Speaker 1: As media. Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and I wanted
Speaker 1: to let you know this is a compilation episode. So
Speaker 1: every episode of the week that just happened is here
Speaker 1: in one convenient and with somewhat less ads package for
Speaker 1: you to listen to in a long stretch if you want.
Speaker 1: If you've been listening to the episodes every day this week,
Speaker 1: there's going to be nothing new here for you, but
Speaker 1: you can make your own decisions. Ah, welcome back to behind.
Speaker 1: Wait no, sorry, it could happen here.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: We'll keep that in so that our audience, who I
Speaker 1: know is deeply tied to the myth of my own perfection,
Speaker 1: knows that I too, air speaking of perfect creatures who
Speaker 1: have never made a mistake. Our guest today is Dan Olsen. Hello, welcome,
Speaker 1: Hi Dan.
Speaker 2: How you doing.
Speaker 1: I'm doing well, not making mistakes exactly exactly. You are
Speaker 1: the Buddha I met on the road, and I'm going
Speaker 1: to say hello, teach me how to be flawless.
Speaker 3: Right?
Speaker 2: So, first, have you heard of gold?
Speaker 3: Yes?
Speaker 1: Yes, I was about to talk about gold. The perfect
Speaker 1: investment Dan, perfect investment vehicle never fails. So Dan, you
Speaker 1: are a YouTuber, an investigator, one of my favorite researchers.
Speaker 1: We had you on recently to talk well a couple
Speaker 1: of months ago, I donuple time, Flat Circle etcheda, but
Speaker 1: we had you wanted to talk about your work reporting
Speaker 1: on the NFT bubble bursting and on the metaverse bubble bursting,
Speaker 1: and more recently, you just published a two and a
Speaker 1: half hour documentary investigation into.
Speaker 2: The game Stop stock cult.
Speaker 1: Which is a lot of people are aware of the
Speaker 1: first part of this, which is that in January twenty
Speaker 1: twenty one, a bunch of folks started like buying you
Speaker 1: via some weird Reddit movement, started buying huge amounts of
Speaker 1: game Stop stock, which, in a period of pretty exaggerated decline,
Speaker 1: caused it to briefly surge in value to absurd levels.
Speaker 2: And I think that's where most.
Speaker 1: People kind of and then, you know, eventually it fell apart,
Speaker 1: and I think that's where most people kind of stopped
Speaker 1: paying attention.
Speaker 4: Yeah, they they remember that week where it was like
Speaker 4: in the news, and then they just kind of assumed
Speaker 4: like that was it.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So yeah, it's it's been a It's an interesting and
Speaker 4: weird ride because the evolution into like cult like behavior was.
Speaker 2: It was a very strange journey.
Speaker 4: It happened surprisingly rapidly, but also not that surprisingly, Like
Speaker 4: once you fully unpack it, you know you have this
Speaker 4: Internet movement that is very nebulous in its origins or
Speaker 4: not in its origin. Sorry, the orders are very straightforward,
Speaker 4: like Wall Street Bets is a gambling sub that had
Speaker 4: like it self describes as if four Chan found a
Speaker 4: Bloomberg terminal, so sure you know it's it's crass, it's
Speaker 4: irony poisoned. You can get just as much social clout
Speaker 4: for losing thousands of dollars as you can for winning
Speaker 4: thousands of dollars. In fact, there's an argument that there's
Speaker 4: more clout for lost porn than there is for like
Speaker 4: actually posting big gains obviously, like not like the healthiest
Speaker 4: or most wholesome community you could you could imagine, but
Speaker 4: you know, out of that plus COVID madness, plus stimulus
Speaker 4: checks and just general nihilism arose this kind of Frankenstein
Speaker 4: short squeeze play on game Stop that weirdly never actually happened,
Speaker 4: because the play just sort of turned into its own
Speaker 4: self fulfilling thing that enough people believed in the idea
Speaker 4: of this short squeeze play that they just kept piling
Speaker 4: in and piling in, and suddenly like the short squeeze
Speaker 4: doesn't actually matter at all because there's enough critical mass
Speaker 4: flooding in that you just get this massive pump anyway,
Speaker 4: which convinces people that, oh, the squeeze is going on,
Speaker 4: because in the moment you don't actually know like what
Speaker 4: mechanisms are driving the price movement. You just see number
Speaker 4: going up, and so more people kept piling in, piling in,
Speaker 4: piling in. I got a phone call from, you know,
Speaker 4: from a friend of mine who's like, hey, have you
Speaker 4: heard about the GameStop stuff? And I'm like, yes, I
Speaker 4: heard about it two days ago, So if you heard
Speaker 4: about it today, it's it's way too late.
Speaker 2: Do not over. It's over.
Speaker 4: And sure enough, like I went back and reviewed our
Speaker 4: text messages and like, and if he had bought, he
Speaker 4: would have been a just massive bag holder.
Speaker 2: Like it it plummeted, you.
Speaker 1: Know, hours later, and like for people who are not
Speaker 1: finance people, which I certainly am not, this is like
Speaker 1: if you watched The Big Short, Uh, that's kind of
Speaker 1: the tax I mean number one. That movie is seen
Speaker 1: as a blueprint by a lot of these guys. Obviously
Speaker 1: there's folks, knowledgeable financial folks who have critiques of that movie,
Speaker 1: but it is it is accepted as like almost kind
Speaker 1: of like a sacred text within the Game Stop Stop
Speaker 1: Yeah community.
Speaker 4: And it's weird because like they're the game Stop enemy,
Speaker 4: the the the ape.
Speaker 2: Okay, well I'll just use their lexicon. We'll go over
Speaker 2: real quick.
Speaker 4: They call themselves apes for reasons that are not worth explaining.
Speaker 4: Their enemy are short sellers. But short sellers are like
Speaker 4: Doc Bury short sold the housing market. And Bury is
Speaker 4: that's Christian Bales character, right, Christian Bales character.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, Like.
Speaker 4: All of the main characters in that movie short sold
Speaker 4: the housing market.
Speaker 2: Like that.
Speaker 4: That was their play. That was the big short was.
Speaker 4: They're like, look, there's this bubble, we're going to short
Speaker 4: sell it. Then when the price goes down, we close
Speaker 4: our positions out and keep a tremendous amount of money.
Speaker 1: And I should we should go just because when I
Speaker 1: watched this with a friend, they did not know what
Speaker 1: short selling was. It's not I think normal, it's not
Speaker 1: a thing normal people will.
Speaker 2: Ever be in a position to do.
Speaker 1: The basic idea and this is all occurring with like
Speaker 1: stocks and commodities, but the basic idea is you make
Speaker 1: an agreement with somebody to get basically a loan of
Speaker 1: a bunch of shares in something, right, and with the
Speaker 1: understanding that you will give those back at a point
Speaker 1: in the future. And then you take those and you
Speaker 1: immediately sell them for their their present value, right, and
Speaker 1: your hope, your like play it like goal is that
Speaker 1: the value of that drops and then you are able
Speaker 1: to buy back an equivalent amount to repay the loan
Speaker 1: and have made a profit based on the gap between
Speaker 1: those two numbers.
Speaker 2: Right, that's the idea.
Speaker 4: That's that's the that's the idea. You you can, as
Speaker 4: an individual like do this.
Speaker 2: You can.
Speaker 4: You can take out a short position with your broker,
Speaker 4: you can. You can do it through derivatives like puts.
Speaker 4: I wouldn't recommend it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's it's not normal people's stock stuff.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not normal people's stock stuff. Like you're there's
Speaker 4: nothing legally barring you from doing it. But it really
Speaker 4: is kind of this like advanced play. You got to
Speaker 4: know what's going on, especially because like a thing that
Speaker 4: a lot of people in the description sort of skip over,
Speaker 4: is it. Well, you're borrowing it, you know, you're borrowing
Speaker 4: a thing, and thus there's the expectation that you'll pay
Speaker 4: some kind of like you know, borrowers fee akin to
Speaker 4: a kin to interest on like the value of the
Speaker 4: thing that you've borrowed, but like it's it's not interest
Speaker 4: on you know, like a housing loan where the interest
Speaker 4: and like where your payments all are geared towards paying
Speaker 4: off the loan. It's just kind of like, all right,
Speaker 4: you owe me five bucks every single month forever as
Speaker 4: long as you're holding this. And so you know, if
Speaker 4: you're not paying attention, like, you need to be very
Speaker 4: actively managing these kinds of positions otherwise, like your borrowing
Speaker 4: fees will just eat up all of your profit.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And it's the kind of thing where like today
Speaker 1: most of those kind of kinds of trades aren't even
Speaker 1: really made by people directly. They're made by massive banks
Speaker 1: of computers and algorithms and shit kind of yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I think that's that's enough background back to the
Speaker 1: kind of cult aspect of it, which is I think
Speaker 1: much more relevant for what we're talking about here. One
Speaker 1: of the points you made early on that I found
Speaker 1: really interesting is is that a significant amount of the
Speaker 1: initial game stock game stops. I'm going to keep doing
Speaker 1: that hype was driven by influencers, right, and that there's
Speaker 1: evidence based on kind of the US government's analysis of
Speaker 1: this that got published that like regulators are paying additional
Speaker 1: attention at increasing attention to the influences that that or
Speaker 1: to the impact that influencers can have here, because there's
Speaker 1: this concern that, especially working in groups, there's like an
Speaker 1: ability for people like this to disrupt the economy to
Speaker 1: a significant extent a way that would affect like normal people.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so one of the weird kind of so pump
Speaker 4: and dumps have existed forever, right. The thing was is
Speaker 4: that so the the memes stock run up, it wasn't
Speaker 4: just GameStop. It was about like fifteen twenty, like in
Speaker 4: January twenty twenty one, like so late twenty twenty, early
Speaker 4: twenty twenty one. It was about fifteen twenty different companies,
Speaker 4: you know, Nokia, BlackBerry, bed Bath and Beyond, like you know,
Speaker 4: just kind of a bunch of over the hill companies
Speaker 4: that were all sort of part.
Speaker 2: Of this this wave.
Speaker 4: And the issue was that in the game stop price
Speaker 4: run up, So the price went from at the end
Speaker 4: of twenty twenty as everybody like as sort of the
Speaker 4: meme wave like begins, and particularly once Ryan Cohen, billionaire Chewy.
Speaker 1: Founder Chewy the Cat treat or dog.
Speaker 2: Online dog food sales. Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, when he buys in like that kind of like
Speaker 4: puts the stamp of approval on the whole thing. So
Speaker 4: it goes from like four and a half dollars up
Speaker 4: to nineteen something, and then at the end of January
Speaker 4: it goes from nineteen twenty dollars up to four hundred
Speaker 4: and eighty and so in that spread the short sales,
Speaker 4: so there was short interest in game Stop. There was,
Speaker 4: in fact a rec less amount of short interest in
Speaker 4: game Stop, but the price increase was so huge, the
Speaker 4: volume of participation was so big, so many people were
Speaker 4: jumping on this that the short interest closing their position.
Speaker 4: The actual like short squeeze portion of all of this
Speaker 4: is only like ten percent of the price movement. All
Speaker 4: the rest of it is just people fomoing in on
Speaker 4: like this thing.
Speaker 2: That they heard about through their cousin.
Speaker 6: Yeah.
Speaker 1: I think another thing that's kind of interesting to me
Speaker 1: is like, as this thing has evolved, you know, you
Speaker 1: mentioned that the actual price got up to like close
Speaker 1: around five hundred dollars by the time this thing kind
Speaker 1: of transitions into being this millenarian kind of apocalypse cult right,
Speaker 1: like not you know, nukes and stuff, end of days
Speaker 1: apocalypse generally, but like a the entire economy is going
Speaker 1: to come The belief that kind of has evolved broadly
Speaker 1: and that obviously there's different kind of actions is but
Speaker 1: is that like there is going to come a point where,
Speaker 1: like the price of games stop stock will increase to
Speaker 1: such an insane some people say hundreds of millions, billions
Speaker 1: of dollars per share that it effectively allows all of
Speaker 1: these apes who have bought shares to hold the entire
Speaker 1: world economy hostage until they have their increasingly ourcane demands met, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is the belief, and that.
Speaker 2: Is the belief.
Speaker 4: So so out of that, like so okay, so the
Speaker 4: short's closing was only like about ten percent of the
Speaker 4: of the total movement. So that leads to the conclusion
Speaker 4: that you know that the events of January twenty twenty
Speaker 4: one weren't a short squeeze, which is actually kind of true,
Speaker 4: Like it wasn't it wasn't purely a short squeeze. It
Speaker 4: was actually very little of it was a short squeeze,
Speaker 4: but because it wasn't a short squeeze like that term
Speaker 4: then allows the creative individual to fill in the gap
Speaker 4: and just say that. It's like just say this like, oh,
Speaker 4: the short squeeze never happened, Therefore it's still on the table,
Speaker 4: the short like the the end. You know, it hasn't
Speaker 4: happened yet, therefore it can still potentially happen. And in fact,
Speaker 4: if we just like look at the trend line, like
Speaker 4: I bet since it hasn't happened, since it didn't happen,
Speaker 4: and the position that they held in December was so reckless,
Speaker 4: it's only gotten worse since, which means that they're getting
Speaker 4: which means that these short sellers must be getting desperate,
Speaker 4: which means they're going to be willing to engage in
Speaker 4: whatever level of depraved criminal activity is necessary to protect themselves. Therefore,
Speaker 4: it's just getting more and more and more and more extreme. Therefore,
Speaker 4: when this finally goes off, it's not just going to
Speaker 4: be like, it's not just going to be a five
Speaker 4: hundred dollars price point, it's going to be a nuclear
Speaker 4: explosion that's going to topple the entire economy. Yeah, and
Speaker 4: that's that's this like of logic and what they and
Speaker 4: it all comes from that, just like missing the fact
Speaker 4: that it's like, oh, it wasn't a short squeeze because
Speaker 4: it was mostly fomo. The short squeeze was buried under
Speaker 4: a mountain of fomo. Yeah, but so it wasn't a
Speaker 4: short sc It's like, yeah, it's all just like based
Speaker 4: in these like word games of like, ah, you said it,
Speaker 4: you know that the dumb and dumber. You know, it's like,
Speaker 4: what are the odds a one in million? So you're
Speaker 4: saying there's a chance. It's like, well, yeah, that's not
Speaker 4: what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because of the impossibility of the things they're
Speaker 1: actually hoping for, but also their fundamental belief that like
Speaker 1: it's inevitable, in part because you know, this is this
Speaker 1: is not wildly different from the psychology of like needing
Speaker 1: to believe in uh that you are going to paradise
Speaker 1: in the after.
Speaker 2: Yeah, hallmarks of millennarians. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Because of that, what you get is a lot of
Speaker 1: people who think that they are thinking scientifically, but what
Speaker 1: they're doing is taking an endpoint, and the endpoint is
Speaker 1: that you know this specific you know these hedge funds
Speaker 1: or whatever are are evil and you know, illegally bribing
Speaker 1: or whatever the government to stop us from succeeding, or
Speaker 1: there's this other conspiracy. You're starting with this endpoint and
Speaker 1: then working backwards and like finding ways to explain the
Speaker 1: things that have happened within that framework, like the.
Speaker 2: Things that would need to be true in order for
Speaker 2: the yeah thing.
Speaker 1: To happen, like the thing that like Citadel must have
Speaker 1: ordered robin Hood to stop letting people buy and share
Speaker 1: game stock stocks rather than like, you know what what
Speaker 1: actually happened, which is that robin Hood simply like could
Speaker 1: not exist if they allowed this to continue. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know legally, I don't believe there's anything that was
Speaker 1: stopping them from doing that. It's medieval peasant brain kind
Speaker 1: of stuff, is what I initially like. That's how when
Speaker 1: I was watching your documentary, I was like, Oh, it's
Speaker 1: this you know, this need to find this kind of
Speaker 1: like magical answer to the problem. And then I like
Speaker 1: interrogated that conclusion and was like, well, no, it's not.
Speaker 1: This is just the way people's brains work, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: like we're pattern making. This isn't medieval pissant shit. They're
Speaker 1: no dumber than we are. Like, yeah, that's what this shows.
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And one of the things that I love just kind
Speaker 4: of on that is that, like you if you had
Speaker 4: a time machine and you went back one hundred thousand
Speaker 4: years and and found a bunch of you know, homoliteral
Speaker 4: literal cavemen, yeah, actual apes more or less, you know,
Speaker 4: but like hundred thousand years ago, that's that's modern humans. Like,
Speaker 4: you know, genetically, that's genetically modern humans. You could just
Speaker 4: like implant yourself in their tribe and teach them calculus
Speaker 4: and you know, yeah.
Speaker 2: They would be short game stuff stuff that. It's like
Speaker 2: like we're like, things don't change.
Speaker 4: It's like he's like, yeah, no, we've been We've been
Speaker 4: doing this ever since we were you know, this pattern
Speaker 4: seeking doesn't change. It's almost like it is basically endemic
Speaker 4: to the human psyche. There's a really good question that
Speaker 4: that I've gotten in response to this is just like
Speaker 4: is this just secular religion? Like is this just are
Speaker 4: we just like wired to need faith in some shape
Speaker 4: or form and if that is not provided by some institution,
Speaker 4: we will just invent it. And it's like I don't
Speaker 4: have the answer to that, but sign's point to yes.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, so I wanted to talk a little bit about
Speaker 1: one of the other things that you brought up that
Speaker 1: I thought was interesting is the way you've got this
Speaker 1: this cast of and these are you know, the influencers.
Speaker 1: These are the people who make a lot of these
Speaker 1: like arcane videos or put out these publish these prospectuses
Speaker 1: with dozens or hundreds of pages laying out you know,
Speaker 1: the arcana of how these different sort of anticipated apocalyptic
Speaker 1: financial moves are going to go out, right, Yeah, a
Speaker 1: lot of these people. The belief is that that I
Speaker 1: think is accurate at least this is what I got
Speaker 1: from your documentary. Maybe I was interpreting you wrong, is
Speaker 1: that most of these or many of these people are
Speaker 1: not believers. They're manipulating a group of people because there's
Speaker 1: money in it. And one of the tactics that you
Speaker 1: see used a lot is kind of faux humility. Right,
Speaker 1: I'm just a dumb ape. You shouldn't trust me. I'm
Speaker 1: not qualified to give financial advice. But here's the secret
Speaker 1: history of the universe to invest your money here.
Speaker 4: Now, So, I mean, you've seen this a lot with
Speaker 4: with various like cult leaders and pseudo cult leaders and
Speaker 4: just general like grift fluencers. You know, there's always this
Speaker 4: question of like how much of their own how much
Speaker 4: of their own hype do they believe? How much did
Speaker 4: they believe when they started, how much did they eventually
Speaker 4: just like convince themselves of as people you know, follow them,
Speaker 4: and I think it's it's very much like kind of
Speaker 4: a an individual case by case basis. Some of them
Speaker 4: are absolutely true believers, like from the get go. Some
Speaker 4: of them, like a lot of them, are like soft believers,
Speaker 4: you know, you know where it's like they're not hardcore
Speaker 4: into it, you know, if you really pressed them, Like
Speaker 4: it's not motivating their their daily decisions. But what they're
Speaker 4: taking from it is like social reinforcement. That they've found
Speaker 4: a group of people who respond to them, who like
Speaker 4: their posts, who leave messages. It's like, oh man, this
Speaker 4: blew my mind. I can't believe the system is like
Speaker 4: this fragile. You know, my tits are jacked, lighting the
Speaker 4: fuse on the rocket ship, buying more moon tickets, you know,
Speaker 4: and they and they respond to that very socially, and
Speaker 4: and and out of that sort of soup of like
Speaker 4: reinforcing messages, it's really easy for people in those influencer
Speaker 4: positions to just kind of like hold conflicting like hold
Speaker 4: the conflicting beliefs of like, I know that this is impossible,
Speaker 4: but also so it is like fulfilling me socially to
Speaker 4: say these things. I'll just I'll just juggle that inconsistency.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: And the way the mechanics of social media, and particularly
Speaker 1: in this case, it's the mechanics largely of Reddit. That's
Speaker 1: not the only place this occurs, but Reddit is certainly
Speaker 1: like the homeland. You could say, the way in which
Speaker 1: up votes and down votes work, and the way in
Speaker 1: which upvotes and down votes take you know, critical content
Speaker 1: people who are trying to induce some accuracy or you
Speaker 1: might even say sanity in the discussion, and that that
Speaker 1: gets pushed down and hidden after a certain point of
Speaker 1: time with enough down votes, as opposed to like the
Speaker 1: stuff that is fundamentally unhinged but is like utopian gets
Speaker 1: up voted. It's it's the the physical, like the actual
Speaker 1: mechanics of how the site is structured to work enforce
Speaker 1: fund at a fundamental level, enforced group think consensus.
Speaker 2: Absolutely.
Speaker 4: Oh, and I mean in the best part about it.
Speaker 4: And we see this like all across Reddit communities. Which
Speaker 4: is this like it is it? It's the social enforcement
Speaker 4: of truth, that that people will take this social mechanism
Speaker 4: of up votes and down votes and use it as
Speaker 4: proof against the claim that it's like, oh, well if
Speaker 4: if your negative sentiment were true, it would have been
Speaker 4: up voted. Yeah, because like there's this underline, there's this
Speaker 4: kind of just like implicit belief that people will recognize
Speaker 4: truth and will upvote truth, and thus up votes and
Speaker 4: down votes are are an accurate filter on reality, which
Speaker 4: is demonstrably not true.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So yeah, that's intensely at play here because you'll see
Speaker 4: apes who will then like reference the fact that like
Speaker 4: that you know that it's like if this insane theory
Speaker 4: were false, why did it get so many up votes?
Speaker 2: Well? Because it it hypes you up. It makes you
Speaker 2: people are irrational.
Speaker 4: You got a tingle feeling in your tummy when you
Speaker 4: read it and the person told you that you were
Speaker 4: going to be a millionaire.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's why.
Speaker 8: It's like asking why do we like magicians? Of course
Speaker 8: we like magicians. It's it looks nice, it's fun, it
Speaker 8: makes us feel a sense of wonder. Yeah, I want
Speaker 8: to discuss one of the terms that you use a
Speaker 8: lot that I missed the first couple of time because
Speaker 8: I'm not.
Speaker 2: I'm not.
Speaker 1: This is not a community I had studied. I thought
Speaker 1: you misspoke at first when you described like someone reach
Speaker 1: achieving a financial wind fall as wife changing money. I
Speaker 1: just thought you, like, I do that all the time,
Speaker 1: show it's delivererate.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, no, No.
Speaker 7: I was like, okay, this is a thing they say.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: A lot of people are like, I thought you misspoke.
Speaker 4: I'm like, no, that's because I was tricking you, Like
Speaker 4: I was. I was deliberately like very lighting in this term,
Speaker 4: like because like because they use it like obviously as
Speaker 4: a as an entendre yea, and I it's like, okay,
Speaker 4: like I'll just use it straight faced with no explanation
Speaker 4: three four times and then finally explain it at the
Speaker 4: end and make a lot of people angry when they
Speaker 4: realize that, like, no, they weren't just mishearing me.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So that's one of those things like that goes to
Speaker 4: sort of the four Chan roots of of all of this,
Speaker 4: which is, you know, the sort of like crass irreverence
Speaker 4: slash misogyny of of chan speak and just this you
Speaker 4: know Wall Street bets will use this kind of like
Speaker 4: celebration of making so much money that you can afford
Speaker 4: to be misogynistic and just like swap your wife. And
Speaker 4: it turns out that, like, as we know, you make
Speaker 4: a joke like that often enough, you're eventually going to
Speaker 4: attract the people who are just straight up like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I hate my wife.
Speaker 1: Yeah I want to be able to replace her, Yeah,
Speaker 1: using my using my crypto or my yeah whatever, my
Speaker 1: game stock Stop, god gains. I was wondering if you
Speaker 1: might lay out one of the things, the parts that
Speaker 1: was most interested in me was the whole Teddy Day,
Speaker 1: Teddy Day, Oh boy, Teddy d Yeah. Can you explain
Speaker 1: Teddy Day to our listeners?
Speaker 4: Okay, So Ryan Cohen, who fancies himself an activist investor,
Speaker 4: he buys into game Stop and gets a minority, pretty
Speaker 4: substantial holdings that count as like a minority thing. You
Speaker 4: need to file a bunch of paperwork with the sec
Speaker 4: that say, like you know, it's like I hold greater
Speaker 4: than ten percent of this company. And he used that
Speaker 4: position to basically get power inside the company itself as
Speaker 4: chairman as of a couple of weeks ago.
Speaker 2: He's now CEO.
Speaker 4: So so Ryan Cohen gets heavily involved with with Game
Speaker 4: Stop and he's like, I'm gonna turn this around because
Speaker 4: his real angs, what seems to be his anxiety in
Speaker 4: life at the moment, is this like sense of legacy.
Speaker 4: He doesn't just want to be like like, oh, I
Speaker 4: got lucky with an online pet food sales thing. I'm
Speaker 4: a I'm a real I'm a big boy finance guy,
Speaker 4: you know, I save dying companies, real rich guy hobby.
Speaker 4: He puts out a series of children's books called Teddy,
Speaker 4: named after.
Speaker 2: His late father.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 2: And these are it's it's five books that have a
Speaker 2: target audience of two year olds.
Speaker 4: That because you know, when when you're rich and you
Speaker 4: want to do something like that, you want to vanity
Speaker 4: published books. You don't just like go to an off
Speaker 4: the shelf vanity publisher. You make your own vanity publisher
Speaker 4: because in the scheme of things like that's just not
Speaker 4: that expensive.
Speaker 2: So Amazon has made it easier than ever, easier than ever.
Speaker 4: So he found this LLC, you know, air Quote Founds
Speaker 4: pays the like six hundred bucks in filing fees to
Speaker 4: create this LLC. Teddy Publishing files a whole bunch of trademarks.
