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Speaker 1: this is a compilation episode. So every episode of the
Speaker 1: week that just happened is here in one convenient and
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Speaker 1: be nothing new here for you, but you can make
Speaker 1: your own decisions. What's meta my verse? This is it
Speaker 1: could happen here, a podcast entirely dedicated to the metaverse um,
Speaker 1: which is the promise of the human future. Um On
Speaker 1: with me as always is my co host Mark Zuckerberg.
Speaker 1: I don't I don't know how talks. I'm not sure how.
Speaker 1: I don't know who the voice you were doing? I
Speaker 1: guess he sounds like nothing like no one but the
Speaker 1: absence of a soul when it's dial up. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: what's going on inside his head in any moment when
Speaker 1: he's not actively making the Internet worse. It's just a
Speaker 1: dial tone in there. Awesome. Garrison what are we talking
Speaker 1: about today? Well, yeah, we're gonna be talking about the
Speaker 1: metaverse and how how it's different from what people talk
Speaker 1: about it as. And yeah, it's it's gonna be, it's,
Speaker 1: it's gonna it's gonna touch on a variety of things,
Speaker 1: split up into two parts. Um. But first I would
Speaker 1: like to paint you a picture with words, A word picture.
Speaker 1: So you're a wickture. Yeah, you're walking walking through your
Speaker 1: favorite grocery store. There's you know, cards passing by, horrible,
Speaker 1: horrible music playing. It's the lighting is white and and
Speaker 1: like overexposed and under exposed at the same time. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's hard, it's hard to see. And this, uh,
Speaker 1: this like a person who looks like an employee keeps
Speaker 1: keeps popping up and trying to take you to different
Speaker 1: sections of the store. You're trying to just ignore her.
Speaker 1: It's a very annoying. All you need to get is
Speaker 1: the stuff you have on a little list, and it's
Speaker 1: it's awful. Um. Eventually you get so fed up with
Speaker 1: this whole experience that you take out, You go to
Speaker 1: where the wine bottles are, You take them out, and
Speaker 1: you arrange them into a giant penis on the floor
Speaker 1: because that's the only thing you can do because you're
Speaker 1: not actually in a store. You're in your living room
Speaker 1: and you have a horrible headset on, and you're trying
Speaker 1: to do shopping in a virtual in a virtual grocery store. Um.
Speaker 1: And that's that's the actual kind of scope of what
Speaker 1: we're gonna be talking about today is virtual marketplaces and
Speaker 1: how they interact with seemingly real marketplaces. Yeah, I'm sure
Speaker 1: this is inspired by There were a couple of videos
Speaker 1: that dropped recently, one of them from I Think Walmart.
Speaker 1: We're gonna be talk We're gonna be We're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about it. So yeah, So a couple a couple
Speaker 1: of days after New Year, a video went viral across
Speaker 1: the social media's ranking up over like eleven million views
Speaker 1: on Twitter um and it was titled how Walmart envisions
Speaker 1: shopping in the mold in the metaverse. Now, So what
Speaker 1: followed was like two minutes of an embarrassing like VR jank,
Speaker 1: including like throwing around virtual gallons of milk from your
Speaker 1: cart into a virtual fridge. Many many dunks were made,
Speaker 1: fun was had, but what a few people probably realized
Speaker 1: is that like this actually this This wasn't a Walmart
Speaker 1: metaverse test store. This was actually a five year old
Speaker 1: tech demo from before non Neil Stevenson fans even knew
Speaker 1: what the term metaverse meant. So a few years back,
Speaker 1: a tech company called a Mutual Mobile partnered with Walmart
Speaker 1: for a project set to quote reimagine retails virtual reality. Now,
Speaker 1: that sounds very fancy and important, but considering this was
Speaker 1: five years ago and you're not hearing about it until now,
Speaker 1: shows how impactful this thing actually was. The first stated
Speaker 1: goal of the tech demo, according to the Mutual Mobile website,
Speaker 1: was to impress influencers at south By Southwest. So you know,
Speaker 1: just like the so called metaverse is now, this is
Speaker 1: largely a promotional project, um and a way to attract investors.
Speaker 1: This was this was never actually a serious thing. It's
Speaker 1: I'm gonna say it right now. South By Southwest was
Speaker 1: always one of the stupidest things in the world. Um,
Speaker 1: and when it comes back it will be still because
Speaker 1: it's stupid. It's a stupid place for the most insufferable
Speaker 1: people in the world to come and talk about technology.
Speaker 1: Some people also listen to music. That's fine, so yeah,
Speaker 1: for for the for the experience itself that you an
Speaker 1: original Oculus rift and programmed roughly like four minute linear
Speaker 1: um expedition into a barren, hellish digital Walmart where you
Speaker 1: pick up and throw it did it did sound exactly.
Speaker 1: My favorite thing about this video is they were clearly
Speaker 1: using the audio of some sort of like shooter game,
Speaker 1: because it was often like things would it would sound
Speaker 1: like you were in like fucking doom going through a portal,
Speaker 1: and it was extremely funny. It was bad, sound like
Speaker 1: hell you'll you'll pick up and throw fake wine bottles
Speaker 1: into your blue digital cart, and the whole thing ends
Speaker 1: with a fake drone delivering an eight hundred dollar TV
Speaker 1: that you fake purchased. It's it's not great. What Mutual
Speaker 1: Mobile and Walmart were trying to do. They have a
Speaker 1: constatement on their website back from it was they said
Speaker 1: that Walmart envisioned unvailing a fully virtual shopping experience that
Speaker 1: puts shoppers inside the store without ever leaving their homes.
Speaker 1: To attract customers and to spell the misconception that they're
Speaker 1: not as advanced as their more digital counterparts. Brick and
Speaker 1: mortar establishments are not the accelerating investments in areas like
Speaker 1: web and mobile, they're also exploring the very edge of
Speaker 1: emerging technology. Walmart of virtual reality is a case some
Speaker 1: point potential shoppers can virtually pick up products, read labels,
Speaker 1: talk to virtual associates, and fill their shopping carts. But
Speaker 1: the goal wasn't just to create something interactive. Walmart needed
Speaker 1: something that showed the potential of VR in retail while
Speaker 1: putting them ahead of the competition. So I mean this
Speaker 1: was like this was this was kind of ahead in
Speaker 1: some ways, but also ahead in the ways that it's
Speaker 1: kind of showing how not useful. This example is so
Speaker 1: obviously like this five year old video resurface now due
Speaker 1: to Zuckerberg and Epic Games, you know, forcing an astroturfed
Speaker 1: metaverse into the cultural zeitgeist, coupled with their you know,
Speaker 1: conflation of anything VR to the legendary metaverse, right, because
Speaker 1: VR does not equal metaverse, nor is it nor is
Speaker 1: it necessarily vice versa. But now these terms are getting
Speaker 1: used so interchangeably that someone can stumble across this video
Speaker 1: and be like, oh, look at this metaverse store, when
Speaker 1: like it's it's not it's just a it's just a
Speaker 1: VR tech type of the metaverse in order to be
Speaker 1: like the thing that people have been imagining through cyberpunk
Speaker 1: since like the nineties, it needs to be persistent and
Speaker 1: interact directly with the real world in a number of ways,
Speaker 1: like it It's It's it's well, we'll get into we'll
Speaker 1: get into kind of what metaverse could be in the
Speaker 1: future in terms of like the it could happen here idea,
Speaker 1: and then not just a metaverse but a series of
Speaker 1: metaverse is what they could be, and how that kind
Speaker 1: of can negates the original idea of it in the
Speaker 1: first place. But um, when asked by Vice News about
Speaker 1: the resurgence of their Walmart project, Mutual Mobile replied, the
Speaker 1: vision of a virtual shopping experience we helped Walmart realize
Speaker 1: back in seventeen stands validated in the metaverse era of today.
Speaker 1: This whole experience has only encouraged us to keep experimenting, innovating,
Speaker 1: and leading the charge with cutting edge tech. So, I mean,
Speaker 1: considering most of the virality of this was people joking
Speaker 1: about it, I yeah, sure, okay, okay, Mutual good good
Speaker 1: luck with that. So a few days after the Walmart
Speaker 1: video went viral, rumors of another big box store going
Speaker 1: Metaverse started to circulate again, accompanied by a video of
Speaker 1: a possible like three D metaverse storefront. Reports emerged, starting
Speaker 1: in India, claiming that H and M had announced that
Speaker 1: it would offer its customers a three dimensional shopping experience
Speaker 1: in its a virtual store inside the metaverse via something
Speaker 1: called Now. I don't know if it's Keik City or
Speaker 1: seek City. Um, I'm not really comfortable saying either of
Speaker 1: those things because they sound weird, but I'm gonna go.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna go with Seek City. That's it's a little
Speaker 1: bit better. I know, I know it sound, but it
Speaker 1: sounds like it's a slur. So I'm gonna say Seek
Speaker 1: but it's it's s e e k um. So this
Speaker 1: This account on on Twitter called us seek vr shared
Speaker 1: the following from it's a show Twitter account shopping in
Speaker 1: the Metaverse with seek coin concept VR store presented to
Speaker 1: H and M by Seek creates mainstream use cases for
Speaker 1: seek coin and scaling virtual reality beyond games. So I'll
Speaker 1: get into what seek is in a bit. But the
Speaker 1: report said that customers will be able to walk through
Speaker 1: the store choose the apparel they wanted to purchase in
Speaker 1: the Sikh City universe. Um. Although the clothes could only
Speaker 1: be worn in the digital environment, payment would be made
Speaker 1: with seek coin and customers could have the opportunity to
Speaker 1: order the same apparel from H and m's physical stores later.
Speaker 1: But that you're buying two separate things. One of us
Speaker 1: the digital skin, one of it's an actual, you know,
Speaker 1: real thing. Um so what a seek? Seek was launched
Speaker 1: in It's a metaverse coin pop project built on the
Speaker 1: Ethereum blockchain and their their Their goal is to connect artists, athletes,
Speaker 1: and other digital content creators directly with their fans and
Speaker 1: virtual worlds. Seeks n f T marketplaces is designed to
Speaker 1: enable real ownership in which I would actually want. That is,
Speaker 1: if it's me having a very sexual zoom chat with
Speaker 1: you know what, we don't need to Garrison, please continue, okay,
Speaker 1: quoting from subside. Seek currently offers a range of immersive
Speaker 1: VR experiences within Seek City, including theater, concert arenas, sports complex,
Speaker 1: hang out lounge, and more. There's all the things you
Speaker 1: can do in your real home, but weird and on
Speaker 1: the internet. This is horrible, and I see a potential
Speaker 1: appeal for people who are like out in the sticks
Speaker 1: or in parts of the world where they're not they
Speaker 1: feel not like they're very politically or whatever disconnected, which
Speaker 1: is the same thing the Internet already does. I'll talk
Speaker 1: about it being in VR will make it better. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I've lived in the middle of nowhere and
Speaker 1: relied on the Internet to be social, and I don't
Speaker 1: think I would have wanted to change the Internet in
Speaker 1: for this because it sounds yeah, anyway, it's I'll talk.
Speaker 1: I'll talk about use cases in a sec. But yeah,
Speaker 1: so end users will be able to use seek token
Speaker 1: to make purchases, vote for content control programming a much
Speaker 1: more after token launch, seek VR, in partnership with Universal Music,
Speaker 1: can realize live performances of world famous artists such as
Speaker 1: bon Jovi, Lady Gaga, you Tube, Sting, and many more
Speaker 1: can take place on this platform. So seek is like
Speaker 1: it's it's kind of the startup, but it's been around
Speaker 1: for a while. It's trying to do like you know,
Speaker 1: virtual venues inside the metaverse. They they do have contracts
Speaker 1: with Universal, so it's it's it's a mix of trying
Speaker 1: it's it's a mix of this coin, so it's a
Speaker 1: mix of this like cryptocurrency, also trying to use this
Speaker 1: cryptocurrency in this world they're trying to build up. Um.
Speaker 1: There their their their roadmap to metaverse right now. First
Speaker 1: thing is like payment integration, so using seek coin. They
Speaker 1: want seek coin to be the coin for everything in
Speaker 1: the metaverse. They want all metaverse be based off this
Speaker 1: thing that they invented called sea Coin because it will
Speaker 1: make them money. Um. Next thing they want to do
Speaker 1: is create a creator enabled ecosystem, so kind of copy
Speaker 1: the content creator thing we have right now, poured that
Speaker 1: into the metaverse. But again have everything you know, you
Speaker 1: can invest in your creators so you can vote on
Speaker 1: what they do using sea coins and all of we
Speaker 1: talked about like the personal ownership in the previous episode.
Speaker 1: But then a lot of it, you know, they have
Speaker 1: like an n FT marketplace, Avatar marketplaces, etcetera, etcetera. But
Speaker 1: a lot of this stuff is built around like concerts,
Speaker 1: you know, venues, you know, a lounge, movie theaters where
Speaker 1: you can do stuff in VR. That is like that
Speaker 1: is the main the main thing that Seek is trying
Speaker 1: to do. They do have this one one quote somewhere,
Speaker 1: oh yeah, the future milestone. So after they achieve this
Speaker 1: Seek metaverse where everything is ran through Seek, all of
Speaker 1: like you know what, whether you're on Oculus, whether you're
Speaker 1: on Vibe, all of it gets run through seeks. It's
Speaker 1: one one multiverse, sorry, one metaverse. Their their future milestones
Speaker 1: are quote a VR Space Academy. They do not do
Speaker 1: not say what that means, Keek Studios again kind of unclear.
Speaker 1: I'm guessing like original content. And then the last one
Speaker 1: is a blockchain metaverse alliance. Those are their those are
Speaker 1: their three big future milestones after they get there there.
Speaker 1: What was that last one? Blockchain metaverse Alliance? I mean,
Speaker 1: this was like in the Facebook thing to write the
Speaker 1: idea that we're going to integrate in f t S.
Speaker 1: But it was also clearly just like they tossed that
Speaker 1: in there on the Facebook one, there was no evidence
Speaker 1: they thought seriously about n f t S or blockchain.
Speaker 1: It was just had gotten big while they were preparing
Speaker 1: the things, so they tossed them in there. Um, I
Speaker 1: I get the idea, right, Like the thing that they
Speaker 1: keep pitching with this is that you'll be able to
Speaker 1: have an item in one game that is yours. The
Speaker 1: company doesn't own it, you can take it to other games,
Speaker 1: which anyone who makes games will tell you was fucking nonsense,
Speaker 1: it's something like that might be vaguely possible in a
Speaker 1: metaverse where everything was forced to use the same engine,
Speaker 1: um and all. Everyone was also forced to abide by
Speaker 1: a bunch of strict rules by Facebook. Um that Also,
Speaker 1: that's probably violating antitrust laws. Um and also it seems
Speaker 1: like a ridiculously Sisiphisian task with no real benefit. I
Speaker 1: don't think anyone's going to do it, but I'm guessing
Speaker 1: that's what they're referring to when they want to jam
Speaker 1: the blockchain up in the fucking metaverse. Like what else
Speaker 1: could it be? The blockchain Metaverse Alliance, all of the
Speaker 1: blockchains the metaverse is gonna aligned into. Yeah, like they
Speaker 1: don't want to put all of the metaverse stuff. You
Speaker 1: want to wear this shirt in the metaverse. So, just
Speaker 1: like the real world, the freedom, the freedom of the
Speaker 1: internet catch you feel. It's the ever expecting possibilities. I
Speaker 1: do love because they keep talking about within the context
Speaker 1: of metaverse games like you'll get to unlock a character
Speaker 1: that's just yours and nobody else can play it, and
Speaker 1: they'll have special abilities that means he wins all the time.
Speaker 1: It's like, why would people play that game? I think
Speaker 1: it was Business Insiders, someone's article talking about how need
Speaker 1: it would be for games to work this way, and like,
Speaker 1: think of all the money you'd make people wanting to
Speaker 1: watch your character wins. People don't want to just like
Speaker 1: watch a guy who's structurally unable to lose because he
Speaker 1: he bought the right character in a racing game win
Speaker 1: every race. That's not no one's going to pay to
Speaker 1: watch that. Do you understand what people watch races for?
Speaker 1: Like now, anyway, let's hear from our good friends at
Speaker 1: our products and services before we come back and talk
Speaker 1: more about seek coins. I guess I don't know. All right,
Speaker 1: we are back, So yeah, zee coins virtual reality spaces
Speaker 1: run on smart contracts through the through the Bayan's smart
Speaker 1: chain and there there there run the run through the
Speaker 1: Ethereum blockchain. UM. So the the there's about seven and
Speaker 1: seven forty four millions seek coins and supply. The maximum
Speaker 1: supply capacity is capped at one billion coins. Uh. Sea
Speaker 1: coins peaked at one one dollar and sixteen cents a
Speaker 1: year ago after launching, and around four cents um. They're
Speaker 1: currently being traded for around sixty cents. So that's that's
Speaker 1: what actual sea coins doing. Like like like people do
Speaker 1: use this, there's not many people like they. They do
Speaker 1: have these contracts with with with Universal Music. Um but
Speaker 1: before this H and M thing, I I never heard
Speaker 1: of Seek coins. Um. So, two days after the rumors
Speaker 1: began circulating that H and M was, you know, partnering
Speaker 1: with Seek, H and M said, Nope, we did not,
Speaker 1: We are we are not doing this, but they did
Speaker 1: not close the door in future possibilities. They said, uh,
Speaker 1: we we we like to we'd like to confirm that
Speaker 1: H and M is not is not opening a store
Speaker 1: in the metaverse at this time. We're also not collaborating
Speaker 1: with Seek. So the official Twitter account for Seek subsequently
Speaker 1: clarified later on that the store that they were doing
Speaker 1: was just a concept that was presented to H and
Speaker 1: M and not a not a launching virtual store yet.
Speaker 1: Um but they do. They do say that they're in
Speaker 1: discussions with H and M to make this a reality,
Speaker 1: but it's not a reality as of now. So this
Speaker 1: this kind of begs the question, like, what about a
Speaker 1: three D digital space is superior to a two D
Speaker 1: digital space for simple tasks like shopping online. So once
Speaker 1: you start, you know, unfolding questions like this about the
Speaker 1: Internet metaverse a r VR, you there are more the
Speaker 1: conternal sides to this than you would have initially estimated.
Speaker 1: Um But, first off, before we kind of have this discussion,
Speaker 1: we should split this into two categories. One for shopping
Speaker 1: for like real physical items that you plan on like
Speaker 1: receiving in person, and then digital items that don't physically
Speaker 1: exist and are just just on your computer and monitor.
Speaker 1: So obviously, like there's no clear advantage in most cases
Speaker 1: to traversing an isolated virtual environment in order to order
Speaker 1: food as opposed to just scrolling through a web page.
Speaker 1: Um But once you expand out of the confines of
Speaker 1: VRS sensory deprivation three three D technology in a r SO,
Speaker 1: augmented reality does actually have some useful prospects, including some
Speaker 1: that are already in use. Amazon and Ikea, for example,
Speaker 1: have options on their perspective websites and apps that can
Speaker 1: like project furniture options into your living space. So you
Speaker 1: can see that's the kind of thing that has some future.
Speaker 1: I think, yeah, yeah, so this is currently this is
Speaker 1: being done on your phone screen, but in a r
Speaker 1: glasses application of this actually serve its purpose quite well
Speaker 1: because something something that want yeah, pretty mediocre and these are.
Speaker 1: And that's kind of the thing the place where at
Speaker 1: I we make fun of this stuff a lot because
Speaker 1: most of its nonsense there are there are really there's
Speaker 1: a lot of potential in some of these ideas, but
Speaker 1: there's their potential for like and the same level that
Speaker 1: the air fryer has potential where it's like a thing
Speaker 1: a bunch of people will buy, but it's not. None
Speaker 1: of this yet is stuff that's going to completely change. Like, yeah,
Speaker 1: you might get a few million people to to get
Speaker 1: these glasses and or this app made this classes for
Speaker 1: a couple of reasons, but who would use this this
Speaker 1: app to like help plan out how they're setting up
Speaker 1: their houses. You might get a few million people who
Speaker 1: do that. It's not going to be like an iPod
Speaker 1: or an iPhone or or like Facebook that no one's
Speaker 1: had figured that out yet. There's there's some neat products
Speaker 1: that are going to be valuable, but we're still on
Speaker 1: the stage where nobody's under nobody's figured out fundamentally what
Speaker 1: people want from this as opposed through like tiny specific needs.
Speaker 1: In the same way that like there was a number
Speaker 1: of futurists who quite add accurately figured out with a smartphone, Like, Oh,
Speaker 1: people want a thing that will give them access to
Speaker 1: all of the knowledge and ideas in the world and
Speaker 1: also let them yell at anybody anytime they want. Like,
Speaker 1: that's something that is going to be incredibly successful, and
Speaker 1: it has and it's changed the entire world. Zuckerberg was like,
Speaker 1: people want to be able to be racist faster, and
Speaker 1: by god, we wanted it and and that was huge. Um,
Speaker 1: I don't like these are It's a good idea, like, yeah,
Speaker 1: let people scope out how their room is going to
Speaker 1: look when they're shopping or whatever through a r But
Speaker 1: we haven't yet hit that this is going to change
Speaker 1: the world, because being slightly better at using Ikea will
Speaker 1: not change the world. Yeah. I think as an avid
Speaker 1: air fryer hater, I do think comparing metaverse to the
Speaker 1: air fryer is actually which I love to say to Garrison.
Speaker 1: I know Garrison hates it when I use the air fryer.
Speaker 1: Fer mhm anti air frier action is my new tattoo.
Speaker 1: They screech like the person at the end of Invasion
Speaker 1: of the Body. But my goodness, do they cook my
Speaker 1: food faster the fry it with the air Wow? Almost
Speaker 1: like it's impossible anyway. UM. Mutual Mobiles digital marketing strategists
Speaker 1: talked with Vice after the Walrut video went viral, and
Speaker 1: he explained that like, the demo was made to show
Speaker 1: the potential of virtual reality and shopping experiences that they
Speaker 1: can have for you know, different people, UM, including its
Speaker 1: ability to connect like elderly people or people with disabilities
Speaker 1: to a shopping experience from the comfort of their own home,
Speaker 1: something that he thinks might even be you know, attractive
Speaker 1: to people who have been through several rounds of COVID quarantine.
Speaker 1: And I can kind of understand this last argument. You know,
Speaker 1: during early quarantine, I definitely used my VR headset more
Speaker 1: often than I had before. UM, and with our alienated
Speaker 1: capitalist world, I can see the use of walking around
Speaker 1: a digital store if you're stuck at home, UM, due
Speaker 1: to something like a plague, or if you know, if
Speaker 1: you have a physical or mental reason that makes you know,
Speaker 1: going to a story difficult. Because but like it's yes,
Speaker 1: this this can help that. But also this is always
Speaker 1: very engine how these types of stores are set up
Speaker 1: and how these stories like affect your brain. It's like
Speaker 1: a big part of going to the grocery store. What
Speaker 1: it's designed to do. Let's make it so that we're
Speaker 1: not just following a shopping list. There's like a structured
Speaker 1: joy of discovery. Everything about the design to the store
Speaker 1: is to get you to buy things you didn't think
Speaker 1: you needed before you walked in, and we're trained from
Speaker 1: birth to like to find this process pleasurable. So in
Speaker 1: that way, walking around a VR like wal Mart or
Speaker 1: H and M might actually make some people happy despite
Speaker 1: that being sad and dystopian if you stop and think
Speaker 1: about it, right, like, because that's that's actually like it's
Speaker 1: a it's a very capitalist thing. But it does make
Speaker 1: us happy because that's that's what we've been trained to
Speaker 1: do since we're babies. So that there's there is that
Speaker 1: side of it for in terms of like, yeah, I
Speaker 1: can see if I really don't want to leave the house,
Speaker 1: but I want to get the experience of walking through
Speaker 1: a place, maybe I will walk through a Target to
Speaker 1: get groceries. I don't know as some people maybe it
Speaker 1: might do that, but otherwise, you know, it's much It
Speaker 1: is much simpler and easier to just scroll through a
Speaker 1: two dy thing on a web page and and and
Speaker 1: and do the things you need. That's the thing. Like
Speaker 1: it's like, yeah, I mean absolutely because I I when
Speaker 1: I was making fun of one of these videos, somebody
Speaker 1: like called it out as being able list and was
Speaker 1: like thinking, all the use as this as for a
Speaker 1: disabled person, if they can use this, they can use Amazon,
Speaker 1: and like as a person who sometimes I don't shop
Speaker 1: for groceries at Amazon, but I've shop for groceries online.
Speaker 1: It's fine. The it's it's it's everything it needs to be.
Speaker 1: You can get your groceries online, and the metaverse is
Speaker 1: just going to make it like weird and off putting
Speaker 1: and unnecessarily complicated because at the moment, I can get
Speaker 1: groceries with my phone while I'm like jogging um or
Speaker 1: as I'm like sitting in traffic, or like while I'm
Speaker 1: on a zoom call listening to Garrison talk about the
Speaker 1: metaverse as opposed to putting on a headset and like
Speaker 1: doing the same thing basically as driving there, but more expensively. Anyway,
Speaker 1: are you grow for shopping? Right now? I am ordering
Speaker 1: seventred cans of ZeVA and forty pounds of raw beef.
