Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted to let
Speaker 1: you know this is a compilation episode. So every episode
Speaker 1: of the week that just happened is here in one
Speaker 1: convenient and with somewhat less ads package for you to
Speaker 1: listen to in a long stretch if you want. If
Speaker 1: you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be nothing new here for you, but you
Speaker 1: can make your own decisions. What they sing my books,
Speaker 1: your grandmother, all of your grandmother's Wow Garrison, my grandmother's dad.
Speaker 1: So that they're still facebooking in the grave, I mean,
Speaker 1: thank god. No. I think my grandparents briefly got introduced
Speaker 1: to my Space before being too sick to use the
Speaker 1: internet anymore. They were on a o L for a
Speaker 1: while though. Oh that's that's quaint. Yeah, they were on
Speaker 1: a o L for a while. Um, you know it's uh,
Speaker 1: it's what I don't often say, Thank goodness for Louis
Speaker 1: body demanship. But at least it stopped them from from
Speaker 1: knowing the horrors that were to come in the digital age.
Speaker 1: They got they got right off the bus before things
Speaker 1: got terrible. Yeah, that is so friends, Romans, countrymen, how
Speaker 1: do you feel about meta, which is totally what we're
Speaker 1: all gonna be calling Facebook for now on for forever.
Speaker 1: My main thought, honestly is that like the word meta,
Speaker 1: the past like two years, the word meta has been ruined,
Speaker 1: both like pop culture thinking it's smart and then ship
Speaker 1: like this, now that a once useful concept has now
Speaker 1: been obliterated and we can't use it for anything anymore,
Speaker 1: you can't be meta. And and the fact that Facebook
Speaker 1: is attempting to use this as the name of their
Speaker 1: company shows that Mark Zuckerberg hasn't had a conversation on
Speaker 1: even footing in his entire adult life, Like everyone is
Speaker 1: trying to get someone out of him every time he
Speaker 1: talks to anybody, so nobody would say, like, you know, Mark,
Speaker 1: met is a terrible name for a company. But anyway,
Speaker 1: they did that, and they had a big event about
Speaker 1: two weeks ago where they got up and talked for
Speaker 1: an hour and twenty minutes about the future of the
Speaker 1: Internet and what Facebook's vision of the metaverse was going
Speaker 1: to be, all this all this very fun stuff. Okay,
Speaker 1: so here's the thing. It's a bad idea, and normally,
Speaker 1: like bad tech ideas are a dime a dozen, and
Speaker 1: we don't cover them on our show because this is
Speaker 1: a show. It could happen here about collapse, things falling apart,
Speaker 1: and the future and what's going to come next. But
Speaker 1: in this case, talking about meta is actually really worthwhile
Speaker 1: because meta is one example of how the people who
Speaker 1: are kind of in control, or at least in control
Speaker 1: of the significant amount of the world that we live in,
Speaker 1: particularly the digital spaces that we've all agreed to be
Speaker 1: locked into, see the future. I think the thing that
Speaker 1: like makes it clear why this is in our wheelhouse
Speaker 1: is an article from Wired by Matthew Galt, who's a
Speaker 1: buddy of mine. He's a great journalist. Um. And it's
Speaker 1: titled Billionaires c VR is a Way to Avoid Radical
Speaker 1: Social Change um. And that title does kind of get
Speaker 1: to the get to the nut of it. But the
Speaker 1: quotes in this thing are fucking wild. So before we
Speaker 1: get into Mark Zuckerberg and his vision of the future
Speaker 1: of the Internet and of humanity, UM, I want to
Speaker 1: read some quotes from John Carmack. Um. So, John Carmack
Speaker 1: is the guy. He made doom right, Like, you can't
Speaker 1: overstate the the impact John Carmack had on gaming, Like
Speaker 1: he invented the first, like first effectively the first popular
Speaker 1: first person shooter. He was the CTO of Oculus for
Speaker 1: a while. UM. And he's very familiar with like three
Speaker 1: D digital spaces, Yes, and he's he's very bullish on VR.
Speaker 1: UM and he gave a quote, well, not gave a code.
Speaker 1: He talked to Joe Rogan during an interview in and
Speaker 1: he said this. Some people read this the wrong way
Speaker 1: and react in correctly to it. The promise of VR
Speaker 1: is to make the world you wanted. It is not
Speaker 1: possible on earth to give everyone all that they would want.
Speaker 1: Not everyone can have Richard Branson's private island. People react
Speaker 1: negatively to any talk of economics, but it is resource allocation.
Speaker 1: You have to make decisions about where things go economically.
Speaker 1: You can deliver a lot more value to a lot
Speaker 1: of people in the digital in the virtual sense. UM.
Speaker 1: And that's one of those things that you can see
Speaker 1: how a guy like John Carmack, who was again a
Speaker 1: smart guy who's been ahead of the curve on a
Speaker 1: number of important things, could could convince himself this is true.
Speaker 1: This is absurd, And I think what we see in
Speaker 1: Facebook's video is going to make clear that it's absurd.
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that it's absurd is that UM,
Speaker 1: like everything else, the people who are building them metaverse
Speaker 1: have done, like what they've done to the Internet. The
Speaker 1: Internet before Facebook and and Twitter and these like these behemoths,
Speaker 1: UM used to be weird in decentralized and primarily not
Speaker 1: for profit. UM. There was there was a period of
Speaker 1: time in which like the idea that you would actually
Speaker 1: make money off the Internet, like really out of like
Speaker 1: content or whatever was just silly because it was this
Speaker 1: it was impossible to monetize. It was this weird, wild,
Speaker 1: like creative nonsense pile UM. And you can only kind
Speaker 1: of make money a around the edges of it, but
Speaker 1: the core of it was just just far too strange
Speaker 1: and uncontrollable UM, too wild and free. UM. And that's
Speaker 1: not the Internet anymore because of the people. Because in
Speaker 1: large part of the people who are trying to build
Speaker 1: these metaverses and the idea that they would allow poor
Speaker 1: people to have the same kind of resources as rich
Speaker 1: people in the metaverse there, they can't let that happen.
Speaker 1: They're not the kind of people who would let that happen.
Speaker 1: They're going to monetize every aspect of this thing. If
Speaker 1: it becomes real. We ever have like an all encompassing metaverse,
Speaker 1: every every moment of it and everything you do in it,
Speaker 1: everything you have in it is going to cost you money,
Speaker 1: probably with some kind of bullshit subscription plus adding on,
Speaker 1: you know, like randomized cashes and other like you know,
Speaker 1: lootbox type mechanics. Selling gambling the children is the business
Speaker 1: model of the future. By the future, I mean it's
Speaker 1: been happening. Yeah, it's the business model they want for now.
Speaker 1: I will state I think some sort of persistent virtual
Speaker 1: reality thing will probably happen in some way someday. I
Speaker 1: don't think any of these people. Part of why my
Speaker 1: thesis of this is none of these people are capable
Speaker 1: of making it. It's because they look at this the
Speaker 1: same way like shitty app developer, shitty like game developers
Speaker 1: for Facebook look at gaming, where it's like everything should
Speaker 1: cost money, you should be able to pay to win,
Speaker 1: and it's like, well, nobody likes that, like nobody nobody
Speaker 1: likes those games. Those are not the things that are successful.
Speaker 1: Like and it is one of the games that comes
Speaker 1: up a lot when people talk about the metaverse is
Speaker 1: Minecraft and what made Minecraft hugely successful and why you
Speaker 1: can kind of plausibly see like, oh, this has elements
Speaker 1: of a metaverse where you're everybody's building these gigantic, persistent
Speaker 1: things that you can interact with and that you can
Speaker 1: make these incredible and people mad like works of art.
Speaker 1: In Minecraft, they did it for free, and they did
Speaker 1: it because like nothing costs money really in Minecraft, if
Speaker 1: I'm not mistaken, like you can make anything with nothing
Speaker 1: just by the game, and then you have the game
Speaker 1: and you can build whatever you want. Your equity is effort, right,
Speaker 1: like yeah, yeah, And it's like you know, like what
Speaker 1: what are my friends like learned computer science? So he
Speaker 1: could like, okay, great circuits, right, he like he built
Speaker 1: a like functioning computer in this game, just like you can.
Speaker 1: You can like it's it's like it's pretty. It's pretty. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you're gonna tell me sometime in the future, virtual
Speaker 1: reality in the Internet is going to get like so
Speaker 1: good and so pervasive that eventually people will bootstrap together
Speaker 1: some kind of metaverse. Yeah, maybe like that that could
Speaker 1: happen if it comes from like a cyber like punk aspect,
Speaker 1: where like emphasis on the punk, then so I can
Speaker 1: see this being a thing. But the way tech companies
Speaker 1: are talking about this. That's not how people use the
Speaker 1: internet currently, specifically, like the mainstream people. There's no way, yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's there's a few more. Like one of the
Speaker 1: things that Matt brings up in this article is like
Speaker 1: VR is a way to avoid radical social change. UM
Speaker 1: is uh like kind of the one of the reasons
Speaker 1: why he's number one, and I think where we should
Speaker 1: all be kind of critical about how realistic it is
Speaker 1: is is kind of the present state of virtual reality,
Speaker 1: which is about one point seven percent of Steam users
Speaker 1: have a VR headset. Steam being kind of the largest
Speaker 1: app to try to monitor like how many people are
Speaker 1: using VR right, Like, it's kind of your best that's
Speaker 1: figuring out the big that's the biggest PC gaming UM headsets.
Speaker 1: Sales of VR headsets did go up about during the
Speaker 1: pandemic UM, but that was kind of alongside of surge
Speaker 1: in video game sales. VR headsets were already We're already boosting,
Speaker 1: and the pandemic definitely it empercies that because it's like, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm stuck at my house. What can I do? Well,
Speaker 1: I'll buy like a two oculus so I can, you know,
Speaker 1: walk around and fight Ninja's in my living room, and
Speaker 1: VR is like real, like VRS cool, like it's I
Speaker 1: have a VR headset for years. It can do. One
Speaker 1: of the things that um I talked talking about, like
Speaker 1: what it takes for technology, new technology to like go viral,
Speaker 1: to become like endemic. It has some of that, which
Speaker 1: is that as soon as you put one of these on,
Speaker 1: most people, unless you're one of the people that it
Speaker 1: makes sick. Most people, if you put them, put them
Speaker 1: on and you show them the right thing, they're like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is actually way cooler than I thought it was
Speaker 1: going to be. Yeah. UM, So that is like I'm
Speaker 1: not I'm not like has I'm not poo pooing the
Speaker 1: entire idea of VR. UM. And there's there's there's been
Speaker 1: some successes on like Half Life. Alex sold about two
Speaker 1: million copies, which is huge for VR, but like also
Speaker 1: nothing for a video game, Like that's like for a
Speaker 1: big for a fucking Half Life game. That ship, which
Speaker 1: just it just shows that it's still like fractional, which
Speaker 1: I don't think any of these people are kind of
Speaker 1: missing UM, but it is kind of point to again
Speaker 1: the degree to which this technology would have to leap
Speaker 1: up for anything like what Facebook where we're about to
Speaker 1: talk like it for that to actually be popular. There's
Speaker 1: a difference between developing VR gaming and developing this metaverse
Speaker 1: concept which goes way beyond VR gaming. Yeah yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but I so what I find what I find so
Speaker 1: like doomed about this isn't the technology, even though I
Speaker 1: think it's important to acknowledge, there's a long way to
Speaker 1: go just in terms of like how heavy it is,
Speaker 1: how much space you need, how not fully immersive it is.
Speaker 1: You know, it's trying to remove lighthouses making it more mobile. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a lot, there's a lot of stuff that control
Speaker 1: schemes are still kind of jank, like, yeah, there's a
Speaker 1: lot to be done, but all of that's I mean,
Speaker 1: think about the first iPhone, right, it was like a
Speaker 1: fucking brick compared to the ship today, all of that
Speaker 1: gets better, and all the first VR headset compared to
Speaker 1: the Oculus two, it's like a massive improvement and basically
Speaker 1: every way. I don't think when people criticize this stuff
Speaker 1: by pointing out like how primitive VR is today, I
Speaker 1: don't think that means anything. Um, it is like worth noting,
Speaker 1: you know, it's current level of adoption but it's not
Speaker 1: people compare this to like three D TVs and stuff.
Speaker 1: It's not that three D TVs were immediately obviously from
Speaker 1: the beginning, nothing but a but a grift um because
Speaker 1: there's nobody wanted what really wanted what three dtvs had.
Speaker 1: Like VR, people do want what VR does, and eventually
Speaker 1: the tech will get there. What's bullshit is the idea.
Speaker 1: And this is why I think this article by Galt
Speaker 1: is so good. The idea that VR is going to
Speaker 1: allow the poor and downtrodden of the world to have
Speaker 1: a slice of the good life. And this is something
Speaker 1: Karmak is particularly bullish about. Quote not everyone can have
Speaker 1: a mansion, Not everyone can have a home theater. These
Speaker 1: are things we can simulate to some degree in virtual reality.
Speaker 1: Now the simulation is not as good as the real thing.
Speaker 1: If you are rich and you have your own home,
Speaker 1: theater or mansion or in private island, good for you.
Speaker 1: You're probably not the people who are going to benefit
Speaker 1: the most. Most of the people in the world lived
Speaker 1: in cramped quarters that are not what they would choose
Speaker 1: if to be if they had unlimited resources. Incredibly deranged. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's out of its mind because that's not how VR
Speaker 1: works like I have, Like I can put on my
Speaker 1: headset and load up like a nice forest, and it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not the feeling of being in a fort like, No,
Speaker 1: that's not. That's not how our senses work. So until
Speaker 1: we can hack our own brains the feeling things we
Speaker 1: don't actually feel, then it's not a thing. And we're
Speaker 1: nowhere close to that level of technology, even just to
Speaker 1: the degree that he's talking about, Like yeah, you could
Speaker 1: you if you don't have a big home theater, you
Speaker 1: could just like put it on and have a huge TV.
Speaker 1: And which is a thing that VR can do now,
Speaker 1: like I've it's not it's not good. It's like Garrison,
Speaker 1: you come over to three times a week and we
Speaker 1: watch movies with all of our friends in my living room.
Speaker 1: Like the good thing about it, Like it's nice to
Speaker 1: have a large screen. I have a big TV, but
Speaker 1: like your friends, you're watching them react, like you're eating
Speaker 1: food together. You're doing all this stuff that will never
Speaker 1: really be possible in VR. I have a lot of
Speaker 1: respect for John Karmen. He made Doom right, Like that's
Speaker 1: a third of my childhood. Um, he's out of his
Speaker 1: mind now if he thinks that that's like what people want,
Speaker 1: what poor people want, Like you've been rich for too long, sir,
Speaker 1: you don't understand human beings. A particular type of escape,
Speaker 1: like using VR as that type of escapism is totally
Speaker 1: wrong because like VR can be escapism, but it's not
Speaker 1: going to trick you into thinking you're living in a mansion.
Speaker 1: That's not that's not how VR works because you're walking
Speaker 1: around a tiny room in your house and you can't
Speaker 1: feel anything. You can like walk through cupboards, which is
Speaker 1: a great way to play VR games is you can
Speaker 1: just like hack it by walking into stuff. And they're
Speaker 1: working on so the article notes that Elon Musk is
Speaker 1: working on a brain machine interface called new Link. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and who knows what I will say, that's a little
Speaker 1: bit like the how how realistic all of those dreams
Speaker 1: are um is questionable. That said, something like what they're
Speaker 1: claiming it is will eventually be figured out. I will,
Speaker 1: and it should it will probably probably should be destroyed.
Speaker 1: It probably should be destroyed. Not put the chip in
Speaker 1: your brain is really bullish on that technology. Gabe Newell
Speaker 1: is the guy we have half life for, like he
Speaker 1: and he and John Karnak if there's a mount rushmore
Speaker 1: of like gamer dudes, it's they make they make one
Speaker 1: of the what they make one of the better headsets. Yeah. Again,
Speaker 1: like we're about to talk about Mark Zuckerberg, who I
Speaker 1: do not think is a visionary. Both Karmak and Newell
Speaker 1: are visionaries. Doesn't mean they're right, because visionaries are wrong
Speaker 1: all of the fucking time. It's part of their job.
Speaker 1: But they're both really, really fucking bullish on this. Newell
Speaker 1: is a big believer in like the promise of kind
Speaker 1: of what the neural link the brain, inner face technology
Speaker 1: and vr uh. He told I g NY were way
Speaker 1: closer to the matrix than people realize, which I don't
Speaker 1: think is the case. Um. And Newell is the person
Speaker 1: who I've just talked about like how smart he is.
Speaker 1: He is even more out of his mind than John
Speaker 1: Karmack on this ship um. In an interview with New
Speaker 1: Zealand's One News Um, he talked about his vision of
Speaker 1: the near future, which is a world in which brains
Speaker 1: and computers interface, and computers can make changes to the
Speaker 1: human brain he called he called the human body a
Speaker 1: meat peripheral Jesus Christ. Okay, so this is lost his
Speaker 1: mind this is the this is the thing about like
Speaker 1: VR and like the metaverse in generals is over like
Speaker 1: emphasizing that we basically just live in the meat space,
Speaker 1: and the meat space exists just to make content for
Speaker 1: the online which is so and the online space is
Speaker 1: the actual real space and we just have to operate
Speaker 1: inside our meat space to make content for that. This
Speaker 1: is like the way technology has been progressing, the way
Speaker 1: tech companies want of things to go. And it's the
Speaker 1: most dystopian thing that's going to give so many people
Speaker 1: like disassociate of mental disorders because it's not horrible for
Speaker 1: I'm going to be super interested to see people of
Speaker 1: my generation, including myself, like how we developed mentally the
Speaker 1: next you know, twenty years, based on how kind of
Speaker 1: fake our lives have been because of how much we
Speaker 1: exist and socialized within this like false network. It's gonna
Speaker 1: be interesting to watch. I I used to be really
Speaker 1: optimistic about aspects of VR. I actually when I was
Speaker 1: in mosle I filmed not that like other people did
Speaker 1: this before I did, but I was kind of one
Speaker 1: of the early people filming like a a VR documentary
Speaker 1: of some combat of like the Battle of mosle Um.
Speaker 1: Aspects of which were aired as A three sixty and
Speaker 1: a bunch of different like TV networks UM, and I
Speaker 1: had this belief that, like, yeah, VR, because the visual
Speaker 1: aspect of VR is so good, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: even at that point Seen was already so good. I
Speaker 1: disbelieve it, like well if you could, because the first
Speaker 1: time I ever went into a war zone, it was
Speaker 1: such an affecting experience, and I thought like, oh my god,
Speaker 1: if you could somehow carve out this moment of experience
Speaker 1: and like transmitted to other people, maybe that would mean something.
Speaker 1: Maybe it would like have an impact on people. I
Speaker 1: do think that is possible in the long Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think maybe we'll like we'll see. The question is like,
Speaker 1: can you give a sh if if you feel like
Speaker 1: horror games, the level of like anxiety and some degrees
Speaker 1: trauma of playing like a really well made horror VR
Speaker 1: game is incredibly intense. UM, and that's something that be
Speaker 1: done very well. So I feel like that type of
Speaker 1: like surreal experience like a war zone could actually be
Speaker 1: carried over to some degree in VR to like change
Speaker 1: people's minds on like hey, maybe war is not good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's that's the dream I don't know how
Speaker 1: much I still believe that, but reading people like Gabe
Speaker 1: Newell and how they talk about this technology makes me
Speaker 1: lose some hope and you want to throw all the
Speaker 1: headsets in. Here's another thing, Game new Will said in
Speaker 1: that view Garrison, after calling the human body and beat peripheral.
Speaker 1: You're used to experiencing the world through eyes. But eyes
Speaker 1: were created by this low cost bidder that didn't care
Speaker 1: about failure rates in r m as, and if it
Speaker 1: got broken, there was no way to repair anything effectively,
Speaker 1: which totally makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, but it's
Speaker 1: not at all reflective of consumer preferences of the human eye.
Speaker 1: No like funck like like they There is some aspects
Speaker 1: of trans humanism that I like. I like change like
Speaker 1: body parts at will with like my mind. But this
Speaker 1: type of stuff you ac you want to throw all technology.
Speaker 1: I support the idea of Like it would be great
Speaker 1: if when people lose their eyes completely from like shrapnel
Speaker 1: or whatever, some sort of like degenerative disease, we just
Speaker 1: pop new eyes in there. Absolutely we start cloning eyes.
Speaker 1: I think that's a great thing. But eyes are amazing,
Speaker 1: Like the most the most impressive camera ever were. No,
Speaker 1: we're close to replicating the ability. It is not a
Speaker 1: low cost bitter. It is like they're imperfect, like everything
Speaker 1: that that is part of the human body. But like
Speaker 1: the break down said that he can't monetize it. The
Speaker 1: same day, that's problem he's also talking about, like, well
Speaker 1: they break down. It's like, motherfucker, if you used a computer,
Speaker 1: you're gave Newell. I've know you've used a computer, Like
Speaker 1: you want to talk about breaking every computer I've ever owned.
Speaker 1: I've used Steam before, Like, yeah, Steam, motherfucker. I'd like
Speaker 1: I would rather have my eyes and I'm wearing glasses
Speaker 1: right now. Go suck an egg and it goes on
Speaker 1: because he he can't stop ship talking like reality. He
Speaker 1: talks about like in the in the virtual world he
Speaker 1: wants to build, the real world will seem flat, colorless,
Speaker 1: blurry compared to the experiences you'll be able to create
Speaker 1: in people's brains. Um And I want you to keep
Speaker 1: that in mind, my, my, my dear friends and colleagues
Speaker 1: as we leap now into the Facebook live stream. First
Speaker 1: of all, I think would be worth like explaining to
Speaker 1: and we've we've danced around what the metaverse is, but
Speaker 1: for people who are totally unfamiliarly, do you think it
Speaker 1: would be worth giving a general explanation Will that be
Speaker 1: covered in the Facebook thing? That's kind of covered in
Speaker 1: the because because this is Facebook building it. But I
Speaker 1: think we should. You're probably right that we should give
Speaker 1: a little bit of context about like where they got
Speaker 1: this idea, because again, Mark Zuckerberg has never had an
Speaker 1: original thought. It's not um and and gave Newell and
Speaker 1: and um John Carmack have had original thoughts in their life,
Speaker 1: but this is not an original thought from any of them,
Speaker 1: all of them, everyone anywhere who talks about the metaverse
Speaker 1: um is whether or not they know it. A fan
Speaker 1: of Neil Stevenson who wrote who wrote a book called
Speaker 1: Snow Crash, where the point was that in the future,
Speaker 1: the world is a dystopian, corporatized nightmare. And because things are,
Speaker 1: in part because things are so bad and incredibly highly
Speaker 1: like advertised and monetized persistent internet called the metaverse that
Speaker 1: exists all around us and it's totally immersive has come
Speaker 1: to dominate everyday life. Um and it's a bad thing.
Speaker 1: Like snow Crash, He's a story of like, wouldn't this
Speaker 1: future be horrible. Yeah, it's not like, hey, this is
Speaker 1: a cool thing, but these tech guys read this and
Speaker 1: they're like, oh yeah, that seems like fun. But you
Speaker 1: could do that. Neil Stevenson, who was yet another person
Speaker 1: I respect, made one crucial flaw, which is he gave
Speaker 1: the hero in his book a katana. And because the
Speaker 1: hero in his book katana, everyone was like, wouldn't this
Speaker 1: be rad if this were the future, Let's make this
Speaker 1: be the entire future. It's a real trash. You need
Speaker 1: to abolish katanas, like, we would save so many lives. Honestly,
Speaker 1: you could probably make a strong case that the Katana
Speaker 1: has a huge chunk of the cultural weight that it
Speaker 1: has because if Neil Stevenson, um, he's a big part
Speaker 1: of that, right, you know, you've got a lot of
Speaker 1: movies and stuff too. But yeah, but like the Katanas,
Speaker 1: i mean punk kind of melding. Yeah, and it's it's
Speaker 1: a it's a it's a very I mean, it's it's
Speaker 1: a bit dated now, but it's still like a good
Speaker 1: book to read. Like there's a bunch of silly stuff
Speaker 1: like that. It's replicating a lot of others cyberpunk art,
Speaker 1: some better, some worse. Yes, some worse cough cough, Ready
Speaker 1: Player one. Yeah, and every like every not every cyberpunk sense,
Speaker 1: because there's people like Corey doctor Oh who do some
Speaker 1: really cool shit. Um, but most cyberpunk senses to some
Speaker 1: extent um borrowed from from Neil Stevenson's work, and Facebook's
Speaker 1: entire idea is based on this. And so the idea
Speaker 1: is that it is a persistent, fully immersive digital world
Speaker 1: that interacts with the real world. So you can be
Speaker 1: in VR hanging out with friends from around the world
Speaker 1: and like a fake living room and then like call
Speaker 1: someone and see like a video of them in the
Speaker 1: real world, is they're like walking to a concert or whatever,
Speaker 1: and like talk to them and like make plans. Like
Speaker 1: that's the idea, right. Um. So this video, this face,
Speaker 1: it opens with you know, you've got your your little
Speaker 1: introduction music and stuff, and then we see Mark Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: looking like a fucking gollum um. Yeah. And and the
Speaker 1: first thing that I really noticed about this is that
Speaker 1: he talks about how we're all going to do this together,
Speaker 1: meaning invent the technologies and use cases that are going
Speaker 1: to make the metaverse worthwhile. Um. And when he says
Speaker 1: all of us. This is not an internal Facebook video.
Speaker 1: This is a video. The meta video is heavily angled
Speaker 1: towards developers UM and investors UM and it's been viewed
Speaker 1: by a lot of people, like twelve million to date.
Speaker 1: But he's talking about like a big part of what
Speaker 1: he's saying is that like the technology for all of
Speaker 1: the stuff that we've rendered, because most of what's rendered
Speaker 1: in this isn't game footage so to speak, like it's
Speaker 1: not a game or whatever. It's here's how it might
Speaker 1: look if the technology has ever invented. Like nothing, nothing
Speaker 1: is like in engine or anything close to it. It's
Speaker 1: a it's all speculative. What's interesting about this to me
Speaker 1: is that he's he is saying we're going to build
Speaker 1: this together and and sort of acknowledging that like Facebook
Speaker 1: does not have the capacity to make this thing they've
Speaker 1: dreamed about, but Facebook is going to own it. So
Speaker 1: he's a lot of like this is him tacitly admitting
Speaker 1: I want to take your surplus value to make a
Speaker 1: metaverse that I then control and monetize entirely at my
Speaker 1: own discretion, which is cool, it's great, and it's also
Speaker 1: like I think, you know, I think if if, if
Speaker 1: you want a sign of where this is actually going
Speaker 1: and like the real creativity behind this, Like okay, again,
Speaker 1: everything in that video is a mock up, right. It
Speaker 1: looks like dogshit. It's so ugly, it's hideous. It looks
Speaker 1: like a fucking Connect game or like a fucking we game,
Speaker 1: which is fine. I don't want to live there, like
Speaker 1: it's always weird in cartoony. Um. Yeah, So he talks
Speaker 1: about and kind of laying out why he thinks this
Speaker 1: is the future. Zuckerberry talks about how text used to
Speaker 1: be the basis of everything online, but now like photos
Speaker 1: and videos dominate and that's yeah, as that change happened
Speaker 1: from like text to video to photos to videos. The
Speaker 1: next change, he kind of frames it like the the
Speaker 1: the the obvious next evolution is to what he calls
Speaker 1: an embodied Internet where you're part of the experience, and
Speaker 1: that's the metaverse, which again that if you don't I
Speaker 1: think that part has some true I agree. I don't
Speaker 1: think he's entirely wrong there. Obviously that's not his idea.