Speaker 4: You know, we're talking like a few thousand dollars all
Speaker 4: in all in order to file, like in order to
Speaker 4: just file a bunch of paperwork. And this is all
Speaker 4: just like the scattershot stuff of like, Okay, we're making
Speaker 4: a product aimed at children, let's file the trademark for
Speaker 4: Teddy very broadly, and so it's going to cover like
Speaker 4: basically children's merchandise across the board. You know, what if
Speaker 4: we want to put what if we want to put
Speaker 4: the characters on blankets or bottles or cups or plates
Speaker 4: or party supplies or whatever. So these trademarks are just
Speaker 4: incredibly wide ranging across just merch Yeah. But the existence
Speaker 4: of these trademark applications and this LLC becomes the seed
Speaker 4: for Teddy the company. As this like the mechanism through
Speaker 4: which Ryan Cohen is going to collaborate with Apes in
Speaker 4: order to trigger MOASS. Because I guess this is the
Speaker 4: important thing about the mythology. Apes believe Ryan Cohen is
Speaker 4: on their side, that he is, he is their inside man,
Speaker 4: he is working with them. He is as frustrated as
Speaker 4: they are that this hasn't happened yet. But for like
Speaker 4: arcane legal reasons. He needs to like he needs to
Speaker 4: operate like a like a clockmaker, you know, he has
Speaker 4: to do everything very delicately and indirectly, and like his
Speaker 4: hand cannot be seen pushing on the scales. So they
Speaker 4: think that it's like that this becomes the thing that
Speaker 4: they view all of their all of their hopes and
Speaker 4: dreams into his Teddy llc that it's like, this is
Speaker 4: the thing that he's going to use as the mechanism
Speaker 4: to do this. He's going to like buy game Stop
Speaker 4: via Teddy. He's gonna buy maybe some other company via Teddy.
Speaker 4: Teddy's going to get bought in to, like is gonna
Speaker 4: get bought by game Stop, like one way or another.
Speaker 4: There were like hundreds of competing theories all rooted in
Speaker 4: in this.
Speaker 2: But then back in.
Speaker 4: January of this year, a insanity starts in two So
Speaker 4: in both GameStop forums and bed Bath and Beyond forums,
Speaker 4: the two meme stocks that are linked by Ryan Cohen,
Speaker 4: they they create this idea called Teddy Day, which is
Speaker 4: a combination of a bunch of things. So Ryan Cohen
Speaker 4: tweeted several Titanic references. James Cameron's Titanic was being re
Speaker 4: released this past February on a day that aligned with
Speaker 4: National Teddy Bear Day, and so two different communities of apes,
Speaker 4: for completely separate reasons, latched onto this idea of Teddy Day.
Speaker 4: It was Friday, February tenth, twenty twenty three.
Speaker 2: They latched onto it.
Speaker 4: As just this that like, this is the day, this
Speaker 4: is when it's all going to come together, this is
Speaker 4: when he's going to make his big move. And a
Speaker 4: major driving piece of evidence that they had for Teddy
Speaker 4: Day was that in one of the Teddy books, the
Speaker 4: kids learned to read a clock and the hands on
Speaker 4: the clock are pointed to ten and two. So Ryan
Speaker 4: Cohen left them clues in this children's book published six
Speaker 4: months early, warning them that that February tenth was going
Speaker 4: to be the day that it all went down.
Speaker 2: That was the day of the apocalypse. That was Teddy Day.
Speaker 4: And it got just like the the spread of this
Speaker 4: got just like absolutely unhinged on the forms, like it
Speaker 4: was all that super stunk and BBB why we're talking
Speaker 4: about For like a week and a half leading up
Speaker 4: to it, the hype was like unreal and then of
Speaker 4: course nothing happened.
Speaker 2: You you I don't know if you noticed this.
Speaker 4: But but the US economy did not collapse last February.
Speaker 2: Oh that's good.
Speaker 1: I had been I have been living like a postal
Speaker 1: apocalyptic warlord under the assumption that it had. But all, yeah,
Speaker 1: I'll pivot now.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So so it's just it's one of those like it's
Speaker 4: just such a great encapsulation of the fact that like
Speaker 4: that these communities, they will they will invent these these
Speaker 4: catalyst moments, convinced themselves that like, oh, here's a date
Speaker 4: that's upcoming, and then the moment that, like the great
Speaker 4: disappointment happens, some of them like bleed off, but for
Speaker 4: the most part, like it. Nothing can actually like stop
Speaker 4: the inertia. They can just discard it. And and they did.
Speaker 4: They you know, no one talks about Teddy Day anymore
Speaker 4: except for the fact that like it, it had a
Speaker 4: brief Teddy Day two point zero as October second was
Speaker 4: like upcoming, because you know, ah, maybe it wasn't the
Speaker 4: tenth of February, it was the second of October, you know.
Speaker 4: And and sure like I'm willing to bet that when
Speaker 4: next February rolls around, like we'll we'll get Teddy Day
Speaker 4: three point zero.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm sure it just keeps this. The same thing
Speaker 1: has happened with like different kind of Christian apocalypse cults,
Speaker 1: right where you'll have a guy pick a day, then
Speaker 1: the day comes and then there's always a reason. And fundamentally,
Speaker 1: because this becomes so much of someone's social life, because
Speaker 1: it becomes part of their emotional support network, because it's
Speaker 1: like fundamentally, you changes the way you talk, Like you
Speaker 1: learn so many new words that make it into your
Speaker 1: diction that like it's easier to just keep rolling the
Speaker 1: expected date ahead rather than like acknowledge that kind of
Speaker 1: fundamental hit to your self conception that admitting you got
Speaker 1: played would take.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the guy who does so religion for breakfast, Yeah,
Speaker 4: he picked up on the fact that, like I was
Speaker 4: using phrases like a great disappointment in in the video,
Speaker 4: like very deliberately, because it's like it's the it's the
Speaker 4: same mechanism. So the great disappointment was like that's the
Speaker 4: event that caused the Seventh day Adventist to come into
Speaker 4: existence because it was like a expected date of the
Speaker 4: apocalypse of the Second Coming, Like yeah, didn't happen, and
Speaker 4: you end up with like this, then fragmentation of the aftermath,
Speaker 4: a bunch of people just bleed off. But you end
Speaker 4: up with like a couple different factions. Ones who are like, ah, well,
Speaker 4: the date was like the date wasn't wrong per se,
Speaker 4: or like the idea wasn't wrong, just like the date
Speaker 4: was wrong, like maybe it's off by one hundred.
Speaker 2: Years or whatever.
Speaker 4: And you get other people who are like, actually, it
Speaker 4: did happen. It just happened in secret, like obviously it
Speaker 4: wasn't going to just like happen in Times Square. It happened,
Speaker 4: like you know, the millennium is already kind of like
Speaker 4: rolling underneath normal like normal looking society. It's going on
Speaker 4: right now. It's just day to day life hasn't changed.
Speaker 4: And that's how you know it's happening is that nothing's changing.
Speaker 4: It's like okay, okay, cool, so completely unfalsifiable, rad awesome.
Speaker 2: Love that for you. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So, one of the things that kind of related to
Speaker 1: that I have been thinking about a lot lately is we've.
Speaker 2: Got this.
Speaker 1: The story that keeps, you know, popping into the news
Speaker 1: every couple of usually a couple of times a year,
Speaker 1: that what are called nons are are increasing as a
Speaker 1: percentage of the population every single year, which is like
Speaker 1: people who are not affiliated to any religion. And I've seen,
Speaker 1: especially a few years ago, you know, atheists that I
Speaker 1: knew who were kind of like more active and like
Speaker 1: atheism is a movement really celebrating this. I think that
Speaker 1: does Like the the assumption that that means that like
Speaker 1: atheism is growing more popular has been kind of fundamentally inaccurate.
Speaker 1: I think what we're seeing and what this this is
Speaker 1: kind of evidence of, is that like non affiliation with
Speaker 1: an organized religion is more common than ever. People are
Speaker 1: rejecting organized, settled religion at a kind of unprecedented rate
Speaker 1: that's certainly undeniable. That doesn't mean they're as they are
Speaker 1: still believe and this is an example, right right, This
Speaker 1: is people are creating. The Internet has given created a
Speaker 1: tremendous capacity to build religions, and that's what people are doing.
Speaker 2: That's what this is.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And it's like how long lasting will it be?
Speaker 4: I mean, I don't in the scope of in the
Speaker 4: scope of world faiths, I don't think game stopism is
Speaker 4: is poised to stand the test of time. I don't
Speaker 4: think we'll be seeing an ape emperor any anytime soon.
Speaker 2: But yeah, like and and the thing is is that
Speaker 2: like you.
Speaker 4: Go back through history and like you you look at
Speaker 4: like religious archaeology, and like you start sort of breaking
Speaker 4: away from sort of this idea of Christian hegemony as
Speaker 4: being effectively like that it's like, okay, you know, once
Speaker 4: the Christianization of Rome happened, like it was was then
Speaker 4: locked in like until you know, Martin Luther, and then
Speaker 4: you get like fragmentation into sects, but like it stays
Speaker 4: like locked in, and it's like it's like nah, when
Speaker 4: you start really digging into the history, it's like this
Speaker 4: is just this is always going on, This is always
Speaker 4: boiling under the surface. You look at like Puritanism in
Speaker 4: America through a non like through just kind of like
Speaker 4: a human lens of like what you know about how
Speaker 4: people behave, and you suddenly start seeing that it's like, oh,
Speaker 4: they were just like in a constant, perpetual state of
Speaker 4: internal fragmentation as people had different ideas about like what
Speaker 4: was supposed to happen, what should happen, and just kind
Speaker 4: of like formed you know, cliques and factions, and sometimes
Speaker 4: those factions got big enough to split off and then
Speaker 4: they lasted, you know, ten twenty thirty fifty years and
Speaker 4: then like either folded back into the main thing or
Speaker 4: or whatever. But this kind of like churn in in
Speaker 4: faith and belief is is just it's always there. It
Speaker 4: just in an organized, codified faith. It's a lot easier
Speaker 4: to lose track of it. Particularly from a historical perspective.
Speaker 4: It's a lot easier to just look at like the
Speaker 4: bigger picture and be like, ah, it was all the same,
Speaker 4: it was homogeneous.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 4: And it turns out no, yeah, sorry, that was a
Speaker 4: very no, no, no, there was. I threw a lot of
Speaker 4: like very big assumptions into a very tightly packed statement there.
Speaker 2: No, no, no. I think that was great.
Speaker 1: And yeah, that's that's kind of I think what I
Speaker 1: what I had to sort of ask about, you know,
Speaker 1: just sort of this fascination with the way in which
Speaker 1: almost anything can become a cult these day thanks to
Speaker 1: sort of the social dynamics of the different online communities
Speaker 1: and how they they reinforce each other. Like this is
Speaker 1: kind of at the center of almost everything that's a
Speaker 1: problem right now one way or the other.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, I think the thing that is new and
Speaker 4: modern really is the ability or is the I don't
Speaker 4: want to say ability, the phenomenon of decentralized self organizing
Speaker 4: belief systems. You know that like there's these a lot
Speaker 4: of the a lot of the meme stock influencers. You know,
Speaker 4: they're not leading it. They're just like nudging it. They're
Speaker 4: not in charge of it. And if they if any
Speaker 4: of them like tried to like really like seize the reins,
Speaker 4: that that would get them like exiled. You know, any
Speaker 4: any kind of like overt power grab would be would
Speaker 4: be antithetical to it. But so it's the it's and
Speaker 4: it's the same thing like in QAnon, if somebody anyone
Speaker 4: who's come out and been like I am q listen
Speaker 4: to me, gets immediately just like just demolished by the
Speaker 4: faithful because like it's it's antithetical to their whole thing
Speaker 4: to have a really identifiable leader. And and the fact
Speaker 4: that there is no identifiable leader, that that the leader
Speaker 4: is mythological is is useful and beneficial to the to
Speaker 4: the organization. And those kinds of like those kinds of movements,
Speaker 4: they're not unique to the modern age, but the modern
Speaker 4: age has made them very easy to form, almost by accident.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, dan uh, this be something for people to
Speaker 1: continue to keep an eye on because it's not gonna stop.
Speaker 4: Probably, oh boy, I'm I'm there's gonna be some like
Speaker 4: amazing doctor dissertations on this subject in like ten years.
Speaker 1: Yes, I would, I would certainly agree with that. Well, Dan,
Speaker 1: you want to let the people know where they can
Speaker 1: find you.
Speaker 4: They can find me on YouTube. The channel name is
Speaker 4: Folding Ideas and I'm on Socials, Twitter, Blue Sky, et cetera,
Speaker 4: et cetera, et cetera, as as Foldable Human.
Speaker 2: Excellent.
Speaker 1: All right, check out Dan's videos. Check out his YouTube channel,
Speaker 1: like and subscribe and.
Speaker 2: Check us out.
Speaker 1: But you already have because you're here, so continue to
Speaker 1: check us out.
Speaker 10: It's it's chaos in congreg This is this is it
Speaker 10: could happen here, the podcast about things Falling Apart and
Speaker 10: just this is a jest a falling Apart episode with
Speaker 10: though it's a kind of funny one.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I'm your host, Mia Wong and with me is
Speaker 7: Garrison Davis. Hello.
Speaker 11: Chaos every everywhere, but especially in Congress.
Speaker 5: So I just.
Speaker 7: Realized you grew up in Canada, which means I did. Yes,
Speaker 7: can can you explain what the speaker that? Do you
Speaker 7: know what the speaker of the House is for America.
Speaker 11: Yeah, it's the guy who like presides over the things
Speaker 11: and has the hammer and he yells, you.
Speaker 7: Know, that's that's that's that's that's pretty close. Okay.
Speaker 11: See see come.
Speaker 7: On, yeah, yeah, it's not bad. It's not bad. This
Speaker 7: is okay. So what we're we're going to go into
Speaker 7: a bit more death about what this person does because
Speaker 7: I don't know, the American Constitution was written by absolute
Speaker 7: clowns and there's some wild stuff there. But however, comma,
Speaker 7: you know, so some more seriously, this is a very
Speaker 7: this is a very sort of consequential and dangerous moment
Speaker 7: in American political history. And in this moment, Congress is
Speaker 7: incomplete chaos. It is it is. It is the most
Speaker 7: non functional it has been in my entire life. And
Speaker 7: that is that is saying something like Congress has been
Speaker 7: non functional for my entire life. This is the worst
Speaker 7: it has ever been. And the reason this is the
Speaker 7: worst has ever been is that Kevin McCarthy, who is
Speaker 7: the now former Speaker of the House, was removed by
Speaker 7: a vote of no confidence on October third, which when
Speaker 7: this comes out, that will be exactly two weeks out.
Speaker 7: And he is removed because he tried to cut a
Speaker 7: deal with the Democrats to avert a government shutdown untill
Speaker 7: the seventeenth, and he got the deal through.
Speaker 11: It would have been crazy if we had a shutdown
Speaker 11: till seventeenth. God, imagine, imagine, I met Jesus. Fuck.
Speaker 7: Here's the thing. Okay, there's no shutdown till the seventeenth.
Speaker 7: There's also a chance of a real serious chance that,
Speaker 7: like the shutdown starts and we still don't have a
Speaker 7: Speaker of the House. Oh yeah, like it's not that high,
Speaker 7: but it could happen, which is nuts. This has never
Speaker 7: happened before. Yeah, and so so I guess we should
Speaker 7: we should go into specifically what hasn't happened before. And
Speaker 7: the thing that hasn't happened before is that no sitting
Speaker 7: speaker of the House dream their term, has ever been
Speaker 7: removed by a vote of no confidence, which is nuts
Speaker 7: because again, and I cannot emphasize this enough, for most
Speaker 7: of the two thousands, the Speaker of the House was
Speaker 7: a guy named Dennis Hastick, who was literally a pedophile,
Speaker 7: and he was not removed by a vote of no confidence.
Speaker 7: So like, this is this is the level of you know,
Speaker 7: weirdness that we're in, like like literally the two hundred
Speaker 7: something year history of the US, this has never happened.
Speaker 11: And from my understanding, you don't actually have to be
Speaker 11: like an elected member of the House to be the speaker,
Speaker 11: which means they could carry on this tradition and they
Speaker 11: could get Polanski as Speaker of the House if they
Speaker 11: could ef thoughts to carry it over.
Speaker 7: You know, at this point, this is only we're gonna
Speaker 7: get you later. There was a there was a a
Speaker 7: two day span, two and a half days span where
Speaker 7: Trump was trying to get himself elected a Speaker of
Speaker 7: the House. Yes, yes, and then that.
Speaker 11: Which would be probably the most funny, the most funny.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, results.
Speaker 11: Yeah, but you know so so because this is he
Speaker 11: also has a path to the presidency.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, you just have to get two impatriotes.
Speaker 11: Somehow and take it out. This is how Trump can
Speaker 11: still win. This is the path, guys.
Speaker 7: This unfortunately she's well, I mean here's the thing. Okay, legitimately,
Speaker 7: if Biden and Harris died in a plane crash tomorrow,
Speaker 7: I actually think Trump could win the would win the
Speaker 7: Speaker of the House vote.
Speaker 11: Oh yeah, absolutely, But this is this.
Speaker 7: Is this is how Berdie can still win. This is
Speaker 7: the path.
Speaker 12: So all right, so so you know we're in this,
Speaker 12: We're in We're in I don't know, We're just you know,
Speaker 12: this is all like nuts but like again, we are
Speaker 12: just we are in the wilderness, like we're in complete
Speaker 12: chaos lands.
Speaker 7: No no one the US has never been here before.
Speaker 7: And okay, the other thing we need to mention is, okay,
Speaker 7: so you know you were saying that there there hasn't
Speaker 7: like you know, we we need we need to bring
Speaker 7: back the like pedophiles to be the Speaker of the House.
Speaker 7: So Speaker of the House, not a pedophile. The guy
Speaker 7: who removed him as Speaker of the House. He's by
Speaker 7: Mad Gates probably probably.
Speaker 13: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So here's here's what I can say legally about Matt Gates,
Speaker 7: the guy who led eight Republicans to join the Democrats
Speaker 7: in the in the voter no confidence. He is a
Speaker 7: man best known for being investigated for the Department of
Speaker 7: Justice for trafficking underaged girls. What I can legally say
Speaker 7: is that he was suspected by the Justice Department of
Speaker 7: being a pedophile. There are there are like there were
Speaker 7: receipts from his like on his phone from like cash
Speaker 7: app of him sending money to underage girls. So you know,
Speaker 7: bad things, bad things happening there. That investigation got killed
Speaker 7: because the bourgeoisie uh protects its allies. But Comma, we
Speaker 7: do not Speaker of the House right now, so something
Speaker 7: I think, I guess we should also mention this. So
Speaker 7: there's like a there's no Speaker of the House. There's
Speaker 7: some guy they put in who's like, is not actually
Speaker 7: an acting Speaker of the House. The only thing he
Speaker 7: can do effectively is like make sure that there's vote
Speaker 7: specifically on there being another Speaker of the House. Yeah,
Speaker 7: And this has thrown the entire American political system into
Speaker 7: chaos because with no Speaker of the House, the House
Speaker 7: of Representatives cannot pass bills. They can't do it, They
Speaker 7: cannot pass any bills at all. And because of the
Speaker 7: way that the American system was designed, not having this
Speaker 7: one person shuts down the entire effectively shut it shuts
Speaker 7: down the entire legislative branch, right because you can't get
Speaker 7: anything passed in the Senate without also getting it ratified
Speaker 7: in the House. And this has just shut down effectively,
Speaker 7: like most of the American government outside of the like,
Speaker 7: you know. I mean, so the executive branches and all
Speaker 7: of the departments stuff are self functioning, but there is
Speaker 7: no legislative branch right now, effectively, is what has happened,
Speaker 7: right I think maybe subcommittee meetings are still running, but
Speaker 7: they can't pass any bills, and this is both a
Speaker 7: blessing and a curse. Normally, this I think would just
Speaker 7: be a curse. I don't know. Maybe right now this
Speaker 7: is probably the best possible time this could have happened,
Speaker 7: because the consequence of this has been the US has
Speaker 7: been unable to follow through on its most sort of
Speaker 7: just rapidly genocidal impulses about Palestine because again, the House
Speaker 7: literally cannot pass any bills until they figure this shit out.
Speaker 7: So we haven't been able to send money to it Laziel,
Speaker 7: we haven't been able to send like God forbid, like
Speaker 7: we haven't been able to plenty troops, which I don't
Speaker 7: know if they I don't know if there was actually
Speaker 7: the political desire to do that anyways, But you know,
Speaker 7: the fact, the fact that there was no speaker in
Speaker 7: the immediate wake of the stuff that's been happening in
Speaker 7: Palestine means that you know, they've they've been restrained from
Speaker 7: just like glassing the entire Middle East, which is which
Speaker 7: is good. The downside is that again, we have until
Speaker 7: November seventeenth to pass a funding bill to avert the
Speaker 7: government shutdown. And not only is there like no progress
Speaker 7: on a deal about that bill, like the American legislature
Speaker 7: is currently incapable of passing any bill, much less the
Speaker 7: spending bill. So things are going great in the American
Speaker 7: political system. And okay, so we should we should ask
Speaker 7: the question why is this happening? And there are both
Speaker 7: sort of short and long answers to this question. Both
Speaker 7: of them effectively have the same route, which is that
Speaker 7: the Republican Party is a coalition. It's one that usually
Speaker 7: has pretty broadly compatible politics, but it is a coalition
Speaker 7: between different sectors of capital. So think, for example, you know,
Speaker 7: you have your different right wing like tech mogul billionaires,
Speaker 7: right like Elon Musk or like Peter Thiel. But these
Speaker 7: people align on a lot of stuff, but they don't
Speaker 7: necessarily have the same interests as like a weapons manufacturer
Speaker 7: or like coke industries, or I mean just like you know,
Speaker 7: like one of the big sort of tensions, for example,
Speaker 7: is that the Republican Party has a lot of backing
Speaker 7: among the financial sector. Uh, the financial sector has very
Speaker 7: little interest in conflict with China because they have an
Speaker 7: enormous amount of capital like tied up in Chinese firms.
Speaker 7: There are a lot of other like people who have
Speaker 7: a lot of like like even this is this is
Speaker 7: a thing between Elon Musk and Peter Teel right or
Speaker 7: like Musk is kind of more pro China than like
Speaker 7: the average like Republican tech billionaire because he has a
Speaker 7: bunch of contracts in a giant factory in China and
Speaker 7: so so okay, so this is this is a coalition
Speaker 7: between different segments of capital who disagree. This is also
Speaker 7: a coalition between different like right wing social movements who
Speaker 7: are also you know, a very powerful part of the party.
Speaker 7: You have evangelical stuff. But I mean, you know, the
Speaker 7: consequence of this, and the consequence of the sort of
Speaker 7: shift right of American politics has been you now have
Speaker 7: this party where there are like libertarians alongside neocons, you
Speaker 7: have more moderate conservatives, and you have basic people who
Speaker 7: are effectively neo Nazis. And the fact that the coalition
Speaker 7: is like this now, the fact that it is genuinely
Speaker 7: more so than it's been in a long time, a
Speaker 7: very broad and diverse coalition. This has made the House
Speaker 7: of Representatives effectively unmanageable. Okay, and this has been a
Speaker 7: real issue in the Republican Party for a while now,
Speaker 7: partially because you know, and this is this is why
Speaker 7: we're getting the government shutdown stuff, like a big part
Speaker 7: of Republican strategy for the last decade, basically since Obama
Speaker 7: took office, has just been shutting down the government and
Speaker 7: doing art obstructionism, so you know, nothing can get done
Speaker 7: at waitgre have you have you been Do you remember
Speaker 7: the last government shut down?
Speaker 12: Yeah?
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, it was only like two years ago. Yeah,
Speaker 11: it feels like maybe maybe it was longer. It feels
Speaker 11: like it was pretty recent. There was no it was
Speaker 11: it was in twenty eighteen. I think it was like, yeah,
Speaker 11: I see, because in my brain we're still in twenty twenty.
Speaker 7: Oh yeah, they were actually twenty So what I.
Speaker 11: Said when I say two years ago, what I mean
Speaker 11: is twenty eighteen.
Speaker 7: Yeah, I mean, and it's that one was funny because
Speaker 7: that was a that was a Republican president. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: which is very funny. But yeah, but you know, but
Speaker 7: back when Obama was in office, like this just happened
Speaker 7: all the fucking time, Like every other week. There was
Speaker 7: like a threat of a government every single time a
Speaker 7: bill liken, a funding bill was going to pass Congress,
Speaker 7: like I had a bunch of family members get furloughed
Speaker 7: well at one point, because the government actually did shut
Speaker 7: down for a long time. But there's a real problem
Speaker 7: with this, which is that this political strategy encourages, effectively
Speaker 7: the it encourages creating chaos, right, and this is something
Speaker 7: that Trump has been very good at sort of exploiting.
Speaker 7: But it also means that there's now this like qudra
Speaker 7: of politicos who've come up who are like incredibly right
Speaker 7: wing and effectively the only thing they know how to
Speaker 7: do is obstructing anything from functioning. And this is what
Speaker 7: McCarthy ran into. He ran into Gates and his sort
Speaker 7: of like band of Mary I don't know, I was
Speaker 7: gonna call him a band of Mary weirdos, but that's
Speaker 7: way too complimentary. His band of like absolute fanatics. And
Speaker 7: the real issue here is that, Okay, so there's currently
Speaker 7: two vacant seats in the House, so this means right now,
Speaker 7: to win a vote in the full House. To become
Speaker 7: a Speaker of the House, you need two hundred and
Speaker 7: seventeen votes. Sorry, hold on, there's new shit happening, like
Speaker 7: right now, McCarthy thinks that Jim Jordan has two hundred
Speaker 7: and seventeen votes. I don't know if I believe him.
Speaker 7: I don't know. Well, I'll just explain what's happening now
Speaker 7: and then we'll put that at the end.
Speaker 11: As like breaking news. Inswer that at the end, Daniel,
Speaker 11: thank you? Or keep it in right now is a
Speaker 11: funny bit, yes, because this situation is still is still
Speaker 11: developing as of time of recording.
Speaker 7: So yeah, like as yes, it's the only way should mention.
Speaker 7: You know, this process is complicated enough that like, yeah,
Speaker 7: as we are recording it, stuff is changing rapidly, like
Speaker 7: stuff has been. News is coming in.
Speaker 3: So what's been.
Speaker 7: Making it hard is that in order to get two
Speaker 7: undred and seventeen votes, right, the Republican majority is only
Speaker 7: they only have two hundred and twenty one votes. So
Speaker 7: if you want to become Speaker of the House, you
Speaker 7: can only lose four total votes, and this means you
Speaker 7: have to win both the Moderates and Matt Gates's coalition
Speaker 7: of fanatics. And this is effectively impossible. It is, it
Speaker 7: is unbelievably difficult. McCarthy was able to do this because
Speaker 7: he pulled votes from the far right by like promising
Speaker 7: things like impeaching Biden and stuff like that, and also
Speaker 7: sort of cutting cutting his own deals with people like
Speaker 7: Marjorie Taylor Green who like and is And this is
Speaker 7: the other thing about about this impiacement vote is that
Speaker 7: it's not actually a purely ideological lines like far right
Speaker 7: versus moderate vote, because.
