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Speaker 1: a podcast about deception, greed, and forgery in the art world.
Speaker 1: I just walked in and saw this great red painting
Speaker 1: presuming to be a rothco. Of course, art forgeries only
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Speaker 1: It was an incredible mans of money. You knew the
Speaker 1: painting was fake. Um Listen to Art Fraud starting February
Speaker 1: one on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or
Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts. M Hey, everybody, Robert Evans
Speaker 1: here and I wanted to let you know this is
Speaker 1: a compilation episode. So every episode of the week that
Speaker 1: just happened is here in one convenient and with somewhat
Speaker 1: less ads package for you to listen to in a
Speaker 1: long stretch if you want. If you've been listening to
Speaker 1: the episodes every day this week, there's gonna be nothing
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Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen Here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: falling apart, and today it's it's there. There's there's a
Speaker 1: little bit of I'm getting put back together, but today's
Speaker 1: mostly them falling apart. Um, I'm your host, Christopher Wong.
Speaker 1: With me, I have Lucy who is a teacher in
Speaker 1: Chicago public schools and as part of the Teachers Union,
Speaker 1: and today we're going to be talking about just the
Speaker 1: absolute shit show that is being inflicted on teachers and
Speaker 1: students in public schools. And Lucy, how how are you?
Speaker 1: How are you doing? Um? You know, it's it's been
Speaker 1: kind of weird, but all in all, I'm in good spirits.
Speaker 1: I think my sisters and brothers and CTU are in
Speaker 1: good spirits. So we're going to keep fighting the good fight. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: before before we fully start to get into the teachers
Speaker 1: Union and Lord Lightfoot's fuckery, I want to sort of
Speaker 1: get a bit of context for people who don't live
Speaker 1: in Chicago or just don't know much about the only politics,
Speaker 1: because lord, you know, if you read sort of like
Speaker 1: media accounts of this, like you you, you you may
Speaker 1: be sort of misled into into thinking that there's like
Speaker 1: even some semblance of good faith going on here from
Speaker 1: Loyd Lightfoot, And like I just I just want to
Speaker 1: like do a great like a Lord Lightfoot Greatest hits
Speaker 1: real for a second. So Lightfoot, like immediately after she
Speaker 1: got elected, like the like the first thing she does
Speaker 1: she starts, she's she literally she's like, Okay, there's too
Speaker 1: much crime on the subway. We're gonna put swat teams
Speaker 1: on them. So you know, you just be on the
Speaker 1: red lighte and there's just wat team and you know,
Speaker 1: because again this is what happens. You put a swamp
Speaker 1: team on the fucking subway, they immediately shot a dude
Speaker 1: in the back for nothing, you just literally no reason.
Speaker 1: They shot him in the back. Um. So that that
Speaker 1: was like, that was like like the first like few
Speaker 1: weeks of Lightfoot. And then during the uprising, she like
Speaker 1: she she turned the rich part of Chicago and she's
Speaker 1: like a medieval castle like she like like like raised
Speaker 1: all the drawbridges into the middle of the city so
Speaker 1: that no one could get into the central part of
Speaker 1: the city. It was like awful. And then you know,
Speaker 1: then as as as we sort of like there there's
Speaker 1: more and more sort of bad lightfoot stuff. Most recently,
Speaker 1: so Chicago got a bunch of aid money from the
Speaker 1: federal government and she spent two one million dollars of
Speaker 1: it paying the police, not the schools. Yeah, nope, and
Speaker 1: CPD like these again, I think I talked about this before,
Speaker 1: but like when when the CIA was like our initial
Speaker 1: torturing program failed, where do we go to like find
Speaker 1: people who know how to torture? They brought into Chicago
Speaker 1: Police Detective like and you know, and and this is
Speaker 1: the CPD, Like like like there's there's two have a CPD, right,
Speaker 1: there's there's like the torture CPD. And then related to
Speaker 1: them but not necessarily identical is the part of the
Speaker 1: CPD that's just a cartel. Like there there was there
Speaker 1: was a thing in in at the beginning of the
Speaker 1: tens were like it turned out that like the almost
Speaker 1: like the huge parts of the CPD were literally just
Speaker 1: a cartel. They're running drugs. They were just like doing
Speaker 1: shakedowns for and and like one person total, like you
Speaker 1: got arrested by the FBI for and everyone else is
Speaker 1: just still there. It's great, it's a it's a time
Speaker 1: so that this is this is who Lorrily Lightfoot is.
Speaker 1: Um she sucks like everyone hates her like like her.
Speaker 1: The people who should be her political allies hate her.
Speaker 1: Like Chicago Chargo got like a police reform bill, and
Speaker 1: the reason it was like a very mild one but
Speaker 1: the reason it happened was just that like like the
Speaker 1: like the Alderman passed it out of just pure spite
Speaker 1: because of how much they don't like Lightfoot. So this
Speaker 1: is this is the this has been my Christopher shouts
Speaker 1: that Lightfoot intruded this, but yeah, needs say life Foot
Speaker 1: not acting in good faith, just absolutely Batman villain. Yeah,
Speaker 1: villain's incredible. No, actually that's not fair because a lot
Speaker 1: of Batman villains are kind of right. Yeah, yeah, she's
Speaker 1: she's she's she's like the nightmare refusion of like Batman
Speaker 1: and a Batman villain, Like what I what are you think?
Speaker 1: The worst aspects of both, and then made them the mayor.
Speaker 1: It's it's a yeah, I've been kind of Um so,
Speaker 1: I moved here almost a year ago from a smaller city,
Speaker 1: and I did not like the mayor in my city,
Speaker 1: and he really was a big fan of like the
Speaker 1: Lory Lightfoot playbook. But um, I guess people weren't as
Speaker 1: politically involved there. And my first week working in Chicago
Speaker 1: public schools, um, somebody mentioned the mayor mentioned Laurie, and
Speaker 1: everybody kind of groaned, and I was like, oh, you
Speaker 1: don't like her, you don't like your mayor, And I
Speaker 1: mean I knew they didn't, but I was just kind
Speaker 1: of testing the waters, and this lady looks at me
Speaker 1: and goes, we hate her. I swear, like if you
Speaker 1: mentioned her name in this city, people practically spit on
Speaker 1: the ground. It's like it's amazing because like men demon Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like like Chicago dotoriously we all hate her. Politicians,
Speaker 1: but like Lightfoot, like like that there were you would
Speaker 1: find rama Manuel supporters, right, Like, I don't know a
Speaker 1: single lord like outside of the schools. Within the schools,
Speaker 1: everyone I know, like even even the even the cops
Speaker 1: don't like her, Like she keeps funneling hundreds of billions
Speaker 1: of dollars and they still don't like her. It's like,
Speaker 1: it's incredible. Do you unite the teachers union and the
Speaker 1: police union. One siding that's the only thing that they've
Speaker 1: ever agreed on is fuck Lory Lightfoot. It's really incredible.
Speaker 1: So life, what's latest scheme? Um? Yeah, do you do
Speaker 1: you want to explain? I guess go back a little
Speaker 1: bit in into the history of sort of how how
Speaker 1: Chicago and Chicago Public schools have kind of been responding
Speaker 1: to COVID and then how they just did this stuff
Speaker 1: and yeah, I guess like, yeah, give us a background,
Speaker 1: like what's going on right now? Well, I'm going to
Speaker 1: preface with two things. One, I am fairly new here,
Speaker 1: so I don't know all of the details. And two,
Speaker 1: I really want to emphasize that I'm just here talking
Speaker 1: for myself. I don't represent CTU in any way. This
Speaker 1: is just I wanted to talk about my feelings on things.
Speaker 1: So UM. What I do know is they were doing
Speaker 1: remote learning, and when I arrived here in March, we
Speaker 1: were fully remote and UM. Then in the fourth marketing period,
Speaker 1: so like around like after spring break, UM we moved
Speaker 1: to a hybrid model, so we had parents and kids
Speaker 1: could like choose if they wanted to stay online or
Speaker 1: if they wanted to be in person. UM. I think
Speaker 1: like sixty percent or more, depending on what school UM
Speaker 1: chose the online option. Like a lot of parents just
Speaker 1: were not comfortable putting their kids in UM. I know
Speaker 1: that there's been like a ton of talk about UM,
Speaker 1: you know, like the most economically disadvantaged families need the
Speaker 1: schools open, but it's kind of been the reverse. It's
Speaker 1: been the people who have UM more means are more
Speaker 1: interested in opening and people who uh are less well
Speaker 1: off are a little more resistant to it. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's not the same across the board. I don't want
Speaker 1: to generalize too much, but that's been what I've seen. UM.
Speaker 1: I think, if I had to guess it, there's a
Speaker 1: lot of history behind that. Like UM, I mean, first
Speaker 1: of all, just can your family afford an illness like this?
Speaker 1: And people living in multi general generational households. And I
Speaker 1: think something that CPS and our government in general really
Speaker 1: fail to acknowledge is just how how much mistrust there
Speaker 1: is between government institutions, public schools, and UM people of color,
Speaker 1: and for good reason. You know, they have been repeatedly
Speaker 1: just screwed over by these institutions. And I can absolutely
Speaker 1: understand why they might not trust a school district that says, hey,
Speaker 1: we'll keep your kids safe, because they weren't doing it
Speaker 1: before the pandemic. UM. So we had I had like
Speaker 1: seven kids in one of my classes, and like ten
Speaker 1: and another and then the rest of them were online.
Speaker 1: And I'm like sitting at a computer teaching to the
Speaker 1: kids online and to the kids in their room. All
Speaker 1: the kids in the room are on their computers too.
Speaker 1: So that we can like still be like one cohesive class. UM.
Speaker 1: It was hard, and it was like kind of like
Speaker 1: mentally fatiguing, like just going back and forth like that.
Speaker 1: But you know, we made it work. I was kind
Speaker 1: of I was really proud of us, Like we made
Speaker 1: it work. We made it happen. We stayed in contact
Speaker 1: with the families and the kids constantly, UM and like
Speaker 1: as things moved on and as numbers started going down,
Speaker 1: more people started warning their kids back UM, and then
Speaker 1: after spring break they UM well, so like after springbreak
Speaker 1: they let people come back. And then as we moved
Speaker 1: towards on our more and more kids were coming back.
Speaker 1: Which it was the school I was in was UM
Speaker 1: handling it very well. Our principle was really committed to
Speaker 1: like keeping us safe. So there was UM testing Like
Speaker 1: once a week somebody would come back and be like, yo,
Speaker 1: go get your COVID test. UM. I don't know if
Speaker 1: kids were being tested, but I know teachers were. UM.
Speaker 1: Then summer happens. I ended up in a different school
Speaker 1: in the Austin neighborhood, which is UM a lot less
Speaker 1: advantage than the one that I had been working in,
Speaker 1: and we open back up fully in person, no remote
Speaker 1: option like at all, like it. UM. The only people
Speaker 1: who could get remote were kids that were deemed medically fragile,
Speaker 1: but they had to one submit like tons of paperwork
Speaker 1: to prove that and to their siblings could not stay removed.
Speaker 1: So at that point, it's like, why, what's the point?
Speaker 1: And if you were a teacher who had a medically
Speaker 1: fragile child in the schools, your kid could be remote,
Speaker 1: but you couldn't, So then, you know, how is that
Speaker 1: going to work? UM? And I found in the school
Speaker 1: where I was. You know, this is the issue with
Speaker 1: Chicago and with you know, most of the country is
Speaker 1: some schools have more resources than others. And the school
Speaker 1: I didn't know where to get tested. Nobody like told me.
Speaker 1: I think there was some kind of testing program, not sure,
Speaker 1: definitely nothing for students. UM. I've since moved to a
Speaker 1: high school that has more resources, but still I have
Speaker 1: not been able to figure out where the hec to
Speaker 1: get testing. Which has been one of the biggest things
Speaker 1: that uh CTU is asking for is we want UM
Speaker 1: opt out testing instead of opt in testing, so you
Speaker 1: would automatically be registered to test, and if you didn't
Speaker 1: want to test, then you would have to opt out,
Speaker 1: which would end up with far more people getting tested
Speaker 1: and make it a lot easier, because a big part
Speaker 1: of why people are signing up is it's really hard,
Speaker 1: Like I don't know where to find it that everyone's
Speaker 1: like it's in your emails somewhere. I've searched my email.
Speaker 1: I don't know, Like we get like emails a day,
Speaker 1: like yeah, and it's yeah, Like you know, I think
Speaker 1: anyone anyone who remembers what being in a school is
Speaker 1: like those they have, I mean just the absolute worst
Speaker 1: bureaucratic stuff, like it's it's it's it's like honestly, like
Speaker 1: it's like my experiences with like academia and like back
Speaker 1: in the high school, like their tech stuff was like
Speaker 1: worse than corporate sex stuff, which is like astounding. Mm hmm.
Speaker 1: It's it's ridiculous. Do you want to jump into here
Speaker 1: into Lightfoot's like okay, Lightfoot has like invented a new
Speaker 1: kind of COVID denialism, which is like like she she's
Speaker 1: now turned into like a COVID test denihilist, Like it's incredible,
Speaker 1: like she she she has she went on this rant
Speaker 1: about how like COVID testing is a quote quasi medical
Speaker 1: procedure and how you're gonna get lost, like it's it's bizarre.
Speaker 1: So this this journalist asked her about the testing because
Speaker 1: and I don't know which journalist that was, but I
Speaker 1: want to thank them so much because they have seen
Speaker 1: a lot of the reporters are actually out there trying
Speaker 1: to keep c t use demands in the conversation as
Speaker 1: opposed to this like whole oh lazy teachers don't want
Speaker 1: to work like fun off, we do want to be working. Um.
Speaker 1: But so I almost thought that she had like mixed
Speaker 1: up with this since and thought that they were talking
Speaker 1: about vaccines. But even so, like stop it, stop, just
Speaker 1: stop doing that. But who is having a reaction to
Speaker 1: a COVID test? It is like literally a cute tip,
Speaker 1: like like you just stick They don't even stick it
Speaker 1: that far up your nose anymore. They just do a
Speaker 1: little in your nostril or like a mouth swot. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like actually, like as someone who had like like I
Speaker 1: genuinely did have a kind of bad reaction because I
Speaker 1: jabbed it up really far and like I was like
Speaker 1: sneezing a lot afterwards. But it's like, oh no, you
Speaker 1: sneezed a little bit like what what does it even mean?
Speaker 1: Like not like I feel like people are acting like
Speaker 1: this test is like this weird new technology it is.
Speaker 1: It isn't like right before the pandemic, Like a couple
Speaker 1: of months before I had the flu and I had
Speaker 1: exactly the same kind of test. They stuck a thing
Speaker 1: up my nose. It was hella uncomfortable. Um it took
Speaker 1: like two seconds. They stuck it on a little plastic thing.
Speaker 1: I'm a bob and said, oh, looks like you have
Speaker 1: the flu. Yeah, it's I don't know where this is
Speaker 1: coming from. I think it's just she is not a
Speaker 1: very charismatic person, and she's not someone who does well
Speaker 1: under pressure. And right now she's back into a corner
Speaker 1: and she's acting out and it's been kind of wild,
Speaker 1: like I've seen she's she's also throwing other people around
Speaker 1: her under the bus. Yeah, Like she says something about
Speaker 1: Pedro Martinez, Like she says, the teachers aren't in charge
Speaker 1: of this, Padre Martinez is in charge. She's the CEO.
Speaker 1: And I'm like, okay, so you're being this is setting
Speaker 1: him up to take the blame on this. Everything that
Speaker 1: you tweeted about, like it was she was like, no, no,
Speaker 1: it's actually the mayor's and sorry, it's it's actually the Uh,
Speaker 1: it's the principles responsible to the principles were like no, yeah,
Speaker 1: CPS is kind of interesting. Um, this can be really
Speaker 1: good or really bad depending on what's school you're in,
Speaker 1: But the principles really have a lot of autonomy over
Speaker 1: their school. Um. I've now been in two schools where
Speaker 1: that's worked out great. My principal rocks. Um, if she
Speaker 1: ever hears this, I hope she knows that I said that.
Speaker 1: I think she's great. Um. Also, the principle I worked
Speaker 1: at the beginning of school year was awful. Um so,
Speaker 1: but when it comes to like district wide protocols, like
Speaker 1: that's district wide and so CPS apparently had a meeting
Speaker 1: with principles where um I heard some rumors about this too,
Speaker 1: but I also saw that letter that they had posted. Um.
Speaker 1: The principles are one really frustrated because CPS isn't communicating
Speaker 1: stuff with them very effectively, and so parents will be
Speaker 1: calling like do we have school tomorrow? And they don't know,
Speaker 1: but CTU knows, and it's telling their members, so the
Speaker 1: teachers all know the like more answers and the principles do,
Speaker 1: which is obviously really embarrassing if you're supposed to be
Speaker 1: in charge. Um. And then there they were told in
Speaker 1: this meeting with CPS, school is gonna be closed on Friday. Okay,
Speaker 1: school's closed on Friday. Great, sounds good. And then Lightfoot
Speaker 1: gets on the day news and tells everybody that it
Speaker 1: will be done on a school by school basis, at
Speaker 1: principle's discretion, depending on if they have staff. So now
Speaker 1: all of these principles who had already told their students
Speaker 1: and families that, um, we're closing, look like they're the
Speaker 1: ones who closed it as opposed like, and that's it
Speaker 1: is rare for me to feel bad for a school
Speaker 1: principle because that's my boss. You know, I don't like
Speaker 1: my boss, but I feel bad for them right now.
Speaker 1: Oh my god. Like you're just trying to like make
Speaker 1: sure that people have the information they need in a
Speaker 1: timely manner, and this lady is up here making you
Speaker 1: look like a monster. It's so unfair. Yeah, should we
Speaker 1: talk about what's been happening and we run up to
Speaker 1: the past sort of winter break, and then the stuff
Speaker 1: that's happening now because it's very grim and bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so a lot of schools have been having COVID cases. Um,
Speaker 1: there's I'm not really sure what's going on with cps
Speaker 1: IS data. It kind of seems like they're not reporting
Speaker 1: it very faithfully or accurately. Like if you look at
Speaker 1: their tracker, they'll be cases and then suddenly they'll be gone. Um.
Speaker 1: We never really get a hard number ever. Like will
Speaker 1: be like if you have a student in your class
Speaker 1: who has been quarantined and we all know what it is,
Speaker 1: but they don't say it. They'll be like, um, you know, uh,
Speaker 1: Johnny will be out for the next x amount of
Speaker 1: time due to health reasons. Please let him join via
Speaker 1: Google Meet And they never do. That's the other annoying
Speaker 1: thing is like the students, I think because they are
Speaker 1: either close contact or they're sick, um you know, to them,
Speaker 1: it's like a a break almost, like they're not going
Speaker 1: to log in randomly. Like it's it's just with I
Speaker 1: think with kids, like once it stops being consistent and
Speaker 1: it's like back and forth all the time, it becomes
Speaker 1: very difficult for them to stay motivated because they're out
Speaker 1: of their routine. Like I I sometimes hate it when
Speaker 1: people say this, but it is kind of true. Kids
Speaker 1: kind of thrive on routine. Um. So at this point,
Speaker 1: now I have like a third of my class at
Speaker 1: any given moment will just not be there and it
Speaker 1: will be different third of the class every you know,
Speaker 1: it kind of like rolls through. So all of my
Speaker 1: students are like different points in the curriculum. It's hard
Speaker 1: to like know what to teach each day because I
Speaker 1: don't know who needs what. It's hard to reach out
Speaker 1: to the kids that are at home and make sure
Speaker 1: that they get what they need because I'm so busy
Speaker 1: trying to catch these kids up and move these kids
Speaker 1: on and all that stuff, um, which I have seen
Speaker 1: some research. I'll see if I can find it. Um
Speaker 1: after we're done that like pointed out that like remote
Speaker 1: learning isn't the worst thing that can happen. The worst
Speaker 1: thing that can happen is just flipping back and forth
Speaker 1: all the time and having huge numbers of kids absent
Speaker 1: from in person learning. Um. So we go on break
Speaker 1: and obviously we have O macron like sweeping through the country,
Speaker 1: and we all knew that there were going to be spikes,
Speaker 1: Like we knew that in Chicago had what was if
Speaker 1: Illinois had some like astronomically high number of new cravit
Speaker 1: cases like breaking records all over the place. Um CPS
Speaker 1: has had huge increases. Yesterday we had forty three four
Speaker 1: cases in Illinois. It's that's a lot, like yeah, but yeah,
Speaker 1: so overbreak like the last like the Union and had
Speaker 1: been trying has been trying forever to get CPS to
Speaker 1: come in and agree to um a few things. So
Speaker 1: one in February we had a um an agreement that
Speaker 1: schools would flip to remote if they reached a certain threshold.