Speaker 1: I you're it's a normal week's worth of food for
Speaker 1: me and that's literally like two days for him. See
Speaker 1: but Robert, you could be doing this while wearing a
Speaker 1: bucket on your head and walking around a fake store.
Speaker 1: I could wear a bucket on my head to the
Speaker 1: real store. They can't stop me. I usually wear a
Speaker 1: bath rob This is the first half where it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, buying actual physical items you plan to receive
Speaker 1: in stores, you know, furniture. It's actually kind of makes sense.
Speaker 1: Uh food, It's a little bit iffy. The only kind
Speaker 1: of consideration there is if people want the mental effect
Speaker 1: of walking around a store, if they find that pleasurable,
Speaker 1: then it's a thing. But you know, it's way more
Speaker 1: efficient to just scroll through your phone. Um As for
Speaker 1: the other side, buying virtual items, whether they be you know,
Speaker 1: n f t S, video game skins or super special
Speaker 1: exclusive VR hangout rooms, I don't give a funk how
Speaker 1: this works. If you want to walk around a VR
Speaker 1: vault about your VR art and your VR clothes, knock
Speaker 1: yourself out. I buy Sonic the hedgehot games. We all
Speaker 1: have our weird things we do that don't make any sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if that's if you these parcery stores are just gonna
Speaker 1: be like the seven weirdest people in the country masturbanting
Speaker 1: as they buy wine and milk. That's the thing, Robert
Speaker 1: I was when I was when I was doing the
Speaker 1: digital picture. In the beginning, I had two scenarios, one
Speaker 1: where you align the bottles into a deck. The other
Speaker 1: one I was gonna say, you take off your pants
Speaker 1: and start masturbating, and I decided not to do that one.
Speaker 1: So I'm happy that because, Yeah, that is the actual
Speaker 1: use case for this, is that someone's people are gonna
Speaker 1: be walking around these fake walmarts just all cherking off.
Speaker 1: That's what's gonna happen there. They're gonna have this animation
Speaker 1: of a real, real female employee of theirs who like
Speaker 1: pops up when you do something you're not supposed to
Speaker 1: do and explain something to you. And it's going to
Speaker 1: be impossible to remove initially, and people are going to
Speaker 1: turn it into a whole weird, horny thing, and like
Speaker 1: they will appear in all these circumstances. It's gonna go
Speaker 1: it's going to be the only thing that goes viral,
Speaker 1: Like it's gonna be the only thing people remember five
Speaker 1: years later about the first of these This is I'm
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start. Go back to this towards the end
Speaker 1: of part two. But this is the actual way to
Speaker 1: handle the metaverse, because we're gonna this this thing is
Speaker 1: going to be forced on us one way or another.
Speaker 1: We're gonna have a form of it, and honestly, the
Speaker 1: best thing we can do with it is either ignore it,
Speaker 1: ignore it, or maybe more attractively, is to funk with it.
Speaker 1: Like that's gonna be the thing, that's gonna be the
Speaker 1: thing to do. There was an article a few days
Speaker 1: ago that the headline is Final Fantasy porn interrupts Italian
Speaker 1: Senate zoom event someone someone joined in and started playing
Speaker 1: poured from Final Fantasy seven, Like this is this is
Speaker 1: to do. This is the way that we need to
Speaker 1: do it. If there's gonna be dumbass like meetings on
Speaker 1: the Zuckerberg metaverse, people need to go in and make
Speaker 1: it weirdly horny. Yeah, Garrison, I could not agree more
Speaker 1: that that's the what you need to do, citizens of
Speaker 1: the Internet is look up something awful, have h A
Speaker 1: B B O hotel. That's the kind of ship that
Speaker 1: we need to be doing in fucking um In in
Speaker 1: the there was basically a children's video game was an
Speaker 1: early kids MMO and a bunch of weird adults and
Speaker 1: something awful decided to create an unsettling cult of people
Speaker 1: who all looked identical and marched around doing all of
Speaker 1: these weird, unsettling things in a children's game. It was
Speaker 1: very fun um like or or like in a in
Speaker 1: second life when it was the new big sexy thing
Speaker 1: there was. This was very self important tech writer, investor
Speaker 1: type person who was doing a Q and A and
Speaker 1: people just like animated thousands of floating penises going around.
Speaker 1: This is this is gonna be the thing. This is
Speaker 1: what you're gonna have to do because in order because
Speaker 1: if it's gonna be this horrible corporate hell, the only
Speaker 1: way to do it. The only way to deal with
Speaker 1: that is to make it unusable for everybody so that
Speaker 1: so that it doesn't get used. And the way to
Speaker 1: do that is by putting dicks everywhere. Dicks andwhere ever
Speaker 1: decides to do a multiverse pre sentation or if one
Speaker 1: party or another has had decides to a multiverse debate,
Speaker 1: it is everyone's moral responsibility, civic duty. This goes beyond
Speaker 1: civic This is as a citizen of the human race,
Speaker 1: you know, as a member of this species. You have
Speaker 1: to try to find a way to suck it up
Speaker 1: for them. Something could be more important. So yeah, So
Speaker 1: if if you're buying digital items, do you never plan
Speaker 1: everyth even person, I don't care how you do it.
Speaker 1: Knock yourself out. We all have our weird things. I
Speaker 1: I bsonic DLCs, people do World of Warcraft. If you
Speaker 1: want to get of art piece, you can only hang
Speaker 1: in your digital room. That sounds miserable, but have fun.
Speaker 1: I I used the internet to order very off putting
Speaker 1: Danish cheese product. Oh yeah, that did happen. That was
Speaker 1: off putting. It was weird. It was like you tried
Speaker 1: to trick yourself into liking it when you were eating it,
Speaker 1: though I we I don't remember not liking it because
Speaker 1: I hate a good amount. But I've had the second
Speaker 1: Cube sitting around and I've had no desired to desired. Yeah, anyway,
Speaker 1: so I did not like it. I just I don't
Speaker 1: know that I ever want to eat it again. Quality
Speaker 1: quality audio content. So here's the thing. I have not
Speaker 1: actually been talking about the metaverse. Nothing I've mentioned thus
Speaker 1: far actually is the metaverse and doesn't have really anything
Speaker 1: to do with the metaverse. Besides the technology of a
Speaker 1: VR and a R. You know, it turns out companies
Speaker 1: like Facebook, Epic, Microsoft involved, the way they talk about
Speaker 1: the metaverse is kind of all a big lie. Like
Speaker 1: if it's not metaverse, it's a it's an astros turf
Speaker 1: to top down marketing scheme to turn more of you
Speaker 1: into data and to create and to create vinyl marketing,
Speaker 1: like that's instant instead of an interconnected solution to the
Speaker 1: alienedd bubbles of Web two, it's just a social media
Speaker 1: network that encompasses all of your vision and encourages even
Speaker 1: more digital alienation and less in person socialization. Kids, you
Speaker 1: know the worst stuff about the internet. What if it
Speaker 1: was the only thing about the Internet. What if it
Speaker 1: was encompanying everything you see instead of just a computer screen.
Speaker 1: So all of the gaming CEOs who are talking about
Speaker 1: the promise of n f T s and like, I
Speaker 1: think it was the one of the guys who runs
Speaker 1: red and I think it might have been Alexis so
Speaker 1: haney In or whatever their name is who said that
Speaker 1: like in five years of games will be n f
Speaker 1: T base because people don't like wasting their time and
Speaker 1: not getting compensated for it, Like, do you know what
Speaker 1: a game is. That's not what people. So I'm gonna
Speaker 1: I'm gonna talk more about metaverse as big tech or
Speaker 1: just bigger tech in part two. But this this, this,
Speaker 1: this will be wrapping up part one of the digital storefronts,
Speaker 1: and then we'll get into some more kind of applications
Speaker 1: of this and how we're actually seeing it in the
Speaker 1: second half. So, Robert, do you wanna Do you want
Speaker 1: to go buy a virtual uh block of Danish cheese? Um? No?
Speaker 1: I did. When I was hanging out on top of
Speaker 1: the mountain the other day, I ran into a guy
Speaker 1: flying some drones, which I normally don't like. But this
Speaker 1: guy had a VR control rig for his very nice drones.
Speaker 1: That's those are dope. I might I might get into
Speaker 1: that yet, uh, But no, I have no desire to shop.
Speaker 1: I like going to the grocery store. Ums. I do
Speaker 1: as much of my shopping that way as possible because
Speaker 1: it's soothing and uh nice and I think very human
Speaker 1: to go be around other people to get food. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's the thing, you know, and things like the pandemic
Speaker 1: where that it comes harder. I think that is where
Speaker 1: the use cases for the digital stores actually come in
Speaker 1: like theoretically, but we've never you've never seen them that
Speaker 1: feeling that's soothing, which it all just looks deeply off putting.
Speaker 1: It all. It's the problem is that it's it's stuck.
Speaker 1: It's stuck in the uncanny valley. So it's not pleasurable
Speaker 1: to be in those digital spaces because you're even though
Speaker 1: it's being marketed as a solution to alienation, it's just
Speaker 1: more alienating because it's because it's it's like very clearly
Speaker 1: exposing the alienation that we try to avoid. Um. So
Speaker 1: it falls right in the middle of the uncanny valley
Speaker 1: and it's not pleasant. But we we we we We We
Speaker 1: will talk more about that in part two. Um. If
Speaker 1: you want to follow the show on the social media's
Speaker 1: that is Cools on media and happen here pod. It
Speaker 1: can keep up with my tweets when I I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what I do on Twitter anymore. But
Speaker 1: that's hungry about tie and you can harass Robert Evers
Speaker 1: at I read Okay, that's the show, do it? Do it?
Speaker 1: Are all kill? This episode is brought to you by Wicks.
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Speaker 1: I'm Robert Lamb and I'm Joe McCormick, and we're the
Speaker 1: hosts of the science podcast Stuff to Blow Your Mind,
Speaker 1: where every week we get to explore some of the
Speaker 1: weirdest questions in the universe, like if sci fi teleportation
Speaker 1: was possible. How would it square with the multitudes of
Speaker 1: organisms that inhabit our human bodies. Can we find evidence
Speaker 1: of emotions in animals like bees, ants, and crayfish? How
Speaker 1: would it interplanetary civilization function just free will exist. Stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow Your Mind examines neurological quandaries, cosmic mysteries, evolutionary marvels,
Speaker 1: and the unders of techno history. Basically, this show is
Speaker 1: the altar where we worship the weirdness of reality. If
Speaker 1: anybody ever told you you asked the weirdest questions, it
Speaker 1: is time to come join us in the place where
Speaker 1: you belong. The Stuff to Blow your Mind podcast new
Speaker 1: episodes publish every Tuesday and Thursday, with bonus episodes on Saturdays.
Speaker 1: Listen to Stuff to Blow Your Mind on the I
Speaker 1: Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: Have you ever felt depressed about work only to have
Speaker 1: your dad be like, why you're so down? So you
Speaker 1: told him you hate your job and he said, well,
Speaker 1: you better talk yourself out of it, and then you thought, hmm,
Speaker 1: I love to talk. I could host a podcast. And
Speaker 1: then you went to Speaker from my Heart and started
Speaker 1: a podcast and got good at it. Then monetized it,
Speaker 1: then quit your boring job and told your dad thanks
Speaker 1: for the advice. And he was like, well, that's not
Speaker 1: what I meant, and I don't understand what a podcast is.
Speaker 1: But you seem happy. So that's great, kiddo. You ever
Speaker 1: do that? Well, you could at speaker dot com. That's
Speaker 1: spr e A k E R ask your dad. You
Speaker 1: actually don't time. Mark Zuckerberg, Welcome to the podcast where
Speaker 1: we talk about the metaverse. I enjoy barbecue sauce And
Speaker 1: that was Mark Zuckerberg. That was pretty good. That that
Speaker 1: is That is SNL worthy. Thank you, Garrison, because it's
Speaker 1: because it's so bad. Alright, um now part that that
Speaker 1: was my own big goal. This is this is part
Speaker 1: two of the metaverse that never was um here at
Speaker 1: it could happen here and we're actually gonna be talking
Speaker 1: about like that. It couldn't wait until we launched portions
Speaker 1: of the show and pretend we never said all this
Speaker 1: ship it's going to be the best Garrison, you know, Robert,
Speaker 1: remember remember when I was talking about um seek City
Speaker 1: and all of the virtual venues. I just I just
Speaker 1: I just got a message from our beloved parent company.
Speaker 1: I heart Media. We planned to extend UM shows into
Speaker 1: the Metaverse, which was that which was announced a few
Speaker 1: weeks ago. But I thought that the Metaverse was a
Speaker 1: pretty good idea. I think we will talk about how
Speaker 1: the metaverse could be cool later in this episode, but
Speaker 1: then we'll explain why it won't be. But yeah, I
Speaker 1: heard Media did announce the web three in the Metaverse
Speaker 1: and the newest consumer platforms for I heart media. So sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm I was just working. It's it's working in a
Speaker 1: matrix for reference there, so yes, I see what. Thank you. UM. Anyway,
Speaker 1: so I'm guessing for non Neil Stevenson fans, many of
Speaker 1: you probably had not heard of the metaverse before last year.
Speaker 1: UM VR. Sure you've heard of VR A R maybe, UM,
Speaker 1: but probably just as like niche gaming technology, you know,
Speaker 1: not not this massive, not not like a massive successor
Speaker 1: to the Internet. UM. Primarily three companies, Facebook, Epic Games,
Speaker 1: and Valve uh, the later two being mostly gaming and
Speaker 1: of our companies, UM kind of all decided the best
Speaker 1: way to push their niche VR and software technology into
Speaker 1: the zeitgeist was with this flashy new marketing, and it
Speaker 1: kind of worked. Metavers is now and many more people's
Speaker 1: like personal lexicon. But it's not really the metaverse, you know,
Speaker 1: like the Walmart thing. It's a way to attract investors
Speaker 1: and drum up free press, but it's still the same
Speaker 1: old VR and a R applications of the technology. None
Speaker 1: of these companies are trying to make metaverse a thing
Speaker 1: that we actually want or you know, working towards an interconnected, immersive,
Speaker 1: three D open source successor to the Internet. All of
Speaker 1: the different websites and services we use united under one
Speaker 1: digital roof, like a super platform that you know, is
Speaker 1: made up of all of these sub platforms. You you
Speaker 1: have social media, online gaming, and all of like the
Speaker 1: you know, ease of life apps, all accessible through the
Speaker 1: same digital space under the same digital economy. That that
Speaker 1: thing isn't happening. People like that, that's not what but
Speaker 1: with money are actually pushing towards, even though they're still
Speaker 1: using the metaverse term. Yeah. There was a great piece
Speaker 1: in Wired that came out last month as a part
Speaker 1: of their Matrix VR issue. Um. It was called the
Speaker 1: metaverse is simply big tech but bigger. It was by
Speaker 1: Cecilia di'antazio. It was so it's it's a wonderful piece
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say a quote
Speaker 1: from it right here. Um. By the mid two thousands,
Speaker 1: it became clear that money wasn't in building individual websites
Speaker 1: that we could access on the open web. It was
Speaker 1: making information sorders, channels, aggregators, and publishers open enough to
Speaker 1: scale with user generated content, but closed enough to reap
Speaker 1: enormous profits. This was the evolution from Web one to
Speaker 1: Web two. For nearly thirty years, the gravity of the
Speaker 1: consolidation has pulled the cyberspace together under the auspice of
Speaker 1: fewer and fewer corporate titans. The freaky little planets get
Speaker 1: drawn together, collide and make bigger planets clade again and
Speaker 1: make stars or even black holes. Facebook eats, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Speaker 1: Amazon swallows two dozen e commerce sites, and you're left
Speaker 1: with these few supermassive players controlling and appropriating the celestial
Speaker 1: motion of billions of users. This is how big tech
Speaker 1: got big end. Quote. So yeah, like, now we have
Speaker 1: all of our isolated toolboxes, and they really fight against
Speaker 1: any inter platform integration. You have you know, Microsoft Office,
Speaker 1: and they're they're like off their office suite. You have
Speaker 1: like Google Workspace, you have Apple's own like Air, drop
Speaker 1: Apple Pages, and finally cut pro plus the the nightmare
Speaker 1: that is Adobe's subscription tools. Like Google wants you to
Speaker 1: spend all day checking your Gmail, traveling with Google Maps,
Speaker 1: watching videos on YouTube, and browsing on Chrome. Meanwhile, your
Speaker 1: friend texts you via I message, uses Apple Maps, and
Speaker 1: calls his mom on FaceTime. This is the single person
Speaker 1: in the world uses Microsoft Edge. That is true, But
Speaker 1: like this, this of the Internet is the one that
Speaker 1: the metaverse is growing out of. Metaverse is just a
Speaker 1: way for tech companies to add VR and a R
Speaker 1: and the accompanying extra surveillance and data collection to this
Speaker 1: poor foot to like their own portfolio of proprietary products.
Speaker 1: In order for that to happened, they need to convince
Speaker 1: us that we need headsets for the next evolution of
Speaker 1: the Internet. So it's not surprising that Facebook and Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: were the first ones to crack this thing right open.
Speaker 1: It's they own not only four of the top six
Speaker 1: social media platforms, but also Oculus, which is the most
Speaker 1: popular manufacturer of VR hardware. VR has been relegated to
Speaker 1: niche gaming technology for like basically two decades, and Zuckerberg
Speaker 1: decided the best way to sell more of its headsets
Speaker 1: and software was to give the tech a fresh new
Speaker 1: paint job and call it Metaverse and like it's sort
Speaker 1: of working that there were approximately nine point four million
Speaker 1: ship min severe headsets in two thousand one, three point
Speaker 1: six million of which were done during the holiday season
Speaker 1: after Facebook's big Metaverse event. It's the affected at the
Speaker 1: quest to which is made by Oculus. A Facebook um
Speaker 1: makes up for more than three quarters of all those
Speaker 1: headsets sold. So the Democrat demographics data isn't explicitly available,
Speaker 1: but probably a lot of kids received these things as
Speaker 1: holiday gifts um Oculus Meta. Facebook does not release its
Speaker 1: via headset sales figures, but the Oculus app that that
Speaker 1: you need to have to make the headset work shot
Speaker 1: to the top spot in Apple's App Store on Christmas Day.
Speaker 1: That was the first time it's ever been in the
Speaker 1: number one app on the App Store, so indicating a
Speaker 1: spike and headsets received as holiday gifts. So they're selling
Speaker 1: a lot of headsets, like Oculus is is selling a
Speaker 1: lot of their things. Like you know, I I got
Speaker 1: one a few years ago, but you know, now there's
Speaker 1: there's there's more and more of them circulating. Um. But
Speaker 1: you know this, it's still all relegated to VR because
Speaker 1: I'm not actually metaverse. You know, arguably the closest thing
Speaker 1: we have to the actual metaverse is stuff like Roadblocks
Speaker 1: and Minecraft. Now that is still not it's I that's
Speaker 1: not immersive three D. It's you're still looking at it
Speaker 1: through a two D screen. But it is software that
Speaker 1: gives users development tools to create their own projects within
Speaker 1: this shared three D space. What separates these things and
Speaker 1: basically all attempts from making the metaverse from being the
Speaker 1: ideal metaverse is still the proprietary aspect. Everything is isolated islands.
Speaker 1: You can't take your Roadblocks game into Minecraft, right, It
Speaker 1: still is isolated to their specific things. But you know, nevertheless,
Speaker 1: robox Is CEO described the company as the shepherds of
Speaker 1: the metaverse in early and he is kind of right,
Speaker 1: and like, that's not that's not totally inaccurate. Um. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna quote again from the Wired piece by Cecilia di'antasio. Um,
Speaker 1: if Big Text unchecked growth continues, there will be multiple metaversees,
Speaker 1: if there are any at all, Each will be interoperable
Speaker 1: under one Tech Giants giant umbrella the same a Apple
Speaker 1: is both a walled garden and a convenient, habitable terrarium
Speaker 1: for its dedicated consumers. Users love the seamlessness of Apple's
Speaker 1: proprietary off porting system, the ambiguity of my message, and
Speaker 1: Apple presumably loves the commission it can charge on developers
Speaker 1: who sell apps in their app store. So Epic Games
Speaker 1: is the other big metaverse proponent right now, you know
Speaker 1: they were. They were actually making announcements about metaverse a
Speaker 1: few months before Facebook did UM and the c a
Speaker 1: l Epic Games. Tim sween Ley has been outspoken against
Speaker 1: the metaverse ran by a big tech giant like Apple.
Speaker 1: But that's not that's not really genuine because his version
Speaker 1: of the metaverse entails of cyberspace made accessible through Fortnite
Speaker 1: and Unreal Engine, two things owned by Epic Games. So like,
Speaker 1: it's not like he's not actually sincere about creating an
Speaker 1: open source thing. He just wants to be the one
Speaker 1: to control it. He's just upset that he thinks someone
Speaker 1: else might. Um. He tried to to Apple last year
Speaker 1: and and failed. UM, and the College Fornia judge told
Speaker 1: him that Epic Games seeks a systematic change which would
Speaker 1: result in a tremendous monetary gain and wealth. The lawsuit
Speaker 1: is a mechanism to challenge the policies and practices of
Speaker 1: Apple and Google, which are an impediment to Mr. Sweeney's
Speaker 1: vision of the oncoming metaverse. So it's not actually about
Speaker 1: like him being against big tech giants and being against
Speaker 1: a big tech giant wren metaverse. It's just that he
Speaker 1: doesn't like that he won't be able to make as
Speaker 1: much money with it if multiple tech companies work together
Speaker 1: to make it. Like that's that's that's really what he's
Speaker 1: concerned about. He would rather be in control of this
Speaker 1: thing um because like, yeah, it would be really interesting
Speaker 1: to see if multiple tech giants work together to create
Speaker 1: an actual successor to the Internet, like an actual like
Speaker 1: you know how the Internet is just when you open
Speaker 1: up your computer and you have access to the net.
Speaker 1: It's not it's it's not like running a specific program
Speaker 1: you get to go on all the things. It would
Speaker 1: be interesting if people actually work to it's creating that.
Speaker 1: But no, it's all about creating very isolated operating systems
Speaker 1: with a very isolated tool like tool chest, Like you
Speaker 1: can't access Steam games via the Oculus store. These things don't.
Speaker 1: These things don't work. Now you can oculus. You can
Speaker 1: use the oculus on Steam games, but not vice versa.
Speaker 1: They're making things the way they're making things because they're
Speaker 1: not trying to design a new Internet because, for one thing,
Speaker 1: the Internet wasn't designed. It was like the result of
Speaker 1: a bunch of people who were doing things that interested them,
Speaker 1: all kind of intersecting and building upon each other. And second,
Speaker 1: like the they're they're not they're making individual profit tunnels.
Speaker 1: They're not actually trying to create. Um, they're not trying
Speaker 1: to like actually trying to think about what people might
Speaker 1: want next, or what people might might want beyond the Internet.
Speaker 1: They're thinking, how what can we sell that we're not
Speaker 1: currently selling? And that's never going to be the thing
Speaker 1: that figures out. Yeah, I don't know. Yeah. On on
Speaker 1: that point, I'm gonna do one final quote from the
Speaker 1: Wired piece. Um, if if these companies dominating cyberspace did
Speaker 1: decide to collaborate simultaneously, piecing together opposite sides of the
Speaker 1: quilt to create a digital tech style, that would be
Speaker 1: very polite. But is there a world in which Microsoft, Facebook,
Speaker 1: Epic Games, Apple, uh Navidia, etcetera combine all of their
Speaker 1: valuable products captain Planet style into an architect of the
Speaker 1: metaverse under open source standards. Nobody in particular roops billions
Speaker 1: from That's sort of a tall task to overhaul your
Speaker 1: code and collaborate with your competitors. Why would three or
Speaker 1: four tech giants partner to make a metaverse when they
Speaker 1: already spent decades and billions constructing one of their own.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's it's never gonna happen. The way the
Speaker 1: way society is made, the way internetworks, that's not ever
Speaker 1: going to be a thing. Speaking of companies and things
Speaker 1: that you can buy online and advertising, here's some ads
Speaker 1: and we're back, and we're gonna talk about possibly the
Speaker 1: most successful version of air of of their techno aology.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about the actual use cases that are
Speaker 1: generating actual profit. So there is a there was a
Speaker 1: tweet a few days ago that I'm just gonna read
Speaker 1: the tweet and then then we'll talk about the implications. Um.
Speaker 1: This one very very viral. UM. I caught this very
Speaker 1: early on, though, and I started writing about it, and
Speaker 1: then a whole bunch of articles dropped on the topic.
Speaker 1: A farmer in Turkey has fitted his cows with the
Speaker 1: virtual reality goggles to make them think they're outside in
Speaker 1: summer pastures. The farmer found out that these pleasant scenes
Speaker 1: make the cows happier and produce more milk. Futures metaverse,
Speaker 1: So we're gonna talk We're gonna talk about the cow Matrix.
