early 2000s like some of my best memories not of just food but like of forming community around food so like when you're doing this stuff like is is there any someone wants to someone hears this they're like how yeah i want to do that on my campus at my workplace in my town whatever like logistically it sounds like you guys have a corner on the Instaport market but like aside from that like are you cooking vegan food so it's it's more accessible for more people you know what kind of stuff like that would you advise for people uh i can jump in on this yeah cooking cooking to scale is an entirely different use than cooking for yourself at home and um you've already identified these as people really legumes and grains spot in bulk um shouldn't come into surprise to anybody who's thought about it for a hot second that that when you buy in bulk it's far cheaper uh but uh it also comes with the downsides like when you're soaking beans you often you know have to soak those beans along time ahead of time um and what we have been doing which i think that my my comrades have touched on is is sourcing from a great variety of uh of low food banks and uh uh uh farms and uh donations both during the strike and afterwards one thing that i would say we struggled with in the initial phases of dollar lunch club when we were still actively striking was that you know the absolute best of goodwill in the world everybody wanted to donate food stuffs um and that meant that our meal planning was was significantly harder because you know we have half a can of tomato paste and we have 25 cans of pinto beans and you know 10 bulbs of fennel and uh three crackers like uh definitely we found that it was easier to solicit both uh cash financially you know setting up a uh uh what's what's it called a a benmo um and also you know for people who can't give money um we put them to work and and that was you know because people want to help and we felt kind of bad after a while turning people away or you know offering to go to the store and what at one point in the strike way i think we got like 25 pre-packaged Indian meals which we ended up giving out to people uh for lunch but as far as feeding people on site uh you know being very specific about what kinds of things you're looking for ahead of time meal planning in a well in advance uh with uh sort of basic framework of okay we got bean and we got a starch um why we have to throw ends of bean pot uh the last thing i'll say is as as Anna has rightly been champion for um the actual cooking devices uh are super important too um and that was one of that has perpetually been one of our biggest struggles because uh uh you know we don't have a call lender so we can't drain the beans and we have foreign supports but there are different sizes and the lids for two don't work with wear and tear uh stuff is is you know breaking right when you meet at the most so you know if you are getting money donations i think uh it's really important to budget for the pots and the pans and the can openers and these kinds of things that really make a difference in getting food pot and out on time and in large numbers yeah i think that's very good advice maria had something to add i have actually a lot of things to add logistics wise because in in our meetings we talk about some some some parts of this and so one of the big things that we talked about um over the strike but also after the strike when we were like hey let's let's continue this project is how much of our things should be like reusable versus like disposable right that was like a big topic of like well okay we're using disposable forks and we we don't like that environmentally because we're putting like a bunch of plastic into you know the trash right and we have to buy plastic each time but then like we don't know okay you know like should we should we buy like you know a bunch of metal spools but they're going to be a little bit more expensive than the disposable ones but you know maybe the cost will even out after a while and like that that kind of you know discussion has to be had about like everything so you know about like bowls about like the pans in which we cook in like mixing bowls like all kinds of things like that where we're thinking you know like based on the funds that we have based on our usage of some of these products is it worth it getting you know like reusable things which unfortunately we'll have to like clean afterwards so they add to the labor but thankfully they don't you know pollute the environment and the way that disposable things do um so for us because we do care a lot about lowering our usage of plastic we did pivot to using more reusable things so I think for a group that may be interested in you know like facilitating something like this in their workplace or in their university or something like that I think that is one important discussion that you want to have what is the time course that you see of this project continuing and is it worth it getting you know like reusable versus disposable tools for for the people that possibly you're going to feed another thing that is related to this is when you're first starting to cook really you're trying to borrow things from other people so a lot of the things that like during the strike we had just borrowed people's in stupats like people brought in their in-stupats they labeled them like oh this is you know Dana's in stupat and then we use those in-stupats after the strike we couldn't do that anymore but there were some people that were willing to be like hey I'm actually like moving out and I'll donate all these Tupperware to you and so we took the Tupperware and now we have like a little Tupperware program where if people don't forget to bring their Tupperware to put lunch in we just like label it you see a Z dollar lunch club you see a Z mutual aid and we just give away the Tupperware and oftentimes you know it's brought back to us that kind of thing and that again facilitates food usage so there's a lot of places where you can find things that you might need in in this kind of thing so can openers I have found a bunch of jars that people you know after they're moving away they leave for free around graduate housing so like there's a lot of things that you can get which you don't really require funds for there's also buying nothing groups on Facebook that I think are particularly effective for this so a lot of people that are just like oh yeah I'm like updating my kitchen I'm throwing away a bunch of these utensils that you can just get for free so that's been really helpful for us as well and I