Speaker 1: That agreement has expired and CPS has refused to come
Speaker 1: to the bargaining table and negotiate a new one. They're
Speaker 1: just like, no, we don't need it. We also have
Speaker 1: been trying to get them to do the opt out
Speaker 1: testing and a like surveillance testing programing in school so
Speaker 1: we can kind of just have little bits of data
Speaker 1: to understand like where are these cases. CPS doesn't want
Speaker 1: to do this. They don't want a threshold for flipping
Speaker 1: to remote because then they would have to flip to remote,
Speaker 1: and they don't want the surveillance testing because then they
Speaker 1: would have to flip to remote, and they just don't
Speaker 1: want to flip to remote. Um. So finally over break,
Speaker 1: you know, it kind of came to a head, like
Speaker 1: they were still refusing to negotiate, like, um, one of
Speaker 1: the UH union delegates in my building said something about, um,
Speaker 1: they've been meeting. They go to these meetings like you know,
Speaker 1: like twice a week. They try to get these meetings
Speaker 1: to happen, and the mayor never comes and the CEO
Speaker 1: never comes, like they will either send lawyers or they
Speaker 1: don't show up. And it's like, dude, sounded so tired
Speaker 1: into moralized, but he said that. I felt bad for him. Um,
Speaker 1: but yeah, So we voted that we were going to
Speaker 1: go in on Monday and Tuesday meet with our safety committees,
Speaker 1: get a feel for what's going on in school, and
Speaker 1: then we are going to have a vote on Tuesday
Speaker 1: night as to whether or not we will do a
Speaker 1: remote work action on Wednesday. And I know a lot
Speaker 1: of people have been like trying to make it sound
Speaker 1: like this was very sudden, but it absolutely wasn't. Like
Speaker 1: we had a vote about whether or not we were
Speaker 1: interested in doing this, and then we had a vote
Speaker 1: on whether we're still interested on having a vote, and
Speaker 1: then we had the vote and delicates voted on if
Speaker 1: they wanted to hold an official like should we do
Speaker 1: an action vote? We did. Um, it was like seventy
Speaker 1: voted yes. Um. There were some complaints that some people
Speaker 1: didn't get their ballots, but they did wait till they
Speaker 1: had enough yes votes to reach that to third majority
Speaker 1: that we needed. So you know, c TU has every
Speaker 1: step of the way really been making sure, um, this
Speaker 1: is actually what we want. This isn't just like unilateral
Speaker 1: things like Lorie keeps throwing that work unilateral around. It
Speaker 1: wasn't unilateral. It was like at least two there's the
Speaker 1: teachers in this district said I don't feel safe at school.
Speaker 1: There's not enough staff in the building right now to
Speaker 1: even teach half my kids. A third of my kids
Speaker 1: are out. This isn't working. So yeah, so we voted
Speaker 1: that we're going to stay home and work remotely and
Speaker 1: then we got locked out. Yeah, which again like and
Speaker 1: I want to almost refer gets on this for a second,
Speaker 1: because like even a lot of people who are sympathetic
Speaker 1: to to to the teacher's unions on Twitter, you see
Speaker 1: this a lot, they'll they'll be like the CTU went
Speaker 1: on a strike, and it's like, no, they didn't like
Speaker 1: teachers and teachers are not on strike. The teachers are
Speaker 1: attempting to work from home and school district will not
Speaker 1: let them. Yeah, it's it's every morning. I get up
Speaker 1: at six thirty, I make my coffee and I sit
Speaker 1: down and I try to log in, and I know
Speaker 1: I won't be able to, but I do it anyway. Um. Thankfully,
Speaker 1: I had thought to download as much of my materials
Speaker 1: as I could prior to this, only my personal device,
Speaker 1: so I am still able to create lessons. Lands been
Speaker 1: making some very cool social study slides. I'm I'm so
Speaker 1: sure that my students are gonna love lots of cool
Speaker 1: assignments for them to do. To um. But yeah, like
Speaker 1: this is a lockout and LORI keeps starting this word
Speaker 1: like illegal work stoppage around. It's not a work stoppage.
Speaker 1: We are actively working. She has legally it is in
Speaker 1: our contract that she can't lock us out and she
Speaker 1: did so. Yeah. So yeah, everyone's doing each other and
Speaker 1: saying illegal. But I know which side is right. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know. I I am not an enormal perspector of
Speaker 1: the law, but like this is this is both is
Speaker 1: one of the rare occasions where the thing that is
Speaker 1: happening is both illegal and also just wrong. The reporting
Speaker 1: on this just has not gotten the actual fundamental thing
Speaker 1: which is happening here, which is a lockout, and it's
Speaker 1: enormously frustrating a lot of ways because you know, and
Speaker 1: I'd say this, okay, so the like local media reporting
Speaker 1: has been a lot better, but any like any national
Speaker 1: coverage has just I've seen it's just been like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's gonna be it. For part one of this interview,
Speaker 1: come back tomorrow for part two, when we will talk
Speaker 1: more about what's actually going on inside the schools and
Speaker 1: you know, generally do the media's job for them, because
Speaker 1: lord knows, they're not actually getting it right. You can
Speaker 1: find us that Happened here pod on Twitter and Instagram
Speaker 1: as usual, or you cannot find us. In fact, I
Speaker 1: encourage you not to find us, because good Lord, the
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Speaker 1: Welcome to It Could Happen Here a podcast about things
Speaker 1: going badly and falling apart. And today we are back
Speaker 1: with part two for interview with lou See about how
Speaker 1: the Chicago Public school system is falling apart under the
Speaker 1: relentless assault of cruelty and malice and incompetence by the
Speaker 1: Chicago Public Schools and by the Mayor, LORDE. Lightfoot. Enjoy
Speaker 1: There's everything I want to talk about a bit, which
Speaker 1: is when you've been back, when you've been sort of
Speaker 1: teaching in in these really like sort of like what
Speaker 1: what does it actually like to teach in these customs?
Speaker 1: And like, you know, how how safe actually is it? So?
Speaker 1: I mean I've been in a lot of different environments.
Speaker 1: When I was teaching middle schoolers, I did not feel
Speaker 1: super COVID safe. Um they are. I don't know if
Speaker 1: people know this about middle school age kids. They love
Speaker 1: to touch each other, especially boys. They love to like wrestle.
Speaker 1: There was putting each other in headlocks. I am constantly
Speaker 1: having to just be like six feet six ft or
Speaker 1: three ft or whatever. CDC has said. We are now. Um,
Speaker 1: they don't put their masks on. They put their masks
Speaker 1: in their mouths all the time, like in their mouths. Um.
Speaker 1: Oh no, there's they're constantly finding like weird little excuses
Speaker 1: to have their mask off. Like they'll just sit there
Speaker 1: with like like they're allowed to have water bottles because
Speaker 1: they can't use the water huntins. They'll just sit there
Speaker 1: with like a straw in their mouth for like extended
Speaker 1: amounts of time. And I'm like, I need you to
Speaker 1: put your mask up, take quicksips and put your mask up.
Speaker 1: And they're like I'm drinking, like I'm going to be
Speaker 1: drinking at the end of this day, but like, I know,
Speaker 1: take a quick sip, put your mask back up. It's
Speaker 1: really really important for your safety. Um. And then I
Speaker 1: have other kids who are absolutely straight up like terrified
Speaker 1: of this because like they've lost parents, theyve lost grandparents. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's really scary. UM. At the high school level,
Speaker 1: it's been a little better. High school kids are a
Speaker 1: little more rational. UM, but I still have a few
Speaker 1: who are just like their masks are down around their
Speaker 1: chins all the time, we're under their nose and I'm
Speaker 1: I'll like several times of class fear, Like, okay, time
Speaker 1: for everybody to do a mask check. Make sure your
Speaker 1: mask is covering your nose, your mouth, your chin. Um,
Speaker 1: I'll remind them like I have a spouse at home
Speaker 1: who has an underlying condition and like, please don't have
Speaker 1: me bring home a deadly disease to him. That would
Speaker 1: really not be great. Um, most of them are pretty good,
Speaker 1: but still they're getting sick. Like I think we had
Speaker 1: like forty kids out of my building one Monday, and
Speaker 1: like twenty eight staff members or something like that. We're
Speaker 1: out and we had one sub which is the other
Speaker 1: That's the other issue is this isn't really a question of, um,
Speaker 1: if we should go remote. It's a question of when
Speaker 1: will we be forced to go remote. And we can
Speaker 1: either do that now before everybody has gotten sick and
Speaker 1: wait for this to subside and get some better mitigation
Speaker 1: strategies in place, or we can do it after everybody
Speaker 1: is sick, and then we're going to be scrambling to
Speaker 1: figure it out and also be sick at the same time.
Speaker 1: I don't really see how that makes any sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the part of this, And I've just like I
Speaker 1: just like I don't get it, Like I just like fundamentally,
Speaker 1: there's there's like a bench break where it's like I
Speaker 1: don't understand why like Lightfoot and CPS are so insistance
Speaker 1: about not going remote, Like I get that, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard on kids, but it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: you know, it is the years two Like no matter
Speaker 1: what you do, it's it's hard on the kids, and
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, I also I wonder how much of
Speaker 1: it is the remote learning that's hard on them, and
Speaker 1: how much of it is just the um everything around
Speaker 1: them is crashing and following and burning around their ears
Speaker 1: because um, the messaging that they've been getting is that
Speaker 1: they don't matter, They're not important, their safety isn't important,
Speaker 1: their families aren't important, and um, some of them like
Speaker 1: want to be remote. A lot of them, a lot
Speaker 1: of their parents want them to be remote. They're like,
Speaker 1: you know, it's not as good, but at least I
Speaker 1: feel safe. Some of them even thrived in remote like
Speaker 1: actually did pretty well. And I really wish that it
Speaker 1: was just an option for those students who actually did
Speaker 1: well with it, that they could just like if we
Speaker 1: even ended up with like a third of our students
Speaker 1: choosing it, it would mitigate this so much because that's
Speaker 1: a third of the people. Not they're to spread around.
Speaker 1: Um So how how big? How big your class sizes are? Um?
Speaker 1: Right now the building I'm in now, I have like
Speaker 1: thirty in some my It was kind of similar at
Speaker 1: the last building, Like they're in that range. I have
Speaker 1: like always have like one or two that are like
Speaker 1: the twenty or below that are usually um special education
Speaker 1: like inclusion classes where I have co teacher. Um. But yeah,
Speaker 1: it's you know, some of them are pretty crowded, and
Speaker 1: it really varies by school. Like there's definitely schools that
Speaker 1: have over thirty kids in a room, um and don't
Speaker 1: have the staff because it's just that's the other thing
Speaker 1: is they keep talking about. You know, I keep seeing
Speaker 1: people be like fire all the teachers, and I'm like,
Speaker 1: good luck, Like, yes, is chronically understaffed. What are you
Speaker 1: going to do? Yeah? I think again, like this job
Speaker 1: is really hard, Like it's being a teacher. Yeah, it's hard.
Speaker 1: It's exhausting, and it's very very rewarding. Like when it's good,
Speaker 1: it's great. When it's bad it is miserable. Um. So yeah,
Speaker 1: and like what it looks like and I mean that's
Speaker 1: you know, it depends, it really depends on what school
Speaker 1: you're in. Um I think everybody can agree that it
Speaker 1: is difficult right now. Um So we we have like
Speaker 1: air purifiers going and masks on, and I cannot understand
Speaker 1: what my kids are saying a lot of the time,
Speaker 1: like I do not know, and they speak so quietly
Speaker 1: like I need you to shout it, say it like
Speaker 1: you mean whatever it is. So you know, that's been
Speaker 1: challenging and frustrating and exhausting. But um the worst thing
Speaker 1: ever is finding out that one of my students is sick.
Speaker 1: Like I hate when they're I hate it when they hurt.
Speaker 1: Like whenever that one of them is hurting, I feel bad.
Speaker 1: And knowing that their home sick is it's it's really
Speaker 1: upsetting and just it's you know, it's distressing for teachers
Speaker 1: to know that their kids are struggling in a way
Speaker 1: like that. Um So that's you know, we want them
Speaker 1: to be safe, you know, like these kids, it's like
Speaker 1: and this is this is true of the staff too.
Speaker 1: When you're when you're getting sick, it's like, yeah, like
Speaker 1: some of these people will be okay, but enormous numbers
Speaker 1: of people are like so, man, these people are gonna die.
Speaker 1: So these people, a lot of these people are going
Speaker 1: to get disabled. Um yeah, I mean the long term
Speaker 1: long terfects been really bad. And you know, one off,
Speaker 1: if people remember we we did an episode with when
Speaker 1: Our Friends use a nurse and like, yeah, like he
Speaker 1: he had long COVID. His long COVID was like he
Speaker 1: he couldn't do more than like like getting out of
Speaker 1: bed or like like walking across the room, which is
Speaker 1: to be battle day. Because if there there's you know,
Speaker 1: there there's an enormous range of sort of like of
Speaker 1: of long COVID side effects and yeah, it's like it's
Speaker 1: it's it's like CPS is just childe of schools. It's
Speaker 1: just like they're getting people killed. Yeah, it's and it's
Speaker 1: you know, that's like the question like they keep talking
Speaker 1: about percentages and I'm like, these are human beings. Every
Speaker 1: one of the numbers is a human. So when you
Speaker 1: say like only you know, point whatever percent are going
Speaker 1: to be long term affected, like, Okay, those are people.
Speaker 1: Can we stop like dehumanizing them with these las like
Speaker 1: data points and um as for like the issue with
Speaker 1: like how like kids are less affected by or whatever
Speaker 1: like the fact is like the more we allow this
Speaker 1: to spread around, the more variants we're going to see.
Speaker 1: And we don't know that the next variant isn't going
Speaker 1: to be the one that is really significantly harmful to children.
Speaker 1: And we are basically turning our schools into these peatree
Speaker 1: dishes where this thing can mutate and become stronger. And
Speaker 1: now we have vaccinated people who are in that mix,
Speaker 1: and it's becoming resistant to the vaccine. So you know,
Speaker 1: I'm a social stade teacher, not a science teacher, but
Speaker 1: this seems like a bad move to me. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's I don't know, it's it's just sort of heartbreaking
Speaker 1: a lot of ways. I mean, it's just like they've
Speaker 1: just decided that, you know. And again like I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know why Lightfoot's doing this. Like maybe it's
Speaker 1: just like she wants to share up her base thing
Speaker 1: because she's trying to build a base among like the
Speaker 1: just like rich, weirddoor ciders or something. But like it's
Speaker 1: she's a small business person. That's always when people are
Speaker 1: the small business owners who don't want to close schools
Speaker 1: because then you know, their workers won't come in. And
Speaker 1: you know, I want to feel sorry for them, but
Speaker 1: I know, I don't know, Like I was like fuck you,
Speaker 1: because there's also a lot of small business owners who
Speaker 1: have been very supportive of us. We had uh there's
Speaker 1: like a taco place offering free burritos to us, Like
Speaker 1: I really appreciate that. Like there's a community who understand that,
Speaker 1: like the lives of our children are so much more
Speaker 1: important than you missing two weeks of profit, Like you
Speaker 1: will figure that out. And if you want to bail
Speaker 1: out businesses, um, we can figure that out. But right now.
Speaker 1: And also, like is is saying like we have we
Speaker 1: aren't we refused to do anything that might be inconvenient
Speaker 1: for business owners, Like what is that? Yeah, and it's
Speaker 1: like it's like yeah, so you know. And also yeah,
Speaker 1: but like business owners did get bailed out, like they
Speaker 1: got they got they got zero present loans. Most of
Speaker 1: those loans got written off. And meanwhile, yeah, it's like, well, okay,
Speaker 1: what did life to do with the COVID money? She
Speaker 1: she gave it to the cops. And oh, hey, guess
Speaker 1: guess who's also just a rapperants better of COVID. Oh
Speaker 1: yeah it's the cops. Yeah, resisted vaccines, the most the cops.
Speaker 1: I mean actually there there there there is one funny
Speaker 1: thing which I'm actually very excited about, which is that
Speaker 1: the cops are doing they're having their first so they
Speaker 1: have a new class graduating. But for the police academies,
Speaker 1: which is really bad, and there's a whole well, one
Speaker 1: of one of the like Lightfoot's things was that there
Speaker 1: there was a huge campaign against building more police academies
Speaker 1: because you know, everyone hates child police apartment. They're awful.
Speaker 1: And if you have a hundred billion dollars for a
Speaker 1: new police academy, why or a hundred million or whatever
Speaker 1: it was, why can't you put some better ventilation in
Speaker 1: the schools? Yeah, well it's gonna yeah, because because because
Speaker 1: like the CPD are like basically feudal lords. They have nights,
Speaker 1: they go out, they can shoot you, like they rob you.
Speaker 1: They just like any any any large number of like
Speaker 1: black kids on the streets, Like if you just have
Speaker 1: like fifteen kids walking around, like eight quad cars will
Speaker 1: show up. And you know that there was Lightfoot was
Speaker 1: like not her like one of her campaignings big of anything.
Speaker 1: It's like no, no no, we're gonna make sure we build
Speaker 1: these academies. And but so they're they're having their first
Speaker 1: like rounded that they've been having trouble recruiting because good. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and and they're they're about to have their first police
Speaker 1: Academy exam and it's gonna be in person, and I
Speaker 1: am this is the only one are the few is
Speaker 1: this jaire Bosonaro where it's like I am rooting for
Speaker 1: the virus here, like please God save us from these cops.
Speaker 1: But yeah, it's it's but they're just bring at home
Speaker 1: and spread it around. Yeah, yeah, that's a sad thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's just it's grotesque. And yeah, it's been this
Speaker 1: thing where I'm like watching, like the school system is
Speaker 1: just throwing their hands up and saying, we don't care.
Speaker 1: We're done. The health system, the health care system is
Speaker 1: like crashing and burning all around us. Nurses are quitting,
Speaker 1: hospitals are like we don't have room for more patients,
Speaker 1: Like did you have a cancer treatment schedules? Sorry? Did
Speaker 1: you have a surgery scheduled? Sorry? I just saw somebody
Speaker 1: on Twitter saying she um has a brain tumor and
Speaker 1: she's supposed to have a surgery for it and she
Speaker 1: can't now because of COVID. Because they have no beds.
Speaker 1: There aren't any, And you're telling me that the right
Speaker 1: move right now is to keep the schools open, which
Speaker 1: has always been in every every pandemic that we've ever had.
Speaker 1: Schools and hospitals and prisons are like the place where
Speaker 1: the whatever diseases spreads. And I know we've been claiming
Speaker 1: that like there's not been spread in schools, but we've
Speaker 1: now seen the data that there, in fact is a
Speaker 1: huge amount. Which I've been like screaming about this since
Speaker 1: we started that their contact racing models are they're absurd.
Speaker 1: There are like kaka esk Like basically, um so, we
Speaker 1: start from the assumption that everybody is six ft apart
Speaker 1: and wearing their mask at all times, which it's not.
Speaker 1: It's not even it's not even physically possible in a
Speaker 1: lot of classrooms for that to be happening. And then too,
Speaker 1: we start with the assumption that those things work, and
Speaker 1: so you'll get a call from a contact tracer that's like, hey,
Speaker 1: um on, you know, like last Tuesday, Tuesday of last week,
Speaker 1: were you within six ft of any of your eighth
Speaker 1: graders for more than fifteen minutes? Funck? If I know
Speaker 1: Tuesday of last week was I near an eighth grader
Speaker 1: for fifteen minutes. I don't know. I have no idea
Speaker 1: even if, like even if I did know, what difference
Speaker 1: does it make. It is an aerosolized virus. It is
Speaker 1: in the air, and the more you sit in classrooms,
Speaker 1: the more it accumulates. Like we have seen like studies
Speaker 1: about um this, We've seen studies about how CEO two
Speaker 1: accumulates in the air when there's crowds. We know that
Speaker 1: stuff accumulates like that in classrooms, very very quickly. And
Speaker 1: you're gonna tell me that as long as I wasn't
Speaker 1: within fifteen or within six feet for more than fifteen
Speaker 1: continuous minutes, not even like um, not even fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: like added up throughout the day, just fifteen minutes continuously,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to get a virus. Are you shipping me?
Speaker 1: Like that makes no sense? And so then if and
Speaker 1: if and if you're answer to those questions are no,
Speaker 1: because whatever you were following the rules, then they're like, Okay,
Speaker 1: you got COVID somewhere else, it wasn't at school. Yeah,
Speaker 1: no it doesn't. Yeah, it's nonsense. It's like I go
Speaker 1: to work and I go home. I don't do anything else,
Speaker 1: so I don't know where else is coming from, like yeah,
Speaker 1: like and I also just want to do a brief
Speaker 1: digression about like okay, so like like I like I
Speaker 1: went to like a like a pretty good like like
Speaker 1: a pretty well like a very well funded like a
Speaker 1: Charicago area school. It's like, okay, those places, those places
Speaker 1: ventilation sucks. Like again, like again, I went to a
Speaker 1: very well funded school. Like we had a we had
Speaker 1: drowned dead rats falling out of the ceiling like it was.
Speaker 1: It was incredibly my my, my great high school memories
Speaker 1: with my principle just like running full tilt pushing a
Speaker 1: trash can because dead drop. See my god, my school
Speaker 1: was wild. We had how bad it was like a
Speaker 1: kind of a chemistry teacher let a kid set off
Speaker 1: a smoke bomb like that they'd made like in a classroom,
Speaker 1: but it didn't work, so it just like actually blew up.