Speaker 1: We're gonna talk about Yeah, yeah, it is to go
Speaker 1: back in time and tell people, hey, you know that
Speaker 1: hit movie The Matrix in the future, We're going to
Speaker 1: do that, but for more milk to get k. So
Speaker 1: the thing that went viral about it that kind of
Speaker 1: broke the story for a lot of people was this
Speaker 1: farmer in Turkey with the pictures of the cows with
Speaker 1: VR goggles on them. Pretty pretty pretty fucked up. UM.
Speaker 1: But the idea and the actual technology used came from
Speaker 1: came from Russia. UM. Farmers worked together with developers of
Speaker 1: veterinarians and consultants at the Oh boy, here, here's a
Speaker 1: Russian town name, or I guess a farm name, Kragskernof.
Speaker 1: I don't know ye that, it's I think we can
Speaker 1: we can were we? I think you nailed it. It's
Speaker 1: it's it's this farm near Moscow. UM. And they teamed
Speaker 1: up so all these you know farmers, developers and vets
Speaker 1: and consultants teamed up to make this cow matrix project
Speaker 1: um and there was an official statement from the Moscow
Speaker 1: Ministry of Food and Agriculture reads the global trend towards
Speaker 1: universal computerization. The significant significantly simplifies work processes in many
Speaker 1: areas that and allows you to achieve unprecedented results. Russian
Speaker 1: milk producers keep up with the world standards and are
Speaker 1: even ready to offer the market new and unexpected solutions.
Speaker 1: On a farm in the Moscow region, a prototype of
Speaker 1: virtual reality glasses were tested to improve the conditions for
Speaker 1: keeping cows. Employees of one of the largest farms in
Speaker 1: the Moscow region, together with i T specialists, decided to
Speaker 1: conduct an experiment studying the influence of virtual reality and
Speaker 1: developed a layout of VR glasses. So the herd donned
Speaker 1: these VR systems adapted for the heads of cows. Um
Speaker 1: so and they also had to they had to to
Speaker 1: to make the imagery work. They need to tweak the
Speaker 1: color palette in the software to make it suitable for
Speaker 1: the cow's vision because cows can't see rudder green, so
Speaker 1: there's just shades of yellow and blue. So in order
Speaker 1: to replicate what grass click to them, they have to
Speaker 1: you know, change the stuff. Um. But yeah, and then
Speaker 1: they programmed a unique summer field simulation program and subjected
Speaker 1: it onto these cows. Uh. The ministry, the Russian Ministry
Speaker 1: of Out Your Culture concluded that the cow matrix does
Speaker 1: work UM. In a statement from t A a few
Speaker 1: years ago, officials said environmental conditions have significant have a
Speaker 1: significant impact on cow health and as a consequence, the
Speaker 1: equality and quantity of milk produced. So you know, like
Speaker 1: this is the thing. I I talked with, um, someone
Speaker 1: I know about this, and they're like, well, if it
Speaker 1: makes the cow like actually happier and healthier than like,
Speaker 1: what's the problem. And like the problem is is that
Speaker 1: like you're gas lighting and entire creature's reality. Like you're
Speaker 1: like you're you're you're like not consentually cass lighting their reality.
Speaker 1: And I that is I don't like that. I don't eat.
Speaker 1: Everything we do to cows is without their consent. So
Speaker 1: I it's one of those things where it's like, but
Speaker 1: we're also not gaslighting their reality and this like we're
Speaker 1: not depriving their senses of what the world is. No,
Speaker 1: this seems like an escalation in our war on the cow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so you know this other farmer in Turkey heard about
Speaker 1: this and decided to try it out on his cows.
Speaker 1: Um And yeah, the fund up cow matrix or the
Speaker 1: cow tricks does seem to do its job extracting more
Speaker 1: milk from the cow to increase profitability. Quote from quote
Speaker 1: from the farmer said, uh, we get an average twenty
Speaker 1: two liters of milk per day from the cows in
Speaker 1: our farm. The milk average of the two cows that
Speaker 1: wore the VR glasses went up to twenty seven liters.
Speaker 1: So yeah, when when When the story first broke there
Speaker 1: was the most popular article was from a site called Futurism,
Speaker 1: which made made me made me very depressive about this
Speaker 1: about futurismism Garrison. Yeah, and it made me mad enough
Speaker 1: that I'm going to read some of its to you.
Speaker 1: Thank god, I haven't been angry in seconds. That cows
Speaker 1: produced more milk when VR makes them think they're in
Speaker 1: beautiful green pastures. Proves that keeping them in agriculture environments
Speaker 1: isn't healthy nor does it make them happy. Putting them
Speaker 1: in a cow matrix does sound a little grim, yes,
Speaker 1: but you can't argue with the results. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: I can I say you actually can. If all this
Speaker 1: has shown is that like potentially, if you put cows
Speaker 1: in this thing during the winter, when it's not sunny
Speaker 1: and bright outside, then they are happier. This is not
Speaker 1: shown that, for example, taking all cows out of pastures
Speaker 1: and sticking them in matrix boxes would make them because
Speaker 1: the thing is they're not they're on pastors. They're in
Speaker 1: little jail cells with VR goggles on their head. So
Speaker 1: like it's that that was that was the use case.
Speaker 1: And like the quote from the farmers, like they're watching
Speaker 1: green pasture and it gives them an emotional boost. They
Speaker 1: are less stressed. Um. And the farmers that he plans
Speaker 1: to be plans to buy ten more It's like you
Speaker 1: can spend thousands of dollars on specialized cal VR headsets, Um,
Speaker 1: or you can you know, like use that money to
Speaker 1: buy more land for the cows to spread out. And
Speaker 1: if we're at that point in society that in order
Speaker 1: to make in order to in order to make enough
Speaker 1: cow milk, we need to gaslight cows by overruling their
Speaker 1: senses with a clunky of your headset on their little
Speaker 1: fuzzy faces. Maybe we should start having milk, Maybe we
Speaker 1: should like maybe that's it, Like if we require this
Speaker 1: to have milk in our cereal, then nope, no more,
Speaker 1: not not gonna. I'm not gonna do that. I refuse.
Speaker 1: That's not like it's already And if you practice, if
Speaker 1: you don't buy milk like like locally from a farm,
Speaker 1: you know, so if we're doing this, that just like
Speaker 1: immediately checks me out of every like, no, I'm just
Speaker 1: fully fully not. Yeah, I think that's kind of evil.
Speaker 1: I think that's kind of evil. Like the whole industry
Speaker 1: way by which we produce meat at scale is pretty evil.
Speaker 1: But that's an escalation. It's it's the specific thing of
Speaker 1: like of of of overruling their reality and senses um
Speaker 1: of another living creature like that is for some reason,
Speaker 1: for some reason, that that send them into a way
Speaker 1: in order for you to get like meat, And that's
Speaker 1: just like turning them into food, but like making their
Speaker 1: living really shitty and then making trying to trick them
Speaker 1: to thinking they're not. Yeah, it's even worse than just
Speaker 1: having them live in shitty conditions, I think from an
Speaker 1: as standpoint, And maybe it's more pleasant for the animal,
Speaker 1: but from like our standpoint, it's worse to me. Yep.
Speaker 1: So speaking of uh, I don't know, don't cows? Is
Speaker 1: there some segway that we can work this in? You
Speaker 1: know what does essentially force you to live in an
Speaker 1: alternate reality that allows you to be more productive for
Speaker 1: the people who make money based on your existence buying
Speaker 1: these products and services that supporting this podcast. I was
Speaker 1: just gonna say podcasts in general do that. But yes, cool,
Speaker 1: al Right, we are back and my last, my last
Speaker 1: big section here is titled we are the Cows. So
Speaker 1: this is that's gonna that's gonna give you a sense
Speaker 1: of how of how we're going to talk about what
Speaker 1: so what what? What the cow Tricks really demonstrates, though,
Speaker 1: is that the end goal of all this is to
Speaker 1: make us the cow? Right? You know we we and
Speaker 1: we already are to some degree with like the Internet
Speaker 1: and smart and smartphones. But this is more. This is
Speaker 1: an escalation, right like the people, the ghoules, that Silicon
Speaker 1: Valley and you know, the whole tech world want they
Speaker 1: want a world where we are forced to don hardware
Speaker 1: rigs that block out our body's senses and replace the
Speaker 1: input with digital coded counterfeit. That's that's an Internet that
Speaker 1: tries to convince you that you're inside of it and
Speaker 1: it is inside of you. That that's that's that's that
Speaker 1: is what they want. Really, Like, even if we get
Speaker 1: the metaverse that I would prefer, you know, like the
Speaker 1: mythical open source, interconnected successor to the Internet with all
Speaker 1: these different websites, tools and games that I like all
Speaker 1: together and intuitively accessible through a share digital space. Even
Speaker 1: if we get that, like, which we won't, And if
Speaker 1: there's safeguards to protect digital privacy that are built in,
Speaker 1: which there wouldn't be, that doesn't actually make the real
Speaker 1: world much better. Like in my opinion, air technology specifically
Speaker 1: could be really cool, um, but but redesigning the world
Speaker 1: to require headsets, goggles or air glasses would suck, Like now,
Speaker 1: not only for people who can't get the technology right.
Speaker 1: If if we redesign the world to be like the
Speaker 1: only way to interact with systems is through this digital lens,
Speaker 1: that's gonna suck. We we now we already had that
Speaker 1: does some degree with smartphones on the Internet, but this
Speaker 1: is another escalation of it. And again, like like the cow,
Speaker 1: it's just gonna be a way to paint over our
Speaker 1: late capitalist climate disaster of a world. Uh. Metaverse is
Speaker 1: a tech capitalist solution to our current and pressing political
Speaker 1: and ontological problems. And I have to used the bathroom
Speaker 1: really badly. Well, I'll talk for a little while. I
Speaker 1: think a big part of what Garrison is saying is
Speaker 1: that instead of relying on these tech industry goougles to
Speaker 1: build the future for you, which is a future in
Speaker 1: which they sell you away to hide from the hell
Speaker 1: that they have made of the world and others like
Speaker 1: them have made of the world. Instead of doing that,
Speaker 1: you've just spend the rest of your life listening to podcasts.
Speaker 1: Put put blinders on over your eyes, cover up all
Speaker 1: of your senses but your ears, and just exist forever
Speaker 1: in a concoon made entirely of my voice and occasionally
Speaker 1: Garrison and Chris's and Sophie's voice, but mainly my voice.
Speaker 1: And they're saying, not listen to just any podcast but
Speaker 1: podcasts that you benefit from. I don't think people should
Speaker 1: listen to any podcasts that I don't do. That doesn't
Speaker 1: seem right. So where's my angle on that? Huh? I
Speaker 1: don't know. Um, I don't know how long we should
Speaker 1: vamp while Garrison just leaves in the middle. I really
Speaker 1: need to I really needed to see. Well, it's okay.
Speaker 1: I just told everybody that we're the metaverse. Now, Garrison
Speaker 1: our contact. I drink so much coffee this morning. It
Speaker 1: was a problem. Okay. In similar to all this, you know,
Speaker 1: remember the John Carmike interview from Yes That's such a bumber,
Speaker 1: the Doom co creator and former CTO of Ovoculus, Yes
Speaker 1: these bodies are a curse job on the journoun Show.
Speaker 1: He openly said the promise of yr is to make
Speaker 1: the world you wanted. It is not possible on Earth
Speaker 1: to give everyone what they would want. Not everyone can
Speaker 1: have Richard Branson private islands. People react negatively to any
Speaker 1: talk of economics, but it's a resource allocation. You have
Speaker 1: to make decisions about where things go. Economically, you can
Speaker 1: deliver a lot more value to a lot more people.
Speaker 1: In the virtual sense, we can have virtual devices that
Speaker 1: can get cheap enough that lots and lots of people
Speaker 1: will be able to have these. Not everyone can have
Speaker 1: a mention, Not everyone can have a home theater. These
Speaker 1: are things we can simulate, though to some degree in
Speaker 1: virtual reality, the simulation is not as good as the
Speaker 1: as the real thing. If you're rich, you probably have
Speaker 1: your own home theater or mentioned in private island. Good
Speaker 1: for you. You're probably not the people who's going to
Speaker 1: benefit the most from this thing. Most of the people
Speaker 1: in a world lived in cramped quarters and are not,
Speaker 1: and they wouldn't and that's not what they would choose
Speaker 1: to be and if they had a limited resources. There's
Speaker 1: this piece of art that goes around the internet. It's
Speaker 1: this dystopian kid in a corner drooling with goggles on,
Speaker 1: with like rainbow pictures. But it's a terrible looking place,
Speaker 1: and people say, this is the world you're trying to build,
Speaker 1: people plugged into virtual reality and ignoring the world around them,
Speaker 1: And Carmacs responses and encouraging. He says, but is his
Speaker 1: life really better off if he takes the goggles off
Speaker 1: and he's in the horrible place? So I I think
Speaker 1: Carmack really has convinced himself that virtual reality is a
Speaker 1: path to making the world a better place. In the interview,
Speaker 1: he compares VR to the invention of like air conditioning.
Speaker 1: He says, like I live in Dallas, it's a hundred
Speaker 1: degrees here. We change the world around us in all
Speaker 1: that we do. We live in air conditioning. People don't
Speaker 1: generally go, oh, you're not experiencing the world around you
Speaker 1: because of air conditioning. This is what human beings do.
Speaker 1: We bend the world to our will, and this is
Speaker 1: how things get better by building, by building techn oology
Speaker 1: and distributing them to people so that they have something
Speaker 1: better than what we would they would have if they
Speaker 1: didn't exist. Now, if you dig into what he's saying,
Speaker 1: here's actually a few interesting things. Because for one, yeah,
Speaker 1: air conditioning is actually kind of bad, like the way
Speaker 1: we're using it and whatever presents it is a band
Speaker 1: aid solution to our continual problem of heating up the earth,
Speaker 1: and it's making the problem worse every single day. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And honestly it's it's yeah, it's like it's like a
Speaker 1: band aid that also makes the problem worse because a
Speaker 1: C contributes to a lot of energy. Shit. But you know,
Speaker 1: air conditioning is also an actual material change, right, like
Speaker 1: it can it can actually help people not die due
Speaker 1: to heat. The metaverseon VR has talked about does not
Speaker 1: improve a middle to lower class person's material conditions, and
Speaker 1: to say so demonstrates how disconnected these tech bros. Are
Speaker 1: from a regular person's reality. The metaphors and VR and
Speaker 1: like virtual worlds are going to be built based on
Speaker 1: the perception of reality held by those who create them.
Speaker 1: That's why we're getting shitty digital private movie theaters, make
Speaker 1: mentions and metaverse concerts and h and M n F
Speaker 1: T stores. They're giving us a simulated version of the
Speaker 1: world that they actually get to live in for real.
Speaker 1: But we can refuse this. We we don't need to
Speaker 1: take them up on this offer. If we're gonna be
Speaker 1: stuck with with multiple proprietary branded meta verses that are
Speaker 1: made by rich tech bros To mirror a world that
Speaker 1: the that the rich tech bro gets to live in,
Speaker 1: the best thing we can do is funk with it.
Speaker 1: We can sabotage it from the inside. We need to
Speaker 1: spam floating dicks at a metaverse concert. This is the
Speaker 1: actual thing that needs to happen, because look, we all
Speaker 1: know terrorism is fun, right, everybody loves terrorism, but there's
Speaker 1: horrible consequences for doing it in the real world. In
Speaker 1: the metaverse, there's no laws against terrorism. Yet you can
Speaker 1: terrorize however you want in the metaverse, and it's just trolling.
Speaker 1: And that's fine, so do that much of it as
Speaker 1: possible until they make it illegal. The concept that would
Speaker 1: go really well with this type of thing is the
Speaker 1: poet terrorism concept of this applies like perfectly to this
Speaker 1: idea of how we need to funk with these digital
Speaker 1: spaces that are trying to be created, because yeah, like
Speaker 1: they're like they're pretty bad. During one Bitcoin consumed all
Speaker 1: of the electrical energy um by equivalent to a country
Speaker 1: like Argentina um in the Bitcoin network handled like nineties
Speaker 1: seven million transactions, so this is roughly zero point zero
Speaker 1: one two per cent of the worldwide volume of non
Speaker 1: cash transactions. But bitcoin was responsible for zero point five
Speaker 1: four of global electricity consumption on total, which is astronomical,
Speaker 1: Like that's all like that's it's either it's ridiculate on average,
Speaker 1: that's like uh like thirteen hundred kill about hours poor
Speaker 1: per bitcoin transaction, which is so much energy. The power
Speaker 1: consumed by a single Bitcoin transaction on average could power
Speaker 1: an average US household for one and a half months.
Speaker 1: It's it is ridiculous how much and how much it's
Speaker 1: getting used. And they're trying to build, you know, like
Speaker 1: the Sek City thing. They're trying to build this metaverse
Speaker 1: off of Crypto, which they're like, I'm sad because like,
Speaker 1: crypto could be really similar to the metaverse. Crypto could
Speaker 1: be really rad, Like crypto could be an actually super
Speaker 1: red thing, but the way it's being used right now
Speaker 1: is really environmentally damaging. UM and this this linking of
Speaker 1: Web three, you know, the mythical Web three and the
Speaker 1: metaverse to crypto is showing like, yeah, it's it's is
Speaker 1: kind of like the band aid solution, where it's not
Speaker 1: it's it's, it's not it's not actually fixing the problem,
Speaker 1: and it's kind of making the problem worse because they're
Speaker 1: so set on linking it to crypto right now that
Speaker 1: it's it sucks, like it it's it's, it's it's gonna happen,
Speaker 1: It's gonna suck. What you can do is you can
Speaker 1: spam Final Fantasy seven porn, you can spam Sonic, the
Speaker 1: Hedgehog feet picks. This is this is the only tool
Speaker 1: we have. But save for actual terrorism, which we're not
Speaker 1: gonna talk about on this podcast, you can, but we
Speaker 1: can't got a poetic terrorism. That is something that you
Speaker 1: can do. You can funk with these systems from the
Speaker 1: inside and make them unusable and that's that's really the
Speaker 1: only thing. And that's what I'm gonna do in my
Speaker 1: spare time because it's fine. Yeah, um, do do poetic
Speaker 1: terrorism in the metaverse. Um, go funk it up for them.
Speaker 1: Um and maybe in the process, here's my dream, garrison
Speaker 1: that perhaps in the process of sucking it up for them,
Speaker 1: we build something that we actually like. That's the thing, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that is similar to how the Internet kind of got
Speaker 1: originally created. Of course, now it's turned into this hellscape,
Speaker 1: but that'll probably that will probably happen anyway ten years
Speaker 1: or more for the meta but we can get a
Speaker 1: little bit of fun out of it and we can
Speaker 1: have some fun with it like we did on the
Speaker 1: Internet for a couple of years or it all got
Speaker 1: real bad. So that is that is the metaverse that
Speaker 1: doesn't exist. Um and yeah, So fight against the cow
Speaker 1: matrix as best as you can. Do your best out
Speaker 1: go the city for the house at the top the world.
Speaker 1: Make a cowsy on. It's up to us. This is depressing, alright,
Speaker 1: that's the episode. Look for your children's eyes to see
Speaker 1: the true magic of a forest. It's a storybook world
Speaker 1: for them. You look and see a tree, They see
Speaker 1: the wrinkled face of a wizard with arms outstretched to
Speaker 1: the sky. They see treasure and pebbles. They see a
Speaker 1: windy path that could lead to adventure, and they see you.
Speaker 1: They're fearless. Guide. Is this fascinating world? Find a forest
Speaker 1: near you and start exploring and discover the forest. Dot
Speaker 1: Org brought to you by the United States Forest Service
Speaker 1: and the AD Council. Hello, Hello, Hey. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you hurt, but my podcast Checking It has been
Speaker 1: nominated for the d a CP Image Award in the
Speaker 1: category of Outstanding Lifestyle and Self Help Podcast. I'm grateful
Speaker 1: for the nomination. I I almost didn't even do a
Speaker 1: podcast because I was just wandering. There are thousands of
Speaker 1: podcasts out there and why is my voice needed. But
Speaker 1: a nomination from the end of a CP lets me
Speaker 1: know that I made the right choice, and I encourage
Speaker 1: you to do. Don't worry if there are thousands of
Speaker 1: something else that you want to do. No nobody has
Speaker 1: your sauce, so listen. You can still vote. Go to
Speaker 1: vote dot in double a CP Image Awards dot net.
Speaker 1: You have until February five, um nine pm Eastern Standard time,
Speaker 1: and please Listen to my podcast. We're part of the
Speaker 1: Black Effect podcast Network on the I Heart Radio app
Speaker 1: or wherever you get your podcast. Thank you for checking in.
Speaker 1: Conquer your new year's resolution to be more productive with
Speaker 1: the Before Breakfast podcast. In each bite sized daily episode,
Speaker 1: time Management and Productivity at Expert Laura Vanderkam teaches you
Speaker 1: how to make the most of your time, both at
Speaker 1: work and at home. These are the practical suggestions you
Speaker 1: need to get more done with your day. Just as
Speaker 1: lifting weights keeps our body strong as we age, learning
Speaker 1: new skills is the mental equivalent of pumping iron. Listen
Speaker 1: to Before Breakfast wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to
Speaker 1: It Could Happen Here, a show about things falling apart
Speaker 1: and how to maybe put them back together a little
Speaker 1: bit better than they were before. I am Robert Evans,
Speaker 1: and with me this week is I guess I'm very
Speaker 1: excited about Chris Begley, author of the Next Apocalypse, The
Speaker 1: Art and Science of Survival. Chris. Welcome to the show.
Speaker 1: Thank you now, Chris. Before we get into the meat
Speaker 1: of our discussion, I have to talk about what you
Speaker 1: do for a living, because for years and years it
Speaker 1: was my job to go around the world. I talked
Speaker 1: to people and pretty much very continent about their different
Speaker 1: interesting jobs. So I've I've talked interviewed everybody from like
Speaker 1: Bravo workers in Nevada to Iraqi counter terrorism special forces
Speaker 1: in Iraq. And you have probably the coolest job title
Speaker 1: if anybody I've met. You're an underwater archaeologist. That's right.
Speaker 1: How did you? Um? How did you? I mean? Was
Speaker 1: that was it just kind of like were you kind
Speaker 1: of laser focused on that goal or was it more
Speaker 1: you were interested in archaeology and you loved diving, and
Speaker 1: so the two just kind of made sense together. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: I started out as ah what now called a terrestrial archaeologist,
Speaker 1: you know, working on the land as most people do,
Speaker 1: and worked for years in Central America. Honduras was my focus,
Speaker 1: as you saw in the book, but other other places
Speaker 1: uh nearby as well, And really it was about I
Speaker 1: would say, I don't know, twelve thirteen, fourteen years ago.
Speaker 1: I wanted to just branch out and little bit from that.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that that all archaeologists have
Speaker 1: seen is that you know, there are certain things that
Speaker 1: really just aren't as explored as other things, and one
Speaker 1: was all of the archaeological resources underwater. I mean, we
Speaker 1: hear about underwater archaeology or maritime archaeology in the Mediterranean, right,
Speaker 1: you know, a Roman shipwrecks and all that, But there
Speaker 1: are big chunks of the world where we've done very
Speaker 1: little to see what's out there, you know. And one
Speaker 1: other interesting thing about that is there are many different
Speaker 1: things you could look at underwater, but often we look
Speaker 1: at shipwrecks. And shipwrecks are different from regular archaeological sites
Speaker 1: because you know, shipwreck is a moment in time that
Speaker 1: all happened in in one instance, and so when we're
Speaker 1: looking at that kind of archaeological site, we see this
Speaker 1: snapshot that we don't see when we look at a
Speaker 1: place that was occupied over hundreds of years. So you know.
Speaker 1: So yeah, so that wasn't my focus, but it became, uh,
Speaker 1: sort of somewhere I wanted to go as I learn
Speaker 1: more about And one of the things I find really interesting,
Speaker 1: the basic thrust of your book is that the way
Speaker 1: in which we think about civilizations falling or collapsing or
Speaker 1: how however you you know, the ways in which folks
Speaker 1: tend to discuss that when we're talking about the Maya
Speaker 1: or the Romans. Um is very different from what archaeologists
Speaker 1: who tend to study these cultures how they tend to
Speaker 1: perceive of of what you might more accurately call a
Speaker 1: decline or or you know, a decentralization or whatever. I
Speaker 1: think there's a number of terms that we could use.
Speaker 1: But these ideas that like you have these civilizations and
Speaker 1: then they suddenly fall apart um are not really based
Speaker 1: in rigorous historical analysis usually. UM. There's some cases as
Speaker 1: as you go into the book, UM, and I'm I'm
Speaker 1: I'm interested in that because you're kind of coming at
Speaker 1: from a very rigorous historical standpoint in this book, UM,
Speaker 1: a lot of the stuff that we talked about on
Speaker 1: on this show in a more contemporary sense. And I'm
Speaker 1: kind of wondering how the idea to write this sort
Speaker 1: of came together because you started it before the COVID
Speaker 1: nineteen pandemic. Obviously that had an impact on the book.