someone who does a lot of sourcing as well so we tend to shop from Goodwill and other thrift stores to make sure that you know are are buying and consumption of some of these tools is as ethical if you can call it that as possible and then a third thing that I would like to add for anyone who wants to you know start a project like this is I think you have to make it be fun for you the person that's cooking and cleaning and organizing apart from making it fun for everyone else who gets you know like free food cheap food tasty food right so something that I I really like about Dollar Lunch Club is that we've been really allowing our members to like run wild with the ideas that they have right so for example we I mean Anna and I have been talking about utilizing all the frozen bread that has been donated to us and making French toast vegan French toast out of that so we're really excited for doing something fun like that because usually in a lot of like soup kitchen places you you have foods that are like hey this is nutritious but you know like I don't want to eat beans all day and someone who like does like beans but not everyone else wants to just eat you know like mashed beans all day that kind of thing and so having a like a variety of things that we cook like we pretty much like cook all kinds of curries a lot of like rice dishes a lot of stews um pesto and spaghetti like pasta you know just like all very different kinds of meals that make it fun for the people who are arriving so like I mentioned pesto I made pesto a couple of times and like a lot of people are like oh pesto basil that's going to be great and that was with like the forage mustard that I was talking about before and like when you have that kind of variety and when you have like interesting fun foods when you can like make uh boba in like an insta pot or you can grab a toaster oven and make garlic bread which is things that we've done you make it a lot more fun for the people that are cooking as well and it just becomes like a community building thing not just for the people eating but for the people doing that labor so that's like that's what I would advise people like yes you are under very tight budgetary constraints we tried to like for some meals like because there's so much donations sometimes there's zero dollars sometimes we have to buy things and we try to have it be less than 20 dollars so we can like feed 30 to 40 people and you can like have that you know money that's donated for like one dollar um have that be for like next time that kind of thing uh did I yeah so like make it fun for yourself uh so you can like continue doing that work and you won't burn out in the way that you you might otherwise even as you were trying to budget yeah yeah I just wanted to say um like in terms of roles um so we always have like somebody who like knows how to like pull a recipe together more um we always have to have somebody who like does dish washing and like each of these roles can have like one or two or three people in it uh in it and then there's always like people who just like do the like labor of prep um and um like yeah that could be all the same person and or it can be multiple for each um and I want to say usually I am a person who either like like I show up to uh peel veggies that people tell me need to be peeled and I show up to wash dishes um because I'm not a person who is like I have trouble making decisions about food I do not want to be in charge of food stuff and that has been like okay and that has meant that like I do not have to like get nervous and worked up about like I don't know how to make decisions about food here I can just show up them peel carrots and it's like kind of helped me um like maybe get a little bit of a better feel for like cooking stuff um so that way when I am like just cooking for myself um I do just think of like okay if I was uh like uh if I was in you know like dollar lunch prep mode um I know I have rice and I know I have beans and so I'm set um and uh yeah um in a lot a lot of times uh just like taking away the like the dirty dish bin and sort of like leaving out maybe like a few washed bowls by the sink along with a sponge and a bit of soap people get the cue and they'll wash their own dishes um yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I think that's great actually having space for for different skillsets and different preferences within your organizing is always key okay guys and where can people find like if they want to I'd know ask you for bean recipes or follow along see pictures whatever it is like a dollar lunch club social media they can find or do you have individual ones you want to share uh so I think Alex can talk about the website oh I have a website yes I made us I made us a website um so we are most active on Instagram uh can can put our handle in the chat it is a dollar underscore lunch underscore club on Instagram um and yeah the website is dollar lunch club UCSD uh separated by dashes and then dot get hub.io because you can get free domain names if it's your get hub user name uh hot tip of the day okay um but uh yeah primarily on Instagram nice yeah it's great uh all right well thank you very much for your time guys I really appreciate it and uh yeah hope more people do the same because as you said I think this is really important wait for we'll guys thank you so much we really appreciate it 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 podcast from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeart radio app apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts you can find sources for it could happen here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources thanks for listening and now the best man uh I was gonna play in this speech out while I got my oil change but I went to take five and it was a lot faster than I thought so here he goes okay Tim you were my first friend Angela you were my first yeah I never thought the two of you would make it but I guess love really is blind and no no I mean in a good way I'd take five your oil changes faster than you think take five the stay in your car 10 minute oil change life insurance isn't just a plot point on true crime podcasts and the unfortunate event of a death wish box life insurance can be a backup plan to help protect your family go to wishbox.life to create a flexible term life insurance plan and get a quote in less than 10 minutes apply now and cancel at no cost within the first 30 days it's easy 100% online and plan start it just nine dollars a month get 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