Speaker 1: It was a time. But like like this croc based learning, Okay,
Speaker 1: you got to light the school on fire. But like
Speaker 1: like this is a this is like yeah, like these
Speaker 1: schools are not like they're not yea. I worked in
Speaker 1: at the beginning of the year was a hundred years old.
Speaker 1: It was built in nineteen twenty and there was always
Speaker 1: this like sewage smell around the bathroom because the pipes
Speaker 1: were messed up. It was weird like and you couldn't
Speaker 1: fix it. I think it was I was the second
Speaker 1: or third time by building lived on fire. Like we
Speaker 1: there was a there was a whole thing in the
Speaker 1: building that was made of asbestos and they just had
Speaker 1: left it because it was like, oh, isn't exposed. Yeah,
Speaker 1: still have over Like I get like I went to
Speaker 1: like a good, well funded one of these schools, Like
Speaker 1: it's I think there's there's like there's there's these two
Speaker 1: there's two things. I think it is. Interestingly, there's when
Speaker 1: you like talk to like the people who want the
Speaker 1: schools to open back up, right, they'll they're also talking
Speaker 1: about like oh no, it's fine. Everyone wears masks, everyone's vaccinated,
Speaker 1: everyone succeeds. Like no, no, they're not like this. This
Speaker 1: is how it works in this like imaginary play world
Speaker 1: you've created. Have you ever met a child? Like have
Speaker 1: you met your own children? Like oh and that's the
Speaker 1: best is like, well, I've been having my kids wear
Speaker 1: a mask like you have your full of ship. Okay,
Speaker 1: because I hold that kid to put their masks on
Speaker 1: like fifteen times yesterday and I love them beautiful face.
Speaker 1: I hope they get to show it off someday, but
Speaker 1: right now, cooped up, please, I'm begging you. And I'm like,
Speaker 1: I'm not like that teacher who's really authoritarian, Like I've
Speaker 1: never been good at like writing kids up and getting
Speaker 1: on them for stuff because it's just like, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I hate doing that. I hate being that person. So
Speaker 1: it's been like, really, it's like a struggle. It's like
Speaker 1: am I going to be the person who nags them
Speaker 1: every five seconds? Or am I gonna be um the
Speaker 1: teacher that they like and want to learn from? Like
Speaker 1: you know, this isn't sustainable. So but you're asking like
Speaker 1: the attitudes of people who want to open schools back up,
Speaker 1: and I it's it's hard because I have talked to
Speaker 1: parents who are worried, but they are also very upset
Speaker 1: because they see that their kids are struggling. And I
Speaker 1: really do feel for them on that, like I really
Speaker 1: really do. It is hard to see a kid struggle,
Speaker 1: but it is harder, I think to see a kid sick.
Speaker 1: That is really hard, and it's just this, like there
Speaker 1: are ways that we can overcome the difficulties of remote learning,
Speaker 1: Like we we can find ways to give them the
Speaker 1: emotional support, Um, we can find better socializing outlets. But
Speaker 1: I don't know how we fix like you've become very
Speaker 1: ill and your body isn't going to recover in the
Speaker 1: way that you thought it would, Like, I don't I
Speaker 1: can't fix that. So that's something I've heard from other
Speaker 1: teachers that like the preparagromout learning stuff like is harder
Speaker 1: and takes more work than Yeah, it does. It's it's
Speaker 1: really rough. I don't like doing it. I want to
Speaker 1: be in the classroom, but yeah, and I just I
Speaker 1: just want to like once again, yell at all of
Speaker 1: the people who are like the teachers are lazy and
Speaker 1: it's like no, people like they're like, yeah, like you're
Speaker 1: you are advocating to do more work because that's that's
Speaker 1: the thing that will keep the kids safe, and it's yeah.
Speaker 1: I think a lot of people don't understand like the
Speaker 1: behind the scenes how the sausage gets made of a classroom.
Speaker 1: But I think a lot of people have this idea
Speaker 1: that like we are given curriculum and plans and materials
Speaker 1: pre made, and sometimes that's true. It depends on your subject.
Speaker 1: Mine is social size is not a subject where that
Speaker 1: happens very much, which is part of why I like
Speaker 1: it because I like to be creative. Um. So like
Speaker 1: my week looks like, UM, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: hours after school where I am sitting down, I'm looking
Speaker 1: at the standards that I need to teach, the topics
Speaker 1: that I need to teach, and I'm researching it and
Speaker 1: learning it and finding a way to teach that to
Speaker 1: kids who don't have the same like baseline knowledge that
Speaker 1: I have. UM. And then I'm creating like an activity
Speaker 1: for them. I'm creating, um, you're I'm finding like material
Speaker 1: sources and like videos and stuff that they can watch
Speaker 1: that are going to help them, or things to read.
Speaker 1: I'm modifying those things for the kids who have um,
Speaker 1: you know, learning differences. I'm translating some of those things
Speaker 1: in the Spanish for kids who don't really read very
Speaker 1: well in English yet. So, like that's a ton of
Speaker 1: work on its own. And then when we switch to remote,
Speaker 1: we have to figure out how to do all of
Speaker 1: that on Google Classroom, where now it has to all
Speaker 1: be typed like or you know, like how do I figure, like,
Speaker 1: how do I do a group project online? How do
Speaker 1: I let them do something creative that isn't just sitting
Speaker 1: here answering questions on a worksheet. That's hard and we've
Speaker 1: been really good at it, and I've found all kinds
Speaker 1: of really cool tools to do that with. But it's
Speaker 1: so much work. And it's work that I'm willing to
Speaker 1: do because I care about my job. I enjoy my work.
Speaker 1: I love my students, but um, you know, and I
Speaker 1: want them to be safe. But like, you know, it
Speaker 1: is a ton of work. I'm not just sitting here
Speaker 1: eating bond bonds all day or drinking cocktails. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: I think there's there's like a larger sort of like
Speaker 1: like Americans have this like the sexist sort of like
Speaker 1: hatred of like in disrespect to people who do both
Speaker 1: care work and a lot of creative work both. And
Speaker 1: then simultaneously there's this sort of like you know, the
Speaker 1: the there's there's there's a resentment to people who get
Speaker 1: to actually do something that helps people. And you know,
Speaker 1: I think right now we're seeing just the most toxic
Speaker 1: fusion of that, which is that like, yeah, I know,
Speaker 1: like these like you know and instead of like you know,
Speaker 1: recognizing the enormous amount of work that that's going into
Speaker 1: all like that's going into into teaching, like the amount
Speaker 1: of sort of like the care and love that's going
Speaker 1: into the creativity it's going into it. And just like
Speaker 1: the people people's willing to, like you're willing list to
Speaker 1: make like enormous sacrifices to try to keep these kids safe,
Speaker 1: they're just like no, Like the teachers are lazy, they
Speaker 1: don't want to work, they're going on strike, like and
Speaker 1: it's you know, and and and it's like they're doing
Speaker 1: this and it's like yeah, like you you're like they're
Speaker 1: killing their own kids. It's just like it's it's this
Speaker 1: weird fusion of like we we I've had. The spaces
Speaker 1: is like a combination of like feminized care labor, emotional labor,
Speaker 1: and um that's sort of like like intelligence, yeah, like professional, um,
Speaker 1: white collar intellectual kind of thing. And then also we're
Speaker 1: teaching a um more introductory level of our subjects, so
Speaker 1: we're seen as like discount intellectuals who are also women
Speaker 1: who do care work. So it's it's very frustrating, and
Speaker 1: I don't think a lot of people understand the amount
Speaker 1: of UM skill and expertise it takes to be a
Speaker 1: teacher and be effective at it. Like, it's not just
Speaker 1: I need to know social studies to the level that
Speaker 1: a twelfth grader would know it. It's I need to
Speaker 1: know social studies beyond that level and know how to
Speaker 1: communicate it to a high school student. And also I
Speaker 1: need to know a lot of stuff about like child development.
Speaker 1: It's it's really it's something and um, I you know,
Speaker 1: I find that to be fun and challenging, but I
Speaker 1: wish it was respected and you know, and then you're
Speaker 1: talking about like people are sacrificing their own kids. I
Speaker 1: want to point out a lot like I think there's
Speaker 1: a racial component to this. UM. The people who are
Speaker 1: in wealthier schools and who are mostly white know that
Speaker 1: their kids are gonna be fine, Like they are in
Speaker 1: schools that actually do have the resources to distance, that
Speaker 1: have air filters, that have good ventilation. Um, they're vaccinated,
Speaker 1: their kids are probably going to be fine. The kids
Speaker 1: that aren't going to be fine are lowing UM students
Speaker 1: of color. And it has always been this way. It's
Speaker 1: always been this way with schools, like when schools were desegregated,
Speaker 1: we started with private school voutuers, and we started with
Speaker 1: all of these like uh, state testing requirements and withholding
Speaker 1: funding from schools that don't meet those you know, testing
Speaker 1: nerds and all of these like um, this extra oversight
Speaker 1: owned teachers like that stuff all comes back to white
Speaker 1: people don't want to have to worry about black people's kids.
Speaker 1: That's it. And you know they will move their kids
Speaker 1: out to the north side or the suburbs or whatever.
Speaker 1: Notice that all of those suburbs schools have flipped. Noticed
Speaker 1: that Lory Lightfoot's kids are in a charter school that
Speaker 1: is not remote well and more than Lightfoot Lightfoot, Lightfoot
Speaker 1: won't like Lightfoot will not put herself in a room
Speaker 1: with the with the same number of people like to
Speaker 1: go to every day. She won't. She was telling people
Speaker 1: at the press conferences they had to wear their masks,
Speaker 1: and then she wasn't wearing hers, which was very charnge
Speaker 1: to me. It's like that's what they like when when
Speaker 1: you when you get to the politician level, they know
Speaker 1: it's dangerous, Like they know it. They they you can
Speaker 1: tell about what they do right now, Yeah, like they
Speaker 1: won't do it, but like no, no, they're they're perfectly
Speaker 1: willing to just send to send you off the die,
Speaker 1: to send all these kids off to die, and it's just, yeah,
Speaker 1: sometimes I feel I get kind of dooomer, and I
Speaker 1: wonder if, like, if that's not the plan, Like is
Speaker 1: it that? I mean, I don't really believe that. I
Speaker 1: think what it really is is this just like malicious neglect.
Speaker 1: Like if you're somebody who's a policymaker and someone comes
Speaker 1: to you and it's like, I need you to care
Speaker 1: about this population here that doesn't have a lot of
Speaker 1: money and needs a lot of things, and you, the policymaker,
Speaker 1: are going to be like, oh, that sounds like so
Speaker 1: much work, And then somebody else is going to come
Speaker 1: to you and be like I need these things over here,
Speaker 1: and I do have a lot of money, and I
Speaker 1: do have a lot of influence, and I'm gonna make
Speaker 1: your life difficult if you don't do what I want.
Speaker 1: They're gonna do with that other side once. And what
Speaker 1: the other side once right now is for kids to
Speaker 1: get back into school so they can have free daycares,
Speaker 1: parents can go to work, and that's and that's it.
Speaker 1: And teachers are standing here being like I didn't get
Speaker 1: a master's degree and do you know countless hours of
Speaker 1: professional development to be a babysitter, you know, and no,
Speaker 1: not to knock babysitters. I was in nanny for a
Speaker 1: long time. That is hard work. But um, I didn't
Speaker 1: get a master's degree to be a babysitter. I got
Speaker 1: a master's degree to be a teacher. And I'm in
Speaker 1: an environment right now where I can't really teach effectively
Speaker 1: and all I'm doing is babysitting. They want to wear
Speaker 1: house kids. That is what we're doing with the schools.
Speaker 1: That's why they want them open. And it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's it's hard not to feel like they just started
Speaker 1: doing it because they hate us, even though I know
Speaker 1: it's not. It's just it does feel that way. I
Speaker 1: will like, I will say that, like you're so if
Speaker 1: you become elected as the mayor of Chicago, like your
Speaker 1: job is to break the teachers union, Like that's that's like,
Speaker 1: that's that's that's that's like the role you're auditioning for.
Speaker 1: And they have been they have been trying to do
Speaker 1: this for literally my entire lifetime. They've been trying to
Speaker 1: do this, like since before I was born, Like that's
Speaker 1: and honestly, like, wouldn't surprise me if this was another
Speaker 1: part of this was just them once again trying to
Speaker 1: break teachers union. Oh absolutely, like and if and not
Speaker 1: even just that, like yeah, you know, like not just
Speaker 1: on the sort of political level, like on the incredible
Speaker 1: cynical level of we'll just kill them. Well, it's it's
Speaker 1: a labor thing. Like, it's not just a Chicago teachers
Speaker 1: union or even a teachers union thing. It is a
Speaker 1: labor movement across the board thing that. Um, the largest,
Speaker 1: I think the largest unionized workforce in the country is teachers,
Speaker 1: and we on top of that are a union of
Speaker 1: workers who have the power to absolutely bring our economy
Speaker 1: to a grinding hole if we want to. We could
Speaker 1: all go on straight right now and nobody's going to
Speaker 1: do ship until we go back to work. Um, they
Speaker 1: could if they, you know, they could try to replace
Speaker 1: us with like people who are basically like hall monitors
Speaker 1: and give kids like canned curriculums. But they wouldn't really
Speaker 1: be learning very well, and parents wouldn't be happy with it,
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't be entering the workforce with the skills
Speaker 1: they need to make money for the economy to you know,
Speaker 1: make money for the almighty Tao. So um. The it
Speaker 1: has been a project for decades in this country to
Speaker 1: try to break teachers unions because teacher unions occupy this
Speaker 1: space where they allow other unions to happen. Um. We have,
Speaker 1: you know, enough influence on politicians that they can't just
Speaker 1: disband the labor board and make unions illegal, which they
Speaker 1: would absolutely fucking love to And if they could just
Speaker 1: get rid of these damn teachers unions, maybe they could
Speaker 1: do it. Um. So you know, and that's what you
Speaker 1: see with the education reform movement, where you have all
Speaker 1: these people advocating for bouchers and charter schools, and it's
Speaker 1: you know, they want to break labor. And I see
Speaker 1: a lot of I mean, now I'm gonna I'm gonna
Speaker 1: scold some of my comrades, but I see a lot
Speaker 1: of leftists who, um are really skeptical of teachers and
Speaker 1: don't want to support the teachers union. And I get it,
Speaker 1: Like there are a lot of teachers who really suck.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of teachers who are not radical,
Speaker 1: like most teachers are not radical. A lot of them
Speaker 1: are pretty conservative, but at the same time. If you
Speaker 1: were to abolish schools immediately right now and break up
Speaker 1: the teachers unions and all that, you're gonna get end
Speaker 1: up with. Rich people go to school, poor people don't.
Speaker 1: If your poor your kid goes to work, probably won't
Speaker 1: be in a coal mine, but you know they'll probably
Speaker 1: be like soldering my computer chips or coding or something
Speaker 1: for like pennies an hour. And I don't want that world.
Speaker 1: And if you actually care about labor, then you need
Speaker 1: to support teachers unions because um, the public schools are
Speaker 1: central to all these communities that we want to be reaching,
Speaker 1: and the unions are the only thing making sure that
Speaker 1: they stay public. Yeah. Yeah, that's like I almost like
Speaker 1: again like to to to to anarchist comrades who are
Speaker 1: anti school, it's like, yeah, like I hate school, I'm
Speaker 1: for it, d D schooling is great, but we need
Speaker 1: to do other things first. Yeah, you have to And
Speaker 1: like again like that you need to like like support
Speaker 1: the workers, not the institution. Like it's like it's like
Speaker 1: saying I'm a vegan, so I'm going to go after
Speaker 1: McDonald's in place, just like like so like I I
Speaker 1: my high school was like all this was much like
Speaker 1: incredibly conservative, but everyone was still in the Union. That
Speaker 1: was like the one. That was the one thing that
Speaker 1: was like, well, okay, they were there, there there. There
Speaker 1: there were two counter failing forces. One was that I
Speaker 1: the Christians didn't seem to understand what liberation theology was,
Speaker 1: so occasionally they'd accidentally hire leftist because they were like, oh,
Speaker 1: you're a Christian, You're fine, you're from America. We're not
Speaker 1: gonna question you further. The second thing was that even
Speaker 1: everyone everyone was in the Union, and that was like
Speaker 1: that was that was literally the only those are the
Speaker 1: only two left wing Like vague, I've gotten into so
Speaker 1: many teaching spaces by talking about how I like critical
Speaker 1: pedagogy and idn't understand very was a conference or being like, oh,
Speaker 1: I'm really really really into Chicago history. I especially love
Speaker 1: the history of like labor in Chicago because it's it's
Speaker 1: huge people here here about it and they don't get
Speaker 1: that like I'm an anarchist, you know, and and a
Speaker 1: lot of the like um sort of like education reform language.
Speaker 1: I think it's very funny. It is just lifted from
Speaker 1: radical like sociologists and anthropologists and educators who are trying
Speaker 1: to find ways to um dismantle like authoritarian structures in schools,
Speaker 1: and so they'll come up with these like, um, you know,
Speaker 1: like restorative practices and all this stuff, and then they
Speaker 1: kind of get they make their way up to the
Speaker 1: Ivory Tower and then get repackaged in this It's it's like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, it's like a machine or something that
Speaker 1: like sucks up radical ideas, brings them up to the academy,
Speaker 1: repackages them to make them nice for politicians, and then
Speaker 1: spits them back out. And it is exhausting and I
Speaker 1: hate it. It makes me so mad. I'll never forgive
Speaker 1: people for what they did to the term restorative justice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: do you have anything else that you want to make
Speaker 1: sure that people like understand about what's happening in the
Speaker 1: schools right now? Um, I guess just the biggest thing
Speaker 1: is I want people to understand that, like, this is
Speaker 1: a question of when and under what conditions are we
Speaker 1: going to be forced into a remote learning situation. This
Speaker 1: isn't like we want remote learning because we like it
Speaker 1: because it's fun. It's because it's going to happen if
Speaker 1: you like it or not. The schools are going to
Speaker 1: close if you like it or not, because the unless
Speaker 1: you're okay with just like people are going to get
Speaker 1: sick and die and or going to work sick, which
Speaker 1: I think most of us agree that's insane. Um it
Speaker 1: is there are you. We're going to be in a
Speaker 1: situation where we don't have enough sta have to keep
Speaker 1: buildings open. So either we can try and mitigate that
Speaker 1: now and keep that from happening, or we can just
Speaker 1: start our hands up and say, fine, let's let the
Speaker 1: schools collapse. I don't want the schools to collapse, So, um,
Speaker 1: if we could just go remote for two weeks and
Speaker 1: get some good testing in and have a vaccine requirement,
Speaker 1: And personally, I would like to advocate for remote as
Speaker 1: an option for parents who want it. I don't think
Speaker 1: that's on the table right now, but um, I think
Speaker 1: more parents out there should be demanding it. And I
Speaker 1: also would like to say to parents, you have a
Speaker 1: lot of power that you don't understand. Um. The school
Speaker 1: districts listen to the parents so much more than the teachers.
Speaker 1: One parents voice is worth like ten teacher voices. So
Speaker 1: if you see something going on in your schools that
Speaker 1: you're not comfortable with, if you have questions, contact your principles,
Speaker 1: contact the district, talk to people, talk to the other
Speaker 1: parents that you know, organize yourselves. Um, if we had,
Speaker 1: you know, strong parent organizations on our side, we would
Speaker 1: be absolutely unstoppable and we could have the school system
Speaker 1: that we want and that our kids deserve. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: I think I like the right figured this out a
Speaker 1: long time ago that you absolutely Yeah, look at what
Speaker 1: they're doing to the school board meetings with CRT. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we could have that for people who are actually good
Speaker 1: people who care, like there's no there's no reason that
Speaker 1: all of the other parents couldn't be going and saying
Speaker 1: I want my kids to learn about race, and I
Speaker 1: want them to be wearing masks, and I want everybody
Speaker 1: to be vaccinated. Yeah. So I think I think I
Speaker 1: think that's a good note to end on. We you know,
Speaker 1: we can make this better. We just have to, you know,
Speaker 1: work together. Yea. Do you have anything that you want
Speaker 1: to plug, like, do you have a way to support
Speaker 1: the teachers who Um, I think I'll send you a
Speaker 1: flyer that we have. It has some information for contacting Ottoman,
Speaker 1: getting COVID tests and a petition to sign um. If
Speaker 1: you could post that I would really appreciate that. I
Speaker 1: definitely can definitely do that. Awesome. Thank you coming. Yeah,
Speaker 1: good talking to you. Hey, Lead the listeners tag here.
Speaker 1: Last season on Lethal Lit, you might remember, I came
Speaker 1: to Hollow Falls on a mission clearing my aunt Best's
Speaker 1: name and making sure justice was finally served. But I
Speaker 1: hadn't counted on a rash of new murders tearing apart
Speaker 1: the town. My mission put myself and my friends in danger.