Speaker 1: It's it's it's all over there, yeah yeah, UM, well,
Speaker 1: I've I was. One of the things that I do
Speaker 1: is teach the wilderness survival courses and UM, and I
Speaker 1: don't do that as frequently as some people that that
Speaker 1: sort of dedicate themselves to that do but but but
Speaker 1: I do it fairly frequently. And um, it became obvious
Speaker 1: to me over time that people were taking these courses
Speaker 1: not just to learn how to deal with being lost
Speaker 1: out in the wilderness, which is sort of was my vision.
Speaker 1: What do you do if you unexpectedly have to spend
Speaker 1: a night out in the woods or or two or three. Um,
Speaker 1: they were really thinking about what about do when things
Speaker 1: fall apart? How do I take care of myself? How
Speaker 1: do I take care of my family using these skills
Speaker 1: that you could use in a situation where things had
Speaker 1: fallen apart? And that sort of oriented me towards the
Speaker 1: fact that you know, people were worrying about the future.
Speaker 1: I mean I could see it. I could see it
Speaker 1: in my students at university. I could see it you know,
Speaker 1: in the people's faces at the supermarket. You know, there
Speaker 1: was something going on there that was um uh, there
Speaker 1: was concerning people, and a lot of it had to
Speaker 1: do with climate change, and that I think was was
Speaker 1: the focus initially for me writing this um because what
Speaker 1: I saw was you know, sort of the prepper community
Speaker 1: and survivalist community looking at things that really seemed to
Speaker 1: be short term and didn't at all focus on what
Speaker 1: we really saw historically. So I think that my um
Speaker 1: my initial motive to motivation to write this was really
Speaker 1: just seeing this concern that was that was growing among
Speaker 1: people about what the future is going to look like.
Speaker 1: And then of course COVID hit and that that that
Speaker 1: really brought all this to the to the forefront. And
Speaker 1: are there any specific ways in your mind that you
Speaker 1: can you kind of think on how COVID altered what
Speaker 1: you were what you were writing, or how you conceived
Speaker 1: of what you were writing. Like once you you know,
Speaker 1: you you have this kind of vision that's inspired by
Speaker 1: the things that you're seeing and hearing, particularly in these
Speaker 1: wilderness survival courses, and then as you get started, we
Speaker 1: have this horrible, horrible plague hit and a number of
Speaker 1: of of things start to happen very quickly. How does
Speaker 1: that kind of alter the trajectory of what you're writing? Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess the you know, the there were some just
Speaker 1: sort of practical logistical things obviously, right, Uh, some things
Speaker 1: that I intended to do or ways that I had
Speaker 1: hoped to interact with folks in the course of interviewing
Speaker 1: people for the book or writing it, you know, wasn't
Speaker 1: going to be possible. But in terms of thinking about
Speaker 1: how things happened, the big thing for me was, um,
Speaker 1: how it became politicized so quickly. You know, that was
Speaker 1: you know in the um you know you know, well,
Speaker 1: now you see all of the memes you know, uh
Speaker 1: talking about the zombie movies where half the population doesn't
Speaker 1: believe their zombies or something. You know, that was never
Speaker 1: really on the radar, at least not on my radar before.
Speaker 1: And so now um, um, you know it is because clearly,
Speaker 1: not only do these things happen and then you have
Speaker 1: a group of people that are dealing with it, you
Speaker 1: have obviously the dynamics within the group, which which of
Speaker 1: course we knew, but to see it play out in
Speaker 1: this way, in this sort of dramatic way, that really
Speaker 1: altered the course of history. I mean, the pandemic could
Speaker 1: have turned out, uh, you know differently, but it didn't.
Speaker 1: And part of the reason that didn't was because of
Speaker 1: the way folks reacted to it. And I'm wondering because
Speaker 1: a part a chunk of your career, in a big
Speaker 1: chunk of this book is kind of looking at in
Speaker 1: places like Honduras where these these civilizations entered decline, and
Speaker 1: in some cases it was very sharp, like within a
Speaker 1: fairly short period of time, ninety percent of the population
Speaker 1: leaves or you know, UH is deceased. UM. And you
Speaker 1: you see like the crumbling of a lot of these
Speaker 1: governmental institutions and whatnot that had had organized life for
Speaker 1: a while. You see the pretty significant migrations. UM. Is
Speaker 1: there any ways in which kind of the last two
Speaker 1: years as an archaeologist has changed or informed how you
Speaker 1: were thinking about um, these places that you've been you've
Speaker 1: been studying, in these moments in history that you've been
Speaker 1: studying for so long. Yeah, in some ways it brings
Speaker 1: some of it into a little sharper focus. For instance,
Speaker 1: you know, one of the things it that archaeologists had
Speaker 1: long talked about was that during these declines or these collapses,
Speaker 1: that it's uneven. It's not equal for everybody. It's not
Speaker 1: equal over space and time, and certainly depending on your
Speaker 1: position in society. UM, there's different ways in which it
Speaker 1: it plays out for you, UM. You know, and that's
Speaker 1: something that we see. We see it from UM. You know,
Speaker 1: access to vaccines to UM. Well, I mean, even things
Speaker 1: like you know, if we think about folks that are unvaccinated,
Speaker 1: Now there's a you know, a chunk of those people
Speaker 1: that are doing it for a sort of political reasons
Speaker 1: or other ideological reason. But there's also a big, uh,
Speaker 1: a big group of those folks that are doing it
Speaker 1: because history shows that they should be wary of anything
Speaker 1: that UH society he tries to do to them. And so,
Speaker 1: you know, you have these these things playing out for
Speaker 1: different ways for um, you know, people from different regions
Speaker 1: of the country or political orientations or race or ethnicity
Speaker 1: or um, you know, a whole variety of things. And
Speaker 1: so seeing how uneven it was the pandemic UH makes
Speaker 1: me think that, you know, it certainly was that way then. UH.
Speaker 1: The other thing that we see when we look archaeologically
Speaker 1: is that it's these big structures or systems that collapse.
Speaker 1: That really is the collapse and the things that cause
Speaker 1: it initially, whether it's I don't know, deforestation or drought
Speaker 1: or warfare or even a natural disaster of some sort
Speaker 1: um that really it's the way people respond to those
Speaker 1: and the way these uh systems deal with those changes
Speaker 1: that really creates the problems that you see later on.
Speaker 1: And we can see that now. For instance, one of
Speaker 1: the things that we're talking a lot now about his
Speaker 1: supply chain issues, right, And this is a result of COVID,
Speaker 1: But it's not a direct result. I mean, it's not
Speaker 1: because the crews on the ships are at the ports
Speaker 1: or truck drivers have uh are sick. It's because of
Speaker 1: the ways in which all of this disrupted things, and
Speaker 1: especially when we get these really efficient but inflexible systems,
Speaker 1: like a lot of our shipping system was um, these
Speaker 1: disruptions result in really big changes. So you know, you
Speaker 1: have these huge ships that can only dock a few ports.
Speaker 1: Once that gets backed up, you can't really shift and adjust.
Speaker 1: And so that's I think for me, just a lot
Speaker 1: of it is seeing it play out where we see
Speaker 1: the fact that we have something that sets it all off,
Speaker 1: but then we have the response of the system or
Speaker 1: the structure that really creates the day to day impact.
Speaker 1: I suspect a big part of kind of why we
Speaker 1: conceive popularly of of quote unquote collapses in the past
Speaker 1: is based on, as you talk about extensively in your book,
Speaker 1: the way in which we look at it kind of
Speaker 1: in fiction, and in fiction it's nearly always like the
Speaker 1: societal equivalent of a bullet in the head. Right you
Speaker 1: the zombie plague is out, and then a couple of
Speaker 1: days everything's fallen apart. And the point that you make
Speaker 1: in this is that it's probably I mean, this isn't
Speaker 1: exactly the phrase, but it's probably better to look at
Speaker 1: it kind of like it's like a tumor or something
Speaker 1: where the things are set in motion that are going
Speaker 1: to lead to things falling apart much much, um, at
Speaker 1: a point before a lot of people probably would have
Speaker 1: noticed it. You know, the problem can be too are
Speaker 1: gone um before it's really obvious. Um. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's that's a good point. And that's the that's
Speaker 1: really something that you know, even with COVID, it shows that,
Speaker 1: right Um. You know, the problems are not only the
Speaker 1: existence or the appearance of this virus, but first of all,
Speaker 1: how did it appear? And that has to do with um,
Speaker 1: you know, decreasing habitat for wild animals and the proximity
Speaker 1: of human populations to animals. And then we have increased
Speaker 1: sort of uh communication and travel, which you know is
Speaker 1: not a bad thing obviously, but it is going to
Speaker 1: change the way in which these things spread. But then
Speaker 1: we have the way that we divide ourselves up into
Speaker 1: nation states, and the way in which we have you know,
Speaker 1: economic systems that are working in certain ways. So you know,
Speaker 1: the vaccine get here but not there, and and and
Speaker 1: so forth. Um. But yeah, that's a you know that
Speaker 1: I think is at the heart of it. You have
Speaker 1: these things that have been set in place. You have
Speaker 1: these parameters in which you're going to have to react,
Speaker 1: and they really set um the stage for what's going
Speaker 1: to happen. You know, you have it's like looking backwards
Speaker 1: four or five moves in chest to see how did
Speaker 1: we get in this situation. It's not just because of
Speaker 1: that last move, it's because of the last ten. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that you bring up that
Speaker 1: I like is that if you're looking for kind of
Speaker 1: a historical example of a collapse that that most mirrors
Speaker 1: the way we tend to look at it in fiction,
Speaker 1: it would probably be what happened to the indigenous population
Speaker 1: of particularly like North America um after the arrival of colonizers,
Speaker 1: which was by a lot of accounts like ninety of
Speaker 1: the population dead within a fairly short span of time,
Speaker 1: primarily from disease. This this rely rapid and cataclysmic um
Speaker 1: um shock. But also at the same time, as much
Speaker 1: as it does seem to mirror some of our you know,
Speaker 1: kind of fictional depictions of of viral outbreaks or other
Speaker 1: sort of of of societal calamities, um, the ways in
Speaker 1: which people survived don't really in any meaningful way mirror
Speaker 1: the are are kind of popular fictional depiction of like
Speaker 1: who makes it out of that sort of a situation,
Speaker 1: you know, the the strapping military veteran with a rifle
Speaker 1: and a stockpile of food or whatever. You know. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that. You know, I would say that certainly having
Speaker 1: these skills to keep yourself alive is important, and it
Speaker 1: is true that if you don't make it through the
Speaker 1: first thirty days, you're not gonna make it through the
Speaker 1: next thirty years. But um yeah, the way people survive
Speaker 1: outside of a few days, perhaps when they're dealing with
Speaker 1: some of these what we would think of a serve
Speaker 1: Bible situations, this is a community. I mean, we see
Speaker 1: that with uh, you know, when we look at the
Speaker 1: Native American history in North America. You know, even as
Speaker 1: populations and entire groups were being decimated by these diseases,
Speaker 1: sometimes a village in a single winner from a wave
Speaker 1: or waves of disease. Even in the in the face
Speaker 1: of that, they reconstituted themselves as communities, sometimes um, multi
Speaker 1: ethnic or multicultural communities. I mean, there was a whole
Speaker 1: variety of ways in which people regrouped. And I think
Speaker 1: that that, you know, that was the message and you know,
Speaker 1: part of the uh, this image of you know, grabbing
Speaker 1: your bugout bag and heading out to the hills is um,
Speaker 1: it just doesn't work, you know. And and the is
Speaker 1: the stockpiling you know as well. Um, And so yeah,
Speaker 1: when we look archaeologically, you know, we always see communitions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and that's something we really try to encourage people do
Speaker 1: on this show, where obviously some amount of disaster preparation
Speaker 1: is is not just helpful, but is I think kind
Speaker 1: of morally necessary if it's at all financially feasible for you,
Speaker 1: you know it is you are it is absolutely the
Speaker 1: right thing to do to try to have two three
Speaker 1: weeks of of relatively storable food, some water, um, you know,
Speaker 1: some other emergency supplies. But kind of beyond that, as
Speaker 1: you said that first, like thirty days if you actually
Speaker 1: want not just to live, but to have you know,
Speaker 1: life have any kind of meaning, Um, you have to
Speaker 1: be thinking in a community oriented situation. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: because ultimately, you know, what's the difference between two weeks
Speaker 1: or two months worth of food? Right, you know it's
Speaker 1: gonna be gone and you know you have to come back.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the things in researching for this
Speaker 1: for this book, one of the things I looked at
Speaker 1: was the history of how we made a living, uh
Speaker 1: and the history of agriculture. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that you know that that I found was that the
Speaker 1: last time that humans lived where a significant portion of
Speaker 1: the population was hunters and gatherers that is, not farmers,
Speaker 1: there was like one of the current population, you know,
Speaker 1: less than five million people in the world. So even
Speaker 1: a catastrophic disaster that you know, reduced us to ofcent
Speaker 1: of current population, we're still going to have more people
Speaker 1: in the world than ever lived without agriculture. And so
Speaker 1: we're gonna have to uh recreate some of these systems.
Speaker 1: And you know, agriculture buying just going to be a
Speaker 1: community based, yeah system it's uh, I mean, you can
Speaker 1: garden on your own, but but the way that it
Speaker 1: needs to work is is going to be a collective. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think, um, yeah, this is we talk a
Speaker 1: lot about. I actually live with a couple of wilderness
Speaker 1: survival instructors and we have about an acre of land
Speaker 1: and we do a decent amount of of of you
Speaker 1: know gardening, you know, animal husbandry and that sort of thing,
Speaker 1: and it it is. Um I've I've spent a lot
Speaker 1: of my life on farm, so I've kind of always
Speaker 1: had an appreciation for how much work it is. And
Speaker 1: one of the things we try to talk about on
Speaker 1: this show regularly is the value of even just having
Speaker 1: a garden of things like guerrilla gardening. Not because I'm
Speaker 1: not one of those people who thinks that, like, oh,
Speaker 1: we need to replace industrial agriculture with like individuals tending
Speaker 1: small gardens. That's not going to work, but because the
Speaker 1: more you kind of interface directly with the concept of
Speaker 1: growing food and with working with other people in order
Speaker 1: to do that, the more prepared you are for any
Speaker 1: number of things that could go wrong, Like even if
Speaker 1: those things don't involve the crunching the food supply lines,
Speaker 1: the connections you make with people doing that sort of
Speaker 1: work will be more valuable than an extra two months
Speaker 1: of stockpiles you know, when you're in your food buckets
Speaker 1: or whatever, you're Alex Jones dried food buckets. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: that's that's absolutely right. And you know, one of the
Speaker 1: things that occurred to me looking into the past at
Speaker 1: some of these uh, you know, collapses or declines that
Speaker 1: had happened in the past, was that a huge percent
Speaker 1: of the population um um was engaged directly in agriculture,
Speaker 1: and you know here in the well in the industrialized
Speaker 1: world is typically less than five percent less than that
Speaker 1: even in the United States. Most people like me don't
Speaker 1: uh don't engage in it. And you know, I know
Speaker 1: something about gardening, perhaps like everybody else, but I'm not
Speaker 1: a farmer. I don't really have that collected wisdom. And
Speaker 1: if I had to do that, um, you know, probably
Speaker 1: it's like a lot of other things. When everything is easy,
Speaker 1: it's not so bad. When you know when it goes bad,
Speaker 1: it really helps to know what you're doing. Um. And
Speaker 1: of course everything goes bad sooner or later, and so um.
Speaker 1: You know, that's that kind of things very important, you know.
Speaker 1: And I think also there could certainly local systems and
Speaker 1: some flexible scale would be really important, you know. So
Speaker 1: I'm also like you a proponent of of this sort
Speaker 1: of thing. You know, if we can get everybody to
Speaker 1: participate in ways that we aren't now, that will give
Speaker 1: us some flexibility. What if what if we do have
Speaker 1: supply chain problems, Well, we have a number of people
Speaker 1: in the community that are already doing some of this
Speaker 1: stuff that could maybe be expanded or get us through
Speaker 1: this period. So yeah, yeah, I mean, even if you're
Speaker 1: not like dealing with everyone's caloric needs, it could be
Speaker 1: as simple as because of where you're located. You know,
Speaker 1: when when the oranges and other kind of fruits aren't
Speaker 1: able to come in from a supply line thing, there's
Speaker 1: a shortage of vitamin C and then knowing how to
Speaker 1: make teata pine needles or whatever, or what kind of
Speaker 1: plants have a lot of vitamin C. You know, even
Speaker 1: though you're not you're not focused on meeting everyone's you know,
Speaker 1: entire caloric needs through small scale farming, but you can
Speaker 1: deal with the a nutrient deficiency or something because you
Speaker 1: understand your environment a little bit better. Yeah, and you know,
Speaker 1: probably quality of life isxues to I mean, you know,
Speaker 1: for uh, you know, kids and u you know, there's
Speaker 1: there's lots of lots of ways you can survive that
Speaker 1: are pretty miserable, So you want to you want to
Speaker 1: try to uh direct it towards those that are desirable.
Speaker 1: And I think part of that is having this flexibility,
Speaker 1: having this knowledge, having a lot of people involved in things.
Speaker 1: And you know, one of the things I talked about
Speaker 1: in my book or ideas of you know, diversity and inclusion,
Speaker 1: which we talk about in certain ways now and often
Speaker 1: I think unfortunately it's talked about, is if it's done
Speaker 1: to benefit the people that are marginalized and left out
Speaker 1: only and while it is partly that it benefits everybody,
Speaker 1: of course, I mean, anyone in a business knows, anybody
Speaker 1: in the university knows the benefits of of diversity. In
Speaker 1: the same way anybody that's trying to do something understands
Speaker 1: the benefit of a diverse range of experiences. You know.
Speaker 1: That's why we make these multidisciplinary teams that go out
Speaker 1: and do things. Uh, you know, it's so that you
Speaker 1: have this this wide variety that can help you keep going. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that I really found fascinating
Speaker 1: in your book and that that kind of made me
Speaker 1: feel a little bit um bad, as I you know,
Speaker 1: I've I've spent a lot of time thinking about the
Speaker 1: what happened, what was done to what also just kind
Speaker 1: of happened as a result of the way diseases spread
Speaker 1: when when colonizers reached North America. I had never really
Speaker 1: devoted that much thought to the actual actions that in
Speaker 1: different indigenous groups took consciously to prevent to protect themselves
Speaker 1: from the spread of diseases. You mentioned the Cherokee in particular,
Speaker 1: UM in your book. Could you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about that, because that's something as soon as I
Speaker 1: read it, I marked that page because I'm like, I
Speaker 1: need to look up what the studies he is referencing,
Speaker 1: because I I don't know anything about this. Yeah, that, UM,
Speaker 1: you know, a lot of that stems from the research
Speaker 1: of of some other archaeologists and they, you know what,
Speaker 1: You're exactly right. We don't think about that. We're not
Speaker 1: taught about it that way. You know, we sort of
Speaker 1: have this this contradictory and sort of u uh, doubly
Speaker 1: problematic way of talking about this. First, for a long time,
Speaker 1: we denied sort of the how traumatic and how much
Speaker 1: of a genocide it was when Europeans arrived UM. And
Speaker 1: then after denying that, we sort of say, well, Native
Speaker 1: Americans are gone and no longer relevant, so we can
Speaker 1: cease to talk about them. Of course that's not true.
Speaker 1: And one of the things that we see when we
Speaker 1: look more in detail at the histories, or we listen
Speaker 1: to the oral histories, or we look at the archaeology,
Speaker 1: is that there are a number of things that that
Speaker 1: that people did and do to um uh uh to
Speaker 1: create the outcomes that they want. And that was no
Speaker 1: different for the Native American groups, you know, I mean,
Speaker 1: they had ways of dealing with disease, and some of
Speaker 1: them will be will be able to understand it via
Speaker 1: our sort of our system right isolating people cleanliness of
Speaker 1: minimizing contact expect especially with sort of problematic groups like
Speaker 1: the colonizer's um you know. But in other ways, there
Speaker 1: are things that are gonna be unfamiliar to us and
Speaker 1: we're not gonna see the effectiveness or of the value
Speaker 1: in it. But one of the things that that all
Speaker 1: of these things did that these groups were doing was
Speaker 1: created or maintained um group identity and cohesion and allowed
Speaker 1: the perseverance of of community. And so there are um
Speaker 1: you know, it's it's easy to think about people as
Speaker 1: sort of passive victims of something, especially when it serves
Speaker 1: your purpose to to think about it in these ways,
Speaker 1: and we just see that it's it's not the case. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there was a remarkable moment in the book, and I
Speaker 1: think it was from when you were in Honduras where
Speaker 1: you you talk about you're finding pottery shirts and they
Speaker 1: have these specific kind of markings on them from I
Speaker 1: don't like a thousand years ago or so, and you
Speaker 1: also know a local woman who's a potter and she's
Speaker 1: putting the same markings on and you ask her why
Speaker 1: and her answer is like, well, because the pottery shirts
Speaker 1: that we find from our ancestors have those on them.
Speaker 1: And my initial thought was like, oh, what what a
Speaker 1: shame that she doesn't know what those originally meant. But
Speaker 1: then I thought like, well, but is that any different
Speaker 1: from like all of the different things that that I
Speaker 1: do because their traditions, because like there are things that
Speaker 1: like people a thousand years ago in in in my
Speaker 1: line did like, no, it's not like it's it's just
Speaker 1: what people do and it is a continuation, and it's
Speaker 1: a very there's um that's a that's that's survival. You
Speaker 1: know that's that's conscious survival. Yeah, you know, and in
Speaker 1: that case, of course, whatever it meant initially, it now
Speaker 1: means that to her, right, So there's the meaning, you know. Um,
Speaker 1: And so it's it's interesting, you know, one of the things,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm from and I live in Kentucky, and
Speaker 1: one of the things, especially when people come to say Appalachians,
Speaker 1: they're looking for sort of authentic Appalachian Kentucky, you know, um,
Speaker 1: and they already have an idea what that is. And
Speaker 1: if you don't see it, because that's not really what
Speaker 1: people do, then the response is never, oh my idea
Speaker 1: is about what is authentic? Might be erroneous. It's I
Speaker 1: wonder why I didn't see authentic Appalachians. You know. It's like,
Speaker 1: well you did. But you know, there's gonna be more
Speaker 1: hip hop and punk groups than there are bluegrass groups
Speaker 1: because you know, these are twenty year old kids. That's
Speaker 1: you know, they're doing this as much as this other stuff,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, more problem and so that that
Speaker 1: is something hum that that I think of often as
Speaker 1: an archaeologist. You know, my focus is in the past.
Speaker 1: But if I'm going to understand things, of course you
Speaker 1: also have to understand how are people thinking about in
Speaker 1: the present and how am I thinking about it in
Speaker 1: the present, because you know, everything, all the stories I
Speaker 1: tell about the past are coming out of or coming
Speaker 1: out of my experience in the present too, and it's
Speaker 1: hard to uh, it's hard to separate those and that
Speaker 1: really the best we can do is try to, um,
Speaker 1: you know, reflect on that and see how is it
Speaker 1: that I might be limiting my understanding because of my
Speaker 1: particular experience. And one of the things I really like
Speaker 1: about your book that I also found fascinating, So it's
Speaker 1: I you know, I I for a while did um
Speaker 1: conflict journalism. And before when when that was just an
Speaker 1: ambition of mine, before I started to do it, I
Speaker 1: would see the articles that were being written by all
Speaker 1: these war correspondents, and I would just be in awe
Speaker 1: of like how did they get that story? How did
Speaker 1: they get that says? How did they must have put
Speaker 1: so much work in? And then when I actually got there,
Speaker 1: I realized, like, oh no, they met they made a
Speaker 1: contact with the local who was good at it, and
Speaker 1: that person showed them around and made all these connections,
Speaker 1: and like, actually, none of this work happens without these
Speaker 1: local fixers, and you make the point that in archaeology
Speaker 1: you're not generally discovering things like even when you're finding shipwrecks,
Speaker 1: it's because these sailors who lived nearby were like, well, yeah,
Speaker 1: a bunch of shipwrecks over there, Like this is where
Speaker 1: you're gonna go find them. You know, It's always the
Speaker 1: way it is, you know, there um um. In the
Speaker 1: example you're talking about, I was part of this project
Speaker 1: in Forney in Greece, which you know, made the news
Speaker 1: because we found so many shipwrecks there something ultimately like
Speaker 1: fifty shipwrecks around this island, um and almost all of
Speaker 1: them were shown to us by local folks, uh that
Speaker 1: sponge divers or people that were fishers, you know, people
Speaker 1: that were out on the water all the time. And
Speaker 1: the few that we found by ourselves was I'm sure
Speaker 1: people knew about him, We just stumbled on him before
Speaker 1: somebody had a chance to show us. It's the same
Speaker 1: way in in the Honduras would we would be walking
Speaker 1: through the rainforest and you know, maybe we've been walking
Speaker 1: for a week, so we're way out in the middle
Speaker 1: of this place. People were constantly telling me the guys
Speaker 1: that I was with, would say, Okay, if we go
Speaker 1: up this creek, you know, for about six hours, and
Speaker 1: we go over here, here's what we'd find. Here's what
Speaker 1: we'd find over here. Here's what we find over here.