Speaker 11: No, like he he even split the more extreme contention
Speaker 11: of the Republican Party in Congress. It's it's it's really bizarre. Well,
Speaker 11: it's not bizarre because you can like understand it, but
Speaker 11: it is certainly interesting where where the dividing lines and
Speaker 11: ended up being for a lot of the people that
Speaker 11: we consider mostly being on the same side right because
Speaker 11: usually people imagine like Matt Gates and Marchie Taylor Green
Speaker 11: usually in the same kind of far right voting block.
Speaker 11: And to see like divisions over over this vote is
Speaker 11: certainly an interesting aspect of you know, possible fractures within
Speaker 11: the even the extreme contingent of the Republican Party.
Speaker 7: Yeah, and this and this has been a really interesting dynamic,
Speaker 7: but it also makes it just like impossible, Like you
Speaker 7: have to in order to do this, you have to
Speaker 7: somehow appease the moderates and gates and like you're dealing
Speaker 7: with multiple different right wing fringe factions. Yeah, and then
Speaker 7: and this is you know what we talk you more
Speaker 7: about the Freedom Caucus in a little bit. But you
Speaker 7: have to, like you're at a point where you're trying
Speaker 7: to appease so many different groups of people who all
Speaker 7: have kind of competing agendas, who also just have like
Speaker 7: personal beef with each other. And as of right now
Speaker 7: time of recording, which is two pm Pacific time on Friday,
Speaker 7: no one has been able to actually pull together this vote.
Speaker 7: We're gonna take an ad break, and then we're.
Speaker 11: Gonna do you know who else actually needs to be
Speaker 11: appeased by these same people?
Speaker 7: Is is it the products and services? It is podcast?
Speaker 11: Ronald Reagan Coin looks down upon Congress every single time
Speaker 11: that guy hits that little hammer, And Ronald Reagan Coin
Speaker 11: also looks down upon all of you. I think I
Speaker 11: think I have a good idea where to put my
Speaker 11: new uh my new four to oh one k investment
Speaker 11: in I'm going to do all all gold coin, move
Speaker 11: all that over to gold coin. It's stable, it's gonna
Speaker 11: be worth it, it holds value, and that is that
Speaker 11: is definitely my plan.
Speaker 7: Oh we're back.
Speaker 11: Hello everybody. Sorry, did didn't did not realize you were
Speaker 11: already back so soon. I was just talking with me
Speaker 11: about expanding my investment portfolio. Anyway, as you were saying, so, what.
Speaker 7: Has happened after that? The answer is an absolute clown show.
Speaker 7: I mean, this is this is one of the most
Speaker 7: like James.
Speaker 11: Lets let's not disparage clowns, shall we.
Speaker 7: That's true. This is unfair to me.
Speaker 11: This is we could have clowns in the audio, We
Speaker 11: could have closeted clowns in this phone call.
Speaker 7: That's true. That's true. Okay, I I yes, I've been
Speaker 7: being unfair to clowns by comparing them to the Republican Party.
Speaker 7: This has been this has been one of the most
Speaker 7: pathetic displays of politics I've ever seen. And I have
Speaker 7: followed the political trajectory of Israeli labor like this is.
Speaker 7: This has it's been truly awful. So all right, So,
Speaker 7: so McCarthy is ousted. The problem immediately is that no
Speaker 7: one has any where close to enough votes to replace him,
Speaker 7: like like and when I say no, what like McCarthy
Speaker 7: McCarthy went down by he lost eight votes from the Republicans.
Speaker 11: Yeah, yeah, No one else is within like sixty, right,
Speaker 11: Like what like this wasn't just a power move for
Speaker 11: Gates then? Like he he was like was was he
Speaker 11: looking to.
Speaker 7: Take the spot or no? No, get the Gate. There's
Speaker 7: Gates has absolutely no shot of winning. He would get
Speaker 7: like ten votes maybe, like basically nothing. What he was
Speaker 7: trying to and this is this is kind of Gates
Speaker 7: is in this kind of obstructionism thing where he's trying.
Speaker 7: The thing he's trying to do basically is he's trying
Speaker 7: to like he's trying to set up himself as a
Speaker 7: political flank of like the moost Republicans, Republicans and everyone
Speaker 7: else are these like sellouts to work with the Democrats. Yeah,
Speaker 7: and he's he's also been trying so so Gates's preferred
Speaker 7: candidate is a guy named Jim Jordan. Jim Jordan is
Speaker 7: the found he was the founding head of the powerful
Speaker 7: far right Freedom Caucus, and he's a really he's a
Speaker 7: real piece of work. He's mad.
Speaker 11: I feel like Jimmy Jordan has been a recurring character
Speaker 11: on this show. Yea, sometimes he's not a very n
Speaker 11: he sucks, like she's not quite like a full on
Speaker 11: neo Nazi in the way.
Speaker 7: Like yeah, but like he's not good. He's he's he's
Speaker 7: from like the far right. He's what I guess you
Speaker 7: would call the like the more acceptable far right of
Speaker 7: the Republican Party. Like he's from the Freedom Caucus, like
Speaker 7: is is a like a very right wing organization even
Speaker 7: within the Republican Party. But they're not seen as like
Speaker 7: weird fringe fanatics in the way, at the.
Speaker 11: Very least, they will hold the door open towards people
Speaker 11: that are even like like even way way more extreme.
Speaker 10: Yeah.
Speaker 11: Yeah, and that's been he's been serving in Congress since
Speaker 11: like twenty and seven.
Speaker 7: Yeah, he's a very he's a very high He's.
Speaker 3: One of the guys.
Speaker 7: He's he's been like the architect of a lot of
Speaker 7: well not the architect. He's been one of the figures
Speaker 7: behind a lot of the sort of like government shutdown stuff.
Speaker 7: He's been. He's he's been one of the guys who's
Speaker 7: kind of like I don't know, like he didn't he
Speaker 7: cause he didn't come in on the tea party wave.
Speaker 7: He came in before that. But he's been he's been
Speaker 7: a guy who's been pushing that kind of sort of
Speaker 7: like that kind of very very rote with politics. His
Speaker 7: his original opponent was Steve Scalise, who is a kind
Speaker 7: of semi McCarthy ally kind of and you will see
Speaker 7: him described as being more moderate than than Jim Jordan,
Speaker 7: and that is maybe kind of true in the sense
Speaker 7: that like he's being back in the fact that like
Speaker 7: like Jim Jordan is being backed by like Marjorie Terry Green,
Speaker 7: Matt Gates and like Donald Trump. This is after Trump
Speaker 7: gave up his bid to like become speak of house himself.
Speaker 11: He backs, which would have been the funniest dot com Yeah.
Speaker 7: Would have been very funny. But however, we don't. We
Speaker 7: don't live in the funniest off possible timeline set. We
Speaker 7: live in the worst one.
Speaker 9: Yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, So that didn't happen. So the problem is the
Speaker 7: other guy is is again this is Steve Scalise, and
Speaker 7: again he's called a moderate. Scalise also wants there There
Speaker 7: is a report of him calling himself and I quote
Speaker 7: David Duke without the baggage and in in the early
Speaker 7: two thousands, he spoke at a David at a rally
Speaker 7: for a group founded by David Duke. Mm hmm, what.
Speaker 11: Without the baggage? What is left of David Duke? Like,
Speaker 11: how what is that?
Speaker 7: What does actually mean? Like we should I guess we
Speaker 7: should have mentioned so David Duke if people don't remember
Speaker 7: David Duke was the Grand Wizard. Yes, yeah, so what
Speaker 7: he says David Duke without the baggage, What he means
Speaker 7: is that he he has David Duke's politics, but he
Speaker 7: doesn't have the immediate what the fuck association you get
Speaker 7: when you mentioned the head of the fucking KKK that
Speaker 7: that that's what he was going for. Right, So this
Speaker 7: is not a good guy he's being presented as.
Speaker 3: And again this.
Speaker 7: Is what passes for like a moderate I mean, he's
Speaker 7: kind of in the modern the part, but like, this
Speaker 7: is what passes for a fucking moderate Republican in twenty
Speaker 7: in twenty twenty three, right, Like these people have always sucked,
Speaker 7: They've always fucking been like this, and you know the problem, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 7: it's it's it's it's it's a real issue that again,
Speaker 7: like this guy who is like speaking at like it
Speaker 7: should like in any even remotely noma political system, having
Speaker 7: given a speech at a rally for an organization ran
Speaker 7: by David Duke would immediately be disqualifying. But you know, no,
Speaker 7: like you can just do that. You can do that
Speaker 7: and you get to be a moderate in twenty twenty three.
Speaker 7: But the problem with the problem Scalisee has is that
Speaker 7: Sclezi's problem isn't that again like clan bullshit. It's the
Speaker 7: fact that the way that votes for the Speaker of
Speaker 7: the House work is that So there's an internal blind
Speaker 7: vote inside of the inside of the Republican Party where
Speaker 7: each each each representative gets to anonymously vote like each
Speaker 7: a problem representative gets to a anonymously vote for their
Speaker 7: preferred candidates. So Jim Jordan like kind of narrowly loses
Speaker 7: out to Scalise in the first route in the first vote,
Speaker 7: so he loses one hundred and thirteen to ninety nine,
Speaker 7: and so Scalise comes out as the guy who's the
Speaker 7: nominee for the Republicans.
Speaker 5: Right.
Speaker 7: Problem is, Scalise lasts one day as that guy. Because
Speaker 7: the problem is to actually become speaker, you need to
Speaker 7: win a vote on the House floor and the vote
Speaker 7: on the House floor with everyone in the House, including
Speaker 7: the Democrats. That's where he needs to win two hundred
Speaker 7: seventeen votes. He did not have it. He so incredibly
Speaker 7: did not have it. That again, within a day of
Speaker 7: him winning this vote, he is out. So Scalise is
Speaker 7: now out of the race. What has been so the
Speaker 7: developments Literally as we are recording this, Jim Jordan has
Speaker 7: won a vote to become like the next he's the
Speaker 7: next person to vote because he was running against just
Speaker 7: a fucking clown. Sorry I'm being offensive to clowns. He's
Speaker 7: just like a nobody, like just like some dipshit Republicans
Speaker 7: like picked off off the street, right, like this is
Speaker 7: where we're at, like that there's no one like if
Speaker 7: if Jim, if Jim Jordan can't do this, like there's
Speaker 7: like I don't know, like you would like bring McCarthy back,
Speaker 7: Like there's nothing he like Jordan. Jim Jordan's like the
Speaker 7: last even semi serious political figure of the Republican Party
Speaker 7: who could even conceivably do this. So Jim Jordan has
Speaker 7: won the vote inside the Republican Party. However, come and
Speaker 7: and also the other important thing that happened literally as
Speaker 7: we were recording, is that he's been he's been endorsed
Speaker 7: by McCarthy now, which is kind of a big deal.
Speaker 7: McCarthy has said publicly that he thinks that Jim Jordan
Speaker 7: has the votes. I don't believe him, and I don't
Speaker 7: believe him because immediately after he said that, it came
Speaker 7: out that Jim Jordan is sixty vote short on the
Speaker 7: floor of the House, sixty six zero. He is screwed.
Speaker 7: There's no way, like he has to get through sixty
Speaker 7: sixty votes and there's no way. I I don't see
Speaker 7: a path for him to do this, even even with
Speaker 7: McCarthy's support, Like, I don't, I don't think it's a
Speaker 7: way for him to do this. As a time of recording,
Speaker 7: the thing that has happened is that the Republicans have
Speaker 7: all gone home because they get out at five, and
Speaker 7: he's going to try to spend the weekends like building
Speaker 7: up support, trying to build up enough votes in the
Speaker 7: House to like win speakership.
Speaker 11: But yeah, this has not seen where it seems like
Speaker 11: it's it seems like a pretty uh pretty chance.
Speaker 7: It's it's possible that like on like Monday or Tuesday
Speaker 7: or something when they're like, when this comes out, I'll
Speaker 7: be eating crow and I'll have to record like it
Speaker 7: that's true because of his date.
Speaker 11: But yes, because this does come out after the weekend.
Speaker 11: So yeah, but we will, I.
Speaker 7: Know buy this. I I absolutely just do not buy
Speaker 7: that Jim Jordan has enough votes. This is this is
Speaker 7: this is this is this is my analysis. If I'm wrong,
Speaker 7: I'm wrong, but guessing at sixty votes and like, there's
Speaker 7: no way, there's no way. So this is this is
Speaker 7: this is a fact. This is the current state of
Speaker 7: Congress right now, Like we don't we don't have a
Speaker 7: legislave branch. Everything, everything is in chaos. Nothing but down.
Speaker 7: Two more to go. We're almost there, fellas. Yeah, well
Speaker 7: the executives. If we cannot come the executive. If we
Speaker 7: can not go the executive, the judiciary will fall by itself. Yeah.
Speaker 11: So that's that is certainly certainly exciting. There's always always
Speaker 11: good things to look forward to.
Speaker 7: Yeah, but you know, I think that I think a
Speaker 7: closing note on this is that the fact that the
Speaker 7: US effectively can't do anything right now while it's in
Speaker 7: the middle of a pretty serious like a couple of
Speaker 7: longline one is in the middle of like several very
Speaker 7: very serious international political crises and wars. Is has I
Speaker 7: don't know, it's been the thing right now that has
Speaker 7: been restraining the US from just like really going all
Speaker 7: out and trying to get it when of Palestine killed.
Speaker 7: So I guess there's that, But I don't know. Our
Speaker 7: government is a joke, yeah, and like and I guess
Speaker 7: I guess. The last thing I want to say is
Speaker 7: I want to invite all of you, everyone is listening
Speaker 7: to this, to look at these absolute numbskulls, Like, look
Speaker 7: at what they're doing right now. They can't even pick
Speaker 7: the one guy who is necessary for the entire legislative
Speaker 7: branch to function. And I want you to ask yourself,
Speaker 7: could we do this? Could like any of you and
Speaker 7: like your neighbors and your friends, run a political system
Speaker 7: better than this, because I bet the answer is yes.
Speaker 11: As mass bombing continues across Gaza, two point three million
Speaker 11: Palestinians remain trapped in the strip as the Israeli military
Speaker 11: conducts a total blockade. Israel has cut off water, electricity,
Speaker 11: and fuel while intentionally restricting humanitarian aid from being sent
Speaker 11: into Gaza. This is it could happen here. I'm Garrison Davis.
Speaker 11: On October seventh, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu gave a
Speaker 11: speech addressing Palestinians inside Gaza. A part of the official
Speaker 11: English translation of the speech reads, quote, all of the
Speaker 11: places which Hamas is deployed, hiding and operating in that
Speaker 11: to wicked city, we will turn them into rubble. I
Speaker 11: say to the residents of Gaza, leave now, because we
Speaker 11: will operate forcefully everywhere.
Speaker 7: Unquote.
Speaker 11: The next sentence in the speech was left untranslated, but
Speaker 11: it roughly read quote, we will target each and every
Speaker 11: corner of the strip. According to the UN, by last
Speaker 11: Thursday October twelfth, about four hundred and twenty three thousand
Speaker 11: people had been displaced from their homes by Israeli air strikes.
Speaker 11: That's about twenty five percent of the Palestinian population. Many
Speaker 11: sought refuge in crowded United Nations shelters set up in schools,
Speaker 11: but even those shelters and hospitals were attacked by air
Speaker 11: Last Friday, October thirteenth, Israel issued a military order for
Speaker 11: all citizens in northern Gaza, including Gaza City, to evacuate
Speaker 11: their homes within a twenty four hour period in apparent
Speaker 11: preparation of a major ground assault on the besieged enclave.
Speaker 11: Over one million Palestinians live in this area. It's almost
Speaker 11: half the population of Gaza. In between bombings, Israeli military
Speaker 11: aircraft dropped thousands of leaflets into Gaza City advising civilians
Speaker 11: to immediately leave their homes and the un shelters, but
Speaker 11: not to actually try and leave Gaza, as the leaflet
Speaker 11: warned that if anyone approached the Israel Gaza security wall,
Speaker 11: they would quote expose themselves to death unquote. Israel laid
Speaker 11: out just a few roads that it was supposed to
Speaker 11: be quote unquote safe to travel southbound. Thousands of people
Speaker 11: in a northern Gaza began to flee towards the strip's
Speaker 11: southern half on Friday morning, but as they were following
Speaker 11: Israel's orders, civilian convoys transporting Palestinian families out of Gaza
Speaker 11: City were bombed by the Israeli military at three different
Speaker 11: points along the evacuation route. At least seventy people were killed,
Speaker 11: with hundreds more injured by the Israeli airstrikes as they
Speaker 11: were trying to follow Israel's impossible order to evacuate everyone
Speaker 11: from their homes in just twenty four hours between Netanyahu's
Speaker 11: speech and the evacuation order of northern Gaza. This leaves
Speaker 11: people questioning where exactly are these people supposed to go
Speaker 11: in Gaza told the Associated Press quote, we can't flee
Speaker 11: because anywhere you go, you are bombed. Unquote. Gaza isn't
Speaker 11: that big. It's only twenty five miles long, and it's
Speaker 11: completely surrounded by Israel and the Mediterranean Sea save for
Speaker 11: a small section on the southern tip, which borders Egypt
Speaker 11: with Israel, sealing off access to Gaza. The only way
Speaker 11: in or out is the Rafa Border Crossing, located at
Speaker 11: the southern end of the strip, bordering Egypt's Sinai Peninsula.
Speaker 11: The Rafa Crossing is a critical passage for humanitarian aid
Speaker 11: and serves as a vital gateway between Gaza and the
Speaker 11: outside world. One of the very first targets of Israeli
Speaker 11: bombing this month was the Rafa Border crossing between Gaza
Speaker 11: and Egypt. It was targeted by three air raids in
Speaker 11: a twenty four hour period, severely damaging the crossing, preventing
Speaker 11: it from operating and resulting in fatalities. There's video and
Speaker 11: audio of the bombings where you hear hundreds of people
Speaker 11: make a singular scream. It's pretty gruesome. With Israel undergoing
Speaker 11: a quote unquote complete siege of Gaza, this crossing was
Speaker 11: the only way to send humanitarian supplies into the Strip
Speaker 11: and to let willing refugees flee the assault. The Egyptian
Speaker 11: Foreign Minister has said that Israel has yet to allow
Speaker 11: the reopening of the crossing. Egypt is expected to assist
Speaker 11: in delivering humanitarian aid to Palestinians and the enclave, but
Speaker 11: it has rejected proposals to accept fleeing Palestinians into its borders.
Speaker 11: Both Egypt and Israel operate a blockade of Gaza to
Speaker 11: strictly control the passage of people and supplies going in
Speaker 11: and out of the Strip. There's no freedom of movement
Speaker 11: to enter or leave Gaza. Even when there's not a
Speaker 11: declared war. One can't simply leave Gaza. There is no
Speaker 11: Gaza airport, at least not since two US and two Historically,
Speaker 11: the Rafa border crossing into the Egyptian Peninsula was only
Speaker 11: open to the public very sporadically, and often for very
Speaker 11: narrowly defined categories such as medical patients, religious pilgrims, foreign residents,
Speaker 11: or residents of Gaza with foreign visas or passports. But
Speaker 11: I don't have to tell you how hard it is
Speaker 11: to leave Gaza even when there's not a war. Because
Speaker 11: late last year, we interviewed two Palestinians for a still
Speaker 11: upcoming episode that's being worked on. During the interview, they
Speaker 11: touched on their own experiences escaping Gaza. So we're going
Speaker 11: to play some of that interview for this episode, and
Speaker 11: I'll jump in occasionally to add some context. So here
Speaker 11: is Ahmed Matar and Abdullah al Casabre, athletes from a
Speaker 11: PK Gaza, one of the most recognized parker teams in
Speaker 11: the world.
Speaker 9: My name is Ahmad mat I'm twenty six years old.
Speaker 9: I'm from Gaza, Palestine, and I do parkour. I live
Speaker 9: at the moment tenniswit in because I'm open. Within six
Speaker 9: years ago after I got invited for the Eraword Challenge,
Speaker 9: it's a partcour competition that was organized in Sweden and Helsingburg.
Speaker 9: And yeah, since that time, I just live in Sweden
Speaker 9: because I just did not want to go back for
Speaker 9: so many reasons that we can just talk about it
Speaker 9: later in this episode.
Speaker 7: Hey, guys.
Speaker 5: I'm I'm a taddler.
Speaker 13: I'm twining, five years old and also in Barkour Athleta
Speaker 13: and I'm also right now in Italy. I got a
Speaker 13: chance to travel to Italy because I part debated in.
Speaker 2: A in a in a movie or in.
Speaker 13: A film which is the directory is in man village Girosa.
Speaker 13: He's an Italian movie. It's called more jumb But my
Speaker 13: friend he was the main character. I was one of
Speaker 13: the characters in the filma. So we got a chance
Speaker 13: to to participate in a festival in si And it
Speaker 13: wasn't really easy. It was really hard to do it
Speaker 13: because because you know, having visa Ahma as dad, it's
Speaker 13: we get a visa as a Palestinian, and especially from
Speaker 13: gether city is something really really hard. And even though
Speaker 13: it's about having the business about it, traveling outside Gaza
Speaker 13: something else. This is also other completely different story. But
Speaker 13: we could manage that, and I've been here in Italy.
Speaker 13: I came to participate in Sishida. First of all, me
Speaker 13: and my friend we managed to get shing a visa
Speaker 13: and it was just for five days. And now I'm
Speaker 13: here in Italy for almost eleven months. In the other city.
Speaker 13: You when you were there, it is not you don't
Speaker 13: really feel free as free, you know, because you're surrounded
Speaker 13: all the time by so many obstacutes, you know, which
Speaker 13: is which is really crazy and it drives even though
Speaker 13: because we were really kids and we didn't have a
Speaker 13: really good childhood somehow.
Speaker 9: Yeah, I remember since were we were kids, we were
Speaker 9: seeing that tanks or what is it called, Yeah, the
Speaker 9: tanks that bombs and we were seeing it in front
Speaker 9: of the street and we were hearing bombs and shootings.
Speaker 9: And that was before two thousand and five. That was
Speaker 9: like since I was four years I could remember all
Speaker 9: of that moments where the tanks are crossing our road
Speaker 9: and we were seeing that I attacks happening between people together,
Speaker 9: and bombs and flights and drones and and that's something
Speaker 9: that for sure affects us as a kid, that we
Speaker 9: we get the far whenever we see some bombs and
Speaker 9: just we want to hide from the bombs and we
Speaker 9: want to be close to the family. For me, all
Speaker 9: of these things that happened around me affected me that
Speaker 9: I wanted to be that guy who would like to
Speaker 9: enjoy life. In the same time, Gaza was a place
Speaker 9: that we had the situation, but we are the psychologically
Speaker 9: or how is it called, Like when you are affected
Speaker 9: by the situation where you know that you are you
Speaker 9: can be dead at a moment, or it can get
Speaker 9: a bump close to you any moment, or someone close
Speaker 9: to you who die.
Speaker 13: I mean kids the most important for the kids just
Speaker 13: there safety and we didn't have safety. The safety is
Speaker 13: what kids really want, you know all the time. I mean,
Speaker 13: when you're a kid, you just need your mom or
Speaker 13: your dad next to you because you really feel this
Speaker 13: kind of safety. But when we were kids, we couldn't
Speaker 13: have this kind of feeling because even our parents they
Speaker 13: were not really sure what might happen to us or
Speaker 13: to them, so how they will protect us. So it's
Speaker 13: not really easy for anyone to protect the others. You know,
Speaker 13: no one able to you know, to do that. That's
Speaker 13: something affected us for sure, like because we we we
Speaker 13: we grown up in such things like that. Maybe for
Speaker 13: me an hour, if you were talking about this is
Speaker 13: maybe something usual, which is something normal, because I really
Speaker 13: good used to it somehow, which is not normal. I
Speaker 13: mean it should have been normal for anyone, but for us,
Speaker 13: you know, we could it kind of normal because it's
Speaker 13: kind of we used to and now when I really
Speaker 13: because before I was really kids, so I didn't know
Speaker 13: what but it's really going on. I was really terrified
Speaker 13: and I was really scared, and I didn't know what
Speaker 13: is really going to happen. But now when I'm kind
Speaker 13: of an adult and I know what is really going
Speaker 13: on and I see the kids when when because for example,
Speaker 13: the last four especially when I'm even outside, guess that
Speaker 13: it's completely completely different, you know, because when you're inside
Speaker 13: Gaza with your family and your friends top apply, it's
Speaker 13: really different. But now when I can see how the
Speaker 13: kids they are screaming, how the kids they they they
Speaker 13: have this kind of feeling, you know that you know,
Speaker 13: they are really ter fired with the pomps because they
Speaker 13: are sneaks to them. So I can really myself and
Speaker 13: I just go through back, you know, the.
Speaker 3: Memory of the stories.
Speaker 13: That really happened via the memories, a lot of memories
Speaker 13: before about that it was really crazy.
Speaker 11: We're going to go on a quick ad break, but
Speaker 11: when we get back, Ahmed will talk about his long
Speaker 11: experience trying to leave Gaza. When Ahmed was younger, he
Speaker 11: began to share videos online of his athletic skills, slowly
Speaker 11: gaining notoriety around the world for his pretty impressive parker ability.
Speaker 11: Soon both himself and Pik Gaza were being invited around
Speaker 11: the world to perform a parker or to enter into
Speaker 11: parker competitions. P k Gaza was invited to the Arabian
Speaker 11: TV show Arabs Got Talent, but they were unable to
Speaker 11: go on the program due to difficulties traveling outside Gaza.
Speaker 11: During this time period, the Rafa border crossing into Egypt
Speaker 11: was only open around six times a year and for
Speaker 11: only a few days. To catch a flight out of Egypt,
Speaker 11: you need to have all of your proper paperwork, tickets,
Speaker 11: and a valid visa which lines up perfectly for when
Speaker 11: the Rafa border crossing happens to be open, and you
Speaker 11: have to also hope that you're not in the back
Speaker 11: of the line to get through the border crossing because
Speaker 11: they only let a certain number of people through each day.
Speaker 11: Ahmed was invited to participate in the Red Bull Parker
Speaker 11: Challenge in China and even successfully got a visa to travel,
Speaker 11: but wasn't able to leave Gaza because the Rafa border
Speaker 11: crossing was closed during the timeframe when the visa was valid.