Speaker 1: Um oh, running out of time, Okay, thank you for
Speaker 1: telling about the host and now because it's unlimited minutes. Great,
Speaker 1: Thanks zoom um speaking of meta verses. Um like, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna I'm gonna flop onto a share screen and
Speaker 1: I'm gonna show you guys a section from this from
Speaker 1: this video, think about computers or phones today. Now, since
Speaker 1: we're doing this remotely today, I figured let's make this special.
Speaker 1: So we've put together something that I think is really
Speaker 1: going to give you a feeling for what this future
Speaker 1: could be like. We believe the metaverse will be the
Speaker 1: successor to the mobile Internet. We'll be able to feel present,
Speaker 1: like we're right there with people, no matter how far
Speaker 1: apart we actually are. Okay, so I'm pausing it here
Speaker 1: because I want you to watch this. The room that
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberge is in, he's not in the metaverse yet,
Speaker 1: he's in like a house. I think it's supposed to
Speaker 1: be his house. It is clearly not a place human beings.
Speaker 1: It has been set dressed. Um. One of the ways
Speaker 1: you can tell is that all of the books and
Speaker 1: picture frames on the bookcase are like the same flat tones,
Speaker 1: because they're not meant to stand out there, meant to
Speaker 1: blend in and very telling Lee this is what's interesting
Speaker 1: to me. As soon as he steps into the frame
Speaker 1: where he's going to announce this. The thing that is
Speaker 1: directly next to his head is the only thing that's
Speaker 1: not like the same kind of baige as everything. It's
Speaker 1: a bottle of barbecue sauce that's being used as the
Speaker 1: book ind to a bunch of books now Meta. Immediately
Speaker 1: after this, like people joked about it online and Meta
Speaker 1: started tweeting about it and like trying to make like
Speaker 1: jokes about oh, Mark just loves his you know, his
Speaker 1: his barbecue so much. Like they tried to turn it
Speaker 1: into a meme because they think it's humanizing and and
Speaker 1: and kind of one aspect of the meme they were
Speaker 1: putting together is that like, oh, he just forgot to
Speaker 1: you know, he just he's he's so into barbecue that
Speaker 1: he leaves his saucer that was put there on someone's orders,
Speaker 1: Like that was it was to create me. We're seeing
Speaker 1: we're seeing marvels as well. They're releasing promotional images specifically
Speaker 1: designed to be turned into memes, and it doesn't work
Speaker 1: because it's so obvious, like because we'd be like, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: we're not going to use this because it's it's a
Speaker 1: it's a dogshit horrible, it's like horrible cinematography, bad colors,
Speaker 1: and it's not a fun meme. But people did follow
Speaker 1: for the Mark Zuckerberg thing. Uh like, oh look at
Speaker 1: the barbecue thoughts. But yeah, that was intentional to create
Speaker 1: like a viral thing to trip. Yeah, anyway, I'm gonna
Speaker 1: let Mark continue here after I made my little point.
Speaker 1: When I send my parents a video of my kids,
Speaker 1: they're gonna feel like they're right in the moment with us,
Speaker 1: not peering through a little window. When you play a
Speaker 1: game with your friends, you'll feel like you're right there
Speaker 1: together in a different worlds, not just on your computer
Speaker 1: by yourself. And when you're in a meeting in the metaverse,
Speaker 1: it'll feel like you're right in the room together, making
Speaker 1: eye contact, having a shared sense of space, and not
Speaker 1: just looking at a grid of faces. So that's important
Speaker 1: because a big aspect of what he's trying to sell here,
Speaker 1: why he's he's trying to convince people that this is
Speaker 1: a real thing, is that it's a bomb for loneliness. Right. Um,
Speaker 1: he is, he is, and he's one of people who's
Speaker 1: responsible for pushing our society to such an atomized and
Speaker 1: isolated direction. Facebook propaganda has isolated huge numbers of people
Speaker 1: from their families. It's um. And of course then there's
Speaker 1: just the aspect of it that is the lockdown, which
Speaker 1: has isolated people a number of a lot of which
Speaker 1: ties back to disinformation spread on Facebook. But like, um,
Speaker 1: he's he's, he's selling this, you know, as a this
Speaker 1: will make you less lonely, will make you feel like
Speaker 1: you're all together. Um, and it's it's He's specifically says
Speaker 1: at one point, this isn't about spending more time on screens.
Speaker 1: It's about making the time we spend on screens already better. Um,
Speaker 1: which is horseshit because, as the Facebook papers make clear,
Speaker 1: Facebook has repeatedly refused to do things that would have
Speaker 1: reduced the harm of their platform because it would have
Speaker 1: reduced the traffic that they've got. And I think those
Speaker 1: are the kind of decisions you can Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: and still like technologically we're still not there, Like when
Speaker 1: when when you're in VR you even if you're interacting
Speaker 1: with other like three D like personas of people specifically,
Speaker 1: like vr chat was very popular among like furries, and
Speaker 1: I think they are Honestly the best example of what
Speaker 1: the metaverse could actually be is how furries use vr
Speaker 1: chat um. But even still that is very different um
Speaker 1: than standing in a room with someone in a first suit, right, Like,
Speaker 1: it's it's totally it's it's totally different. And metaverses and
Speaker 1: this type of thing. I don't think we'll actually solve alienation.
Speaker 1: I don't think it's because you're not actually touching anyone,
Speaker 1: Like it's it's not if you're not. There's still that
Speaker 1: that that digital fog between you and everything else. Do
Speaker 1: I think there's some elements of it that could be developed,
Speaker 1: specifically using a R that would make things a little
Speaker 1: bit cool. Yeah, uh, but it's not going to solve
Speaker 1: alienation as a concept. In fact, it could actually make
Speaker 1: it worse. It could make it worse. Like again, there's
Speaker 1: some use cases for I don't know, people who have
Speaker 1: like a l S. Maybe you could develop some sort
Speaker 1: of rig that would allow them to interact like more
Speaker 1: with with people around them and like that could be
Speaker 1: useful for those people. But like, it is not a
Speaker 1: societal answer to loneliness. And I think one thing that
Speaker 1: makes that clear is you look at their vision of
Speaker 1: home spaces. So this is kind of the center of
Speaker 1: the of the metaverse. They want to build is everybody
Speaker 1: has their little digital home um that you can set
Speaker 1: up and you can design to your liking, and you
Speaker 1: can buy things like n f T s to decorate it.
Speaker 1: This becomes a big part of the pitch that like
Speaker 1: n f T s are going to be in it
Speaker 1: and like that way you know that they have at
Speaker 1: one point, like somebody buys like an autographed poster for
Speaker 1: a Metaverse concert that's an n f T and they
Speaker 1: get to put it in their room and know that
Speaker 1: it's the only one of those posters or something, which
Speaker 1: is the dumbest thing I can imagine. Um, maybe it'll work.
Speaker 1: I don't know. I I don't really see how that's
Speaker 1: any different from an n f T being revolutionary case
Speaker 1: than like, you know, being able to buy something in
Speaker 1: a fucking video game. No, it's it's just the way
Speaker 1: people already hate to do. Yeah, it's it's just skins
Speaker 1: or whatever bullshit cosmetic stuff I want. Number One of
Speaker 1: the things that's in entertaining about this is how bad
Speaker 1: a lot of the acting is for all of the
Speaker 1: money and time they have. Like Mark Zuckerberg is a
Speaker 1: ship presenter and and this bit where he tries to
Speaker 1: explain why the home space is so cool? Um and
Speaker 1: it shows you like their home space. It starts about
Speaker 1: four thirty on the video of people at home when
Speaker 1: a watch is just a perfect, perfect encapsulation of like
Speaker 1: how inhuman this this world they want to build really
Speaker 1: feels what even when they try to present it in
Speaker 1: its best face? Okay, Mark, Hey, what's going on? We're
Speaker 1: floating in space this place that's awesome, right, it's from
Speaker 1: the creator I met in l Ah. This place is
Speaker 1: amazing that you of course it's me. You know, I
Speaker 1: had to do the robot man. I thought I was
Speaker 1: supposed to be the robot. WHOA. I knew you were bluffing.
Speaker 1: Where is Nai? Let's call her Naomi? Hey? Should we
Speaker 1: deal you in? Sorry I'm running late, but you've got
Speaker 1: to see what we're checking out. There's an artist going
Speaker 1: around Soho hiding a r pieces for people to find.
Speaker 1: Really street art, that's cool. So I wanted to stop
Speaker 1: here because this is also part of like what's it's
Speaker 1: this perfect? It's like n f T culture and all
Speaker 1: this ship like the street art they show, this is
Speaker 1: clearly them trying to be like, here's one of these
Speaker 1: cool use cases for how the metaverse is going to
Speaker 1: interact with and influence the real world. Like this artist
Speaker 1: pastes this art on a wall that when you look
Speaker 1: at it in the metaverse or when you you film
Speaker 1: it and you send a video to people in the metaverse,
Speaker 1: it becomes this big three D thing and it it
Speaker 1: just looks like ship. It's just a bunch of like
Speaker 1: squiggly lines and stuff. Like. It's not like there's good graffiti,
Speaker 1: especially in San Francisco, there's incredible fucking graffiti. Um, this
Speaker 1: is just like nonsense. It looks like it looks like
Speaker 1: a fucking n f T. Like it's just this this
Speaker 1: kind of shitty. It was obviously designed by a computer,
Speaker 1: not an actual person. Yeah, and there's nothing like it
Speaker 1: doesn't say anything. There's nothing cool about it. Um and
Speaker 1: they haven't again because Mark Zuckerberg can't conceive of art.
Speaker 1: There's nothing about this that like makes me think, oh
Speaker 1: what a need futuristic thing. It was like, oh cool,
Speaker 1: I can see squiggly lines in person and on my phone.
Speaker 1: I mean, the big metaverse and like a R and
Speaker 1: VR is like you know, making depth within actually making
Speaker 1: two D space appear to be three D space. This
Speaker 1: still looks too D like it doesn't. It's not. It's
Speaker 1: not tricking my brain in any way whatsoever. Especially with
Speaker 1: the concept of like filming it on your phone. We
Speaker 1: have the technology now like that's not that's not the metaverse.
Speaker 1: That's just filming it already on your little box, as said,
Speaker 1: and we have the technology to do like that. A
Speaker 1: r thing with fucking um with your Pokemon Go did
Speaker 1: that like five years ago, and it's not what people want.
Speaker 1: Um well, Pokemon long time, but we ever got to
Speaker 1: world peace and it was a CIA. Pokemon Go is
Speaker 1: the closest we ever got to like the metaverse, like realistically,
Speaker 1: but people don't want People don't want to like take
Speaker 1: photos of crappy street art that then becomes three D
Speaker 1: but still isn't like it is. It is incredibly grim
Speaker 1: that most of like the case uses for metaverse stuff.
Speaker 1: The only thing they can imagine it being is like
Speaker 1: fucking met This is like the biggest thing that they show.
Speaker 1: He's like, oh, we can make virtual meetings. They've tried that.
Speaker 1: The video that we just played. They're all in like
Speaker 1: this spaceship and everybody's three D like one person. It
Speaker 1: looks like kind of a hologram of their real bodies.
Speaker 1: Some people are just like three D rendered cartoons of themselves.
Speaker 1: One person is a big robot, and they're all like
Speaker 1: floating in zero G and playing card sitting at a
Speaker 1: table and playing virtual cards, and there's like a bed
Speaker 1: in the background. But like, you can't go in the
Speaker 1: bed because it's not a fake. It's a fake and
Speaker 1: you're not floating in zero G because will never be
Speaker 1: able to trick you into thinking you're sitting in a
Speaker 1: in a in your chair in a room with some
Speaker 1: ship on your face. You're you're fucking Carl Havoc and
Speaker 1: trying to pretend that you're like having a good time
Speaker 1: playing cards with your friends. It's like, yeah, if I
Speaker 1: could have a space station house where my friends and
Speaker 1: I could float around and play cards, that would be sick.
Speaker 1: But you're not promising that. Are you doing that? Um?
Speaker 1: Like there is there is games that simulate zero G.
Speaker 1: They don't trick you. They make you nauseous. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: can be fun, but like it's I'm not going to
Speaker 1: be in the same way that eating Hawaiian baby woodrow
Speaker 1: seeds can be fun. Um. Yeah, So he goes on
Speaker 1: to talk about the avatars that you'll have, which are
Speaker 1: basically he describes them as pro profile pictures, but much
Speaker 1: richer because they're live, which I find unsettling and part
Speaker 1: by thinking about what will happen when people die to
Speaker 1: their digital avatars. But whatever. Um. At this point he
Speaker 1: goes on to talking about how people he thinks people
Speaker 1: are going to actually use these avatars, and it's, um,
Speaker 1: it's very unhinged one for hanging out and maybe the
Speaker 1: fantasy one for gaming. You're gonna have a wardrobe of
Speaker 1: virtual clothes for different occasions, designed by different creators and
Speaker 1: from different apps and experiences. So one of the things
Speaker 1: he's talking about that is exciting is that like you'll
Speaker 1: be able to have a different avatar for uh, like work,
Speaker 1: if you're in a work meeting, or like hanging out
Speaker 1: with your friends. Um. And to me, that says, like, oh,
Speaker 1: so now I'm gonna be expected to like maintain and
Speaker 1: keep up an avatar for like my job and like
Speaker 1: dress that fucking thing, and then I'll have to like
Speaker 1: switch to hang out with people, And like why why
Speaker 1: does that? What does that provide me? Being able to
Speaker 1: like sit in a room as an avatar that I
Speaker 1: don't currently have like through zoom, Like why why is
Speaker 1: in what world? Is that something people want? The only
Speaker 1: only good use case for this is Furries. This is
Speaker 1: the only way it worked because they that has almost
Speaker 1: like a true representation of their own body. What what's
Speaker 1: this is gonna do for regularly for like people who
Speaker 1: are not Furries is it'll probade people a lot of
Speaker 1: weird like dysmorphia. Yeah, or if you're or if your
Speaker 1: trends and you make a female avatar, assuming like you know,
Speaker 1: for me, if I was to make like an avatar
Speaker 1: that's more feminine, that can be fun for me. Um,
Speaker 1: But for a lot of people, these weird like digital
Speaker 1: versions of themselves will probably they're just like Uncanny Valley
Speaker 1: and it will probably make you feel weird. Yeah. Um.
Speaker 1: And he's he's so focused on like this as a
Speaker 1: way for people to work together while being remote, which
Speaker 1: says a lot like It's seventh, like like about a
Speaker 1: half minute after this point or a minute or so
Speaker 1: after this point, he brags that your home space can
Speaker 1: even have your own personal office where you work, which
Speaker 1: is within the metaverse, within the metaverse, which is really
Speaker 1: bleak to me, just like digitally ruin your eyes. You
Speaker 1: can goggles that long, your eyes get rude because it's
Speaker 1: blasting light into your re and it's it's also just
Speaker 1: like I like sitting with a laptop, and I have
Speaker 1: a laptop, and I have a second screen for my laptop,
Speaker 1: and I sit at my comfortable living room table and
Speaker 1: I write and browse the Internet and research and stuff.
Speaker 1: And yeah, every now and then, like I hunch over
Speaker 1: too much in my back gets a little bit sore,
Speaker 1: but like it's not. It's it's pretty comfortable, and I
Speaker 1: can get up and move and do stuff in the house.
Speaker 1: Putting a bunch of ship on me and sitting still
Speaker 1: and like being unable to perceive the world around me
Speaker 1: and locked into this uncomfortable digital desk because it's later
Speaker 1: on whenever they do there's this mix of you can
Speaker 1: see the videos of the technology as it actually exists,
Speaker 1: and they're aspirational and the aspirational version. It's like you're
Speaker 1: in this gorgeous three dimensional office that looks so you're
Speaker 1: playing basketball, both in real life and in the hologram,
Speaker 1: which it first of all just impossible, like you're never
Speaker 1: going to do, never ever going to happen, just physically impossible.
Speaker 1: But when you see the clips of like what because
Speaker 1: they do have aspects of this built. When you see
Speaker 1: the clips of like the workspaces they have built, it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: of my screen is the Microsoft word app or excel
Speaker 1: um as it or or Outlook as it currently exists,
Speaker 1: and it is like the edges of this little VR office.
Speaker 1: So all I'm looking at is I'm seeing a full
Speaker 1: eye version of like whatever apps I'm used. You can, yeah,
Speaker 1: you can. You can get a air headset, you can
Speaker 1: download virtual desktop, you can bring your desktop into your
Speaker 1: v into a VR space. It's not useful, like it's
Speaker 1: like it's it's it's novel for the first twenty minutes,
Speaker 1: and then you get bored of it because you realized
Speaker 1: that you can actually see your keyboard so you can't
Speaker 1: type fast. There's a great joke about this in the
Speaker 1: last season the Community, the best example of the metaverse,
Speaker 1: where he's like because like the big part of like
Speaker 1: Epic Games version of the metaverse is like interacting with
Speaker 1: like brands and all your apps within a three three
Speaker 1: D digital space, which is what the Dean does in Community. Yes,
Speaker 1: like run to his email, which yeah, like this is
Speaker 1: a great example of why this technology is never going
Speaker 1: to actually catch on for regular people because that's not
Speaker 1: how they use the Internet. That you don't want to
Speaker 1: traverse a three D digital space to get to your email.
Speaker 1: That's that's asinine. Yeah, and it's there's aspects of it
Speaker 1: that are asinine, and there's aspects of that just thus
Speaker 1: just impossible. So, like a big thing that he's hitting
Speaker 1: on with this is interoperability, which is like you want
Speaker 1: to be able to trans travel between different apps, between
Speaker 1: different programs that different people have made, and you want
Speaker 1: to be able to take like whatever items you buy,
Speaker 1: whatever n f t s you have with you. Um,
Speaker 1: And he's talking about like this will work in games.
Speaker 1: This is a thing that like you've seen people talk
Speaker 1: about with like the promise of n f t s
Speaker 1: for gaming, like you could get an item that like
Speaker 1: is yours so they can't nerve it or or whatever,
Speaker 1: and like it will travel for you from game to game.
Speaker 1: There's a developer I follow on on Twitter. He made
Speaker 1: the game Audios, which is about like a guy who
Speaker 1: disposes of bodies for the mob and tries to quit.
Speaker 1: It's a it's a cool games. He's a good developer.
Speaker 1: Doc something or other. He wrote a huge article about
Speaker 1: like why none of this n f t's can't work
Speaker 1: for gaming? Um that also hits on like why what
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg saying is impossible? Which is that Like, so you're
Speaker 1: saying that everyone who makes a game has to has
Speaker 1: to build in like a way to handle every single
Speaker 1: item that you could possibly get in the metaverse and
Speaker 1: everything that you're having, Like it's it's an unthinkable challenge.
Speaker 1: Um it's and and like why and what if a
Speaker 1: game shuts down? Right, Like are you saying they have
Speaker 1: to continue operating the game forever and updating it forever,
Speaker 1: even once it's no longer profitable so that you can
Speaker 1: keep using your eye Like no, it's just it's it's
Speaker 1: functionally impossible. Um, but it's It's what's interesting to me
Speaker 1: is he's talking about all this. He has to know
Speaker 1: this is impossible when he does. There's all these scenes,
Speaker 1: like you said, where people like playing basketball, and like
Speaker 1: one of them is in the real world and one
Speaker 1: of them is in VR, but they're both playing in
Speaker 1: a real world. And so the person with a with
Speaker 1: a virtual ball, and it's like number one, how is
Speaker 1: the person the real world? How do they feel that ball?
Speaker 1: He assistant vague shit about like haptic feedback, which doesn't
Speaker 1: work that way. Um, maybe there's a way if you're
Speaker 1: wearing like a glove that it could trick you into
Speaker 1: believing you were hitting a ball or something, um like
Speaker 1: like and not everyone's wearing headsets like we're just we'll
Speaker 1: get to that in part two, the headset question. Um,
Speaker 1: but what what what's interesting is that like a huge
Speaker 1: amount of the coolest stuff, the stuff that you can
Speaker 1: be like, well, that would be neat. Yeah, if I
Speaker 1: could fucking if I could fucking play pool with my
Speaker 1: friend in Germany and it would feel like we were
Speaker 1: both in the same room, um, even though only one
Speaker 1: of us is standing around a real pool table. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that would be an amazing feat of technology. It's never
Speaker 1: gonna happen. Um, certainly not in any kind of reasonable
Speaker 1: time for him. Mark knows that all that is going
Speaker 1: to happen. It most is like a digital prince sweet
Speaker 1: that like is damages people's eyes and brains. Um. And
Speaker 1: he knows that, but he's angry that Zoom beat him
Speaker 1: to the to the punch when the pandemic hit. Um.
Speaker 1: And this is his like that's kind of one of
Speaker 1: the sinister things about it. Um, there's other sinister ship,
Speaker 1: which we'll talk about in part two. But you know what, guys,
Speaker 1: it's time to end to part one. This is enough
Speaker 1: for part one. Well, we'll talk more about we'll talk
Speaker 1: about what's really frightening about a lot of what Mark's
Speaker 1: trying to build in part two, But for right now,
Speaker 1: I want to talk about ending the episode which I
Speaker 1: guess I just did Goodbye, Welcome Back. It could happen
Speaker 1: here the show where we're talking right now about the
Speaker 1: metaverse that a bunch of rich people think that you're
Speaker 1: going to want to live in once ruin the regular world.
Speaker 1: Um uh. And why it's dogshit and it is dogshit,
Speaker 1: so it's just it's just it's just total dogshit. Um.
Speaker 1: Everything about this, I don't know. It seems like a
Speaker 1: waking nightmare to be to me so far if we're
Speaker 1: actually talking about like what they are, what they are
Speaker 1: immediately trying to because a bunch of this is aspirational
Speaker 1: nonsense that as we've stayed at is like you are
Speaker 1: never going to play a perfect game of basketball in
Speaker 1: a mix of real and a R courts with your
Speaker 1: friend in Hong Kong. Like that's never going to happen. Never,
Speaker 1: That's not how physics works, that's not how electronics works.
Speaker 1: Maybe when we find out how to literally hack the
Speaker 1: human brain, we can like put you into a quasi
Speaker 1: seizure state that that that that mimics that. But like
Speaker 1: the closest, the closest thing we have to this right
Speaker 1: now is actually uh VR board games is the best
Speaker 1: is the best example of this. Or you can play
Speaker 1: with you can play Settlers of Catan with your friend,
Speaker 1: a classic across the Yeah, and there's some cool ship
Speaker 1: you can do with haptics and haptic feedback is like
Speaker 1: the base example of it is when you like touch
Speaker 1: your phone and your phone like vibrates under your hand
Speaker 1: to like let you know that you've you've touched like
Speaker 1: a command. And there's there's people who think like at
Speaker 1: some point we would be we may be able to
Speaker 1: make using haptic feedback, like a virtual keyboard that feels
Speaker 1: like a real keyboard. That might be possible. That's still
Speaker 1: that's still like kind of like the idea of a
Speaker 1: keyboard that isn't there but feels like a real keyboard
Speaker 1: might be that that's still on the fringes of possibility
Speaker 1: like this, The fucking ship they're showing in this video
Speaker 1: is like nonsense. We will have laser cannons before we
Speaker 1: have any of this bullshit, like we will be shooting
Speaker 1: each other in space before we have this nonsense. Um,
Speaker 1: And thank god for that because at least that sounds fun.
Speaker 1: So the actual center of what they've built in terms
Speaker 1: of the products that that Facebook is launching now for
Speaker 1: the metaverse, UM, the core of it is Horizon Home
Speaker 1: and Horizon World. And I think Horizon is kind of
Speaker 1: the brand they're going with for all of their different
Speaker 1: like meta programs. UM. Horizon Home is the home spaces
Speaker 1: thing that they discussed earlier, where people can like make
Speaker 1: their own like houses. And one of the things they
Speaker 1: don't talk about in this they keep saying like you
Speaker 1: can build whatever you want, you can make it look
Speaker 1: like anything. They don't say a word about how like
Speaker 1: decorating your digital home is going to be monetized versus
Speaker 1: how much of it will be sweat equity. And again,
Speaker 1: like the smart thing would be make it all sweat equity,
Speaker 1: make it like minecraft, make be able to build anything
Speaker 1: they can conceive of. If they're actually creative enough and
Speaker 1: spend the time. They won't do that, um as they
Speaker 1: talk about in that like in the video they played
Speaker 1: like we're like, oh, this is a cool world. It
Speaker 1: was made by a developer. Like yeah, you're gonna buy
Speaker 1: the cool ship. Um I don't. I don't know what
Speaker 1: you're gonna buy it. And it's gonna suck because all
Speaker 1: you can do is sit at a table. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: because like you can't go into bed, like you can't,
Speaker 1: Like all of this stuff is just cosmetic, like it's
Speaker 1: you're not gonna be tricked into thinking it's real. I've
Speaker 1: I've been in cool VR like three D rooms and
Speaker 1: like they're cool to look at for like ten minutes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: any boring Yeah, like it's easy, like oh yeah, it's
Speaker 1: like the real world, but I can't touch anything. And
Speaker 1: when they show you the stuff that's closer to real,
Speaker 1: like the different like people chatting in the metaverse and whatever,
Speaker 1: it doesn't look fun. There's a there's a scene where
Speaker 1: they like show people like watching a YouTube video together
Speaker 1: in the metaverse and they're all like these disembodied upper
Speaker 1: torsos because of course VR sets can't can't read your legs,
Speaker 1: so it's like a bunch of torsos floating around a
Speaker 1: maximized YouTube video window. And it's like I would rather
Speaker 1: just show a friend my phone. I would even rather
Speaker 1: text them a video and being in person with somebody
Speaker 1: watching on a on a phone or even but even
Speaker 1: even if without Like it's the kind I think that
Speaker 1: they're expecting that, Like everyone's kind of bummed when they
Speaker 1: send a friend video over signal or text and like
Speaker 1: wait for them. No, I would rather do that than
Speaker 1: this ship. I don't want to hang out as a
Speaker 1: bunch of torsos around a YouTube. We don't want have
Speaker 1: to schedule of VR session every time I want to
Speaker 1: share of YouTube video. No, that sounds horrible, and it
Speaker 1: sounds like I would constantly have to be in VR.