Speaker 1: Though it wasn't all bad, I'm going to be real
Speaker 1: Ify Tig, I like you, but now all signs point
Speaker 1: to a new serial killer in Hollow Falls. If this
Speaker 1: game is just starting, you better believe I'm gonna win.
Speaker 1: I'm tig Torres and this is Lethal Lit. Catch up
Speaker 1: on season one of the hit murder mystery podcast Lead
Speaker 1: Lit a tag Tara's Mystery out now, and then to
Speaker 1: an in for all new thrills in season two, dropping
Speaker 1: weekly starting February nine. Subscribe now to never miss an episode.
Speaker 1: Listen to Leave the Lit on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm
Speaker 1: Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're the hosts
Speaker 1: of the science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind, where
Speaker 1: every week we get to explore some of the weirdest
Speaker 1: questions in the universe, like if sci fi teleportation was possible,
Speaker 1: how would it square with the multitudes of organisms that
Speaker 1: inhabit our human bodies? Can we find evidence of emotions
Speaker 1: in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How would it
Speaker 1: interplanetary civilization function just free will exist? Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels, and
Speaker 1: the wonders of techno history. Basically, this show is the
Speaker 1: altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If anybody
Speaker 1: ever told you you ask the weirdest questions, it is
Speaker 1: time to come join us in the place where you belong.
Speaker 1: The Stuff to Blow Your Mind podcast new episodes publish
Speaker 1: every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on Saturdays. Listen
Speaker 1: to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: When P. T. Barnum's Great American Museum burned to the
Speaker 1: ground in eighteen sixty five, what rose from its ashes
Speaker 1: would change the world? Welcome to Grim and Mild presents
Speaker 1: an ongoing journey into the strange, the unusual, and the fascinating.
Speaker 1: For our inaugural season, we'll be giving you a backstage
Speaker 1: tour of the always complex and often misunderstood cultural artifact
Speaker 1: that is the American Side Show. So come along as
Speaker 1: we visit the shadowy corners of the stage and learn
Speaker 1: about the people who are at the center of it
Speaker 1: all in a place where spectacle was king. We will
Speaker 1: soon discover there's always more to the story than meets
Speaker 1: the eye. So step right up and get in line.
Speaker 1: Listen to Grim and Mile Presents now on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: Learn more over at Grim and Mild dot com Slash presents. Alright, Robert,
Speaker 1: you want to opening us up with something I don't know. Nope,
Speaker 1: you're opening. The opening is is that is what you
Speaker 1: just did? Okay, wells already opened. Welcome to take it
Speaker 1: happen Here the podcast about how things things do be
Speaker 1: crumbling sometimes, including our ability to introduce the podcast that pages.
Speaker 1: It's actually a very meta art piece about the Yeah,
Speaker 1: we started off very polished and slowly commentary on I
Speaker 1: don't know something. It's called figure out what. It's a
Speaker 1: commentary on it. It's called metamodernism. It's the post it's
Speaker 1: post postmodern. Anyway, Um, what are we talking about? Disinformation
Speaker 1: and various bullshit today. So among the many disinformation vectors online,
Speaker 1: Joe Rogan's podcast is obviously one of like the largest
Speaker 1: single single vectors. Um. Yeah, I mean I've said this before,
Speaker 1: but I'll say it again. I don't think there's a
Speaker 1: cable news station as influential as Joe Rogan, you know,
Speaker 1: and you could you could make commentary on like, oh
Speaker 1: maybe they have a larger viewership in terms of like
Speaker 1: their actual ability to influence large numbers of people. Um,
Speaker 1: there's certainly no single cable news host that comes close
Speaker 1: to Joe UM. And I would argue probably no network
Speaker 1: that does. He's extremely influential by virtue of the fact
Speaker 1: that he's um a meathead of people seem to find
Speaker 1: friendly and engaging, and he is very charismatic. He's good
Speaker 1: at what he does, he's good at talking. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: multiple times during the past three weeks, Rogan has brought
Speaker 1: on two separate quote unquote doctors who have started to
Speaker 1: pedal something called old mass formation psychosis, which is kind
Speaker 1: of a new vector in the anti vax kind of
Speaker 1: argument and like headspace, so like as for like the
Speaker 1: it could happen here a portion of the episode, This
Speaker 1: one's pretty simple. Could mass formation psychoses happen here? No way,
Speaker 1: not this time. We created it, not this time. No,
Speaker 1: not this time. It's totally made up, pure fiction. It's fiction.
Speaker 1: It's fiction. We made it up. We made this one up.
Speaker 1: It's a made up tail. It's a total fabrication. Nope,
Speaker 1: not really ever happened anywhere. I might also argue, no, nope, fictional.
Speaker 1: We've solved the podcast total this is not a thing,
Speaker 1: total fabrication, made up tail. So yeah, well, but when
Speaker 1: whenever these like cook doctors bring up mass formation psychosis,
Speaker 1: you can actually kind of watch them get close to
Speaker 1: understanding something real, but then they veer off into reactionary nonsense.
Speaker 1: Like most powerful on sense, there is an element of
Speaker 1: truth that it is uh spinning off of, you know,
Speaker 1: So let's start off with some of the more kind
Speaker 1: of deranged examples and well then eventually providing at least
Speaker 1: some background onto the whole massformation psychoa. This this idea,
Speaker 1: and then we'll kind of discuss some of the more
Speaker 1: slightly interesting aspects of this argument that Rogan seems fond
Speaker 1: of pushing right now. So, the first guy I want
Speaker 1: to talk about is Dr Peter McCole, which is not
Speaker 1: the not the guy that was trending on Twitter last
Speaker 1: week or whatever this was. This is someone else that
Speaker 1: Rogan brought on a few weeks previously who actually started
Speaker 1: talking about this first. Um So background on McCole. By
Speaker 1: most accounts, he was like a top cardiologist for many years,
Speaker 1: you know. He he shares a similar story to other
Speaker 1: doctors who have become kind of COVID conspiracy celebrities. Former
Speaker 1: friends and co workers say he was a pretty reasonable
Speaker 1: guy and a good doctor, and then COVID he realized
Speaker 1: he could be worth millions of dollars. Yeah, COVID ahead
Speaker 1: that he started to kind of go off the rails,
Speaker 1: and he he initially began developing conspiracy theories, in particular
Speaker 1: around hydroxychlor quinn um. And mccull was also in the
Speaker 1: news earlier this year due to or I guess uh,
Speaker 1: due to legal dispute with his former employer, Baylor University Health. So.
Speaker 1: According to a lawsuit for nearly six months after McCall's
Speaker 1: employment had ended, he continued to use his professional titles,
Speaker 1: such as the Vice chief of Internal Medicine at Baylor University,
Speaker 1: and mis represented himself as a Baylor employee dozens, if
Speaker 1: not hundreds of times in media interviews in which he
Speaker 1: spread disinformation about the pandemic. So the type of misinformation
Speaker 1: that he talks about, you know, pretty basic stuff of
Speaker 1: vaccines are neither safe nor effective. Um. He was a
Speaker 1: very early hydroxic quin proponent. Um. He claims that there's
Speaker 1: no asymptomatic COVID transmission at all, even if you're not vaccinated. Um.
Speaker 1: And he claims that you cannot get COVID twice once
Speaker 1: you have at once. The post infection natural immunity is
Speaker 1: one percent of protective against all future COVID disease, which,
Speaker 1: of course this thing works that way, works that way. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: everything I just said is not true. All of it
Speaker 1: can individually be disproved by the existance of Jayre Bosonaro,
Speaker 1: every single to say that, Chris, I'm looking over at
Speaker 1: my digital picture frame that is just loaded with like
Speaker 1: a dozen photos of JayR. Bolson Yaro in the hospital dying. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I recommend everyone do that. It improves every morning. As
Speaker 1: soon as I walk up to my recording studio, I
Speaker 1: see JayR. Bolson Yaro getting ship sucked out of his
Speaker 1: nose from a tube, and I just feel ready to
Speaker 1: take on the day. It beats coffee. Wow, that's strong words. Um.
Speaker 1: The other big thing and since how since I want
Speaker 1: to get into the mess, uh psychosis bullshit is that
Speaker 1: he McCall also asserts that fifty Americans have died from
Speaker 1: the vaccine shots. This is not true, um, looking at
Speaker 1: like death's possibly associated with it, It is like a
Speaker 1: maybe a thousand or two thousand, which sucks, um. And
Speaker 1: but like that's that's the highest amount because again it's
Speaker 1: not even a lot of these things are not necessarily
Speaker 1: direct directly causal um, So it's hard to figure out
Speaker 1: what is what. But if there is a number, it's
Speaker 1: around the two wish thousand range. Uh not um. And
Speaker 1: mccaull thinks that, or at least promotes that the idea
Speaker 1: that like the vaccine, is a conspiracy theory to suppress
Speaker 1: hydroxical wor quin and therapeutic treatment for COVID. And this
Speaker 1: conspiracy is organized at every level. Uh. Three different regions, corporations,
Speaker 1: Big Pharma, Hollywood, and and this is this is the
Speaker 1: mass formation psychosis, is that we've believed that both COVID
Speaker 1: is like a big problem and that the vaccine is
Speaker 1: the solution. So I'm gonna I'm gonna play a clip
Speaker 1: hopefully you guys can hear this of of of McColl
Speaker 1: talking about mass formation psychosis. Dope. We've seen mass psychosis
Speaker 1: in history, both more the horrific group suicides that have
Speaker 1: happened with religious culture. We knew a Nazi Germany where
Speaker 1: people in a sense offered their children up to eugenics
Speaker 1: programs and a progressive mass psychosis, and they themselves walk
Speaker 1: into gas chambers and my gas that they didn't kick fight,
Speaker 1: go kicking skimming this type of that's a mass psychosis.
Speaker 1: So what Desmond says is it must be four conditions
Speaker 1: met for a mass psychosis. The first is the population
Speaker 1: must be isolated. People must be isolated for a plot period.
Speaker 1: Number two, we must have things taken away from us
Speaker 1: that we previously enjoyed. Number three, there must be constant,
Speaker 1: free floating anxiety, anxiety of more viruses, more disability, more death,
Speaker 1: more anxiety. And then The last one is that Kapper
Speaker 1: number four is there must be a single solution offered
Speaker 1: by an entity and authority. The vacts scene, the only
Speaker 1: solution to the pandemic is the vaccine. We're in a
Speaker 1: mass ecosis. And what Desmond says is with the vaccine,
Speaker 1: there is no limit to the absurdity that we will see,
Speaker 1: no limit to the absurdity. So this idea of here,
Speaker 1: take a vaccine, take any vaccine. That's absurd. Vaccines are different.
Speaker 1: There must be a winner, there must be a loser,
Speaker 1: must be something. Why why would it be any vaccine.
Speaker 1: It's the same with the mask where masks, it doesn't
Speaker 1: matter what kind of mask, just put it over your face. Absurdity,
Speaker 1: the absurdity of well, I've already had COVID. The CDC
Speaker 1: says you can't get COVID again. Okay, so listeners at
Speaker 1: home should know so that you understand what this video
Speaker 1: is that the entire time he's talking, there's what appears
Speaker 1: to be the eviscerated corpse of a black woman lying
Speaker 1: underneath it. Like it's horrifying, It's like very how do
Speaker 1: you like like something? I think it's one of the
Speaker 1: dolls that medical students learned how to do autopsies on
Speaker 1: It's not a real person, but it does look like
Speaker 1: the corpse of an eviscerated woman as he's just like chatting.
Speaker 1: The face really does look like it took me. I
Speaker 1: thought it was like I couldn't forget what was going
Speaker 1: on for like, yeah, I mean, yeah, they're the cadaver
Speaker 1: dolls that they have for trading are quite good. Um,
Speaker 1: I kind of want to get one for the next
Speaker 1: time I'm in Texas and want to use an HIV lane.
Speaker 1: But that's the story for another day. So yeah, that's
Speaker 1: that's pretty dumb, especially the notion that people were hypnotized
Speaker 1: into peacefully walking into gas. I just need to stay
Speaker 1: like that's that not Not only is that like that
Speaker 1: is objectively untrue to the extent that I could provide
Speaker 1: anyone interested with thousands of pages of reading from people
Speaker 1: who survived concentration camps about how they worked and why
Speaker 1: people walked into them, and a lot of it just
Speaker 1: boils down to the fact that it was they were
Speaker 1: making a very rational choice, which was I have no options. Year,
Speaker 1: I cannot get out of this, but I can at
Speaker 1: least make sure that my children are not panicking in
Speaker 1: the last seconds before we're killed. And a lot of
Speaker 1: the people the the because a lot of the actual
Speaker 1: like grunt work of of key of loading humans into
Speaker 1: the gas chambers was done by other inmates who were
Speaker 1: also not going through psychosis. They were given a chance
Speaker 1: to survive longer by helping to operate the camps. UM.
Speaker 1: And those people you can read, some of them did survive, UM.
Speaker 1: And some of them wrote about their experiences UM, which
Speaker 1: is some of the most harrowing shit like imaginable for
Speaker 1: a human being to possibly go through. It is all
Speaker 1: tremendously well documented. And the most offensive thing I can
Speaker 1: imagine is saying that these people were somehow is saying
Speaker 1: Number one, it's incredibly offensive to say that they were
Speaker 1: going through some sort of psychosis and that's why they
Speaker 1: walked into the chambers and not This was the best
Speaker 1: option available to them, given what was going on and
Speaker 1: what like the situation they had been forced into. They
Speaker 1: did not have other options. UM. It was that or
Speaker 1: get machine gun to death. UM. And maybe you think
Speaker 1: you would choose a different option, UM. But if you're
Speaker 1: critiquing them or trying to claim that like the only
Speaker 1: reason they would do that. What they did was that
Speaker 1: they had lost their minds Um, I will I will
Speaker 1: hit you in the face with a brick. Fuck you
Speaker 1: like that. That that's my answer to that. Actually, if
Speaker 1: you are someone who is interested academically and why people
Speaker 1: did some of the things that they did at at
Speaker 1: the death camps, um, and like why how that actually
Speaker 1: functioned psychologically. It's like a short book. It's this way
Speaker 1: for the gas ladies and gentlemen. And it is a
Speaker 1: quasi fictionalized book by a guy named Taddius Borowski who
Speaker 1: was a survivor of the death camp. So it's based
Speaker 1: on his experiences at Auschwitzendakau Um and he he describes
Speaker 1: the way in which the world of the camps worked
Speaker 1: and the psychology of the camps worked. Um. And he's
Speaker 1: not and he's not a piece of ship grifter asshole.
Speaker 1: He's a guy who lived through all of this. So
Speaker 1: if you actually care about any of this, just read
Speaker 1: that everything this guy says is wrong, and if I
Speaker 1: had a chance to, I would hit him in the
Speaker 1: face with a brick. Please continue, Garrison. Yeah, it really
Speaker 1: sucks because it's not just a combination of medical misinformation
Speaker 1: but also just the most ship sociology. UM, and it
Speaker 1: creates this a really a really disgusting package of of
Speaker 1: of really bad sociology medical misinformation. Um. And like yeah,
Speaker 1: he's doing this too, like because he can make a
Speaker 1: profit off of it, So he's saying these things. So
Speaker 1: I know, UM, he mentioned a name, Desmond. Desmond's the
Speaker 1: guy who kind of coined this term. We'll we'll talk
Speaker 1: about more about him at the end, but for now,
Speaker 1: let's go on an ad break and we'll be back
Speaker 1: to talk about Dr Robert Malone, the other other guy
Speaker 1: who's been pushing this nonsense. So I probably will want
Speaker 1: to hit with a brick even more so, honestly. And
Speaker 1: we're back talking now about mass formation, psychosis and the
Speaker 1: dumb people who are well or smart people who are
Speaker 1: using they're they're evil. That tough. So yeah. So after
Speaker 1: after McColl went on Rogan's show, it got that that
Speaker 1: show got pretty popular. UM. One one big right wing
Speaker 1: kind of Trumpett media personality named Melissa Tate was permanently
Speaker 1: banned from Twitter after posting about the podcast and making
Speaker 1: the following post to her half a million followers, Global Bombshale.
Speaker 1: Dr Peter McCall on the Joe Rogan Show says Maderna
Speaker 1: made the Coode vaccine long before COVID actually hit, and
Speaker 1: that the pandemic was a premeditated and concerted scheme by
Speaker 1: government and medical entities to then force vaccinations as the solution.
Speaker 1: So that's the type of narrative that they're trying to
Speaker 1: foster because the pandemics has been so good for Biden's
Speaker 1: approval ratings. It's really working out great for everybody. Uh
Speaker 1: us U S Senator Ron Johnson also promoted the interview,
Speaker 1: saying Rogan asks excellent questions, McCall provides the answers. So yeah, um.
Speaker 1: So apparently the mass formation Psychosis Doctor Guy was enough
Speaker 1: of a hit that Rogan's team decided to very soon
Speaker 1: after bring on another line, conspiracy doctor doctor Robert Malone.
Speaker 1: So during the last week, Rogan invited Malone onto his show.
Speaker 1: Malone's of of a virologist and and a immunization doctor
Speaker 1: who claims credit for inventing the m r n A
Speaker 1: vaccine in a pair of papers from the late eighties spoilers,
Speaker 1: he did not there was the vaccine before him, and
Speaker 1: work continued after him. Yeah yeah, um yeah. In in
Speaker 1: eighty nine, he published a paper UM kind of positing
Speaker 1: maybe mr NA can be binded with with other kind
Speaker 1: of uh proteins. He did not really do any work
Speaker 1: on it besides just sing, I wonder if this could
Speaker 1: maybe happen, um, and then knowledge were people asking similar
Speaker 1: questions and publishing papers at the same time of the question. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Malone actually thought this was too hard and abandoned
Speaker 1: this project very soon and then went to work for
Speaker 1: like the military to develop other random like uh. He
Speaker 1: thought the RNA vaccines were too hard, so he went
Speaker 1: on to develop more stuff around DNA vaccines and has
Speaker 1: been working with like the military and various like big
Speaker 1: farmer companies fun vaccines for a while. More accurately, Dr
Speaker 1: Carrico and Drew Wiseman are two doctors that are widely
Speaker 1: agreed and acknowledged to have put the most development work
Speaker 1: and actual like like actually doing the science to make
Speaker 1: m M RNA vaccines a thing, um. And then of
Speaker 1: course development of them was due to you know, work
Speaker 1: of hundreds of researchers. UM. So it's it's not you know,
Speaker 1: one person does not invent something like this, it's it's
Speaker 1: a group of a lot of people. But but it
Speaker 1: makes it for an easy title for your viral video. Yes,
Speaker 1: and in fact, actually um uh logically, the That's a
Speaker 1: Journalist website reached out to Malone and for an article,
Speaker 1: and Malone replied Black stating that he did not actually
Speaker 1: literally invent the the vaccine, but instead developed a vaccine
Speaker 1: technology platform. Um. Then he presented logically copies with nine patents, um,
Speaker 1: none of which are the patents for functioning mrn A
Speaker 1: vaccines of course. Um. But but he he claims to
Speaker 1: have patented mr and A technology. I mean he did.
Speaker 1: It's technology that doesn't work and never has and never
Speaker 1: has worked, and the patents are expired. Um. Anyway, I
Speaker 1: need to pat some ship. That just sounds like a
Speaker 1: real easy way to make a good grift. Yeah. So,
Speaker 1: you know, as we've seen with my O, but because
Speaker 1: because Malone has crafted this you know, narrative that I'm
Speaker 1: the inventor of this thing. You know, look, just like
Speaker 1: we've seen with my like COVID Griffin name Doctor's episode
Speaker 1: behind the Bastards, just a little shred of like medical
Speaker 1: authority can be more often transformed with propaganda into something
Speaker 1: much greater than what it is, you know, whether that
Speaker 1: be claiming to be the inventor of the m R
Speaker 1: and A or you know, claiming to be the former
Speaker 1: Heads Scientists adviser. Neither of those have to actually be
Speaker 1: true to work, because propaganda makes it true via like repetition.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's the kind of thing where like
Speaker 1: dunking on these guys like it's important here to correct
Speaker 1: the record, it doesn't do anything. No, the fact that
Speaker 1: they and nothing that they say is true does not
Speaker 1: matter when it comes to them having an influence in
Speaker 1: the community they have. If you get on Rogan, it
Speaker 1: doesn't like like you've already done the thing that you
Speaker 1: need to do to be able to to profit from this.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter that you're lying. A few months ago,
Speaker 1: Malone went on to Steve Bannon Show to talk about
Speaker 1: how the vaccines make COVID worse worse actually, and you
Speaker 1: know this is the is the quote from Steve Bannon.
Speaker 1: You're hearing it from the individual who invented the m
Speaker 1: R and A vaccine and has dedicated his life to vaccines.