Speaker 1: They knew where everything was. Um. And that's you know,
Speaker 1: one of the things that you uh uh uh, that
Speaker 1: that you learned is you know how reliant you are
Speaker 1: on people that live in a place. I mean, they
Speaker 1: just know it. Yeah, there's no Um, when you get
Speaker 1: right down to it, is as obsessed as we are
Speaker 1: kind of in the Western Cannon with the idea of
Speaker 1: lost cities. Um, that's not really a thing that tends
Speaker 1: to happen. Um. Yeah, no, no, no, it's not. And
Speaker 1: and in fact, most of the archaeological sites that people
Speaker 1: didn't know about it was just because they were so
Speaker 1: small and ephemeral that no one really paid attention anything. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's no lost city. They're they're always known for somebody. Well, Chris,
Speaker 1: I think that's that's most of what I wanted to
Speaker 1: get into in this conversation. I'm wondering before we kind
Speaker 1: of close out, because you are both the author of
Speaker 1: this book, The Next Apocalypse, which is I think a
Speaker 1: fascinating way of looking at the idea of things falling
Speaker 1: apart and a wilderness survival instructor. If you're going to
Speaker 1: suggest people, you know, a practical kit bag to prepare
Speaker 1: for short and kind of long term problems, what are
Speaker 1: you what are you putting in your bag? Well, you know,
Speaker 1: there's the two main things, uh, that you're always gonna
Speaker 1: want is is a knife because that allows you to
Speaker 1: make a lot of other things. And a way to
Speaker 1: start fire, you know, and we've all seen in the
Speaker 1: movies sticks together and you know, friction methods and that works,
Speaker 1: and you can do that, but it is incredibly difficult
Speaker 1: to do in the butt, you know, and for most
Speaker 1: of us that don't do it all the time, Uh,
Speaker 1: you're just not gonna be able to do it when
Speaker 1: it's forty degrees in raining and you really need a fire.
Speaker 1: You know, you'll be able to do it when it's
Speaker 1: a hundred degrees and dry, you know, uh, because everything
Speaker 1: is about to catch on fire anyway. But uh, you
Speaker 1: know so, um and what would what would that look like? Well, uh,
Speaker 1: you need something that will catch on fire pretty quickly.
Speaker 1: And the thing I always takes cotton balls, you know,
Speaker 1: if you take cotton balls and a disposable lighter or
Speaker 1: one of those uh fire starter sticks, it will make sparks.
Speaker 1: Um that those cotton balls will catch fire instantly. And
Speaker 1: if you take one and you coat half of it
Speaker 1: with petroleum jelly, then not only will catch fire, it
Speaker 1: will burn you know, for you know, a minute or so,
Speaker 1: long enough to catch other stuff on fire. So you know,
Speaker 1: making fire and having some sort of cutting tool are
Speaker 1: the very basic things. But um, you know, the beyond that,
Speaker 1: I would say, uh, you know, clothing or some sort
Speaker 1: of shelter is is the other thing. You know, Exposure
Speaker 1: to elements will kill you quicker than anything, and so
Speaker 1: having some way to uh to protect yourself and that's
Speaker 1: usually gonna be you know, first line of defense is
Speaker 1: going to be your clothes. And one of the things
Speaker 1: that that you'll know anybody that that deals with sort
Speaker 1: of survival situations is that most people that really get
Speaker 1: in trouble with things like hypothermia, you know, it's not
Speaker 1: when it's thirty degrees below and they're out doing something.
Speaker 1: It's when it's fifty degrees and sunny and they're out
Speaker 1: in a T shirt during the day and then at
Speaker 1: night it drops to thirty degrees and you know they're
Speaker 1: stuck out somewhere with without proper clothing. That's that is
Speaker 1: when things get really dangerous. So you know, I would say,
Speaker 1: you know, if you can have some way to start fire,
Speaker 1: some sort of knife, and appropriate clothes for spending the
Speaker 1: night out, you know, then then uh, and you're probably
Speaker 1: in pretty good shape for most situations. Well, Chris, thank
Speaker 1: you so much for talking with with us today. Chris Begley,
Speaker 1: underwater archaeologist, author of the Next Apocalypse, The Art of
Speaker 1: Science and Survival. Chris, is there anything you'd like else
Speaker 1: you'd like to say or kind of get into before
Speaker 1: we close out for the day. No, just thank you
Speaker 1: very much for for reading the book and for reaching
Speaker 1: out to talk with me, because I think that, you know,
Speaker 1: especially now as we go into sort of an uncertain future.
Speaker 1: I mean, future is always uncertain, I suppose, but um
Speaker 1: as you know, we're really recognizing some of these challenges.
Speaker 1: You know, I really am hoping that this sort of
Speaker 1: um uh, community based idea becomes the way we think
Speaker 1: about things. Uh. You know, it doesn't mean it's easy
Speaker 1: or that we're gonna like it. It doesn't mean that
Speaker 1: that's what I want. I mean, tell you the truth,
Speaker 1: I would love it if it was just me out
Speaker 1: in the woods with my family. You know, I can
Speaker 1: do that. It's much harder to be part of a
Speaker 1: community and make things work for a big group of people.
Speaker 1: But that's just the way it's going to be. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that's that's ultimately the way in which you have
Speaker 1: a lot more real security because I think, um uh,
Speaker 1: I think people I don't know. The world seems so
Speaker 1: complex and messy that it's easy to imagine that that
Speaker 1: safety comes from getting away from the world. But historically
Speaker 1: that's just not how it works. Now the world finds you.
Speaker 1: You know, it's a being part of a group is
Speaker 1: always best and your your little group can never defend
Speaker 1: against the big group. I mean, if we want to
Speaker 1: put it in those terms, you know, you can't just
Speaker 1: hoard everything and uh, it just doesn't work. Might work
Speaker 1: for a little while, but yeah, so that you know
Speaker 1: that for me, that's the message I'm hoping, Yeah, people
Speaker 1: take from it. Well, Thank you very much, Chris. For
Speaker 1: those of you listening at home again, please do check
Speaker 1: out The Next Apocalypse The Art and Science of Survival
Speaker 1: by Chris Begley. That's going to do it for us
Speaker 1: all today. Chris, thank you again and have a wonderful
Speaker 1: day here you too, Thank you. Wrote Hello and welcome
Speaker 1: to our show. I'm Zoie de Channel and I'm so
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Speaker 1: Welcome to Our Show podcast, where we'll share behind the
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Speaker 1: Oh boy, Prop, You know what's fun is is live shows,
Speaker 1: live podcast shows, live podcasts are incredible. You know what
Speaker 1: isn't incredible is the plague, which is why we've decided
Speaker 1: to find a way to give you all a live
Speaker 1: show that won't spread the plague, a virtual live show.
Speaker 1: We had to pivot, and one can say you could
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Speaker 1: totally eliminated the problems of living in a three dimensional
Speaker 1: plane we have. It's it's groundbreaking. You could call it
Speaker 1: the metaverse. Anyway. It's gonna be February at six pm PST.
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Speaker 1: there too, and you can buy tickets at moment House
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Speaker 1: You don't have to watch it. It's so bad. You guys,
Speaker 1: we gotta do this are talking about it was good.
Speaker 1: I thought everybody was going to bed. We're all just
Speaker 1: saying the same ship over each other, all at once.
Speaker 1: That's so that they notice it. It's called chemistry. This
Speaker 1: was really bad. Adoption of teens from foster care is
Speaker 1: a topic not enough people know about, and we're here
Speaker 1: to change that. I'm April Din't, the host of the
Speaker 1: new podcast Navigating Adoption, presented by adopt us Kids. Each
Speaker 1: episode brings you compelling, real life adoption stories told by
Speaker 1: the families that lived them, with commentary from experts. Visit
Speaker 1: adopt us Kids dot org slash podcast or subscribe to
Speaker 1: Navigating Adoption presented by adopt Us Kids, brought to you
Speaker 1: by the U. S. Department of Health, the Human Services
Speaker 1: Administration for Children and Families, and the Act Council. Oh boy,
Speaker 1: it could happen here. That's the name of the podcast,
Speaker 1: And I'm Robert Evans, the guy hose sing the podcast.
Speaker 1: Who else is with me, is it is it? Garrison? Hello,
Speaker 1: good morning, afternoon evening, Garrison Davis. Ye, not yet a
Speaker 1: doctor Garrison Davis, not yet, soon soon to be Dr
Speaker 1: Garrison Davis. I don't know if you're going to pass
Speaker 1: the exam that I know you're gonna have to pass
Speaker 1: in order to get through this class. But yeah, a
Speaker 1: little teaser for the future. Speaking of the future, this
Speaker 1: is a podcast about the ways in which the future
Speaker 1: is going to be real fucked up and ways in
Speaker 1: which maybe we could try to make it less sucked up. Um.
Speaker 1: And today we have on a guest, Mr Calvin Norman,
Speaker 1: who posted a thread on our subbredit with the very simple,
Speaker 1: very unsettling title the woods are Bad um And Calvin,
Speaker 1: you want to introduce your yourself, your credentials and what
Speaker 1: you were trying to get across in that threat, because
Speaker 1: I found it very affecting. Yeah, thanks for rovert. So
Speaker 1: my name is, like you said, Calvin Norman. I work
Speaker 1: in forestry. I've worked in forestry for a while now.
Speaker 1: I used to be an industrial forester in the Great
Speaker 1: Lakes region, so Wisconsin, Michigan. Then I worked in the Southeast.
Speaker 1: I did my masters down there, and now I'm in
Speaker 1: the mid Atlantic, so I've I've kind of been around
Speaker 1: the eastern United States. I haven't gotten that west yet.
Speaker 1: But and I'm a certified forest or candidate certified forest
Speaker 1: I got like a year left on that, so I
Speaker 1: been around. I also do wildlife stuff. It's pretty fun.
Speaker 1: And yeah, your your thread. What I found interesting that
Speaker 1: I have a good friend who is in forestry or
Speaker 1: was in't forestry at least and got their degree and that,
Speaker 1: and we were we were out hunting in the Cascades
Speaker 1: a little earlier or a little later last year. Um,
Speaker 1: and there's this wonderful moment. We've been following a game
Speaker 1: trail up like this Steve hill side and it was
Speaker 1: kind of a clearing where we were a clear cut,
Speaker 1: but there's deep brush all around. And we get to
Speaker 1: the top of this thing, we look out and we
Speaker 1: just see, you know, these these rolling mountains of the Cascades,
Speaker 1: all covered in this the most this lush, beautiful greenery,
Speaker 1: all these these pine trees and everything. And my friend
Speaker 1: says to me, it's going to be totally different in
Speaker 1: twenty years. Um, it's already a different force than the
Speaker 1: one I grew up with. And and that that is.
Speaker 1: That is kind of the cliffs note. So what what
Speaker 1: you're You're getting into a lot of detail here, and
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you could just kind of like, yeah,
Speaker 1: start on that explain kind of what's actually happening in
Speaker 1: our woods, or at least the woods that that you're
Speaker 1: comfortable talking about here. It's a big yeah. Yeah. This
Speaker 1: is a big continent and you have a pretty good
Speaker 1: international base. And I can't speak for the Europeans or
Speaker 1: the Canadians. There's a whole different ball game over there.
Speaker 1: And tropical stuff is just wild, really cool about wild stuff.
Speaker 1: So mainly talked about the US, mainly Eastern United States.
Speaker 1: So if you look at the eastern United States, this
Speaker 1: is a forest that has never existed before in the
Speaker 1: history of the United States. Um previous you know, prior
Speaker 1: to like nineteen twenty, our forest was like depending on
Speaker 1: the source of read, between twenty and chestnut with other
Speaker 1: species mixed in there. And now we have a mainly
Speaker 1: oak dominated forest. We lost all of our chest into
Speaker 1: the chestnut white um out Western You've got a couple
Speaker 1: of other things going on, but fire suppression just just
Speaker 1: changed the forest there. The same here in the East
Speaker 1: coast and into the Midwest. You know, you used to
Speaker 1: see a lot more fires going through. I mean, so
Speaker 1: that was lightning strikes, but no doubt a lot of
Speaker 1: it was you know, intentionally set by the first nations
Speaker 1: and people before the people that we think of as
Speaker 1: the first nations. And um, you know that has mainly disappeared,
Speaker 1: except for the southeast, where virus never really stopped being
Speaker 1: at the ground, which is really cool. But even their
Speaker 1: species composition has changed dramatically. Um. A lot of what
Speaker 1: we're seeing, as you know, changes in human management. But
Speaker 1: there's also a number of invasive species that have changed things,
Speaker 1: you know, like chestnut blight, emerald ashbore, Asia longhorn beetle
Speaker 1: is coming in. You know, those are just the past
Speaker 1: the understory. And you know, plants is a whole different ballgame. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's all not great. It's all not great.
Speaker 1: I was talking with some colleagues and Agricultural Show right
Speaker 1: before I posted that more talking about how the woods
Speaker 1: were bad, and we very easily laid out a scenario
Speaker 1: where we lost the most of our remaining dominantory species.
Speaker 1: It was not at all hard to do. It took
Speaker 1: about two minutes, so not great. And then the West
Speaker 1: coast things aren't great either. And when you're talking about
Speaker 1: when you're talking about losing these species and stuff like
Speaker 1: the chestnut light, where is that coming from? How much
Speaker 1: of that is sort of as a result of climate change,
Speaker 1: Like we're having a lot of tree species have trouble
Speaker 1: here in the West because of how much hotter the
Speaker 1: summers are and how much drier things have gotten. So
Speaker 1: how much how much of what you're saying where you
Speaker 1: are is because there's been changes to the climate, and
Speaker 1: how much of it is you know, I guess kind
Speaker 1: of like globalism, like people bringing in pests and bringing
Speaker 1: in lights and stuff from other areas and it spreads
Speaker 1: like wildfire. Well, I think that we're just starting to
Speaker 1: see the beginning of climate change, like driving species you
Speaker 1: know up the mountain, off the mountain out west and here,
Speaker 1: you know, out of certain regions, you know, as things
Speaker 1: are getting hotter and drier or is you know, climbates
Speaker 1: are becoming more extreme. You know, here in the ne
Speaker 1: Atlantic we had one of the wettest years on record,
Speaker 1: I think it's like five or seven, whereas in the
Speaker 1: Midwest they had droughts but before that we had two
Speaker 1: years of drought, so you know, it's it's more extreme,
Speaker 1: and that's that's just starting to take part. But the
Speaker 1: extinctions and near extinctions have been mainly due to non
Speaker 1: native pest um. And that's just most of it right there. Um,
Speaker 1: just because we haven't really seen the start of climate change, yeah,
Speaker 1: impacting diseases. So like out west with the mountain piebele,
Speaker 1: you're seeing more generations of mountain piebele comes through. I
Speaker 1: was just doing a presentation for some folks in South Dakota,
Speaker 1: and something like a third of their total forest was
Speaker 1: impacted by mountain pine people. Jeez. And and what is
Speaker 1: that like when you actually talk about this, these beetles
Speaker 1: coming in. That's the kind of thing that even as
Speaker 1: we've gotten more comfortable talking about sort of of of
Speaker 1: the different kind of collapses spawned by climate change, I
Speaker 1: think that they we tend to imagine more spectacular things,
Speaker 1: these giants sweeping fires that burned through huge chunks of states,
Speaker 1: and these huge like environmental calamities. What is this like?
Speaker 1: What happens when one of these beetles hits a forest?
Speaker 1: One of these beetles specs obviously not like a singular beetle,
Speaker 1: Like what what is actually like how quick is the
Speaker 1: effect and what kind of comes after that? Like I
Speaker 1: I know there's sort of a shock wight. It's kind
Speaker 1: of like a bomb going off. I'm interested in kind
Speaker 1: of tracing the root of that explosion, if that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So it depends species, its specs. Chest. That plate was
Speaker 1: really fast and it just seems to have torn through
Speaker 1: the chest instative range. So chest that went from Florida
Speaker 1: to Maine and out west like Tennessee kind of area
Speaker 1: there um, and it just you know, in like something
Speaker 1: like fifteen years, the entire species gone. Emerald ashboard has
Speaker 1: taken a little bit longer. Got here in the eighties,
Speaker 1: started kind of going off in the mid two thousands,
Speaker 1: and it's killed a couple of billion trees. So when
Speaker 1: that hits a small forest, you know, if it's a
Speaker 1: if it's a pretty you know, beatle that kills pretty fast.
Speaker 1: Like Emerald dashboard, it gets into your trees. It starts
Speaker 1: with one or two, and then within four or five
Speaker 1: years it's it's in most of them in a forest.
Speaker 1: And then with Emoral dashboard they're dead and five Hemlock
Speaker 1: William Delgit is pretty similar. It'll just show up one
Speaker 1: day in a stand and then the hemlocks are dead
Speaker 1: within five seven years. Uh. And you know, sometimes you
Speaker 1: know what's going on, you know, because embal dashboard is
Speaker 1: very clear signs. And other times you don't know what's
Speaker 1: going on because the tree can't be so tall and
Speaker 1: all of a sudden trees are getting thinner and thinner
Speaker 1: and then they're dead. Or you have pests like um
Speaker 1: oak will and that in that trees are dead, you know,
Speaker 1: in two months, and then it spreads out like a circle.
Speaker 1: You know it kind of exactly when you see like
Speaker 1: a bacteria like growth medium with the bacteria spreading out,
Speaker 1: that's oak spreads and it's just like trees are dead,
Speaker 1: you know, two months and they spread out and out
Speaker 1: and out and scary sometimes. Is there anything that can
Speaker 1: be I mean it sounds like with with most of
Speaker 1: these cases, like with what's happened to kind of like
Speaker 1: the chestnuts, and it's it's too late for a lot
Speaker 1: of that. Is there anything that can actually be done
Speaker 1: to stop this? Like I know we have all these
Speaker 1: structures in place to try to stop the spread of
Speaker 1: invasive species, but like once they're in there, it kind
Speaker 1: of seems like usually we're fucked. Yeah that that okay, Yeah,
Speaker 1: once you get past, like there's what's called the invasive
Speaker 1: species establishment curve, so it's an escar and once you
Speaker 1: get like right, like once it starts take it up,
Speaker 1: it's like, oh, well, we're done here. So let's let's
Speaker 1: start thinking about the future. And as you lose more species,
Speaker 1: like what do we do here? Or if you're like
Speaker 1: you know, in the case of the case of actions,
Speaker 1: like this action is going in a swamp, I have
Speaker 1: nothing else that's going to grow here, So now I
Speaker 1: just have an open wetland, like I keep grow any
Speaker 1: native trees here were done. So the biggest thing is
Speaker 1: preventioned like don't don't bring invasive species in or non
Speaker 1: native species in. I was talking to a lady couple
Speaker 1: of weeks ago and she hasn't roll or not. She
Speaker 1: has hemlock William Delgi on a property and she brought
Speaker 1: in a bio control or she assumed was a bio
Speaker 1: control from the Japan. It's a beetle and yeah, in
Speaker 1: this case, it was one that had been tested and
Speaker 1: failed because it doesn't make it through the winter. But
Speaker 1: you know, stuff like that, like just just don't do that,
Speaker 1: you know, I shaped the thought there, but don't with
Speaker 1: some of these species we have, you know, you know,
Speaker 1: like hemlock, the indulgent. We have pesticides that worked really
Speaker 1: well and that you apply them ordered the tree and
Speaker 1: so it's like, all right, I treated this tree. This
Speaker 1: tree is good for seven years. Some of them, like
Speaker 1: emerald lashboard, you're done. There's just nothing you can do.
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's a prevention, prevention, and then then you
Speaker 1: can quarantine. But then you know, it's like where this
Speaker 1: county is done, so we're gonna just try to make
Speaker 1: sure that only this county dies. Jeez, you mentioned a
Speaker 1: bit earlier like thinking about the future, what does that
Speaker 1: actually look like when when we hit a situation as
Speaker 1: we have with a lot of these species, were like,
Speaker 1: all right, well this ship's we ain't we ain't stopping this.
Speaker 1: What is what like, what do people like you do next?
Speaker 1: Like what is the next kind of step for the
Speaker 1: forests or is it just sort of a smoke them
Speaker 1: ale you got them kind of thing. Uh, Sometimes it's
Speaker 1: smoke them while you got them. So like beach Park
Speaker 1: disease is going through just roasting beach in the East coast,
Speaker 1: it's going it's going to the Midwest, and so there
Speaker 1: it's kind of like, well, you know, if it's in
Speaker 1: there and your beach or dyeing and take them out,
Speaker 1: and if they're not, don't there's it's fat. But there's
Speaker 1: one percent that can make it. So you know, like
Speaker 1: maybe we find that one percent and last words, nine failed.
Speaker 1: But I've seen you know, in the past couple of years,
Speaker 1: I've seen two that made it. So like if we
Speaker 1: don't cut them all, maybe someone survive. Theoretically we could
Speaker 1: then like clone or breed or whatever the trees that
Speaker 1: live and and a few generations have more of them. Um,
Speaker 1: if other ship doesn't happen. Yeah, the chestnut project has
Speaker 1: been going on for the last hundred years, and it
Speaker 1: looks like I'll take about forty more. It's that's a
Speaker 1: controversial opinion. Some people say it's a fashioned forty but
Speaker 1: you know years oh the chestnut foundation. Really it's a
Speaker 1: really neat thing. So there were some chestnuts that were
Speaker 1: found resistant in some planet outside the range of chestnut light,
Speaker 1: and so the ideas where they slowly started back breeding.
Speaker 1: So they crossed in Chinese chestnut which is resistant to
Speaker 1: the blight, which is native to China and East Asia,
Speaker 1: and so they crossed them in with the remaining chestnut
Speaker 1: with the hopes of you know, kind of eventually breeding
Speaker 1: out the Chinese but just maintaining the American chest snut
Speaker 1: and just getting that gene in there. And so they
Speaker 1: started that back in like the thirties and forties when
Speaker 1: they realized what was happening. Well, you know, today is
Speaker 1: two and we are still without American chestnut in the forest.
Speaker 1: There are some backbread versions that are more resistant, but
Speaker 1: they will still get infected. I've been to a couple
Speaker 1: of chestnut nurseries where they're doing experiments and it's it's
Speaker 1: sad because they'll they'll get up and then they'll die.
Speaker 1: They'll get up and they'll die, and it's like, oh,
Speaker 1: there's two, but there are two over there in the
Speaker 1: corner that made it, and those get you know, onto
Speaker 1: the next one. But there is some work out of
Speaker 1: New York Sunny in New York where they altered a
Speaker 1: chestnut and they put in um. They just they just
Speaker 1: change the genes. So the version of the genus makes
Speaker 1: chestnut flight resistant is in that and that's getting approved
Speaker 1: by the E p A, f d A and U
Speaker 1: s d A. Hopefully that gets approved. If that gets approved,
Speaker 1: we get real, we get real further along because the
Speaker 1: resistant trees are not the same aim as the American
Speaker 1: just the resistant trees are more they're shorter and more shrubby,
Speaker 1: and they don't fulfill the overstory cannot be rolled chest.
Speaker 1: I used to playing, um, that's that's best case scenario.
Speaker 1: Worst case scenarios. You're like, um, butternut which was driven
Speaker 1: to functional extension at the same time, and we're just
Speaker 1: nowhere on that produce, working on some stuff, but it's nowhere.
Speaker 1: They're not in the woods now. How how much of
Speaker 1: like because I tend to roll my eyes pretty hard
Speaker 1: when we're talking particular climate change and people are like, well,
Speaker 1: I think that science is going to save our asses
Speaker 1: from this one. We're gonna we're gonna develop some like
Speaker 1: miraculous carbon capture method and like at the last minute,
Speaker 1: we'll we'll we'll be able to reverse everything and it'll
Speaker 1: be fine. I tend to roll my eyes at that.
Speaker 1: But this, and maybe I'm not obviously I don't understand
Speaker 1: this in nearly the level you do is this kind
Speaker 1: of a thing where if there's hope for a lot
Speaker 1: of these species and a lot of these biomas, it's
Speaker 1: going to be and stuff like we figure out how
Speaker 1: to hack these trees to keep them alive, and like,
Speaker 1: is that really kind of where we are? I know
Speaker 1: some very good tree genesis and tree breeders, but I
Speaker 1: don't think that they have the capabilities of, you know,
Speaker 1: coming up with trees that are resistant to all of
Speaker 1: the various fungi and bugs that are out there. And
Speaker 1: even if they do, it's you know, you have to
Speaker 1: get them out into the woods. You have to plant.
Speaker 1: We have billion makers of forest. You've got to get
Speaker 1: them out into the woods. You have to have the
Speaker 1: nurseries to get them out. There's you know, even if
Speaker 1: you were able to create trees that resistant to all
Speaker 1: of these pests, it would be impossible. So no, the
Speaker 1: only the only answer is, uh, don't don't do climate change.