Speaker 1: Like you talk about how we're not trying to expand
Speaker 1: screen time, but like, am I just waiting around in
Speaker 1: VR to like show friends YouTube? They are really unclear
Speaker 1: about how often you need to be in a headset,
Speaker 1: and it's it's kind of suspicious. It's almost like they
Speaker 1: don't actually plan on doing anything. I want to play
Speaker 1: another video that they claim to be a use case.
Speaker 1: And the way this video starts is like this actual
Speaker 1: person is in an actual real world concert for some
Speaker 1: guy I've never heard of that Facebook. I think he's
Speaker 1: he's some clearly some sort of musician with a following
Speaker 1: the Facebook hired to do a concert for this video,
Speaker 1: and she like calls her friend on the metaverse, and
Speaker 1: her friend digitally hops into the concert and they're like,
Speaker 1: the digital girl and the real girl are like dancing
Speaker 1: together at the show, which I don't know whatever, Like
Speaker 1: that is more possible than the basketball shit. Um, I
Speaker 1: mean yeah, watching having a like a VR version of
Speaker 1: standing in a room where musician plays. Sure, I mean
Speaker 1: it's not. Yeah, yeah, I would debate like whether or
Speaker 1: not it's doable. But then after that they see, like
Speaker 1: during the concert, this like digital thing pops up. That's like,
Speaker 1: do you want to go to a free after party? Um?
Speaker 1: And first off, all of these after parties will cost
Speaker 1: money and they'll all be dogshit, But um, that's the
Speaker 1: same with most real after parties. So I guess that's
Speaker 1: that's at least Facebook accurately delivering on the promise of
Speaker 1: the real world. Um, but I want to play like
Speaker 1: what happens in this metaverse after party that these two
Speaker 1: both hop into digitally after one of them. So like,
Speaker 1: as this starts, the lady who was actually at the
Speaker 1: concert like sits down at home and gets into the metaverse.
Speaker 1: Imagine your best friend is at a concert somewhere across
Speaker 1: the world. Uh oh, what if you could be there
Speaker 1: with her? Yeah? Real? Yeah, real, real and clear? How
Speaker 1: that works? Yeah? Real quick? That the concert? See the
Speaker 1: holographic version? How the person see that? Yeah? Is she
Speaker 1: wearing all that while she's dancing? Everyone wearing VR and
Speaker 1: seeing the world through VR. Because I'll tell you about
Speaker 1: Like right now, I'm I in our put put on
Speaker 1: I put on Oculus as a joke, and right now
Speaker 1: I have it on the pass through mode, which means
Speaker 1: I can see the real world through my cameras in
Speaker 1: the oculus. And you know what it looks like? Shit, Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's black and white. It's super grainy. I can't there
Speaker 1: has it has no like exposure range. Everything is like
Speaker 1: it's it's like you look like you're wearing a sunglasses
Speaker 1: case in your look like the world. But like I
Speaker 1: can't do anything because it all is like a horrible
Speaker 1: digital like like I can't like it's not really like
Speaker 1: I can't do anything aspects of this one, like at
Speaker 1: some point passed through mode will be in color and
Speaker 1: the latency will be notice right, like and there won't
Speaker 1: be late and seeing like yeah, but it'll but it's
Speaker 1: not gonna be still be with your human eyeball. It'll
Speaker 1: it'll still be a thing. So that girl is going
Speaker 1: to have to be at a concert dancing getting super
Speaker 1: sweaty and like she's wearing something, even if it's as
Speaker 1: small as like regular glasses and she's not Like I
Speaker 1: guess better, but it's more to the end. But like,
Speaker 1: if people are actually gonna developed this technology, the real
Speaker 1: way to do it is with a R, not not VR,
Speaker 1: because with a R, yeah, you could have put on
Speaker 1: like actual glasses and have like a person show up
Speaker 1: on the thing and make it look like they're there,
Speaker 1: well actually still seeing the real world. That's gonna be
Speaker 1: the way to do it. Yeah, And I think that
Speaker 1: there's what to do it. Yeah, I think that's what
Speaker 1: they're like claiming here, but it's really unclear how it's
Speaker 1: all going to interface. How the a R is going
Speaker 1: to interface with like the full VR stuff, Like are
Speaker 1: we going to have two separate sets of gear, one
Speaker 1: for when we're in the real world and we can't
Speaker 1: be fully immersive and one for when we want to
Speaker 1: dive into the metaverse as turn it around? Do we
Speaker 1: always carry it around wherever we go? Yeah, but I
Speaker 1: want to play the section. I sorry, I played the
Speaker 1: video where they were at the concert just because it
Speaker 1: it looks very silly. I want to play the section
Speaker 1: where they're at the after party because it's it's dystopian
Speaker 1: as fun. So here's the all all metaverse after party
Speaker 1: that looks like a bunch of fucking connect avatars standing
Speaker 1: around and like a room made out of glowing neon
Speaker 1: digital room. Yeah, nobody's drinking, which is the only good
Speaker 1: thing to do with an afterparty that's not cocaine. So
Speaker 1: from from the jump, I'm like, well, what is the
Speaker 1: only good thing about an afterparty is if you want
Speaker 1: more drugs and all of the drugs places are closed. Party,
Speaker 1: maybe at the end you can hook up with a
Speaker 1: digital avatar. Yeah it's anyway, I'm I'm just gonna play
Speaker 1: this dog shit where they were. This is wild, is it?
Speaker 1: They're just slowly Dancy's a giraffeman. Check this out. Charity
Speaker 1: action for n f T party that looks like ships
Speaker 1: of your favorite song. Yeah, it looks dogs. Yeah. So
Speaker 1: it's like it's it's a it's a horrible three D chat.
Speaker 1: We are already have these, These already exist, and they're
Speaker 1: not tons of fun. They're fun is when you're in
Speaker 1: first suits and you're walking around a fake city destroying it.
Speaker 1: That's the only fun way to do this. And the
Speaker 1: thing they're showing in this is that like an autographed
Speaker 1: poster for the concert um is an n f T
Speaker 1: that you can buy for a charity auction, and like
Speaker 1: as they're looking at it, the actual musician walks by
Speaker 1: and tells them it looks cool, and so they buy
Speaker 1: it and they have the musician come in for that
Speaker 1: number one to like try to make this kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you'll be able to do these digital events where you
Speaker 1: can meet actual celebrities, which like, no, I'm sure celebrities
Speaker 1: will agree to do Q Q and as in the
Speaker 1: multiverse like they do anywhere else. But they're not going
Speaker 1: to just walk around in some dogshit virtual party because
Speaker 1: they have money and they can do actual fun things
Speaker 1: in the actual real world. They're gonna be fucking supermodels
Speaker 1: while skiing down a mountain in Lake Tahoe. Because they're rich. Um,
Speaker 1: they're going to be like flying in their private jets
Speaker 1: or driving in a fucking yacht and eating lobster that's
Speaker 1: been tortured. So it tastes better because they're rich, Like
Speaker 1: they're they're not going to be hanging out in a
Speaker 1: digital lobby telling you that a fucking dogshit poster in
Speaker 1: f t is cool and that you should buy it. Um,
Speaker 1: unless you're a millionaire and they want your money because
Speaker 1: they're Nicolas Cage and they have an addiction to buying
Speaker 1: Tarrannosaurus parts. I don't know, it's it's silly, it's it's ridiculous. Um. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that I thought about when
Speaker 1: I was watching this is like the concept of metaverse culture. Um,
Speaker 1: So like at some point, if this is a thing,
Speaker 1: there's going to be like like if there ever is
Speaker 1: a metaverse, people will develop a culture for it, just
Speaker 1: like they've developed a culture for Twitter, a culture for Reddit,
Speaker 1: a culture for Facebook, just as there were like internet
Speaker 1: culture or was fantasy. Yeah, it happens with every community
Speaker 1: you make online. Um. And and that's the thing, Like
Speaker 1: there's no I see no space in this thing that
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg has envisioned as he is presenting it for
Speaker 1: organic evolution of a None of the things that here
Speaker 1: are gonna make people want to form a culture around it,
Speaker 1: because it's all it looks like, it looks like boring
Speaker 1: yuppie ship, all of it, but none of it is
Speaker 1: actually looks cool or fun, and none of it, none
Speaker 1: of it is he's not talking about any of it
Speaker 1: with like the there's no there's no openness in it,
Speaker 1: like there's no I don't see where a culture could evolve,
Speaker 1: and if one does, it's going to be directly like
Speaker 1: in opposition to Facebook moderation, um like yeah, um well yeah,
Speaker 1: and I mean and there's there's an extense to which
Speaker 1: like they can't write because like if you actually let
Speaker 1: people just like do things, like imagine the griefing that's
Speaker 1: going to happen in one of these spaces, right Like
Speaker 1: every person's avatar is going to be like sixteen thousand dogs,
Speaker 1: like this is That's literally this all it's going to be, like,
Speaker 1: this is this is this is what Twitch looks like,
Speaker 1: right Like every twitch chat is a guy posting a
Speaker 1: hydramatee of dogs. Like it's like none of none of
Speaker 1: this can actually work if you let people do literally anything.
Speaker 1: If you don't let people do anything, like why would
Speaker 1: you know I'm gonna want to do it? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 1: Like how how are you going to sell them this crap?
Speaker 1: Like once upon a time there was a game called
Speaker 1: Second Life. I guess it still exists, but we're talking
Speaker 1: people talked about it the way they're talking about the
Speaker 1: metaverse now, and that became just like it was never that.
Speaker 1: But there was like this beautiful moment where this I
Speaker 1: think and she Chung was her name, Um, this like
Speaker 1: culture writer, kind of expert lady was like doing a
Speaker 1: Q and A and Second Life that was like build
Speaker 1: as being this like big event for the platform that
Speaker 1: was going to like make people take it seriously. And
Speaker 1: a bunch of like users showed up and made a
Speaker 1: bunch of floating dicks like float through the room during
Speaker 1: the interview, so that like while this person was trying
Speaker 1: to talk seriously about Second Life, just like floating cocks
Speaker 1: we zooming past her head the entire time, and it
Speaker 1: was extremely funny and it's it's exactly the kind of
Speaker 1: thing like, yeah, Mark, that's what all of this is
Speaker 1: going to look like. Any mass event is going people
Speaker 1: will find a way to grief it. Um, and that
Speaker 1: will in fact be the thing they most want to do.
Speaker 1: Is that will be the actual culture. Part is fucking
Speaker 1: with Facebook. Yeah you know, but that's the part about
Speaker 1: that that sucks. It's like, yeah, you know. It was
Speaker 1: like you're universal reality thing, right, So like, okay, what
Speaker 1: are people going to do in a virtual reality? It's well, okay,
Speaker 1: you're gonna get You're gonna get a bunch of neo
Speaker 1: Nazis like figuring out a way to like show you
Speaker 1: just like the worst ship you've ever seen in your life.
Speaker 1: Like it's it's gonna it's gonna be all the stuff
Speaker 1: from the two thousands were like half of the Internet
Speaker 1: was just like a video. Why this is the thousand
Speaker 1: tends to like half of Twitter is just heading videos,
Speaker 1: And now it's in VR. It's like, yeahs in the metaverse,
Speaker 1: it's going to be amazing. Some of that's even already
Speaker 1: happening in like VR social media apps. I know of
Speaker 1: a few specific Nazis involved in January six who networked
Speaker 1: and met with people via of specifically VR chat. So like,
Speaker 1: this is this is already a thing, um And making
Speaker 1: it more broad than like this small, you know, because
Speaker 1: the VR right now is mostly just a small subsect
Speaker 1: of like gaming culture right and people are into it
Speaker 1: because there is VR games that are cool, like like
Speaker 1: Beat Saber is fun, right people game Um. In order
Speaker 1: for them to break this through into the mainstream, they
Speaker 1: need to make it appealing some way. And the only
Speaker 1: way they're making appealing right now is by doing meetings
Speaker 1: and like concerts. So the next part I Want to
Speaker 1: Play doesn't say a lot about the future marks trying
Speaker 1: to build, but it's very funny because it's him sitting
Speaker 1: down with a woman who works in his gaming department
Speaker 1: and she's walking him through like what games are going
Speaker 1: to be integrated into the metaverse? And it fucking reads
Speaker 1: like and I think you should leave sketch, Like it
Speaker 1: feels like a sketch where the joke is that everyone
Speaker 1: is awkward and not talking the way human beings talk.
Speaker 1: And in case you can't watch this chunk of the
Speaker 1: video and it starts at about like nineteen thirty four. UM.
Speaker 1: In the actual Facebook video, all of the video games
Speaker 1: they're talking about, like look Dogship, they look like the
Speaker 1: Kirkland brand of like popular like fighting games and fps
Speaker 1: s and stuff. None of them look very good. Um,
Speaker 1: so I'm gonna play a clip from this because it's
Speaker 1: very funny. Bailed out active communities be Saver has a
Speaker 1: passionate community and a million dollars and less pressed around
Speaker 1: a great example of the games releasing fresh content. They've
Speaker 1: actually been working on involving the way that you inter
Speaker 1: wrap with the tracks and feel the music, the way
Speaker 1: he's nodding in this, like his digital avatar looks more
Speaker 1: like a person. Here's some beat saber yeaheah, it looks
Speaker 1: like regular beat saber. Yeah, but it's it's VR. It's
Speaker 1: a it's already as VR. Yeah, it's already a VR game.
Speaker 1: You can't wait to play this, and you can already
Speaker 1: play with incredible artists to release new music puts all
Speaker 1: the time. You can do this a little more than
Speaker 1: question been working more of this metaverse prison take, Oh God,
Speaker 1: every scene where she's talking to him and he's just
Speaker 1: like Bobblehead nodding just a little bit, but not like
Speaker 1: it's he looks. Mark actually will benefit from the metaverse,
Speaker 1: like outside of a financial thing, because a a sculpted
Speaker 1: three D representation of him will be a thousand times better,
Speaker 1: more human than he looks like, more of a person. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I mean, it's just like he's scripted it badly
Speaker 1: and he's a narcissist, so he has to be the
Speaker 1: one to present it. Again a small number one, if
Speaker 1: Steve Jobs were doing this, Number one, he wouldn't because
Speaker 1: he understood what people wanted from technology. But if he
Speaker 1: were doing something like this, he would introduce like little
Speaker 1: chunks of it, and then he would have a famous
Speaker 1: person who's charismatic introduced the rest of it, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the like it wouldn't be it wouldn't introduce how
Speaker 1: I'm sitting like a bobblehead listening, and he would introduce
Speaker 1: VR and a R into a way that actually integrets
Speaker 1: how people use the Internet, all right, because there is
Speaker 1: ways that there is ways of doing it. It's not
Speaker 1: this like super monetized n f T like bullshit holographic
Speaker 1: fake stuff. Yeah, and there's there's aspects of this, like
Speaker 1: he goes through after this, like there's a bunch of
Speaker 1: gaming stuff, which is impossible for the reasons we've talked about,
Speaker 1: and then there's aspects of it that seemed cool, like
Speaker 1: there's a scene where like an architect gets onto his
Speaker 1: digital office and like somebody sends him, uh, schematics too
Speaker 1: of a building they're making, and he's able to generate
Speaker 1: a three D and walk around the building like, Okay,
Speaker 1: that actually seems it seems like useful, Like you've developed
Speaker 1: a use case for the all of the architects out there.
Speaker 1: It's it's I'm still not convinced that CAD would actually
Speaker 1: be better in three D than it would be like, sure,
Speaker 1: it's I I think it may someday. I think it
Speaker 1: could be. Like if you are one of the concreasingly
Speaker 1: small number of people who can afford to like build
Speaker 1: a house of your own, I can see why it
Speaker 1: would be neat to be like, Okay, well let's do
Speaker 1: a three D render of the house and I can
Speaker 1: walk through it and I could maybe make changes at
Speaker 1: the last moment. As I'm kind of experiencing that is
Speaker 1: definitely useful where a window is like yeah, I can that.
Speaker 1: That seems like something number one Technologically you could do
Speaker 1: that more or less. Now, Um, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: it's not gonna be as instantaneous as this, but if
Speaker 1: you give it time to render it could be done,
Speaker 1: and it it's something that a number of people might
Speaker 1: find useful. But again that's a niche product because like
Speaker 1: eighteen people in our generation are rying homes. I mean
Speaker 1: also it's it's it's expensive to develop because you would
Speaker 1: have just modeling an actual real life location is a
Speaker 1: lot of work. Yum. Now there is there is a
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of technology that's getting way better
Speaker 1: at it by machine cameras um and like basically filming
Speaker 1: a space and and the community can reconstruct it pretty accurately.
Speaker 1: Um that that that is a growing field. But still
Speaker 1: it is is it's a very niche you know area
Speaker 1: at least at a yeah, so I the thing that
Speaker 1: is so anyway, there's aspects of this that are ridiculous,
Speaker 1: aspects of this that seemed neat, But the longer you
Speaker 1: watch it, the thing that comes becomes really clear is
Speaker 1: that all he's really advertising is mass surveillance. Yea. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's a point in this video where they're showing you
Speaker 1: how they can like map a real world location so
Speaker 1: you can be in your actual house, put on your
Speaker 1: VR glasses, um and it can map the your actual
Speaker 1: home digitally in real time and as you and as
Speaker 1: you pick up real things in your house, you you
Speaker 1: see them being picked up in VR and presume the
Speaker 1: other people in the VR could see it, which we
Speaker 1: are not quite there yet. I stay pretty here in
Speaker 1: VR technology, we're getting close to this, but we're not.
Speaker 1: We're not quite there. I mean we're we're we're actually
Speaker 1: we actually are where what they show in the video.
Speaker 1: And I'm gonna play you a second from it because
Speaker 1: i want to show you something here at least, I mean,
Speaker 1: like like consumer products. We're not We're not at this
Speaker 1: point yet. Yeah, and I want to show you, uh
Speaker 1: where we are because this video they're showing like actual footage.
Speaker 1: So they have built this thing. But there's a catch,
Speaker 1: and so I'm just gonna play it right now, right
Speaker 1: out the researcher. So what's critical here is that this
Speaker 1: is all happening in real time. So if you I've
Speaker 1: just paused it, well you've got here. On one side,
Speaker 1: there's a woman in a real like house, sitting and
Speaker 1: picking up like a toy home on her couch. And
Speaker 1: then on the left you see the VR version of
Speaker 1: her house, which looks close to photo realistic and like
Speaker 1: the house that she's holding in the real world is
Speaker 1: floating in the same way that she's holding it, Like
Speaker 1: her body isn't there, like the stuff she's interacting with is.
Speaker 1: But if you look at the house she's holding. The
Speaker 1: reason that they're able to do this and it really
Speaker 1: does work is it's covered in sensors. And and actually
Speaker 1: every single thing in the real house is covered in
Speaker 1: sensors because that's the only way for this to worverything
Speaker 1: that's moving is covered in sensors. Yeah, yeah, and it
Speaker 1: it is impressive, like as a proof of concept, like this,
Speaker 1: this is here, we can do this, but like it's
Speaker 1: still light years away from practical and more to the point,
Speaker 1: when you look at this, you realize that, like, well,
Speaker 1: if this is ever going to work, the only way
Speaker 1: to make it work is for Facebook, through this service,
Speaker 1: to map your entire home in real time, every hour
Speaker 1: of all day. And they also go on to talk
Speaker 1: about like how you're gonna have just your commands and
Speaker 1: like you'll be able to like make an expression or
Speaker 1: like a hand gesture and that will do things, which
Speaker 1: means that like this service isn't just learning what's in
Speaker 1: your home and what you do with the things in
Speaker 1: your home. It's it's learning your facial expressions and your
Speaker 1: gestures and like what they mean and interpreting those at
Speaker 1: all times. I can kind of explain where oculus which
Speaker 1: is over Facebook. I think they're technically renaming oculus yea
Speaker 1: spring to just calling it the metic quest but what
Speaker 1: wait wait wait, the medical quest that that that's that's
Speaker 1: what they're calling it instead of instead of oculus UM.
Speaker 1: So where where that right now? Is basically, uh, the
Speaker 1: only kind of real world interactivity that they have for
Speaker 1: their VR headsets. Again for like the consumer models, I
Speaker 1: don't know, it's in link development. UM is hand tracking.
Speaker 1: This this is the thing they've been working on for
Speaker 1: a long time. Is that you put on the headset
Speaker 1: and the camera like the cameras and depth sensors built
Speaker 1: into the headset can see your hands and like you said,
Speaker 1: you have like gesture controls where you can do certain
Speaker 1: things in your hand and it will make certain things happen.
Speaker 1: This is the only interactivity that that we have. It's okay,
Speaker 1: it's not perfect, like it's it is. It is better
Speaker 1: than a lot of the other hand tracking systems from
Speaker 1: other companies, but like it's it's it is very much
Speaker 1: a work in progress, UM. And the way to make
Speaker 1: this work is by is very good depth sensing cameras,
Speaker 1: which I think Apple makes some of the best ones
Speaker 1: right now that they put into the iPhone. Uh. The
Speaker 1: other way of doing this is with lighthouses. So this
Speaker 1: is like separate um separate like uh, separate cameras that
Speaker 1: you set up around the corners of your house that
Speaker 1: project different like wavelengths of light and they get it
Speaker 1: received back, so they can map your house UM with
Speaker 1: not just cameras but also like like in like infrared
Speaker 1: sensors and that kind of thing. So these are these
Speaker 1: are like the two methods of doing it. Facebook is
Speaker 1: really trying to go full on, full on to the
Speaker 1: everything is built into the headset thing. So no, so no,
Speaker 1: like lighthouses. Everything is just depth depth sensing cameras. So
Speaker 1: that's why they're working on hand tracking so much because
Speaker 1: that's something you can actually do. But like, I can't
Speaker 1: pick up anything, um, Like the only thing I can
Speaker 1: pick up is my controllers, which because they they have
Speaker 1: sensors built in, they can be rendered in the actual
Speaker 1: game the same way like my hand can be, so
Speaker 1: that that that's where they're at for that for the
Speaker 1: consumer products get more than it's getting developed. Again where
Speaker 1: they're at you think about what Facebook has already done
Speaker 1: with the formation you provided, and how so much of
Speaker 1: their money comes from selling your data. Um. The only
Speaker 1: way for this to work that they've they've passed always
Speaker 1: watching everything, every moment of your existence, including like your
Speaker 1: micro expressions, which is why oulan in the tiny little
Speaker 1: box here. And here's the thing. If they were to
Speaker 1: actually develop the technology, which I don't think is impossible,
Speaker 1: although it's not particularly close. Um, it's not going to
Speaker 1: be cheap to store all that. So in order to
Speaker 1: make it a tile outside, well, it's going to be
Speaker 1: cloud based. But in order to make it like cloud
Speaker 1: isn't free um in a subscription probably I think you'll
Speaker 1: pay some, but I think in order to make it affordable, um,
Speaker 1: so that more people are on it, they're just going
Speaker 1: to sell your data in a way that has never
Speaker 1: been in a and and the government will have access
Speaker 1: to it. Like is it's actually like the thing that
Speaker 1: he is actually proposing here is I want to build
Speaker 1: a machine gun odd that knows your sins, like that
Speaker 1: knows when your hearts in your house, like before you smile.
Speaker 1: That can predict like when you're about to make a
Speaker 1: gesture or laugh because it is so accurately mapped your
Speaker 1: body and motions. Um, it's actually a nightmare. Like when
Speaker 1: you really think about what he is trying to build
Speaker 1: here and it's like, well, what, what's what what's the
Speaker 1: actual use case for this? And it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: so you have you have a bunch of spustal forces guys.
Speaker 1: You put them in a VR thing and then you
Speaker 1: know you can you can, you can you can have
Speaker 1: them drill on knowing exactly where all the rooms in
Speaker 1: the houses, where everyone is in, where everyone is in
Speaker 1: a house any given time. It's like, oh, hey this
Speaker 1: this is gonna be great. This is yeah, it's it's great. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's really cool. Um, they have a So there
Speaker 1: is a little bit here briefly about where like Mark
Speaker 1: talks about how the last year or so has been
Speaker 1: um fucking uh. The term he uses is humbling for them.
Speaker 1: Oh god yeah, and you you kind of think that
Speaker 1: like he's about to say that, like, oh, because we
Speaker 1: we made life dramatically worse and our service was integral
Speaker 1: in several ethnic cleansings and a couple of civil wars
Speaker 1: and like hate crimes on a scale that was unimaginable
Speaker 1: before it really came into being, or that we thought
Speaker 1: had been at least we thought had been consigned to
Speaker 1: a century or so ago before Facebook came into being.
Speaker 1: But no, that's not why it's humbling. Why he says
Speaker 1: it's been humbling is that Facebook has been developing services
Speaker 1: for other platforms like the App Store, where they don't
Speaker 1: have total control, and that sucks. And that's like the
Speaker 1: thing that that's the that's him admitting a little bit
Speaker 1: that like a big part of this is they're trying
Speaker 1: to build a service the entire Internet gets filtered through
Speaker 1: that they completely control, so that they are never in
Speaker 1: anyone else's wheelhouse, Like everything is done through Facebook. And
Speaker 1: with Facebook's approval as opposed to them, they want to
Speaker 1: get face Facebook. Facebook is going to become the state. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's the thing that it says so much about
Speaker 1: Mark that he's like, what's humbling? Isn't all of them
Speaker 1: a stake? Because I've made It's that periodically I have
Speaker 1: not had total control. Um, it's great. Um. He then,
Speaker 1: from immediately from this says that if we all work
Speaker 1: at it, all of us. The metaverse can reach a
Speaker 1: billion people by the next decade um, which is very funny.
Speaker 1: Um that he thinks that that's like an enticing fucking thing.
Speaker 1: So one of the use cases they try to present
Speaker 1: is they have a beauty influencer who like made like
Speaker 1: a fucking candle line or something, uh, that she's sold
Speaker 1: on Instagram and she's she's very successful in Instagram. They
Speaker 1: bring this lady in and number one as soon as
Speaker 1: they started interviewing her, it's it's it's what I was
Speaker 1: saying about. You have a higher a celebrity to do this, Mark,
Speaker 1: You're not charismatic. She's immediately the most engaging person in
Speaker 1: the entire presentation because she's a successful Like she's someone
Speaker 1: who understands how she appears on camera, Um, how to
Speaker 1: make herself seem likable on camera, how to like interact
Speaker 1: with the world on a camera, and nobody else in
Speaker 1: this video understands that, Um, which is just funny. It's
Speaker 1: not particularly like say anything other and that, like, you
Speaker 1: have professionals do difficult things, Mark, don't don't hire your
Speaker 1: weird gawky engineering staff to like be the faces of
Speaker 1: this thing. They're not good at this, and neither are you.
