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