Speaker 11: The US based World Free Running and Parker Federation tried
Speaker 11: to help Ahmed travel to the United States to participate
Speaker 11: in the wfpf's twenty sixteen competition in Las Vegas, but
Speaker 11: Ahmed was unable to get an American travel visa due
Speaker 11: to long wait times to use the Northern border crossing
Speaker 11: into Jerusalem, and even if you did manage to get
Speaker 11: into Israel, it was quite difficult to receive a US
Speaker 11: travel visa as applicants were frequently denied. A park Ori
Speaker 11: Gym in Italy frequently invited Ahmed to participate in their
Speaker 11: summer and winter events, but the Italian embassy denied requests
Speaker 11: for a travel visa three times. In late twenty sixteen,
Speaker 11: Ahmed got invited to the Air Whip Parkour Challenge in Sweden,
Speaker 11: and with the help of some Swedish friends, he was
Speaker 11: able to secure a travel visa in just two weeks. Unfortunately,
Speaker 11: when Ahmed got the visa, the Rafa crossing was closed,
Speaker 11: but by pure luck, just one day later it was
Speaker 11: announced that the crossing would be reopening. When he went
Speaker 11: to the crossing, he learned that there were thirty thousand
Speaker 11: people in line in front of him. With the crossing
Speaker 11: only set to be opened briefly and the temporary visa
Speaker 11: set to expire, it was not looking great. After a
Speaker 11: very challenging series of events that Ahmed is about to explain,
Speaker 11: he was able to get to Sweden and just last
Speaker 11: year he started in a play about his own life
Speaker 11: and his journey traveling from Gaza to Sweden.
Speaker 6: Tell us a little bit about this. This is going
Speaker 6: to be a play about your life that they're doing
Speaker 6: in Sweden.
Speaker 9: So we have had the premiere for the play in
Speaker 9: ninth of May. So we have been doing the show
Speaker 9: for a while now, like we have had eight performances
Speaker 9: at the moment, and the play is about me with
Speaker 9: my family and then my friends from Peking Gaza. I
Speaker 9: also talks about the journey from Gaza to Sweden, which
Speaker 9: was the biggest part of the play. That yeah, talking
Speaker 9: exactly about how it is to face the visa embassy,
Speaker 9: Egyptian control, Egyptian security when we get out of Gaza,
Speaker 9: that they have to also a Palestinian side that they
Speaker 9: have to interview. Was every like I have if I
Speaker 9: have the visa. Let's say I got the visa after
Speaker 9: some tries, then I have to apply for the trouble
Speaker 9: which I have to stand in the queue behind all
Speaker 9: of that people who already applied before me, which is
Speaker 9: imagine nine thirty one thousand, Mike, you number is thirty thousand.
Speaker 9: Then I have to wait. And okay, let's say I
Speaker 9: got in front of all of that people and today
Speaker 9: I am here in the Palestinian side. Then this Palestinian side,
Speaker 9: then RAPA orders have to interview me and check all
Speaker 9: why do I need to travel? Show me your documents
Speaker 9: if I have any mistaken my documents, and I go
Speaker 9: back to Gaza. Even if all my documents, I have
Speaker 9: the vision and everything. And then if you don't want
Speaker 9: me to travel, then I have to stay in Gaza. Okay,
Speaker 9: let's say I did best the Palestinian side. I am
Speaker 9: in the Egyptian security side, and there one time the
Speaker 9: Egyptian security sent me back to Gaza after waiting. I
Speaker 9: have the visa and I was like, no, what are
Speaker 9: you going to do? I'm going to do parkour. I
Speaker 9: have a poor competition. Now what is parkour?
Speaker 5: Jump?
Speaker 9: Oh, then you go jump back in Gaza.
Speaker 7: I have to go back, and my.
Speaker 9: Family did not expect I would be backing as because
Speaker 9: I was at home around five am in the morning,
Speaker 9: and that was a whole day, like waiting to get
Speaker 9: to the Egyptian side, and then from there he send
Speaker 9: me back and yeah, and the end, I mean, without
Speaker 9: the help I could, I would not have travel because
Speaker 9: thirty thousand people in front of me. I have the
Speaker 9: Q number, but I am behind them, and I have
Speaker 9: the visa that will expire in two days. Like let's
Speaker 9: say that it starts in two days and it will
Speaker 9: expire in twenty days. And if I don't travel in
Speaker 9: this twenty days, my visa will expire, and then I
Speaker 9: cannot travel with him. And the only thing I had
Speaker 9: to do was like going to the crossing the first
Speaker 9: day with my father. He went with me and we
Speaker 9: just stand there in front of the crossing. It's you know,
Speaker 9: there is a control, there is a list with names
Speaker 9: that you cannot really cross if you don't get any help.
Speaker 9: So I go there and then we just waited around
Speaker 9: six hours, me and my father. Then the sunset came
Speaker 9: and good dark, and then he was like, I cannot
Speaker 9: do anything. We have to go back, and then we
Speaker 9: went back home. The day after my fight, tell my
Speaker 9: father list can we go, I have to travel, I
Speaker 9: have the visa. I just will explore. And then he
Speaker 9: was like, well, I cannot do anything. He don't know
Speaker 9: what he will do, my father. So I told him, okay,
Speaker 9: I will go for the guy. We have a guy
Speaker 9: close to us, like let's say my neighbor, but he's
Speaker 9: a far neighbor. And he was the manager of the
Speaker 9: crossings between us, like managing of coordinating the visas or
Speaker 9: like the last between US and Egypt. So he can
Speaker 9: really do whatever he wants. He can enter Egypt whenever
Speaker 9: he wants. He's a very friend between Egyptians. So he's
Speaker 9: the manager of the christ he's the boss. So I
Speaker 9: go to him and I wait him outside his car.
Speaker 9: Like so, I was close to his car waiting him
Speaker 9: to get out of his home. I know he goes
Speaker 9: to his work around eight in the morning. Then I
Speaker 9: wake up at seven in the morning and I go
Speaker 9: there waiting him to come to his car. I see
Speaker 9: his car. Then I was really happy that he did
Speaker 9: not leave to his work, and I knew that he's
Speaker 9: still there and I was waiting waiting, and then he
Speaker 9: came and then I show him my visa and I
Speaker 9: really have to travel the competition and they have to
Speaker 9: join this competition. And then he was like, okay, but
Speaker 9: do you have the Q number? Yes, but I am
Speaker 9: the last in the list. Okay, but how will we do?
Speaker 9: I cannot tell you, but I have already. I told
Speaker 9: him I have already been into Egypt before, but the
Speaker 9: Egyptian security sent me back to Gaza and he told me,
Speaker 9: do you have the registration of that the time you travel?
Speaker 9: And I told him yes, and did have that time
Speaker 9: and it was okay, follow me to the crossing. I
Speaker 9: told him, yeah, but I can I go with you
Speaker 9: in your car so you don't forget me when you
Speaker 9: go there. Because he's very like beoble just run after
Speaker 9: him and a crossing mariandn there. I had to tell
Speaker 9: me I want to go with you, and he said yes, okay,
Speaker 9: you can come with me. And then he told me,
Speaker 9: but you cannot stop. I told him, can I stop
Speaker 9: her and say goodbye to my family first? Because they
Speaker 9: did not know that I will travel. I just took
Speaker 9: a very small bag with me in case I really
Speaker 9: had like a tack bag with me and he said yeah,
Speaker 9: but you cannot stop. I have to go now. And
Speaker 9: then I was okay. I called my mom, Mom, he's
Speaker 9: going to help me, and but I cannot stop say goodbye.
Speaker 9: And then yeah, I went to the crossing and he
Speaker 9: put me into like a viv that I had to
Speaker 9: go like in a very special past that was just
Speaker 9: five people in it. And I was very like respected
Speaker 9: by the control there and there was like I got
Speaker 9: all the way today to Egypt. And in Egypt, I
Speaker 9: really met the same guy that he also asked me
Speaker 9: about parkour and he was like, oh you And then
Speaker 9: my friend, the guy, the manager of the crossing told
Speaker 9: me I show him what parkour is. I really had
Speaker 9: to go slept for him. I did a workster in
Speaker 9: that room where he the control chick and I was
Speaker 9: oh wow, so cool. Okay, here is the stamp enter
Speaker 9: to Egypt. But I had to go into that airport.
Speaker 9: He did not know. You know, the Egyptian don't understand
Speaker 9: the visa, like if if it's in the visa, it
Speaker 9: says that it's gonna be valid in this day, if
Speaker 9: it's valid in this like imagine I get the visa
Speaker 9: today but it's not valid yet. But the crossing is
Speaker 9: opened today and tomorrow and the day after I have
Speaker 9: to travel in these three days, then the crossing will
Speaker 9: close for another six months, so I had to travel
Speaker 9: in them days otherwise I will lose my visa. So
Speaker 9: my visa was not valid at that time. I traveled
Speaker 9: from Kasas, so he thought that it's valid.
Speaker 3: So he was, oh, go to.
Speaker 9: The airport now and travel from there. He thought that
Speaker 9: I can travel to Europe directly, but if my visa
Speaker 9: is not valid, Europe would not let me in. So
Speaker 9: I had to stay in the airport that time that
Speaker 9: my visa was not valid, which was five days, and
Speaker 9: then and I traveled, but I had to wait in
Speaker 9: the airport because he did not understand my visa.
Speaker 11: No one should have to do a Webster front flip
Speaker 11: to cross a border. Because there was still one week
Speaker 11: left until the visa became a valid, Egyptian security sent
Speaker 11: Ahmed straight to the airport to wait for the week.
Speaker 11: While in limbo at the airport, the Egyptian authorities locked
Speaker 11: him in a small room without his phone or his
Speaker 11: belongings until the visa became valid. After many harsh difficulties
Speaker 11: and compounding inconveniences, Ahmed boarded his plane for Europe. Ahmed
Speaker 11: has built a life for himself in Sweden. He's been
Speaker 11: teaching parkour classes there for years now. In fact, that's
Speaker 11: how the play came about. The mother of one of
Speaker 11: his students is a theater director and she became interested
Speaker 11: in his story. By his account, life is much better
Speaker 11: for him now, but he still is not free to
Speaker 11: see his own family or to go back to his
Speaker 11: original home. Getting into Gaza is almost as hard as
Speaker 11: getting out of Gaza.
Speaker 6: And hopefully you guys can get back into your family's too,
Speaker 6: because I know that must be read difficult, being separated
Speaker 6: and not being able to get back.
Speaker 9: Yeah, it's been six years almost.
Speaker 6: Jesus man.
Speaker 14: Yeah, that's really hard, you know.
Speaker 9: Dramaton the Theater. I've invited my brother and luckily he
Speaker 9: got the visa from first time. He got help from
Speaker 9: the same guy and that helped me and asked him
Speaker 9: and he put him into a special vest. He traveled
Speaker 9: from Gaza with having doing and then now he's here and.
Speaker 6: Oh wow, he didn't have to be a backflip in
Speaker 6: the visa.
Speaker 9: I did not, because he's an artist and he had
Speaker 9: the visa and everything. So he got the visa because
Speaker 9: in dramat and the Theater Center invited him to be
Speaker 9: a part of the show with his cool piece of
Speaker 9: fabric that he drove. True. Yeah, Alla, the same way
Speaker 9: with the travel and you know, if you don't have
Speaker 9: someone to help you, you would not travel.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it shouldn't be that way.
Speaker 9: Abdulla had to get it also help because his visa
Speaker 9: also was also one week and one week and he
Speaker 9: had to prove that week and he's named the last
Speaker 9: of the place.
Speaker 11: Unfortunately, Abdullah had some internet issues and some of the
Speaker 11: audio isn't usable. But he similarly only made it out
Speaker 11: of Gaza because he had a friend who had a
Speaker 11: contact at the Italian consulate. When Abdullah tried to apply
Speaker 11: for the visa, the office wasn't taking any more applications,
Speaker 11: but this friend was able to explain Abdullah's situation to
Speaker 11: the consulate and they decided to give him a travel visa.
Speaker 11: Abdullah also had to travel through Egypt and was forced
Speaker 11: to stay in a small present cell for three days
Speaker 11: without food or water. Once he got to the Cairo airport,
Speaker 11: the German airline he was booked on refused to accept
Speaker 11: his paperwork because they didn't want the responsibility of stamping
Speaker 11: his passport with the alternative of just going back to Gaza.
Speaker 11: Abdullah was able to find a manager of sorts and
Speaker 11: explain his situation with the travel visa and needing to
Speaker 11: go to this film premiere or this Parkhorp thing. You know,
Speaker 11: it's not the easiest thing to explain, not everyone knows
Speaker 11: what parkhor is, but the manager was sympathetic, and then,
Speaker 11: just like what happened with Abed, they requested a Parkourt
Speaker 11: demonstration to see if this guy was actually telling the truth.
Speaker 11: So the already exhausted Abdullah did a backflip in the
Speaker 11: airport as he was recovering from the COVID vaccine, and
Speaker 11: then the manager, seemingly satisfied, transferred him from this German
Speaker 11: airline to an Egyptian airline and he was able to
Speaker 11: make it to Italy and escape the prison of Gaza.
Speaker 13: When you're anyone who's a prison, the only thing that
Speaker 13: he thinks about, I mean, when you're a prisoner for
Speaker 13: the whole life, I mean, the only thing they think
Speaker 13: about is just how to escape. No, I mean that's
Speaker 13: normally because you just want to be free, because you're
Speaker 13: a prison.
Speaker 9: I've never been into the prisons, I.
Speaker 7: Mean I've never No, we both say.
Speaker 9: I mean, I've been to the Brazen of Gaza, but
Speaker 9: not the.
Speaker 13: Real exact That's exactly what I mean. So we both
Speaker 13: we were in a prison which is open, big prison,
Speaker 13: and the only way that we were thinking about is
Speaker 13: help to get out of that. And the only was
Speaker 13: really possible is just to use per food as an
Speaker 13: opportunity for us so we can get our freedom. And
Speaker 13: somehow now you're in Sweden. Im in Italy, we have
Speaker 13: this scant freedom, but at the same time it's really
Speaker 13: hard because our family is all friends and everyone. We
Speaker 13: still connected, not freedom, so it's still connected.
Speaker 9: Like I mean, I was trying to meet my family
Speaker 9: last in this summer and I applied for the Egyptian visa.
Speaker 9: Because I still don't have the Swedish passports, I have
Speaker 9: to apply as a Palestinian to go back or to
Speaker 9: visit Egypt. So I applied for the Egyptian visa to
Speaker 9: visit my family because my mother was in Egypt and
Speaker 9: so there to to attend the marriage of my actem.
Speaker 9: But she was there in Egypt with my sister and
Speaker 9: the yeah, I applied for the visa. I never with
Speaker 9: the visa, so I have to it's like I'm not
Speaker 9: free yet. I mean, yeah, I will get the Swedish
Speaker 9: passport soon. I don't know when, but I'm sure it's
Speaker 9: not more than six months from now, because I have
Speaker 9: been applying. I have applied six months ago and it's
Speaker 9: usually not more than a year to get the decity.
Speaker 9: And usually it's accepted if you have everything correct in
Speaker 9: the country, like if you're legal and you pay attacks working,
Speaker 9: you're studying and another language, I'm good there, Just like
Speaker 9: I have to wait so in the end I will
Speaker 9: be able to meet them. I would not be able
Speaker 9: to I would not say I will be free to
Speaker 9: enter Gazza whenever I want, because yeah, to enter gas
Speaker 9: at the moment I hear from people, it takes like
Speaker 9: three to four days and you suffer in the way,
Speaker 9: just like you have to stay in the car these
Speaker 9: three days and every thousand kilometers one thousand meters to
Speaker 9: get to stop by a control like a road control
Speaker 9: that they need to check everything you have, every bag
Speaker 9: you have take it out in the road and you
Speaker 9: have put it back by yourself, and then the car
Speaker 9: continues another another control, and then in the end you
Speaker 9: arrive like Gaza and you say this is the worst
Speaker 9: part of my trouble because because they don't want to
Speaker 9: do it again, they don't want to get together and
Speaker 9: suffer the same way again and the same to get
Speaker 9: out of Gaza. To get out of Gaza. I mean,
Speaker 9: if I have the Swedish passport, for sure I will
Speaker 9: have I will have the best trouble from Gaza without
Speaker 9: worrying about getting a pieza or not. But in the
Speaker 9: same time, yeah, I need to wait an aqueue. When
Speaker 9: well I traveled, When I will be able to travel
Speaker 9: from Gaza, is it like going to be one month,
Speaker 9: two months, three months, because it's like thousands of people
Speaker 9: who want to travel, and it just they allow five
Speaker 9: hundred people a day and that's maximum. And then I
Speaker 9: don't allow any more of that people. And then also
Speaker 9: they they closed the crossing at any moment. And I
Speaker 9: remember the time I traveled from Gaza, was the crossing
Speaker 9: was closed for six months to three six months and
Speaker 9: it was none it was not open at all, and
Speaker 9: there was start thirty one thousand people in the front
Speaker 9: of me in the queue, thirty one thousand, So I
Speaker 9: imagine like I was the last person in the queue
Speaker 9: and they have to wait all of these people to travel,
Speaker 9: and the crossing was open just the three days every
Speaker 9: three months. That means like in this three days, it's
Speaker 9: one thousand, five hundred. When is the rest gonna travel?
Speaker 9: When will I have to travel? And imagine you have
Speaker 9: a visa that is valid for like ten days. If
Speaker 9: you get the visa just for everything in Europe that
Speaker 9: is just three days, and then you get the visa
Speaker 9: for ten days, and then if you don't travel in
Speaker 9: that ten days, your visa get expired, and then you
Speaker 9: have to apply for a new visa. And then after
Speaker 9: that you have to wait because if you get refused visa,
Speaker 9: you cannot apply directly. You have to wait six three
Speaker 9: to six months and then you can apply for the
Speaker 9: new visa. So it's really terrible, Like I don't want
Speaker 9: to go through all of that process again. And that's
Speaker 9: why I decide stay in Sweden and work in Sweden
Speaker 9: and get a Swedish citizenship where I can travel freely
Speaker 9: without worrying about oh, getting a visa or not. And
Speaker 9: because till now, because I'm not Swedish, I have to
Speaker 9: think about getting a visa or not. Will I be
Speaker 9: refuse vicea or not? And even Egyptian embassy refuse my
Speaker 9: visa and they did not even answer me. Call them
Speaker 9: every day, did I give the visa? When will you
Speaker 9: give me the visa? I go to their office here
Speaker 9: in Stockholm. The end, they're like, oh, you have to
Speaker 9: call us, send us an email, and I call and
Speaker 9: send the in. Oh, we will call you when you
Speaker 9: get the visa. But will you call me that if
Speaker 9: I don't get the visa. No, we will call you
Speaker 9: when you get the visa, Okay. And then they said
Speaker 9: to my mom, I'm not coming to the Egypt.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that sounds rough. And I know for a long
Speaker 6: time Abdallah was in Ghaza when you were in Sweden, right,
Speaker 6: and Abdellah was trying to get the visa to travel.
Speaker 6: Last time we spoke, you hadn't been able to get one.
Speaker 6: So I'm glad you did. I'm glad you're now a
Speaker 6: film star.
Speaker 9: You have been applying many times. Yeah, I remember we
Speaker 9: went together many times. And they also like there is
Speaker 9: a weird and also invited him and you had also
Speaker 9: and they got refused visa. And I'm sure he applied
Speaker 9: befo as to Italy and he applied for England. Yeah,
Speaker 9: I also applied Italy, I got refused Italian visa around
Speaker 9: four times, and I got the refused visa from Norway Oslo.
Speaker 9: I got an event in two thousand thirteen and USA
Speaker 9: fight did me like for Las Vegas, and WFTF invited
Speaker 9: me for an event in Las Vegas that I could
Speaker 9: not make, and also Germany Hamburg and Hanover invited me.
Speaker 9: And there was many events that I could not make.
Speaker 9: In the end, I could make it to airwork. But
Speaker 9: the first year of the airwork like they invited me
Speaker 9: twenty fifteen and I applied for the visa, I did
Speaker 9: not get it. And then the year after twenty sixteen
Speaker 9: and got the visa because I had the help also
Speaker 9: from another private invitation. So I got double invitations that
Speaker 9: it made it stronger for the consulate and the embassy
Speaker 9: in jury residence the visa and it was like yeah,
Speaker 9: it was twenty one days visa and directly when I
Speaker 9: arrived with and I was like, my friends knew I
Speaker 9: don't want to go back. So they taught me to
Speaker 9: the migration office in Helsingborg in Malmo and there I
Speaker 9: extended my visa for six months first and in that
Speaker 9: six months I wanted to work and stay here. So
Speaker 9: I started to look for a job and I started
Speaker 9: my own job actually like start to work with hardcore
Speaker 9: or myself, like making classes that I was teaching in English,
Speaker 9: and I had one of the students translating to the
Speaker 9: kids in Swedish, so he was getting three classes. It
Speaker 9: was tough at that time. I was like it was
Speaker 9: hard for him also to translate because he was not
Speaker 9: more than thirteen years old, who was so shy and everything,
Speaker 9: and I was forest forrest. You learned the Swedish language
Speaker 9: because of that, because I wanted to work, and I
Speaker 9: just started to know hands, head and the food, knee,
Speaker 9: and it was easy because it was similar to English.
Speaker 9: And by the time the kids had taught me to
Speaker 9: speak Swedish at the moment because it was the only
Speaker 9: way I learned Swedish. It was my way to learn
Speaker 9: Swedish was I was the kids all the time. The
Speaker 9: kids language was the easiest to take, like to back out,
Speaker 9: because the kids have a simple language that you can
Speaker 9: really learn it much faster than talking with another that
Speaker 9: talked really fast and talking very advanced Swedish. I dreamed
Speaker 9: to travel from Gaza and then I made it. I
Speaker 9: did travel from Gaza and then you think, Okay, what
Speaker 9: do I want to make next? And then I I
Speaker 9: want to work with Packport, and then I started working
Speaker 9: with Pakport. I never expected that I would be in
Speaker 9: the biggest theater stage in Sweden. A then I am
Speaker 9: here in the biggest theater stage in Sweden. That's just
Speaker 9: like being able to come and watch my store and
Speaker 9: watch me perform in Parkour and telling nice story to
Speaker 9: the It's like I never think thought about it, but
Speaker 9: just Parkour brought back to me.
Speaker 11: As an extra note, earlier this week, James spoke with
Speaker 11: Ahmed and Abdullah and as of a few days ago,
Speaker 11: at least both of their families were okay. Obviously, this
Speaker 11: is an ongoing situation, but I just wanted to add
Speaker 11: that in here because that's the most up to date
Speaker 11: information we have. Ahmed is still in Sweden, is still
Speaker 11: doing Parker. You can find him at Mataragaza on Instagram
Speaker 11: or his website Matargaza dot com. That's m A tar
Speaker 11: Gaza dot com. Abdullah is still in Italy and is
Speaker 11: studying to become an English teacher, and just last February,
Speaker 11: Ahmed and Abdullah were able to see each other in person.
Speaker 11: For the first time in quite a while. The documentary
Speaker 11: that Abdullah is in is called One More Jump. It's
Speaker 11: about very similar questions on whether it's worth it to
Speaker 11: stay and fight for your country or try to escape
Speaker 11: and fulfill your dreams. Thank you once again to Abdullah
Speaker 11: and off Ed for talking with us. I'll link their
Speaker 11: social medias in the show notes below. See you on
Speaker 11: the other side.
Speaker 14: Hello, everybody, Welcome to it could happen here. This is
Speaker 14: Sharene and I am so happy to be joined by
Speaker 14: my guest today. I'm so excited to speak to him.
Speaker 14: I am joined by dB Kashi. He is a pro
Speaker 14: palsying activist from New York and Israel, and there's just
Speaker 14: a lot of stuff I want to talk to you about.
Speaker 5: So welcome, pleasure to be here. Great to meet you, Sharen.
Speaker 14: I want to start with just some background for the
Speaker 14: audience to just like kind of get to know where
Speaker 14: the perspective you're speaking from. Can you tell me a
Speaker 14: little bit about your family history and where you grew
Speaker 14: up and where your parents are from and all of that.
Speaker 5: Sure, my parents were both born in Israel, and they,
Speaker 5: like Miny Israelis moved to New York City in the
Speaker 5: eighties and had myself and my two siblings, and as
Speaker 5: my grandparents were getting older, to whom we were very close,
Speaker 5: my mom decided to move back to Tel Aviv when
Speaker 5: I was in two thousand, so right before the Second Intifada.
Speaker 5: And so when I was thirteen eighth grade, I moved
Speaker 5: to Tel Aviv for the first time. And you know,
Speaker 5: obviously I was very familiar with it, like visit every summer,
Speaker 5: and you know, grew up in in our grandparents' house,
Speaker 5: both of whom were Iraqi Jews who immigrated to Israel
Speaker 5: in the early fifties. And so yeah, so when I
Speaker 5: moved there in eighth grade, I was completely pretty much
Speaker 5: a shock in terms of what I was used to
Speaker 5: in New York. Obviously, I had friends from many different
Speaker 5: walks of life, many different backgrounds here. I was very
Speaker 5: used to that, right. I didn't grew up in you know,
Speaker 5: a very staunch Jewish community. I had Jewish friends, but
Speaker 5: I didn't solely have Jewish friends, and so that's what
Speaker 5: I loved, that's what I embraced. But when I moved
Speaker 5: to Israel, it was very jarring. You know, I had
Speaker 5: studied in Hebrew for the first time, and you know,
Speaker 5: everything that we studied in school was pertaining to the
Speaker 5: Jewish identity. So every kind of history class, you know,
Speaker 5: you'd study about the Roman Empire and the Jewish people.
Speaker 5: You'd study about, you know, ancient Greece and the Jewish people.
Speaker 5: And that's okay to learn about Jewish identity, but intertwining
Speaker 5: it with every aspect of the school curriculum and really
Speaker 5: thinking about the persecure really kind of hammering home this
Speaker 5: notion of persecution. Really kind of understanding how you know,
Speaker 5: And again, I think it's important to understand your history
Speaker 5: and history in general, but I think that kind of
Speaker 5: introducing this notion of persecution as a tactic to retraumatize
Speaker 5: people that aren't directly experiencing the trauma. Right, So, everyone
Speaker 5: in the world learns about the Holocaust, but did you
Speaker 5: know that in Israel, Holocaust Remembrance Day isn't on the
Speaker 5: same day as the rest of the world's Holocaust Remembrance
Speaker 5: Day because they want to own their own kind of
Speaker 5: version of the Holocaust Remembrance Day, right, And so you know,
Speaker 5: when you think about the Holocaust, you think about other holocausts,
Speaker 5: other genocides that have happened, and Israel's failure to recognize
Speaker 5: those genocides like the Armenian genocide, right, and the fact
Speaker 5: that you know, many people don't know, but you know,
Speaker 5: throughout history Israel has armed genocidal forces with Israeli made
Speaker 5: weapons to you know, support imperialist motives and colonialist powers
Speaker 5: around the world. So you know, even even now with
Speaker 5: what's happening in Armenia with the Iserbaijani's right, Israel's on
Speaker 5: the wrong side of that equation, right, And so it's
Speaker 5: never been about standing with the side of the oppressed
Speaker 5: for Israel. It's never been about, you know, ensuring that
Speaker 5: what happens when they say never again, actually never again,
Speaker 5: never happens again to anyone around the world. Right. Think
Speaker 5: about their policies, the racist policies around refugees, right. I
Speaker 5: think people don't understand.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 5: I have a very unique perspective because I understand kind
Speaker 5: of the minds of the colonizers. I can humanize the colonizers.