Speaker 1: He's the opposite of an anti vaxer, right, So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's that picular. So yeah, start starting around June one,
Speaker 1: Malone began to make the rounds you know, Bannon Tucker,
Speaker 1: Glenn Beck, um, and now Joe Rogan. So you know,
Speaker 1: starting in June, he had like less than five thousand
Speaker 1: Twitter followers. Uh and just before his suspension at the
Speaker 1: end of December for spreading misinformation, he had like over
Speaker 1: half million. Um. So yeah, So right after his Twitter
Speaker 1: suspension for lying about COVID and causing you know, misinformation
Speaker 1: to run to to run rampant around a health issue. Um,
Speaker 1: that's when Rogan invited him on and was right after
Speaker 1: he got suspended from Twitter. And there's been one particular
Speaker 1: clip from the interview that has really caught like the
Speaker 1: far right's attention. Um, you know, the tweet that's it's
Speaker 1: it's connected to it was captioned on Joe Rogan. Dr
Speaker 1: Robert Malone suggests we are living through a mass formation psychosis.
Speaker 1: He explains how and why this could happen and its effects.
Speaker 1: He draws analogy to the nineteen twenties and thirties Germany.
Speaker 1: They had a highly educated population and they went barking mad. Um,
Speaker 1: they did not. They made a series of logical The
Speaker 1: Nazis did not go mad. They were not crazy, They
Speaker 1: were not out of their mind. They were doing they
Speaker 1: were a large part of what they were doing was
Speaker 1: saying things that they knew were nonsense and lies in
Speaker 1: order to get elected because it riled people up. And
Speaker 1: then a large chunk of their policy was figuring out, well,
Speaker 1: if this is the ship that we've been saying, how
Speaker 1: do we how do we translate that into policy? Again,
Speaker 1: realms have been written on this by credible researchers. The
Speaker 1: people who ran the camps were not insane, although they
Speaker 1: were often deeply depressed in suicidal because it's not good
Speaker 1: to run a death camp, they were all making rational decisions.
Speaker 1: And the people who let it happen, we're letting it
Speaker 1: happen because it was dangerous and scary to interfere in
Speaker 1: any way. They were all making rational decisions. There was
Speaker 1: no insanity responsible for the Holocaust, which is worse like
Speaker 1: in the party everything. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What they're like,
Speaker 1: they're they're what they're doing is like they're they're they're
Speaker 1: they're trying to give people a way out right like that,
Speaker 1: you know, this is this is sort of like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's well, the Nazis went insane. All the people who
Speaker 1: follow them went and saying it's like, no, no, they don't.
Speaker 1: You don't get that way out like you. They chose
Speaker 1: to do this. Yeah. The the scariest and most meaningful
Speaker 1: lesson to take from the Holocaust is that you yourself
Speaker 1: could be a part of a holocaust, even if you
Speaker 1: didn't support the killing, because it's extremely easy to not
Speaker 1: get involved and stop something like that once it reaches
Speaker 1: a certain level. And it's easy for the kind of
Speaker 1: political organizations that can make things like that possible to
Speaker 1: reach a point where they can carry that sort of
Speaker 1: ship out because again, it's scary to fucking fight them. Uh,
Speaker 1: let's want the clips like a minute long, and I
Speaker 1: think it's worth watching to see both in the context
Speaker 1: of when Rogan decides to interject and when he decid
Speaker 1: it's not too basically European intellectual inquiry into what the
Speaker 1: heck happened in the twenties and thirties. You know, very intelligent,
Speaker 1: highly educated population and they went barking mad um And
Speaker 1: how did that happen? Um? The answer is mass formation psychosis.
Speaker 1: When you have a society that has become decoupled from
Speaker 1: each other and has free floating anxiety in a sense
Speaker 1: that things don't make sense, we can't understand it, and
Speaker 1: then their attention gets focused by a leader or a
Speaker 1: series of events on one small point. Just like hypnosis,
Speaker 1: they literally become hypnotized and can be led anywhere. And
Speaker 1: one of the aspects of that phenomena is the people
Speaker 1: that they identify as their leaders, the ones typically that
Speaker 1: come in and say, you have this pain, and I
Speaker 1: can solve it for you. I and I alone, okay,
Speaker 1: can fix this problem for you. Okay. Then they will lead.
Speaker 1: They will follow that person through how It doesn't matter
Speaker 1: whether they lie to them or whatever. The data are irrelevant.
Speaker 1: And furthermore, anybody who questions that narrative is to be
Speaker 1: immediately attacked. They are the other. This is central to
Speaker 1: mass formation psychosis, and this is what has happened. We
Speaker 1: had all those conditions. If you remember back before, everybody
Speaker 1: was complaining the world doesn't make sense, blah blah blah um,
Speaker 1: and we're all isolated from each other, we're all on
Speaker 1: our little tools, we're not connected socially anymore except through
Speaker 1: social media. Um. And then this thing happened and everybody
Speaker 1: focused on it. That is how mass formation psychosis happens,
Speaker 1: and that is what's happened here. Horrible, completely wrong, um
Speaker 1: in every single way. UM. They the Germans were not
Speaker 1: confused because nothing made sense. They were angry because of
Speaker 1: the terms of the Treaty of Versailles. That were also
Speaker 1: angry because of what they saw as and what like,
Speaker 1: because of a myth that had grown up about why
Speaker 1: they had lost the first to World War, which was
Speaker 1: spread by people who were the equivalent in that time
Speaker 1: of Joe Rogan. They were scared of the left, of communism,
Speaker 1: of disorder, of riots in the streets, um and one
Speaker 1: whin Hitler took power. Most Germans did not like him.
Speaker 1: They did not blindly follow him. He gradually gained the
Speaker 1: vast the support of the vast majority of Germany through
Speaker 1: a number of different, very logical things. One thing that
Speaker 1: he did that got him a lot of support was
Speaker 1: he took businesses and homes and money from Jewish people
Speaker 1: and from members of other groups that the Nazis were targeting,
Speaker 1: and he gave it to Arians. There was a direct
Speaker 1: financial interest for a lot of people who got in
Speaker 1: line behind the Nazis, and he established a series of
Speaker 1: programs like the Strength through Joy program, that really did
Speaker 1: benefit in a way that they had not known before
Speaker 1: the German working class um. And a lot of this
Speaker 1: was again subsidized through the appropriations of things that had
Speaker 1: been owned by people that the Nazis were targeting. People
Speaker 1: fell in line behind Hitler for logical reasons. He did
Speaker 1: not reach the highest point of his support from the
Speaker 1: German populace until the taking of Paris, which obviously that
Speaker 1: was something that a lot of Germans supported. They had
Speaker 1: spent four years failing to take the city in World
Speaker 1: War One. Um. Anyway, Sorry, it's all nonsense, it's all lies.
Speaker 1: I think the reason why this is latching on so
Speaker 1: much to people on the right, like people on the
Speaker 1: right who who don't consider themselves fascists, who who think
Speaker 1: who would say Nazis are bad, right, there's they still
Speaker 1: are latching onto this because it provides a way for
Speaker 1: them to not understand how fascism actually works. Right. It
Speaker 1: provides an alternative explanation that makes them not have to
Speaker 1: actually think about what fascism is. Um. And that's why
Speaker 1: they're latching onto it. And it also is already it's
Speaker 1: already a part of the conspiracies they have around vaccines
Speaker 1: and power structures. So because because it's the conspiratorial basis,
Speaker 1: instead of like thinking about power structures from like an
Speaker 1: anarchistical like like hierarchy lens, it reinforces the world views
Speaker 1: they have and makes them not half to interrogate the
Speaker 1: ones that they don't want to. Um it sucks. Malone's
Speaker 1: substack goes into more of this and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: pretty bad. There's a this is a few quotes that
Speaker 1: I think really kind of tied this together, and then
Speaker 1: he has some horrible statistics. Um. He says, as many
Speaker 1: of you know, I've spent time researching and speaking about
Speaker 1: mass psychosis theory. Most of what I've learned is come
Speaker 1: from Dr Desmond. Dr Desmond is like the guy who
Speaker 1: pointed this term um and uh, Malone writes. Desmond realized
Speaker 1: that this form of mass hypnosis, the madness of crowds,
Speaker 1: can account for the strange phenomenon of about of the
Speaker 1: population in the Western world becoming entranched with the noble
Speaker 1: lies and dominant narrative concerning the safety and effectiveness of
Speaker 1: the genetic vaccines, and both propagated and enforced by politicians,
Speaker 1: science bureaucrats, pharmaceutical companies and legacy media. Of course, the
Speaker 1: obvious examples of massformation is Germany in the thirties and forties.
Speaker 1: How could the German people, who are highly educated, very
Speaker 1: liberal in the classic sense west in thinking people, how
Speaker 1: could they go crazy and do what they did to
Speaker 1: the Jews? How could this happen to a civilized people.
Speaker 1: A leader of a mass formation movement will use the
Speaker 1: platform to continue to pump the group of information to
Speaker 1: focus on. In the case of COVID nineteen, I like
Speaker 1: to use the term fear porn. Leaders through mainstream media
Speaker 1: and government channel and government channels continuously feed the beast
Speaker 1: with more messaging that further hypnotize their adherents. Studies suggest
Speaker 1: that mass formation follows a general distribution. People are brainwashed
Speaker 1: and hypnotized fully doctor and in the group narrative. In
Speaker 1: the middle are persuaded and may follow if no where
Speaker 1: the alternatives perceived, and thirty percent will fight the narrative.
Speaker 1: Those who rebel and fight against the narrative become the
Speaker 1: enemy of the brainwashed and the primary target of aggression.
Speaker 1: So that's the way he thinks. That is how which
Speaker 1: is really it's really subjing Like in terms of how
Speaker 1: he's building a narrative in his head and specifically building
Speaker 1: a narrative for other people's heads to to view. Why
Speaker 1: do I feel distrustful of certain pieces of power but
Speaker 1: love other pieces of power? Yeah, and it's again like
Speaker 1: this idea that like well, Germany was liberals there, Germany
Speaker 1: had an enormous right wing movement, Like it was a
Speaker 1: hugely conservative country in a lot of ways. It would
Speaker 1: also had a lot of leftist organizing and a lot
Speaker 1: of leftists in it, especially after World War One, but
Speaker 1: like the fry Corps ship, there were these massive, million
Speaker 1: strong right wing armed street movements that existed for the
Speaker 1: entirety of the Weimar Republic. Like it's again everything he
Speaker 1: says is wrong. Yeah, and again it's like the notion
Speaker 1: that like are fully burnwashed, are in the middle of
Speaker 1: persuadable fight the narrative, it's like these these people who
Speaker 1: are upset, these like these specifically conservatives, were obsessed about
Speaker 1: thinking like I would have fought the Nazis. And because
Speaker 1: they don't understand how fashions and works and power dynamics,
Speaker 1: they don't understand how how they're actually getting pulled into
Speaker 1: the same thing. But they still view themselves as the
Speaker 1: rebel right. They there's everybody wants to be right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like they're still focused on being Yeah, it's absolutely like
Speaker 1: they're still focused on being the rebel and like we're
Speaker 1: rebelling against the vaccine that that is just like rebelling
Speaker 1: aginst the Nazis. And you're like, what, um, so I
Speaker 1: just want to say about those numbers if they're too
Speaker 1: completely made up? Yeah, yeah, when when people start throwing
Speaker 1: even numbers statistic exactly like that, it's because they're lying. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's because yeah, yeah, absolutely not. Yeah, that's that's complete nonsense.
Speaker 1: For one. Yeah, it's so so I get because now,
Speaker 1: the other thing that happened around this interview, because it
Speaker 1: didn't give a lot of traction among the right, is
Speaker 1: that whenever these things gained traction, they also developed conspiracy
Speaker 1: theories that people are trying to suppress it. Like look
Speaker 1: at the Google algorithm when you type in certain keywords
Speaker 1: like I know that the day this was trending, it
Speaker 1: was like if you google dr Malone, the interviews only
Speaker 1: like the sixth result, The first one is this YouTube
Speaker 1: video debunky and like I did this and like no,
Speaker 1: the first result was the obviously viral video of him
Speaker 1: saying the thing, Like they just they can take one
Speaker 1: screenshot that maybe someone made or maybe because of one
Speaker 1: person's computer algorithm that's what gave them and use this
Speaker 1: as like evidence that this is the entire system of
Speaker 1: the Internet suppressing the thing. Like, no, the Internet wants
Speaker 1: things to go viral. Now, there's certain things where they
Speaker 1: like trying to shut down the spread of dangerous stuff,
Speaker 1: but this got very viral. This was not contained in
Speaker 1: any way, but because of this notion like they're trying
Speaker 1: to hide it, you know, it plays into their them
Speaker 1: thinking they're like they're them thinking that they are the
Speaker 1: rebels or something. And there's also a very practical reason
Speaker 1: why the people who particularly know that they're lying do this,
Speaker 1: and it's because all of their success is based on
Speaker 1: a foundation of the way in which YouTube and Facebook
Speaker 1: and Twitter algorithmically amplified them and their predecessors, and they
Speaker 1: know that creating controversy over the fact that they're being
Speaker 1: suppressed um leads to more content that jin's that basically
Speaker 1: algorithmically spreads their stuff more because more people are talking
Speaker 1: about it, because other people's channels start debating it, because
Speaker 1: idiots on the left are like, well, we should at
Speaker 1: least have them on platform them because we're anti censorship too,
Speaker 1: so let's debate them. And like all of this stupid
Speaker 1: ship feeds into spreading their stuff. It's a very intelligent strategy. Um,
Speaker 1: I hate it, but just in just in terms of
Speaker 1: how ridiculous it is. I know, a few days ago,
Speaker 1: a Congressman Troy Nells said that I submitted the transcript
Speaker 1: from the Joe Rogan Experience podcast episode with Dr Malone
Speaker 1: to the Congressional Record. Big tech wants to restrict your access,
Speaker 1: your access to information, but they cannot censor the Congressional Record.
Speaker 1: Not tech is the entire reason why you know about
Speaker 1: these people. Yeah, entirely. So if it were not for
Speaker 1: big tech, Joe Rogan would be narrating videos of robots fighting.
Speaker 1: So Jack so Beak got real into this because he
Speaker 1: loves anything that goes viral. If it weren't for big Tech,
Speaker 1: Jacks Obak would have died in the ditch of an
Speaker 1: oxycontent overdose. So he he got real into it. He
Speaker 1: changed his like he changed his Twitter name to Jack
Speaker 1: mass Formation, psychosis, psychosa Beck or some bullshit like that.
Speaker 1: Stupid and it was it was tweeting about a NonStop
Speaker 1: for a week and like like a kid learning about
Speaker 1: a new topic because of synchronicity, He's he's gonna like
Speaker 1: projected onto everything he sees now because like this this
Speaker 1: new all encompassing topic that makes you avoid what fashions
Speaker 1: them actually is and then point out at the things
Speaker 1: you don't like. So of course he's gonna apply to
Speaker 1: everything he He made a tweet right before January six,
Speaker 1: um as the anniversary of the Capitol intermpted ku thing.
Speaker 1: Regime media has launched a propaganda push against Ashley Babbitt
Speaker 1: today to psychologically prep their flock for the upcoming mass
Speaker 1: formation event planned for January six this week. This this
Speaker 1: is called priming and it's a textbook mass formation theory tactic.
Speaker 1: Wait till you see what of next? And it is
Speaker 1: the sixth today, has anything? What happened? Not goddamn thing?
Speaker 1: They got fucking Linn madwell Morenda does sing songs dedts,
Speaker 1: you got gnel from Miranda? Did you see that? That
Speaker 1: wasn't He might have said something in the beginning that
Speaker 1: was due, but the performance has been played before on
Speaker 1: other things. Well and I am you know what, if
Speaker 1: we're taught trying to reach across the aisle. I am
Speaker 1: willing to admit that the popularity of lin Manuel Miranda
Speaker 1: might be a mass formation psychosis. Absolutely, the popularity of
Speaker 1: Hamilton's is a massformation psychos its. Absolutely, we're just being assholes.
Speaker 1: But like, like seriously like it again, but it doesn't
Speaker 1: it does. The fuck is when it when it comes
Speaker 1: to again like the fact that he said there's gonna
Speaker 1: be this whatever psych mass formation psychosis event on the
Speaker 1: anniversary of January six, then it's going to be huge.
Speaker 1: Watch for it. Nothing happens, doesn't matter, never matters, will
Speaker 1: never matter. Um because again, like it's it's I think
Speaker 1: one of the issues that we have here is the
Speaker 1: degree to which brain brainwashing and hypnosis and stuff are
Speaker 1: talked about within kind of discussions of a cultic milieu
Speaker 1: when they're not really a factor, not a factor in cults,
Speaker 1: not nearly as much as you think, yea, and not
Speaker 1: in the way that you think. There's things that like
Speaker 1: you could call brainwashing, but the the and you could
Speaker 1: even maybe call hypnosis, although that's a lot murkier. It
Speaker 1: is a very technical thing. Yeah, But but the what
Speaker 1: actually like the stuff that's actually happens. Again, it's always
Speaker 1: much more logical and rational if you can just inhabit
Speaker 1: the mental space of the people who are in those
Speaker 1: communities because of what they're primed to believe first and
Speaker 1: because of what is happening socially, because of the degree
Speaker 1: to which they isolate themselves from people who are outside
Speaker 1: of that bubble. Like, that's why it's so hard to
Speaker 1: get them out. It's not that like magically their brains
Speaker 1: have been taken over. It's that they have pretty methodically
Speaker 1: been put into a position where rejecting what is being
Speaker 1: told to them within this context is immensely more painful,
Speaker 1: um than just continuing to believe things that are not true. Um.
Speaker 1: And there are more consequences for it, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: you lose a support network, you lose a great deal
Speaker 1: of of of your own opinion of yourself and your
Speaker 1: self worth if you start to reject this stuff. Um. And,
Speaker 1: once you can trap people in that, it's the same
Speaker 1: way that scientology works. Once you can trap people in that, um,
Speaker 1: it's the evidence of their eyes and the fact that
Speaker 1: like they're obviously being lied to and the things that
Speaker 1: they're being told about don't come to pass. It's this.
Speaker 1: It's the reason why you have a bunch of apocalyptic
Speaker 1: cults who say the days the world is going to
Speaker 1: end on this day and time that day and time comes,
Speaker 1: the world doesn't end, and the cult goes on. You know, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's pretty it's pretty ridiculous. This, this whole thing was
Speaker 1: started by this professor of uncle psychology at a at
Speaker 1: a university in Belgium, Matthias Desmot. He seems to have
Speaker 1: a pretty bad understanding of history and actual like power structures,
Speaker 1: and does not know the least bit about fascism um,
Speaker 1: and has trying to craft this thing to fill in
Speaker 1: the gaps in his own knowledge and applies it to everything.
Speaker 1: And I've read some of his stuff. It's it's nonsense. Um.
Speaker 1: Again that just like the doctors who talked about it,
Speaker 1: they're like, yeah, he's using this also is a way
Speaker 1: to explain how COVID is not real and how the
Speaker 1: vaccine is a is a ploy to do bad thing.
Speaker 1: It's it's all ridiculous, it's irresponsible, um. And they're using
Speaker 1: it as a tactic and hopefully it's just gonna blow over,
Speaker 1: but I'm sure it'll pop up everyone every once in
Speaker 1: a while again just like it popped up, you know,
Speaker 1: a few weeks ago. But that's that's really all. I
Speaker 1: all I want to get into it. I I could
Speaker 1: say more, but I think we have said enough. Um,
Speaker 1: all right, all fucket, Yeah, that's it. That's all I've got.
Speaker 1: UM Read This Way for the Gas Ladies and Gentlemen
Speaker 1: by Thaddius Borowski. Um. It will. It will have a
Speaker 1: major impact on the way you see the entire world
Speaker 1: if you if you actually read it. Um, there's some
Speaker 1: incredible pieces in there. One of one of the things
Speaker 1: that the Taddius points out is that like people only
Speaker 1: ever have like one kind of language for for talking
Speaker 1: about like the things that they feel, where whether it's
Speaker 1: something they they kind of vaguely care about or something
Speaker 1: they care about enough to murder over. And so when
Speaker 1: people engage in acts of like horrific violence on a
Speaker 1: mass scale, they often do it looking and acting like
Speaker 1: they would if they were irritated at somebody in traffic. Um.
Speaker 1: And it's the most unsettling thing about being the victim
Speaker 1: of a genocide that you don't see the kind of
Speaker 1: hate and the kind of rage and the kind of
Speaker 1: like what you would expect someone would need to be
Speaker 1: amped up to. It's more of like you see, more
Speaker 1: like kind of boredom and and irritation and all that
Speaker 1: stuff like it's not anyway read read read Daddy Sparowski. Um,
Speaker 1: he's I desperately wish Joe Rogan would just sit and
Speaker 1: narrate this book on his show, because I do actually
Speaker 1: a service in the world. Anyway. Um, that's that's the episode.
Speaker 1: I'm Jake Halbern, host of deep Cover. Our new season
Speaker 1: is about a lawyer who helped the mob run Chicago.
Speaker 1: We control of the courts, We controlled absolutely everything. He
Speaker 1: brobed judges and even helped a hit man walk free,
Speaker 1: until one day when he started talking with the FBI
Speaker 1: and promised that he could take the mob down. I've
Speaker 1: spent the past year trying to figure out why he
Speaker 1: flipped and what he was really after. From my perspective,
Speaker 1: Bob was too good to be true. There's got to
Speaker 1: be something wrong with this. I wouldn't trust the guy.