Speaker 1: I just want to point out, so he said that
Speaker 1: like he can get one billion people the next decade.
Speaker 1: So far there's only been sixteen million vir headsets sold ever. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so getting that to the point of a billion, it
Speaker 1: seems like quite quite the challenge. I mean, it is
Speaker 1: a challenge, but you could look at like how quickly
Speaker 1: smartphones went from Yeah, except smartphones were useful in improving
Speaker 1: the world in very obvious ways, whereas the metaverse and
Speaker 1: even VR in general doesn't improve the world from us
Speaker 1: people in obvious ways. Yeah, but that that's kind of
Speaker 1: what I'm saying, is that, like, the thing that is
Speaker 1: stupid and doomed about this isn't like, oh, you would
Speaker 1: have to sell so many headsets. If it was legitimately
Speaker 1: something every single person wanted on their head, they would
Speaker 1: sell a billion. They would sell a billion in a
Speaker 1: couple of years, you know. Um, but they haven't made
Speaker 1: that look like like so this, this beauty influencer thing
Speaker 1: is an example of the trying to like explain here's
Speaker 1: something that people will find cool about the metaverse, um,
Speaker 1: and the way they do it is like talking about
Speaker 1: how you can have a digital storefront where like people
Speaker 1: can't just buy products, but they can interact with you. Um.
Speaker 1: She talks about how it will be good for letting
Speaker 1: her interact with their fans, but like bringing them into
Speaker 1: my home, which sounds like a fucking we love our fans,
Speaker 1: but like, no, I do not want anyone from anybody
Speaker 1: goddamn home. I barely want my friends in my home
Speaker 1: half the time. Like absolutely not. Um, they didn't present
Speaker 1: us with a use case of how a brand, in
Speaker 1: this case, this candle company this lady made that's big
Speaker 1: on Instagram could release like a new candle flavor and
Speaker 1: launch a digital experience with it so you can buy
Speaker 1: both real and digital products. It's kind of unclear in
Speaker 1: the video whether or not you're paying for the digital
Speaker 1: experience or is it like free when you buy the candle. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like I don't games is like developing. It's like
Speaker 1: you know, dropping products at the same time in the
Speaker 1: real world in the digital world, but like the digital
Speaker 1: version is free because it's like because it's like an
Speaker 1: add right, you could try something out virtually before you
Speaker 1: buy it physically, and that's what like Epic Games is doing.
Speaker 1: And honestly, I think epics version of the Metavors is
Speaker 1: slightly more hinged. They understand more what people actually want. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because like all the stuff they're trying with Fortnite again,
Speaker 1: it doesn't seem fun for me. But at least it's
Speaker 1: like an extension of how people use the Internet already,
Speaker 1: whereas Facebook's is not that. Yeah. And and Mark never
Speaker 1: really understood what people wanted. He he accidentally did basically
Speaker 1: to make something else, Like he wanted a place to
Speaker 1: share pictures of ladies he thought was hot. Um, and
Speaker 1: he accidentally built a thing that like gave people something
Speaker 1: they did one, which was a way to stay in
Speaker 1: contact with their friends from high school in college as
Speaker 1: they grew older. Right, Like that was the thing about
Speaker 1: Facebook that made it get huge originally. Um. And he
Speaker 1: hasn't learned anything since. He's just been smart. He's he's
Speaker 1: hired people who are smart enough to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: Instagram is probably going to be a big deal by that,
Speaker 1: you know, um like that that, but I haven't seen
Speaker 1: anything that's made me think like Mark gets what people want.
Speaker 1: And this has just made it clear that like he
Speaker 1: absolutely doesn't. So I want to play this video of
Speaker 1: like this is the digital experience to go with this
Speaker 1: fucking candle that they're they're framing is like a piece
Speaker 1: of art that everybody's gonna want to interact with candles.
Speaker 1: It's it's incredible because it again feels like a nightmare.
Speaker 1: I am. I am a big candle fan, so same here.
Speaker 1: What if I effect to transports us something to magic
Speaker 1: It's like a shitty arboretum. I don't do what it
Speaker 1: has to do with candles. It's Jackie. As we walk
Speaker 1: in this amazing world, I just feel like this is
Speaker 1: like endless possibilities of my imaginations. I can't even begin
Speaker 1: to imagine. But I don't understand what has that to
Speaker 1: do with candles. Yeah, like they have again like there's
Speaker 1: I can walk around, like why can't begin to imagine
Speaker 1: all the things people are going to I can walk
Speaker 1: around digital spaces and like quest it's again it's fun
Speaker 1: for like thirty seconds, and then you see everything You're like, well,
Speaker 1: I can't touch it or smell it or actually feel
Speaker 1: it or do anything. So I'm gonna go back and
Speaker 1: have a soda and yeah play and like read a
Speaker 1: book or something like. And they've brought in this influencer
Speaker 1: who like used one of their other services in a
Speaker 1: way they hadn't initially intended and was successful in that,
Speaker 1: which is not a bad idea in its surface, Like yeah,
Speaker 1: bring in creative people and let them play around and
Speaker 1: make something new to show people how exciting this is, right,
Speaker 1: that's the smart thing to do. But all they've presented
Speaker 1: is like, look, it's a tiny little weird arboretum. You
Speaker 1: can walk around and after buying a candle, and it's like, well,
Speaker 1: I like candles, but that's not fun. That doesn't sound
Speaker 1: like a fun. Addition, part of the metaverse is like
Speaker 1: making like interactivity more like be able to interact with
Speaker 1: with digital things, and like that's not interacting, that's just
Speaker 1: walking around like unless I can like take of like
Speaker 1: a bazooka and blow up our like the candle, you know,
Speaker 1: like that's like you have to do something. Like all
Speaker 1: of the V are games that are fun, like like
Speaker 1: like like like a super hot or like something. It's about,
Speaker 1: you know, picking up objects in VR and throwing them
Speaker 1: at people. That's fun and you likes, unless I can
Speaker 1: pick up this candle and it's all people with it
Speaker 1: in the game, I don't see what really the dry
Speaker 1: like what's what's exciting about this? You were saying something, Chris, Oh,
Speaker 1: I guess you know. The thing I keep coming back
Speaker 1: to with this is it the only way this and this,
Speaker 1: literally any of this makes any sense if it's just
Speaker 1: like a chip in your brain, just because all of it,
Speaker 1: all of it is built around that. But it's but
Speaker 1: it's not like it can't be like we don't the
Speaker 1: technology for that won't exist for like ages and so
Speaker 1: there it's like it's it's like they're they're selling some
Speaker 1: of it definitely is headset based, like that arboretum thing.
Speaker 1: But even yeah, but like I mean I think even that, right,
Speaker 1: like okay, so why would you want Like yeah, you're
Speaker 1: if you're saying, like why would you It's like, Okay,
Speaker 1: it's interesting for like ten minutes, right, Yeah. The only
Speaker 1: way that would be like the only way that would
Speaker 1: be an actually interesting experience is if you could get
Speaker 1: all the full century experience you can smell and feel, yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and that that's that's that's like, that's that's the thing
Speaker 1: where like think only makes sense if it's like a
Speaker 1: brain ship. Well, I mean there's there's two versions. There's
Speaker 1: one it's a brain ship or two it's a video game,
Speaker 1: and Epic Games is doing the thing where it's a
Speaker 1: video game, and and that's slightly yes, yeah, yeah, but
Speaker 1: like they don't you know, but they're they're trying to
Speaker 1: sell like and I think part of what's going on
Speaker 1: here is also just like this is this is designed
Speaker 1: to like like, this is designed to like trick Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley investors. Yes, that is like yeah, and those people
Speaker 1: I think are just gonna be like, oh, well, we'll
Speaker 1: have brain ships eventually, and so we'll just we'll talk
Speaker 1: about probably talk about that part more at the end,
Speaker 1: because yeah, this is just a scam. This is just
Speaker 1: a scam, and it is like again to talk about
Speaker 1: like the dystopian aspects of this, Chris, as you brought up,
Speaker 1: one of the aspects is that like it's a complete
Speaker 1: panopticon of perfect surveillance. If they actually make this thing
Speaker 1: a number two is the only way to do most
Speaker 1: of what they're talking about that's cool is to give
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg physical control over human beings brain chemistry on
Speaker 1: a global scale, which I think it is a bad
Speaker 1: idea for that. I don't I don't want to walk
Speaker 1: around in a weird candle room that badly, Like to
Speaker 1: your point, Chris about like how it's you know, there's
Speaker 1: no sensory stuff. Is like like the most popular VR games,
Speaker 1: the reason why they work so well, there's why that
Speaker 1: they don't, like Break the Uncanny Valley is because you're
Speaker 1: in like a barren land, like you know, like the Saber.
Speaker 1: You're not in a place you know you're in the
Speaker 1: in the game interface for like for Super Hot, you're
Speaker 1: in like whitewashed, abstract like concrete spaces, right, so like
Speaker 1: there's nothing, there is nothing to smell or feels like
Speaker 1: you don't feel like you're missing anything because you're in
Speaker 1: a very like stripped down version of reality. There is
Speaker 1: a really good of VR game, I forget what it's called,
Speaker 1: but it's it's based on like an office and you're
Speaker 1: like fighting robots to break out of like this capitalist
Speaker 1: office room. And it's cool because like, yeah, it's miserable
Speaker 1: because it's like it's like an office space. You feel
Speaker 1: like you're in an office because it's nothing about it's exciting. Right,
Speaker 1: video games that are in like lush worlds feel so
Speaker 1: much more like disconnected because you have like a weird
Speaker 1: like you have you have like you have like an
Speaker 1: uncanny valley thing, but instead of like a face or
Speaker 1: a person, it's like environment. We're running a long time.
Speaker 1: I want to move to something that I think is
Speaker 1: important here, which is there is one moment in this
Speaker 1: video where they try to address the fact that they've
Speaker 1: done a tremendous amount of damage to the world and
Speaker 1: they have repeatedly failed to like uh anticipate dangers that
Speaker 1: their services have, so they need to like deal with
Speaker 1: that at some point. And this is like, well, what
Speaker 1: about if like what about bad things that could happen?
Speaker 1: What if like what about like unintended things? What about
Speaker 1: like ways in which this could be harmful to society
Speaker 1: that you haven't foreseen. So, because they're not completely stupid,
Speaker 1: in order to address that, they bring on a well
Speaker 1: dressed uh or not well dressed, but they bring on
Speaker 1: like a friendly British man um who kind of kind
Speaker 1: of reads as like a like a scientific kind of
Speaker 1: expert guy. They bring on a charming British person to
Speaker 1: like talk about how they're going to not not destroy
Speaker 1: the world. And this is very telling so far. It's
Speaker 1: it's such visionary stuff. But as you mentioned early on
Speaker 1: with all big technological advances that are inevitably going to
Speaker 1: be in all sorts of challenges and uncertainties. And I
Speaker 1: know you talked about this a bit already, but people
Speaker 1: want to know how we're going to do all this
Speaker 1: in a responsible way, and especially that we play our
Speaker 1: part in helping to keep people safe and protect their
Speaker 1: privacy online. Yeah, that's right, This is incredibly important. The
Speaker 1: way I look at it is that in the past,
Speaker 1: the speed that new technologies emerged sometimes left policy makers
Speaker 1: and regulators playing catch up. So on the one hand,
Speaker 1: companies get accused of charging your head too quickly, and
Speaker 1: on the other, tech people feel that progress can't afford
Speaker 1: to wait for the slower pace of regulation. And I
Speaker 1: really think that it doesn't have to be the case
Speaker 1: this time around, because we have years until the metaverse
Speaker 1: we envision is fully realized. So this is the start
Speaker 1: of the journey, not the end. So that's telling UH
Speaker 1: that he's like, we don't need to worry about like
Speaker 1: we don't need it, Like it'll be regulated properly, it'll
Speaker 1: be safe enough, because it's going to take so long
Speaker 1: to figure all this out that surely we will anticipate
Speaker 1: and deal with all of the potentially toxic side effects
Speaker 1: of this technology ahead of time. Um. And if you
Speaker 1: believe that, I would say, take a look at Facebook's
Speaker 1: track record with that kind of thing. Um. But they
Speaker 1: are smart and having a charming British man do it,
Speaker 1: that's the right guy to have in the only aspect
Speaker 1: of good casting in this that is the right guy
Speaker 1: to have come on and try to allay people's fears
Speaker 1: that this will destroy society. You bring you bring a
Speaker 1: charming British man in, you know, that's how you do
Speaker 1: that kind of thing. Um, that's when I get canceled
Speaker 1: for the things I've been doing overseas. Um, I'm going
Speaker 1: to hire a British person to defend myself. Do they
Speaker 1: make any more comments about like a R glasses or
Speaker 1: VR quite a few. I wanted to move on to that. Um,
Speaker 1: even though yeah, we're so um they talk about they
Speaker 1: have a whole section where they're they're talking about the
Speaker 1: actual glasses they have. So they announced the number one
Speaker 1: they have a project. The goal, as he repeatedly says,
Speaker 1: is to make a quote normal, good looking pair of
Speaker 1: glasses that do all this stuff, which that is yeah. Um,
Speaker 1: and he he does in order as like a proof
Speaker 1: of concept, he shows us these a R ray bands
Speaker 1: that actually look legitimately rad They look like normal at
Speaker 1: least the privn't touched a pair of these in my hands,
Speaker 1: but the the the videos that are supposed to be
Speaker 1: these real products show a pair of what looked like
Speaker 1: normal ray bands that you can take pictures and videos with,
Speaker 1: you can answer phone calls on, you can do like
Speaker 1: video phone calls on them, and actually that they seem
Speaker 1: neat and like they look like normal glasses. Um, and
Speaker 1: that is pretty cool. Um. They go kind of pivot
Speaker 1: from that to announcing that like they have this new thing,
Speaker 1: Project nizar Um, which oh I looked up what nazarre
Speaker 1: means a little bit ago. It's probably dystopian. Uh No,
Speaker 1: I think it was just yeah, uh, it's a town
Speaker 1: or it's a surf spot, right, it's a place and
Speaker 1: I think Portugal where there's like great waves and Mark
Speaker 1: Zuckerberg is really into surfing. He plays a surfing game
Speaker 1: at one point in this That is one of the
Speaker 1: most um embarrassing things, embarrassing thing as I've seen in
Speaker 1: my entire fucking life. Um. But yeah, so project is
Speaker 1: are is that they're supposed to be like the first
Speaker 1: true like VR glasses. So they do the good thing,
Speaker 1: which is like here's the real technology these ray bands,
Speaker 1: and look, these are pretty neat. Obviously that doesn't come
Speaker 1: close to what they're promising. Um, and this whole thing
Speaker 1: where they talk about what the glasses, which they say
Speaker 1: they're making good progress on, are going to do, we
Speaker 1: don't ever see any fucking glasses. Yeah, yeah, And and
Speaker 1: that's because they're not really close uh to to working yet.
Speaker 1: That's the air glasses are gonna be the way to act.
Speaker 1: Like if the goal is to integrate digital spaces into
Speaker 1: the physical space, I think I think it's a good
Speaker 1: goal because what that's gonna do, that's gonna make the
Speaker 1: digital space less fake, right, it's injecting that into the
Speaker 1: actual real world. So I think that will actually really
Speaker 1: help with like disassociate of stuff is because it's actually
Speaker 1: in it's actually in the real world as well. I
Speaker 1: think that's gonna be wonderful when that gets developed. And
Speaker 1: I think the glasses are are definitely going to be
Speaker 1: a thing within the next ten to twenty years. There
Speaker 1: ways of like figure illuminating last on the side to
Speaker 1: make like like what it looks like an image. This
Speaker 1: is definitely gonna be a thing that's going to be possible.
Speaker 1: Like surveillance of privacy is like the big, big fears
Speaker 1: for that because we're nowhere close to hacking the brain
Speaker 1: enough to feel sensations. And like, the only thing I've
Speaker 1: played a lot of VR, the only thing that you
Speaker 1: can feel in VR is fear. That's the only thing
Speaker 1: that VR is capable of replicating as as a feeling.
Speaker 1: It's like, you can feel terrified in VR. That's that's
Speaker 1: that's it. You can't ever feel like there's one thing
Speaker 1: you can feel exhausted game. And I was doing like
Speaker 1: bow draws for like four hours, and I was like,
Speaker 1: we've we've developed the way to make you frightened and tired.
Speaker 1: That is what r's best will. By the way, what
Speaker 1: Twitter does normally all true, all of like all of
Speaker 1: like the resident Evil VR games. Yeah, they're gonna making
Speaker 1: you tired and terrified, and that's kind of it. So
Speaker 1: we we have to close out. But I want to
Speaker 1: do that by playing Mark Zuckerberg lamenting the Internet that
Speaker 1: he played a major role in building, as a way
Speaker 1: to talk about why we need a metaverse because it's
Speaker 1: kind of funny because we're allowed to build and use,
Speaker 1: are more tightly controlled than ever, and high taxes on
Speaker 1: creative new ideas are stifling. This is not the way
Speaker 1: that we were met to use technology. The metaverse gives
Speaker 1: us an opportunity to choose well, but it's going to
Speaker 1: take all of us creators, developers, companies of all sizes together.
Speaker 1: We can finally put people at the center of our
Speaker 1: technology and deliver an experience where we are present with
Speaker 1: each other. Yeah, what what a Google? Like? All of
Speaker 1: that nonsense every when you're not you're one of the
Speaker 1: people who has turned the Internet into an expensive walled garden.
Speaker 1: It didn't used to be this way. Then Facebook swooped
Speaker 1: in made themselves for free um like integral to all content,
Speaker 1: and then started charging those content creators and like sucking
Speaker 1: them around and lying to them, which led to the
Speaker 1: destruction of a huge number of websites and a triman.
Speaker 1: This amount of digital culture, like your Wyatt, feels like
Speaker 1: a dead waled garden, and everything you've presented in this
Speaker 1: video makes the metaverse feel like a dead waled garden.
Speaker 1: But I want to play his last lines in the
Speaker 1: in this video because this is him kind of summing
Speaker 1: up his vision for the future via the metaverse, and
Speaker 1: now it is time to take everything that we've learned
Speaker 1: and help build the next chapter. I am dedicating our
Speaker 1: energy to this more than any other company in the world,
Speaker 1: And if this is the future that you want to see,
Speaker 1: then I hope that you will join us, because the
Speaker 1: future is going to be beyond anything we can imagine.
Speaker 1: I agree with that part mark. The future is going
Speaker 1: to be beyond what you can imagine. What a gool, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you have no imagination. It's just it's just using
Speaker 1: trendy tech terms to trick investors into giving them billions
Speaker 1: of dollars. That's like the right, That's that's all it is.
Speaker 1: Because all of this, like this like haptic feedback replicating
Speaker 1: like human feelings and stuff, that we're nowhere close to that,
Speaker 1: and when we do, it's going to be dystopian. But
Speaker 1: we're not close to it, and it's going to be dystopian,
Speaker 1: or it's going to be better in ways that like
Speaker 1: we can't yet conceive of um and then eventually it
Speaker 1: will be destroyed for profit if it actually gets cool
Speaker 1: like the old Internet was. Yeah, it's yeah, it's it's yeah,
Speaker 1: but I think but both this and even a lot
Speaker 1: like a lot of the epic stuff just seems ah,
Speaker 1: it's just the new way that tech companies, that's where
Speaker 1: they think the money vault is is by using these terms,
Speaker 1: and they think using these terms is going to get
Speaker 1: them lots of extra investor money because the actual technology
Speaker 1: is nowhere really close to this and it's not what
Speaker 1: people wanted out of the Internet anyway, it absolutely is not.
Speaker 1: But I don't know, I think this was important. I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: Facebook is important and has a major impact on the
Speaker 1: way the Internet is continuing to evolve um usually in
Speaker 1: negative ways. But this is how these people who are
Speaker 1: doing a lot of damage view the future. So you
Speaker 1: should know what they're looking at and what they anticipate.
Speaker 1: But I think I think that there's a kind of
Speaker 1: optimistic note to this though, right was just like Okay,
Speaker 1: so we've we've reached the point where like even like
Speaker 1: Boris Johnson is going like, oh god, climate change is coming, right,
Speaker 1: and this is the best they've got, right, they have
Speaker 1: they have nothing, They have nothing, And you know what,
Speaker 1: I think, like, what are the only ways we can win?
Speaker 1: Is if we're facing a uniquely incompetent ruling class. And
Speaker 1: if it if the rule, if the if the guy were,
Speaker 1: if a guy we have to deal with in order
Speaker 1: to like not drown every single whale and like have
Speaker 1: half of the world's city is consumed, but the ocean
Speaker 1: is Mark Zuckerberg, like, we got a shot some smarter
Speaker 1: people that aren't that obviously behind the scenes, right like yeah, yeah, um,
Speaker 1: but I I don't think I think that's a nice
Speaker 1: note to end on, because it is, it is worth
Speaker 1: The nice thing about this is how clearly they don't
Speaker 1: under stand what the future is going to look like online. Um,
Speaker 1: they have ways in which they're trying to direct the future,
Speaker 1: and aspects of that will come true, like their VR
Speaker 1: will succeed in some form at some point and it
Speaker 1: will be potentially an unprecedented surveillance breakthrough has some unsettling implications,
Speaker 1: and bet of our stuff is getting developed a lot
Speaker 1: of other stuff. I think the move by Twitter to
Speaker 1: create like this, like it's called like like Twitter spaces
Speaker 1: where it's like this, like you know, basically like voice
Speaker 1: chat room. Like a lot of people are moving towards
Speaker 1: this concept where we try to like inject more like
Speaker 1: in person interactivity into this virtual framework, right, which how
Speaker 1: this with like with like a clubhouse last year during
Speaker 1: during the pandemic, where people like watching like Netflix in
Speaker 1: the quote same room, right, Like, we're seeing people try
Speaker 1: to do this with varying mix mixed success. But this
Speaker 1: is the way tech is is inching. So it is
Speaker 1: a good idea to keep your eye on it because, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of implications for like clevacy and advertising
Speaker 1: and all that kind of stuff. Will continue to cover
Speaker 1: aspects of this. Talk about the technology, talk about the
Speaker 1: surveillance implications, talk about the visions these people have. But
Speaker 1: I think that this has been these episodes have been useful,
Speaker 1: and like here's what Mark thinks is coming. Here's what
Speaker 1: Facebook is pouring like ten billion dollars into it's dumbest shit,
Speaker 1: have a nice day podcast. All right, Well I've done
Speaker 1: my job for the day. Wow, you've even by our standards.
Speaker 1: That's a that's an intro, that's actually thank you. This
Speaker 1: is of course it could happen here a show about
Speaker 1: how things aren't going so great, kind of falling apart,
Speaker 1: crumbling a bit, but also maybe things could be better.
Speaker 1: That would be nice. Let's try and do that. Today
Speaker 1: is one of the maybe things could be better episodes.
Speaker 1: And we are talking about the ongoing wave of strikes.
Speaker 1: We had Strike Ober last month with John Dear strikes
Speaker 1: and and and strikes uh and like what it a
Speaker 1: couple of different food companies, a bunch of strikes um.
Speaker 1: And today we would like to get an update on
Speaker 1: all the motherfucker's who were out there striking for better
Speaker 1: conditions UM and and better treatment UM. And today, for
Speaker 1: that purpose, we've brought on the Great Kim Kelly. Kim.
Speaker 1: You are a journalist who focuses a hell of a
Speaker 1: lot on labor. You've been up and down to some
Speaker 1: of the coal strikes that have been going on. You
Speaker 1: were there for the Amazon attempt to form the union
Speaker 1: in um O GS was that Arizona, um Alabama, Alabama?
Speaker 1: UM And you're writing a book on the history of
Speaker 1: labor um in the United States. So I'd like to
Speaker 1: just kind of turn the floor over to you. There's
Speaker 1: a four. There's okay, there's a four. It is filthy,
Speaker 1: just as it AADs up. You know, we're doing our best,
Speaker 1: aren't we. Yeah? Weird, Yeah you are, we are not.
Speaker 1: I am I'm trying to keep up with all this
Speaker 1: labor action. It's exciting action, hot labor action, some hot
Speaker 1: labor action stories. So, as you mentioned, we're just kind
Speaker 1: of coasting off of the peak of Striketober, which was
Speaker 1: such a fun thing to kind of see explode in
Speaker 1: the mainstream consciousness. Like usually labor stories, they are a
Speaker 1: big deal with the people that are involved in them
Speaker 1: and people in the labor world who are watching and
Speaker 1: like rooting for them, but they don't necessarily end up
Speaker 1: on like you know, the mainstream like that. Theyn't end
Speaker 1: up on the TV. They don't end up with like
Speaker 1: fancy old guys talking about it on dateline or whatever.
Speaker 1: But that's something that happened, and I think there's been
Speaker 1: a real shifting consciousness that is the company that And
Speaker 1: of course you know, it's like Strictober is fun. There's
Speaker 1: all these these big strikes happening at the same time.
Speaker 1: But we of course need to remember that that didn't
Speaker 1: happen in a vacuum. There's people on strike now who
Speaker 1: have been on strikes since before, since before it was cool, right,
Speaker 1: since much earlier. Like shout out to the st Vincent
Speaker 1: nurses in Massachusetts and to the coal miners in Brooke
Speaker 1: with Alabama Warrior Men who have both don on strike
Speaker 1: for over eight months and then kind of right so
Speaker 1: literally like they're like they're in the middle of their
Speaker 1: tour drives for their children because they've been on strike
Speaker 1: for so long, and they kind of got a little
Speaker 1: bit left out of the conversation around strike Tober and
Speaker 1: I think that just kind of shows that we need
Speaker 1: to be paying attention even when it's not as flashy
Speaker 1: or new or exciting. I mean, strikes were was exciting,
Speaker 1: but you know, there's a lot going on and one
Speaker 1: of the things I think is interesting and important, especially
Speaker 1: as we head into strikes giving, which I guess we're doing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: strikes giving strike Smiths, strike in time, thank you, Ary.
Speaker 1: I guess to day forth strike you Lily, Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it gets worse really until we get to Labor
Speaker 1: Day and by then Striker's Day. That one works pretty well.