Speaker 5: I think there's a dangerous kind of maybe thinking about
Speaker 5: things from a bit of a different angle than kind
Speaker 5: of people are used to. And also bringing it back
Speaker 5: to the events of the last ten days or eleven days,
Speaker 5: at this point, I think, you know, I've always kind
Speaker 5: of looked at and identified with the Palestinian struggle, right,
Speaker 5: And I've always seen it as a human rights struggle, right,
Speaker 5: and you know, as such, and as many well regarded
Speaker 5: activists and thinkers and intellectuals have always talked about the
Speaker 5: unification of all the struggles of the oppress, and that's
Speaker 5: always always arrived at the identification with this struggle for
Speaker 5: the Palestinian people. I've also felt, you know, by virtue
Speaker 5: of this se this imposed identity of you know, Israeli,
Speaker 5: I've always felt directly responsible for the oppression of the
Speaker 5: Palestinian people, even though I've never done anything myself to
Speaker 5: champion or perpetuate that oppression. I've always worked against it
Speaker 5: from a very very young age. Now, people always ask me,
Speaker 5: you know, kind of annoying questions like, you know, why
Speaker 5: do you care so much about the Palestinians when so
Speaker 5: many people in the world are suffering. And the answer
Speaker 5: to that question is I care about all suffering. But
Speaker 5: this is something that the government that supposedly represents me,
Speaker 5: that the entity that supposedly represents me is directly perpetrating,
Speaker 5: and frankly, after going to many protests in New York
Speaker 5: and in Israel itself. I've realized that this is the
Speaker 5: most important human rights struggle of our generation for sure,
Speaker 5: but of modern times because it stands for all of
Speaker 5: it's essentially the last beacon of direct colonialism. Right. We
Speaker 5: all know how kind of neocolonialism works. I mean maybe
Speaker 5: we do when we don't, but neocolonialism, through you know,
Speaker 5: different coupitalist structures, right, America has been able to perpetrate
Speaker 5: neocolonialism without actually having to occupy other people, you know,
Speaker 5: save for Iraq for almost twenty years, but or fifteen
Speaker 5: years or whatever, it was a very long time. But
Speaker 5: Israel is directly and physically occupying on other people, and
Speaker 5: they have been for the last seventy five years, right
Speaker 5: officially for the last seventy five years. And that's been
Speaker 5: a constant, Right, It's not, hey, you know, here's a
Speaker 5: country and let's you know fight, let's continue our kind
Speaker 5: of battle in that way. It's been it's always been.
Speaker 5: If you're a scholar of Israeli history, of Zionist history,
Speaker 5: you always you start understanding that the goal was to
Speaker 5: take over all of Judaea and Samara, right, and that's
Speaker 5: kind of how the settler government that Netanyahu has in
Speaker 5: power has been speaking for years. Right. I'm really upset
Speaker 5: and really kind of frustrated by the way that the
Speaker 5: Western media has been portraying what's happening over the last
Speaker 5: eleven days, because even Israeli media Halitz, which is an
Speaker 5: Israeli newspaper, which is very prominent one right, isn't portraying
Speaker 5: it the way that the Western media is portraying it. Right,
Speaker 5: they're criticizing the Netanyahu. There's so many people in Israel
Speaker 5: that are scared, right, All the leftists are scared. They're
Speaker 5: being persecuted. They're signal groups doxing friends of mine, people
Speaker 5: literally fighting for human rights, they're doxing them. Islaelfly he's
Speaker 5: orthodox reporter that's been staunchly pro Palestinian and he's a
Speaker 5: very prominent member of the press. Angry mob of right
Speaker 5: winging extremists try to knock down his door the other
Speaker 5: day and he had to escape from the back door
Speaker 5: and run away, so they don't, you know, potentially kill him, right,
Speaker 5: And so these voices are being silenced in Israel. No
Speaker 5: one is talking about that. Everyone in the West is
Speaker 5: beating the drums of war. The media is supporting that.
Speaker 5: We've seen on the kind of a micro but tragic level,
Speaker 5: what happened to that six year old kid that was
Speaker 5: stobbed to death by someone just because of the anti Islamic,
Speaker 5: anti Palestinian rhetoric that's being perpetrated. And so everyone's kind
Speaker 5: of losing their shit as all of a sudden, everyone's
Speaker 5: saying the same thing because everyone is being pushed to
Speaker 5: justify this war. But people are starting to wake up, right,
Speaker 5: The UN's woken up in very very slowly. People are
Speaker 5: starting to wake up because they're seeing that genocide is
Speaker 5: actually being committed and so you can't throw your full
Speaker 5: weight behind genocide. But they're walking it back too slowly.
Speaker 5: And the people that I'm disappointed by are people that
Speaker 5: are supposedly smart, spewing complete nonsense rhetoric about two sides. Right.
Speaker 5: I struggled, Right, this is important. I struggled. I know
Speaker 5: people who were killed in the Hamas attack personally and
Speaker 5: intimately know them. Right. You know my ex girlfriend's best
Speaker 5: friend was killed, right, She's We've hung out many, many,
Speaker 5: many times. She was a very sweet, very kind person.
Speaker 5: We know an activist who was literally because people don't understand.
Speaker 5: And this is for a lot of the kind of
Speaker 5: pro Palestinians that that and I completely empathize, and I
Speaker 5: understand why people believe what they believe. Believe me, but
Speaker 5: this is for a lot of the pro Palestinians that
Speaker 5: you know immediately called all of them settlers, right, And
Speaker 5: I think it's important to distinguish because if there's ever
Speaker 5: going to be a path forward in this mess, we
Speaker 5: have to offer a new rhetoric that deconstructs the nationalist ideologies. Okay,
Speaker 5: I don't put the Palestinian flag or say free Palestine,
Speaker 5: which I do as a nationalist ideology. I say that
Speaker 5: as a deconstruction of nationalism, as a call to freedom
Speaker 5: for all, right, though oppressed as well as the oppressor. Right,
Speaker 5: if you actually read everyone's quoting, everyone's quoting Phenonen, right,
Speaker 5: everyone's quoting all these revolutionaries, if you actually read the
Speaker 5: material that they said. Chae Gavari even said the true
Speaker 5: revolutionary is guided by deep with deep feelings of love
Speaker 5: in their heart. And he said this at the risk
Speaker 5: of sounding absurd, he said that direct quote the people
Speaker 5: perpetuating in Israel. I can say this from a first
Speaker 5: hand account. I know very good people that are guided
Speaker 5: by nationalists and fascist ideologies. However, they've been manipulated, they've
Speaker 5: been lied to, They've they're fed propaganda twenty four to
Speaker 5: seven through the news and the sentiment in Israel right now.
Speaker 5: And I can tell you this, I'm getting messages from
Speaker 5: people they think everyone is trying to kill Jews. That's
Speaker 5: what they believe, That's what they've been told. They think
Speaker 5: this is armageddon for the Jewish people. That's what the
Speaker 5: media narrative is in Israel. Okay, in spite of the
Speaker 5: fact that there are many people that are against what's happening,
Speaker 5: there are many people that directly blame Netanyahu for this,
Speaker 5: but they're being scared to believe that they're being going
Speaker 5: to be attacked on all fronts, and they have to
Speaker 5: do everything they can to neutralize the threats. Okay, that
Speaker 5: is the survival kind of That is a fact. Does
Speaker 5: that mean that every single person in Israel is a
Speaker 5: terrible human being, as evil as some people say, No,
Speaker 5: that is not true at all. Right, And my point is,
Speaker 5: and what a lot of the revolutionaries said, right. Palo
Speaker 5: Freer in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed said in the
Speaker 5: process of dehumanization, the oppressor dehumanizes himself. Putting that aside, though,
Speaker 5: I think that you know, for me, I see I
Speaker 5: know people that died, it was very difficult for me
Speaker 5: the post in the first two days. I think there
Speaker 5: were some problematic justifications for the massacre that didn't sit
Speaker 5: well with me because I'm a humanist. But in the
Speaker 5: same token, right, I think that I understand the context.
Speaker 5: I think it behooves us to understand the context.
Speaker 9: Right.
Speaker 5: There's a really famous quote. I forget who said it,
Speaker 5: but if you started the clock or started looking at
Speaker 5: kind of the colonization in America from when the Native
Speaker 5: Americans started shooting the arrows, you think that the Native
Speaker 5: Americans were the aggressors. Right. If you started looking at,
Speaker 5: you know, the colonization of Algeria when the Alga, when
Speaker 5: the local population started rebelling, you think that they were
Speaker 5: the aggressive, right. And that's not to say in the
Speaker 5: same breath that terrible things happen to amazing people there.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 5: What people don't know, and a lot of the Propolst
Speaker 5: movement doesn't know, is that many of the people living
Speaker 5: in the area on Gazas are actually activists, like very
Speaker 5: anti Zionists activists, right that many of the testimonies of
Speaker 5: the families of the of those activists are saying to
Speaker 5: stop the genocide, that it's not going to bring back
Speaker 5: their friends, their family members. Those are the people that
Speaker 5: were a lot of whom were killed in the attacks
Speaker 5: because that's where they live, they work with. You know,
Speaker 5: organizations at GAZA like acknowledge that, right, understand the complexity
Speaker 5: saying hey, you guys are all settlers. That's just dumb.
Speaker 5: It's not factually true. Their grandparents were, their great grandparents
Speaker 5: were one hundred percent. But now their generations and generations
Speaker 5: of people, right, just like in their generations and generations
Speaker 5: of people that descended, Are they to be held accountable
Speaker 5: for the actions of their ancestors. Doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 5: They should be held accountable for actions that they take now,
Speaker 5: for sure, right, holding your government accountable, you know, thinking
Speaker 5: about an actual solution to this terrible situation that one
Speaker 5: hundred percent people should be held accountable for. But to
Speaker 5: call them settlers as a justification for their deaths is
Speaker 5: something that I will never do, right, and I don't
Speaker 5: think it helps the struggle, right. I think it's important
Speaker 5: to say and then simultaneously also say, did you guys
Speaker 5: know that Israel played a very major role in establishing
Speaker 5: the Commas, Like, don't be stupid, open a history book,
Speaker 5: see what happened. Right, Understand, don't just be quick to
Speaker 5: call and quick to say both sides. It's not a
Speaker 5: both side situation, even though the aggression was terrible, those
Speaker 5: are those two things can be true. It's a devastating,
Speaker 5: tragic event, right, and I know many great people that
Speaker 5: were killed in it, But in the same breath, we
Speaker 5: have to remember what caused it.
Speaker 14: Yeah, Context is everything.
Speaker 5: Right, context is everything. Israel funded the Kamas. Bib has
Speaker 5: direct quotes in Israeli newspapers saying we have to fund
Speaker 5: the Kamas in order for is Palestinians never to have
Speaker 5: a state. He directly said that how do you guys
Speaker 5: ignore these statements. They've been very Bib has been very
Speaker 5: clear as to what is going to happen and what
Speaker 5: he's trying to accomplish. And then on top of that,
Speaker 5: to compound things, the settlers in his government right now
Speaker 5: Isamal Bengvil and Smotrich are two settlers. They literally are settlers,
Speaker 5: like in according to the National Law they're considered settlers, okay,
Speaker 5: illegal settlers. And there the second and third most powerful
Speaker 5: people in Israel. Okay, I don't think people understand or know,
Speaker 5: but those two guys. There's there's a famous rabbi okay,
Speaker 5: in Jerusalem. He's an extreme missed fundamentalist rabbi, Jewish fundamentalist rabbi.
Speaker 5: What he's been calling for for a long time, Ka
Speaker 5: sadaka is Kahana was right. He was a very fascist
Speaker 5: rabbi that was basically calling for the extermination of all Arabs.
Speaker 5: And they're basically they're called kahanistem and that's it's basically
Speaker 5: what the left in Israel used to call this government.
Speaker 5: Man tash Khanistem means government of Kahanists, Okay, that is
Speaker 5: what that's who's running the country. And this rabbi has
Speaker 5: been calling for in a biblical sense. And we all
Speaker 5: know when people have an utmost you know, devotion to religion,
Speaker 5: that guides them right, not our world. Our world does
Speaker 5: not guide them. The religious texts and the religious leaders
Speaker 5: are the ones who tell them what is right and
Speaker 5: what is wrong right religious in religious fundamentalism, and so
Speaker 5: what this rabbi has been calling for for years has
Speaker 5: been a war to end all wars. Okay, that is
Speaker 5: what he's been telling them. That is what they've been
Speaker 5: operating under. Okay, their allegiances are to him, not to
Speaker 5: the Israeli people, like literally to that ideology, and so
Speaker 5: they're in the government right now. Over the last year,
Speaker 5: they've been essentially adding illegal settlements at a rapid rate,
Speaker 5: emboldening and empowering settlers to commit violence that we haven't
Speaker 5: seen in many, many years, levels of violence we haven't
Speaker 5: been seen in many many years, even before this latest
Speaker 5: aggression I'm talking about over the last twelve months. And
Speaker 5: the biggest most annoying thing that I hear from Westerners
Speaker 5: that think they understand, right, they're like, oh, yeah, we
Speaker 5: really care about Palestinians. But Hamas has to go two
Speaker 5: things to that. One, the fact that there are Palestinians
Speaker 5: on the West Bank and the Palestinians in Gaza doesn't
Speaker 5: mean they're not the same people. They're Palestinians in forty
Speaker 5: eight as well. They feel feelings of solidarity because they're
Speaker 5: all oppressed in different ways. Right, It's solidarity under this
Speaker 5: got under this Grand Zionist oppression that they experienced and
Speaker 5: so I think that it's a fallacy that it was
Speaker 5: an unprovoked attack. It's a fallacy, right, It's not the
Speaker 5: case the fact that Aleksa kept getting bombarded by settlers
Speaker 5: on purpose, on purpose, I don't put it back like
Speaker 5: they did this to get a provocation. They've been provoking
Speaker 5: to get the retaliation for Hamas. They've been doing this
Speaker 5: for years. This is nothing new, right. Every time Ramas
Speaker 5: shot rockets over the last five years is because Israel
Speaker 5: was attacking ELECXA right right after Ramadan if you remember,
Speaker 5: or doing Ramadan. Sorry, And so every time a barage
Speaker 5: of rockets came in right after that barrage rockets because
Speaker 5: Hamas wanted to show that someone is sticking up for them.
Speaker 5: But I'm just saying you have to understand the context
Speaker 5: when you're in a blockade, when you're living in a
Speaker 5: concentration camp. Worse than a concentration camp, frankly. Right, every
Speaker 5: electricity is controlled, water is controlled, food is controlled. You're
Speaker 5: not able to leave, right, You're not able to freaking
Speaker 5: leave when you want. You're not able to come when
Speaker 5: you want, not able to. A sixty kilometer strip of
Speaker 5: land is the most densely populated strip of land in
Speaker 5: the entire world, depression is the highest, the highest rates
Speaker 5: of depression. I think the highest rates of child suicide
Speaker 5: are in Gaza. Okay, when you're living under those conditions,
Speaker 5: I have no idea how you don't. I have no
Speaker 5: idea what that would feel like. So how can I
Speaker 5: judge anyone any response to that? Right in the same breath,
Speaker 5: I can also say it's a tragic thing that innocent
Speaker 5: people died, and they're innocent people, and I think it's
Speaker 5: important to hold that complexity. Also for the Palestinian cause.
Speaker 5: I think it's important to not lose sight of our
Speaker 5: humanity in criticizing the grave injustices that Israel has committed
Speaker 5: and putting the blame squarely on Israel's shoulders. That Hamas exists.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I think that's something that I keep coming back
Speaker 14: to is whenever someone is just all about condemning Hamas,
Speaker 14: which is like, yes, as you mentioned, like innocent people
Speaker 14: shouldn't have died, But I blame all the violence that's
Speaker 14: happening in Israel on Israel, like it's not you. Yeah,
Speaker 14: you can't just start like at a slave revolt as
Speaker 14: the beginning of history of slavery. It's like, no, actually exactly,
Speaker 14: they did that for a reason and they had no
Speaker 14: other choice. And I mean for Palestinians, I think, like,
Speaker 14: what's the biggest context that's missing is like they've tried everything.
Speaker 14: It's not their first choice to kill people that didn't
Speaker 14: deserve it. It's I think I think that's what's been
Speaker 14: really annoying with the the people that have chosen to
Speaker 14: spoke to speak out that have never spoken out before.
Speaker 14: They are so narrow in their view of them that
Speaker 14: it's so damaging because they have so many follow werds,
Speaker 14: or they're talking about the wrong things, and all of
Speaker 14: those things like kind of perpetuate a really dangerous environment
Speaker 14: where like a six year old kid can get stabbed
Speaker 14: to death. Or I don't know. I agree with everything
Speaker 14: you said, and I really appreciate you saying all those
Speaker 14: things before I forget. We're going to take our first break,
Speaker 14: so don't go anywhere and we're back. Something you mentioned
Speaker 14: early on that I have been thinking about and getting
Speaker 14: getting really angry about is why people are surprised or
Speaker 14: like unexpecting you to speak out about Palestinians if you
Speaker 14: are not a Palestinian. I am not a Palestinian. I'm Syrian,
Speaker 14: and I am extremely vocal about the Palestinian cause and
Speaker 14: the Palestine. I've always been one hundred percent free Palestine
Speaker 14: till I die. And it's almost like surprising to people,
Speaker 14: like why are you so worked up? Like why aren't
Speaker 14: you so worked up like that? That's what really gets
Speaker 14: me is your humanity and care. It shouldn't be contingent
Speaker 14: on your identity if you actually give a shit. And
Speaker 14: I think that's what I really want to like relate
Speaker 14: to people, is this is not the Palestinian's struggle solely
Speaker 14: for themselves, Like this is a struggle for all. Like
Speaker 14: if this genocide obliterates the Palestinian people, that's on humanity shoulders.
Speaker 14: That's not like that that is so indicative of how
Speaker 14: depraved humans have become. It's just so upsetting. It's just
Speaker 14: a complete obliteration. There has been videos of settlers saying
Speaker 14: they want to flatten the whole thing, make it a
Speaker 14: parking lot. I mean, I don't even have to tell
Speaker 14: you what like actual media and like politicians have been
Speaker 14: saying because it's like atrocious. But I think that's what
Speaker 14: I want to relate to people, is like if you're not,
Speaker 14: if you don't care, examine that, because that is troubling
Speaker 14: to me, if you don't care about actual genocide. And
Speaker 14: maybe that word has been used too much to like
Speaker 14: make people give a shit, but it really makes me
Speaker 14: people's humanity when they are able to kind of just
Speaker 14: like shrug it off and continue about their day.
Speaker 5: I've been practicing being hopeful. I think it's really important,
Speaker 5: especially in times like these, to be hopeful because without hope,
Speaker 5: and it sounds cheesy, but it's true, we're not empowered, right,
Speaker 5: We're not able to act. And I think what's exciting,
Speaker 5: what's I guess heartening to me is actually the people's
Speaker 5: response to what's happening. Yes, there are many influencers and
Speaker 5: celebrities that posted the wrong thing, I'm also seeing many
Speaker 5: that posted the right thing. I'm also seeing many people
Speaker 5: that I'm surprised by. I'm seeing many people that I
Speaker 5: wasn't surprised by posting the wrong thing, frankly, But I'm
Speaker 5: also seeing many people white people, you know, black people,
Speaker 5: right like, people of all kinds that are disconnected, you know,
Speaker 5: from an identity perspective to the Palestinian people doing so
Speaker 5: much showing up. I went to the I was. I
Speaker 5: saw images from the protest in uh the other day
Speaker 5: and there, and I'm not talking about the Jewish protest,
Speaker 5: which was amazing, right. What JVP did with if not
Speaker 5: now in front of truck Schumer's house was incredibly right.
Speaker 5: That's that's solidarity. That's that's that's real, right, That's that's
Speaker 5: that's that's humanity, right, that's what humanity should be. That's
Speaker 5: real solidarity. I'm talking about the protests though, that that
Speaker 5: was Palestinian lad in the midtown, and I saw tons
Speaker 5: of Jews there, m hm. And I'm not talking about
Speaker 5: the stmar Anti Zionist, you know Hasidic Jews, those are great, right,
Speaker 5: and they're they're helpful. I'm talking about like regular regular
Speaker 5: ass Jews, right, like me, Right, people like not even
Speaker 5: wearing yamakas, like people with you know, small yamlicas that
Speaker 5: aren't like you know, Hasidic or anything, holding up signs
Speaker 5: to help liberate the Palestinian people. In spite of the Hamas,
Speaker 5: in spite of everything that happened, they showed up. They
Speaker 5: were not scared. A Pastinian flag doesn't scare them, right,
Speaker 5: I shouldn't it shouldn't. But again, I want to be
Speaker 5: I want to I want to maintain my my I
Speaker 5: guess I want to maintain the view of objectivity. I
Speaker 5: think again, you know, Devil's advocate, I think when when,
Speaker 5: And again this is not not me blaming, right, it's
Speaker 5: more so offering kind of a perspective to question how
Speaker 5: to kind of move forward when people Israeli's Jews whoever, right,
Speaker 5: are indoctrinated to believe that Palestine means no place for me, okay,
Speaker 5: And then you couple that with the anger anguish that
Speaker 5: the oppressed people are feeling and saying, yeah, fu fuck that,
Speaker 5: like we we don't want you here, right, like you
Speaker 5: look what you're doing to us. I think that they
Speaker 5: view the Palestinian flag as a replacement of, you know,
Speaker 5: the flag of Israel, which many people actually kind of
Speaker 5: not many people, some people view it that way. And
Speaker 5: I think that the way I see it and the
Speaker 5: way many people I know see it, it's a flag
Speaker 5: that represents liberation from oppression, liberation of the Palestinian people
Speaker 5: who are being actively oppressed by Zionism, right, an ideology, right,
Speaker 5: you know, perpetuated and executed by people. But it's still
Speaker 5: an ideology.
Speaker 14: So just like because I think this always comes up
Speaker 14: but being anti zion and it has nothing to do
Speaker 14: with being anti Semitic, And I think they always get completed,
Speaker 14: and that's on purpose to make people afraid to speak
Speaker 14: up about Israel. I can only imagine how brainwashed Zionism
Speaker 14: becomes to like the whole, like the education and everything, Like,
Speaker 14: is that something you experience like firsthand?
Speaker 5: One hundred percent? I think what we've seen over the
Speaker 5: last decade, right, the fact that Natanya has been in
Speaker 5: power for over twenty years, that's that's like the dictatorship
Speaker 5: level stuff. And people in America are like, oh yeah,
Speaker 5: the West, you know, there is a semblance of you know,
Speaker 5: power to the people in the West, as semblance of it. Right,
Speaker 5: we're seeing how much the media is in cahoots with
Speaker 5: you know, power against the people right now. It's just very,
Speaker 5: very scary and everyone should be up in arms, no
Speaker 5: matter where your feelings lie. But there is you know,
Speaker 5: there's a new president. You know, every four years of
Speaker 5: a president is termed. Right, you can't be you can't
Speaker 5: be a president for more than two terms. Right. These
Speaker 5: are real things, right, these are real protections you have
Speaker 5: three different branches of government. Right, you have local level
Speaker 5: local government, you have so many different checks and balances
Speaker 5: that are you know, corrupted and corupted in certain ways,
Speaker 5: you know, through lobbyists and you know, corporate interests, et cetera.
Speaker 5: I'm aware, but at least you have that system. In Israel,
Speaker 5: that system doesn't exist, Okay, there's no constitution and a
Speaker 5: prime minister can't be termed. And so now Bibing Ntano
Speaker 5: has been in power and figured out how to survive
Speaker 5: attempts on his throne many times over through building coalitions
Speaker 5: with the right wing extremists, which frankly are against his interests.
Speaker 5: Like he wanted to kind of perpetuate status quo and
Speaker 5: just kind of be in power. Like this is kind
Speaker 5: of made it difficult for him to just be the
Speaker 5: guy who kind of you know, makes it makes everything
Speaker 5: okay for Israelis. Right now, Israelis are scared shitless and so.
Speaker 5: But but putting that aside and going back to your point,
Speaker 5: the knock about was never even discussed until recent history,
Speaker 5: Like it was not like no one even knew what
Speaker 5: that word means. Right, we celebrated it as Jomat's mote
Speaker 5: independence day. So the Israeli Independence Day is the Palestinian's
Speaker 5: knockbat which means the great tragedy for those who don't know,
Speaker 5: and what they call it the catastrophe. Yes and so.
Speaker 5: But but what's interesting and very sad is that in
Speaker 5: recent years, because of the world actually and when Israelis
Speaker 5: tell you don't know what you're talking about, don't comment
Speaker 5: on things you don't talk about that you don't know about.
Speaker 5: You most likely if you've done any any literally any
Speaker 5: if you read one book on Palistine, if you read
Speaker 5: on Palestine by Noam chomskyin and Elain Pape, like, you
Speaker 5: know more than Israelis know about their own situation. And
Speaker 5: I say that wholeheartedly because I know what they study, right,
Speaker 5: They omit the large swaths of information in order to
Speaker 5: form the psyche through the narrative that they perpetuate. And so.
Speaker 5: But because of recent external and global pressure, because of
Speaker 5: the fact that the world's the new generation of young
Speaker 5: people have educated themselves on Palestine, you know, catalyze a
Speaker 5: lot of them, catalyzed by the social justice movement. Right,
Speaker 5: the Angela Davis is the Tromskis of the world who
Speaker 5: always since the sixties I've been talking about Black liberation
Speaker 5: is incomplete without the liberation of Palestinians unifying struggles. They
Speaker 5: know more about history of it Israel and Palestine then
Speaker 5: Israeli's new. Okay. I've always been super impressed, not like
Speaker 5: not to say that people are dumb. I actually think
Speaker 5: people are very smart, right if they're willing to look.
Speaker 5: But every Palestinian friend of mine, every single one knows
Speaker 5: so much about Zionism and zion Is history, right, there's
Speaker 5: scholars of Zionist history, right, But Israeli there's no idea
Speaker 5: about Palestinians and Palestinian history.