Speaker 1: And to the carbon captured perspective, um, the only machine
Speaker 1: that's going to capture the amount of carbon we need
Speaker 1: our trees. I do. I do forest carbon stuff, which
Speaker 1: is a whole different episode. I want to I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm there, I'm extremely interested in that because obviously, like
Speaker 1: we've we've been supported by a couple of companies who
Speaker 1: like one of the things they do to try to
Speaker 1: be nice is they'll they'll plant trees and stuff, which
Speaker 1: is not useless. But also a lot of people think
Speaker 1: that that's what building a forest is, and like, no,
Speaker 1: forests are a huge part of the problem with why
Speaker 1: the West is so flammable. As we chopped down all
Speaker 1: these trees and we grew back just the trees um
Speaker 1: to chop them down again, and that turns out to
Speaker 1: not be resilient at all to anything, because trees do
Speaker 1: not live on their own ever. Yeah, that's why it's
Speaker 1: a forest. It's not just exactly right, Yeah, no, it's yeah,
Speaker 1: that's that's a planting. There's not the infrastructure to plant
Speaker 1: our way of climate change. There's not the land. It's
Speaker 1: just impossible. And so even even if even if they're
Speaker 1: worthy infrastructure in the lane, that we don't have the
Speaker 1: time because you know, trees take time to grow. They
Speaker 1: work on a different time scale than humans do, even
Speaker 1: your your shortest lived trees sixty eight years. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it is one of those things where I mean, we
Speaker 1: we had this is what we taught we kind of
Speaker 1: started this new season which is forever with which is
Speaker 1: that like there's no there's nothing we can do that
Speaker 1: will stop us from continuing to face worse and worse
Speaker 1: because because consequences of climate change, because the carbon is
Speaker 1: already been admitted, right, you can't just pull it out.
Speaker 1: Warming is even if we were to like make very
Speaker 1: revolutionary changes tomorrow, there's still some degree to which it's
Speaker 1: going to get worse. Um. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: like within your field, what like carbon capture using trees
Speaker 1: and stuff, can you talk to us about like what
Speaker 1: that actually looks like as opposed to sort of the
Speaker 1: will plant a tree for every dollar you spend kind
Speaker 1: of thing. Um, So yeah, I actually I actually can.
Speaker 1: It's I do a lot of my work about forest
Speaker 1: carbon stuff. So yeah, Basically, the idea is to make
Speaker 1: sure you have the best way to get carbon cy
Speaker 1: equestration of the force is to have a healthy functioning forest.
Speaker 1: And that's you know kind of where these pests and
Speaker 1: climate change are interfering with that. And so you know,
Speaker 1: to maintain a healthy functioning force in the East Coast,
Speaker 1: you know, some of these you need to have fire,
Speaker 1: some of them not. Some of them are too wet
Speaker 1: to burn. Uh. And then you know, harvesting needs to
Speaker 1: take place in some of these some of these don't
Speaker 1: need to be harvested. Again, we're talking, you know, no
Speaker 1: means makers of forest here. So we're gonna be incredibly
Speaker 1: broad and we got to keep invasives out. You need
Speaker 1: to keep force pest to a minimum, and then make
Speaker 1: sure that you're managing the forest, you know, as best
Speaker 1: as it can be managed. And I say managed, this
Speaker 1: is not something new. Humans have been on the East
Speaker 1: Coast since. You know, it depends on the artifacts you
Speaker 1: want to look at and what archaeologists you want to trust.
Speaker 1: But like twenty five to twenty thousand years ago, and
Speaker 1: the last glaciers left the East Coast eighteen thousand years ago,
Speaker 1: so we had people here before the glaciers were gone.
Speaker 1: So these forests have never not had humans hands on
Speaker 1: them and never not been touched and manage by humans. Um.
Speaker 1: And you know, we gotta make sure we're doing the
Speaker 1: best we can. You know, some of that means that
Speaker 1: we're managing force with what's best for you know, that
Speaker 1: means managing for us for what's best with the force
Speaker 1: of mind, nut with best what's best for the end
Speaker 1: of the quarter, what's best for your bank account. That's
Speaker 1: hard to do because forces are getting more and more
Speaker 1: expensive to manage and to you know, manage just an
Speaker 1: able here in the East Coast, we got to do
Speaker 1: a lot of fencing. We've got to keep deer out
Speaker 1: of force because their populations are so high. It's just
Speaker 1: ridiculously high, and they've never got to come back down.
Speaker 1: You know, we have to spray invasive species, we have
Speaker 1: to pull invasive species. You gotta go through and you've
Speaker 1: gotta make sure you know you're you're preventing all those
Speaker 1: kinds of stuff. And so we can take you know,
Speaker 1: you can if you do a good shelter, would you
Speaker 1: can like make four dollars out of it, and then
Speaker 1: you can put all that money back into growing your
Speaker 1: next generation of force. So forces is really going from
Speaker 1: a profit making venture in a lot of cases to
Speaker 1: like you're barely making money or you're you're like breaking
Speaker 1: even or losing money. It's it's no longer you know,
Speaker 1: if you really want to do it great, You're not
Speaker 1: always making money, which is hard for people to get
Speaker 1: their head around. I mean, it's the kind of thing
Speaker 1: that in a reasonable world, huge amounts of money would
Speaker 1: be adverted to from other things, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: thirty five, Um, I feel like you guys could do
Speaker 1: a lot with one f thirty five worth of cash.
Speaker 1: I feel like that would solve almost all of our problems. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the problems that you see in force we don't
Speaker 1: cost a lot to fix, but it it costs a
Speaker 1: lot for a four stonner be that you know, an
Speaker 1: agency or person, it costs a lot. Yeah. It's like
Speaker 1: all of the issues around climate change kind of all
Speaker 1: circle around, like growth based economics and a lot of
Speaker 1: the like nothing has a shared cause, but they all
Speaker 1: have this similar aspect to them where yeah, every every
Speaker 1: part of them gets worse by the extreme focus on
Speaker 1: economic growth at all costs and that suffers that that
Speaker 1: that makes everything and everyone suffer. So, you know, it
Speaker 1: would be nice if since we have a government, it
Speaker 1: would be nice if they do, you know, give more
Speaker 1: funding towards uh stuff like this type of force management,
Speaker 1: which I know they do some, but you know, a
Speaker 1: fraction of it compared to what they give to like
Speaker 1: the Pentagon or you know, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. I mean
Speaker 1: even big you know forestries technically agriculture, but even like
Speaker 1: you know, like corn and like grow agriculture's yeah, they
Speaker 1: have the corn as massive subsidies compared to compared to
Speaker 1: everything else. Yeah, like the NRCS to the Natural Resource
Speaker 1: this Conservation Service, they do a lot with you know,
Speaker 1: farm agriculture, and you know, they it's very difficult for
Speaker 1: forest ollers to get that kind of money into forests.
Speaker 1: If we could get you know, that money, it would
Speaker 1: be a game changer. But we're not there. Uh, there
Speaker 1: is some change being made in the administration. But yeah,
Speaker 1: that's like stuff and that doesn't help, doesn't help today,
Speaker 1: that doesn't still unpassed today. Yeah, you can't unkill trees. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I guess is there anything that you're optimistic about within
Speaker 1: your field right now? Like if you I think that
Speaker 1: would be handy both in terms of like is there
Speaker 1: any sort of is there a light at the end
Speaker 1: of the tunnel? Um, because I'll admit, like, when I
Speaker 1: think about not having the forests, that's pretty much the
Speaker 1: most blackpilling thing I can imagine, like for myself, like
Speaker 1: that's the that's the thing that I have trouble coping
Speaker 1: with emotionally more than anything else. There's lots of horror
Speaker 1: all things about what's coming, but that's the one that
Speaker 1: like really scares me the most. Yeah, I don't think
Speaker 1: we're gonna lose forests as a thing. They're just were
Speaker 1: to become. You know, if without things being done, they
Speaker 1: become less, they're gonna be fewer of them, and they're
Speaker 1: gonna become much less diverse and functioning. You know, for
Speaker 1: a lot of these you know, invasive species, be they plants,
Speaker 1: you know, especially in basive plants, we have a lot
Speaker 1: of we know how to control them. I was just
Speaker 1: writing a thing about controlling wavy basket grasp, wavy leaf
Speaker 1: basket grass. It's a new invasive species to my area.
Speaker 1: It's highly controllable, and we know how to do it.
Speaker 1: It's just again a question of people, you know, getting
Speaker 1: out there and money to do it. You know, if
Speaker 1: we have the people and the money, we can solve
Speaker 1: that problem. Oh also we stop you know bringing that
Speaker 1: in the be even better. We you know, actually took
Speaker 1: you know i PM, right, not i PM, but quarantine
Speaker 1: and pest management seriously, and you know, people like stopped
Speaker 1: throwing you know, they look like plant out of the
Speaker 1: park just because like I don't want to kill it, Like,
Speaker 1: let's let it be free. Don't do that. Goldfish, don't
Speaker 1: don't throw them in the lake. That's why you have
Speaker 1: huge goldfish coming out of Lake Florida. Don't. Don't just
Speaker 1: cut pets loose and stuff like that. And if we
Speaker 1: can get a lot of that under control, would be
Speaker 1: in a lot better place. Again, I don't think they
Speaker 1: force of disappearing in the future unmanaged. I think they
Speaker 1: just become fewer and less diverse and less flunky, and
Speaker 1: then you lose spaces species based on them, like birds,
Speaker 1: you know, wildlife, all that kind of stuff. And also
Speaker 1: I mean one of the things that also they have
Speaker 1: to become less accessible, both because there will be less
Speaker 1: of the man um as things get more fragile, Like
Speaker 1: how else do you keep some of these invasive species
Speaker 1: out but keeping people out, which is I think a
Speaker 1: bad move for a lot of reasons. But I I
Speaker 1: don't know. I also don't know, like is it possible
Speaker 1: to have a global society where there is not just
Speaker 1: trade but the movement of people on a wide scale
Speaker 1: and not have this kind of ship crossing right, Like
Speaker 1: that's when I think about as as someone who's more
Speaker 1: US and anarchists. When I think about the only things
Speaker 1: that a border should exist to do, it's it's keep
Speaker 1: stuff like that out. But I just I don't know
Speaker 1: how possible that is. Like a lot of this stuff is.
Speaker 1: I mean, is this the kind of thing that's just
Speaker 1: spread by carelessness? Because it kind of seems like it
Speaker 1: can be spread to by people who think they're taking
Speaker 1: care Yeah, and both is the answer. There's some very
Speaker 1: good research out there about the relativeness between global trade
Speaker 1: and you know, invasive species. But that also you look
Speaker 1: at like colonialism and colonial societies. There were these things
Speaker 1: called introductory societies who loung get the name wrong, but
Speaker 1: basically they are clubs. It's like, all right, I would
Speaker 1: like clubs of people like I would like to see
Speaker 1: this new place that I live in, like the old place.
Speaker 1: Like the European starling was introduced in New York because
Speaker 1: you know, one guy, I wanted to see all of
Speaker 1: the birds of Shakespeare in Christ. Oh, I get even
Speaker 1: better for one for you. The moth, formerly known as
Speaker 1: gypsy moths as see as I'm gonna say that word
Speaker 1: um is now found in America because of this one guy.
Speaker 1: I'll put the name in the chat for you so
Speaker 1: you can say it, because I know how much you
Speaker 1: love saying French names. This guy is one of the most.
Speaker 1: Here comes the wave of comme it's a better anti
Speaker 1: French racism. Oh no, no, yeah, oh, I don't know.
Speaker 1: It doesn't matter. We still get well. Nobody does about
Speaker 1: my Italian accent. It's just the French. It's once again,
Speaker 1: the Italians deserve it as well. Tell us about at end. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so this guy, he was a French scientist who
Speaker 1: who left France. He came to the US for a
Speaker 1: little while. He got Massachusetts. He was also also an
Speaker 1: amateur entomologist, and he was like, oh, you know what
Speaker 1: I think American needs is I think they need a
Speaker 1: silk industry. Now they have a nagtive silk off. It
Speaker 1: doesn't produce good silk. It doesn't breed fast. So he
Speaker 1: brought in the the matic I gotta do the scientific
Speaker 1: name because we changed the name on it because the
Speaker 1: common name is a slur. So we're not doing so
Speaker 1: la matria disparo. So he brought this this moth in
Speaker 1: from Europe. Uh, and he started trying to breathe these
Speaker 1: two moths which are not related at all. It didn't work, obviously,
Speaker 1: and then he just kind of, you know, he went
Speaker 1: he went off to being an astronomer, and he just
Speaker 1: let these moths go in his backyard and he didn't
Speaker 1: tell anyone they were there. And then all of a
Speaker 1: sudden these things escaped, and now they're killing trees, you know,
Speaker 1: across the eastern United States, and they're in Washington, Oregon.
Speaker 1: I think they're in DC a little bit too great.
Speaker 1: So yeah, that's that's that's that's such a good parable,
Speaker 1: like a parallel to the invasive species that is French people.
Speaker 1: That really does just tie up all all aspects of
Speaker 1: that amazing. It makes me think a lot everything you're
Speaker 1: saying about cut Zoo, which which is in the I've
Speaker 1: heard some people say they're getting a handle on it.
Speaker 1: I don't know how to evaluate that at the moment,
Speaker 1: but when I was last living down there, it was
Speaker 1: just like devouring the entire southeast. Yeah, you can handle
Speaker 1: it again, if you want to spread it, you can.
Speaker 1: You can get what's called it chew groove, so a
Speaker 1: bunch of goats. You can get a handle on it.
Speaker 1: But again that's money and effort. So it's just a question.
Speaker 1: So you do get delicious, delicious goat made. Oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: I tell you what. The people who do goat invasive management,
Speaker 1: they haven't made. Would they do goats out to people
Speaker 1: they get paid for the goats and they also get
Speaker 1: their goats fence, or would they slaughter them they even pay?
Speaker 1: You know, that's a good business model as someone with
Speaker 1: a couple of goats. That does sound like the dream. Yeah. God,
Speaker 1: they don't work on all the invasive species I do.
Speaker 1: There are folks, so they probably don't eat those beetles.
Speaker 1: Huh No. No. They also don't like plants with thorns
Speaker 1: on them either, and it's very few goats can handle
Speaker 1: an entire French person either. So yeah, we can't. We
Speaker 1: can't trust the goats to solve all these problems for us.
Speaker 1: It is nice that they're helping. Um, I don't know,
Speaker 1: so I try to Are there things either in terms
Speaker 1: of like it acts people gonna take, or probably more
Speaker 1: more realistically, organizations people could support that you think are
Speaker 1: actually helping try to stop as much of the woods
Speaker 1: from going bad as fast or reverse the some of
Speaker 1: the stuff we've been talking about today, like how can
Speaker 1: we try to have some some room for people to
Speaker 1: do something, if if there is anything people can do
Speaker 1: other than check your fucking shoes for beatles when you
Speaker 1: come back from wherever, burn all of your clothing anytime
Speaker 1: you leave the state. Okay, that's that's a good start.
Speaker 1: That's a really good start. Not even to say sometimes
Speaker 1: it's the county to stop. When you go on a
Speaker 1: road trip, you stop your car at the county line
Speaker 1: and you roll it off of a cliff with tanner
Speaker 1: righte and just let it burn. But don't don't push
Speaker 1: out of the woods. We've seen that. How not into
Speaker 1: the woods? Now into the ocean where everything's fine? Yeah,
Speaker 1: they say, that's what they say about the ocean great.
Speaker 1: I don't think I work between the farfield and the stream.
Speaker 1: I don't do stream or water stuffers's chemistry in there,
Speaker 1: So I don't know what happens over there. That's fine.
Speaker 1: I assume everything is great there. It does seem to
Speaker 1: be going fine. Yah um. I think the best thing
Speaker 1: that you could do is in individuals, is don't cut
Speaker 1: random stuff loose, learn the plants of your area, learn
Speaker 1: what's around you and what should be there, and like
Speaker 1: when you see something that shouldn't be there and you
Speaker 1: know it's in invasive, remove it. We're legally possible. Obviously,
Speaker 1: don't go into like someone's like arboretum and it's like
Speaker 1: slight pulling plants out. That'd be real bad, burned down
Speaker 1: small farms wherever you find. Yeah, oh man, the egg
Speaker 1: people will not be happy about that. But yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: I'm not gonna say anything. Um So I think, you know,
Speaker 1: learned plants trees is neat um. And then if you, um,
Speaker 1: you know, think of if you're thinking about, like, you know,
Speaker 1: how can you help manage force? You know, if you
Speaker 1: lots of people either own forces or people who own
Speaker 1: force and you know, encourage them to get a force
Speaker 1: management plan or land management plan and get that. And
Speaker 1: then also if you got a lawn, rip your lawn
Speaker 1: out again where possible and use native plants. I do.
Speaker 1: I do some you know some lawn change stuff. And
Speaker 1: it's just frustrating the amount of lawns out there. It's like,
Speaker 1: you know, one of these people. One of these reasons
Speaker 1: we're losing so many you know, birds and we have
Speaker 1: fewer birds and bird species because like they can't eat grass.
Speaker 1: These things eat fruits and insects and seeds which you
Speaker 1: don't get in grass. So you know, if you don't
Speaker 1: own a force, that's fine, And I'm I'm a huge
Speaker 1: advocate of that. I try to be on the show
Speaker 1: and people, again, we always get this thing where there
Speaker 1: are people who will critique when we talk about some
Speaker 1: of these small scale solutions. Is like, oh, you know,
Speaker 1: turning your turning your lawn into a hermac culture garden
Speaker 1: with local species isn't going to like produce enough food
Speaker 1: to feed your families. Like, no, it's not about that.
Speaker 1: If you could get a couple of thousand people to
Speaker 1: do it, and they convince another couple and like so
Speaker 1: on and so on and so on, then suddenly, if
Speaker 1: you're increasing significantly the amount of carbon sequestered by that
Speaker 1: lawn and you're also making a better habitat for birds
Speaker 1: and whatnot, that that scales. That is a thing that
Speaker 1: scales if we got a single nificant number of people
Speaker 1: with lawns to replace them with something like we're talking
Speaker 1: about kill kill that grass that almost certainly isn't fucking
Speaker 1: native to your area. Plant stuff that is and and
Speaker 1: and try to reintegrate at least your lawn back into
Speaker 1: the local ecology. If you got a million Americans to
Speaker 1: do a version of that, you that's not an insignificant thing. Um. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And it is something that you can do in a
Speaker 1: lot of states, there's programs to support it. In my state,
Speaker 1: there's a program specifically for like changing lawns over and
Speaker 1: that program is backed up there out of money until
Speaker 1: they spent it all already. There's definitely interest there them
Speaker 1: a thirty five. Let you sell it to whoever, whoever,
Speaker 1: anyone gets it if they want it, it just goes
Speaker 1: up on Craigslist, all right, Yeah, put it on Craigslist. Yeah,
Speaker 1: give it to the highest bidder. Yeah. Um. The other
Speaker 1: thing you can do is go outside, like support your
Speaker 1: local land management agency. Most of these, like forest Service
Speaker 1: and park Service, they depend on money spent by users
Speaker 1: to go spend money at the forest. The other thing
Speaker 1: people can do your fucking boots first though. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: definitely that. And don't don't bring shit in. Don't don't
Speaker 1: bring your like weird thing in, like your weird plant,
Speaker 1: because you don't want to kill it. Your entirely seed
Speaker 1: based diet. Yeah, if you don't, If you hunt, great,
Speaker 1: that supports conservation. If you don't want to hunt, you
Speaker 1: can still buy duck stamps and these other things that
Speaker 1: support wildlife management. In the US, wildlife is funded by
Speaker 1: the users, So those people who buy guns and AMMO,
Speaker 1: you buy arch your equipment, and who buy hunting licenses.
Speaker 1: So if you want to support wildlife, the best thing
Speaker 1: you can do is buy a hunting license, even if
Speaker 1: you don't hunt. That's it's kind of countertuitive, but it's
Speaker 1: the core of the North American mode of wildlife. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's a really good point, and it is one of
Speaker 1: the It's also one of those areas when we talk
Speaker 1: about ways in which theoretically there's room to build in
Speaker 1: roads between left and right in this country, conservation and
Speaker 1: hunting should be one right. And there are hunters on
Speaker 1: the right who are actually talking a pretty good, like
Speaker 1: reasonably about conservation, Like it is an area of shared interest.
Speaker 1: Everybody likes wild places, so quote unquote wild We just
Speaker 1: talked about how none of them are actually wild. They've
Speaker 1: all existed with human beings for forever. But like, yeah,
Speaker 1: we like we like the outdoors, yes, the outdoors. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: and what you know, people have been like, so I hunt,
Speaker 1: I have my cross blows right over there. Crossbow. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you don't have to get a gun. I have been
Speaker 1: wanting to get a crossbow pilled for a while now.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I wouldn't mind getting crossbow pilled myself. Shoulder
Speaker 1: holster for a crossbow. There we go. Oh yeah, that's great. Yeah. No,
Speaker 1: this is not a super expensive one, but it's pretty
Speaker 1: much a rifle. Yeah, I mean ballistically at the ranges
Speaker 1: who use them, there's not any meaningful difference really. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And if you're a person who you know doesn't like it,
Speaker 1: doesn't trust yourself around him, uh, they're very safe. So yeah,
Speaker 1: get get you one of those if you want. It's
Speaker 1: a fun time across. I also like it a lot
Speaker 1: more than my uh my guns because it doesn't yet recoil.
Speaker 1: But that's enough about that. Well that's great. Um, is
Speaker 1: there anything else you wanted to get into Calvin before
Speaker 1: we kind of roll out today? Uh? You touched on
Speaker 1: forest carbon stuff. That's a whole man a bunch of
Speaker 1: stuff on that. That's a whole other world. I am
Speaker 1: interested in talking more about that. But perhaps we should
Speaker 1: do have a dedicated entire thing. I mean, we should
Speaker 1: definitely dedicate an entire thing that it's an incredibly important
Speaker 1: subject UM and I think there's a lot to say
Speaker 1: about how different Um indigenous groups have been. Like up
Speaker 1: in the Northwest in particular, we have a lot of
Speaker 1: um kind of tribal efforts at stuff like not just
Speaker 1: with the with the forest, but also with like the
Speaker 1: coastline and whatnot in rebuilding certain populations along the coast.
Speaker 1: In the Midwest, Phenombera does a great job with forest management.
Speaker 1: I'm actually doing a webinar thing about one of our
Speaker 1: forest passing we're having done come talk about their management. Well,
Speaker 1: we invited them. I'm not actually sure if they're gonna
Speaker 1: do it yet, but the practice we use is based
Speaker 1: on what they use it there. So yeah, it's it's
Speaker 1: really cool what various first nations do. Yeah, I just
Speaker 1: want to plug trees. Yeah, my favorite type of tree
Speaker 1: probably the redwood. Used to live in Arcade to go
Speaker 1: running in them every day. Um, I know that's kind
Speaker 1: of a cliche answer, what's your what's your favorite tree?
Speaker 1: This is one behind me here, no one can see
Speaker 1: my background. It's white oak. You can't make white oaks.
Speaker 1: So yeah, yeah, that is an impolittant tree. Forest products
Speaker 1: are like one of the only things that supports supports
Speaker 1: forest management. So it supports forest so it don't be
Speaker 1: afraid to use, you know, sustainably managed wood and wood products.
Speaker 1: Finding capitalism and drink a shipload of bourbon always a
Speaker 1: good call. Really, Um, alright, well, Calvin Norman, any any
Speaker 1: less pluggable to plug? Um? Plants? Uh? If you want
Speaker 1: to learn plants, that's great. You want to learn about
Speaker 1: what's going on your native you know your areas around you.
Speaker 1: There's lots of groups that do that. Your local extension
Speaker 1: service helps you out with a lot that most of
Speaker 1: their stuff free. So plug that. Yeah, go outside and
Speaker 1: plug that. I don't do twitter good. Yeah, all right, well,
Speaker 1: go outside, hugg a tree. Calvin Norman, thank you again
Speaker 1: so much for coming on. Um. If you want to
Speaker 1: see Calvin's original thread, just type in the woods are bad, uh,
Speaker 1: and it could happen here read it, or just go
Speaker 1: to the it could happen here, read it and scroll
Speaker 1: down a bit you'll find it. Um. That's gonna do
Speaker 1: it for us today until tomorrow. Go out into the woods.
Speaker 1: Who out into the woods, wash your fucking boots first.
Speaker 1: What grows in the forest trees. Sure you know what
Speaker 1: else grows in the forest. Our imagination, our sense of wonder,
Speaker 1: and our family bonds grow too, because when we disconnect
Speaker 1: from this and connect with this, we reconnect with each other.
Speaker 1: The forest is closer than you think. Find a forest
Speaker 1: near you and start exploring. I Discover the Forest dot Org,
Speaker 1: brought to you by the United States Forest Service and
Speaker 1: the AD Council. It could happen. Here is the podcast
Speaker 1: you're listening to with your ears or perhaps other parts
Speaker 1: of your body if you have, I don't know, some
Speaker 1: bizarre form of synesthesia that causes you to taste sound. Um,
Speaker 1: maybe you're tasting us right now. In which case, UM,
Speaker 1: I'm gonna open up the flavor bouquet by introducing my
Speaker 1: co host Garrison UM and our guest for today. Why
Speaker 1: don't you take over now, Garrison, I've done my job great.
Speaker 1: That sounds lovely. Yeah, hey, Garrison, here could happen. Here
Speaker 1: is the podcast. We have a special guest today. UH
Speaker 1: journalist and researcher W. F. Thomas. Hello, Hello, it's so
Speaker 1: good to be here on Behind the Woman's Revolution, The
Speaker 1: Police Insurrection Daily. Thank thank you lovely to have you. UM.