Speaker 1: I'm also a fan of strike and Town's Day, um
Speaker 1: strike and tized Day. That's cute. Rage baby, keep this going, Yeah,
Speaker 1: strike strike, there's a missed opportunity there. Although that that
Speaker 1: frightens me Garrison that the band ween might go on
Speaker 1: strike and I don't know society we do, we wouldn't
Speaker 1: have our we would we would be completely out of ween,
Speaker 1: our reserves if we aren't going to last long if
Speaker 1: they stop friends. Yeah, there's been a tragic shortage of
Speaker 1: ween for years now. I don't know that we can
Speaker 1: handle a stripe. You can. I mean, I didn't realize
Speaker 1: you were a nerd, Robert. This is kind of throw
Speaker 1: some things into question. Yeah, yeah, I mean, as a
Speaker 1: heavy metal dirtbag, I'm like contractually obligated to make say
Speaker 1: things like that. But as I was pontificating a minute ago, right, So,
Speaker 1: as we go into strikes giving, there are still more
Speaker 1: big strikes on the horizon and potentially strikes in the horizon.
Speaker 1: But part of the story that I think is also
Speaker 1: very energizing and important is the organizing that's happening in
Speaker 1: the new unions that are hopefully gonna end up being formed,
Speaker 1: not necessarily as a result of this wave of attention,
Speaker 1: but they're kind of caught up in the tide. I mean,
Speaker 1: we look at the Starbucks workers in Buffalo who have
Speaker 1: scared the ship out of their employers to the point
Speaker 1: where they're flying executives in to follow them. Around the
Speaker 1: store and be like, please don't vote for reunion. We
Speaker 1: need all of our billions of dollars we can't share.
Speaker 1: Or you know, even workers at wire Cutter who are
Speaker 1: threatening to strike on Black Friday and their whole thing
Speaker 1: is telling people what's stuff to buy, you know, and
Speaker 1: McDonald's workers, and I think ten different these are ten
Speaker 1: different cities or ten different states, ten different locations just
Speaker 1: went out on like a one day strike over sexual
Speaker 1: harassment in the workplace. Kroger workers are taking a strike
Speaker 1: authorization vote in Texas. We have multiple Amazon organizing attempts
Speaker 1: happening in Staten Island, and a rerun of the election
Speaker 1: coming up in Best for Alabama, and there's just so
Speaker 1: much happening that, you know, I hope that the novelty
Speaker 1: idea of the strikes wild word strikes giving. I hope
Speaker 1: like that was fun. But I hope now that people
Speaker 1: are paying attention, that they stay interested and realize that,
Speaker 1: you know, labor stories. Maybe it's not necessarily always like
Speaker 1: a big strike or like a cool picket line to
Speaker 1: look at, but there's a lot going on. Like every
Speaker 1: story is a work story, every story is a labor story,
Speaker 1: and people seem like they're finally catching on the fact
Speaker 1: that you know, we're all workers and wow, cool things
Speaker 1: happen when we come together. Yeah. I I hope that too,
Speaker 1: and I hope that, um, you know the word on
Speaker 1: everybody's lips, who's I don't know. Coming at this from
Speaker 1: kind of a little bit of a more uh, either
Speaker 1: radical or desperate point of view, depending on how you
Speaker 1: want to frame it. Is like general strike, general strike,
Speaker 1: and you know, there's there's been some there's been people
Speaker 1: online who keep saying like, Okay, well we're all just
Speaker 1: gonna go on on Black Friday, everybody general strike And
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, well you don't. You don't set that
Speaker 1: up on Twitter. Like the unions that are striking now
Speaker 1: have strike funds and put a lot of thought into
Speaker 1: it and have like had to take there's things you
Speaker 1: have to do in order to not irresponsibly like just
Speaker 1: screw over a bunch of working people. Um. But it
Speaker 1: is like, I'm a believer in the potential of something
Speaker 1: like a general strike to to force significant concessions. I mean,
Speaker 1: if we did it right, Yeah, I think if. I
Speaker 1: mean it's a huge if because it's never really effectively
Speaker 1: been like there's been pieces of it done, like we saw.
Speaker 1: I think the closest we've gotten in like my lifetime
Speaker 1: has been when the the airline workers threatened to go
Speaker 1: on strike over the over the budget thing, and you
Speaker 1: just saw the federal government go, oh fuck, nope, you
Speaker 1: know what, we can actually pass this thing. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's the thing like that threat that I think that
Speaker 1: was Sara Nelson said that even like hinted towards that
Speaker 1: in twenty nineteen when the government shutdown. That's sort of
Speaker 1: that was a tipping point. I think that's the first
Speaker 1: time people, well really was probab the first time in
Speaker 1: many people's lifetimes that an actual labor leader with that
Speaker 1: platform had even mentioned those words. Because general like general
Speaker 1: strikes historically kind of are more situated in that late
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, early twentieth century like labor swinging its stick
Speaker 1: around era, and we've been kneecapped so much that that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel as as possible. But I mean the fact
Speaker 1: that she said, and she was part of the airline industry,
Speaker 1: if we're ever going to actually you know, bring capital
Speaker 1: to its knees, we're gonna need the transportation workers. We're
Speaker 1: gonna need the dock workers. We're gonna need to like
Speaker 1: actually analyze who is moving things around the country, who's
Speaker 1: making sure things work, and how can we get them
Speaker 1: to put down to down their tools and be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: we're gonna do something about this. You know, the whole
Speaker 1: general strike idea, I mean, I mean and arguably, like
Speaker 1: one of the first ones was you know, Black reconstruction.
Speaker 1: They the book, there's uh this argument that the first
Speaker 1: general strike was enslaved enslaved people leaving the plantations and
Speaker 1: withdrawing their labor from that situation, like that was a
Speaker 1: form of striking. And I think the general strike is
Speaker 1: kind of a morphous idea, especially online as more people
Speaker 1: learn about labor and learn about it. But there's also
Speaker 1: like kind of a specific thing like yeah, you can't
Speaker 1: just declare like Okay, we're all not going to go
Speaker 1: to work tomorrow, like cool, But there's so much planning
Speaker 1: that goes into it to make sure that people are
Speaker 1: able to do that and sustain that. And the people
Speaker 1: that are traditionally you know, already left out or the
Speaker 1: most vulnerable and marginalize like that their needs are prioritized
Speaker 1: because the people that can afford to declare general strike
Speaker 1: and not show up for a week, Like that's all
Speaker 1: well and good for them, but what about everyone else
Speaker 1: who can barely afford to go to work at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I've had these arguments with people online, and it's often like, well,
Speaker 1: you're saying we shouldn't be like, if we just do it,
Speaker 1: people will figure it out, like the infrastructure will be
Speaker 1: build after the fact. And I'm like, that's I'm glad
Speaker 1: that you're in a situation where you feel like you
Speaker 1: could you could handle that kind of uncertainty. But like
Speaker 1: a single mother of four who relies on her job
Speaker 1: to keep them fed and alive, isn't going to be
Speaker 1: like someone will figure out how to feed my kids, Like, well,
Speaker 1: that's not how people work, you know. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: where having like a robust commitment to mutual aid and
Speaker 1: strike funds and like an actual fabric, like having the
Speaker 1: fabric of community where you can depend on your neighbors
Speaker 1: instead of never talking to them, Like a general strike
Speaker 1: would have a huge impact, but on who, Like who
Speaker 1: would it hurt more if you didn't plan it properly,
Speaker 1: if you didn't have if you didn't have an actual
Speaker 1: grassroots network of people ready to help if you didn't
Speaker 1: need to understanding that not everyone can just go run
Speaker 1: off in the streets. Some people like have mobility issues,
Speaker 1: some people have children, some people are older or sicker. Like,
Speaker 1: there's so much that goes into it. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: your car is fucked up and you know you need
Speaker 1: to take it in to get some stuff fixed, or
Speaker 1: it's eventually going to break down entirely. But that doesn't
Speaker 1: mean the right solution to just get in there and
Speaker 1: start hitting ship with a hammer like you need there
Speaker 1: needs to be like some systemic way you approach it right,
Speaker 1: Like there's a proper way to fix an engine, right,
Speaker 1: and we can do that, Like we can start building
Speaker 1: those networks. We can start you can organize your workplace
Speaker 1: and plug into the into like the organized labor framework,
Speaker 1: which obviously has many flaws, not as radical as I
Speaker 1: would and many other people like it to be, but
Speaker 1: they know how to do this ship. Like, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of different pieces that can be pulled together, different
Speaker 1: organizations and populations that need to work together if we're
Speaker 1: actually going to accomplish something like this, And I don't
Speaker 1: know if people are ready to put in all that
Speaker 1: work because it's more fun to tweet. Yeah, but I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: as they say in Alabama, bless their hearts. You're you're
Speaker 1: spending a tremendous m emman, as you just noted, You're
Speaker 1: spending a tremendous amount of time on the ground with
Speaker 1: a lot of these people talking with them. Are you
Speaker 1: are you seeing kind of how how are you hearing
Speaker 1: them talk about the other strike efforts you know, in
Speaker 1: other industries that are going on right now, because it
Speaker 1: has been more in the news than it's been at
Speaker 1: any point I can recall on the recent past, And
Speaker 1: I'm wondering how in places like Bessemer, you know, in
Speaker 1: places like um you know that coal miners strike you've
Speaker 1: been at, like, how are they being are to what
Speaker 1: extent are they talking about other strike efforts? Like is
Speaker 1: that does that seem to be something that there's a
Speaker 1: lot of kind of consciousness and discussion about or is
Speaker 1: it just kind of in the background. I mean, it
Speaker 1: really depends. I like you said, I've spent I spent
Speaker 1: most of my time with the coal miners over the
Speaker 1: past years. I've been writing a book and that's been
Speaker 1: my one, my one fun thing. But I've been I mean,
Speaker 1: I talked to them every single day. And I've been
Speaker 1: to Alabama lots of times, and I you know, I'm
Speaker 1: in a group chaut with the wives, Like I know,
Speaker 1: I have a decent grasp what's going on. And honestly,
Speaker 1: the thing about is that some there, there are some
Speaker 1: folks who are very engaged and who have made twitters
Speaker 1: and they have their Facebook groups and they do pay
Speaker 1: attention is happening, and I do think they feel that
Speaker 1: kind of excitement and that wide spread says its solidarity.
Speaker 1: But one thing there that's important to remember, especially for
Speaker 1: workers who are already disadvantaged or the dealing with low
Speaker 1: wage labor, is like it's really hard to go on strike,
Speaker 1: Like there's a lot of ship they have to figure out,
Speaker 1: Like there's kids, there's health issues, there's how am I
Speaker 1: going to pay my rent? Like like funds are great,
Speaker 1: but they don't cover everything. Like I think that's one
Speaker 1: of the realities that maybe it gets sort of glossed
Speaker 1: over because we're also online and we like to you
Speaker 1: and me, it feels like, oh, everyone's fucking stoked about
Speaker 1: these strikes. But for someone in rural Alabama who is
Speaker 1: just hoping this strike is over soon, so they can
Speaker 1: go back to work and have some financial stability. They're
Speaker 1: not necessarily reading your tweets or like signing up for
Speaker 1: webinars or even paying attention to like cool other strike efforts.
Speaker 1: I'm sure some some folks are aware and they find
Speaker 1: have that time to plug in, but most people are
Speaker 1: just trying to get by. And these are folks who
Speaker 1: are spend like eight hours a day on the picket
Speaker 1: lines and there's no cell phone service out where their
Speaker 1: picket lines are, Like, there's only so much that a
Speaker 1: normal regular worker on the picket line can do to
Speaker 1: keep up. Yeah, and um, you came into this, I
Speaker 1: think unlike a lot of the people who are who
Speaker 1: are actually striking, you came into this with a lifelong
Speaker 1: history of the like of interest in kind of uh
Speaker 1: labor justice movements and whatnot, which I don't think most
Speaker 1: people who are in unions necessarily spend a ton of
Speaker 1: time studying the last hundred years of labor relations. Um,
Speaker 1: what has surprised you? Like? What what have what? What
Speaker 1: is like been a new realization that you've gotten since
Speaker 1: you started covering the stuff on the ground in this
Speaker 1: most recent period. So the thing that's really sticks with me,
Speaker 1: and I'm going past my minors again because that's you know,
Speaker 1: my where where the most familiarity. But something that I
Speaker 1: think has so much potential, and I'm not going to
Speaker 1: entirely sure how to articulate what that potential is. But
Speaker 1: so something I have seen is when this strike began,
Speaker 1: most not all, but the majority of the folks involved
Speaker 1: in this particular strike, or conservative Christian people who were
Speaker 1: a lot of voted for Trump, but a lot of
Speaker 1: them were like just in that world, maybe not like
Speaker 1: you know, wild mega people, but that's just what was
Speaker 1: the norm where they are in their community, and they
Speaker 1: will think about that much. But there are some people
Speaker 1: that I've seen, especially those were involved in the mutual
Speaker 1: aid efforts or have been who have seen Birmingham DSA
Speaker 1: come out, who have kind of taken this kind of
Speaker 1: like wider review of what's happening, how they fit in.
Speaker 1: I've seen their politics and their perspective shift, Like there
Speaker 1: are some people who are like straight up socialists now
Speaker 1: that seven months ago would have probably spit in your
Speaker 1: face or at least given you a hell of a
Speaker 1: look if you wouldn't even suggested such a thing. And
Speaker 1: this is a small sample size, and this is a
Speaker 1: unique situation, but I think it really speaks to the
Speaker 1: potential there to like reach people who are very ideologically
Speaker 1: politically different from what we maybe think of as labor,
Speaker 1: people as progressive, radical whatever people on like our team, right,
Speaker 1: But the power of the strike and the power of
Speaker 1: labor is that there is so much there. There's kind
Speaker 1: of an inherent calm and ground because so many people,
Speaker 1: most people, a lot of people, most people have a job,
Speaker 1: a lot of people hate their boss. You can kind
Speaker 1: of build from that very very low baseline and find
Speaker 1: more common ground and kind of you can you can
Speaker 1: work towards a better understanding. Like maybe you're not going
Speaker 1: to be best friends, but you can potentially shift someone's
Speaker 1: harmful worldview by exposing them to new ideas once they
Speaker 1: trust that you're not just there to tell them they're
Speaker 1: wrong and stupid and bad. Were like, look, we were
Speaker 1: coming at this like I'm going to talk to you
Speaker 1: like a person. I understand we see the world differently,
Speaker 1: but like you know, I'm here to support you. I'm
Speaker 1: here listening to you. Maybe you could listen to what
Speaker 1: I have to say too, Maybe it might change how
Speaker 1: you see things. And sometimes it works. Yeah. Yeah, um
Speaker 1: you know what else works kim blowing shut up? Well
Speaker 1: okay allegedly um minecraft. Yeah. I was gonna say cap ads,
Speaker 1: cap adalisms, ads and services. Um, but I like your
Speaker 1: answer better. So let's just let's just let's just roll
Speaker 1: out with that material support, right. Like another concrete example there,
Speaker 1: the Birmingham DSA has been very active in fundraising and
Speaker 1: showing up and just providing support for the miners and
Speaker 1: and the people on strike. And this is not necessarily
Speaker 1: a population of people that like the idea of socialism,
Speaker 1: whatever idea of it is that they hold, because Fox
Speaker 1: News and russal In Barre are big cultural stand bias there,
Speaker 1: like whatever they think socialism is. And then have a
Speaker 1: bunch of socialists show up and just practice solidarity and
Speaker 1: mutual aiding practice socialism, and they're like, oh, these guys
Speaker 1: are great, thank you for coming out and things like that,
Speaker 1: where it's like, I feel like so much of radical
Speaker 1: politics in various, you know, various tendencies. There's just like
Speaker 1: a branding problem and there's a propaganda problem on the
Speaker 1: right wing, and the mainstre media is tell anybody what
Speaker 1: anything means, Like, yeah, it's a broader conversation, right, But
Speaker 1: I felt for a while like one of the things
Speaker 1: that leftist organizers need to get better at doing is
Speaker 1: being willing to like drop names when they're not productive. Like, Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe these people because of the media environment, they've grown
Speaker 1: up and are never gonna want to consider themselves socialists.
Speaker 1: But if they are willing to organize together and support
Speaker 1: the efforts of other working people to organize together against
Speaker 1: the capital holding class, like then okay, Like what is it?
Speaker 1: Why do you need them to like start quoting Karl
Speaker 1: Marx or is it just cool that you've you've got
Speaker 1: them doing what they like? Yeah? I I that makes
Speaker 1: a lot of sense to me that, like, yes, some
Speaker 1: that you can get a lot of these people on
Speaker 1: board with again, pretty radical things if you're if you're
Speaker 1: kind of approaching it from within their world, from within,
Speaker 1: like I'm not trying to talk to you about burning
Speaker 1: down the system. I'm trying to talk to you about
Speaker 1: how you get what you need. And it just so
Speaker 1: happens that how you get what you need um is
Speaker 1: taking the system on in a very direct way. I Mean,
Speaker 1: so many ideas that are painted as radical just like
Speaker 1: aren't like that's normal people caring for him, like it
Speaker 1: is like community care and common sense. It's just been
Speaker 1: politicized to this insane extent. And even it's like I'm
Speaker 1: just like even like a lot a lot of the
Speaker 1: tenants of mutual aid you can even see pop up
Speaker 1: in a lot of like church communities as well, at
Speaker 1: least like at least like smaller, you know, closer knit
Speaker 1: like communities that are actually based around helping each other.
Speaker 1: At least I was I've observed that and a lot
Speaker 1: of my time traveling across the States. Yeah, absolutely, that's
Speaker 1: a huge part of it. Like the church is the
Speaker 1: only mutual aid option in so many like smaller and
Speaker 1: more icely rural communities or just communities where the church
Speaker 1: is a big deal. Like there's always ways to chip
Speaker 1: away these institutions and eventually hopefully burned them down right
Speaker 1: without alienating people and making them feel like you're coming
Speaker 1: in and telling them everything you believe is wrong and
Speaker 1: actually and I'm making a mistakes. And of these folks,
Speaker 1: I'm sure they believe things that are absolute garbage. And
Speaker 1: I would never do everybody, you know, like there's you know,
Speaker 1: but there's there's just covering this strike in particular has
Speaker 1: really just taught me a lot about the gray areas
Speaker 1: in between, not in like I wish you watched a
Speaker 1: liberal way, but just in a way of like, how
Speaker 1: do you relate to normal fucking people who see the
Speaker 1: world differently but are in ultimately the same struggle as you? Like,
Speaker 1: maybe I could, I mean going down there on the
Speaker 1: only time I've been around that many Trump supporters was
Speaker 1: like at protests where I was yelling at them, or
Speaker 1: like at my family dinners. So I wasn't you know,
Speaker 1: I wasn't expecting to make friends, but then I did,
Speaker 1: and I think hopefully we've we've shifted each other's perspectives
Speaker 1: a little bit in a way that's beneficial. I don't know,
Speaker 1: it's been, It's been interesting. Yes, talking to people really
Speaker 1: is a lot different than tweeting at them. Yeah, as
Speaker 1: a rule, don't tweet would be my recommendation to people.
Speaker 1: Never never, Yeah, talk to your neighbors and be nice
Speaker 1: to people when you buy coffee or food from them,
Speaker 1: and amaze what happens. And yeah, tell your neighbors, Hey,
Speaker 1: I'm taking my phone down to the river to throw
Speaker 1: it in. Can I take your phone with me? Can
Speaker 1: we just all throw our phones in the river? Um, yeah,
Speaker 1: if you want to. If you're gonna start at being
Speaker 1: the weird neighbor, it's a strong start. We've already killed
Speaker 1: the water system, so it's fine, like just right in
Speaker 1: the river with the car batteries. You know, they're good
Speaker 1: for the eels. The thing I love about our show
Speaker 1: is just the hope, is the incredibly hope injected optimism
Speaker 1: that we start an end every episode with. But no,
Speaker 1: I mean like me, like, yeah, the more people you
Speaker 1: know in your community, especially people who are like working class,
Speaker 1: you know, when bad stuff starts happening, the more people
Speaker 1: you know the better, because that's a lot of guessing.
Speaker 1: A lot of a lot of these people who are
Speaker 1: like you know, like like like like old like old
Speaker 1: union workers. They have a lot of like physical skills,
Speaker 1: like like they know how to do a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of stuff. And it might be worth getting to know
Speaker 1: some of those people, even if you know, depending where
Speaker 1: you live, like yeah, they'll probably say something not great
Speaker 1: at least for you know, the first bit, but once
Speaker 1: you know, I have a lot of family and like
Speaker 1: a rural area of Alberta, and like yeah, my, my
Speaker 1: family is like pretty gay. Um. So you know, once
Speaker 1: you're in close to those people, yeah, they're they're gonna
Speaker 1: say something that's maybe not great. But once they get
Speaker 1: to like know, you would really be like, oh, like
Speaker 1: you're another person. They like people actually, you know, people
Speaker 1: want to be around other people, and they'll even change
Speaker 1: the way they talk to be like, oh, yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: this isn't the best way to hang out around people
Speaker 1: because it's going to drive people away. So yeah, I'll
Speaker 1: change the way I say some things because like it
Speaker 1: turns out people actually, like a lot of a lot
Speaker 1: of folks just kind of want to make their lives
Speaker 1: a bit better and that's really their main focus. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's hard to know to do that. And it's it's
Speaker 1: it's just this man or of like so much of
Speaker 1: what um, so much of what kind of the way
Speaker 1: that discourse happens online has poisoned aspects of activism is
Speaker 1: in like making it difficult for people to relate in
Speaker 1: that way without feeling like, well, okay, but if I
Speaker 1: can't get them on board with all of these other things,
Speaker 1: like I can't talk with them or whatever, like because
Speaker 1: they're because they don't agree with this and this like
Speaker 1: we can't organize like the purity of ideology. Yeah, Like
Speaker 1: I feel like most people who aren't terminally online don't
Speaker 1: even necessarily have like a specific ideology not yeah yeah right,
Speaker 1: Like there's just stuff that they have learned or they
Speaker 1: have decided that is true about the world. They just
Speaker 1: kind of go with it and interrogated all the time,
Speaker 1: and you can like those are people you can talk
Speaker 1: to and maybe ship, like I've done it with my dad,
Speaker 1: Like I've seen it happen with some of these conservative
Speaker 1: coal minor folks. Like even something as small as being
Speaker 1: able to humanize, like like okay, if you're talking about
Speaker 1: something like, well the thing you said, like that really
Speaker 1: upset Joey and you like Joey, so like maybe think
Speaker 1: about that, and they'll probably be chiller because like, oh,
Speaker 1: well that's yeah, it's Joey. I can't I don't want
Speaker 1: to be a dick to them. If we can just
Speaker 1: find a way to enact that on a very broad scale,
Speaker 1: life would be a lot better for a lot of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's this, It's this dichotomy between a lot people want
Speaker 1: to own the folks they see as like being against
Speaker 1: them or being on the other side. But also people
Speaker 1: don't want to be a dick to people that like
Speaker 1: they like, you don't want to feel like you're a dick.
Speaker 1: So if you if you lean more into the weird
Speaker 1: in opposition, then you're going to trigger the well I
Speaker 1: wanna I want to make the person who disagrees with
Speaker 1: me angry side of the brain. But if you can
Speaker 1: lean into the like, hey, like we can get along,
Speaker 1: like and I and and maybe you don't want to
Speaker 1: feel like an asshole if we get along, then I
Speaker 1: don't know, that's a productive place to to continue conversations
Speaker 1: from and a good way to shift people. And then
Speaker 1: when you're then when your area floods because of severe
Speaker 1: rain and storms, that we have people that can help. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's the importance of interacting with people in person, like offline,
Speaker 1: which is like obviously more difficult to do because we're
Speaker 1: still tried to depend. Yeah, they're like their caveat, caveat caveat,
Speaker 1: but like it's so much easier to talk to someone
Speaker 1: and kind of like see the world you shift or
Speaker 1: even just humanize yourself to someone who is inclined to
Speaker 1: not thinking of you as someone worth talking to. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: as long as it's not you're not putting yourself in danger,
Speaker 1: like there's yeah, obviously I'm a blond lady, you know.
Speaker 1: But yeah, still we're not talking about like, oh, you
Speaker 1: have to go be friendly to people who want to
Speaker 1: murder you because your trance. No, it's about No, we're
Speaker 1: not saying that. But most of these people don't think that.
Speaker 1: Maybe they have some regressive attitude or or they'll use
Speaker 1: the word gay to mean something, you know, not cool,
Speaker 1: and you'd be like, hey, you don't have to be like, hey,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm you know, I'm actually gay jan or
Speaker 1: maybe don't hope with that. Maybe you depending on the situation,
Speaker 1: to be like yeah, maybe maybe there's other words that
Speaker 1: we can use for this, because yeah whatever, Yeah, And
Speaker 1: and you can shift people into a closer alliance, um,
Speaker 1: just by becoming a human in their eyes and also
Speaker 1: letting them become a human in your eyes, um, which
Speaker 1: is necessary. The other option is not a pleasant one.
Speaker 1: So I would prefer the option where more people grow
Speaker 1: to see each other as human and worth supporting. Right,
Speaker 1: I know there is better tactic to me. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: know there's this argument where like no one is like
Speaker 1: I shouldn't have to educate you. I shouldn't have to
Speaker 1: put the time into to shift you, and like that
Speaker 1: is valid, that's fair, Like you shouldn't have to but
Speaker 1: ideally know, yeah, but if you want to that change
Speaker 1: to happen, it's probably not going to happen unless she
Speaker 1: puts an effort in because they're probably not gone acual.
Speaker 1: They think they're fine, And I don't know, there's a
Speaker 1: bunch of ship that you shouldn't have to do that
Speaker 1: we're also all gonna have to do Like I shouldn't
Speaker 1: we I shouldn't have to say, hey, guys, maybe we
Speaker 1: don't kill the ocean. Maybe killing the ocean is a
Speaker 1: bad idea, like I shouldn't have to No one should
Speaker 1: have to say that, but we do not please the
Speaker 1: fact that you shouldn't have to do something also doesn't
Speaker 1: mean that like the thing doesn't need to be done.
Speaker 1: And obviously I don't think that the primary onus on
Speaker 1: speaking to let's say, the kind of increasingly radicalized white,
Speaker 1: lower middle and middle class, I don't think that falls
Speaker 1: primarily on people of color, on on the LGBT community.