Speaker 14: It's just I think it's really unsettling because, I mean,
Speaker 14: for those who don't know, the catastrophe was like like
Speaker 14: the mass expulsion of like seven hundred and fifty thousand Palestinians,
Speaker 14: ethnic cleansing, massacres extreme, like just a disgusting show of
Speaker 14: forcing someone to leave their land and taking it over.
Speaker 14: It was atrocious and her and I think the fact
Speaker 14: that they can't even learn about power or like learn
Speaker 14: deeply about Palestine or Palestinians, it's like another way of
Speaker 14: ethnic cleansing and like forgetting to even exist. And I
Speaker 14: think that's very unsettling because you can't just forget. I mean,
Speaker 14: at the same time, they say, like history is written
Speaker 14: by the people that are in power, right, or the
Speaker 14: people that like win the war, quote unquote, and they're
Speaker 14: very capable of convincing a big amount of people that
Speaker 14: likew like that they were never here.
Speaker 5: I think being hopeful is a practice, and I've definitely
Speaker 5: fallen into, you know, bouts of depression and helplessness and
Speaker 5: hopelessness also, I think we all do. But I think
Speaker 5: it behooves us to practice hopefulness, especially in times like these,
Speaker 5: because without it, we don't have the power to liberate
Speaker 5: the oppressed. Right, Yeah, and I think you know, yeah,
Speaker 5: I mean, like like you said, it's it's I think
Speaker 5: it's also important. I keep saying the Palestinian struggle is
Speaker 5: the people's movement all over the world, right, and we're
Speaker 5: seeing that It's not me, I'm nobody, but but we're
Speaker 5: seeing that people understand that. Right. Like I said, people
Speaker 5: are smart, Right, you don't have to go to you know,
Speaker 5: an Ivy League school to be intelligent.
Speaker 13: Right.
Speaker 5: Palafreer talked about banking and intelligence, right, when you just
Speaker 5: consume information from a teacher, perpetuating the perpetuating the injustices,
Speaker 5: and maintaining the system of oppression. Right, you can be
Speaker 5: as educated as you want in that form of education
Speaker 5: and not understand the world and understand the inequalities around you, right,
Speaker 5: But if you feel those inequalities, if you have that empathy,
Speaker 5: if you're able to expand your consciousness a little bit
Speaker 5: to also include those that you may not identify with
Speaker 5: or as or you know that that maybe are not tangible,
Speaker 5: their experience is not as tangible to you, then then
Speaker 5: you're able to understand and situations pretty clearly and easily.
Speaker 5: And I think the world is showing up because they
Speaker 5: understand that. Right. Sure, the air world is showing up.
Speaker 5: And that's incredible, right because they understand. Right, this is
Speaker 5: like what I always say is Palestine is the last
Speaker 5: kind of like I said earlier, the last direct colonialist
Speaker 5: project that exists in the world direct right, in terms
Speaker 5: of direct and active about that colonials project that exists
Speaker 5: in the world and the air world. You know, if
Speaker 5: you read Edwards Aid and Orientalism, you understand how the
Speaker 5: West basically created and othered kind of they are a
Speaker 5: world in order to create that separation and division in
Speaker 5: order to create you know, a world that serves self
Speaker 5: interest in visualism versus kind of communitarianism and of the
Speaker 5: kind of East. And so when when you think about
Speaker 5: in that context, you start understanding that, you know, this
Speaker 5: is and this is a struggle against kind of Western imperialism, right,
Speaker 5: this is a struggle to free all oppress people, because
Speaker 5: that's what that's what Zionism Israel currently stands for. And
Speaker 5: everyone who perpetuates it, and people that talk about intersectionality
Speaker 5: and anti racism and all of that, and they still
Speaker 5: say and they still don't understand that this is literally
Speaker 5: a real time manifestation of the ship that they've been
Speaker 5: reading in history books, right, and we're seeing it and
Speaker 5: it's jarring, and resistance is fucking jarring, right Like it
Speaker 5: was darring to me. I could barely watch it. I
Speaker 5: had people crying, you know, and this is I didn't
Speaker 5: say this earlier, but I had you know, family members
Speaker 5: that didn't want to speak to me, and like, you know,
Speaker 5: people cursing at me, and like friends from you know,
Speaker 5: middle school sending me hate messages. My mom is receiving
Speaker 5: death threats, right, Like this is real shit, right, And
Speaker 5: so like this isn't like an abstract like and and
Speaker 5: so you know that's what that's what people don't necessarily
Speaker 5: understand when they just approach it academically. And I commend them.
Speaker 5: And I think it's important to like understand the intellectual
Speaker 5: context of things, like I've done the work, I've read
Speaker 5: the books, but I think it's also important to kind
Speaker 5: of take a step back and contextualize things all around, right,
Speaker 5: and only through that contextualization can we rehumanize, you know,
Speaker 5: both the the oppressed and the oppressor are in order
Speaker 5: to actually have a path forward that's inclusive of all
Speaker 5: that doesn't that doesn't pit people against each other. Right,
Speaker 5: Jews lived on that land for many years before Zionism,
Speaker 5: if your.
Speaker 14: Scholar, I want to say, just fine, before the introduction
Speaker 14: of Zionism, which is a very modern, very fascist ideology.
Speaker 5: Not only Zionism though, right, Like think about Psych's Peco. Right,
Speaker 5: the British French treaty that was signed in nineteen twenty
Speaker 5: that sliced up the Arab world, according to their whim
Speaker 5: didn't take into account any demograph, any ethnic geographic relations,
Speaker 5: didn't take into account any of that, and that is
Speaker 5: what set the tone for a lot of what we're
Speaker 5: seeing in their world today. Right, compounded by the introduction
Speaker 5: of a European ideology into the region that served European interests,
Speaker 5: is what is what we're seeing to this very day,
Speaker 5: and the Palestinians bear the biggest brunt of it. I
Speaker 5: wouldn't say like I would say, like in recent years,
Speaker 5: there's tragedies all around due to Western imperialism and Western intervention. Right,
Speaker 5: I take that back, right, Like I don't want to
Speaker 5: compare tragedies, but the tragedy of the Palestinian people that
Speaker 5: there's no one really advocating on their behalf. Yeah, I
Speaker 5: was going to add a wrinkle that probably ninety nine
Speaker 5: point nine percent of the population doesn't know, including Pustinians
Speaker 5: and Arabs, because it was actively erased. But up until
Speaker 5: psychs Peco, up until Western imperialism, Arab Jews were an
Speaker 5: integral part of Arabic culture. Okay, An my grandparents from Iraq, Right,
Speaker 5: Iraq wasn't the Iraqi Jews were not Zionis. There were
Speaker 5: hundreds of thousands of Jews in Iraq that lived there
Speaker 5: since Babylonian times. Right, there are many you know, many
Speaker 5: empires that came through the air world, right, so this
Speaker 5: place replaced et cetera. But they were there for hundreds
Speaker 5: of years at the minimum. Some would say some of
Speaker 5: them were actually not there due to the Spanish Inquisition, right,
Speaker 5: but actually were there before and never left basically, And
Speaker 5: so you know they were musicians, you know, they played kusum,
Speaker 5: right like there were there were statesmen, there were they
Speaker 5: were very integral part of the culture, right. And and
Speaker 5: there many Arab friends that do know this, and they
Speaker 5: they're like, yeah, like this is the biggest, the biggest,
Speaker 5: one of the biggest tragedies is kind of the betrayal
Speaker 5: of the Arab jew right, And they understand, right, like
Speaker 5: at this point in time, and this is not only
Speaker 5: iraqis was Egypt and you know Yemen and Morocco. There's
Speaker 5: a huge just community, right, like these these people live there.
Speaker 5: The Nazism is not an Arabic concept. They're trying to
Speaker 5: paint Arabs as Nazis.
Speaker 14: Even growing up, I would go to Syria a lot,
Speaker 14: and my grandfather would like he would only get bread
Speaker 14: at the Jewish bakery, Like he would take the walk
Speaker 14: and go there, and it was normal. No one cares, like,
Speaker 14: no one gives a shit really what your religion is
Speaker 14: in those communities. And I think, I mean, this is
Speaker 14: obvious for people that are reading about all of this,
Speaker 14: but the media and Zionism in Israel, they're purposely conflating
Speaker 14: what's happening with religion to make it more complicated for people,
Speaker 14: to make it this like ancient battle of all time,
Speaker 14: when it's not about any kind of Muslim versus Jewish
Speaker 14: versus Arab versus whatever. It's it's really so simple, to
Speaker 14: the point where it's kind of silly. And I think
Speaker 14: they make it so complicated for people to be scared
Speaker 14: to talk about it. They're they're not informed enough. They
Speaker 14: don't know about religion, they don't know about the history.
Speaker 14: You don't have to know about any of that to
Speaker 14: know that oppression is wrong and genocide is wrong.
Speaker 5: And every every every resistance movement in history was considered
Speaker 5: a terrorist, yes, movement in modern times, right, even Israeli militias. Right,
Speaker 5: you had the Lefi, the Excel and the AGA. Okay,
Speaker 5: they're considered terrorist organizations because they would attack civilian British
Speaker 5: and they've attacked civilian targets during the British mandate. YEP,
Speaker 5: sounds familiar, but you know what, those those three militias
Speaker 5: became the idea, the idea exactly. The three militias that
Speaker 5: formed that formed the IDEF once Israel was given statehood
Speaker 5: were considered terrorist organizations. The ira Rist organization right Melson
Speaker 5: Mandela was on the US Terrorist watchless until two thousand
Speaker 5: and eight. These are real things. These are all facts.
Speaker 5: But I'm saying even if you're thinking about it from
Speaker 5: the perspective of attacking civilians, Okay, wrong in my opinion,
Speaker 5: but when you don't have if you look at actually
Speaker 5: ere another another fact, right, look at what the Chbella
Speaker 5: is doing. Okay, they were considered terrorist organization. Their armed
Speaker 5: to the teeth. Israel scared shitless of the Isabella threat.
Speaker 5: I'm hearing it from people on the ground. Right, they're
Speaker 5: attacking military targets. They're showing the world that they can't
Speaker 5: because they can. They used to not be able to,
Speaker 5: Now they can. So they are when a population is oppressed,
Speaker 5: suppressed to the level that the Gosins are, what military
Speaker 5: do they have? Do they have F sixteen fighter jets
Speaker 5: that they can go and bomb? I don't know the Kiriyah,
Speaker 5: did you guys know that the biggest military base in
Speaker 5: Israel is in the middle of the televis.
Speaker 14: Yeah, in a residential area.
Speaker 5: In a residential area. So what if, what if? What
Speaker 5: if the Gosins had f sixteen fighter what if Kamas
Speaker 5: had sixteen fighters? They wouldn't want to bomb that? Yeah,
Speaker 5: Like people are people that dense like that. They don't
Speaker 5: understand how this thing works and what what oppression looks like. Right.
Speaker 5: A lot of my Pastinian friends always say the world
Speaker 5: wants us to be the perfect victims. Yeah, and in
Speaker 5: a lot of in a lot of senses, the burden
Speaker 5: is always on the victim, right in these oppressive scenarios.
Speaker 5: So I always tell them, guys, like, we have to
Speaker 5: be smart. We have to make sure that you know, again,
Speaker 5: I like, it's it's trauma that I can't you know,
Speaker 5: I feel in my bones. But but it's not it's
Speaker 5: not directly happening to me, and and and so I can't.
Speaker 5: I'm not. It's not from a place of judgment. It's
Speaker 5: from a pragmatic perspective. We have to understand that that's
Speaker 5: the trap that they're setting for us. The Kamas enacted
Speaker 5: the Kamas did exactly with the right wing government wanted
Speaker 5: them to do in order to justify the plan that
Speaker 5: they had all along. I'm not going to go so
Speaker 5: far as to start perpetuating conspiracy theories because it's not
Speaker 5: my place. So I'm not going to say that they
Speaker 5: planned this and it was, you know, an inside job.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to say that. But what I will
Speaker 5: say is it served the interests of the right wing government.
Speaker 5: And the one thing I wanted to say, because I
Speaker 5: keep going off on tangents and I apologize, But to
Speaker 5: your point about the Knakba, I said, in the last
Speaker 5: ten years, it's pretty crazy to see the narrative shift.
Speaker 5: Israel has so been so emboldened. They feel so invincible
Speaker 5: because of the international support that they have. Now they
Speaker 5: acknowledge a knakoba. Now they acknowledge the knob, but we
Speaker 5: know how they acknowledge it. They say, yeah, the Knackba happened,
Speaker 5: Let's do a second one, yep, right, And so now
Speaker 5: they're now all of a sudden the knock by existed, right,
Speaker 5: and they're basically saying, hey, let's do a second one.
Speaker 5: All the like, all the right wing government of Mine
Speaker 5: officials are saying, second knof but let's do it now.
Speaker 5: Let's let's that's what they try to do. Yeah, they're
Speaker 5: trying to do in Gaza.
Speaker 14: It feels like the first one just ended, right.
Speaker 5: That I always I always say that I agree, but
Speaker 5: I'm saying, like I'm talking about mass expulsion right now.
Speaker 5: They're trying to They're trying, under international on everyone's noses
Speaker 5: to utilize genocide and ethnic cleansing to displace millions of
Speaker 5: Palestinians from Gaza. And God knows, I don't. They don't
Speaker 5: have a they don't. This was like a biblical idea, right,
Speaker 5: like the Judean Samaria. This is not like a there's
Speaker 5: no like specific plans that people had, Like this is
Speaker 5: a biblical, fervent, ideological idea. They don't freaking know what
Speaker 5: they're doing. They don't want to go to they don't
Speaker 5: want to go to war with Iran. They're scared of
Speaker 5: the Like these are real things, these are real threats,
Speaker 5: Like Israel hasn't fought a real opponent since the seventies
Speaker 5: and the Young pol War. That's what I'm trying to say,
Speaker 5: Like this showed how vulnerable they are and they're scared.
Speaker 5: I'm telling you, like I know the sentiment on the ground,
Speaker 5: like people are scared out of their minds. They don't think.
Speaker 5: They're not very confident in Israel's military, right, Like that's
Speaker 5: why they're bombing the shit, and like that's why they
Speaker 5: haven't invaded. They said they're going to invade, babes talking
Speaker 5: this big game. They haven't done yet because they're scared.
Speaker 14: Remember, also, is that the IDF that's all. It does
Speaker 14: not actually act in the best interests of the civilians,
Speaker 14: if anything. Like there was like a report from an
Speaker 14: Israeli woman who survived the massacre at the music festival
Speaker 14: that said a lot of them were shot by like
Speaker 14: their own forces. It was like indiscriminate shooting.
Speaker 5: The biggest casualties for Israeli soldiers up until this was
Speaker 5: friendly fire.
Speaker 7: Yeah really, that's that's.
Speaker 14: I mean, I just think that's so hard to remember
Speaker 14: because it's a they're framed as this very like ideal
Speaker 14: warrior bullshit and it's so far from the truth.
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what I'm saying. Their eighteen year old kids. Yeah,
Speaker 5: these aren't like US, like marines that are career assassins.
Speaker 5: Like have you ever seen in a US marine and
Speaker 5: next to an Israeli soldiers. I'm serious, like like.
Speaker 14: I know, there's become a trend to be a soldier
Speaker 14: of anything. It's like very like you see these like
Speaker 14: young people talk like yeah, exactly, it's like a very
Speaker 14: cool thing to.
Speaker 5: Do because there's never a threat though Israel. Israel has
Speaker 5: been You've grown up in Israel believing that you're the
Speaker 5: most powerful entity and you can do whatever you want
Speaker 5: whenever you want, right, and that notion has been shaken
Speaker 5: to its core. And if you're part of the propaganda machine,
Speaker 5: if you if you're caught in the propaganda machine that
Speaker 5: is kind of Zionist Israeli ideology, you're basically now your
Speaker 5: whole world is crumbled beneath you. Right, you're completely in
Speaker 5: survival mode. Everyone's posting, everyone's like you have to eradicate
Speaker 5: come us. They're not even eradicating comas. What are they doing,
Speaker 5: They're just emboldening come ups Like this happens all the time.
Speaker 5: It's just happening on a much bigger scale right now.
Speaker 5: Every any Hamas leader that they basically looking for, like
Speaker 5: a big like a major Hamas leadership, you know, attack
Speaker 5: and once they're able to neutralize, you know, in their words,
Speaker 5: numerous high ranking officials. I think they'll declare victory even
Speaker 5: though they're not going to be victorious. They're not going
Speaker 5: to bring back the fourteen hundred people.
Speaker 14: They're also going to kill the hostages at this rate,
Speaker 14: you know what I mean, Like they're not like.
Speaker 7: They've already killed more than twenty two.
Speaker 14: That's how much do you actually care about your civilians
Speaker 14: and the hostage like the foreign hostages either like it's
Speaker 14: your but but I don't know those clearly showing their ass.
Speaker 5: In my opinion, I want to have a clear message
Speaker 5: though to kind of people that are on the fence
Speaker 5: in the West that are being fed propaganda through Western
Speaker 5: media outlets. That is quite clear at this point. And
Speaker 5: some of them recognize this, and that's why they come
Speaker 5: to my page and they're like, oh, you know, thank you.
Speaker 5: I didn't I didn't know. I didn't know. In Israel,
Speaker 5: there are many people, not even ideologically that want to
Speaker 5: bring the hostages back and don't understand why Israel is
Speaker 5: doing what it's doing before and not even talking to
Speaker 5: them about the hostages.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it complete being like pleads just yeah.
Speaker 5: I'm not talking about left wing activists. I'm talking about
Speaker 5: like average israelis right. Natania has failed the Israeli people
Speaker 5: that attack the fact that and again this I don't
Speaker 5: enough people know this right, people who know know, but
Speaker 5: maybe some some don't. That attack was a complete military
Speaker 5: failure on behalf of Israel. And that happened because over
Speaker 5: the last six to nine months since the right wing
Speaker 5: government took place, took power, they've been using the idea
Speaker 5: to support, empower, embolden and protect settlers in the West Bank.
Speaker 5: And that's why settler attacks have increased. That's why settlements
Speaker 5: have increased, that's why they're more settlers than ever before.
Speaker 5: And what they were doing on that very day people
Speaker 5: don't already know. I hope they do. But if they
Speaker 5: don't already know, the IDF was in the West Bank
Speaker 5: on Sukquot, which is a Jewish holiday, and they were
Speaker 5: protecting settlers in building a sukkah, that structure that people
Speaker 5: sit in in the middle of Juara, a Palestinian village,
Speaker 5: and they were protecting them and chaper owning them so
Speaker 5: that they can break into Palestinian village to build a
Speaker 5: sukkah in order to antagonize Palestinians. That's say what you
Speaker 5: may about anything else. The fact that that is the
Speaker 5: priority of the government. You know you're doing the oppression.
Speaker 5: You're already committing the oppression. You're already subjugating the Tastinian people.
Speaker 5: You know that Hamas is comas, you're going to remove
Speaker 5: security forces from the border to embolden and empower settlers instead.
Speaker 5: It doesn't make any sense.
Speaker 14: It's I mean, that's why the most unsettling things I've
Speaker 14: seen coming out of Israel are those right wing protests
Speaker 14: where they're like death to Arabs and whatever, or like
Speaker 14: they're attacking people and the ideaf is like either helping
Speaker 14: them or standing by. If you're on the fence about this, still,
Speaker 14: you are literally for genocide. Those are the two differences.
Speaker 14: It's either your for genocide or you're against genocide. And
Speaker 14: if you're considering the options, examine yourself. That's not right.
Speaker 14: I was just sent this tweet apparently yesterday, the twitter
Speaker 14: for Israeli Prime Minister at Israel PM said this is
Speaker 14: a struggle between the children of light and the children
Speaker 14: of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.
Speaker 14: Are you fucking kidding me? That's like Nazi Hitler shit?
Speaker 14: Are you there are so many lives I've already been lost,
Speaker 14: and the ones that have not been lost are never
Speaker 14: going to recover. They've lost so much other than their life.
Speaker 14: There are so many terarrifying and horrific videos that I've
Speaker 14: seen that no one should have to go through, And
Speaker 14: not only are they going through it, they're getting funded
Speaker 14: and encouraged by most of the world. I cannot accept that.
Speaker 14: I sorry, I don't want to cry, but I might.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's that's where we're at at this point.
Speaker 14: No, but I appreciate you being here to get through
Speaker 14: to people who might still be considering what's happening as
Speaker 14: a both sides thing or a justification for anything. When
Speaker 14: they see tweets like that, or when they see justification
Speaker 14: for killing all the people because they're all barbarians or
Speaker 14: whatever it is. I urge you. I urge you to
Speaker 14: seek out Palestinian sources of news, actually see what's happening
Speaker 14: in Gaza, listen to people who are not advertising anything
Speaker 14: to you, and it's like pleading for their lives. I
Speaker 14: just this can't be how we end up as a people.
Speaker 14: I'm it's extremely unlike no words to describe how devastating,
Speaker 14: and I think if you are listening and you are
Speaker 14: wondering what to do, there are places you can donate to.
Speaker 14: I can put some links in the description of sources
Speaker 14: that I trust of people to follow and all that stuff,
Speaker 14: so you can look at the description for that. I
Speaker 14: think what's very important that people maybe aren't taking too
Speaker 14: seriously is how important social media and like spreading awareness
Speaker 14: has been, because the only reason the resistance has come
Speaker 14: this far is because of that, because more people are
Speaker 14: aware about what's going on. People aren't accepting that Israel
Speaker 14: is doing this. So I think we just can't stop.
Speaker 14: Like as much as they want the world to forget
Speaker 14: that Palestinians were even there, we cannot forget Palestinians, and
Speaker 14: I'm not going to stop talking about it neither he is.
Speaker 5: This is why I'm speaking on I just got a
Speaker 5: message on Palestinian friends. You are our voice now. We're
Speaker 5: not allowed to spit out a lip. They are arresting
Speaker 5: anyone who speaks or shares the truth. Please, I beg
Speaker 5: you don't give up on our people in Gaza. We
Speaker 5: need your voice to stop the genocide. Thousands of lives
Speaker 5: have already been taken. We can't stand this anymore.
Speaker 14: Please listen to that, everybody, please.
Speaker 5: It's very hard to fathom and internalize what's happening.
Speaker 14: Yeah, it's a lot, and we're privileged enough to think
Speaker 14: about it that deeply. People in Gaza Palestinians, they don't
Speaker 14: have the luxury of no of anything other than their
Speaker 14: nightmare of a reality.
Speaker 5: No, I want to add in just yea, because I
Speaker 5: think that the biggest kind of pushback that we keep
Speaker 5: hearing is homas Yes, please yet. And I think that
Speaker 5: again remembering what we kind of mentioned earlier in the call,
Speaker 5: how liberation movements for occupied peoples have always been deemed
Speaker 5: terrorist organizations and you know, even targeted civilians. Right, So
Speaker 5: not only like by the definition of terrorist organizations are
Speaker 5: terrorist organizations. So even if that's what we believe, and
Speaker 5: let's just say that that's you know, we accept and
Speaker 5: agree that that's what Hamas is, I think it's important
Speaker 5: to understand that terrorist organizations have become political organizations time
Speaker 5: and time again. And I think that it's also important
Speaker 5: to understand historically the Hamas As as an entity again
Speaker 5: remind you was created and partially created and funded by
Speaker 5: the State of Israel, emboldened by the State of Israel.
Speaker 5: Because I want to be very clear, up until the nineties,
Speaker 5: right al slow accords to the peace process. People say, oh,
Speaker 5: the Palestinians didn't want peace. To your point earlier, the
Speaker 5: Palestinians were willing to take almost anything. At that point, Arafat,
Speaker 5: who was considered a terrorist before he became a statesman, right,
Speaker 5: was on the table with Robbin had an agreement in place. Okay,
Speaker 5: and then people don't know. If you're not a scholar
Speaker 5: and you don't know, you should know. Oh, Goldstein, an
Speaker 5: Israeli terrorist came in to a mosque I believe it
Speaker 5: was in Hebron, I don't remember exactly, and he killed
Speaker 5: more than thirty people during prayer, just indiscriminately shot innocent
Speaker 5: people in a mosque. So the biggest, one of the
Speaker 5: biggest tragedies. Right, and then he was not only did
Speaker 5: they the response you know Overban's response to that was
Speaker 5: it was locking down Hebron, Palestinians in Hebron, so because
Speaker 5: he was fearful of what the Palestinians would do in retaliation.
Speaker 5: The immediate response by Rabine was locking down the people
Speaker 5: of Hebron. Okay, instead of going and doing something about
Speaker 5: the settlers that committed the crime or that emboldened the
Speaker 5: person committing the crime. That's number one. Number two, that
Speaker 5: sparked the retaliation because when people don't have justice, they
Speaker 5: take justice in their own hands. So that sparked this
Speaker 5: series of attacks in Israel, right, devastating attacks in Israel.
Speaker 5: But it was that that did that, And it was
Speaker 5: his He could have he could have handled that differently,
Speaker 5: but he didn't, right and and and that was what
Speaker 5: sparked the response. Then in turn, okay again who putting
Speaker 5: that aside? Right? And sorry, little tidbit. His grave Hu
Speaker 5: Cochtain's grave is go uarded by the IDF as some
Speaker 5: and many many many consider him a national hero.
Speaker 14: Yeah, I've seen photos of people like crying at his
Speaker 14: grave like it's yes, save their family or something. When
Speaker 14: he's not just you literally just like went into a
Speaker 14: mosque with a gun and shot thirty people who were
Speaker 14: fucking praying.
Speaker 5: Yes, And that's wrong.
Speaker 14: People are idolizing exactly.
Speaker 5: It's rotten to its core, is my point. This is
Speaker 5: what you're supporting when you support the state of Israel. Okay,
Speaker 5: this is part of part of this is part of
Speaker 5: what you're supporting. Now taking a second step, Robin was
Speaker 5: assassinated by a Jewish Israeli, not by Pastinian. Even in
Speaker 5: spite of everything, the peace process was still going on
Speaker 5: because they did everything to foil it, right, and then
Speaker 5: they assassinated the Israeli Prime minister. And ever since then,
Speaker 5: right then you had Ariel's your own and whatever that
Speaker 5: to continue a peace process and you know, some capacity.
Speaker 5: But ever since then, for the last twenty three years,
Speaker 5: no one has been talking about a peace process. They blamed,
Speaker 5: they blamed the Palestinians for every act of resistance. They
Speaker 5: don't listen. They believe that they talk the way that
Speaker 5: politicians discussed the Palestinian kind of oppression is managing the occupation, Okay,
Speaker 5: managing the oppipation. No one's talking about peace, not left left,
Speaker 5: pseudo left, whatever you want to call it, not liberal,
Speaker 5: zionis left or center or right. No one is talking
Speaker 5: about peace. No one is talking about any semblance of peace.