Speaker 1: He looks like a little scum, big liar, stool bidgi.
Speaker 1: He looked like what he was or at. I can
Speaker 1: say with all certainty I think he's a hero because
Speaker 1: he didn't have to do what he did, and he
Speaker 1: did it anyway. The moment I put the wire around
Speaker 1: the first time, my life was over. If it ever
Speaker 1: got out, they would kill me in a heartbeat. Listen
Speaker 1: to deep Cover on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcasts. Adoption of teens from
Speaker 1: foster care is a topic not enough people know about,
Speaker 1: and we're here to change that. I'm April didn't what
Speaker 1: the host of the new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by
Speaker 1: adopt us Kids. Each episode brings you compelling, real life
Speaker 1: adoption stories told by the families that lived them, with
Speaker 1: commentary from experts. Visit adopt us Kids dot org, slash podcast,
Speaker 1: or subscribed to Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids,
Speaker 1: brought to you by the U S Department of Health
Speaker 1: and Human Services, Administration for Children and Families, and the
Speaker 1: ACT Council. This is Roxande Gay, host of The Roxanne
Speaker 1: Gay Agenda, the bad feminist podcast of Your Dreams. Now,
Speaker 1: what is the Roxanne Gay Agenda, you might ask, Well,
Speaker 1: It's a podcast where I'm going to speak my mind
Speaker 1: about what's on my mind, and that could be anything.
Speaker 1: Every week, I will be in conversation with an interesting
Speaker 1: person who has something to say. We're going to talk
Speaker 1: about feminism, race, writing and books and art, food, pop culture,
Speaker 1: and yes, politics. I started show with a recommendation. Really,
Speaker 1: I'm just going to share with you a movie or
Speaker 1: a book, or maybe some music or a comedy side,
Speaker 1: something that I really want you to be aware of
Speaker 1: and maybe engage with as well. Listen to the Luminary
Speaker 1: original podcast, The Roxanne Gay Agenda, The Bad Feminist Podcast
Speaker 1: of Your Dreams, every Tuesday on the I Heart Radio app,
Speaker 1: Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Could it
Speaker 1: happen here? It maybe? I Robert Evans, host of this podcast,
Speaker 1: UM to introduce this today's episode, which is not my episode,
Speaker 1: it's it's Andrew's, uh episode. So, how how are you doing?
Speaker 1: Andrew Hood In that introduction, I'm good. I think it's
Speaker 1: um could use some work, but you know we'll shop it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: We we never workshop anything. We just we just roll
Speaker 1: right ahead. UM, so abolish that. Abolish introductions, you know,
Speaker 1: start in the middle. Why don't we just do that now?
Speaker 1: In media res podcast. Yeah, we'll make every podcast like
Speaker 1: Finnigan's Wake, where the opening of the podcast is like
Speaker 1: halfway through a paragraph that the end of the paragraphs
Speaker 1: or at the end of the episode starts every everything
Speaker 1: will be a circle. Let's just Sophie. I think that's
Speaker 1: the new plan. Okay, Okay, Andrews, what do you guys
Speaker 1: for us today? Right? So today I wanted to talk
Speaker 1: about bio regions and bioregionalism. It's uh philosophy slash movement,
Speaker 1: slash way of viewing things. There's a lot. So today
Speaker 1: we'll be exploring what it is, where it came from,
Speaker 1: and the role I see it playing in our strides
Speaker 1: towards anarchy. But first of course we really gets some
Speaker 1: context bioregionalism. Have any of you heard of it? By
Speaker 1: the way, I have heard the tournament right right, So
Speaker 1: it's actually pretty recent, um, all things considered. UM. It
Speaker 1: was coined as a tomb by a guy named Alan
Speaker 1: Van new Cook, found of the Institute for Bioregional Research,
Speaker 1: and as a movement it really gained a lot of
Speaker 1: popularity in the late nineties seventies in the Ozaks, Appalachia,
Speaker 1: Hudson River, and San Francisco Bay Area regions. UM. They
Speaker 1: had a conference in a prairie, interestingly enough, near Kansas City,
Speaker 1: and they've also had conferences in the Squamish bioregion of
Speaker 1: British Columbia as well as the Gulf of main By
Speaker 1: region on the Atlantic. And of course with all these
Speaker 1: different people coming together sharing all their different ideas talking
Speaker 1: about cool nature stuff, they developed a sort of a
Speaker 1: platform which they outline in papers on subjects changing from
Speaker 1: agriculture to forestry, to arts, economics to community. So while
Speaker 1: it was a very North American focused movement and philosophy
Speaker 1: at first, it has also expanded to Europe and Australia
Speaker 1: and these groups, they hundreds of them all over. UM.
Speaker 1: They get involved with local ecological work like preservation and restoration,
Speaker 1: pumic culture or that, and they also form networks so
Speaker 1: they would link on specific issues like water conservation or
Speaker 1: organic farming or tree planting. And of course bioreginal groups
Speaker 1: also get involved in attempts to make communities more self
Speaker 1: sufficient by mapping and utilizing local assets and well, as
Speaker 1: you come to see, um, bioregionalism and maps kind of
Speaker 1: go hand in hand away UM, because it really is
Speaker 1: about that sort of big picture looking at the earth
Speaker 1: and the environment and outplace in it. So what is
Speaker 1: bioregionalism exactly In essence, it's a philosophy based around the
Speaker 1: organization of political, cultural, and economic systems around naturally defined
Speaker 1: areas called bioregions. Sort of bioregions. There are areas defined
Speaker 1: through physical and environmental features, including watershed boundaries, soil and
Speaker 1: terrain characteristics, flora, fauna, and climate. Bioregionalism also stresses the
Speaker 1: determination of a bioregion is a cultural phenomenon and emphasizes
Speaker 1: local populations, local knowledge, and local solutions because humans are
Speaker 1: actually surprisingly part of nature. Our cultures or settlements they
Speaker 1: arise from nature, They arise from the characteristics of the
Speaker 1: bio regions that we inhabit. So I mean that to
Speaker 1: me is a clear virtualty and bioregionalism and land back.
Speaker 1: And it also points to me um the fact that
Speaker 1: while bioregionalism maybe a fairly recent philosophy starsh movement, its
Speaker 1: roots and the ideas it presents are nothing new, you know, um,
Speaker 1: I mean bioregionalism posits that, you know, human societies must
Speaker 1: learn to our bioregions and the connections between them if
Speaker 1: we have to be ecologically sound. And this was an
Speaker 1: active is really old news, you know, for the indigenous
Speaker 1: peoples who have maintained these lands and been stewards of
Speaker 1: these lands for thousands of years. I think that thinking
Speaker 1: in a bioregional scale allows us to establish regenerative and
Speaker 1: circular economies, effectively, restore local ecosystems, restructure our systems using
Speaker 1: ecological design principles, and of course deepen our cultural connections
Speaker 1: to the land we inhabit. So that to me really
Speaker 1: stresses the importance of bioregionalism in our approach to environmental issues.
Speaker 1: Before I continue, I just wanted to say that for
Speaker 1: those who want to like visualize, because I know this
Speaker 1: is a podcast, you can only hear my voice. Um
Speaker 1: One Earth has a pretty decent map of bio regions
Speaker 1: on the website, so you could just google bio regions
Speaker 1: and it should come up. They basically have like five
Speaker 1: bio regions on their map. And well, according to that map,
Speaker 1: trend that is part of bioregion Anti NT Stanning for
Speaker 1: neotropic and E Stanning for East and Turnadas grouped with
Speaker 1: South America and particularly the Venezuela Guyana's region for obvious
Speaker 1: reasons being that the Urn coup and other rivers that
Speaker 1: come from the Amazon flew out to you know, trend
Speaker 1: ads shows really so clunky segue um. There a couple
Speaker 1: of different concepts that one might want to keep in
Speaker 1: mind when a aproaching or attempting to curate a bio
Speaker 1: regional understanding of the world. Of course, perspective and a
Speaker 1: bioregional perspective is important, and it's basically one that seeks
Speaker 1: to ensure that political boundaries match ecological boundaries, highlighting the
Speaker 1: unique ecology of the bio region, encouraging the consumption of
Speaker 1: local foods where possible, encouraging the use of local materials
Speaker 1: where possible, and encouraging the cultivation of needs of plans
Speaker 1: in the region. I will point out like from now,
Speaker 1: that's from what I've read about bioregionalism and the talks
Speaker 1: that I've seen, there are definitely some you know, liberal sensibilities,
Speaker 1: some capitalist realism um. In the way that some bioregionalists
Speaker 1: talk about, you know, things like organizing our politics and
Speaker 1: our states and stuff around by regions. Obviously, you know,
Speaker 1: they are pushing things pretty far because they do talk
Speaker 1: about you know, going and really orienting our economy around
Speaker 1: you know, bio regions and thinking in terms of that.
Speaker 1: But at the same time, there's still like an almost
Speaker 1: passive acceptance in some of the readings that I've seen
Speaker 1: of capitalism. You know, I think that's pretty common in
Speaker 1: a lot of what I like to call almost radical
Speaker 1: um ideas and philosophies and stuff. Of course, when I
Speaker 1: approached these ideas and these philosophies and stuff, I always
Speaker 1: try to, you know, keep that anarchist analytical freework in
Speaker 1: my head, understanding that you know, these ideas are still
Speaker 1: being filtered through an ultimately like Campitus society and capitalist world,
Speaker 1: and so you're gonna want to try to navigate that
Speaker 1: and sift that out and really get the nuggets of
Speaker 1: gold within these ideas. I don't see states um, and
Speaker 1: I think you would agree with me being the path
Speaker 1: out of you know, that's a climate catastrophe um. For
Speaker 1: those who have been reading like you know, Against the
Speaker 1: Green and you know Griever's work, we know that states
Speaker 1: have been pretty equalsider from their very inception. So I
Speaker 1: think that if poogionalism would be effective, I think it
Speaker 1: would be best if it stayed away from that sort
Speaker 1: of status um conception they do emphasize localism UM as
Speaker 1: the political localism, but it's always within the context of
Speaker 1: was often within the context of like the relationship between
Speaker 1: the local and the state and that sort of thing
Speaker 1: almost like a kind of I don't know if I'm
Speaker 1: using this to him correctly, even like monarchism, does that
Speaker 1: makes sense some kind was it? Some kind of like
Speaker 1: municipalist almost something like that, But yeah, yeah, we should
Speaker 1: probably talk a little bit about like what what monarchism
Speaker 1: and municipalism are UM, just so people don't get kind
Speaker 1: of caught up on the terms UM. And particularly I
Speaker 1: think that like within a context of like the United States, UM,
Speaker 1: municipalism is kind of an easier way to sell folks
Speaker 1: who may be more conservative on certain anarchists principles. It's
Speaker 1: basically the idea of yea strong community sort of control
Speaker 1: and autonomy UM, as opposed to uh, strong overarching kind
Speaker 1: of federal or state control over over you know, different communities. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because menarchism is kind of like a weird grab bag thing.
Speaker 1: It's like, yeah, it's it's it's sort of like, okay,
Speaker 1: so you want to be in an arco capitalist, but
Speaker 1: you can't because you're just smart enough to realize that
Speaker 1: you can't have a right to state. So either the
Speaker 1: America state is the only thing it does is enforced
Speaker 1: property rights. And yeah, I think that's a slightly terrifying vision,
Speaker 1: but I think but you know it's it's yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a more self away than the average Yeah, but you
Speaker 1: know this is yeah, and I think that is less
Speaker 1: of a focus specifically on property rights and more of
Speaker 1: more based out of an understanding that UM like strong
Speaker 1: hierarchical federal or even state level control UM generally winds
Speaker 1: up creating reach a lot of a significant amount of
Speaker 1: like regional um uh, what's the word I'm looking for,
Speaker 1: um inequalities UM and and is responsible for a lot
Speaker 1: of like ecological devastation and whatnot. This idea that you
Speaker 1: can have like like one of the things that you
Speaker 1: would have with an actual municipalist system, as you wouldn't
Speaker 1: be allowed to operate a company like Coke Industries that's
Speaker 1: able to UM, you know, be based out of I
Speaker 1: think Kentucky, UM, but operate a series of refineries in
Speaker 1: the Gulf Coast that render large sections of that area
Speaker 1: uninhabitable because you would leave kind of control over what
Speaker 1: can be actually done in that area to the people
Speaker 1: who live there, rather than being able to have UM
Speaker 1: a corporation by land there and have its right to
Speaker 1: pollute enforced by the state. Right, that's kind of like
Speaker 1: one little example. UM, there's municipalists. The system in northeast
Speaker 1: Syria and Rojava is is sort of a municipalist system
Speaker 1: and one of the specifically libertarian. Yeah, I mean there's
Speaker 1: an distinction between like, well generally and m yeah, we're
Speaker 1: we're getting into the weeds a little bit here, but
Speaker 1: these are these are like that's kind of the basics
Speaker 1: of what those terms mean. Just so that people don't
Speaker 1: get lost when you when you bring them up, because
Speaker 1: I think a lot of folks, UM, you know, don't
Speaker 1: have necessary early that kind of those definitions don't just
Speaker 1: pop up in their head when you use that word,
Speaker 1: right right, yeah, fair enough. UM. I also mentioned that
Speaker 1: states have been ecosidal from the inception, so I feel
Speaker 1: like I should probably trying to find that as well.
Speaker 1: UM equal side and ecosidal is UM is basically UM
Speaker 1: this idea that came out to the environmentalist movement, UM
Speaker 1: meanttive points to the survey harm to nature, the mass
Speaker 1: damage and destruction of ecosystems that's you know, caused over
Speaker 1: decades by you know these companies and really buy the
Speaker 1: system as a whole. So it's often viewed through like
Speaker 1: a legal lens, as in, you know, these um companies
Speaker 1: should be tried for their crimes um and as like
Speaker 1: for committing equal side and that kind of thing, because
Speaker 1: it's off then view like as like illegal like lower
Speaker 1: Street put in police to classify equal side as a
Speaker 1: crime and that sort of thing. Um only a few
Speaker 1: countries have done that, like actually quotified eco side, but
Speaker 1: it is something that um so environmentalists pushed, you know,
Speaker 1: really raise awareness as a crime against humanity and the planet. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think it's also kind of important to understand with
Speaker 1: equal Side is that like there's a lot of focus
Speaker 1: I think in like left like in fronmutal movements just
Speaker 1: purely incorporations and even if you go back to the
Speaker 1: companies memes like Hunter companies destroying the planets like well yeah,
Speaker 1: like like half of the merse they don't. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: so you know, yeah, this this is something like like
Speaker 1: with equal Side, it's like yeah, it's like it's not
Speaker 1: just corporations that do this. It's you know, it's it's
Speaker 1: the the state as a structure. It's the state as
Speaker 1: the institution. Is the state as exactly, Yes, their agencies
Speaker 1: is there sort of And that's that's what I try
Speaker 1: to Like, what I realized is it's kind of important. Known.
Speaker 1: I guess this is kind of like slowly like shifting
Speaker 1: away from birationalism, but that's fine. Um. What I will
Speaker 1: say that I've tried to like consciously, um sort of
Speaker 1: put into practice is emphasizing that, like capitalism is not
Speaker 1: the only issue, you know. Um, Like I those people
Speaker 1: like try to separate capitalism on the state, as if
Speaker 1: they could ever truly be separated. Even people who understand
Speaker 1: that you know, acro capitalists misguided and that you know,
Speaker 1: the state is necessary to maintain capitalism. There's some sort
Speaker 1: of like disconnect where there's like a whole ton of
Speaker 1: you know, organization and meaning and all that about capitalism.
Speaker 1: And you know, oftentimes these sort of efforts are like
Speaker 1: particularly reformist types and unions and stuff. They try to
Speaker 1: mediate with capitalism through the state, you know, through the government,
Speaker 1: look re local government or federal government, whatever the case in.
Speaker 1: And what I really try to emphasize is that it's
Speaker 1: not enough to have like a theory of capitalism. I
Speaker 1: think it's even more important to have a theory of
Speaker 1: hierarchy because I think it avoids it helps to avoid
Speaker 1: getting into these sort of traps of like um well,
Speaker 1: class reductionism for one, but also like recreating certain structures
Speaker 1: within your organizations and in your efforts to change things,
Speaker 1: recreating the very you know, circumstances you're fighting against. You
Speaker 1: can't like condense everything into one problem, because try as
Speaker 1: we might, it's not that everything is one problem. It's
Speaker 1: an interconnected mesh that binds all of our problems together.
Speaker 1: And you can focus on, you know, really big extensions
Speaker 1: of that mesh, but it still is kind of just
Speaker 1: the mesh, and the mesh isn't the thing, but it
Speaker 1: connects to the edges of all of the things. And yeah,
Speaker 1: that type of ecology can be useful and even even
Speaker 1: relating to bioregions in terms of how they also connect
Speaker 1: with other territories and entities. I think it also you
Speaker 1: know it this is one of the sort of problems
Speaker 1: that you have if you know it's like, okay, so
Speaker 1: your plans it takes sort of sovereign state power. It's like, well,
Speaker 1: you do it right, But I mean the thing is
Speaker 1: if if you if you you know, you seeze control
Speaker 1: of power of a state, right, your borders are essentially
Speaker 1: just like where the state's war machine ran out of steam.
Speaker 1: And you know, and this this becomes a normal's problem
Speaker 1: because like I mean, if if you look at the
Speaker 1: bioregional maps, right, it's like there's there's literally no way
Speaker 1: you could ever have states with these borders, because yeah,
Speaker 1: it's not like this, it's it's it's impossible, like you
Speaker 1: you cannot do it. And you know what that means
Speaker 1: is that states are sort of necessarily going wee, they're
Speaker 1: either going to be like a small fraction of a
Speaker 1: bioregion or they have multiple in them. And that's another
Speaker 1: sort of that becomes a sort of logistical problem because
Speaker 1: you know, like if you want to look at like
Speaker 1: a lot of the worst sort of ecological sort of
Speaker 1: like human disasters, it's when you get states attempting to
Speaker 1: apply like state environmental issues. Yeah, yeah, it's more certifically
Speaker 1: like it it's it's you know, they have something that
Speaker 1: like sort of works in one test environment, and then
Speaker 1: they broadly apply it across you know, an enormous sort
Speaker 1: of variety of areas and reasons to have their own
Speaker 1: biospheres and have their own and that stuff. That's like
Speaker 1: that's like the fastest way to kill an enormous number
Speaker 1: of people. Yeah, just like it's like forcing a jigsaw
Speaker 1: piece that obviously doesn't fit into a spot where you
Speaker 1: wanted to, but you're just breaking the pieces. I want
Speaker 1: to say as well, that like that sort of I mean,
Speaker 1: at least the state's attesting it, right, Um. I remember
Speaker 1: I kind of remember the exact name of like the
Speaker 1: the sort of like ideology or whatever. I think it
Speaker 1: was like this Elie Soviet Unian probably one of your name,
Speaker 1: This Elie Soviet Union in practice related to like farming
Speaker 1: that they just applied over like a vast vast region
Speaker 1: end up with like a huge decrease in like food production.
Speaker 1: I can't remember the name of it. Senku Oh, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it just had this he had this theory and it's
Speaker 1: just like pushing it and yeah, it led to some
Speaker 1: serious issues. Yeah, and I think you know, if we're
Speaker 1: gonna have like what's important about sort of birationalism, it's
Speaker 1: you have to have if you're going to implement anything right.
Speaker 1: You know, it's especially when you're trying to sort of
Speaker 1: manipulate biospheres, you're trying to preserve a biosphears you have
Speaker 1: to have local knowledge from the people who have been
Speaker 1: living in these biospheres for you know, enormous amounts of time.
Speaker 1: And that's something that states are really bad at and
Speaker 1: you know, tend to actively suppress and it's something you know,
Speaker 1: and I almost said this, there's there's a kind of
Speaker 1: like there's like a kind of neoliberal version of this stuff.