Speaker 1: It falls on people like you and make Kim. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but it's still has to be done. Like it's a
Speaker 1: thing that needs to be done. And I'm not saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you out there, who you know, left where you grew
Speaker 1: up in rural Alabama because someone was going to fucking
Speaker 1: murder you and you had to get to a place
Speaker 1: where you could not deal with that. I'm not saying
Speaker 1: you need to go rolling back to Alabama. Um, but
Speaker 1: it's good that people are talking and working with and
Speaker 1: trying to build connections with folks out there and change
Speaker 1: the nature of kind of aspects of the culture and
Speaker 1: make things better because that needs to be done. We
Speaker 1: can't just be like, well fuck some of those people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and we get that that is definitely easier if you
Speaker 1: are like one of the bros. If you are you know,
Speaker 1: a bigger SIS adjacent dude, that is that is of
Speaker 1: course going to make things easier. Yeah, I mean what
Speaker 1: you think about like that's kind of the text, that's
Speaker 1: the right word. But the fact that you do feel
Speaker 1: comfortable and you're you're safe and you're not under a
Speaker 1: threat in those spaces because of who you are, like
Speaker 1: as like a white SIS or even a white says
Speaker 1: lady like you like the price you pay for that
Speaker 1: is making it easier for everyone else to feel that too,
Speaker 1: Like exactly, like that's your job, other people's jobs to survive,
Speaker 1: and you can be the one that pushes the boundaries
Speaker 1: on these things. So when someone says something not great,
Speaker 1: you can kind of call them out in like a
Speaker 1: browish way, and they can respond to that a lot
Speaker 1: better than, you know, than a lot of other people
Speaker 1: who they don't know, you know, screaming at them in
Speaker 1: a no context scenario. We're like, oh, like, oh, you don't.
Speaker 1: I'm like, I'm a pretty lady. You don't want to
Speaker 1: make me upset by being rude, that's exactly, yeah, Like
Speaker 1: you shouldn't. You should see this thing as rude and
Speaker 1: not okay, like the amount of men who have apologized
Speaker 1: me down there for swearing it's so funny. Yeah, man,
Speaker 1: my dude, I live in Philadelphia, But that's cute. But
Speaker 1: if I could dis harness any of that, like chivalrous
Speaker 1: whatever patriarchal viewpoint, like, hey, apply this to being cool
Speaker 1: to my trans friends, are like not being rude to
Speaker 1: anyone else, Like sure, I'm down. Yeah, we don't take
Speaker 1: kindly to miss gendering around these parts. Yeah, for a
Speaker 1: lot of people at least, like you know, when I
Speaker 1: worked at like smaller workplaces, you know, where it's like
Speaker 1: a small business where I know the owner. Even if
Speaker 1: I mean, if some other employees want to unilize, the
Speaker 1: prospect is always kind of more weird or challenging because
Speaker 1: you know, it's a smaller business. Maybe it's like connected
Speaker 1: to like a larger you know, larger overall industry. You know,
Speaker 1: like when I was like when I when I was
Speaker 1: like a park or instructor, right, I had discussions with
Speaker 1: other with other like employees about doing you know, like
Speaker 1: a park or instructors union type thing. But but it's
Speaker 1: it's it's hard when there's there's like not many of
Speaker 1: you or like you know the owner. What would you
Speaker 1: say is like good good ways to at least get
Speaker 1: get that conversation going among other employees and then you know,
Speaker 1: like similar similar examples from other stuff for people who
Speaker 1: deal with like smaller workplaces that aren't you know, like
Speaker 1: a coworker. They're not working for the Amazon or anything.
Speaker 1: You know, it's it's more like small local stuff, right. So,
Speaker 1: like the most important basic building block of of all
Speaker 1: this is one on one conversation that's organizing, right, and
Speaker 1: even if you just work with like three or four
Speaker 1: other people and maybe unionizing and a formal structure doesn't
Speaker 1: necessarily make sense or it seems like it might be
Speaker 1: too much of a headache, you're still you know, like
Speaker 1: a group of workers coming together. It's still a union.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter what n l r B has to
Speaker 1: say about it. And you you have shared interests and
Speaker 1: share challenges, and there's things that work you probably want
Speaker 1: to change, so even coming together and discussing that with
Speaker 1: your coworkers, like, there's no law that says you have
Speaker 1: to be in a union. If you want to get
Speaker 1: some ship done, you can march on your boss at
Speaker 1: WW style and make them and demand a meeting. You
Speaker 1: can make a petition, you can do public pressure campaigns
Speaker 1: like all of the things, not all of them, but
Speaker 1: a lot of the tools that we see organized labor
Speaker 1: engaging in and unions engaging in those are those are
Speaker 1: available to everyone else too. It's easier if you're within
Speaker 1: that framework because you have that firepower behind you, and
Speaker 1: you have maybe some legal protections, but just as workers,
Speaker 1: you know, I guess it's more like the IWW solidarity
Speaker 1: uneuse a multiply where like we didn't like, we don't
Speaker 1: need to do no stink ad badges, like we're a
Speaker 1: union because we say we're a union, we're going to
Speaker 1: take control of things in our own way. Like you
Speaker 1: see this in UM. I'm trying to say, I think
Speaker 1: what's it called diversity threast there's a there's a thrift
Speaker 1: shopping I think Richmond, Virginia where workers just like they
Speaker 1: weren't being treated properly. I think it was like a
Speaker 1: like a queer community space that wasn't living up to
Speaker 1: its values due to actions by management, and so they
Speaker 1: just put a letter on the doors that we're not
Speaker 1: coming to work until you fix this. Here are clear demands,
Speaker 1: here's what we need here, you go figure it out.
Speaker 1: Like I don't think they're in a formal union, but
Speaker 1: they're acting collectively, and that's something that is totally available
Speaker 1: that to everyone as long as you're in a workplace.
Speaker 1: If you're independent contractor like me and probably some of you,
Speaker 1: that sucks and it's harder, but you can always find
Speaker 1: your people and you can always there's always options, right,
Speaker 1: Like you don't have to just join at union. You
Speaker 1: don't have to be a teamster to get shipped done. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you know, when you were saying that, I
Speaker 1: was going through my past experience as a place like that.
Speaker 1: I'm like, yeah, we we kind of did do some
Speaker 1: of that stuff to varying degrees of success. Sometimes it
Speaker 1: works out well, sometimes it doesn't work out so well. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, I mean there was definitely a while where
Speaker 1: we did that did definitely makes them make some decent
Speaker 1: changes kind of based on on that model. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: kind of a shift of perception where like you were
Speaker 1: just doing this because this is because you're a worker,
Speaker 1: and like we need to do this. But if you
Speaker 1: just take a step back and think, but it's like
Speaker 1: this is a labor action, We're a union of workers.
Speaker 1: Like even just that little shift where it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's always us against them, but look as us as
Speaker 1: a little as a group, as a collective against this manager,
Speaker 1: against this exploitative practice. I think that has a little
Speaker 1: bit of power and a little bit of energy because
Speaker 1: your religion now and I'm still I think maybe it
Speaker 1: makes you feel a little less alone. And also and
Speaker 1: like you know, concerned activity is a legally protective regard too,
Speaker 1: so like there are some busin pieces of labor law
Speaker 1: that are useful in these situations too, if you have
Speaker 1: a nerdy friend who would like to read about them
Speaker 1: for you. All right, well I think that's going to
Speaker 1: do it for us here and it could happen here.
Speaker 1: Um until next time, remember, um, you fuck it organized?
Speaker 1: And where can people find Kim Kelly online? If we
Speaker 1: want to send angry tweets? Oh well just try me
Speaker 1: buddy at grim Kim because my college radio DJ name
Speaker 1: will never die. And uh you can if you are
Speaker 1: thus inclined, you can pre order my book. But like hell,
Speaker 1: the Untold History of American Labor on the internet hopefully
Speaker 1: not Amazon, hopefully not. Yeah. I mean if you do, like,
Speaker 1: thank you, But there's other places that are better. You
Speaker 1: Do you want people to send you a bunch of
Speaker 1: random knives Kim knives? I mean I wouldn't. We've had
Speaker 1: a lot of luck with that in the past. I
Speaker 1: like nice that, like skincare, I like loose leaf tea.
Speaker 1: I contain multitudes. Really, send Kim a loose leaf t
Speaker 1: skincare knife, one of those one of those exfoliating knives
Speaker 1: with a with a t infuser in the in the hilt.
Speaker 1: Somebody make that great. Sounds like that, sounds like the
Speaker 1: next behind the Bastards merch. Yeah, the t Knife. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: we'll put that out after we get finished where We've
Speaker 1: got a very exciting Black Friday product this year, which
Speaker 1: is a male to mail uh an adapter. People say
Speaker 1: you shouldn't do it, They say it causes electrocution and
Speaker 1: fires and death, And I think those people are cuts
Speaker 1: um by our mail to mail adapter show the the
Speaker 1: woke establishment that you won't be you won't be changed. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here, this is it could happen here to
Speaker 1: show about how things are falling apart and how maybe
Speaker 1: they could be made a bit better. Right now, today
Speaker 1: we're doing an episode that is based on a I
Speaker 1: don't know essay Garrison wrote and I edited that we
Speaker 1: think you'll find interesting. So here it goes. Green capitalism
Speaker 1: promises to deliver us all the same luxuries and commodities
Speaker 1: that we enjoy today, but without doing net harm to
Speaker 1: the biosphere. It's the message liberal elites try to hold
Speaker 1: on when they make their case for being better stewards
Speaker 1: of the environment than Republicans. This is not untrue, but
Speaker 1: it's also not true enough to stop your house from
Speaker 1: flooding or your town from being incinerated in a hell storm.
Speaker 1: When it comes to the methods green capitalism posits by
Speaker 1: which we might reverse course without changing the direction of
Speaker 1: the ship, one term you'll here often is energy efficiency.
Speaker 1: I want to read a statement I found on white
Speaker 1: House dot gov, a fact sheet on the new US
Speaker 1: government commitment to reduce carbon emissions by fifty to fifty
Speaker 1: I should note that's fifty of the two thousand five levels,
Speaker 1: which were like fiftcent high or something like that. Anyway,
Speaker 1: here's the quote. The United States can create good paying
Speaker 1: jobs and cut emissions and energy costs for families by
Speaker 1: supporting efficiency upgrades and electrification and buildings. Through support for
Speaker 1: job creating retrofit programs and sustainable affordable housing, wider use
Speaker 1: of heat pumps and induction stoves, adoption of modern energy
Speaker 1: codes for new buildings. The United it States will also
Speaker 1: invest in new technologies to reduce emissions associated with construction,
Speaker 1: including for high performance electrified buildings. Now, energy efficiency is
Speaker 1: in fact a fine goal, and trying to reduce emissions
Speaker 1: is broadly good. But the sad and kind of weird
Speaker 1: fact is that increasing efficiency can sometimes mean increasing pollution
Speaker 1: through what's known as the efficiency paradox, which is of
Speaker 1: course the title of the episode, because what you want
Speaker 1: you want us to think of a second title, of
Speaker 1: a separate title from that. Come on. So, first off,
Speaker 1: what does energy efficiency mean? In general terms? Energy efficiency
Speaker 1: refers to the amount of output that can be produced
Speaker 1: with a given input of energy. Output being stuff that
Speaker 1: energy is used to do, like like your house, or
Speaker 1: wash your clothing, or power your wall mounted twenty volt
Speaker 1: vibrator that requires as much electricity as an arc welder
Speaker 1: in order to use. Energy savings are the reduction of
Speaker 1: energy use without the loss of output produced. Improved energy
Speaker 1: efficiency is exped to bring a number of benefits. First
Speaker 1: of all, reducing energy usage should result in lower energy bills. Ideally,
Speaker 1: reduced energy demand also means that energy imports can be decreased.
Speaker 1: The International Energy Agency has estimated that strict efficiency policies
Speaker 1: could allow the world to achieve more than forty of
Speaker 1: the greenhouse gas emissions cuts needed to reach its climate
Speaker 1: goals even without new technology. So there is considerable wiggle
Speaker 1: room within the existing structures of global society to reduce
Speaker 1: emissions a lot without fancy space technology but despite substantial
Speaker 1: energy efficiency gains in the past few decades and decreases
Speaker 1: an output from places like the United States, we as
Speaker 1: a species are using more energy than we have pretty
Speaker 1: much forever, and emissions wildly surpass are or the Earth's
Speaker 1: ability to handle them. Quoting from the Global Carbon Project quote,
Speaker 1: global energy growth is outpacing decarbonization. Despite positive progress in
Speaker 1: twenty countries whose economies have grown over the last decade
Speaker 1: and their emissions have declined, growth and energy from fossil
Speaker 1: fuel sources is still outpacing the rise of low carbon
Speaker 1: sources and activities. A robust global economy in sufficient emission
Speaker 1: reductions and developed countries in a need for increased energy
Speaker 1: use in developing countries where per capita emissions remain far
Speaker 1: below those of wealthier nations, will continue to put upward
Speaker 1: pressure on CEO two emissions. They use the term developing
Speaker 1: UM and developed We don't prefer those. But obviously population
Speaker 1: growth contributes to all that, the growth and the use
Speaker 1: of energy and the emissions of carbon um. You know,
Speaker 1: more people, more cars in the road, whatever, But it's
Speaker 1: not really the primary factor that's adding onto the increase
Speaker 1: in energy use for the human race. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: that later, though for now, it's important to note that
Speaker 1: the full potential energy savings, like in these kind of
Speaker 1: hypotheticals about how much could be saved by improving efficiency,
Speaker 1: are usually estimated by assuming that demand for energy services
Speaker 1: will remain unchanged after energy efficiency gains. So when they
Speaker 1: say that we can get the greenhouse emissions, gases gas
Speaker 1: reductions we need by increasing efficiency, they're doing that assuming
Speaker 1: that nothing will change about our overall energy use when
Speaker 1: we make things more efficient. But time and time again
Speaker 1: we see that once products are made more energy efficient,
Speaker 1: people often end up consuming, producing, or even using more
Speaker 1: of the thing, which makes the potential savings less meaningful
Speaker 1: in a net result. Doesn't mean that it's not a
Speaker 1: net good, but it's not as much as is often
Speaker 1: calculated in these climate proposals. You can see this demonstrated
Speaker 1: on the job. If you're in say food services, if
Speaker 1: you happen to figure out how to do a task faster,
Speaker 1: your boss probably isn't gonna let you use that extra
Speaker 1: time to just chill out and do stuff on your phone. Um.
Speaker 1: What is the phrase, if you can lean, you can clean? Um?
Speaker 1: So if you do something faster, now, You're just expected
Speaker 1: to do it faster all the time and output more
Speaker 1: total work for your boss. This is the paradox of efficiency,
Speaker 1: and it applies to energy as well. On a societal level,
Speaker 1: Increased energy efficiency is a double edged sword, having the
Speaker 1: potential to help cut emissions by a significant factor um
Speaker 1: and having the potential to increase our total energy use
Speaker 1: depending on what is made more efficient and how people
Speaker 1: react to it. The idea that energy efficiency improvements can
Speaker 1: actually lead to more overall energy use goes all the
Speaker 1: way back to the start of the Industrial Revolution. In
Speaker 1: eighteen sixty five, economist William Stanley Jeevens published a book
Speaker 1: called The Coal Question, in which he argued that innovation
Speaker 1: and efficiency, particularly in the case of the coal powered
Speaker 1: steam engine, would actually increase the overall consumption of coal,
Speaker 1: rather than reducing it as it had been intended to do.
Speaker 1: His prediction that efficiency improvements on steam engines would lead
Speaker 1: to massive economic expansion accelerating coal consumption was very much correct.
Speaker 1: This idea, then dubbed the Jeevens paradox, is still very
Speaker 1: much worth considering when we discuss efficiency gains and policies
Speaker 1: that are meant to reduce energy consumption and thereby fight
Speaker 1: climate change. In modern terms, we described the process by
Speaker 1: which potential energy savings can be cut by greater use
Speaker 1: of the energy efficient product as the re bound effect.
Speaker 1: There are two different kinds of rebound effects observed, the
Speaker 1: most obvious of which is dubbed the direct rebound effect.
Speaker 1: Direct rebounds are observed when improvements and energy efficiency for
Speaker 1: a particular energy service reduces the effective price of that
Speaker 1: service and thus provides incentives to increase its demand. This
Speaker 1: leads to the overall increased efficiency, not equaling to a
Speaker 1: reduction energy use as as you might think. Direct rebounds
Speaker 1: are observed when improvements and energy efficiency for a particular
Speaker 1: energy service reduces the effective price of that enough that
Speaker 1: it provides incentives to increase its demand. You may upgrade
Speaker 1: to a more energy efficient appliance, but because of the
Speaker 1: lower energy costs, you'll use the appliance more often and
Speaker 1: thus use more total energy. Or in some cases, energy
Speaker 1: efficiency gains are cut by the fact that more efficient
Speaker 1: products allow people to use more of that product. For example,
Speaker 1: someone may get a more efficient fridge that's also much larger,
Speaker 1: and so even though it cools more efficiently, it's also
Speaker 1: consuming overall, more energy, transportation has a lot of direct rebounds.
Speaker 1: Despite massive fuel efficiency gains in recent years, transportation is
Speaker 1: still responsible for twent of global greenhouse gas emissions. Transportations
Speaker 1: contribution to global warming is quickly increasing, with travel producing
Speaker 1: greater and greater percentages of the planet's carbon footprint. Private
Speaker 1: automobile tailpipes will drive this phenomenon for the foreseeable future,
Speaker 1: as the number of active vehicles on the road is
Speaker 1: projected to grow from seven hundred million in the year
Speaker 1: two thousand to two billion byt So, even though cars
Speaker 1: are a lot more efficient, vastly more cars are being used.
Speaker 1: And of course that's not entirely. It doesn't mean that, like,
Speaker 1: more efficient cars cause people to buy more cars, but
Speaker 1: it does make it more affordable for more people to
Speaker 1: own cars and to drive them further, which drives up,
Speaker 1: you know, fuel use and drives up emissions. And you
Speaker 1: see how the whole problem works. And it's not just cars.
Speaker 1: When planes became more fuel efficient, ticket prices decrease and
Speaker 1: more people started to travel by plane. As cost per
Speaker 1: mile dropped, more miles were flown. The fact that airplane
Speaker 1: has got more fuel efficient didn't reduce general pollution by
Speaker 1: the air travel industry quite to the contrary. In fact,
Speaker 1: the decreased emissions led to an increase in air travel,
Speaker 1: which shot a hell of a lot more poison out
Speaker 1: into the sky and also gave us eat pray love.
Speaker 1: So the other kinds of rebounds are indirect rebound effects.
Speaker 1: This refers to when energy efficiency leads to monetary savings
Speaker 1: for a producer or consumer, who then can spend those
Speaker 1: extra savings on other carbon emitting goods and services that
Speaker 1: otherwise they couldn't afford. For example, you buy a more
Speaker 1: fuel efficient car, you save money on fuel, and you
Speaker 1: went up with extra funds in your bank account that
Speaker 1: you can use on a vacation, and maybe you take
Speaker 1: a flight on that vacation. So in the end, you
Speaker 1: emit more c O two despite the fact that you're
Speaker 1: emitting less c O two through your car. You've got
Speaker 1: five bucks extra in the bank and you fly to
Speaker 1: Mexico on it. Right, that's an indirect rebound effect. So
Speaker 1: even if a product is replaced by a more efficient
Speaker 1: one with similar spects, lower energy bills can mean that
Speaker 1: more consumers will have more money to spend on goods
Speaker 1: and services. This is generally seen as desirable from a
Speaker 1: social and economic standpoint, and probably from an individual standpoint.
Speaker 1: Having more money is always useful UM, but it involves
Speaker 1: additional energy consumption means that you're consuming more, you're emitting
Speaker 1: more UM, and so the savings and whatnot have it
Speaker 1: actually led to a savings in terms of you know,
Speaker 1: from an environmental perspective. An analysis of EU data shows
Speaker 1: that out of twenty nine EU countries, eleven experienced rebound
Speaker 1: effects of over fifty, which means more than half of
Speaker 1: the gains in energy efficiency were consumed by increases in
Speaker 1: energy use. Six of those countries, including Denmark in Finland,
Speaker 1: reached over rebound effects. This is called a backfire, and
Speaker 1: it means that in those six countries, extra energy spending
Speaker 1: overtook all of the efficiency gains achieved. Air Conditioning and
Speaker 1: heating are large contributors to both direct and indirect rebounds.
Speaker 1: A rebound effect as large as sixty has been shown
Speaker 1: in increased improvements and efficiency in the residential heating sector,
Speaker 1: which is something that the White House specifically quote about
Speaker 1: in their paper. In China, long term rebound effects ranging
Speaker 1: from forty six percent to fifty six percent for residential
Speaker 1: electricity consumption in Beijing have been estimated. All of this
Speaker 1: data casts doubt on the wisdom of relying on energy
Speaker 1: efficiency policies to reduce energy demand. I'm gonna quote here
Speaker 1: from a report by the Copenhagen School of Energy Infrastructure.
Speaker 1: In recent decades, large increases in demand for energy services
Speaker 1: have globally driven energy consumption. As a counterbalance, energy efficiency
Speaker 1: has become a key energy policy mechanism to tackle higher
Speaker 1: energy consumption and emissions, and countries and regions have adopted
Speaker 1: different targets and policies to achieve energy and environmental objectives.
Speaker 1: The main goals of these policies are to minimize the
Speaker 1: dependence on fossil fuels and mitigate local air pollution and
Speaker 1: g h G emissions. This has been particularly relevant for
Speaker 1: the energy intensive sectors. The development and deployment of more
Speaker 1: efficient technologies are, along with more technology management, the main
Speaker 1: channel to achieve these environmental and energy objectives. However, energy
Speaker 1: efficiency improvements can lead to changes in the demand for
Speaker 1: energy services, changes that offsets of the expected energy savings. Consequently,
Speaker 1: forecasts of energy consumption reductions may be overstated, as evidenced
Speaker 1: by the empirical literature. Rebound effects can be a non
Speaker 1: negligible issue. Therefore, ignoring them can imply an overestimation of
Speaker 1: the benefits coming from energy efficiency improvements. This can in
Speaker 1: turn lead to decisions such as the overallocation of public
Speaker 1: funds to ineffective environmental and energy policies. Policy Makers need
Speaker 1: to take rebound effects into account for air quality, energy security,
Speaker 1: and climate change policy reasons. A rebound effect different from
Speaker 1: zero implies that the expected proportional reductions and emissions from
Speaker 1: fuel efficiency improvements might not be achieved. Therefore, the policy
Speaker 1: goals to reach specific levels of emissions through fuel efficiency
Speaker 1: enhancements may need to be adjusted accordingly. Again, we have
Speaker 1: nothing against the idea of making more efficient devices. The
Speaker 1: point is that energy efficiency can't be pursued in a vacuum.
Speaker 1: It has to coincide with changes to a less extract
Speaker 1: of cancerous mindset regarding the Earth's resources and carrying capacity.
Speaker 1: Just telling someone you can drive more for less money,
Speaker 1: or you can afford to keep your TV on all
Speaker 1: the time doesn't really help anything. My fear is that
Speaker 1: governments and corporations the neoliberal leviathan, as we've come to
Speaker 1: call it on this show, will focus almost overwhelmingly on
Speaker 1: energy efficiency to maintain economic growth and obscure the overall
Speaker 1: lack of action on stopping carbon emissions. Think Joe Biden
Speaker 1: doing donuts in an electric jeep through such a lens
Speaker 1: as the Biden administration. Energy efficiency is a foil to
Speaker 1: climate change is a charade being used to keep relentless
Speaker 1: economic growth. Feud is a net good. It plays into
Speaker 1: the myth that will be able to mitigate, adapt, and
Speaker 1: survive the effects of climate change with little to no
Speaker 1: change to our current lifestyles. What we need to do
Speaker 1: is decouple human well being from energy consumption and consumption
Speaker 1: in general to effectively combat climate change. This needs to
Speaker 1: happen at such a scale that advocating for individual changes
Speaker 1: in lifestyle will never be enough, but that is still
Speaker 1: a significant part of the puzzle. The trick comes and
Speaker 1: getting people to accept the fact that their life will
Speaker 1: need to change without them telling them and buying this
Speaker 1: product instead of that product is how you do it.
Speaker 1: That said, populations of people can and do change their
Speaker 1: behaviors in pretty profound ways. In nineteen fifty, abortion was
Speaker 1: not at all an issue for the religious right. Resistance
Speaker 1: to abortion might make some Protestants distrust you because that
Speaker 1: was seen as a Catholic concern. Now abortion is the
Speaker 1: defining political issue of the ascendant right. Their promise to
Speaker 1: destroy it is the rock upon which their titanic power
Speaker 1: is based. In a less calamitous sense, since two thousand seven,
Speaker 1: we've gone from a time in which smartphones were expensive
Speaker 1: trash for rich people to buy, to today when they're
Speaker 1: expensive trash that every human being who can afford to
Speaker 1: has to carry at all times because they're so utterly
Speaker 1: integrated to our daily life. So yes, people can change.
Speaker 1: A bigger challenge, though, will be to change the mindset
Speaker 1: of industry, which is not entirely or even often driven
Speaker 1: by consumer demand. As we've seen with the release of
Speaker 1: papers proving Chevron and other oil and gas companies knew
Speaker 1: about and deliberately hid research on climate change for decades.
Speaker 1: Big capital will put its thumb on the scale every
Speaker 1: step of the way. In other words, if you come
Speaker 1: at the behemoth that is the integrated industrial economy, you'd
Speaker 1: best come correct. How do we do that? Well, if
Speaker 1: anybody really knew, they would have, you know, done it
Speaker 1: by now. The human infrastructure of extract of capitalism is
Speaker 1: deep and vast and tightly woven into the structure of
Speaker 1: every government with any real power. So, with the full
Speaker 1: understanding and admission that we aren't claiming to have solutions
Speaker 1: to that problem, let's talk about something that will at
Speaker 1: least be part of any real solution to the problem.
Speaker 1: D growth. This is a term will explain in more
Speaker 1: detail later, but we mean it's simply as a holistic
Speaker 1: approach to encouraging reduction and energy consumption and global environmental justice.
Speaker 1: A paper on the Jeevens paradox and the Link between Innovation,
Speaker 1: efficiency and sustainability for the Frontiers and Energy Research concluded
Speaker 1: quote the Jevens paradox and tales that sustainability problems cannot
Speaker 1: be solved by technological innovations alone. They must be solved
Speaker 1: through institutional and behavioral changes. While there are still differences
Speaker 1: of opinion about the scale every bound effects and ongoing
Speaker 1: arguments about the macro and micro and longer and shorter
Speaker 1: term consequences of efficiency, our interest in this topic today
Speaker 1: is driven by the goal of improving how we use
Speaker 1: energy rather than totally overhauling or abandoning efficiency. One example
Speaker 1: would be the current fight in Europe over smartphone chargers.
Speaker 1: Most of the rest of the smartphone industry worldwide has
Speaker 1: jumped onto USBC. Is the right kind of port for charging,
Speaker 1: etcetera with your device. Before this point, those of you
Speaker 1: have been using smartphones for a decade or we'll remember,
Speaker 1: there were tons of different charges and thus a tons
Speaker 1: of different waste. Every phone had to come with a
Speaker 1: new charger. A lot of them wound up in the
Speaker 1: trash that has been reduced by everyone jumping onto USBC.