Speaker 5: I find it very particular, right, and this is why,
Speaker 5: this is why I'm saying we live in the twilight zone.
Speaker 5: That Donald Trump's four years in office, okay, he had
Speaker 5: Kushner that that say, what all the bad things right
Speaker 5: about his about his behavior. He was and through normalization
Speaker 5: deals with their world, trying to get a deal for
Speaker 5: the Palestinian people, albeit the most absurd sort of deal
Speaker 5: if you ever read what the Abraham Cords actually entailed,
Speaker 5: right like weird like highways and weird, right like not
Speaker 5: a deal that anyone should have accepted. But putting that aside,
Speaker 5: he was talking about it. There was discussion, there was
Speaker 5: Palestinian like the word Palestinian was being said by the
Speaker 5: Office of the President. In the last four years that
Speaker 5: Biden was in office. No one said anything, no one
Speaker 5: did anything to advanced piece. No one even brought a
Speaker 5: bogus deal like Darrek Kushner to the table. I don't
Speaker 5: make it make sense. I don't understand. They basically bought
Speaker 5: into the Zionist idea that we can just live, continue
Speaker 5: living while millions of people are being oppressed and occupied.
Speaker 5: This is the Democratic Party. And that's why we see
Speaker 5: the media now the way it is, because they're rolling
Speaker 5: the media narrative too. Right, So open your eyes see
Speaker 5: it for what it is, right, don't get cloud don't
Speaker 5: let your judgment get clouded by this. Two side bs
Speaker 5: aspect hold space for the killing of innocent civilians, including
Speaker 5: the killing of Israeli innocent civilians, while simultaneously understanding that
Speaker 5: this is all because of the aggression of colonialism and
Speaker 5: specifically a perpetuation of the Zionist project as a colonialist,
Speaker 5: nationalist ethno state. And that is what I ask of
Speaker 5: you guys to do, right, Yeah, thank.
Speaker 14: You for that. That's I think a great place to end.
Speaker 14: Thank you again for joining me. You are just as
Speaker 14: your Palestinian friends said in that message, your voice is
Speaker 14: really critical because people will more likely listen to you
Speaker 14: than to a Palestinian. So I very much thank you
Speaker 14: for your activism. And I don't know, it's we're not
Speaker 14: living in a just world and so we just have
Speaker 14: to stick together. I also want to mention the other
Speaker 14: reason why social media is so important is like, one,
Speaker 14: there's a reason they cut electricity to Gaza. They don't
Speaker 14: want anything coming out of there. They want them to
Speaker 14: die in a blackout. And two they are literally arresting
Speaker 14: people for following Palestinian accounts. Now yeah, so I mean,
Speaker 14: if that's not sutalitarianism, like what the fuck is? I
Speaker 14: don't but anyway, so, uh, that's it for today. I
Speaker 14: can't I don't think I can do anymore. But again
Speaker 14: I'll put some sources in the description to donate to
Speaker 14: to keep raising awareness. If you have people in your
Speaker 14: circles that are still hesitant about having a stance on this,
Speaker 14: like have conversations. It shouldn't be complicated. It really shouldn't be,
Speaker 14: because it's not. And that's all. That's all I have.
Speaker 14: Thanks everybody, thank you.
Speaker 5: For having me.
Speaker 1: Welcome back to it could happen here, a podcast about
Speaker 1: things falling apart, And speaking of falling apart, when we're
Speaker 1: talking about the crumbles, the slow and sometimes rapid erosion
Speaker 1: of institutions in this country, nothing is quite as relevant
Speaker 1: as the tech industry.
Speaker 2: I'm Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: Obviously on the line with me is Garrison Davis, and
Speaker 1: we also have someone new with us today who's going
Speaker 1: to be talking talking tech and particularly talking about the
Speaker 1: NFT crash and some of what that has to tell
Speaker 1: us about both how the tech industry functions now and
Speaker 1: about how kind of our economies of hype contribute to
Speaker 1: a state of what Ed Zitron, who was our guest here,
Speaker 1: tends to call the rot economy. Ed welcome to the show. Hey,
Speaker 1: thank you for having me.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'll just hand it over to you at this point.
Speaker 3: So you may remember two years ago where kind of ghoulish,
Speaker 3: half wit libertarians emphatically told you that NFT's non functible
Speaker 3: tokens would change everything, that people wanted to own a
Speaker 3: unique digital object, and indeed that the said uniqueness of
Speaker 3: said object, say a picture of an ape or an
Speaker 3: animated gift of a sports moment, would be worth millions.
Speaker 3: The hypeia was insane. Justin Bieber paid one point three
Speaker 3: million dollars for a board ape, which is one of
Speaker 3: ten thousand procedurally generated pictures of a monkey, and celebrities
Speaker 3: like Milakounis and Lindsay Lohan would fund and create their
Speaker 3: own NFT projects. In fact, multiple celebrities raised millions of
Speaker 3: dollars for these kind of noxious little creations. Their logic
Speaker 3: entirely hinged upon the idea that something being a one
Speaker 3: of a kind somehow made it valuable, and that a
Speaker 3: digital token connected to a picture or a video was
Speaker 3: the same as say, a rare baseball card or a
Speaker 3: comic book, or the sense that owning part of a
Speaker 3: digital entity like a game was somehow valuable. I personally
Speaker 3: do not think owning a sword from World of Warcraft
Speaker 3: a unique one means anything. I do not think that's
Speaker 3: meaningful in any way. But listen, got a bit of
Speaker 3: advice for anyone listening. When any one tells you to
Speaker 3: ignore your eyes in your ears, it's the Duller voice
Speaker 3: in your head that says, huh, that sounds really goddamn stupid.
Speaker 3: Or to of course, put a bunch of money into
Speaker 3: an unproven asset. You should always try and work out
Speaker 3: how they're going to get paid in the end. But nevertheless,
Speaker 3: it's important to know the fundamentals of this crap, this
Speaker 3: noxious industry. Now, of course we're talking about cryptocurrency, so
Speaker 3: these are tokens on a decentralized blockchain. In this case,
Speaker 3: a non fungible token or not as an n FT
Speaker 3: is a unique digital identifier on a blockchain like Ethereum
Speaker 3: or Polygon, one that cannot be copied, substituted, or divided
Speaker 3: like a regular token. Ownership in this case, who owns
Speaker 3: the n FT is based on whoever owns the wallet.
Speaker 3: That said, that the NFT in question is actually stored
Speaker 3: and meaning that if someone tricks you into sending your
Speaker 3: board ape to somebody else they technically own it. These
Speaker 3: NFTs of images, say the board Ape, Yacht Club, Pudgy penguins,
Speaker 3: what have you, are connected to images. So by which
Speaker 3: I mean you are quite literally buying a jpeg, you
Speaker 3: are buying a tokenized jpeg. These images are kept on
Speaker 3: something called the Interplanetary File System IPFS, and you have
Speaker 3: an IPFS address that attached to each token. What's important
Speaker 3: to know about this is this is another decentralized project
Speaker 3: where there's no real proof that your IPFS dress isn't
Speaker 3: going to disappear in ten years. So you could end
Speaker 3: up buying one of these tokens and be left with
Speaker 3: bugger roll. Like I said, you're effectively buying a very
Speaker 3: expensive jpeg that may or may not be an image
Speaker 3: of something in ten, fifteen, twenty years, or even five years.
Speaker 11: So like I used to buy a whole bunch of
Speaker 11: digital games for my Nintendo Wii system, right, and these
Speaker 11: were not physical games, And now I cannot re download
Speaker 11: any of these things even though I bought them, because
Speaker 11: the digital system is just Nintendo is no longer supporting
Speaker 11: it is because it's kind of like a similar mechanism
Speaker 11: here in terms of there's like all this necessary internet
Speaker 11: infrastructure to like host these digital assets, but we don't
Speaker 11: actually control it infrastructure, right, So it's different than holding, like,
Speaker 11: you know, a disc or, in the case of an NFT,
Speaker 11: like an actual physical picture of a monkey.
Speaker 3: What's really funny is the example you just gave is
Speaker 3: one of the few examples of where NFTs could actually
Speaker 3: be used.
Speaker 6: Huh.
Speaker 3: Digital games right now are in this position where, like
Speaker 3: you said, and you find this a lot with streaming
Speaker 3: products as well, where you can buy something, you buy
Speaker 3: a video game, you buy a movie, and you own
Speaker 3: it on Apple TV. Apple has complete power to pull
Speaker 3: that down if indeed there was a non fungible token
Speaker 3: that contained the video in question, that might be quite useful.
Speaker 3: That might be really useful. In fact, unlike NFTs in general,
Speaker 3: which are not useful at all. You are just buying
Speaker 3: a jpeg that leads to an image, and owning this jpeg,
Speaker 3: this NFT might get you inside a discord, perhaps a
Speaker 3: special discord, of like minded people who have spent a
Speaker 3: lot of money on something very silly.
Speaker 7: Sounds like a party.
Speaker 3: It's so good and it's it was really something. These
Speaker 3: things have been around since at least twenty fourteen. I
Speaker 3: think crypto Kitties was one of the original ones. You
Speaker 3: could breed horrible looking cats. These horrible cats have sex
Speaker 3: and create horrible looking cats. Well you didn't get to
Speaker 3: see the sex. Don't worry.
Speaker 7: Okay, what's the only reason I invested? Well, I let
Speaker 7: me google crypto kitty rule thirty four. I'm sure.
Speaker 3: I'm sure that there is a crypto kitty hen type.
Speaker 1: But now make sure to put Reddit in the in
Speaker 1: the search RaSE.
Speaker 13: There.
Speaker 2: You gotta you're gonna get better results that way.
Speaker 7: Will I get in trouble for sending these results in
Speaker 7: the group chat? Will people get mad?
Speaker 3: I feel nothing anymore.
Speaker 11: Yeah, honestly, there's not as much as I thought there
Speaker 11: would be.
Speaker 7: I'm kind of disappointed.
Speaker 3: Well, there's a vampire. So the thing about this is
Speaker 3: the gold rush, This huge multi billion dollar NFT industry
Speaker 3: that kind of popped and dropped in the last couple
Speaker 3: of years, was something created by a kind of perfect
Speaker 3: storm of post lockdown financial hystery. You saw it with
Speaker 3: like AMC and game stop stocks, you saw it with
Speaker 3: crypto in general, and it was the sense that you
Speaker 3: were getting in early on something, and it kind of
Speaker 3: resembled in a funky way, like beanie babies baseball cards,
Speaker 3: but also with the kind of stench of the fine
Speaker 3: art industry. But I also think that during the pandemic,
Speaker 3: and I'll get to a little more of this later,
Speaker 3: people really got this defined sense of how unfair everything is,
Speaker 3: how you can't just go to college anymore, you can't
Speaker 3: just work really hard and get a mortgage. You have
Speaker 3: to effectively find a way to cheat. And this seemed
Speaker 3: like a cheat they had got in on early. The
Speaker 3: problem is they didn't, and I'll kind of get into
Speaker 3: that later. But another part of it, the part that
Speaker 3: really stank to me, was that they were selling this ugly,
Speaker 3: obviously rotten dream that you were owning part of a
Speaker 3: future media property, being at the yeah, like you were
Speaker 3: going to be part of Disney or Marvel the board apes.
Speaker 3: When you bought a board ape, you allegedly got the
Speaker 3: rights to distribute it and build a show or merchandise,
Speaker 3: And in fact, Seth Green bought an ape that he
Speaker 3: tried to build a TV show around, Classic twenty twenty
Speaker 3: two idea building a TV show.
Speaker 1: Around Oh you guys, did you guys see the show?
Speaker 7: By the way, we waked in the first few episodes.
Speaker 1: No, no, no, that was a different NFT show.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that was a different board ape show.
Speaker 2: I can clarify here.
Speaker 1: There was a there was a show called The Red
Speaker 1: Ape Family that was about an adjacent property that Red Apes,
Speaker 1: but other NFTs. But then Seth Green was also trying
Speaker 1: to make a show that was like almost like a
Speaker 1: Who Framed Roger Rabbit where it's a mix of like
Speaker 1: cartoons and like real background sets. But it's just like
Speaker 1: about Seth Green, who is a monkey as a bartender,
Speaker 1: Like it looked like dog shit.
Speaker 3: What's funny is someone scammed him out of that ape
Speaker 3: so he I had to pause He had to pause
Speaker 3: production on his show.
Speaker 7: This is the future of entertainment fucks.
Speaker 3: Because he didn't have the intellectual property rights anymore. And
Speaker 3: then he ended up having to pay one hundred grand
Speaker 3: to get it back and the show never I cannot
Speaker 3: find the show anywhere. But this is the thing putting
Speaker 3: that aside. People genuinely thought they were buying, like amazing
Speaker 3: Fantasy fifteen, first appearance of Spider Man, stuff like that.
Speaker 3: They thought that they were buying something that would give
Speaker 3: them access but also some degree of ownership over a
Speaker 3: future IP and frankly, I can understand how they were
Speaker 3: scammed because you had people like Alexis o'hanian, the founder
Speaker 3: of Reddit, who threw his VC firm seven seven six
Speaker 3: sunk fifty four million dollars into an NFT project called Doodles,
Speaker 3: claiming in January of this year, twenty twenty three, that
Speaker 3: Digles this year, this year. H In fact, now, to
Speaker 3: be clear, the funding was last twenty twenty two. Okay, okay,
Speaker 3: but he claimed this year. And to be clear, Doodles
Speaker 3: is a collection of NFTs and an associated cut in
Speaker 3: that kind of looks like Adventure Time, but significantly worse.
Speaker 7: Yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker 3: Alexis said that Doodles wanted to build the next generation
Speaker 3: of Disney and a whole world of IP that is
Speaker 3: giving people a state and a sense of ownership.
Speaker 7: Sure so, sure, buddy, Yeah.
Speaker 3: Exactly, Thank you, Alexis. I one hunch, how does being
Speaker 3: rich feel? So to be clear, what Doodles was is
Speaker 3: still it was a collection of ten thousand NFTs of
Speaker 3: Doodles procedurally generated, like most of these, and it's worth
Speaker 3: taking a step back here. Why are so many of
Speaker 3: these projects ten thousand images? It's because there's absolutely no creativity,
Speaker 3: not even a little. They just is it's.
Speaker 11: Like a is there like a false scarcity aspect which
Speaker 11: is trying to like inflate value. Is that like another
Speaker 11: reason for why they would have like these limitatches becase
Speaker 11: I know the original board ape ones were like around
Speaker 11: around ten thousand as well, at least initially.
Speaker 3: Yes, there's always like a couple thousand ten thousand, but
Speaker 3: when you take a step back and really think about it,
Speaker 3: that's actually a huge amount. It isn't the scarce good
Speaker 3: It isn't It may be to the people who are
Speaker 3: pumping and dumping them, but ten thousand isn't creativity. There's
Speaker 3: what like it's maybe thirty different spider men, so that's
Speaker 3: not ten thousand of them. And none of these have
Speaker 3: a name, none of these have a character. I will
Speaker 3: get to the two characters and Doodles, because there are
Speaker 3: just two.
Speaker 1: The more that you talk about this and just kind
Speaker 1: of based on my paying attention to it, I kind
Speaker 1: of feel like part of what we're seeing is like
Speaker 1: the intersection of two cultural myths, right. One of them
Speaker 1: is like the myth about how I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: entirely myth, largely accurate about what happened with Apple when
Speaker 1: it went public, right, and you have all of theseundreds
Speaker 1: of like nerds who had just been like working class
Speaker 1: kids who become worth hundreds of millions of dollars overnight, right,
Speaker 1: which has become part of kind of like our our
Speaker 1: cultural memory of like how tech is supposed to work
Speaker 1: ever since. And then the other is like Star Wars, right,
Speaker 1: and the way in which George Lucas revolutionized capitalizing on
Speaker 1: every silly idea you've ever had, Like a lot of NFT.
Speaker 1: A lot of the NFT hype is based on the
Speaker 1: belief that like you could be you could you could
Speaker 1: buy into the next like Glurf, stream Bow or whatever
Speaker 1: fucking weirdo George Lucas character, and it could get a movie,
Speaker 1: you know, because yeah, it's all infinitely capitalizable.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the kind of Buckshittos of the world. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: I mean you're actually right as well, because I don't
Speaker 3: know if you remember when episode one Star Wars Episode
Speaker 3: one came out, they deliberately made the box to look
Speaker 3: like the old Return and the Jedi figures, which were
Speaker 3: now worth thousands, well a lot.
Speaker 7: Of money, a lot of money.
Speaker 3: But there is that full scarcity aspect, and it is.
Speaker 3: It is like that, except even worse because there's less
Speaker 3: value to it. Because when you buy a doodle, as
Speaker 3: you will putting thousands of dollars into something called a doodle,
Speaker 3: one might wonder what exactly is the value of this,
Speaker 3: Because doodles do not actually convey any intellectual property. Board
Speaker 3: apes kind of do. The legalities muddy. You can merchandise
Speaker 3: your doodle for up to one hundred thousand dollars of
Speaker 3: physical goods, So T shirts. You know why you would
Speaker 3: buy a doodle T shirt? I'm not really sure, but
Speaker 3: you could sell it. Just the theoreticals here are amazing. But Doodles, really,
Speaker 3: at it's call, was sold on the idea that it
Speaker 3: allowed you to steer the company to vote on the
Speaker 3: future of Doodles, which is kind of similar to Board
Speaker 3: Ape Yacht Club. You could get ape coin if you
Speaker 3: had NFTs of the apes or the mute apes, and
Speaker 3: you could then vote in these votes about the few
Speaker 3: true of the Board eight Yacht Club, but not Yuga Labs,
Speaker 3: who owns the board ep Yacht Club. So really you
Speaker 3: were just controlling a vague sense of nothing. In the
Speaker 3: case of Doodles, you could vote on what they may
Speaker 3: do in the future. It was never really obvious was
Speaker 3: doodles a doo. Doodles is a dow okay, okay. And
Speaker 3: the funny thing to remember about almost all of these
Speaker 3: as well is not in the case of Doodles, but
Speaker 3: in the case of like the bord Epe Yacht Club
Speaker 3: and the ape chain, I hate this crape and Joyson
Speaker 3: Horowitz owns fourteen percent of all ape coin of their
Speaker 3: initial drop. They own multiple cryptoproducts, large chunks of these
Speaker 3: total tokens, and so they can control these votes if
Speaker 3: they need to. But what's also important to know is
Speaker 3: none of this stuff involves the actual goddamn company. Nobody
Speaker 3: owns a thing. These decentralized autonomous organizations doos are always
Speaker 3: framed as this kind of democratic process, carefully leaving out
Speaker 3: the fact that demo crack system with transactable votes is
Speaker 3: by definition of goddamn kleptocracy. But on top of that,
Speaker 3: you don't own anything. You don't have anything with these companies.
Speaker 3: You don't get stock, you don't get anything. You just
Speaker 3: have one of ten thousand images that may in ten
Speaker 3: years not actually go anywhere. It's farcical. The only thing
Speaker 3: dumber than that, however, is the fact that Doodles is
Speaker 3: no longer an NFT project and will no longer cater
Speaker 3: the speculators. According to a statement from marsh by the
Speaker 3: co founder, Jordan Poopy Castro, Poopy is oh wow.
Speaker 1: See this is where I'm putting, you know what, Garrison,
Speaker 1: I'm putting the whole company pension plane behind this guy.
Speaker 1: Poopy's got to be the one who makes those cars
Speaker 1: from now on.
Speaker 3: It's really going to suck as well. If you were
Speaker 3: like a speculative investor in Doodles already and you find
Speaker 3: out that your whole thing is going to be worthless
Speaker 3: because of a guy called Poopy, I think that that
Speaker 3: that's just very special to me. So yeah, continue, I'll continue. So,
Speaker 3: just to be clear, less than the year before this,
Speaker 3: according to their investor, this company was positioned to continue
Speaker 3: to define the NFT industry and onboard millions to the
Speaker 3: blockchain and become one of the most inclusive, creative, joyful
Speaker 3: media brands in Web three and beyond. This is the
Speaker 3: same company that had now officially rug pulled their entire
Speaker 3: customer base. And by the way, if you'd have invested
Speaker 3: at the time that the fifty four million dollar funding round,
Speaker 3: so towards the end of twenty twenty two, you would
Speaker 3: have lost money. You would not have gained money. There
Speaker 3: was no liquidity event that had given would give you anything.
Speaker 3: Also important to recognize with so other than Alexis o'hanian,
Speaker 3: the other investor in Doodles was FTX Ventures. So in
Speaker 3: March of twenty twenty three, you kind of sat down
Speaker 3: with morning coffee and you read the announcement from Jordan
Speaker 3: Poopy Castro and found out that your FTX back to
Speaker 3: n FT project had lost about eighty five percent of
Speaker 3: its value and now the company was not backing you
Speaker 3: in any fucking way.
Speaker 11: Yeah, but I mean FTX is putting out Super Bowl ads.
Speaker 11: They seem stable, they seem like Alliam, that'd be fine,
Speaker 11: what could.
Speaker 3: Happen'd be fine. But what's great about this is it
Speaker 3: is probably one of the largest rug pools I've ever seen.
Speaker 3: And nobody is in trouble. Nobody's mad at Alexis Ohanium.
Speaker 3: Doodles sold people on a dream, a stupid dream, but
Speaker 3: a dream, yes, yes, yes, very very goddamn stupid one
Speaker 3: that you'd be investing in participating in the future of
Speaker 3: intellectual property and have some industry over its future. You
Speaker 3: would theoretically, though obviously when you read this now it
Speaker 3: sounds dumb. And also when you read it at the time,
Speaker 3: it's you were meant to be buying into the next Disney,
Speaker 3: the next Marvel, Yes, what was sold?
Speaker 7: That is another huge aspect a thing.
Speaker 11: There's like, I think a lot of people who are like,
Speaker 11: you know, grew up with like pop culture and want
Speaker 11: to take part in like the creation of like culture
Speaker 11: and media. But you know, Hollywood systems feels so foreign
Speaker 11: and unattainable. So this thing comes up and this looks
Speaker 11: like like a democratized way that you can like get
Speaker 11: in on some like new version of what the entertainment
Speaker 11: like landscape will be. And you're like, oh, this is
Speaker 11: this is like my chance I can be one of
Speaker 11: ten thousand people to like contribute towards this next big,
Speaker 11: you know, cultural thing in ten twenty years. I mean,
Speaker 11: obviously that's like in retrospect, it's very clearly a scam
Speaker 11: for some people, like probably myself and many people listening.
Speaker 11: Initially this sounded like a scam, but it certainly was
Speaker 11: alluring for a good deal number of people. I mean,
Speaker 11: I'm this is kind of reminding me that there was
Speaker 11: this very similar kind of DOW, big big failure around Dune.
Speaker 11: They were wanting to put out.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, they wanted to buy, they wanted to buy
Speaker 1: the deck and the rights to Yodorowski's Dune, Yes yeah.
Speaker 11: And and and put out media and put it like
Speaker 11: their own like animated series, which is funny because initially
Speaker 11: they just they weren't even gonna bother with like the
Speaker 11: intellectual property, which is really funny because you know, a
Speaker 11: big part of of this this NFT stuff is like
Speaker 11: you own the IP of each NFT character, right, And
Speaker 11: as they as this kind of project progressed, they slowly
Speaker 11: started to realize that what they've done was probably just
Speaker 11: commit massive fraud, and they completely collapsed. Like this Dune
Speaker 11: like NFT DOW project was being was being boosted by
Speaker 11: a lot of like very mainstream publications. It was it
Speaker 11: was extremely hyped up, which can lead people to like
Speaker 11: assume this is like a legitimate, like entertainment project that
Speaker 11: you could like participate in by buying this small little piece.
Speaker 11: Last year, very very clearly kind of fell apart. Yes,
Speaker 11: was kind of pre predestined.
Speaker 3: And what's really sad about this is we can laugh
Speaker 3: at these people. I'll get to this in a bit
Speaker 3: and laugh at these people. We should, It's very funny.
Speaker 3: But at the same time, a lot of people got
Speaker 3: screwed here because they trusted in people like Alexis Ohanian,
Speaker 3: founder of Red unscathed despite the horrifying things that Reddit
Speaker 3: has done. Alex Ohenian insanely rich, married to a tennis star,
Speaker 3: God bless him. Oh they're happy. But nevertheless, Alexis has
Speaker 3: managed to fairly easily escape all blame for the fact
Speaker 3: that he misled everyone with this and other things. But
Speaker 3: this in particular because the dream of doodles. God that
Speaker 3: sucks to say out loud, by the way, the dream
Speaker 3: of doodles was that you would buying one of these
Speaker 3: ten thousand things, and that you'd be part of a
Speaker 3: community and you'd be able to steer the doodle's movement.
Speaker 11: The doodles community is christ I know, the doodles revolution
Speaker 11: I think is more more accurate.
Speaker 7: And the doodles no, that's not term no, no, no,
Speaker 7: I like that.
Speaker 2: I like that this.
Speaker 3: Dood least as doodlers. They're all the doodoos.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but you would be.
Speaker 3: Investing in the future VIP, you'd have part of this
Speaker 3: and you'd be you know what, put aside the money,
Speaker 3: put aside all the cash, because they're not doing speculation anymore.
Speaker 3: It's not about that. Let's just focus on the community,
Speaker 3: which is dying, which is completely dead, I would argue.
Speaker 3: So fairly recently, Doodles had to remove the fifty quorum,
Speaker 3: which would require fifty percent of NFT holders to interact
Speaker 3: with the project to push a vote through. They had
Speaker 3: to remove that in say why they had to remove it,
Speaker 3: and I guess because nobody gives a shit, because nobody cares,
Speaker 3: nobody gives a rap fuck about any of this, and
Speaker 3: then voted to appoint a founding Community Council to make
Speaker 3: decisions about where the doodle bank, oh my god, Jesus
Speaker 3: christis would be would be spent in the future. So
Speaker 3: the doodle bank was where some of the revenues went
Speaker 3: from the secondary sales of these NFTs, because the companies
Speaker 3: always take a cart because let's seeking baby anyway. So
Speaker 3: if you were interested in the community aspect of Doodles,
Speaker 3: you're kind of shit out luck because they've now entirely
Speaker 3: deleted their Visions and Guidelines document, which is the part
Speaker 3: of the website that tells you how any of the
Speaker 3: community shit works, and they nothing is happening right now
Speaker 3: with them. There's nothing going on. This is the ninth
Speaker 3: most popular NFT project, and they have attempted to and
Speaker 3: indeed succeeded in removing their association with NFTs. Now one
Speaker 3: would think, okay, maybe they have a discord. Of course
Speaker 3: they did find it eighty five thousand members, oh wow,
Speaker 3: except it felt more empty than my discord, which has
Speaker 3: six hundred people in it eight seven hundred and sixty
Speaker 3: members as of when I opened it last. And the
Speaker 3: newest stands section did not have a post in it
Speaker 3: since August thirtieth, which was announcing that the Doodle's Crops
Speaker 3: collaboration had sold out, terrible news to the least buckable
Speaker 3: people alive, and their other official channels really hadn't been
Speaker 3: updated since mayor August. The General Hall channel, which is
Speaker 3: where everyone was talking, was mostly just bots and people's
Speaker 3: saying the words Dude's rule, that's dods rule. No real communication.