Speaker 1: A lot of people say Garrison's voice tastes like sorbet
Speaker 1: by the way, so comment we get a lot, a lot,
Speaker 1: lot of a lot of a lot of those d M.
Speaker 1: S Um, you surprised off that. Um, So we're gonna
Speaker 1: be talking about something I've wanted to actually bring up
Speaker 1: myself for a while now, but I just have not
Speaker 1: put it the work in And now luckily someone else
Speaker 1: did the actual work, so we know we could just
Speaker 1: talk about it. We're talking about something called a disclosed TV, um,
Speaker 1: which is a broad range of things. It's not it's
Speaker 1: not just one thing. Uh, And I guess I'll hand
Speaker 1: it over to the person who did the actual work
Speaker 1: in terms of like how how would you describe what
Speaker 1: disclosed TV is? But but like before we get into
Speaker 1: like the journey of the platform and thing like what
Speaker 1: like what is it? Yeah? Um, let me start this
Speaker 1: off by saying it already before the publication of the
Speaker 1: article been publicly threatened vaguely with legal action from disclosed TV.
Speaker 1: So that will be largely informing what I say today.
Speaker 1: But we do have a lot of receipts Um. You
Speaker 1: have very scary lawyers here, So I'm I'm I'm excited
Speaker 1: whatever happens, So feel free to say whatever you want
Speaker 1: to say. But UM, Disclosed TV markets itself and presents
Speaker 1: itself as a news aggregator UM operating Twitter, UM, Telegram,
Speaker 1: gab getter. They have a Facebook as well as well
Speaker 1: as the main site where they host what one could
Speaker 1: describe as articles as well. Yeah, and I think Disclosed
Speaker 1: TV for our purposes despite like they have a very
Speaker 1: large Facebook presence UM. But the way that we usually
Speaker 1: interact with them, and specifically like me and Robert and
Speaker 1: then other people who are like journalists orge to anti
Speaker 1: fascist researchers, usually we interact with Disclosed TV on Telegram
Speaker 1: or through Twitter, um, Twitter, through like it's how they
Speaker 1: like break a lot of current events in like a
Speaker 1: where like you know, a lot of like political figures
Speaker 1: talk about them is is Twitter, UM, and then Telegram
Speaker 1: is where they really disseminate these out into more obscure groups.
Speaker 1: And maybe they change their wording because they know the
Speaker 1: audience is a little bit different and they've been a
Speaker 1: vector of information for a while. Really really with the protests,
Speaker 1: they kind of picked up a lot of there was
Speaker 1: they were everywhere in terms of like saying specific things,
Speaker 1: not doing sourcing UM and just having like basically they
Speaker 1: are a place where they kind of create what then
Speaker 1: they try to create what the news is because of
Speaker 1: how isolated they are from the sources that they actually
Speaker 1: pull info from, and they're very they're very interested in
Speaker 1: kind of crafting their own version of events UM, which
Speaker 1: appeals to people across the spectrum. Like, they don't just
Speaker 1: market towards the far right wing. Sometimes they frame things
Speaker 1: to kind of attract of a variety of people on
Speaker 1: like the under the extremist banner, let's say. Um, So,
Speaker 1: you know, you don't just see them in far right circles.
Speaker 1: You see Disclose pop up in a lot of places
Speaker 1: because of the way they frame news and breaking events. UM.
Speaker 1: But they didn't always start out like this. This isn't
Speaker 1: what they always were. They weren't always this kind of
Speaker 1: content aggregator that creates their version of news. UM and
Speaker 1: Thomas did more research into what they were before, which
Speaker 1: I actually had not done that research yet. UM. So yeah,
Speaker 1: let's uh, let's talk about that a little bit. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So I'm gonna start off with talking about how I
Speaker 1: first heard about Disclose. UM. So I was living in
Speaker 1: Germany when the pandemic hit um and got COVID first
Speaker 1: wave in Germany in the moor march Um. Luckily I
Speaker 1: was totally asymptomatic. But I was kind of stranded in
Speaker 1: Germany for a couple of weeks, um and how to
Speaker 1: isolate in a vacation rental. And the Bavarian man who
Speaker 1: owned it just kept coming and talking to me. And
Speaker 1: I would tell him, Hey, it's probably not the best
Speaker 1: idea for you to be coming by and chatting with
Speaker 1: me all the time. And no, he got into talking,
Speaker 1: and we're talking in German. He got we got into
Speaker 1: talking about the pandemic, what he thought about it, and
Speaker 1: he started talking about how he thought, oh, the government's
Speaker 1: making this seem way worse than it is. You know,
Speaker 1: the deep state, if you know anything about that, and
Speaker 1: he and he said deep state in English. Um. And
Speaker 1: I was familiar with German farright currents at that time, UM,
Speaker 1: but I had never encountered a pilled German dude. And
Speaker 1: that's when I realized this is gonna be a fucking problem.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, And and it lo and behold, it has
Speaker 1: continued to be a problem. So as I got back
Speaker 1: to the U S and and the other thing when
Speaker 1: I was in Germany is the first time I taught
Speaker 1: I encountered telegram. UM when a German I knew said, hey,
Speaker 1: I I just don't trust WhatsApp because it's own by Facebook.
Speaker 1: Why don't you download Telegram In Q thousand nineteen, I think, um,
Speaker 1: and and it was pretty innocuous to me at the time.
Speaker 1: I didn't realize this would become a problem. Yeah, fast forward, UM.
Speaker 1: I was working on my master's project, which UM you
Speaker 1: can talk about more later on because it's kind of
Speaker 1: besides the point, UM if you don't want to hear
Speaker 1: about it, but looking at Telegram as the cultic milieu UM,
Speaker 1: using Colin Campbell's framework of the cultic milieu UM to
Speaker 1: understand specifically how Q and on spread in Germany and
Speaker 1: how Q and on interacted with these native underlying conspiracy
Speaker 1: narratives within Germany. UM. Because Telegram is already massively popular
Speaker 1: in Germany before after j six, I think of the
Speaker 1: band wave came down and there was much more migration
Speaker 1: to the platform. So you know, I did the social
Speaker 1: network analysis looking at the conspirat German conspiracy is seen
Speaker 1: on Telegram, and one of the biggest notes that came
Speaker 1: up and I was looking at a number of times
Speaker 1: shared into other groups or channels was disclosed TV. UM.
Speaker 1: And that's the first time I came into it. I
Speaker 1: look through it and realized, okay, they there is an
Speaker 1: editorial stance within this, UM, and that editorial stance largely
Speaker 1: attracts conspiracists and far right extremists to this coverage into
Speaker 1: you know, this is widely shared among conspiracists and far
Speaker 1: right extremists. UM. Fast forward. UM. I'm on Twitter, as
Speaker 1: many of us are, unfortunately, UM, and I saw disclosed
Speaker 1: TV just popping up everywhere, UM, even from people who
Speaker 1: who I would think should know better. Yeah, absolutely, are
Speaker 1: you know, big extremism researchers and journalists UM shared it.
Speaker 1: I remember there one specific one that really came across
Speaker 1: my feed UM. Disclosed had had taken a video from
Speaker 1: like the Blaze, Glennbex whatever about the firefighters who were
Speaker 1: quitting over vaccine mandate or something and had all of
Speaker 1: their boots or whatever. And I saw, yeah, lots of
Speaker 1: people sharing that as well. UM. And eventually I got
Speaker 1: tired of saying, hey, they should have suspect, don't share it, UM,
Speaker 1: and decided to write an article about it, so I
Speaker 1: could just send my article to people and it's really
Speaker 1: interesting what I found. Um. Disclosed tv started off in
Speaker 1: the mid two thousand's as just this forum for UFOs,
Speaker 1: paranormal stuff, cryptids, big Foot sightings, and existed in largely
Speaker 1: the same format until two thousand and twenty one. Um,
Speaker 1: there were some shifts in in the way the site
Speaker 1: presented itself. UM it was. It started off as a
Speaker 1: member loggin where members could write articles that were largely
Speaker 1: long forum forum posts and then have people comment on
Speaker 1: them and reply. Um. And at one point, Disclosed made
Speaker 1: the jump to functioning as a news aggregator while including
Speaker 1: an editorial spin on that and including some of their
Speaker 1: own articles. Do you want me to get more into
Speaker 1: that now? Yeah? Because yeah, because like the shift was
Speaker 1: was it wasn't like immediate as well, right, Like they
Speaker 1: were starting to kind of present themselves in more of
Speaker 1: a news gathering way, you know, around the late s
Speaker 1: of course, during this became a big thing in terms
Speaker 1: of their social media presence. Um, they were trying to
Speaker 1: present themselves as like a news aggregator, right, but they
Speaker 1: still operated that, but they still operated the forum on
Speaker 1: their site throughout most of that time, and it's only
Speaker 1: until recently where they shut that forum down UM, which
Speaker 1: was you know, full of full of all kinds of
Speaker 1: conspiratorial nonsense. It's very easy to see past for most people.
Speaker 1: Uh you know, secret Arctic Ship, which is yeah, it's
Speaker 1: always that's usually yeah, even in to get stuff like
Speaker 1: watch this s j W get wrecked, which which is
Speaker 1: not a quotation, but just that kind of vibe, that
Speaker 1: style of content. Yeah, going from the forum operating then
Speaker 1: with they you know, their social media accounts, to the
Speaker 1: shift this more of like presenting as a news website.
Speaker 1: Talk about that and the potential effects that we see
Speaker 1: this having on both like the social media sites and
Speaker 1: just the overall trend of news aggregation in general. I guess. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So the first big shift that I found UM was
Speaker 1: the creation of their telegram channel, which is in January
Speaker 1: one actually, so this is relatively more recently shift that
Speaker 1: happened UM, and they operated their telegram as a UM
Speaker 1: as more in this traditional news aggregator since and so
Speaker 1: that's how they really blew up on Telegram. At some
Speaker 1: point they deleted all of their old tweets UM and
Speaker 1: started operating their Twitter in a similar manner. It was
Speaker 1: after they created this telegram channel UM in September. Actually
Speaker 1: overnight on septemb they completely re rebranded the site. They
Speaker 1: took out all the user forums UM. They included backdated
Speaker 1: articles to a year prior UM and looking looking through
Speaker 1: archives of it, there was a note saying something along
Speaker 1: the lines of we have found so much growth on
Speaker 1: social media. Are growing Telegram channel, are growing Twitter account UM,
Speaker 1: and something to the effect of we we are changing
Speaker 1: our strategy and going about this a different way UM.
Speaker 1: And you can if you were into the forum, you
Speaker 1: can join our discord UM which is funked and I'll
Speaker 1: get I'll get into that later UM. And yeah, looking
Speaker 1: it was really interesting too because looking at these backdated
Speaker 1: articles UM, they included very obviously plagiarized content. UM. They
Speaker 1: had I believe it's it's all in the article, but
Speaker 1: they had four journalists UM names attached with the article
Speaker 1: using um AI generated images for their pictures. UM. And
Speaker 1: the especially the articles that they themselves pulp wished. UM.
Speaker 1: We're very focused on UFOs, paranormal paranormal phenomenon UM, as
Speaker 1: well as content that could cause skepticism within an audience
Speaker 1: UM about vaccines, and lockdowns. And I do not know
Speaker 1: the intent of U their editorial board, and so I
Speaker 1: cannot speak on that, but of course it generated this effect. Yes,
Speaker 1: that is they found a way of creating content which
Speaker 1: develops a very specific audience, which grew their numbers, which
Speaker 1: made them, you know what one could assume would make
Speaker 1: them want to make more of that content, because that
Speaker 1: makes more numbers than they can UM use that to
Speaker 1: grow their platform. UM. Yeah, specifically leading up like after
Speaker 1: after January UM ramping up when of the vaccines were
Speaker 1: coming more and more common in the States and that
Speaker 1: across the world. UM, they have seen a pretty significant
Speaker 1: growth and have changed their platform accordingly exactly. UM. So
Speaker 1: we began looking into who the who the fun owns this,
Speaker 1: what's going on with this UM. Like all German companies UM,
Speaker 1: and it is based in Germany, there's a requirement by
Speaker 1: law to include an imprint or an impress them that
Speaker 1: includes an address UM contact information for the site UM
Speaker 1: there in the company that owns it UM, a company
Speaker 1: called Future Bites operates disclosed tv UM, which describes itself
Speaker 1: as a private equity firm and media group. UM and
Speaker 1: looking into the ownership behind Future Bites is a man
Speaker 1: by the name of Uva Brown who has a pretty
Speaker 1: interesting backstory. He's hosted, He's made numerous web hosting sites. UM.
Speaker 1: I believe he created some dating sites as well, but
Speaker 1: but my research was not conclusive, so that's a maybe. UM.
Speaker 1: But eventually he sold. He had his most success when
Speaker 1: he sold one of his web hosting sites to go
Speaker 1: Daddy for a lot of money. And along the way,
Speaker 1: in his own as he described, booked a flight on
Speaker 1: virgin to go into space and see for himself if
Speaker 1: the earth, if the Earth was flat. Oh my god,
Speaker 1: awesome cool that that, this is great, thank you. So
Speaker 1: this this is who we're dealing with. Um. Sweet. And
Speaker 1: the thing about Disclosed being based in Germany, UM, that
Speaker 1: that becomes an issue, UM, is that Germany has a
Speaker 1: very different h look at free speech than in the US. UM.
Speaker 1: For example, even online displaying swastikas UM and denying the
Speaker 1: Holocaust is legal and is a prosecutable crime that can
Speaker 1: get you jail time. UM. So as we explored as
Speaker 1: I mostly and UM, there's additional reporting from Berny Piper
Speaker 1: and I'll talk a bit more about that later explored
Speaker 1: the discord and their Telegram. We realized, Hum, it seems
Speaker 1: to be a lot of Nazis here, and by which
Speaker 1: when I say seems to be a lot of Nazis,
Speaker 1: I mean people with swastikas in their profile builds UM
Speaker 1: with you know names, referencing the Holocaust with the whispers
Speaker 1: parentheses um and saying denying that the hologast happened. Um.
Speaker 1: And also sharing the neo Nazi, famous neo Nazi, infamous
Speaker 1: neo Nazi propaganda film Europa The Last Battle UM, which
Speaker 1: was shared by prominent q and on influencer ghost Ezra. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I know. Um. Oh man, this this came up a
Speaker 1: few days ago. One of the one of the channels
Speaker 1: that me and someone else have been watching, uh forwarded
Speaker 1: me being that that that film being shared at the
Speaker 1: it was it was, it was that the the Free
Speaker 1: Oregon Telegram channel was sharing links to that and I
Speaker 1: wonder I would I would like to track back where
Speaker 1: that link came from. Um. Yeah. Not not great seeing
Speaker 1: that film circulate more and more, especially among like you know,
Speaker 1: the Free Oregan Telegram channels, you know, like anti mask,
Speaker 1: Anti backs, Anti lockdown channel. Yeah, and seeing the percoloration
Speaker 1: of that type of content. Yeah, so in preparing for
Speaker 1: this article, UM, with the help of of the Logically
Speaker 1: editorial team, I'm a freelancer UM. Their current head of content,
Speaker 1: Ernie piper Um, sent an email basically asking, hey, what's
Speaker 1: going on. You all seem to have a Nazi problem
Speaker 1: that's kind of borderline illegal in Germany. UM, to which
Speaker 1: for a while, this for for about twenty four hours
Speaker 1: as closed, just went totally quiet and didn't post UM
Speaker 1: and then came out with a post specifically targeting Ernie
Speaker 1: Um by name and with a picture of him and
Speaker 1: linking to some of his old reporting work as well,
Speaker 1: UM saying yes, Uva Brown owns this. He got his
Speaker 1: money from go daddy. You know, we value free speech
Speaker 1: and we condemn hatred whatnot, and and saying, oh, our
Speaker 1: telegram we have a tell there's a telegram group, but
Speaker 1: we have these rules in it and h okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: we we had to shut down the discord that got
Speaker 1: a little bit out of hand. We admit that, you know,
Speaker 1: they had people denying the Holocaust with swastika icons in
Speaker 1: their discord that they didn't seem to care too much
Speaker 1: about until someone pointed it out. UM. And you know
Speaker 1: there's there was additionally very explicit neo Nazi content in
Speaker 1: their telegram channel as well, with the excuse oh well
Speaker 1: we're glowing growing form. We we can't moderate everything. Is
Speaker 1: well they have. They just crossed four hundred thousand in
Speaker 1: their telegram channel and I think about thirty thousand and
Speaker 1: their telegram group, um, which is frankly bullshit. Yeah that
Speaker 1: is if if my personal opinion is that if you
Speaker 1: cannot don't have the resources to moderate this space, you
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't space the space. Um. And and additionally confirming oh, okay,
Speaker 1: we we when we made our new version of the site. Yes,
Speaker 1: we backdated some articles from previous user generated content that
Speaker 1: we you know, didn't vet properly. We're trying to fix
Speaker 1: that now. They removed some of those articles, um. And
Speaker 1: that yeah, we none of the people who who are
Speaker 1: the authors of our articles are real people and they're
Speaker 1: all pen names. Um. You know. They also have or
Speaker 1: at least had a tab on their website that said
Speaker 1: right for us and looking for people to send them
Speaker 1: things and saying you know, well we will disclose your
Speaker 1: bio and link to all your social media if you
Speaker 1: write a story for us. And they're there was zero
Speaker 1: of that happening as well. So do you think that,
Speaker 1: I know, like on the rules for their telegram they
Speaker 1: have the no Nazi stuff rule. Um. Do you think
Speaker 1: they're actually trying to discourage that because they're scared of
Speaker 1: legal stuff or is that just presentorary? And they I
Speaker 1: guess you know, this is just going into speculations. So
Speaker 1: I think this might be more a question for even
Speaker 1: Robert Um in terms of, yeah, like is the anti
Speaker 1: Nazi stuff presentorary? And because it does seem to be
Speaker 1: a lot of their user base is fostering that type
Speaker 1: of thing or is you know being moved over from
Speaker 1: other similar channels, um? Because yeah, like a lot of
Speaker 1: like the amount that we see disclose, like you know,
Speaker 1: intercept with channels like you know, the Rise above Him
Speaker 1: channel UM, and a whole bunch of like eco fascist channels,
Speaker 1: and a whole bunch of channels you know, on a
Speaker 1: like a broad range of like actual like fascist topics,
Speaker 1: like people who are like into fascist theory. Um. It's
Speaker 1: quite high that like the amount that disclosed shows up. UM.
Speaker 1: And I don't know, like you could look at all
Speaker 1: their stuff saying I mean like yeah, on their rule
Speaker 1: page saying no Nazi bullshit. Um but then if you
Speaker 1: spend any amount of time looking at where they're posts
Speaker 1: are forwarded, it's almost primarily people who are self describe
Speaker 1: themselves as fascists. Um So I mean, yeah, it's hard
Speaker 1: to or Donald J. Trump Jr. Yes, yes, it expands
Speaker 1: out into a lot of you know, just like you know,
Speaker 1: American journalists suits study extremism could also share discloses stuff
Speaker 1: on Twitter, right, that is part of their thing is
Speaker 1: making that and you know that that does strengthen them
Speaker 1: because it gives them that legitimacy. So then when people
Speaker 1: point out that they have Nazi problem, like, no, that's
Speaker 1: not us, that's just some of our users who are
Speaker 1: trolling or you know whatever whatever bullshit they want to say.
Speaker 1: Um So, I guess, like how I guess the real
Speaker 1: way to frame this is like how often have you
Speaker 1: seen Nazi stuff associated with the disclose with the disclosed
Speaker 1: TV brand? Because that's the one thing we actually can measure, right,
Speaker 1: we can't measure their intentions, but we can measure how
Speaker 1: often this stuff happens. Yeah, I mean that's always like
Speaker 1: the best way to measure that kind of thing, rather
Speaker 1: than just sort of like making the allegation listing like
Speaker 1: we find it in this many channels, we see it
Speaker 1: shared in these areas. It's being discussed by these people
Speaker 1: and like like that that's I think always kind of
Speaker 1: how you actually build these these sort of networks is
Speaker 1: by looking at what is actually spreading where like that's
Speaker 1: that it is thankfully something that you can measure pretty objectively,
Speaker 1: and like they are fostering it with the amount of
Speaker 1: stuff they talk about like George Soros and you know,
Speaker 1: the amount of stuff that they like. The way they
Speaker 1: frame breaking news is has that editorial bent where it's
Speaker 1: very clear that it's getting pushed in a specific direction,
Speaker 1: like there's that is that is a thing that you
Speaker 1: can observe by reading the type of narrow of their
Speaker 1: weaving via how they report information. Yeah, the the topics
Speaker 1: that they choose to cover, our topics that resonate very
Speaker 1: deeply with conspiracist and with far extremist communities. Um. If
Speaker 1: I had to speculate, UM, I will say at least
Speaker 1: since the article has come out, Um, they've done a
Speaker 1: better job of moderating their telegram channel at least for now.
Speaker 1: So good job disclosed TV. No one you can't find
Speaker 1: links to Europe with the last battle there anymore, you
Speaker 1: can still find you can still find very rampant homophobia
Speaker 1: slurs um because you know they didn't they clearly auto
Speaker 1: blocked some words, but people can shorten them or use
Speaker 1: different spellings for those words to still be used in
Speaker 1: the channel. Um. There's still anti semitic um coded anti
Speaker 1: Semitic references as well, UM responding to something saying oive
Speaker 1: a for example, which is something that tends to be
Speaker 1: used by a lot of neo Nazis and anti Semites. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean even and if you do any amount of
Speaker 1: research on Telegram, you will you will find forward links,
Speaker 1: forwarded links to this channel all everywhere, like if it's
Speaker 1: it is, it is so massive, the footprint that they
Speaker 1: have currently in the in like the the cycle of
Speaker 1: of forwarding posts specifically on telegram. UM. And yeah, and
Speaker 1: they're they're getting a lot of traction on it because
Speaker 1: they have stuff framed in a way that's really easy
Speaker 1: for them to have those stuff like line up with
Speaker 1: the communities that promote those types of worldviews um and
Speaker 1: promote the you know, the narratives that they want to foster.
Speaker 1: So let's see, let's have another quick break, and then
Speaker 1: let's maybe talk about your big master's project, which is
Speaker 1: really interesting. Yeah, can I can? I? Can? I do it? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I do this. You know. You know what isn't telegram? Uh?
Speaker 1: Literally these ads unless we get an ad by telegram,
Speaker 1: which we are primarily sponsored by the duo Brothers. Um,
Speaker 1: but that's for a separate project. My favorite ad is
Speaker 1: the is the one where it's the kid playing and
Speaker 1: they find a gun. Oh yeah, that's my favorite. And
Speaker 1: well we are thanks to great job. Great We hope
Speaker 1: everybody enjoyed that kid finding a gun of kid firing it. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So there's one of my favorite tweets recently was like somebody,
Speaker 1: it was somebody like clipped a screen grab a news
Speaker 1: article that was like a toddler has shot someone every
Speaker 1: day in the United States for the last three years,
Speaker 1: and somebody quote tweeted and said, somebody fucking stop him.
Speaker 1: It's very good. Um. The last thing I want to
Speaker 1: talk about is just kind of why news aggregators are
Speaker 1: bad in the first place, and examples of which we've
Speaker 1: seen the past few years, and how they contribute to
Speaker 1: dis information specifically, and how they don't do sourcing for
Speaker 1: any claims and they try to make themselves a primary
Speaker 1: source even though they're not. UM and then also would
Speaker 1: love to talk about your very fancy project. So yeah,
Speaker 1: we saw a lot of news aggregators that like during
Speaker 1: the protest, specifically that that spawned and killed many a
Speaker 1: news aggregator account um, which did not help things very much. UM.
Speaker 1: And this is this is an issue that strikes across
Speaker 1: the political spectrum. Yes, I mean one of the biggest
Speaker 1: instances of that would be an account called and on
Speaker 1: cat right. That was the yeah um who you know
Speaker 1: marketed themselves towards the left wing. UM. And again I
Speaker 1: don't know what their intentionality was. They may have had
Speaker 1: their heart in the right place. I have no idea, UM,
Speaker 1: and I'm not going to speculate on that right now.
Speaker 1: But the effect that they caused was damaging to how
Speaker 1: information is disseminated, specifically in high stress events UM. You know,
Speaker 1: like for instance, the written house shooting, you know, like
Speaker 1: stuff like that. Uh, like the big accounts, the demos
Speaker 1: around that before that, yeah, before that, yes, yeah, like
Speaker 1: and the in fostering that very fast paced unverified information
Speaker 1: circulation UM that gets you know a lot of retweets
Speaker 1: it gets it gets a lot of eyeballs on it,
Speaker 1: but but it's hard. It makes it very hard to
Speaker 1: backtrack claims because they do not want to link to
Speaker 1: other accounts, because they're mostly interested in growing their own account.