Speaker 1: But Apple continues to use their own special charger, and
Speaker 1: now the EU was promising to make a law to
Speaker 1: mandate USBC for charging new phones in an attempt to
Speaker 1: reduce waste. This isn't again a bad thing, but if
Speaker 1: someone's really concerned with waste among the smartphone industry, planned
Speaker 1: obsolescence is the thing to go after. Now. Targeting planned
Speaker 1: obsolescence stopping it includes a number of things, and for
Speaker 1: one thing, you have to fight for the right to
Speaker 1: repair devices, which is something that a number of corporations,
Speaker 1: not just in the smartphone industry, have lobbied to in
Speaker 1: some cases make illegal. More than that, it's stopping somehow
Speaker 1: these companies from making the conscious decision to brick old
Speaker 1: technology to increase profits, and that aspect of it is
Speaker 1: the bigger enemy than even the right to repair. As
Speaker 1: electronic device has become common and more sectors of daily
Speaker 1: life via the Internet of Things, the overall share of
Speaker 1: global energy use that goes to making new versions of
Speaker 1: old products that could still be working but are designed
Speaker 1: to break is is really quite depressing. For one example
Speaker 1: of how large it must be, I haven't found any
Speaker 1: solid information on the total size of this industry things
Speaker 1: that you have to repeatedly re buy because they're meant
Speaker 1: to break, But the mobile phone industry and two thousand
Speaker 1: nineteen alone was four point six percent of global GDP,
Speaker 1: So that's close to five percent of global GDP just
Speaker 1: from making owns that are designed to break so you
Speaker 1: have to buy a new phone. This is an example
Speaker 1: of an area in which people's perspectives have to be changed.
Speaker 1: And I think actually that digital fatigue, the fact that
Speaker 1: we're also fucking exhausted with these devices these days, may
Speaker 1: provide somewhat of an inroad for convincing people that they
Speaker 1: need to buy new gadgets less often. But because these
Speaker 1: gadgets are so crucial to daily life, the industry actually
Speaker 1: also has to be forced to change. And again, rite
Speaker 1: repair is one part of this, but that doesn't stop
Speaker 1: Apple from just deciding to throttle their old devices whenever
Speaker 1: they need to add a new layer to the money pile.
Speaker 1: Our overall point with all this is that solutions to
Speaker 1: climate change have to be cultural and not just based
Speaker 1: in some version of will invent a better version and
Speaker 1: that will solve the problem. Hybrid gas burning cars and
Speaker 1: standardized charging chords are nibbling around the edges of the problem.
Speaker 1: Relying on technological advances pacifies us in the present, and
Speaker 1: it reinforces the need for certain types of human material codependence,
Speaker 1: and that kind of codependence leads to increased dependency and
Speaker 1: more extraction. By no means am I trying to say
Speaker 1: that innovation is bad. I love gadgets as much as
Speaker 1: the next person. Innovation also has the capacity to heavily
Speaker 1: decreased resource extraction. It just has to be tailored with
Speaker 1: something more than just will make this device more efficient
Speaker 1: so we can use it more or sell more of them.
Speaker 1: The capitalist mode of mass resource extraction and grind for
Speaker 1: efficiency are intertwined, and if we are to limit the
Speaker 1: most catastrophic effects of climate change. We as a culture
Speaker 1: need to rethink how we view efficiency and energy use.
Speaker 1: For the past few hundred years, economic growth has been
Speaker 1: the road that has led to our current ecological dilemma.
Speaker 1: The fantasy of switching over to nuclear and renewable energy
Speaker 1: with a perfectly efficient electric grid to just sidestep climate
Speaker 1: collapse is it's a fantasy. We missed our chance to
Speaker 1: do that. Even if we stop all carbon emissions right now,
Speaker 1: all of them, the carbon already in the atmosphere would
Speaker 1: push us past two degrees celsius of warming in about
Speaker 1: fifty years. So what besides carbon capture can we do
Speaker 1: about this? We as in both you, the regular listener,
Speaker 1: and the goals with power and real influence. Well. The
Speaker 1: two thousand eighteen International Panel and Climate Change Special WORKPORT
Speaker 1: indicated that in the absence of speculative negative emissions technologies,
Speaker 1: the only feasible way to remain within safe carbon budgets
Speaker 1: was for high incombinations to actively slow down the pace
Speaker 1: of material production and consumption. D growth is the planned
Speaker 1: reduction of energy use, corporate profits over production, and excess
Speaker 1: consumption designed to bring the economy back into balance with
Speaker 1: the living world in a way that reduces inequality while
Speaker 1: focusing on human and ecological well being. This isn't just
Speaker 1: some sort of utopian Marxist thinking, and in fact, a
Speaker 1: lot of Marxists have critiques of deep growth, and deep
Speaker 1: growth could be applied to a number of different economic
Speaker 1: and governmental systems. There are even some weirdo capitalist advocates
Speaker 1: of de growth. Discussion about solving climate change can get
Speaker 1: into uncomfortable eugenics e territory if you aren't careful, So
Speaker 1: I should emphasize here that d growth is primarily about
Speaker 1: already wealthy countries limiting their economic growth. When aggregated in
Speaker 1: terms of income, the richest half of the world, high
Speaker 1: in upper middle income countries, amid eighty six percent of
Speaker 1: global CO two emissions, the bottom half lower and middle
Speaker 1: income countries amid only fourteen percent. With very few exceptions,
Speaker 1: the richer than nation is, the more it emits. It's
Speaker 1: all part of the resource extraction infinite growth lie we
Speaker 1: tell ourselves to keep going. Wealth is so much more
Speaker 1: of a factor in emissions than population. North America is
Speaker 1: home to only five percent of the world population, but
Speaker 1: amids nearly eighteen percent of c O two. Asia is
Speaker 1: home to sixty percent of the world's population, but AMIDST
Speaker 1: just forty nine percent of CO two. Africa has sixteen
Speaker 1: percent of the population, but emids just four percent of
Speaker 1: its c O two. This is reflected in per capita emissions.
Speaker 1: The average North American AMIDST seventeen times more than the
Speaker 1: average African. This inequality in global emissions lies at the
Speaker 1: heart of why international agreement on climate change has and
Speaker 1: continues to be so contentious. The richest countries in the
Speaker 1: world are home to half the world pop relation and
Speaker 1: emit eighty six percent of c O two. We want
Speaker 1: global incomes and living standards, especially for those of the
Speaker 1: poorest half of the world, to rise. The only way
Speaker 1: to do that while limiting climate change is to shrink
Speaker 1: the emissions of high income countries. Even several billion additional
Speaker 1: people in low income nations would leave global emissions almost unchanged.
Speaker 1: Three or four billion poor individuals would only account for
Speaker 1: a few percent of global c O two. At the
Speaker 1: other end of the distribution, however, adding only one billion
Speaker 1: high income individuals to the wealthiest parts of the world
Speaker 1: would increase global emissions by almost a third. A programmer
Speaker 1: in the United States has a higher c O two
Speaker 1: footprint than fifty farmers in Uganda. A decent chunk of
Speaker 1: this is just due to meet consumption. Meet consumption per
Speaker 1: capita in the richest fifteen countries is seven fifty percent
Speaker 1: higher than in the poorest twenty four countries. Lowering the
Speaker 1: population of say Uruguay won't do much for emissions. This
Speaker 1: is not the case when you talk about wealthy nations.
Speaker 1: In fact, if you live and say the United States,
Speaker 1: possibly the biggest thing you was an individual could do
Speaker 1: to reduce emissions is to have fewer or no children.
Speaker 1: It's estimated that dedicated recycling curbs about point three metric
Speaker 1: tons of c O two emissions per year, while having
Speaker 1: one fewer child is equivalent to preventing over fifty eight
Speaker 1: tons of c O two emissions a year. Better sex, said,
Speaker 1: and free access to contraceptives could also go a shockingly
Speaker 1: long way to curbing individual emission in wealthy countries, these
Speaker 1: numbers are averaged across a whole nation, and just like
Speaker 1: the case in less wealthy countries, the impact on emissions
Speaker 1: by having one fewer kid will be far lesser if
Speaker 1: your middle class or poor than it would be if
Speaker 1: your upper middle class are rich, but of course, none
Speaker 1: of that is going to be enough if industrial production
Speaker 1: keeps chugging along and advising people not to have children,
Speaker 1: one of the singular driving motivations for human beings across
Speaker 1: history isn't exactly a vote getter of a proposition. D
Speaker 1: Growth is critical, but the question of how to get
Speaker 1: there is thorny as hell. There are a few easy answers.
Speaker 1: Abolishing planned obsolescence could be pretty easily pitched to the
Speaker 1: average person. Cutting down on the number of people who
Speaker 1: have to commute could have a significant impact on toxic
Speaker 1: car culture, and again you can sell that to people.
Speaker 1: The obvious solutions are good places to start, but they
Speaker 1: should be seen as opening incisions, meant to clear the
Speaker 1: way to make deeper, more expansive cuts and eventually Hugh
Speaker 1: Away at the cancer we've planted in the heart of
Speaker 1: our civilization. Uh, it's could it's happened? Could hear? Robert
Speaker 1: Evans the podcast that is now begun? Um, this is
Speaker 1: a show about how things are falling apart and occasionally
Speaker 1: how to hot to maybe deal with that, maybe you
Speaker 1: try to steer things in a better direction. We talk
Speaker 1: about a bunch of stuff today. We're gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about more supply line um um stuff. And and in
Speaker 1: order to kind of introduce this episode, we wanted to
Speaker 1: bring in Alexis, who posted a right on Twitter about
Speaker 1: some of their experiences in the industry in which they
Speaker 1: work that that we all found very interesting. And so
Speaker 1: we just wanted to bring Alexis on and uh and
Speaker 1: and first off, have you kind of go over what
Speaker 1: what you went over in that threat and then um
Speaker 1: kind of zero win and talk about that. So Alexis,
Speaker 1: welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna let you take it from here and then
Speaker 1: we'll we'll drill in once you once you get through
Speaker 1: your your piece, all right, So I'm just going to
Speaker 1: go ahead and read the thread that I posted and
Speaker 1: then yeah, we'll go from there. Uh. So, labor shortage
Speaker 1: discourse time. I work for a food manufacturing company, specifically
Speaker 1: bottling and canning various beverages, and we are desperately understaffed.
Speaker 1: The wages are competitive, but they can't keep anyone on
Speaker 1: after they hire them. Why, because we're short on people.
Speaker 1: As soon as someone is trained, they start throwing massive
Speaker 1: amounts of mandatory over time on them to try and
Speaker 1: cover the missing pieces while they look for more people
Speaker 1: to hire in. Folks get burned out and quit. And
Speaker 1: this is where my hate of justin time manufacturing comes in. Obviously,
Speaker 1: in food manufacturing, you can't just stock a warehouse with
Speaker 1: stuff and let it sit for a year, but you
Speaker 1: can keep a couple of weeks worth stock rotating at
Speaker 1: all times if you devote the warehouse space, employees, et
Speaker 1: cetera to doing so. This would give you some flex
Speaker 1: time to train your new people without having to run
Speaker 1: everyone into the dirt. So, even with a place that
Speaker 1: is offering decent money and benefits, because this is a
Speaker 1: union shop, we can't keep people because we're making a
Speaker 1: conscious decision to only ever have one to two days
Speaker 1: of stock on hand to increase profits. Meanwhile, thanks to
Speaker 1: lean manufacturing, we don't keep a ton of spare parts
Speaker 1: for our equipment on hand. Thanks to the supply chain
Speaker 1: just disruption, We've got packaging equipment that's been waiting on
Speaker 1: replacement parts for six months, which further fox our productivity
Speaker 1: doomed to downtime, which makes the company's schedule even more
Speaker 1: overtime to try and make up for the lost cases
Speaker 1: from equipment downtime, which burns out more employees, which puts
Speaker 1: us in an even deeper labor hole. I've been warning
Speaker 1: about justin time being a time bomb in the making
Speaker 1: for over a decade now. When it works perfectly, you're fine.
Speaker 1: A single interruption causes cascade effects. And since everyone has
Speaker 1: been doing the just in time thing, there's zero slack
Speaker 1: anywhere in the system. Grocery stores don't have any extrasoda
Speaker 1: in the back, they get behind demand builds up. Distribution
Speaker 1: doesn't have any pallets in the warehouse what warehouse, so
Speaker 1: they can't answer the surgeon demand from grocery stores. Manufacturing
Speaker 1: doesn't have spare parts for aging equipment, so we can't
Speaker 1: boost production. Spare parts makers don't have stock build up,
Speaker 1: so on and on it goes. The actual approximate cause
Speaker 1: of this is deregulation of capitalism that is incentivized quarterly
Speaker 1: profits and made long term thinking anathema to CEOs. But
Speaker 1: share conservatives blame California for not letting old trucks offload
Speaker 1: at the ports. That's it, and that's that's the essence
Speaker 1: of my thread. I then plug my podcast at the end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I wanted to. I'm curious as to kind of like,
Speaker 1: uh to what I'm trying to understand, Like what the
Speaker 1: solution is. Like we've talked a bit about Okay, justin
Speaker 1: tie manufacturing is is problematic for a lot of reasons. Um,
Speaker 1: keeping more like on the shelves is going to allow
Speaker 1: you to avoid these crunches, and it's going to like
Speaker 1: make supply line issues like the ones we've experiencing since
Speaker 1: the start of the COVID pandemic less severe and less common. Um,
Speaker 1: But how do you actually how do you actually make
Speaker 1: that happen? Because I guess the traditional free market thing
Speaker 1: is that like, well, because this has been such a
Speaker 1: problem for companies, um, you know, they'll naturally change the
Speaker 1: system in order to avoid this in the future. I
Speaker 1: don't feel like that's likely to happen. Um, And I'm wondering,
Speaker 1: like what do we uh what what what do you
Speaker 1: think is the way forward here? Well, because some of
Speaker 1: the problem is right now, like most most companies, you
Speaker 1: will pay taxes on stuff that you have stored in
Speaker 1: a warehouse things like that. UM, So no company is
Speaker 1: going to voluntarily lower their profit margins if the other
Speaker 1: companies don't do it themselves as well. So really there's
Speaker 1: going to have to be some sort of forcing of
Speaker 1: companies to uh have that on hand. And I don't
Speaker 1: see just being able to write a law that says, oh, well,
Speaker 1: you're required to have this much backstock on hand, as
Speaker 1: as being a functional way to work. And really, as
Speaker 1: I'm sure you know, Robert, I know you're well aware,
Speaker 1: the capitalism itself is kind of the problem. But as
Speaker 1: far as I guess, a solution to this sort of thing, um,
Speaker 1: you would have to disincentivize the quarterly profits above all
Speaker 1: in order to force companies back into long term thinking. Now,
Speaker 1: from a purely like mechanical standpoint, um, I guess if
Speaker 1: you if you did something to incentivize companies having backstock
Speaker 1: or flex stock on on hand, that might help. But um,
Speaker 1: I mean, I'm just I'm just a cog in the
Speaker 1: machine getting ground up. So as far as like big solutions,
Speaker 1: that's I mean. I've been looking at it every since
Speaker 1: I worked in a freaking casket factory and we started
Speaker 1: doing just in time there, and just every time that
Speaker 1: I've been in a place, a manufacturing place and seen
Speaker 1: it happen, I'm just like, oh, this is gonna go wrong,
Speaker 1: because you can't. You can do just in time if
Speaker 1: all of your suppliers are local, but having it stretched
Speaker 1: across the global supply chain, it just it it's inevitably
Speaker 1: going to collapse in on itself. I'm sorry that I'm
Speaker 1: not more helpful. No, no, but I mean this is
Speaker 1: this is like the problem because there's a lot of
Speaker 1: reasons why the supply chain is global. Some of them
Speaker 1: are like labor related reasons, some of them are cost cunning,
Speaker 1: some of them are just like pure pragmatism. Um. But
Speaker 1: it's trying to like I I don't I feel like
Speaker 1: it's it's one thing to say, like, well, part of
Speaker 1: the problem is that like all of these different pieces
Speaker 1: come from different countries, um. And there's a number of
Speaker 1: shady reasons for aspects of that, UM. But it makes
Speaker 1: for greater problems when there's a piline shortage and then
Speaker 1: like okay, well what are we what are we gonna?
Speaker 1: Are you suggesting that we make everything domestically because I
Speaker 1: don't feel like that's a realistic solution. Um. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: it's like it's just it's I'm trying to get a
Speaker 1: handle on there's a couple of angles on this there's
Speaker 1: there's what we think is going to happen, um, And
Speaker 1: then there's a question of like, is there a way
Speaker 1: that the system as it exists could make this whole
Speaker 1: thing less vulnerable? And and a lot of ways that's
Speaker 1: going to be separate from the question of what would
Speaker 1: be better for everyone to happen, because a lot of
Speaker 1: what would be better for everyone to happen is a
Speaker 1: white A significant chunk of these things that we have
Speaker 1: constantly stocked on the shelves are no longer parts of
Speaker 1: our life, right. Um, there's a lot of things that
Speaker 1: are made that we do not need and that are
Speaker 1: there's an environmental cost and a show social cost and
Speaker 1: YadA YadA, YadA um. But I guess first I'm kind
Speaker 1: of curious to drilling in, like how realistic do you
Speaker 1: think it is that the system as it exists is
Speaker 1: going to like mitigate this and come up with better
Speaker 1: ways to to do this that render us less vulnerable
Speaker 1: to the supply crunches? Like is there I don't see
Speaker 1: a great financial incentive in it for them yet, um,
Speaker 1: because they don't seem to be hurting, right, Like that's
Speaker 1: that's the thing? Well actually, and and again, please keep
Speaker 1: in mind this is limited anecdotal evidence. Yeah, because it's
Speaker 1: gonna be definitely John Deer, I know, was making record
Speaker 1: profits before all the this union stuff happened. But like,
Speaker 1: that's not everyone, right. So again, I work for a
Speaker 1: soda manufacturer. So every time you're in you know, enjoying
Speaker 1: your your Schmetzy Schmola or your or your Schmago whatever whatever,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to explain which company I work for
Speaker 1: because I don't want to get in trouble um. And
Speaker 1: we're we're actually a captive bottler, which means that it's
Speaker 1: a separate company, but we work for the big soda corporation.
Speaker 1: I think that in certain instances those things will change, because,
Speaker 1: for example, just last week, we had one of our
Speaker 1: four lines go down of our production capacity went down
Speaker 1: because we had a motor burnout on the rollers that
Speaker 1: would move a full palette out to be picked up
Speaker 1: by a forklift, and there was no replacement motor in stock,
Speaker 1: and so we had I think forty eight hours of
Speaker 1: downtime on this. Now, all the way up at the
Speaker 1: top the company executive, you know, we're one of thirty
Speaker 1: some plants. They don't care about why it was down,
Speaker 1: just that it was down. So in our position here, um,
Speaker 1: the people a little higher up the food chain than
Speaker 1: me are insisting like, hey, we've been after you guys
Speaker 1: for months that we need spares like this. And I
Speaker 1: think that as that sort of stuff happens, as it
Speaker 1: cuts into potential future profits, you know, it's not dropping
Speaker 1: their profits, but it's keeping them from being even higher,
Speaker 1: maybe certain certain companies are going to be like, Okay,
Speaker 1: maybe we do need a couple more spares on the shelves.
Speaker 1: As far as on the production side of it, I
Speaker 1: don't see that happening. I think we're still going to
Speaker 1: be shipping out palletts of you know, pallets of corn
Speaker 1: syrup infected carbonated water as fast as we can make them,
Speaker 1: which you and you were talking about the environmental costs,
Speaker 1: like you do not want to know how much water
Speaker 1: it takes to make a single leader of soda. You
Speaker 1: really don't. Um. But on this on the production, like
Speaker 1: input side, I think that companies are going to start
Speaker 1: stocking spare parts because it has been and I still
Speaker 1: have friends who work for other companies that I used
Speaker 1: to work for. It has been all throughout the system.
Speaker 1: And I live in the Midwest. Every company is going
Speaker 1: through this where they're having huge amounts of downtime because
Speaker 1: they things as small as a gasket or an O
Speaker 1: ring are not on the shelf, and they're finally companies
Speaker 1: are finally going to listen to what their maintenance people
Speaker 1: have been screaming at them, that we can't just stagger
Speaker 1: along and then oh, well it's next day delivery. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and then you freak out that this line was down
Speaker 1: for twenty four hours now that it's not even next
Speaker 1: day delivery, it's next week delivery. I think that side
Speaker 1: of it they're going to probably try and fix. But
Speaker 1: the other side, shipping to the consumer, I really don't
Speaker 1: see that they're going to change that. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 1: that makes that makes sense, and I we are you're
Speaker 1: kind of lad thinking about this inevitably to like two conclusions.
Speaker 1: One of them is that I have my I'm sure
Speaker 1: parts of this the system will adapt, as it already
Speaker 1: has been in fact, which is why I, like you
Speaker 1: haven't seen toilet paper run out as bad as it
Speaker 1: did at the start of the pandemic. Again, right, there
Speaker 1: is a degree to which the system is capable of adjustment,
Speaker 1: but kind of in a larger sense. Um, this is
Speaker 1: number one. I'm kind of left with the feeling that
Speaker 1: because of the way the system was set up and
Speaker 1: the fact that it was disrupted so severely, it's kind
Speaker 1: of impossible to get a percent back on track, especially
Speaker 1: considering the disruptions are going to continue, not just waves
Speaker 1: of COVID, but you know, in natural disasters and whatnot,
Speaker 1: shortages of things like truck drivers, Like these different little
Speaker 1: hits are going to keep coming, and I just don't
Speaker 1: know that wherever going to like catch everywhere enough that
Speaker 1: like shortages of some sort aren't an aspect of our
Speaker 1: lives kind of forever. And this is one of those
Speaker 1: things that if you've spent a lot of time outside
Speaker 1: of the United States, that's something a lot of people
Speaker 1: have been dealing with for years. It's just not something
Speaker 1: Americans are used to dealing with. And I think I
Speaker 1: kind of feel like that's just where it is now.
Speaker 1: Like I don't feel like every aspect of our our
Speaker 1: production and consumption system is going to get back where
Speaker 1: it to where it was February. I think maybe that's
Speaker 1: never happening again. No, absolutely, it will not ever happen.
Speaker 1: You were saying earlier that you know, there's some practical
Speaker 1: reasons for the global supply chain. Like one of the
Speaker 1: things that we've had such hard time getting in is
Speaker 1: any of our concentrates that contain real vanilla. Obviously, we
Speaker 1: can't grow vanilla in the United States. Yeah, that's the
Speaker 1: thing you have to I mean, that's part of why
Speaker 1: colonialism exists, right, you need to go get vanilla. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So yeah, So, like there are certain things that are
Speaker 1: going to be stay have to stay globe if we're
Speaker 1: going to continue to make the things that we make.
Speaker 1: And just from my side of it, being able to see, oh, well,
Speaker 1: why can't we get this concentrate in, Oh because it
Speaker 1: has vanilla as an ingredient, and there's been a bunch
Speaker 1: of draughts and ship and so vanilla is in a crunch,
Speaker 1: you know that sort of thing. So I just, um,
Speaker 1: you're right in that. Yeah, we're going to have shortages.
Speaker 1: There's it's you know, and it's not just the mechanical
Speaker 1: side on ours. It's like we can't get cans in,
Speaker 1: we can't get concentrated in, we can't you know, whatever
Speaker 1: it is that we can't get in is going to
Speaker 1: slow us down and demand will build up. I did
Speaker 1: have somebody in that thread respond and say, I don't
Speaker 1: see how demand for soda will build up. And I'm like, now,
Speaker 1: I have a friend who's like a diet Dr. Pepper fiend,
Speaker 1: and as soon as diet Dr. Pepper shows up, now
Speaker 1: she buys like packs. Demand will absolutely build up for
Speaker 1: stuff when people feel like they're being deprived of something
Speaker 1: that when it becomes available, they are going to hoard
Speaker 1: it as best they can. Yeah. And that's again with soda,
Speaker 1: just kind of an annoyance. And so although that can
Speaker 1: because individual people can react in extreme ways, can snowball.
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna be surprised if one of these days
Speaker 1: we have somebody shoot up a fucking grocery store because
Speaker 1: they're whatever was out. Um. But that's also not a necessity.
Speaker 1: And I think that like the concern is that especially
Speaker 1: when you you look at stuff, like you know, there's
Speaker 1: a couple of states that had like their wheat harvests
Speaker 1: and corn harvest that were like half or less than
Speaker 1: half of normal in big chunks of a rack. It
Speaker 1: was like down by I think like seventy um. Like
Speaker 1: these massive shortages of growing basic food stuffs. Um, And
Speaker 1: that's all that's all tight into this, Like it's not
Speaker 1: the same business that you're on, but it's all tied
Speaker 1: into aspects of this, and it's all tied into like
Speaker 1: a lot of our ability to get that food out
Speaker 1: of the field is reliant upon different kinds of mechanical
Speaker 1: harvesting equipment. The materials to which to like fix and
Speaker 1: replace it are often like caught up in this whole
Speaker 1: just in time problem because they don't make enough of
Speaker 1: them and sometimes they don't have them in store is
Speaker 1: and then there's like a strike at John Deer and
Speaker 1: so more aren't getting made and so there's not what
Speaker 1: you need to repair the equipment in time to get
Speaker 1: stuff out of the field everywhere, and in a year
Speaker 1: when you already have a reduction of harvests, like that
Speaker 1: cuts down on it further. Um Like I I think,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's it's this. There's always a couple
Speaker 1: of things to look at, which is like number one,
Speaker 1: as we've talked about, like how is the system going
Speaker 1: to try to handle this? What ways are they going
Speaker 1: to be successful, what ways are they going to fail?
Speaker 1: What things are you going to have to endure? And
Speaker 1: what things I think what I want to talk about
Speaker 1: next is like what things do we need to change, uh,
Speaker 1: in order to like, as communities be more resilient to
Speaker 1: this stuff, which you know, has less to do with soda,
Speaker 1: which again is not a necessity, but more to do
Speaker 1: with figuring out how to anticipate and endure supply line disruptions.
Speaker 1: Right absolutely. And and while I'm currently in soda, I
Speaker 1: have been in everything from automotive too, I think as
Speaker 1: or casket manufacturer. So you know, when I can go
Speaker 1: through a casket a week, you know, especially when you're
Speaker 1: driving your well, yeah, when I'm drunk a boy right
Speaker 1: right through a trailer park, I mean you're you're I
Speaker 1: mean your casket order has got to be through the roof.