Speaker 3: It felt like several chat bots kind of what you know,
Speaker 3: how you see Oblivion or Skyrim MPC's walk up to
Speaker 3: the other Yeah, kand greetings to you. Imagine that with
Speaker 3: NFT's eighty five thousand bloody people. I even tried to
Speaker 3: I'm not going to say antagonize them, but I did
Speaker 3: ask them, are you happy with your investment? No responses.
Speaker 3: I was like, how'd you feel about? No response? Someone
Speaker 3: responded with Dude's rule once and it's insane because you
Speaker 3: won't believe this. The valuation of this company in their
Speaker 3: fifty four million dollar funding round was seven hundred million
Speaker 3: goddann dollars, and their chatroom as the charm and vibrance
Speaker 3: of a dying more. This is meant to be the
Speaker 3: next generation of Disney, and yet it has no fans.
Speaker 7: There are people who will shoot.
Speaker 3: You to death for insulting Spider Man. There are people
Speaker 3: who will scream at you for not liking the latest
Speaker 3: Star Wars thing. These are superfans. Yeah, there are people
Speaker 3: who will do that with obscure video games you've never
Speaker 3: heard of. But for Doodles, this barly billion dollar enterprise,
Speaker 3: the future of Disney. Not one of these people cared
Speaker 3: anything about this. All it was there's like, there are
Speaker 3: no superfans no loyalists, no evangelist, nobody excited, no one
Speaker 3: even expressing an emotion. Just a bunch of freaks who
Speaker 3: got con saying GM every two minutes or hours. Actually,
Speaker 3: it was so strange because I've been in chatrooms since
Speaker 3: it was like eleven. I've seen varying levels of chat
Speaker 3: rooms in various games. Even the smallest community was kind
Speaker 3: of hopping at some point. This then had no life.
Speaker 7: It was so strange. It's just like a digital ghost town.
Speaker 3: And the reality is what I said earlier. There's ten
Speaker 3: thousand of these goddamn things, these featureless, procedurally generated things.
Speaker 3: There's nothing to them. These NFT companies, these ones that
Speaker 3: allegedly want to replace Disney, they're incapable or unwilling to
Speaker 3: do anything approximating world building or law development. Lore Doodles,
Speaker 3: which is worth seven hundred million goddamn dollars, which got
Speaker 3: fifty four million dollars, has three characters that I can find.
Speaker 3: There's hap Is cap Mellow, and there was another one
Speaker 3: which I could not find a name for. There is
Speaker 3: maybe ten minutes of footage in the years that this
Speaker 3: thing is meant to exist. It's just so bizarre. It's
Speaker 3: so utterly craven and half fast. It's people attack Disney
Speaker 3: and Marvel through Disney obviously in Star Wars that oh
Speaker 3: they're just ah, they're pushing this crap out, They're just
Speaker 3: churning this shit out and saying people are buy anything.
Speaker 3: In comparison, Disney are steadfast or teurs. They are creative
Speaker 3: agents like likened to Salvador Dally. They are the compared
Speaker 3: to the NFT people, they're gods. Because even Disney's least
Speaker 3: likable properties get more attention and have bigger fans than this.
Speaker 3: There are Disney adults who would like crying and falling
Speaker 3: on their knees when the lockdowns ended. Oh yeah, now
Speaker 3: these people would care. Now these people of Jordan, Poopy
Speaker 3: Castro died tomorrow, nobody would shed a tear or even remember, apparently,
Speaker 3: And it's just I think the way to look at this,
Speaker 3: and especially Doodles, is that there is just within the
Speaker 3: NFT world and actually within the tech industry, writt large
Speaker 3: just this deep deep seated loathing for creativity, storytelling and
Speaker 3: the customer Pendleton Ward who made the original avengue time
Speaker 3: don't if you remember, which is very clearly where Doodles
Speaker 3: is ripped off from Just compare them. They look very similar.
Speaker 3: He made it over a decade ago. It's a five
Speaker 3: minute long video. He made it on his own, without funding,
Speaker 3: without anything, and it's beautiful and it's weird and it's great,
Speaker 3: and you're like, Wow, I'm so glad this guy did this. Doodles,
Speaker 3: which has tens of millions of dollars sitting around, has
Speaker 3: put out seven goddamn minutes of teasers and advertisements for
Speaker 3: brand collaborations. That's it.
Speaker 7: That's all.
Speaker 3: Something about Pharrell, something about Crocs, something about allegedly Doodles
Speaker 3: having a cartoon. I don't goddamn know, but my theory
Speaker 3: is that none of this was ever about creating anything.
Speaker 3: This was an attempt to go back to what you
Speaker 3: were saying earlier, to recreate that sense that I just
Speaker 3: bought the Star Wars toy that will be worth three
Speaker 3: thousand dollars and ten years.
Speaker 2: That's all.
Speaker 11: This works well, and I'm pretty sure they're well on
Speaker 11: their way, because I'm looking at the Doodle site right now.
Speaker 11: You can buy a rug featuring my favorite Doodles character
Speaker 11: hap for one hundred dollars.
Speaker 3: So are you serious that these not the focus is
Speaker 3: selling a rug.
Speaker 11: Yes, yes, the crops are sold out. Unfortunately, I know,
Speaker 11: I know you were really wanted to get those.
Speaker 7: They're sold out. They were one hundred and twenty bucks.
Speaker 11: They're selling. They're selling little Vinyl toys for one hundred
Speaker 11: and eighty five dollars. They have a cat mush, they
Speaker 11: have a cat plush for forty bucks, they have a
Speaker 11: puzzle for twenty two dollars, and they finally have the
Speaker 11: before mentioned rug.
Speaker 3: So yeah, it's it's just wonderful.
Speaker 11: It seems like a good investment. These things are selling
Speaker 11: out fast. You want to, you gotta, you gotta get in.
Speaker 11: Your character is gonna be the next one?
Speaker 7: Yeah.
Speaker 3: But I think that the ultimate thing is none of
Speaker 3: this was about creating anything that really is it. It
Speaker 3: was creating just enough to sell securities, the suckers, and
Speaker 3: now all of it is falling apart. The SEC just
Speaker 3: sued a group of celebrities for an NFT cat cartoon
Speaker 3: called Stoner Cats.
Speaker 2: Yeah. No, I was really excited about Stoner Cat.
Speaker 3: I was really pumped up for seeing Stoner Cats. But
Speaker 3: sadly the SEC changed the creator for unregistered offering of NFTs,
Speaker 3: which are securities, and they raised eight million dollars. It's
Speaker 3: just very sad, very funny by the way that the
Speaker 3: SEC now was to get in like Garyginsters, to look
Speaker 3: at stoner cats and say all right, let's let's take
Speaker 3: a look at this, or that's not good. How a
Speaker 3: test is going to have fun with this? But I
Speaker 3: think NFTs were and are probably one of the more
Speaker 3: nihilistic parts of the tech industry. Yeah, because they did
Speaker 3: the bare minimum to convince people. They made up all
Speaker 3: of It's kind of like that episode of The Simpsons
Speaker 3: where they remake Flanders's house and it's just a facier
Speaker 3: and it effectively falls poster. Yeah, yes, exactly, and it's
Speaker 3: just enough to make people believe this could be worth enough,
Speaker 3: because it's never really obvious what actually makes something worth something.
Speaker 3: In the collectible's market, there are established artists whom I
Speaker 3: personally own a bunch of original comic artwork, a lot
Speaker 3: of it by Arthur Adams, and that market is fairly
Speaker 3: small because there's only so much one man can do,
Speaker 3: and the value comes from what people are willing to pay.
Speaker 3: But in that case, it's beautiful pencils and inks and
Speaker 3: it's gorgeously you want on your wall. In this case,
Speaker 3: it's I'm buying something that sounds like it might be valuable.
Speaker 3: There's not really a fundamental community that sounds fine, but
Speaker 3: when you push past even the first layer, it all
Speaker 3: falls apart. And that's because, in my opinion, the NFT
Speaker 3: hype was just a long come on customers in the media.
Speaker 3: It's a scam, a scam where companies built the appearance
Speaker 3: of value without but actually generating anything. There's nothing to
Speaker 3: old some vinyl figures. Who cares. Nobody's done. The boord
Speaker 3: Ape Yacht Club has the world's shittiest cartoon. They did
Speaker 3: a flash game called Dookie Dash.
Speaker 7: Yes I did, I did see Dookie Dash.
Speaker 3: What was great was.
Speaker 7: Game of the Year twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: Game of the Year twenty twenty two. Immediately, by the way, scammed,
Speaker 3: just immediately someone broke it and they had to like
Speaker 3: they were like, what, how did this happen? But that's
Speaker 3: the thing, you go, Labs worth a couple billion dollars,
Speaker 3: Doodle's worth seven hundred million, nothing to them, not a
Speaker 3: single interesting idea in any of them. But they existed
Speaker 3: to con people into believing this completely thin view it
Speaker 3: and also the nihilistic part is it was talking about
Speaker 3: people collecting art and collecting creative things without actually ever
Speaker 3: seeing the value in the object. The objects creativity was
Speaker 3: only as valuable as it was sellable, but not even
Speaker 3: sellable to an enterprise. It was just like to another
Speaker 3: person who could continue the chain of shit.
Speaker 11: I think there is a large untapped market for this though,
Speaker 11: that Doodles is actually trying to exploit, because I just
Speaker 11: found probably one of the most upsetic things I've discovered today,
Speaker 11: which is saying something because I've seen a lot of
Speaker 11: a lot of best stuff today, today's footage, a lot
Speaker 11: of workime footage is But there is a Doodle's immersive
Speaker 11: experience in Chicago for children. Oh No, children create their
Speaker 11: own Doodles and you can pay twenty eight dollars per
Speaker 11: person to spend an hour in this Doodles themed art
Speaker 11: installation in Chicago. I'm looking at I'm looking at the
Speaker 11: availability there is.
Speaker 2: Yeah, looks like we can book one for the team.
Speaker 7: There is ten slots open each day.
Speaker 11: All the slots are open tomorrow, so I think we
Speaker 11: should get a flight like tonight.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right now, I want to book this asap.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's gonna sound I'm gonna send you this like
Speaker 3: because it's the most one of the more disturbing things
Speaker 3: I've found. I don't want to go to the Doodles camp.
Speaker 15: Every It's twenty twenty eight dollars per kid for one
Speaker 15: hour of walking in this one Doodles themed room where
Speaker 15: first your kid creates a Doodle's character so you can
Speaker 15: enter doodle World.
Speaker 11: You go through a rainbow portal, you slide down rainbows,
Speaker 11: play in puffy clouds, and crash a spaceship, and then
Speaker 11: you romp through a limpsical world until your hours up,
Speaker 11: and then you leave after spetting twenty eight dollars per child.
Speaker 1: It's like if a committee designed fucking U Meal wolf right. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's a committee of people on thorazine.
Speaker 3: But if you watch this video, is well of this
Speaker 3: Doodle's world. Here's the thing. You don't see anything of anything,
Speaker 3: there's none. There's a picture of the guy who I've
Speaker 3: already forgotten the name of Hop.
Speaker 7: I can't believe forgot Hop's name.
Speaker 3: I can't believe I've forgot Hop.
Speaker 11: But one and eighty five dollars to get a figure
Speaker 11: you have to remember.
Speaker 3: God damn it. And but that's that's the thing. This
Speaker 3: is just it's a masterpiece of emptiness. It is a
Speaker 3: meaningless thing. There is nothing to doodles, no.
Speaker 7: It's it's it's vapid, there's nothing to any of it.
Speaker 3: And NFT investors was sold this dream of kind of
Speaker 3: an access to wealth or for both sides that like, oh,
Speaker 3: the artist will make money because every NFT sale you
Speaker 3: get some royalty, some residuals, which theoretically is a cool
Speaker 3: thing that when an artist has a piece sold on
Speaker 3: someone else. I like that idea I always have. And
Speaker 3: in turn, by buying into this quote unquote art, you
Speaker 3: can generate your own wealth and you can be part
Speaker 3: of this positive chain where everyone wins. But you're also
Speaker 3: early so you get to feel smart. Except the problem
Speaker 3: is that you're more than likely left with a worthless
Speaker 3: piece of shit. You're left with nothing. So fundamentally there
Speaker 3: will be and I don't believe more than a couple
Speaker 3: thousand people made any money on NFTs. Now, the majority
Speaker 3: of the people who bought NFTs are going to be
Speaker 3: left in the red, and every new entrant is just
Speaker 3: another sucker to hopefully dump an investment onto. Because there
Speaker 3: are no NFTs that have a fundamental value. There's not one.
Speaker 3: It's not like No, it's that Disney, Marvel, none of
Speaker 3: these major things. Notice that none of them got involved.
Speaker 3: They didn't want to fucking touch as DC did a
Speaker 3: vague idea of buying comic covers, but even then it
Speaker 3: was half us because why why would you do it.
Speaker 3: I've been saying this since twenty twenty one, that these
Speaker 3: things had no value, that it was just an attempt
Speaker 3: to sell people this vague sense of participation in a
Speaker 3: new economy. And in fact, there was a study that
Speaker 3: came out an analysis of seventy three two hundred and
Speaker 3: fifty seven NFT collections. Ninety five percent of NFTs on
Speaker 3: the market are now totally worthless. The value of these
Speaker 3: collections is zero ethereum. Almost every single person encouraged to
Speaker 3: invest them by The New York Times, by CNBC is
Speaker 3: a victim of a massive legal fraud peddled by Internet
Speaker 3: charlatans like Alexishenian. I'm not saying he's one of them,
Speaker 3: but there are people within the NFT industry who also
Speaker 3: washtrade these things, which means that they effectively sell them
Speaker 3: to themselves. And there's actually increasingly impressive research that suggests
Speaker 3: that most NFT set were just washtrading, just people pumping
Speaker 3: and pumping and pumping. That's why justin Bieber's ape that
Speaker 3: he blet for one point three million dollars is worth
Speaker 3: about sixty grand. Now he'll be fine, but other people won't.
Speaker 3: And that's what's really anger inducing. That's what fills my
Speaker 3: veins full of poison. And if these were never worth anything,
Speaker 3: and the majority of the industry is made up of
Speaker 3: fake goddamn transactions, and the people who will suffer on
Speaker 3: the majority, and the majority are not rich, the majority
Speaker 3: are not anything other than desperate people who were manipulated.
Speaker 1: It's like with fucking the FTX collapse, which is funny
Speaker 1: in a lot of ways, but also one of the
Speaker 1: big bag holders wound up being like a teacher's pension fund.
Speaker 1: Like that was massive, and obviously I think that like
Speaker 1: an addition to going after sam people, regulators should be
Speaker 1: looking at who the fuck made the call to put
Speaker 1: people's pension money in fucking brain genius kids gambling din
Speaker 1: But it is like there is like real harmed it
Speaker 1: and that was like always the plan. Everyone who was
Speaker 1: involved in pushing this is was trying to, Like the
Speaker 1: whole game plan was create this critical mass of hype
Speaker 1: that broke people's ability to actually analyze what they were doing.
Speaker 1: That just kind of made them panic and throw money
Speaker 1: in because they felt like otherwise they were going to
Speaker 1: miss out on their chance to retire, right That was
Speaker 1: the whole thing, and that's why, like the entire social
Speaker 1: media hype around this was all based on you're going
Speaker 1: to stay poor forever if you don't get in on
Speaker 1: this right now, Like it's so disgusting, and yeah, just evil,
Speaker 1: evil people.
Speaker 3: And they were never a great investment. They were never
Speaker 3: in the future of IP. They're just a vehicle to
Speaker 3: extract capital from retail investors, from regular people who to
Speaker 3: your point earlier, who didn't invest in Apple earlier, oh
Speaker 3: Google early, they didn't get the chance, they didn't buy
Speaker 3: the Star Wars toy. So this was their chance to
Speaker 3: get ahead. And if these are just an exploitative scam,
Speaker 3: they create just enough it's a true scam as well.
Speaker 3: They create just enough to get people in the door
Speaker 3: and just enough to make that investment defensible. They and
Speaker 3: it honestly shared a lot of the language of the
Speaker 3: Joe Oldsteins and conspiracy theorists and other teller evangelists telling
Speaker 3: people to your point that oh, you're not gonna make it,
Speaker 3: Oh have fun staying poor. What a noxious fucking thing
Speaker 3: to say, What a disgusting thing to say to someone.
Speaker 3: And what's funny is they use the other scam that
Speaker 3: some companies in the tech industry used FDx, for example,
Speaker 3: where they would raise rounds a venture capital which gave
Speaker 3: the appearance of a real enterprise where things were actually happening,
Speaker 3: and then they sold them this dream of oh, you
Speaker 3: could own a piece of this, despite the fact that
Speaker 3: not a single goddamn NFT actually granted stock options, voting rights,
Speaker 3: or anything else because if they did that, it would
Speaker 3: immediately become a security, so they'd never do that. You
Speaker 3: don't have consequential votes. You don't have any industry over
Speaker 3: this industry. You just have a thing that can be
Speaker 3: It may not be fungible, but the operating environment for
Speaker 3: it is absolutely fucking fungible. If doodles was truly not fungible,
Speaker 3: they wouldn't be able to change the doodle's quorum.
Speaker 2: They would just have to.
Speaker 3: Sit there and do nothing. But what's also important to realize,
Speaker 3: and as I've said before, but I'll say it a
Speaker 3: goddamn again, is they really didn't try very hard. The
Speaker 3: board ape Yarch Club, which is the biggest one the
Speaker 3: ten thousand horrifying looking apes owned by a company called
Speaker 3: Yuga Labs. They were valued at four billion dollars in
Speaker 3: twenty twenty two. Despite the fact that they said they
Speaker 3: were going to go Hollywood, they've not actually created anything.
Speaker 3: They They said they were going to do a metaverse product.
Speaker 3: They sold NFTs of this metaverse thing that they've never shown,
Speaker 3: called other Side. I believe. Yeah, it crashed.
Speaker 1: Ethereu, but they have not the video game where you
Speaker 1: travel through a toilet looking for poop, Dookie Dash.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is the new Disney everyone, This is it.
Speaker 3: This is the new Disney. It's the metaverse that will
Speaker 3: never get built. It's the cartoon about monkeys and toilets
Speaker 3: that actually advertise Dookie Dash. The rich, deep lore of
Speaker 3: the bored A Yacht Club, by the way, is that
Speaker 3: a monkey did a poo so bad that a key
Speaker 3: came out to another dimension. But then the monkey somehow
Speaker 3: put that key in a beer that the monkey drank,
Speaker 3: and then the monkey did another poo where it put
Speaker 3: it into the sewer pipes, thus making it necessary for
Speaker 3: you to pilot another monkey to go and get the key.
Speaker 3: Very fucking stupid, very bad, ugly, like the designs suck.
Speaker 3: That's the other thing. These aren't even good looking. And
Speaker 3: this is a company worth.
Speaker 16: Four billion dollars, four billion dollars, and all they've done
Speaker 16: is not make a metaverse, but make a lot of money,
Speaker 16: make a terrible he is looking of cartoons that may
Speaker 16: or may not go anywhere, and an Ebulum's World clone that.
Speaker 3: Got scammed almost immediately. Someone found a way to exploit
Speaker 3: it immediately because it's a flash game. These are not
Speaker 3: creative enterprises. These are not entertainment companies. They're shell corporations
Speaker 3: for ill godden revenues for secondary market sales of ten
Speaker 3: thousand bullshit pictures that were hyped up by the media
Speaker 3: who could not analyze it properly. They just saw the
Speaker 3: large amounts of money that were being made, the crooked ways,
Speaker 3: by the way, the ones which were clearly pumped everyone
Speaker 3: covered them. World of Woman. Do you remember that one
Speaker 3: World of Woman? The NFT That was my favorite one
Speaker 3: because there were so many guys in the crypto world
Speaker 3: who like Yeah, I bought a world of woman entity.
Speaker 3: I support woman. That's I love it. No, it's so good,
Speaker 3: And it's because all of it's exploitative. NFTs are vehicles
Speaker 3: to exploit people, particularly Americans, who so desperate and fairly
Speaker 3: questioning their place in the world that is continually turned
Speaker 3: upon providing basic social services and the ability for its
Speaker 3: citizens to thrive. There are a few honest ways for
Speaker 3: the average person to accumulate wealth anymore. It's nearly impossible
Speaker 3: to buy a house. Returns on the market suck. Market's
Speaker 3: already confusing, And yeah, all of that's quickly outpaced by
Speaker 3: the fact that you have student loans, health insurance, and
Speaker 3: inflation is making things more expensive than ever. And I
Speaker 3: would argue that that is really the root of what's
Speaker 3: so evil about crypto.
Speaker 7: Yeah, it's inherently exploitative.
Speaker 3: It is inherently linked in all of these ways to
Speaker 3: religious dogma that you're buying into something that you're finally
Speaker 3: part of, something meaningful, something that will grow, something that
Speaker 3: will make you whole in a way that your predecessors
Speaker 3: might have been just through living normally. This industry it
Speaker 3: took root because most people can't thrive. Everyone has to hustle.
Speaker 3: Everyone has to struggle. You can't do the things that
Speaker 3: people even twenty years ago could. You can't work a
Speaker 3: normal job and buy a house anymore. You can't get
Speaker 3: a mortgage. In many cases, you can't just go to
Speaker 3: college and probably pay those loans off in five years.
Speaker 3: God no, that shit's going to follow you decades and
Speaker 3: nobody's helping you. And then along comes these Along comes
Speaker 3: this very technological, cool sounding, non fungible token, this thing
Speaker 3: where oh, I could be part of this new art market.
Speaker 3: I can be the smart one for once. I could
Speaker 3: be ahead of everyone, and the people on the other
Speaker 3: side of that transaction are telling you everything you want
Speaker 3: to hear. Then the next Disney, then the next Marvel.
Speaker 3: You're gonna be part of something. You're gonna make it.
Speaker 3: That's what you'll do if you buy into this. All
Speaker 3: of those crypto people are totally fine, all of them,
Speaker 3: the Winklevosses like Sohanian Mack Andresen Christi, they're all doing great.
Speaker 3: They are multi millionaires several times over. The people on
Speaker 3: the other side are victims, victims of what I would
Speaker 3: argue any just society would decide was a financial crime.
Speaker 3: And I think that every single venture capitalist who put
Speaker 3: money into these products and who pumped them should be
Speaker 3: held accountable. They won't because that is the modern tech industry,
Speaker 3: because that is the modern government. There is no justice
Speaker 3: for the victims of NFTs. And it's really horrifying to watch.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 11: I know, sometimes it can be hard to be sympathetic
Speaker 11: for these folks because we imagine them being like, you know,
Speaker 11: freedra Reddit, you know, chriacters. But I think if you
Speaker 11: have the capacity to feel sympathetic to like former cult members,
Speaker 11: this is kind of the same thing. This is like,
Speaker 11: this is it's really the same process and a big
Speaker 11: part of actually beating cults is the ability to be
Speaker 11: sympathetic to former cult members. That it's actually like a
Speaker 11: crucial part of getting people to like get past this
Speaker 11: sort of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's that's going to include not just the innocent,
Speaker 1: but some people who did some pretty ugly things. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I think that's and that's hard critical.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I always try and push people to think
Speaker 3: of that because it is very easy, to your point
Speaker 3: to look at the fedoras, to look at the wag
Speaker 3: me guys, we're going to make it people and say
Speaker 3: these are the majority. I would argue most people, and
Speaker 3: I'll say this haven't been in too many telegrams of
Speaker 3: too many rug pulled projects just watching the vast majority
Speaker 3: of people are desperate. They just want their investment to turn.
Speaker 3: They just want something because there really isn't much way
Speaker 3: out for most people. There really isn't. Most people get lucky,
Speaker 3: and that's how they live what used to be, what
Speaker 3: used to be just like the general purpose good life,
Speaker 3: two point four children, house, white picket fans just doesn't
Speaker 3: happen for anyone anymore. And you're left with this. In
Speaker 3: a society where that happens, where there's so there are
Speaker 3: so few opportunities to thrive for people, you get things
Speaker 3: like this, you get these massive cons and I think
Speaker 3: that it will be hard for this to take root again.
Speaker 3: I don't think cryptos unscrewing people. I think that they
Speaker 3: will find a way to pump this in the future.
Speaker 1: Yeah, which is why you should buy our new cool
Speaker 1: Zone coin, you know, for just the price of forty
Speaker 1: five dollars a coin you can ape in and we're
Speaker 1: recommending right now just kind of transferring your whole four
Speaker 1: oh one k over into cool Zone coins, which which
Speaker 1: you can do by just sending it to our mailing
Speaker 1: address in the form of a check. Well, we'll get
Speaker 1: your coins to you.
Speaker 3: Don't worry, no problem, I will personally take care.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: Ed, thank you so much for putting this together. I
Speaker 1: think it's important to kind of look at this sort
Speaker 1: of stuff in retrospect, especially as the next con builds
Speaker 1: up scheme. You know, interest rates will drop eventually and
Speaker 1: then there will be another attempt to fleece large numbers
Speaker 1: of people, possibly using Larry David, although he may have
Speaker 1: learned this lesson this time. Ed, do you want to
Speaker 1: give the people some some notes on where they can
Speaker 1: find you if they want to read your stuff?
Speaker 3: You can find letters your ed dot at that's my newsletter,
Speaker 3: where's your red app? And you can find me on
Speaker 3: Twitter or x the Everything app or rate. My newstop
Speaker 3: business will be called soon at ed Zitron. I'm also
Speaker 3: on blue Sky. You find me a zitron, C I,
Speaker 3: t R O N.
Speaker 1: Well, check ed out any of those places and check
Speaker 1: us out here. You already found us once, so presumably
Speaker 1: you will not forget how to find us the second
Speaker 1: time until next time. You know, don't invest money in
Speaker 1: unregistered securities. Hey, we'll be back Monday with more episodes
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Speaker 14: It Could Happen Here as a production of cool Zone Media.
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Speaker 3: coolzonemedia dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Speaker 3: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 14: You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 14: monthly at coolzonemedia dot com slash sources. Thanks for listening.