Speaker 1: Fe It's like, oh, well do you know who will
Speaker 1: have like local knowledge blah blah blah. And then they're like, well,
Speaker 1: well we'll have local knowledge, but they that this will
Speaker 1: help them create market solutions to things. It's like that
Speaker 1: also doesn't work, and it's basically just motized Like yeah,
Speaker 1: but because that I really like sits letson sits well
Speaker 1: with me. You know, like these sort of like see
Speaker 1: that you see a lot of liberals like doing it
Speaker 1: a lot of these days where they'll be like doing
Speaker 1: the whole land acknowledge one's thing and they'll be doing
Speaker 1: the that thing where they would just like say that
Speaker 1: oh this is from so and sue culture and whatever,
Speaker 1: and then just like boom and then carry yeah, carry
Speaker 1: on with business as usual. Yeah, which is I learned
Speaker 1: this technique from so and so tried, no, let me
Speaker 1: work as a consultant for your company. Yeah thing, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's come out. It's commodifying the thing, and that
Speaker 1: that both produces a warped replication and then it also
Speaker 1: kind of makes the original thing seem like used in
Speaker 1: a weird way as well, like it wasn't designed. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I once reminded a bit of alienation and how we
Speaker 1: are just sort of separated from, you know, aspects of
Speaker 1: our actual humanity because of the structures we live under. Right,
Speaker 1: So instead of relating with the environment, or relating with
Speaker 1: our culture, or relating to other people, we're just relating
Speaker 1: through like these commodities and these products and these you know,
Speaker 1: just bastardized versions of things. And I think that is
Speaker 1: also something that sort of leagues like some environmentalists in
Speaker 1: terms of there's there's there's almost like this subtle ill
Speaker 1: nation from the nature that um many of them seek
Speaker 1: to preserve, right where on the one hand, yes, you're
Speaker 1: trying to you know, preserve it and protect it and
Speaker 1: as commendable brand. The other hand, the way you're going
Speaker 1: about it is basically like anti tactical to those schools
Speaker 1: because you don't have that connection with the nature that
Speaker 1: you're trying to help. You know, what it seems like
Speaker 1: a lot of people not recognizing is that you know,
Speaker 1: humans are apart nature, right, and this is another bioregional concept, right,
Speaker 1: this thing called bioregional reinhabitation in it in being that um,
Speaker 1: meaning that we must come home to the geographical and
Speaker 1: physicalter and reinhabit, understand its ecological uniqueness and familiarize ourselves
Speaker 1: with the stories woven into the fabric of said land.
Speaker 1: It's history, it's people with its cultures, it's flora, it's fauna.
Speaker 1: You know. It's only once we come home to the
Speaker 1: our byo regions and to our ecosystems, to all places,
Speaker 1: that we can really work together to see its potential,
Speaker 1: to see how we fit into it, how we can
Speaker 1: facilitate its healing, you know, bio region by bio region. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that definitely mirrors stuff I've been working on relating to
Speaker 1: that type of like cognitive dissonance that you're talking about.
Speaker 1: And that alienation not just from like human to human,
Speaker 1: but human to human to place, because yeah, we have
Speaker 1: like developed this like this commodified other version of nature
Speaker 1: that isn't actually what nature is. Um it's it's it's
Speaker 1: we formed this thing that is separate from us, which
Speaker 1: is not how we need to think about it, because
Speaker 1: it should be. We are all part of the same
Speaker 1: of of of that same system. We are not separate
Speaker 1: from it, and we're not isolated from it or its effects.
Speaker 1: We are just another part of it. So it's about
Speaker 1: getting in like getting a sense of ecology with both
Speaker 1: your bioregion and then the biosphere as as as a whole,
Speaker 1: and getting that ecology which kind of will break down
Speaker 1: this notion of nature being an other. And and I
Speaker 1: think because of the idea of nature being another that
Speaker 1: really kind of fosters our extraction that's led to our
Speaker 1: current problems because we don't use problems affecting us. We
Speaker 1: give them as a practice as affecting the territory. And
Speaker 1: if we're if we're not the territory, then we can
Speaker 1: be safe. But that's not Sorry, go on, I think
Speaker 1: I think I may have talked about this on the
Speaker 1: show before but you know that there's another aspect here,
Speaker 1: which is that viewing humans is sort of like separate
Speaker 1: from like this abstract nature is how you get a
Speaker 1: lot of really bad like racist environmentalism. Like if you
Speaker 1: haven't read The Trouble with y by, yeah Coroning, the
Speaker 1: Trouble with Wilderness is one of the things that like
Speaker 1: if you study, yeah, if if you do environmental studies
Speaker 1: at all, like this is one of the first things
Speaker 1: they hand you. And the reason they hand it to
Speaker 1: you is because it you know, so the the the
Speaker 1: image of wilderness that we have is sort of like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's just like completely untapped thing, and it's like, well, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: So the reason the reason we have this image of
Speaker 1: like a wilderness with nothing in it is because there
Speaker 1: used to be people there and we killed them all
Speaker 1: or fortunately imported them. Yeah yeah, yeah, and it's it's wilderness.
Speaker 1: And yeah it was for us literally planted and called
Speaker 1: those forests were I think even more pointedly, you should
Speaker 1: it should be stated those forests were a work of
Speaker 1: engineering that's on par with the pyramids at Giza, if
Speaker 1: not like absolutely massively in excess of it there, they
Speaker 1: are a work of engineering that's every bit as impressive
Speaker 1: as any city ever built. Um and everything is like
Speaker 1: intense and required as much knowledge and scientific understanding. People
Speaker 1: just all we had, all of those people had died
Speaker 1: by the time white folks really because of the spread
Speaker 1: of disease or just because of act Like yeah, like
Speaker 1: I think that's true. Definitely the East coast with the
Speaker 1: West Coast, I think it's even grimmer because the West
Speaker 1: Coast you and this this happened, you still see this
Speaker 1: where like a lot of like theiricannational parks were literally
Speaker 1: like like people would go and ethnically cleanse the population
Speaker 1: that was there and then be like, oh hey look
Speaker 1: it's it's now wilderness. This is now and this this
Speaker 1: is like the origin of the environmental movement. It's all
Speaker 1: of these like just like the most racist people you've
Speaker 1: ever seen in your life, like people yeah, well and
Speaker 1: even even even before them, like in you know, like
Speaker 1: like early hundreds, like people like those guys. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's like like when when when those guys are talking
Speaker 1: about like the purity of the field, like they're everything
Speaker 1: they think about the wilderness is also just about the
Speaker 1: purity of the white race, and it's it's yeah, and
Speaker 1: if if if when you when when you start making
Speaker 1: that this like that's the separation between teams in nature,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's how you get this, Like that's how
Speaker 1: that's how you get these you know, ethnic cleansing like
Speaker 1: genocide forests. I've been reading this very good book, just
Speaker 1: started last night, and I think we're gonna have the
Speaker 1: author on the show soon. Chris Begley. He's an underwater
Speaker 1: archaeologist and he wrote a book called The Next Apocalypse
Speaker 1: that's about collapses throughout history and how they actually differ
Speaker 1: from the popular conceptions of them. And he actually talks
Speaker 1: about a lot of the stuff we talk about in
Speaker 1: this show UM. And one of the points he makes
Speaker 1: is that this idea of like lost cities in dark
Speaker 1: jungles and whatnotum is based entirely on misconceptions first of
Speaker 1: all about like what jungles are, and then second on
Speaker 1: like these these very eurocentric ideas towards what lost means.
Speaker 1: Like he points out that every time there's been a
Speaker 1: lost city or civilization discover, it's because archaeologists just like
Speaker 1: asked the people living there where the ruins were in there,
Speaker 1: Like oh yeah, it's like right over there, like we
Speaker 1: we've known about this since forever. It was never lost,
Speaker 1: we just stopped living in that specific area. And the
Speaker 1: other thing he points out is that like this idea
Speaker 1: of a jungle as like a difficult and primeval place
Speaker 1: is ridiculous. If you had to pick anywhere to be
Speaker 1: stranded in the world of in terms of bioregions, you
Speaker 1: would pick a jungle like the Amazon, because it's pretty
Speaker 1: easy to survive there. That's why people live there for
Speaker 1: so long. Yeah, there's a ton of the Amazons. You know,
Speaker 1: as we've discovered, you know, there were cities and stuff
Speaker 1: happening in the Amazon. You know, it was like planted.
Speaker 1: There's food jungle like food forests and whatnot. Is the
Speaker 1: term people use it within the jungle like people set
Speaker 1: the people set the jungle in the Amazon up to
Speaker 1: provide them with food in a way that isn't exactly
Speaker 1: isn't the same as like what we consider to be agriculture,
Speaker 1: but it's absolutely a kind of agriculture. And because people
Speaker 1: don't see it as agricultures, like, oh, that's just you know,
Speaker 1: they were just running around the forest before we arrived,
Speaker 1: you know, it's like, yeah, no, they had they had
Speaker 1: essentially built themselves a big smart house in the middle
Speaker 1: of the woods that provided them with everything they needed.
Speaker 1: Um with upkeep that we would consider minimal based on
Speaker 1: like what a lot of our European ancestors, it certainly
Speaker 1: like did in terms of labor to keep farms going.
Speaker 1: Like if you compare, I mean you could also talk
Speaker 1: about how like peasants in the medieval period probably worked
Speaker 1: less than a lot of people in the United States
Speaker 1: duties like everyone works less, we do know, but it's
Speaker 1: a lot harder to keep like a mono culture farm
Speaker 1: going than it is to to keep a food forest going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because I mean, once it's established, it literally maintains itself.
Speaker 1: M What was the name of the book that you
Speaker 1: were talking about. Just it's called The Next Apocalypse and
Speaker 1: it's it's very good so far. Chris Begley is the author.
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna have them on next week. But
Speaker 1: um yeah, I've I've found it so far about a
Speaker 1: third of the way and very good, so much out. Okay,
Speaker 1: who wants to say we're back you just that's the now,
Speaker 1: that's the exit area. You're welcome there we are or song.
Speaker 1: So yeah, once we have like embraced our understanding that
Speaker 1: you know, we belong to the land and not vices
Speaker 1: and must therefore pattern ourselves and societies based on its needs.
Speaker 1: Um you know, that's when we get to that place
Speaker 1: of bioregional regeneration, which is another key concept of bioregionalism.
Speaker 1: And lastly, there's the concept of bioregional sensibility, which was
Speaker 1: developed by Mitchell Thomas Shoe, and it's about developing the
Speaker 1: observational skills to observe the bioregional history, to develop the
Speaker 1: conceptual skills to juxtapose you know, the scale of you know,
Speaker 1: the community and the region, and the bio ecosystem, the bioregion,
Speaker 1: all these different levels. Was ability to like think in
Speaker 1: terms of all of them, to develop the imaginative faculties too. Really,
Speaker 1: I would say, play with multiple landscapes and develop the compassion.
Speaker 1: Two empathize with and work with both local and global neighbors,
Speaker 1: not just local and global human neighbors, but also you know,
Speaker 1: the flora and fauna living next door. There are a
Speaker 1: lot of different bioregional practices happening all of the world. UM.
Speaker 1: I didn't note that it started in North America, but
Speaker 1: I noticed a lot of the big projects happening in
Speaker 1: like South America, you know, in Brazil, Sinaldo Ville, in
Speaker 1: Costa Rica Regenerativa, to think Colombia Regenerativa and the Pluriversity
Speaker 1: in the Himalayas as well, and many others. They're basically
Speaker 1: engaging in efforts involving applied education, ternity of agriculture systems, mapping,
Speaker 1: green belt restoration. There's the you know, the green Belt
Speaker 1: project in Africa as well, and these are all efforts
Speaker 1: to really understand and work with the bio regions that
Speaker 1: these people inhabit. So just a few tips that I
Speaker 1: wanted to end us off with you before we and
Speaker 1: things off. UM. I was trying to link um, the
Speaker 1: things that I talked about in some way to what
Speaker 1: people on the groups they are part of, the organizations
Speaker 1: they are part of, the communities are part of. Can
Speaker 1: do you know, as an action to strengthen their resilience
Speaker 1: or to develop you know, autonomy. Right in this case,
Speaker 1: it is the strength and resilience and also to develop
Speaker 1: the vitality of the bio region you inhabit. So, first
Speaker 1: of all, I think it's important that we learn as
Speaker 1: much as we can about our areas and learn especially
Speaker 1: through action, whether it be through cleanups, you know, observing
Speaker 1: the space around you, whether it be through observing weather
Speaker 1: patterns um betther be through looking at the we're on
Speaker 1: hikes and looking at the way that the temperature changes
Speaker 1: and the texture of the soil changes as you go
Speaker 1: up and down in um altitude. I think it's also
Speaker 1: important to try to get involved with actions too, um
Speaker 1: restore natural features and to understand the police that those
Speaker 1: natural features have in the broader by region. Of course,
Speaker 1: there are lots of sustainable projects happening all over the world.
Speaker 1: You know, if they aren't any in your area, UM
Speaker 1: be the change you want to see, start one, make
Speaker 1: it happen, and really also, I would say, find ways
Speaker 1: to link projects for environmental sustainability and restoration with projects
Speaker 1: for human humanancipation. Find ways to like support access to
Speaker 1: you know, basic human needs within your locality. To find
Speaker 1: ways to sort of because when we speak of bioregions
Speaker 1: and you know, living within our bioregions and so on
Speaker 1: and so forth, that's all well and good, But if,
Speaker 1: for example, your region has to import whole bunch of
Speaker 1: food all the time to support the population, I think
Speaker 1: there needs to be w used to UM decrease that
Speaker 1: sort of import and to find ways to UM live
Speaker 1: sustainably within the area. Raise awareness, of course as well
Speaker 1: UM about bioregional thinking, systems thinking, social ecological thinking, and yeah,
Speaker 1: just get to we're okay anti work work for figuring
Speaker 1: these structures of more horizontal, barriginally ethical and sustainable way
Speaker 1: of life. And of course disrupt the projects that getting
Speaker 1: the way of those schools. And I see that as
Speaker 1: tentatively as I can. To avoid legal trouble. That's it.
Speaker 1: Take care of everyone and be kind to every other thing. Piece.
Speaker 1: I call the Union Hall as his male life, and
Speaker 1: there I thank these people to planning to kill Dr King.
Speaker 1: On April four, Dr Martin Luther King was shot and
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Speaker 1: was arrested. He played guilty to the crime and spent
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Speaker 1: would parade all we found a gun, the James old
Speaker 1: raybard in Birmingham that killed Dr King. Except it wasn't
Speaker 1: the gun that killed Dr. King. One of the problems
Speaker 1: that came out when I got the ray case was
Speaker 1: that some of the evidence, as far as I was concerned,
Speaker 1: did not match the circumstances. This is the MLK Tapes.
Speaker 1: The first episodes are available now. Listen on the I
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Speaker 1: Look to your children's eyes to see the true magic
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Speaker 1: Welcome to it could happen here a podcast that is
Speaker 1: remarkably today not really so much about things falling apart
Speaker 1: and is mostly about things in fact getting better and
Speaker 1: how we can do that. Um. I'm your host, Christopher.
Speaker 1: With me today is Garrison and we're also joined by
Speaker 1: Nick and Max, who are two members of the artist
Speaker 1: collective Solar Punk Surf Club who have released a very
Speaker 1: very interesting new game that we are here in part
Speaker 1: of talk about called solar Punk Features. Hello nick I, Max,
Speaker 1: How how are you doing? Hey? Doing well? Thanks? Yeah,
Speaker 1: doing great? Thanks for having us on. Yea excited to
Speaker 1: have you to on. So I guess my first question
Speaker 1: is how did you too, get into game design and
Speaker 1: sort of first have the idea to do a sort
Speaker 1: of like political gaming project like this. It's a good questions. Oh,
Speaker 1: we're not, Um, we're definitely not game designers by profession
Speaker 1: or trade. Um. We're members of the artist collective solar
Speaker 1: Punk Surf Club, and we're particularly interested in creating artwork
Speaker 1: and social practice that pre figures these kinds of egalitarian
Speaker 1: futures that we'd like to see in the world. And
Speaker 1: so this game was something that we've been kind of
Speaker 1: a project that we've been thinking about and sitting on
Speaker 1: for a little while and was kind of something that
Speaker 1: made us excited, got us excited, and we think there's
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of other reasons that we think it's
Speaker 1: a really cool, um project to work on an important project,
Speaker 1: and um, yeah, so we kind of took a took
Speaker 1: a deep dive headfirst into the world of game design
Speaker 1: and learning how to how to do that over the past.
Speaker 1: You're so okay, So how about we I guess also
Speaker 1: start with I guess explaining what solar Punk features is
Speaker 1: and sort of how it works, and then we can
Speaker 1: get into the sort of political aspect of this sort
Speaker 1: of game design project. So, solar Punk Futures is a
Speaker 1: storytelling game where players imagine pathways to a desirable future
Speaker 1: by collaboratively overcoming real world challenges. The object of the
Speaker 1: game is to collectively remember one of the stories that
Speaker 1: grew into our utopia um. The idea is that through
Speaker 1: back casting, where you assume within the context of the
Speaker 1: game that players are already in utopia and merely remembering
Speaker 1: back to their ancestors struggle, that players can transcend the
Speaker 1: idea that what currently exists must necessarily exist, which social
Speaker 1: theorists Murray book Chin described as the acid that corrodes
Speaker 1: all visionary thinking. So we wanted to make a system
Speaker 1: to facilitate collaborative performance sort of. We call it a
Speaker 1: collaborative performance of memory, but one that combines sincerity with
Speaker 1: laughter and speculative storytelling. The game also combines a lot
Speaker 1: of different elements that we saw in other games, um,
Speaker 1: collaborative you know, the collaborative storytelling, cooperative gameplay, uh, some
Speaker 1: elements of role playing, and different kind of mechanics that
Speaker 1: we thought would build out that kind of like I
Speaker 1: said earlier, those prefigurations of those egalitarian world So we're
Speaker 1: trying to you know, we're trying to make a game
Speaker 1: that had the fiction and the idea you have utopia
Speaker 1: built in uh in terms of the goals of the game,
Speaker 1: but it was also we wanted to build it into
Speaker 1: some of the mechanics of how the game is actually
Speaker 1: played too. Um. But my question from here is sort
Speaker 1: of well, I mean, I guess firstly is I think
Speaker 1: what sort of specifically drew you to solar Punk is
Speaker 1: sort of an aesthetic for for this, Like I know
Speaker 1: there's been a lot of sort of like the kind
Speaker 1: of social pology solar punk fusions, but I'm interested in
Speaker 1: what you specifically to it. So we see solar punk
Speaker 1: as a visionary utopian politics and aesthetic that critically engages
Speaker 1: the reality of capitalist catastrophe while maintaining a radical optimism
Speaker 1: about humanity's hopes for a communal, ecological future. Nick was
Speaker 1: just speaking to this um. We see it as a
Speaker 1: restorative justice process on a planetary scale among p pole
Speaker 1: between humans and non human nature. So that means reclaiming
Speaker 1: pieces of the past, pre pre capitalist culture. UM. That
Speaker 1: means material accountability for old practices, and it also means
Speaker 1: radical adaptability towards new ones. I think it provided a
Speaker 1: useful way of synthesizing several currents that we had already
Speaker 1: been thinking about and involved in between new media and
Speaker 1: social practice, thinking not just about images and objects in space,
Speaker 1: but also the set of social relations that those things produced. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we're also we're like partisans within solar punk. I don't
Speaker 1: think there's I don't think there's too many pro capitalists
Speaker 1: within solar punk, but I think there are some people
Speaker 1: who are maybe drawn to the aesthetic but don't necessarily
Speaker 1: have a politics. But we do think that there's a
Speaker 1: kind of a latent horizontalism, a latent anarchistic politics in
Speaker 1: a lot of the aesthetics around solar punk, and so
Speaker 1: uh as a as a collaborative as an aesthetic that
Speaker 1: is being defined collaboratively by people online and elsewhere. You know,
Speaker 1: we wanted to kind of stick out of position about
Speaker 1: what we thought a really realistic utopian world might look
Speaker 1: and feel like. Yeah, and I think this is something
Speaker 1: else I know YouTube I'm very passionate about. UM is
Speaker 1: about specifically using games as a medium to do this
Speaker 1: and sort of this as like this kind of storytelling
Speaker 1: membrance as a specifically political intervention. So could you talk
Speaker 1: a bit more about you know, like a yeah, you know,
Speaker 1: good questions like okay, so why this and not on
Speaker 1: you know, on this sort of less more like like
Speaker 1: why this and not Guerrilla Gardening? Why this and not
Speaker 1: some other kind of organizing etcetera, etcetera. Um. Yeahn't should
Speaker 1: hear you to say about that? Yeah, well, I'm not
Speaker 1: gonna hate on Guerrilla Gardening. I definitely think it's a
Speaker 1: both situation. Um, it's also in the game. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: It's it's one of the cards, one of the tools
Speaker 1: that you get to use as an ancestor. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think, you know, there's a lot of different things
Speaker 1: that we were thinking about when we were thinking about
Speaker 1: why a game that I got a little bit into earlier.
Speaker 1: But you know, for one, UM, I think it helps
Speaker 1: reach abroad and often deep politicized audience with a fun
Speaker 1: way to kind of engage in some thorny political questions.
Speaker 1: I think that games as a participatory medium were especially
Speaker 1: interesting for people who are interested in sort of anarchistic
Speaker 1: modes of teaching and education, in education through doing rather
Speaker 1: than lecture. Although you know, we were also read a
Speaker 1: lot of good political theories, so I'm not I'm not
Speaker 1: opposed to that. Um And then I think, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: games are also fun, and there's a lot of there's
Speaker 1: a lot of political organizing and activism work that happens
Speaker 1: out there that feels that's hard and that is necessary
Speaker 1: to do. But just because a lot of the important
Speaker 1: work to be done is hard doesn't mean everything that's
Speaker 1: hard is important. And everything that's fun is you know,
Speaker 1: trifling or not going to help us get where we're
Speaker 1: going and and overthrow capitalism and build a new world.