Speaker 1: It is it is a lot a lot of people. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean I I do actually wonder how fuck um,
Speaker 1: I mean like, I do actually wonder how much like
Speaker 1: the casket industry and something that has been affected by
Speaker 1: the by like by the pandemic with the you know,
Speaker 1: an influx of dead people, and how that's how how
Speaker 1: that's affective thinks that That's something I've been wondering about,
Speaker 1: But I have not actually spent a time looking into
Speaker 1: I can't speak to the pandemic specifically. I quit. I
Speaker 1: quit the casket industry in two thousand and eight, but
Speaker 1: I do recall my boss, the owner at the time,
Speaker 1: being very very upset that Hurricane Katrina had a lower
Speaker 1: death toll than he anticipated because she had over ordered
Speaker 1: the sheet metal to make the caskets, and he was
Speaker 1: very piste off about having all that extra stock because
Speaker 1: they were to society. Yes, yeah, that's that's good to hear. Yeah, great.
Speaker 1: He was in a bad mood for like a month
Speaker 1: after Katrina because it hadn't reached his expectations. Well, sure,
Speaker 1: that's a real problem for for absolutely, he's got that's
Speaker 1: all the sympathy, critical support. That job was grim. I'm
Speaker 1: just gonna say that that sounds like it. I I
Speaker 1: have a through a through a loved one, a connection
Speaker 1: to somebody who is like works for a company that
Speaker 1: makes body bags and was amazing for them. They did
Speaker 1: incredible in um. I didn't hear any ghoulish stories. It's
Speaker 1: just like, yeah, of course you guys made a bunch
Speaker 1: of extra money. Sounds like that was great for you,
Speaker 1: putting it putting in a mental note to go through
Speaker 1: a bunch of the campaign contributions of people who make
Speaker 1: body bags and check if they're supporting anti mess Yes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: see if Big Corpse got into this at all. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, honestly, the thing that the thing to do is,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm not a big fan the stock market
Speaker 1: in general, but next time, the next time that there's
Speaker 1: a pandemic, find out which companies make body begs on
Speaker 1: the stock market and invest in those as soon as
Speaker 1: as soon as the pandemic starts. I mean, I can
Speaker 1: tell you what I'm I'm putting money into big corps
Speaker 1: as soon as uh as soon as the next pandemic hits.
Speaker 1: That's absolutely gonna happen. Oh boy, all right, Yeah that's Graham. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's fine. There's a reason why after after
Speaker 1: I started working there, I immediately told my husband, Hey,
Speaker 1: make sure if I die before you, I'm cremated. So yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't want to give these monsters any of my money.
Speaker 1: What I what I'm looking into is just full full
Speaker 1: body stuffing that people can pose me around it. But
Speaker 1: that's a set for a topic. Yeah, you talk about
Speaker 1: that a lot, Garrison. What I did want to mention
Speaker 1: is like, actually, when you were talking about how they
Speaker 1: hire in a lot of employees and they make them
Speaker 1: more horrible hours and then they you know, they quitness
Speaker 1: is kind of a constant kind of process and like
Speaker 1: this isn't exclusive to that industry at all. Think one
Speaker 1: of the worst defenders of this is actually the Postal Service. UM.
Speaker 1: I think the Postal Service has like the lowest employee
Speaker 1: satisfaction out of any shipping company. UM. And like my my,
Speaker 1: my father, I work for the Postal Service for a bit.
Speaker 1: And when you first join up, you join as like
Speaker 1: you join as a on like a non career employee path,
Speaker 1: and then you can get promoted to a career employee
Speaker 1: path after a few years. But the turnaround for the
Speaker 1: non career employee paths is massive, Like local branches can
Speaker 1: stay after like people who start working at the Postal
Speaker 1: Service will end up quitting within the year. Now that
Speaker 1: number can be different based on nationally and for based
Speaker 1: on like you know, based on what states you're in,
Speaker 1: but but across the board, it's it's always around at
Speaker 1: least fifty for employee turnaround for people who join up
Speaker 1: the Postal Service on these like a city carrier assistant positions,
Speaker 1: it's fascinating, Yeah, because because when when you when you're
Speaker 1: a non career employee path you have to work seven
Speaker 1: days a week and you can be called into work
Speaker 1: basically any time usually working around tend to all our days,
Speaker 1: all of the career employees, so all of the sounds,
Speaker 1: but like all of all, all of like all of
Speaker 1: the regular carriers get to work like their specific route
Speaker 1: and that's it. That's their whole day. For the for
Speaker 1: the people who are new to the job, they're forced
Speaker 1: to work tons of routes um fill in whenever someone
Speaker 1: else can't, and we constantly be doing over time um
Speaker 1: and working like basically NonStop, NonStop, with only like two
Speaker 1: like only two holidays off a year or something. It's
Speaker 1: it's pretty intense, um, which is why you know, when
Speaker 1: the postal service comes have problems and because and and
Speaker 1: because there's so few there's generally not tons of employees,
Speaker 1: I mean like there is lots like comparedly like like
Speaker 1: the Postal Services one of the bigger employers in the
Speaker 1: whole country. But for people when when when employees drop off,
Speaker 1: filling those positions can be really hard in times of
Speaker 1: like crisis, So like you know last year when there's
Speaker 1: all these problems with the postal service, all of these
Speaker 1: kind of issues around the supply chain and how people
Speaker 1: treat their workers. All of them like like you know,
Speaker 1: compound to create one like much bigger problem which we
Speaker 1: saw last year with the postal service and like late
Speaker 1: in like the late summer. Um. So I've just spent
Speaker 1: an interesting how it's like, you know, these same issues
Speaker 1: around like how we treat workers is adding on to
Speaker 1: this problem of like supply chains and getting stuff delivered
Speaker 1: and all this kind of stuff. And so what what
Speaker 1: I find interesting there is so you're you know, we're
Speaker 1: talking about the employee issue and yeah, it's sure. So
Speaker 1: I've been Uh, the plant I was working in, which
Speaker 1: is twenty minutes from my house, closed down, and now
Speaker 1: I'm working ninety miles away literally an hour, and I
Speaker 1: am i am working four twelves a week, and I'm
Speaker 1: crashing at my parents house, which they live about sixty
Speaker 1: miles away. So it's a little bit better, um, but
Speaker 1: also suck. Yeah, and my parents are hard right evangelicals
Speaker 1: who do not agree with you know, so that's fun.
Speaker 1: But um, the plant that I was in was a
Speaker 1: non union plant, and the one I'm in now is
Speaker 1: a union plant, and one of the things that I've
Speaker 1: noticed that actually kind of different is for once in
Speaker 1: the non union plant, things were actually better because what
Speaker 1: we could do what what what could be done is,
Speaker 1: all right, we're all working seven days a week. We
Speaker 1: have enough staffing that if nobody calls in, we have
Speaker 1: one spare person who normally goes around and gives breaks
Speaker 1: and stuff like that. Well we could, you know, basically
Speaker 1: all take turns taking a day off during that seven
Speaker 1: day week. At the union plant that I'm at now, though,
Speaker 1: it's all seniority based, so any time that they force
Speaker 1: over time, they go from the bottom of the seniority
Speaker 1: list on up. So the people the people who are
Speaker 1: being forced into those which I described in the thread,
Speaker 1: I think it was it was split off in the thread.
Speaker 1: But the people who were being forced to stay over
Speaker 1: four hours and then come in four hours early, where
Speaker 1: you oh, you were working six to two, now you're working,
Speaker 1: you know, six to six, and then you're coming in
Speaker 1: at two in the mo runing instead of six in
Speaker 1: the morning the next day are always the people who
Speaker 1: are the lowest on the seniority list, which is same thing,
Speaker 1: same same thing with the Postal Service. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it's not there's a number of different I mean
Speaker 1: I've heard that complaint from a couple of different union gigs, um,
Speaker 1: and it's yeah, it's a problem. Yeah, and it's that's
Speaker 1: why we get these new people and they get trained up,
Speaker 1: and now they're trained and they're signed off, and then
Speaker 1: they immediately go from because when you're training, you're not
Speaker 1: you can't train on overtime or whatever. But now it's oh, okay,
Speaker 1: well now you're working every weekend, you're being forced over,
Speaker 1: you're being forced in early, just NonStop. And so yeah,
Speaker 1: they get trained for a month and then a month
Speaker 1: after that they quit because they went from working a
Speaker 1: relatively sane amount to aunt. We went fifty eight days
Speaker 1: at one point without a day off. My dad went
Speaker 1: like almost I think like three hundred days without with
Speaker 1: without a day off when he started the Postal Service.
Speaker 1: Like kind of funny thing is like when you hear
Speaker 1: the Postal Service talking with this like from the in
Speaker 1: their own reports and on their own website, what they
Speaker 1: find a problem with is not not the turnaround in
Speaker 1: and of itself, but how they're basically wasting money on
Speaker 1: trainings for people that don't end up working. It's like
Speaker 1: that is their main concern is that they're spending all
Speaker 1: this money on like training for people that don't stick
Speaker 1: around often. Um, and like, yeah, well maybe you should
Speaker 1: address why they don't stick around often. That's that seems
Speaker 1: to be kind of the actual issue here. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: what I've been pushing for, and I know this is
Speaker 1: more on the labor side than on the on the
Speaker 1: supply chain side that we were focusing on. I've been
Speaker 1: pushing for instead of three shifts where we keep just
Speaker 1: getting just hammered with this stuff, I want us to
Speaker 1: do four shifts, twelve hour days and do like a
Speaker 1: two on two off, three on three off type swing
Speaker 1: shift where you have like one shift that works. You know,
Speaker 1: you work three days one week, four days the next week,
Speaker 1: and you work twelve hour days, but really you wind
Speaker 1: up getting a bunch of days off, you know, Like
Speaker 1: that's if you're gonna work seven days a week, that's
Speaker 1: the best way to do it in my opinion. I mean, like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's there's a lot of resistance to well,
Speaker 1: well then we have to hire these extra people. Well
Speaker 1: you're hiring those people anyway. And then they're quitting. I mean,
Speaker 1: like you're not even getting your value out of them
Speaker 1: slave drivers. I mean, like you said, this is more,
Speaker 1: this is more than labor side than the supply chain side.
Speaker 1: But honestly, these are these are like the same side, right,
Speaker 1: because if you don't have employee like this is you know,
Speaker 1: this is a fundamental you know thing, and like how
Speaker 1: capitalism works, right, you need to have you know, workers
Speaker 1: to make there have be any value at all. Right,
Speaker 1: So if there's if there isn't any people to working,
Speaker 1: then there is no supply chain. It's gone. Because if
Speaker 1: we need people to do it, both on the production
Speaker 1: side and both in like the transportation side. That's like
Speaker 1: you know ups um usps, you know FedEx, you know,
Speaker 1: so like the mail carriers and stuff is very important
Speaker 1: to all of this because you you you need in
Speaker 1: order to for for there to be a supply chain,
Speaker 1: there needs to be the chain part right where you
Speaker 1: carry it from one place to to another. So it's
Speaker 1: both it's both on the production side and on the
Speaker 1: transportation side. For all these problems, you know. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: one of them one of the things that I in
Speaker 1: the replies to my thread, which I got into was
Speaker 1: that part of the the only slack in just in
Speaker 1: Time manufacturing is the employees. They've pulled all of the
Speaker 1: slack out of the system on the mechanical side and
Speaker 1: on the production side of it, on all the physical side.
Speaker 1: The only slack left is people, and they have stretched
Speaker 1: us all to the absolute breaking point. Now I'm lucky,
Speaker 1: relatively speaking in that I'm salary so like I'm more
Speaker 1: on the inventory side of things, so I'm not doing
Speaker 1: the hourly production, seven day a week thing. Like I said,
Speaker 1: I work four twelves um. But I can still you know,
Speaker 1: and that that's this job, every other previous job not
Speaker 1: the same thing. But I can still see where they've
Speaker 1: taken out. Like once again, we used to have spares
Speaker 1: on the shelf so that when something broke down we
Speaker 1: could fix the machine and keep running. Now instead of
Speaker 1: the spare, the spare is people working weekends. That's the
Speaker 1: spare part. And that makes total sense, right, You're you're
Speaker 1: the capitalist. A better spare that is a part on
Speaker 1: the shelf costs you money in terms of like you
Speaker 1: need to have that space, that's extra rent you're paying.
Speaker 1: You need to have bought that part. Having your people
Speaker 1: just killed themselves is much cheaper. You can sort of
Speaker 1: misuse the marks here, right, or like one of Mark's
Speaker 1: things is like, okay, well, you know you have you
Speaker 1: have this increased machinery. You have this increased machinery, but
Speaker 1: that means you're producing less value because you know, you've
Speaker 1: you put more people out of work. Was like, okay, well,
Speaker 1: what if what if we just we re extend the
Speaker 1: work day again and sort of you know, reverse all
Speaker 1: of the gains that have been happening. Well, okay, I
Speaker 1: say have been happening, reverse all the gains that happened
Speaker 1: between about nineteen thirty and like nineteen seventy, and just
Speaker 1: oh well, what if we just make everyone for a
Speaker 1: twelve hour days again? And that that was you know,
Speaker 1: one of that was the thing that would struck me
Speaker 1: both listening to this and reading threat, was that it's
Speaker 1: it's not even just wages, it's just it's it's it's
Speaker 1: it's just the fundamental power rebalance. And then it's a
Speaker 1: fundamental power and balance. It's gotten so bad that even
Speaker 1: like you know, the the like sometimes the remains of
Speaker 1: the union system, it's like it's not even you know,
Speaker 1: the the unions like in this particure case like this
Speaker 1: is they're not even it's not even really helping. It's
Speaker 1: just creating, like you have a small labor aristocracy that
Speaker 1: you have everyone else could be getting just like ground down.
Speaker 1: In this case, it's that we've got we've got a
Speaker 1: small core of people who have been there twenty or
Speaker 1: thirty years. And and whereas before, maybe even ten years ago,
Speaker 1: they might have viewed the union as a vehicle to
Speaker 1: help everybody, things have gotten so bad that now it's
Speaker 1: just okay, I'm going to use this system as much
Speaker 1: as i can to cover my own ass because things
Speaker 1: have gotten so damn bad. And obviously, you know, Reagan
Speaker 1: destroying the unions and stuff like that help with that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's that I and I feel like the
Speaker 1: union in in my job could be very helpful, um,
Speaker 1: but it would require certain people in it too, instead
Speaker 1: of looking out for just their own interest, because hey,
Speaker 1: I've been here twenty five years, so I'm in the clear.
Speaker 1: Like actually, go, okay, maybe I should you know, sacrifice
Speaker 1: a little bit of of that power or that privilege
Speaker 1: to help the people who are just hiring in so
Speaker 1: that we can keep them, so that that this doesn't
Speaker 1: have to keep happening. Yeah, and it's you know, this
Speaker 1: is one of the things that has made the John
Speaker 1: Dear strike, that made it so powerful, was these those
Speaker 1: older workers who I mean that they had a tiered system, right,
Speaker 1: So you have workers hired I think before like ninety
Speaker 1: seven got a full pension, and then like after ninety
Speaker 1: seven was like a third of that, and then workers
Speaker 1: hired in the last couple of years weren't getting any
Speaker 1: pension at all. And a big part of the strike
Speaker 1: is like all of the workers saying that's not acceptable, um,
Speaker 1: including the ones who had a full pension, who had
Speaker 1: some of a pension, like saying that, like the fact
Speaker 1: that the newer people are getting screwed over is an acceptable.
Speaker 1: And I've heard different reasons for why that happened, because
Speaker 1: this is this tactic what you're talking about, and kind
Speaker 1: of like what happened to John Deere, it was a
Speaker 1: common tactic. You know. It's the thing we talked about
Speaker 1: in colonialism all the time. You want to divide the
Speaker 1: population against you know, each other, each other one way
Speaker 1: or the other. Give them like make make them feel
Speaker 1: as if their interests are not necessarily aligned, you know,
Speaker 1: so the people who um, and there's reasons. I've heard
Speaker 1: different reasons for why John Deere was different, including the
Speaker 1: idea that like a lot of these are family jobs,
Speaker 1: so it was not people. It was people being like, well,
Speaker 1: my kid's not going to get a pension, and that's bullshit. Um. Anyway, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I just it's it's it's important to talk about like
Speaker 1: that as a problem, and also to highlight different strikes
Speaker 1: where that seems to have been overcome by the workers,
Speaker 1: like this fact that they were attempted to be played
Speaker 1: against each other didn't really work out, and where in
Speaker 1: my case it very much is like another another example
Speaker 1: being so we'll have people who are are lower on
Speaker 1: the seniority list and like let's say, for example, well
Speaker 1: one weekend we're running lines three and five and not
Speaker 1: the other two. The newer people might only know stuff
Speaker 1: online four. But if the new people don't get scheduled
Speaker 1: to do something, even if they're just being forced in
Speaker 1: to sweep the floor, the people who have the higher
Speaker 1: seniority will throw a fit saying, well, they're lower seniority,
Speaker 1: why aren't they in here as opposed to well, because
Speaker 1: they can't run that machine. And then they don't want
Speaker 1: to train them to run that machine. It's it's very
Speaker 1: they've managed to succeed where the John Deer capitalists might
Speaker 1: have failed in making this all about like all right working.
Speaker 1: And I don't blame the people who have the higher
Speaker 1: seniority on this because if my you know, if if
Speaker 1: you're working, conditions are hell and you have the option
Speaker 1: of okay, well, on a short term scale, I can
Speaker 1: screw over this other person and actually see my family
Speaker 1: once in a while. Most people are gonna do it,
Speaker 1: especially if that person is somebody who just hired in
Speaker 1: that you don't know, we'll screre that guy. And that's
Speaker 1: where once again, if unions were stronger, if there was
Speaker 1: more than what is it right now, like to three
Speaker 1: of jobs or a union job. But unions have been
Speaker 1: so like just weakened that this sort of situation is
Speaker 1: allowed to happen, I guess you could say, and I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: that comes back to just like the solute, the solution
Speaker 1: to the supply chain problem isn't really like it's it's
Speaker 1: it's it's not it's not a logistical solution. It's not
Speaker 1: even really like a capital gained solution, like a tax solution.
Speaker 1: The solution is that you know, you have to fundamentally
Speaker 1: change the balance of power between capital and labor, and
Speaker 1: you know, I mean that and that and that that
Speaker 1: can be like you know, I think things will get
Speaker 1: better if it's if it's more unions, but like things
Speaker 1: are going to continue to suck until like the capitalists
Speaker 1: ceased to exist as a class. Yeah, And I think
Speaker 1: that's like that that's because yeah, that's always the and
Speaker 1: it's one of those like we get we get critiqued
Speaker 1: on the internets sometimes because I think people will will say, like, well,
Speaker 1: you know, is your only solution to this? You keep
Speaker 1: talking about like mutual aid and anarchism, and like I
Speaker 1: just don't feel like that's a big scale solutions. Like yeah,
Speaker 1: but the current system isn't going to work very well
Speaker 1: on a big scale. Part of what we're always talking
Speaker 1: about is like how to how to get your how
Speaker 1: to get yourself and your people through the situation, because
Speaker 1: that's also important, and it's the same thing with like
Speaker 1: a union, right unionizing you and your fellow laborers and
Speaker 1: your factory, or or making your union more effective and
Speaker 1: more able to like advocate for everyone. That's not going
Speaker 1: to fix the bigger problem. That's not going to deal
Speaker 1: with the the issues that like, that's not going to
Speaker 1: stop climate change, that's not going to stop supply line
Speaker 1: crunches in a grand scale, it's not going to stop
Speaker 1: creeping authoritarianism. But it can make life more bearable for
Speaker 1: you and the people around you. And that's that's also
Speaker 1: part of like getting by in a crumbling world about yeah,
Speaker 1: and yep, it's it requires a bit of more foresight,
Speaker 1: which I think was one of the other purposes behind
Speaker 1: working us as many hours as they do. Is when
Speaker 1: you're so fucking tired all the time from working what
Speaker 1: you're working, you don't have time to stop and think
Speaker 1: about the larger implications of things. M hm and yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's part of what they're going for. Yep. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I don't know anyone else get anything. Well, I
Speaker 1: guess just the clear solution of this is that I
Speaker 1: need to just stuck up on Bang, right, I just
Speaker 1: need to buy all I can because I love Bang I.
Speaker 1: I can't stop drinking Bang I will I'm scared of
Speaker 1: how much Bag I drink. I will say. One of
Speaker 1: one of the wonderful mutual aid solutions is if you're very,
Speaker 1: very nice to the syrup mixing people. They will be
Speaker 1: kind to you if you are working a double and
Speaker 1: they will give you a shot of the energy drink
Speaker 1: syrup before it been mixed. Oh my god, oh boy.
Speaker 1: You should you should not have told Garrison that a problem.
Speaker 1: Garrison's going to quit his job podcasting just to be
Speaker 1: able to get just gonna shooting up energy drink here
Speaker 1: on out. That's all I'm doing with my time. I'm
Speaker 1: I'm leaving, leaving the call right now, finding the nearest factory.
Speaker 1: And my second day on the on the job in
Speaker 1: the soda manufacturing thing, I had a twenty four pack
Speaker 1: of energy drink explode all over me change of clothes,
Speaker 1: and that's when I learned that caffeine and touring can
Speaker 1: soak through your skin. Oh yes, I mean basically was
Speaker 1: seeing sound? Okay. So I I've just been looking up
Speaker 1: inflatable hot tubs and I feel like if I could
Speaker 1: order enough pure energy drink syrup in an inflatable hot tub,
Speaker 1: I could build basically the equivalent of Baron Harconan's rejuvenation bath,
Speaker 1: but with like Peter Bang syrup. That is that is,
Speaker 1: that is my plan. Just twelve caffeine and Tori, it's
Speaker 1: just gonna be we're all gonna quit our jobs. We're
Speaker 1: just gonna have the same amount of money. They get
Speaker 1: slower over time because we're again spending it all on banks. Obviously,
Speaker 1: you need you need the inside person to supply you
Speaker 1: with the syrup. So we'll just have sort of an
Speaker 1: Ocean's eleven situation where you guys pull up to the
Speaker 1: loading dock and with a tanker and I'm just hooking
Speaker 1: the truck up. You know, it's gonna be like Scarface,
Speaker 1: but we're selling pure syrup. And then Garrison loses his
Speaker 1: mind and winds up in a machine gun fight in
Speaker 1: a mansion, and when instead of burying his face into
Speaker 1: a mountain of cocaine, he's instead got just a little
Speaker 1: he's just sticking his hand into a bowl of syrup
Speaker 1: to absorb the caffeinated nutrients. When I when I p
Speaker 1: it's just gonna be straight syrup. Now that is yeah. Anyway,
Speaker 1: Well that's the episode where if people want to find
Speaker 1: you a lot where and they find you? So I
Speaker 1: host along with my husband and our friend Justin, we
Speaker 1: host a trans comedy and pop culture podcast where we
Speaker 1: also interview interesting people. Um it's called the Violet Wanderers.
Speaker 1: So you can find us on Twitter at violet Wanderers
Speaker 1: or the Violet Wanderers dot com or email the Violet
Speaker 1: wanders at gmail dot com. And that's basically that's my
Speaker 1: Twitter handle. And I just slowly got sucked into the
Speaker 1: Twitter hellscape where yeah that happens. Originally one on just
Speaker 1: like oh, I'm gonna just promote my show, and then
Speaker 1: I started responding to people and before you know what,
Speaker 1: I'm writing twenty tweet rants about just in time on
Speaker 1: my stupid gay podcast account. I got into Twitter to
Speaker 1: converse with a young Justice podcast and that's why I
Speaker 1: created my Twitter accounts. And here I am now So
Speaker 1: I was trying to get a planet side to Beta
Speaker 1: Key and I got it. But the consequences where I
Speaker 1: am now here, Yeah Twitter, Twitter, Twitter, and it's consequences
Speaker 1: disaster for your you're this, You're such a child. I
Speaker 1: remember the first Planet Side Betaday, Chris. It was an
Speaker 1: age and dreamed of. Oh Chris, and you all are
Speaker 1: welcome to come on the show anytime. I will. I
Speaker 1: will bother you to come on my show sometime. Excellent. Yeah,
Speaker 1: plugs plugs probably. Yeah. Yeah, Like I said, the Violet
Speaker 1: Wanderers were on Apple, were on Spotify, were on podcast Addict, whatever,
Speaker 1: you know, it's all your major podcast platforms. Uh. The
Speaker 1: tagline of the show is made for no one, So, um,
Speaker 1: expect a lot of queer humor, a lot of me
Speaker 1: calling my husband a slut, and us talking about video games,
Speaker 1: comic books, movies, and then occasionally just randomly interviewing really
Speaker 1: interesting people who I harassed into coming on the show,
Speaker 1: like which Robert I know, you know Daniel Harper from
Speaker 1: I Don't speak German. He's been on a few times. Um,
Speaker 1: we've had him on and had some fun talking about Nazis,
Speaker 1: which ye teams kind of you know, counterintuitive, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of humor that can be found in Nazis
Speaker 1: if you know the right places to look. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I you know what, I just watched a German language
Speaker 1: movie about Hitler that was made in two thousand seven
Speaker 1: by a Jewish German comedian that includes I've watched a
Speaker 1: lot of Hitler movies, you know, periodically, I just get
Speaker 1: on Netflix and Hulu type and Hitler just kind of
Speaker 1: watch whatever is there. This is the first time I
Speaker 1: have seen Hitler fucking in a movie. I've never seen
Speaker 1: anybody who had the courage to do that. And he
Speaker 1: is just yeah, he's it's it's uncoming as one ball
Speaker 1: just swinging in the land. It is. It is an
Speaker 1: uncomfortable scene, but not the most uncomfortable scene in that
Speaker 1: particular movie. Um, it's quite a film, that's asn't say,
Speaker 1: that's pretty amazing. But yeah, come on, come on sometime
Speaker 1: we'll play around vin Selmageddon, which is a game that
Speaker 1: I've created, and uh, you know, if you guys don't
Speaker 1: want to kill yourselves afterwards, then hey, you survived the game.
Speaker 1: As long as I can get some start up out
Speaker 1: of the deal, that's that's all I want. I will,
Speaker 1: I will, I will smuggle you some syrup out and
Speaker 1: mail it to you. Okay, alright, that's that's gonna do
Speaker 1: it for all of us here today that it could
Speaker 1: happen here until next time. I don't know. Go go read,
Speaker 1: Go read The Dawn of Everything. It's good, it's worth reading.
Speaker 1: Check it out. Hey, We'll be back Monday with more
Speaker 1: episodes every week from now until the heat Death of
Speaker 1: the Universe. It could happen here is a production of
Speaker 1: cool zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 1: visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check
Speaker 1: us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to podcasts, you can find sources
Speaker 1: for It could happen here, updated monthly at cool zone
Speaker 1: media dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.