Speaker 1: Um so, and I will say disclose has gotten better
Speaker 1: about linking to the sources, even if the title and
Speaker 1: the tweet don't necessarily match what is in the story
Speaker 1: they link to. Yeah, at least someone could take a
Speaker 1: different interpretation from the two. Yes. So, just like you know,
Speaker 1: news aggregation and the way intersects with disinformation and misinformation
Speaker 1: not just a problem for the far right, not just
Speaker 1: a problem for the right wing, not just a problem
Speaker 1: for liberals, not just problem for leftist This is the
Speaker 1: thing that anyone, anyone can really grasp on to um
Speaker 1: And some of it's accidental, some of it's intentional, Right,
Speaker 1: there's some some people might just do this kind of mindlessly,
Speaker 1: and some people may, you know, do this aggregation with
Speaker 1: a very specific intent in mind. So just be very
Speaker 1: careful whenever you have an account that always leads with
Speaker 1: all caps like breaking like news. Like if if you
Speaker 1: have an account that always does that, maybe maybe maybe
Speaker 1: don't take that account super seriously all the time. Maybe
Speaker 1: you should uh find other sources of info that don't
Speaker 1: always start the tweets with breaking news and all caps
Speaker 1: or advice to people if they do want something like that,
Speaker 1: find an actual news source. Yeah, there's plenty of valid
Speaker 1: criticism them to be made against, you know, these mainstream
Speaker 1: media M s M. Centrist stuff from from you know,
Speaker 1: even from the left. There's there's criticism. Um, but you
Speaker 1: have to find some way of finding your own meaning
Speaker 1: and understanding of what is going on in the world
Speaker 1: around you. I think a CNN Reuters. Yeah, And on
Speaker 1: that point, I think that is part of why I
Speaker 1: think Disclosed can succeed and or like what they did
Speaker 1: can succeed, even like when I see stuff shared on
Speaker 1: the left, even by like anarchists, because it is a
Speaker 1: not mainstream media news source, the way they can frame
Speaker 1: things of sometimes rarely will match up with like an
Speaker 1: actual anarchists views and they're like, yeah, I'm gonna share
Speaker 1: it from this thing because it does feel like an
Speaker 1: underground you know source. It doesn't. It doesn't. It's not
Speaker 1: you're not sharing a CNN article, so you feel better
Speaker 1: because instead you're sharing something that is not in the mainstream.
Speaker 1: So like I get that, I get that pull to
Speaker 1: not something that is ingenuous reading of a CNN article instead, Yeah,
Speaker 1: but instead of you're you know, it's not actually better.
Speaker 1: It's just marketing. They're just tricking you via esthetics and branding,
Speaker 1: and that's all that it is. Right, So maybe you
Speaker 1: should learn learn to see past the marketing and branding
Speaker 1: of those types of things and look at the actual
Speaker 1: content of what's being shared. What is the university project
Speaker 1: thing that has been taking up a lot of your time? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and um, so you're back in the US, and I
Speaker 1: got interested, um, especially in looking at the spread of
Speaker 1: Q and on in Germany, and that you led me
Speaker 1: down this research path, um, and brought me especially to
Speaker 1: telegram um again before it was largely used in in
Speaker 1: right wing circles in the US. Will the Nazis have
Speaker 1: have pretty regularly in the US and on telegram as well. Um.
Speaker 1: But this led me to look at this and and
Speaker 1: um especially to to look at program the context of
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, Colin Campbell's concept of the cultic bilieu, um,
Speaker 1: which I don't know if y'all have talked about that
Speaker 1: on this we have one behind the Okay, but yeah,
Speaker 1: to give a quick summary, is is the concept that
Speaker 1: there is this space and when Colin Campbell wrote that,
Speaker 1: it was in I believe the seventies. So it was
Speaker 1: a physical space where people go to find these rejected narratives,
Speaker 1: you know, reject the idea of rejected knowledge, and they
Speaker 1: go to seek this kind of knowledge and and and
Speaker 1: these things. UM. So he's talking about things like UFO
Speaker 1: conferences or or meet ups, or or alternative bookstores, or
Speaker 1: perhaps maybe signing up at an institute to get a
Speaker 1: degree in metaphysics. Yeah, as what a weirdly specific example gears. Yeah, sorry,
Speaker 1: does red the red of thought? Yeah? Anyway, how's that going,
Speaker 1: by the way, Garrison, it's going good, good. Yeah. And
Speaker 1: and what you find is is people can very easily
Speaker 1: move between ideologies UM. And as they move between ideologies, concepts,
Speaker 1: specific schools, they cross pollinate these schools UM. And this
Speaker 1: is how you get these kind of highly syncretic movements
Speaker 1: like Q and on UM, like the modern conspiracy movement,
Speaker 1: which is incredibly syncretic, and UM some of the other
Speaker 1: really bad ones that are out there as well that
Speaker 1: combine these different views. UM. Specifically, when you start, when
Speaker 1: you start combining this type of like cultural mysticism with
Speaker 1: politics often you can have very volatile results. Yes, exactly,
Speaker 1: can you think of any examples? I mean, in some
Speaker 1: ways the modern eco fascist movement is built on a
Speaker 1: lot of this type of stuff, so that that would
Speaker 1: be the easiest, That would be the easiest. The I
Speaker 1: think that the syncretism of because I think a lot
Speaker 1: of people have been surprised to see like you know,
Speaker 1: kind of like natural medicine and and what not subcultures
Speaker 1: and eight like alien subcultures kind of colliding with Q
Speaker 1: and on and and these like more like far right
Speaker 1: neo Nazi type groups, and the fact that there are
Speaker 1: all of these things that were associated for years kind
Speaker 1: of more with the left have been increasingly um pulled
Speaker 1: into this this sort of um weather system of conspiratorial
Speaker 1: thinking has been surprising to a lot of people who
Speaker 1: don't understand this stuff. But it makes total sense if
Speaker 1: you if you have been paying attention to the scholarship
Speaker 1: on on what is actually like how cults sort of
Speaker 1: form like it's it's it's um. It's like a weather
Speaker 1: pattern that's been building for quite a while. There's a
Speaker 1: gravity to it that sucks um everything in together and
Speaker 1: at all kind of it's as you said, syncretic um.
Speaker 1: It's not to get into horseshoe through, but this is
Speaker 1: even how you get some of that cross over, right. Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: that was that was That was what I was just
Speaker 1: going to mention. Is that even a lot of like
Speaker 1: the left wing authors or you know, post left wing
Speaker 1: authors who got into this like cultural mysticism. Um. You
Speaker 1: see their texts now getting shared by like like open fascists.
Speaker 1: Even though these authors were anti fascist, um, they are
Speaker 1: able to still pick and choose what parts they're writing
Speaker 1: to appropriate because some of it can kind of synchronize
Speaker 1: them at from opposite ends a very long time. Like
Speaker 1: if you we've we talked about in our Gabriel the
Speaker 1: Nunzio episodes Fume, which was this kind of like we're
Speaker 1: a large chunk of like the fascist intellectual movement got
Speaker 1: started um in the post World War One period, but
Speaker 1: also there were like a ton of anarchists and a
Speaker 1: lot of like left wing um like thought leaders and whatnot.
Speaker 1: We're kind of all it was again kind of there
Speaker 1: there was this kind of like gravity center that pulled
Speaker 1: everything in and it all started churning together and um yeah,
Speaker 1: we're we're we're we're seeing that happen now. Um, and
Speaker 1: it sucks. That's that's that's great. To jump back to Cample.
Speaker 1: That's one of those examples of those physical space of
Speaker 1: the call and that call Campbell was talking about, right, Um,
Speaker 1: where it's it's any place that ideas that are rejected
Speaker 1: by you know, the orthodox kind of the establishment. There
Speaker 1: is overlap. There is not necessarily ideological overlap, but there
Speaker 1: is an interplay between them as people move between them
Speaker 1: and as these ideas come into collision with one another.
Speaker 1: Um and with the Internet, right, whole different fucking ball game.
Speaker 1: Um yeah, because that space is now everywhere exactly and
Speaker 1: and telegram specifically has these specific affordances that make it
Speaker 1: ideal for having this soup of bullshit on it as well. Um,
Speaker 1: it's it's additionally one of and this may be changing.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of discussion going on about this, especially
Speaker 1: within the German government, who could actually they already have
Speaker 1: a law that they could use to say, hey, you
Speaker 1: can't have Nazis on you can't have this Nazi ship
Speaker 1: in telegram. Um. But telegram is one of these last
Speaker 1: places where where things are largely allowed to spread without
Speaker 1: any kind of interruption, right, um, which I do think
Speaker 1: you know you look at Telegram is used in in um,
Speaker 1: the Hong Kong uprising as well, it was used for
Speaker 1: it was used in the George Yeah, that George Floyd
Speaker 1: uprising as well. Um, and it's the same things that
Speaker 1: people too at time is fake, um, bolish line of
Speaker 1: your time. Um, but shooting your clock, shoot the fucking clock.
Speaker 1: But okay, let's get back to the topic. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: but but but drumming back into this Telegram markets itself,
Speaker 1: is this very secure platform. It's probably not right. It
Speaker 1: does have it's certainly not absolutely not. It does have
Speaker 1: it does have encrypted chats, but that's only for one
Speaker 1: to one messaging between people. And even then you need
Speaker 1: to go and make you sure that security settings right.
Speaker 1: And again I I don't fully trust that. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: don't fully try. I mean signal is about barely trust signal. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: I trust conversations. When everyone has put their phone inside
Speaker 1: a Faraday bag in a house and then we walked
Speaker 1: two miles into we walked two miles into the woods,
Speaker 1: then you can have a conversation. Yeah, um, but tell
Speaker 1: grand market itself is a very secure app, right UM,
Speaker 1: which is which is largely marketing. You know, it's it's
Speaker 1: appeal is that it's not what's app, it's not owned
Speaker 1: by Facebook. It's probably worth acknowledging that for because it's
Speaker 1: also very popular with a lot of people in UM
Speaker 1: you know, parts of the Global South and countries with
Speaker 1: authoritarian governments, and it is has been used for a
Speaker 1: lot of organizing. It can be more secure and all
Speaker 1: more secure but also more able than what than any
Speaker 1: other tool people have access to. I mean in Syria
Speaker 1: it's like it's again extremely and for like neighbors, like
Speaker 1: neighborhoods and towns will have like Telegram groups for this
Speaker 1: little village where they a lot of stuff gets done
Speaker 1: over Telegram in places like that, and telegram sits in
Speaker 1: this interesting space between social media. UM. It's not a
Speaker 1: full on social media site, but it's also not just
Speaker 1: a messaging Applegram. It's kind of to categorize. It is
Speaker 1: an interesting sort of like in between type thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because you can have essentially unlimited I think the number
Speaker 1: is in the hundreds of thousands for how many people
Speaker 1: can join a group message UM on Telegram. And you
Speaker 1: also have these one way messaging thing called channels where
Speaker 1: where one person or group of people can send out
Speaker 1: messages that appear alongside everyone else's message feed as well. UM,
Speaker 1: and that can you can also enable comments on that UM,
Speaker 1: which I'll get into and a second UM. But but
Speaker 1: it's a great way to share information as well. What
Speaker 1: I was specifically looking at is the forwarding of messages,
Speaker 1: because you you can forward a message from this one
Speaker 1: channel into whatever group chat you're in, and it links
Speaker 1: back to that channel. And I was interested in saying,
Speaker 1: how far you know, what connections can we make from this?
Speaker 1: What kind of zigzagging can we find? UM enhancer is
Speaker 1: sucking a lot UM where where someone may may use
Speaker 1: telegram for for example, a neighborhood group message right, and
Speaker 1: then someone forwards a messages a message for this channel
Speaker 1: UM or for this other group message UM where they
Speaker 1: talk about, oh, here's kind of help practices to use,
Speaker 1: and then you get into the pseudo science of things
Speaker 1: crossing into further messages from what's forward forward groups and
Speaker 1: channels from what's forwarded into that group and channel, and
Speaker 1: so on so on until you get to the neo nazis. Eventually,
Speaker 1: UM and it's also it is it is a concerted
Speaker 1: effort on the part of people pushing their ideology, who
Speaker 1: will go in the comments of these giant channels and say, hey,
Speaker 1: check out my channel. Um, what's not a real one?
Speaker 1: You know Ariyan cooking, which is probably a channel, but
Speaker 1: it probably is. Yeah, great job checking. Sorry, but check
Speaker 1: out check out, check out, check out this or whatever.
Speaker 1: And and especially when q and on moved on, a
Speaker 1: lot of promoters. Um, there there was organized groups of
Speaker 1: of Internet neo Nazis going on and trying to pill
Speaker 1: boomers into neo Nazism. And there because of the because
Speaker 1: of the mesh like network of Telegram, they try to
Speaker 1: make those meshes connect via dissemination. Right you can. You know,
Speaker 1: people who are dedicated to these more esoteric groups can
Speaker 1: join more regular like Marga groups or qut on groups
Speaker 1: and start slowly bringing links to the start doing links
Speaker 1: and forwarding to the more extreme channels. Um and eventually yeah,
Speaker 1: that does that does work. It can be a slow,
Speaker 1: careful process um or it can be very fast and
Speaker 1: like bombastic. And it'll depending on the person. One of
Speaker 1: them will latch onto one one to watch onto the other. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And and before the article came out. UM, what I
Speaker 1: did see was the specific thing of accounts that I
Speaker 1: would associate or or believe to be neo Nazi UM
Speaker 1: encouraging people to join their groups and channels UM in
Speaker 1: the in the telegram group message as well. And I
Speaker 1: cannot speak to what that looks like right now after
Speaker 1: the article has come out, and I've been trying to
Speaker 1: take a break from Telegram for my day to day life,
Speaker 1: UM and focus on reading actual books. So but yeah,
Speaker 1: that is I can always tell when one of us
Speaker 1: has been spending time on Telegram, because the things we
Speaker 1: consider jokes get much worse. Yeah, you remember when I
Speaker 1: found that playlist of Blinks covers. It was what there
Speaker 1: was like a hundred of them something. Yeah, you always
Speaker 1: find you could, you could find the most fucked up stuff. A.
Speaker 1: Don't don't do it. Don't don't scroll untilolutely do not.
Speaker 1: You're not going to get this isn't like coveting the state.
Speaker 1: You don't even like it's it's not even it's not
Speaker 1: worth it, like there's no sacred novit like knowledge that
Speaker 1: we're hiding. It's just it's it's just kind of sucks,
Speaker 1: like it just like it just to feel bad. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it just makes you feel worse about life and yourself
Speaker 1: and the people around you. So the scope for your
Speaker 1: master's project what it's kind of the what's the what's
Speaker 1: the deal with like tying these things together? I guess yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So so using this social network analysis to argue that
Speaker 1: the telegram does function as this cultake milieu, um, which yeah,
Speaker 1: it seems seems to be, which seems to be the case. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: you know, and the question gets into what is the
Speaker 1: responsibility the platform? Right? Um? Because I fully believe there
Speaker 1: should be something at least similar to this. It has
Speaker 1: been used for you know, purposes the line with all
Speaker 1: politics in which I would call good and needed. Um. However,
Speaker 1: they've also allowed this fucking awful ecosystem to spread. It's
Speaker 1: it's interesting to see when Telegram has had to step
Speaker 1: in and they you know, they have pulled down some ices,
Speaker 1: accounts and channels. Um. And and they have down when
Speaker 1: I was in um Al Hall, which is that the
Speaker 1: camp where all the ISIS prisoners were in Syria. Like
Speaker 1: while Jake and I were in the camp, we could
Speaker 1: see on telegram like ISIS supporters and al hole talking
Speaker 1: about stabbing guards like in real time. It was not
Speaker 1: particularly Uh, they've done like a lot. There's less of
Speaker 1: it than there used to be, but it is still
Speaker 1: not hard to find iss on telegram. Yeah, and they
Speaker 1: they've taken down a few amounts of neo Nazi channels. Um.
Speaker 1: It's it's funny because oh God, maybe cut this. But
Speaker 1: they've taken on some of the new channels when they've
Speaker 1: shared ice as ship for example. Yeah, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: we're we've we're familiar with that line of thing. That's
Speaker 1: something we've mentioned before. Okay. There has been pressure from
Speaker 1: from the play store and Google as well, or the
Speaker 1: play store from Google and and the app store Apples,
Speaker 1: app store from Apple to say we we aren't going
Speaker 1: to carry the app if you don't do just a
Speaker 1: tiny bit better essentially um which which which also it
Speaker 1: exists as a web client, um both as as a
Speaker 1: web client and as a desktop app as well. UM.
Speaker 1: But that would you know, limits some of it. Um. So.
Speaker 1: So this has become largely discussed in the German in
Speaker 1: the German Parliament because there's a new um, there's a
Speaker 1: new government in Germany, and and there is this history
Speaker 1: of Germany kind of is the lead for doing things
Speaker 1: about this digital content, especially within the EU. And and
Speaker 1: as I mentioned, there's already law call Adopt Enforcement Act
Speaker 1: that requires platforms to take down content in Germany. Um,
Speaker 1: they could be implemented on telegram as well. There's already
Speaker 1: a law. Yeah. I mean, this is like the thing
Speaker 1: why you know what I watch happen lots is you know,
Speaker 1: these channels will get shut down and they'll make a
Speaker 1: new one, and it will shut down that one and
Speaker 1: make a new one. Right. It's this You see this
Speaker 1: with like discord servers, telegram channels. It is kind of
Speaker 1: this endless cycle, um. And seeking an end to the cycle.
Speaker 1: It's always not as easy as what one would hope, um,
Speaker 1: because of the cyclical nature of building these platforms and
Speaker 1: connections and how the people who run these you know,
Speaker 1: intersect and specifically with with telegrams really easy because the
Speaker 1: channel gets shut down, you're still part of twelve of
Speaker 1: the channels, and odds are one of those channels is
Speaker 1: going to afford you the link to the new channel
Speaker 1: that was that was lost. Uh. Yeah, And this is
Speaker 1: the thing you see where they send lists of channels
Speaker 1: within within extremest groups and channels they will send out
Speaker 1: lists of here's other groups and channels to check out
Speaker 1: as well. Yeah, but I mean I would. So that's
Speaker 1: something that's you know, hard for regular people to actually do.
Speaker 1: But something I think that people who do not own
Speaker 1: these platforms nor lawmakers can't think about is particularly the
Speaker 1: the the cultic milieu that does you know, go past
Speaker 1: regular left right divisions in terms of politics and how
Speaker 1: you know, symbol like symbology, um and stuff that was
Speaker 1: you know initially you know, perhaps more anarchist or or
Speaker 1: left wing is being used by people on the right,
Speaker 1: and some people are really confused by that, and there
Speaker 1: is ways to there is ways to understand it like
Speaker 1: it is. It does. I am very frustrated when I
Speaker 1: look at you know, people online who don't understand why
Speaker 1: Nazis can use ted K and right, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 1: like it's it's not it's it's not it's not not
Speaker 1: not what it's not not really about Ted K actually
Speaker 1: wrote it's more than the symbolic meme of ted K.
Speaker 1: And trying to you know, get that, get that line
Speaker 1: of thinking across is not the easiest thing, because sometimes
Speaker 1: it will go in the other direction and be like,
Speaker 1: oh ted K is a Nazi, which isn't accurate either,
Speaker 1: Like that's that's not also the most accurate thing to say,
Speaker 1: So it's it's the cultivalu framework of being. Yeah, sometimes
Speaker 1: these symbols can cross over from one thing to another,
Speaker 1: and sometimes the action can be the same. You know,
Speaker 1: both anarchists and like insurrectionary fascists both want to like
Speaker 1: attack like industrialization and attack points of industry, right, but
Speaker 1: maybe their ideologies are slightly different, sometimes in specific ways.
Speaker 1: So it's always a tricky thing to kind of navigate. Um.
Speaker 1: So I think in terms of you know, people should
Speaker 1: think about what symbols they promote, uh like publicly and
Speaker 1: stuff is a good thing, and think about news aggregation
Speaker 1: and how to maybe not not just share something because
Speaker 1: it's countercultural, trying to figure out what other what other
Speaker 1: types of narrative the sources spreading UMO journalist support the
Speaker 1: work of real journalist because a bunch of kick asks
Speaker 1: people out there, um who are doing awesome research and work.
Speaker 1: So I think that kind of wraps up the scope
Speaker 1: of what I want to talk about around disclose specifically
Speaker 1: because I mean discloses a thing, but it's also like
Speaker 1: it's good as just like an example to like this
Speaker 1: overly this broader like phenomenon. I think, um, because like
Speaker 1: Disclose won't be here forever, hopefully, like you know, hopefully
Speaker 1: in a few years. It's something that we can just
Speaker 1: like look back on and laugh about. Um. But it's
Speaker 1: you know, it's still a good signifier for a phenomenon
Speaker 1: that happens. And the phenomenon even even if Disclose goes away,
Speaker 1: the phenomenon is still going to stay, um, And it's
Speaker 1: important to point it out when you see whatever the
Speaker 1: next version of this is. So. And I'll also say
Speaker 1: that the culticnalu isn't necessarily a bad thing. Right. This
Speaker 1: is you know, where where the stuff that is rejected
Speaker 1: by the Orthodox goes and clearly eliminating right, any kind
Speaker 1: of culticnal you just means everything is exactly the fucking
Speaker 1: same and falls in line with or thoughts belief which
Speaker 1: I strongly disagree with as well. No, there's there is
Speaker 1: a way to be countercultural without being a conspiratorial fascist.
Speaker 1: I would say that most responsibility in which you were
Speaker 1: consuming and sharing, Yes, And I would say like most
Speaker 1: people who are actually counterculture are yeah, like actual punk
Speaker 1: is is that you know, once you're enforcing traditional hierarchical
Speaker 1: viewpoints that that ain't punk. That is uh, that's playing
Speaker 1: into what the status quo was. That isn't that isn't revolutionary.
Speaker 1: Pistols would disagree with you, aren't they all? Yeah? But
Speaker 1: I think we can all agree that having living members
Speaker 1: of the sex Pistols was a mistake, and I would
Speaker 1: I prefer Alana Wachowski's version of punk to theirs anyway.
Speaker 1: So hey, who cares? UM? So thank you for your work,
Speaker 1: Thomas Um. I recommend people reach your article, UM, which
Speaker 1: you can do by googling disclosed TV. Now it will
Speaker 1: be for me. It's the second result that pops up.
Speaker 1: So that's gool um. Send it to all your friends
Speaker 1: and mutuals who are sharing disclosed TV. UM. You can
Speaker 1: find it on logically dot Ai is the website and
Speaker 1: the full title of the article is Disclosed TV Conspiracy
Speaker 1: Forum turned disinformation Factory. Thank you, Thank you for that. UM.
Speaker 1: Do you want to direct people to your Twitter account
Speaker 1: or do you want to be a ghost that fades
Speaker 1: away in their memory? Uh? Just don't be fucking weird.
Speaker 1: You can find me on Twitter at w underscore Underscore
Speaker 1: Thomas god Damna christ be weird. All right, I guess
Speaker 1: I'm keeping my account Lockford. Um. Yeah. I also want
Speaker 1: to shout out UM some of the local mutual aid
Speaker 1: or one of the local mutual A groups in the
Speaker 1: town where I live or in the area where I lives.
Speaker 1: The Atlanta Justice Alliance. Their cash app is cash symbol
Speaker 1: a t L mutual fund and their VENMO is a
Speaker 1: t L mutual fund. They're helping out UM they've done
Speaker 1: weekly UM weekly provided food and resources for people on
Speaker 1: the house, people living in downtown Atlanta. UM and are
Speaker 1: a great group. And then also people want to give
Speaker 1: more money to things, shout out Atlanta Solidary Fund who
Speaker 1: have helped many of my friends get out of jail
Speaker 1: after they were arrested in protests. And also you can
Speaker 1: hire me, yes if you researchers, Yes you can. You can't.
Speaker 1: You can't hire Thomas if you want. I mean, I've
Speaker 1: I've I've I've known Thomas for a bit. UM. They
Speaker 1: do really good work. UM Yeah, they're very They're very
Speaker 1: They're in my experience, they're very careful researcher. They will
Speaker 1: not say things without thinking about them a lot first,
Speaker 1: which is always great in the researcher, or at least
Speaker 1: not publicly send them money and off putting comments. An
Speaker 1: even mix of money and really off putting Twitter comments.
Speaker 1: One more shout out to my one more shout out
Speaker 1: to my friends at Terrorism Bad Pod, which you should
Speaker 1: listen too, is on Twitter. Terrorism Bad Pod. Well, that
Speaker 1: doesn't for us today. If you, for some reason are
Speaker 1: on social media and you want to follow us, you
Speaker 1: can follow us that cool Zoned Media or hassolutely don't
Speaker 1: do or happen here pod um. You can follow Robert
Speaker 1: Evans at I write okay, send him weird do not
Speaker 1: do that, and you can send me weird messages at
Speaker 1: creepo time all right, se Garrison pictures of salads that
Speaker 1: you make and keep keep doing that for like five
Speaker 1: or six years to the point that it actually becomes funny.
Speaker 1: Because it's going to take a while. I'm just happy
Speaker 1: that people will stop sending meal porn. So that's honestly,
Speaker 1: that's a wind that one's on you though. Alright, good
Speaker 1: finde for funny. Hey, we'll be Monday with more episodes
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