Speaker 1: So um, yeah, those are those are some of the reasons. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And I think that's especially sort of interesting point because
Speaker 1: I think a lot of what happens in left to
Speaker 1: spaces you get a bunch of people doing stuff and
Speaker 1: they burn not really fast because you know, you're doing
Speaker 1: an enormous amount of work. It's all miserable. A lot
Speaker 1: of the times you're getting physically assaulted, and like, I
Speaker 1: think that's one of the things that's interesting to me
Speaker 1: about this is you need other forms of sort of
Speaker 1: community building and sort of like you need other forms
Speaker 1: of organizing that do not involve you being repeatedly traumatized
Speaker 1: over and over again. And that, yeah, especially just working
Speaker 1: on something like this, and then I don't know, just
Speaker 1: playing with your friends and having having things that are
Speaker 1: like collaborative and joyful and community building is I think
Speaker 1: very important as a way to just you know, even
Speaker 1: just this is not a very basic logistical level, but
Speaker 1: prevent people from burning out. Yeah, yeah, And and I
Speaker 1: definitely think that there's a role there to prevent people
Speaker 1: from burning out and and inspiring people with some of
Speaker 1: the fun ideas, the ideas that they come up with
Speaker 1: when they're not looking at a Google doc meeting notes,
Speaker 1: but instead they're playing a card game and maybe drinking
Speaker 1: a couple of beers and they're like, oh, how would
Speaker 1: I combine guerrilla gardening and um, you know, performance art too,
Speaker 1: bring about you know, to solve a specific challenge of
Speaker 1: capitalism like deforestation or these are some of the cards
Speaker 1: in the game. Um, And so I think it can
Speaker 1: be inspiring, you know, it's also um, it can be educational.
Speaker 1: I played with some family. Uh I think the first
Speaker 1: time I played, when we got the physical copy that
Speaker 1: wasn't a play test, was with some family and they
Speaker 1: don't necessarily identify as leftists of any kind. But we
Speaker 1: had a really fun game where we explored ideas of
Speaker 1: deconstructing borders, and uh, you know they were It wasn't
Speaker 1: like I was guiding them in this direction. It was
Speaker 1: just kind of the assumption of the game that there
Speaker 1: was utopia, got beyond this ingrained capitalist realism that there
Speaker 1: just isn't that there isn't an alternative, And they're like, okay,
Speaker 1: well the game says we're already in utopia, so that
Speaker 1: means there's no private property. And I was like, whoa,
Speaker 1: that's a that's a jump I didn't expect from my
Speaker 1: from my family. One thing I'm interested in in terms
Speaker 1: of how it functions as a game is like balancing
Speaker 1: the actual more I don't know, fun based like role
Speaker 1: playing game elements with like it's kind of structure as
Speaker 1: a thought exercise, and like a world building game, like
Speaker 1: how how how do you approach trying to get a
Speaker 1: balance of like fun role playing as well as this
Speaker 1: type of like reverse world building. I was kind of
Speaker 1: I was still a little bit on the y A
Speaker 1: game in the first place question, but I'm also intrigued
Speaker 1: by the balancing fun and politics question. If you don't mind,
Speaker 1: I wanted to go back to the y A game
Speaker 1: for just a second, um, because I think maybe it
Speaker 1: will lead into this. Games are, you know, an ancient
Speaker 1: form of art. I know, I said we work in
Speaker 1: new media before, but games are actually an ancient form
Speaker 1: of art, and I would argue social practice. Um. There's
Speaker 1: a game called Senate. There's a game called the Royal
Speaker 1: Game of r which both date to five thousand years
Speaker 1: ago in ancient Egypt and ancient Mesopotamia, respectively. We did
Speaker 1: in making the game, we did a bunch of research
Speaker 1: on the history of of games. There's a fifteenth century
Speaker 1: game called the Game of the Goose from uh well,
Speaker 1: present day Italy that paired like these gorgeous illustrations, also
Speaker 1: with like didactic moral instruction. In the early early twentieth century,
Speaker 1: the Surrealists created a series of games um with the
Speaker 1: intention of breaking through traditional thought patterns and unleashing the
Speaker 1: potentials of the unconscious. They also wanted to subvert academic
Speaker 1: modes of inquiry UM. And then today, you know, some
Speaker 1: of our most popular table top games, you know, I
Speaker 1: think Nick was mentioning this earlier, how they can sometimes
Speaker 1: inscribe oppressive logics. So, you know, rather than a game
Speaker 1: where you're competing against other players to drive them into poverty,
Speaker 1: or a game where you're trying to colonize other players land,
Speaker 1: you know, for the purpose of world domination, we wanted
Speaker 1: to make a game that actually practices the cooperation, interdependence, care, consent, uh,
Speaker 1: these things that will be needed, you know, for it
Speaker 1: actually to transcend the social ecological crises of our day.
Speaker 1: And kind of to that point, you know, I would
Speaker 1: say that games always reflect the beliefs and norms of
Speaker 1: their historical context. So with Solar Punk Futures, we wanted
Speaker 1: to kind of flip the script and UM project using
Speaker 1: you know, the modalities of like speculative fiction, collaborative performance,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, the values and more is of a
Speaker 1: of a desirable future. So games are are very human thing,
Speaker 1: an ancient human thing. And why do people play games? Uh?
Speaker 1: As I mentioned, you know, education is part of it, UM,
Speaker 1: but also building social bonds is another important piece, and
Speaker 1: that always is a company. It's a very like academic
Speaker 1: way of talking about it, maybe, but it is. It
Speaker 1: is fun. It has to be fun. That's why people
Speaker 1: do it. In terms of the to get a little
Speaker 1: deeper into the balancing question, you know, every game is
Speaker 1: a balance between a bunch of different competing factors. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of people who were talking about the balance
Speaker 1: between randomness and planning in in games, and the balance
Speaker 1: um between structure and free form, and it's definitely something
Speaker 1: if there's any game designers out there thinking about making,
Speaker 1: you know, games like this, play testing it will help
Speaker 1: you so much because you know, the game in a
Speaker 1: rough form existed in the spring of last year, but
Speaker 1: playtesting really helped us refine a lot of those questions
Speaker 1: and find that kind of balance between structure and freeformness.
Speaker 1: We wanted it to be accessible to people who aren't
Speaker 1: d n D players, but we've also played with people
Speaker 1: who play a lot of D n D and GM
Speaker 1: and all this stuff, and they took it in a
Speaker 1: lot of fun and wild directions that we didn't expect.
Speaker 1: That helped inform kind of new ways that we could,
Speaker 1: you know, we added some optional rules in there for
Speaker 1: people who want to take it in a different direction
Speaker 1: or or add more complexity, or or even or for
Speaker 1: other people who need a little bit like a handhold
Speaker 1: and want to flip a coin to decide something rather
Speaker 1: than um, you know, come up with it totally on
Speaker 1: their own. So I think, um, yeah, it's a hard
Speaker 1: it's a hard thing to balance, you know, all the
Speaker 1: different factors that go into a game. But I definitely
Speaker 1: think play testing and all the people who who played
Speaker 1: with us in those early games really helped helped us
Speaker 1: figure out the right balance. And to your earlier point
Speaker 1: about burnout, like activists burnout, Um, some people who we've
Speaker 1: invited to play the game maybe have have expressed this
Speaker 1: idea of like, well, um, I'd love to, but I
Speaker 1: don't have time, And maybe maybe they they think of
Speaker 1: of gaming. And I know I've certainly been guilty of
Speaker 1: this too, of feeling like guilt over things that feel
Speaker 1: like it indulges like you should be doing the real
Speaker 1: work all the time. But you know, I think it's
Speaker 1: important to hold that in the perspective of the tradition
Speaker 1: of of feminism. Civil rights advocates, others on the left
Speaker 1: that have talked about the importance of um joy that
Speaker 1: needs to be integral to our struggles. There's the famous
Speaker 1: I'm a Goldman quip. If I can't dance, it's not
Speaker 1: my revolution. So apps, you know, these ideas of like
Speaker 1: guilt and shame or martyrdom or whatever are kind of
Speaker 1: toxic parts of the old world that we need to
Speaker 1: to let go of. UM. So, I guess this is
Speaker 1: kind of coming back to say that there's as as
Speaker 1: Nick was saying, there is an ethical, pre figurative case
Speaker 1: of um of how games can allow people to um
Speaker 1: express themselves through play, but there's also a tactical one,
Speaker 1: and that games can be a structured way of thinking
Speaker 1: about how do we create a liberated society? One everything
Speaker 1: I think is sort of interesting about well, like, I
Speaker 1: guess this is somewhat less true of tabletop games as
Speaker 1: in medium, because typical games are a lot of sort
Speaker 1: of cloud of storytelling ish stuff. But like I know,
Speaker 1: like like so, like I I play a lot of
Speaker 1: video games, right, and it's like it's like a lot
Speaker 1: of the structure of what gaming is is sort of
Speaker 1: like it basically it turned into like another job that
Speaker 1: you have and it's interesting. Yeah, you know, and you
Speaker 1: you like, you get you get the same you even
Speaker 1: get like bogo like crossover between the terminology of like
Speaker 1: like you know, like I think like grinding is like
Speaker 1: the grind. Yeah, like grind. I think I think that
Speaker 1: came from gaming first and then moved over into the
Speaker 1: weird grindset stuff. But like I think you're right, yeah yeah,
Speaker 1: and gamification, right, that's another way that like gaming is
Speaker 1: being almost like weaponized by capitalism to get squeezed just
Speaker 1: a little bit more out of everyone. Yeah, there's there's
Speaker 1: a really interesting article whose name I am forgetting because
Speaker 1: I am yeah, I um, but Vicky Oustawal wrote it
Speaker 1: like a while ago that was about how like games
Speaker 1: are like it's you know, it's it's used sort of
Speaker 1: mechanically doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Speaker 1: But it's it's a problem because it's like it's it's
Speaker 1: labor that's like too perfect. It it doesn't create anything.
Speaker 1: There's no sort of like like there's there's no sort
Speaker 1: of like um like aspect that produces like value that
Speaker 1: could be extracted. You're just sort of you're just doing
Speaker 1: a thing over and over again, and it's like and
Speaker 1: you know, and that then then that you know, becomes
Speaker 1: a problem for capital in some sense. It's why there's
Speaker 1: all these panics about like everyone being addicted to gaming,
Speaker 1: because it's like, well, okay, you're not making money for us,
Speaker 1: But I think it's interesting simulator you could be driving
Speaker 1: some actual Yeah. Yeah, but you know, I think it's
Speaker 1: interesting that this is a political intervention into that of
Speaker 1: creating something that's you know, precisely the opposite of that
Speaker 1: that it's you know, you're not sort of like it's
Speaker 1: not just like an incredible intensification of the sort of
Speaker 1: like reward systems of working. It's hey, we're gonna come
Speaker 1: together and we're gonna tell we're gonna you know, make
Speaker 1: collaborative decisions and overcome challenges. And I think I think
Speaker 1: that's a very interesting sort of political angle to come
Speaker 1: at this from. Yeah, I think a lot of a
Speaker 1: lot of tabletop games in particular, compared to video games.
Speaker 1: I think, well, i'll say, role playing games in particular
Speaker 1: put you in a driver's seat in a way that
Speaker 1: I think can is is hard, right, Like sometimes I'm
Speaker 1: too tired to or if I think, you know, I
Speaker 1: have a I have a D and D night, and
Speaker 1: I'm like, I don't know if I have the energy
Speaker 1: for this after working all day, um, whereas I might
Speaker 1: have energy to play you know, a video game RPG
Speaker 1: that kind of walks me, you know, handholds me through
Speaker 1: a story. Um, it's kind of more like watching more passive. UM.
Speaker 1: But I do think that there's I just think there's
Speaker 1: something so important about thinking through what it might be
Speaker 1: like to live in this utopian society. And it's important,
Speaker 1: I think because if we don't well, for one, a
Speaker 1: ton of people just don't even think about it. Um.
Speaker 1: And so to the extent that this game is something
Speaker 1: that gets bought or played with families of people who
Speaker 1: are you know, one of the many people who have
Speaker 1: been de politicized in this country. UM, I think that
Speaker 1: can be really helpful. But I also think that Um,
Speaker 1: I've played it and I've found really fun and exciting
Speaker 1: ideas that I wouldn't have thought about if I was
Speaker 1: staring at a power map or something and thinking where
Speaker 1: can we intervene in my city too, you know, help
Speaker 1: help solve this or that problem. So I think, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think there's power there. So I think one of
Speaker 1: the thinks I think it's interesting to me about how
Speaker 1: you tube sort of the team put this product together.
Speaker 1: And it's also like you know, so like you can
Speaker 1: buy the versions of it that have like very very
Speaker 1: nice art, but you also just put the cards and
Speaker 1: the rules up for free and you can just sort
Speaker 1: of print and play its owner. Yeah, if you could
Speaker 1: talk a bit about decision you do that democratic accessibility
Speaker 1: is really important to us. It's part of the concept
Speaker 1: that we wanted to integrate into every aspect of the
Speaker 1: game's production and distribution. And so yeah, the whole thing
Speaker 1: is available as a free print and play PDF download. UM.
Speaker 1: It's all Creative Commons licensed. UM. So that's yeah. And
Speaker 1: you know, at the same time, as you mentioned, we
Speaker 1: we uh are interested in materiality and want wanted to create, um,
Speaker 1: something that could could a company, you know, a face
Speaker 1: to face interaction as well, which is you know, frankly, well,
Speaker 1: I'll just speak for myself. That's probably more my interest. UM,
Speaker 1: even though I think you know like that we have
Speaker 1: a tabletop simulator version two, which I think is really cool.
Speaker 1: But as far as the decision to make the game,
Speaker 1: you know, free, free forever, um. We want people to play.
Speaker 1: We want it to be genuinely useful. Um, this is
Speaker 1: not a this is not a capitalistic business venture. We're
Speaker 1: running a break even budget and want to just keep
Speaker 1: doing projects and you know, elaborating like the solar punk
Speaker 1: tradition and connecting it to social, ecological, communalist politics. So
Speaker 1: if this can be a catalyst towards being able to
Speaker 1: do more of that, then um, then that's you know,
Speaker 1: we'll have we'll have succeeded on our on our terms
Speaker 1: at least. What's the satus of physical copies of how
Speaker 1: can people if they want to use cards and stuff?
Speaker 1: What is how how would want to go about getting those? Yeah,
Speaker 1: so there's a couple of different ways. People can download
Speaker 1: the free print and play if they like. If they
Speaker 1: really love it, they want to buy the physical copy.
Speaker 1: We sold out of the kind of first edition that
Speaker 1: we were able to afford to print, but we're raising
Speaker 1: money on Kickstarter for a second edition. So if people
Speaker 1: back us at a certain tier there I think it's
Speaker 1: forty five dollars or higher. Uh, you get a copy
Speaker 1: of the game when we're able to print them. Uh,
Speaker 1: And so yeah, so it's a um and of course,
Speaker 1: as Max mentioned, you can also play on tabletop simulator.
Speaker 1: But yeah, we're we're really excited about it. I think
Speaker 1: we're also hoping to take it around to some you know,
Speaker 1: political workshops, probably on Zoom for the foreseeable future, um
Speaker 1: get maybe game convention, tabletop game conventions and stuff, and
Speaker 1: also some art art shows um to be announced, to
Speaker 1: be announced, but there's a couple of art shows that
Speaker 1: we're excited to be showing it in. So um yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: One one thing I'm really excited about in terms of
Speaker 1: playing this at some point is the I think starting
Speaker 1: from the point of like you're trying to build the
Speaker 1: world now, you can really easy, it's really easy to
Speaker 1: run into ruts um starting at the end point than
Speaker 1: working backwards, I think because that produces that reverse type
Speaker 1: of thought. I think it's a little bit easier for
Speaker 1: to find the path than just starting here and looking
Speaker 1: at the world to be like, oh, how do we
Speaker 1: do anything to make it better? Instead of being at
Speaker 1: the opposite place and being like, what's what is the
Speaker 1: way to backtrack? I think can maybe give you some
Speaker 1: connections and ideas that you may not have had otherwise
Speaker 1: because we're kind of always stuck in the now, how
Speaker 1: do we get now better. So I would be very
Speaker 1: excited to try try this out at some point and
Speaker 1: uh and experience that backtrack thinking, because I think it's
Speaker 1: a Yeah, I'm really intrigued with that specific aspect of
Speaker 1: the game, because yeah, I'm sure there's gonna be a
Speaker 1: lot of solar Punk games within the next decade probably, Um,
Speaker 1: and this is one aspect that I think actually is
Speaker 1: really unique and something that's not just intrinsic to solar Punk. Um.
Speaker 1: You know, it's something that's kind of been added on.
Speaker 1: So uh, that's something I'm really excited about. And yeah,
Speaker 1: I would love to love to pick this up uh soon. Yeah,
Speaker 1: thank you for saying that. Um. I think one of
Speaker 1: the things that we hope that the game does is
Speaker 1: help people break through that capitalist realism. Yeah, like there
Speaker 1: is no alternative. It's easier to imagine the end of
Speaker 1: the world than the end of capitalism, et cetera. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, similarly, if you ask people to imagine
Speaker 1: the future, uh, it's very hard and uh and if
Speaker 1: they are able to at all, it is often extrapolating
Speaker 1: sort of the worst trends of today into a dystopian future. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I remember slightly. I remember So when when I was
Speaker 1: in I was in middle school or something, we had
Speaker 1: this society where we had to like write a you
Speaker 1: like write what are perfect like utopian society would be,
Speaker 1: and we like did it, and like three quarters of
Speaker 1: the like society people come up with were just like
Speaker 1: the worst imaginable dystopia. It was just like it's just
Speaker 1: really grim. Sort of Yeah, if I was gonna, if
Speaker 1: I was gonna make what I thought was an accurate
Speaker 1: prediction of the future, it might be more similar to
Speaker 1: the first season of this podcast, then yeah, uh, some
Speaker 1: of the hopeful futures. But I don't I also don't think.
Speaker 1: I don't think the door is closed on any kind
Speaker 1: of solar punk future. I think it's important. One of
Speaker 1: the important aspects that we included that that is that
Speaker 1: makes solar punk different than just kind of vague utopianism
Speaker 1: is that we think we ask people to also think
Speaker 1: about the barriers they run into, to think about, you
Speaker 1: know what, who's gonna who's gonna oppose you if you're
Speaker 1: trying to um, you know, deal with polluted water and
Speaker 1: you find some really great system and improve a region's
Speaker 1: water supply, you know, Nestley might come in and buy
Speaker 1: the rights to the whole region, the whole watershed. So
Speaker 1: you know, imagining those that opposition, the material conditions that
Speaker 1: might change, and how you adapt to them. We hope
Speaker 1: that's something that people also benefit from who played this
Speaker 1: game and and make some prediction ends about the strategic
Speaker 1: decisions that capital is going to make to oppose your
Speaker 1: your utopian vision. And I hope there are more solar
Speaker 1: punk games, Like you said, I hope there's a preponderance
Speaker 1: of solar punk art in the in the next decade.
Speaker 1: That would be amazing. And you know, to what you
Speaker 1: were just saying, you're right, solar punk doesn't mean the
Speaker 1: end of politics, doesn't mean the absence of conflict. Um.
Speaker 1: So I think we tried to integrate that into the game.
Speaker 1: What makes a good solar punk stories that it is
Speaker 1: plausible yet distinctly anti utopian, anti dystopian rather um it
Speaker 1: you know, provides a glimpse into a future possibility for say,
Speaker 1: the reharmonization of humans with other humans, humans with non
Speaker 1: human nature, um, and that is going to involve some
Speaker 1: amount of opposition on the one hand and reconstruction on
Speaker 1: the other. In short to to critique by building as
Speaker 1: the slogan goes all right, yeah, plugs time. What do
Speaker 1: you what do you need two have plugs? Uh? So yeah,
Speaker 1: we have an upcoming live stream on Twitch with Veterans
Speaker 1: for Peace. They have some gamers for Peace and Tuesday
Speaker 1: night on at eight p m they're gonna be playing
Speaker 1: solar Punk solar Punk Futures with us. Uh. If people
Speaker 1: are interested in the game, they can download it for
Speaker 1: print and play on our website at h T T
Speaker 1: P colon slash Slash the Future dot w TF uh
Speaker 1: and UH. People can also find a link to our
Speaker 1: kickstarter on that website if they're interested in pre ordering
Speaker 1: physical copy, which we very much appreciate. We're getting close
Speaker 1: to funded. That's very exciting. I hope, I hope, I hope.
Speaker 1: I hope it gets funded. I want to see more
Speaker 1: of these because the art is extremely cool. And yeah, well,
Speaker 1: thank you to you for coming on this. This has
Speaker 1: been it could happen here and we'll see you the
Speaker 1: next time an episode goes up. I don't know when
Speaker 1: that's gonna be right now, So yeah, wonderful extros. Hey,
Speaker 1: We'll be back Monday with more episodes every week from
Speaker 1: now until the heat Death of the universe. It could
Speaker 1: Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. Or
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Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen
Speaker 1: to podcasts. You can find sources for It could Happen Here,
Speaker 1: updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources.
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